Is it God Speaking? Agency of Deities in the Western Himalaya

ABSTRACT

In many ethnographies, deities reflect social structures, represent power relations, or serve as a resource for individuals. However, believers usually do not doubt the existence of deities and their agency: that is, their ability to act and initiate change. The gap between these points of view narrows in the religious experiences in the Indian Himalayas. There, the local population, who communicate with local deities via mediums, face an epistemological problem: how to be certain that they are, indeed, talking with their gods. Furthermore, the believers are aware that they play a role in the decisions of the gods. These two aspects of the religious experience are expressed in the gradual transition of the gods from a Pahāṛī to a pan-Hindu identity, an indication of the way in which the agency of the gods is being challenged and is subject to negotiation by the locals.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• identity
• deities
• spirit possession
• western Himalaya

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Anup K. Kapoor, head of the Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi, for hosting me as a postdoctoral fellow, and for guiding me along the way. I thank P.C. Joshi and Chakraverti Mahajan, members of the department, for their fruitful discussions about religion in the Himalayas. I thank Hagar Shalev, Nissim Leon and Shlomo Guzmen-Carmeli for their comments on previous versions of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Asaf Sharabi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3879-9183

Notes

1 The fieldwork took place intermittently between 2013 and 2017, for a total of 20 months.

2 In addition to the four Mahāsū devtās, the name Mahāsū is used (though only rarely) as a general name. This is one such case.

3 Rātri-pūjā is traditionally called d(h)ām (Sanskrit dhāma ‘abode’) in western Uttarakhand and eastern Himachal Pradesh.

4 It is not a new phenomenon (see, Berreman 1963, 136–142; Zoller 2007, 112). However, in recent years we are witnessing a deepening of this trend.

5 According to local myth, the four Mahāsū brothers came to the area from Kashmir, and when they arrived Boṭha injured his foot. As a result, Boṭha resides permanently in the central temple in Hanol.

6 Bolain has only one temple, in Thithrawali. The village is located in Nerua Tehsil of Shimla district. The idea that the Mahāsu brothers have a sister is known and recognised mainly to the locals who live in that area.

7 This sanitising attitude is probably due to the growing influence of mainstream Hinduism with its ascetic and abstinent Brahmanic inclinations. See Shalev and Sharabi (2018) for this process of Sanskritisation.

8 The case of Mahāsū’s mediums is rather exceptional, because with many other deities in the region, the mediums come from the lower castes.

9 Compare it with other places in the Himalayas, such as Western Nepal, where the medium (dhāmī) has to prove that the deity chose him by performing a miraculous test (Campbell 1978; Gaborieau 1976).

10 The Jāgar, a well-known ritual of possession in nearby areas (e.g. Krengel 1999; Leavitt 2016), does not take place in Mahāsū’s territory.

11 According to linguistic anthropologist Claus Peter Zoller (in corresponded email, 12 September 2017) the word mālī (which is a homonym of mālī ‘gardener’) probably derives from the Sanskrit mahallaka – ‘venerable, old’.

12 In Pahāṛī the word gatti means ‘little heap’. The word is rarely used outside the context of the encounter with the gods.

13 In a nearby area (Garhwal), Sax (2009, 54–59) describes a different mechanism that he calls a ‘logic tree’, when at least in the beginning of the conversation there are yes or no questions composed by the medium. Sometimes clients refuse to answer these questions. In effect, Sax argues, they are challenging the power of the mediums.