Toward a history of the Navarātra, the autumnal festival of the Goddess

Book section

In this essay, I wish to address the problems a historian encounters while explaining the function and origin of rituals. One is particularly confronted by these problems when dealing with a ritual such as the Navarātra. With regard to its function, the festival resists sharp distinctions between the sacred and the temporal because it simultaneously propitiates a deity and solemnizes the authority of a ruler. It seems to be two things at the same time: a rite of religious power and a rite of political power. In fact, in the Southern Navarātra, for instance in that celebrated in Vijayanagara, the worship of the goddess would take place largely out of view in a private shrine, while all the individual rites of the festival appeared to publicly celebrate in a larger communal area a cult of the king, appearing as a result, as it did to Portuguese visitors to the Vijayanagara court, to be a political festival with a minor religious role. While explaining its origins, we run into even greater difficulty as the earliest traces of the Navarātra are found in four distinctive religious traditions: the Vaiṣṇava, the Śaiva, the Purāṇic and even possibly the tribal. Where it truly “originates” is therefore difficult to see, though for the purpose of teleological clarity I have proposed here that the Vaiṣṇava domain was where a mature, theologically coherent conception of the rite evolved. On the whole the ritual appears to have been at each stage of its manifestation of a composite character. The overall impression is that we are looking at many permutations of different rites with different origins that attached themselves around the central figure of the goddess, and through her, and the demon-slaying mythologies about her, acquired a structural and thematic unity. In the following parts, I wish to present and probe these ambiguities while representing a scheme of the richly varied regional traditions of the Navarātra that emerged in the course of its history.

Authors: Sarkar, B

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Brill
• Journal: Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions: Essays in Honour of Alexis G.J.S. Sanderson
• Pages: 321–345
• Series: Gonda Indological Studies
• Series number: 22
• Publication date: 2020-08-03
• Acceptance date: 2016-05-01
• Event title: Shaivism and the Tantric Traditions. A Symposium in Honour of Alexis G. J. S. Sanderson
• Event location: University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
• Event start date: 2015-03-26
• Event end date: 2015-03-28
• DOI: 10.1163/9789004432802_015
• EISBN: 978-90-04-43280-2
• ISBN: 978-90-04-43266-6
• Language: English