Programme
Leslie Orr
Assistant Professor
Department of Religion
Concordia University
E/ orr@vax2.concordia.ca
Image, Emblem, Actor: Women and the Gift in Medieval South India
South Asian scriptural norms – and popular stereotypes – lead us to believe that the participation of women in social transactions and gift exchange has been entirely passive. Here we find the idea that a woman’s agency in giving is constrained by her lack of access to material resources: a woman does not have property, rather she is property. But as we look more carefully at the historical evidence, we find that these ideas must be reconsidered. The medieval inscriptions of South India, engraved in Tamil on the stone walls of Hindu and Jain temples, represent women in medieval Tamilnadu as givers – in the patronage of religious institutions and practices and in the sponsorship of public works. But the inscriptions also project the message that women are given, in their poetic depiction, in the prasastis, of the king taking women of the conquered enemy as loot and his enjoyment not only of his queens, but of goddesses who are said to have become his consorts.
In this paper, I am interested in seeing how the activity of women as donors plays out against the backdrop of normative models and of the poetic rhetoric of the prasastis. My presentation will center around portraits – drawn from the examination of the Tamil inscriptions dated between AD 850 and 1300 – of six particular temple sites where women have been especially active as donors. I will analyze women’s gift-giving with reference to the aims and the consequences of their donations, and in the context of ritual milieu of the temple and of the royal rhetoric contained in the records of gifts. This paper will not only deepen our understanding of the relationship between women’s involvement with giving, on the one hand, and abstract normative and mythic images of woman and the gift, on the other, but will enhance our appreciation of the multi-vocal character of Tamil inscriptions as historical sources.
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Prof. Orr's research interests include religious and social history of medieval
South India, especially Tamil Nadu of the Chola period (9th to 13th centuries);
women in pre-colonial South Asia; Hindu temples; devadasis; interaction of
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism; Brahmins (Brahmans); food and feeding;
asceticism. She is the author of the book,
Donors, Devotees and Daughters of God: Temple Women in Medieval Tamilnadu
(2000) and numerous articles, including, most recently, "Identity and Divinity:
Boundary-Crossing Goddesses in Medieval Tamilnadu," in Journal of the American
Academy of Religion 73:1 (2005) and "Processions in the medieval South Indian
temple: Sociology, sovereignty and soteriology," in South Indian Horizons:
Felicitation Volume for François Gros (2004).