Shankh-er Shongshar, Afterlife Everyday: Religious Experience of the Evening Conch and Goddesses in Bengali Hindu Homes

Abstract

This essay brings together critical archetypes of Bengali Hindu home-experience: the sound of the evening shankh (conch), the goddess Lakshmi, and the female snake-deity, Manasa. It analyzes the everyday phenomenology of the home, not simply through the European category of the ‘domestic’, but conceptually more elastic vernacular religious discourse of shongshar, which means both home and world. The conch is studied as a direct material embodiment of the sacred domestic. Its materiality and sound-ontology evoke a religious experience fused with this-worldly wellbeing (mongol) and afterlife stillness. Further, (contrary) worship ontologies of Lakshmi, the life-goddess of mongol, and Manasa, the death-and-resuscitation goddess, are discussed, and the twists of these ambivalent imaginings are shown to be engraved in the conch’s body and audition. Bringing goddesses and conch-aesthetics together, shongshar is thus presented as a religious everyday dwelling, where the ‘home’ and ‘world’ are connected through spiraling experiences of life, death, and resuscitation. Problematizing the monolithic idea of the secular home as a protecting domain from the outside world, I argue that everyday religious experience of the Bengali domestic, as especially encountered and narrated by female householders, essentially includes both Lakshmi/life/fertility and Manasa/death/renunciation. Exploring the analogy of the spirals of shankh and shongshar, spatial and temporal experiences of the sacred domestic are also complicated. Based on ritual texts, fieldwork among Lakshmi and Manasa worshippers, conch-collectors, craftsmen and specialists, and immersion in the everyday religious world, I foreground a new aesthetic phenomenology at the interface of the metaphysics of sound, moralities of goddess-devotions, and the Bengali home’s experience of afterlife everyday.

Territory Identity and Ritual Life of Religious Spaces in Urbanized Communities: A Case Study of Jiangsu

“…We chose to employ a phenomenological method in order to obtain detailed, in-depth, and all-round objective conclusions about the religious practices of urbanized communities. Phenomenological methods were often used to explore complex cultural, social, and historical phenomena (Seamon, 1982), such as sense of place (Relph, 1976), religion (Sarbadhikary, 2019; Watts, 2019), and health and well-being (McNamara, 2005). A phenomenological method emphasizes the importance of researchers being aware of their own experiences, philosophical frameworks, and biases, in order to set-aside their own opinions during observations, interviews, and analyses.…”

Revealed by Water, Hidden in Water

“…In other words, it is a natural gift from the sea. Following Sarbadhikary's (2019) insistence that the conch shell, -when sounded every dusk‖, makes -the home open out to the sea again‖ (8), we can say that it is a peculiar gift from water that opens our hearts to the sea and to the ultimate abundance of water. Drawing on the view that the shankha always reminds us of -nature's innate freedom‖ (Sarbadhikary 2019, 8), we argue that water gives us the conch shell to help us recognize, again and again, its source in primordial waters when we hear the sound of the sea emerging from its cavity.…”

Sacred serpents and the discourse on conservation: Interrogating interspecies dynamics in rural Bardhaman

“…The story of its origin is derived from one of the most popular and persistent mythological legends of Bengal, involving the famous couple, Behula‐Lakhindar, and the name Jhanglai is said to be derived from the jingling sound of Behula's bangles. Moreover, in popular Bengal legends, snakes have an ambivalent nature—violent and reverential at the same time (Bhattacharya, 1965; Dimock, 1962; Sarbadhikary, 2019). Likewise, when it comes to religious literature on serpents, we find that there is a conflict between the Christian theorising of snakes and the importance of snakes in other traditional religions.…”