Woman and Goddess in Hinduism
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WOMAN AND GODDESS IN HINDUISM
WOMAN AND GODDESS IN HINDUISM
Reinterpretations and Re-envisionings
Edited by
Tracy Pintchman and Rita D. Sherma
WOMAN AND GODDESS IN HINDUISM
Copyright © Tracy Pintchman and Rita D. Sherma, 2011.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–11369–5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pintchman, Tracy.
Woman and goddess in Hinduism : reinterpretations and re-envisionings/Tracy Pintchman, Rita D. Sherma.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978–0–230–11369–5 (hardback)
ISBN-10: 0–230–11369–9
1. Women in Hinduism. 2. Hindu goddesses. 3. Women—Religious aspects—Hinduism. 4. Hinduism—Doctrines. I. Sherma, Rita DasGupta. II. Title.
BL1237.46.P56 2011
294.5’2114—dc22
2011005468
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: August 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
For the pioneering women scholars on whose shoulders we stand: Julia Leslie, Barbara Holdrege, Rita Gross, Sanjukta Gupta, and many others
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Hermeneutics of Intersubjectivity
Rita D. Sherma
Part I Theological Reflection
1 Sat, Suttee, and Svitr
Arvind Sharma
2 Female Beauty, Female Power: Seeing Dev in the Saundarya Lahar
Francis Xavier Clooney
3 Mystery, Wonder, and Knowledge in the Triadic Figure of Mahvidy Chinnamast: A kta Woman’s Reading
Neela Bhattacharya Saxena
Part II Reclaiming Alternative Modalities of Feminine Power
4 St Rasos and kta Phas: A Feminine Reclamation of Mythic and Epic Proportions
Phyllis K. Herman
5 Spreading akti
Karen Pechilis
6 The Kl Practice: Revisiting Women’s Roles in Tantra
Loriliai Biernacki
Part III The Feminine Principle in Hindu Thought and Practice: Problems and Possibilities
7 Hindu Rituals on Behalf of Women: Notes on First Principles
Laurie L. Patton
8 The Feminine Concept of Surrender in Vaiava Discourse
E. H. Rick Jarow
9 Gandhi’s Reconstruction of the Feminine: Toward an Indigenous Hermeneutics
Veena Rani Howard
Conclusion: Reimagining the Hindu Feminine
Tracy Pintchman
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
We wish to express our gratitude to our editor Burke Gerstenschlager at Palgrave Macmillan, who recognized the need for this volume and its message, and to Kaylan Connally, editorial assistant, for all her help through the publishing process. Deep appreciation goes to our esteemed contributors for their patience and diligence in working with us, and for the insights and quality reflected in their work. A special note of thanks to Rita’s daughter Nisha Sherma, who is responsible for the idea and photography of the art on the front cover. We are indebted to Rohini Krishnan, who oversaw the book production process, and Elspeth Tupelo, who prepared a draft of the index. Finally, we are very grateful to our families and especially our husbands, Dr. Arun Sherma and William French, for their unwavering support.
Introduction:
A Hermeneutics of Intersubjectivity
Rita D. Sherma
In recent years, the growing interest in the relationship between religion and “the Feminine,” whether human or divine, has given rise to diverse academic volumes exploring this connection in different traditions. The academic examination of the Feminine in Hindu traditions has been, for the most part, rooted in efforts to describe and interpret, using various scholarly methods, including ethnographic, historical, or literary research on Hindu women and Hindu goddess traditions. Important as these areas of study are, they are necessarily circumscribed by the methods of inquiry they employ and hence are, generally speaking, not concerned with exploring the relevance of Hindu understandings of the Feminine to theological concerns or contemporary forms of gender activism.
The aim of this book is to offer a multilayered exploration of Hindu understandings of the Feminine, both human and divine, that emphasize thealogical and activist methods and aims over historical, anthropological, and literary ones. In this regard, this is essentially a collective work of constructive Hindu thealogy. We mean to employ the term “thealogy” here in the broadest possible sense.
The traditional academic parameters of textuality and anthropology are, of course, necessitated by the demands of credible scholarship. They can, however, be complemented by thealogical reflection and constructive engagement. Such an approach could provide a more nuanced exploration of the significance of Hindu understandings of the feminine in terms of the following:
• conceptual resources for thealogical reflection and reinterpretation;
• alternative insights on the multiple possible modes of envisioning female empowerment and the divine feminine in feminist theory discourse; and
• the relevance of Hindu models of the feminine to cross-cultural philosophical, theological, ontological, or sociological interchange.
In offering multiple constructive explorations of the Hindu Feminine—some with, and others without the framework of a confessional stance—this book uses a wide-angle lens to understand more fully certain aspects of the Feminine in the Hindu ethos in terms of their potential for application as elements of constructive thealogy.
The chapters of this volume approach the Feminine in Hindu traditions from the standpoint of intersubjective construction via a method that I have termed dialexis. Dialexis here refers to a form of intellectual engagement “across styles” that takes as its starting point an adequate accounting of contextualized signification. The various styles of expression and communication that cultures use to express themselves are grounded in lexical choices made in particular historical, geographical, and societal contexts.
“Lexis” refers to the use of expressions relevant to the style of a text or of any communicative encounter. The term “lexical choice” is being used here to signify more than words alone; we use it to refer to all attempts to convey meaning including words, art, ritual, music, and so forth. Ideas that may be, in themselves, universally applicable, may be difficult to comprehend if they are deeply informed by, and entrenched in, an unfamiliar cultural ethos. Dialexis should allow us to penetrate those contextual lexical or communicative choices. We consider dialexis, which will be described in greater detail later, to be the foundation of intersubjective scholarship.
The “hermeneutics of intersubjectivity”
is an approach that assumes that the “Other” is not just an object of study, but also a subject from whom I can learn. Thus, this volume starts with the assumption that understanding and respect are both aided by, and dependent on, scholars’ perceptions of the Other not merely as object of investigation, but also as subject; and not only as subject but as “subject with whom we are in conversation.”
The demands of rigorous, credible scholarship and the desire to foster mutual understanding are both served when descriptive parameters are viewed not as limits but as starting points, and when scholarship is complemented by an engaged hermeneutics that strives to be dialogical. We view such an approach as of particular significance for the contemporary academic study of Hinduism, which has suffered from deeply corrosive tensions due, in part, to applications of academic frameworks deeply grounded in the Western ethos—such as Freudian and Marxist hermeneutics—to Hindu materials in ways that some individuals have perceived to be inherently distorting and disjunctive.
METHODOLOGY: TOWARD A
HERMENEUTICS OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Methods of study (whether textual, anthropological, iconographic, or other) are epistemological tools; they are modes of uncovering information. They are not, however, hermeneutical orientations, and the two should not be confused. For example, textual exegesis is a method that can be interpreted and understood through many different hermeneutical lenses (such as, e.g., feminist hermeneutics). It is the lens that is the hermeneutical orientation; textual exegesis is a modality of investigation. The exegesis may be deeply influenced by the hermeneutics used, but they are not the same thing.
The presentation, therefore, of a certain hermeneutical angle by this volume—which I refer to as the hermeneutics of intersubjectivity—is not an attempt to assess the value of different methods for the study of the feminine (or any other issue) in the Hindu ethos. This is because—as per philosophical hermeneutics—we can define hermeneutics as the effort of the human mind to fully understand, process, internalize, and be transformed by that which it encounters, whereas a methodology is a body of procedures, protocols, rules, and modes of investigation grounded in a given field of inquiry. The first, ultimately, is a way of being; the second is a way of acting. They cannot be conflated.
The “Hermeneutics of Alterity”
A lens that could be termed the “hermeneutics of alterity” has often been used to study the feminine (both real and conceptual) in Hindu thought and culture. “Alterity” signifies “Otherness,” from the German “alter,” or “other,” not as an account of basic individual variations but as the systematic categorization of classes of peoples and cultures as irretrievably “Other.” The hermeneutics of alterity comes into play whenever we are examining something that is seen as clearly outside of ourselves.
It is important to acknowledge that a hermeneutics of alterity can allow for the distance necessary to initiate timely critique, or elicit new threads of meaning out of a tradition. However, it must be applied with care. Uncritically applied, it runs the risk that the uniqueness of the identity of a conceptual and actual lifeworld (lebenswelt) will be misread not to the point of deconstruction, but to the point of misconception. In such a case, the lifeworld of the Other, as understood by the Other, ceases to have any bearing on the scholar’s interpretation. In other words, commenting and interpreting without accessing the conceptual key of the Other does not help to unlock the cultural baggage.
In terms of contemporary reconstruction in theology or philosophy of religion, the hermeneutics of alterity can be problematic even when individuals embedded in an ethos use it to create a separation between themselves and the culture to which they belong in order to facilitate critical examination and revision. This danger exists, in part, because of the current global religious situation in which orthodox religion is in violent conflict, in many parts of the world, not only with the religious traditions of others, but also with the implications of modernity and postmodernity. There is also the possibility that the disjunction evoked through a misreading of a text or the misunderstanding of a context may be less effective in birthing change than a reflective reconstruction that integrates (or at least, acknowledges) important aspects of the tradition’s viewpoint, though not its entire vision of the world and human life.
Contemporary feminist activist scholarship constantly engages this ground reality—that effective, nonviolent change requires acknowledgment and understanding of the tradition’s perspective before theological reconstruction can be created and pragmatically applied. This hermeneutical orientation is in evidence, for example, in Rita Gross’s Soaring and Settling: Buddhist Perspectives on Contemporary Social and Religious Issues or Rosemary Ruether’s Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing.
The effort to include and surpass the hermeneutics of alterity is central to the thrust of this volume. This collection of essays seeks to widen the examination of the theme of the Hindu tradition’s relationship to the idea of the “Feminine” by opening their analyses to “intersubjective construction” and “dialexis.” Both are key components of a “hermeneutics of intersubjectivity.”
The Hermeneutics of Intersubjectivity
An approach that embodies intersubjective construction entails reflecting on an encounter with particular subjects and materials in a way that not only seeks comprehensive understanding of their lexical context, but also strives to articulate how those subjects or materials may be engaged to inform—or transform—one’s own constructive thought. It is important to keep in mind, however, that when we address the Other as subject with whom we are in conversation, we are not engaged in a monologue; rather, we are immersed in a dialogue. As we are transformed by our encounter with the Other toward broadening our vision, so should the Other—in an ideal circumstance—be moved to reconsider present perspectives.
Only when the possibility of mutual transformation remains available can the fusion of horizons—Hans-Georg Gadamer’s dream— remain viable. The hermeneutics of intersubjectivity does not imply uncritical acceptance of the Other or his/her lifeworld. It does, however, give primacy to integrating our deepest understanding of the self-perception of the Other into our conceptual portrait of the Other. Intersubjective hermeneutics allows room for both critical and constructive engagement, but it does so with the premise that I cannot change what I do not fully understand.
The intellectual origins of the intersubjective orientation are commonly thought to lie in the field of self psychology. Founded by Heinz Kohut, MD (1913–1981), self psychology was the first major psychoanalytic movement in the United States to identify the crucial role of empathy in understanding human development and psychoanalytic transformation in patients. But the intersubjective orientation must not be equated with empathy as defined in self psychology. It is also rooted in existential phenomenology, structuralism, and philosophical hermeneutics.
Intersubjective scholarship in religious studies involves more than writing phenomenologically about one’s encounter with a religious tradition. Because we are human and our cognition reacts to all that it encounters, there will be a reaction—intellectual, emotive, traumatic, creative, and so forth—to the Other and his/her lifeworld. Thus any investigation that takes us out of our familiar cognitive space entails contemplation, on the internal effect, engendered by the new encounter, toward one’s own constructive thought. For critical, constructive, and reflective philosophical and theological scholarship to be engaging and transformative, the articulation of the phenomenon that we have observed needs to be accompanied by contemplation on, and awareness of, our own internal response.
Dialexis
Lexis refers to the study of, or use of, words—especially those particular choices that are relevant to the style of a text or of any communicative encounter. Lexical choice implies communicative choice, and is an important aspect of creating a style suitable for a particular audience. We use lexical choice here to mean more than just words; we use it to imply all efforts t
o convey meaning whether verbal, artistic, musical, and so forth. This has a twofold significance for the scholar studying a tradition.
First, it signifies that the way in which a culture articulates itself is rooted in lexical choices made as a result of its historic, geographic, and cultural context. For example, if we use the concept of “transcending fear” as our metaphor, we can see that the iconography of Kl in abhya mudr (the hand gesture that conveys “fear not”) is expressive of a lexical choice made by a certain people embedded in, and responding within, a certain culture. This is not, however, the only possible lexical choice for conveying the concept of “transcending fear.” This choice has famously horrified European missionaries whose hermeneutical toolbox did not have the right instruments of understanding to “unpack” the meaning of Kl’s iconography. Thus, conceptual insights that are, in themselves, transcontextual, may appear totally conditioned by, and embedded in, a limited expression. To be sure, there are marked variegations in lexical choices within cultures themselves, which demands a nonessentialist approach.
I am introducing the term “dialexis,” therefore, to refer to an intellectual engagement “across expressive styles” taking into account the factor of diversity. That is to say, different cultures (and groups within cultures) have divergent emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual “styles.” This may suggest various parameters for hermeneutical examinations of, and reactions to, iconographies, texts, narratives, and so forth. We maintain that dialexis provides the impetus for looking beyond surface appearances to help us better understand the communications or insights under the different contextual lexical choices presented to us.
ADEQUATE HERMENEUTICAL EFFORT
The second issue at stake, given the variable of lexical choice, is that of adequate hermeneutical effort. When we encounter something new, we need to be vigilant about the uncritical use of hermeneu-tic lenses that are themselves outgrowths of culture and context. In such an enterprise, how are we to know that our interpretation of the “feminine in Hinduism” (or of anything at all) accords with what is meant by the tradition itself or the majority of its practitioners? How do we determine whether the elicitation of meaning that our internal responses are based on is grounded in adequate understanding?