In my reading of the divine feminine, I stumbled across Arundhati Subramaniam’s poetry and prose, where women do not seek permission—from God, tradition, or language. They arrive already whole, already questioning, already aflame. Across Wild Women, Women Who Wear Only Themselves, Eating God, and Upside Down Women, Subramaniam curates a luminous, unruly lineage of women who refuse the domestication of the sacred. This is not spirituality as soft surrender. This is devotion with teeth.
At a time when spiritual discourse is increasingly sanitized—filtered through wellness jargon or stripped of its cultural and philosophical depth—Subramaniam returns us to an older, more dangerous terrain. One where longing is embodied, faith is interrogative, and the divine is something you dare to touch, consume, even argue with. Seen through the lens of Bhakti and Tantra, this is a spiritual grammar that understands the body as altar, desire as mantra, and questioning itself as prayer.
Wild Women: Reclaiming the sacred as untamed
Wild Women is not an anthology in the conventional sense. It is an act of recovery. Gathering the voices of women mystics, saints, and poet-seers from across the Indian subcontinent, Subramaniam dismantles the myth that women’s spirituality has historically been passive, decorative, or self-effacing.
These women—Meera, Akka Mahadevi, Lal Ded, Janabai—do not whisper their devotion. They claim it with ferocity. Their poems blur the lines between Eros and prayer, body and transcendence. Desire here is not a distraction from God; it is a route to Him—or Her—or That which refuses naming.
In presenting these voices, Subramaniam does something quietly radical: she restores women to the center of India’s spiritual imagination, not as footnotes or exceptions, but as originators of insight within a Bhakti–Tantric tradition that prized lived experience over inherited authority.
Women Who Wear Only Themselves: Living without spiritual costume
Women Who Wear Only Themselves brings the inquiry into the present moment. Through intimate portraits of contemporary women mystics, Subramaniam explores what it means to live a spiritual life outside institutions, hierarchies, and prescribed roles.
These women are not ascetics in the conventional sense, nor are they spiritual influencers. They inhabit a more difficult space—one of inner authority, solitude, and deep listening. To “wear only oneself” is not a metaphor for exhibitionism; it is a commitment to authenticity so complete that even spiritual identity is held lightly.
In this sense, they continue a long Bhakti–Tantric inheritance: renunciation not as withdrawal, but as radical presence; discipline not as obedience, but as attentiveness to inner truth.
For me, this book resonated deeply with questions that I return to again and again: How does one live consciously in the world without being consumed by it? What does integrity look like when tradition no longer offers ready-made answers?
Eating God: Devotion as intimacy, not distance
Eating God may seem, at first glance, like a departure—a curated anthology of Bhakti poetry spanning centuries. But placed alongside Subramaniam’s work on women, it becomes something else entirely: a manifesto for devotional intimacy.
Bhakti, as this collection reminds us, was never about polite reverence. It was about hunger. About dissolving the boundary between devotee and divine. To eat God is to refuse distance, hierarchy, and abstraction.
This intimacy has always been central to the women mystics of the subcontinent. As Lal Ded writes in one of her vakhs:
“Where are you looking for me?
I am in you.”
Here, divinity is neither distant nor mediated. It is interior, immediate, and inseparable from lived experience. The seeker does not journey outward toward God; she turns inward, dissolving the illusion of separation. Subramaniam’s curatorial instinct repeatedly returns us to this truth: devotion is not ascent, but recognition.
Within this tradition, women mystics appear not as anomalies but as natural inheritors of a path that valued direct encounter over mediation. Tantra and Bhakti converge here—in the insistence that liberation is not granted from above, but realised through the body, breath, voice, and longing.
In reclaiming these voices, Subramaniam underscores a truth often overlooked: Indian spiritual poetry has always been radical, embodied, and inclusive—long before modern feminism found its vocabulary.
The Gallery of Upside Down Women: Spirituality in an unsteady world
Upside Down Women brings this lineage into contemporary, unsettled life. Here, Subramaniam turns her attention to the fault lines of modern womanhood—aging, desire, political unease, motherhood, solitude, mortality—and reveals them as sites of spiritual and ethical inquiry.
These poems do not offer empowerment as spectacle. They offer presence: alert, ironic, tender, unguarded. The “upside down” of the title becomes a moral position—a refusal to stand comfortably within inherited hierarchies of gender, power, and belief.
What distinguishes this book within Subramaniam’s wider spiritual project is its insistence that inner life cannot be separated from social life. The sacred here does not reside in transcendence or retreat, but in attention itself—in how one speaks, remembers, resists, grieves, and loves. This is Bhakti–Tantra translated into modern consciousness: devotion without dogma, discipline without domination.
A poetics of becoming, not belonging
Across interviews and public conversations, Arundhati Subramaniam often returns to the idea that poetry is not about closure, but continuity.
“Poetry is not about conclusions but continuities—commas, not full stops.” -Arundhati Subramaniam
This sensibility animates all her work on women. Gender, spirituality, even devotion itself are treated not as fixed identities but as evolving inquiries. Her writing resists spiritual finality. Instead, it privileges movement, doubt, and ethical attentiveness.
Her women are not role models; they are thresholds. They invite us to loosen our definitions, to distrust easy binaries, and to approach the sacred not as something external to be mastered, but as an inner terrain to be negotiated daily.
Why Arundhati Subramaniam’s women matter now
In a cultural moment where spirituality risks becoming either commodified or polarised, Subramaniam’s work offers a third way: rooted yet restless, reverent yet questioning. She stands within an ancient lineage of embodied devotion while refusing its institutional ossification.
This insistence on inner authority also echoes a wider feminist ethics of survival and self-reverence.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” – Audre Lorde
Read alongside Subramaniam’s work, this becomes a spiritual as well as political proposition. Attention to the self—its needs, intuitions, silences, and longings—emerges not as retreat, but as resistance. In a culture that profits from women’s exhaustion and erasure, devotion to inner life becomes a radical act.
For readers seeking depth over doctrine, inquiry over instruction, and poetry that dares to remain unresolved, Subramaniam’s women offer not answers—but permission.
Permission to be wild. To be unclothed of false certainty. And, to hunger for what cannot be named.
Arundhati Subramaniam is an award-winning Indian poet, essayist, and literary critic known for her work at the intersection of spirituality, gender, and contemporary culture. Based in Mumbai, she has written extensively for leading Indian and international publications and is widely respected for her nuanced, reflective engagement with faith, philosophy, and literature. Her writing is marked by intellectual depth, lyrical sensitivity, and a sustained commitment to exploring how spiritual inquiry is lived—especially by women.
She is the author of several acclaimed books, including Wild Women, Women Who Wear Only Themselves, Eating God, Upside Down Women, and When God Is a Traveller, based on her long conversations with Sadhguru. A recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry, Subramaniam is regarded as one of the most influential contemporary Indian voices writing on spirituality, devotion, and the sacred feminine.
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