Lona Chamarin: How a Wounded Girl Became Goddess of Fear

I have said her name more times writing this book than I said it in twenty years of fieldwork before it.She was a Dalit woman in North India, assaulted by the men who owned the land her family worked, and offered no justice by any court, elder, or council that could have granted it. So she found a different kind of justice, one built at Kamakhya, among yoginis who trained her past the point where fear controlled her, into a woman five centuries of North Indian folk memory has never dared to soften.This is not a documented biography. It is folklore in the fullest, most serious sense of that word - the accumulated, still-living testimony of practitioners across four Indian states who invoke her name before certain workings, who fear her exactly as much as they respect her, and who have never once tried to make her likable.Lona Chamarin: How a Wounded Girl Became a Goddess of Fear follows her from a leatherworker's village to a literary reference in a 1540 Sufi epic, into the Shabar mantras still spoken today, and asks the question underneath all of it: what happens to a woman's rage once the world finally has no choice but to remember it.