The Tarapith Pilgrimage by William Dalrymple
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“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 leant a little closer, in a confidential manner: “My seven colleagues have come to Ma Tara too,” he said, pointing to a small group of burly-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 powerful 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, several of the candidates actually fought their campaign from behind bars in jail and at least thirty-three of Bihar's Legislative Assembly M.P's have criminal records. Dular Chand Yadav who has 100 cases of dacoity and 50 murder cases pending against him, can also be addressed as the Hon. Member for Barh.
Milan looked just 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 somewhat 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 simple rudraksh rosary.
Milan the Boss
“In Bombay,” he said, “they called Milan Thakkur- 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. ”
We were standing in the inner enclosure of the temple at Tarapith near Birbhum in West Bengal, some two hundred kilometres from the border with Bihar. The temple lies amid a flat, green and bucolic countryside: fertile flood planes where abundant soils and huge skies stretch out endlessly towards the Bay of Bengal- a great green Eden of water and vegetation.
The Great Temple
The road from Shantiniketan was raised on an embankment and passed through a vast patchwork of variegated wetlands: muddy fields of half-harvested rice gave way to others where the young green seedlings had just been transplanted into shimmering squares of flooded paddy. Through all this ran a network of streams and rivers and frog-croaking, fish-filled, lilly-littered lakes. These were surrounded by busy fishermen with bamboo fishing cages and lines of village women with earthen pitchers. Rising from the ripples of this waterland were raised mounds encircled with windbreaks of palms. On these stood small wattle villages, or sometimes the brick estate house of the local zamindar.
From a distance, Tarapith looked like just any other Bengali village, with its palm weave huts, and still, cool fishpond. But here one building dominated all the others: the great temple, which rose above the surrounding village like a great cathedral in mediaeval Europe. Its base was a thick-walled red brick chamber, broken by an arcade of arches and rising to a great white pinnacle, like snow capping of a Himalayan peak.
Inside, below the low-curving Bengali eves, stood the silver image of the Goddess, half submerged beneath marigold garlands crowned and shaded by a silver umbrella. On her forehead was a red patch of kumkum. Onto this the brahmins placed their fingers, then transferred the red stain onto the foreheads of the devotees. In gratitude the pilgrims then kissed her silver feet, and left her offerings of coconuts, white silk Benares saris, incense sticks, bananas, and, more unexpectedly, bottles of whisky.
The Tarapith Pilgrimage
Tarapith is regarded as one of the most powerful holy places in India, the abode of the Devi’s Third Eye, and the place where many of the greatest saints of Eastern India attained perfection - including, it is said locally, Gautama Buddha. As a result, it is believed you can get whatever you want from the powerful Goddess here- if you approach her with the right mantras, and the appropriate offerings.
Yet despite the benign nature of the surrounding countryside and the reputed power of its presiding deity, compared to the other great pilgrimage sites of the region, Tarapith is little visited. A thin line of pilgrims were queuing to do darshan to the image of the goddess, but although it was approaching the time for the evening arti, the place was surprisingly empty for such a famous shrine.
The reason for this, I had been told in Calcutta, was that Tarapith had a sinister reputation, notorious for the unsavoury “left-handed” Tantric rituals which are daily performed in the temple.
The Goddess
Stranger things still were rumoured to take place in the nearby cremation ground after sunset. Here the Goddess was said to live, and at midnight - so the Bengalis believe- Tara could be glimpsed here in the shadows drinking the blood of the goats slaughtered day after day in an effort to propitiate her anger. For in this largely vegetarian country, the worship of the Goddess at Tarapith involves a great deal of blood sacrifice, of a sort rarely seen elsewhere in modern India: at least twenty goats a day are despatched here to satisfy the Goddess’s hunger.
In the tenth century hymn of a hundred names from the Mundamala-tantra, Tara is called She Who likes Blood, She Who Is Smeared with Blood, and She Who Enjoys Blood Sacrifice. And while Tara has a healthy appetite for animal blood, the Mundamala-tantra explicitly states that she prefers that of humans, in particular that taken from the forehead, hands and breasts of her devotees. Yet none of this seemed in any way to deter Milan Ghoshal.
“Tantra is more powerful than conventional Hinduism,” he explained matter of factly as he tied up his goat, and sat down on a low wall nearby. “Without the shakti [spiritual power] of the Devi you cannot do anything.”
“And you think this is the place to access that power?”
“There are very few places where Shakti is worshipped,” he replied. “That is why I drove for eight hours—300km-- 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 it is an ama vashya, a night with no moon. On this night we believe the Goddess is at large, and more open to our prayers. ”
Milan indicated a platform where a priest was constructing a yagna- a Tantric symbol- from flowers, coconuts, bamboo, vermillion and coloured sand- all part of the ritual of sacrifice. As we watched, Milan talked of his campaign and his plans to win the election with the aid of the Goddess’s power:
“I am a fighter,” he said, “and so is she. Sometimes in my films the fights are so terrible that people die. Elections in Bihar can be a little like this. But with Ma Tara’s protection I don’t think we need fear. She can work great miracles. This is the surest way to vanquish our enemies. ”
The Lady Twilight
Tara, the Lady Twilight, the Cheater of Death, is renowned as one of the most wayward of Hindu Goddesses: according to the Mantra-mahodadhih, the Goddess can be found “sitting on a white lotus situated at the centre of the water enveloping the entire universe.
With her left hands 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 her frightening aspect, she in not alone, but instead part of a sisterhood: there are a whole brood of dark-skinned untameable Tantric divinities who are worshipped in Bengal, and who here take precedence in popular piety over the more familiar trinity of 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, are offered blood sacrifices by their devotees, and prefer to have sex with corpses, straddling them on a burning cremation pyre. Such Goddesses- embodying all that would normally be considered outrageous or even repulsive- lie at the shifting threshold between the divine and demonic, and are anti-models, violating approved social values and customs- “going up the down-current,” as one Bengali Tantric once put it to me.
The Root of Tantra
At the root of Tantra lies a deeply heterodox concept: the idea of reaching God through opposing convention. Whereas caste Hindus believe that purity and good living are safeguarded by avoiding meat and alcoholic drink, by keeping away from unclean places like cremation grounds and avoiding polluting substances such as bodily fluids, Tantrics believe that one path to salvation lies in inverting these strictures.
The rites that take place in the Tarapith cremation ground involve forbidden substances and practices- alcohol, bhang 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 instruments of power.
The dark and wooded cremation ground in Tarapith is the perfect backdrop to such beliefs, and attracts scores of the hardest of hard core Tantric sadhus- wanderers, sorcerers, witches and skull-feeders. Many of these have been unhinged by 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 saffron-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 they pray and meditate, or caught suddenly by the influence of the Goddess, roll on the ground in ecstasy, screaming “Jaya Tara! It is also here, within the bounds of the cremation ground, that they perform their Tantric rites.
The Domesticated Cremation Ground
Yet in many ways what is most striking about the cremation ground when you visit it is not that it is some exotic or sinister quality, so much as its oddly domesticated feel. Though the doors of the huts here are all flanked by lines of human skulls—many clearly belonging to children—all painted pillar box red and built into the packed mud of the huts, the tantrics who live here sit sipping tea and playing cards, as if living in a skull-filled cremation ground was the most normal thing in the world.
“We look after one another,” I was told by Shakuntala Bhairavi, a wild looking Sadhvi with matted hair and patched saffron robes. “If one of us is sick, the others make sure he is OK. When the floods come in the rains, when the ground is wet and our homes are submerged, naturally we come to the aid of each other.” She explained that lived in the cremation ground for one reason: so as to be near her diety, Ma Tara:
“It is for her that we people inhabit this place,” said Shakuntala. “She pulled us here, and we remain here for her sake.”
“But aren’t you scared living in a place like this?” I asked.
“Tara loves us,” replied Shakuntala, “so I am not scared. And anyway the dead do not come here to the cremation ground. Only the bodies are here. The dead take birth again.”
She paused, then added: “We have been fetched by mother away from the humdrum of normal life. She arranges everything for us: the gifts that come to us, the alms which allow us to survive. I feel her presence here. Definitely. This is her home, not the temple. ”
“But have you actually seen the Goddess here?”
“Recently I saw a fox- her vehicle,” she replied. “Sometimes in my dreams I glimpse her but she has never yet spoken to me.”
Shakuntala fingered the beads of her rudraksh rosary: “Maybe I am not worshipping her in the right way. Unless you call her from within in a truthful manner she will never hear you. It is a long struggle, and its not easy. But if you stay here, getting up at 2 a.m to pray, and if you persist and do not give up, then surely you will get something.”
The Skulls
I asked about the skulls that littered the graveyard: why did every hut here seem to need one?
“We cannot speak of everything,” she replied. “But the skulls give us power and charge our prayers with their shakti. The spirits bring them to us, and their spirits remain with the skull. We feed them with rice and lentils, and then they protect us, keeping us away from death. They help us to awaken the Goddess. But—“ and here Shakuntala’s eyes widened—“ if you make one mistake in the ritual, you go mad. Many here have lost their mind doing this. Others tried to do battle with the Goddess, to tame her with magic. Look what happened to them!”
Yet for Shakuntala, it was clear that the Goddess was not something terrible. She talked intimately of the Goddess as Ma Tara-- Mother Tara-- as if she was a benign old matriarch, a quite different image from that on the popular prints that I had seen in the bazaar on the way into the temple. Here, it is true, Tara was sometimes shown as a nursing mother or transfigured, enthroned in the paradise of Kailasa or on the Isle of Gems. But usually she was depicted almost naked and sitting upon a tiger’s skin with four arms, a garland of freshly-severed skulls, matted hair and a lolling tongue. She weilded a blooded cleaver as she stood dripping with blood, victorious over a dead corpse with an erect phallus- to my eyes unambiguously wild and ferocious. I said as much to Shakuntala.
“Ah,” she said. “This is true. This is her scary side. But all this just means she can fight the devils.”
“But she looks herself almost as much a demon as a Goddess.”
“Tara is my mother,” said Shakuntala simply. “How can your own mother evoke fear? When I first came here in a distressed condition, Ma protected me. Now I don’t want to go anywhere but stay here. To me, Ma is all. My life depends on her. ”
Return to the Temple
By the time I got back to the temple, darkness had fallen and the evening arti was beginning. The shrine chamber was lit up with camphor flames were being circled in front of the deity.
I found Milan Thukur sitting patiently on his wall by the yagna, waiting for the priests to complete the sacred symbol. When it was finally done, a fire was then lit in its centre, and in the candles framing its corners. As the flames rose higher the brahmin threw in handfuls of rice from a thali, all the time reciting Sanskrit mantras, while Milan and his colleagues sat silently cross-legged on the far side. When the ritual was over, Milan got up.
“Now it is time for the sacrifice,” said Milan, “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 was in a two-pronged metal stand shaped like a giant tuning fork. One of the brahmin then painted it 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 brahmin pulled the body away where it lay writhing on the ground. There was a strong smell of warm blood, moist earth, decayed flowers and incense. Milan placed a bunch of smoking agarbatti in the sacrifical pit and smeared his forehead with the blood, dipping his fingers in the bloody sand of the pit.
“Now I am ready,” said Milan. “All auspicious work starts in the name of Ma. Tomorrow 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.”