Abstract
The fierce Indic mother goddesses, typified by the image of Kali, have exercised an almost irresistible attraction on non-specialists, even as specialists have been more wary about succumbing to their power. Jordan’s endeavour is particularly challenging as she straddles both worlds. By her own account, she is trained in philosophy and religion, literature and public health (p. xxii), and it is this formidable, if somewhat disparate, array of disciplinary skills that she brings to her analysis of the divine. From this emerges a rather intimidating perspective (p. xxvi). In her own words:
My research has been guided by my conviction that religion is a ubiquitous natural bio-cultural phenomenon commensurate with music, art, dance, poetry, and even disease and warfare; as such, religions should be the subject of comparative analysis and intellectual criticism.
The book is organised into two parts, of which the first, titled ‘Origins’, includes three chapters. The second part, somewhat inappropriately designated as ‘Historiography’, runs from the Cankam age to the global village, through thirteen chapters.
In her introduction, Jordan reintroduces the notion of a primordial matriarchy. Virtually all the evidence she cites derives from resuscitations of nineteenth and mid-twentieth century scholarship; one notices a tendency to elide over the debates within feminist anthropology, debates that have queried grand notions of evolution or devolution (depending on one’s perspective), from a period of mother rule located in a hoary, almost unknown and virtually unknowable past. Debates about the project of ethnography are also ignored, to revive an uncomplicated picture of the grand mother.
The very title of the next chapter leads us into further anachronisms. It proclaims: ‘The Milieu of the Indus Culture: c. Third to First Millennia BCE’. As is obvious, this dating has little to do with the chronology of the Harappan civilisation, painstakingly established by archaeologists over several decades, and approximating to c. 2700–1800 BCE. This chapter abounds in sweeping generalisations such as the following (p. 15), made without any qualifications, caveats or caution:
Throughout Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures, the Earth Goddess and her creations were bonded by the idea that plants and animals were a manifestation of the Great Goddess herself.
We also learn, without further discussion that Korravai/Kali was ‘notoriously promiscuous’ (p. 39).
The fact that we have no means, beyond speculation, of arriving at any conclusion whatsoever about these religious traditions, and that the assumption that these were uniform, universal and the same over millennia is highly problematic, are not even mentioned, let alone engaged with. The Harappan civilisation itself surfaces more substantially almost thirty pages later. What is disappointing is that there are no references to the work and ideas of scholars such as Shubhangana Atre and Gregory Possehl, who engaged with the possibility of recovering evidence of the mother goddess and/or the symbolic centrality of water through a study of the archaeological evidence.
The following two chapters contain an assortment of information, pertaining to diverse religious traditions. The logic for inclusions, exclusions and organisation are by no means obvious: the reader is led through a breathless, rapid cross-cultural survey, which hardly illuminate the issue of origins. There are vivid details, drawn from an eclectic reading of both primary and secondary sources, but it is hard to find traces of a cohesive argument. What emerges is that the worship of the goddess has been widely prevalent, a somewhat self-evident conclusion, to say the least.
As noted earlier, the second part begins with the Cankam age. The author continues to subject the reader to a combination of details, excerpted from a range of readings, and sweeping generalisation. We learn, for instance, that, ‘The Tamil heroic age of the Cankam period is a transient time marking the shift from tribalism to feudalism and individual monarchic states’ (p. 151). Some of these generalisations tend to be baffling, as for instance the assertion that, ‘During the Tamil Cankam age in Tamil Nadu, the status of women was equivalent to that of Vedic women in north India’ (p. 158).
This is followed by a chapter on the early Aryans, purporting to run from the Vedic to the ‘Epico-Puranic’ eras. Amongst other things, the author works with a racialised understanding of the category of Aryan, without engaging with the debates around the question. This is followed by a summary of what is known about Vedic (and other) goddesses. The next chapter covers several centuries, focusing on traditions of renunciation and a perceived revival of the goddess tradition. It takes the reader through a brisk, but not particularly insightful survey of the Buddhism and Jainism, in their varied forms, including Tantric traditions that valorise the goddess.
More or less identical chronologies are traversed through the next two chapters, one focusing on the Sastric and Puranic traditions, and the second on what the author characterises as the Sakta counter culture. The latter flows into a discussion on yogic cults, which is juxtaposed with the arrival of Islam. The author’s understanding of Islam is rather problematic and results in formulations such as the following (p. 310):
Eight centuries later, Indians and Muslims would temporarily unite under the banner of Bharat Mata and the ruling meme of fierce buffalo-slayer Mahisasura-mardini to successfully drive the British out of India.
More useful is the detailed summary of various Tantric traditions. This leads into accounts of Tantric beliefs and practices culled from a variety of sources. Expectedly, some of the details are gory. Further along the way, the author attempts to track how female imagery, including that of Bharat Mata, were used in the nationalist movement, even as other forms of goddess worship, and worshippers who did not conform to such ideals, were marginalised. Jordan concludes by surveying the postcolonial scenario in the subcontinent and beyond with broad brush strokes.
In spite of these vast temporal and spatial dimensions that the author traverses, or perhaps because of them, we are left with somewhat ahistorical conclusions. To cite her (p. 427) once again:
Standing at the root of the human genetic tree, they are personifications of the fundamental structure of reality in vanishing vernacular cultures, and the last historical and symbolic remnants of the Great Goddess lineage that once dominated the world’s first civilizations.
At once encyclopaedic and erratic, Jordan’s work challenges the reader expecting narratives that are more complex. But for those looking for a fast track survey through the vast corpus of literature on the goddess tradition, the volume may prove useful if handled with care.