Stories About Posts: Vedic Variations Around the Hindu Goddess (review)

Abstract

Madeleine Biardeau, Stories About Posts: Vedic Variations Around the Hindu Goddess. Trans. AIf Hiltebeitel, James Walker, Marie-Louise Reiniche. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004, 358pp. Much of the history of existing scholarship on India's goddesses is the history of a thought-model, employed to serve the purposes of ordering and classifying the huge ensemble of data that scholars confront in textual sources and/or in the fieldwork. We only need to recall the desperate observation by W.T.Elmore that the material on the heterogeneous forms of worship in India while almost limitless is fugitive. The thoughtmodel, has made its presence prominent with the works of Elmore (1915) and Henry Whitehead (1921), who constructed a major grid of dichotomies by naming a particular set of deities, especially the goddesses, and contrasting them with the Hindu-Aryan and male deities. This move, unfortunately, has sidelined the necessary scholarly skepticism that accompanied the concerns of the early writers on Indian religions, such Gustav Oppert (1893). One should note here that though Oppert (1893) also regarded female energy to be of non-Aryan origin, he was quite reflective in asserting the genealogy of the Aryan-Dravidian dichotomous currents and the difficulty in discovering the original source of these currents. In this backdrop of texts and positions, Madeleine Biardeau's Stories about Posts figures an important landmark, for it restores the skepticism about the dichotomous framework back into religious scholarship. As Biardeau succinctly dismisses the idea of the goddess as a specifically Dravidian contribution to the structure of Hinduism, she, in the same breath, challenges the related irreducible duality, constructed in terms of great tradition vs. little tradition or great Hindu temples vs. tribal or 'primitive' contributions in the works on Hinduism today. Biardeau's challenging mission, supported by her ethnographic fieldwork during the 1970s and 80s in the Deccan (including Orissa) and Southern Tamilnadu, culminates in the thesis that variations found in the cult of the Goddess-in both her royal and village aspects, stories about posts can be traced. Her interpretive method, which she describes the path followed after field investigations, deliberately orders the material on goddess worship for the purpose of tracing the discourses of posts. Anchoring her study to the practices of goddess worship, Biardeau finds a common cord in the form of post running through these practices from Orissa through Andhra to Tamilnadu, and stretches this common cord to the anterior Vedic sacrificial post or yupa. Part One of the book pays special attention to the subaltern god Potu Raju, who is the younger brother of goddesses in Andhra, and the current rituals connected to posts of buffalo sacrifice at royal temples of goddesses in Orissa. Represented by a wooden post or pole or a processional icon and participating in the festivals of his sister-goddess, this god-in-his-symbolic form is located back to the Vedic sacrificial ritual of the yupa, the sacrificial post of torture, the sacrificial pit, and the sacrificial victim. Textual sources on the Vedic ritual well textual and oral ethnographic details gathered from Orissa assist the author in this enterprise. In the course of her inquiry, she raises a crucial question concerning the Vedic ritual and the mythico-ritual complex of the buffalo sacrifice to the goddess: Did the sacrifice of the buffalo to the goddess correspond to the disappearance of the practice of solemn Vedic sacrifices with their animal victims? (p. 92). As Biardeau admits that a verifiable historical correlation between these two is not possible, she approaches the question structurally by juxtaposing the two contexts of the sacrificial arena and the battlefield, and arrives at the notion of double inversion: namely, one, the inversion of individual Vedic (brahmanic) sacrifice to the collectively practiced buffalo sacrifice in the goddess worship, and two, the inversion of the sex of the deity and the category of the victim foregrounded by the sacrifice, (pp. …