Indira Goswami

Margins and Beyond

Namrata Pathak, Dibyajyoti Sarma

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032425276
• eBook ISBN: 9781000600292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book engages with the life and works of Indira Goswami, the first Assamese woman writer to win the highest national literary award, the Jnanpith Award, in 2001. From sociological treatises to a springboard of a socio-political milieu, Goswami's texts are intersections of the local and the global, the popular and the canonical. The writer's penchant for transcending boundaries gives a new contour and shape to the social and cultural domains in her texts. That every character is a representative of the society, that the context comes alive in every evocation of class struggle, power play, caste discrimination and gendered narratives add an interesting semantic load to her texts. While tracing the trajectories discussed above, this book foregrounds Goswami's act of going beyond the margins of varied kinds, both abstract and concrete, in search of egalitarian and democratic spaces of life.

The book looks at Indira Goswami's works with a special emphasis on the author situated within the Assamese literary canon. It not only discusses the themes and issues within her writing, but also focuses on the distinct language and style she uses. The volume includes non-fictional prose, excerpts from her short stories and novels, viewpoints of critics, letters and entries from diaries, as well as interviews with Goswami about her writing and personal life. It engages with her works in the context of her multifaceted, almost mythical life, especially her avowed 'activism' against animal sacrifice and militancy in her latter career.

Part of the Writer in Context series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of Indian literature, Assamese literature, English literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, global south studies, gender studies and translation studies.

Section V
Many Margins of Indira GoswamiFlesh, Blood, Spirit

26 The Divine and the MundaneRitual Sacrifice, Blood and the Feminine Principle in Indira Goswami’s Under the Shadow of Kamakhya and The Man from Chinnamasta

Vibha S Chauhan

DOI: 10.4324/9781003147015-34

I

Indira Goswami uses her pen to represent not just different socio-economic and religious aspects of Assam but that of many other regions as well. Some of her most poignant writings focus on the issues of marriage and widowhood. Her early novel The Blue-Necked Braja (1976) tells the unfortunate story of deprivations that the widows in the holy city of Vrindavan are forced to live through. Religion and religious ritualism become a façade for sexual and emotional exploitation of the widows. The theme is revisited in The Moth-Eaten Howdah of a Tuskar (2004), in which Indira Goswami unveils the distressing conditions of widows living in a religious institution, the Vaishnavite Satra.¹ This integration of the ‘woman question’ with religion once again becomes the core theme of Goswami’s novel, The Man from Chinnamasta (Chinnamasta 2006) and her story, Under the Shadow of Kamakhya (Kamakhya 2001). Kamakhya is one of the eight stories in the collection with the same title. It is the longest story in the collection and is often referred to as a novella due to not just its length but also the complex construction, deconstruction and the reconstruction of different layers of experience it portrays in domestic and religious spheres. In Chinnamasta, Goswami examines and analyses the ancient religious tradition of animal sacrifice at the Kamakhya temple situated in the city of Guwahati in Assam. The novel, when it was published, generated a grave controversy and an uproar across many orthodox sections of society that considered the book to be an attack on ancient religious rituals and practices. However, both the book and the writer also received unprecedented support from the general masses as well as animal rights groups that demanded the banning of animal sacrifice at the Kamakhya temple. The novel thus blurs the distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, which is any case, as Terry Eagleton says, is a ‘questionable one’ and ‘unlikely to get us very far’ (Ibid.).² The discussion about the relationship between society and literature goes beyond the scope of this chapter, yet it would be pertinent to state that the connection between Goswami’s writing and the social ‘reality’ that surrounds it is extremely dense and mutually reciprocal.

Both Chinnamasta and Kamakhya share the geographical locale of the Kamakhya temple and the river Brahmaputra that flows next to the hill on which the temple stands. The narrative tapestries of both are rich with the complex coexistence of apparent irreconcilables like feminine frailty and male dependency on the feminine principle. Unlike the traditionally accepted concept of the feminine principle and its essentialisation into immutable categories, the two narratives gradually unravel and interrogate the concept to reveal its constant interaction with socio-religious constructs. The sacrifice of animals at the holy altar of the Mother Goddess, for instance, clearly overlaps with victimization, passivity as well as the power of the feminine. Eroticism and spirituality are combined with the symbol of blood that gets connected with life, death, sexuality, spirituality and pollution. The representation of the feminine principle is thus highly nuanced with both the transcendent and the mundane continuously contesting and collaborating within the construct. There is a continuous process of what appears to be the creation of normative archetypes in the description of women characters as well as the goddess only to be demolished and overthrown later.

Both Kamakhya and Chinnamasta are located in pre-independence colonial Assam. ‘The year was 1930’, announces the first sentence of Kamakhya (Goswami 2001: 39). The narrative of Chinnamasta also proclaims that ‘It was 1920 after all’ (Goswami 2006: 11). Nonetheless, constant references to Gandhi, the Simon Commission and the colonial power does little to privilege the objective present over timelessness. It is this temporal and geographical specificity of the two novels, along with the many different ways in which they transcend the local, that this chapter hopes to investigate. While the cosmic energy of the Kamakhya temple dominates the novels, it is never too far from the human drama of control, defiance and vengeance that is played out under its shadow and it is the complex dynamics of this ‘play’ that this chapter will attempt to discuss and unfold.

II

The origin of the Kamakhya temple, alive in local lore as well as in the Kalika Purana, the ancient Sanskrit compendium, is traced back to the legend of Sati, who was the daughter of Prajapati Daksha and the wife of Lord Shiva. Daksha was vexed with his daughter’s marriage with Shiva who lived with snakes, his body smeared with ash and his habitat being the cemetery. His companions were ghosts and goblins. In short, Daksha did not consider Shiva as a suitable husband for his daughter Sati, who defied her father to marry him. Sati feels humiliated when she is not invited for a yajna organised in her father’s house but decides to still go there. She is shamed by her father for coming to his house uninvited. He also disgraces the absent Shiva by hurling abuses at him. Unable to bear the humiliation, Sati jumps into the yajna fire and is charred to death. Shiva is furious when he gets to know of this. He too goes to Daksha’s house, picks up the charred body of Sati and begins his dance of destruction, the tandav. All creation is on the verge of complete collapse when Lord Vishnu begins to shadow Shiva and gradually chops off parts of Sati’s body with his chakra, the divine wheel. These different parts of Sati’s charred body are believed to have fallen in 51 spots, which have evolved as the 51 Shakti Peethas (abodes of Mother Goddess). The place where the Kamakhya temple stands is the spot where Sati’s yoni or vulva is believed to have fallen.

Some scholars, however, also believe that the temple was connected with the fertility worship and the ritual of sacrifice of the indigenous communities like the Khasis. Goswami herself weaves many of the above narratives in the two texts. In Kamakhya she locates the temple in its temporal history as well and mentions how it ‘had been destroyed by Kalapahar’, believed to be a general during the reign of the Kamata kingdom that ruled over the region in 13th century after the fall of the Palas (Goswami 2001: 55). Reconstructed in 1565, the Kamakhya temple is one of the most important sites of tantric worship and the sect of Sati followers. Literally meaning the ‘renowned goddess of desire’, Kamakhya is iconically represented by a shape similar to that of the female vulva. This is located in the inner sanctum or the garbhagriva (womb chamber) and watered by a perennial spring. The temple complex has within it a set of individual temples dedicated to the ten Mahavidyas, or ten forms of the goddess as perceived in Shaktism, which considers the metaphysical reality as being feminine and the Devi, or the goddess, as being the supreme source of all energy. Chinnamasta, or ‘the one with a severed head’, is one of the Mahavidyas belonging to the esoteric tantric tradition and is the goddess referred to in the title of the novel The Man from Chinnamasta. The goddess is represented as nude and self-decapitated, standing on a copulating divine couple. The goddess holds her severed head in one hand and a scimitar in the other. Three streams of blood sprout out of her neck. One stream ends in the severed head of the goddess and the other two in the mouths of the two figures standing next to her. Clearly, Chinnamasta may be seen as representing many contradictory aspects of life, including death, fury, sexual energy, spiritual energy and sacrifice, including self-sacrifice. This concept of self-sacrifice is not limited only to the icon of the goddess and is depicted in the novel as a practice followed by ordinary devotees as well. One such incident is described in the following lines:

A straggle of people followed [a] palanquin. It was the sort used for carrying the sick. Henry noticed the man inside was wounded, his clothes were bloodstained.

A priest stopped at the sight of a white man.

‘What happened?’ the munshi enquired.

‘A pilgrim from Coohbehar. His eldest son is sick and he has no money for treatment. Can’t afford to sacrifice a goat or a buffalo. So he offered his own blood.’

‘His own blood?’ Brown was astounded.

(Goswami 2006: 33)

Philosophers and anthropologists have tried to analyse the symbolic place of blood in societies but its complexity has led many of them to describe it as ‘a signifier of nearly everything’ (Simpson 2009: 112). ‘Not only does blood have a remarkable range of meanings and associations, … but many of these encompass their antinomies’ (Carsten 2013: 2).

The antinomies or the paradox of the blood image persistently recurs not just in literary and creative constructs but also in ritual practices described in both Kamakhya and Chinnamasta. The blood ritual, or the sacrifice of animals at the altar of the goddess, comes to a standstill due to another ‘blood cycle’, that of menstruation of the goddess at the Kamakhya temple. ‘The Devi who feeds on buffalo blood’ is not offered blood on ‘the four days in the month of July (asadha)’ when she is believed to be menstruating, which is when the Ambubasi mela, or fair, is organised (Goswami 2001: 48). ‘Perfumed water in one-hundred-and-eight earthen pitchers [is] used at the purification ceremony after the ambubasi’ (Goswami 2001: 62). Goswami mentions this again in Chinnamasta when she says that:

The temple doors were shut. The Mother Goddess was menstruating. Her loins were covered with a red cloth. Every year on the seventh day of the month of Ashaad the temple closed for three days. It opened on the fourth day.

(Goswami 2006: 79)

The paradoxical image of blood with multiple connotations of life, death, purity, impurity, taboo and pollution is too obvious for comment. The association between blood and the organic and the primeval is stressed by Mary Douglas, who approaches blood as what she calls a ‘natural system of symbolizing’ (Douglas 1970: xxxiii). She describes it as a ‘natural symbol’ that generates and activates our primal connections with our origins. The power of blood is accepted in all cultures of the world. Its connotation, however, gets impacted by a whole array of ‘socio-sacred’ relations, including those of power and control. The symbolism of menstruation within this framework, needless to say, is connected with the gender paradigm that sculpts it to fit into the male-focused enquiry and taboos since ‘menstrual blood is viewed as especially dangerous to men’s power’ (Engebrigtse 2007: 129). Emile Durkheim argues that emergence of human religion, along with its collective rituals as well as its taboos, can be traced to its intricate relationship with menstruation, which is perceived as both divine and polluting. The gendered gaze thus transforms the exclusive energy of the feminine body and sexuality into a frailty and a flaw from which neither the women nor the goddess in Kamakhya and Chinnamasta are spared.

III

The protagonist of Kamakhya is the ‘breathtakingly beautiful’ Padmapriya who has been spurned by her husband Bhuvaneshwar and his family for a white mark on the small slender portion of her back. Her father Bhagwati and mother Yashobai are accused of deceitfully marrying off their ‘diseased’ daughter with ‘leucoderma, white leprosy’ to Bhuvaneshwar (Goswami 2001: 42). Padmapriya is obsessed with the spot and scratches it often. ‘Several of her blouses had split around the back because of this persistent clawing. It has almost developed into an unconscious habit now. Often, she would begin to scratch at the spot with her nails until the blood oozed out. Hot, sticky blood’ (Goswami 2001: 42). The other two men who figure in the story are Saeng, the ‘deformed midget’ who walked around with his ‘bent, misshapen form’, and:

Shambhudev, the priest in charge of ritual sacrifices. … Shambhudev was a well-built man. He was strong and muscular. ... He had the shoulders of a lion. His arms appeared to have been cast out of iron. The hot blood pumping inside him could almost be felt even at [a] distance.

(Goswami 2001: 44, 42, 52)

Padmapriya goes to the forest to seek white kunda flowers for the worship of the Devi and meets Shambhudev a few times. The strong attraction between the two develops into a physical relationship when Shambhudev and Padmapriya enter a dark cave:

searching for their white kunda flowers. A wild fragrance filled the air. A mysterious fragrance somewhat like the fragrance given off by the perfumed waters in the one-hundred-and-eight earthen pitchers used at the purification ceremony after the ambubasi. … In their heightened state they could feel the Devi’s blood present in all things.

(Goswami 2001: 62)

Padmapriya’s hair is:

dishevelled when she steps out of the cave and there seems to be the pollen of some unknown flower on her body?

Or was it … the fragrance of the water used to bathe the divine Goddess, the Goddess who had the heavy menstrual flow.

Oh, what was that fragrance?

Like the fragrance of the raw blood, blood from the sacrificial site which flows to the bosom of Brahmaputra.

(Goswami 2001: 63)

The passage that follows the above lines moves on to describes Padmapriya’s nightmare:

She saw the look on the faces of the men preparing the buffalo for sacrifice. The buffalo was lying sprawled on the ground. Its hooves and horns were tied to the ground. … She felt a sharp pang of sympathy for the struggling animal. … Suddenly she lunged towards Shambhudev; just as Shambhudev’s khargah spun out of his hand. In a frenzy she gouged deep furrows over Shambhudev’s chest with sharp nails of her fingers,

‘Cruel, thoughtless, how can you be so thoughtless,’ she screamed. Shambhudev’s blood was dripping down her two hands.

(Goswami 2001: 63–64)

The preponderance of the blood image and its association with the representation of female body and sexuality brings together religious ritualism, divinity, eroticism and sacredness. Padmapriya’s and Shambhudev’s passion is swathed within the same ambiguity that surrounds the discourse of blood and sacrifice. There is, however, no touch of moral criticism of the relationship which is built up almost as a natural progression of something innately instinctive. What in fact gets targeted as self-centred sensuality is Bhuvaneshwar’s renewal of his relationship with Padmapriya. Reconciliation on his part seems complete when Padmapriya is discovered to be pregnant. ‘Bhuvaneshwar confessed before the elders that the child in Padampriya’s womb was his’ (Goswami 2001: 74). Proud and happy, he offers a ‘black ram as sacrifice to the Devi’ and goes to Padampriya who looks like the Devi to him with her ‘large collyrium-adorned eyes’ (Goswami 2001: 75). Padampriya however announces to him that, ‘“The child isn’t yours. … The child’s father is Shambhudev.” … Bhuvaneshwar collapsed in a head near the door’ (Goswami 2001: 75–76).

Clearly the centre gets entirely decentred by the time we approach the end of the narrative. It is not Padampriya but Bhuwaneshwar who gets eventually sacrificed at the feet of Padampriya, who is transformed from a victim to the vanquisher.

IV

The major themes, symbols and leitmotifs that cons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Photographs
• Preface to the Series
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Life Made of Thousand Broken Pieces: The Many Margins of Indira Goswami
• SECTION I The Fiction of Indira Goswami
• SECTION II The Non-Fictional Works of Indira Goswami
• SECTION III Reading Indira Goswami: Literary Reception
• SECTION IV Spaces to Inhabit: Private, Public and In-Between
• SECTION V Many Margins of Indira Goswami: Flesh, Blood, Spirit
• SECTION VI Indira Goswami in Conversation
• SECTION VII Writing as Translation: On Language and Craft
• SECTION VIII From the Archives of Indira Goswami: Letters and Reminiscences
• SECTION IX Gathering the Pieces: Chronology and Bibliography
• Indira Goswami: A Biographical Chronology
• A Life in Pictures
• Biographical Notes
• Indira Goswami: Select Bibliography
• Index