Ritual Context It is pertinent to note, that the festival of Sanjhi coincides with the shraddha ritual performed in honour of dead relatives. As already mentioned, these rituals are performed in the Hindu month of Ashwin (September) during the dark fortnight marked as pitri-paksha. During the pitri-paksha, ancestors are propitiated by feeding the Brahmin priests and offering rice and barley balls called pindas to deceased relatives. It is believed that ancestors descend on earth during this period to accept these offerings and in return bless their descendents with fertility, prosperity and progeny. During the ritual, shraddha mandalas, (ritual diagrams) are drawn to propitiate and invoke the presence of ancestors or pitris. These diagrams, as Pupal Jayakar observes are: “magical tools through which the dead are contacted and empowered to participate in living ritual”.1 According to her, the pictograph of Sanjhi is a shraddha mandala. Jyoti Bhat, believes it to be “the abode where the wandering souls of the departed relatives take shelter.” As to the name Sanjhi, he contends: “Since the souls enter these abodes in the evening (sanjh), the diagrams are called sanjas…..”2 However, at no time during our field work was Sanjha kot referred to as shraddha mandala. It is equally true that links between ancestoral worship and Sanjhi cannot be denied. It is likely that the origin of Sanjhi ritual lies in the hoary past, when Sanjhi was probably worshipped as an ancestral deity of the lineage or clan. It may be of importance to note here that one of the images of Sanjhi in Jayakar’s book “The Earth Mother’ does depict her face as that of a dead women, gaunt and emaciated3 (Jayakar, 1969, fig. 10). However, the Sanjhi that we find on the walls of contemporary Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh is full of life-force, bright and vibrant. The dynamism and contemporaneity of tradition has added layers of narratives and motifs to the image over the years and today Sanjhi is celebrated primarily as a festival of young girls which operates at multiple levels of significance with a wide semantic field of meanings and symbols. According to one of the myths, mentioned earlier also, Sanjhi is a young, married out daughter, who has come to visit her parents for a period of sixteen days. On the basis of this, some scholars have drawn parallels between Sanjhi and the Durga Puja tradition of Bengal . In Uttar Pradesh Sanjhi arrives in her natal home on the last day of the pitri-paksha and stays there through navratras (period of nine-days, falling immediately after pitri-paksha; dedicated to the worship of goddess Durga) till Dashera (the festival on the 10th day devoted to the goddess worship (also celebrated as the day of victory of Rama over Ravana). In the shared Indian tradition, death and regeneration occur concurrently. Death and life form a continuum. Ancestoral worship is closely linked with the notion of perpetuation of the lineage. Sanjhi is a shodashi kanya, a sixteen year old young maiden, containing within her the seed of creation. The goddess in her virginal form as a sixteen year old girl represents source of all life. All the motifs that find place in the Sanjhya pictograph are symbolic of fertility. Her worship during the fortnight dedicated to the dead, who are envoked to bestow progeny and continuity of life on earth, verbally and visually recapitulates and revalidates the notion of cosmic rhythm, in which life gets created out of death. The pictograph of Sanjhya captures and binds this life-source in a ritually fortified enclosure. Commenting upon the ritual and magical diagrams in folk paintings, Stella Kramrisch writes: The magic diagram makes it possible for power to be present and it brings this presence into the power of the person who has made the diagram…. Here it is the magic circle, in other designs the sacred square, a concatenation of curves or an intersection of polygons, that encloses the magic field. Into it the power of the god is invoked. It is assigned to its enclosure, it is spellbound. It cannot escape; it is controlled….”4 Reverting back to the notion of cosmic rhythm where life is created out of death, we may point out the iconography of Chinmasta in Tantric art, which is an example par excellence of this cyclical rhythm; and so is Sanjha at another level; with a different idiom and lexicon. 01 Pupul Jayakar, 1969, p. 115 02 Jyoti, Bhatt, 1991, ‘Sanya – A Traditional Art Form’, India Magazine, 11 (12): 20-33 03 Jayakar, 1969, Page. 04 Stella, Kramrich, 1968; Unknown India : Ritual Art in Tribe and Village, Philadelphia . Philadelphia Museum of Art, p. 65-66.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 17:21:19 +0000
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