Where on earth did the bathroom stone disappear?

Meeting Pushkar Sohoni last week—prolific art-architecture historian of the Deccan, the question of whatever happened to the traditional bathroom stone in Marathi households grew animated between us—a group of scholars and old friends meeting after a long time.

The bathroom stone is a historical and distinct hallmark of the traditional home in the Deccan-Marathi region. While toilets were traditionally separated from bathrooms and located across the backyard, bathrooms called nhani or mori were closer to the main house, adjoined to its outside boundary. These traditional bathrooms were marked by the presence of a large, square piece of dressed basalt rock, placed right in the centre. It’s somewhat pock-marked and typically basalt surface with an additional slope to it was perfect in terms of its function, to sit on while bathing, or wash clothes.

This stone in the Marathi bathroom has long disappeared, replaced now by the low plastic stool. The most interesting factor that Sohoni pointed to was the absence of any specific name for this bathroom stone. The nameless bathroom stone was perhaps so much part of the very anatomy and structure of the nhani, that it was its presence that produced a room as a nhani. The bathroom stone disappeared with the change in the style of modern bathrooms that were typically small, had tiled floors with running water and state of the art plumbing, located in multistorey buildings.

The discussion with Pushkar and friends, brought to my mind older memories from Ph.D fieldwork days, when I was researching childbirth rituals and deities in rural Maharashtra. The village women I worked with, laid great emphasis on the bathroom stone and the paata-varvanta (the grinding stone and pestle) as sites of the paachi ritual—the first childbirth ritual for a new-born performed on the night between the 5th and 6th day postpartum.

The paata was made of the same dressed basalt rock, as the bathroom stone was, and the first ritual goods offered to the goddess Satvai (childbirth goddess) were laid out either on the bathroom stone itself or on the paata, and sometimes on the paata that was laid on top of the bathroom stone: lamps made of wheat dough in front of small stone pebbles (five, seven, nine, or eleven in number) laid out in a row, joined together by a multicoloured string (vastra). The varvanta or pestle—an oblong stone grinder made from basalt would be dressed as the baby and the new-born would be laid to the paata or bathroom stone in obeisance to the Satvai. The Satvai was considered a dangerous goddess, who rode a caparisoned red horse and in her most malevolent form, called the Ghod-Satvai.

The baby’s placenta (vurr) would, without fail, be buried underneath this bathroom rock and the bath water from the mother and baby would be allowed to fall on the placenta-rock on its way out through the water-exit. This was considered a mark of respect to the Satvai—the baby’s original and ancestral mother. The rock-placenta-Satvai was thus, somewhat akin to a burial spot for ancestral mothers who would, henceforth, after receiving obeisance, protect babies and mothers. The bathroom rock was the Satvai’s last bastion, located on the margins of the household in the bathroom: inside but outside—a space in-between.

Some of my interlocutors described the paata and the bathroom rock as the very plinth of the Satvai temple, on which the small pebbles represented the deity multiple icons. The wheat dough lamps signified the goddess’s guardians. My interlocutors also offered an iron implement to the Satvai at the paata or bathroom stone—iron knives that had been used to cut the baby’s umbilical cord. The iron knife was later replaced with, or accompanied by a pen and paper.

I remembered how a talented Indologist from Deccan College had analysed the importance of the paata, the bathroom stone, and the offering of the iron knife to the Ghod-Satvai, as remnants of the Megalithic burial cultures of the Deccan that was commonly encountered in Maharashtra. Horses, iron weapons, goddesses, and old burial spots of heroes and heroines, Satis, and Satvais, marked by basalt dolmens that were considered to be ancestral spirits, and that were continually worshipped for protection.

It was not only modern bathrooms that had changed to eliminate the traditional bathroom stone. Childbirth and the conceptions around it had also changed. The placenta, the basalt bathroom stone, and the paata no longer held any ritual significance, with a rising preponderance in clinical births. There were no ancestral collective of horse backed village mothers, who held vigil over mothers and their babies in the Deccan regions of Maharashtra.

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