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La possession en Asie du Sud

 | 
Jackie Assayag
, 
Gilles Tarabout

Corps

Spirit possession

Reframing discourses of the self and other

La possession : reformulation des discours sur le soi et l’autre

Shail Mayaram

Résumé

Cet article met en question la prééminence de la problématique binaire du soi et de l’autre dans la théorie sociale contemporaine. Une telle opposition ne prévaut pas seulement dans le champ des études culturelles, elle se constate également dans des disciplines telles que l’historiographie et l’anthropologie, ainsi que dans les multiples travaux sur l’ethnicité. L’étude de la possession suggère cependant un paradigme de remplacement pour définir le soi et l’autre, la nature des relations interethniques, et la compréhension de la culture et des cosmologies. L’argument est développé à partir d’une étude ethnographique de deux femmes shamanes dans l’ Ajmer rural au Rajasthan. L’esprit de Pīr Babu ou de l’imam Hussein martyrisé lors du massacre de Karbala possède la femme « hindoue », Sushila Rawat ; la déesse-mère collective appelée Bayasaab Mātā possède la guérisseuse « musulmane », Jamila Merat, dont la pratique a été reprise par son plus jeune frère après sa mort.

L’incorporation atteste de la perméabilité du corps ou (parce que) l’autre domine substanciellement le soi durant la transe. Le pouvoir de l’esprit possédant permet au guérisseur d’intervenir dans le monde terrestre du désir, kāma, et de la nécessité. En voyageant dans le temps et à travers l’espace, esprits et guérisseurs tissent de complexes cosmographies, telle celle que relate Sushila au pays mythique de l’ismaïlisme et des traditions intouchables.

L’imaginaire foisonnant des deux sanctuaires est en contraste avec les discours polarisés sur l’ethnicisation tenus par des groupes comme la Tablighi Jamacat et la Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), activement engagés dans des luttes pour l’affirmation des identités régionales. Le discours de la thérapie mythico-rituelle donne une réponse « civilisationnelle » de remplacement aux politiques de « redressement des torts de l’histoire » (righting historical wrong) et aux problèmes de l’évaluation de la conquête passée et/ou de la violence réelle ou perçue. La relation client/guérisseur donne naissance à une communauté de discours qui transcende la caste et les frontières ethniques.

Le caractère performatif de l’identité sexuelle des deux femmes guérisseuses les aide à renégocier les rapports entre sexes à l’intérieur de la communauté. Mais le discours de la maladie et de la possession met à jour les conflits entre sexes dans les communautés ethniquement définies. L’objectivation du soi et la subjectivisation de l’autre, impliqués dans la possession, suggèrent des voies nouvelles pour conceptualiser la dualité du soi et de l’autre.

Texte intégral

  • 1 The fieldwork on which this paper is based was done in rural Ajmer between the winter of 1995 and t (...)

1The Self-Other has emerged as one of the major conceptual frameworks in cultural studies.1 The juxtaposition frames a good deal of contemporary discussion on social life, culture and politics the world over. Indeed, it has become almost an ‘orthodoxy’ of social understanding. But one of the most interesting aspects of possession is the way in which it renegotiates the taken-for-granted-ness of the distinction between the self and the other. It is able to do so because of a dramatically different conception of personhood.

  • 2 Gaborieau (1996) contrasts the more peaceful notions of jihād articulated by the Ismailis and the A (...)

2The idea of the self in this essay refers to a shifting terrain moving back and forth from conceptions of the individual self to those of the collective self. In a good deal of contemporary writings, the self is usually conceived as that which is affirmed, valorized (with the exception of the pathological self). It is contrasted to the other who is feared, depreciated, discarded. Although the other might also be exoticized it is always considered antithetical to the self. The domain of unreason, it must be subject to practices of cultural exclusionism and silencing, as the Foucauldians have repeatedly pointed out, building on Foucault’s genealogy of otherness with respect to the mad, diseased, criminal... Some theorists have also used the notion of multiple selves. This suggests a psychic splitting and the idea of a validated self vis-a-vis a ‘rejected self’ which is itself a mode of othering. The latter corresponds at the cultural level to the ‘internal enemy’ who must be purged. Examples are notions of the effeminate Hindu who must be masculinized or the interpretation of the Islamic idea of jihād as a war against the self.2

3This paper investigates a series of questions. What are the political implications of the dominant formulation of the Self-Other? What are the politics that might follow from an alternative formulation? How do cultures negotiate the question of difference and otherness? Do they, on occasion, distance themselves from dominant ideologies and disciplinary assumptions? Further, how do cultures cope with pasts, especially if the historical experience of the other has involved the experience of conquest and/or violence? What are the available alternative strategies that address the question of otherness?

Beawar and surrounding villages with inset of Rajasthan

Beawar and surrounding villages with inset of Rajasthan

(Prakash NathTantresh, Shri Ramdev Upasana tantra: gupt mantron va Shri Ramdev yantra sahit. Beawar, Pipaliya Bazar, n.d.)

SHAMANISM, OTHERNESS, AND CULTURAL CONFLICTS

  • 3 For an elaboration see De Souza 1996.

4Some of my work has been an attempt to search for a framework, a vocabulary that will enable us to move out of the taken-for-granted, naturalized categories of‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’. This paper, then, is part of an ongoing project that attempts to reconfigure established notions of‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’. I argue that shamanism based on possession constitutes a creative response to otherness. It takes up the Self-Other question but tosses it about, turns it around and transforms it. Indeed, it ends up by suggesting alternative civilizational responses to the issue of how to address past conquest and/or violence, real or perceived. A response which is, politically speaking, dramatically different from the “righting historical wrong” stance.3

5Friedson’s ethnography of the Tumbuka in eastern Malawi shows how the erstwhile spirits of conquerors called vimbuza are used to fight witchcraft and help save lives. It is not that the shamans obliterated the memory of conquest and violence. On the contrary, each act of healing evokes the power and fear of the conqueror of the past. This power is, however, deployed as a source of strength in the present. The vimbuza create the prestigious prophet healers called nchimi (Friedson 1996: 70). The other is not only that which is rejected and despised, but also that which is invoked in the present as a healing force. Shamanism endows the culture with a capacity to cope with a past of conquest as the cultural alternative makes it possible that the community does not have to resort to a strategy of righting historical wrong. Shamanism, then, not only has to do with individual healing; it can also be an antidote to the pain of past conflict and violence between communities. This is not to deny that the exorcist’s practice and cosmology cannot be used in contexts of communal conflict. It can, and is, as Bruce Kapferer (1991) has powerfully shown with respect to Sri Lanka.

  • 4 Also by Taussig (1987) despite his reservations.

6The term ‘shamanism’ is deliberately used in this paper. It has been identified with a series of problems including the fact that it was initially used with respect to the Siberian experience. As recent users point out, the category must presume a plurality of shamanisms (Atkinson 1992). Nonetheless, I find it useful as it highlights a structural position that inhabits the healer-doctor-exorcist continuum. It underlines common themes that characterize the Indonesian balien, the African nchimi and the Rajasthani bhopa/bhopi. The term also serves to highlight the structural distance between the priest-brahman and the shaman-bhopa as mediators respectively of gods and spirits. The debate continues but the term ‘shaman’ continues to be used in a range of recent studies (Mageo & Howard 1996; Turner 1996; Tsing 1993).4 We, of course, assume that possession refers only to a limited universe within shamanism since not all shamans are spirit mediums.

7Further, the term ‘possession’ is no less problematic. It privileges the moment of trance as also the identity of the possessing spirit suggesting a complete annihilation of the self for the duration of possession. Indeed, psychologists of an earlier period preferred the term ‘dissociation’, implying the continuity between the biography and psychosocial context of the person who becomes the spirit medium (although they tended to reduce it to illness). Thus, the self is not completely displaced and can be described as having a Self-Other or hyphenated identity even as s/he speaks in multiple voices. As Levy, Mageo and Howard put it, “When a body is taken over in full possession the inhabited self is transformed and the body becomes the identified place where two or more fully formed selves contend with their own voices, intentions and different kinds of social skills. In such instances the socially suppressed can be expressed...” (1996: 18).

8Much of the literature on possession emphasizes either a performative or a therapeutic approach to possession. The former sees it in terms of ritual practice and language use while the latter views it in relation to medical anthropology and indigenous psychotherapy. This paper stresses a larger perspective on possession viewing it in relation to the social context and the ways in which it defines and redefines the larger cosmic and, through it, the social universe. Our approach encompasses and builds on the ritual drama and therapeutic perspectives. Butler’s (1990) notion of gender performativity that examines the constitution of the gendered subject through performative acts is particularly useful with regard to the former.

9In an earlier article on spirit possession I contested Sudhir Kakar’s argument that Muslim spirits mostly possess Hindus. Kakar’s (1982; 1990) position on possession is an extension of a dichotomous mode of thinking, the other that takes over the self introduces a complete bodily dislocation and must be exorcised. Not only did the cases of possession that we examined in depth refute the argument of the inevitability of the subconscious Muslim demoniac for the Hindu, instead they suggested a range of explanations for possession including possession caused by loved ones (Mayaram, fthcg. a).

10The argument is developed further here highlighting the potential creativity of the spirit medium drawing upon the cases of two shaman women. The first part outlines the ethnography of the shrines, and the second part the imaginative move of the two shaman women in reformulating the self (individual, familial, and ethnic) and the otherness of the other. This is manifest in four different aspects of their ritual practice including understandings of the body, the idea of travel in time and space, the ways in which the spirit medium’s power relates to the world of necessity-desire. Finally, we examine the constitution of new social networks through therapeutic practice and how the shrines as gendered spaces expose the fragility of monolithic (primordialist!) imaginaries.

11When I began my fieldwork in rural Ajmer, the area was rife with ethnic tension. Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) parāvartan (so-called homecoming or re-conversion) had yielded over one hundred thousand ‘neo-Hindu’ persons, or so it was claimed (Mayaram, fthcg. b). Ideas of what are a ‘Hindu’ as well as a ‘Muslim’ permeated popular discourse.

12Hitherto the Rawat and Merat inhabitants of this area were among communities that Hindu and Muslim orthodoxies found difficult to characterize as either ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’. Colonial ethnographers highlight their common cosmology (Dixon 1850).

13Ethnicized ideas of difference, however, percolated the region in the course of the century (Carstairs 1983). They were manifest in the restructuring of kinship rules which now prohibited Rawat-Merat inter-marriage and emphasized caste-like endogamy (hitherto seen as incestuous) and in a series of disputes. The Rawat now stress their Hindu-Rājpūt identity.

14In the 1980s with both the VHP and the Tablighi Jamacat working in the area, several villages became sites of major ethnic disputation. These occurred over issues such as the alleged throwing of a cow’s bone by a maulwi in charge of the local madrasah into a well, thereby making the water unpotable for Hindus. Also over ‘reformist’ Muslims’ objections to suspending the playing of the customary drum or the dancing of the camivalesque Gair on the Holī festival; and the choice of burial versus cremation for neo-Hindu (VHP converted) Merat. Ethnic violence occurred in Beawar in 1986 and in 1991, and tension has almost continuously pervaded the countryside since the early 80s.

TWO SHAMAN WOMEN

15It is in this context of extremely polarized ethnicities that one must evaluate the role of two shaman women in rural Ajmer. Their respective shrines intersected with the identities that surrounded them, but also in their own quiet way challenged the givenness of Self-Other narratives of ethnicizing ideologies.

SUSHILA

16Sushila is one of our two shaman women and the bhopi ritual specialist at the shrine of Pīr Bābā. Pīr Bābā is a pseudonym for Imam Husayn, the son of c Ali martyred during the Karbala massacre venerated on the occasion of the mourning festival of Moharram. I have outlined the ethnography of this shrine in considerable detail elsewhere (Mayaram, fthcg. a). Briefly, Sushila is a 35-year-old, illiterate ‘Hindu’ woman of the Rawat caste. She has been married into a poor family that comes from the village called Hussain Tekri.

  • 5 See Egnor-Trawick (1988) for cursing as a manifestation of power.

17Hussain Tekri (technically in Pali district) is part of the rural fringe of the town of Beawar that lies under the administrative jurisdiction of Ajmer, the well-known pilgrimage center of northwestern India (see map, p. 102). Not surprisingly, the vhp has been attempting to rename it Deonagar. Sushila’s affinal family jointly holds less than five acres of land. To supplement their income Sushila’s husband previously worked as a labourer in the nearby town of Beawar. He was given to bouts of drinking and would frequently vent his anger on Sushila. Her first trance is described as a reaction to his alcoholism and beating. Sushila elaborated the initial parchā or introduction to the ‘miracle’ of Pīr Bābā on an occasion when her husband returned home drunk. The food she served him was transformed into flowers. The next time he came home drunk, as she put it, “Pīr Bābā came within me.” She poured water from a vessel over herself, threw away her oṛhnī and went to the village shrine of Pīr Bābā. The flinging of the garment associated with veiling and seclusion is symbolic of a gendered defiance of patriarchal social structure and the constraints it imposes upon women. Shortly after her husband arrived she cursed him asking Pīr Bābā to make him blind and lame.5 This was the beginning of a major change in Sushila’s position in the family. Slowly she overcame the resistance of her affinal family. Today her husband assists her therapeutic practice as the mujāwir of the shrine (the term meaning physician is derived from Sufi discourse). His elder brother now also abhors alcohol. The entire family is currently involved in the spiritual enterprise of Pīr Bābā.

JAMILA

18Our other case, Jamila, is somewhat more difficult as it witnessed her death in the interim and the succession by her younger brother, Nasruddin. They belong to a Merat family classified as ‘Muslim’. Jamila could never be interviewed directly by us and instead appears in the following description as represented by others.

19Both Jamila and Nasruddin were/are spirit mediums for the goddess. They work in a context where gods/goddesses are now being claimed as ‘Hindu’. The vhp pushes the candidature of Ashapura Mātā, the clan goddess of the Chauhan Rājpūts, as the goddess appropriate for the emergent Hindu-Rājpūtized identity of the Rawat-Merat. But Jamila was ritually possessed by a more popular mother goddess called Bayasaab Mātā who is believed to be responsible for both causing and curing polio and paralysis.

20Jamila’s ritual practice was conducted in her natal village of Nimgarh located 15 kms. east of Beawar in the district of Ajmer.

21The Bayasaab Mātā shrine is easily spotted from a distance by the colourful flags that flutter above it. The shrine consists of a simple room built at an elevation from a narrow village path. On the light green painted walls inside hang photographs of Bayasaab Mātā and Jamila. A square structure covered by a circular gumbad (dome) rises in the middle of the room where a flame is kept continuously burning in an earthen container.

Popular mother goddess called Bayasaab Mātā–or Bāyansā (Bīdāsaṇiyā), i.e. the seven sisters popularly believed to be responsible for both causing and curing polio and paralysis.

Popular mother goddess called Bayasaab Mātā–or Bāyansā (Bīdāsaṇiyā), i.e. the seven sisters popularly believed to be responsible for both causing and curing polio and paralysis.

(Photogr. Shail Mayaram, Ajmer, 1996)

22Nasruddin, also called Pappu, has become the bhopa of the shrine after his sister Jamila’s death in 1994 when he started getting possessed by the goddess. His home is located right across from the shrine. He lives here with three older brothers, his brother’s wife, and his parents in their small house of three rooms and a kitchen. The family is extremely poor and can barely manage its subsistence. The elder brother works as a labourer helping break and load stones onto trucks.

23Bhopa Nasruddin provided us a skeletal outline of Jamila’s short and troubled life. She had undergone a nikāh to a man from nearby Rupnagar but came back rejected. Jamila began to get ritually possessed after a long illness lasting about two years. Her husband visited her informing her that he wanted to remarry. Nasruddin told us that Mātājī (mother) gave her consent to the marriage saying “merī bhopī nahīn āyegī,” that since Jamila would not return to him it was better for him to marry again. After the initiatory spirit seance the goddess regularly possessed his sister for three years. Jamila assiduously built up her practice till she suddenly fell ill with a terrible stomach pain and was rushed to the hospital at Beawar. On the third day of her hospitalization, according to Nasruddin, the goddess came for three hours. She demanded water, then declared “merī bhopī bachegī nahīn” ( “my bhopi will not live”). “She (the goddess) got the intravenous drip removed.” Jamila died.

24Gita, the female shaman of the Bayasaab Mātā shrine at Shyamgarh, who had treated Jamila’s illness and seems to have been her role model, filled in for us the details of her tormented life. In Jamila’s case, unlike Sushila’s, it was not alcohol and domestic violence that was the problem. She had gone once to her husband’s family at her muklāvā, the rite of departure to her affinal family, but the marriage remained unconsummated. She was unceremoniously told that her body was undeveloped like that of a boy’s despite her advanced age. Her husband and his family refused to keep her on the grounds that she was flat-chested, looked like a child herself and would not be capable of bearing one.

25After her return to her natal home Jamila approached Gita for her recurrent stomach and body ache. Gita maintains that Mātājī had caused Jamila’s illness. However, Jamila took her advice and went on a pilgrimage to the Rāmdev tombshrine at Runicha. She recovered to become a bhopi to the goddess herself. Jamila’s case is similar to other ethnographies of persons who are first clients and then healers (Taussig 1987). Gita had an established practice running from her natal home and Jamila possibly also felt encouraged to do the same.

26As Jamila acquired a following in the village, a small shrine was built adjacent to the house over a preexisting platform. However, she now had to face the hostility of her own natal family. Being a single woman, she possibly presented a threat to male inheritance. The two elder brothers were particularly annoyed that a young, 28-year-old girl should continue to ‘sit at home’. Gita maintains that eventually Jamila consumed poison. Did she take her life because of the tremendous tension she was living under and the constant taunts of her elder brother? Or was she poisoned, as one Nimgarh inhabitant told us?

27Of her brothers Jamila had loved Nasruddin the most and would always take him out with her. Just before her death she expressed to him her anxiety that none would now look after Mātājī. But he reassured her that he would serve the goddess.

28Bhopa Nasruddin was wearing an olive green trouser and a striped shirt when we first met him. He was about 16 years old then and unmarried. He keeps long hair and has an innocent face given to ready laughter. Nasruddin has been educated up to the seventh class but admits that he could no longer concentrate on his studies as, “Mātājī did not let me study.” Nasruddin has been host to the goddess since 1994. He never leaves the shrine in accordance with the goddess’s wishes. During the navrātrā (the nine nights dedicated to the goddess) he fasts for all nine days.

29We have no direct experience of Jamila’s healing practice but can derive an idea from Nasruddin’s own. The trance occurs anytime between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday. The bhāv or trance can also occur in an undesignated fashion if someone in great pain approaches him. Clients begin to arrive in the morning and continue to come into the afternoon. Nasruddin’s mother helps him with minor ritual tasks such as placing the coconut and the incense in the earthen container. Possession takes place only when some clients have collected. Many are from Nimgarh and surrounding villages but some come from as far as central India. They bring incense, coconut, cloth, sacred thread and grains of barley or wheat. The foodgrains are placed in a pile in front of the bhopa. The afflicted ones greet the icon that faces the rising sun in the morning, offer the grains, and then wait their turn sitting under the nim tree.

30The goddess summons clients separately for the savāl-javāb (question-answer), asking them the cause of their suffering and giving them sacred ash and wheat grains. After this dialogue, the grains are picked up and tossed a few times by Nasruddin’s mother. While some are scattered, the remaining ones are counted. If they are joṛe ūne or in pairs the client’s desire will be fulfilled.

31Let us now return to our theme and explore the reconfiguration of notions of the Self and Other within the discourse of possession.

BODY MATTERS

32Possession suggests how corporeality is envisaged as a permeable site from which the spirit medium might ascend, or the spirit descend. The bhopa/bhopi may be characterized as one whose body is entered by a deity or a priest.

33The embodiment of the spirit assumes that the self (of medium/victim) can be substantially taken over by the other. Indeed, the self may even be experienced as other during the trance. Both Sushila and Nasruddin referred to their loss of memory. The seance is generally described as a loss of consciousness in which memory is suspended. But while the memory associated with the self becomes dormant, the memory of the possessing spirit takes over. Thus, the interrogation of a client-victim builds on the memory of similar dialogues on earlier occasions. Once Nasruddin asked us for the photographs we had taken of him during our previous visit.

34Thus, there is a discontinuity of the self as it displays the attributes of the possessing person. But this is not necessarily pathological or schizophrenic as psychiatrists had once stressed. Indeed possession needs to be viewed more as a skillful communicative act and as culturally crafted and creative coping behavior rather than as an illness, particularly for women, a point to which we will return.

35Who then is this Other that reconstitutes Being? Sushila described herself as being controlled by the ruah or spirit of Pīr Bābā. Like certain other Muslim saints such as Mira Datar, Imam Husayn’s power arises from his having been a shahīd or martyr.

  • 6 The term uparlī parāī used locally and elsewhere refers to Bayānsā or Bīdāsaṇiyā, a collective folk (...)

36Jamila is said to have been governed by Mātājī (shorthand for Bayasaab Mātā), the mother goddess who causes/cures polio and paralysis.6 In Rajasthan and elsewhere the seven local goddesses are said to be derived from the Saptamātrikās or seven mothers of the Sanskritic tradition who prevailed from Vedic to Puranic times. They are found in numerous sculptures where they frequently appear with the companion Bhairu (Meister 1986).

  • 7 An older anthropological perspective viewed the virgin goddess as unrestrained and therefore sexual (...)

37It has been argued, that the goddess is virgin yet maternal, suggesting her sexualised power. Further, that a virgin goddess is called Mātājī is not a contradiction in terms but indicates how she is a potential wife and mother and emphasizes her role as protective mother to her clientele.7

  • 8 Bhairu/Bhairon/Bhairava is a creature of Śiva. Mahakal Bhairava was made in order to teach Brahma a (...)

38The possessing goddess of Nimgarh is associated with the divine-demoniac Bhairu whose smaller sub-shrine is adjacent to hers. Significantly, the trance occurs on Saturday and Sunday that are also the days of the worship of Bhairu. Symbolized by a large stone icon, Bhairu is both a locality god and manifestation of the Sanskritic deity who is believed to be an instrument of the goddess’s power.8 Bhairava, a Śaiva guardian figure, is usually attendant to various goddesses and also a deity in his own right. Chalier-Visuvalingam comments that as an insatiably lusty bachelor he seduces women, especially young virgins but is associated more with low-caste women. The Nimgarh Bhairu is obviously the dark Kāla Bhairava, the commoner deity who is offered meat and wine and blood sacrifice which are unacceptable to Gora Bhairuji of a light and benign aspect. But both are derived from Mahādev and are the masters of ghosts, witches and demons (Carstairs 1961: 92-94).

39When an alcohol offering is made a curtain has to be drawn separating Bhairu from the goddess shrine. The alcohol is brought by clients and can range from local tharrā (undistilled liquor) to ‘English wine’. It is offered along with oil and vermilion and drops of goat’s blood. The blood is taken from a cut in the ear and after this rite the goat is known as the Bhairuji’s goat.

40Speech and bodily contortion suggest how the other overtakes the spirit medium at least temporarily. Body boundaries are rendered fluid as Bayasaab penetrates Nasruddin’s body through the thumb, generating a feeling of heaviness. The possessing spirits are more audible than visible. Sushila’s voice tends to become particularly hoarse. During the trance Nasruddin yelps as his body contorts though he still continues to answer questions. The yelps grow more rapid and loud then slow down to a rhythmic tempo while the head simultaneously sways. Once during possession the dēvi manifests herself in her vikrāl rūp or terrible form that lasts about ten minutes or so. This is when his face and body twist and hands spread out sideways. His moaning, writhing body contorts, much like that of a spastic. He foams at the mouth, akin to a patient suffering from paralysis. If required his mother gives him water that he drinks from a mouth that has turned crooked.

41In the following dialogue with Ghanshyam the goddess’s scathing tone was marked:

Money does not stay in your hand. Your family lives apart from you. You drink. (Denial.) Don’t lie, lies do not stand up before me. I will give you employment. And your book, make sure you give me a copy. Don’t be too greedy. Don’t drink after you go from here and your home will be peaceful. Offer your dēvi a bottle of wine in my name and you will get a job. Come again.

We could hardly believe that this was the shy, giggling and retreating Nasruddin.

42Sushila’s hair is a riotous, black mass as her body sways in circular fashion from her waist down during possession. Loosening the hair is a mode of sexual expressiveness (Mageo 1996: 43). Sushila is dramatically unveiled in a social context where veiling is a dominant cultural ideology.

  • 9 Dhūp, made from a combination of camphor, sandalwood, incense and guggal, exudes a fragrance when p (...)

43Both our spirit mediums belong to the category of willed and designated trance that is induced by drumming and the burning of incense, either dhūp or lobān.9 The use of rhythmic speech, music and aromatics render the trance a sensuous experience. The indigenous language use of “chāyā ānā” suggests that possession is willed. This distinguishes it from “bhūt or dākan lagnā” indicating possession by a ghost or witch that is not voluntary and requires exorcism. The latter often affects living women and is uncontrolled, signifying the powerlessness of the victim. Possession is said to have been caused by a dākan in case she is a live woman, or by a balā (the liminal beings who are neither living nor dead; cf. Shore 1978; Taussig 1987).

44Just as the other marks the healer’s body, it overtakes its victim whose identity is also a negotiated one. The self is conceived as vulnerable, exposed to the environment and to havā or wind. At Hussain Tekri the possessing spirit may cry out, tremble and shriek. The victim’s body is fastened to chains that remain till the exorcism takes place, which is at the completion of the peshī or juridical hearing. Each balā is described as having a vaqt or time on completion of which it can be exorcised. The chain is then tied to one of the windows.

45The following statement made by a victim of possession suggests the shifting registers of voices, of victim and possessing agency. The victim cries as he holds on to the wiremesh and his body sways back and forth in a trance:

Clients awaiting their turn with Pīr Bābā, a few victims of possession wail at the wiremesh, the red of the window comes from the five threads of help (symbolizing the five pīrs) that clients tie.

Clients awaiting their turn with Pīr Bābā, a few victims of possession wail at the wiremesh, the red of the window comes from the five threads of help (symbolizing the five pīrs) that clients tie.

us bachṛe ko bachāne kī himmat nahīn hai kyā. nahīn hai to bol de. ye bachṛā nahīn uthaūñga. ye bachṛā jindā hai. terī ijāzat hai to use jālī ke andar challe se bāndh le. ab vo jindā rah saktā hai. bachṛe ko bachā de.
Don’t you have the courage to save your calf [son]? If you don’t, speak up. Then I will take up the burden. This calf is living. If you give permission a chain can tie it to the wiremesh. Now he can live. Save this calf.

46And then the voice of the possessing spirit who is obviously a Muslim boy and speaks in songlike tones:

  • 10 For a discussion see Besnier 1996.

yahī boltā hūñ kī bachṛa chāhiye. halāl vālī meat khāne vālā huñ. kalejā kis kā ban rahā hai.
That’s what I say, I want this calf. I am a halāl meat-eater. Whose liver is being cooked?
[He wants to know, ] “Bābā, what am I? Bābā, tell me where I come from? Why have I come? What have I come here to take? Where will I go from here?”
A complex heteroglossia is involved.10

  • 11 Bayasaab Mātā is also known for her continuous savāl-javāb or interrogation that investigates the n (...)

47The bujh or the interrogation suggests the speaking presence of Pīr Baba in Sushila’s body.11 He holds what is locally called a darbār (court) where he pronounces nyāya (juridical ruling). The victim asks: “What is my offence?” There is a homology with the royal court here and also with the assemblage of gods who pronounce reparations or the penance of the victim. The spirit-deity might even arbitrate disputes.

48The sunvāī or hearing is the dialogue that takes place between the two possessing spirits who are hierarchically related. Hāzarī (attendance) is the almost compulsive nature of the presence of the spirit who eventually reveals his/her caste and gender identity. As I watched a family bring in their screaming daughter, I was told: “This is how Baba controls the balā. In Baba’s darbār the balā cries out, trembles and shrieks.”

49The alien spirit can be exorcised only when it appears in this, its aslī rūp or real form. Then the balā is brought under remand and will itself demand a faislā (judgement). Some can take a few days, some weeks, and some even years before the final exorcism rites take place. But balās are liable to repossess the same or another person and have to be accorded an even more drastic punishment in a double remand.

50The restoration of body boundary is foregrounded in the idea that the healing spirit must exorcise the disembodied spirit of a witch/sorcerer/ghost. Health is, as Laderman suggests in her work on Malay shamans, defined in terms of spiritual gates and disease viewed as the breaching of the body’s gates that no longer protect the “fortress within” (Laderman 1996: 115-16). As the balā or spirit is believed to suck blood and the dākan to be cannibalistically capable of feeding on the victim’s body, the exorcism is aimed at a re-establishment of body identity.

51Possession demolishes a series of dichotomies, and among them that of appearance-reality. There is no obvious frontier between the visible and the invisible. As Jacques Le Goff suggests, the visible is merely the trace of the invisible (1990: 28-29). Body deportment and speech of the medium are a mere hint of complex cosmographies involving spirits. The unseen and unheard are rendered audible and nearly tangible.

POWER

52The other is then mutable, translocatable and contactable through khat or mail, but is also valorized due to his/her power. Spirits are dangerous if left free and hence need to be bound. This ability to bind and to heal suggests the power of the host, as s/he is able to render the spirit’s power socially useful. The spirit’s manifestation in the medium’s body helps address the mundane world of living. There is no denial of the reality of the everyday here but instead what might be a capacitating endeavour to equip clients to deal with this world.

53These and other rural shrines, then, relate to the world of kama, of desire and necessity. Both Pīr Bābā and Bayasaab Mātā are regarded as presences to which one can appeal for the fulfillment of needs and wants. “You can ask for mannat,” my Ansari-Julaha woman guide told me on my first visit to Hussain Tekri. This much older woman urged me, “Aunty, just say what is in your heart. If your work is suspended (rukā huā) it will be completed (purā hogā).” Several women, fewer men and some children waited their turn with the Bābā so that they could present their fariyād (requests).

54Folk deities in general assist the project of living as the following excerpt from a dialogue recorded in my field diary at the shrine suggests:

My turn comes after that of a woman whose son had disappeared. I am told to hurry up, to sit properly in front and to ask what I want.
Khairunissa Ansari instructs me:
– Come with me and do the salām and ask about any problem you have. Say insistently, “ye kām ho jānā chāhiye bīs din main” [This task must be accomplished in twenty days]. Bābā is given deadlines. You can ask any question.
Hesitating to make public my problems, I ask Pīr Bābā tamely:
– When will my book be ready?
Pīr Bābā:
— jarūr [Certainly].
Then as an aside commanded others to make room:
– achī tarah baitho, hatjā bhāī [Sit properly, move to one side].
To me:
— Bābā par vishvās rakho to jarūr hogī. jo turn dil main ummīd le ke āye ho main purī karūñgā. note likh ke jālī main jāo. sache dil se tan man se dud kar ke jāo. tumhāre dil main jo bhī kam ho purā kar dūñga [Have faith in Bābā and it will be done. The hopes in your heart will be fulfilled. Write a letter and leave it in the window-mesh. Seek benefaction with a true heart. I will fulfil the desire in your heart].
Other clients instructed me:
— Write a report of your dukh dūr (suffering).
Meanwhile Khairunissa pressed showing many years of practice:
— makan kārvā do, file pass karvā do [Ensure the house, that they pass the file],
Bābā:
– kuch bhī mat karo duā karo [Don’t do anything, just pray for benefaction].
Khairunissa:
– duā kartī hūñ, baba āp to roshan hain [I seek benefaction, Bābā you are luminous]. She added, “But I have great worries, tell me what to do.”
Bābā:
— hardam nazar rakhtā hūñ [I keep my eye on you always].
Khairunissa:
— dushmanon ko nīche jhukānā [Make sure my enemies bend].
Bābā:
— sab ko niche jhukā diyā tassallī rakho [Be patient, all will bow down].
Khairunissa:
— bahut pareshān hūñ, kām kariyo nihāl [I am very disturbed, do something to make me happy].
Bābā:
— duā karo [Pray for benefaction].

55It is not only the spirit medium who can have access to divine spirits but also clients who can make written petitions to Pīr Bābā in Hindi, English or Urdu, that are tied to the window with the "madat kī dorī" ( “the thread of help”). Even as clients tie five threads (symbolizing the five pīrs) on the windows with seven knots each they appeal for Bābā’s intercession to relieve their suffering.

56We interviewed Nasruddin once as he was washing his clothes. He stated, “I have so much power, I call people again and again.” He treats people for polio, paralysis and spirit possession. The goddess variously promises government and other employment, prosperity (barkat), and alleviation of suffering (dukh dūr karūñ). The small children who are playing around the shrine tell me that anyone who comes is cured. But the goddess is selective and does not treat everyone. When Mahopal Merat was brought to the shrine one night with a stomach ache and loss of speech, her ākhe (grains of barley) were not accepted and she was told that she could not be saved. She was taken to the Ramgarh Bayasaab Mātā shrine where she died.

57Nasruddin told us, “Only the dukhiyā (suffering) come, not the ones who are contented.” Monetary contributions are taken only after the goddess cures the afflicted. Clients usually make offerings ranging from Re. 1 to higher amounts. At Hussain Tekri there is box for contributions, but Bābā prohibits ever demanding one.

58The power of the possessing one is manifest in his/her capacity to protect bodily integrity. At Hussain Tekri clients are given rose flower petals and prasād consisting of ilaichīdānā in paper packets wrapped with green and red sacred thread. Arabic āyāt placed inside a cwīz or protective amulet strung on a red-yellow thread is also given at a payment of something like Rs.130. Copper kaṛās that cost thirty rupees and other devices such as the gusl pānī or the bodily bath water of the Pīr suggest the radiant expansiveness of his protective powers. A silver challā (amulet) protects against illness. But take off the amulet and you are likely to get affected again!

59At Nimgarh, clients who come after the trance are given thread called tāñtī that has been put through the smoke, bhabhūti (ashes) and prasād of coconut. Tāñtī is a thread of raw cotton tied around the wrist to relieve any form of bodily suffering in the name of a deity (Lalas 1962-1978, 2: 1488). The idea of prasād is not part of Muslim liturgy and is clearly derived from Hindu practice meaning offerings given to worshippers that are leavings from the divine meal.

60The power of the Pīr-deity resonates through the possessed body. The early manifestation of Sushila’s powers evoked a hostile response from her husband, who takes out his sword wanting to cut off her head, but then Bābā appears and he has to change course. Sushila also provoked, to begin with, an ethnicized response from some members of her all Rawat village, who dismiss her saying, “All this is Muslim,” implying that it was inappropriate for a Hindu woman. Some Muslims were also known to say, “Why does Pīr Bābā come to a Hindu’s home?” A few others in the village also taunt her, but, as she put it, Pīr Bābā has his own way of teaching them a lesson.

TRAVELS IN TIME AND SPACE

  • 12 Gharib Nawaz is the popular name for Khwaja Muin ud-din Chishti. His dargāh in Ajmer city is the mo (...)
  • 13 I owe this to a discussion with Ramchandra Gandhi.

61Sushila’s voyage extends over a complex mythic terrain as she relates to different moments of time. Like Khwaja Gharib Nawaz of the Chistiya silsilah, Imam Husayn is also an enemy of magic, hence his power to fix spirits.12 The body of the spirit medium or shaman is, however, endowed with special attributes. Indeed it is conceived at the intersection of form and formlessness.13 Local practices have emerged from a long dialectic between form and formlessness–hence, the idea that the martyred spirit of Imam Husayn can be embodied by a living woman spirit medium.

62Sushila relates simultaneously to the Rāmdev tradition. The bhopa family are themselves pūjāris of the Rāmdev temple that they built from offerings to Baba although they attribute it to Bābā. Sushila thus connects the mythic landscape of Ismailism and untouchable traditions. Temporally the events are located in 680 A. D. and in the early half of the 15th century respectively.

63Rāmdev/Rāma Pīr, a kṣatriya hero-saint, is referred to as dhedhon kā dev (god of the untouchables), a saviour of the poor (Binford 1976). The five pīrs who came from Medina one day when he was grazing goats are said to have tested him. Rāmdev asked them to come and sit and offered them food. “But our bowl is lying in our house,” they said. At which Rāmdev put his hand to the goat and milk came forth. So he is acknowledged as the sixth pīr ( “pīron se baṛā pīr Rāmdev”). The five pīrs and Rāmdev are represented by the bodily symbols of the hand and feet respectively. Rāmdev shrines usually comprise a platform (chabūtrā) with the imprint of footprints (charan, pāgliyā), the form in which he is worshipped. These obtain benefaction (duā) if made in front of the house. The panjtān also prominently displayed at Hussain Tekri symbolizes the five Shi’a sacred persons including the Prophet Hazrat Mohammad, HazratcAli “shere khudā” (the lion of the Lord), his wife Fatima, and two sons, Imam Hasan and Husayn.

64Khan (1997, ch. 2) argues how the Rāmdev cult bridged aspects of Ismailism and tantrism although these were submerged by the Rājpūtization of the 18th- 20th centuries. Ismaili sources indicate the conversion of untouchable Meghvals in Sind, Gujarat and Rajasthan. The Rāmdeorā-Runicha tomb is architecturally Mohammedan and is a prominent object of worship while the saint’s flag and sheet covering are both green. With a following drawn from both Muslims and Hindus, it is legitimate to read the fatiha or the Koranic verses appropriate to Islamic mortuary ritual at his mazar (tomb). Not surprisingly, Sushila dresses in green that is also the colour the shrine is painted in.

  • 14 Harji Bhati’s own shrine complex displays a row of mazars sheltered under cenotaphs which are the t (...)

65The iconography of Jamila’s shrine is equally complex. The Bāyansā-Bhairu complex is shared with the Rājpūt Pīr Rāmdev, his untouchable sister Dalibāī, and Harji Bhati. In a prominently displayed poster Rāmdev is depicted as a bearded warrior bearing a spear and riding a horse while Harji who carries a fly-whisk stands in front of his own horse. Dalibāī is Rāmdev’s dharm-bahan (adoptive sister) or guru-bahan (co-disciple) and might have been his tantrik partner. According to Meghval traditions, Rāmdev ate with untouchables and sang devotional songs with them for which he was ostracized by some of his Rājpūt kin. Harji was an 18th-century Rājpūt saint-poet and devotee of Rāmdev. He composed several hagiographies describing Rāmdev’s life and miracles which may be the oldest songs describing the career of Rāmdev. Khan (1997: 88,95n.) argues that oral traditions relate Harji to the Ismaili Pīr Shams whose shrine is located in Multan and that he might have belonged to a guru-disciple lineage initiated by Shams.14 Significantly, Nasruddin plans to make a Rāmdev temple near his home.

  • 15 cAbbas Alamdar was flag bearer during the Karbala battle and killed at a very young age, hence his (...)

66Sushila’s powers have even generated visions for her own husband who told us, “Once I saw two persons, one dressed in black and the other in green. The first was cAbbas Alamdar who had a black beard and the second was Aka Husayn who had a black and white beard.”15 The tomb of cAbbas Alamdar (both the Prophet and c Ali ’s half brother and, hence, Husayn’s uncle) is said to lie under a nearby acacia tree where exorcised spirits are interred. On another occasion Halubhāī experienced Bābā Ramsha Pīr: “Bābā (Rāmdev) appears to us in dreams and gives us instructions,” he said.

67The spiritual itinerary of Sushila is reflected in the cosmography of clients, which evokes both Islamist and untouchable traditions. Bhagwati Rawat’s balā cries out before it is sealed in a bottle and buried, cAbbas cAli Alamdar kī kasam, ab masūm ko kabhī nahīn satāūñgā re, Ramsha Pīr kī kasam kabhī nahīn satāūñga" ( “I swear by cAbbas cAli Alamdar, I will not trouble this innocent one, I swear by Ramsha Pīr I will not cause trouble”).

68Tsing deploys the idea of ‘travel’ to show how the shaman traverses the space of a spiritual landscape. Through her chant the shaman woman, called Uma Adang, also travels in time. Like the more conventional Meratu shamans, she refuses the boundaries separating the body, the local, the regional, and the foreign (Tsing 1993: 260).

69Eliade describes the trance as the manifestation of soul-flight. But the journey is not only of the shaman but also of the possessing spirit. Pīr Bābā’s savārī or carriage arrives by an identifiable path. When I accidentally came in the way I was urgently told, “inko rāste se hatāo,” i.e., to step to one side as I was blocking the path of Baba. Spirits travel in time and across space: Pīr Baba originally came from Karbala and was localized in shrines such as Javra Sharif in Ratlam where he has a huge dargāh. The further localization in Ajmer is explained by Ratlam being too distant for poor people to go. Ayub maintains, however, that cases, which have failed at Javra Sharif and Runicha (the Rāmdev shrine) come to Hussain Tekri. A shorter distance was traversed by the goddess as she moved from Shamgarh to Nimgarh; hence, the Mātājī from Shamgarh is baṛī (elder).

ETHNIC RELATIONS

70An ethnography of the two shrines and their respective healing practices indicates a range of personal, cross-ethnic intersections and networks that defy ethnicizing/nationalizing attempts. Several castes and communities (including Christians) come to Hussain Tekri apart from persons of the untouchable castes, Raigars and Bhambis, who are associated with the stigmatized leather trade. Bhambi villagers from Nimgarh present at the goddess shrine told me that usually they come on the day of the chaukī, but if anyone suffers from more pain s/he is brought there. The healing complex brings into existence a speech community that transcends caste and ethnicity and is marked by intense communication.

71What are these networks? A Muslim called Hafiz comes on every chaukī and is Bābā’s greatest sevak after Sushila’s husband. He performs a range of tasks such as beating the drum or buying the packets of lobān. He interviews the balā, writes letters to Bābā, ties the protective amulets and helps in the exorcism ritual. On one occasion I saw him cut a victim’s hair, tie it into three knots and put it into a bottle getting her to blow into it twenty-one times. The bottle is then capped and buried in a hole. The client is sent for a cooling bath and asked to circum-ambulate both Bābā’s and Rāmdev’s shrines.

  • 16 See Devji (ts.) for a discussion in the context of Gandhi and Indian Muslims.

72Intense friendships as well as working relationships can be witnessed in the two shrines. They range from the relationship between Gita and Jamila to that between Sushila and her brother Hafiz. They also arise between clients as they come in contact at the shrine such as the friendship which developed between the balloon seller Laxman Soni and Sabir. The discourse of brotherhood has been contrasted with that of friendship, ft is said that friendship arises out of choice, and brotherhood is grounded in the givenness of kinship.16 While this is true of Western cultures, in Asiatic cultures friendship often assumes a kinship idiom.

  • 17 Personal interview, 12 Sept. 1996.

73Lower-caste ideas translated from an individual to a macro-cultural level suggest a far more negotiable and fluid terrain of collective identities. But the shrines just as powerfully bring under the spotlight the cleavages within communities ethnically defined. Hafizbhāī was the one who first brought Ramabāī Rawat to Sushila.17 Her own female affinal relatives possessed Ramabāī. These dākans or witches fed on her liver that caught fire. This can result in death within 24- 36 hours unless intervention by a healer is made. She is only one of the many women bewitched by an intimate relation, neighbor or friend who seek solace from Pīr Bābā. We will return to this again in the next section.

74In virtually every African society south of the Sahara the intrusion by a person close to one is expressed in the idiom of witchcraft. This draws heavily on the cannibalistic metaphor since the witch is said to eat her victim or sap a person’s vitality by debilitating the force inherent in body fluids. But the witch is always someone close, a member of the victim’s group-clan, village and often a neighbour. Witchcraft and sorcery, as Kuper writes, “take toll of people between whom bonds already exist...” (Jacobson-Widding, ts.). The discourse of possession reveals a myriad of fissures in communities, invented and imagined and also engendered to which we now turn.

Khairunissa Ansari praying at what is said to be the tomb of cAbbas Alamdar where exorcised spirits are interred.

Khairunissa Ansari praying at what is said to be the tomb of cAbbas Alamdar where exorcised spirits are interred.

Sub-shrine over the tomb of c Abbas Alamdar

Sub-shrine over the tomb of c Abbas Alamdar

This contains a model of the tacziyahs or effigies of tombs of the martyrs of the battle at Karbala, a small replica of the pañja (hand) that symbolizes the five pīrs and the pagaliyā or footprints that represent Rāmdev. Behind them is a picture of Javra Sharif said to be the main dargāh of Pīr Bābā or Iman Husayn.

Painting depicting Rājpūt Pīr Rāmdev with his untouchable, adopted sister Dalibāī kneeling before him and saint-poet Harji who bears the fly-whisk.

Painting depicting Rājpūt Pīr Rāmdev with his untouchable, adopted sister Dalibāī kneeling before him and saint-poet Harji who bears the fly-whisk.

ENGENDERING COMMUNITIES

75The sexual politics of the shrines is woven through our ethnography. Sushila who suffered domestic abuse for many years deployed Pīr Bābā’s (counter) power to establish a more favourable position in her household/family/village/locality. The husband who once wanted to behead her is now profoundly affected by Pīr Bābā, to the extent that he refuses to make a singular statement about his identity, stating, “We believe in both Hinduism and Islam.” His land is in Bābā’s name.

76Bhairu Singh Rawat, Sushila’s brother-in-law, confessed to us that he gave Sushila a lot of trouble and even beat her:

I used to drink a lot. (But) Bābā hates alcohol. He spread conflict in our house. Bābā began to appear to my wife also. My son became unconscious one day with his tongue hanging out. My wife brought him to Bābā’s [to Sushila’s] and because of his miracle, he was cured. I had promised that I would give up alcohol if he were cured.

  • 18 Deities and pīrs sometimes have a non-alcoholic orientation. Carstairs (1983: 13-14) mentions a bho (...)

77Not only did the domestic violence come to a halt, Sushila was also able to establish non-alcoholism in her household and what is now her space of ritual work.18

78Sushila has also been able to overcome the social seclusion of the women of her caste, an agenda which is being pushed as the Rawat try to mould their identity in the image of the Chauhan Rājpūt clan. Not even a menstrual taboo affects the regularity of her possession. The only time Pīr Bābā “did not come” is in the post-partum period after she had her children.

  • 19 For a denial see Rajan 1998.

79The recent debate on whether Hindu goddesses are feminist seems infructuous.19 Indeed, in this case Pīr Bābā has an equally, if not greater, emancipatory potential. Possession and the authorization of Pīr Bābā enable the bhopi to transgress ‘normal’ role expectations and norms of body display and movement. Feminism, we need to remind ourselves, is a contemporary discourse. Further, goddess mythologies vary considerably. Moreover, goddesses are not intrinsically feminist/anti-feminist and it is the context of signification associated with the goddess that is important.

80The spirit medium is no mere vessel or completely plastic. Both Gita and Sushila deployed the virgin mother goddess’s own biography to live apart from their husbands. Bayasaab flew away just before her marriage was to take place. Jamila struggled valiantly against her elder brothers’ attempts to send her back to her husband. Nasruddin told us that to begin with, his father had been very skeptical of his sister’s bhāv and told her that it was all pretence. Then Mātājī showed her parchā: two kilos of silver had been stolen from a household but Mātājī was able to identify the thief and the hiding place. But while Gita and Sushila’s possession enabled them to strengthen their positions within the household, Jamila continued to be vulnerable. Her brothers remained consistently adamant and eventually Jamila could not withstand the patriarchal pressures, goddess notwithstanding.

81In the case of both our shaman women what lay exposed was the extraordinary fragility of the community itself, rent by patriarchies of affinal and natal families. Sushila’s and other exorcism shrines are far more frequented by women. Some women come for treatment relating to infertility, others for psychiatric healing.

82Some woman’s problems arise out of marriage. Razia Kathat came to Sushila soon after her first visit to her affinal family where a low-caste Raigar woman bewitched her. The latter is regarded as part of a class of spirit women who consume feces during childhood then acquire sidhi or special powers. But when her jeth (husband’s older brother) starts beating Razia the Raigar spirit abuses him–a socially prohibited act which could be legitimately done as the spirit was Razia’s sās (mother-in-law) in kin terms (being from the same village). The shrine emerges as a space where the inexpressible can be uttered and norms of social respect and distance from senior affinal male kin are permitted a violation.

  • 20 Personal interview, 14 Sept. 1996.

83Another woman, Hiribāī (the wife of a teacher called Kailash Chand), began getting possessed when her husband Kailash told her that he wanted to get a second wife. Pīr Bābā, however, gave this barren woman a son when she was forty-four years old. The son has been named Roshan. The spirit of cAbbas Salamdar also periodically possesses Hiri.20

84The cultural attribution of women’s suffering is externalized and understood in terms of spirits. Their bodies are seen as particularly liable to possession. But the large numbers of women are explained because possession is one of the cultural forms to express resentment available to them along with lamentation, stylized verbal abuse, etc. (Tapper 1979: 6-7). The readjustment accords with Lewis’s (1971) interpretation of shamanism as an oblique strategy of protest. Possession makes it possible for them to survive within the family. Many do, and some don’t, hence Jamila’s death.

85It is somewhat paradoxical that persons who manifest a lack of power and status and are perceived as being weak, experience spirits. This renders our shrines a subaltern arena where women’s vulnerability is struggled against as they make demands and claims authorized by spirits. Spirits both trouble, and at times assist, ‘the weak’.

86One might wonder whether the reformulation of the Self-Other is relevant only in contexts of spirit possession. But the insights into the self and the other that it yields may help one understand other contexts and alternative modes of theorizing personhood and political practice.

87Possession, the imbibing of sacred food or the bath water of the Pīr and other acts indicate a sense of expanded selfhood. Similarly, in the holy communion the ritual eating of the divine body of Christ in the Eucharistic rite accomplishes a merging of identities (human/divine), temporal modes (past/present), and extreme ontological states (life/death) (Dunton-Downer 1997). The reconstruction of the self through an expanded identity is demonstrated in other arenas as well. The psychoanalytic notion of ‘self object’ suggests how the other gets incorporated into the self and gets experienced as individual subjectivity.

  • 21 Nandy is one of the contemporary theorists who has most creatively used the idea of multiple selves

88Nandy argues that several South-Asian cultures indicate an idea of a fluid self that is really a configuration of selves encompassing non-selves and antiselves. This is a negation of the modern concept of the self as a well-bounded, individuated entity separable from the non-self (Nandy 1995; 1996). The idea of an associative model of the person based on transaction has been pursued convincingly by Marriott. Hence the Pakistani writer Intizar Husain can state that he sees himself as a person who had one foot in Ayodhya and one in Karbala– moreover, that he always felt there was a Hindu sitting inside him (Bhalla 1997).21

89The association between state, writing, history and religion has been marked in contrast to the periphery characterized by (non-state) community, orality, beliefs such as in witchcraft and spirits. Rahi Masoom Raza (1996) describes the inhabitants of a village, Ghazipur, as being ‘outside history’. Possibly Sushila, Nasruddin and others like them are the people whom the vhp is trying to bring into ‘history’, the (‘Hindu’) religion and the nation-state. But their shrines remain microcosmic public spaces where the social dramas of competing social identities, conflicting ideologies and sexual politics are played out. These parody established religion and social convention, as Lambek (1981) would put it, but also the imagined ethnicities of official discourse and nationalist ideologies. They represent anti-communitas but also a new communitas that arises out of necessity and desire and challenges the givenness of collective identities, of the inherited self. I have argued elsewhere that medical pluralism–the existence of multiple systems of medical resort–has fostered the emergence of new networks across ethnic boundaries (Mayaram, fthcg. a).

90The possessed body is mirrored in the conception of the social body. Clearly, possession diverges from ethnic annihilation as a response to the other. Kapferer’s contention that the rite is a metaphor for the riot is questionable (1991; 1997: xiii). He sees exorcism as a model for the extreme expression of otherness manifest in violence. But the rite can also be a counter-ethnic metaphor, generating a new set of relations arising from the cosmic incorporation of the other.

  • 22 Appadurai (1998) sees affirmative action with respect to OBCs as a ‘quasi ethnic’ confusion created (...)

91Appadurai (1998) has recently argued that ethnic violence is a mode of the resolution of uncertainty with respect to identities created by modern taxonomies and the flows of arms, refugees, trade, information and mass media characteristic of globalization. Violence creates “a macabre form of (dead) certainty.” The argument is powerful but fails to see counter-processes such as democratization.22 In Apparadurai’s formulation the stranger is absolutized as the ethnic other. But surely there are different cultural strategies to negotiate the stranger, the other. Possession can invert ethnicizing logic suggesting a reverse process by which an intimacy with the stranger, the ethnic other, can be established. It suggests another mode of the resolution of uncertainty not only in the realm of categories but also with respect to cosmological uncertainty mirrored in social relations. Inasmuch as the shrines challenge the discourse of caste and untouchability, they resolve the question of purity in however transient and limited a fashion.

92We conclude then, with a series of problems that arise from possession in relation to the Self-Other binarism. What happens to the idea of the integral person with a distance boundary posited by a good deal of social theory? Is there not a range of strategies of approaching the other? Can one not, following the lover and the spirit medium, delight and revel in the otherness of the other? Can the other not be a source of power for the self? Further, can one go beyond viewing the other as not only alien and external but as essential for one’s own conception of the self?

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Notes de fin

1 The fieldwork on which this paper is based was done in rural Ajmer between the winter of 1995 and the summer of 1996. Ghanshyam Gurjar helped me study the several cases on which this and another paper are based. Komal Kothari, Drs. Dominique-Sila Khan and Renu Addlakha and Professors Lawrence Alan Babb, Ann Gold, William Sax have all been useful sounding-boards. This work has grown in ancillary fashion to fieldwork on ethnic conflict and religious conversion. The ideas were eventually put to paper only because of the persistence of Imtiaz Ahmad, Gilles Tarabout and Jackie Assayag. The hospitality of Vinu and D. B. Gupta in Ajmer and of friends in Beawar and Jaipur such as Laxman Singh and Zafar Mohammad has been equally indispensable.

2 Gaborieau (1996) contrasts the more peaceful notions of jihād articulated by the Ismailis and the Aḥmaddiyas with its conceptualization in the writings of Maulanas Ilyas and Maududi.

3 For an elaboration see De Souza 1996.

4 Also by Taussig (1987) despite his reservations.

5 See Egnor-Trawick (1988) for cursing as a manifestation of power.

6 The term uparlī parāī used locally and elsewhere refers to Bayānsā or Bīdāsaṇiyā, a collective folk goddess comprising seven sisters whose prakop or anger is said to be responsible for disease epidemics (Lalas 1962-1978,1: 403). Ūprī havā, however, can comprise the ‘wind’ of any spirit, whether deity or ghost.

7 An older anthropological perspective viewed the virgin goddess as unrestrained and therefore sexually aggressive and dangerous, desiring to consume her victim literally or sexually and so representing death in contrast to the sexually controlled, married goddess who is creative. This view argued by Babb (1975) and Ramanujan (1986) has come under criticism recently. Harlan maintains that the malevolent-benevolent classification of goddesses is dichotomous. She points out that aggression is not antithetical to the function of protection so that the goddess may kill enemies for benevolent purposes. Further, the sexuality of the goddess is not dangerous, but is tied to procreation (Harlan 1992: 76n.). Ann Gold cites women’s own perceptions of female sexuality as generative and life-giving rather than as threatening. In contrast to the androcentric view, female sexuality is associated with birth-giving capacities (Gold 1989 [1988]; see also Marglin 1995 and Sax 1991: 33).

8 Bhairu/Bhairon/Bhairava is a creature of Śiva. Mahakal Bhairava was made in order to teach Brahma and Indra a lesson because they were criticizing Siva Bhairava cut off the head of Brahma with his nail which got stuck to his hand. Śiva made him the guardian-deity of Kashi. There are supposed to be sixty four Bhairava’s and both Kāla and Gora (dark and light) forms are worshipped on Saturday or Sunday. They are served by two dogs (Lalas 1962-1978, 3: 3442). As the most terrible embodiment of Siva (kapāla, rudra, bhīshaṇa) Bhairava is revered by the Kānphaṭā Yogīs and Śāktas. Nāth mendicants beg in his name (Briggs 1973: 160). In Punjab he is the symbol of fertility with Mother Earth as his consort. In Kaula tantra, Bhairava is worshipped at the centre of a circle of Mothers or Yoginīs, while the Yoginīs of temples are the patron deities of those who follow the heterodox path of the Kaula mārga (Dehejia 1986: 31). In his other manifestations Bhairon is an earth godling worshipped by Kunbi peasants and one of the five pīrs worshipped by the Panchpiriya sect (Crooke 1925: chs. 5, 6). Bhūt Bhairon is symbolized by an unhewn stone, smeared with oil and vermilion.

9 Dhūp, made from a combination of camphor, sandalwood, incense and guggal, exudes a fragrance when placed on embers. Lobān is a scented gum that is used in worship and medicine (Lalas 1962-1978, 4: 4441).

10 For a discussion see Besnier 1996.

11 Bayasaab Mātā is also known for her continuous savāl-javāb or interrogation that investigates the nature and cause of an occurrence (Lalas, 1962-1978, 2: 1059).

12 Gharib Nawaz is the popular name for Khwaja Muin ud-din Chishti. His dargāh in Ajmer city is the most important subcontinental Muslim shrine that draws Muslim and Hindu masses from all over the world for pilgrimage.

13 I owe this to a discussion with Ramchandra Gandhi.

14 Harji Bhati’s own shrine complex displays a row of mazars sheltered under cenotaphs which are the tombs of the celibate renouncer-successors to Harji. The sanctum contains a miniature of an Islamic tomb that is covered by a cloth and the recess faces west towards Mecca. Offerings of a sheet, rag horses and foot-print stones are made here by devotees.

15 cAbbas Alamdar was flag bearer during the Karbala battle and killed at a very young age, hence his black beard. Aka means leader or master. There is strong Shi’a imagery here as the Shi’as wear black clothes through the month of mourning.

16 See Devji (ts.) for a discussion in the context of Gandhi and Indian Muslims.

17 Personal interview, 12 Sept. 1996.

18 Deities and pīrs sometimes have a non-alcoholic orientation. Carstairs (1983: 13-14) mentions a bhopa who has a vision of a deity who asks him to stop drinking. I was told of the Tējājī Bhopa at Andhidevri who started drinking as a result of which the devatā departed.

19 For a denial see Rajan 1998.

20 Personal interview, 14 Sept. 1996.

21 Nandy is one of the contemporary theorists who has most creatively used the idea of multiple selves.

22 Appadurai (1998) sees affirmative action with respect to OBCs as a ‘quasi ethnic’ confusion created by the Indian state rather than as a process of incorporation that accompanies democratization.

Table des illustrations

Titre Beawar and surrounding villages with inset of Rajasthan
Légende (Prakash NathTantresh, Shri Ramdev Upasana tantra: gupt mantron va Shri Ramdev yantra sahit. Beawar, Pipaliya Bazar, n.d.)
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsehess/docannexe/image/26277/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 79k
Titre Popular mother goddess called Bayasaab Mātā–or Bāyansā (Bīdāsaṇiyā), i.e. the seven sisters popularly believed to be responsible for both causing and curing polio and paralysis.
Crédits (Photogr. Shail Mayaram, Ajmer, 1996)
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsehess/docannexe/image/26277/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 32k
Titre Woman healer.
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsehess/docannexe/image/26277/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 37k
Titre Clients awaiting their turn with Pīr Bābā, a few victims of possession wail at the wiremesh, the red of the window comes from the five threads of help (symbolizing the five pīrs) that clients tie.
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsehess/docannexe/image/26277/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 82k
Titre Khairunissa Ansari praying at what is said to be the tomb of cAbbas Alamdar where exorcised spirits are interred.
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsehess/docannexe/image/26277/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 50k
Titre Sub-shrine over the tomb of c Abbas Alamdar
Légende This contains a model of the tacziyahs or effigies of tombs of the martyrs of the battle at Karbala, a small replica of the pañja (hand) that symbolizes the five pīrs and the pagaliyā or footprints that represent Rāmdev. Behind them is a picture of Javra Sharif said to be the main dargāh of Pīr Bābā or Iman Husayn.
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsehess/docannexe/image/26277/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 45k
Titre Painting depicting Rājpūt Pīr Rāmdev with his untouchable, adopted sister Dalibāī kneeling before him and saint-poet Harji who bears the fly-whisk.
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsehess/docannexe/image/26277/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 77k

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Institute of Development Studies Jaipur

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