posted on 2013-05-15, 10:49authored bySiobhan Lambert-Hurley
Raihana Tyabji is best known to history, not for her writing or even her singing, but as a devotee of Gandhi. Yet
in 1924 this at least nominally Muslim woman composed a small book of bhakti devotionalism that has
continued to garner popular interest right into the twenty-first century. She gave it the evocative title, The Heart
of a Gopi, on the basis that what had been revealed to her was the very 'soul', the inner self, of the gopi and,
through that, an understanding of Lord Krishna himself. Considered in this paper then is the question of how far
this piece of bhakti devotionalism may be read as a kind of personal narrative, an evocation of the self. Does the
referencing of an established narrative tradition give the author's feelings and experiences, especially as a
Muslim woman devoted to Krishna at a time of increasing religious rigidity and growing communal strife, a
kind of validity not achievable otherwise? And, if so, how do we separate out the author's 'self' from the
literary conventions – in this case, the gopi tradition – that structure the story? In the tradition of Islamic life
writing, can the gap between the miraculous and the mundane be breached in order to understand the mystical
experience charted here as a kind of autobiography? Even from the rationalist's perspective, should not the life
of the imagination still be considered part of the life?
History
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Politics and International Studies
Citation
LAMBERT-HURLEY, S., 2013. The heart of a Gopi: Raihana Tyabji’s bhakti devotionalism as self-representation? Modern Asian Studies, 48 (3), pp.569-595.