Goddess Beyond Boundaries: Worshipping the Eternal Mother at a North American Hindu Temple

The Parashakthi Temple in Pontiac, Michigan serves as a site of worship for the Hindu goddess Karumariamman, whose origins are in South India. In her American home Karumariamman has assumed the status of Great Goddess, a tantric deity and wonder worker who communicates directly with devotees through dreams, visions, and miracles. Drawing on fifteen years of field work, Tracy Pintchman reveals how the Parashakthi Temple has become a site of theological and ritual innovation.

A unique spiritual community, the temple does not simply reproduce Indian goddess traditions, but instead reimagines Hinduism and the Hindu Goddess in the American religious, cultural, and natural landscape. The congregation’s faith is grounded in a vision of the Goddess as a breaker of boundaries, including those of race, ethnicity, religion, geography, history, and nationality. Like her congregants, Pintchman suggests, the goddess is emblematic of the qualities of a new immigrant; she embraces the opportunities her new home affords her and refashions herself, but she does not forget her roots, keeping one foot planted in her Indian homeland and another planted firmly in her new land, the United States.

Pintchman considers larger issues concerning the creativity of immigrant Hindu communities and the ways in which diaspora contexts facilitate the production of new forms of Hinduism that are made possible by globalization and modern technology.

Tracy Pintchman is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Global Studies Program at Loyola University Chicago. Her many scholarly publications include two monographs, The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition (1994) and Guests at God’s Wedding: Celebrating Kartik Among the Women of Benares (2005).