Vicissitudes of the Goddess: Reconstructions Of The Gramadevata In India's Religious Traditions

382 Pages·2013·8.392 MB·English

by  Sree Padma

Vicissitudes of the Goddess
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VICISSITUDES

OF THE
GODDESS

Reconstructions of the
Gramadevata in India’s
Religious Traditions
z

SREE PADMA

1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sree Padma, 1956–
Vicissitudes of the Goddess : reconstructions of the Gramadevata in India’s religious
traditions / Sree Padma.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–19–932503–0 (pbk : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–19–932502–3 (cloth: alk.
paper) 1. Hindu goddesses—India—Andhra Pradesh. 2. Folk religion—India—Andhra
Pradesh—History. I. Title.
BL1216.4.A54S74 2013
294.5´2114095484—dc23
2013004847

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For my dear mother, Vuyyuru Annapurnamma,
and in loving memory of my father, Vuyyuru Venkatrao.
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Contents

Acknowledgments i x
Introduction 1
1. Goddess Explained—Perspectives from the West 9
2. Contextualizing the Fertility Goddess and the Cult of G ramadevatas 46
3. Fertility Symbols of Goddesses: Historical Renderings and
Contemporary Practices 71
4. Profi les of Anthropomorphic Goddesses in Myth, Ritual, and History 132
5. Bala Perantalu:  Auspicious Virgin Mothers 197
6. Perantalu : Auspicious Wives 216
7. Deifying Victimized Women: Sacrifi ces and Murders 246
Conclusion 262
Notes 273
Bibliography 3 09
Index 323
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Acknowledgments

it was almost twenty years ago that this project was fi rst conceived. A year of
fi eld work in 1993 with a couple of scholarly presentations was what I brought
with me as I came to participate in the Study of Women and Religion Program
at Harvard Divinity School during 1994-1995. During that time, I resided at
the Center for the Study of World Religions as a Senior Fellow. Thanks to lively
conversations that year, I decided to study the discrepancy between how the
divine (goddess) and mundane (women) worlds were articulated in India and
specifi cally in Andhra Pradesh. While this issue continued to be relevant to
my research and teaching, my preoccupation with other research projects over
the years made me greatly expand my research focus to incorporate the exami-
nation of the infl uences of goddess religion on many other forms of Indic
religious culture. This necessitated the investigation of a range of sources,
including contemporary ritual practices, oral traditions, literature, art, inscrip-
tions, and other archaeological materials.
Some of the preliminary research for this project began while I was at
Andhra University as a research associate and was teaching graduate stu-
dents in the department of history and archaeology. I owe my original
inspiration for research to my professors, including the late K. Sundaram,
C. Somasundararao, A. Kamalavasini, K. Krishnakumari, and B. Mastanaiah,
and to the dedicated staff of the main library at Andhra University.
My fi eldwork for this book took place in two phases. While the fi rst phase
of my intensive fi eld trips to temples, ritual sites, archives, libraries, and
archaeology museums had taken place in 1993 and 1994, the second phase
spread over a number of years into 2012, when I made irregular visits to India
from the United States. During these fi eld trips I was assisted by a number of
people, to whom I am grateful. Some of these are priests of the Brahmin and
non-Brahmin castes who served in g ramadevata and popular goddess temples
and who enthusiastically narrated to me the details of rituals and mythologies
germane to their goddesses. Most inspirational of all was the late Dr. Kundurti