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A review by katie_greenwinginmymouth
States of the Body Produced by Love by Nisha Ramayya
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
I went into this book expecting poetry but in fact this book is a totally unique blend of essay, poetry and theory brilliantly exploring themes around Hindu tantric beliefs, the goddesses of the Mahāvidyās, the language of Sanskrit and how all these can be interpreted and explored through a post-colonial and feminist lens to shed light on topics such as Hindu nationalism, British imperialism and, as the title suggests, love. As she writes near the beginning of the book:
“The Mahāvidyās embody Satī’s anger towards the men in her life (the men who claim to love her), her refusal to be determined in relation to them or on their terms, her powers of transformation and the potential of her symbolic dominance beyond the limits of her own myth...The Mahāvidyās are metaphors, which is where the difficulty begins. If I’m not careful I allow them to mean everything, to make everything possible, to swallow the whole world so that I can’t see anything without looking through her, without piercing the skin of her feminist context. I don’t want to pierce her in order to realise why exists beyond her; I must eat her first.”
What I absolutely adored about this book was that there is no clear demarcation between poetry and essay and each bleeds into the other. The quote above demonstrates this. It’s a complex, dense and at times enigmatic book but I loved it all the more for its shifting and challenging style. I read this coming from a place of knowing next to nothing about the topics it covers and as a white British person I am not familiar with many of the cultural references so I appreciate there is a lot I will be missing here, but equally I felt I learnt a lot through the essay sections and the references which included nods to Sara Ahmed, Julia Kristeva and Frantz Fanon amongst many others. It will take many readings to appreciate all the layers in this book but that is something I am genuinely looking forward to.