Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Adivasis in eastern Chhotaudepur District, Gujarat, celebrate a whole-village festivalknown as Gamshahi or Gamgondriyo ideally once every five years, but usually atlonger intervals. This article concentrates on the central ceremony, which takes placefrom Wednesday afternoon to roughly Thursday noon, traditionally between Divaliand Holi, as determined by village leaders in consultation with a ritualist known as abadvo. It first describes Gamshahi as a realization of ritual scripts, then it analyses thecelebration as ritual work nested within ritual play, both constituting a ritual spectacle.It does so in preparation for noting contrasts with another periodic festival thatexhibits a similar nested structure, the Olympic Games. The contrast marks distinctivefeatures of contemporary indigenous culture in India, at least of this indigenousculture, as distinct from globalizing modernity. The ultimate, as yet unanswerablequestion that it poses is, as Adivasis increasingly participate in this global culture, willthey adapt, reassert, or relinquish traditional celebrations such as Gamshahi?
Keywords
Rathvas, Gamshahi, Ind Puja, Olympics, spectacle, ritual play, ritual work
Introduction
Gamshahi is a festival celebrated at infrequent intervals by Adivasis -indigenous people, mostly Rathvas - primarily in Chhotaudepur and Kavanttalukas, the two easternmost talukas of Chhotaudepur district in central Gujarat.1It belongs to a type of celebration known locally as Ind Puja or simply Ind.In the literature, Ind Puja has been discussed as one component of a broadercomplex often called Pangu (it has several names) which comprises the ritualsperformed at the dedication of a wall-painting known as a Pithora (see Shah1980; Jain 1984; Pandya 2004; Ishai 2008, 2015; Tilche 2011, 2015).Gamshahi is, however, different from this better known celebration of Ind ina couple of important respects. First, whereas in Pangu Ind Puja is only onepart - and a subsidiary one - of a more complex ritual, in Gamshahi it is thecentral ritual. Furthermore, because the painting of Pithoras is sponsored byhouseholds, Pangu is a ritual celebrated by a household and its guests. Bycontrast, Gamshahi is the celebration of an entire village, in both the subjectiveand objective senses of the preposition: in theory, the entire village takes partin Gamshahi, and the recipients of ritual attention, to the extent that there arerecipients, are the village dev (goddess or god) and its ancestors, all of whomcan be taken in a loose Durkheimian sense to be collective representations...