A life broken by loss can mark the beginning of a new way of seeing. When the familiar collapses and the heart is stripped of its securities, the mind begins to ask what lies beyond impermanence. Saints of every age have passed through this crucible. For them, the real meaning of loss was not deprivation but the moment when the root illusion gave way to something more real.
Bhagavan Sri Ramana’s awakening began with just such a moment. Confronted by death at sixteen, he turned inward and discovered that what dies is not the Self. Likewise, Gautama Buddha, shaken by the sight of sickness, old age, death, and a sadhu saw that no earthly pleasure could conceal the ephemeral.
Those who face death often see with clarity what others only read about in the lives of saints. Suffering, rightly seen, is not punishment but a passage, the finite yielding to what is whole.
This applies to the life of Avudai Akkal, the 18th-century mystic-poet of Senkottai. Born into an orthodox family in the agraharam of Senkottai near the Western Ghats, Akkal was married as a child. But her first encounter with death was that of someone she scarcely knew. On the evening of her wedding, the garland placed around the neck of her young husband concealed a venomous snake which bit him. He died at once. The next morning, when elders wept and wailed, she asked with childlike directness, “Why cry so much for a boy who has died in another house?” But they were not crying only for the boy. They were crying for the implications that the event would have for their daughter and the family.
The Child-Widow of Senkottai
Though precocious in her spiritual inclination, at this young age, the girl had no way of comprehending what fate had visited upon her. From the time of the tragedy on her wedding day, she was required to erase every symbol of marriage—her jewellery, bindi, and colourful clothing—and don the white sari of widowhood. Remarriage by tradition was not allowed, nor would she be included in the family inheritance. Only austerity awaited her.
Confined to the dim interior rooms, not permitted outdoors and restricted in her activities, the threshold of her home bore the sign of a child-widow: such a house could not be graced with the daily kolam designs at its threshold.
Sridhara Venkatesa Ayyaval
Yet within this harsh order, a hidden sanctity flowed into her life, and widowhood would become, against the odds, an initiation into a deeply fulfilling, vibrant and indeed, exceptional spiritual life. What society had deemed misfortune would prove in her case to be pure grace which arrived in the form of a stranger at the door of the family home.
One day, the wandering saint Tiruvisanallur Sridhara Venkatesa Ayyaval a shining figure of the namasankirtana tradition, was invited by the King of Travancore to conduct Sivaratri worship in the royal temple. Accepting the request, Ayyaval set out on foot from Kumbakonam with a group of disciples, chanting the divine name as they travelled. Passing through Sengottai, the saint was received with customary respect by the local residents. As he walked down the street lined with kolams, lamps, and swept thresholds, Ayyaval suddenly stopped before one house—the only doorway without the auspicious kolam.[1] Hearing the sacred chant, the young widow was seized by an inner force and rushed out. Seeing the monk, she fell at his feet and pleaded, “Save me from this fate!” Moved by compassion, Ayyaval assured her that widowhood could not bar one from God and asked her to meet him at the riverside mantapam that evening for initiation. Shocked, the onlookers dragged her back inside and confronted the saint, insisting she was ineligible for initiation. Ayyaval replied with timeless clarity:
If she is not eligible, then no one here is eligible. The only qualification for knowledge is the longing for Truth.
That evening she escaped and went to the riverside. The guru whispered into the girl’s ear a mahavakya, namely, Brahma Satyam—“The Self alone is real.”[2] From that moment her life of mourning took on a new character. The girl’s future now lay with her guru and no matter what she did, as long as it was in his footsteps, only good could result. Thus, she was steadily initiated into religious life.
One day while at the river, she picked up a mango-leaf that her guru had used to clean his teeth. Just touching it brought a current of spiritual power which shot through her body like electricity, awakening latent spiritual virtues.
Against social convention, the young widow followed the guru to Travancore, enduring ridicule from denizens of the area. But the guru had no doubt about her potential. Well-to-do ladies murmured about the shaven-headed girl who dared travel with men. But Ayyaval stood firm, declaring: “She is not a widow—she is a jnani.” Over time, her steadiness silenced her detractors.
Her detachment became evident to all who chanced to meet her. One day the Travancore king sent bilva leaves made of pure gold for her worship near the river. She accepted them quietly. The next morning, she gathered both the priceless gold leaves and the withered flowers and cast them into the river. For her there was no difference between precious gold and decaying plants—both forms of the same Brahman.
On another occasion, when the guru, his disciples and young Akkal were meditating at the river bank of the sacred Kaveri, a flash flood struck. The disciples ran for safety, but the young girl remained motionless in samadhi. The waters rose and encircled her, yet leaving a small island of sand untouched beneath her form. Witnesses said the river itself had acknowledged her stillness, otherwise, how could such a miracle be explained. From that time onward, the guru’s disciples who had till then been disapproving of her presence came to see her greatness and at last accepted her into their company.
The Voice of the Real
The girl lived near her master by the Kaveri for many years. Under his care, young Akkal’s wisdom ripened into luminous poetry and songs by the hundreds began to pour forth from her lips. Composed in the idiom of domestic life, they were radiant with sublime advaitic signification. She praised the guru and God in thanksgiving for the life she had been led to:
I, for a long time suffering as though trapped within a moat, was liberated! As one rescued from a blazing palace by a helping hand; as one who, drowning in the torrent of a flooded river, is hauled ashore and resuscitated by a helping hand; as one who, on the verge of being consumed by the vast forest fires of grief, is saved—you facilitated my ultimate freedom with your infinite compassion! That one deed is enough! [3]
Soon Akkal was no longer oppressed by public opinion or the rejection she suffered from her family in childhood:
Father, mother, daughters and sons
Became like a crowd in the marketplace,
Like animals in a flock, like a mere number,
While I became Timeless eternity.[4]
She mocked hypocrisy not as a means to rebel but to restore dignity and sanity to those for whom the life of faith had become murky, to remind them where true sanctity was to be found. Her non-duality was transcendent but practical and unpretentious. A verse declares:
Caste, order, and scripture are gone;
I am the Supreme Brahman beyond all attributes.[5]
It should be said that Akkal did not occupy herself with singing or writing songs, rather, songs simply poured forth unbidden by virtue of her deep encounter within—through intense inner recollection. Proclaiming Brahman within, she resolved the shame she had felt just years before, born of her widowhood. But now she no longer felt oppressed by societal norms:
Diving deep into the ocean of sorrow, reaching the other shore,
I shunned shame and disgrace
And became vast as the sky—Paraparame.
And again:
The idle gossip, falsity and delusion of the world disappeared
And I became like the sky
Vast, indivisible, Paraparame.
This song whose verses end with the invocation Paraparame—“O Transcendent One!”—signalled Akkal’s surrender and the dawning of self-knowledge.[6]
Her clarity shone in other verses from this same song:
All the scriptures I had read became tattered and worn like old cloth,
While I became shoreless and immeasurable infinity, Paraparame.[7]
The Daily Round
Avudai Akkal’s mystical insights were not a rejection of the world—like Bhagavan Ramana she had no need to reject anything—but absorption in the world around her without any need for criticism of it. Her verses show that liberation is not elsewhere but is contained in the rhythm of daily life. She sang of the Divine through the familiar: the mortar and pestle, the cowherd, the river, the cooking pot—bridging the metaphysical and the mundane.[8] The mortar that grinds grain becomes the mind that crushes desire. The river that flows is the Self moving as consciousness.
Her teaching was fearless in its simplicity. For her, Brahma Satyam was not doctrine but direct experience—The Real is what remains when all has gone.[9]
She continues:
The divisions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ have vanished;
Names and forms, the sense of ‘we’ and ‘I’—all are gone.[10]
Non-duality became the centre of her voice:
I am not the body, I am consciousness the supreme,
I am the Absolute, Brahman indeed..
Upon meditating, ‘I am consciousness alone!’
With an awareness that like a stream of oil flows,
Is there either world or body to behold? [11]
And:
Mind, if you ask if activities remain
Even after realisation is gained,
It’s like a man who, after waking, recounts a dream.
Or one who rejoices, saying, ‘The Self is only me!’ [12]
Just as a large boulder unmoving remains,
Though a river in spate over it cascades,
His inner faculties, like a rock, unmoving remain,
By wave upon wave of impressions unfazed…
The ajnani and the jnani are both alike.
If you ask how to distinguish them in this bodily life,
The ajnani in actions is fully occupied.
The jnani, free of action, simply as Brahman abides.[13]
After her guru’s passing, she continued to sing songs which became for her listeners a deep teaching. Seekers including other widows gathered around her, finding in her voice consolation and courage. She was called “an unmattha—one who wanders like a madwoman—spiritually intoxicated. She composed her songs while in this state”.[14]
Is there a mind to remember and forget,
Or any body, subject to birth and death?
In the undefiled can there defilement be?
Or anything that as large or small is seen?
Is there any caste or class in that Self?
Any witnesser or anything witnessed?
In the ocean of overflowing bliss
What is form and what is formlessness?
A wonder, a wonder, a wonder indeed is this.[15]
Women followed her, learnt her songs and passed this treasure on to other women. Slowly her songs became known in every local brahmin household. There may have been a time, perhaps, when the women of all brahmin households in Tiruneveli district sang her songs.[16]
The Dance of Stillness
Akkal’s later poems are suffused with joy—the joy of being nothing separate, of moving yet unmoving. The pallavi (refrain) of one such song reads:
Dance, my dear, as the undivided One…
This dance that knows no dancing is the dance of bliss.
In a verse she defines the dance:
Dwelling in the form of ‘That,’ free of ‘I’ and ‘other,’
Abiding firmly come what may,
Deeply sleeping yet wide awake—this is the dance of joy and bliss.[17]
Here “dance” means life lived from the centre, the Self that neither acts nor refrains from action—natural absorption amid activity.[18]
Suffering as Redemption
In both Avudai Akkal’s life and the lives of the widows who came to Bhagavan, we see the same thread, the movement from loss to faith, from deprivation to revelation. What appears as personal tragedy becomes, in the light of inquiry, the threshold of awakening.
Bhagavan often said that suffering is the call of the Self—the unbearable pressure of truth upon what is false. When life collapses around us, the attention turns inward where grief is allowed to purify the heart, dissolve pride and illusion, until the only refuge is awareness itself. Abiding there is the only means to know the deathless. Avudai expresses this with serene finality:
As the raging forest fire consumes without discrimination
All the wood—trees, stumps, trunks—in its path,
So the fire of Knowledge completely devoured
The categories of time, space, name and form.[19]
In this plain idiom, she articulates the essence of advaitic teaching: death and bereavement are not ends but revelations that point to what was never born.
Akkal speaks of the body’s death as a bird’s flight from the sky—nothing lost, nothing gained. The formless remains unmarked by change.
Akkal lived near the Courtallam Falls, where, tradition says, she spent her last days in silent absorption. One morning she climbed the hill with three disciples and told them not to follow her. She walked up and vanished, never seen again—no grave, no body—only the rumour of her union with the Infinite remained.
Conclusion
What Akkal wove with words, Bhagavan Ramana communicated in silence. Those whom society had rejected—the widows, the poor, the ill—found recognition with Bhagavan. He treated no one as broken or incomplete. His silence carried the assurance that redemption is simply born of seeing clearly—what you seek, you already are.
Avudai Akkal’s life and Bhagavan’s teaching illuminate one another, showing that the path begins where dependence on worldly security ends. For Akkal, child-widowhood served as a gateway to the Beyond.
Postscript
One afternoon in 1946 following an advaitic discussion in the Old Hall, Lokamma began to sing a rustic Tamil tune. Bhagavan’s face lit up: “Avudai Ammal,” he said softly. “Mother used to sing this song very often. It says exactly what we have been speaking of.” Bhagavan went on: “Avudai Ammal has composed a great many songs. They are very popular in Madurai and other nearby districts. Some of them have been published. Still, so many remain unpublished. They have been handed down orally from generation to generation, mostly through women, who learn them by heart, hearing them from others and singing them along with those who already know them.”[20]
Only in the last century have Avudai[21] Akkal’s songs finally been collated and published, first in palm-leaf transcriptions and later as the Senkottai Sri Avudai Akkal Padal Thirattu. Scholars tell us that among Avudai Akkal’s works, her most celebrated compositions include the major philosophical pieces with deep non-dual content, Vedanta Kuravanji, Vedanta Vidya Sobanam, Soodalai Kummi, and her luminous collection of shorter lyrics known as Vedanta Jnanarasa Kirtanaigal. These songs, blending poetry, devotion, and advaitic insight, have been cherished for generations in the Tamil non-dual tradition. A comprehensive edition of her works has been published by Sri Gnanananda Niketan, Sri Gnanananda Tapovanam, Tirukoilur. The Jnanarasa Kirtanaigal in particular gained wider recognition through musical renderings by the renowned Bombay Sisters (Smt. Saroja and Smt. Lalitha, with musical direction by L. Krishnan), bringing Akkal’s voice to modern listeners through recorded audio performances. Ramana Kendra are beginning to sing some of her songs. [22]
Avudai Akkal’s verses echo through the Tamil countryside even now, sung by women who may not even know her story but feel her voice as their own—an enduring testimony that the heart and soul of the Tamil land transcends the generations and every social chain.
In the end, threads converge—the widow, saint, seeker, and sage—all meeting in the same silence where grief ends and only Being remains. [23] —
Footnotes and References for Further Reading
[1] Transgressing Boundaries, Kanchana Natarajan, Zubaan 2012.
[2] Brahmajnanavalimala, verse 20.
[3] “Pantitan Kavi”, Ibid., p. 55.
[4] Ibid., p. 87.
[5] https://pattaabhi.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/shenkottai-avudai-akkal-vedanthic-songs.
[6] “Avudai Akka of Chengottai” by Dr. Kanchana Natarajan, in the Mountain Path, January 2010, pp. 23-25. In this song entitled Paraparakanni, the author footnotes the word Paraparame saying: The song is addressed to the Paraparam, the Absolute Being that transcends the duality of both param (Supreme) and aparam (non-supreme). The Tamil saint Tayumanavar, probably Akka’s senior contemporary, also composed Paraparakkanni, a widely read work. This address to the Absolute is used to describe the spiritual journey of the author as well as to detail the nature of the world and its illogical social norms. While Akka uses the Paraparakanni to express her spiritual attainment, she also rails against the Brahminical systems that she understood well from personal experience as a child-widow. (See also Dr. Kanchana Natarajan’s Transgressing Boundaries, 2012, Zubaan, pp. 84-97).
[7] Ibid., Mountain Path, January 2010, pp. 23-25.
[8] Transgressing Boundaries, p. 47.
[9] Vedānta Āccē Pōccē, (‘What Vanished and What Manifested with Vedanta’), Transgressing Boundaries, pp. 174-179; see also, the Mountain Path, July 2019, pp. 33-69.
[10] Vedānta Āccē Pōccē.
[11] Concert Programme of Songs by Cenkōttai Srī Āvudai Akkāl, by Robert Butler, 2021, p. 6.
[12] Ibid., p. 7.
[13] Ibid., pp. 7-8.
[14] Introduction to Songs of Cenkōttai Srī Āvudai Akkāl, translated by Robert Butler, 2019, pp. ix-x.
[15] Concert Programme of Songs by Cenkōttai Srī Āvudai Akkāl, by Robert Butler, 2021, p. 19.
[16] Introduction to Songs of Cenkōttai Srī Āvudai Akkāl, translated by Robert Butler, 2019, pp. ix-x.
[17] “Self-Realisation and Destiny: The Advaita of Avudai Akkal” by Robert Butler, in July 2020 Mountain Path, p. 17.
[18] Transgressing Boundaries, pp. 55-58.
[19] Transgressing Boundaries, p. 13.
[20] From Day by Day with Bhagavan, 2002, pp. 95-97, quoted in Kanchana Natarajan’s Introduction to Songs of Cenkōttai Srī Āvudai Akkāl, translated by Robert Butler, 2019, pp. ix-x.
[21] Dr. Kanchana Natarajan tells us that the name ‘Avudai’ is the Tamil form of Gomati Amman, the presiding goddess of the temple Sankaran Koil, some 40 kilometres from Senkottai. This massive temple is dedicated to Siva, his consort Gomati and Shankaranarayanan. (Ibid., p. ix.)
[22] Sri Gnanananda Niketan: http://www.srignananandaniketan.org
[23] The support of Cheenu Srinivasan of Sydney is much appreciated.
