Deep Beauty: Rajasthani Goddess Shrines Above and Below the Surface

Abstract

Rajasthani folk culture was legendary and unsurpassed, described the pervasive presence and potency of Rajasthan' s shrines and their deities in everyday lives. Notwithstanding massive inroads by global modernity's multifarious manifestations (from television to transportation; from mobile phones to intercaste elopements), Kothari' s observations on the integral importance of shrines remain valid. These places and their deities continue to be meshed in multiple ways with human lives and livelihoods, especially with aspirations for health and wellbeing, both physical and psychological. In the Banas Basin region of Rajasthan where I have intermittently conducted research since 1979, shrine improvements and reconstruction are much in evidence in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This article's substantive focus is the origin tales of three Rajasthani shrine goddesses set within the devotional ambiance of their specific sites as well as in broader contexts of religion, gender, and society. Such sites lodge, please, contain, and channel divine female power, as associated narratives and images reveal. I observe at these sites three broad and intersecting dimensions of meaning: environmental, sociological, and cosmological, conveniently coded as landscape, gender, and beauty. Employing these three interpretive angles, I consider interrelated expressions of rural religiosity emergent in practices of regional pilgrimage to goddess shrines, and especially in those shrine's founding or chartering vernacular mythologies. South Asian shrines have been studied as sites of vows or transactions, of psychological healing, of regional or community identity, of folk aesthetics on display.2 Moreover, Hindu goddesses as theological and iconographic phenomena have long attracted scholars of gender and power as well as of classical and folk arts.3 My