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A Dalit religion online: clashing sensoryscapes and remote ethnographies behind the screen

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Abstract

A Bengali Dalit religion called Matua emerged in the nineteenth century in East Bengal. It counts tens of millions of followers across the Bay of Bengal and the Indo–Bangladesh border. With the COVID-19 pandemic, Matua religious gatherings were shifted online. This paper asks what happened to multisensory and sonic-haptic religious engagements of the Matua community once ritual gatherings were transported to the cyberspace of digital media. Using data collected through remote ethnography and digital ethnography with the Matua community in 2020 and 2021, we suggest that the increased online visibility of the Matua community (1) contributed to reshaping Matua identity narratives as a global diasporic network, downplaying previous self-definitions of untouchability and displacement; (2) exacerbated inequalities along class and gender lines; and (3) shifted the sensoryscape of Matua ritual experiences, with important repercussions in the domains of embodiment, ritual authority and authenticity. As Matua experiences of increased online visibility clashed with their traditional aesthetics of resistance through shared sonic commingling, we argue, more broadly, that understandings of visibility must take into consideration culturally informed articulations of the senses and sense hierarchies, and how sensory ideology can manifest following the affordances of different media.

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Notes

  1. All interviews cited in this article were conducted in Bengali over the phone or WhatsApp. We use pseudonyms for our interlocutors. This research was undertaken by a team of six researchers, with the supervision of Carola Lorea. It includes telephonic interviews and online ethnography conducted between August 2020 and March 2021 with Matua participants based in West Bengal, Bangladesh and the Andaman Islands. The project is part of the larger study “Religion Going Viral: Pandemic Transformations of Religious Lives and Ritual Performances in Asia” funded by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, August 2020 – March 2021. “Matua” refers to a Dalit religious community that emerged in the nineteenth century in East Bengal and spread, after Partition, in various parts, and especially borderland areas, of the Indian subcontinent.

  2. On digital media and religion during the Covid pandemic see Sect. 3 of CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age (Hertzman et al. 2023).

  3. For example, YouTube channel Matua Mulnivasi Media ( https://youtube.com/@matuamulnivasimedia), created in 2012, upholds Matua philosophy, teachings, and video recordings of cultural programmes within Matua congregations. In 2018 and 2019, the channel has uploaded an average of 55 videos per year but in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, 62 videos were released.

  4. For instance, YouTube channel by the name Haribhakti TV ( https://youtube.com/@HaribhaktiTv) was created as recently as May, 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown. In the description section of the channel, the main objective is to upload videos based on evidence from sacred scriptures that are beneficial for humanity in a superstition-free society.”.

  5. In this aspect, our argument resonates with Arvind Kumar Thakur’s (2020) findings on the limits of Dalit mobilization online. Digital Dalits, according to Thakur, gave voice to fragmented political positions, expressed through proliferating websites, making the political realization of a united subaltern agenda more ambivalent (2020:362).

  6. See our article on remote ethnography and the gender of connectivity, co-authored with Raka Banerjee, Aarshe Fatima, Khaled Oli Bin Bhuiyan, Mukul Pandey; published online on 23 September 2021. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/remote-or-unreachable-the-gender-of-connectivity-and-the-challenges-of-pandemic-fieldwork-across-the-bay-of-bengal

  7. Ocularcentrism is the predominance of sight in the modern Western hierarchy of the senses and ways of knowing; this hegemony of the eye is a Eurocentric discourse establishing seeing – and therefore observation, the collection of visual data, and written sources (Hoang 2011) – as the higher sense, epistemologically as well as morally (van Ede 2009:62).

  8. On the Namashudra movement and radical aesthetics of protest, see also Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (1997), Sipra Mukherjee (2016, 2018a, 2018b), and Benil Biswas (2016).

  9. Sri Sri Hari Guruchand Global Organisation: https://www.facebook.com/HGGOInc; Sri Sri Hari Guruchand Nam Prachar Gosthi: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1103930249796377/

  10. The term sensoryscape is employed in sociocultural studies on the senses, as a conceptual framework to theorize how experiences of the body sensorium create intimate somatic connections and mediations between self, social others and social spaces (Low 2013). In addition to this secularist approach, our use of “sensoryscape” takes into account – alongside scholarship of religion and the senses (e.g. Harvey and Hughes 2018) – practices and discourses of the senses that are mobilized to create connections and mediations not only with other humans, but also with non-human and more-than-human agentive entities (i.e. deities, present and past gurus, subtle yogic energies, ancestors, etc.). The paper therefore contributes to sensuous scholarship (Stoller 1997; Vannini et al. 2013) and, more specifically, to the intersecting fields of religion and the senses (Meyer 2008, 2011; Harvey and Hughes 2018), and religion and media (Meyer and Moors 2006; Engelke 2010; Lovheim 2013).

  11. Here, “sect” is used to loosely translate emic terms for the socio-religious formation that Matua members call variously Matua dharma (religion), dharmāndolan (religious movement) and sampradāẏa (community).

  12. On the history of the so-called Chandala, later re-named Namasudra, in colonial Bengal, see particularly Bandyopadhyay (1997), Sumit Sarkar (2002). On the Matua movement see Nandadulal Mahant (2002) Manosanta Biswas (2016) and Carola Lorea (2020).

  13. For example, water touched by them was unacceptable to the higher caste Hindus. They were deprived of the services of the village barbers and washermen. They could not enter Hindu temples and various other social disabilities were attached to them, including the impossibility to access modern formal education.

  14. In an interesting study of Harichand Thakur’s hagiography, Sipra Mukherjee (2018a) has shown how the text underwent significant changes between the first (1916) and later editions running into the 1990s. Later editions of the text included a genealogy of Harichand Thakur that claimed Brahmin ancestry. It included a story of how Harichand’s ancestors, all pious Vaishnavas, had a high caste birth, but lost caste status due to a morganatic marriage, as a punishment for disregarding societal rules of touchability and commensality.

  15. On the history of migration of Namashudra refugees from East Pakistan and their resettlement in India, see among others: Uditi Sen (2011, 2018), and Bandyopadhyay and Basu Roy Chaudhury (2022).

  16. Thakurnagar, now a small yet lively town right by the Indo-Bangladesh border, is also the first autonomously organized Dalit refugee colony after the Partition of India. See Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Anasua Basu Roy Chaudhury (2014).

  17. Some examples of Matua websites and social media pages that have been there for a while, way before the pandemic include: Sri Sri Hariguruchand Matua Samaj (শ্রীশ্রী হরি-গুরুচাঁদ মতুয়া সমাজ—শ্রীশ্রী হরি-গুরুচাঁদ মতুয়া সমাজ (page.tl), Matua Mulnivasi Media (https://youtube.com/@matuamulnivasimedia), Jago Matua Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/JagoMatua/featured) and their Facebook Page: (https://www.facebook.com/jagomotua).

  18. YouTube video of their first international conference: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21TrZ8ETPr0&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR2Gxs1E3PxKXxQdI5Gtr0gPmQ5hD05POJzla_PxWp5PNuSlZORQYyFALtY). Posted by Jago Matua, 13 July 2020.

  19. https://www.facebook.com/HGGOInc/?ref=page_internal

  20. For example, see this harisabhā from August 5, 2021. Female devotee Champa Banali sings a song from min 1.05.10 until about 1.14.14. https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=248528090248934

  21. For example: in the same harisabhā (see previous note), a devotee joining from his bamboo-walled thatched house in the Khulna area (Bangladesh) sings a beautiful song with the harmonium. When another participant joins with his voice to chant “Haribol!” the audio from the singer’s side stops,and resumes after the other participant’s voice becomes silent. See min. 1.57.20.

  22. For example: in the same harisabhā (see previous note) Sujata Biswas is suggested to turn off her video and continue her song, for the internet connection is too slow (min. 5.21.00).

  23. Their latest Facebook post, at the time of writing this article, appeared to be from July 7 2022.

  24. On the neglected topic of performance genres and their circulation across post-Partition borders, see Aniket De (2021) and Priyanka Basu (2013, 2017).

  25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjTFn6AzNCc (Posted on 29.th March, 2020).

  26. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1103930249796377 (Last accessed on 23rd February, 2023).

  27. The role of travelling performers-preachers (kīrtaniẏā, gosāin and kabiẏāl) in spreading Matua dharma has been noticed by Biray Bairagya (1999), Mahant (2002), and Biswas (2018), among others.

  28. See Sipra Mukherjee (2018a, 2018b), and Aditi Mukherjee (2020).

  29. We are thankful to our colleague Raka Banerjee for conducting most of the remote ethnography with the research participants on the Andamans over 2020–2021 and sharing her findings.

  30. Other religious communities where shared sensory events are central (e.g. collective chanting for Sufi dhikr, or the burning of the temple in the American Burning Man festival) experienced a similar sense of alienation and a radical modification in their ritual aesthetics. See Lorea (2022).

  31. See https://dalitdiscrimination.tumblr.com/. Last accessed 29 September 2023.

  32. Similar questions of authenticity for embodied rituals shifting online were raised by various strands of Christianity. For example, for evangelical communities ‘the virtuality of the Internet’ did not constitute an obstacle to the feeling of presence of Christ during Covidian online rituals (de Almeida and Guerriero 2020). But for Catholics, the crucial materialized presence of Christ embodied and sensed in the mouth, with the partaking in the Eucharist Mass, was irreplaceable via digital media (Cressler 2020, Devakishen 2020). In short, disembodiment and sensory deprivations have been felt in unequal manners, depending on the sensory ideologies of each particular religious community.

  33. See Sylvain Pinard’s (1991) critique of Diana Eck’s work on darshan.

  34. On the sensory sanitization of modern Hinduism, see e.g. Hugh Urban regarding Tantric traditions (Urban 2003), Varuni Bhatia (2017) on Bengali Vaishnavism, and Peter van der Veer (2014) on religiosity and modernity in India and China.

  35. Rohit Chopra has argued that identity narratives on Dalit websites resemble those of Hindutva websites: “in cyberspace, Dalit discourse may tend to mirror this dominant mode of online representation, even as it remains opposed to Hindu nationalism” (2006:187).

  36. On the (at least theoretically) equal position of Matua men and women, see Bagchi (2008) and Nandadulal Mahant (2010).

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Funding

This research was conducted by a team of six researchers, with the supervision of Carola E Lorea. The project is part of the larger study “Religion Going Viral: Pandemic Transformations of Religious Lives and Ritual Performances in Asia” funded by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, August 2020–March 2021.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Religious Studies, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Carola E. Lorea

  2. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, GITAM (Deemed) University, Visakhapatnam, India

    Aditi Mukherjee

  3. Department of Sociology, Presidency University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

    Dishani Roy

Authors
  1. Carola E. Lorea
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  2. Aditi Mukherjee
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  3. Dishani Roy
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Contributions

All authors have contributed to the study's conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Carola Erika Lorea, Dishani Roy, and Aditi Mukherjee. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Carola Erika Lorea and all authors commented on the previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Aditi Mukherjee.

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Research involving human participants: This research has involved human participants and their informed verbal consent has been secured for all the interviews and interactions. The informed consent of all research participants has been secured for this research.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Lorea, C.E., Mukherjee, A. & Roy, D. A Dalit religion online: clashing sensoryscapes and remote ethnographies behind the screen. Dialect Anthropol 48, 83–112 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-023-09708-6

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