Divinity Lite 
By Navtej Sarna
Published by India Today
By Geeta Doctor

They resemble the tales of Beatrix Potter, ancient wisdom boiled down into palatable pellets that can be bought or backpacked at airport shops and gift counters. Like Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit or Jemima Puddle-Duck, the books promise the soft storylines of just one hero or heroine who appears emblazoned on the cover in charming line drawings that lure the reader into following a trail of a delicate hand sign, a winsome trinity of eyes or the looping syllables of Islamic calligraphy. The muted earth colours of the book jackets, relieved by a band at the base, are neither too stridently sectarian nor lushly self-adulatory.

The surprise is that each book is a small gem of delegent scholarship and passionate attachment on the part of the author. They may have started off as easy- to-digest compendiums of information about this God or that prophet and certainly they offer this type of readymade details to those who need a quick guide to the pantheon of the subcontinent’s bewildering panorama of superluminary beings, but each writer has gone beyond his or her brief. They appear to have been inspired not just to prescribe or describe in the way most commentators writing on religious figures might have done, but to suggest different ways of looking at their subject. At the same time, there is a fairly neat structure that each author has adhered to. It starts with an introduction that like a traditional storyteller’s hook has a personal element and ends with a summing up that either lays down the main tenets of the religion, as in the case of the book on Muhammad, or leaves the reader with the plangent refrains of the songs of Guru Nanak or places a multifaceted Goddess like Durga in a modern context. The middle portions deal with the life or legend, and variations or interpolations with commentaries.

This tangential approach naturally works better in some cases than in others. Nilima Chitgopekar’s The Book of Durga is a delight. She brings a multiarmed arsenal of scholarships, almost casually, marshalling the many different sources and interpretations of the Goddess through the centuries while allowing the reader to savour the nuances of her appeal that strides many worlds and incarnations. At the same time, she does not forget to center the Goddess in the bustle of the potters of Kamartuli who bring the deity alive in Kolkata every year, with their mesmeric images of the Mother Goddess in rice hick, clay from different sources, even the threshold of prostitute’s houses. The laughter of the little girls who are believed to have possessed the power of the virgin Goddess is also there. Chitgopekar is particularly sensitive in her assessment of the Durga myth being gliby appropriated to serve partisan ends- of both the patriarchy that weaves sentimental slogans around a complacent figure and of the western feminists who use her as a convenient icon of ferocious female power on the rampage. The truth, she suggests, is much more subtle and elusive.

That, perhaps, is the essence of the books. They satisfy an initial curiosity and yet leave the reader in the hope of learning more.