In a past letter, I seemed sceptical about the positive impact the lights of Divali can make on our crime situation, overwhelming as it is. But as if in some kind of mystical response to that scepticism, a thought came to me—“Sudden a thought came like a full blown rose/Flushing his brow and in his pained heart/Made purple riot..
.”—as John Keats would say—that Divali, in its embodiment in the Hindu goddess Mother Lakshmi, can have a positive effect on our lives in a more specific way. I refer to the contemporary movement for women’s rights as reflected in the feminist movement internationally, extending itself into a kind of “wokeism” in the US as a more aggressive assertion of those rights; and recently, again in the US, groups now championing the cause of women’s rights in sport at a time when transgenderism is a serious threat.
I would like to suggest that the Goddess Mother Lakshmi, at the centre of Divali, the symbol of wealth and prosperity, can be an inspiration for such rights. And the Divine Mother is not alone in this. She is one of hundreds in the Hindu pantheon, such as the Goddess Saraswati, representing knowledge and the arts; the Goddess Durga as the protector against negativity; and one of the most powerful of them all, the goddess Kali, with the power to vanquish all destructive forces in nature.
It is instructive how the idea of “woman power” as contained in the Hindu texts such as the Puranas and the Mahabharata, inter alia, would have.
