But it is only as she begins to read aloud the traditional Chandimangal-composed by her husband’s grandfather to celebrate the goddess-that the long-buried stories begin to emerge. Her husband’s silence about his mother’s murder and the childhood tragedy that beckons him from the shadowy landing of Kailash, the embroidered handkerchiefs in an old soap box in her father-in-law’s room, and the strange presence of the old, green-eyed Pishi-all intrigue and mystify her. The book excavates the multiple and layered heritage of the region which includes tribal culture, Buddhism, Tantricism, and so on, as is available in rituals, proverbs, verses, circulating myths, poetic genres and kathas, caste manuals, census records etc to illustrate how tradition is a matter of strategic selection.In The Song Seekers, the debut novel by Saswati Sengupta, the monsoon rains wash over the city of Kolkata while four women sit and read and talk in the kitchen of Kailash, the old mansion of the Chattopadhyays where Uma comes to live after her marriage in the summer of 1962. It is this vibrant laukika archive- considered low from the hegemonic perspective-that M utating Goddesses explores to realize the politic trafficking between this realm and the sastrik. But there are religious practices and beliefs under the broad rubric of Hinduism that are neither governed by the male Brahman nor articulated in Sanskrit. The critical studies of Hindu goddesses have been dominated by the sastrik perspective deriving from the Sanskrit scriptures authorized by the male Brahman. It focuses on the goddess-invested tradition of Bengal's Hinduism to argue for a historical evolution/devolution of divinities in tandem with sectarian interests and illumines in the process the knotted correlation of gender, caste and class in the sanctioning of female subjectivities through goddess formation.

Mutating Goddesses traces the shifting fortunes of four specific Hindu deities - Manasa, Candi, Sasthi and Laksmi- from the fifteenth century to the present time. Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public Health.The European Society of Cardiology Series.

Oxford Commentaries on International Law.

The Song Seekers by Saswati Sengupta