Girls Gone Wild

Ok, listen up. The possession ritual took place in a temple known for this sort of thing on the sixth day of Navratra (spring worship of the Great Goddess) in Chainpur, a small village in Kaimur district, Bihar, in the Gangetic plain about 90 km southeast of Varanasi. Arriving at the temple early in the afternoon, we entered the courtyard to see lots of folks, mostly family groups of adults and children--two or three folks at the smaller end of the spectrum, and eight or ten at the larger, sitting cross-legged on the concrete facing the shrine (established beyond the porch surrounding the courtyard) of Harsu Brahm, a ghost with great power, a former royal priest who was seen standing on the burning ghat during his cremation at Varanasi. All that is left of his “seat” is a small stump of black rock around which his shrine is built.

Murmuring and chanting created a kind of soothing hum, along with the rather more staccato and excited vocalizations of the possessed. It went like this: Somebody seated would after a while start swaying back and forth, then more and more and more. Some folks were extremely active, crying out, slapping the ground rhythmically, rolling their eyes up and back into their sockets, their clothes getting disarranged. As far as I could tell, no one lost consciousness, though that isn’t to say it may not have happened when I wasn’t there.

Priestly shamans came and went from these groups, sitting a while, leaving for a while and coming back to talk to the spirit speaking through the possessed. Sometimes the shaman laid on hands, sometimes he fashioned an amulet for the possessed person to wear, or struck the possessed devotee gently on the back or shoulder with a stick, or gently slapped them. A trance might continue for hours in an individual case (some possessions had started before we arrived, all those were completed when we left three hours or so later, new ones having started in the meantime), often calming down for a while and then starting up again.

Most of these devotees were women, though we realized after a while there were men too. Maybe 10 or so possessions were visibly in process at any one time. The temple priests are of course men, descendants of Harsu Brahm himself. The decision to bring somone to the temple for the purpose of releasing a troubling spirit is a family affair, though we spoke with at least one woman who spoke of feeling peace and relief from her terrible headaches which no doctor has been able to cure, every time she comes there.

How do you know you’re possessed? Folks feel “heavy headed,” lose their appetites and experience general malaise. Possession may be tantrically induced by another family member where ill will exists toward the vicrim. During possession, ”anything” may happen. Women may beat a family member or start to remove their clothes (family sitting nearby will prevent this: to protect female modesty, we were asked not to photograph). I saw no one doing either. Whatever happens, the spirit is responsible, not the woman, and the women are said to (and say they) remember nothing of what transpired while the spirit was manifest.

In the most agitated possession I saw a woman sat on the ground cross-legged (this is everyone’s posture), rhythmically leaning forward low to the ground from the hips, slapping the floor with both hands and clapping them together before lifting up to sitting level and starting the same rapid sequence again. Her upper body described a fast, wild circle, her unbound hair was flying, her head swung around on her neck. Each time her hands slapped the earth, her head came dangerously close to the floor but never actually hit it. From time to time her eyes receded in their sockets. Much of the time they seemed to perceive objects in the environment. Her breathing and speaking patterns were hoarse and rhythmic. Her excitement would build and decline, and then she would sit listening to the priest. Towards the end of the possession she was able to smile at us. At intervals the priest questioned the spirit.

A possession can end only when the spirit speaks a ritual formula, “Harsu Brahm ki jai” (All praise to Harsu Brhahm), the sign that it agrees to leave the possessed person. In one case we saw a woman struggling in a weak voice to say, “Harsu….. Harsu…,” who could get no farther. The spirit also states an amount of payment for the priest must be made as among the requirements for what must be done for the spirit to leave the person. We did not learn what it was, since the priest we questioned happened to be a family member of the possessed devotee.

Local folks are impressed by the fact that people identify similar symptoms as possession. Another way to think about it is that cultures teach folks how to be ill, how to talk about it, and what ways it ought to be addressed. The people my friend spoke with told of going to lots of doctors, none of whom could cure whatever ailed them until they came here. One wonders if there can really be the funds or ability for such a lot of people to go to such a lot of doctors, though this temple is a famous one to which people come from far away, including, according to one priest, the son of a certain high official in Varanasi. Perhaps (only perhaps) this formulation is a way of comparing traditional to modern ways more than an empirical statement about alternatives. One also wonders why, if the shaman is known to be effective, people don’t come here first. In any case, everyone seems to know a story of someone in their own extended family (a very large group of people) who had some definite symptom—blood in the urine in one case I was told about—being treated by respectable doctors, such as at BHU—and then later being cured by a shaman. Probing discovered that the treatment at BHU was frequent and expensive. What the BHU diagnosis was, and what was the correlation between the cure and stopping the BHU visits was vague.

I take at face value the reality and intensity of this experience of auspicious possession for devotees. Per the above notion that cultures teach people about sickness, the open character of the courtyard made the attributes of possession widely available to public inspection by members of the community who crowd in. I even found myself moving my own head (faintly!) in time with some of the possessed and with the songs piped in over the loudspeaker. It wasn’t hard to imagine gradually build up the aerobic quotient.

Why mostly women? Women are generally considered more religiously sensitive than men, at least as devotees. To the extent that the disturbance is manifest in the family, the family is where the women always are. They can’t easily go out and blow off steam like men do (not to say the guys don’t bring it home, but at least they have that outlet). Since women have little status and identity within the patriarchal family (especially daughters-in-law—-most of the women we saw were fairly young, i.e., not yet likely to be matriarchs in their own households), this is a setting in which a huge amount of family and public attention is paid.

But what impressed most is this. Here is a public space where women can go safely out of control in a society where women are obliged to exhibit both subservience and rigid self-possession in public. Here female uncontrol is divinely sanctioned and occurs within the safe confines of the temple where women cannot be molested for their infractions--in fact, the infractions are not theirs, but the spirit’s.

The comparison that immediately comes to mind is Holi, the Hindu spring Festival of Colors celebrated this year on March 1. On Holi, men roam the streets in gangs. In talk about Holi in Varanasi (celebrated by Hindus all over the country, though not necessariliy in the same way—in Mathura, women are said to beat the men on Holi, for example), sooner or later women and men alike make the point that WOMEN DON’T GO OUT. On the eve of Holi, there are large public bonfires, the materials for which are gradually accumulated over the preceding month. Vandalism and petty theft is rampant, folks crash about stoned on bhang shouting rude and obscene remarks and drenching one another’s faces and clothes with hard core dyes—green, yellow, red, pink, blue--paintball style, and nobody can say boo. The small boys command the small neighborhoods and gallis (the narrow alleyways of older Varanasi), the big boys command the major thoroughfares. On Holi the fundamental male lessons of alliance, conquest and defeat are given visible and dramatic form.

During Holi might makes right, and men must band together to project might and defend themselves from the might of other men, and women hole up in the house since nothing,including molesting women, is disallowed.

Pause here to clear throat and signify that Holi INSIDE is no piece of cake. Did I mention that playing Holi INSIDE with the womenfolk of the family I was visiting and their brother, one delighted 14-year-old moving back and forth between inside and outside the house, himself dyed a muddy combination of many different colors, the women of the house poured buckets of blue and yellow dye on me and turned my hair and skin glowing blue-green? It washed off my skin, but the next day I slunk out to get my hair dyed a color you have not previously seen: shocking brown with, when i stand in the sun, arresting green highlights. Objectively speaking, the blue-green was more flattering to my complexion, but a Western woman with green hair who needs to talk to local people is a culturally impossible category.

So in possession rituals the women go wild where the community assembles, their families safely in attendance. Anything they do is not their responsibility. What mostly happens is their clothes are disarranged, an otherwise unthinkable condition for women in public. That and they are totally spent and calm by the time it’s done.

Lastly. At the center of the courtyard is an old gnarled neem tree with sacred strings encircling its trunk (wrapping trees is a practice that appears over and over in southern and southeastern Asia—sometimes the wraps are scarves), encased in four stone walls at its base, with sacred pennants thrust in the packed earth around its trunk to signal the apirit-power of the tree. At its foot are many many hardened blobs of concrete, somewhat randomly placed against each other. Each contains a spirit successfully exorcised and obedient to Harsu Brahm. (Other spirits have entered rice brought from the home of the possessed at the time of the exorcism' once the spirit agrees to leave, that rice is burnt in the fire pit of the temple.) A win-win for the spirits and the formerly possessed. The former are honored but confined, the latter are released.