Religion, Devotion and Medicine in North India: The Healing Power of Śītalā, by Fabrizio M. Ferrari
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The orth Indian goddess talā is most often understood as the goddess of smallpox, a fierce goddess ho is both the cause and cure of disease.Scholarship on her worship, literature, iconography, and evolution has, for the most part, agreed with this assertion, with few acknowledging her simultaneous existence as a benevolent and protective mother.In Religion, Devotion, and Medicine in North India: The e n er , Fabrizio Ferrari aims to correct this imbalance, as he argues that the majority of scholarship on talā has been complicit in the construction of the myth of the fierce smallpox goddess, hen, in fact, she has al ays and only been a goddess of protection.Through a combination of ethnographic, textual, iconographic, and archival research, Ferrari traces talā s history in orth India, ith the crux of his argument centering on the eighteenth-century Bengali talāma gal āvyas, herein she is portrayed as dangerous and disease-in icting.The volume consists of five chapters organized thematically on the topics of talā s literature, iconography, contemporary orship, association ith smallpox, and legacy, as well as four appendices with English translations of Hindi and Sanskrit texts.As much of Ferrari's argument is based on dismantling previous scholarship, each chapter (with the exception of chapter 5) attempts to take on a current understanding of talā and dismantle it.verall, hile Ferrari s or is valuable for its analysis of historical texts and contemporary rituals, his main argument that the smallpox-bringing talā is an inauthentic result of foreign in uence is unconvincing.Ferrari begins with textual sources, including ur s and dharmanibandhas from the t elfth to sixteenth centuries, tantric and āgamic texts from the t elfth to eighteenth centuries, and the Bengali talāma gal āvyas from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Interspersed ith ethnographic details of modern ritual practice, the texts are used to question the previously accepted notion that there are t o distinct talās the fierce, disease-bringing Bengali version and the benevolent protective mother of orth est India.e argues that the absence of an association ith smallpox or other diseases ithin early texts proves that the fierce talā of later texts is the result of "the interpolation of textual material associated with other, ugra, goddesses" (19).He continues this argument in his fourth chapter when he returns to the talāma gal āvyas, ithin hich talā is portrayed as a fierce, disease-bringing goddess.Ferrari argues that these texts represent the beginnings of the smallpox myth and shaped a ne profile of the goddess that eventually impacted on renditions and understandings of talā in colonial and post-colonial Bengal, in the rest of India and, eventually, abroad (120).Ferrari clearly considers
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".