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Religious rites are as ancient as the land. People have always
believed in omens and evil spirits, boons and hoodoos, superstitions
and supernatural powers. Some of these beliefs are still prevalent
today.
In the then prevailing
fashion among the minions of the Raj, R.E. Enthoven dedicated much of
his free time to the study of the customs and habits of the
indigenous population. Luckily for hi, AMT Jackson, another servant
of the crown had left behind copious material on Gujarat, then
contiguous with the Konkan. Enthoven put it together in two volumes,
in 1915, under the common title, Folklore Notes.
Enthoven dwells on beliefs,
hoodoos, superstitions, supernatural powers, boons, omens, and evil
spirits. There were religious rites for everything: for the success
of agricultural
operations and protection
of cattle, to scare away noxious animals and insects and ensure
sun-shine and favourable weather. Rites to be performed when boys and
girls attained puberty and women conceived and delivered. And there
were rites performed with great fanfare and rites performed in
silence and secrecy.
That might have been nearly
100 years ago. But even today, as this writer recently discovered
during an extensive tour of the Konkan, newly married girls have to
perform the worship of Mangala Gauri successively for the first five
years, on every Tuesday, in the month of Shravan, the month of the
Hindu calendar when fruit-bearing trees are grafted and ears of rice
begin to pop up, and tender cucumbers begin to peer through the
foliage. It is enjoined that women performing the worship of Mangala
Gauri must not speak while having their meals on that day. If they
prevaricate,, they could mar their happiness forever. One way of
saying that they might never again conceive.
The cucumber was the symbol
of fertility of some west coast tribes. The totem survives, now as a
symbol of the Catholic church. It is evident at Santana, a north Goa
village where the Portuguese erected the first, largest and the most
sumptuous church outside the Old Goa complex. Every August, women
wanting a child crowd the church and offer the Pieta a cucumber with
a prayer. The parish priest attests that it works. Barren women, he
says, come from all over Goa and even beyond- Bombay and Calcutta.
Hindu women bow down to the
Sun on the 11th, 12th , 30th and
40th day after their delivery. The Kunnbi women, the
aborigines, do it on the 7th day. They offer the Sun-god
some grains of rice. The offers of grain are an obvious
acknowledgement of gratitude and of the belief in the virtues of
fertility. The Kunnbis believe that their tribe was conceived by the
influence of he rays of the sun. The other Hindus, of the upper
castes in particular, do not seem to believe that the Sun could cause
humans to conceive.
The moon, on the other hand,
is believed to have the power to remove all diseases. The moon is the
king of herbs and all trees and plants thrive because of it. One can
“drink” the moon’s rays by placing figs, bananas,
sugarcane and other eatables in the moonlight and eating hem early in
the morning. Or better still by placing a cup of milk under the moon
for sometime and hen drinking it. The full moon night is a good night
for all manner of people: it is auspicious for the sanyasis, the
ascetics, who shave their heads on the day and also for those
married, because a child conceived on a full moon night will be
bright and beautiful, wise, and will go far in life.
The Konkan was not always
the desolate land it now is. Gopikas once bathed without a care in
the emerald waters of Konkan’s many lovely beaches and left
their clothes to dry o the sopanas, the majestic flight of steps
leading from the sea to the hill-tops. On top of the promontories
once could see forts built of quartz and laterite and they stood “as
stately seem but lovelier far/ Than in the panoply of war”.
Rennel, an 18th
century tralveller, wrote, “few countries with so straight a
general outline are so much broken into bays and harbours.” And
thus came to this land many adventures and mariners and not all of
them were men of scruples. Small wonder then, that in this area,
religion and nationalism are almost synonymous. One could not thrive
without the other. Hence, perhaps, the fetish of fertility: the land
had to be fertile to provide mankind sustenance and the women even
more so, in order to guarantee the continuance of the “race”.
And they devised a thousand rituals to fully ensure the fertility of
their women and lands.
On the 12th
day after her delivery the mother puts on new bangles and new
clothes; coconuts, betelnuts and leaves, grains of rice, bananas and
grains of wheat are place don her lap. She then comes out and bows to
the Sun.
It is said that upon
their arrival in the Konkan, land specially created for them by
Parasuram, the hammer-wielding God, the chosen 96 Gowd Saraswats
realized that their priority task had to be to colonize the land.
The land abounded in peepul trees (ficus religiosa), and they soon
realized that the seeds of the tree had miraculous properties. Baren
woman would conceive if fed dried peepul seeds after the mandatory
rituals and incantations. “No harm trying”, as a Bombay
resident on a pilgrimage to Sawantwadi, told this writer.
In Sattary, Goa’s
most primitive sub-division – and perhaps for that same reason
the least spoilt – the Dhagar, a very handsome pastoral tribe,
schedule their weddings and betrothals, during the south-west
monsoon. That is the time when they return from their nomadic sojourn
of the plains to their primal corals. Nature is at its best, the soil
loamy, soft and yielding. Nature, they say, cannot be wrong. If the
season is right for plants and weeds, it ought to be right for men
and women too. Betrothals are arranged and the nubile girls are
sternly viewed and inspected by the elder women of the clan. They
must be free from physical blemish if they are to perpetuate a
“race”- that is how they see themselves- that has been on
this earth ever since God made the sun, the moon, the sea and the
hills and the rivers. And the Dhagras- God’s own supreme
usufructuaries.
Sterility among the
Dhagars is a strong ground for divorce or for a man to take another
wife. But being generous and sporting, they do not repudiate a wife
on a whim. The sixty bhuts, the spirits of the tribe, are invited to
speak through oracles and prescribe the right remedy. And the bhuts
often direct that the woman pray to the moon, the mountain and river
and beg of them the boon of a child.
Thunder in these areas is
the military of the king of the clouds and lighting his banner. The
clouds are messengers of the gods and earthquakes occur when the
thousand-headed Shesha shakes its head. There are other widely
different, but equally ingenuous interpretations of calamities and
natural phenomena. They are perhaps, weird and in every respect
unscientific. But for large majority of these people, that is how it
is. They begin their day, before setting foot to the ground, with a
prayer that is gloriously sensuous: “ O Goddess who art clothed
by the sea, and whose breasts are the mountains and who art the wife
of Vishnu, I bow down to thee.
Please forgive the touch
of my feet.
O Goddess Earth who art
born by the power of Vishnu, whose surface is of the colour of a
conch-shell and who are the store-house of in-numerable jewels, I bow
down to thee.
And no better way for
them to begin the day than seeing first thing in the morning, within
one hundred paces: boiled food, the blue jay flying by the left side,
the moon in front, a married couple, a cow with its calf, one’s
own mother, beautiful girl and if nothing else, a woman of pleasure.
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