Conclusion: Reimagining the Hindu Feminine

Abstract

As is suggested by the subtitle of this book, the enterprise in which all the contributors to this volume are engaged involves reinterpreting and re-envisioning the feminine in Hindu religious environments. All of the essays in this book are faithful to traditional Hindu categories, texts, and ways of thinking, especially ways of thinking about what constitutes the feminine in Hindu contexts, but all see within the materials they examine possibilities for revision in ways that are in general affirming of values associated with female gender and, in particular, potentially or actually empowering to contemporary women. In her introduction, Rita D. Sherma articulates a shared methodological basis that supports this process and involves two key elements: intersubjective construction and dialexis. Intersubjective construction, as Sherma proposes it, refers to a particular type of interpretive approach, one in which a scholar engages the materials he or she is exploring in a way that both takes seriously the points of view of “others” being studied and seeks to integrate those points of view into his or her own constructive thought. Dialexis is a process of reflection “across styles” that prizes engagement with divergent cultural modes of communication and aims to unpack the meaning of such communications in a way that is contextualized and respects their integrity.KeywordsIndian LandscapeReligious ChangeHindu TraditionConstructive ThoughtIntellectual EngagementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.