Aghor Medicine: Pollution, Death, and Healing in Northern India

Foreword

Foreword Jonathan P. Parry Ron Barrett’s lucidly written and totally absorbing account of Aghor medicine is a landmark addition to the already considerable anthropological and Indological literature on the sacred north Indian pilgrimage city of Banaras. But it is also a major contribution to the sociology of Indian renunciatory traditions, describing the way in which these practices qualify and relativize the values of hierarchy and their place in a pluralistic system of healing practices. Thus, this book also has real significance for the field of medical anthropology. Barrett’s study is based on more than two years of field research in Banaras; before this period, he had worked there for some months as a trained nurse in a street clinic for leprosy patients and their families sponsored by a nongovernmental organization. That experience crucially informs his text, and many of his most valuable and original insights are about the relationship between Aghori ascetics and leprosy patients. Also important is the fact that by the end of his fieldwork, he had become a disciple of the lineage. Participant observation is a difficult balancing act, and the dangers of toppling one way or another are serious. Barrett remains beautifully poised, writing with the insight and sympathy of an insider while maintaining the analytical detachment of an outside observer. His account is sufficiently reflexive to allow us to locate its author in relation to his subject, yet it scrupulously avoids the selfindulgent autobiographical parading that in some recent writings threatens to drown out the rather more interesting voices of the anthropologists ’ informants. One of its great merits is that it shows how Aghori xi philosophy, and the practices it informs, constitutes a profound reflection not only on existential conundrums common to humanity at large but also on some of the most central questions of social science. What, for example, are the roots of social inequality? Why are some people stigmatized ? Barrett manages to de-exoticize that philosophy and practice without diminishing their intrinsic interest and distinctiveness. Strategically , he does not discuss the antinomian practices with which the Aghori ascetic is most closely associated in the popular imagination until the end of the book. Aghori practices, one has to admit, are eye-catching—at least given a bald account of them. They supposedly include coprophagy and necrophagy and the consumption of other highly polluting substances, the use of skulls as food bowls, the offering of menstrual fluids to the sacred fire, the practice of meditation while seated on a corpse, prolonged periods of ascetic austerities at the cremation ground, and the dispensation of blessings to lay householders by means of a beating. The logic behind them is the fundamental unity of divine creation and the need to deeply internalize an understanding of that unity to attain salvation . Aghori practice calls for devotees to realize their identity with the rest of the cosmos and to confront their mortality. The adept must aim to achieve a mental state of nondiscrimination that recognizes the divine as all-pervasive and omnipresent. In the ultimate scheme of things, the opposition between the pure and the impure, and hence between the Brahman and the Untouchable, is illusory. Caste, and other forms of social hierarchy, is thus radically relativized. Consistent with that fact— as Barrett informs us in chapter 1—the Aghor tradition developed as “an ideology of resistance to the pervasive social inequalities and power dynamics of Banaras during the British Raj.” The immediate end is a particular state of mind. The antinomian practices are a specific—but not exclusive—means to it. Though they provide a faster route to attaining that state than others, they make for a more dangerous path to travel, and madness and death threaten the adept whose ascetic discipline proves inadequate. In the exemplary case, however, they yield extraordinary and miraculous powers. By virtue of these powers, the Aghori is capable of acting in the world as a worker of wonders and as a healer of the most recalcitrant of human illnesses. In recent decades, however, the association between the Aghori ascetic and these extreme practices—of which my own earlier account (Parry 1982) had attempted to make some sense—has been deliberately downplayed . The sect has undergone significant reform, and today the domixii Foreword nant strand in its ideology focuses on social service to the truly disadvantaged over the quest for individual salvation—or, perhaps better, stresses the first as a...