Jain Spirit 2002 10 No 12

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 39

family served the villagers with their own hands as a token of the great esteem in which they held those who lived in proximity to the goddess.
Once, when Dipukaka was a child, the family attempted one of these trips to Mataji's temple, but on the last stretch of road to the village the bullocks balked for no apparent reason at continuing. There was nothing that could be done to force or cajole them to go forward. Finally, though they were very near to Thorala, the family members decided to go home and try again the next day. Mataji, it was felt, did not want them to come just then. The next day they set off once again. When they came to the spot on the road where the bullocks had refused to advance the day before, the same beast paid no mind, placidly continuing their pace. When they arrived in the village, they discovered that there had been a dispute the day before between some of the villagers, which had come to such a bad end that several had been killed. Had the family members arrived in the middle of the fight when passions were running high, they too might have been in danger. Everyone in the party went straight to the temple to thank Mataji for looking out for them and for keeping them out of harm's way. In Kathiawar, everything is interpreted as a sign weighted with meaning. Nothing happens by chance.
Bapuji successfully bequeathed his devotion to the clan goddess to his children, who all, some more assiduously than others, make the effort to take the trip to Thorala. There are specific occasions when a trip to seek the goddess's blessing is required, such as when the firstborn son's hair gets its first cutting at the age of five, or when a newly married couple comes to perform a ritual before the goddess without which they cannot consummate their marriage. When my brother Pravin was born in 1961, Bapuji sent my mother a letter with strict instructions that his hair was not to be cut until he was five years old and could be brought to Thorala to have it shorn during the proper ceremony. My brother's thick hair was soon hanging down right in front of his face. Only after my mother wrote to report that she was receiving regular compliments of her new little 'girl' did Bapuji relent and give her permission to have the baby's hair cut in Seattle. He never insisted on the hair-cutting ceremony again and the tradition, impractical in this modern world, is now lost. One may, of course, come to pay darshan to the goddess any time, as I do whenever I happen to be in India. We always bring along prasaad, food that will be blessed by the goddess, including laddus, candy-coated peanuts and fresh coconuts that the priest breaks up as he intones his prayers.
The intimate ceremony of ritual feeding that once bound the Kamdar family to the villagers of Thorala has long ceased. Now, as our car pulls away from the village to carry us back to Rajkot so we can catch our flight to Bombay and then on to New York or London, we can see the temple priest distributing the prasaad to the village
children who, far from looking like the descendants of feudal lords, look the way scrawny poor children do all over India. The cow-dung-plastered walls and deep front porches of the traditional homes that graced Thorala's narrow lanes when Motiba and I were there have been replaced by concrete block structures devoid of personality and, it would appear, comfort. The villagers no longer wear traditional dresses. The men are all in trousers with their collared shirts untucked, machineknit caps on their heads in place of the bright turbans they used to sport. The married women wear proper saris of nylon or machine-printed cotton in the 'national dress' style with the paalav draped over their left shoulder rather than in the Gujarati style, in which the paalav is draped over the woman's bodice. The young girls are all in cheap frocks or even nightgowns. It seems puzzling at first that the women in this remote village should wear their saris as women do in New Delhi and not as they do in any nearby city or town in Kathiawar. Then one notices the television satellite dishes sitting atop three of the new concrete bungalows: obviously, the women of remote Thorala, who rarely if ever make the three-hour trip to the nearest town, are aping fashions they can now see on television in their own home. Soon every trace of life as it had been lived in the village for hundreds of years will have vanished. Teenagers who have seen Baywatch and the latest music videos from Bombay find little appeal in traditional life and dress.
Out of devotion to Mataji, our kuldevi, our family has directly contributed to the erasure of all that is traditional in the village. There is now an official Kamdar mahadevi, (great goddess) temple management committee. The committee has built a new dharmashala across from the temple with Western-style toilets, raised bed frames, a mirror and even an electric clock in each guest room. But for the villagers' welcoming cries of Jai Mataji, "Long live the MotherGoddess,,, the village of Thorala that Motiba took me to see on an enchanted afternoon twenty years ago, has ceased to exist.
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Kuldevi Protects
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©2000, Mira Kamdar
Mira Kamdar will be coming to the UK in Autumn 2002 to launch Motiba's Tattoos. She is a Professor of Social Science in USA.
Motiba's Tattoos
A GRANDDAUGHTER'S JOURNEY INTO HER INDIAN FAMILY'S PAST
MIRA
KAMDAR
September November 2002 Jain Spirit
37