Abstract
In this chapter, Baindur explores three interconnected themes: the ideas of women’s place in the home, the ‘elsewhere’ they travel to, and the understanding of transcendence or self-discovery in these journeys to elsewhere. One of the ways through which women sought to transcend the limiting experience of a domestic life in Eastern culture was through seeking transcendence and spiritual experience. The nuns of Buddhist faith, the theri-s, or the devotee saints like Mira Bai, reject the life of women as providers and nurturers. They take recourse to wandering or travelling as a way to discover some kind of transcendent experience. I posit that displacing oneself from familiar place-scapes (by travel) and then working on a re-engagement of the body and its environs such as clothes and movement becomes a way for women to rediscover their uninhibited self.
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Notes
- 1.
The Therigatha is an anthology of about seventy-four poems ascribed to the elder nuns and form a part of the Buddhist minor cannons.
- 2.
Mira Bai was a royal princess in Rajasthan, India, in 1498.Though married to the King of Chittorgarh, Rana, she considered Krishna, a Hindu deity, her true love. In doing so, she broke the cardinal rule of a devout wife who is to regard her husband as lord. She rejected norms of the royal household by publically singing and dancing in the temple.
- 3.
Virginia Woolf (1931), who was against this ideal role of a woman, wrote in 1931, ‘Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer’.
References
Casey, Edward S. 1993. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hallisey, Charles, trans. 2015. Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women. Vol. 3 of Murty Classical Library of India, ed. Sheldon Pollock. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hanson, Susan, and Geraldine Pratt. 1995. Gender, Work, and Space. London: Routledge.
Stein, Karen. 2011. Getting Away from It All: The Construction and Management of Temporary Identities on Vacation. Symbolic Interaction 34(2): 290–308.
Woolf, Virginia. 1931. Professions for Women. London: Hogarth.
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Baindur, M. (2016). Displacing the Domestic: The Elsewhere of Transcendence. In: Beaman, L., Sikka, S. (eds) Constructions of Self and Other in Yoga, Travel, and Tourism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32512-5_6
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