In personifying Urdu in this way, Urdu poets are participating in an ancient Indian tradition, which includes such figures as Gosae-Era and Jaher-Era, the goddesses of music worshipped by the tribal Santals; the Vidyadevis, the Jain goddesses of knowledge; the Sapta or Asta Matrkas, who in Kashmir Shaivism personify the letters of the alphabet, and grammar, and thus language itself; and the shape-shifting Satarupa, "Having a Hundred Forms," who with her partner Brahma gives birth to the arts, time, and death. Saraswati, "The Flowing One," who is a variant form of Satarupa, is worshipped as the incarnate form of knowledge and learning by millions of women and men today. And following much other writing on the subject, in the book Passions of the Tongue, Sumathi Ramaswamy traces the ways in which Tamil-speakers have imagined their language as "Mother Tamil," as goddess, and as maiden, with attendant feelings ranging from piety to eroticised love.

My favourite knowledge-goddess, however, is Vac. Vac is literally speech, voice, language; Brahma sings the universe into existence through Vac, the divine voice. Therefore Vac is the divine Word, which sustains all the gods and all that lives, she is the mother of the universe. So, within this tradition, the equivalent to the neo-Platonic logos is a primal feminine source, the fount of creativity and creation. In the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, the creator, personified as death or hunger, participates in a great copulation with Vac: "[The creator] desired, 'May a second self of me be produced!' With mind, manas, he - death, hunger - copulated with speech, Vac... With that speech, Vac, with that self, he created this whole world, whatever exists: the rishis, the yajuses, the samans, metres, sacrifices, men, cattle."

The origins of the universe itself, then, lie in an eroticised and sexually active relationship with language, with the Word. But I suspect that Dr. Sunder Rajan will have no patience for this further genderising, and certainly not with any hints of promiscuities with language. She writes, "It is impossible to think of the woman writer in quite this relationship to her language." Sadly enough, it may indeed be impossible for Dr. Sunder Rajan to think of this; but in fact women have recorded their eroticised relationships with their art, their craft, their process, and their language. One thinks instantly, of course, of Emily Dickinson, that Wayward Nun of Amherst, who stunned herself with "bolts of melody." I shall quote her, but I warn you, gentle Sunday-morning reader, this is racy stuff. Put down your teacup before you read this:

A Word made Flesh is seldom
And tremblingly partook
Nor then perhaps reported
But have I not mistook
Each one of us has tasted
with ecstasies of stealth
The very food debated
To our specific strength -
A Word that breathes distinctly
Has not the power to die
Cohesive as the Spirit
It may expire if He -
"Made Flesh and dwelt among us"
Could condescension be
Like this consent of Language
This loved Philology.

Vah, Emily-behen! "Like this consent of Language/ This loved Philology." Indeed.

The contemporary American poet Judith Harris reads language on the male body, which in her gaze takes on the mythical form of a god. The poem is called "The Male's Body as Muse":

My husband dips into sleep,
his body disguised
by the moon's intrusion.
Astonishingly, he seems still to be a stranger,
a gathered map
for language.

Only now, the impossible may happen: 

my husband can become immortal,
his muscles, taut, smoothed;
his face made young again...

...my husband, the archetype,
sleeps and grows more beautiful,
because I have willed it this way.

And here is our very own Mirabai, speaking to her divine husband, her very genderised muse-figure, in Robert Bly's translation:

Don't go, don't go.

I touch your soles, I'm sold to you.

Show me where to find the bhakti path, show me where to go.

I would like my body to turn into a heap of incense and sandalwood

and you set a torch to it.

When I've fallen down to grey ashes, smear me on your shoulders and chest.

Mira says: You who lift the mountains,

I have some light, I want to mingle it with yours.

Artists have eroticised their connections with their media in complicated and various ways; readers who are intrigued by this heated interflow may be interested in looking at the work of Amrita Sher Gill, Kamala Das, Begum Akhtar, Frida Kahlo, Djuna Barnes, Kathy Acker, Jeanette Winterson, Aretha Franklin, Sappho... Art - and much else - grows from desire. This is a strange thing to have to say in response to a scholar of literature, but nevertheless I find myself having to say it. Martha Graham, who told her dancers to "Dance from the vagina," wrote in her autobiography, "[Dance] is the eternal pulse of life, the utter desire... Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart. Desire is a lovely thing, and that is where the dance comes from, from desire." Now, I'm not sure exactly how one would express and incarnate desire in a completely de- genderised universe, and especially in the Indian languages, which genderise even chairs and slippers, and make sacred objects of them. The genderising of Urdu, and Hindi, and many other languages and abstractions, has a chequered and complex history, and there are those who see all genderising as straightforward evidence of evil intent. In this kind of analysis, worship of goddesses is part of The Problem, and such worship must be torn out by the root. But I am by tradition, by inclination, and by vocation a but-parast (that's "idol-worshipper," for those readers looking for a gloss), and I continue to see goddesses and gods everywhere. Whether all of this adds up to "sustained sexism" on my part, or a hectic and sustained desire on Dr. Sunder Rajan's part to simplify, to reduce, I shall let you decide, gentle and multiply-gendered reader.

But, to continue - in a 1997 issue of the journal Thamyris, Sumathi Ramaswamy published a distillation of her book, an article titled "Virgin Mother, Beloved Other: The Erotics of Tamil Nationalism in Colonial and Post-Colonial India." In this article, she suggests that through the last century, the varied figurings of the Tamil language were a way for Tamil-speakers to construct a new and particularly Tamil subjectivity, in reaction to and in engagement with modernity. According to Ramaswamy, the figure of Tamil as Virgin Mother displaces Tamil as sexually- active woman in response to a bourgeois Tamil nationalism that circumscribes female sexuality within strict domestic boundaries. The rise of the Virgin Mother, who displaces older traditions of turbulent, sexually active goddess figures, may be understood to be - at least in part - a reaction to the colonial assault on Indian "immorality" and cultural degeneration. Curiously enough, the editor of this issue of Thamyris was none other than Dr. Sunder Rajan. In her editorial introduction, Dr. Sunder Rajan wrote that Ramaswamy's essay "propounds an 'erotics of nationalism,' in order to describe the Tamil nationalists' love of the Tamil language which is personified as the paradoxical Virgin Mother: this suggestion works not only at a playful level to account for the 'pleasure of politics,' but also probes the possibility that 'sexual desire itself may be reconfigured in Tamil (and Indian) modernity to cater to the imperatives of nationalist ideologies.' Her argument has implications for a productive theory of desire as a technology of nation-building."

An erotics of language, then, may have similar implications for a productive theory of desire as a technology of poetry-making. Helene Cixous told us, "More body, hence more writing." To throw out the goddesses (and the gods) with the unhygienic phallologocentric bathwater might not only hamper our own efforts to defeat sexism, but result in us discarding not only our linguistically-marked bodies, but also our souls. For both women and men, to find a re-imagined and re-written goddess within oneself, or a reconfigured muse, is a productive act of differentiation, in the sense that Cixous perhaps meant when she said, "There has to be some other." Desire depends on the existence of an other, many others. It is in the space between the self and the Goddess, between the self and God, that the spark of desire catches fire and becomes a ghazal, a call to a beloved who is both fleshy and divine. In this ghazal, the agony of the beloved's absence is transmuted into the ecstasy of the beloved's versified presence, and into the ecstasy of a communion with Vac. The sexual play of goddesses and gods, and a logos that shifts gender and shape, may enable both women and men to indulge in creative play, in art-making that is joyful or dark or ironic or filled with laughter. For example, P. J. Harvey becomes the mother of gods and also takes up the phallus in her song: