Nine Lives (38 page)

‘Every night we believe she reveals herself here, just before dawn,’ continued Manisha. ‘At that time you feel her very strongly. If she did not bless us in this way we would not be here. She takes us in. She takes care of us. She gives us help. Anyone who comes here and calls on her will overcome their difficulties. She is everywhere in Tarapith: in the leaves of the trees, the buds of the rice, in the sap of the palms, the clouds that bring rain. All we do is to light some fires in her honour, chant a few mantras, perform some rituals. She does the rest.’

‘But aren’t you scared to live in a place like this?’ I asked.

‘Tara loves us,’ replied Manisha. ‘So no, I am not scared.’ She paused, then added, ‘And anyway the dead do not stay here in the burning ground. Only the bodies are here. The dead take birth again.’

Manisha smiled. ‘We have been fetched by the Mother,’ she said. ‘She has taken us 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. This is her home.’

‘Have you actually seen the goddess?’ I asked.

‘The Mother has many forms,’ she replied. ‘All the forms of Tara cannot be numbered. Recently, I saw a jackal – her vehicle. Sometimes in my dreams I glimpse her, but she has never yet appeared to me in a vision. I hope one day she will. If you call her from your heart, one day you will see her, floating before you.’

Manisha 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 it’s 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 see her.’

I asked about the skulls that littered the graveyard: what did they actually do?

‘We cannot speak of everything,’ she replied. ‘But the skulls give us power and charge our prayers with their
shakti
. The spirits help bring them to us, and they remain with the skull. We take good care of them, and feed them with rice and dal. Then they protect us, keeping us away from evil and death. They help us to awaken the goddess.’

From the way that Manisha spoke, it was clear that for her the goddess was not something terrible. She talked intimately of her as Ma Tara – Mother Tara – as if she were a benign matriarch, quite a different image from that on the popular prints that I had seen in the bazaar on the way there. Here, it is true, Tara was sometimes shown as a nursing mother or enthroned in the Paradise of Kailasa or on the Isle of Gems. But usually she was depicted almost naked with matted hair and a blood-red lolling tongue and sitting upon a tiger’s skin with four arms, wearing a garland of freshly severed heads. She wielded a blood-smeared cleaver as she stood victorious, dripping with blood, over a dead corpse with an erect phallus. To my eyes she was unambiguously terrifying, weird and ferocious. I said as much to Manisha.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘This is true. This is her wild side. But all this just means she can fight the devils on your behalf.’

‘But she looks herself almost as much a demon as a goddess.’

‘Tara is my mother,’ replied Manisha simply. ‘How can your own mother evoke fear? When I first came here in a distressed condition, Ma protected me. I had been beaten by my husband, rejected by my mother-in-law and had lost my home and my three daughters. It was she who brought Tapan Sadhu to protect me and give me love. In this place of death, I have found new life. Now I don’t want to go anywhere. To me, Ma is all. My life depends on her.’

Tarapith lies in a great planisphere of flat, green country: fertile floodplains and rice paddies, whose abundant soils and huge skies stretch out towards the marshy Sunderbans, the
Ganges Delta and the Bay of Bengal – a great green Eden of water and vegetation.

The road from Shantiniketan is raised on a shaded embankment and passes through a vast patchwork of wetlands: muddy fields of half-harvested rice give way to others where the young green seedlings have been transplanted into shimmering rectangles in the flooded fields. Through all this runs a network of streams and rivers and frog-croaking, fish-filled, lily-littered duck ponds. These are surrounded by fishermen with bamboo fishing cages and lines of village women with earthen pitchers. Kingfishers watch silently from the telegraph wires. Rising from the ripples of this flat waterland are raised mounds encircled with windbreaks of palm, clumps of bamboo, and tall flowering grasses. On these stand small wattle villages of reed and clay, with their bullock carts and haystacks, their thatched bus stops and the occasional spreading banyan tree.
Sometimes, to one side, rises the brick estate house of the local grandee.

From a distance, Tarapith looks like just any other Bengali village, with its palm-thatched huts, and still, cool fish pond. But here one building dominates all the others: the great temple of the goddess. Its base is a thick-walled, red-brick chamber, broken by an arcade of arches and rising to a great white pinnacle, like the snow capping of a Himalayan peak. Inside, below the low-curving Bengali eves, stands the silver image of the goddess with her long black hair, half-submerged beneath marigold garlands and Benarasi saris, and crowned and shaded by a silver umbrella. On her forehead is a patch of red
kumkum
powder. On to this the temple priests place their fingers, then transfer the red stain on to the foreheads of the devotees. In gratitude the pilgrims then kiss her silver feet, and leave her offerings of coconuts, white silk saris, incense sticks, bananas and, more unexpectedly, bottles of whisky.

Yet in Tarapith, those who live here are quite clear that Tara’s preferred residence is not the temple, but the cremation ground which lies above the ghats of the river on the edge of the village. Tara is, after all, one of the most wild and wayward of Hindu goddesses, and cannot be tamed and contained within a venerated temple image. She is not only the goddess of supreme knowledge who grants her devotees the ability to know and realise the Absolute, she is also the Lady Twilight, the Cheater of Death, a figure of horror and terror, a stalker of funeral pyres, who slaughters demons and evil
yakshis
without hesitation, becoming as terrible as them in order to defeat them: 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.

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 only became well defined 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, e
arly 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.