Review of Film "Chidra" by N. Harel and A. Moran

Indic rites of purification aim to negate the law of karma by removing the residues of malignant past actions from their patrons. This principle is exemplified in a rarely studied religious festival of the West Himalayan highlands (Himachal Pradesh, India) known as the Kāhikā Melā, wherein a ritual specialist assumes the karmic residues of large publics and subsequently transfers them to their presiding deity by serving as a sacrificial victim. While early reports perceived the rite to be a Tantric variant of the universal ‘scapegoat’ rituals then being popularized by James Frazer, observing a recent performance of the rite significantly complicated this view. This paper proposes a novel reading of the Kāhikā Melā through the prism of karmic transference. Tracing the path of karmas from participants to the ritual specialist and beyond, it delineates the logic behind the rite, suggesting that the culminating act of human sacrifice is, in fact, secondary to the mysterious force that impels its acceptance. * The paper corresponds with the documentary movie Chidra (2018), more on which here: https://vimeo.com/259167827 ** This is a slightly revised version (primarily diacritics and a couple of fine tunings to minor points) of the paper published online

Exploring literary influences in the practice of artist Chitra Ganesh. Published in Papercuts (Vol. 15, Fall 2015 issue) - a South Asian literary journal of poetry, prose and reportage, published by DWL.

Words and Silences : The journal of the International Oral History Association , 2018

The purpose of this essay is to explore the methodology of oral history and to show how emotion plays an important role in it. While reading memory as a source material, one cannot do away with the influence of emotion. The selectivity of remembrance has mostly been guided by the sentiment of the interviewee. Good, bad, whatever we remember is part of our present emotional state of mind. This article will be a case study of a Patua village, called Naya, located at the western part of Medinipur, West Bengal, India. The Patuas are a community of scroll painters mostly living in the eastern part of India, West Bengal. This paper is divided into two sections. The first section is on ‘ Space, time and authority’, where I have explored how being a migratory community, the Patuas exercise a sense of authority over the space they live today. It will also explore, how do they individually recall their first coming to Naya and how do they define their relationship with the place? In this process of remembrance, what role does sentiment play and how through these acts of recall do they constitute their identity and authority? The second part of the essay ‘ Lineage, time and identity’, explores the way they have reconstructed their own past through memories, and forged a common identity of being ‘Chitrakar’. The paper will explore how the interplay between memory and emotion plays an important role in the identity formation of this community of painters. In this process, this article will also explore the relation between myth making and memory.

Abhinavagupta: Genius of Kashmir, 2016

[400-word abstract for IGNCA international conference in Delhi, Dec. 15-17, 2016, on] Abhinavagupta: The Genius of Kashmir As a ritual performance, the brahmanical sacrifice (yajña), around which the semiotics of Vedic life revolved, could be undertaken only by twice-born upper-castes and officiated exclusively by trained orthodox brahmins. Participation of otherwise excluded lower castes was ensured through transposition onto public festivals, popular pilgrimages with their mythological backdrop, (antinomian) tantric praxis, individual life-cycle rituals (saṁskāra), etc., and especially the all-inclusive classical theater (nāṭya). Abhinava declares that the 'stage manager' (sūtradhāra), though of lowly (śūdra) caste, deserves to be addressed as "Ārya" for he is fully initiated (dīkṣita) into the innermost secrets of Bharata's nāṭya-veda. My comprehensive hermeneutics of 'The Little Clay Cart' (Mṛcchakaṭikā) shows how this 'profane' (prakaraṇa) drama not only remains a yajña in disguise, but helps clarify the inner meaning and purpose of this foundational Vedic institution. The dīkṣita state of the (royal) protagonist (nāyaka) as sacrificer (yajamāna) has been split off into his indispensable equal and alter ego, the 'great brahmin' (mahā-brāhmaṇa). While provoking laughter that punctuates the play's aesthetic surface, this clown's 'follies' serve to cloak his transgressive role as bearer of the sacred enigma (bráhman). The murderous plot repeatedly underlines the 'guileless' buffoon's (ritual) complicity with the even more ridiculous figure of the villain Śakāra, in whom the 'evil' (duṣṭa-) dimension of the dīkṣita's embryonic regression (-baṭuka) has been more fully developed. Falsely accused, Cārudatta, romantic hero as substitute victim, is reprieved at the very moment when 'evil' king Pālaka, just about to immolate the sacrificial goat, is slain. Abhinava's cryptic declaration that the vidūṣaka deploys 'the semblance of the comic' (hāsyābhāsa) that nevertheless generates humor (hāsya) confirms that this foremost exponent of radical Tantrism entertained an esoteric understanding of the sacrificial underpinnings of worldly theater that is only hinted at in his otherwise encyclopedic commentary on Bharata's founding treatise. Having assumed the cosmogonic role of Brahmā in the ritual preliminaries (pūrvaraṅga) and conversing in Sanskrit in the prologue, it is the 'brahmin' sūtradhāra who steps onto the profane vernacularized stage as the deformed jester bearing the crooked stick (kuṭilaka) of his patron god.

A Brahmo-Hindu Rabindranath Tagore had a lasting regard for the Buddha. The rational and humanistic aspects of the teachings of the Buddha had attracted the creative genius of Tagore since his earlier days. "Only once in his life, said Rabindra Nath, did he feel like prostrating himself before an image and that was when he saw the Buddha at Gaya" (Maksud Syed). He found the Buddhist principle of man's social equality particularly alluring to his own concept of 'divinity in man'. Chandalika is a dramatic expression of this ideology. The play is a visual presentation of the age-old struggle of the marginalized section of Indian society to attain the status of equality. It is based on a Buddhist legend associated with one of the Buddha's disciples named Ananda. In this legend, Tagore found readymade material for the propagation of this idea of equality and humanism through an intense conflict between marginality and spirituality. The play is also a criticism of the worst vice of the Vedic religion, namely, casteism. John Wilson, in his celebrated work, Indian Caste Volume One, observes: " Buddhism in its most important social aspect was a reaction against Caste, the tyranny of which multitudes had begun to feel to be unbearable.. . " (Wilson, 1877: 278). It is a short drama in two parts with just three characters – Prakriti, her Mother and Ananda. Prakriti and the mother represent the marginalized human world who are in conflict with the spiritual world of Ananda. The legendary Buddhist monk, Ananda, opens the blind and subjugated mind of Prakriti with a divine preaching of equality and makes her aware of her 'self'. Prakriti then becomes a symbol of revolt against this age-old malady of the Indian society. Soon, however, she oversteps the religious and ethical boundaries of the established social norms and desires to wed the very monk to prove her awakened worldly existence. Her mother, still under the spell of caste-suppression, fears the worst, but eventually yields to the entreaties of her daughter and tries to aid her cause by using her magical skills sacrificing her own life in the end. In the process, the inner life of these three characters becomes a battlefield of a conflict between the ethics of morality and worldly desires. The play begins at the confrontation of Prakriti and her Mother over the topic of Ananda's inspiration of Prakriti as a living, breathing human being and not as an untouchable, despicable, socially neglect chandalini. His magical words – 'Give me water' – addressed to the frightened girl, significantly negate her orthodox sense of being an outcaste. A holy man asking for water from an untouchable was completely unheard of in those days. It was thought to be a violation of the social as well as religious code of conduct. To receive and to give food or water were sacrilegious for both – the monk and the untouchable. In the play, therefore, the 'water act' presents the untouchable's liberation from the unjust bondage of slavery of the customary prison of marginality. A new human being full of vitality, exuberance and revolt from this oppressive custom is born.

2020

The road gets narrower as you go to Chithralekha's grandmother's house where she used to live at the rear end of the village in Edat, Kannur in Kerala. The road ends at her house and there is no way to go further. Dalit houses at the end of the village is not an exception in India. 1 Villages are designed in such a way that the upper-castes do not need to cross Dalit houses as they pass. It was not just about the possibility of them seeing or touching Dalits. It was also about a well-designed ecological and geographical exclusion. Houses are arranged in such a manner that wind blows from where upper-caste houses are situated to the Dalit houses. The idea was that upper-castes should not get polluted by the wind that has breezed over lower castes. The caste order decided not just access to the material and cultural resources, but also to the flows of nature. It is in such a place where caste decides even the nature you can access that Chithralekha, a Dalit woman, decides to drive her autorickshaw on public roads in 2004. Her entry to the public roads which is in principle shared by all invites the wrath of the people from castes above hers and other guardians of the caste order. Ayyankali's fight against the casteist order more than a century ago did result in accessing public roads for Dalits in Kerala. 2 If the public roads have become accessible to all and the right to work is ensured, how will one explain attacks against Chithralekha?

Culture and Religion, 2004

In this paper, I examine a birth ritual practised by a community of low-status entertainers from the Indian state of Rajasthan known as Bhats. On the birth of sons, but not daughters, Bhats offer gifts to the Hindu god Bhaironji, a pan-Indian boss of the underworld. Specifically, they sacrifice a goat, extract its stomach, slice it open so that it forms a gaping slit, and pass their wailing newborn through the dripping opening seven times. This ritual, which I interpret as a symbolic child sacrifice, would seem to exemplify 'Sanskritisation'-the low caste copying of elite life-styles-in the way Bhats imitate dominant Hindu ideals implicit to a kingly tradition of blood sacrifice. However, I contend that this feast is unique in the way that Bhats simultaneously mimic and appropriate, subvert and contest, as well as rework and combine ritual traditions associated with both kings and priests.

Revisioning Karma: The eBook,, 2008

In accord with the theme of this conference, I will contrast the challenges to karma made by Dale Wright with a set of recent and equally challenging works on the nature of kamma and narrative in Theravāda Buddhism. Kamma is often portrayed as a coherent and rigid ethic of intention-ality and personal responsibility: a being's actions accrue to that being, and those actions inevitably ripen into their morally deserved consequences—pleasure or suffering, sickness or health, wealth or poverty—in this life or in lives to come. Complex versions of kamma, which draw and deviate from notions of intentionality and responsibility, are present in the Theravāda story tradition. Using episodic examples from the Milindapañha and the commentary to the Petavatthu, I will explore analogies and metaphors of a wise Buddhist king acting with intention, ordering and carrying out harsh punishments without the suggestion that the king will garner punishment for himself. As well, a story of meritorious kamma gained by an undisciplined and ignorant girl when she is forced to honor the feet of Sāriputta—a small violence that saves her from suffering in the hell realms. Within these stories, intentional acts without kamma, nonintentional acts with kamma, and ordinary intentional kamma, exist simultaneously. As such, they allow for special roles, special actions, and a concern for appropriate timing.