Abstract
What is the potential of rituals in southern Odisha (Orissa) which are performed by women in honour of Hindu goddesses to shape women’s gender-identity? And how does that affect their female performer’s sense of self? These are the questions that are central to ‘Promising Rituals’, a monograph based on ethnographic research done in the city of Berhampur between 1999 and 2003. For Hauser, gender-identity is an ‘embodied faculty’ (p. 11) that encodes the sentient body, habitual routines and tacit knowledge. Gender is ‘done’ by people, permanently, without cognitive involvement. The book focuses on how women’s participation in ritual performances contributes to their ‘doing gender’ and how that affects their experience of their gendered selves.
The first three chapters consider various aspects of women’s religious conditioning. Adolescent girls can choose to perform Jahni Osā, a (individual) religious fast in honour of the goddess Brndābatī, which prepares them for gender specific forms of worship. Girls say that they perform the rituals since these are fun and to satisfy the goddess, but their fast also displays that they are ready for marriage. Women’s religious agency is apparent in Niśā Man.galabāra Osā, the seasonal worship of the goddess Man.galabāra. A seemingly conservative rite, performed for the well-being of husband and children, it does allow women certain autonomy in their imagination of the goddess and in their conduct of the ritual. Lastly, Hauser shows how women’s gender is produced through the cultural and social framing of menstruation, which is primarily perceived as a source of ‘impurity’.
The other five chapters of the book centre on processions dedicated to the goddess Bur.hī Thākurānī in which women are the main participants. First, Hauser introduces possession as a fairly common element of women’s religious idiom that, however, does not find approval in the eyes of (male) Brahmins. During processions, a married woman can carry an earthen pot on her head, which contains the deity. From the pot, the deity can ‘jump upon’ or ‘dance’ on its female carrier. This happens infrequently, but it emphasises the theatrical or performative aspect of these processions. Women sharing in the divine agency express wild and uncontrolled behaviour that starkly contrasts with the modesty and docility that is normally expected of them. In anthropology, possession has often been explained in psychological terms, either as a coping mechanism serving to re-establish the self or to provide women a way to resist their inferiority and subordination. Here, female ritual performers achieve agency by means of submission to the divine. Hauser argues, ‘rather than being an individual role-play of self and other, this religious practice serves as a paradigmatic way of realizing and sharing divine generative power (sakti) for the benefit of the community’ (p. 146). Consequently, the pot processions earn women respect from their family and neighbourhood. They display how women’s religious acts are beneficial to their families and society, and that men depend on their wives’ and mothers’ engagement with the divine.
For the goddess Mā Thākurānī, ‘private’ pageants can be organised during the hot season, but her largest celebration is the Thākurānī Yātrā which is celebrated every second year. Like other goddesses, Bur.hī Thākurānī, the tutelary deity of Berhampur, can bestow benevolence, but she is also feared for her anger, which might cause disease and calamities. She has to be appeased regularly in order to ensure her protective powers. For the biennial festival, the goddess is transported by a dedicated priestess in an earthen pot, which she carries on her head from her permanent location at her in-laws shrine to the shrine of her father where she resides for the duration of the festival. During the three weeks that the festival lasts, the priestess carries the pot during nightly processions through town, followed by hundreds if not thousands of women with their own earthen goddess-pot. Otherwise, it is very unusual for women to roam around on the streets at night. The last night of the festival even has tens of thousands of women who, submitting themselves to the goddess, return her to her permanent location at the temple of her in-laws. The festival concludes with each of the women breaking their pots and the sacrifice of a black male goat.
The book presents a lot of exciting ethnographic data, but perhaps because of that and considering the complexity of the rituals analysed, it sometimes leaves the reader wanting. Given that much of the book is dedicated to an analysis of the Thākurānī Yātrā, it would have been useful to include a map showing the location of the temples in Berhampur, as well as the wards in which the nightly processions take place. The analysis presented also raises questions as to the material objects used during the processions, most notably the earthen pots. How do these become seats of the goddess? And do they remain empty, as no mention is made of fluid or anything else that is inside them? The festival ends with the women breaking their pots. How do people interpret this? What happens to the pot carried by the main priestess?
In their ritual engagement, women can experience themselves as powerful ritual and social actors. This offers them ‘the opportunity of verifying their sense of self vis-a-vis the world’ in reaction to and apparently against ‘restrictive and omnipotent role expectations’ (p. 236) conveyed by a mainstream Hindu religious discourse. Is their engagement of the goddess only socially relevant if ‘society’ attributes considerable significance to the goddess? Is belief or religious conviction required to make the rituals stand out? People say that the adolescent girls who engage in fasting are ‘nowadays motivated by convention, rather than devotion’ (pp. 36–37) and Hauser mentions that even though many participants are uninformed about ritual meaning, that does not stop them from performing those. Perhaps, the relevance of these extensive celebrations depends primarily on a social consensus that they are important at all, to some extent independent of the various meanings that can be attributed to them in a religious or symbolic sense.