Trinath
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Trinath (Bengali Trināth, "lord of three"; also Tinnath, and Trinatha in Odisha) is a deity of popular worship in eastern Bengal, Assam and Odisha who unites the Hindu gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva in a single form. His worship, called the Trinath mela, puja or seva, began in eastern Bengal in about 1867. It turns on ganja. Worshippers bring one pice worth each of ganja, oil and betel, a lamp is lit, three chillums are filled with the ganja and offered to the god, and the people present smoke them while a verse narrative, the Trinather panchali, is read or sung, until the lamp burns out. The rite needs no temple, image or Brahmin priest, and it was open to every caste. Muslims in eastern Bengal kept a parallel observance under the name Tinlakh Pir. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission reported in 1894 that the worship had "spread extensively throughout Eastern Bengal and the Surma Valley of Assam".[1]
Most of what was written about the cult in its first decades came from its critics: British and Bengali officials, pleaders and landholders who gave evidence to the Commission, and a colonial ethnographer who called the cult "impious". The historian Utathya Chattopadhyaya, who gives Trinath a chapter of his history of ganja in British India, reads that testimony as the work of upper-caste men alarmed by a devotion of labouring and low-caste people that made the shared smoking of ganja an act of worship.[2]: 147–149, 167, 173–174 The worship reached Odisha before the end of the nineteenth century and remained widespread there and in Assam into the late twentieth. In Bangladesh it survives in occasional gatherings.[2]: 146–147, 181
Names
The Bengal excise officer Abhilas Chandra Mukerji, who reported on the cult for the Commission, derived the name from Sanskrit tri, "three", and nātha, "lord", and described the god as Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, "the Hindu Trinity in one".[3]: 253 The opening of the cult's verse text makes Trinath lord of the three worlds, the earth, the heavens and the underworld.[3]: 253 Chattopadhyaya takes the -nath ending to mean simply "lord". The historian Asim Roy, following the literary historian Sukumar Sen, had derived it from Bengal's Natha cults; Chattopadhyaya argues that Trinath's followers borrowed from that tradition in name only.[2]: 151–152
The worship went by several names: Trinath puja, Tinnath puja, Trinather mela, Trinath seva (or seba, "service") and, among Muslims, Tinlakh Pir or Tinlokh Pir.[2]: 146 The Commission itself introduced the rite as "the special form of worship by the followers of Siva, called the Trinath or Tinnath Mela",[1] and some of its witnesses took the god for a form of Shiva. T. L. Jenkins, the collector of Dacca, said the name was a change from "Trailakyanath or Mahadeb", Shiva as lord of the three worlds,[4] and J. D. Anderson, the acting commissioner of excise in Assam, glossed "Trinather Seba" as "the worship of Mahadev".[5] In the Barak Valley the household rite was performed before a picture of Shiva, and its songs were sung almost entirely to him.[6]
Origins
Mukerji traced the cult to a single man. In 1867, he wrote, Ananda Chandra Kali (or Kailai), of Dhamrai in the Dacca district, first held the worship at his father-in-law's house at Fattehpur, in the Tangail subdivision of Mymensingh. Kali was a Barendra Brahman who had studied at the Dacca Normal School, taught for a time and briefly served in the police. He had smoked ganja since boyhood, still smoked two pice worth a day, and had "the reputation of being a versifier". He meant, Mukerji wrote, to introduce "a common god, who might be worshipped by all classes, rich and poor, Brahman and Chandal, and by all creeds", using only cheap things: ganja, oil and betel leaf. Mukerji added a guess of his own, that Kali may have wished to save ganja smokers "from disrepute", since ganja could then be smoked in a god's name.[3]: 253 Mukerji drew his account from Kali's brother and from enquiries in the Dacca, Chittagong and Rajshahi divisions.[3]: 254
Other accounts differ on the founder and the date. Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy, a member of the Commission, dated the cult to 1869 and named its founder as Annada Chandra, a Varendra Brahman of Dacca district.[7]: 376 James Wise, a doctor at Dacca, reported in 1883 that the founder there was said to have been "Ananda Chunder Das, a constable in the municipal police". Because the worship had spread so far, Wise thought it likelier that "some one of more influence and education" had begun it. He also suggested that it was meant to join the Hindu triad to the Christian Trinity.[8] Chattopadhyaya places the cult's birth among the rural fairs of Tangail, in country where Hindu and Muslim devotion had long borrowed from each other. Dhamrai, Kali's birthplace, held a large annual chariot festival with a market in cheap devotional booklets.[2]: 151, 155
The rite
The verse text sets out the rite in its prelude. Mukerji's translation of it reads: "Only three things, each worth one pice, are required for this puja", siddhi (ganja), pan (betel leaf) and oil, so that "the rich and the poor may equally join". The worshippers meet at night. They wash the ganja as it is washed for smoking, fill three chillums with equal shares of it, light a lamp with three wicks and sing Trinath's praises for as long as the wicks burn. Whoever fails to respect the prasad, the offering the god has accepted, which Mukerji glosses as the chillums of ganja, is threatened with hell.[3]: 253
The worship had no fixed day or season. Mukerji listed the occasions as the fulfilment of a vow, recovery from illness, a marriage or the birth of a son. In his evidence he described the puja step by step. Three new chillums were filled and offered, the lamp was lit and the book was read; the chillums were lit, and the priest took the first pull and passed the pipe on, followed by the second and third pipes. Everyone present had to take the chillum and bow to it. Regular smokers drew hard, others gave "a gentle pull". The original three pice had grown in places to offerings of 5, 7, 9, 101 or 108 pice of ganja, filled into as many as 108 chillums, though three pice was still usual. Pan, betel nut and sweets were offered and then shared out.[9] Wise described each worshipper pouring his paisa of mustard oil into one large lamp with a wick of three twisted threads, and the congregation sitting round it to chew betel, smoke and listen to the panchali until the light failed. Meetings were held after dark by anyone who wished to fulfil a vow, avert a threatened misfortune or give thanks.[8]
Jenkins gave the Commission the Dacca form. No image of the god was made. The people met in an open space of the house or an outer room, where a pice worth each of ganja, oil and betel was set out. The lamp was lit, three chillums were placed before it, and the company sang Baul songs in chorus while they smoked the pipes three at a time. The ceremony ended when the lamp went out, and "No Brahmin is required".[4] In Faridpur a government pleader described devotees building a mud altar to Trinath and heaping it with betel, sugar drops and ganja.[2]: 169
Some features have lasted. In 2008 a Faridpur villager told the folklorist Saymon Zakaria that his people made no statue of Trinath but laid a picture of him on a mat in the yard to begin the fair, and his version of the god's story still turns on three things bought for a paisa each: betel nut, oil and siddhi.[10] In the Barak Valley the service was held when a household's cow calved. Ganja was offered in multiples of three, three chilims were set before the god, kirtan songs were led mostly by members of lower castes, and the ash of the burnt ganja was kept as prasad and marked on each participant's forehead.[6]
Women at the rite
Accounts of women's part differ. Wise wrote that women were "rarely present".[8] Mukerji wrote that women took no active part but often listened to the reading,[3]: 254 and Jenkins that they did not take part.[4] In his evidence to the Commission Mukerji said that the smoking was confined to men, though old Baishnavis, Vaishnava women, sometimes attended and smoked.[9] Chattopadhyaya argues that the cult's promise of answered vows drew large numbers of women from oppressed castes, and he notes witnesses in Tippera and Comilla who complained of women at the night gatherings.[2]: 152, 169–171
The Trinather panchali
A panchali is a Bengali narrative poem in everyday language, written to be recited or sung before a gathering. The first Trinath panchali, twelve pages of cheap paper bearing the name "Sri Ananda" once, was printed at Dacca in 1872 according to Chattopadhyaya, who worked from copies in the British Library. Its first thousand copies, printed in February, had sold out by April, and four thousand were printed that year.[2]: 154 Mukerji dated the first edition to 1871.[3]: 253 By 1877 a Dacca newspaper claimed that 20,000 copies had been sold.[2]: 157
The poem opens with the god's motive. In Mukerji's translation, the Lord had come as Gour, the saint Chaitanya, and "delivered the sinners by preaching the name of Hari", but "was not satisfied with this", and came again with Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva joined in one.[3]: 253 The tale that follows, as Chattopadhyaya summarises it, concerns a poor Brahman who loses his cow and calf. A voice sends him to market with three coins for ganja, betel and oil. Having no vessel, he takes the oil in his waistcloth, and the grocer who tries to cheat him finds his whole stock poured away. The Brahman's family teacher kicks over the new shrine and its pipe, and his wife and son die at that moment. He repents and revives them with the ash of the ganja from the broken pipe. A blind man and a lame beggar are healed on their way to a Trinath mela, and the closing song declares that neither tantra nor mantra is needed: song is enough.[2]: 158–162
Rival versions followed. A Sanskritised panchali by Bharatachandra Kaviraj, printed at Dacca in 1874, prescribed a pipe of gold and Ganges water for making the ganja paste, and set the worship on Fridays. It replaced the poor Brahman with a king and a wealthy merchant, and had Shiva tell the sage Narada that siddhi came to India as seed carried by ascetics. Chattopadhyaya reads it as an attempt by Dacca's upper-caste elite to bring the cult back under Vaishnavism. Kali's own text outsold it. A Calcutta edition by Gopalchandra Manna followed in 1875. Later versions include one of 1918 from Khulna by Ambika Charan Biswas, who said he had recovered the full tale from a teacher in Bhubaneswar, and a short one printed at Dacca in 1924.[2]: 157–158, 164–165, 177–180
The worship also passed into rhymes. One set, collected at Kotalipara, says that Tinnath eats nothing, yet with a paisa of oil lights three lamps and with a paisa of ganja fills three pipes; another warns of withered limbs for anyone who scorns him.[2]: 175–176 The local historian Jogendranath Gupta printed a Trinath song from Bikrampur, signed by Ramai Fakir, in which the goddess Durga gives the three gods the joined name Trinath; in that song the puja costs five paisa.[11]
Followers and spread
Mukerji gave five reasons for the cult's spread: it was open to all classes "from Brahmans to Chandals", it could be held almost any day, it was a vow worship promising cures and success, it cost three pice, and ganja smoked "in the name of a god" could not be looked down upon. By his account the worship was general in ten districts: Dacca, Mymensingh, Faridpur, Backergunge, Noakhali, Tippera, Chittagong, Bogra, Sylhet and the Serajganj side of Pabna. It was held by the well-to-do as well as the poor but was "almost dying out among the educated bhodrolokes".[3]: 254
Wise saw the cult spreading "with wonderful rapidity among the fisher and agricultural population", and named its followers as "Chandals, Kaibarttas, and Tiyars".[8] These were fishing and labouring castes that Brahmans treated as untouchable; Chattopadhyaya adds the Mehtars, sweepers and scavengers.[2]: 147 In 1909 Gupta recorded Trinath worship among Namasudra, Jugi and other low-caste Hindus in villages near Madhapara and Baherkuchi in Bikrampur, with ganja smoked freely from nightfall while the devotees sang.[11] In Khulna district, a missionary witness told the Commission, the gatherings had drawn in Kartabhaja followers and Muslim fakirs.[2]: 168
Muslims took up the worship too. The Commission found it "observed at all times and at all seasons by Hindus and Muhammadans alike, the latter calling it Tinlakh Pir"; in the Surma Valley, one witness said, ganja was offered in the name of a pir for the good of the cattle.[1] A history of Mymensingh written in 1932 describes Muslim families praying to "Tinnath Pir" for lost cattle and against illness, and promising three, five or seven pipes of ganja for a boon.[2]: 151–152
By 1894, by Chattopadhyaya's count, the worship was found in at least sixteen districts of Bengal, and officials in Assam and the Surma Valley reported it among plantation labourers from Bengal and Bihar.[2]: 171, 173 Anderson described a "Trinather Seba" in Sylhet as a night of "chanting of hymns, beating of drums, and consumption of ganja".[5]
What observers said
The Commission gave the cult a paragraph of its own. It found the rite "of recent date", said that ganja, once offered by the pice, was now offered "in large quantities", and recorded that during the ritual "it is incumbent on all present to smoke".[1] Wise thought the cult an "impious worship" taken up by "uneducated and credulous" people. He could account for it only by supposing that "the Brahmanical hold on the people is relaxing" and that "the masses blindly accept any worship which recognises the equality and brotherhood of all classes of mankind".[8] Gupta listed Trinath worship among the popular cults he thought a disgrace to so educated a society as Bikrampur's.[11]
Many of the Bengali witnesses who described the cult to the Commission were deputy magistrates, pleaders and landholders, and most disapproved. As quoted by Chattopadhyaya, the collector of Noakhali called Trinath "par excellence, the god of ganja", worshipped by the lower classes. A deputy magistrate at Brahmanbaria said that everyone present was "bound to smoke ganja on pain of the god's displeasure", and a government pleader in Tippera said: "To decline is considered sacrilege." A pleader at Silchar called the worship a "cloak" for the habit and a "training ground for beginners in ganja consumption", and an assistant commissioner in Sylhet objected that it had "no Shastric injunction". Two licensed ganja vendors in Mymensingh disagreed over whether the three chillums led to a habit.[2]: 146, 167–173 Chattopadhyaya reads this testimony as the alarm of upper-caste men at what the gatherings did: people of low caste met at night, Hindu and Muslim, men and women, and drew in turn on one pipe. He argues that the shared pipe went further than the shared meals of earlier dissenting sects, because it made people of different castes put their mouths to the same pipe.[2]: 153, 170–171
Excise reports connected the cult with sales. The report for 1874–75 recorded that in the Brahmanbaria subdivision of Tippera, where groups of fifteen or twenty low-caste Hindus met to worship Trinath after buying ganja, 133 maunds were sold in three police circles, against 118 in the other nine circles of the district.[2]: 170 The Commission added that one witness had found the worship in Orissa, while "a few witnesses" said that it was "gradually dying out".[1]
Odisha and Assam
Witnesses from Orissa told the Commission that the Trinath mela had come to Balasore and Cuttack from Bengal, and that it had been popular in Jajpur and Bhadrak for fifteen or twenty years. Mukerji reported that in Orissa it was young Bengali bhadralok at the melas who were taking up ganja.[2]: 177–178
In the twentieth century Odia authors made Trinath their own. They retold the panchali as a purana and as a charita, a life story, and one such text, perhaps of about 1900, placed the god's origin not in Bengal but at Sripur in Orissa. A Sri Trinatha Purana was published at Jajpur in 1984. Many devotees in Orissa identified Trinath with the trio of Jagannath, his brother Balabhadra and his sister Subhadra.[2]: 177 After 1950, Chattopadhyaya writes, the mela revived in Bhubaneswar, the new state capital, on fairgrounds and on the verandahs of large government houses, where the anthropologist James M. Freeman found it "widely attended by government clerks"; clerks of the Mallia caste sang at the melas after work.[2]: 180
In Assam, temples to Trinath at Maligaon and on the Nilachal hill held regular worship in the 1960s, using Assamese versions of the panchali.[2]: 181 In the Barak Valley of southern Assam the household service of Trinath has nearly vanished; a study based on interviews recorded in 2020 found only fragments of its songs still sung in remote villages.[6]
Decline and present practice
Chattopadhyaya dates the cult's retreat in Bengal to the years after 1909. Swadeshi activists, he writes, treated intoxication among young men as harmful to the nation, and unlike sects such as the Matua, Trinath worship had no organisation or institutions to carry it forward. Fewer editions of the panchali were printed.[2]: 175 In 1904 four men who had met in Trinath gatherings in Dacca district were caught up in a murder trial, the "scandal of Doyhata" studied by the historian Sumit Sarkar; Chattopadhyaya treats it as a glimpse of the cult's wider world that the official papers otherwise missed.[2]: 174–175
In Bangladesh, Trinath congregations still gather from time to time.[2]: 181 At the Faridpur fair described to Zakaria in 2008, a local singer led the songs of Tinnath to the khol drum, and the villager who described it said he prayed to Trinath for success in his work and would spend the money it brought in the god's honour.[10]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. IX, "Social and religious customs", paras. 436–438, p. 161 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17 2.18 2.19 2.20 2.21 2.22 2.23 2.24 2.25 Chattopadhyaya, Utathya (June 2026). Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India. Oakland: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/luminos.276. ISBN 9780520425699.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Note by Babu Abhilas Chandra Mukerji, Second Inspector of Excise, Bengal, on the origin and history of Trinath worship in Eastern Bengal". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. III: Appendices, Miscellaneous. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. pp. 253–254 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Mr. T. L. Jenkins, Magistrate and Collector of Dacca". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. IV: Evidence of Witnesses from Bengal and Assam. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. witness no. 21, p. 58 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Mr. J. D. Anderson, Deputy Commissioner; Officiating Commissioner of Excise". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. IV: Evidence of Witnesses from Bengal and Assam. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Assam witness no. 4, p. 536 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Chakraborty, Mithilesh (October 2020). "An Almost Extinct Folk Ritual of the Barak Valley: The Service of Trinath or Tinnath Thakur" (PDF). International Research Journal of Human Resources and Social Sciences. 7 (10). Association of Academic Researchers and Faculties: 72–74. ISSN 2349-4085.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. "Note of dissent by Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy", pp. 363–381 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 Wise, James (1883). Notes on the Races, Castes and Trades of Eastern Bengal. pp. 184–185 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Babu Abhilas Chandra Mukerjee, Brahmin, Deputy Magistrate and Deputy Collector, on deputation as 2nd Inspector of Excise, Bengal". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. IV: Evidence of Witnesses from Bengal and Assam. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. witness no. 63, p. 166 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Zakaria, Saymon (2 February 2008). "From Faridpur Trinath Thakur Comes to the World". Star Insight. Dhaka: The Daily Star. Retrieved 13 November 2026.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Gupta, Jogendra Nath (1909). Bikrampurer Itihas [History of Bikrampur] (in Bengali). pp. 372–373 – via Internet Archive.