South Asian religious studies has sometimes favored a canonized pantheon of gods, often at the exclusion of village practices that include the worship of nature and fertility goddesses. In this new vast study, Sree Padma, a historian of South Indian and primarily Andhra religious and visual culture, has focused on Dravidian manifestations of goddess worship and their transformations over millennia. Her work is particularly strong in addressing the artificial divide between textually endorsed Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jaina religious practices and village (or popular) religious praxis. The two have generally intermingled; thus this book necessarily treats the overlapping spheres of local, often agrarian, worship and more dominant, “mainstream Hindu” practices. Padma’s main project is to contextualize grāmadevatā (village goddess) traditions and to trace these goddesses’ transformations. The reviewer is wedded to flattening stereotypes (even calls Kali a fertility goddess) and here again For the naked goddess section, Padma traces the worship of Dravidian fertility goddesses such as Ellamma and Mātaṅgī through terracotta carvings, ivory sealings, and stone sculptures dating from the fourth century BCE through the seventh century CE in Andhra Pradesh. Narrative sources include seventh-century CE Tamil literature, Buddhist texts, Telugu folk songs, and temple inscriptions dating up to the thirteenth century CE. Will have to look up the actual book. https://h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=41241
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 06:14:50 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015