Authoritative Modes of Speech in a Central Himalayan Ritual

Introduction¹

Among the most striking aspects of the culture of the Central Himalayan region (this includes the Indian state of Uttarakhand and the westernmost part of Nepal) are the development of bardic narration and the social role played by rituals of divine possession. These practices interact variously in different sub-regions (for examples, see Lecomte-Tilouine 2009; Hitchcock and Jones 1976).² My concern here is with one of these configurations: that of a set of rituals known as jāgar (in colloquial Kumaoni jàg), since they take place at night, which are performed in the central part of Kumaon, the former kingdom that makes up the eastern section of Uttarakhand. The purpose of the Kumaoni jāgar is to manifest one or several local divinities. This is done either for the good of a family, in which case the ritual is held in the family’s home, or for the good of the village or this “whole created world” (yo sṛṣṭi sansār), in which case it takes place in a temple or courtyard, both called dhuṇi, dedicated to the legendary sage Guru Gorakhnāth. In the case of a house jāgar, which is what interests us here, the ritual is organized by the family concerned and actually run by a semi-professional singer/drummer—since his primary role is to perform narrative, I will be calling him a bard—in this case called a jagariyā. Under the jagariyā’s direction, the god in question, one of a regional set of gods held to be subordinate to the great Hindu gods, enters into the body of a medium, called ḍaṅgariyā, “beast of burden,” or ghoṛi, “little horse.” The god then dances in the medium’s body, distributes sacred ash to the assembled people, and speaks out of the medium’s mouth in a dialogue with the jagariyā and members of the household.

The whole configuration of the jāgar, then, offers two highly authoritative voices. One is that of the controlling singer and drummer, who has immediate responsibility for the proper running of the ceremony for the benefit of the host household. The other is that of the god himself or herself, as transmitted through the medium. In the case of the bard this is a specialist authorized to carry out this particular activity; in the case of the divinity, this is an entity with far wider authority. But beyond these foci of authority, both figures in fact use language that is highly patterned, apparently producing both aesthetic and persuasive effects. In other words, the operative dimensions here are not only who is doing the speaking, but also how the speaking is being done.

To try to put some order into the multiplicity of language effects, I will be using the model of six functions of language proposed by Roman Jakobson (1981 [1960]) based on earlier work by Karl Bühler and the Prague School.³ The sextifunctional model is well known, but I will summarize it here. Every act of language involves six elements (in no particular order of importance): a speaker or emitter, a hearer or receiver, a message transmitted between them, a referent that the message is about, a shared code that makes the message intelligible, and the fact that emitter and receiver are in contact. Any given language act will fulfill functions related to each of these elements. Jakobson labels the correlate functions: emotive, conative, poetic, referential, metalinguistic, and phatic. The functions may be hierarchical so that one can usually identify a dominant function, the one that is “foregrounded” (Mukařovský 1977 [1938]; Hasan 1989), while the others remain active as well.

Language Functions in Ritual

The key functions for this discussion are the emotive, conative, poetic, and phatic. Jakobson’s term “emotive” seems too narrow to cover what is conveyed about the speaker in an utterance, since there is so much more is going on than the mere expression of emotions. This is why many authors (for example, Yaguello 1981) have preferred the earlier term “expressive” (Bühler’s Ausdrucksfunktion) to “emotive.” We can here...