Emotion Objectified in Food Ritual

I turn now to consider sources of variation between traditions. Sects have a different view of emotion than does the popular tradition. In sectarian traditions the five basic emotions of bhakti are sorted out and codified, and one emotion is generally chosen above others for worship in the sect; in the popular view, emotions are fickle and change, depending on where one is in Braj and what the festive occasion might be. Food rituals in each tradition provide a setting that must be culturally comprehended or appraised; that is, comprehension is the experience that constitutes the emotion in question. As I will show in greater detail below, emotion is constructed in food ritual through certain performance codes, which vary from tradition to tradition. Examples of performance codes include foods themselves (their variety and amounts), whether these foods are visually displayed in the temple, the nature of the culinary art in the sect, and the degree of culinary change and elaboration across the festive cycle. Additional factors to be considered are the

identity of cooks (Brahmans or ascetics), the attention given to purity rules in cooking, the presence or absence of food categories based on a scale of purity, and the importance given to food vis-à-vis other forms of sensory expression in the sect.

The Vallabhite Sect and Maternal Emotion

The maternal love (vatsalya bhava) of Krishna's foster mother, Yashoda, is the favored emotion for Vallabhites.^[14] Worship centers on icons of two- or four-armed Krishna or of Krishna as a crawling toddler with one arm upraised, butterball in hand. Icons are housed in temples (haveli) whose interiors and ritual artifacts theatrically recreate the Braj of Krishna's childhood down to the most minute detail (see Bennett, this volume). Considerable attention is lavished on cuisine in the sect, and Vallabhites are the undisputed gourmets of Hinduism (Toomey 1986). Sumptuous offerings play oil against other sensory media in worship (e.g., painting, flower arrangement, music, and poetry). This array of ritual and ceremonial forms is thought to manifest outwardly an inner emotion, namely maternal love, and offer an incentive (bhavana) to developing this inner emotion in all who practice devotion.

Conceptions of motherhood and the experience of motherly love in the sect arc modeled on cultural definitions of motherhood in the Indian kinship system. In their analysis of the latter, Vatuk (1982) and Das (1976) explain that biological ties between a mother and her child are backstaged, that is, not given public expression, in the conduct of Indian family life. So as not to seem too possessive of her child, and hence perceived as self-centered by other members of her husband's family, a woman is expected to deindividualize her relationship with her child to the extent that any member of the family can be entrusted with its care.^[15] Thus, everyday behavior in Indian families self-consciously recognizes the fact that the process of mothering, unlike the process of childbearing, can involve any number of surrogates in addition to, or instead of, the real mother. In Vatuk's words (1982:95), "In family life the tasks of mothering should be shared, as food and space and intimacy are shared, among all of its members according to their needs and inclinations."

What it means to be a mother in India and to experience motherly love arc clearly constituted by a quite different set of cultural criteria than they arc in the West. What is more, Vallabhites transpose this familial model, in a number of interesting ways, to social and affective relations in the sect. For example, the sect refers to itself as Vallabha's family, Vallabha-kula. Caste and lineage ties are strongly emphasized in the sect's leadership; cooks, for example, must belong to specified Gujarati Brahman castes (jati). Devotees' identification with Yashoda (who is, after all, Krishna's adoptive mother rather than his natural one) metaphorically extends the notion, put forth in

the kinship system, that maternal love is something anyone, male or female, in the family-sect can experience. Lastly, ritual, so central to the sect's ideology, is conceived in terms of a culinary metonym: pusti^[*], or nourishing grace (Bennett 1983); another name of the sect is Pusti^[*] Marga, the Way of Grace. Pusti refers to a grace that nourishes, supports, and strengthens the souls of devotees. As the transactional focus of Vallabhite ritual practice, food is perhaps the chief means by which emotion is experienced in the sect. In devotees' minds the devotional process consists in nourishing the infant icon in the temple (or in one's personal possession, as the case may be) and being nourished by him in return. Thus, icons, it is believed, return the maternal affection stored up in food offerings, by showering these same offerings with pusti and keeping the ritual process in motion.

Similar attitudes are reflected in the sect's food practices. Food offerings are prepared in vast amounts and with such attention to ritual detail that they are said to reflect a mother's watchful eye for her child. "Attention means care," priests remarked, "a mother's care." And the purity rules observed by cooks and priests in this sect are far stricter than those in the other two traditions at Govardhan. Temple cuisine—an amalgam of Gujarati, Rajasthani, South Indian, and Braj cuisines—is sweet or bland, for the most part; salt and spices are kept to a minimum because these are believed injurious to Krishna's sensitive child's palate. Krishna is fed eight times daily in the temple, from the time he is awakened in the morning until he is serenaded to sleep at night. Large food festivals are another specialty in the sect. Best known of these is Ghappan Bhoga (the "Fifty-Six Delicacies"), one showpiece of the festive year at Jatipura (Mital 1975; Sivaji 1936). Fifty-six recipes, prepared five or six ways from items such as chick-pea gram, flour, milk, dry fruits, and other grains, are called for in this offering. Fifty-six baskets of each dish are, in turn, offered, bringing the potential number of offerings to 21,952 (7 × 56 × 56). The sizable offering is displayed in a temporary enclosure at the side of the hill. A theatrical backdrop is set up on the hill, and one Govardhan stone, decorated with enamel eyes and made up to resemble Krishna's face, peers out from a hole in the painted scenery. Symbolism of the number fifty-six directly relates to maternal love, for devotees say that, like Yashoda, they show their untiring love by providing Krishna with round-the-clock nourishment: eight times a day, seven days a week.^[16]

In the Vallabhite system, Krishna's experience of his own rasa crystallizes in temple ritual. In this highly metaphoric system material acts of worship are metonyms for the love-filled emotions they express. The central metonym, pusti, makes nourishment a critical quality of the love or grace that flows between devotees and Krishna. In this way, maternal affection is conceived and experienced as a grace-filled emotion that nourishes devotees' hearts in much the same way that food nourishes their bodies. In this sect food offerings objectify the closely welded domains of heart and body, spirit

and matter. To conclude, many features of the Vallabhite system—its ethos of maternal love and the metonymically related realms of the physical-material and the spiritual-emotional, distinctive to the sect's ritual practices—are nicely summarized in the following remarks by a member of this sect. (To savor some implications made in this section, I suggest that the reader go over the statement several times, substituting at appropriate places the word love for the words "wealth," "money," or "food" in the original statement.)

Whenever we visit a place of lila in Braj, we offer Krishna what his cowherd friends (gopa) and cowmaiden consorts (gopi) offered him. In our sampradaya we are admonished not to hoard wealth. Money needs to be in constant circulation, to be shared with as many others as possible. Unfortunately, we can hold on to money, but food cannot be hoarded. It will spoil if it is not shared. A single person can only cat so much food, the rest needs to be shared or it will spoil. Food, then, is the most shareable form of wealth. Food is the best thing that we can offer to god. Whatever we think is best, we offer to Krishna as bhoga. Money is not a form of bhoga. Krishna is a child. If you give him sweets, milk, or other such things, he will be pleased. Bhoga is defined as those things that give pleasure to the lord. Our sect's wealth is concentrated in food. In the Shastras it states that whatever god gives us, we must give back in return, as an offering. Food should never be prepared for its own sake; to do so is a sin. Why? Because everything we see belongs to god—it cannot be enjoyed by us unless it is first offered to him. Prasada or food is the grace by which Krishna helps us to live our lives. Next to air and water, food is the most essential thing in life. All our necessities, luxuries, everything in short, must first be offered to Krishna, as they rightfully belong to him. We use Krishna's things through his grace.^[17]

The Chaitanyaite Sect and the Amorous Emotion

If Vallabhites frame the human/divine relationship in familial terms, then Chaitanyaite ascetics at Radhakund can be said to frame devotees' experience of this same relationship in terms of an emotion that violates domestic order: madhurya bhava, the illicit love between Krishna and his consort Radha (Kakar 1986). Icons of Krishna as a comely adolescent flute player, symbolically if not visually linked in some way to Radha, replace icons of the mischievous child in this sect.^[18] Radha and Krishna's passionate love disrupts the ordered relations normally expected of men and women in Hindu society. Madhurya bhava is characterized by eroticism and ambiguity, both of which are delineated for devotees in ways specific to this cultural group. Equally critical to our understanding of the love experience in this sect is the notion of viraha (love-in-separation). For devotees the purest form of love is incomplete or frustrated love—the same love experienced in myths by suffering and forlorn gopis who have been separated from Krishna after partnering him in one of his many amorous exploits. Thus, for Chaitanyaites, the frustration of the emotions' desire for immediate union with Krishna (a condition theoreti-

cally impossible in this philosophical system) becomes the closest possible encounter with the divine.

This complex emotion is open to a wide range of interpretations in different sects and/or regions of India where it appears (see Marglin, this volume, for a discussion of this emotion in the context of Puri), even, in this case, between householder Brahman priests and ascetics in the same sect.^[19] Chaitanyaite worship practices at Radhakund reflect a decidedly ascetic view of the erotic emotion (cf. Lynch, this volume). Each asrama (monastic dwelling) in the town has an image of Radha-Krishna in its shrineroom; beside the images are placed bits of Govardhan stone (whose natural coloration is said to represent the divine pair) and votive pictures of Chaitanya and his disciples, Nityanand and the Six Goswamis of Brindaban. But ascetics emphatically state that the amount of attention given to icon worship— relative to chanting and other more aural forms of worship such as listening to readings of sacred texts—is a matter of personal choice. In other words, icon worship is not as central a focus in the worship style followed by ascetics as it is in the householder branch of this sect. Something of this ambivalence toward icons comes across in the following anecdote, told by a sadhu at Radhakund:

If a family is involved in worship, it becomes more elaborate, takes more pleasure in display and other worldly things. As a rule, we sadhus are not interested in the outward show of worship, such as one might find in temples at Brindaban, Mathura, and other places in Braj. A classic case of this involves Sanatana Goswami, himself a renouncer (virakta) and one of the six acarya of our sect, who founded the temple of Madan Mohan in Brindaban. One of his disciples, an elderly lady from Mathura, asked him to take on the worship of her family deity, a splendid image of Madan Mohan, after her death. Sanatana Goswami agreed hesitantly, saying: "I am a sadhu and do not have time to look after this little tyke's every wish. Whatever I beg in the way of food, I will share with Madan Mohan. If he is pleased with this meager amount, then I will take him into my charge." Hearing this, the deity agreed, but after several weeks of dry, stale bread, Madan Mohan called to Sanatana: "You bring roti without so much as salt. Please bring back some salt from your begging rounds, or maybe even a few sweets which I also crave." Sanatana went to his disciples and complained—"This naughty fellow is trying to kill by bhajana. Today he asks for salt and sweets. Next time he will ask for chattisa vyanjana^[*] (a large feast calling for thirty-six different dishes, elaborately prepared and offered before the deity)." When Sanatana left Brindaban and retired to Govardhan later in his life, he handed over Madan Mohan to one of his lay followers, in whose family it remains to this day.^[20]

According to ascetics, icon worship is a personal, private act conducive to an idiom of purity stressing intimacy and closeness with the deity. These same ascetics define purity as an inner state where intention precedes the

manipulation of physical substances in a controlled ritual environment. Absent entirely are large food displays and the separation of foods into ranked categories during cooking and offering, both characteristic of Brahmanical temple cuisine.^[21] Offerings are fairly simple, consisting mostly of rice, spiced pulses and other grains, and stewed vegetables. Sweets, the mainstay of other traditions around the hill, are seldom offered. Lastly, food offerings are not parceled out to devotees, common practice with most temple prasada; rather, they are shared by devotees as a feast or common meal (vaisnava^[*] seva, after participating in long hours of group chanting and other strenuous devotional activities. In short, more sensual and visual forms of ritual expression (i.e., changing the image's clothing or food offerings on a seasonal basis) are left unstressed in this tradition, and the food offering itself takes on aspects of a feast, rather than a sweet or other culinary souvenir to be taken away from the temple by pilgrims.

Attitudes toward food offerings at Radhakund are similar in several respects to those described by Audrey Hayley (1980) for Vaishnavas in Assam. First, rice (called anna, life's breath, that on which life depends), which is given high moral evaluation in the eastern states of India, is the food offering par excellence in both religious communities. Second, they share the view that the collective religious experience itself is the living body of Krishna, superior not only to his iconic representation but even to the god himself. This collective experience is embodied in food offerings which have been transformed by sound into the four constituent parts of worship: god, name, guru, and devotee. In this view, the food offering reconstitutes the central importance of the devotional act itself and the devotees who perform it. Food offerings therefore make substantial the spiritual intentions behind devotional acts; concomitantly, consumption of these offerings is believed to sustain devotees in further acts of community worship.

Emotion in the Folk Tradition at Mount Govardhan

In the Braj folk tradition I find not one or two emotions, emphasized over the others, but an amalgam, a medley of emotions playing harmoniously off against one another as one moves across the sacred landscape. Moodiness and sentimentality permeate Braj culture, giving the region an ambience of sweetness and solitude in some places, of boisterousness and prankish good humor in others. Entire towns are said to be saturated with one emotion or another, depending on the emotional tones of the lila that took place there. Residents of certain towns are accorded masculine or feminine qualities by virtue of their association with gopas or gopis who lived there before them. As a key or dominant symbol in Braj cosmology, Mount Govardhan is thought to preside over and enfold within itself the many teeming emotions of Brai lila.^[22]

Govardhan hill means many things to many people. To members of the

Vallabhite sect, the hill is especially sacred because their principal icon, Sri Nathji, sprang from one of its cracks at Jatipura; to Chaitanyaites, the hill still resounds with the echo of Krishna's flute and the memories of his afternoon love play with Radha and the other cowmaidens. In the folk conception, shared by sectarian groups as well, the hill connects a wide array of referents: it is alternately Krishna's natural body, a mountain of food (Annakuta), a bestower of boons, and the source of the region's agricultural growth and renewal. The hill is semantically open, capable of exegesis at various levels, from that of sectarian literati to the views of simple peasants who come on pilgrimage here every full moon (purnamasi^[*]) to pledge their devotion to the mountain in return for good fortune and prosperity. Devotees of all persuasions agree that Krishna-Govardhan condenses into one ritual object both Krishna's many visual images, referred to by hundreds of thousands of melodious-sounding names or epithets, and the welter of emotions stored up in these images. Depending upon one's perspective, Krishna is seen in the stones in different ways. In just one example, peasants who come to Govardhan regularly see the hill as a folk deity: the "king of hills," the protector of cows, and the provider of boons and Bounty (daniraya).

Food ritual in the folk tradition is relatively fluid and unsystematic when compared to sectarian practices. In Govardhan's main temple—the place where locals say the hill's mouth (mukharavinda) is located—the temple image is comprised of two Govardhan stones, treated half like a temple icon and half not.^[23] For most of the day the stones are left unadorned so that pilgrims can enter the temple and feed them directly with their own hands. Local Brahmans act as guides in this process, in contrast to the way officiants might be expected to act in temples that house consecrated icons. Foods offered are simple sweets and milk—not the products of a sophisticated temple cuisine, but foods bought in the marketplace and associated with feelings of pleasure, well-being, and auspiciousness (subha), in the festive and ceremonial cycle of North India (Madan 1987:48-71).^[24] Folksongs and pilgrimage ditties, like the Govardhan Calisa (a forty-line prayer sung by pilgrims), mention foods by name and express the idea that Krishna is a simple peasant who shares pilgrims' food in a spirit of joyous, easy reciprocity.

This same flexibility is demonstrated in numerous other local food practices. Priests and pilgrims generally admit to a relaxed view of ritual: "Ritual implies a distance of some sort between man and god. This distance has no place at Govardhan, where both man and god are part of nature. Images in this temple are svayam^[*] prakat^[*], that is, spontaneously manifested in nature, without need of priestly intervention to establish them in the temple or to maintain their sanctity in the future."^[25] Practices in the local temple attenuate the daily format followed in iconic worship. Unlike icons, which are dressed first thing in the morning and served eight or so daily meals, the mukharavinda temple's stones are dressed only after four o'clock, when the

heaviest hours of pilgrimage traffic are over. Only then do the stones appear as anthropomorphic likenesses, with enamel eyes and artificial limbs attached, wearing brightly colored clothes, crowns, and silver jewelry. Similarly, the eight meals of standard temple worship are abbreviated to three: sweets in the morning, a noontime meal of grains and pulses, and warm milk and more sweets at night. The temple does not have kitchen facilities per se; meals are purchased from vendors in the market and offered by pandas without any provisions to shield the images from public view.

Pilgrims are allowed considerable latitude in how they choose to worship in the temple. Those, who can afford it, bring clothes and jewelry for the temple images and worship them with large amounts of rich and varied foods, pails full of milk, incense, fresh flowers, and so on. Others, with less means at their disposal, offer small clay thimbles of milk and popcorn-sized bits of pulled sugar with cardamom seed centers. Finally, as I mentioned earlier in connection with the Annakuta celebration, the aesthetic environment in local temples is particularly charged on festival days. For commercial reasons, temples are draped in strings of colored bulbs on these occasions. With their varied and extravagent food displays and the many songs and performances all around, these festivals create, through a pleasant blend of music, food, and pageantry, a savory experience of Lord Krishna for pilgrims.