Abstract
Hinduism fits well into the “sound-filled” West African religious soundscape, which is a scene of competition and conflict. This article explores the soundscape of devotional singing, mantras, and prayers as a central part of the embodiment and embedment of Hinduism among Africans in Ghana, where the Indian diaspora has been relatively small and the indigenous movement of Hinduism entirely through African initiative. Using ethnographic and written sources to examine the Hindu Monastery of Africa, founded by the Ghanaian monk Swami Ghanananda in 1975, I examine how the oral and aural popular devotions crafted by the swami have shifted attention away from worship through idols toward sensory exploration of the unmanifest form of the divine. Such practices have made irrelevant the issues of translatability and conversion found in other religions. The Hindu Monastery’s sound-production as a communal calling—without respect to language or school of Hindu teaching—has created unexpected new directions in public piety, including the celebration in Ghana of the annual Sabarimala pilgrimage to a sexually ambiguous deity that has in India been the scene of protest over gender and caste discrimination. The Monastery has transformed into a sanctuary for singers and seekers of all religions, including many Indian migrants and gurus, as well as an Indian woman swami, giving Hinduism a new life in Ghana following the death of Swami Ghanananda in 2016.
Highlights
Follow this and additional works at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr Part of the African History Commons, Hindu Studies Commons, and the New Religious Movements
Soon after the untimely death of his mother in 1945, Kwesi Essel started what he described as a prayer camp in his hometown of Senya Beraku, a fishing village in southern Ghana.[1]
What was probably an eclectic prayer camp concerned with spiritualism rather than religion grew into a community of thousands affiliated with the Hindu Monastery of Africa (HMA), headquartered in the Odorkor area of Accra.[2]
Summary
Soon after the untimely death of his mother in 1945, Kwesi Essel started what he described as a prayer camp in his hometown of Senya Beraku, a fishing village in southern Ghana.[1]. Essel’s own journey began when he started to collect pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses from catalogue advertisements for Indian astrologers and talismans, such as rings.[26] Krishna, a god who was so dark that he was shown in blue, was pictured with snakes and dancing women, which tapped into a deep vein of West African art and worship of Mami Wata, a water deity of African and African diasporic communities.[27] Yet, in apparent defiance of his teacher, Ghanananda wanted to go beyond the visual appeal of the blue god and explore more esoteric visual representations of the lingam, the aniconic symbol of generativity associated with Shiva, the destroyer god Beyond that, he sought to create a more holistic Hindu cultural repertoire, forgoing image for a focus on sound as sacred. Swami Ghanananda used the words of the Divine Life founder, Swami Sivananda, to construct a different order of pleasures, with sound enhanced over sight to “please the mind” and lead a person to purity and clarity.[33]
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