Roles And Rituals Of Indian Women

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.

Anthology of essays on the role of women in social change in India - includes discrimination, social mobility, employment and family life, women's rights, religion, the ageing women, emigrants to the UK, etc. Bibliography pp. 253 to 258, references and statistical tables.

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.

Jamison examines the conceptual position of women in the culture of early India, specifically the Vedic and early epic periods (c. 1500-200 BC). Jamison begins by focusing on a single, apparently marginal female role, the activities of the "Sacrificer's Wife" in solemn ritual, and isolating the set of conceptual functions filled by the wife in that context. She then turns to a brief but emblematic myth from the middle Vedic period, "Manu's cups", in which a woman barely escapes being sacrificed with the consent of her husband. This story, Jamison shows, raises questions about women's ritual role and about hospitality obligations that the rest of the book sets out to answer. The central portion of the book is then given over to an extended consideration of women's roles in solemn Vedic ritual. Drawing on the vast corpus of textual material on solemn ritual, Jamison is able to delineate a sharply focused picture of women and their functional roles in this realm where abstract rituals are enacted and encoded. She goes on to apply these concepts to the "messy sprawl in everyday life", primarily as depicted in epic narrative (especially the Mahabharata) and regulated in the legal literature. Particular attention is given to the role of women in the areas of hospitality, gift exchange and marriage. Jamison's analysis not only illuminates ancient Indian attitudes toward women and gender, but forces a radical reassessment of the institutions under review.

With reference to Brahmapur, Orissa, India.

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.

An exploration of Hindu women’s folk religion focusing on goddess worship and women’s rituals.