Ardhanarisvara: Divine Androgyny in Indian Art, Myth, and Feminist Thought by Ellen Goldberg

Description

One of the enduring issues in the late modern and postmodern study of gender and equality in the context of religion is to what extent religious traditions offer images of the feminine—and masculine—that may inspire a non-patriarchal way of construing selfhood that is genuinely free from destructive power relations at both the social and soteriological levels. India offers a robust polytheistic imagination that contains numerous female and male deities who range from dutiful and auspicious wives (Laksmi) to enraged single “mothers” (Kali), and from austere ascetics (Siva) to heroic warriors (Rama).

Somewhere in between stands the androgynous deity Siva–Sakti, the ardhanarisvara, (lit. “half-woman-lord”), “the lord who is half woman.” While there is relatively little in the way of mythological narratives about this figure, s/he does have a rich iconographic, meditative, and devotional tradition within the larger framework of Hindu Saivism. Goldberg traces the image of the ardhanarisvara through the long events of Indian iconographies, the hathayoga tradition of meditation in north India and devotional (bhakti) poetic texts in Sanskrit and from south India. Following this Indological inquiry, she concludes with an analysis of the conceptual framework of religious androgyny in the context of contemporary Indian and western feminist theory. In what ways may the imaginative resources of the androgyne inspire a postpatriarchal liberative selfhood for women and men?

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