Seeing the cover and title of the book Treasures of Lakshmi: The Goddess Who Gives by the accomplished authors and leading literary figures of our times Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal, one is at once intrigued and enthralled. The picture of the Goddess on the cover is not that of the conventional, perfectly etched and statuesque Lakshmi in a red sari sitting or standing on her lotus one is accustomed to see in calendars and pray before in paintings and idols. Instead, one sees an expressive, imposingly crowned, plump bust of the goddess, wearing Maharashtrian finery including the nath, who gazes at you with a half-smile of benediction, exuding power.
One is truly primed to unlock a treasure chest of the expected and least expected revelations; of the sacred alongside the poignantly human. One is stirred by the ancient sages’, including the great Shankaracharya’s sublime envisioning of her, even as she is with us in the modern age as part of what Malashri calls materiality and ‘brand rhetoric’; the beguiling stories that flow from the Ganga of ancestral memories to those stories dreamt up in our village huts by grandmothers in different parts of Bharatavarsha; the prayers and chants coming down from the Vedic age to aartis and verses sung by the everyday bhaktas and poets of this unique Sacred Feminine that Sri Lakshmi embodies.