Women's Lives, Women's Rituals in the Hindu Tradition
Abstract
This book explores the relationship between ritual practices and the lives and activities of Hindu women beyond the ritual sphere. It presumes that Hindu women are deeply engaged and invested in the performance of religious practice. Rituals that take place in Sanskritic, Brahminical Hindu environments continue to be instituted and directed largely by Brahmin males, but women largely control many types of ritual practice that occur outside of such contexts, including many household, calendrical, and local devotional practices. Even in environments where Sanskritic traditions maintain a strong presence, women often sustain active ritual agendas and function as engaged actors in many types of ritual work. Indeed, in some parts of India, women are taking leadership roles in Sanskritic ritual performance. It is maintained that Hindu women's religious practices are not isolated from social, cultural, domestic, or larger religious roles or frames of meaning but tend to engage realms that transcend individual ritual contexts. This book is divided into two parts: "Engaging Domesticity" and "Beyond Domesticity". The first part consists of five chapters that engage domestic and interpersonal values in relation to women's ritual practices that tend to expand the boundaries of normative domesticity. The five chapters in part II, "Beyond Domesticity", similarly reveal the many ways that women's religious performances permeate diverse realms and breach borders. These chapters collectively take up a somewhat different challenge, however, exploring women's ritual practices outside the confines of strictly domestic contexts and contesting the impulse to link women's ritual performance primarily with domestic realms and concerns.
... In the introductory chapter, Pintchman (2007) gives account of her field study which was conducted in Benaras, where many of the men and women suggested, that in India, women are found to be more religious than their male counterparts and do the "lion's share of the day-to-day religious work" (p.4). Pintchman speaks about the Hindu rituals which are largely seen to be directed by the Brahmin males, but the women control the large part of the ritual practices which takes place outside the contexts that includes, "household, calendrical and devotional practices" (p.4). ...
... The food proscriptions controls our dietary practices based on religious beliefs. Pintchman (2007) cites the work of Khandelwal saying that women renouncers in the Hindu tradition identify themselves with the role of mothering and adapt the term Ma known as mother as a type of address (p.5). ...
The present research work was conducted to study & compare the
perception of working Muslim teachers & religious leaders regarding
the educational problems of Muslim girls studying at elementary stage
in Muslim prone area of Malda district (second highest concentrated
district) in the state of West Bengal (third highest concentrated Muslim
state) in India (Census of India, 2011). The study was undertaken on a
sample of 184 persons (2011) in total out of which 121 Muslim male
teachers, 32 female teachers working in six Elementary Schools
(Model Madrasha, Majharul High Madrasha, Dariapur Baishi High
Madrasha, Mahammodian High Madrasha, AGJS High Madrasha,
Nai-mouza High Madrasha) & 31 religious leaders under Kaliachak
Phase-1, Kaliachak Phase-11 & English Bazar Block in Malda district
randomly. To collect data, a self made standardized perception scale
(Pradhan’s Perception Scale on Muslim Girls’ Education, PPSMGE,
2011) was used by the researcher. This scale consists of 53 items
divided into five major dimensions Viz Familial and Social Issues,
Personal Issues, Academic Issues, Gender Sensitive Issues, Cultural &
Religious Issues. In each dimension, there were a number of sub-items
which represent problems faced by Muslim girls at elementary level.
So far as the method of study is concerned, it comes under the purview
of descriptive survey. Statistical technique such as quantitative
analysis & qualitative description of the fact had been resorted to.
Findings of the study showed that rural and urban teachers’
perception towards Muslim girls’ education almost an equal level of
performance in respect of all the major variables of investigation.
Key words: Perception, Teachers, Religious Leaders, FSI=Familial and
Social Issues, PI=Personal Issues, AI=Academic Issues, GSI=Gender
Sensitive Issues, CRI=Cultural & Religious Issues.
... Although this may be the outcome of local research on gendered divisions of tasks and responsibilities in private and public spaces in the 1980s and 1990s, it also may reflect dominant (traditional) western and (priestly) male assumptions about Hindu women's confinement to the home. To this perspective I would like to add a gender perspective that connects with (feminist) anthropologists' scholarship challenging the stereotype image of the subordinated and secluded North Indian woman (e.g., Gold 1988;Harlan 1991;Jeffery 1979;Jeffery and Jeffery 2018;Pintchman 2005Pintchman , 2007Raheja and Gold 1994) and is based on my research in Rajasthan (e.g., Notermans and Pfister 2016). In my opinion, women's Govardhan puja in rural Udaipur today, in both its public location and its outward orientation towards the natural environment, allows a gender perspective that goes beyond women's domestic domain and values the vital contributions women make to the rural economy and the sustenance of the environment that humans and non-humans share. ...
... To reveal women's critical voices and 'poetic resistance to structures of power' (Raheja and Gold 1994, pp. xv-xvi;see also Harlan 1991;Pintchman 2005Pintchman , 2007Wadley 2008, p. 330), their work is mainly speech-oriented and makes little explicit references to women's cow dung practices or other artistic aspects of the rituals. misfortune. ...
In line with the special issue’s focus on material religion and ritualistic objects, this article focuses on the multi-sensory prayers that certain groups of Hindu women craft in cow dung at the doorstep of their residences during Divali. This yearly ritual of kneading and praying with cow dung is known as the Govardhan puja (worship of Mount Govardhan). It is generally said to be the worship of the popular cowherd god Krishna and the natural environment he inhabits. Ethnographic research into the multiple meaningful layers of women’s cow dung sculptures in the rural villages nearby Udaipur (Rajasthan) reveals the ritual is more than that. The cow dung sculptures not only reflect Krishna’s body and sacred landscape but also the local environment women share with families, animals and (other) gods. Therefore, the article seeks to answer the following questions: how are women’s cow dung sculptures built up as ritual objects, what different images are expressed in them, and what do these images reveal about women’s intimate and gendered connections with their human and non-human environment? To answer these questions the article focuses on the iconography of women’s sculptures, the performance of the ritual, and the doorstep as the location where women’s beautification of the cow dung takes place.
... Analisis kandungan bermaksud analisis data yang diperoleh untuk membuat perancangan, mengorganisasi dan mendapatkan keputusan (Schreier, 2012) 10 . Analisis teks pula merujuk interpretasi data verbal dan bukan verbal yang sah dan dapat membuat rumusan (Pintchman, 2007) 11 . Semiotic pula bermaksud simbol, iaitu titik, garisan dan reka bentuk yang mempunyai maksud tertentu yang boleh dijadikan media komunikasi. ...
... Analisis kandungan bermaksud analisis data yang diperoleh untuk membuat perancangan, mengorganisasi dan mendapatkan keputusan (Schreier, 2012) 10 . Analisis teks pula merujuk interpretasi data verbal dan bukan verbal yang sah dan dapat membuat rumusan (Pintchman, 2007) 11 . Semiotic pula bermaksud simbol, iaitu titik, garisan dan reka bentuk yang mempunyai maksud tertentu yang boleh dijadikan media komunikasi. ...
Koolam merupakan lukisan lantai yang amat popular dalam kalangan masyarakat India. Lukisan Koolam bukan melibatkan hiasan semata-mata malah ia merupakan media komunikasi. Dalam kajian ini, lukisan Koolam dikaji dari perspektif ilustrasi. Kajian dijalankan di bandar Sungai Petani, Kedah. Koolam yang menjadi sampel kajian ialah Koolam asas yang diperbuat daripada serbuk beras dengan menggunakan pergerakan tangan yang spontan. Metod yang digunakan dalam kajian ini terdiri daripada kaedah aspek Grounded Theory (teori asas), Phenomenology (fenomenologi), Content Analysis (analisis kandungan), Textual Analysis (analisis teks) dan Semiotics (semiotik). Dapatan kajian membuktikan bahawa Koolam-Koolam asas di bandar Sungai Petani dimulakan dengan titik. Titik ini disamakan dengan ‘pottu’, iaitu tanda yang terdapat pada dahi kaum wanita India. Titik-titik pada kolam kemudian disatukan agar berbentuk pelbagai jenis garisan yang kemudiannya membentuk Koolam dua dimensi dan tiga dimensi. Koolam-Koolam di Sungai Petani terdiri daripada unsur seni, iaitu ruang, warna asas dan tekstur yang sempurna. Prinsip asas yang terdiri daripada corak, pergerakan, keseimbangan, proposi, harmoni dan penekanan dalam lukisan kolam jelas kelihatan pada Koolam-Koolam di bandar Sungai Petani, Kedah. Kajian ini diharapkan dapat memberikan pendedahan dan pengalaman baharu kepada generasi baharu yang hanya melihat Koolam sebagai lukisan perhiasan. (Koolam is a form of drawing that is done on the floor and is very popular in the Indian community. It is not merely meant to be decoration, but a form of communication. In this study, Koolam is researched from the illustration perspective. The study is carried out in Sungai Petani,Kedah. The Koolams that are the samples in this research are the basic forms and are drawn with spontaneous hand movements using rice in the form of powder. The method that are used in this study are Grounded Theory (the basic theory), Phenomenology, Content Analysis, Textual Analysis and Semiotic. The findings of the study on the basic 'Koolams' in the Sungai Petani town shows that they are drawn with a dot. The dot is equated to the dots that are found on the Indian women's forehead, which is known as the Pottu. These dots are then joined with various lines, that will form two or three dimentional Koolams. They also contain the art elements, which are the space, basic colours, and the perfect structure. Furthermore, the basic principles such as pattern, movement, balance, proportion, harmony, and emphasis are obviousin the Koolams that are found in the Sungai Petani, town in Kedah. This research was carried out with the aim of giving exposure and experience to the new generation, so that it is not just seen as a piece of decorative art.)
... The book, Women's Lives, Women's Rituals in the Hindu Tradition (Pintchman, 2007) focuses particularly on the relationship of women's ritual practices to domesticity, exposing and exploring the nuances, complexities, and limits of this relationship. The author could have also looked at kolam as a comparison to other similar forms across the world. ...
... Thus, women in the family wake up early in the morning to draw kolam in the thresholds known as the marzaghi kolam. (Pintchman 2007) ...
... Confined to the domicile, and valued for their -natural‖/physical capacity of procreation, women are ascribed the caring roles while men, being associated with the mind and the spiritual, are awarded the more prestigious religious, political and economic roles in public spaces [11]. We contest this female/male, private/public divide through recognizing that women are deeply engaged in religious practice, not only in the domicile but also as engaged actors -in environments where Sanskrit traditions maintain a strong presence‖ [13]. Women's religious participation goes beyond domesticity and stretches out as far as the pilgrimage site, empowering them in their everyday life. ...
... Once the river water enters pilgrims' homes, it becomes women's affair. In line with the literature [12,13] we observed that in the domestic sphere, women, and especially the older ladies, take the lead in religious activities, while men support them in the background. ...
This article studies the meaning of water and gender in the North Indian pilgrimage to the sacred river Ganges. It joins the recent criticism in anthropology concerning the nature/culture divide and aims to transcend that divide by focusing on water, not apart from but as part of social life. Assuming that water’s sociality is gendered, the authors look at how both the river water—itself as a landscape material—and the pilgrims’ engagements with that water are gendered. Starting from the central question: How do men’s and women’s ritual engagements with the sacred female river water (mutually) construct social life? The article investigates men’s and women’s ritual use of water at different sites. It focuses on more than the central pilgrimage shrine and links the sacred river site to people’s homes to know how the moving river water, collected by pilgrims at the shrine, is used in water rituals back home. Trying to counterbalance the male and scriptural bias which is prominent in the literature on Ganges’ pilgrimage sites, the pilgrimage is studied from the perspective of lived religion that takes people’s embodied practices and sensory experiences of nature into account as well as people’s everyday life. By showing how men’s and women’s rituals differ and complement each other, it argues that men’s rituals at the pilgrimage site and women’s rituals at home serve the recreation of the family in a paired way. The argument is built on longitudinal and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork at the Ganges river shrine in Haridwar (Uttarakhand) and pilgrims’ residence in Udaipur (Rajasthan).
... Within Hindu contexts specifically, the research builds on Pintchman's (2007) analysis of how gender operates in the construction of Hindu religious identities and Hancock's (1999) work on the embodied dimensions of female religious authority. These theoretical perspectives help illuminate how contemporary women ascetics negotiate the inherent tensions between ascetic ideals of transcending bodily identity (including gender) and the persistent gendering of religious bodies and practices within Hindu traditions. ...
... Lewis (1966), who tend to either critique these rituals for their alleged lack of authenticity or academically theorize the phenomenon with a complete disregard for the intentions of the spirits. Most importantly, they argue, for social purposes (to maintain caste boundaries) or for scholarly ones, that the rituals might allow (lower-caste) women to gain some, if not all, kind of access to power (Pintchman 2007;Erndl 2007;Sered 1996). ...
Aaji, an aging, lower-caste storyteller, singer, spirit medium, and rice farmer from a village in northern India, uses her distinctive voice and vocal traditions to engage with the spirit of the seven Devis (goddesses). The careful cultivation of human, more-than-human, and ethnographic relationships over time reveals what multimodal anthropology might entail when collaborating with more-than-human spirits.
... In Hinduism, it is believed that the menstruator is polluted and thus is forbidden from sharing spaces of any form with others ( Sutherland and Leslie, 2006 ). Along with social isolation, menstruators are expected to maintain separation from religious idols and spaces of religious worship ( Pintchman, 2007 ). Similar practices are observed in Jainism where menstrual blood is believed to make the menstruator impure ( Bhartiya, 2013 ). ...
In the era of increasing global interconnectedness and decreasing cultural insularity, investigating how individuals navigate conflicting cultural norms and behavioral choices is increasingly important. This paper focuses on the impact of the contact between religiously tight cultures and industrialized, liberalized loose cultures on menstruation-related practices and traditions. In-depth interviews conducted in Jerusalem and Mumbai revealed that the nature of contact between these two conflicting ecologies impacted which traditions are adopted and how they are molded. Diffused contact, as was witnessed in Jerusalem, leads to more hybridized behaviors, and religious and non-religious practices are performed simultaneously. Whereas a more concentrated contact, as was seen in Mumbai, leads to the performance of religious norms only in situations where figures of authority can issue sanctions. Moreover, it was also found that individuals used considerable self-reflection to decide how and which practices to adopt. These findings imply that individuals are agentic operators, and that they exert considerable influence on their environment and how they adopt the cultural norms that surround them. This paper leaves scope for further research on the nature of cultural contact zones and the role of self-reflection in the collaborative co-construction of cultural norms. This paper also hopes to provide insight towards helping resolve intra-group conflict.
... Views from a wide range of erudite scholars (Farrer 1975, Jordan and Kalcik 1985, Kousaleos 1999, Mills 1999, Garlough 2008, and Goldstein 2015 have helped us to shape the theoretical framework of this study from both a religion as well as a gender perspective. Also, a further review of literature about the role of women within the development and refashioning of Hindu religiosity is provided to us by Young (2002) and Pintchman (2007), who extend the scope of this study. This present paper delves into the folk narrative of Goddess Manasa, which, though originated from ancient religious texts, has nevertheless evolved many times, making its way towards public culture through diverse creative domains that represent Manasa, and that also represents themselves through Manasa's story. ...
Until recently, folklore, like all other genres and disciplines, had a male-bias. A tendency to see the folkloric world in male terms as well as the sexist preconception about prevailing gender roles restricted the line of inquiry in case of folkloric fieldworks. Initially, the lack of feminist approach to the folklore and the folkloric representation of women characters, could be said to pervade the discipline with a conscious or unconscious gender bias. But the introduction of feminist theory into the study of folklore has opened new possibility for folkloric feminist scholarship to demonstrate how the analysis of women’s lore transformed folklore studies and why the feminist lens provided a different meaning to folklore that had the potential to disrupt patriarchal culture. The objective of the folkloric-feminist method offers a model for understanding social relations as gendered relationships of power. Though feminism has a political agenda and desire to change women’s position in society, this agenda expressed within mainstream folklore studies rarely connotes political action, but instead a methodological and theoretical intervention that in a compatible manner, yokes folklore studies and feminism together to reconstitute a new foundational base. Their conjoined efforts (i) validate and regenerate the socio-cultural life of women and to (ii) trace and highlight the forms of women’s symbolic expression that are concealed from or considered unimportant to mainstream culture. In this regard, Margaret Mill’s advocacy (1999) for the requisition of a performance-oriented, folkloric feminist women’s genre and its application, has been appreciated as it deconstructs previously unquestioned assumptions about authority, agency and power hierarchy. Contextualizing the above discussion, the present paper will show how the select Bengali play decodes the Manasa myth to create a new lore in the light of gender discourse and religiosity.
... "It was due in part to the efforts of Subbalakshmi's family and the work of other women like Bangalore Nagaratnammal, Balasaraswati, and Rukmini Devi Arundale that the fields of education and performing arts opened up for Hindu women in the twentieth century." [11] In India, this was the time when modernization of women was introduced by some Hindu women. Their enthusiastic and motivational activities empowered the Indian women to face the social challenges and to resolve their issues. ...
... V Manuov¥ zákoníku (posvátném hinduistickém textu) je stanoveno, ºe ºena nesmí být samostatná, vºdy ji musí st°eºit muº, a´uº otec, manºel, bratr, nebo syn (Sugirtharajah 1994). Nesmí se rozvést, manºel je jí vybrán otcem, nesmí hovo°it s cizími muºi a musí obsluhovat své bratry (Pintchman 2007 ...
Gender inequalities are geographically determined and inuenced (among others) by dominant culture and religion. For example, the inuence of Muslim cultural rules and traditions (not necessarily based on Quran) on the status of women is frequent topic of geographical and popular studies in recent years. Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity form characteristic behavioral patterns of women and men and also hierarchical organization of society, which more or less discriminates women. The aim of this paper is to analyze the normative framework of the role of women in the biggest world religions in social, economic and political sphere and to compare this religions using statistical analysis.
Agama hindu adalah salah satu dari 6 agama yang diakui oleh Indonesia. Indonesia memiliki populasi hindu terbesar ke empat setelah India, Nepal dan Bangladesh. Para penganut agama Hindu yang berasal dari Hindia di Indonesia Khususnya di Kota Medan sudah banyak terpengaruh terhadap budaya sekitar sehingga sedikit melunturkan budaya yang mereka bawa dahulu. Cara pandang penganut Hindu mengenai perempuan cukup menjadi sorotan sebab jika dilihat dari kisah para dewa dewi kedudukan perempuan dapat diartikan sebagai sumber kehidupan yang disimbolkan sri devi. Bahkan menurut kitab Weda, Tuhan membelah dirinya menjadi dua bagian yang sama yaitu satu bagian menjadi laki-laki dan satu bagian menjadi perempuan. Oleh karena itu, laki-laki dan perempuan punya kedudukan yang sama karena berasal dari bahan yang sama. Tuhan dalam manifestannya tidak akan mampu menjalankan tugas jika tanpa saktinya yaitu dewi sebagai sosok seorang wanita. Hal ini tergambar jelas saat memasuki kuil tempat para penganut Hindu beribadah. Saking istimewanya Hindu mempatkan sosok perempuan, perempuan yang sedang mengandung akan dianggap sebagai seorang manusia yang sedang membawa anugerah dari dewa karena dianggap membawa dan menjaga jiwa yang nantinya kan menjelma kedunia. Karena itu, selama seorang perempuan mengandung maka akan dijaga, dihormati dan penuh dengan ritual peribadatakan untuk mendoakan serta menjaga ibu dan bayi selalu aman. Selain itu, keistimewaan perempuan yang sedang mengandung bila ia adalah ia boleh memakan apapun walaupun ia seorang vegetarian selama ia mengandung asal itu demi kebaikan ibu dan bayi. Setelah seorang perempuan melahirkan maka pola asuh anak akan berbeda sesuai dengan asal keluarganya. Namun tentunya selama proses kehidupan manusia tidak luput dari proses ritual, doa dan pemujaan untuk menjaga keimanan seorang penganut Weda. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode penelitian kualitatif dengan melakukan observasi mendalam diperkuat dengan hasil wawancara oleh pendeta setempat serta dokumnetasi sebagai bukti pendukung penelitian.
Trees play a profound role in the spiritual rituals of the Shakta Tantric tradition, acting as a catalyst for the practitioner's spiritual transformation. Yet, the practice of tree worship often seems obscure to the modern mind, necessitating innovative approaches to integrate its essence into contemporary educational frameworks. This chapter endeavors to redefine worship as an artistic process that could potentially cultivate empathy, highlighting its capacity to deepen human connections with the environment by exploring the implications of adopting a tree-centric or arboromorphic perspective within educational frameworks.
Collecting and scattering may seem like opposites, but they are in fact complementary, interdependent actions. To collect religious art and other objects is also to scatter them. Though collecting can sometimes be virtuous, it is always disruptive to some previous order. Reversing that kind of disruption, which occurred on a grand scale during European explorations and colonization of much of the world, is not always possible, but telling the stories of those disruptions is an important first step for museums to take. A next step is to engage in meaningful conversations with places from which objects have been collected.
Mirra Alfassa (1878–1973), better known as The Mother, was Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual partner and co-founder of Integral Yoga, a global movement based in South India and currently numbering multiple centres around the world. Affectionately addressed by her devotees at the Ashram as Douce Mère (Sweet Mother), Alfassa is understood to be an incarnation of the Universal Mother, or Shakti, who has ‘taken birth’ on earth in order to facilitate the spiritual – and physical – evolution of humanity to its next stage of development. At the same time, Alfassa deemed celibacy as necessary for advanced spiritual practice, and had renounced biological or ‘physical’ motherhood (and sexual intimacy) even before her collaboration with Aurobindo. Alfassa’s complex attitudes towards gender and normative gender roles, this article argues, inform her teachings and self-positioning as The Mother. Specifically, the intersection of sex, gender and physical materiality is an important current in Alfassa’s thought, including her instructions to future residents of Auroville (a utopian intentional community), her reflections on the Matrimandir, as well as her teachings on the future supramental humanity, whose ‘luminous’ divinized bodies would be genderless or androgynous. Here, the author examines the tensions between the gendered creative and spiritual powers attributed to The Mother, such as her role as Aurobindo’s Shakti and as a grace-bestowing living goddess, and Alfassa’s often ambivalent discourse around gender, embodiment and motherhood. These tensions, it is argued, are not only key to her articulation of Integral Yoga, but also raise broader, conceptual questions about persistent cultural and religious associations between gender and materiality.
Scholarship abounds on contemporary Hindu food offerings, yet there is scant literature treating the history of food in Hinduism beyond topics of food restrictions, purity, and food as medicine. A virtually unexplored archive is Hindu temple epigraphy from the time that was perhaps the theological height of embodied temple ritual practices, i.e., the Cōḻa period (ninth-thirteenth centuries CE). The vast archive of South Indian temple inscriptions allows a surprising glimpse into lived Hinduism as it was enacted daily, monthly, and annually through food offerings cooked in temple kitchens and served to gods residing in those temples. Through analyzing thousands of Tamiḻ inscriptions from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries CE, I have gleaned information concerning two distinct material cultural facets. (1) The practice of writing these rare but remarkable recipes which themselves are culinary textual artifacts has allowed us to access (2) Hindu food offerings of the past, also complex, sensory historical artifacts. In exploring these medieval religious recipes for the first time, I aim to show: the importance that food preparation held for temple devotees, the theological reality of feeding the actual bodies of the gods held in these temples, and the originality of the Cōḻa inscriptional corpus in bringing about a novel culinary writing practice that would be adopted more extensively in the Vijayanagara period (fourteenth-seventeenth centuries CE). This study, a radical new attempt at using historical sources inscribed in stone, sheds new light on medieval Hindu devotees’ priorities of serving and feeding god. The examination of this under-explored archive can help us move our academic analysis of Hindu food offerings beyond the hitherto utilized lenses of economics, sociology, and anthropology. Further, it contributes to our understanding of medieval temple worship, early culinary studies, and the history of food in India.
Despite classical precedent for mixed-sex companies, by the seventeenth century most Indian theatre forms employed all-male casts featuring specialized female impersonators. The modern theatre abandoned the practice in the early twentieth century, and although many traditional secular forms followed suit, female impersonation remains the rule in religious theatre. In this article, I argue that by divorcing the female body from the representation and incarnation of divine femininity, female impersonation reinforces the patriarchal structures of Hinduism created by the continuing influence of the Brahminical tradition of the classical period.
The heart of activity in the mandram centers on pūjā, devotional worship in the form of ritual performance. This chapter draws the reader into the rich textures of ritual life and volunteer seva practices at the mandram. There is a strong element of communal participation in the rituals performed. In this chapter we see how the mandram functions as a religious center in the community, highlighting ritual practice, women’s leadership, direct ritual participation and religious festivals.
Rita Sherma’s methodological discussion of perspective in the study of religion in the introduction to this volume is an important new contribution to the continuing scholarly consideration of relationships among the self, the subject, and knowledge. She emphasizes that engagement, critical distance, and articulation are inseparably intertwined modes in a methodology of scholarly inquiry that fosters the creation of empathetic scholarly knowledge.1 She argues that intersubjective construction, “in which the scholar experiences, integrates, and reflects on the encounter,” involves both engagement and critical reflection within the encounter between knower and subject, while dialexis, “in which the scholar is intellectually engaged while taking into account that different cultures have divergent emotional, aesthetic and intellectual styles,” involves both self-reflection and a recognition of difference in the articulation of the knowledge produced within the encounter. The interface between the two modes contours scholarly study, bringing together both personal engagement and critical study in the formation of scholarly knowledge. The nexus of the hermeneutics of intersubjectivity, constructive reflection, and dialexis is an encouraging methodology, recognizing experience (emotional, aesthetic), critical reflection (on the scholar’s own experience as well as diverse sources of information about the subject), and articulation (dialogue with scholarly discourse) in its validation of the exploratory nature of scholarly knowledge.
The very idea of religion and its institutionalized form is a piqued one for women. In religion you either follow the dictum or you are blasphemous. One cannot ask questions in and to religion. It is more of contradiction to ask a constitutional right from a religion. Religion and constitution both are about code of individual and social conduct whereby the former establishes hierarchy and the later denigrates it. Even if one gets and achieves the constitutional right from a religion s/he is no more a ‘religious’ one as being devoted and a devotee one should not question the lord and his incarnate agents – men. One cannot ask for a 17th century right to liberty and equality from a religion which emerged and evolved aeons ago. Women cannot challenge the patriarchy which institutionalizes itself by and via religion by asking entry into holy places but by rejecting them in totality; at least, till a machine is invented which can detect a dalit woman from a non-dalit woman, and/or a menstruating woman from others.
Being a good Jain woman involves negotiating between the mutually exclusive ideologies found in the South Asian discourse of devoted wifehood and in the Jain discourse of renunciation. This book draws from a diverse collection of oral tellings, popular tracts, songs, verse narratives, fasting rituals, religious dramas, and large-scale worship to provide new perspectives on the inherent tension between these ideologies and the space that tension creates for laywomen's agency. Heroic Wives suggests that women creatively and selectively negotiate their identities as wives at different moments on the trajectory of wifehood. In part I, women in established marriages use piety and ritual practices to protect their husband's health, to transform bad marriages into good ones, and to create and maintain ideal marriages. Part II examines how Jains reconfigure the relationship between wifehood and renunciation: on one hand, reconciling the two through stories of renunciation as a form of devoted wifehood, and, on the other, deploying the discourse of both in order to construct their identities as women who don't renounce, but instead choose to become wives. On a broader level, Heroic Wives discusses Jain narrative/ritual complexes as the site of laywomen's negotiations between multiple discourses that shape their thinking about wifehood, and in this context, Jain women position themselves as the agents of their futures. This book provides new perspectives on the experience of wifehood, South Asian women's lives, and Jain religious practices and narratives. It further advances ongoing dialogues about interactions of ritual, narrative, selfhood, and identity.
Devotion is a category of expression in many of the world's religious traditions. This book looks at issues involved in academically interpreting religious devotion, as well as exploring the interpretations of religious devotion made by a sixth century poet, a twelfth century biographer, and present-day festival publics.
Constrained by traditions restricting their movements and speech, the Maithil women of Nepal and India have long explored individual and collective life experiences by sharing stories with one another. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes including a kind of magical realism, these tales allow women to build community through a deeply personal and always evolving storytelling form. In Maithil Women’s Tales, Coralynn V. Davis examines how these storytellers weave together their own life experiences–the hardships and the pleasures–with age-old themes. In so doing, Davis demonstrates, they harness folk traditions to grapple personally as well as collectively with social values, behavioral mores, relationships, and cosmological questions. Each chapter includes stories and excerpts that reveal Maithil women’s gift for rich language, layered plots, and stunning allegory. In addition, Davis provides ethnographic and personal information that reveal the complexity of women’s own lives, and includes works painted by Maithil storytellers to illustrate their tales. The result is a fascinating study of being and becoming that will resonate for readers in women’s and Hindu studies, folklore, and anthropology. © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved.
The concept of an “early medieval” period (c. 600–1300 c.e.) in the study of South Asia’s past is well established, yet remains ill defined and poorly understood. As a result, debates regarding grand explanative frameworks, not to mention the meaning and use of the term medieval, have dominated the study of the period. Important though these concerns are, what underpins them, and something that is rarely considered, is how sources and methodologies affect the study of the period. Historiographic review of scholarship on the early medieval reveals that from its inception, the period has been studied exclusively through the examination of documentary sources and monumental remainswithin the fields of history, literary and religious studies, and art history. Archaeology has been used to support historical theories, largely in order to provide further empirical “proof ” of a perceived decline in trade and urbanism. The continued use of archaeological evidence in this way has meant that the full potential of archaeological inquiry has not been fulfilled, and the impetus for new archaeological research has been stifled. As a result, the early medieval is arguably the most poorly represented period archaeologically in the entire subcontinent. Critical assessment of the limited amount of archaeological evidence that does exist reveals a number of methodological and theoretical concerns that bring into question its applicability and use. These shortcomings not only force one to question historical interpretations, but also limit what can be said, archaeologically, about the period. It is argued that many of the wider uncertainties surrounding the definition and meaning of the early medieval stem from this absence of archaeological research. What is urgently needed is a revitalization of the archaeological approach to the study of the period; some ways are suggested in which this might be achieved in terms of methodological approaches, and questions that could be asked.
Research unraveling the potential for women’s empowerment through participation in religious rituals is an important corrective to theorizing that suggests that liberation requires that women avoid rather than embrace the litany of cultural rituals that in the past have served to oppress them. The field, however, is premised on theoretical frameworks that are heavily focused in the pursuit of uncovering resistance against patriarchal orders in religious engagements of women, thereby failing to account for the dialectical nature of such engagements. Employing Bourdieu’s theory of habitus to investigate religious fasting practices of 41 Bengali Hindu women, I argue that the impetus for active negotiations, that entail a more dialectical engagement with meanings of cultural rituals, is located in a set of class-based predispositions that are fostered and reinforced in the experiences and opportunities that women encounter in their daily lives.
A frequent pattern found among crypto-religious communities is that the rituals or beliefs held in secret are transmitted primarily by women, from mothers to daughters. This paper examines a small community of women in south India, the secret Christians of Sivakasi, in order to investigate why these women chose to maintain a delicate, and at times dangerous, balance between their outward observance of Hindu rituals and their inner, private adherence to Christianity. By contextualizing these Nadar women's lives in the vexed history of caste conflict in late nineteenth-century south India, I show that women in this upwardly mobile Hindu community found in clandestine Christian circles a means of securing a limited autonomy in an intensely patriarchal milieu, especially as their lives became increasingly circumscribed by Brahmanical customs. Georg Simmel and Paul Christopher Johnson's analyses of the affective dynamics of secrecy illuminate the complex motivations for women's involvement in these groups, in spite of the risks, and help explain why the conjugal bond becomes the focus of so much attention in the narratives of Secret Christians. By identifying features that distinguish crypto-religiosity, a relatively rare but distinctive outcome of religious encounter, in dialogue with Maurus Reinkowski and Joel Robbins's work, I hope to make this category more useful, and push our understanding of the complexities of religious change beyond the well-known dyad of conversion and syncretism.
This article examines the ways in which two female Hindu gurus in Rajasthan perform a gendered model of religious leadership and, by extension, explores the guru tradition as an alternative to the more official male model through their practices of devotion, which the author characterizes as their "rhetoric of renunciation." The essay argues that the female gurus' performances represent the "symbolic labor" by which they "earn" symbolic capital in the public religious arena of satsang. Moreover, through their devotional practices, the gurus performatively "domesticate" renunciation and guru leadership by foregrounding the feminine values of connection, community, and care. By emphasizing the gendered concerns already elucidated, the gurus distinguish their traditions and leadership from the dominant Brahmanical model of renunciation and traditions of leadership.
Across cultures and historical time, menstruation has tended to be perceived as mysterious, dangerous and potentially contaminating. Most world religions place prohibitions on and prescribe codified purity rituals for menstruating women. We surveyed 340 religious and non-religious women from the Rocky Mountain West region of the United States regarding their attitudes and experiences of menstruation. We found that prescriptive religious women rated their periods as more bothersome, embarrassing, shameful, and endorsed more prohibitions, prescriptions and seclusion during menses compared to non-religious women. However, perhaps because their religions openly acknowledge menstruation, and their practice of rituals spotlights menstruation as a special time, religious women also identified a positive aspect of their menstrual cycles not shared by their non-religious counterparts. This was a heightened sense of community with other women. Further, women in committed relationships had more positive experiences of menstruation than single women, and this was especially true for women in prescriptive religions, despite a greater onus placed on them to observe menstrual rituals. This study complicates our understanding of how the practice of codified religious prohibitions and prescriptions around menstruation impacts women’s experience.
This article relates certain figures of the subject in an emergent Indian pilgrimage. On the basis of ethnographic research and 15 in-depth interviews, I show that these religious subjectivities, phenomenologically immersed in highly precarious material conditions, are radically relational. Observations on the pilgrimage (en)counter the cognitivist assumptions of a body of scholarly opinion on contemporary religious practice. The analyst's attention to pilgrimage rituals and narratives traverses sociological, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic theories, and is, thereby, drawn to important questions of self, ethics, and time.
In recent decades, a great deal of attention has been devoted to critiquing nineteenth and early twentieth century Indological work and its Orientalist assumptions, distortions, and biases. These processes of self-reflection have produced crucial methodological and theoretical revision and have propelled us into an academic era of ‘posts’, including post-colonial and post-Orientalist alongside post-modern. This essay contemplates what has risen from the ashes of previous generations of Western Indological discourse and where these ‘posts’ seem to have led us with respect to academic research on Hindu traditions. What kinds of changes have taken place during the last two or three decades, and what new opportunities might they present for the future? What trends have emerged, and what do they suggest about what we have been constructing, and might fruitfully construct in the future, out of all these posts? What might be the present and near future state of Hindu studies in Western academic settings?
This article shows how a focus on religion can highlight how and why violence is so deeply engrained in the lives of women in Rajasthan whilst also, through insights into ritual, illuminating those moments when women use religion as a source of strength and courage in responding to violence. Interviews with some secular NGOs working to end violence against women in Rajasthan reveal their focus on the negative impact of patriarchal religion in sustaining male dominance, thereby sanctioning the use of violence against women. Ethnographic research looking at women-only ritual spaces reveals how positive religion can be for many women as a social and spiritual space where they work through their problems both internally and with others. A simultaneously positive and negative view of religion could help outsiders understand why violence exists whilst also supporting creative and sensitive activism working with those women most affected.
In the last 25 years, significant conceptual and interpretive shifts have occurred in the scholarship on asceticism in South Asia that broaden not only ‘what counts’ as asceticism, but also ‘who counts’ as an ascetic. Moreover, the recent surge of anthropological and ethnographic studies, particularly those focusing on female asceticism, has contributed innovative and alternative models of asceticism to the more dominant, Sanskritic literary model(s). This essay is an introductory survey of the literature on Hindu asceticism and has the following objectives: to discuss the text-based structural studies on asceticism that have helped to shape the field and to present the recent and emerging scholarship on female Hindu asceticism that challenges and/or supplements the dominant Brahmanical textual model by illuminating the role of female-centered social values and practices and of bhakti traditions in the constitution of gendered traditions of asceticism. This essay is intended as a preliminary research tool for scholars and students with which to navigate the topography of Hindu asceticism and to understand the crucial developments in the field that have changed the ways that scholars theorize both the category and phenomenon of asceticism in South Asia. Finally, it suggests some fruitful avenues for future research through consideration of ascetics’ performative practices as a strategy for creating non-orthodox asceticism(s) as an alternative to the dominant and orthodox model.
This article compares two projects designed to train groups of rural Rajasthani women as community health workers. Through ethnographic research conducted during the training periods of each project I highlight stark differences in the management and structural approaches. The successful project recognised the importance of rituals, specifically puja, in the daily lives of participants. Both the NGO management and the trainees performed daily rituals that helped foster a supportive network. Sensitivity combined with a wider insight into the practical realities and constraints facing women in rural Rajasthan contributed to the long-term success of the second project. The first project has folded. I argue a lack of open dialogue and real connection with participants meant the project's management were unable to adapt/tailor the program to the needs and experiences of the women involved.
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