Playing with corpses and worshipping skulls: bodily modifications and gender transformations in rural West Bengal

Abstract

The paper describes the concluding rite of the gajan, a major hierogamic celebration of West Bengal. The night before the end of the festival, ascetic devotees dance with rotten human corpses and human heads in honour of Dharma Thakur, a local fertility deity. After giving a description of the ritual, I try to enlighten the relation between the fertility leitmotif of the gajan and its climax: the danse macabre (dance of death). The practice of sporting with corpses and their ritual beheading will be analysed by furnishing a psychoanalytical and cross-cultural interpretation. In order to do that, it will be suggested that the ritual behaviour of Dharma's devotees is due to the gender modification of the actual recipient of the service. Only if we accept that the object of worship is female (the Goddess, Dharma's spouse), will it be possible to explain the psychical crises occurring to male devotees and their efforts to become ‘ritual women’. The paradigm of the ‘guilty male’ of agricultural societies will be further analysed by comparing the Bengali maā khelā (playing with corpses) with similar practices within different cultural environments, including Sanskrit Puranic lore, Greek mythology and Italian popular Catholicism.