Prof. Dr. Lawrence A. Babb
The Hindu goddess - that is, the goddess of the wider South Asian religious' world outside the ambit of Jainism in the strict sense - is a very complex figure. Many analysts have noted an apparent conflict between What seem to be two very different, even contradictory, sides of her nature. When she takes the form of such manifestations as Laksmi she embodies fertility, prosperity, and well-being. As Kali and in other similarly fearsome or martial forms, however, she is associated with bloodshed and death. As David Kinsley (1975) has pointed out, this is not necessarily a contradiction. When seen in the context of wider Hindu views about the nature of the cosmos, prosperity is destruction, and birth is death. It seems possible that these transformations of the goddess's character have something to do with marriage (see Babb 1975: 217-29; but for a contrary view see Erndl 1993). Her more combative forms are often represented as unmarried, or at least marriage is unstressed, whereas her more peaceful manifestations seem to be associated with the married state.
These issues emerge in an extremely interesting way in Harlan's materials. The lineage goddess has two sides or facets among the Rajputs. For men, she is a protectress of the lineage and the kingdom. For women, on the other hand, she is primarily a protector of the household. These two functions are associated with radically different images of the goddess: unmarried versus married. As household protectress she frequently appears to women in dreams or visions, and when she does she appears in the form of a "lovely suhagin," a married woman (Harlan 1992: 65). The battlefield protectress, often appearing in animal form, is directly associated with unmarried Durga, "whose very power derives from her status as a virgin unrestrained by male control" (ibid.: 71). As household protectress she is linked with the ideal of the pativrat, the dutiful wife; here her protective function is wifely and maternal. Indeed, to be a pativrat is to emulate the lineage goddess who is the archetypal protectress that an ideal wife should be.[1] Moreover, in the worship of the lineage goddess in her domestic manifestation, which is primarily a women's activity, fasting replaces blood sacrifice as the central ritual motif (ibid.: 86-88).[2]
The Rajput lineage goddess, moreover, is not merely an emblem of the identity of the group with which she is linked; she is an embodiment of that identity in a way that seems to involve a linkage of substance. As Harlan points out, fluid imagery is very important in this context. She is associated with the blood her warriors shed on the battlefield; when the king or warrior dies, his death is a sacrifice to her that "nourishes" (ibid.: 62) her. But other myths portray her as a milk-giver (ibid.: 55-56), an image that seems to come to the fore in the domestic contexts of her worship (ibid.: 69-70). In these fluid transactions the lineage goddess emerges as custodian not merely of a lineage's power and renown but of its very substance. In this connection, it is surely significant that, according to one version of the tale, when the people of Osiya undertook their ill-advised project of repairing the Mahavir image, the goddess's anger is manifested as a flow from the image of a lethal mixture of milk and blood, two powerful symbols seemingly associated with the essential nature of any lineage goddess, Rajput or Jain.
From the standpoint of the goddess, when Rajputs become Jains the issue is sacrifice. And what is at issue is not merely what the goddess eats, although that is an important aspect of the matter. More fundamentally, and as we see in Harlan's material, the very symbolism of the sacrifice itself is central to the notion of who Rajputs are. Rajputs are those who offer themselves on the battlefield as the goddess's sacrificial victims. The Navratri buffalo sacrifice resonates with this idea. Thus, when Rajputs become Jains the sacrifice must go. As in the Rajput myths - myths that associate the lineage goddess with a crucial event in the formation of a group and the establishment of its identity - the transformation of Camunda into Saciya Mata is associated with the formation of the Osval caste. Crucial to this event is Camunda's giving up of sacrificial victims. She becomes vegetarian, in parallel with the transformation of meat-eating Rajputs into Jains, which is central to the myth of Saciya Mata's temple.
However, in this transformation she does not lose all of her former functions or character. She remains a protectress, but she also seems to retain a certain vindictiveness. In Harlan's materials the lineage goddess can be punitive (ibid.: 68-69), punishing her devotees for their own good. The punishment is frequently imaged as a deprivation of fluids; cows dry up or her victims' bodies are dessicated by fever. Often she does this "because her worship has been neglected in some essential way. She warns that unless her worship is performed properly, various undesirable consequences will ensue" (ibid.). We see the same tendency in the myths of Saciya Mata's curse. In the tale of the Bahi Bhats her anger arises from the omission of an essential element of her ritual culture, namely animal sacrifice. In the myths of the Mahavir temple a Jainization of her bad temper has occurred; here her anger is not inspired by neglect of her ritual needs but by mistreatment of Mahavir's image.
It is of interest that, in an apparent inversion of the Rajput imagery, in the pujari s' tale Saciya Mata's punishment of the Osvals is manifested as too much fluid, not too little. This rather surprising reversal may have the function of preserving - within the context of an encompassing idea of the goddess's punitive inclinations - a clear distinction between Jain and Rajput goddesses.
But we must note, finally, that in a sense the Jain version of the Rajput lineage goddess is not really "transformed" at all, because even the Rajput lineage goddess has a "Jain" side to her character - that is, there is a side to her character of which Jains can approve. We see this in the distinction between the Rajput lineage goddess in her martial and pativrat forms - the lineage goddess of the mardana (men's quarters) versus the lineage goddess of the zanana (women's quarters) respectively. The Rajput lineage goddess does indeed possess an unwarrior-like form, which is her domestic manifestation. And it is surely significant that when the domestic lineage goddess is stressed (as is the case in women's worship), not only does the Navratri buffalo sacrifice recede into the background, but on the all-important occasion of Navratri the votive fast (vrat) moves to the fore (ibid.: 88).
The imagery of the domestication of Saciya Mata, I suggest, can be seen as an assertion of the domestic subtradition of Rajput lineage goddess worship, a subtradition with an ascetic bias. In a tale of Rajputs becoming Jains, it makes sense for sacrifice to be pushed aside, allowing asceticism to assume the central role in religious practice. Saciya Mata becomes the servant and protector of ascetic Lord Mahavir, which is emblematic of the fact that the fast, not blood sacrifice, has become the defining ritual act.
According to Harlan's persuasive analysis, the sati tradition acts, in part, to resolve contradictions involved in these images. When a warrior dies he has been sacrificed by his lineage goddess on the battlefield, but at the same time this represents a failure of the lineage goddess in her role as domestic protectress and also a failure of the wife as the lineage goddess's emulator, who protects her husband by means of the self-sacrifice expected of all pativrats. Resolution is achieved when the wife becomes a sati: "Symmetry is reestablished only through a further sacrifice, that of the wife on behalf of her husband" (1992: 224).
