The world has more understanding of the mystery of life and death than we can ever know. When I was a graduate student in India in the 70s, I stayed with the Sora Indigenous people in the highlands of eastern India, who used to talk to their dead through their shamans. Surrounded by shouting, drinking, and laughing dancers and musicians, living and dead Sora would gossip, cry, and argue for hours at a time.
I had never imagined something like that when I was a young Englishman. The living and dead talked to each other. Ononti, the shaman with a spirit husband and children in the Underworld, was a magician, but what kind of one? The mourners embraced her stiff, entranced form in their desire to hold people who no longer had bodies of their own. She became one dead person after another. What did this ceremony do?
One of the most elaborate processes of grieving ever documented was revealed by my long, immersive visits over the years. The Sora religion I witnessed constituted not only a spiritual tradition but also a sophisticated system of psychotherapy and social regulation that consoled the bereaved, softened generational tensions, and made it easier to debate and compromise. As we become more limited to the hegemonic belief systems of the present time, Indigenous wisdoms around the world will become a spiritual gene bank.
Indigenous cultures and spiritual traditions are closely adapted to local social and historical conditions which act like specialized ecological niches. A loss of theodiversity as dramatic and potentially irreversible is what I call theodiversity.
I didn't notice that a new generation of Sora children, the first to attend school and become literate, were turning away from their ancestral religion to Christianity or Hinduism. Young Sora, educated in a mainstream regional language, expressed contempt for the "backwardness" of their parents and grandparents, as a sympathizer with the old religion. The traditional funeral rites are largely forgotten almost 50 years after I began researching them. A Christian or Hindu funeral was given to almost all the Sora who passed away.
The age of mass extinction has lost cultural and religious diversity. Monocrop plantations, economies based on single commodities, a global financial system, the introduction of majority languages in school and the rise of religious fundamentalisms are all consequences of a single worldview. It is more important than ever for scholars to explore the diversity of human thinking, which is difficult to access and document, and is still largely unknown. The diversity of forms in biology helps us to adapt and survive. The loss of another species of theodiversity is a major resource for future-proofing a planet that is racked by conflicts, degraded environments and irresponsible governments.
I had to find a new way to understand in the new millennium. Why were so many younger Sora rejecting the world of the Sora shamans so completely? The Sora are thinking about the change. Some of them are now asking for my field notes, photographs and tape recordings from the 1970s as heritage documentation of a culture they never experienced themselves, but which still defines their ethnic identity. My elderly Sora friend, Monosi, a Baptist modernizer who died in 2017, wanted me to create a dictionary of the Sora language to give to the younger Sora, many of whom speak only Odia.
I was fascinated by the ancient gods and spirits of the landscape after studying ancient Greek language and mythology. I wondered what it would be like to live in an animistic world where the environment is believed to have humanlike consciousness. I trained as an anthropologist because I couldn't live with the ancient Greeks. I was able to find an account of the Sora. The Adivasi communities lived in forested mountains of eastern India where they cultivated millets and rice. They spoke a language of the Austroasiatic family that was not found in India. I arrived in Rajingtal, a Sora village of about 600 people, after three days of cycling and walking from the regional capital.
The Sora wasn't sure if he would get me. They shouldn't welcome a stranger from a far away land who can't speak their language. I joined a group of men in drinking the fishtail palm's mildly fermentable sap after two weeks. My first Sora friend, Inama, invited me to live with his family. He worried that I would be lonely and sent his little boy, Paranto, to stay with me. A lot of Paranto's friends would join him for a night out. The children's chatter gave me an inside look at village gossip, which helped me learn the Sora language.
Anthropology is like detective work, with tactfully exploratory conversations, the pursuit of clues, connections and patterns and false starts. The villagers of Rajingtal helped me with food, water and firewood, and I joined in work parties and squatted among the people around Ononti to observe her training of her successors. The training of most Sora shamans began when they were young. I wanted to learn more about the human condition from my Sora hosts.
I lived in other Soracommunities. Each village had several shamans who specialized in different things. One of the greatest women was Ononti. She sat on the floor with her legs crossed and sang a chant that invoked her spirit husband and previous shamans. She was forced tovacant her body for 10 or 20 dead villagers to come up in succession to speak, each swigging palm wine through her mouth. I tried various tricks to see how much the shamans were guiding the conversations, but they always remained in their characters. I didn't understand the state of mind involved in a Sora shaman's trance, with its mix of beauty and terror in the Underworld, and the theatrical aspect of assuming one identity after another.
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People care a lot about what happens to their loved ones after they die. I didn't know what to think. They came up with a solution to the problem of death, the concern of all religions. My Sora friends thought separation from loved ones was the most important thing about death. In their view, a person who died did not simply disappear but continued to exist and feel. Both the living and the dead experienced grief from this separation. The dead were able to bring the living as close to them as possible because of their mutual attachment. The only cause of illness and death that Sora could think of was other dead people. Each illness reminded you of your attachment to someone who was pulling you towards them by eating your soul.
The living did not want to die. The response to an illness was to give the dead the soul of a sacrificed animal as a substitute for your own and to engage the dead in conversation as they used the shaman's voice to explain their feelings. Here is Amboni, a young girl who died of leprosy, addressing through the mouth of a shaman, her living mother, Rungkudi, and aunt, Sindi, in terms that surely aimed to give expression to their own feelings of guilt.
"Where are my gold nose rings?" was the question asked by Amboni from the Underworld.
They must have died in the pyre. We searched but couldn't locate them.
I want to know why you don't show me my nose rings.
They were so small. I would show them to you. My love, don't cause your own illness in other people. Is it possible that your parents didn't do enough to support you? They didn't refuse to help you or turn their backs.
You scolded me, you called me Leper- Girl, and you were horrible to me. You said, "You're a big girl now, why should I feed you when you don't do anything?"
She couldn't help but say it. There was a lot of work to be done when you were a child.
I would love to have my necklaces. I don't understand why I can't have my nose rings. Without my nose rings, I have to dig, shovel, and level fields in the Underworld. I had scars all over my body. It was passed on to me.
Don't you pass it on? Don't give it to your mom and sisters.
If I catch them, I catch them. I will touch them if I have the opportunity. I pass it on to someone else.
Don't pass your wounds, scars, and cough on to other people.
"My mummy doesn't care enough about me!" she said as she returned to the Underworld.
The dead person's feelings of victimhood made them pitiable in the first sessions. The living mourners made the deceased into a less angry person. The shaman's male assistants would sing and dance in the persona of the ancestors toredeem the dead person from their particular symptoms of their death and lead them into the Underworld.
Dialogues allowed the living and the dead to explore their shared life and now their separation and to heal each other's loss and resentment. In Sigmund's theory of bereavement, a mourner may suffer from the same emotional condition as the dead. There is a big difference. The memory of the dead person is only part of the mourner's mind. The Sora conceived their dead as existing autonomously and reaching out to the living in a drama that was performed in public for all to hear, see and debate. It was a shared condition that death was not a solitary event.
People are understood more through their involvement with others than they are through their own actions. The environment is a socialized idea. Local deities created the world. The dead are scattered across the landscape where they bring their soul force into the crops of their descendants and recycle the animal blood sacrificed to them. This is not an exploitation of the earth, it is a cycle of total mutual sustenance and dependency. There is nothing impersonal about this view. The very idea of environment is fully humanized through the dynamics of the memory traces that humans leave behind.
The power hierarchy in this world was reflected by the Underworld. My Sora friends were living in poverty at the end of a feudal regime. To communicate with Odia-speaking police and other officials, the Sora had to use a special caste of interpreters. Sora was easy prey for fraud and extortion because they had no idea what was being said on their behalf.
The spirit husbands of the Sora shamans were actually police officers in the Underworld. They were fantasy counterparts of the Sora aboveground who were domesticated by the shamans. As the names of the ancestors of the shamans' clients were written down, the spirit husbands of the shamans could speak Odia. They used the writing technique to open a channel to their ancestors, but they didn't use it to hurt the Sora.
I became one of the funeral assistants singing the songs that supported the shamans when I lived in a neighboring village. I noticed an evolution in the dialogue between the living and dead after learning to translate it. The dialogues were used to create a structured and healthy forgetting. The dead accused the living of neglecting them while the living defended themselves. The dead person was less likely to be diagnosed as the cause of death as the tone became more relaxed. As they evolved from predator to protectors, the dead gave their names back to their babies.
When nobody was left to remember them, the dead person turned into a butterfly. This was the end of the person and the end of their suffering.
My first book on the Sora was written in the 1980's, but I continued to visit my friends. Mainstream religions advanced the tradition of the shaman. Young Sora saw loss as liberation. Canadian Baptist missionaries moved up from an original base in the plains to one on the other side of the Sora hills from Rajingtal and Sogad. The core of Sora converts continued to advance their religion even after the foreign missionaries left in the 70s. In the 1980's a flood of government schools, roads, employment and development cash were introduced in Odia, as a result of the church adapting the Roman alphabet to introduce literacy in the Sora language. The Sora's previous exploitation was completely undid by the church and school.
The death of Maianti, a dear friend and colleague, and the disrespect shown to her by some Sora youths caused Ononti to give up trancing. She passed away in 2005
A few months after Ononti's death, five women shamans, including Lokami and Taranti, sat side by side and began to enter a trance, their souls descending into the Underworld to meet their spirits. Through Lokami's mouth, the spirit of Ononti came back and greeted me. Taranti cried out, "Why can't I do it?" after falling out of her reverie. I woke up after coming back from the path. I don't know if I will ever see my family again.
The world of the living was where Taranti's children lived. She was damaging their chances of promotion by her profession of witchcraft. She had lost her confidence under the pressure of being shamed. I thought about the reason for young people's conversion and felt for my friend's pain. I couldn't accept the Christians' explanation because they are correct. I had to find a way to understand it.
All religions acknowledge suffering as a part of the human condition and all offer hope and liberation. A new religion can change a person's understanding of the universe. A new idea of heaven counterbalanced the Underworld of the Dead. One old man told me that he didn't know if he would go to the sky or the Underworld when he died. The company is better in the Underworld.
The relationship between living and dead was the most significant change. The Sora Baptists still don't know how death comes about. A new kind of attachment to a distant deity and his son Jesus has replaced the old kind of attachment to the dead.
Sora Baptists feel better when they don't communicate with the dead. A young Christian told me that remembering made me ill. The local Baptists want to break with the dead but also with the old religion, which the Sora pastors insist must be abandoned entirely. Although younger people feel liberated as they become literate in both Sora and Odia and give up their traditional customs to join the mainstream competition for jobs, older Sora have a new reason to fear death.
There is a chance that one can be caught between the two worlds. Inama passed away in 1992. A Christian funeral was given to him by his son. Paranto had a hard time finding a way to mourn his father's death. He said he met his father in a dream. It was like we were meeting in the middle of the night.
Where are you from? I wanted to know.
My father said that he was still alive. I still exist.
It was the middle of the night and there was no one there. I couldn't stop crying. I was upset.
I thought you had died. I spoke. He was going to his favorite place to drink. It's 'Ai!' Do you know where you're going?
I'm just walking around. When he was healthy, he looked the same.
How come your body was so sick?
It's all good. I'm okay now.
There wasn't anyone around. The man didn't hurt me. We just cried.
Through this dream, Paranto was reassured that his father was doing well despite the fact that Christianity cannot give. The dream made it possible for him to speak with his dead father through a shaman.
It can be difficult for fervent converts to make a decision. Monosi became a Sora Baptist in the 1940s. He traveled throughout India to help with the translation of the bible. I didn't approach him because I thought he wouldn't approve of my interests. He was asked to help me understand a tape of chants by Taranti. Monosi was so enchanted by the incantation she had sung that she named each place after it. Monosi had a change in her life. His eyes opened to a world he had once rejected, after he begged me to bring him more tapes.
After 30 years, Monosi and I collaborated on a project to document the culture he had changed. The main book in Sora besides the Bible is a book about their own ancestors.
The younger Sora was attracted to Christianity because it offered a more comforting view of life and death. One clue was that Sora in some other areas were also converting to orthodox strands of Hinduism, influenced by Hindu missionaries who claim that India's Adivasis lost contact with proper Hinduism in the jungle. The missionaries try to clean up the Adivasi religions by abolishing bad habits. Christianity and Hinduism both offer the same pathway for coming out of isolation and reinforcing the impact of schools, roads and jobs by drawing the Sora into the Indian mainstream.
Younger Sora are more suited to the new circumstances in which they find themselves. Newly literate Sora are moving downhill to integrate into the Indian nation-state and the global world. Christianity and Hinduism are not interested in features of the local environment but in biblical Israel, where no Sora has ever been, or the sacred sites of Hindu nationalism. Young Sora abandon their ancestors and turn to Jesus or Krishna because they don't want to be isolated or poor anymore.
Many instances of conversion are recounted in history. This transition from paganism has taken many centuries in Europe. The dislocation and pain that these streamlined accounts mask has been shown to me by my life with the sora. Young Sora are achieving political and economic emancipation at the same time as they lose intimate bonds with their ancestors and environment. There are only a few moments of personal drama in a huge historical shift, like Taranti's sundering from her beloved spirit family and Paranto's inability to speak to his dead father.
The Sora are less exploited and impoverished now than they were in the past. They are more likely to be drawn into the culture wars that are tearing the world apart in India than they are in Euro-America. Taranti's tears at her lost world, Monosi's theological anguish, and Paranto's comforting dream should worry us all.
The descriptions of when Lokami and mourners used leaves from a sacred tree to make bowls and when Sora men drank palm wine were incorrect.
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