A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religious Exploration

8. Toward a New Model of the Hindu Pantheon

T oward a New Model of the Hindu Pantheon A Report on Twenty-Some Years of Feminist Reflection One of my favorite unfinished and unpublished manuscripts is titled “The Significance of Gender in the Hindu Pantheon.” This chapter represents my return to that manuscript, which has spent more than fifteen years in my to-do pile. Both manuscript and chapter circle around my dissatisfaction with the model of the Hindu pantheon found in most textbooks. My dissatisfaction applies equally to the chapter on Hinduism found in world religions textbooks and to textbooks designed for a first course on Hinduism. Having taught introductory courses on Hinduism many, many times, and as a feminist scholar on the lookout, I found the standard description of the Hindu pantheon as consisting of Vishnu, Shiva, and Devi to be incredibly androcentric—and I still do. But now, I have other reservations as well. The literature on Hinduism which introduced me to that religion routinely presented a model of the Hindu pantheon that is still very much with us, especially in textbooks used by those who will most likely never again study Hinduism. That model tells students that there are three major Hindu deities—Vishnu, Shiva, and the Goddess, always presented in that order, and almost always with fewer words devoted to the deities further down on the list. My early objections remain. This model gives the impression that male deities are more important and more popular than female deities. It also often gives the impression that male deities are normal and understandable while goddesses are odd and exotic. And, finally, the two male deities stand out as distinct 143 chapter 8 Gross_Ch08 10/17/08 14:50 Page 143 personalities, while the female deities, who also have distinctive mythologies and iconographies, are lumped together under the generic title “Devi” or “the great goddess.” That portrait is incredibly androcentric. Hinduism is the only major contemporary world religion in which goddess worship is prominent and normal. In such a religion, it does not seem likely that the female deities would be regarded as an add-on or an afterthought. It is also unlikely that the numerous and varied goddesses would be so generic and so undifferentiated that they could accurately be lumped together under one label. It has long seemed to me that something must be askew in this stereotypical textbook model of the Hindu pantheon. However, this androcentric interpretation of information from another culture cannot be attributed solely to the androcentric mind-set of Western scholars, as was the case with much of the earlier literature on primal traditions such as Aboriginal Australia.1 Western scholars could, with some justification, claim that they were merely reporting faithfully what Hindu informants and texts told them. Many Hindus share the perception that there are three major sects of devotional Hinduism—Vaishanvite, Shavaite, and Shakta, the latter often being lumped with Tantric sects and presented as exotic and foreign, even to Hindus. Rather than an imposition of Western androcentrism on the information , we seem here to have mutually cooperating androcentrisms— Hindu and Western. In such a case, some might argue that, while feminists may not like androcentric models, if they accurately reflect a religion’s own selfdeclared theology, Western feminist scholars are not in a good position to attempt to discredit that model or to configure the data with a less androcentric model of the Hindu pantheon. Against this argument one could make two counterarguments. First, Western scholars do not simply uncritically accept Hindu claims about Hindu phenomena which do not so closely match Western values. For example, Western scholars of Hinduism do not generally present the Hindu caste system as an inevitable social ideal even when they try to explain it empathetically. And Hindu claims about Hindu origins and history are not taken any more seriously than are the claims put forth by any other sacred history, Western included. So there must be another explanation for Western scholars’ uncritical acceptance of the Hindu model of the pantheon as consisting of Vishnu, Shiva, and the Goddess. I would suggest that androcentric Western scholars didn’t see anything 144 T oward a New Model of the Hindu Pantheon Gross_Ch08 10/17/08 14:50 Page 144 unusual or questionable about Hindu androcentric interpretations of the Hindu pantheon because they accord so well with Western preconceptions about deity. In the West, it has been many hundreds of years since...