ABSTRACT
https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203151631/f83e39f2-fb3e-4f6b-8067-30bae33d638e/content/icon_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>Goddesses abound in India — varied and diverse, they sometimes contradict each other. There are those who are consorts, those who have consorts, and there is the one who is alone. She is bedecked with jewellery or with a garland of skulls; at other times, she is the nude goddess. Many-armed and wielding weapons, she sometimes disarms you with just a lotus in hand, and uses the abhaya and varada hastas to dispel fear and grant boons. Then there are those other goddesses — with no arms or arms that end in stumps; repulsive, angry or gracious, or expressionless with no facial features, sometimes not even a head; riding ferocious animals like a lion, tiger, leopard, or seated in tranquil equipoise on the lotus. Portrayed in vivid anthropomorphic detail or expressed symbolically, she could be a pot with eyes scratched on it, a cowrie shell, or a piece of stone smeared with vermilion. Sometimes the goddess is also abstracted into a flash of energy, colour, sound and geometry. Who can say which of these represents the ‘true’ goddess tradition? Which is the ‘essence’ and which is ‘derived’? How does one invest chronology, historicity, linearity — qualities that the goddess cuts through in her many-layered presence in ritual, cult, icon, art, text and philosophy?
