Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  Tara means “star” in Sanskrit, and some scholars trace the origins of her cult to the Mesopotamian goddesses of the stars, Ishtar and Astarte: indeed the modern English word “star” and “Tara” are almost certainly linked through a common Indo-European root, via the Persian Sitara, the Greek Aster and the Latin Stella, all of which have the same meaning. It is even possible that the modern Catholic cult of Our Lady Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, may be part of the same tradition. Moving eastwards in the early centuries AD, the cult of Tara quickly became central to Mahayana Buddhist cosmology, where the great goddess was worshipped as the consort of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara and came to represent primordial female energy. As such, it was believed that she enabled her devotees to surmount all forms of peril and danger.

  In her Hindu form, which re-entered Bengal from the Himalayas via Buddhist Tibet, and hence is sometimes known as “Chini Tara”—Chinese Tara—the goddess has always been perceived as a more volatile figure than her Buddhist devotees understood her to be. According to the Mantra Mahodadhi of Mahidhara, the great medieval Sanskrit work on Tantra, Tara can be found “sitting on a white lotus situated at the centre of the water enveloping the entire universe.

  With her left hand she holds a knife and a skull and, in her right hands, a sword and a blue lotus. Her complexion is blue, and she is bedecked with ornaments … She is decorated with three beautiful serpents and has three eyes. Her tongue is always moving, and her teeth and mouth appear terrible. She is wearing a tiger skin around her waist, and her forehead is decorated with ornaments of white bone. She is seated on the heart of a corpse and her breasts are hard … [She is] the mistress of all three worlds.

  In this frightening aspect, she is not alone, but instead part of a sisterhood who encompass a range of visions of the divine feminine at its most terrible: a brood of dark-skinned and untameable Tantric divinities who are worshipped in Bengal, and who here take precedence in popular piety over the more familiar male gods: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. These goddesses, known as the Ten Mahavidyas, are attended by jackals, furies and ghosts. They cut off their own heads, and are offered blood sacrifices by their devotees. In the miniatures which illustrate the Tantric texts, they prefer to have sex with corpses than living men or gods, straddling them on a burning cremation pyre and bringing the dead to life through the power of their shakti. These goddesses, embodying all that would normally be considered outrageous or even repulsive, lie at the shifting threshold between the divine and demonic, violating approved social values and customs—“going up the down-current,” as a Bengali Tantric once put it to me.

  All this is a survival of some of the oldest forms of Tantric rites which date back to the early medieval period, when they were once widespread around India. The word “Tantra” is a reference to ancient texts that deal with yogic practices, magical rites, metaphysics and philosophy, and which straddle the world of Hindu Vaishnavites and Shavites, and cross over into not only Jainism and Mahayana Buddhism, but even Chinese Daoism and some forms of Sufi Islam.

  Though Tantrism became well defined only at the end of the first millennium AD, some of its constituent elements, such as its goddess cults, shamanism and sexual yoga, may date back to pre-Aryan and pre-Vedic religious currents, and in many ways are fundamentally opposed to the ideas and structures of the Vedas, which emphasise the social and religious hierarchies. Tantrics, in contrast, oppose society’s conventions and encourage the individual of whatever background to develop a mystical relationship with the deity within, placing kama, desire in every sense of the word, in the service of liberation. While Tantric texts can represent an elevated philosophical tradition, popular Tantric practice is often oral and spontaneous. It aims at ritually gaining access to the energy of the godhead that created and controls the universe, then concentrating and internalising that power in the body of the devotee. This turns the world and the body into channels of salvation, and a means of merging with the Absolute, but also grants tangible magical powers to the devotee, in this life, in the present.

  Shaivite Tantrics regard the universe as the product of the divine play of Shakti and Shiva, which are ultimately identical, separate aspects of the same unity, like fire and heat. To access this energy, early Hindu Tantric rituals seem to have encouraged blood sacrifice in cremation grounds as a means of feeding and winning over a series of terrifying and blood-thirsty Tantric deities. By the tenth century there was a change of emphasis towards a type of erotico-mystical practice involving congress with the Yoginis, powerful and predatory female Shakti divinities who demanded that they be worshipped and fed with offerings of sexual emissions, as well as with human and animal sacrifice.

  Once satisfied, the Yoginis were believed to reveal themselves as ravishing young women by incarnating in female devotees with whom male practitioners sexually interacted. Especially important was the oral ingestion of sexual fluids thought to give the devotee access to the goddess’s supernatural powers. In this way Tantric sex was used to awaken latent energies from the base of the body and bring them to the fore, so using the physical body with its blood and semen, desires and energies, as a way of accessing the spiritual, and the divine. The elaborate scenes of group and oral sex displayed on the walls of the temples at Khajuraho may well illustrate such rites. Yet while Tantra has come in the West to be associated almost exclusively with “Tantric sex,” the Tantric texts which survive from this period were always more concerned with death and transcendence than the sexualisation of ritual, which was only one part of a much larger whole.

  Moreover, the sexual aspect of medieval Indian Tantra is quite different both in aim and practice from the “Tantric sex” marketed in illustrated manuals published in the contemporary West. Early Tantric texts make no reference to pleasure, bliss or ecstasy: the sexual intercourse involved in the rites was not an end itself so much as a means of generating the semen whose consumption lay at the heart of these Tantric fertility rituals—a sort of inverted Tantric version of the offerings made in Vedic fire sacrifices. This original Devi-propitiating Tantric sex stands at an unimaginable distance away from the sort of faddish Tantra cults embraced by Western rock stars, with their celebration of aromatherapy and coitus reservatus, a movement well described by the French writer Michel Houllebecq as “a combination of bumping and grinding, fuzzy spirituality and extreme egotism.”

  These original esoteric medieval Tantric traditions nearly died out in India, sinking from view around the thirteenth century AD, probably partly as a result of the disruption that followed in the wake of the violence of the Islamic invasions, which broke many of the lines of guru-disciple relationships through which Tantric secrets were passed. Tantrics later became a particular target of European missionaries, who made “the obscene ceremonies of the Hindoos” central to their polemics. The nineteenth-century rise of the Hindu reform movements, many of which emanated from Bengal in reaction to British missionaries, nearly finished this process. For the reform movements championed what some scholars have called the “Rama-fication” of Hindu worship in the Ganges plains: the rise of the Vaishnavite bhakti cults of Lord Krishna and especially Lord Rama, to the extent that they eclipsed many other more traditional and popular forms of local devotion involving Devi cults and blood sacrifices, which were judged primitive, superstitious and anti-modern by the urban and often Western-educated reformers.

  All this conspired to make Tantra a marginal phenomenon almost everywhere except in certain areas of Bengal, Kerala and Assam, as well as in Nepal and Bhutan, where Tantra still flourishes as a mainstream form of religion, in the latter case within a Buddhist rather than Hindu context.

  At the root of popular modern Tantric practice lies a deeply subversive and heterodox concept: the idea of reaching God through opposing convention, ignoring social mores and breaking taboos. Whereas caste Hindus believe that purity and good living are safeguarded by avoiding meat and alcohol, by keeping away from unclean places like cremation grounds and avoiding polluting substa
nces such as bodily fluids, Tantrics believe that one path to salvation lies in pushing every boundary and inverting these strictures, so turning what is polluting into instruments of power.

  Tarapith, in other words, is a place where the ordinary world is comprehensively turned upside down. Today, the rites that take place in the burning ground involve forbidden substances and practices—alcohol, ganja and ritualised sex, sometimes with menstruating women—for Tara’s devotees believe that the goddess transmutes all that is forbidden and taboo, and turns these banned acts and forbidden objects into pathways of power. Onto this base of transgressive sacrality has grown a whole body of esoteric practice involving secret knowledge, rituals, mantras and mandalas.

  The dark and wooded cremation ground in Tarapith is the perfect backdrop to these practices and beliefs, and attracts scores of the hardest of hardcore Tantric sadhus—wanderers, sorcerers and skull feeders. Many of these have been partially unhinged by their experiences or extreme acts of asceticism, and are now looked upon as holy madmen, living in a mystical anarchy in a great open-air lunatic asylum for the divinely mad. These red-robed sadhus live here with their skulls and their spells, with the half-burned corpses, and the dogs and the jackals, the vultures and the carrion crows, occasionally throwing bones at passing visitors to warn them off.

  Here on the boundaries of life and on the cusp of reason, they pray and meditate, daily confronting their fear of death. Caught suddenly by the influence of the goddess, these crazed anchorites roll on the ground in ecstasy, screaming “Jaya Tara!” (“Victory to the goddess Tara!”). It is also here, within the bounds of the cremation ground, on nights with no moon—the most inauspicious time in the month according to orthodox Hindus—that they perform their Tantric rites.

  Yet, just as Manisha Ma had said, in many ways what is most striking about this place is not any sinister quality, so much as its oddly villagey and almost cosy feel. There is a palpable sense of community among the vulnerable outcastes, lunatics and misfits who have come to live there, and those who might be locked up, chained, sedated, hidden, mocked or shunned elsewhere are here venerated and respected as enlightened lunatics full of crazy wisdom. In turn, they look after one another and appear to tolerate one another’s eccentricities. It is a place where even the most damaged and marginal can find intimacy and community, and establish their own centre of gravity.

  Later that evening, when Manisha Ma took me to the temple, I got a small glimpse of how Tantra still plays its part in modern Indian politics. Inside the sacred enclosure, a line of pilgrims were queuing to have darshan of the image of the goddess, but although it was approaching the time for the evening aarti, the place was surprisingly empty for such a famous shrine. Separate from the main crowd, in an enclosure to the east, however, stood a group of burly men wearing homespun khadi, and one of these was clutching a goat.

  “I am a Bollywood fight director,” explained the man holding the goat, “and for many years I was a stunt fighter. Now I am standing for election. That is why I have brought this bakri all the way from Bihar, in my own car—to offer it to the goddess.”

  Milan Ghoshal leaned a little closer, in a confidential manner. “My seven colleagues have come to Ma Tara too,” he said, waving his hand at his entourage of tough-looking moustachioed men in short sleeves loitering some distance away. “You see,” he explained, “in our state, politics is only for the strong. There are many tough and violent men competing for power in the Bihar Assembly.”

  This, I knew, was certainly true. Bihar has long been renowned as the most lawless state in India: in recent elections, many of the candidates actually fought their campaign from behind bars, and a large number of Bihar’s Legislative Assembly MLAs have criminal records. Milan certainly looked the right man to fight an election in such a place: he had a thin beard and a shaven head, a firm jawline and a broken nose that, together with the deep scar above the left eyebrow, gave him a harsh and brutish expression. Yet for all the broad-shouldered, village wrestler physique, he wore the simple long white homespun kurta of the politician, and around his neck he had strung a rudraksh rosary.

  “In Bombay,” he said, “they call me Milan Thakur—Milan the Boss. I trained in martial arts in Bhutan, and now I am a master. No one can beat me in a fight; not in Bombay and not in Bihar.”

  “And all this is important in Bihar elections?”

  “Of course,” he said, putting the goat down. “Bihar is a rough place. I need Ma Tara to fight alongside me. If she accepts my offering, then maybe with her protection, I will win. Ma Tara can help get us power. If not, I have no hope. I am not a rich man, and I cannot spend the money that some of the other candidates will be throwing at the people.”

  I introduced Manisha Ma, who had just come up from the temple, where she had queued to have darshan. When Milan learned that Manisha lived in the cremation ground, he bent forward and made a gesture of touching her feet. “Tantra is much more powerful than conventional religion,” he explained. “Without the shakti of the Devi and her followers you cannot do anything.”

  “And you think this is the place to access that power?” I asked Milan.

  “There are very few places where shakti is still worshipped,” he replied. “That is why I drove for eight hours to come here, getting up before dawn. In my part of Bihar, when men seek shakti they know they must come to Tarapith. We chose today because tomorrow is an amavashya, a night with no moon. On this night and the next, we believe, the goddess is at large, and more open to our prayers.”

  Milan indicated a platform where a priest was chanting amid a yantra—a Tantric symbol made from flowers, coconuts, bamboo, vermilion and coloured sand—as part of the yagna ritual of sacrifice. A fire was burning in its centre, and flickering candles framed its corners. As the flames rose higher the priest threw in handfuls of rice from a thali, all the time reciting Sanskrit mantras, while two of Milan’s colleagues sat silently cross-legged on the far side. Milan sat for a while with Manisha and me, watching the priests chanting, and when the ritual was over, he got up. “Now it is time for the sacrifice,” he said, “my astha bhole.”

  The goat, which had been tethered a short distance away, was brought forward, and Milan picked it up and put its head in a two-pronged metal stand shaped like a giant tuning fork. One of the priests then painted a saffron stripe on its head and stepped back. Another man, barefoot in a dhoti, came forward with a long, sharp cleaver, just like the one held by Tara in the prints. With a single swipe he cut off the head, and the priest pulled the body away, where it lay writhing on the ground. There was a strong smell of warm blood, moist earth, decaying flowers and incense. Milan placed a bunch of smoking agarbatti incense sticks in the sacrifical pit, and dipping his fingers in the bloody sand, smeared his forehead.

  “All auspicious work starts in the name of Ma,” said Milan. “Tomorrow, on the night of no moon, I will announce my candidacy. With Ma’s aid I and my colleagues are ready to fight this battle. She is the most powerful protector you could want. I tell you: with her power, no one can stand against us.”

  The following day I returned to the cremation ground to talk to Manisha Ma. What interested me was how different her vision of Tara was to that of Milan, who clearly saw the goddess as a supernatural channel through which he could gain worldly power. Manisha, however, believed that Tara was a motherly figure who had saved her, looked after her when she was most vulnerable and who above all had brought her love. I wondered what this actually meant, and what kind of life Manisha had lived before moving into the burning ground.

  As Tapan Sadhu continued following the test match at the back of the hut (“India are ninety-four without loss!”), and as a roving chai wallah poured clay cups of tea to the growing circle of listening sadhus and sadhvis, Manisha settled back on a durree surrounded by her skulls, and began to tell me her story.

  “I was born in the town of Ariadaha in south-west Bengal,” she said. “My father worked for the Public Works Department. His j
ob was to announce how the water would be distributed. He had a drum and a megaphone, and used to tell people when the water supply would be cut off and when it would be turned back on again.

  “I had seven sisters and one brother. When I was born, before my father got his PWD job, we were very poor, and often ate only once a day. Some days my mother could only afford manioc, which she would cook with a little salt and give to us to eat. I was close to my sisters and also to my father, who loved me very much. But my brother was the one my mother loved. He was very spoilt: if the slightest thing went wrong for him she would stop eating and go on a fast, and if there was only food for one, then he would get it. One of my sisters died when I was three: we both had a fever and as my father could afford only one piece of fish, he gave it to me. The next day I got well, but my sister’s fever increased and she died. My mother still says your sister died because of your father. If he had given her the fish, she would have lived.

  “After my father got his job with the PWD, I went to school, but only until class five, when I was eleven. Even before then I was not a good student: the school made me feel confined and I was always running away. My parents scolded me, but it never suited my temperament. I still am not good at reading or writing. After I had passed out of class five, my father decided that we needed more money as he couldn’t feed us properly on his small government salary. So when I was thirteen, we moved to Calcutta, and both my mother and he went to work in one of the jute mills in Baguhati. We used to wait impatiently for them to return. My mother would bring flour, and when she got home we all made chapatis. Sometimes I earned a little too, cleaning the dishes and washing the clothes of our neighbours. But I didn’t mind. I was very excited to be in Calcutta, which was full of cars and buses and cinemas and all manner of things we rarely saw in Ariadaha. We were staying in a third-floor apartment, and my sisters and I would look out at the Howrah Bridge rising in the distance and all the great sights of the city.