by Laleen Jayamanne and Namika Raby
(Part I of this article appeared in The Island on Friday (31 Jan.)

Women’s Mental Health: Trance/Dance in Folk Rituals

The lecture Namika heard on ‘pregnancy cravings’ (dola duka) among peasant women in a particular village, is one of Gananath’s earliest pieces of research which shows his turn of mind, originality, in taking seriously a compelling female desire which may not have been treated in the scholarly arena with the gravity and seriousness that it warranted. I associate a certain sense of cultural embarrassment on hearing the term ‘dola duka’ in Sinhala back in the day when a pregnant relative of mine craved to eat pieces from a freshly baked (navun) clay pot with its special fragrance. The film shows Gananath’s empathetic ability to pay careful ethnographic attention to a variety of gendered states of mental distress and trauma and their traditional ritualised ecstatic expressions, especially with regard to women, well before some feminist scholars in the West began to be interested in the topic of ‘Women and Madness’ from a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective. Psychoanalytic theory became methodologically important for Feminist Film Theory, which I used in my doctoral thesis on ‘Female Representation in the Lankan cinema’.

A sequence in Dimuthu’s film focuses on the subject of Gananath’s book Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience, which is a case history of an old woman called Karunawathi Maniyo (mother). She appears with her thickly matted, long snake-like grey locks which, we are told, were created by her as a mode of existence, entailing a ritualised daily practice of puja at an altar, with images of the fierce Kali with fangs and Durga Ashuramardani (a divine figure of combat capable of violence and great power), to express and assuage her mental distress. However, I did not see an image of Pattini, the ‘good mother’, on her altar.

It is worth noting that both Kali and Durga are not maternal figures and though they were incorporated into the Brahminical Hinduism, they have no consorts and were in origin folk goddesses, according to the historian of ancient India, D. D. Kosambi. It is worth remembering that the first feminist press in English, in India was called ‘Kali for Women’! There is here an evident externalisation of an unusual desire, intelligible within Karunawathi Manio’s social class/group and as such, acceptance of her idiosyncratic behaviour and appearance. It is impossible to imagine such a Medusa-like scary treatment of hair in a middle-class milieu.

Again, there are images of a possessed young woman, Nawala Maniyo, who participates in an exorcist ritual in a trance, eyes glistening between strands of her long tresses masking her face. This reminds me of Gananath’s extraordinarily gripping Case Study, ‘Psycho-Cultural Exegesis of a Case of Spirit Possession in Sri Lanka,’ which we dramatised for the soundtrack of my film A Song of Ceylon (Australian Film Commission, Sydney: 1985). Again, as an ethnographer he demonstrates how the Sinhala-Buddhist folk culture provided symbolic means of collective, public, theatricalised, somatic, expression of profound individual trauma registered in the unconscious of the young possessed woman, Somawathi, and the therapeutic value of these public, social forms of physical expression.

In the early 20^th Century Vienna, the Neurologist Sigmund Freud treated young bourgeoise female patients suffering from a new pathology named ‘Hysteria,’ which in turn led him to postulate a theory of the Unconscious and to develop his ‘Talking Cure’ through ‘free-association’, to assuage mental pain. This however was in a privatised and personalised setting in his study; the female patient lying down on a couch speaking in a ‘stream of consciousness’ mode, with Dr Freud as the silent listener, his gaze averted. Freud’s case studies of these patients are also gripping reading, like a 19^th Century novel, and they are also ‘ethnographic’ psychoanalytic interpretations of the pathology named Hysteria, a new medical category which entered the Diagnostic Manual.

A portrait sculpture of Prof. Gananath Obeysekera by Prof. Sarath Chandrajueewa

In contrast, while deeply interested and trained in psychoanalytic theory and methodology at the University of Washington, Seattle, by European specialists, Gananath appreciated and powerfully theorised the public, social nature of Exorcist Rituals (Bali Thovil) and other such therapeutic practices.

Further, he showed how the rituals, based on folk beliefs, were imaginative, performative public events with an ‘audience’ participating in them and their importance as witnesses, for the cure. In these, the female ‘patient’ or woman possessed of demons danced to drum beats in ecstatic trance, resisting through spirited dialogue, the Exorcist (Kattadirala), who embodied patriarchal authority and even physical violence. In these rituals the possessed woman is given a public arena to play (dance) in, and while the ritual has a familiar cultural ‘script’ so to speak, the possessed woman has every chance to improvise and play as she desires or as the demons (all male) possessing her desire.

It is clear through this work that, contra psychoanalysis, the unconscious is not structured like a language and the repressed is insighted to find expression through trance-dance and vocal expression which go against traditional notions of femininity. In ecstatic states the patient is animated by drum beats that touch her nervous system directly and thus the entire body, revealing deep registers of affective trauma, that a purely static, talking cure (while lying down on, what became, that famous couch, now preserved in the Freud Museum in London) could not possibly do.

Dimuthu brings all this out lucidly, not only with the questions he poses to Gananath but also by placing the relevant photographs or clips within the interview sequences themselves. This montage technique of placing carefully chosen stills and clips from Gananath’s very extensive ethnographic archive, interspersed with the ‘Talking Heads’ interviews, makes the film very lively and watchable. It also teaches us something about the complex theoretical ideas Gananath worked with in an accessible way because of his powers of ‘scientific’ rigorous ethnographic observation, tempered by a Buddhist Humanist empathy and engaging style of writing so rare in scholarship.

Perhaps the film would encourage young scholars to read Gananath’s writing as Dimuthu did even before he entered the University. And I hope it encourages the translation of at least some of his major work. The film is significant in this sense, too, because Gananath did not accept the orthodoxy in his field and questioned received methodologies and theories. His critical mind is truly dazzling in its generosity of spirit and sense of curiosity even so late in his retirement. We hear him say, ‘Even now (then in his 80s, soon to be 95!), I am learning something new every day in the Uva-Wellassa area’ and exhorts us also to make that a goal. Yes, let’s!

Gananath’s use of the idea of the unconscious, via Freudian Psychoanalysis, in his ethnographic theorisation of rituals was enabling methodologically. It provided a key theoretical concept for understanding the actions performed by men and women under immense mental and physical duress, which went against the mandated gender norms of the traditional culture. I remember in the 1980s how Gananath was severely criticised by Marxists for ‘indulging in and validating superstitious folk beliefs and practices’ among the so called, ‘ignorant peasantry’.

The whole nexus of folk beliefs and cultural practices, including aspects of Hinduism, and their integral articulation with Buddhism, practiced as a popular religion with rituals and dramatic enactments by these rural communities was dismissed in a simplistic rationalist critique, as myth, hence false. But what has survived time, as an anthropologically cogent theoretical analysis based on meticulous, imaginative ethnographic work, is Gananath’s central argument about the hybrid, generous, inclusive nature of Buddhism as a religion, practiced in the robust, open folk traditions, by the peasantry. Dinidu gives considerable time to Dr Kumudu Kusum Kumara, who explains Gananath’s very detailed, complex argument and research with clarity and imagination in the film.

Buddhist Humanism or ‘Protestant Buddhism’

Kumudu explains the significance of Gananath’s formulation of the concept of ‘Protestant Buddhism’ introduced by the Theosophist Colonel Olcott in the 19^th Century, who schooled the Buddhist revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala in constituting a Sinhala-Buddhist Catechism based on the Thripitakaya (the canonical Buddhist text), fit for school children in Daham Pasal modelled on Sunday School for Christian kids. He explains how this was a rationalising, westernising move, following Max Weber’s thinking here. Gananath’s brilliant coinage ‘Protestant Buddhism’, which was also strongly aligned with the Nationalist Anti-Colonial Movement, rationalised religious practices making them exclusive. A Victorian-English-Protestant-Puritanism thus entered Buddhism in Lanka, making it more akin to Protestantism in Europe which had a very severe moral code. Thereby the inclusive flexibility of the Buddhist folk tradition with its humour and sense of play, is lost along with, crucially, the story-telling tradition based on the Jataka Tales of the Buddha’s many rebirths, parables about ethical behaviour towards all living beings.

With this loss, we are told, the tradition of Buddhist Humanism, with its values of compassion as exemplified in these stories teaming with natural life and animals, too, also disappeared. Further, through this loss the ethical values nurturing and sustaining ‘a Buddhist Conscience’ were also lost, he argues. We are shown (via images), how the painterly folk tradition in Temple Murals and the literary sources, song, poetry (kavi), trance-dance, drumming, dramatic enactments within the folk traditions (as distinct from the official chronicles of the Mahavamsa and Deepawams), offered an alternative vision of Buddhism as practiced by the peasantry.

We learn that in the folk tradition Dutthagamini repented killing Elare the Tamil king and conscience struck, he attempted reparation and contrition, unlike the patricidal king Kashyapa who escaped into a hedonist life in the rock fortress of Sigiriya. Kumudu says that Gananath argued his case by reading the folk archive, of images on Temple walls and anonymous folk texts (Panthis Kolmura, a large corpus of 35 long poems, some of which he translated and also sang, Kadaym poth or Boundry texts and Vitti poth or Event books), which were authorless and title less work of the people, for the people and by the people. The film helps us to understand that it is this folk tradition, cultivating empathy and an ethical conscience, a capacity to be contrite, that has been lost within the post-independent ethno-nationalist version of official Protestant-Sinhala-Buddhism, with state patronage. This imported ideology of the English speaking coloniser is then presented as the ‘pure original Buddhism’ shorn of local superstition, hybrid folk tales and beliefs and rituals, rejected as ‘unBuddhist’. Indologists in turn supported this rationalising move of creating a ‘pure, original Buddhism’.

A Case Study

Kareem, a young Muslim man hangs on hooks (attached to a swing-like structure on wheels in a religious procession), as penance at the Kataragama Hindu festival and is also seen dancing in a trance. Gananath explains in his Case Study of Kareem that he was imprisoned in 1961 for assisting in the Army Coup against the Government. One wonders how a humble young Muslim cook got caught up in and imprisoned for a foolish Coup staged by a select group of English-speaking bourgeois gentlemen of Colombo, who were all high up in the armed forces of that era. Daughters of three of these officials who were arrested and served sentences were close friends of mine in school during this time, which heightens a sense of the absurdity of this poor man’s plight. Gananath’s case study of his childhood revealed an authoritarian paternal figure who instilled fear in him. However, he seemed serene and happy in the photographs taken with Gananath after the ritual and even when swinging from the ritual hooks.

Here, I would like to cite Arjun Appadurai’s review of Gananath’s magnum opus, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini because it is not readily available to those outside the academy.

“This is a book of unusual scope, quality, and scholarly significance. Ostensibly a description and analysis of a single cult in Sri Lanka, it is in fact a major symbolic, psychological, and ethno-historical study of practical religion in Sri Lanka, and of the relationship of that island to Indic culture and society. It is the product of two decades of field research by Sri Lanka’s most distinguished anthropological interpreter, and its combination of textual analysis, ethnographic sensitivity, and methodological catholicity makes it something of a blockbuster”.

Dimuthu informed me that Gananath studied six different traditions of the Pattini Cult, starting in the 1950s. Dimuthu and his research team went looking for the priests of each of these traditions named in his book and found that they had died but they did meet a student of Yahonis Pattini Mahattaya of the Rabaliya tradition and of Podi Mahaththaya, H. D. Edwin Pattini Mahatthaya, who is now the only living informant of Gananath’s Pattini research. Edwin Pattini Mahattaya performed aspects of the Pattini Cult for Gananath at his request for the sake of photo documenting it for his book. His son Tilak is seen dancing as Pattini in the Dimuthu’s film. Seeing him becoming Pattini (after his ritual investiture), even in an all too short clip, is among the high points of this film for me, because we see a profound metamorphosis of this young male ritual dancer into a female archetype, Pattini, the only Mother goddess of Lanka, in an inspired rhythmic play with codes of gender and beyond to reach an ecstatic body and spirit – words fail me. What we can also see is the profound gestural, rhythmic, spiritual transmission of this syncretic tradition across generations, across the abyss of death itself.

Pattini’s origins are in Kannagi, a heroic human figure from the Tamil Epic Silappadikaram, who is worshiped as a mother goddess, Kannagi-Amman, in India and in the East coast of Lanka by Tamils who still observe matrilineal descent (a system of tracing kinship through a person’s female ancestors), according to Gananath. The significance of this for gender and family relationships would be of particular interest to feminists. There is a large modern Bronze statue celebrating Kannagi in Chennai, India and colourful plaster ones and paintings in Hindu temples in Lanka, seen carrying her iconic anklet. (To be concluded)