The Female Voice and the Crossing of the Boundaries of Scholarship:A Note on the Rahasyam of the Lady from Tirukkōḷūr, with a Complete, Annotated Translation

The Śrīvaiṣṇavas are prolific writers, who masterfully used multiple languages for composing works in a range of genres, from commentaries to esoterical works, from devotional poetry to hagiography. But while this community, roughly half of which consists of women, claims equality with a difference for women-which includes the right to liberation at death and to religious, albeit non-Vedic, learning-it hardly seems to have encouraged them to emulate the male authors and produce works of any kind. Despite this attitude, a few female voices, sometimes muffled as they can be, are heard across the centuries. One such voice belongs to Tirukkōḷūr peṇpiḷḷai (“the woman from Tirukkōḷūr, " 12th c.?), who allegedly spoke words betraying her scholarly knowledge, and that, too, to the great Rāmānuja himself. Who this woman-who ventured into the jealously-guarded male domain of scholarship-was, and what her ‘composition’ deals with are the topics of this brief essay.