Water and Womanhood: Religious Meanings of Rivers in Maharashtra

By Anne Feldhaus

Book Overview

Rivers in India are commonly associated with certain worldly religious values: wealth, beauty, long life, good health, food, love, and the birth of children. However, these "domestic" values have been relatively neglected by Indologists, who have tended to view India and Hinduism through the prism of poverty, misery, asceticism, and themes of purity or pollution. Following recent scholarship by arguing that the earthly pursuits are equally vital to an understanding of popular Hinduism, Feldhaus examines the role of these ideals in the religious meanings of rivers in Maharashtra, a large region of western India. Drawing both on written religious texts and on a wide range of oral, iconographic, and ritual materials gathered in the course of field work in India, she shows that these values, which are usually associated with women or represented by goddesses, are an important motif in popular religious practices and oral traditions associated with the rivers of Maharashtra, and she presents the many different ways in which rivers are imagined, enshrined, worshipped, and feared.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 019509283X
• ISBN13: 9780195092837
• Release Date: May 1995
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Valuable Direction

The subject of rivers in India may sound a little old hat. But this book really brings something new and valuable.Unfortunately I read it over a year ago, so I don't remember every detail. But it was a book I was quite impressed with and lent to friends who were writing related papers at the time, so when I saw that no one else had written a review, I thought that I'd better.To begin with, the author makes the simple point that rivers aren't primarily about purity/pollution, a typical dichotomy through which their religious significance is understood, but also about fertility/lack. That's new but not really a big surprise. But she goes on to talk about the Seven Sisters, goddesses who are present in certain water bodies, and who have the power to give a child and also to take one away. She goes into them in a bit of detail, based on her interviews. They're often depicted as seven stones, or simply strokes of paint on stones near the water. Some people are loathe to talk about them, but she found a number of stories of rituals to the Sisters inducing them to give a child, or allow a sick child to live, or protect the children of a town from drowning.If you're a bumbling student of Hinduism, as I've been, and you need all the help you can get finding information on what to write intelligent papers about, this book is not only highly interesting, but I believe it also marches into a subject area which is somewhat unexplored...of the really minimal symbols and representations of some small goddesses. I wish I could say more, but I'm not omniscient and I'm also a bit out of the field nowadays.And for people who aren't struggling to write papers, it's just a very fine and readable book.