ABSTRACT
Separated by over two centuries and 1300 miles, Mahadevi (twelfth-century Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, India) and Lalla (fourteenth-century Kashmir) have been brought together by numerous scholars of Hinduism due to the remarkable similarities between their life stories and legacies. Both are considered exemplary female Hindu saints, embodying local medieval Shaiva religious traditions through their intense personal ascetic practices and expressing their intimate devotion to their Lord through spontaneous mystical poems composed in the local vernacular language (Mahadevi in Kannada, Lalla in Kashmiri). Wandering the mountainsides with only their long hair to cover their nakedness and pouring forth utterances that encapsulate profound theological complexity in simple, readily understood verse, scholars have speculated whether there is a distinctly unique style or approach to female mystical devotion that these two exemplify and give expression to.
In contrast to these lines of scholarly inquiry, this chapter argues that the remarkable similarities between Mahadevi and Lalla are not a revelation of a shared unique mystical inner state, feminine religiosity, or female praxis. Rather, historical analysis of the similar depictions of these saints found in later Kannada, Persian, Sanskrit, and Telugu writings demonstrates that our current legacies of Mahadevi and Lalla are a product of similar processes of reclaiming, reshaping, and reinscribing that authors of their afterlives utilized to authorize such figures as exemplars of their religious traditions, safe, and worthy of reverence. In doing so, Mahadevi and Lalla, as female ascetics, serve to simultaneously navigate and introduce new religious ambiguities as well as fix and produce new genderings in the writings of later religious scholars for the spiritual advancement of their audience of male disciples.
