NOTES
I am deeply indebted to Tracy Pintchman and Rita D. Sherma for their extensive help in editing this essay.
1. I have explored the idea of Gynocentric spirituality in In the Beginning IS Desire (2004). I use the capital “G” in “Gynocentric” deliberately to denote the supremacy of the Great Goddess in the kta tradition.
2. Elizabeth Benard (1994: 28) explains: “In many Hindu Tantric texts, such as the Great Liberation, the yogis are the ones who meditate on the deity without form, while the householders meditate on the deity with form; however Chinnamast’s form is such an awesome vision that only yogis can meditate on her with form.”
REFERENCES
Benard, Elizabeth Anne. 1994. Chinnamast : The Aweful Buddhist and Hindu Tantric Goddess. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas.
Khanna, Madhu. 1979. Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions.
Kinsley, David. 1997. Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Muller-Ortega, Paul. 1989. The Triadic Heart of iva. Albany: SUNY Press.
Prajñnnda, Swamy. 1988. Tantre Tatta O Shadhana (Theory and Practice in Tantra). Kolkata: Ramkrishna Bedanta Math.
Sanderson, Alexis. 2006. Meaning in Tantric Ritual. New Delhi: Tantra Foundation.
Saxena, Neela Bhattacharya. 2004. In the Beginning IS Desire: Tracing Kali’s Footprints in Indian Literature. New Delhi: Indialog.
Sherma, Rita Dasgupta. 1998. “Sacred Immanence: Reflections of Ecofeminism in Hindu Tantra.” In Purifying the Earthly Body of God: Religion and Ecology in Hindu India, ed. Lance E. Nelson, 89–132. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
White, David Gordon. 2001. “Introduction. “ In Tantra in Practice, ed. David G. White, 3–40. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
P A R T II
Reclaiming Alternative
Modalities of Feminine Power
C H A P T E R 4
St Rasos and Skta Pthas:
A Feminine Reclamation of Mythic
and Epic Proportions
Phyllis K. Herman
The fundamental questions underlying the materials I take up in this chapter are (1) how “the feminine” and “feminism” can be characterized for and by Hindu women today, (2) whether or not there is a potentially positive relation between those two terms. In Hinduism, a traditional paradigm for the former is that of the pativrat, the faithful wife who honors her vows of marriage. Two of the most compelling and persistent examples of the pativratare Stand Sat, epic heroines and goddesses who continue to be widely promulgated as models for how the Hindu women of India should behave. I would like to consider particular aspects of these pativrats dialexically, that is, as a style of feminine being and action, which could enhance an indigenously defined feminism in India. For better or worse, Rma and iva have been activated and characterized in the service of Indian nationalism and Hindu masculinity, and Kl; and Durg have been employed as models of femininity in the service of the Hindu state. Here I would like to address how Stor Sat can and even should be reclaimed as models of empowerment for modern Hindu women.
I will pursue this perhaps unsettling idea that the model of the faithful wife could constitute a feminist paradigm by outlining the power inherent in the ideal of the pativrat and by looking at the two quintessential models (Sat and St) and their shrines in Ayodhy and Citrakt. I will address how in particular St in her kitchen shrines provides both a locus for a Hindu feminism and a provocative starting point for a dialogue between Western feminists and Hindu women. The construction of the feminine in Hindu iconography, cultural narratives, and sacred geography gives Hindu feminism its own voice. As Rita Sherma notes in her introduction to this volume, “Hindu perceptions of the divine feminine inform and shape Hindu expressions of female agency and authority that are beginning to be articulated in a different key from Western feminist ideals” (xi).
In India, an intrinsically empowering “thealogy” is already in place—literally. The whole of the Indian subcontinent can be seen, I would argue, as the body of a goddess/pativrat: St reenters the earth at the end of the Rmyaa, Sat’s body parts are scattered all over India, such that their diffused bodies both “fertilize” the subcontinent and unite it as a whole. Their shrines are local manifestations that connect and are connected to the larger “faithscape” of the subcontinent, nourishing the nation as a whole while expressing the ritual power of individual women. These shrines that commemorate St and Sat wives also support the traditional connections between the good Hindu wife and the well-being of all India: the pativratis responsible for the care and feeding of her immediate family and, by extension, the care and feeding of the nation is within her purview as well.
In what follows, I will first summarize the essential connections among St, Sat and the paivrat. I will explore the connections between two different manifestations of goddess-geography in India: the Sita’s Kitchen” shrines (StRasos), which celebrate St as cook, and the “Seats/Places of Goddess Power” shrines (Skta Pphns), which mark the places where parts of Sat’s dead body fell to earth. I will contemplate the conflation of these shrines in Ayodhy and Citrakt, linking the ascendancy of St, the cook in her kitchen, over Sat, the wife who is literally “the cooked,” to the lives of contemporary Hindu women. In so doing, I hope to delineate resources for Hindu feminism that are already implicitly and explicitly in place.
DEFINING THE PATIVRATA
The ongoing power of both St and Sat is built upon their standing as the ideal Hindu wife, the pativrt, literally, “one who is true to the vow to her husband.” After marriage, which transforms the powerless girl into a wife, the pativrat has three primary duties, each involving, literally or figuratively, the application of heat or the use of fire. These duties are turning raw foodstuffs into cooked dishes, creating children from the raw energy of sex, and remaining faithful to her husband especially by reserving her passion for him alone. In the strictest interpretation of these duties, the wife’s life is a continual sealing of the f leshly bond bet ween herself and her husband, as she moves from the ritual fire of marriage through the rituals of the kitchen, childbirth, and, in a few cases, the funeral pyre.1 Thus, each and every day of her married life, a good Hindu woman—like the Brahmin priest—is dealing with “the most highly charged substances and elements in Indian theology” (Fruzzetti, 1982: 69), namely, fire, food, and flesh.
A model for the powers the pativrat attains through performance of her duties is found, as Mary McGee (1987: 337) has noted, in the tapasvin, literally, “one possessed of and characterized by heat” (Kaelber, 1989: 15) or “one who heats himself up” (Malamoud, 1996: 47), the Hindu ascetic who is usually, but not necessarily, male. The Sanskrit and Hindi linguistic roots tap (to heat) and pac (to cook), with their very long and complex ritual and devotional (bhakti) associations, suggest that the tapasvin and the pativrat attain perfection through the management of the transformative powers of inner and outer heat. The Sanskrit verb root tap relates to the inner heat brought about by austerities but also to the productive power of sexual heat and the generative heat of the sun on the soil. Tapas is always seen as a creative process; for example, the Aitareya Brhmaa (5.32) tells how the world comes into being through tapas, and the Mahbhrata tells of tapas-laden ascetics able to generate rain and fertility (Kaelber, 1989: 18–19).
The root pac has a similar complex of meanings. It relates to the act of cooking itself, and in the history of Hinduism, there is a definite preference for food that is pakk (cooked in ghee) over food that is kacc. The difference between pakk and kacc is not Claude Levi-Strauss’s famed distinction between the raw and the cooked, but rather that pakk foods are more elaborately prepared than that which is kacc: “what is pakk is therefore more precious, or ;better’ than that [which] is kacc (Malamoud, 1996: 52). The root pac is also used outside of the literal kitchen, in relation to the gestation of the human embryo or the development of seeds into food. In this context,
pac can be translated as “to ripen” or “to mature.” Thus, just as the heat of the hearth or oven (clh) cooks food, the heat of the mother’s body causes her fetus to mature and the heat from the sun causes seeds planted in the earth to grow and ripen (see Herman, 1998: 164).
In sum, Hindu women, both epic and ordinary, achieve goodness through their interactions with fire: St and Sat define themselves as good wives par excellence by offering themselves to the flames; real women establish themselves as good wives (pativrat) by cooking over the kitchen fire. This interaction has been enacted daily across India for centuries in the kitchen area (raso) of the home, where, as many scholars have noted, the Hindu wife presides over the fire just as the Hindu priest presides over the sacred fire in the temple space. This fundamental definition of the pativrat as one who interacts productively with heat is instanced not only by the stories of St and Sat but also by the local hierophanies of their powers found across India—the St Rasos and the Skta Pthas commemorating Sat.
STA’S KITCHEN, SAT’S BODY
In the Vslmki Rmyaa and in other iterations of the Rma narratives, Stsubmits to a trial by fire (agniparks) in order to prove her continued purity, and thus her claim on her status as pativrat. She emerges alive, revitalized, and even exceedingly fruitful: after walking through the ritual fire, and after returning with Rma to Ayodhy, St begins to cook up, as it were, twin sons for Rma, fulfilling one of the basic duties of the pativrat. Before Lava and Kusa are born, however, St is sent, at Rma’s behest, into exile in the forest. Feeling unable to live again with Rma, St turns her final act into that of a pativrt. After her sons are reunited with Rma, she reenters the earth from which she was born, ensuring the fertility and abundance of food that are essential to creation and maintenance of Rma’s ideal rule (Rmarjya).
Missing from the Rma narrative’s explicit celebration of Stas fertility in life and Stas service to her husband after deathtwo of the three essential attributes of the pativrat—is any explicit reference to St in the kitchen. The modern and popular manifestations of St as the presiding goddess of the kitchen in the many St Rasos found in contemporary India (Herman, 2000) consolidate St’s claim on the title pativrat; these shrines also literalize and localize her abstract roles as the cook (her fertility, both as mother and in the earth) and the cooked (in the earth and during her trial by fire) of the Rmyaa, making St into a pativrat more suited for everyday life.
In 1997 and again in 2000, I set out to visit most of the sites in India where a St Raso has been recorded in the pilgrimage literature, compelled by the fact that the great heroine and paradigmatic pativrat of the epic never cooked yet has many shrines dedicated to her culinary expertise. My list of the locations of her kitchen shrines expanded as I traveled, however, as those I met described to me the St Raso in their home villages. There were reports of them all over the subcontinent, even in places not generally associated with the Rma narratives. Those St Rasos that I was able to visit usually contained some literal manifestation of the Indian kitchen—a clh, a rolling pin, a rolling board, a seat.2 In each case, I was struck by just how much these extremely evocative domestic shrines portray St as both a cook and a constant manifestation of the Goddess (Dev) and goddess power, universal energy (akti). In defiance of the epic and other narratives, including the Rmcaritamnas, St is perceived as an extremely dedicated cook. The concrete relationship between St and cooking, along with the interpretation of the epic pativrat as a presiding goddess of place, turned out to be very similar to another unifying aspect of Indian sacred geography, namely, the kta Phas of Sat.
D. C. Sircar (1973) has engaged in an exercise similar to my earlier work on St wherein I tracked the Vedic and epic sources for St and her modern kitchen shrines, tracing the mythological history of Sat and her kta Phas.3 According to Sircar, the early sources for this legend make no mention of Sat herself, but the story gradually evolved until the fifth century, when the great poet and dramatist Klidsa has Sat, now identified as the daughter of Daksa and the wife of iva, choose to commit suicide to rebuke Daksa for not inviting her husband to the great celebration he is hosting, which centers on a ritual fire (5). Sat dies by fire in defense of her husband’s honor, just as St endured the trial by fire in the Vlmki Rmyaa. Both go into a ritual fire, but only one comes out in her current incarnation to continue her marriage. It is of note that given the associations between the pativrat and tapas that I developed earlier, in one iteration (the Klik Pura), Sat is described not as entering the ritual fire, but as spontaneously combusting, using her own ascetic heat or tapas.
More important, the Puras added to Klidsa’s tale of the dismemberment and dispersal of Sat’s body over the subcontinent and connect what were probably already extant expressions of feminine geographical hierophany to Sat. In some Purnas, her body drops apart as iva proceeds with her corpse over his shoulder or clasped in his arms; in other versions, Viu hastens the process, gradually cutting Sat’s body up to disperse it. As it turns out, the influence of the lovely and devoted Sat, the first incarnation of iva’s consort, has brought the ascetic iva closer to this world and to the life of the householder. In her next incarnation, as Prvat, having gone through the fire, the goddess is able to fully domesticate iva, bearing his children and completing the divine pairing of male and female power. Sat had marked herself as the pativrat extraordinare by choosing to end her life in service of her husband’s honor, but the truly productive marital relationship is the one she builds with iva in her next incarnation, as Prvat.
In any case, the modern kta Phas mark where the parts of the dismembered pativrat, Sat, fell and seeded the earth of India with a series of sacred spaces (Kinsley 1986: 187). The number of kta Phas enumerated in the texts varies widely, ranging from under a dozen to over a hundred, and the lists usually note the presiding feminine deities (aktas) of each site. Like the St Rasos, these domestic shrines reflect locative devotion, and their existence is both prompted by and yet not always documented in the texts. I refer to the kta Phas as domestic not because they are kitchen shrines but because they have, like the St Rasos, a certain concrete “this-worldliness” of place and geography as feminine:
The word “Ptha” . . . suggests to us that the goddess takes a seat, in this world—a firm seat, a bench . . . and the prayers and concerns that one might bring to the goddess who takes a seat . . . are the prayers and concerns having to do with birth and death, disease and health, food and water, fertility and longevity. (Eck 1982; cited in Brown, 1998: 239)
Thus, like the St Rasos, the kta Phas make the traditional connection between the pativrat—whether it is Sat or St or the modern wife—and divine feminine, who through her interactions with fire and heat creates, transforms, and nurtures in the service of her family.
INTERSECTING FEMININE
SACRED SPACE: AYODHY AND CITRAKT
Today, many shrines are dedicated to St’s culinary expertise: from Ayodhy to Nasik, they express a topography of the Rmyaa and testify to St’s culinary expertise. These shrines make concrete a relationship between St and cooking that has become a popular interpretation of her as a presiding goddess of place. As the goddess in the kitchen, St is manifest as a source of providence and nurture. It is as if St, who at the end of the Rmyaa is swallowed up by and reunited with the earth, emerges to preside over the clh. Within the St Rctso shrines, the land of India as the source of sustenance and the kitchen as a sacred space conflate.
The mythic history of the Phct shrines is an interesting variation on the impulse underpinning the St Rctsos. Like St, Sat chooses to end her life, throwing herself in the fire rather than, as St did, into a cleft in the earth. Sat’s body is then taken up and scattered by iva, who thus unwittingly spreads her power across and into the landscape of India. Today, each of the various shrines to her scattered parts is described as having its own presiding goddess—the dismembered goddess creates a series of sacred spaces that, when taken together, encompasses the whole of the subcontinent.
These two text
ual and physical genres of feminine sacred space explicitly intersect in Ayodhy and Citrakt, important locales of the Rma narratives. Medieval scriptures describe both St Rctsos and ktct Phcts as being present, yet only the St Rctsos exist there today; the Sktct Pthcts listed in texts are not to be found. For example, three separate lists of pihct shrines in Puranic and medieval texts give Ayodhy, the city of Rmctrctj’yct, as the site of a ktct Phct and name as the presiding goddess not St but rather Annaprna, literally, “she who is filled with food.”4 The Mcttsyct Pura cites St herself as a presiding kta and states that her Phasthna is to be found at Citrakt, the region of the famous forest idyll of the Rmyaa. Nonetheless, ktct Phas make no appearance in either the Ayodhy Mhtmya or the Citrctkt Mhtmya, two late medieval texts that are still used to direct the pilgrim to important holy stations.
The St Rctsos that exist in their respective landscapes are quite clearly located and described, however. Just as the Ayodhy Mhtmyct states, a St Rctso exists on the Rmkot in modern Ayodhy (as I saw it in 1997; see Herman, 1998). This beautiful shrine in the basement of the Birthplace of Rma Complex (jctnmctsthnct) is equipped with an image of St, a clh, a rolling pin, a rolling board, and a seat. The pctits who accompanied me into the shrine told me that the rctso shrine had been a very popular site of pilgrimage before the demolition of the adjacent Babri Mosque; the shrine is currently unused, a victim of the security measures in place since the 1992 riots. In the Citrctkt Mhtmyct, the devotee is told to worship on the second day of pilgrimage at the great Hanuman shrine on a hill and then continue to the highest point pilgrims are allowed to go in all of Citrakt, to an elaborate St Rctso complex at the summit. This hilltop compound (as I saw it in 2000) is made up of several buildings, all dedicated to St: the main one has Hindi inscriptions clearly identifying it as the Kitchen of St Shrine. This structure contains a clh, a rolling pin, and a sitting place where St is said to have prepared food and cooked it. The hill itself is known by various names, including Hanumn Hill, but the peak (and sometimes, the entire hill) is known in and around Citrakt as St Rnso.
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