20/05/2024 15:30 - 16:30

HALL: LA PIRA - ROOM 2

Proponent: Pintchman T.

Speaker: Bhatia N., Dimitrova D., Pintchman T.

Chair: Pintchman T.

The papers in this session examine ways that depictions of Hindu women, including representations of the relationship between women and goddesses, have shifted during the last thirty years. The first paper, "Reimagining the Pativrata Ideal Among Contemporary Hindu Women," addresses ways that Hindu women both in India and in diaspora have come to reinterpret, reinvent, or invert traditional, patriarchal models of the "ideal wife," or pativrata, extolled in normative Hindu texts, in contemporary Hindu settings. Drawing on ethnographic research and artifacts of popular culture, this paper examines changing perceptions of the pativrata role. The second paper, "Shifting Perceptions of Womanhood and the Brahma Kumari Tradition in Canada," examines shifting perceptions of womanhood in the Brahma Kumari tradition in Montreal. The Brahma Kumari lineage was founded in South Asia in the 1930s that is well known for affording women prominent leadership roles. This paper discusses shifting perceptions of womanhood in the Brahma Kumari tradition in contemporary Canadian and global contexts. The final paper, "Goddesses, Devis, and Abducted Women in Stories of the 1947 Partition," examines how some contemporary writers have come to narrate stories of women's abduction during the 1947 Partition of India by drawing upon Hindu mythological tales. The paper analyzes how modern writers reimagine abducted women as devis, goddesses, to address Partition violence.