Five days of revelry

A shopkeeper in a Delhi neighbourhood might, at times, wrap a packet of sanitary napkins with brown paper or hand it over in a black polythene bag, even without being asked to do so.

Miles away, festivals are held to celebrate the menstruation of a goddess as well as the earth. Ambubachi Mela at Assam’s Kamakhya Temple and Raja Parba in Odisha are both celebrated in June every year.

“In cultures around the world, the earth is seen as a woman,” says Devdutt Pattanaik, mythologist and writer. “In eastern India, there is the belief that the earth actually menstruates like a woman. On that day, all women are asked to rest. And no one tills the earth, which is also resting.”

Kamakhya Temple is one of 51 Shakti Peeths, the sites where parts of goddess Sati are believed to have fallen when a grieving Lord Shiva moved around with her body. Located on the Nilachal hill in Guwahati, Kamakhya Temple was where her yoni (vulva) fell. During the festival, the three-km pathway to the temple is lined by stalls set up by volunteer organisations offering devotees resting places, water, food and the occasional snack. There are hawkers, too, selling religious knick-knacks.

The five-day mela is usually held towards the end of June (22-26 this year). The main temple housing the yoni idol remains closed during the period, and reopens at the end of the fifth day. Lakhs of sadhus visit the temple, with some coming out of their seclusion only for the festival.

Because the mela is associated with the goddess’s menstruation, there is an overwhelming presence of red in the temple premises. Apart from the sadhus and some devotees dressed in red, there is a lot of sindoor or vermilion powder sprinkled about the temple. It colours the deities carved in stone, the pigeons in certain corners of the temple and, finally, the foreheads of devotees returning from darshan. This temple is also one of the few where animals are sacrificed, and one can see goats around. According to some accounts, the blood from their sacrifice is another way in which the festival marks the goddess’s menstruation.

However, the most explicit way in which Ambubachi Mela is seen to address menstruation is with the prasad. Inside the closed temple, the goddess’s yoni is covered with a red cloth. When removed at the end of the festival, the cloth is wet. Pieces of the cloth are offered to worshippers as prasad.

Jessica Frazier, a fellow at Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, highlights the festival’s link to Hinduism’s tantric school of thought. “Growing out of medieval developments in Hindu theology, tantra takes seriously the idea of natural energies, and it tends to see the divine as expressing itself through fertility and gender,” she says in an email interview. “Menstrual blood can be seen as a sign and source of female power — divine menstrual blood even more so.”

Kamakhya Temple is said to be associated with tantric thought, as opposed to traditional brahminical thought. It is the latter’s insistence on ritual purity that raises questions about how Hindu society at large understands menstruation. The view that menstruation is a process of being rid of what is impure, and the forced seclusion of women has been met with criticism, especially in the Western academic world.

While Pattanaik reasons that some of the seclusion practices are from a time before the use of absorbent material, there are others who describe it as a time of rest and rejuvenation for the women. Indeed, during Odisha’s Raja Parba, held in the first half of June, the women play, and sing and dance while the men go away to make arrangements for the fairs held during the festival.

Clinical psychologist Sarika Persaud has an interesting take on the notions of impurity and inauspiciousness associated with menstruation in Hinduism. “We generally observe ritual impurity at the time of interacting with corpses. Those who have had a parent die do not enter a temple for a period of time due to ritual impurity... However, the goddess also rests in this ‘impure’ place, right upon that thing that reminds us of our mortality and frightens us the most. We are also reminded of Kali and Tara, goddesses who reside in the shamshaan , or cremation grounds. The embodiment of auspiciousness itself resides even in the most ‘impure’ places.”

Clearly, there is a need for greater scholarly research, especially free of ethnocentric biases towards Eastern thought, on the concepts surrounding menstruation in Hinduism. At the same time, orthodox interpretations need to be challenged, instead of being merely brushed aside.

Mythri Speaks, a Bengaluru-based organisation, has since 2014 been working towards creating greater awareness on menstruation. “Across rural India, especially South Indian villages and in the North-East regions, we find that even today the first period is celebrated and every subsequent period is viewed as an opportunity for women to understand their overall health,” says Sinu Joseph, managing trustee at Mythri Speaks. “If you meet women from tribal areas that are untouched by so-called development, we find even more positive reinforcements of the significance of menstruation.”

Garima Garg is a journalist and photographer based in New Delhi

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