Chronotopic Narratives of Seven Gurus and Eleven Texts: A Medieval Buddhist Community of Female Tāntrikas in the Swat Valley of Pakistan

Abstract

Modern South Asian women’s writing wells up to the stirring surface of contemporary literature in now globally recognizable forms of fiction and memoir, inter alia, the novel, the poem, the biography, the autobiography. Yet, beneath these topmost layers of colonial and post-colonial literary tides flow undercurrents of precolonial women’s writing, often in radically other figurations of lettered expression. Even further down than the familiar temporal strata of the Vaiṣṇavite and Śaivite religious poetry written by the dozen authoresses ranging from Muktābāi to Rūpa Bhavānī between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, there exists another place in the deep, like an underwater lake, of a much older women’s writing penned by Tantric women gurus. The majority of this archaic Buddhist literature streamed out of the Swat valley in Pakistan, a locality for no less than seven known female gurus, who lived, taught, or wrote there between the eighth and eleventh centuries. After a short prologue on Swat and its recent history, the essay surveys eleven female-authored medieval Tantric works, which range in genre from ritual treatises, meditation practice-texts, and mystic poems, to literary forms that even seem evocative of contemporary women’s gendered voices: spiritual biography and autobiography empowered by a place.