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Hillary Rodrigues, "The Supreme Refuge: Durgā's Transformation Into the Hindu Great Goddess" (SUNY Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
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Dr. Raj Bhakra
Welcome to the New Books Network hello and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Bhakra, and more importantly, I I have the pleasure of welcoming back to the podcast Dr. Hilary P. Rodrigs, who is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Lethbridge. We are speaking about a topic that is near and dear to both of our academic arts in his new brand new Sunni Hindu Studies series publication, the Supreme Durga's Transformation into the Hindu Great Goddess Hillary. Welcome back to the podcast.
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Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
Hi Raj, it's nice to be with you again.
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Dr. Raj Bhakra
Likewise. So you've got to tell us, you've got to tell us about the backstory. I mean, many of our listeners will know that you are a scholar of pretty much all things Durga. Some may not, but how what was the gestation of this book like?
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Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
Well, it really is a career long piece of work and as you as the title of the book says, this is volume one of a two volume study on Durga. So it is a kind of a bit of a massive project. And it all started way back when I began my PhD studies. I thought that Durga would be an interesting goddess to study and I began by looking at contemporary expressions of Durga worship. I kind of situated myself in Banaras and studied at the Durga temple there and so on. And actually alongside with that, I began to see that Durga Puja was a very significant expression of Durga worship and ended up doing a detailed study of the Durga Puja, which ended up in the appendix of my PhD dissertation. So while people often end up transforming the dissertation study into a book, I ended up over a period of many years fleshing out the appendix and publishing that as ritual worship of the Great Goddess. So that study on Durga was a study of the Durga Puja and I cannibalized some of the the work on Durga from the main thesis. So I Mean, my interest in Durga kind of continued and I go back to India and travel to other places looking at her cult. But what really kind of kickstarted a more focused interest was my involvement with that Navaratri studies group that I believe you were also very much a part of, that was sort of spearheaded by Uctre Huskin. And, you know, it raised so many fascinating questions. Of course, the focus there was on Navaratra Navratri, but there were allusions to historical facets of Durga worship and Vijayanagara and so on and so forth. So when the COVID crisis hit and I was more or less sort of seconded and at home to my. My desk, I just began to write. And I thought, let me take all that I know now and try to put this all together. I ended up writing a massive piece of work detailing all that I knew about Durga. But my contemporary work forced me to ask other questions, like when does she actually become the great goddess? And when does Durga first find itself kind of mentioned in the classical literature? And so on and so forth. Well, I'm making this a long story, perhaps too long, but in essence, I had asked and I kind of doggedly pursued the answer to questions. When I asked them, I was like, who has said this? Oh, really? Is that really true? Rather than repeat pieces of information that other scholars have, I began to kind of question the data and just to find out for myself if that was true or not, and ended up writing a massive volume which was in fact way too big for most publishers. I tried cutting it in half and it was still too long. I was extremely grateful that SUNY thought wise, after suitable reviews and so on, to decide to go ahead and publish these two volumes, which are typically longer than the average book. And you know how sometimes you're constrained by publisher demands and so on. So in a way, this book, I tried to divide it somewhat reasonably, the first half dealing more with a kind of a textual and iconography based study. While the second book, which we can talk about when that comes out perhaps at the end of this year, has more of an anthropological focus because I deal with Durga after she becomes kind of identified with the great Goddess and how her cult is expressed in other parts of the world, notably in Java and Bali and Nepal and South India. And then I kind of bring the story back to Benares and Quito, a focus there. So that's the second volume. This first volume really works through the textual sources trying to kind of correlate a chronology, in some sense of how Durga develops from Whatever she was a minor goddess, into being equated with Devi, the great goddess. That's essentially the book.
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Dr. Raj Bhakra
Yeah, that's fascinating. I think we will walk through, Walk the listeners through that journey, touching on, you know, maybe some little points in each chapter, because I think it's a really important, fascinating journey, you know, pan out big picture. We have. We have an ancient, well established, widespread culture, tradition or following of God as a she, and the traditions that is really the only living great goddess traditions on this level that I know of. And certainly at times, even theologically, philosophically, ideologically out there, even for Hinduism, which has a penchant, perhaps, for holding in pretty much everything. So we have this massive following of a great goddess figure. We have a text sort of crystallizes up. You talk a bit about that, but then there's bits and pieces and snippets, and this work is much needed doing. I think Sunni was both gracious and wise to not try to truncate it, because we don't have, believe it or not, we don't have this history of all things Durga. You know, there's. Oh, there's a Kinsley, there's often Kinsley's Hindu goddesses, and certainly there's materials here or there. But the fact that we don't have this history of all things Durga bespeaks, at least on one level, the absence of individuals who have spent decades studying all things Durga who may have that purview, because it's a sort of work that only someone with your exposure over time and interest in both live practice and text could possibly put together. So I think it's a brilliant initiative for the field and just an amazing capstone project. I would love to have the listeners learn what we know about origins may not be the correct term, but sort of the earliest whispers of or the earliest manifestations of this entity we now know as Durga.
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Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
Yes, well, thank you for that. With my contemporary studies, people just would refer to the Goddess as Ma or Devi and so on. And I said, well, who is she? Well, she's Durga. So by and large, the majority of scholarship tends to just equate Durga with Devi, and rightly so, because that has been the case for probably a thousand years or more. But. But I began to ask the question, well, hold it now. This word, this name, Durga, was this always Devi? Were they always one and the same? And so I started to say, no, at some point, a more minor goddess becomes identified with and equated to the great goddess Devi. And of course, the Devi Mahatmya. Is sort of a very important text in terms of crystallizing that identification. But the process actually happens earlier through which Durga starts to be progressively identified as Devi. You know, when I studied in Benares, almost nobody ever referred to the text as the Devi Mahatmya. They always called it the Durga Saptashati. In fact, that was the. But I deferred to the conventional scholarship because textually it is the Devi Mahatmya. And almost all scholarship refers to that text as the Devi Mahatmya, as opposed to the Durga Sapthi. But it's often called the Chandi or the Saptyashati. And it looks like it had that name going back to about the 13th century with Janeshwar, who referred to. He wrote a long expanded version of the Gita, and he said, oh, you know, originally The Gita is 700 verses, just like the Durga Sapthashati. So at any rate, I tried to look through the earliest sources and, you know, Thomas Colburn's work was very, very helpful in that regard. You find Durga appearing in some Vedic texts and so on, but not to a goddess. It really just refers to a difficult passage, sort of mountaintop and things that are difficult to traverse and so on. But in some later Vedic literature, you begin to see Durga emerge as a goddess. Now, some of this appears to be from my study, insertions into Vedic literature from a later period. But we can pretty much say that in terms of non insertions, you start getting the term Durga as a goddess appearing in some Dharma Shastras and then later in some Griha Sutras and so on, where she is worshipped as a goddess. In the Dharma Shastra literature, there are verses invoking a Durga Savitri or Gayatri, just a mantra really, to her, as a kind of a refuge of some sort, as a kind of a way of alleviating problems, etc. So the earliest stage, Durga actually emerges as a kind of a goddess who is mantracally invoked to help one get out of problems and difficulties and so on. I found that interesting and that became a theme that began to run through because I was struggling with the name Durga and coming up with translations and people have inaccessible and hard to access and so on and so forth. And the term for a fort is a Durga and fortress. And so it's like impenetrable and hard. You know, in my earlier efforts to translate the name effectively, I came up with the term formidable, thinking that, oh, that because she's powerful and so on and so forth. And I was never fully satisfied until finally it dawned on me that the the term refuge seems to be. They actually called her a refuge. Seems to be a more ideal translation for the term in that sense that it encapsulates what she is. Dur is difficult ga is to go through or pass passageway or something. But if you think about it, refuges of various sorts, whether it's a fortress, people run to a fortress, if they're being attacked, it's a refuge, it is hard to penetrate and get. Durga's abode is often some impenetrable jungle, sometimes a hermitage of a great sage that is a sort of a refuge for others. Even in the Devi Mahatmya you find that King Surata goes off into the middle of the jungle and there he finds this hermitage of Meda surrounded by wild animals and so on and so forth. So I found that refuge works really well as a theme and a term for translating the word Durga and what she actually means. Anyway, moving along with the history of looking at things after the Vedic sources, the early Vedic sources, I then turned to the so called hymns that are found in the epics. Now the epics do emerge after the Vedic period and so would be kind of the natural place to turn to. But there are three hymns in particular that Thomas Cockburn had sort of looked at. Two from the Mahabharata and one from the Hariwamsa, which I'm putting in the epic kind of period because it rightly belongs there. And mostly people consider these hymns to be late insertions into the epics, and rightly so. I believe that they are, except for one hymn, the first stratum of a hymn to Nidra, which doesn't mention Durga at all. The two other hymns, the Durga Stava and the Durga Stotra do mention Durga by name. So that was my interest and focus and I was a little puzzled thinking, okay, how does Durga appear as a goddess in this late Vedic period, around the first century of the Common Era, if she wasn't around and then why would she appear late? And some people would place those hymns even later than the Devi Mahatmya, which I with some other scholars now date a bit later, like the mid 8th century. And there was this strong idea that she's linked in a Vaiava context and develops out of a Vaiava context and so on. And in a way I part ways with some other scholars. I agree with the fact that different sectarian traditions are constantly equating Durga with their version of the she is a great goddess, the great goddess of, you know, in Vaishnavism but she's Lakshmi. And so she's actually subordinate to Vishnu. Oh, yeah, yeah, She's a great goddess, but she is Parvati and therefore kind of subordinate to Shiva. But the Devi Mahatmi articulates a vision of the Devi as supreme. And the general idea is that this series of minor goddesses gets amalgamated into a great goddess. I find that a little bit hard to accept or believe. And I propose that in fact, historically there is a current of great goddess worship going way back and also outside of India. And so I try to link those connections with goddesses like so on into this articulation of a vision that you find in the Devi Mahatmya. But I'm getting ahead of myself coming back to those epic hymns. Suddenly, and I think this is one of the things that I put forward in this book that's a little different, is that I suggest that the hymns should be separated from their framing verses because they're small verses that people have framed them for insertion into the epics. And those verses often tie her to Nidra and Vaishnava framework and so on. After all, the epics are somewhat. I mean, the Mahabharata and Hariwamsa are essentially vaiava, sort of an orientation. And so they do this with the Goddess. But if you separate those out. And the reason I did that is even looking at the Devi Mahatmya in my studies, it does have its own frame story and so on, with Medus and Surata and so on. So when they actually sing the praises to the Goddess and they worship her, they certainly aren't singing the portion of the hymn that includes their story in it and so on. I mean, there's that. But in ritual recitations of the Devi Mahatmya, there are now angas that are used, sandwiching the text on either side and so on. And people sometimes recite them all as if they're one, but they aren't necessarily that way historically. And so I thought, well, let me just try and look at these hymns separated from their framing verses. And so it makes for a little bit difficult reading because I have DSTV as Durga Stava, then dstv, which is with the framing of verses when I'm talking about them. But essentially what I found is a much better correlation between some of the early iconography and these hymns when they are separated from their framing verses. And I suggest, because the Harivamsa has a kind of a paean to Nidra and it replicates a line from the Durga Stava almost exactly, and people aren't sure which one came first. And since the hymns were often placed later, they placed the Harivamsa hymn first. But my suggestion is that the Durga Stava by itself probably predates or is around the same time as that early strata of the Hariwamsa. So that moves these hymns historically, chronologically to an earlier period. And if you are able to do that, then you find that the way the goddess is described, with attributes like a peacock feather banner and peacock feather bracelets and armlets, and fascinatingly divine diadem, begins to find correlations in some of the earliest iconography. So I keep that aside. I just deal with the hymns and what they show in terms of attributes. And then I turn to. So the third chapter, I begin to look at some of the early iconography and particularly some of those goddesses with weapon hairpins that are found in Chandra Ketugar and so on. And in this sense, the book is actually covering material. You know, Bihani Sarkara's wonderful book on Durga really covers the cult of Durga from the kind of Gupta period onward. And I'm looking at some of the earlier stuff because the rise of Durga predates that Gupta period. It's important there. Her book was a wonderful resource for me. It made me spend more time looking at inscriptional evidence and so on. So, yeah, what I began to find is in some of these early plaques, you've got goddesses with some uncanny attributes, like associations with the peacock and sometimes peacock feather fan. And there are some early pieces of evidence showing goddess with what looks like peacock bracelets and so on. And quite importantly, on some of the early terracotta plaques, you find the buffalo defeating goddess holding aloft something in two hands that earlier scholars had misidentified or couldn't clearly identify. They called it an iguana or piece of intestine, and so on and so forth. And what I argue and suggest is that it's probably this supreme diadem, a diadem that reflects that she is in fact the lord of deities, you know, the goddess, like the goddess of goddesses or something. A supreme Doris Srinivasana had rightly written that this was a symbol of self coronation. So what you have here is this goddess holding. So I then spend time reflecting on the diadem and how significant it is as a symbol of rulership and so on. What I'm able to do then in the subsequent chapter is make this correlation between the those epic hymns and what they say with some of her attributes and some of this early iconographic evidence. The plaques that show Durga holding aloft this unidentified item, which I argue is probably this diadem and peacock feather standard, which often was misidentified as a quiver or some other thing. So these two poorly identified or misidentified symbols, iconographically, I suggest those items that are referred to in these hymns, and they work well if the hymns are placed somewhat earlier. So I spent some time working on that. But it also feeds into thesis that I have at the end of this book in terms of the Goddess's sovereignty, her relationship to sovereignty, and her relationship in terms of sovereignty among the gods. Anyway, so after that, should I go on and move along with the search? So I do spend some time on this peacock feather standard and on the diadem. I then turn to some Gupta imagery, which again correlates well with some of that other stuff because it too contains the standard and the self coronation motif and so on. And we have some slightly better dating on some of those things, harving, Setudiagiri and so on. I then kind of take some time to talk about the term Maheshasur Mardini, because I get fascinated with this whole notion of crushing. The early images of Durga, terracotta plaques from Mathura and so on have her crushing the buffalo with her bare hands. And mardini means to crush, it does mean to kill. But really the literal translation is crusher of the buffalo demon as opposed to killer. And in the earliest text she's often a killer, Hantani and so on and so forth. So I was like, why is crushing so important? And why bare hands at first? And later she, you know, by the Gupta period, she's spearing the buffalo. So I spent some time exploring those motifs, the motifs of crushing with one's bare hands or ultimately stomping on the buffalo. And for this I turned to some Near Eastern Zoroastrian imagery where Zoroastrian priests and so on would crush and kill evil spirits with their bare hands, and then also once crushing with the feet is less polluting and so on. So I suggest that these may be some kind of motifs that get incorporated into the depiction as to why this. And I also look at the lion and all these other attributes. I try to look at some historical precedents for them and how they may have made their way into the Indian context, either pulled from within South Asian context or sometimes coming from abroad. And certainly with the Goddess Lion, I see a lot of resonances with the goddess Nana, who was a very important supreme goddess really, to the Kushanas, who had a major influence in India and the North. And sometimes, I think early scholarship has kind of, let's say, hesitated to look a little bit at influences from the near east and so on, being overly focused on South Asia for good reason. I mean, the postcolonial period, there's been a desire to sort of not talk too much about outside influences on. But the idea of outside and inside is a little silly when you consider how great a civilization India was and that it was having interactions from the Indus Valley period with kingdoms in Mesopotamia and so on. And that didn't really stop Alexander. I mean, those kings from the Achaemenian period and so on didn't not know about India. They tried to cross the Indus. My sense is that we have to look much more holistically at the question of the Goddess, her attributes and so on than to just be overly focused on the South Asian context. So after discussing the notion of crushing. And of course, I look at the Chandi Shataka, which is a very important literary text where it's all about the Goddess stomping on the Buffalo Demon and so on. So that motif is quite important there. And then I kind of break up the historical trajectory of the study somewhat by looking at the Devi Mahatmya, which I spent some time on. And then later I look at some puranas that I believe predate the Devi Mahatmya, like the old Skandha Purana, with a marvelous work that's been done by Yokochi and others in the Skandha Purana project, and also the Devi Purana and Varaha Purana. These, I believe, have stories of a Goddess defeating a Buffalo Demon or defeating Shumba and Shumba and so on. But these are, I think, historically earlier than the Devi Mahatmya. But I treat them after looking at the Devi Mahatmya because I think it's such an important text. So I wanted to look at that and then show later on. So I kind of break with that historical trajectory and then look at the Devi Mahatmya. And you, of course, know that text extremely well. But my focus throughout chapter is to try to look at where Durga appears as opposed to just Devi. Of course, I tell the tale and I'm interested in what the story is really trying to say about the Goddess. But in all cases, I'm trying to make that link because it's such an important one in terms of having the great Goddess Devi actually clearly identified as Durga. And in the Shumba Nishumba episode, the big long one, you know, the demon at one point, when she is, you know, why are you fighting? You know, you said you'd fight me alone. And in fact you've got all these other people, all these other goddesses fighting with you and stuff, and she pulls everything, you know, back into herself. And you know, that's this point he kind of, he calls her dorga. And so to have, you know what I mean, this term actually being used directly and so on in that context, these are some very key examples of where that fusion kind of takes place in a very effective and enduring way. Because of course, the Devi Mahatmya becomes such an important text, skillfully written, because it becomes the seminal text that is recited, recited out loud, continues to the present day, more than a thousand years later and so on. And so that's part of the rationale. That is why Durga gets identified most firmly as the great Goddess. And then I do conclude with a kind of odd thesis or an interesting one that I think might be provocative, and that is that the Devi Mahatmya is very skillful at reconciling a whole series of tensions. And I spend some time on blood sacrifice. But you notice that in the Devi Mahatmya, the king and the merchant, Samadhi, Suratta and Samadhi don't go out and kill a bunch of animals and offer it, they offer their own blood. So in a way the text is sort of suggesting that the highest form of offering or higher forms of offering is a kind of bit of self sacrifice to some extent rather than killing some other creatures. I think this is in response to critiques from Vaiava traditions, Buddhist traditions and so on. It moves in a direction that offers an alternative, which is not to say that animal sacrifice vanishes and so on, still very much part of Goddess worshiping tradition. But there is something that it offers. And I, I suggest also that in a way the thesis of this first Marga study is that Durga, when she was in this process of self coronation, was in a period where there was a lot of different gods like Shiva and Vishnu and so on, all vying for supremacy, including Skandha. I kind of make this argument as to why the Goddess surpasses Skandha in terms being the defeater of the Buffalo demon. My thesis is that at some point skillful, I think, deeply insightful shakta theologians decide, hey, let these gods fight it out among themselves for supremacy. They move the Goddess to a place of transcendent supremacy. So when the Devi defeats the various demons, as she does in the three episodes of the Devi Mahatmya, she doesn't go hey, I'm the greatest. I mean, she is. She says, yeah, I'm the greatest. But she then goes, okay, guys, I've defeated the demons. Now I'm going off into the transcendent primordium. Whereas where I hang out. And you guys are now restored back into your rightful places and you will get due worship. So in other words, she articulates a kind of a theology that is polytheistic. It supports a polytheism, the worship of many different gods each getting their due place in the heavens. Mahisha, like many other demons, claims supremacy. He drives the gods out of the heavens. And you have this motif with, you know, with Mazda in the Zoroastrian tradition. You have it tacitly with Buddhism where Buddhism comes on the scene and becomes kind of the supreme form. And you get this with Islam. You get this with the Christian influence later on and so on. So I kind of suggest that monotheistic systems are in tension with the diverse, tolerant polytheistic systems. And the goddess takes a role of being supreme but moving to a transcendent primordium and supporting a kind of polytheistic, pluralistic form of worship. So that's kind of an argument that I make. And as a result, those motifs of self coronation and so on the diadem disappear from her iconography and kind of the book sort of ends there. But a lot of these motifs will get picked up in the second volume. Have I gone still too long, boy?
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Dr. Raj Bhakra
Well, I'm sure that folks interested in all things Zorga are still listening, so not to worry. Yeah. So a lot of ideas here. Thank you for walking through the trajectory and your treatment of some of the sources. So this sort of idea at the end is an important idea. I mean, it's all very important, but sort of. I sort of live in more so in the world within the text. Although I do have some questions about the historical director. I'll ask in a moment. But this. See, it's a very, very different theology that the text is provided not because of the gender of the supreme deity being feminine but the very mode being a very different mode of power. I mean, it's sort of summed up fairly well by Coburn as. But I think it's deeper than that. Power is something the gods have. The power is something that she is. So when I think about it, I think of it as a sort of particle wave duality. The different particles, the particulars, the deities, they're all competing for which particularity should be at the apex of this hierarchical vision. And yet she represents something that's beyond that. She's sort of a wave that's part and parcel of them all and beyond them all. And I think you're absolutely right. Her rest state is in the primordium. She's there. She's sort of a metadivine figure that's mysterious and imminent and transcendent and beyond distinctions of sort of monotheism and polytheism. I think that's a really fascinating important articulation is in many ways I think it's the structural opposite of the project of Genesis, which is another majestic masculine vision, but it's a vision of sort of glorifying the apex, the sole apex versus sort of the oceanic expanse. So it's really, really interesting regarding the word refuge. I like that. I like the idea that a refuge is when you think of refuge, you know, all of the things we associate the word or the Goddess Durga with inaccessible, impenetrable on all registers that the refuge is almost describing that from the inside, from. From the other side. It's not that she's impa. She's impassable to those who would do you harm. So you're on the inside of the force.
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Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
You're on the ins are safe within this refuge. And the refuge is hard to get to look at old monasteries where they would be in a very difficult place to get to impenetrable jungles and so on and so forth. Once you're there, you are safe, you see. And part of what helped me to get this is looking at Buddhist texts because you think of the Buddhists go for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. And I found, ah, they criticize going for refuge into deep forests to like the places of Goddess worship are challenged by the Buddhist tradition of going for refuge in this metaphysical state of realization which Buddhism offers. And I thought how interesting that there has always been this tension between the blood sacrifice of Goddess traditions and so on versus the pacifistic Buddhist traditions. But one is a very worldly based kind of tradition that embraces the totality of manifest reality. The other one has a quality of transcendent abstraction or something with the Buddhist tradition, the self. And really. Yeah, so you're absolutely right in highlighting that aspect of the Goddess being this kind of refuge that you can go off to and find protection there. But it is hard to get to it once you are protected. It is hard to penetrate that.
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Dr. Raj Bhakra
Yes, it's both maybe difficult for one to attain that level or state or to seek that refuge. But more to the Point, it's impossible for those difficulties or those who do you harm. And I think this maps perfectly well onto the shifts and scholarship over the last 30 years regarding the sort of Saumya versus Ugra aspects of the Devi, where they're both very much there, but one can't fetishize. Meanwhile, me, without understanding that the Tigris is protecting your cubs. She doesn't come into being that way. She doesn't leave that way. That, that the wrath is episodic. And actually it's not seen as it's applauded because this, these are the soldiers, if you will, that are protecting your nation, your cause. This is the response of a mother protecting her young from those who would harm them. So it's really. One understands the ugra or the raudhra form of the goddess as sort of the outer shell. And then the saumya is the inner sanctum, much akin to the refuge versus the fort.
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Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
Right. Which is why they can talk about her as ma mother. But of course, as you mentioned, mother is fierce in protection of her children. So you have this combination of the two aspects, the ambivalent, which is why you can't talk about, as you had mentioned before, the idea of her transcending the duality of goddess of the tooth and goddess of the breast and so on. Yeah.
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Dr. Raj Bhakra
So let's sort of. There is no straight line. It's a web of. There's a web of. You know, the fact that this history is not a straight line, is a feature, not a bug, because the story of Durga is a web, not a straight line. But nevertheless, you know, if we're looking for an earliest instance of mention of a Goddess Durga, would you attribute that to the him in the Taitiri? Or how would you. If someone asks you what was the earliest mention in sort of Vedic thought of Durga, what would you say?
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Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
Oh, that's not easy too.
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Dr. Raj Bhakra
I know. Forgive me, Chamyatam.
- [42:01]
Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
Well, for sure, some of the earliest Dharma shastras have this Durga savitri sik, but we're not sure what it is, whether it truly is kind of a mantra, because some have suggested that it's really just. It means a verse of protection as opposed to a form of the Gayatri mantra that has Durga in it because the texts are kind of ambiguous to just say, oh, repeat the Durga for you know what I mean? So the word Durga appears as this hymnic utterance, but by the time of this text. So Timothy Lubin has studied, for instance, the Bodhayana, Gurha Sut Shastra. And there's ritual and worship to Durga as goddess. And so that's in his estimate, it's probably around the first century of the Common Era. So there are some. So as early as the third century B.C. you could say that Durga shows up as a goddess, but we can't be absolutely 100% sure that those aren't some insertions from a later period. We aren't absolutely sure what they are. But somewhere around that period, from between 3rd century BCE to the 1st century of the Common Era, you have Durga appearing as a goddess. And by the time she appears in that ritual text, she is a goddess who has all of these attributes of refuge and so on, which is why I feel a bit more confident at pulling those epic hymns to an earlier period without their frames, their frame verses. Yeah. And I'm not sure when they are attached into the epic. And that could have certainly happened at a much later period, certainly later than. But, but once you do that, once you see, ah, I can look at these hymns and pull them forward in time, it aligns with the fact that Durga has worshipped the goddess in this early period. That gets fairly early. But the attributes that she has don't seem to be attributes that we find later on yet these attributes are in sync with some of the early iconographic representations. And so now you get a nice alignment with those plaques, those early plaques of her either as a buffalo subduing goddess, of course, we get a goddess fused. The goddess with the hairpin weapons I suggest might be Kaushiki. This is just something I suggest as a possibility if you were to give her a name from existing names that we have in texts. I'm not saying that that's absolutely 100% the case because we don't know. But you get a fusion between Nidra, Kaushiki and Durga at some point, the buffalo slaying goddess and the, you know, the goddess of sleep and so on and so forth gets fused in that pre Gupta to Gupta period. And then you start getting Puranic articulations of the goddess killing the buffalo. But it isn't Durga always. And so then I was trying to really connect the dots between articulations of Durga because really, in a way what this book is doing is just using Durga as the focus and trying to thread the needle through the beads that show up off Durga along the way. And I was surprised that no one had done this before because it was like, ah, well, Durga's Devi and you know, so on and so forth. And so by just Being relentlessly focused on Durga. It provided a very interesting tactic in some sense. Yeah. To work through that material with some very interesting results.
- [46:18]
Dr. Raj Bhakra
So then, just for those listening, so the hymns that we see appended, interpolated, occurring in the. In the epics. When would you. And the listeners well, know that dating is quite hazardous in South Asia? And I don't just mean shoddy.com, i mean the dating of texts is quite a hazardous enterprise. And so. Ish. When might you place. Because there's a couple of dating innovations you do in your work. So when might you place those hymns?
- [46:50]
Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
I think that the Durga Stava, the hymn that Yudhishthira sings, you know, to the Goddess. Yeah, I think that that is slightly prior to the core of the Hari Vamsha. And the Hari Vamsha, because the Harivamsa has this. Oberyn calls it a hymn, but I don't call it a hymn because it's a hymn that Vishnu sings to Nidra and he goes, oh, you know, you will be great. You will be worshipped as this and you will be famous as that, and you will. Blah, blah. Well, a hymn of praise is not. You will be this, that, and the other. You know what I mean? It's like he's actually singing something about a goddess that already has those attributes and so on. It's like the, you know, it's the old. The trope of predicting something that already exists. Right. And one of those artificially antiquated.
- [47:55]
Dr. Raj Bhakra
Just so we're clear, they're pretending to be from an earlier time.
- [47:58]
Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
That's right. I mean, in a. It's like I am predicting all these great things for you, but with the text written, you know, it's good. Yeah, because, you know, already are being worshiped like that. And one of those verses in that Hari Vam show is identical to a verse in the Durga Stava. And so Colburn says, we don't know which is first, is it this one or that one? And since the hymns were typically read with their framing verses and placed quite late, the default position is that all those hymns were much later. But I suggest that that hymn may well predate the Harihamsha. And the Hariwamsa picks up that trope and writes, or it's circulating around the same time. Now, when is the Hari Vamsha's core written? And you have a problem there about dating the Harivamsha. But more and more scholars are placing it fairly close to the Mahabharata, meaning not that much later. And so when is the Mahabharata written, well, 2nd century BC to the 2nd century CE. I mean, hiltabidal place, between 0 and 150 of the common Era. But so let's put it there. Let's say for about the second century of the Common Era or a little earlier, you have these hymns already circulating. And I think that the Dugra Stotra is probably. It's hard to say because it picks up on some of the vaiava themes that you find later on. It seems to have some motifs that you find in the Bhagavad Gita. So then I try to look at when do we date the Gita somewhat? And again, I think Stotra may be a little later than the Stava. Later, probably. Then the Bhagavad Gita was composed and then these were all inserted at various times, appropriately into the epic. Although I don't go there and try to say when that insertion occurs, because it could have happened beyond our pay grade. Exactly. I mean, I tried my best in this to try and look at the facts as we know them, to try to make some informed decisions about certain things and judgments. And I hope that readers will at least have the facts that they're disposal when they read these books. And whether they align with my interpretation or not is entirely up to them. If they have some alternate perspective onto why my interpretations should be modified or something. That's entirely part of the idea of us, is to try and further the scholarship in this area. That's exactly what I wanted to do, was to really try and gather all the data and then go, you know what? But this is what I think based on what I'm looking at. And you're happy to think differently if you can come up with a cogent reason to convince me otherwise. And I'd be happy to change my opinion as well, but.
- [51:16]
Dr. Raj Bhakra
Absolutely. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the best books are beginnings. I mean, this is the first comprehensive history of Durga. Great. Fantastic. Similar with me, it was the first sort of literary read of the Devi Mahatmya. Great. I'm sure it needs correcting. I'm sure it's not perfect. Absolutely. But it's a start. It's a start. Right.
- [51:35]
Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
We hope that that's what will happen, is it'll inspire more thoughtful study and analysis. It's such a fascinating. The Goddess tradition in India is so utterly fascinating. I'm so indebted to my mentor, David Kinsley, who really turned me onto the subject. And he said, well, what do you want to do. I said, well, I think I'd like to study goddesses. And he said, what would you like to study? I said, I think Dorga. I kind of was fascinated by this beautiful goddess with a lion as her mount and many arms and I didn't know much about her. And he was like, really? Okay, that's good, go for it. And then in my conversations he was like, you know, I put Durga as a separate chapter in my book and I have a separate chapter on the Mahadevi. And that's all I thought, unusual. And he said, because, you know, I'm uncomfortable with equating the two just willy nilly or something. And so that's what kind of led to wanting to do the study. And Yokoji says the same thing. I mean her study of Kaushiki is like, hey, we need a study of Durga, you know, and it's not there. So this is probably the first study
- [52:54]
Dr. Raj Bhakra
that's 100% the first. I mean, as I said at the opening, it hasn't been done before and it needs to be done. But also there's so few people within academia who could do it or who would do it. So it's a very important piece. So let's quench this idea of. For the audience. It'll be really interesting to know this. So this sort of idea of Durga's transformation into the Hindu great gods, would you say this was the Devi Mahatmya? At some point before the Devi Mahatmya, what would you say?
- [53:25]
Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
You know, I think she was like, I think there were probably. Well, I think there were articulations that probably existed in shakta circles that probably said, look, Durga is the great goddess, but we don't have any hard evidence of this, you know, her self coronation with this divine diadem. All of those motifs are really going well. Who coronates themselves? I refer to Napoleon, that painting by David where he doesn't let the Pope put the item on him but he crowns himself emperor and so on. But Srinivasa, I mean, I've been thinking about this for some time, but she wrote a good book on self coronation motifs in Greek and all the way to the Indic period in India, these articulations of self coronation. But what I really suggest is that the self coronation is not just. It's like a very important. The diadem is a very important symbol of supremacy. I refer to Alexander and his use of the diadem and diadems through, you know, the Middle east and so on to show that it's not just a trivial. The thing is it's not a trivial symbol. It's an extremely important symbol. And so there was probably a Shakta tradition that was framing the Goddess as the supreme Goddess. And that Goddess was probably being called Durga along with other names. But Durga was one of them. I can't be sure. You know, she could have been jayavictory Vijaya, you know, think of Nike and coronation and so on. Name means victory. And so you got these correlations between the Goddess symbolizing victory and so on. So it's not easy to say. And then when I looked at the Puranic literature that predates the Devi Mahatmya there you don't really have a clear articulation of Durga as being the Goddess. The Goddess is called by some other name like irony or you know, and because it's framed in a different context, et cetera. So it pretty much is the Devi Mahatmya that then makes. Yeah, it says it out loud. But I don't think it just. The Devmya is not written out of a vacuum in my mind. And it's not just somebody going hey, let me just take all these different goddesses and string them all together and make them the great Goddess. I feel, and this is where I part ways that all of those trends to create a great goddess, but one that was subordinate to a male God play into another stream that is not clearly articulated. A great goddess tradition that actually was pre existent and that when we see traces of in those early Mahabharata hymns and in some of these other texts and so on and in the other goddess traditions like Nana and so on. But you know, and so then that great goddess tradition becomes a kind of a magnet for these other sectarian groups that are actually playing into the creation of a great Goddess who is the summation of all other gods because they're like, yeah, yeah, she is a great goddess, but she's actually kind of subordinate to our male deity and so on. And that also dovetails with, you know, the importance of the Goddess in empowering kings and her role in sovereignty and so on and so forth. So you have all of these factors that are at play in the construction of a great goddess as Durga. But it is not sufficient in my mind to explain the coming together and the creation of a great goddess. You have have a great goddess tradition that is finally articulated in no uncertain terms in the Devi Mahatmya that then manages very skillfully and successfully to bring all of those other strands together and tie them into one successful effective articulation but it didn't come out of just those separate strands. I feel I could be wrong and I'm going against conventional scholarship or some of the general by default scholarship that suggests she just comes out of this collection of individual goddesses.
- [58:19]
Dr. Raj Bhakra
Yeah, I mean, that's entirely resonant. I mean, in terms of what I know about the history of South Asia, but more importantly, what I sort of perceive about people and trends and cults and followings and religions is you don't just wake up one day and receive a text and be like, okay, I'm sold. I mean, clear. Clearly, clearly it's. It would be next impossible to me to not understand the Devi Mahatmya as to use Cockburn's words. But the same idea of crystallization of an extant tradition or a legitimization, you know, you know, people didn't start bringing evergreens in and decorating them just because of Christianity. That was happening for a long time before. Or it was made something. It was sort of canonized by another tradition. So it would be counter. Counter the ethos of patriarchy. It would be counter the temperament of human beings. There was no shortage of options. Whether you wanted various deities or philosophies or theologies in South Asia for this to have any legs. It must have been moving for a very long time. It just seems to me clear that this would be an extant tradition probably, but an ancient one that was fully assimilated, fully crystallized, fully articulated. A lot of sort of Sanskritic Brahmanism in the Devi Mahatma. But there's no way it would even have been commissioned, much less survive, much less be pan indic, unless it was a massive movement that became more and more difficult to sort of marginalize or ignore by the time of the day Maui, which brings me to one of your other not necessarily innovations, but I'm curious to hear more about. I'm curious for our listeners to hear more about what they can read in the book. But let's hear more about your placing and dating of the David Bahamia, if we may.
- [60:17]
Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
So, you know, my. I kind of stopped the tale when I was talking about Gupta imagery and correlating that, you know, with the diadem and the peacock banner and so on. But then I look at the iconography that emerges in the Pallava period with what I call the victorious goddess, where she's just standing atop a buffalo head. That becomes quite a. Quite popular with the cholas. And you also find this in Southeast Asia around the same period, maybe even earlier. But you also have With Apollavas, this narrative exposition developing in tandem with some Puranic accounts. So you get the shape shifting demon, so you have the, the very well known bar relief from Mamalapuram of the buffalo headed demon fighting the goddess on her lion and so on. So now you're getting kind of this narrative exposition which starts paralleling some Puranic accounts of the Devi's battle because prior to that you only have hymns worshipping as a killer of buffaloes or whatever it is, a buffalo demon and so on. But now you're actually getting a kind of shape shifting, half. Human and buffalo and so on, imagery emerging. But that's emerging in the seventh century. And what I look at is the earliest instant of the emergent demon where the buffalo's head is lopped off and the demon emerges and then is killed. And. And one of the earliest images, actually there are three images that you find at Kailasa temple. The one that's carved out of a single rock in Ellora where you've got some images that show a goddess killing buffalo demon that's changing with buffalo ears and so on. And then. And one of the images has the full blown relief of Durga riding lion and killing the buffalo with weapons and the buffalo's head is lopped off and so on. So it's almost exactly a kind of visual representation of Devi Mahatmya's description of what occurs. And that temple's carving was done by a Rashtrakuta king. The Rashtrakutas were probably the most important and most powerful dynasty kingdom in India at the time. And so my suggestion is that we can kind of probably place Devi Mahatmya's articulation and description of that killing at the same time. And so I placed that in the middle of the 8th century for reasons of just looking at some of the other iconographic depictions and their evolution, but then correlating them with the texts and when they sort of seem to emerge and so on. So I'm coming at that dating from a slightly different perspective than some other people, but I think some of the recent scholarship is doing the same thing, which is placing the Devi Mahatmya later than some people place it as early as the 5th and 6th century and so on. I'm putting it in the middle of the 8th century. So. But that's aligned with, I think. Exactly. Yeah. We know that there's hard evidence after that of a verse that's carved and so on later than that. So we kind of know that it probably was composed earlier than that period. But not. And even if you think of Pargiter, in his translation of the Markandea Purana, he said, well, I think the De Mark Mia is an insertion, but I'm not sure. But I could put it. He puts it potentially in that framework of time. Markandea is early Purano, some people dated at the 4th century and so on, but the Devi Mahatmya could well have been composed and started much later. Now, that doesn't mean that some of the hymns that are sung to the Goddess in it and so on aren't earlier. I didn't bother to try to look at that and see if some of the hymns that are sung to the Goddess are composed earlier. And some scholars have suggested that may be the case.
- [65:43]
Dr. Raj Bhakra
Yeah, I'm going to try to not get any nerdier. You and I can chat at some point just so our listeners can follow along, specialists in general, but I can't resist asking one question regarding. That may require just a teeny little bit of speculation. Given that the Devi Mahatmya AKA Chalipataha, whether it's in the narrative or liturgical register, given that it is ubiquitous, it's pan indic, I mean, there are no variants. Given that establishment as a text, what would you. I mean, when you conjecture a vehicle of that, if not sort of the Guptas or an empire, like, how do you have a sense of how that might have even happened? I may. This may be well beyond, you know, like the fact that the Devi Mahatmya is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. It's pen and dick. It doesn't have variations. It's, you know, in every premise of South Asia, particularly Navaratri. I mean, it's a widely celebrated text. I'm wondering now, how does. How does something become so pan indic and so stable? I mean, I find that to be a fascinating phenomenon, especially since it's such a new and unique vision, gets installed in every crevice. I mean, I have to look more carefully at the dating question. It's sort of, as I say, I typically do sort of narrative interpretations of the worlds within the text. But of course, this context is crucial. And I keep trying to sort out, when I think about it, what but an empire would give the reach required to establish it sort of with every and every crevice of South Asia. But that might be too simplistic of you as well.
- [67:35]
Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
I think there are various attempts along the way to have certain hymns gain notoriety or preference and so on. You know, the fact that you have these two hymns to Durga inserted into The Mahabharata at crucial times that kings are in duress, right? So you have means that by the time of the insertion, it was sort of important to insert a hymn to Durga because a sovereign would turn to a goddess for help or something in need. But like the Durga Stava for instance, Yudhishthir is hymn in my fieldwork experience is still used. People still recite that hymn. So it has endured the rugga stotra less. So I find it's. But that's just me and my work. It's been fairly wide ranging, but I haven't really focused exclusively on that question. And of course, when people sing the hymn with Durga Stava, they include the framing verses in it as part of the hymn and so on. But the Devi Mahatmya is very successful at. So quite often in these hymns they go, hey, hey, by the way, if you recite this hymn, the Goddess will come and help you and make sure you do it on the key occasions. And what were they doing in Vijayanagar? Were they singing during the Navami celebrations? And so on and so forth. But the Gita does this, right? It says, hey, look, you've got to recite us and do it in secret and so on. But the Devi Mahagmya says, you know this better perhaps than me, Raj, in the sense of. It says, look, for heaven's sakes, make sure you recite it on these key dates. Make sure you recite it. And you know what I mean, at least once a year. So it tells you when to recite it and how to recite it and so on and so forth, and to do it out loud, not in secret, even though it has its esoteric versions, you know, it is like you. And to this day, people are reciting it in stairwells and they're reciting it in temples and they're reciting it. So if you even just hearing the hymn has its benefits and so on and so forth. Now, I believe that. And part of my articulation is that it articulates a vision of the Goddess preserving and restoring the worship of the gods, a kind of a polytheistic, pluralistic tradition. So when Hindu kingdoms were being under assault, you could say, by monotheistic ideologies, there could have been a greater rise in the need to call upon the Goddess as a refuge to help preserve a brand of religious worship which was polytheistic and pluralistic as opposed to ideologies that might have not been. And so I think that in historical times, if you look at the. And I'm not trying to frame this as the coming of Islam versus Hinduism or something, but Islamic was a monotheistic tradition that stood in tension with polytheistic approaches. Think of all the temples, think of all the social norms, the priesthood, the Brahmanic traditions and so on that were all under threat when monotheistic systems overran them. So the rise of this threat, this monotheistic threat, whether it was in Zoroastrianism, whether it was with Buddhism, whether it was, you know, at different times, I think these may have been factors that played into the popularization of a call on the Goddess as a refuge. And the text that was most available and most effective at articulating this was in fact the Durga Saptashati, the Devi Mahatmya. And so this is what leads to its spread, its popularity and so on. And I kind of build on that in the second volume and show other examples of it, even though the Goddess has transformations. So the thesis that I put forward in this book doesn't just stay dead there, it kind of continues with the second volume and has some other examples to support some of the, my, my interpretations. So.
- [72:28]
Dr. Raj Bhakra
Well, that's an excellent teaser and probably a great place to, to pause for now. So thank you very much for appearing on the podcast today.
- [72:37]
Dr. Hilary P. Rodricks
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a delight actually talking and kind of reviving some memories of the book. I, I wish I had some of the, the details and data right at my fingertips too, but my mind has been elsewhere. I'd have to be reaching into the book and, and, and, and talking about it. But it's been a delight talking about it and to, to speak about Durga and Devi Mahatmya with you has been a genuine pleasure because I guess we could call ourselves Goddess Geeks, Those who geek out on Goddess traditions, especially a delight. So thank you very much.
- [73:23]
Dr. Raj Bhakra
You're very welcome. Thank you, Goddess Geek. I like it. I might use it in the future. Thank you. For those listening, we've been speaking with Dr. Hilary P. Rodrigs, who I have to mention was actually one of the fine members of my doctoral committee, who knows they finished a decade or so ago and has been instrumental in my education in my graduate studies. And it was kind enough to write the forward to my first book, the Goddess and the Myth, which was actually my dissertation. So many, many threads there are, you know, in Goddess geekery. So we've been speaking with Dr. Rodricks about his brand new Hindu Study Series Sindh publication, the Supreme Refuge. Durga's Transformation into the Hindu Great Goddess. Until next time, keep well, keep listening, keep reading and keep contemplating what it means to be a geek of the Goddess. Take.