The Dilemmas of Domesticity: Possession and Devotional Experience Among Urban Smarta Women
May 25, 1995 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195081176.003.0003 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Population | Smarta Brahman households |
| Citations | 11 |
| Key points | Argues that studying marriage's margins and boundaries reveals what is central to Hindu marriage, and that inversions of and resistance to normative marriage act as "diagnostic indicators" of the knowledge and power relations supporting claims about Hindu marriage. Through the interpenetration of bhakti and spirit possession in Smarta Brahman households, the author contends that the "resistance" often attributed to bhakti requires a more complicated and nuanced approach than the view of bhakti as a critique "from below" of Hindu orthodoxy and caste inequality. |
Abstract
Abstract The introductory essay to this volume suggests that by tracing marriage’s margins or boundaries we are enabled to better discern what is central to marriage and, taking this notion a step further, to see that inversions of and resistance to normative versions of marriage may be read as “diagnostic indicators” of the complex relations of knowledge and power that support claims about the meaning of Hindu marriage.1 In this essay I engage the center periphery dynamic, and its ambiguities, through a discussion of the interpenetrations of bhakti(religious devotion) and spirit possession in several Smarta Brahman households. Bhakti,an umbrella term for a variety of ecstatic devotional forms dating from the seventh century c.E., has often been viewed as a critique “from below” of the formalism of Hindu orthodoxy and the accompanying structural inequalities of caste.2 I would like to argue here for a more complicated and nuanced approach to the “resistance” often attributed to bhakti.