Gendering the Divine: New Forms of Feminine Hindu Worship

Abstract

On the corner of a suburban road behind the main high street in East Ham, east London, part of the London Borough of Newham, a converted house with a garage extension is home to an unusual religious site of Hindu devotion. Inside, before the highly decorated, colorful shrine to Goddess Adhiparasakthi, fifty to sixty mainly female Sri Lankan devotees, all dressed in red, are chanting devotional hymns in a quiet, focused manner, led by a woman worshiper in her thirties. The “congregation” consists of Hindu women of all ages, from children to grandmothers, and also includes a few men. Some are in the small kitchen, preparing food with the same attentive devotion. On the walls are posters of their male guru in India who is considered an embodiment of Sakthi (divine female power). On the posters are slogans in Tamil and English that state, “One Mother, One Family” (Tamil: Ore Thai, Ore Kulam). The devotees’ red clothes represent the color of the blood of all human beings. In this paper, I argue that in the Sri Lankan Hindu Tamil diaspora in Britain, public places and spaces of worship such as described above are offering new sites of practice where female devotees no longer remain simply participants, but are becoming transformed into religious specialists and leaders of ritual. Using evidence from recent and ongoing fieldwork in this newly established temple in East Ham, called a “Worshipping Centre,” or Sakthi Peetham, I will address how the diasporic environment may influence these gendered choices of religious practice and reveal the complex trans-national and trans-cultural links between Tamils in Sri Lanka, India, and Europe. This small, local site of religious practice, where groups of predominantly Sri Lankan women gather to participate in the rituals of Hindu worship, challenges norms and offers the women a space where they can embody and perform the divine, giving them access to a religious agency that is commonly taboo in Brahminical Hindu worship. In traditional Shaivite temples that cater for the Hindu Tamil diasporic community in different parts of greater London, only male priests play the role of intermediary between the deities and the worshipers. I examine how through their movements, gestures and specific bodily actions, the forms of worship of the women of the East Ham Sakthi Peetham indicate an