Mutating Goddesses

Download or read book Mutating Goddesses written by Saswati Sengupta and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mutating Goddesses traces the shifting fortunes of four specific Hindu deities—Manasa, Candi, Sasthi and Laksmi—from the fifteenth century to the present time. It focuses on the goddess-invested tradition of Bengal's Hinduism to argue for a historical evolution/devolution of divinities in tandem with sectarian interests and illumines in the process the knotted correlation of gender, caste and class in the sanctioning of female subjectivities through goddess formation. The critical studies of Hindu goddesses have been dominated by the sastrik perspective deriving from the Sanskrit scriptures authorized by the male Brahman. But there are religious practices and beliefs under the broad rubric of Hinduism that are neither governed by the male Brahman nor articulated in Sanskrit. It is this vibrant laukika archive—considered low from the hegemonic perspective—that Mutating Goddesses explores to realize the politic trafficking between this realm and the sastrik. The book excavates the multiple and layered heritage of the region which includes tribal culture, Buddhism, Tantricism, and so on, as is available in rituals, proverbs, verses, circulating myths, poetic genres and kathas, caste manuals, census records etc to illustrate how tradition is a matter of strategic selection.