“A World Where Many Worlds Fit”: Understanding Cosmopolitics through Narratives of Possessions and Spirit Invocation among the Lhopos (Bhutia) in Sikkim

Abstract

“A World Where Many Worlds Fit”Understanding Cosmopolitics through Narratives of Possessions and Spirit Invocation among the Lhopos (Bhutia) in Sikkim Kikee Doma Bhutia (bio) Understanding Cosmopolitics Huddled in a four-wheel-drive on my way to Tingchim, my natal village in Sikkim in the eastern Himalayas, after an absence of several months, I listened to fellow villagers talking, which they did with considerable apprehension, about recent spiritual turmoil in the village. The driver, the brother of Ongdi, a ritual healer, said: “Even the Barapathing pawo1 said that our pawo is very strong and invincible, that his powers were attained not through teachings and guidance but acquired directly from spirits and ancestors. And that he is growing more powerful by the day.”2 To understand this turmoil, we need to back up a little. It was four years earlier that Ongdi began to experience a series of strange fits.3 For instance, he would suddenly run across the river and become possessed by different spirits, including the shindré (spirit of the dead) that belonged to his deceased brother. As these possessions became longer and increased in regularity, he was declared a pawo by the Tingchim villagers, which was the only logical way for them to interpret his sudden, out-of-character behavior. This interpretation was spurred along because of his grandfather’s status as one of the strongest pawos in the village. Moreover, spiritual qualities were known to transmit themselves across generations, and it was thus a foregone conclusion that Ongdi had inherited his [End Page 263] grandfather’s qualities. Ever since his recognition, the responsibility to supervise offertory rituals to the deities (among several other ritual tasks) had fallen on Ongdi’s shoulders. To be sure, he did not opt to become a ritual healer. On the contrary, he was very apprehensive about becoming and being one. His nephew confided to me: “Even though aku’s [uncle’s] ancestors come from the tradition of pawos, he tried not to become one. He even drank his urine and pulled his underwear over his head to cease being one, but he cannot choose as he is the chosen one.”4 That evening, back in the village, I meant to meet an old friend and visit her house. It was already late as we walked together. Normally we would have taken a short-cut, but this time my friend insisted, “Let’s not go through this part of the forest today. Who knows what lurks in the dark? Let us take the long way.” Something had happened in the village during my absence. The following days I observed that no villager was willing to venture into the forest, and this, I learned, was because the pawo had issued a warning about the presence of a sdé (deity/spirit/demon), ready to cause harm or kill and take one of the villagers as company. Upon asking Doma, a self-professed village ritual specialist about the eerie situation, she said prophetically: Once the sdé got his eyes on a man, no matter what happens, he will take him for sure. Villagers might not take me seriously and they might not believe in me, but I know these beings and I have interacted with them. See that forest area near that stream where Zyashing Aju [a deity] lives [directing her hands toward the right from where we sat], to our eyes it looks like radung, titepati, and bonmara,5 but I see a mansion, with soldiers guarding the gates. I can see it. I know it. All across Sikkim, the concept of the supernatural world, peopled by deities coexisting and interfering with the human world, is a lived reality, as well as an interpretative framework in which villagers cast mundane and extraordinary events. This other world is engaged through annual ritual offerings at a formal level, but more routinely through pawos and nejums (female ritual healers) offering moh (divination) for those deemed inflicted by sdé by invoking yul lha gzhi bdag (local protective deities). This article introduces different spirits (sdé, shindré), ritual specialists (pawo, nejum), and villagers. First, I seek to reconstruct and narrate one particular encounter where Tashi (a villager) attempts to...