Logic in a Popular Form : Essays on Popular Religion in Bengal by Sumanta Banerjee

Kali has come a long way. From a tribal goddess of the jungle, worshipped by dacoits, to metropolitan respectability with her own night of revelry each November - what a long, strange trip it's been.

The evolution of Kali in the Bengali popular psyche is just one of several phenomena that Sumanta Banerjee traces in these illuminating essays on popular religion in Bengal. It's a look at religion as ordinary folk - workers and peasants - really live it, making up the rules as they go along, often in direct contradiction with what the 'great' traditions say they should believe, or how they should act.

Popular religion is not something that scholars like to look at because real devotees are so damn inconvenient. They make up their own gods, like Shitala Ma or Ola-bibi, and pilgrimage
sites like Tarapeeth and Ghoshpara, without the sanction of their respective religious establishments and holy books. Scholars like studying religion as pristine, uniform and orthodox. That's almost as foolish as if political scientists only looked at Constitutions, parliaments and Prime Ministers, or if journalists only covered the Corporation, Lal Bazar and Writers Buildings.

Religion, Marx said (and Banerjee quotes), is "The general theory of this world ... its logic in a popular form." Here, the veteran journalist seeks to chart the 'mentalities' of the faithful, to make sense of the logic, the internal rationality, of popular religion. He argues that ordinary people fashion, and re-fashion, what they deem sacred to make sense of the often hostile, profane world in which they live.

That's a good enough reason to warrant writing about popular movements, but the best reason is that they're so impishly fascinating. Those who go by the little traditions believe in the bizarre, the supernatural, and sometimes the macabre.

Consider the Tantrik anchorite Bamakshyapa, a canny, bangla-guzzling, dope-smoking, meat-devouring bohemian who chose the Tara Ma temple in Tarapeeth, Birbhum for his devotion. A contemporary of Ramakrishna - both came from similar poor, rural, Brahmin backgrounds - Bamakshyapa's life was spent mostly at drinking sessions with Doms at the local cremation ground, as jackals devoured decomposing dead bodies nearby. And while Ramakrishna provided succour to the souls of the urban, Bengali bhadralok, Bamakshyapa was, as Banerjee calls him, "The dramatist of popular angst."

The 19th Century was a time of great time of socio-economic turmoil in rural Bengal. The poor flocked to him with their woes - With offerings of meat and ganja - which ranged from straying husbands to dreaded diseases. A reluctant miracle worker, he used his rustic homilies, his outrageous practices, and his simple faith in his 'mother,' Tara, to provide them with a spiritual balm to face the vicissitudes of life

Incorporating Buddhist, tribal, and later Muslim and Christian elements into Hindu myths and practices is common through Bengal's little traditions, where people's lives were layered with influences from all the great traditions to have taken root in this fertile delta. The Vaishnav mystic Aulchand of Nadia, whose followers later institutionalised the Karta-bhaja sect based in Ghoshpara, is one example, as is the creation of the godling Satyapir/Satyanarayan. Both are neither strictly Hindu nor Muslim, drawing devotees from both faiths, much to the consternation of the respective orthodoxies. Aulchand departed from the strictures of the Gaudiya Vaishnavites, who after Chaitanya's death had become an upper-caste movement controlled by the Brahmin Goswamis.

But like Chaitanya, Aulchand's followers were drawn from all castes and religions at Ghoshpara, men and women, Brahmins and Sudras, ashraf Muslims and adivasis all ate and prayed together. Though the Karta-bhajas themselves became institutionalised and deserted many of their original precepts after Aulchand, in many ways his rise, as that of Lalan-Fakir and many of his contemporaries of the Sufi/Bhakti strain, became widely popular all over Bengal largely because the lower-class/ caste Hindus and Muslims sought to regain the egalitarian promise of Chaitanya.

There are many such syncretic sects in Bengal (in fact, by one account, of the 50-odd syncretic sects that exist in India, over 40 are in Bengal), One of the most resilient has been of the saint Satyapir or Satyanarayan. In the villages of both West Bengal and Bangladesh, the myth of an avatar of Vishnu who visited a Brahmin as a fakir packs in layers of Buddhists, Hindu and Muslim beliefs in direct opposition to strict Hindu or Muslim beliefs (the former rejects a Muslim avatar of Vishnu, while the latter rejects the notion of reincarnation) But Satyapir/Satyanarayan as one who punishes disbelievers and protects his devotees, was and is widely worshipped through prayers and devotional songs. The songs explicitly establish its dual religious identity ("Makkaye Rahim ami, Ajodhyaye Ram - I am Rahim in Mecca, in Ayodhya Ram") and have remained so in the countryside where the name of the Pir and Narayan is taken interchangeably in song and worship. Today of course, the Satyapir tradition has been made more respectably "Muslim" among urban Muslim elites, and more "Hindu" - as exclusively "Satyanarayan" puja that is common in middle-class, Hindu homes in Kolkata.

In each case, Banerjee traces the evolution of these movements over time, showing how they have morphed to meet the changing needs of their followers; Banerjee is the author of several books on Bengal's modern cultural and political history. Here, like the bourgeois gentry of either faith who look upon popular manifestations much like they would a demented relative they keep locked in a dark room, the author sometimes seems the watchful Marxist uncle, ever eager to make sense, and over-explain the socio-political and sometimes tenuously scientific rationales in these movements.

His faith in the modern and the rational also blinkers him to the plain fact that these traditions and practices are just the things that should be written about and demonstrated to stick it to today's fundamentalists with their pencil-thin versions of faith. He argues that popular movements arise out of the specific collective needs of a society, and cannot be understood, or valorised, outside their milieu. The Satyapir tradition cannot counter modern Hindu fundamentalism because they operate in different contexts. And while singing along with Aulchand may not unseat Narendra Modi, Banerjee may be wrong to underplay the role of popular religion as a whole in the current political climate. After all, who better but the religious rank and file, the real goddesses and devotees - the dope-smoking Bamakshyapa and dacoit devotees of Kali - to show up the tilak-smeared and beard-scratching hate mongers and reassert control over religious life as they live it?

The loudest corners of both Hindu and Muslim camps in South Asia have increasingly become the fundamentalists - the elite, urban clergy with their own political and economic grievances trying to recast the gloriously messy, multi-faceted practices of their co-religionists into starched straitjackets.

On this note, Banerjee's final chapter, which shifts from popular religion to a study of Bharat Mata - the idolatry of the nation in a religious form - is important. It is an important point of departure for it shows how devotion to the nation has subtly come to mimic or replace certain religious sentiments in modern, urban India. Bharat Mata now has its own high and low traditions, its own scriptures and pantheon, its Shaktas and Vaishnavas in Nehruvians and Gandhians, and its demons in ISI, HuM and RDX.

And if popular religion has vanished in the modern metropolis, then are the collective needs focussed in the little traditions of popular nationalism, of the Netaji cult, (defying the trinity of Nehru, Gandhi and Patel), or the Barreto altars that are worshipped in bylanes and bustees by shrinking numbers in the face of the national godhead Tendulkar? There are many new questions, but it is high time we began asking them.

Kushanava Choudhury 03/11/02

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