Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal JUNE McDANIEL OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls This page intentionally left blank Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal june mcdaniel 1 2004 1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sa˜o Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright ᭧ 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McDaniel, June. Offering flowers, feeding skulls : popular goddess worship in West Bengal / June McDaniel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-19-516790-2; ISBN 0-19-516791-0 (pbk.) 1. Kali (Hindu deity)—Cult—India—West Bengal. 2. Shaktism—India—West Bengal. 3. West Bengal (India)— Religious life and customs. I. Title. BL1225.K33 W36 2003 294.5'514'095414—dc21 2003009828 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Acknowledgments Thanks go to the Fulbright Program and its representatives, whose Senior Scholar Research Fellowship made it possible for me to do this research in West Bengal, and to the College of Charleston, who granted me a year’s leave for field research. Thanks also to USIS in India, who were very helpful, especially in New Delhi and Calcutta. Two of my best informants were anthropologists, Satyakam Sengupta and Pashupati Mahato. Both spent weeks and months in long discus- sion with me about Bengali folk religion, and they were wonderful sources of information and gossip. I’m glad that I had the opportunity to know them. Thanks also go to Narendranath Bhattacharyya and Debabrata Sen Sharma for their detailed information on Bengali and other forms of tantra, and to Probhal Sen, Asha and Bijoy Mukherjee, Ranjit and Kumkum Bhattacharya, Tushar Niyogi, George Matthew, Surajit and Purnima Sinha, Amit and Mandira Sen, D. D. Mukherjee and Swami Lokeshwarananda, and Ashok Mukherji. Thanks go also to Jayashri Ma, Gauri Ma, Archanapuri Ma, Tapan Goswami, Amiya Kumar and Mrs. Sinha, M. Chattopadhyaya, A. K. Chakraborty, Parvati Soren, Bacchu Ghosh, the Andul Kali-kirtan Samiti, and the priests, local healers, sadhus, tantrikas, holy women, artists, patuas, story-tellers, merchants, waiters, gardeners, farmers, taxi drivers, doctors, engineers, housewives, grant administrators, and Shakta devotees of all sorts, who kindly gave me their opinions about everything imaginable. Thanks also to the British Library, for access to some very old books, and to Jill Yarnall, for her story. Special thanks to my husband, Jim, photographer and support system extraordinaire, and Constantina Rhodes Bailly, for inspiring vi acknowledgments discussions. Also special thanks to Cynthia Humes, who went through this manuscript in its original, thousand page form, and gave useful suggestions for cutting it down to virtually half its length—this is true academic fortitude. Some passages in this book are revisions of articles that I have previously published. The introductory section of folk Shaktism in chapter 1 was pub- lished in a similar fashion in my book Making Virtuous Daughters and Wives: An Introduction to Women’s Brata Rituals in Bengali Folk Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 1–11. The biography of Tapan Gos- wami in chapter 2 may also be found in similar fashion in “Interviews with a Tantric Kali Priest: Feeding Skulls in the Town of Sacrifice” in Tantra in Prac- tice, edited by David Gordon White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 72–80. Contents Notes on Transliteration, ix Introduction, 3 1. Folk Shaktism Life with the Goddess, 27 2. Tantric and Yogic Shaktism Knowledge of the Goddess’s Ways, 67 3. Shakta Bhakti Devotion to the Goddess, 145 4. The Great Bhakti Goddesses of West Bengal Durga and Kali, 209 5. Shaktism and the Modern West Kundalini Vacations and Tantric Honeymoons, 265 6. Conclusions, 295 Notes, 305 Diacritical List, 331 Bibliography, 341 Index, 353 This page intentionally left blank Notes on Transliteration There is something ironic about a book on Indian popular religion that is inaccessible to a popular audience because of the use of Bengali and Sanskrit diacritical marks, whose symbolism is only understood by specialists. Therefore, in this book I have minimized the use of diacriticals. They appear only in direct quotations, and bibliographic information—and in a list of terms, where full diacritics are given. Transliteration is always a difficult issue, especially in books that are strongly regional and use a large number of foreign terms. Most of the terms used in this book are Bengali, and there are two major issues involved. One is diacritical marks. Should the standard San- skrit spelling and diacriticals be used, which will please the classical Sanskrit scholars but may alienate the non-Indologist readers? Or should terms be spelled phonetically, which will allow non- Indologists greater access to the material, but may alienate Sanskritist readers? The second question is the use of the Sanskrit v, which is the Bengali b (and the Hindi w) and the general question of whether to Sanskritize the Bengali or write it in the colloquial style that is actually used. This book will try to compromise on these issues. In the text, Sanskrit and Bengali terms will be spelled phonetically and without diacriticals. The letters s´ and i. will be written sh, and both c and ch will be written ch. The letter r. is transliterated ri. Bengali and Sanskrit terms will appear in the list of terms, which will not include place names or the names of historical or living individuals. Thus the text will be easier for non-Indologists to read, but diacritical information will be accessible. The documentation will include full diacritical x notes on transliteration marks for titles, but individuals’ names will be spelled phonetically or as the author spells it in English. The question of whether to use Bengali, Sanskritized Bengali, or Sanskrit terms in the texts is more difficult. I decided that terms that I heard continually in the Bengali form I would leave that way (using brata instead of vrata, for instance), but terms used more rarely I would leave in the Sanskrit (thus, Sarasvati rather than Sarasbati, or the more phonetic Shawrahshawti). Book titles will work the same way: terms like bangala for Bengali will be used rather than vangala, but more familiar Sanskrit terms will be retained. I hope that, by this system, the book will be accessible both to specialists and to interested nonspecialists. Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls This page intentionally left blank Introduction In the spring of 1998, India detonated five underground bombs at Pokhran, in northwestern India. Some Indian newspapers declared Pokhran to be a shakti pitha, a place sacred to the goddess Shakti. Western observers wondered whether this was some sort of religious justification for India’s nuclear testing. The term shakti has a variety of meanings in India. According to the Sam. sad Bengali-English Dictionary, it means power, strength, might, force, capability, energy, and potency (and it was a name for an ancient missile). Shakti also means the female principle taking part in creation, or the female deity.1 The goddess Shakti is the essence of divine power, whose pres- ence is believed to be manifest in certain places on earth. As the story goes, when the goddess in her incarnation as Sati committed suicide (due to her father’s insults to her husband, Shiva), Shiva was mad- dened with grief and danced with her body in his arms. The gods wished to stop his mad and destructive dance, so they chopped her body into pieces. These pieces fell in different places in India, and each place became sanctified ground. These are the shakti pit.has or sati pit.has, and today these places are recognized as shrines, which are visited by religious pilgrims. The goddess is believed to reveal her power of creation and destruction in such places—and what place could reveal power more clearly than a place where nuclear weapons have been detonated? India is an important area of study for goddess worship. Whereas many feminist theologians and mythologists struggle to reconstruct ancient goddess traditions from the artifacts found in such an- 4 offering flowers, feeding skulls cient cultures as Celtic Ireland and Periclean Greece, India has been worship- ing goddesses continuously for thousands of years, and continues to do so today. If we accept the thousands of stone statues of women found at such ancient Indus Valley sites as Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, and Lothal (these centers are usually dated from 2500 bce to 1500 bce) as goddess statues, as do many scholars, then goddess worship has been going on in India for at least four thousand years. Geographically, Shaktism or goddess worship in India has primarily been of two types—the south Indian worship of the goddess Shri or Lakshmi and the worship of the goddess Kali. These types have different values and rituals and emphasize different goddesses (or different forms of the same goddess, depending on the theology). The first type, located primarily in southern India, sees the goddess as the embodiment of good fortune, fertility, and wealth, and it respects the brahmanical tradition (the orthodox Hindu tradition, which em- phasizes caste and purity). It tends to follow the classical or shastriya approach, with knowledge of and respect for scriptures.