Book review: The Goddesses’ Henchmen: Gender in Indian Hero Worship by Lindsay Harlan

As ethnographers often find, people encountered during fieldwork can have their own ideas about what topics make for appropriate research. A researcher who allows herself to be instructed can stumble upon unexpectedly fertile projects. This was the case for Lindsay Harlan when she was researching her earlier book, Religion and Rajput Women (1992). The men who received Harlan in the outer spaces of households often cross-examined her about why she wasn’t writing about something they considered important, such as Rajput history and heroism. Harlan amicably allowed her hosts to hold forth on heroes, even as she persevered with the project at hand. The seeds of her next research project were already sprouting, and in The Goddesses’ Henchmen: Gender in Indian Hero Worship we are treated to the first of two harvests. While this volume follows the theme of gender in the narratives and songs flowering around ancestral and domestic worship of Rajput heroes, Harlan also promises us a second volume that will examine hero cults rooted in shrines tended by specialists from a cross-section of castes