Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

The arguments put forth in these articles focus on variations of a single question: What do feminist approaches bring to the study of South Asian religions?¹ The short answer is that they bring a depth, sophistication, and several challenges to the field of feminist interpretations of religions. In each of these papers, the authors raise quintessentially feminist queries: What power do wives have? How do goddesses establish their authority? Do all women experience themselves as possessing agency? At the same time, each author explicitly or implicitly rejects definitions of feminist analysis that focus primarily on what Karen Pechilis calls “patterns of oppression and empowerment” (13). These articles explore the rich ground of otherworldly elements and the experiences of women and goddesses. Taken together, these papers make several key contributions to the ongoing study of women, of gender, and of South Asian religions. In her introduction to these articles, Pechilis offers us Jonathan Smith’s distinction between religions as presentation and representation. Pechilis is correct in identifying these articles as explorations in representation, insofar “as they explore perspectives that offer diverse possibilities for validating women as participants in religion” (8). However, they also insist that religion, when encountered in the stories of the women and goddesses discussed by these authors, is real, in the spirit of Smith’s characterization of an understanding of religion that is based on presence.

First, these papers draw attention to the ways in which South Asian religious texts and practices invert socially accepted categories for particular ends. In the conclusion to her article, Pechilis writes, “We can see that Cēkkilār calls the reader’s attention to social categories and assumptions that society imposes on the subjectivities of people within those categories” (30). Despite the relatively limited scope of authority available to wives in classical Tamil culture, the text “insists that she can achieve the highest state of spirituality and that she can communicate that state through her poetry” (30). Through the use of suprareal elements, Pechilis continues, the text foregrounds not only the religious significance of the text itself but also “the distance between the story’s and the society’s view of women” (30). Cēkkilār, a male court minister of the twelfth century, is the author attributed with the composition of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār’s hagiography, which is unique insofar as her poetry is autobiographical. Pechilis [End Page 60] deftly shows how Cēkkilār offers “an implied critique of a social world that cannot accept her as a religious exemplar” (22). She analyzes the categories of place, body, and identity as the means by which the text emphasizes the social dimension of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār’s life, and as the vehicles through which Cēkkilār subtly criticizes the societal limits placed on the woman that Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār was (Punitavati).

In giving up her wealthy community, a world where she was surrounded by “industrious and loving kin,” and in giving up her beautiful, high-caste, chaste, and “pure” body, the author of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār’s story demonstrates that Punitavati could not remain spiritually powerful within the role of a wife. Her plea to God: “I request that you remove this sack of flesh that bears my beauty only for the sake of the man who has spoken thus [her husband who has left her]; instead, give to me, your servant, the form of the ghouls who venerate your sacred feet” (20). Through her husband’s ungracious response to his wife’s religious powers (he leaves her), the author shows the incommensurability of sainthood with the state of being a wife, although Pechilis shows that she is later emotionally reconciled with her husband—but not socially. Further, Pechilis suggests that we recognize Punitavati’s bodily transformation into a ghoul “as an emblem of the author’s awareness of the divergence between the real nature of these people (as both individuals and as representatives of categories of people) and society’s view” (28). It is difficult to think of a more illustrative...