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Ishita Banerjee-Dube studied at Calcutta and conducted her
research at Heidelberg and London. She is presently Associate Professor at
the Centre for South Asian Studies, El Colegio de Mexico. She is also
the author of Divine Affairs: Religion, Pilgrimage and the State in
Colonial and Post Colonial India.
Ishita Banerjee-Dube continues her tales of faith and time in
her new book. The focus is on the present state of Orissa, in
eastern India, and the lens through which we get a
glimpse into Banerjee-Dube's world is that of the Mahima Dharma,
a religious and social sect that emerged in the 1860s in the
wake of a devastating famine. The founder was Mahima
Swami (Mukunda Das, d. 1875), supposedly the human form of
the Absolute, who broke through caste barriers by accepting
cooked rice from untouchables but declining it from the ritually
pure—the Brahmins.
Mahima Dharma, much in the style of the Lutheran
Reformation that rebelled against the practices of the corrupt Catholic
church by popularising direct devotion to the Holy Trinity in
16th century Germany, eschewed temples and idols and advocated, instead,
direct worship of an all pervasive, formless Absolute. This formless
Absolute was declared, in the Mahima Dharma cult, equally accessible to
all. The subaltern cult of Mahima Dharma, therefore, dealt a blow to religious mediation
through temples, to idol worship and, most important of all, to the centralized Jagannatha cult
in Orissa, which has been linked with the Oriya ruling class since the
11th century. |
