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Book Reviews
Is the Goddess a feminist?
– the politics of South Asian goddesses
By Alf Hiltebeitel & Kathleen M. Erndl
Sheffield Academic Press, 2000, pages 287, ISBN 1-84127-157-8
 Following the two anthologies
studying the Devi by Hawley and Wulff in 1982 and 1998, the millennial
year brings us 14 papers—10 by women scholars--put together by
concentrating on south Asian goddesses in the perspective of feminism.
Rita Gross answers the question that Hiltebeitel and Erndl turn into the
eye-catching title of the book with “It depends on who the devotees are
and how the term feminist is defined.” The key to the answer, she argues,
lies in the subtle interaction between the Goddess and her devotees. Both
sexes are comfortable with powerful goddesses, and therefore with
charismatic women in India, instead of seeing them as negative and feared
entities as do Western scholars of Hinduism.
Rita DasGupta Sharma, Miranda Shaw and Kathleen Erndl’s papers are the
most interesting in correcting the prevalent view that Indian traditions
block-out women. The Gorakhnath tradition of the Kanphata yogis was far in
advance of the orthodox Hinduism’s chauvinistic doctrines about stri-dharma
in permitting widow remarriage, divorce and initiating girls at the age of
12 along with boys, practicing initiation by female siddhas.
Tantric texts specially revere women adepts and roundly condemn to
perdition the Tantric who refuses to initiate a chandala, a
yavana and a woman, considering them low. Vajrayogini’s consort
Candamaharosana is ready to cut to pieces male scoundrels who fail to
honor women. The Krama school of Kashmir Saivism was founded by yoginis.
As in the Mysteries of Astarte and Demeter, men participating in
Vajrayogini rites had to fulfill elaborate requirements serving to
preserve women’s religious sovereignty. The tradition of the female
initiator has revived strongly in modern India in the numerous god women
with large followings: Sarada Ma, Anandamayi Ma, the Mother,
Amritanandamayi Mai, Jyotir Ma, the Brahmakumaris etc. This tradition is
free of priestly ordinance and nothing bars a woman contacting the Great
Goddess through a private experience. Shaw makes an invaluable discovery
that English renderings of Sanskrit texts invariably changed female
references to male, as did the Tibetan versions. She exposes the Western
fallacy enshrining patriarchy as universally normative, failing to
recognize Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism’s celebration of women’s
independent religious quest. This fallacy was a tool in the hands of
British imperialists to project their rule as needed to liberate Indian
women. She notes that British policies deprived women of property, legal
rights, social status and religious and artistic expression (devadasis
were condemned as prostitutes and their art driven into extinction). She
pleads for deconstructing the cross-cultural monolith of patriarchy as a
paradigm of universal oppression of women so far as India is concerned,
since here feminism was not a modern Western introduction. Turning the
question on its head, she asks, “Can we be called feminists by Vajrayogini
standards?”
Kathleen Erndl’s investigation of how the concept of Shakti has empowered
Hindu women and been adopted in Indian feminism supplements these papers.
This feminism is not a Western import but has its roots in the Shakti
cults of old, so that it is not a negative reaction of rebellion, but a
rediscovery of a positive creative force empowering men and women alike.
Shakta female saints have higher status than their Vaishnava counterparts.
Unlike in the West, speaking of God as female is not shocking to the Hindu
tradition. However, the challenge facing Indian feminists is how to
generate a sense of commonalty among women cutting across caste, class,
language and kinship barriers.
Cynthia Humes contradicts Erndl’s thesis, drawing upon fieldwork regarding
Vindhyavasini Devi to find a persistent emphasis on the great gulf
existing between ordinary women and the Great Goddess. The Devi
Mahatmya is seen not as about a great woman but about a goddess,
precluding identification in terms of all that is socially termed
“feminine”. The later text Devi Bhagavata makes the goddess expound
negative attributes of women’s nature and refashions the goddess as femme
fatale for enemies and mother for devotees.
Alfred Collins attempts a psychological hermeneutic of Samkhya, reading
into the epic tales of Nala and Damayanti, Savitri and Satyavan the
actions of Prakriti towards Purusha. The female of the pair saves the
male, virtually becoming her spouse’s guru. He takes this further to show
that Prakriti’s purushartha is to transform herself to reveal the
true Purusha, in the process destroying the overreaching ego of the
deluded Purusha (Ravana, Mahishasura).
Lindsey Harlan studies theRajput clan-goddesses (kula devis) who
exact a very high price for protection: the men must sacrifice themselves
to sate her. The goddess is at once Shakti, wife and queen, which creates
a tension because of the inherent dichotomy: the wife’s dharma is to
protect her husband’s life so that he outlives her; but the warrior’s
dharma is to die in battle, not in bed. The tension is resolved through
the solution of sati, which exonerates the wife, or the extreme instance
of the Hadi Rani who decapitates herself to encourage her doting husband
to die in battle. “The demure domestic female is ultimately also a
consumer. Like the divine kuladevi protector, her protection comes at a
high price: the sacrifice of men in battle.” However, there are also
stories like that of Jamvai Mata of the Kachwahas where the chaste wife
saves her husband from the blood-lusting kuladevi. Jains (from Jina,
conqueror) descended from these families transmogrify these martial
goddesses into domestic ones in keeping with their non-violent doctrine.
Hiltebeitel seizes upon a critical question asked at a crucial juncture of
the Mahabharata by Draupadi that remains unanswered leading to her
being dragged by her hair in a single cloth into the court followed by
attempted stripping. The question Panchali (‘the puppet’) asks challenges
men’s ownership of women in patriarchy--“She raises the feminist questions
of a Barbie doll”—in two spheres: dharma of the family and dharma of men’s
court. In losing Draupadi, and lapsing into total silence, Yudhishthira
seems to have lost his higher Self, which she represents. Hiltebeitel
finds Draupadi – as prakriti – an ambivalent feminist whose
question “is one that an interculturally sensitive feminism might find
interesting.” Calling in question male supremacy in kinship and family and
in the men’s court, this question is posed in a different class context by
Mahasweta Devi’s tribal heroine, Dopdi, to the Naxalite “gentlemen”
revolutionaries and remains unanswered as they rape and kill her.
Usha Menon and Richard Shweder argue that the answer to the question the
editors ask is “mostly no”. While South Asian traditions encourage the
view of the goddess as an ecological feminist, this might be misleading.
The Oriya tradition of Bhubanseswar goes against any feminist
interpretation: without Shiva, Shakti cannot create; on her own she
destroys society and nature. While in terms of physiology man is superior,
in terms of culture women surpass men. The goddess’ power is significant
only when reined in from within, and is exercised most responsibly by
enduring sacrifices and subordinating oneself to family duties. Hence,
while Kali may be a symbol of feminism for Western women, in Oriya women
she is neither a symbol of equality nor of social transformation.
Stanley Kurtz finds the antithesis of Western egalitarian individualism in
the Santoshi Mata cult, for here the female and male deities are not just
side-by-side but even within each other. He finds that the West
appropriates the Hindu goddess for the purpose of marketing feminism,
because the system of gender hierarchy is inherent in the goddess. In the
world of the goddess separation is illusory and founded in a profound
unity at the core.
Tracy Pintchman asks a basic question: whether powerful, independent
goddesses are conducive to female empowerment in society. This is in the
context of the theory that in goddess-less traditions the Hindu goddesses
provide a resource for rediscovering the goddess. Yet, Brahmanical
orthodoxy is by no means less repressive than those traditions that are
devoid of goddesses. Hindu priestesses make no connection between the
goddesses who posses them and women’s empowerment. On the other hand, they
stress the gender-free grace of the goddess and stress the submissive role
of women in society. Extracting another culture’s goddesses for a
different individual or society’s purpose deprives the symbol of the very
context that makes it meaningful in the community and therefore it cannot
motivate beyond the individual level. That is why empowering
interpretations of Hindu goddesses are unlikely to advance the feminist
cause in Western culture, whereas it might do so in Indian.
Dobia’s personal account of discovering Parvati is exactly the converse of
Pintchman’s paper, delineating how an image of Devi brought her into touch
with unfathomable depths within herself. She finds the significance of the
multi-faceted Divine Mother best brought home in Sri Aurobindo’s
description of Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati, Mahakali and Maheswari. Dobia
notes the struggle in various forms of the Devi to retain the
transcendental perspective while dealing with social constraints of the
worldly female role which make her particularly relevant for women.
Kripal’s paper pursues the usual psycho-analytic thesis that sees Kali as
a symbol of all that man fears most in woman and reads into the worship of
the goddess the Christian “bride-soul” homoerotic concept. The large
number of male heads lying around in the myths of the goddess is seen as
symbolic castration. Because of this he questions the relevance of
importing the goddess into the West where sacrificing anything individual,
particularly male sexual power, is non-negotiable. He doubts if the West
can emulate Ramakrishna’s simultaneously being a child of the mother,
reject Tantra’s heterosexuality and delight as Radha as the female lover
of the Divine. However, precisely because Kali offers spiritual and sexual
possibilities the West is not familiar with, is it worthwhile listening to
the goddess’ voice?
Rajan’s concluding essay finds that questioning whether the Hindu goddess
is a feminist leads to the exploration of multiple ramifications of
feminism in the intertwined contexts of religion, politics and social
movements in modern India.
All in all, the editors have put together an extremely rewarding read that
challenges prevailing paradigms of feminist thought and offers alternative
paths of investigation for building up a feminism that will be true to
indigenous traditions predating Western feminism by far. However, with as many as ten women
contributing to this book, one is disappointed to find no follow up on the
perceptive insight that all texts regarding the Devi are male-authored. In
that context, the absence of any reference to the only hymn to the
Creatrix, Adi Shakti, composed by a female seer is surprising. In the
Rig Veda (X.125) we come across eight verses composed by Vak, daughter
of rishi Ambhrin, who is described as “Brahma-knowing”. Here Vak,
experiencing Adi Shakti as her Self declaims, “It is I who, creating the
universe and all worlds, wholly pervade them like the wind. Though I
transcend the heavens and this earth, yet by my glory have I manifested
creation.” This sukta, set to soul-stirring music by Pankaj Mullick
in the radio broadcast “Mahishasur-mardini”, reveals how the supreme
goddess still resonates within Bengali households every year at the dawn
of Mahalaya. –
Pradip Bhattacharya
March 16, 2003
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