No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1999.

Traditional heteronormative gender narratives in the Hindu religion, such as pativratā, do not always provide a clear basis for women’s empowerment within Hindu ritual. The Ṣoḍaśī-pūjā, in which Ramakrishna worshiped his wife Sarada Devi as the living goddess Ṣoḍaśī, provides a clear and subversive template to establish a unique form of feminism rooted in Kālī-bhakti. This paper seeks to develop a novel Hindu feminism called Strī-Śakti-Bhāva according to a four-fold tantric empowerment: (1) strī-śakti, (2) śaktipāta, (3) devībhāva, and (4) śakti-sevā. This study draws upon various English translations of Bengali hagiographies in the Ramakrishna tradition and contemporary research materials from Indian feminist scholars. Since the Ṣoḍaśī-pūjā empowered Sarada Devi to serve as the spiritual mother of the Ramakrishna Order, this paper concludes that Ṣoḍaśī-pūjā certainly provides a mechanism of women’s empowerment that is uniquely situated within the Hindu religion.

No abstract available. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1988.

No Abstract Included / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis investigates the use of metaphorical language in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda is one of the most influential modern-day Hindu scholars, and his interpretation of the ancient Hindu scriptural lore is very significant. Vivekananda’s influence was part of the motivation for choosing his Complete Works as the empirical domain for the current study. Vivekananda’s Complete Works were mined using AntConc, for water-related terms which seemed to have a predilection for metaphoricity. Which terms to search for specifically was determined after a manual reading of a sample from the Complete Works. The data was then tagged, using a convention inspired by the well-known MIPVU procedure for metaphor identification. Thereafter, a representative sample of the data was chosen, and the metaphors were mapped and analysed thematically. This study had as its main aim to investigate whether Hindu religious discourse uses metaphors to explain abstract religious concepts, and if so, whether this happens in the same way as in Judaeo-Christian traditions. Furthermore, following Jäkel (2002), a set of sub-hypotheses pertaining to ubiquity, domains, models, unidirectionality, invariance, necessity, creativity and focussing is assessed. Key findings in this study include a general confirmation of the above-mentioned hypotheses, with the exception of ‘invariance’, which proved to be somewhat contentious. The data allowed for the postulation of underlying conceptual metaphors, which differed somewhat from the metaphors used in traditional Judaeo-Christian philosophy. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)