Grounding Gender and Religious Histories

Aloka Parasher Sen’s latest collection brings together seven essays dealing with gender and religion, almost all of which were previously published, and have been revised for inclusion in this volume. Taken collectively, the volume is a three-pronged history of the intersections of gender and religion in local contexts. Parasher Sen’s stated intent is to trace how women subscribed to and broke out of the prescriptive norms that were laid out for them and to generally explore how religious ideas shaped gender relations in early India, while trying to bring in the particularities of local history in all this (p. xviii). The spotlight on the region—here the Deccan and its sub-localities—is intended to balance out the metanarratives to do with gender in early India and to offer a more realistic and empirically grounded picture. In doing so, Parasher Sen is acutely aware of the limitations of her sources, which, as she points out, are often pan-Indian and have very little to say about the region. This she hopes to redress by bringing in archaeological, epigraphical and art historical materials, with variable results.