The book Nine Nights of Power: Durga, Dolls, and Darbars is the second edited volume in a series on the Hindu festival of Navaratri published within the last three years. The first volume in the Navaratri series was published in 2018 with a similar title, Nine Nights of the Goddess, that looked at different spaces and spheres of the Navaratri festival. The second book, Nine Nights of Power, the focus of this review, has been described by the editors Ute Hüsken, Vasudha Narayanan, and Astrid Zotter as a “direct continuation” of the first book with the aspect of democratization of the festival tying both volumes together. Hillary Rodrigues’s conclusion chapter in the first book forms a clear bridge into the second book, as the first chapter highlighting Navaratri as a festival of all people and with multiple agendas. In spite of many points of continuities between the volumes, the second book crafts its own niche in Navaratri literature. It discusses the Navaratri festival “through the lens of individual participation and experience” (2). The experience of the individual is foregrounded through garb? dancers and kolu displayers as well as political leaders and descendants of former kings. Themes of public versus private, urban versus rural, and festival as religious versus cultural event are also explored. The book is not aimed at theory but at religion as practice documented through ethnographic studies. The chapters themselves are quite descriptive and the readings would be accessible even to a population of students new to the study of Hinduism. Throughout the book, authors have examined questions as they relate to the “performative, material, and visual aspects of the festival as it manifests itself in specific local and temporal contexts” (3).
Among its many strengths is the creative manner in which the book’s primary argument shapes the structure of the book. Each component of the four-part argument is given its own section. The first part of the argument and section that examines Navaratri as agent of renewal and transformation is discussed in essays by Hillary Rodrigues and Neelima Shukla-Bhatt. The second section looks at propriety versus creativity in Navaratri with essays by Moumita Sen and Ute Hüsken. The third examines gendered identities in Navaratri with essays by R. Jeremy Saul, Jennifer D. Ortegren, and Ina Marie Lunde Ilkama. And the fourth section argues for Navaratri as instrument of power with essays by Astrid Zotter, Caleb Simmons, and Uwe Skoda. What is remarkable about the book’s structure and primary thesis is that although gender, power, agency, and transformation are not new subjects and have been discussed quite in bit in ritual theories, the book’s primary argument does a good job of bringing these diverse subjects (and a nuanced look at ritual theories) into an important dialogue with one another as well as with the older subjects of purity and impurity, as well as caste and class in Hindu society. Unfortunately, lacking a concluding chapter, the book does not tie the ideas together in a comprehensive manner.
The strong emphasis on images is another major asset of the book and has been commented on by the editors as an approach to “look at the festival as a practice and as a performance rather than as a text” (4). The photographs in the book capture detail in a graphically strong and impactful manner. The photo of a man holding a sword raised high in the air, about to cut the head of a sacrificial animal tied helplessly with a rope, is perhaps the one that will cause many readers to pause. The feeling of intimacy among people documented inside private living rooms and close-up photos of people in temple or other public settings indicate sentiments of trust and mutual participation between scholars and the people with whom the studies have been conducted. The editors’ arguments about images “as a potential way of knowing,” as a “shorthand for a lot of description,” and in reference to the “intermediality produced by the close interlocking of the images and the texts brings the field alive,” are important points the book is making to emphasize a “more nuanced, multilayered storytelling” in ethnographic studies through strong imagery (4). In addition to the photographs, the ethnographic texts describing the different social contexts surrounding the festival are engaging reads with quite a few chapters bringing Indian politics to the forefront of their festival studies, in addition to refreshing takes on caste, dance, and gender. The arguments made within individual chapters in fact lend a unified voice to the demographics and politics of a rapidly changing India that, on the one hand, seems to be democratizing the Navaratri festival on so many social levels while, at the same time, also getting controlled by Hindutva ideologies of religious political groups like the RSS.
In spite of the suggested strengths of this book, studies of Navaratri would greatly benefit from including works from scholars in fields such as folklore. Given the subjects of festival and ritual that the book deals with, the lack of disciplinary diversity is a primary drawback of the book. While two folklorists, Lisa Gabbert and Richard Bauman, are cited, the series seem to draw more from religious studies in spite of asking questions about creativity, agency, renewal, and individual and communal powers, whose answers do not lie in religion alone. By including more disciplinary voices, a future book on Navaratri should perhaps engage in greater dialogue on tradition and transformation to arrive at more diversified results. Also important to consider in a future volume is the celebration of the Navaratri festival in diasporic settings like the United States, where the festival is celebrated with great enthusiasm. In spite of these shortcomings, this book is an important read for anyone interested in exploring questions of purpose and meaning in festivals, the way they tie our ordinary and festival lives together, as well as for those seeking to understand a nation-state caught in a throng of new nationalist sentiments and religious political ideologies.
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[Review length: 997 words • Review posted on April 8, 2022]