Yogmaya

Neelam Karki Niharika

2 ideas

1. Yogmaya's 1941 mass drowning in Arun

   Yogmaya Neupane was born in Bhojpur in eastern Nepal in the 1860s, married as a child and widowed young. She became an ascetic whose followers rallied around her verse sermons against caste discrimination, child marriage, bribery and Rana misrule. After petitions to Prime Minister Juddha Shumsher demanding a righteous 'dharma rajya' were ignored and a planned collective self-immolation was blocked, she and roughly 67 followers threw themselves into the Arun River in 1941, and the regime then suppressed her writings and memory.

2. Asceticism converts a widow's exclusion into authority

   In a society that treated widows as ritually polluted and socially dead, renunciation let a woman step outside the household order that had marginalized her. Her severe austerities became religious credentials that high-caste men could not easily dismiss. The spiritual authority that followed let her publicly condemn caste, marriage customs and the state, which no ordinary widow was permitted to do.

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