Courting Krishna on the banks of the Ganges: Gender and power in a Hindu women's ritual tradition

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 23-32

  Pintchman, Tracy ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL TRADITION; HINDUISM; RELIGION; WOMENS STATUS;

ASIA; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; INDIA; SOUTH ASIA; WORLD;

EID: 15044347046     PISSN: 1089201X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-24-1-25     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. See, for example, Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," Feminist Review 30 (1988): 61-88.
2. See, for example, Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
3. For more on Kartik and Kartik puja, see Tracy Pintchman, "Karttik as a Vaisnava Mahotsav: Mythic Themes and the Ocean of Milk," Journal of Vaisnava Studies 7:2 (1999): 65-92;
4. and "The Month of Kartik and Women's Ritual Devotions to Krishna in Benares," The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin Flood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 327-342.
5. The traditional Hindu calendar consists of twelve lunar months. In Benares, as in most of North India, these months are measured from full moon to full moon. When measured against the solar calendar commonly used in the West, the first day of Kartik usually falls sometime in mid-October, although this varies from year to year. Normal discrepancies between lunar and solar calendars mean that dates calculated by the solar calendar will not consistently correspond year after year to particular dates calculated by the lunar calendar.
6. "Fasting" in Hinduism encompasses a wide variety of food abstention practices, from complete abstention from all food and drink to abstention from a single type of edible product.
7. In John S. Hawley's research on rasa-lila performances in Braj, the term rasa-lila is also used to indicate both the rasa-lila episode itself and the entire "play" (lila) of Krishna's life enacted in liturgical drama. See John S. Hawley, At Play With Krishna: Pilgrimage Dramas From Brindavan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981),
8. and Krishna, The Butter Thief (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1983), chaps. 6 and 7.
9. Each lunar month of the Hindu calendar is divided into two fortnights: the "dark" or "waning" fortnight, which constitutes the period of time from the end of a full moon to the end of the following new moon; and the "light" or "waxing" fortnight, which begins right after a new moon and concludes with a full moon. Each fortnight, in turn, consists of fifteen lunar days or tithis. A tithi is defined as the time that it takes for the moon to move twelve degrees around the earth. What is often very confusing to those unfamiliar with the Hindu calendar is that tithi is often translated as "day," but it is not the same length as a solar day. A solar day lasts from one sunrise to the next sunrise. But a tithi, which is based on the moon's movement, can last anywhere from twenty-two to twenty-six hours.
10. See, for example, Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Anne Grodzins Gold, Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
11. Nita Kumar, ed., Women as Subjects: South Asian Histories (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia;,1994);
12. Lila Abu-Lughod, "The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women," American Ethnologist 17:1 (February 1990): 41-55;
13. and Marie Griffith, God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
14. I am grateful to fellow scholar Steven Heim who, in a personal conversation, articulated to me this distinction between alternative and teleological discourses, both of which are often cited as "resistance". Raheja and Gold's Listen to the Heron's Words is an example of a work that, while commendable in numerous ways, seems to me to blur the line too much between these two types of discourse.
15. See, for example, Susan Starr Sered, Women as Ritual Expert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
16. and Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated By Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
17. also Leslie Northrup, Ritualizing Women (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1997).
18. Lina Gupta, "Hindu Women and Ritual Empowerment," in Women and Goddess Traditions in Antiquity and Today, ed. Karen King (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 85.
19. Usha Menon, "Does Feminism Have Universal Relevance? The Challenges Posed by Oriya Hindu Family Practices," Daedalus 129:4 (Fall 2000), 91.
20. Mary Elizabeth Hancock, Womanhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), 32.
21. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 171-80.
22. Susan Wadley, "Hindu Women's Family and Household Rites in a North Indian Village," in Unspoken Worlds: Women's Religious Lives in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Nancy A. Falk and Rita M. Gross (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), 109.
23. Anne Mackenzie Pearson, "Because It Gives Me Peace of Mind": Ritual Fasts in the Religious Lives of Hindu Women (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1996), 10.
24. Pearson, "Because It Gives Me Peace of Mind" 11.
25. Kathleen Erndl, "The Goddess and Women's Power: A Hindu Case Study," in Women and Goddess Traditions in Antiquity and Today, 27.
26. Erndl, "The Goddess and Women's Power," 30.
27. Erndl, "The Goddess and Women's Power," 19.
28. Anne Grodzins Gold, "From Demon Aunt to Gorgeous Bride: Women Portray Female Power in a North Indian Festival Cycle," in Invented Identities: The Interplay of Gender, Religion, and Politics in India, ed. Julia Leslie and Mary McGee (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 213.
29. Gold, "From Demon Aunt to Gorgeous Bride," 226.
30. Gold, "From Demon Aunt to Gorgeous Bride," 227.
31. Gupta, "Hindu Women and Ritual Empowerment," 85-86. Gupta describes these as Western vs. Hindu concepts of power, but I find this dichotomy misleading. Clearly Hindu culture and religion embrace notions of physical and socio-political power, and Western notions of inner or spiritual power are not that different from those expounded in traditional Hinduism. "Secular" vs. "religious" might be a more helpful way of contrasting these differing concepts of power, although that dichotomy, too, is somewhat misleading.
32. Marjorie Proctor-Smith, "'In the Line of the Female': Shakerism and Feminism," in Women's Leadership in Marginal Religions: Explorations Outside the Mainstream, ed. Catherine Wessinger (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 25-28.
33. Proctor-Smith, "'In the Line of the Female,'" 28.
34. Ramanujan, "Is there an Indian way of thinking? An informal essay," Contributions to Indian Sociology 23:1 (1989).
35. Ramanujan, "Is there an Indian way of thinking?", 47.
36. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, "Women, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview," in Women, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 39.
37. Sered SS, Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister, 205, 210.
38. See also Susan Seymour, Women, Family, and Child Care in India: A World in Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 101, 277-278.
39. Brenda E. Brasher, Godly Women: Fundamentalism and Female Power (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 13.
40. Brasher, Godly Women, 27, 8-9.
41. When I returned to Benares in the fall of 1998, I interviewed several women on videotape. These were, however, repeat interviews with a few highly knowledgeable participants, not new interviews. Hence I do not include those interviews here.
42. I have changed the names of all informants quoted in this essay to conceal their identities. Many thanks to Sunita Singh, my research associate, and one very knowledgeable puja participant, Kusumlata (not her real name), who worked together to generate pseudonyms that would approximate original names with respect to regional and age associations.
43. Seymour S, Women, Family, and Child Care in India, 279.
44. Sered SS, Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister, 197.
45. Elizabeth Collins, Pierced By Murugan's Lance: Ritual, Power, and Moral Redemption among Malaysian Hindus (DeKalb, III.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), 173.
46. Collins, Pierced By Murugan's Lance, 182, referring to Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 14;
47. Karen Kapadia, Siva and Her Sisters: Gender, Caste, and Class in Rural South India (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), 7.