Paper presented to BRADLEY P. HERTEL and CYNTHIA A. HUMES, eds.,

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991)

The Marriage and Cult of Lat Bhairava:What it means to be a Banarasi even Today 3

The origin myth of Bhairava, the terrifying aspect of Shiva, found in the Puranas attests to the intimate and indissoluble link between Benares and Bhairava. After having emerged from the pillar of fiery light (jyotir-linga) to violently cut off the head of Brahma, the "skull-bearing" (Kapalika) Bhairava had to wander about for twelve years in order to expiate his brahmanicide. Finally he reached Benares where the skull of Brahma, and with it the sin of Brahminicide, fell into a tank appropriately named the "liberation of the skull" (kapalamocana). Yet even after his absolution, the "Black" (Kal) Bhairava remained at Kapalamocana as the "sin-eater" (Papa-bhakshana) to devour the impurities of future pilgrims to the city of final liberation (moksha). Paradoxically, Bhairava, the (ex-) criminal, also reigns as the policing magistrate (Kotwal) in Benares, entrusted with the duty of preserving its sanctity not only by barring its access to sinners but also by punishing those who indulge in sins even within the confines of the holy city. The "punishment of Bhairava" (bhairavi-yatana) burns up the accumulated sins of seekers of liberation and is inflicted on everyone at the moment of death in this "great cremation-ground" (mahashmashana). This punishment was administered at a pillar (lat) whose stump, now called "Lat Bhairo," still stands beside the present Kapalamochana tank where it is worshipped as the phallic representation (linga) of Bhairava. The pillar was the focus of fanatical violence between Hindus and Muslims during the famous "Lat Bhairo riots" of 1809, which eventually evolved by 1811 into a common political agitation directed against the excesses of colonial rule, without however resolving the question of the Lat. In the larger context of the recent revival of Hindu-Muslim claims and clashes over other holy sites in India, Lat Bhairo provides some insights into the manner in which human violence is channeled into and regulated by symbolic archetypes. Like that other holy city par excellence, Jerusalem, which is claimed alike by all the children of Abraham, Banaras lives as that inner space where the forces of modernity continue to re-enactwillingly or unwillinglythe still unresolved conflicts both between and within the religions traditions of man.

The Lat Bhairava pillar was almost completely levelled during the Banaras riots of 1809. Today this Hindu icon is a mere stump, 3 feet thick and 7 to 8 feet high, that stands stubbornly but precariously on a slightly elevated stone platform in the midst of a Muslim idgah, where the devout of both faiths continue to pray and offer their respective sacrifices. Entirely encased under protective copper sheeting installed after the riots by the District Magistrate, it is separated from the idgah only by a small enclosing brick wall which can nevertheless be overlooked by Indians of higher stature. Just outside the wall and to the north is the adjoining "well of Bharata" (Bharat kupa), the youngest brother of Lord Rama. Towards the south of this terrace, and 5 or 6 meters below, is a large tank named Kapalamochana, a strong well-built structure with stairs and foundation of solid stone. Many Hindus bathe here for the tank is reputed to cure women of sterility and bathing daily for 40 days can even remove leprosy. There are also some sacred trees: the branch of a tulsi that was uprooted during the riots, and particularly a pippal and a nim tree (see the map of the temple), whose "marriage" all over India is a Hindu prolongation of the Vedic sacrificial symbolism of (the union of) the asvattha and the sami trees. The shrine is located on the north-eastern part of the present city on the junction of the Grand Trunk Road with the road leading to Sarnath, and is almost a mile west of the confluence of two sacred rivers, the Varana and of course the Ganga. The open praying area of the idgah is bounded on the west by a wall with the niche (mihrab) indicating the orientation (qiblah) of Mecca, so much so that some of the kneeling Muslims in the back rows could easily end up having the Lat between them and the object of their adoration. To the stump of the original Lat, which was once famous among the Hindu population both for its antiquity and for its sanctity, is normally affixed a small mask of Bhairava (see photo 1). The divinized magistrate of Banaras appears to supervise the work of the cudgel-bearing policeman who are permanently posted in the vicinity to prevent the outbreak of fresh communal tension.

The evidence points to an "Ashokan" pillar, no doubt the one that Hiuen Tsang in 636 A.D. saw standing before a Buddhist stupa. The Hindu Mahatmyas refer to a "pillar of the great cremation-ground" (Mahashmashana-stambha) standing at the present location of the Lat. The Kashikhanda (97.64-6), which reflects the post-Islamic adaptations of the mid-14th century, speaks of Maharudra residing with his consort Uma (not in an adjoining temple but) in the pillar itself, near the "Lord of the Skull" (Kapalesha), and refers to the adjacent Kapalamochana. The Kapalikas, who were adepts of the Soma doctrine (now understood as overt sexual rites modelled on Shiva's union with Uma), generally haunted the cremation-grounds and were adepts of human sacrifice. Stories still circulating among the Muslims of the surrounding area tell of the Muslim warrior, Ghazi Miyan, having eradicated the regular human sacrifice at a temple of Somnath that would have existed near the confluence of the Varana and the Ganga. This may refer to the Maharudra temple, probably a Kapalika cult center, which Sukul claims once existed around the pillar. It must have been devastated along with the rest of the city by Qutb-ud-din Aibak, chief general of Muhammad Ghori, at the end of the 12th century. The French lapidary Tavernier saw the pillar in 1665, during the reign of Aurangzeb, within the walled gardenwith many sculptures and beautiful architectureof a mosque. Its shaft, which was 32 to 35 feet high and all of one piece, terminated in a pyramid with a large sphere. Since Bhairava functioned as Sin-Eater at both the Mahashmashana-Stambha where as Kotwal he executed the ultimate punishment, and also at Kapalamochana where as Kapalin he was freed of the ultimate crime of Brahmanicide, it is perfectly logical that, in the wake of the Muslim occupation of Omkareshvar, the heart of Hindu Kashi, Kapalamochana had come to be (re-) identified with Lat-Bhairo, where the Kapalin remains as executioner, victim and pillar of the world (Sukul, pp. 71-2, 250, 346-8).

The (Maharudra temple around the) Mahashmashana Stambha must have been the haunt of Kapalikas and Pashupatas in the pre-Muslim period. Through a general evolution well attested elsewhere in North India, even in the major Bhairava temples of Benares and Ujjain, the post-Muslim Lat seems to have been in the religious custody first of the Naths (Jogees), then the Gosains and finally the Brahmins (cf. Chalier-Visuvalingam, 1989: 159, 205-10). According to the available genealogy, the rituals were first of allwe have concrete evidence only from the 17th centuryperformed by householders of the Gosain (Gosavi) caste. The migrations of Gosavis, who functioned as merchants and bankers in the 18th and 19th century, were connected with the sale of cattle and are intimately related to the spread of Kal Bhairava. These mendicant soldier-traders, who were the largest owners of urban property in Banaras in the late 18th century and constituted (along with other mendicants?) one fourth of the city's inhabiatants in the early 19th century, were a bulwark to the politico-religious authority of the Bhumihar Maharajas of Banaras. True to the ethos of the Bhairava cult, however, this "military caste" was organized around the guru-disciple relationship and recruited its members according to ability and without any regard to caste-distinctions. Brokers between diverse social groups, they maintained the piligrimage routes and rythms on the one hand and conserved their ties with the orders of regular sadhus like the Dasnamis on the other (Cohn, 1984; Freitag, 1989b: 6, 24-25). The Gosains connected with Lat Bhairava are clearly linked with the Kanphata Jogis, its preceding custodians, for their names generally ended with Nath. None of the Gosains once connected with this temple are now alive; they must have surrendered the care of this temple about thirty years ago due to the lack of heirs. The last Gosain was a widow named Bhagavati Devi who was apparently "too friendly with the neighbouring Muslims" and also not managing the temple very well. Because of this, a Committee was formed in 1958 and its direction has been always in the hands of a Brahmin. This sociological development corresponds to the progressive purification of the Hindu mode of worship from human sacrifice to bloodless vegetarian offerings, leaving it to the Muslims to perform the intermediate goat-sacrifices during their (Baqr) Id celebrations which the "brahminized" Hindus now find rather distasteful (Kumar, 1989: 157-8).

"Near the Laut of Eedgah there is a peepul tree, and under this tree the Hindus put some idols and made it a place of their idolatry. When the Musulmans gathered together for the purposes of praying at the Eed, &c., the Brahmins on the spot remove the idols. If there happened to be any which could not be conveniently taken away they were carefully concealed with grass. The faithful on the day of Eed used to perform the sacrifice there and never met with any interruption from the Hindoos."

The earlier temple committee is now a board of 8 trustees named Lat Bhairo Prabandak Samiti duly registered under "Registration of Societies Act no. XXI of 1860." Today it is on the initiative of Bhageluram Tokedar, a rich merchant who owns two big markets in Benares, that the committee is very alive. The temple is very well managed and the daily rituals and the festivals are regularly performed. The devotees, though belonging to every strata of society, are mainly from the neighbouring area of the holy city. However, there is a small hard-core group of male devotees who particularly venerate Lat Bhairava and enjoy being with "Baba" as he is fondly called. According to the trustees, it is only in 1965 that a wall was built with the agreement of both Hindus and Muslims in order to avoid communal tensions. Nevertheless, the atmosphere remains tense and there are a great number of court cases from both sides and in the police presence day and night around the area. The well had remained closed after its destruction by the Muslims during the riots of 1809 and had almost disappeared until 1895 when the Court ordered the Muslims to pay 100 rupees as penalty and to rebuild the well (Upadhyaya, samvat 2028:5). The water of this well, which is supposedly different from that of the Ganga and the Varana flowing some distance away, is used for washing not only the utensils needed for the ritual but also (the temple of) Lat Bhairava itself. According to the local myth, Daksha came to this "well of Sita" (the chaste wife of Rama) to unwillingly give away his virgin daughter to Shiva in marriage (kanyadan). This well is usually called bharat kupa janani "the mother, the well of Bharata," which apparently derives from its role during the Ram Lila festival when its maternal waters are probably used in the coronation ritual (abhisheka) of Bharata. If we omit the name Bharat as being a later accretion, we have the name "mother (in the form of a) well" (kupa janani) and for many devotees the well is indeed the symbol of the Mother, which recalls the maternal waters of the Rigveda. Bharata ruled on behalf of his elder brother Lord Rama during his voluntary exile, and it would appear that the royal dimension of an archaic cosmogony had long been integrated along with the Lat into the Ramlila cycle. During the renactment of Rama's "reunion with Bharata" (Bharat Milap) at the nearby Nati Imli, the Maharaja of Banaras is identified not only with Rama but also with Bharata and, as front rank of the audience, with the kingdom and all its people (Kumar, 1988: 197-200; Freitag, 1989b: 208-10).

The daily rituals performed at Lat Bhairava are quite similar to that of other Shiva temples, involving decoration and adoration, as well as offering to the deity. The Lat and other images in the temple are washed with water drawn from the adjacent well, and the adoration with fire (arati) is performed before the Lat, then the well and finally the Kapalamocana tank. Apart from curd and jaggery the Lat is also offered horse-bean fried in oil, which is a substitute for meat in the mortuary rites, and some wine; sometimes fried fish is offered as well. Praises of Lat Bhairava, Kal Bhairava and the "Boy" (Batuk) Bhairava are sung and finally the one hundred and eight names of Bhairava are recited. As at other Shiva temples, the principal days are Tuesday and Sunday and also the 8th and the 14th of every lunar month. The main festivals celebrated at the Lat today are:

a) the marriage of Lat Bhairava with the well celebrated every year on the 15th (full-moon) day of the waxing fortnight of Bhadrapada (August-September).

b) jiotiya (jivatputrika-vrata). A vow observed by women for the longevity and welfare of their children on the 8th day of the waning fortnight of Ashvin (September-October) particularly at the Lakshmi Kund just west of Godaulia on Luxa Road (Eck, p. 267).

c) Ram Lila is performed near Kapalamocana tank every year since 350 years.

d) Fair with enactment (lila) of the fight between Kols and Bhils every year on the 14th of the waning fortnight of (Ashwin) september-october. The fair was already obsolete and attracting no more than a few dozen people in the mid-19th century when Sherring visited Banaras.

e) Shivaratri, Navaratra, Diwali, Bhairavashtami, Holi, etc. (ie., the most popular Hindu festivals).

While all these festivals are noteworthy, the focus here will be on the marriage of Lat Bhairava with the well. The metal "crown" (mukuta) of Bhairava is kept in the house of Bhageluram Tokedar, one of the Trustees who is no doubt the major patron of the festival. This "crown" is actually a huge moustached head with two faces like that of a warrior (see plate 6). It is apparently of quite recent origin but is said to be made of a consecrated mixture of eight minerals (ashta-dhatu) as per the prescriptions of the Kashi Khanda. Late in the afternoon of the full-moon day, the crown is carried by some devotees on a red palanquin from the house at Visesvarganj in procession to Kal Bhairava, who is considered the younger brother of Lat Bhairava (see plate 5). The modern temple is located in the Kotwalpuri district in the maze of lanes between Chaukhamba Lane, the "Main Street" of pre-modern Banaras, and Maidagin Park. The procession does not go inside the Kal Bhairava temple but merely stops in front to allow one of the Kal Bhairava temple priests to perform arati with vegetarian offerings before the crown. As the only Gosain among the otherwise Brahmin priests, he is the solitary vestige of an earlier ritual organization when the Kala Bhairava temple was in the hands of the Nath ascetics, themselves the successors of the skull-bearing Kapalikas. It is in his house, just adjacent to the temple, that the capital of the Mahashmashana Stambha is still preserved and worshipped as the "Discus-handed" or Chakrapani Bhairava. From there the procession proceeds through first Jatanabar, back to Vishveshwarganj, then through Kajimandi, Baluabir, Hanuman Phatak, Teliyana (Lat Bhairava Bazar) and Jalalipura and finally skirts the Kapalamochana tank to reach the Lat around midnight. It halts at least 50 times to perform very simple rituals for devotees, much wine is drunk during these stops. The "marriage party from the bridegroom's side" (barat) is large and accompanied by elephants, musicians, and youth performing acrobatic dances with swords. In former times, the procession was joined especially by singing prostitutes. The make-shift temple complexthe Lat, the well and the tankis heavily decorated, music is played and, in short, everything is readied to receive the bridegroom who arrives in the form of the large head of Bhairava. The well is draped with a red sari in the manner of a Hindu bride, the Lat with a yellow-silk garment (plates 4 and 6). Though the whole area is under the close vigilance of the police, there are a large number of people rejoicing with all the fanfare of a modern Indian marriage. Finally the "crown" is taken out of the red palanquin by four men to be carried in three circumambulations around the well, then around the tulsi tree (see the map of the temple). It is then mounted with great efforts on the top of the pillar (plate 6), and worshipped in a mode that is not substantially different from the daily ritual. Though during some other festivals such as Bhairavastami or Shivaratri, one may offer meat, wine and other intoxicants, the offerings during the marriage must be purely vegetarian. The priest tolls the four bells, then the devotees play cymbals and two of them play the damaru, a small hourglass-shaped double-faced drum associated with Shiva. He performs arati in front of the Lat, the 8 Bhairavas (in the order enumerated in the accompanying map of the temple) and at the corner consecrated to the goddess. Then the priest, followed by the devotees, leaves the enclosure of Lat Bhairava in order to perform the arati in front of the well and also in front of the Kapalamocana tank (plates 7 and 8). Finally the priest returns, stopping near the tulsi tree, to the Lat, where the devotees join him in singing different hymns in praise of Bhairava. The only difference between the daily ritual and that of the marriage, is the approximately hour-long havan, or fire-offering which is esential for all Hindu marriages. The main offerings during this ritual are rice, grain, semolina, ghee (clarified butter) and wine. The priest puts a religious mark of ashes (tilak) on the forehead of the male devotees and a tilak of vermillion for the female devotees. However, because it is very late in the night, the participants are mainly males. When the havan is over, the priest ties the Lat and the well together with a garland in the Hindu manner of a bridegroom and a bride. The following morning there is a simple feast for all the devotees, consisting principally of rice and pulse boiled together into a porridge which is cooked inside the precincts of Lat Bhairo. According to Bhegularam Tokedar, the expenses for the marriage amounted to approximately five thousands rupees which is quite a sum, and was covered through donations from the devotees. The crown is finally dismounted and brought back to the trustee's house under heavy police escort.

The present Kala Bhairava temple would have been, according to Sukul (1977: 203-4), the site of the pre-Muslim linga to Lord Bhairava (bhairaveshvara) with an adjacent "well of Bhairava" (bhairava-kupa), which is precisely the configuration now duplicated at the Lat. It is physically impossible to transport the Lat to be immersed in the motherly well. There is, however, the practice in Rajasthan of keeping images of Bhairava in stepped wells, and the folklore of Benares abounds in lingas being hidden in sacred wells. Between the modern Vishvanath temple and Aurangzeb's mosque, which is itself a Muslim transformation of the earlier 16th century Vishveshvar temple, stands the Jnan Vapi well. "In the beginning" long before the descent of the Ganges when there was no other water on earth, it was dug out by Shiva himself with his trident in order to cool the linga of Vishveshvar with its water. According to legend, the linga was preserved from Aurangzeb's desecration only by being thrown into the deep waters of the well. The royal inscription of the Queen of Indore, who sponsored the construction of the present Vishvanath temple, makes no mention of her having established a different linga. In their post-riot memorial of November 25, 1809 the Muslims charge that some Hindus had corrupted the Superintendent (Mutwali) of the Vishveshvar mosque. The Hindus began to worship the well and share their offerings with the Mutwali pretending that Vishveshvar had concealed himself in the well. Hindus likewise "worship with the utmost faith a stone fountain" in a mosque compound in the Daranagar quarter, and "so also was the Laut of Feroze Shah converted by them into the Laut of Bhyroo and the lower order of Hindus worshipped it" (Robinson, pp. 113-4). The position of the motherly Bharata Kupa beside the Lat on the idgah indeed replicates the situation of the well of liquid wisdom between the Vishvanath temple and the Jnana Vapi mosque. The Manikarnikeshwara linga, which stands underground at the bottom of a deep shaft, could at one time be reached by a tunnel originating on the cremation (Manikarnika) ghat. In the Puranas, this "Lord of Manikarnika" is mysteriously said to be in the middle of the Manikarnika tank (kund) itself (Eck, 1982: 246). It is this "well of the Jewelled Ear-ring" beside the cremation ghat that has the greatest cosmogonic significance in Kashi for, at the beginning of time, the city itself floated upon its primordial waters (Eck, 1982: 238-251). After all, the true form of Kashi is the Shiva linga itself, no different from the pillar of light from which Bhairava himself was born.

The fecundating powers of Bhairava's linga are revealed in Benares 8 days after the celebration of the Lat's marriagehence on the 8th of the still inauspicious waning fortnight of Ashwinas part of the vow for "long living sons" (jivatputrika) which must be performed near a pool, in this instance the Kapalamochana tank. In fact, the ceremonies are conducted on the idgah itself and couplesthose recently married and also those already blessed with childrenmake a circumambulation around the Lat (see plate 9). The day immediately following the Jivatputrika Vrata is Matri Nawami, which is reserved for the propitiation of deceased women particularly mothers. The well of the chaste Sita is, after all, the site where Daksha gave his virgin daughter Uma in marriage to the terrible Rudra, only that she might eventually throw herself as Sati into his sacrificial fire. Daksha-Prajapati's consequent decapitation in the midst of his sacrifice by Virabhadra is itself a multiform of Brahma's beheading by Bhairava. Since Bhairavashtami, the birthday of Bhairava, is the only other day when the "crown" is again mounted on the pillar, though without any fanfare, Bhairava's wedding would appear to be symbolically identical with his very birth. But the full moon of Bhadra also marks the beginning of the fortnight of the waning moon of Ashwin, "the fortnight of the manes" (pitr paksa) when the most potent funerary rituals are performed for the departed ancestors. An execution stake on the cremation ground, particularly at this most inauspicious moment, would be the last place any orthodox Hindu would wish to celebrate, much less consummate, his marriage. For the devotees, however, "Baba is beyond this kind of consideration." Though it does not speak of a marriage as such, the Kashi Khanda (100.99) already singles out the full moon of Bhadra for particular worship of the Kula Stambha. It is possible that the marriage has been revived in its present form only in the early (1906?) 20th century and the procession itself has perhaps been influenced by similar Muslim practices during Muharram (Kumar, 1988: 212, cf. 224), but the comparative evidence suggests that it derives from pre-Muslim times. Through a systematic analysis of the Newar New Year festivals, centered around the raising and felling of a wooden pole called the linga, it has been recently argued that the marriage of Lat Bhairo must be the vestige of a royal cosmogony re-enacting the symbolic death and rebirth of the king as sacrificer par excellence. Funerary rituals and notations are intrinsic to all these festivals because even real death is assimilated to an (internalized) sexual union whereby the flame of consciousness is experienced as ascending from the base of the spinal column to burst through the cranial foramen. The calendrical determinations reveal the funerary riteswhich are especially effective when the Sun is in Virgoto be themselves modelled on the scenario of the death and "matricidal" rebirth of the sacrificer from the virgin womb of the bride-mother. Though the concern for general fertility dominates the popular perception of these "marriage" festivals in Nepal and even Benares, the themes of human sacrifice and of ultimate liberation still remain in the background. The "punishment of Bhairava" undergone by all sinners who are privileged to die in Kashi is hence modelled on the decapitation of criminals with the Lat itself assuming the symbolic role of the Vedic sacrificial pole (yupa).

Banarasipan

What is the relevance of this evolution from brahminicidal Kapalikas to vegetarian brahmins, this gruesome tale of Brahma and Bhairava, of Lord Vishwanath and his terrifying kotwal, of forgotten kings and Vedic scapegoats, of sacrificial death and final liberation, to the contemporary devotees, who reveal little awareness of this esoteric scenario, and to the everyday life of the people of Banaras who hardly frequent the shrine? Since time immemorial, the positive ideal of ascetic renunciation has been so reinforced by the ubiquitous procession of corpses that the denizens of this "great cremation ground" of the universe were almost naturally imbued with a sense of outer transitoriness and inner tranquility. Though the unspoilt forests and fresh lakes where the quasi-mythical sages once roamed at ease have practically disappeared, all Banarasis stiil have the irresistible urge to leave the crowded city for (ir)regular, often daily, "outings" into quiet solitude particularly along, on or to the far side of the serene Ganga (Kumar, 1988: 83-110). The best locale however is a favorite well nourished by the subterranean Ganga and endowed with its own unique bio-chemical virtues, an aura which the Bharat Kupa Janani has somehow still retained. But Kashi is also the bastion of caste-orthodoxy that insists on outer purity, so much so that even this often impulsive "picnicking" (bahri alang), the main entertainment of Banaras, still takes on a highly ritualized form with an almost obsessive concern among the Hindus for outdoor defecation (nipatnâ), washing clothes (sâfâ lagâna) and bathing. Even the simple pleasures of outdoor cooking, strolling through the narrow twisted lanes (galis) and road-side music sessions before a makeshift shrine, all seem to constitute a generalization of (an aesthetic mood deriving from) the intense pilgrimage activity even beyond the ritual parameters otherwise prescribed for visitors from outside. Though Lord Vishwanath does embody that apex where ritual purity converges upon transcendental freedom, he still has this inalienable and endearing streak of "Pashupata" non-conformism which finds full expression in the transgressive Bhairava. The other-worldly egalitarianism of the (Shaiva) renouncers, who had died to the bondage of (the caste-) society, expressed itself within the closed fraternities devoted to the Kaula Bhairava as an unrestrained enjoyment of this world necessarily rooted in an inner assurance of spiritual mastery. It was no doubt the percolation into the general mentality of the cultural cross-currents generated and sustained by this polarity that is responsible for the paradoxical insistence in Banarasi culture on both socio-ritual hierarchy and absolute equality, the juxtaposition of material poverty and inexhaustible spiritual wealth. "The importance of worldview (jîvan darshan) is recognized and elaborated by all the people of Banaras. No matter what the origins of a person, in whichever province or community, once he adopts Banaras mitti (the earth of Banaras) and Banaras masti (the joy of life), he is lost to the rest of the world... A central feature of this worldview is the deliberate consciousness of all the people of Banaras as being equal.... Partly the equality derives from the fact of everyone being 'dependents' at Shiva's court. Partly it is the very ideal of the life-style to disregard money and harbour a tongue-in-cheek concept of raisi, or wealthiness, which consists of a self-image of acting like a lord even without wealth.... But most of all, Banaras is special and superior to other places because its people are not enslaved by work, do not care about money or hoarding it, and certainly do not like to be dominated, by getting involved with naukri (service) and tankwah (salaries). They are devoted to leisure: to music, processions, celebrations, wrestling, bathing, bhang, and going to bahri alang" (Kumar, 1988: 82). While conserving vestiges of an archaic cosmogony and a sacred geography, today the cult of (Lat) Bhairava primarily provides his devotees with a ritual skeleton, even a pretext, for enjoying each other's company in the (literally) intoxicating presence of Baba. Nowhere perhaps is this "Banarasi ethos" (banarasipan) more alive than in the temple of Batuk Bhairava which, unlike the Kala Bhairava temple, is not frequented by pilgrims and whose dynamicand often stone-drunk(Gosain) Mahant is a major patron of the various festivals at the Lat. Elizabeth had the privilege of accompanying him on a day-long Banarasi picnic with an otherwise all-male bus-load of revelers-devotees to restore a Bhuta-Bhairava temple in the forests near Vindhyachal (Chalier-Visuvalingam, 1989: 206-7). Our own highly orthodox brahmin teacher of Sanskrit and Kashmir Shaivism, whose real home was rather in Darbhanga, was an accomplished scholar of (the philosophy of) grammar, logic and Vedanta whose achievements were officially recognized by the Banaras Hindu University with the honorary title of Mahâmahopâdhyâya. He considered himself the incarnation of the philosopher-mystic Abhinavagupta, which did not prevent him from spending his evenings in bhang-induced samâdhi on the ghats simply enjoying (ânand lenâ) the atmosphere (âbohavâ) of the Ganga. The ultimate spiritual teaching and blessing with which he terminated our morning lessons was "be ever so (self-) intoxicated" (khûb mast raho). It was precisely the Kashmiri Abhinavagupta, the brahmin incarnation of Bhairava who, by relating the "relish of tranquility" (sânta) in the normative Sanskrit theater to the experience of rasa in the hedonistic cult of the radical Tantras, rigorously formulated the philosophical underpinnings of this otherwise ineffable experience of abiding "aesthetic rapture" (camatkâra). During the Shahmiri period such interiorized and individualized modes of Shaiva worship fused harmoniously, even and especially at the level of popular religious culture, with Islamic esotericism as exemplified by the brahmin poetess Lalla and her illiterate Sufi disciple Nur-ud-Din, the founder of the Rishi order of Kashmir (Visuvalingam, 1991b). Stripped off its specifically Hindu references and ritual notations, the "ideology of freedom" still dominates the lifestyle of the poverty-stricken Muslim artisans of Banaras, who have no doubt reinforced it with the overtly egalitarian inspiration of their own religious tradition. This all-Banarasi "ideology of leisure," which had powerfully reconstructed so many lives among an entire generation of pan-chewing Western hippies in the seventies, is perhaps above all the aesthetic refractionif not resolutionof the dialectic of transgressive sacrality that pulsates through the very heart of Hinduism (Visuvalingam, 1985, 1989)

Though the devotees of Lat Bhairava are no longer able to explain Bhairava's marriage to the adjacent well, they invariably refer to a similar practice of their predominantly Muslim neighbours in the Adampura and the adjacent Jaitpura areas. Not only is the pillar beside a Muslim cemetery with a central sepulcher (rauza) made up of "Buddhist" architectural remains (Sherring, 1868: 306-7), but the custodians of the Muslim tomb-shrines elsewhere in the city generally "digress" into the story of Ghazi Miyan when likewise questioned about the particular saint of their locality. On the first Sunday of the solar month of Jyestha (falling between 14 and 21 May), they celebratelike Muslims elsewhere in North India and western Nepalthe annual wedding procession (barat) of Ghazi Miyan's tragic marriage with Johara Bibi. It moves from the Jaitpura crossing to the domed mausoleum which houses (the replica of) his "tomb" at whose head is likewise a high pillar. Ghazi Miyan was born into "history" as Salar Masud, the nephew of Mahmud of Ghazni, at Ajmer in 1014. As his desire for martyrdom was as intense as his proselytizing zeal, he headed the Muslim warriors in their numerous incursions into the Gangetic plain, until he was felled in battle in 1033 at the tender age of 19 by the Hindus at Bahraich. When Muslim domination over north India was permanently established towards the end of the 12th century, his tomb was rediscovered. It became such an important pilgrimage site that, already by the 13th century, the poet Amir Khusru could speak of the whole of Hindustan being embalmed by the fragrance from the perfumed tomb. The ballads, which are sung by low-caste Muslim musicians (dafali) belonging to a fraternity devoted to his cult, make Bahraich itself his birthplace. He was cursed even before his birth to be martyred on his wedding-day. On the fateful day, he has to exchange his marriage garments for armor and the wedding music becomes martial as he rides out to battle. He annihilates the aggressors and it is only while returning that he is killed by the arrow of a survivor.

"In India, poles whose summit is ornamented with an effigy of the head of the martyred hero are taken out in procession; in Nepal, it is the pole itself which receives the blood of kids offered to obtain rain; no doubt that in these rites, it is the saint himself who is represented by the poles through a symbolism which is widespread in the Muslim world" (Gaboriau, 1975: 314).

On Saturday afternoon in the Muslim village of Kuraha in Nepal, the pole is carried from the forest, preceded by untouchable Hindu musicians (damai), to be deposed beside the mango tree in whose shade is the replica of the Bahraich tomb. In Kuraha this stone platform (mazar) is housed in a small square building constructed exactly on the model of the Hindu temples of the region. On Sunday morning, the Muslim men attach an oriflamme to the summit of the new pole before raising it against the mango-tree. They then level the pole raised two years ago leaving that of the previous year intact, so that there are always two poles standing permanently against the tree. The three kids to be sacrificed are made to give their consent in the well-known Hindu manner. The two white kids reserved for Allah alone are sacrificed facing Mecca and according to the rules of halal so that the blood flows into the earth. The throat of the third kid, the black one, is slit at the foot of the new pole so as to impregnate the wood with its blood. "Everyone agreed that the blood was destined not for Allah, but to the pole, linga, itself, to which it is offered (carhaunu) like a victim to a Hindu god" (p. 307). The primary difference between the sacrificial marriages of the black (Kala) Bhairo and of the saint Ghazi Miyan would appear to be the replacement of criminal execution with that of triumphant martyrdom in holy war (jihad).

transgressive marriage

In India, as opposed to Nepal, there is a "massive participation of Hindus in the offerings to the tomb and to the pole, symbols which they could easily assimilate to the material supports of their gods" (Gaboriau, 1975: 315). William Crooke had already suggested an original sun cult with a cosmogonic marriage, and Gaborieau adds that the pole itself, "in the rites meant to obtain rain, appears as a sort of phallic symbol uniting heaven and earth" (1971: 313). Ghazi Miyan, the martyred youth, is not just the lord of rain and the harvests, his tomb dispenses all boons, particularly sons to the childless. It is thus not so much the martyr's union with Allah that is the popular focus of the Muslim cult but rather the regenerative forces unleashed by his tragic marriage, which begins to be celebrated in India even 2 to 3 days before the Sunday festival. A bed, a couch and other accessories are sent to the tomb in the belief that Ghazi Miyan annually re-enacts his wedding. He is even said to have been wearing his wedding robes when he was struck down. The men call him "the delight of the fiancé" (gajna dulha) and the women call him "Salar the libertine" (salar chinali). "The women who enter the tomb fall down in a faint believing that the saint has sucked them... And the water pressed out from the under-garment (lungi) of the saint is distributed to the faithful as a sign of fertility (Gaboriau, 1975: 297). In the Nepali cult at the Muslim village of Kuraha, the exchanges of love songs between the otherwise rigidly segregated sexes on Saturday night invariably develops into promiscuous flirting and even extra-marital unions. "Not only is the distinction of caste momentarily suspended, as in every Hindu festival, but the distinction between Hindus and Muslims ceases momentarily to operate. This licence...is associated everywhere in India with the festival of Ghazi Miyan and this since a long time for protests by the orthodox authorities have been noted since the beginning of the fifteenth century" (Gaboriau, 1975: 313). Despite some persisting rules of the game regarding social distances, the carnaval-like atmosphere tends to dissolve all restraints among the revellers. The figure of Ghazi Miyan had long since been incorporated into the Panchpiriya sect, which was followed by the mass of the peasantry in eastern Uttar Pradesh. By the end of the 19th century, Ghazi Miyan was reckoned to be the foremost among the (variable collection of) Five Saints (Panch Pir) which included both Muslim and Hindu figures like Bhairava and Kali (Schwerin, 1981: 151-3). The 1901 census still recorded 53 castes who declared the Panch Pir to be their principal object of worship and 44 of these were described as being wholly or partly Hindu. At the turn of the century the annual festival of Ghazi Miyan at Bahraich regularly drew an assembly of over 100,000 people and the followers of the Panch Pir around 1920 were estimated to still number about 13.5 million (Pandey, 1990: 87 ).

The Muslim festival of mourning comprises an obligatory scenario that strangely resembles the Hindu festival of Holi. Nevertheless, the participation of the Hindus is an individual affair and, at the strictly ritual level, the marriage of Ghazi Miyan remains as specifically Muslim as the marriage of Lat Bhairo is Hindu. That the martyr provides a role-model for the Indian Muslim, even quite independently of the socio-political notations that pit him against the infidel Hindus, is confirmed by the all-night narration of his legendbefore a backdrop of painted representations of his (battles and) martyrdomin the presence of the puttee during his normal marriage ceremony (Shurreef, 1863: 66). Decked in a piece of red cloth and stuck into an earthen pot of unboiled rice, the puttee is a branch of a pomegranate tree which is bent in the modest manner of the bride. The next morning the puttee is carried on the shoulder of the bridegroom to the water's edge and set adrift after having offered prayers to Salar Masud. The Iranian "passion play" depicting the tribulations of the "virgin" Fâtima, who laments the Prophet's death while grinding barley on a mill-stone, dwells at length on Ali's attempt to procure blood-red pomegranate juice to quench her thirst and this is the prelude to her prophecies of the martyrdom of her children and to her own death (Pelly, 1879: 110-32). The ritual relevance of this symbolic complex to the Indian Muharram is evident: in some of the ceremonial enclosures, a large female doll is depicted grinding wheat or rice on a hand-mill placed before her (Shurreef, 1863: 121). Little wonder that "married women are not allowed to show their faces to their husbands during the ten days of the first Mohurrum after marriage, at which time they are kept apart from one another" (Shurreef, 1863: 123); which may well be compared to the Hindu prohibition of marriages during the dark "funerary" fortnight of Margashirsha, when Lat Bhairo's own marriage is celebrated. The Muslim bridegroom is symbolically assimilated to the martyred warrior even as Ghazi Miyan's martyrdom has been transformed into his wedding-day. The cult of the saint, who is present in the tomb and the pole, though always troublesome for the purists, is ancient and extensive in the Islamic world outside of India. The prayer (namaaz) immediately preceding this revelry, the sacrifice of the first two kids the following day, and the prayer (du'a) accompanying the offering of the first-fruits, are wholly Islamic (pp. 313-4). The whole Muslim community, to the exclusion of the Hindus, participates with strict equality in the sacrifice and the following communal feast (Gaboriau, 1975: 309, 316). Most significant of all, perhaps, is the repeated identification by the sohila (ritual songs sung throughout the festival) of the city of Ghazi Miyan's tomb to Mecca and Medina (Gaboriau, 1975: 300, 306).

tenth of Muharram

The tenth of Muharram remained a day of celebration for the Ummayyads and the Sunnites even after the martyrdom of Husain at Kerbala, when it became a day of mourning for the Shiites (Peters, vol. 3, 1990: 109-10). Like Banaras for the Hindus, "the rebuilt grave has remained to this day the devotional center for pilgrims from all over the Shi'a world. Those that are buried by the sanctuary will surely enter Paradise. Many aged Shi'i settle in Kerbala or ask in their will to have their bodies transported to the holy city. For centuries endless caravans of the dead have been coming to Kerbala from Persia and India, transforming the town into one vast burial-ground" (Grunebaum, 1951: 87, 90). One syncretic version of the Ghazi Miyan ballad serves instead as an Indianized founding legend for this ten day festival of Muharram: it is Hasan and Husain, the grandsons of the Prophet, who are themselves born at Bahraich of their mother Fatima al-Zahra, only to be killed there on the day of their marriage with Johara Bibi. Husain's death is no longer due to the butchery at Karbala in 680 on the 10th of Muharram by the Sunnite caliph Yazid but due to the attack on Bahraich by the Sahal Deo Bhar, the infidel Hindu king of the Ghazi Miyan cycle. Whereas the 5th or the 7th of Muharram, depending on the place, celebrates the marriage processions of Qassim, son of Hasan, with Fâtima (or Sakina), the favourite daughter of his uncle Husain., the remaining days are consecrated to the commemoration of their death and to their funerals. The contrast between marriage and death is underlined in all the songs of lamentation and constitutes the very essence of the festival. The Persian theater simply equates them: "O Hussein, walk at the wedding of your dear Qassem, and see how the blood has indeed replaced the henna on the hands and feet of your young." "In the plain of anguish, the tomb will serve as the nuptial bed and the shroud will be the marriage robe." The death of Ali Akbar, Husain's eldest son, on the preceding day is likewise assimilated to a nuptial union though there is no question of a real marriage (Pelly, 1879, vol.1: 287-303). The act representing Qassim's martyrdom even comprises a scene where his well-decorated marriage-couch is juxtaposed to a similar bed covered with black to signify his elder brother's misfortune (Pelly, 1879, vol.2: 9). The celebration of the death anniversary of any Muslim saint is technically designated by the Arabic term urs which originally signifies "marriage" so much so that the union of the soul with God has become, in both popular religion and esoteric literature, a sexual union that is consummated only in death. Through the sexual mediation of their children, a mystic "marriage" is perhaps implied between Hasan and Husain themselves, which would also explain the permanent presence of two poles and the sacrifice of two kids in the Ghazi Miyan festival. Characteristic of Hasan and Husain respectively, the green and red banners, which are fastened to the upright lance or bamboo pole representing Ghazi Miyan at Bahraich (Schwerin, 1981: 150), recall the twin (banner-) snakes fluttering from the Bhairava-pole at the Bisket festival which were likewise slaughtered within the context of sexual union (Chalier-Visuvalingam, 1989: 184-5). The dynasty of "the Fatimids (969-1171) had Husain's head transferred to Cairo and the Mosque of the Hasanain (literally the two Hasan)that is, Hasan and his brother Husain) was erected over the relic and still preserves a reputation of especial sanctity" (Grunebaum, 1951: 89). In the same vein, the Fifth Imam, Muhammad al-Baqir, was the grandson of not only Husain but also of Hasan through the latter's daughter, Fatima, thus reuniting in himself the two lines of descent from Fatima and Ali (Momen, 1985: 37). The "tomb" (rauza) of Imam Hasan in Banaras is just about 200 meters to the north of the Lat, with that of his mother Fatima Zahra immediately on the other (western) side of the Sarnath road, while the Rauza Hazrat Imam Husain is less than 400 meters to the north-west of his mother's sepulcher. It is most significant that Johara (Zohra or even Zahra), the name of their common wife, is just a variant of the epithet "the Radiant or the Resplendent" that permanently characterizes their mother Fatima (al-Zahra).

Ghazi Miyan in Banaras

Some of the most significant finds from the "archaeology" of Lat Bhairo are however remnants of what had been incorporated by the Muslims into their baroque "frieze" about this martyred warrior. A bridegroom discovered that he had been chosen to be the next victim, on the very day of his imminent marriage, at the problematic temple of Somnath near the confluence of the Varana with the Ganga at Rajghat. Responding to the hysterical condition of the victim's mother, Ghazi Miyan bathed in the Ganga and took his place, but the image started sinking as soon as he placed one foot across the threshold. The Muslim hero nevertheless managed to seize the disappearing head by its tuft and kick it, before dispersing the hair which grew wherever it fell as a type of grass. In a common variant, Ghazi Miyan removed his own head to avoid seeing and being seduced by the hundreds of naked women sent by the king's astrologer in order to destroy the power of his purity and thereby render him an easy sacrificial victim. The sohila which opens the festival and accompanies the procession at Kuraha asks rather enigmatically: "Where has the hair fallen? It has fallen somewhere. Bala Pir [Ghazi Miyan] has departed [in] the dress of a doll" (Gaboriau, 1975: 300). The allusion is to the custom in Bahraich where (a representation of) the long-haired head of the saint is carried in procession at the tip of a lance (Gaboriau, 1975: 317, fn. 23). At Bhaktapur, the place of the designated bridegroom-victim was taken, again in response to his mother's wailing, by the unknown foreign prince, alias Bhairava, whose (symbolic) death becomes the precondition for his marriage to the lusty princess. Nowadays, it is the Lat which is popularly held to be sinking into the ground, and Kala Bhairava, alias Kashi Vishwanath, was decapitated at the Bhaktapur cosmogony when he had almost completely disappeared into the earth on his underground escape-route back to Benares. The martyrdom of the Muslim warrior and the punishment of the Hindu god serve as the two poles of a common ideology of self-sacrifice based on the identity of the killer and the victim. Despite the still unresolved tensions between Islam and Hinduism on the social and doctrinal levels, these "hybrid" legends reveal an uncanny understanding of the cults of both Ghazi Miyan and of Lat Bhairo. Indeed, among the foremost devotees of Ghazi Miyanwho, like Dulha ("bridegroom") Dev, is also believed to have been killed by fire on the eve of his wedding (Schwerin, 1981: 157)are the untouchable Doms of Banaras who specialize in the "human sacrifice" of the crematory ritual for the entire Hindu community from the furthest reaches of the Indian subcontinent.

The raising and felling of Bhairava's linga-pole during the Bisket festival is accompanied by a ritual battle between the upper and lower halves of the city of Bhaktapur in Nepal. Cheered on by the riotous population, the hair-raising tug-of-war in order to drag the chariot of Bhairava from the center into their respective halves of the city becomes violent at the least pretext. On the night of April 1985, the Nepali army was stationed in a state of preparedness around the Taumadhi square andas we watched from the loft of the Nyatapole inn facing the Akash Bhairab templethe festival degenerated into a veritable riot with stone-throwing and casualties on both sides while the Gorkha soldiers looked on impassively. A similar north-south conflict during the festival of Siti Nakha in Kathmandu involved deaths on both sides and the regular sacrifice of captured prisoners to the goddess Kali. It was the model for similar battles in villages elsewhere in the Newar kingdom, which must have corresponded to an earlier dualistic tribal organization. The founding legend makes no bones about the Malla king Gunakamadeva, the reputed founder and culture-hero of Kathmandu, having instituted this custom at the behest of Skanda, the god of war, in order to destroy his enemies and to prevent his subjects from revolting (Chalier-Visuvalingam, 1991). The dangerous game was abolished only around 1870 by Jung Bahadur Rana, at least in the capital, when a non-participating onlooker, British Resident Colvin, was struck by a flying stone. Similarly, the regular clashes between rival Hindu sects like the Shaiva Nagas and the Vaishnava Bairagis over the least pretext such as precedence in taking their sacred bath in the Ganga during festivals like the Kumbha Mela, reflect an underlying ritual paradigm that valorizes death as liberation. This dualistic structure was easily extended and adapted to accommodate the more basic religious opposition between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Due to the coincidence of Dashahara and Muharram occurring on the same day in 1821, for example, many were killed at Cuddapah in the Deccan when neither party was willing to give way. Nevertheless, many Hindus participated fully in the Muharram festival, consumed only meat that had been sacrificed according to Islamic rites and even disguised themselves as Muslim ascetics. If any fighting and bloodshed took place between the two communities, the Hindus who had temporarily become fakirs took the part of the Muslims and fought against their own co-religionists (Shurreef, 1863: 122; cf. Pandey, 1990: 131, fn. 34).

Sunni-Shia conflict

Though the cult of Husain, who by virtue of his death became "the bond of reconciliation with God on the Day of Judgement," subsequently spread to the Sunnites, the Muharram processions outside of India are generally observed only by the Shiites. "Not infrequently fights with Sunnites or other adversaries will develop, resulting in casualties and even deaths.... National animosity against the Arabs expresses itself on occasion, but the true villains are Caliph Yazid, who gives the order to kill Husain, and Shammar, or Shimr, who is believed to have struck the fatal blow. The excitement of the audience reaches such a pitch that the spectators not infrequently try to lynch the actors representing the murderers of Husain. Anti-Sunnite feeling is said to be such that no Sunni would be knowingly tolerated among the spectators. The final scenes usually depict the progress of the martyr's severed head to the Court of the Caliph" (Grunebaum, 1951: 87, 90). In India, the Shiite community allowed Christians and even Hindus to enter the ceremonial booths (tabut khanas) and participate in the Muharram festivities; only the Sunni Muslims were denied and, under the English rule, prevented admission. When the tabuts are finally carried to the Muslim cemeteries, "and Sunnis and Shiahs meet face to face before the open graves of Hasan and Husain, the feuds between them, which have been pent up all the year, are often fought out to a bloody end" (Pelly: 1879, pp. xxii-iv). There were frequent clashes especially in Uttar Pradesh, generally occasioned by the public Shi‘a cursing versus Sunni praise of the first three Caliphs, leading to the ban on pubic processions in 1909, which however did not prevent inter-communal violence from re-surfacing in 1935-36 and in 1939. Among the still sensitive spots in Banaras (Jaitpura) are the Doshipura mohalla, especially during the festival of Barawafat celebrated by the Shia who are the majority in this locality, and the Kazi-Sadullapura mohalla during the Muharram (Kumar, 1988: 69). Indeed, the opposing evaluations of Muharram seem to have been read back onto the Prophet himself, for the Sunnis rejoice while the Shias grieve during the innovative Barawafat which paradoxically marks both the birth and the death of Muhammad (Kumar, 1989: 159-63). The Sunni-Shi‘a divide has remained so strong that "when the issue of separation of India and Pakistan came to the fore in the 1940s the Shi‘a were at first reluctant to entrust themselves to a Sunni dominated state of Pakistan and so, in the main, opposed separation and supported the National Congress Party politically" (Momen, 1985: 276-7).

Shia-Sunni reconciliation through Ghazi Miyan

Nevertheless, "the total number of Shi‘a in India and Pakistan is difficult to estimate since they do not exist as a separate identifiable community as in most parts of the Middle East but are intermingled with Sunnis and many practise taqiyya [dissimulation or religious "hypocrisy"] of their beliefs in the presence of the Sunni majority. There are moreover some difficulties of definition in that there appear to be large numbers who participate in the Muharram ceremonies, for example, and who venerate Imam Husayn, but who are otherwise not identifiable as Shi‘is. British censuses that attempted to differentiate Shi‘is from Sunnis in the early 20th century are thought to have grossly underestimated the number of Shi‘a on account of the practice of taqiyya" (Momen, 1985: 277). There are separate Sunni and Shia shrines for the Prophet's family in the vicinity of the Lat and the self-depiction of the vast majority of the Banarasi Muslims, particularly the entire community of weavers, as "Sunni" (Kumar, 1989: 147, 163) should be replaced in this context of dissimulation and a certain fluidity, even vacillation, of religious identity (cf. Freitag, 1989b: 252-3). In India, both Sunnis and Shi'is observe the festival, not in the form of theater but as processions called marsiyah after the elegies composed and recited specifically in honor of Hasan and Husain.Jaffur Shurreef concludes his narration of Karbala and prefaces his very detailed description of Muharram as celebrated around Hyderabad in South India with the quasi-Shi‘a observation that since Husain's martyrdom "the rejoicings at the eed (or festival), have been abolished, and mournings and lamentations established in lieu thereof" (1863: 112). Though he does indicate (p.114), for example, that the Sunnis consider unlawful the practice of violently beating the breast in grief which is regularly practiced by Shi‘a women, and though he approvingly mentions certain groups of fakirs praising the "four virtuous friends"the Caliphs Abu Bakar, Omar, Othman and Alithis Sunni compiler studiously avoids mentioning any Sunni-Shi‘a conflicts. The Shias have extra processions like the wedding and maintain a certain distance, but all the Sunnis of Banaras except the Wahabis celebrate Muharram (Kumar, 1988: 212-22). The dynamics of reintegration under the banner of Islam is reflected in the syncretic version of the Ghazi Miyan ballad which attributes the slaying of Hasan and Husain to the idolatrous Hindus. This is a perfectly logical development, for the Iranian "hagiography" already presupposes that the Sunni victors, particularly Shimr, must necessarily be "infidels" in order to slay the near family of the Prophet (Grunebaum, 1951: 91). The ambivalent complicity of Hindu orthodoxy in propagating the Muslim cult throughout the subcontinent may be judged by its treatment in the Parashurâma-carita, a history of the brahman Peshwar dynasty composed in 1771 by a brahman chronicler: Hasan and Husain, the demoniac sons of Muhammad himself, are slain on the 7th and 10th of Muharram respectively by the Hindus only to receive worship ultimately from the idolators even as far south as the Karnataka and Dravidian lands. In the Mahikavatici Bakhar, an early 17th century historical biography, they even become the slain sons of Alauddin Khilji, who in revenge killed the king of the Yadavas of Devagiri, Ramdevrav, and thus heralded in 1296 the fall of Maharashtra to Muslim domination. The rise of the (Moghul) "barbarians" (mleccha) to political supremacy in India is attributed precisely to the ubiquitous Hindu celebration of the urs (Wagle, 1989: 51-4, 64). Though the festival continued to be the occasion of Shia-Sunni conflict in India, the transposition of the sacrificial marriage to the Ghazi Miyan cycle served, in part, to facilitate and legitimize a common front against the infidel Hindu majority (Schwerin, 1981: 157-160). The Indianized martyr provides the mythicized model for the tradition of warrior Sufis who, as religious auxiliaries legitimizing the Muslim imperial expansion into the western Deccan, constituted the first wave of Islamization resulting in the medieval Sultanate of Bijapur (Eaton, 1978: 19-44). The popularity of Muharram among both Shias and Sunnis has indeed been expanding throughout the last century in Banaras, but since the 1931 Hindu-Muslim riots the Hindus of the sacred city have stopped participating in it (Kumar, 1988: 215-6).

dualistic conflict in Iran

Iranian cities and villages, including the successive Safavid capitals, had likewise been divided into opposing sets of quarters dominated by rival sects (for example, the Hanafites and the Shafi'ites, both of Sunni persuasion), which regularly engaged in violent conflict with the connivance and even encouragement of the rulers, both foreign (for example, the Mongols) and indigenous (particularly Shah Abbas). The opposing ascetic orders of the Sunni Ni'mati and the Shia Haydari, who were doctrinally close to the transgressive Mala'amatiya (Way of Blame), were founded in the late 14th C. in eastern (Kerman) and western (Tabriz) ends respectively of Iran. Even after the advent of the Safavid dynasty in 1502 when the Ni'mati gradually converted to Shiism, they continued to fight the Haydari. All social antagonismsright through the Qajar period and down to our own timeswould inevitably polarize, even if only in symbolic form, under their opposing "sectarian" banners and reach a violent climax during the (tenth of) Muharram. However, the tomb of Sultan Mir Haydar at Tabriz was venerated not only by Shias and Sufis from as far as Ottoman Turkey but even by the Sunni Muslims; and it was Shah Abbas, the (Shia) Safavid ruler (1587-1629), who had the "heretical" shrine demolished no doubt out of fears for his own political security in the face of popular dissent. His active divide-and-rule policy against his own subjects resulted in the spread of the Ni'mati-Haydari polarization from the urban proletariat to the court and the countryside, so much so that Safavid Iran was hopelessly disunited in the face of the Afghan invaders. Thus even the Sunni-Shia divide, notwithstanding the doctrinal differences of their respective theologians, has a marked ritualized character that feeds on and further inflames communal grievances stoked by other social factors (cf. Mirjafari, 1979). This binary pattern within Islam, which corresponds even in many of its details to that of Hindu Nepal, may well derive from archaic (pre-) Aryan institutions, but it conforms all the same to the immanent logic of human violence. The centrality of (Pacali) Bhairava's symbolic role as the royal scapegoat (in Kathmandu) suggests that succeeding rulers had (merely) exploited, and generally within certain self-imposed limits, a pre-existing socio-ritual mechanism meant rather to regulate and provide a convenient safety-valve for the constant and pervasive menace of self-consuming violence otherwise capable of undoing the entire community (Girard: 1977). Under normal conditions in Banaras the celebration of the festivals of Muharram and Barawafat, which have been consistently growing over the recent decades, is characterized rather by intense but sportive competition organized by the various clubs (anjuman) between the neighboring Muslim wards (muhallas) themselves (Kumar, 1989: 158-163). The stubborn persistence of the dualistic mechanism into our own timeswhether contained within integrative (royal) festivals, diverted to further partisan political agendas, distorted by systematic economic exploitation, exacerbated by modern racism, generalized in our age of enlightenment into intense individual competion for climbing the ladder of "success" or perverted into fissiparous outbursts of crime pure and simpleonly proves that the ideology of pacifism urgently needs to be supplemented by adequate techniques for confronting, neutralizing and transmuting the innate violence that nourishes even the most refined disguises assumed by the acquisitive urges of the divided soul.

dualistic conflict around the Lat

Not only did Islamic iconoclasm in the form of "Aurangzeb" leave the aniconic "Ashokan" pillar standing before the idgah when it tore down the surrounding pantheon of Hindu idols. The Muslims' own post-riot memorial which was "signed by 724 persons, 105 of whom were accounted individuals of note" (Robinson, 1877: 119) went further to claim that this pillar of the world was in fact "the structure of Feroze Shah, like the pillar (Laut) at Allahabad, Delhi and other places, and which the Hindoos state to have been erected by their own forefathers. But, be that as it may, it was not an object of their worship entitled to any great veneration like the temples of Bisseysur and Bhyronauth; for no account of this pillar is to be found in any of their orthodox books. The style of worship of the Hindus is this, wherever they find set up (a pillar) they call it, at the incitement of their priests, a place of their worship, and after sometime has elapsed they consider it as a place of worship of the highest sanctity." The same source notes that "for some years the lower classes of Hindoos and Mussulmans have annually celebrated the marriage of the Laut, and have divided the offerings between them" (Robinson, 1877: 113-4). The latter fact was still reluctantly admitted by the legal custodians of the idgah when we interviewed them in 1979 with John Irwin. The low-caste Muslims were primarily from the illiterate weaver (Julaha) community still living in Alaipur (which includes Adampura and Jaipura wards) and who generally congregate at this idgah instead of at the Gyanvapi mosque like their caste-fellows living in Madanpura. Though the weaver community in north India reverenced the flag of Ghazi Miyan to whom they ascribed the comparatively recent conversion of their ancestors, by the early 19th century they were already beginning to abandon such syncretic, "un-Islamic" practices under the growing pressure of Wahabi reformism emanating from the Arabian peninsula. For the down-trodden castes, the stricter observation of the Islamic law and personal code (shariat) provided the means of reasserting their social status in the face of politico-economic domination by the upper classes, both Hindu and Muslim (ashraf). A parallel process of purification was also occuring among the Hindu untouchables like the Chamars who were giving up liquor, meat, (blood-) red vegetables, etc., and demanding the abolition of caste and an end to idol worship. Despite its undisputed age-old sanctity, the now "brahmanized" Lat Bhairo or Mahashmashana Stambha was largely neglected by the Hindu scriptures no doubt because of the stigma of death and impurity associated with it. The growing Hindu-Muslim division was further reinforced by the attempts of the colonial administration to systematically classify and publicly record everything, thus leaving the Muslim weavers little choice but to shed their Hindu names and customs in order to gain an equal standing within the fraternity of Islam (Pandey, 1990: 83-90). The mock conflict between "Kols" and "Bhils" at the fair held on the day before the new moon of Ashwin, fourteen days after Lat Bhairo's marriage, has long since disappeared. Perhaps it was rendered quite unnecessary by the even greater sacrifice of battle for the world-pillar celebrated jointly by Hindus and Muslims under the divide-and-rule British impartiality of the latest district magistrate.

The "Lat Bhairo riots" of 1809 have played a crucial role in colonial historiography not only because of their gravity and magnitudecomparable, we are told, only to the Kanpur outbreak of 1931but also because they are among the first to be recorded in the colonial period (Pandey, 1990: 29). Though the history of Hindu-Muslim riots goes back into the pre-colonial period (17th century Gujarat, for example), and may be legitimately understood as the continuing legacy of the Islamic conquest of north India, it is noteworthy that there had been no notable outbreak of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims during the previous 100 years in Banaras, which has always remained the Mecca of Hindu orthodoxy (Pandey, 1990: 26, fn. 6). Banaras had been a "mughalizing" city in the early 18th century and reflected cultural patterns that continued to be fostered by the Nawab's court at Awadh. Hence the strong ties established early in the career of the present Bhumihar dynastya landlord family which had served as tax officials for the Nawab but had become virtually independent by 1750with Muslim lower-caste groups like the weavers. The triumvirate of powerholdersroyal clan, merchant-bankers and Gosainspatronized an innovated and grandiose form of the Ram Lila, centered on the symbolic identification of the Maharaja with Lord Rama, which claimed the wholehearted participation of rival landowning and commercial groups like the Rajputs and the Marathas. Even the Muslims joined in celebrating it more as a civic festivity around the unifying figure of the king offered as an aesthetic spectacle in the public arena at Ramnagar and Nati Imli. The British however had replaced Awadh as the national level authority in 1775 and the Resident's power at Banaras steadily increased until they finally took direct control of the city in 1784. The Bhumihars too had enriched themselves and come to power in the Banaras region precisely through British land reforms that had displaced the earlier supremacy of the Rajputs and Marathas. By 1809 the then Maharaja had suffered loss of power and face through his unsuccessful decade-long agitation to free himself from the control of the East India Company. The Muslim kotwal too had already lost the confidence of the Banarasis in 1803 when he had acquiesced to highhanded British attempts to impose a (phatakbandi) tax for recruiting patrols of watchmen. Unlike the ostentatious participation of the Maharaja in the public arena, the British administration held aloof from community life and exercised its authority through local intermediaries, but intruding ever more profoundly into the relations, structure and functioning of the pre-existing communities. Though the social tensions and lines of fissure generated by these far-reaching politico-economic changes are difficult to determine precisely, the rationalizing mentality introduced by the British state had no doubt begun to have an insidious effect on the Banarasi "civic" culture which had for so long united the high and the low, both Hindus and Muslims. The joint participation of Hindus and Muslims in each other's cults and festivals should moreover not obscure the intense ideological struggleeven where peaceful and mutually accommodatingbetween the rival religions on the symbolic level for the heart, mind and soul of India. The Hindus could not remain oblivious of the living visual testimonies to the razing of the religious architecture of their sacred city (c. 1660s) by Aurangzeb who had sought to impose an Islamic city called "Muhammadabad" upon their socio-religious center (Freitag, 1989a; 1989b: 19-52). Having now lost their political supremacy in India, the Muslims, on the other hand, had been willing to submit to Hindu acculturation but certainly not to the extent of surrendering the divergent world-view imbedded into their own ritual practices. The Muslim memorial begins by observing that for 3 years the Muharram coincided with the Hindu festival of Dashahara and for 3 years with Holi; and that trouble had been averted each time by the British authorities restraining the Hindus from celebrating Dashahara till the Muharram was over and from dancing, etc., during Holi (Robinson, 1877: 112-3). The licentious Hindu festival of Holi formerly involved much indiscriminate violence on the ghats and elsewhere and it is therefore not surprising that Sherring (1868: 191-5; cf. Pandey, 1990: 34-6, 80, 129, and Freitag, 1989b: 51) simply attributed the origin of riots to an unfortunate coincidence of the Hindu and Muslim calendars, which brought a mob of Holi revelers into headlong collision with a mourning procession of Muharram. In this climate of accelerated social change and disequilibrium brought about by British rule, all that was needed for the resurgence of the dualistic pattern of violence along redrawn Hindu-Muslim lines was an appropriate symbol that could condense within itself the axial issue that separated Islam from Hinduism.

Robinson (1877) has however given a very detailed report using the memorials written by the Hindus, Muslims, and the British shortly after the Lat Bhairo riots, so called because the pillar was the destructive focus of the three-day carnage between Hindus and Muslims. In 1809, the conflagration was sparked off by a trivial incident: in fulfillment of a vow upon his recovery from illness, a Hindu of the Nagar caste would have tried to replace the mud dwelling of Hanuman on the contested ground between the idgah and the pillar with a stone enclosure. At first the Muslim weavers were content to appeal to the law-officer (qadi) and agreed to let the Hindus to continue with the Bharat Milap before refering the dispute to the court immediately after the Dashahara holidays. When they were over on 20th October, they instead held a mammoth protest meeting, in the excitement of which they polluted the Lat and its surroundings by overturning Hanuman's pedestal, uprooting the adjacent tulsi tree, and beating the pillar itself with shoes. The conjuncture of events around the Lat so faithfully reflects the overlapping disposition of Hindu-Muslim sacred space between the Vishwanath temple and the Aurangzeb mosque, that Robinson's account mistakenly locates the Muslim demonstration around this mosque within the old Vishweshwar enclosure and shifts imperceptibly to the defilement of the pillar which is in fact quite a long way from the religious center of the modern city (cf. Pandey, 1990: 37-9). By daybreak the whole Hindu community had heard of the sacrilege and a crowd began to assemble at the Lat, so much so that the acting British magistrate had to deploy 2 companies of sepoys to protect the Muslim places of worship. Anticipating retaliation by the Hindus, the outnumbered Muslim weavers, who were at the forefront of all these manifestations, then decided to sack the temple of the king of the gods, Vishwanath himself. Had the attempt succeeded, it would have certainly resulted in the utter annihilation of the Muslim community in Benares. The Hindus led by the Rajputs, whose attempts to assemble at the Lat had been thwarted by the district magistrate and the army, fell back and regrouped to bar the route of the Muslims who were advancing with raised standards and crying "Hasan, Husain." Outnumbered and beaten back by the better armed Hindus at Gai Ghat, the 7 or 8 thousand weavers retreated leaving about 80 of their dead (but see note below). To revenge their defeat, the Muslims slaughtered a cow on one of the holiest ghats and mingled its blood with the sacred waters of the Ganga and, according to Heber (1828: 429, 431), the sacred well itself was subjected to the same sacrilege.

The attack on the Bisheshwar had now been made and foiled, and the Mahommedan army, returning as it happened by another route to that taken by the crowds rushing to Bisheshwar arrived at the Latand found it defenceless. They at once proceeded to mischief. A cow was dragged out from a neigbouring house and killed at the foot of the pillar. Its blood was taken into every corner, till all the sacred place was splashed with it, and then the carcass was flung, with shouts of exultation, into the holy tank of Bhairo. Firewood was heaped round the Lat and lighted to destroy no doubt the metal appendages of the pillar; and finally amidst cries of triumph, the Lat itself was overthrown, shattering in its fall into many pieces! (Robinson, 1875: 98-99).

Having triggered off this irreversible quid pro quo and now exulting over their short-lived trumph, the weavers simply went into hiding in their quarters. Such was the horror of the sacrilege that the Hindus, even on receiving the news, would not visit the defiled spot and kept milling around the area of the Vishvesvar temple. The Rajputs, who had already been incensed by the report of a Muslim butcher having killed a cow on October 9th when the Hindus were still making offerings to the manes at Kapiladhara, counterattacked only on the following day.

But about noon. . . there was sudden call to arms, and as if from the earth a vast throng of armed Rajputs, some thousands strong, poured out and led by Rattan Singh and Mannear Singh, took their way to the Lat. Behind and mixed up with them were hundreds of Gosains, screaming invocations to the god, and by their cries and gestures excited the armed crowd to a frenzy of fanatical rage. At headlong speed the avengers traversed the intervening streets and soon arrived at the outraged Lat now lying in fragments and splashed with cow's blood. The mosque of Aurungzebe was soon in flames. Every Mahommedan found lurking within its precints was put to the sword, and his body thrown into the blazing pile. A hog was brought in, killed at the pulpit, and its blood sprinkled over the corpses and ashes. Meanwhile the passage of the Rajputs and Gosains through the streets had filled the city with fanatical excitment, and from end to end Benares was given up to pillage and slaughter (Robinson, 1875: 100).

The Rajputs had even begun to demolish the tombs around the Durgah of Fatima, the mother of the Imam Husain, and would have proceeded to do the same to the tomb of Prince Jewan Bukht, held in the highest veneration by the Muslims, had not Mr. Bird checked them in the nick of time. On re-entering the city, the latter saw

multitudes of armed Hindus were assembled in every quarter directing their rage chiefly against the lives and properties of the weavers and butchers. The Gosains were busy delapidating the Gyanbafi Musjid and had set fire to it. Several bazaars were in flames, and the whole quarter of the Julahars was a scene of plunder and violence (Robinson, 1875: 100).

However due to the "diplomacy and firmness" of the district magistrate, the rioters were eventually broken up and the city was completely in the power of the large military force by the next day, but not before some fifty Masjids had been destroyed. The subsequent Muslim memorial argued:

If in support of their religion they sought vengeance the destruction of the Imambarrah, which they had already accomplished, was complete; if their object was the effusion of blood, they would have directed their havoc and slaughter against those who had destroyed the Laut and not have plundered and robbed the whole body of the Musalmans in the city who had no connection whatever in the licentiousness of the persons who aimed at its destruction. They murdered the innocent, though the Noorbaafs [weavers] and other Musalmans, after witnessing the injury to the Imambarrah, with the exception of the destruction of the Laut (which was in fact not an object of Hindu worship, and at all events be it what it might it was common to both parties) did not extend the hand of rapine to their impure property. The murderous excesses therefore which were committed by the Hindus can be attributed only to a lust for robbery and plunder: some of the Hindus also took that opportunity of gratifying their private resentment and killed and wounded each other (Robinson, 1875: 117).

The available details on the evolution of the riots rather suggest a cathartic eruption of self-consuming violence that exploited every possible fissure in the social fabric before falling back to more normal modes of self-regulation. It was perhaps symbolically inevitable that the Lat of the "sin-eating" Bhairava, who had always been the scapegoat of Vishvanath, was defiled and dismembered by the Muslims in the name of their own Lord of the Universe. And the irony of divine justice demanded that the Hindus should have proceeded to desecrate and destroy the royal Jama Masjid which had once housed their own Vishweshwara. After all, the Lord of the Universe was ultimately identical with the scapegoat Bhairava on whom he had displaced his own ritual impurity, a necessary part of the sacrificial process of death and rebirth.

The Mahommedans concerned were of the lowest order, butchers and weavers. Among the Hindus were many of rank and influence. The Rajputs to a man, great and small, mixed eagerly in the mêlée and were prominent in it.... On neither side were there men of the very highest position; the Raja of Benares and the family of Mirza Jewan Bukht were alike thanked by Government for withholding their countenance to the rioters. As regards the religious classes, it is noteworthy that the higher Brahmins took no part in the riot. They expressed throughout a dignified and seemly grief and listened to reason when the magistrate asked their assistance to quell the excitement. It was a Brahmin who saved from death the [already severely wounded] child of the murdered Mutwali of the mosque [by voluntarily interposing his own inviolable body before the Gosain aggressor; a fact acknowledged by the Muslims and for which he was rewarded by the British]. The lower religious classes of the Gosains, however, behaved throughout with obstinate fanaticism, headed the mob in their atrocities, murdered, robbed and burned with their own hands, and opposed from first to last the restoration of order (Robinson, 1875: 93).

Much later in the 1920s and 30s, Hindu and Muslim landlords (zamindar) could still make common cause, for primarily socio-economic reasons, against lower castes like the Ahirs who were trying to improve their caste-status by campaigning for cow-protection and claiming the right to wear the sacred thread (Pandey, 1990: 155-7). The Hindu-Muslim conflict over the Lat thus seems to reflect, at least in part, the social tension between the low-castes of Muslim weavers and butchers, who initiated the agitation, and the higher Hindu castes grouped around the "aristocratic" Rajputs. The "10 sects of Gosains" became involved only at the second stage, whereas the relatively "secular" Rajputswho had once been the real mainstay of the Moghul army and provided some of its best generalsopposed the weavers' action from the start. With the advent of British administration, the Rajputs, who had been the main landed group from the 16th to the 18th centuries had lost their traditional dominance in the region to the triumvirate constituted by the Bhumihar dynasty, the merchant-bankers and the Gosains (Cohn, 1987: 320-42). The District Magistrate, Mr. Bird, notes that

On the 21st of October, the Gosains in general took no active part in the disputes at Copaul Mochun between the Julahars and the Rajpoots. The Bisheshwar was threatened with attack, the Lat Bhairo was absolutely destroyed, without a single effort on their part to prevent it; on that day the Rajpoots presented the only obstacle to the excesses of the Julahars, but on Sunday, the 22nd, when a scheme had been concerted to retaliate on the Mahommedans at large, for the injuries done to the religion of the Hindus the Gosains were foremost in the work of vengeance (cited by Robinson, 1875: 102).

The weavers constituted the largest segment of the numerically small Muslim community of the region and were moroever concentrated in the urban centers. According to the Banaras Gazetteer (1909), "though they are almost certainly of Hindu extraction the Julahas are the most bigoted and aggressive of all the Musalmans, and have always taken a prominent part in the religious quarrels that have from time to time arisen in Banaras" (Pandey, 1990: 105). Considering that it is these same Muslims who were participating with the Hindus in celebrating the marriage of Lat Bhairoand even claimed the pillar for their ownwe may be justified in assuming that their desecration of the Lat wasto begin withas much an expression of general social resentment than of religious fanaticism. In 1815, there would be a struggle between the local weavers and the East India Company over new British regulations seeking to impose taxes on thread, cotton and other "personal" goods worth more than 10 rupees per person being imported into the city (Pandey, 1990: 99-100). At the mercy of moneylenders and other middlemen, the weavers of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh became increasingly vulnerable to the play of market forces because of the very nature of their occupation. Their economic dislocation was further aggravated by the politics of industrial capitalism: the increased prices from the middle of the 19th century and growing (foreign and Indian) factory demands for raw cotton reduced them to coolies, or servants or to begging. Under these appalling conditions, it was only natural that Islam, particularly the Shia martyrs and the Indianized Ghazi Miyan, should have provided the revolutionary banner for their revolt against an enveloping Hindu order which had acquiesced to the powers of the repressive state. The communal violence of 1849 at Shahabad, for example, was ignited when, precisely during the ritual procession (of tazias) on the tenth of Muharram, impoverished Pathan debtors stopped before the house of their money-lender, 'the most respectable Hindu merchant in the district', in order to plunder his property and to build from the loosened bricks a miniature mosque on his very threshhold (Pandey, 1990: 69-82).

The late 18th and early 19th century, however, witnessed a sharp increase in the demand for their goods and skills and the weavers of Banaras, in particular, were perhaps less affected by the subsequent socio-economic upheavals (Pandey, 1990: 72, 75). More important than the loss of income, for the fiercely independent Julahas, was the preservation of an occupational life-style where weaving and worship, workshop and mosque, were wholly and deliberately identified. The period (of transition?) immediately preceding the riots may have rather seen the reformistic (Wahabi) wave of Islamic self-consciousness temporarily coincide with a heightened self-confidence and assertiveness conferred by recent economic prosperity (cf. Pandey, 1990: 96-107). Their very readiness to resist the encroachment of Hindu idolatry upon their idgah
by defiling the Lat in whose cult they had otherwise been participatingsuggests that in the first place their own pillar never had for them the same sanctity that it had for the Hindus. Whatever be the nature and composition of the hidden tensions which led to the initial desecration of the Lat, it was sparked off by a religious dispute and the resulting conflagration engulfed the whole city and polarized the population along the Hindu-Muslim divide. Hinduism and Islam, after all, embody and consecrate wholly incompatible social ideologies, the one hierarchic and the other egalitarian. The Hindu "memorial" of grievances presented to the British authorities after the riots was in the name of "we, all the Brahmins, Cuttries [Kshatriyas 'aristocrats'], and persons of Byse [Vaishya 'merchant/peasant'] and Sooder [Shudra 'labouring'] castes.... We, every sect of the Hindu persuasion, have emigrated from all parts of the country to this place, for our religion tells us that Casheejee (Benares) is a spot eminent beyond all others for its religious purity and a place of worship and adoration. It is here that according to the Beyds, Poorans and Shastras, the gods have always fixed their residence" (Robinson, 1875: 106). It was believed by the Hindus and Muslims alike that the Lat was and still is slowly sinking into the ground so that, when its top became level with the ground, not only would the Hindu caste-hierarchy collapse but "all nations would be of one caste. The throwing down, therefore, of this pillar was regarded as most ominous and dangerous to Hinduism." Rev. Buyers also recorded a conversation between two brahmin soldiers guarding the prostrate pillar at the height of the riots: "Ah," said one, "we have seen what we never thought to seeSiva's Lat has its head level with the ground. We shall all be of one caste shortly. What will be our religion then?" "I suppose the Christian," answered the other; "for, after all that has passed, I am sure we shall never become Mussulmans" (Sherring, 1868: 192-3; cf. Heber: 430-1). By the law, as then existing, the sentences passed on the offenders should have depended on the fatwa of the Mahommedan law officers, who would however have been obliged to release the Hindu prisoners in order to avoid meting the same punishment to the Muslim detainees. The acting British magistrate, Mr. Bird, hence protested,

although common sense and natural justice must view the excesses of both parties as equal offences against the public peace, the authority of Government and the welfare of the society, still the fundamental principles of the Musalman law are diametrically at variance with such a sentiment. That law resting on the assumption of the excessive sanctity of the Mahommedan religion and the heresy of all other modes of belief, will consider the slightest insult offered by a Hindu to a place of Musalman worship as heinous sacrilege and profanation, while in the greatest outrages committed against any object of Hindu superstition, it will see nothing but a laudable attempt at the extirpation of idolatry" (Robinson, 1875: 104).

That the Government eventually dispensed with the fatwa to have the trials conducted by a special court, only serves to underline the impossibility of any fundamental reconciliation so long as polytheistic Hinduism continues to define itself in terms of a caste-hierarchy which must necessarily exclude or demote the impure Muslim, and so long as monotheistic Islam continues to define itself in terms of an uncompromising iconoclasm which it must necessarily impose on all infidels. The Muslim memorial ends with an appeal:

the spots within the precincts of Musjids which the Hindoos, contrary to fact pretend to call their places of worship, such as...the Laut [Caul Bhyro Koolusthum] of Feroze Shah; and, which from the avarice of the ignorant Mutwalee of the faithful they have for some time frequented for the purpose of Pooja, be prohibited to them, in order that a stop may be put to the dissensions which must constantly arise from participation of the Hindoos" (Robinson, 1875: 119).

The Hindu memorial makes counter-claims on the sacred sites of the city and remonstrates that

if the Musulmans enjoy strength and power for war and combat, let them look to the Caaba and Curbulla the true places of their worship. It is but lately, as all the world knows, that a sect of their own, the Mohaubies [Wahabis] attacked the Caaba, made a general massacre of their holy city, rooted up the tombs and monuments of their prophets and their imams, and plundering property by crores, carried it off as spoil... Let them go there and wage war with the destroyer of their race, let them seek retribution for the blood of their own tribe, and in support of their faith kill the enemies and murderers of their brethren and be killed themselves. The fame of their attachment to their faith will thus spread throughout the world, and they may restore their delapidated tombs and Imambarrahs. By their constant dissensions with us poor creatures they vainly injure their own hopes in the next world, and only harrass us" (Robinson, 1875: 111).

The Hindu memorial adds for good measure that "the violence sustained at the hands of these short-sighted Musalmans was not once practised under the administration of the Mahommedan Emperor. It has occured under the Government of the English Company renowned for its active goodness" (Robinson, 1875: 111). The idgah here had no particular sanctity but was esteemed by the Muslims only because it marked the former ascendancy of Islam over the religion of the Hindus, whereas the Kapalamochan tank and (what was left of) the Lat was of the highest sanctity to the Hindus. The district magistrate (now Mr. Watson) hence proposed to hand over the whole site to the Hindus as part of an overall policy of separating the two communitiesto prevent future clasheseven at the price of totally excluding one or the other at disputed sites like Vishveshvar. However, Mr. Bird opined that both Hindus and Muslims had suffered so severely that neither would molest the other. "Government adopted his counsels and no alteration whatever was made to the original position of the parties. Permission was given to both alike to repair damages, and according to their respective religious customs each purified their violated altars. The Hindus held high ceremonies, and with prayers and Ganges' water the fragments of the Lat were restored to their original sanctity and reverently buried" (Robinson, 1875: 106). But it was not until June 1810, "when the Hindus reconsecrated their outraged shrines and the veneration paid to the original pillar was transfered to the mutilated relic, that the first riot can be said to have actually concluded" (Robinson, 1875: 102).

violence dissolves Muslim-Hindu divide

Human violence has a logic of its own and even the intervention of the Gosains, which signalled the disastrous "sacralization" of the conflict, was perhaps not a complete derailment of the archaic dualistic pattern around the raising and the felling of the Bisket linga. The brahmins and higher castes had been fasting on the ghats since the evening of the 20th to mourn and protest the sacrileges at the shrines particularly the Lat and the Ganga, which meant that liberation was no longer possible in the desecrated city. When they were finally persuaded by the district magistrate to disperse on the 23rd, the Gosains and other rioters, who had been too busy slaughtering and pillaging to participate in the fast, now took their place on the ghats on the 24th morning. Bird observed that "they collected not like the Brahmins on the 23rd from religious principle, but for the purpose of obtaining concessions" which they could now extort through "the danger to be apprehended from their influence and example" at a time when the public authority naturally looked to the community leaders for support (Robinson, 1875: 103). Having run its quasi-apocalyptic course along the Hindu-Muslim communal divide, the indiscriminate violence thus began to cut across religious barriers and assume political overtones increasingly directed against socio-economic injustices. The police had earlier

divided themselves into two parties, Hindu and Musalman, and wherever they were stationed sided with their co-religionists against each other instead of combining to preserve the peace against all comers.... The Kotwal himself was a Musulman, and for his supposed complicity with his co-religionists went in danger of his life till he resigned his post. The soldiers [perhaps half of whom were brahmins; Heber, p. 429], however, maintained throughout the utmost discipline, and, whether Hindu or Mahommedan, remained true to their trust of guarding the places of worship of either denomination, acting as effectively against their co-religionists as against other disturbers of the peace (Robinson, 1875: 103).

But even as "the original disturbances marked only by shocking religious outrages had subsided in June 1810," a singular feud erupted between the military, the chief indigenous instrument of British domination and aggrandizement, and the agents of law-enforcement, namely the police: "The sepoys carried on a guerilla warfare in the streets of the city against the police, and in either body Hindus and Mussulmans were indiscriminately mingled" (Robinson, 1875: 103). The sepoys had not only persistently defied a magisterial order against the carrying of arms in Benaras but also ridiculed the police for their earlier role, thus leading to a long succession of affrays in August and September 1810 (Pandey, 1990: 40). Already during the Lat Bhairo riots, for about 20 days in October and November 1809, the sepoys were not allowed time off to bathe, dress or prepare their food, so as "to prevent them as much as possible from communicating with the people. For this purpose they were provided with mithaie [local sweetmeats] that they might be at all times within the control and observation of their officers" (Pandey, 1990: 48-9). When a reinforcement of British troops arrived on November 21, the authorities withdrew a good many sepoys from the city but still retained, for the same reason, the entire contingent of European officers. The British civil and military officials were indeed quite concerned that, like the Hindu and Muslim police, the Indian sepoys could themselves become infected by the contagious popular violence which could have easily sought a fresh and perhaps more legitimate target, namely the repressive economic order imposed by the colonial administration.

House-Tax Revolt of 1811

Even before the city had been quietened down through a partial reorganization of the city police in October 1810, "the House Tax Regulation (XV of 1810) had been extended to Benaras, and from the ashes of the sepoy-police agitation, the phoenix of riot rose in all its original strength," so much so that "the 10th of January 1811 found Benares, as the 1st of January 1810 had found it, seething with clamorous mobs and troops holding the city" (Robinson, 1875: 92). In the wake of measures to ensure greater control over collective gatherings, this ill-advised House Tax was introduced in December1810 to provide greater revenues for funding the expanded state apparatus. The Banarasis protested that this additional burden would make it impossible for them to continue with their own charitable practices of maintaining numerous traditional institutions for the widows, brahmins, mendicants and the poor who filled the sacred city. They were even willing abandon their city for good rather than submit to this violation of the basic principles on which it had been established (Freitag, 1989b: 43-50). Most unpopular both for its amount and its novelty (Heber, 1828: 432-6), the proposed tax provoked the whole population of Benares and its neighbourhood to sit in the passive resistance of a unanimous self-mortifying "strike" (dharna). Bird noted that "men of all classes and description, from the highest to the lowest, whether Mohammedans or Hindoos, Jolahirs, Raujpoots and Goshains included, were all of one mind, and engaged by oath to promote the common cause." The "religious orders" including "men of rank and respectability" exerted their full influence in favor of the agitation; Heber even wrote of religious tracts (dharmaptris) "issued by the leading Brahmins as being central to the process of mobilizing the people" (Pandey, 1990: 41ff.). Pandey, however, points out that the Rajputs, who had championed the "Hindu" cause in 1809, did not participate so enthusiastically in this popular uprising against the British administration; many Rajput landowners even assisted the colonial authorities in their attempts to disperse the crowds. The leadership of the anti-house tax agitation, at least in the initial stages, seems to have been spearheaded by artisans, workers and lower classes like the Julahars. The blacksmiths (Lohar), in particular, took the initiative of halting the production and repair of implements of cultivation and of harvest (which was fast approaching) so as to ensure the cooperation of even the landowners. One British official observed that "instead of appearing like a tumultous and disorderly mob, the vast multitudes came forth in a state of perfect organization: each caste, trade and profession occupied a distinct spot of ground, and was regulated in all its acts by the orders of its own punchayet" (Pandey, 1990: 47; cf. 197). The shrewd British did not attempt to disperse the strikers nor the subsequent (abortive) march on the Governor at Calcutta, nor did they immediately yield to the civil pressure. Once the rebellion had exhausted its momentum, however, they quietly repealed "the obnoxious tax, and thus ended a disturbance which, if it had been harshly or improperly managed, might have put all India in a flame" (Heber, 1828: 436). The crucial development, which seems to have escaped the otherwise exemplary "impartiality" of the British reporters, is that the Hindus and Muslims were now united in opposing their economic exploitation and political domination by foreigners.

Ram-mandir demonstration

Pertinent for our etiology of the 1809 Hindu-Muslim riots is the near-famine period from the mid-1880s to the mid-1890s which saw a decline in the demand for silk goods and the weaving industry give place to the piece-goods of British manufacture. So much so that "in 1891, 1,000-1,200 weavers went to the house of the District Magistrate, Banaras, with a petition asking for lower grain prices and complaining of no work. The industry was so depressed that the government considered diverting all the weavers to a new industry of weaving carpets" (Kumar, 1988: 20-21). In 1890, the British Collector had ordered the demolition of a Hindu temple in Darbhanga, an achievement that was personally supervised by the Vice-Chairman of the Darbhanga Municipal Board, a Muslim gentleman. A few months later, the British-controlled Municipal Board of Benares attempted to demolish a temple of Lord Rama at the Bhadaini quarter in order to build a water-pumping station which would be eventually paid for by an increase of taxes on the already oppressed people of the sacred city (Sukul, 1974: 289-93). A Temple Protection Committee was organized and prominent Hindu citizens, including even a few municipal councillors, mobilized mass protest from November 1890 against the proposed demolition which, by April 1891, had practically begun. The outbreak of violence on April 15, 1891, was described by W. Crooke as follows: "the weavers of Benares, always a turbulent, fanatical class, took advantage of a quarrel over an almost deserted Hindu shrine, with which they had no possible concern, to spread rapine and outrage through the city" (Pandey, 1990: 53ff; cf. 105, cf. 160-1). The "bigoted" Julahas, like the rest of the 63 Muslims arrested for participation in the riots, had in fact joined their Hindu brethren in resisting the destruction of the Ram Mandir. The local Muslims as a whole were in sympathy with the Hindu cause for they knew well enough that the next target of imperial economic welfare could easily be their own sacred monuments. Sure enough, the "Hindu-Muslim riots" provoked the following month by the attempted demolition of a mosque at Shyambazar, Calcutta, were in reality a Muhammadan uprising which was supported by the Hindus. In both cases, the so-called "riots" were in reality organized and largely peaceful resistance on the part of the Indian subjects that ultimately succeeded in prompting the government to intervene and completely reverse the decisions of the local administration. The master narrative of "Hindu-Muslim" antagonism is a stereotyped construction of a (still lingering neo-) colonial anthropology, whose inability to understand the dialectical development of religious culture in the Indian subcontinent served as a further licence for a divide-and-rule policy of economic exploitation (cf. Pandey, 1990: 44-5). This anamnesis of their shared history may yet serve the Hindus and the Indian Muslims, both the fundamentalists and the secularists, as a springboard for realizing the Orientalist dream of Benares as the veritable Mecca of the East (Pandey, 1990: 27).

(Appendix by Sunthar Visuvalingam)

"These are the laws and the rules which you must carefully observe in the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers, is giving to you to possess, as long as you live on earth. You must destroy all the sites at which the nations you are to dispossess worshipped their gods, whether on lofty mountains and on hills or under any luxuriant tree. Tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the image of their gods, obliterating their name from that site" (Deuteronomy 12:1-3).

The violent conversion of Hindu temples into mosques was simply an extension of the original strategy of transforming (the idolatrous Arab pilgrimage cult around) the pagan Kaaba into the unifying sacrificial symbol of a triumphant and uncompromising monotheism (1:233; 3:64-7). When the pre-Islamic tribes of the Quraysh were forming alliances for battle simply over the privilege of lifting the black stone into place in order to complete their joint renovation of the Ka'ba, it was the (future) Prophet who ordained that all the tribes should equally participate by taking hold of the ends of a cloak to lift it into position so that he could establish it with his own hands (1:191). Even then some of the first Muslims, as exemplified by Umar, refused to worship the Ka'ba and did so only on the Prophet's insistence and example, and with full knowledge that they were kissing a mere stone (3:120). Arabic inscriptions on the new entrance porch (Alâî Darwaza) built by Alauddin Khilji to the mosque of the Kutb Minar at Delhi liken the latter to a second Kaaba (Baitu'l mamur). Another Hindu nagari inscription on the right hand jamb of the main entrance door calls the Minar by the Hindu term stambha. Qutb-ud-din Aibak laid the foundation of this "pillar of light" (from qutb and manâra) in 1192 "both as tower of victory to celebrate the defeat of the Rajputs in battle, and as a minaret for the priest's call-to-prayer at the adjoining Victory Mosque (Quwwatu-l-Islam), built on the site of a Hindu temple dedicated to Visnu" (ibid., p. 136). Though the mosque was dedicated in 1199 A.D., the Kutb was completed only after his death in 1211 A.D. by his successor Iltutmish. Alauddin Khilji (1296-1316) had started building a second and even larger Minar at the mosque but it was never completed beyond the basement storey. Before the Islamic Kutb stands the equally famous 4th century Iron Pillar which had itself stood on a mound facing a Vishnu temple. Fifteen years after Firoz Shah Tughluk ascended the throne in 1351 A.D., the Kutb was severely damaged by lightning and the Sultan repaired it by increasing its height and adding a new cupola, which also fell to the ground after the earthquake of 1803. By the end of his reign in 1388, he had pillar shafts brought to Delhi from Topra in the Ambala district of present day Haryana and from Mirath in Uttar Pradesh; a third pillar bearing Ashokan inscriptions had been re-erected within the compound of his mosque at Hissar, 150 miles to the west of Delhi. The Topra pillar was erected immediately before his royal Jami Masjid in the fort at his capital, thus corresponding to the location of the "flag-pole" (dhvaja stambha) in the compound of the Hindu temple. Firoz Shah was a patron of the cult of Ghazi Miyan and had made the pilgrimage in 1378 to Bahraich where he had his hair cut (Schwerin, 1981: 148-9). His Hindu mother and his awareness of the cosmogonic significance of the Indian pillar-cult notwithstanding, the iconoclastic Sultan would have had sound Islamic justification for (re-) erecting a(n even Ashokan) pillar at the idgah at Banaras, so long as the monument was not treated as a divinity in itself. Akbar himself was keenly interested in the Allahabad (pre-) Ashokan pillar which he enclosed within his own fort, and unsuccessfully attempted to transport an ancient pillar to his capital at Fatehpur Sikri before he eventually had his pillar-throne (diwani-khas) constructed there in stone. In some of the Shiite Traditions, moreover, "the link between God and the Imams is visualized as being a pillar of light descending from heaven upon the Imam," which only serves to identify his station even further with the "axis mundi" or "pole" (qutb), the Perfect Man (al-Insân al-Kâmil) of (Sunnite) Sufism (Momen, 1985: 149, 208-9). The inevitability of the socio-religious confrontation hence did not precludefrom the very beginninga certain complicity between Hinduism and Islam in the symbolic interpretation of the violence to which the Lat was subjected.

Ibn Ishaq's Life of the Apostle of God already speaks of some of the treasure of the Ka'ba being stolen from a well in the middle of it. It was on the stone of the Ka'aba, created at the same time as heaven and earth, that Abraham would have united with Hagar to conceive Ishmael and it was there that he would have subsequently tethered his camel when he sought to immolate him for Allah (1:190-1, 244-5). The Ka'aba stone, which is repeatedly referred to as a "pillar" in the context of the Prophet's farewell pilgrimage in the year of his death (3:116), is also the Muslim counterpart of the stone that Jacob had earlier set up as a pillar in the Hebrew "House of God" (Beth-El), to mark the site where he had seen the ladder to heaven (1:34-5). The Prophet was himself transported on the Night of Destiny from the sacred Mosque at Mecca to the "distant" (al-aqsa) mosque where he ascended the ladder to "which the dying man looks when death approaches" in order to receive the first revelations of the Koran (17.1; 1:208-10; 2:43-5). Even otherwise, the first intimation of the Koran on Mount Hira by archangel Gabriel to the sleeping Prophet was already likened to an experience of death (1:193-4). The site of the ascension (me'raj), which seems to be a simplified version of the ascent through the seven palaces of the Jewish Heikhalot mysticism (Visuvalingam, 1991), was subsequently identified with (the Al-Aqsa mosque standing before the Dome of the Rock built over) the Stone of the Foundation on the Temple Mount of Jerusalem (1:208-9). On this rock, where Abraham had sought to sacrifice Isaac, had once stood the Jewish Holy of the Holies, a place of symbolic sexual union as represented by the twin cherubim, which were also equated with the palm-tree. The episode where Jacob is maimed by an unnamed assailant who then blesses him with the name "Israel," is itself a symbolical enactment of the animal being immolated at the altar of the Temple so as to be borne to heaven by the "ladder" of the sacrifice (2:84). Muhammed originally chose Jerusalem as the direction of prayer and is even reported, on the authority of (the future second Caliph) Umar, as worshipping before the Kaaba such that it stood between him and Jerusalem (1:207, 218-19). The originally white stone, which had become completely black due to constant fingering by menstruating women, is interpreted by the great Ibn Arabi as (the evil in) the dark luminosity of the heart. The words of Al Hallaj as reported by al-Ghazali: "People make the pilgrimage; I am going on a (spiritual) pilgrimage to my Host; While they offer animals in sacrifice, I offer my heart and blood. Some of them walk in procession around the Temple, without their bodies, For they walk in procession in God, and He has exempted them from the Haram." Hallaj's limbs were amputated before he was hoisted on the cross and finally beheaded not only for proclaiming his identity with Allah but particularly because of his affirmation that the Temple of the Ka'ba itself had to be destroyed (within) as the last remaining "idol" separating the mystic from its Founder (3:112-22, 244-9). This axial "pillar" of the Muslim pilgrimage probably corresponds not only to the black spot that was removed from the heart of the Prophet when, as a mere child, his body was cut open and cleansed with white snow (1:184), but also to the black kid sacrificed to the pole at the culmination of the Nepali festival of Ghazi Miyan. The camels slaughtered during the Hajj in commemoration of Abraham's sacrifice of Ishmael, the progenitor of the Arabs, are but substitutes for the pious pilgrims themselves.

For the Shiites, the Hidden Imam (Mahdi), who bears the same name Muhammad (ibn al-Hasan al-Askari) as the Prophet himself, disappeared in 874 A.D. into the Well of the Occultation (Bi'ral al-Ghabya), while imprisoned with his mother, in the cave-cellar of his house-mosque at Samarra (Momen, 1985: 161-71). His messianic re-appearance at the end of time will happen more specifically on the anniversary of Husayn's martyrdom on the tenth (Ashur) of Muharram (1:382-5), the first month of the Arab calendar, whose choice as a Muslim festival was originally modelled on the Yom Kippur, which likewise fell on the tenth day of the first month (Tishri) of the Jewish calendar (3:109-10; Schissel, 1990). Now, the ritual of the scapegoat on Yom Kippur, which symbolically identified the High Priest as both executioner and victim, also explains the splitting of the Jewish Messiah into a martyred ben Joseph and a triumphant ben David. The Zohar (3:100b) moreover assimilates the ten Days of Awe to the stages of a divine wedding consummated on Yom Kippur. The Jewish sacrifice of the Red Heifer (Numbers 19:1-10), whose ashes rendered the pure impure and vice versa, was identified by Saint Paul and even more systematically by Thomas Aquinas with (the feminized) Christ on the Cross (2:230-2; 3:47). The transgressive Sabbataian Jews subsequently identified her with the Kabbalistic secret of the Messiah, who had abrogated the law of the Torah. The Koran scrupulously retains this "ridiculous" Mosaic prescription in its second Surah, that of the Cow (2.67-73), to the effect that, in order to allay mutual accusations of murder, an unyoked and unharnessed cow must be sacrificed and its pieces used to hit the corpse of the victim. In the Jewish prototype, an untraced murder is expiated through breaking the neck of a heifer, which is enjoined by the judges upon the elders of the nearest Jewish city, who thereupon washed their hands over the corpse declaring "Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen it. Forgive, O Lord, Thy people Israel, whom Thou hast redeemed, and suffer not innocent blood to remain in the midst of Thy people Israel" (Deuteronomy 21.1-9). Even in mishnaic times the slaughtered cow was symbolically assimilated to a man and, according to one source, the consent of a Bet Din of seventy-one members is necessary for the killing, which would amount to "re-inscribing" a purely criminal act into the properly sacrificial paradigm of the Red Heifer (contrast Patai, 1983). The tenth Act of the classical (pre-Islamic) Sanskrit play, "The Little Clay Cart" (Mrcchakatikâ), successively assimilates the (innocent) brahmin being led to his execution to the Indra pole being carried to the cremation-ground, to the sacrificial goat being led to the Vedic yûpa, to the delivery of a cow (gosava) and his death to the birth of a son. Not only is this "chief person" of the sacred city (of Ujjain), whose body is imprinted all over with the extended hand in blood-red sandal paste, (falsely) accused of having murdered his beloved courtesan for her gold, but his own wifewith whom she is symbolically identifiedprepares to throw herself into the fire just as he is being executed. However, the drums of execution suddenly become the drums of marriage, the blood-red garments of the victim are transformed into the wedding attire of the bride-groom, and the (un)expected reunion with his courtesan-wife at the stake is experienced as a rebirth from the throes of death. The calf "unexpectedly" found within the "barren" cow, which was "to be bound or immolated after" the sacrifice (anûbandhyâ) as an offering to Mitra-Varuna, was identified with the immortal Vedic sacrificer himself. The (premature) extraction of the embryo (of sometimes indeterminate sex) was assimilated to a normal delivery and it was decapitated only to be ritually (re-) united (by means of the brahman) with the golden womb of the dead mother so as to form a single sacrificial entity. "Thus that which is superfluous (atirikta) becomes not superfluous," declares the Satapatha Brahmana. By adding the detail of the calf, the Hindu memorial has simply translated the Muslim "sacrilege" into a brahminicidal "decapitation" of Lat Bhairo himself, into the death and "matricidal" (re-) birth of the sacrificer from the maternal womb within. The present stalemate in India between the outward socio-religious manifestations of the "primordial" and the "final" revelations is best symbolized by the stubborn stump of Lat Bhairo remaining in the middle of the idgah. The toll on the living will however continue at least until Muslims and Hindus willingly join hands in completely levelling not the innocent pillar but the remaining socio-economic inequalities in what may perhaps be called an Islamic fulfillment of Vedic cosmogony.

the period before Islam)" (Momen, 1985: 169). The messianic liberty that inspires the Shia movement ìs however not so much a glorification of licence but a perfect interiorization of the maternal figure of the Imam who will simply render (the outward observance of) the law wholly superfluous. All the Imams are said to be not only martyrs on the model of Husain, but were born circumcised, with their umblical cords already severed and even spoke from within their mother's womb!" (Momen, 1985: 22). In the final analysis, it would seem that the Mahdi, who "will come with a new Causejust as Muhammad, at the beginning of Islam, summoned the people to a new Causeand with a new book and a new religious law (Sharî'a), which will be a severe test for the Arabs" (Momen, 1985: 169), is no more than the "historical" hypostatization and religio-political institutionalization of the death and rebirth of the Muslim initiates from the inner womb of a Fatimid gnosis. As the Mother-Creator figure, Fâtima is "not very different from the image of Mary in Roman Catholicism, she is even referred to as ‘virgin’ (batûl)" (Momen, 1985: 236). Such "virginity" is no doubt also the primary significance of the "barennness" of the anûbandhyâ cow and the requirement that the Mosaic heifer must have never been yoked. Fatima represents the Sophia of the Shiite gnosis and would functionally correspond, in the Suhrawardian transposition, to the Avestan Spenta Armaiti (Corbin, 1977: 63-68). The Imams thus share the "maternal" role of the brahmin (= cow): "the Imams are the 'brides' of the Prophet.. And furthermore, since Initiation is nothing but the spiritual birth of the adepts, in speaking of the 'mother of the believers' in the true sense, we should understand that the real and esoteric meaning of this word 'mother' refers to the Imams. Indeed, this spiritual birth is effected through them..." (ibid., p. 67). Bhairava himself was absolved of his brahmanicide only when he re-emerged from the Ganga at Kapalamocana during that precise conjunction when Banaras itself, the "great cremation-ground" (mahashmashana), assumed its full significance as the womb of Hinduism (Chalier-Visuvalingam, 1989: 178-80 on the matsyodarî). The inner violence of this rebirthwhich was outwardly expressed through the punishment of Bhairava, the martyrdom of Husain and even the crucifixion of Christimplied not just a positive valorization of (initiatic) death as liberation. It would suggest that the only way of completely uprooting the innate human propensity to violence is perhaps through an intense struggle (the "greater jihad") culminating in a conscious inner re-enactment of the marriage of Lat Bhairava and Ghazi Miyan, a perfect interiorization that would render wholly unnecessary this endless sacrificial cycle of raising, felling and resurrecting the pillar of all humanity.

(All the photos were taken by Elizabeth Chalier Visuvalingam in September 1985).

1. 2. 3. The temple during the daily rituals.

4. The well draped in a red sari.

5. The crown is taken on a palanquin towards Lat Bhairava temple

6. The crown is mounted on the top of the pillar. Note the decoration and to your right the garland which is tied to the well.

7. Arati to the well.

8. Arati to the kapalamocana tank.

9. A young couple making the circumambulation around the Lat during the jivatputrika festival.

Elizabeth Chalier Visuvalingam, Doctorat de troisième cycle, Paris X University (France) in anthropology and Ph. D in Indian Philosophy at Banaras Hindu University (India), is currently (1990-1992) visiting scholar at Harvard University in the Sanskrit and Indian Studies department. She has undertaken fieldwork between 1984 and 1989 in North India above all in Benares and also in the Kathmandu Valley among the Newars. Her principal publications include "Bhairava: Kotwal of Varanasi" in Varanasi Through the Ages, Varanasi 1986; "Adepts of the god Bhairava in the Hindu Tradition", in Kulture Istoka, 1988, Zagreb; "Bhairava's royal brahmanicide; The problem of the Mahabrahmana, in Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel, SUNY Press. 1989; "Le roi et le jardinier: Pacali Bhairava de Kathmandou." in G. Toffin and V. Bouillier eds., Classer les Dieux en Himalaya en Asie du Sud (forthcoming).

Sunthar Visuvalingam obtained his Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Philosophy from the Banaras Hindu University on the topic "Abhinavagupta's Bisociative Conception of Humor: Its Resonances in Sanskrit Drama, Poetry, Hindu Mythology and Spiritual Praxis." He is now preparing his French "thèse d'état" on "The Semiotics of the Vidûsaka: The Ideology of Transgression in Brahmanical India." He has just edited a collective volume on Abhinavagupta and the Synthesis of Indian Aesthetics which is to be followed by similar volumes on Philosophy and Religion. A joint volume with Elizabeth Chalier Visuvalingam is also being prepared on Transgressive Sacrality in Hinduism and the World Religions. He is currently Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of the World Religions at Harvard University.