In Reciting the Goddess: Narratives of Place and the Making of Hinduism in Nepal, Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz illuminates the “powerful ways in which people, place, and literature intersect” (p. 206) in the Nepali cult of the goddess Svasthānī Devī, whose name means “goddess of one's own place.” Combining textual criticism with art historical and ethnographic methods, Birkenholtz cogently contends that the Svasthānī tradition has survived the major sociopolitical and religious developments of the last five centuries largely by absorbing and adapting narratives of place accommodating to both local and translocal visions of a “Hindu Nepal.”
In the first chapter, Birkenholtz introduces the ritual observations (vrat) and narratives (kathā) of the Svasthānīvratakathā (SVK), or “Story of the Ritual Vow to the Goddess Svasthānī.” Despite originating among the Newar people indigenous to the Kathmandu Valley, the Svasthānī tradition also assimilated the more regional voices of their high-caste, hill Hindu, or Parbatiyā, neighbors. According to Birkenholtz, this coalescing of Newar and Parbatiyā currents significantly influenced Svasthānī's iconographic, linguistic, and literary evolution.
Chapter 2 examines Svasthānī's iconography. In her earliest sculptural debut, Svasthānī appeared as Pārvatī, the cosmic consort of a universal Śiva. However, by the nineteenth century, manuscript illuminations began to depict her as a solo deity, often surrounded by the eight tantric mother goddesses. Birkenholtz asserts that this iconographic ambiguity is, in large part, what makes Svasthānī so accessible to different communities (p. 75). Although Svasthānī's appearance became progressively more tantric and Newar, the remainder of the book documents the SVK's inverse trajectory as it increasingly conformed to Parbatiyā concerns.
Chapter 3 surveys the SVK's linguistic and literary history. Here, Birkenholtz skillfully navigates Nepal's “linguistic triangle” (p. 23) of Sanskrit, Newar, and Nepali to argue for a nonlinear model of vernacularization—one that can account for the degree of hybridization exhibited between these three languages in Nepal. Birkenholtz points out that the same Hinduizing project that contributed to the rise of the Nepali-language SVK also impacted Svasthānī's narrative complexion. As the Svasthānī tradition “actively embraced some of the Brahmanical Hindu influences introduced into the Nepal Valley” after the Gorkha conquest of 1768–69 (p. 103), the SVK underwent what Birkenholtz identifies as a three-stage process of Puranicization.
The first two stages of Puranicization are taken up in chapter 4. According to Birkenholtz, the first Puranic narratives started to appear in SVK manuscripts in the early eighteenth century. Later, toward the end of that same century, Svasthānī literature took on an even more robust Puranic framework and began to articulate a more systematic Brahmanical worldview. Chapter 5 then elaborates on the final stage of Puranicization, in which the SVK incorporated another wave of classical Hindu stories, all with a shared emphasis on the pativratā, or chaste and faithful wife, as the ideal Hindu woman. Birkenholtz shows that nineteenth- and twentieth-century social reform and nationalist discourses about Hindu womanhood in British India catalyzed in Nepal an “entrenching of orthodox Brahmanical Hindu ideology and ideals, embodied in the figure of the Hindu woman” (p. 158). Furthermore, Birkenholtz demonstrates that the very label “women's tradition” has contributed to Svasthānī's survival, even if much of that tradition is “arguably not about, by, or in the best interest of women” (p. 200).
In the final chapter, Birkenholtz returns to her central claim: that the Svasthānī tradition remained relevant largely by adapting narratives of place that contributed to, and are thus windows into, “the processes through which Nepal became ‘the world's only Hindu kingdom’” (p. 208). Her reading of Svasthānī's narrative corpus as a “cultural archive” (p. 208)—as a historiographical lens reflecting the theological, linguistic, social, and political concerns of the people who produced it—is convincing, if not groundbreaking. Nevertheless, Reciting the Goddess does break new ground in at least two critical ways. First, by focusing on what she calls the “missing histories” (p. 22) of Nepali Hindu literature, Birkenholtz rejects Indo-centric discourses in Hindu studies that “prioritize and privilege Hinduism as an Indian phenomenon” (p. 208). Second, by emphasizing its religious, social, and cultural dimensions, Birkenholtz presents the Svasthānī corpus as both alternative and complement to the more politically oriented vaṃśāvalīs, or genealogical chronicles, that inform much of the existing scholarship on Nepal's literary history.
Likewise, Birkenholtz's ability to trace connections across social, geographic, iconographic, linguistic, and literary horizons is a defining feature of the book. However, by repeatedly associating “Newar” with “local, tantric, private, female, motherly” and “Parbatiyā” with “translocal, Puranic/Brahmanical, public, male, martial,” Birkenholtz risks further reifying the very sorts of fixed categories that Svasthānī unsettles. That a local Newar tradition was able to so effectively accommodate and articulate translocal and Parbatiyā concerns is itself proof that Newar-ness is not always reducible to local-ness. To be fair, this actually appears to be one of Birkenholtz's larger points. Still, at times her broad-stroke associations overstate such binary correlations.
Nonetheless, Birkenholtz's holistic, interdisciplinary methodology, augmented by her impressive command of Nepal's linguistic and literary history, make Reciting the Goddess a timely contribution to the study of South Asian religion, literature, and cultural geography. Additionally, the book's rich appendices, including archival records, Sanskrit and Newar transcriptions, an English translation, and chapter outlines, render this enigmatic narrative tradition accessible wherever “one's own place” may be.
