I would like to introduce you today to a very special religious custom widely or I might say universally prevalent in uttarakhand hills. It is called the worship or obeisance to Isht Devta.
To point out its origins and deeper meanings would be task of Anthropologists. But I would like to state it as I have seen it since my childhood upto the present.
By this belief Various clans have their specific local deities. There are various names for these deities.(My one is GOLU DEVTA)These deities are ever present around us invisibly supervising our affairs and goading us to our good. Periodic obeisance must be paid to them by some communal form of worship .but sometimes they might be angry as well. particularly if we have ommitted some specific perfomance which was required to be done for the sake of the deity .Then We may face problems in life which we feel are unusual. If you are in such a suspicion then you go to some mysterious kind of preists who are experts in telling how exactly the problem can be solved by special pujas.
Sometimes it may turn out that rather than a deity some ancestor ,say, upto three or four generation ago was dealt cruelly by other family members(usually such ancestor is female).Her soul has not found rest. It has to be pacified and put to rest to quell the problems dogging one.
In that case such special people have to be sought on whom the deity incarnates himself.
The deity has to be invoked by some very special form of prayers by experts to emerge(if i am to enrich you with the local dialect this special form of prayer is called ‘JAGAR’ and these special preists are ‘DUNGREEJ’)
If the deity chooses to emerge he reveals the solution and it is hoped that problems wouldnot recur now.I saw first this in my family and village. Later on I found the tradition is prevalent and thoroughly entrenched in whole of Uttarakhand.
To me ofcourse this all looked very superstitious and I thought our hillsfolk are specially backward to believe such things.
But I immensely liked the drama accompanying such religious rites .The Dungrees have special drums and tongs and very special prayers which are half songs and half dialogues. This combined with The excitement and awe that any time a supernatural deity would emerge in a human had elements of a great drama. When the deity emerged after lot of efforts it gave out a terrible shreik. It shuddered and trembled in great agitation,spoke haltingly and in angry or highly patronizing tones. Never in calm voiice but always highly agitated. All this added to the mystery and awe of the spectacle.
Growing up I was more and more curious about this phenomenon. In Delhi University I once mentioned this to a fellow Uttarakhandi student. He was highly amused and we exchanged the names of our deities. His was BHOLUNATH.I asked him can it be a subject of anthropological research. It was then that he mentioned and asked me to read The great Antropological work of JAMES FRAZER called THE GOLDEN BOUGH.
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. It was first published in two volumes in 1890; in three volumes in 1900; and in twelve volumes in the third edition, published 1906–15. It has also been published in several different one-volume abridgments.(I have a huge one volume abridgement) The book like its title is magical .It has recorded almost every ritual and folk custom practised anywhere in earth by human beings. The work was aimed at a wide literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855) and its influence on contemporary European literature and thought was substantial. It is in this book I came to know that the phenomenon is universal.
In my copy it is in Chapter seven Named as INCARNATE HUMAN GODS
It is a big chapter and not easy to paraphrase
But at one place it says
The incarnation commonly known as inspiration or revelation reveals itself in supernatural knowledge rather than in supernatural power. In other words its usual manifestations are divinations and prophecy rather than miracles……….The belief in temporary incarnation or inspiration is worldwide.
Describing one such instance in Polynesia it says:
As soon as the God was supposed to have entered the priest the later became violently agitated and worked himself up to the highest pitch of apparent frenzy ,
the muscles of the Limbs seemed convulsed, the body swelled, the countenance became terrific, the features distorted and the eyes wild and strained. In this state he often rolled on the earth, foaming at the mouth,as if labouring under the influence of the divinity by whom he was possessed and in shrill cries and violent and often indistinct sound revealed the will of the god
Exactly as I used to see
Further it is written:
But examples of such temporary inspiration are so common in every part of the world and now so familiar through books on ethnology that it is needless to multiply the illustrations of general principle.
I never ever thought while seeing these religious rites that perfect explanation and illustration of these phenomenons have been done in a world famous book.
I have also tried to keenly observe how the highly educated present generations of Uttarakhandis react to these customs .Infact I never met one who rejects it out of hand.
The response is part amusing ,part wonderment. There is a sense of reverence inspired by the fact that it is a relic of those religious customs in which our ancestors believed so much and the solace provided by these incarnate gods made their lives more bearable.
But perhaps it is not belived that there is any
specific intervention by god on our behalf. All Bounties of god are available to all and after that we are on our own.It is just worship of Almighty in a different form(I once saw a photograph of our NSA Ajit Doval,an uttarakhandi attending these annually performed pujas at his village )
THE MASAN PUJA IN UTTARAKHAND
I will now like to menton one specific form of worship which relates exclusively to girls. The girls and their families in uttarakhand hills(very prevalent in villages and not so unusual in towns) believe that some ghost (called Masan in local dialect)somewhere had an eye on them when they would have passed a forest or other desolate place. It has infiltrated their lives and creates problem of many kinds. It is supposed to become real active only after marriage . So after marriage all the usual or unusual problems are attributed to it.
Again the solution is a special kind of ritual. Some years after marriage when problems are suspected due to Masan this ritual has to be performed at her parental place.
In this either a goat or a cock has to be sacrificed to propitiate the ghost along with all other rites and being so pacified the ghost goes its own way.
Once I and a cousin of mine almost bribed some of these ritual performers to take us to the sight of performance where everyone is not allowed.The ritual was performed in midnight in a forest .A cock was sacrificed . lot of mumbo jumbo was utterd and at dawn everyone returned to his place.
The girl remained at home. Only requirement for her was to not step out of house till dawn.The party of course recieved fees for all this trouble.A regular source of employment for these people.
Now all ladies in the group who have been in Ranikhet or any other place in hills for a considerable period of time and have any suspicions on this account you must contact me. I can arrange a Masan puja. You will have a chance to see a kumaoni village and you will shed off all effects.
If you have been into forests or have crossed a water stream at odd times in hills (like the one which runs at the bottom between the ridges on which canossa convent and war memorial hostel are located) there are more than fair chances that some apparition has managed to enter your life and is influencing your behavior.
So friend this was all about THE GOLDEN BOUGH, JAMES FRAZER ,ISHT DEVTA AND MASAN PUJA OF UTTARAKHAND.
MAY MY GOLU DEVTA BLESS ALL OF US
Amici Aternum 