Identity and divinity: Boundary-crossing goddesses in medieval South India

I seek in this article to consider the extent to which schemas of classification current in popular and scholarly understandings of India's religions may be misleading as guides to the situation in Tamil Nadu in the period of the eighth to thirteenth century. By examining the myths, iconography, inscriptions, and placement in ritual settings of female deities, we are led to the realization that various distinctions among types of divinity that seem to us self-evident may have had little meaning for those who worshipped these goddesses a thousand years ago. I suggest that a more correct understanding of the significance of these goddesses in their own historical context must involve serious reconsideration of the salience of sectarian categories-Hindu or Jain, Saiva or Vaisnava-and the organization of deities into central or peripheral objects of worship, local or universal manifestations of the divine, and representatives of dangerous or beneficent powers.