Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship inWest Bengal (review)

Fruzzetti, Lina.

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 80, Number 3, Summer 2007, pp.903-904 (Article)

Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research

DOI: 10.1353/anq.2007.0041

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/anq/summary/v080/80.3fruzzetti.html

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BOOK REVIEW

Lina M. FruzzettiBrown University

June McDaniel, Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular GoddessWorship in West Bengal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 368 pp.

June McDaniel’s Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worshipin West Bengal, is a welcome addition to the study of religion and society

in India, specifically since the research took place in West Bengal, wheremany previous studies have addressed forms of popular religious cults. LikeMcDaniel’s, these works have situated the importance of the Mother Goddesswithin the local and scriptural Hindu pantheon. McDaniel’s own approachconsiders religious texts alongside the lives of the ordinary male and femalepractitioners—tribal, rural and urban devotees. This is an attempt on herpart to broaden the division between high and low deities, gods and humanbeings, literate and illiterate people, in ways that religion makes sense to theworshiper. It is in this regard that I found the book remarkable reading:unique and refreshing for readers beyond those in religious studies.

Special mention must be made of her chapter on the Shakta Bhakti,notably the way she develops Shakta nationalism along lines closer to thenationalist movement and the associated role of the Goddess, the symbol-ism of land and country, and the concept of the motherland. She drawson the parallel between the emergence of idea of Bharat Mata and theanti-colonial nationalist movement, weaving in the rich range of Bengali

June McDaniel’s Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal

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literature, poetry and songs reminiscent of the period preceding the firstwar of independence.

Her chapter on the folk shaktism combines folk stories and interpreta-tions found across villages and tribal areas of West Bengal concerning thegoddess and her worship, her multiple temperaments, her dispensation ofsacred boons and punishments, telling stories much in the style of some con-temporary ethnographic works. The book is full of anecdotes and brief sto-ries, but where McDaniel stops short is in her omission of relevant anthropo-logical works and in neglecting to pursue the meanings behind theinformation she received. There are several ways to address the Goddess,through text, anecdote, observation, and through people’s own account ofwhat they do and understand. Her treatment of “the ideal wife Behula” orSitala the Goddess of children and diseases, or Manasha the Goddess ofSnakes, would have benefited from consideration of recent anthropologicalstudies, such as the works of Ralph Nicholas and Aditi Nath Sarkar.Furthermore, the meaning of the wrath, love, and fear of the GoddessManasha has been linked in anthropological literature to Bengali marriagerituals, elaborating the significance of iron bangles which married womenwear, in an almost exact replay of the Manasha myth. Additionally,McDaniel’s endeavor to rely on folk texts in elucidating the meanings of thegoddess Durga, at times reaching into remote villages in an attempt to gainwider information is commendable, but I was surprised by the omission ofAkos Ostor’s definitive work on the particularities of Durga, Shiva, andManasa, studies which combine rich anthropological data with history, tra-dition, and practice in the Mallabhum area where the worship is still widelypracticed. In these days of recognizing blurred boundaries, a question aris-es about the nature of the relations among disciplines. To what extentshould we draw on interdisciplinary approaches in considering a particularsubject? Not that every dimension of “ folk religion” ought to be coveredfrom history to sociology and economics, but where anthropologicalapproaches to the same subject exist in a close degree relevance, surely theydeserve at least a nod in their direction.

The book has its drawbacks, despite its impressive collection of literarymaterials, texts, and other “on the ground” data amassed for the study.McDaniel’s work will be cautiously read and used for courses in religious andarea studies, popular culture and cultural studies, and anthropology, offer-ing different yet parallel perspectives in studying local and historical mani-festations of popular Hinduism.