Let me begin by noting that these essays engage an impressively wide range of data drawn from a rich array of sources: Vedic texts, ethnographic field work, the epics Mahbhrata and Rmyaa, sectarian literature, tantric literature, religious iconography, Gandhian practices, and more. Clearly, Hindu traditions devote a great deal of attention to both goddesses and women in a variety of environments. To re-envision the feminine in Hindu traditions, therefore, is really to re-envision Hindu traditions more broadly, or so it seems from what has been presented here. Although there are many aspects of Hinduism that would lend themselves in some way or other to the kind of scholarly consideration that the essays in this volume strive to achieve, however, on the whole these essays tend to engage topics that are important and controversial, and hence also ripe for fresh analysis. How should we read complexity and nuance, in an appropriate and accurate way, back into a character like St, given the history of readings that emphasize her subordination to Rm and her devotion to perfect wifehood? How might tantric texts and practices, with their emphasis on revering goddesses, be read in a way that recognizes their potential for promoting women’s agency? How might we reread “feminine” virtues and habits, such as surrender or compassion, in culturally informed way that does justice to the contexts in which they arise but does not merely reinforce values that disempower women as a class? These kinds of questions are front and center in contemporary academic discussion about how best to interpret Hindu traditions in contemporary scholarship.
Despite the diversity of data that these essays engage, there are nevertheless some common threads that run through the volume as a whole. To this end, it seems to me that two themes pertaining to the nature of the feminine in Hindu environments seem to come to the fore as especially (although not exclusively) relevant to this project of re-envisioning the Hindu feminine: first, the abiding need to engage the connection of the Hindu feminine to materiality and embodiedness; and second, the contribution of Hindu discourses about female power to ways of thinking about the limitations of Western academic discourses of power. To put it another way, it is the traditional Hindu association of the feminine in Hindu contexts with prakti, materiality, and śakti, female power, that the essays in this book tend to highlight as key to the project of reinterpreting the feminine in Hinduism in service of constructive and activist thought. The ways in which these essays engage the identification of the feminine with materiality and power in these diverse Hindu contexts counter disempowering interpretations that represent prakti, the material realm, as a snare or trap that precludes spiritual advancement, and akti as potentially or actively dangerous female sexual energy that is in need of male containment. They demonstrate Caroline Walker Bynum’s (1986: 15–16) observation that “even traditional symbols can have revolutionary consequences” when reconfigured, for traditional symbols “can acquire new meanings, and these new meanings might suggest a new society.”
Frank Clooney’s chapter highlights the material nature of the Hindu feminine as the foundation from which to build a type of constructive theology. Clooney notes that the Saundarya Lahar, as a tantric text, “prizes the material and bodily as well as the spiritual and intellectual” (p. 34 in this volume), celebrating Devi’s feminine form and depicting her as a beautiful woman. By celebrating Devi’s embodiedness, the text affirms that “physicality, pleasure, and beauty” are in themselves spiritually significant and not just instrumental to the spiritual. Clooney’s essay suggests that the alliance of the Goddess with embodiment and materiality can become the basis for theological revision. This portrait of Dev contrasts significantly with the vision we get in, for example, the Dev-Mhtmyn, the kta text that is so often associated with the theology of the Goddess in Hinduism. Cynthia Humes (2000) notes that in the Dev-Mhtmyn, the Goddess is female but not “feminine” and certainly not comparable to human women. The type of power the Goddess demonstrates in the Dev-Mhtmya, notes Humes, is a kind of “feminismo” that borrows from paradigms of male, not female, power (137). Clooney argues, on the other hand, that in the Saundarya Lahar, Dev is depicted in explicitly feminine terms and can be approached as divine only when understood as a beautiful woman.
Clooney also notes that in this text the goddess is simultaneously maternal and erotic. Neela Saxena, similarly, argues that the icon of Chinnamast, while clearly erotic and seemingly violent, may also be read as relational and maternal, reflecting larger tendencies within human female sexuality. Saxena notes that her gynocentric reading of the Chinnamast image “may be indicating not only sensual pleasure, but also a deeply inward experience,” such as may be felt “by a woman physically” (p. 72 in this volume) as she nurtures a fetus in her womb with her own blood and, later, a child at her breast with her own milk. I find the blending of erotic imagery with maternal imagery to be particularly significant with respect to the larger goals of this book. Scholarship on Hindu goddesses has tended to split them into two camps: maternal goddesses, who tend to be cool and benevolent, and erotic goddesses, who tend to be hot and dangerous. But it is doubtful that women experience themselves in this “split” way. Indeed, Ann Gold has argued that Rajasthani women’s folk culture presents a more integrated view of female nature as simultaneously erotic and maternal, seductive and fertile (Raheja and Gold, 1994: 30–72). I have made a similar argument with respect to erotic and maternal relationality in women’s devotions to the deity Ka, where women worship Ka simultaneously as child, mature lover, and husband (Pintchman, 2005). The vision of Dev in the Saundarya Lahar as simultaneously maternal and sexual and Saxena’s similar reading of Chinnamast also suggest the possibility of reclaiming a view of the Hindu feminine as unified with respect to the erotic/maternal nexus, thus valorizing how women themselves probably tend to experience their own natures in this regard.
Phyllis Herman also highlights materiality in her discussion of both Sat and St. She notes that an intrinsically empowering Hindu “thealogy” is already implanted in the Indian landscape as Sat’s fallen body parts, embodied as “seats” of the goddess and understood as transforming the Indian landscape into a Hindu “faithscape” (p. 80 in this volume). But overlying that image and triumphing over it is the image of St in her kitchen as a presiding goddess of place. As a cook, St is a “priestess” of sorts, turning raw foodstuffs into refined dishes in a role that Herman highlights as a potential resource for promoting women’s agency in the public realm. Just as Sat’s body—transformed into the land of India—sustains and nurtures the life it supports, so does St in her role as cook; but it is the body of the active, living kitchen goddess St, the devoted wife (pativrat) with “the health and welfare of the entire nation as her mandate” (p. 92 in this volume), which prevails in religious importance over the broken and dismembered body of Sat, the wife whose mandate extends only as far as her husband. Herman’s interpretation of Sat in the contexts she explores ultimately diverges from that of Arvind Sharma, who highlights at the end of his essay not Sat’s demise, but rather her agency in choosing her husband, a largely neglected point that Sharma rightly lifts up as a potential resource for social change. Different emphases in interpreting the stories about Sat yield divergent understandings of Sat’s relevance to the social sphere. Sharma also challenges and overturns normative Hindu understandings of Svitr who, together with Sat, “constitute paradigmatic norms of Hindu womanhood” (p. 19 in this volume), in a way that renders them ideals of independence and self-determination rather than archetypes of wifely devotion and submission.
In Citrakūt, St situated in her cooking shrine becomes paradigmatic of female power as embodied, emplaced, and intrinsically transformative. In a related vein, Karen Pechilis observes that in Siddha Yoga, the feminine is rendered both active and universal in the embodied persona of, this time, the Hindu female guru Gurumayi, rather than a goddess (p. 107 in this volume). The power that Gurumayi manifests is made possible through her bodily presence and through the embodied presence of her ashram, which Pechilis describes as the metaphoric body of
the guru. Pechilis also highlights the value that Siddha Yoga places on affirming embodied personal experience as a value that it shares with both academic feminism and feminist spirituality. Here we see a shift in emphasis away from divine to human bodies and from Goddess to guru, specifically Gurumayi, who acts as an earthly conduit for universal female power. Only Gurumayi is able to bestow the akti that will awaken devotees and move them along the path to spiritual enlightenment.
Biernacki also highlights reverence for “divine” human females in the tantric traditions she explores. But Biernacki not only highlights the seeming valorization of (exceptional) female gurus, but also focuses on the valorization of ordinary, embodied “living women as venerable” (p. 125 in this volume) in the Kl Practice. Here, Biernacki argues that the point of the practice is not to attribute divine status only to female gurus, but rather to see all normal, non-possessed women as divine embodiments of the Goddess’s potency. In the texts that Biernacki explores, it seems that the human female body in general acts as a repository of the Goddess’s power, rendering all human women both powerful and dangerous. This is especially true of women who cultivate their inherent power through religious practice. But this danger is not linked to female sexuality, as it is in many environments, instead rendering the powerful female a ritual agent in her own right.
Biernacki insists further that the texts she explores require us to move beyond a familiar, assumed gender binary of women versus men or female versus male—a binary that seems inherently agonistic—in approaching the topic of women in her materials, for they represent women as one of not two but five classes, jtis, that can be ranked hierarchically. Of these, she argues, women as a class are assimilated most closely to the highest other class, Brahmins, not the lowest, udras, as is the case in other contexts.
Biernacki’s point suggests a larger methodological shift evident in several of these essays, a shift toward emphasizing the liberative or empowering potential to women of particular, often context-sensitive Hindu categories, values, and frames, along with or instead of Western feminist ones, in reimagining feminine power and supporting female agency, a shift that seems important, even essential, to the project that this volume hopes to advance. Surely Sherma’s method of “dialexis,” as a form of intellectual engagement across different cultural styles, may be well served when we “see with” or adopt the conceptual and hermeneutical categories imbedded in the materials we are studying. To this end, Veena Howard shows us how Mohandas Gandhi appropriated the culturally lauded Hindu practice of renunciation, along with its emphasis on celibacy, but transformed the meaning of renunciation, seeking to feminize celibacy in particular and deploy it in ways that supported easing restrictions on women rather than promoting them. E. H. Rick Jarow also pushes us to “see with” the image of the r antra to enter into discussion about the plural spiritual and worldly meanings of “surrender” in traditional Indian and modern Western contexts and follows the lead of the Puras in adopting a methodological approach to his material that stresses amplifying important tropes rather than constructing theories, which is what is often emphasized in Western academic discourse (p. 174 in this volume).
In a similar spirit, we might read Arvind Sharma’s arguments regarding Sat and Svitr in relation to the image of the jo, the traditional Hindu value of the unified male-female pair—not the agonistic male-female binary mentioned by Biernacki—that Sudhir Kakar (1990: 83–84) highlights as central to understanding the heterosexual ideal in traditional Hindu contexts. Sharma highlights what he calls the assertive roles of these female figures in defending the honor of the husband or rescuing him; in both cases, the husband is, Sharma argues, “worth it” in that he is a blameless, laudable life partner for his heroic female counterpart. What makes these husbands “worth it,” I would contend, has to do with how their relationships with their wives fits the ideal of the jo, two persons joined together in a harmonious, interdependent, and mutually fulfilling oneness characterized by emotional intimacy, mutual affection, and fidelity (Kakar, 1990: 23). We may understand Svitr in particular as acting in her own self-interest in rescuing her beloved husband from death in the hopes of preserving her jo bond. After going to all that trouble to get a husband of her choosing, why should she allow such an ideal partner to get away?
The turn toward thinking with or through traditional Hindu categories with an eye toward how our hermeneutical efforts may ultimately promote women’s well-being raises a larger question: Should we refer to this shared undertaking of reinterpretation and re-envisioning as “feminist,” or is it in fact something different? The project in which these scholars are engaged strikes me as singular in its desire to ground itself in respectful engagement with or rereading of Hindu cultural formations with an eye toward distinction from discourses of Western feminism. Patton addresses the issue by defining the “feminist purposes” to which she wants to put traditional philosophy generally as “thinking philosophically with the concerns of women in mind, such as safe childbirth and the prevention of female infanticide” (p. 150 in this volume). A broad definition like this one, which is quite helpful in the context of Patton’s argument, may not always help us in other contexts to navigate cultural differences or disagreements about what is, ultimately, in women’s best interest. Pechilis points us in the direction of questioning the unreflective use of “feminism” as a term when she poses the question, “when we ask ‘Is the subject feminist?’ what are we really asking?” (p. 101 in this volume). In seeking a non-Western paradigm for the promotion of gender justice, Madhu Kishwar (1990) has told us famously that she herself is not a feminist, but to my knowledge she has not articulated clearly what she is in place of being a feminist.
I wonder if it might be desirable to move beyond the terms “feminism” and “feminist” in relation to the kind of enterprise in which these essays are engaged. I am thinking here of the example provided by adjectival terms such as “Mujerista” or “Womanist,” which identify ethnically or racially specific paradigms of pro-female thought. Is there a term that would more appropriately capture what is going on here to identify what is unique about this project? This is not a question that any of the essays in this volume has chosen to take up, but it is one that we might well ponder when thinking about these scholars’ shared goals. In 2004, Madhu Khanna, a scholar affiliated with the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts in Delhi, launched an initiative called “Nrvda,” which we might translate as “Discourse about Women” or, more straightforwardly, as “Women’s Studies” and it shares some of the goals of this volume. The primary aim of the Nrvda network is to engage “hidden and hitherto neglected areas where culture becomes a main resource for women’s empowerment.”1 The Nrvda initiative therefore shares with this volume a desire to engage traditional Hindu resources to critique and revise traditional frames in ways that support women’s activism but also take seriously Hindu women’s experience.
Yet the Nrvda initiative does not seem to share a specific concern with the kind of specifically theological revisioning in which some of these essays engage. What about referring to this shared enterprise as having a specific focus on “aktivddhi,” which we may translate as “increase/promotion of śakti,” to indicate an emphasis on both kta theological concerns as well as a distinctive ultimate concern with promoting the flourishing of women? Or, as Laurie Patton suggested to me in a private conversation we had about this issue, would a term such as “aktimarga,” “the way of akti,” more effectively describe the type of intellectual engagement that the essays in this volume hope to promote?
This question of terminology leads me also to ponder further the nature of the relationship of this type of project to change in the social realm. To what extent should social or religious change be an essential goal of constructive intersubjective thought? Sherma notes in her introduction to this volume that a hermeneutics of intersubjectivity does not imply uncritical acceptance of the Other or his/her life-world. If we aim toward promoting more gender j
ustice for women, what assures us that our reinterpretations advance a social agenda that is, for want of a better term, pro-female—and how do we know exactly what we mean by that term? Patton’s essay makes concrete connections to specific contexts in which traditional categories can be put to new uses for women as a group. Pechilis notes (in chapter five) Catherine Wessinger’s observation that conceptions of the divine that de-emphasize the masculine prove attractive to women and support them in legitimating their presence in religious leadership roles. But particular representations or concepts of the divine are not sufficient in and of themselves to promote justice for women. Indeed, at least some of the interpretive claims put forth in these papers could be deployed to support a conservative agenda.
I wonder if it might be helpful or desirable to add promotion of social or religious change in a way consonant with gender-justiceoriented goals as a third necessary moment beyond intersubjectivity and dialexis in this project of constructive intersubjective scholarship on the Hindu feminine. Adding such a third moment would merge respect for cultural difference, as implied in the method of dialexis, with the responsibility to conduct constructive social and cultural critique in contexts where women continue to endure measurable social and economic disadvantages. In other words, perhaps the ultimate goal ought not only to be reading and reflecting intersubjectively but, as Jarow argues in his essay in this volume, to both “empathize and criticize, for both modalities are stronger when supported by the other” (p. 193 in this volume; emphasis mine). The hermeneutics of intersubjectivity is open to critical analysis for the purpose of greater human and global thriving. Patton’s essay points us in this direction, arguing for developing ritual alliances of traditional religious values and practices with modern health care for women and girls.
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