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The introduction sets up the basic question of the book: when are goddesses as role models potentially empowering or oppressive for women? It situates this question within contemporary feminist debates. It contrasts the role models of Sita and Radha and counters a monolithic understanding of these goddesses, arguing for a historically nuanced study of how their stories change over time as told in classical Sanskrit sources, the bhakti or devotional tradition, and the popular culture frameworks of television series and movies. Three hypotheses will be tested. First, are bhakti texts in privileging love above duty and celebrating women's subjectivity liberating for women? Second, does the modernity of the medium of television and film result in a more progressive view? Finally, how is the increasing influence of Hindutva in the public sphere reflected on screen? The introduction establishes the methodology of “siting” Sita and Radha, introduces the sources used and outlines the overall organization.

This chapter focuses on the paradigmatic love story of Radha and Krishna, widely considered in Hindu cultural imagination as a parable of the human longing for and union with God. The liaison of Radha and Krishna has been portrayed in thousands of exquisite miniature paintings depicting the lovers in separation and union, longing and abandonment. The legend is not a narrative in the sense of an orderly progression whose protagonists have a shared past and are progressing towards a tragic and happy future. Tender and cheerful, and not tragic, it is rather an evocation and elaboration of the here-and-now of passion. While the figures of Radha and Krishna are linked to the heroine and hero of classical love poetry in many ways, they are primarily products of the bhakti movement, which is known for its erotic mood.

This chapter talks about the religious movements of the Sikh, starting with the Nirankaris. This was founded by Dyal Das, who believed that God was formless and that idol worship was futile. The second is the Radha Soami sect that was founded by Shiv Dayal. It has a doctrine that contained elements of both Sikhism and Hinduism, and described God as the union between Soāmī (the Master) and radha (the soul). The Namdhari or Kuka Movement of Balak Singh was known to task its followers to live simply and practice a single religious ritual, which involved repeating God’s name. Balak Singh was succeeded by Ram Singh, and it was his boycott of British goods, law courts, government schools, and the postal service that was adopted six decades later by Mahatma Gandhi.

This chapter considers the Singh Sabha, a society that protested against the speeches of a Hindu orator, and the missionary activity of Christians and Hindus. It illustrates that the Radha Soami, Nirankari, and Namdhari movements made a small impact on the Sikhs. These all developed into schismatic coteries that owed allegiance to their particular guru and practised their own obscure rituals. It shows that after an American Presbyterian Mission was established in Ludhiana, other religious factions opened their own centres. The British officials, however, actively supported the Christian missionaries. The chapter moves on to discuss the Singh Sabhas of Amritsar and Lahore, and introduces the Arya Samaj. The followers of Arya Samaj believed in a single omnipresent and invisible God who was equal to human beings.

In Bengal, Lakṣmī bratakathās begin to appear from the middle of the eighteenth century and proliferate in a standardized format from the next century. This representation of the goddess, as a domestic deity, is a mark of the times—especially the debut of the ‘new woman’—as the Lakṣmī lore had long been in circulation. The moral centre of these bratakathās is the good wife of caste-patriarchal construction who is assumed to be a monolithic ideal for all gathered under the term Hindu. The by-product of the nascent discourse of nationalism in its search for the autonomous space of the subject body is better understanding of the importance of the domestic sphere, and the Hindu wife. However, this understanding clouds the fact that the goddess had several independent cults. This construction cannot be understood in exclusion to the popularity of Rādhā whose representation presents almost a counter-narrative to the golden conjugality of Lakṣmī.

This chapter introduces some of the foundational stories related to Mount Govardhan and describes the physical features of the mountain as well as the sacred terrain that surrounds it. For instance, the story of the origin of Mount Govardhan, as told in the Garga Samhita, is a narrative widely known by worshipers of this sacred mountain and central to many theological conceptualizations of its deeper meanings. Perhaps most significant for the latter initiative is that Govardhan consists of the consolidated form of supreme love that emerged out of the bliss-filled hearts of the divine couple Radha and Krishna. There are also stories on how Mount Govardhan came to be situated in Braj. They are narrated in texts and recounted by numerous knowledgeable people residing near the sacred mountain today.

In this chapter, Daya Krishna asserts that the gopīs did not love Krsna; instead, they loved to love him. According to Krishna, the gopīs exemplify pure, free, objectless love. The gopīs are the perfect example of the ideal that bhakti as a purusārtha is supposed to seek in the Indian tradition. And, amongst the gopīs, it is Rādhā who exemplifies it to perfection. The exemplification of the ideal, however, divides into two neatly separated parts: the one when Krsna is there and the other when he leaves the eternal abode of love and the gopīs have to live without him. The former is the land of eternal dalliance; the latter of the eternal memory which recreates and relives in it. In the former state, Krsna seeks the gopīs as much as they seek him, though the texts do not clarify whether the seeking on both the sides is equal, reciprocal, and complementary.

For centuries Vrindavan has been famous as a refuge for widows. Some have come to live here of their own accord; others are ejected from their families as burdensome and inauspicious presences after their husbands die. But this pattern is gradually changing, and in unexpected ways. Two notable women who have played major roles in India’s leading political parties—Congress and the BJP, sworn enemies—have recently established new sorts of women’s institutions in Vrindavan. Even Oprah Winfrey has come to visit.

The development of rasa in the Ānanda‐vṛndāvana is the topic of Chapter 7. As this chapter demonstrates, Kavikarṇapūra’s ‘narratology’ is based not on action, but on the emotional being of the protagonist. The chapter therefore articulates Kavikarṇapūra’s argument that Kṛṣṇa is the chief protagonists, and it looks at his defence of Kṛṣṇa’s extra‐marital relations with the gopīs. This prepares an examnation of one narrative section of the Ānanda‐vṛndāvana, Kavikarṇapūra’s retelling of Kṛṣṇa’s disappearance from the gopīs just prior to their celebrated circular (rāsa) dance. The focus of this chapter is the development of rasa, and particularly the rasa of Love (prema‐rasa), a concept that is central and unique to the theology of Kavikarṇapūra and Śrīnātha.