Sukanya Sarbadhikary

This paper studies historical and literary constructions of deity-figures like Krishna and Kali, and the sects representing them, that is, vaishnavas and tantra-predominant shaktas, in Bengal. While the overarching historical lens posits these deities/sects as radically different, even antagonistic, with syncretic attempts following periods of intense strife; literary archetypes, developed in proximate association with regional philosophy, intuit the most subtle traditions of deity/sectarian equivalence. I focus on three kinds of texts of the early modern period and analyse varieties of divine correspondence represented therein: Krishna-Shiva sharing souls, Kali becoming Krishna, Krishna becoming Kali, Kali-Shiva as the same essential energy, Kali-Krishna sexual union, and this synthesis understood variously as Kali's/Krishna's play with herself/himself, etc. These divinities are equated essentially as transformations (prithak) of the original cosmic buzz (AUM/pranav), and complex practices of sonic philosophy ground these equivalent deities within esoteric bodies. These practices and texts thus fuse Kali/Shiva/Krishna, and this tantric-devotional, shakta-vaishnava, prakrit/purusha continuum encompasses a longue-duree ethical habitus including idols, songs, poems, proverbs, theatre, pictures, manuscripts, and bodies. This lifeworld of sacred interchangeability enables, responds to, as well as supersedes historical realities of sectarian difference, opposition, and syncretism, rather than only mirroring immediate temporal concerns. Literary ontology thus nestles and surpasses historical religious constructions in Bengal.

This paper seeks to analyze the recent phenomenon of the development of a Matri Sena (literally, an ‘Army of Holy Women’) among the Matua sect of West Bengal, India. Historically known to have suffered caste-based untouchability and forced migration due to communal conflict, the Matua community’s current political motivations surround the issue of ‘refugeehood’ and Indian citizenship. Given this background, the emergence of the Matri Sena as a complex identity among a religion–caste–gender–nation nexus is oriented towards bipartite objectives: one, to actualize the gender-egalitarian ethos that informs Matua religious foundations, and two, to claim legal citizenship status for its community members precisely through a new gendered ideology. We argue that the women gurus of the Matri Sena are able to realize their religious/political aims by fashioning themselves as mothers of an ideal family, community, and by extension, the nation. In deploying their specific gendered ideological constructions, they enact their new roles as influencers in both private and public Matua lives. In such renderings, the woman guru’s mother-figure emerges as a political subject through crucial engagements with Matua religiosity on one hand, and dominant Hindu nationalist discourses on the other. In this article, we critically analyze ways in which the Matri Sena constructs a new maternal notion of religio-political power, and how such power furthers both collective Matua aspirations and contemporary national imaginations.

This paper analyses how the body and sacred drum, mṛdaṅga—used as the rhythm-accompaniment of Bengal’s devotional music dedicated to deities, Rādhā–Kṛṣṇa (kīrtana)—are cultivated and experienced as homologous, mirror-reflections of a macrocosmic sonic buzz, Nāda-brahman. Dimensions of cosmic/acoustic transcendence and its materialising potential as the body and instrument are explored through the number 16. 16 is analysed as an unfolded, expanded expression of what Yoga texts describe as the unstruck drone, AUM̐, or Nāda-brahman, composed of 3½ (4-fold) parts, exactly like the Tantric kuṇḍalinī, spiralled as the feminine, sonic power at the spinal base. I argue that these Yogic, Tantric, and devotional ontologies come together in Bengal’s mahā-mantra: 16 nāma (names) 32 akṣara (syllables), or Hare Kṛṣṇa chant, which practitioners say, constitute both the body and mṛdaṅga. Based on decade-long ethnographic work with Bengal Vaiṣṇavas, and mṛdaṅga’s makers, players, and sound meditators, studying expert techniques, oral traditions of esoteric poems and myths relating the body–mṛdaṅga as mirroring agents, and through philosophy of sound readings in Yoga and Tantra, I argue that the meditative body’s transcendental potential is analogous with mṛdaṅga’s sounding. Both these vessels are constituted through various classifications of number 16: evident in the body’s/drum’s constructions, breathing, rhythming, tonality, and being. The body becomes the drum and vice-versa, and these resonant vessels throb with Nāda-brahman’s vibration, or AUM̐’s/16’s cosmic pulsations. In making the mṛdaṅga, the body externalises inner aural potential, and while playing it, fuses the body’s and drum’s constitutive buzzing hum, AUM̐, through their own immanent materialities.

The epistemic question about what constitutes religious belief in non-Western contexts is addressed here through the ontology of sonic experience. I demonstrate that religious beliefs are habitually ingrained as long-sustaining visceral memories, when afforded by sensory—for instance, aural—affects. Bengal’s peculiar devotional milieu constructs a prototype of oppositions. On one end is the urban, classical, martial goddess, Durga, with elite histories of acquiring a high Brahmanical form, and whose autumnal rituals are based on scriptural rules, caste hierarchies, and distance among the devotees and deity. On the other end is the rural, indigenous, non-classical, peasant god, Shiva, whose spring-time worship celebrating primordial death and regeneration is based on intensely embodied and communitarian principles of identity among the caste-equal bodies of devotee men, and even their god. Based on immersive ethnographic analyses, the paper argues that these dual psychological ends of the regional sacred cosmos are made vividly real through differential perceptive experiences of percussion sounds (ubiquitous in these festivities), their varied tempos, textures, volumes, and rhythm modulations. Through phenomenological deep listening, I describe stark styles of making and playing the sacred membranophone drum, dhak, which embodies distinct rhythm styles, relationships with rituals, and psychophysical effects on the devotional ensembles. I show how the bodies of devotees, dhak players (dhakis), deities, and even the dhak, become tied to the tonalities of the drum, which is taught through generations of deft learning among dhakis, to sound distinctly when echoed for Durga and Shiva. The paper’s main argument is that these dhak sounds, which have remained a conceptual oversight in literature, not only aid in, but indeed, enable the experience of and belief in Bengal’s divergent deities. It is through such empowering sensory sedimentations of the different sounds of the same percussion, that people recognize, remember, and maintain the region’s devotional dialectic and complex religious lifeworld. In essence, the body’s powerful experiences of drum sounds make religious belief palpable and possible.

This essay brings together critical archetypes of Bengali Hindu home-experience: the sound of the evening shankh (conch), the goddess Lakshmi, and the female snake-deity, Manasa. It analyzes the everyday phenomenology of the home, not simply through the European category of the ‘domestic’, but conceptually more elastic vernacular religious discourse of shongshar, which means both home and world. The conch is studied as a direct material embodiment of the sacred domestic. Its materiality and sound-ontology evoke a religious experience fused with this-worldly wellbeing (mongol) and afterlife stillness. Further, (contrary) worship ontologies of Lakshmi, the life-goddess of mongol, and Manasa, the death-and-resuscitation goddess, are discussed, and the twists of these ambivalent imaginings are shown to be engraved in the conch’s body and audition. Bringing goddesses and conch-aesthetics together, shongshar is thus presented as a religious everyday dwelling, where the ‘home’ and ‘world’ are connected through spiraling experiences of life, death, and resuscitation. Problematizing the monolithic idea of the secular home as a protecting domain from the outside world, I argue that everyday religious experience of the Bengali domestic, as especially encountered and narrated by female householders, essentially includes both Lakshmi/life/fertility and Manasa/death/renunciation. Exploring the analogy of the spirals of shankh and shongshar, spatial and temporal experiences of the sacred domestic are also complicated. Based on ritual texts, fieldwork among Lakshmi and Manasa worshippers, conch-collectors, craftsmen and specialists, and immersion in the everyday religious world, I foreground a new aesthetic phenomenology at the interface of the metaphysics of sound, moralities of goddess-devotions, and the Bengali home’s experience of afterlife everyday.

Recent studies of Asian religious traditions have critiqued Western philosophical understandings of mind–body dualism and furthered the productive notion of mind–body continuum. Based on intensive fieldwork among two kinds of devotional groups of Bengal—claimants to an orthodox Vaishnavism, who focus on participating in the erotic sports of the Hindu deity-consort Radha-Krishna in imagination and a quasi-tantric group, which claims to physically apprehend Radha-Krishna's erotic pleasures through direct sexual experience—I demonstrate that, although these devotional groups stress on combating theologies, with emphases respectively on the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’, in their narrations of religious experiences, however, both groups allude to rarefied phenomenological states of cognition and embodiment. So, while influenced by ideas of (mental) ‘purity’ and (bodily) ‘actuality’, respectively, practices of both groups rely on similar states of mind–body continuum. So I argue that the mind–body complex has intensely nuanced articulations in the discursive and experiential domains of these non-Western religious contexts. Through my analyses of the texts and embodiments of these opposed devotional groups, I show that theology gets both organically entangled with as well as challenged by phenomenological experiences. I further argue that explorations in the tenor of religious studies sharply enrich the anthropology of religiosities. Also, such engagements between theology and anthropology have been relatively lacking and need more emphasis in studies of contemporary South Asian religions.