Instant Download Forgotten Friends Monks Marriages and Memories of Northeast India Chatterjee PDF All Chapter

Get ebook downloads in full at ebookname.
com
Forgotten Friends Monks Marriages and Memories of

Northeast India Chatterjee
https://ebookname.com/product/forgotten-friends-monks-
marriages-and-memories-of-northeast-india-chatterjee/
OR CLICK BUTTON
DOWNLOAD EBOOK
Explore and download more ebook at https://ebookname.com

Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...
Tribal Architecture in Northeast India 1st Edition René

Kolkman
https://ebookname.com/product/tribal-architecture-in-northeast-
india-1st-edition-rene-kolkman/
The Muslim Question in Assam and Northeast India 1st

Edition Monoj Kumar. Nath
https://ebookname.com/product/the-muslim-question-in-assam-and-
northeast-india-1st-edition-monoj-kumar-nath/
The Routledge Companion to Northeast India 1st Edition

Jelle J P Wouters
https://ebookname.com/product/the-routledge-companion-to-
northeast-india-1st-edition-jelle-j-p-wouters/
A Grammar of Guìqióng A Language of Sichuan Li Jiang
https://ebookname.com/product/a-grammar-of-guiqiong-a-language-
of-sichuan-li-jiang/
Informatics in Medical Imaging 1st Edition George C.
Kagadis
https://ebookname.com/product/informatics-in-medical-imaging-1st-
edition-george-c-kagadis/
Make Arduino Bots and Gadgets Six Embedded Projects

with Open Source Hardware and Software 1st Edition Tero
Karvinen
https://ebookname.com/product/make-arduino-bots-and-gadgets-six-
embedded-projects-with-open-source-hardware-and-software-1st-
edition-tero-karvinen/
Nonconvulsive Status Epilepticus 1st Edition Peter W.

Kaplan
https://ebookname.com/product/nonconvulsive-status-
epilepticus-1st-edition-peter-w-kaplan/
Boilerplate The Fine Print Vanishing Rights and the

Rule of Law Margaret Jane Radin
https://ebookname.com/product/boilerplate-the-fine-print-
vanishing-rights-and-the-rule-of-law-margaret-jane-radin/
A Guide to Confident Living 1st Fireside ed Edition Dr.

Norman Vincent Peale
https://ebookname.com/product/a-guide-to-confident-living-1st-
fireside-ed-edition-dr-norman-vincent-peale/
Clinical Pathology of Urological Tumours 1st Edition
Mikuz Gregor
https://ebookname.com/product/clinical-pathology-of-urological-
tumours-1st-edition-mikuz-gregor/
Title Pages
Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and

Memories of Northeast India
Indrani Chatterjee
Print publication date: 2013

Print ISBN-13: 9780198089223
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2013
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198089223.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Forgotten Friends (p.ii)
(p.iii) Forgotten Friends
(p.iv)
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research,
scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered
trademark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in India by
Oxford University Press
YMCA Library Building, 1 Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001, India
© Oxford University Press 2013
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First published in 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as
expressly permitted
Page 1 of 2
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.
Subscriber: University of Glasgow; date: 12 August 2021
Title Pages
by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate

reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the
scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University
Press, at the
address above
The international boundaries, coastlines, denominations, and other

information
shown on any map in this work do not imply judgement on the part of
Oxford University Press concerning the legal status of any territory
or the
endorsement or acceptance of such information. For present
boundaries and
other details, please refer to maps authenticated by the Survey of
India.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
ISBN 13: 978-0-19-808922-3

ISBN 10: 0-19-808922-8
Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro 11/13.2

by The Graphics Solution, New Delhi 110 092
Printed in India at Rakmo Press, New Delhi 110 020
Page 2 of 2
Figures

Indrani Chatterjee

Print ISBN-13: 9780198089223
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198089223.001.0001
(p.vii) Figures
1.1 Physical Contours of Eastern India 37
1.2 Sharecropper’s Buddhist Temple, Pilak, Tripura 40
3.1 Navadvip Khunti 130
3.2 Follower of Khunti, Potrait and Image, Navadvip 131
5.1 Mary Winchester in 1871 265
7.1 Modern Political Boundaries of Eastern India 362 (p.viii)
Page 1 of 1
Abbreviations

Indrani Chatterjee

Print ISBN-13: 9780198089223
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198089223.001.0001
(p.ix) Abbreviations
ABHS
American Baptist Historical Society
AGG
Agent of the Governor General
AGG, NEF
Agent of the Governor General in the North-East Frontier
AHR
American Historical Review
Asst.
Assistant
BC
Board’s Collection
BDRC
Bengal District Records, Chittagong
BFP
Bengal Foreign Proceedings
BJC
Bengal Judicial Consultations
BJP
Bengal Judicial Proceedings
BOR
Board of Revenue
BPC
Bengal Political Consultations
BPP
Bengal Political Proceedings
BRC
Bengal Revenue Consultations
Page 1 of 3
Abbreviations
BSOAS
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
CDR
Kachar District Records (comp. Debabrata Datta, ed. Sunanda Datta,
Kolkata, 2007)
CMA
Church Missionary Archives, Wales.
CNISSAS
Centre for Northeast India, South and Southeast Asia Studies
Collr.
Collector
Commr.
Commissioner
Comp.
Compiled
CSSEAS
Centre for the Study of South-East Asian Societies
CSSH
Comparative Studies in Society and History
DHAS
Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies
Dy.
Deputy
Ed.
Editor
EI
Epigraphia Indica
(p.x) EPW
Economic and Political Weekly
FPP
Foreign and Political Proceedings
GG
Governor General
GOB
Government of Bengal
GOI
Government of India
ICSBA
International Centre for the Study of Bengal Art
IESHR
Indian Economic and Social History Review
IHRC
Indian Historical Records Commission
IOR
Page 2 of 3
Abbreviations
India Office Records

Islam BDR
Sirajul Islam (ed.), Bangladesh District Records: Chittagong vol. 1,
1760–1787
JAAR
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
JAS
Journal of Asian Studies
JASB
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal
JAOS
Journal of the American Oriental Society
JARS
Journal of the Assam Research Society
LP
T. H. Lewin Papers, Senate House, London
MAS
Modern Asian Studies
NAI
National Archives of India, Delhi
NEF
North-East Frontier
NLW
National Library of Wales, Aberstywyth
OIOC
Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library
PP
Parliamentary Papers
RDR
Rangpur District Records, Walter K. Firminger (ed.)
SDR
Sylhet District Records, Walter K. Firminger (ed.)
SRCB
Select Records of Cooch Behar, vol. 2. Calcutta, 1869.
Page 3 of 3
Acknowledgements

Indrani Chatterjee

Print ISBN-13: 9780198089223
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198089223.001.0001
(p.xi) Acknowledgements
A FERRY-RIDE ON THE BRAHMAPUTRA sparked off this book. I was visiting
Gauhati for its archives, but had decided to take a detour to study the
architectural design of a temple on an island off the river. I was unaware that my
unpreparedness for such a visit struck other passengers on the ferry as odd until
a matron, leading a festive group of young male and female weavers, took me
under her protective wing. When we got off the ferry, her group of pilgrims
offered their fruit and sweets to the priest within the temple. I had nothing to
contribute. But the matron quickly gave me work to do—‘click photographs!’—a
place to stand in when the offerings were given to the priest, and entered my
name alongside those of the other members of the group asking for the deity’s
blessings. The names, I noticed only then, all ended with ‘Bodo’. Even though I
had brought nothing to the ritual, they gave me large shares of the fruit and
sweets that had been returned by the deity as ‘blessings’. Their kindness,
unremarkable to those who are not attuned to the social and political hierarchies
of the subcontinent, shamed me out of my intellectual and political smugness
and torpor. Even if she never reads this book that resulted from her generosity, I
thank Rupa Bodo for that instructive gesture of inclusion.
A chain of old and new friends have guided me at every step. Monisha Behal,
better known as Ben, assured me a place to stay in Gauhati, and put me in touch
with her network of friends and family in many parts of northeastern India.
Along with Oli and SP, marvelous and caring hosts in Gauhati, I am especially
grateful for the help and sustenance organized by Dingi Sailo, her entire family,
Ramdini and Dinkima and everybody who travelled with me between Aizawl and
Siaha. I thank Pu T.K., Nonai, and Ma Puia for accompanying me on a hair-
raising journey up the hillside to Serkawr. However, I remain especially grateful
to the Lha Pi (p.xii) family for their hospitality at the end of that journey—and
for permission to photograph their historic home in the hills, their library, and
Page 1 of 4
Acknowledgements
records. I also thank Kalyani Das and Debashish Das for sheltering us in Kalyani
and for accompanying me on one of the more daring of my intellectual journeys
through the archives and institutions of Navadvip. Their generosity led me to the
doors of the Manipuri dham there and to the custodian of the deity (sebait)
Tikendrajit, who gave me permission to photograph the metal ‘licence’ that has
been reproduced in this book. I also thank the lineage of Bhattacharyya purohits
who spent long hours narrating the histories of each of the sites across Manipur
and Tripura for me, for explanations and commentary on the signs and symbols
of Buddhist awakening at a formally Vaisnava site. I especially thank them and
the sebait, Rajkumar Tikendrajit Simha, for permissions to photograph all the
images within.
My undergraduate and graduate students at Rutgers University have borne up

with my ideas, tests, and arguments patiently through the years. They are the
reason that I have tried to write simply. They are the reason that I wish to write
at all. My colleagues in the department, especially Temma Kaplan, Julie
Livingston, and Bonnie Smith read through and commented on various segments
of drafts. Mia Bay, Paul Clemens, Barbara Cooper, Samantha Kelly, Jennifer
Jones, Cami Townsend, and Seth Koven provided dollops of emotional support in
the department. I have learnt a great deal from them, as I have from the tireless
efforts on my behalf by colleagues in the Interlibrary Loan department of the
Alexander Library and members of the Art Library at Rutgers University. This
hard-working group of librarians has been heroic in securing copies of books
and rare articles for me. I could not have studied what I did without them.
My warm thanks also to a vast network of generous colleagues outside my own

university. I have received gifts of books and articles from people across such a
wide range of places that I am deeply humbled by them. I wish to acknowledge
in particular Robert Linrothe, who gave me his marvelous and illustrated books
on Bengal art and archaeology in addition to reading and commenting on early
drafts of the first two chapters. Paul Nietupski found and sent me all the articles
that I could ever hope to read and digest on Himalayan geographies and
monastic regimes. Jacques Leider found manuscripts (p.xiii) that would be of
special interest and sent them online to me. Elliot Sperling encouraged me by
sending along his own unpublished work, as did William Pinch, Dick Eaton, and
David Curley.
I also received a great deal of support from South Asian feminist scholars who
convened the annual Feminist Pre-Conference at Madison and constituted
themselves as my ‘sisters under the sari’. I owe a special vote of thanks to Anjali
Arondekar, Geeta Patel, and Ramya Sreenivasan for many hours of scintillating
conversation; to Minnie Sinha, Barbara Ramusack, and Geraldine Forbes for
wise counsel on many aspects of institutional life. Anjali and Ramya bravely
committed to reading drafts and gave me the critical comments that only
‘sisters’ can. I thank them for keeping me honest at all times. I particularly
Page 2 of 4
Acknowledgements
thank Anannya Dasgupta who turns everything she touches into a thing of
beauty; she turned a jumble of words into a chapter once and showed me that it
could be done. Ramya too committed to reading drafts even as she moved jobs,
homes, and cities—and remained a stalwart friend of the project despite all that.
A fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton and another at the

Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University allowed me freedom from teaching
commitments and a lively and engaged environment in which to first conceive
and then execute different segments of the manuscript. Julia Thomas and Bruce
Grant were especially generous in their engagement at Princeton. Sincere
thanks go to Kay Mansfield, administrator extraordinaire and friend of scholars
at the Agrarian Studies Program, K. Sivaramakrishnan and Jim Scott for
cordially nourishing open-ended debate. The most sincerely felt thanks also to
Kasturi Gupta, South Asian Studies Council at Yale, for being the centre of home,
hospitality, warmth and care for all visitors from South Asia as well as from other
American universities to New Haven. Her warm hospitality and care ensured
that there was enough laughter with which to recover from bad days.
My heartfelt thanks go to my parents who taught me to resist fear and welcome

the unknown and invisible. I am grateful that they let me be curious and that
they remained curious about the strange world I inhabited in my work. I am also
grateful that they shared at least one trip to a Buddhist site with me. Watching
them as they responded to archaeological finds of stones and metal objects in a
humble caretaker’s trunk in an on-site hut, as well as to Buddhist (p.xiv)
populations described as ‘tribal’ in anthropological scholarship, were clarifying
moments. I thank them for that memory of Pilak and Unakoti, as much as I
remain grateful to Rong-phru-sa and his community for their tenderness and
conversation.
I have received so much from Sumit Guha that it is hard to know how to describe
it all. Over the years, he has lifted a great deal of responsibility from my
shoulders, and encouraged me to explore parts of a world that had been hitherto
shut off to us. I thank him for accompanying me also on one of my trips; his
presence made the visit to the Buddhist stupa at Baxanagar and its environs
especially memorable. In addition to that, he has endured additional hours of
intellectual work debating the admissibility of this or that body of evidence, the
need for additional language-training, running his razor-sharp eye over my draft
chapters. His commitment to the world of learning has been an inspiration. I
hope this book compensates in some way for all that he has endured in its
making.
However, all things in my life have begun with one good woman and been
completed by other expert women. This monograph too would not be complete
without the expert cartographic skills of Lois Kain. Nor would it have been
clarified without the compassionate expertise of Margaret Case. I thank both
Page 3 of 4
Acknowledgements
women profusely. I remain responsible for all the failures and shortcomings, and
would like to ask for my readers’ pardon for such in advance.
Page 4 of 4
Introduction

Indrani Chatterjee

Print ISBN-13: 9780198089223
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198089223.001.0001
Introduction
Indrani Chatterjee
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198089223.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

This chapter touches on the three aspects of history tackled in the rest of the
monograph. These are the issues of forgetting, of friendships between male
teachers and students, and of the friendship between teachers and their lay
female supporters living in households. By surveying the historiography of
Indian religious groups, of women and Indian nationalist politics available thus
far, the chapter identifies the various gaps in the historiography that are
addressed in the monograph. The chapter thus places the region studied in the
monograph with surviving Tantric Buddhist, Vaisnava and Sufi lineages after the
thirteenth century. It also touches on the nature of Tibetan-Bengali languages
used in the sources, and points to the physical traces of surviving histories in the
landscape.
Keywords: forgetting, Tantric Buddhists, Tipura-Tripura, Tibetan-Bengali
THE BACKBONE OF THIS BOOK is a political and economic order centring on

monastic teachers in a variety of disciplines—Buddhist, Vaisnava, Saiva, Tantric,
and Sufi. These teachers and their disciples, students, and adherents constituted
a basic unit of political society in precolonial India, which lasted in ever-
attenuated forms into the twentieth century. Among other things, these monastic
teachers and students performed the social labour of evaluating, corroborating,
transmitting and storing information; both hermit-like and collective
monasticism implied a broad-based organization of life common to many groups
in the subcontinent.
Page 1 of 31
Introduction
Among these, the Sufi, Vaisnava, and Saiva lineages of the fifteenth to
nineteenth centuries have received serious historical attention.1 Such attention
has been withheld, however, from the Bon Tantric and Mahayana Buddhist
lineages that occupied the same terrain.2 Moreover, the particular relationships
that existed between Buddhists and non-Buddhist others—such as the Sufi or
Vaisnava lineages around them—have also been ignored. This deficit is only
partially due to post-nationalist distance from the material archaeological and
numismatic remains, records, and lived practices in large swaths of the area.3
The oversight of collocated Buddhist and Bon figures is more likely based on a
linear and largely Christian logic of time and history. In its Protestant and post-
Reformation aspects, such logic implied the absolute uniformity of the faith of
subjects and their sovereigns. Moreover, British colonial scholars in the early
nineteenth century constructed a chronology in which a ‘Hindu epoch’ was
followed by a ‘Muslim one’ and so on. When some texts in the same century
were found to describe Buddhist thought and practice, colonial scholars
retrofitted Buddhism into this chronology.4 Accordingly, Buddhism was believed
to have ‘died’ in India and lived outside it after the thirteenth century.5 This view
(p.2) has been spectacularly influential in shaping postcolonial Indian historical
scholarship, especially of eastern India.6
Elsewhere, scholars of Tibetan-language records have, however, found that

Tantric Buddhist and Bon teachers–disciples and adherent households continued
to thrive on the plains of eastern India long after the arrival of Central Asian
Sufis.7 This was especially true of places along the foothills of the Himalayas
(Kamarupa, western Assam), but it was also true of places further south, such as
Kumilla (centre of colonial Tippera, historically Tipura, transcribed as Tripura in
modern India), Chittagong, and the region that modern maps identify as Arakan.
Sometime between the seventh and tenth centuries, this entire area had
constituted the southern part of a Tibetan empire, whose southern border ran
along the river Ganges on the Indian plains.8 In the sixteenth century, the
itinerary of a Tantric Buddhist monk, included long stays at monastic centres in
the highlands of ‘Bhangala or Tipura’, ‘Ra’kan (Arakan) and Assam’.9 This
teacher’s disciple also wrote a history of the extent of Vajrayana (Tantric)
Buddhist settlements in the same region, whose populations he referred to as
‘Ku-ki’.10 In classical and standard Tibetan, ‘sKu’ (pronounced ‘Ku’) is shorthand
for the Buddha’s body, and ‘sKyed’ (pron. ‘Kye’) a reference to birth.11 Together,
the term stands for the birth of incarnate Buddhas. By such use, the monk-
historian linked the presence of Muslim Central Asian armies (Turuskas) on the
plains with the re-invigoration of Buddhist teaching. Monks from Magadha, he
wrote, ‘returned’ to their original homes; the distinction between the different
Buddhist teaching traditions was erased and these places were sanctified as
homes of reincarnated Buddhas (‘Ku-ki’)
Page 2 of 31
Introduction
Such accounts were taken seriously by literate Bengali-speaking men in the late
nineteenth century. It was reflected in their sense of social geography. Sarat
Chandra Das, who visited some Tibetan Buddhist sites during these years, thus
provided three different meanings for a literary term such as ‘Kamboja’. The
first identified it with a region called ‘Upper and Eastern Lushai Hill Tracts lying
between Burma and Bengal called Koki land’; a second identified it with
‘southeast of Burma and Siam, where the Buddhists of Magadha had taken
shelter during the conquest of their country by the Mahomedans in 1202 a.d.’12
The third identified the term (p.3) with people from Inner Asia. This expansive
sensibility survived till the 1930s, when the historian Benoychandra Sen situated
Bengal and Kamarupa (part of modern Assam) within a ‘Tibeto-Chinese’
Kamboja as well.13
This study also presumes upon the expansive temporal and geographical
sensibility of the monk-historian as well as that of the late nineteenth-century
Bengali-speaking and Tibetan-reading male. The territorial spread inferred by
terms such as ‘Tipura’ and ‘Rakhan’ is enormous. ‘Tipura’ referred to Bhatgaon
(eastern Nepal); it was the site of the palace of the Saiva lord Anandadeva
(1147–67).14 It was a name also associated with a goddess, Tripurasundari,
whose temple in the Tibukche Tol was the centre of the town. Descendants of
Anandadeva were identified as ‘Tripuri’ and alternated in the control of the
valley with another family, the Bhonta, with its centre at Banepa (in the east of
the valley). Their power-sharing arrangements were disrupted at the end of
thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth, when Tipura (Bhatgaon)
was repeatedly attacked, with the connivance of its rivals, by Tirhutiya (from
plains of Bihar) forces established in the Terai (foothills).15 Whether as fugitives
or as new members of the Tirhut forces, the Tipuria followed Saiva ascetic
warriors who travelled between the temples dedicated to the wealthy Visvanath
on the plains and Pasupatinath on the mountains.16 After the Sultan of Bengal
raided Bhatgaon in 1349, a female regent in Kathmandu shored up the lineage
by arranging a marriage between her seven-year-old granddaughter and an
initiated Saiva, Jayasthiti Malla, from the Gangetic plains.17 The erstwhile dual
rule of Tipura-Bhonta was transformed into a form of triple rule, identified as
Malla rule within the valley.
Himalayan Malla were important for the history of eastern India for many
reasons. At least one of the branches of the Malla dominated a region called
‘Khasa or Ya-tshe’ in western Tibet between the end of the thirteenth and
through the fourteenth century. This region is now divided up between the
modern Indian states of Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Western Nepal, Tibet
and the Republic of China. However, in the thirteenth-fifteenth century, these
Malla were both lay patrons of, and often ordained monks in, a lineage of
Buddhists whose main monastery was at a place called Sa-skya [pronounced
Sakya].18 The Sakya Buddhist hierarchs in turn had been (p.4) significant
mediators in the thirteenth century vis-à-vis Inner Asian armies led by Mongol
Page 3 of 31
Introduction
commanders. Sakya Buddhist proximity to Mongol commanders enabled them to

flourish, sometimes in rivalry with other Buddhist ordination lineages in the
Kailasa-Mansarovar region, such as the Kagyupa located at monasteries such as
Digung-pa (in Tibetan, bKa’-rGyud-pa at ‘Bri-gung-pa) or another lineage of
Buddhist called the Kadampa.19 The co-dependence of monastic lineages and
laymen’s militias shaped the histories of war on both sides of the Himalayas. The
ancient Tibetan tantric lineages (called the Nyingma) had developed a
reputation for battlefield sorcery. As a scholar puts it, no Himalayan Buddhist
lineage was entirely devoid of its own arsenal of harmful magic and
functionaries.20 This must also be kept in mind when speaking of eastern Bengal
in the same centuries. For Malla forces were said to have entered Magadha and
then reached Gangasagar in Bengal in the fifteenth century. In the early
seventeenth century, Mughal armies seeking to oust Afghan sultans from eastern
India confronted Tibetan-speaking Bon and Buddhist Tantrics in the same
area.21 Together, this evidence suggests that scholars who argue for the
‘Tibetanisation’ of regions in the Brahmaputra valley only in the seventeenth
century may have under-estimated the historical depth of the process.22 This
monograph attempts to understand why, and to trace its consequences for a
postcolonial historiography and politics of the region.
It proceeds by resurrecting an outline of relationships that once linked the

coastal plains with the Himalayan societies. It then lays out the conditions that
induced postcolonial historians to ignore or forget these relationships. It ends
with both explanations for, and implications of, such forgetting in the
postcolonial historiography of gender, geography and memory in and across
eastern India.
Monastic Teachers as Forgotten Friends and ‘Governors’

Foremost among the forgotten relationships were those that had coalesced
around a variety of monastic teachers, some of who were spoken of as ‘spiritual
friends’ (Sanskrit kalyanamitra, Bengali-Hindustani dost). Each group of
disciples, students, and adherents of a teacher was formed by a mode of
ritualized initiation, mandatory in all forms of Mahayana (and Vajrayana)
Buddhist (p.5) orders, Vaisnava Bhakti, Saiva and Bon Tantra, and among Sufi
silsilahs. Empowerment and initiation rituals may or may not have been followed
by a second and third, equally formalized, ordination or renunciation ritual, but
a basic ritual of initiation was adequate to constitute a relation of power and
affection, and had material and political effects.23 To accept initiation was
equivalent to submission to a legal–moral and disciplinary practice that was
identified with particular teachers. Thus the ‘irony’ noted for Mahayana lineages
—that ‘progress’ in training was equated with greater and greater ‘dependence’
and the merging of the disciple’s personhood into that of the teacher’s and of the
teaching lineage—could be thought of as representative of more than Buddhist
traditions.24 Similar initiation committed disciples of other traditions also to
mandated, physical and mental–emotional observances, that dissolved the
Page 4 of 31
Introduction
‘individual self’ into a larger and more potent entity, whether that of a guru, or
that of the guru’s own ritual-intellectual teachers, and through them to an even
wider group of followers and disciples. These relationships might have been
renewed at various points in the course of the performances enjoined by the
initiation itself; these may or may not have varied by season, generation, and
gender under the direction of a teacher–guru.25
Rituals of initiation, common to most teaching–learning societies in the

subcontinent, had a threefold implication for a South Asian history of politics.
They shaped subjectivities of entire lineages of students and teachers by means
of shared discipline of appetites and desires, bodies and minds. They secured the
availability of administrative and military personnel; and they established and
elaborated an economic system and network.
The disciplinary and spiritual lineage that each teacher claimed as his own
shaped the training of the student and the cultivation of a discipline, often
referred to as asceticism.26 Scholars of Sanskrit texts use the term yoga (and
prayoga) to refer to such regimes of practice or discipline.27 The doctrines to be
cultivated varied from teacher to teacher, from that of generative potency and
power over the elements to renunciation of all such power. In some, especially
the Vajrayana Buddhist orders, one ultimate goal of such discipline was to make
the hierarchical division of male and female itself irrelevant to the goal of
achieving liberation from the cycles of birth and rebirth.28
(p.6) An equally important aspect of this form of politics was the availability of
trained and disciplined clerical, artisanal, and military personnel that initiation
and ordination established. Since the second century CE, monastic ordination
lineages of Mahayana Buddhists had developed clerical administrations made up
of grades of contemplative, teaching, and service-oriented monks.29 From the
seventh century, this monastic form of government spread through Tibet and
Central and Inner Asia. An ubiquitous system of monastic administrations and
economies existed in many Asian societies ranging from Mongolia to the islands
of Southeast Asia during the late medieval and early modern periods.30
Copperplate and stone inscriptions, dating between the seventh and thirteenth
centuries, and paper and cloth deeds thereafter, found in many parts of eastern
India, spelled out identical ‘constitutions’ of monastic governance.
The third and most important aspect of these ritualized relationships was
economic. All initiates paid for their learning and assimilation in some form.
Sanskrit legalists used terms such as dakshina to refer the exchange of services
between a skilled teacher and a lay disciple or ‘patron’. The quality, size and
nature of these payments separated the humbler initiates from their wealthier
counterparts. Biographies of Tibetan and Chinese scholars reveal that some
initiates made over cloth, wine, barley, and meat––moveable and useable goods––
along with labour services.31 Wealthier initiates offered ‘as remuneration for the
Page 5 of 31
Introduction
initiation rite an image made of gilded bronze, and a golden throne as a thanks-
offering (gtan-rag), a silver spoon with the image of a stag, a sword with an
ornamented hilt, and an armour with the image of a scorpion on it’.32 Labour-
services at one end and precious bullion at another connected the same order of
disciples through their common subjection to the adept teacher-master.
Commoner labour-providers, wealthy merchants, and fierce warriors could all be
counted among the lay (or un-ordained) disciples or ‘subjects’ (Sanskrit praja)
and simultaneously patrons and protectors, of a monastic or teaching lineage
and all its residential sites, fields, herds, and goods.
The wealthiest however appeared to have given produce of cultivable or

uncultivated lands to individual members of a monastic or teaching lineage,
declaring the recipients and the lands exempt from taxes and labour-levies. Such
deeds and documents were thus economic (p.7) and political charters. The
most effective were those granted by Buddhist monks, either as a collective or
as individuals. Such for instance was the case of the first Tibetan abbot of the
monastery at bSam.yas (pronounced ‘Samye’), who allotted a ‘hundred subject
households’ to the monastic collective.33 Sometimes these payments were ‘fees’
for the conduct of an important ritual.34 These payments and grants enabled
heads of monasteries, or their most ardent lay disciples, to assemble a
heterogenous and differentially skilled set of people on those lands.35
In particular, this pattern of economic activity by monastic men in the early

centuries amassed men skilled in arts of physical combat (wrestling, stickwork,
archery) and ritual warfare on monastic estates. This was especially true of
Vajrayana body-based tantra, kaula, siddha disciplines practiced by some
branches of Buddhist and Saiva-sakta lineages at the time.36 Monastic militias
grew out of such estates of Tantric Buddhist and Saiva orders. ‘Pala’ Buddhist
donors, for example, settled ‘Vedic’ Brahman lineages, skilled in these ritual
arts, in the Brahmaputra valley.37 A lineage of ordained Buddhist tantrics such
as the Kargyupa constituted an entire police and military force of the Tshalpa
monasteries.38 Since Vedic Brahmans and Buddhist monks alike originated from
lay families and clans that also supported their gurus, both laymen and ordained
monks appear to have provided military service to monastic estates and
teachers. Each such community was multi-layered: asceticized lay householders
followed monks, some of who were preachers while others exercised temporal
and ‘royal’ authority.
Monastic grants which inscribed the ‘payments’ that all residents of such lands
were obliged to make to the ‘Brahman’ recipient of the gift were most politically
potent when accompanied by other provisions that established limits on external
authorities. Sometimes these authorities acted on behalf of laymen. Sometimes
these were the donors’ own bureaucracy, especially those of law-enforcement
personnel (chat-bhat). Exemption from their ingress into the gifted estate, and
exemption from their search warrants, meant that the ‘sovereignty’ of the
Page 6 of 31
Introduction
recipient was localized, shaped by the terms of the grant, and limited to the
territorial boundaries spelled out in the grant.39 Within these limits, wealthy or
powerful monastic donors exchanged their own powers of tax collection or
authority (p.8) over a group of people for the skills and support of a non-
Buddhist adept, his teaching–disciple lineage, and the lineage’s support and
participation in the donor’s government. Thus, monks sometimes received the
moral authority to punish crimes committed by villagers within their domain,
and the economic authority to collect sale taxes and charge fines and arrears.40
In sum, such grants decentralized the powerful monastic donor’s own authority
by making his favoured monastic lineage, or another lineage or teacher
responsible for many aspects of pastoral care.
This pattern of localized sovereignties also intensified non-sectarianism,

characteristic of eastern Indian monastic governments of the ‘Pala’ as well as of
the Saiva Tantric teachers and disciples whose names ended with -sena
(Devasena, Buddhasena, and his son or disciple Jayasena).41 Lay disciples of one
teaching lineage patronized skilled adepts of other lineages. A grant of the
Buddhist (paramasaugata) Mahendrapala, for example, confirmed all the gifts of
grain and land that a Saiva subject had earlier made to various working
populations.42 Identical non-sectarianism was noted of the Sena lineage in the
thirteenth century. A Tibetan Buddhist monk (Dharmasvamin) who went on
pilgrimage to Bodhgaya (Bihar) in 1234–5, after the Turko-Afghan Muslim
‘conquest’ of the region, found one of the Sena disciples as a ‘lord of
Magadha’.43 Buddhasena issued orders to the cultivators and others attached to
the tax-exempt property owned by the Mahabodhi complex that the income from
the property be assigned permanently to yet another Buddhist monastic scholar
(bhikshu pandita), Dharmarakshita, who had once been the Rajaguru (royal
preceptor) of the Kama country. Dharmarakshita, in turn, was advised to care for
the elderly monks from Sinhala (modern Sri Lanka), presumably also present on
the plains at the same time. Presumably such pattern of non-sectarian gift
continued in the Himalayan worlds as well between the thirteenth and
seventeenth centuries: for long-haired Saiva Natha ascetics (yogis, bairagis)
were painted in Buddhist processions till at least 1712.44 Such non-sectarian
patronage also enabled the establishment of Central Asian Sufis in eastern
India.45 Thus the same actions were spoken of as gift (dana) and mandatory
charity (zakat).
When the term was dana, they referred to an invisible but socially valued good
called punya or merit, a commodity that mitigated the (p.9) effects of karma,
overcame debt––especially to one’s ancestors––and overcame bad rebirths for
the donor. Like other kinds of capital, merit was produced by the Buddhist monk
and acquired by both laity and the ordained in exchange for lands, grain, herds,
manufactured goods, labourers, and labour-time given in dana. The process of
exchange consolidated the political and economic relationships between donor
Page 7 of 31
Introduction
and recipient, as well as tying the present ‘long life’ and afterlife of both to the
future.
Michael Walsh has recently argued that ‘merit’ was a commodity which was the
object of many transactions and exchanges between lay and ordained monastic
actors alike.46 Rather than the division of labour associated with an
industrializing economy, Walsh’s treatment of merit as a quantum good suggests
that labour in a monastic economy was divided between the lay and the
ordained, and the returns of labour between the worldly (laukika) and the
cosmological (paralaukika). Work in both domains constituted the merit-making
goals of laymen and laywomen. Laymen were expected to conquer greed, desire,
and ignorance as they moved towards renunciation of worldly ambitions on their
journey towards monastic merit-making. Laywomen, too, were expected to
conquer greed, desire, selfhood in their ability to give up the fruits of their
work––cattle-wealth, trade goods, cash, and sons that had been generated by
their work in the world. Such gifts in turn amassed moral capital, or ‘merit’, for
the lineages in which they were simultaneously daughter and wife, sister and
mother.
For lay followers, anonymous gift-giving had little value since such gift-giving
had to earn ‘merit’, which in turn could be accumulated and transferred to the
credit of particular persons, lineages, clans. As a ‘good’, such merit was moral
capital that was transferred and transmitted to ancestors, future generations of
descendants, disciples as well as teachers and superiors. These dual conceptions
of material and future returns shaped the economic actions of both laymen and
laywomen and are attested by metal images commemorating such monastic
teachers in many parts of Bengal, Assam, and Bihar in the medieval and early
modern periods. These images were of the monks themselves.47 Some of these
images bore inscriptions transferring the merit accrued from gifting an image
(including a Siva-linga) to a teacher (acarya).48 Susan Huntington’s study of
medieval sculpture (p.10) from eastern India found many such inscribed
images.49 Similarly, Gouriswar Bhattacharya’s work on an eleventh-century
inscription on a slate relief identified a Bouddha bhikshu male with shaven head
and long ears as that of a tantric acarya, the preceptor of the donor and a
worshipper of Tara.50 These images constituted investments in spiritual futures,
and represent an identity of values and wealth-holding by lay males and females
in the same period. Both used mobile wealth to invest in meritorious futures, a
fact that is also borne out by the names of lay females (upāsikā) who sponsored
the writing, illustration, and donation of key ritual manuscripts of Mahayana
Buddhist orders across eastern India and Nepal in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries.51
Transmissions of ‘merit’, and generosity as forms of moral capital, distinguished

some men and women from others. A reputation for generosity, wisdom,
knowledge, or skill was as much part of capital as lands and herds and goods
Page 8 of 31
Introduction
created and earned by such traits. The rules of transmission of each kind of
‘good’, however, varied from group to group in time. Methods of accounting for
transmission of moral capital in spiritual and social lineages fuelled the
construction of tradition in the shape of genealogies in the hands of descendants
and successors. Such methods of transmission enhanced the generational
authority of men and women who alone could ‘remember’ and transmit
genealogies. As in seventeenth-century Vietnamese and Thai societies, post-
menopausal women, though female in anatomy and work experience, became
‘male’ as they aged; their prestige and potency within the household grew as
they accumulated hitherto ‘male’ oral-ritual skills such as those of communal
lore, genealogies, and ritual invocations.52
Mughal documents and inscriptions from the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries suggest a continuity of this pattern of monastic government and the
extension of power through the actions of such teaching-learning lineages. In
the eyes of their disciples, all such figures––whether Bonpo or Buddhist,
Vaisnava or Saiva, Sufi or alim, ‘teacher’ or ‘priest’, diviner or prophet––were
potent figures with the power to control or avert disease, death, and defeat.
They were appreciated and nurtured by all with the means to do so. Some of
these men were closer to alchemists, like the Muslim diviner (qalandar), an
‘expert in the science of necromancy and magic spells’, (p.11) who was the
teacher of a highly-ranked Mughal officer, a governor of Bengal. He received a
substantial annual stipend (30,000 rupees) from his disciple, and served as both
arbitrator of disputes and as a naval commander, as occasion arose and as his
Mughal patron-cum-disciple needed.53 An earlier generation of scholars of
Muslim and Hindu lineages had studied mostly male members of such political
societies. Following Mills, however, this monograph turns its attention to the
women-centred households that constituted the ‘base’ of support and
provisioning for both monastic militias and teaching lineages of males.54
Forgotten Laywomen and Monastic Codes of Gender

Three concerns in particular drive this monograph. One is that of female donors
and the monastic economy. Despite the economic salience of dana and zakat, the
historiography of eastern India has lagged behind that of southern India in its
study of gendered economic agency within the terms laid out by monastic
constitutions.55 Recent scholarship on the gendered nature of donative activity
in eastern India suggests some parallels with the southern Indian evidence.56 It
appears that though women’s public authority over land may have been widely
known, women did not liquidate their holdings for their own donative activities.
Instead, it is likely that the instance of the landowning female consort of a
Buddhist male (Devakhadga) was representative: this female allowed her
husband to make gifts of her immobile wealth (land) while she used gold, a
mobile and malleable form of wealth in her own donative activity, which
comprised the covering of an image of a Brahmanical goddess with precious
bullion. This would appear to fit with the record between the seventh and the
Page 9 of 31
Introduction
eighteenth centuries, which indicated that many laywomen acted as donors of

valued mobile goods such as manuscripts, lamps, and herds; fewer of them gave
lands. From the seventeenth century, however, some female donors also gifted
lands to monastic recipients. As with previous regimes of monastic actors,
Mughal donors also rendered gifted lands exempt from taxes; imperial and local
officials were instructed not to impede the recipient’s organization of cultivation
and collection of harvests from these lands for their own subsistence (madad-i-
ma’ash).57 Women also appeared to have made gifts of their (p.12) claims in
the labour-services of others to their teachers and gurus in the eighteenth
century.58 What happened to such actors in the monastic economy in the
nineteenth century?
A second question arises from the recorded involvement of monastic

governments in marriages of disciples, members of ordination lineages, and of
related laity. Three different kinds of disciples and members of monastic
communities have to be distinguished in any group. One was the initiated
layman who had sexual partners; the second, the ordained monk who also had
sexual partners; and finally, the ordained celibate male or female who did not.
Theoretically parallel to each other, ordained monastic and lay householder
lineages in fact overlapped in the communities around individual Tantric Saiva,
Sakta, Vaisnava, and Tantric Buddhist teachers. One such overlap appeared in
the records of an initiated Buddhist tantric lord, the ‘king’ Dharmapala, whose
banner had the goddess Tara represented on it.59 The same Dharmapala,
however, after having visited the pilgrimage sites of Kedara and Gokarna,
‘entered the life of a householder’ by marrying Rannadevi, daughter of a
Rastrakuta. From this marriage was born Devapaladeva, who combined both
monastic and temporal authority in himself and was described in the inscriptions
as world-conquering ruler.60 The father’s ritual-meditative focus on Tara was
shared by the son, whose inscription on an icon of the deity found in Patna
district bore Tantric formulae (Om Tare Tuttare Ture Svaha).61 The affinal
relationship with the Rastrakuta was inherited and renewed by men in the Pala
lineage. These affinal relations were equally marked by an absence of
sectarianism. The Pala Buddhist initiates’ wives were not themselves initiated
Buddhists but ‘Hindu’, likely Vaisnava.62
Cross-lineage affinities suggest that marriages between disciples strengthened

the political and economic bases of a teacher and his teaching lineage, perhaps
by expanding the sources from which ‘gifts’ could originate. Sanskrit texts on
dana authored by learned Saiva tantric ‘Sena’ men, for instance, recommended
endogamous sexual unions for those considered spiritually and ritually
distinguished (kulina). However, these men of superior moral achievements were
also required to accept ‘in gift’ the hands of maidens from households of lesser
moral capital. When Saiva monastic governance thus authorized polygyny and
hypergamous relationships for the (p.13) distinguished and spiritually
accomplished men (that is, kulina brahmans), they implicitly positioned the
Page 10 of 31
Introduction
supremely disciplined householder male (kulina brahman) as the tantric

analogue of the supremely disciplined celibate monk. Both received ‘gifts’ from
disciples and acted as a ‘field of merit’, returning blessings. Since ‘gifts’ were
permanent, the same codes therefore accommodated a variety of arrangements
such as single-generation or bi-generational polyandry (niyoga). Epic narratives
laid claim to arrangements in which supremely disciplined elder males (‘sages’)
were nominated (by elder women) to impregnate childless widows of the elder
women’s households.63 Such textual Brahmanic and precolonial provisions are
illuminated further by recently found documents which establish explicit
contracts of fraternal polyandry in the period between the fourth and eighth
centuries CE in and around northwestern Afghanistan.64 Neither fraternal
polyandry nor levirate nor polygyny was unknown to monastic governments. If
such was the case, when and why did these marriages acquire ‘subaltern’
status?65 Or to put it in another way, when did political and economic
institutions become merely ‘domestic’? Were eighteenth-century or nineteenth-
century British colonial policies responsible for both the degraded status of such
marriages as well as the inability of historians to appreciate them in the
histories of the seventeenth-nineteenth century?
From the eighteenth century, it is true, individual colonial officials disdained

plural partnerships that were ‘repugnant to European ideas’.66 Yet such
attitudes were neither uniform nor given effect as policy immediately. A Scottish
private trader and official of the East India Company who spent four months at
the fifteenth-century monastery at Tashilunpo in 1774, referred to polyandry
among the subjects of the monastic estate as a form of ‘club[bing] together in
matrimony as merchants do in trade’.67 Engels too lauded these forms of
political cooperation as representative of the ‘mutual toleration among adult
males’ essential to the formation of permanent political groups.68 Even the
Bengali-speaking men who visited those societies in the late nineteenth century
found these marriages praiseworthy, connected to the monastic arrangements of
the same societies. Yet, when the first feminist histories of the subcontinent
began from the 1980s, these patterns of marriages were acknowledged in all
parts of the subcontinent but that of eastern India. For instance studies (p.14)
of northern India located fraternal levirate (karewa) in the labour-intensive
agropastoralist work of women there.69 But no study of eastern Indian historical
practices tracked the persistence of such marriage patterns in terms of
agropastoralist and labour-intensive work in the seventeenth or eighteenth
centuries. Certainly no historian, including me, had previously tied these
regimes of meritorious but monastic female subjects’ labour to the very
foundations of colonial or imperial political history.70
Had all of us postcolonial historians simply overlooked the evidence of the

eighteenth-century ‘colonial’ archives? If we had, what were the reasons for
such exclusion? After all, British officers who praised polyandry had also
described landscapes of predominantly female cultivators. One who visited the
Page 11 of 31
Introduction
winter capital of a Himalayan monastic lineage was struck by the women who
cultivated the terraced corn fields; that it was mainly women who planted,
weeded, harvested, and performed a ‘thousand laborious offices, exposed
themselves to hardships and inclement weather’.71 Such officers noted the lack
of a separation between ‘domestic’ and ‘external’ work and the absence of a
sexual division of labour; women, like men, also worked as transporters or
‘coolies’. In the 1780s, a Company official observed women in Sylhet carrying
cloths, iron, cotton, and fruits ‘from the mountains’ of Assam for sale to the
plains. These women carried back considerable quantities of salt, rice, dry fish,
in extremely short supply in the Himalayan foothills. Colonial observers
described the men of these groups accompanying the women ‘with arms to
defend them from insult.’ These officers referred to such groups as ‘my Tartar
friends’ while detailing the method of transportation: ‘women in baskets
supported by a belt across the forehead, the men walking by their side,
protecting them with their arms’.72 These colonial eighteenth-century
descriptions of female labour did not disparage the labourers. But their encomia
of such labour overlooked the twinned ‘political–moral economy’ within which
such labour was transacted on estates owned by monastic lineages and in
exchange for merit. Postcolonial feminist historians of eastern India appear to
have mimicked these colonial observers twice over: first in overlooking the
significance of monastic militias and men, and secondly in overlooking the
predominantly female cultivators among (p.15) Tibetan-speaking people living
on many of the hills and plains of Bangladesh-Bengal and Assam.
Therefore a third area that this monograph engages is the persistent nature of
labour-services and dues. These affiliated lay and monastic households to each
other across different ecologies across different terrains. Legends collected in
the early twentieth century from the same regions as earlier monastic histories
called ‘Buddhist lands’ continued identifying adult women and female children at
the literal centre of narratives of migration from the Tibetan highlands to the
plains. As one account visualized it, ‘the women and children were in the middle,
before and behind [them were] the brave chieftains and warriors strong’.73 The
women carried the implements of cultivation––the short axes (dahs), hoes, the
seeds and the brass cymbals, yak tails and harps; the men carried the
implements of war––the swords and shields. These legends and accounts insisted
that the women and children had been the main producers of the crops of
consumption and exchange; males were soldiers who guarded cultivators. These
accounts treated marriages of such productive females as acts of great political
import, the substance of diplomacy, of ‘friendships’ between groups and
collectives. They treated the theft of such cultivators as immoral. They even
spelled out that transmissions of authority and property were mediated through
daughters, sisters, and mothers: men accessed or managed authority and
property by virtue of their relationships to women, not independently of them.
Page 12 of 31
Introduction
And finally, these were political decisions taken in collective assembly, and
therefore to be maintained as an expression of ‘collective will’.
When postcolonial socialist feminist scholars of eastern India overlooked this

particular mode of political cooperation routed through the household, they
failed to value the ‘protection of women’ that reverberated in literati discourse
from the nineteenth century. Postcolonial historians granted such affective
investments only to the anti-colonial urbane literati nationalists. Partha
Chatterjee, Tanika Sarkar, and Mrinalini Sinha highlight the ways in which
nationalist ‘Hindu’ males responded to British colonialism by reconstituting the
household and the family as the male’s uncolonized ‘sphere of sovereignty’ in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.74 This position misrecognizes a
common and central concern of males dependent on female producers for their
food and their ‘merit’. It (p.16) rests on blindness towards the payments of
labour-services as ‘rent’ or ‘taxes’, well-known everywhere in the lands flanked
by the rivers Brahmaputra and the Ganges. As a result, monastic and lay
communities’ struggles to retain females and children as cultivators and
transporters for their own monastic estates remains a curiously under-studied
part of colonial economic and political history. By focusing on the political
economy within which polymorphic households and friendships were re-
constituted and labour-services ‘freed’ for colonially organized economic
‘development’, this study offers a new, culturally and historically specific way of
conceiving gender and politics for a forgotten part of the subcontinent.
Forgetting and ‘Northeast India’: Lamentable Historiographical Practice or

Monastic Governmentality Restored?
The causes for our common postcolonial historical refusal to name the political
histories of eastern India correctly remain to be investigated. Had we never
learnt or had we forgotten to look in the right places? Forgetting has been much
lamented lately.75 But not so in South Asia. In 1992, after mobs of Hindus
destroyed a historic fifteenth-century mosque at Ayodhya in the name of an
amoral certitude about the past, at least one scholar lauded the ‘principled
forgetfulness’ located in the worldview of the victims.76 Nandy celebrated those
societies that refuse to remember the past either objectively or clearly or in its
entirety. He argued that such forgetting was essential for maintaining the social
fabric of the present and for defeating the amoral desires that drive post-
Enlightenment historians.
This position puts historians of South Asian pasts in a dilemma: if forgetting is a

value, then we are called upon to ensure its production and widespread
distribution, rather than its amelioration. Yet, Nandy offers no guidelines by
which political, economic and social institutions may create and transmit such
forgetting. Moreover, he considerably mis-states the contrast between history
and forgetting. A significant trend in modern South Asian history has been its
sensitivity towards the malleability of memory.77 Two studies of precolonial
Page 13 of 31
Introduction
forgetting in particular have the potential to extend Nandy’s argument

regarding the objects and temporal rhythms of forgetting and remembering. The
first is Sumit Guha’s study of (p.17) Bhosle records between the seventeenth
and nineteenth century. He finds that the Bhosles forgot the ancestral lands in
the peninsula whence they came to prominence; instead, they laid their claims to
authority in the region in political negotiations with a trans-regional Mughal
administration.78
A similar process is found in Elliot Sperling’s study of the migration of

Tibetanized clans from Inner Asian (Tangut or Xi Xia, from around Lake Kokonor,
in northeastern China) kingdoms to eastern and southeastern Tibet (Khams) and
to the monastic centres of the Sa-skya lineage of Buddhists during and after the
thirteenth century. Sperling argues that the migrants and their hosts in Khams
integrated their historical memories to the extent that the link to an exalted past
as rulers of the Xi Xia state became the common historical memory of the
population in Khams as well.79 Such deliberate amalgamation of memories binds
both northern and eastern Tibetan clans (Tangut and Khams Mi Nyag) in
narratives of the origin of Sikkimese ‘kings’ and clans, many of who held estates
in eastern Nepal between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century.
Such purposive and precolonial acts of forgetting local particulars for more
potent or illustrious pasts were also characteristic of early modern Buddhist
‘pagoda histories’ in Arakan. There the working of Time was denied altogether
as an attempt to paper over the ruptures that Time imposed; stressing eternity
was a method of reassurance to the community of followers.80 This was
especially true for histories of buildings or decoration of stupas, which
constituted the highest kind of ‘treasure’ in Tibetan Buddhism: Buddha’s mind-
treasure.81 Equally important, the calendar of ‘decline’ of the Buddhavacana
(teachings of the Buddha) was a real concern among avowed Buddhists. Hence
the stress on eternity, rather than the emphasis on change characteristic of
European historical texts, was itself a sign of the composers’ disciplinary
location.
By reminding ourselves of the ways in which monastic governments shaped

memory, this study historicises the forgetting of Himalayan pasts in the histories
of ‘Assam’, ‘Tripura’, ‘Northeast India’, written in the twentieth century. For
instance, an eminent Buddhist monastic complex such as Nako (in modern
Himachal Pradesh, on the border with Tibet) lauded by seventeenth-century
Tantric and Persian-writing historian, mystified a twentieth-century (p.18)
editor such as Suryya Kumar Bhuyan.82 His omissions of particular Buddhist
monastic sites in north-western parts of the subcontinent, while remaining
aware of Saiva and Sufi actors in the same landscape, then generated an
amnesiac colonial and postcolonial geography and history of a region called
Assam. Post-colonial Indian historians of ‘Assam’, ‘the Northeast’ and of Bhuyan
himself, remain unwilling to relocate the region in a broader trans-regional
Page 14 of 31
Introduction
space that included Ladakh, Kashmir, Inner Asia and beyond.83 In its place, a
post-nationalist geographical sensibility attempts to come to terms with colonial
policies towards forests, rivers, and environments shaped by animals.84 Little in
this scholarship re-imagines precolonial geographies shaped by monastic
governments across dispersed sectarian traditions and ecological niches. Even
less is said here about the ways in which the replacement of monastic
government and geography substantially rewrote ideas of gender and rank for
the ‘Northeast’.
So, to return to the question posed by Nandy’s argument, should modern

historians of eastern India continue to emulate their predecessors in forgetting
about the Buddhist centres in Ladakh and the Himalayan world altogether? Or
are the histories they attempt to write meant to recover from such forgetting?
The former is doubtless an easier option at present, especially since the histories
one might recover potentially damage various kinds of nationalist and regionalist
claims to land, dominance and dignity made by various politically active groups.
Forgetting however is also a politically loaded action. One can illustrate the
political costs of forgetting by alluding to the complex scribal cultures nurtured
by monastic sites in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.85 Such cultivation
of scribal cultures, however, was conditioned by two factors: first, heteroglot
languages and the second, a priority to oral transmission of core issues.
Ambiguous written language was especially part of Buddhist-Saiva Tantric

cultivation.86 In records generated within such epistemological traditions,
twilight language was used to refer to three kinds of objects of knowledge––the
manifest, the cognitive, and the realized––valued by non-dualist groups.87 Such
languages could only be deciphered by students formally trained by teachers
empowered to explain such terminology. When the teachers lost their ability to
(p.19) teach, or the students disappeared, historians of the region failed to
recognize the written record.
Furthermore, oral transmission enhanced this possibility. Turko-Mongols of the

thirteenth–fifteenth centuries had relied on religious or clerical figures to
perform the work of political ambassadors. Such clerical figures were charged
with delivering the more important secret and oral message not trusted to a
formal letter, while formal letters were produced collaboratively by a largely
undifferentiated collective in the chancellery.88 Cryptic letters from the
chancellery of an Assamese heavenly lord (svargadev) to various hegemons in
the vicinity similarly name priestly brahmans and scribes as conveyors of the
much more important ‘oral communication’ to be delivered in secret. The high
status of oral transmission, highlighted in writing itself, suggests the problems
of interpretation that would arise in cases where sacred envoys—the ‘brahmans’,
the teacher-monks, religious scholars and priests—were killed, persecuted,
disappeared in the course of battle. The writing that they carried or created
would become inexplicable without oral commentary. Something of this process
Page 15 of 31
Introduction
occurred repeatedly between the seventeenth and the early twentieth century on
the plains of eastern India. So that by the early twentieth-century, colonial
literati failed to recognize their Himalayan and trans-regional pasts etched out
in the records themselves.
Judging from the surviving diplomatic correspondence, Sanskritic Bengali was

cultivated as a diplomatic language in eastern Himalayan centres in the
eighteenth century. An Englishman who carried a Persian-language letter to a
Bhutanese Buddhist monastic centre at the time found only Bengali in diplomatic
use there.89 This tradition remained vibrant well into the first half of the
nineteenth century.90 In the mid-nineteenth century, missionaries summoned to
the hills of the east inhabited by Tibetan-speaking populations noted that the
Bengali alphabet was adapted for expressing what missionaries called ‘the
sounds of Garo words’.91 [The region constitutes modern Meghalaya in India].
Tibetan-inflected Bengali-language records abounded in other parts of eastern
India as well. Even in mid-twentieth century, public intellectuals from
Chittagong continued to use such Tibetan-Bengali unselfconsciously. For
instance, two (p.20) separate authors described historical texts as ‘gojen-lama’
books.92 Gojen (written as `kho.chen in Tibetan and pronounced gojen) stands
for a ‘note written by a superior officer/official on a report submitted by a
subordinate officer/official that indicates the superior’s decision or answer’.93 It
exemplifies many such Tibetan phonemes and words used by Bengali speakers
outside the metropolitan centre of Calcutta.94
Yet, in the same century as such Tibetan-inflected Bengali writers, Bhuyan

collected written texts generated by locally settled scribes in the Brahmaputra
valley and called them buranji without recognising the term’s Tibetan and
monastic connection at all. In Tibetan the term ‘byas’ (pronounced ‘chi’ and ‘ji’)
means to say/tell. When added to the Tibetan verb ‘phukhs.lon’ (pronounced
‘pulon’ and ‘bulon’, meaning to know or understand the gist or essence of a
matter) it suggests a synthetic narrative. Such syntheses, in addition to the
difficulties of converting the Tibetan calendars (of sixty-year cycles) to Saka and
Vikrama era dates, shaped major controversies about these chronicles and
records, most of which were also editorially reconstituted and printed only after
1930.95
Postcolonial historians of ‘modern’ eastern and northeastern India have already

mastered a particular kind of forgetfulness about their trans-regional, trans-
sectarian and trans-national precolonial histories. In place of amnesia then, this
monograph seeks to highlight its causes and its costs. In this it wishes to extend
recent debates about historical thinking in another direction altogether.96 While
an earlier scholarship drew attention to the wealth and heterogeneity of
communicative and commemorative technologies in prefiguring the constitution
of historical records, it said little about the priority of monastic commitments in
shaping the non-formation of ‘historical records’ or the non-transmission of
Page 16 of 31
Introduction
scribal cultures. These issues have been especially significant wherever

Vajrayana, Saiva, and Bon tantric lineages were collocated: their disciplinary
regimens emphasize oral teaching, disciplined silence, institutions of social
retreat and the determined maintenance of obscurity and secrecy.97 Tantric
Buddhist and Sakta emphases on oral modes of instruction and transmission of
sacred knowledge made them particularly vulnerable to traditions of ‘history-
writing’ that insisted on transparent and referential forms of writing. Forced to
operate amidst groups with scribal cultures (p.21) of the latter kind, many
might have created written texts which appear as ‘recovered treasures’ only
available to visionaries.
These conditions appear to have been shared by three verse narratives used in
this monograph, all of which have been identified with a lineage of Himalayan-
based Tantrics of ‘Tippera’. One of these is SriRajamala, an annotated and
revised verse narrative published in four volumes during 1927–30.98 Others are
Krishnamala and Srenimala: both were published only in 1995–6. However, the
editor of the first claimed that he ‘discovered’ a manuscript copy of the poem
which was originally written in the eighteenth century. In a similar vein, the
published SriRajamala is offered as a continuous record from the fifteenth to the
eighteenth centuries, but it was only finalized in its poetic form around 1840–4
by a Durgamani Wazir, composer of the Srenimala, a record of marriages in the
same lineage. Moreover, the Bengali version was explicitly identified as a
translation from an original ‘Tripur bhasha’, which has never been available in
writing to any scholar till date. Admittedly, these verse narratives cannot be
treated as accounts from the seventeenth-eighteenth century of which they
speak, but they can be treated as local language historiographic narratives,
parallel to and contemporaneous with histories written by men and women
trained in colonial schools and universities of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
Only as contemporaneous texts can these records become meaningful as

commentaries on colonial conditions. They are attempts to remember a
precolonial past that was dominated by initiated monastic warriors. The opening
segments of the first volume of the SriRajamala, for instance, encompasses all
tantric traditions––the Saiva, Vaisnava, and Buddhist––by referring to ‘root’ texts
such as the Yogini tantra and Haragaurisamvada, a composition by Hema
Sarasvati, one of three poets patronized in fourteenth-century Kamatapura
(northern Bengal-Assam) and dramatized at the court of the (eastern Nepali)
Bhatgaon Mallas in the early seventeenth century as Haragaurivivaha.99 Tantric
composers of narratives of SriRajamala, Krishnamala, and Srenimala used
explicitly non-dualist frame that united absolute (paramartha) and
phenomenological (vyavahar, laukika) statements as ‘truth’. Such non-dualist
metaphysics emphasized dissolution of differences between subject and object,
knowledge and knower, secular and sacred.
Page 17 of 31
Introduction
(p.22) Earlier generations of historians of independent India were critical of

such verses. Like Bhuyan who had ignored Buddhist-Sufi Nako, earlier critics of
the mixed language verses of SriRajamala failed to notice the Himalayan and
trans-national references in them. A few examples should suffice. The first
volume refers to populations from ‘Kaifeng’, the metropolis of the northern Song
Chinese empire, who accompanied others on their way to the Indo-Gangetic
plains. Though the verses themselves provide no date for such an event, other
sources mention gifts of cotton goods carried to the Song metropolis by Indian
Jews in the eleventh century and the arrival of lay Buddhist associations in
southern China in the fourteenth.100 Read against these sources, the verses do
not appear to ‘falsify’ the past so much as encode it in a non-European, monastic
and itinerant hermeneutic. The geographical space encountered in these verses
under the term ‘trisrota’ (or ‘three rivers’) was a reference in colloquial Sanskrit
to the river Tista, which flowed from the eastern Himalaya through Sikkim-
Nepal on to the plains of Bengal.101 In the same vein, the verses speak of a
mountain (parbatiya) king of ‘Tripura’, whose followers were knowledgeable in
‘malla-vidya’ (lit. wrestling, also hand-to-hand combat). However, since these
verses were printed only after the circuits of a monastic geographic order were
dissolved, many of the places named in such verses remained unrecognized by
nationalist plainsmen of the twentieth century. ‘Herambo’ is a case in point: few
Bengali readers after 1930 could translate the name as the district of Herombo
in western Nepal, associated with an ancient (in Tibetan, the term is ‘rNyingma’,
and represents an ordination lineage) Buddhist monastery. However, the verses
that use such terms also specify the flora and fauna of the terrain. Animals
referred to in the poem included mountain goats ‘with extremely fine hair’,
horned goats of the high Himalayan and Tibetan plateaus.102
Such landscapes were eclipsed from view finally by the Second World War and
its aftermath, the territorial Partitions of 1947. These were the second set of
circumstances that shaped postcolonial historical imagination and methods of
verification. As a result, the terracotta plaques, stone inscriptions, metal images
and coins that corroborate names and dates mentioned in the verse-narratives
and chronicles, which lie scattered across the monastic geographic order
between western Tibet, Kashmir, Nepal, Burma, western and (p.23) southern
China, Assam, and Bengal, (many of which are in private collections across
eastern India) were seldom studied at any length by professional Indian
historians in the 1970s–90s.103
Place names on the coasts also hint at connections with foothills: for instance, a
temple dedicated to the goddess Ambika, also called Tripurasundari, sits on a
high hilltop outside the modern town of Agartala. A river that flows from Nepal
into the Gangetic plains (of modern Uttar Pradesh in India) called the Gomti
gives its name to a river in the southern part of modern Tripura. In the vicinity
are Buddhist stupa sites such as Pilak and Baxanagar. Terracotta plaques found
in the walls of the abandoned stupa at Pilak mirror the motifs of terracotta
Page 18 of 31
Introduction
plaques found on the Buddhist stupa at Paharpur (presently in northern

Bangladesh). The earliest plaque recovered from Pilak, sculpted with date Om
Śakābda 1419 (1497 CE), in the same script and numbers used for medieval
Bengali, puts the building, or at least embellishment, of the Buddhist stupa in
the tenure of the Turko-Afghan Muslim Hussain Shahi (1494–1519 CE)
governors in western Bengal.104 Another terracotta plaque also recovered from
Pilak is sculpted with the figure typical of Achaemenid Bactrian art: it is the
mythical horned lion with a spearhead-ending tail, a long slim body shaped like
an S and an open mouth.105 The only difference between the older Bactrian
motif and that of the Pilak terracotta and coins of the seventh-century
Himalayan Buddhist-Vaisnava lords of Nepal (Manadeva and Sivadeva c 570s–
605 CE) and those found in Kumilla/Tripura on the Bengal plains is that the
horned lion of the latter has a raised right paw, and appears to be holding a
plant in it.106
These objects, names, and practices resonate only when placed within the map
of a monastic geographic order that connected the Himalayan and trans-
Himalayan world with that of the coastal and riverine plains of eastern India.
The ‘Tipura’ coinage, marked by the composite horned lion referred to above,
had the same weight standards as the silver tanka of the Afghan sultans of
Bengal.107 The close economic relationship that is narrated by the SriRajamala
between a lineage of monastic militants and a Turco-Afghan imperium appears
plausible in the light of such external corroborative material.
Nor are these verses, chronicles, and correspondence limited to relations

between men, women, deities, and spirits alone. They also (p.24) treat all
animals as wealth, given in payments of different kinds. Verses of SriRajamala
aver that one of the scions of Tipura/Tripur, having presented the sultan, the
supreme commander of Gauda (Gaudesvar), with elephants, was allowed to
settle in ‘Vanga’ (eastern Bengal).108 Buranjis refer to the number of elephants
that were sent annually by monastic tenants, residents of Tipura and the Assam
hills, to Mughal tax collectors well into the eighteenth century.109 They refer to
institutions of trapping and corralling elephants (kheda) established for such
purposes. They document the many different lives that made up the monastic
geographic order in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
In addition, these heteroglot records alone allow us a vantage point from which
to launch the interrogation of colonial categories of knowledge as well as
colonial methods of recognition as the practices of distance. Viewed from the
perspective of intimates—the perspective that this monograph adopts—the same
groups that appear as ‘Dafla tribes’ in nineteenth-century English records
reappear in chronicles and poems as seventeenth-century tenants (bahatia) of
old monastic lineages of married abbots.110 Other Vaisnava texts place names
such as those of ‘Govinda Garo’, ‘Paramananda Miri’, ‘Jayaram Bhutiya’, a Nocte
called Narottama, and a ‘Jayahari Yavana’ (literally ‘Yavana’ was Ionian or
Page 19 of 31
Introduction
Greek, but in seventeenth-century usage referred to Muslims)––names taken as

badges of subaltern and ‘tribal’ alterity in the colonial order––as fellows and
members of ordination lineages.111 Eventually, these heteroglot genealogies,
poetry, and chronicles’ insistent mapping of a relational universe commends
them to every postcolonial historian as the starting point of a journey out of a
fragmented landscape—that of a so-called ‘Northeast India’—and into reviving a
modicum of the friendships that have been valued in and among Buddhist
communities.
Architecture of the Argument

Chapter 1 surveys the ways in which monastic governments of collocated
Buddhist, Saiva, Sufi, and Vaisnava guides, teachers, and their adherents shaped
what van Spengen has called ‘monastic geographicity’.112 The term expresses
the spatial extent of a cultural complex of establishments and movements, a
conceptual map of dominant patterns of communication, lifeways, repertoires,
and (p.25) techniques, and a political complex of ‘subjects’ and ‘sovereigns’.
The chapter argues that exogamous marriages and polyandrous and polygynous
unions were the fulcrum of such ‘monastic geographicity’.
This chapter begins with the basic units of monastic geographicity––the

monastic residence, established by adherent individuals and clans that focused
pastoral networks, pilgrim itineraries, and trade routes, acted as local
marketplaces and storehouses. By virtue of receiving the gift of donors in
exchange for merit, individual monasteries came to possess extensive lands,
livestock, trading goods, and capital on loan. This vast geographic order had
been created by the establishment of monasteries at the crossroads of silk
routes in the Himalayan domains, including Assam, as well as along the coasts of
Bengal, Burma, and beyond.113 At least one such silk road was called the
Northern Route (Uttarāpatha).114 There were others, either branching off from
the Northern Route or entirely independent of it. Mobility between the
Himalayan hills and coastal plains along routes dotted by such monastic
establishments enabled the circulation of people, herds, and objects, as much as
they led to the convergence of ideas, structures of lineage-making, rituals, and
disciplines. Mahayana Buddhist manuscripts dated between the eleventh and
fourteenth centuries circulated by many routes within this vast domain and were
eventually found in Nepal.115 Using similar routes and extending them further,
men and animals from ‘power’ centres in Himalayan uplands settled the
lowlands and swamps of the Indo-Gangetic and Irawati lowlands and swamps.116
Monastic centres, spread out across different environmental and resource

niches, had to be connected to each other through other relationships, either of
friendship or of marriage. Therefore alliances and marriages became the
fulcrum of ‘monastic geographicity’ and the key to monastic governments. In the
medieval Tibetan empire, these marriage alliances set up ‘uncle–nephew’ or
‘father-in-law and son-in-law’ relationships (zhang dbon) or ‘elder brother–
Page 20 of 31
Introduction
younger brother’ relationships (tschen-tschung) between central governments

and provincial powers. Similar marital relationships were recorded in
genealogies that expressed the localization of Central Asian (Afghan) and West
Asian (Arab) lineages of ulema and Sufi pirs in Bengal after the fifteenth century.
In the late seventeenth century, Mughal attempts to reorganize monastic militias
then created (p.26) conditions in which descent from monastic men became
important to remember.
Chapter 2 traces the early encounter between the English East India Company
and the key figures of monastic geography and genealogical memory in the
second half of the eighteenth century. Officers attempted to destroy monastic
exemptions from taxes, and to tax lands held as service–wages by adherents in a
temple–monastic economy. Female landholders, major donors and actors in the
monastic economy, became particular targets of these policies. Twin
dispossessions converged to create shifts of title in landed wealth within all
groups with claims to collect payments in kind and services from people settled
on such estates. At the same time, the legislative enactments also created
conflicts of succession within the all-male lineages of teachers and gurus on the
land.
Chapter 3 tracks the further diminution of authority of monastic leaders and

their households of adherents across the early nineteenth-century network that
encompassed lineages and families in Ava, Assam, Tripura, and Manipur. The
East India Company’s wars of the early nineteenth century, especially that with
Burma and in the Brahmaputra and Barak river valleys, were crucial in the de
facto delegitimation of a widow’s rights of inheritance from a second husband.
In highlighting this, the chapter links colonial land-revenue legislation from
1790–3 to the legal dispossession of daughters as well as widows much further
eastwards than hitherto understood. This dispossession clarifies the ways in
which ‘Hinduism’ itself was revised to keep it abreast of the expanding colonial
military frontier. At the same time, this chapter attempts to fix the cause of such
dispossession not in an idealized British law of coverture or married women’s
‘separate estate’ but rather in military and economic concerns after the Anglo-
Burmese War (1824–6). Such concerns, rather than abstract legal ideals,
eventually eroded the political fraternities based in a common spouse, or
polyandry and levirate, from eastern Indian history. Structural and discursive
shifts occurred simultaneously to obliterate the marriages of daughters and
sisters from the colonial archives and from the authority or dignity accorded to
these households by subsequent historians.
Chapter 4 translates between metaphors and descriptions of adherence and the

nineteenth-century Liberal and colonial Anglophone (p.27) discourse of
‘feudalism’, ‘slavery’, and ‘savagery’. In choosing linguistic and cultural
translation as an interpretative stance towards both hybrid regional and English-
language written sources, one of my goals is to reinstate translation to its
Page 21 of 31
Introduction
intellectual dignity as a historically established scholarly activity. Translation

had a hoary literary genealogy especially in the medieval and early modern
periods during which texts and teachers from eastern India travelled and taught
in Himalayan terrain; translations also engaged visiting Moroccan Muslim
scholars and craftsmen at the same time.117 In keeping with that past, I subject
English-language colonial records to translation. On the one hand this renders
coherent a great mass of descriptive terms and nomenclature found transcribed
in the records of the East India Company between the eighteenth and twentieth
centuries. It makes the hybridity of the colonial archives explicit. On the other
hand, it allows us to read these terms against the shifting economies of land
revenue and military service associated with the growing power of the East
India Company. Finally, this method of reading also reveals the ways in which
early nineteenth-century colonial Englishmen mimicked the very monastic
political economies that their policies gradually, and selectively, overrode.
Chapter 5 analyses the implications of colonial mimicry of monastic politics. It

traces the formation of two parallel and competing orders of ‘friendship’ in
eastern India. While the conflicts over tea plantations have been hitherto studied
as issues in European management of immigrant labour, this chapter tracks the
politics of fraternity practiced by monastic subjects resident in places such as
Kachar, Sylhet, Tripura, and Manipur when tea plantations arrived there. In
particular, this chapter studies the confrontation that is known as the ‘Lushai
Expedition’ of 1871 in the colonial records. This expedition inaugurated the
territorial segregation of tea-growing regions by an imaginary ‘Inner Line’ and
its administration by a Chief Commissionership of Assam set up in 1874. In
effect this ‘Inner Line’ was aimed at keeping the visiting, non-residential, non-
native monastic teacher, guru, and guide of yesteryear from acquiring lands,
trade goods, and subjects in terrain and among ‘labourers’ coveted by European
tea planters. An apparently political boundary was thus created to keep
monastic subjects apart from their erstwhile ‘friends’.
(p.28) Chapter 6 studies the attempt led by women to restore older codes of
friendship in the face of intensified militarization of colonial governance in
southern Kachar, northern Chittagong, and the Arakan hills. British military
policemen did not distinguish between male and female when using the term
‘coolie’. Yet in at least a few instances, their demands for labour were also
demands for sexual services from local wives. These demands were resisted by
networks of intermarried clans. The resistance of 1890–1900 provided the
background for the gradual turn to Christian healers who lived alongside the
British Indian armies. I track the effects of events in the Himalayan monastic
world of 1903–4 on a cluster of villages that had been affected by the exclusions
of the Inner Line. The populations of these villages on the Indian side of the
Inner Line followed older monastic ideas of debt and exchange and offered
themselves to Christian missionaries. Elder women led this attempt to re-
establish the merit-based monastic economy, only this time with a new kind of
Page 22 of 31
Introduction
monk and teaching at its centre. The Inner Line had however cut off hillocks
from flat lands. Therefore, Christianization of newly isolated societies also
excluded such populations living on elevations from interactions with plainsmen.
These circumstances finally and ironically led to the renunciation of collocated
pasts in Bon, Tantric Buddhist, and Saiva communities as ‘barbaric’. This
simultaneously consolidated a social amnesia about the past within the new
learning societies on the hills as well as on the plains. In postcolonial
universities outside the Inner Line, scholars began to identify hitherto co-
members of monastic discipleship as ‘strangers of the mist’.118
Notes:
(1) . Eaton (1978, 1993); Digby (2001); Green (2006, 2008); White (2009: 198–
254); Pinch (1996, 2006); Dube (2004); Chaturvedi (2007).
(2) . For studies of Arakanese Buddhist-Muslim kings between the fifteenth and
eighteenth century, see Gommans and Leider (2002); Leider (2002); for Muslim–
Mongol military commanders who protected Tibetan Buddhist texts and
practices by compelling Jesuit missionaries to learn them in the eighteenth
century, see Pomplun (2011).
(3) . For studies of monastic sites and assemblages excavated over easternmost
India and Bangladesh, see Dikshit (1938); Das (1971); Mitra (1976); Mitra
(1996); Gill (2002); Roy (2002); Das (2004); for a survey of all the sites in Bogra
district, see Rahman (2000) and comments on the co-existence of Buddhist and
Brahmanic finds; for Avalokiteshvara and Akshobhya finds at Mainamati and
Paharpur in Bangladesh, see Imam (2000a, 2000b); Bhattacharya (2000, 2003);
for Jaina, Saiva and Buddhist finds, see all articles in Mevissen and Banerji
(2009). For reports of Buddhist and Saiva finds at western and southern Tripura
sites dateable to the sixth century by the Archaeological Survey of India, Gauhati
Circle, visit http://asi.nic.in/asi_exca_2005_tripura.asp (last accessed on 15 June
2009). Compare standing Buddha figure of red standstone from Pilak, southern
Tripura, dated to the tenth century by the Tripura Government Museum, http://
tripura.nic.in/museum (last accessed on 15 June 2009), with red standstone
standing Vishnu from Pilak at Tripurasociety.org/ photogallery (last accessed on
15 June 2009). The Tripura Government Museum has also collected miniature
terracotta figures of Mukhalingam (Saiva) Avalokiteshvara, Tara, and Vishnu
from various sites: for an analysis of these, see Sengupta (1986, 1993).
Accidental excavations continue to yield paired Buddhist–Vishnu icons such as
the pair found while excavating a pond at Taichama, western Tripura, for which
see The Telegraph, 17 March 2006 at http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060317/
asp/northeast/story_5976829.asp (last accessed on 15 June 2009). Some of these
finds and sites have been read alongside Sanskrit and Bengali-language
inscriptions, deciphered, and translated in Bhattacharya (1968); Das (1997);
Bhowmik (2003); Palit (2004); Acharjee (2006); and Acharjee (2008); for
descriptions of recent excavations, see Chauley (2009). For sites in modern
Page 23 of 31
Introduction
Bengal and Assam such as Surya Pahar at Goalpara, see Kaushik Phukan, http://
www.posoowa.org/2007/06/27/the-conditionof-surya-pahar-a-neglected-
archaeological-site/ (last accessed on 15 June 2009) and http://
explorenortheastindia.com/assam.htm (last accessed on 20 June 2009); for the
depiction of multiple deities at the Hayagriva Madhava temple at Hajo, see
http://asi.nic.in/images/epigraphy/008.jpg (last accessed on 15 June 2009). For
reports that the Hajo temple is the site of the winter pilgrimage of thousand of
Buddhist Tibetans and Bhutanese on the grounds that Shakyamuni attained
Mahaparinirvana at Hajo, that the Vaisnava temple itself is a chortem called r-
Tsa-mchg-gron (Tsamcho-dun), that a rocky area a few kilometres away is
considered the site of the Buddha’s cremation called Silwa tsal-gi tur do (the
pyre of the cool grove), that Buddhists also consider sacred a Saiva Kedarnath
temple on the shoulder of a hill nearby and call a lake beside the temple Tso-
mani bhadra (the lake of the notable gem), see Ravi Deka’s report filed in 2000
at http://www.geocities.com/ravideka/archaeology.htm (last accessed on 20 June
2009); for scholarly discussion of Hajo as well as the Tibet-Assam connections of
the seventeenth century, see Huber (2008: 125–65); for other sites in modern
Northeastern Indian states, see Dutta and Tripathy (2006, 2008).
(4) . For illustrative studies of the gradual discovery of Buddhism by the British,
see Lopez (ed.) (1995a and 1995b); Leoshko (2003); De Filippis (2003 [1932]);
and Harris (2006).
(5) . For representative illustration of such schema, see Verardi (2011).
(6) . For illustrative examples, see Niyogi (1980); Bhattacharya (2008).
(7) . For the fifteenth century, see Mckeown (2010); also Elverskog (2010); for
translation activities of Indian pandits and Tibetan lo-tsa-ba between fourteenth
and seventeenth centuries, see Shastri (2002).
(8) . Doctor (2005: 18); for a list of the epigraphs found in coastal Bengal, see
Morrison (1970, 1974); updated lists and sites in Hussain et al. (1997); Banik
(2009).
(9) . Tucci (1931: 697, 699).
(10) . Taranatha’s History of Buddhism in India (1970: 330). Taranath, b. 1575,

wrote this in 1608.
(11) . Hodge (2009: 171); Goldstein et al. (2001: 55).
(12) . Das (1990 [1902]: 10).
(13) . Sen (1942: 341–6).
Page 24 of 31
Introduction
(14) . Petech (1984: 66). Bhatgaon, in eastern Nepal, was also known as
Bhaktapur in Sanskrit.
(15) . Ibid., 107, 109. For earlier reports of worship of Tripuresvari alongside
Bonpo and Buddhist practices in western Nepal (Jumla) and Tibet, see Tucci
(1956: 17–62); for confusion about the status of Tripurasundari in late twentieth-
century Bhaktapur, compare Levy (1987) with Gutschow and Basukala (1987);
Vergati (2002 [1995]: 39, 110).
(16) . Gaenszle (2002).
(17) . Petech (1984: 124–9).
(18) . Dhungel (2002: 47–72).
(19) . For the Kagyupa, see Dargye (2001); for the Kadampa, see Rai (2006).
(20) . Pomplun (2010: 118).
(21) . Jahangirnama (1999: 142–3).
(22) . Huber (2008: 6); for different interpretations on both sacred geography of
Tibetan Buddhists and of ethnic categories such as ‘Mon-pa’ in southern Bhutan,
see Pommaret (1999) and Templeman (1999).
(23) . For debate on ‘monastic’ as a term, see Gellner (1987, 1992).
(24) . Amstutz (1998).
(25) . As Alexis Sanderson’s studies of Pala disciples of particular Tantric

teachers reveal, initiates were spoken of as ‘kings’: after initiation, these men
rewarded their teachers with headships of monasteries and monastic estates.
Though king, each Pala was also a ‘subject’ of a teacher; Sanderson (2009: 92–4)
for Pāla-built monasteries for teachers; also see his lecture at the University of
Toronto, February 2010.
(26) . Flood (2004). Askesis literally meant exercise or discipline, giving

practical effect to a doctrine and continuous embodied practice. See Valantasi
(1995); for the centrality of disciplinary practice, not doctrines, to the formation
of all schools, sects and lineages in India, see Silk (2002).
(27) . Ingalls (1957); Pollock (1985); for yogacara as attempt to synthesize

diverse contemplative, ruminant and renunciative practices or muni-yati cults,
see Amstutz (1998); Bronkhorst (2011: 164–5 and passim).
(28) . For Theravada symbolism, see Kirsch (1996); Van Esterik (1996); Keyes
(1984); for Mahayana gender, see Cabezón (1992); Gyatso (2003); Makley
(2007); Cook (2009).
Page 25 of 31
Other documents randomly have
different content
for those pots too, and tote all the quilts there, and the sack of newly
ginned cotton April had given her for lining the quilts, besides all the
rations that had to be cooked for the quilters to eat at dinner-time.
With a sleepy groan Breeze rose and pulled on his shirt and
breeches, then his sluggish feet shambled toward the water-shelf
where the tin washbasin sat beside the water-bucket. Big Sue made
him wash his face, no matter how soon or cold the morning was. He
might as well do it, and get it over with.
As he reached a heavy hand up for the gourd that hung on a nail
beside the water-bucket, his arm lengthened into a lazy stretch, the
other arm joined in, and his mouth opened into a wide yawn. Then
his fingers dropped wearily on to his head where they began a slow
tired scratching.
Big Sue stopped short in her tracks, and the sparkle in her beady
black eyes cut him clear through to the quick.
“Looka here, boy! Is you paralyze’? I ain’ got time to stop an’ lick
you, now. But if you don’ stir you’ stumps, you’ hide won’ hold out to-
night when I git back home. Dat strap yonder is eetchin’ to git on you’
rind right now! Or would you ruther chaw a pod o’ red pepper?”
The long thin strip of leather, hanging limp and black against the
whitewashed wall not far from the mantel-shelf, looked dumb and
harmless enough, but Breeze gave a shiver and jumped wide awake
as his eyes followed Big Sue’s fat forefinger. That strap could whistle
and hiss through the air like a blacksnake when Big Sue laid its licks
home. Its stinging lash could bite deep into tender naked meat. But
the string of red pepper pods hanging outside by the front door were
pure fire.
He wanted to cry but fear crushed back the misery that seized him,
and gulping down a sob he hurried about his tasks. First he hastily
swallowed a bite of breakfast, then he took a big armful of folded
quilt tops, and holding them tight hurried to Maum Hannah’s house
with them.
The sun was up, and the morning tide rolled high and shiny in the
river. The air was cool, and the wind murmuring on the tree-tops
strewed the path with falling leaves. Some of them whirled over as
they left the swaying boughs, then lay still wherever they touched the
ground, while others flew sidewise, and skipped nimbly over the
ground on their stiff brown points.
The sunlight smelled warm, but the day’s breath was flavored with
things nipped by the frost. The sweet potato leaves were black, the
squash vines full of slimy green rags. The light frost on the cabin
steps sparkled with tinted radiance as the cool wind, that had all the
leaves trembling in a shiver, began to blow a bit warmer and melt it
back into dew.
This was the second frost of the fall. One more would bring rain. The
day knew it, for in spite of the sun’s brave shining, the shadows fell
heavy and green under the trees. Those cast by the old cedar
stretched across the yard’s white sand much blacker and more
doleful than the sun-spotted shade cast by the live-oaks.
Maum Hannah’s house was very old, and its foundations had
weakened, so the solid weight of its short square body leaned to one
side. The ridge-pole was warped, the mossy roof sagged down in the
middle, and feathery clumps of fern throve along the frazzled edge of
the rotted eaves.
Two big black iron washpots in Maum Hannah’s yard sat close
enough to the house to be handy, but far enough away to kill any
spark that might fly from their fires toward the house, trying to set fire
to the old shack, tottering with age and all but ready to fall.
Inside Maum Hannah, dressed up in her Sunday clothes, with a
fresh white headkerchief binding her head, a wide white apron
almost hiding the long full skirt of her black and white checked
homespun dress, awaited the guests. She was bending over the fire
whose reddish light glowed on her cheerful smile, making it brighter
than ever.
“Come in, son. You’s a early bird dis mawnin’. You’s a strong bird
too, to tote sich a heavy load. Put de quilts on de bed in de shed-
room, den come eat some breakfast wid me. I can’ enjoy eatin’ by
myse’f, and Emma went last night to Zeda’s house, so e wouldn’t be
in my way to-day.”
The bacon broiling on a bed of live coals, and fresh peeled sweet
potatoes just drawn out from the ashes where they had roasted,
made a temptation that caused Breeze’s mouth to water. But he
hesitated. Cousin Big Sue was waiting for him, and he knew better
than to cross her this morning.
“If you can’ set down, take a tater in you’ hand an’ eat em long de
way home. A tater’s good for you. It’ll stick to you’ ribs.”
Breeze took the hot bit from her hand and started to hurry away, but
she stopped him, “No, son! Don’ grab victuals an’ run! Put you’
hands in front o’ you, so. Pull you’ foot an’ bow, an’ say ‘T’ank
Gawd!’ Dat’s de way. You must do so ev’y day if you want Jedus to
bless you. All you got comes from Gawd. You mustn’ forgit to tell Him
you’s t’ankful.”
Most of the cabin doors were closed, but the smoke curling up out of
every chimney circled in wreaths overhead. Little clouds of mist
floated low over the marsh, where the marsh-hens kept up a noisy
cackling. Roosters crowed late. Ant-hills were piled high over the
ground. All sure signs of rain, even though no clouds showed in the
pale blue sky.
As soon as Breeze’s work was done, Big Sue had promised he could
go to Zeda’s house or to April’s, and spend the rest of the day
playing with their children, and now there were only a few more
lightwood splinters to split. The prospect of such fun ahead must
have made him reckless, or else the ax, newly sharpened on the big
round grind-stone, had got mean and tricky. Anyway, as Breeze
brought it down hard and heavy on the last fat chunk to be split, its
keen edge glanced to one side and with as straight an aim as if it
had two good eyes, jumped between two of his toes. How it stung!
The blood poured out. But Breeze’s chief thought was of how Big
Sue would scold him. Hopping on a heel across the yard to the door-
step he called pitifully for Maum Hannah.
“Great Gawd!” she yelled out when she saw the bloody tracks on the
white sand. “What is you done, Breeze? Don’ come in dis house an’
track up dis floor! Wha’ dat ail you’ foot?”
She made him lie flat on the ground and hold his foot up high, then
taking a healing leaf from a low bush, growing right beside her door,
she pressed it over the cut and held it until it stuck, then tied it in
place. That was all he needed, but he’d have to keep still to-day.
Maybe two or three days.
By ten o’clock Big Sue was outside the yard where Zeda stirred the
boiling washpots. Onion-flavored eel-stew scented the air. The stout
meeting benches had been brought in from under the house, two for
each quilt. The quilting poles leaned in a corner waiting to be used.
The older, more settled women came first. Each with her needle,
ready to sew. The younger ones straggled in later, with babies, or
tiny children, who kept their hands busy. They were all kin, and when
they first assembled the room rang with, “How you do, cousin?”
“Howdy, Auntie!” “How is you, sister?”
Leah, April’s wife, had on somewhat finer clothes than the other
women. The bottom of her white apron was edged with a band of
wide lace, and she wore a velvet hat with a feather in it over her
plaid headkerchief. But something ailed her speech. The words
broke off in her mouth. Her well-greased face looked troubled. Her
round eyes sad.
“How you do, daughter?” Maum Hannah asked her kindly. “You look
so nice to-day. You got such a pretty hat on! Lawd! Is dem teeth you
got in you’ mouth? April ought to be proud o’ you.”
But instead of smiling Leah’s face looked ready to cry. “I ain’ well,
Auntie. My head feels too full all de time. Dese teeth is got me fretted
half to death. Dey’s got my gums all sore, an’ dey rattles when I tries
to walk like dey is gwine to jump down my throat. I can’ eat wid ’em
on to save life. De bottom ones is meaner dan de top ones. I like to
missed and swallowed ’em yestiddy.”
“How come you wears ’em if dey pesters you so bad?”
“April likes ’em. E say dey becomes me. E paid a lot o’ money fo’
dem, too. E took me all de way to town on de boat to git ’em. But dey
ain’ no sati’faction.” She sighed deep. “An’ de blood keeps all de
time rushin’ to my head ever since I was salivate.”
Maum Hannah listened and sympathized with a doleful, “Oh-oh!”
while Leah complained that the worst part was she couldn’t enjoy her
victuals any more. She’d just as soon have a cup and saucer in her
mouth as those teeth. It made no difference what she ate, now,
everything tasted all the same.
“Fo’ Gawd’s sake take ’em off an’ rest you’ mouth to-day!” Maum
Hannah exhorted her. “You may as well pleasure you’self now and
den. April ain’ gwine see you. Not to-day!”
“Somebody’d tell him an’ dat would vex him,” Leah bemoaned.
But Maum Hannah took her by the arm and looked straight in her
eyes. “Honey,” she coaxed, “Gawd ain’ gwine bless you if you let
April suffer you dis way. You an’ April all both is too prideful. Take
dem teeth off an’ rest you’ mouth till dis quiltin’ is over. It would fret
me if you don’t.”
Screening her mouth with both hands Leah did rid her gums of the
offending teeth, but instead of putting them in her apron pocket she
laid them carefully in a safe place on the high mantel-shelf.
The room buzzed with chatter. How would such a great noisy
gathering ever get straightened out to work? They were as much
alike as guinea fowls in a flock, every head tied up turban-fashion,
every skirt covered by an apron.
Big Sue welcomed every one with friendliest greetings, and although
her breath was short from excitement, she talked gaily and laughed
often.
A sudden hush followed a loud clapping of her hands. The closest
attention was paid while she appointed Leah and Zeda captains of
the first quilts to be laid out. Zeda stepped forward, with a jaunty toss
of her head, and, shrugging a lean shoulder, laughed lightly.
“Big Sue is puttin’ sinner ’gainst Christian dis mawnin’!”
Leah tried to laugh, her tubby body, bulky as Big Sue’s, shook
nervously, as her giggling rippled out of her mouth, but her eyes
showed no mirth at all.
“You choose first, Leah. You’s de foreman’s wife.”
Leah chose Big Sue.
“Lawd,” Zeda threw her head back with a laugh, “Yunnuh two is so
big nobody else wouldn’ have room to set on a bench ’side you.”
The crowd tittered, but Big Sue looked stern.
“Do, Zeda! You has gall enough to talk about bigness? T’ank Gawd,
I’m big all de way round like I is.” She cast a wry look toward Zeda,
then turned her head and winked at the crowd. But Zeda sucked her
teeth brazenly. She was satisfied with her shape. She might not look
so nice now, but her bigness would soon be shed. Just give her a
month or two longer.
“You ought to be shame, wid grown chillen in you’ house, an’ a
grown gal off yonder to college.”
“When I git old as you, Big Sue, den I’ll stay slim all de time. Don’t
you fret.” Zeda laughed, and chose Gussie, a skinny, undersized,
deaf and dumb woman, whose keen eyes plainly did double duty.
When Zeda looked toward her and spoke her name, Gussie pushed
through the crowd, smiling and making wordless gurgles of pleasure
for the compliment Zeda had paid her by choosing her first of all.
“I take Bina next!” Leah called out.
“Bina’s a good one for you’ quilt. E’s a extra fine Christian.”
“You better be prayin’ you’se’f, Zeda,” Bina came back.
“Who? Me? Lawd, gal, I does pray.” Zeda said it seriously, and her
look roved around the room. “Sinners is mighty sca’ce at dis quiltin’.
Who kin I choose next?” She searched the group.
“Don’ take so long, Zeda,” Big Sue chided. “Hurry up an’ choose. De
day is passin’. You an’ Gussie is de only two sinners. You’ ’bliged to
pick a Christian, now.”
“Den I’ll take Nookie. E’s got swift-movin’ fingers.”
The choosing went on until eight women were picked for each quilt,
four to a side. Then the race began.
The two quilt linings, made out of unbleached homespun, were
spread on the clean bare floor, and covered over with a smooth layer
of cotton.
“How come you got such nice clean cotton to put in you’ quilt?” Zeda
inquired with an innocent look across at Big Sue.
When Big Sue paid her no heed, she added brazenly, “De cotton
April gi’ me fo’ my quilt was so trashy and dark I had to whip em wid
pine-tops half a day to get de dirt out clean enough to use.”
Still Big Sue said nothing.
“You must be stand well wid April.” Zeda looked at Big Sue with a
smile.
Big Sue raised her shoulders up from doubling over, and in a tart
tone blurted out, “You talks too much, Zeda. Shut you’ mouth and
work.”
“Who? Me?” Zeda came back pleasantly. “Great Gawd! I was praisin’
de whiteness of de cotton, dat was all.”
Two of the patch-work covers that Big Sue had fashioned with such
pains, stitch by stitch, square by square, were opened out wide and
examined and admired.
“Which one you want, Zeda? You take de first pick.”
“Lawd, all two is so nice it’s hard to say.”
Gussie pointed to the “Snake-fence” design, and Zeda took it,
leaving the “Star of Bethlehem” for Leah. Both were placed over a
cotton-covered lining on the floor, corner to corner, edge to edge,
and basted into place. Next, two quilting poles were laid lengthwise
beside each quilt, and tacked on with stout ball thread. The quilts
were carefully rolled on the poles, and the pole-ends fastened with
strong cords to the side-walls. All was ready for the quilting.
Leah’s crew beat fixing the quilt on the poles, but the sewing was the
tedious part. The stitches must be small, and in smooth rows that ran
side by side. They must also be deep enough to hold the cotton fast
between the top and the lining.
Little talking was done at first. Minds, as well as eyes, had to watch
the needles. Those not quilting in this race stood around the hearth
puffing at their pipes, talking, joking, now and then squealing out with
merriment.
“Yunnuh watch dem pots,” Big Sue cautioned them. “Make Breeze
keep wood on de fire. Mind now.”
The quilts were rolled up until the quilting poles met, so the sewing
started right in the middle, and as the needles left neat stitches, the
poles were rolled farther apart, until both quilts were done to the
edges. These were carefully turned in and whipped down, with
needles running at full racing speed. Zeda’s crew finished a full yard
ahead. The sinners won. And how they did crow over the others!
Deaf and dumb Gussie did her best to boast, but her words were
stifled in dreadful choked noises that were hard to bear.
Big Sue put the wild ducks on to roast. They were fat and tender,
and already stuffed full of oyster dressing, the same dressing she
fixed for the white folks. She said the oysters came from near the
beach where the fresh salt tide made them large and juicy.
What a dinner she had! Big Sue was an open-handed woman, for
truth.
Some of the farm-hands stopped by on their way home for the noon
hour. Coming inside they stood around the fireplace, grinning, joking
and smoking the cigarettes they rolled with deft fingers.
Everybody was given a pan and spoon. Zeda and Bina helped Big
Sue pass around great dishpans of smoking food, and cups of water
sweetened with molasses. For a time nothing was said except the
exclamations that praised the dinner. Indeed it might have been a
wedding feast but for the lack of cake and wine.
The wild ducks, cooked just to a turn, were served last. Their red
blood was barely curdled with heat, yet their outsides were rich and
brown. Lips smacked. Spoons clattered. Mouths too full dropped
crumbs as they munched.
A grand dinner.
“Take you’ time, an’ chaw,” Big Sue bade the guests kindly. “You got
plenty o’ time to finish de rest o’ de quilts befo’ night.”
As soon as the edge was taken off their appetites they fell to talking.
Big Sue did not sit down to eat at all, so busy was she passing
around the pans of hot food, and urging the others to fill themselves
full.
As more men came by and stopped, the noise waxed louder, until
the uproar of shouting and laughter and light-hearted talk seethed
thick. When all were filled with Big Sue’s good cheer, they got up and
went out into the yard to smoke, to catch a little fresh air, and to
wash the grease off their fingers. The pans and spoons and tin cups
were stacked up on the water-shelf out of the way where they’d wait
to be washed until night.
The quilting was the work in hand now, and when the room was in
order again, and the women rested and refreshed, Big Sue called
them in to begin on the next set of quilts.
April went riding by on the sorrel colt, on his way back to the field,
and Big Sue called him to come in and eat the duck and hot rice she
had put aside specially for him. But he eyed her coolly, rode on and
left her frowning.
Zeda laughed, and asked Big Sue if April was a boy to hop around at
her heels? Didn’t she know April had work to do? Important work.
The white people made him plantation foreman because they knew
they could trust him to look after their interests. He not only worked
himself, but he kept the other hands working too.
Leah sat silent, making short weak puffs at her pipe.
Maum Hannah’s deep sigh broke into the stillness.
“I ever did love boy-chillen, but dey causes a lot o’ sorrow. My
mammy used to say ev’y boy-child ought to be killed soon as it’s
born.”
“How’d de world go on if people done dat?” Bina asked.
“I dunno. Gawd kin do a lot o’ strange t’ings.”
This made them all stop and think again.
The kettle sang as steam rushed out of its spout. The flames made a
sputtering sound. The benches creaked as the women bent over and
rose with their needles. Bina sat up straight, then stretched.
“If all de mens was dead, you could stay in de chu’ch, enty, Zeda?”
Bina slurred the words softly.
Zeda came back, “Don’ you fret ’bout me, gal. Jake ain’ no more to
me dan a dead man.”
“Yunnuh stop right now! Dat’s no-manners talk. Jake’s a fine man, if
e is my gran. I know, by I raise em. When his mammy died an’ left
em, Jake an’ Bully and April was all three de same as twins in my
house.” Maum Hannah spoke very gravely. Presently she got up and
went into the shed-room. She came back smiling, with a folded quilt
on her arm. “Le’s look at de old Bible quilt, chillen. It’ll do yunnuh
good.”
She held up one corner and motioned to deaf and dumb Gussie to
hold up the other so all the squares could be seen. There were
twenty, every one a picture out of the Bible. The first one, next to
Gussie’s hand, was Adam and Eve and the serpent. Adam’s shirt
was blue, his pants brown, and his head a small patch of yellow. Eve
had on a red headkerchief, a purple wide-skirted dress; and a tall
black serpent stood straight up on the end of its tail.
The next square had two men, one standing up, the other fallen
down—Cain and Abel. The red patch under Abel was his blood,
spilled on the ground by Cain’s sin. Maum Hannah pointed out Noah
and the Ark; Moses with the tables of stone; the three Hebrew
children; David and Goliath; Joseph and Mary and the little baby
Jesus; and last of all, Jesus standing alone by the cross. As Maum
Hannah took them one by one, all twenty, she told each marvelous
story.
The quilters listened with rapt attention. Breeze almost held his
breath for fear of missing a word. Sometimes his blood ran hot with
wonder, then cold with fear. Many eyes in the room glistened with
tears.
The names of God and Jesus were known to Breeze, but he had
never understood before that they were real people who could walk
and talk. Maum Hannah told about God’s strength and power and
wisdom, how He knew right then what she was doing and saying. He
could see each stitch that was taken in the quilts, whether it was
small and deep and honest, or shallow and careless. He wrote
everything down in a great book where He kept account of good and
evil. Breeze had never dreamed that such things went on around him
all the time.
Yet the quilt was made out of pictures of the very things Maum
Hannah told. Nobody could doubt that all she said was the truth. In
the charmed silence, her words fell clear and earnest. The present
was shut out. Breeze’s mind went a-roaming with her, back into the
days when the world was new and God walked and talked with the
children He had so lately made. As she spoke Breeze shivered over
those days that were to come when everybody here would be either
in Hell or Heaven. It had to be one or the other. There was no place
to stop or to hide when death came and knocked at your door. She
pointed to Breeze. That same little boy, there in the chimney corner,
with his foot tied up, would have to account for all he did! As well as
Breeze could understand, Heaven was in the blue sky straight up
above the plantation. God sat there on His throne among the stars,
while angels, with harps of gold in their hands, sang His praises all
day long. Hell was straight down. Underneath. Deep under the earth.
Satan lived there with his great fires for ever and ever a-burning on
the bodies of sinners piled high up so they could never crumble.
Maum Hannah herself became so moved by the thought of the
sufferings of the poor pitiful sinners in Hell, that her voice broke and
tears dimmed her eyes, and she plead with them all:
“Pray! Chillen! Pray!
“Do try fo’ ’scape Hell if you kin!
“Hell is a heat!
“One awful heat!
“We fire ain’ got no time wid em!
“Pray! Chillen! Pray! For Gawd’s sake, pray!
“When de wind duh whip you
“An’ de sun-hot duh burn you
“An’ de rain duh wet you,
“All dem say, Pray! Do try fo’ ’scape Hell if you kin!”
On the way home through the dusk Breeze stopped short in his
tracks more than once, for terror seized him at the bare rustle of a
bird’s wing against a dry leaf. When the gray shadow of a rabbit
darted across the path and the sight of a glowworm’s eye gleamed
up from the ground, Big Sue stopped too. And breathing fast with
anxiety, cried out:
“Do, Jedus! Lawd! Dat rabbit went leftward. A bad luck t’ing! Put dem
t’ings down! Chunk two sticks behind em. Is you see anyt’ing
strange, Breeze?” She sidled up close to him and whispered the
question.
Breeze stared hard into the deepening twilight. The black shadows
were full of dark dreadful things that pressed close to the ground,
creeping slowly, terribly. The tree branches rocked, the leaves
whispered sharply, the long gray moss streamed toward them.
“Le’s run, Cun Big Sue.” Breeze leaped with a quick hop ahead, but
her powerful hand clutched his shoulder. “Looka here, boy! I’ll kill you
to-night if you leave me. No tellin’ what kind o’ sperits is walkin’. I kin
run when I’s empty-handed, but loaded down wid all dese t’ings a
snail could ketch me! You git behind me on de path.”
The black smoke rising out of the chimney made a great serpent that
stood on the end of its tail. For a minute Breeze was unable to
speak. His heart throbbed with heavy blows, for not only did that
smoke serpent lean and bend and reach threateningly, but
something high and black and shapeless stood in front of Big Sue’s
cabin, whose whitewashed walls behind it made it look well-nigh as
tall as a pine tree. It might be the Devil! Or Death! Or God! He gave
a scream and clung to Big Sue as the figure took a step toward
them.
“Yunnuh is late!” April’s voice boomed out.
“Lawd!” Big Sue fairly shouted. “I was sho’ you was a plat-eye. You
scared me half to death! Man! I couldn’ see no head on you no
matter how hard I look. How come you went inside my house with
me not home?”
April grunted. “You better be glad! I had a hard time drivin’ a bat out
o’ you’ house.”
“A bat!” Big Sue shrieked with terror. “How come a bat in my house?
A bat is de child of de devil.”
April declared the bat had squeaked and grinned and chattered in
his face until he mighty nigh got scared himself.
“Lawd! Wha’s gwine happen now? A bat inside my house! An’ look
how de fire’s smokin’!”
She hurried Breeze off to bed in the shed-room whose darkness was
streaked with wavering firelight that fell through the cracks in the
wall. Fear kept him awake until he put his head under the covers and
shut out all sight and sound and thought.
He was roused by a knock on the front door. Big Sue made no
answer, and another knock made by the knuckles of a strong hand
was followed by a loud crying, “Open dis door, I tell you! I know
April’s right in dere!” This was followed by the thud of a kick, but no
answer came from inside. Breeze could not have spoken to save his
life, for sheer terror held him crouched under the quilts and his
tongue was too weak and dry to move.
Where in God’s world was Big Sue? The first of those knocks should
have waked her. Sleep never did fasten her eyelids down very tight,
yet with all this deafening racket, she stayed dumb. Had she gone off
and left Breeze by himself? The voice calling at the door sounded
like a woman’s voice at first, but now it deepened with hoarse fury
and snarled and growled and threatened, calling Big Sue filthy
names. Breeze knew then for certain it was some evil thing. His flesh
crept loose from his bones. His blood ran cold and weak. He realized
Big Sue was not at home. Maybe she was dead, in her bed! The
thought was so terrible that in desperation he lifted up his head and
yelled:
“Who dat?”
At once the dreadful answer came.
“Who dat say ‘who dat’?” Then a silence, for Breeze could utter no
other word.
Outside the wind caught at the trees and thrashed their leaves, then
came inside to rustle the papers on the cabin’s walls, and whisper
weird terrible things through the cracks. The thing that had knocked
on the door was walking away. Its harsh breathing was hushed into
sobs and soft moans that made Breeze’s heart sink still deeper with
horror.
For a minute every noise in the world lulled. Nothing stirred except
the ghastly tremor that shook Breeze’s body from his covered-up
head to the heels doubled up under his cold hips.
A sudden fearful battering in company with despairing howls,
crashed at the door! It would soon break down! There was no time to
waste putting on clothes! Hopping up into the cold darkness, Breeze
eased the back door open and slipped into the night.
The horrible door-splitting blows went right on. Thank God,
somebody was coming. Running, with a torch. Breeze forgot that
snakes were walking, and leaped through the bushes over ground
that felt unsteady to his flying feet. His heart swelled with joy and
relief, for the man hurrying toward the cabin lighting his way with a
fat lightwood torch was Uncle Bill. Twice Breeze opened his mouth to
call out, but the only sound he could make was a whispered—“Uncle
Bill—Uncle Bill!”
Following the torch’s light he could see a black woman cutting the
door down with an ax. Who in God’s name would dare do such a
thing? Uncle Bill walked right up to her and shook her soundly by the
shoulder.
“What is you a-doin’, Leah? Is you gone plumb crazy? Gi’ me dat
ax!” He jerked the ax from her hands and she began shrieking
afresh, and trying to push him back. But she couldn’t budge him one
inch. Holding her off, with his free hand he made a proper, polite
knock, although the door was split and the dim firelight shone
through its new-made cracks.
“Dis is me, Bill, Miss Big Sue,” he called out, a stern note deepening
his voice.
Leah shrilled out harshly. “You better open dis door! You low-down
black buzzard hussy! You wait till I gits my hands on you’ throat! You
won’ fool wid my husband no mo’ in dis world!”
Fully dressed and quite calm Big Sue appeared. She answered with
mild astonishment:
“Why, Leah! How come you makin’ all dis fuss? You must want to
wake up de whole plantation? You ought to be shamed. I never see
such a no-manners ’oman!”
“Whe’s April?” Leah howled. “Whe’s April, I tell you? Don’ you cut no
crazy wid me to-night! I’ll kill you sho’ as you do!”
“Fo’ Gawd’s sake, Leah! Shut you’ mouth! I dunno nuttin’ ’bout April.
You is too sickenin’! Always runnin’ round to somebody’s house a-
lookin’ fo’ April!”
“Yes, I look fo’ em. You had em here too! See his hat yonder on de
floor right now! You fat black devil!” Seizing Big Sue’s kerchiefed
head with both hands Leah tried to choke her, but Big Sue wrenched
herself loose and with a wicked laugh raised one fat leg and gave
Leah a kick in the middle of her body that sent her backward with a
slam against the wall.
“You’d choke me, would you? I’ll tear de meat off you’ bones!” Big
Sue screamed, but Leah crumpled sidewise and fell flat on the floor,
her eyes lifeless, her face stiffened.
Big Sue had roused into fury. She staggered forward and bent over
and rained blows with both fists on Leah’s silent mouth, until Uncle
Bill grappled her around her huge waist and dragged her to the other
side of the room.
Big Sue bellowed. “You’d choke me, enty? You blue-gummed pizen-
jawed snake! Gawd done right to salivate you an’ make you’ teeth
drop out.”
For all the signs of life she gave, Leah may as well have been dead.
She lay there on the floor, limp and dumb, even after Uncle Bill took
the bucketful of water from the shelf and doused her with it. She
didn’t even catch her breath. Uncertain what to do, Uncle Bill knelt
over her and called her name.
“Leah! Leah! Don’t you die here on dis floor. Leah! Open you’ eyes. I
know good and well you’s playin’ ’possum.”
Except for the fire’s crackling and the low chirping of one lone
cricket, the stillness of death was in the room.
“Put on you’ shirt and pants, Breeze. Run tell April Leah is done faint
off. E must come here quick as e kin.”
The darkness of the night was terrible as Breeze ran through it
toward the Quarters. A cedar limb creaked mournfully as the wind
wrung it back and forth. Its crying was like sorrowful calls for aid.
Breeze tried to hurry, to make his legs run faster, but they were
ready to give way and fall. His feet stumbled, his throat choked until
he could scarcely breathe. His brain wheeled and rattled inside his
skull. How horrible Death is!
A few stars twinkled bright away up in the sky, but the waving tree-
tops made a thick black smoke that covered the yellow moon. High-
tide glistened in the darkness, all but ready to turn by now. Leah’s
soul would go out with it if something wasn’t done to help her.
Lord how awful her eyeballs were, rolled back so far in her head!
Jesus, have mercy! The thought of them made Breeze senseless
with terror. Tears gushed from his own eyes and blinded him.
April was not at home, and Breeze raced back, but already Leah was
coming to. She lay on the floor, her fat face, black as tar against the
whiteness of the pillow under it now, was set and furrowed. Her
toothless jaws moved with mute words, as if she talked with some
one the others could not see. She kept fumbling with the red charm-
string tied around her neck, as her dull eyes rolled slowly from one
face to the other.
Breeze longed to fling himself on the bed and cover up his head, but
Big Sue sat storming and panting with fury. Leah ought to be
ashamed of herself, running over the country at night trying to bring
disgracement on her.
“Whyn’t you answer Leah when e knocked?” Uncle Bill asked her.
Big Sue jumped at him angrily. “How’d I know Leah wasn’ some
robber come to cut my throat? Just ’cause Leah is married to de
foreman an’ livin’ in a bigger house dan my own, an’ wearin’ finer
clothes, dat don’ gi’ em no right to break down my door wid a’ ax!
No. Leah ain’ no white ’oman even if e do buy medicine out de sto’.
No wonder e got salivate. Gawd done right to make dat medicine
loosen all Leah’s teeth an’ prize ’em out so e ain’ got none to be a-
bitin’ people up wid. T’ank Gawd! Bought ones can’ bite. I wish all e
finger-nails would drop off! E toe-nails too! Leah’s a dangerous
’oman. E ain’ safe to be loose in dis country. No. Leah’d kill you
quick as look at you!”
XIV
CHURCH
Sunday morning rose with a pale clear sky, and a sun that glittered
bright and hot as it mounted.
Big Sue was already up when Breeze waked. She was fussing
around, cooking dinner to take to church, fixing a basket, and China
dishes to hold it. Her best clothes, and Breeze’s, were laid out on
chairs to be put on. They must be ready when Uncle Bill came for
them in his new buggy. He had to go ahead of time, for he had
charge of the communion as well as of the Bury League which would
be organized when the service was over and the dinner eaten. The
head man of the Bury League had come to preach and to form a
Society to Bury. Big Sue baked rising bread yesterday in the Big
House kitchen stove. The brown loaves, uncovered, sat in a row on
the shelf, waiting to be wrapped up. They’d turn to Jesus’ own body
when the preacher prayed over them, and blessed them. Blackberry
wine, in the two big demijohns in the corner of the shed-room, would
turn into Jesus’ blood. Breeze couldn’t make it out in his head
exactly, but Big Sue said it was so. Breeze had picked the
blackberries that made the wine, and he’d bought the white flour for
the bread from the store. How could they turn to Jesus? But Big Sue
said prayer can do anything. Anything! When a fine preacher like the
Bury League leader prays. Not everybody knows how to pray right,
but he did. Yes, Lord, he did!
Before taking time to swallow down a mouthful of bread for
breakfast, Breeze and Big Sue put the demijohns on the front porch,
ready to go to church. They packed up all the fine dinner in one box,
and the communion bread in another, so when she was dressed in
her Sunday clothes, she’d have nothing to do but sit still and wait
and rest.
How different she looked with her body pulled in tight with a great
corset full of steel bands! Like a cotton bale pressed too small. The
frills of her petticoat were lace-trimmed. Over them, hiding them
carefully, was her new purple sateen dress.
She sat down on the porch with a pan of breakfast in her lap and
began to eat. Breeze was back in the shed-room dressing when he
heard her laugh and scramble to her feet to say in her company
manners voice:
“How you do dis mawnin’, Reverend?”
Breeze peeped through the open door in time to see her draw a foot
adroitly behind her in a low curtsey to a strange man who answered
in a familiar voice:
“Quite well, thank you, Mrs. Good-wine. How you do this morning?”
“Not so good,” she said sweetly. “Bad luck’s been a-hangin’ round de
plantation lately.”
“Bad luck ought not to pester a lady who can fix frog legs like the
ones you sent us last night for supper. They were elegant.”
Breeze stood still and listened. He knew that voice, sure as the
world. The Bury League preacher was his own stepfather. Hurrying
into his clothes he tipped across the room to the window to see
better, but Big Sue’s antics held his eyes. She was down on her
knees, shaking all over in the drollest way, with laughter that took her
breath. Her company manners were gone. Between gasps and
shouts she gurgled, “Great Gawd! You ought o’ seen dem frogs dis
mawnin’. Dat fool Breeze didn’ kill em! He cut off dey hind legs an’
turned dem loose in de back yard! I liken to a broke my foot jumpin’
when I missed an’ stepped slam on one!”
“Who did you say done it?” The Reverend was disturbed. The
greenish cast of his long-tailed coat and derby hat spread over his
swarthy face, and he sat down so suddenly on the steps that Big
Sue’s roars hushed and her company manners came back.
Scrambling to her feet and casting a fierce look toward the window
where Breeze stood, she sympathized:
“I’m too sorry. No wonder you’s sick! Eatin’ de legs of a livin’ frog! But
dey’s dead now. I made Breeze knock ’em in de head a while ago.
Breeze is a crazy boy. When I git home to-night, I’m gwine gi’ em de
heaviest lickin’ ever was. I ain’ gwine leave a whole piece o’ hide on
em. No, suh! I’m gwine bust his crust, sure as you’ bawn.”
“Whe’d you git dat boy? Is he you’ own?” The Reverend’s voice was
weakly.
“No, Lawd. My son, Lijah, is got plenty o’ sense. Breeze is a li’l’ boy I
got f’om Sandy Island to stay wid me, by I was so lonesome in de
night by myself.”
The Reverend took a handkerchief out of the pocket in the tail of his
long coat and wiped the sweat off his face, then he leaned his head
on his hand. Big Sue was anxious.
“Would you like a li’l’ sweetened water, suh?”
He shook his head.
“How ’bout a li’l’ cookin’ soda? Dat might settle you.” He didn’t need
a thing. He must go now. He and Miss Leah were to talk over the
hymns so she could lead the choir. He was subject to spells of
swimming in the head, but they didn’t last long.
His mention of Leah’s name changed Big Sue’s tone altogether. She
laughed out.
“Lawdy, I bet Leah’ll strut to-day. April took em to town an’ bought em
some teeth. Dey don’ fit good like you’ own, dough. Leah wouldn’
trust to chaw wid ’em, not fo’ nothin’. I don’ blame em, dough. I’d
hate to broke ’em if dey was mine. Leah is sho’ tryin’ to look young
dese days. E natural hair is white as cotton, but e polishes em wid
soot an’ lark.”
Except for Big Sue’s displeasure about the frogs, Breeze would have
told her that the Reverend was his mother’s husband who
disappeared the day his grandfather cut the big pine, but the boy’s
one wish was to have her forget him, and maybe she’d forget the
licking she promised to lay on his hide.

Instant Download Forgotten Friends Monks Marriages and Memories of Northeast India Chatterjee PDF All Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Instant Download Forgotten Friends Monks Marriages and Memories of Northeast India Chatterjee PDF All Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Instant Download Forgotten Friends Monks Marriages and Memories of Northeast India Chatterjee PDF All Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Get ebook downloads in full at ebookname.

Forgotten Friends Monks Marriages and Memories of

Explore and download more ebook at https://ebookname.com

Tribal Architecture in Northeast India 1st Edition René

The Muslim Question in Assam and Northeast India 1st

The Routledge Companion to Northeast India 1st Edition

A Grammar of Guìqióng A Language of Sichuan Li Jiang

Make Arduino Bots and Gadgets Six Embedded Projects

Nonconvulsive Status Epilepticus 1st Edition Peter W.

Boilerplate The Fine Print Vanishing Rights and the

A Guide to Confident Living 1st Fireside ed Edition Dr.

Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and

Print publication date: 2013

(p.iii) Forgotten Friends

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

© Oxford University Press 2013

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First published in 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate

The international boundaries, coastlines, denominations, and other

You must not circulate this work in any other form

ISBN 13: 978-0-19-808922-3

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro 11/13.2

Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and

Print publication date: 2013

Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and

Print publication date: 2013

India Office Records

Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and

Print publication date: 2013

My undergraduate and graduate students at Rutgers University have borne up

My warm thanks also to a vast network of generous colleagues outside my own

A fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton and another at the

My heartfelt thanks go to my parents who taught me to resist fear and welcome

Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and

Print publication date: 2013

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: forgetting, Tantric Buddhists, Tipura-Tripura, Tibetan-Bengali

THE BACKBONE OF THIS BOOK is a political and economic order centring on

Elsewhere, scholars of Tibetan-language records have, however, found that

commanders. Sakya Buddhist proximity to Mongol commanders enabled them to

It proceeds by resurrecting an outline of relationships that once linked the

Monastic Teachers as Forgotten Friends and ‘Governors’

Rituals of initiation, common to most teaching–learning societies in the

The wealthiest however appeared to have given produce of cultivable or

In particular, this pattern of economic activity by monastic men in the early

This pattern of localized sovereignties also intensified non-sectarianism,

Transmissions of ‘merit’, and generosity as forms of moral capital, distinguished

Mughal documents and inscriptions from the sixteenth and seventeenth

Forgotten Laywomen and Monastic Codes of Gender

eighteenth centuries, which indicated that many laywomen acted as donors of

A second question arises from the recorded involvement of monastic

Cross-lineage affinities suggest that marriages between disciples strengthened

supremely disciplined householder male (kulina brahman) as the tantric

From the eighteenth century, it is true, individual colonial officials disdained

Had all of us postcolonial historians simply overlooked the evidence of the

When postcolonial socialist feminist scholars of eastern India overlooked this

Forgetting and ‘Northeast India’: Lamentable Historiographical Practice or