The Kanwar is India's largest annual religious pilgrimage. Millions of participants gather sacred water from the Ganga and carry it across hundreds of miles to dispense as offerings in Śiva shrines. These devotees—called bhola, gullible or fools, and seen as miscreants by many Indians—are mostly young, destitute men, who have been left behind in the globalizing economy. But for these young men, the ordeal of the pilgrimage is no foolish pursuit, but a means to master their anxieties and attest their good faith in unfavorable social conditions.
Vikash Singh walked with the pilgrims of the Kanwar procession, and with this book, he highlights how the procession offers a social space where participants can prove their talents, resolve, and moral worth. Working across social theory, phenomenology, Indian metaphysics, and psychoanalysis, Singh shows that the pilgrimage provides a place in which participants can simultaneously recreate and prepare for the poor, informal economy and inevitable social uncertainties. In identifying with Śiva, who is both Master of the World and yet a pathetic drunkard, participants demonstrate their own sovereignty and desirability despite their stigmatized status. Uprising of the Fools shows how religion today is not a retreat into tradition, but an alternative forum for recognition and resistance within a rampant global neoliberalism.
The Kanwar is India's largest annual religious pilgrimage. Millions of participants gather sacred water from the Ganga and carry it across hundreds of miles to dispense as offerings in Śiva shrines. These devotees—called bhola, gullible or fools, and seen as miscreants by many Indians—are mostly young, destitute men, who have been left behind in the globalizing economy. But for these young men, the ordeal of the pilgrimage is no foolish pursuit, but a means to master their anxieties and attest their good faith in unfavorable social conditions.
Vikash Singh walked with the pilgrims of the Kanwar procession, and with this book, he highlights how the procession offers a social space where participants can prove their talents, resolve, and moral worth. Working across social theory, phenomenology, Indian metaphysics, and psychoanalysis, Singh shows that the pilgrimage provides a place in which participants can simultaneously recreate and prepare for the poor, informal economy and inevitable social uncertainties. In identifying with Śiva, who is both Master of the World and yet a pathetic drunkard, participants demonstrate their own sovereignty and desirability despite their stigmatized status. Uprising of the Fools shows how religion today is not a retreat into tradition, but an alternative forum for recognition and resistance within a rampant global neoliberalism.
Uprising of the Fools: Pilgrimage as Moral Protest in Contemporary India
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Uprising of the Fools: Pilgrimage as Moral Protest in Contemporary India
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Overview
The Kanwar is India's largest annual religious pilgrimage. Millions of participants gather sacred water from the Ganga and carry it across hundreds of miles to dispense as offerings in Śiva shrines. These devotees—called bhola, gullible or fools, and seen as miscreants by many Indians—are mostly young, destitute men, who have been left behind in the globalizing economy. But for these young men, the ordeal of the pilgrimage is no foolish pursuit, but a means to master their anxieties and attest their good faith in unfavorable social conditions.
Vikash Singh walked with the pilgrims of the Kanwar procession, and with this book, he highlights how the procession offers a social space where participants can prove their talents, resolve, and moral worth. Working across social theory, phenomenology, Indian metaphysics, and psychoanalysis, Singh shows that the pilgrimage provides a place in which participants can simultaneously recreate and prepare for the poor, informal economy and inevitable social uncertainties. In identifying with Śiva, who is both Master of the World and yet a pathetic drunkard, participants demonstrate their own sovereignty and desirability despite their stigmatized status. Uprising of the Fools shows how religion today is not a retreat into tradition, but an alternative forum for recognition and resistance within a rampant global neoliberalism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781503601741 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/21/2017 |
| Series: | South Asia in Motion |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Uprising of the Fools
Pilgrimage as Moral Protest in Contemporary India
By Vikash Singh
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the LelandAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0174-1
CHAPTER 1
MASTERING UNCERTAINTY
Performance and Recognition in Religion
IT WAS SURPRISING how fast the glorious mountains with their great magnitude had receded in the horizon. The festive town of Hardwar, with its baffling mix of the evocative aura of a divine space at once ancient and timeless with a noisy, caveat emptor commercial culture, also retreated from the mind as we matched paces on the unpaved street several miles outside the town. We were part of a dense procession of participants in various shades of ochre carrying kanwa?s, with branches of the procession extending hundreds of miles in every direction, and our thoughts frequently centered on the goal and the journey ahead. K, several years younger than I, yet a veteran who had made the journey many times, advised me on the choice of footwear, luggage, and clothing. "The journey would be formidable, and the most trivial-looking choices were critical," he had warned. I must acknowledge that I was perhaps in denial of the physical challenges — since, of course, millions were accomplishing it, and I also felt confident because of my regular jogging. Nonetheless, a premonition from losing marked contests in the past committed me to explicit determination. We walked with resolve, outpacing the flow of the procession and advancing toward a group of three ahead, among the fastest and most boisterous on the trail, who were continuously yelling slogans that were answered by the chorus of fellow travelers. "We must join them," K had said; "this will keep our spirits high and make the journey much easier."
In view of my research considerations, and to provide for contingencies (I was still convalescing after a prolonged fever), we had embarked on the expected four-day journey a day in advance, targeting the libations on the fourteenth of the month of Srava?a, that is, on Sivaratri, the day of the new moon (Amavasya). Our destination was Pura Mahadeva, about ninety-five miles away, a renowned Siva temple on the banks of the Hindon River in Meerut. It was critical that we complete the journey and arrive at the shrine in time for the libations, while ensuring that the sacred kanwa? was not breached in any way. The ordeal would lose all merit if the kanwa? was breached — for example, if the containers were desecrated, fell to the ground, the water spilled, or if we failed to make it to the destination in time. Moreover, to ensure the integrity of the practice, we had to abide by a variety of stipulations regarding how the kanwa? was held, carried, rested, and worshipped.
For a veteran such as K, completing the journey was not much of a cause for concern as to accomplish it with élan. At times I thought it was almost an occasion for swagger, a sport to demonstrate his will and character in a more or less competitive sociality. At other times though K would become more solemn and reflective, haunted by his family's woes. This was not unusual. Although many would be making the journey bound by explicit vows, grateful for wishes that had been fulfilled or that they sought, the action devoted to Siva was also simultaneously a sport, a recreational activity, and an engaged enactment of serious commitments, obligations, and overwhelming anguish. Lacking any formal education, K lived an almost nomadic life — a truck helper at times, living with family or relatives at other times, or occupied with odd errands in Delhi — with scarcely a source of income. In the sociality of the Kanwar, however, as normal conventions are disrupted and where the high of the sulfa and the arch renouncer Siva (who, although the fierce Master of the world, lives in the wild in great destitution) were valorized, K held sway. K would mentor and assist me selflessly during the journey, going through it with exemplary certitude and affability.
If the pilgrimage was a chosen and familiar arena for K, for me it was novel. I was anxious about its protocols; what began as "objective" research soon took the form of a critical, in some sense inaugural, religious performance as it materialized through many conversations, rituals, and the expectations of my relatives. This added to my resolve as I matched paces with K, and we soon caught up with the group.
Ramlal was voicing the slogans, demonstrating an extraordinary aptitude for shooting out inventive, full-throated exhortations without interruption. For the most part, he sincerely hailed Siva as Bhola (Simpleton or Fool); His wife, Parvati; Ga?esa, their child; the Ganga; or Hardwar. At other times, he would be more inventive and mischievously play on the sexual innuendos of the conjugal relations between Parvati and Siva. We replied to his calls and marched ahead at a brisk pace on the banks of the Upper Ganga Canal. Carrying the kanwa?, we spoke of nothing else, maintaining an attitude of devotion and immersion in the sacred. Only during a break after several miles of walking, a couple of hours later, as we had some juice and everyone (but I) smoked sulfa would we briefly acquaint ourselves with secular concerns. The others seemed to know each other well; one was teased for already needing a muscle pain-relieving spray on his knees and ankles, even as Ramlal received accolades for his stamina and ingenuity despite his illness. He was suffering from stomachaches and loose bowels because of suspected food poisoning in Hardwar. Probably in their mid-twenties, all three were casually employed as construction laborers. Ramlal, who had been making the pilgrimage for seven or eight years, told us that he had almost forgone this year's pilgrimage for lack of money. He had asked his companions to forget about him and go on their own, but his wife would not suffer his gloom. "I was sitting at home dejected," he said, "as everyone was leaving. But suddenly my wife brought a loan of two thousand rupees [about forty dollars] and asked me to get ready immediately, because my companions were waiting outside."
This was a story I had heard very often. Every other participant had a tale to tell of leaving for the journey at the last minute after having lost all hope, against all intent and plans. It was usually because of the lack of finances or pragmatic consideration of the costs it would involve. Yet a last-minute swell would send one on the journey, an impulse that would break out of normative concerns — financial restraints, calm reasoning, the many expenditures of the adventure. Suddenly, in the manner of the immediacy of a call, desire proved irresistible, although of course in correspondence with the desires of so many others, as one saw a multitude, and many in one's circle, embark on the journey. The outcome is usually interpreted as a sign of the deity's will — unless the deity invites, the journey cannot materialize, by any means; but if He calls, it will take place despite any number of obstacles.
This refrain, echoed by almost every participant, even by those who have never been able to make the journey, succinctly expresses the peculiar dialogical character of the Kanwar. More than the obvious financial constraints, this demonstrates tensions of desire and responsibility, of faith and guilt, of religion and recreation, and of a shared temporality of uncertainty that bonds the actor with loved ones — here, the wife. This expression of a last-minute decision, a fortuitous event read as a sign of divine will, enacts and demonstrates many of the paradoxes of the participants' religious act and their social conditions.
OF PERFORMANCES AND INTERPRETATIONS
The Kanwar pilgrimage from Hardwar is today India's largest annual religious event, with an estimated twelve million participants in 2010 and 2011. At its most basic, Kanwar refers to a genre of religious performances where participants ritually carry water from a holy source in containers suspended on either side of a pole. The pilgrimage derives its name from the device, called kanwa?, and the water is usually carried to distant temples for libations at a sivalinga. The source of the water is often the Ganga or rivers considered its local equivalents, and the offering is dedicated to Siva, addressed as Bhola or Bhole Baba (Naïve Grandfather or Father). The pilgrim, accordingly, is a bhola and in the vocative, bhole! Although there is little mention of the Kanwar as an organized festival in canonical texts, the phenomenon surely existed as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Jesuits and English travelers report seeing Kanwar pilgrims at many points during their journeys in the North Indian plains.
This book focuses on a specific Kanwar phenomenon, in which Ganga water is collected from Hardwar, the renowned religious city at the site of the river's emergence into the great plains of North India. In a few cases the water is obtained at the glacial origins of the river at Gaumukh or Gangotri. Although participants carry the sacred water to locations across northwestern India, a renowned Siva temple at Pura Mahadeva in the Meerut district of Uttar Pradesh has been a key site historically. Colonial records from the late nineteenth century report two annual religious fairs at Pura, each involving several thousand participants. One of these was in February, on the occasion of Sivaratri, and the other in July/August during the lunar month of Srava?a. The numbers remained in the thousands until about three decades ago. There is not much mention of the Kanwar in official records until the 1970s, beyond colonial accounts of the festival; according to my informants, only a select few undertook the pilgrimage following specific vows. Sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, however, the Hardwar pilgrimage in Srava?a started to expand. During his 1990 fieldwork in Hardwar, James Lochtefeld reports estimates of a quarter million pilgrims, a number that had tripled by his second visit in 1996. In 2002, the number of pilgrims was estimated at four million, growing to six million in 2004, seven million in 2009, and above twelve million in 2010 and 2011.
Young adult or adolescent males of mostly poor or lower-middle-class background, from both rural and urban parts of the contiguous states of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Punjab, make up the majority of the participants, who often walk upward of a hundred miles — in some cases, several hundred miles — following extensive rituals. Most make the journey either in flip-flops or barefoot, and many aggravate their travail by various types of ritual rigors. For example, one version called the Kha?i (Standing) Kanwar is defined by the commitment that the kanwa? will remain shoulder-borne throughout the journey. In another, the Dan?avata (Prostrate) Kanwar, participants advance by repeatedly stretching themselves on the ground, for a predetermined part of the journey. Some find the journey easier than others, but most people either take recourse to pain-reducing medicines or are high on cannabis. In addition to the pilgrims on foot, the phenomenon includes tableaux that illustrate mythic episodes in various art forms, such as sculpture, paintings, and live performances. Regular kanwa?s are also often decorated with red polyester or georgette strips; garlands, pictures of deities, streamers, or tridents; and replicas of snakes, parrots, and so on.
In The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger called attention to the novelty, the modern and recent roots, of many a social phenomenon presented in the halo of "tradition" and invoked as an essential, timeless legacy of antiquity, a sacred sign of enduring national and ethnic integrity. The old and timeless, these scholars showed, was often but a projection motivated by social and political imperatives in the present. Although the sacred characterization of the Ganga and pilgrimages to it are at least as old as the Mahabharata, and the custom of carrying its water over long distances is also possibly quite old, to appreciate the character, novelty, and meanings of the contemporary Kanwar, one must see it as a radical break from "invariance" and the past, as Hobsbawm and Ranger argued. While the custom may be old and the track beaten, the social conditions and consequences of the Kanwar pilgrimages that have proliferated across northern and central India since the late 1980s and today involving tens of millions of participants are thoroughly contemporary, reenacted anew in the present. In its ritual, demographic, interactional, and contextual affects, the Kanwar may be read as a dramatized presentation, a performance that intricately narrates the pulse of social conditions in contemporary India. The past here is no demiurge but only another character or figure in a drama conjured in the immediacy of the present, the hic et nunc.
Few in the social sciences today would dispute this apparent shift of emphasis from "tradition" to "social construction." In understanding contemporary "religion" and its putative "worldwide resurgence," scholars have time and again brought attention to the political, social, and economic changes of the twentieth century as the "modern" form of social relations became ever more pervasive and increasingly penetrated every recess of social existence throughout the world. According to a wide consensus, as noted in the Introduction, the movement toward cultural and religious solidarity springs from reaction against social change and moral confusion, or anomie. These prove to be ripe conditions for the politicization of religion and, consequently, for intergroup violence. "Ethnic violence in the era of globalization," "dead certainty"; thus Arjun Appadurai provocatively sums up the conclusions of a wide body of sociological, anthropological, and social psychological research that sees religious and ethnic conflict to be a consequence of contemporary uncertainties as long-held beliefs, worldviews, and practices are faced with the prodigious circulations of this epoch. Speaking of religion, this perspective arrives at a fundamentalist, fanatic side of religious communities resisting change, communities gathering against the flow of Time, often violently, but in the end, of course, in vain. There is some truth to this narrative that at once weaves the progressive, emancipatory epistemology of the World Spirit with a structuralist conception of identity and difference and the classical sociological figure of the "collective consciousness." No less significant in contemporary religion, however, is what this account, which must be regarded as a serious case of ecological fallacy, subdues, obfuscates, turns secondary and insignificant.
Focused on the collective, the abstract, the historical and conceived from a distance at global levels, this perspective glosses over the actual, lived, finite existence of ordinary social actors. This is clearly not merely a sociological problem but one inherited from philosophy and epistemology in general. It is surely an ethical issue; more important, however, it pushes under the carpet — and thereby socially annuls — an entire world of lived existence, obligations, and issues and an epistemology that could relate them.
While interreligious conflicts and the identification of the Hindu and the nation may be important to the participants' identity consciousness, they are by no means the immediate forces compelling their journeys. Beyond any discomfort with a changing world and its values or the erosion of the naïve security of custom, these were participants (often young) preparing for a life of material and social uncertainty, performatively mastering and enacting their anxieties and obligations at delicate points, crossroads, of their lives. The religious setting was but an arena to perform to the unique challenges of an economically destitute yet extremely hierarchical society, as well as to address their desires and immediate social responsibilities. This should be blatantly obvious to the most casual observer of the phenomenological environment of these religious practices, the participants' utterances and life circumstances, the composition of the rituals, each character in the scripts (or scriptures) that the displacement of these realities by terms such as "nationalism," "fundamentalism," and "identity" — for all their truths — appears as an elaborate ruse. As it so often happens, the self-evident truth is the least noticed. It is social science trapped within a web of significations of its own making; or perhaps "it too is profoundly enmeshed in social structures" and in the circulation of truths as part of a "discursive regime," determined as much by "relations of meaning" as by relations of war. And has there been a greater reason for war — the real war of bombs and drones and murderous threats of making the sand "glow in the night," for example — in the last few decades than the war of reason against the fanaticism of religion? But is not the search for deeper meanings, latent functions that are the true motivations behind the smokescreen, the feints of manifest content, the very raison d'être of the social sciences? Maybe so. Such functionalism, however, strays far from the principles and concerns of Freudian psychoanalysis on which it may be modeled. For the last thing one may accuse the "talking cure" of is ignoring the so many ways in which the subject speaks.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: Illegitimate Religion chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the pilgrimage and the dominant scholarly perception of most contemporary religious actors as people unable to face the freedom and choices offered by modernity. Instead, the chapter argues that these young religious subjects are trying to master through practice and performance the norms, scarcity, and unpredictable outcomes of precarious, informal economic conditions at a critical point of transition into adulthood. It argues that representations of religion are often premised on an epistemology of domination that treats human beings as things, and in a teleological frame that knows no death. This chapter instead presents an orientation drawing on the finitude of being-in-the-world, and a psychoanalytically informed perception of human subjectivity and ethics, which operates as the analytical undercurrent of the book.
1Mastering Uncertainty: Performance and Recognition in Religion chapter abstractThis is an ethnography of desperate household finances, participants' fears about the safety and health of their loved ones, affirmations of their moral sincerity and resolve, their desire to prove themselves, as well as tales of everyday humiliation and despondency. Weaving the empirical data with Weber's insights on the intersections between religion and economy, phenomenological theory, performance studies, and Indian metaphysical texts, it demonstrates how religious practice is a means of performing and preparing for an informal economy. The narrative places participants' performances, art works, ritual expressions, and the excessive labor of the journey in the context of their ordinary works (or lack thereof). Unlike exclusive formal institutions, which are increasingly governed by neoliberal rationalities, the religious event provides an open, freely accessible yet challenging stage for participants to practice and prove their resolve, gifts, and sincerity.
2"Everything is a Gift, Bhole": Custom and the Ethics of Care chapter abstractScholars have often pictured religious participation as a kind of market exchange. But in the Kanwar, participants' express fears and anxieties regarding obligations for the life, health, well-being, and expectations of loved ones, expressly denying their interest in material gain. Analyzing such wishes, and the speech acts of the religious vow in the context of highly precarious living conditions and widespread suffering, this chapter looks at the role that ego deferral plays. Participants feel justified to ask for a divine gift only insofar as it can be seen as an obligation or gift to someone else. Engaging these concerns in reference to a customary ethic of care, and through conversations with Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Vedic texts, the chapter interrogates the dominant utilitarian notion of the "individual" to demonstrate a subjectivity that is from the outset relational and morally embedded.
3Ominous Signs: Of Dread, Desires, and Determination chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the repetitive, obsessive, and mortifying character of the religious practices, showing how they manifest the dread of everyday life. I argue that there is a lack of representation of some of the most overwhelming experiences, fears, and desires of social and psychic life in dominant discourses of the nation, economy, celebrities, or individual merit. These forms of understanding suppress the concrete realities of life in the social margins, which instead are deferred, displaced to, and play out in religious practice. This analysis of participants' narratives focuses on personal historicity, and the profound lived time of the subject, as opposed to historical time with its focus on abstract collectivities, demonstrating the importance of an analytical approach which is alert to the continuities of religious, moral, and economic practices.
4Damning Corpses: Violence, Religious or Secular? chapter abstractThe chapter continues with ethnographic description of the author's journey, and corpses floating in the Ganga Canal while police officers turn a blind eye. Evoking the ubiquity of violence and apathy interspersed with moments from the exceptionally violent history of the region, it documents the tense moments where this "Hindu" procession passed through Muslim neighborhoods. Analyzing such episodes in relation to recent Hindu-Muslim conflicts, along with imaginaries of religious violence from India's medieval history, it shows that conflict over religion is usually provoked by interests of power and politics. Differences in faith take the form of actual violence only when stoked by statist actors seeking power. In a state where a politics of religion and identity has been systematically engineered through extensive organization, and where every political party tries to outwit the others in the diligent capitalization of differences, "religious conflicts" are inevitably the product of secular politics.
5Caste and the Informal Economy: Subversive Aesthetics of Popular Religion chapter abstractWhile the Kanwar obviously has a wide following, it is also frowned upon, and indeed reviled by a large sections of society. To mainstream ideals, these indiscriminate, carnivalesque performances, the low- brow culture of the Kanwar, present a poor, botched, illegitimate version of religion which lacks the composure of adult religiosity. In the context of a nationalist project, it comes across as offensive and uncanny, provoking disgust. While such aversion is partly an effect of postcolonial anxieties, national self-consciousness is itself driven by the uncertainties of a highly unequal and poor society. This aesthetic chasm is aggravated by India's caste heritage—a differentiation between the subtle and the gross, the pure and the abject, which is simultaneously aesthetic and metaphysical. The Kanwar thus enacts a conflict over habitus where sedimented hierarchies are overturned, and the stigmatized occupy the highways for several days, publicly performing its religious and sublime character.
6Wishful Nightmares: Triumphant Neoliberalism and the Resistances of Religion chapter abstractDespite the complex social conflicts apparent here, religious practices such as the Kanwar are rarely treated in sociological scholarship as forms of "resistance." They are usually seen as substitutions for other, explicit social and political causes and interests. Anchored in an exegesis of rituals and enunciations in the Kanwar, this chapter advances an alternate understanding of resistance. I conceptualize resistance in hermeneutic terms, focusing on the temporality of being-in-the-world instead of an abstract teleological universal Good. Bringing the lessons of psychoanalytic practice with critical ethnography, this chapter argues that such re-articulation is indispensable for a radical epistemology that can make sense of new, global infrastructures of power and violence.
7War, Nation, and the Human as a Thing chapter abstractThis chapter argues that an idiom of war dominates modern political consciousness. This leads into the characterization of religious subjects as calling for war, which in turn makes them legitimate targets of political warfare. There are fundamental misrecognitions—say in the vicissitudes of market fundamentalism, state terrorism, Cartesian Individualism— involved in such construction of the other as uncompromising bigots. Epistemologically, this is because of the apathetic treatment of the individual as just another entity, a thing, a commodity; a system of thought based on the cognitive, at the cost of material conditions. This chapter analyzes the discourse of Hindu nationalism and revisits the performative and moral significations of religion in reference to the realities of global neo-liberalism. Religion, its cries, ethic and order, are being called on here for existential meaning and predictability, the possibility of trust, community, and hope in circumstances otherwise bolstering a state of paranoia.