Of Spirits and Devils

Anita Roy

Travelling with my in-laws to their ancestral village in South Karnataka for an all-night spirit possession ceremony, I wondered what I was letting myself in for. I'd visited Adve a month previously, for the first time, accompanying my partner and our three-year old, where we were welcomed as prodigals, bearing a son. This second visit had a more specific agenda: to witness a Kola ceremony. Each family in the village hosts the annual ceremony in rotation, but this particular Kola was to be held in order to pay back a specific debt. Ten years previously, the daughter of the house next door to our uncle's had promised to host a Kola if Jhumadi, the village's guardian spirit, would ensure the success of her husband's business. The business had flourished in Mumbai, and this year, she had decided to make good her debt travelling from the city to the village with her teenage daughter (reluctantly) in tow.

On the bus journey in, my mother-in-law threw herself enthusiastically into the dual role of village elder and native informant, even though, strictly speaking she was neither of these - having lived most of her life in Mumbai and priding herself on her educated and secular outlook. "Jhumadi or Dhumavati in the local language, Tulu, is the deity of Appa's village. If the Kola goes well and the god is pleased, she'll protect the village - the people, the crops, the animals, everything." The word she used for 'god' was 'bhuta', which sounded like the Hindi word for ghost, which indeed it is, but here the bhutas are not the scary shades of departed humans, but spirits whose roots are found in ancient animist traditions of the pre-Vedic past. And unlike the pantheon of Puranic gods - Durga, Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma - who are worshipped in temples officiated by Brahmin priests and who receive offerings as silent spectators, the bhutas have a much more intimate, give-and-take relationship with their devotees.

In the past, Christian missionaries mistakenly took the bhuta-aradhane (spirit-worship) of Karnataka for devil-worship. The French missionary Abbe Dubois wrote in the 18th century that "Each family has its own bhootam... every bhootam has its own particular name. Some are thought to be more powerful and more spiteful than others and these are naturally most widely worshipped. All these evil spirits delight in sacrifices of blood."

"Is there going to be a sacrifice?" I asked, somewhat squeamish at the thought. "Oh yes," Amma replied, "a chicken or two - but we needn't stay for that."

At the turning for Adve, a huge advertising hording dominated the skyline. Between the lines of coconut palms, the Onida Mephistopheles leant casually on a spanking new air conditioner, wearing his trademark horns and a come-hither smirk, under the words: To die for.

In this stretch of country, along India's southwestern edge, the land is thick with spirits: each village and each place has its own guardian deity. Snake-worship is very common. There are animistic bhutas - buffalo, snake, peacock, elephant, wild boar; deified or deiform humans; there are those linked to a particular locality; there are even those known for a specific trait or personality flaw - such as Niche (vile and treasonable), Potte (dumb), and Marlu-Jhumadi (foolish and indifferent). Powerful, capricious, unpredictable forces. And tonight I would meet one in the flesh.

* * * * *

Normal village life had come to a halt for the kola. Every household was alive with people busying themselves with preparations. In the courtyard next to the village temple, a small concrete stage was being decorated with fairy-lights and flower-garlands. The roof was festooned with bunches of orange-yellow betel nuts, areca flowers that hung down in knobbly white strings, purple and orange balloons, and coconut leaves carefully shredded into grassy ribbons.

The three dancers who were to perform that evening were getting themselves ready. They sat to one side, chatting easily and smiling, as they deftly tore palm fronds into long strips, gripping the central rib with flexible toes and working away with their hands. Their facial similarities and easy intimacy clearly marked them out as brothers. Their mother fussed and chivvied around at the back, adjusting this, smoothing that.

As the evening drew on, the crows cawed their way home and the deep emerald sky was blotched with the black silhouettes of impossibly large bats, heading out. As the stars emerged, the dancers tied up their hair in dainty top-knots, and wrung out damp sheets of palm bark to wrap around their legs. These homemade shin-guards protect their skin from the curved brass bells that they strap on to dance with. Two of the dancers proceeded to mix rice flour, turmeric, and coconut oil in the palm of their hands to make a vivid yellow paste. This was then smoothed on - first the nose, then forehead, cheeks and chin until their faces disappeared behind a golden mask. Their transformation had begun.

            ***

The women of the village had gathered outside the temple. The gateway was littered with shoes, like debris washed up by the tide, although most wandered around the village barefoot, to sidestep the botheration of footwear on this of all nights, when sacred spaces burst their bounds and leaked into the mundane.

The spirits were rousted up with a loud volley of firecrackers, a burst of maniacal drumming and a fanfare of brass as the band struck up - and continued to play for the next eight hours with barely a pause. The nasal meanderings of the shehnai merged with the clarion call of a huge trumpet that curved above its player's head like the horn of a mountain goat. The young boys of the village took turns in drumming - eyes as bright as beacons - as the elders disappeared into the inner sanctum to call out the spirits.

Girls after puberty and pre-menopausal women are forbidden from entering, but the little mandir seemed to be able to accommodate any number of men. Finally with a great flourish, the men processed out, led by two bare-torsoed pujaris holding curved silver swords, their bodies shaking with darsana, the presence of spirit. Following behind came the brass effigies of animal spirits that kept the goddess company: a bullock, a cow, an elephant, a peacock, a deer, a boar, a cobra and a rather sweet little piglet-spirit. Then came the goddess herself, in two parts: first her torso, a triangle of glinting brass globes, huge breasts and a swelling tummy, followed by her face, a moon-disk with blue-irised eyes and a thin tongue of silver protruding from her many, sharp teeth. Another smaller face followed. "That's her assistant," explained my mother-in-law, matter-of-factly.

Once the spirits had been safely installed on stage, festooned with flowers and flanked by diyas, the first dancer appeared, with a three-pronged wooden structure strapped to his back and the brass effigy of the bullock's head balanced on top of his own. He swirled and shook, the red flags at his back flapping like sails on the high seas. The whole contraption looked distinctly unstable, and a minor official scurried behind him as he danced, tugging at ropes and retying knots like a sailor adjusting the rigging. The necks of the musicians swelled and deflated like bullfrogs, droning their music while the drummers pounded out a rhythmic tattoo. As the tempo increased, the dancer's haughty nostrils flared, he grabbed the bullock's snout to keep it from slipping, the fronds of his skirt swirled out and in and sweat started from his face. He looked like he was about to cry.

Suddenly, with a crash, it was all over. Time for the next two to take his place. The yellow-faced twins emerged, their bodies atremble. With multicoloured tassels and shiny epaulettes, their tunics were part-matador, part-harlequin. Their grass skirts shimmered with the shaking of their bodies as they broke out into a surprisingly jolly, stiff-legged skip, cantering about the yard. With their masculine bodies and girlish gestures, their cupid-bow lipstick and painted eyebrows, they resembled pantomime dames. As they stood, juddering before the deity, sharp cries escaped their lips, their eyes rolled: the spirit was upon them.

* * * * *

By now it was 3am. I felt light-headed and hollow-limbed; that slightly drunken jet-lag feeling of being awake when you should be fast asleep, imbuing the whole experience with an air of heightened reality, as in a waking dream. It was time for the goddess to clothe herself in human body: to dance, to listen and to talk.

One of the yellow-faced dancers sat on a tall stool to be dressed as Jhumadi herself. An ornate brass plate, as big as a fireplace, was strapped to his back and his waist supported a semi-circular metal plate fringed with coconut palm fronds. Jhumadi's torso was tied to his neck, and rested on the plate, silver nipples and golden belly-button jutting like weapons. Above the dancer's impassive face, the deity's head was balanced on a casing of twine and cloth and secured to the backboard with rope. The whole ensemble must have weighed at least 15 kilos, and as the dancer heaved to his feet, an assistant scurried behind him, ready with the stool in case the whole thing capsized.

Jhumadi's assistant, Bante, had possessed the other yellow-faced dancer. Bante never speaks, but Jhumadi enters the body of the other dancer in order to listen to and answer questions, worries and troubles of the villagers. Seated on his stool, the oracle faced the audience, at eyelevel. The band had, finally, fallen silent and some of the musicians had simply wrapped themselves in thin shawls and keeled over to sleep.

For a supernatural spirit, Jhumadi seems surprisingly down-to-earth. Hands on his knees, he/she leaned forward slightly like a village woman sitting down to gossip with her neighbour.

One man spoke of some family problems. Another - a Muslim woman this time - asked how to find her missing daughter. Jhumadi's advice came in a sing-song refrain. The solution to their troubles always comes in the form of some ritual: sandalwood on the tongue, a particular offering at a particular time. The woman was advised to perform a ritual in the direction in which her daughter has left. "Well, that's not too difficult," mutters Amma out of the side of her mouth. "Everyone knows she's gone to Bombay."

The eeriness of the hour, between midnight and dawn is heightened by the silence of the night after eight hours of cacophonous music. The only sound is the murmured conversation between this neighborly goddess and her friends. I stand to stretch my legs and feel them tremble - not with darsana but with plain old tiredness. My mother-in-law and I hold hands to navigate our barefoot way back along the dirt tracks to the house.

* * * * *

The morning brings an after-party feel: capsized chairs, trampled flowers, the loudspeaker's mute scream. Visitors drift back to their own homes, and the village empties of its menfolk. The women return to their domestic chores, the children - hair neatly oiled, satchels on their backs - skip off to school. Jhumadi is safely back in her temple, and the sacred and mundane have separated once more.

On the drive back towards the airport, Amma points out the site of a new 1,015 megawatt power generation plant. As the local inhabitants fight tooth and nail through the courts, construction has already started. The coal will be supplied from Australia; the power (the politicians say) will drastically cut down the current shortfall in Karnataka. But what of the seven villages that will be destroyed to make the plant? And what of the many others (including Adve) that will be rendered uninhabitable due to pollution from the resulting fly-ash?

Is there another model of development that does not necessitate environmental disaster? That is not urbancentric? That does not involve the steady drain of life from the villages to swell the cities? A future to live for? Or an airconditioner to die for?

As we drove away, I watched the Onida hoarding receding in the rear-view mirror: the devil smiling as though the pact was sealed, the bloody ink already dry, his harvest of souls in the bank.