IB World Religions 4.5.3. Gender and Religious Experience: Home, Modern India, the Diaspora and the Goddess Notes

4.5.3. Gender and Religious Experience: Home, Modern India, the Diaspora and the Goddess

Stridharma and the home

1. Classical Hindu texts describe a distinct stridharma, the duty proper to women, which locates a woman's religious life chiefly in the household rather than in public ritual or renunciation.
2. The household is not treated as a lesser setting. Hindu teaching holds the home to be a place of continuous offering, so a woman's cooking, cleaning and care of the shrine are presented as religious acts and not merely domestic ones.
3. A wife is called sahadharmini, the one who shares in dharma. Many household rites are held to be incomplete unless husband and wife perform them together, which gives married women a standing that unmarried and widowed women have not always shared.
4. The ideal of the pativrata, the wife devoted to her husband, carries this furthest by treating service to him as a spiritual discipline in its own right. Many Hindu women describe it as dignity and vocation, while many others, in India and abroad, criticise it as a religious frame for inequality.
5. Women are also the ordinary carriers of kula-dharma, the practice of a particular family. Which kuladevata (family deity) is honoured, which fast days are kept and which songs are sung usually passes from mother to daughter rather than through any text.
6. The texts themselves are not uniform on any of this. Passages praising women as the household's good fortune sit beside passages restricting their independence, and modern Hindus differ sharply over which strand is authoritative.

Vrats and personal devotion

1. A vrat is a vow, usually involving a fast, undertaken for a chosen purpose. Vrats are the most widespread form of Hindu women's religious practice and are often the part of the tradition women speak about with most ownership.
2. They are largely self-directed. A woman decides which vrat to keep, for how long and to which deity, and most vrats need no priest, no temple and no male participation.
3. Well known examples run through the year: Karva Chauth in the north, kept for a husband's long life, Vat Savitri, tied to the story of Savitri reclaiming her husband from death, and Varalakshmi Vratam in the south, addressed to Lakshmi.
4. Each vrat carries its own vrat katha, a story read or told while the fast is kept. The stories usually feature a woman whose steadiness secures a result, so the practice teaches through narrative rather than doctrine.
5. New vrats still appear. Devotion to Santoshi Ma spread rapidly across India after the 1975 film Jai Santoshi Maa, and her Friday fast became popular among women who had no earlier connection to the goddess.
6. Hindu women assess vrats very differently. Some describe them as an exercise of religious agency and shakti within their own control, while others, including many younger women in India and the diaspora, question fasts kept for a husband when no equivalent is asked of him.

Bhakti and women's voices

1. The bhakti movements that spread across India from the sixth century onwards offered women a route to religious standing that did not depend on birth, learning or male permission.
2. Their claim was that God responds to love rather than to qualification. If devotion is what counts, then a woman with no right to Vedic recitation is not disadvantaged, and several traditions state this explicitly.
3. Andal, a Tamil poet of about the ninth century, is the only woman among the twelve Alvar saints. Her Tiruppavai is still recited in Srivaishnava temples each December, and she is worshipped in her own shrines.
4. Akka Mahadevi, a twelfth century Virashaiva poet, left husband and clothing alike and wrote vachanas addressed to Shiva as her only husband. Lal Ded in fourteenth century Kashmir composed verses still quoted by Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims.
5. Mirabai, a sixteenth century Rajput noblewoman, is the best known. Her songs to Krishna as her husband are sung in temples, films and classical concerts, and her refusal of her marital family's authority is central to every version of her story.
6. The pattern has a cost written into it. These women almost all left marriage or refused it, so their example expanded what a woman could be religiously without changing what was expected of women who stayed.

The Goddess as role model

1. Hindus worship God in female form as Devi, and in Shaktism she is the supreme reality rather than a consort. Shakti, divine creative power, is understood as feminine, so power itself is gendered female in this framework.
2. The Devi Mahatmya, a text embedded in the Markandeya Purana, is the classic statement. In it the gods fail against the buffalo demon Mahishasura and pool their energies into Durga, who destroys him herself.
3. The goddesses present very different models. Lakshmi and Parvati are approached for prosperity and household wellbeing, Saraswati for learning, and Kali, garlanded with skulls, for a power that is deliberately outside domestic order.
4. Festival practice makes the point publicly. Navaratri and Durga Puja fill nine nights with goddess worship, and in kanya puja young girls are fed and honoured as living forms of the Devi.
5. Hindu women often cite these figures directly. Sita is invoked for endurance and loyalty, Draupadi for outrage at injustice, and Radha for a love that overrides social propriety, so scripture supplies several competing templates at once.
6. Whether goddess worship improves women's lives is disputed by Hindus themselves. Some argue it supplies a dignity that other traditions lack, while critics including Hindu feminist writers point out that regions with intense goddess devotion have not thereby produced better outcomes for women.

Modern India and the diaspora

1. Women's religious standing in India has shifted with education and public life. Women now study Sanskrit and the Vedas in numbers that would have been unthinkable a century ago, and some train formally as priests.
2. Organisations in Pune and elsewhere have trained women as purohitas, household priests who conduct weddings and other rites. Families who engage them report satisfaction, and some traditional priestly bodies dispute that women may officiate at all.
3. Temple entry has become a legal question as well as a religious one. Indian courts have heard cases on women's access to the Haji Ali dargah and the Shani Shingnapur shrine, and to the Sabarimala temple in Kerala.
4. Menstruation taboos are the sharpest live dispute. Many Hindu women continue to keep the traditional restrictions willingly, others describe them as exclusion dressed as purity, and both positions are argued in explicitly religious terms.
5. In the diaspora the mandir functions as a community centre as much as a place of worship, and women largely run that side of it. Bhajan groups, children's classes and annadana (food service) are typically organised and staffed by women.
6. Diaspora women also carry the work of transmission. Deciding which festivals a family keeps in Leicester, Toronto or Durban, and explaining them to children schooled in another idiom, falls mostly to mothers and grandmothers.

Female gurus and authority

1. Hindu priesthood is hereditary and largely male, but guru authority works differently. A guru is recognised because followers judge that realisation is present, and that test is not restricted by birth or sex.
2. That opening has produced a long line of women teachers with substantial followings. Devotees usually address them as Ma (mother), which frames spiritual authority in maternal rather than sacerdotal terms.
3. Sarada Devi, the wife of Sri Ramakrishna, was recognised as a teacher in her own right after his death and is worshipped by the Ramakrishna movement as the Holy Mother.
4. Anandamayi Ma (1896 to 1982) attracted a wide following in north India, including political figures, on the strength of reported continuous absorption rather than any formal training or lineage.
5. Mata Amritanandamayi, known as Amma, gives darshan by embracing each visitor in person, and her organisation runs hospitals, universities and disaster relief. Other contemporary women teachers include Gurumayi Chidvilasananda of Siddha Yoga and Anandmurti Gurumaa.
6. Female gurus are not exempt from the criticism aimed at male ones. Questions about money, succession and the treatment of followers are raised about these organisations too, and Hindus differ over how much personal authority any guru should hold.