When Freedom is the Ultimate Value: Women Poets Divided by Space and Time
Keywords:
female body, sexuality, religion, caste, rebellion, articulationAbstract
This paper attempts to strike a comparison between the articulation of select women poets who are separated by space and time but united by the desire for freedom. Both The Therigatha, a collection of poems by the early Buddhist nuns called Theris and Wild Words: Four Tamil Poets, a collection of twentieth-century feminist poetry by Tamil women, offer an insight into the dynamics of patriarchal oppression of the female body and its rebellion, through different ways, albeit differentiated by vast stretches of history and time. Female body and sexuality and its intersection with identity, politics, religion and caste, as treated within the cultural context of their times, is at the core of the discourse. These poems focus on the body's resistance to the cultural norms of the times, be it the strictly religious setting of the Buddhist Sangha of the 6th Century CE or the Tamil social context of the 20th Century CE. These poems, when analysed through the lens of intersectional feminism, throw light on the lived experiences of women against the background of the perennial Nature-Culture debate informing the ethos of the Indian subcontinent.
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