Heidi J. Miller

Harvard University

Department of Anthropology

11 Divinity Ave.

Cambridge, MA 02138

heidiarc@hotmail.com

In the Devi Mahatmya, a Sanskrit text recorded during the sixth century C.E. in northwest India, the ultimate reality is seen as female, yet this femaleness is not embedded in obvious physical attributes nor in biological concepts of fertility. The three myths recounted in the text describe the great prowess and transcendence of the Goddess as evidenced by her actions and not by the fact that her sex is female. This is in contrast with general interpretations of female representations in terracotta from the archaeological record that emphasize the biological aspects of the female body. The text describes a multidimensional female entity without an explicitly female body, and the archaeological record has yielded explicitly female bodies generally interpreted solely by their biological illustration as fertility figurines. This paper will explore the image of the Goddess in the Devi Mahatmya in relation to terracotta representations of the female form from the same region and time period. Then the interpretation of anthropomorphic figurines from earlier archaeological cultures in the subcontinent is questioned. It is hoped that this study will cast doubt on the automatic label of ‘fertility figurine’ assigned to depictions of the female form recovered from the archaeological record