Abstract
This essay brings together critical archetypes of Bengali Hindu home-experience: the sound of the evening shankh (conch), the goddess Lakshmi, and the female snake-deity, Manasa. It analyzes the everyday phenomenology of the home, not simply through the European category of the ‘domestic’, but conceptually more elastic vernacular religious discourse of shongshar, which means both home and world. The conch is studied as a direct material embodiment of the sacred domestic. Its materiality and sound-ontology evoke a religious experience fused with this-worldly wellbeing (mongol) and afterlife stillness. Further, (contrary) worship ontologies of Lakshmi, the life-goddess of mongol, and Manasa, the death-and-resuscitation goddess, are discussed, and the twists of these ambivalent imaginings are shown to be engraved in the conch’s body and audition. Bringing goddesses and conch-aesthetics together, shongshar is thus presented as a religious everyday dwelling, where the ‘home’ and ‘world’ are connected through spiraling experiences of life, death, and resuscitation. Problematizing the monolithic idea of the secular home as a protecting domain from the outside world, I argue that everyday religious experience of the Bengali domestic, as especially encountered and narrated by female householders, essentially includes both Lakshmi/life/fertility and Manasa/death/renunciation. Exploring the analogy of the spirals of shankh and shongshar, spatial and temporal experiences of the sacred domestic are also complicated. Based on ritual texts, fieldwork among Lakshmi and Manasa worshippers, conch-collectors, craftsmen and specialists, and immersion in the everyday religious world, I foreground a new aesthetic phenomenology at the interface of the metaphysics of sound, moralities of goddess-devotions, and the Bengali home’s experience of afterlife everyday.
Highlights
Problematizing the monolithic idea of the secular home as a protecting domain from the outside world, I argue that everyday religious experience of the Bengali domestic, as especially encountered and narrated by female householders, essentially includes both Lakshmi/life/fertility and Manasa/death/renunciation
Through Kamala–Bimala–Indira, we find the rehabilitation of the religious experience of mongol in the Bose family
Like the evening conch-sound twirling out of the coiled shankh, and like knotted hair unfastening, Lokkhi unfastens to Manasa, and the home relaxes towards abandonment
Summary
This essay, based on in-depth ethnographic research, brings together three sacred archetypes of Bengali domestic religious experience, to reimagine the shongshar in ways that address continual cultural undertones These three sacralities are: (contrary) goddess-universes of Lakshmi and Manasa, and the material object, shankha (pronounced as shankh), or conch-shell. The experience of mongol, which is central to the discourse of Bengali households, has subtle overlaps with everyday objects like the conch and the imagination of goddesses It addresses unobvious but entwined experiential aspects like life, death, and resuscitation. My ethnography suggests that in households which worship Lokkhi, narratives of family jointness, nuclearity, working women, housewives are all woven together through experiences of wellbeing and peace; while in those which worship Manasa, experiences of fear, death, and niyoti (fate) often dominate Through such a class/caste entangled group, tied narratives of fertility, purity, death, and scare, and the conch’s sound-world,. I hope to intuit some common Bengali Hindu understandings of the experience of home/shongshar
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
