The disputed civets and the complexion of the god: secretions and history in India.

• Author: McHugh, James
• Position: Report

In 2002 the civet and its odorous secretion hit the news in India. The newspaper The Hindu reported that at the temple of Venkatesvara at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh the temple authorities (or Tirumala Tirupati Devathanams: TTD) were rearing nine civets in the Sri Venkategvara dairy farm in order to collect their secretions, which are used to anoint the sacred image in the temple every Friday. This article reported that the animal is endangered, and that since captive breeding is not feasible the future of procuring the animals was in danger, as was the ritual of anointing with civet. (1) The story seems to have resurfaced in 2008, when we read again in The Hindu that the civets kept at the temple dairy farm had actually been confiscated, as "rearing them in captivity violated the provisions of the Wildlife Protection Act 1972." The animal apparently smears its secretion on twigs, and this material is collected to be used in the temple. The latter article also notes that in the context of a request by the temple authorities to have the animals returned to the temple, "It was also contended in the representations that the withdrawal of Punugu oil from the ingredients used during the 'abhishekam' as prescribed in the Vaikhanasa Agamas amounted to interference with the age-old religious practices." And, the article continues, "Justifying the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams' case for permission to possess the civet cats as part of the temple paraphernalia such as elephants, horses, oxen etc, and [sic] the representation cited the practice of using fallen peacock feathers in temples for rituals. The same analogy could be applied in this case also, the representation noted." In addition to the force of tradition and scripture, this article also notes that "The civet according to temple priests and wildlife sources has miraculous properties of keeping the stone of the Moolavirat [that is to say, the main stone image] smooth, fresh and free from splits and cankers." (2) Another article from August 2008 notes that it is unlikely that the civet cats will be returned to the temple. This article adds the details that the temple authorities had "pitched a sandalwood pole in its dairy farm (Goshala) where it reared the civet cats to scoop the secretion periodically." And this later article also notes a possible solution to the problem: the temple authorities could fund an enclosure for the civets at the zoo and collect the civet in return. (3)

Anyone who has ever studied the history of perfumery in pre-modern India might be surprised to learn that civet is such a key material in this apparently orthodox context. Scholars of Sanskrit texts are no doubt familiar with references to musk (kasturika) and sandalwood (candana), but it is unlikely that they will ever have come across civet, a material one does not tend to associate with Indian perfumery. Yet here was civet, a stinking cat secretion, in South India, considered a vital part of the weekly adornment of the main image of Venkatesvara in the temple at Tirumala. This is the same weekly process of cleaning and perfuming that involves the replacement of the most famous aromatic adornment of this image, the large white trapezoid mass of molded borneol camphor that adorns the forehead of the image, bisected by a groove filled with a dark-colored paste of musk and sandalwood. As I shall argue in this article, it turns out, on closer examination of a broad range of sources, that civet-like materials, by various names, were one of the more important types of perfume in India during much of the second millennium C.E. Indeed, civet was perhaps one of the most characteristic perfumes of the sixteenth century from Amsterdam to Delhi; yet only centuries previously it was unheard of.

By studying the history of civet in pre-modern India I hope to answer the following questions. First, why is one of the most revered Hindu temple images in India anointed with what nowadays might seem to be a rather strange and possibly unappealing substance?

Civet is not mentioned in our sources until the late first millennium C.E., and within a few centuries this material is all the rage. Yet the animal itself was there all along, being native to many parts of Asia and Africa. How does a substance, and such a peculiar substance, go from complete obscurity to being a royal perfume within such a short time? More abstractly, how does a material gain a use value and an exchange value?

Moreover, how did Indian perfumery practices and olfactory tastes develop over the second millennium C.E., a period when a long-established "Sanskritic" and Indic tradition of (exotic, cosmopolitan) perfumery encountered what we might call Indo-Persian courtly cultures, which added new practices and terminologies to the mix? That is to say, what happens when two cultural practices--two styles of perfumery--that are intrinsically and overtly prone to value the exotic interact? I hope this study will expose certain major gaps in our knowledge concerning the trade and use of some materials during this period, and the article will also highlight the strengths of different types of textual sources for the study of material culture.

Finally, as a methodology, can studying material culture together with textual culture (i.e., representations of materials) tell us anything that studying texts and materials separately cannot, especially in a period when, as the work of Sheldon Pollock has shown, the relations of certain languages to high textual culture were being reconfigured in South Asia? (4)

In exploring these questions I shall primarily focus on Sanskrit texts as they relate to patterns of consumption of civet in India, the manner in which civet is represented, and the practices these texts describe. I will nevertheless frequently gesture towards other sources--such as accounts of European travelers, Indo-Muslim texts, texts in South Indian languages, the contexts of other perfumery traditions, trade, and even the geographical distribution of species. These other, quite diverse, sources will help both enrich our understanding of civet-in-Sanskrit, as well as exposing productive areas for further study.

Perfumes are an illuminating aspect of material culture to study as both their material ingredients and the words used to refer to these aromatics make explicit the fact that in any transfer of cultural materials the materials involved are already mixed and hybrid. (5) But merely to observe the fact of hybridity or syncretism is quite inconsequential. In the case of perfumes we often see what one might call overt, deliberate, and intrinsic hybridity. Not only are blended perfumes layered combinations of aromatic materials and foreign terminologies, but their culturally mixed nature was frequently celebrated, from the writings of Pliny and Indian, Arab, or Chinese sources all the way to the flagrant orientalism one sometimes sees in perfume marketing today. (6) Love of the exotic and the flaunting of the foreign nature of materials celebrate contact and cultural-material admixture, though typically this is represented as a movement of materials from a strange luxurious periphery to the civilized center.

Translation and mixing of names, substances, and practices is a common denominator in perfumery traditions, so here I will consider one case and observe how the style and direction of translation varied, particularly the sites of translation and the precise manner and language in which these developments took place. Although complex, the situation is not impossibly opaque and I hope to be able to unravel at least some of the tangle of interactions in the case of this one substance.

But how are we to go about studying the history of civet? In Objects of Translation, Finbarr Flood (2009: 9) notes that studies of eighth-to thirteenth-century South Asian history often rely on texts, and even when scholars have consulted inscriptions these have been disembodied from their material contexts. Instead he proposes to highlight things as sources, that is to say, material culture. The study of a historical aromatic, however, differs from the study of architecture and art, in that the nature of our sources compels us to think about both texts and things. On the one hand I wish to study the material civet itself, as produced, traded, processed, and consumed. Yet, I also intend to look at transformations and diversity within textual representations of this material--changes in the names given to it, the properties attributed to it, and the contexts in which it was described. It would appear that the same (or a similar) substance is, in an earlier Sanskrit textual inflection, just one aromatic among others. Then, just a few centuries later, under the guise of a Sanskritized Arabic or Persian term, and also in South Indian languages, this perfume is represented as prestigious and regal. It is even explicitly linked to a figure strongly associated with high Sanskrit literary culture, King Bhoja of Dhar. The changes in thinking, classification, and description manifest in the written sources on civet are interrelated to the changes in practice in a manner that is dialectical--textual representations and actual practices reinforced each other. The history of perfumery (like that of food, drink, and materia medica) is particularly well suited to such a history, for with historical perfumes we possess only texts, and no surviving perfumes. Furthermore, these transcultural materials were traded over vast distances and both names and practices associated with them traveled widely.

WHAT IS CIVET?

What exactly do I mean by "civet"? Civet can refer to an animal called the civet cat, of which there are several species. These are not true cats, but rather belong to the family Viverridae. This animal has, in fact, been in the news more than once of late. One type of civet was linked to the crossover to humans of the virus that caused the disease...