Lajjāgaurī is perhaps one of India's oldest goddesses, with images of her found in South Asia dating back to the Indus Civilisation c. 3000 to 1500 B.C.E. Her devotees can be traced back even earlier, to the Ukraine c. 10,000 B.C.E. In India, new finds continue to expand the geographical spread of Lajjāgaurī's devotees, most recently to Odiśā. Ḍhere's work on Lajjāgaurī - a study of the meanings of the visual representations of the Goddess - is based on a tireless pursuit of her image throughout western India. In contrast to the other thousands of Indian goddesses whose images are superabundant, Lajjāgaurī has become more reclusive as other deities have risen. This work by the towering Marāṭhī cultural specialist Dr Rāmacandra Cintāmaṇ Ḍhere is a unique and important study, painstakingly and lovingly translated into English by Dr Jayant Bāpaṭ.
Jayant Bhālcandra Bāpaṭ holds doctorates in Organic Chemistry and Indology, and is an adjunct research fellow at the Monash Asia Institute at Monash University. His research interests include Hinduism, goddess cults, the Fisher community of Mumbai, and Jainism, and he has published widely in these areas. He is co-editor with Ian Mabbett of The Iconic Female: Goddesses of India, Nepal and Tibet (Monash University Press, 2008) and Conceiving the Goddess: Transformation and Appropriation in Indic Religions (Monash University Publishing, 2016), and a co-author of The Indian Diaspora: Hindus and Sikhs in Australia (DK Printworld, 2015). For his work in education and for the Indian community, Jayant was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2011.
Known popularly as Aṇṇā, Ḍhere was a prolific writer on many aspects of religion in India and on Indian folk culture, especially that of Mahārāṣṭra. He was second to none in the study of ancient Marāṭhī and Saṃskṛt literature and was responsible for bringing to light many rare and lost manuscripts. Ḍhere produced over a hundred books on the religion of the masses. Often working with dense and obscure subject matter, such was Ḍhere's poetic style of writing that it attracted not only the literati but the average reader as well. Unfortunately, he wrote mainly in Marāṭhī, and occasionally in Hindi. For the first time, this translation makes Ḍhere's enlightened study of the mother goddess available to English readers, in a substantial contribution to the field.
R. C. Ḍhere's Lajjāgaurī is a classic work of scholarship on Hindu goddesses. Exploring the meaning of the Lajjāgaurī image, Ḍhere engages in an extensive discussion of sexual imagery and fertility cults in India. He also makes Lajjāgaurī a springboard for elucidating the cults of other important goddesses such as Reṇukā, Yallammā, Aditi, and a variety of folk goddesses, as well as the male deities Jotibā and Subrahmaṇya. Long beloved by Marāṭhī readers, the book appears here in English for the first time. By making it more widely accessible, Jayant Bāpaṭ has performed a great service to Indologists throughout India and the world. -- Anne Feldhaus, Foundation Professor of Religious Studies, Arizona State University, USA
