“The volume offers impactful contributions to discussions of religion, culture, history, literature, and gender. The artful translations and studies remain accessible to the lay audience for which the work is intended (though perhaps slightly challenging in the more academic sections), while also offering unique content that will appeal to specialists in the field.”
—Religion
“A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses is a welcome supplement to the crowded subfield of studies on Hindu goddesses. It is certain to adorn syllabi and reading lists of both undergraduate classes on Hinduism and more advanced seminars on female divinities. Its contributors deserve many garlands and accolades for being part of this fine work.”
—Reading Religion
“A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses is a resplendent work on lesser explored goddess traditions that, through these English translations, are rendered accessible to a larger audience. It is laudable for reading the diverse traditions in their own light. . . . a valuable source to students, scholars, and readers of the Indian goddess traditions, South Asian studies, Indology, and Hindu studies.”
—Asian Affairs
“An outstanding introduction to goddess traditions across South and Southeast Asia. Its careful translations of diverse sources bring the myths and practices of goddess traditions directly to the reader. There is no other work like it.”
—Richard S. Weiss, author of The Emergence of Modern Hinduism: Religion on the Margins of Colonialism
“The carefully researched essays in this volume help us gain new insights into local goddess traditions in South Asia. The primary sources translated into English for the first time greatly enhance the value of this book. I highly recommend it for use in undergraduate courses.”
—Gudrun Bühnemann, author of The Iconography of Hindu Tantric Deities
“Arguably, the forgetting of the Goddess began in the Occident. When the Protestants did away with ritual and form and invoked their personal god, the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit stepped into place sidelining the mystic mother responsible for the immaculate birth. George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss speaks of the visit of the Goddess, disguised as a poor woman with a child who begs to be ferried across the river. When she reaches the other side, she is transformed into light and beauty and heaps her benefactor with benedictions and is never sighted again over the subsequent long centuries.Doris Lessing also evokes the Goddess in Memoirs of a Survivor around a hundred and ten years after The Mill on the Floss in the sacked and ruined city of London, whose resources are commandeered by groups of young brigands. In the midst of the unending chaos and misdirection, the Goddess arrives heralding a possibility that she might provide direction out of the ruins of modernity. Coincidentally, at this time the Beatles song Let it Be must have resonated through the London air waves, evoking memories of McCartney’s dead mother and Mother Mary, the Goddess of the Catholics.Closer home in the 20th century, the difficult lives of real women, who continue to be treated as second class citizens all over the world despite being front-runners in times of peace and war had eschewed the possibility of the resurrection of the Goddess altogether. With God dead, and hegemonic power reaching tripping point, it is not surprising that Goddesses had been relegated to marginal spaces in mainstream imagination. The visitations of the Goddess too have been barely recorded. One blink while reading the novel, and the fleeting visions in The Mill on the Floss and Memoirs are missed by the reader altogether.A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses is a timely revelation that the Goddesses given short shrift by the mainstream have remained backstage and continue to be felicitated and adored by the communities inhabiting the specific geographies of not one but numerous Goddesses. The fine print uncovers tales of multiple Goddesses located in a time before the common era which have been told and retold. Temples in all these distinct geographies are sites of joyous extended celebrations that have shifted and converged and been revamped in more recent times.This fascinating book, encapsulating tales of the feminine divine from India and beyond offers us a garland of infrequently mentioned Goddesses from South Asia, twelve in number: with an entire set of Goddesses, a group of seven Matrikas or Mother Goddesses, who are part of the pantheon. In terms of geographical identification, the Matrikas spill outside of India stretching into Malaysia and beyond, with instances of several local and regional Goddesses whose stories overlap and merge into a larger pan-Indian identity. A map in the Introductory section, written by the editor Michael Slouber, allows us to see the actual geographical territory where each Goddess’s influence lies. Most of these Goddesses are part of living traditions. This is a garland of Goddesses connected by the strings of time and practice over the long centuries. Their presence has been overlooked in theological debate, in patriarchal societies, and in religious and philosophical discussions and academia due to practices that have shifted the axis towards Gods and Prophets in a patriarchal universe. Representing women’s lives and paralleling them, symbolizing the invisibility of women’s lives in the historic imagination, these Goddesses have continued to quietly form part of living traditions for a long time.Divided into three sections, Part One, ‘Demons and Battle’, highlights the demons who prey upon local populaces and desecrate the three worlds and can only be vanquished by the power of the Goddesses, the Gods who created the demons in the first place, being unequal to the task. We are introduced to Bhadrakali, Chamundi, Kaushika and the Matrikas in this section.Each of these Goddesses is a matriarch, presiding over a large community of men and women who draw their energy from her. We must recall that the first quarter of the 20th century saw the assertion of women’s spaces in the larger world and the arrival of secular Goddesses who claimed legal and material rights, including rights to suffrage. It has taken the determined and gritty research of fourteen scholars in the first quarter of the 21st century to identify and collate stories and narratives of sacred spaces in which Goddesses have continued to reside in a world that can prove the absence of the soul in the human body through the ultrasound and the MRI.Well documented and accompanied by ancient stories available in diachronic texts that are translated from Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Kashmiri into English, each of the four essays in the first section is accompanied by exquisite and stunning illustrations of the Goddesses by Laura Santi.The Goddess as demon hunter in the first section reveals the setting up of a cosmic drama in which evil males, shape shifters, corrupted by their power, ask for boons from willing Gods and then tyrannize all worlds and all manner of creatures. The Goddesses come into their own albeit powered by the Gods and decimate the demons with extraordinary energies. The Goddesses are sufficiently venerated, and their power is also celebrated in all the worlds, heavenly, human and demoniac.The second section titled ‘Miracles and Devotees’ draws our attention to the shifting identities of Goddesses over the long centuries in the ramifications caused by potentates and political blocks. The stories of Kalia Devi and Rashtrasena trace the rise of local Goddesses who take on pan-Indian identities and are subjected to changes in ritual practice when elite communities take over the hoary traditions practiced by the older tribes, from whom authority has been vested. The challenge to heteronormativity and hierarchy posited by the Goddess Bahucara is highlighted by the focus on her sustenance of communities of transgender and hijras all over India, and the various names that she is worshipped by. Laura Santi’s detailed black and white sketches of the Goddesses continue to absorb and delight.The last section ‘Tantras and Magic’ speaks to us of the much neglected and less studied Goddesses, namely, Rangda from Bali, Tvarita from Nepal, also worshipped in Maharashtra and Pune, Kameshwari from Arunachal Pradesh, Tibet, Myanmar and Bhutan and Kali from manuscripts found in North India and Kashmir. This section highlights the use of sacred chants and incredible mystic power and status that these Goddesses possess. Kali, for instance is visualized as ‘the perfect embodiment of absolute transcendent and immanent consciousness beyond which nothing would exist’. The book concludes by firmly re-rooting the Goddesses back into our imagination and consciousness, through painstakingly collating and presenting narratives and histories to corroborate this. By letting us know that the Goddess lives and reigns, the book allows us to explore the possibility of re-examining the priorities and values that have shaped our world into binaries and hierarchies. Perhaps this century will herald the return of the Goddess in order to flag off a nurturing and holistic matriarchy.”
—Ratna Raman, Professor, Department of English, Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi