Suchergebnisse

none ; My research is devoted to the priests of the Kāmākhyā temple complex (Guwahati, Assam). This old complex, headed by the Kāmākhyā Temple and formed by some twenty temples, is the only Assamese shrine to receive the visit of people from outside North-East India. Everyday thousands of people visit the Kāmākhyā temple complex and their number dramatically rises during festivals. Two criteria, bloodline and ritual training, organize the Brahmans' activities; the combination of these two criteria makes up the profile of each Brahman and entitles him to specific activities. In my thesis I analysed the relative significance of the Brahmans' activities related to the public worship (part I of the thesis) and of those related to the private worship (part II) in the light of the transformations the Kāmākhyā temple complex is presently undergoing. The increasing number of pilgrims has a profound impact on the internal organization of the priestly community and on the choices of single Brahmans - and also contribute in shaping the economic and social life of Kamakhya Dham, the village surrounding the temple complex). It emerged from my fieldwork that a contemporary tendency among the Brahmans is to delegate the public worship to fellow Brahmans and to concentrate one's energies in dealing with the pilgrims' religious demands and in providing them with basic facilities. The rapidly changing situation, along with the enrichment of some of the Brahmans, is clearly a fertile ground for contestation and identity affirmation. I extended the analyse to the discourses through which Brahmans having different qualifications and belonging to different groups legitimise their standing; through the study of legal documents, I explored the fractures and hostilities existing among the Brahmans which resulted in a eighteen-year-old dispute presently pending at the Supreme Court of India (part III). To sum up, the thesis aims to understand the complexity of the dynamics involving the Brahmans, the emergence of new interests and the ...

According to many Hindus, travelling to Assam, in North-East India, is dangerous. The Assamese woman might trap the male outsider, using her magic to transform him into a goat and turn him back into a man at night. Unable to leave, the man would become the sex-toy of his mistress. Fear is the emotion many Hindus once felt (and still feel) about remote Assam. Still, many set off on a pilgrimage to Assam's most famous temple - the Kāmākhyā temple in Guwahati. In many narratives, Assam, though frightening, is the source of occult knowledge for those who are prepared to cope with such awe-inspiring power. Through the analysis of several narratives about Assam, the paper advances a reflection on our notion of fear and shows how the latter is often tightly connected to attraction. The narratives are taken from several field visits by the author and her research focusing on the Kāmākhyā temple, as well as common stories from Hindu folklore. Together they explore a frightening picture of Assam. To make sense of these data, the paper evokes the notion of śakti and analyses the way Assamese women are depicted in the narratives under consideration.

This article examines the cross-cultural influence that worked on the absorption process of the goddess Kāmākhyā (Assam) within the Brahmanic pantheon, through a correlation of textual and historical-religious pieces of evidence. 2 2 This article is an enlarged and revised version of a paper that I presented on 18 September 2015 during the sixth Coffee Break Conference (17–19 September) held at the Italian Institute of Oriental Studies of 'Sapienza' University of Rome. In Assam, the cross-cultural interaction, between local tribes and Indo-Aryan speakers, began around 200 BCE–100 CE—when the Vedic culture had already changed from its earlier theological pattern. Therefore, after had been influenced by a long cross-cultural negotiation, the early medieval north-eastern purāṇas transformed the dakṣayajña myth, legitimising the temple of Kāmākhyā on Nīlācala as the greatest śākta pīṭha (seat of power), where the yoni (vulva) of Sat ī was preserved. In this way, the Purāṇas reconnected Nīlācala–Kāmākhyā not only to the sexual symbolism, but also to an ancient cremation ground and its death imaginary–a fact that the systematisation of the yoginī cult (ninth–eleventh century) into the Yoginī Kaula school corroborated. In this cross-cultural context, the early medieval Assamese dynasties emerged tied to the danger of liminal powers—linked to both the heterodox śākta-tantra sects and tribal traditions that were harnessed by the kings through the exoteric and esoteric rituals practised at Kāmākhyā.