Sakti Worship in India and Iconography: With Special Reference to Madhya Pradesh

The Indian sub-continent offers interesting diversities in its various aspects and religion is one of them. A multitude of gods and goddesses and their worship have had a significant role to play in these diverse strands of religion, particularly of the Hindu tradition. Among them, the worship of the female principle the Sakti, symbolizing force has occupied a position of eminence from time immemorial. The word ‘Sakti’ offers a very wide connotation, embracing such attributes as ‘infinite power’, ‘being the ultimate source and form of all’. The centrality of Sakti worship in the Hindu tradition has long intrigued the scholars studying the religion and a good number of works is available on the subject. However, they mostly deal either with the worship of a particular goddess of the Hindu pantheon extending over the length and breadth of the country or concentrated over a specified area or, in some cases, involve the worship of the female principle in general, over a vast area. In the present work, the emphasis is on a comprehensive and detailed account of the worship of some important divinities of the Sakti cult of the Hindu pantheon from an iconographic point of view, bringing out one particular region in the limelight the erstwhile state of Madhya Pradesh which, though, important in its own right, has, curiously, escaped the kind of attention that it warrants in this respect. A number of images are presented here with their corresponding literary references which make it one useful for the study of artistic and iconographic traditions of this country.