Savitri, the Unshackled Shakti : Goddess Identification, Violence and the Limits of Cultural Subversion of Widows in Varanasi
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00856401.2014.884987
ISSN1479-0270
Autores Tópico(s)Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health
ResumoAbstractIn Hindu cosmology and life-worlds, women are described as being Shaktis, personifications of cosmic feminine power or shakti. However, the shakti of Hindu widows of all ages, because it is no longer directed into reproduction, is feared as being rampant, likely to incur disgrace, polluting and dangerous. Hence, widows, deemed culpable of having failed in their primary wifely duty of protecting and preserving the health and lives of their husbands, are often ill-treated in an attempt to weaken and disarm the reservoir of power that they continue to embody. This article focuses on a case study of a young widow, Savitri, who strove to support her children and maintain her self-regard in the face of frequently-violent hostility from her neighbours due to her creative yet subversive circumvention of the religio-cultural prescriptions and proscriptions her widow status demanded. The article explores social and psychological processes through which identification with the great Hindu goddess, Mahadevi, might enable marginalised widows to sustain the self-experience of being imbued with power—shakti—like their goddess is, albeit within the constraints of the wider community.Keywords: WidowsshaktipowerviolencesexualitygenderHindu goddessesmarginalisationVaranasi Notes1 Patrick Olivelle (trans. and ed.), Dharmasutras: The Law Codes of Apastamba, Gautama, Baudhayana, and Vasistha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 264.2 Diana Eck, Banaras: City of Light (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 4.3 Moksha is a religious tenet which literally means liberation from samsara, the eternal cycle of rebirth, but this is not its only arena of understanding. Moksha is also a cultural symbol which finds its more pragmatic expression as people's creative responses to the difficulties of living. People desire to be relieved of suffering or deprivation and to gratify desires for acquiring better health and material conditions, as a more immediate modality of salvation—albeit one that is more short-term.4 Jonathan Parry, Death in Banares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).5 Martha Alter Chen, ‘Introduction’, in Martha Alter Chen (ed.), Widows in India: Social Neglect and Public Action (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1998), p. 19.6 Ibid.7 Ibid.8 My fieldwork was conducted over seventeen months during 1999–2000, with subsequent work in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.9 Olivelle, Dharmasutras, p. 264.10 See also Sarah Lamb, White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender and Body in North India (Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2000).11 A ‘Banarasi’ is a person who claims to be indigenous to Varanasi, i.e. a ‘son of the soil’. The Thakurs are a baronial land-owning caste.12 See also Lawrence Cohen, No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things (Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 226–32; and Sheleyah A. Courtney, ‘Creating a Living Goddess: Status, Sacrality and Urban Contests of Desire’, in The Australian Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 17, no. 2 (2006), pp. 127–46.13 Lawrence A. Babb, ‘Destiny and Responsibility: Karma in Popular Hinduism’, in Charles F. Keyes and E. Valentine Daniel (eds), Karma: An Anthropological Enquiry (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 163–81; Sheryl B. Daniel, ‘The Tool Box Approach of the Tamil to the Issues of Moral Responsibility and Human Destiny’, in Charles F. Keyes and E. Valentine Daniel (eds), Karma: An Anthropological Enquiry (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 27–62; Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, ‘Introduction’, in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (ed.), Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983), pp. 3–38; McKim Marriott and Ronald Inden, ‘Caste Systems’, in Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Vol. 3 (Chicago, IL: 15th ed., 1974), pp. 982–91; and Ursula Sharma, ‘Theodicy and the Doctrine of Karma’, in Man, Vol. 8, no. 3 (1973), pp. 347–64.14 Ruth Freed and Stanley Freed, Ghosts: Life and Death in North India, Vol. 72 (Seattle, WA: Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 1993), p. 16.15 Ibid., p. 103.16 See Shelayah A. Courtney, ‘Shaping Shakti: The Formation of Feminine Power through the Life Cycle of Liminal Hindu Women of Varanasi’, unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of Sydney, 2002.17 Kakar discusses the case studies of two women from the slums of Delhi who emphatically stressed their love for their extremely abusive husbands. Kakar analyses the phenomenon of such enduring love in terms of the iconic representation of a strong cultural image, that of the ‘ardhanarishwara—“the Lord that is half woman”—of the God Shiva…(which) represents the wished-for oneness of the divine couple rather than the two-ness of mortal spouses’. This iconic image, he believes, infuses the cultural ideal of marriage in the notion of the pair, culturally envisaged as the jodi—’a single two-person entity’. See Sudhir Kakar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality (New Delhi: Viking, Penguin Books, 1996), p. 72.18 The abandonment of widows at Manikarnika ghat figures prominently in histories and cultural imaginaries and many widows reside in the vicinity.19 See Sheleyah A. Courtney, ‘Hindu Women's Kajali Tīj Song Performances as Rituals of Rebellion: Intersecting Poetics of Suffering, Sorcery and Fertility in the Context of Marriage in Varanasi’, forthcoming. See also Courtney, ‘Shaping Shakti’.20 The Hindi word randi (prostitute) has come to mean ‘widow’. 21 For further discussions of the cultural configuration of poverty, weakness and strength of mind in Varanasi, see Cohen, No Aging in India, pp. 226–34; and Sheleyah A. Courtney, ‘Attraction, Amusement, and Anxiety: Aging Women in Varanasi’, in Social Analysis, Vol. 52, no. 3 (Winter 2008), pp. 1–24.22 Madhu Kishwar has described how Hindu women belonging to the lower castes resist violence and sexual exploitation through their own sexual continence. See Madhu Kishwar, ‘Women, Sex and Marriage: Restraint as Feminine Strategy’, in Manushi, Issue 99 (Mar.–April 1997), pp. 23–36.23 Courtney, ‘Attraction, Amusement, and Anxiety’, pp. 1–24.24 At the time, I felt the implication was that I might also be assaulted. Moreover, because I was a foreigner, this probably would not have been overlooked by the authorities, who would most probably have blamed Savitri and, by association, her community for the fracas, rather than the higher-status perpetrators. I discussed this with Savitri later and this was also her view.
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