Download or read book Conceiving the Goddess written by Jayant Bhalchandra Bapat and published by . This book was released on 2016-12 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceiving the Goddess is an exploration of goddess cults in South Asia that embodies research on South Asian goddesses in various disciplines. The theme running through all the contributions, with their multiple approaches and points of view, is the concept of appropriation, whereby one religious group adopts a religious belief or practice not formerly its own. What is the motivation behind this? Are such actions attempts to dominate, or to resist the domination of others, or to adapt to changing social circumstances - or perhaps simply to enrich the religious experience of a group's members? In examining these questions, Conceiving the Goddess considers a range of settings: a Jain goddess lurking in a Brahminical temple, the fraught relationship between the humble Camar caste and the river goddess Ganga, the mutual appropriation of disciple and goddess in the tantric exercises of Kashmiri Saivism, and the alarming self-decapitation of the fierce goddess Chinnamasta.