Research Associate Tulasi Srinivas on Water, Gender, Caste, and Religion in Emerging Climate Justice and Sustainability Initiatives

Based on a lifelong study of Hinduism in her hometown, the global city of Bangalore, India, Dr. Tulasi Srinivas seeks a new way of understanding everyday modern, sacred life. Focusing upon the anthropology of wonder, beauty and grace, her work forges new pathways to think about religion and climate sustainability.

For the 2022-23 academic year, Srinivas is the Colorado Scholar and Visiting Professor of Women's Studies and South Asian Religions at the Women’s Studies Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. She is also Professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Transnational Studies at The Marlboro Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College, and a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Indian Sociological Society.

In addition to many articles, Srinivas has published four books including, most recently, The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder (Duke University Press), and Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism (Columbia University Press). She has held several prestigious fellowships at Harvard University, Georgetown University, Kate Hamburger Kolleg, Bochum, Germany, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Below, Srinivas discusses her research at the WSRP this year on “The Runaway Goddess: Water, Gender and Caste in a Climate Apocalypse,” an ethnographic and archival project examining the significance of gender, caste, and religion in emerging climate justice initiatives.

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“The Runaway Goddess" is the third of a trilogy of books I'm writing about my hometown of Bangalore. The first was The Cow in the Elevator, an Anthropology of Wonder, which has been published. I've just finished the second one, titled, "The Goddesses in the Mirror, an Anthropology of Beauty," which is about women, beauty parlors in Bangalore, and the myths around beauty. My final book of the trilogy, "The Runaway Goddess," deals with water scarcity in Bangalore.

Water is believed to be sacred in Hinduism. Descended from heaven, it is the primordial fluid from which all creation emerges. In its lying form of rivers and lakes, it is allied with feminine goddesses known as Saritha. This is the background to my city of Bangalore, which, when I was growing up, was known as a city of a thousand lakes. Because of these many water resources, it was considered a city of auspiciousness.

During a recent summer at home in Bangalore while working on my project, I had a memory of a huge granite-lined well—one of many recharge wells that had been built in medieval times on the outskirts of the city. Surrounded by a small sacred grove, the well was a perfect spot for weaver birds to nest. The birds would flit in and out of the trees reflected in the water. They had corralled that sacred grove. The water in the well reflected the sky, which was a limpid blue. It was an exquisite day.

With this memory so vivid in my mind, I decided to take a drive to visit the location. Driving around for hours, I could not find the well nor the grove of trees. Suddenly, I realized I was looking at it. It was now a Jaguar car dealership with shiny cars. The sacred grove had been cut down, the birds had fled, and there was a dirty sliudgy mess inside the lined well.

Bangalore is a city of success. With the information technology and biotechnology industries in the city it is a hub of development, metastasizing every week. Side by side with increasing development, the lakes I remembered were slowly disappearing. Over the past 30 years, as water resources dwindled and the lakes dried up, the precious land was built into housing developments, universities and hospitals, gifted away by the shortsighted city development authority. In fact, some housing developments in Bangalore are named “lake bed colony.”

Mourning the lost weaver birds, I realized that the landscape I remembered as a young adult no longer existed. At that point, I asked myself: What does this mean for the future of the city that I love and where I truly feel that I belong? My life became what anthropologist and cultural theorist Mary Douglas calls, “matter out of place.” One of endless exile; I couldn't go home. Home no longer existed in the same way. Anthropologist call their immersion in other’s societies “fieldwork.” What can an anthropologist do when their field is dying?

Seeing the results of our human hand and the urgent need to address climate change, I returned to my thoughts about our relationship with nature and with the sacred world, which brings us back to the auspiciousness and importance of water.

I was given and watched an unaired video of one of the biggest recharge lakes in the area repeatedly and spontaneously bursting into fire because of the pollutants in it. The video began with a middle-aged woman named Gauri who was of the horticulturist caste. She had grown up around the lake and remembered the crystalline waters abundant with fish. She remembered the temple by the shore, where the lake goddess was, and she began to cry, saying: “The goddess has been raped, and she's run away.”

Her words made me consider: If the goddess runs away from the lake where she supposedly resides, what happens to the great religion that is Hinduism, whose belief is that in searching for water one is essentially looking for life—the primordial fluid out of which creation and life comes?

At the time, I had been reading about scientific discoveries of water on Mars and became very interested in the parallels between cutting edge scientific exploration and the religious parables and myths in Hinduism. I wrote my application for this WSRP research associate position with this in mind, and I realized the thematic question I was circling around was: If water is life, what is a life without water?

This is the central question—the urgent question of our age. And so it became an urgent and timely question for me, and my project got its name from Gauri’s lament "The Runaway Goddess." It comes from a deep well of sadness, fear, loss and grief that she and I share.

Globally, we are slowly running out of water, our essential resource. We are cycling between drought and flood, and the cycles are becoming wilder and less controllable. The Anthropocene concept states that human intervention creates the situation of ecological destruction. This language makes us linger in a climate of grief. How do we get beyond? How do we make our commitment into action?

I met an elderly Dalit woman of the well digging caste who told me that she lived to repair wells and small mud dams so the waters flow “through the grace of god.” Through my interlocutors, most of them such elderly women, I came to the understanding that we need to repair the world through small actions that have enormous consequences for sustainability and social justice. What we need to thrive comes from the grace of God and from indigenous knowledge of action. The success of repair and of reparations in reconnecting us to one another and to our natural world, needs grace. The healing of the world as we know it will occur with our grace toward one another and to that which we care for.

This idea resonated with me, so I began to think about grace in a proactive way, deeply rooted in Hindu understandings of how blessing comes about and how grace functions in the world as a divine gift. Considering grace as a concept to reflect upon Hinduism understandings of what the sacred entails, I started reading about the way Hinduism understands the notion of the divine feminine and, in recognizing this in my project, what it means when the goddess runs away.

The class I am teaching at HDS, “Goddesses and Ghosts: The Divine Feminine in Hindu Worlds,” embodies these thoughts. The course discussions consider how we structure our notions of the feminine, what attributes we might think of as feminine, and how, in Hinduism, the feminine takes on different castes than what we anticipate. The class has students from all over the globe, with each one contributing their own unique understanding. We're reading about different forms, attitudes, desires, and different understandings of the goddess and how these differences play through myth and contemporary performance.

Hinduism and the divine feminine is a very complex, hermeneutical challenge to understand, because there is no one canon about it. I want students to understand the different frames in which the goddess operates and that this is central to Hinduism—it is agency in multiplicity. This is embedded in Hinduism and applicable in their own lives as students.

As an anthropologist, I look at religion as an object of study and am interested in getting the students to understand that perspective on religion. Not theology alone, but to approach it as a living tradition and ask, How does one live with the tradition, and how does one interact with it, and how does one change it, if we can? I was very intent that this would be our method and framing for the course, with the idea that what students take away is an understanding of Hinduism as a living, rich, complex, and nuanced tradition, both in text and in life.

Before I came to HDS for the opportunity at the WSRP, I had my book structured, but as I reviewed it, I decided it was too static and too locked into academic ways of writing. I wanted to explore more—to get more grounded in how to write about the decimation of something that is so important for life, so I am rewriting it, and I’m happy to report that it is coming to life!

This year at HDS has given me a better sense of the rhythm and tone I needed for this topic. And it is the perfect place in which to think about the divine gift of water, of grace and their meaning and value in the world as we move toward sustainability and justice.

When we think about water, we inevitably think about human thirst and survival. But I'm also deeply concerned about our depredations of water and how it will affect other species. We are destroying species at the rate of hundreds a day. And this is from the right to life point of view. We shouldn't think about the right to life as a human thing alone, but that every species has the right to life and we need to move from an attitude of dominion to one of custodianship for our and others survival.

Armed with our knowledge of ecological destruction, we need to pivot from grief and rage to love and grace. Rage is valuable as a reaction to what we have wrought and destroyed, but only through grace can we find our way out of it. For it is only through grace that repair and survival occurs, and the runaway goddess can return to her lake.

—Interview conducted and edited by Denise Penizzotto, HDS correspondent