Devi: Goddesses of India.

• Author: Haberman, David L.
• Position: Review

Edited by JOHN STRATTON HAWLEY and DONNA MARIE WULFF. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1996. Pp. 352. $17.95 (paper).

When I sat down to review Devi: Goddesses of India, I assumed that I would simply be reading a new edition of The Divine Consort (Berkeley, 1982), the well-known collection of essays also edited by Hawley and Wulff. I therefore began my reading wondering how a good book might be made better. I was wrong, however; Devi is quite different from the earlier volume. This is not a new edition of The Divine Consort at all, but with few exceptions, an entirely new collection of essays. The result is an extremely useful book for the increasing number of courses now being offered on Hindu goddesses.

Devi consists of twelve essays, plus an informative introduction by John Hawley. Two of the essays - by Eck on Ganga and by Kinsley on Kali - are identical to those that appeared in The Divine Consort. Three of the essays - by Coburn on Devi, Narayanan on Sri, and Wulff on Radha - are re-written versions. Seven essays are new in the Devi volume: Humes' on Vindhyavasini, Doniger's on Saranyu Erndl's on Seranvali, Caldwell's on Bhagavati, Harlan's on Sati, McKean's on Bharat Mata, and McDermott's on Kali in the West.

Devi differs from The Divine Consort in a number of ways. The earlier volume, subtitled "Radha and the Goddesses of India," focused primarily on Radha, whereas this volume is much more extensive. As the title indicates, The Divine Consort was primarily concerned with goddesses understood as consorts. The Devi volume, however, emphasizes independent goddesses and - when they have them - goddesses who dominate their male partners. In his introductory essay, Hawley remarks that this in part reflects a redirection of Western scholarship since the publication of The Divine Consort. He attributes this shift to the growing feminist influences in the field of religious studies. And that leads to another major difference between the volume under review and the earlier volume: whereas most of the articles were written by men in The Divine Consort, here the authors are overwhelmingly women. (Only two of the essays are authored by men, and these two are carried over from the previous collection.) The significant entrance of women into the study of South Asian religions (I conducted the ten-year review for the Religion in South Asia section of the American Academy of Religion in 1996 and noted that slightly more...