The Silent Killer

The Ass as Personification of Illness in North Indian Folklore

Authors

  • Fabrizio M. Ferrari University of Chester Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/rosa.v7i1-3.249

Keywords:

Adalpura, ass, disease, donkey, illness, religion and nature, Śītalā, smallpox goddess, Varanasi, vernacular Hinduism

Abstract

Sitala ('the Cold One'), a mother goddess worshipped in Northern India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, is traditionally represented as a beautiful young lady riding a donkey. But the ass is a rather marginal character in both oral narratives and devotional/auspicious literature. Unlike the majority of divine mounts in classic and popular Hinduism, the animal has no proper name and is speechless. Vernacular and Sanskrit literatures do not indulge in descriptions, nor do they mention its gender. In brief, the donkey is an annihilated mythological character. In this article I will discuss the ass as a living symbol of illness. My analysis will examine narratives in Sanskrit and vernacular (Hindi, Bhojpuri and Bengali) texts where the ass is associated with goddesses of death, disease and misfortune. By reflecting on several years of fieldwork in India, I will then confute past and present readings of Sitala as a 'smallpox goddess' and will explore the role of the ass as a metonym for illness. So rather than being disease per se, Sitala is a controlling deity, a performance symbolically rendered through riding the ass. Besides shedding new light on the worship of an extremely popular goddess, this article eventually reflects on the origin of mechanisms of cultural blame and pollution originated at the convergence of the praxis and social behaviour of human and non-human animals (as well as other-than-human persons) in Northern India.

Author Biography

  • Fabrizio M. Ferrari, University of Chester

    Fabrizio M. Ferrari was educated in Indology at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and received his PhD from SOAS in 2005 for a study on popular Hinduism in West Bengal. He taught South Asian Religions and Religious Studies at SOAS and now, as a senior lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Chester, specialises in the study of popular Hinduism and folklore. He has published articles and book chapters on disease goddesses and healing rituals. His first book is on the Bauls of Bengal (Oltre il confine, dove la terra è rossa. Canti d’amore e d’estasi dei bāul del Bengala, Ariele, 2001), while his new work discusses the gājan festival of Bengal (Guilty Males and Proud Females. Negotiating Genders in a Bengali Festival, Seagull, 2010). He wrote the first monograph in English on the Italian anthropologist and historian of religion Ernesto de Martino (Ernesto de Martino on Religion. The Crisis and the Presence, Equinox, 2012) and has edited the volume on Health and Religious Rituals in South Asia: Disease, Possession and Healing (Routledge, 2011). His research is mainly directed towards the study of religious folklore in the frame of Marxist anthropology. His forthcoming book is Religion and Medicine in Hindu Folklore. The Goddess Śītalā and Ritual Healing in North India (Continuum, forthcoming 2014).

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Published

2013-10-08

Issue

Vol. 7 No. 1-3 (2013)

Section

Fifth Tantra: Awe, Fear, Death

License

© Equinox Publishing Ltd.

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How to Cite

Ferrari, F. M. (2013). The Silent Killer: The Ass as Personification of Illness in North Indian Folklore. Religions of South Asia, 7(1-3), 249-270. https://doi.org/10.1558/rosa.v7i1-3.249