Chaube of Mathura || Part 6a of 8

< Credits: Reproduced from the Book called Divine Passions. The papers in this volume were originally written for a conference on "The Anthropology of Feeling, Experience, and Emotion in India" held at the University of Houston on 1-14 December 1985. The conference was part of the Festival of India held in the United States during 1985-86. Nineteen highly provocative papers were presented; the nine in this volume were selected because they most directly addressed the conference's theme. >

The Mastram as an Ideal

The mastram is a person who is mast (happy, lusty, proud, carefree, intoxicated); he enjoys a carefree lifestyle with a sense of physical and emotional well-being. A Chaube who knew some English said, "Eat drink and be merry; that is how we live, we have no worries here [in Mathura]." The opposite of feeling mast is feeling sust (slow, lazy, idle, bored, inactive, sad).

Ideally a mast person and a true mastram is not entangled in moha (naturalor habitual attachment to things and people). A mastram, thus, remains happy; neither the pangs of loss and separation from friends nor the pains of worry and anxiety about possessions touch him. This implies that he has the wherewithal to live well and that he is not despised as kangal^[*] (destitute). The ideal of the mastram reflects and actualizes niti (the wise conduct of life), which "represents an admirable attempt to answer the insistent question how to win the utmost possible joy from life in the world of men" (Ryder 1956:5). Niti is "the harmonious development of the powers of man, a life in which security, prosperity, resolute action, friendship, and good learning are so combined to produce joy" (Ryder 1956: 10). As an ideal of personhood, the mastram is a symbolic template or control for experience (C. Geertz 1973) that identifies, interprets, creates, and often becomes the social experience of self and emotion that it is said to be.

Chaubes are fond of quoting a saying:

Where trees are thorny shrubs,^[7] and wells harbor brackish water;

Where locals shout boisterously, and greet guests with insults;

Behold Krishna! such is your Mathura.

That was how Udhav, Krishna's beloved friend, experienced Matburs and its urbanites when Krishna sent him there on an errand. And that, too, is how Mathura's Chaubes see themselves: without cant or servility, straightforward, sharp-tongued, proud, independent, without care or concern (laparvah) for how others may see them. In short, they are mast.

Chaubes, like most people of Braj (Brajbasi), are a rustic, rough crew.

The open, artless, even crass behavior of Brajbasis provides the standard [of this rusticity]. Krishna came here because he knew he would not be inundated with etiquette, and Brajbasis count themselves lucky that they have been included among the people with whom Krishna came to dwell. They don't have to impress anybody. (Hawley 1981:48)

Unusually active, open, assertive, playful children are indulgently said to be mast, as are mischievous young boys who are laughed at and have their cars playfully boxed for their teasing or puns with sexual innuendoes. Such children reflect, actualize, and recreate the paradigm of Braj's most beloved child, Krishna, himself a tease, a trickster, a carefree and ebullient child, a perfect mastram. Being mast and becoming a mastram, then, is not merely a reputation for Chaubes to live up to; rather, it is an ideal of personhood that tells them how to behave and how to feel when or if truly themselves (see H. Geertz 1974). Being mast is in the nature, soil, streets, air, atmosphere, blood, and culture of theBrajbasi and especially of the Chaube. As Rosaldo (1984:150) says, "Cultural idioms provide the images in terms of which ... subjectivities are formed, and, furthermore, these idioms themselves are socially ordered and constrained."

Few, if any, Chaubes become and live the ideal, but it is a state of life and

personhood to which many aspire. Most, if not all, feel mast on many occasions of daily life. Four things, they say, are conducive to feeling mast and becoming a mastram: marijuana (bhamg^[*]), good food (bhojana), remembering the Lord through prayer (bhajana), and physical exercise (kasrat).

Marijuana, as an intoxicating even narcosis-inducing substance that is drunk rather than smoked, occupies in India, and especially in Braj, a domain of meaning, experience, and moral evaluation that is wholly different from that which it occupies in the West. Chaubes say that it is a medicinal plant (buti^[*]) given by Lord Shiva who himself was greatly addicted to it. According to one informant, Shiva is the leader of all the nine planets which in astrological thinking influence one's life for good or ill. Thus, if one goes directly to the leader and appeals to him with the drink he enjoys, then one can hope that Shiva will influence his followers to give good fortune. Dauji, another name for Krishna's brother Balaram, was also an addict of marijuana, and he is daily offered the drink in his temple at Baldev some miles distant from Mathura.

In Hindu understanding, the universe is characterized by three qualities or attributes (guna^[*]) that inhere in all things: sattva (truth, honesty, peacefulness, goodness, sincerity, purity), rajas (passion, energy, forcefulness, wrath, anger), and tamas (darkness, ignorance, dullness, distress, anxiety). One of these three qualities predominates in and characterizes all things in the universe. These three qualities are also categories of relative moral value, rather than of dichotomous good and evil. Although other castes do not necessarily share their point of view (Carstairs 1954, 1967), for the Chaubes, as Brahmans, marijuana is a substance endowed with the highly valued moral qualities of sattva; it gives asattva intoxication.^[8] Alcohol, they say, is a substance endowed with the base qualities of tamas and gives a degraded and degrading intoxication. Because Hindus, and Chaubes in particular, believe that one becomes what one cats, then by drinking marijuana one enhances good moral qualities and experiences the emotional states inherent in it; its moral and emotional benefits are many.

Marijuana is, then, morally good, and the condition it induces is religiously valuable. Indeed, Chaubes are fond of contrasting marijuana with alchohol which, they say, only makes one agitated and quarrelsome. Marijuana, on the other hand, makes one feel peaceful, filled with bliss (ananda), friendly to all, mentally concentrated and resolute on one thing in a fuguelike state (ekagrata), and unattached, talking little to others while in solitude with the self (ekant).^[9] Carstairs (1954:225), a physician and anthropologist who did fieldwork in Rajasthan, India, says that his "own experience confirmed... clinical accounts, with emphasis on feelings of detachment, of extreme introspection, of the loss of volition coupled with a dreamlike impression of heightened reality."

A heavy dose of marijuana (cakacak bhamg^[*]) induces a state of nondesire and peacefulness much like the deep sleep of yoga. Marijuana, it is said, is like religious songs (bhajana) that fill the heart with peace and center the mind on divinity. Thus, to drink a heavy dose is to actualize and experience an emotional at-oneness, peace, nonattachment, and true self-awareness approaching the blissful pleasure (ananda) that is union with divinity and self-integration. Small wonder is it that many Chaubes have a daily or nearly daily draught.

Marijuana drinking also makes one lusty (mast), and sex is one legitimate pleasure and end of life (kama). It is the drink of choice on Holi, the Festival of Love (see Marriott 1966). This is a day of joyful revelry, much like Mardi Gras, in which traditional restraints and tabus are broken and trysts occur. People can be observed furtively coming out ofdharmsala rooms not normally used at this time of year. Chaubes quote a saying:

Kaga basi Bhog vilasi Satyanasi

This can be very freely translated as:

In the morning at first crow call, take leftovers.

At the time of midmorning dinner, take amorous pleasure.

In the evening after bhamg, be totally depraved.

Chaube use of marijuana is much more than an individual addiction, it is very often a compulsive social drama much like the deep play of the Balinese cockfight so well described by Clifford Geertz (1973). Cakacak bhamg means not only to have a strong dose of marijuana but also to have a deep relationship with someone. Among Chaubes the preparation of marijuana (often as a cold drink called thandai^[*] can be an elaborate event of sharing and merrymaking. Along with the marijuana various ingredients, as befits the season, such as black pepper, almonds, pistachios, raisins, mangoes, and sugar arc ground to a paste with mortar and pestle (symbols of Shiva), mixed with water or milk, and then strained into a pail. All this is done to the tune of jokes, banter, gossip, and pleasurable anticipation of the drink itself. Just before the drinking vessel is passed around from hand to hand, the first drink is offered to Shiva, when a few drops arc poured over the mortar and pestle. Generally one person buys the ingredients, creating a bond of expected reciprocity. In 1982 a new system, called the "American system" in which all share in the purchase of ingredients, was often followed. The invitation to cakacak bhamg is often extended to passersby, even anthropologists, on especially happy occasions, such as the birth of a male child. Communal drinking of marijuana creates a moral pressure of mutual obligation and a public bond of social identity; a Chaube is one who can, ought, and does drink marijuana, as well as one who feels masti and himself through it, its effects, and its multiple meanings and associations. I freely translate a local saying:

Take bhamg and open to yourself the treasure house of knowledge.

Without drinking it, the tongue is tied in talk.

Yogis and saints alike desire it, and Shiva among the gods craves it.

In it are the fruits of many pilgrimages and the waters that flow in the Ganges.

When the goddess Bhamg enters the body, she reveals countless wonders.

For the Chaubes drinking marijuana with others is, as Geertz says of the Balinest, "a kind of sentimental education. What he learns there is what his culture's ethos and his private sensibility ... look like when spelled out externally in a collective text" (C. Geertz 1973:449). Cakacak bhamg is itself a positive agent in creating and preserving such a sensibility. Through and in marijuana the Chaube actualizes in himself a coincidence of emotionalism (pleasure, merrymaking with friends, eroticism) and asceticism (peace, nonattachment, at-oneness, deep concentration) that is characteristic of the great mastram, Shiva, the erotic ascetic (O'Flaherty 1973). In summary, marijuana is a positive moral substance that creates in a Chaube highly valued religious thoughts, states, feelings, and emotions. Through it he experiences these states; he feels mast.

At this point I must make a short detour to say something about the Chaubes' own understanding of the relation of thought and emotion, asceticism and emotionalism. Thus far, I have spoken of them as though they were separate entities. According to my informants the seat of thought and of feeling is the man, a word meaning mind, heart, intellect, soul, disposition, purpose, desire. One Chaube pandit soundly put me straight when he said that the English language locates emotions in the heart and thoughts in the head, but Hindi shows its superiority in finding both as aspects of the same thing in the man.^[10] The Hindi words bhava and bhavana mean emotion as well as idea and thought. There is a slight difference between them, however; bhava refers to the permanent emotional potentialities in everybody, andbhavana (see also Eck 1985) is the imaginative thoughts-feelings stimulated by some external thing. Bhavana transforms the latent bhava into an actual emotional-imaginative experience.^[11] The Dravidian languages also "do not so fastidiously separate 'knowing' and 'feeling' in the way SAE [Standard Average European] terms do. In Dravidian, 'rationality' is not just a way of knowing/thinking but a way of feeling/knowing" (Tyler 1984:36).

From such a point of view, then, asceticism, with its emphasis on thought and meditation, and emotionalism or eroticism, with its emphasis on feeling and emotion, are not logical contradictions: rather, they are logical contraries, two aspects of the same thing. The concern to discard neither asceticism nor eroticism but rather to bring them into unity is a theme of modern

Indian novels that reveals the depth and topicality of this concern in everyday Indian life (Madan 1981). Marglin (this volume) notes that female temple dancers were likened to Vaishnava renouncers; yet at the same time they were specialists in the erotic emotion. Toomey (this volume) says that Chaitanyaite ascetics cultivate the erotic emotion, and Vatuk (this volume) writes that elderly people who see themselves as renouncers may be the recipients of ostentatious care, just as gurus in the Lingayat (Vail 1985) and Ramanandi (Veer 1985, 1987) sects, although renouncers, live in a luxurious life style provided by their devotees. What asceticism is also depends upon its cultural construction. Caught in a play of differences, Indian asceticism differs from and defers to a cultural system of signs other than that of the West.

Marijuana consumption also provides a conceptual and experiential unity to the quartet of marijuana, food, religious song, and physical exercise, all conducive to becoming mast. Marijuana centers the mind on one thing, divinity. Those who sing bhajana take it so that they can sing focused well on divinity. Wrestlers and body builders take it because, they say, marijuana concentrates the mind on the physical activity and creates an appetite for the food necessary to build a healthy body

Food is the second social and symbolic substance enabling one to feel mast and become a mastram. Marijuana, it is said, gives both the hunger to relish and the capacity to consume enormous mountains of food without ill effects; this is one explicit reason why Chaubes drink it.^[12]

Food is consumed to nourish both the physical body and the emotional self. Chaubes are strict vegetarians and consume mostly sattva type food which, they say, produces in a person the moral emotions of peacefulness, truthfulness, compassion, kindness, and sympathy to all creatures. As one informant said, "Food should be sattva; then it gives the proper emotions (bhava). Sattva food is food like sweets." Before consumption freshly cooked food is always put before and offered to an image of the Lord (Thakurji^[*]); it thus becomes consecrated (prasada) and imbued with something of the Lord himself. In the offering of food to god, in its return to his devotee, and in its consumption asprasada, emotions are believed to be exchanged between humanity and divinity. One Chaube said:

When we give food to god we give it with love (prema). God does not need food; he does not cat it. What he takes is our sentiment (bhavana). As you eat, so your thoughts will be. There is an important point here. Women cook food, but they cook it for love of god. In food there is a subtle (suksma^[*]) meaning. We make it with love, and god gives it back with love. We eat his love and thoughts. From this our own thoughts get better. (emphasis mine)

Food, then, not only brings with it the pleasure of taste and the satisfaction of a full stomach, but it also nourishes with a feeling of divine love and a strengthening of the purer thoughts-emotions in a person's character. Chaubes sometimes call food bhoga, a word meaning both food offered to god as well as the experience of pleasure, sexual passion, nourishment, wealth, and body. Food is at once a moral and a material substance that imbues persons with its own moral and material qualities. Chaubes sum it up in a saying, "Eat sweets, stay mast (mal khao, mast raho)."

For the Chaubes more than religious emotions and meanings lie in food. Mast also means to feel proud, and the Chaubes are proud of their justly renowned capacity to cat enormous portions of food, of their sweet tooth for Indian confections, and of their capacity, they say, to down and digest a liter of clarified butter (ghi) in one sitting.^[13] It is meritorious for other Hindus to give Brahmans food, and certain religious ceremonies require their gustatory presence. Thus, pilgrims and clients often give feasts (Brahmana^[*] bhojana) to one or more of them. Indeed, as Brahmans, Chaubes expect to be feasted. Of themselves they say, "We are takers; we don't give." A Chaube can most easily feel and be mast when he is not poor. One sign of not being poor and of being well taken care of by one's clients is being fed by those who have the duty to feed. One who eats well at home also knows, as do others, that he is not penniless (kangal). Being feasted and fed and engaging in gastronomic feats gives a feeling of satisfaction that one's status and identity are being confirmed and validated, that one can and does live mast.