Theo-Piracy Of A Sacred Tribal Ritual?

January 2023. ‘Scientific American’ published an article by anthropologist Dr Piers Vitebsky. It was exotically titled ‘Dialogues with the Dead’.

It was about the ‘Shamanic’ ritual associated with mourning in Sora tribals of Odisha. The subtitle of the article informs the reader that this ‘indigenous spiritual tradition speaks to the fragility of theological diversity.’

The article contains many interesting insights, particularly for an Indian reader. But it is more in the way of how a typical Western academic mind understands an Indic tribal ritual and tries to theorise (and appropriate) it.

Coming from a Christian and Western secular culture, as the author himself acknowledges, he tries to study ‘the Sora Indigenous (or Adivasi) people in the highlands of Odisha, eastern India.’ This is what he discovers:

He tries to explain the ‘Shamanic’ rituals through a Freudian framework and then describes the limitations:

So far, so good.

But the real problem comes when he symmetrically characterises Hinduism and Christianity as competing global religions which pose a threat to such indigenous spiritual traditions.

This is not only contrary to empirical reality but also a typical continuation of a colonial worldview. If one goes through the entire article carefully, one can clearly see how even this seeming symmetrical treatment of Christianity and Hinduism actually reveals a subtle but strong pro-Christian bias.

‘Largely Outside the Hindu World’?

At the outset he states that the ‘Sora’ tribes numbering ‘some 400,000’ speaking ‘a language of the Austroasiatic family— unlike India’s mainstream Indo-European and Dravidian languages— ... lay largely outside the Hindu world.’

This is actually an anthropological impossibility.

The very name of the tribe, 'Sora', is one of the variants of the names of this tribe - Saura, Savara and Sabara.

There have always been interactions and internalisations of the elements of various spiritual traditions around each ethnic community in India, at least right from the Harappan-Vedic times.

Asko Parpola, a scholar of Harappan and Vedic studies, considers Varuna as being depicted in the famous Pasupati seal and his original identity as being Sambara.

According to him, a later variant of this name was Samvara, which in turn was derived from the term meaning ‘to enclose’. He related this even to Goddess Durga.

He speculates an etymological relation to Sambara and the term Saraba meaning ‘fierce tribal.’ In other words the tribal community was not an untouched exotic Amazonian tribal equivalent. It has always been interacting with larger Indian community which itself is made of a mosaic of similar such communities. This is further evidenced by the presence of what Sanskritist Michael Witzel calls the Munda Substratum in the earliest part of Rig Veda.

Even otherwise in a culture like that of India, where no monopolistic religious theology was present, and where theo-diversity (a better term coined by Prof. Lokesh Chandra than the one used by Prof. Vitebsky) is a core-civilisational element, a tribal community while retaining its original identity can continuously interact with the surroundings, fertilising and evolving.

Continuing Relations

Even in later period the transactional and intertwined relations between forest-dwelling Saraba and non-Saraba people have been attested by Odisha literature, at least six hundred years old.

One of the most famous pilgrimage centres of Sri Vaishnav tradition is Puri Jagannatha temple. Fifteenth century Oriya poet Sarala Dasa in his rendering Mahabharata departs from the original and tells a Puranic origin story for the pilgrimage centre in which Saraba and Brahmin elements are harmonized together.

Prof. Edwin Bryant considers this ‘a complex synthesis of pre-Aryan Indian culture and Aryan theology has still not been fully explored.’

In reality what is true for Puri is true for almost all shrines. To understand this process which conserves the local tradition well within a larger cultural and spiritual context, with both interacting and enriching each other, is the quintessential process that generates and regenerates what is called Hinduism.

As Hinduism is not a single-book, single-prophet or single son-of-God centric monopolistic religion but rather a natural religion with theo-diversity at its heart, the very model for interaction of the tribal with non-tribal in Hindu context should be different.

Christian Missionary and Hindu Nationalism

But Prof. Vitebsky continues with drawing parallels between Christianity and Hinduism.

Looking deeper into the article, one finds that he has a positive image of Christianity nonetheless. He considers conversion to Christianity as a process stopping the exploitation of the tribals.

The missionaries write the tribal language in Roman script, thus cutting the tribals effectively from the organic relations they have with the Oriya language. The Oriya non-tribals become the exploiters here.

But when the woman Shaman has the non-tribal Oriyan as their spirit husbands in their altered states, that is projected by Vitebsky as fantasy – as a means of controlling the exploiters in a fantasy underworld and not as indicative of a deeper bonding between the tribal and non-tribal people.

From here on his narrative very closely resembles the narrative set by ethno-botanist Mark Plotkin, in his Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice which is set in the jungles of the Amazonian forest. This is what Plotkin writes after he had compiled a treatise of the medicinal plants of the Amazonian tribe in their own language:

Now consider what Vitebsky writes about his compilation of the ritual hymns:

In other words, what Plotkin does for plants in the setting of Amazonian Jungle, Vitebsky tries to do with Indian tribal spiritual ritual.

But Soras/Sabaras are not an isolated Amazonian tribe. They are well immersed strand in the matrix of a living culture.

While talking about missionaries, Plotkin had at least documented the unethical ways of the missionaries but he did not care much about the loss of religion of the tribes.

Vitebsky goes a step further.

One fails to understand what Vitebsky means when he says that the geography of Hinduism is not oriented to features of local environment or what he means by ‘the sacred sites of Hindu nationalism.’

In fact, for Hinduism, the entire planet with all its diversity is sacred. To Hindus tribals or non-tribals, every sacredness is their sacredness. A tribal does not consider as non-sacred or Satanic the sacred site of another tribal. And hence, is a Hindu. A Hindu will not say to an Australian aborigine that she should abandon the Uluru rock and consider Kailash the holiest of the holy. Rather a Hindu would bow before the sacred rock with the same veneration she has for Kailash.

Will my Children Talk to Me?

Vitebsky himself unwittingly gives a space to show his false symmetry. He writes about a tribal friend Inama who laments to the anthropologist: You’ve seen how I talk to my dead parents, but after I die, will my children talk to me?

This is because son of Inama had converted to Christianity. Vitebsky states that the converts are strictly forbidden from talking to the dead through Shamans. Inama was given a minimalist Baptist funeral. But his converted son was having trouble without the ceremonial mourning. Then he had a dream of his father. Vitebsky writes:

This is perhaps the most important distinction that Vitebsky has missed. The natural pan-Hindu association of any tribal community does not necessarily force the so-called Brahminical rituals on them. Rather it gives the tribal community the needed space to conduct their rituals while protecting them from the more institutionally and financially strong aggressive proselytising forces.

In fact, in the state of Tripura, when Baptist-supported NLFT started gunning down Jamatiya tribals for conducting their funeral ceremonies, the Hindu identity helped them to survive and protect their rituals.

Spiritual Gene Bank: Theo-Piracy versus Vedic Model?

Prof. Vitebsky has a future vision:

A gene bank of spiritual wisdom may definitely look like an improvement over the museum-syndrome of the conventional Western mindset. But here one should remember that the spiritual traditions are taken out of their surroundings.

Culturally they have been removed from their larger setting.

Either the professor fails to understand or pretends not to understand the fact that Hindu society and culture through the ages and despite the challenges of invasions, colonisation, and post-colonial alienation, has kept the diversity alive – neither frozen nor as living museum pieces.

Hinduism is actually a family of religious traditions, where tribal traditions have always formed the basis and significant number of core vitals of the system. What is called Animism is part of them.

Scholar Sandhya Jain who has done in-depth research into the tribal dimensions of Hinduism points out the inappropriateness of the use of the terms like ‘animism’ and ‘aboriginal’:

Then very appropriately she cites Mahatma Gandhi’s criticism of the colonial categories of the so-called tribal and non-tribal:

And also the answer Gandhi gave to a missionary regarding his objection to the classification of tribal religions as distinct from Hindu family of religions:

Despite such a criticism of colonial categories by key civilisational savants of India, these categories have been allowed to remain and flourish in academia. In 2023 Scientific American publishes an article that does two important things:

• identifies the utility and importance of a spiritual tradition of a tribal community for the West; and

• isolates the community from its organic Hindu surrounding and prepares this isolated tradition for ‘spiritual gene bank’ perhaps in some Western University or Western funded Institution either inside or outside India with the dominant control of that institution naturally in the hands of academics like Prof. Vitebsky.

Against this, Hindu Dharma creates for every spiritual tradition boundaries that are porous, like cell membranes through which cultural and spiritual osmosis takes place continuously.

Tribal traditions are celebrated in Vedic religion for their Bhakti as in Kannappa Nayanar narrative and tribal traditions are celebrated too for the wisdom they contain as in the narrative of Kritarjuneeyam.

If Prof. Vitebsky really desires that the tribal spiritual traditions in India and around the world should be preserved then he should first try to decolonise himself.

References:

• Piers Vitebsky, Dialogues with the Dead, Scientific American, January, 2023, pp.39-47

• Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture, Oxford University Press, 2001, p.101

• Edwin Bryant (Ed.), Krishna a Source Book, Oxford University Press, 2007, p.142

• Asko Parpola, The Metamorphoses of Mahisa Asura and Prajapati in 'Ritual, State, and History in South Asia: Essays in Honour of J.C. Heesterman' (Ed. A.W.Van Den Hoek, D.H.A.Kolff & M.S.Oort), BRILL, 1992, p.298

• Mark J. Plotkin, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, Penguin Books, 1993, p.287

• Sandhya Jain, Adi Deo Arya Devata: A Panoramic View of Tribal Hindu Cultural Interface, Rupa & Co. , 2004, p.18