Item – Theses Canada

​
OCLC number
911182784
Link(s) to full text
LAC copy
Author
Sharma, Shital,
Title
A prestigious path to grace : class, modernity, and female religiosity in Pustimarg Vaisnavism
Degree
Ph. D. -- McGill University, 2014
Publisher
[Montreal] : McGill University Libraries, [2014]
Description
1 online resource
Notes
Thesis supervisor: Davesh Soneji (Supervisor).
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
"This dissertation explores the relationship between class formation, women's religious practices, and domesticity among the Pustimarg Vaisnav mercantile communities (baniyas) of Gujarat. It argues that in modern India, Pustimarg women's religious activities inform baniya class formation and respectability on the one hand, and constitute the domestic patronage of Pustimarg on the other. Women's social and religious practices thus come to be centrally implicated in the question of what it means to be a Pustimarg Vaisnav in the modern world. Using archival and textual sources, I begin by unpacking the social and economic histories of baniya communities in both pre-colonial and colonial contexts, and trace their emergence as Pustimarg's most prestigious patrons. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in emulation of Rajasthani nobility, baniyas publically displayed wealth and prestige through donative activities centered around both Pustimarg temple ritual (seva, "service"), and gifts offered to the Brahmin religious leaders of the tradition, the Gosvamis. As "class" begins to emerge as a discrete marker of status in colonial India, upper-caste Pustimarg women are positioned as vital actors in the production of family prestige and respectability within the domestic sphere. In this dissertation, I therefore focus on Pustimarg baniya negotiations with modernity and identify baniya men's concerns around sectarian identity as they come to be dramatized in nineteenth and early twentieth-century social reform movements centered upon women in the Bombay Presidency (including the well-known "Maharaj Libel Case" of 1862). This study also turns to traditional sources, such as Pustimarg hagiographic literature (vartas) and devotional songs composed by women in the dhol and garba genres, in order to understand the religious practices of women in these communities and their relationship to the production of prestige. My analysis of the vartas provides a sense of women's social roles and positions in the Pustimarg imagination, while women's performance genres provide an important counterpoint to the much-celebrated "official" liturgical music of Pustimarg temples (havelis). In the final chapter of the dissertation I draw on my ethnographic work to demonstrate how, in the contemporary context, the imbrication of material and religious cultures is seen through the performance of increasingly commodified styles of domestic ritual and through the consumption and display of religious commodities in the home. Recently, women from upper-class Pustimarg families have also begun taking lessons in what they regard as the "classical" style of temple or haveli music. All these processes, I argue, cast women as the producers, performers, and pedagogues of elite Pustimarg sectarian identities. The material expressions of their devotion in domestic contexts as well as women's religious practices - which includes performing seva daily, organizing religious gatherings in the home, and participating in temple music lessons - have reconstituted the home as a modern site of Pustimarg patronage."--
Other link(s)
digitool.Library.McGill.CA
digitool.library.mcgill.ca