Unravelling of the Number 16 in Corporeality, Percussion, and the Bengali Hindu Cosmos: The Experience of the Body/Mṛdaṅga

Abstract

AbstractThis paper analyses how the body and sacred drum, mṛdaṅga—used as the rhythm-accompaniment of Bengal’s devotional music dedicated to deities, Rādhā–Kṛṣṇa (kīrtana)—are cultivated and experienced as homologous, mirror-reflections of a macrocosmic sonic buzz, Nāda-brahman. Dimensions of cosmic/acoustic transcendence and its materialising potential as the body and instrument are explored through the number 16. 16 is analysed as an unfolded, expanded expression of what Yoga texts describe as the unstruck drone, AUM̐, or Nāda-brahman, composed of 3½ (4-fold) parts, exactly like the Tantric kuṇḍalinī, spiralled as the feminine, sonic power at the spinal base. I argue that these Yogic, Tantric, and devotional ontologies come together in Bengal’s mahā-mantra: 16 nāma (names) 32 akṣara (syllables), or Hare Kṛṣṇa chant, which practitioners say, constitute both the body and mṛdaṅga. Based on decade-long ethnographic work with Bengal Vaiṣṇavas, and mṛdaṅga’s makers, players, and sound meditators, studying expert techniques, oral traditions of esoteric poems and myths relating the body–mṛdaṅga as mirroring agents, and through philosophy of sound readings in Yoga and Tantra, I argue that the meditative body’s transcendental potential is analogous with mṛdaṅga’s sounding. Both these vessels are constituted through various classifications of number 16: evident in the body’s/drum’s constructions, breathing, rhythming, tonality, and being. The body becomes the drum and vice-versa, and these resonant vessels throb with Nāda-brahman’s vibration, or AUM̐’s/16’s cosmic pulsations. In making the mṛdaṅga, the body externalises inner aural potential, and while playing it, fuses the body’s and drum’s constitutive buzzing hum, AUM̐, through their own immanent materialities.