Hindu women, lived religion, and the performance of gendered narratives: Canadian examples

The lived religious experiences of Hindu women, and the interpretations of these that they bring to bear on their own lives and those of their children in diaspora, have largely been overlooked in the study of Hinduism, resulting in a significant lack in our understanding of the lived religious experience of Hindus. This dissertation responds to that lack by paying attention to women's daily embodiment of religious narratives in Canada. I investigate participants' household devotional activity in dialogue with their experiences of temple worship, all with a view to revealing performances of religious narrative in quotidian diasporic experience. Hindu women's daily interactions with the Divine are presented as a site of dialogue between orthodox norms and the imaginative, creative element inherent in the lived experience of religion. It is shown that women's devotional lives are a key site for the articulation of daily, experiential Hinduism in which individual actors, while constructed by culture in their role as appropriately devout wives, mothers and daughters, operate within a field pregnant with the potential for active constructions of culture. The study reveals three primary conclusions: 1. The performance of religious narratives is an important part of the majority of participants' lives in Canada. 2. Religious narratives of auspicious womanhood, while considered important, are flexibly interpreted and deployed by participants. 3. The desire to provide children with a rootedness in tradition does not correlate to the desire that one's daughters embody that tradition. The majority of research participants are (or were) concerned to educate their children about Hindu religious narratives, but are not concerned that children continue traditional practices in their own lives unless they wish to do so. Troubled by the characterization of women's religious practices as both marginalized and marginalizing, and unsatisfied by the generalization that in adhering to religious roles Hindu women are mute subjects of patriarchy, this study shows that women's engagements with tradition are spaces of dialogue; generative loci of multiple and significant meanings for themselves, for their families, and for the Indo-Canadian Hindu community. This elastic process of meaning-making need not be interpreted as subversive of tradition, but is more fruitfully presented as constitutive of the religious life-worlds of Hindus