Overview
- Presents a novel presentation and examination of text and praxis of Indic goddess culture
- Explores numerous instances of the authority of female speech from Indian goddess traditions and relates them to the contemporary gender debates
- Suggests a tradition of “womansplaining” from Indic goddess cultures that can serve as a corrective to a modern, global, addiction to “mansplaining.”
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Contemporary debates on “mansplaining” foreground the authority enjoyed by male speech, and highlight the way it projects listening as the responsibility of the dominated, and speech as the privilege of the dominant. What mansplaining denies systematically is the right of women to speak and be heard as much as men. This book excavates numerous instances of the authority of female speech from Indian goddess traditions and relates them to the contemporary gender debates, especially to the issues of mansplaining and womansplaining. These traditions present a paradigm of female speech that compels its male audience to reframe the configurations of “masculinity.” This tradition of authoritative female speech forms a continuum, even though there are many points of disjuncture as well as conjuncture between the Vedic, Upanishadic, puranic, and tantric figurations of the Goddess as an authoritative speaker. The book underlines the Goddess’s role as the spiritual mentor of her devotee, exemplified in the Devi Gitas, and re-situates the female gurus in Hinduism within the traditions that find in Devi’s speech ultimate spiritual authority. Moreover, it explores whether the figure of Devi as Womansplainer can encourage a more dialogic structure of gender relations in today’s world where female voices are still often undervalued.
Reviews
“Anway Mukhopadhyay offers a bold yet careful contribution to emerging dialogue between South Asia and the West, between religious, secular, and feminist perspectives, and between contemporary gender dynamics and millennia old Shakta traditions. This work is an engaging example of activism grounded in both scholarship and religion that could help us all communicate in a spirit of mutual respect.” (Patricia Dold, Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Anway Mukhopadhyay is Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Authority of Female Speech in Indian Goddess Traditions
Book Subtitle: Devi and Womansplaining
Authors: Anway Mukhopadhyay
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52455-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-52454-8Published: 28 August 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-52457-9Published: 28 August 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-52455-5Published: 27 August 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 171
Topics: Religion and Gender, Hinduism, Gender Studies, History of South Asia