The Goddesses Who Lived Amongst Us
by Bandana Purkayastha
Among the many rituals of Durga Puja that remind us that we are a part of a greater indivisible whole; for instance, the Tvat< Tamasilesson of Chandogya Upanishad is reflected through the ritual raising and immersing of the goddess from the depth of our being. The priest, on our behalf, brings her forth from within the individual being, invests her image with qualities befitting a goddess, and on dashami, ritually submerges her back into the individual-of-the- universe. As individuals, and as collectivities, we are supposed to follow this ritual of looking within ourselves, “raising” the set of values represented through the array of goddesses and gods with their animal and plant associates, to the forefront of our consciousness, as a way of connecting our lives to a greater whole every day. This central principle of Hinduism—to become more human by acknowledging and enacting our connections to the universe--is likely to be familiar to many people who gather to celebrate Durga Puja.
But, recently, as I worked with a group of women who originally came to the US from different parts of India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, to publish a book about our experiences of living our religion, I was confronted with the question of whether I could draw the same inspiration about these values and principles if I focused on people who live/d among us. It is an intriguing question; after all, if I truly believe that our goddesses and gods are personifications of what we imagine to be within the realm of the possible, then these values and qualities should be in evidence among real people. So, to try and answer this question, I began to think about who would come closest to Durga, Lakshmi, and Saraswati, among the women whose lives and deeds have significantly enriched our lives as Bengalis. Instead of reverting to the example of the children—the-Kumaris--who are worshipped as embodiments of Durga, I focused on adult women, whose conscious choices and activities, have framed ours.
While I began to think about many people across many countries who could qualify for these designations, I decided to limit myself, for now, to people who were born in Bengal, or spent most of their lives in the region. I also decided to limit myself to the 19th and 20th centuries, since this history ushered tumultuous changes in our lives. Many of us can directly trace the legacy of our parents and grandparents who participated in the nationalist uprising or social and religious movements of the time. This was also the historical period when Durga became our cultural icon. She was worshipped earlier by sections of people, one among many goddesses. During this period she became the mother goddess whose worship pierced hierarchical walls of caste, gender, and class, as her worship was infused with a series of social and cultural meanings that wove together newer forms of Bengali religious and cultural nationalisms.
Goddess Durga is the demon slayer. She represents fearless-ness, strength, valor, extraordinary energy and power to challenge and defeat a mighty adversary, whose untrammeled unregulated use of power was wrecking havoc in the world. Goddess Durga is also a mother- figure, her ability to confront and destroy what is unjust is balanced by her creative force as she presides over her “children”—learning, wealth, valor, and obstacle-remover--so that, together, these qualities make for ideal families, communities, societies. In my mind, the living goddess who exhibited such powers—the power to mobilize against political and social injustice, to challenge and confront it, while spreading education, fostering valor, and empowering people to act on their own behalf—during this historical period, was Sarala Devi Chaudhurani.
Sarala Devi was born in 1872. Her mother, Swarnakumari Devi was a sister of Rabindranath Tagore’s, the editor, from 1884, of the journal Bharati, the founder of the Ladies Theosophical Society, and the founder of Sakhi Samiti, a women’s support group that paid particular attention to the need of widows. Sarala Devi was one of the earliest female graduates of Calcutta University (via Bethune School and College). She worked as the Assistant Superintendent of a girl’s school in Mysore in 1894 and returned to Calcutta to take on the editorship of Bharati.
The “demons” of the time were the British colonial power and the lack of mobilization and among men and women to act against social stasis. In her seminal history of the women’s movement in India, Radha Kumar writes that Sarala Devi threw herself into a maelstrom of organizing to cultivate strength among men and women. She started with the antaranga dal, organizing young men who had to lay their hands on the map of India and pledge that they were ready to sacrifice their lives in the cause of India’s freedom. As her realm of influence increased rapidly, she introduced a series of bratas, including martial arts training, as a way of getting young Bengali men to hone their mental and physical prowess. In 1904, for the Congress session in Calcutta, she trained the group to sing Bankim Chandra’s Bande Mataram, and in 1905, through the Suhrid Samiti, she indelibly linked this homage to a motherland to the rallying call of the Indian nationalist movement. She started a Birastami festival to commemorate valor on the second day of Durga Puja where young people recalled past heroes and took a vow to fight imperialism. She was an outspoken supporter of the railway workers strike against the British in 1899. Undaunted by the attacks by large sections of Hindus who castigated her for behavior unworthy of a Hindu woman, she moved onto the national stage. In 1905, after the partition of Bengal and a rapidly rising fear among Hindu and Muslim women of being raped by British soldiers who were “keeping law and order,” she began to organize self-defense lessons for women as well.
In 1910, she organized the Bharat Stree Mahamandal, the first, and formal Indian women’s organization. The aim of the organization was to spread female education, but, acknowledging that purdah and child marriage were the main obstacles to women’s education, she began to organize money to send teachers into homes to teach women. Well aware of the efforts of the missionaries to reach the “recesses of the zenanas” to impart a “civilized education” to Indian girls and women, this organization created Indian texts to emphasize vernacular cultures, brought women’s crafts and skills to the public arena throughmahila silpa melas, and created avenues for bringing women’s visions, women’s writing to the public sphere. At the same time the organization organized relentlessly against child-marriage and purdah, two causes that were later taken up by a large number of other newly formed women’s organizations. Sarala Devi’s work is key to understanding women’s participation in the nationalist uprising, formally through public participation in protests, boycotts, and later the students “terrorist” uprising, but also through the significant “private” participation of choosing only swadeshi products, the circulation of nationalist bratakathas through women’s circles, of harboring and aiding male nationalist “brothers and sons” who were fleeing from the British, through <arandhans which served as means to raise family consciousness to protest British political decisions. While recent historical reconstruction has credited Gandhi, solely, with moving women into the sphere of politics, Sarala Devi’s work had been in-force for decades before Gandhi returned to India and started the Satyagraha movement. Her Durga -like combination of intellectual force, fearless-ness, valor, and steadfastness of principle was recognized by Swami Vivekananda, who, when he was buffeted by attacks of Christian missionaries in the US, wrote to Sarala Devi: “if talented and bold women like yourself, versed in Vedanta, go to England and preach…speak [to] America, if an Indian woman in Indian dress preach[es] there…there will rise a great wave which will inundate the whole Western world…you have power, wealth, intellect and education, will you forego this opportunity?” (quoted in Shamita Basu, in Religious Revivalism as Nationalist Discourse, 2002, p.158).
If Sarala Devi is my choice for Durga, then my choice of Sarswati centers on two remarkable women, Begum Rokeya Hussain and Sister Nibedita for their remarkable work in stretching the boundaries of our intellect. For any individual, who may have been amazed at my choice of a Muslim woman and an Irish woman as Hindu goddesses, it is important to remember that the best traditions of Hinduism do not rely on ethnocentric distinctions. Ramakrishna’s life is an exemplar of learning from many religious practitioners; his famous dictum, popularized by Vivekananda, about the many rivers which lead to the same ocean is a reminder to us that we can be good Hindus by not shrinking our human lives, by not letting our “clear stream of reason” die in the “dreary desert of dead habit” within the confines of “narrow domestic walls.”
Goddess Saraswati reflects learning and wisdom. Her associate the swan, is credited with the ability to sift through the mud and impurities in the water, just as the lotus, on which she sits, frequently rises, as a thing of beauty, above the scum and filth under the waters of the ponds.Begum Rokeya was born in 1880; she was secretly educated in English and Bengali by an older brother, before her marriage, at age 16, to Khan Bahadur Sakhawat Hussain, the Judicial Magistrate of Bhagalpur. Her husband encouraged her writing till his death 11 years later. >Begum Rokeya< wrote a series of remarkable essays and satires on the social boundaries that crippled women’s lives; her 1905 work in English, Sultana’s Dream, remains relevant to our lives today! In order to foster learning among Muslim women, she created Sakhawat Memorial School for Girls, facing down, just as Sarala Devi did, the orthodox outpourings of outrage.
Begum Rokeya was also active in other spheres for women’s empowerment; she founded the Bengali Muslim Women’s Association, which focused primarily on women’s status and education, till her death in 1932. Since she did not have the advantages of extraordinary social capital like Sarala Devi, her actual achievement, of founding a girls’ school, has endured beyond her lifetime, appear to be quite remarkable. Like Bethune school, founded in 1849 as the first formal “public” school for girls in India, Sakhawat Memorial School for Girls, now run by the West Bengal Government, remains a historical icon in Bengali history.
Sister Nibedita, though best known as Swami Vivekananda’s associate, is, in my mind, the central facilitator of the Bengal renaissance movement, the new forms of literature and art that broke away from European hegemonies. Through Nibedita, an ardent champion of Indian glories, we find the intersections of the streams of ideas emanating from Ramakrishna- Vivekananda movement, the Tagores, and Sri Aurobinda’s and his and of revolutionaries. If we now recognize Nandalal Bose’s path-breaking art, that created an alternative form of modernity for India, a great deal of credit goes to Sister Nibedita, who insisted that Nandalal spend time learning from the Ajanta frescos. If we are able to revel in the erudition of Amartya Sen in his recent social commentaries on Indian multi-rooted civilization, or feel proud of the luminous array of contemporary Bengali artists, or simply recognize the cosmopolitanism of Bengali culture, then we owe a debt to Nibedita, who was, with Rabindranath, one of the chief architects of the intellectual horizons that were created and concretized during this time. Thus if learning is about the process through which we imagine and live lives beyond the confines of what the familiar, then, women like Begum Rokeya and Sister Nibedita, much like the goddess of learning, have played a significant role in shaping how we perceive the connection between our learning and the rest of the world of which we are a part.
Unlike Durga and Saraswati, it is more difficult to designate someone as Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, whose associate the owl reminds us not to be dazzled by wealth, to see through dark-ness and, consequently, use wealth wisely. Despite the icon, real women have not, very often, been in a position to control and manage wealth. I could choose the untold number of women who turned over their jewelry for the nationalist cause, literally financing aspects of the nationalist movement, and designate their use of stri-dhan, as reflective of Lakshmi’s values. But their individual names have not been recorded in history. So, for my iconic living goddess, I will delve further back in time and pick Rani Rashmoni who used her wealth to for just purposes.
Rani Rashmoni was born in 1793, she was married off at the age of eleven to a wealthy landowner. She was widowed while she was still young, and, despite her remarkable wealth, lived the austere personal life of a Bengali widow, till her death in 1851. As a wealthy landowner she was struck by the unjust-ness of a new British—East India Company--tax on the daily catch of fisher folk in the area. Since many fishermen survived on a near-subsistence basis, this tax negatively affected their chances of survival. Rashmoni decided to challenge this tax.
She leased a stretch of the Ganga for Rs. 10,000 (a remarkable sum for the time) from the British, who were enthusiastic about getting the money from her, instead of chasing down individual fishermen. Once the lease was complete, she ordered her minions to stretch a set of chains across the river, to mark the boundaries of her leased property. The riverine traffic ground to a halt and the British protested. Rani Rashmoni proclaimed her right to protect her property. The tax on fisher folk was then rescinded. While her wealth was managed by her son- in-law Rani Rashmoni is credited with a number of socially conscious, financial decisions. She demonstrated a principle later preached by Vivekananda: that performing religious rituals in temples is of no use if we do not address the hunger and suffering of nara-narayans (human- gods). Once, she had arranged to go on pilgrimage; the food and provisions for this journey filled 30 boats. At this time, famine stalked a part of Bengal; hearing about the sufferings of her people she donated the entire resources for this pilgrimage to the hungry people. Her endowments created many of the Bengal landmarks: the temple of Dakshineshwar<, the scene of Ramakrishna’s remarkable priesthood, was endowed by her; Presidency College and National Library, in their original iterations, were endowed with her money. The stories about her reflect this unique combination of wealth and wisdom that exemplifies Lakshmi.
The stories of Goddesses and Gods tell of demons they have to overpower. But they remain distant from us because they seem not to be constantly buffeted by the kind of challenges we face everyday. But the lessons of the lives of these living goddesses exemplify the challenges and possibilities of being “tied by a thousand bonds while we seek mukti.” Their lives, like ours, are tempered by failures and successes. Thus they can continue to act as our inspirations, as we rededicate our lives to living our dharma through everyday ethical acts of humane-ness.
1 Dr. Bandana Purkayastha is, most recently, the author of Negotiating Ethnicity, on the children of immigrants from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, and the co-author of Living Our Religions, on the experiences of Hindu and Muslim women in the US and in their countries of origin. She is a professor at the University of Connecticut.