Bhakti does not flourish in certainty or calm assurance. Like romance, it lives on longing, vulnerability, and unanswered questions. Too much security dulls desire; too much distance breaks trust. What sustains bhakti is the charged tension between absence and presence—between promise and fulfillment. Faith, in this sense, is not stability but waiting with love.
This is not merely poetic intuition. Within the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition, longing is doctrinally grounded. According to the theology articulated most authoritatively by Rāmānuja, all beings stand in an asymmetrical relationship to Bhagavān: He alone is the śeṣi (owner, master), while all selves are śeṣa (owned, dependent). The universe itself—matter and sentient beings alike—issues from Him as dependent modes of His being, just as a body is the garment of the puruṣa who inhabits it.¹
This metaphysical dependence is not merely ontological; it is devotional. The Lord is both the goal (upeya) and the sole means (upāya) of attainment. There can be no reliance on one’s own worthiness or capacity. The devotee approaches not as an achiever but as a refugee, trusting that it is the duty of the master (śeṣi) to care for the servant (śeṣa).² Such a structure does not reward confidence—it requires surrender. And surrender, lived existentially, necessarily unfolds as waiting.
Viraha and the Feminine Soul
In this framework, the soul is always feminine—not by social convention but by theological necessity. The feminine voice expresses total dependence, vulnerability, and expectancy. Separation (viraha) does not negate love; it intensifies it. Love matures not through possession but through yearning.
This explains why erotic-romantic language is not marginal but central to bhakti traditions. As Vijaya Ramaswamy has shown, male saints repeatedly adopt the feminine voice in their most intense devotional expressions—not as literary play, but to inhabit what patriarchal society labels “feminine” qualities of passion, surrender, and longing.³ Nammāḻvār, Tirumaṅgai Āḻvār, Māṇikkavācakar, and Kabir all speak as women when devotion reaches its deepest pitch.
In one striking instance, Nammāḻvār speaks of “communing with Her (God) in the nakedness of her beauty,” a phrase that resists allegorical softening. The erotic here is not accidental excess; it is the grammar of intimacy when all other idioms fail.⁴
Jayadeva and the Theology of Divine Vulnerability
Jayadeva’s Gīta Govinda stands as one of the most daring theological poems within this devotional universe. Tradition recounts that while composing an Aṣṭapadī, Jayadeva hesitated at a line portraying Kṛṣṇa begging Rādhā to place her foot upon His head. Troubled by the radical reversal implicit in such a gesture, he left the verse unfinished. On returning, he found it completed—written, it is said, by Kṛṣṇa Himself.
The verse reads:
Smara-garala-khaṇḍanaṁ mama śirasi maṇḍanaṁ
dehi pada-pallavam udāram
“O destroyer of love’s poison, place your tender foot upon my head as my crown.”
Here, divinity does not dominate desire; it submits to love. The Lord assumes vulnerability, even humiliation, for the sake of devotion. Separation wounds Him as deeply as it wounds the devotee. Bhakti thus emerges not as human weakness reaching toward divine strength, but as a shared exposure in love.
Orthodox Hindus sing these verses as bhajans, not as scandal but as sanctification. What redeems eros here is not denial, but direction.
Biblical and Christian Parallels: Desire as Sacred Speech
This grammar of longing finds a striking echo in the Song of Songs:
“I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not.” (Song 3:1)
The poem refuses to correct desire. Absence is not explained away; it is inhabited. Love persists precisely because fulfillment is delayed.
Christian mysticism echoes this structure. In The Living Flame of Love, St John of the Cross speaks in an explicitly feminine voice of surrender, emptiness, and transformation:
“She most willingly and with intense delight surrenders herself wholly to him… God transforms her in himself, makes her entirely his own, and empties her of all she possesses other than him.”⁵
Here again, certainty is absent. Union is real, but never fully possessed. Love unfolds through longing.
Seeking Rather Than Possessing: Sufi and Bhakti Convergences
Across South Asian devotional traditions, longing appears not as a deficiency but as the very condition of the path. Kavita Panjabi notes that in both Sufi and Bhakti poetry, metaphors of journey—safar, hijr, manzile shauq—dominate. Ishq refers less to settled love than to perpetual seeking; the sālik is one who never stops searching.⁶
This helps explain the persistent gender ambiguity in devotional poetry. Why does the poet-saint, even when socially critical of women, take on the female voice in moments of deepest intimacy? Panjabi traces this to a long-standing paradox within Sufi and Bhakti traditions: femininity becomes the only available idiom for expressing a desire that refuses closure.⁷
Kabir’s poetry exemplifies this with startling clarity. Speaking as an uninhibited woman, he longs for an explicitly sexual union with Ram—not metaphorically, but bodily, emotionally, and existentially. Desire is not a distraction from devotion; it is its very purpose. Femininity here confers not passivity but authority: the devotee dares to instruct God in love.⁸
Viraha as Fullness, Not Lack
The culmination of this devotional tradition is the recognition that separation itself is not a deficiency but a generative force. A couplet attributed to Kabir and Shaikh Farid declares:
“Do not abuse that viraha, for viraha is a king.
The body deprived of viraha is forever a burning ground.”⁹
As Kumkum Sangari observes, viraha signifies not emptiness but fullness—a claim to presence grounded precisely in absence. Unlike karma, which situates the present within a closed and completed past, viraha speaks of an unfinished present, a time perpetually in the making. The moment of longing is never finally resolved; it remains open, alive, and formative.¹⁰
This insight is not confined to classical texts alone. In my own engagement with bhakti—particularly through songs composed in viraha-bhāva—I have repeatedly encountered this paradoxical union of anxiety and assurance. These songs do not resolve doubt through doctrinal certainty; rather, they intensify devotion by allowing longing itself to become the site of faith. What theology often seeks to stabilize, bhakti dares to sustain in tension.
While reflecting on these compositions, I was reminded of Marie Corelli’s Romance of Two Worlds, a book I first read several decades ago. Borrowing its evocative title, I found it aptly naming the devotional condition bhakti inhabits: a romance lived between two worlds—presence and absence, assurance and uncertainty. It is precisely this uncertainty that guards the devotee from collapsing faith into rigid dogma, or from fleeing into agnosticism when doctrinal assurances falter.
This tension also illuminates how sacred erotic language unsettles attempts at moral or textual domestication.
The same tension between sacred longing and interpretive anxiety is not confined to explicitly religious texts. It surfaces with particular clarity in modern secular debates over freedom of expression. This recalls Irving Wallace’s The Seven Minutes, a novel I read decades ago and which left a lasting impression on me. Wallace fictionalizes an obscenity trial to probe how societies police desire, language, and moral boundaries in the name of public order.
While The Seven Minutes itself does not directly invoke Scripture, it is historically indebted to an earlier and very real controversy surrounding John Cleland’s Fanny Hill. In the landmark obscenity trials over that novel, the defence famously cited passages from the Song of Songs—initially without identifying them as biblical—to demonstrate how erotic language, condemned in one register, is revered as sacred in another. The courtroom was thus forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: that the boundary between pornography and Scripture is not secured by language alone, but by interpretive authority.
This episode is illuminating for a reflection on bhakti. What appears scandalous, dangerous, or morally suspect within one interpretive framework may function as sanctified speech within another. Hindu devotional traditions have long resisted the modern impulse to divide life into watertight compartments—sacred versus secular, erotic versus spiritual, certainty versus doubt. Bhakti poetry moves freely across these boundaries, not out of moral confusion, but out of theological conviction: that longing, in all its intensity, belongs within the grammar of devotion.
Seen in this light, the appeal to Scripture in a secular court of law is not an anomaly but a symptom. It reveals how even the modern world, while claiming to regulate desire through legal and moral codes, instinctively reaches for sacred texts to defend human freedoms such as speech, expression, and imagination. Bhakti simply refuses to conceal this continuity. It neither sanitizes eros nor isolates faith from uncertainty. Instead, it allows longing itself—unresolved, risky, and vulnerable—to become a mode of truth.
Conclusion: Why Longing Is Not a Defect of Faith
Bhakti—especially in its viraha-bhāva—does create anxiety and uncertainty. Yet this very condition preserves the sanctity of Scripture, whether Scripture emerges through oral transmission or written tradition. Longing does not weaken revelation; it protects it from premature closure.
Textual criticism, though an indispensable tool for understanding any text—including Scripture that claims exclusive authority for its followers—often seeks to sanitize faith by submitting it almost entirely to Reason. When Reason alone governs exegesis, theology begins to demand assurance, coherence, and certainty at every step. Such rationalistic confidence may not deepen faith; it can just as easily slide into agnosticism, because personal religious experience refuses to be contained exclusively within rational categories.
This is why I describe my devotional compositions as Bhakti Theology Songs. I do not reject theology—but I refuse theology at the cost of bhakti. Theology must remain open to longing, not armored against it.
Bhakti survives not by eliminating uncertainty, but by inhabiting it faithfully. In Śrīvaiṣṇava theology, the soul—often imagined in feminine voice—waits, aches, and hopes, not because God is absent, but because love matures through delay. Viraha is not failure; it is refinement. Absence is not negation; it is a mode of presence that sharpens desire.
Romance—whether human or divine—does not flourish in total possession. It lives in the charged space between promise and fulfillment, between this world and the other. To believe, then, is not to silence longing, but to allow longing itself to become prayer.
Bhakti does not promise a safe voyage.
It entrusts itself, instead, to a faithful landing.
Chennai, December 30, 2025
Footnotes
- D. Dennis Hudson, Krishna’s Mandala: Bhagavata Religion and Beyond (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), 193, 257.
- Hudson, Krishna’s Mandala, 262.
- Vijaya Ramaswamy, “Introduction,” in Devotion and Dissent in Indian History, ed. Vijaya Ramaswamy (New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2014), 10.
- Ramaswamy, “Introduction,” 10; citing Nammāḻvār and Tirumaṅgai Āḻvār.
- St John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, cited in Ramaswamy, “Introduction,” in Devotion and Dissent in Indian History, 10.
- Kavita Panjabi, “Introduction,” in Poetics and Politics of Sufism & Bhakti in South Asia: Love, Loss and Liberation (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2011), 26.
- Panjabi, “Introduction,” 37.
- Purushottam Agrawal, “The Erotic to the Divine: Kabir’s Notion of Love and Femininity,” in Poetics and Politics of Sufism & Bhakti in South Asia, 67, 74; Mata Prasad Gupta, Kabir Granthavali (Allahabad: Sahitya Bhavan, 1986), 328.
- Charlotte Vaudeville, A Weaver Named Kabir (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 172; also attributed to Shaikh Farid in the Guru Granth Sahib.
- Kumkum Sangari, “Viraha: A Trajectory in the Nehruvian Era,” in Gender and Nation (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 2001), 113; originally published 1990.
Appendix. This was created by Perplexity on my prompt on December 29, 2025
A Romance of Two Worlds by Marie Corelli (real name Mary Mackay), first published in 1886. This Victorian-era work blends romance, occultism, fantasy, and spiritual themes, reflecting Corelli’s interest in mysticism and “human electricity.”library+3
Author Background
Marie Corelli was a popular British novelist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, known for her melodramatic stories infused with esoteric ideas. She wrote under a pseudonym and gained fame for works exploring spirituality, divine love, and the unseen forces of the universe, often drawing from Christian mysticism and occult concepts.
Plot Summary
A young female musician in London suffers from depression and neurasthenia, leading her to a holiday where she meets Raffallo Cellini, an Italian painter who gives her a potion inducing divine visions. Cellini sends her to Paris to study under Heliobas, a Chaldean Christian “electric physician” who teaches her about spiritual electricity, prophecy, and cosmic secrets through elixirs and meditation. The story culminates in her spiritual awakening, encounters with angels, and reflections on God’s nature as pure light and love, bridging the material and spiritual worlds.
Key Themes
- Spiritual Electricity: Corelli portrays the universe and human body as powered by electric forces enabling visions, healing, and connection to the divine.
- Interworld Romance: The narrative contrasts earthly struggles with heavenly realms, emphasizing love, destiny, and oneness with God.
- Mystical Healing: Protagonist overcomes illness via occult practices, guardian angels, and meditative disciplines.
Fanny Hill: Appendix
Full Title: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (commonly known as Fanny Hill).
Author: John Cleland (1709–1789), English dramatist and novelist, who composed it in debtors’ prison around 1748 to settle debts.
Original Publication: Volume 1 on November 21, 1748; Volume 2 in February 1749—issued serially by printers Fenton and Ralph Griffiths in London under the pseudonym “G. Fenton.” Roughly 100 pages per volume; written partly during Cleland’s East India Company service in Bombay (pre-1740).
Genre and Content: First-person erotic memoir of 15-year-old Fanny Hill’s seduction, brothel life, and moral redemption in 18th-century London. Epistolary form pioneered explicit English prose pornography while claiming literary and instructive value.
Publishing and Legal History
- Early Bans: Suppressed by Cleland himself post-Volume 2; expurgated editions proliferated from 1750 amid obscenity raids.
- 19th–20th Century Prosecutions: Banned in U.S. (1868, 1960s), UK (until 1970); over 200 clandestine editions by 1900.
- Landmark U.S. Case: Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966)—Supreme Court (5-4) overturned Massachusetts ban, requiring obscenity material be “utterly without redeeming social value.” Defense experts cited Song of Songs’ sensuality to affirm artistic merit, blurring pornography-Scripture lines.
Connection to Irving Wallace’s The Seven Minutes: Wallace explicitly modeled his 1969 novel’s obscenity trial on Fanny Hill‘s saga—fictionalizing the 1966 ruling, erotic focus (young woman’s inner thoughts), and free-speech debates, though without biblical quotes.
Modern Availability: Public domain; Penguin Classics (1985, ISBN 9780140432497); Oxford World’s Classics. Over 50 editions on Goodreads.
Relevance to Bhakti Reflection: Like sacred eroticism in Song of Songs, Fanny Hill‘s defenses reveal interpretation’s primacy over content—porous, personal, defying rigid domestication.
Appendix: Scholarly Excerpts (Organized by Footnote Number and Theme)
Appendix A
Śrīvaiṣṇava Theology: Dependence, Ownership, and Grace
(Footnotes 1–2)
Footnote 1
D. Dennis Hudson, Krishna’s Mandala: Bhagavata Religion and Beyond (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010)
“According to the Sri Vaisnava doctrine she {Āṇṭāḷ} represented the śeṣa–śeṣi-bhāva developed by Rāmānuja—all individuals are completely dependent on the Bhagavān because he is the owner (śeṣi) and they are the owned (śeṣa); and since he brings all things out of himself through his own ‘womb’, the entire universe of matter and sentient beings are but dependent modes of his own being, just as the physical body is the dependent ‘garment’ worn by the individual ‘person’ (puruṣa).” (p. 193)
“This Sri Vaisnava doctrine of the relation of the owned to the owner, or of the servant to the master, the śeṣa–śeṣi relationship, had been expounded most authoritatively in the eleventh century by the sect’s most important ācārya, Rāmānuja.” (p. 257)
Footnote 2
D. Dennis Hudson, Krishna’s Mandala, 262
“The Lord, according to Sri Vaisnava notions of human weakness and divine grace, is both the goal of human existence (upeya, prāpyaṁ) and the means to that goal (upāya, prāpakaṁ). The Lord alone is the means for attaining the Lord and there can be no reliance on one’s own worthiness or ability to attain him. The refugee can, however, rely on the Lord to accept him or her, for it is the duty of the master (śeṣi) to look after his servant (śeṣa). This doctrine, obviously, is quite different from doctrines of self-reliance taught by other Indian traditions such as early Buddhism, Jainism, or the Yoga of Patañjali.”
Appendix B
Feminine Voice and Bridal Mysticism in Bhakti
(Footnotes 3–4)
Footnote 3
Vijaya Ramaswamy, “Introduction,” in Devotion and Dissent in Indian History (New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2014), 10
“Therefore, although the language of erotic love is common to both male and female saints, men in the adoption of this mode resort to the female voice in order to assume what patriarchal society dubs the feminine qualities of erotic love and passion. Some outstanding examples of ‘male’ bridal mysticism can be seen in Kabir in medieval North India, in Nammāḻvār and Tirumaṅgai Āḻvār within the Vaiṣṇavite Āḻvār tradition and Māṇikkavācakar in the Śaivite tradition.”
Footnote 4
Ramaswamy, “Introduction,” 10; citing Nammāḻvār and Tirumaṅgai Āḻvār
“In fact, Nammāḻvār in one erotic poem talks of ‘communing’ with her (God) ‘in the nakedness of her beauty’.”
(References: Tirumaṅgai Āḻvār II:7:VII:1, 35, etc.)
Appendix C
Christian Bridal Mysticism: A Cross-Traditional Parallel
(Footnote 5)
Footnote 5
St John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, cited in Ramaswamy, “Introduction,” 10
“In that sweet drink of God, in which the soul is imbibed in him, she most willingly and with intense delight surrenders herself wholly to him, in the desire to be totally his and never to possess in herself anything other than him. God causes in this union the purity of and perfection necessary for such surrender. And since he transforms her in himself, he makes her entirely his own and empties her of all she possesses other than him.”
Appendix D
Sufi–Bhakti Vocabulary of Journey and Seeking
(Footnotes 6–7)
Footnote 6
Kavita Panjabi, “Introduction,” in Poetics and Politics of Sufism & Bhakti in South Asia (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2011), 26
“Dindī refers to walking, safar to journey, hijr to leaving one space for another, and manzil-e-shauq to gradual progress in different stages of ishq. Ishq relates more to seeking than love in the romantic sense, because the sālik is one who perpetually seeks.”
Footnote 7
Panjabi, “Introduction,” 37
“The ambiguity that characterises both Sufi and Bhakti poetry in relation to issues of gender is captured very aptly in the chapter on Kabir: ‘why is it necessary for the sādhak-poet who condemns women, to take the form of a woman in the deepest moments of his poetry and spiritual practice?’ Historically one could trace this ambiguity to the paradoxical veneration and aversion in the approach to women in Sufism.”
Appendix E
Kabir: Erotic Desire, Femininity, and Divine Union
(Footnote 8)
Footnote 8
Purushottam Agrawal, “The Erotic to the Divine: Kabir’s Notion of Love and Femininity,” in Poetics and Politics of Sufism & Bhakti in South Asia, 67, 74;
Mata Prasad Gupta, Kabir Granthavali (Allahabad: Sahitya Bhavan, 1986), 328
[Kabir verses and translations exactly as you have provided, followed by Agrawal’s analysis on femininity, authority, desire, and submission.]
(This appendix section may be subdivided if you wish: E1. Kabir’s Verses / E2. Agrawal’s Interpretation)
Appendix F
Viraha as Generative Absence
(Footnote 9)
Footnote 9
Charlotte Vaudeville, A Weaver Named Kabir (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 172
“Do not abuse that viraha, for viraha is a king.
The body deprived of viraha is forever a burning ground.”
(Note: also attributed to Shaikh Farid in the Guru Granth Sahib.)
Appendix G
Viraha as Fullness and Unfinished Time
(Footnote 10)
Footnote 10
Kumkum Sangari, “Viraha: A Trajectory in the Nehruvian Era,” in Gender and Nation (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 2001), 113
“As a bhāva, viraha signifies not an emptiness but a fullness, or a claim to presence based on absence… Unlike karma which speaks an absolute past containing the present, viraha speaks an unfinished present, an incomplete time-in-the-making… The time of viraha is never finally resolved.”
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