That night, Tara breaks into the temple library—a place punishable by death for her to enter. She finds an old, discarded commentary on the Vedas. Utilizing her memory of the chants she heard and connecting them to the translations in the commentary, she teaches herself Sanskrit in secret. She realizes the error the High Priest made was grammatical, not spiritual; he invoked the wrong aspect of the deity.
They called me a woman in Brahmanism. Not a priestess. Not a scholar. Not a witness to my own life. Just property. Just a field to be plowed, fallowed, then left to dry.
Ethical and political dimensions
Ray brilliantly shows that worship is not agency. The woman is deified so that she can be controlled.