appeared in classical contexts but in relatively subsidiary roles – for example,
as consorts, wives, adoptive mothers, and attendants in urban complexes of
the Gangetic basin. There was, of course, evidence of goddess worship in
agricultural settings from early times – from the Atharvavedic hymn of praise
to Pr.thvı ̄, and terra-cotta representations of fertility goddesses in the first
two millennia BCEto the iconography of the naked “squatting goddess” in
the Deccan by the first century CE. Now these disparate streams were
merging to propel the goddess into a place of supremacy she had not there-
tofore achieved. There appear to be several reasons for this development:
- The increased visibility of “folk” and tribal communities in areas that had
thereto not been fully integrated. Many of these communities were
worshiping goddesses of particular places, of natural powers (e.g., diseases)
or of particular families. 2) The propensity of kings and other would-be
patrons to incorporate such people into their domain by “co-opting” their
deities into the official cultus. Such was the case, for example, in Orissa
and in the Co ̄l
̄
a courts of South India, where the royal cult of S ́iva was given
a bride derived from the rural landscape. 3) The employment of brahmans
in the courts and in public contexts who were prepared to make “connec-
tions” (bandhu) – that is, to link the “new” deities to the legitimating older
ones. 4) The likelihood that goddesses became one strategy by which
Hinduism came to replace Buddhism in several settings. There is evidence,
for example, that shrines to the goddess were established occasionally
on the site of Buddhist pal.l.is(sacred places) – Bha ̄gavatı ̄ shrines in Kerala
are a case in point. These “replacements” were not necessarily arbitrary.
Goddesses could personify those attributes (prosperity, creativity, etc.)
deemed auspicious to vaidikaadherents just as female icons had come to
embody perfections and attributes within Buddhism. Further, the Buddhist
understanding of the world with its ambiguities and dis-ease could be
personified in the person of a goddess who represented the forces of nature
and the ambiguous, even hostile, powers of the world. Such may have been
the case with Durga ̄, emerging by the tenth century in Bengal, possibly
representing a Hindu personification of duh.kha, the Buddhist term for
the unsatisfactoriness of the world.^30 5) The increased visibility of tantrism,
especially in such places as Bengal, with its worship of the female form,
almost certainly lent impetus to the classicalization of a powerful goddess
figure. 6) Finally, one can identify a dialect of “self” and “other,” when
communities or kingdoms sought to differentiate or identify themselves
over against other communities or kingdoms. In such dialectics, a myth-
ology of militancy was often evoked – the “asuras” were the representations
of the “other guys”; in the mythological rhetoric of warfare, “our deity”
was more powerful than theirs. The great goddess was presented myth-
ologically as more powerful than those deities who preceded her. Among
112 The Post-classical Period