Toward a History of the Navarātra, the Autumnal Festival of the Goddess

Abstract

In this essay, I wish to address the problems a historian encounters while explaining the function and origin of ancient rituals. One is particularly confronted by these problems when dealing with a ritual such as the Navarātra. With regard to its function, the festival resists sharp distinctions between the sacred and the temporal because it simultaneously propitiates a deity and solemnizes the authority of a ruler. It seems to be two things at the same time: a rite of religious power and a rite of political power. In fact, in the Southern Navarātra, for instance as celebrated in Vijayanagara, the worship of the Goddess would take place largely out of view in a private shrine, while all the individual rites of the festival appeared topublicly celebrate a cult of the king in the larger communal area: the Navarātra thus appeared, as it did to Portuguese and Persian visitors to the Vijayanagara court, to be a political festival with a minor religious dimension.1 While explaining its origins, we run into even greater difficulty as the earliest traces of the Navarātra are found in more than one distinctive religious tradition: theVaiṣṇava, the Śaiva, the Purāṇic and even possibly in regional traditions of communities outsidemainstream ‘Hindu’ traditions. Where it truly “originates” is therefore difficult to see, though for clarity’s sake I have proposed here that the Vaiṣṇava domain was where a mature, theologically coherent2 conception of the rite evolved. On the whole the ritual appears to have been of a composite character at each stage of its manifestation. The overall impression is that we are looking atmany permutations of different rites with different origins that attached themselves around the central figure of theGoddess, and throughher, and thedemon-slayingmythologies surrounding her, acquired a structural and thematic unity. In the following, I shall