Heroic Shāktism

Abstract

This book tells the story of Durgā, the buffalo-demon-slaying deity dear to Indic rulers, between the 3rd and the 12th centuries CE, as she transformed from a Vaiṣṇava, to a Śaiva and finally to a supreme deity, a concentrated power-source Śakti, in whom all divinities and dualities were thought to inhere and also to transcend. Reconstructed through mythology, liturgy, the belles lettres, ritual instructions, epigraphy, local legends of kingship, sculptural evidence and anthropological studies, the stages of this story illuminate an entire belief system concerning political power: warrior-centric goddess worship called heroic Śāktism in the book. The belief that a good king and a true warrior must worship the goddess Durgā, the form and substance of kingship, heroic Śāktism formed the bedrock of ancient Indian practices of cultivating political power. Wildly dangerous and serenely benevolent at one and the same time, the goddess's charismatic split nature promised rewards for a hero and king and success in risky ventures. Fundamentally, the slow development of this deity cannot be disentangled from the narrative of the state in pre-modern India. Heroic Śāktism unfolded within a social landscape of conquest and competition, dependent on a monsoon economy in which harvests were unreliable and the appeasement of gods in control of environmental crises, foremost among whom was the goddess, was paramount. Its emergence is imbricated with the imperatives of state: military expansion, especially after the demise of the Gupta empire, the rise of local lineages, the assertion of regional cultic identities, the authorization of territorial ownership and the development of the regular ritual life of kingdoms. All these political processes involved Durgā at their very core. She was the prime symbol that communities used to articulate the shifts they underwent during the fluctuations of expansion and consolidation. This story of the Goddess and political power is shown in three discrete but related parts. The first ‘Beginnings’ tracks a historical process by plotting the development of her cult from its early form in the Gupta period to its mature phase in the 11th century CE, when it had secured more robust patronage, and by showing the sectarian appropriations and consequent conceptual and ritualistic amplifications in the understanding of the deity along the way. In the second part, ‘Synthesis’, focused on the 12th century CE, Heroic Śāktism is seen as a social phenomenon representing diversified state-power, arising when the single monolithic Durgā transformed into a deity incorporating regional authorities that partook of her larger identity in order to consolidate and integrate themselves into a pan-Indic network. In the third part, ‘Belief Systems and rituals’, Heroic Śāktism is explored through its matrix of ideas, beliefs and stories, and the ritual enactments, coalescing during the Navarātra, during which this idea-matrix was enlivened through hymn, offering and prayer, whereby the cult acquired meaning and purpose in society and culture. For without ritual, without the enmeshing of goddess into relationships with people, the cult and its notion of power were incomplete and without effective connection to the world.