Abstract
This chapter portrays the cultural world of the temple town of Bhubaneswar. It presents indigenous discourse about “the good life,” the good death, and rebirth. It discusses indigenous understandings of various Hindu concepts like mana (mind/heart), bhagya (fate), karma, and lalato lekha (destiny as written on the forehead) and the connections between the last three. In addition, it focuses attention on Hindu definitions of the human body, in particular, the maternal body. It also describes in some detail the dietary and daily practices of the Odia Hindus who live in this neighborhood.
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Notes
- 1.
The one exception to this is Snehalata, the 38-year-old married woman who, as I mentioned in the last chapter when describing the Pati household, has left her husband and returned to her natal household; in 1991, she expressed a desire to renounce the world and join one of the many ashrams in and around the temple town, but in 1992–93, she was less certain that this was the right course of action for her.
- 2.
The traditional occupation of the Hadis has been to clear night soil from latrines. They belong to a previously untouchable caste.
- 3.
The Bauris are another group of the previously untouchable. Their traditional occupation is the weaving of straw mats and baskets.
- 4.
Manogobinda Mahasupakaro, the Ayurvedic physician (kabiraj), and my source for much of what I know about the temple town, says, “that there are other lives (janmantaro) is certain. Why, there is this story that is told here that demonstrates this—here in this sacred area (kshetra) there is a pond (kundo) called the Papanasini (destroyer of sins) kundo—this was a pond that was created through the penance (tapasya) of Siddhabhuti, a devotee (bhakta) of Siva. But it also has another name—the she-monkey’s pond (Banari kundo). This pond lies right to the northwest corner of the temple, near the Municipal hospital. The way it got this name—Banari Kundo—is remarkable. A she-monkey used to live in the bamboo trees that surround the pond; in a previous birth, she used to be a queen, but because of the bad actions (kukarma) that she had done, she was reborn as a she-monkey who lived among the branches that hang over this pond (pokhri). She finally died in those trees and her bones (asthi) fell into the waters of that pond. And the waters of that pond are so excellent that she was reborn in a king’s household as a princess, but her face remained that of a monkey’s. Then she tried and tried and, in the end, remembered (jatismaro: remembering the incidents of one’s previous birth) why her face was that of a monkey’s. She saw that in her previous birth she had been a monkey; a bamboo stem had pierced her and she had died and her body had fallen into the pond below. She then told the king to organize a gift-giving (daan) and she gave instructions that if Brahmans from Odisha were to come, she was to be told. When Brahmans from Odisha finally came, she was told. She asked them where they were from and they replied that they had come from Odisha, from the temple of Jagannatha. She then asked them if they were familiar with Bhubaneswar and the temple of Lingaraj. They said that they were and so she told them to go there to the bamboo trees that surround the pond called Papanasini and look for the the head of a monkey that is stuck in the branches. She told them to drop the monkey’s head into the pond and then to return to her. The Brahmans did as they were told to. At that time, the queen was sleeping; when she got up and looked at herself in the mirror, her face was no longer that of a monkey, it was that of a beautiful woman. The queen gave no explanation to the king for her changed face, but when the Brahmans returned, everything was explained and they were rewarded. The king and queen then both came to this region (kshetra) and established two phalluses (lingams) of Siva here. Prathamastami (a particular religious festival) is the day when the monkey head was liberated (mukti hei thila), and on that day every year, worship (puja) is done to those two phalluses. Therefore, this story proves to us that there are other lives (janmantaro).”
- 5.
In the Odia language, kamna and basna are synonyms for “desire.”
- 6.
- 7.
“Their house” refers to her future husband’s family home.
- 8.
In the temple town, Ma is the most common way of referring to Devi, the Great Goddess of Hinduism.
- 9.
Gharo here means both the “family” and the “physical structure, the building.”
- 10.
To people unfamiliar with Hindu India, caste appears to be the most salient characteristic of the Hindu world, but as Marriott and Inden have correctly observed, caste, defined as an “institution of ranked, hereditary, endogamous occupational groups, is a foreign concept” (1977: 230). There is no indigenous term that is a perfect synonym for it. The word that Hindus use is jati, which is the Sanskrit cognate of the Latin “genus,” and, not surprisingly, both terms connote much the same thing: “class, kind, and group sharing essential characteristics.”
- 11.
Dharma has been translated here as “everything” because “dharma,” in this context, has a variety of meanings: destiny (bhagya), duty (kartavya), and one’s nature (prakriti or svabhav).
- 12.
Of course, not all diseases are included in this list of 64: for instance, Odia Hindus of the temple town believe that leprosy and small pox have different causal ontologies—for instance, kicking a Brahman in a past life results in leprosy in this life.
- 13.
Bauris are a previously untouchable caste. Their traditional occupation is the weaving of straw mats and baskets.
- 14.
In Odia, rajja also means “female secretions” that when joined with male semen (bija) creates new life. Etymologically, the word rajja is related to the Sanskrit rajas, one of the three gunas that constitute all matter in the manifest world, and implies “passion, dust, creativity, menstrual blood, etc.”
- 15.
Sada means plain or pure, depending on your perspective, and so sada bhojan means plain/pure food.
- 16.
For more on the nitya karma particular to women, see Chap. 6.
- 17.
For instance, Sudhansubabu told me that as a young man, he was told by his father and the family priest to spend a few minutes every day staring at a flame (beginning with 15 min and then gradually increasing the time spent till, in the end, one gazes into a flame for an hour). After many days of such single-pointed concentration (ekagrata), one finally sees one’s own image in the flame, and then one finally approaches effective control over one’s mana.
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Menon, U. (2013). Odia Hindu Ways of Thinking. In: Women, Wellbeing, and the Ethics of Domesticity in an Odia Hindu Temple Town. Springer, India. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-0885-3_3
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