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An Embodied History of Hindu Practice in Ghana Yale Journal of Music & Religion Volume 6 Number 2 Sound and Secularity Article 6 2020 Singing and Sensing the Unknown: An Embodied History of Hindu Practice in Ghana Shobana Shankar Stony Brook University (SUNY) Follow this and additional works at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr Part of the African History Commons, Hindu Studies Commons, and the New Religious Movements Commons Recommended Citation Shankar, Shobana (2020) "Singing and Sensing the Unknown: An Embodied History of Hindu Practice in Ghana," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol. 6: No. 2, Article 6. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1172 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Music & Religion by an authorized editor of EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Singing and Sensing the Unknown: An Embodied History of Hindu Practice in Ghana Cover Page Footnote I am grateful to Stony Brook for a Fellowship in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences that enabled me to undertake research in Ghana in 2019. This article is available in Yale Journal of Music & Religion: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr/vol6/iss2/6 Singing and Sensing the Unknown An Embodied History of Hindu Practice in Ghana Shobana Shankar Soon after the untimely death of his ritual facilities, as Asonzeh Ukah describes mother in 1945, Kwesi Essel started them, have dramatically altered African what he described as a prayer camp in urban landscapes, providing renewal and his hometown of Senya Beraku, a fishing resources that deliberately “assert religious village in southern Ghana.1 He led a small presence and power in the social and cultural group in meditation and other practices, ecology of a people.”4 Lagos and Accra could although what all their activities were is be remapped to show the locations that are not clear. To be sure, Essel had felt a strong perceived as sites of spiritual power in the connection to the religion of his mother, minds of city-dwellers and visitors from who was renowned for her ability to enter afar. Yet in Ghana, Pentecostal camps have different states and communicate with the drawn scrutiny nationally and abroad over spirit world, and worked as a priestess in their abuse of people with psychosocial the court of the local Fante traditional ruler. disabilities who either came voluntarily or A Christian presence also existed in Senya were committed by others claiming to want Beraku, where the Dutch had built a slave to cure them of spiritual illnesses.5 Though “castle,” Fort Good Hope, in the eighteenth nothing like this has come to light in the century. What was probably an eclectic history of Hinduism in Ghana, Essel’s camp prayer camp concerned with spiritualism did coalesce for at least one of the same rather than religion grew into a community purposes that prayer camps have today— of thousands affiliated with the Hindu to control the human body and its senses Monastery of Africa (HMA), headquartered in an effort to reach the unseen world. Of in the Odorkor area of Accra.2 Essel, who all the senses, sound is perhaps the most became initiated as the first African Hindu important, I argue, for an African Hinduism monk, remained the guru or spiritual that represents an embodied experience and leader of the HMA’s five branches in Ghana religious style more than a belief system. and one in Togo until his death in 2016. As Hinduism in West Africa emerged The Monastery holds a unique reputation, largely outside the agency of Indians, especially among the Indian diaspora, as a Swami Ghanananda understood that its place of Hindu devotional songs (bhajans), translatability to a cultural landscape quite performed in Indian languages by Africans, different than that of its birthplace would many of whom are Christian or Muslim.3 be tested.6 In the competitive religious It may be surprising that Swami environment of Ghana, the HMA and Ghanananda Saraswati, as Essel became other Hindu movements, such as the Inter- known, described his early community national Society for Krishna Consciousness as a prayer camp. Such camps now pro- (ISKCON, or Hare Krishna movement) liferate in Ghana, Nigeria, and other and the Sathya Sai Baba Mission, have African countries, not as Hindu sites but been condemned by Pentecostal preachers as Pentecostal Christian outposts. These as “occultists” in the same manner that Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 89 white Christian missionaries denounced holdovers from tradition. Does Hinduism indigenous African religions in earlier need to go through the same processes centuries.7 One strategy that Ghanaian as Christianity or Islam to become an Hindus and their supporters have used is African religion? To be more specific, to highlight the universality and historicity must Hinduism be vernacularized as the of Hinduism as “the original religion Christian Devil was among the Ewe— of the world” in which all believers can through struggles between selfhood and find “fulfillment,” thereby employing a community as part of the conversion “discourse of antiquity” that highlights process and new kinds of personhood Hinduism’s inclusiveness.8 Another strategy that emerged—as Birgit Meyer argues in I analyze in this article, using ethnographic Translating the Devil?11 and documentary evidence collected over My research suggests that conversion two visits to the Monastery in 2017 and and translation, arguably concerns of 2019, is the use of Hindu music, mantras, Christianity and Islamic studies, are not and other sounds, as well as silences, to the most central questions for African emphasize the unknown and unknowable Hindus themselves. As a relatively new in the search to become one with the divine. religion among Africans, distinct from In other words, African Hindus, especially that of the Indian diaspora that has been their leading guru, directed devotion away the primary focus of research to date, from understanding through translation Hinduism represents a popular devotion of music, words, and sounds in order to in which belief is only part of the religious promote performance, particularly in public project, and in fact can be a distraction as a participatory experience in which from the goal of earthly detachment. Peter newcomers can join. Swami Ghanananda, Lambertz, who has studied Japanese-origin chastising the Indian diaspora for not spiritualist movements in the Democratic sharing Hinduism with Africans, argued Republic of Congo that came via Brazil, that this belief system contained the means offers a helpful framing for studies of for “harmonizing the efforts of all religions “sense making” that allow us “to overcome to foster the needed peace for both material the analytical distinction between a and spiritual development.”9 phenomenological focus on experience This article recasts translation, a on the one hand, and a mentalistic central theme in religious studies, concentration on the other.”12 This sense especially in African studies. Scholars in making is precisely my focus in seeking to this field feel a strong impetus to make show how African Hindus cultivate sound African cosmologies comprehensible to in everyday lived experiences in ritual and non-Africans, usually secular-minded nonritual encounters at the Monastery. Westerners who see African cultures as oral, Sound has been an underdeveloped vernacular, indigenized, and “different.”10 theme in religious studies, even with the Africanist scholars of African religions turn to lived experiences and everyday have emphasized the modern processes out practice.13 Indian music in Africa, of which African religions have developed, furthermore, has been trapped in scholarly challenging the Eurocentric secularist preoccupation with Bollywood music, which assumptions that Africans’ religions are has overshadowed other fascinating musical 90 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) cross-currents, such as that between India without knowing the words, has made a and Senegal in Sufi music.14 Hinduism new ritual in the Monastery’s repertoire in Ghana is also a unique test case for the by adding a regional festival sought by the argument that the religious soundscape is increasing number of South Indian migrants noisy, particularly due to competition and to Ghana. The third section explores a new conflict between Christianity and Islam layer of Hindu sound that coincided with and within these religious communities in the visit of a female Indian guru (swamini) Africa.15 Hinduism also has a “necessary following the death of Swami Ghanananda. sonic realm built into its structure and Her gender ambiguity and production of substance.”16 Competition is less its modus sounds and deities have brought into being operandi in the Hindu Monastery of Africa; popular devotion focused on fertility, a focus rather, controlling sound to calm the mind that did not exist before in the Ghanaian and body was Ghanananda’s prescription to Hindu context. This new gendered creation his listeners. “Gradually all sounds will melt of Hindu sound and meaning emerged after away. In the beginning you can close your the death of the beloved Ghanaian guru, ears with cotton, wax or any other substitute giving the community a renewed sense of for some time to shut out gross sounds identity to carry on. which disturb your Japa [mantra repetition] and concentration,” he wrote in The Secret Lost in Strange Sounds of True Spiritual Practice.17 Hinduism was By the early 1960s, Kwesi Essel had moved made for a raucous religious landscape like his prayer camp from Senya Beraku to Ghana’s, and the guru understood how to Odorkor.18 Encouraged by an acquaintance create the effect of an oasis or refuge for the who was reportedly high up in the experimentation with sound control.
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