Babas and the State

Though Beriya Baba criticized the sarkar, the government, and its representatives the police, he proudly told us that the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi herself had sent him a letter. The tea shop men told me that another prime minister, Charan Singh, had visited Baba years back. "He swears at all of them," they assured me. Baba's curses are not only heard to be powerful, they are powerful. Politicians come to collect them.

Stanley Tambiah, in his study of the Thai Buddhist cult of amulets, broadened the Weberian notion of charisma to include its objectification and translocation through economies of force or exchange. In concluding, he notes that ascetic masters claiming supranormal powers "have been taken up and assiduously visited by the country's politicians, bureaucrats, and intelligentsia—especially from the metropolis." Like the amulets in which a saint's charisma is recognized to be embedded, the visit to a saint itself becomes a fetishized commodity, which ruling elites with increasingly questionable legitimacy collect. Tambiah indicates: "The political center is losing its self-confidence, but it has not lost its might; it searches for and latches onto the merit of the holy men who are the center of religion but peripheral to its established forms."^[23]

The visit, in Uttar Pradesh in India, to a superannuated saint allows for the transfer of charisma through the several sensory pathways through which the baba and the political visitor mix their substance, and the various media record and disseminate the transaction. Intergenerational charismatic transfers increasingly depend upon the image of the transfer, suggesting that the process Tambiah records is dual: the politician's personal need for a renewable source of old age charisma, and the necessary production of simulacra of the transaction for its effectiveness.

Each of these sensorial modes can be thus approached both in terms of an anthropology and a political economy of the senses.^[24]Seeing the baba, in the first instance, is a form of darshan. As Eck has noted, darshan can be a central act of

Hindu worship; seeing and being seen potentiates a transfer of substance between deity and devotee, and the act extends to holy persons:

When Mahatma Gandhi traveled through India, . . . they would throng the train stations for a passing glimpse of the Mahatma in his compartment. Similarly, when Swami Karpatri, a well-known sannyasi who is also a writer and political leader, comes to Varanasi to spend the rainy season "retreat" period, people flock to his daily lectures not only to hear him, but to see him. However, even an ordinary sannyasi or sadhu is held in esteem in traditional Hindu culture. He is a living symbol.^[25]

The examples of Gandhi and Karpatri are instructive in other, quite different, ways. Shahid Amin has explored the complexity of Gandhi darshan in eastern Uttar Pradesh, suggesting that peasants and landlords took away different and often opposed forms of charismatic empowerment from the phenomena of massive Gandhi darshan rallies in the early 1920s.^[26] The darshan of the late Karpatri, whose house I chanced to rent and who haunted the memories of Marwari Mataji and of the Tambe brothers discussed above, differently helped to realize the various projects of his urban anti-Chamar supporters and his royal patrons. Similarly, the charisma of the politician's Devraha Baba darshan became an increasingly contested site in the 1980s, and the effectiveness of living symbols came to depend upon the effectiveness of media management.

Tasting as a mode of charismatic transfer establishes a symbolic hierarchy between the charismatic source and the recipient who is willing to accept the theoretically polluted but auspicious leftovers of the deity or saint. In the commensal transaction of a puja, the worshipper offers appropriate foodstuffs to God, who consumes the essence of the gift and allows the giver to partake of the seemingly intact but now "leftover" portion as the grace of prasad. Beriya Baba offered me his own food—literal leftovers, in his case—as prasad. The transaction was more complex because as a patron I had given him money. The hierarchy established through an exchange of coded substance, in the sense of Marriott and his students, which confirmed my willingness to accept his pollution, rhetorically extinguished the traces of a different hierarchy in which Baba was a client. When one gave to widows, the gift was unidirectional, save in the collective institution of the bhajan ashram through the mediation of a management who kept most of the gift, and here food was exchanged solely for voice.

Touching is similarly a mode of establishing the unambiguous direction of the flow of charismatic power. The tea stall men and the boatman reminded me to stay off of Baba's boat. To step aboard would have been to lift myself above him as well as to bring to earth, in a sense, his distanced position. Central to the embodied performance of hierarchy was the polarity of head and foot. For Devraha Baba, given his position on a platform on stilts, encounters with visitors were more easily managed. The main practice for the politician taking darshan of Devraha Baba was to have Baba place his feet directly on the politician's head. The image—simultaneously that of extreme obeisance and powerful legitimation—

appeared in newspapers throughout the country whenever an important politician came to Devraha Baba for darshan. More than any other sensory mode, the choreography of the touch translated into the national darshan of the aged saint with his feet on the prime minister, an image akin to the politician-son touching the feet of the old widow-mother but with one critical difference: no matter how opportunistic politicians might try to stage-manage their encounters with Baba, he remained a source of charisma whose presence was never exhausted by the hypocrisy of the filial scene.

Finally, charisma is transferred through its hearing. Beriya Baba cursed, and his supplicants took away blessings. Devraha Baba would sit silently in front of his little hut during those festivals when he was available for darshan, and would not speak. The tension for the listener would grow, until Baba would suddenly begin to offer a discourse, usually on Krishna devotion as a path opposed to the pleasures of this world. Like Beriya Baba's voice, Devraha's voice challenged in its unpredictability: he would withhold his presence and voice, sitting hidden inside his aerial hut and then would suddenly appear, sit silently in view, and then suddenly speak.

The importance of the voice draws more on generational than divine transaction. The old body becomes a source of powerful charisma when it no longer constitutes a threat to children seeking legitimation of the morality of their appropriation of the household. Like Buddhist amulets, old bodies enshrined in well-kept dying spaces become powerful icons and indices of the moral legitimacy of a family. The old body, in a sense, is fetishized, and as such becomes available as a critical marker within the legitimating discourse of the nation-state and its discontents.

But familiar old bodies degenerate, provoking the continual crises of Seva anxiety. The charisma of older male authority—among politicians, figures from Devi Lal and Laloo Prasad Yadav to the late N. T. Rama Rao and M. G. Ramachandran before their final decline come to mind—must eventually give way to the abjection of the weak old father forced to beg like a dog. The baba out there—as a sannyasi already ritually dead, as a latter-day rishi living apart from society—offers a voice that cannot devolve into lament. When babas threaten, as in the nursery stories of child-stealing babas with large sacks, told to children, or as in the collapse of the language of witchcraft, international conspiracy, and childlifting babas into the 1996 lakarsunghva panic, they threaten in an uncanny conjuncture of the domestic and interstitial old man, as a double to the father. As authority and charisma out there, they mirror the father as a site of male authority; as the domestic old man, they are a simulacrum of male authority, its pale shadow—"without speech, just making the motions of being human"—save for the sound of an infinite and ever more impossible desire, the bark.

The old "babas" beaten in 1996 were often with children, usually their grandchildren or other relations, when they were seen and heard to be uncanny and dangerous, and what was very hard to read was the nature of their desire. For most old men with access to the rhetorical possibilities of Sannyasa , even a partial relocation of their identity from home to interstice was insufficient to transform their

relations with family and neighbors from the pathetic request of the old grandfather to the inviolate liminality of the luftmensch.

Every sixteen years, the great astrological festival the Kumbh Mela is held in Allahabad, the closest city of similar size to Varanasi and also a pilgrimage site of long standing. Sannyasis and other interstitial holy men and women from throughout the country gather along with millions of pilgrims in what has become perhaps the largest single assemblage of persons in human history. A city is erected for the sannyasis and others, a literal center out there in Victor Turner's sense.^[27] In 1989 as in previous Kumbh Melas, Devraha Baba would not camp within the bounds of the interstitial city, this decentered center. A sannyasi's sannyasi, he maintained his separation even during the festival's collapse of the boundaries.

I attended the Allahabad Kumbh Mela that year along with my friend Pankaj Mishra and an estimated 15 million others. To visit Devraha Baba, we had to walk for several kilometers away from the tent city at the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna, along the sandy banks. Hundreds of pilgrims formed a line across the sand ahead of us, making the same trek. Baba's management had set up a corral of sorts, into which we pushed our away. Inside, I saw Baba's familiar hut on stilts; I had seen it at other pilgrimage centers, but had never had the chance for a Devraha darshan. Baba was inside the hut, not visible to us, when we drew as close as we could. Hundreds of villagers were waiting for darshan and a sermon. Closest to Baba's hut, several well-dressed people in suits and fashionable saris waited with photographers in attendance. Someone nearby told his companion: "Politicians." They too were part of the expected scene.

While we all waited, a man in a politician's pressed white pajama-kurta and paunch gave us a long talk on the message of Devraha Baba and Hindu dharma. The talk was uninspiring, save for the fact that already by 1989 any linkage of the importance for the nation of "Hindutva," or Hindu-ness, particularly in the presence of politicians, suggested the then-coalescing rhetoric of the recently revitalized populist Hindu right. Despite his offering his feet, with detached equanimity, to Congress, Janata Dal, and Bharitiya Janata Party [BJP] supplicants alike, Baba's superannuated charisma was coming to signify the meaning of tradition in very specific ways. The man exhorted the audience to go and buy a three-volume set on the life and worship of Krishna, available at the edge of the enclosure, which Baba would then bless with his feet. A line of peasants formed by the book counter.

Baba's head briefly stuck itself out the door of the hut and then disappeared back inside. He looked, I thought, far older than Beriya Baba. Many Banarsis with whom I talked about Devraha Baba told me the same routinized narrative of how old Baba must be:

When I was a boy, my grandfather took me to see Deoria Baba [another name for Devraha, who is said to come from the town of Deoria]. He looked the same then as

he does now. And my grandfather told me that when he was young, he was taken to see Baba, and was old then, too!

Grandfathers take grandsons who become grandfathers themselves; Baba remains the stable icon anchoring this narrative of skipped generations. The visit to the baba suggests a framing of time—the infamous "cyclical time" of the non-West^[28] —distinct from the proximate temporality between father and son dependent on the father's ageless—sixty but strong—body; A. R. Radcliffe-Brown long ago suggested that the social reproduction of culture and time worked through these two modes, parents to children and grandparents to grandchildren.^[29] Each mode presumes a certain sort of body in time: the relation between father and son presumes the ageless body of the father, able to carry its hegemony agelessly without the signs of decrepitude locating and delimiting its power; the relation between grandfather and grandson presumes the body of the ageless—but aged —baba, not that of the grandfather himself who may relationally framed as weak and in decline but of Old Age out there, transfigured. Devraha Baba's old age is the sign of a different order of culture and power, and it is an order intensely appealing to politicians constituted by a different order. I heard the grandfather story frequently, its details seldom varying from telling to telling. As an urban folk tale, it reflected both the importance of Devraha's really being old—against the easy suspicion lavished on lesser figures like Beriya Baba—and the power of the interstitial old man as a sign of an alternate masculine order of age and power than the dynamics of generational domesticity.

Devraha's authenticity was maintained by his firm colonization of the periphery. Not only Indira Gandhi but members of both Congress and the various opposition parties in the 1989 national elections sought out Baba's feet, photographers on hand. The home minister in Rajiv Gandhi's cabinet, the Sikh Buta Singh, came to Devraha Baba in search of Hindu legitimacy. BJP politicians brought bricks for the Ram temple to be built on the site of the disputed mosque in Ayodhya; Baba placed his feet on these, too. In the year following the Kumbh Mela, the last year of his long life, Baba became increasingly identified with a "pro-Hindu" political stance, less and less of the antinomian center out there. Brought down to earth perhaps, in the end, by the colonization of the forest as explicitly Hindu, as opposed to antinomian, space, Baba died in 1990.

Until the end, many besides the powerful continued to take Baba's darshan, his voice, his books, and if fortunate, his feet. Baba's longvity, I was frequently told, came from his mastery of yoga. Many yoga masters in Varanasi were known to have lived for generations through both their accumulated siddhis or "mind-overmatter" powers, and more specifically through breath control. As the number of one's breaths in the course of a lifetime is fixed, a venerable yogic idea, a key to longevity is learning to breathe less often. Even if one didn't attempt the practice of yoga, the charismatic transaction with the master of his or her body was itself an embodied encounter. Devraha, the master of the body, offered its gifts as so

many siddhis: health, fertility, potency, power, wealth. Unlike the hegemonic order of the politician and father, which worked time by denying its effects—like the agelessness of the "sixty years young" adult able to defer the claims of old age—the order of the charismatic baba insisted on its elaborated embodiment: the 140 year old visage, the matchstick limbs, the feet gingerly lowered, the careful location in a tree, or on a boat.