Thank you. Thank you so much, Zubia, should we invite people to turn on their videos?
What do you think folks want to do that while you're doing that?
I will get my screen share up and I hope without any mishap.
There we go. I hope you can see that. OK, wonderful.
Thank you. So as Obama for the wonderful invitation and for the very warm introduction.
And thank you all from wherever you are zooming in.
It's a real pleasure.
And I'm really I was really delighted to receive this invitation from Zubia because it gives me an opportunity to try out some new ideas,
which is what seminars and forums like this are so wonderful for.
And in particular, as you can tell from the title of the talk,
I wanted to use this as an opportunity to reflect on what it has meant for me as a professional historian to
engage over the past couple of decades with a number of goddesses who have succeeded in capturing my imagination,
in disturbing the terms of my engagement with official archives, in troubling the categories of my analysis,
and in redirecting my work along parts that I had not envisioned before.
My unanticipated encounter with them compelling me to become, if you will, somewhat.
Godus aware this awareness, I have to say, Oh, let me see.
I'm having trouble. OK, this awareness, I would insist, does not imply a nostalgia for religious forms that would oppress cells and impede reason,
but rather a willingness to enter into productive assemblages with these goddesses and see where this willingness takes me.
You have to take my word. I had I did not in the beginning seek out these multi armed miracle working beings of my own accord.
Instead, they have erupted over and again in the most unexpected ways and places, demanding my attention and simply refusing to go away.
The title of my presentation, as I was telling my dear friend Margaret Bernau, who is here, pays homage,
of course, to Barney Cohen's wonderful essay, an anthropologist amongst historians, first published in 1962.
But as I offer these comments, I'm also inspired by Gayatri Spurlock's confession in reflecting on her own engagement
and the more surprising engagement with the goddess figure when she observed,
quote, I am no longer beset by the need to occlude the traces of the irreducibly autobiographical in cultural speculations of the sort.
So in that spirit, as I speak from the page of my autobiographical self as a professional historian,
I should also note that unlike scholars of religion who work on the Indian subcontinent,
especially feminist scholars of Hinduism for whom the goddess is indeed a staple,
the respectable card carrying historian of modern India typically maintains a discreet
distance from these sites of affective intensity that punctuate the Indic life world.
We keep them at bay on the margins of our disciplinary practise, invoking them in passing sometimes perhaps,
but then moving on all too quickly, almost as if we are embarrassed about what to do about them.
If we incorporate them more centrally into our so-called Objectivists narratives.
A secular subject like history faces certain problems in handling practises in which gods,
spirits of the supernatural have agency in the world, writes the page.
Chakrabarty, who I know is going to be speaking with you all in a couple weeks.
Secular history, he argues, are usually produced by ignoring the signs of divine presences.
Quote, Such histories represent a meeting of two systems of thought, one in which the world is ultimately that is,
in the final analysis disenchanted, and the other in which the humans are not the only meaningful agents for the purpose of writing history.
The first system, the secular one, translates the second into itself and quote What?
In other words, use a libertarian phrase. The discipline is essentially robbed of Gotz as its good professional adherents conform to what, Alfred?
Following Peterburg characterises as methodological heightism.
So what happens when the professional historian wilfully ceases to honour this great divide between the
disenchanted Wally and the supernatural extraordinary and instead allows the godly to power her narrative?
As I explore this question, I also consider how the goddess conspires and collaborates with enchanting labour
of the image to destabilise the certitudes of my prosaic social science analysis,
compelling me into the visual turn upon which many historians have,
somewhat reluctantly, I should say, embar visual work, in fact,
spurs the disciplinary historian into a realm not constituted exclusively by words and texts,
even as it reveals truths otherwise occluded by focussing entirely on the verb.
I make no case for the sovereignty of the visual image or the artwork.
On the contrary, a shuttling back and forth between the discursive and the figural is critical, I would argue, to the method of the image historian.
But this very act of shuttling has also convinced me of the capacity of the
image to operate as an agent with power over people who believe in that power.
To invoke Peterburg, visual history has enabled me to puncture the received narrative and to append recognised truths, propelling me in the process.
Interstate's of rapture that frequently accompanies new discoveries and revelations, if only momentarily,
before the disenchanting professional protocols of the discipline inevitably reassert themselves.
The goddess, as it were, seises that window of opportunity before the historicism imperative sets in and inserting
herself into my narrative begins to fundamentally transform its tenor and texture.
Even as they engage in this analysis, I am all too aware of the risk of opening the gates of the seemingly safe space of secular
history to this divine beings who also power the imaginary and politics of Hindu nationalism,
which has dug itself deep into the Indian democratic landscape with its own brand of illiberal enchantment, especially in the past decade and more.
As I don't have to remind this audience, I would insist nonetheless that the very act of historicism,
of putting the gods in their time and in their place is an important safeguard since fundamentalisms are by definition a. historical.
Nevertheless, I concede that this is a highly charged tightrope walk.
But I hope to convince you in the next half hour or so that it is worth it.
As I introduce you briefly to these extraordinary beings who have taken over my professional life the first to do so.
And I'm going to go into autobiographic using the autobiographical Vanel beginning of the beginning.
The first to do so was Mother Thumma referred to in Thumma in various ways,
but most frequently is Thamrin thig the language spoken by millions both in India and in the Diaspora, imagined as goddess, queen and mother.
She's a figure virtually unknown at the time, a life full before the late 19th century,
when she appeared in response to in response to various pressures of colonial modernity,
ranging from the pedagogical to the governmental in very many tantalising ways,
in prose, poetry and ultimately in pictures like several that you will see here in which cartographic objects such as
the map and the globe are used to locate her in the world in a manner that I would argue is highly modern.
Thig came into my life when I was a graduate, when I was in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1980s,
attempting to write a dissertation in the history department on the cultural politics of Tamil nationalism in 20th century India,
a respectable historical subject and a very lively one.
At that point, virtually nothing in the existing scholarship on the subject, then, especially in the English language,
had prepared me for this embodied figure who I soon began to encounter everywhere in arcane literary musings,
in mystical religious verses, in the populist poetry of the street, or almost all in fumer, and also in pictures such as these.
If following the political theorist Jean Bennett, we agree that to be enchanted is to be simultaneously transfixed in wonder or excuse me,
simultaneously transfixed in wonder and transported by sense to be caught up and carried away,
that retie was certainly such an enchanted entity for those who sang and wrote about her and drew and painted her in very many different ways,
but almost always varying about the allure of the sacred signified most frequently by the halo and by the by for arms and most nonhuman way of being.
You will agree. She was, however, curiously absent in any form in the published and unpublished government documents in the
official state archives that historians of colonial and post-colonial India typically turn to,
in fact, begin with. And yet, whenever I left the safe space of the familiar official archives with its privileging
of the English language and of prosaic narratives and read Tamil poetry and song,
I frequently felt as if I was in what Philip Fisher has called a moment of pure presence,
quote, thoughts, but also limbs are brought to rest even as the senses continue to operate.
Indeed, in high gear, you notice new colours discern details previously ignored here.
Extraordinary sounds as familiar. Landscapes or landscapes of scents sharpen and intensify.
End quote. In other words, the contours of what I was so easily characterising in prosaic social science languages,
Tamil nationalism began to blur and to take on other shapes and forms.
Before long, I found myself abandoning the very framework of nationalism and identity politics with which I start
had started several years earlier and under whose mandate my doctoral dissertation did get written,
but which I now found too inadequate to capture the array of passionate attachments between the defied feminised and embodied language,
a site of wondrous intensity and it's enthralled speakers.
So I went on to develop a new analytica of Tamil devotional Thommo Patra, around which eventually my first book came to be written,
albeit in the prosaic language of social science discourse and in English,
but nevertheless now considerably leavened by the enchanting presence of the goddess in my narrator.
I have come to see in retrospect that heeding the call of thunder thigh enabled me to
respond to historian Pressingly Dworaczyk provocation to rescue history from the nation.
In fact, perhaps even to hear that provocation entered the page Chakrabarty injunction not
to write the history of other parts of the world as an already known history.
Something which has happened already happened elsewhere and which is to be reproduced with local content.
Ironically, then, it is my entanglement with this goddess who appears, by all accounts, is a throwback to a timeless past,
which pushed me to begin engaging with one of the most productive of tones in history writing in the subcontinent,
namely the post-colonial, with its emphasis on allowing the unassimilable,
the untranslatable and the different to reverberate through the empty, homogenous and resolutely godless time of disciplinary history.
My second protagonist is the much more well-known figure of mother India, also known as part of the Indian National Territory,
also emerging from the late 19th century like Bamuthi as a goddess, queen and mother.
This is also a figure that I had not set out to write about at all at first,
my project and instead been conceived very much in response to the spatial turn in the social sciences and to the rise of
what has been called geo humanities to focus on the formation of cartographic culture in colonial and post-colonial India.
When, however, I began to look at and for maps of India from the early 20th century outside the official archives of the state,
it was soon apparent that the territory called India in colonial maps from the late
18th century or so onwards and laid out as empty cartographic space within the
gridded frame of a network of latitude and longitude was also otherwise imagined as
the body of modern India and gloriously pictured in all manner of visual media,
ranging from oils and acrylics to chromatographs and even cinema.
These are the products of the visual labours of artists who I have called Barefoot Cartographer's,
even with no obvious training in the use of maps and the signs of their production or that or the aesthetics of their creation.
These artists grab specialised artefact, one of the most prised innovations of the British Empire,
and dislodge it from its official circles of circulation and use and put it to
effective purposes and projects that exceed those of science or of the state.
So here are some of the ways in which Indians were introduced to the figure of Mother India,
especially those who did not go to school or take geography lessons in the company map of India in the company of modern India.
She's either occupying and filling up the map or she's merging partially with it, or she's purged, seated or standing on it.
And most scandalous of all, she dispenses with it entirely and comes to stand in herself for the Jewish body of India.
Ironically, but not altogether surprising, given what we now concede about modern science's capacity to also generate new wonders,
even ecstatic enchantment, the mathematics to map of India,
the proud artefact of a secular colonising state and its sciences is in fact the
essential guarantor of mother India's novel persona as deti of national territory.
The map is indeed the very ground on which she appears and its presence.
Sure. So the distinctive identity enabling her to not be readily confused with or mistaken for other ancestral goddesses like Durga,
on whom she's clearly but not exclusively modern. And yet in being hijacked for the cause of the goddess,
the secular scientific map is also anthropomorphised its abstract space filled with the sensuous, feminine and quite Hindu presence of mother India.
In other words, one kind of enchantment is supplemented by another through the work of the barefoot cartographer.
So in this manner, the goddess once again interrupted my disciplined pursuits and put pressure on a good
social scientific question that I had been asking cued by my reading of Benedict Anderson,
25 in each school, and a whole host of insightful scholars of cartographic science, namely, why does the nation long for cartographic form?
The choreographed figure of Mother India asserted itself to remind me that this yearning for freedom does not
only take recourse to abstract mathematics reasoning that undergirds the sciences of cartography and geography,
but it was also radically supplemented in 20th century India by the anthropomorphic, the sacro and the maternal.
And yet being cast in the company of the goddess is not without considerable risk, even to the point of threat to one's life and limb,
as also witnessed in the late career of Moqbel, Fida Hussein, India's most famous modernist artist,
one of whose paintings on Mother India you see on your screen.
Muslim, though he might have been by both, Hussein was drawn from early on to the plethora of Hindu deities,
especially goddesses who he painted on thousands of canvases with great artistic acumen, but also in a spirit of exacting,
ecstatic abandon, not dissimilar to the love felt by the buttocks or the devotee for a chosen DETI celebrated in the
decades after Indian independence as exemplary of India's much vaunted pluralism and secularism.
These canvases return to haunt the artist in darker times, the very presence of the goddess on their painted surface,
making him vulnerable to attacks from a resurgent Hindu nationalism with its own claims on the figure of Barat mother.
This was especially the case when in 2005 that Godus made an insistent appearance in the work you see before you as a nude body in pain,
the names of various Indian cities scattered across her torso with the words Bhopal
and Gujarat sites of industrial and communal genocide etched on her bare breasts.
The resulting furore, as many of you may know,
sent the 90 year old artists into self-imposed exile from the country of his
birth work and passions never to return until his death in London in June 2011.
But it also brought Hussein a household name in the India I grew up in, into my professional orbit again in a manner that I had never anticipated,
compelling me to insert his images into a tradition that has accumulated over the past century and more around the hallowed figure of modern India,
but a tradition from which the work of Muslim artists like him have been radically cast out.
Once again, the goddess had intervened to remind me that the historian of every generation has to rise and meet the obligation, even at great risk,
to their own life and labour to recover the voices of past sufferers and therefore
provide them with some small measure of secular salvation to invoke the.
Here is what the Benyamin also writing at the moment of great peril to his personal life and, of course, world history.
Indeed, Hussein's travails at the hands of ill I'm sorry, travails at the hands of illiberal forces caution us from assuming that Goddess's,
however enchanted they might seem to have had an easy journey through India's complex secular modernity.
Their anthropomorphic sovereignty left unchallenged the mixed fortunes of one ancient goddess whose origins,
unlike birthmothers or thunder thighs, stretch way back into the distant beginnings of religious life in the region is a case in point.
I speak of the divine being variously known in Sanskrit and other Indian languages as spirit.
We who they be or rue motha our earth imagined as an embodied female whose existence in Indic
imagination has been documented from the earliest known Sanskrit texts in premodern art practises.
She has been especially manifest in the context of a rescue from the clutches of a cosmic demon by vadas,
the BORGEAUD and third incarnation of the Peranich Super Deity.
This new. Although there is considerable variation in how she's visualised across various media as indeed in how her rescue is imagined,
more often than not it is cast as a beautiful, demure female, obviously in all of the men's male animal God who is her saviour.
So in contrast to the fierce mother goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, she's typically not multi limned.
She's more humanoid than divine, which may account for some of how her fate unfolds in modernity.
Fast forward to the closing years of the 19th century and you can see the dramatic transformation
in her representation when her sensuous female presence is displaced by another enchanted image,
that of the Earth as the perfect sphere of scientific modernity.
In fact, over the course of the 20th century into the present,
this is the standard manner in which vast cosmic rescue mission is invariably visualised across numerous media,
even in paintings and statues in context and contemporary temples.
So sweeping is the displacement of the Feministe Earth by the inanimate spherical globe of scientific cartography.
On the one hand, this is not surprising for us,
I have documented under the force of what I have characterised as pedagogic modernity in British India,
the terrestrial globe began to circulate an ever widening circles as a proxy
for our planet and the material stand-in for what I have called modern earth.
And yet, as I discovered in the course of my archival research, once again,
when I left the frame of the official archives and went outside the context of colonial schools and educational missions, the Globe,
centred on the map of India,
was also put to the service of transforming Hinduism's many deities into Indian boards as they came to be visualised sitting or standing on it,
holding it in their hands or simply placed in their company.
As we see in this beautiful contemporary painting by Mesilla artist Shalini Kumari, where the goddess and the globe fuse into each other.
Similarly, saw in a poster printed soon after Indian independence at the time when Prime
Minister Nehru had firmly committed India to a path of scientific modernity.
Indeed, if we are to go by the title of the print, the viewer is called upon to see the Gridded Globe itself as Abu Dhabi or Goddess Earth.
It is a strategic ambiguity at play here.
So it seems to be that on the face of it, Hindu gods are once again prevailed in a modernising, secularising India with the end,
with the aid and alliance of the very instruments of secular science that ought to have banished them in the name of secularism.
So just as the map of India distinguishes Mother India from a whole host of other goddesses, the terrestrial globe,
the PRISE product of modern science enables poetry to also carve out a distinctive
look for herself so she cannot be confused with the generic Hindu goddess.
And yet this has not come without a cost, as we saw in the way the Globe displays us,
are completely in some context or as we see in this image of the controversial Tamil politician,
H.R. Raja, trying to combat global warming one hot summer in Chennai by pouring water or a mounted school globe.
So even as pretty female form has to concede to return metal or plastic sphere, it is worth noting.
And Rajah's action, the transfer of rights and rituals from the SAPOL body to the secular object placed on a lotus shaped pedestal,
no less so due reverence has had to resort to some unexpected Salvationist strategies in the time of modern earth.
So having been exposed,
that's just such surprising encounters and unexpected appearances with these more than human beings from the other side of the secular divide,
so to speak. One might say that the ground was well prepared for me to be a recipient to the hail of yet another goddess.
And that's exactly what happened in October 2006. So here she is in all her glory.
A brand new goddess generated on a computer screen in New Delhi and offered to the Dalitz of India as their salvation from centuries of caste,
Hindu oppression. She takes the form, as you can see here, the familiar Statue of Liberty, but relocated now to a new home.
The map of India, its critical western, northern and eastern boundaries all undone.
Her formal name, as you can see, is English, the Dalit goddess, but since her birth,
precisely on October 25th, 2006, on the two hundred and sixth birthday of Thomas McColley,
the colonial administrator and Victorian historian was most associated with the pedagogical ascendancy of English in British India.
She also came to be known the English, the Dalit goddess in Hindi as ungrazed of literally English goddess and Delamare, literally the Dalit mother.
She's a product of the imagination of Delhi based Dalit men, the artist Shanti's Roubaud,
and especially the journalist and public intellectual Chandra upon Prasad starting in 2004, but especially from 2006,
Prasad spearheaded for a few years an intriguing or the short lived campaign
to change the very terms of recognition for his fellow Dalitz by proposing
that English be the sole language and that his fellow Democrats should resolutely turn their backs on the cost saturated spoken languages of India.
As was the case with smoothy and mother India, the entry of English, the ballot Godus into my professional life,
compelled me to begin asking new questions, this time about the Dalhart relationship to Indian languages,
something that I had not considered at all in my early career,
and the Dalit relationship to Indian nations space that is totally occluded in my work on mother India.
Once again, a goddess figure manifested itself to interrupt my ways of thinking,
create trouble for my past arguments, and redirect the flow of my work in new, productive ways.
So for these reasons,
I have not been persuaded to dismiss Prasad's short lived project as a clever attention getting gimmick or a performative access,
as some critics will want to do.
In their mind, mimetic capture of such an iconic image from from New York all the way to northern India from their location there.
I want to underscore bold and Prasad's conspicuous refusal of markers that are visibly identifiable with the Indic universe,
especially a Hindu Sanskrit symbolic word.
This is what sets apart the iconography of the ballot baby from those fashioned for thigh or about that matter.
There are few subterfuges of antiquity at work here, to borrow a phrase from political theorists, should be the coverage.
Everything in this body scape, with the singular exception of the Buddhist spoked,
which is largely novel to the iconographic landscape of modern India and is a product of its recent experience of modernity.
The fountain pen, the floppy hat, the computer monitor, even the map of India.
The Dalit intellectual Gopal Guru once wrote, quote, Ballots have no nostalgia,
what they remember is only the history of humiliation and exploitation, end quote.
In an invitation letter that Brassard sent out to commemorate the two thousand nine English day, he declared, quote,
We will deactivates our roots based preferences caste, language, religion, culture, food, habits and lifestyle.
We will realise that nostalgia is a sick psychological weapon of the dominant.
For at least a few hours, we will sign off from the wisdom that we have never asked for and put.
So this critical, anti nostalgic nostalgia might well be the signature sentiment animating this particular Dalhart visual politics,
a politics that does not have to bear the burden of maintaining authenticity,
purity and a commitment to a healthier parts that are essential to uppercuts status.
Paradoxically, the historically oppressed Estancia Elia reminds us, have agreed to freedom to choose new symbols in the new global age,
since they pretty much not invested in a part in a past that has oppressed them.
So does this particular ballot immersion in a politics of what Aditya Nigam has called the here and the now free,
the followers of gender bound for from the clutches of what anthropologist Jill Reese and Urmila Mohun have called veneration nation,
the recursive culture of adulate practises and aesthetics that have acutely that
they have acutely identified as coursing through the long haul of India's history.
And that is especially visible in the charged social political movements around the Murti and Borith.
Martha, the answer is not all that straightforward.
In some of his writings, Brassard has clearly assigned the English goddess an important, performative,
even ritual role that is revealing of his larger aspirations regarding the future place of English in India, especially Delyth, India.
So he calls upon Dalit parents to show an image of the goddess English for a minute, as he puts it, to born Dalit infants.
He then advises, and I'm quoting from this very long poem that is there on this poster that he has composed.
But this is the verse I wanted to draw your attention to. OK, go ahead.
Lean toward the baby, lean poetically, reach out the years first the left you whisper, now a, b, c, d, turn to the right.
Whisper one, two, three, four.
Enthralled God, English has embraced the baby.
On the 30th of April 2010, the foundation stone for a new temple to the goddess English was laid in the school
yard in Bunkerville Lockin Precursory District in Eastern with the British,
a village of about 8000 souls, about 47 percent.
The list, in the words of journalist is on and who attended the ceremony, quote,
The chief priest was the suit clad children of the mantra chanted A, B, C, d.
After a few speeches in Hindi emphasising the need for English amongst ballots and other oppressed groups,
a 30 inch bronze idol was installed and a song composed by teachers of the school sold over the din London say sheltered i.e. and ungrazed.
Dave Maiya computer Valdimir. He and grazi David Mia Hamm supported David Miia junkie David Maya.
She hails from London. This gorgeous English. She reigns over computers, hail goddess English.
She's everybody's goddess. She's goddess of the people the world over.
In my own discussions with children born on this project, on this event,
he noted that large numbers of Dalit women who attended the event are immediately translated his English,
the Dalit goddess into ungrazed baby Maya, and even started to offer worship as we see in these some of these photographs from the moment.
So I want to conclude by turning to the politics of affective embodiment that lies at the heart
of India as veneration nation and the pressure that puts on me as a professional historian,
even while I walk the tightrope that I spoke of earlier, relentlessly,
historicism these figures as I go about my work, but also injecting the enchanted into my historical practise.
In his autobiography, The Man Who would go on to become independent,
India's first prime minister famously worried over his fellow citizens tendency to
anthropomorphise a tendency which he put down to the force of habit and early associations.
This was clearly something that Needle hoped we would get over in March forward on the path of scientific and secular socialism,
guided by the spectral and formless spirit of the nation, quote, Often, as I look at this word, I have a sense of mysteries, of unknown depths.
What the mysterious is, I do not know. I do not call it God because God has come to mean much that I do not believe in.
I find myself incapable of thinking of ADT or of any unknown supreme power in anthropomorphic terms,
and that the fact that many people think so is continually a source of surprise to me and quote.
Many of us who came of age in Peruvian, Indian, that certainly includes me, followed our first prime minister in our state of bemuse,
suspicion and even hostility towards the anthropomorphic, the credulous and the idolatrous.
And in our efforts to estrange ourselves from these in our own abstracted visions of a secular, democratic, socialist India.
If historians are the paradigmatic narrators of such a secular socialist nation,
no wonder then that the histories that we are trying to write fends off the agency of the Godly
and the more than the human orifice translated into the prosaic language of social science,
as I have already noted.
And yet, paradoxically, it is by becoming a professional academic that I've had to contend with and cohabit with some of these wondrous beings,
the Northern European and citizen or secular historian would naturally wish for a court press themselves upon me in ever proliferating ways.
The philosopher of science, Bruno La Tour,
has most insistently reminded us that we live in times in which we are witness to a fabulous population of new images,
fresh icons, rejuvenated mediators, greater flows of media, more powerful ideas, stronger ideals.
These modern goddesses who have entered my professional life are such strong ridi idols
in whose mediated presence I have simultaneously felt both caught up and carried away,
experiencing a pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and a more uncanny feeling
of being disrupted or torn out of my default sensory psychic intellectual disposition.
This, Jane Bennett tells me, is the overall effect of worldly enchantment.
Quote, Enchantment is something that we encounter that hits us.
But it is also comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies.
Such a comportment, she argues, enables us to develop an affective attachment to this world.
It is an ethical aspiration, indeed critical obligation, which requires bodily movements and space mobilisations of heat and energy,
a series of choreographed gestures, a distinctive assemblage of affective propulsion.
It is a comportment that prohibits us from slipping into the banal and the humdrum or worse lapsing into indifference and complacency,
refusing to heed the need for secular salvation or calls for social justice.
In Bennett's words, quote, The wager is that some small but irreducible extent,
one must be enamoured with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order
to be capable of donating some of one's scarce mortal resources to the service of others.
End quote. And so I have come to believe that history writing itself can and should be a deliberate strategy for such effective propulsion or ethical,
worldly enchantment, of which no one, however hard-bitten she or he may be, need feel ashamed, quote,
All we need to do is to immerse yourself in the epiphanies of form taking place before our eyes and quote.
In this call to immerse myself in the epiphany of form,
I hear the hail of the mother goddess who over the long course of the subcontinent's history originating
in the valley of the Indus in the third millennium B.C. has been something of a scandal herself,
fierce, volatile, unpredictable, even becoming a weapon in the hands of illiberal forces, as we have seen with the travails of Emma Forseen,
but also playful, mischievous, compassionate and alert to the pleas of the disenfranchised, the marginal and the subaltern.
As we have seen in the project of children of not least my entanglements with these diverse goddesses have taught me to seriously question
my opening premise cute by influential social theory that modernity ushers in the inevitable and necessary disenchantment of the world.
Instead, what I have learnt to recognise is that the enchanted figure of the goddess in all its complexity
contends with rivalling regimes of enchantment with their own proclivities and passions,
including those produced by being engaged in the work of worldly historical scholarship, which, too, has frequently held me spellbound and enthralled,
prohibiting me from lapsing into indifference, holding out the promise of secular salvation in the service of others.
As I bring my talk to a close, I cannot but help observing that just when I thought I was done with Goddess's, I have been proven wrong yet again.
As the world came to a standstill literally in the early months of 2020 with the arrival of covid-19 in our midst.
In India, the spread of the novel coronavirus also precipitated the arrival of a new goddess in the midst of its citizenry, or to be more accurate.
She's the adaptation of a recent goddess to the current moment as mother,
India takes on a completely new job as the slayer of disease and a protector against a pandemic.
My colleague and friend Ravinder called and I went off.
We had to on a hot pursuit of this new avatar in a paper we recently published from which I'm sharing some of these images on the slide.
Her iconography, as you can tell, is still very unstable, with elements borrowed from the old, the near new and the entirely novel.
As with her prototype, the new goddess too has a votaries were all too willing to appropriate for an illiberal Hindu nationalist cause,
particularly dangerous at a time when the party in power is apparently battling.
The virus is also a Hindu nationalist, but she has also drawn our attention to the role of the essential worker in hospitals and streets.
Most importantly, in striking contrast to the ancestral disease, the Dave Davies of the Indian landscape.
The new goddess is not the defaecation of covid-19, but a warrior summoned to destroy the disease.
So I said, draw my presentation to applause, I leave you with some of these images amongst several others,
that may well be harbingers of more to come if I have learnt to know my goddesses.
Well, thank you.