Chaube of Mathura || Part 8 of 8

From the Paper "The Mastram Emotion and Person Among Mathura's Chaubes" 

Conclusion

Masti (and feeling mast) is a complex culturally specific emotion that neither measures of physiological responses, neurochemicals, and the like nor references to cognition and concepts alone make humanly understandable. The approach taken in this essay considers emotions as culturally constituted appraisals experienced by an engaged self. They are at once sentient and sensible, taking their charge of feeling and their depth of meaning from cultural practices, themselves heavily loaded with cultural experience, history, and significance. Informants do lie and cover up—sometimes even to themselves—their true feelings, but talk of masti among Chaubes is constant and perdures because experience of it for them is often real and never insignificant. It is historically produced in the cultural practices I have described; at the same time it both confirms and reproduces those practices that Chaubes appraise as sattva in moral quality.

The meaningful experience of the emotion masti, and as well the ideal of the mastram, is not merely individual or even that of the Chaubes alone, for it has always been experienced within a larger political economy coloring meaningful emotion. As pilgrimage priests, the Chaubes were and are tied to the donations of their clients, some rich, others poor. As the fortunes of clients have waxed and waned so has the Chaubes' experience of masti. In recent times with the expanded market economy, as well as the new parliamentary democracy, many of the younger generation have taken to secular education and work in commerce, government, and industry. They have left behind many traditional social practices that produced and reproduced masti; in so doing its meaning and their experience of it have changed.

The emotion, masti, considered as a sign, is characterized by différance. It differs from asceticism in the cultural practices involved. Yet masti cannot explicitly be understood without implicitly implying its deferred contrary, asceticism. The emotionalistic ideal of the mastram, the aesthete, in no way contradicts the ideal of the sannyasi, the ascetic; both seek the same goal but use different means. Both seek not the denial of any of one's powers but their full development and refinement. In the Indian scheme, "Nothing is discarded or excluded in this process of refinement: everything is included, improved, and carried forward into one integrated experience. In this experience eroticism exists no more nor less than does asceticism" (Madan 1981: 148).

The mastram is a locally received exemplar of niti, the ideal of the good life,

that is in accord with dharma (duty, ethical conduct) and artha (material gain, polity). Yet it is also, and more important, in accord with moksa^[*] (salvation) and uses the concrete means of marijuana, food, physical exercise, and prayers to achieve it. Its way (marga), is in the Hindu devotional (bhakti) tradition that emphasizes identification with the Lord through emotion. Masti is an emotion (bhava) that intimates the taste (rasa) of divine pleasure or bliss (ananda).

The mastram is also, in my opinion, a folk version of the rasika (a man of good taste who appreciates beauty and excellence). In classical theory a rasika is one who has cultivated his taste and emotions to the point that he can experience a rasa, the quintessence of a human, aesthetic emotion culturally transformed into an experience of divine emotion. Marijuana is imbibed in order to experience peaceful and blissful (sattva) intoxication; sanctified food (prasada) bears in it divine love; bhajana are sung to sympathetically tune into, and become unconscious in, the Lord's love; wrestling and exercise imitate ascetics and Krishna's own activities and bring the pleasure of good health. All these activities through constant practice are believed to refine and strengthen the higher, sattva emotions, just as the activities of the rasika cultivate, strengthen, and sensitize his taste for divine aesthetic emotions.

The aesthete and the ascetic complement but do not contradict one another. To find in Indian asceticism and emotionalism contradictory opposites is to distort them into a Western mode of thinking that distinguishes thought from emotion and mind from body. In the Chaube mode of thinking, thought and emotion are merely two aspects of the same thing, both having their seat in the faculty called man. "There is no absolute distinction in India between Matter and Spirit; both are equal aspects of one single principle— the two sides of the same coin" (Lannoy 1971:282).

Finally, emotions are not merely feelings of the true self lurking behind a social mask, as in some recent sociological theories (Denzin 1984). Rather they are moral and motivating cultural appraisals that constitute particular kinds of persons. A Chaube unable to feel mast would not be a true Chaube, nor would he be able to imagine-feel himself a Chaube without experiencing it. Masti is tied to his conception and experience of himself as a social person with a particular identity, Chaube. This is not to say that other Brajbasis do not also feel, value, and desire masti. Rather it is to say that in feeling mast in behavior, ritual, history, and belief which Chaubes consider unique to themselves, they confirm, create, and anchor in coherent emotional reality their identity, their personhood.

< 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. >