The Body of the Goddess: Religious and Political Power of the Indian Female Body and Ruptures of Resistance

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Kate Kaura, M.A.

Graduate Program in Comparative Studies

Ohio State University

2018

Thesis Committee:

Dr. Hugh Urban, Advisor Dr. Mytheli Sreenivas Dr. Isaac Weiner

Abstract

In India the woman’s body is often a contested site of power: a physical manifestation of religious, political, cultural, historical, and national assemblages. Her body can simultaneously be both identified as the nation-state and the divine feminine goddess, or even as cosmos herself.

I will first examine historical patriarchal interpretations of utilizing the Indian woman’s body for political and religious purposes by using three specific cases. By looking at the Hindu Yoni

Tantra ritual, Tamil nationalism’s Mother Tamil image, and Bollywood’s iconic film ‘Mother

India’ I argue the Indian woman’s body has often been a site of dominant patriarchal narratives that utilize the essential image of the woman for their own religious and political gain. However, more interestingly, I use a particular lens to examine how the woman’s identity in each of these cases is not fixed or static but rather a fluid representation of the momentarily defined context in which she can simultaneously challenge the very structures that define and dominate her. I will then take a deeper look at more recent cases of Indian women essentializing their powerful bodies and identity for their own political, social, and religious gain, in such instances as women around the Kamakhya temple in Assam, the graphic novel Priya’s Shakti, the Abused Goddesses ad campaign, as well as other recent Indian feminist movements.

Vita

2004……….……Gahanna Lincoln High School 2008…………….B.A. Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University 2018…………….M.A. Comparative Studies, The Ohio State Universtiy 2018-Present……Graduate Teaching Associate, Comparative Studies, The Ohio State Univerity

Publications

Wilson (Kaura), Kathleen. “Tantric Sound: The Nondual Saivism of Kashmir’s Manifestation and Liberation in Sanskrit Words, Deities, Tattvas, and Cakras”. The Ohio State University Arts and Sciences Knowledge Bank (2018).

Fields of Study

Major Field: Comparative Studies Graduate Interdisciplinary Studies: South Asian Studies

Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………i Vita………………………………………………………………………………………………..ii Contents…………………………………………………………………………………………..iii Introduction ...... 1

Theoretical Approaches: Subalternity, Third World Feminism, and Identity ...... 2

Indian Women’s Strategic Essentialism ...... 7

The Woman’s Body as Cosmos ...... 12

Tantric Bodies and the Yoni Tantra ...... 19

Blood, Tears, and Breastmilk: Tamil Nationalism’s “Mother Tamil” ...... 29

‘Uterine Nationalism’: Tamil Women’s Movements and Strategic Essentialism ...... 36

“Mother India”: (Strategically) Essentializing the Feminine Body as Nature/Natural ...... 38

Contemporary Indian Women Utilizing the Goddesses ...... 43

Priya’s Shakti ...... 48

Conclusion ...... 58

References ...... 62

iii

“Where there is power there is resistance” -Michel Foucault

Introduction

I will first examine historical patriarchal interpretations of utilizing the Indian woman’s body for political and religious purposes by using three specific cases. By looking at the Hindu Yoni

Tantra ritual, Tamil nationalism’s Mother Tamil image, and Bollywood’s iconic film ‘Mother

Theoretical Approaches: Subalternity, Third World Feminism, and Identity

The woman’s identity in each of my examples can be examined in a unique moment in time: a subject-positioning that defines both her contextual power and her subalternity. According to

Gayatri Spivak, a subaltern woman’s identity is not fixed but rather a unique position with a

“subject-effect”; often defined by her circumstances, resistance, and position of oppression.

Spivak writes that often there was a “subject-deprivation of the female in the operation of this mobilization and this solidarity”1. Within Subaltern studies, this “subject-effect” is a positionality that seems to operate as a subject but is part of an “immense discontinuous network” of “politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on”: all which produce the effect of the contextual forces acting upon her identity2. The “identity” of the woman is neither fixed nor clearly autonomous, yet is defined through her relation to concrete and oppressive structures. Her subalternity can be a unifying force for all those marginalized, creating a solidarity of patriarchal oppression. Through Spivak’s deconstructionist and Marxist theoretical background, she explores (and recovers) the woman’s positionality as this “subject- effect” and argues that women played a crucial role in India in both catalyzing resistance and creating solidarity among the subaltern movements. Spivak argues in “Can the Subaltern

Speak?” that the subaltern woman is defined by “the ideological construction of gender” that in turn keeps the male dominant. There is no subaltern identity that can speak for itself; the subaltern is the female in the shadows. She compares women’s struggle to India as a whole, as it was also an object of liberation from colonialism to constitute a new identity (as I will explore with Mother Tamil and Mother India). Simply, the subaltern approach strives to both uncover

1 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Can the Subaltern Speak: Reflections on the History of an Idea (Columbia University Press, 2010) 229 2 Ibid 213

2 women’s experiences and contextualize their daily struggles and resistances. The most common place to uncover the traces of women’s roles and identities is in patriarchal and almost always male-authored colonial discourse, legal documentation, historical accounts, and even Hindu sacred texts. This is the entry point of analysis for the examples I have chosen.

Early Hindu literature and law had defining influences on all Indian social life; according to

Bose, foundational documents of the Hindu way of life inscribed both social relations and personal beliefs as “religious imperatives” and “these texts have exerted a deep impact on women’s lives and conduct through history…they are thus some of the most useful sources of understanding women’s lives in India”3. One of the most common and widely commented upon textual sources of women’s roles in early Hinduism is the Laws of Manu. Instead of reiterating what has already been said, I have chosen to focus upon other, perhaps more controversial, yet still very crucial religious texts such as the Yoni Tantra as well as the myth of Sati. I find it important and interesting to analyze religious texts to discern women’s identities in India because of the sheer force of religion in India: both concepts of worth and structures of duty as defined by religious communities deeply enact upon the lives of Indian women. Arguably,

Hinduism clearly defines women’s “self expression, achievements, and initiatives as known in legends, literature, and historical records”4. Further, most, if not all, of the Hindu texts have been male-authored. I will touch upon subaltern methodological readings of male discourse, but through using a feminist framework and theoretical terms such as ‘assemblage’ I hope to gain a deeper understanding of the unique position of women, firstly as defined by a patriarchal gaze

3 Bose, Madrakranta. Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern India (Oxford University Press, 2000) viii 4 Ibid. xii

3 and then subsequent uses of ‘strategic essentialism’ by women themselves.

The theoretical term ‘assemblage’5 is an interesting entry point to identify and define the complex phenomena that often occurs at the level of the woman’s body in these examples. Puar argues that assemblage emphasizes more of a connection with the multitude of concepts and contexts that give the term its meaning: it explains “relations of force, connection, resonance, and patterning”6. Assemblages help us create “roadmaps” of the “not quite fully understood relations between discipline and control”7. In this way, the importance of the woman’s body is not its essence (as many of these Indian examples often promote), but instead her body can be seen as a site of connections in which contestation and representation of the various socio- cultural forces are enacted. Intersectionality, a term that became popular with Western feminism but lately has been critiqued by Jasbir Puar and others, is often critiqued for not adequately challenging reductive essentialism; it simply combines all the multiple essentialisms together in relation to one another (race, gender, sexuality, etc) as fixed identities. On the other hand, assemblages “de-privilege the human body as a discrete organic thing” and can help us better understand the forces acting upon, within, and from the woman’s fluid body -in both my physical and mythological examples. Further, only using intersectionality as a theoretical lens may be problematic in that it does not account for possible identity assumptions originating in Western feminist scholarship: many of the “cherished” categories of the “intersectional mantra”- race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, religion, and disability—can be seen as the “products of modernist colonial agendas and regimes of epistemic violence, operative through a

5 Used by Jasbir Puar, W. Connolly, Stephen Collier, and Aihwa Ong 6 Puar, Jasbir. “I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess”. philoSOPHIA (2011) 57 7 Ibid. 63

Western/Euro-American epistemological formation”8. Additionally a Subaltern approach would also be critical of the colonial structures and oppression inherent in various Western identity politics. I would like to avoid any approach that necessarily assumes a Western bias, whereby the

“norm” is based on white western hegemony, and everything else is defined by ‘difference’. Rey

Chow critiques intersectionality because it produces a finite subject for politics and creates exclusion through difference: “difference now precedes and defines identity”9. Especially when speaking about subaltern spaces and Indian women, the term assemblage would be more appropriate and nuanced for particularities and would avoid reifying a static subject for analytical gaze: viewing women as “subjects” judges them prior to the process of deeper contextual analysis.

Chandra Mohanty is another scholar critical of underlying colonial biases inherent in all theoretical and political global feminisms. Mohanty argues that Western feminist scholarship

(especially the discourse on Third World women) is Eurocentric, hegemonic, universally ethnocentric, and is inadequate in its self-consciousness about the dominant effects on the rest of the world. This results in Western feminisms that “appropriate and colonize the constitutive complexities that characterize the lives of women in these countries”10. Therefore, I try will avoid a Western feminist approach that lacks the contextual understanding of cultural, religious, historical, and political positions within each case. Additionally, Mohanty warns that applying any broad theories to a homogenous notion of Third World women as a whole is problematic, oppressive, and essentializing. Western dominant discourse often creates the stereotype of “Third

8 Ibid. 54 9 Puar, Jasbir. “I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess”. philoSOPHIA (2011) 355 10 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke University Press Books (2003)19

World Women” as a universally powerless group of victims, seen as “Other”. This move to reduce women constricts the female subject to simply her gender, “completely bypassing social class and ethnic identities”11. Without specific socio-historical contexts, theoretical concepts such as sexual division of labor, family, reproduction, and marriage create universalizing categories of all women globally, which silences the unique experiences of class, caste, race, and social status in women of the Third World. Simply, women of the West may share a gender with women in the Third World, but their lives, experiences, and identities are very different.

Conflating these categories not only creates an illusory sisterhood but also demonstrates a “false sense of the commonality of oppressions, interests and struggles between and among women globally” while ignoring racism, colonialism, and imperialism of the Third World experience12.

By first acknowledging the social relations of struggle (location, class, race) one begins to see women as a reality. I also use a Third World feminist approach which acknowledges that the overly simple binaries of oppressor and oppressed, dominant and dominated are too reductionistic to challenge the existing system of power relations- all women are not in the same powerless group. In fact, many often exert protest through powerful individual acts of resistance.

These “cracks” in the system, according to Foucault, can only be understood in the “context of resistance” which breaks down the power structures13. I will examine instances of Indian women’s resistance while remaining aware of and transcending the borders and categories in women’s bodies, experiences, and struggles.

11 Ibid. 31 12 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. (Duke University Press Books, 2003) 36 13 Ibid. 352

Indian Women’s Strategic Essentialism

I argue that both goddess worship and women’s identity with goddesses, the nation, and cosmos, especially in the cases of the Yoni Puja and ‘Mother India’ (deeply rooted in Sakta and Shakti ideology) can be initially problematic when viewed through a feminist gaze, in that it essentializes the “feminine” gender, promotes a binary of heteronormative identities, and reduces the whole woman to particular parts of her body. However, not falling short of just a critique of essentializing the feminine I push these cases further to reveal an interesting religious and/or political outlet for women’s resistance by challenging the patriarchy through powerful bodily practice and strategic essentialism. In these examples, and because of her possibility of a unique feminized power, a new space can open for a woman to challenge her own status. I argue that through these various sites women are using their own essentialized notions of womanhood and divine femininity to challenge existing concepts of gender, power, and social place- to improve their status within Indian society. I call upon scholars such as Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak,

Hugh Urban, Bruce Lincoln, Kathleen Erndll, Mandakranta Bose, Lorelai Biernacki, and

Vandana Shiva to complicate these women’s bodies (both physical and metaphorical) as sites of strategic resistance to existing hegemonic patriarchal structures. For example, in Hindu Tantric practices such as the Yoni Tantra, I show that women are often both problematically reduced to their sexual organs and feminine “shakti” (power) through ritual, and yet through simultaneously using this identity -one often associated with power and divine transformation- they can strategically utilize these moments of rupture to improve their status around the Kamakhya temple in Assam.

Anti-essentialist scholars argue that the category “woman” should not exist as a concrete and fixed ideal, and gender is not always constituted “coherently or consistently in different historical contexts” because gender “intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities”14. Butler sees the body as more a historical situation rather than a biological species; gender is not determined by physiology of sex. Further, gender is wholly dependent on its formulation and nexus of many intersecting influences and contexts

(assemblages), and thus becomes “impossible to separate out” from the contexts in which it is produced15. Gender is a constituted social temporality: it "is in no way a stable identity tenuously constituted in time- an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts”16.

Inhabiting gender and the body is an active and ritual process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities, meaning the body is a historical representation, a “manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation”17. Victor Turner says a ritual is a repeated act, a social drama with meaning and legitimization; performative gender is never fixed but is produced through a lived experience, an act of subjective experience (phenomenology) and situated in a broader cultural context. Many argue that marking women in any essentailized way is dangerous to the subjectivity of their personhood, is guilty of reducing women down to their gender, body parts, and even psychological qualities. To address gender-based violence, capitalism and oppression, and the ecological crisis created by patriarchy, what is needed is not a gender-based ideology, but rather a deeper understanding of Third World Women’s struggles against all oppressive forces. This would allow a nuanced and contextualized understanding of

14 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. (Routledge, 2006) 4 15 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. (Routledge, 2006) 5 16 Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”. (Theatre Journal 40:4 1988) 519 17 Ibid. 521

8 the space that is created from their experiences, identities, resistances, and their daily lived struggles.

Strategic essentialism is a widely discussed feminist and political strategy by scholars like Judith

Butler, Diana Fuss, Chela Sandoval, Gayatri Spivak, and others. Broadly, strategic essentialism ensures that a movement utilizes a common discourse as well as a shared identity politics to unite and mobilize. Butler resists the need to argue that gender essentialism is necessary to fight for women’s rights. However, what some feminists have tried to argue is that by taking a poststructuralist approach, gender and sex are deconstructed to the point of losing any intrinsic value to one’s identity. A post-structuralist and anti-representationalist stance is problematic, in that just at “the moment when so many of us have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves…that just then the concept of subject becomes problematic”18. Rather, instead of deconstructing gender, which erases the category of woman altogether, instead we need to

“articulate a normative vision for feminist theory which celebrates or emancipates an essence, a nature, or a shared cultural reality which cannot be found”19. The category of woman requires a critical genealogy that relies on a phenomenological set of presuppositions (politics of performative gender acts). In order to politically represent women we need to not “reify the very collectivity the theory is supposed to emancipate” but rather unite against the forces of oppression (patriarchy, sexism).20

18 King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and The Mystic East. (Routledge, 1999) 197 19 Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”. (Theatre Journal 40:4 1988) 521 20 Ibid. 521

In the Indian cases that commonly discus the promotion of a feminine power/nature/shakti, which is inherently powerful and associated with goddesses and national identity, I offer the possibility that women can strategically essentialize their own femininity as a performance act of resistance, in order to harness that power to challenge hegemonic gender oppression. However, this raises interesting questions about the legitimatizing need for a subject-consciousness of strategic essentialism before performing it as an act of resistance, and whether that conscious (or not conscious) act counts as actually performing strategic essentialism. Vandana Shiva, a prominent (and controversial) Indian scholar and ecofeminist activist, argues that Indian women are identifying with the feminine and nature in powerful and revolutionary ways. The feminine principle becomes a “category of challenge which locates nature and women as the source of life and wealth, and as such, active subjects, maintaining and creating life-process”21. She writes that

Indian women conceive of their own bodies as being productive in the same way they conceive of nature being so, to the point of conflating the two: women are not “of their own bodies or of the earth, but they cooperate with their bodies and with the earth”22. Women re-associating themselves with alternative modes of labor and power threaten traditional models of patriarchal capital and exploitation. Through essentializing their own natural physical capabilities, they are possibly able to question those same power structures that exploit them.

Those that are sympathetic to an essentialist approach in non-western cultures (such as the Indian women’s examples below) argue against an anti-essentialist critique because they consider it a form of neo-colonialism. Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues that the Indigenous ontological

21 Ibid. 47 22 Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. (South End Press, 2010) 47

10 relationship of native woman and belongingness to nature could be seen as essentialist or a form of strategic essentialism. She asserts that the Western epistemology that defines the self as fluid and non-unitary is itself an (Euro/western) assumption, an essentialism, of what constitutes true selfhood. Therefore, when Indigenous people assume a fixed identity or essence with their native land or culture, to insist that that is essentialism silences and “dismiss[es] non-Western constructions, which do not define the self in the same way… the politics of such silencing is enabled by the power of Western knowledge and its ability to be the definitive measure of what it means to be human and what does and what does not constitute knowledge”23. She argues that questioning native “ways of knowing and being” has more to do with owning the “power to be a knower [which] is commensurate with the West’s “rational” belief system”24. She states that the anti-essentialist critique originating in the West is contradictory in that it is universally applied to all subjects “despite its epistemological recognition of difference”25. Moreton-Robinson raises interesting questions in relation to Third World Women and Indian goddess essentialisms. For instance, does her critique explain why Indian women appropriating goddess worship

(essentialism) is at odds with secular “feminism”(anti-essentialism) in India? Why do we already assume the ‘self’ is an implicitly fluid identity in our western epistemologies? Is our discomfort with fixed selves our western ontological and epistemological biases, and can we ever truly escape them? And lastly, is it a colonizing move to judge Indian feminine essentialisms as lesser than or not as “adequate” when addressing self-constitution and subjecthood? I will keep these questions in mind as we explore the strategic essentialisms of goddess worship/embodiment and the political site of resistance of the woman’s body throughout the paper.

23 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) 13 24 Ibid. 13 25 Ibid. 13

The Woman’s Body as Cosmos

Before I explore the feminine identity and body as defined by the male’s perspective in the Yoni

Tantra ritual, I think it would be beneficial to give a brief overview of how the woman’s body is often the site onto which the Hindu cosmos is mapped. In no way is this an exhaustive list;

Hinduism is often referred to as having limitless sects and subsects, and even more gods and goddesses. I have chosen to highlight those examples that define the cosmos through the use of the female body that may help contextualize my specific examples.

Hinduism and gender in India are intrinsically intertwined and mutually defined, although both shaped by patriarchal social structures. Hinduism shapes gender roles and expression through laws about essentialized notions of women and divine goddesses, most strikingly in feminine religious notions such as shakti. Shakti is a “classical term in Hinduism meaning spiritual power” and is, in bhramanical Hindu texts, the moral and spiritual power inherent “in women and in goddesses”26. Shakti represents a force within the cosmos and within women that acts both

“creatively and destructively” and can be “nurturing but also appropriately ruthless, chaotic and orderly”27. Shakti is associated with divine motherly qualities such as being nurturing and

(pro)creating, but also as fierce warrior goddesses qualities such as powerfully protecting, and is associated with nature and the body. At times the feminine definitions and uses of shakti may seem contradictory, and that is because in India “shakti [is] a fluid and multivalent concept which is found in many different contexts and can be used, even manipulated, for many different

26 Pechellis, Karen. The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States. (Oxford University Press, 2004) p.8 27 Kempton, Sally. Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga. (Sounds True, 2013) 11

12 purposes”28. Undoubtedly, through tracing these historical roots that define shakti we can begin to understand the impressions and influences on the woman’s daily lived experience.

With the development of the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali, purusha and prakriti were central to the

Samkhya philosophy as well. Prakriti was not just the realm of the feminine/nature, but also associated with the body/mind. Purusha was consciousness/spirit, and the “feminine principle shakti (energy) swirls the masculine principle purusha (stasis) into action, thereby initiating creation”29. Identification with prakriti was seen as both attachment to the illusion of manifestation (maya) and the cause of suffering. Purusha, the masculine, was freedom, purity, and moksha. According to Sherma, “Patanjali’s worldview afforded ample opportunity for the development of a discriminatory perspective on women due to their biological functions”30.

Despite the pejorative definition of prakriti, Samkhya philosophy helped solidify the female as essentially the nature, reality, and cosmos herself.

Another widespread Hindu mythological tale of the feminine as cosmos (and nation) is the story of the goddess Sati. Hindu mythology explains that Sati, a Sanskrit word derived from the feminine noun “sat” meaning goodness, virtue, and truth, is a Hindu goddess and Shiva’s consort. In the popular myth she immolates herself out of humiliation for her husband Shiva not being invited to her father’s yajna (ceremonial sacrifice). Her shame and humiliation was reconciled with her own choice to end her life on a ceremonial fire, a symbol of purifying one’s

28 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 92 29 Pechellis, Karen. The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States. (Oxford University Press, 2004) p.8 30 Sherma, Rita SadGupta. “Sa Ham-I am She: Woman as Goddess”. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, Edited by Kathleen Erndll. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 28

13 soul. Out of the grief of his wife’s self-immolation, Shiva went into a “frenzied dance of destruction” while holding Sati’s corpse. By Shiva risking complete destruction of the world,

Vishnu, another Hindu god, intervened. To get Shiva to stop dancing, Vishnu cut Sati’s body into pieces and she fell to the earth all over India. Each site the pieces fell was sacralized and temples were built to commemorate her bodily sacrifice. These sites are now called the

Sati/Shakti Pithas, or Seats of Power. And although the Sati myth describes the dismemberment of her corpse, “the emphasis at the sites is not on the worship of Sati’s relics but on the worship of the living goddess”, of the whole goddess, and the relics are “understood as manifestations of

Shakti”31.

Throughout the centuries Sati’s body has quite literally been placed onto physical locations in

India: 51 temples have been built spanning the entire country, each representing a different body part to commemorate the goddess. Sati’s metaphorical body mapped on to physical space developed into the “mother’s body” in Indian nationalistic propaganda against British Colonial rule. Imma Ramos writes that in India “the rhetoric of paralleling Mother and nation has proved strategically effective in encouraging Indian citizens to adopt the role of her loyal children since the late nineteenth century”32. Again, we see a new and interesting assemblage of the political, religious, and cultural physically mapped on to the goddess’s body in India at a unique moment in time. Politically, the goddess Sati through the Pithas became a “personification of the subcontinent and an icon of heroic self-sacrifice” and historically she has represented in many

31 Ramos, Imma. Pilgrimage and Politics in Colonial Bengal: the Myth of the Goddess Sati. (Routledge; 1 edition 2017) p. 2 32 Ramos, Imma. Pilgrimage and Politics in Colonial Bengal: the Myth of the Goddess Sati. (Routledge; 1 edition 2017) p. 103

14 areas such as Bengal and Assam the “revolutionary struggle amongst Bengali nationalists fighting for Swaraj or self-rule” against the British colonial rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries33. Utilizing the imagery of Sati as quite literally India herself, political efforts such as patriotically “re-imagining [the Sati Pithas] as the fragmented body of the motherland in crisis” could provide the ground for an “emergent territorial consciousness” to unite Indians34. During colonial times the imagery of Sati’s body parts (as physical spaces/temples) needing to be unified was crucial in the fight against British rule to gain independence. This feminine goddess’s body is often utilized for political action (and as we will see in Mother India and Mother Tamil later) and becomes a religious and nationalist site where the “ideal feminine”, “self-sacrificing wife” and Hindu morals are mapped on to the woman’s body. Although Sati is not often appropriated by Indian women for strategic essentialism, it is worth mentioning in that it brings up many interesting questions and complicates the notion of female agency, mobilizing the woman for nationalism and gendered sacrifice. What this example of sati has shown, and how it connects to the others, is how it elucidates the Hindutva rhetoric of the “goddess as bio-territory”.

Exploring how the woman’s body is mapped on to the cosmos of Sati’s sites of her body parts as well as divine notion of prakriti and Brahmanical shakti of mainstream Hinduism, I will now contrast the use of shakti within the tantric traditions. Although Hindu Tantra is as complex and diverse as mainstream Hinduism itself, there are some basic beliefs common throughout many tantric sects, such as the importance of the complete union, or Shiva-Shakti-samarasa. This complete union is attained through the meeting of Shakti, embodied as kundalini-shakti in the

33 Ramos, ibid. p. 2 34 Ramos, ibid. p. 2

15 subtle body at the base of the spine- with Shiva, at the crown of the head. In a divine union with

Shiva “she is also the ground of the Absolute from which the process emanates”35. This kundalini-shakti in an individual is “life force and latent spiritual consciousness” and pictured as a serpent. The journey of kundalini from the dormant Shakti to the higher levels of consciousness of Shiva is a “paring of opposites” that tantrics ritually visualize. This visualization of the male and female essence is both within the physical body and is a “supreme symbol” of “the eternal union of Siva Sakti, the primordial masculine and feminine, passive and active principles that like at the foundation of all reality”36. These opposites form the basis of general tantric attitudes toward gender. Tantra posits a “bipolar supreme reality (Shiva and Shakti) in which all pairs of opposites- including gender- are seen as manifestation of the two principles”37. The tantra traditions’ feminine models (shaktivada) “enabled the feminine aspect to be elevated to a supreme status in tantric spirituality” and connected the particular to the whole, or the goddess and brahman38. It is possible then that the male tantric worshipper is not uncomfortable with a female supreme, as evident in Shakta tantra. Moreover, many tantric texts “contain numerous references to the initiation of women into lineages, female religious preceptors, and women as embodiments of the Goddess”39. This new emphasis on women’s spiritual aspirations in tantra, including female gurus to confer initiation (diksha), and self-agency of women sages created a space that, at the time, nowhere was “the identification between woman and Goddess more

35 Ibid. 33 36 Urban, Hugh. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (University of California Press, 2003) 40 37 Sherma, Rita SadGupta. “Sa Ham-I am She: Woman as Goddess”. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, Edited by Kathleen Erndl. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 35 38 Pechellis, Karen. The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States. (Oxford University Press, 2004) 21 39 Ibid. 37

16 explicitly affirmed than in the sacrament rituals and meditations of the tantric tradition”40. But what tantra traditions show is that these paths valorized embodiment as an approach to the sacred and thus regrounded tradition of renunciation, making it justifiable for women to dedicate their lives to spiritual pursuit” this was done through secrecy in tantra.

However, it is widely debated whether Hindu tantra acted as a source for power and autonomy for Indian women, or instead offered the same gendered and submissive roles in a continuity with larger Indian society as a whole. Despite many contemporary scholars praising Hindu tantra as a source for power and autonomy for Indian women (Biernacki among others), “the tantric texts are written by males for males and, consequently, manifest an androcentric viewpoint”41.

Solely taking a hermeneutical approach to tantra leaves out several different contexts from which many insights can be gained, in that the woman’s perspective, role and identity may be present, but not necessarily in the texts themselves. A textual approach would leave out a women’s initiation experience and female tantric adepts’ various identifications with Shakti. In order to examine this “the scholar, seeking evidence of female empowerment founded on identification with the Goddess, must look at folklore, devotional songs, and poetry” to find women’s relation to the Goddess42. I will explore various scholar’s views on this later. However, instead what we should probably be asking of the patriarchal texts on goddesses is not to highlight women’s experiences, but rather it may be more productive, Hugh Urban argues, to rather use tantric concepts such as kama (pleasure) and sakti (power) to “critique and reframe our own taken-for-

40 Sherma, Rita SadGupta. “Sa Ham-I am She: Woman as Goddess”. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, Edited by Kathleen Erndl. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 31 41 Sherma, Rita SadGupta. “Sa Ham-I am She: Woman as Goddess”. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, Edited by Kathleen Erndll. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 31 42 Ibid. 36

17 granted-understandings of desire and power”43. My entry point to analyze the Indian woman’s body as a site of contested power will be firstly from the male-defined and male-centered religious doctrine the Yoni Tantra. Secondly, I will explore women’s own perspectives on identity within this tradition near the Kamakhya temple and their potential uses strategic essentialism.

43 Urban, Hugh. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (University of California Press, 2003), 3

Tantric Bodies and the Yoni Tantra

The Yoni Tantra, a Sanskrit text in the Hindu Tantric practice from the sixteenth-century Cooch

Bihar region near Kamakhya describes in detail the ritual act of worshiping the yoni (woman’s reproductive organ) as the goddess Shakti, the divine feminine. Historically this has been done at the site of the Kamakhya temple in Assam. The Goddess Kamakhya is the goddess of desire

(kama), and she herself is “said to give life to the earth and power to her devotees” through the annual festival of her menstruation. Kamakhya can be called “the ‘matrix of power’, as the generative mother or womb (Sanskrit matr, etymologically related to Latin pater and matrix) that gives birth to the universe and the divine energy that flows through all its elements (matras)”44.

Given that the familial structure around the Khamahya temple is matrilineal, it follow that women in the area may be more widely accepted as powerful leaders, gurus, and practitioners in the tantra community. In general, Hindu Tantra’s rites, specifically in the Yoni Tantra ritual, define and proscribe identities and roles for women as representation of the divine feminine, or shakti. Shakti is an ancient and pervasive notion that is defined as an energetic force, an active goddess principle that represents femininity, power, creativity, and manifestation. According to its cosmology shakti is not only the ground of all reality but is more specifically concentrated and visible in both women’s bodies and the goddesses. Because shakti is located within women’s bodies, the power and divine nature of the woman as shakti helps elevate her position; specifically, this is employed through practices such as in the tantric Kamakhya temple in Assam by veneration of young women (kumari girls literally dressed up as goddesses and placed on a shrine to worship), as women priests holding religious authority, as powerful metaphorical menstruation blood (that is actually goat’s blood) used in puja (worship) rites, and as daily

44 Ibid. 2-3

19 worship to the goddess shakti45. Hugh Urban has extensively documented this through his academic tantric research in Assam and at the Kamakhya temple. For example, in the article

“The Womb of Tantra: Goddesses, Tribals, and Kings in Assam” he describes the tantric temple in Kamakhya “as one of four oldest ‘seats of power’ (sakta pithas) in South Asia, the locus of the goddess’ yoni or sexual organ, and the site of her annual menstruation…[which] continues to play a key role in the lived practice”46. The Kamakhya temple in Assam acts as not only the

“symbolic womb of tantra” but as a real and living space of various forces enacting upon the woman’s body.

In more esoteric tantric rituals around Kamakhya, women are active participants in the worship of their yoni or womb, of the goddess through sexual union, and through mantra and devotion.

The Yoni Tantra describes in detail the Tantric ritual where a male practitioner engages with the female practitioner’s body as Shakti herself. He begins by imposing/visualizing the goddess on to the woman practitioner and then “entering” the temple of the yoni through sexual intercourse and through reciting mantras. Paradoxically, these specific rites in the Yoni Tantra highlight the complex negotiations of power and assemblages that the female practitioner’s body represents, while still conflating and reducing the woman’s body to her womb/yoni in ritual practices. For example, in the Yoni Tantra, the specific instructions are given:

“With his mind on the goddess, he should worship the

goddess. For that [divine] Sakti is in the form of the [human] Sakti.

That man will attain the four aims of life: duty,

45 Urban, Hugh B. The Womb of Tantra: Goddesses, Tribals, and Kings in Assam. The Journal of Hindu Studies (2011) 231 46 Ibid. 232

wealth, pleasure and liberation”47

Quite literally, meditating on and worshipping the goddess in her divine form is the exact same as worshipping the human body of the woman in the ritual. Simultaneously, the woman practitioner is essentialized and reduced to her female-ness, her yoni, and raised to the status of a goddess. She represents the otherworldly power to transform the male practitioner and yet remains a passive partner in the rite. More specifically, the female partner’s caste, class, and social status are detailed in the Yoni Tantra, yet are also lenient: she can be

“a dancer, a daughter of a skull-bearer, a prostitute, a washer-woman,

a barber’s daughter, a female brahmin, a daughter of a low class man,

a daughter of a cowherd, and a daughter of a garland maker

– these are praised as the nine kinds of maiden”48

These recommended maiden/partners vary widely across the spectrum of Indian social hierarchies; a female brahmin (the highest, priestly, and “pure” caste) is a stark contrast socially to a prostitute or daughter of a lower-class man. Specifically, in rural areas at that time, “the prestige of a caste was higher or lower according to the degree of its purity” and the “physical constitution of women as well as their cultural construction as objects of male lust made them, in men’s eyes, potentially the more polluting”49. This highlights that despite her impure lower social status, within the Yoni Tantra ritual the female is still a pure source of shakti. In contradiction, while her status in the social sphere matters, within the ritual it is seemingly irrelevant. Although this subversion of social norms is very characteristic of Tantric practices, in analyzing the Yoni Tantra ritual by reducing the woman to just her intersectional mantra of

47 Urban, Hugh. Translation of the Yoni Tantra, (2010) 48 Ibid. 49 Guha, Ranajit. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Spivak and Guha. (Oxford University Press, 1988) 152

21 gender, sexuality, and class/caste reiterates her as a fixed subject stagnant in time and space. In this particular instance during the Yoni Tantra ritual, the woman is, at one moment, possibly a lower-class and pollutin unmarried woman, and the next is elevated to a pure goddess in sexual partnership with the power to offer liberation. These temporary moments where every aspect of her identity is malleable and porous, religious and social/cultural, physical and divine requires the nuances of assemblage to understand. Puar argues that “the liminality of bodily matter cannot be captured by intersectional subject positioning”, meaning that subjects and bodies are unstable matter, and you cannot group them into neat identity formations50. The paradox of subverting all social norms, castes, and sexualities lies in the power of the tantric ritual and in the woman’s body. By using assemblages, or even a post-poststructuralist understanding, Puar's and

DeLanda’s approach argues that “categories—race, gender, sexuality—are considered events, actions, and encounters between bodies, rather than simply entities and attributes of subjects”51.

Quite literally, the encounter of the male and female tantric practitioner’s bodies change social standings, religious identities, and divine human representations for the duration of the ritual.

The tantric woman’s identity therefore is an event, a process, a multi-causal and multidirectional assemblage.

Performing rituals and rites, and as sites of living expressions of shakti, these tantric women reinforce that the body is “interwoven with and constitutive of systems of meaning, signification, and representation”52. The body as the lived body, as argued by the “Sexual Difference” theory of feminism with scholars such as Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, which states that the body is

50 Puar, Jasbir. “I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess”. philoSOPHIA (2011) 56 51 Ibid. 57 52 Grosz, Elizabeth. “Refiguring Bodies” from Volatile Bodies. (Indiana University Press 1994) 18

22 necessarily not a historical or biological function. They argue that the woman’s body is a “site of contestation, in a series of economic, political, sexual, and intellectual struggles”53. Describing the body in this way reinforces the complex layers of social and political dimensions mapped on to the woman and the goddess- as an assemblage or roadmap of discipline and control.

In the documentary “The Performance of Gendered Roles at Kamakhya, Assam”, the creator

Tracy Wares explains that every woman is inherently shakti. Women living around the

Kamakhya temple are interviewed in the documentary to explain how they identify with the goddess and feel empowered through their close association with her. In one interview the women states “if you worship [shakti] with your whole heart and soul then you get strength” and

“as a woman you feel that much more special, because you feel that special divine force is kind of encompassed in me because I am a woman and I am Indian, and this kind of energy is existent in me”54. These women worship the goddess as themselves, and draw from this power in their everyday lives. Another woman explains, “yes, I am Devi, I am Shiva, I am everything, I am so powerful like Devi, mother goddess, I am mother goddess”55. Embodying the goddess is a crucial fundamental component to their Tantric practice and puja. Again, we see even today that the essentialism of “womanhood” is synonymous with the divine feminine, yet transcends all social identities:

“All women in the Shakta tantra, all women share a continuity of being

with the goddess, all women irrespective of the caste creed age status or

personal accomplished are regarded as the physical incarnations of Shakti,

53 Ibid.19 54 Wares, Tracy. “The Performance of Gendered Roles at Kamakhya, Assam” 55 Wares, Tracy. “The Performance of Gendered Roles at Kamakhya, Assam”

the divine cosmic energy, the great goddess, all women at birth are inherits

of the intrinsic shakti, the divine cosmic energy”56

Within the Kamakhya temple there are powerful and interesting ways women are essentializing their own femininity while drawing great strength from that role. In utilizing this power, these modern-day women around the temple hold positions in society that are arguably higher than in non-tantric areas, and are venerated and respected for simply being stewards of their feminine power. In this unique moment new and potential spaces emerge as her body is a site of social contestation and religious identification, all while reinforcing traditional gender essentialisms and reductionist thinking about the woman’s body. Stepping outside of the Western bias of assumed women’s roles and independence, we can see these women, in their unique situations, are utilizing their male-defined positions to challenge patriarchy, essentializing their bodies to promote women’s veneration, and showing the woman’s body as an event, a momentary re- identifying, an assemblage in a complex interaction of outside forces act upon her, all while representing the source of true power herself.

South Asian scholar Lorelai Biernacki has made an effort to recover women’s voices from tantra in particular texts. Most specifically she looks at the Kali practice in the 15th-18th century texts, the Brhannila Tantra, which translates at the “Great Blue Tantra”. A 256-page text, which mentions left-hand tantric rituals, including the five M’s, refers to the Blue Goddess of Speech, but also the Blue Hill in Kamakhya. Here it is said that Shiva, in the grief over his wife Sati’s death, dismembers her and her limbs all fall to earth- and Kamakhya is where her sex organ

56 Ibid.

24 landed and turned the hill blue57. To Biernacki, this text “attached importance to women’s abilities in spiritual pursuits” including acknowledging women as respected as both practitioners and gurus58. Her attempt to recover women’s voices in anonymously authored texts is admittedly difficult and potentially problematic, and Wendy Donniger’s opinion is that “gender is both too simple and too blurry a category when it comes to mapping the complexity of human relations”59. Dismissing this aim of trying to decipher the gender of the authors, instead

Biernacki tries to map the discourse that categorizes the world into gender. Throughout her work, Biernacki looks for the instances where gender is either flipped to subvert roles, or where the models of women do not follow the typical gender binaries. This particular myth that she explores “offers a renegotiation of women’s identity of offering an atypical, and, we might add, uncommonly humanistic, example for addressing violence to women”60. Biernacki references

Judith Butler in reinforcing that gender is a performative act, and assures that her analysis is

“feminist” in that it “allows us new portraits, portraits that shift the underlying differentials of power encoded in the ways that relations between the genders get represented”61. Critiques of

Biernacki’s work cite that although she tries to get at the female perspective, it still remains that it is from male-authored texts and from male voices, which is the same issue with analyzing only the Yoni Tantra without outside historical contexts. Further, the multiplicity of meaning for

“woman” in translating from Sanskrit proves opaque at times, as with all translating work, and it can be dangerous in that it allows the translator to make linguistic generous assumptions in favor of their argument. This critique allows us to ask larger questions that are relevant in all historical

57 Biernacki, Loriliai. Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra. (Oxford University Press, 2007) 14 58 Ibid. 17 59 Ibid. 21 60 Ibid. 22 61 Biernacki, Loriliai. Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra. (Oxford University Press, 2007) 26

25 translations on women: what choices do scholars make in their translations, and are they consistent with the larger contextual and historical realities of the time? In what other ways is woman more than just the parts that are relevant to tantra? What Biernacki’s work does is help us complicate the notion of agency as not simply a binary of oppressed or free, but it demonstrates certain grey shades of freedom within systems of patriarchal power.

The central and essentialized object of Hindu tantra is arguably the woman’s yoni, or sexual organ. At times, the Yoni Tantra ritual completely conflates the female practitioner with her yoni; often her identity and personhood are completely interchangeable with her sexual organ:

“merely by worshiping the yoni, the worship of Sakti is surely performed”62. This reduction and essentializing of the goddess with her yoni only reifies the conflation of the two, using assemblage as a theoretic tool and looking for strategic essentialism(s) offers deeper insight into what is really going on: by taking a closer look at the unique space that opens during the Yoni

Tantra, the challenging of power, gender, sexuality, social status, and liberation, we begin to see a unique opportunity only created in this divine moment. Also within the Yoni Tantra the common myth of the goddess Sati is explained. Sati, who was dismembered to create the 51 pithas or sites where her mythological 51 body-parts fell, in tantra becomes subverted and instead she is made whole again: “the goddess Sakti [Sati] is symbolically re-membered and reintegrated- again, through a sacrificial act”63. Through inverting the mainstream myth into a tantric practice of mythologically unifying Sati, the “pithas are reconnected in the interior landscape of the female body or human sati”64. The female practitioner then is the canvas to

62 Urban, Hugh. Translation of the Yoni Tantra (2010) 63 Urban, Hugh B. The Power of Tantra (I.B. Tauris and Co, 2010) 107 64 Ibid. 107

26 reunite Sati’s parts and to integrate her own body as the tantric goddess. A deeper contextual understanding of not only Sati's original myth but of the cultural, historical, and even political implications would be necessary to understand the complicated assemblage of the tantric woman’s unique non-static identity in this ritual. These tantric practices, along with the Yoni

Tantra worship, can create spaces for the female to utilize her newly-created goddess identification to then subvert social structures for her own benefit. What needs to be clarified, and what is central to the argument as to whether ‘goddess equates to women’s empowerment’ is the question and distinction of identification with the goddess, or worship and reverence to the goddess, as “mode of communion with the Goddess”, which entails a relationship of worshipper and worshipped65. Arguably, women gurus are physical embodiments of the goddess, such that, according to Karen Pechellis in The Graceful Guru, “female gurus are understood by Hindu tradition and by their followers alike to be manifestations of the Goddess; that is, as perfect embodiments of shakti”66. Pechellis emphasizes that “the special nature of Hindu female gurus as embodiments of the divine” has implications “for feminist interpretations of them”67. Some of these gurus may partly be aligned with western feminism by rejecting the notion of gender duality, meaning, that their followers and movements view the female guru not just as woman but as the genderless ultimate reality. She clarifies that “the focus of the teachings of Hindu female gurus is not specifically expresses as “empowering women”, although many women devotees participating in their spiritual paths do experience them as empowerment” but the sole role of guru does challenge other norms on the “feminist agenda”68. For example, the most

65 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 48 66 Pechellis, Karen. The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States. (Oxford University Press 2004) 9 67 Ibid 9 68 Ibid 7

27 powerful “feminist” work a female guru can do is just by being a guru: “the most radical challenge of the female gurus is not directed toward the received guru tradition but rather the received social expectations. Their asceticism…challenges the Hindu social norms of womanhood, which are marriage and bearing children”69.

Yet, not all female gurus promote gender equality. Elizabeth Puttick challenges us to divide female gurus “among feminist lines”70. She lists several modern female gurus that fall along the path of female devotion (which she views as empowering), such as “Ammachi, Anadamayi Ma, and Mother Meera” yet in contrast, she views the female gurus Nirmala Devi and Gurumayi

(from the Siddha Yoga tradition) as “explicitly anti-feminist” because they are leaders of patriarchal traditions that promote sexist teachings”71. Others locate themselves within their own

Hindu traditions, but interpret it in their own way. Of these are Gauri Ma who “established spiritual and social work centers for women; Anandamayi Ma [who was] was self-initiated;

Jayashri Ma is independently employed in the working world alongside her religious activities;

Shree Ma has self-consciously attempted to synthesize her Bengali tantric heritage with the

Christian background of her followers; [and] Ammachi [who] was born into a low caste, yet she physically embraces all devotees”72. Despite many varying degrees the role of female guru play, what is ubiquitous is that the role of a female guru provides Indian women “a legitimate alternative to the culturally mandated roles of wife and mother”, and elevates the feminine to a divine embodiment in physical form.73

69 Ibid 7 70 Ibid 6 71 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 6 72 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 7 73 Ibid. 8

Blood, Tears, and Breastmilk: Tamil Nationalism’s “Mother Tamil”

The woman’s body as irrevocably tied to the religious, political, and cultural is also often exemplified in 19th century Tamil India in (male-created) revolutionary discourse. The southern state of Tamil Nadu in India utilized a female icon named “Tamil Tay”, or “Mother Tamil”, to be their feminine political symbol of the nation-state as a response to feeling threatened by the hegemonic Hindi and Sanskritized culture of the North. Mother Tamil was a “hybrid mother- goddess” who “incorporated the powers and potentialities of the female divinities of the Hindu pantheon”74. More specifically, “Mother Tamil” originaited as

“a figure of speech, worship, and identity around the 1890s in elite literary and religious writings which set out to establish the distinctiveness of Tamil speakers from an India that was represented as Aryan, Sanskritic, and Brahmanical. In contrast, the Tamil- speaking community was deemed socially ‘non-Brahman’, and linguistically, racially, and ethnically, ‘Dravidian’…the Tamil-speaking community also came to be imagined as an autonomous, sovereign ‘nation’, in clear opposition to the emergent Indian nation…and [later] was more widely disseminated through newspapers, street songs, political speeches, even cinema.75

Thus the Tamil nation, symbolized and untied by Mother Tamil, “is not merely a political, economic, and ideological entity; it is also, crucially, a somatic formation in which the body of the woman, and the vulnerable, violated woman in particular, is critically implicated”76. The woman’s body- her womb, blood, and breastmilk- in Tamil political imagery and propaganda creates an imagined site of nationalism for the Tamil community. Further, the sexual purity of this imagined Mother Tamil is upheld during times of war and conflict and its associated threat of rape. Through her imagery the Tamil nationalists instigated rebellious acts against both colonialism and dominant Indian nationalism using the imagery of the woman’s body: her

74 Ramaswamy, Sumathi. “Body Language: The Somatics of Nationalism in Tamil India”. Gender and History. Vol.10 No.1 (April 1998) 79 75 Ramaswamy, Sumathi. “Body Language: The Somatics of Nationalism in Tamil India”. Gender and History. Vol.10 No.1 (April 1998) 80 76 Ibid. 78

29 womb, milk, tears, scarred face, and battered limbs. The Tamil’s Dravidian identity was projected on to the Mother Tamil, first as a fierce queen, but then on a frail and endangered mother that was dependent on her children in order to keep her political campaign and identity alive. Later the campaign utilized the image of the diseased maternal body to show their own impoverished state of the Tamil language/nation, and to shock their audience to take arms.

McGuire’s theory on the woman’s body is helpful in understanding the assemblages of the divine body of Mother India, which is “always produced in the context of specific ecological, economic, and social conditions (Bourdieu)- thus its political significance and its potential role in social change, as well as social stability” was important for a rhetoric of Tamil nationalism77. It was a very conscious effort on the part of Tamil nationalists to use certain imagery of a battered mother for desired social and political effects, meaning that in this certain moment in time, the woman’s body was particularly defined and represented in a specific way for specific political purposes. McGuire goes on to say that “the social meanings of the body are necessarily linked with the political body”78. Mother Tamil’s body, and the Tamil woman’s body in general, becomes the crucial space where local/national political issues matter, where their own self- images and self-identifications become concern for the public sphere. Alternatively, Mother

Tamil and the nationalistic Tamil woman’s body was not just used in a “positive” light for Tamil unity, but also became the site of polemic patriarchal control and oppression as they later became

“the recording surface of repressive cultural practices and symbolic humiliations”79. For

77 McGuire, M. B. Religion and the Body: Rematerializing the Human Body in the Social Sciences of Religion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 29 (1990) 290 78 Ibid. 290 79 Ramaswamy, Sumathi. “Body Language: The Somatics of Nationalism in Tamil India”. Gender and History. Vol.10 No.1 (1998) 101-102

30 example, in Tamil propaganda, the literal and metaphorical woman’s body was the place of violence from any outside threat: an attacker and instigator, always male, and in this instance as the imagined Hindi majority. Discourses and narratives that placed Mother Tamil as the victim both reinforced the archetype of the powerful violent male as well as showed/glorified a sort of heroic Tamil male protectiveness. Tamil nationalist discourse even edged toward alluding to

Mother Tamil’s rape, although never outright admitted it: “although one could argue that the very possibility of rape that such vivid imagery suggests is just as threatening, [a Tamil propaganda’s passage] explicit absence starkly contrasts with the reality of rape that haunts women’s lives in many parts of India”80. However, in keeping Mother Tamil un-raped ensures her purity and upholds her honor- and thus a worthy image to represent Tamil India. Twofold, women are first reduced to most importantly (and only) their sexual purity, and secondly, sexual purity has become indistinguishable to the larger community as dignity and respect.

In Ritu Menon’s Borders and Boundaries: How Women Experienced the Partition of India,

Menon writes that during the partition in India and Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century, communal honor was closely tied to the women’s body through sexuality. On both sides of the partition women’s sexual purity and sexual violence became a means of war crimes and religious violence. The atrocious employment of rape “was used as a weapon, as a sport and as a punishment…it sparked the deepest feelings of revenge, dishonour and shame”81. During this time in India, women’s bodies were the place that was often destroyed through conflict of

80 Ibid. 97 81 Khan, Yasmin. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale University Press, 2007) 133

31 religious and national boundaries82. In that way, their bodies mapped a literal and imaginative religious identity and nationalism: women’s bodies not only displayed the metaphorical borders and national boundaries but were also physically marked with scars and mutilations, unwanted pregnancies and abortions, as well as embodying the lifelong social stigma of a rape victim83.

Historically, through the use of women’s bodies, both sides wanted to consume and eradicate the other. Even in contemporary political right-wing movements today, the imagery of the raped woman is still utilized. In Hindutva and BJP right-wing Hindu rhetoric the response to Muslim

Pakistani threats is to regularly call upon memories of Partition, where the “raped Hindu woman becomes symbolic of the victimisation of the whole Hindu community”84.

Mainstream acceptance of the rape narrative is on the one hand positive for feminists in acknowledging its prevalent occurrence and brings awareness to the violent act, however at the same time reinforces women as passive victims for the service of men’s desires and hatred, and views women’s bodies as passive and empty spaces waiting to be taken/invaded. Women’s bodies are negative/absence and men’s bodies are presence/positive. Surmising that women (and their sexualities) are passive, “vacant and vulnerable”, and to be kept at home, therefore the feminine becomes an empty void, an “actor allocated to the subordinate functions85.

The Tamil and Partition woman’s body is the site of political and sexual contestation- a place of struggles of sexual difference and identity, politics and economics, and violent nationalism.

82 Many women had jai hind and pakistan zindabad scared on their faces and bodies. Many felt they would not be accepted due to shame; some were sold on the flesh market, others committed suicide, or as a pre-emptive measure their families killed all their women to avoid the dishonor 83 Menon, Ritu. Borders and Boundaries: How Women Experienced the Partition of India (Rutgers University Press, 1998) 84 Turner, Ellen. “Empowering Feminist Responses to Hindutva”.(Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific Issue 28, March 2012) 29 85 Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). (University Of Minnesota Press, 2006) 78,79

These identities were defined very specifically in a particular time, place, and context for a patriarchal political agenda, and in understanding the woman’s body we need to account for particular global contexts and histories. Puar warns, current “categories privileged by intersectional analysis do not necessarily traverse national and regional boundaries nor genealogical exigencies” and because of this, they are “presuming and producing static epistemological renderings of categories themselves across historical and geopolitical locations”86. Avoiding a reductive and static application to Mother Tamil will ensure the fullest understanding of the complicated assemblage of the multilayered, and very culturally and historically specific site of the Indian woman’s political, national, and religious body in these specific moments in time.

For example, without keeping assemblages in mind, we might overlook the nuanced context of caste as it relates to women’s bodies not only during Tamil nationalism and the Partition, but within women’s daily lives across the country. Caste is often interchangeable and inseparable from Hinduism, and is deeply tied to Indian women’s lives, sexualities, and identities. This is evident in the day-to-day lives of Indian women, but more strikingly these types of issues come out during times of crisis, conflict, and violent movements. Many Indian Dalit87 scholars argue that caste is an experience, not a theoretical social structure88. In response to western anthropological views of caste, these Dalit scholars labeled the western assessment of caste as inadequate and as “homo hierarchicist”. These implied western ideological views do no hold up

86 Puar, Jasbir. I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess. philoSOPHIA (2011) 54 87 Dalit is the traditional and general name given to the lowest castes of India, or “unscheduled castes”, “untouchables”, or “backwards castes”. Although Dalit is often polemical, many within the group are reclaiming the term. 88 See Ambedkar, B.R. Annihilation of Caste (Verso; Annotated, Critical edition 2016)

33 to an Indian woman’s daily lived experience of caste. In this way, an application of assemblage would better highlight the multifaceted concept of caste for an Indian woman: often many deeply held beliefs about caste are contradictory and illusory. For example, Arundhati Roy in the introduction of the revolutionary book the Annihilation of Caste by Ambedekar explains “men of privileged castes had undisputed rights over the bodies of the Untouchable women. Love is polluting. Rape is pure. In many parts of India, much of this continues to this day”89. A Dalit

(Untouchable) woman thus was too polluting to touch, eat with, or love, but to rape was acceptable. This type of contradictory and irrational thinking has strong roots in Hinduism, not just because it is from which the caste system originated, but because of the religious notion of karma. The “burden” of karma reinforces that “those born into the subordinated castes are supposedly being punished for the bad deeds they have done in their past lives…In effect, they are living out a prison sentence”90. Justifiably, lower-caste people somehow karmically deserve the current caste they were born into. And, therefore, acts that resist their caste/Hindu status defy divine law and would guarantee more bad karma and subsequent punishment- it is imperative they comply peacefully with their social rank. A complicated web of caste, purity, sexuality, religion, spiritual laws, and resistance all inform the daily experience of the Indian woman. For millions of Hindu women of all castes, “Hinduism in its practice is a way of life that pervades everything- birth, death, war, marriage, food, music, poetry, dance” and Ambedkar argues,

Hinduism itself “is their culture, their very identity”91. To try to neatly tease apart identities that fit into essentialized static categories (race, caste, class, sex) would be to deeply ignore and problematically misinterpret the daily existence of women and women’s struggles in India. In

89 Roy, Arundhati. “The Doctor and the Saint” in Ambedkar, B.R. Annihilation of Caste (Verso; Annotated, Critical edition 2016) 25 90 Ibid. 25 91 Ambedkar, B.R. Annihilation of Caste (Verso; Annotated, Critical edition 2016) 47

34 one moment, a lower-caste woman’s body is seen as too polluted to gather water from the local well, yet at the same time is often a socially acceptable (and un-polluting) body to rape, often historically with a political motivation. Through these localized cultured and engrained religious ideologies, a woman’s body is a site of contradicting forces.

‘Uterine Nationalism’: Tamil Women’s Movements and Strategic Essentialism

According to Butler, through strategic essentialism women can create a space to function as a permanent “site of contested meanings” that, as I argue, is best understood through assemblages of identity92. For example, we can see strategic essentialism operating in India specifically in nationalist Tamil discourse. Tamil nationalist movements use women’s bodies as symbols to represent national, political, and cultural identity. Reductive in nature, using a woman’s body for political gain is inherently essentializing, yet I push the analysis further to acknowledge that because the political/social/cultural is mapped on to the Tamil woman’s body as ‘Mother Tamil’, the woman herself has the unique opportunity to use her status to reexamine and reconceptualize her own place within society in Tamil India. This particular nationalist and male-authored discourse first reduces the identity of the woman down to her womb and the nation down to a family unit. In doing this, “the nation as family reconfirmed, however, that women’s primary productive function within the national body politic, regardless of the class, ethnic, caste and occupational differences, was primarily a reproductive one”93. Ironically the woman’s public political image was one of a private, apolitical, reproductive, and domestic role of wife and mother. However, Tamil women, despite remaining tightly bound in the male-dominated nationalist discourse, capitalized on their own power as the “mothers of the state” and employed strategic essentialism to “exploit the obsession with biological maternity as an opening wedge so as to break out of the narrower role prescribed to them”94. In essentializing their own bodies, they found a “broader, less constricted vision of their contribution to the state”95. Finding these

92 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. (Routledge, 2006) 21 93 Ramaswamy, Sumathi. “Body Language: The Somatics of Nationalism in Tamil India”. Gender and History. Vol.10 No.1 (1998) 101 94 Ibid.100 95 Ibid.100

36 momentary ruptures in the societal system arguably has contributed to women asserting their own autonomy and power, not by resisting the system or becoming “other”, but by reinforcing their (bodily) value within the family-society. Despite the nationalist discourse creating a “fixed” and essentialized identity for Mother Tamil and Tamil women which only reinforces a heteronormative identity, what was really happening beneath the surface was a simultaneous resistance to hegemony and patriarchal oppression by utilizing their own female power; an assemblage of various (and often contradictory) “roadmaps of precisely these not quite fully understood relations between discipline and control”96. Specific body parts of Mother Tamil were essentialized to create effect and incite citizen action in women: “uterine nationalism” was a term to describe the “sexualized, separate species of nationalism that is often advocated for women…women’s patriotism grows out of the recesses of the womb”97. Women were inspired to serve the nation with and through their bodies, biologically reproducing public nationalism in the most private way possible. Mother Tamil and many women of the Partition (both sides) are interesting examples of the lived and symbolic experience of the Indian woman. Just as the power of shakti is ascribed to, enacted upon, and a force from within the woman’s body, so too

India’s powerful patriarchal forces of caste, social expectations, national politics, religion, and wars are all too often forced upon the site of her body.

96 Puar, Jasbir K. I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess. philoSOPHIA. (2011) 63 97 Ram Ramaswamy, Sumathi. “Body Language: The Somatics of Nationalism in Tamil India”. Gender and History. Vol.10 No.1 (1998) 99

“Mother India”: (Strategically) Essentializing the Feminine Body as Nature/Natural

Vandana Shiva, as well-known scholar and activist on Indian environmentalism, ecofeminsisn, and women’s rights, draws a strong connection between and direct essence of nature and woman:

“the violence to nature, which seems intrinsic to the dominant development model, is also associated with violence to women who depend on nature for drawing sustenance for themselves, their families, their societies”98. Despite current feminist theory that argues against any essentialiszing of the woman as nature, historically, the patriarchy in India placed women and nature together, shakti itself is seen as a powerful force of nature, so it warrants examining in what ways the conflation of nature and woman affect the identity and use of the woman’s body.

Further, the work of the ideology that places women in India parallel with nature may help challenge western notions of patriarchy and gender: as Shiva writes, in their fight to survive on onslaughts of both nature’s needs and individual’s needs, “women have begun a struggle that challenges the most fundamental categories of western patriarchy- its concepts of nature and women”99. Specifically, Indian women fighting for ecological and gender rights “have challenged the western concept of nature as an object of exploitation and have protector her as

Prakriti, the living force that supports life”100. Historically, especially in religious discourse, women are inherent to India’s concept of nature, both in reality and metaphorically, as exoteric and esoteric ideologies: “at one level nature is symbolised as the embodiment of the feminine principle, and at another, she is nurtured by the feminine to produce life and provide sustenance”101. And although many feminist scholars see this essentializing of the woman as nature extremely problematic, I will later explore the use of strategic essentialism as a powerful

98 Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. (South End Press, 2010) xxxi 99 Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. (South End Press, 2010) xxxii 100 Ibid. xxxii 101 Ibid. 40

38 tool women are using within the patriarchy to challenge hegemonic patriarchal and colonial ontologies of domination over nature and people. These assumptions of a dichotomy of man dominating both woman and nature “generates maldevelopment because it makes the colonising male the agent and ‘model’ of development…women, the Third World, and nature become underdeveloped, first by definition, and then, through the process of colonisation, in reality”102.

As Elizabeth Grosz argues, and what we can see in all my examples, is that the close association between women’s bodies (both representations and functions), nature, religion, and politics, are all originally defined within a patriarchal narrative. Later I will explore women’s own conceptions of their bodies in relation to nature. For now, Grosz argues that patriarchy works by justifying women as more closely related to their bodies than men:

“relying on essentialism, naturalism, and biologism, misogynist thought confines women

to the biological requirements of reproduction on the assumption that because of

particular biological, physiological, and endocrinological transformations, women are

somehow more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men”103.

Arguably, due to the lack of men’s own connection to their bodies, they look toward women to control and satisfy their own “need for corporeal contact” through “access to women’s bodies and services”104. For instance, tantric rituals essentialize women and women’s bodies as “more natural” than their male counterpart’s: tantric shakti is literally the manifestation of the entire natural world. More specifically shakti represents the subversive taboo of sexual desire, bodily fluids, and pure feminine power. The male’s “access to women’s bodies and services” can be

102 Ibid. 42 103 Grosz, Elizabeth. “Refiguring Bodies” from Volatile Bodies. (Indiana University Press, 1994) 14 104 Ibid.13

39 seen in the yearly celebration of the goddess’ menstrual cycle at Kamakhya, where all members of the community come together to offer goat’s blood to the goddess, and in performing this ritual, men can influence local fertility rites105. Through appropriating the woman’s bodily functions the male can exert control over his natural, personal, and societal surroundings. These

Indian perspectives view the female body as a unique and distinct means of access to

“knowledge and ways of living”; in doing so they “have accepted patriarchal and misogynist assumptions about the female body as somehow more natural, less detached, more engaged with and directly related to its ‘objects’ than male bodies”106. Perhaps because the widespread Hindu notion of shakti as nature (Prakriti) is so entrenched in the Indian worldview, it is difficult for

Indians to not identify women’s bodies (and not males’ bodies) with nature itself.

In the more recent and widely popular Bollywood movie Mother India (1957), assumptions of the woman’s body being more natural or connected to nature is a pervasive theme woven throughout the lengthy nationalistic film. Radha, the main character and lower-caste peasant woman whom the viewer follows throughout her difficult life, represents India’s iconic image of women’s labor in alternative spaces (domestic life, agricultural work, etc). Radha is the embodiment of not only the struggle and hardship toward India’s economic development, but also represents the deep connection of the woman’s body with nature or the land herself. In one scene Radha, at the lowest and most desperate part of her life, is about to leave her village behind and give up, but she mysteriously hears “your mother is calling you” to beckon her back. Her

“mother” is the agricultural land itself; she “is calling you” to not abandon working India's agricultural land, and in doing so she will get the payoff of economic prosperity. To abandon her

105 Urban, Hugh B. The Power of Tantra (I.B. Tauris and Co, 2010) 232 106 Grosz, Elizabeth. “Refiguring Bodies” from Volatile Bodies. (Indiana University Press, 1994) 15

40 farmland is to abandon her own mother’s success. At this point in the film, in her desperation,

Radha also speaks to the goddess in her local temple and addresses her as “the goddess who carries the burden of the world”. Women and the goddess are seen to carry the heavy responsibility of working India’s land on their shoulders in order for India as a whole to prosper.

Radha finds strength in the goddess to take on the daily hardships of women of the time, and through glorifying sacrifice, she embodies the womanly perseverance to develop India, as the natural feminine caretaker of the land and community, as “Mother India” herself107. It is through emphasizing her own feminine natural and powerful identity that Radha finds the strength to transcend her struggle and sacrifice to continue her important duty as an Indian woman, as

Mother India.

The conflation of woman, nature, and Mother India is not new, in fact, it has historical roots dating back to the colonial era. Ronald Inden in “Imagining India” writes that historically from a western colonial perspective Hinduism was perceived as a metaphorical female jungle that can be “managed by its male masters”108. Inden argues that many Indologists, historians and anthropologists in their work conflate the west with rationality- a “Western, male territoriality” as the “exemplar of world-ordering rationality”- and imply that India and Hinduism are both feminine and irrational, and therefore inferior109. In Orientalism and Religion Richard King explains the oppressive gender binary of the West as masculine and India as the feminine Other:

“just as the myth of India has been constructed as the ‘Other’…women have been defined

107 Mother India. Director: Mehboob Khan. (Mehboob Productions, 1957) 108 Inden, Ronald. Imagining India. (Indiana University Press, 2001) 87 109 Ibid. 87

41 as ‘not-male’ or other in relation to normative patriarchal paradigms’”110. Judith Butler argues that masculine “othering” is a “dialectical appropriation and suppression of the Other…deployed centrally but not exclusively in the service of expanding and rationalizing the masculinist domain”111. The “othering” of gender is a political and patriarchal tool for justifying oppression and domination.

Hinduism is often seen as an essentialized “feminine” and “spiritual” not just by colonialists but arguably in a dialectical fashion by Indians themselves. Calling attention to how British colonial ideology has made a “substantial contribution to the construction of modern identity and self-awareness among contemporary Indians”, King asserts that Indians themselves adopted these essential and stereotyped identities. Indians even accepted and transformed these colonial stereotypes which in turn were then “used in the fight against colonialism”112. We see now the same tactic by contemporary Indian women using gender stereotypes and essentialisms of the feminine, shakti, and goddesses (despite being initially defined by patriarchal religion) which is now promoted by women to fight against sexism and gender violence. Similarly, existing hegemonic discourse can be adopted and transformed (such as myth) in a strategic way to subvert social norms for social transformation. I will later explore how various religious myths are being re-appropriated by women for a feminist agenda.

110 King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and The Mystic East. (Routledge, 1999) 114 111 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. (Routledge, 2006) 19 112 King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and The Mystic East. (Routledge, 1999) 93

Contemporary Indian Women Utilizing the Goddesses

I will briefly explore how contemporary women and women’s movements in India are drawing correlations between the goddesses, divine feminine, and a feminist agenda. Firstly, the correlation between Hindu goddesses and the feminist agenda is complicated and wrought, at best. Shakti is a powerful and widely applicable notion to many different agendas, to reiterate: shakti is a “fluid and multivalent concept which is found in many different contexts and can be used, even manipulated, for many different purposes”113. Even today, the goddesses can be used as tools for power, gender awareness, and social change given their rich and multifaceted history in India, their multiplicity’s of uses, and their deeper connotations and meanings. I will look at some of the ways that shakti and the goddesses are used by Hindu women today.

Historically, by the 1990s, women’s movements in India tended to focus more on economic issues that followed a more secular “social-feminist agenda” which was informed by a

“dialectical materialist ideology, borrowed from the West, which is extremely suspicious and critical of anything religious”114. Often feminism and religiosity were at odds in India; many women fighting for gender equality did not look to patriarchal Hinduism for doctrinal support.

The history of Indian feminists dismissing religion all-together was due to Hinduism’s mainstream patriarchal norms. The trend and initial discourse in the 1970s within Indian feminism, as seen in publications like the magazine Manushi, was a “strictly socialist-feminist approach which ignored or denigrated religious and other traditional cultural forms”115.

113 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 92 114 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 92 115 Ibid. 98

Yet, at the same time, others were in fact using the goddess for a modern “feminist” agenda. The first publishing house on and for women was set up in 1984 and was called Kali for Women. As the name suggests, they call upon the image of Kali, the fierce and powerful goddess to promote their “urgent sense that they had to make Indian women’s voices heard, through academic publishing and activist works, translation and fiction”116. More recently there has been a shift to incorporate Indian religions, and some Indian women are “expanding their own visions of feminism to include a spiritual dimension and are finding powerful resources within their own traditions”117. Indian feminists who take a more positive approach, including the Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva, have argued that India has gone through a “maldeveloplment”, meaning that currently “gender subordination and patriarchy have intensified in India” and she advocates “a return to values and practices associated with Prakrit”, the feminine religious principle118. We now arrive at the present-day situation, and hopefully have a better understanding how religious life is deeply embedded within Indian (gendered) culture, as well as the significance of using the goddess in various social movements.

By looking to new ways to reinterpret Hinduism to fight for women’s equality in India, modern day “feminists are reappropriating their favorite goddesses to challenge sexual and domestic violence”119. In Women and Violence in India, Bradley argues that now “goddesses such as Kali and Durga have been used by some feminist groups as symbols of women’s Shakti, harnessed in

116 “Kali for Women” Wikipedia (2018) 117 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 97 118 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 99 119 Stark, Eloise. “In India, Religion Meets Feminism”. http://thediplomat.com/2016/05/in-india-religion-meets- feminism/ (2016)

44 order to mobilise women and consciousness raise into political action (for example Shakti in

Kerela)”120. In a recent article in The Diplomat titled "In India, Religion Meets Feminism”, the author examines Indian efforts to re-appropriate their Hindu religion while acknowledging that issues of economics and class struggle may play a part: “for many Indian women, religion is a huge part of daily life, especially in the lower classes. It’s hard to imagine any large scale feminist movement that didn’t take this into account”121. These movements appeal to a particular class of women that may need to use the legitimization of the religious myths for their own source of power. As opposed to the status of higher class women, lower socio-economic women need to uniquely position themselves within religion to elevate their already disempowered position. Arguably, many Indian women within the secular feminist movements are upper- to middle- class, educated, and their positions afford them higher social status in their efforts to fight patriarchy.

Some scholars argue that more broadly Hindu women who are strong enough to step outside traditional Hindu roles and “circumvent or subvert the orthodox institutions” have a powerful ability to interpret their own relationship with “female divinity as one of identity which often allowed them to go beyond the boundaries of normative religious and social behavior”122.

Further, many argue that in India it is not simply goddess or feminine worship that single- handedly empowered women to challenge societal norms, but it was more the “ubiquitous presence of female deity” that has subtly influenced the lives of Hindu women which over time

120 Bradley, Tasmin. Women and Violence in India: Gender, Oppression and the Politics of Neoliberalism. (I.B.Tauris, 2017) 56 121 Stark, Eloise. “In India, Religion Meets Feminism”. http://thediplomat.com/2016/05/in-india-religion-meets- feminism/ 122 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 25

45 leads to the identification of that same divine feminine. Some goddesses, for example, are devout wives and mothers of the household (Lakshmi), while others are self-sacrificing (Sati). Other yoginis in the tantric tradition identified with “fierce and autonomous goddesses of tantric lore”123. Complicating this naturally assumed goddess equals empowerment debate is the fact that it depends more on which goddess Hindu women are identifying with rather than their ability or freedom to choose. Some argue that it is those women who chose submissive goddesses were “destined to remain in the restrictive social structure” while others who chose the strong and powerful models were able to “subvert orthodox norms”124. It is no surprise that those who possibly has the most success in subverting social norms around gender and power were the tantric traditions who’s rituals center around taboo and subversion and stem from a matrilineal family structure.

Although many interpretations of Hinduism have had controversial relationships with women’s issues, linking the goddesses with gender equality is one remedy that seems to recently be gaining effectiveness:

“in India, religion seems like one of the hardest places to achieve progress in women’s

rights. But although it may be one of the toughest battlefields to fight on, it is also one of

the most vital. By linking feminism and religion, these women are bringing the fight for

women’s rights to a wider part of the population”.125

123 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 25 124 Ibid. 25 125 Stark, Eloise. “In India, Religion Meets Feminism”. http://thediplomat.com/2016/05/in-india-religion-meets- feminism/ (2016)

With the increase of awareness and visibility around gender violence and rape culture through the influential role of social media, many women are now looking to the goddesses for inspiration, legitimacy, and feminine authority in their creative media campaigns. One such movement that links religion with feminism is the recent graphic novel Priya’s Shakti.

Priya’s Shakti

Priya’s Shakti is India’s first “augmented reality” graphic novel that re-writes the history of popular gods and goddesses to bring awareness to gender violence, abuse, and sexism in India.

First released at Mumbai Comicon 2014, Priya’s Shakti was inspired by the horrific Dehli gang- rape case in 2012126. According to one of the authors, an American-Indian filmmaker, his personal experience at a protest was a catalyst for its creation: "my colleague and I spoke to a

Delhi police officer and asked him for his opinion on what had happened on the bus…Basically the officer's response was that 'no good girl walks home at night,' implying that she probably deserved it, or at least provoked the attack”127. Several creators got together and responded to the grang-rape and subsequent victim-blaming through their graphic novel.

Priya’s Shakti tells the story of a young woman from a village who is also gang-raped and banished from her home for being a dishonor to the family. She flees to the jungle in shame to commit suicide. But in divine retribution the Goddess Parvati incarnates from Priya’s body and confronts the men. The village men are startled when Parvati shows her true form. Shiva,

Parvati’s divine husband, becomes enraged with the men of the world, and curses them all to impotency. The world goes into chaos and war, but Parvati then takes the form of Kali to convince Shiva to stop. In a colorful and entertaining adventure, Priya and the Goddess Parvati

126 The 2012 Delhi gang rape was widely reported in the media; a 23-year-old woman with her friend were picked up at night in Delhi and beaten, tortured, and gang raped on a bus. Eleven days after she was transferred from a Delhi hospital to Singapore due to extensive injuries, but died two days later. Widespread protests followed, several new laws passed, and rape cases were fast-tracked in the judicial system. Some argue this is not enough. 127 Chowdhury, Jennifer. “India's Newest Heroine Breaks Rape-Talk Taboo with Comic Book”. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/indias-newest-heroine-breaks-rape-talk-taboo-comic-book- n268481 (2014)

48 fight gender violence in India, and the comic culminates by Priya powerfully riding back into her town “on a tiger to get revenge on those that wronged her.”128.

The campaign calls for readers to join the online movement, complete with a hashtag

(#standwithpriya). Interestingly, Priya’s Shakti encourages women across India to help “stand up and fight” by voting, raising awareness, and going to school. It has been downloaded over

300,000 times, and has received several awards including the Ford Foundation, UN Women, which named it the 2014 Gender Equality Champion, and a recipient of the 2014 Tribeca Film

Institute New Media Fund. The books, story, and photographs are in exhibitions of a global tour in New York, Paris, and London. Even within India physical copies are being distributed to rural schools to bring awareness around rape and gender violence with the hopes that “men can be sensitized towards rape and how rape victims are treated”129. The writers then spent a year traveling across India “learning from poets, philosophers, activists, and sociologists focused on gender-based violence” and in an interview with NBC news, Devineni explains “talking with several rape survivors, I realized how difficult it was for them to seek justice and how much their lives were constantly under threat after they reported the crime,” and that "their family, local community, and even the police discouraged them from pursuing criminal action against their attackers. The burden of shame was placed on the victim and not the perpetrators”130. This is a common and often dominant cultural assumption about rape, and there are many current multimedia and social media campaigns to combat this. An India and U.S.-based non-profit was

128 Stark, Eloise. “In India, Religion Meets Feminism”. http://thediplomat.com/2016/05/in-india-religion-meets- feminism/ (2016) 129 Chowdhury, Jennifer. “India's Newest Heroine Breaks Rape-Talk Taboo with Comic Book”. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/indias-newest-heroine-breaks-rape-talk-taboo-comic-book- n268481 (2014) 130 Ibid.

49 created from the movement, called Aapne Aap (meaning “yourself”), where further comics will be made about women’s issues worldwide. A second and third comic book have been made about acid attack victims and sex-trafficking in Calcutta’s red light district. Some of these recent women’s campaigns use religious myth (Priya’s Shakti), some use parody and humor such as in the video “Rape- It’s Your Fault”131 and some women’s movements take justice into their own hands by carrying bamboo sticks and wear pink saris (the Gulabi Gang). Even further, a growing number of Indian women’s organization support both gender equality and more feminist interpretations of fluid sexual identities: organizations such as Sahayatrika, Sahodaran,

SANGAMA and the Alternative Law Forum work to promote “different sexualities, forcing open a space for peoples of different sexual identities to co-exist without the fear of violent repercussions”132.

By aligning itself with the established goddess myths, Priya’s Shakti is a textual example that gives authority, legitimacy, and agency to the women’s right to fight for gender equality, despite the fact that mostly all historical Hindu texts were written by men in a patriarchal context. This shows that we do not need to discard all patriarchal discourse about goddesses as oppressive: for

Indian women’s movements “there are instances that the stories are being re-interpreted in new ways, allowing an opening for the actions of the goddess as ‘thinkable’’133. Priya’s Shakti is an interesting case of a visual and artistic re-telling of religious myth. And although myths themselves do not have any autonomous agency, it is how and who uses them for their own

131 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hC0Ng_ajpY 132 Bradley, Tasmin. Women and Violence in India: Gender, Oppression and the Politics of Neoliberalism. (I.B.Tauris, 2017) 56 133 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 22

50 purposes that gives them compelling substance. Moreover, whomever interprets the myths brings a unique context and perspective each time it is read. Bruce Lincoln theorizes possible usages of myth to further socio-political change, one of which directly speaks to Priya’s Shakti. Those retelling myth may “advance novel lines of interpretation for an established myth or modify details in its narration and thereby change the nature of the sentiments (and the society) it evokes”134.

When this is carried out, there is successful deconstruction of established social forms and simultaneous emergence of new legitimized discourse in society. When some women are fighting for legitimacy themselves, one effective option they may have is to re-write the existing myths of Hinduism’s past. By first situating themselves within and embracing the foundational religious myths, Indian women both legitimize their position and can exhibit agency and authority to re-shape the Hindu myths. Seeing religion not as simply an opiate or illusion, but as a force for social transformation, Lincoln’s work shows that each retelling of a myths can incorporate intentionality, agency, and change, which can mobilize movements. Even more within the multiplicities of Hinduism(s) and multiple retellings of popular myths, yet another textual interpretation of the gods and goddesses allows Priya’s Shaki the freedom and authority to exist alongside all the other Hindu mythical interpretations. Hinduism is arguably one of the most tolerant traditions of varied expressions of deity worship and ritual, and the success of

Priya’s Shakti rests on the idea that Hindus are open to these types of contemporary re-tellings.

And as described in Lincoln’s discourse, the desired transformational result of Priya’s Shakti would be the successful deconstruction of established social forms and simultaneous emergence of new formations within society. Collective images and myths can be powerful tools that can be

134 Lincoln, Bruce. Discourse and the Construction of Society. (Oxford University Press, 1989) 24

51 used by “oppressed classes as a source of political awakening” and that “mythic narratives of past traditions” can be transformed into “revolutionary visions of liberation”135.

Further, Urban and others argue that the interpretations (and re-interpretations) of goddesses and myths have no real core “essence”, and are therefore dependent on those whom are interpreting them, their agenda, and intentional use. Many argue that it is not the goddesses themselves who are empowering, but rather, how (and by whom) they are being interpreted. This leaves an ambiguous space for the image of the goddess: “there is no inherent, invariable relationship between powerful goddess and the advocacy of women’s empowerment…rather, there are potentially empowering interpretations of goddesses that may or may not be articulated or effectively appropriated, just as there are potentially disempowering interpretations of the same goddesses”136. Further, various interpretations of religious symbols (such as the goddess)

“usually reflect social or political agendas, including those pertaining to gender”. Thus, the goddesses are reduced to only interpretations that can be (mis)appropriated for one’s own cause.

Another popular (yet potentially problematic) effort to re-interpret the goddesses is the modern

Indian ad campaign called “Abused Goddesses”. I will examine how the goddesses are used for another particular agenda, this time for gender-based violence awareness, and the polemtical controversies that followed: those of essentializing the feminine, beautifying violence, and stereotyping women as passive victims.

135 Urban, Hugh B. The Power of Tantra. (I.B. Tauris and Co, 2010) 88 136 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 191

Abused Goddess Campaign

The “Abused Goddess” Indian digital ad campaign gained global recognition for presenting photographs of popular Hindu goddesses as domestic abuse victims. Mumbai-based ad film agency Taproot India created images of three goddesses of Hindu mythology- Durga, the fierce warriors goddess, Saraswati, the goddess of learning, and Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, in their “silks, jewels and crowns- but all covered in bruises, cuts, and welts”. Actual women were dressed up as these goddesses and photographed revealing the aftermath of gender-based- violence on their bodies. The copy for the ad read "Pray that we never see this day. Today more than 68 percent of women in India are victims of domestic violence. Tomorrow it seems like no woman shall be spared. Not even the ones we pray too137.

Although at first it was received as an empowering message that brought awareness to widespread domestic violence, quickly many feminists and activists criticized this controversial campaign. Among many of the critiques, the “Abused Goddesses” are seen to reinforce gender stereotypes of women as passive victims, normalize and “beautify” domestic abuse, as well as promote the “savior complex” of men to women, of the West to the East. Arguably most importantly, I will examine how this kind of ad campaign problematically essentializes women.

Written on Aljazeera online, the subtitle to Sudha G Tilak’s article on the ads reads: the

“campaign that used images of battered Hindu goddesses to highlight crime against women is

137 Tilak, Sudha. “Bruised goddesses' Hurt Indian Feminists”. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/10/goddesses-hurt-indian-feminists- 2013105104822923415.html (2013)

53 denounced as cheap tokenism”138. Tilak calls the campaign a mere "trivialisation of highly revered goddesses”139. Some have the opinion that goddesses were not needed to get the message of gender-based violence across. However, the campaign arguably gained much attention because it was willing to place the battered woman as a goddess, and in so enforcing the identification between goddesses and actual women. Furthermore, this also strengthens the colonial phenomena of “brown woman in need of saving” from her own culture (as seen in sati).

DasGupta, in her critique, argues:

“whether of goddesses, celebrities, or models, images which glamorize gender-based

violence may undermine the very cause they work for. By portraying bruised and battered

goddesses as beautiful yet passive and in need of ‘saving’, these ads simply play into the

same patriarchal narratives that allow gender-based violence to take place, as well as the

same colonialist narratives that frame women of the Global South as needing, and

welcoming, ‘rescue.’”140

Historically, the colonial conquest of India was wrought with dominating and oppressive cultural and political narratives; one of which being that India was seen as an essentialized orient:

‘feminine’, ‘weak’, and ‘exotic’. Whereas this campaign may tread along these lines to reaffirm

India as the opposite of Europe, and thus needing “saving” and/or conquering, it continues to postulate cultural ‘essences’ and perpetuate common stereotypes.

138 DasGupta, Sayantani. Abused Goddesses, Orientalism and the Glamorization of Gender-Based Violence. http://www.thefeministwire.com/2013/09/abused-goddesses/ (2013) 139 Ibid. 140 Ibid.

The “Abused Goddesses” ad also highlights the oppressive act of stereotyping women of divine feminine beauty, in that “many felt the ad walked a thin line. It addressed domestic violence.

Then again it pigeon-holed women into the ideal female as a goddess figure”141. Not only that, but the real effects on women are arguably more; Delhi-based Professor Brinda Bose argues that this plays into the sexist and essentialized notions of women as either virgin or ‘slut’: why is she

“Durga/Saraswati/Laskhmi and not Kali, whose nude monstrosity makes genteel society squeamish at the best of times? If she was a slut/monster, would she be worthy of being saved in society's terms? And why does she need to be 'saved', in that most patriarchal rhetoric?”142. She reiterates that feminism gives her the freedom to chose not between just the slut and the virgin- it allows her the agency to chose whatever identity she wants, or to “ignore these choices” altogether. Essentializing women, in this case, both seeks to raise awareness and yet contradicts the mission of women’s empowerment in India by reinforcing the stereotypical and narrow gender roles. Rita Gross entertains the possibility that goddesses and shakti are only interpreted in a possibility of two essentialized ways: the submissive ‘good’ wife and the wild strong warrior. Because of the limiting and oppressive role models offered to Indian women, she questions that since they were created by a male-dominated patriarchal religion, they serve the purposes for men, and that “some would even argue that the goddesses function to help maintain patriarchy by giving women divine images of other decent goddesses who are submissively married or frighteningly out-of-control unmarried goddesses”143. In the “Abused Goddesses”

141 Tilak, Sudha. “Bruised goddesses' Hurt Indian Feminists”. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/10/goddesses-hurt-indian-feminists- 2013105104822923415.html (2013) 142 Ibid. 143 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 105

55 campaign, it seems that the identity chosen for women were the virginal goddess (leaving out the

‘slut goddess’), with not a whole lot of freedom for fluidity. This could mean that in this case

“the goddesses are not feminists, but are the creation of patriarchal males, and serve their needs”144.

However, in the tale of Priya’s Shakti, the goddess Parvati does incarnate into Kali for the purposes of embodying a more wild and powerful goddess, so Priya’s Shakti may offer more fluidity and autonomy for goddesses/women to choose their identity based on in-the-moment needs. Historically, during the independence movement in India, it was feared that women would become “blood-thirsty and dangerous” just like Kali, the popular image of independence for

India, so it became more socially appropriate to imitate Sita rather than Kali145. If this trend continued, then it would be logical to see that that is why the “Abused Goddesses” were all the

“good” demure goddesses, the “proper” and preferred embodiments of Indian women (by society’s standards). And on the other hand, this is why Priya’s Shakti may be so catalyzing; that women on a large-scale witness the embodiment of the strong and fierce incarnations of Parvati and Kali. Despite both efforts to help the situation of women, some might argue that Priya’s

Shaki and the “Abused Goddesses” are just another contemporary iteration of Hindu goddess reverence (not women’s reverence), remaining in the patriarchal cannon of Hinduism, reinforcing the “status quo”. Although the two Indian campaigns have both raised awareness while riding the wave of recent progress for women’s rights in India, many women still feel it perpetuates oppression and marginalization. Strategic essentialism entails being conscious of the

144 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 105 145 Ibid. 105

56 delicate balance between a unified cause and identity while not committing the same gender essentialism the cause is against. Butler argues that the resistance should create a space where the

“assumptions of its essential incompleteness” allows it to function as a permanent “site of contested meanings”146. Only this kind of open coalition allows for true gender/identity expression while still serving as a “normative ideal relieved of coercive force”147. A more effective approach would be to unite against “gender violence”, sexism, and patriarchy. Further, utilizing a goddess as a symbol is tricky in that it can “engender a variety of different and even contradictory moods or motivations”148.

146 Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” Theatre Journal 40:4 (1988): 519-32 147 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. (Routledge, 2006) 21 148 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 191

Conclusion

Although it is debated that Indian women’s movements may or may not gain any traction by reappropriating and latching on to Hindu goddesses, as Indian women fight for equal legitimacy on a daily basis, and as we have explored, by situating themselves as powerful manifestations of shakti, divine goddesses, Mother India and Mother Tamil, Indian women can in these instances both re-essentialize their own femininity and simultaneously transform their position. And although Western feminist theory may see essentilaizing women in India as not only problematic but oppressive, it is a more complicated and interesting issue than to simply dismiss these women’s efforts; it seems that often through conceptualizing strategic gender essentialismwomen are given the agency (as afforded by religious ideology) to push for systemic change. I would like to challenge the strict binary of identity fluidity and essentialism and instead put the both in conversation with each other. I would like to examine how the Indian examples of Priya’s Shakti and the “Abused Goddesses” challenge and inform the western concept of strategic essentialism and cause us to rethink the category through a mutual dialogue. By suspending any early judgements as to whether these examples are essentialist or not, we can allow the text speak and avoid any silencing of difference. Both essentialism and gender fluidity are in a productive tension; they are not either/or but rather both/and. Through opening a space for theoretical analysis, we can see another kind of space opening for women in these cases. As Urban writes about women in tantra, “as such, they may not have created the foundation for a movement of radical women’s liberation, but they have been able to open a unique space or gap within the dominant relations of power”, and we can see this apply to the efforts of the two recent campaigns, Mother Tamil, and the women in the Yoni Tantra149. Ironically, the male-dominated,

149 Urban, Hugh B. The Power of Tantra. (I.B. Tauris and Co, 2010) 143

58 male-authored, patriarchal religion that can be seen to historically oppress women is the very same religious cannon that many Indian women are sourcing from to empower themselves. So somehow in the varied, diverse, and heterogeneous nexus of Indian Hinduism(s) both the source and remedy may be found for women’s equality.

The goddess, as evident in the multiple uses of the divine feminine for various agendas, has no empowering intrinsic qualities herself; it is rather how she is interpreted, contextualized, and used. According to the editor of Is the Goddess a Feminist?, however you define feminism or whether you think the Goddess is a feminist or not, in studying many of the myths (and re- interpretations) of the goddesses, awareness on necessary critical feminist issues on gender will arise. As we have seen, various Indian religions, cultures, and political movements from a male perspective can use essentialized notions of the woman for their own patriarchal agendas. But because these strategies are rooted in the woman’s body, and those bodies entail an assemblage of cultural, political, social, and religious forces, a unique space gives women an opportunity to utilize their own power. However, despite momentary ruptures of gendered power, interesting questions arise when we consider that utilizing the goddesses may still function within patriarchy rather than fighting it. Examining the agency that women are afforded (taken) while working within the gendered essentialized roles allows us to question whether those ruptures in societal norms can actually be pressure valves that still function within the patriarchy. In other words, does patriarchy afford women these small and momentary marginalized spaces for agency within their permanent stereotypical roles? Are the women as goddesses really creating lasting change, or are these isolated instances? Some would argue that in fact “shakti-related phenomena such as goddess possession and women gurus are safety valves which ultimately function to preserve the

59 patriarchal system”150. Is it enough for the women to feel like they can momentarily get “outside” their oppressed position, all the while still being inside and returning to it? Further, it is argued that some of these women may engage in “religious practices and experience spiritual empowerment as a kind of consolation prize for losing status in the ‘real world’”151. One could then question whether these moments of resistance formulated through identity are more just liminal phases (Victor Turner) where women temporally subvert gender norms, only to afterward return back to the patriarchal dominance that preceded it.

Further research on this topic would include inquires and questions around the role of conscious strategic essentialism in India, as well as possibly a more appropriate notion of Bordieu’s strategic behavior/action, which is not inherently conscious, but nevertheless productive in social relations. I would like to explore other ways Indian women (by utilizing goddesses) are challenging femininity without using essentialism. In addition, I would ask what are the limits encountered when one turns to religious figures for social movements, and how other non-Hindu religious movements utilize the woman’s body? Most striking, I find that the Priya’s Shakti graphic novel stands out among the case studies in that it is one of the only instances where the main character, and later goddess incarnate, was actually raped in the story. This challenges many national and religious narratives of women worthy of “needing saving” as necessarily sexually pure. Tamil Mother, Mother India, and other religious females in Hindu mythology are

“almost raped”, and thus keep their sexual purity intact, and remain as a worthy female to protect. What would have been the political, religious, and national implications if any of these women were actually raped? What Priya’s Shakti allows is for us to question this discontinuity

150 Erndl, Kathleen and Alf Hiltebeiteland. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. (Oxford University Press, 2002) 96-97 151 Ibid. 96-97

60 of newer more contemporary narratives of women who have been raped and their legitimacy and visibility in the public sphere, as well as their impact on social movements in India.

Despite critical and theoretical speculation, it seems that by engaging a sort of strategic essentialism (conscious or not), what links these Indian women’s bodies is far from a static identity, but rather an example of an assemblage of contesting control, power, and femininity. In this light, Indian women’s bodies in the Yoni Tantra, Tamil nationalism, the film Mother India, the “Abused Goddesses” campaign, and Priya’s Shakti do not hide or diminish their sexual qualities, but instead through reinforcing and re-appropriating their feminine shakti to catalyze change they can challenge the very religious structure their embodied symbolism came from.

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