In Search of Shitala
Shitala, Kalighat painting
Deities like Shitala represent a specific premodern response to disease. Paromita Patranobish explores what Bengal’s pox goddess could teach us about social ethics in Anthropocene times.
One of the recurring narratives of Bengal’s Patachitra folk art tradition is the story of Shitala, the Hindu deity of the underworld and pestilence. The folk idiom—itself a site for inscribing marginal subjectivities and neglected expressive forms—is an apt medium for the articulation of this ambivalent entity’s prehistory.
Shitala has often been left obscure in mainstream, unrepresented in the repertoire of popular television mythologies, Amar Chitra Kathas, and the prevalent religious iconography in places of worship, including home altars. I first encountered her as a name uttered with both reverence and trepidation, while I lay quarantined and convalescing from chicken pox. I spent my sickbed isolation time reading about the scientific etiology of the disease, which might have been the fascinatingly named Herpes Zoster virus. Soon, however, I discovered from the hushed conversations of worried elders that the virus—like the semantic plurality of most Indic faiths—had alternative avatars. A many-headed hydra, like the multi-dexterous Gods of the Hindu pantheon, the virus, it appeared, was both a manifestation of divine presence as well as an invitation for divine intervention. What I was afflicted with wasn’t just a contagious microorganism colonizing my cellular chemistry; it was an act of possession, a sacred being inhabiting the body, in order to cleanse and thus cure it of the disease, and my intrinsic fleshly pollution.
In Hindu conceptualizations of divine possession, an entity—usually a minor God or Goddess, animated and powerful—enters the body of a person, either willingly or in response to invocation, and inhabits it till appropriate expiatory or propitiatory rituals are performed at a social level. The contact with the sacred and its primordial otherness translates at the level of the individual body as painful and markedly anomalous manifestations, the pustules of pox being one such. Within the scheme of religious hermeneutics, certain diseases make the ailing body a medium and vehicle for the expression of divine will. The debilitation of the person becomes a threshold for the amplification of the divine: the self as the seat of rational agency and free will is evacuated, made into a no-man’s zone for the occupation of the sacred. The sick individual is also a form of individuality, a singularity or haecceity, from which the scaffoldings of modern liberal selfhood have been removed.
What I was afflicted with wasn’t just a contagious microorganism colonizing my cellular chemistry; it was an act of possession, a sacred being inhabiting the body, in order to cleanse and thus cure it of the disease, and my intrinsic fleshly pollution.
Illness in this interpretive framework has a communicative function. It is the predominant mode through which the element of community as what surrounds and sustains the individual is brought to the fore. The deity’s object of address is not so much the individual subject but the collective social domain to which it makes its desires, demands, powers, and promises made known. The divine origins of sickness underscore the ethical, interpersonal, and reciprocal entwinement that binds and underlies the figure of the autonomous human subject. It brings to our attention a relational collectivity that includes not only historical-chronological time, socially segmented space, and cultural notions of identity, but also contains nonhuman and elemental forces.
As Victor Turner’s studies have shown, pathological states are transitive and liminal. Liminal states occupy a threshold (limen) between two normative or stable stages: child/adult, young/old, sick/healthy, agrarian/industrial, primitive/modern, and enable the examination, analysis, and reconfiguration of those foundational values, principles, norms, institutions, and practices that structure social formations. Liminal moments overturn established hierarchies creating temporary anarchic pockets of chaos, confusion, disorder, and instability. They permit the liberation of those ways of existing, styles of expression, habits, pleasures, and capacities, that are repressed in the production of stable social orders.
The construction of pox as an act of divine visitation—a becoming sacred of the ordinary or profane self in the event of divine intervention—is not a mere superstition, an old-wives tale of grandparents’ lore, or the remnant of a premodern approach to disease to be rejected outright as anachronistic and antithetical to western Scientific discourse. Just as to think of the performative possibilities of Shitala’s presence in the diseased body as metaphor, a figurative fantasy set up to comprehend, explain, and thus tame the unknowable, unpredictable. and radically alien nature of both illness and its cause, is to miss the rich field of ethical and existential questions that non-modern conceptions of disease provoke.
This last point is at the heart of much controversy especially in the light of the global encounter with a novel virus during COVID-19 and the pandemic’s protracted effects, as ideological claims over religious resources usurp the latter to fit these into uniquely and narrowly partisan frames. Some years ago, Paul Gallagher wrote a scathing and illuminating article on the anti-vaccine campaigner Meryl Dore’s misappropriation of Shitala as being a harbinger of the “gift” of measles. In this piece, Gallagher debunked the reductive notion that disease as it appears in non-secular, mythic or religious worldviews is merely synonymous with divine retribution, or alternatively a miraculous divine prophylactic making the sufferer automatically immune. In what seems uncannily prophetic in retrospect, Gallagher exposes how contemporary politics—in this case, the argument against vaccination—twists ancient texts and complex belief systems. Shitala and the smallpox epidemic is used as an example of divinely preordained justification for a specific response towards medical protocols.
Bringing the mythic and the medical together in her person, Shitala’s benedictory and divine immunization does not contradict the medical and scientific model of immunity, but instead reinforces it through the trope of the antigen: a beneficent form of the malignant disease which is also its cure.
Gallagher and a host of other commentators on Shitala’s role in the causing and curing of disease (Ralph Nichols, Veena Das, Edward Dimcock, and Aditi N Sarkar) have shown how religious interpretations of pathology have historically been part of larger cultural contexts and shifts, in which a range of contending forces: social, political, and economic negotiate to make sense of and establish standards and paradigms of truth.
Faith based iconographies, narratives, and practices do not yield to easy appropriations without losing their potential to create new trains of thought, unconventional and divergent perspectives on human realities. When placed in the context of modernity’s dominant model of truth, that is at once empirically verifiable, capable of being semiotically coded and represented in language, as well as consistent with the basic tenets of a liberal humanist vision of the world which places the human subject at the centre of earthly and cosmic affairs, the rhetoric of supernatural possession appears to be a mere figment of the imagination, a fabular remnant of a pre-scientific era before the invention of modern medicine. But as Veena Das explains, deities like Shitala represent a specific premodern response to disease and are also active agents in a society’s engagement with mortality, corporeality, and human finitude.
Shitala’s social resurgence in Bengal and North India as an icon of pestilence is historically connected with the smallpox epidemic in Bengal. In 19th century Bengal, variolation practices included an elaborate ritual invocation of Shitala. These were a set of inoculation methods first used for smallpox (variola comes from the Latin for smallpox) as an early precursor to vaccination. A ‘tikadar’—literally, someone who places a mark—often chosen from a marginal caste, took on the double role of a medical practitioner and priest to inoculate the smallpox patient, usually children. Like in similar variolation practices in China and Turkey, the mark on the child’s forehead, or tika, was rubbed with pus collected from infected skin, and consecrated to Shitala. It became the sacred point via which she would take possession of the body.
Bringing the mythic and the medical together in her person, Shitala’s benedictory and divine immunization does not contradict the medical and scientific model of immunity, but instead reinforces it through the trope of the antigen: a beneficent form of the malignant disease which is also its cure.
The second time I encountered this pestilential goddess was in a local crafts fair in Kolkata, sometime during the late nineties. She was the subject of a narrative scroll painting that was being unraveled to the accompaniment of an incantatory song, sung by a frail woman whose family had been practitioners of this endangered folk-art form across generations. The hypnotic quality of the bard’s voice, coupled with the intoxicating details of the maverick goddess’s escapades as she roams the earth ridding it of maladies, had the ability to make the old tale come to life as a spine-tingling feverish sensation, an auditory rapture which held the audience in thrall.
The story of Shitala and how she comes to be associated with pestilence is a complicated one. One of the many circulating versions of her origin story traces her to a sacrificial fire. from which she emerges as a woman of considerable beauty. In order to remain perennially beautiful, she is tasked with having to always bear on her person grains of lentil (masoor, which lends its name to the Sanskrit term for measles). She is given a consort (a brother in some versions) called Jwarasura (literally, fever demon), also born of the same fire, and a beast of burden to bear her supply of grain. Together with these companions Shitala initially roams the heavens. Tragedy strikes this journey in the form of an infestation. Her grains rot and begin to contaminate the heavens. Petitioned by the other gods and promised earthly worshippers in return, Shitala and her consort leave for the hither realm, wormy masoor in tow, where enamoured of Shiva, the kings refuse to acknowledge this new and obscure female goddess. Denied recognition—that fundamental tenet of the metaphysical contract between gods and humans—Shitala takes recourse to force, using her powers of contamination to create a kingdom-wide plague, until those in power are compelled to acknowledge her powers and install her as a permanent tutelary deity.
In a related subplot of this story, Jwarasura starts his own rogue trail of disease on earth, inciting Shitala to take the form of an antigen, and cure the afflicted by entering their bodies and fighting Jwarasura from within. This variation on the pathological associations of the goddess is also what connects her with a more modern immunological imagination.
In several Patachitra traditions of rural Bengal—which themselves draw upon local oral narrative repertoires of invocation and address collectively called the mangal-kavyas or auspicious songs—Shitala’s earthly role as an arbiter of disease in its pathological and curative dimensions, both toxic and palliative, is the subject of worship and eulogy. In most standard artistic representations, the goddess is clad in a gossamer garment, usually vermillion or royal blue, barefoot and sitting semi-reposed on her donkey, an upraised broom and pitcher of cold water/cooling condiment in her hands, and a threshing winnow stuck in her hair like a comb. Despite being considered an avatar of the goddess Durga, Shitala is not portrayed as overtly militant. Her weaponry is of a much more humble and pragmatic order: objects of daily use, just as the orientation of her combat is not the cosmic body politic threatened by other races but the downsized, microcosmic corporeality of the earthly subject invaded by other species. But what is singularly distinctive about her instruments and method—and what would possibly appeal to a therapeutic imaginary both in its premodern and modern variations—is their duality: the broom and winnow are not just the stuff of combat, they serve a more sustainable function of hygiene and purification, reinforced in turn by the cleansing and restorative properties of water.
Religion has acquired a significance in the light of the current landscapes of disease and social isolation. During the pandemic, we saw a hegemonic, hierarchical, and centralized power structure, nationalistically-coded and ritualized spectacles of banging plates and blowing conches, or the popularization of new age spiritual rhetoric as a mechanism of emotional coping.
The ambivalence at the heart of this representation extends to the way the deity is linked to the field of disease. While her more virulent counterpart has a straightforward mode of causing sickness through contamination, Shitala’s relationship to disease is inductive, where illness is a means to affect its antithesis. Like other Indic cult deities like Manasa, the snake goddess and Ola Bibi, the goddess of cholera, Shitala’s pestilential curses as well as her curative fevers are specific usages of illness to bring about cure at the level of the individual and society. The deity uses disease to enforce her authority, demand recognition, remind her followers of their obligations. In more modern immunitary paradigms, she cures from the vantage of the bodily interior that she occupies, and where she is both the disease and its remedy. The cult of Shitala like that of other marginal deities is a reminder of the forces that exist outside our cognitive capacities or powers of rational comprehension.
Shitala’s presence could very well be seen as a foregrounding from the peripheral discursive perspective of myth, religion and indigenous art forms, interpretive possibilities that alert us to new ways of making sense of experiences and phenomena that are at the limits of language, representation, and understanding, including that of pathological experiences. Shitala’s mythic presence engages and synthesizes two kinds of ontological otherness: the divine and the parasitic, of god and virus. These are both anterior to the human subject defined as a bounded, autonomous, self-contained being. Both the viral infection and divine possession are forms of contact with otherness, events that expose the embodied self as an open structure, an ecology capable of harbouring multiple agents. They are paradigms of co-existence and cohabitation that bring the anthropocentric notion of the autonomous human subject as a consistent, unified, and stable entity to a crisis, inviting in turn thinking about the entangled, interconnected, collaborative nature of existence, and challenging us to reconceptualize the liberal cult of the individual to make space for articulations of living that are symbiotic, empathetic, and collective in form and motivation.
A few years ago, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ‘Corona Mata’ emerged as a new deity worshipped in different parts of India, including Assam, Andhra Pradesh, and Jharkhand. During Durga Puja in Bengal, Durga was presented as a Corona warrior, with some idol makers replacing her traditional weapons with medical equipment. Not surprisingly, almost all of these idols were accompanied by Mahishasur, Durga’s arch enemy impersonating the virus itself. Religion, in its organized, public form has acquired a new significance in the light of the current landscapes of disease and social isolation. During the pandemic, we saw a hegemonic, hierarchical, and centralized power structure, nationalistically-coded and ritualized spectacles of banging plates and blowing conches, or the popularization of new age spiritual rhetoric as a mechanism of emotional coping. While the trope of supernatural protection can and has been used to delegitimize scientific mandates (the large-scale gathering of pilgrims at Kumbh in direct violation of medical protocols and social and civic ethics, being the most blatant case in point), subcultural faith traditions as Shitala’s with their remarkably radical and often socially-subversive imaginaries open up a space of a discursive coupling and intertwining between medicine and ritual, science and faith, purity and pollution, corporeality and spirituality, transcendence and immanence, which in turn have the potential to challenge both religious and social hegemonies.
The figure and legend of Shitala demonstrate the disease’s social ramifications. She compels acts of communitarian worship and social rearrangements that destabilize caste and gender hierarchies, and provides therapeutic and spiritual authority to the socially marginalized. Her dual nature visibilizes and sacralizes the infirm, disabled, pustulous body, by reinscribing it in an order of divine significance, where it is no longer seen as repulsive or alien. The traditions of worship and devotion engendered around her craft a new theology, in which disease and healing coexist as parts of the same deific persona, and menial objects associated with dirt, labour, and pollution are loaded with class and caste connotations, infused with talismanic efficacy. In rescripting the phenomenon of contagion as a matter of social responsibility, the cult of Shitala—in its multiple narrative and iconographic configurations—is a reminder of the ethics of caregiving and mutuality.
In her anthropological work on the cultural significance of possession among the Hmong community, Anne Fadiman charts a contested terrain of competing knowledge systems as determining factors in establishing a disease. A young girl susceptible to frequent seizures becomes the site for a tense co-existence of epidemiological knowledge and local spiritual epistemologies. What is diagnosed as epilepsy is also simultaneously re-signified within the community narrative of her body as an instance of spirit possession, as a dwelling place for an alien force.
In 2021, in the throes of COVID-19, I revisited Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) as an alternative approach to illness. The Hmong understanding of possession, as a framework with which to explain the inexplicable and unpredictable manifestations of physiological experience, exhibited a remarkable transnational resonance with narratives of Sitala. Physically and mentally depleted by a virus whose shapeshifting dimensions and relentless mutational capacity were redrawing the boundaries of medical knowledge, I thought of the infected body as a site of multispecies encounters. A zoonotic virus that originated in a wet market in China inhabiting a global continuum of humanity seemed to compel alternative interpretive paradigms, ones that allowed for an acknowledgement or the porous entanglements between the human and its multiple interlocutors.
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Paromita Patranobish teaches at Mount Carmel College, Bangalore. She has a PhD on Virginia Woolf, and has taught in SNU, Daulat Ram College and Ambedkar University Delhi. When not teaching or writing, she loves to spend time with her camera and telescope doing amateur photography and stargazing. You can find her on Twitter: @paromita33.
