Mumbai's faith-food debate over temple traditions

Mumbai was not always a city. It was once seven islands, separated by mangroves and tidal waves, each home to several goddesses, who were fed fish, chicken, mutton and toddy by the local residents -fisherfolk, toddy tappers, salt makers and rice farmers.Two goddesses deserve mention: Gauri and Ekavira. Every year, during the rains, Gauri follows her son, Ganesha, into people's houses. While Ganesha receives only vegetarian offerings, Gauri relishes fish, crabs, prawns and clams, food she ate before her marriage to the hermit Shiva.Ekavira, meanwhile, sits in the margins, on the mountains and caves around Mumbai. She was a princess named Renuka, who was beheaded by her own axe-yielding son, Parashuram, on orders of her husband, the Brahmin Jamadagni, after being accused of harbouring adulterous thoughts. Later, the husband resurrected the wife. But she remained impure, so she stayed at the frontier, receiving food of marginalised people - chicken, mutton and toddy, which she once ate in her father's house. Her devotees call her Yellamma, everyone's mother.Gauri and Ekavira are both meat-eating mothers of vegetarian gods. No one had a problem with this arrangement until merchants arrived. Merchants of all castes and creeds came to Mumbai: Portuguese, British, Muslims from Konkan and Cambay, Parsis, Jains and Vaishnavas from Gujarat, Banias from Rajasthan. They traded first in opium, then cotton, then in the stock market and now in real estate. The Europeans built churches, Muslims built mosques, Parsis built agiaries. They all ignored the goddess of the natives, who ate fish, mutton and chicken just like them.However, that was not the case with the vegetarian merchants. Some of these merchants identified Mumbai's powerful local goddesses with the many female guardians of hermit-teachers. Others chose to worship Mahalakshmi of Mumbai as the lotus-loving vegetarian consort of Vishnu, even though a lion stands before her shrine. They ignored the fact that in Maharashtra, for centuries, Mahalakhsmi is the local title of the warrior-goddess Bhavani.Over time, the migrant merchants have become rich and powerful. And they have started exerting influence on policies, even temple policies. As Hinduism came to be defined as a religion, ignoring its caste-based diversity, the vegetarian lobby (Brahmin and Vaishya) took it upon themselves to declare all Hindu gods and goddesses as vegetarian. This was code for purity. So now they are insisting on saving goats and roosters on grounds of compassion.Many buy into these evocative arguments. But the argument disappears when the mangroves of the coastline and forests inside the city are systematically destroyed to make way for giant infrastructure projects, complete with manicured gardens and marble temples. Those disgusted by offering of fish to Gauri and goats to Ekavira do not see the destruction of entire ecosystems as 'himsa'. Profit clearly trumps compassion.Migration always creates conflict, especially when the migrants become rich and powerful and seek to change local traditions. Quarrels over temple food seems petty. But it is not. It is a quarrel about who owns the sacred, who defines the divine, and whose history gets to count. The one who pays more taxes, or the one who remains true to the most ancient traditions of the land.Mumbai today is pulled between the financially powerful Gujarati merchant lobby and politically powerful Marathi lobby, with vegetarian castes increasingly siding with the merchants. Fishmongers are being told not to enter buildings. Neighbours told not cook meat on festival days. Abattoirs are being shut to respect religious sentiments of the rich.When the Bombay Presidency was dissolved after Independence and states were reorganised on linguistic lines, Maharashtrians won Bombay much to Gujarati disappointment. But the city remained cosmopolitan in a way that Madras did not. When the Madras Presidency was divided, Chennai became emphatically Tamil. Telugus departed for Hyderabad. Kannadigas made their way to Mysuru, Mangaluru and Bengaluru. The cosmopolitan memory of that city was erased. Nobody remembers it.Mumbai did not erase itself. The Hindi film industry stayed. Marathi theatre thrived alongside Gujarati and Parsi theatre. The city remained a meeting point of several cultures and linguistic groups. This is its gift, and also its wound - because cosmopolitanism, when unmanaged, can become a mechanism by which the original inhabitants are quietly pushed to the periphery of their own land.As Hindi is being imposed on non-Hindu speaking Indian, the Maharashtrian wonders why is it unreasonable to spotlight Marathi in Mumbai, the city of Tilak and Ambedkar, Savarkar and Gokhale? Are noble ideals of diversity and inclusion being manipulatively used to dilute the local language and traditional food habits? To accommodate the rich merchants, and their purity-conscious monastic gurus, must Gauri be denied her fish and Ekavira her meat?

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/jXGPd1r