Overview

South Asia is the only major region where the ‘Great Goddess’ is still a living reality for believers – yet its society remains male-dominated. Drawing their examples from ritual practices, myths, and sacred texts the contributors to this volume discuss the place of the feminine within the sacred sphere of South Asian religion. The theme is full of contradictions, for the impurity of woman must be held against the powers she incarnates, and the religious status of these powers is an old theme of debate among Hindu and Buddhist thinkers. Finally, the feminine pole in religious thought cannot simply be equated with human woman- hood. . . . Yet the very presence of feminity in the sacred sphere contrasts with its exclusion from scriptural Islam or from protestantism, and offers, perhaps, to women, a mode of religious expression in an idiom where gender is a central paradigm of thought.

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Harald Tambs-Lyche studied at the University of Bergen, Norway and at SOAS, London. Following work on the Indian diaspora (London Patidars, 1980) he worked extensively on religion and society in Saurashtra, Gujarat (Power, Profit and Poetry, 1997; The Good Country, 2004).

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