Actually, two St Rnso sites are to be found in the region of Citrakt—the second, not mentioned in the Mhtmyct, is currently in ruins but is being rebuilt. The remnants of this St Rnso are located in a cave on top of another hill, above the modern village of Lalapur. The paits I spoke with said that St was there either during her first exile, when she cooked for Rma and Lakshmana, or during her second exile, when she cooked for the poet Vlmki and for her sons, Lava and Kua. The remains of a Vlmki ram are also visible, just above the signs marking the St Raso.
Ayodhy, the greatest of cities, and Citraküt, the forest idyll nonpareil, are obviously connected to each other by way of the Rma narrative. However, I suggest that the modern presence of St Rusos in both areas today connects them to the promotion of abundant food, especially as it relates to the formation and maintenance of that paradigm of Rma’s perfect rule wherein all are fed and satisfied. In point of fact, the Ayodhy Mhtmya explicitly connects Annaprna and St. In the description of the St’s Kitchen Complex (Stpakisthtmct), the goddess Prvat asks her husband, iva, to tell her about the great kitchen of St. iva says that the kitchen of St is always filled and pilgrimage to it can be done at all times, adding that the kitchen is so great that it destroys evil and that just seeing it will fill the pilgrim’s own house with food (nnnnpr virjate). The Ayodhy Mhtmya (AM. 24.1–8) thus locates power and presence of St in a divine kitchen shrine that is always full of food and has the power to bestow prosperity and food. In Ayodhy and in Citrakt, a “construction” of the Great Goddess resides in the St Rusos and in the idea of the kta Phcts—the universal and particular notion of the Goddess in these localities is St, seated in her kitchen shrine, actively preparing and cooking food for the satisfaction of one and all. The agency that once guaranteed a Rmarjya “filled with bountiful food” can still be available to a modern pilgrim or devotee. But what does this all matter, this subsuming of the ktct Phcts of Ayodhy and Citrakt by the St Rctsos, this enshrining of St in the kitchen where, indeed, Sat should be sitting?
I would argue that the definition of the pativrat chosen by modern Hindus is literalized by this coincidence of time, place, and texts. The triumph of St in the kitchen over the shrines dedicated to the broken body of Sat is a move that expresses an historical empowerment of Hindu women. Let me reiterate the myths and their implications. The winning paradigm does not privilege the shrines that grew out of the story of Sat, of a divine husband carrying the body of his dead wife, lonely, mad, so grief-stricken that the continued existence of the universe is threatened, almost fatally disconnected from family and the good of the larger community. Instead, it privileges the woman at the hearth, tending to the feeding and nurture of her family and, by extension, the kingdom as a whole. Quite literally, the St Rusos in Ayodhy and Citrakt are a triumph of hearth and home over the kta Phas, sprouted from the disconnection and fragmentation of the goddess/pativrat’s body. In other words, where St and Sat are pitted directly against one another, Hindus prefer the active, living kitchen goddess, the one who holds the family together, to the goddess without a family.
COOKING AS RITUAL
In 2003 and 2004, I interviewed a range of housewives in India belonging to different castes, classes, and incomes about various aspects of cooking and food preparation in their homes. I spoke with women in large urban centers such as Delhi and Ahmedabad and in the rural areas of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan. Most of the women acknowledged their role as ritual experts in the kitchen—including women who worked outside the home. Only women involved in a dialogue with Western feminism regarded the notion that the kitchen was a locus of power with suspicion, and many of these women did not cook. Among the housewives I surveyed, all those engaged in food preparation agreed that cooking was intimately connected to their role in securing the continuance and well-being of their families.
The value that Hindu women place on cooking echoes sentiments in other traditions. Various scholars have noted that women, both in Eastern and in Western religious traditions,5 are considered ritualists primarily when it comes to food and food preparation. Speaking of Judaism, Susan Sered (1992: 9) notes that “the rituals of food preparation imbue with holiness the everyday domestic work [of women].” Dealing with Medieval Christian women, Caroline Walker Bynum (1987: 159) writes that “food is important to women religiously because it is important socially . . . food is particularly a woman-controlled resource.” In modern India, St in her kitchen shrines is the quintessentially feminine paradigm and her place and occupation empowers women: she is a goddess who sanctifies and glorifies what Western-influenced feminists have come to see as the most menial of tasks, cooking. The modern St Raso shrines offer a point of insight into the construction of the powerful sacred and ritual nature of actions involved in women’s daily participation in food preparation.
The women I interviewed uniformly stressed the role of the use of fire, irrespective of whether the cooking was done on a gas stove or on the old-fashioned clh itself. The standard kacc and pakk rules, though the details were not universally agreed upon, were often invoked as well as the notion of the superiority of cooked foods over raw. In many cases, the act of cooking was further described as intimately related to the performance of household pj by women (see Ghosh, 1995), the one action triggering mention of the other because both link the use of fire and the purity of the body. The modern pativrat must keep her body, her clothes, her kitchen space, and her utensils pure when dealing with food and fire. Purity laws, so emphasized in the history of male-led rituals, accentuate the parallel between the power of the priest in the temple and the pativrat in the kitchen.
Religious notions of purity are especially apparent in the prohibitions against women cooking or doing daily worship (pj) at certain times. Hindu women are forbidden to cook or touch the family’s food and water during menstruation. According to my informants, the length of this proscription ranged between three and ten days, with shorter terms and lower caste commonly showing a positive correlation. A fertile woman’s reproductive abilities are thus explicitly related to cooking: a woman who has failed to conceive (i.e., a menstruating woman) cannot cook; likewise, a new mother cannot cook, typically for twenty-one-forty days after giving birth, because she cannot conceive. In the same vein, a newly married woman should not light the fire for cooking or worship, typically for twenty-forty days after her wedding, at which point, the new bride prepares a feast for the husband and her new in-laws and becomes the “official” cook for her husband.
Personal notions of purity were a daily concern among the housewives I interviewed who prepared food. Several women described elaborate morning preparations and precautions before performing worship and cooking the first meal. These included washing the body and hair and putting on a new sari. One village women told me that she waited to defecate until after cooking the first food of the day. Most concurred that, at the very least, one should wash and put on clean clothes before cooking. All removed footwear before entering the kitchen, and the kitchen or kitchen space itself is kept as clean as possible.
The ritual connections between women, food, purity, and the household are also expressed in the performance of vows (vratas), a duty inherent in the term itself, pativrat. The ideal wife, by cooking and maintaining the house, fulfills her dharmic vows. While vratas are not literally connected to cooking, they are literally connected with food, as the term most commonly refers to women’s fasting practices. Hindu women can and do control food for the family, and this in itself is a locus of power; when a women controls and restricts the food that enters into her own body, it is an extension and inter-nalization of this power.
Different vows require varying degrees of disciplining food intake by the woman. By practicing asceticism in fulfillment of such vows, the pativrat continues to generate creative and transformative heat, tapas. The woman (tapasvin) gains significant powers, powers that are usually limited to men. There are excellent studies of vratas (see McGee, 1987; Pearson, 1996; McDaniel, 2009); however, I
want to note here that the vratas maintain the complementary functions for women in the home with respect not only to the temple priests but also to the male ascetics who, through the fulfillment of their vows or vratas of self-denial, acquire great control over themselves and the sacred. Mary McGee (1987: 336), in tracing the history and character of vratas, notes that “in many ways, to be a pativrat is the vrata par excellence of women” and that to be a pativrat, the wife must undergo fasts at different times and occasions. Almost every Hindu woman performs fasts not only to promote the well-being of her family but also because “it gives me peace of mind” (Pearson, 1996).6
THE PATIVRAT AND FEMINIST THEALOGY
St the cook is a modern mythic role model in a particularly Hindu expression of the control women have always had in India, whether or not it is acknowledged as such. Hindu perceptions of gender empowerment have been expressed in different ways at different times. In terms of sacred feminine as the locus of authority for women, goddesses are not inherently empowering or disempowering for women but are filtered through human agents: “[T]here are potentially empowering interpretations of goddesses that may or may not be effectively appropriated, just as there are potentially disempowering interpretations of the same goddess” (Pintchman, 2000: 191). St, divine pativrat, has been a historically malleable figure: she has been and can continue to be a model of empowerment, depending upon the construction of her authority.
St as a historically powerful pativrat has been invoked by, for example, nineteenth-century Hindu reformers and activists in the i ndependence and nat ionalist movements, in pa r t in reaction to ea rlier Western critiques of roles for Hindu women. Christian missionaries and evangelical reformers within the British administration had come to regard Hindu women collectively as “abject victims of a decadent, priest-ridden system.” The Hindu response was to agree that Hindu women were then being kept ignorant and downtrodden but to argue that this situation had not always been the case: the epic heroines such as St had inhabited a golden age wherein “Hindu women had been men’s social equals and the religious system [Hinduism] had been pure” (Ratte, 1985: 355).
In the early twentieth century, Sarojini Naidu, a political and social activist, likewise located the power of women in the classical pativrats of epic tradition, but she regarded her contemporaries as positive agents of change rather than victims. The golden age still existed for Naidu, who found in St a powerful heroine/pativrat and a proactive model for “subjugated” women/Mother India. She focused on St as the exemplar of an ideal alive in those Hindu women who personified love and service and sacrifice while playing a role in the cause of independence:
Why are the names of St [and] Svitr . . . so sacred and common place in every household and the cause of inspiration? . . . It is spiritual understanding and intellectual development that made them great . . . No one can be greater than a good woman . . . cooperating and [providing] help to suffering humanity are nation building works. (367–368)
Naidu was well aware that this description might further a view of H i ndu women a s ne ces sa r i l y sub ser v ient ; t hu s , she wa s ca ref u l to specify that the “good woman” included not only the traditional housewife but also the newly educated independent woman, both of whom can function as pativrats to the nation. As Ratte notes, by invoking the pativrat/heroine to represent all modern Hindu women, Naidu provided nationalist society with a different view of gender, one that sanctioned nontraditional behavior through traditional references: St and Sat were presented as active heroines, examples of embodied action for the twentieth-century Indian woman.
The notion of the pativrat came to be troped very differently by later feminists and nationalists, however. St a nd S at h ave once aga i n become popular examples of the ultimate victimization of women by Hinduism. The Hindu nationalist movement has portrayed especially St as the quintessential Hindu wife, mother, and nation/motherland who has been or could be “kidnapped” (raped) by the Muslim “demons.” In this scenario, Hindu men are to emulate Rma in his role as active protector and rescuer, while St is to remain passive and vulnerable. Modern Western feminist responses to the pativrat likewise see in St primarily an obedient, self-sacrificing woman. They are unable to find any element of proactive choice in the St who follows Rma into the forest, accepts the trial by fire and banishment, gives birth while alone in the forest, and for the good of the kingdom chooses to descend into the earth. The very best that Western feminism has said about her is that St can function as a “relevant and comforting model of wifehood” (Gross, 2000: 107). Many Indian feminists informed by Western feminism concur with this response.7
Hindu feminists who can see past the Western critique and who can unpack the meanings of the iconography of St and her rasos, can employ them as expressions of female empowerment. Madhu Kishwar has begun to articulate a different view of St with her article, published in Manushi in 1997, “Yes to St, No to Ram”:
While for women, St represents an example of the ideal wife, for men she is St mt not just the daughter of the earth . . . but Mother Earth herself who inspires awe and reverence. By shaping themselves in the St mold, women often manage to acquire enormous clout and power over their husbands and family.
In the political realm, such reversal of power could have very real (and to my mind, very positive) consequences for legislative agendas; whether such a reversal is the desideratum for daily relationships is more open to question, however.
Since 1997, Indian feminists, and Kishwar herself, have gone much further in exploring how “the social and political power of any reli-g iou s s y mbol dep ends on a c u lt u r a l contex t t hat i mbues it w it h mea n-ingful interpretations tied into a network of shared beliefs, values, and stories” (Pintchman, 2000: 198). Acknowledgment of the traditional power of the pativrat as “cook” empowers Hindu women in ways that the importation of Western paradigms cannot, building on the historical connection between women’s daily work and the well-being of all India. Kathleen Erndl (Pintchman 2001: 15) argues that ordinary Hindu devotees move with ease between universal and particular notions of the goddess in both their ritual and their devotional lives. Both St and Sat are intimately connected to the sacred fire and to the divine fertility of the earth. The impulse behind the conflation of the two shrines in two sacred landscapes may be a pragmatic valorization of the importance of the kitchen and the kitchen fire for the human pativrat. St, concretely portrayed as cooking in her raso shrines builds on an ancient and modern notion that women’s daily work in the kitchen—like the daily acts of the Brahmin in the temple—are regarded as vital actions for the maintenance of the world.
The St Rasos have become established fixtures of reconfigured sacred space in Ayodhy and Citrakt because, I would argue, St has been and can continue to be a powerful and empowering model for Hindu women. In looking at the extant raso shrines and the extinct or nonexistent phasthnas in Ayodhy and Citrakt, one might say that the survival of the St Raso is a gloss not only on the feminine sacrality of both local and transcendent place but on the vital and proactive domestic role of the pativrat and her correlation to the welfare of the whole of India. While Western feminism has rejected the kitchen as a place of power, admitting no cultural basis for assessing it as such and often linking it directly to the subordination of women, Hindu feminists can draw on a concretely portrayed tradition in which the daily work of women in the kitchen is regarded as sacred action. Although it leaves most Western feminists at a loss, in Hindu tradition a woman’s place of power can be situated in the kitchen.
The sacred geography of the Hindu home centers on the kitchen (Ghosh, 1995: 21) and in that space, food preparation becomes the quintessential domestic religion and the guarantee of the family and the country’s well-being. Without Hindu women fulfilling their prescribed role in the home, all aspects of life—religious, social, political, and economic—would collapse, at least in theory, according to Hindu tradition. Power grounded in a long-standing perception of the kitchen as fe
minine sacred space is not to be lightly cast aside just because it does not have any positive correlation in Western culture. In the ongoing struggle to define liberation for women around the world, it behooves women to build from their existing spaces of power, even or especially if it is the kitchen—it could well empower them to act to promote and protect the well-being not only for their immediate family but also for the community as a whole. If the pativrat is mapped as the body of the nation, then her work must be valued as central to the survival of the nation. Rather than appropriating the individualist ideals of Western feminism, Hindu feminism can build on principles grounded in the ideal of the pativrat, the woman who has the health and welfare of the entire nation as her mandate.
Woman and Goddess in Hinduism Page 11