Lakṣmī

In Bengal, Lakṣmī bratakathās begin to appear from the middle of the eighteenth century and proliferate in a standardized format from the next century. This representation of the goddess, as a domestic deity, is a mark of the times—especially the debut of the ‘new woman’—as the Lakṣmī lore had long been in circulation. The moral centre of these bratakathās is the good wife of caste-patriarchal construction who is assumed to be a monolithic ideal for all gathered under the term Hindu. The by-product of the nascent discourse of nationalism in its search for the autonomous space of the subject body is better understanding of the importance of the domestic sphere, and the Hindu wife. However, this understanding clouds the fact that the goddess had several independent cults. This construction cannot be understood in exclusion to the popularity of Rādhā whose representation presents almost a counter-narrative to the golden conjugality of Lakṣmī.

Manasā

Manasā worship is placed within a larger map of ophiolatry in India but unlike the cults of male deities associated with snakes, Manasā declines. In the printed bratakathā of the early twentieth century, her liminal qualities are presented through the metaphor of dance prescribed as a taboo. The dancing goddess is traced to the Bengali maṅgalakābyas of Manasā from the fifteenth century that attempt to rein in a laukika goddess with śāstrik norms. The negative representation of the goddess and her decline are found motivated in terms of her origin outside the caste-Hindu pantheon such as old tribal beliefs and Mahāyāna Buddhism, the subaltern caste location of her primary votives, her specialized knowledge and refusal to submit to patriarchal–heterosexual marital norms. Manasā’s malignancy in hegemonic culture emanates from her refusal to conform to Brahmanical femininity. The male scripting of the maṅgalakābyas constructs a good woman—Behulā—to counter her.

Invoking the Goddesses

Mutating Goddesses begins by examining the paradox of goddess worship in patriarchal societies. Hindu goddesses have been dominantly understood from a śāstrik perspective—deriving from Sanskrit scriptures authorized by the male Brahman—that exiles women. But there are religious practices under Hinduism that are governed by neither the Brahman nor Sanskrit. These laukika practices are held in a hierarchical relation to the śāstrik. Chapter 1 focuses from within that vibrant realm, the kathās/narratives appended to the propitiation of the goddesses known as bratas which allow direct participation of the women and the Dalit castes unlike the Brahmanical rituals. Briefly the Brahmannization of Bengal is traced and the Bengal caste system is sketched, since caste and gender are held together in the dominant construction and reception of goddesses. This Chapter concludes by showing how caste and gender define genres to categorize the construction and reception of goddesses and votives.

Conclusion

The Conclusion addressees the question of the relevance of this study in the contemporary context: Do women still observe bratas? Are these kathās still in circulation? Does the arrival of the novel and later cinema and television reduce the mode of storytelling of the bratakathā to solemn but specious nonsense? Ironically, modern technology has also aided the propagation of caste-patriarchal stereotypes of women and generated new bratas. The laukika bratakathās of Manasā, Caṇḍī, Ṣaṣṭhī and Lakṣmī can also be used as a site from which the totalizing assumptions of caste-patriarchal societies may be challenged.

Ṣaṣṭhī

Cultural memory and living practice of Bengal representṢaṣṭhī as the patron deity of childbirth and children’s welfare. But she is marginalized in the elite public domain despite the sanctity of motherhood within patriarchy. A search for Ṣaṣṭhī, through the regional Upa-purāṇas, maṅgalakābyas, proverbs, popular verses, and brathakathās reveals several Ṣaṣṭhīs: a goddess of the groves, a group of rain goddesses, a group of foster mothers, an old woman, and a goddess of the lying-in-chamber after delivery. Mothers who do not fit the norm of the caste-patriarchal nourishing mothers, as signalled by Ṣaṣṭhī, are often re-presented in Brahmanical imagination as ghoulish devourers of children. Kshīrer Putul (1896) by Abanindranath Tagore further mutates Ṣaṣṭhī for the modern colonized metropolis. This is significant in the context of modern Bengal’s re-forming of tradition marked by the dissociation between the metropolitan and the rural, the elite and the plebian cultures, fed by differences of class, caste, and gender.

Caṇḍī

The ubiquitous goddesses dotting Bengal are referred to by the epithet mā/mother and commonly trailed by the suffix Caṇḍī and usually calcified as the Brahmanical wife of Śiva. The Caṇḍī maṅgalakābyas by Brahmanical male poets from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries helped propagate the śāstrik framing of the laukika goddesses. The narratives start appearing as the Afghan sultanate of Bengal is incorporated into the Mughal Empire, proliferate in the seventeenth century as the Mughal conquest is consolidated, and stagnate by the end of the eighteenth century as the empire begins to disintegrate and the British Empire start rising. The modern canonized criticism of the Caṇḍīmaṅgalas argues that the genre represents the agenda of shaping a Hindu community in the context of Muslim rule and Caitanya’s critique of Brahmanical norms. But an ideological silence shrouds the detrimental implications of this patronizing project on customary caste and gender practices and rights.

Mapping the Terrain

The politic construction of archives is central to the argument of this book. Chapter 2 traces the complex relation between the śāstrik vratas, which are the formalistic ‘Hindu’ rituals sanctioned by the scriptures composed in Sanskrit and performed with the aid of the Brahman priests, and the laukika bratas which are the customary rituals performed by men and/or women without the aid of Brahman priests and the Sanskrit texts. It reveals that the number of śāstrik vratas continues to increase through the ages garnished by the substratum of non-Brahmanical laukika rituals with attention to the notions of vrātya (the liminal other). This chapter identifies and analyses the ideological impulse propelling this commerce in terms of the pre-modern Brahmanical politics of the Purāṇas and the modern excavation of the laukika realm to define the nation in colonial context with implications for the divine feminine.