Fertility worship and monsoon among agricultural communities of Bardhaman

Abstract

Religious life worlds are generally constructed through ideas of transcendence, abstraction and immateriality, and thus detached from everyday mundane worlds of subsistence and livelihood. My thesis, through a detailed ethnographic exploration of village deities' worship systems among Purba Bardhaman’s agricultural communities, aims to explore the diverse ways in which the natural and cultural realms intrinsically interact with one another. The thesis argues that both the natural worlds of these farming communities—in which monsoon is of supreme importance—and their cultural worlds, where religious mediations in the form of local village deities are central, together drive their everyday livelihoods. I conceptualize gramdevatas (village deities) as primary embodiments of nature-culture enmeshment, upon which experiences of land, subsistence, human-animal relations, and climate change conditions, fold into one another, in people’s mundane cultivating practices. Such inhabitation involves peculiar forms of divinizing the landscape through human-animal-sacred relations, marked by both fecund and organic holistic syncretism and differentiated modes of relationalities. The first part of the thesis deconstructs the idea of Purba Bardhaman as a farming utopia, and rather thinks of it also as a sacred landscape, arguing that place-experiences are always also religious embodied. This is exemplified particularly by rethinking Bardhaman’s status as a secure ‘mainland’, and instead showing the varying perceptions of people’s vulnerability, ritual assertions, territorial identities, and rain-enmeshed festivals, as important ways of relating to lands and their climatic histories. Gramdevatas’ intimacy to human lives, their organicist, material and tangible existence in physical landscapes, constitute important symbiotic relations among human agricultural labour, monsoonal topographies and notions of sacrality. The second part demonstrates village deities’ intricate mediations of ecological and cultural affects, and argues that their embodiments take diverse forms— of animal deification, subsistence-oriented syncretism, and bloody sacrificial traditions. While gramdevatas as sacred snakes primarily depict natural dimensions of worship, as subsumptions of classicized religious deities, they also uphold major syncretistic cultural ideals. However, Bardhaman’s subsistence economy, human agricultural labour practices, and climatic considerations in village deity worship, depicts such cultural assimilation as especially foregrounded in its physical, organic landscapes. Further, blood sacrifice rituals in honour of gramdevatas mark the culmination point of nature-culture interfaces, since material dimensions of sacrificial traditions—including the animal body and the ritual blood—grants a distinctive organic aspect to such religious icons. Blood as materially present in sacrifice rites, and symbolically invoked within hierarchical caste relations, ties diverse cultural dimensions of cohabitation and differentiation, in human-animal-divine relations. Thus, attending closely to Bardhaman’s agricultural landscapes, my thesis explores how the categories of nature, culture, human, animal, and divinity, intertwine through mundane cultivating experiences, embodying permeable boundaries between the transcendental and the material realms, the abstract and the specific, ecology and culture, global crises and everyday rural life.