short biography of yogmaya

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NEPAL: Yogmaya Neupane: Nepal's First Female Revolutionary

She gave voice to the voiceless -- women, lower castes, the exploited -- when the entire country cowered to Rana rulers. She married thrice when widow marriage was an unpardonable offense.

She confronted rulers in person demanding dharma-rajya (good governance). She was jailed for attempting immolation as a sign of protest against the regime, thereby becoming the first woman in the country known to have been jailed for political beliefs.

And on July 14, 1941 -- when aged between 73 to 81 -- she threw herself into the Arun River to bring shame to the regime. Sixty-seven of her disciples followed suit. The bodies were never found.

For seventy years since the country´s biggest mass suicide, Yogmaya Neupane´s story has languished in obscurity. Even in her home district, Bhojpur, she was little more than a myth.

But what was just a popular myth until ten years ago is now increasingly being established as a fact, according to Professor Michael Hutt, who on Tuesday presented an outline of Yogmaya´s biography in an attempt to establish facts of her life.

“She was born between 1860 and 1868 in Simle, Bhojpur. There are still 14 Neupane households in the village. All are very clear about Yogmaya´s place in their lineage,” said Hutt, Professor of Nepali and Himalayan Studies at School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

Makings of a Rebel

According to facts presented by Hutt, Yogmaya, whose given name was Mayadevi, was the only daughter of her parents, who also had two sons younger to her.

She was married to a Koirala boy when she was aged between five and nine. The boy died soon after marriage. Following traditions prevalent back then, Yogmaya was thereafter considered inauspicious by her in-laws. She spent several difficult years with them until finally fleeing to her Maiti (maternal home) after deciding to reject the unhappy fate of a widow. Her parents informed her in-laws that she was with them. But the in-laws weren´t interested in taking her back.

What followed was Yogmaya´s first serious attack on social traditions. She eloped with a Brahmin boy to Assam. But her second husband also died, and she married yet again. She is believed to have given birth to a daughter from her third marriage.

Between 1903 and 1916, Yogmaya renounced the institution of marriage, traveled to holy places and returned to her home district to lead the life of an ascetic. For the rest of her life, she was a permanent resident of Majuwabesi, Bhojpur, where she set up an ashram and observed extreme austerity.

She is believed to have meditated in a cave, naked and without food, for months. Wrapped in just a single piece of cloth, she had the appearance of a man.

Word spread of the powers she was believed to have been blessed with in reward for leading an austere life and she earned hundreds of disciples who called her Shakti Hajoor and Shakti Maya. Many of her followers were from the dalit community.

Challenging Ranas

Yogmaya, whose utterances are carefully yet incompletely preserved in Sarvartha Yogbani published from Assam after her death, condemned caste discrimination and corrupt Brahmins, moneylenders, jagirdars, and the rulers.

She sent petitions to Bir Shumsher, Chandra Shumsher and Juddha Shumsher demanding alms and dharma-rajya. She warned the rulers that apocalypse was near for them.

In 1936, she traveled to the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu where Juddha Shumsher came seeking blessings from her. She is believed to have demanded from him, “Truth! Dharma! Alms!”

The demands are interpreted today primarily as those for good governance and privileges that only male ascetics were entitled to back then.

Juddha Shumsher is believed to have assured her that the demands would be met.

But the assurance didn´t translate into action and Yogmaya, along with 204 of her followers, most of them Brahmins, made plans for mass immolation in order to put the weight of the deaths on the ruler´s conscience. Before they could commit immolation, they were arrested and jailed in Dhankuta and Bhojpur. Yogmaya was released four months later.

After being convinced that reforms weren´t forthcoming, Yogmaya and her 67 followers hurled themselves into a raging Arun River in their final act of rebellion on July 14, 1941.

They are believed to have hollered while taking the plunge, “May the unjust Rana government be destroyed! May dharma be established!”

Seventy years after the mass sacrifice, Yogmaya´s statue was unveiled in Bhojpur on March 8, 2011, to mark the International Women´s Day. Feminists owned her as the first among them in the country. It was a latest bead in the thread that is leading to her iconization as Nepal´s first female revolutionary.

“My plea to Nepal´s historians and social scholars is for further research,” said Hutt. “How did she not appear in standard history of Nepal for sixty years?”

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Yogmaya Neupane: The Unknown Rhetorician and the Known Rebel

Peitho Volume 24 Issue 3, Spring 2022

Author(s): Asmita Ghimire

Asmita Ghimire is a PhD student in Rhetoric, Technical and Scientific Communication in the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her research areas are Technical and Professional Communication, Transnational and Translingual Rhetoric and Writing, Transnational Feminist Rhetoric and Writing , and Global Policy Rhetoric. She is originally from Nepal where she taught in the Kathmandu University after finishing her master in English Literature and Writing. She has published i n Academic Labor: Research and Artistry and other scholarly Journals.   

Abstract: Yogmaya Neupane is a female rhetorician of Nepal who contributed to the eradication of the Sati system from the country in 1920. However, current studies of Yogmaya limit her as a feminist, rebel and literary figure, failing to recognize her rhetorical skills. This paper resurrects, and thereby calls for further studies of Yogmaya as a rhetorician. While doing this, this paper appropriates the western feminist methodologies of community listening, strategic contemplation, and critical questioning, ultimately showcasing how these methodologies blend and intersect in the project of reconsidering a transnational feminist as a rhetorician.

Yogmaya Neupane (1860-1941) was a feminist, activist, rebel, and political and social thinker in Nepal. As a thinker and an activist, she organized people and initiated awareness against stereotypes, superstitious religious practices, the caste system, child marriage, discriminatory treatments of women, corruption, and unequal distribution of wealth, among other issues. During the early 1900s, Nepal was ruled by Ranas, whose regimes are considered to be the dark period in the history of Nepal; their rigid adherence to Hindu systemic discrimination had perpetuated superstitious religious practices such as Sati — the practice of immolating the wife into the pyre of the husband after the husband dies. Yogmaya established Nari Samiti , the first women’s coalition in Nepal, around 1906 to fight against the injustices and discriminations against women, such as the practice of Sati (Aziz, Hutt, Yadav). Nari Samiti became a viable medium to officially pressure the governmental system which was exerting autocratic power. Through political activism and social awareness approaches, she forced the then government to eradicate the system of Sati from the country.   

But a system of Sati was not the only trial of Nepalese women during that period. Women and girls in Nepal during the 1900s were considered second-class citizens: they were secluded from political and legal rights and subject to polygamous marriage and widow discriminations. In addition, child marriages were prevalent practices, which were legally and morally sanctioned under the Hindu legal system ( Muluki Ain 1854). Yogmaya fought for “alms for righteous governance”—a system of government based on justice and truth, in her words (Aziz 59). After spending more than thirty decades on activism and revolution, when she discovered that Ranas’ systems of autocracy were adamant about secluding women and other marginalized castes, she decided to sacrifice her life to threaten the government. Because murdering a Brahmin or forcing a Brahmin to take her life was considered a sin in Hindu philosophy and was also punishable by the Nepali civil code ( Muluki Ain 1854), she used the threat of ending her life as a resistance technique to shake the government. Being from a so-called pious Brahmin family, whose harm was considered as harm to God, she used her embodiment to threaten the government and political system.  She arranged self-immolation by fire in 1938 along with 204 followers, but she was instead arrested and put in prison. After spending more than three months in prison, she again marched for self-immolation, this time in the water. On July 5, 1941, she threw herself into the river Arun, where she died. Sixty-seven of her followers also followed her path and jumped into the Arun.  

Before dying, Yogmaya had composed Sarvartha Yogbani , which includes her teachings and philosophies. Even after her death, most of her living followers regarded her book as their fundamental tenet. In the Yogbani , she denounced the caste system, subordination of women, economic disenfranchisement of working-class people and appeals for establishing justice. It is an enriching resource for social activists, philosophers, and writers. However, the book was banned in Nepal until 2000. Not only were her activities considered blasphemous by misogynist patriarchal values, but she was also vilified as a prostitute, wayward, mad, and crazy by the patriarchal norms. As a result, official Nepalese history did not account for the name of Yogmaya even after half of the century of her death. After the death of Yogmaya, Nepal went through great political reformations and enjoyed a vibrant period of democracy that was largely critical of the Rana regime, the legacy of the eradication of the Sati system from Nepal remained credited to Rana rulers, and the erasure of Yogmaya was perpetuated. This is to say, regardless of the political system that was in power, females have continued to be politically marginalized while Yogmaya’s contributions have failed to be realized in official history. While there were records of Yogmaya’s existence, nonetheless, the records of her contributions were “burned for fuel on some chilly winter nights” (Aziz 68).   

Remembering Yogmaya  

As a young girl growing up in Nepal, I heard about the system of Sati before I “heard” about Yogmaya, who had forced the government to ban it. I first learned about the system of Sati in the Nepali Literature class around seventh grade. When my Nepali literature teacher, a bold and vocal woman, talked about the custom of burning women in the pyre of their husbands. Goosebumps came all over my body. For the first time in my childhood years, I became afraid of being female. I became afraid of being female before I realized I am a female.  Even scarier was to think about my grandmother, my mother’s sister, and other women whom I had seen without husbands throughout my life. How did they escape that fate after their husbands died?  That day after school, I went straight to my mother’s sister’s home, who used to live a couple of houses away from my parent’s home. I asked my mother’s sister, who was born in the early 1900s, was married at the age of seven and became a widow at the age of nine, “ हजुर चै सति किन नजानुभको ?” translated in English as “why did you not go Sati ?” Her response was, “They did not ask me to”.  Who did not “ask” her? Who would have had the power to force her to Sati and , in contrast, who emancipated her? Did she know  

Like Yogmaya, my mother’s sister was married at the age of seven to a boy who was nine. She was allowed to live in her parents’ home until she reached the age when she could do errands herself. But when she was nine, her husband, along with most of his family members, died due to the cholera epidemic. She became a widow at the age of nine for a husband she barely knew. Although my mother’s sister did not have to go Sati , she sacrificed her whole life for the husband who died when she was only nine. She never wore colorful clothes, never went to public places without accompanying the male family members and lived a secluded life. The reply that I got from her, “They did not ask me to”, becomes meaningful only now as I am strategically contemplating the life she lived alongside the life and contributions of Yogmaya. I realize that my mother’s sister was not forced to go to Sati only because of Yogmaya’s contributions. Did she know that she and many like her were fortunately absolved from duty of Sati because of Yogmaya? Most probably not!   

My mother’s sister wanted to believe, like my schoolteacher, that she was absolved from her duty of Sati by Prime Minister Chandra Shamsher Rana (1901-1929), on 8th July 1920.  Her generation was raised to doubt that an average Nepali woman like herself could be courageous enough to challenge the patriarchal structure. And it was hard to imagine the ramifications of doing so.  Since repressive erasure of Yogmaya’s contributions past almost three generations and the oral history about her was limited to women in the Arun River Valley only, it was discomforting for the women of my mother’s generation to challenge official narrations (Connerton; Hamilton,and Shopes). It took my entire school years and even prior years at the university to convince myself that what my schoolteacher told me was only a version of official history.   

Context for Feminist Rhetorical Recovery  

Others have tried to research Yogmaya before me. Yogmaya Neupane has been extensively studied from anthropological, sociological, literary and historical perspectives. In anthropological and sociological study, Yogmaya and her works are considered rebellious and revolutionary, aiming to bring social change (Aziz; Hutt). First among them is an ethnographic account produced by Barbara Nimri Aziz, whose work is iconic in studying and recovering the story of Yogmaya as a rebel. Aziz’s work is revolutionary also because she compiled the collections of her poems in her book Heir to silent Song Two Rebel Women of Nepal , which would otherwise be banned by the government. Yogmaya is also portrayed alongside the Hindu mythic figures and her works have largely been analyzed from a Hindu Vedic perspective (Neupane, Bhandari, Shrestha). In addition, feminist and historians like to date her social movement practices as some of the first feminist movements in Nepal representing her as a first feminist (Yadav, Lama, Karki, Shrestha). Similarly, in most of the literary references to her, such as in works by home-grown writers such as Uttam Prasad Panta and Lekhnath Bhandari, she is highlighted as a literary figure and her poems as radical.  As Michael Hutt opines in his critical analysis of the “forcible forgetting” of the history of Yogmaya in “nationalist and teleological history” (Hutt 383) and the recent narrativist revival of her in ahistorical accounts and studies, literary studies of Yogmaya were a prominent factor for her recent revival in Nepal. Referring to Uttam Prasad Panta’s article on the literary contributions of Yogmaya, at one point, he recognizes that literary identification of her was the safest way of seeking public recognition —”an initiative that enriched the literary pedigree of the national language and identified new icons to enhance the kingdom’s Hindu identity that? would not be frowned upon” (Hutt 349). However, even critical research such as this represents her as a female ascetic, political revolutionary, feminist, and literary artist only. Although historical, sociological, anthropological, feminist and literary methodology have immensely contributed in establishing and recovering her works and contributions, which would have been erased, lost, forgotten and repressed. But looking at the past and reconstructing it in a crude academic fashion may not be enough for recuperating feminist rhetorical practices, let alone rewriting the feminist contributions in the history. In the case of Yogmaya, her recovery efforts have largely been concentrated in recovering her rather than recovering her practices—consequently, erasing the revolutionary practices of her along with a large number of her followers whose contributions were equally important. In addition, recuperating efforts may require us to theorize her practices; in another words, redesigning her practices as what decolonial feminists want to call “praxis” (hooks)   

A Transnational Feminist Rhetorical Practice for Recovering Yogmaya  

I want to add one more historiographical account along this line: Yogmaya is the first female rhetorician of Nepal. Reading anthropological and historical research on Yogmaya, while providing greater possibilities, was still generally reductive, reading more like a fairytale for women of the democratic era to believe that a woman could jump into the river for a greater good, let alone burning into the pyre of a husband following the traditions. Based on the description of her in the first half of the essay, I want to reiterate 1) the initiative that she took for female liberation, 2) her teachings and philosophies in Sarvartha Yogbani , and, finally 3) her embodied resistance through the practice of Jal Samadhi (mass immolation in water) expounds her rhetorical skills and strategies. For me, these feminist principles rest on how I envision my locality through the feminist rhetorical perspective, for instance, imagining critically into questions such as what forced Yogmaya to jump into the river? Or what saved my mother’s sister from being Sati ? In this case, imagining critically means to rhetorically envision local feminist efforts of Yogmaya by examining the history lived by her and women like her, further pondering rhetorically into the reason she chose her rhetorical practices or the reason she chose a particular rhetorical practice. However, this is a complex endeavor given that it invites more questions than answering one. For example, the question that made me numb was what am I to write about a woman who flowed herself into the thundering Arun River, never to return, for a cause which was then called fanatical? What am I to say, about a woman whose history was never talked about and even forbidden in my culture? Legacy is not a word that was made to suit her in hi story ; she was ostracized, defamed, and vilified. Further, the history writers cleansed, dumped, forbade, and erased her. Opening her story is like excavating a memory that has now become a myth. Ashes were rare things, and an archive is impossible for her archaeology. In fact, the effort to recover the feminist rhetor in the culture where rhetoric is yet to be defined in western academic terminology is an innovative process for the reason that it helps in designing a new methodology or employ the foreign methodology in a new way.   

To begin this recovery effort, I contacted Barbara Nimri Aziz, who pioneered Yogmaya among scholarly circles. I scheduled a couple of meetings with her, which she affirmed and appreciated with intellectual wit. In our first phone conversations, she recalled her 1980’s visit to Nepal— where Yogmaya had lived, preached, and performed her resistance and protest in the 1900s. She had visited the place nearly forty years after the death of Yogmaya. In our extensive phone conversation, she shared that it was like finding her own foremothers’ stories. Being a daughter of Arab immigrants, she found her affinities and shared values as soon as she discovered Yogmaya’s contributions. In her book, Heir to Silent Song: Two Rebel Women of Nepal , she writes “I didn’t imagine in Nepal I might find activists similar to Mother Jones and Sojourner Truth… How could a woman raised in America and England, even though she was of Arab origin, imagine she might find her true ancestors in Nepal?” (Aziz 28)  

When Barbara visited Nepal, she met Manamaya, the pupil of Yogmaya and a respondent in Barbara’s research who is also, along with a number of other followers, used to reciting the verses from the book Sarvartha Yogbani . This recitation was private, and Barbara writes, “I noted how, when either Manamaya or Bhaktini Aama sang [them] for me, they did so in the privacy of their small dwellings, and at night” (Aziz 39). But those brave followers of Yogmaya wanted the message to be spread and the story to be heard by all the people. So, Manamaya invited Barbara into her small hut one night and handed the book which she had wrapped in a cloth-like “sepia brown booklet” and kept inside the bed mattress (Aziz 39-40). In my research process, when I was searching for the original book of Yogmaya and asked Barbara about it she wrote me, “The entire set of available Yogbani is included as an appendix to my book Heir to Silent Song: Two Women Rebels of Nepal . It represents the only written collection yet available of Yogbani . Such a treasure to be given to me in 1981 to share with all. These conversations between Barbara and me, two feminist researchers distanced by generation and nationality but made closer by rhetorical ethos— the ethos of care and humility— helped me to engage in a compassionate argument, collaborative practice, and negotiation. At one of our conversations, she explicitly advised me that a Nepali woman should study and explore on Yogmaya. Perhaps, while saying this, Aziz listened to Patricia Sutherland who advises that the feminist methodology of primary research is garnered from women’s primary experiences. It encouraged me to commemorate my position as a researcher and to navigate my gendered and transnational experience.  

This authentication of Yogmaya as a rhetorician was possible through juxtaposing my narrative, which explored and discloses attachment, about how the history of Yogmaya was deleted from the public narrative. For doing this, I have relied extensively on feminist rhetorical practices to weave my personal experience of Yogmaya and the women’s issues she advocated for with my recovery of her rhetorical work. The gap of nearly a half-century after her death (the anniversary of which elapsed without mentioning her name), wherein the country went from the autocratic system of Rana to democracy, and from a British system of the monarchy to a quasi-Chinese system of federalism, was possible to recuperate through decolonial feminist methodologies that debunk traditional objective methodological practice ( Bizzel’s ‘function of emotion,” Royster’s “storytelling and telling history,” Kirsch and Royster “critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and social circulation,” Sutherland “primacy of gendered experience,” Enoch “local narrative,” Garcia’s “community listening”). Employing these methodologies was challenging because it helped in closely examining the research around her, requiring answers in regard to coherence in translations and interpretations. For example, in Aziz’s works one of her bani (verse) from Sarvatha Yogbani is translated as “Though I am the one who is despised by society, and discarded I have to prove my innocence” (Aziz XV). The original verse was “ म भगवन हैन , म समाजले तिरषकार र धृणा गरेको नारी हु ।“ (Aziz 57). The question that one can raise in the translated version is: did she really believe that she needs to “prove” her innocence?  As feminist researcher in Nepal, Kumari Lama, notes,   

Yogmaya develops immense rebellious feelings towards discriminatory Brahmanic social values since her young age. She executes her dissenting characteristics very gracefully in her life. She challenges Hindu religious authority eloping with a man she loves despite being a child-widow. Undoubtedly, her elopement exhibits her resistance as well as her strong punch against patriarchal authority that incarcerates women’s freedom. (Lama 18)  

Reading the above translations (rather mistranslation) of her bani alongside the examination of her feminist practice gives the dual picture of her feminist efforts as someone who wants to “prove” her innocence to the social practices against which she had relentlessly fought. I find the translation problematic, an inaccurate version of how she was, in contrast to how she was interpreted.  In fact, if this would have been translated by any Nepali feminist, they would translate it along the lines, “I am the one who is despised and discarded by society, God I am not”. Given that original translations if kept intact would seriously counter all her sacrifice and contributions, it is also important to examine the way an inaccuracy in translation represents another kind of erasure.  

Secondly, examining her rhetorical practices helps in authenticating feminist praxis in Nepal within the larger spectrum of global feminist practice. Until now, answering the question in regard to feminist praxis in Nepal is hard since one has to either rely on western feminism or the feminism in the border.  Even growing up outside of the West, I heard of Yogmaya long after I was introduced with Simone De Beauvoir, Helene Cixous, Betty Friedan — however, the feminist movement led by Yogmaya preceded them. In fact, Yogmaya’s contemporaries were suffragists in the United States. With a deep sense of humility, before writing this paper, I contemplated all those dormant periods of my academic life—periods when I used to feel that the feminist revolution is western conduct and periods when I lived in oblivion, with the assumption that the Sati system was eradicated by the Ranas in Nepal— When reading canonical scholarship in feminism and rhetoric, I would think of Beauvoirian ideas from the perspective of my mother’s sister, and sometimes even Spivak and hooks from the perspective of Yogmaya. Meanwhile, Indian feminists, close to home, even the one who decried the western feminist portrayal of “Indian Suttee” (Narayana) are as distant as any other western feminist given that Nepali feminist fought different battles and employed different resistance principles (Mohanty; Spivak). In Yogbani , Yogmaya criticizes the structure of patriarchy and systemic inequality. She diatribes against the caste system, corruption, Brahmin value, and huge economic disparity among people. In one of her bani , she declares her denouncement of caste by saying,   

Before I owned a caste  

Belonging to the Brahmin clan.  

Now look, I have no caste.  

Ho, I chucked it there in the hearth (Aziz 60)  

In the above lines, Yogmaya declares the renouncement of her Brahmin caste. Symbolically, her practice of renouncing caste, is a denunciation of entire Brahminism which has played a vital role in exerting power politically, socially, and economically. Her rhetorical tool of anti-brahminism bespeaks about her feminist praxis which distinguish her from feminist across culture. Similarly, her relentless appeals to dharmarajya (Alms for righteous government) shows that her resistance praxis are borne locally. Below, she decries government corruption and appeals for restorations of justice. She says,  

Kill the corrupt; behead the thief.  

Judge with virtue, eliminate lies.  

When our charioteer arrives, truth will reign.  

And smash kings and courtiers too. (Aziz 68)  

Finally, recovering and rewriting the rhetorical practice of feminism in the global south requires deep personal reflections alongside bringing the solidarity amongst the feminist across borders. As a Nepali woman, I grew up listening to the tale of my mother’s sister. When I listened to Barbara and her ethnographic account, it overlaps with listening to my mother’s sister along with my personal reflections to my own contemplative witness of her life that I saw as a kid. The collage of listening and mindful contemplation allowed me to think ‘dialectically and dialogically, to use tension, conflict, balances, and counterbalances as critical opportunities” (Krisch and Royster 652). In another word, listening to Barbara layered and broadened with listening to my mother and her sister, which became more viable when I collaged what Romeo Garcia calls community listening.  For me, community listening is listening to my mother’s sister, whose experiences were relational if not akin to the subject in question, made me feel that these women have stories to tell which I can never find in the history books. Through the practice of collaging, merging, and juxtaposing of different methodologies into one, I find that in a uniquely transnational situation like this one, methodological experimentation and conflict necessitates and procures recoveries and reconsideration of feminist rhetoricians. In another word, in the course of this research, I often intersect Garcia’s community listening and Sutherlands’ advice for negotiation and collaboration, and subsequently look to these methods from Kirsch and Royster’s idea of critical imagination and strategic contemplation; examining alone through one of these techniques deeply hinder (and sometimes limits) the possibility of reestablishing Yogmaya, whose rhetorical history lies under the teleological history of Nepal, the false lesson that was “asked” to transfer to me through my school teacher, and perhaps in the anecdote of my mother’s sister.  

**Acknowledgement: This paper went through the several phases of thinking, thinking the “thinking,” researching, writing, and revision. This work would not have been possible without the valuable comments and feedback from my mentor, Amy Lueck, associate professor at Santa Clara University, in all these phases of writing.

• In Nepali language, Sati is referred as both noun and verb. While using it as a noun, usually, during the time of Sati system, a woman would become Sati after their husband died. In that case, like widow, women would be referred as Sati. Sati is also used by referring to a practice, a verb. While, in both of these usages, “S” is capitalized.   
• I prefer to use the word Nepali ( नेपाली ) to Nepalese while referring to the people from Nepal. Nepali is directly derived from Nepali language, where it is called. In contrast, Nepalese is a word refer to people from Nepal usually by the British.   

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Shrestha, Mathura Prasad. “ योगमाया – बिर्सिन नसकिने / बिर्सिन नहुने एक ब ीरां गना .”[Yogmaya: Unforgettable Rebel] सामाजिक आन्दोलनकी अग्रणी तथा कवि : योगमाया , edited by Matrika Timsina et.al., Nepal Adhyan Kendra, (B.S. 2057): 175-178.  

Shrestha, Tina. “The Life and Work of Yogmaya Neupane: A Representation of a Historical, Non-Secular and Political Subject.” Social Sciences in a Multicultural World , edited by K. N. Pyakuryal, B. K. Acharya, B. Timseena, G. Chhetri, M. Uprety, and D.P. Chapagain, Kathamandu, SASON, 2008, pp. 206-18.  

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?.”   Die Philosophin , vol. 14, no. 27, 2003, pp. 42-58.  

Sutherland, Christine Mason. “Feminist Historiography: Research Methods in Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly , vol. 32, no. 1, 2002, pp. 109-22.  

Timsina, Matrika. “ नेपालको सामाजिक राजनीतिक आन्दोलनमा योगमाया ” [Yogmaya in Nepal’s Social–Political Movement]. In सामाजिक आन्दोलनकी अग्रणी तथा आदिकवि योगमाया [Yogmaya, Leader of a Social Movement and Founder Poet], edited by Matrika Timsina, L. S. Kunwar, (B.S 2057): 138–166. Kathmandu: Adhyayan Kendra.  

Upreti, Bishnu R., Drishti Upreti, and Yamuna Ghale. “Nepali Women in Politics: Success and Challenges.” Journal of International Women’s Studies , vol. 21, no. 2, 2020, pp. 76-93.  

Yadav, Punam. “White Sari—Transforming Widowhood in Nepal.” Gender, Technology and Development , vol. 20, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1-24.  

Social Science Baha

• Lecture Series

The Iconisation Of Yogmaya Neupane

Michael Hutt on The Iconisation of Yogmaya Neupane

According to a popular tradition, on 14 July 1941, an elderly female religious ascetic named Yogmaya Neupane committed suicide by hurling herself into the raging Arun River in Bhojpur district of eastern Nepal. Sixty-seven other people followed her example, and none of their bodies was ever found.

On 8 March 2011, to mark International Women’s Day, a statue of Yogmaya Neupane was unveiled in the district headquarters town of Bhojpur. This was the latest development in an iconisation process that constructs and promotes Yogmaya as Nepal’s first female revolutionary.

This lecture will try to establish the facts of Yogmaya’s life, so far as this is possible, present and discuss a selection of verses from Sarvartha Yogabani, the text that is held to preserve her utterances, and then analyse the attempts that have been made by various activists and scholars to construct her as, variously, a feminist rebel, a social reformer, and a progressive poet.

Listen to or download lecture in audio format

Michael Hutt  is Professor of Nepali and Himalayan Studies at School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He was Head of the South Asia Department from 1995-9, and has served as Associate Dean (2002-4) and Dean (2004-10) of the Faculty of Languages and Cultures.

The study of modern and contemporary Nepali literature is Hutt’s home ground, and he is well known as a translator. He has also published on Nepali politics, Nepali art and architecture, censorship in the Nepali print media, and the Bhutanese refugee issue. His publications include  Himalayan Voices: An Introduction to Modern Nepali Literature  (1991),  Nepal in the Nineties: Versions of the Past, Visions of the Future  (1994),  Modern Literary Nepali: An Introductory Reader  (1997),  Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan  (2003), and  Himalayan People’s War: Nepal’s Maoist Rebellion  (2004). His latest work is  The Life of Bhupi Sherchan: Poetry and Politics in Post-Rana Nepal .

Prof Hutt is currently invoved in a research project on the construction of public meaning in Nepal.

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Yogmaya Neupane

1860 – 1941, who was yogmaya neupane.

Yogmaya Neupane was a Nepalese religious leader, women's rights activist and poet, who founded the first organization of Nepali women, the Nari Samiti for Women's Rights in 1918.

Neupane was born in 1860 in Dingla, Bhojpur District, Nepal. She entered into an arranged marriage at an early age, and was widowed within three years. Upon returning to her maternal home she was accused by her in laws of mariticide.

After a few years, she remarried and left for Assam in India. She returned to Nepal with her daughter in 1903 and became involved in various religious activities. She also protested against injustice, corruption and blasphemes through the medium of hymns, religious songs and poems.

In time Neupane attracted over 2,000 followers and organized them into the country's first Nari Samiti. The committee constituted under the leadership of Neupane concentrated its activities against the exploitation of women in the name of religion and tradition, including widow marriage, child marriage and polygamy. Within a few years of its activity, the committee submitted a 24-point petition of demands stating the problems facing women to Rana Prime Minister, Chandra Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana, who, in 1920, abolished the Nepalese practice of Sati.

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About: Yogmaya Neupane

Yogmaya Neupane (Nepali: योगमाया न्यौपाने) (1867–1941) was a religious leader, women's rights activist and poet based in Bhojpur district of Nepal. Yogmaya is considered to be among the pioneer female poets in Nepal with her only published book of poems, the Sarwartha Yogbani (Nepali: सर्वार्थ योगवाणी) considered to be her most notable contribution.

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Shakti Yogmaya — A Tradition of Dissent in Nepal

[Originally published in “Anthropology of Tibet and the Himalaya”. Editors,  Charles Ramble and Martin Brauen; Ethnologische Schriften Zurich, ESZ 12, Ethnological Museum of the University of Zurich 1993]

In East Nepal, early in this century, an extraordinary uprising took place. Led by a woman of exceptional ability, it directly challenged the Rana regime and the Brahmanically-determined power structure prevailing in Nepal. Yet that uprising and the personage of its leader are almost totally obliterated from the historical memory of the Nepali nation. In this article I try to throw light on that obscured history. At the same time I reflect on some of the challenges we face as scientists as scientists exploring the role of women and peasant people in our lives and our work.

As many people familiar with my research will know, a decade ago I became interested in the experience of pilgrimage in South Asia. I made several journeys  to specific Himalayan sacred places and wrote about them (Aziz 1982; 1983; 1987). My curiosity about pilgrimage originated when, sometime earlier in Nepal, I witnessed Tibetans’ relationship to the relics of Langkor; pilgrims drew personal power from a history told in an account of a set of stone relics carried to safety from Tibet to Nepal in 1959 (Aziz 1979).

Before that of course like anyone who travels in India or Nepal, I was familiar with the sight of women and men en route to a monastery, an alpine lake, an enchanted cave, a riverbank, or the residence of a holy person—to encounter the divine.

In 1980 when I began to think about this experience more systematically it was also a time when I began to reflect on the limits of my past approach. It was essential to articulate my own voice within the anthropological texts I was interpreting, Ethnography, I decided, could not exclude self-reflection.

By that time, I had also simultaneously been convinced by the revelations from our feminist scholars of the 1970s, of the misogynist character of modern social science and history. In media and political life, in academic research and in language, in virtually every interpretive field, not to mention daily interactions, there was indeed a powerful selective exclusion or obfuscation or devaluation of the experience of women. Without really needing more evidence than studies available by 1980, I understood what the new feminist scholars were claiming. It left an indelible mark on me and I could never again view human relationships within the same narrow limits.

In this state of mind, I pursued pilgrims through those mountains we know so well. Departing eastwards from Solu in the hills one rainy September, I found myself in the valley of the Arun River. It was a steamy hot, jungley place cooled only by the breeze coming off the icy water.

Well accustomed to the ready hospitality of Tibetan nuns, I stopped at another community of women there on the banks of the Arun. In this case, it was a shrine Manakamana, home to a group of sanyasi or bhaktini—ascetic Hindu women.

On my first night at the temple, lying in the open shed, I heard the soft roar of the great Arun River and the shrill of the night insects. Woven with those sounds in the air was the ladies’ singing. I did not know Nepali well and I was familiar with Hindu prayers only as a tourist. But I sensed that something special was embedded in those words. Called Hazurbani , they would gradually lead me to the life and work of their creator, a remarkable woman known to her people as Shakti Yogmaya.

What I learned about Yogmaya, I want to share with you now. I make no claim that her life had any bearing on Tibetan people. She worked with Hindus- Brahman and Chetri—whose activities and history are beyond the scope of a seminar on Tibet and the Himalayas. Today however, the life of such a person as Yogmaya is relevant to any peoples residing in this region. Nepal has recently experienced an unparalleled public uprising with revolutionary implications. What happened in that nation this past spring (1990) raises questions about political resistance and leadership in the entire area. Today, any history of dissent existing in Nepal, past or present, is of immediate concern.  As Yogmaya was herself a dissident, her efforts or accomplishments must be examined in any discussion of this nation’s political history.

The 1990 spring uprising in Nepal was a massive nationwide movement which took a form m unique in the world. Although my concluding remarks will touch on this event, I am interested in it only in light of past rebellions. In this paper, I confine myself to that earlier revolt. Yogmaya’s campaign may not have had the same success; it was certainly local by comparison. But it was significant in itself. And perhaps, once we understand the past, we may recognize in Nepal’s history similarities or links with the more instance of dissidence.

Before proceeding, I want to pose four questions. Such considerations normally come, with their answers, at the end of a scholarly paper.  I do not have answers for the questions I raise. Appearing here at the outset of my account, they may assist readers in judging the material as the story unfolds.

• Is it significant that this revolt occurred in East Nepal an area not far from the Limbu land, and also close to Assam and Darjeeling in India where  political dissent has a long history?
• Why was the movement joined only by Brahman and Chetri people in this region?  Why did it not spread to the Rai and Magar people of the area, populations who were more exploited and who were also known to have endured far greater injustices than the higher case Brahman and Chetri?
• Could this movement have been part of the Assam-Bengal resistance movement, largely directed against British rule that emerged in the earlier half of this century?
• How was the resistance movement led by Yogmaya so thoroughly removed from Nepali historical consciousness?

Now to our heroine. Yogmaya belonged to a Neopane Brahman family in the village of Kulung. This same locality became the centre of her operations and it involved several eminent Kulung families . Kulung (on the ridge) and Majwabesi (at the riverside) are half a day’s walk from Khandbari, the present district center of Sankhuwasabha,  from Chainpur, a major town in the eastern hills of Nepal, and Bhojpur. (Bhojpur town has a well known history of dissent.)

The earliest comment on Yogmaya’s life was an act of rebellion: it was her elopement. She came to others’ attention when she ran off to Assam with a lover. This was of local interest because she was a child widow, and because the man she loved was not a Brahman. He is nameless and details of her life with him beyond the boundaries of Nepal are not yet well known.

Confining my research to Nepal, what I learned about Yogmaya happened only after she returned to the run Valley. Her followers, it seemed, had little interest in what happened to her in India. For them, her story begins around 1930. Why she returned we cannot yet say, but she made a clear decision to do so, bringing with her a daughter, the child of that union, a girl whose name was Nainakala.

Yogmaya’s family had remained in Kulung, and when she arrived at their door, she was not warmly received by her parents. Her brother and his wife Ganga Devi, did welcome her and they became very close.

Together with Yogmaya and Nainakala, this couple became the core of the movement that reached its peak with perhaps 2,000 members a decade later.

The first assigns of Yogmaya’s genius appeared in her poetic hymns. These were later to be known collectively as the hazurbani . They are the utterances I heard when I arrived at the riverside temple where her followers lived. They were the sparks which ignited my curiosity and led me to the events of Yogmaya’s extraordinary career. They contained the kernels of her teachings and symbolized both her appeal and her talent.

Early in what I would call her mission Yogmaya began to compose poems. At first, as far as I can tell, these praised nature, the river, the Himalayas. In style they were close to the devotional bhajan .

Hailed as supreme, our Himalaya Feeds the waters. Arun emerges; with Barun it runs Down, down they mingle into Irakwati. A graceful bird’s song Captures my heart; Oh gentle river’s whistle Caresses it.

Others of her compositions are playful songs associated with her austerities and yogic powers.

Parting the year in two, Perform your rites; In summer, favour a scorching fire, In winter, delight an icy river. Fear execution? Why? A body is mortal after all. Here by divine grace, Later, on some pretext I shall be gone. Only later it seems, did her verses become virulently political. Greed and avarice consort with gluttony; It’s not an occasional union. If the raj in his palace never looks, There’s nothing to attend the poor; Not even occasional justice. They mix greed into our incense And we burn it. Odious smells arise. How horrified the gods! They plead. Wealth cannot multiply without fraud, None can say: ‘not so’ The rich make pilgrimage to garner benefits, We poor go in search of our souls.

(Translated by Parizat and Morari Aryal)

At present no dates are attached to these poems. It is not absolutely certain if the poet created any of the differences we see in content at various periods. Research is needed to say for certain if the political poems came later. From such research we may also ascertain what outside (Indian) influences there were. I have assumed that the political poems came later because she herself adopted a more assertive and confrontational general strategy.

The hazurbani reproduced here were printed, they appear in a book of about 100 poems, a small collection published in Darjeeling in 1940, not long after she died. The booklet containing both political and purely religious examples, and the accompanying biographical note, found their way back to Nepal. it seems however that they did not come to public  attention.

The survivors of the  movement who offered me a copy of this book, maintain that many more of the hazurbani they recite have not yet been written down. If interest in Yogmaya grows researchers may still be able to harvest more examples from recording the recitations of these women and men. (the tape recordings I made from the women I met can be made available for comparison.)

Anyone who knows these hazurbani maintain that they were exclusively Yogmaya’s, composed spontaneously , uttered in a state of trance. I have no reason no doubt this. Comparing them to poems (all without political content) collected from the disciples, Prem Narain and others, and bhajan sung by the yogis in the region, the special quality of these verses is easy to recognize. Moreover their rhythm is also distinctive. After her daughter was educated and these compositions became a feature of her teachings, Nainakala copied them out. Her aunt, Ganga Devi, was the person who created the special rhythms in which they were sung.

During the first years after Yogmaya returned to Kulung region, she did not spend much time with her family. She left her daughter with her brother and his wife who educated the girl. Meanwhile the emerging revolutionary roamed the hills of her country. We know from some of the hazurbani and personal stories that her pilgrimage took Yogmaya to Khembalung cave nearby, to the border of Tibet and to other holy places.

That was, I think, the time when she began to understand the beauty of her land but also to witness and think about the exploitation of her people and to feel compassion for them. We can fairly assume that her experience in Bengal, at a time of political foment there, was an important foundation; it surely contributed to the development of her own philosophy. But we have no concrete evidence of this and await research from Bengal itself before we can precisely trace the link.

These women who taught me about Yogmaya, her surviving followers, say her teaching was unique, that she was nobody’s agent. They deny that she was a member of a particular party or sect. According to them, she did not belong to any wider political movement. Correspondingly, working with them, I was unable to find specific evidence of ties between Yogmaya and other reformers in the region, or of influence form India’s political struggle, so active at the time she lived in Bengal. We should assume some degree of outside influences. The Nepali scholar Janak Lal Sharma claims that Yogmaya belonged to Joshmani, an anti-Brahmanical sect influenced from Darjeeling, India. Yet, according to Sharma,  Joshmani was non-political in its nature and aims (Sharma n.d)

Where then did our heroine receive her political education? To locate the roots of her mission more research in India is needed. Doubtless, investigations into those parts of India where we know Yogmaya travelled should be useful.

Meanwhile, why do we not take the evidence offered by Yogmaya’s followers? Involuntarily, I found myself resisting this obvious approach. I searched beyond Yogmaya. In the course of this research I often said to myself: “but she must have learned this from elsewhere; she must have had a teacher.”Unable to shed the common biases of scholars,  I rushed from the Arun Valley to Kathmandu to consult historians, politicians and poets about this remarkable woman. In some cases, individuals such as (Prime Minister) BP Koirala, and a former minister from Kulung, D.B. Basnet, affirmed her existence. But that was all. To learn facts, I had to return to the Arun Valley and speak to the bhaktini . In the course of this exercise, I became aware of biases I had inherited in my training as a social scientist. I admittedly have difficulty imagining that a hill farmer, and a woman as well, can independently evolve those political positions and philosophies. Yogmaya’s positions were reasonable and logical. They need not have come from some higher authority. Why could she not have arrived at her position based on her own intelligence and resources?

Indeed when I read the hazurbani , I am convinced she could have.

Lord Prime Minister, hurrah! Again and again, I applaud you. Like a spider who neither ploughs nor sows Yet swells and swells still more. Nowadays O Brahmans, live as you wish; Like lords you can plunder the poor, So corrupted you sell your trust. So deep the roots of your greed. Fat bellies burst And those bribes ooze out To poison you. So savor your riches a little longer.

Simple as they are, these compositions are indisputably profound. I have no doubt that they had the power to inspire rebellion. The hazurbani remain my primary sources. Essentially they are anti-Brahmanical; they oppose the Brahmanical economic and political grip on society, its caste distinctions, and the selfishness of those in power.”It is all contained with the hazurbani ” say her people.

Examine these examples and compare them with political speeches, scholarly philosophies , theories and the poems of others. Scholars and poets in Nepal tell me that nothing comparable exists. The same is said of the musical rhymes that carry the hazurbani . They are unlike any Nepali folk songs and they are not really in the tradition of the hymnal bhajan . They can be explained only by the genius of their creator.

Yogmaya, before she actually began to advocate reform, spent several years in retreat. She stayed alone. It was in a cave, Manohar, no more than an overhanging rock above the place she would make the centre of activity. At first, I believe, she was shunned by most of the villagers in her community. She had, after all, broken the rule prohibiting widow remarriage. Furthermore she had crossed caste lines.

Later, after she became an accomplished yogi, meditating in this cave, people temporarily forgot about this. Because of the power over nature that she demonstrated, she won the respect of the villagers. They began to bring food to her and witness her strange physical powers, the tapasya , or austerities.

Her really active period of dissent began when she emerged from this cave. It lasted just a few years, perhaps no more than four, from 1936 to 1940 (B.S. 1993-1997). If one understands what an accomplished yogi is capable of, it is easier to appreciate Yogmaya emergence from reclusiveness to political activism. We should remember the cultural climate as well. As Dr. Harka  Gurung remarked of Yogmaya’s strategy, “In a political system where authority itself is religiously sanctioned, it is necessary that any opposition to government also takes a religious form”.  No resistance could get very far otherwise.

One hazurbani declares “there is no difference between fire and ice”. Losing her fear of death, this rebel also lost her fear of the Raj. Losing her attachment to her life, she could confront any trial. Moreover she acquired the power to see how social differences are simply creations. She sang “I am the babe in your lap/you are the child in mine/ your eyes have tears just like mine” Advocating social equality at that time was indeed rebellious and it called for tremendous courage. Anyone advocating such ideas faced the possibility of execution.

After Yogmaya defied nature’s power, she could also defy the authorities. Moving to the riverside at Majhwa, she began her political campaign in earnest. Nainakala her daughter, sister-in-law Ganga Devi, and Yogmaya’s brother joined her. Somehow, speaking against caste and Brahmanical abuse, she was able to gather local people around her. They recognized the injustices she spoke of; they felt things might be changed; otherwise they would surely not have persisted.

Within two years the moon-faced yogi had attracted a considerable community of men and women. It reached two thousand at its peak, with several hundred residing at Majhwa itself. Most of Yogmaya’s followers were Chetri or Brahman. None was poor. Only a few were former child widows.

Women and men in neighboring villages heard about the hazurbani and the miracles their creator performed; and they travelled to the riverside settlement to join that community. They took relatives along; not old parents ready to die but young girls and boys and their aunts and uncles. Whole families assembled around the yogi. Predictably, after some months, others in the area became alarmed. From the start there was resistance as well. Hearing about anti-caste ideas being promoted there, parents did not want their young people attending. They were shocked to hear of Brahman widows taking up residence with male members of the community.

Local criticism grew. But the movement did not stop. If anything it became more rebellious. As her following grew, Yogmaya became more forceful. She advocated what she called a dharma-raj , a term I interpret as “rule by justice”. With this slogan, Yogmaya directed her attacks towards the palace, to the dictator Raj, Nepal’s hereditary prime minister . Believing he might be pressed to accept and to introduce the changes she sought, she launched a series of appeals. The local people’s campaign may have been so successful that she felt encouraged to take this step.

By now Yogmaya had become a frequent visitor to Kathmandu and the holy Pashupatinath northeast of the city. A following of Brahman men and women, many of them from East Nepal who lived in the capital, gathered around her there. Others moved from Kathmandu to Majhwa, her centre on the eastern bank of the Arun River.

After her first appeal to him, Yogmaya was shunned by the Raj, although she may have had an audience with a secretary in the palace. There is hardly a doubt that the ruler was aware of her and her demands. Later, back in the Arun Valley, she dispatched Nainakala to Kathmandu to deliver another plea for dharma-raj . That too was dismissed outright. Yogmaya responded by intensifying her demands. It seems she sought no intermediaries. She directed her assaults to the ruler himself. Her fierce poems to the palace are grounded in the reality of the life of the oppressed: the bonded laborer; the child widow; the sharecropper; against the priest who recites, then collects his gifts, and the merchants who mix grain and sand.

Yogmaya rightly supposed that the dictator would never attack her personally. She knew the rule against Brahman murder. She was assured that no ruler, however ruthless, could commit this most heinous crime. Perhaps this protection explains why her earliest attacks went unanswered. Normally such a challenge to supreme authority was easily dealt with—by brute force, imprisonment and murder. According to Hindu law however, this Brahman troublemaker could not be killed. It was equally difficult to jail a yogi, and a woman as well. So her challenge was met with silence.

Yogmaya did not like this. Finally she decided on a strategy to force the ruler’s hand. She presented the palace with a bold threat: “Give us rule by justice, or we shall sacrifice ourselves”. Her statement was delivered in writing and it was signed by more than 200 of her followers. They specified moreover how they would burn themselves in a great fire by the river. Indeed, on the shore of the Arun River, members of her group had already begun to assemble logs for their communal pyre. The pile of wood had reached an immense, awful size, when one night, troops arrived.

Barely forty-eight hours after the palace received Yogmaya’s demand, it acted. Hundreds of soldiers were dispatched from Dhankuta and Bhojpur. They gave no warning. Many of Yogmaya’s people were captured. Others ran, fleeing in all directions through the forest and up the mountainside. Because the military commander had the list of names submitted with Yogmaya’s ultimatum, his soldiers pursued and sought out individuals in their homes.

Many escaped arrest; however the rebel leader was not among them. She, along with the other women captives were imprisoned at Mandir Temple in Bhojpur, the district headquarters. Most of the men were taken to the jail in Dhankuta, two days walk south.

The commanding officer at Dhankuta region at that time was Madev Shamshere Rana. In 1984 three years before he died, I met him and he confirmed that as head of the Dhankuta region more than forty years earlier, he himself had led those troops up the Arun Valley to capture Yogmaya. (Documents relating to Yogmaya’s rebellion, he said, were located in the district office. He suggested that legal proceedings had followed her arrest. But up to the time of this report, no corresponding file has been recovered. Efforts should be made to locate it since it may be one of the few official documents bearing directly on this episode.)

For months after this arrest, tension gripped the area. It was evident that the government did not know what to do next. The woman and her people could not be held indefinitely. Neither could they be killed. The several hundred followers in hiding were an unknown element whose actions could not be predicted. Not surprisingly the next move came from Yogmaya. The campaigner began to recite the hazurbani from inside her prison. Her fellow captives accompanied her.  At Bhojpur and also at Dhankuta, it is said that policemen and their families gathered near the prison to listen to the verses. Sympathy for the rebels seemed to be growing.

More time passed. The government must have been desperately searching for a solution. The problem of holding the rebels was compounded by their social status. Not only were many of them Brahmans; they were also members of eminent families and that won them considerable public sympathy.

Eventually Yogmaya prevailed upon to agree to abandon her mission in return for her release. As far as we know, she agreed to abandon her demands and to disband the group she led. If anyone doubted that the accord would hold, they did not say.

The rebel leader returned to Majhwa and an ominous silence followed. She had not been released more than a few days when an announcement quietly circulated among the faithful. Each was faced with a decision. Early, about 2 o’clock in the morning of Asoj Ekadesi, seventy women men and children gathered at the riverside downstream from where they customarily assembled. Yogmaya was there of course. Nainakala and her uncle and aunt were in the assembly too.

Today Majhwa is a quiet bend on the great roaring Arun River. In a small mandir above the bank, beside a tree where she sat uttering her demands, a wooden arm chair is preserved. There is no photograph of her, no book, no urn of ashes, no relic bone. Most of the time, the mandir is locked. In the morning and again at sunset, some elderly ascetics, most of them women, the most feeble looking men and women you can imagine, attend the shrine.

“Oh those are some old bhakti ”, the local people will tell you. “Old widows; they sing their prayers and will die there.”

But this was indeed the meeting ground of two thousand rebels, people who had hopeh for change, a leader of extraordinary courage, a person who dared to say injustice had to end. A visitor to Majhwa today can meet some of those survivors. It is still possible to hear the hanzurbani sung as well. And the temple custodians may lead a visitor to the sandy beach, to the round stone embedded in the bank covered by the high summer river. In wintertime it is easily exposed, lying just beneath the surface of the beach. 

 “This is where Yogmaya entered heaven”, they explain. “Sixty-eight of her devotees joined her; they followed one another into the river.”

Yogmaya’s body was never found.

A list of names is said to exist, names of the men and women who signed the paper after the master. They included Yogmaya’s daughter and her faithful brother and sister; they included her disciple Prem Narain and whole families of men and women and their children.

We know exactly what happened from a lad who arrived with his mother but fled in fear. He hid in a tree, it is said, to witness the event and later recounted to others what he had seen. It is rumored that another person was present but left after all the others had jumped. He took with him the list of signatures of women and men who sacrificed themselves with Yogmaya.

In Asian terms Yogmaya is credited with having prevailed over the ruler. He should not have allowed her to die. According to Hindu tradition therefore he bears responsibility for her death.  So she succeeded in humiliating him, demonstrating by her death that he was incapable of offering a compromise. After Yogmaya, Mahatma Gandhi used the threat of suicide as a political leaver to achieve his goals. His confrontations are legendary. The self-immolations of Buddhist monks in Viet Nam will also be recalled. Are not the actions of Yogmaya and her followers of the same order?  Moreover, is her act not a measure of the magnitude of her leadership? The speed with which the military  moved into the area is proof itself of the seriousness with which the government viewed Yogmaya.

Why then is this heroine so little known?

Nobody disputes the suicides. And some of the survivors published what poems they could collect. This is an important document, a modest but real record of this piece of Nepal history.

After the rebel’s martyrdom, her people lived in fear if not terror. Majhwa was abandoned. The survivors must have been traumatized by the loss of their leader. They dispersed and spoke of the past only with great caution. They dared not utter the beloved hazurbani . Most copies of the small book of poems published in Kalimpong (Mani Press) disappeared from circulation. A few were kept in secret. (Only in 1985, after my third visit to the area, was I shown one of these thin yellowing volumes.) Nowadays, as you see, a few people who know the poems do sing the hazurbani .

Locally the story is well known. No one denies it; yet it is never discussed in public. If asked, people may offer some information about the movement. They are not keen to elaborate however.

Apart from what is in this booklet, the events were not recorded. Memory of the movement and the character of Yogmaya have become fragmented. Nothing affirms the events of or assigns them value today. “Old widows; they burn themselves”, some will tell you. “Communists”, say others. “Decadent women, a prostitution ring; immoral”, were the phrases used by people in response to my first inquiries about Majhwabesi. The people invoking these images are government personnel and local bystanders who speak of Yogmaya only with distain, or they try to avoid the subject altogether.

Contrasting with these attitudes are the reports of the devotees who cherish their leader’s memory.

While we can see that Yogmaya was far from forgotten, I think the evidence illustrates that this movement is recalled as if it were insignificant. It never entered Nepali historical consciousness. The effect is the loss to the nation of the contribution and the momentum offered by such a powerful force, by such a leader. Yogmaya was a troublesome widow, not a hero to many bystanders. Her utterances they interpreted as simply religious chants, not a political philosophy, her followers as merely “old women”, not activists for justice. 

What are the cumulative effects of this memory gap? First, leadership remains something not associated with Nepali women, nor with the uneducated. Another more important outcome is that contemporary dissidents and idealists and nationalists, if they remain ignorant of Yogmaya. Are denied her as a resource in their contemporary ongoing struggles for justice. They may not know what they once achieved and therefore what they are capable of.

It is said that if a person does know that they have achieved something in the past, they can never enjoy self-respect.

Recent political events in Nepal call for further reflection and self-evaluation. With the unprecedented uprising across Nepal in 1990, I have new questions about Yogmaya’s place in history. Perhaps she merged into historical consciousness on that occasion. I am curious to know, for example, how dissent took expression in this in this part of East Nepal in the tumultuous months of February and March, 1990. As dissent spread at this time, it rose in the distant mountains of Nepal as well in its cities. Did it take hold in villages along the Arun River Valley more easily because it fused with the historical rebellion of the 1930s?

There is hardly any doubt that the virulent hazurbani can apply to a corrupt panchayat system and rule by the current monarch as much as they did to Rana misrule two generations earlier. So, were the hazurbani revived during the 1990 rebellion and did they help galvanize people in this latest struggle? It is possible. And if this happened, we are justified in feeling even more certain about Yogmaya’s leading place in her nation’s history.

I owe much to Janak Lal Sharma of the Department of Antiquities, Kathmandu who has many more materials to share about the Josmani sect. I am also grateful to Madev Shamshere Rana, to Dambar Bahadur Basnet who recalled many personal memories of Yogmaya for me, to Lochan Nodhi Tiwari and Uttam Pant, and to Harka Bahadur Gurung and Parizat– both of whom especially encouraged me to pursue this worthy history when traces where so faint. Most of all I have the women of Manakamana temple to thank.

Aziz, B.N. 1979. Indian philosopher as Tibetan folk hero; Legend of Langkor: a new source material on Phadampa Sangye. Central Asiatic Journal 23 , 19-37.

Aziz, B.N.1982. A pilgrimage to Amarnath. Kailash 9 , 121-38

Aziz, B.N.1983 Sacred encounter at Amarnath Cave. Natural History 92 , 45-51.

Aziz, B.N.1987 Personal dimensions of the sacred journey. Journal of religious studies 23, 247-61.

Aziz, B.N. Sharma, J.L. n.d. Josmani santa parampara ra sahitya (Nepali text). Kathmandu.

• June 7, 2020
• In Blog , Heir To A Silent Song , Nepal and Tibet , Yogamaya and Durga Devi
• Nepal Tibet

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Ancient yogmaya temple, mehrauli – delhi heritage.

Yogmaya Temple in Mehrauli, located right behind the famous Qutub Minar complex is probably the oldest living temple in Delhi.

Mehrauli itself is one of the oldest inhabited areas of Delhi. It was the first capital of the pre-Islamic era and all the rulers ruled from here. It had a strong Hindu and Jain imprint at some point in time. Most of them were destroyed to create a Muslim identity for the area. Temples were destroyed to create mosques and build the tallest minarets.

One temple that survived all the destruction was the Yogmaya temple. As you go from the Qutub complex towards the Mehrauli bus stand, on your right you would see a stone gate with two lion figures adorning both sides. Enter the gate and walk about 150 meters or so and you would see the temple on your left.

Jain scriptures mention this Mehrauli area of Delhi as Yoginipura, probably named after this temple. It is not too difficult to co-relate this as ancient Jain temples like Dadabari is still present in this area.

Legends of Yogmaya

The Yogmaya temple aka Jogmaya temple is an ancient Hindu temple. It is believed to be more than 5000 years old, taking it to the Dwapar Yuga when the Mahabharata war happened.

Goddess Yogmaya is believed to be an incarnation of Adi Shakti Mahalaxmi . It is one of the 51 Shakti Peethas . The head of the Devi had fallen here in the Pindi or a stone form. She is supposed to be one with the dominant Satva Guna, hence no animal sacrifices, no non-vegetarian food or wine is permitted in this temple.

Yogmaya was the sister of Sri Krishna, born to his foster parents Yashoda and Nand. When Kamsa tried to kill her by way of hitting her newborn head on a slab of stone, she flew away from his hands. She announced that the child who would eventually kill him had already taken birth. She then went to the Vindhyachal Parvat and lived there as Vindhyavasini . A temple there on the hill duly celebrates her. Even in Durga Saptashati, she is mentioned as born to Yashoda and Nanda in this cycle of time.

Some scholars believe that the head of Yogmaya is in Delhi and her feet are in Vindhyachal.

Mahabharata & Yogmaya

Some sources mention that Krishna himself had built this temple. The story goes that Krishna and Arjun came to pray at this Yogmaya Temple during the Mahabharata War. When Arjun’s son Abhimanyu was killed by Jayadrath, he took a vow that he would kill Jayadrath by the next evening or self-immolate. The next day, Kauravas kept Jayadratha away from Arjun, making it impossible for him to be killed.

It is at this point in time that Arjun and Krishna came to this temple and asked the Devi to help them. She with her Maya created a temporary eclipse that gave Arjuna an opportunity to kill Jayadratha.

Yet another legend says that Yudhisthira had built this temple after the Mahabharata War.

For me, all these stories just establish the antiquity and continued worship of Yogmaya.

History of Yogmaya Temple at Mehrauli

Yogmaya is the Kuldevi of Chauhan kings who ruled from Qila Rai Pithora in Delhi.

One wonders how this ancient temple survives all the waves of invasions in the city of Delhi. For the longest time, it must have lived literally in the eye of the storm. It was first attacked by Ghazni and then later by Islamic invaders. In mid-16th CE, Hindu king Vikramaditya Hemu restored this temple.

In the late 17th CE, Aurangzeb ordered the destruction of all temples including this one. His army trying to destroy it had a strange experience. During the day whatever they used to break, used to come up again at night. They started losing their hands in the process. When this kept repeating, Aurangzeb gave up and this is how it managed to survive. You can see a long room built around the temple. They were trying to convert it into a mosque. Remember, temple structures are always square and mosques have longish rooms.

This room now works as a storehouse for the temple, used to store the food items that are used to feed the needy.

It is safe to assume that temples may have been constantly preserved by the local population who worship the mother Goddess.

A little-known fact about this temple is that India’s great uprising of 1857 was planned on the premises of this temple.

Yogmaya temple is supposed to be one of the five surviving temples in Delhi from the Mahabharata period. Another old temple is Bhairav Temple right outside Purana Qila which was the site of Pandava’s Indraprastha. Other old temples are located close to Nigam Bodh Ghat and in the lanes of old Delhi like Khari Baoli .

Visiting Yogmaya Temple

Location-wise, it should fall within the walls of Lal Kot – the early 8th-century fort of Delhi built by the Tomar kings. There was a sun temple in the vicinity of this temple, but that can not be traced now.

It is a rather small temple. You would tend to miss it till you get to know its long history. There is supposed to be a temple tank or Johad called Anang Tal to the north of the temple, which I could not see.

Temple Trust

Yogmaya temple is now managed by a trust. A family of the Vatsa priests has taken care of this temple for centuries if not more. I spoke to an elderly lady who was praying in the sanctum of the temple. She is the eldest daughter-in-law of the Vatsa family who takes care of this temple. She said, since the family is big now, they take turns doing the Pooja in the temple and this year her branch of the family is in charge of doing the Pooja.

Holding Durga Saptashati in her hands, she said that the current temple is not more than 60 years old. However, the small sanctum called the Goddess’s Bhavan is centuries old. The room has never been changed. The marble and tiles have just been added over a period of time.

Daily Rituals

The deity you see covered in clothes and flowers is just an envelope that covers the main deity beneath it. As I mentioned earlier, in Pindi Swaroop, the Devi stays inside a well-like formation.

She explained the daily rituals of the temple that includes the bathing and Shringar of the Devi twice a day. The water, curd, milk, and honey with which the deity is bathed are then distributed as Charnamrita to the devotees. Only men are allowed to be inside for the Shringar. The sanctum is too small to accommodate more than a few people.

She explained the Goddess is Shakti and how Shiva is always present with Shakti. While showing me the Shivalinga, she pointed out that it is placed slightly above the level at which Goddess is placed. She showed me the long room adjacent to the main temple which she said was an attempt to convert the temple into a mosque by Aurangzeb.

She pointed me to the beautiful fans that adorn the ceiling of the temple. The central big one was presented by the president of India during the Phool Walon ki Sair festival. Other fans were presented by other government officials.

What I enjoyed most about my visit to the temple was this conversation with this lady. She spoke with so much affection. Everything she said showed her total devotion towards Devi, the Goddess.

There was gratitude in her voice and a realization of bliss for being able to spend her time with her deity. It is not very often that you meet such people in today’s time. Everyone visiting the temple came and touched her feet. She would bless all of them generously. Her whole personality exuded devotion and affection as if she is the Devi herself. It was a blessing to just sit by her side and observe her.

Like all Devi temples, Navaratri is the biggest festival celebrated at Yogmaya Temple. Of the two main Navaratri, the Sharad Navaratri falls sometime in October and is celebrated with a lot of fervor at the temple.

Phool Walon Ki Sair

Phool Walon ki Sair is a festival that was started by Bahadur Shah Zafar. Some say that Akbar II started it when his wife visited the Goddess to pray for the safe return of her exiled son.

This festival originally used to take place in the monsoon month of Saavan, on Shukla Chaturdashi or the 14th day of the bright fortnight. Is it just a coincidence that at Vindhyavasini temple in Vindhyachal, Kajri is sung during Sawan or the monsoon months? I wonder what is the relationship between the monsoon and the Goddess. However, in modern and secular times, it takes place in September-October sometimes. This means it sometimes even falls during the inauspicious Pitripaksha or fortnight of the ancestors.

Indra Dhwaj Festival

It may have also coincided with the ancient Indra Dhwaj festival that used to happen on Bhadrapad Shukla Ashtami. Remember Delhi was the land of Indra and it was a tradition to worship him during the rainy season.

In the good old days, people from Shahjahanabad used to walk to Yogamaya Temple for Phool Walon ki Sair . They used to offer fans made of flowers at the temple on Wednesday and at the Dargah of Baba Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki on Thursday. It was like a grand picnic when urban people used to step out to spend some time in the forests.

This festival makes this temple a part of the new age legacy where festivals transcend religions and faith and become more community-oriented. The lady priest at the temple also said that the two shrines share their devotees. Most of the devotees who visit one shrine also visit the other.

Simple Temple

With all the antiquity and stories associated, it is a very simple temple, with randomly done artwork on the outer walls. It is surrounded by houses on all sides and the temple Shikhar is hardly visible from a distance. The entrance gate on the main road is the most ornate part of the temple. If you are looking for architecture or grandeur, this is definitely not the place. Visit it to meet so many legends and stories, and definitely to see the perseverance to survive for eons.

You can walk around the area outside the temple, to see some upmarket boutiques and some ancient monuments. Just go around and feel the place for all that it has seen in the living history of Delhi.

You can also take the Mehrauli Heritage Walk or visit Mehrauli Archaeological Park to know more aspects of Delhi’s past.

Other Yogmaya Temples

There are many other temples dedicated to Yogmaya across India.

Some of them are:

• Vindhyavasini at Vindhyachal near Varanasi
• Yogmaya Temple at Barmer
• Yogmaya Temple at Jodhpur
• Yogmaya Temple at Vrindavan
• Multan is currently in Pakistan
• Alamthuruthi in Kerala
• Yogmaya Temple near Agartala in Tripura

Other Devi temples in Delhi include Kalka Ji Temple and Jhandewalan Temple. If you know other temples, please do tell us, and we will update the post.

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15 comments.

wwwwwwwoooooooow gud gud.kabhi nahi dekha yaar.nw i must visit.thnx a ton young lady.keep walking nd talking:P

Interesting post 🙂 Thank you for writing about this.

fascinating and insightful. lovely photos, too. Showing my birthplace with new facets 🙂

Thank you for such gud post. This will definitely help me to discover more about Delhi

Delhi is so full of gems..even after years and years of living and discovering here..I still have just managed to scratch the surface 🙂

wonderful post..

Thanks Anuradha for the lovely post. Good to read this. I’m part of the family of priests (Vats Family) who have been taking care of the temple for ages now. In fact, as per the family pedigree, its been more than 1000 yes. I have decided to bring our temple before people, help it get attention so that people can connect to our rich culture. These days finding large families amicably managing a temple, just because of their love and dedication for their deity (also our kul devi) is difficult to find. I’m planning to put in place a website to reach out to mass population and tell them about the temple and its priest. Will keep you posted on this. Thnx again for the post. Keep Walking.. 🙂

Good to hear from you Aashish, would love to meet you when I am in Delhi next and help you revive interest in oldest living temples of Delhi – almost an unknown entity.

A very important article bonding history,travel and mythology.very helpful.The new generation is losing their interest to know such places of importance.at list such article give a light to the future for discovery of ruins at different places.appreciated the hard works..goddess yogmaya was an incarnation of goddess durga.Lord Vishnu administered the universe through her form.the names of yogmaya and rakta dantika appears in last chapters of durga saptasati written by markadheya rishi..she make stable the universe and plays vital rules at the tiimes of re creation of universe as per Puranas.

Thank you Prabhat Ji for adding this precious knowledge to the article.

Im Rajesh sharma 10/20 yogmaya mander mehrauli new delhi

Mehrauli or Mihirawali….is oldest part of Delhi…even Delhi derives it’s name from Mehrauli’s iron pillar….when the iron pillar situated in the Qutub Complex was tried to be taken away…it was not possible but it’s foundation got weakened and pillar started shaking…which means Dheela or loose in Hindi….over the span of more than 1000 years the place was called Dhilli or loose and finally known as Delhi. Mehrauli is one of the oldest with some shrines belonging to all the religions, Jains have Jain Mandir Dadawadi, where oldest caves and temples are situated. Mehruli also has Gurudwara dedicated to Baba Banda Singh Bahadur who was instumental in granting land rights to all the peasants of north India, he killed the Nawab of Sirhind with a single blow of sword, he was imprisoned in Lohagarh fort of Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh and brought over to Mehrauli, his son was killed in his lap and he was skinned alive by muslim barbarians. Again Mehrauli has shrine of Khawaja Bakhtiar Kaki who was mentor of Hazrat Nizamuddin, the zayereen or pilgrims going to Ajmer always visits Bakhtiar Kaki shrine before embarking onwards to Ajmer. Then Mehrauli has Budhist temple, Christian Church right behind Qutub Minar and some of oldest step wells in India. Mehrauli was inhabited by some original dwellers and they traces their roots to this ancient township till date, even a sirname of local Jaats is derived from Mehrauli, Mehlawat or Mehalwat Jaats of Mehrauli are considered as it’s original dwellers. But the political apathy and municipal failure have converted this once beautiful locality into urban slum. Even now the entire urban village is surrounded by lush green forests and has cold temperature, it is well noticed that Mehrauli remains cool almost by two degrees as compared to rest of Delhi, it was summer capital of Mughal rulers during mughal period. I request netizens of Mehrauli to come together and install a statue Baba Banda Singh Bahadur at the entry of Mehrauli, remove encroachments around Yogmaya Temple and Gandhak ki baoli, widen the narrow lanes by removing illegal encroachments. Still there are some of the old building surviving in the area and it can be converted into designer hub, a heritage walk and a great tourist place.

Thank you for adding to IndiTales story.

Interesting article indeed. There’s so many little things that we tend to overlook about our culture with our busy lives. Articles like these keep us connected. Thank you

Manasi, that is our goal to reconnect India with its own roots.

[…] Goyal, Anuradha. (2010). “Ancient Yogmaya Temple, Mehrauli – Delhi Heritage.” Inditales (Blog) https://www.inditales.com/ancient-yogmaya-temple-mehrauli-delhi/ […]

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Judy Oppenheimer, early biographer of Shirley Jackson, dies at 82

Her 1988 book, “Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson,” explored the brief, tortured life of the author best known for her short story “The Lottery.”

Judy Oppenheimer, a writer and journalist best known for a biography exploring the brief, tortured life of author Shirley Jackson, whose short story “The Lottery” became one of the most widely read works in 20th-century American fiction, died May 1 in Baltimore. She was 82.

She had Parkinson’s disease and bone cancer, said her son Toby Oppenheimer. She died at an assisted-living community.

Ms. Oppenheimer began her career at The Washington Post, her hometown newspaper, where she was promoted from “copy girl” to reporter in the 1960s. She later worked for the Philadelphia Daily News before returning to the Washington area and freelancing while raising her two sons.

She attracted broad notice in 1988 with her debut book , “ Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson .” It was the first biography of the author most famous for “The Lottery,” which sparked a furor when it appeared in the New Yorker magazine in 1948.

Set in an unnamed present-day New England town, the story depicts an annual ritual in which the townspeople gather to stone one of their members to death. Early readers reacted in horror and in anger — as though Jackson had accused them of conforming in some way to the banal evil on display.

Jackson generally answered queries about the story obliquely, though she once wrote that she had “hoped, by setting a particularly brutal rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity of their own lives.”

In the decades that followed, “The Lottery” became a mainstay of literary anthologies and high school and college reading lists.

In its fame, the story came to overshadow the rest of Jackson’s literary output, which included, most notably, “The Haunting of Hill House” (1959), a Gothic thriller about a woman on the edge of madness that was adapted into a 1963 movie, “The Haunting,” starring Julie Harris and Claire Bloom. Jackson also wrote the novels “The Bird’s Nest” (1954) and “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” (1962).

She diverged from the darkness of her fiction to write “Life Among the Savages” (1953) and “Raising Demons” (1957), both witty portrayals of domestic life drawn from her experience as the mother of four children. After struggles with substance abuse, Jackson died in 1965, at age 48, of cardiac arrest.

In interviews with the author’s children, other relatives, friends and acquaintances, Ms. Oppenheimer explored Jackson’s life, starting with her rearing by an often critical mother who neither understood nor appreciated her daughter’s psychological depths.

“She was not the daughter her mother wanted; that much was clear from the start,” Ms. Oppenheimer wrote in the biography’s opening passage. “Shirley Jackson was born … into comfort, pleasant surroundings, and social position, but to parents who never truly knew what to make of her, not in childhood and not throughout her entire forty-eight years.”

Ms. Oppenheimer examined the possibility that Jackson had been sexually abused as a child and documented her strained marriage to the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. She delved into Jackson’s imaginative powers and what Ms. Oppenheimer characterized as her “clairvoyance,” into her fears and anxieties and her sensitivity to the condition of mental frailty.

The result, book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in the New York Times , was a “lively but harrowing biography.” In Ms. Oppenheimer’s telling, he wrote, “right to the end, the story of Shirley Jackson’s life retains its urgency, and we read even the happy passages with a sense of impending disaster.”

In 2016, another biographer, literary critic Ruth Franklin, expanded on existing scholarship with the book “Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life.”

Judith Altman, one of three daughters, was born in Washington on Jan. 20, 1942. Her mother was a math teacher, and her father worked for the Labor Department.

When Judy was 9, her family moved to Arlington, Va., where she graduated from what was then Washington-Lee High School in 1959 . She received a bachelor’s degree in American thought and civilization from George Washington University in 1963.

She and her husband, Jerry Oppenheimer, worked together at the Philadelphia Daily News — he as an investigative journalist, she as a movie critic — before their first son was born and they moved back to the Washington area. The marriage ended in divorce.

Ms. Oppenheimer freelanced for publications including The Post , Washingtonian magazine , the Village Voice, Ms. magazine, Salon , Slate and the Forward . She also worked on the staff of the Baltimore Jewish Times.

Survivors include her two sons, Jesse Oppenheimer of Los Angeles and Toby Oppenheimer of Brooklyn; a sister; and three grandchildren.

Toby Oppenheimer inspired his mother’s second book , “ Dreams of Glory: A Mother’s Season With Her Son’s High School Football Team ” (1991), chronicling a year of football at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland.

Ms. Oppenheimer had harbored no interest whatsoever in a sport that she regarded — until her son began to play — as little more than an exercise in brutality. To her surprise, she discovered that she “purely adored the entire wild, maddened, electric, power-pumping totality of this game.”

“A coach would later tell me at length about the need to unearth the buried animal when training players, the animal that lies dormant in our soul,” Ms. Oppenheimer continued. “Well, football released my animal, too.”

In writing the book, Ms. Oppenheimer pursued her reporting with classic shoe-leather rigor, with one exception: In deference to her son’s wishes, she never entered the inner sanctum of the locker room.