Seven Saktis: An Ancient Force is Re-Awakening in Modern-Day South India explores the remarkable persistence and renewal of Sakti across the religious and cultural history of South Asia. Moving between the distant past and the contemporary world, the book traces recurring images, symbols, practices, and patterns of meaning through which ideas of sacred feminine power have been expressed, transformed, and brought to life anew.Beginning with prehistoric South Asian rock art and the visual world of the Indus Valley, the study follows a distinctive sequence of motifs and associations through astronomy and astrology, epic and Puranic traditions, medieval Bhakti and Tantric practices, and the sacred landscapes of Tamil goddess temples. Antelope imagery, stems and leaves, the boar and bullock, sound and smell, pillars and churning, ponds and pots are examined not as isolated symbols, but as elements within a larger history of religious imagination and cultural transformation.The book then turns to modern South India, where ancient patterns acquire striking new forms in goddess festivals, possession and dance, Tamil fiction, ideas of rebirth and rain, and the contemporary Valli Kummi movement centred on Lord Murugan’s courtship. Bringing together visual culture, mythology, ritual, literature, performance, and lived religion, Seven Saktis considers what happens when motifs rooted deep in South Asia’s past are rediscovered, reinterpreted, and embodied within new historical circumstances.At its heart, the book is an inquiry into continuity and renewal: how an ancient religious force can remain culturally resonant without remaining unchanged, and how the past can re-enter the present through image, story, landscape, ritual, and performance.
Brenda E.F. Beck
Brenda E. F. Beck is Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough and President of the Sophia Hilton Foundation of Canada. She received her D.Phil. in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. A leading specialist in the social anthropology, folklore, and oral traditions of Tamil Nadu, she has devoted more than five decades to the study of the Kongu region and its cultural heritage. She is the author of Peasant Society in Kongu: A Study of Right and Left Subcastes in South India; The Three Twins: The Telling of a South Indian Folk Epic; Hidden Paradigms: Comparing Epic Themes, Characters, and Plot Structures; and The Legend of Ponnivala; and has published extensively on Tamil folklore, mythology, and oral epic traditions.
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