Conceiving the Goddess: Transformation and Appropriation in Indic Religions

314 Pages·2016·18.92 MB·English

CONCEIVING THE GODDESS
An old woman drawing a picture of Durga-Mahishasuramardini on a village wall,
Gujrat State, India. Photo courtesy Jyoti Bhatt, Vadodara, India.
CONCEIVING THE
G O D D E S S
TRANSFORMATION AND APPROPRIATION
IN INDIC RELIGIONS
Edited by
Jayant Bhalchandra Bapat and Ian Mabbett
Conceiving the Goddess: Transformation and Appropriation in Indic Religions
© Copyright 2017
Copyright of this collection in its entirety belongs to the editors, Jayant Bhalchandra Bapat and Ian Mabbett.
Copyright of the individual chapters belongs to the respective authors.
All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia’s Copyright Act 1968, no part of this
book may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the copyright owners.
Inquiries should be directed to the publisher.
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Design: Les Thomas.
Cover image: The Goddess Sonjai at Wai, Maharashtra State, India. Photograph: Jayant Bhalchandra Bapat.
ISBN: 9781925377309 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925377316 (PDF)
ISBN: 9781925377606 (ePub)
The Monash Asia Series
Conceiving the Goddess: Transformation and Appropriation in Indic Religions is published as part of the
Monash Asia Series.
The Monash Asia Series comprises works that make a significant contribution to our understanding of
one or more Asian nations or regions. The individual works that make up this multi-disciplinary series
are selected on the basis of their contemporary relevance.
The Monash Asia Series of the Monash Asia Institute replaces Monash University’s MAI Press imprint,
which, from the early 1970s, has demonstrated this University’s strong interest and expertise in Asian
studies.
Monash Asia Series Editorial Board
Professor Marika Vicziany, Chair, Professor of Asian Political Economy, Monash Asia Institute,
Faculty of Arts
Professor Greg Barton, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Arts
Associate Professor Gloria Davies, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts
Dr Julian Millie, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Arts
Dr Jagjit Plahe, Department of Management, Faculty of Business and Economics
Dr David Templeman, School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Faculty of Arts
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Title: Conceiving the Goddess : transformation and appropriation in Indic religions /
Jayant Bhalchandra Bapat; Ian Mabbett.
ISBN: 9781925377309 (paperback)
Subjects: Goddesses, Indic--South Asia.
Women and religion--South Asia.
South Asia--Religion.
Other Creators/Contributors:
Bapat, Jayant Bhalchandra, 1938- editor.
Mabbett, I. W. (Ian William), 1939- editor.
Dewey Number: 294.5211
Contents
Dedication ............................................ vii
Acknowledgments ......................................viii
Preface ...............................................ix
A Note on Style and Diacritics .............................xi
Chapter 1 ..............................................1
On Appropriation and Transformation
Ian Mabbett and Jayant Bhalchandra Bapat
Chapter 2 .............................................25
Crowns, Horns and Goddesses: Appropriation of Symbols in
Gandhāra and Beyond
Angelo Andrea Di Castro
Chapter 3 .............................................56
The Appropriation of the Goddess into the Purāṇic Narrative:
Integration/Appropriation in the Vāmanapurāṇa
Greg Bailey
Chapter 4 .............................................78
The Yakṣiṇī Devī of Mangaon: Appropriation of a Jain Goddess
by Brāhminic Hinduism
Jayant Bhalchandra Bapat
Chapter 5 ............................................102
Appropriating the Inappropriate
John R. Dupuche
Chapter 6 ............................................126
Ravidās and the Gaṅgā: Appropriation or Contestation?
Peter Friedlander
CONCEIVING THE GODDESS
Chapter 7 ............................................142
The Goddess Chinnamastā’s Severed Head as a Re-Appropriation
of the Cosmic Sacrifice
Ian Mabbett
Chapter 8 ............................................160
The Appropriation of Durgā
Pratish Bandopadhayay
Chapter 9 ............................................179
From a Śaktipīṭha to Kuladaivata: The Appropriation of Goddess
Jogāī of Ambe
Madhavi Narsalay
Chapter 10 ...........................................211
The Female Protector of Yolmo’s Hidden Land
David Templeman
Chapter 11 ............................................225
Ekveera Devi and the Son Kolis of Mumbai: Have the Kolis
Appropriated the Karle Buddhist Chaitya?
Marika Vicziany, Jayant Bhalchandra Bapat and Sanjay Ranade
Chapter 12 ...........................................257
Modern Appropriations of Devī
Martin Hříbek
About the Editors and Contributors ........................278
Index ................................................281
vi
Dedication
Dr. R. C. Dhere (21/7/1930 – 1/7/2016)
Photo courtesy of the Dhere family.
The scholars who have contributed to this volume are committed to
bridging the knowledge gap that exists because outstanding scholarship
in Indian languages is not readily accessible to English-speaking audi-
ences. For this reason we dedicate this volume to the late Dr Ramchandra
Chintaman Dhere, a prolific writer on many aspects of folk culture and
religion in India. Dhere’s extraordinary research publications, comprising
over a hundred books and several hundred articles, are written mainly
in Marathi. Only a small proportion of his work has been translated. His
unique insights into the complexities of Indian history and culture deserve
widespread international recognition. Known fondly as Aṇṇā, Dhere was
actively pursuing his research and writing until his sad demise on July
1st 2016. He knew that we had decided to dedicate this work to him in
recognition of his contributions to research. Those of us who knew him
personally have felt a great loss, but all of us will miss his imaginative
insights into Indian life. Our appreciation of the extraordinary efforts he
made to record aspects of Maharashtrian history and culture (not easily
accessible even to scholars) is the basis for this dedication.
Jayant Bhalchandra Bapat and Ian Mabbett
– vii –
Acknowledgments
This book is a sequel to the earlier publication, The Iconic Female: Goddesses
of India, Nepal and Tibet, edited by us and published by the Monash Asia
Institute in 2008. The present volume brings together outstanding research by
twelve authors, many of whom contributed to the previous volume. However,
in addition, it contains contributions from researchers in two other continents.
The co-ordination of twelve major contributions and integrating them into
a thematically unified and cohesive whole with a central theme has been a
long, complex, time-consuming and, at times, frustrating task. As editors,
we are very pleased to see the successful conclusion of our labours. We are
grateful to the contributors for the enthusiasm, responsiveness and patience
with which they have adapted the perspectives of their individual pieces of
research to fit into a collection that to us is a lot more than the sum of its parts.
A work of such complexity requires major effort and contributions from
a number of people. We thank them all. However, we must partic ularly
mention the continuing inspiration and the constant practical involve ment
of Professor Marika Vicziany, whose energy and encouragement have con-
trib uted as much as anything else to make the publication of this book pos-
sible. We thank members of the Monash Publications Committee for their
useful feedback and encouragement. We are grateful to the team at Monash
University Publishing, especially Nathan Hollier, Joanne Mullins, Les
Thomas, Laura McNicol Smith and others, for their meticulous work and
infectious enthusiasm in producing this volume with the utmost care and
attention to detail. Our friend and mentor, Dr Rashmi Desai, has also been
a constant source of help in spite of his health problems. We also thank him
for alerting us to the photograph on the frontispiece of this book. We are
deeply indebted to Mr Jyoti Bhatt who took the photograph and has kindly
allowed us to use it. We thank Alfonso Martínez Arranz for painstakingly
preparing the index for this book. Finally, we thank John Harris, who has
provided the superb line drawings for many of the chapters in this book.
Having long been retired, we are both at an age where family, child ren,
grandchildren and social interaction need to take a higher priority than
academic pursuits such as this book. We are grateful to our respective
spouses, Sunanda and Jaccy, for allowing us to pursue our interests, often
at the expense of our families.
Jayant Bhalchandra Bapat and Ian Mabbett
– viii –
Preface
Australian scholarship about India has grown enormously during the last
ten years, but mainly in the field of business and economics. Interest in
Indology, broadly defined as the study of India’s culture, history, litera-
ture, philosophy, languages and social life, has continued to decline with
few young scholars replacing the rapidly ageing population of the ‘old
hands’. This is a problem that worries us and is being addressed by the
South Asian Studies Association of Australia.
One way of responding to the problem of how to increase interest in
Indology is for the ‘old hands’ to demonstrate how relevant and exciting
their research is, in the hope that this will stimulate younger scholars to
join us. For this reason, the present collection of essays about Indian god-
desses is more than just an intellectual exercise.
As an intellectual exercise this volume fulfils a promise that we made in
2008, when we published The Iconic Female: Goddesses of India, Nepal
and Tibet. At that time we foreshadowed a second volume about South
Asian goddesses because we had identified a small group of Australian
scholars who were deeply engaged in ongoing research in this field. This
is the second volume that we imagined.
The twelve scholars who contributed to the present collection agreed
prior to writing their chapters that we should focus on a single theme. We
wanted to go beyond reflecting on the variety and complexity of South
Asian religious worship captured in the previous volume published in
2008. We compared our textual research and fieldwork to see whether
there was any large, overarching theme that reflected our shared inter-
ests. Many cross-cutting issues emerged, but of these we agreed that the
problem of how particular communities ‘appropriated’ religious beliefs
and customs was the most challenging. ‘Appropriation’ was therefore
selected as our common theme. As the first chapter explains, this is a
strong word going well beyond notions of cultural borrowing, imitation,
emulation or syncretic processes. It is a word that imagines active pro-
tagonists reaching out and determining a conscious process of cultural
elaboration.
This is the second volume to be published by Monash University
on the subject of the South Asian goddesses in the hope of Australian
scholar ship contributing to a deeper understanding of the history and
present religious culture of South Asia. These cultural underpinnings are
– ix –