The Lajjagauri and Anandanayaki: A New Light on the Nature and Worship of the Adi-Mata, the Primordial Mother

Description

Lajjagauri is perhaps one of India's oldest goddesses with images of her in South Asia dating back to the Indus Civilisation c. 3,000 to 1,500 BC. Her devotees can be traced back even earlier to the Ukraine c. 10,000 BCE. In India, new finds continue to expand the geographical spread of Lajjagauri's devotees, most recently to Odisa. Dhere's work on Lajjagauri is based on tireless pursuits of her image throughout western India. In contrast to the other thousands of Indian goddesses whose images are super abundant, Lajjagauri has become more reclusive as other deities have risen.

Jayant Bhalcandra Bapat holds doctorates in Organic Chemistry and Indology, and is an adjunct research fellow at the Monash Asia Institute at Monash University. His research interests include Hinduism, goddess cults, the Fisher community of Mumbai, and Jainism, and he has published widely in these areas. He is co-editor with Ian Mabbett of The Iconic Female: Goddesses of India, Nepal and Tibet (Monash University Press, 2008) and Conceiving the Goddess: Transformation and Appropriation in Indic Religions (Monash University Publishing, 2016), and a co-author of The Indian Diaspora: Hindus and Sikhs in Australia (DK Printworld, 2015). For his work in education and for the Indian community, Jayant was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2011. Known popularly as Anna, Dhere was a prolific writer on many aspects of religion in India and on Indian folk culture, especially that of Maharastra. He was second to none in the study of ancient Marathi and Samskrt literature and was responsible for bringing to light many rare and lost manuscripts. Dhere produced over a hundred books on the religion of the masses. Often working with dense and obscure subject matter, such was Dhere's poetic style of writing that it attracted not only the literati but the average reader as well. Unfortunately, he wrote mainly in Marathi, and occasionally in Hindi. For the first time, this translation makes Dhere's enlightened study of the mother goddess available to English readers, in a substantial contribution to the field.

R. C. Dhere's Lajjagauri is a classic work of scholarship on Hindu goddesses. Exploring the meaning of the Lajjagauri image, Dhere engages in an extensive discussion of sexual imagery and fertility cults in India. He also makes Lajjagauri a springboard for elucidating the cults of other important goddesses such as Renuka, Yallamma, Aditi, and a variety of folk goddesses, as well as the male deities Jotiba and Subrahmanya. Long beloved by Marathi readers, the book appears here in English for the first time. By making it more widely accessible, Jayant Bapat has performed a great service to Indologists throughout India and the world. -- Anne Feldhaus