ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the issues of gender in the soteriological context of the South Indian Śrīvaiṣṇava religious community, who are devoted to Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa. It focuses on the narrative of the cowherd women from the Sanskrit literature, the Viṣṇu Purāṇa and Bhāgavata Purāṇa. As the story goes, in the Vṛndāvan forest, one of the sacred sites in northern India, Kṛṣṇa, a manifestation of God in the form of a cowherd boy, enjoys affectionate relationships with various cowherd women who were devoted to Him. This narrative inspires the Śrīvaiṣṇava authors, among many religious traditions, to question the gender norm and acknowledge gender fluidity when it comes to liberation. This chapter begins by investigating the establishment of the gender norm in the doctrinal context of bhakti in the philosophical treatise, the Śrībhāṣya, of Rāmānuja, the most influential leader of the Śrīvaiṣṇavas. It then investigates two significant understandings of the narrative of the cowherd women in two texts: (1) the Tamil Tiruvāymoḻi of Nammāḻvār, the first generation of the Śrīvaiṣṇavas; (2) the philosophical and theological treatise, the Nyāyasiddhāñjana, of Vedāntadeśika, a leading Śrīvaiṣṇava figure from the fourteenth century CE. Reading all of the works together through the lens of contemporary gender debates, like those dealt with by Judith Butler in Undoing Gender (2004), I hope to suggest new ways of thinking about gender, especially gender norms, fluidity, and transformation, in medieval texts and a devotional community such as the Śrīvaiṣṇavas.
