Bamakhepa: The Goddess Would Not Eat Without Him

This is the story, and it is the reason he is in this series.

What he did

He ate the food that had been prepared for the goddess, before it was offered to her.

Which is not a small thing. The bhog at a temple is cooked, presented to the deity, offered with mantras, and only then distributed. Eating it first is a violation at the centre of how temple ritual works, and it was done by a man who lived in the burning ground and was widely regarded as mad.

What was done to him

He was beaten and thrown out.

The temple servants dealt with him the way temple servants have dealt with such people everywhere, and the previous entries in this series have recorded the same event happening to Balarama Das at the Puri chariot and to Salabega at the Puri gate.

What happened that night

The goddess appeared to the temple's patron, the Rani, in a dream, and said that Bama was her son, that he had been beaten in her house, and that she would not eat until he was fed.

And in some tellings she says the plainest possible version of it: I have already eaten. He ate, so I ate.

What was done then

He was brought back.

And the arrangement was reversed permanently: at Tarapith, Bamakhepa was fed first, before the deity, for the rest of his life.

Which is a remarkable institutional climb down, and it was made by a temple establishment that had just beaten him.

What the story is actually saying

Three things, and they are worth separating.

One. The ritual order was wrong and the goddess said so.

Not that the ritual does not matter. The temple keeps functioning, the bhog keeps being offered, nothing is abolished. What is corrected is the ranking: the man they classified as beneath the ritual turned out to be the point of it.

Two. It came from above the institution and not from inside it.

Nobody at the temple changed their mind. No servitor reconsidered. The correction had to come from the deity, to the patron, at night, because those were the only two channels that outranked the people at the gate.

Which is honest about how such corrections actually happen, and it is not flattering to institutions.

Three. He never apologised and never changed.

He did not become respectable afterwards. He went back to the cremation ground and carried on exactly as before, and the temple worked around him.

The pattern across this series

And this is now the third time it has appeared in the same batch.

Balarama Das pushed off the chariot at Puri, building his own in the sand, and the real chariot refusing to move. Salabega kept outside the Puri gate, and the Rath Yatra stopping at his tomb every year since. Bamakhepa beaten at Tarapith, and the goddess declining to eat.

Three regions, three centuries apart in places, the same story.

Which means the tradition knows. It knows exactly what its institutions do to people who do not fit, it has told itself so repeatedly and in detail, and it has built the correction into the ritual calendar in at least two of the three cases.

And it keeps doing it anyway, which is the other half of what the pattern means.

The place

Tarapith, in Birbhum, is a temple of Tara beside a mahashmashan, a great cremation ground, and it is a siddhapith, a site where practice is held to succeed.

The local tradition connects it to the fall of Sati's eye, gives it to the sage Vashishtha as the place he accomplished his sadhana, and treats the cremation ground rather than the temple as the real seat.

And it is a working cremation ground. Bodies burn there daily, in the open, with families present.

What that means for a visitor

Behave as you would at any funeral, because that is what it is.

No photographs of pyres or of grieving families. Do not step over the ash of a burning. Do not treat it as an attraction. The people there are burying their dead and every one of them can see you.

Now the cautions, which are specific

One. Shava sadhana

The Tarapith tradition is associated with practice on a corpse, and this article will describe nothing about it.

The plain position: nobody needs this, no goal in the tradition requires it of an ordinary devotee, and it is not a step on any path a person reading a devotional article should be considering.

And the legal position is unambiguous. Disturbing a body, or a burial or cremation site, is a criminal offence in India, and so is anything done to a body without lawful authority. A person who offers to arrange it for you is offering to commit a crime with you. Police 112.

Two. The professional aghori

Tarapith, Varanasi and Kamakhya all attract men in costume who make a living from visitors.

Skull, ash, matted hair, a fire, and an offer: a reading, a removal of an obstacle, a tantric remedy, a photograph, a blessing, and a fee that grows once you have engaged.

Genuine renunciants exist and generally do not solicit. The person who approaches you at the gate and opens with your problems is running a business, and the business is the same one described in the Krishnananda entry: escalating payment against a supernatural threat that was invented at the moment you arrived.

Three. Liquor and cannabis

Tara at Tarapith is offered liquor. That is part of the practice at that site and this article is not disputing it.

What it is not is a licence.

Cremation ground sites in India draw a steady trade in ganja and in drinking framed as sadhana, and a great deal of it is young men on a weekend with a religious excuse.

And the specific harms are ordinary and real: cannabis is associated with psychosis risk, particularly in adolescents and in anybody with a family history; alcohol at a cremation ground at night in an unfamiliar town is how people get robbed, injured and worse; and neither substance has ever been reported to shorten anybody's path.

If it has stopped being occasional, the free national helpline for substance use is 14446, and Tele MANAS 14416 is free at any hour.

Four. Sacrifice

Goats are sacrificed at Tarapith, and West Bengal does not prohibit religious animal sacrifice.

The Madhavdeva entry in this batch sets out the position at length: this is a real and continuing disagreement inside Hinduism rather than a settled question, several states prohibit it and others do not, and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960 applies everywhere regardless.

A visitor who does not want to see it should know that they will see it, and a visitor who does not want to participate is under no obligation to.

Five. Your valuables and your group

Ordinary and worth saying. It is a crowded pilgrimage town with a night culture around a cremation ground. Keep your group together, keep your phone and cash secured, and do not go to the burning ground alone at night with somebody you met that day.

Where and when

• Tarapith, Birbhum district, West Bengal, reachable from Rampurhat, and Rampurhat is on the rail line from Kolkata
• Bamakhepa's samadhi is at the site
• Kaushiki Amavasya, in August or September, is the largest occasion of the year and the town is extremely full
• Kali Puja, in October or November
• Nearby: Bakreshwar, Nalhati and Bolpur Santiniketan are all within reach

A daily practice from this entry

• Om Tare Tuttare Ture Svaha is the Buddhist Tara mantra and is not this one; the Hindu form used at Tarapith is Om Hrim Strim Hum Phat, and Ma Tara on its own is enough
• A lamp
• And the Bamakhepa question, which is the whole of his story: who is the person your arrangements have decided is beneath them

His name contains it, and this section exists because of what gets done with it.

Khepa

Bengali for mad, and it was not a compliment when people first used it about him, and Bengal later turned it into one, which is a thing Bengal does.

And there is a whole category of figures like this: the avadhuta, the pagla baba, the majzub in the Sufi world, the holy fool in the Christian one. Every tradition has a slot for the person whose behaviour is wrong and whose standing is high.

And it is a genuine spiritual category. People have gone past the point of caring what a room thinks of them, and some of them are worth listening to.

Now the part that has to be said

Most people who are behaving strangely are unwell, and they need a doctor.

This is not a hostile claim about religion. It is the ordinary situation, and treating it otherwise costs people years of their lives.

What that looks like in practice

Somebody in a family stops sleeping, stops eating, stops washing, talks to people who are not in the room, becomes convinced of things that are not happening, cannot work, cannot be reasoned with.

And the family, especially in a small town, very often does not go to a doctor.

They go to a shrine. They go to somebody who reads it as possession, or as the effect of something done by a neighbour, or as a spiritual crisis that must be endured. They pay for remedies. Months pass. Years pass.

And the specific harms

• Untreated psychosis has worse outcomes the longer it runs. Duration of untreated illness is one of the strongest predictors of how a person does afterwards, and it is the one thing a family can actually change
• People are confined. Locked in rooms, tied, and in the worst cases chained, at home and at religious sites
• The Erwadi fire in Tamil Nadu in 2001 killed twenty eight people with mental illness who were chained at a place of healing, and it is the reference case in this country for exactly this practice
• The Mental Healthcare Act 2017 prohibits chaining a person with mental illness in any manner, guarantees the right to treatment and to live with dignity, and applies to every setting including religious ones

So the instruction is the ordinary one

If somebody in your house has changed like this, take them to a doctor.

Not instead of prayer. Nobody is asking anybody to stop praying, and this is a devotional site. Alongside it, and first, and quickly.

• Tele MANAS 14416, free, all hours, in Indian languages
• A district hospital or any government hospital has a psychiatry department, and treatment there costs little or nothing
• AASRA 9820466726 and Vandrevala 9999666555 for crisis
• 112 if there is immediate danger to the person or anybody else

And what about Bamakhepa

We cannot diagnose a man who died in 1911 and this article will not try.

What can be said is this. He lived to seventy four. He ate, he functioned, he had relationships, he had a practice with a structure to it, he taught, and he was coherent when he chose to be. Whatever he was, he was not somebody being destroyed by an untreated illness in a locked room.

And the difference between those two situations is the whole of this section.

The romance is the danger. The image of the mad saint makes untreated suffering look meaningful, and it is used, constantly, by families who do not want to make the trip to the hospital and by people who make money from not sending them.

Bamakhepa was fed first at Tarapith. He was not left in a room to get worse while somebody told his mother it was a spiritual matter.

Who: Bamakhepa, roughly 1837 to 1911, of Tarapith in Birbhum district, West Bengal, his name meaning Bama the mad one. He was born Bamacharan Chattopadhyay at Atla near Tarapith to a poor brahmana family, his father Sarvananda and mother Rajkumari, his father dying while he was young, and the ordinary path available to a poor brahmana boy was priestly service in somebody else's household. He would not do it, and went to the cremation ground instead.

How he lived: in the Tarapith mahashmashan, the great burning ground beside the temple, not visiting but living in it for decades until he died. He wore almost nothing, ate what was there including food from offerings made for the dead, kept no schedule, observed no rules, and was regarded by respectable people as filthy and deranged. Kailashpati Baba is named as his guru and Mokshadananda also appears. He was a contemporary of Ramakrishna at Dakshineswar, and Bengal is embarrassed by neither of them. The accounts do not tidy him up: he was abusive when he wanted to be, took what he wanted, ignored people who came to him and paid attention to people nobody else would touch. He was loved then and is loved now.

The plate: he ate the food prepared for the goddess before it was offered to her, which is a violation at the centre of how temple ritual works, and the temple servants beat him and threw him out. That night the goddess appeared to the temple's patron in a dream and said Bama was her son, that he had been beaten in her house, and that she would not eat until he was fed, some tellings adding that she had already eaten because he had. He was brought back, and thereafter he was fed first, before the deity, for the rest of his life.

What the story says: the ritual order was wrong and the goddess said so, without abolishing the ritual, correcting only the ranking, since the man classified as beneath it turned out to be its point. The correction came from above the institution rather than inside it, because nobody at the temple changed their mind and the only channels outranking the men at the gate were the deity and the patron. And he never apologised and never changed, going back to the cremation ground while the temple worked around him. This is the third time this batch has recorded the same story: Balarama Das pushed off the chariot at Puri, Salabega kept outside the Puri gate, Bamakhepa beaten at Tarapith. The tradition knows exactly what its institutions do, has said so repeatedly, has built the correction into the ritual calendar, and keeps doing it anyway.

Visiting Tarapith: it is a working cremation ground where bodies burn daily in the open with families present, so behave as at a funeral, take no photographs of pyres or grieving families, and do not treat it as an attraction. Shava sadhana is associated with the site and this article describes nothing about it: nobody needs it, and disturbing a body or a cremation site is a criminal offence in India, so a person offering to arrange it is offering to commit a crime with you. Professional aghoris work the visitors at Tarapith as at Varanasi and Kamakhya, and the person who approaches you with your problems is running the escalating payment business. Liquor is offered to Tara there, which is not a licence: cannabis carries psychosis risk particularly for adolescents and anybody with family history, alcohol at a cremation ground at night in an unfamiliar town is how people get hurt, and the free substance use helpline is 14446. Goats are sacrificed and West Bengal does not prohibit it. Keep your group together and your valuables secure.

The word mad: khepa was not a compliment when it was first used about him and Bengal turned it into one. Every tradition has a slot for the person whose behaviour is wrong and whose standing is high, and it is a genuine category. But most people behaving strangely are unwell and need a doctor, and families very often go to a shrine instead, paying for remedies while months and years pass. Untreated psychosis has worse outcomes the longer it runs, people are confined and in the worst cases chained, the Erwadi fire in Tamil Nadu in 2001 killed twenty eight chained people with mental illness at a place of healing, and the Mental Healthcare Act 2017 prohibits chaining in any manner and applies to religious settings. Take them to a doctor, alongside prayer rather than instead of it, and first, and quickly. Tele MANAS 14416, any government hospital's psychiatry department, AASRA 9820466726, Vandrevala 9999666555, and 112 in immediate danger.