Goddess in the Mirror
Book • 2025
Tulasi Srinivas's The Goddess in the Mirror examines beauty parlors across Bangalore to investigate how practices of beauty intersect with myth, religion, gender, and class.
Drawing on long-term ethnography, the book shows clients and beauticians narrating goddess stories and repurposing epic myths to make ethical and political claims.
Srinivas frames chapters around attributes of the goddess—allure, radiance, woundedness, fertility, and fluidity—to analyze how beauty functions as both resource and constraint in a patriarchal present.
The study attends to diverse participants including middle-class clients, migrant salon workers, and trans Hijra individuals, revealing tensions of caste, labor, and technology within salon spaces.
By situating aesthetics as ethical practice rooted in Hindu moral imagination, the book argues for a decolonial, embedded understanding of categories like beauty and grace.
Drawing on long-term ethnography, the book shows clients and beauticians narrating goddess stories and repurposing epic myths to make ethical and political claims.
Srinivas frames chapters around attributes of the goddess—allure, radiance, woundedness, fertility, and fluidity—to analyze how beauty functions as both resource and constraint in a patriarchal present.
The study attends to diverse participants including middle-class clients, migrant salon workers, and trans Hijra individuals, revealing tensions of caste, labor, and technology within salon spaces.
By situating aesthetics as ethical practice rooted in Hindu moral imagination, the book argues for a decolonial, embedded understanding of categories like beauty and grace.
Mentioned by
Mentioned in 0 episodes
Mentioned by ![undefined]()
Raj Balkharan
Tulasi Srinivas, "The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty" (Duke UP, 2025)
