The Goddess and the Woman, The Paradox of Female Power in Hinduism

“ INDIAN HOME LIFE Although the women are supposed to have no religious standing and are considered unfit to read the Vedas or touch the consecrated gods, still their entire life is influenced by religion or superstition, and the religion and superstition of the Eastern woman, of whatever land, is so inextricably entwined, that it is hard to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. Like her sisters of China and Egypt, she is afraid of the evil eye. ”

“ Brahmin boy to a religious life, and is supposed to sanctify him for the study of the Veda.
The thread of the Brahmin is made of cotton and formed of three strings; that of the Kshatriya is made of hemp, and that of the Vaisya is of wool. It is termed the “sacrificial cord,” because it entitles the wearer to the privilege of sacrifice and religious services. Certain ceremonies are observed for girls as well as for boys, but neither girls nor women are invested with the sacred thread nor the utterance of the sacred mantras. They have consequently no right to sacrifice. ”

“ The Shāstras have enjoined the worship of certain higher-grade deities, and have prescribed certain ceremonials for the purpose. But women are not authorised to make use of these ceremonies. The reason is that the Shāstras regard women as inferior to men and do not grant them the privileges given to the latter. They are not allowed to learn the Vedas nor can the Gāyatri-mantra be taught to them. ”

“ For example, while Christianity has raised woman to a position of respect and honor, and made her influence felt as something sacred and potential in the family and in all society, Hinduism has brought her down even from the place which she occupied among the primitive Aryans, to an ever-deepening degradation. It has made her life a burden and a curse. Pundita Ramabai, in her plea for high-caste Hindu women, quotes a prayer of a child widow in which she asks, "O Father of the world, hast Thou not created us? or has perchance some other God made us? Dost Thou only care for men? ”

“ If the wife have her own free will, notwithstanding she be sprung from a superior caste, she will behave amiss. A woman is not to be relied on."
"Confidence is not to be placed in a woman. If one trust a woman, without doubt he must wander about the streets as a beggar."
In accordance with these ideas the life of the Hindu woman has been divided into "the three subjections." In childhood she must be subject to her father; in marriage to her husband; in widowhood to her sons or--most miserable of all!--lacking a son, to her husband's kinsmen. ”

“ The position of women in the Hindu home is fundamental, and much misunderstood by the people of the West.
It is sadly true that woman in Hinduism has suffered, throughout the centuries, gross injustice, and has laboured under a thousand disabilities. But it does not follow from this, as those not familiar with Hindu lives are too apt to conclude, that woman is therefore a nonentity and a mere helpless drudge in the family.
It is true that the great lawgiver, Manu, said, "No sacrifice is allowed to women apart from their husbands, no religious rite, no fasting ”

“ From our point of view the social condition of women in India is highly deplorable. The women are not regarded as the equals of men, but rather as an appendix to them. Their religion teaches that they have no acknowledged rights as individuals, and that the only happiness they can attain in this world and in the world to come is to become wives and mothers of men, and that the more a woman sacrifices herself for man the greater will be her reward in the future. ”

“ These passages and many others like them show that women were honoured in ancient India and considered the intellectual companions of their husbands, their affectionate helpers in the journey of life, and the inseparable partners of their religious duties. Hindu wives received the honour and respect due to their position, in addition to having rights to property and to inheritance. In return Hindu wives have ever been honourably distinguished for their fidelity, and feminine unfaithfulness is comparatively rare. ”

“ Husband and wife also drew near to the gods together in prayer. That the education of the females was not neglected is proven by the fact, that some of the most beautiful Vedas or national hymns and lyric poems were composed by ladies and queens. —
With the decline of the Aryan race and culture in India, caused most probably by the hot, enervating climate of the country, the position of women also underwent a change for the worse. Especially the growing despotism of the Brahmanic priests gradually robbed women of all their former rights and liberty. ”

“ But in the races that rejected Christianity, that rejected Buddhism, it is otherwise. The Hindu women keep themselves in zenanas. They are not allowed in the temples, or only in special parts. They can take no part in the public services. They cannot combine to influence religious matters. At the time the Buddha lived women were very much freer than they are now, and this accounts for its initial partial success at home. But as waves of conquest, the incessant rigorous struggle for existence deepened and circumstances contracted that liberty, so as it contracted did Buddhism die. ”

“ It is a significant fact that in the religion of no other people on earth does the worship of the female find so prominent a place. In many parts of the land Sakti worship, or the worship of goddesses, is widely prevalent and almost paramount in influence. It is really the worship of power under a female form; and the power which these goddesses exercise is mostly malevolent in its character. The terrible wife of Siva, in all her dread manifestations, is the most popular deity, because the most feared in the land. ”

“ The great feature of the religion taught by the Tantras is the worship of Sakti—Divine power personified as a female, and individualised, not only in the goddesses of mythology, but in every woman: to whom, therefore, in her own person religious worship may be and is occasionally addressed. The chief objects of adoration, however, are the manifold forms of the bride of Siva; Parvati, Uma, Durga, Kali, Syama, Vindhya-vasini, Jaganmata, and others. ”

“ Shâktas worship the Universal Energy as Mother, the sweetest name they know; for the mother is the highest ideal of womanhood in India. When God is worshipped as "Mother", as Love, the Hindus call it the "right-handed" way, and it leads to spirituality but never to material prosperity. When God is worshipped on His terrible side, that is, in the "left-handed" way, it leads usually to great material prosperity, but rarely to spirituality ”

“ Wherever we find goddesses in a religion, there certainly exists a higher measure of esteem for women than among the faiths honouring only male deities. Half the Hindus revere Shakti, the female symbol of deity, and they address their god as She. ”

“ It was probably also during this period that the female element was first definitely admitted to a prominent place amongst the divine objects of sectarian worship, in the shape of the wives of the principal gods viewed as their sakti, or female energy, theoretically identified with the Maya, or cosmic Illusion, of the idealistic Vedanta, and the Prakriti, or plastic matter, of the materialistic Sankhya philosophy, as the primary source of mundane things. ”

“ In Vedic belief and ritual goddesses occupy a very subordinate position, they play hardly any part as rulers of the world, and only two—Ushas, the spirit of the dawn, and Sarasvatī, originally the impersonation of a sacred river—acquired special importance. ”

“ Some Hindu scholars demur to this derivation of Śâktism from lower cults. They point to its refined and philosophic aspects; they see in it the worship of a goddess, who can be as merciful as the Madonna, but yet, since she is the goddess of nature, combines in one shape life and death. May not the grosser forms of Śâktism be perversions and corruptions of an ancient and higher faith? In support of this it may be urged that the Buddhist goddess Târâ is as a rule a beautiful and benevolent figure, though she can be terrible as the enemy of evil and has clear affinities to Durgâ. ”

“ Because the goddess is none other than Aurora, the Dawn of the Vedas.
In the mythology of the Puranas and in the mysticisms of the Tantras this, the first and grandest of festivals so universally observed and so solemnly celebrated throughout India, was associated with a portentious event in the history of the heavens. The kingdom of heaven was in danger, the Demons and Asuras made all powerful by the suffrance of the Almighty attacked the regions of the gods, dethroned them, reduced them to the most abject condition of poverty and defied the command of the Creator himself. ”

“ Siva's consort Pārvatī or Umā likewise, especially in her manifestation as Kālī, is the energy that destroys, that makes the world involve or draw itself into the quiescent state from which it started or evolved. In fact a sect of worshippers called Sāktas, "the adherents of Sakti or Energy," affirm that this Sakti, the feminine element in god, is the sole, if not the preponderating, cause of all visible phenomena. It may be noted that the word sakti is of the feminine gender in the Sanskrit language. Almost every human or divine activity has been personified as a goddess ”

“ In India, as is the case elsewhere, agricultural ceremonies and the culture of the local gods are often entrusted to women because they are more emotional, believed to be in closer touch with the spirit world, endowed with a stronger fertility Mana than that possessed by men. But the appointment of women as regular priestesses seems to be uncommon, Bishop Whitehead mentioning an exceptional case in the worship of the Mother goddess Nakulammā. ”

“ He used to dress himself as a woman — he was, as it were, our Mother — and we must likewise look upon all women as the reflections of the Mother. In India there are two great evils. Trampling on the women, and grinding the poor through caste restrictions. He was the Saviour of women, Saviour of the masses, Saviour of all, high and low. And let Akshaya introduce his worship in every home — Brahmin or Chandala, man or woman — everyone has the right to worship him. Whoever will worship him only with devotion shall be blessed for ever. ”

“ During the rains, for one waxing moon, the days are sacred to that Goddess, who represents the all-pervading energy of nature, the spouse of Shiva, the Great God, the ultimate Destroyer. During these days the maidens of middle-class Gujarát worship the Goddess with an eye fixed upon the attainment of the perfect husband. The little girls go in groups and bathe and pray, and they make the vow that is the Vow of Life. ”

“ No Westerner can realise what a powerful influence matrimony has upon the life of a Hindu woman. Her husband is the representation of the Divine on earth to her, the object of her worship. There can be no mistake whoever he may be; he is the only one, and none other ever dare claim a thought in her mind. She has been trained in this conviction throughout the ages until it has moulded her nature and is in itself enough to awaken her love and foster it. ”

“ For instance, when he so eloquently and beautifully portrayed the Hindu idea of womanhood as the divine motherhood ideal, to be forever reverenced, even worshipped with a devotion of loyalty such as the most woman-respecting unselfish and truest of American sons, husbands and fathers cannot even conceive of, one would have liked to know what the reply would have been to the query as to how far this beautiful theory is exemplified in practice in the majority of Hindu homes, which hold wives, mothers, daughters and sisters. ”

“ For example, there is the status of women in Hinduism. We may credit the eulogies so often devoted to the domestic influence and character of the women of India. In India, Sister Nivedita with pardonable exaggeration tells us, "the sanctity and sweetness of family life have been raised to the rank of a great culture," and she adds that there is "a half-magical element in this attitude of Hindus towards women." But all this must not conceal from us the tremendous practical disadvantages under which the women labour, disadvantages so burdensome as to react with severity upon the race. ”

“ Whether it be as wife or mother, the women of no other land wield greater power than the much-abused women of India. There is no woman on earth who reveals, at this present time, more devotion and attachment to her husband than does the Hindu wife. The old system of Sati, whereby a woman immolated herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband, what was it? ”

“ The man who sells his goods, or fulfils his contract, is cheated if he fails to realise payment, but he who gives form to some ideal may never get his due and be fully paid. What I have felt in the women of India is the consciousness of this ideal--their simple faith in the sanctity of devotion lighted by love which is held to be divine. True womanliness is regarded in our country as the saintliness of love. It is not merely praised there, but literally worshipped; and she who is gifted with it is called _Devi_, as one revealing in herself Woman, the Divine. ”

“ Hinduism, as we find it in India now, is but a tradition, of which the women keep the record. You may believe what you will, there are no articles of belief, there are idols for the ignorant, there is poetry, allegory, which you may interpret as you will; there are the beautiful songs of the Bhagavad Gita, there is the propitiation of evil spirits, there are the extortions of the ash-smeared; there is the ecstasy of the wife-worship of Life, of her husband, her child. There is the crown of self-sacrifice, and there is the demand of the stronger for the service of the weaker. ”

“ In their opinion, there is no enjoyment higher that that of love; the Hindus call it kámada; [251] and say that, when a woman and a man are in close conversation, whoever disturbs them is worthy of God’s malediction, because they both therein share a state of happiness. The Agama favors both sexes equally, and makes no distinction between women; they may belong to whomsoever: men and women compose equally humankind, and whatever they bring forth makes part of it. This sect hold women in great esteem, and call them śaktis (powers) ; and to ill treat a śakti, that is, a woman, is held a crime. ”