‘Gopāl is my Baby’: Vulnerable Deities and Maternal Love at Bengali Home Shrines

Abstract

Abstract This article utilises interviews I completed with Hindu Bengali women in Kolkata, India, concerning their practices of domestic shrine care and worship. I illustrate how the loving relationship women build between themselves and their domestic deities—a relationship women describe as the marker of bhakti—is fomented through their daily caretaking of deities such as Gopāl, the toddler form of Kṛṣṇa found in many Kolkatan home shrines. While male Brahmin priests oversee pūjā in Kolkata’s Hindu temples, it is often the mothers, daughters, and daughters-in-laws that are responsible for the care and daily worship of the domestic shrine, where such work is deemed ‘a woman’s duty’ and is assimilated within the domestic responsibilities that Bengali women traditionally undertake. Household shrine care and worship varies but generally consists of acts that one might show to a beloved family member such as feeding and offering water; cleansing, dressing and adorning; gift-giving; decorating a comfortable living space; and waking and putting to sleep. Bengali women explained to me their authority over the domestic shrine by citing their maternal capacity to love to suggested that they were more apt and skilled than men to care for the physically vulnerable deities at home. When noting this, they often mentioned the needs of the child-god Gopāl and their feelings of maternal love and devotion that his presence evokes within them through his depiction as a chubby toddler, crawling on his hands and knees with one hand that is extended outwards; much like a child asking to hold the hand of his parent. This article examines how both the familial necessity of caretaking demanded by the home deity and the imagining of the deity as physically vulnerable promote the development of this bhakti relationship between the female devotee and deity within the contemporary Bengali home.