Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz – författare

The Swasthani Vrata Katha is the most widely read, recited, and listened-to devotional text among Hindu laity in Nepal. Originating in the late sixteenth century, the Swasthani tradition encompasses three interrelated elements: the goddess Swasthani, revered as the goddess of "one's own place"; the goddess's story (katha) and its annual recitation; and the month-long ritual vow (vrat) undertaken by women to honor Swasthani. Today, the Swasthani blends widely circulating Hindu myths—featuring Shiva, Sati, and Parvati—with local folk narratives that reflect women's everyday hardships and the worldly and spiritual rewards of fulfilling one's dharma and devotion to Swasthani.This textual and ritual practice devoted to the goddess Swasthani centers women's roles, expectations, and responses and has significantly shaped Nepali Hindu identity and practice for both women and men. In Nepal, the Swasthani holds cultural, religious, and social significance comparable to the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics elsewhere in the Hindu world. Its characters—Goma, her son Navaraj, and his wife Chandravati—similarly offer a familiar local cultural vocabulary through their trials and triumphs.This book presents the first full-length scholarly English translation of this important text from the original Nepali. As Parvati once brought Swasthani's story from the divine to the human realm, this translation brings it from Nepal to a broader English-speaking audience.This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Reciting the Goddess is the first book-length study of Nepal's goddess Svasthani and the popular Svasthanivratakatha textual tradition. In the centuries following its origin as a simple local legend in the sixteenth century, the Svasthanivratakatha developed into a comprehensive Purana text that is still widely celebrated today among Nepal's Hindus with an annual month-long recitation. Jessica Birkenholtz uses the Svasthanivratakatha as a medium through which to view the ways in which political and cultural shifts among Nepal's ruling elite were taken up by the general public. Drawing on both archival and ethnographic research, the book examines Svasthani and the Svasthanivratakatha within the shifting literary, linguistic, religious, cultural, and political contexts of medieval and modern Nepal from the sixteenth century to the present. It also explores both the complementary and contentious relationships between Nepal's heterogeneous Newar Hindu and high-caste hill Hindu communities, and those of Nepal as a Hindu kingdom vis-à-vis Hindu India. Reciting the Goddess brings the Svasthani devotional tradition to light as a new case study in the discussion of the making of Hindu religious identity and practice in Nepal and South Asia.

Religion has long been a powerful cultural, social, and political force in the Himalaya. Increased economic and cultural flows, growth in tourism, and new forms of governance and media, however, have brought significant changes to the religious traditions of the region in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book presents detailed case studies of lived religion in the Himalaya in this context of rapid change to offer intra-regional perspectives on the ways in which lived religions are being re-configured or re-imagined. Based on original fieldwork, this book documents understudied forms of religion in the region and presents unique perspectives on the phenomenon and experience of religion, discussing why, when, and where practices, discourses, and the category of religion itself, are engaged by varying communities in the region. It yields fruitful insights into both the religious traditions and lived human experiences of Himalayan peoples in the modern era.Presenting new research and perspectives on the Himalayan region, this book should be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, Religious Studies, and Modernity.