The Authority of Female Speech in Indian Goddess TraditionsDevi and Womansplaining

Anway Mukhopadhyay

The Authority of Female Speech in Indian Goddess Traditions

Anway Mukhopadhyay

The Authority of Female Speech in Indian Goddess

TraditionsDevi and Womansplaining

ISBN 978-3-030-52454-8 ISBN 978-3-030-52455-5 (eBook)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52455-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Anway MukhopadhyayDepartment of Humanities and Social SciencesIndian Institute of Technology KharagpurKharagpur, West Bengal, India

v

I would like to thank a lot of people for the way they enthused me through-out my work on this book. I thank my parents and sister, my colleagues and students and the various Shakta scholars, friends and acquaintances who, in diverse ways, contributed to this project indirectly. I especially thank the various monks and devotees of the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission who have provided me with various kinds of neces-sary information on Shaktism in Bengal and have also facilitated my under-standing of the persistence of the matribhava, the maternal feeling, of Ma Sarada through the male monks of the Math and Mission. In this context, special mention must be made of Swami Pararupanandaji, Matrimandir, Jayrambati, West Bengal, and Swami Alokanandaji, Ramakrishna Advaita Ashrama, Varanasi. In the same vein, I also thank the Matajis of the Sri Sarada Math and Ramakrishna Sarada Mission, Dakshineswar, Kolkata, and the Sri Sarada Math, Varanasi. I heartily thank the ashramites of the Ma Anandamayee Kanyapeeth, Varanasi, including Jayadi, Geetadi and Guneetadi, for the help they have extended to me, time and again. Thanks are also due to the librarians of the University of Burdwan. Sri Utkarsh Chaubey must be thanked for the way he supplied me with texts on Shaktism and information on Indian spirituality in general. Professor Vanashree, Professor Emerita at the Department of English, Banaras Hindu University, has always been a maternal figure for me and a great support and source of encouragement. I would also like to acknowledge the consistent support and affection I received from Professor B. L. Tripathi, Professor K.  M. Pandey, Professor Anandprabha Barat, Professor

Acknowledgements

vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Angshuman Khanna, Professor Lata Dubey, Professor Banibrata Mahanta, Dr Madhvi Lata and Dr Vishwanath Pandey at Banaras Hindu University, Professor Nandini Bhattacharya and Dr Arpita Chattaraj Mukhopadhyay at the University of Burdwan, Professor Suchorita Chattopadhyay and Dr Debashree Dattaray at Jadavpur University and Professor Ashok Kumar Mohapatra at Sambalpur University. In my present workplace, that is, the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, I keep receiving academic stimulation from all my colleagues. I thank them heartily. However, special mention must be made of the following people: Professor Narayan Chandra Nayak, Professor Manas Kumar Mandal, Professor Suhita Chopra Chatterjee, Professor Chhanda Chakraborti, Professor Anjali Gera Roy, Professor Priyadarshi Patnaik, Professor Pulak Mishra, Dr Jayashree Chakraborty, Dr Jenia Mukherjee, Dr Anwesha Aditya, Dr Archana Patnaik, Dr Anuradha Choudry, Dr Somdatta Bhattacharya, Dr Dripta Piplai (Mondal) and Dr Bornini Lahiri. I am especially indebted to Professor Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, Professor at the Department of CSE, IIT Kharagpur, and the former Director of the institute, for the way he shared with me valuable information about spiritual sadhana in the traditions of Kriya Yoga and gave me his beautiful book on his Guru Ma, Mata Sharbani. I can never thank enough Dr Shreya Matilal, faculty member of the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law, IIT Kharagpur, and Dr Annapurna Matilal, faculty member at the Midnapore College (Autonomous), for the warm support I keep receiving from them, as a member of their extended family. I regularly have intellectually stimulating discussions on the Indic religious traditions with both Mr and Mrs Matilal. In the same vein, I would also thank Dr Tapas Kumar Bandyopadhyay, Dr Uday Shankar and Dr Arindam Basu of the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law; Dr Somnath Ghoshal of the Centre for Rural Development, IIT Kharagpur; Dr Sujoy Kumar Kar of the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, IIT Kharagpur; and Professor Somnath Bharadwaj of the Department of Physics, IIT Kharagpur. I also thank Dr Soumyatanu Mukherjee, previously my colleague at IIT Kharagpur and presently a Lecturer in Finance at the Southampton Business School, UK, and his wife, Shreya. I would also like to thank the research scholars who are working under my supervision  – Bijetri Datta Majumder, Ishrat Ara Khatun and Sudipta Chakraborty. Thanks are due to Neha Chatterjee as well, who was working with me as a research scholar before joining a

vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

college as an Assistant Professor. Special thanks go to Dr Arghya Dipta Kar, who pursued his doctoral research under the supervision of Professor Madhu Khanna, for the stimulating discussions on Shaktism and tantra that I have had with him and the interesting works on goddess cultures he presented me with. In fact, it is Dr Kar who presented me with the book Durgamangal, in which the beautiful piece “Parvatipurana” is included. I also thank Shouvik Narayan Hore and Viraj Shukla, for the help they offered to me, regarding the insertion of diacritical marks in this book. However, unfortunately, I could not avail myself of this help due to the COVID-19 crisis in India, which led to a nationwide lockdown, thus mak-ing it impossible for Shouvik and me to sit together and work on the dia-critical marks. This is what has led to the disturbing absence of diacritical marks from this book. Hence, for the absence of the diacritical marks, it is the coronavirus which is to be blamed.

Finally, I must thank Amy Invernizzi, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, and the peer reviewers for their help and suggestions. I cannot but thank Dr Patricia Dold heartily for her immensely helpful suggestions and appre-ciative comments. In the same vein, I must thank Vinoth Kuppan for pro-viding me with necessary guidelines about the technicalities of the submission of the final manuscript. In fact, Amy and Vinoth have both been very co-operative throughout this project, and I cannot thank them enough.

ix

1 Introduction: What the Goddess Said—What Her Speech Means to Us Today 1

2 Authoritative Female Speech and the Indic Goddess Traditions: An Overview 13

3 Divine and Divine-Human Speeches of the Devi: The Speech Contexts and the Dynamics of Authority in the Devi Gitas 41

4 Authority of Female Speech, Efficacy of Female Guidance: The Goddess and Women in Tantric Contexts 69

5 Two “Devis”, Two “Gurus” Speaking with Authority: Sarada Devi and Anandamayi Ma 93

6 Modifying Masculinity: Tantric Culture, Female Speech and Reframed Masculinities 123

7 The Beauty of Womansplaining: The Authoritative Speech of Devi in India, in the World 151

Index 157

contents

xi

AU Annapurna UpanishadBDP, MK Brihaddharma Purana, Madhya KhandaBDP, PK Brihaddharma Purana, Purva KhandaBM Bangmayi MaBM Bhu Bhumika in Bangmayi MaDB The Srimad Devibhagawatam (Devibhagavata Purana)DG The Devi Gita (from the Devibhagavata)DU Devi UpanishadKCT Kulachudamani TantraKU Kena UpanishadKuP, PB Kurma Puranam, Purva BhagaLT Laksmi TantraMBUP Shri Mahabhagavata UpapuranaMRH Mother Reveals HerselfNTT Nigama Tattvasara TantramPN Pithanirnayah (Mahapithanirupanam)RV Rig VedaSB Srimad BhagavatamSDV Sankara-Dig-VijayaSP The Siva-puranaSRU Sarasvati Rahasya UpanishadSSC Shri Shri ChandiSSMK Shri Shri Mayer KathaTR Tripura RahasyaYT, PK Yogini Tantra, Prathama Khanda

AbbreviAtions

1© The Author(s) 2020A. Mukhopadhyay, The Authority of Female Speech in Indian Goddess Traditions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52455-5_1

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: What the Goddess Said—What Her Speech Means to Us Today

In the contemporary discussions on mansplaining (Solnit 2014a, b, Chap. 1; Pot’Vin-Gorman 2019, 54–55; Turner 2017), what is foregrounded is the arrogance of male speech that sees listening as the responsibility of the dominated and speech as the privilege of the dominant (Solnit 2014a, Chap. 1, subheading 1). As Rebecca Solnit points out, “Being told that, categorically, he knows what he’s talking about and she doesn’t, however minor a part of any given conversation, perpetuates the ugliness of this world and holds back its light” (Solnit 2014a, Chap. 1, subheading 1). What mansplaining denies systematically is “equiphony” (a la Isabel Santa Cruz [Amoros 2004, 344]), the right of women to speak and to be heard as much as men are entitled to. What is at stake here is the attitudinal dimension of the patriarchally sanctioned socio-cultural interactions. Within the circuits of such interactions, women have to constantly fight for establishing the legitimacy of their speeches: “Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being” (Solnit 2014b, Chap. 1, subheading 2). Mansplaining, one may argue, is a cross- culturally evident phenomenon. It is not confined to specific geo-cultural cartogra-phies. The Brahmin man mansplains to his wife in the most orthodox social scenarios of India, just as the white male boss of a (white/non- white) female employee does in his office, located in a Western metropolis. It is quite difficult to find out the “innocent” man, the humble listener to

2

the female speech who does not conflate the binary of speaking/listening with that of male/female.

However, while patriarchy and androcentrism are undeniably global in scope, discourses alternative or counterpointing to them are also present, throughout the planet, even though the global systems of patriarchy label them as obscure local cultures lacking global outreach. Hence, it is high time we reinstalled these “local”, “obscure” alternative traditions at the heart of the global culture today. Since we inhabit a more dynamic planet than our predecessors did, it is possible now to build bridges between discourses, imaginative “heterotopias” (Hetherington 1997, viii), multi-ple alterities, which would have remained unconnected in a less compre-hensively networked globe. It is within this context that I situate the issue of the authoritative female speeches textualized in the Indic goddess tradi-tions. In these traditions, the difference between the goddess and the woman is often blurred, as the concept of reincarnation brings the god-dess and her human avatar – the fleshly woman – close to each other. The authority of female speech is underpinned in the various versions of the Devi Gita, a sub-genre of Shakta scriptural literature presenting the god-dess  – either in her transcendental form or in her human avatar  – as authoritatively speaking to humans and gods on cosmic secrets and the way to moksha/liberation. Similarly, in various tantric texts, we come across humble male listeners who respectfully receive the enlightening speeches of the Goddess.

Of course, in Indic scriptures, there is ample evidence of mansplaining: men impose their ideas on women; men assert their prejudiced ideas about women; men deny the intellectual potential of women; men deny women access to certain spiritual and intellectual resources  – in text after text, within the Sanskritic tradition. Hence, it is not that I have, in this book, set out to project a binaristic opposition between the mansplaining West and a womansplaining India. I have rather focused on the alternative tradi-tions of womansplaining in Indic goddess cultures which are not just alter-native to the Western traditions of mansplaining but also alternative to the Indian modes of mansplaining, both historic and contemporary. However, rather than continuously juxtaposing the traditions of womansplaining in India against those of mansplaining, I have tried to tease out those strands of womansplaining within the Indic goddess cultures which do not simply present a gynocentric reversal of mansplaining but rather necessitate a thorough re-imagining of gender in the present scenario. While Caroline Turner points out that both mansplaining and womansplaining might

A. MUKHOPADHYAY

3

sound disturbing to their recipients (of the opposite gender) (Turner 2017), Nell Stevens argues that womansplaining is different from mans-plaining by virtue of being characterized by the sharing of wisdom with friendliness and love (Stevens 2018). I have tried to trace the ethos of womansplaining underlined by Stevens, from the perspective of an (implicit) “ethics of sexual difference” (Irigaray 2004, 7–19). Irigaray (2004, 8) questions: “Has a worldwide erosion of the gains won in wom-en’s struggles occurred because of the failure to lay foundations different from those on which the world of men is constructed?” I would like to argue that the paradigm of womansplaining as presented by Stevens can be seen as an attempt at laying foundations of communication different from those that encourage mansplaining. Moreover, Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference motivates Britt-Marie Schiller to figure forth the “incom-plete masculine” who knows that he is not “omnipotent” and that “the other is not at his disposal” (Schiller 2011, 132). A central objective of this book is to explore how the instances of authoritative female speech in the Indian goddess cultures necessitate a reframing of masculinity by impel-ling the male audience of authoritative female speech to understand and appreciate the significance of turning into the “incomplete masculine”.

By drawing on the kind of work initiated by Miranda Shaw and Loriliai Biernacki and improvising on their approaches (Shaw 1995, 3–19; Biernacki 2007, 3–27), the present book focuses on the possible hidden connections between the textualized female speeches that exude the aura of authority and the non-textualized female presences, the embodied female speeches turned into silence by textual, cultural and political era-sures. It is true that we can by no means establish an easy correlation between goddess traditions and empowered women. However, I would argue that while we cannot establish the presence of powerful women from the presence of empowered female speech in a goddess text, we can-not totally erase that presence as a possibility, either. Women’s history, in most of the cases, has been a history of shadowy traces, rather than con-crete memorializations. Arguing that all textual representations of power-ful female figures and voices are just figments of male imagination and have no connection with flesh-and-blood women will lead to lending omnipotence, at least theoretically, to male intelligence and male discourse (Shaw 1995, 12–14, 19; Biernacki 2007, 6–10, 20–27). However, in my work, rather than establishing any easy equation between goddesses and empowered women, I have followed two trajectories – (a) adapting the New Historicist paradigm (Brannigan1998, 6–9) to my requirements, I

1 INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE GODDESS SAID—WHAT HER SPEECH MEANS…

4

have critically engaged with the lack of a robust archival presence of flesh- and- blood women in the goddess traditions and tried to present some surmises (without claiming their absolute factuality) about the presence of empowered women behind or around the empowered female speech tex-tualized in the Indic goddess cultures, and (b) following the political thrust of the Cultural Materialist method (Brannigan 1998, 9–11), I have argued for a recontextualization and reinterpretation of these textualized female speeches in the present scenario of India and the world at large.

In Indic traditions, texts are always open; they have been subjected to multiple modifications, endless pluralization, in terms of adaptations, reshapings and ideological reframing. Most of the texts are anonymous, or assigned a mythical authorship. We don’t have a concrete history of the hands or mouths (Indian culture has been, largely, an oral culture) that worked behind the formation of these texts. In the case of the history of women in India, the impossibility of historiographical systematicity caused by the slippery fluidity of the texts at hand is doubly conspicuous. This book does not make any decisive statement regarding the “presence” of “real” women behind the coruscating, authoritative speeches entextual-ized in the Indic goddess cultures. However, I do present surmises in that direction, without claiming absolute authenticity for this position, and delineate the ways in which these speeches could be recognized today as specimens of womansplaining rather than examples of male ventriloquism instrumentalizing the figures of the Goddess. In short, I interrogate the position which would like to see the female speech as nothing but male speech using the Goddess to underpin male authority in the name of the Female (for an example of this position, see Adriana Cavarero’s reading of the Parmenidean goddess [Cavarero1995, 38–39]). Nevertheless, I have also remained acutely aware of the dangers of overlooking the instances of male ventriloquizing through the Goddess’s speech. That is why I have sought to appropriate those aspects of the Goddess’s speech which can be used to facilitate gender justice and, hence, ought to be isolated from the conservative ideological frames which strive to domesticate her female speech. However, rather than looking for the male voices lurking behind the textualized female speeches, I have tried to examine what we can do with those speeches today, what the Goddess’s speech may mean to us today – and how, in Gadamerian terms (Lawn 2006, 66–68; Sherma 2011, 5–6), our horizon and the Goddess’s horizon may be dialogized.

In this book, I deal with the two most significant dimensions of the speech act and speech context within the frame of gender, as far as the

A. MUKHOPADHYAY

5

goddess-centred scriptures and religious performances in India (including especially the homology of the Goddess and the female guru) are con-cerned: the authority of the female speech, in religious, philosophical and social terms, and the receptivity of the male listener who receives the reli-gious “womansplaining” with humility and attention. Drawing on these phenomena, I seek to present a detailed descriptive and analytical account of the authoritative female speech within the Indian goddess traditions and the socio-cultural implications thereof. While most of the works on Shaktism and tantra tend to focus on the issue of femininity in the tantric context, I dwell on the modification of the discourses and practices of masculinity, necessitated by the texts/practices foregrounding authorita-tive female speech. More specifically, I focus on the intricate ways in which the female speeches in these texts or religious performances underpin an alternative – receptive – mode of masculinity, underlining the fallacies of a domineering mode of masculinity. Tantric narratives written by Bengali male authors, for example, often evince this transmuted masculinity that is awed by the aura of the divine feminine and hence forced to deviate from the hetero-patriarchal celebrations of the “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 2005, 77–78). It is exciting to look at the figurations of the “incomplete masculine” in these texts.

This book, unlike many other ethnographic and text-based studies of the divine feminine in Indic traditions, centres round the potential for altering the prevalent gender ideologies and epistemologies in India which often indulge in a systemic gender injustice. I hint at the possible ways of actualizing the potential for inaugurating gender justice that might be excavated from the Indic goddess traditions, with reference to the authori-tative female voices in these traditions. In this context, my venture squares with the projects of the eminent Tantra scholar Madhu Khanna who, through her institution Tantra Foundation and her published works, seeks to bridge the gap, in the Indic patriarchal structures, between the authori-tative presence of the Goddess(es) in the religious/spiritual space and the disempowered women in the larger societal space (Mukhopadhyay 2017, 157–160). Anyone located in India who is researching the cultural archives of Shaktism and/or tantra would uphold the ethical concern about the disjuncture between the powerful goddesses and the disempowered women in Indian society. Hence, as a man located in India and working on these issues, I cannot but develop a kind of cultural materialist approach which seeks to roll the texts of the Indic goddess cultures into the vortex of diachronicity – to move the text into the present scenario, to analyse its

1 INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE GODDESS SAID—WHAT HER SPEECH MEANS…

6

significance today, rather than focusing exclusively on its historical con-text. This is not just a re-contextualization of the texts in today’s India. They may be useful for today’s world as much as for today’s India, not only because India is not outside the “world” but also because patriarchy, as a network of interlinked oppressive systems, is global in scope.

For similar reasons, I draw on the method of dialexis on which Rita Sherma (2011, 2) insists. According to her (2011, 2–3), an intersubjective hermeneutics would always resist the objectification of the Other and would rather stage a dialogue with the Other-as-Subject. As she (2011, 2) states, “Dialexis … refers to a form of intellectual engagement “across styles” that takes as its starting point an adequate accounting of contextu-alized signification.” I improvise on this model of dialexis by setting in motion an intersubjective hermeneutics in terms of gender, by listening to the female voices from other times which are entextualized in the goddess cultures of India, cultures to which I also have a personal affiliation. Sherma (2011, 1) underlines the necessity for “thealogical reflection and constructive engagement”. I would contextualize womansplaining within the domain of this sort of Indic thealogy that has been foregrounded, in different − direct or indirect – ways by Lata Mani, Madhu Khanna, Neela Bhattacharya Saxena and Rita Sherma (Mukhopadhyay 2017, 157–165; Khanna 2018, 173–199; Saxena 2011, 61–75; Sherma 2011, 1–16). Sherma (2011, 2) speaks of the capacity of such projects for providing “alternative insights on the multiple possible modes of envisioning female empowerment and the divine feminine in feminist theory discourse” and the “relevance of Hindu models of the feminine to cross-cultural philo-sophical, theological, ontological, or sociological interchange”. My proj-ect aims at finding and (re-)archiving resources for constructing such a broad-spectrum cross-cultural platform to renegotiate goddess cultures and feminism, with particular reference to empowered female speech. I take as a methodological point of departure Sherma’s focus on the “thea-logical and activist methods” (2011, 1). I wish to explore what the Indic goddesses have in store for the womansplaining activists of today.

Why am I, a “man”, speaking on the authoritative female speeches in the Indic goddess cultures? Is it not an act of “mansplaining” itself? Am I mansplaining – paradoxically – about womansplaining? I think the issue about mansplaining and womansplaining is not located merely in an androcentrism/gynocentrism debate. Womansplaining is not to be con-fused with an insistence on absolute male silence; it is rather related to the demand for male receptivity to female speech. In fact, my book is as much

A. MUKHOPADHYAY

7

an exercise in listening to female speech (that of the goddess, female guru or enlightened woman) as an exercise in speaking/writing. In fact, I don’t see my speech here as mansplaining at all. Rather, I see the present project as the presentation of a chronicle of my listening to the female speeches – textualized voices of the divine feminine, whispers of women from what Ashis Nandy (2003, 1–2) calls “nonhistoricised pasts”, layered and tex-tured female speeches coming from women living around me, women who lived in recent or distant pasts, women whose voices come down to me through a complex chain of textual and flesh-and-blood male and female listeners. In fact, I would like to claim that I do exactly what the mansplainer would not do: I write what I receive from the female speeches that I listen to. Even though I do speak of interpreting or analysing them, this interpretation/analysis is not the academic mansplaining that male academics are encouraged to do. Of course, my mode of listening is not the only valid mode of listening. Listening, as well as speech, is plural in nature, but one does need to build up an “ethic of listening” (Parks 2019, xiv–xv), listening with love, listening in the “Open” (a la Rilke [Muller 2010, 32]) rather than listening from the windows of over-arching theo-ries about female speech or female silence.

Besides, working from outside the West, we come across many exciting, alternative configurations of gender. In fact, the present book seeks to foreground an alternative tradition of womansplaining to show that, in the non-Western goddess traditions of womansplaining, the male and the female are often semi-permeable categories. The Shakta sadhaka, in many secret traditions, is required to assume or “attain” femininity to proximate the Divine Feminine (Gupta 2009, 87). In the Hindu modes of sadhana, there is often a focus on becoming one with the god one worships. In the case of the goddess traditions, the sadhaka has to – and does – become, more often than not, one with the Goddess. Hence, my listening to the female speeches that I chronicle here allows me to come out of a male self- consciousness and makes my “speech” a textualization of the history of my listening to the female voices. However, I don’t claim to assume the authority to represent the female voices. Listening and representing are two different activities. Nevertheless, if a man believes that gender studies, Goddess spirituality (Mukhopadhyay 2017, xii) or feminism is “women’s business” and hence men should not deal with it, his “silence”, in that case, becomes worse than “mansplaining”. Unlike the West, where the goddess movement has been seen as an offshoot of the feminist struggles, in India, the goddess cultures involve both men and women in complex

1 INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE GODDESS SAID—WHAT HER SPEECH MEANS…

8

webs of interactions and relationality (Mukhopadhyay 2017, xii–xiii; Pechilis 2011, 100–104; Shaw 1995, 12). I seek to understand whether there is a way to actualize the potential for gender egalitarianism in these traditions which Indian men have overlooked but can embrace now.

As a researcher utilizing, context-specifically, the methods of both “autoethnography” and “observant participation” (Chang 2016, 9–10, 15–26; Brewer 2010, 60–61), as one speaking from within the Indic tradi-tions that are explored in this book, I have sought to underline the con-tinuum of the Indic goddess traditions, the continuum that exists thanks to, rather than in spite of, the multiple slippages, alterations, deletions and additions which have occurred within that tradition. I move between eth-nography and textual/discourse analysis, as far as the methodology is con-cerned, and try to explore the slippages, as well as continuities, between the domain of textualization (the formation of the texts of Shaktism) and the domain of performativity (sadhana/spiritual practice) within the fold of Shaktism. As Rita Sherma (2011, 4) notes, even the researchers work-ing from within a tradition often try to maintain a distance between their academic selves and the tradition which they study (to which they belong too). I have deliberately tried to avoid this kind of artificial self- distantiation necessitated by the “hermeneutics of alterity” (Sherma 2011, 3–4) and to be objective without pretending much to distance myself from the tradi-tion I study.

Finally, my book seeks to clear the way for a constructive interface between the planetary feminisms (Morgan 1984, 1–37) of contemporary times and the traditions of authoritative female speech in the Indic god-dess cultures, while simultaneously underscoring the necessity for the re- interpretation and feminist appropriation of the texts of Shaktism in India today, where violence against women and over-patriarchal attitudes on the part of men trying to promote hypermasculinity have become a persistent trouble. The gift that can be offered by this alternative tradition of “wom-ansplaining” in a largely “mansplaining” globe needs to be accepted and utilized by the mainstream Indian society now, and it may also be extended to the planetary discourses of gender justice which struggle to ground gender equity in the principle of the re-epistemologization and expansion of the concept of “rights”.

This book has seven chapters, including the present one that serves as the introductory chapter. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the diverse manifestations of authoritative female speech in the Indic goddess tradi-tions. Chapter 3 deals with the divine and divine-human voices of Devi in

A. MUKHOPADHYAY

9

the Shakta Gitas and explores the speech contexts and the implications of female authority in these texts. Chapter 4 focuses on the dynamics of authoritative female speech in tantric texts and contexts and underlines the figure of the humble male listener of Devi’s speech. Chapter 5 discusses the direct homologization of the embodied woman and the Goddess in the case of the female guru in Hinduism who is often seen as the Devi herself in a human form or Devi’s incarnation, with specific reference to Ma Sarada and Ma Anandamayi, great female gurus from twentieth- century Bengal. Chapter 6 underscores the ways in which the authority of female speech, in the tantric cultures, often leads to the reframing and radical modification of the ideas and images of masculinity, by ushering in a receptive masculinity, a mode of masculinity manifested in the humble, receptive male listeners of female speeches. In Chap. 7, which is the con-cluding chapter, I focus on the diverse ways in which the goddess tradi-tions of India can be yoked to the agendas of planetary feminisms and discuss how Devi’s womansplaining can foreground a culture of speaking and listening without violence and aggressivity.

RefeRences

Amoros, Celia. 2004. Feminism and the Three Enlightenment Ideals. In Another World Is Possible: Popular Alternatives to Globalization at the World Social Forum, ed. William F. Fisher and Thomas Ponniah, 338–345. London/New York: Zed Books.

Biernacki, Loriliai. 2007. Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra. New York: Oxford University Press.

Brannigan, John. 1998. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. Houndmills and London: Macmillan. Transitions Series. General ed., Julian Wolfreys.

Brewer, John D. 2010. Ethnography. Jaipur: Rawat.Cavarero, Adriana. 1995. In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient

Philosophy. Trans. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Aine O’Healy. New York: Routledge.

Chang, Heewon. 2016. Autoethnography as Method. London/New York: Routledge.

Connell, R.W. 2005. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity.Gupta, Suman. 2009. Debipith Kamakhya. Kolkata: Dip Prakashan.Hetherington, Kevin. 1997. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social

Ordering. London/New York: Routledge.Irigaray, Luce. 2004. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and

Gillian C. Gill. London/New York: Continuum.

1 INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE GODDESS SAID—WHAT HER SPEECH MEANS…