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.