The recent performances of women dancing and ploughing over the fields to please the rain deity exemplify the value of ancient symbolism. Some years ago a group of Australian women performed a similar ritual to end the drought. Such expressions may not have rational explanations, but they certainly carry symbolic cultural values. The loss of symbolic language in forms of rituals and arts is the loss of man’s association with nature. Let me propose some explanations.
Who cares whether dancing naked in the fields under the stars brings rain or not. The joy to feel alone with the crude nature around makes us complete as the original human. The real man is natural while the social man is very new in the course of human evolution.
The performances can be taken as strengthening the bond between man with nature: They are symbolic postures to reflect our joys and pains when nature acts upon us adversely. They also tell us how humans need to return to nature with their primitive and instinctual selves. The dancing and ploughing with the ritual-nakedness also represent our moments of respite from the burdens of social cults, cultures and creeds. They can be read as the celebrations of man’s essential selves around Mother Nature.
If women and men sing during the harvests, they also show their concerns when there is no rain. They both are forms of human reactions with joy and pain, hope and anxiety. They are the psychological cultural postures of human response to nature. The loss of such performances is the loss of symbolism.
The language of ancient symbolisms kept humans near to nature whether through fertility rituals, festivals, stories, or forms of art. They sometimes look as irrational believes and practices but the irrational is inherent in human nature and hence to act irrationally is to be human. Probably, the only thing that man should care about is not to harm others. So who cares whether dancing naked in the fields under the stars brings rain or not. The joy to feel alone with the crude nature around makes us complete as the original human. The real man is natural while the social man is very new in the course of human evolution.
Since we cannot return to be the pre-social man in totality because we are social animals up to our bones, we at least can occasionally celebrate the essential man by returning to Mother Nature. Such ideas may sound strange to many of us, but we do like to be natural through festivals and ritualistic performances, dreams and imaginations, through stories told during rainy evenings, and by art and literatures.
One of the Mohenjo-daro seals depict a tree evolving from a womb of a nude woman. The symbolism is about how agrarian life is valued around the vegetation goddess. The picture symbolizes life that issues forth from the divine womb. The visual image of the tree from the womb is one of the most significant languages of fertility symbolism. Many of the South Asian ethnic and Indus valley cultures conceived the supernatural in terms with mother goddess. The host of the male deities comes late in South Asian traditions. Some of the most known seals of female figurines are found from Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, and Baluchistan.
A student asked me a few questions after about the women dancing and ploughing naked in the field in the night. He wondered, “How can dancing bring rain, don’t you think that these superstitious women need education?” His explanation was to see human acts through the idea of causation: The link between dance and rain, that dance results in rain.
There are many things, as they say, between heaven and earth. Human acts do not always work in terms with causations. We want to perform out of emotions, feelings, faith, and aesthetic purposelessness.
In case of the women dancing for the rain, it may have been the hope enacted through dancing instead of cursing and complaining about the lack of rain. It is a process of healing the selves in the midst of conflicts and sufferings, deaths and disasters. Man does not yield to adversities easily and hence such forms of rituals are human efforts to come out of myriad forms of anxieties. The student asked me again, “What if there is no rain? Won’t it cause more frustration?”
Man has very strong survival instinct, I said. S/he will find other ways to please and heal herself. If dance does not work, there are other modes of healing practices, rituals and performances, songs and stories, and then there is hope. She will wait, man will wait. “There are many things between heaven and earth,” he smiled.
pallabi@pallabi.wlink.com.np
Related story
Dancing on his toes
