Women's Lives, Women's Rituals in the Hindu Tradition

Women's Lives, Women's Rituals in the Hindu Tradition
Title Women's Lives, Women's Rituals in the Hindu Tradition PDF eBook
Author Tracy Pintchman
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 225
Release 2007-03-29
Genre Religion
ISBN 0198039344

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In this book, Tracy Pintchman has assembled ten leading scholars of Hinduism to explore the complex relationship between Hindu women's rituals and their lives beyond ritual. The book focuses particularly on the relationship of women's ritual practices to domesticity, exposing and exploring the nuances, complexities, and limits of this relationship. In many cultural and historical contexts, including contemporary India, women's everyday lives tend to revolve heavily around domestic and interpersonal concerns, especially care for children, the home, husbands, and other relatives. Hence, women's religiosity also tends to emphasize the domestic realm and the relationships most central to women. But women's religious concerns certainly extend beyond domesticity. Furthermore, even the domestic religious activities that Hindu women perform may not merely replicate or affirm traditionally formulated domestic ideals but may function strategically to reconfigure, reinterpret, criticize, or even reject such ideals. This volume takes a fresh look at issues of the relationship between Hindu women's ritual practices and normative domesticity. In so doing, it emphasizes female innovation and agency in constituting and transforming both ritual and the domestic realm and calls attention to the limitations of normative domesticity as a category relevant to many forms of Hindu women's religious practice.

Roles and Rituals for Hindu Women

Roles and Rituals for Hindu Women
Title Roles and Rituals for Hindu Women PDF eBook
Author Julia Leslie
Publisher Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
Pages 298
Release 1992
Genre Hindu women
ISBN 9788120810365

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The considerable interest currently being expressed in women and religion has thrown down an important challenge; the need to see women not merely as the passive victims of an oppressive ideology but also perhaps primarily as the active agents of their own positive constructs. This book therefore aims to fill a notable gap in the literature. Twelve contributors study the role of women in Hindu religion by examining textual studies of the part played by women in a variety of religion rituals, both past and present, by exploring the socio-religious context of their various communites; and by using specialist material to draw on cross-cultural conclusions.

Women in the Hindu Tradition

Women in the Hindu Tradition
Title Women in the Hindu Tradition PDF eBook
Author Mandakranta Bose
Publisher Routledge
Pages 237
Release 2010-01-19
Genre Literary Collections
ISBN 1135192588

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This book accounts for the origin and evolution of the nature and roles of women within the Hindu belief system. It explains how the idea of the goddess has been derived from Hindu philosophical ideas and texts of codes of conduct and how particular models of conduct for mortal women have been created. Hindu religious culture correlates philosophical speculation and social imperatives to situate femininity on a continuum from divine to mortal existence. This creates in the Hindu consciousness multiple - often contradictory - images of women, both as wielders and subjects of authority. The conception and evolution of the major Hindu goddesses, placed against the judgments passed by texts of Hindu sacred law on women’s nature and duties, illuminate the Hindu discourse on gender, the complexity of which is compounded by the distinctive spirituality of female ascetic poets. Drawing on a wide range of Sanskrit texts, the author explains how the idea of the goddess has been derived from Hindu philosophical ideas and also from the social roles of women as reflected in, and prescribed by, texts of codes of conduct. She examines the idea of female divinity which gave rise to models of conduct for mortal women. Instead of a one-way order of ideological derivation, the author argues that there is constant traffic between both ways the notional and the actual feminine. This book brings together for the first time a wide range of material and offers fresh stimulating interpretations of women in the Hindu Tradition.

Making Virtuous Daughters and Wives

Making Virtuous Daughters and Wives
Title Making Virtuous Daughters and Wives PDF eBook
Author June McDaniel
Publisher State University of New York Press
Pages 145
Release 2012-02-01
Genre Religion
ISBN 0791487652

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Exploring the folk religion of India and the role of girls and women within it, author June McDaniel focuses on the brata (vrata) ritual in which moral lessons are taught and goddesses are revealed. Bratas are performed to gain such goals as a healthy family, a good husband, and a happy life. They are also performed so that the performers (bratinis) develop such virtues as devotion, humility, and compassion.This book presents data from fieldwork, along with brata stories, songs, poems, and ritual activities. It discusses Bengali folk religion, offers an example of ritual worship in folk Hinduism, and surveys a variety of bratas. The author analyzes the similarities and differences among these rituals in low-caste village life and in high-caste Hindu tradition, and notes that the development of these rituals involves a form of continuing divine revelation with women as the primary transmitters. Bratas act to maintain traditional Hindu values, but also emphasize the power of women, whose virtues can save their husbands from hell worlds and their families from disasters.

The High-caste Hindu Woman

The High-caste Hindu Woman
Title The High-caste Hindu Woman PDF eBook
Author Ramabai Sarasvati
Publisher
Pages 172
Release 1887
Genre Hindu women
ISBN

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Woman and Goddess in Hinduism

Woman and Goddess in Hinduism
Title Woman and Goddess in Hinduism PDF eBook
Author T. Pintchman
Publisher Springer
Pages 242
Release 2011-08-29
Genre Social Science
ISBN 0230119921

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Offering multilayered explorations of Hindu understandings of the Feminine, both human and divine, this book emphasizes theological and activist methods and aims over historical, anthropological, and literary ones.

Feeding a Thousand Souls

Feeding a Thousand Souls
Title Feeding a Thousand Souls PDF eBook
Author Vijaya Nagarajan
Publisher
Pages 337
Release 2019
Genre Design
ISBN 0195170822

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Every day millions of Tamil women in southeast India wake up before dawn to create a kolam, an ephemeral ritual design made with rice flour, on the thresholds of homes, businesses and temples. This thousand-year-old ritual welcomes and honors Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and alertness, and Bhudevi, the goddess of the earth. Created by hand with great skill, artistry, and mathematical precision, the kolam disappears in a few hours, borne away by passing footsteps and hungry insects. This is the first comprehensive study of the kolam in the English language. It examines its significance in historical, mathematical, ecological, anthropological, and literary contexts. The culmination of Vijaya Nagarajan's many years of research and writing on this exacting ritual practice, Feeding a Thousand Souls celebrates the experiences, thoughts, and voices of the Tamil women who keep this tradition alive.