Walking towards the Goddess
On a brief visit home to India in the last week of April, Ritu Sharma handed me a signed copy of Shakti: Tales of Power and Promise. It travelled back with me to Panama and waited, as books often do, for the right weekend. When I finally opened it, I read it with genuine pleasure. By the end, I was convinced that the author has written a book more intimate, thoughtful and enduring than its genre usually permits.
Ritu and I have known each other for many years. We trained together for about three and a half months in Mussoorie before our professional paths diverged: hers into the Indian Revenue Service, mine into the Foreign Service. Since then, I have followed her journey from a series of postings that has now brought me to Panama, about as far from a Himalayan shrine as one can reasonably be. That a book about the goddess should reach me here, across oceans, felt in itself like a small reminder of how far these old energies travel.
Shakti is a pilgrimage, though it does not sit neatly within either travel writing or religious study. The author travels across Shakti Peeths, not as an academic cataloguing temple architecture, nor as a tourist collecting impressions, but as a seeker trying to understand what remains alive in these places. That distinction gives the book its quiet strength. Much of its appeal comes from the person doing the looking. Ritu Sharma is a serving IRS officer, a Chevening Fellow, and a public servant with two decades of experience in government. The administrator and the devotee often appear together in her sentences. One notices the discipline of observation, but also the willingness to be moved. It is this tension that keeps the goddess from becoming abstract.
The journey moves from Vaishno Devi in the northern mountains to Chamundeshwari in the south and Kamakhya in the east. Each chapter reads less like a formal essay than a conversation. The author does not offer a dry history of the shrines. She brings the reader close enough to sit beside her. One of the most memorable passages is her descent into the cave at Kamakhya, where water moves through a fissure in the rock. She allows the sacred strangeness of the place to work on her instead of reducing it to explanation, and the scene stays with the reader.
Her prose is clear, unhurried and accessible. It carries the weight of Indian mythology lightly enough for newcomers, while remaining respectful of those who approach these shrines with devotion. Even the cover, with the adorned feet of the deity, establishes a note of reverence that the book gradually earns. The author’s larger suggestion is made without sermonising: the divine feminine is not merely an inheritance to be preserved, but a reservoir of courage, memory and renewal. In her telling, power and promise are not separate ideas; they flow into one another.
The book is not without its limits. Its warmth sometimes avoids harder questions that could have deepened the inquiry, and readers looking for rigorous comparative scholarship may need to look elsewhere. But that is not the book the author sets out to write. What she offers instead is a way of carrying the sacred forward, not as nostalgia, but as a living presence. Reading her in Panama, far from any shrine, I found that presence unexpectedly persuasive. For a book of this kind, that is no small feat.
The book reviewer is a member of Indian Foreign Service and has served as Ambassador of India in Panama; Views presented are personal.
