Tales of Unrestful and Undomesticated Women

This volume collects three articles that deal with the imagined women in Western and Indian cultures, from the Greeks up to the gendered Hindu frame of mind in the modern colonial age, before independence.

In the West women may be imagined as metamorphic creatures, coming back from death to satisfy an unfulfilled wish, even lust, or as ghoulish snakes or vampires. In the nineteenth century they acquire a revengeful nature and sometimes they embody heathen half-demonic personae.

In the Hindu world women are doomed as a rule to subaltern domestic and conjugal roles, according to framed type. This happens in particular with widows who are generally endowed with an inborn power of shattering confusion (moh).

However, a numinous spark is still burning inside them who become the external sheath of the Goddess in fight against evil.