Entranced by the Goddess offers an accessible introduction to Goddess worship in India, with particular emphasis on folk religion and oral traditions in the Himalayan region of Uttarakhand. Sudha Chandola draws on her background in a Goddess-worshipping Brahman family and also her fieldwork that was warmly supported by relatives and friends. With affection and sensitivity, Chandola explores how believers interact with the powerful Mother Goddess through many names and forms, temples, pilgrimages, rituals, stories, songs, and especially trance.
Entranced by the Goddess contributes to current scholarship primarily through rich ethnographic materials rather than through extensive references or sustained debates with theoretical frameworks. Chandola argues that amid India’s rapid social change, folk traditions are being rapidly lost; while Goddess worship is likely to remain, regional variations are likely to be forgotten. Her aim is thus largely to present and preserve aspects of local Goddess traditions. The accessible tone of the book and the cover’s reference to the book’s relevance to Goddess worship among English-speaking modern pagans indicate a wide target audience beyond specialists in Indian folklore.
In Part I, Chandola introduces readers to a historical sketch of Goddess worship in India as known through Sanskrit texts, and also many goddesses who are present in folk traditions. Thus, in addition to widely worshipped goddesses like Kali, Lakshmi, and Sarasvati, Chandola describes goddesses associated with cows and with serpent worship; with the sacred basil plant and with rivers; with village boundaries and with diseases; and also with hope and with destiny. Chandola discusses shorter nonnarrative and lengthy narrative songs featuring the Goddess, and their occasions of performance. She presents ritual tales associated with fasts honoring different manifestations of the Goddess. In less detail, she also describes folk mantras invoking the Goddess, and introduces five deified attendants of the Goddess who are likened by one old woman to office assistants who might allow for a shortcut to the deity.
In Part II, highlighting examples of trance, Chandola moves to a more narrative voice. Four chapters unfold with the suspense of short stories as she engages with villagers who embody Goddess power. Chandola encounters the Goddess in the form of an eight-year-old girl attended by her mother as devotees flock in, yet who is no longer possessed as she grows older. Chandola also ventures forth with family members on a mission both professional and personal to meet a village grandmother chosen by the goddess of barley seeds; when asked questions in trance, the barley seeds this old woman holds sprout if the answer is affirmative. In addition, Chandola sets off in the company of relatives for night sessions of Goddess worship, and as drums roll, men in trance lick or bite at ladles red-hot from their proximity to coals. Chandola herself experiences the mystery of remaining unscathed, and feeling only a soothing heat when her hands are rubbed with such a ladle by an entranced man.
The book concludes with a description of new Goddesses and changes in Goddess worship, along with an exhortation to collect and preserve folk traditions. Since the acknowledgements mention that these materials were collected over decades, one wishes that Chandola had shared more specificity about the historical dimensions of her field materials, thereby enhancing the larger argument about change and loss. Diacritics would also have been helpful in guiding pronunciation, at least in the glossary, or the first time that names or terms are introduced. One hopes that printing errors sprinkled through the book might be corrected in reprintings.
--------
[Review length: 578 words • Review posted on August 5, 2008]