alone. Philosophy needs the language of poetry to enter the penumbra—that force field around us, partly lit, partly in shadow, that shapes who we are yet defies our attempts to fully control or comprehend it. Whether we refer to this realm as natural, spiritual, historical, or political is less significant than its essential ambiguity. It enthralls us to the same extent that it eludes us. And though it may unsettle and even destroy us, it may become a source of generative power.
In a magisterial study of Sinhalese sorcery, Bruce Kapferer explores this ambiguity. His starting point is the “magicality” of human existence, a term he borrows from Sartre to emphasize that “human beings are at once individuals and beings who transcend and transgress the boundaries and space of their own and others' organic individuality.”8 This field of wider being in which we are immersed is “magical” because our knowledge and mastery of it always remain slippery and uncertain. Thwarted in our efforts to achieve presence, prosperity, and power through direct social and economic action, we have recourse to magical, occult, or ritual means of attaining our goals. In the Sinhalese social imaginary, this is the field of sorcery, embodied in the image of Suniyam riding a blue mare (emblematic of his power), carrying a broken pot of fire in his left hand (destructive heat) and a sword in his right (judgment and punishment), and his body covered with snakes (venomous punishment). What fascinates Kapferer is that the forces of sorcery permeate both the body politic and the individual body, so that the struggle against political anarchy implicates a psychological struggle against madness. This is compellingly shown in the life story of Lillian, a “soothsayer” (sastra karaya) able to work with demonic forces in ways that enable her to dispense medical and spiritual advice to clients.
Lillian was in her seventies and had been attending supplicants at a temple in Colombo from 1935, though she had her own shrine in the poverty and crime-racked shantytown of Slave Island where she lived.
Her father, a rickshaw man, had come to Slave Island from an equally notorious part of the southern provincial city of Galle. Lillian and her parents lived among a group of Tamil drummers, members of an outcaste community. As Lillian tells it, she would dance at their ritual occasions, and at eleven she experienced her first encounter with the goddess Bhadrakali, who possessed her. Three years later she married Liyanage, who sold tea to the dockworkers. By then her father had died, but his ghost (preta) maintained an attachment to her. When she became entranced by her father and danced possessed, her husband was infuriated and beat her. Her husband continued beating her as Lillian had other possession experiences. The ones she recalls in particular are her entrancements by the goddess Pattini, whose violent and punishing form she connects with Bhadrakali. In 1935, after bearing five children, she left her husband and journeyed to the main shrine of Kataragama in the southeastern corner of the island. While she was at Kataragama, her husband, who was still fighting with her, met with an accident and was killed. Lillian felt that he had been punished by the god Kataragama and by Bhadrakali for beating her and her ill-treatment. Lillian possesses the violent and punishing powers of Bhadrakali and Pattini. She has her warrant (varam) from the main Bhadrakali shrine at the Hindu temple of Munnesvaram (outside Chilaw, north of Colombo). Lillian also has a warrant from god Vishnu, which she achieved at the time when she first began to manifest and use her violent powers. As she describes it, she would visit the shrine to Vishnu at a local Buddhist temple and declare before the god that she had achieved knowledge, or realized the truth (satyakriya), and that she was pure, refusing sexual contact with her husband and having no intention to be married again. On one occasion, the eyes of Vishnu's image closed and then opened. Lillian took this as a sign that Vishnu had granted her his powers through which she could control the violent forces that she manifests. Lillian constantly renews her relationships with the gods by visiting their key shrines. She claims that she got the idea of being a maniyo [“mother,” “soothsayer”] at the Bhadrakali shrine from her involvement in the annual festival at Kataragama, where the god is attended in procession by the six mothers (kartikeya) who took care of him at his birth.
Lillian expresses in her own life a personal suffering and a violence present in close ties. She also embraces in herself wider forces of violence as well as difference. She freely admits a connection with criminal elements in the city, and this is vital to her own power. Lillian represents herself as a totalization of diversity and claims a knowledge of eighteen languages (eighteen being a symbolic number of the totality of human existence)…. Lillian, I note, is an embodiment of fragmenting force but also a potency for the control and mastery of such force. This is one significance of her warrant from Vishnu, the guardian of Buddhism on the island and a major ordering power. Lillian is pleased with her own success in business. She has controlling interest in three taxis.
Lillian's clients invoke the powers that reside in her body. Some address her directly as Bhadrakali maniyo. Lillian says that she has cut thousands of huniyams [sorcery objects], and has used her powers in the making and breaking of marriages, the settlement of court cases, and the killing of personal enemies.9
This powerful story reminds us that the world around us—whether conceived of in terms of supernatural or market forces, of sectarian, class, or caste identifications—is potentially a source of well-being and destruction. Not only must we struggle against an external world that limits our choices and circumscribes our existence; we must struggle against our inner fear of being crushed and erased, as well as our anger against the forces that oppress us.
I have cited Lillian's story at length because it brings into dramatic relief the complexity of the struggle to exist in a world sundered by sectarian violence, class conflict, and oppressive political power. Strategies to earn an income through business ventures coexist with tactics to avoid domestic violence and channel the powers of the gods. But Lillian's story also calls into question the appropriateness of labeling her choices as real or illusory, or asking whether it is better to struggle against injustice rather than devote oneself to “private projects of self creation.”10 There are no algorithms for answering such questions. We can neither know for certain whether a Marxist analysis of social injustices in Sri Lanka would be helpful or harmful nor know for sure whether our understanding of Lillian reflects our own Western dismay at unnecessary human suffering. For Rorty it is enough to describe and testify to the lives of others, as far as we can, on the grounds of our human solidarity with them. They are not misguided creatures, in alien worlds, but ourselves in other circumstances.11 But to invoke poetry or to speak of the consolation of wild orchids may be to risk rendering the world too benign and to leave its social violence unremarked. During his first trip to India, Rorty spoke to a fellow philosophy professor who was also a politician. After thirty years of attempting to help India's poor, this man confessed that he had found no solution to the problem. “I found myself,” Rorty writes, “like most Northerners in the South, not thinking about the beggars in the hot streets once I was back in my pleasantly air-conditioned hotel.”12 But back in America, recalling his experiences, Rorty's only conclusion is that all the love and talk in the world—the technological innovations, the new genetics, the power of education, the politics of diversity—”will not help.”13 Is this defeatist? A confirmation that, for us, the poor will always remain unthinkable? And where does such a conclusion leave us? Withdrawn into the safe confines of our own small world, immunized from the perils of actually entering the world with which we claim solidarity, consoled by poetry? Or inspired to return to the streets until we find one person whose life is changed, no matter how imperceptibly, by his or her encounter with us, so that the question is no longer whether solidarity can be thought into existence but how it is actually brought into existence by our everyday choices of what we do.
CHAPTER 3
Hermit in the Water of Life
And in the evening of my days
Let me remember and be remembered
By the friends that I have made…
—Brijen K. Gupta
