The Hindus (67 page)

Such a goddess, first under the name of Chandika (“the Fierce”
^hp
), later often called Durga (“Hard to Get [To]”), bursts onto the Sanskrit scene full grown, like Athene from the head of Zeus, in a complex myth that includes a hymn of a thousand names. Many of the names allude to entire mythological episodes that must have grown onto the goddess, like barnacles on a great ship, gradually for centuries. The founding text is “The Glorification of the Goddess” (
Devimahatmya
), a long poem probably interpolated into the
Markandeya Purana
(which also tells a number of other stories about powerful women and goddesses) between the fifth and seventh centuries of the Common Era. It is clear from the complexity of “The Glorification of the Goddess” that it must be a compilation of many earlier texts about the goddess, either from other, lost Sanskrit texts or from lost or never preserved vernacular sources, in Magadhi or Tamil, perhaps. Some of the stories may have come from villages or tribal cultures where the goddess had been worshiped for centuries; early in her history she may have been associated with the periphery of society, “tribal or low-caste peoples who worshiped her in wild places.”
⁴⁸
Yet by the time of the
Markandeya Purana
, goddesses were worshiped in both cities and villages, by people all along the economic spectrum.

“Glorification of the Goddess” is the Devi’s “crossover” text, from unknown rituals and local traditions to a pan-Indian Sanskrit text. Why does the
Markandeya Purana
pay attention to goddesses at this moment? Why now? For one thing, it was a time when devotional texts of all sorts flourished, and since people worshiped Chandika, she too needed to have texts. What may have started out as a local sect began to spread under royal patronage inspired by bhakti. Centuries earlier the Kushanas had put goddesses on their coins; now the stories behind the coins began to circulate too as more valuable narrative currency. At some moment the critical mass of Devi worship forced the Brahmin custodians of Sanskrit narratives to acknowledge it. The Purana goes out of its way to tell us that merchants and kings worshiped her; in the outer frame of the Purana, a sage tells the story of the Goddess of Great Illusion (Mahamaya) to a king who has lost his kingdom and a Vaishya who has lost his wealth and family; at the end of the story the goddess grants each of them what he asks for: The king gets his kingdom (and the downfall of his enemies), while the Vaishya gets not wealth, which he no longer covets, but the knowledge of what he is and what he has (and the downfall of his worldly addictions). Clearly the Vaishya is the man this text greatly prefers.

This is the story it tells about Chandika:

The final moment in this story is a scene particularly beloved of artists, who often depict Chandika’s lion chomping on the buffalo’s head while the goddess disposes of the head of the anthropomorphic antigod, who comes out not from the buffalo’s mouth but from his neck after he has been beheaded. The goddess rides on a lion, a Vedic animal; in later centuries, when lions become rare in North India, Chandika and other goddesses are often depicted riding on tigers or sometimes just great big pussycats, as depicted by painters and sculptors who have evidently never seen a tiger, let alone a lion. The myth has been convincingly linked to a ritual that has been documented in many parts of India to this day, the ritual sacrifice of a buffalo, often associated with a sect of Draupadi.
⁵⁰
Goats too and other animals are frequently sacrificed to the goddess Kali; the animal is decapitated, and its blood is offered to her to drink. In some variants of this ritual, a man, dressed either as the buffalo or as a woman, bites the neck and drinks the blood of the sacrificial animal (usually a lamb or a goat).

We can see patriarchal Sanskritic incursions into this early textual version of the myth, the Brahmin filter as always extracting a toll as the story crossed the linguistic border. Chandika’s power in this text comes not from within herself but from the energy (
tejas
) of the male gods, as the light of the moon comes from the sun. She is created by re-memberment (the inverse of dismemberments such as that of the Man in “Poem of the Primeval Man”), a not uncommon motif in the ancient texts. Manu, for instance, says (7.3-7) that the first king was created by combining “lasting elements” or “particles” from eight gods.
^hq

A. K. Ramanujan once said that you can divide the many goddesses of India into the goddesses of the tooth and the goddesses of the breast.
⁵¹
The goddesses of the breast are wives, more or less subservient to husbands, but they do not usually give birth to children (though they sometimes adopt children). Devi is the Great Mother, but we hear little or nothing about her mythological children;
we
are her children. The tooth goddesses (not at all like tooth fairies) are unmarried, fierce, often out of control. They are killers. They too are generally
^hr
barren of children, celibate mothers; indeed some of them wear necklaces made of the heads of children and low-slung belts made of children’s hands; with habits like these, it’s a very good thing that they
don’t
have children of their own. Chandika, whom “Glorification of the Goddess” also calls Ambika (“Little Mother”),
^‡
is the paradigmatic tooth goddess in India. She is also both the paradigmatic
shakti
(“power”) and the paradigmatic possessor of
shakti
.

Shakti
is a creative power that generally takes the place of the power to have children; men give birth without women in many myths, while the goddesses, for all their
shakti
, are cursed to be barren.
Shakti
is generally something that a male god, not a goddess, has and that the goddess
is
. One Upanishad depicts Shiva as a magician who produces the world through his
shakti
.
⁵²
Eventually the Puranas used the word to designate the power/wife of any god, often an abstract quantity (a feminine noun in Sanskrit) incarnate as an anthropomorphic goddess. Many female deities, as well as abstract nouns, came to be personified and “wedded” to great gods as their
shaktis
, such as Lakshmi or Shri (“Prosperity”), the wife of Vishnu. Unlike the independent Vedic goddesses Speech and Night, who stand alone, these consort goddesses appear in Sanskrit texts almost exclusively as wives. Shiva, who inherits much of Indra’s mythology when Indra fades from the pantheon, also inherits Indra’s wife Shachi (a name related to
shakti
), and so, in many texts, Shiva’s wife—whether she be Parvati or the goddess Kali or Sati—is the most important
shakti
of all, the role model for the other goddesses who become known as the wives (and
shaktis
) of other gods. In one text, Shiva emits his own
shakti
, who then becomes the Goddess that the gods beg to kill the buffalo.
⁵³

But the Chandika of “Glorification of the Goddess” is definitively
un
married, independent, a tooth goddess. Shiva is not her husband but merely the messenger that she sends to challenge other rebellious antigods, in the battle that follows immediately after Mahisha’s death, nor does she become the wife of Mahisha. Therefore she is not the
shakti
of any particular god, and her
shaktis
, whatever their origins, ultimately belong to no one but herself; they are the
shaktis
of a
shakti
. In the next battle, Chandika emits her own
shakti
(which howls like a hundred jackals) and absorbs all the gods’
shaktis
into her breasts.
⁵⁴
In its intertextual context, therefore, “Glorification of the Goddess” stands out as a feminist moment framed by earlier and later texts that deny the
shakti
her independence.

The pious hope of goddess feminists, and others, that the worship of goddesses is Good for Women is dashed by observations of India, where the power recognized in goddesses certainly does not necessarily encourage men to grant to women—or women to take from men—political or economic powers. Indeed we can see the logic in the fact that it often works the other way around (the more powerful the goddess, the less power for real women), however much we may deplore it: If women are made of
shakti
—like Chandika, who is her own
shakti
, rather than like Parvati, who is Shiva’s
shakti
—and men can only get it by controlling women, women pose a constant threat to men. The conclusion that many men seem to have drawn from this is that women should be locked up and silenced. One defiance of this scenario is the widespread phenomenon of women who are possessed by fierce goddesses, thereby either acquiring or becoming
shaktis
and being empowered to say and do many things otherwise forbidden.
⁵⁵
But in taking the mythology of goddesses as a social charter, the goddess feminists are batting on a sticky wicca.

One goddess who has played an important role in the lives of real women is Sati, the wife of Shiva, who is occasionally implicated in justifications for the custom of widows immolating themselves on their husbands’ pyres, called suttee.

The
Mahabharata
versions of the story of Daksha’s sacrifice do not mention Daksha’s daughter Sati at all, though sometimes they mention Shiva’s other wife, Parvati (who is not related to Daksha in any way, nor does she herself go to the sacrifice, or die, though her wounded amour propre spurs Shiva to break into the sacrifice). At that stage the conflict, about Rudra’s non-Vedic status, is just between Daksha and Shiva. Several early Puranas too tell the story of Daksha and Rudra/Shiva without mentioning any wife of Shiva’s, or mention her just in passing.
⁵⁶
Even in versions that name Sati as the daughter of Daksha, the conflict is still primarily between Vaishnava Brahmins and more heterodox Shaivas. This story is narrated in several of the early Puranas:

Sati is not a sati (a woman who commits suttee). Her husband is not dead; indeed, by definition, he can never die. But she dies, usually by fire, and those two textual facts are sometimes taken up as the basis for suttee in later Hindu practice. The compound
sati-dharma
thus has several layers of meaning: it can mean the way that any Good Woman (which is what
sati
means in Sanskrit), particularly a woman true to her husband, should behave, or it can mean the way that this one woman named Sati behaved. Only much later does it come to mean the act of a woman who commits the religious act of suttee, the immolation of a woman on her dead husband’s pyre (for which the Sanskrit term was usually “going with” the husband [
saha-gamana
] or “dying after” him [
anu-marana
]).

Sati dies and is reborn as Parvati (“Daughter of the Mountain”), the daughter of the great mountain Himalaya, the mountain range where Shiva is often said to live, generally on Mount Kailasa. Parvati is a typical breast goddess, confined and defined by her marriage. But before Parvati could marry Shiva, she had to win him, no easy task, since Shiva had undertaken a vow of chastity. She did it with the help of the god of erotic love, Kama incarnate. The
Mahabharata
refers, briefly, to the encounter between Kama and Shiva, the latter here referred to as a
brahma-charin
(that is, under a vow of celibacy): “Shiva, the great
brahma-charin
, did not give himself over to the pleasures of lust. The husband of Parvati extinguished Kama when Kama attacked him, making Kama bodiless.”
⁵⁸
An inscription of 474 CE refers to the burning of Kama by Shiva,
⁵⁹
so the story must have been fairly well known by then; Kalidasa tells the story in his poem
The Birth of the Prince
. Here is a slightly fuller Puranic version of the episode: