Academic interest in Hindu goddesses has burgeoned since the 1970s because of three coalescing factors: in the United States, funding for fieldwork in South Asia through postwar area studies programs; feminist scholarship, with its stress on women's experience and feminist perspectives; and the move from a reliance on texts and elite viewpoints to an emphasis on local, oral, village contexts where goddesses tend to thrive. With increasing numbers of publications, however, the best way to characterize Hindu goddesses, either as individuals or as a category, has become contested and complex. Accordingly, this essay has three aims: to cover representative Hindu goddesses; to indicate the types of scholarly methodologies currently employed to study them; and to describe major hermeneutical controversies in their interpretation.

For heuristic purposes, this survey organizes goddesses via a pacific (saumya)/fierce (raudra) spectrum, or, as Wendy Doniger first labeled it, a...