ABSTRACT
The Kathāsaritsāgara (KSS), a Sanskrit text of the early medieval period by court poet Somadeva describes women’s Tantra or magico-ritual practice. Kashmir had many cults and religious systems, including Tantric ones. Tantric practitioners and philosophers were prominent in Kashmiri society and courtly culture but were denigrated in various contemporary texts. The story of Kālarātrī and Kuvalyāvalī examines the depiction of Tantric ‘witches’ (ḍākinī, śākinī, yoginī). Tantric priestesses and teachers initiated disciples into spiritual practices and managed their own respective institutions. Kashmir’s dynamic religious space interpreted magico-ritual practices, particularly of the Śāktas, in more esoteric terms, while maintaining Brahmanical hegemony.
The KSS creates a textual-ritual space of orthopraxis as vrata and tapas, and heteropraxis as mantrasiddhi, understood as performance of magico-religious rituals. The praxes overlaps, making this a synthetic divide. Ritual objects, gore, and the antinomian presence of women as master-priestesses, translated as ‘witches,’ are the main differences between the two. Reversing the situation and inverting the outcome subverts female ritual agency in the text. The gendered spatial location of protagonists’ situations and actions addresses marginality, centrality, and intersectionality.
