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An upper palaeolithic shrine in India?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

J. M. Kenoyer ,
J. D. Clark ,
J. N. Pal  and
G. R. Sharma
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Extract

There is little doubt that a religious belief imparting a sense of law and order and helping to control the relationships between human populations and the other components of their environment, is highly developed among present-day hunter/gatherers. Such beliefs not only help to provide a feeling of unity stretching far beyond the hunting band itself, but they afford an ordered interconnexion between the foragers and the spiritual processes which are looked upon as all-powerful forces influencing life and death (Turnbull, 1968, 25). This is well exemplified in the case of the Musahar, a Dravidian tribe of hunter/gatherers who inhabit the jungle regions of the Eastern Vindhyas in Central India. According to Nesfield, quoted by Crooke (1896, Vol. IV:34), ‘The great active power in the universe … is Bansapatti, Bansatti or Bansuri, the goddess who … personifies and presides over the forests. By her command the trees bear fruit, the bulbs grow in the earth, the bees make honey, the tussar worm fattens on the asân leaf, and lizards, wolves and jackals (useful food to man) multiply their kind. She is a goddess of childbirth. To her the childless wife makes prayers for the grant of offspring. In her name and by her aid the medicine man or sorcerer expels devils from the bodies of the possessed. In her name and to her honour the village man kindles a new fire for lighting a brick kiln. Woe to the man who takes a false oath in the name of Bansatti.’

Type
Articles
Information
Antiquity , Volume 57 , Issue 220 , July 1983 , pp. 88 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1983

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Footnotes

A combined team from Allahabad University and the University of California, under the direction of Professors G. R. Sharma and J. Desmond Clark, have completed two seasons' work at the terminal upper palaeolithic site of Baghor I in the Sidhi District of Madhya Pradesh, India. Although Professor Clark, who gave us this account, voiced his doubts about religious interpretations for what he called ‘esoteric archaeological finds’, nevertheless it is stated in this article that there is a very strong probability that the structure and the stone represent a shrine to the goddess, or female principle, ‘Shakti’, which was built by the group of final upper palaeolithic hunter/gatherers who were living at the site of Baghor I. The directors were assisted by Jonathan Mark Kenoyer of Berkeley, and J. N. Pal of Allahabad University.

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