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Women, Religion and the Body in South Asia
Noted for their haunting melodies and enigmatic lyrics, Bauls have been portrayed as spiritually enlightened troubadours traveling around the countryside in West Bengal in India and in Bangladesh.
As emblems of Bengali culture, Bauls have long been a subject of scholarly debates which center on their esoteric practices, and middle class imaginaries of the category Baul. Adding to this literature, the intimate ethnography presented in this book recounts the life stories of members from a single family, shining light on their past and present tribulations bound up with being poor and of a lowly caste. It shows that taking up the Baul path is a means of softening the stigma of their lower caste identity in that religious practice, where women play a key role, renders the body pure. The path is also a source of monetary income in that begging is considered part of their vocation. For women, the Baul path has the added implication of lessening constraints of gender. While the book describes a family of singers, it also portrays the wider society in which they live, showing how their lives connect and interlace with other villagers, a theme not previously explored in literature on Bauls.
A novel approach to the study of women, the body and religion, this book will be of interest to undergraduates and graduates in the field of the anthropology. In addition, it will appeal to students of everyday religious lives as experienced by the poor, through case studies in South Asia. The book provides further evidence that renunciation in South Asia is not a uniform path, despite claims to the contrary. There is also a special interest in Bauls among those familiar with the Bengali speaking region. While this book speaks to that interest, its wider appeal lies in the light it sheds on religion, the body, life histories, and poverty.
eBook
Woman and goddess in Hinduism : reinterpretations and re-envisionings
\"Offering multilayered explorations of Hindu understandings of the Feminine, both human and divine, this book emphasizes theological and activist methods and aims over historical, anthropological, and literary ones. The contributors approach the Feminine in Hindu traditions from the standpoint of intersubjective construction via a method that can be termed dialexis. Here, dialexis refers to a form of intellectual engagement \"across styles\" that takes as its starting point an adequate accounting of contextualized signification. The diverse ways that cultures articulate themselves are rooted in lexical choices made in historical, geographical, and cultural contexts\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A Woman's Rāmāyaṇa
The Ramayana, an ancient epic of India, with audiences across vast stretches of time and geography, continues to influence numberless readers socially and morally through its many re-tellings. Made available in English for the first time, the 16th century version presented here is by Candravati, a woman poet from Bengal. It is a highly individual rendition as a tale told from a woman's point of view which, instead of celebrating masculine heroism, laments the suffering of women caught in the play of male ego.
This book presents a translation and commentary on the text, with an extensive introduction that scrutinizes its social and cultural context and correlates its literary identity with its ideological implications. Taken together, the narrative and the critical study offered here expand the understanding both of the history of women's self-expression in India and the cultural potency of the epic tale. The book is of interest equally to students and researchers of South Asian narratives, Ramayana studies and gender issues.
eBook
Jewels of authority : women and textual tradition in Hindu India
The essays in this collection address the problem of Hindu women's relationship to authority, both within and without the textual traditions of Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindi, and English. The authors adopt a method of close textual and ethnographic reading, which results in some surprisingly new and subtle ways of interpreting older, more \"classical\" discourses, such as Veda and Mimamsa, as well as newer discourses, such as the RSS use of the Devimahatmya.
eBook
“Reciprocal Illumination” of Hinduism, Human Rights, and the Comparative Study of Religion: Arvind Sharma’s Contributions
Arvind Sharma has made immensely significant contributions in the fields of both comparative religion and the study of Hinduism through his methodology of “reciprocal illumination” and his prominent role in international conversations on women and religion, religion and human rights, freedom of religion, and religious tolerance and conflict. Aware of the power of religion and its negative valuation, especially post-September 11, he displays a deep commitment to fostering interreligious understanding, arguing for religion as an essential and positive partner in envisioning and actualizing human flourishing, upholding human dignity, and engaging in global ethical cooperation, and equally he demonstrates Hinduism’s potential contribution both to these endeavors and to moving the field of comparative studies beyond its Western, Christian, and colonialist origins and assumptions. This essay details these contributions and Sharma’s place as an interpreter of Hinduism for those inside and outside the tradition in our time.
Journal Article
Women in the Hindu Tradition
This book accounts for the origin and evolution of the nature and roles of women within the Hindu belief system. It explains how the idea of the goddess has been derived from Hindu philosophical ideas and texts of codes of conduct and how particular models of conduct for mortal women have been created. Hindu religious culture correlates philosophical speculation and social imperatives to situate femininity on a continuum from divine to mortal existence. This creates in the Hindu consciousness multiple - often contradictory - images of women, both as wielders and subjects of authority. The conception and evolution of the major Hindu goddesses, placed against the judgments passed by texts of Hindu sacred law on women’s nature and duties, illuminate the Hindu discourse on gender, the complexity of which is compounded by the distinctive spirituality of female ascetic poets. Drawing on a wide range of Sanskrit texts, the author explains how the idea of the goddess has been derived from Hindu philosophical ideas and also from the social roles of women as reflected in, and prescribed by, texts of codes of conduct. She examines the idea of female divinity which gave rise to models of conduct for mortal women. Instead of a one-way order of ideological derivation, the author argues that there is constant traffic between both ways the notional and the actual feminine. This book brings together for the first time a wide range of material and offers fresh stimulating interpretations of women in the Hindu Tradition.
Mandakranta Bose is Professor Emerita, Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia, Canada. Two of her major publications are Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval and Modern India and Sangitanarayana: A Critical Edition .
\"Bose’s work is indispensable to the field of women’s studies in general and to the study of women in Hindu social and philosophical thought in particular; the author manages to bridge gaps in the existing knowledge, and her work will hopefully spark new discussion, especially given the preoccupation with women by men throughout history.\" - Susanne Kranz, Zayed University; Journal of International and Global Studies Volume 4, Number 1, (November 2012).
1. Introduction 2. Gendered Divinity: Goddesses in the Hindu Tradition 3. Shaping Women’s lives: The Role of Ancient Hindu Texts 4. Women Poets of Hinduism 5. Sanctuary: Women and Home Worship 6. Conclusion
eBook
Good Queen, Bad Queen: Gender, Devotion, and Mythmaking in Women’s Histories
How do we remember and write about powerful women and the impacts they have had on history? Who tells their stories, and to whose advantage are those narratives constructed? And what happens if we look carefully and acknowledge that when they enter historical narratives, many of these “women” are not adults, but actually relatively young girls? Rani Rasmani Dasi (1793–1861) and Bar-rajā Phuleshwari Kunwari (also known as Phulmati and Pramateshwari) (d. 1731) are each remembered as powerful women influencers of popular religion in South Asia, though in very different ways. These two “queens” were each remarkable women who variously defied, upended, and upheld common assumptions and narratives about caste, gender, power, and religion in Hindu society in early modern India. This study critically investigates the work of Rasmani and Phuleshwari’s many chroniclers, biographers, and hagiographers, questioning received narratives and attempting to construct a glimpse of them as living girls and women. What do we actually know about them, about their activities and motivations? And what can we know, when so much of the evidence is unreliable? Thrust into unfamiliar social, political, and religious environments as young girls, they grew into deeply religious women who used their considerable influence and resources to promote their own visions of divine power. They also became full participants in and beneficiaries of problematic power structures of domination and exploitation. But with closer investigation, it appears that much of what we think we know about these women is incomplete or, in the case of Phuleshwari, completely unreliable.
Journal Article