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

Tracy Pintchman is a professor of religious studies at Loyola University Chicago and author of The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition and Guests at God's Wedding: Celebrating Kartik among the Women of Benares.

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.

List of Illustrations     xi
Contributors     xiii
Introduction   Tracy Pintchman     3
Engaging Domesticity
The Cat in the Courtyard: The Performance of Sanskrit and the Religious Experience of Women   Laurie L. Patton     19
Wandering from "Hills to Valleys" with the Goddess: Protection and Freedom in the Matamma Tradition of Andhra   Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger     35
Lovesick Gopi or Woman's Best Friend? The Mythic Sakhi and Ritual Friendships among Women in Benares   Tracy Pintchman     55
Words That Breach Walls: Women's Rituals in Rajasthan   Lindsey Harlan     65
Threshold Designs, Forehead Dots, and Menstruation Rituals: Exploring Time and Space in Tamil Kolams   Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajan     85
Beyond Domesticity
Domesticity and Difference/Women and Men: Religious Life in Medieval Tamilnadu   Leslie C. Orr     109
The Anatomy of Devotion: The Life and Poetry of Karaikkal Ammaiyar   Elaine Craddock     131
The Play of the Mother: Possession and Power in Hindu Women's Goddess Rituals   Kathleen M. Erndl     149
Does Tantric Ritual Empower Women? Renunciation and Domesticity among Female Bengali Tantrikas   June McDaniel     159
Performing Arts, Re-forming Rituals: Women and Social Change in SouthIndia   Vasudha Narayanan     177
Index     199