Immersion of a Goddess Effigy (Week Eight)

Dancer with headpiece

In the temple

The Goddess Effigy

Immersion of a Goddess Effigy (Week Eight)

We drove the 110 miles down from Kuvempu University, high in the Western Ghats, to arrive back at the Mangalore University Guest House in a little under eight hours.   After a lunch, a short jog and a nap, I took my backpack and, as the afternoon cooled down, I walked (as I often do), to the cluster of stalls and fruit stands a kilometer north of the campus.  They know me there now—actually most people on the way do—and I always buy about the same thing: a kg of Mysore bananas, maybe some minosas (an orange like fruit) maybe grapes, maybe pomegranates. There isn’t that much choice for me.   I can walk to at least a half dozen stalls and they are almost identical.  I don’t understand how this market economy works.   Besides the fruit, there are dozens of varieties of what appear to be either fried and salty items (occupying the place of potato chips for the U.S.) or sweets.

I watched a man squatted on the ground in front of the stalls who was selling fish spread across a green plastic tarp in front of him. Between shooing flies he sells the six inch fish in small black plastic bags.  The river (The Netravati) is about five miles north of here, and I wonder if he is one of the fishermen, and how he got here, and when the fish were caught.

I walk back on a red dirt path alongside the road and stop for a few minutes to watch the boys playing Cricket in the empty field.  They pile stones behind the batsman for a wicket.  Usually they call to me and ask me to play.  This time they only wave.

At the end of the field a dozen college age men are handing out literature.  They are dressed in white and orange.  The flyer is written in Kannada script, and they begin to explain when a man (also in white and orange) on a Vespa pulls up to us,  and says to me. “Get on”.  We drive down the plateau towards the rice paddies until we pull into a small Hindu temple.   He explains that this evening is the last day of a festival for a deity of knowledge and new beginnings that is celebrated by the people of this temple.  A life-size mud effigy of the goddess is in the back of the temple and as the evening turns to night the figure will be transported in a procession from the temple to a pool where the effigy will be lowered into the water, dissolved and returned to mud.  They give me a bag of food items that the priest has blessed and I am invited to take part in the procession—in fact, implored to take part.

Some dancers are wearing costumes that make them into nine foot tall figures.  A man and a woman each wear a wire and paper figure of a horse that, when they dance, appears to be two people riding horses.   My favorite is a woman in a more traditional Indian dance dress who wears a seven foot high headpiece. She could be fifty (she could be 30). Her face has  hard edged angular features (I’ll include some pictures). After ceremonies, the goddess effigy is loaded onto a float on a truck and the procession follows the wild spinning and sharp energetic movements of the dancers while a half dozen drummers bang away and what I am sure is a rhythm.   There are a hundred of us at the start from ten year old children to –well to old people like me.  The mood is festive and lively and everyone chatters above the din.  People crowd around me to make sure I am OK.  The man who brought me comes back regularly to check that I am doing OK.  He tells me several times that I can get in the float vehicle.   It is a kilometer or two down a steep jungle path to the pool and I need to consider my age.   I assure him that I am OK, but that I will take his offer if I get tired.  The path is steep and descends into the jungle night with the way lit by small candle like flames on banana leaves placed along the side of the path.   At a few points there are tables of food.  Those around me are pleased that I take– and like –the offerings. There is constantly a crowd around me,  and the daughter of the man with Vespa tells me that everyone likes me and is pleased that I am in the procession.  One of the drummers gives me his drum and I join the group until I expect they realize that I don’t get the beat.

We arrive at the water’s edge before midnight.   Out into a pool in the rice paddies, they have built a wood platform with an open center into which they will lower the goddess.   The pool is 20 meters across and –they say –ten meters deep.  Some of the local rice farmers are squatting along the two accessible edges of the pool, and the Vespa guardian goes to ask them if they can make room for me to see the immersion.    He talks to them for awhile in Tulu (although Kannada is the official language of Karnataka, only the better educated (and maybe higher caste?) people in the Mangalore region speak it as their first language).  He comes back to me and says. “Have you been here before?”   “Oh yes,” I say, “but not at night.  I barely recognize where I am”.     “These rice farmers,” he says, “They all say that they are your friends, that you run and ride a bicycle down these paths, and that they all know you.”   “Oh I only know them well enough to say ‘very fine, thank you’ when they call out ‘how are you?’ as I go by.”    The farmers squeeze together and make room for me.  They all squat.  I really can’t do that and one of the farmers finds a place and way for me to sit on the levee around the rice paddy.

The immersion ceremony is prefaced with floating flames on leaves out into the pool.  The night and the water are calm.  The flames are lit and with gentle sweeps of a hand the leaves are floated out into the pool. It takes a half dozen men to lower the goddess in the water,  and bubbles rise from the pool for the half hour before we hike back up the trails in the dark.

Dan

Daniel Wulbert, Fulbright Scholar, Mathematics,  Mangalore University,   Karnataka, India

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