("KokH Jali" 1949) (Bedi 1981 34-50) Ma is a mortal woman with some divine traits A word needs to be said about Bedi Although more widely known to Indians for his work in the film industry3, Bedi (1915-84) is considered by literary critics to be one of the major writers of Urdu fiction In 1966, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award for his novelette A Slightly Soiled Sheet which was filmed in 1986, two years after Bedi's death His literary life extended over a forty-year period, beginning in the 1930's and ending in the 1970's but his work bears the indelible stamp of the Progressives, a group of writers whose heyday lies between the 1930's and Independence This group, modeling itself on the Marxist Social Realism, concentrated on depicting the problems of society4 Bedi's specialty became analyzing the problems of Indian women, but, particularly in his later work, he investigates female nature as well After thinking about goddesses in India, I have concluded that Indians so accept female divinity that my question had no meaning to Indians Deities are part of a system of beliefs which forms one's world view, so isolating divinity for explanation and analysis is difficult or impossible Moreover, the Hindu pantheon is itself complex First, deities and mortals are not mutually exclusive categories All beings possess power, shakti, and deities are beings with more power than humans Second, deities come to earth to interact with humans in various ways They come in visions or dreams (Baurghart 1987 264), in visitations such as possession (Erndl 1987218-87), during prayers to inhabit their idols (Preston 198061), or as avatars living out an animal or human life cycle (Parnnder 1982) Bedi uses divinity in two ways, as an extension of observable Hindu reality and as metaphor Since goddesses are part of Hindu belief, they can occur in literature just as human women can Sometimes Bedi's writing describes a reality beyond the empirical world to include events a Hindu would nevertheless recognize as true In Give Me Your Sorrows , for example, Indu's mother-in-law, long dead when Indu enters the family as a bride, petitions Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva so that she can come to earth to get to know her daughter-m-law Because the gods grant her wish, Indu's mother-in-law is reincarnated as Indu's daughter Bedi also uses goddess imagery to create a metaphor in which he compares a character or situation he wishes to depict to one already familiar to his readers through mythology This familiar character or situation can then be used as a first step in taking the reader to unfamiliar territory—a process necessary in the type of literature whose goal is to educate readers When used as a metaphor, Bedi s characters are not goddesses but are mortal women manifesting some divine traits Bedi uses this ambiguity in his fiction Goddesses like Rano in A Slightly Soiled Sheet and goddess-like characters such as Ma in A Barren Woman possess some divine qualities Since Indian society constructs rigid confines of behavior for its women, the paradigm of divinity allows a woman to transcend some of these restrictions Both Bedi's goddesses and some of their look-alikes expand themselves beyond cultural ^or a description of Bedi s contribution to Indian films see Abbas (1982 165 7) in Urdu and Hemming (1985 81 97) in English ''For an exhaustive treatment of Progressives throughout India see the two volume work edited by Coppola (1974) Annual of Urdu Studies, #7 5§