It is impossible to understand the Hindu
festivals of India without a knowledge of the lactate cultures of South Asia
during the third millennium BC which developed the socio-religious systems that
in the middle of the first millennium
with the Guptas and the first law-giver Manu created the Hindu worship
as a religion, and infact the first Hindu temples only appeared in the eleventh
century, great examples being the Hoysala temples of Karnataka. Cattle –keeping
was the earliest base for these protohistoric lactate cultures and these had a
profound effect on the development of Indian civilization and in turn affected the civilizations of
Egypt and West Asia upto the Mediterranean regions of Crete and Mycenae where
bull cults developed, and influenced the lactate Danubian proto-cultures, and
the development of earliest cultures in the basins and river valleys of central
Europe. The first animals we find in Indian rock-art are deer and wild cattle.
Later on around 4-3000 BCE we find domestic cattle in the rock paintings of
India and this was the early period of agriculture and the beginning of river
valley civilizationas. Agriculture with its food surpluses gave us the very
first civilization in the Indus valley and its manifestation in the visual
arts, of which the present tribal art of Hazaribagh in Jharkhand is a
continuing example, although we are confused about the exact authenticity of
dates for the similar wall murals of Catal-Huyuk to which European scholars
have ascribed dates several thousand years earlier ?
I will give the description which I gave in
my book Harvest Icons (1999) : “ The
villagers of Jharkhand do not celebrate the Diwali or ‘Festival of Lights’as it
is celebrated by the Hindus in the towns and cities of India. Here no rows and
rows of fired clay oil-lamps with factory-made oil and commercial wick are
used, and even candles lighting the housetops. Here instead the village folk
make their own very different lamps which are in fact “everlasters” in that
they are not cups containing oil but instead made with a kind of “wax
substitute” as I will describe, and these lamps with a twined cloth wick of the
simplest kind burn longer that oil lamps or candles, singly or in pairs over
doorways and arches through which the courtyard of a house is entered, or in
small , empty idol-less alcoves as tribute to the eternal who creates and keeps
the creation going – of which the cattle are the greatest manifestation in a
plough agriculture society. The night before the Hindu Diwali in the towns the
Sohrai lamps are lit and will burn every night for three days. The Sohrai diyas
or lights are made separately for each of the three nights. For this first
night on the eve of the Hindu Diwali clay mixed with cowdung and Ghee (
clarified butter-fat) is lit, the braided cloth wick burning steadily for
several hours until the oil-lamp itself is consumed. The second night (Diwali
in towns) clay mixed with rice flour and Ghee diya is made and lit. Finally on the third
night, the night of the Sohrai harvest festival in the village the third diya,
made with opnly rice flour and Ghee is lit. This is the light of the
Sohrai. The Sohrai is a day after the
Hindu Diwali. “
And wherever we find a Hindu festival we shall find its earlier village
counterpart celebration taking place the day after. For those who have
discovered this the two Indias come out in clear perspective. The word Sohrai
itself is a Mundaric word for the stick which is used to drive cattle as well
as close the gate of the cattle pen
(Soro). In the ancient Indian evidences of this festival we find in the
Ramayana of Valmiki the reference that the Diwali or festival of lights was
first celebrated when Lord Ram returned from his fourteen year forest exile to
his capital of Ayodhya with his wife Sita and his brother Laxman. On the day of
his return with his army of vanaras
or forest tribes the night was celebrated with a display of lights. The story
is the first mention in a text. But in the villages of India the festival of
lights has a different meaning as it is strictly associated with the harvest of
rice in November and the celebration of the cattle which have brought food to
the village, and so far as to the point of a “bull-fight” which is called Khuta
Bandhana the day after Sohrai, which means “tying to the stake” that is
symbolic of the domestication of cattle and not as simple as the British
ethnographers thought as being a replacement of the human sacrifice called Meriah. Here the bulls are tied to
stakes in a large field where groups of men go to them and “play” with them,
throwing clothes at them or exciting them wit the skin of a jackal. Three men
usually play mandar drums singing to
the bull about what a nice animal it is. This custom was the origin of the
Spanish bullfight when the gypsies carried these traditions to Europe. How
different is this from the Hindu Diwali!!
In the Hindu calendar the festival of Diwali
begins with a festival called Dhanteras
in which the Hindu financial year starts. This is five days before Diwali.The second day is
NarakaChaturdani) marking the slaying of the demon by Lord Krishna. The third
day (as in ancient Egyptian bull cults) is the moonless night of Amasya
Aqnd marks the worship of the goddess of
wealth Lakshmi who is often symbolized by the cow. The fourth day is marking
Vishnu’s banishment of Bali to the patala (underworld). All this is heavy Hindu
mythology which has little to do with existing village traditions. On the fifth
day sisters invite brothers to eat sweets in a display of affection and the
hindus say mountains of sweets are necessary to represent Mount Meru of the
Krishna legend.
However, we see that in the archaic
traditions of the village the word Diwali comes from the simple word for an oil
light called diya. In its
sanskritized form it begins to change its meaning in Deepawali which in
Sanskrit means “a row of lights”, which is substantially different in meaning
seen in context. Sanskritization
etymologically means the change of cultural traditions. Its mythology is
different and old significances are dressed up to fit a new form of worship. It
is thus a weapon of colonial conquest.
As we have seen the simple origins of this
festival in the villages of India, and here specifically referring to the
forest villages of which Jharkhand has perhaps the largest remaining share in
India, the festival is celebrated among the Scheduled Castes which are
described officially as “Semi-Hinduized Aborigines”. These people are exactly
the same as the tribals (Adivasi first settlers) who are indigenous peoples of
a similar lactate forest culture, and in this festival we find the ancient
root-culture being practiced in its proto-historic form. It is of interest that
on the moonless night called Amasya (the
third day of the Hindu Diwali) the Santal tribals of Jharkhand mark the day by
cleaning the cowsheds, washing the cattle, putting oil on the hooves and horns
of their cattle, and some vermilion is put on the oiled horns and foreheads of
the animals. This is called their Bandhana Porob which is similar to the
Bandhan or staking of cattle referred to practiced by their Scheduled Caste
neighbours such as the Kurmis. The
Kurmis also on the Sohrai day wash the cattle and anoint them with oil and vermilion,
and tie a sheaf of green rice on their foreheads between the horns. They also
put “spots” on the cattle which are produced by dipping the clay cups of Diwali
in red blue or other colors. It is of note that in the rockart of Hazaribagh
such circles on the body of a wheeled animal have been found (Isco rock-art,
Panel 3, 3500 BCE)Similar forms found in the village mural paintings in the
Hazaribagh villages lend credence to a continuing tradition, and such
continuity of a cattle cult have been brought to light between the rock-art of
Bhimbetka (a World Heritage site near Bhopal) and the villages of Smardha near
them. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that the village tradition of
lighting oil lamps in cattle sheds continues in rural Bengal and Bangladesh on
this festival. Another important fact is that firecrackers are never used
during Diwali or Sohrai in the villages nor have I noted any such tradition.
They would obviously also frighten the cattle. Firecrackers are obviously a
modern urban custom.
Among the Kurmis of Hazaribagh the cattle are
taken to the nearby forest for grazing on the morning of the Sohrai dayand
brought home before noon when they come into the houses over a special welcome
path called an aripan which is made
by dripping rice-flour gruel into a string of circles which resemble cattle
hooves at the head of which a bunch of a forest grass (Latlatiya) is placed in a clay cone. Such strings of circles are
commonly found in the rock paintings associated with cattle and it is an old tradition
of five thousand years or more. The mud houses of our forest villages have been
repaired after the rainy monsoon season and their walls are now readied for
painting with large murals covering almost all the wall spaces bothg inside and
outside, displaying the fantastic art of Sohrai done by the village women in a
continuing matriarchal tradition handed down from mother to daughter and called
Ma-Beti Parampara. Among the Kurmis,
Ganjus and Oraons of certain villages it is a painted art, among others it is a
comb cut sgraffito art. In the painted
Sohrai red, black and white earth colors are used mixed with water and painted
on the walls using a crushed stem called datwan.
In the comb cut version first a black surface is laid on with black manganese color
found in the fields near the jungle, then a white layer of kaolin or brilliant
white earth dug out from chalk deposits in the jungle, are laid over this. When
the white is cut with combs by the women the black underground appears in exquite forms. The painted Sohrai is either cattle forms
with the figure of the animal creator deity Pashupati (Lord of Animals)
standing on the back, or intersecting circles making a lotus (Kamalban) so common in the Indus valley
painted pottery, or the anthropomorphic Pipal (Ficus religiosa) and other zoomorphic forms, but no Hindu deity is ever found. The comb cut art is called Khovar
(for its association withy the decoration of bridal rooms)which is largely
decorative plant motifs in the valley villages and wild animal forms in the
hill villages, while the Ganju tribals in the forests paint the Sohrai with
wild animal forms and the Oraons paint huge floral forms on their mud houses.
The day after the cattle welcome on Sohrai
Puja is the day devoted especially to the Bulls. The bulls are staked in different places in a big field and groups of
men go and tease them by waving cloths or skins of jackals, and a few men
carrying drums approach them singing special songs in their praise. The Khuta
means the post to which the bull is tied, and Bandhan means “to tie”. This is
the remnant of a five thousand year old event when the first cattle were
domesticated! One is reminded that the bull cults of Europe, in Crete and
Mycenae, were since earliest times similar in their worship of cattle.
When all is said and done we are painfully
aware of how ancient traditions are destroyed by dominant cultures to propagate
a new faith and new way of life in the interests of a dominant culture. Here in
Jharkhand we have been witness to the destruction of the tribal way of life –
especially in the forest villages – to make way for huge opencast coal and iron
ore mining projects, big dams, railways and highways to export mine produce,
and the systematic dispossession and brutalization of tribes to give economic
benefits of which the tribals are not themselves the beneficiaries because the
wealth is appropriated by the state and its middle-men and the big
corporations. In Jharkhand we see the obliteration of cultures which are the
last flowering of an ancient world, and such places are increasingly rare in
our modern industrialized world. We are replacing these self-sufficient systems
with no sustainable options and which languish as the agricultural fields and
forests are mined and watch helplessly as the cattle and agricultural way of
life which Sohrai represents is cruelly and mercilessly destroyed forever and
then they will be homeless migrants who will have to go in search of sustenance
to the towns and big cities…
Bulu
Imam
Sanskriti, Dipugarha
Hazaribagh
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