Fertile Disorder : Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern 9780824837785, 0824837789

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Fertile Disorder

Fertile Disorder Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern

Kalpana Ram

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

© 2013 University of  Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of  America 18 17 16 15 14 13   6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ram, Kalpana. Fertile disorder : spirit possession and its provocation of the modern / Kalpana Ram. p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3630-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Spirit possession―India―Tamil Nadu―Case studies.  2. Rural women―Religious life―India―Tamil Nadu―Case studies.  3. Folk religion―India―Tamil Nadu.  4. Family planning―Government policy―India―Tamil Nadu.  I. Title. BL2015.S66R36 2013 294.5’42―dc23 2012017566

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Wanda China Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Note on Transliteration

xiii

Introduction

1

Part I: State Intellectuals and Minor Practices 11 1. Visible and Invisible Bodies: Rural Women and State Intellectuals 13 2. Minor Practices 42 Part II: Gender, Agency, Justice 71 3. Possession and the Bride: Emotions, the Elusive Phantom of Social Theory 73 4. The Abject Body of Infertility 106 5. Learning Possession, Becoming Healer 132 6. Performativity in the Court of the Goddess 157 7. The Nature of the Complaint 194 Part III: Revisiting the Projects of Modernity 223 8. Possession and Social Theory 225 9. Possession and Emancipatory Politics 252 Notes 277 Bibliography 285 Index 305

Acknowledgments

I savor the moment when I can thank all the people who have contributed their enthusiasm, suggestions, warmth, and institutional support to this project over the years. In one case, all these qualities coincided with the pleasures of sharing, for a brief time, fieldwork. I begin by thanking Stella. I lived with Stella, her mother, and her children in a coastal village in the 1980s. She accompanied me during the interviews I conducted in 1991 and 1996. As the director of a nongovernmental organization, she allowed me to follow her networks among Dalit women in the villages of Chengalpattu District. Her children, Sheila and Babu (I still cannot stop calling him by his family pet name even after he has become a charismatic leader in his own right), continue to create for me an immediate sense of home no matter where they are in Tamil Nadu, long after they have married, had children, and set up households of their own. I want to thank Pamela Kelley, my editor at the University of Hawai‘i Press, for her immediate response to my proposal for this book, and for her understanding and support through the process. She found two superb readers, whose ready appreciation of the wider project of this book and complementary suggestions have both been valuable. I should mention at the outset the importance of institutional and funding support. The Australian Research Council (ARC) gave me a generous five-year research fellowship, which gave me the time I needed for the two ingredients that come together in this book— ethnographic research and a concentrated study of the phenomenological philosophical tradition as represented by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. In the decade of teaching that has followed I was never again to have that kind of time: for the leisure to think and read quietly, without continual distraction, is the one resource the management of our university system in Australia does not allow for in its rapid expansion of administrative duties for teaching academics. vii

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Acknowledgments

Two universities in Australia have figured importantly and repeatedly in my scholarly career. I have long valued the Australian National University as a supportive institution. I wish to give particular mention to what was, until recently, the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. There I took my doctorate and spent stimulating years with Margaret Jolly in the 1990s, running a series of key conferences on gender relations in the Asia-Pacific region, editing books together, and helping her establish the Gender Relations Centre in its foundational years. I take this opportunity to thank Margaret for remaining an enduring warm presence in my life, consistently reading my work over the years, always with great generosity of spirit. The Australian National University also remains important to me, the source of frequent invitations to give seminars and workshops in the anthropology series, in the Sexuality and Gender seminar series, and, in recent years, the many workshops to do with India that have been convened by Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey. Scholarship on India, especially in the social sciences, has become all too rare in Australia. Another institution has provided me with warm collegiality and a generous environment. This is the Anthropology Department at Macquarie University, which hosted me as an ARC fellow, and is now the department where I teach and where I played a special role as head of the department between 2007 and 2010. The department continues to bring me supportive and stimulating new colleagues to work with, and I cherish the traditions that continue to flourish there, enriched by the contribution of regular visitors such as Jeremy Beckett and Michael Allen, who attend our seminar series. Working together on hosting the annual Australian Anthropological Society conference in 2009, the Research Weeks, which have become annual events, and the lively seminar series on Phenomenology and Anthropology in 2011 have all been highlights of working collegially in creating stimulating intellectual occasions. I particularly want to acknowledge the support and friendship over the years of talented graduates of the department such as Jennifer Deger, Rosemary Wiss, Jovan Maud, and Malcolm Haddon. I value the stimulation of working with my own senior graduate students, whose insights have mingled with my own. My colleagues who helped me set up an interdisciplinary India Research Centre at Macquarie University in 2010, such as Adrian McNeil, Goldie Osuri, Andrew Alter, and Maya Ranganathan, as well as my graduate students, are all helping me realize my dream of nurturing and renewing research on India here in Australia. My work has been fostered by the generous reception of diverse overseas audiences. I thank the people who have organized invitations, showered me with warmth and hospitality during my stays, and ensured intensive discussion of my work. Many continued to collaborate with me, as editors and

Acknowledgments ix

publishers of my work in edited collections and special issues of journals. I bring them to memory by the places to which they have taken me. My colleagues and friends in India have frequently invited me to present seminars at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in the University of Delhi’s Sociology Department and Institute of Economic Growth, at the Madras Institute of Development Studies in Chennai, and at the SNDT University in Mumbai, where I was jointly hosted by the Women’s Studies Department and the Sociology Department. For this I thank Mary John, Satish Deshpande, Patricia Uberoi, Sujata Patel, Janaki Nair, Radhika Chopra, Meenakshi Thapan, and Bhargavi Davar. I particularly benefited from stimulating responses to my presentation on women and spirit possession at a conference on women and mental health organized in 1996 by Bhargavi Davar for Anveshi, a women’s organization in Hyderabad. Pallabi Chakravorty and Nilanjana Gupta introduced me to Jadavpur University, Kolkotta, in 2006, and working with them has allowed me to think further about the elements of dance that are a part of spirit possession. In 2010, my work on dance led to an invitation by the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University to give a keynote address at its conference on “Architectures of Erotica,” an occasion that allowed me to make the acquaintance of a whole new group of colleagues working on aesthetics. In the United States I have had many memorable seminar discussions in some of the leading centers for South Asian studies, such as the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Syracuse University. At some places, such as the University of Berkeley, I benefited from the cross-fertilization of audiences drawn from the Center for South Asia Studies, women’s studies, sociology, and anthropology. For this I thank my colleagues Lawrence Cohen, Raka Ray, Carol Breckenridge (who has, sadly, passed away), Dipesh Chakrabarty, Cecilia van Hollen, Veena Oldenburg, my cousin Priya Jaikumar, and my brother Harsha Ram. I want to acknowledge my brother’s ready help in putting me in touch with people when I visit the United States, but above all I cherish our long conversations on the all too rare occasions when we are able to be together. Dipesh Chakrabarty made my seminar at the University of Chicago particularly memorable by delighting in discussing my project as if time were no account. I enjoyed a period of teaching in the United States in the first half of 2001 as visiting professor in Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Anthropology, whose head was Veena Das. I thank Gyan Pandey for the invitation to come. The time stands out for me for the quality of my relationships with a lively and diverse group of postgraduate students. I thank Jayati Lal, with whom I convened a special reading group in feminist theory for postgraduate students. I recall with pleasure the warmth of such colleagues

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Acknowledgments

as Nilofer Haeri and Sonya Ryang. I want to thank Akhil Gupta and the postgraduates of the Humanities Center at Stanford University for inviting me to present a seminar in 2004 as part of their workshop series “Interrogating Modernity and Postcoloniality.” More recently, I have keenly enjoyed discovering new colleagues and audiences in Britain. For their invitations to present my research and for their hospitality, I thank Pnina Werbner and Richard Werbner from Keele University and Manchester University, respectively, Ann David and Andrée Grau from Roehampton University, and Silvia Posocco and Sadie Wearing, who hosted, in 2007, a daylong international workshop, “Performativities: Contexts, Domains, Perspectives,” at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics. The last was a memorable event thanks to the collective presence and contributions of Judith Butler, Soshana Feldman, Eve Kofsky Sedgwick, Susan Squier, and Karen Barad. Another panel stands out for its affirmation of new dimensions to be explored in the ethnography of spirit possession. At the annual conference of the European Association of Social Anthropology in 2008, a splendid affair, Vlad Naumescu and Arnaud Halloy convened and led a daylong series of discussions on the topic “Learning Spirit Possession.” Their edited volume of papers coming out as a special issue of Ethnos promises to be a valuable addition to the literature. I also wish to thank Ishita Banerjee and Saurabh Dube for their warmth and hospitality at the conference “A South Asian Modern” at El Colegio de México, Mexico City, in 2007; Kristin Bloomer (Department of Religious Studies) and Subramanian Shankar (Center for South Asian Studies) for inviting me to give the Rama Watumull Collaborative Lecture in 2009 and for making such a pleasurable occasion of my trip to the University of Hawai‘i; and Chris Prentice and Vijay Devdas for the invitation to give a keynote paper at a conference on popular culture and postcolonialism at the University of Otago, New Zealand, in 2009. In Sydney, I have particularly valued collective experiences such as working with colleagues as a member of the editorial collective of the Australian Journal of Anthropology under the successive editorships of Michael Allen, Rozanna Lilley, and now Martha Macintyre. I wish to particularly thank Michael Allen for consistently being able to see in me only the best I am capable of, and thus helping me to do my best. I have had the good fortune in the last few years of experiencing the heady blend of collective nurture and intellectual rigor among the women in my writing group, and for this I want to thank them—Vivienne Kondos, whose idea it was to start the group, Jeannie Martin, Diane Losche, Gillian Cowlishaw, Kim Paul, Christina Rocha, Lisa

Acknowledgments xi

Wynn, and Rozanna Lilley. Kim provided, in timely fashion, a bush-haven retreat to quietly read the book as a whole. I thank my parents for their love and sustenance down the years. My mother has become a reader of all my work, and I look forward to her astute comments on this book. My father becomes more and more of a role model as he gets older. My sister and her family provide a near and reassuring presence. My daughter, Kavita, has helped make it a home away from home when she and I have set up house in places like Canberra and Baltimore. For the warmth, grace, humor, and wit she brings into my life I will remain forever grateful. I have reserved my last thanks for the man who above all has made this book possible. To my husband, Ian Bedford, I express my gratitude for his years of love, care, and intellectual companionship, as well as my continued delight in the humanity and irrepressible humor that he combines with enormous erudition and self-disciplined work. He has insisted and made sure that I write this book, and that I write it as well as is within my power.

Note on Transliteration

I have used the Tamil Lexicon as the basis for transliterating Tamil words into English orthography with appropriate diacritical marks. There is a strong demarcation between spoken and written Tamil, or “low” and “high” Tamil. There are also marked political and practical distinctions between the more Sanskritized “Brahman” Tamil that my family speaks and other forms of Tamil. The language politics of the twentieth century has tried to make language a basis on which to invoke a homogeneous “non-Brahman” cultural tradition. There are, however, radical differences between the Tamil spoken by coastal villagers in Kanyakumari and that spoken by agricultural Dalit communities in Chengalpattu District—the two areas of fieldwork I draw on in this book. I have therefore found it important to retain the local flavor of speech and, on occasion, have rendered words and whole sentences in the vernacular, with diacritics. Similarly, the names of places and deities that may be little known outside the region are rendered with diacritics, whereas those that are easily recognized in their English written form as used in India have been left in that form. This applies also to names of castes and pan-Indian deities, for example, and to Sanskrit terms such as “dharma” that are familiar in English.

xiii

Introduction

T h i s b o o k i s m y s u s ta i n e d r e s p o n s e to a puzzlement that has refused to leave me since I began ethnographic research in the early 1980s. Far from losing force, an enigma has remained disturbingly alive. Thinking about it has, in successive stages, slowly shaped my responses to wider issues. Yet until the writing of this book, I have not found the space to consolidate those responses nor to fully acknowledge a persistent source of the shifts in my intellectual outlook. So what was this enigma? I encountered it first in the very distinctive culture that belongs to the fishing villages of cream-and-pastel-colored churches on the baking sands that snake continuously along the west coast of Tamil Nadu. Here the district of Kanyakumari tapers to a point at the southern-most tip of the Indian subcontinent. Men and women—but more often women— repeatedly attributed illnesses and troubles of all kinds to the interventions of spirits, ghosts, and deities. This in itself was not new to me. Every event and undertaking in India, however “secular,” is likely to contain an element of invocation that appeals to and acknowledges powers other than the living, whether these be deities or ancestors. The distinction between them is often blurred. What was new was that for many around me, deities, spirits, and ghosts did more than help shape human events. They directly entered human beings, changing them radically, if only for brief periods. During such intervals, their behavior, gait, and language would alter. In the shrines of Catholic saints where people went to seek relief from the troublesome spirits, the Catholic deities did battle with the demonic. In Tamil Nadu, the Christian powers shared certain characteristics of the demonic world. Like those spirits, they too entered the bodies of humans, taking them as mediums in such confrontations. I learned, from the literature on the subject, to call this phenomenon 1

2 I n t r o d u c t i o n

spirit possession. But locally, the phenomenon was not easy to capture in a single term. Among the Hindus in agricultural communities of Tamil Nadu the meanings associated with spirit possession were fluid and ambiguous. The same goddess could both heal and afflict. Disease itself could be as much a sign of possession by the goddess as could the cure from disease. Local terminology reflected this fluidity. The phenomenon on some occasions was called pēy piṭittal or āvi piṭittal—being “caught” by demons and ghosts. At other times the same sense of being overtaken by an external force was not deplored but celebrated as cāmi āṭṭam, or “being danced” by a deity. No major ritual dedicated to such goddesses was complete without dance, and it was therefore imperative to bring to the occasion ritual specialists who could become possessed. In this state, they would tell kuṟi, or deliver the goddess’s response to people’s problems. Such phenomena have continued to trouble my foundational assumptions for many years. What is a human subject under such conditions? What kind of human subjectivity must already be in place to allow possession to occur? What is religion, if the same deities can be afflictive as well as beneficent? What is a “human” body, if it can be claimed by a whole array of entities? What is agency if people can be “claimed” in this manner? What is gender, if there can be periods when the woman is a woman no longer? Yet in possession, not all was flux and transformation. The spirits themselves seemed to insist on gender distinctions. Away from the luminous world of rituals, in the ordinary life cycle of men and women, spirits distinguished between men and women and between different phases of the life cycle. They were positively attracted to women, for better but also for worse, in those periods when a woman’s body was undergoing transformation—at first menstruation, at subsequent menstrual periods, in the sexually transformative period early in a marriage, in periods of pregnancy, and at childbirth. Men’s bodies were not marked in the same way, either by spirits or by the social order. Over the years, I had come to know some of the women who had experienced spirit possession in their lives. There was a pattern to these episodes, and they did coincide with the intervals of enhanced vulnerability to the spirit world. But these were the times in which—as unmarried young women, as brides, and as women who wanted to become mothers—they were most vulnerable to social pressures. Both kinds of vulnerability were fused in their experience. Need one restrict oneself to a sociology of power in order to produce an academic analysis of gender? Or was it possible to extend one’s sense of what it is to live as a gendered subject—not only in the world of rural Tamil Nadu—by attempting to do justice to both threads? None of this is to say that the people around me were clear in their own

Introduction 3

minds about such phenomena. There was always skepticism and doubt. Was the medium genuinely a deity speaking through the medium? Or was it a demon? Was the medium faking it? Yet for all their skepticism, there remained for them the distinct possibility of something called genuine possession by a deity. Such possession was an occasion for awe and reverence. It stood, too, for the possibility of pragmatic recourse to divine assistance and justice. Through the mediation provided by mediums, deities would preside over a “court” in which people sought justice. But what kind of court was this? Was it simply a court for those too poor to take recourse to ordinary courts? Did the presence of the deity—since it was no human judge who presided over this court—redefine the nature of justice itself ? And if justice was redefined, was this achievement confined to the arcane spheres of “folk religion” or “folk healing”—or could it be allowed to speak to issues encountered in the modern world? There is a time-honored tradition in anthropology when dealing with incomprehension, and I have availed myself of it. Incomprehension, ideally, is a trigger for reflexivity directed at foundational assumptions. However, there is nothing automatic about the reflexivity granted by this procedure. The unknown is continually assimilated to the known. In the vast literature on spirit possession in anthropology, the challenge of the phenomenon is continually displaced as frameworks familiar in Western philosophy are selectively reaffirmed once more. In this book I am particularly concerned with identifying the persistence of those traditions that equate subjectivity with mental states and with ideas, thoughts, and inner emotion. Agency in this understanding of subjectivity, which I have come to describe as mentalist, is equated with the exercise of will, decision, choice, and planning. In Christianity, the discursive construction of “possession” has itself played an active role in demarcating body from spirit, locating “the person” in the soul and later, and more specifically, in the conscience. This tradition has found in possession one of the most striking corroborations of this duality. The “person” disappears, to be replaced by a demon or devil, while the body remains an enduring vessel for the occupying force. We have now at our disposal decades of structuralist and poststructuralist critique aimed precisely at “philosophies of consciousness,” giving us a rich legacy of ways of redescribing the traditional “subject” of philosophy, the human individual, not as the origin of all consciousness and thought but as the “effect” of discourses, practices, and representations. These critiques contribute to the language with which I describe the elusive “subject” of possession, even though I feel impelled to seek fresh alternatives. Nonetheless, for all the forcefulness of academic critique, the more traditional representations of

4 I n t r o d u c t i o n

agency, consciousness, and the body are tenacious. They exercise their effects all the more pervasively because so many forms of contemporary critique are intent—as the book will show—on denying any continuity or shaping power to tradition, preferring to view it as a fragmented and thoroughly makeshift affair. The tenacity of these dominant discourses is not due primarily, however, to the inadequacies of critique. The discourses persist, rather, because they circulate not as academic theory at all but in the form of practical projects of the widest variety. In the postcolony, intellectual discourses on “modern subjectivity” are seldom a description of an existing disposition to be found in existing individuals. They appear instead as projects of modernity, in a pedagogical mode, requiring a class of intellectuals who take up the project of reform and governance. I am particularly concerned in this book with those projects in which modern understandings of agency and subjectivity are mobilized to directly reshape the lives of rural people—through economic planning, family planning, and development but also through projects of reform and emancipation. The book opens as well as ends with a consideration of such projects. Three domains of modern discourses on subjectivity are considered: rationalistic understandings of childbearing as “reproduction” (particularly in demography and state planning), reform and activism (especially feminist and Marxist discourses of emancipation), and the social sciences themselves. These kinds of discourse would, quite simply, discount any possibility of the genuineness of a phenomenon like spirit possession. What are the wider implications of such denial? What losses may it have inflicted on social science and politics? When we rule out the possibility of spirit possession, what else is ruled out? In this book I try to amplify our sense of what is at stake in continuing to allow certain dimensions of social existence to remain unacknowledged. I am concerned here not only with the stakes for anthropology and within academia but also with the politics of class and caste in India and in the Indian diaspora. When middle-class Indians—otherwise engaged in all manner of traditional practices from yoga to Ayurveda and celebrating some of the most patriarchal of ritual observances—find traditions such as spirit possession wholly incomprehensible, is this merely their distaste, or does it not contribute as an active ingredient to the constitution of class? Although I have mentioned losses, the mood of this book is one of hope and optimism rather than of an elegiac mourning for the loss of magic in modernity. I have sought and have to some extent found alternative modes for understanding social existence and modernity itself while reflecting on such dramatic phenomena as spirit possession and hope to communicate this to the reader. Indeed, what I suggest is that magic is not a monopoly of any

Introduction 5

particular social formation but is rather an indispensable component of the most taken for granted of phenomena. Magic is present not only in modern technologies such as the camera and sound recording, or in the practices of the modern state (Taussig 1993, 1997) but also, as I wish to show, in an aspect of everyday life that has been largely shunned by modernity, the dull and obdurate zone of habit. The Tools: Ethnography, Phenomenology, and Research Experiences in Tamil Nadu Some of the resources for this understanding have been drawn from the ethnographic method, as used in anthropology, which, following my initial training in philosophy and in sociology, has become my disciplinary home since the 1980s. It has taken me a long while to learn to write ethnography. I think of ethnography now as the effort to provide a phenomenon with as rich a sense of interpretive contexts as possible. This method is more consequential than it may seem. Phenomena such as possession have been rendered vulnerable to practical and intellectual forms of manipulation by being removed from their context. In providing an interpretive context, one reclothes, as it were, a phenomenon that has been stripped bare. I have not tried to repeat the ethnographic endeavor that seeks to represent a particular place in all its complexity (Ram 1991b). This is not because I celebrate the use of fragments in place of totalities, as some debates in anthropology and history have advocated. The interpretive method, properly understood, need make no claim to having exhausted all that can be said about what counts as context. It need not be totalizing nor restrictive of the account it produces of people and places. As interpretation, it is open-ended without being relativistic. It functions as an invitation, to be joined by other projects of interpretation and to be superseded by more cogent interpretations as these come along. But in this book, another set of aims takes the place of the goals of a classic ethnography. I seek to offer a robust examination of the limitations of modern projects of subjectivity in the way they understand the relation between human existence and the world. It is this larger aim that allows me to bring together topics and materials that are normally kept apart. I move from state-driven projects, in the first part of the book, to individual case studies, in the second half, of possession in the lives of women—disparate elements that find their unity in the wider project of the book. In pursuing this goal, I have relied for fresh understanding on insights that have arisen in Western philosophy itself. If philosophy has generated part of the problem, it has also provided some answers in the form of very differ-

6 I n t r o d u c t i o n

ent understandings of our relationship to the world. The concepts, tools, and alternative ways of thought developed by the phenomenological philosophers Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have been crucial to my conceptualization of this book. In particular, I take full advantage of the centrality that their phenomenological framework affords to the body, to the active flow of purposive human practice, and to the equally, if not more neglected, dimension of the emotions and affects. Here I join forces with what has been described as an affective turn in the humanities and social sciences (Clough and Halley 2007). I have drawn on diverse models of affect in order to enrich the range available to contemporary scholarship. Although I certainly use the work of Deleuze (see chap. 3 in particular), his legacy has also long dominated cultural studies and cinema studies, and I draw the reader’s attention to certain limitations in rendering emotional dimensions of life exclusively as the flights and assemblages of energy. I have turned therefore to other sources of inspiration. These include the work of Silvan Tomkins on the bodily basis of affect. We owe to the work of the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Sedgwick and Frank 1995) a revival of interest in the work of Tomkins and a renewed discussion on muchneeded alternatives to viewing culture entirely as a matter of “discursive construction.” For some time now I have been using the Sanskrit rasa theory of aesthetics as a way of understanding not only performing traditions but also a whole range of phenomena, such as the affects that cling to immigrant lives of the Indian diaspora and to the middle-class experience of Indian nationalism (Ram 2000b and 2011a). But I hope to show readers also that the phenomenological work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty provide a rich vocabulary, including subtle concepts such as mood (Ram 2011) and Sorge (care, concern), which might equip us so that we avoid repeating forms of analysis in which the emotions appear as an addition to an already complete understanding of human existence. Phenomenological philosophy is enjoying something of a resurgence in the discipline of anthropology (see, e.g., the overview offered by Desjarlais and Throop 2011). Like these anthropologists, I seek to take phenomenology out of the philosophical domain into an empirical context, in my case that of a modernity to be found in Tamil villages. In those villages, oppositions between body and mind and between reason and unreason function not as elements of philosophical tradition but as well-honed weapons of war, bristling with sharp edges, wielded to mobilize groups and individuals, to pit the present against the past, to equip reformers with agency in opposing the deadweight of superstition. I do not propose to reduce the notion of modernity to such a war. Nor do I suggest we simply reverse the values by elevating tradition over modernity or unreason over reason. But to restore some understand-

Introduction 7

ing of the power and affective force of modernity requires us to depart from the dominant discourses. The uses I propose for phenomenology in this book range beyond the empirical context of India and beyond the disciplinary context of anthropology. I engage here with feminist theory, postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, and cultural studies. All of these have been part of my socialization, and by now they constitute elements in my habits of thought. I try to address areas in which I have long sensed inadequacies but for which I have only recently begun to propose more systematic alternatives. Some of the weaknesses I seek to illuminate and address concern concepts that are at the center of attention. This is the case with the concept of agency, which continues to enjoy wide debate. Others, such as the concept of experience, languish quietly in the corner, chastened by the ferocity of critiques directed at them. In both cases, I seek to move away from the attitude of pure critique and to adopt a constructive role in suggesting better modes of understanding. Different kinds of research locations are represented in this book, and different research methods. Most of my research comes from a coastal village located in Kanyakumari District where I first worked in the 1980s. I returned to the village in 1991 to more systematically explore women’s experiences of puberty and maternity. I conducted interviews with all generations and agegroups. The fact that I had known many of the women as young girls helped a great deal in encouraging them to speak intimately of their experiences of marriage, maternity, and, for those who had become mothers of female children, their aspirations for their daughters. Some of the women in this book, such as Vijaya (chap. 3), had moved away from the village, but others, like Santi (chap. 4), continue to live there and allowed me to renew our acquaintance. My most recent visit to the coastal village was in 2006. I went then to pay my respects to people who had suffered terribly from the tsunami that devastated this part of the world. More than two hundred residents of the village had died, over a hundred of them children. The church bell tolled constantly, summoning villagers to an anniversary memorial service. Photographs of the dead children were pasted up all over the village. My old room was still standing, the walls pockmarked by the salt of the receding tidal wave. People I knew were keen to share stories of their experience, many asking for practical forms of assistance. I have written elsewhere about the young women who found the energy to organize collective forms of aid in the aftermath of the disaster even while looking for their own missing family members (Ram 2008a). In 1996 I began to spend time in Dalit agricultural laboring communities around the township of Chengalpattu, near Chennai. I was keen to widen my

8 I n t r o d u c t i o n

sense of rural Tamil Nadu, to move away from those particularities of Catholicism and fishing community that had come to dominate my ethnographic experience. I wished to gain a sense of women’s lives in agricultural communities. The ties in being the mother of a young child and the uncertainties of the early career of an academic did not allow for a repetition of my earlier experience of fieldwork. I never lived in any of these communities, instead following networks already established by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). I reflect, in the opening pages of the first chapter, on the weaknesses of an exclusive reliance on such methods. These stand out for me when I compare the results with the kind of knowledge that is generated by living with people over a long period of time. All the same, there were certain advantages in being accompanied to their own villages by women from Dalit communities who were already working as “animators” for the NGOs. I was never positioned as a complete outsider, nor even simply as an upper-caste Tamil woman. Instead, I was readily assimilated to that category of visitors with whom these women were already familiar. I was yet another middle-class NGO professional interested in bringing improvement to the lives of Dalit women. Their readiness to share their life histories with me flows from this perception. In keeping with the conventions of the genre of “the complaint” and the lament (see chap. 7), they shared life experiences with an outsider whom they perceived as more powerful than themselves and as capable of helping if she could be moved by the rhetoric of painful experience. The material I gathered during this period did give me a stronger sense of the lives of Dalit Hindu women, particularly the connections between their lived experience and goddess worship. It was here that I encountered the spirit medium Mutamma (chap. 6), as well as the women to whose life stories I refer in chapter 7. In different parts of the book I incorporate direct quotations as well as descriptions from field notes. Unless otherwise stated, these are from notes I took during different periods in the fishing village as well as in the agricultural villages of Chengalpattu. The reliance on NGOs had the further effect of hastening a process already under way. I had developed a long-standing interest in the category of intellectuals who work directly with coastal villagers, such as parish priests and Catholic social workers, and in 1992 I had begun to train a direct and explicit ethnographic focus on professionals such as teachers in coastal villages. By 1996, I was extending this work to include NGOs, social workers, and doctors who worked in maternity wards of the public hospital at Chengalpattu, as well as in a family-planning clinic in Chennai. I participated in workshops run by NGOs to educate girls in a new awareness of their bodies. The chapters in part 1 are based on this strand of research.

Introduction 9

In the decade that followed I tried to investigate the relationship between the possession I encountered in the village, usually episodic and uninvited, and the possession that occurred in the valued world of public rituals. The latter often involved long periods of informal apprenticeship on the part of performers. In 2000 and then again in 2006, I attended ritual performances of epic theater in such genres as the vil pāṭṭu, or “bow song” traditions of Kanyakumari, and the terukkūttu in Chengalpattu. The latter is a genre of performance whose title literally translates as “street performance” and is often mistakenly glossed as “entertainment” by residents of metropolitan Chennai. However, in rural Tamil Nadu it continues to be a valued ritual form (Frasca 1990, 1). I also attended a festival of the kuti āṭṭam of Kerala, which I viewed as part of a theater season of evening performances, consummately rendered by the dedicated artists of the Natanakairali theater company in Irinjalakuda. My reflections on performance in the ritual sphere of possession, and on the performance of afflictive possession, have been sharpened by the research I continue to undertake on the involvement of the middle classes (both in India and in the Indian diaspora) with the classical performing arts of dance and music (see, e.g., Ram 2000, 2002, 2005, 2010b, 2011a). The Structure of the Book The structure of the book is shaped by the form of my argument, which is conceived in the form of a journey from the familiar to the unfamiliar, not in order to stay there but to be able to revisit the known with a fresh gaze. In part 1, I interrogate the practical projects of demographers, planners, and medical professionals, with a particular emphasis on the construction of fertility in the modernizing discourses of such intellectuals. The specific Tamil regional traditions of rationalism are given special attention in the second chapter. There I consider the way modern discourses have distinguished and parceled out the range of practices that pertain to possession, thus reducing it to an isolated phenomenon that lacks any language of its own. The chapters in part 2 move quite sharply away from the preoccupations of state intellectuals. They engage instead with those forms of spirit possession that erupt as unlooked-for crises in women’s lives. I am guided here by de Certeau’s methodological recommendation that we diverge from Foucault by examining “minor practices” rather than exclusively attending to the practices that forged a successful dominance. As part of my examination of spirit possession as a minor practice, I explore the relationship between the crises in women’s lives and their experiences of marriage and maternity. The chapters make use of individual life stories, to show how they continuously integrate

10 I n t r o d u c t i o n

the setbacks and instabilities of life as it is lived in and through meanings that are to some extent simply pregiven by local cultural practices. But by the second half of part 2 we slowly start to move back toward more general considerations of agency, politics, and justice. Is it possible to reconceptualize agency within the framework of possession? How does possession become redefined in the process? Can we reexamine the scope of justice by understanding the nature of the complaints that are brought to the “courts” over which deities preside? Part 3 returns definitively to the preoccupations of modern social theory and politics, but in the spirit of a traveler who returns refreshed from a sojourn in a radically different land and sees the old and the familiar in a new light.

Chapter 1

Visible and Invisible Bodies Rural Women and State Intellectuals

S i n c e m y e a r l i e s t f i e l d w o r k in coastal villages of Kanyakumari in the 1980s (Ram 1991b), I have found myself in the thick of all manner of programs and interventions in the lives of villagers, undertaken by professionals of various kinds. Such a sense of being surrounded by programs was no doubt shaped by my own background and dispositions, which mark me as a member of the broad grouping I attempt to characterize in this chapter. From subtle forms of “mutual recognition” that enabled easy access to others from this group, to my own need for certain basic forms of material comfort, which led me to seek residence in the household of a social worker rather than in a fishing household, a variety of social factors have made the programs and interventions that were under way in the coastal villages particularly visible to me. These projects included the movement for “Basic Christian Communities” initiated by reformist parish priests as a form of participatory democracy, innovations in the technology of artisanal fishing boats, witnessing the design of fiberglass catamarans by Father Gillet (1985), and health programs that tried to reform men of their alcoholism and women of their poor hygienic and maternal practices. These undertakings were the work of a variety of agencies. Some were undertaken by reform-oriented parish priests, others by foreignfunded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), still others by Catholic missions active in the field of social work. The overwhelming presence of the Catholic Church in coastal communities stood out in all these initiatives, as well as in the routine administration of village affairs. The state, however, remained a distant entity to villagers (Ram 1991b, 13

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1996). Where it was a matter of their direct experience, the state was represented more often by the punitive activities of the police than by programs for welfare. In the early 1980s, police firings on fishermen during contestations between Hindus and Christians, fueled by the efforts of the Hindu rightwing organization known as the RSS (Subramanian 2003) were assimilated to coastal perceptions of the state. I was tempted by the image of a state within a state (Ram 1996). At the same time, however, many NGO initiatives were encouraging villagers to view the state as the provider of basic amenities. In doing so, they indirectly encouraged new forms of involvement with the state. Groups of village women were often organized by NGOs to consolidate their newly aroused social awareness with a collective visit to the block development officer, demanding, as their right, the provision of services such as water pumps and electricity. Some of the young coastal girls, particularly active in such initiatives, proved to be keen readers of reformist tracts written by priests. In the 1990s, I began to work more systematically on themes having to do with maternity. I became aware of the complex, often ambivalent attitudes held by village women to birth in hospitals. A ready source of comparison was available in their experience of home births, assisted by older women who also worked as fish traders (Ram 1994a, 1998a). Biomedicine was relatively easily accessible in this part of Tamil Nadu. A bus journey of a little over an hour would take women to the many private clinics that dotted the town of Nagercoil. Doctors, and their interaction with village women and midwives, became defined as part of my fieldwork. At this point I began comparative work in the villages near the town of Chengalpattu, located close to the metropolis of Chennai. The family I had lived with in Kanyakumari moved to Chengalpattu District, and my old friend the social worker eventually became the director of her own NGO. I welcomed the chance to acquaint myself, for comparative purposes, with women who belonged to Dalit agricultural laboring communities, with Hindu rather than Catholic communities. But my fieldwork periods now were short, squeezed between teaching and maternal responsibilities of my own. I was in a new area, and instead of gradually becoming acquainted and forging new relationships with villagers, as I had in coastal Kanyakumari, I was reliant on introductions supplied by my friend’s NGO. Even when the networks became broader and I could meet the staff from various organizations at conferences dedicated to regional NGOs working in rural Tamil Nadu, they still provided no substitute for the many forms and styles in which I had got to know people in the course of residing in one place over time. My access to rural experience was now mediated heavily by these organizations, their directors, and their



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particular styles of directorship. I found the shift frustrating and inadequate (thus sharpening my views on what constituted adequate methodology for fieldwork). I well recall a particularly frustrating occasion. It was 1994 and I was visiting, on the invitation of an NGO director, a village in the district of Tiruvannamalai. I had become aware of connections between the ways in which older women in Chengalpattu District were narrating their lives to me and the wider genre of the female lament (Ram 2007). I decided—sensing already that this was the wrong way to go about it—to simply ask the women about such songs. The director translated this as a directive to get women to sing for me. On this understanding, she proceeded to instruct them to sing songs that had been taught by the organization’s “women’s wing.” I pressed for other kinds of songs, and the director claimed she did not know of any. The women, however, confirmed there were indeed songs that they called cōka katai (stories of suffering) and kōra katai (ugly stories). The director said she did not see what was to be gained from such songs. One of the women began a song only to be cut short by the director, who told them, “Akkā [elder sister] is not interested in this long drawn-out rāga [Skt.] of yours. She wants to see how you actually act out the crying.” And she began to mimic the women, exaggeratedly sniffing and sobbing. The singer left shortly after, saying one does not cry in that way without an occasion for it. Another woman felt she had to defend the genre. She said, “These kōra songs have enormous power, enough to make an annā or appā [“brother” or “father,” i. e., men who should be concerned with women’s welfare] stop still and make tears pour down his face. Moreover, these songs come in the face of death and suffering.” The director called out to the departing singer, “Do you think these songs of yours are going to be sung overseas? Either sing—or go.” A young woman interjected fiercely and asked the director to ask for favors with due respect and kindness. The director flew into a temper, called on all to bear witness to all the things she had done for the village, and to witness the insult to her authority from one so young. Eventually matters settled down, and I even got to hear several songs, which I duly transcribed in a somewhat subdued mood. Such frustrations and experiences had the salutary effect of ensuring that I paid explicit attention to reformers, teachers, doctors, and priests as worthy of ethnographic attention and reflection in their own right (Ram 1996). Looking back on this period makes it evident that well before the advent of discourses of neoliberal governance in India, before the language of “rolling back welfare” took purchase, and before the rise of such hybrid entities as GONGOs (semiautonomous NGOs housed in government departments; Aradhana Sharma 2008, xxix), the welfare functions of the modern state were

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Chapter 1

represented in rural Tamil Nadu by nongovernmental initiatives rather than by state initiatives. Nonetheless, many of the professionals shared the language of the state. Like the state, they sought to improve, reeducate, develop the villagers. They strove to make villagers recognize their own backwardness, readily identifiable in their inability to save, their lack of cleanliness and sanitation, their propensity to violence, alcohol, and gambling. Some professionals, such as doctors, shared even more specific policy orientations with the state. Childbirth in hospitals, as rural women were only too well aware, was never simply a matter of child delivery. One could expect to come away fitted, at the very least, with an IUD, or, if one had already had two children, sterilized. Gramsci’s Category of State Intellectuals Such experiences have fed into my readiness to adopt, as a provisional point of departure, Gramsci’s category of state intellectuals. His definition goes beyond the classic intellectual undertaking of creating and systematizing discourses to include functions that would not normally be classified as pertaining to either the state or to intellectuals. Gramsci (1971, 16) describes intellectuals under the conditions of modernity as a vastly expanded social category, basing his description crucially on the functions they serve rather than on any characteristic of their intellectual abilities: “What matters is the function, which is directive and organisational, i.e. educative, i.e. intellectual.” Unlike “traditional intellectuals,” who are “castelike” in their formation—a description that naturally resonates with particular force in India— modern state intellectuals fulfill a wide range of functions. Knowledge is for the first time directly involved in the development and expansion of capitalist productive forces and in overseeing and managing the relations of production, giving rise to new categories of intellectuals such as technicians, engineers, and managers. But the directive, organizational, and educative functions are by no means limited to the production process: By “intellectuals” must be meant not those strata commonly understood by this denomination, but in general the whole stratum that exercises organisational functions in the wide sense—whether in the field of production, or in that of culture, or in that of political administration. (Gramsci 1971, 97, 99n)

Gramsci’s concern with understanding the legitimation of class rule by means other than direct domination sustains his exploration of the moral au-



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thority that is invested in the role of intellectuals as carriers of that which is progressive and new. It is this spirit above all that is recognizable among the different kinds of modernizing intellectuals active in the Tamil countryside. In what follows I wish to combine Gramsci’s broadly analytic approach with the recent shift to a more ethnographic study of the state. To an ethnographer of rural Tamil Nadu, the emphasis on “the everyday state” as it is experienced by the poor and the marginalized, rendered through descriptions of actual encounters with government officers and lower-level state personnel (Corbridge et al. 2005), is bound to seem attractive. So too is the attention to the particularities of timing, emplacement, and language so characteristic of ethnographic labor: “Dress codes can matter. The wording of exchanges certainly matters. Who gets to speak when and in what tones? It might also matter where the business of state is staged” (Corbridge et al. 2005; see also Ram 2010a). All the same, that which is visible and available to the ethnographer is not adequate or self-sufficient as a framework—a theme I explore in different ways throughout the book. There are continuities that link the work of intellectuals in rural areas with the work of intellectuals in other locations, such as demographers, planners, and policy makers. The ethnographer who concentrates too heavily on face-to-face encounters misses the invisible participation of these other categories of intellectuals. Gramsci explores these continuities in terms of shared function. But it is also possible to combine two features of analysis, bringing together function with the embodied and the sensory. I am particularly concerned in this book to expand our methodological vocabulary to register as embodied, dimensions of social life that are not to be confined to the present moment of ethnographic encounter, in that mode of face-to-face “intersubjectivity” between ethnographer and subject so popular in postmodern anthropological formulations. To Gramsci’s mode of analysing continuities at the level of function, I therefore bring in at this point continuities that exist at the level of a shared set of orientations that precede any particular encounter between people or groups of people. Orientations may be conscious, but they also contain existential and embodied dimensions that are less than conscious. It requires the scope of this book to explore this thesis and its implications. Here I will simply state that orientations connect the abstract with the concrete. They have their base in the sensory and practical domains of bodily activities. Orientations are learned primarily as bodily alignments to the world, as particular ways of doing things. Orientations can, in later life, become transposed onto quite abstract commitments. Gramsci’s concept of functions, for example, would not suffice to unify state intellectuals were it not sustained by certain forms of existential

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orientation on the part of such intellectuals. Consider the following vignettes culled from different periods of my fieldwork in Tamil Nadu accompanying different kinds of state intellectuals.1 I wish the reader to attend not only to the concrete particularities of each episode but also to implicit orientations, as well as to the explicit attitudes that form an emergent pattern. 1. I am conducting an interview with a doctor in a large public hospital in the town of Chengalpattu, situated near metropolitan Chennai. Class and gender distances allow the doctor to speak, with prescriptive confidence, of planned fertility. However, it is not his own planned fertility of which he speaks—nor do we, as intellectual interlocutors, even expect him to do so. Neither does he address the planned fertility of the male body in general. The body of fertility is projected exclusively onto women and onto uneducated rural women in particular. This is not done through any overt reference; rather, the projection is implicit in the modalities of the technologies considered and in the assumptions about how seriously the “woman in the body” (Martin 1987) is to be considered when this technology is “inserted.” Doctor: After the second child, we compulsorily insert a Copper T, or sterilize. We also have motivation by the nurses. Q: Why is the diaphragm never used or suggested? Doctor: The diaphragm is outdated. Q: But there are also problems with the Copper T. Doctor: Theoretically, there are no problems with the Copper T. The problems of back pain and so forth have not been shown to be connected with insertion. Q: How prepared are you to remove the Copper T if the woman is having problems? Doctor: If the woman insists, we will remove it, but we will advise her, according to her medical history and family situation, as to what she should have instead. Copper T is best. If she wants oral pills, she can have them, but many forget to take pills. The Loop has problems of rejection, of allergy. These problems are not there with Copper T. Now the government has made Copper T compulsory after the second child. There is the human rights issue. But for the population in India, this is necessary.

Let us review this example. Over and above the finer details of the doctor’s responses to my questions, what stands out is his absolute identification as a medical professional with the broad directions of state policy, which is



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19

always being updated. This identification occurs at the expense of the bodily experience of the user. When the person who has the IUD inserted or a sterilization performed is a rural woman from a surrounding village, she has little hope that her pain or unease will count as sufficient reason to have it removed. On my field trip to villages near Chennai in August 1996, interviewing Dalit women on their experiences of puberty and maternity, I came across a woman who had had a Copper T inserted without her knowledge at a well-known government hospital in Madras. During her periods, she felt a protrusion and attempted to remove the obstacle, experiencing agonizing pain. She went to a different doctor, who removed the remaining parts of the IUD but failed to inform her that this meant she could now become pregnant—as she soon did. She experienced an extremely difficult and painful pregnancy and delivery since the uterus had barely healed from the previous laceration. Sterilization, the preferred alternative, is even more definitive in its aftereffects. Once the woman has been “motivated” to undergo sterilization after the second child is born, the operation is irreversible. The doctor’s inability to hear the voice of the woman is not caused by any explicit preference on his part. What the doctor actually says is •• There are human rights issues, but for the population of India, compulsory insertion of an IUD is necessary after the second child. •• There is “motivation” by the nurse [for sterilization], but we compulsorily insert the IUD. •• If the woman insists, we can remove the device, but it has been scientifically shown that the problems women may experience are not related to the device. (“Theoretically, there are no problems with the Copper T.”) •• If the woman wants other methods, they are there, but the diaphragm is outdated, the Loop was full of problems, and the pill is too susceptible to lapses of memory. Each of these propositions, as I have phrased them, oscillates between two kinds of consideration. On the one hand are human considerations, the woman’s experiences, preferences, and choices; and on the other, considerations of the larger good (that of the nation), which can be addressed only by the rationality of planning, technology, and science. In each case, the second set of considerations far overwhelms the former. 2. I am in the city of Chennai visiting the clinic of the Voluntary Health Service (VHS). I am getting along well with the doctor, a particularly frank and sympathetic woman. The VHS is a semiautonomous body but enjoys

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Chapter 1

government funding and broadly follows government guidelines, particularly in family planning. Its professionals serve many of the so-called slum areas of Chennai and have extensive interaction with poor women. The doctor grants me an interview on government policy and on her perceptions of its problems and limitations. She has many ideas on how people ought to be persuaded to adopt family planning. She then takes me in to watch her practice. At no time are the women asked whether it was acceptable for me to be there watching them. Occasionally I am addressed in English in the midst of a fitting: First woman:  I have lower abdominal pain and a pricking sensation, and I am wondering whether I have had an IUD inserted without my knowing. I went to hospital because of experiencing a spontaneous abortion at five months with my last pregnancy. Doctor: We do not insert IUDs without the woman’s knowledge. But do not try for another child so soon either—allow a year or so to pass before, or an abortion may recur.

A second woman is having a Copper T inserted. She has had one child. The doctor asks her to lie as she would when giving birth. Evidently there is meant to be only one possible position—on the back with legs apart. Doctor: You have let your pāvāṭai [underskirt] touch my gloves. My gloves are sterile—you must not let that happen again.

The woman is slow to spread her legs. Doctor: What is all this verṭkam [shyness]? You have given birth, haven’t you?

The doctor shows me the opening in the cervix and the “T” inserted in a sheath. I feel queasy and very uneasy at the way in which this woman is being turned into a body for medical display to women of the “educated” class. The doctor gives me a disquisition at this point about how the width of the cervix must be ascertained—if it is not correct and the “T” is pushed in too far, the bowel can be perforated or the uterus punctured. I wonder how the woman is feeling as these hazards are recounted to someone from a different social class while she lies with her legs wide apart after having been chided for too much modesty. Reflecting back on it, I realize that the doctor must have spo-



Visible and Invisible Bodies

21

ken to me in English, which means the woman would have been completely excluded from what was being said about her. The doctor goes on while she inserts the “T” to tell me that the newer, more expensive version of the “T” does not stretch the uterus as much. It is over. The woman is not asked how she feels with the device in place. The string is clipped to ensure less irritation. Back at the desk, the woman is told to come back if there are problems. But she is told only certain problems are to be considered relevant to the device: irregular periods or lower abdominal pain. Other problems are not to be sheeted home to the device. The Copper T was being hailed by doctors during this period of fieldwork in 1996 as a “problem-free” solution. The celebration of this device was only the latest of the waves of technologically induced euphoria that make it much harder for women to have their complaints taken seriously. In the Chennai clinic, the woman is told not to go to anyone else to get the device removed. She is told, quite sharply, to refrain from tugging at the device herself—not because she might damage her organs; instead, what is emphasized is how expensive the device is. She is also told not to remain quiet if there are problems. The invocation of a shared essential femaleness—“You have given birth, haven’t you?”—is qualified by the power relations that align the doctor with me but separate us both from the patient. The doctor speaks to me in English while fitting the patient with an IUD, chides her for not cooperating, and awards limited right of recourse should she wish to have the device removed. Invocations of shared femaleness function, in this instance, as an ideology in the classic Marxist sense of a discourse that conceals the operations of class. But let us also note the role played by the fundamentally different bodily positions that distinguish doctor and patient as subjects. One lies on the table with her legs apart while the other observes, opens the vagina, and inserts an IUD. And, to return to language, one is silent, the other chides her for risking contamination of the sterile field with her clothing and for not opening her legs wide enough. The doctor chats to the anthropologist in English about the dangers faced by the woman on the examination table. In her work on the clinical examination in the United States, Katherine Young (1997) writes of the existential volatility of the doctor-patient relationship. The patient is not an object, yet there is a tendency to turn her into one. The resultant tensions require constant renegotiations from the doctor. In the situation I have described, however, there are fewer negotiations to be made. Tensions exist but are to some extent prenegotiated. 3. I am interviewing schoolteachers in the primary school in the coastal village of Kanyakumari about their experience of pregnancy and maternity.

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Chapter 1

One of them tells me she regards childbirth, menstruation, and menopause as natural functions, not to be fussed over or made too much of: “Now I have irregular bleeding, but these things are all iyaṟkai [nature], so we should take it as such [iyaṟkai ēṟṟri koḷḷaṉum].” But then she goes on, Some people have a tendency to take even small things and make a big noise about them [cila pēr koñcam iruntālum periya cattam pōṭuvārkaḷ]. I [on the other hand] have always had a strong will. These coastal people—they neither treat pregnancy as a time to take sensible precautions, nor will they stop having children when they have had enough. Instead, they treat having babies like eating, drinking and going to the toilet, and then complain endlessly about their special burden. They should see pregnancy as a time of oncoming joy and responsibility, but now they treat themselves like sick patients. I have taught at school up to the last minute before the onset of labor, with both my first and second child.

Another teacher, an unmarried woman of thirty-nine, when asked about whether childbirth ought to be hospitalized, replies, Hospital birth is good for emergencies, but if home birth—please keep the house very clean! I think childbirth and pregnancy are normal—except when there are too many children—then it becomes difficult. Some of these wives and husbands [meaning the villagers], they seem to think of only one thing—making “jolly.”

In both cases, the teachers distance themselves from the villagers, their behavior, and their attitudes. Villagers are simultaneously guilty of treating birth as a time of sickness, of making too much fuss instead of treating it as “natural,” and of treating sex and having babies as natural, of not being cultured enough. In the first instance, “naturalness” is a virtue of the more cultivated elite, who know how to accept natural processes. In the latter, where naturalness is an attribute of the nonelite, it comes to mean a mindless bodily process (like eating, drinking, and going to the toilet). Babies are, by definition, born to the poor as the result of the absence of self-control. The inability to handle contraceptive choice is only a further corollary of this more fundamental lack of self-control. I am back in Australia, reading texts by demographers and family-planning experts. This is background research to better acquaint myself with the history



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of family-planning programs in India. The texts weave inextricably the discourses on family planning with discourses on population and with political commentaries on the health of the nation-state. All three are bound together by shared enemies, the risks they run from “backward” political identities: Each identity-bound group, whether religious or ethnic, caste or linguistic, feels that its safety lies in numbers and percentages; the moment its demographic leverage decreases, its importance and influence in government suffer, and its vital interests are at stake. This anxiety over numbers is the central problem of the Indian family planning program. (Panandiker and Umashankar 1994, 103)

The “anxiety” Panandiker and Umashankar refer to is projected onto the dangerous identities. But the anxiety of the demographers themselves is far more palpable in this genre of texts. Colorful and explosive images, scarcely to be expected in books that accuse others of irrational and emotional excess, leap off the page at me. Narayana and Kantner (1992, ix) refer to the politics of caste and religion as a “sack full of writhing cobras . . . threaten[ing] to break through a dangerously threadbare social fabric.” They describe electoral politics as the further ingredient that “keeps the cauldron of cultural antagonism bubbling.” Caste and religion are undesirable collective identities that are then taken up and kept alive by democratic politics. The analysis in Panandiker and Umashankar (1994) follows similar, if less colorful, pathways of thought. The analysis begins by suggesting that India’s “diversity” and “federal democratic political system” have “deeply conditioned” the success or failure of population policies. It soon becomes apparent that diversity figures almost exclusively as a problem, qualifying the policy’s chances for success. India’s multiplicity of languages is an obstacle to official communication and to national consensus around the program (93). Regional differences raise the specter of secessionist mobilizations and undermine national unity. Religious leadership is referred to as responsible for “propaganda” (97), undermining the influence of a secular leadership committed to “education.” Even the emergence of lower-caste political leaders, themselves beneficiaries of the idealism of the nation-state in its early adoption of affirmative “reservation” policies, is now viewed as permitting the influence of the wrong kinds of identities and as frustrating the attempts of the nation-state to modernize and secure general welfare: The backward castes, as a group, have observed the political power of numbers and are suspicious of proposals for controlling population

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growth. Brought up in a rural agricultural milieu where large families are respected, and where at least two sons are desired, members of these castes are highly suspicious of the perceptions of urban elites drawn from socially and economically advanced sectors of the population. One of the chief ministers of a state from a backward caste has nine children, and is reported to have said that he had this large family because he opposed the family planning program of the Congress Government. (98)

The eruption of frustration with various “backward” identities as obstacles to progress, the impatience with democratic politics, manifested itself most dramatically in the imposition of the Emergency in 1975. Faced with a whole range of social movements—anti–price rise urban movements, the Bhoodan movement under the Gandhian leadership of J. P. Narayan directed at land redistribution, a national railway workers’ strike—Mrs. Gandhi declared the suspension of civil liberties. Between June 1975 and January 1977, electoral processes were suspended throughout India. The effects of the Emergency were registered in many areas of civil life, but one of the principal government initiatives permitted by the abrogation of civil liberties was a particularly authoritarian version of family planning. After the resounding electoral defeat of Mrs. Gandhi by the Janata Party, a Commission of Enquiry was appointed by the new government. According to the report of the Shah Commission (1978), the number of state-administered sterilizations—predominantly of men—rose from 1.3 million in 1974–1975 to 2.6 million in 1975–1976, and then soared dramatically to 8.1 million in 1976–1977. The populous belt of Uttar Pradesh was one of the northern states where the policy was implemented with zeal. After failing to achieve its state-assigned “target” of 175,000 sterilizations in 1975–1976, the region notched up 837,000 the next year (Shah Commission 1978). The ferocity of the quest for sterilizations, their regional concentration in the northern states, and their particular association with Mrs. Gandhi’s son Sanjay Gandhi, who pursued the sterilization targets as his own personal agenda, all told heavily against the regime, as did other factors. When readmitted to the polls in 1977, the electorate resoundingly voted out the Congress Party. Yet even after a definitive electoral rejection, we find many state intellectuals involved with population control and family planning reluctant to abandon their approach. Participants in a population policy workshop conducted in 1978 (Gandotra and Das 1984) debated whether state goals such as sterilization were best achieved through compulsion or whether they could be attained by indirect, that is, “developmental” methods—such as literacy, maternal and infant health care. “Voluntary” participation continued to be en-



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visioned entirely within the framework set by state discourse. Yet even this version of participation was too broad, for it failed to exclude the agency of that section of the population most troublesome to the paper givers: an “underdeveloped citizenry.” The majority of Indians, the editors argued, had simply not reached a sufficient level of development to allow choice to be placed in their hands. The orientation I have described never entirely leaves the discourses of demographers, whether they attempt to explain failures or “successes.” Tamil Nadu became a demographer’s “success story” in the second half of the 1990s “as the state [that has achieved] quick fertility transition without either economic or social development as was the case in Kerala” (Irudaya Rajan 2005, 39). Demographers had by this stage shifted to a focus on the region rather than on the nation as the unit of analysis (see Hodges 2008, 139ff. for an overview). Yet even as some demographers have located the causes for a drop in fertility in regional political traditions, such as the Self-Respect Movement, others cannot help but approve the “innovative schemes” of Tamil Nadu’s family welfare program. And what are these innovative schemes? Tamil Nadu’s family welfare program, we are told, was one of the first to introduce “the provision of subsidy to doctors who perform vasectomies, a fee for canvassers of sterilization and cash incentives to low income vasectomy acceptors” (Rajna, Kulkarni, and Thenmozhi 2005, 195). The purpose here is not to single out demographers, or indeed any particular group of intellectuals for their attachment to coercive norms. My argument directs us rather to a division of labor between different categories of intellectuals, one that is made possible in turn only by an underlying set of shared identifications. The Affective Project That Underlies Identifications between State and Intellectuals Each of the categories of intellectuals I describe above is characterized by different occupations, different professional expertise, and different modes of activity. Some, such as doctors, are oriented toward action. Had I restricted myself, in the case of doctors, simply to interviewing them, I would have overlooked the mode in which they actually exercise their effects—not through statements on policy but by directly operating on the bodies of others. At the other end of the spectrum, demographers and political scientists are very much in the business of making discourse. Theirs is precisely the task, as Gramsci would describe it, of systematizing and rendering discourses coherent, of smoothing over contradictions, and of competing with rival intel-

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lectual discourses. The medicalized body that underlies the vision of family planning was not, for instance, the only construction of the body that could have become dominant in Indian nationalism. Gandhi’s views on birth control were much publicized in India after his meeting with Margaret Sanger. For Gandhi, the emergent subject was a moral subject rather than the bourgeois citizen-subject of political theory. Whereas the bourgeois citizen-subject is eligible for certain rights and civic responsibilities on the basis of rationality, Gandhi exhorted Indians to claim their subjecthood through a quest for moral truths. His position on birth control was a corollary of this quest. Ahimsa (Skt., “nonviolence”), satya (Skt., “truth”), and the quest for self-restraint dictated, for him, a view of the body as the place in respect of which to exercise moral self-control rather than technological regulation. Brahmacharya (Skt., “vow of sexual abstinence”) regulated birth without reliance on modern industrial technology. It also encouraged men to exercise the moral virtue of aparigraha (Skt., “nonpossession”). One of the chief possessions men were asked to relinquish was their prerogative of selfish subjugation of women. One can only speculate as to how such a discourse might have mediated or reshaped interactions between state intellectuals and rural villagers in the field of birth control had it succeeded in becoming the dominant discourse of Family Planning. As things now stand, the discourses of demographers and planners implicitly sustain those state intellectuals involved in practical interventions. The very differences between strata allow certain forms of collaboration. Doctors and nurses need a certain confidence in order to get on with their tasks. In order to act, they draw not only on their professional training but also on an implicit assurance that their assumptions are right. Except when cornered by an anthropologist, they are not in the business of mounting an explicit argument as to why family planning should be any concern of the state and its personnel. This is not their affair. But there is a whole group of intellectuals who address themselves precisely to this task. Doctors for their part can rest in the confidence that their own assumptions are supported, discursively elaborated, and rendered coherent by experts in the fields of planning, policy, and academic scholarship. Teachers can decry the unbridled sexuality of the villagers whose children they teach, knowing they are supported in their opinions by experts. Yet such collaborations and division of labor would not be possible without a prior set of shared orientations. All the different kinds of intellectuals I describe in my vignettes take for granted, and performatively reestablish, a social and discursive distance between themselves and those they establish as the objects of their practices. The demographers do this discursively, constituting particular groups and identities as obstacles in the way of progress



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and modern goals. The doctors achieve their end by establishing a practical distance between themselves and the bodies of the rural villagers. However, orientations based on distance alone would not suffice to bind together a social group. No subjectivity can be based entirely on distance. We also require objects of identification with which we establish relations of intimacy, and which, moreover, we introject and make part of our own identity. All the groups described above exhibit an identificatory relationship so powerful that it goes without saying. They have all adopted ways of “seeing like a state” (James Scott 1998). Looking back at fifty years of history writing by “leftwing as well as nationalist and other liberal scholars,” Pandey (1991, 560) finds that “the view from the ‘centre’ remains the recognised vantage point for a meaningful reconstruction of Indian history.” The archive they draw on continues to rely on government and court records. The result, concludes Pandey, is that “the historian adopts the view of the established state” (560). But where should we look for, and find, this “view of the established state”? Here again it would be a mistake to concentrate exclusively on discourses. If we were to look at government discourses for our clues as to the nature of the established state, we would have to conclude that demographers, political scientists, as well as professionals directly interacting with rural people are quite at odds with the view of the state. Official discourses on family planning since the Emergency often read, in crucial respects, rather like a catechism monotonously repeated: I must not coerce people and treat them as targets. Family Planning was rebaptized the Family Welfare Program in the 1980s, and the state committed itself to wholly voluntary and educational approaches. In the mid-1990s, the Swaminathan Committee Report advocated “prowoman” policies and high-quality services and recommended the abandonment of predetermined contraceptive acceptor targets (Srinivasan 2006, 12). In 1994, the Indian government became signatory to adopting the recommendations of the influential International Conference on Population and Development at Cairo, and family-planning targets were (yet again) rejected, in favor of a “reproductive health” approach. The National Rural Health Mission of 2005 speaks the language of concern with the wider determinants of health in nutrition, sanitation, and safe drinking water. So where do our doctors, teachers, and intellectuals derive their comfort, their assurance that they do indeed speak with implicit authority on behalf of the modern? Foucault’s pioneering attention to what we might term silent practices is apposite precisely at this juncture. The practices are “silent” in the sense that they are quietly at odds with formal discourses. The official, formally egalitarian juridical discourses of rights and representative democracy that

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accompanied bourgeois society were also accompanied by “tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms” that are “non-egalitarian and a-symmetrical” (Foucault 1979, 222). In India, while the official discourses of Family Planning may reiterate their “target-free approaches,” state practices generate the opposite set of effects, which enjoy their own underlying continuity. The emphasis on sterilizations was not abandoned with the overthrow of the Emergency. It simply shifted its target. Instead of men it was now women who were targeted. Until the period of the Emergency, male sterilization was four to five times more common than female sterilization. But by 1994, “96% of all sterilizations in India were done on women” (Van Hollen 2003, 144). The reaction to male sterilizations during the Emergency, combined with the introduction of new forms of female sterilization—minilaparotomy and laparoscopic sterilization—have led to an almost exclusive policy focus on women since the early 1980s (Soonawala 1992, 83; Soni 1984, 151; Narayana and Kantner 1992, 108). Even while the discourse spoke of reform, the practices of sterilization simply became less visible. Instead of the “camps” that marked the Emergency, women could be targeted “on delivery tables immediately following childbirth or abortions, within the confines of public maternity wards” (Van Hollen 2003, 146). In the mid-1990s, while “prowoman” policies were being recommended, and even as the government was signing on to the reproductive health approach advocated by the international women’s movement, Tamil Nadu’s Department of Family Welfare had set a target “that 70% of all women leaving the hospital after delivery be covered by some family-planning method, namely sterilization or an IUD” (Van Hollen 2003, 147). This was not merely a matter of a regional state deviating from central government policy. Thanks no doubt to its early adoption of “innovative schemes,” Tamil Nadu was actually excelling at a nationwide competition orchestrated by the central government through its All-India Hospitals Postpartum Programme implemented at the level of hospitals: The government provided hospitals with a certain annual rupee-outlayper-bed provided that the hospitals performed a certain number of tubectomies per bed each year. The family-planning “performances” of various districts within the state were also noted and ranked by the state government, and prizes were given accordingly, and the central government distributed prizes to individual states based on their “performances.” The government of Tamil Nadu had often received crores of rupees from the central government for winning first or second place. (Van Hollen 2003, 145–146)



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In 2006, Professor Srinivasan addressed the prestigious International Institute of Population Sciences in Mumbai. His address reviewed a half century of family-planning policy and practice, locating the origins of the institution itself in the forty years of collaboration between social science, demography, economic planning, and the government. Professor Srinivasan concluded that over the fifty years, the family-planning program placed almost a total emphasis on sterilization as the major method of family planning from the very beginning; vasectomy until 1977 and tubectomy thereafter, and the quality of services offered in this regard was far from satisfactory and has not improved over time. . . . Spacing methods, such as IUD, oral pills, injectables and condoms are being used by a small proportion of the eligible couples, even 50 years after the initiation of the program. (Srinivasan 2006, 26)

Such an overwhelming predisposition toward sterilization at the level of state practice is not, of course, neutral. Sterilization is the method least able to be reversed. Contraceptive technologies allowing reversibility and greater choices in preventing pregnancies have been underemphasized and have lacked infrastructural support. Even within the range of such methods, the preference for the IUD has allowed doctors, rather than the woman, to decide whether and when the intrauterine device is removed. Such practices can silently undercut the explicit discourses. While one program might announce a new emphasis on public health, cutbacks in public expenditure—which have accompanied the past two decades of structural adjustment and health reforms advocated by the World Bank—have spelled a radical depletion of the budget for the infectious disease program in India. Expenditure on infectious diseases once accounted for “nearly 30% of India’s public health budget; now it is down to 4 percent” (Rao and Sexton 2010, 27). Ethnographers have shown that the Emergency period continues to live on, in Uttar Pradesh as elsewhere, as the “time of nazbandhi [sterilization]” (Pinto 2008, 366). If it lives on in this manner, it is not simply in the form of memories of a bygone era. Rather, it takes the form of apprehensions that have been sustained by continuities in a whole range of silent state practices. Village health workers such as Auxiliary Nurse Midwives continue to be associated in Jaipur, Rajasthan, “mainly with the work around family planning, in distributing condoms, intra-uterine devices (IUDs) and hormonal pills, rather than with their skills in childbirthing” (Unnithan-Kumar 2004, 71). Even today, according to Rao and Sexton, “several states have introduced a twochild norm for those who wish to contest local elections, while others have

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introduced such norms for access to government schools” (Rao and Sexton 2010, 6). Nothing in what I have said need imply that people are utterly passive in the grip of such apprehensions, well-founded as I have shown them to be. Ethnographers have found that women seek out private clinics and local healers as alternatives to government clinics (Unnithan-Kumar 2004). Many women have found a use even for sterilization. It is used as a mode of contraception not because women have “chosen” it in some neutral environment of a technological “cafeteria” but because it allows them a means of negotiating power relations in the family and wider community. It allows them to establish themselves in the first place as fertile mothers before undertaking any measures to curb fertility (Unnithan-Kumar 2004, 71). In southern India, sterilization allows women who have had children to more quickly establish themselves in the more powerful role of a senior woman who has moved past the age of fertility after bearing children. In this capacity, they can more successfully negotiate with the power of the mother-in-law as well as that of the husband (Saavala 1999). My focus at this point, however, is not on the responses of rural women to the constraints of family-planning policy but on the silent practices of the state, and the basic orientation these provide for different strata of intellectuals who, in one way or another, affect the lives of rural women. As I have argued elsewhere (Ram 2011b), even silent practices wordlessly convey more than an orientation. They shape a mood. The mood in this case is one of distrust— distrust of the capacities of ordinary people, of the poor and of minorities, to comprehend and share the “view of the established state.” In her reflections on expert commentaries about maternal indifference to infant death in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Pinto draws attention to the emotions that escape the “language of population, hygiene, and compliance: ‘Those people have too many babies.’ ‘They never get sterilized.’ ‘They never go to a doctor.’ ‘They live in filth.’ . . .” (Pinto 2008, 366). Where does it spring from, this profound and lasting identification with the state and its projects? What can account for the intensity of affects, which erupt as anger and dismay when the state’s plans for modernity appear to be blocked? How is it that the irrational identifications of intellectuals themselves become invisible, while those of others attract to themselves all the opprobrium of backwardness? Gramsci (1971, 116) directly addresses this deep-seated identification in his “Notes on Italian History.” As a Marxist, he is careful to specify certain social and historical conditions for his thesis, which is a striking one. Under conditions in which economic development is “artificially limited and



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repressed,” turning a given region into a “periphery” of metropolitan capitalist development, Gramsci argues that modernity does not there appear as an economic force embedded in “vast local economic development.” Where no class—such as a strong capitalist class—is available to directly organize the production process and so to emerge as “the bearer of the new ideas,” it is the “intellectual stratum” that plays this part. Furthermore, political mobilization rather than economic development becomes the basis for the emergence of a modern state. These two features create an exaggerated and unique identification between intellectuals and the state. The problem can be formulated as follows: since the state is the concrete form of a productive world and since the intellectuals are the social elements from which the governing personnel is drawn, the intellectual who is not firmly anchored to a strong economic group will tend to present the State as an absolute; in this way the function of the intellectuals is itself conceived of as absolute and pre-eminent, and their historical existence and dignity are abstractly rationalised. (Gramsci 1971, 117)

In such circumstances it is little wonder that, as he puts it, many intellectuals end up “thinking they are the State” (Gramsci 1971, 16). The thesis works extremely well for the Indian nation-state, born of the energy released by mass anticolonial social mobilizations in which intellectuals had a leading role. In his early work, Chatterjee (1986) examines the work of three intellectuals as exemplary of the different phases of anticolonial political thought. But when viewed in terms of Gramsci’s thesis, these intellectuals are not simply exemplars of a particular phase. Their function as intellectuals is crucial in forging the weapons for a wider political mobilization. In the next section I argue that the successful establishment of a postcolonial state never entirely or definitively abolishes the affects and energies that cling to modernity as a project undertaken by state intellectuals. Modernity as Governmentality and Modernity as Affective Project Arguing for a shift from “sovereignty” to “governmentality,” Foucault (1979) sought to show that thoroughly modern forms of power no longer depend on the body of the sovereign or indeed on any kind of body. There are only procedures that classify, distribute, analyze, and spatially fix the objects of governance. Foucault’s thesis lies behind a large body of work that characterizes both the colonial and the postcolonial state in India as the purveyor of a grid of power through which a “population” comes into being in the process

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of being mapped, surveyed, and, above all, known. The colonial project of coming to know India, of mapping and enumerating it, has been repeated in, if anything, an enhanced register for the postcolonial state. For Chatterjee, the “moment of arrival” where nationalist thought is transformed into a discourse of order and power is exemplified above all in the Nehruvian state’s undertaking of planning as “the concrete embodiment of the rational consciousness of a state promoting economic development.” The state attempts to bring into a “single body of knowledge” both physical resources and economic agents in their needs and propensities of action. Planning is, in this view, above all an epistemic process that proceeds “by constituting the objects of planning as objects of knowledge” (Chatterjee 1994, 207). I wish to show that while this thesis generates a potent understanding of Family Planning, it also narrows the range of our understanding by ignoring important dimensions. Family Planning does indeed fit quite readily into an account of power as knowledge. I quote from the First Five Year Plan and its goals, released in 1951: (a) The reduction of the birth rate [must be achieved] to the extent necessary to stabilise the population at a level consistent with the requirements of the national economy. (b) Family limitations or spacing of children is necessary and desirable in order to secure better health for the mother and better care and upbringing of children. (First Five Year Plan, cited in Raina 1988, 10).

The subcommittee of the Planning Commission, leading up to the First Five Year Plan, makes its recommendation in the following terms: Family limitation is necessary and desirable in the interest of the family. It is necessary and desirable that the members of every family comprising the nation take all suitable and practicable steps for securing that the occurrence of a birth in the family is properly spaced in time and limited in number, so as to safeguard the health of the mother and child and enable an adequate share of the resources of the family to be applied effectively to the care and upbringing of children. (cited in Raina 1988, 6)

The family, in this imaginary, is an economic unit, no less than the nation. The “family plan” therefore treats the family as an economic whole, with its resources to be assessed and allocated through the application of a single rational will. The temporality of planning requires the time of the family to be



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understood just as the Five Year Plan conceptualizes the time of the nation: as empty, homogeneous time, unresponsive to the particularity of any context and measurable in the form of properly “spaced” outputs (births) and inputs (cost of upkeep). As I have sought to show, Foucault is even more apposite in directing our attention to practices that silently accompany and undercut official policy discourses that speak of safeguarding rights. However, Foucault’s thesis of disembodied “governmentality” does not, I also argue, quite suffice as a characterization of the modernity I saw circulating with such energy in rural Tamil Nadu. Nor does it account for the eruption of affects in the most prosaic of governmental discourses on demography. These energies and affects lead us back to the group called state intellectuals. Something of the political mobilization that it took to establish a nation-state continues to lend its affective energies to projects of modern reform. The mobile energies of the anticolonial movement in which intellectuals came to see themselves as leaders of a “passive revolution” and subsequently as the engine of the state itself continue to inform their view of modernity as something to be fought for and established through conscious political will. Even the Nehruvian period, characterised by Chatterjee as the “moment of arrival” for the State of Reason, is also characterised by the highly dramatic and affective invitation from Nehru to keep faith with India’s “tryst with destiny.” Nehru’s famous speech “at the stroke of the midnight hour” of August 15, 1947, summons “Midnight’s Children” as bearers of a destiny, something “given,” and also a “tryst” to be kept by Indians, something to be lived up to. Under such conditions, developmentalism never quite assumes its rationalistic form as a linear and teleological form of progress. It remains a project, a watchword, a goal, an undertaking as far as state intellectuals are concerned. When Family Planning first makes its appearance, planning itself is an activist rather than a purely governmental project. Deshpande (1993) has drawn our attention to the striking difference between the “culturalism” that seems to mark Western writings on the imagined nation and the centrality of the economy to Indian nationalist imaginings. Nationalism was critically concerned with the active creation of poverty by the British. This became a key marker of the illegitimacy of colonial government. The publication of R. C. Dutt’s Economic History of India in 1901 has been described as possibly the “definitive core of the nationalist canon” (Prakash 1999, 181). British industrialization was understood by nationalist intellectuals as the means for a “deindustrialization” of India, spelling the ruin of the handicraft industry and the destruction of the village community without the compensation of capitalist development. Wealth was being siphoned off to Britain. Deshpande traces

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two quite varied responses to the economic critique of colonialism. On the one hand, Gandhi looked forward to a nonmodern economy based on moral rather than commodity relations. The contrast to this is Nehru’s model of socialist planning and development economics. The agency of planning performs a major role in the moral vision of a new state that will rescue India from the autarchy and immiseration of colonial rule, guiding the nation toward economic self-sufficiency. As in the Soviet Union and in China (an example even closer to India) planning is a response to the depredations of colonial rule, and the need for it is highlighted by many decades of nationalist critique. The National Planning Committee (NPC), which began its work in 1938, was born in an atmosphere of critique, out of the vision of a vastly expanded sphere of human agency. Set up by the Congress as a “Committee of Experts to consider urgent and vital problems the solution of which is necessary to any scheme of national reconstruction and social planning,” the NPC marks a point in history where the Congress, having done extremely well in the 1937 elections, stood poised to anticipate state power. Behind the establishment of the committee lay the efforts, described in Prakash (1999, 187), of such nationalists as Malaviya and such scientists as Saha, whose vision was of largescale industrialization ushered in by a nation-state “embodying and applying science” (191). The historical experience of the Soviet Union provided the discourse defining a state-planned economy. As with China (Anagnost 1995), socialist planning was a response not simply to capitalism but also to the specifically colonialist depredations and anarchic misadventures highlighted by decades of pointed economic critique. The distinction between governmentality and politics, between “reason” and activism, becomes blurred under such conditions. While the establishment of a nation-state creates new distinctions and tensions between the state and activists, dramatized in the declaration of the Emergency, the state is never entirely robbed of its own affective dimensions. A certain drama, the drama of claiming political agency, of appropriating a modernity initially imposed from without, is never entirely absent even in as rationalist and governmental a discourse as that of family planning. The imaginary unity of the nation, the utopian aspiration of a people working in harmony toward the same goals, does not simply disappear. For what troubles the demographers is precisely the gap between the present in all its messiness and the utopian expectation of unity. The discourses of demographers are no less charged with affect simply because the excitement of imminent independence has died. But the emotions their discourses arouse are now intermittent and of a different kind. The “people,” once addressed by state intellectuals as potential members of the same nation-body, now figure as obstacles.



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Modernity was never simply given as a state of being in India. It has always depended on the affective involvement and politically charged energies of state intellectuals for its propagation and defense. In this sense, I question Foucault’s claim that modern forms of power ever entirely replace an earlier reliance on the bodies of individuals, or that we can dispense with, even in seemingly rationalistic projects, considerations of affect and emotion that are integral to bodily existence. The omission of these dimensions has reinforced a thoroughly epistemic characterization of modernity. By making governmentality a primary characteristic of the modern state, postcolonial theory has consistently represented the state as a complex of ways of knowing its object. Such a relationship invests the knower with authority and power over the known. But even among modernizing intellectuals in India, modernity is far more than an exercise in knowing. Chatterjee (2008, 54; see also 2011, 92–93) argues that India is now witnessing an unprecedented extension of governmentality into rural areas as “governmental agencies distributing education, health services, food, roadways, water, electricity, agricultural technology, emergency relief and dozens of other welfare services have penetrated deep into the interior of everyday peasant life” (2008, 54). Yet in much of rural Tamil Nadu, such “penetration” has long since occurred. “Penetration” has been achieved precisely because it has been sustained by the energies of mobilization rather than willed by an exclusively governmental gaze. In Tamil Nadu, perhaps more than in other parts of India, we can clearly see the activist and political challenge that clings to the propagation of rationalism. Such an affective mixture in this part of India may be traced to its origins not only in the anticolonial social movements but also in the Self-Respect Movement, a mobilization that began in the 1920s. Its opposition to Brahman dominance brought together a rationalistic critique of ritual and an egalitarian mobilization against caste rank, as defined by “traditional” hierarchies. As Price (1996) has cogently argued, “self-respect” (suya-mariyātai) referred to a reworking of traditional notions of honor (mānam) and respect (mariyātai). Instead of residing in inherited rank or even in the more fluid modes of acquiring prestige in precolonial Tamil Nadu (Dirks 1987; Appadurai 1981), mānam and mariyātai became redefined as inhering in equal social relations, without deference to caste. Such a redefinition of honor was at once individualistic—it depended on the individual’s mode of conduct, on the capacity to defend one’s dignity above all else—and social since it consisted in a more generalized message about equality. Regional politics and state government have been dominated ever since by the political party that initially led and organized the movement. The

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­ ravida Munnetra Kazhagam (known simply by its acronym as the DMK) D came to power in 1967. A faction broke away to form the AIDMK in 1972. These two parties have, since the initial electoral victory, dominated Tamil politics through the twentieth century, effortlessly resisting the hegemony of the Congress Party, which has dominated in northern Indian politics. The political and educative roles are closely fused in Tamil Nadu and quite explicitly brought together in the category of the “modern intellectual.” This is, in fact, not merely a category but a title, laden with the emotions of reverence, awarded to the most famous political leaders, such as C. N. Annadurai (1909–1969) and Mu. Karunanidhi (b. 1924). Annadurai has been described as aṟiñar, one who has attained knowledge. Karunanidhi has been addressed as kalaigñar, “artist.” Political leadership and educative functions are enhanced with cultural capital derived from the display of skills in cen tamiḻ, “cultivated Tamil,” displayed as oratory in political speeches and in the flourishes of rhetoric and alliteration in fiction, plays, journalism, and film scripts. M. G. Ramachandran, chief minister of Tamil Nadu for a decade, from 1977 to 1987, and earlier a popular actor in the films of the DMK, owned a string of titles, including vāttiyār, “teacher,” puraṭci naṭikar, “revolutionary actor,” and makkaḻ tilakam, “idol of the masses.” The constellation of titles is itself suggestive of the vast affective reach of what is performatively rendered by “state intellectuals” in this part of India, combining as they do the roles of teacher, revolutionary, and cinema actor. The “people” are constituted simultaneously as students, political followers, and cinema fans (fan clubs double as forms of political organization in Tamil Nadu; see Dickey 1993; Rogers 2009). While many would argue that the rationalist component of the Self-Respect Movement has long since disappeared from the leadership of political parties, it continues to circulate in the activist energies of NGOs and reformist intellectuals,2 as well as in ongoing critiques of “superstition” in popular religion. Writing of the “multiple histories of contraception,” the historian Sarah Hodges (2008, 151) arrives at a similar conclusion to my own: it is not possible to interpret family planning as simply a form of governmentality. Instead, she argues, Indians also forged “a distinctive politics of self-governance through health.” The Limits of State Intellectualism The term “intellectualism” has come to acquire a particular critical content in Western philosophy. It denotes the marked inflation of the role of consciousness and is tied to an “epistemologically grounded notion of the subject.” Although this particular tradition has revolved around a question—how do



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we know what we know about the world?—the question already presumes a conception of what it is to be a human subject: “A person is a being with consciousness, where consciousness is seen as a power to frame representations of things” (Taylor 1985, 98). From this definition flows a certain understanding of agency. An agent is a being who acts—who has certain goals and endeavors to fulfill them. Agency, in this view, is unproblematic. So too are the goals and endeavors: What is striking about persons, therefore, is their ability to conceive different possibilities, to calculate how to get them, to choose between them, and thus to plan their lives. The striking superiority of man is in strategic power. Central to this is the power to represent things clearly. We can plan well when we can lay out the possibilities clearly, when we can calculate their value to us in terms of our goals, as well as the probabilities and cost of their attainment. Our choices can then be clear and conscious. . . . So in one view, what makes an agent a person, a fully human respondent, is this power to plan. (Taylor 1985, 104)

Such a view of the person is not confined, as I propose to show in this book, to Western philosophy. It surfaces with systematic regularity in the social sciences, even when confronted—or precisely when confronted—with its own limit cases. But the form taken by modern intellectualism in India has been different. Its effects are harsher. Its attendant costs have been much greater. The description of agency offered by Taylor has a very odd kind of resonance for the middle-class generation born in India (I include myself here) in the decade immediately following political independence. Reading Taylor’s description of the modern person, I recall my puzzlement as a child, meeting cousins returning to India from a sojourn either in England or the United States. Resemblances in appearance were striking. The visitors were hailed as kin. Yet their comportment was unexpected and a little strange. For Midnight’s Children, the description of modernity as “the power to plan” has the ring of family, somewhat displaced. Certainly we knew of Five Year Plans. More salient for a child were the cartoonlike representations, on roadside posters, of round-faced couples with two children exhorting families to plan and limit their number of children: “Two or three, enough!” (Dō yā teen, bas!).3 So it is not the agency to plan but its location in discourses of “personhood” and individuals that seems dissonant and alien. The agency of the dominant Western philosophical tradition, according to Taylor, is located in the individual person and is no more than a description of what is to be

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found in any person. In modern India, however, there is no such presumption that agency of the kind described actually exists in all persons. “The power to plan” is not a description of what exists but an ideal that must be brought into being as a social reality. Intellectualism in the postcolony is not associated primarily, it seems to me, with an overvaluation of the contemplative mind but with the overvaluation and exaggeration of the consciousness associated with sheer will, with decision making, and with the agency of political projects that will bring a new reality into being through determined effort. It is no coincidence that Lenin’s daring vision of a vastly expanded revolutionary role for a small, highly conscious “vanguard,” outlined in his April Theses of 1917, has been seized on by a vastly heterogeneous array of intellectuals, who all have one thing in common: they are engaged in nation building in what Gramsci has described as the “peripheries” of a metropolitan capitalist modernity. Examples range from Kemal Atatürk, with his desire to conjure up a “self-instituting” modernity in Turkey (Houston 2006, 161), to the “extreme voluntarism” of the Islamist Hekmatyar in Afghanistan in the 1970s (Bedford 2011, 144ff.). There is another difference, which makes state intellectualism in India, particularly in contexts of state, more intrusive than Western intellectualism. In Taylor’s (1985, 114) understanding, most people operate with the same models of agency as those discussed by the philosophers. Intellectuals differ from ordinary people only in their willingness to turn different versions of agency into exclusive alternatives. But the task of modern intellectuals in India has seldom been perceived in this light. Intellectuals are not seen as systematizing and rendering coherent what they share with “most people.” Insofar as their function is specifically modern, their relationship to ordinary people is rather that of reeducation. They contest and rectify ordinary forms of thinking. What makes the application of this goal to rural people particularly unfair is the fact that no one, not even those who propagate it, can actually live up to such ideals. Consider what it would mean to live out the kind of subjectivity that family-planning discourse envisages as the only alternative to sterilization—a subjectivity that properly “spaces” children. This would require transforming the capacity to have children, which may or may not be the object of consciousness at any given point in an individual’s life, into something that is formally considered. It is not only that the mind must do the surveying, the ordering, and the choosing, but also part of what it must survey is the body itself. One has to convert a propensity, a capacity, which may be conceived—if conceived at all—in any number of ways, into a discrete biological feature that can be located in specific organs, whose natural laws can



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be learned and controlled in the same way that science envisions objects in the world. The body, quite eliminated from this view of human subjectivity, becomes part of the objective world. The more frequently criticised term in modern discourse is “biologism”—an understanding of the body that turns it into a biological entity governed by natural laws like any other object in the world. Less frequently noted is a component that is presumed by biologism and that therefore silently accompanies it, a certain view of the mind we might describe as mentalism. Mentalism assumes that subjectivity is located entirely in the mind and takes the rest of the world, including one’s own body, as an object for its consideration. The ethnography of family planning is replete with instances of the mismatch between state projects of family planning and the diversity of forms of gender, family, and community. The rain-forest Dayak peoples of Indonesia described by Tsing (1993, 109), for example, with all the best will in the world, simply “could neither imagine nor invent plannable families,” with the requisite traits of “male heads” representing wives and children. Do we live time, particularly when it comes to having children, as a matter of measurement, of spaced intervals without reference to intervening events? Here too anthropologists have argued otherwise: Demographic students of reproduction tend to imagine that fertility decisions are made once-and-for-all, generally at the beginning of the reproductive lifespan, with at most small adjustments after that. In this way they make people into timeless strategizers who never change their minds. In doing so they neglect the ambiguity, spontaneity, and improvisation, the bungling, changing-of-mind, and full-scale about-faces that characterize most people’s lives, reproductive and otherwise. (Greenhalgh 1995, 22)

To these questions anthropology is already asking we need to ask questions also about the kind of bodies imagined by family planning. The adoption of alternative methods of contraception, and in particular the concept of “spacing” one’s fertility, are often regarded as beyond the comprehension of uneducated women. But do we, any one of us, characteristically experience the capacity to have children as “fertility”? Do we, even with the best education in the world, regard fertility and time as variables to be correlated in the form of even intervals? There are a number of caveats and concessions that must be made at this point, for it is true that the technology of “spacing fertility” does successfully act on the body, using precisely such presumptions. Nor would I rule out that a degree of agency may occasionally be gained by

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just such a reduction. To have one’s ailments crisply diagnosed as a “gynecological problem” afflicting particular organs, to have them thus delimited and even surgically removed, or to have them augmented with chemical hormones and implants, can be experienced as relief. And if there are disturbances in our capacity to have children, then the acquisition of the capacity to have children most definitely can become an entirely conscious, even obsessively conscious, project. But we are mistaken when we try to generalize this as a primary way of living the potentiality to have children. That potentiality is not lived as a discrete objectlike thing in the world, nor do we live it as an object of our thoughts unless there is a disturbance of some kind. Even then—as the rest of this book will show—there is no guarantee that disturbances of the kind we call infertility will necessarily be lived as purely mental processes, or as purely physiological processes. I would describe this impossible ideal as pernicious, not simply because it is out of reach of human subjectivity but also because of the particular role it has had in cross-class relations between state intellectuals and villagers. The greater the cultural capital enjoyed by one’s class, the less one needs to be troubled by such lofty and impossible definitions of modernity. The urban middle class has its own hybrid amalgam of understandings in which humoral notions of heating and cooling liquids and foods, astrology, Ayurveda, yoga, and many other older understandings continue to play a salient role. Pluralism comes under relatively little challenge when it occurs in the practices of elites, in part because elite orientations to “tradition,” and indeed to the past itself, do not give rise to immediate suspicions of “backwardness.” Quite the opposite is the case. In diverse areas, ranging from classical music and dance (Weidman 2006; Bhakle 2005; O’Shea 2007; Ram 2000, 2005, 2010b, 2011a) to favored medical traditions such as Ayurveda, the ability to invoke ancient wisdom has been a constitutive feature in the very making of the middle class. Berger’s study (2008) of the formation of a specifically Hindu urban middle class identity in Uttar Pradesh demonstrates the privileging of Ayurveda in the emergent public domain in the first half of the twentieth century. Similarly, in a study of doctors and patients in metropolitan IVF (in vitro fertilization) clinics, Bharadwaj (2006, 454) describes the “continuous relationship with the past” unselfconsciously enjoyed by the elites, a relationship that feeds into “daily conversations, acts and attitudes towards the rapidly changing surroundings.” In dealing with the incapacity of IVF technology to deliver certainty, doctors and patients from the educated middle classes in India invoke a wide range of religious understandings. However, the ability to sustain “a continuous dialogue with its cultural past” is not, as Bharadwaj would have it, a unique attribute of “the contempo-



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rary Hindu worldview.” That ability is in a sense universally available—for all human existence enjoys an opening on to the past. But that ability is also less available than Bharadwaj imagines. For not all Hindus, in their dialogue with the past, are equally endowed with cultural legitimacy. A rural woman might move between biomedical facilities, home remedies, and religious pilgrimages. On her visits to shrines, she may well have done more than just pray to the goddess. Such shrines are also meeting places for mediums. Possessed by the power of the deities, mediums divine the cause of misfortune in their petitioners and offer divine help. Yet in the case of such a woman, there is no question of interpreting such fluid utilization of traditions as a “continuous dialogue” between past and present. The mediums she consults are consigned to a past that stands over and dominates rural villagers. Their location in this kind of past is taken as evidence of their intellectual incapacity to make sound distinctions between modern medicine and other, superstitious treatments. Whether the authority on mediums is a parish priest, a bishop, or a “secular” intellectual or a professional, the consensus is the same: such mediums do not qualify as a repository of ancient wisdom, nor are they to be deemed authentic in their possession. Rural “pluralism” is never treated as neutral, particularly when it includes a whole bundle of practices that are regarded as “supernatural” rather than as “religious.” Class privilege resides, therefore, not just in one’s access to a tradition admitted to the national tradition but also, more fundamentally, in the extent to which one is permitted to value, or even to acknowledge, the orientations bequeathed by the past while still being recognized as a “contemporary” subject coeval with modernity.

Chapter 2

Minor Practices

L i v i n g i n a n d m o v i n g a r o u n d Tamil villages affords the middle-class intellectual an opportunity to become aware of phenomena that fall outside the range of what she knows or even quite recognizes. Anthropology has simply systematized and elaborated the kind of reflexivity by which that intellectual, or any sojourner in a foreign land, can compare and contrast new understandings with those familiar to her from her own primary socialization. But this method yields very different results depending on where one was socialized. I grew up in India, and my family migrated to Australia when I was fourteen. We made frequent visits home. Whatever I may know at an intellectual level about the cultural and social diversity in both these countries, at times I continue to experience “India” and “Australia” as relatively homogeneous entities. This tendency in my own experience suggests a phenomenological basis for the “Orientalist” practices and attitudes we now detect in the colonizing West. When I work as an ethnographer of rural India, however, the relevant contrast is no longer between India and Australia. Now the contrast is between the India I grew up in and the very different versions of “India” I have to cope with. The reflexivity born of this contrast succeeds in exposing some elements of the class and caste nature of the dominant culture that I took for granted when I was growing up in Delhi. An upbringing in upper-caste urban Hindu India allows one to bask in the assumption that one lives in a place where a unique Indian modernity has successfully integrated the best of Indian traditions. For members of a dominant culture this assumption is all 42



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the more pervasive in that it also allows for the exercise of a certain selectivity among those traditions. In the 1960s, before the rise of a more combative Hindu nationalism, a version of “Hindu tradition” was thus enabled to take its place among several elements of modernity congenial to the Indian middle classes. This version coexisted comfortably enough with an official secularism. Children who attended modern schools assumed they would follow their elders through the prescribed sequence of modern institutions. I thought little about religion—I did not need to—and moved quite easily into the secular Enlightenment politics of Marxism and feminist theory and politics at Sydney University in the 1970s, making a transition in due course into the circles engaged in poststructuralist and postcolonial critique. Religion seemed further away than ever. Secularism of this kind rests on a certain obliviousness to one’s surroundings. No wider culture—not even a secular culture—is without elements of dogma, faith, and religion, warring or reconciled with secularism as the case may be. In India the political upsurge of Hindu nationalism in the late 1980s and 1990s made it impossible to sustain such an undisturbed version of secularism. My own journey, as an Indian displaced to a Western country, began in Catholic fishing villages in the early 1980s. The themes of my investigation— capitalist transformation, the sexual division of labor, labor movements, and the role of women—were such that they could have been safely contained within the terms of my intellectual training. But the unfamiliar nature of the place began to alert me to new challenges. Living in a Catholic community in India, a fishing community at the margins of a largely agrarian rural culture, was startling enough (Ram 1991b). But further challenges awaited me. I began to listen to villagers’ accounts of their illnesses. I encountered a set of etiologies that were systematically diverse. Some referred to a branch of medicine called Siddha,1 others to sorcery. To combat sorcery, villagers had recourse to the Catholic saints and to Mother Mary, or Māta. But they also consulted mantiravātis, men who knew how to wield mantras for better and for worse. Affliction by spirits was common among women and especially among those who were prevented from establishing themselves as the mothers of thriving children. I quote from my notes: Claramma is childless—she keeps suffering miscarriages. She went to Siddha doctors, but there is a popular perception that the pattiyam, or dietary restrictions that go with this treatment, cannot be assimilated by all bodies. She is still on these medicines, but has been visiting shrines ever since undertaking a significant pilgrimage to Bālarāmapuram in Kerala, to

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the shrine of St. Sebastian. She went there to seek a cure for her inability to urinate, which bloated her stomach. The power of the saint was such that she was able to experience relief even before she reached the shrine. Once she was there, a medium diagnosed that someone had placed a sorcery offering to Icakki in her house. On return she purified her house, and tried to free it of fish and cooking smells before inviting two mantiravātis (Skt. mantravādi), a married couple, to come to visit her. Their assistants began to dig around the house, and found the magic material in a corner. They replaced it with a spear, the symbol of St. Sebastian. Two months later another magical offering was found, this time by her husband, who was sleeping on the front porch of the house. The next morning he was too ill to go fishing. They called in the parish priest, who prayed over the material and burnt it. Claramma believes her husband’s relatives would prefer to see her die childless. Before their marriage, her husband lived with his father’s sister’s family. His father’s sister wanted him to marry her daughter. After marriage, Claramma tried to live with these relatives but was given no access to her husband’s income. Her dowry jewellery was taken off her. She and her husband set up house separately, as a couple, but there has been friction between them. She feels his relatives are hoping she will die, allowing him to return to them. She believes she is only kept alive by God’s grace.

None of these etiologies were familiar to me. What was challenging was not the unfamiliarity in itself but the mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The closer it came to my own previous experience, the more unsettling was the mixture. Siddha medicine, for example, was widely used in Kanyakumari. Its use in such treatments I could assimilate to the use of Ayurvedic medicine by middle-class Indians. But one component of the mixture—possession, and the beings who possessed villagers—I found quite unsettling. I was not alone. In part, I was becoming attuned to the apprehensions of my companions in the coastal village, who—as we walked together—would avoid certain paths where we might encounter a being they simply called Eseki. She and her henchmen, Cuṭalai Māṭan and Vannāra Māṭan, were regularly mentioned in accounts of misfortunes and illnesses of all kinds. When mantiravātis failed, my fellow villagers turned to Māta, for she knew how to combat devils of all kinds. What made it all far more disturbing to me, however, was my gradually becoming aware that this malign being was worshipped as a goddess— just across the road dividing the coastal Catholics from “inland” agricultural Nadars. There, she was venerated as Ammaṉ, the generic name in southern



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India for the goddess. Icakki Ammaṉ (sometimes spelled in English as Esakki Ammaṉ) proved to be worshipped not only in smaller shrines near the coastal villages but also in larger temples in Kanyakumari District. Yet even for her worshippers Icakki Ammaṉ was known for her gruesome deeds. A local book of folklore I picked up in the market conveys the ominous atmosphere surrounding Ammaṉ. The description takes the form of a viṭukatai, a genre of story (katai) that, as in a quiz, leads the listener by degrees to the object of description, creating an aura of mystery: kāṭṭtukuḷḷe niṟpāḷ kaḷḷar uṭan piṟantāḷ pillai eṭukka teriyum—ānāl pillaiyai āṭṭa teriyātu avaḷ yār?   (Perumāḷ 1990, 44) I translate the above as follows: She stands within a forest She was born to the Kallars She knows how to take a child But not how to rock a cradle. Who is She? I was faced with more than an ethnographic puzzle. I was being drawn closer home. For Ammaṉ was a part of my childhood. I had thought I knew her. She rose, resplendent, each year in the rooms of my family’s network of Tamil households in Delhi. At the time of her festival of Vara-Lakshmi Nōṉpu, she would emerge from the deft fingers of women, equipped with full breasts of coconuts, draped in magnificent Kanchipuram silks and jewels. Perched on top of this rather buxom edifice, her silver visage appeared disproportionately small, but she always gleamed reassuringly at the women gathered in her honor. The transmission of the silver visage was a thoroughly domestic affair, passed on by mothers-in-law to daughters-in-law as an aspect of women’s ritual responsibility to secure their family’s well-being. Presided over by this serene deity, her worshippers celebrated her in equally serene fashion. Women and girls gathered in front of her to sing songs composed by Tyagaraja and other nineteenth-century saint-composers, while the men chatted amicably about politics and the workplace on the verandas—from what I would glean on my little forays out there. The less-interesting ritual part-

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ing gifts—a half coconut, betel leaves, and shavings of areca nut, vermilion kuṅkumam (powder for auspicious mark on forehead)—were soon discarded by us children. The gifts we snacked on as we went home consisted of nothing more stimulating than boiled, mildly spiced chickpea cuṇṭal. This familiar Ammaṉ stood revealed as a thoroughly upper-caste goddess. The Ammaṉ I now encountered could not have been more different in her appearance, in her temperament, or in her relationship with devotees. It was not until the early 1990s that I finally had the opportunity to attend a fullfledged festival held in honor of Icakki Ammaṉ at one of her main temples in the district, called Mūppantaḷ Kōyil. I was accompanied by my friend Stella. I don’t know which of us felt more at sea in the extraordinary scenes that unfolded around us—the upper-caste Hindu or the Catholic raised in the urban environment of Colombo. I offer my field notes of the occasion, not simply to convey empirical data but to emphasize how someone brought up in middleclass India can find themselves in a foreign land among those who ostensibly share the same “Hindu” religion. Trip to Mūppantaḷ Kōyil, the Shrine of Icakki Ammaṉ, Kanyakumari (November 10, 1992) A beautiful overcast day, Kanyakumari at its best, clouds rolling over peaks, paddy and lily ponds, and rushing streams whose beauty belies the devastation wrought by the floods last month. The temple is in two parts, both dedicated to Icakki. Cuṭalai Māṭan is worshipped outside her temple. One structure is crude, more like a rest-house for pilgrims, and the image of Icakki is also crude. Around are banyan trees, some with clusters of Icakki pommai [dolls], donated by pilgrims as part of their nērtti [offerings]. In the main temple, Icakki stands with her mouth agape. Stella calls it the raudra (Skt.) or “angry” avatar (Skt.). The priests keep thrusting red powder into her mouth, making it ever more bloody looking. The priests are quite different from the Brahman priests I am used to. They are wearing green vēṭṭtikaḷ [men’s lower garment wrapped around waist] with gold borders [instead of the white vēṭṭtikaḷ worn by Brahman priests]. They look a lot fitter too! The other temple has a very crude image, still looking more like a pommai than a proper vikrakam [temple image, Skt. vigraha], with a lot of crudely made jewellery and a cavari [hairpiece] just pasted on. The crudity of the image is startling. People are sitting in rows in two rooms, awaiting the ceremony. The cult is patently around fertility. Small children are led in by the dozen for blessings; in the main ceremony women bring cradles, large wooden ones, not elaborate, either empty, or holding a little



Minor Practices

image of a child, depending on whether the women are thanking Icakki or praying for a child. The full cradle is bathed in a tank outside, then placed on an offering plate along with cantaṅam [sandalwood], kuṅkumam, panīr [scented water], silk cloth, flowers and fruit, to be offered as arcaṉai [ritual offering] by the priest. Those making offerings are led in procession with koṭṭtu mēḷam [drums] and nāgasvaram [long, double-reeded instrument used in temple ceremony] around the temple three times and then up the centre aisle for the offering and āratti [passing of the camphor flame in front of the image]. Outside, a little group of vil pāṭṭu [bow song] singers perform in quite a muted way, an “aḻakaṉ katai” a story about a rākśasā. No-one is paying them much attention until I request them to sing the song more fully for us. I note down the words of the song to Icakki [which I later translated, and give below]: May Sarawati sit on my tongue and guide my song A Nāgarājar and a Nāga Devi Had been ruling for twelve years The place they ruled over was surrounded by salt oceans, by green oceans, by coral bound oceans. But—they had no children. They had gold, they had money, they had wealth But there was no child to experience it, There was no child to inherit it and prolong the lineage There was no child to roll and play with the coconuts so carefully harvested and stored. [The Nāga queen spoke] The women are calling me barren, sterile [malaṭi] What if we have so much wealth, they call me a childless sinner; What sins have I committed? Have we not given milk to the infants who cry of hunger? Have we not done the right thing by our subjects? Why then this punishment, why this sentence, O King? The couple did perform penance, and sacrifice [yākam, Skt.]. They gave milk to the children, they built shelters for the pilgrims, they built resting stones for pilgrims; they practiced the dharma of the gift [dāna darmam]; they practiced the dharma of bestowing food [aṉṉa darmam].

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They had one girl, they called her Ulaka mahādēvi A second, they called her Śakti A third, they called Māri a fourth they called Kāḷi a fifth they called Icakki a sixth they called Dūrga. These girls played around Mount Kailāca [the home of Shiva] They played with Gaṇapati and Murukaṉ [the sons of Shiva] Then Icakki wished to go down to the Realm of the Demons [Bū Lōkam] She did tapas [penance] to Civaṉ [Shiva, Skt.] to equip herself She asked for vaṟaṅkaḷ [boons]: “I wish for the śakti that is enough to subdue a mad elephant To strike those who have come at an untimely hour [nēram tappi vanta vaṟam]. I wish for the śakti to strike them in the throat.” Civaṉ granted her these boons, but still she did not leave. Civaṉ was astonished She then asked for one more vaṟam: “I wish for pearls” [muttu] she said. Civaṉ was puzzled: there are so many kinds of pearls, he said. There are pearls inside the oysters; Inside elephant’s tusks; There are so many varieties in the world, what kind of muttu do you want? “None of the above kinds,” she said. “I wish the kind of muttu that will make men worship me.” He granted her the boon, unaware of the nature of this “muttu.” [As we say], to test the strength of a knife, plunge it into the very tree on which it was sharpened. Just in that way, Icakki threw some of the muttus On Civaṉ himself. He writhed as one who had been placed in flames, There was not even enough space to place a needle So covered was he with them.



Minor Practices

Civaṉ called Pārvati to help. She ran and plucked a newly sprouted soft banana leaf And covered him with it. She knew not whether to stay with him Or to run for help to Vișṉu. She ran to Vișṉu But he was not in the ocean of milk. At last, she found him and told him of her husband’s trouble But Vișṉu knew not what to do. The two of them, Vișṉu and Pārvati, Went in search of Icakki. Vișnu: You must cure my brother in law [macciṉar] Icakki took a bunch of margosa leaves [vēppa ilai] And she stroked Civaṉ’s body with it. He was healed. Civaṉ thought: I am a god, yet I cannot take this pain. How will mankind manage? He took the pearls And he dry fried them to reduce their strength. But some of the muttus escaped And Icakki picked them up. Siva with a pati [cup for measuring rice] Carefully measured out the muttus. The fried muttus are the milder poxes. The strong ones are small pox. All these muttus belong to Icakki. With them she rules over the earth. Evidently [I write in my notes] Icakki, wielder of the pearls of small pox with which she could terrorise Shiva himself, is one of the disease goddesses found all over India. The ferocious nature of the child Icakki is heralded by the ontology of her sisters, none of whom are auspicious goddesses. But neither are they as lowly as the Sitala Ma of north India. They all dwell within a range demarcated by the village goddess Māri Ammaṉ on the one hand, and on the other, by the raudric or terrifying aspects of the Sanskritic goddesses, Durga, Sakti and Kāli. Icakki is located within this range of goddesses through the familiar South Indian narrative trope of kinship, particularly of the relationship between “sisters.” By afternoon, a crowd has gathered around these performers. A swing

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has been erected, decked with flowers. We are told the Ammaṉ will swing on it. In front of the singers, dance some women. The very presence of dance among women in a public place signals the “presence” of possession. An old woman dances with her tongue clenched between her teeth. A young woman dances, her hair out, the talaippu [upper part of sari] tucked at her waist. Later she jumps on one spot, her hands outstretched and clenched. A young woman has brought with her a garland, a red towel and a turmeric-coloured cloth. She joins the dancers late, after placing these items around her neck and hitching her sari at the waist. Her expression may be one of suffering—the rest just seem rapt. An old woman in a white sari, and no blouse, and another older woman wearing a saffron sari, holding the goddess’s vēppa ilai [margosa leaf] dance rhythmically, and offer the leaves to onlookers. Stella later recounts she saw a woman clasping her hands like an empty cradle, and rocking it. I think of all the reproductive disasters that seem to inevitably occasion women’s possession in the village. The women among the onlookers ululate from time to time, covering their mouths while doing so. I recall my grandmother reproving me when I did this, telling me it was inauspicious, appropriate only at mourning. But here it is part of worship. A man comes through, who has been worshipping Cuṭalai Māṭaṉ. His body is smeared in vipūti [sacred ash], and his white vētti soaked after a ritual bath. He carries a vēl [the goddess’s trident], a vāḻ [curved sword], and a thick club under his arm. He looks gaunt and fierce. Later, a male priest appears, in a state of possession. He comes in front of the vil pāṭṭu singers and dances—first barely twitching, then more vigorously. His feet are planted firmly apart, bracing his body. His head shakes from side to side. At one point he lurches towards the swing, and is helped to sit on it. Other priests push from behind and the women sing an ūncal pāṭṭu [swing song]: Ammaṉ is on the swing She will answer and banish our woes Celebrate the Ammaṉ on the swing The swing stops and there is a stampede to have the goddess tell “kuṟi” or prophesy. The possessed priest places his hand on the head of random individuals, and tells “kuṟi” after “kuṟi.” When he seems to run out, the swing is re-started. This swing is like the dance of possession—a kind of mechanical dance, which supplies the rhythm and fuel. From time to time there is ululation, but intent on the kuṟi and the swing, I have not noticed what is going on to my right. I turn around and experience shock: the



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ground runs with rivulets of water turned red with blood. The “Cuṭalai Māṭan” worshipping priest is standing with his vāl in hand. Two headless black goats lie on the ground. A third black goat is held by two men. It stands still—and then, “Orē veṭṭu” shouts someone admiringly, “[In just] One stroke!”—the head has been severed with one blow, evidently regarded as a worthy skill. Several chickens are slaughtered by the same man. The chickens are offerings brought by worshippers. He charges a few rupees and takes the head of the creature as commission. I am soaked with rain and sickened by the blood, so I wander off. I find another hub of activity at the next shrine. A giant pot of water, thick with turmeric and herbs, is slowly heating up over a smoking fire—a slow fire, in all this rain. Round it dance a man and woman holding a whisk of areca flowers. The man is bare-chested and the woman wears no blouse. Inside the shrine, the drums, nāgasvaram and bells have all created a rhythmic music to dance to. The drums subside, then rise to crescendo. The two dance at varying tempos as well, the man occasionally dipping his hand in hot liquid and flourishing it at the crowd. He smears the liquid on his face, which is red with kuṅkumam powder, as is his tongue, which he sticks out occasionally. He plucks the vēppa ilai off branches he carries and throws them in the pot. A long while later, the pot comes to a boil and the crowd begins to surge forward and ululate. The two dip the fronds of areca flowers into the boiling liquid and slap their heads and bare backs with it. The liquid sprays, steam rises off their bodies, clearly visible against the overcast sky. They dance around the pot, and another goat is sacrificed. The crowd melts away within minutes.

Indian Cultural Marxism on Folk Religion In a well-known paper on the “five components of Hinduism,” Sontheimer (2004) delineates some of the characteristics of folk and tribal religion. In these spheres of practice, the gods are not distant. They are presences in the landscape. One can gain access to them by drumming and dancing. While there are ritual specialists, they do not function simply as intellectuals. The gods possess their bodies. They become shamanic mediums. Drumming and ecstatic possession are central features in Sontheimer’s account, along with various acts of ecstatic bodily modification, such as skewering cheeks with metal spokes at the height of ritual emotion, fire walking, and speaking with the voice of a possessing god or goddess. A strong element of play pervades folk festivals. A continuum obtains between human beings and divinities:

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dead heroes and heroines of a clan can easily become worshipped as gods and goddesses, particularly if they have met with a violent death. Nowhere else among the “five components”—nowhere in Brahmanic scripturalism, asceticism, and renunciation, and nowhere in bhakti (Skt., “devotion to a personal god”)—are the gods immediately accessible to devotees. Worship in all these cases—including bhakti, which is often celebrated for its incorporation of lower-caste creativity—is directed to a transcendental god. As Sontheimer (1995, 394) points out, every one of these dominant models, incorporated as they are into upper-caste culture, have signified their disapproval of the distinctive features of folk and tribal complexes. In bhakti, for example, active and continual labor has been devoted to sifting out what is pure, sātvik (Skt.) from rākșas (Skt.), “demonic,” bhakti. Sontheimer’s identification of possession as a distinctive element of “folk” and “tribal” religions, as well as similar claims by other scholars, has been extensively reexamined by Smith (2006). In an ambitious undertaking, Smith surveys evidence from a variety of Sanskrit texts, genres, and periods of composition, ranging from the Rig Veda to the epic traditions (the Mahabharata in particular), Ayurveda, and Tantra. The more limited but more valuable claim made by Smith is that Sanskritic traditions have more in common with possession than is commonly acknowledged. In this claim Smith is successful. He brings to light the existence in these traditions of rich and vivid constructions that produced a “hybridised self and notions of identity that were open, permeable, and without fixed boundaries” (593). His argument at this level is welcome and entirely in keeping with my own argument, which does not seek to sequester possession from a much more generalized and pervasive cultural style. I part company, however, from Smith’s more far-reaching claims. He seeks to classify all Sanskritic cultural constructions that can be found to favor “a real, if temporary, shift in identity and perspective” (2006, 199) as forms of “possession”: “It is a metamorphosis, but it cannot be called shape shifting. Thus, I argue, it is fair to label it possession” (591). Based on such a reclassification, Smith seeks to restore a certain temporal preeminence to Sanskrit texts. The epic Mahabharata he describes as having “decisively set the agendas for possession in South Asia for the next two millennia” (174). He posits an original moment of a Sanskritic culture that is “pre-Brahmanic.” In this moment, the folk and the Sanskritic had not yet bifurcated: “[Before] the philosophy and theology of the Vedas and the Upanisads devolved into Brahmanism, possession was recognized, even embraced by Brahmans” (199). Whether or not there was such an originary unity, by the end of his book Smith is prepared to distinguish between Brahmanic, or Sanskritized, forms



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of possession and non-Sanskritized forms of possession. Yet he still wishes to call them all possession. Within this one category, Brahmanic possession is distinguished as the “gradual school,” while the non-Sanskritic forms he terms the sudden school of possession (Smith 2006, 591). Smith’s actual description of Brahmanic forms of possession indicates differences far more profound than those conveyed by his distinction between gradualness and suddenness. The school of “possession” he finds in the Sanskrit texts “inculcates control by keeping the consciousness and intentionality of the ritualist intact and dominant. It is neither festive nor oracular and may be very private” (Smith 2006, 591). But these are features that radically distinguish the Sanskritic from the folk and tribal models. These models do not value “keeping the consciousness and intentionality of the ritualist intact and dominant.” They are often “oracular” and never “very private.” Such forms of possession in the folk model are not even necessarily “sudden.” They may be cultivated in the form of apprentice-based learning in the performance of ritual theater (Frasca 1990; Blackburn 1988). I have therefore seen little reason to extend the term “possession” to the Brahmanical model. I continue to see distinctive features in the so-called folk and tribal cultural complexes. This is not just a matter of taxonomic accuracy. If differences between elite and folk or tribal religions continue to inform the heterogeneity of Indian cultural practices, this indicates that the bid for cultural hegemony—or what Dumont described as Sanskritic culture’s attempt at “encompassment” (Dumont 1972)—is not the successful project he took it to be but remains an entirely unfinished business. A deity such as Icakki bears, in her very ontology, the marks of an extraordinarily long history. She certainly contains characteristics that can be traced to Vedic deities. A recent full-length study on Icakki Ammaṉ by Schuler (2009) traces the name Icakki to the Vedic yakshi (Skt.). Yakshis were associated with magical powers and, in later sutras, transformed into “demonic beings” (Schuler 2009, 242). However, other elements of Icakki’s ontology link her to pre-Sanskritic elements that were a vital organizing principle of the Caṅkam poetic corpus2 (first c. BC to fifth c. AD; Hardy 1983). For instance, she remains connected to the milky kalli plant, which serves as a witness to murder and as a weapon of revenge in one of the central narratives in her worship today. The association between a deity and the kalli plant occurs in the Puṟāṉūru (first c. BC to second c. AD), which speaks of the kalli as inhabited by a deity and as characteristic of the dry pālai wasteland and the cremation grounds (Schuler 2009, 228). We could, of course, interpret this, and like instances, as simply a part of the rich tapestry of syncretism. Yet syncretism itself need not imply an end to antagonisms. Her cult and her ontology are a living testimony to tensions

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and power struggles that have never quite been reconciled. In the narrative I heard and translated at her shrine, Icakki is assimilated as a sister to the pantheon of Sanskritic goddesses, significantly located at the more fearsome end of the goddess spectrum. Icakki, in this narrative, gains her dreaded powers over disease (the muttu, or “pearls” of the pox) only after supplicating Shiva. Schuler (2009, 31n14) refers to a “clash between Saivism [the worship of Shiva] and the Ammaṉ cult, and the Saiva tradition’s aim of taming the cult.” Shiva is supposed to have defeated the goddess in a dance contest. An early Saivite devotional hymn by Kārakkāl Ammaiyār (550–650) tells of a de­mon­ ess associated with the kalli plant and the cremation ground. Unlike in the Puṟāṉūru, she now seems to sulk in her futile rage against Shiva: “Angrily, she kicks dust to put [the fire] out where he is dancing, our god of Tiruvālaṅkaṭu” (cited in Schuler 2009, 32). Yet the matter is far from resolved, it would seem, even in the twentyfirst century. The narrative I heard sung at her temple has Icakki turning her newly acquired power of affliction back on Shiva himself. Shiva finds his suffering from smallpox as unbearable as might any mortal. The great Sanskritic gods are forced to run to Icakki for help. Dealing as I am, therefore, with matters that are not resolved, I draw my inspiration in this section from cultural Marxist scholars, whose work has enjoyed a lively presence in the modern Indian intellectual landscape. What makes these particularly useful for my purposes is that the activist orientation of cultural Marxism distinguishes and enlivens the account it offers of folk religion. Folk and tribal elements emerge not as superseded phenomena—even though this meaning continues to cling to Marxism’s teleology of progress—but as cultural elements that have only ever been imperfectly assimilated into the idiom of upper-caste Sanskritic Hinduism. One of the most original theorists in this tradition was Sontheimer’s mentor, D. D. Kosambi, who published in the 1940s and 1950s. In earlier historicist versions of the past, India had appeared as a country with “no history,” wrapped in Oriental stasis. Kosambi, as a historical materialist, challenged this assumption. Through his privileging of the longue durée of shifting modes of production, India was theorized as a “country of long survivals” (Kosambi 1956, 8). Kosambi transformed elements of colonial anthropological discourse— which saw India as a museum of social evolutionary stages—into a discourse whereby the presumptive unity of the Indian social fabric was denied. India was explored as an uneven social formation where hegemony was worked through assimilation. Kosambi emphasized not the replacement of prior cultural practices but the incorporation and imperfect assimilation of the practices of forest dwellers, nomadic pastoralists, and warrior bandit groups into



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the social order of caste and Brahmanism. The deities of the anterior groups become unequally assimilated into the Sanskritic pantheon. These deities reemerge as the domesticated wives or infants of the dominant Sanskritic male deities. Formerly autonomous goddesses are turned into wives. Goddesses with their own full-fledged cults are turned into avatars of the Brahmanic goddess Lakshmi or Parvati. Kosambi encourages us to look even at contemporary India to see “history” as an ongoing process. Such processes are identified not only in the areas designated by colonial anthropology as the domain of the primitive but also right in the cultural heartland of the big cities: It is not the primitive tribes of other countries that are of primary interest here, nor primitive Indian survivals in marginal territory such as the Khasias, Nagas, Oraons, Bhils, Todas, Kadars. The social clusters that survive even in the heart of fully developed areas, say in and around cities, with others which mark all strata of a caste society as having developed at some older date from the absorption of tribal groups, constitute priceless evidence for the interpretation of some ancient record or archaeological find; their survival as backward groups also furnishes the real problem for explanation in the light of historical development. (Kosambi 1956, 7–8)

The “brief tour” of his own neighborhood in Pune on which he conducts the reader is a superb example of Kosambi’s method. The reader is able to look at the Indian environment with new eyes, noticing the unevenness of the social formation and the marked diversity of cultural practices. Institutions introduced by the British (the Law College, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Fergusson College) as well as the buildings of the newly independent Indian bourgeoisie figure merely as the most recent social layers of this complex edifice that is represented as one culture (Kosambi 1956, 25ff.). Alerted by a perspective such as this, we find, in the genealogy of popular religion in Tamil Nadu, traces of deities that date back to the middle of the first century. If we refer once more to early Tamil Caṅkam literature dating to the middle of the first century and the late third century, we find descriptions of male gods belonging to the forest (mullai) and mountain (kuṟiñci) regions of Tamil Nadu called Mayōṉ, Ceyyōṉ, or Murukaṉ. Mayōṉ was assimilated into the Krishna cult, which entered Tamil Nadu from what is now Andhra Pradesh between the sixth and tenth centuries (Hardy 1983). Ceyyōṉ, a hunting god, was assimilated with the Vedic figure of Skanda. By the fourth or fifth century, all these figures had been merged into Murukaṉ, the son of the god Shiva (Clothey 1978).

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Subsequent scholarship on the Tamil country has uncovered a social history in which, to use Kosambi’s words (1956, 25), “tribal elements [are] being fused into a general society.” The literature on the nonagrarian castes of Tamil Nadu, and their particular association with the worship of bloodthirsty deities, is well exemplified in the work of Mines (1984).3 Viewed in this perspective, the cult of Icakki Ammaṉ appears as something more than a remote object worthy of antiquarian scholarship. It is also more than a simple tussle between female and male deities. The links between the particular cults, the particular ways of life, and the specific landscapes and places in which those ways of life evolved remain alive in the practices of the cult. In the following narrative, taken from local folklorist A. K. Perumāḷ (1990), Icakki Ammaṉ, located now in the mountain landscape, unleashes her wrath at the disturbing incursions of agriculturalists sent in by the king: The king enlists agriculturalists to grow banana groves in the mountainous country. Icakki comes in the form of a giant parrot and seizes a whole grove of bananas and secretes in a mountain cave. The agriculturalists attempt to smoke her out, but on emerging she vanishes. She then reappears as Icakki and creates havoc, beating up the people. A mantiravāti reveals her identity, and a temple is built to propitiate her. The mantiravāti attempts to bind her with mantras, and in return he gets a fine wooden bed, heavily worked with craft skills. The wood comes from the mountain forests, however, and Icakki is in it, traveling with it. She kills the mantiravāti at night, tearing open his stomach. The bed is sold at a ridiculously cheap price, but the buyer, a Muttu Veḷḷāḷar, gets killed. The bed is burnt at a cemetery, but one splinter remains. A Nāṭār girl picks it up for use as firewood and she is killed. Finally, another Icakki temple is built to placate her. (my paraphrase and translation)

The incursion into mountain country presumes a dominant agrarian mode of production already defined by the power of kings to command the labor of agriculturalists. But instead of taking this class system as unproblematic, the cult dramatizes the disturbance the expansion of this system creates for the mountains that Icakki calls home. These mountains are so much her domain that she can continue to punish intruders as long as a single piece of wood from her forest world still circulates among them. The story conveys, in the dramatic idiom of a forest-dwelling goddess’s wrath, a historical structure that Marxist scholars would describe in terms of the ascendancy of the dominant modes of production over other social for-



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mations. There exists a broad consensus among many scholars of Tamil history that kingship and religion worked in tandem as modalities of power in integrating outlying groups into agrarian society (Stein 1980; Bayly 1989; Dirks 1987). Kings of the fertile riverine tracts of Tamil Nadu were able to sustain large enterprises of temple building, to endow Brahmans, and to incorporate, through warfare and distribution of the insignia of sovereignty and honors (Dirks 1987), the world of “martial predators, forest and hill-dwelling hunter-gatherers and predatory cattle-keeping plainsmen such as the Kallars, Maravars and Akamutaiyars of the southern Tamil country” (Bayly 1989, 22). The latter groups in particular have been linked with the worship of goddesses like Icakki Ammaṉ, with bloodthirsty male guardian deities, and with the cult of the dead (Bayly 1989). Cults such as Icakki Ammaṉ’s have strong connections with the Telugu “folk” goddesses. The Nadar community, who form the core of worshippers of Icakki Ammaṉ, were not originally associated with the agricultural heartlands of Tamil Sanskritic culture. They were brought in by the Telugu-speaking Nayakas and, by the seventeenth century (Bayly 1989, 25), had made the sandy tracts of Tiruneveli their own place. There they developed their own internal class structure of landlords, agricultural laborers, and toddy tappers and traders. Modernity and Folk Religion: The Case of Tamil Nadu Sontheimer argued (1995) that modernity has made matters worse for folk and tribal religions. Missionaries, rationalists, social-reform movements, and a newly reconstituted Hinduism have sealed off boundaries that were more porous in the past. Then a far greater range of “folk” elements found their way into mainstream currents of religion. In the new Hinduism of the middle class, “bhakti and the philosophical contents of Hinduism” have come to stand for the entirety. There remains, in his view, not even a disapproving awareness of folk Hinduism. Smith (2006, 3), too, attributes the nonrecognition of possession in classical Indology to “a long-standing aversion among educated Judeo-Christian as well as educated Hindus, for whom possession has fallen outside the realm of both reason and social accountability.” In Tamil Nadu, modern attitudes toward folk religion have been shaped by specific regional histories. But these histories do not begin with the colonial period. Modernity must be seen to have been shaped by the interaction between precolonial and colonial relations of power, which shaped, in turn, the forms of political mobilization and challenge. According to the rich body of scholarship on precolonial kingship and power in Tamil Nadu (see, e.g., Stein 1980; Dirks 1987; Appadurai 1981; Price 1996; and Narayana

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Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 1992), a complex mutual understanding obtained between dominant agrarian groups, such as the Vellalars, and the Brahmans, whom the king patronized and endowed with land for settlements (Skt. brahmadeyas). Such an alliance forms an enduring, and progressively elaborated, feature of Tamil/Telugu history from the time of the Pallava (sixth to ninth c.) and Cola (1000–1200) kings and throughout the Vijayanagara period (1400–1565), when new martial groups such as the Kallars and Maravars were incorporated into the ritual order of the “segmentary” state. This alliance continued until the nineteenth century, surviving into the twentieth century in isolated pockets such as Pudukottai (Dirks 1987). A complex dynamic of power proved capable of absorbing outlying groups, but—as we have seen— in only a very uneven fashion. When subjected to British understandings of caste and India, those social processes were modified and in some ways simplified. The outcomes are studied under the rhetoric of postcolonial theory. As many scholars in this field have argued, the colonial construction of Brahmans as the caste at the apex of a society structured by the singular principles and values of religion produced a singularly impoverishing view of India. This colonial reduction of India to a religious principle turned, moreover, into a self-fulfilling formula. The sphere of power represented by kings and the paḷaiyakkārar, or “warrior chiefs,” may have been ignored by colonial discourse but not in colonial practice. The British waged a vigorous series of so-called Poligar wars aimed precisely at obliterating the power of the warrior chiefs. The Brahman ritual and political dominance in the twentieth century arose not out of any simple continuity with a precolonial past but from a complex colonial reordering of society. Such dominance led in turn to an equally striking feature of twentieth-century politics in Tamil Nadu, the non-Brahman movement. Anti-Brahman politics did not, however, lead to a new evaluation or championing of folk religion. This is somewhat surprising, since the material of folk religion could certainly have fueled the quest for an antique and autochthonous tradition. The literary texts most beloved of the new “Dravidian” cultural movement contain vivid descriptions of practices remarkably similar to the scenes I witnessed at Icakki Ammaṉ’s temple. The discovery of the corpus of Tamil poetry already referred to as the Caṅkam corpus has been particularly significant for the construction of a “non-Sanskritic” version of a tradition in which literature and the arts were equipped to form the centerpiece. The Kuṟuntokai, again from the earliest texts in the poetic corpus, describes the following rituals for a girl who is sick. In fact, she pines for her lover; but her worried mother consults the priest of the god Murukaṉ.



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There is evidence in the early poetry that religious practices associated with Murukaṉ were fairly widespread, at least among the hill tribes. In Narr 288 a priestess (kaṭṭuvicci) is asked for a diagnosis of a maiden’s languor. The diviner, be it priest or priestess, is believed to be possessed of the god and thus have access to the god’s will (Tol. Poruḷl 115) . . . In one such ritual of divination, the site is spread with sand and decorated . . . with red kāntaḷ flowers. Before the dance the priest offers an invocation to the hills. The dance is accompanied by musical instruments and songs. The priest elevates a puppet to take the illness from the maiden; a ram is sacrificed and its blood offered to Murukaṉ. The staff of the vēlaṉ is then held up over the kaḻaṅku nuts as if in benediction. The priestess . . . is dressed in two colors. She is given paddy which she throws into the air. She perspires, shivers, smells her palms and starts her rapturous singing in praise of Murukaṉ. The paddy is counted by four’s. If one, two or three paddy grains are left over, Murukaṉ is believed to be the cause of the malaise; if the count is even, something else is the cause. (Clothey 1978, 27)

The rich possibilities afforded by such continuities were not pursued by the Dravidian movement. Instead, “Reason” was singled out as a central value. Although the politics of the Self-Respect Movement contained many elements, it was thanks to rationalism that the political challenge to the ascendancy of the Brahman was fused with a determined repudiation of ritual. Such rationalism has long been abandoned by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam parties; it nonetheless continues to circulate as a highly favored form of modernist intellectual critique in Tamil Nadu. The critique represents the “folk” as gullible, too easily duped by the religious charlatan. Behind the hocus-pocus of popular religion lurks the rapacious priest or the sorcerer. Film critics pour scorn on the gullible spectators of goddess films who “pat their cheeks in devotion,” unable to tell the difference between an ordinary actress and a goddess (Ram 2008b). In her study of possession in Chennai, Bloomer (2008) describes a TV show, Kuṭram naṭṭantatu eṇṇa (What Was the Crime That Was Committed?), produced by Vijay TV. The “crimes” are popular religious practices. Successive episodes, she writes, devoted themselves to tracking down and unmasking women who work as spirit mediums in Chennai. Recent episodes of the same show reveal how little has changed. The episode aired on June 2, 2009, directs its exposé at lovelorn couples who appeal to deities in the shrines, writing down their secret desires on pieces of paper and receiving from the priest a metal cylinder containing a mantra. Mūṭa nampikkai, or “idiotic beliefs,” laments the host, are to be found not only where one would expect them but among the educated as well.

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Reason has been central to the constitution of a Tamil modernity that stakes out its territory in a never-ending war on popular religion. But reason reappears on the other side of the divide. It has a role not only in the repudiation of tradition but also in the constitution of a Dravidian tradition. If modern Brahmanism mapped out an intellectual history of Hinduism through the Rig Veda, the Upanishads, the advaita philosophy of Shankara, and so on, then Dravidian intellectuals mapped out equally intellectualist understandings of southern Indian religion based on the metaphysical philosophy of Saiva Siddhānta. An excerpt from C. N. Singaravelu (1992) provides a contemporary example. He begins by describing Saiva Siddhānta as “the Religion of the Tamils as its roots can be traced not only to the Vedas and the Agamas, but also to the most ancient Tamil literature such as the Caṅkam literature and the Tholkappiam” (12). He then cites those English and European scholars, beginning with Rev. G. U. Pope, who have “studied Tamil and Saiva Siddhanta philosophy and have been overwhelmed by the excellence of this Philosophy” (12). Among the “Special Features of Saiva Siddhanta,” pride of place is given to “The Place of Reason” (16). We are informed that the very first chapter of the work of Sivagnana Siddhiyar, one of the saint-scholars, or “Siddars” (cittar in Tamil spelling), deals with Epistemology (Alawai). “To interpret the verses of Siddhiyar or the sutras of Sivagnana Bodham correctly one has to depend on the rules and laws acceptable to reason and logic” (17). Foregrounding epistemology in the construction of “tradition” allows the author to then draw comparisons to the Greek intellectual tradition of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato. The list of comparisons gives us some indication of what is at stake—an establishment of parity with Western rationalist traditions, stretching all the way back to the Greeks. Like “Indian” nationalism in Chatterjee’s understanding (1986), “Dravidian” nationalism was both derivative and contestatory of colonial discourses. It was particularly influenced by missionary efforts. These efforts proceeded along contradictory lines. On the one hand, missionaries helped propagate antinomies between enlightenment and local superstitions in a rationalist critique of tradition. But the missionaries also sought local precedents for Christian teachings, invoking ancient, entirely “Tamil” regional precedents for the values they sought to inculcate. Scudder, a missionary, learned Tamil in 1865 and sought to establish that Tamils already possessed within their own ancient culture the values of an individualism that was opposed to fate and fatalism (Irschick 1986, 17). A more celebrated missionary contribution was G. W. Pope’s translation of the Tamil classic Tirukkuṟal in 1886, which is regularly cited in Dravidianist scholarship. Pope’s foreword to the translation states,



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The Tamil race preserves many of its old virtues and has the promise of a noble future. Their English friends, in teaching them all that the West has to impart, will find little to unteach in the moral lessons of the Kurral rightly understood. . . . These three virtues [humility, charity, and forgiveness of injuries] are everywhere forcibly inculcated by the Tamil moralist. These are the themes of his finest verses. So far, then, we may call this Tamil poet Christian; and to understand him, to free him from his mistaken glosses, to teach his works, to correct their teaching where it is misleading, and to supplement it where it is defective, would seem to be the duty of all who are friends of the race that glories in the possession of this poetical masterpiece. (Pope 1990, xii)

To “village worship,” on the other hand, fell the stigma of primitivism, much as occurred in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka (David Scott 1994). In the preface to his well-known collection on village goddesses of southern India written in 1921, Bishop Whitehead recommends the study of their worship to students of comparative religion as a living museum of the oldest substratum of primitive religious ideas: Before the Aryan invasion, which probably took place in the second millennium BC, the old inhabitants of India, which are sometimes called Dravidians, were a dark skinned race, with religious beliefs and customs that probably did not greatly differ from those of other primitive races. . . . And it was not until the Aryan invaders had conquered North India and had settled down in the country, that there was in India any growth of philosophic thought about the world as a whole. The problem of the universe did not interest the simple Dravidian folk. They only looked for an explanation of the facts and troubles of village life. Their religion, therefore, did not advance beyond a crude animism and belief in village deities. . . . What we now call Hinduism, therefore, is a strange medley of the most diverse forms of religion, ranging from the most subtle and abstruse systems of philosophy to primitive forms of animism. At the same time, the primitive forms of Dravidian religion have been in their turn greatly modified by Brahmin influence. (Whitehead 1988, 12)

Whitehead’s evaluation of the primitivity of “Dravidian” animism was part of a much broader colonial construction of India that was never purely Orientalist—for the hierarchy of cultural Orientalism merged with the hierarchy of scientific evolutionism (Ramaswamy 1997, 26). The only respite offered to the so-called Dravidians from such relentless denigration was an alternative

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Orientalism that found virtue for the Dravidian “race” in a corpus of literary and philosophical works and in a linguistic constitution that owed nothing to the later accretions of “Aryan” Sanskrit. Missionaries such as Caldwell, with his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (1856), established that Tamil was a complete language in itself, with a unique identity, quite apart from the Indo-European family of languages. Tamil intellectuals defended “Dravidian” culture from the charge of primitivism through “neo-Saivite” revivalism. Saivism, centering on the worship of Shiva, was declared by Tamil intellectuals to be the authentic, non-Aryan religion of the Tamil people. Along with this essentialist identity came a need not only to purge “Aryan” elements but to expunge practices that could not be defended as “rational.” Popular practices of worship became particularly indefensible: Their [i.e., the neo-Saivite] program was puritanical and elitist as well in its advocacy of vegetarianism and teetotalism, and in its call for the excision of “irrational” customs and rituals (animal sacrifices, the worship of godlings, and the like) which were the very stuff of village and popular religion. (Ramaswamy 1997, 25)

Possession as a Minor Practice Michel de Certeau (1984) has described everyday practices such as cooking, walking, and shopping as a kind of remainder, practices left out or set aside by the intellectual project that began in the late eighteenth century. He traces the gradual colonization of an immense reserve of “arts” and “crafts.” That colonization, eventually to be articulated in a science, is first performed in the innocuous guise of simple “description” by the encyclopedia project. The sciences are “the operational languages whose grammar and syntax form a constructed, regulated and thus writeable system.” The arts on the other hand “are techniques that await an enlightened knowledge they currently lack” (66). From this “know-how” is further subtracted the repertoire of those elements that can be perfected by machines. Deprived of its techniques, the understanding embedded in these practices retreats into a subjective knowledge (savoir). Separated from the language of its procedures, “know-how” now appears to be “intuitive” knowledge. Everyday practices come to be constituted as the space of a “folkloric region or rather as an overly silent land.” (69) De Certeau’s description helps illuminate the operations that underlie the constitution of “folk religion.” I have been at pains to extend the genealogy of such operations beyond colonialism. But colonial modernity put its own



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particular stamp on what was already a complex field of power. The further the phenomenon is from the domain of reason, the greater the tendency to render it into a mute phenomenon, awaiting a discourse to give it meaning. Spirit possession figures as one of the greatest casualties of this process. More than any other aspect of popular worship, it has become a practice lacking a discourse of its own. The ensemble of practices within which possession lives has been carved up by different disciplines to constitute distinctive objects of knowledge. The stories of Icakki Ammaṉ appear in collections of local folk tales. The performances of her epics are represented in performance studies. The wider practices of curing and the diagnoses of misfortune are assigned to anthropology but are distributed across a number of subdisciplines, from studies of folk religion to medical anthropology. Possession is actually a remainder, something left over after a previously coherent set of practices has been thus distributed. This diminished remainder, deprived of its context, is vulnerable to being reclaimed as an object of investigation for the disciplines. It can be examined as a pathology by clinical psychiatry, as an index of social stress by sociology, and as the object of cross-cultural variability by anthropology. What possession can no longer claim is the capacity to generate knowledge in its own right, whether for its practitioners or for those who study it in more abstract ways. My aunt in Chennai froze with horror and had no idea what to do when her domestic servant went into a trance and began to make pronouncements. To the middle classes, who regard possession and goddesses like Icakki as if they had come from a distant land, what is missing—were they to spare a thought for such matters—is the ingredient of direct experience. Once during my fieldwork in 1991 I asked a local potter to make me an image of Icakki such as I had seen at the temple of Mūppantal. I wished to keep an image of the goddess, whose cult I was finding so intriguing: The potter keenly observes me, and asks me if I have nampikkai [faith]. I say I do, a little, in the goddess. Next question: have I had aṉupavam [Skt. anubhav] or experience of her. I am stuck for a response. He tries to help me by giving me examples of such experience: have I had an illness cured by her? has she ever spoken to me in a dream? I say, no, she has not. Then how, he asks me, can I say I have faith? He relents and tells me to come back in four days. But when I return to the potter, the version he produces for me to take home is of a demure sari-clad female, hair neatly coiled in a bun, responsibly holding a child in her hand—nothing at all like the Icakki who made me gape in the temple at Mūppantal. There the infant would be more likely to emerge mangled from her mouth. It would not be nurtured. Evidently the potter has decided I would be ill equipped to handle

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the powers of the image I so blithely commission. She is a kōpakkāri [a habitually angry female], not to be messed with. (field notes, 1991)

A Western episteme has carved up the field in which possession occurs. That episteme no longer belongs to the West alone. Nor does the episteme belong to academics, to do with it what they will, or else to undo it by the sheer force of their critique. The genie is out of the bottle, if it was ever entirely inside one. All the epistemic divisions and disciplines I refer to have long circulated within India. The Folklore of Tamilnadu series is published by the Institute of Asian Studies in Chennai and is a useful collation. But its term for the epics performed in temples is “ballads”—the outpourings of a “rural folk” who are situated at a social distance very far from the world of the scholars who do the collecting: Meant to provide a positive distraction from the tedium of their routine farm labour, these compositions are verily a window into their hearts and minds. Through them, the folks [sic] reveal their attitude to the prevailing social realities; they relive their hopes and desires, joys and sorrows; they record their beliefs and visions of life. The rhythm of their day-to-day living, the rites and ceremonies by which they seek to bring meaning to their otherwise drab existence get inescapable expression in these songs. The folks also betray through these compositions their irrationality, their adherence to codes of behaviour that seem unthinking and uninformed; these poems are also an uninhibited and unconditioned portrayal of their weaknesses and failings and frustrations. (Nirmala Devi, 1987, vii)

Village ritual performance, which in its temple context has the power to move people into altered states of being, appears, shorn of all dynamism, on Sunday afternoon TV under the designation of nāṭṭuppuṟappāṭṭu, or “folk songs.” In lackluster studios, with no audience or ritual context to sing to, the performers appear diminished. By contrast, Ammaṉ narratives emerge with far greater raw power in B-grade popular cinema (Ram 2008b). Yet even in these films, goddesses such as Icakki Ammaṉ are stripped of those powers that are most likely to disturb upper-caste assumptions. The goddess no longer goes on wild rampages killing guilty and innocent alike. In these films, she accords greater priority to protecting the wedded status of women than to avenging the injustice done to them. Meanwhile, in contemporary Tamil Nadu discourses of reform are delivered to reshape the subjectivity of villagers. I have explored elsewhere the reformist texts written by intellectuals and read by the younger, educated women



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in the fishing villages (Ram 1996, 1998c, 2009a). Here I mention only one example taken from these texts to illustrate the way that spirit possession is made to figure in a generalized war against irrationality. Pēya noyvā? (Demon or Illness? 1991) is one of many titles by a prolific priest, Fr. John Prakash, all of which offer the same predetermined choice to the populace: irrational idiocy or reason? Which are you going to choose? Uṭala manamā? (Body or Mind?), Matiyā vitiya? (Wit or Fate?), and finally, Mantiramā tantiramā (Mantra or Trickery?). Pēya noyvā opposes spirit possession to a modernity that understands its manifestations only as mental illness. The text wages war on all forms in which possession plays a part: on pēy piṭittal (demon possession), cāmi-āṭṭtam (divine dance), kuṟi collaratu (divination), āvi piṭittal (spirit possession), and kaṅaku kēpatu (consultation with a diviner). A case study offered by Fr. John tells of a young man named Kumar who believes he is possessed by a pēy, or “demon spirit.” He is taken by his family to the local shrines of the Christian saints, where the pēy within him can respond only by screaming abuse at the saints (cf. Ram 1991b). A Catholic priest attempts to cure Kumar but bows to the informed approach of “a doctor of mental health and welfare.” This doctor finds—not surprisingly—that the reasons for Kumar’s illness have their source in his own imagination, in his fear and guilt (over sexual infidelity), false beliefs (mūṭa nampikkai), and erring lifestyle (tavarāna vaḷkkai). Such oppositions are not confined to texts. Not only are they read and taken to heart as models for personal relationships by the young women I know but the attempt to displace possession with psychiatric treatment is also encouraged as a practical project. In 1996, several people who were seeking cures at Catholic shrines told me they were being visited by a psychiatrist. Four years later I had an opportunity to meet this psychiatrist and conducted an extensive interview with him. He was one of a team. His colleagues included social workers employed by a Catholic nongovernmental organization. Parish priests too were part of the network, many of them referring their parishioners to the psychiatrist. The entire team effort had been put together by the bishop of Nagercoil, who had been finding it awkward to deal with foreign visitors. These visitors were far too inclined to put to him embarrassing questions about the possessed people at the church shrines. The psychiatrist I interviewed treated the possessed with hypnosis, followed by implanting suggestions in the minds of patients. He told me he regarded the “hysterical dissociations” of possession as rendering patients all the more responsive to the administration of hypnosis. Other patients he came across in shrines he classified as psychotic and treated with drugs. When I questioned him on the much-cited association between women and posses-

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sion, he had a ready answer. Both women and hysterics shared certain personality traits, he informed me. Both exhibited “histrionic” traits, dependent behavior, and narcissistic personality traits. To this diagnosis he added social evidence: women also suffered from conflicts with their mothers-in-law or husbands. Many nursed guilt over sexual affairs. Psychology, psychoanalysis, and lay sociology had joined forces in common opposition to superstition. Foucault’s corpus of work demonstrates the ease with which one discourse of governmentality can be referred to another, or indeed can imperceptibly shift into that other. Matters singled out for reform turn easily into matters for psychiatric treatment. Such treatment in turn can be readily transmuted into matters requiring punishment and use of force. In 2001, the reach of governmentality was more systematically extended, moving readily from the discourse of human rights to one of judiciary intervention. Several people died at a Muslim shrine (dargah) in Erwadi, Tamil Nadu. They had been housed in hutments. Many were chained to their beds when a fire broke out. The ensuing Supreme Court directives compelled state governments to implement the Mental Health Act. What was particularly striking about the language of intervention was that religious shrines where popular forms of healing took place were simply described as “mental institutions”: Erwadi was referred to, for example, as a mental asylum. The National Human Rights Commission reported, Following this shocking incident, the Supreme Court took suo moto notice of the incident in the form of a PIL (CWP No 334 of 2001). Notices were issued to the Union of India and to the state of Tamil Nadu. Subsequently, the court directed the Union of India to “conduct a survey on an all-India basis with a view to identify registered and unregistered “asylums” as also about the state of facilities available in such “asylums” for treating mentally challenged. (National Human Rights Commission 2008, 72; italics in the original)

Once defined in this manner, popular shrines could be brought under the requirements of the Mental Health Act as well as under the State Mental Health Authority, which was given powers to investigate and close down homes for the mentally ill. But the language adopted by the state had already been prefigured by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), of whose recommendations the Supreme Court urged “scrupulous implementation.” The report reveals that since 1998 studies conducted by the NHRC had consistently described both mental institutions and popular shrines in the same terms, as “two types of hospitals.” Indeed, it is hard to know which is



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being referred to at any given point in the following description, taken from an empirical study conducted by the NHRC in 1999: The first type does not deserve to be called “hospitals” or mental health centres. They are “dumping grounds” for families to abandon their mentally ill member, for either economic reasons or a lack of understanding and awareness of mental illness. The living conditions in many of these settings are deplorable and violate an individual’s right to be treated humanely and live a life of dignity. . . . The second type of “hospitals” . . . are those that provide basic living amenities. Their role is predominantly custodial and they provide adequate food and shelter. . . . These hospitals are violating the rights of the mentally ill persons to appropriate treatment and rehabilitation and a right to community and family life. (National Human Rights Commission 2008, 270)

The myriad ailments and problems brought to shrines are thus translated into mental illness, while the shrines themselves are transformed into “illegal mental homes” in which human rights violations are endemic. Some public intellectuals have been acutely aware of the series of elisions taking place. Davar and Lohokare (2009) undertook a study of dargahs (Muslim shrines) in Maharashtra in order to discover what actually goes on in such places. They also raised concerns about the greater authority handed to mental hospitals and mental health professionals and indicated the potential for arbitrary interference in sites of indigenous healing. These fears about major interventions into shrines have not materialized. According to L. Branagan (2011), the sheer heterogeneity of shrines and of their political networks and the regional complexities of the country have thwarted the administrative vision of the state. Typically the Supreme Court imagined a homogeneous space that could be administered by committees in every district of the nation. But my concern here is not so much with the efficacy of the legislative intervention as with the discursive terrain shared by a variety of institutions— among them human rights organizations and the state—that may often be at odds with one another. When it comes to possession, the shared terrain is much wider. The bishop, the psychiatrist, the mental hospital, the social worker, the sociologist, the rationalists, the human rights activists, the government, and the Supreme Court—all speak a common language. It is a discourse that allows them, in dealing with the possessed, to refer individuals from one authority to the other. In universities the world over in the past two decades, the call for interdisciplinary approaches has been extremely popular. But this demand overlooks a crucial fact. The dominant episteme works precisely through the divi-

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sion of labor between the different disciplines. It is this episteme that carved up the lifeworld of earlier societies and distributed the pieces across a variety of specialized disciplines. Piecing together the modern fragments produced by this array of disciplinary practices will not restore Humpty Dumpty. Minor Practices as a Source of Fruitful Hypotheses Possession is now a minor practice. But does this mean that we would be wise to overlook it? Should we attempt nothing more than an inventory of dominant discourses? To do so would be to squander the resources of ethnographic experience, which lends itself to richer possibilities than elaborating what is only too well known. There are still extant, in Tamil Nadu, a number of interrelated practices such as life-cycle rituals, practices of divination and healing, and ritual dispensations of justice. These practices continue to provide for the ethnographer a potential access to possession not as a naked phenomenon to be scrutinized but as one that is clothed by surrounding meanings that must be interpreted in a circumspect manner. A further possibility is suggested by Michel de Certeau’s methodological orientation, one that works, as we have seen, with the “minor” status of certain practices. De Certeau writes partly against the grain of Foucault’s monumental studies on governmental modernity. A society, he argues, is “composed of certain foregrounded practices organizing its normative institutions and of innumerable other practices that remain ‘minor,’ always there but not organizing discourses and preserving the beginnings or remains of different (institutional, scientific) hypotheses for that society or for others” (de Certeau 1984, 48; emphasis added). Based on this distinction between “foregrounded” practices, equipped with a discourse, and “minor” practices, he poses two questions (48), which I paraphrase as follows: 1. How can we explain the privileged development of the particular series constituted by the panoptic apparatus? 2. What is the status of so many other series, which, pursuing their silent itineraries, have not given rise to a discursive configuration or to a technological systematization? Could these be considered an immense reserve, constituting either the beginnings or traces of different developments? Both questions help afford a little distance from dominant governmental perspectives. Each question introduces a complementary methodological orientation. The first suggests we interest ourselves in how certain practices become minor practices. This is the question, chiefly historical in orientation,



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that has preoccupied me in this chapter. But it is the thesis proposed by the second question that sustains my explorations over the rest of the book. For this thesis makes the tantalizing proposal that even “minor” practices have the potential to teach us something, to stimulate our imaginations in order to suggest different ways in which we might understand our social world. Minor practices can contain “an immense reservoir” of different hypotheses, not only for the society in which they occur but for other societies as well. Could possession, if better contextualized, afford us such fertile possibilities? I believe that it does and hope to have persuaded my reader by the end of the book.

Chapter 3

Possession and the Bride Emotions, the Elusive Phantom of Social Theory

Vijaya of Katalkarai Ūr, Kanyakumari I met Vijaya in 1983.1 She was then a young bride. She and her husband, James, lived in a somewhat makeshift fashion with her married sister and the sister’s household in the coastal village of Katalkarai Ūr in Kanyakumari District, Tamil Nadu. Villagers who knew of my interest in possession referred me to Vijaya since she was known to have been suffering spirit attacks. The following account was pieced together by me on the basis of what I heard from Vijaya, her husband, and James’s sister. Episode One of Spirit Possession: The Death of the Father

Vijaya’s first spirit attack had come one year after the death of her father. The family consisted of five girls, two of whom had married, one of them into Katalkarai Ūr. Vijaya’s family were Mukkuvar by caste—as were the people of the fishing villages of Kanyakumari—but belonged to a community of Mukkuvars who live and work away from the coast. Such “inland Mukkuvars” form a part of a community of fish traders living in the old market townships of Kanyakumari. A growing number of Mukkuvar men in these townships have turned to jobs as salesmen, car mechanics, drivers, and employees in footwear manufacturing. Vijaya, like her married sister before her, worked for a cashew company. The death of the father threw the family into poverty. A household of mother and three unmarried daughters faces a particularly vulnerable future. Each of the unmarried girls must be equipped with large sums in dowry if they are to successfully contract marriages; and marriage is os73

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tensibly the precondition for any kind of future security for women. Vijaya’s mother went back to work as a fish trader at this point, while Vijaya tried to earn some money for the household by selling cooked foods from the home. She still worked at the cashew company, but the extra money she earned was barely enough to cover a few small expenses. One year after her father’s death, when Vijaya was eighteen, she was struck mute. Family and neighbors tried to revive her, burning braziers of scented coal (cāmpirāṇi) in her presence. Her eyes did not open for two days. Finally, a Catholic priest was called in to pray over her. Her eyes opened, but she remained mute. Her family then took her to a hospital. The doctor there diagnosed Vijaya’s problem as a nervous complaint. He asked her to stay on the premises, and after nine days she began to speak. The doctor was paid 500 rupees—a high expense for a poor widow. But the symptoms recurred in a fortnight. The family now began to suspect sorcery and turned to a Hindu cāmiyar, or “mendicant,” who prayed over a tāyittu (a talismanic protective thread), which was then worn around Vijaya’s waist. At a Hindu temple, near the site of a major regional weekly market, a healer, in a state of trance, revealed to the family that Vijaya was being troubled by Icakki Ammaṉ, the regional goddess. For five weeks in a row the family returned to the temple. By this time Vijaya had been mute for forty-five days. At this point, one of Vijaya’s married sisters, who lived on the east coast of Tamil Nadu, wrote of the miracles in her district since a cūrucaṭi (cross) had been set up in honor of Sahāya Mātā. Just as Hindu deities are worshipped as particular to a place and sacred territory and are credited with attributes suited to specific human purposes, so also are the Christian deities. These shared features help explain the much-noted fluidity with which people are able to cross formal religious boundaries when seeking cures. The Virgin Mary, who is worshipped as Mātā, or the Mother (see Ram 1991b for details), can be worshipped in many places. She has a shrine dedicated to her in Kanyakumari itself. But Vijaya’s sister was reporting the particular power attributed to Mary at the shrine of Sahāya Mātā (the Mother Who Helps), in the east-coast town of Tirucentūr. Despite the distance, Vijaya and her mother journeyed to Tirucentūr, where Vijaya’s mother made a vow to feed many people if her daughter was cured. At the shrine, a japa mālai (prayer with rosary) was offered daily. On the third day, Vijaya fainted, and when she came to, uttered her first word: “Mātā.” Her mother kept her promise and fed twenty-five people. Episode Two: Vijaya the Bride

When I met Vijaya she had been married barely a year. She was experiencing a recurrence of her condition, in episodes that were particularly intense in the



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month we met. All she could tell me about her episodes was that her head felt heavy. She would hear from others that she then became abusive to everyone, particularly to her mother-in-law. At such times she exhibited enormous physical strength, enough to make men afraid of her. Vijaya and her sister were seeking treatment with a mantiravāti, a specialist able to wield mantras to both inflict and allay magical spells. However, Vijaya was also being taken to biomedical clinics in Nagercoil, the major urban center in Kanyakumari District. I was soon acquainted with the tense and anxious circumstances of Vijaya’s marriage. This was a “love marriage” which had been opposed by her husband’s family and especially by his mother. Such unions were rare when I met Vijaya. Most marriages were conducted between fishing households (Ram 1991b). The absence of a father meant that Vijaya’s mother could not afford to match the high rates of dowry that I have recorded for Mukkuvar coastal villages (Ram 1991b). Vijaya met her future husband when visiting her elder sister at Katalkarai Ūr. James occasionally worked on the fishing boats with that sister’s husband. Over time, as the villagers say, paḻakkam occurred—they became familiar with each other. James’s mother strongly opposed the match. Not only would Vijaya bring little dowry but also the mother feared James might wish to establish a separate household after marriage. Although it was common practice for married couples to set up their own household, this still caused tensions since the economically strongest households were those where a father and unmarried sons worked together on fishing craft and pooled their incomes (Ram 1991b). In this case, the opposition from James’s mother precipitated the very thing she feared. According to neighbors, James began fighting with his family, refusing to go to work. One day he simply brought Vijaya to live in the village, seeking to force compliance from his parents. He took her to several houses: to her married elder sister’s house and then to his father’s sister’s house in the neighboring village of Colachel. At last he tried to bring her to his own home, at which point his mother’s elder brother chased the couple out of the village. A difficult period ensued, during which senior community men persuaded Vijaya to return to her mother, arranged for relatives to raise a nominal dowry, and persuaded James’s mother to agree to a marriage. The marriage took place in Villikudi, Vijaya’s hometown. All seemed peaceful for a month. But Vijaya remembered feeling strange even within a few days of the marriage. Her husband and others noticed that she would laugh oddly and not respond when spoken to. Finally, she lapsed into muteness. Suspecting a spirit attack, the family squeezed onion juice into her eye. The spirit spoke, claiming responsibility for her previous attack as

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well. It revealed itself to be the spirit of a married woman who died a violent death. The woman had lived near Vijaya for four or five years and been friendly with the young girl. She had been a retiring woman during her lifetime, married to a policeman who made her life a misery, tormenting her constantly with suspicions and accusations of infidelity, and beating her. Finally, when Vijaya was fifteen, the woman died a painful death from poison. It was unclear to Vijaya whether she was poisoned by her husband or whether she had committed suicide. Having identified itself, the spirit swore never to depart from Vijaya. Vijaya began to experience several episodes of possession in a day. A husbandand-wife team of mantiravātis from the coastal town of Maṉavālakurucci were brought in for a cure. They performed a ceremony in which they circled a coconut over her head and said they had captured the spirit. It was at this stage, when she and her husband had moved out of his mother’s home to live with her elder sister, that I met Vijaya. By now, James had ceased to work as a fisherman; he was increasingly unable to work at all. He had developed mysterious stomach pains, which were at their most acute in the early hours of the morning, precisely the period when men go out to fish. People suspected that the same spirit was responsible for James’s illness as well. Vijaya told me that the spirit prevented her from seeking solace in the church. Yet despite this obstacle, and the lack of money, she was hoping to find a cure by making a pilgrimage to the Catholic shrine in the Kanyakumari town of Ovari as well as to the more famous shrine of Vēḷānkaṉṉi Mātā on the east coast of Tamil Nadu. The Bride in the Sociology of Possession Each possession experience I recount in this book gathers up the unique circumstances of each individual woman’s life. Yet there are regularities that recur, linking one possession episode to another and to the wider world in which they occur. There is, as Merleau-Ponty (1986, 442) has suggested, a “phenomenological basis for statistical thought. It belongs necessarily to a being which is fixed, situated and surrounded by things in the world.” Possession does not escape this regularity, and it is this feature that has allowed social theory a point of entry in the domain of discourses regarding spirit possession. A voluminous sociological and anthropological literature has been enabled, for example, by just one empirical regularity—the recurrent empirical pattern of an association between women and possession. In the 1960s, Lewis opened his landmark essay on the sociology of possession (1966) by



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writing of a literature “studded with references to the frequent prominence of women in these cults.” Since that observation, the sheer empirical, statistically significant juxtaposition of women and possession has continued to surface unabated in the literature. In her imaginative ethnography on the zār cult in Sudan, Boddy (1989, 138) observes, “Possession activity is mainly though not exclusively the province of women. Somewhat more than 40% of Hofriyati women ever married and over the age of fifteen claim a zār affliction.” In a similar vein and closer to Tamil Nadu, Harper (1963) notes in an early study of Havik Brahmans in the southern Indian state of Karnataka that 10 to 20 percent of women past the age of puberty (and therefore married) who are either childless or with young children experience spirit possession. In his work on sorcery and exorcism in Sri Lanka, Kapferer (1991, 92) concurs. Here too “women are more often the subject of rites of healing and cults of exorcism than are men.” Such empirical coincidences would seem sufficient reason for social scientists to produce an account of possession that yields insights into gender at the same time. However, Lewis’s Malinowski Memorial Lecture of 1966, entitled “Spirit Possession and Deprivation Cults,” additionally reflects the pressures of a burgeoning women’s movement exerted on scholarship to concern itself explicitly with questions of gender. The address argues for a shift in focus in the anthropology of possession away from a concern with the specialized and prestigious figure of the shaman—most strikingly represented by Eliade’s Le chamanisme (1951)—toward a focus on those who experience possession in cults that are regarded as marginal and even reprehensible by the rest of society. In doing so, he directs attention not only to possession trances, which are part of curing, but also to possession as illness: possession that is unlooked for, unwanted, and often chronic. Lewis’s most detailed examples (1966, 1989) are drawn from his fieldwork material on the zār cult in northern Africa among the Somali. However, he compares this material to spirit cults in other parts of Africa, as well as in the Arctic, South America, India, Southeast Asia, China, Korea, and Japan. In all these places he finds that a diagnosis of spirit possession “gives women the opportunity to gain ends (material and non-material) which they cannot readily secure more directly” (1989, 77). These initial formulations anticipate both the strengths and weaknesses that have attended the sociological treatment of possession. In this section I consider just two instances of analyses I describe as sociological rather than as anthropological, in the sense that they remain quite impervious to certain cultural meanings of the actors that fall outside the realm of modern forms of understanding. They seek instead—and for quite different reasons—to substitute a more external analysis as a measure of greater critical objectivity. Both

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are quite early examples of the analysis of possession and may be said to have been superseded in certain respects by more sophisticated forms of hermeneutic approach in the anthropology of possession, which are discussed in a later chapter. However, one of the key shortcomings I seek to disclose here has remained a persistent problem right down to the present. This problem concerns the challenge posed by possession to a traditional conception of the individual subject. There is another reason for reexamining the social analyses of an earlier era. These analyses continue to be widely read both within and outside academia, whenever the connection between women and possession seems to require explanation. In the academy, Lewis’s work has acquired the status of an explanatory framework that is ready to hand, preassimilated, and therefore easily encapsulated in shorthand phrases such as “Lewis’s deprivation theory” (Doumato 2000, 39). Writing more broadly of women’s marginalization in the Gulf region, Doumato finds that “deprivation theory,” whereby possession “compensates” for a lack of authority, “goes a long way” in explaining not only women’s possession cults in Muslim settings but also “any spiritual community that offers marginal members of society a clearly defined identity and a sense of community” (39). And more recently there have been calls to return to Lewis’s emphasis on producing a model that will “explain” possession (Cohen 2008). Outside the academy, what circulates in India among professionals as an “explanation” of possession is precisely this kind of sociological analysis. It has become part of the spontaneous common sense of educated professionals and intellectuals to explain possession (insofar as they are required to think about it at all) as an outlet for social tensions. As explored in chapter 2, a wide range of intellectuals and professionals, from parish priests in Catholic coastal villages to social workers, nongovernmental organizations, doctors, and teachers, would explain to me the prominence of women among the possessed in villages as caused by “tension” (cf. Halliburton 2005) and as an attempt to extract concessions from those around them. Tamil culture has a long history of reflection on the ambiguities of possession. The corpus of Caṅkam poetry, verse ascribed to the first five centuries AD, allows for diverse possibilities, including the possibility that possession is conscious stratagem (Hardy 1983, 138).2 What has altered is this: a consensus has been born among modern intellectuals that there can be no such thing as “true” possession. And a principal authoritative source for such a consensus is academic analysis of the kind I examine here. There are certainly insights to be had from these pioneering analyses. Why would women need to resort to such indirect means in order to gain



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“ends”? In asking this question, Lewis took up many of the questions feminists were asking. How did the “social structure” look from the point of view of women? A Somali woman, he found, was marginalized by her exclusion from the prestigious religious cults. In the cults, Allah was to be approached through a male Prophet and through male lineage ancestors. Men in this society held all the major positions of authority and prestige. Women were excluded from worshipping in mosques. Kinship was strongly patrilineal. Men were frequently absent on pastoral tasks, leaving a woman “struggling to survive and feed her children in this harsh environment.” Her status in marriage was unstable due to the prevalence of polygyny and the frequency of maleinitiated divorce. By the 1970s, the topic of kinship had come to preside at the very core of Western feminist reevaluations of society.3 Family, marriage, housework, and love, all came to be newly understood as “work” and as “ideology.” Feminists in the discipline of anthropology were particularly well situated to ask new questions about the status of women in non-Western societies. In due course, female possession came under scrutiny. The analysis of female possession put forward by the Cambridge Women’s Group (Brown et al. 1981) is an early case in point. In the case study, a young Punjabi woman died after being sexually assaulted by her husband while she was still recovering from childbirth. She died in her natal home, where she had returned for the birth. Shortly after, her spirit entered her niece, asking for her baby, for new clothes, and for food. Other women in the village also became possessed. The Cambridge women write of the utter isolation of the new bride, who is sharply separated from her natal kin and, in her new, affinal home, “completely at the disposal of her male relatives,” on whom she must rely for goods, shelter, social status, and cash. The women’s world is not only separate from that of men but also riven internally by hierarchy. Female behavior is policed in this hierarchy by means of gossip and ridicule and through illtreatment—the mother-in-law or older sisters-in-law may withhold food from a junior woman. To call on natal kin for support after marriage is a threat to this hierarchy since it affirms bonds that reduce the girl’s dependency on her affines. In this description, possession expresses that anger and frustration for which there is no other mode of expression. Instead of being directed at the world, as is allowed in a man, women turn this anger against themselves. The analysis closely parallels discussions of female madness that I recall as a member of Sydney’s feminist discussion groups of the mid-1970s, prompted especially by the publication of Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness in 1972 (Chesler 1997). The study of kinship and power continued to inspire fresh insights into

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the 1980s. Writing of Chetri women in Nepal, Grey (1982) made use of the concept of “status ambiguity.” From the perspective of men, kinship is tidy: there exist two quite different categories of women. There are daughters and sisters, who are fertile but whose sexuality cannot be activated by the men. These women are the cheli-bētis who may be periodically worshipped by men, as sisters. Then there is another category of women who are wives, both fertile and sexual. They are strangers to the house and must be engaged with in strictly hierarchical terms. They are dangerous as well, having the capacity to corrupt a man’s loyalty to his parents and brothers. Among the Chetri, accusations of being a boksi, or “sorcerer,” are made only of in-marrying women, not of the cheli-bēti. From the perspective of women, the matter appears quite differently. The same woman must move from one social context to another, and she must somehow negotiate her role as the supposed bearer of quite opposed qualities. By referring to this rich vein of sociological analysis, we can learn much about the wider context in which Vijaya’s spirit attacks occurred. Let us see how such an analysis might unfold in relation to Vijaya. Each one of her attacks occurred at a point where the young woman is left socially vulnerable. The death of her father plunged her family into poverty, but for an unmarried young girl of eighteen, there were far graver consequences. She was left without the patriarchal head of the family, who ought, according to high Sanskritic culture, to proffer his daughter in marriage as “the gift of the virgin daughter” (Skt. kanyādān). Such a gift, the most precious of them all, must be accompanied by other gifts if the father is not to be left with the opprobrium of having conducted the “sale of the daughter,” which is how the practice of bride-price is referred to by Sanskrit culture. Dowries have been inflated by capitalist transformation. In fishing communities it is also a means for men to accumulate the capital with which to buy nets and boats (Ram 1991b). Its rapid escalation in coastal communities placed girls like Vijaya and her sisters in a particularly unstable position. To make matters more volatile still, when Vijaya eventually married, the marriage was besieged by opposition from the groom’s family, especially from her mother-in-law. Vijaya is regarded as a poor match by James’s mother. As a new bride living in her husband’s village and household, her situation could not have been more insecure. Sociological Objectivity and Its Hidden Supports in an Unreconstructed Philosophy of Consciousness Social theory, as described above, is made possible by the regularities and repetitions that can be discerned even among the particularities and unique



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events of social existence. However, sociology is not the only discourse made possible by such features of social life. Lewis (1989, 25) himself offers only one alternative to a sociological approach to possession: to regard possession as “an entirely arbitrary and idiosyncratic affair.” However, this conclusion is not justified. Discourses about demons, spirits, and their relations to humans also base themselves on the regularities of social life. Indeed, such discourses single out the very phases of women’s lives that sociology prefers. Brides are known by villagers to be vulnerable. Of course, very different meanings inform this signification. For villagers, women are vulnerable because they are attractive to demonic spirits, who are attracted, too, to the bodily flows of maternity, sexuality, and puberty. Knowledge of the ways of the spirits calls forth various precautionary measures to protect women. Caution is required whether in the disposal of menstrual cloths or in the movements of menstruating girls and brides. Circumspection is exercised at such times, especially during the night and in moving outside the home if only to urinate. Just as certain periods in the cycle of the female body are vulnerable, so too are certain places. Spaces that are known to be infested by spirits—especially between villages—are avoided or treated warily (cf. Niranjana 2001). Such knowledge is often simply implicit in practices—in what one does, in the routes one avoids without reflection being necessary. Recognition of the patterned nature of social existence is not in itself, therefore, a unique attribute of sociology. Rather, it forms the basis on which sociology, as one among a number of different kinds of discourses, is able to reflect on such discernible patterns. Yet sociology has erected an absolute difference between itself and other forms of knowledge. One of the central bases for such a claim lies in its criteria for objectivity. Nowhere does this come to the fore more than in the sociology of possession. Lewis (1989) explicitly equates objectivity with a refusal to be affected by the drama of possession. In a revealing passage (22–23), he criticizes anthropologists studying possession for allowing their gaze and subjectivity to become entangled in the flamboyancy and color of possession rituals. Proper sociologists should not look where they are directed, he tells us, but away. Lewis recommends the relative successes of the anthropology of witchcraft, where the anthropologist has been able to turn the tables to reveal the true victim: the so-called witch, who has been made the scapegoat for larger misfortunes. Lewis finds that this “objectivity” in the anthropology of witchcraft has been made possible by the fact that anthropologists are comparatively immune to the temptation of believing in witchcraft. By contrast, anthropologists become entangled in possession, even beginning to believe in the “genuine therapeutic value” of shamanistic healing rites.

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A wedge is thus driven by Lewis between the domain of the social and the domain of rituals with their color, imagery, and symbolism, all of which equips them to seduce the would-be objective observer into sharing a sense of their authenticity. It is possible, concedes Lewis (1989, 25–26), that the history of religion might be an appropriate place to study the dramatic or colorful aspects of ritual. Here the distance of historicism would provide something of a safety barrier, locating possession safely in the prehistory of the observer. But if we are to admit the study of possession in the present, other means must be found to artificially create the approved distance. Lewis comes up with a set of “epidemiological” questions that will artificially create the requisite distance: •• How does the incidence of ecstasy relate to the social order? •• Is possession an entirely arbitrary and idiosyncratic affair, or are there particular social categories of persons more or less likely to be possessed? •• If the latter is the case and possession can be shown to run in particular social grooves, what follows from this? •• What does ecstasy offer these social groups? In many Western debates, sociology is typically opposed to a method that takes the individual as the starting point. Social theory is juxtaposed by critics to individual agency and to the complexities of inner subjective life, which are often regarded as better captured by imaginative literature than by disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. One such critic of anthropology, Rapport (2008, 332), argues, “That which social science has posited as cultural traits and social facts are more properly to be claimed as attributes of individual human beings, facts of their capabilities and their attributes.” I wish to argue that the academic corpus on possession suggests something quite different. Certain traditional Western understandings of individual subjectivity, inherited from philosophies of consciousness, have continued to serve as vital supports for sociology and even for some of the later hermeneutic treatments of possession. I use the sociological treatment of possession as a limit case that allows us to more clearly discern underlying assumptions that normally remain hidden. When Lewis asks the key question that has energized countless sociological treatments of possession—What does ecstasy offer these social groups?—the phenomenon of possession becomes a problem entirely external to the constitution of the social group. The orientation of that preconstituted social group to possession becomes that of a strategic-minded individual. Possession comes to be regarded as one more “stratagem” employed by the marginalized. Collectively, women are seen to



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express a “strong and explicit sense of sexual solidarity” and to hold explicit feelings of “grievance and antagonism towards their men” (Lewis 1989, 69). Such grievances require an outlet. Possession becomes an antimale stratagem in a “sex war,” a “feminist strategy” (76), one among others, while possession cults become “thinly disguised protest movements directed against the dominant sex” (26). Either singly or collectively, in this view, women choose possession as a stratagem. Such a conscious choice may be regarded unsympathetically, as it is by local Somali men, as but a form of malingering, deception, and general faking. Or it may be championed by men such as Lewis as a feminist stratagem in a sex war. But either way, it is regarded as a conscious strategy. The framework leaves no scope for any other possibility that is not predicated on full consciousness. I suggest that the inability to regard possession in any terms other than those of conscious choice and stratagem affects far more than the way we represent possession. The latter may well be considered marginal to the main concerns of social theory. But the inability to represent the individual subject or indeed the collective as anything but a conscious and choosing subject has implications also for the way in which inequality is represented. In Lewis’s (1989, 67) account, the Somali woman experiences the unequal social structure only in the form of external restrictions on her exercise of free choices. “Tribeswomen” are not, we are told, “as naive as those anthropologists who suppose that tribal life conditions its womenfolk to an unflinching acceptance of hardship and to an unquestioning endorsement of the position accorded them by men.” Instead, we are given a subject who is entirely whole. Inequality is reduced to no more than a series of heavy odds ranged against the female subject. Lewis may not agree with the local folktale he quotes where the husband calls his wife’s bluff in pretending to be possessed and repays her in kind (69), but neither does his analysis depart from the premises that sanction good humor as an appropriately objective response to female inequality or to instances of female possession. Many of his descriptions carry the rollicking tone of this Somali folktale and of the many televised episodes of “sex war” comedies of this period such as I Love Lucy that took the unpleasant sting out of notions like female oppression. In Lewis’s retelling, temporary “hospitalization” in a shaman’s home offers the “hard-pressed Luo housewife” a “pleasant respite from the work-a-day world” (73). The spirits “help to enlarge the wardrobes of those they possess” (72). Occasionally, however, “the husband’s patience is liable to run thin,” in which case “if a good beating will not do the trick (and it often seems to be very effective),” then “there is always the threat of divorce and unless the wife actually wants this (as she may) or is

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genuinely physically ill (as she may very well be or severely psychologically disturbed), this threat usually works” (72). This tone, which allows the male anthropologist to sit back and appreciate the robust give-and-take of the sex war, is made possible only on the assumption that women are not particularly damaged either by “a good beating” or by oppression. Neither possession nor gender inequality, the two terms I am trying to link, seem to affect or modify the kind of subject he presents. This feature of Lewis’s account is not idiosyncratic with him. Consider the very similar framing of the problem in another account of possession among women in the southern state of Karnataka, written in 1963 by Edward Harper. Harper injects a more hermeneutic approach. Instead of resolutely confining himself to a causal investigation of female possession, he is prepared to ask, “What are the meanings that link gender and possession?” The state of possession, he notes, not only exempts the woman of blame but also “is itself symbolic of femininity. Women are believed to be weak and may thus be easily attacked by spirits. Also, spirits are stated to ‘come on’ a woman because she is beautiful and irresistible” (1963, 175). Yet despite this insight, he depicts a Brahman bride as embarking on marriage with a few basic choices ranged in front of her: •• She can adapt by being obedient, submissive, hardworking, and noncomplaining, anticipating a gradual gain in stature within the family. •• She might consider suicide. This kind of “adjustive behavior” might solve her problem and in addition carries the satisfaction of causing her affines to be punished after her death since the community will turn against them, and it will be difficult for them to find another daughter-in-law. •• She can refuse food, turning her aggression inward and giving rise to gossip in the community about her treatment at her in-laws’. •• She can become “possessed.” This way, she will not be held responsible for her behavior. Instead, she will be shown deference and accorded special attention, indirectly influencing the behavior of others. Although Harper speaks of trance as a condition always regarded as genuine by the community, his model is unable to accommodate such a possibility. His Brahman bride is conscious at all times. She not only has full access to all states of her consciousness but also inhabits a world that confronts her, even in conditions of extreme “stress,” as an arrayed set of options set out before her. Agency is exercised in the act of choosing, and this choosing behavior seems to persist even to the point of suicide and possession. The Cambridge feminist analysis of possession among Punjabi rural



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women is quite different in tone. If Lewis’s and Harper’s women remain entirely intact as subjects, able to look inequality in the eye and choose their options even when at their most vulnerable, the Cambridge feminists see absolutely no scope for female agency or subjecthood among Punjabi women. Entirely dependent on their men for survival, there is among these women no hint of the solidarity needed to wage a “sex war.” Open to abuse from senior affinal women, vulnerable to sexual violence and murder from their men, these women are so damaged that they turn their oppression on one another and on themselves. As with Lewis, however, possession is never entertained as anything but a “strategy.” The difference is that for the Cambridge women it is a singularly unsuccessful strategy. The shamanic cure simply places women back in the patriarchal social order that they never really left in the first place. Although possession allows women to go unpunished, “cure” is merely the other side of punishment in this analysis. If Lewis’s refusal to be drawn into the phenomenology of possession results in women who are unrecognizable—supersubjects—then in the hands of the Cambridge feminists the same refusal results in representations of Punjabi women who are just as unrecognizable: they are supervictims. Even Punjabi weddings, which normally provide the opportunity for engagement in exuberant female performance traditions of song, dance, and banter, do not seem pleasurable occasions at all. They are shorn of any female presence except that of the bride, who is described in grim tones as “so veiled and swaddled that she looks more like an animated parcel than a person” (Brown et al. 1981, 139). If for Lewis spirit cults are elevated to the level of conscious feminist protest, for the feminists they are downgraded and express the isolated solipsism of madness. Here too possession remains obdurately external to the analysis. If we were to apply these paradigms to Vijaya’s possessions, we would find ourselves in an oddly polarized world. In such a world, Vijaya would consider her options as a bride and opt for possession. If she were an agent of the kind envisaged by Lewis, she would remain an entirely conscious strategic subject throughout. On this understanding, she would seek the advantages of making things so difficult at her in-laws’ that she and her husband would be able to move out. Certain aspects, of course, would be hard to fit easily into this scenario: among them the fact that James, her husband, is also beginning to experience malign and untoward effects. Nor is it as clear what instrumental advantages Vijaya would have managed to extract from her earlier episodes of possession after the death of her father. Vijaya would be, on this understanding, a subject who is never really possessed, even when she chooses to be so. In the Cambridge scenario, Vijaya

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never was a subject, nor can she be one, located as she is within a patriarchal order. None of her strategies will ever change her situation. All will result only in one form or another of ever firmer re-emplacement within an oppressive order. Presumably Vijaya must await the arrival of a collective and fully conscious feminist movement before things will change for the better. Despite this absence of subjecthood, however, Vijaya remains entirely self-possessed even in her possession. On Becoming Ensnared by Phantoms: Entering the Affective World of Untimely Death, Injustice, and Danger In this chapter, and indeed in the rest of this book, I wish to explore the question of understanding what might be gained by not turning away in quite such a dismissive manner from the world of spirits and demons. I argue that our incomprehension of possession is the index of a greater loss. We seem unable to comprehend how the world might be lived in by a being who is other than a self-enclosed, relentlessly conscious, and knowing subject confronting a world that is entirely external. It is true that we may sometimes experience the world as if it were arrayed in front of us in the form of a range of options that we perfectly comprehend. But this is only one modality among many. It is hard to conceive of it as available to those who find themselves in circumstances that are extreme. By contrast, in entering the world of phantoms, demons, and village goddesses in rural popular culture one is dragged into a world in which extreme human circumstances, particularly those perceived as tragic and unjust, fundamentally alter the relationship between past and present and between subject and the world. Demonic ghosts are produced, instantaneously produced, by violent, untimely deaths. Tragedy produces not only the emotion of sadness but also something that reminds us of a Victorian Gothic sensibility. The too-sudden, violent death of a human being unleashes volatile and potentially transformative energies, turning human beings into gruesome and horrifying spirits that come back to earth seeking revenge and causing untold misery until placated, and unless placated. Tragic loss is not only an ordeal of the interior emotions; it also produces new creatures in the world. These creatures have a horrifying agency and ontological characteristics of their own. Such an understanding of violent death is more widespread in the world than is commonly recognized. Reminding us of Hertz’s description of violent deaths as producing “unquiet and spiteful souls [that] roam the earth forever,” Steedly (1993, 237) writes,



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Death by violence, as Karo [of northern Sumatra] understand it, effects a ghastly spiritual merger of victim and killer, a mutual implication in the murderous event from which neither finally escapes. . . . These lost and irreconcilable spirits return, lending their power as indiscriminately to those who would harness the horror of their passing to sorcerous purpose as to those who would recognise the humanity dwelling within this horror.

These phantoms are intent on conveying to the world the violent circumstances of their deaths. They do this not only by speaking through the bodies of others when possible but also by conveying in a sensory manner the violent circumstances of their deaths. I take the following examples from a session I attended with a Christian spirit medium who was occupied with identifying the spirits troubling her clients: •• A mother has brought her son, who finds it impossible to enter their home. Once inside he smells fumes of poison and his body begins to ache. He is unable to eat because of this smell. He is unable to work. Saint Michael, speaking through Mary, the medium, tells them that the son is troubled by the spirit of a man who killed himself by drinking poison. Saint Michael requires the mother and son to return to him five days in a row. The son is asked to fast before his next visit, when a medicine will be given. •• Mātā, or the Virgin, speaks through Mary. She has diagnosed several spirits troubling a woman. They include Icakki, Vannāra Māṭaṉ, and the spirit of a relative. The spirit signals its presence by the smell of arrack [cheap country liquor]. According to Mātā, this is the spirit of a relative of the woman’s father who committed suicide with arrack and poison. The woman is reprimanded for not being more careful about when she walks around the streets at night.4

This domain of popular culture, if we are open to it, has something to teach us of how injustice comes to be lived affectively. These ghosts are not purely internal; they are not experienced as manifestations of the subject’s mental states. But neither do they have the “objective” status of other beings in the world that share with humans a material, tangible quality. Yet they serve to connect human beings to the past. These creatures continue to hunger for human beings who will bear witness. The reader will recall that the spirit that possessed Vijaya as a bride was once a married woman who suffered both in life and death from her husband’s jealous rages. Vijaya knew this woman, knew of her suffering, and was clearly affected by her story.

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One of the perennial questions that creates a difficulty for social science interpretations of possession is this: why do certain individuals become possessed and not others. The difficulty is partly addressed if we include the affective dimension of existence. For it is this capacity to be affected by the suffering and violent end of others that is the prerequisite for the particular kinds of possessions being discussed here. Such a capacity is also the prerequisite for bearing witness; and the bearing of witness is one way in which we might understand such possession. It is this capacity, unevenly distributed within any social group, that seems to allow ghosts to find particular individuals who can serve as their witnesses, often in pitiable and dramatic ways. These individuals lend their own bodies and voices to allow the ghosts to communicate with a wider public. They do so with varying degrees of practice, agency, and will. At one end of the spectrum are women such as Vijaya, whose possession is involuntary. At the other end are ritual practitioners, valued performers who give affective shape to the worship of the goddess and of minor male deities. One end of the spectrum is dominated by women, the other, accruing ritual value, is dominated by men. There is, nevertheless, a continuum from one end to the other of the spectrum that has often been missed in accounts of possession. That continuum is afforded by the capacity to be moved, to be affected by the bodily danger and death of others. This capacity to be affected is crystallized around the theme of violent death, which is pervasive in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere in the south. In the vil pāṭṭu, or “bow-song,” genre of performance in Kanyakumari District (Blackburn 1988; Schuler 2009), where Vijaya lived, as in the terukkūttu genre of other parts of Tamil Nadu (Frasca 1990; de Bruin 2006), the most intense performances are those that bear witness to violent death through the medium of retelling the story, or katai, of the life and violent death of a hero. So powerful is this preoccupation that in both terukkūttu and the Kerala genre of kathakali, the performance of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata has been reattuned to favor the depiction of death dealing and the killing of wrongdoers. This retelling is not simply a representation: the performance heightens the affects, allowing both performers and participants to relive the events. The moment when the death of the hero is rendered is also the moment at which the affected witnesses contribute fresh life to the ghost: their bodies are given over as the vehicle for the urgent communicative needs of the dead hero. Consider the following vivid account provided by Blackburn (1988, 42–43) in his study of the vil pāṭṭu performance tradition: Dancers possessed by the hero of a death story will run over to the god’s icon, grab the weapon leaning there—the sword, knife, staff, or arivāḷ



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(machete) with which he fought and died in the story—and brandish it wildly in the air. . . . The extreme ritual depth at the center slot is also indicated by the way these dance props are handled. Dancers hold the burning torches close to their chest and face; others strike their heads, foreheads, or back with the flat edge of the weapons they carry. In some festivals, dancers may walk over a bed (about 30 feet long) of burning coals, or scoop them up and cradle them in their bare hands. . . . a group of men is assigned to monitor these dances. . . . The extreme ritual depth of the dance . . . also becomes the focus of attention for the large festival crowd that gathers in a circle. . . . From the crowd come mediums for other gods in the temple or other nearby temples. . . . These designated dancers are also sometimes joined by ordinary individuals in the festival crowd . . . most of the individuals will have danced this way before or have been possessed outside the temple context. Many of these unofficial dancers are women, who dance very differently from the designated, male dancers. The women loosen their long, black hair, bend at the waist, and slowly sway in small circles. If the atmosphere is particularly charged, the total number of dancers may reach eight or ten, each careening around, waving their weapons and burning torches, while others sway in the crowd and urge them on with cries of the kuravai [ululation]. (emphasis added)

The dominance of men is noticeable in this description of ritually valued forms of possession. Whether as the bow-song performers, designated monitors, or mediums from other temples, the descriptions are all of men. When women are mentioned, it is only in the subsidiary category of “unofficial” dancers. The same dominance of men applies in all the ritually valued forms of performance that have been ethnographically described for other parts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala (Beck 1981; Frasca 1990; Zarrilli 2000; see also Sarah Caldwell 1999). Similarly, the death stories foreground the deaths of male heroes. But if we were to treat male and female possession entirely separately, we would also miss important meanings shared by the two. The death stories of women are also present in the ritual performances at the temple of the goddess. But they are present in disguised form as the “birth stories” of the goddess herself. Blackburn (1988) does not comment on the fact that the rebirth of the goddess is often predicated on the death of a woman. Consider the following story, the central narrative performed in Icakki Ammaṉ’s temples in Kanyakumari.5 A boy and a girl were born to a devadasi, or “temple dancer.” The girl, Lakshmi, herself grew up to be a dancer at the temple. A Brahman boy, Velavan, who fell in love with her, squandered the

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money in the temple treasury on Lakshmi. When the money was gone, he was turned out by the dancer’s mother. He left the village in anger, but Lakshmi followed him. While she slept with her head on his lap, he smashed her head with a rock and ran away, taking her jewelry with him. Her brother arrived the next day, and in deep mourning over her death, committed suicide. Her lover, Velavan, was bitten by a snake and died. Lakshmi and her brother were reborn as demonic infants, intent on wreaking revenge. By day, they seemed innocent babes, but at night they would steal and slaughter cows and goats. The king, their father, left the children in the forest, where they grew up under the tree sacred to the goddess, the margosa, or vēppa maram. That tree was cut down by a member of the Veḷḷāḷar caste,6 causing the death of Neelan, the boy. His sister, Neeli, vowed revenge on the entire community of Veḷḷāḷars. She took the kalli cactus and placed it on her hip. There it turned into a child. Meanwhile Velavan, the lover from her previous birth, had been reborn as Ceṭṭi Anandan. Neeli approached him, saying, “Come, my husband!” Sensing his end, he fled, taking refuge with the Veḷḷāḷar. She trapped him in the house and tore open his stomach. The elders of the Veḷḷāḷar community opened up the house the next morning and sensed their own responsibility for his death. In some versions of the story, overcome by their inability to protect a guest who had pleaded for protection, they jump into a fire and die. This birth story of the goddess is indeed the story of the violent death and reincarnation of a woman. Killed by her own lover, she returns to life as an avenging goddess. Popular culture relishes precisely this replacement of a victim by the superagent. The stories of such transformations are retold with pleasure and are often the occasion for humor in live performances as well as in the B-grade Tamil and Telugu “goddess cinema.” Cinematic renditions, like the temple performances, provide the occasion for affective involvement, and the culminating deeds of the goddess in such cinema creates among cinemagoers a wondering and worshipful attitude that resembles that of the worshipper gazing at the deity in temples (Ram 2008b). Vijaya’s possession must be resituated within this wider field of practices. The dead woman who troubles her is no longer the long-suffering, retiring victim whom Vijaya once knew. She comes armed with all the demonic powers of an avenging deity. The rage, abuse, and physical strength that the woman was unable to exhibit in her lifetime she now exhibits through Vijaya. Unable to make her husband desist from torment, she now makes all men afraid. Unable in her own lifetime to employ verbal aggression, she now abuses Vijaya’s mother-in-law, the tormentor of Vijaya. We can also now make better sense of a puzzling detail of Vijaya’s possession. This spirit does



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not seem to know where to stop. We can understand the connection between Vijaya and the dead woman, but why is James, her husband, dragged into the vortex of the spirit’s effects? This lack of proportionality between the original injustice and the act of revenge is a notable feature of popular religious culture. The powers of the goddess and of the male demon deities are testified not in the symmetry between cause and effect but precisely in their excess. In the birth story related above, the demonic deity swears revenge on the entire community of Veḷḷāḷars as the punishment for one. The relentless pursuit of a murderous husband into the next birth cycle marks only the beginning of her revenge. Schuler (2009, 226) tries to restore a sense of proportionality to our understanding of the goddess’s vengeance. She draws attention to the fact that in her rebirth the goddess is not only avenging her own murder in her previous birth but also punishing the Veḷḷāḷar community for the murder of her demonic twin brother in her current birth. But this motive does not make the revenge itself any more proportional. According to the narrative, the Veḷḷāḷars do not actually murder her brother. They inadvertently cut down a tree in which the spirit of the already murdered brother has taken refuge. In revenge, Icakki not only kills all the men in the community but also devises ruses and strategies to murder all the women and infants. This story, like many others of its kind, ends in a bloodbath. In the following extract, a woman murdered by her seven brothers is transmogrified into a rampaging demon deity. She begins by killing the seven brothers who killed their own sister in the name of family honor: And jumped out Kuṟukkulāñci [the demon deity] Stabbed the seven Cāstiri brothers to death Set about destroying the soldiers around, Killed the bystanders and onlookers; Kuṟukkulāñci spared not those too that minded their way Bringing them to death by means violent. (Nirmala Devi 1987, 161) The rampage demonstrates more than the awesome sweep of the demonic power. It also maps out new territories for the goddess or the male demon. Once her full fury is unleashed, she can be “cooled” and placated only by the building of a new temple in her honor. By building such temples, her worshippers “reterritorialize” the volatile goddess. They ask the deity to consent to grace them and to live among them, adding their country to her territories. The indiscriminate violence, while it lasts, resembles the random and furious sweep of epidemics. These too are associated with the goddess. But

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in its response to injustice, the goddess’s furious progress recalls the march of peasant insurgency identified by Guha (1983, 157) as “a total and integrated violence” of wrecking, burning, looting, and eating that appeared to the peasants’ enemies to far outsoar the scale of the misdeeds that had prompted it. The gendered idioms of justice and injustice in subaltern culture vary in significant ways from the corresponding idioms of “high” culture. The oral popular tradition in Kanyakumari adds to the ritual depth of the injustice in the Icakki story by introducing a new element. Not only does the husband kill his wife. He removes his wife’s tāli—the necklace tied around the bride’s throat at marriage—to satisfy the casual whim of his paramour. This indecency compounds the injustice and constitutes as much of a turning point in this story as the murder. The affective power of the tāli connects subaltern culture with elite culture in Tamil Nadu. The tāli is a potent sign of the binding of a woman’s śakti (power) to her husband. It appears at the ritual high point of the marriage ceremony. From that point on the tāli carries with it the śakti or ritual power of the marriage itself. It is a continual reminder to the woman both of the bonds that now shape her existence and of her right to expect protection from her husband, the more powerful party in a hierarchical relationship. Tamil high culture calls on the woman to foster the śakti of the marriage and of her tāli, in part by her observance of her ritual vows but most important by her daily ritualized discipline of chastity (Wadley 1980). The ritual powers that are assembled in the tāli can act as a conduit of accumulated moral authority, much like the powers a male ascetic gathers by sustained penance. My grandmother would relate with relish the story of the wife whose accumulated powers exceed that of the male ascetic. In this story, a woman deliberately keeps a male ascetic waiting while she serves her husband his meal. That ascetic has already shown himself to be a man lacking in self-control. Earlier in the story, he angrily reduced an offending stork to ashes for daring to disturb his austerities. When the wife is ready to serve his food, the ascetic glares at her, but she puts him in his place with the simple question, “Did you think I too was a stork, O sage?” (Kokkeṉṉṟu niṉnaitāyō Koṅkaṇavā?) The term Koṅkaṇavā identifies the sage as one of the eighteen sages of the powerful Siddha (Cittar in Tamil) tradition of Saivite sages. The powers the woman has accumulated through her chastity render her immune to the curse even of so powerful a personage as a noted Siddha sage. But more than this is revealed by the question she poses. Her powers supersede those of the ascetic since she knows all that has occurred in his recent past. Her self-control as a wife has made her tapas (Skt.), the powers derived from austerity, superior to his. In upper-caste narratives, wifely powers are seldom exercised against the husband, no matter what the provocation. Morally influential Tamil epics



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such as the Cilappatikāram (written in the fifth century by Prince Ilango) have been revived and made contemporary by Tamil nationalism in the twentieth century. The epic tells of a wife, Kannaki, who patiently puts up with a philandering husband. The husband abandons her for his paramour. Yet still her moral śakti is put to use on the husband’s behalf. When he is falsely accused of theft and put to death, she travels to the court and confronts the king. Her classic tirade ends when she tears the left breast from her body and hurls it at the city of Madurai, which bursts into flames. This famous story makes manifest a power latent in all deserving women. The power is objectified not only in the tāli but also in their own bodies. The tāli’s power itself derives from the bodily and moral self-discipline that women exercise in the pursuit of chastity. As Kannaki’s spectacular action indicates, that power inheres equally in those parts of the body that most intimately define a woman’s gender: her breasts and womb. The power is also invoked in the annual rituals (known as nōṉpu rituals) held by Tamil women for their husbands. There is here the aspect of a wager engaged by wives with the god of death. The wager, if stated, would sound something like this: if I have been chaste, if my tāli is strong, then I defy you to take my husband away in death. In the epic, Kannaki issues a similar challenge. Since her husband has been unjustly taken away, a surge of her śakti reduces the kingdom to ash. Scholars who have noted the recurrent theme in Tamil literature of “the motif of a woman who suffers great injury and avenges herself ” have also drawn parallels between the heroine Kannaki and the wronged heroines of the Icakki corpus (Schuler 2009, 29). However, the differences are equally profound. Kannaki, like the wives who undertake the nōṉpu rituals, deploy their śakti only on behalf of their husband. No such inhibition, however, deters the protagonists of the death stories associated with Icakki Ammaṉ. Here the terrible agency of the murdered woman does not depend on how chaste she was in her life. Indeed, the heroine in the Icakki story is a devadasi, a dancer, not a wife. It is enough that she loved and trusted a man, did him no wrong, and is repaid by a betrayal that brings her life to an untimely close. The violation of the covenant is enough to change her into a relentless demon who stalks her adversary, her lover or husband, into his next life. Small wonder, then, that although Icakki is still worshipped by specific castes, it is Kannaki who circulates widely in Tamil modernity as an icon of Tamil womanhood. The Affective Force of Love and the Alliance Model of Sexuality The life circumstances of the murdered woman link Vijaya’s possession to the death and birth songs of the goddess. But there are circumstances of Vijaya’s own life that closely resemble those of the women’s death stories. We must

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recall that Vijaya is no ordinary bride. She has entered a love marriage. The liaison began without the prior approval of both families. Such liaisons are dangerous to both lovers. They break with the dominant model of marriage. Describing sexuality in nineteenth-century India, Guha (1987, 150) states, Unlike Europe, where according to Foucault the “deployment of sexuality” had already emerged as an independent apparatus of social control since the eighteenth century and superimposed itself on the “deployment of alliance,” in nineteenth century India sexuality was still subsumed in alliance for all social transactions—for marriage, kinship and “transactions of names and possessions.”

However, the historical dominance of the alliance model has produced in India, as its counterpoint, the subversive motif of romance. What has changed with Indian modernity is not the “arrival” of romantic love. What is new is the notion of a “love marriage,” as it is popularly termed, in implicit contradistinction to “arranged marriage.” The alliance model of sexuality has historically lent a certain daring and individuation to the play of desire. Desire contravenes boundaries of caste and hierarchy. Unlike the population who marry and reproduce within the alliance model, and who remain nameless, the lovers who dare to love outside the model of alliance are named and remembered in all the detail of an individualized biography. They are remembered not singly but, as befits lovers, in dyadic pairs. In northern India, the Punjab and Sindh have moving song epics dedicated to Sassi-Punoo, Soni-Mahwal, and HirRanja. They are remembered too by the tragic deaths that mark such lovers. In Tamil Nadu, the genre of “death stories” deals not only with the violent betrayal of women by their lovers and husbands but also with the betrayal of women by their own kinsmen—often their brothers—who hunt down and kill them for eloping with a lover of their own choice. The Story of Kuṟukkulāñci (Nirmala Devi 1987), translated from palm-leaf manuscripts by the Institute of Asian Studies in Chennai, tells the story of a young man from the Mutaliyār caste and a Brahman woman called Pūraṇavaḷḷi. Pūraṇavaḷḷi agrees to elope with her lover. They travel to Kerala, where they find shelter at the court of the king. But the lovers are hunted down by Pūraṇavaḷḷi’s brothers and murdered for this insult to family honor. At the moment of her death, Pūraṇavaḷḷi, a treasured, much-cosseted and beautiful woman, turns into a rampaging demonic creature called Kuṟukkulāñci. Somewhat unusually for the genre, the new creature is male, not a goddess.7 In a story recorded and beautifully described by Trawick Egnor (1991), the death of the young woman called Singamma is systematically planned by her brothers in order to avenge the slur she has



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brought on the family’s honor by escaping their custodianship and going to the market. Singamma is buried alive in a hole dug for her but eventually appears as a goddess “rising up high, speaking with unsheathed energy, wearing pearls” (230). Vijaya’s aspiration for a love marriage exposed her to danger. It is not only in stories that couples are killed for eloping. Such punishments have become all the more frequent with the rise of Dalit movements and the increase in intercaste marriages. Human rights organizational newsletters and journals in southern India carry regular reports of the murder of young couples, above all where intercaste liaisons are involved (see, e.g., Burnad 2003; Chowdhry 1998). Yet the death stories of lovers communicate the sense that these dominant codes of morality are not the only ones that matter. Lovers are entitled to love, to find union in each other. In the epic story, Pūraṇavaḷḷi, as she confronts her brothers, laments, Aren’t there women on this earth That have taken to a course of this kind? Have I committed a crime unknown to this world? ( Nirmala Devi 1987, 159) Furthermore, brothers owe a duty of love and care to their sisters, a duty that is not extinguished by the demands of honor. In the south as in the north, brothers extend physical protection in exchange for the ritual and magical powers of the sister. Beck’s (1974) analysis of Tamil folktales finds the brother-sister dyad to be of central significance, with brothers showing tender concern and protecting their young sister from outside aggression, while the sister imparts special magical powers for her brothers’ safety. These alternate codes of morality are not simply the province of narratives. They leak out of the boundaries of genre and become the stuff of women’s narrativization of their lives. In these narratives, closely related to the genres of women’s laments, there is, as Trawick Egnor (1991, 243) puts it, “a strong sense of moral outrage” that reflects the fact that “people are not behaving toward each other as they should, and the pain of innocents results from this immorality.” Injustice as Untimely Arrestation In considering possession in its framework of sundered moral relationships, it is once again easy to forget that we are dealing with phantoms, ghosts, and

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demons and not simply with a floating sense of moral outrage. Demons and ghosts are not discourses about moral injustice. They are terrible and ambiguous creatures that spring forth not from the mind but from mutilated and severed bodies. In this section I wish to explore the corporeal genesis of ghosts. The theme I explore here bears a close relationship to the notion of śakti, which has already been identified as a particular kind of energy, corporeal on the one hand but also amenable to moral cultivation. But there are questions to be raised that take us beyond śakti. What is it about bodies that—under destructive circumstances—gives rise to ghosts? What persists, in the Tamil villagers’ understanding, from the condition of the living body to that of a ghost? I have found some resemblances in Vitebsky’s (1993, 53) account of construction of power among the Sora people in the forests between Orissa and Andhra Pradesh: Sora describe the impulse of sonums [spirits of the dead] as a force, power or energy . . . and say that it can be conducted and stored in space. When I took Sora friends to a city, they had no difficulty in understanding electric lights, accumulators and telephones—to the extent that these operate in the same way as a sonum, which is seen as similarly dynamic and subject to storage in containers, transmission along threads and paths, and leaping across gaps. But in Sora practice, consciousness is far more than electricity. The impetus which it represents cannot be switched off since it has its own will and agency with which, as sonum, it engages and affects the living.

In rural Tamil Nadu, it is the life force not only of the dead but of the living too that is considered to be like electricity. An old woman with whom I was conversing, an agricultural laborer in Chengalpattu District, Tamil Nadu, objected to the government policy of advocating sterilization after one or two children on the grounds that the “current”—she used the English word—was still flowing. She went on to elaborate on this. Iratta oṭṭam, “the flow of blood” (here the blood of fertility), should not be abruptly cut off by sterilization. The version of family planning that has been experienced by rural women, with its abruptness and lack of care, only exacerbates the existing basis for disquiet. Sterilization, to them, entails the sudden rupture of a stillflowing energy. Women’s wombs, like their breasts, are the site of a flowing current—regardless of the woman’s moral conduct.8 Tragedy and injustice in women’s death stories, like the too-sudden sterilization of a still-fertile womb, inheres in just such bodily ruptures. The violation of relational moral codes only adds to the injustice. It is for this reason



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that both women’s and men’s death stories dwell on the mutilation and cutting of the body. Masilamani-Meyer (1989, 87) characterizes the katai (story) of the male folk hero Kāttavarayaṉ as follows: “In the katai the scene of the stake is described with much pathos. Kāttavarayaṉ, pierced at various parts of his body by nails and hooks, languishes on the stake, while there is great wailing and lamentation among the spectators.” To comprehend the extreme and the unusual, we need to reexamine the normative. Or better still, the extreme and unusual illuminate for us premises that are usually taken for granted and therefore invisible. We may infer from these laments over bad deaths what it is to lead a “good” life. A good life is a fulfilled life. The ideal life cycle, at once ethical, corporeal, and aesthetic, is entirely gender specific. There is simply no generic “human” when it comes to understanding those values pertaining to excellence and ethics that are embedded in the life cycle. We can begin with the performance of death stories themselves. These performances never miss an opportunity to enlarge on the sense of a corporeal life potential gone to waste. They dwell on the details of every embodied life phase of a hero or heroine to portray an excellence that is incipient but unfolding. There the shared character of the life cycle ends. The death stories of men and women diverge from this point. The hero’s maturation entails the acquisition of the broadest range of skills that will equip him to move out into the world and take his place in it. The stories tell of outstanding aptitude and of the appetite for learning skills of an immense variety, far outstripping the limits of caste habitus and hierarchy. Male heroes of popular epics (Muttupaṭṭan, Cinnatampi, Tontimuttu, Kāttavarāyaṉ, Kaṭṭapommaṉ) are allowed by the narratives to pursue a wider range of projects than any woman. Sexual desire and love are only one component (though an important one) of men’s heroic adventures. Their desires encompass the quest for honor as well as an aspiration to make one’s way in the world, searching for an ideal setting that will befit the extraordinary skills and talents of the male hero. These life itineraries are not available for the women in the epics. Women have only one means of individualized action at their disposal. It is within their discretion to bestow their sexual favor without regard for the alliance model approved by their family, kinship, and caste. Divergent constructions of tragic death for men and for women are as old as the epic genres in the Tamil language: a longue durée indeed. Describing Caṅkam Tamil poetry, Hart (1986, 251–252) writes, The Tamils thought that a man possessed exceptional power if he was a young warrior who had killed others in battle. A woman possessed this

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power if she was young and beautiful. Should such a person die without this power having been used up in a natural way—if a man died while fighting or a young woman died a sati or in some unjust way—the unused power was thought to attach itself to his or her spirit, which then had to be propitiated in order to keep it under control.

In this respect, very little has changed. Moffat (1979) found that among the Paraiyar community in the Tamil district of Chengalpattu women who die while still virgins or before the death of their husbands are transformed into the goddess and worshipped as such. Moffatt asked the Paraiyars about the terms used for these women—pūvāṭaikkāri and pūvaṭai—those who have “flowered.” The terms, he was told, refer to the goddess’s being brought from a well in a flowerpot (226). Trawick Egnor (1986, 307), in reference to the former term, offers the following interpretation: In many households in the village, a deity named pūvāṭaikkāri (“she with flowers”) is worshipped in this way, as the principal household deity. Pūvāṭaikkāri represents all the women of that household who died still un-widowed or still unmarried—still wearing flowers—for flowers are forbidden to widows.

While I would not disagree with these findings, I would suggest that one of the central meanings of these terms refers to the girl or woman herself. It is she who is the pū, or “flower.” Consider this description (Nirmala Devi 1987, 138) of Pūraṇavaḷḷi at her puberty ceremony, blossoming in the protective nurturance of her father and family:  . . . at twelve, in blossom full Grew to puberty and matured in mind too. In joy profound the father was, And saw his daughter given a campaṅki oil bath Had her dressed in silk delicate Adorned her forehead with a crescent spot Got her ear rings and a necklace of gold. And in lovely flowers she was decked out. Ceremonies and rituals marked the day With Pūraṇavaḷḷi in a golden plate placed. . . . The use of the term “blossoming” to describe the girl’s unfolding essence is not a stray metaphor. It is a systematic figure that constructs the entire



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life cycle of the female. As in the verse quoted above, the girl who attains first menstruation is said to have flowered (pūppu) (McGilvray 1982; Kapadia 1995). The puberty ceremony is called pūppuppuṉita nīrattu viḻā, or the “auspicious bathing festival for the one who has flowered.” Similarly, medical discourses on menstruation and the onset of fertility use the imagery of flowering. In ancient Tamil medical texts such as the Vaittiya Vallaṭi, by the sage Akattiyar, the entire process of conception and reproduction is visualized through the dominant metaphor of the flower: From the day of menstruation, for fourteen days, like the sixteen petals of the lotus flower, the girl’s reproductive parts will unfold. From the fifteenth day, each petal will close one by one. Between the fifteenth and the thirtieth day, if a vintu [semen] reaches the womb through union, the womb that had flowered like a lotus will close its petals one by one daily.9 (Venukopal 1986)

The gendered metaphors acquire the power to shape subjectivity through their capacity to inform more than one set of practices. They demonstrate a sensory synesthesia by means of such “crossing over.” Images of woman as blossom and creeper are to be met with in all kinds of discursive genres—in epics, ritual life-cycle practices, and medical treatises. Such attributes of an organic specificity to femininity make possible the operation of gender relations that are at once complementary and hierarchical. Dumont’s (1972) description of “encompassment” as a form of relationality and power peculiar to hierarchy has been applied mainly to the operation of caste in India. Yet his own model of hierarchy as something that persists but is unrecognized in the West is drawn explicitly from Western gender ideology (239–245). He refers to the narrative of Genesis. Eve is created from Adam’s rib. In that one act the two sexes are differentiated and at the same time placed in a hierarchical relationship to each other. Eve will forever be “encompassed” by Adam. In Tamil Nadu, the hierarchical relationship of encompassment in gender relations (cf. Busby 2000) is elaborated and given further sensuous form in the favored arts of shilpa (Skt.), or “sculpture,” and of dance. Divine as well as idealized heterosexual couples are apprehended by worshippers in complementary and hierarchically deployed stances, with the creeperlike sinuous female body curving for support toward the treelike, upright stance of the male body. The comparatively greater height and breadth of the male body is exaggerated to visually convey the sense of protective encompassment, just as the greater curves of the female body are exaggerated to convey its labile capacity. Such sculptural poses are reembodied in dance. Spectators are invited to

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experience heightened moments of stillness in the dances of southern India, where the rhythm is suspended to allow spectators to enjoy the presence of a divine heterosexual eroticism. It will be clearer now why I describe the construction of gendered life cycles as displaying a specifically aesthetic as well as an ethical quality. The tragedy of “unfulfilled” deaths refers us back to all these elements simultaneously. Phantoms as Objectifications of Existential Ambiguities We can keep phantoms, ghosts, and demons in the box reserved for exotic or nonsensical phenomena, which is where modernity has placed them. They are often to be found there when class and colonial distinctions are being redrawn. Alternatively, we may, in a reflexive movement that has informed much postcolonial scholarship, reverse the direction of the enquiry. We may enquire, as I did in chapter 2, into the discursive and historical antecedents of modernity that have led to a marginalization of such ghosts. Yet there are also other ways of proceeding, because though the ghosts may be marginal they have not disappeared, nor have they lost their powers over many. What would happen if we were to return to the ghosts, not for the purposes of a local ethnographic exploration alone but to see whether the existential possibilities they dramatize are as remote from our experience of “advanced” modernity as we may suppose? We can all recognize the injustice of the untimely death of a child or a youth in the prime of life. But, as is shown by Heidegger (1962, 279), there is a sense in which all death is “untimely” from the perspective of the one who dies. For what is extinguished by death is that dimension of potentiality that implies there is “always still something outstanding, which . . . has not yet become ‘actual.’ ” This “outstanding” business cannot be deemed to be settled in the way that a debt is settled when the money is paid off. Nor is the potentiality of human existence the same as that of a fruit that is unripe. The philosopher concedes that there are commonalities between fruit and human that derive from the fact that they are both living things. Both the fruit and the human being share this quality: what they will become arises not from something external to them but from within their own development (287). We say of both plant and human existence that they “perish” when they die. The fruit when ripe has exhausted its full potential. But there is always something more to be settled in human existence. To the extent that our death is not a purely biological phenomenon, it consists precisely in the fact that the one who dies has taken away from him this horizon of possibilities (288).



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Heidegger’s formulation helps show why the tropic equation of woman and flower holds experiential force and yet exercises effects that are insidious. There is something that rings true about seeing a young woman (or man) as in “full blossom.” But this assimilation of women to plants has an underhand force. It operates precisely to disguise the difference between the never-tobe-settled potentialities of human existence and the exhaustible potential of flowers and fruit. Nearly all constructions of a “good life” attempt to settle, once and for all as it were, the question of a woman’s future. Marriage and maternity are taken to extinguish any unsettling notions of a future horizon of potentialities that extends beyond their sphere (see also de Beauvoir 1974).10 The notion of a “good death”—death as a cumaṅkali, a wife who dies still wearing the tāli, signifying a husband who is alive—also attempts to extinguish any lingering sense that a woman’s death, like a man’s, might leave certain potentialities unfulfilled. Possession and hauntings by ghosts and demons are bounded by such frameworks of meanings. They arise out of “bad deaths” that remain obdurately gender specific, and they implicitly refer us back to a normative understanding of what it is to live and die well. But in referring us back to such frameworks, they also keep alive all sorts of unsettling possibilities: that bad deaths exist; that the hierarchically dominant group can and does overstep the limits of justice in its treatment of the subordinate group; that there is an authority higher than that of the dominant social group or gender; and that death does not extinguish the force of injustice. Death in these cases only amplifies the force and temporal reach of the human victim. Tragedy is released from the privative framework of individual lives—where it may or may not be noticed—to the public domain of a haunting that cannot be avoided by anyone. The ghost of Hamlet’s father marks something more than the private, subjective trauma of a young man who finds his father killed by his uncle and his mother married to his father’s murderer. The ghost will not go away. Hamlet’s haunting by this ghost signals “something rotten in the state of Denmark.” In the world of the play and in Tamil Nadu, it is time itself that is “out of joint.” For women in particular, I have argued in this chapter, possession brings their own affective lives closer to the world of public rituals dominated by men. As a possessed woman, Vijaya occupies, in however unequal a fashion, the same field of meanings and practices as the heroes and heroines whose tragic deaths animate male ritual specialists in the worship of the goddess. Many of the elements of the death stories central to the production of the sacred in rural Tamil Nadu are present in her possession. At the time of her “blossoming” she is deprived of a father who could provide the encompassing protective shade of a tree. The troubles that seize her at this time are diagnosed

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by at least one healer as the pernicious effects of Icakki Ammaṉ. This is a goddess who is herself ambiguous in relation to female suffering. As a maverick demonic agent, she can dispense trouble to men and women, but she can also become reincarnated, as we have seen, to avenge the violent death of a woman. In this sense, her ontology is a collective precipitate of women’s bad deaths. Certainly her capacity to erupt in anger and destruction is renewed by such sources. Vijaya’s life continues on a rocky course and now takes on other elements of women’s death stories. Instead of the safe course, whereby her own kin would usher her into the embrace of a carefully chosen, socially appropriate mate who would bring her into sexual flowering and eventually into fruition as a mother, she embarks on a dangerous course: love elopement. Vijaya is luckier than the women in the death stories. Although she is first chased out of the village by James’s uncle, the senior men of the village enable a peaceful resolution, where a “proper” marriage, with due attention to at least the nominal payment of dowry, is conducted in Vijaya’s hometown. But no sooner does the marriage take place than Vijaya becomes afflicted by an untoward spirit. The spirit eventually identifies itself as the phantom produced by a woman’s unfulfilled, untimely death. One cannot claim that the circumstances of Vijaya and of this dead woman were identical. The woman was murdered when Vijaya was fifteen. So how is it that the temporal and circumstantial distances between the two seem not to matter to the ghost? What is it that allows the phantom to live again and to exercise its effects? In trying to situate Vijaya’s possession within a complex of practices that collectively produce a heightened attunement to the incomplete nature of violent death, I have drawn attention to the power of the living in bearing witness to such injustices. Possession, located by performance traditions as the culmination of a repeated process of retelling and reliving the life and death of the murdered hero, dramatizes for us a human capacity that is far more fundamental. I have called this the capacity to be affected by the violent death of another human being. The phrasing recalls for us the work on affect by Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Seeking to distinguish their use of the term from the earlier term “emotion” (designated as sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari), they emphasize the mobile flow of energies and intensities not only between human subjects but also between human subjects and all that the world contains. Affect in this view is intimately connected with the body’s capacity to act, with the flows between bodies, either augmenting or diminishing that capacity. Affect in this sense is the capacity to be affected by others and to affect others in turn, a contagiousness (278) in the movement of energy. Their work is particularly resonant with the experience of the collective flows of



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energy in ritual performances such as the vil pāṭṭu as the energy of the dead hero flows contagiously between performers and spectators. But it is still not adequate to describe these practices, with their heightened mood of concern for the dead, simply as a flow of energies. Describing the “surprisingly widespread” purchase of ritualized mourning in myth, ritual, and “village religion” in southern India, Shulman (1989, 56) writes, One could perhaps call it cathartic, in the Aristotelian sense of arousing and transforming—perhaps also purging—the tragic emotions of eleos and phobos. Its outstanding symptom is not ecstasy [unlike the bhakti religion of viraha, or “separation”] but mourning or lamentation—pulampal. . . . This type of devotion requires a victim for its lachrymose display of emotion. . . . Ritualized mourning for this divine victim seems to be accompanied by a fascination with death, with violence leading to death, and with the notion of (tragic) fate.

Shulman’s description locates the emotions as an attribute of a complex of social practices themselves rather than as subjective states locked away in the interior of human subjects. This is a sense I wish to retain. However, emotions, although not strictly subjective, are not “objective” in the conventional sense of the term. They have a practical or directive function in allowing individuals to orient themselves. In an overview of literature on emotion, perception, and memory, Milton (2002) has undertaken to challenge the conventional opposition between emotion and rationality. Emotions, she argues, enable “the development and use of knowledge.” They allow “information to be picked up and they influence the ways in which that information is retained, interpreted and used” (66). Heidegger’s argument goes deeper. The emotions are the very precondition for “involvement,” for having a world, in the sense that Heidegger describes as Sorge, or “care,” in Being and Time (1962, 235ff.). Sorge, or care, does not necessarily denote caring in the sense of solicitude or concern for others but rather the sense that the world matters to us, even if we take up a mode of indifference or inconsiderateness of others. It is this mattering that allows us to pick out a meaningful world as one that is near, close at hand. Such a structure of active involvement is normally covered over, according to Heidegger—but only in the general sense that what is fundamental and necessary to our existence is also necessarily invisible. The ground on which we walk and on which we depend for all our actions in the world is the element least foregrounded in our consciousness. It requires special circumstances—such as a rocky road, full of obstacles—to bring that taken-for-granted ground to consciousness.

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The preoccupations of ritual performance practices are with just such special circumstances. Rather than ordinary deaths, which can be treated with a kind of “untroubled indifference” (Heidegger 1962, 299), these practices are concerned with those deaths that intrude on our consciousness and trouble it. Taussig (1997, 77) links the “theaters of spirit possession” with Walter Benjamin’s observation that “at the source of the story-form” lies the potential authority of death. The stories that form the core of ritual performance in rural Tamil Nadu expressly aim to bring about a reinvolvement with the kinds of lives and deaths that a scientific historian would relegate to a “mythic” time. Such events cannot be objectively verified. But in retelling their stories, these lives and deaths come to matter all over again to participants. Through this “mattering,” these events and personae are brought very close in time and place, so close that the ghosts are able to repossess those individuals most vitally affected. A performer of the musical kuṭam (clay pot) tells an ethnographer, Only if the story is performed will the possession of the deity take place. The reason for this is that the person who is possessed by the deity has that power only after he has heard the sound of that particular story [being told]. If the performers sing in any other way, he will say, “This is not proper.” They expect the particular words of the story to be heard. (cited in Schuler 2009, 326)

This “nearness,” which is outside the reach of a purely historicist understanding of time, can help us proceed a little further with a question already raised: why would Vijaya be possessed by the ghost of a woman who died a violent death when she herself was still a young girl? An observation by Merleau-Ponty, writing in 1945 (see 1986 English edition), is particularly helpful for integrating memory and emotion in the exploration of ambiguous phenomena. I draw on his commentary (76ff.) on “phantom limbs.” A patient who has lost a limb nevertheless persists in feeling he still has possession of the limb. Merleau-Ponty describes two kinds of situations. In one, the phantom erupts immediately at the time of the mutilation, much as the phantom sprouts out of the mutilated body in Tamil Nadu. In the case of other patients, however, the phantom appears when an emotion or circumstance recalls that in which the wound was received. What kind of remembering is this? We can no more say that the “recollection” takes the form of a conscious memory than we can say of the Tamil bride that she voluntarily chooses possession. Instead, memory takes the form of a phantom. Merleau-Ponty prefers to characterize this phantom as a former



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present that cannot recede into the past. The present circumstance recalls the arm, not as one image is associated with another but in accordance with a different mechanism. The arm is recalled because “any memory re-opens time lost to us and invites us to recapture the situation evoked” (Merleau-Ponty 1986, 85). An arm or a limb lost in traumatic circumstances, according to a recent study, results in the “phantom limb” itself assuming an abnormal or anatomically impossible posture—the “limbs being twisted or pointing in the wrong direction, or digits on the phantom hand being switched, or crossed over” (Giummarra et al. 2010, 802). The demonic forms that inhabit the Tamil landscape similarly mark the vital presence of injustices that will not fade. It is notable that the phantom troubles Vijaya at two key moments: after the death of her father and just after her elopement and marriage to James. A sociological analysis would be justified in the observation that both of these “moments” represent an isolating and vulnerable social position for a woman. But the phantoms alert us to other dimensions of such an existential situation. They draw attention to the emotions while at the same time redefining the emotions for us. The ghosts come from outside Vijaya and are experienced as ontologically distinct entities rather than as projections, thoughts, ideas, or representations. A society that understands emotions as “ghosts” rather than as “psychology” comes closer, I would suggest, to understanding the phenomenology of emotions. We would be justified in saying that the emotions are latent in the situation (a father’s death, an elopement) rather than locked up in Vijaya’s subjectivity. Even dreams and nightmares are still about the world, connecting us to it in distinctive ways. Summarizing recent evidence on nightmares, Kirmayer (2009, 324) notes that “nightmares are associated with difficulties in regulating dysphoric emotions. Distressing dream imagery is stimulated by emotional events of the day and by sleep cognition.” If ghosts challenge the notion that emotions are “subjective” states, they also refuse to allow us to fall back on the notion of “objectivity.” Objective reality is commonly located entirely outside the human subject. The opposite is true here. To be affected by a ghost is to risk bringing it to life in one’s own body.

Chapter 4

The Abject Body of Infertility

Women of my age have mothered seven children, Or they are married women, carrying their first child. Young full coconut trees fruit abundantly; They swell with maturity, but what good am I? With my friend I go to the tank, But at the water’s edge they insult me. This I cannot endure . . . It’s a battle, a raging war against a childless woman. It’s a battle an outright war against a barren woman. Blackburn 1988, 175

The material in this chapter is based primarily on my relationship with a woman called Santi, who had experienced possession episodes ever since moving to her affinal village as a young bride. I first became acquainted with her in the early 1980s during my initial period of fieldwork in a coastal fishing village of Kanyakumari District (Ram 1991b). Santi was widely and simply referred to in the village as pēykkāri, or “demon-infested woman.” Her spirit attacks had occurred over so many years that young women of the village recalled seeing her possessed when they were children. They recounted the way Santi would run up to the tree in her backyard asking the spirits to throw down money so that she could go and buy “ice” (flavored ice blocks). As a 106



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result of this familiarity, the epithet was used without any necessary animosity or censure. As is often the case in rural and small-town India, oddities are simply accepted and referred to in a matter-of-fact way as a taken-for-granted feature of the person’s identity. I renewed that acquaintance in 1991 when I returned with a more focused interest in both possession and maternity. Since Santi’s earliest experiences of possession occurred when she was a bride, I could have discussed her in the previous chapter. However, the long duration of Santi’s experiences with spirits gives me the opportunity to show how two temporalities are interwoven: that of possession and that of the female life cycle. There is much in the South Asian literature about brides and their difficulties. But tensions over the capacity to become a mother are a relatively neglected dimension of female possession experiences. Spirit attacks surfaced with regularity in the accounts I was given, usually retrospectively, of all manner of difficulties that women experience in successfully becoming mothers. Phenomena that are distinguished in Western constructions, such as sterility, miscarriage, and even infant death, all fall under the broader category of infertility in southern India. All these phenomena in turn may come to be diagnosed as the site of spirit trouble. Spirit trouble therefore offers me greater opportunities to explore gender trouble than do other fields of ritual practice, such as life-cycle rituals. Many anthropological accounts of ritual construction (e.g., Baker Reynolds 1978; Good 1991) succeed in giving the impression that such construction is a rich but seamless affair.1 Although in this chapter I draw on interpretations of ritual, the evidence shows the inadequacy of any such constructions to “match” the complexities of life experience. Santi of Katalkarai Ūr Santi the Bride

Santi grew up in Pūnturai, a coastal village in Kerala. She was thus a stranger in the Tamil-speaking villages of coastal Kanyakumari, where she came to live after marriage. Her origins continued to mark her in the relatively homogeneous world of her husband’s village. In addition to the blunt epithet of pēykkāri, Santi was sometimes referred to by other villagers, even twentyfive years after her marriage, as the Malayali (“the one from the Malayalispeaking region, i.e., Kerala).2 Strong social and religious ties do obtain between Kerala and the Kanyakumari coastal people. Men from Kanyakumari regularly go to work in Kerala, where more boats are mechanized and employment opportunities are greater. Important pilgrimage routes, both Hindu

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and Christian, link the shrines of deities. The shrine of Bhagavathi Ammaṉ in Maṇṭaikkātu, of Kanyakumari, is important to worshippers in Kerala and attracts pilgrims annually to the vicinity of the coastal village where Santi now resided. Icakki Ammaṉ, in turn, is worshipped in Kerala under the name of Neeli. Catholic shrines similarly link coastal people on either side of the Kerala–Tamil Nadu divide. Despite these links, marital alliances between the two states are rare, and the villages of coastal Kanyakumari remain fairly homogeneous.3 Like Vijaya, the heroine of the previous chapter, Santi was a strongwilled bride who married a man she had chosen herself. She met her future husband while he was paying a visit to her family in Kerala. At the time he was seeking to marry elsewhere, but, as she puts it, “I liked the look of him.” There seems to have been little opposition from the families. Their match must have been made more acceptable by the fact that it reinforced an already existing marriage alliance. Her maternal cousin’s daughter had already married her husband’s elder brother. Acceptance did not, however, mitigate the shock of moving to Katalkarai Ūr as a bride.4 Santi represents it as a journey into wilderness. “Much of the village was nothing but kāṭu,” she recalls. The term kāṭu, common to both the Tamil and Kannada languages, has been explored by Niranjana (2001) in her exegesis of the gendered meanings of space in the villages of Karnataka. The word means “forest” but is regularly used by villagers to refer to “uncultivated wild spaces surrounding the village.” The term brims with fear. These places, such as the groves, thickets, and hillocks around villages, carry the risk of “exposure to undesirable people [and] spirits” (112). The contrast must have seemed great to the new bride. The fishing villages around Trivandrum are quite urbanized, and Kerala has often been described as a region where the division between urban and rural hardly exists. Kanyakumari, however, is rural, and this was even more apparent twentyfive years ago. The contrast between natal and affinal homes is affectively charged for women. They must forsake their homes to go as a stranger to their husband’s home. During one of my return visits in 1991, I spoke at length to Santi about her life. On that occasion, she emphasized the security she felt as a child: My mother was a fish trader and my father a fisherman. Both were people of Pūnturai, and I was very much a child of the village. I have four brothers and one sister. I was especially fond of my sister, but she died in childbirth soon after her marriage. I also lost one of my brothers before my marriage. I had to work hard but was very much loved by my parents.



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As the eldest daughter, with her mother working as a trader, Santi remembers her childhood as a time of hard work, cooking, and looking after the younger siblings. It was evidently a secure world, in which she was treasured. Gender norms in Katalkarai Ūr must have seemed restrictive to Santi. I have described in Mukkuvar Women (Ram 1991b) the norms of respectability that ensure that the work of fish trading, requiring skills of independence and wit, is restricted to older, married women, the unmarried women preferring the more secluded and therefore more respectable work of tailoring, teaching, or even weaving nets. An ethnography of the fishing communities of the Trivandrum area, where Santi grew up, describes a high proportion of married women over twenty-five working as fish traders (Busby 2000, 56). Katalkarai Ūr had further peculiarities that are relevant to Santi’s subsequent experiences. Although populated entirely by Catholic fisher people, a quarter of a century ago the village contained a hundred Hindu families, all of them dyers of cloth. The families had gone, but their presence had not altogether receded. It stayed alive through the lingering presence of Hindu spirits and deities. These spirits in turn relied on their material location for their continued life. The “Hindu” corner of the village used to contain a temple dedicated to Kumāri (unwed) Ammaṉ. The area also had a burning ghat for cremating the dead. Both unmarried goddesses and the spirits of the dead belong to the category of volatile beings, more likely to possess humans than married goddesses, who are thought to have been “cooled,” bound and harnessed by their marriage, in a manner that, not coincidentally, recalls similar understandings of the mortal Tamil woman (Baker Reynolds 1978; Ram 1991b). Though the temple no longer existed, its foundations continued to “emplace” the powers of the deities. Santi’s new home stood in this corner of the village, right over where the temple was supposed to have been. Her cousin’s daughter had already warned Santi of Hindu spirits. Santi described the maṇam, or “fragrance,” she would have exuded as a new bride, the kalyāṇa puticu maṇam, or the “odor of the newly wed.” Within a fortnight of entering the house, she first encountered the deities that were to remain her lifelong companions, for better or worse. Her account departs from the conventions of “possession” experiences. She describes the beings she encountered as located at some distance from herself but as very real, visible to the eye. In her wish to emphasize this to me, she pointed to the corner of the house where the cooking is done and referred to them in the present tense: “Innā nikiṭu” (colloquial for “There they stand”). The being she first saw was a man with a mustache sitting on the ural, or “mortar.” She was unable to name this or any of the deities she saw, but the description she gave fit the iconography of “guardian” demon deities such as

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Cuṭalai Māṭan, who is popular in the southern parts of Tamil Nadu (Hiltebeitel 1989). Cuṭalai Māṭan is usually represented with a fierce mustache. The moment she saw him, a blow landed on her head. She called out to others for help, and fainted. For the next eight and a half years she continued to see various beings she simply describes as Hindu tēvatekaḷ (Skt. devas, “deities”). Unlike other Catholic villagers, she did not automatically assume that she was encountering Icakki Ammaṉ. Her descriptions were of grander beings, adorned with flowers, one of them bearing a conch. Such descriptions denote the “higher” deities of Hinduism, with the conch being an attribute of Visṉu. But as I was to realize, it was futile to try to force Santi’s visions into a clear identification in line with middle-class Hindu preconceptions. Santi’s deities looked like grand deities but behaved more like volatile deities of the kind of Icakki Ammaṉ and her even more violent henchman, Cuṭalai Māṭan. An early episode recounted by Santi heightens ambiguity. Santi was on her way to an āṭakkam, or “funeral,” of a relative. There, her period started, and her clothes were soiled: I went and quickly changed my clothes and was about to get out of my soiled [aiyamāṉa] underskirt [pāvaṭai] and there I see: gold bangles, conch [caṅku], necklace, anklets. All of these are scattered on the ground. . . . I was fated to die that day, but I didn’t. Instead, I bent down to pick up the jewels—still in my bloodstained pāvaṭai. When I tried to straighten up, I couldn’t. I prayed—I said please forgive me, God, I did wrong. I told no one of this incident—they say you will get nothing good if you talk. The deity’s voice told me: “This is my sari, my jewels, and I had gone for a wander [naṭamāṭuvataṟkku]. This woman has tried to take my things. I will not leave her after this.”

Unlike Icakki Ammaṉ, who is positively attracted to women’s bodily fluids and odors, the more Sanskritic gods and goddesses are offended by women’s bodily fluids, both of menstruation and parturition. For them, a menstruating woman in a temple or domestic shrine is a source of pollution. There seem to be elements of both reactions in Santi’s description: as with the Sanskritic gods and goddesses, these Hindu spirits are offended by the attempt to blur the boundaries of purity and pollution. Yet on other occasions she describes them as attracted by her fragrance as a bride, by the odors of a newly released sexuality. Santi’s experiences blend the two quite distinct modalities of experience associated with the Sanskritic and the non-Sanskritic deities.5 The presence of



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the former, if obtained, usually after arduous practices of worship and devotion, takes the form of darshan (Skt.). Darshan for the devotee may consist in no more than looking upon images of deities in the temple, but it can also take the rare, highly valued form in which the deity manifests itself visually before the favored devotee as a live presence and may even speak to the devotee. Traditions mediating the Sanskritic and non-Sanskritic traditions have a long history in Tamil Nadu, going back to the synthesis of Caṅkam traditions, favoring sensuous worship and possession, with the entry of northern Indian deities such as Krishna—a process that began “from the last few centuries BC onward” (Hardy 1983, 120). Such syntheses have favored an intensely emotional and occasionally erotic form of bhakti that finds expression in the striving for forms of union with the divine, starting with the Ᾱḷvār Vaishnava saints from the seventh century onward (Hardy 1983). The existence of such synthetic forms of cultural tradition does not obliterate the distinction between the different sources from which the synthesis took its energy. Non-Sanskritic forms of the goddess characteristically manifest themselves in the body of the human. But this is not the erotic form of knowingness as well as despair eloquently articulated by Tamil poets such as Ᾱṇṭāḷ, whose body, breasts, and abdomen have “known” the caresses of god (Hardy 1983, 418ff.). The manifestation of goddesses such as Icakki Ammaṉ is very often neither sought after nor longed for. The presence of the goddess does not necessarily result in the well-being of the devotee—indeed, her “claim” on the human subject is more likely to be experienced through “heat” diseases such as small pox, which is as hot and imperiously claiming of the body as she is. Possession is evidently to be located in a continuum with this form of an imperious and ambiguous “claiming” by the goddess or a demon deity. The distinction I am making between the Sanskritic and non-Sanskritic styles of human contact with deities corresponds very roughly to the distinction made by Rouget (1985) between ecstasy and trance. Ecstatic states are sought after and found by means of arduous practices undertaken largely in solitude and withdrawal from the world. Visions (“hallucinations”) have an important role in these states of ecstasy. Possession, on the other hand, occurs in the midst of the social world, and given the radical displacement of the subject (as it is taken to be) it is accompanied by “amnesia” and cannot include an “experience” of visions. These are evidently “ideal types,” and I have indicated the syncretism that has played an equally vital role in India. I seek, over the following chapters, to argue that the subject is not as radically displaced as first appears. To maintain this, we must also be prepared to revise our preconceptions of what

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constitutes subjectivity. But the evocation of these ideal types does serve to highlight what is distinctive about Santi’s account. Her description of her first vision resembles darshan but has about it all the sinister overtones of contact with the volatile goddess. As the relationship with the deities develops, it comes to resemble the classic account of possession. The deities ceased to be external to Santi. Her account refers to āṭṭam, or “dance,” fierce dancing (nalla āṭṭam) that gave her no peace: “I could not have just sat here and talked to you like I am now.” She was a spectacle for all—the people of the village would gather to watch. Now she was no longer “herself ” but was imbued with ferocious strength. If anyone touched her, “she” would beat them up “good and proper” (nalla aṭi). No one was spared these beatings— not even members of her household (vīṭṭu āḷ). But Santi herself did not remember them. Santi’s account distinguishes different phases within possession. These entail, crucially, either the presence or absence of speech (pēccu) and dance (āṭṭam). In the context of possession, these terms no longer refer to the speech or dance of the human subject but to that of the possessing deity or spirit. Pēccu, in this context, is radically different from the speech of the deities in the Sanskritic understanding of darshan. Instead of taking the form of a benign blessing, the speech of the possessing deity consists of demands. Yet until these are known they cannot be met. Without pēccu, it is impossible for anyone—that is, for a specialist in such matters—to identify the demands of the occupying spirit or deity, and, equipped with this knowledge, to strike a bargain. In the absence of such identification and bargaining, the possessing creature simply proceeds as it wishes. Obliging the occupying spirit or deity to speak is crucial to the “cure” or reintegration of the human subject into social and cosmic worlds. Āṭṭam is even more ambiguous in its meanings. We must distinguish between the place of āṭṭam in spirit possession and its place in the Sanskritized forms of worship historically practiced in the great temples of Tamil Nadu and other parts of India (see Ram 2010b for a comparison; see also Frasca 1990). In the temples the dances were undertaken by professionally trained worshippers of the Hindu deities. They did not culminate in possession. But the āṭṭam of possession in the Tamil region is historically older, has pre-Sanskritic meanings, and is itself characterized by two quite distinct relations between possessing deity and the world. It may indicate the capacity of the spirit to trouble the human subject (to “lead them a merry dance,” as it were). But āṭṭam may also serve as the medium for an intimate knowledge of divinity. Many of the ritual forms of “folk” performance in Tamil Nadu, such as terukkūttu, involve āṭṭam (Frasca 1990) as well as possession. The more



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benign potential of āṭṭam spills over into cures. Āṭṭam in shrines signals the trouble and torment of the possessing spirit as it registers the stern presence of higher powers, either superior deities within the Hindu hierarchy or Māta or a Christian saint. This second, curative kind of āṭṭam is often a prelude to driving out the possessing spirit, with the aid of pēccu, the bargaining dialogue between the spirit and a specialist. The presence of the first kind, by contrast, indicates that the possessing spirit still enjoys the upper hand.6 Āṭṭam of the second kind was mentioned in Santi’s descriptions of the numerous trips her husband took her on to the Catholic shrines of saints. She told of the way āṭṭam would hurl her against the stone walls of the shrines: I went to all the shrines of importance: Rājā Ūr, where I stayed for one month, Maṇālikarai, Saint Michael of Trivandrum, where I stayed for three months. My husband also decided to take me to give offerings at the Maṇṭaikkātu temple [the shrine of the goddess Bhagavathi Ammaṉ, very close to Santi’s village], but my periods came on the journey there and I could not go. We went on pilgrimages to Veḷānkaṉṉi, to Kaḷḷikuḷam, to Ovari, to Valiāturai [all in regions adjoining the Kanyakumari area—Kerala, Tirunvelvēli, and, as in the case of the important shrine of Veḷānkaṉṉi Māta, extending in some instances to the east coast of Tamil Nadu.] Wherever I went, there was āṭṭam. At Maṇālikarai, the āṭṭam would take me and fling me into the surf. Finally, at Valiāturai, a healer told me that it was a temple spirit that had me, and that it would take its own time to leave. Once the children come along, it becomes difficult to make such pilgrimages and stay at shrines.

Along with āṭṭam, several other characteristics of possession begin to feature in her account. Amnesia makes its appearance in her descriptions, accompanied by periods of apparent lifelessness: “I would simply lie without food and water until someone woke me up.” She would regain consciousness and find herself in different places, with no awareness of how she got there: “My purusaṉ [husband] was in Trivandrum. There was no āṭṭam, but I found myself lying in front of the kurusaṭi [base of the cross] in the church with my hands and feet bound. The village people had taken me there. I lay there without food or water. Finally a policeman came in and gave me some water.” At some stage—it was not clear from her narrative when these different phases occurred—she was taken back to her maternal home in Pūnturai. Evidently, some effort was made to remove her from the potent home of these temple deities. She lived in Pūnturai in her parents’ home for two years at a stretch, and her husband stayed there with her.

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Gradually, the spirits were identified. Santi described her growing sense of familiarity and ease with the possessing spirits: They [the Hindu deities] would come as a jōṭi [ jōdi; Hindi, meaning “couple”]. I lost my fear of them through familiarity (paḷakkam). I stopped near Ceṭṭi Koyil [the temple at which the Cettiyar community worships] at night to have a pee, and they appeared. I said to them, “Ho, so you have come looking for me, eh, helped by the maṇam [odor—of the urine]?

This relationship based on familiarity will prove central to my account of agency and learning in possession. Volatile Spirits as Agents of Gender Trouble

The spirits resented Santi’s capacity to become a wife as well as a mother. One incident she singles out concerns her tāli, the central icon of a southern Indian wedding. Santi reported that a number of items around the house would disappear—particularly money, jewelry, and even food. The spirit would “simply make off with them” (in colloquial Tamil, appaṭiye eṭuttuṭṭtu pōyviṭum). The most distressing of these losses was the disappearance of her tāli: The tāli was hidden in the wall of the kōyil [temple]. No one could find it. A mantiravāti was called in, and he got the spirit to confess: “The tāli is here, and the rest of the silver with it, in the west of the temple.” Sure enough, there it was. We gave the tāli to the kōyil cāmiyār [church priest], and he did a mantiram [mantra or spell] to it. Only after that did I wear it.

Yet none of these losses compared with the toll taken by the deities on Santi’s capacity to bear children. The deities would make her dance while she was pregnant: “I lost my first child to the spirit—the āṭṭam came while I was pregnant, and I lost the baby.” A woman may be host to a spirit. She may also, as is far more likely, be host to a baby. Between these two conditions a phenomenological overlap can be discerned. Occasionally, for Santi, this overlap seemed to take a benign form. The spirits would tell her whether a girl or a boy was in the womb. But more typically, Santi’s capacity to establish herself as a mother was cruelly impaired by the frequency of spirit attacks: I lost two more babies to the spirit, one at four months, the other at two. The abortions were cured only after a vaittiyar [doctor] gave me a tāyittu [talisman] with medicine in it. But I lost one of my babies to mūḷai kāyccal



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[brain fever], not because of the spirits. I also had trouble urinating. After the last birth, I had such a bloody and massive flow that it was as if I had given birth to ten babies.

Santi had eight surviving children, six of them boys and two girls, but she continued to experience reproductive problems right up to the last pregnancy and birth, one and a half years before this particular interview: “Since the last baby, my little Cincy, my periods have stopped. But I had mukavāta caṉṉi and had to go into a special ward of a Trivandrum hospital. At this time, my face and neck were twisted right around.” The term Santi used to describe her last attack, mukavāta caṉṉi, refers to “facial paralysis.” She associated it with a veṭṭu, or “blow.” The spirits, their attacks on her body, and the drastic cures had inflicted a cumulative effect over the years, leaving her with many long-term bodily problems. By the time the spirits decided to leave Santi, she had been branded, beaten, her arm had been broken, and pepper had been repeatedly placed in her eye. She was thrown around repeatedly while “being danced” by the spirit, and she suffered from headaches and backache. The term veṭṭu, used by Santi to describe her last illness, suggests that it can be directly related to this history of injuries. Given this troubled history and her physical problems, one might have expected to find a woman who made much of her suffering. Instead, Santi remained remarkably cheerful, of robust temperament. She was willing to give counsel to others. She continued to go on pilgrimages when she could, pleading for the health of her children. She reminded me as we spoke that we were in the month of Tai, the time of the special festival of Māta in her shrines at Ovari and Kaḷḷikuḷam, both in the adjoining district of Tirunelvēli. The last time I saw Santi was in December 2005. The occasion was the death anniversary occasioned by the tsunami. Two hundred individuals had been killed in Santi’s village alone. More than a hundred of these were children. Little Cincy, the baby who survived the spirit attacks on her mother, had survived the tsunami too. She stood by her mother’s side, a beautiful young woman. “Auspicious Fertility”: Positivities in the Construction of the Female Subject A large and impressive body of ethnographic literature is devoted to describing a value that has been translated as that of “auspiciousness” (e.g., Appfel Marglin 1985; Carman and Marglin 1985; Madan 1991; Parry 1991). In a volume dedicated to representations of the Hindu notion of dharma, Carman (Carman and Marglin 1985, 109–110) notes,

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Thus far we have not paid sufficient attention to the relation of both dharma and moksha, or salvation, to two other legitimate goals of human life: artha, which means both power and wealth, and kama, the satisfaction of desires. Both the traditional king and the married woman embody a value closely related to artha and kama, the value of auspiciousness.

The term “auspiciousness,” used in this literature as a translation of such Sanskrit terms as maṅkalam and shubham, raises the question of Orientalism. Carman himself describes “auspiciousness” as one of the many terms “dug up” by Western students from the pre-Christian past of European cultures and used to describe religious phenomena in non-Western cultures. The term seems to have been derived from the Roman practice of augury. In the Indian context, the term has far greater “reach” than merely to the interpretation of omens. It refers instead to an entire complex of values related to the pursuit and ensuring of well-being, as well as to the ethical sense of the “rightness” and blessedness of such modes of being. In ethnographies, the use of “auspiciousness” has taken on a corrective significance. It seeks to correct what has been perceived as the misunderstanding that arose from too exclusive an emphasis on the values of purity and pollution. Purity and pollution came to prominence in the literature on India in large part through Dumont’s masterly interpretation of “Indic civilization” as unified by these “encompassing” values (Dumont 1972). Viewed exclusively in these terms, women’s bodies could only be said to exemplify a site of periodic pollution. In Tamil Nadu, menstruation may be referred to as a form of tīṭṭu, “impurity,” or as tūram, “distance,” referring to the separation of the menstruating woman from other people and from objects that could transmit the impurity to other people and to divinities. These objects include cooking vessels and items used in worship. Other terms for menstruation, such as vīṭṭu veḷi, which is translated in Tamil English as “out of doors,” also revolve around the spatial separation of the menstruating woman, in this case from the purity of the domestic space—from the home, or the vītu itself. All Tamil castes express some notion of a transition from impurity to purity in the ritual of the first menstruation. The girl is secluded. Her soiled clothes are removed and washed by a woman from a service caste that does laundry. The actual ritual marks the girl’s full transition into purity through a ritual bath. The motif of purity and pollution recurs in subsequent periods of bodily flux, all of which are ritually marked. Similarly, the body of maternity, the expulsion of the placenta, the umbilical cord, and the flows of postpartum blood are all constructed in many parts of South Asia as polluting and requiring the services of midwives (who are thereby rendered low in status) to remove the



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attendant pollution from the mother and child (see Jeffery 1979; Jeffery and Lyon 1989; Rozario 1998; Rozario and Samuel 2002, but see also Ram 1998a and 2009c for variability in this understanding of childbirth). If femininity were to be understood exclusively in these terms, it would be difficult to understand how women in India experience any sense whatsoever of the self and its agency. Exclusive emphasis on pollution has thus had a role in reinforcing a prior colonial tendency to represent Indian women as victims of religious tradition. It is in this context that the ethnographic attention to auspiciousness offers an opportunity to restore some balance. It allows us to recognize the fact that as long as women occupy a series of subject positions that are regarded as fitting and proper for women, then the value of purity and pollution is far outweighed by the beneficence attached to such women. The phases describe what it is for a woman to lead a “good life”: as an unmarried young virgin (kaṉṉi), as the wife of a living husband (cumaṅkali), and as the ammā, or “mother,” of living children (particularly sons). None of these terms has any equivalent for the male life cycle—the period of virginity, for example, has as its closest equivalent the period of brahmacharya, but that implies voluntary celibacy undertaken during a period of tutelage and is accordingly restricted to men from the upper castes. The notion of cumaṅkali, the blessed wife of a living husband, has no equivalent term for the husband. Two particular domains of meaning and practice are of significance in pursuing a further understanding of the cultural pathways that construct women’s bodies. I will take each in turn. I should stress at the outset that this is not a discussion of metaphors, like the work of writers such as Lakoff and Johnson, who study the way that primary bodily experiences generate metaphors in language (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Johnson 1987). Rather, we are dealing with understandings embedded in practices, which have the capacity to shape the meanings attached to women’s lives. Of the many practices one could focus on, I have chosen the life-cycle rituals for the girl child, since these are dramatic enough to allow the meanings to be glimpsed more clearly and to allow us to glimpse the ways in which a sense of coherence is created in and through the repetition and variation of key discursive motifs. The rituals also highlight the variability of gender across castes and regions. Woman as Fecund Nature

A rich and overlapping cluster of representations, shared by the elite and nonelite cultures of Tamil Nadu, interweaves the female body with the natural world. The girl at puberty (as recorded in the previous chapter) is said to have flowered. Flowering contains within itself a temporal anticipation of fruition, of bearing children. The eroticism of fertility unites two domains, the human

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and the natural. Plenitude and abundance are values in themselves. The Nadar bards who sing, to this day, at the temples of the goddess Icakki, ritually invoke the beauty of the place as a land of rain, flowering, and fruit, where tamarind and turmeric, sugarcane and sweet ripe bananas, red and white paddy, and spreading peacock fans all testify to the eroticism of fertility (Blackburn 1988). The tropes connect the lower castes to the high literary genre of the classic Tamil version of the Ramayana by Kampan, who evokes both the beauty of women and the erotics of nature. Kampan’s Ramayana lovingly catalogues the local trees that flower and bear fruit. The flowers are like stars, the garden flows with honey, the geese themselves become drunk sipping the juices dripping from trees and flowers, and the parrots employ sweet speech, like the soft talk of women (Hart and Heifetz 1988, 178ff.). Contemporary popular culture in the Tamil film industry draws on this rich tradition. Film songs celebrate the sexiness of female fertility and of male potency. Women celebrate the hero by calling out to him, Nī ōra kaṇṇāl pārtāle nāṉ puḷḷatacci (“Even a sidelong glance from you is enough to impregnate me”; from the song “Uslampatti peṇ kuṭṭi”). The better-known hit film Bombay by Mani Ratnam builds a love scene around the man’s pursuit of his wife and his demand, understood as erotic, that, having presented him with twin sons, she now present him with a daughter (potte pillai peṟṟu kōṭu). These are constructions that allow little separation between the body, the mind, and the emotions. Alongside the appearance of breasts, hair, and the flowering of reproductive organs, qualities widely and routinely associated with women in Tamil Nadu are said to “flower.” These qualities can be rattled off by any schoolchild: accam, “dread, terror”; maṭam, “ignorance, folly, artlessness”; nāṇam, “shyness, coyness” as a specifically feminine quality, but also shame, sensitive dread of evil, keen moral sense, shrinking as with a disturbed plant or animal when touched; and payiṟppu, “disgust, abhorrence, delicacy, modesty, shrinking from anything strange.” In the same way, it is not simply “the body” that comes to fruition. Ammā eṉṟāl aṉpu, proclaims a popular Tamil aphorism: To say “mother” is already to have said “love.” Such emotions are not to be understood as separate from the body. Love is said to flow in breast milk, that bodily fluid of maternity par excellence. Breast milk shapes the child as surely as the uterine blood, which is given much prominence in southern Indian understandings of gestation. In non-Brahman Tamil culture, the Sanskritic tendency to reduce the woman’s contribution to that of a fertile field in which seed is sown gives way to a fuller understanding. Babies are thought to gain most of their blood in the womb from the mother, making the uterine connection strong even within



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the patrilineal inheritance system (Busby 2000; Kapadia 1995). The preferred value in southern kinship, that of marrying a girl to the mother’s brother, to his son, or to classificatory cross cousins, is therefore a further elaboration of what is already perceived as the potent bond between brothers and sisters born of the same womb (Trawick Egnor 1992). Rhetorical references to maternity in Tamil Nadu typically ground themselves in dramatic references to the forging of fleshly bonds in the maternal work of gestation and giving birth. In a range of discursive contexts, in laments, in films, in the rhetoric of politicians in Tamil Nadu, the term tai, or “mother,” is employed for its affective and embodied resonance. The reference to the mother as birth giver is often explicitly invoked in everyday exclamations such as Eṉṉappetta tāyē! (O my mother who bore me). Women refer to the nine months of “carrying” the infant in the womb (cumakkaratu) when upbraiding an ungrateful child. These values are dramatized in the ritual life cycle of the girl. Anand Pandian (2009) has described the close interweaving of the cultivation of nature and the cultivation of moral virtue in rural Tamil Nadu. Such a braiding of meanings is realized with particular force in the construction of the female body, whose “natural flowering” calls forth elaborate ritual as well as everyday practices that aim to morally shape and contain the flow of that natural force. I attend here to the literature on ritual life cycle practices and reserve a discussion of everyday practices for later in the book. The literature on puberty rituals for girls in Tamil Nadu (Good 1991; Kapadia 1995; McGilvray 1982, 1998) instructs us to understand the onset of first menstruation as an auspicious occasion in which the undoubted pollution of menstruation is more than overshadowed by the joyous nature of the event. Sanskrit terms for auspiciousness, such as maṅkalam, find their way into Tamil phrases, such as maṅkaipparuvam, denoting all that is good, beneficent, and propitious. The ritual bath that marks the transition from impurity to purity is simultaneously the carrier of the value of auspiciousness. The bath is called maṅkaḷacnāṉam, or “auspicious bath.” The substances used to bathe the girl—such as cow’s milk and urine—are the substances used on sacred occasions. Scholars such as Kapadia (1995, 123) have found that the value of auspicious fertility is particularly elaborated among Dalit communities: . . . female blood creates children, and the most significant prestations flow along uterine blood lines, from Mother’s Brothers to their sisters’ children. It is this uterine blood that manifests itself at puberty and that is purified and made auspicious in the most elaborate ritual sequence known in NonBrahmin culture.

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Certainly, the contrast with traditional Tamil Brahman treatment of female puberty is telling. Urban Brahmans have largely dispensed with the ceremony altogether. But ethnographic records from Anantha Krishna Iyer (1981) for the Cochin region of Kerala, published in 1912, report a more attenuated version of the pubertal ceremony for Brahman girls. The emphasis is on a transition from impurity to purity, and although there is a jubilant atmosphere, the anticipation is of marriageability rather than of fertility. Puberty was simply the signal to send the girl to her marital home, since prepubertal marriage was normative for Tamil Brahman families. The contrast between Tamil non-Brahman castes and the castes in northern India is even more revealing. In the north, female puberty does not warrant even an attenuated ceremonial recognition. Instead it is registered through an intensification of the values of shame and spatial seclusion (Jeffery 1979; Ursula Sharma 1980). The value of auspiciousness adheres to the married woman and to the woman with children but not to the unmarried girl who has come of age. These regional differences are not restricted to the female life cycle taken in isolation. They are supplemented by related differences in respect of marriage and kinship patterns. An extensive survey of the occurrence of the puberty ritual reveals that it coincides almost exactly with the area of the “Dravidian” preference for marriage with already related kin. This area covers not only the four linguistic regions of southern India but extends south into Sri Lanka and north as far as the Madhya Pradesh–Orissa border of central India (Good 1991). Further north still, the ritual disappears even as the marriage system becomes characterized by a sharp hierarchical distance and distinction between wife givers and wife takers.7 Ontological Continuities between Human and Divine: The Woman and the Goddess

The second domain of meanings links the auspicious female in the direction of the goddess. The female-goddess continuum forms a specialized subdomain of a much larger cultural thematic we might better describe as that of a certain transposability between the human, the divine, animals and other sentient beings, and also material objects in the world more generally. Stones ooze sacred ash, blood, and milk as signs of immanent divinity; rock formations are created by temporary sojourns on earth by gods and goddesses and later form the basis of large temples; rivers share the substance of goddesses, as do human faculties such as imagination and learning, which are worshipped as the endowments granted by Saraswati. Human beings may not only be reincarnated and retain the capacity to recall their previous lives even



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while remaining a child in this life (Gupta 1992), but they may also change their ontological status in successive reincarnations. Gender is not merely preserved in this series of transpositions. It is actively constructed in and through them, particularly in and through the ritual life cycle. Men and women are both touched by divinity at that most central of South Asian rituals, marriage. The rituals of marriage treat both groom and bride as divine god and goddess (Dumont and Pocock 1959; Inden and Nicholas 1977; Srinivas 1942; Harman 1989). This is no mere analogy, as Harman (1989, 128–131ff.) makes clear: If we are speaking of a time of purification and of transformation, marriage is clearly an occasion when a person is transformed and purified to the point of temporarily becoming a deity. This dynamic has been noted widely: the young bridegroom on the day of his marriage is given honors and worship normally reserved only for kings or gods. . . . Temporarily, if the groom becomes a god, the bride becomes a goddess [this is particularly so during the rituals in which other women prepare the bride]. . . . And when the bridal couple is taken in procession, the form of the procession suggests that they are deities. Indeed, the Dharma Śāstras specify that the newly married couple in procession—regardless of their caste—can claim the right of way over kings and Brahmins.

Marriage is celebrated for both the girl and the goddess as the most unambiguously “auspicious” life-cycle ritual. The bride is singled out through many parts of India to be dressed and addressed as the goddess. In southern Indian marriages, the tāli is also worshipped by the elders and senior women of the gathering, invested as it is with the śakti of the bride status. Similarly, the sari of the bride is propitiated by most who come into contact with it before it is worn. I noticed a shopkeeper in a well-known sari shop in Chennai paying reverence, with a fleeting practiced gesture, to the bridal sari he was handing to the customer over the counter. Indeed, such saris intended for marriage (kor­vai saris) are endowed with the quality of auspicious śakti in anticipation of the occasion and the wearer, not only by the mix of colors but also by features worked into the design (Kawlra 2005). An extensive ethnographic literature describes the shared qualities of śakti linking the bodies of girls and the goddess for the entire region of South Asia.8 Some of the values we have already discussed for menstruation—such as pollution as well as the auspiciousness of fertility—must now be further augmented. The foods fed to the girl at the time of first menstruation can be

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said both to strengthen fertility and to cool and propitiate the potentially hot and volatile elements of an emergent and as yet unharnessed female sexuality. These are exactly the ways in which the unwed and potentially dangerous version of the goddess is propitiated. The pubertal girl is bathed, with special emphasis on a “head bath” (talai kuḷi), since the head is a nodal point for the accumulation of heat (McGilvray 1982; Kapadia 1995). The head bath could be and has been understood as signifying the removal of pollution and an entry into purity. But the same action also contains the meanings of cooling a volatile goddess. Temple worship features bathing the goddess with auspicious and sensorily pleasing fluids donated by worshippers such as milk (in the apicēkam, where liquids are poured over her as a sensuous bath), rubbing her with sandalwood paste and turmeric, decorating her with kuṅkumam (vermilion), dressing her in a new sari after the apicēkam, and adorning her with songs of praise. The bride and, in southern India, the pubertal girl are in a similar state of auspiciousness after the rituals. Among wealthier nonBrahman castes such as the Vellalars, puberty rituals culminate in adorning and dressing the girl as various “auspicious” goddesses such as Antāḷ and Lakshmi (Baker Reynolds 1978). Such an exegesis of value is not sufficient in itself. Its function rather is to help us understand the range of implicit but shared meanings that cluster around cultural actions and bodily functions. I have explored elsewhere ways in which such meanings may be contested (Ram 1998c) and reframed by women (2007). In what follows I concentrate rather on how the same value can carry with it both positive meanings and quite dark implications for women. “Abjection”: The Dark Shadow of Every Positive Value Kristeva (1982, 2ff.) uses the term “abjection” to describe the embodied loathing of an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. Butler’s (1993, 3, also 1990, 133ff.) extension of the term adds to that bodily loathing the rejection and sequestration of entire populations. For Butler, abjection describes “those ‘unliveable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject.” Butler is referring to those groups accorded less than subject status on the basis of race, gender, and sexuality. The values of fertility seem unambiguously positive. But all values carry their own dark shadow. This is perhaps most easily understood in the case of purity and its underside, pollution. In India, entire communities have been assigned the task of removing the abject wastes of society in order to keep high castes in a state of purity, however unstable that state usually proves to be.



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Even here, social-reform movements that address the problem of “untouchability” have not always grasped the necessity to simultaneously challenge the “purity” of upper castes. Abjection is universal to human cultures and not confined to the caste system. It takes many different forms. The value of auspiciousness in relation to women inevitably drags in its train the abject categories of the widow and the infertile (married) woman. In celebrating the construction of the female body among Tamil agricultural Dalit communities, Kapadia (1995) cautions the reader. Female uterine blood, she points out, has always been controlled by men. She warns too that the situation of Dalit women is deteriorating further due to economic changes. Yet such caveats as these leave the value of fertility uninterrogated. It is not necessary to appeal to external considerations, such as economic change, in order to understand how the same values that celebrate women might also turn against them. If we think in structuralist terms, the category of “infertility” must be considered the inevitable product of that form of differentiation in respect of which the value of fertility acquires its meaning. However, these values are not simply linguistic signs. They attach themselves with particular ferocity to bodily processes. Within the history of Indian modernity these two forms of female stigma have received markedly different amounts of attention. The upper-caste widow became the leitmotif of the social-reform movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through creative works and social-reform movements, the Indian middle class has become well acquainted with protests at the forced asceticism of the widow, particularly of the child widow, stripped of all signs of auspiciousness. The images are seared in middle-class consciousness through the many films and novels dedicated to dramatizing the process: the breaking of the bangles, the removal of the red kuṅkumam, the shaving of the head, the forced wearing of saris colored with the white of asceticism, bleached of the colors of sexuality and fertility. As a result of this long-standing critique, some of the practices have been modified. Widows nowadays keep their hair, they may wear colored saris if they are members of the urban middle class, and some are daring enough to continue to wear the kuṅkumam. However, even in the affluent middle classes, Brahman widows are not invited to weddings or other auspicious occasions reserved for married women and unmarried girls. They are seldom encouraged to remarry, even though the option was made legal in 1856. In rural areas, the conditions are still more stark. Lamb’s (2000) ethnography of rural Bengal records poignant descriptions, by Brahman widows, of their frugal and tasteless diet. Brahmanic practices continue, in this

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ethnography, to set the tone for the non-Brahman communities in their treatment of widows. The situation of infertile women is worse, since it remains so little marked in the history of Indian modernity. Fertility itself has been framed by modernity, as we have seen, largely in terms of rational planning with an emphasis on controlling the population, or at best on the biomedical improvement of childbirth. Even the use of amniocentesis for purposes of sex determination—which may lead to the abortion of female fetuses—is framed by professionals in terms of rational planning and choice over the “products” of fertility (Menon 1996; Ram 1998b). For poor women, government-provided health services continue to be associated more with the curbing of fertility— accompanied by varying levels of insistence by health personnel—rather than with any assistance in the dilemmas of infertility. The emergence of a marketdriven proliferation of clinics providing assisted reproductive technologies (ART) is likely to prove less than useful to women whose infertility is more closely related to poverty. According to Qadeer (2009, 28), “Of the estimated 8–10% infertility in Indian women, 98% have secondary sterility—they have been pregnant at least once before but are unable to conceive again. Their problems are due to untreated disease, poor health care practices or malnutrition. Most of these can be avoided through effective antenatal and postnatal care, and through good primary health care with basic facilities to diagnose and treat infertility.” That is to say, the bulk of female infertility is not “amenable to ART” (Qadeer and John 2009, 10). Women from middle-class and upper-middle-class groups are also stigmatized but much more likely to use biomedical methods of assisted reproduction. A study in Gujarat (Mehta and Kapadia 2008, 445) found all the members of the sample were using medicines to stimulate ovulation or intrauterine insemination. But even these couples found in vitro fertilization too expensive given its uncertainties. Where women from poorer backgrounds do figure in the practices of assisted reproduction, it is in a role where they are taking care of the infertility of others rather than their own. They figure as surrogate “gestational mothers.” Evidence indicates that women who perform this role tend to be from poor and lower-middle-class backgrounds (Qadeer 2009, 28; Saravanan 2010). Many become surrogates in order to address debts that have been incurred in the context of illness, marriage, or as a result of a husband who was unemployed or alcoholic (Saravanan 2010, 26). In the process, they must negotiate the stigma of work that is equated with sex work, since the dissociation between pregnancy and sex is not widely understood (Pande 2009). Meanwhile, the situation remains dire for women from working-class and poorer classes who are stigmatized as “infertile” (Unnithan-Kumar 2001,



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2004). The same discourses that make it impossible to separate out body, mind, and emotion place women under a colossal burden if their bodies fail to “bear fruit.” To be a woman it is not enough to take up the appropriate roles and behavior—one must have a womb and breasts (Busby 2000). While doing fieldwork, I often heard women being admonished or reassured if they displayed bodily embarrassment in the company of other women: united by a shared embodiment, we were all the same, and there was no call for shyness as there would be in front of a man. The very construction of the feminine body that glowingly celebrates an auspicious life cycle for the woman turns against a woman whose body cannot sustain the required transitions or whose social circumstances do not permit it. The same teleological construction of a woman’s life cycle that celebrates her coming into flower and fruition throws the entire ontological status of a woman into question if the various sequences of her life fail to smoothly “flower.” If a girl is delayed in her menstruation, even for reasons other than pregnancy, there is talk in the village, for her social transition into feminine adulthood has been compromised by a failure in her body. If a woman lives but without finding her husband, her entire vāṟkkai is placed at risk. The term vāṟkkai, when used for women, takes on the specific meaning of one who flowers and flourishes in the protective shade of marriage. The sense of anxiety that pervades the attempts by the girl’s kin to see her well established is captured in the phrase vāṟāveṭṭi, referring to one who has had her vāṟkkai cut off. The typical “cutting off ” refers to rejection in marriage or forfeiting the prospect of marriage. Such a cut ruins her chances of a good life. But there is more than this to a good life. Marriage in turn anticipates the fulfillment of maternity and brings with it the abject dark zone of infertility. Women deemed infertile are not permitted the luxury of elevation as tragic figures. Tragedy in ballad or ritual commemoration is reserved for women who are cut off by untimely death in the fullness of their youth, especially if they are virgins, with all their lives as “auspicious women” ahead of them. A cumaṅkali (wife of a living husband) who dies before her husband is similarly elevated to superhuman status. But to be married and not to have children is far more than a disability of social status. Such a woman is neither a flowering plant that can bear fruit nor one who shares the qualities of an auspicious goddess. The abusive language to which she is subjected makes this abundantly clear. On a day I spent with older Dalit women, all of them agricultural laborers, Karpakam, sixty years old, recalled the early years of marriage when, for five years after her periods began, she failed to have a child: I was called a koṭu māṭu [sterile cow]. I had all kinds of things done to me to make me conceive. I was made to drink the juice of mala vēmpu leaves.

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An ulakkai [pestle] was placed across my path and I had to step across it, to release the obstacle [taṭai]. The same month I conceived. But I had numerous spontaneous abortions—the pregnancies would never last more than two or three months. Though I went on to have six sons, I also had two others who died.

When all is well, the cow, like the woman, is regarded as the essence of generosity, mildness, and maternal love in the unstinting flow of milk for its young ones. Both cow and woman are reverently and lovingly addressed as ammā, or “mother.” Both are deserving of adornment. But if either is judged to be sterile, her status is anomalous. In the lament with which I opened this chapter, the infertile woman goes on to describe herself as worse than a stone or a block of wood: Had I been born as soil, At least now I’d be an earthen pot. Had I been born a tree, at least now I’d be a temple door. . . . Had I been born a stone, at least now I’d be an image standing in Murukaṉ’s temple at Tiruccentūr. . . . But I was not born soil or stone jewel or tree. I was born a woman to suffer.

(Blackburn 1988, 170)

Stones and wood belong to the natural world. But they too can play a part in the world of the sacred, as items of use in ritual worship. An infertile woman is less than a thing—she persists in a state of ontological liminality We can detect in Karpakam’s narrative a further implication of the notion of infertility as it is understood locally. Her narrative refers to far more than the inability to conceive. It refers too to the possibility of spontaneous abortion, of conceiving a baby who will not survive the critical first years of infancy. To be a mother is to be the mother of children who have established themselves as thriving, as independent of the mother’s body. Given the tenu-



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ousness of infant survival, we begin to glimpse the vast number of women who fall under the shadow of infertility. The following observations, which concern Lakshmi Ammā of Peranaka Ūr in Chengalpattu, are taken from my field notes of 1996. Lakshmi is fifty. She was married five days after she came of age. She had five boys and one girl, and all died, some within days, some when they could walk and run. She would dream during her pregnancies that hands were coming to grab her and she would not be able to breathe. After a large number of penances and prayers, and consultations with specialists, it was found that a spell had been placed on her. By this stage Lakshmi was going mad with grief. The situation was cruel enough to precipitate her conversion to Christianity. She had a vision of a woman in a white veil (mukkāṭu) whom she took to be Māta. She went to mass the following day, and visited the Māta’s shrine at Vēḷānkaṉṉi. Her next child, now eleven, survived and is studying at school. But being a Christian in a Hindu community, she worries whether she will be alive to see her daughter married.

The problem of infertility, as constructed by the culture, has entirely to do with women’s embodiment. Male sexuality has its particular anxieties, those related to sexual performance and semen retention (Carstairs 1958; Daniel 1984), but there is no linguistic category for male fertility. It is simply taken for granted. Husbands who have not had children are sanctioned to remarry and take a second wife. In the course of a village study for the district of South Arcot in Tamil Nadu, the researcher was told, I had two children. Both died after birth. My husband married my own sister. Since then I restricted my participation in social events. I won’t come outside especially in the morning when people go out to work. If I happen to come across them people will curse me as an ill omen. (K. T. Kalaiselvi 1991, 66)

Another woman in the same study spoke of the additional burden of having to bear sons before the demands of fertility were satisfied: I suffered a lot in my life—after seven years of marriage I delivered a girl baby. My father in law beat me up and persuaded my husband to marry another woman. He did not do this, but I know he had sexual relations with many women, and would beat me up if I questioned his behaviour. When I

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was pregnant the second time I prayed to God for a male child—I did not want a girl who would have to experience all the suffering her mother had been through. (K. T. Kalaiselvi 1991, 60ff.)

Respite—from an Unexpected Source: The Wild Goddesses and the Value of Arbitrary Power It is not the auspicious goddesses who plague and possess women like Santi. It is the wild goddesses, their guardian deities, and the spirits of the dead who in some cases converge on every phase of a woman’s life meant to give room for the further blossoming and ripening of her essence. Such wild goddesses seem to head instinctively for the most “auspicious” periods of a woman’s life, when, as a young bride, she is trying to establish herself as a mother. Icakki is ominously described as knowing how to “take” a child but not how to rock it. The following story elaborates the import of the terse aphorism: In Panchalingapuram, among the Itaya [Shepherd] community, a girl was pregnant. She had her vaḷai kāppu ceremony [pregnancy ritual adorning a girl with bangles and flowers] at her in-laws. Then her mother was advised to take her home. The girl told the mother that she had secreted, without her husband’s knowledge, some money that she would bring home with her. The mother, also greedy for the money, let the girl walk back on her own to the back of the house where she had hidden it. On the way Icakki appeared and beckoned to her. The girl took no notice. On her way back, Icakki stood in front of her and laughed horribly. She showed long claws to the girl, who vomited blood and died. Icakki ate the fetus. The girl returned the next day as a pēy [demon]. She took stones and trees and threw them at the villagers. The people of the village erected a pītam [obelisk] where she was buried, performed a poṅkal [ceremonial boiling of milk and rice], and offered bali [animal sacrifice]. They gave a paṭaiyal [offering] that included all the things that would be given to a new mother: a new sari, some medicines given to strengthen her, and hot water infused with herbs (used for washing the woman after delivery). (Perumāḷ 1990, 127n11; my translation)

The propitiation of such a pēy is not confined to stories. It can be found today in rural Chengalpattu among Paraiyars and among the Nadars of Kanyakumari. To prevent a woman who died in pregnancy from returning as a pēy, her dead body is presented with all the gifts a new mother would be given: new clothes and the medicines of early maternity. Not only is a woman’s fertility a



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magnet for the destructive attention of goddesses such as Icakki Ammaṉ but also women who die in liminal states such as pregnancy themselves turn into spirit beings who behave much like Icakki herself and must be propitiated in much the same way. Goddesses like Icakki compared with her auspicious counterparts would seem to imply nothing but trouble and tragedy for the lives of women. To upper-caste middle-class observers such as myself, the very unfamiliarity of the bloody and destructive village goddesses makes such an interpretation all the more likely. It has taken me more than a decade of fieldwork and reflection to learn that such appearances can be deceptive. It is indeed the case that for women whose lives coincide with the ritually celebrated life cycle, the rich texture of meanings associated with wifehood and maternity will provide sustaining forms of agency. But for the many women whose lives do not coincide with such a construction of femininity, auspicious values—rich as they are—turn against the women and become sources of hostile valuation. In the extremities of such suffering, it is precisely the random and amoral character of capricious goddesses and demon deities that affords a little cultural respite to women. Security is not necessarily to be found in the notion of an inherent unfolding teleological essence that shapes the life cycle. Goddesses like Icakki bring into the lives of women, or, rather, objectify in a manner that can be culturally shared and understood, the force of arbitrariness. The Icakki cult foregrounds elements of unpredictability and of the capacity of human bodies to be overtaken by malign forces that cannot be evaluated in moral terms. The epics dedicated to Icakki make it explicit that birth and fertility are not governed by the moral doctrines of either dharma or karma. The song I heard at the shrine of Icakki tells of a royal couple who enjoy all forms of worldly power but lack a child. Frantic, they pursue the three paths (tri-marga, Skt.) that lead to salvation: gnana (Skt., “wisdom”) marga, or “the path of knowledge,” dharma marga, and bhakti marga. They perform dana dharma (the dharma of giving gifts) and anna dharma (the dharma of giving food to the hungry)—but to no avail. Pure bhakti does not work for them either (Shulman 1989). The arbitrary character of fertility, objectified in the character of Icakki, responds in such cases neither to morality nor to the karmic chain of good deeds. It can be matched only by the deployment of equally arbitrary and amoral techniques. The bow songs and associated Tamil folk epics tend to privilege magic and sorcery. In the narratives of Icakki and similar goddesses, it is mantiravātis, those with skills in manipulating mantras, and not ritual priests who alone have any hope of arresting her when she is on a rampage.9 The wielding of mantras does not require cognitive maturity or gnana. This

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facile applicability of a dangerous power is at the heart of the tragedy of Kunti in the epic Mahabharata. As an immature, unwed girl, she is granted a powerful mantra that allows her to be impregnated by a god. Wielding it without caution, she finds herself bearing the child of the sun god Surya and must confront the dilemmas of a young, unwed mother. Mantras and tapas (the winning of power through practicing austerities) are techniques that can be employed with little reference to morality or good deeds. Even demons may wield them successfully. The dilemmas this poses for the gods affords the plot of many a Hindu myth and epic story. Hiltebeitel (1989) goes so far as to view the male demon deities of the Draupadi cult in Tamil Nadu as being none other than mantiravātis, or “black magicians.” In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau (1984) valorizes such practices as walking through the city, cooking, or living in a rented apartment. Such practices, de Certeau tells us, are able to counter the operations of dominant power and to turn life into something “habitable, like a rented apartment,” by furnishing it with the acts and memories of individuals. The practices surrounding the cult of goddesses such as Icakki Ammaṉ can be thought of in similar ways. The infertile body, which has been turned into something alien, like a rented apartment, becomes a little more habitable. One of the most striking lessons of fieldwork was taught to me by women such as Santi. Losing her babies to the spirit, as Santi puts it, was terrible, but being able to see it as the work of capricious spirits frees Santi from the overtight embrace of essentialist ontologies. The problem is external, and so is the cure. A woman who loses her babies would ordinarily be regarded by society as something less than a woman. Instead, she remains a woman, who is occasionally plagued by afflictive misfortune, but a woman nonetheless. This may sound suspiciously close to a modern formulation, by which we might characterize Santi as averting blame, apparently consciously, by reference to external forces of misfortune. It makes a difference, however, that misfortune is not simply an external abstract force but is the action of a demonic figure such as Icakki, who has a fully fledged personality all her own. This objectification of forces in a wild goddess makes a difference to what follows. The diagnosis allows Santi and others like her to go to mantiravātis, to shrines, to healers. Once a malady is diagnosed as the work of troublesome spirits, new kinds of engagement with curative practices are opened up. As Boddy (1989) has perceptively pointed out in her examination of spirit attacks on Hofriyati women in Sudan, these are cures in which the whole family must participate, thus taking on some of the responsibility. Families come to share the burden of seeking cures and may even, in many instances, begin to share the burden of Icakki’s unwanted attentions.



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Not all Santi’s afflictive spirits are wild and terrifying deities. Many are pranksters, mischief-makers, with whom she has managed to strike up a more comfortable relationship over the years. If Icakki brings affliction into her life, these beings bring into her life a spirit of play that is directed particularly at the sanctity that surrounds women’s roles. The tāli worn around the neck of the married woman—for example—is never supposed to leave her body unless she becomes a widow. The mischievous deities themselves simply “make off ” with her tāli and hide it. It takes a mantiravāti to make them confess where it is. They play the same havoc with the values of purity and pollution. Santi’s most dramatic encounter with the Hindu deities occurs when she begins to menstruate while attending a funeral. She is cleaning her soiled underskirt when she sees the jewels strewn around by deities who have gone for a stroll. She attempts to pick them up. It appears to be this contact with pure objects while she herself is impure that strikes her body rigid, paralyzing her in a bent position. At one level, the paralysis suggests a body frozen, transfixed at the dividing line between the pure and the impure. However, such orthodoxies are soon dispelled. While the deities of orthodox Brahmanic discourse might well be affronted by the mixing of purity and impurity, they are hardly likely to reward the offender by appearing to her. They are even less likely to inform her that they will remain with her not as a sought-after blessing but in the ambiguous function of “claiming” her. Like all the volatile village deities and spirits, Santi’s “Hindu” deities are attracted rather than repelled by the odors and colors of women’s bodily flows. They appear after her wedding night, smelling her sexual odors; they appear when she menstruates; and they are attracted to Santi even when she urinates at night near a Hindu temple. She, in turn, is no devotee of theirs. By this time, she is not even entirely afraid of them. She is able to “talk back” to them, as to familiar presences in her life: “Ho, so you have come looking for me, eh, helped by the maṇam [odor]?”

Chapter 5

Learning Possession, Becoming Healer

I n t h i s c h a p t e r I explore a category of women mediums who “heal” while possessed.1 Such healers, called spirit mediums in the anthropological literature, have been widely noted in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka (Trawick Egnor 1982; Hancock 1999; Kapadia 1995; Obeyesekere 1981; Kapferer 1991).2 In introducing these women, I am not confronting the reader with an entirely new category. For they are basically no different from the women we have already encountered. Like Santi and Vijaya, these women have experienced afflictions that are due to spirits. Unlike Santi and Vijaya, however, they go on to act as mediums. It is the quality of their relationship with the spirits that alters. In exploring how this might occur, I attempt to speak to a larger theme: how agency and forms of skill might be cultivated without the analyst having to rely exclusively on conscious cognitive operations such as decisions, choices, and the imposition of will on the external world. Material relevant to this argument is also to be found in the following chapter, which undertakes a fuller description of the actual texture of performativity in the sessions of mediumship and focuses on the relationship of mediums to their clients. In this chapter, I simply concentrate on the journey into mediumship. In southern India, more valued forms of mediumship than those described in this chapter involve the training of the medium by an already initiated adept. To the mantiravāti, who wields mantras for good or ill, may be added the actors and musicians who take part in the many forms of ritual performance of epics in Tamil Nadu and adjoining Kerala. Such participation requires a period of instruction. Performers, as they proceed, may veer over or culminate in possession (Frasca 1990; de Bruin 2006). 132



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By contrast with both mantiravātis and performers, the mediums I am concerned with enjoy no formal tutelage, no form of apprenticeship. Their school is “the school of hard knocks,” as the English expression goes. This is why life stories form the ethnographic core of this chapter. Buffeted by a lengthy period of suffering, these women succeed in turning the tide only by reattuning themselves and establishing a different relationship to the spirit source of their affliction. We have glimpsed this possibility in an earlier chapter. Santi, who experienced spirit visitations beginning when she arrived as a bride in her husband’s village and throughout her troubled period of fertility, grew to know her possessing deities well enough to be able to address them in quite a cheeky fashion when she finds them putting in another appearance: “They would come as a jōṭi [Hindi for “couple”]. I lost my fear of them through familiarity [paḻakkam].” The Tamil word used by Santi, paḻakkam, is closely related to the concept of habit, which I explore further in the next chapter. The term refers too to the growth of emotional intimacy, affections, and a sense of relational interdependence. From one point of view, . . . parakkam [sic]3 was love . . . Parakkam was the reason for the growth of the feeling of love; love was the reason for the continuation of parakkam. To know somebody, to spend time with them, to be familiar or intimate with them, was to have parakkam with them. When you had parakkam with a person, just as you had parakkam with a substance [such as food or wine], that person became part of your system. (Trawick Egnor 1992, 99)

It is this quality I use as the centerpiece of my account of the development of agency within possession. In acquiring intimacy with that which is initially an external force, such women refine their unwanted capacity to attract spirit trouble into a skill. In Kanyakumari, these women are called kuṟi collaravā, “those who speak the kuṟi.”4 Kuṟi has been translated by Blackburn (1988, 41) as “mark, or sign,” “because it has the force of prophecy.” Attuning themselves to the spirit with which they have developed an intimacy, the women prophesy, in the sense of divining the source of the misfortune of those who come to them. To these women, themselves poor and underprivileged, are drawn others, equally poor. They gather around the medium at informally constituted sites of healing: out in the open in the shade of the margosa tree beloved of the goddess, in shrines to Icakki Ammaṉ or Saint Michael, or in the front veranda of the homes of more established healers. The women’s life stories form a vital part of their claim to authenticity.

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The rest of their claim rests on the performativity of the mediumship sessions themselves. I begin with the stories of the healers I met during my first period of fieldwork in Kanyakumari in the 1980s and move to the case study of Mutamma, a medium I encountered in 1996 among Dalit agricultural women in Chengalpattu District. The first few case studies are rather less detailed than the story of Mutamma. All this reflects is a growing familiarization on my part with the kind of pattern to look for. The quality of paḻakkam, of growing familiarity, in other words, is also a feature of the relationship between ethnographer and subject matter and is crucial to the growth of agency in the ethnographer. I have set out the life stories in order to encourage a similar, if truncated, process of familiarization on the part of the reader. For what is salient in anthropology is not only the rich description of one event but also the discernment of certain patterns that emerge over time. Nonetheless, each life story contains all the distinctive features of an individual life. The Healers of Kanyakumari District: The 1980s Mary Swarnabai of Karingal, Colachel: A Catholic Healer

Mary Swarnabai was a Catholic Nadar living in Colachel in the 1980s. When carrying out my fieldwork in the neighboring village, I attended several sessions of kuṟi and accompanied her to the shrine where she renewed her powers, the Catholic shrine of Raja Ūr dedicated to Saint Michael. I pieced together the story of how she came to be a medium. Mary had been married into a joint household that consisted of her husband, his father, and his three brothers. Problems began when one of the brothers married and his wife demanded a partition of the house. Mary was seven months pregnant at the time. She went to Raja Ūr to pray, and there Saint Michael, in a vision, assuring her safe delivery of the child, asked that the child be brought and laid in front of his shrine forty-one days after its birth. Mary did as she was asked, but the troubles created by her sister-in-law did not subside. One night Mary had a dream in which Saint Michael told her that she should allow the partition to go ahead and should ask for the mēṟku verāṇṭā, or “front veranda,” area for herself, even though it was the least comfortable part of the house. Saint Michael assured her he would ensure that she received that section and that she would be able to make a life in it. Three days after the dream, the partition was built, and communication with the brother’s wife ceased for a while. Soon after this event, a neighboring Hindu family stole a sari that Mary’s niece had brought home for tailoring. Mary prayed to Saint Michael, and he revealed where the sari was. Mary decided to accuse the family, who angrily



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demanded that she repeat her accusation in front of a Hindu holy man. There she was told to speak the truth or be beaten up. When she prayed again to Saint Michael, he told her that he would punish these people. Within a month, their cow died and other misfortunes followed. She began to have faith in the dreams. They became more frequent, warning her of the impending illnesses of her own children as well as the specific names of hospitals where she should take them. She was able to take preventive action. Her husband’s tuberculosis was cured in a timely fashion, and illnesses became less frequent. Minor illnesses that Mary herself suffered, such as diarrhea or fever, now responded to prayer alone, without resort to any other form of cure. She began to experience some success in curing others outside her own community. A young Hindu widow with two children, from the coir-weaving community, came to her with a swollen hip. Siddha medicines and other cures had not worked for her. News of Mary’s strong connection to Saint Michael’s shrine at Raja Ūr had reached this woman. Mary prayed and applied the oil she had brought from the shrine to the swollen hip. In two days the woman was able to return to work. After this episode, Mary began to cure regularly in the name of Saint Michael. Her actions occasioned much suspicion that she was possessed by a pēy, or “malign spirit.” Her younger brother-in-law in particular resented the fact that her gift brought the sick and the possessed to their door. Older resentments flared again. After some time, both her sister-in-law and her daughter became strangely ill—they began rolling on the floor. At last they acknowledged that they needed Mary’s help. Mary prayed over them, and they were cured. Her relations with her brother and his family became vastly improved. The parish priest came to check on her. Hearing that she was curing in the name of Saint Michael, he wanted to check her regularity in church attendance. She assured him that she was devout. She could not have a demon in her. He instructed her to use only prayer. As a result of these instructions, and in contrast with Hindu mediums, Mary, in the accounts she gave me, often denied that she experienced any form of possession and insisted that the kind of curing she offered rested entirely on the force of prayer. Thus far she had not charged anyone money for her praying and curing. This changed after a dream visitation from Saint Michael. She had been experiencing difficulties paying the school fees for her children. In the dream, Saint Michael told her to stop worrying—he would ensure that some money came her way. Mary began asking clients for small amounts of money. Her husband too became more cooperative. He agreed to his wife’s request that he set up his tailoring business at home, giving up a more lucrative position near

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the bus stand. The work that Mary was now undertaking required some form of male guardianship, for drunks would sometimes come in and disrupt the gatherings. In the midst of such chaos, Saint Michael would simply fail to appear. Her husband’s presence helped. As Mary entered menopause, her calling became easier to practice. She regarded the early cessation of her periods as a gift from Saint Michael, leaving her free “like a man,” to treat clients at any time of the month, to move freely to his shrine, and to sleep there overnight. Her husband again helped matters by agreeing to cease sexual relations with her. Indeed, said Mary, it was he who suggested that they become “as brother and sister now that the children were older.” This feature of home life again made it easier for Mary since her clients included young girls, who often stayed with her under her care. When I knew her, Mary was telling kuṟi at home and at the shrine of Saint Michael, at Raja Ūr. Clients who visited her at home were often directed to the shrine. Gomati, a Hindu in a Catholic Mukkuvar Village of Kanyakumari

I met Gomati, the wife of Cellappan, the tea-shop owner in Katalkarai Ūr, during my fieldwork there in the 1980s. I have been informed by her son that she has passed away and that the family has since moved to the town of Nagercoil. When I met Gomati, hers was one of the two Hindu families that still regarded themselves as part of the Catholic fishing village. Her husband was very ill with tuberculosis and diabetes, and Gomati was helping to run the tea shop as well. They owned three cows and two calves, earning their livelihood from supplying milk. Gomati’s gift became apparent in the form of illnesses—headaches and fainting spells—from which it was difficult to revive her. She was only seventeen and newly married. Hospitals and clinics would say there was nothing wrong with her. Medicine sought from Siddha medical doctors failed to work. Some light was shed at last when her horoscope (jātakam) was consulted. An astrologer (jōciyar) revealed that she was being troubled by her mother’s kulatēyvam (clan deity), who was none other than Icakki Ammaṉ. On his recommendation, a shrine was built for Icakki so that she might take up her residence at the shrine rather than in Gomati’s body. Since it was her mother’s clan deity that was involved, the shrine had to be built in Gomati’s home village; but the astrologer encouraged Gomati to propitiate Icakki in her new home in order to cultivate a more benign relationship. Gomati did as she was asked, but her worship of Icakki upset her husband’s lineage deity, Narayana Guru. He made his rage and annoyance known by making Gomati dance, and she obtained little respite until she agreed to worship him as well.



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Gomati began to have children, but Icakki would “come on” her regularly on Tuesdays and Fridays, requiring her to make pilgrimages to her own shrines. As a mother of many young children, she told me, this had proved especially difficult. Equally difficult was the observance of norms of purity. Not only must she stay away from the household shrine during her periods but also she must keep her daughters away. Gomati’s concern with purity set her apart from Christian mediums such as Mary, who seemed well able to go into a trance in a crumpled nylon sari. Gomati, by contrast, took ritual baths of purification before seeing clients, applied vipūti, or “sacred ash,” to her forehead, and wore silk saris, more resistant to pollution. I was not surprised to hear that Gomati’s family had moved to Nagercoil after she died. Even at the time of my fieldwork, her family, being Hindu, had been placed in a difficult situation thanks to communal tensions between Hindu and Christian villages. Catholic men from the village had checked Gomati’s house to see if she and her family were hiding anyone. Gomati herself was not “reliable,” even in the view of her own family. In her trance states, they had no control over what she might or might not say. Rita of Kanyakumari, the Convert to Catholicism

Rita was originally from Kerala. When I met her, she lived in a thatched hut by a large pond in the agricultural market town of Karingal in Kanyakumari. Rita was a medium visited by Saint Michael but had been born a Hindu. Life became very hard when her husband, an ice vendor, contracted a serious illness. They took him to many hospitals and shrines, but to no avail. An old woman advised them to go to a Christian shrine in Kerala that was efficacious for driving out spirits. By this stage, they had run out of money. Her children’s clothes, she said, were rags stitched together. They were reduced to begging, and Rita was distraught. In a dark moment of despair, she approached the well, intending to drown herself and her children. From nowhere a little white puppy appeared and kept tugging at her clothes. It would not let her throw the children into the well. Turning back, she felt a deep impulse to abandon herself to the mercy of Saint Sebastian, to worship at his feet. But the visions she had were of Saint Michael, who asked her to conduct daily public prayers and to see clients. This was no easy demand. With small children to look after, she felt unable to embark on a consuming task like this. Two years before I met her, Rita’s husband had died. Her poverty deepened, and she was homeless again. She arrived in Karingal with her children, appealing to the parish priest for help. He offered her some accommodation but forbade her from using her gift. Rita refused. Finally, the village panchayat (council) allocated her a little land. The

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day I visited her, she saw five clients and, surprisingly, proved to have kept a notebook of all the clients she had seen. I was able to gain a sense of the characteristic complaints that brought people to her. Claramma of Karingal, Kanyakumari

At Karingal, where Rita lived, I had the opportunity of visiting Claramma, a more-established healer who saw clients in a shrine she had built adjoining her own house. With her, too, the capacity to use her “gift” evolved after much suffering. Claramma was a Nadar Catholic woman who took laundry. She had been given up for dead after a snakebite and continued to suffer many lingering illnesses. Finally, at the shrine of Saint Anthony a healer promised to diagnose the source of her problems if she attended the shrine for seven weeks in a row. At the end of this period, she began to be “danced.” She was danced so hard that on one occasion, when she regained consciousness, she found she had lost a tooth, her knees were bruised, and her sari was torn. Rival and conflicting cures were prescribed by different mediums. A Hindu mantiravāti recommended elaborate offerings to Icakki, though she and her husband already felt committed to Saint Anthony. They stayed with the latter. The turning point came while visiting a sick relative in the hospital. A trembling came over her, and she found herself advising the sick man that it was useless to seek relief from medical doctors when his real problem lay elsewhere. He had been ensorcelled, she told him, by a neighbor. At first unconvinced, the relative eventually came to her home seeking further counsel. Saint Anthony now began speaking through Claramma, telling the relative what he needed to do to find a cure. She had been curing ever since. By the time I met her, fifteen years later, she was receiving visitations from, in addition to Saint Anthony, Māta, the Mother of God, and Saint Michael. Each visited her on a particular day of the week. Mutamma, a Hindu Dalit Medium in Chengalpattu District: The 1990s

A decade after I had met the healers of Kanyakumari, I was in Tamil Nadu again, in 1991–1992. By now Stella and her family had moved from Kanyakumari to Chengalpattu District, south of Chennai. Stella was now the director of her own nongovernmental organization, the Rural Education and Animation Centre. The organization focused on a range of Dalit women’s issues in the villages of Chengalpattu, including health, obtaining basic facilities for the village, and readying women to avail themselves of the new reserved seats legislation for women in the panchayats. It was here that I met Mutamma, who was the talaivar (head) of her village branch of the Mātar Cankam (Skt. Sangham), or Mother’s Union.



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She immediately stood out by her striking presence. An enormous red poṭṭu (the characteristic vermilion mark) and sacred ash quite covered her broad forehead. She wore her hair in an unusually large knot. This tall woman, her ramrod straight posture shaped by years of labor in rice cultivation, could glide into a room and stand there quite noiselessly, much to the discomfiture of one of my better-educated companions. Working with both mediums and social activists from the 1980s onward, I had become wary of a certain modernizing discourse in which mediumship and “secular” activism are inevitably pitted one against the other. Mutamma presented the case of a woman who straddled both worlds. In Mutamma’s village of Vichur, where I had the opportunity both to listen to her tell the story of becoming a healer as well as observe her oracular consultations, I noticed some particularities in her self-presentation as a healer. Although she could not be said to have been “taught” her role, her father had been a spirit medium as well. It is significant that, unlike the others, she began her story with him rather than with her own experiences. As she tells it, at the age of twenty-two (“before marriage or wisdom [aṟivu] had caught up with him”), he was seized by a spirit and taken wandering far and wide (“all over the world”). When the spirit finally spoke, it demanded that a temple be built in its honor on land that was then used for paddy growing. In return for this it undertook to protect (kāppāttu) the kirāmam (village). The temple was built, and from that time on her father stayed at the temple night and day. Several deities spoke through her father. They included Muttu Māri Ammaṉ, Venkatachalapati, Konangi Perumāḷ, Devamuni, and their kuladēvi (familial deity), pūvāṭaikkari, a woman of the family who had died a virgin. A girl was given to him in marriage. He had five daughters by her, of which Mutamma was the second. In Mutamma’s early childhood, a critical illness brought her close to death. She was reborn through the grace of the goddess: At three I was given up for dead. They had already prepared the bier [ēṉai] for me—this is a special bier made for a child, shaped like a cradle, covered with a yellow cloth. I had not eaten for weeks, I was in a coma, and I was considered dead. Then the cāmi [deity] spoke through my father: “Give her my name. I will come on her. Make two eyes [kaṇ], and I will open the eyes of the girl.” These eyes had to be made in silver and donated to the kōyil [temple]. My eyes opened and I lived. So that the spirits of the cremation ground [cuṭu kāṭu] should not be envious [of the corpse they had been denied], they took a brick from home,

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prepared it for cremation with all ceremony, gave it an oil head bath, decorated it with maṇcaḷ [turmeric] and kuṅkumam, and burnt it. And to me they gave the name Cuṭukāṭṭuk Kaṉṉi, or Virgin of the Cremation Ground. The deity, who was none other than Ammaṉ, gave me a new name too—the name Muttamma. I had been known as Kanakāmparam until then.

Mutamma experienced cōka mayakkam—a disturbing ongoing giddiness— until the age of ten. The sound of the mēḷam, or “drumming,” would bring on āṭṭam (dance) in her. The āṭṭam would occur without pēccu (speech) and therefore no means of identifying the spirit. She was married very young but remained unreconciled to her husband for quite some time: I was only twelve when I was married to my attai piḷlai [father’s sister’s son]. He had lived with us for a few years. Since my father had no sons, he brought his sister’s son to live with us. I knew nothing of the fact that I was getting married—I wondered why they were preparing a feast, taking me to Chengalpattu. I kept running away from him. When it came time to be with him, I tied my sari to my aunt to know that she was still with me. But while I slept, she untied the knot and sneaked away. My husband went to see a kūttu [terukkūttu, rural theater tradition], and his friends said to him: go home; do not take no for an answer. On return, he saw me asleep in his mother’s arms. He tried to take my arm, but I rejected him. I kept on rejecting him. Finally he was so dejected he went off to hang himself. They had to tie a tāyittu [charm with a mantra said over it] to my tāli to change my mind about him. But somehow we got by.

At this point in her life, Mutamma began to experience a series of disasters. In retrospect, she interprets them not as trials sent by the goddess but as sorcery cast on her by her husband’s cousin for refusing his sexual advances. After marriage I was the victim of cuṉiyam [sorcery]. My husband’s cousin called me to him [kūppiṭṭāṉ, i.e., made advances]. I was a good-looking woman. When I walked, I walked fine and strong. I also had a full set [of jewels] in those days. Because I rejected him, the man said, “What I cannot have, will not survive,” and he kept cuṉiyam on me.

This narrative was taken up and repeated to me by Mutamma’s children on other occasions. Her daughter Amuda’s version of the story omits the sexual harassment of her mother:



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There was envy of my mother, who wore a full set of jewelry—not just two earrings but five in each ear, a neck chain, vaḷaiyal [bangles]. She always gave away everything to anyone who needed to raise cash. But when my uncle asked her, she refused. We know that this triggered the pōṟāmai [envy]. After that, Ammā sickened and her children began dying. There was pōṟāmai of my brother, who had done his SSLC [Senior School Leaving Certificate]—he died. Ammā began to have continual periods and to behave like an insane person, even putting a rope around her neck to hang herself.

Mutamma tells of her suffering as her children began to die: Three of my children died. A fifteen-year-old son, studying tenth, got vecakkaṭṭi [a poisonous tumor], a daughter of three got whooping cough, and one son who had anemia died of fright—his time [nēram] had come on him. It was his fate [viti]. My husband’s brother became sick and went into a coma [mayakkam].

But in the midst of the suffering—throughout which the identity of the spirit had not been revealed to her—the goddess spoke. Besides her pēccu Mutamma received in a dream a resplendent visual image of the goddess with all her insignia. At this time of trouble, I had a dream in which Muttumāri Ammaṉ came with agni [fire], tīcaṭṭi [fire pot], katti [knife], and cūlam [the tiricūlam; Skt. trishul]. She came to give me śakti. The dēvi placed the katti and cūlam at my feet, giving me the sign that was to remain with me.

The appearance had such ritual power that even the retelling of the episode by an experienced medium such as Mutamma was enough to occasion the eruption of the goddess in our midst. As I watched, Mutamma became possessed. She yelled, gritted her teeth, and had to be brought out of the state by her son, who assists her during her trance sessions. He gave a special drink infused with some of the turmeric water kept on a special tray along with kuṅkumam and sacred ash, used to propitiate the goddess and to enable Mutamma’s sessions with her clients. Only when she had been ritually guided out of the possession could she resume her narrative: After this vision, a child in the village became very seriously ill. Before I knew it, the āṭṭam began. People did not know how to view this. They said, is this a pēy or a cāmi?

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Just then the cāmi “came on” a relative and spoke through her to let the people know that I had the cāmi in me, not a pēy. That is how I came to speak and to become a diviner [kuṟi collaratu]. But my troubles were not yet over. The cūniyam set on me did not immediately leave. I had a lot of [menstrual] bleeding. Finally, my womb [karuppai] was removed. But the goddess finally punished my husband’s cousin. She chased him and stuck her cūlam in the mud in front of him. He was brought low after that. He begged my forgiveness publicly, and my other children were safe after that.

Relations with her husband’s cousin seemed amicable at the time I met her. Her children told me he had even contributed to their upkeep after Mutamma’s husband deserted her. Unlike her father, who is said to have cured through the medium of five deities, Mutamma has access only to three: Muttumāri, her namesake, Konangi Perumāḷ, and their clan deity, the pūvāṭaikkāri. Different deities “come on” her for different reasons. Pūvāṭaikkāri, as we have seen, is the generic name for a virgin ancestor who died unfulfilled and is worshipped by the family as a family deity. Her coming, Mutamma explained to me, was a sign of longing and desire (pācam). Konangi Perumāḷ, by contrast, comes on a human medium only when there is danger (āpattu). Agency in Spirit Mediums: A Heroic Agency? In discussing the same category of female mediums, Obeyesekere (1981, 87– 88), writing of Sri Lanka, describes their period of suffering as a liminal “dark night of the soul” from which they emerge with a new, triumphant status: This critical event is also a diacritical one: it is a liminal period, in Turner’s sense. It is a period of dying: she [referring to a particular healer] does not take nourishment, and the dead relatives threaten to take her away. She then awakens to a new dawn: the relatives become agents for good; she is now no ordinary person, but a child of the gods, carrying within her their essence and power, or sakti. The inner transformation is paralleled by an outer one. She has a new status; she is now a priestess with an, often, idealized goal, the succor of those in need. She will also assist aspirants who, like her, have the divine spark. She will be a guru to others, and like the hundreds of ecstatics before her, help infuse the conservative Buddhist culture with the bhakti ethos from Hinduism. With her new status and role she is now on her own, with a new iden-



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tity—a relatively independent person, not tied to her family like the ordinary Sinhala housewife. She has abolished her everyday world and has moved into an extraordinary one.

Obeyesekere’s gloss on the narratives of the women is not entirely unwarranted. The women are certainly describing a journey in which they acquire agency. However, his framework is one that takes its orientations from understandings of agency derived from the narrative structures of European mythic texts. Teresa de Lauretis (1987, 43) illustrates the persistence of these structures, drawing on Lotman’s theory of typology to argue that the mythic stories are “morphologically” gendered: “[According to Lotman] . . . there are only two characters, the hero and the obstacle or boundary. The first is the mythical subject, who moves through the plot-space establishing differences and norms.” Or, to quote Lotman (1979, 167), “Looked at typologically, the initial situation is that a certain plot-space is divided by a single boundary into an internal and an external sphere, and a single character has the opportunity to cross that boundary.” In this opposition between the mobile hero and the obstacle that must be overcome, argues de Lauretis (1987, 43–44), the latter (sphinx, dragon, sorceress, or villain) is morphologically female and the mythic hero male: As he crosses the boundary and “penetrates” the other space, the mythical subject is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of difference. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter.

Such a topos does not sit easily with the experiences of the female mediums I have encountered. Although they certainly move through a “dark night of the soul” to become professional healers, their success does not depend on their capacity to impress their own agency on to their surroundings or to “penetrate” the obstacles as in Western myth emplotment. Instead, the skill— based on a slow temporality of practice and paḻakkam, or “habituation”—lies in their ability to extract an agency out of what has been inflicted on them, not through conquest but by making room for the Other. The degree of skill is measured not through an agency that rests on vanquishing obstacles but through the means by which the medium is able to allow the deity to communicate its power and presence to all who are gathered. The situation throws the conventional model of agency into disarray. Yet the persistence of these deep-rooted traditional models of agency can be judged by the degree to which anthropologists are forced into impossible

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choices in making sense of the phenomenon of mediumship. In an evocative and detailed description of a curative séance among the Kaluli of New Guinea, Schieffelin (1996, 84) tells of a situation where one medium (named Walia) outstrips another (named Aiba) in terms of his capacity to convey the spirit’s presence. This situation leaves Schieffelin with a methodological dilemma: If we take the mediums to be the performers, the issues focus around the rivalry between Walia and Aiba and the means by which the former successfully discredited the latter and got him ousted from the séance. If we take the spirits to be the performers, then the question becomes on what basis the audience decided Aiba was a fraud and how they managed to oust him out of the séance.

Schieffelin attempts to resolve the issue by recommending a movement back and forth between “our perspectives and that of the Other, rather than the reduction of the Other’s perspective to ours,” as a means of comprehending a mutual humanity. But the “choice” he has felt obliged to make, between the mediums as performers and the spirits as performers, is already structured by a perspective we would have to describe as “ours,” not “theirs.” With stark choices posed in these terms, “the perspective of the Other” can only seem fundamentally illusory, making an appeal to a common humanity unmoored in any genuine or demonstrable commonality. If we characterize the agency of mediumship more carefully, however, we may find that it opens up the prospect of locating such a genuine commonality. It is true that the medium is not the classic Western subject of agency. If she were, there would be no genuine mediumship. But neither is the medium the complete opposite of the classic Western subject. If the medium were completely absent in her or his subjectivity, entirely replaced by a being from the spirit world, there would be no difference between mediumship and earlier phases of possession that are experienced as pure affliction and trouble. The new version of agency we have to formulate must place temporality at its very core. It is only over time that the woman is able to attune herself to the importunate call of spirits and deities. She accommodates the spirit. Not only does she provide accommodation for the spirit in her own body but she also accommodates herself in the sense of adjusting herself, allowing and making room for the Other in her own way of being. Such accommodation is not the same as choice. The woman has not chosen this path. But neither is it acquiescence. She does not simply do the bidding of the spirit, or appease the spirit, as characterizes the first phases of possession. This version of accommodation is slow and processual. Far



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from involving a polarized choice between medium and spirit, it entails the development of a relationship that allows more accessible channels of fluidity and communication between the human audience, the possessing spirit, and the subjectivity of the medium. Yet this gentle and slow process of adjustment makes all the difference between mediumship and the initial experience of possession—which, as we have seen, can be a distressing one. When the deity leaves the body after some hard “dancing,” the woman finds her body bruised or a tooth missing. Deities, in these early phases, do not bring blessings but directly attack the woman’s fortunes, particularly her maternity. The deity may “take” some of her children. It may cause abortions and stillbirths or irregularities of menstrual flow. Radical uncertainty is felt by all about the very ontology of the occupying entity. Is it deity or is it demon? Is possession an affliction or is it a boon? This radical undecidability never entirely vanishes, in part because the ontology of possession and of the possessing deities is itself ambiguous in its very essence. In part, ambiguity persists because of the vulnerable situation of the female mediums. I examine their situation— understood as a want of cultural capital—in the final chapter. Yet, over time, some women, those who become healers, effect a way of coming to live with the visitations of the deity. The ontology of the occupying spirit is clarified not only to the woman but also to a broader social grouping of people. We can borrow the vocabulary used in other parts of India to distinguish mediumship from the afflictive phases of possession. In Rajasthan (Gold 1988), possession by hostile destructive ghosts and witches is discussed either in roundabout terms, as the spoiling or dirtying of a person’s heart, or as a kind of tainting by a blemish (khōt) or darkness (kālo) belonging to the witch. In this version of possession, a great discrepancy obtains between the interests of the spirits and those of the persons they possess. Spirits are said to play (khēlna) by speaking through their victims or by prompting their physical actions. Benign possession, in contrast, is understood as the attestation by the human being of the deity’s bhāv, or “affect,” or as the chāya, or “shadow” of the deity. Shadows, in this case, are regarded as benevolent, as protection from the sun’s rays, and not as fearful darkness. What is central for my purposes is the emphasis Gold places on the fluid and subtle nature of the phenomenon. The imagery of both emotion and shade suggests a perceptible but shifting influence rather than “the sense of clutch upon an object implied by ‘deity X possesses person Y’ ” (Gold 1988, 38). When human spirit mediums are possessed by the same deity over time, “complicity and mutuality” characterize their relations (39). In developing this accommodation and mutuality, intercorporeality plays a key part. The woman is no longer simply invaded by the spirit being. She

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elaborately invites it in through ritual bodily practices. She is equally able to “come out” of such periods, even if she may, as in Mutamma’s case, need a ritual assistant to do so. The Tamil term paḻakkam conveys inflections of meaning that are useful here. According to Trawick Egnor (1992, 97), The term parakkam [sic] was used frequently in our household, and was an important and complex part of people’s thinking and day to day theorizing about human behaviour. Any addictive habit, such as coffee drinking or cigarette smoking, was a parakkam. . . . To know somebody, to spend time with them, to become familiar or intimate with them, was to have parakkam with them. When you had parakkam with a person, just as when you had a parakkam with a substance, that person became part of your system.

This way of understanding habituation conveys an outward directedness, a form of intentionality directed to the world. In defining paḻakkam, I would suggest as a governing idea that of developing a taste for something or someone. As a result of having developed such a taste, one is far from experiencing an increased self-sufficiency. Unlike the Western hero who emerges victorious and autonomous after this ordeal, on emerging from paḻakkam one needs the other all the more to complete oneself. Acquiring intimacy and a taste for what is initially an external force, the mediums develop a relationship of paḻakkam with the very spirits that are initially experienced as afflictive. Here, the senses have a crucial role, as they do in any relationship. First of all, there is affliction, random, mysterious. Then there is dance, or rather “being danced” by the deity or spirit. Afflictions are not naturally caused. Their sign is ambiguous. There is no communication. We do not yet know whether the spirit is a deity or a demon. We do not know what it wants. We do not know how to placate it. Only gradually do speech and vision open up new modes of communication between the woman and the deity. The deities begin to appear to the woman in dreams, to speak to her. They tell her of their intentions toward her, they promise relief and improvement in her life and in the lives of those she holds dear. They demand forms of propitiation in return for the protection they offer. The relation with human others, too, plays an important part in the accommodation process. Occasionally, as in Mutamma’s case, the deity “comes on” someone else in order to confirm that it is indeed a deity and not a demon. Occasionally, too, the deity communicates itself to a mantiravāti or astrologer who is treating the woman for possession. A vast literature in anthropology attests to the range of sensory bodily techniques that play a part in mediumship. Music, dance, and drugs may or may not play a part, but in all cases testimony records a manipulation of the



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senses of smell, taste, and touch and of the body’s facility in providing “sensori-motor integration” (Gell 1980, 236). Helped by such inclusive forms of sensory communication, over time the bodily boundaries of these women shift to make room, allowing the deity or spirit to complete them. The spirit mediums I witnessed, as with spirit mediums in other parts of India and elsewhere (see Connor, Asch, and Asch 1986), are able, with experience, to move easily in and out of these states at the request of their clients. More strikingly, the initial degree of disturbance one finds with women such as Vijaya and Santi is no longer present. Instead, one senses that these spirit mediums are able to maintain a porosity, like a permeable membrane, between their subjectivity and that of the spirit, allowing them to stay in touch not only with the spirit world but also with the clients gathered around them. Previous experience is allowed to play a part. Not only are mediums able to answer questions put to them but they also typically build up a familiarity with clients and their problems over several visits, and this familiarity is not entirely displaced during the trance state. Instead, it is put to use on the clients’ behalf in confirming the relevance of the responses offered by the spirit or deity. Such signs of prefamiliarity with clients are easily interpreted by observers as signs of inauthenticity. I do not exclude myself from this characterization. On one occasion I found myself hailed by the goddess who spoke through Mary: Makaḷē! [Daughter!] You are without your husband, and he is an older man. You are often apart. You wish he would not leave you so often to go away. You have now left him behind, you have come to see your old friends. You have left him in your araṇmaṉai [palace].

I immediately found myself remembering occasions when my friend Mary had inquired into my novel situation. Why was I there without my husband? Recalling her curiosity, I was not short of arguments that would abolish the very possibility of a goddess and insist on her identity as a mere mortal, the woman Mary. Yet the development of prefamiliarity, far from being a sign of inauthenticity, is the very basis of any kind of skilled response. The medium simultaneously develops paḻakkam both with the demands and behavior of spirit beings and with the demands and behavior of her clients, and based on that prefamiliarity is able to respond to new contexts with varying levels of skill. Obeyesekere would represent these women as not only overcoming the spirit as obstacle but also “abolishing” the “everyday world of an ordinary housewife.”5 Here again, the description belies the account given by the me-

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diums. It is only over time that these women are able to slowly negotiate the tension between the demands of the spirit—including even their benign dictum that she dedicate herself to the spirit and to clients—and the obligations of being a young mother, which is what most of these women are to begin with. Their obligations concern small children, the sexual demands of husbands, and the restrictions and discomfort of menstrual periods. All of these make it difficult to put aside the time for weekly sessions with clients and the frequent trips to shrines demanded by the spirit deity. Such demands cannot be “abolished” by some fiat. Rather, the women in their accounts recall what is, once again, a slow process of adjustment over a life cycle. This is a process that involves the entire family. Some of these adjustments occur with the maturation of the family in the life cycle of a family: the children grow up and become independent, menopause sets in, marital sex slows or in some cases stops altogether. And slowly, the practical supports for a life more dedicated to the spirit deity and to clients begin to develop. Husbands are not simply set aside. Their cooperation is often crucial. Every one of the women’s narratives involves the husband quite centrally. His attitudes to the spirit, and to the early diagnoses of the nature of the spirit, toward the steps that must be undertaken to bring about an improvement in his wife’s well-being all matter a great deal. Even if the spirit does not establish a direct relationship with the husband as it does in some parts of the world (Lambek 1980), the degree to which the husband is prepared to support the household arrangements required for regular sessions of mediumship continue to be of great importance. Mary’s husband acts as a male guardian, and by removing the sexual obligation enables Mary to have young girls stay with her. Other male family members may step in to perform similar supportive roles, particularly if the husband is absent, as is the case with Mutamma. Her son becomes her ritual assistant, literally standing by her side to enable her to move into and out of states of kuṟi. This is not, I have argued, the heroic model of transcending the everyday world. However, I suggest that mediums exemplify a kind of agency that is more useful, illuminating a much broader range of circumstances in women’s lives as they negotiate the demands of multiple roles and responsibilities as wives, mothers, and family members, as well as breadwinners in the wider economy. Of Mediums, Pregnancy, and Childbirth: Renegotiating the Polarities in the Comparative Anthropology of Personhood A better characterization of agency in mediumship can serve other purposes as well. The gap between mediumship and ordinary experiences of agency



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in “the West,” or indeed anywhere, is not as great as Schieffelin supposes. I wish to consider further ways in which this can be held to be the case. We can anchor an invocation of shared humanity in something more than abstract appeals for tolerance and understanding, provided we move away from certain models of subjectivity that have been hegemonic in constructing Western understandings of personhood. The anthropology of Indian personhood would seem, at first sight, to be engaged in just this task. A notable lineage of scholarship on India, associated initially with the work of Marriott and Inden (1977), has argued that personhood in South Asia is neither unified nor closed off from the world. Rather, personhood entails the exchange of bodily substances, hierarchically coded and ranked. Individuals attempt to regulate rank through “right eating, right marriage, and other right exchanges and actions. Existing bodily substances may be improved by selective additions, by ‘polishings’ (samskaras). . . . Less desirable or appropriate particles may be rejected by internal sedimentation, by right excretion, or by external removal, often aided by persons of suitably lower genera” (233). The line of argument was extended by Daniel (1984) to the construction of relations between the person, place, and things in the world. In his innovative ethnography set in rural Tamil Nadu, he moves away from an exclusive preoccupation with caste. Villagers strive to find compatibility between their own bodily substances and the substances that characterize their dwelling places since their own capacity to flourish is predicated on the ingestion of food and water of the place, while the very house one lives in has both substance and some qualities of personhood, such as the need for companionship (105ff.). I described in chapter 2 the transformation of possession into a “minor practice.” Possession has been deprived of its context and taken up as an isolated phenomenon, to be distributed among rival but interdependent modern disciplines. Restoring it to its context requires our awareness of this broader set of practices, which belong not only to the ritual sphere (Smith 2006) but also to the world of everyday practices that this body of work has brought to light. I diverge, however, from a fundamental premise that runs through this literature. The Indian (or South Asian) version of personhood is assumed to be so much at odds with Western versions of personhood that it requires the use of entirely specialized, culturally specific “ethnomethodologies.” Such an assumption leads in fact to its own instabilities of meaning. For on closer inspection, many of these seemingly unique and specialized concepts turn out to be nothing more than direct inversions of what are taken to be “Western” constructions of personhood. Thus the Western “individual” produces its inversion, the Indian “dividual” (Marriott and Inden 1977, 232), while Western “monads” produce their inversion in Indian “holists” (Barnett, Fruzetti, and

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Ostor 1970). Even Dumont, who might be said to have exemplified this trend with his opposition between Indian hierarchy and Western individualism, in fact regarded hierarchy as universal—it simply leads a “shame-faced” existence in the West. Many of the later authors go much further than Dumont in terms of sealing India off into its own exotic world. I have argued elsewhere (Ram 1994b) that the underlying premise of the argument is wrong. Comparativist anthropology often seems predicated on a willed ignorance of critiques by marginalized groups within Western society. What parades as the “Western perspective” is often none other than the dominant model of the self, impermeable, individualist, and disembodied, in comparison with which the self of other cultures must inevitably appear remarkably permeable and collectivist. Yet we have thirty years and more of feminist critiques that illuminate the impossibility of such a Western self. Or rather, the fiction of such a self can be sustained only on the presumption that it never has to anticipate processes such as pregnancy and birth. A self of this kind implicitly views the world from the perspective of a masculine body. But even such a body experiences illness. Illness, as anthropologists have pointed out, particularly when chronic, contributes “so intimately to the development of a particular life that illness becomes inseparable from life history” (Kleinman1988, 8). The “turn to the body” that began in the 1980s is not of itself sufficient to rectify the nature of the problem. Rectification depends on how “the body” is conceptualized. Take, for example, the influential texts on cognitive semantics by Mark Johnson (1987) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980). These authors are often cited as exemplary for their efforts to integrate the body into their account of mental processes. Yet a feminist reader such as Christine Battersby (1998, 41) is moved to wonder aloud, “What would it be like to inhabit a body like that?” Her wonder is occasioned by descriptions that represent the body as a bounded entity in which one can place things and from which we can remove things: Our encounter with containment and boundedness is one of the most pervasive features of our bodily experience. We are intimately aware of our bodies as three-dimensional containers into which we put certain things (food, water, air) and out of which other things emerge (food and water wastes, air, blood, etc.). (Johnson 1987, 21)

Battersby (1998, 17) finds this imagery hard to reconcile with her experience of inhabiting “a body that bleeds with the potentiality of new selves.” Such fleshy developments in feminist theory ought to be central to any anthropological project. They are particularly important for ethnographic interpretations of spirit possession among women, where bodily experiences



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of pregnancy, miscarriage, overbleeding, and the death of infants are among the material to be interpreted. The imagery of pregnancy may certainly be depicted in terms of the woman-container or vessel nurturing the male seed and growing the fetus. But this is a radical vitiation of the breadth and variety of female experience. The alterations in bodily boundaries during pregnancy, the intimations of a growing, separate yet dependent being within one’s own body, the powerful experience of pain, the temporality of childbirth that imperiously claims all one’s being, the experience of slowly opening up parts of the body one has scarcely been aware of, all carry with them a transformation of ordinary bodily orientations and therefore of ordinary social orientations. Women in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea describe the pain of labor as so intense that “they lose all awareness of who or where they are.” In particular, they “forget their kin” (Merret-Balkos 1998, 226). Elaborate care must be taken, through the “planting” of the placenta and the cord, to reinsert the women back into their social responsibilities. Feminists reflecting on pregnancy and birth in the West have found far less reason than anthropologists to posit a stark dichotomy between “our model” and “theirs.” An early feminist analysis by Graham (1976) of constructions of pregnancy in the United Kingdom in the 1970s finds much that is similar to anthropological accounts of female spirit possession. Pregnancy is often described as if it entails the relinquishing of the woman’s agency to the biological imperatives of physical and hormonal changes. Graham quotes from a handbook for expectant fathers: Your wife may often feel guilty because she cannot control the fluctuations of mood that she finds herself experiencing during pregnancy. . . . Lethargy, vagueness, lack of concentration—these are among the effects that can affect a woman during pregnancy. There is nothing she can do about any of them when they do descend on her. . . . A woman has to accept herself as she is and to be able to smile at the extraordinary things she sometimes finds herself doing. (303)

The various instrumental advantages that women are supposed to seek from spirit possession also strike a chord for Graham. Like the possessed woman, pregnant women in the West are allowed to manipulate their superiors, temporarily escaping the expectations of housework and cooking and, for some, wage work as well. However, as soon as the spirit-fetus leaves, the woman is expected to go back to her usual duties and fulfill her usual obligations. Graham’s reading of spirit possession is restricted to what now appears, from my account, as just one modality—the afflictive modality. Yet even

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such a qualified reading takes us some way into biomedical constructions of pregnancy, since pregnancy is repeatedly depicted as lacking in maternal agency. The body of biology dominates all else. I well recall reading, early in pregnancy, reference books that identified bodily symptoms of nausea and fatigue as the body attempting to fight off an external invasion. Martin’s (1987) interviews with women in the city of Baltimore found that female representations of pregnancy and of birth systematically minimize their own agency in the experience. They represent the self as separated from the body. Metaphors of splitting were particularly acute in women’s experiences of Caesarean births: I felt as if my head was separated from my body. . . . I couldn’t believe it was me—it felt like a movie that I was watching. . . . I felt strange and detached from my body. I wanted to scream. . . . I felt detached from my own body . . . as if I was watching the whole thing from the ceiling. (84)

But if the afflictive modality of possession helps illuminate the biomedical version of pregnancy and childbirth, then the development of agency-in-possession can be said to illuminate other dimensions of women’s experiences of pregnancy and maternity in the West. An article published in the journal of the Australian College of Midwives by Lahood (2007) describes women in New Zealand who have seen helping and guiding spirit beings provide succor during prolonged and difficult labor. The beings ranged from a recently deceased grandmother to a woman with deep-blue eyes dressed as a nun, while in many instances human birth attendants were themselves transformed into angels. These experiences are described by the author as “non-ordinary states of consciousness.” But the more quotidian version of agency I seek to locate in mediumship comes to the fore in the work on pregnancy by the philosopher Iris Marion Young. In her influential paper “Pregnant Embodiment,” Young (1990) tries to capture the negotiations women make with pregnancy’s increasingly urgent intimations of a being that is not oneself yet is completely within oneself. The mother has an entirely privileged relation to the existence and movements of this other being,6 even while that being is increasingly on its way to separation. Changes in bodily boundaries are being renegotiated: The integrity of my body is undermined in pregnancy not only by this externality of the inside, but also by the fact that the boundaries of my body are themselves in flux. In pregnancy I literally do not have a firm sense of where my body ends and the world begins. My automatic body habits



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become dislodged; the continuity between my customary body and my body at this moment is broken. In pregnancy my pre-pregnant body image does not entirely leave my movements and expectations, yet it is with the pregnant body that I must move. (165–166)

Such negotiations are not necessarily the polar opposite of the philosophical model of a unified subject. They do not entail utter fragmentation and incoherence. Instead, Young wishes to emphasize the existence of quite serene and quotidian adjustments. The awareness of one’s body-in-flux can well be appreciated in quite an aesthetic mode by the pregnant woman. Whereas the situation of pregnancy demands a certain attention to the body, women also continue with their ordinary projects in the world: Pregnant consciousness is animated by a double intentionality: my subjectivity splits between awareness of myself as body and awareness of my aims and projects. . . . I am an actor transcending through each moment to further projects, but the solid inertia and demands of my body call me to my limits not as an obstacle to action, but only as a fleshly relation to the earth. (165–166)

Young’s account would be all the more convincing if she were to more radically incorporate the temporality of pregnancy into it. Temporality is central to the agency of mediumship. Pregnancy may entail a partial break from the prepregnant body of habit, but it also enjoys a certain slow temporality of its own. There is no sudden transformation overnight. The body is not in flux from moment to moment. The temporality of pregnancy is long enough and slow enough to allow the added solidity and weight to become integrated into one’s bodily movement. So much is this the case that it is after the birth that the body feels anomalous, weightless, and no longer subject to the force of gravity. The rate of change and discomfort is at times so accelerated as to force itself on one’s notice. But at other times it is slow and incremental. There is time for a certain freeing up of conscious subjectivity, a release from the necessity to be explicitly aware of the body. The “freeing up” described by Young (1990, 165) is not simply an effect of absorption in some other task. The prerequisite for such absorption in tasks is that the woman has enough time to get used to moving around with a belly that projects beyond her former bodily boundaries—a belly that expands, but slowly. It is this gradualness that allows her to attend to other tasks and projects without having to attend to her own body at every moment. In this sense, the process is akin to the slow incorporation into one’s

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own bodily boundaries of items of apparel that are worn every day. MerleauPonty’s (1986, 143) description of “habit” is pertinent here: A woman may, without any calculation, keep a safe distance between the feather in her hat and things which might break it off. She feels where the feather is just as we feel where our hand is. If I am in the habit of driving a car, I enter a narrow opening and see that I can “get through” without comparing the width of the opening with that of the wings, just as I go through a doorway without checking the width of the doorway against that of my body. The hat and the car have ceased to be objects with a size and volume which is established by comparison with other objects. They have become potentialities of volume, the demand for a certain amount of free space. . . . To get used to a hat, a car or a [blind man’s] stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power of dilating our being-in-the-world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments.

Young (1990, 161) opens her essay with a caveat. Her description of pregnancy applies, she says, only to situations where the woman either ­chooses the pregnancy or at least positively accepts it. Of the two scenarios, that of outright choice is not relevant to the version of agency I seek to elucidate. It does not apply to mediumship. Does it necessarily apply to pregnancy? To insist on choice would restrict Young’s rich account of pregnant embodiment a great deal, since women, historically, have seldom experienced pregnancy as a choice. The notion of positive identification comes a little closer, but we still need to refine it. Merleau-Ponty’s version of habit, by contrast, moves right away from the epistemic heritage that equates subjecthood with conscious representations, with ideational content, or with intentions, decisions, and will. Indeed, for this reason he makes a consistent distinction between knowledge, which inevitably harks back to these states of consciousness, and bodily forms of understanding. The body can come to “understand” an object that initially is encountered as external and that seems recalcitrant, obdurate. We need only elaborate a little his example of driving a car. When we first learn to drive, where the volume of the car has not yet been “understood,” it is difficult to turn corners without an accidental bump or graze. It is a measure of skill and expertise to take that turn without the need for an explicit consciousness of either the car or the angle of the corner. The agency of mediumship goes beyond mere acceptance. It entails developing a skilled form of comportment in relation to an initially unknown and unchosen being that seems to want to consume a great deal of one’s life.



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The medium develops skilled forms of attunement. These are simultaneously manifested on two fronts. The medium must develop a paḻakkam with the character and demands of the spirit beings. Given the multiplicity of spirits that move into their body, the medium must have a familiarity with what makes each of them distinct, so that each of them can “come through” in all their individuality. Her family must develop paḻakkam. On the other front, she must have paḻakkam with the generality of problems that her human clientele ask her to address, as well as some familiarity with the specific group of clients who make repeated visits. Habit is not the opposite of innovation, it is the prerequisite for it. All of this paḻakkam must come through to spectators not in a generic or formulaic way but with fresh performativity, the capacity to dramatize the presence of the spirits and to convince and address her clients satisfactorily so that they will come back and send others. I have stressed those occasions in which ordinary skilled comportment is accomplished precisely at the point at which conscious deliberation is left behind. I have done so to show that we need not be faced with such stark choices as Schieffelin presents between the agency of a skilled but fully conscious performer and the agency of the spirits. It is illuminating to consider how often innovative explorations of skilled performance seem to resort to images of alchemy, augury, and mediumship, often without apparently noticing the implications of these images. In his stimulating book Art and Agency, Gell (1998) describes the “submission” required of the artist to the object he or she wishes to paint. In order to represent a tree, an artist has to submit to it, allow it to impose itself (37). The physical act of drawing this tree is, in turn, not an extension of the will of the artist: Because one’s hand is not actually directly controlled by the visualized or anticipated line that one wants to draw, but by some mysterious muscular alchemy which is utterly opaque to introspection, the line which appears on the paper is always something of a surprise. (45)

Merleau-Ponty’s (1986, 145–146) description of skilled musicianship similarly draws on powerful images of mediumship. Where could the music be said to reside? Is it in the score? Is it somewhere in the musician’s consciousness? Or is it part of the external world, which the musician must struggle with and conquer? Neither object nor subject will deliver us the account we seek, because they are not strictly separated in the actual flow of music: Between the musical essence of the piece as it is shown in the score and the notes which actually sound round the organ, so direct a relationship

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is established that the organist’s body and his instrument are merely the medium of this relationship. Henceforth the music exists by itself and through it all the rest exists. There is here no place for any “memory” of the position of the stops, and it is not in objective space that the organist in fact is playing. In reality his movements during rehearsal are consecratory gestures: they draw affective vectors, discover emotional sources, and create a space of expressiveness as the movements of the augur delimit the templum.

As with the medium, the less a conscious subjectivity intrudes and the less an instrument (like a spirit) remains a purely external object, the more directly the musician is able to become a conduit for the music itself to come alive.7

Chapter 6

Performativity in the Court of the Goddess

S p i r i t m e d i u m s a r e t y p i c a l ly i n c o r p o r at e d in anthropological discourse into the general category of “healers.” However, anthropology must also contend with the currents of meaning that are set in motion when the term “healing” is invoked and that carry it swiftly away from the world of rural Tamil spirit mediums. As they circulate today in popular culture, the terms “spirit” and “healing” spontaneously evoke a version of “spirituality” that is abstracted from any particular cultural context, even while they simultaneously accrue cultural capital from invocations of a grounded “indigeneity.” At a recent forum held in Sydney after the screening of an Ecuadoran film on shamanic healing, a gathering of healers assembled. Some came from different parts of Latin America, others were from Australian indigenous men’s groups, and still others were white Australians conducting healing tours from Sydney down the Amazon. While the audience was extremely enthusiastic, as facilitator I had an uphill task with many of the healers. Why was I introducing politics? Why was I asking them to describe bodily techniques when healing was fed by pure spirituality? Why was I resisting the idea that Aboriginal and Indian “healing” were fundamentally the same?1 The experience helped clarify what this chapter is not about. Some elements of the healers’ responses would be recognized by the spirit mediums I seek to describe. I can well imagine a shared reluctance to describe for an audience the techniques employed by practitioners who strive to create magical effects. However, other elements, such as the invocation of a pure spirituality, would be baffling to the southern Indian mediums. These globalized understandings of healing assume it is pos157

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sible to begin (and end) at a methodological level of universalism even before any specific investigation has begun or description has occurred. The notion of a spirituality that transcends politics, that can be located at a point prior to cultural histories, and that even manages to soar above the body as a site of techniques and skills has an old genealogy for countries such as India. In India, colonial and nationalist discourses have long propagated the notion of an original religious purity that became sullied by a certain “decadence” that had set in by the eighteenth century. Performance traditions in southern India that paid an equal attention to the professional and the erotic, to the political and the divine, were understood to have been contaminated by excesses and by the decline afflicting Indian tradition. To restore the lost purity required the cleansing operations of European colonial rule (Mani 1998) and the socialreform movements of the nineteenth century (Uberoi 1996). In Tamil Nadu, pure spiritual dance and music were extracted, to be produced and consumed and henceforth heavily patronized, by a new middle class.2 The cultural history of India tells us something different. Even though that narrative of decline and pollution in turn shaped the cultural history of the twentieth century, the codes and conventions deployed by the healers draw on an older history than that of colonial and postcolonial modernity. State power and religion in the subcontinent have, over the centuries, used one code to support the other. Godly power and the protocol of the celestial courts have been actively modeled on the power of kings, while kingly authority in turn has borrowed the codes of divine power. The condensations and displacements of codes between godly and earthly sovereignty have been strong and continuous in Tamil Nadu since the rise of “ritual kingship” in the Pallava dynasties of the sixth century. Over this time, the endowment and building of temples and the settlement of Brahmans in specially designated tracts of land became a key aspect of kingly authority (Stein 1980; Dirks 1987, 28). The medieval Vijayanagara dynasties further elaborated this mutual borrowing of codes, and the tendency reached its apotheosis in the Nāyaka dynasties of the Tamil region from the early sixteenth century to the 1730s. At this time, the king “assumes the identity, and the ritualized routine, of the god in his shrine. . . . Similarly, courtesans and devadāsīs [women who perform rituals and ritual dance in temples] merge into a single role” (Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 1992, 187). Not all South Asian traditions have allowed such a mirroring of court and divine power. Royal authority has been disputed by a rival authority, that of the saint renouncer. The moral prestige and authority of this figure has been a notable feature of all the major religions of South Asia—from the ascetics and mystics of Hinduism to the Buddha, and beloved Sufi saints of Islam.



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These figures forged their moral claims by turning their back on the privileges that accrue from belonging to the family and the state. From a position outside the bonds of normative sociality, such figures have provided the moral authority for a critique of caste and other forms of social hierarchy, albeit in the name of an even more encompassing hierarchy that subordinates the individual to the divine, but directly so, without the intervention of state or priestly power. Conceivably, the existence of such traditions of renunciation and critique has provided some basis for the modern requirement for a realm of pure spirituality. However, this would be a misreading. The moral force of the saint renouncers derives precisely from a continual critical interplay of codes within a domain in which kingship, state, and religious power are already mutually intertwined. Sovereign royal power sought periodically to augment itself precisely by ostentatiously subordinating itself to the power of a saint renouncer whose moral force had acquired a strong reputation. In any case, the female mediums I describe cannot be fitted into the mold of the saint renouncer who stands outside the social order. They remain within the household, although their lives are increasingly occupied with traveling to shrines, where they renew their powers and enlarge their clientele by acting as mediums for pilgrims. They do not—as do nearly all the religious traditions of renunciation in South Asia—engage in a mode of devotion that is predicated on an intense and affective mood of loss, longing, and yearning for union with an elusive divine. In their case, the deity comes to them, initially quite unbidden, and it is the medium who must accommodate herself to such visitations. The sessions of the female mediums I witnessed do not accord either with the modern construct of a pure spirituality or with older models of a renouncer or saint-poet. They fit, rather, with the mood, tone, and ethos of a precolonial court in which the divine rules in the modality of a sovereign ruler. Such conventions have not been entirely abolished in Tamil Nadu by the sheer weight of modern history. Every year, in the old mercantile Tamil city of Madurai, elaborate festivals lasting ten days are held to celebrate the autonomous reign of the goddess Meenakshi over the city. Even though the pretext for the celebration is the marriage of the goddess to the male deity Shiva, at which point orthodox texts describe and prescribe her transformation into a charming wife, the older ways of regarding such a goddess come through in the celebrations: Mīṉāṭci’s ritual dominance over the city is dramatically represented in two of the Wedding Festival’s ritual processions. . . . The exclusive attention she receives as the city’s newly crowned monarch is suggestive of, indeed a reenactment of, the traditional procession made by the Hindu monarch after the grand coronation. The processional path around the four

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concentric Māci streets is significant. These streets once formed the outer limits of the ancient city. Her procession marks off the outer boundaries of her domain. She is the newly crowned monarch of the territory her path circumscribes. (Harman 2000, 43; Harman 1989)

Anthropologists such as Harman (2000, 42) refer a little distantly to claims by scholars that Meenakshi (Mīṉāṭci in Tamil transliteration) and her marriage are “simply a way to incorporate a powerful, locally important Dravidian goddess into the Brahmin, Śaiva, Hindu pantheon.” However, we need not retreat to speculation or to what Harman refers to as scholarly “belief.” Current practices provide their own forms of evidence. Not only are there still, in Madurai, “certain groups of local people . . . [who] will not worship her husband or perform the more respectable Sanskritic worship styles the temple seems to have adopted” (42), but also, in villages, the sovereign goddess is incarnated and rules again through mediums. Thus incarnated, the goddess presides as much over petitioners and supplicants gathered at a royal court as over worshippers gathered at a temple. If these women are “healers,” it is in the sense that justice dispensed by an elevated public authority can be said to heal. The association of mediums with the dispensation of royal justice is not unique to the Tamil sites I describe but appears to be pervasive in India (see, e.g., Sax 2009; Gold 1988). According to Gold (1988, 38), in Rajasthan the priest who is possessed may be called a cauki, or “square stool.” In this context, the cauki (Skt.) is a judicial seat, “making the shrines by extension ‘places where justice is dispensed.’ ” The question of what this justice consists of will be treated in a twofold fashion. Chapter 7 examines the nature of the complaints that are brought to the court, to show how the qualities of the justice dispensed by the “courts” of the goddess are uniquely apposite to the particular quality of the complaints themselves. But there is a matter that in some ways requires prior consideration and that forms the subject of this chapter. For justice to be convincingly dispensed, these women mediums have to convey and to make present to those assembled the authoritative presence of a sovereign. Dispensation of justice begins, in this instance, with human sensory awareness of the presence of a vastly superior being who is both deity and sovereign power. The sheer presence of such a being, even before it specifically says or does anything, bears witness to the suffering of worshippers and petitioners and provides them with a futural horizon of hope. Those gathered at such occasions—some already confirmed clients, others watching for amusement and entertainment, liable to turn skeptic—must be reconstituted into a gathering of petitioners in the presence of a deity.



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How is this achieved, even as a possibility? Mediums are engaged, with varying degrees of skill, in the manipulation of codes, conventions, and the “fuzzy” logic of a symbolic habitus, where the quality of imprecision is what allows such innovations to occur (Bourdieu 1977, 121; but see 140ff. for a fuller exploration of the connection between ambiguity and magical improvisations). Yet as is the case with every theme I broach in this book, the subject matter is at odds with the language available to us, whether that language is derived from the social sciences or from cultural studies. And it is this very lack of commensurability that will, again, provide the means for reexamining some of the intellectual models that form our available heritage. How, for instance, are we to discuss the nature of innovations and manipulation of codes in mediumship? Should we be discussing it under the model of “skilled performance”? But mediums claim they retain little or no memory of what they do during their “performance.” Does performance necessarily entail conscious remembering? And what kind of model of performance is appropriate for those who measure their success not by applause or approbation but rather by the deference and awe they seek to elicit as the attitude due to the goddess they incarnate? What does this measure imply for commonsense understandings of performance as a form of “make-believe,” where performers and spectators consciously suspend certain ordinary attitudes toward reality? I reserve a later part of the book (chap. 8) to reexamine the implications for models of “performance,” but in this chapter I give priority to an alternative model, that of “performativity.” The concept of “performativity” makes a claim for our attention at this point precisely because it affords a breathing space from assumptions about the intent and consciousness of the speaker of an utterance. Instead, the emphasis is shifted to the creation of effects. I open this chapter with an ethnographic vignette of a medium in full flight as the goddess. I follow with an exploration of how we might use the concept of performativity to examine the production of what might be termed authority effects. Poststructuralism draws on a particularly rich tradition of the deconstruction of the production of authority, from the work of Althusser to that of Foucault, Derrida, and Bourdieu. It would seem therefore a pertinent tradition from which to approach a performance that strives for nothing less than the transformation of spectators into devotees. Mediums claim the performativity not of skilled practitioners but of a goddess, for whom to speak is to make something happen. Yet there are aspects of poststructuralist critique that prove singularly inapposite for the context I seek to illuminate. This is not so much a matter of intellectual disagreement as of finding inappropriate the kinds of scholarly attitudes and orientations that accompany a tradition that has been shaped

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predominantly by the style and attitude of critique and unmasking. An attitude that may be well deserved when aimed at the authority of powerful cultural models embedded in Western philosophy, and indeed more generally in Western culture, becomes singularly misdirected when aimed at women such as Mutamma, Rita, and Mary. We are already acquainted from the previous chapter with the life circumstances of these women. Mary, a Catholic medium, is the wife of a man running a small tailoring shop. Mutamma hails from a landless laboring community of Dalits. Rita is quite destitute. The conventions and codes of royalty, sovereignty, and divinity that they wield were never meant to be wielded by Dalit and lower-caste women. To be sure, such codes have historically circulated in southern India not simply as modes of exclusion but also as modes of incorporation. These cultural codes have provided the drama and affective force that has served to attract and “bring in” outlying social groups, loosely integrating the warriors, chiefs, pastoralists, and forest dwellers into the idioms of “ritual kingship” (Dirks 1987) characteristic of the fertile wet zones of the Tamil region (Bayly 1989). In the twentieth century, these codes of ritual kingship were given new life by Tamil leaders of the “Dravida” parties. I have already remarked on the unique role of intellectuals in Tamil politics and on the constitution of “cultivated Tamil,” or cen tamiḻ, as a form of political cultural capital. Tamil politics, as Bate (2009, 63ff.) rightly observes, is a bricolage of elements. The rationalism I described in chapter 2 is combined with the deployment of affective precolonial traditions of poetic praise and bhakti devotionalism, once reserved for addressing sovereigns and deities and now commandeered by politicians and their followers. The implications of this hybrid style for Dalit women have been equally contradictory. On the one hand, the heady mix of poetic performativity and modern emancipatory rhetoric has allowed the values of rationalist critique and egalitarianism to spread far beyond the confines of party leadership, not only to ordinary working-class men but also to Dalit women such as Mutamma and to a younger generation of women (Ram 1998c, 2008a, 2009b). But, simultaneously, forms of exclusion have been created, which Bate’s ethnography identifies. To speak in the manner of written literary texts draws on a level of literacy that excludes the very subalterns whom politicians address. Bate’s (2009, 28) description of an annual festival organized by the local rickshaw drivers’ association is a poignant one: Ward secretaries . . . from all the parties spoke; one of the local doctors even rose up on the stage to speak. And the crowning event was a pattimandram [public debate] by the most famous of all debate speakers, Solo-



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mon Poppaiyah. But in the three days of events, in perhaps thirty different speeches, not a single rickshaw driver rose to the mic to utter anything to the crowd but a few simple words of thanks to his guests. . . . The refinement (cemmai) of the language was a massive barrier to voicing one’s concerns to a public. The fact of it was that if you could not read you could not speak. And literacy was probably the first of many barriers to speaking.

Nonetheless—as we shall see—the language adopted by Mutamma is precisely that of the grand sovereign. She deploys, with great skill, the imposing words, gestures, and bodily bearing of a sovereign. It is here that some of the limitations of poststructuralist critique begin to appear. To show by critique that the authority of these women is in reality a matter of “authority effects” and the reiteration of social conventions is to perform a function that effectively ranges the social theorist on the side of a culture and history that stand only too ready to “cut them back down to size.” Concepts that accompany the deconstruction of performativity, such as “masquerade” and “sleight of hand” (Butler 1995), which I adopt initially, stand therefore only to be discarded. I attempt in this chapter to put forward alternatives to purely deconstructive strategies while seeking to retain some of the ground that has been gained. For the account I wish to produce, it will be necessary to breathe fresh life into certain concepts—such as that of “experience”—that have been blighted by the strong winds of suspicion and skepticism directed at anything associated with the notion of a “full” or “authorial” subject. I also seek something more restorative than the fate reserved by deconstruction for concepts that are acknowledged as indispensable but placed under “erasure”—a sort of netherworld that is neither outright banishment nor the full life enjoyed by a concept that has the commitment of those who use it.3 What is put in place of the authorial subject is equally unsatisfactory for my purposes. I seek something more than the carapace of a “subject position.” I argue that we need not resurrect the traditional subject of “philosophies of consciousness” in order to employ the concept of experience. The resources for just such a revised version of experience are to be found in the phenomenological philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and I attempt in this chapter to set out some of the tools I borrow from them in order to develop such an account. Let us begin, however, with Mutamma’s court of justice. Mutamma’s Court of Justice We encountered Mutamma in the previous chapter with the story of how she became a healer. Here I draw on my field notes from observing her in full

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flight as the goddess. She is seeing her clients in the open, under the margosa tree of the goddess. In her hands she holds a tiricūlam, or “trident,” a clump of margosa leaves, and a long stick. Her son stands nearby holding a tray with camphor, kuṅkumam, and vipūti (sacred ash). Mutamma exhales noisily, whirls with the tiricūlam in hand. Mutamma henceforth addresses her clients not in her own person but as the goddess, in imperious tones, chastising the supplicants and then graciously consenting to extend help, using a grand Tamil, with many elevated words. Although it may not exactly be the cen tamiḻ employed by successful politicians, neither is it colloquial Tamil. By such means, she indicates not only the loftiness of her own domain but also the exalted space that all who are gathered in front of her inhabit for these purposes. For example, she routinely refers to people’s homes as their araṇmaṉai, or “palace.” In exploring a parallel example of mediumship in southern India, Schömbucher (2011, 54) has argued that “possession is expressed verbally and therefore has to be analysed in terms of language.” While I begin with language, I proceed, over the rest of the book, to question such a focus on language, widely distributed in the social sciences, as the primary “medium” of social construction. In conveying divine presence to those gathered, the body, with all its capacities, serves as a medium. Mutamma’s first client is a woman who has been ill since she underwent medical sterilization. She has come with her daughter, who also has complaints. Mutamma, now the goddess, touches the woman with her tiricūlam on the womb, breasts, and head. She divines a neglect of the woman’s kulatēyvam, or “household deity,” who is another pūvaṭaikkāri, a woman who died a virgin. Goddess (addressing the woman): Your head pulsates. If you work two days, you cannot work the third day. Your chest and stomach [māru and vayaru] are in pain. The responsibility of saving you is mine [kaṭamai eṉatu]. I give you my word [vākku]. Come to me over the next six months.

The next woman is addressed: Goddess:  Your family is unstable [kuṭumpa cañcalam]. You have no husband. You have one son who listens only to his wife, not to you. He has separated his household from you [taṉi vīṭu]. [In sharp, imperious tones] Where were you for so long? Didn’t people let you know where I was to be found? Will your children come to me?



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Mutamma’s son helps to elaborate and translate the goddess’s questions. The petitioner consults an older female companion. Mutamma’s son is told that the woman’s son has failed to cooperate with her. The mother feels there is no respect given to her by the son, and she grieves over the fact that the son refuses to support her economically. Goddess:  You feel as if you were on fire. For nine long months, for three hundred days, you carried this boy in your womb. You spent on him, you raised him, you had him married. Now he treats you as if you were dead. He is not happy. You are in agony [uṉakku vēṭanai]. But bring me your son. I will make him promise to care for you. Woman [in tears]:  You say all that is in my heart. But no temple of yours gives me solace. Goddess:  Take your son to my temple. Woman:  He will not come. Goddess:  I will make him come. Take my lemons [wedged on the tiricūlam], give him one a day. How will you know that it is working? Little by little the illness will subside [nōyvu velaṅkum]. By the day of nōṉpu [the goddess’s festival], the “item” [poruḷ, referring to the son] will come. Your opponent [etirai], his wife, will be overcome. His temerity [pōkku] I will subdue [āṭakkarēṉ]. I will get a vākku [pledge, word] from him.

The goddess’s arms shake, she shouts “Wha!” holding her tiricūlam on her head. Her son gives the woman a lemon from her tiricūlam. The goddess now addresses the next petitioner, also a woman: I have told you all along. I will remove the cuṉiyam [sorcery, curse]. Your son eloped and had a registered marriage against your wishes, and you saw his wife with another man. On your say-so, he left his wife and is now with another. Your son’s wife and her relative have placed a cuṉiyam. I will remove it [nāṉ vilakkarēṉ].

Her son gives the woman a lemon and some margosa.

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The next petitioner has leg pains and is given a lemon. Then comes a young man accompanied by his father. The goddess addresses the father: This boy refuses to marry his conta [closely related] girl [i.e., the prescriptive marriage]. He put off the second girl you chose for him, saying it was not the right time. But one of these girls you have in mind for him is fatal. She has a tōcam.4 He now has a relationship with a married woman who has two children. He threatens to give up his life in your palace [araṇmaṉai] if you question his comings and goings. He takes money and things [poruḷ] from you and spends it on this woman and refuses to account to you. I will make arrangements for his marriage. But the boy must change his aversion [veruppu] and his thinking [putti]. But if you do the acal marriage [the prescribed marriage] it will result in a death. Father: Please make him change his mind. Goddess:  Next week, I will give my pledge. Addressing son:  Aim your combativeness [pōrāṭṭam] at me, not at your parents. I will curb [aṭakki] your temerity [pōkku]. Come next week. Bring the girl and I will get a pledge from both of them and bring them together. Take the lemon.

The goddess addresses the next client, a young man whose arm is wounded: You have been fighting again. Take my lemon and bring it back in a week. If you do wrong again, the lemon will spoil. You must not think of Jesus when you have Ammaṉ piracātam [the goddess’s piracātam, or “blessed offering”]. You went to a healer who told you you had a civappu noyvu [scarlet illness] that she could not cure. You went to a Christian cāmi [deity]. Do not bow before it. It will come to no good [ceri paṭṭu varātu]. We are both tēvatekaḷ [deities]. But then why has she not been able to help? Come to my palace. Worship only me, or else the pain will get worse.

The goddess now addresses a woman: You have family quarrels. You husband is in a drunken stupor [pōtai]. He doesn’t know how to conduct himself—what to say, how to pro-



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tect people. He fights with the next person and beats you up. Does he know you have come here? Woman:  No. Goddess:  Give him this lemon. If he eats it, it will bring him here. If not, I will take care of him. He has to come for two weeks. I cannot give my pledge in the first week. He has two natures [kuṇam], which takes longer.

At this point, the goddess beats herself with the margosa leaves and babbles vigorously. She addresses a man: Your maṟumakaḷ [daughter-in-law] is possessed by your dead relative’s spirit. The spirit has sorrow [cōkam] and is drawn by love for her [pācam]. You can welcome it in.

Mutamma addresses me next, rather to my disconcertment: You have now left your husband behind, you have come to see your old friends. You have left him in your araṇmaṉai.

The next client, a young girl, is beaten with margosa leaves, and the goddess stamps on the lemon with her foot: You went at twelve o’clock to get firewood to the very place where the man died of drowning. His spirit lives in the water and is in you now. You should not have gone there.

The goddess throws the margosa leaves in the air, shouts, “Wha!” exhaling violently, staggers back, and is given a drink of turmeric water. Then the goddess (temporarily) leaves her.5 A Theological Model of Performativity A clearly theological construction, the postulation of the subject as the causal origin of the performative act is understood to generate that which it names; indeed, this divinely empowered subject is one for whom the name itself is generative. According to the biblical rendition of the performative, “Let there be light!” it appears that by virtue of the power of a subject or its will a phenomenon is named into being. Although the sentence is deliv-

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ered in the subjunctive, it qualifies as a masquerading performative in the Austinian sense. (Butler 1995, 205; emphasis in original)

Mutamma’s performativity is precisely that of a “theological model,” where to name something is to bring that phenomenon into existence. Faced with a mother who suffers from the neglect and disobedience of her son, she imperiously issues a summons for the absent son to present himself at her court. When the mother expresses doubt, she announces that he will come by the day of nōṉpu, a day especially charged with the powers of the goddess. She assures the mother that the suffering will abate as he is made to literally “eat her words,” for he must consume her power, contagiously infused in the lemon wedged on her trident. The statements are all made as if they simply describe what will happen: nōyvu velaṅkum, “the illness will subside.” The language is demarcated from everyday speech, as behooves a goddess. The Tamil speech of the goddesses is grand, hierarchically elevated, quite unlike the Tamil of Mutamma’s everyday speech. Such linguistic switches of code have been identified among female rural mediums in Bali (Connor, Asch, and Asch 1986, 65–66) as well as other parts of southern India, where it has been described specifically as “ritual discourse” (Schömbucher 2011, 53). The tone is that of command and lordly reassurance, of a kind wielded only by sovereigns and never by subjects. What is wielded here is precisely the power not just to describe but to bring things into existence through speech. Although the structure of the encounter is dialogic, the predominant tone is that of a deity pronouncing, without being told, on the suffering of the petitioner. There is no need for the petitioner to speak. The goddess sees all and speaks the pain of the sufferer: You feel as if you were on fire. For nine long months, for three hundred days, you carried this boy in your womb. You spent on him, you raised him, you had him married. Now he treats you as if you were dead. He is not happy. You are in agony. Your head pulsates. If you work two days, you cannot work the third day. Your chest and stomach are in pain.

Poststructuralist theory has developed a particularly rich vocabulary for interrogating and deconstructing authoritative models of knowledge. Althusser’s concept of “interpellation” is a case in point. It allows us to illuminate the mechanisms by which Mutamma brings the goddess alive, reorienting the people who are gathered around her and turning them into new kinds of subjects, those who are subject to the goddess. In Althusser’s example, the policeman “hails”—“Hey, you there!”—and in the “recognition” the person



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walking in the street betrays as she turns around, there is forged not only a reaffirmation but also a reconstitution of the subject (Althusser 1971, 163). Out of Mutamma comes a voice—more intimate in its effect than the policeman but even more powerfully hierarchical—that hails the woman in front of her as “Daughter!” This voice simultaneously interpellates the spectator as supplicant even as it announces to the world that Mutamma has been replaced by the voice of Divine Law. The woman is transformed from a person whose troubles are insignificant into a privileged addressee. She is a subject who henceforth matters, because she matters to the goddess. Those who are assembled, too, are no longer a motley collection of individuals. They are endowed with a new existential importance as an integral group that will bear witness to the goddess’s power and to her ability to see and resolve the woman’s pain. We can glimpse in this reconstitution of those gathered in front of her the double sense of “subjecthood” already implicit in this account of interpellation, which was to be richly elaborated by Foucault (see, e.g., 1979).6 They are subjects-in-Law, subject to the power of the goddess, her vassals. But in being subjected to the power of the goddess they are also reconstituted as subjects whose “mattering” makes of their suffering something that can be alleviated but is also unjust. Such a form of “interpellation” is crucial to the dispensation of justice. The morality of reciprocal and hierarchical obligations up to now has been neglected, even violated, calling forth the justice of an even higher authority. The model of sovereignty at work here may be “incarnated” in the body of Mutamma, but this does not mean that power begins or ends in the body of the medium-turned-goddess. The power to transform extends much further. Performativity proliferates through insignia and objects that can be carried away by the petitioner. It transforms the makeshift spaces of a shady tree into a court. This court has all the hallmarks of a precolonial state, with petitioners, supplicants, elaborate modes of indirect address, insignia, and material cultural artifacts that are imbued with the power of the sovereign by virtue of intimate contact: Hindus and Muslims [in the seventeenth century] operated with an unbounded substantive theory of objects and persons. The body of the ruler was literally his authority, the substance of which could be transmitted in what Europeans thought of as objects. Clothes, weapons, jewels and paper were the means by which a ruler could transmit the substance of his authority to a chosen companion. To be in the gaze or sight of one who is powerful, to receive food from or hear sounds emitted by a superior, was to be affected by that person. (Cohn 2004, 19)

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Mutamma has her petitioners take away with them objects imbued with her power. She sends her lemons, associated with the worship of Ammaṉ, back with her petitioners. The lemons are in turn to be ingested by those who trouble her subjects—by the recalcitrant son, for example, so that her power can work on him internally and draw him to present himself at her court. Cohn describes elements of a shared habitus that, in the seventeenth century, overrode differences between the Hindu and the Muslim courts. Today, Catholic and Hindu mediums share the same habitus. Mary fingers the rosary and makes use of candle wax and of the oil from lamps burning at Catholic shrines to Māta. She gives away the wax and rubs the oil into the bodies of supplicants. From a Hermeneutics of Suspicion to a Hermeneutics of Appreciation The poststructuralist tradition we are considering here finds fresh expression in an influential contemporary scholar, Butler (1995). The task of this tradition, as we have seen, is the deconstruction of authority, exposing the underlying mechanisms that generate authority as so many effects. Following Derrida in particular, Butler is keen to highlight a masquerade at work in this theological mode of performativity. What appears to be a sovereign power emanating from the voice is in fact a reiteration of social conventions. Reiteration, and with it the inherent “iterability” or repeatability of all utterance and text, conveys, in these texts, the capacity of social practice to elude authorial intentions. As she argues (again following Derrida), social practice continually lifts meanings out of a “true” context. The text comes to be re-cited in ways that produce new uses and meanings. The argument that social conventions subtend and sustain all action, even those that seem to originate from a speaking subject—a novelty perhaps in Western philosophy—is more familiar to social theory. Certainly the weight given to social conventions does serve to bring poststructuralist critique much closer to social theoretical formulations than do certain versions of postmodernist “constructionism,” which make it sound as if the “constructed” nature of social reality were a matter of positing social life as entirely constructed from moment to moment. Where I depart from these theorists is in seeking an alternative to the pejorative tone inflecting their description of such “reiteration” as a form of “masquerade.” Such critical inflections are no doubt justified in application to a target they see as pervasive in Western metaphysics. That target is the originary subject, the authorial presence whose intentions are supposed to be transparently conveyed and understood by others and whose intentions and



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utterances are taken to be fixed in meaning. Such a critique is necessary. Indeed, I have myself tried to show that a certain unreconstructed version of subjectivity resembling the target functions as a hidden support for the “structures” and mechanical metaphors of social theory. But a Dalit woman has never been treated as anything remotely resembling a sovereign subject. Even Mutamma’s home is in an area designated as a cheri, a zone lying outside the village, or ūr, “proper.” Mutamma’s “masquerade” is not that of a dominant and prestigious philosophical world actor disguising her own sources of authority. It consists, rather, in the actions of appropriation by a person who has been placed outside the sphere of subjecthood proper, a person appropriating the codes and bodily bearings of a sovereign being. To describe her performance as a masquerade is in fact to join the serried ranks of the many kinds of skeptics who would be ready to discredit her precisely as a masquerading fake. Her bid may or may not be successful.7 She must transform not only herself but also those gathered around her. They may be gathered in various attitudes of expectation—ranging from skepticism to the hope of entertainment and the confirmation of an already existing conviction. She may be called on to respond to a client who is upper caste, whose authority and education far exceed hers, and whose habitus can be only dimly imagined by the Dalit or lower-caste medium (Schömbucher 2011, 40). But for so long as the “court” lasts, they must all be transformed into subjects who are subject to her. Some of the problems in adhering too closely to a deconstructive model in developing an account of mediumship are to be glimpsed in Morris’s (2000) striking account of mediums in northern Thailand. Morris wishes, as I do, to resist a dominant metaphysics that would see nothing but fakery in such phenomena. As a result she is drawn, as I am, to the point where skepticism would be at its greatest. How is it possible that mediums retain no memory of their “work” as mediums? Morris advocates that we seriously acknowledge such claims: It is not necessary to endorse these claims to insist that they be seriously acknowledged and even taken at their word. For only in the wake of a submission to the fictions that mediums themselves inhabit can one ask what work forgetting performs and, thus, how mediumship itself works. (84)

But despite many complicated caveats, the dominant tone of the ethnography is not of a kind whereby mediums can be “taken at their word.” Rather, the phenomenon of mediumship is continually deconstructed. Morris locates the force of deconstruction, not in her own rhetorical strategy, but in the forces of history. Modernity has done the work of deconstruction for her.

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It continually converts mediumship into little more than a series of static, nostalgic representations (of precolonial authority, of the primitive powers of northern ethnicity, of magic itself). Although at many points we are also told that modernity has caused a revival of mediumship in Thailand, this version of mediumship remains, in her account, irrevocably changed from what it can have been in the past. For Morris acknowledges that the force of mediumship cannot be comprehended within the terms of a modern economy of representations. Instead, it is part of a “cosmological orientation [that] permits practices in which presencing (in possession and other kinds of haunting) is assumed to be possible” (Morris 2000, 161). Yet Morris knows, too, that such a cosmological orientation cannot simply be located in a premodern past. There is, to the contrary, a burgeoning “psychic and cultural reinvestment in the possibility of represencing on the part of those who, like their contemporaries in other parts of Asia, Africa and North America, are seeking magic rather than visual pleasures in the modern” (162). Morris attempts to resolve this paradox by making the Thai elite responsible for turning rituals into “symptoms of the past and . . . objects of visual consumption” (162). Those who persist in seeking magic are—one must infer—located outside this elite. At least part of the deconstructive force of this text lies, however, not in modernity’s powers but in the author’s adoption of a strategy that will not allow the notion of “presence” to stand unchallenged. For deconstruction was forged in order to undermine and expose claims to presence. As a result, all that can really be conceded to the claims of mediumship is that these claims are “fictions.” Those who are investigating mediums temporarily submit to this fictional order only to see how these fictions really “work,” while mediums themselves, we have learned, “inhabit” these fictions. There are a number of elements in this argument that are unsatisfactory. I hope, by the end of the book, to be in a position to describe shared elements of “inhabited fictions” that are recognizable even to those who are not mediums. I also wish to show that there are forms of presence that are not necessarily based on what Derrida described as a “metaphysics of presence” in a critique that has come to circulate—more widely and consequentially—as a critique of all “essentialisms.” I would wish to suggest, further, that such acquaintance with presence is available to all, even to elites who may be culpable of wishing to consume static representations of the past. Indeed, as I have tried to show elsewhere, referring to elite consumption of various forms of Indian “classical” dance and music, the same practice may be capable of generating both static representations and viable forms of presence (Ram 2000, 2005, 2010b, 2011a). In order to sustain such wide-reaching claims, I propose to build on the



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account I began to develop in the previous chapter, an account that suggests an alternative understanding of temporality, the body, and consciousness. In that chapter, I described mediumship as a slow temporality of adjustment and accommodation, whereby the passage of time is allowed to soften the sharp dichotomy between the agency of the spirit or deity and the agency of the human subject. Such dichotomies are not merely an artifact of the difference between a Western “us” and a non-Western “them.” They are an aspect of the phenomenology of mediumship itself. There, the initial presence of the deity is experienced as externally imposed, even afflictive, certainly as overwhelming. A medium adjusts to and accommodates the insistent presence and demands of a being radically different in its ontology. In fact any woman who has experienced repeated episodes of such visitations over a period of time develops such accommodation. But an experienced medium such as Mutamma has to do much more. She has to act as a medium between this deity and the audience, an audience whose needs exhibit a certain regularity of pattern and history, but an audience, too, that is freshly constituted each time, requiring alertness and variation on her part. It is this attunement to the audience, more than any other feature, that brings out the skeptic in the Western(ized) observer. Even were we prepared to concede that she might have a special relationship with the deity, we are not prepared to allow that she can simultaneously hold, within herself, an access to the past that does not rely on conscious memory. But in order to develop the ethnographic possibilities in the direction I wish to take them, I need the help of a theoretical apparatus as powerful as that which has been provided by Foucault and Derrida. In what follows I introduce the relevant aspects of the framework bequeathed to us by the phenomenological heritage of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. This heritage precedes and prefigures the work of Derrida, Foucault, and other poststructuralists but has the advantage that it allows us to see the iterability of conventions as a distinct asset rather than as the occasion for a dethroning or unmasking of philosophical pretensions. In Merleau-Ponty in particular, there is a mood of serene appreciation of human creativity that is thoroughly appropriate for what I have in mind. A Nonessentialist Understanding of Experience: Heidegger on the Porous Borders of Lived Temporality and Spatiality Phenomenology is commonly understood as a simple description of “experience.” On the basis of this understanding it is assumed to have been thoroughly discredited by poststructuralist critique. Such assumptions are of concern

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to me since they have strongly shaped much of academic theorizing since the mid-1980s, both in feminist theory and in the social sciences.8 In an influential foray, Joan Scott (1992) attempts to do away with the category of experience altogether since it is “essentializing” and “reifying.” However, she reluctantly decides it is too ubiquitous to abolish and recommends instead that we “analyze its operations” by “focusing on processes of identity production, insisting on the discursive nature of ‘experience’ and on the politics of its construction” (37). Faced with the impossibility of its abolition by fiat, experience is abolished instead by treating it entirely as a construct, a construct that can be studied as the effect of categories, such categories as production, discourse, and politics. These categories, it appears, can operate as a kind of “motor” that produces experience but require no experience for their own functioning. Critiques of “experience” that resemble Scott’s have surfaced in anthropology as well. Desjarlais (1996), for instance, equates experience with a Western construction of subjectivity as interiority, depth, and richness and imputes such representations to the phenomenological traditions. Yet in writing of homelessness, as he does, and finding the existing accounts inadequate, he necessarily falls back on the same measure and implicitly appeals to a better description of the experience of homelessness. I have referred earlier to the common deconstructive response to this predicament of being unable to do without a particular concept that is under critique. That response is to place the devalued concept under erasure while at the same time adopting it in purely strategic fashion. Those engaged in feminist politics have been urged by Butler (1992, 14), for example, to simultaneously “suspend commitment to that which the term ‘the subject’ refers” and instrumentally engage in such muddied arenas. I have argued elsewhere that this recourse to the “strategic” is not a sustainable response. This instrumentalist subject seems altogether more knowing and less vulnerable than the subject it seeks to replace (Ram 2006). I argued in a much earlier paper that a total rejection of experience leaves us in an impoverished state in feminist theory (Ram 1993). But I was not then equipped to suggest an alternative formulation of experience. The alternative I now argue for is to be found in phenomenology’s capacity to challenge both the objectivist versions of time and space and the subjectivist version of experience. Heidegger’s philosophical framework as set out in Being and Time (1962) introduces a systematic distinction between “time” and “temporality” and between “space” and “spatiality.” In each case, the first term refers to authoritative “objective” renditions of time and space, measurable in homogeneous and interchangeable units with borders that do not bleed into one another. The second term, which he privileges as an alterna-



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tive, places experience at the center. But experience is no longer “subjective” as understood by the long tradition in philosophy that would locate experience in the interiority of a subject. Instead, he moves toward an understanding of human existence in which the distinction between subjective and objective is no longer central to every aspect of our experience. Temporality is not to be gauged by the qualitatively undifferentiated time of the clock, nor by the interchangeable days of a calendar. Nor can our “being in space” be represented in the same way as we would speak of an object being in a container (79). The language of our intellectual traditions fails to distinguish these two. Heidegger turns rather to common language as a medium that preserves the less-scientific but more primary level of experience he wishes to disclose (Heidegger 1962, 140ff.). When we say in colloquial English that something is “a stone’s throw away,” we implicitly abandon the objectivist measure of distance in favor of a form of reckoning that is predicated on the presence and activities of human actors. Yet neither is such language to be understood as “subjective” in the sense of being arbitrary nor at variance with the “true” character of the distance (141). Instead, it is more accurate, he argues, for it speaks to a shared practical understanding of distances that is predicated on shared human activities such as walking or throwing a stone. Without such a practical grasp of the world in the first place, the possibility of measurement would not exist. The fact that these activities may also have further cultural components as in Iris Young’s (1990) well-known exploration of the phrase “a girl throw” does not constitute a problem for this account, which is openended in respect of the ways in which the social may be variably constituted. The more urgent task is to rescue experience from the impoverished account that in the first place sequesters it within an individual consciousness and then rejects it in favor of the more accurate scientific measurement of the world. To get at this level of experience, Heidegger characteristically describes everyday, “workmanlike” forms of activity where the actor and the learned environment are flowing smoothly together. By concentrating on such situations, Heidegger is able to steer us away from the necessity to posit a conscious intention behind every act, to detect a conscious memory or representation behind every relationship to the past, and to expect conscious planning and choice behind every relationship to the future. In our everyday modes of comportment, as we go about our ordinary activities, what matters to our engagement is a past that flows into the present, equipping us in conducting those activities. This is a past that resides in the very skills we have acquired in handling and comporting ourselves in relation to others, to a material culture, and to a total ecology. Not only the actor but also that ecology bears

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the mark of the past, of having been fashioned by previous generations. The purposive orientations of our activities, in turn, equip us with specific orientations to the future. In this sense, the present that we inhabit is not closed in on itself. Our very mode of inhabiting the present equips us with a way of being open to both past and future. Just as the visual focus of perception comes equipped with the backdrop of the horizon, so also the present of our activities provides its own way of equipping us with a past that is salient as a background horizon.9 While conscious reflection regularly comes up in Heidegger’s account, it figures rather as interruption than as the characteristic state of affairs, signaling that something has gone awry in the relationship between actor and environment. Yet even when Heidegger does move on to the more existentially charged project of taking conscious and deliberate ethical responsibility for our own agency in a social world, he never returns us to a version of temporality or spatiality in which the past or the future is sealed off from the present. Instead, the heightened nature of the purpose at hand itself calls forth an urgent scanning of the past. My example of this point comes from Althusser’s (1965, 179) striking description of the revolutionary: Lenin meets Imperialism in his political practice in the modality of a current existence: in a concrete present. The theoretician of history or the historian meet it in another modality, the modality of non-currency and abstraction. Lenin knew perfectly well that he was acting on a social present which was the product of the development of imperialism . . . , but in 1917 he was not acting on Imperialism in general; he was acting on the concrete of the Russian situation, of the Russian conjuncture, on what he gave the remarkable name, “the current situation,” the situation whose currency defined his political practice as such.

Conjunctures, though unique and concrete, are a complex intersection of forces precisely because they are not sealed off from the past. If Lenin in Althusser’s representation was dealing with a very specific imperialism, it was nevertheless a situation defined by the past patterns and tendencies of imperialism. Conjunctures are not sealed off from the future either. It is this potentiality that a revolutionary actor—and not only a revolutionary actor—seeks to exploit. The actor selectively appropriates from the past what is needed to act in the conjuncture, while the orientation of action equips the actor with a futural orientation. A certain selectivity is necessarily built into this opening on to past and future, distinguishing lived temporality from the time of all objectivist accounts of time. We do not live all of our past at any given time,



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nor do we approach a “future” as some totality. Rather, the past lives as a level of “preunderstanding” with which we approach any given situation, task, or place. Merleau-Ponty’s “Body of Habit” Although the central role of human embodiment is already implicit in the purposive flow of human activity in Heidegger, it is not until we arrive at Merleau-Ponty’s contribution (1986) that we acquire a rich and definitive location for this important shift away from philosophy’s traditional preoccupation with a subject defined exclusively in terms of mental states of consciousness. For Merleau-Ponty, this relation between the horizon of the past and the present lives primarily in the body. It obtains as a flexible relationship between the “body of the moment” and the “body of habit” (82). The body of habit is partly prefigured in my use of the Tamil conception of paḻakkam, or “familiarization,” which incorporates the notion of developing a taste for something or someone. Like the medium who incorporates the initially alien spirit, paḻakkam and the body of habit involve an expansion or dilation in our sense of our bodily boundaries, bodily capacities, and spatial extension into the world. But there may also be mismatches between the body of habit and the situation we inhabit, as described in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the “phantom” quality of a phantom limb. The futural orientation of the present is implicit in our activities, in the sense that an aim, a direction, a purposive quality are all implicit in our bodily actions. When an arm is cut off, what renders it still alive, to the subject who experiences it as a phantom arm, is the retention by the body of habit of a live sense of practical possibilities. Objects continue to present themselves as if they can be reached. It is possible that with the passage of time, the body of habit will “catch up” with the fact that whole areas of activity are no longer possible. Neuropsychological studies of phantom limbs would seem to corroborate this potentiality—phantom pain often “diminishes with time” (Borsje et al. 2004, 909). In Merleau-Ponty’s formulation even an extreme phenomenon such as a phantom limb does not require us to assume that the subject is consciously lying to herself, or that she is repressing a truth that was once conscious. But his formulation takes us on a path quite different from that of cognitive neuroscience, which, in its treatment of phantom limbs, seems to share some features of Merleau-Ponty’s argument while excising others and arriving at quite different conclusions. Without addressing the fuller implications of neuroscience and neuropsychology, but in order to clarify the distinctive nature of Merleau-Ponty’s argument, I confine myself to a few observations.

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In a summary of recent advances that he hails as a Copernican revolution, Halligan (2002) argues that “folk models” have now been definitively displaced. The problem with the folk model, according to Halligan, is that it perceives the real, physiological body as actively producing sensations of pain, of tickle and itch. Based on such tactile impressions, we “imagine each element of our mind to reside in the relevant part of the body” (Lloyd, cited in Halligan 2002, 254). As a result, it is impossible to understand where these sensations are coming from when that physical part of the body is no longer there: I will argue . . . that the prevalent common sense assumption of phantom experience as pathological is wrongheaded and largely based on a longstanding and pernicious folk assumption that the physical body is necessary for experience of a body. Viewed in this light: “Phantoms are a mystery only if we assume that the body sends sensory messages to a passively receiving brain. Phantoms become comprehensible once we recognise that the brain generates the experience of the body. Sensory inputs merely modulate that experience; they do not directly cause it.” (Halligan 2002, 252, citing Melzack 1992 and Saadah and Melzack 1994)

The research corroborates one aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s argument: what persists, even after the amputation or loss of a limb, is a certain virtual bodily scheme: The reason why the phantom limb has the same quality as the amputated limb is precisely because “it is produced by the same brain process that underlies the experience of the body when it is intact.” In other words, “the phantom represents our normal experience of the body . . . it is the body we always feel, but without the input that normally modulates the central neural processes that produce the experience” (Melzack, 1989). On the basis of recent clinical and experimental findings, Ramachandran reaches a similar conclusion: “The experiments I’ve discussed so far have helped us understand what is going on in the brain of patients with phantoms and given us hints as to how we might help alleviate their pain. But there is a deeper message here; your own body is a phantom, one your brain has temporarily constructed.” (Halligan 2002, 53, citing Ramachandran and Blakeselee 1998)

The study of phantom limbs has encouraged neuroscience to argue that the brain has plasticity and is not simply “hardwired” at birth. Halligan



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(2002, 263) cites Ramachandran’s research, which shows that when the limb is amputated, the brain is able to support its old body scheme by “functional remapping; cortical areas which normally represent the amputated limb are ‘invaded’ or functionally taken over by neighbouring regions of the brain.” One welcomes the integration of the brain, and indeed other aspects of physiology, into the account we have to produce. But in thus solving the mystery of the phantom, this particular model of neuroscience also seems to abolish the difference between the “intact” body and the body that is suddenly missing a limb. Strangely, in the transition from physiology to the virtual world of the bodily scheme, neurological arguments seem to have virtually abolished all aspects of the body except the brain. It would now seem that the body is nothing but a phantom, generated by the only entity that retains full agency, the brain itself. Gone too is the central reality of the emotions emphasized by Merleau-Ponty, of the fear and confusion surrounding the sudden and brutal disappearance of the limb and the practical world to which it gave access. Paradoxically, the folk model actually better captures one element of what Merleau-Ponty seeks to insist on: we do require a physical body, not just in order to make sensory “inputs” to the brain but also in order to have a world at all. The body is no more a “phantom temporarily constructed by the brain” than it is a pure construction of consciousness. “Having” a body is not merely a matter of a mental image. It is also a matter of being able to actively grasp the world in and through movement, not only purely exploratory movement but the “motor” grasping of practical problems posed by the world. In a sense, then, it is the folk model that accurately captures this truth when it “imagines” that “each element of our mind resides in the relevant part of the body” (Halligan 2002, 255, citing Lloyd 1993). We need to retain this understanding even while aspiring to acknowledge the “virtual” dimension of bodily schemes. For without it, neuroscience would seem to be unable to account for the very real differences between the intact body and the body with a phantom limb, except as a matter of missing some sensory inputs. In Merleau-Ponty’s (1986) account there remains a very clear distinction between the two. In the first case the habitual body serves as a guarantee for the body at this moment; in the other, even while the habitual body continues to generate the same momentum, “[objects] present themselves as utilisable to a hand which I no longer have. Thus are delimited, in the totality of my body, regions of silence” (82). A recent neuropsychological study of phantom limbs conducted in Australia (Giummarra et al. 2010) comes close to Merleau-Ponty’s formulation, invoking memory as residing in “limb-specific proprioceptive actions” that continue to be attempted even after they can no longer be performed:

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Ultimately, rather than resulting from a mental image of the limb alone, perception of the corporeal phantom probably also stems from proprioceptive adjustments and minute, involuntary movements that occur during attempts to locate the limb in space. The phantom limb percept enters into awareness, or is even strengthened . . . during both non-conscious and intentional execution of motor schemata, including performance of automatic movements stored as limb-specific proprioceptive memories. (804)

Bourdieu’s “Habitus” Resituated within the Phenomenological Heritage The account of the body of habit might seem to exclusively privilege temporality, the capacity of time to create new aptitudes. But there are direct implications for the way we think of place as well. “Place” is preoriented for us by other places we have inhabited, or by other constellations of “equipmental wholes” that bear some resemblance. Places are not circumscribed by firm borders but experientially draw on and leak into broader areas Heidegger (1962, 136ff.) describes as regions (Gegend; see also Casey 1997, 248) with which the place we inhabit shares some elements. We might take our example from Foucault—the ease with which one governmental discourse shifts into another also has its grounding in a certain “regional” configuration. Schools, prisons, hospitals, and work share certain elements in a “disciplinary society,” making it easy for prisoners to be “referred” to mental institutions or schoollike institutions for treatment, education, or correction (Foucault 1979, 227). In the work of Bourdieu (1977), this relationship between “region” and the place we inhabit becomes conceived as a relationship between the “habitus” and the “situation.” Although he relies crucially on Mauss’s (2009) development of the term “habitus” to convey techniques of the body that vary radically with different forms of socialization, there is a deeper pattern that links Bourdieu’s social theory to the phenomenological philosophers. Like Merleau-Ponty’s body of habit, the “habitus” is the past that exists in us not as representations but in the form of bodily schemas and dispositions, as the smells, tastes, and tangible qualities of our socialization, which give every one of us a unique relationship to the past from which “the situation” calls forth aptitudes. All these theorists privilege action as the vantage point from which a particular situation reveals itself to the subject. All privilege the improvisational nature of action as actors adjust to the demands of the present. If Althusser privileges the conjuncture from the perspective of the revolutionary actor, Heidegger privileges purposive action of any kind as “disclosing” the world to us in comprehensible chunks; but his examples tend to draw on the



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image of the workman with his tools. Bourdieu’s work privileges strategic action, viewing social life as a continual attempt to activate and modulate relevant aspects of our dispositions that are in us as a result of our past histories. The task of social theory becomes, for Bourdieu (1977, 82–83), that of revealing the match between the opportunities that are thrown up by concrete situations, the skills of the actor, and varying levels of “cultural capital,” our dispositions accrued through our history. We see here a direct connection with Merleau-Ponty’s formulation of the relationship between the body of habit and the body of the moment. As with the exploration of the phantom limb, Bourdieu’s work is particularly notable for its elaboration of the various forms of mismatch between habitus and “situation.” Mismatch occurs at some cost as people find their habitus too radically altered for ordinary modulations to be of much use. In Bourdieu’s early evocative work undertaken in the 1960s on the peasants from the Béarn region, the rise of new educated tastes among the girls makes it difficult for the men to find wives. They come to dances hoping to find a girl, but the people dancing are “smartly dressed couples dancing to popular tunes.” The peasant men are made to appear shabby in their clothing and clumsy in their movements. So instead, “they stay there, until midnight, barely speaking, in the light and noise of the dance, gazing at the inaccessible girls. Then they will go into the bar and drink face to face. They will sing together the old béarnaise tunes . . . and, by twos or threes, they will slowly take their leave, at the end of the evening, toward their isolated farms” (Bourdieu 2002a, cited in ReedDanahay 2004, 100–101). Such radical change can occur as a consequence of migration, rapid technological change, the vagaries of capital (as when a long-standing industry such as coal mining pulls out of a region), or as a result of actors’ own attempts at mobility in a highly stratified class society. But the important point to be made here is that as with the phantom limb, the problems of radical mismatch between habitus and situation are not due to change per se. Change is part of the normal flow of social life, and it is what keeps the relationship between habitus and situation a live one. The problem is rather with the scale and abrupt temporality of change—too much has changed, and too quickly. The phenomenological heritage thus veers sharply away from any simple notion of experience as a self-evident category. Indeed, it breaks definitively with the notion of fixed borders and boundaries around place and time. Neither place nor time is locked into the present as a self-enclosed unit, a quality Heidegger (1962, 377) refers to as the ekstasis, or the transcendence, that is built into even ordinary experiences of time and place. We are freed by these

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descriptive tools from having to view ourselves as locked into solipsistic and monadic capsules, from having to regard each instant of time as isolated, or from understanding the places we inhabit as defined by fixed boundaries, as if we were inhabiting geometric space. We are also freed from a reliance on the utter self-presence of consciousness to all things at all times. This is a heritage easily lost under the weight of repeated misrepresentations of phenomenology. One of the least excusable, given his own heavy use of phenomenological theory, is Bourdieu’s almost willful misrepresentation of phenomenology in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), where he repeatedly equates it with the individualistic existentialism of Sartre and on this basis rejects it. In a later book on Heidegger (1991) he performs a similar move, reducing the philosopher’s work to his notorious politics, discrediting those who would object to such a reductionist move as themselves tainted by bourgeois notions of the autonomy of philosophy, and successfully avoiding acknowledgment of his own profound reliance on Heidegger’s framework (see also Weiner 2001, 1ff.; Throop and Murphy 2002).10 Bourdieu has been moved to protest at such criticisms. In his “Response to Throop and Murphy” (2002b, 209), published after his death, Bourdieu says, “I have often declared my indebtedness to phenomenology, which I practiced for some time in my youth.” While his indebtedness is clear enough, his lifelong ambition of overcoming the limits of “subjectivism” and “objectivism” also drives him to reduce phenomenology to subjectivism in order to demonstrate the dialectical transcendence of his own method. Paradoxically, his muddying of the waters has obscured the clarity of his own methodology and the way he is read. He is routinely criticized for the notion of the habitus, which is taken to be a fixed, essentialist version of place, with impermeable boundaries. The fact that for Bourdieu the habitus exists, in a thoroughly Heideggerian manner, only in relation to a “situation”—a term that he joins his phenomenological forbears in using—disappears entirely from this hostile or uncomprehending account of his work. I have foregrounded an account that allows us to displace the centrality of the consciousness-driven version of subjectivity while appreciating the creativity of all ordinary human action. Such an account will help us to appraise the creativity of mediumship, particularly that of a Dalit medium such as Mutamma. Forms of Prefamiliarity That Are Given Fresh Life by Mutamma An experienced medium such as Mutamma can draw on her past in responding to the needs of the present without having to be fully conscious of what



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she is doing. She can do this because it is what we all do as we attune ourselves to the “situation” at hand. Her “situation” is more complex than it is for the rest of us, for it is characterized by the radical presence of beings that coinhabit her body. But in attempting to create a bridge between herself, the deity, and the complainants, the skilled medium in a place such as rural Tamil Nadu is able to draw, with others, on a shared past in which such mediumship is itself an ingredient of the habitus. The conventions Mutamma uses were forged over a longue durée. To function as a live horizon, however, the past cannot stay as “history.” It cannot emerge in the present as historical fact. Nor can it emerge as a corpus of inflexible “rules” (Bourdieu 1977). The term “tradition” is apposite provided it is rescued from the usual understanding: tradition as an inert weight bearing down on the living. Instead it has to be appropriated, taken up by actors in the present, if it is to help define that present. Mutamma is able to draw people into her orbit precisely to the extent that she is successful in giving fresh presence and force to traditions, remaking them as shared forms of understanding that might have a chance of taking effect before other attitudes and resistances come crowding in among spectators. The precolonial court lives again as Mutamma grandly addresses onlookers as her subjects. As behooves a sovereign, she sternly defends her territory and her subjects, warning them not to stray over to rival territories, discrediting her rivals. Later in the same session she warns one of her subjects who had “strayed” and sought help from a Catholic healer: You must not think of Jesus when you have Ammaṉ piracātam. You went to a healer who told you you had civappu noyvu, which she could not cure. You went to a Christian cāmi. Do not bow before it. It will come to no good. We are both tēvatekaḷ. But then why has she not been able to help? Come to my palace. Worship only me, or else the pain will get worse.

But there is more than speech and language being reworked to suit the occasion. Mutamma gives fresh and dramatic meaning to darshan, the term used for gazing upon the consecrated image of the deity (Eck 1985; Fuller 1992) in Hindu worship. Perhaps not enough has been made of the fact that a crucial part of this experience is experiencing her gaze on an assembled collectivity of which one is part. The worship of iconic as well as aniconic images in India rests on the sense of transcendence made possible for the devotee in the presence of this gaze, in receiving the gaze of the hierarchically elevated. In describing the carnal nature of intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty (1968, 143) suggests that we become “fully visible” for ourselves only in a world that contains other seers. Their sight fills in for us those aspects of the

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world that we cannot see. In darshan the worshippers feel the gaze of the deity on themselves; what is more, they are constituted as a collectivity gazing at a shared world that contains the deity’s image of transcendental beauty and power, the material, sensorial technology of devotion, as well as the faces and embodied affect of other worshippers. Mutamma’s incarnation of the deity fully exploits the prefamiliarity of a visual culture. Medium, petitioners, and audience alike know what the divine “looks like.” This iconography is prefamiliar precisely because it is not confined to specific sites such as temples. Its familiarity stems from the continual transposition from one material medium to another. This iconography is known to all from images consecrated in temples and shrines, from inexpensive calendar images hung in domestic shrines and shops (Jain 2007), from small images hung over the driver’s seat in taxis and buses, and from the songs of devotional praise that ring out through loudspeakers from temples, churches, and mosques to form the morning soundscape of India. These songs, though belonging to an aural medium, are in turn amplifications and corroborations of what is seen, for many of them are nothing other than the stringing together of epithets of praise that dwell on the beauty of different parts of the deity and on his or her attributes. Although the epithets produce still images of great power, they contain narratives of the exploits of the deity. Performance, in turn, brings alive such narratives and such moments of stillness. Dancers will frequently take a devotional poem of praise as a text for performance and arrest the movement in order to assume the iconographic poses of the god or goddess (Vatsyayan 1963). The goddess’s iconographic pose in her avenging warrior form is a particular favorite of dance forms: the dancer’s arms lifting an imaginary tiricūlam to impale the prostrate evildoer, the dancer’s entire body taut, her facial expression frozen in the moment of dealing death. This pose, like the Sanskrit epithet mahishasura-mardhini, or “she who slays the buffalo demon,” is a metonym for an epic narrative of the goddess in her warrior mode. Any of these metonyms—the pose, the epithet, and the iconographic emblems of the goddess—retains the capacity to act instantaneously on the listener or spectator precisely because it holds in it, in coiled tension, an entire set of narratives, experiences, and emotions associated with the goddess. To see a woman such as Mutamma brandishing the bunches of margosa leaves, smeared in sacred ash, or grasping a trident piercing lemons is to be predisposed to sense the presence of the goddess. Such a predisposition works even more strongly in favor of Mutamma in a society in which gods and goddesses enjoy food, drink, kinship, and sexuality, music, dance, and theater, both in their own heavenly domains and through the attentions that human



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devotees lavish on them in the temples built specifically for that purpose. Even in temples dominated by upper-caste Brahman priests, where the male priest must maintain a gap between human and divine in order to insinuate his own mediation as a necessary service, there are Saivite theologies in which ritual transforms the priest into more than a mediating instrument. The priest himself becomes the living embodiment of Shiva (Fuller 1984; Davis 2008). This continuity affects more than priests and theologians, bestowing on ordinary women ontological continuities with the śakti, or energies, of the goddess. We have seen that in the world of subaltern religion, these ontological continuities between human and divine are, if anything, more pronounced. Gods and goddesses are more liable to reside in the world of humans than in heaven. What is called possession in the literature may be more accurately considered as a modality in which devotees apprehend the divine as well as the demonic in a carnal form. Within this general possibility of fluidity between human and divine there is one further vital set of schemes (schème, in Bourdieu) that works in favor of a Dalit woman’s becoming the incarnation of the goddess. I refer here to the reversal of hierarchy that is occasioned by the repeated violation of moral codes—a theme I explored in chapter 3. When this occurs, volatile ontological transformations are unleashed. Mutamma’s capacity to become the goddess is sustained by the circumstances of her own life experience, which testify to the ability of the goddess to intervene and bring justice. Ensorcelled and sexually preyed on by her husband’s kinsman, her children slowly dying, Mutamma the young mother is visited by the goddess Ammaṉ. The goddess comes with fire, fire pot, knife, and trident to lend Mutamma her śakti as an enduring presence in her life and to lay low her enemy, who is forced to beg forgiveness publicly, fully witnessed by the social collective. In chapter 3 I explored the circulation between the narrativization of “real life” possessions and performances of styles of ritual theater. Here we can add another layer to the circulation of certain schemes. There is a striking and increasing overlap between rural popular culture and the burgeoning visual and narrative mediascapes of cinema (Ram 2008b). The following is my summary of the plot of a film made in 1970 called Namma vīṭu tēvam (The Goddess within Our Very Own Home; dir. Sundaram): My elder sister was very beautiful. She was raped by a wealthy young man and killed herself, unable to bear the shame. No one knew the true story, but she died outside the temple of Ammaṉ, and the villain did not realize that Ammaṉ was a witness. Unknowingly, my parents organized my marriage to the very same man who had raped my sister and caused her death.

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My life was a misery—my mother-in-law was a scold, my husband did not give up philandering and running after other women, my father-in-law did nothing to intervene. But it was the final straw when my husband wanted to take all my jewelry and even my tāli to give to his current mistress. I stood my ground, and this time I refused to give in. He snatched my jewelry, tore the tāli off my body, and pushed me—I hit my head as I fell and he left me dying to go to his mistress. But I transformed into Ammaṉ. I kept the bodily form of the dead woman. My husband was amazed to see me alive, and no one around me could work out what had happened to the demure wife. Now I set about restoring justice—when my mother-inlaw scolded once too often, I struck her dumb; when she raised her hand to strike me, she found her arm frozen. My impotent father-in-law found himself paralyzed. But I gave my husband another chance. I told him to seek forgiveness from a famous rishi (Skt.) in her ashram. He arrived there and, sinner that he is, the only emotion that overcame him was that of lust for her. He began his familiar move to hunt down his prey—but this was no ordinary woman. It was actually me, Ammaṉ. I let him chase me—right into my home, my temple. In his final moments I let him see me—the horrifying experience of my angered raudra (Skt.) form advancing inexorably to the sound of blaring conchs, my many arms holding the weapons of destruction, my tongue lolling with blood and fury, my hair unleashed like a weapon. He retreated before me, terrified yet swooning with the ecstatic experience—he lay prostrate before me before I plunged my cūlam into his belly. He was found like this, impaled, by his tearful and awestruck family. He was still alive and confessed to them the story of his infamous crimes and of Ammaṉ’s meting out this punishment.

Films such as Ammaṉ (1995, dir. Kodi Ramakrishna), Rajakāḷi Ammaṉ (2000, dir. Rama Narayanan), Pālayatu Ammaṉ (2000, dir. Rama ­Narayanan), and Poṭṭu Ammaṉ (2000, dir. K. Rajarathnam) explicitly foreground the goddess’s responsiveness to injustice. The film Ammaṉ, originally made in Telugu as Ammoru, perhaps comes closest to displaying what I described in chapter 3 as the “ritual depth” of performances of tragedy in southern Indian culture. The heroine is extremely isolated and vulnerable, an orphan, with only the goddess and a kindly temple priest for comfort and companionship. From the moment she attracts the love of a well-to-do, educated young man visiting his family in the village, her fate is sealed, since his family is scheming to marry him to his cousin. The indignities visited on the heroine are far more insidious than assaults on her life—they include attempts to have her paraded naked in front of the village, and, when all plans to prevent the wed-



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ding are foiled, to convince the world and herself that she has become insane. The hero returns overseas without her, and the girl is trapped in a world of horror. The goddess intervenes only when she is left for dead, pregnant and bleeding, her womb gashed and gored, in front of the goddess’s temple. The goddess emerges down the temple stairs as a radiantly confident young girl. She heals the heroine and moves in with her. A marvelous scene has the young girl bringing rain to the village. Excited only as a child can be by a festival of song and dance held in her own praise, she dances with her hair unleashed, declaring to the world that she is Ammaṉ. The confrontation and the climactic delivery of Ammaṉ’s justice are violent and bloody, and she is brought back to her cooled state only with difficulty. I do not know if Mutamma has seen these Ammaṉ films, whose hit songs are now incorporated into worship at village goddess festivals (Ondrich 2005). But Mutamma’s narrativization of her own life exhibits similar patterns of emplotment as the goddess dramatically intervenes to rescue her. We are dealing with a series of transpositions from one field of cultural practice to another. What allows these transpositions to occur in the first place is the existence of certain basic cultural schemes, in Bourdieu’s (1977) sense of the term. The schemes entail a conjunction of elements at once more basic, and more impoverished, than any of their actual realizations, whether in cinema, in ritual performance, or in the explicit understanding of life itself. Pared back, the relevant scheme consists of no more than a few relational pairs—womanman, suffering-power, death-birth, human-divine, woman-goddess. By virtue of being shared, these schemes, impoverished as they are, and precisely because of their impoverished quality, are able to connect different fields of practice, creating pathways whereby each field is able to confer its own power and meanings to the others. These relational pairs are easily mistaken for the cognitive oppositions of structuralist explanation. But this is not what they are. They are embodied, corporeal schemes. When women such as Mutamma become mediums for the goddess, striking convergences appear between the way in which actors on screen convey the presence of the goddess and the way in which Mutamma convinces others that they are in the presence of the goddess rather than that of a poor Dalit woman. Spectators, whether of Mutamma or of the goddess in the film, can know whether they are watching an ordinary woman or a goddess only through bodily gait, stance, demeanor, and style of language. Instead of the demure, long-suffering wife, we have in the goddess a woman whose outward appearance is the same but who now walks with measured gait. Her head is never bowed; she meets the gaze of her hierarchically superior in-laws with level eyes and intimidates them instead. Instructions fail to elicit obedi-

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ence; instead, the woman serenely does exactly what she pleases. Similarly, when Mutamma is Ammaṉ, her language alters, her stance changes, she chastises recalcitrant devotees, and she pronounces the fate of those who resist her power. Devotees await other carnal signs of the arrival of the goddess. I myself soon became adept at detecting in particular mediums the bodily signature of the goddess’s arrivals and departures: a spluttering cough might characterize these moments in one medium, a convulsive start or a yawn in another. In this section I have described a set of predispositions, born of pregiven familiarities and attitudes on the part of spectators, that allow a temporal fissure to appear before attitudes of skepticism and other forms of distantiation between spectator and performer come crowding in. It is this gap or fissure that Mutamma attempts to widen as she creatively manipulates and deploys the iconographic emblems, which are a means not only of establishing her power to those gathered but also of extending her powers to those beyond the gathering. Since she is a live goddess, both ordinary forms of intersubjectivity and darshan can receive new dramatization, with fresh possibilities. Through the voice of the goddess, that which is private and hidden becomes discursively shared, in the presence of “four people” (nālu pēr, as the Tamils say), who are gathered at the healing sessions. In the all-seeing gaze of the goddess, in gazing in turn at her all-seeing gaze, human subjects become visible to one another in a shared world where suffering and injustice have been supplied with a new horizon of hope. Transpositions, Habitus, and the Crossing of Formal Boundaries I have just described forms of prefamiliarity that are bred by transpositions and movements of various kinds: the movements from one site and surface of visual inscription to another, the movement of corporeal schemes between rituals, cinema, and other narrative contexts. This movement of patterned forms of perception between sites helps illustrate what I mean when I say that “place” does not come to us as a space with formal, airtight boundaries. We are indeed able to apprehend it as a concrete and particular place, but that apprehension is already sustained by some kind of prefamiliarity that allows us to prerecognize it as a place of a certain kind by virtue of our familiarity with other places that resemble it in some way. If it did not bear such a resemblance, if it occupied no relationship to a broader “region,” we might not recognize it as any kind of place. We would have no idea of how its “equipmental wholes” bear any relationship to our bodily comportment—as when people used to sitting cross-legged on a mat and eating curry and rice with their fingers and hands find themselves for the first time confronted with



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tables, chairs, knives, forks, and napkins. In this respect, I wish to exploit the close relationship between Bourdieu’s use of the term “habitus,” as a constellation of bodily dispositions that grow up in response to particular inculcated ways of dealing with the world, and the Latin habitatio, “a place to dwell in,” and habitare, “to dwell in.” Restoring the Heideggerian emphasis on dwelling as a central feature of human existence restores also the relationship between body and world that is implicit in the term “habitus,” since bodily techniques grow up not simply in isolation but in concrete repeated interaction with a particular material world. The habitus as a dwelling place need not—in fact generally does not— coincide with formal maps and boundaries. This is so not only because people move across these boundaries but also because the boundaries of a map need not figure in the spread and transposition of practices from one site to another. A frequent accusation leveled at the concept of habitus is that it presumes a sealed or impermeable boundary around it. But concepts such as habitus belong to a philosophical tradition that was fashioned in critique of strictly bounded notions of space (see Heidegger 1962, 79ff.; Dreyfus 1991, 41ff.). Such modern presumptions have shaped modern histories. Postcolonial scholarship has traced the ways in which modern governmental exercises undertaken in India from early in the twentieth century, such as the massive operations of the census and mapping, “froze” the identities of religion and caste, both in temporal and spatial terms, with varying effects on the people who occupied these slots (Cohn 2004, 224ff.; Appadurai 1993). In response to the essentializing politics of contemporary Hindu nationalism, which claims all national space for a single unified religious identity, it has become common for many Indian intellectuals and activists to gesture toward a past that was syncretic and to a popular culture that is still pluralist. The images of syncretism may be images of a conscious policy, such as that adopted by the Mogul emperor Akbar in choosing the best of religious philosophies. Such a legacy has been celebrated in the recent blockbuster Bollywood film Akbar. Or activists may refer to the mutual borrowings of Hindu bhakti and Muslim Sufi traditions, borrowings that have produced merged idioms of worship. Popular religious culture has therefore been a prime site for invocations of syncretism. If I were to write about mediums in keeping with the traditions of anthropological writing on religion and healing in Asia, I would be highlighting, as evidence of medical and religious pluralism, the movement of patients and pilgrims across the boundaries of Hindu, Christian, and Muslim shrines in search of cures and solutions. Their motivation would be described as pragmatic. The exigency of illness drives people to cross boundaries (see, e.g., Mandelbaum 1966; Leslie 1977; Landy 1977). The implication is that people will try “anything.” The

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trope of pragmatism is a persistent one, carried over into more recent writings on eclectic strategies pursued in dire situations (Lock and Kaufert 1998; Ram 2010a). None of these observations are wrong in themselves. There has been syncretism in the sense of borrowings across borders, and people do cross formal boundaries in search of solutions. However, the concept of a habitus gives us another way of conceiving of the matters at stake. The movement across borders may be undertaken for pragmatic motives, but it would not be possible to sustain such movement if people did not recognize the shrines on the other side of that border not simply as “places” in some general sense but as very specific kinds of places in which the power to cure resides and awaits them (Bayly 1989, 454–455). In other words, movement is sustained by forms of prefamiliarity. Only through the sense of a “fit” between preunderstandings and prefamiliarities and a given situation can one find comfort and sustenance in shrines and the abodes of mediums and other kinds of healers regardless of whether they are Hindu, Muslim, or Christian. Many of the features I have described for Mutamma, the Hindu medium, will be prefamiliar to a Hindu visiting a Christian medium. For this kind of prerecognition to be sustained it is not necessary to have an exact replica. All that is needed is that a certain relational scheme be repeated. Thus Mary, the Catholic medium, has Saint Michael and Māta speaking through her, not Ammaṉ—but, still, a goddess is working through her. The materials with which she imparts the power of the Catholic saint or goddess consist of the oil from the lamp, the wax of the candles at the home shrine, the well water mixed with water from the church’s altar, and flowers from the garland around the statue of the saint. But she puts them to use in ways very similar to those of Mutamma, who pierces her lemons with the trident of the goddess. In both cases, clients can expect to have these materials brought into contact with the body of the person whose illness or whose nature has to be altered. Mary sprinkles the well water on the eyes and the ailing parts of those who come to her. The flowers from the garland are to be placed under the pillow of the sufferer to ward off troubles. The wax from the candles is to be powdered and applied to sores and boils. In some cases she herself massages a back with the candle wax. Ingested or rubbed and massaged into the body of the sufferer, these materials, suffused with the power of the deity, continue to circulate in a new zone of effectivity. As with Mutamma, clients will pick up the indications that the ordinary woman has been replaced by a saint or goddess. Mary hears the complaint, places her hand on the head of the petitioner, and seems to go slack. When the spirit enters, her mouth opens in a sound that resembles a yawn. When the deity speaks, a rough sound in the throat punctuates each comment, as if each



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sentence is emerging with effort. Mary, like Mutamma, exploits prefamiliarity with popular visual iconography. She assumes the posture of Saint Michael depicted in innumerable posters and postcards, in framed photos in people’s homes, and in statues at shrines dedicated to him. Divining the existence of a demon, she, as Saint Michael, places her foot on the back of the sufferer, stamping out the demon within. And clients and petitioners can expect, as they expect with Mutamma, the voice of authority to issue forth. Mary as Saint Michael (addressing an elderly man): You are suffering from weakening eyesight. I exhort you all not to worship false gods anymore. Where has it got you? [Throws water on his face.] Do you not feel better already? [The old man slowly nods.] You will be better. You have mūḷai kācal [brain fever], but it is in the early stages. For this you must seek medicine from a hospital. But there is an āvi [spirit] of a man who used to move with you [i.e., familiar to you], he is attracted to you.

Mary as Saint Michael addressing a woman: It is not your husband who calls you out at night but Māṭan, Vannāra Māṭan. Your illness began two years ago. It was sent to you by your husband’s relatives, who are envious of your good fortune. Your husband has become chronically ill. Avoid contact with these relatives and go to Vēḷānkaṉṉi. I will drive out this cur and bring him to my heels. I will drive out this pēy [demon]. [Inta nāyai māṟṟi tārēn; inta pēyai māṟṟi tārēn.]

Like Mutamma, Mary signals the shifts when a new, higher entity emerges to speak through her. Māta has a distinctive voice, more singsong and rhythmic but no less authoritative than Saint Michael’s. Māta (to a young woman who has not yet danced): Why are you frowning at Māta? Is it anger you feel? I won’t let you go so easily! This woman has Icakki and Vannāra Māṭan and the ghost of a deceased bothering her. She has headaches, fever, and today these are troubling her sorely. She was not careful about what time she walked the streets. A smell of arrack hangs over her. Her father’s relative died of drink and poison.

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[A spark from a lighted incense lands on her nylon sari. An onlooker moves to put out the spark.] Do not be afraid. Nothing will happen to Mary while I am here. [The incense sticks are placed near the girl’s nose. The girl laughs. Water is splashed over the girl.] Leave the girl with me. Let her hear my japa mālai [rosary].

In certain ways, the habitus of popular culture is made up of a shared set of patterns. A single instance is not enough: we should talk not of a place but of a “region.” In equipping people with a sense of what is “fitting” and “proper” behavior, a region, or patterned clusters of instances, precedes and prefigures the potential efficacy of pragmatic decisions to seek a cure in this or that shrine, with this or that curer. This is not syncretism. Such familiarity is not the result of borrowings from one religion to another. The effect is rather of successive waves, as incoming religious practices come to reckon with preexisting cultural patterns. At times, such attempts at remakings may be unsuccessful. As I have written in my ethnography of Catholic popular culture in coastal Kanyakumari (Ram 1991b), the Christian goddess sharply polarizes qualities that are united in the fiery Hindu goddess. The Catholic goddess is all goodness, depriving the Hindu village goddess, in Christian villages, of her capacity for good. The Hindu village goddess, by default, becomes the wicked demon. It would be a mistake, therefore, to attribute to the habitus of popular religion a spirit of tolerance. It has not been created out of the spirit of tolerance nor out of any other spirit nor indeed according to a policy of any sort. A shared habitus may indeed provide its inhabitants with the potential for challenging newly created boundaries between places and religions. I saw many such instances on a visit to Pakistan in 1997, where I was able to watch with older people their favorite Indian cinema from an earlier era and sing popular ghazal and other genres of songs we all loved. But shared frameworks of understanding can also provide the grounds for competition. In the case at hand, Mary and Mutamma are mediums for sovereign beings. These beings, Christian and Hindu, act in the same way—which is what puts them in direct rivalry with each other. They require assurances of loyalty and fealty from their subjects. If Mary regards Icakki as another demon, Mutamma acknowledges that Māta is a tēvate, a deity such as herself. But this makes her none the better disposed toward her rival. She spells it out clearly for her supplicant: You must not think of Jesus when you have Ammaṉ piracātam. You went to a healer who told you you had a civappu noyvu that she could



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not cure. You went to a Christian cāmi. Do not bow before it. It will come to no good. We are both tēvatekaḷ. But then why has she not been able to help? Come to my palace. Worship only me, or else the pain will get worse.

And Mary for her part scolds her errant, straying supplicants: I exhort you all not to worship false gods anymore. Where has it got you? The very fact that these goddesses have to scold and exhort their subjects shows that there is indeed a fluidity of “cure-seeking behavior” on the part of sufferers. The petitioners may move from one sovereign power to the other, reasonably secure that they will understand the behavior of the rival powers. But the sovereign beings themselves will continue to behave as queenly rivals.

Chapter 7

The Nature of the Complaint

Could one address oneself in general if already some ghost did not come back? If he loves justice at least, the “scholar” of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. Derrida 1994, 176

Mediums such as Mary and Mutamma are both agents and instruments in the conduct of a Court of Divine Law. The people who attend them are petitioners. But what is the nature of the complaint? I take the term “complaint” from Wilce’s (1998) fine ethnography of “troubles talk” among rural Bangladeshi women. In particular, I use his distinction between “complaints as symptoms, as reified signs of disease” and complaint as “the social and discursive dynamics of complaining, or troubles telling” (15). However, as we shall see, though complaint is not the reified sign of disease, neither is it purely discursive. It locates itself quite centrally in bodily and intercorporeal affects. I have referred to the “nature of the complaint” for a further reason: to signal that I wish to attend, not to this or that specific complaint but to elicit the underlying nature of the concerns that run through them. We will not understand the nature of the justice that is sought and received until we understand the nature of the complaint. The one who receives the petitions—the goddess or saint—already precognizes the nature of the complaint. But we scholars, as lesser beings, have been slower to grasp what is at stake. Whether through fitting into the pregiven categories of analysis in the social sciences or as a result of looking with the prefocused eye of the politicized analyst for signs of 194



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progressive “good sense” among subaltern groups, the nature of the complaint is constantly hijacked in the commentaries available on such subjects. Since a considerable body of work points in a different direction from the way I wish to proceed, I buttress my interpretation in this chapter with evidence from a different ethnographic context, that of life narratives. Here—as will be seen— I encountered very similar underlying concerns. Divining the Complaint As in chapter 5, I set out my accounts of other mediums in successive entries, to allow readers to develop their own sense of paḻakkam (familiarization). At the home of Mary, the Catholic medium, people begin arriving early. The following session began at 9 a.m.: Petitioner 1: A mother comes with her son and daughter-in-law to give thanks for the return of the son. The son had been missing for many years. Mary had given them repeated assurance of his safe return. But all is not well with the prodigal son who has returned. They have brought him here not only to give thanks but also to address problems that afflict him. He is haunted by the smell of poisonous fumes. Mary has already once diagnosed this problem as the persistence of the untimely death of a man who was poisoned. Other problems are also raised by the petitioners: there is an unmarried daughter, the boy’s sister. The family has received a good offer of marriage for her. But there is no money for the dowry. Mary is holding a rosary in her hands and kneeling. At first she begins to speak in an ordinary voice, but I realize that this is no ordinary speech, since it is punctuated by a rasping noise like the clearing of the throat. All individuals are addressed as Makaḷe and Makane [sons and daughters]. Around her, the day is quite an ordinary one for the rest of her household. Mary’s children are getting ready for school, and her husband is working on the sewing machine. But it is Saint Michael who is giving advice. He gives detailed dietary instructions for the afflicted man, after which Mary takes a glass of water, holds the cross over the man’s head, and speaks rhythmically and rapidly. Finally the water is slapped on his face, and he is given a bit to drink. All other family members are given a drop of water and told to recite the jaba mālai (Catholic prayers). Petitioner 2: Mary’s goddaughter has come with problems. There is domestic discord between her husband and the three sons. Her sons are leav-

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ing home, which spells financial disaster for the fishing household. Mary has been telling her for some time that these are not ordinary misfortunes. Paying a visit to her goddaughter’s village, Mary immediately sensed that there was a takaṭu, a cylinder containing harmful mantras buried at this house. She did not have the power to remove it but asked her goddaughter to consult divine powers. In this session Saint Michael diagnoses the problems in household discord with reference to the husband’s drinking addiction. Petitioner 3: An elderly man, accompanied by his daughter, seeks treatment for failing vision. Petitioner 4: A woman brings her relative’s child for ongoing dysentery. Saint Michael suspects someone has tried to put a spell on the child but assures all present that he will not allow it. Petitioner 5: A girl feels she and her mother are neglected by her father and brothers. She wants to know if she can secretly sell off some property to marry the man of her choice. Mary advises her to go ahead. The father will come around. She does not have to agree to marry where she does not wish to. Petitioner 6: A woman brings a feverish child and is rebuked by Mary for not having come on an earlier day. Rita, the Catholic Healer of Karingal

The reader was introduced to Rita in chapter 5 as a woman saved from suicide by divine intervention. Once rescued, in the extremity of poverty and abandonment, she converted to Catholicism. I took notes one day as petitioners came to her to experience the presence of the goddess Mary, worshipped as Māta (Mother) rather than as the Virgin. Petitioner 1: A woman is childless. Rita addresses her in the voice of Māta: “You were told to come to me for seven weeks in a row. You only came for four. Come for the next nine weeks. You will have a child. Bring the child to me forty-one days after the birth and make your offerings.” The woman pledges a large statue of Māta. Petitioner 2: A woman is pregnant and fears a recurrence of earlier miscarriages. Her husband is overseas, and he is sick. Māta tells her: “Bring



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me a photo of your husband, and prayers will be held. Your child will be born well.” Petitioner 3: A woman who has been training as a teacher through a correspondence course is tired of working as an āyāh, or “nursemaid,” and wants a better job. Now it seems to be Rita who is addressing her, telling her she will have a better future. Petitioner 4: A worker who climbs coconut trees for a living has been injured and is unable to work. Rita massages his back with oil from the shrine. Petitioner 5: A girl suffers from sores in the scalp. She is told to purify her hair with baths and with sāmrani [a brazier with fragrant incense]. Next week when she returns, Rita will lick the sores. Later Rita tells me she has cured poisonous wounds by licking them.

Rita kept a kind of registry for her patients, which quite astonished me— perhaps to impress the parish priest. When she approached the priest in a state of utter despair and penury, she was told she would receive some accommodation provided she did not use what she describes as her gift. I copied down the following entries kept by Rita in her registry: 1. A husband and wife from Tippirai Malai, K.K. District, leave their signatures. The wife has been incurable for nineteen years. When she came to the shrine she began dancing and was cured. 2. A man has suffered from fevers and allergies for ten years. Rita beat him with a broomstick and spat on his face. 3. 5/1/81: A family has had sorcery (mantiravātam), resulting in mental diseases, giddiness, weak limbs. Forty-one days at Rita’s has helped the family. 4. A male taxi driver from Paliakadai has done the rounds of mantiravāti, doctors, and nāṭu vaittiyars for a year and a half. He has attempted suicide several times. One of his customers recommended Rita, and he has been coming for the past eight days. The courts of the goddesses and saints integrate, under the category of injury, every misadventure, from breaking one’s back shinnying up coconut trees—which we would designate as “work-related injury”—to fevers and allergies and a whole range of difficulties we would describe as “personal.”

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The “personal” complaints revolve around crises in primary and intimate dyadic social relations: ruptures between child and mother, between child and father, between lovers, or between husbands and wives. Mothers are afflicted by sons who refuse to care about their mother’s wishes. They will not marry the woman a mother has selected for them. They repay years of nurturance with obduracy and disobedience. Wives are afflicted with husbands who are alcoholic, liable to turn violent or desert them. Fathers and sons quarrel instead of mutually supporting each other. There has been a breakdown in care and concern. Someone close, who should have loved and cared, fails to do so. Such ethnographic evidence is not unique to Tamil Nadu. Moore (1993) describes something similar in her observations of a holy man and healer in Rajasthan, in northwestern India. The healer is a Muslim maulavi, or “holy man”; he is not a medium. He dispenses amulets containing the sacred words he writes on a small piece of folded paper. But the complaints brought to him are, for all the differences in faith and region, remarkably consistent in nature with my evidence from the south, for both Catholic and Hindu “courts.” In Rajasthan, too, most of the adult petitioners are women. They complain variously of “stomach-aches; possessions; depressions; babies who cried, did not nurse, had fevers, or who passed bloody stools; infertility or the conception of only girls; children who did not go to school, would not study, or were fearful at night; husbands who had ‘wandering eyes’ or beat their wives; businesses that failed; and livestock that fell ill” (Moore 1998, 163). Here too “the bulk of [complaints came from] women whose problems included possessions, miscarriages, nursing, and fights within the affinal family” (163). Moore is struck, as I am, by the courtlike nature of these shrines and those who preside over them. But she conceives of them as courts for those who lack access to any, more formal form of dispute resolution. In order to demonstrate this, Moore reviews all the alternative sources of adjudication to which the clients could have turned. The panchayat, or village council, incorporated by the postcolonial state as an official organ of local representation, is flexible in respect of the issues it adjudicates, but at the time of Moore’s fieldwork, in the early 1990s, it excluded women. The institution, officially open to all castes, is unofficially exclusive. The panchayat closes ranks around the combined interests of the wealthy, the high caste, and the large lineages. Other recourses to the state are not much better from a peasant perspective. Villagers’ criminal complaints are prepared and investigated by the police rather than by lawyers. The police are feared for their violence and their tendency to mete out preadjudicatory punishments. Complainants as well as respondents are likely to be punished in this manner. The demand for bribes allows the powerful to more easily deal with the police than the poor can. Lawyers are feared “for their verbal skills, which can turn truth into lies,



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and all the actors—witnesses, lawyers, judges, and police—are vulnerable to bribes” (Moore 1998, 531). State courts frequently fail to protect women, and where there is conflict between customary practice and legal rights, local state court judges, usually all men, support the former. Moore is not wrong about the limitations of these courts and formal procedures of adjudication. I have described nothing less from the perspective of coastal villagers in chapter 1. What is problematic is that for Moore, the medium, the goddess, the saint, and their court become a kind of leftover, a “remainder” from the world of official, formal politics and justice. For her, they adjudicate over the same concerns one might take to the police or lawyers or to the village panchayat if one were more sanguine about receiving a fair hearing in such quarters. But in order to argue this, Moore has to effectively ignore her own statement as to the nature of the vast bulk of complaints. Instead of “possessions, miscarriages, nursing and fights within the affinal family,” Moore turns her attention to two case studies—both of which concern disputes over land ownership and money. It can be no accident that in both situations, the petitioner could have challenged the offender in ordinary courts. The obstacle does lie in poverty. But it is not poverty that prevents women from taking to ordinary courts their complaints about “possessions, miscarriages, nursing and fights within the affinal family.” For what kind of justice could ordinary courts have to offer to those who fear, perhaps with good cause, that they have ceased to matter to those most intimately concerned with their welfare? Even miscarriage and infertility, as we have seen, are far from being merely physical incapacities. They threaten the social and familial regard for the wife and daughter-in-law to such an extent that she may sink below the threshold even of what it is to be a woman. One’s Life as Complaint I have suggested here that the underlying nature of the complaint should be understood as a feeling that one has ceased to matter, to matter to those who should care. My interpretation is based not only on what I observed in the shrines and at the homes of mediums but also on another set of occasions, when I invited older Dalit women to tell me the story of their lives.1 In the mid1990s I was researching rural women’s experiences of bodily transitions in a life cycle, concentrating particularly on puberty and maternity. These women, like the medium Mutamma, came from agricultural castes in two of the villages of Chengalpattu District, known as Kāvanipākam and Pernaka Ūr. I was introduced to them through the mediation of a nongovernmental health organization. They lived not far from Mutamma’s village. The women, in their fifties and sixties, responded with generosity and eloquence to the invitation to tell

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the stories of their lives. Their names were Karpakam, Indrani, and Lakshmi, and others who joined in were Vellachi, Jaya, and Indrani’s daughter. The women’s narratives were structured in ways that related them intimately to the genre of the lament (Ram 2007; see also Clark-Decès 2005). Since my earlier publication of this material, I would seek to resituate the life narrative within a continuum of ritual performances, particularly the performance of death stories in vil pāṭṭu. The life narratives that follow can be placed in a relationship to the performance and experience of possessions— possessions that haunt, possessions that heal—and to the complaints that drive people to mediums. None of these genres of performance are mechanically replicated in the women’s life narratives. Unlike conventional laments, which mourn the loss of husband or the absence of children, these women had both husbands and children. It was not death that produced untimely loss but joyous and propitious occasions: nothing other than marriage or maternity itself. These events, socially regarded as entirely auspicious, had in effect brought the women’s childhood to an end in an untimely fashion. They had separated them cruelly from the nurturance of their parents. The women had been married off with the arrival of first menstruation: Karpakam:  I was very attached to my father—I would get him to lift me up and throw me in the air, I would sleep on his tummy, and he would call me his butti ponnu, the little daughter with a big tummy. To get me to sleep, he would tie a tambuti [the smallest coin in the old currency] on my nāṭa [drawstring of petticoat]. Indrani: I had tai vīṭup pācam [an intense love for my mother’s home]. One’s tai is special. She struggled to raise us. My daughter also says: Peṇpiḷḷai maṉacu [the heart of the daughter] is different. Āṇpiḷḷai maṉacu kallu [the man’s heart is stone].

The intensity of this love remains unfulfilled in these narratives. As in the formal laments recorded in this district by Trawick Egnor (1991), mothers and fathers are snatched away from women by marriage and by death. In the case of Lakshmi, My mother died when I was seven. Not a day went when I did not shed a tear. I had to fetch water, look after the smallest baby, cook for everyone. There was no one to tell me how to be, how to tie my clothes. Father’s brothers lived next door. Their wives taught me how to cook.



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Without a mother, a girl child must cook, look after siblings, fetch water. She now has no one to dress her, to teach her how to perform tasks. As an aspect of the mother’s teaching, by example as much as by words, we may include social instruction in comportment. Ushering the female child into each of these practices is itself regarded as a form of nurturance, as part of maternal love. For those whose mothers are not taken away by death, marriage may occasion the same bitter loss. Lakshmi:  For two years after marriage, I kept coming back to my mother’s house. Then I had a baby of my own. My mother-in-law treated me terribly [koṭumai paṭuṭṭiṉāḷ]. All of them, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law too. They beat me even when I was pregnant. [Lakshmi cries.] Karpakam:  I was going on eleven when I was sent back to be married in my ūr [she had been living in Madras]. He was a man not related to us. I knew I was to be married, but I didn’t know what that meant. They gave me bangles and I was happy just jingling them. Due to poverty not many gifts were exchanged, and I didn’t have much jewelry, just a nose ring and earrings. After marriage, I came to this village. It is two buses away from my mother’s house. In those days it would have meant a day’s journey. We walked here from my village. But I was always crying for my mother’s house. Sometimes my parents would visit, and occasionally my husband would take me there. He looked on me as a child and did not speak harshly to me. Then I became a “major” [came of age] at thirteen. Lakshmi:  Five days after puberty there was a betrothal ceremony. He was young too—he had no mīcai [mustache] as yet. For two years after marriage I kept returning home to my mother’s.

In most of these cases, women emphasized that the new home did not provide female nurturance to replace that of their mother. Either the motherin-law was cruel, as in Lakshmi’s case, or there was simply no mother-in-law or any other women to help a young girl child come to social maturity: Karpakam:  My mother-in-law had no daughters, just five boys. Indrani: Here [at her husband’s home] there was no mother-in-law, and my husband’s sisters were all married. There were no women here

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for me to be with. I did not know how to feed my husband. My father-in-law had to teach me. I would not speak to my husband. My husband rejected me as too young and ignorant, unable to do anything around the house. The elders of the ūr spoke and said: Who will take this girl?

I described in chapter 3 the idealized Tamil representations of the ritual life cycle of the woman, whose essence unfolds as she blossoms in puberty, ripens in marriage, and bears fruit in maternity. Instead of this conventional treatment, or, rather, exploiting the potentialities of this conventional treatment, the women’s narratives dwelt on the pain that came from a premature declaration of ripeness on the part of society. They exploit also the theme of untimeliness, which I have described earlier as one of the central themes that generate a sense of the tragic and provide the ritual depth in Tamil performances. Instead of puberty being the time at which aṟivu, or “self-knowledge,” is developed of how to socially comport oneself (Ram 2009a), these women emphasized that they were abandoned before the dawning of any comprehension, or aṟivu. The trauma and shock of marriage formed the pivotal point of transition. Unpreparedness and untimeliness, culturally explosive and shared tropes, took on the coloring of individual and particular circumstances. Karpakam emphasized that she was completely unprepared for any kind of agricultural work. As her mother had too many children to feed, she had been sent to live with her mother’s elder sister in Madras. Karpakam:  I knew no agricultural work, only housework. I did not know how to pound the rice, could not weed or plant. My mother-in-law let me be, saying I was still young. I learned gradually to sow and plant.

Marriage brought other requirements for which the girls were entirely unprepared. They were expected to engage in sexual relations: Indrani: When puberty came, there was a ceremony, and my husband’s sisters had to teach me. I knew nothing of sex. Somehow a baby was born. Over the next few years, I got habituated to my husband [paḻakkam ākiviṭṭutu]. He kept me well [nalla vaittu iruntāṉ]. We were scared of sex. Today, there is uṇarcci [conscious awareness]. Even the kids in pāvaṭaiccaṭṭai [i.e., prepubescent girls] don’t have any embarrassment [kūccam]. One year after my first menstruation, I had a child. My husband’s sisters stayed with me daily



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for seven months. Initially, I did not buckle under my husband [purusaṉukku aṭaṅkaḷe]. Later, I saw no alternative.

The harshness of life as a young bride was further magnified for those women who experienced problems with fertility. I described in chapter 4 the trauma of failing to conceive, losing babies during pregnancy or early infancy, and being taunted as a koṭu māṭu, “sterile cow.” Vellachi recalled the tyranny she experienced as a young mother at the hands of her husband and mother-in-law: In those days, you could not sit down in front of your in-laws, not even to breast-feed your babies. We were remembered by husbands just for sex— anta nērattukku peṇṭāṭṭi [a wife just for “those” times]. If we complained we were told we would be sent home [to mother’s home].

After a lifetime of suffering from the stigma of infertility and losing babies, Karpakam finally had herself sterilized, only to have the operation botched by the clinic: Karpakam:  Even after sterilization, I have had overbleeding and been taken to the hospital twice.

There was no phase of life that did not bring its share of suffering. As older mothers, the women suffered neglect by their children. Women in Tamil Nadu are routinely invoked as tai, “mother” (Lakshmi 1990; Ramaswamy 1997). The women were quick to perceive a new opportunity to generate dramatic potential from the gap between conventional expectations and the realities of their lives. “One in a hundred treats his mother as the tēyvam [deity] they tell us we are,” said Vellachi. “I know of just one son who actually does a namaskāram [respectful greeting] to his mother and offers her food before he eats himself.” Karpakam drove home the point with further flourish: “The matter is quite the reverse—we are the ones who bow [kumpiṭu] to our sons as if they were deities; and we do this all the way until the cuṭu kāṭu [cremation ground] claims us.” Then others began chiming in: Another woman:  My daughter-in-law won’t even feed me. The sons get food from a hotel. From time to time I try to go and stay with my brother, but my son objects. In my mother’s day, children and daughters-in-law listened to the parents. Parents in turn were kept well, with affection. Today? They eat well, and we eat scraps and leftovers, if they wish to give us even that.

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Vellachi: While my father was alive, he thatched my roof, and I was surviving so long as my mother was alive. Now a brother cannot take that place.

In her account (Grima 1992) of the performance of suffering among the Paxtun-speaking women of Swat in northwestern Pakistan, Grima identifies the centrality of suffering (gham) to women’s entitlement to speak and tell the stories of their lives. Young, unmarried women are regarded as not yet having suffered. They themselves refer the ethnographer to older women, to those who have the most “beautiful” stories, who have experienced hardships and dealt with them in accordance with the codes both of Paxtun honor and of the Islamic notion of the redemptive quality of endurance with dignity. Each crisis in a woman’s life is socially attended by other women, performatively elaborated by the woman and witnessed by others. A life story, when told, is remembered as a “chain of crises and stresses”: A woman’s life is perceived almost entirely within a framework of hardship and suffering, beginning with her being severed from her mother. Many women agreed, upon my asking, that the time before marriage had been one of happiness. But hardly any women admitted remembering anything of this period. (85)

In southern India, where the situation was little different, women had additional cultural resources at their disposal. They were able to draw on the explosive theme of the unleashing of demonic energy by the untimely rupture of life forces. Men, who dominate rural Tamil genres of performance, emphasize the premature death of heroes. The death of a heroic and subaltern man, cut down in his prime through war or treachery or both, can trigger the āvēcam, the “heightened affect,” which allows the dead hero to possess performers and spectators (Masilamani-Meyer 1989). Women for their part emphasize life itself as the site of suffering— and, indeed, of tragedy. The suffering they undergo has been caused by the violation of fundamental moral codes or expectations. Society has not dealt with them fairly. Despite the widespread assumption that a given family has “looked after its womenfolk” in marriage and maternity, women are often exposed to a cruel violation of intimate primary relationships. A girl who is little more than a child is put to work among strangers. Many old women represented themselves to me as abandoned by their parents, brutalized or at least neglected in the early years of marriage, forced too quickly to take up laboring jobs, tormented by the husband’s sexual infidelity (Schuler 2009), or



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stigmatized for their failure to deliver children, only to be neglected, in old age, by their own sons. Yet the narratives provide little warrant for drawing a distinction between injustices specific to family life and those that might be explained by social class and labor exploitation. For women remembering their lives as young wives, the labor in the home, the sex in the husband’s bed, the requirement to produce babies, to cook meals for the family are all of a piece with the requirement that they perform agricultural labor in the fields and care for livestock. The injustices they perceive are not exclusively or even primarily injuries of caste or class. They are not separable from the travail of their lives. For them, the primary injustice is the failure of family, kinship, and marital relations to provide them with the nurturance and love that their culture professes. That failure remains, even for old women, a fresh and primary source of grief which draws to itself all other, more recent sources of sorrow. Injustice as a Rupture in Intimacy Complaint, then, needs to be understood in a wider context. The courts of goddesses and holy men—to whom these complaints are directed—are quite different institutions from the courts of law to which women such as these are denied access by the modern state. Their analogue is to be found in a variety of performance genres that attempt to secure redress for weaker members of a hierarchical society by mobilizing the powers of affect. Genres of this category include the female lament, which feeds, as we have seen, into the narrativization of life itself. I draw here on the fine work on laments, both for Tamil Nadu (Trawick Egnor 1986, 1991; Clark-Decès 2005), other parts of South Asia (Grima 1992; Wilce 1998), and for the wider world (e.g., AbuLughod 1986; Seremetakis 1991). Close continuities can be traced between the idioms deployed in all these genres, including the petitions brought to the goddess. All give a central place to affect, whereby emotion and bodily sensation are experienced as one. As one widowed Tamil woman told the anthropologist Clark-Decès (2005, 44), “If I begin to tell my kuṟai [grievances], the gods will come down; their tears will flow into the ocean.” When modern scholars recount the business of the “courts” but pay little attention to women’s kuṟai, they inadvertently sustain a whole genealogy of neglect. The theme is an old one in Tamil Nadu: because their ordeal finds no hearing in the courts of kings or among their menfolk (often the perpetrators of injustice), women turn to the sacral sphere of curses and oaths, or become demonic goddesses. These goddesses remain forever connected with injustice, invisible but portentous beings who inhabit the land-

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scape and bear witness to the miscarriage of justice. Schuler’s (2009) study of Icakki Ammaṉ’s rituals contains descriptions of yakshi female figures in the early Tamil text Cilappatikāram. One yakshi is a statue that weeps tears of sorrow “whenever swerved the king’s sceptre and [undue] preference was shown in court”; the other yakshi is demonic and deals out direct retribution to adulterers and cheats: it simply catches and eats them (245). We have seen in earlier chapters that Icakki Ammaṉ is in a sense a composite of women who have suffered injustice. Here, for once, the sweep of what is considered injustice is wide enough to encompass women’s concerns: their lives may have been cut short by their murderer, but the potency of that crime lies equally in the fact that these women have never come to fruition as beloved wives and mothers. Possession by such deities, or, as in the case of Vijaya, by the spirits of murdered women, is imbued with the ritually potent theme of injustices that have never seen the light of day. The courts of the goddess and saints provide another such space. Here the goddess comes down not simply to listen but to speak on behalf of the sufferer. It is the goddess, not the petitioner, who lends her eloquence to sufferings, and she does so in a heightened form for all to hear and witness. Such forms of “speaking on behalf of ” do not proceed on the basis of consultation. The goddess simply knows the plight of her petitioner. Such a form of “preknowing” is central to establishing the authority of the goddess. A body of ethnographic and psychotherapeutic evidence for India summarized by Wilce (1998, 38) finds that “subordinates have strong expectations that their superiors will not only offer support in return for loyal obedience, but will even intuit their needs. Family elders are expected to know junior members’ needs through refined powers of empathy (which must entail careful attention to subtle hints and verbal indirection).” The goddess does more than simply revoice the concerns of the petitioner. Her mode of enunciation is itself a promise of retribution, of justice and the advent of hope. She speaks in a grand tone, far different from that of the lamenter. At the same time, the success of her vocabulary and idiom depends on effectively reusing and re-presenting a circulating stock of affective images that are common to all Tamil speakers. In laments directed at their neglectful children, for example, women speak of maternal love not simply as emotion but as the bodily experience of labor, a labor that swells the belly, bends the back, explodes in the pain of childbirth, and leaks and flows as milk from the breasts. Such invocations, in turn, are not restricted to specialized genres but find their way into daily speech. The exclamation Ammāṭi, pettavaḷe, which is translatable in English as “Oh Mother, who bore me,” was commonly used when I was a child by the older generation—by my great-grandmother, for ex-



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ample, as she tried to straighten her stiff body. However old the speaker may be, she remains a child when in pain and needs her mother. Used in this way, the term conveys a sense of the connection between the bodily suffering of the speaker in the present and the bodily suffering of the mother to whom one owes the debt of life. The mother is made present as she who went through the pain and travail of childbirth in giving life and is felt all the more keenly in her absence. The exclamation, in its own quiet and condensed way, is itself a lament. In the following excerpt from a lament recorded by Clark-Decès (2005, 63), the bodily marks and imprints of maternity are elaborated as the basis on which an old woman confronts her son with her pain at his lack of love and nurturance: Because I carried you when you were little Today my shoulder slopes, My hip tilts. Because of you I lost my strength. Because of you I endured hardship. Now, my little man, there is no one to call me “mother.” The goddess in her court uses the same dramatic idioms. She employs the same vivid descriptions of bodily states to convey her shared knowledge of the powerful emotions that are eating up her petitioner: Your head pulsates. If you work two days, you cannot work the third day. Your chest and stomach are in pain. . . . Your family is unstable. You have no husband. You have one son who listens only to his wife. He has separated his household from you. . . . You feel as if you were on fire. For nine long months, for three hundred days, you carried this boy in your womb. You spent on him, you raised him, you had him married. Now he treats you as if you were dead. He is not happy. You are in agony. . . . The woman is in tears. She says: You say all that is in my heart. But no temple of yours gives me solace.2

The goddess promises to bring the erring son to the court. But she promises, too, to teach him to care. We mistake the matter if we think of either the seeking or the deliverance of justice purely in terms of specific actions. Heidegger’s (1962, 235ff.) concept of Sorge, introduced in chapter 3, is not limited to solicitude or concern for others. It is intended to illuminate an even more basic level of concern, the level at which we might say that something or someone matters to us, for better or for worse. When women complain of

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their husbands and sons, they are not merely conveying the fact that those dearest to them are inconsiderate. Their suffering stems from the even more basic sense that they have ceased to matter to them. The sons are now absorbed in their wives or in pursuing their own desires. The husbands have deserted them or turned to alcohol. For some women the very world seems to have gone cold and indifferent. And for those whose children die without recourse, or take a long time in being born, the indifference of the world carries the additional destructive sting of their ceasing to matter as a woman. Such injuries, considered along with illness and accident in the courts of goddesses and saints, cannot secure redress from ordinary modern courts. The problem is not simply that those suffering injury are poor but that these institutions do not comprehend what is needed. What is sought by the sufferer is the restoration of the missing dimension of connection. Genres such as lamentation address precisely this dimension. So too does the court of the goddess. In both cases, the affective flow of tears attests to the restoration and renewal of a bond of care across hierarchies of inequality. Sufferers are often of lower hierarchical status than the party that has injured them, since even a mother is less powerful in her old age than an adult son. But a lament that brings tears to neglectful superiors attests to the renewal of their capacity to respond to one to whom they owe a duty of care. A goddess who movingly retells the plight of her petitioner brings tears to the sufferer as she feels her suffering brought into the shared hearing of all witnesses and experiences the release of knowing that the powerful goddess herself knows and cares. It is the restoration of this sense of mattering to others that has the power to heal. A form of involvement, Sorge, has been elicited where earlier it was missing. The Mute Body of “Somatization” Confronted by people who experience abandonment and desertion as pulsation in the head or pain in the chest and stomach, anthropology has repeatedly had recourse to the category of “somatization.” This is no descriptive category. It is a diagnostic one with genealogical depth. It refers back, in the first instance, to Freud’s terminology of “conversion.” For Freud, the paralyzed arm or the “neurasthenic” absence of sensation in parts of the bodies of the women he treated were forms of “conversion.” They were “hystericizations” of problems that really lay in the unconscious, in the layers of unresolved Oedipal complexes, or in familial dramas that occurred in childhood but not in the present inhabited by the adult. Kleinman’s (1988, 57) adoption of the term “somatization” makes explicit use of this genealogy:



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Somatization is the communication of personal and interpersonal problems in a physical idiom of distress and a pattern of behavior that emphasizes the seeking of medical help. Somatization is a sociophysiological continuum of experience: at one end are cases in which patients complain of bodily ailments in the absence of any pathological bodily processes— either as a conscious act (malingering, which is unusual and easy to detect) or as an unconscious expression of life problems (so-called conversion, which is more common); at the other end are cases in which patients who are experiencing the disordered physiology of medical or psychiatric disease amplify beyond explainable levels their symptoms and the impairment in functioning those symptoms create, usually without being aware of their exaggeration.

The concept has enjoyed wide currency. Young wives and those unsuccessful in maternity, we are told by Moore (1993, 1998), “somatize” their complaints in the absence of exercising any form of power or authority. They enjoy the few material benefits that a visit to the maulavi brings, a break from the drudgery, a glass of sweetened milk, warm baths recommended as part of the cure (1998, 170). The powerless (who are women, or young men) displace their want of economic and political power onto the body. We are back in the territory where possession by ghosts and demons is routinely interpreted as a temporary reprieve from powerlessness. Nor is this a coincidence. The psychoanalytic language of conversion was itself a form of displacement, a form of “conversion,” as it were, of the previous discourse of ghosts and demons to the language of science. Freud was explicit and reflexive about this shift. The editor’s note (Freud 1974, 69–70) to Freud’s analysis of a “Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis” describes Freud’s interest in demonology, evinced in his early work with Charcot and in his comments on the topic in his early letters to Fliess, as well as in his publication of an analysis of demonic possession in 1923. Freud remarks on the inversion that psychoanalysis effects on demonology: henceforth, the forces of sexualization will be located inside rather than outside the patient (72). The agency of externally located spirits is thus relocated as the agency of the mind, located in the interiority of the subject. There are, of course, older precedents for such a notion of interiority.3 Auerbach (2003) would remind us of the Christian antecedents to the notion of subjectivity as interiority, to be identified in the very way that the Bible structures its drama, as compared with the “even” tone of Homer’s epic Iliad. And Foucault (1978) has traced, in the Christian confession, the precedent to psychoanalysis’s desire to arrive

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at a truth about the repressed sexual desires of the patient. Compare Freud’s (1973, 375) language of confession and resistance to confession: She suddenly confessed of her own accord that she had not told the truth: what had occurred to her had not been “colour” but “incarnation”—the word I had expected. This lack of straightforwardness showed that it was at this point that resistance was greatest.

Such a history lives on in the eagerness of social science to unmask the truth of bodily sensations. Can we detect malingering in a given case?—or is it conversion, the displacement of a truth that lies elsewhere? Whether in church confessions, in psychoanalytical talking cures, or in social science, we as intellectuals are trained to seek the truth of the body—often of women’s bodies—in a reality that lies “elsewhere.” The guiding assumption here is that the body itself is silent, is capable only of the mute provision of “symptoms.” The last part of this chapter is devoted to challenging this assumption. But I wish first to critically resituate the assumption in terms of de Certeau’s (1984, 61ff.) insightful commentary on the master discourses of the Enlightenment central to Western modernity. In chapter 2 I utilized his concept of “minor practices” in order to consider the historical constitution of spirit possession as a practice without a discourse of its own. De Certeau describes the setting aside of certain social and cultural experiences as reserves of “wildness.” Once these are set aside in this manner, science can then colonize these reserves as so many zones that can be transformed into objects of theoretical systematization, as so many mute symptoms that require explanation. He singles out three figures that have been central in the construction of these wild reserves. These are the figure of the woman, the figure of the primitive in other cultures, and the figure of the West’s own prehistory, essentialized in the demonological discourses of devils, witches, and possession. Any of these figures can serve as the master trope in defining the space of the “ethnological” (70). The body itself has become a silent domain of mute symptoms, a wild reserve that needs science to explain its meanings. A wide array of discourses serve the procedure through which the mute symptoms of the body are converted into the language of modern enlightenment. These range from biomedicine to psychoanalysis, sociology, and even the modern forms of emancipatory politics (see part 3). A degree of selectivity on the part of the scientific user is thus built into the process, ensuring that we never experience the discomfort of a merely mechanical sense of tradition at work. Freud’s invocation of an unconscious, for example, is not the one Kleinman adopts in his definition



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of somatization. He seeks the causes of somatization in a series of eminently rationalized categories. Among these are the social conditions that encourage expressions of distress, the cultural idioms of misery that use a language of bodily complaints to represent personal and interpersonal problems, and an array of individual psychological characteristics (anxiety, depression, personality disorders). What is preserved in all cases is the existence of the body as a “wild-reserve zone”: for it is this preservation that propels the explanatory moves. All the explanatory categories—the social, the cultural, and the psychological—swirl around the body and draw on its symptoms. But the body itself does not speak, does not act in defining the social, the cultural, or the psychological—it does not act, in short, until somatization occurs. It is as if the social, the cultural, and the psychological did not require a body. We do not, it would appear, need a body in order to have a world, any kind of world at all. The Body in “Social Suffering” In this section I wish to consider the more politicized discourses that, like the foregoing, treat bodily affects as “conversions” of “social” processes. These discourses illustrate my point that the presence of a discursive tradition at work need not entail any mechanical sense of repetition. Indeed, some of the accounts I consider here are quite explicitly conceived of as critiques of somatization. In her vivid and compelling study of the poor in Brazil, ScheperHughes (1992, 185) sets out to “politicize” the explanatory framework and “to recuperate the uses of the body” from what she describes as the “exhaustive and generally unenlightening literature in medical anthropology on ‘somatization.’ ” She seeks to limit Kleinman’s description of somatization to “a generally maladaptive and fairly primitive defense mechanism involving the deployment of the body in the production or exaggeration of symptoms” (185). In her alternative interpretation of the bodily symptoms of nervoso—a complaint that includes trembling, fainting, seizures—she finds that the complaint “offers itself both as metaphor and metonym for the sociopolitical system and for the weak position of the rural worker in the current economic order.” Women who suffer from nervoso are expressing the tragedy of “husbands and sons who have been murdered in violent altercations in the shantytown or abducted and ‘disappeared’ by the active local death squads” (186). Scheper-Hughes’s “repoliticization” of the body confers on it a greater existential urgency. The politics of hunger and political violence becomes foregrounded by bodily symptoms. Yet the effort to bring politics and the body together does not alter the definition of politics and only marginally changes the understanding of the body. Politics remains, in the traditions of

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socialism, what it always was: an effort to elucidate and challenge class inequality. Its particular focus is on the state as the vehicle of class rule and of the selective exercise of violence against the poor and the working classes. The result of this definition of politics—a tradition valuable in its own right— is an inevitably piecemeal quality to the ethnography. Only certain complaints are of interest and significance. From others, the ethnographer’s gaze quickly falls away. I mentioned earlier the example of Moore’s (1993, 1998) description of the Muslim shrine. Moore begins by noting that the vast bulk of complaints concern stomachaches, possessions, unfaithful husbands, and the like. She then devotes her attention to two cases concerning disputes over land and money. Scheper-Hughes (1992) makes a similar preselection. She begins with the women’s nervoso, a condition that makes little distinction between different kinds of tragedy, that of having one’s men murdered in violence within the shantytowns and having one’s men abducted by the state. But her attention is drawn to those forms of violence with which she is most concerned: “the nervous political system just now emerging after nearly a quarter century of repressive military rule but with many vestiges of the authoritarian police state still in place” (186). The violent murders within shantytowns, less easily absorbed into the discourse of class inequality, are soon left far behind. More recently, the concept of “social suffering” (Bourdieu et al. 1993; Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997) has renewed a tradition that, like ScheperHughes’s account, also goes back to socialist theory. Suffering that appears to be purely individual, personal, psychological, and medical is in reality “social,” is occasioned by the unequal distribution of social and cultural capital. To this, Kleinman, Das, and Lock add the atrocities of large-scale political violence, inflicted not only by the state but also by governmental professional practices. In this sense, social suffering itself, like the unequal social and political capital that occasions it, is distributed unevenly, as is the socially given capacity to represent the experience of suffering and to place it into official discourses. But the assumption seems to be that we lose sight of the “social” if we do not foreground inequality as a problem. To make suffering “social,” such foregrounding seems to require exclusive reference to large-scale events of political violence, especially involving the state: partition of the subcontinent, civil war, apartheid, states of emergency. One entry in the volume edited by Das, Kleinman, Ramphele, and Reynolds (see Lawrence 2000, 171ff., 196ff.) deals with a theme very similar to mine and is situated among the Tamils of Sri Lanka. As with my ethnographic material, mediums are approached by sufferers, many of whom are missing their family members. But there is one major difference. These family members are missing because of prolonged civil war. A question arises at this point. Would mediums and missing family members have a place in the newly formed canon of “social suffering” if the



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missing family members were not casualties of the state and armed militants? I think not. Yet is it any less “social” a form of suffering if family members were missing for reasons that cannot be directly traced either to the state, to civil war, or to other forms of political violence? Although the conceptualization of “social suffering” is meant to expand the meanings of suffering, the exercise has in effect preempted an awareness of the radical extent to which sociality enters into bodily experience. Consider the following quotation: Social suffering results from what political, economic, and institutional power does to people, and reciprocally, from how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems. (Kleinman, Das, and Lock, 1997, ix; emphasis added)

The form of the sentence seems to promise a “reciprocal” kind of agency that will exceed or modify the reach of the first set of terms. Logically, the second half of the sentence should have “people” as agents responding to political power. But the agency in both halves of the sentence remains firmly restricted to “forms of power.” A whole range of phenomena that are not directly related to this drive to reveal the workings of power are rendered unable to play a part in constituting “the social” in social suffering. The “subaltern school” of historiography was founded with the striking thesis put forward by Guha (1983) that there existed, in the colonial period, a radical discontinuity between modern colonial bourgeois codes of politics and cultural codes that were shared by both subaltern peasants and their feudal masters. Reinterpreting colonial archives on peasant rebellions, he argued that bourgeois modern notions of politics simply failed to account for the codes and meanings of peasant politics, even in insurrectionary moments of rebellion, because they lacked a fundamental capacity or will to understand precapitalist modes of politics and justice. In a later book (Guha 1997) he further elaborated this argument: the colonial state established political dominance in Indian society but never established hegemony. There remained, in a remarkably intact form, a flourishing domain of meanings that eluded not only the control but also the understanding of colonial modernity. Guha’s argument has circulated in Indian intellectual life over the past thirty years, quickly engendering applications to Indian nationalism (e.g., Chatterjee 1986) as well as to the topic of working-class formation in modern India (Chakrabarty 1989). A number of influential formulations of Indian modernity revolve around the trope of hybridity and the quality of “doubleness” in institutional cultures (see Rajagopal 2001 on the segmented publics constituted by the media in India; see also Das 1995, 53; Chakrabarty 2000, 113). But the attempt to elicit the distinctiveness of nonmodern sets of mean-

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ings and life forms remains in fundamental tension with the political categories of Marxism (Chakrabarty 2000, 72ff.). For all the sophistication of its academic theory, Marxism is fundamentally a political project intended to bring a revolutionary working class to power and to transcend capitalism in the process. When a scholar of subaltern politics such as M. S. S. Pandian turns his eye to rural popular culture, he is guided by Gramsci’s attempt to extract the “progressive element or ‘good sense’ in the ambiguous and contradictory mosaic of the common sense of the subaltern classes” (M. S. S. Pandian 1992, 69) rather than an attempt to follow through the more unfamiliar codes of subaltern culture. The corpus of folk epics he cites are easily located within the genre of “death stories” described in chapter 3, where men and women die violent deaths and turn into grisly deities. He locates the progressive element of good sense in the fact that these epics register the violence of upper castes. “Common people’s lives are constantly and inescapably disrupted,” he writes, “by upper class/caste instigated adventures like crop destruction, denial of irrigation water, dispensation of arbitrary justice and violation of peasant girls’ modesty” (69). But in representing the significance of these epics in this way, the author inadvertently reinforces a masculinist interpretation of the world. The genres themselves allocate a secondary place to women’s death stories and allocate to them themes that are supposed to entirely preoccupy women— namely, love, sexuality, marriage, and kinship. But at least they register as tragedy the violence suffered by women at the hands of their own kinsmen and lovers. In Pandian’s search for resistance against upper-caste violence, the presence of women becomes even further reduced. Now they no longer figure in their own tragedies but take their place alongside crops and cattle as the objects of rescue by male subaltern heroes from the violence of upper castes. I should hasten to add that the author’s use and citation of folk epics occur in the context of an exploration of modern politics, not in an attempt to appreciate rural popular culture. But in the process, we come full circle back to the very paradigm that Guha originally set out to challenge. By contrast, I have returned, in this chapter, to something of the original impulse in subaltern studies. Guha and others undertook the risk of expanding our sense of what “justice” might mean by paying closer attention to meanings unfamiliar to the lens of modernity. A More Primordial Understanding of the Body and of Sociality in Constituting a Sense of Wrong and Injustice The bulk of the complaints brought to the courts of the goddess are not concerned with rectifying inequality. None of them are based on egalitarian prem-



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ises, nor do they ask for egalitarian solutions. Most are not about intercaste relations but about intimate familial relations. This certainly makes them ineligible to qualify as a “progressive element” of class-based resistance to domination. They can resonate, nevertheless, with other concerns in the present. The complainants cry out for the restoration of a sense that they matter to the other partner in intimate, long-term dyadic relationships. They alert us to dimensions of sociality that have too long been obscured thanks to the dominant tendency to represent hierarchy, on the one hand, and individualist forms of egalitarianism, on the other, as two utterly opposed principles of society. These complaints are built instead on a smaller contrast. They contrast two kinds of relationships: those where one still has a sense of mattering to the other and those that have been leached of this element. It is not hierarchy as such that has robbed the complainer of a sense of agency—for there is hierarchy in both cases—but the absence of this crucial element, which I have tried to elicit with the aid of Heidegger’s concept of Sorge. The breakdown that counts here is the breakdown in the dimension of concern. What matters to the complainant is that they have ceased to matter to the other person. The primary wellspring of complaint would come as less of a surprise to us if we maintained, in the social sciences, a more constant visualization of the circumstances of our primary socialization as infants, which takes place in a state of extreme immaturity and prolonged dependency on others. When we consider the prominence of choice, decision making, equality, and autonomy as the prime requisites of human subjectivity, we must draw the conclusion that the human subject is thought to be born entirely mature and adult. Yet subjectivity is not constituted, as if for the first time, in adulthood. Subjectivity is primarily constituted in a state of extreme inequality and dependency. An infant finds itself, to use Heidegger’s term, simply “thrown” into a world that is, to all intents and purposes, given. The world is no artifact of its own choosing and making. Yet this circumstance of the child need not spell victimhood or lack of agency in itself. In the account provided by Merleau-Ponty (1986), bodily movement and bodily faculties assume a central role in this sense of agency. Far from entering sociality primarily through the modality of “inscription”—a motif that has become ubiquitous in the social sciences—we encounter in Merleau-Ponty’s work a body that enters sociality because it is active, intent on knowing and exploring the world. For him, it is “clearly in action that the spatiality of our body is brought into being” (102). The experience of intersubjectivity is already to be found in the aptitude for mimesis in the fifteen-month-old baby described by Merleau-Ponty (352). The baby opens its mouth when the adult playfully takes one of its fingers and pretends to bite it. Biting already has an intersubjective significance—the baby

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perceives my intentions in its own body and those of my body with its own. Recent empirical evidence from studies of infant development has pushed this capacity for mimesis to much earlier periods of infancy. Meltzoff and Moore (1995) describe results of experiments with newborn babies in hospitals (the youngest, only forty-two minutes old!) who not only engage in “successful facial imitation” but within twelve to twenty-one days imitatively distinguish a variety of adult gestures, even after a lapse of time. Such behavior is not, they find, reflexive. It is interpretive, creative, and volitional. Yet such characteristics, conventionally attributed to a “subjectivity” located primarily in interior states, reveals, for these authors, “a primordial connection between self and other . . . the actions of other humans are seen as like the acts that can be done at birth” (53). The fact that infants can re-create the act of another human being allows them to give that act special meaning. The infant infers this in the recognition of the act as specifically human unlike other events such as the swaying of a tree or a pendulum (54–55). Merleau-Ponty’s (1986) framework prompts us to consider such behavior as something more than imitation. It suggests rather the modality of completion—the infant does not simply undertake a parallel exercise to the one it perceives, it completes the perceived movement with a movement of its own. Between my consciousness and my body as I experience it, between this phenomenal body of mine and that of another as I see it from the outside, there exists an internal relation which causes the other to appear as the completion of the system. (352)

In his posthumously published work The Visible and the Invisible (1968, 130ff.), Merleau-Ponty develops this more radical interpretation with the image of the chiasm or fold, through which self and the world are intertwined in a carnal embrace. Other beings in the world, particularly human beings, complete us. As soon as we have other seers, we become “fully visible” for ourselves. The sight of others fills in, for us, that which we cannot ourselves see. Others become seers for us, in much the same way as the blind man’s stick extends his bodily apperceptions. In touch, as in the caress, the reversibility of outside and inside is complete. Even in sound, although my own voice remains a distinctive experience, “if I am close enough to the other who speaks to hear his breath and feel his effervescence and his fatigue, I almost witness, in him as in myself, the awesome birth of vociferation” (144). Vulnerability is thus built into this fundamental capacity to affect and be affected by others. Not only does it make us inherently subject to others and their regard—a theme out of which Sartre extracted, in Being and



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Nothingness (1969), a veritable compendium of existential instabilities and oscillations—but it also provides the basis for more abstract systems of justice that depend on the ability to incorporate into ourselves the initially radically different views of others. Indeed, disciplines such as anthropology depend implicitly on this capacity. It follows, too, that any primary disturbance either in our bodily capacities or in our social world will disturb that flow of relationality, the level of one’s openness to the world. In her vivid writings on the body in pain, Scarry (1985) refers to the diminished voice and isolation of the one who suffers pain. In pain, we are no longer able to move out into the world freely in order to meet its fresh challenges. The intentionality or outward directedness of our being is impaired, leaving us isolated. The intersensory sharing of the world between human beings breaks down. Scarry describes the infliction of physical pain, in accidents, torture, and war. But she could just as well be talking of the pain of illness (Carel 2008) or of the loss of sensory or mental capacities. Equally, disturbances in the world such as war and natural disasters, or even migration (Ram 2005; Guha 1998), cause a breakdown in that openness. The breakdown of our openness to the world need not be spectacular to be fundamental. It need only be enough to abolish that ordinary, everyday level of assurance with which we go about our everyday practical activities. Just as bodily pain breaks down or impairs our social relationships, so also a breakdown in primary social relationships is experienced in the body—not because it is being “converted” or “displaced” there but because it is in and through such social relationships that our bodily sense of being in the world was constituted in the first place. When the goddess describes the suffering of the mother as “feeling as if you were on fire,” she is not describing a secondary or derivative process. Bringing the Two Understandings of “Justice” Closer Together I have argued that the complaints at the divine courts point to the existence of a quality of pain and suffering that cannot be reduced to that which is inflicted on subaltern groups by the hierarchies of caste.4 But having allowed the source of this pain its due weight and consideration, we can now use that domain to shed new light on the political concerns for equality and justice that flow from the oppressions of caste. Such a return to the political is necessary, because both these conceptions of justice now circulate among subaltern groups. The medium Mutamma, in her capacity as the talaivar (head) of the women’s group, could draw on her eloquence in displaying her mastery of the idiom of emancipatory modern social movements:

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Lourdes [the nongovernmental organizer] called us to organize. She told us the politicians line their pockets. We can ask for a road, for current [electricity]. Out of the four or five rupees we earn, we must see to the children’s education, we have to buy and cook our food out of that coolie money. We work all day. We can ask for greater wages. Since we began to organize, we now have a hand-pump set. We went to the current office and said we want a paṭṭā [title] for our land and a water pipe for our street. Our aṟivu [wisdom] was born, it grew. We have not allowed the sale of liquor in our village for three years now [this refers to the political struggle against liquor consumption originating in Andhra Pradesh among Dalit women in the early 1990s], but it goes on secretly being brewed in villages. The vote buyer [politician] sits in comfort. He goes to America, to London, and roams the world. We still have our paṭaiyāḷ [labor servitude]. I ask this: you say you will give us loans, you take our signatures, but my child is in rags. The loan has gone elsewhere. My being a talaivar has brought me nothing to feed my child with. Other talaivar get fat, they wear their poṭṭu [kuṅkumam] and mañcal [turmeric]. We sent a maṉu [petition] to Jayalalitha [then the state chief minister]. We asked her why she kept raising the prices of food, of fertilizers. We asked her, how can we survive. You and your ministers squat around the place.

Speech is not always necessary. When I asked an older Dalit man how he had experienced intercaste relations when he was growing up, he responded without a word. It was eloquent in him simply to assume the posture of subservience that had previously been exacted from him. He hunched his shoulders so that they sloped down, lowered his head so his gaze fell on the floor, and covered his mouth with his hand. For what is refused under the regime of caste hierarchy, particularly where Dalit communities are concerned, is not simply intersubjectivity, nor simply participation in the “transactions” of bodily substances (Marriott 1990), but the elementary reversibility of touch, gaze, and speech. When a Dalit encounters a hierarchically superior person, only one of the two can gaze at the other, stand erect, cover himself with clothes, or speak. Yet the very fact that the Dalit man could mime for me the crucial requirements of his status displayed a certain distance, a certain freedom from these requirements. It would be premature to see in this resistance the kernel of “good progressive sense” in subaltern culture. But does that resistance owe nothing to the sensibility that seeks justice in the courts of the goddess? I have no wish to deny the role of modern social movements in contemporary Dalit consciousness. On another occasion, Amuda, a lively young



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Dalit girl in one of the agricultural villages of Chengalpattu, proffered the following account of the intercaste relations in their area: We numerically dominate the ūr [village], and we surround the Vanniar settlement. [She draws a sketch on the floor]. [I ask her about the caste politics of water in the ūr]. They are generous with the pump set—but we have to wait till their women are all finished bathing and washing clothes before we take any. And we must stand apart. It is the Vanniar women who enforce it more than the men. Men from our community and Vanniars will exchange cigarettes and light each other’s cigarettes; but the women will say to us: What’s the matter . . . Can’t you see us? [meaning that the Dalit women should get out of the way]. It is our own people who perpetuate this attitude of enslavement [aṭimaitānam]; we apologize, stand aside, fold our hands in respect. If we had the guts we would say to them, “If we scratched your body and scratched ours, you would find that our blood is the same, no different.” Didn’t God make you and me alike? And out of the village, we all have to mix: when we go to a film or catch a bus they sit next to us, even have their arm around us. Are there separate buses for you and me? Recently one of us was refused service in a shop, but we all fought on his behalf. (Amuda)

Amuda’s evaluation is complex and carries in it many traces of modern developments: there is an awareness of numerical dominance, which is derived from participation in elections, as well as an awareness of an older history of participation in modern governmental exercises such as census enumeration. Above all there is a sense that the fight is on. Even her inclusion of the Dalit residential area in the designation of “village” is a militant statement. Caste ideology designates Dalit areas as cheri, outside the village “proper.” Amuda’s striking humanist aphorism, “If we scratched your body and scratched ours, you would find that our blood is the same, no different,” draws on a rich heritage of opposition to social hierarchy that dates back to the 1920s. The values of the Self-Respect Movement are often said to have all but disappeared in the course of the corruption and alliance politics that beset a ruling party so long in office. But as I have argued elsewhere (Ram 2009b), the values of anticaste humanism have become absorbed as a “tradition” circulating as a repertoire of feelings, sentiments, and intellectual formulations, as forms of action and protest, that are found ready to hand when a fresh situation seems to call out for them. It is tempting at this point in the argument to point to the historical dis-

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courses of mysticism, love, and oneness before god that have flowed through South Asian history like a river, disregarding barriers of caste, religion, and even of gender. But the complaints and suffering at the courts of the goddess point to other, more primary experiences that lay the basis for experiencing nonreciprocity as injustice. A study by Alex (2008) of touch and the senses in creating domains of belonging and exclusion in Tamil Nadu describes the accentuated domain of touch found in child socialization in rural Dalit communities. Babies and toddlers are continually taken up, cuddled, teased, and carried around, by boys and girls alike. Up to the age of two they are referred to as kaikolande, literally “the child you carry on your arm.” There are also nondirected forms of touch that take place among children simply sitting or standing together. This closeness is reflected in sleeping patterns and practices. Siblings share a bed. Within their own communities, there appears to be a subtle rule that babies and toddlers should have body contact, that they should be in touch with those persons they have a relation with. Touching and holding is a means of communication, an embodied form of closeness and unity, a direct expression of relatedness, or in Marriott’s terms, of “shared substances.” (532)

I am trying to foreground the sources that allow a child to experience rejection at the hands of others not only as shame (see Sedgwick and Adam 1995) but also as unjust, calling for action of some kind. There are implications here for what justice might mean in the field of intercaste relations. The modes by which women lament, narrate their lives, petition the goddess, or, in turn, become goddesses who narrate the suffering of the petitioner to gathered witnesses are all a means of both elaborating and assuaging a very particular dimension of justice. When they feel the tears flow in the eyes of listeners (Seremetakis 1991), when they feel the potential of their own power to melt hard hearts, when they feel the reassurance of the goddess that the errant spouse or son will care again, justice is already performatively present. Justice that consists simply in formal rights or even substantive enjoyment of rights fails to address this crucial dimension, but so too does the discourse of development and citizenship. Consider a revealing story told by Cody (2009). Literacy activists in rural Tamil Nadu were striving to bring adult Dalit women to the point where they could write and so become effective citizens. Both forms of advancement were to be demonstrated by encouraging the women to present the district collector with a petition. The women were relatively slow to involve themselves in the demand for land title, which was supposed to mobilize them



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into citizenship. Eventually, they thought of a demand that really did concern them—the obstruction, by upper castes, of the traditional route to the cremation ground for their dead. This route lay through fields now appropriated by upper castes. The women took a day off from agricultural labor. They dressed in their best clothes and bought flowers for their hair, only to find the collector was absent for the day. There was no time left for them to write out the petition themselves. They left behind a written petition, but which was drawn up for them at short notice by the literacy activist. What is more, the petition was written to fit in with a modern egalitarian sensibility, an effect that involved systematically removing all references by the women to the collector as a hierarchically elevated “dharmic master.” The plea for compassion was removed. The signature would have appeared felicitous for some . . . because it fulfilled the requirements of development-as-pedagogy, by acting as a sign of enlightenment through writing. . . . But for the women who had come to the office that day from Katrampatti, my sense is that they would only have been satisfied that they had performed the act of petitioning if they had been able to see the Collector and plead with them orally using generic conventions compelling superiors to act on behalf of the weak . . . their ambivalence is a product of having been denied the chance to make an affective claim through eye contact, ensuring the collector would feel with their suffering. (368; emphasis added)

Chapter 8

Possession and Social Theory

T h i s b o o k h a s p r o c e e d e d a s an instance of a classic anthropological gamble. The gamble takes something like the following form: if we unsettle certain underpinnings of a variety of Western scholarly traditions by moving the grounds of investigation to another place, might not that process also shed light on some of the wider, more enduring perplexities that inhabit scholarly and political debates? The fact that such moves usually leave intact many of the defining assumptions of Western scholarship is testimony not to the fruitlessness of the quest but to the fact that cultural and historical traditions cannot simply be discarded in their entirety and certainly not by sheer will or decision. There is always some assumption left unexamined, some premise left untouched. But this is to be expected. These traditions were not created by purely intellectual means in the first place and cannot be dissolved by purely intellectual means either. The scholar, like any other cultural subject, is shaped by extraintellectual forces. Like any other subject, she cannot help but stand on unexamined ground. Her realistic aim is to hope to subject some of her guiding assumptions to scrutiny. What makes the anthropological project a particularly fertile one is that it can generate not only critique but also new and imaginative hypotheses based on the stimulation offered by very different ways of inhabiting the world. My gamble has an additional component—that it is possible, and important, despite the lessons learned from postcolonial critiques of Western universalism, and despite the now-faint but persistent lure of cultural relativism in 225

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anthropology, to generate hypotheses that bring the “exotic” and the “familiar” into a shared framework. This project is to be distinguished from that of anthropology as “cultural critique” (Marcus and Fischer 1986). There the anthropologist, contextualizing and interpreting the unfamiliar culture, aims to “bring the insights gained on the periphery back to the center to raise havoc with our settled ways of thinking and conceptualization” (608). Such a project, despite tonic effects, often seeks to simply confound the West in its own presumptions, offering little guidance as to how one might generate fresh understandings of one’s own social practices. The comparativist project, as in the extensive literature that undertakes to typify personhood in India in contrast with the assumptions of Western individualism, often fails to do justice to the complexities of either location (see Ram 1994b). The West may emerge typified by its own dominant representations to the detriment of its own minority subjectivities, while the other culture may serve only as a foil, also doomed to remain locked into a static typification. Mine has not been a comparativist purpose. My purpose, rather, is to close some of that distance. Even phenomena as extreme as possession, if better understood, can provide us with fresh ways of understanding forms of agency and experience that are not restricted to one ethnographic area but are to be found across a range of instances, many of them quotidian and unobtrusive. It is this feature that distinguishes my project from all variants of ethnographic argument that end in an “ethnospecific” methodology. In pursuing this trail, I have taken to heart de Certeau’s gently delivered challenge to Foucault. It is not simply that a scattered “polytheism” of minor practices survives, dominated, but not erased, by the “monotheistic privileges” of the panoptic apparatuses. Such an insight is not in itself new for older political traditions such as Marxism. What is important about de Certeau’s challenge is his demonstration that minor practices are significant, have something of wider significance to teach the world. Possession, as we saw in chapter 2, is a thoroughly marginalized minor practice. Although an archaic and continuous tradition in southern India, it has been pushed off the lit stage on which national identity is performed (Ram 2010b). The idea that such a tradition could actually constitute a mode of knowledge, a mode capable of illuminating aspects of behavior and experience, may be quite as radical for the society in which it occurs as it is for others. Possession in Tamil Nadu lends itself to the anthropological gamble. It confounds many of the binary oppositions that have structured dominant discourses of modernity. Illness is represented in such discourses as the opposite of healing. But possession can appear both as random affliction and as the means to a cure. It can appear as the climax of an invitation to a deity or spirit, rendered in consummate fashion by skilled ritual performers of epics. The performers



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of ritual styles such as vil pāṭṭu and terukkūttu undergo years of informal apprenticeship to be able to generate that kind of intensity. Should the aptitude for possession, then, be regarded as knowledge of the kind that is gained through apprenticeship? Yet women, so prominent in certain kinds of possession, are barred from becoming apprentices to the ritual performance styles. An ambiguous character pertains not only to the possessed but also to the entities that possess them. The same deities who are given a hero’s welcome by worshippers in some contexts can wreak malicious and random havoc on individuals who have expressed no desire for them. Such is the case for the deities of Kanyakumari District. Icakki Ammaṉ and her henchmen, the Māṭans, never entirely lose their demonic character. It is true that in other parts of Tamil Nadu, the goddess has fewer macabre qualities and the deities associated with sorcery are more clearly identified and delimited (Nabokov 2000). But throughout Tamil Nadu, the goddess advances a fierce claim over her devotees. The disease of smallpox may now no longer have purchase over human populations, but the symbolic structure of its traditional etiology reveals fundamental meanings that are still alive. The pox is a claim by the goddess, her marking of the human body. The oppositions between good and evil, deity and demon, are as blurred as the oppositions between illness and healing. If the miseries that flow from the unwanted attention of demons, deities, and ghosts can bring people to healers, the healer herself may resort to possession in order to divine the nature of the afflictions brought before her, as well as the nature of the cure. If there seems an element of injustice in the random and destructive attentions of ghosts and demon deities, then the conduct of possession can also offer a kind of redress. The agent of divine justice is brought to presence. In a wider perspective, even the afflictive presence of ghosts and demons turns out to bear some connection with justice. One of the most potent sources of injustice is the untimely severance of a life in full flow. Such severances instantly produce ghosts and demons who will not go away. These beings desire to have their story retold and reexperienced by ritual performers, or just to have their presence acknowledged. In this sense, even those who suffer from their presence bear witness nevertheless to a past injustice that continues to live on. In the manner of a Gothic novel, injustice lives on not as memory but as affliction. A Christian Model of Possession in Anthropology? The phenomenon we are dealing with is anything but unitary. It ranges over a wide spectrum of possibilities in the relationship of human beings with beings

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of a nonhuman kind. At one end of the spectrum of agency, afflictive, random visitations may or may not be accompanied by a loss of consciousness in the human subject. At the other end, years of informal training enable ritual performers to bring dead heroes back to life. The area in between these two states is occupied by female mediums who effect their own gradual “accommodation” of afflictive experiences. The nature of my fieldwork has not equipped me to deal in this book with spirit possession among elite castes in the domain of popular religion in Tamil Nadu. Although possession is less common in the religion of elites, it does occur (see Kapadia 1995; Hancock 1999). Here the goddess is more likely to be uniformly auspicious, gentle, wifely, a wedded Lakshmi. But even here possession by the goddess may occur. Hancock’s case study of an urban Tamil Brahman woman who develops powers of mediumship shows a very different mode of recruitment, but the actual processual “learning” of mediumship follows a pattern similar to the one I have described. The Brahman woman experiences early phases of possession as overpowering. She has no memory of what has happened during those episodes but gradually acquires a greater awareness of her own actions. This she attributes to her growing bond with the goddess (Hancock 1995, 67). Such a bond is experienced as a positivity, as a form of attachment, connectedness, and an exchange of energies. In Tamil, the semantic domain to which Hancock wishes to alert us is occupied by terms such as eru (to climb), kaṭṭu (to bind), and paṟṟu (to be attached to). Such terms can be applied to attachments among humans and between humans and inanimate objects as much as to attachments between humans and deities (1999, 173n10). None of the ambiguities to be found in popular religion in Tamil Nadu figure in the Christian theological model of possession. In this tradition possession is unambiguously associated with evil, uncleanness, and disease. The exorcist, whose originary figure is Jesus himself, is unambiguously on the side of good: And Jesus rebuked him, saying, Hold thy peace, and come out of him. And when the unclean spirit had torn him, and cried with a loud voice, he came out of him . . . And at even, when the sun did set, they brought unto him all that were diseased, and them that were possessed with devils . . . And he healed many that were sick of divers diseases and cast out many devils; and he suffered not the devils to speak, because they knew him. (Mk.1:25, 26, 32, 34; see also Mk. 5:2–20).1

The effects of the Christian model are a part of lived reality in Tamil Nadu, experienced most directly among Catholic populations. In the coastal



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fishing communities rival visualizations of good and evil are brought into conflict. Mary or the Catholic saints are called in to exorcise deities worshipped by local Hindus. Less spectacularly, the influence of evangelical missionary discourses may be noted in the rationalist critiques of tradition and superstition. Missionary Christianity and rationalist Enlightenment in the colonies coincide in their agreement that local practices, reduced to so many “beliefs,”2 are no more than collations of superstition and are to be discarded as such. In nineteenth-century Ceylon, “demonism” came to be represented in missionary discourses as an enduring substratum of Sinhala religious practices, a site equated with Christian notions of devil and Satan worship (David Scott 1994). Buddhism was treated better. It was regarded as sharing with Christianity an attempt to bring truth to the superstitious Sinhala but rated as a poor precursor of Christianity (David Scott 1994, 158ff.). My concern here is with the effects of this Christian theological model within anthropology, not only in understanding religion (as in the routine use of the term “supernatural” to describe ghosts and demons, presuming a particular view of what to include in the category of “nature”), but also in shaping social theory more broadly. Religious experience has provided social theory with some of its most potent models for conceptualizing society as something more than a mere collection of already constituted individuals. Religious experience—whether exemplified by the “totemism” in which a woman identifies the first stirrings of fetal life with the entry of the spirit of objects that hold her attention at the time (Durkheim 1965, 209) or by Christian rituals of Communion—is proposed by Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life as the model of and for sociality. Much in this classic account bears revisiting. Prefiguring many aspects of the current turn to affect in social theory, Durkheim integrally links agency, affect, emotion, and participation in embodied collective social practices (see also Mazzarella 2008, 296ff.). He writes of affect as contagious and of emotions in the collective practices of religion as effervescent, thus emphasizing the experience of collective forms of agency among participants. Durkheim’s key insight, that social practices are supraindividual, the matrix within which particular constructions of the individual can come into being, must surely continue to form the cornerstone of any theory that seeks to challenge the dominance of individualism in the methodology of social enquiry. But in order to stress the supraindividual features of social formation, Durkheim adopts a structure of exposition that is at times remarkably similar to that of Christian representations of possession as the work of an immaterial spirit that enters into and speaks through the bodies of individuals. The value changes in Durkheim: such decentred agency is no longer taken as a negative

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force. But the structure remains the same. The social, that which precedes individuals and which speaks through them, in effect takes the place occupied by the spirit in religious forms of explanation. It is no longer the spirit that speaks through us but society. The humanist reformulation of the spirit makes the individual an embodiment not of divinity but of Man. Humanity is supraindividual but is represented in every individual. In structuralist theory, this structure of exposition persists in the influential model provided by Saussure’s linguistics. It is present in his insistence that it is language in its underlying network of differences and distinctions (langue) that speaks through the subject, while parole, that which is spoken, loses interest for such a theorist. In Dumont’s famous exploration of Homo Hierarchicus (1972), structuralism comes together with Durkheim’s collectivism—though without his insights into affect and embodied participation in social practices—to give us a vision of Indian society as entirely subsumed by social relations. Dumont’s understanding of these relations replicates the structuralist understanding of oppositions and distinctions within language. Castes, like linguistic units, are devoid of any content except that given by the relationship of the terms to one another. The individual through whom Indian society speaks never comes into focus. Little significance is attached to how people might live, experience, or engage in social relations of the kind he describes. For all that, Dumont’s work on India remains a tour de force, indispensable for aspects of the argument advanced in this book. Similar observations might be made of social theory in general. If elements of a “possession model” are present in the conception of “the social,” it is a Christian model of possession at work. Agency is made to reside in an immaterial spirit. Much work on possession itself reproduces this model. In fact some of the more sociologically oriented explanations of possession and gender examined in chapter 3 seem to resurrect a version of the individual subject that is pre-Durkheimian. In attempting to explain why it is women who make up such a large and recurrent social category in the cases of possession, these explanations move between a vision of the social as a set of structural forces and a conception of the individual understood largely in terms of an unvarying consciousness. As in the classic tradition of Enlightenment political theory, the social structure and the individual remain two entirely separate terms, the former impinging on the latter in a way that is largely hostile. Finding herself encased in a social structure that oppressively constrains her freedom, the female subject is held to respond by enacting familiar versions of agency, those associated with liberal political theory. She surveys her choices and weighs up advantages and disadvantages. Depending on the version, the woman seems to choose possession, or to will herself



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into possession. In the name of granting her agency, we find her planning or at least strategizing possession. What have we lost by granting such agency? The version of consciousness we are left with is itself a particularly constricted one: alert to everything, missing nothing, a consciousness for which there are no aspects of the world that are opaque and hidden, nor other aspects foregrounded by involvement. Such a consciousness is not only incapable of true possession (and so may be readily accused of malingering and deception) but also incapable of the most ordinary forms of perception. For we rely on the light and shadow of perception, in which aspects less significant to us recede into the background in order to allow that which is significant to stand forth. The Continued Centrality of Consciousness in Hermeneutic Accounts of Possession Sociological modes of explanation do not, of course, provide the only model in what is by now a vast literature on possession. But the problems I have located in them, which stem from a model of human subjectivity based primarily on consciousness, are to be found in other understandings of possession. I single out only a few samples in this, the penultimate chapter of the book, by way of illustration. In his book Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession (1985), Gilbert Rouget places possession in a continuum with other phenomena such as ecstasy and visions. The basis of this typology is a conception of “the subject” and “his” presence or absence. In possession, the subject gives the impression that he is totally engaged in his trance, that the field of consciousness has been completely taken over by this state, that he has lost all reflexive consciousness, that he is incapable of coming back to himself (unless enjoined to it by some external intervention); in short, that he is plunged into a sort of bewilderment. It is impossible to attract his attention; if he turns his eyes in your direction he does not see you. (13)

The presence or absence of “the subject” is equated primarily with “the field of consciousness” and with “reflexive consciousness” in particular. On this basis, various forms of mysticism, such as that of Christian, Sufi, or Hindu ecstatics, are distinguished. Rouget refers to a striving for annihilation in God in the Sufi state of fana, in the Hindu state of samadhi, and in the “ravishment” and ecstasy of Christian mystics like Saint Teresa of Ávila. The

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mystic may also experience visual or auditory hallucinations. Nevertheless, the mystic in these grand traditions remains a subject in that he is capable of retaining keen memories of such an experience. Indeed, Rouget describes ecstasy as a keenly memorable experience that one can recall and ponder over at leisure. It is for this reason, points out Rouget, that we have abundant commentaries on mystical ecstasies written by the mystics themselves—whereas possession and even shamanism have left little by way of self-representations of the experience. Rouget makes it clear that these distinctions allow for many forms of hybridity in actual practices found across cultures. For example, the “religions of transcendence,” such as Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, nevertheless admit, in their logic, states of trance that signal the presence of divinity. These states, associated particularly with dance, as in the dances of the Muslim dervish or in the dance in the presence of the Holy Ghost of certain Christian cults, do not allow the dancers to actually identify with or imitate God but merely to feel the presence of divinity. But for all these hybrid instances, the typology rests on the presence of the subject, which rests in turn on the presence of reflexive consciousness, and even more particularly on memory. Other characteristics play a secondary role. The body and its transformations in possession are described by Rouget (1985, 13–14) in all their exceptionality—walking on coals without burning, piercing the flesh without bleeding, speaking languages never learned, giving acrobatic displays well beyond one’s normal ability, contacting the dead, seeing into the future, embodying a divinity. Despite the astonishing nature of these capacities, they remain but “one sign of trance” among others. Meanwhile, consciousness—in its presence or absence—remains the defining feature of the human subject. Recent representations of possession continue this tradition of allocating a subsidiary role to the body, even elevating the image of the body as container to the level of a universal cognitive scheme. Cohen (2008) distinguishes between two kinds of possession. The distinction rests entirely on the presence or absence of consciousness (typically, no in-between possibilities are entertained in such a metaphysics). The first type is afflictive but does not involve a displacement of consciousness. The second kind is described by Cohen as “executive possession.” Here the “spirit entity is typically represented as taking over the host’s executive control, or replacing the host’s ‘mind’ (or intentional agency), thus assuming control of bodily behaviours” (103). Arguing for basic cognitive developmental systems as part of a universal architecture of the human mind, she characterizes the first kind of possession as pathogenic possession on the basis that it corresponds, according to her, to childhood acquisition of notions of contamination and strong affects of disgust and



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fear in response to such contact. In turn, such a representation corresponds, according to her, to an “intuitive dualism” of mind and body whereby “the person” is identified as a psychological agent while the body is assimilated to a physical object. Here “the person” is said to be universally equated with “beliefs, desires, dispositions, intentions” (109), whereas the body comes to figure exclusively as physical object, a container into which the person/spirit is poured and which does the will of the mind/spirit (111). How universal is this scheme? Dualism, it may be granted, is ubiquitous in academic writing. It resurfaces with irrepressible force even in writings specifically dedicated to a fresh appreciation of the body. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) reiterate the image of the body as a container into which we “put things” such as air, water, and food. It is not only the body that becomes a bounded entity in this view: air, water, and food also become strangely clear-cut entities that are placed by the agent—consciousness—into the container body. It may be granted, too, that such images do not recur in academic writing by sheer chance. There are indeed situations where one may experience a dissociation from the body, or where such a “splitting” may be adopted as a protective device to minimize the breakdown inflicted by violence or illness. But to recognize this is not to turn such a dualism into a primary way of experiencing one’s body. To account for why such a universalist representation might appear as the “common sense” not only of academic thought but of a wider habitus, one has to interrogate the constitution of some forms of “common sense” (Gramsci 1971, 325–326). Terms such as “consciousness,” “mind,” “spirit,” and “soul” (and to this list we can add “cognition”) can be easily transposed from one to the other when it comes to locating agency because of their overlapping genealogical antecedents in a particular dominant cultural history. So far I have mentioned only one such genealogy, that of Christianity. Heidegger’s (1962, 74) genealogy for humanist understandings of “Man” singles out three major antecedents. The Greek Logos provides the first element, distinguishing Man from all other kinds of beings as “something living which has Reason.” Christianity overlays the Logos with soul and conscience as the source of Man’s transcendence. Third, and most recent, is the crucial move by which science comes to extend its domain beyond the natural world and assimilates the study of Man to the study of a world governed by mechanical causal principles, leaving “psychology” to deal with what is not dealt with by biology. With the further consolidation offered by the generalization of the scientific model, argues Heidegger, the sense in which we exist in the world becomes indistinguishable from the manner in which water can be said to “be in” a container, as entities in neutral space. None of these genealogical traditions simply disappear. Quite possibly

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the negative value associated with a diminution of individual agency in the face of external forces has been colored by a Christian sense of possession as evil. In Tamil Nadu, where possession may be invited as a form of worship, agency is bound to have other meanings. Other examples abound. The assertion of the scientific model as universal informs the funding, accounting, and ethics models employed by the Western universities of today, creating new pressures on the humanities and social sciences. The image of the body as container in academic writing is heir, simultaneously, to all these traditions, as is the assimilation of the “person” to consciousness, Reason, cognition, spirit, and will. It is for this reason that one has to exercise caution in embracing the term “embodiment.” We should not be content merely to oscillate between the science model and those older Christian antecedents in which an immaterial spirit is “embodied.” “The Body” as the Body in Motion: Comportment and Motility in Personhood and in Possession Could we employ an understanding of possession in a non-Christian setting to unsettle some aspects of these genealogies, profound as they are? Neither possession nor personhood can be understood without reference to the body, nor is this body primarily conceived as an unchanging container for spirit or for a person. “Executive” possession, to adopt Cohen’s terminology for the moment, is not understood in rural Tamil Nadu in terms of a supposedly “intuitive” mode of mind-body dualism. While there are continuities at the level of the body—which may be described as looking “the same” before and after possession—the distinctive mark of possession is precisely the fact that the body is both the same and radically not the same. There is a complex relationship of both transformation and continuity between the ordinary person and the possessed, and both these relationships involve the body. It will take the rest of the chapter to unpack this statement. The spirits, deities, and demons that replace the person arrive replete with their distinctive capacities but also with their characteristic attitudes: humor, insolence, hauteur, anger, affects. None of these can be grasped by others except in and through the body. Nor is it a psychologically identified agent “inside” the body that alters in possession. The person is identifiable not as a set of beliefs and desires lurking whole and intact somewhere within the external body but precisely in the characteristic movements, habits, postures, and gestures of the person. These bear the stamp both of individuality and of the social attributes of age, gender, and caste. In other words, it is not simply “behavior” that is “observed” by others and then subsequently



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interpreted. Others grasp, all in one swoop as it were, the modalities of the person, her or his social situation and particular projects of the moment—all in the same movement and gesture. Such forms of recognition by others are predicated not just on “the body,” a term that itself has the effect of producing a denuded and stationary body, but on a body always clothed by motion. In what follows I therefore foreground the significance of motility, the body in movement, for the social recognition of personhood. Nowhere is the unified comprehension of the individual and the social in behavior made clearer than in the way people apprehend movement as specifically gendered. The Tamil language captures this dimension perfectly. In Tamil Nadu, as Seizer (2005, 149) points out, “a person’s behavior is her naṭamuṟai, the way or manner (muṟai) of her walking (naṭai). Her naṭamuṟai is how she moves through the world. Naṭamuṟai is a matter of bearing.” A similar explicit attention to modes of movement as modes of moral orientations to the world emerges in Geurts’s (2002, 75) ethnography of Ghana. Here, moving in an erratic fashion, even in fun, is discouraged since it produces a person who is aimless and irresponsible, just as a sense of balance in movement instills also a sense of moral balance and judgment. The naṭamuṟai, or “comportment,” of young women is treated as natural, “flowering” along with the shyness and timorousness of puberty in a girl. But should there be any deviation, it is quickly brought into line by others. For on her behavior will depend not only the social recognition of the woman herself but also the honor and reputation of her family and clan. There is no room here for a separation between the person as consciousness and the body as passive vehicle. In this region (and in India more generally) girls must, from an early age, but especially after their first menstruation, devote considerable attention to anticipating and precluding any social censure that might jeopardize their reputation. They must make such considerations a routine component of all the activities, tasks, and movements that they undertake. The postpubertal female body is not achieved without the suppression of formerly acquired skills and embodied attitudes to the world. Those skills and dispositions do not disappear simply because they are no longer discursively affirmed. Indeed, it is because they persist that they come in for express vilification: girls who laugh too loudly are reprimanded in no uncertain manner and told not to display their teeth too prominently (pallai kāṭṭātē). Their mode of dress is under constant scrutiny. Women are quickly reminded (often by other women) of lapses. I had to get used to my female companions in rural Tamil Nadu simply reaching out to adjust my sari over my blouse if they judged it to have slipped too much in movement. New orientations must be learned after puberty. They are borne in the body, as is implied by Bourdieu’s (1977, 94) description of bodily

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hexis among the Kabyle, where the ideal woman, described as embodying “the specifically feminine virtue of lahia, modesty, restraint, reserve,” is one who must walk without an excessive swing of the hips while taking care not to let her hair escape a scarf. This is the female equivalent of the gait of the man of honor who walks at steady, measured pace, his head up, expressive of strength and determination. As Abu-Lughod (1986) has argued, the sense of honor instilled in women themselves is often overlooked in the literature, which treats honor as an exclusively male affair. So insistent, so ubiquitous is this set of social demands on women’s comportment that its absence, or even the relaxation of this embodied principle, can call forth the most dramatic explanations. One such explanation is possession. Possession represents at once a break with a woman’s ordinary naṭamuṟai and a behavior that assumes its drama only against the invisible backdrop of that ordinary, day-to-day discipline. I have previously discussed the concept of “horizons.” These are at once spatial and temporal. From the perspective of spectators, the ordinary comportment of a woman remains alive and salient as the horizon against which the behavior of the present becomes interpreted as “possession.” In the shrines, where the demonic spirit is tormented by the power of a superior being such as the Christian goddess Mary, the changes may be spectacular. The sari is transformed from a modest garment to the gear of an athlete, ready for the strenuous dancing and acrobatics that will follow. The talaippu, the part of the sari that normally trails loose over the shoulder, is tucked into the waist. The hem of the sari is hitched to the waist, occasionally by carers, as the women turn into acrobats. Language, which must normally express the restraints of femininity, now expresses coarse and foul abuse. Deference to mothers-in-law, to elders, to saints, and to men generally is transformed to vilification. The female body runs, jumps, leaps in the air, shins up pillars, and makes men afraid. As one man described it to me, women suddenly possess “the strength of tigers.” These transformations naturally take center stage. But many of the changes that occur—away from the shrines, in the domestic sphere—are quite subtle. The poise of the carriage shifts, the style of comportment alters, the tilt of the gaze changes, the bodily mode of intersubjective exchanges is remodulated. Where women are concerned, these subtle shifts are equally the stuff of drama, precisely because the normative sense of how a woman should look, move, and conduct herself is so strongly defined. Even the normally larger-than-life aesthetic repertoire of Indian styles of performance, including cinema, is called on to do very little to embellish this drama, to which spectators are already thoroughly attuned. In southern Indian “goddess cinema,” audiences—especially after hours of watching the heroine



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survive harrowing incidents of victimization—particularly relish those episodes in which the contained, disciplined movements expected especially of younger women give way to the movements of a goddess. Of course the goddess dazzles as well with her miracles. But these alterations in comportment are enough to signal to cinema audiences the momentous transition from victim to sovereign agent, from victim to dispenser of justice—a justice imposed on villains with a savory blend of spectacular violence and mordant humor. In real life, men can be far more troubled about the implications of such transformations in their own wives. Mediums cannot establish themselves without the cooperation of husbands, but such help may not be forthcoming. I quote the following excerpt from my field notes where a husband called Raja Mani, a Nadar tradesman from Kanyakumari, describes his wife Sugandhi’s possession. As a Hindu Nadar, Raja Mani stoutly maintained that Icakki Ammaṉ was a goddess worthy of worship—despite her leading his wife on a fine dance. But his approval of the goddess did not prevent him from finding his wife’s behavior a source of acute discomfiture: Talking generally of their life circumstances, Raja Mani told us that he had had a good business, employing five people, including an accountant, supplying flower garlands to Trivandrum and realising a substantial daily turnover—until it was all wrecked by his wife’s ongoing possession by Icakki Ammaṉ. Within one month of marriage, attracted by the bridal odours—even though his wife did not go out for the requisite fifteen days—Icakki Ammaṉ possessed her. I was told this was often the way: Icakki sits in the bridal flowers, and then the bride begins to talk strangely. Icakki may ask the bride for the flowers for herself. In this case, Sugandhi, wearing her flowers, was on the way to her mother’s house, when Icakki became attracted to her. Sugandhi was troubled by Icakki for the next year, and her husband found her behaviour a source of great shame and embarrassment: “Sugandhi would tear my clothes and throw them off, as well as her own clothes. I would have to cover her with my shirt.”

The extent of his discomfiture may be judged by the continual discourse kept up by Raja Mani on the topic of a woman’s proper place, something he (like many Tamil moralists) saw as under threat from modernity: In Pandayakalam [the time of the Pandian kings] the girl would have veṭkam [shyness, modesty]. In those days she would be isolated, as the houses were far apart. Now, there is TV, there is no veṭkam. Brides used to have their eyes covered with vetalai [betel-nut leaf] so that they did not

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even know where they were being taken. Nowadays, the bride lifts her head [i.e., looks at the groom] even as he ties the tāli [wedding necklace tied at the time of marriage by the groom], and all is considered over once she has done a quick namaskāram [respectful greeting] to her mother-inlaw. I have spoken about these things in public. I spoke about Tiruvalluvar [literary moralist writing somewhere between 400 and 500] to a crowd once. I pointed out three things. First, he was a weaver by caste, a Nesavalar. In the time of Tiruvalluvar, if a husband asked his wife to fetch him a light even in daytime, she would do so without questioning. Today’s woman will ask, “Have your eyes gone blind or what?” We Nadars think that the husband is next to god for the girl. If a man comes in with mud on his feet and asks the wife to fetch some water, and she brings it, then all will go well. If, on the other hand, she calls out, “You get it yourself ” and refuses to even bring him drinking water, then gradually the man will drink, he will come home and beat her, and all will be awry.

But whether such transformations are an occasion for exultation, as for spectators of “goddess cinema,” or a source of anxiety and embarrassment for husbands like Raja Mani, both kinds of reaction illuminate the obduracy with which the present and the past remain in relationship with each other. That relationship hinges, as far as spectators are concerned, on the persistent meanings and social consequences that are predicated on female bodily comportment. The foregoing may suffice to characterize the viewpoint of spectators. But how does one describe the relationship between everyday comportment and the body of possession from the perspective of the possessed women themselves? Is the behavior of possessed women a “performance” in which they invert the forms of everyday behavior? How might one describe it as performance without reverting to the assumption that roles are being consciously assumed? Is Possession—and Gender Itself—a “Performance”? The model of performance, amplified by considerations of art and aesthetics, has acquired considerable importance for the hermeneutic approaches to female possession. Such approaches came of age with the work of Boddy (1989). Boddy aimed quite specifically at escaping the “instrumental” logic of an all but inevitable question—does possession provide a redress to female subjugation or merely reinforce male hegemony? In the account Boddy advances of the connections between infertility and possession, both phenomena



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mark the limits of human strategizing. Fertility is that which women seek to cultivate and enhance through embodied moral practices (seeing magical objects or sealing and purifying the body). But it is also something taken as disorderly, beyond the control of women. This disorderliness is not a matter of conscious dissent. The experience of infertility simply exceeds standard cultural expectations. Such excess contains no necessary advantage to women, since fertility and its moral cultivation are the only resource women can pit against male domination in virtually every sphere. Yet this is one of the areas least amenable to strategizing and conscious control, for all the painful practices of infibulation and genital surgery that older women perform on younger ones in a bid to create the perfect bodily vehicle for reproducing moral and ethnic identity. Possession elevates this experience of individual powerlessness into a representation of the powerlessness of all human beings before the spirit world, encouraging kinsfolk, including men, to admit to their share in a certain human condition rather than to hold the individual woman responsible for her infertility. My indebtedness to Boddy’s interpretation is in evidence in chapter 4 of this book. Boddy’s text marked the culmination of a decade of feminist work that had begun to move in the direction of a more appreciative stance toward religious cults. Constantinides’ (1978) investigation of the zār cult in northern Sudan and Kendall’s (1985) of Korean women’s shamanic rituals broke with representations of spirit cults as expressions of women’s powerlessness in other spheres of social relations and explored them as active sites of sociality in their own right. Ignoring Lewis’s advice to “look away” from the seductions of rites and rituals of possession, these studies began to take the sites of ritual experiences as the direct object of their gaze. In doing so, they brought to feminist anthropology something of Durkheim’s original insights. As he argues in the conclusion to The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1965), religious cults are more than ideas and beliefs adopted by individuals in order to explain an objectively given world. To suppose that they are is to favor a representation that can by definition produce only an inferior version of what science does, and does better. Nor can beliefs and ideas account for the inner strength experienced by participants: “The cult is not simply a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly translated” (464). Rather, Durkheim recommends that we consider the sphere of action. The religious cult comes to be regarded as a site of regularly repeated acts in which both sociality and faith are constituted. From the late 1970s into the 1980s, something of the active, constructionist view of social practice begins to find its way into an alternative brand of feminist ethnography. The same zār cult that was studied by Lewis now comes to be repre-

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sented as a form of sociality by whose help women can withstand the new forms of seclusion and isolation occasioned by migration from rural villages into the towns of Sudan. These forms of sociality are diverse and overlapping, allowing women to form networks of friendship, economic transaction, service exchange, reciprocal invitation to life-cycle rituals, marriage negotiations—as well as, of course, curing and healing illnesses. In addition, they are performative venues, “rare opportunities for drama and entertainment” (Constantinides 1978, 198). Kendall (1985) similarly views the kut rituals not only as important sites of female culture in themselves but also as consolidating and constituting afresh a far wider range of female sources of status, power, and responsibilities than is permitted by a view of possession rituals as an expression of female victimhood. In the rituals, women not only attend to matters concerning fertility and maternity but also revitalize “the whole house and all who dwell within. Women exorcise the sick, tend the house gods, and free the family’s restless dead from hell” (177). In characterizing the breadth of responsibilities, Kendall seeks to free women’s sociality from those characterizations that would represent such sociality as nothing more than a separate and subordinate enclave. In Kendall’s view, these features of “the social” outweigh the negative weight of symbolic representations of women’s bodies as polluted and polluting during menstruation and birth. Attention to the symbolic systems of meaning that construct femininity begins to open up new ways of relating ordinary lived states of femininity with states of possession. For Kapferer (1991), possession expresses normative assumptions of women’s vulnerability and proximity to disorder and spirit attacks. For Boddy, it expresses all this; but it further provides opportunities for women to witness the mocking of gender norms and the revelation of other worlds that the spirits bring alive. Possession in the zār cult of the Sudan thus addresses women’s experiences and concerns in all their breadth and complexity—but obliquely, in a “new light,” much as a work of art does. Possession in the zār cult becomes a satirical reflexive text, like that of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, from which spectators can draw new understandings. Such a turn to textual analogies, argues Stoller (1995, 25), runs the risk of turning sensory experiences, such as smell, into symbols. But Boddy’s preferred aesthetic mode is that of performance. The zār performances constitute a theater capable of showing audiences their enduring concerns in a new light. By allowing spirits to enter them, women are able to loosen their rigid identification with their social identity. The problem with this turn to aesthetics is that the discourse it sustains is not neutral. Terms such as “reflexivity” and “performance” foster an automatic set of orientations toward a conscious subjectivity. Boddy equips the



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trance states of the women with the property of the retention of conscious memory. Although she sometimes bases her observations on reports from villagers, more typically she relies on the presence of some version of the self during trance, if only in a detached and deeply receptive mode (1989, 354). Such a characterization could possibly apply to skilled mediums who have become practiced at mediating between different entities, worlds, and states of being, although even here the use of the term “memory” is problematic. But how could it be reconciled with the early episodes of possession, where both memory and being are overwhelmed? One suggestive line of enquiry lies in Boddy’s (1989, 349) observation that the capacity for trance is one that can be cultivated from an early age, trance lying in a continuum with the prognostic value given to dreams and visions. But for the most part there has been very little attempt to introduce into the hermeneutics of possession the dimension of temporality as a way of bridging the distance between conscious reflexivity and other, bodily modes of understanding. I give here one more example before turning to an elaboration of my point. An interesting and unusual case study of possession is provided by Hancock (1995, 1999) as part of her more general ethnography of urban Tamil Brahman women in Chennai. The case study allows us a rare opportunity to glimpse the caste ingredient within the frame of gendered comportment. The woman in the case study, named Sunithi, suffers from reproductive problems and is advised by her Dalit domestic servant to approach a Dalit spirit medium. Sunithi is cured of her problems, remains the client of the medium for several years, and gradually, guided by the medium’s interpretation of events in her life, comes to regard herself as a medium sought by the goddess. But Sunithi’s version of possession behavior soon differentiates itself sharply from that of her mentor, since the goddess who indicates her favor is not the fiery Karumari Ammaṉ, who claims and possesses the Dalit medium, but the benevolent Varalakshmi Ammaṉ, the giver of boons, worshipped by wives and young unmarried girls. At no point does Sunithi’s possession behavior include the āṭṭam, or “dance of possession”: “As an ammaṉ Sunithi avoided the typical repertoire of possession behaviors (e.g., frenzied dance and self-mortification) observed among other, mostly non-Brahman and Untouchable, mediums” (1995, 67). While in a state of possession, Sunithi’s goddess speaks in the distinctive colloquial Tamil of Tamil Brahmans. The meals she demands are vegetarian curd rice and lemon rice, not the blood sacrifices and liquor that satisfy the tastes of an Icakki Ammaṉ. The final act in what Hancock (1995, 74) describes as “Sunithi’s domestication of a volatile and markedly undomestic goddess” entails Sunithi’s creation of a divine family around the goddess.

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These are striking manifestations of the way in which not only gender but also caste enter into the style of possession itself. However, the problem of how to represent the nature of this “entry” of the everyday into possession behavior has not vanished. The problem here is not that transformations in consciousness and body are simply ignored. Hancock writes sensitively in many places about the central importance of bodily transformations: When the goddess came to a woman, the contradictions that were implicit features of bodily experience were exhibited and dramatized. They were enacted through and on the body—by dissociating consciousness from the body and the world of objects of which the body is part, by fracturing intentionality, by displacing agency, by multiplying subject positions. (1999, 166)

But when she has to theoretically reflect on Sunithi’s move from a Dalit to a Brahmanical style of possession, Hancock makes little distinction between the comportment of possession and self-consciously entertained forms of caste distinction. In an earlier version, Hancock (1995, 67) has described Sunithi as “self-consciously incorporat[ing] the ammaṉ personality into her own social identity.” In the later monograph, Hancock moves away from this attribution of an absolutely self-conscious act and instead describes Sunithi’s possession behavior in terms of “aesthetic devices” that are also “ways of identifying herself, her followers, and the performance as Brahman, as opposed to non-Brahman” (1999, 153). Yet this is to make no distinction between the way in which her followers consciously view her performance and the slow and partly involuntary evolution of Sunithi’s possession behavior over time, as it gradually creates a distinctively Brahmanic style of possession. Hancock’s wider concern in this ethnography is not with possession but with the many conscious political stratagems Brahmans are using in the public sphere of Chennai to resist or modify encroachment on their caste privileges, an outcome of twentieth-century politics in Tamil Nadu. These maneuvers include forming a political association. But there seems little to distinguish the operation of caste as self-conscious political activity and the entry of caste into a state of being that (as Hancock has just described) entails a fractured intentionality, a dissociated consciousness, and multiple subject positions. I would further question whether it is adequate to describe the performance of caste in everyday life as nothing more than a conscious series of observances. Hancock appears to consider such central aspects of everyday sensory experience as food, dress, and language exclusively as a matter of distinction between “Brahman-ness” and “Sudra-ness.” This is to make all of so-



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cial life nothing more than a series of deliberate attitudes and strategic actions, following the powerful precedent set by Bourdieu on the subject of class. Brahmans are certainly capable of drawing such distinctions with all the pretension of an upper caste that adheres to its claims to “purity.” But food, dress, and language enter too into the body of habit. Earlier (chap. 5) I made use of the Tamil term paḷakkam, the acquisition of habit and of a taste for someone or something. Related terms occur in other southern languages. The Kannada speakers of the Karnataka region use the term abhiyāsā, a process of attuning oneself to particular regimes through experience and adjustment. According to Nichter’s (1980) study of medical pluralism in the villages of this region, villagers deemed particular medicines inefficacious because the villager “has no abhiyāsā for that kind of medicine.” But abhiyāsā could also be acquired (if not all at once) for the properties of relatively unfamiliar medical regimes such as biomedicine (227). The like terms paḷakkam and abhiyāsā convey a sense of habituation both as a residue of past practices and as an active processual acquisition that connects us to our future. It is this crucial integration of aspects of temporality and embodiment that is neglected whenever academic accounts of possession invoke such notions as performance, strategy, reflexivity, and resistance. More seriously for the social sciences, awareness of bodily habituation is frequently missing even in the discussion of dimensions of social life as fundamental as caste/class and gender, which also contain elements that are not chosen and not necessarily present to the mind. An influential model of gender as “performance” was advanced by Butler in her first publication, Gender Trouble (1990). In her zeal to destabilize the dominant norms of heterosexual normativity, Butler sought to contest the distinction between gender and the performance of drag as a relationship between an original and a copy. Subsequently, it became difficult to argue— without being deemed to have fallen captive to essentialism—that the “construction” and “performance” of ordinary ways of living gender were possibly quite different from the “construction” and “performance” of drag. Despite Butler’s own later modifications (1993, 10), her model has circulated widely, partly because it fit well with dominant tendencies in postmodern theory. In particular, it was assimilated to a model of “construction” that dissolved—as if by fiat—the threads of intentionality and embodiment connecting past and present. Instead, the postmodern subject (and, in other versions, the postcolonial subject) was taken to be a creature without moorings whose existence was invented from moment to moment. “Construction,” as in the still popular “construction of tradition” paradigm, delivered a subject who had invented herself, who had access to the past only in the form of conscious representations and quasi-instrumentalist conjurings (Ram 2000). This version of

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“constructionism” has been widely contrasted to “essentialism” as the only alternative. Essentialism could be described as a metaphysics in which phenomena are understood in terms of an internal essence. Yet one of the central critiques of such a metaphysics, elaborated by Derrida, provides little fodder for the version of constructionism I have just described. In his critique of Austin, Derrida (1990, 14) specifically argues that the performativity of language need not be tied to a reliance on “the conscious presence of the intention of the speaking subject in the totality of his speech act.” In her later work, Butler (1993, 10, 244nn7, 8) acknowledges the missing dimension of “sedimented” temporality in her model of gender as performance. She returns in particular to the dimension of temporality in Derrida’s concept of every act as a repetition, a reiteration. However, this is hardly a dimension that can simply be added or subtracted from an account. It makes a fundamental difference to the way we understand what it is to “live” gender. The slow and cumulative temporality of primary socialization is such that by the time one is an adult, gender is lived as integral to one’s way of being in the world. Yet this too qualifies, though in quite a distinctive way, as a “constructionist” account. As we have seen in this book, such a view need not entail subscribing to a version of gendered being in the world that is free of conflict and tension. But it does allow us to glimpse why it might be that the descriptions offered by “essentialist” discourses often seem to come closer to lived experience than the formulations of the dominant brand of constructionism. In coastal Kanyakumari, where I interviewed women and girls on the subject of puberty, knowing how to comport oneself as a good female subject was regarded not only as a form of virtue but also as a form of knowledge. When asked how they felt about the kaṭṭuppāṭū, or “disciplines,” imposed on them, they initially disconcerted me by describing their response to these expectations as the spontaneous development of aṟivu, a term that in Tamil means wisdom and understanding. Occasionally they also used the Sanskrit term buddhi. Both terms carry a more general meaning of wisdom and intelligence, but for girls at the time of puberty, they entail a restricted set of meanings. For girls, aṟivu means anticipating and accepting disciplines. Such socialization entails a form of knowing that is associated with maturation. Girls have to turn the acquisition of those restricted movements and attitudes into their own project (Ram 2009a). An essential aspect of such agency is the capacity to absorb expectations, not as rules but as general orientations that are then applied afresh to different social situations. Such agency is anticipated in the very mode of instruction. Women and girls I interviewed in coastal villages were characteristically vague about the nature of the instructions they received on how to be a good girl (Ram 1998c). These included generalized,



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catchall phrases such as iṅkē aṅkē pōkāte, “do not go here and there” [or better still, do not go “hither and thither”]. The punitive consequences were equally generalized: Veḷiyile pōṉā kurai colluvarkaḷ, “If one goes ‘out,’ (they) will speak ill of one.” This generality did not reflect a failure of the instructors or a lapse in the memory of my interviewees. What was being instilled was a set of broad orientations that depend on the girls and women exercising their initiative in interpreting what they meant in specific situations. Many women took pride in the fact that they had already anticipated their future role: “I never gave them any reason to restrict me,” said one young woman, “I did not need to be told these things.” Reflexivity is built into such acquisitions—but this is not the reflexivity of an entirely conscious set of reflections. The aṟivu, or knowledge, in girls on which social honor depends is carried quite essentially in the body as a set of bodily understandings. The term “sediment,” used by Butler even in her self-critique to refer to the effects of temporality, is inadequate to describe the ways in which the past resides in the body. Although it captures some sense of the constraints imposed by the past, the image is one of a heavy residue that settles to the bottom of a mixture (cf. McNay 2000, 45). I suggest we think of the past instead as bequeathing a set of skills with which we improvise in relation to the needs of the present (Ram 1999). There may be limits to such improvisation. If the present is radically different to any past we are familiar with, then we will certainly falter, fumble, and even be rendered mute for a time. Equally, there are aspects of our past that lie disused, and such neglect, if it persists for a sufficiently long time, will mean that the skills become rusty, although they never disappear entirely, as we might assume. The everyday performance of gender is a form of improvisation within constraints. But those constraints do not take the form of “scripts,” just as improvisation is not exactly the same as performing a “role.” The constraints take the form of tastes, habits, and orientations, which pull us up when we move too far outside the range of improvisations these allow for. They are not roles, for to the extent that we are skilled, we perform these improvisations without, for the most part, needing to become fully aware of them. To some extent, lived gender more closely resembles the less-than-conscious performativity of “possession” rather than the performance of drag. Breaking with the Body of Habit: The Specific Use of Bodily Movement in Possession In respect of the body, Tamil Nadu provides two very different models of performance. Pursuing the contrasts will help show how possession seeks to

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break with the body of habit. The most prestigious forms of ritual performance traditions, such as Bharata Nāṭyam, have been aligned historically not with possession but with attitudes set out in the Sanskrit aesthetics of rasā. The key concepts of rasā theory are discursively explored in such texts as the Nātyaśāstra and the later medieval text Abhinaya Darpanā. In this aesthetic tradition, which is not in itself “ritual” except in the sense that most enterprises in India have contained an element of invocation to the deities, the aim of performance is to use all the sensory tools of theater (costume, stylized language, stage setting, dance, music, narrative) to awaken in the spectators an enhanced appreciation of an emotional essence. The means to this experience may take the form of consciously savoring the essence of a narrative or line of poetry. It is this model of aesthetics that has been consciously acknowledged in the contemporary nationalist understandings of the Indian “classical tradition” (Ram 2011a). The performer must, in this tradition, remain in control of the effects he seeks to excite in the spectator. A different model of performance is associated with terukkūttu and vil pāṭṭu. These forms of ritual theater, insofar as they result in possession, rely on the performer’s becoming eventually overwhelmed by the entity or being whose life and death he depicts. If this is indeed “performance,” it recalls Merleau-Ponty’s (1986, 212) suggestive description of falling asleep. Before we sleep, we go through the motions of lying down, arranging our limbs in the attitude of repose, inviting, even summoning sleep, but “sleep comes when a certain voluntary attitude suddenly receives from outside the confirmation for which it was waiting. . . . A certain rhythm of respiration, which a moment ago I voluntarily maintained, now becomes my very being, and sleep, until now aimed at as a significance, suddenly becomes a situation.” It is not only the performer’s relationship to the character played that is so different in possession-oriented ritual theater. The form in which the spectator is addressed is also different. In rasā aesthetics, the spectator is addressed as a cultivated connoisseur (a rasikā) who can savor the emotional nuances that are revealed in an attitude of privileged leisure (Ram 2011a). But the emotional effervescence of theaters of possession, by contrast, affects spectators by contagion. It offers them the possibility of ceasing to be spectators and of becoming coparticipants who share in the direct presence of the deity. Such differences in attitude toward control and spectatorship are necessarily accompanied by very different orientations to the body in performance. As Frasca (1990, 109) observes, terukkūttu places far greater emphasis than Bharata Nāṭyam on “nonrepresentational dance and bodily kinetics [as] primary conduits for the communication of the feelings and emotions inherent



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in the dramatic structure.” Such sequences would be routinely described in Bharata Nāṭyam performances as “pure dance,” devoid of narrative or emotional significance. “Pure dance” is the English term used in contemporary dance concerts, but it has come about as a translation of the medieval Sanskrit aesthetic term nritta. Nritta is understood by its sharp distinction from abhinaya, the dramatic enactment of text. The latter is meant to be the medium for eliciting an experience of rasā. The former is not. I have argued elsewhere that such distinctions do not hold fast even for the contemporary spectator of dance or theater—pure nritta, as in the fast-paced tillānā sequences of Bharata Nāṭyam, effectively holds and conveys the emotional pleasures of coherence, symmetry, grace. Possibly, as Frasca suggests (109), this emotionholding capacity of nritta was recognized in earlier Sanskrit treatises but lost in medieval and postmedieval commentaries. But even if this recognition is lost to discourse, certain features in today’s concert structure and dance training suggest otherwise. The face of the dancer never ceases to communicate, even in such nritta sequences, the ultimate emotion of such formal occasions of performance: shubham, or “auspiciousness” (Ram 2000). The tillānā is also given the privileged position immediately before the closing invocation of maṅkaḷam, the auspiciousness that ends a dance concert, suggesting that “pure dance” retains the formal capacity to bring grace and well-being into the world. This derivation may seem speculative, but what is not in doubt is that such capacities are explicitly recognized as indispensable to theaters of possession. In this context, bodily movement both establishes the emotional tone and is crucial to the transformation of both performers and audiences. The emotions most closely associated with male possession—power, violence, heroism, and anger—are those most closely associated with the use of a forceful and continuous spinning movement called kiṟikki, which involves the entire body and is rapid, almost frenzied (Frasca 1990, 103–105). The root of the term kiṟikki is traced by Frasca to the onomatopoeic term kiṟu-kiṟu, whose primary meanings are “to be confounded, disconcerted, confused, giddy.” We gain a sense of what is at stake from Gell’s (1980) description of the Muria people of Bastar (central India), who experience movements such as swinging from children’s play and turn these into a deliberate bodily technique. Drawing on Diekman’s research on meditation, Gell applies the concept of “deautomatization,” a process by which normally unreflective actions and percepts are reinvested, by subjects engaged in passive meditation experiences, with a heightening of awareness: Swinging and riding make use of a physical support whose independent activity permits the behavioural abstraction of equilibratory skills: Muria

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trance is only more complex than this in that it is the body itself, in its own semi-autonomous role as a vibrating, shuddering entity that has been separated out, and divorced from its normal integral place in consciousness. (237)

Of particular importance here are two categories of sensations—the exteroceptive, which furnish information about external objects, and those linked to proprioception, which provides “a person with information about the state of her deep tissue, her own movements and activity, and the effects of her own displacement in space” (Geurts 2002, 9). Performers who use the kiṟikki movements to induce possession are engaged in styles of movement that allow a dramatic break in the habituated relation—which is also a postural relation—between body and world. Such movements by performers of terukkūttu are possible only after years of training, however informally rendered (Frasca 1990). The movements of women in possession are the result, by contrast, not of any conscious practice. They may have been exposed to other women who are possessed, or to representations of female possession. Yet very similar movements are employed. Dancing and swinging are part of the possession behavior of women. The fact that these movements are derived from the world of play holds a special significance for girls. I described earlier the disciplines (kaṭṭuppāṭū) that are imposed on girls at the time of puberty, requiring the suppression and vilification of prior dispositions. If there is an existential category of movements destined to be socially disowned or repressed by women, it is a category that includes movements that are not tied to any goal that would bring them to an end. This criterion answers precisely to Gadamer’s (1985, 93) description of one of the essential features of play. From the time they are required to abandon these wayward dispositions, the movement of girls is tied to specific goals. But the earlier movements reemerge in possession. I encountered these movements indulged with special force by adolescent girls who ran wildly around the Catholic shrines in excited, giddy groups. Their exhilaration struck me most forcibly as the reemergence of forbidden play, an impression that comes through strongly in my early fieldwork (Ram 1991b). But I emphasize that swinging and whirling are not the simple evidence of possession they are taken to be by spectators. Instead, when they are singled out from the flow of activity and of play and turned into repetitive, even obsessive bodily forms of iteration, they become the very means of transformation from the everyday body of habit to something new. Not only are gendered personhood and possession integrally connected to the body in movement, but the transition from one to the other is also centrally mediated by specific forms of motility.



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Drawing on the Body of Habit in Female Possession: Continuities The body of habit is not entirely broken with in possession. There remains a link between the past and the present, retained not in the form of mental choices or decisions but as a repertoire of bodily orientations. There is, in the socialization of girls, a role for possession in the acquisition of gender as a complex of bodily understandings. I build on the earlier work of Kapferer (1991), who discusses the relationship between femininity and possession. He found that the very construction of femininity entails a greater vulnerability to demonic attack. This he attributed to women’s greater exposure to states of pollution, occasioned not only by their own bodily cycles but also by their social responsibility for undertaking polluting tasks at funerals, and by the attribution to women of a greater attachment to worldly desires. Such constructions of femininity were not to be conflated with the status of women in daily life, he argues. Women may occupy positions of economic and social power, but whatever their position, they must reckon with the vulnerability to disorder their culturally constructed identity. Men prone to demonic attack, on the other hand, are weak, in this view, because of “their socially constructed situation” (class or caste) “rather than their cultural identity” (149). Kapferer is right. But symbolic constructions do not simply sit like an invisible layer on the body—they are made part of bodily movement itself. One discovers this very quickly by “doing gender wrong.” Punitive consequences quickly follow, as Butler (1990, 139) points out. I still recall my puzzlement, after some years away from India in Australia—crucial teenage years—at the unwelcome attention I received when I first started moving around the busy streets of Trivandrum. I was dressed much the same as the women around me. Slowly I realized that I was the only woman who was not hurrying between home and work, head down, eyes averted from chance encounters. It was not that the women around me in the bustling city streets were willing themselves at every moment to keep their eyes averted and disengaged. They may have been barely conscious of their deportment. At the end of a three-year study of women on the streets of Mumbai, Phadke (2007, 1510) reports: “It was not until we actually began counting women on the streets of Mumbai that we realised how few women there actually are, never more than 28 per cent at any given place or time.” The study finds that even middle-class women require their presence in public space to be mediated by signs of matrimony, by the chaperonage of men. They announce the purposeful nature of their presence in public space by carrying bags and parcels (1512; Ranade 2007). In view of the consequences that may follow, no woman can sustain a mode of

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unconcern for long. But one usually learns these lessons early, and thereafter the forms of bodily understanding contained in the body of habit are marked by an unstudied awareness of the negative and the positive symbolic meanings of female behavior. Not only supposed sexual behavior but undisciplined female movement, like loosened hair and tongue, align the subject with the hot, angry, and demonic aspects of the goddess and of demonic spirits. I have had occasion to refer to the many practices through which the human and the divine participate in a shared metaphysics and a shared ontology, and to the even more numerous practices that ritually define (while seeming only to “reveal”) the continuum between women and goddesses. These meanings do not obtain simply in the eye of the beholder in shrines—they are forever latent in the way that women live their bodies. Such meanings may or may not become salient in the present. The female movements of possession are therefore fresh appropriations of diverse connections that have already been made. In her 1990 book Throwing Like a Girl, Iris Young describes the existentially split nature of female movement. Elaborating on the phrase “girl throw,” Young describes a movement into the world that is arrested and interrupted. It contains both an impulse to accomplish an act or project—the “I can” of bodily orientation described by Merleau-Ponty—and a self-censorship. No doubt such complications exist for women in India as well. They arise there not only in the form of inabilities rising from self-doubt over one’s capacities: they consist too in affinities the women find they have with distinct nonhuman beings. Although these affinities become more salient at puberty, the seeds are laid in childhood. I have not studied childhood socialization in rural villages and can draw only on my own socialization experiences. Fits of unruliness on my part were met by my mother with the invocation of an alien and disruptive creature called Alpana, whose presence had nothing to do with “Kalpana.” I was given the opportunity to walk out of the room. My mother would pretend to wait with bated breath to see whether the good (camattu) Kalpana would walk back in. I dimly recall responding with perfect relish to the imaginative reprieve thus afforded. I also recall taking refuge under the bed from my mother wielding a comb and telling me I would turn into paṟaṭṭai-Kāḷi, “Kāḷi of disheveled hair,” if order was not restored to my tangled curls. The result of this socialization was felt even years later in Australia. As a newly arrived teenager I wanted to look like all the other girls at school, who wore their hair out. I would leave home in the long plaits of a demure young Indian girl and let out the plaits at school. Of course, in any case, with long black curly hair, very thick and voluminous, I looked nothing like the exclusively Anglo-Australian girls of my high school, whose sleek blonde hair seemed to take up no room at all. This only added



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to my ignominy as I approached home and my mother. It seemed to me that I had indeed transmogrified into a wanton paṟaṭṭai-Kāḷi. Eventually, I solved the contradiction in the only way I could imagine. I cut my hair very short. These forms of socialization may never be actualized in the form of possession. But, as is clear from my self-description, they exercise effects of varying kinds. The point of regarding gender, or any other aspect of one’s socialization, as a form of skilled orientation that may or may not come into play in dealing with the present is that it is unnecessary to posit any direct causal connections of the kind that the legal discourse poses to the anthropologist, recast as “expert witness”: did X commit this act because he or she is of Indian origin? As we have seen from the case studies of individual women, “possession” arises in accord with the singularities of life situations as they unfold. Various forms of “learning” can be said to continue through the long trajectory of possession incidents, which are particularly striking in the case of women who become mediums.3 We have seen that the bodily styles of mediums vary considerably, integrating their specific pasts with the present. In shrines such as Raja Ūr, young girls show a specific style of their own. Yet in none of these cases do the meanings reside exclusively with either the spectator or the one possessed but rather in the relationship between the two. Whether in Christian or Hindu shrines, spectators and possessed women share the meanings of an undisciplined female motility. These meanings convey nothing less than a sense of social and cosmic disorder.

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I n t h i s b o o k I h av e d e l i b e r at e ly r e f r a i n e d from urging readers to view the agency of possession and mediumship as “resistance” to power or as “empowerment,” let alone as a radical liberation from caste, class, and gender relations of power. The reasons for this deliberate restraint can now be explored. The discursive traditions that analyze power have created a hierarchy of agency. Within this hierarchy, the minimum point that can be imagined is the point of resistance to power. But the female medium does not resist. She does not overturn any hierarchy of power relations. If we view her position through the lens of Bourdieu’s (1993) “field of power,” then—within the specific subfield of traditional medicines practiced in a rural district of Tamil Nadu—the female medium can be seen to occupy one of the very lowest positions. Unlike the female medium, most rural practitioners are able to claim some form of cultural capital based on the inheritance of knowledge in a tradition. Practitioners of Cittavaittiya (Citta, or Siddha, medicine) employ the herbs and organic drugs employed by Ayurvedic practitioners but in addition, “make much use of salts, metals, mineral poisons, in short of anorganic remedies” (Zvelebil 1973, 32). These Siddha specialists trace with pride a patrimonial lineage that goes back to male sages, such as Akattiyar (Skt. Agastya), to whom is attributed the authorship of more than two hundred medical treatises (32), and Tirumūlar, whose treatise Tirumantiram is dated to the second half of the seventh century. In addition, contemporary practitioners invoke, as their ancestors, cittar saints, seventeen in number, whose lives span the pe252



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riod between the seventh and seventeenth centuries. Claims of this kind play a key role in the attempts of Siddha practitioners to emulate the successes of Ayurveda (Wujastyk 2008) in establishing affiliation with the “great traditions” of medicine, yoga, and spiritual practice as part of the Indian national tradition. The one female practitioner of Siddha medicine I came across in Kanyakumari District was of considerable repute but had been taught, by her father, only in the absence of a male heir. Ordinarily such knowledge is reserved for men. Gender inequality also divides the field of mediumship itself. Women’s authorization to become mediums is initiated at random, as an unbidden form of possession. By contrast, male mediums emerge as kuṟi prophesiers or mediums in the more formalized contexts of ritual worship. The officiants at Icakki Ammaṉ’s temple are always male, hereditarily transferring their rights to mediumship at the temple worship of Icakki. They are known also as cāmi āṭi, or “god-dancers,” since the power to verbally prophesy arrives only after the dance of possession (Blackburn 1988, 41). Figures resembling these male hereditary cāmi āṭi have been described as playing an important part in the culmination of the annual festival of the village goddess (Beck 1981; Kapadia 1995). We have already noted the professional groups of artists and performers who perform ritual invocatory styles of epic narrative, such as the terukkūttu performers at Draupadi Ammaṉ festivals. These, as we recall, consist of men only. The women kuṟi speakers, by contrast, do not become healers through a hereditary right, nor do they occupy the most prestigious position in the cycle of ritual worship at the temple of the goddess. They do not enjoy their skills as a patrimonial legacy. They have never been taught their skills by anyone in authority. The contrast goes beyond the more usual contrast between formal and informal learning. Male ritual performers of genres such as terukkūttu are trained “informally,” in the sense that they learn by doing and by participating in performances. But they nevertheless participate in a recognized relationship of learning and apprenticeship to a guru and train as such for many years. Female mediums, on the other hand, neither have a teacher nor do they leave behind a tradition through pupils. The inventiveness I have described in female mediums can be reinterpreted as a virtue born of necessity, of an impoverished cultural capital. The most inventive of all the spirit mediums I came across in Tamil Nadu were the Catholic mediums. These were also the most singularly disadvantaged group of mediums, enjoying no support from the Church or from modernizing intellectuals. Compared to them, even Dalit Hindu mediums such as Mutamma seemed richly endowed with cultural forms of authorization. Mutamma was able to inherit from her father a certain authorization for her own authenticity

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as a medium. A deity spoke to the villagers when she was three, announcing that she would be brought back from the dead only by ritual forms of propitiation to the goddess. Although the question may always be raised whether it is a pēy (evil spirit) or a deity that possesses, the experience of possession is potentially prestigious and sacred for Dalit Hindus. Compared with Christian healers, Mutamma had a more fully elaborated and coherent narrative. She seemed to move in predestined fashion toward her calling as a healer. If we place rural female mediums in a cross-regional comparative perspective, we would have to say that none of them enjoyed the kind of cultural capital that has been described for Korea, for example, where mediumship is a subordinate but still prestigious tradition (Kendall 1985). Shamanism in South Korea has recently been incorporated into the nationalist canon of practices (Kendall 2001; see also Morris 2000 on Thai elites). No such prospect is in store for like traditions in the context of Indian nationalism. There reverential recuperation is extended no further than to the figure of the devadasi, who was until recently held to blame for the degeneration of the purity of Indian dance traditions but is now venerated as their authentic repository. Instead, for the low-caste mediums I describe, the situation in Tamil Nadu closely resembles that described by Kapferer (1997) for Sri Lanka, by Tsing (1993) for mediums in Borneo, and by Steedly (1993) for Sumatra. Tsing (1993, 235) describes at length the makeshift improvisations of a female medium that are linked to “her awkward status as a woman creator.” Here, as in Tamil Nadu, most women enter the field of possession as “patients rather than as healers” (243). Both Tsing’s and Steedly’s ethnographies reflect on the difficulty women experience in participating in valued forms of address that are reserved for men. Indeed, Steedly (1993, 185ff.) argues that the capacity of female mediums to be “spoken through” rather than presenting themselves as the authors of speech becomes salient for women precisely because of the contradiction between being female and being an author. In contrast with women who innovate because they lack a “tradition” that backs and authorizes them as healers, the male specialists, or aduras, studied by Kapferer (1997) in Sri Lanka have the luxury of disparaging innovation as a repertoire of so many “modern moves” (53). Here, too, we find the same reference to inventiveness as a quality born of necessity. Female sastra karayas, or “soothsayers,” organize and perform rites “usually of their own invention” (47). Sastra karayas enjoy no more than the authority to be gained from personal experience, whereas the authority of the aduras is vested in “a diversity of named ritual practices that have been passed from teacher (guru) to teacher down the generations. Their knowledge and practice has authority and potency primarily because it is learned and is an extension of tradition



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rather than a knowledge that is experientially based and embodied as a result of significant personal biographical events” (48). Clearly, the “personal experience” claimed by female mediums does not necessarily provide the rich form of cultural capital that it might promise in more individualistic cultures. The analytics of power, as used here following the example of Bourdieu and others, supplies an indispensable perspective. The problem is that it has become an overfamiliar aspect of our scholarly habitus. As a result, we are predisposed to notice only what has already been picked out for us as significant. I could have begun my exploration of mediumship, several chapters ago, with that which is closest to hand—the familiar trio of caste, class, and gender inequality. But had I done so, the forms of agency that mediums do exercise would not have even registered on the scale. If the agency of mediums were the only casualty from this way of proceeding, this might not appear to matter. But in this book, I have made of the agency of the medium—and even of the ordinary sufferer—a means to consider particular forms of agency that attend all human existence. These forms of agency depend on the slow temporality of accommodation. The English word “adjust” has been readily integrated into the Tamil syntax (as in koncam adjust paṇṇintu pōkalāme, “you could make an effort to adjust as you go on”)—perhaps because it is a disposition so often required of people. No doubt those who are junior in the hierarchy— such as young, in-marrying brides, for example—will be asked to “adjust” more often than their seniors. But more basic processes are at work, processes central to all human agency. In the advisory injunction to “adjust,” the Tamil syntax demonstrated above does not allow us to conceive of adjustment as an action completed once and for all. The verb pōkalāme is related to the noun pōkku and, like the noun naṭamuṟai, draws attention to the characteristic gait with which one “goes,” moves, through time as well as place. In this book I have also used other terms from southern Indian languages—paḷakkam in Tamil, abhiyāsā in Kannada—that convey an expansive ability of our bodies to move out into the world and to incorporate into their virtual boundaries that which is initially external. All the terms draw our attention to a process that continues, requiring a slower temporality than we are normally attuned to in the social sciences, let alone in politics. The agency of cultivating mediumship is better understood, as I have argued, as the agency of making room for that which is alien, disturbing, afflictive, or simply foreign. The version of agency I am describing is partly captured by Taussig’s (1993, 46) description of mimetic sensuous knowing as a form of “yielding” that is as much body as mind. Taussig does not reemploy this conceptualization of agency when he comes to write of spirit possession.

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Instead, The Magic of the State (1997, 78–79, 166–167) describes two moments of possession—that when the corpselike body is laid out on the ground in a trance state and the moment when the spirit takes hold of the body, turning it into a theater of drama and action. In my account, the medium’s court, at the moment of possession, is indeed a theater of drama and action. But when we consider her mediumship as a process over time, neither a “body” moment nor a “spirit” moment can be clearly distinguished. Here Taussig’s (1993, 46) earlier description comes much closer. Her agency may be plausibly characterized as a “strange mixture of activity and passivity involved in yielding-knowing.” If this is mimesis, it is not so much the copying of another but rather the taking in of an Other who persists in making sensuous contact. The thesis has an application far wider than to the particular ethnographic situations that have been the core subject of this book. It describes, for instance, the less-spectacular agency of the immigrant who slowly develops tastes and affinities for the foreign land. Such processes could, of course, be quickly retranslated into the language of political discourse as “assimilation,” a loaded word in colonial and postcolonial discourses on race and ethnicity. Yet they occur quietly and unobtrusively over a long period, with or without the encouragement of state policies, and remain an indispensable aspect of immigrant agency in a new land. The development of new tastes and affinities allows the development of social skills with which the first-generation immigrant is enabled to move between the country of original socialization and that of resocialization, or between the diasporic community and the dominant society. Such an ability is not a matter of conscious policy on the part of the individual or of choosing on a given occasion to take up one stance rather than another. It is a matter of imperceptibly flowing into the bodily attitudes, language, and forms of sociality of the person or the group one moves toward. Following the phenomenological tradition, I would describe this process as one of “attunement.” Such a flow becomes easier and more spontaneous with practice, but its secret lies in the powerful pull of sociality itself. We mistake the matter if we describe that pull exclusively in terms of a conscious policy of assimilation on the part of dominant society, let alone of the state. Such proclivities also have their limits, as in situations where the immigrant has to deal with both social groups simultaneously. It is all but impossible to take up both sets of orientations at the same moment. Not all social life is about enabling innovation and change. Habits and tastes acquired early in life, as part of one’s primary socialization, never entirely lose their purchase. They set limits to change, even when they seem to simply lie dormant ready to spring back to life the minute the immigrant sets foot back in her childhood environment. For all the facility that might be acquired in moving be-



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tween the different contexts, the secondary socialization of the immigrant is never a replacement of the first. The attitudes, syntax, and gestures acquired in one’s country of birth reerupt unexpectedly, like the slips of tongue, jokes, and dreams in which Freud located evidence of an unconscious. If these are “resistances,” they are neither entirely conscious nor voluntary. Nor are they necessarily resistances to power. But they are the indispensable equivalent of historicity in the lived body. The concept of attunement has been used in anthropology effectively and with style by Stewart (2009) to describe the way we respond to new and disturbing shifts of regime. We sense changes in the political climate even before we actually know what it is we are sensing. Her case studies (see also 1997) examine the catastrophic coincidence of neoliberal state policies with the withdrawal of industry and state welfare from the coal-mining communities of West Virginia. This is attunement as lived by those at the receiving end. The concept can help in describing the reactions not only of people in coalmining communities but also of academics in universities, wherever organizations “cascade” policies from above as if they were the river Ganga descending from the brow of Shiva himself. People in Stewart’s text “watch things arrive.” However, there is more to attunement than this. Some of Stewart’s own descriptions (such as the literary example she gives of the farmer who orients himself to the soil’s seasonal temporality by tasting a pinch of dirt) point to an attunement that is qualitatively different from our rather spasmodic efforts at simply coping with the next inevitable onslaught of institutional change. The attunement to which I draw attention is an aspect of our body of habit. It entails the slower, more cumulative accretion made possible by a certain rhythmic quality in our relationship to the world. Undoubtedly, the pace of change has escalated to a point where it is more difficult to meet this simple requirement of rhythm. But it is a characteristic of modern intellectuals that we are ourselves more attuned to change, to newness, than to the effects of slower temporalities. Slower temporality appears, once again, as the opposite of the modern. Like the Slow Food movement, it is immediately vulnerable to the charge of nostalgia for an outmoded past. Those who dare attempt a more appreciative or even a neutral description of such movements are under pressure and anticipate criticism by coming up with all kinds of specialized and elaborate intellectual efforts to defend their treatment (see, e.g., Parkins and Craig 2006). Bodily “Morphology” and Feminist Theory Considerations of this kind touch closely on what some feminist philosophers have described as a “morphology” of the body. In Anglophone feminist phi-

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losophy, the term “morphology” has played an important part in the search for alternatives to an earlier form of critique that denied the biological determinism of “sex” only to uphold the cultural determinism of “gender.” The gains so made were felt to be undermined by the costs of accepting and even cementing a timeworn opposition between nature and culture. A new wave of feminist argument, influenced by French philosophers such as Irigaray and by Lacanian psychoanalysis, sought a “third term” with its authorizing source neither in biology nor in sociology but in “morphology”’ (Gatens 1991, 115; see also Weiss 1999). Yet if these strands of feminist philosophy have been prompt to explore the possibilities of the new territory named morphology, these explorations are necessarily subordinate to the more general political project within whose field they occur. The new territory is no sooner named than it is annexed. No sooner is it annexed than the territory is put to work. Butler (1993, 91) wishes bodily morphologies to be harnessed to the “displacement of the hegemonic symbolic of (heterosexist) sexual difference and the critical release of alternative imaginary schemas for constituting sites of erotogenic pleasure.” Weiss (1999, 67) is a little less ambitious and opts for “resistance”: To change the imaginary, we must in turn create new images of the body, dynamic images of non-docile bodies that resist the readily available techniques of corporeal inscription and normalization that currently define “human reality.”

The same analytic of power that gave us “docile bodies” now wishes to find examples of “non-docile bodies,” which it will recognize only by the criterion of “resistance” to a “human reality” that still appears to consist entirely of “corporeal inscription” and “normalization.” Agency is indeed to be found in the capacity of bodily movement to embrace new tendencies or to resist “inscription.” But it lies too in many other forms. One of these is its capacity to integrate our past and present, not only at the level of representations or of purely symbolic functions but also in terms of the “motor grasping of a motor significance” (Merleau-Ponty 1986, 143). Weiss (1999) carefully notes this integrative function as described by Merleau-Ponty, but since it lacks political value for her, the function eventually disappears from sight. What remains of “morphology” is “a fluidity that defies discrete boundaries, borders, and barriers” (67). In fact, these aspects of agency are interrelated. Without the integration and absorption, we could not deal with, and possibly could not even relish, the novel, the changing, and the unexpected in each situation. We could not



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innovate. The example I give is taken from the performing arts. The term “practice” is often acceptably used in quite an abstract manner in social theory without any reference to bodily engagement. I therefore draw not so much on the social sciences as on the concept of practice dinned into me by my teacher of southern Indian classical music when I was a child. The first question— after he had gratefully tossed back a small tumbler of hot southern Indian coffee, expertly drunk without allowing his lips to pollute the rim—was whether I had “practiced” (cātakam in Tamil). In his study of northern Indian music (in which he also figures as a beginner student) Neuman (1980) ruefully describes what he saw as a confusion of values on the part of his teachers, who were senior musicians. They were more interested in whether his cuticles were built up into a horny ridge from hours of practicing the sarangi than in his actual performance. It was taken for granted that years of practice, or riaz, lay ahead before anything much could be expected by way of performance. Dedication to riaz is not only a path to greatness. It is a form of greatness in itself. The modern disdain for traditional forms of pedagogy, involving vast amounts of memorization (derogated as “cramming” by the British educationists in India; Seth 2007), and for bodily disciplines, is entirely consistent with the modern overvaluation of consciousness as the exclusive site of understanding. For all the hybridity brought by colonial modernity to all aspects of social practice in India, a good deal of the knowledge in music and dance still passes primarily from body to body through mimetic repetition (see, e.g., the fine account given by Zarilli 2000 for kathakali).1 These repetitions do not preclude an active agential experience of learning. The student must transpose what is seen, grasp it as a scheme, turn it into one that is enacted. Although poetic texts of songs and epics have an important role in transmission, these contain only the barest bones of performance (Kersenboom 1995). A good performance must combine technical virtuosity and emotional interpretation. To achieve this entails mastering the appropriate rāgas, intricate footwork, and a sense of the range of interpretations possible for a given line of text, as well as learning how to juggle the different cycles of temporality that are marked by tāḷam (or tāl, Skt., measured beats that determine the tempo of different compositions), footwork (if the performance includes dance), and musical rendition. Not surprisingly, pedagogy in these forms is long drawn out, taking years of “practice.” But the achievement of competency is marked precisely by a certain freeing up of consciousness. One is no longer to be entirely aware of every move one needs to make, of every tāḷam, or rhythmic time cycle, into which one has to fit the music and the footwork. Indeed, it is precisely when one can stop thinking about every such imperative that one can also exercise a certain freedom in relation to

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the tradition, allowing oneself forays into new interpretation. The patterns of movement are themselves in the body, so that one can concentrate on im­prov­ i­sa­tions in each actual performance. Agency is to be viewed therefore as an intricate combination of the conscious and the habitual, where freedom relies on the integration of the past offered by the habitual. The student begins by striving consciously through hours of rigorous bodily practice to achieve certain levels of competency. This competency itself is gauged both by the transformations of the body—the callused hands of the player of instruments, the muscular strength of the calves of the dancer—and by a certain freedom to improvise. Yet this improvisation in turn is never entirely “free”—the style that is the hallmark of the pāṇi, or lineage of the teacher, has by now been absorbed into the style of singing or dancing by the student, and improvisation occurs within those constraints. What would happen if instead of subordinating these forms of agency, taking them merely as artifacts or reflections of something grander, tailoring them to serve existing political agendas, we were to allow them to occupy their own ground? They might then help us in unsuspected ways. This is the hypothesis I have been following in relation to mediumship, but other illustrations suggest themselves. Something as apparently trivial as the capacity of bodily morphology to encompass external objects, particularly those intimately connected with our everyday motility, such as our footwear or clothing, could temper the overheated modern debates over female clothing, particularly in the non-Western world. Female attire everywhere, including the West, has been slower to adopt a rationalized notion of efficiency than male attire, highlighting a certain ambivalence within modernity itself, not only about the “place” of women but about the “look” of women. In the most “modern” of places, as a result, handbags hang off the arm, high heels, mediating between ground and body, render posture more fragile, while on Indian women, saris trail on the ground and flutter over the shoulder. Men, for their part, have long since adopted the none-too-attractive modern ensemble referred to simply in India as “pant-shirt.” I deliberately avoid mentioning that most contentious of all items, the veil, in order to draw attention to the much wider range of items of female attire that in fact fall short of modern criteria of bodily freedom and rational efficiency. But once we introduce the slow temporality of bodily involvement, we cannot continue to represent the relationship of heels, saris, or veils to the long-term wearer as the relationship to a subject of a purely external object that acts as pure impediment. Any such wearer has long since integrated such items into their bodily morphology through continued use. This is not a settled achievement. Every modification in the shape, fabric, or volume of these items



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can cause a temporary loss of efficacy. A rise of half an inch in the stipulated height of a pair of heels can make the expert heels wearer wobble; a sari made of slippery synthetics instead of cotton can leave the sari wearer disastrously out of control. But this only highlights the fact that in the ordinary flow of things, these users are able to move around quite efficiently without having to be conscious of what is most intimately connected to their bodies. Indeed, such items can be said to have been in some sense incorporated into their bodies. The sari wearer can feel positively unclothed in a dress that leaves her legs exposed. This is not a unique attribute of women who are perceived by the West as “covering themselves up.” The female habitual wearer of shoes can feel positively half-dressed when required to leave her shoes at the door—as was asked of my wedding guests in Sydney. As with any aspect of subjectivity that is not conscious, chosen, and achieved entirely voluntarily, processes of gradual adjustment and incorporation are most easily associated, under modernity, with unfreedom, addiction, and the loss of autonomy2—that is, with conditions from which emancipation must be sought. We need not invert this dichotomy. We need not seek to replace consent and choice or even the wider socialist visions of agency with something as humble as accommodation and adjustment. Choice and consent have been crucial demands by all subaltern groups who have historically been denied such forms of agency. All that is entailed in my argument is that we should refrain from obliterating all forms of agency that do not immediately announce their serviceability for modern political goals. Erasing them has in fact contributed to the crisis-ridden quality of these goals themselves, for nowhere is this crisis more in evidence than in feminist controversies over the question of female agency and victimhood. I turn to examine just one instance of the way this crisis has played itself out in India. The Destabilization of Feminist Political Assumptions about Agency I take my examples from the debates, controversies, and challenges faced by feminists in India; but these will seem familiar to readers who follow feminist debates elsewhere. Similar controversies have been part of the international give-and-take within feminism since the 1980s, when strong critiques emerged of Western representations that portrayed “third world women” and “black women” as victims (see, e.g., Hooks 1989; Anzaldua 1987; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991; Trinh T. Minh-ha 1989; Frankenberg 1993; Grewal et al. 1988). One predictable response to these critiques of victimhood was to invest “third world women” with a “superagency” (Bulbeck 1991). But this

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proved equally problematic (Ram 1991a). The controversies have continued wherever feminism has identified victimhood: in disputes over the agency of sex workers, or over the agency of women who are understood to be victims of sex trafficking (Doezema 1998, 2000; Law 1997; Sandy 2007). The sites of controversy will go on proliferating, since they are all expressions of a deeper problem: the invocation of victimhood and agency in emancipatory discourses. In the 1980s, the threats to female agency and to the women’s movement were located by Indian feminists at a safe distance. The problem, as it was seen, lay with the reliance of antifeminist forces on binary categorizations of tradition and modernity. Radha Kumar (1993, 173) writes of the reappearance of sati as a political issue in the late 1980s: In September 1987, an incident of sati (widow immolation) in a village in Rajasthan sparked off a campaign which gave rise to a furious debate which spanned not only the rights and wrongs of Hindu women, but questions of religious identity, communal autonomy and the role of the law and the State in a society as complex and as diverse as India’s. . . . In the course of the debate a series of binary oppositions were invoked, between rural and urban, tradition and modernity, complementarity and sameness, the state and religious communities, spiritualism and materialism, and so on. The invocation of these oppositions had the effect of presenting either side (for and against sati) as homogeneous, so that the former were described as representing rural, traditional communities who were struggling to preserve themselves from the homogenizing tendencies of the Indian nationstate, while the latter were described as representing elite, urban, modern sections of society, who were pressing the state to intervene in communities they bore no relation to, and were thus supporting and encouraging the nation-state to extend its sphere of control over civil society.

By the close of the 1980s, the category of modernity itself was brought into question for the first time within feminist and Leftist scholarship. Second-wave feminism in India, ever closely involved with socialist and Marxist politics, responded quickly to new tendencies in Indian Marxist theory. The departure that proved particularly significant was the work of Subaltern Studies historians in reviewing the lasting implications of colonialism in its capacity to shape Indian nationalist discourse. Applying similar orientations, feminist work on sati in the colonial era began to unearth a genealogy of modernity that made it impossible to ignore the connections between colonial and contemporary representations of sati (Mani 1998; Sangari and Vaid 1989;



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Sunder Rajan 1993). The binarisms of tradition and modernity became harder for feminists to treat as external to feminism itself. Sunder Rajan (1993, 18) writes, In the representations of sati in contemporary India . . . the subjectivity of the woman who commits sati remains a crucial issue; female subjectivity has in turn hinged on the questions: Was the sati voluntary? Or was the woman forced upon the pyre? These stark alternatives were posed as an aspect of British intervention in the issue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and still retain their force when played into the series of oppositions that categorize the problematic of tradition versus modernity. For defenders of sati today all satis are voluntary and for its opponents all of them are coerced.

The trouble moved closer to home with the growing prominence of women as militant proponents of “tradition.” Women, actively defending and marching on behalf of sati (Kumar 1993), helped to demolish the Muslim mosque Babri Masjid in 1991. They enrolled as active members of militant Hindu organizations. Sarkar and Butalia write in their introduction to Women and the Hindu Right (1995) of the now-intimate dimensions of the crisis: Politically and methodologically this assertive participation in right wing campaigns, pulled many of our assumptions into a state of crisis for we have always seen women as victims of violence rather than its perpetrators and we have always perceived their public, political activity and interest as a positive liberating force. . . . For we need to understand what we are faced with. For we do have before us a large-scale movement among women of the right who bring with them an informed consent and agency, a militant activism. If they are imbued with false consciousness then that is something that includes their men as well and if they are complicit with a movement that will ultimately constrain themselves as women, then history is replete with examples of women’s movements that foreground issues other than or even antithetical to women’s interests. (3–4)

Even more basic assumptions began to be questioned. Increasingly, the category of “agency,” like that of “victim,” appeared as a site of trouble in feminist writings and no longer as a basis for resolute claims. In the 1990s, feminist work pioneered explorations of women’s experiences of the Partition of India and Pakistan (Menon and Bhasin 1998; Butalia 1998). This body of work by activist scholars, less known than the later work of academic scholars

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such as Das (1995) and Pandey (2001), deserves wider recognition. Butalia (1998) writes movingly of women who died during the Partition of India and Pakistan. She refers not only to “the routine, and visible violence” that occurred in clashes between religious communities but also of those instances where women were put to death by their own families or took their own lives. Such violence ought to yield a clear-cut feminist indictment of violence against women. But Butalia is stopped by the consideration of alternatives to death, which included rape and possible abduction and further violation, with almost certain conversion to Islam. The evidence indicates that men and women participated in the discussions that preceded the making of difficult choices. In some cases, women are reported to have fearlessly led other women to their suicides at the village well. In such cases, their memories are worshipped as martyrs who died defending community honor: If the women were aware of the discussions, perhaps even involved with them, can we surmise that in taking their own lives they were acting upon a perceived (or rather, misperceived) notion of the good of their community? Did their deaths corroborate the ideology—and were they part of this ideology?—that the honour of the community lay in “protecting” its women from the patriarchal violence of an alien community? The natural protectors by this reckoning are the men, who at this particular moment are unable to offer such protection. Because the women knew this, can one suggest that they could well have consented to their own deaths, in order to preserve the honour of the community? Were they then, consenting victims/agents of the patriarchal consensus I have spoken of above? Where, in their “decision” did “choice” begin and “coercion” end? What, in other words, does their silence hide? (Butalia 1998, 161–162)

Butalia attempts to address the dilemma by referring to consent and nonconsent, authorship and nonauthorship as coexisting elements. Yet eventually she is impelled by the available language to wonder how to specify exactly where “choice begin[s] and coercion end[s]” (Butalia 1998, 162). She is forced to conceive of the situation in terms of a “decision” to live or die. This dominant construction of subjectivity inherited by feminism is unable to entertain more than one kind of relationship to the world at one time. Where choice begins, coercion ends. Even in extreme circumstances, the dilemma of the subject is represented primarily as an epistemic dilemma. She makes decisions based on what she knows. As such, she is newly vulnerable to the kinds of questions regarding her actions that such a woman would scarcely have confronted but which have nagged Western epistemology since Descartes.



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Was her knowledge true or false? Was it knowledge based on misperception (a “misperceived notion regarding the good of the community”)? If it was so, then even consent would be understood as consent to an illusion. Or was it coercion pure and simple?—in which case there was no decision making and therefore no agency at all. The criteria for agency soar above any human situation. To meet the criteria, there must be unequivocal decision making, undertaken with a full knowledge of the facts, by a subject equipped with access to true and adequate representations of a world that is objectively given. It becomes impossible to conceive of any fundamental alteration in the relation between world and subject, even in the most extreme circumstances. It is the same tradition that asks of women possessed by demons and ghosts whether they are agents who chose the ghosts as a stratagem or whether they are to be regarded as victims of patriarchal coercion. Either way, the possibility of being haunted by ghosts is put out of the question. It is effectively dissolved. That may seem, to most feminists, a small loss. Yet these losses themselves turn into ghosts that come back to haunt feminism when it tries to reconstruct the subjectivity of women in other circumstances. At the very moment of extremity, when the distance between subject and world is closing in, only one language is available to describe their predicament: a language that assumes a primary separation between subject and world. Emancipatory discourses have built on these premises. They provide for only two alternatives: either “false consciousness” or the clear perception provided by the emancipatory discourses of Marxism or feminism. Butalia writes, with a deliberate oxymoron, of “consenting victims.” Sunder Rajan (1993, 19) phrases the matter more directly: there is a “methodological crisis.” Those who mobilized against sati seemed to be able to do so only by imputing utter victimhood to the woman. Those who glorified it could proceed only by way of attributing complete, even superhuman agency to the woman: But even where they [feminist opponents of sati] allow that the widow may have complied with the decision, her “suicide” is regarded not as true “choice” but merely as an option that is preferred to life as an ill treated widow, or one which results from “false consciousness” and ideological indoctrination. In any case, they have refused to grant that wanting to die is a sufficient reason to die. However, if one subscribes to a liberal ideology of the freedom of choice one must sometimes grant sati the dubious status of existential suicide. To refuse to do so is to find oneself, as feminists have done, in another bind, that of viewing the sati as inexorably a

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victim and thereby emptying her subjectivity of any function or agency. (Sunder Rajan 1993, 19)

Neither the hypothesis of utter victimhood nor that of complete agency enables feminism to proceed, for, she argues, “if victimhood is equated with helplessness and agency with self-sufficiency, all feminist politics will be rendered either inauthentic or unnecessary” (35). Feminism continues to surprise itself by detecting female agency in unsuspected quarters. Regularly—but always, it appears, unexpectedly—these discoveries are made in the domain of religion. Mahmood’s (2005) examination of Islamic pietism is a recent example. Mahmood mounts an argument against the liberal equation of religion with unfreedom, particularly with female unfreedom. She does so by showing that women belonging to pietistic Islamic organizations actively cultivate agency by setting themselves to diligently study Islam and by aiming to apply it in every waking moment of their lives. Yet her undertaking, as I argue, though a salient one, does not allow her to push her interrogation of agency as far as she intends. The kind of pietism to which she refers bears all the hallmarks of a quintessentially modern project. Mahmood emphasizes the “bodily element” in pietism and the opposition it affords to a purely formal doctrinal adherence. The doctrines are to be made bodily by daily attentive repetitions of particular practices. Yet the project is also unmistakably an enterprise by which textual doctrine and program mark the starting point for reform. In this respect, like other modern revolutionary doctrines, it ranges itself sternly against “traditional” cultural practices, including an older version of Islam itself. Such traditions, dismissed by pietism in Egypt as “folklore” (49), entail the admixture with Islam of practices that are simply local, of the place. Such traditions, as a result, have been far from homogeneous, differentiating the “Islam” that evolved in the Indian subcontinent from the “Islam” of Egypt, and for that matter, differentiating the “Islams” of different parts of India (see Dale 1980 on Kerala and Alam 2004 on northern India). As I argued in chapter 6, such evolutions were never exclusively a matter of “syncretic borrowings,” nor are they principally a matter of exchanges between religions. It is not that “Islam” borrowed or even adapted to “Hinduism” but rather that newer social forces (such as incoming religions) engaged with a whole range of social practices local to the place. In the past, too, tensions between popular and doctrinal Islam were much in evidence in the Indian subcontinent. According to Bedford (2011, 148– 149), writing about Islamic orthodoxy in post-Zia Pakistan,



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Throughout the subcontinent, from the days of Ahmad Sirhindi in Akbar’s Delhi, orthodox opinion had at times distanced itself from popular practices and had condemned their toleration by Muslim rulers. Unwelcome practices were ascribed to Hinduism. . . . More often, ashraf (higher status) Muslims had simply held aloof from popular currents.

What is new about modern pietism is that its opposition to popular religion is not limited to the “excesses” of music, dance, and invoking the departed pīr, or “saint,” at shrines but carries over into an opposition to all that is not chosen, willed, or entirely held in the mind. Pietistic Islam campaigns against these elements of “traditional” Islam as vociferously as any secular revolutionary campaign. If Mahmood’s project is to show that there is indeed agency in the project taken up by female adherents of Islamic pietism, she succeeds very well—no small achievement in an age of Islamophobia. But in respect of the more wide-ranging project that Mahmood sets herself, that of thoroughly interrogating modern, and especially emancipatory, notions of agency, she is hampered by the very nature of the ethnographic material she is working with. The discourse and project she studies are based too securely on modern premises to help her accomplish such a task. By comparison, “minor practices” such as mediumship and possession, if taken seriously, can force us to rethink precisely those features that modernist projects most abhor. Pietistic Islam itself may be lived in ways that have much more in common than at first seems to be the case with the medium’s gradual attunement to the initially alien spirit. I refer here to Ahmad’s (2010) study of South Asian women working in Kuwait as domestic servants. Their experience of Islam would, at first glance, seem to fit the Christian understanding of “conversion,” which has also provided elements central to the modern paradigm of revolutionary change: change that is dramatic, total, and consciously willed. For these women are of Hindu and Christian backgrounds. Yet their “conversion” is in fact neither the dramatic and clearsighted agency of an elective path nor the willed conscious attention to every detail of daily existence enjoined by pietism (as described by Mahmood). Instead, their relationship to Islam is the relationship of the long-term immigrant to the host society, much as I have described it. The women gradually absorb the orientations of the new culture through affective involvement with others, but without necessarily consciously rejecting or shedding their primary orientations: Far from an abrupt rejection or transformation of their previous religious traditions and lives, these women experienced becoming Muslim as pro-

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cessual, characterised by a gradual re-engagement and reworking of their lives through Islam, a process in which differences between Islam and their previous religious traditions were not necessarily clear. (294)

Constraints Imposed by Marxism In this book I have had many occasions to resort to Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus as well as to that of Merleau-Ponty, “the body of habit.” The relation between the two bears some reflection. In considering this very question, Strathern (1996, 35) comes to the conclusion that the habitus involves latent dispositions, whereas habits are acts performed over time. However, this cannot be the basis of the distinction since latent dispositions can be inculcated only by bodily acts performed over time. The habitus is useful as a concept precisely because it alerts us to the fact that it is not only those particular acts singled out as “habits” but also the entirety of our socialization that entails bodily acquisitions. As I explored in the previous chapter, gender, caste, class, and like categories are bodily competencies as well as tastes, although we may also experience them on occasion as oppressive relations of power external to ourselves. The nonconscious dimension of the concept habitus allows significant advances on models of culture as primarily a matter of invention and performance. By contrast, Mahmood’s (2005, 135ff.) use of the term “habitus,” which reaches back to an earlier, Aristotelian usage, divests it precisely of what is most innovative about it. The Aristotelian usage makes of the habitus a conscious discipline in moral virtue. While this modification renders the concept usable for her enterprise of studying Islamic modernist projects of pietism, at the same stroke it loses its usefulness in the social sciences for describing the full range of socialization, including the process by which culture becomes “second nature.” I have tried to strengthen precisely these meanings by exploiting the proximity of the term “habitus” to the term habitatio in order to highlight the fact that socialization is socialization into a place and a region through a process of dwelling in it. The concept draws our attention to the acquisition of broad social patterns that are shared across social groups similarly situated. “The body of habit,” on the other hand, is uniquely tailored to the life history of an individual. It is the acquisition of a particular assemblage of familiarizations, of abhiyāsā and paḷakkam, which shift and alter over a lifetime. Both concepts crucially draw our attention to the centrality of bodily engagement in social practices if these are to become lived incorporations. Yet of the two, Bourdieu’s overall theoretical framework is less easily generalized to the extent that it is tied to the project of Marxism and class



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revolution. Such a commitment will not allow him, for example, to grant a fundamental agency to bodily understandings of the world. Although there are many examples in his work where the body is a site of competency and negotiation with the world, this tendency finds itself overridden by the imperatives and orientations of his politics. As with other modern projects, his Marxism orients him in quite the opposite direction. That which is made bodily, that which is taken for granted, becomes that which is in the service of power. The subject is led by virtue of embodiment to fundamentally misrecognize the conditions of his or her existence. If embodiment is beyond the grasp of cognition, it must, according to this definition, be beyond the reach of understanding and is therefore secure from any fundamental challenge and change. In this sense, the body works only in the service of domination, whether it be the domination of the masculine sex (Bourdieu 1998) or of a particular social class (Ram 2002). Bourdieu is well-known for integrating agency into his account of social practices. For this innovation his work is often included in the canon of poststructuralism. But as a result of the fundamentally negative role played by the body, this agency remains an entirely conscious agency. His use of the phenomenological heritage enables him to lower the requirements posed of agency, turning down the volume from the level of choice and decision to that of strategies and strategizing. Men and women continually adjust their moves in elaborate anticipation of the moves from other parties. His analogies with games of chess and boxing (Bourdieu 1977, 11) are more than analogy. With Marxism orienting the analysis of the social, social life can be little more than maneuverings in securing a little more cultural capital or, as in Bourdieu’s later work, in establishing greater forms of distinction from other classes and class fractions. The phenomenology makes it a more sophisticated Marxism, one that extends the reach of the analysis and fine-tunes it. Bourdieu’s attention to the strategic use of time in gift exchange and, with it, the reintroduction of a conscious agency into anthropological gift theory must rank as among the finest analyses of its kind. But as an ingredient of his Marxism, the analysis cannot but raise the bar as to what constitutes genuine change. Although Bourdieu seldom spells this out, what lies behind his apparent inability to concede change is not a static social theory but a very high expectation of what real change would look like. Bourdieu may not have adhered to Leninist Marxism’s insistence on the necessity for revolutionary theory and for a tight, highly conscious party organization. But he did continue to maintain the necessity for a demasking, scientific theoretical perspective on experience, which is otherwise capable of delivering only a “misrecognition” of the real conditions of our existence.

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Resituating the “Romance of Resistance” In moving between examples as diverse as pietist Islam and revolutionary Marxism I have sought to highlight certain continuities between projects otherwise opposed to one another. If we are to gain a better sense of the reach and fundamental sweep of human agency, we cannot derive it from these highly politicized modern projects. Already they presuppose far too much precisely on the question of human agency. The contemporary predilection for the “romance of resistance” (Abu-Lughod 1990)—a romance that shows no signs of abating—must be interpreted as a watered-down version of an enduring political paradigm. With the political defeat of the vision of a total and liberating revolution, a vision that enjoyed resurgence in the 1970s, Marxism subsequently retreated to newer, less-ambitious aspirations. I have suggested that in Bourdieu it remained as an unspoken assumption, silently raising the bar for what would constitute “real” change. In other variants of the retreat of the Left, aspirations shrank to more minimal requirements. But unlike the aspiration for a revolution that was clearly recognizable as a political goal, these new, minimal versions of politics became easily conflated with a description of the basic elements of human agency itself. “Resistance” became the starting point for all conceivable forms of human agency. It continued to nurture a problematic in which power formed the sum total of human existence. The exercise of resistance was the minimum quantum of agency that could be ascribed to those who were disadvantaged by power, to the subaltern and the marginalized. Foucault’s reformulations of power provided the most sophisticated version of this new orientation. Seeking to move away from the overunified theories of power inherited from Marxism and relocating power in a proliferation of sites, he tried to reconceive agency as something that occurred within these sites. Yet this potentially productive insight was reduced, in its popularized version, to the agency of “resistance.” The aphorism “Where there is power, there is resistance” was taken up and repeated generally like a mantra despite the fact that this was probably one of the weakest formulations in Foucault’s oeuvre. The search for “resistance,” itself but a downscaling of the older Left problematic, carried over many of the same problems. The master question is produced at the end of every analysis, always with the breathless air of conjuring an unsuspected rabbit out of a hat—Is this phenomenon resisting power or is it reproducing power? Yet it is only a variant, duly downsized to suit the times, of the older Marxist question, Is this consciousness irretrievably trapped within bourgeois or “feudal” ideology, or is it potentially revolutionary?



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We have seen that the scholarship on possession has been beset by this question since the late 1960s. With the introduction of “the body” into social theory, the body is now answerable to the same master question. In her fine ethnography of women who tour Tamil Nadu as stage actresses, Susan Seizer (2005) characterizes as “road work” the initiatives exercised in order to maintain the norms of chaste behavior expected of “good” women. Returning from engagements in the early hours of the morning, alighting at public bus stations, and walking home along the road, she describes her own gait as unconsciously adopting that of the woman she is traveling with, walking quickly, looking neither left nor right. In this and other acts, she persuasively sees the women as carving out small spheres of privacy that will allow them to maintain their respectability in public, male-dominated spaces. Then comes the sobering moment of truth, which all our ethnographic subjects have to face sooner or later. Is the actresses’ “road work” everyday resistance? Is this resistance capable of transforming the consciousness of the actresses and the dominant categories? Or is it adaptive and collaborative with dominant power relations? Does it serve to “reinscribe their own stigma,” or does it “actually effect fundamental change in the underlying circumstances of stigmatized Tamil women’s lives”? (Seizer 2005, 329). In her ethnography on Tamil rituals, Nabokov (2000, 97) similarly finds it “hard to say what is fully or finally liberating for [women] about Tamil exorcisms.” The ritual treatment is not liberating for the woman, she concludes, because all the preconditions for full and final liberation are missing. The ritual is “neither spontaneous nor voluntary nor even conscious” (97). Other anthropologists are predisposed to find resistance writ large in subaltern Tamil culture (e.g., Kapadia 1995). But whether anthropologists detect an oppressive wider culture or a resistant subculture, the problem is the same in both cases. Both responses derive from modern political traditions that demand too much of human subjects to qualify as agential—nothing less than a liberation both “full” and “final” will do. Acts must be entirely spontaneous, voluntary, and entirely conscious. It is hard to imagine what act if any would satisfy such criteria. One may ask whether such a vision of liberation is even desirable. Meanwhile, those who wish to rescue their subjects from the perdition of nonagency cannot but busy themselves with the search for resistance. From Modernity to Possession and Back: Understanding a Phenomenon as Distinct from Knowing a Phenomenon In this book I have used my exploration of possession as a guide to locating a number of powerful predispositions that run through academic theory,

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frequently fed by wider projects of emancipatory and left-liberal politics. My approach to the relationship between possession and modernity is therefore quite different from the one that has been traced by a number of influential ethnographies where possession figures as an index or concrete expression of the tensions introduced by capitalism into a precapitalist culture. In some cases, as in the factories of Malaysia (Ong 1987), the arrival or consolidation of capitalism takes the form of new relations of production and new disciplines of work. In others, the focus is on the new migratory patterns of men (Boddy 1989). Taussig’s (1997) ethnography describes a cult of the spirit queen that directly and mimetically amplifies different qualities of the modern state. Each of the two moments of possession he distinguishes mimes a quality of the state. The still, deathlike body of the entranced subject mimes the imagery and statuary of dead heroes of the state, while the volatile body of possession mimes the state’s invocations of “the pueblo” (166–167). Two other ethnographies follow in Taussig’s footsteps in this respect. Tsing’s (1993) ethnography, set in South Kalimantan, describes a cult of the diamond queen, whose discourses seek to mime and thus to enter the “national discourse on history and the state” (271; emphasis added). Morris’s (2000) mediums in northern Thailand produce mimetic forms of representation that assuage a uniquely modern elite appetite for nostalgia. These ethnographies all undertake to discern a direct relation between possession and modernity. While I have shown aspects of modernity at work in each woman’s experiences of possession, the significance of my project lies elsewhere. I have focused attention on the ways in which possession makes visible what modernity leaves out of its adjudications. One of the most substantial areas of experience the problematic of modernity leaves out of its formal adjudications is the world of spirits, ghosts, and deities. I have sought to show how productive are the lines of inquiry that are opened up by taking this world seriously. In this respect my undertaking resembles the work of Keller (2002). Keller addresses the phenomenon of possession and the agency of spirits and ancestor deities in order to question inherited philosophies of the subject. Postcolonial and feminist critiques have remained confined, Keller argues, by the premises of a humanist, anthropocentric secular Western framework. She urges us, instead, to embrace the fact that possessed women are made into the instruments of nonhuman agencies. However, my enterprise differs in some significant respects from that of Keller. It will help clarify my argument to bring this out further. Unlike Keller, I seek to soften her contrast between the worldview of secular Western intellectuals and that of religious communities in the non-Western world. Even where I have sought to incorporate the agency of spirits and ghosts, it



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is not in absolute contrast to a “West.” And unlike Morris (2000), I do not seek to bring the Western and non-Western worlds into the same frame by showing that spirit possession, everywhere and anywhere, is today thoroughly integrated into modern regimes of representation and technology. I have suggested, rather, that by taking seriously the worlds in which ghosts and spirits are real entities, we are helped to recognize experiences of presence that are available even in a “secularized” world. As long as we continue to reason and argue exclusively within the framework of the dominant humanist and rationalist traditions of thought, these dimensions will continue to remain obscured. While social theory must be regarded as a tradition in many respects dedicated to decentering the humanist subject, it has achieved such aims at the expense of magicality. In restoring this dimension I have sought assistance not only from the world in which possession can occur but also from the work of the phenomenological philosophers who direct our attention to the many areas of ordinary experience in which the division between subject and object falls away. The bridges I seek to build, or to reinforce, are erected not in the name of asking secular intellectuals to respect or tolerate an absolutely alien principle of difference but in order to show that there are aspects of existence, quotidian to such intellectuals, that can also be illuminated by something as unfamiliar as possession.3 Our socialization into the world of place, for example, and all that it contains, both human and nonhuman, has a magical force to it. I have tried to illustrate this by reference to the experience of migration. The immigrant or the long-term traveler discovers, if only by virtue of displacement, the power and magic of the place she is used to. In other parts of the book, I have taken the experiences of pregnancy as a point of reference. Both the afflictive phases of possession and the accommodation of spirits in that matter-of-fact way I have described have resonance with some aspects of pregnant embodiment. In rural Tamil Nadu, indeed, a strong empirical pattern connects female gynecological problems with spirit attacks. Keller (2002) describes the relationship of the possessed woman to the deity as that of a hammer or a flute to the one who wields the tool or instrument. She wishes to highlight the agency in receptivity, and her point is well taken. Furthermore, there are indeed many dimensions of human experience where we feel the force of the world as something invasive, alien, demanding, and quite outside our control. But were we to imagine ourselves exclusively as tools in the hands of a carpenter, possession would illuminate only one element in the ordinary range of human experience. However, possession is not, as we have seen, a unitary phenomenon. Once we cease to isolate it from the flow of temporality, it is possible to see that certain skills are developed. The

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medium’s agency goes beyond receptivity and extends to a probing at­tune­ ment to audiences, to their histories, and to the particularities of the ontology attributed to the deities to which she responds. In this sense, the agency of possession more closely resembles the agency of the carpenter or the musician rather than the instruments in their hands. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty use the carpenter and the musician in order to illuminate an agency that is very far from the originary agency attributed to Man as the wielder of tools, or to the romantic genius of the nineteenth-century European composer. In the flow of practice they describe, it would be futile to determine whether the agency should be attributed to the embodied skills and dispositions of the subject, to the instrument, to the materials she is working with, or to the larger project toward which she is oriented. Let us bring the example even closer to home for the possibly skeptical reader. If the duality of mind and body looms large in Western intellectual formulations, this duality does not necessarily reflect the range of experiences available even to the intellectual who upholds such a theory. In the course of writing a book—even a book that propounds a dualist model of mind and body—such an intellectual, if skilled, would have experienced occasions when the body seems to dissolve into the background, where the rest of the world falls away, foregrounding only the sensations of the keyboard, which turns into an extension of one’s fingers, and of the words on the computer screen, which seem to constitute the whole world. Yet even as one looks, fingers the keyboard, and listens to the rhythm of the words on the page, one is attuned to an indistinct murmur that comes from beyond the page, through the fissure between the page and the wider temporal and spatial horizon of the chapter, and, even more indistinctly, from a space impossible to locate, as a sequence of intimations of the book one is writing. I have argued that if we cease to limit ourselves to the intellectual formulations of Western rationalism, secularism, and the political projects of emancipation and look to a wider range of experiences even within modernity, we can find much that is in a continuum with possession. By attending to such experiences from our own daily lives, finding a language that will do them justice, we can build up in ourselves an understanding of possession. The purely intellectual goal of producing ethnographic knowledge of possession in Tamil Nadu, by contrast, remains firmly anchored in an ethnographic “elsewhere,” or at best sustains a relationship of comparison. “Comparison” presupposes and requires a continued separation of two domains. Once the domains are separated in this manner, the best we can argue for is an ethical attitude of respect and tolerance for alterity and of critical reflection on one’s own differences from the “Other”—a term that has found new popularity in versions of



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postmodernism. “Understanding,” in contrast, presupposes a period of bodily involvement and familiarization on the part of the ethnographer and of the reader. Understanding can sustain a wider variety of orientations than knowledge. These include practical orientations. Anthropology is possibly unique among academic disciplines in that it depends on such understanding. It is developed in the anthropologist over many years of involvement with particular places, people, and bodily practices. Ethnography is replete with descriptions by anthropologists acknowledging the significance of such involvement, which are simultaneously practical and emotional (see, e.g., Desjarlais 1994, 27; Seremetakis 1994; Throop 2012). Yet these moments of insight are easily overlooked by intellectualist theories of knowledge and therefore require much more by way of explicit recognition and integration, particularly in an era in which scientistic and management paradigms have the power to define “research.” Considerations such as these qualify the way in which we understand quotidian experiences—as well as self-conscious modern projects. There is nothing in the approach I have taken that requires us to acknowledge a binary opposition between rationality and irrationality, or between emancipatory politics and the accommodation to existing structures of power. The alternative hypotheses nurtured by minor practices such as possession are to be treated not as alternative answers to the problems set by dominant discourses but as ways of refreshing and renewing ourselves by attending to quite different aspects of human existence for a while. Far from requiring us to repudiate reason or emancipatory politics, such a move allows us to simply demote them a little, to cease to accord them the absolute intellectual and political primacy they so often demand. There is nothing to stop us from returning to these very traditions and projects with an enriched sense of what they entail. The detour through possession can afford us a new attunement toward that which is embodied, magical, and affective in even the most rationalist and emancipatory of modern projects. I have been enabled to revisit projects of Indian modernity, such as the discourses of demography and planning, which I had, in earlier times, described in entirely governmental terms (Ram 2001). Such an account gave me no way of understanding the affects that explode, as we have seen, even in the midst of the most prosaic of discourses in the form of frustration and disappointment. I am now able to do better justice to the fact that these projects are themselves sustained by affective involvement with the state on the part of intellectuals (Ram 2011b). Nationalism has relied heavily on middle-class involvement with the aesthetics of music and dance (Ram 2011a). The Self-Respect Movement of Tamil Nadu, with its avowed opposition to ritual and religion, has depended crucially on the alliterative and rhyth-

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mic components of language (Ram 2009b). What is valued in intellectuals characteristic of the movement, who are orators, playwrights, scriptwriters, and actors, is their rhetorical skill, especially those skills directly productive of affect through language. The movement has relied even more heavily on the magic of cinema. In the world of cinema, of cinema heroes and fan clubs, which double as a political cadre, the politics of self-respect attracted to itself all the devotionalism that is taken to be the preserve of language nationalism in Tamil Nadu—often a rival project (Ram 2009b). Emancipatory projects can be enriched by their acknowledgment of such dimensions. If today young Dalit women such as Amuda speak the language of the Self-Respect Movement (“If we scratched your body and scratched ours, you would find that our blood is the same, no different”), it is because the rhetoric of the movement has traveled in the form of images and aphorisms and not simply as intellectual discourses. The study of possession, if allowed to disorder habitual categories of thought, can reveal unsuspected dimensions of familiar movements and practices and so complicate wider debates over modernity.

Notes

Chapter 1: Visible and Invisible Bodies 1. Many of the vignettes presented in this segment have been published in Ram 2001, 2010a, and 2011b. I have not attempted elsewhere, however, to consider this material in a framework that brings together Gramsci’s framework with that of phenomenology. 2. For reasons of space, I am unable to discuss the women’s movement traditions in my account of family planning and state intellectuals, although this tradition provides the inspiration for much of my critique. However, I have published on this elsewhere (Ram 1998b, 2008a, 2009a, 2009b). Activist discourses of the women’s movement in Tamil Nadu and in India more generally keep alive a discursive constellation of meanings that draw on the political traditions of socialism, Gandhian politics, and the tradition of the Self-Respect Movement. These traditions connect the meanings of contraception with a broader understanding of female emancipation rather than with population control and rationality. 3. By the late 1990s, this image already appeared redolent of an earlier, shared era of cultural modernity. Writing in 1998, Mary John contrasts it with the new image of contraception that had arrived in metropolitan India: the massive billboards for the Kamasutra condom showing a “semi-nude young couple in an apparently heightened state of sexual arousal, accompanied by an equally sensational text along the lines of ‘For Your Pleasure’ ” (377). However, the invitation to join the party is a selective one. For those designated as “the rural poor,” it is “family planning” as state policy rather than “pleasure,” as projected by corporate advertising that continues to exercise greater force.

Chapter 2: Minor Practices 1. There is little scope to explore Siddha medicine in this book. For present purposes, I will simply describe it as a southern Indian variant of the better-known Ayurvedic medicine. 2. Of the complex of five “landscapes” or poetic situations, one of the two principal

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forms of classical poetry in the “pre-bhakti, pre-Pallava” age of Tamil literature, Zvelebil (1992, 250) has no doubt “that the model is ‘original’ Tamil, in the sense that it has not borrowed from any other source; it is indigenous to the Tamil land.” The killi plant associated with the goddess is also said to belong to the dry palai tinai, or “landscape,” thus marking it as part of this complex. Zvelebil’s statement is not to be taken to mean (as he points out) that there was a time in which “Sanskritic” elements were not at all to be found in Tamil culture (255). 3. The work on Tamil and southern Indian folk religion in its ongoing tensions and collaborations with Sanskritic culture is a rich and ongoing field of scholarship—see in particular the work of Hiltebeitel (1988) on the assimilation of Draupadi, the heroine of the Mahabharata, into the folk worship of Ammaṉ, and that of Narayana Rao (1986, 1991) and Shulman (1989).

Chapter 3: Possession and the Bride 1. In this and the succeeding chapter, I revisit two key case studies from fieldwork in Kanyakumari in the 1980s. I have written about both in Mukkuvar Women (Ram 1991b). 2. The heroine wonders whether the shamanic healer will discover that her illness is really lovesickness: “My friend! When my mother, on account of my ‘illness,’ arranges for the vēlaṉ to come, will that vēlaṉ be able to find out about my affair with the lord of the fragrant country . . . ?” (Hardy 1983, 138). 3. In India, we have a much earlier example of such work. Irawati Karve’s Kinship Organisation in India (1953) undertook to redraw the “kinship map of India” from women’s point of view. She argued that the northern system of kinship isolates women by seeking as marriage partners men who are separated as far as possible from the girl’s family by kinship, by “blood,” as well as by residence and status. In the south, by contrast, where marriage repeats and strengthens existing kinship bonds, “the distinction between the father’s house and the father-in-law’s house is not as sharp as the north. . . . A girl’s behaviour in her husband’s family is much freer” (Karve 1994, 71). 4. Spirits retain other characteristics of the dead man or woman as well. I had thought that I was unique in experiencing enormous difficulties with the smell of fish, which suffuses the coastal fishing villages. I soon learned that other “inlanders” shared this problem, to such an extent that even the spirits of inlanders were seldom able to tolerate the coastal environment. Coastal spirits, by contrast, have no such problem. They may even be attracted by fishy smells. Girls are not allowed to eat fish during their first menstruation: the spirits, who would be attracted to them and to their blood in any case, would be excited even further by the odor of fish coming through in the blood. 5. See Schuler 2009 for a complete text and translation of the narrative. 6. I have applied diacritics to caste names such as Veḷḷāḷar where I am translating or paraphrasing a Tamil text or recitation. They are dropped outside this context. 7. Death stories usually preserve the gender of the murder victim in the gender of the avenging deity. Male heroes turn into various kinds of māṭans, or “male demons.” Women turn into demon goddesses. The editors and translators of the Tamil epic are also struck by



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this anomaly and devote some time to speculating on what the reasons for the deviation might be (Nirmala Devi 1987, xvi–xvii). 8. This does not necessarily mean that rural women reject sterilization for this reason alone. Instead, their adjudications are based on a complex assessment of a changing configuration. The same woman went on to argue, for example, that young women today lack the strength to bear as many children as the women of her generation. She cited the presence of pesticides and fertilizers in the paddy that she and other agricultural women laborers are involved in planting, transplanting, and weeding. Rice consumed with this “medicine” (maruntu) in it sapped women of their strength. Given such circumstances, sterilization after fewer babies seemed the most viable option. 9. Translation by Arumugam Kandiah, a Tamil scholar resident in Sydney who worked with me in translating selections from Tamil texts relevant to my research. 10. It is important to recall that de Beauvoir made her original intervention precisely at this point in the argument, exploiting the tension between the open-ended nature of “human” existence as elaborated by Heidegger and Sartre and the “closed” nature of patriarchal constructions of woman as wife and mother.

Chapter 4: The Abject Body of Infertility 1. I have described elsewhere (Ram 1999) the lures of such anthropological descriptions for the reader, especially for the diasporic Tamil reader such as myself. 2. Similarly, the house where I lived continued to be referred to as Colombo Vītu, or “Colombo House,” despite the many years that had lapsed since the family had lived there. 3. According to church parish records, some 30 to 50 percent of marriage partners belong to the same fishing village, whereas over 90 percent of marriage partners from Katalkarai Ūr were recruited from within the district. See Ram 1991b for details. 4. Katalkarai Ūr is the pseudonym I adopted in my earlier ethnography (Ram 1991b) of this fishing village in Kanyakumari District. 5. The reader may wish to return to the discussion in chapter 2, “Indian Cultural Marxism on Folk Religion,” on Sontheimer (2004) and his crisp delineation of the distinctive features of “folk” Hinduism. 6. The distinct phases I am describing are the result of my own observation, and I have not seen them conceptualized as such. Blackburn (1988, 41) notes that “the verbal level of possession” in oracular mediums “is still dependent on the kinetic; the dance must precede the speech in order to establish its veracity.” There is also evidence of such distinctions as part of the conceptual vocabulary of Tamil ritual. In his ethnography of ritual performances such terukkūttu, in which possession plays a valued part in bringing the deity into presence, Frasca (1990) distinguishes three “concentric, three-dimensional spheres” of performance. Katai refers to the story enacted by the performers, that is, to the narrative material, implicitly shared by audience and performers. Pāṭṭu, which usually means “song” in Tamil, in this context means the sung performance of the katai and is regarded as a more developed version of pēccu, or “speech.” Kūttu, which Frasca places as the most encompassing of the layers, refers to the enactive or dramatic element of the ecstatic ritual.

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7. These differences in turn have tended to create for women a different range of experiences of marriage in the north and the south. Although this is crucial to the examination of gender and possession, I refer the reader to Ram (1991b), which contains an overview of the literature. See Uberoi 1994 for a useful collection of papers on marriage and kinship. These differences are not to be romanticized in terms of the absence or presence of patriarchal arrangements. It is rather as if the patriarchal dilemma, posed by the question of what is to be “done” with the prospect of an unmarried sexualized girl, has been dealt with rather differently, according to the “Dravidian” set of kinship orientations, which conducts parents to a safe port or destination for the girl, already assured of close kin as potential affines. Such reassurance allows, I speculate, a space for more celebratory attitudes on the part of the social order. But see Ram 2007 on the laments of older Dalit agricultural women over having been prematurely “plucked” in marriage while still buds. 8. For Tamil Nadu, see Good 1991; Kapadia 1995; Baker Reynolds 1978; Ram 1991b, 1998a, 2007; Trawick Egnor 1980; and Harman 1989. For northern India, see Wadley 1980; for Sri Lanka, see Obeyesekere 1981; McGilvray 1998; and Kapferer 1991. For Nepal, see Allen 1982; Kondos 1982. 9. The following story, which I read as one among many Icakki/Neeli stories in a folklore collection (Perumāḷ 1990, 191n14) turns out to be a central Icakki story of worship in Kanyakumari, telling of how she came to the region, and therefore invested with considerable ritual depth (Schuler 2009, 257, 325). I use it to convey the demonic flavor of this goddess and her close association with mantiravātis: In Thengam Pudoor there lived a powerful mantiravāti of the Pandaram community of flower weavers. His wife was pregnant. She had no parents or relatives. The mantiravāti was unable to find any servant who could help her through the pregnancy. He therefore invoked the goddess Icakki with his mantras, and changing her into a charming sixteen-year-old by driving a wooden wedge [kambu] of a specific tree into her head. The girl worked diligently and swiftly at all the heavy tasks—fetching water, pounding grain and rice into flour, getting firewood. The mantiravāti had warned his wife not to get too familiar with the new servant, not to touch her or talk to her. One day the girl came back with a load of firewood and said to the wife: “Ammā, the wood has hurt my head. Please take a look.” The wife, looking at her sweet face, examined the head and found a splinter buried. The girl pleaded for her to remove it and the wife did so. Immediately the girl became the fearsome Icakki, laughing horribly. Throwing the wife on the ground, she tore open the stomach, ate the fetus, and wore the entrails as a necklace. The mantiravāti on returning knew that Icakki would destroy the entire village and so built a temple for her to reside in.

Chapter 5: Learning Possession, Becoming Healer 1. In the following chapters I go on to problematize the sense in which these women can be said to simply “heal.” They also, and more centrally, dispense justice.



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2. Similar categories of women, known as sastra karayas, are encountered also in Sri Lanka. Their rites, Kapferer (1997, 48) tells us, are of their own invention, are performed in the home, and they “ground their knowledge in direct experience.” 3. The difference in spelling of this key concept between myself and Trawick Egnor is because I am adhering strictly to the orthography from Tamil to English as used by the Tamil Lexicon. 4. I have also heard them referred to as kaṇakku collaravā, “those who calculate the nature of one’s woes,” or possibly, “those who calculate the number of return visits needed to the deity.” Although in this chapter I often limit myself to describing mediumship as a matter of giving voice to a visiting deity or spirit, the modalities of performativity are far richer and sensorily elaborated. This is explored in the following chapter. 5. For some women, such as Mutamma, the description of “housewife” itself rings oddly given that Dalit women work as agricultural laborers, and Mutamma, indeed, has often been the sole breadwinner for the children. 6. This privilege is no longer absolute. The use of ultrasound by medical staff radically reroutes this privileged experiential knowledge. Staff and even the pregnant woman routinely look at the screen, whereas in India the prestige of medical staff and of new technology is such that the woman will typically not even be able to look at the screen herself (Victoria Loblay, Macquarie University, pers. comm.). 7. Ultimately, for Merleau-Ponty (1986, 212), the world in all its colors and sensory immediacy itself can be said to “possess” one—at least that would be truer than saying that we apprehend the world primarily through our thoughts, intentions, and projects. “I give ear, or look, in the expectation of a sensation, and suddenly the sensible takes possession of my ear or my gaze, and I surrender a part of my body, even my whole body, to this particular manner of vibrating and filling space known as blue or red.”

Chapter 6: Performativity in the Court of the Goddess 1. Much else could be said about the striking sense of urgency communicated by the audience at the screening of La curación, September 7, 2010, as part of the Sydney Latin American Film Festival. 2. The literature on southern Indian performance is extensive, particularly for Tamil Nadu. For an overview of the literature for Tamil Nadu, see O’Shea 2007. On music, see Weidman 2006. 3. I wish to thank all the colleagues from Anthropology, Sociology, and Philosophy who attended my presentation of the paper “ ‘Experience’: A Discredited Category, or a Necessary One? Phenomenology’s Contribution to a Revised Understanding of ‘Experience’ and Its Uses for the Social Sciences.” The paper opened the Anthropology and Phenomenology series of Macquarie University’s Anthropology Department on March 3, 2011. I have used the presentation and the stimulating discussion that followed to clarify some of the arguments of this chapter. A further complexity lies in the fact that the concept of erasure as used by Derrida is taken from the same phenomenological heritage I propose to use as an alternative—the phenomenological method of “bracketing.” In this method,

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concepts central to our intellectual traditions have brackets placed around them. However, the spirit of the method is different from that of deconstruction. Heidegger does not, for instance, seek to place any concept to remain in suspension forever. Rather, he seeks to show that a dominant tradition such as science, for example, is not the most primary of attitudes with which we understand the world. One is encouraged to return to these second-order concepts with a new and enriched awareness of the specific cultural and historical genealogy that has given rise to them. 4. See discussion of the category of tōcam in Kapadia 1995, 82ff. Astrological horoscopes based on the configuration of the planets at birth and at the time of first menstruation are consulted to ensure compatibility of bride and groom. Mutamma is warning the groom’s father that the girl he has in mind has a fatal flaw in her horoscope and will bring death if she weds his son. 5. For comparable material from the South Arcot District of Tamil Nadu, this time with a male medium who speaks as the goddess, see Nabokov 2000, 50–51. 6. In terms of Foucault’s central distinction between “subjectification” in the mode of sovereign power and “subjectification” in a regime of modern disciplinary power where there is no singular source (Foucault 1979), Mutamma’s performance fits clearly into the sovereign model of power. It emanates from one central source. 7. See Schieffelin 1996 for an engaging and revealing account, set in a very different society, of the risks of failure undertaken by spirit mediums. 8. The list is extensive. For other references, see Ram 1991b. 9. I am restricting myself to the philosophers I am most familiar with. As Gadamer (1985, 269) tells us, the concept of “horizons” “has been in use in philosophy since Nietz­ sche and Husserl to characterise the way in which thought is tied to its finite determination. . . . A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far enough and hence overvalues what is nearest to him. Contrariwise, to have an horizon means not to be limited to what is nearest, but to be able to see beyond it.” 10. Two papers by Throop (2009; Throop and Murphy 2002), discovered since writing this chapter, reinforce many of the points I make. We diverge on our assessment of Bourdieu.

Chapter 7: The Nature of the Complaint 1. This segment draws on material in Ram 2007. 2. Schömbucher (2011, 42–43) provides the transcript of a medium in the Teluguspeaking part of southern India, which conveys further the vivid elaboration of suffering by the goddess. The listening sufferer says “hm” as she listens, her response a form of recognition that the goddess knows everything and can give words to her own fleshly suffering: 60 ammō, if you ask me to explain your desperation 61 for the past 15 days, until this day, anna 62 olē, your body to you [hm] 63 will become heavy, daughter [hm]



Notes to Pages 209–251

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64 your body will become water to you [i.e., weak], daughter [hm] 65 your legs will become weight to you [hm] 66 your head will become weak to you 67 early mornings, after dawn, ammā 68 your desperation 69 in your eyes, it will be pitch-dark 70 when you are full of that 71 your head is going round and round like a wheel, cimmā 72 by putting your head down 73 you are remaining like that, ammā . . . 78 your four veins 79 are being dragged and pulled 80 in your desperate situation 81 your twelve bones are in such a bad condition, daughter 82 in your memory, cimmā 83 the burning sensation is coming from outside 84 it occurred to you 85 as if somebody squeezes your throat 86 you sink down, daughter. 3. Desjarlais (1996) provides useful comments on the persistence of this construction within anthropology. 4. There are definite resonances in my material with earlier feminist debates over Carol Gilligan’s influential text In a Different Voice (1982). There she argues not only for the centrality of relationships in women’s moral reasoning but also for the ways in which this model in turn qualifies her colleague Kohlberg’s model of moral development. The latter, based on universalist norms of impartiality, had found women lagging in their moral development. It lies beyond the scope of this book to enter into this debate, and I plan to revisit it in future work. But it is significant that Schuler’s (2009, 222) study of Icakki Ammaṉ’s rituals, like the present work, invokes Gilligan’s “ethics of care” to describe the nature of justice dealt with by this goddess.

Chapter 8: Possession and Social Theory 1. My thanks to Ian Bedford for locating these passages for me. 2. An extensive literature now traces the reduction of lived embodied practices to beliefs held purely in the mind and its implications in particular for the impoverished representations of other religions. See, for example, Needham 1972; Asad 1993; Lopez 1998. 3. A stimulating panel entitled Learning Possession held at the European Association of Social Anthropologists conference in Ljubljana 2008 gave focus to a new orientation toward the study of possession as the study of a form of learning. The proceedings and my paper on motility and gender in possession are forthcoming in 2012 in a special issue of Ethnos, vol. 77, no. 2.

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Chapter 9: Possession and Emancipatory Politics 1. At a pioneering dance conference held at Jadavpur University in 2006 I was startled, after the conference, to have my feet touched in that practiced fleeting gesture of reverence to a guru by a postgraduate student of dance. She had studied at Nalanda Nrtyakala Mahavidyalaya—the leading university institution for classical dance training and theory, located in Mumbai. The student had subsequently studied postmodern theory of dance at the University of Roehampton, and her paper expressed the sharp conflict in modes of pedagogy she had experienced (see Ahuja 2010). Although the paper does not deal with the conflict at the level of the body already trained in guru-shishya relations, the practiced nature of the gesture itself spoke volumes. 2. See, for example, Helen Keane’s (2006) perceptive contrast between the varied modes in which smoking may be experienced and the dominant discourse on addiction in public health campaigns. 3. Seligman and Kirmayer (2008, 33–34) are critical of psychiatric and anthropological approaches to “dissociation” for their tendency to “focus almost exclusively on its most intense or dramatic forms,” when in fact “non-pathological or normative dissociative experiences are ubiquitous and reflect normal variations in consciousness due to functional shifts in attention and information processing.” I hope to have shown that it is not necessary to methodologically choose between the extraordinary and the quotidian.

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Index

Abhinaya darpanā: model of performance aesthetics, 246. See also Nātyaśāstra aesthetic model of performance; Rasa theory abhiyāsā (attunement), 256–257; as accommodation and adjustment, 243, 261; of immigrant to host society, 267–268 abortion: of female fetuses, 124; spontaneous, 126. See also miscarriage Abu-Lughod, Leila, 235, 236, 270–271 action: improvisational nature of, 180; purposive (Heidegger), 175–177, 180–181; strategic (Bourdieu), 181, 269. See also “body of habit” affect/emotions, 30, 44, 105, 106, 145, 162–163, 205, 207; affective projects, 25; affective turn in the humanities and social sciences, 6, 302; attachment of state intellectuals to modernity, 31, 34–36; and attention (Durkheim), 229, 243; central importance of, 179–180, 229, 243; embodied emotion, 155–156, 179, 219, 225 (see also MerleauPonty, Maurice); in performance, 155–156, 218, 246–247, 259 (see also Rasa theory); rationality (Milton), 103; responding to violent death, 102–103; social theory not adequately accounting for, 6, 73, 105; Sorge (care) (Heidegger), 20, 103, 117, 221, 222, 229; in tragedy, 102, 103 agency, 10, 71; as attribute of intellectuals, 38; conventional model of, 143–144; defined, 36–37; epic heroines having only one means of, 97–98; in European mythic texts, 143; in female mediums, 144–146, 148–149, 154–155; feminist analysis of,

261–268; habit and agency, 260–262; hierarchy of, 252; issue of choice and consent, 261, 263–266; liberal political theory, 230–231; modernist conception of, 38 (exaggeration of will), 264–265; performance practice as model of, 259–260; as planning, 37–38; political agency, 263; in pregnancy (attunement to demands of), 150–154; in receptivity, 155, 273–274; as residing in spirit, 130; skill development, 154–155. See also paḻakkam Ahmad, A., on agency and piety, 267 Alex, G., 220 alliance model of marriage, 93, 94, 97 Althusser, Louis, on the temporality of the revolutionary, 176–177 ambiguity in possession, 145, 226–227. See also existential ambiguities Ammā, Lakshmi, of Pernaka, 127 Ammaṉ (Hindu goddess): an epithet of Icakki Ammaṉ, 44, 46, 50; an upper-caste goddess, 45–46; as wholly good, 46 Amuda, 276 Annadurai, C. N., 36 Ᾱṇṭāḷ (Tamil goddess), 111 anti-Brahman movement, 58 anticolonial thought and movement, 31, 33, 35. See also colonialism aṟivu (self-knowledge), 202 āṭṭam, in possession, 112–113 attunement. See abhiyāsā “auspiciousness,” 116, 130, 247, 261 authoritative models of knowledge, 168–169 Ayurveda/Ayurvedic medicine, 40, 44, 252

305

306

Index

“backward” identities/“backwardness,” 16, 23–24, 30, 40, 55. See also caste and class “Basic Christian Communities” projects, 13 Battersby, Christine, 150 Benjamin, Walter, 104 bhakti devotion, 111, 162, 111 Bharadwaj, A., 40–41 Bharata Nāṭyam performances, 247 biomedicine, 14; constructions of pregnancy, 152 (see also pregnancy) birth control. See contraception; family planning; fertility control Blackburn, Stuart, 88, 89, 133, 253, 279n.6 Boddy, Janice, 130, 238–239, 240–241 bodily movement: agency and, 215–216; continuities of (the “body of habit”), 249; personhood expressed through, 234–238; of women in possession, 49, 245–248, 250, 251, 271 (see also female possession) bodily secretions, 114; breast milk, 118–119; uterine blood, 118–119. See also menstruation/menstrual blood body, the: alteration of bodily boundaries, 2, 150–152, 189–190; bodily memory, 104–105; bodily resistance, 258; bodily understanding, 250; body as a container, 233, 234; mutilation of, 97, 104; temporality of bodily involvement, 260–261. See also embodiment body of fertility, 18–19 “body of habit” (Merleau-Ponty), 177–180, 268 Bollywood. See Indian “goddess cinema” Bourdieu, Pierre, 161, 186, 235–236, 243, 252; on agency as strategy, 181, 269; on embodiment, 269; on habitus, 180–182, 267 (see also habitus); Marxism in, 268–269; Outline of a Theory of Practice, 182; “Response to Throop and Murphy,” 182 brahmacharya, 26, contrasted with female virginity, 117 Brahman caste, 243; colonial construction of, 58; dominant agriculturalists in Tamil, 58; marriage in, 92–93; possession among Brahman brides, 84, 228, 241–243; treatment of female puberty, 120. See also caste and class bride: as a goddess, 121; possessed by goddess(es), 73, 84, 237; removed from her maternal home, 107–109, 200, 201–220; “ripening” in marriage, 202; status of, 7–8, 9–10, 20, 202. See also patrilineal marriage and kinship; Santi of Katalkarai Ūr; Vijaya (Kanyakumari bride)

Bulbeck, C., 261 Butalia, Urvashi, 265 Butler, Judith: on abjection, 122–128; Gender Trouble, 179, 243, 258; problems with model of gender as performance, 243–244, 245 Cambridge Women’s Group, analysis of female possession, 79, 84–85 cāmi āṭi (god-dancers), 253 Caṅkam poetry, 78, 97–98 Carman, 115–116 caste and class: author’s experience of, 42–44, 249, 250–251; “backward” identities and “backwardness,” 16, 23–24, 30, 40, 55; caste and possession, 241–243; caste as more than conscious strategy, 242–243; caste distinctions in Hindu practices, 42–43, 51–52, 228; caste ideology, 219; class, 268–269; class and privileges in relation to the past, 40–44; class inequality, 18, 22; intercaste relations, 95, 218–219, 220, 221; lower castes, 23, 52, 118, 124, 162, 171, 208; performance of caste, 242–243; social attitudes toward, 4; supraindividual expression of, 230; traditional hierarchies, 35; upper-caste practices, 41, 241–243; Western conceptions of hierarchy and, 149–150; the working class, 162, 213; working-class women, 124–125. See also Brahman caste; rural culture; subaltern classes Catholicism, 208–210 Catholic mediums, parallels with Hindu mediums, 190–193. See also female mediums; mediumship Catholic saints: St. Anthony, 138; St. Michael, 133–136, 190, 191–192; St. Sebastian, 44, 137 Chatterjee, Partha: on anti-colonial thought and nationalism, 31, 32, 60, 213; on governmentality in rural India, 35; on planning, 33 Chennai, 7, 19–20; possession in, 59, 63, 241 Chesler, Phyllis, Women and Madness, 79 childbirth, 22, 124, 148; bodily boundary changes and demands of, 151, 206, 207; fertility control often imposed after, 16, 28; home birth vs. hospital birth, 14, 22; pollution attending, 116–117. See also maternity choice and consent, issue of, 261, 263–266 Christianity, 233. See also Catholicism; Catholic saints Christian model of possession, 227–231, 234

Index 307 Christian mysticism, 231, 232 Cilappatikāram, 93 cinema: magical aspects, 276. See also Indian “goddess cinema” cittar saints, 252–253 Cittavaittiya (Siddha medicine), 43, 252–253 Claramma (Nadar Catholic woman of Karingal), 43–44, 138 Clark-Decès, 205 clinical examinations, 21–22 Clough Patricia and J. Halley, 6 Cohen, E., on possession, 232–233 cōka katai (stories of suffering), 15. See also lament genre colonialism: colonial discourses, 158; political but not necessarily cultural dominance, 213 colonial modernity, 62–63 “common sense” (Gramsci), 233 comparison as method and limits of, 274–275 complaints: abandonment, 204; at the courts of goddesses and saints, 10, 138, 194–195; of crimes, 198; definition of, 194–195; divined by the medium, 195–196; of husband’s infidelity, 198, 202, 204–205; of illness (see healing); in-law problems or abuse, 200–201, 203; mothers neglected by children, 203–204; overwork, 201; personal and familial nature of, 198, 215; possession, 198, 199; premature marriages, 202–203, 204, 280n.7; removal from maternal home, 107– 109, 200, 201–220; reproductive problems and incapacities, 164, 198, 199 (see also infertility); sexual dysphoria or husband’s infidelity, 198, 202, 204–205; and the state system, 21, 22, 74; suffering and injustice of women’s lives, 199, 204–205. See also coka katai; injustice; lament genre conjunctures, 176–177 consciousness: as the central component of possession (accounts), 231–232; computeruse model of, 274; conscious reflection (in Heidegger), 176; decision-making and, 38; memory and, 232; opaque aspects of, 231; philosophies of, 3–4; prefamiliarity in possession, 182, 184–185, 188, 190; subjectivity, 3, 177, 240–241 (see also subjectivity); Western philosophic assumptions about, 80–82 Constantinides, 239 constructionist thought, 243–244; construction of, 121; construction of the female body,

119–120, 123; constructions of femininity, 249. See also by topic contraception, 29, 30, 36, 39, 277. See also fertility control; intrauterine devices (IUDs) courts of the goddesses and Catholic saints: complainants’ grievances (see complaints: at the courts of goddesses and saints); as Courts of Divine Law, 186–187, 194, 205–206, 227; performativity in, 157. See also female mediums; mediumship cross-boundary movement, and pre-familiarity, 189–190 cultural past, 40–41, 55 cultural transpositions between fields of practice, 185–188; habitus and, 188–190 culture: cultural dimensions of possession, 209; cultural Marxism (see under Indian Marxism); cultural past, 40–41, 55; culture as “second nature,” 268 Cuṭalai Māṭan (deity), 46, 50, 110 Dalit villages: agricultural communities, 7–8, 14, 125, 134; child socialization in, 220; consciousness of caste, 218–219; construction of the female body, 119–120, 123; Hindu mediums of, 253–254; older man’s nonverbal expression, 218; women of, 8, 276, 280n.7, 281n.4 Daniel, V., 149 darshan (devotion), 111; gazing at the deity, 183 Davar, B., and M. Lohokare, 67 death: of children and infants, 25, 30, 127; the good death of a woman (cumaṅkali), 101. See also violent death death stories, 109, 111, 115, 228, 292; associated with Icakki Ammaṉ, 93, 103, 107–109; of lovers or pairs in love marriages, 94–95; of women and men differing, 103, 111, 115, 116, 228; women’s death stories, 93, 96, 102, 214. See also violent death “deautomatization” process, 247–248 de Beauvoir, Simone, 101 de Certeau, Michel, 62–63, 68; on “minor practices,” 9, 210, 226; The Practice of Everyday Life, 130. See also minor practices deities, 1, 108, 109, 110, 113, 131, 145, 227, 228, 246; ancient, 53–54, 55; bloodthirsty, 56; possession by (see possession); Sanskritic and non-Sanskritic variations, 53, 55, 111. See also demons; goddesses; religious experience; and by name

308

Index

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 102–103 demographers, 22–25, 26; affective identification with state, 34; as makers of discourse, 25–27, 40, 47; as state intellectuals, 18, 39, 40, 41, 48 (see also state intellectuals); view of reproduction, 39, 53 demons: demonic world, 1, 229; demon possession, 89–90; exorcism of (Christian), 228–229; guardian deities, 109–110; in midcentury Ceylon, 229. See also possession “deprivation theory” (Lewis), 77–80 Derrida, Jacques, 161, 170, 172, 173, 194, 244, 281n.3; on the “metaphysics of presence,” 172 Deshpande, Satish, 33–34 Desjarlais, R., 6; and J. Throop, 174 divinity, fluidity of humanness and, 185–186. See also deities; demons; goddesses doctor-patient relationship, 21–22. See also medical professionals Doumato, Eleanor A., 78 dowry, 73–74, 75, 80. See also patrilineal marriage and kinship Dravidian movement, 35–36, 58, 59, 60; Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam parties, 59 Dravidian people, 61–62, 120, 280 dualism: intuitive, 233; mentalism/biologism, 39; mind-body separation, 233, 274 Dumont, Louis, 53, 99, 116, 121, 150 Durga (Hindu goddess), 49 Durkheim, Émile: on the centrality of emotion, 229, 243; collective embodied practices, 229; on possession, 239; on social practices as supraindividual, 229–230; The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 229, 239 Dutt, R. C., Economic History of India, 33 dwelling place: the habitus as, 189; socialization and, 189, 268, 273; socialization grounded in, 189, 268, 273 economy as affective project, 32–34 ecstasy, 231, 232; ekstasis (transcendence), 181–182; trance, 111 Egnor, Trawick, 95, 98, 200, 205 emancipatory discourse and activism, 252, 265, 266 embodiment: alteration of body boundaries, 151; body of fertility, 18–19; “body of habit” (Merleau-Ponty), 177–180, 268; Bourdieu on, 269; of the deity, 169–170; feminist alternatives to polarized accounts

of embodiment, 151–154; intercorporeality, 145–146; necessary for consciousness, 179; sensation, 146–147. See also body, the; female body; somatization emotion. See affect/emotions; phantoms/phantom experience “encompassment” (Dumont), 53, 99–100 Enlightenment, 43, 210, 229, 230 essentialism: critique of essentialism, 172, 243; essentialist politics in Tamil Nadu, 62, 189; problems with critique, 244 ethnography, 5; ethnographic encounter, shared orientations, 17–18; experience of the anthropologist in the field (see Ram, Kalpana); extraintellectual forces in scholarship, 225 existential ambiguities, 100–105 exorcism, in Christian model of possession, 228–229 experience: alternative account of, 174–182; critiques of and need for some version of, 174; importance of, 7; need for post-structuralists to take account of, 170–174 exteroceptive sensation, 248 family: complaints about familial relations, 198, 215; as economic unit, 32–33; kinship and power, 79–80; spacing children, 38–39. See also patrilineal marriage and kinship family planning: authoritarian aspects, 23, 24; official discourses and silent practices, 27–28, 32, 38; “prowoman” policies advocated, 27, 28. See also fertility control female body, 2, 7, 36, 81; alteration of bodily boundaries (universal), 150–152; attitude of health care providers toward, 21–23; bodily kaṭṭuppāṭū (discipline) imposed beginning with puberty, 244–245, 248; breast milk, 118–119; as fecund nature, 117 (see also fertility); gendered metaphors, 99; host to spirits and babies, 114–115; loathing of, 122–128; on medical display, 20–21; suppression of agency, 235–236, 244–245. See also bodily movement; bodily secretions; female sexuality; maternity; pregnancy female mediums: agency and, 142–148; connecting intimately with sovereign powers, 41, 133, 183, 192–193, 282n.2; crossregional comparisons, 254; development of skills, 154–155; emerging from suffering (Obeyesekere), 142–143; having no training, 253, 254–255; healing powers, 74, 130,

Index 309 133, 134–136, 138, 143, 145, 157, 158, 160, 163, 190; healing powers—becoming a healer, 132, 139 (see also by medium, e.g., Mutamma); intercorporeality of medium and spirit, 144–146; as kuṟi collaravā (those who speak the sign), 133; lacking cultural capital, 252–255; life stories support authenticity, 133–134; mimetic sensuous knowing and attunement, 255–257; parallels between Hindu and Catholic mediums, 190–193; prior experience of possession as affliction, 132–133; requiring spousal cooperation, 237 (see also husbands of mediums); transcending everyday life, 148 female possession: among upper castes, 92–93; appearance changes during, 236; bodily movement in, 49, 245–248, 250, 251, 271 (see also bodily movement); social gains in (Lewis), 77–78; temporary relief from powerlessness, 209; transition from victim to agent through, 237. See also female mediums; possession female sexuality: desire and tragedy, 94–95; heroines bestowing illicit sexual favors, 98–99 feminist analysis: of agency, 261–268; bodily morphology, 257–259; definitions of victimhood, 261–262, 266; phenomenological experiences and, 174; of possession as victim-behavior, 79, 84–85; and pregnancy, 150–151; sex and gender, 258; studies of religious cults, 239 (see also religious experience) fertility: as auspicious (artha and kama), 115, 116; body of fertility, 18–19; fertile womb as a source of power, 96–97; positive constructions of woman associated with, 117–120; as source of oppression (abjection), 122–128; unpredictable and arbitrary, 129–130; untimely loss of as injustice, 95–100. See also reproductive issues and problems fertility control: cash incentives, 25; compulsory aspect, 18–19, 23–24; contraception, 29, 30, 36, 39, 277; contraception—intrauterine devices (IUDs), 18–19, 21–22; a goal of the state, 32–33; vasectomy, 25, 29. See also intrauterine devices (IUDs); sterilization fertility problems. See infertility; reproductive issues and problems fertility ritual, Icakki Amman and, 46–51 fishing villages, 1, 8, 43, 65, 73, 106, 108, 136, 278, 279 Five Year Plan, Indian, 32–33

“folklore,” elite representations of, 64 “folk models” of phantom limb versus scientific model, 178 “folk” religion, 3, 278n.3; Marxist account of, 51, 54, 279; modernity and, 57–62; unresolved tensions with “high” culture, 52–54 Foucault, Michel, 9, 180, 270; on “governmentality,” 31–32; on silent practices, 27–28, 33; on state discourse, 66 Frasca, Richard, 246, 247, 279 Freud, Sigmund: on hysterical conversion, 208, 209–210; the language of confession, 210; on the unconscious, 210 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 248 Gandhi, Mahatma, 26, 34 Gell, Alfred, 247; Art and Agency, 155 gender: construction of, 121; gender distinctions in possession, 2; gendered death stories, 103, 111, 115, 116, 228; gender-specific life cycles, 97, 98–100 (see also women’s lives); performance of, 238, 243–244 gender inequality, 18, 71, 84, 253–255; abortion of female fetuses, 124; gendered metaphors, 99–100; hierarchal relations, 99–100 Geurts, Kathryn L., ethnography of Ghana, 235 goddesses: born and reborn after violent death, 52, 86–87, 89–92, 93, 102; celebrations for, 159–160; connected to injustice, 205–206; courts of (see courts of the goddesses and Catholic saints); iconographic poses(s), 184; language of (see language: of the goddess used by mediums); in popular culture (see Indian “goddess cinema”); as spirits of murdered women, 206; transformation of women into, 98, 120–121, 127, 185–186; as wild and volatile, 122, 128–131. See also Icakki Ammaṉ; Māta; non-Sanskritic deities; and by name goddess possession. See possession goddess shrines, 46–51, 74, 92; death stories of women at, 89–90 (see also violent death) Gold, Ann, 145 Gomati (Hindu medium in Mukkuvar village), 136–137 Graham, Hilary, 151–152 Gramsci, Antonio, 16, 17, 277n.1; on “common sense,” 214, 233; on modernity, 31; on “peripheries” of a metropolitan modernity, 38; on state intellectuals, 16–25, 30–31 (see also state intellectuals)

310

Index

Greek philosophy, the Logos, 233 Grey, John, 80 Grima, Benedicte, 204 Guha, Ranajit, 94, 213, 214 habitual body, 179 habituation. See paḻakkam habitus: Bourdieu on, 180–182, 267; divergence from Mahmood’s reversion to Aristotelian version, 268; as dwelling place, 189; mismatch between habitus and situation, 181–182, 183; patterned forms of perception, 188–189. See also Bourdieu, Pierre Halligan, Peter, 178–179 Hancock, Mary E., 228, 241–243 Harman, William, 121 Harper, Edward, 84 Hart, George, 97–98 healing, 190; divergence from regional traditions, 157–158; globalized understandings of, 157–158; local healers, 30; mediums as healers, 74, 130, 132, 133, 134–136, 138, 139, 143, 145, 157, 158, 160, 163, 190 (see also female mediums; mediumship) health programs, 13 Heidegger, Martin, 274; on death, 104; on ecstasy/transcendence in experience, 181–182; on emotions, 101, 103; genealogy of humanist understandings of “Man,” 233–234; phenomenological theory of, 173, 175; on the purposive nature of action, 177, 180–181; on Sorge (care), 20, 103, 117, 221, 222, 229 Hindu mediums, parallels with Catholic mediums, 190–193 Hindu religion, 184–185; author’s early socialization into, 45–46; caste distinctions in practice of, 42–43, 51–52, 228; colonialist theories of, 61–62; deities of antiquity, 53–54, 55; five components of Hinduism (Sontheimer), 51–52; Sanskrit deities, 49, 52, 54; syncretism, 53–54, 189 Hodges, Sarah, 36 honor: as a male affair, 236; in women (requiring restricted agency), 244–245 horizons, 236 human-divine transposability, 120–121; intercorporeality of medium and spirit, 145–146; transformation of women into goddesses, 98, 120–121, 127, 185–186 humanism, in the societal/individual relation, 230

husbands of mediums, Raja Mani (Nadar tradesman), 237–238 hysterical conversion/“hystericizations” (Freud), 208, 209–210. See also somatization hysterical dissociation, 65–66 Icakki Ammaṉ (Hindu goddess), 136; ambivalent character of, 227; as Ammaṉ, 44, 46, 50; antiquity of, 53–54; death stories associated with, 93, 103, 107–109, 111; defying agricultural kings, 56–57; fertility powers, 47–48; healing powers, 43–44, 49, 63; legend of, 47–49; reborn after violent death, 52, 86–87, 89–92, 93, 102; regional variation in name, 44–46, 108; rituals include yakshi (female figures), 206; shrines to, 46–51, 89–90, 92, 118; as wild and volatile, 128–129. See also goddesses illness, 100–101, 150, 198, 210 Indian feminist debates, 261–262. See also feminist analysis Indian “goddess cinema,” 64, 90, 186–187, 236–237, 238; Ammaṉ, 186–187; Namma vīṭu tēvam (The Goddess within Our Very Own Home), 185–186. See also Tamil film industry Indian Marxism, 262; on history and culture, 51, 54–57. See also Marxism Indian state, 24, 27–29, 32–35; appropriation of modernity, 34–35; Five Year Plan, 32–33. See also family planning; modernity; state Indrani (Dalit woman), life narrative, 200, 201–202 inequality: gender and, 253–255 (see also gender); social inequalities, 4, 23, 52, 118, 124, 162, 171, 208 (see also caste and class). See also injustice infant death and stillbirth, 30, 145 infant subjectivity, 215–216 infertility, 106; abuse and stigmatizing of, 124– 126; experience of, 239; not bearing sons as, 127–128; possession occurring in cases of, 238–239; as a problem of females and not males, 127; as spirit-induced malady, 130–131, 127; treatment of, 124–125 injustice: avenged in possession, 64, 90–92; based on class inequalities and state oppression, 198–199, 211–214; the body and, 214–217; as a primary rupture in intimacy, 205–208; the rupture of intimacy, 205–208; sociality and, 214–217; suffered by women

Index 311 in cinema, 185–187; suffered by women in life (see complaints: at the courts of the goddesses and saints; inequality; reproductive issues and problems; women’s lives); as untimely loss of fertility, 95–100; as untimely severance of a life in full flow, 227. See also justice intellectualism: Gramsci’s thesis explored, 30–31; in India, 37–38; in postcolonies, 38; in western philosophical critique, 36 intercaste relations, 95, 218–219; justice and, 220, 221. See also caste and class intercorporeality, 145–146, denial of in caste relations, 218 intrauterine devices (IUDs): Copper T, 6, 18, 19, 20, 21; IUD insertions at a health clinic, 18–19, 21–22; refusal to remove, 21. See also contraception in vitro fertilization, 124 Islam: and modern pietism, 266–268; as part of modern constructions of agency in politics, 38; tensions between popular and doctrinal, 266–267 IUDs. See intrauterine devices (IUDs) Iyer, Anantha Krishna, 120 Johnson, Mark, 150 justice, 10; associated with deities, 160–161, 227; bringing together earthly and divine justice, 217–221; Divine Justice (see courts of the goddesses and Catholic saints); in the face of tragedy, 87–88; justice associated with both state and local institutions, 198–199, 220; mediumship associated with dispensation of, 160–161; nonmodernist/ primordial perspectives on, 214, 220–221; performance of, 220. See also injustice Kanyakumari district, 13, 14, 44, 133; Catholic popular culture, 192; deities, 227; female healers of, 134–136 (see also female mediums); female puberty in, 244; Icakki Ammaṉ shrine in, 46–51, 89–90, 92 (see also Icakki Ammaṉ); Katalkarai Ūr village, 73; ritual performances of (see ritual performance) Kapferer, Bruce, on mediums in Sri Lanka, 77, 240, 249, 254, 280n.8 Karpakam, 126, 203 Katalkarai Ūr, 108, 109 kaṭṭuppāṭū (disciplines), 244–245, 248. See also female body

Keller, Mary, 272 kingship: agrarian kings, 56–57; codes of ritual kingship, 162; precolonial kings, 57–58 kinship obligations, 75, 80, 94, 95, 119; brothersister dyad, 95. See also patrilineal marriage and kinship kiṟikki (continuous spinning), 247–248 Kirmayer, L. J., 105 Kleinman, Arthur, on somatization, 208, 210–211 Kosambi, D. D., 54–56 Kumar, Radha, 262 kuṟi collaravā (those who speak the sign), 133 Kuṟukkulāñci (demon), 94 Kuṟuntokai, 58–59 Kuṭram naṭṭantatu eṇṇa (What Was the Crime That Was Committed?), TV show, 59 Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson, 150, 233 Lamb, Sarah, 123–124 lament genre, 200, 205, 208; songs of suffering, 15; statue weeping tears, 206; vil pāṭṭu (bow-song), 9, 88 language: of the goddess used by mediums, 168, 206–208, 217, 244; as inadequate for capturing the nature of inter-subjectivity, 164; as shared understanding (Heidegger), 175; and subjectivity (Saussure), 230 Lauretis, Teresa de, 143 Lewis, I. M., assumption of strategic consciousness in possessed women, 82–84; deprivation cults, 77–78; on objectivity, 81–82; I. M., on possession in women (of the zār cult), 76–79, 82–86, 239; on the zār cult, 77, 239–240 life cycle: as gender-specific, 97, 98–100. See also women’s lives life narratives, 200 magic, 4–5, 273–274 Mahabharata epic, 52, 130; performance of, 88–89 Mahmood, Saba, 266, 268 male possession and mediumship, 50, 204, 247–248; cāmi āṭi (god-dancers), 253; male specialists in Sri Lanka (aduras), 254; men dominating ritual performance, 88–89, 101, 204, 253 mantiravāti, 56, 75, 131, 132, 280. See also mediumship marriage: bride and groom as divine, 121; inter-

312

Index

caste marriages, 95; premature marriages, 202–203, 204, 280n.7; “ripening” in, 202 (see also bride); sexuality or love in leading to tragedy, 94–95; women dying before their husbands, 98. See also bride; patrilineal marriage and kinship Martin, Emily, 152 Marxism, 214, 268–269, 270. See also Indian Marxism Mary (Catholic Virgin). See Māta Mary Swarnabai (Nadar Catholic medium), 229; connection with St. Michael, 134–136, 190, 191–192; divining complaints, 195–196; Māta speaking through, 146; performance of holy acts, 170; similarities in her mediumship with Mutamma, 190–193 Masilamani-Meyer, Eveline, 97 Māta: as Christian goddess, 43, 74, 170, 190, 231; having all good rather than ambivalent qualities, 192; healing powers, 43, 138; speaking through Mary (medium), 147 Mātans (deities) in Tamil Nadu, 227. See also goddesses maternal home, untimely removal from, 107–109, 200, 201–220 maternity, 7–8, 14, 119, 148; “bearing fruit,” 202; breast milk, 118–119; childbirth (see childbirth); infant death, 16; maternal complaints, 198, 203–204; motherhood, 107, 126–127; shared aspects of pregnancy and possession, 107–109, 151, 152, 200, 201–220. See also fertility Mauss, Marcel, 180 medical professionals, 18, 26; division of labor with other categories of state intellectuals, 17, 25ff; social and discursive distance from rural patients, 26–27 mediumship, 132, 144; associated with dispensation of justice, 160–161; cross-religious commonalities, 189–190; cultivation of borders by mediums, 255–256; deconstructive account of, 171–172; distinguished from possession, 145; gender inequality in, 252–255; the mantiravāti, 56, 75, 131, 132, 280; phenomenology of, 173–177; a regional schema of, 190–193; skills acquisition, 273–274. See also female mediums; male possession and mediumship Meenakshi/Mīṉāṭci (Hindu goddess), 159–160 menstruation/menstrual blood: as creating children (Dalit), 119–120; as impure (tīṭṭu),

110, 130, 131, 240; spirits may be attracted to menstrual blood, 278n.4 menstruation onset: care of girls at first menstruation, 121–122; first “blossoming” (pūppu) as auspicious, 98–99, 113, 133, 292n.4; late onset as a kind of failure, 125 Mental Health Act, India, 66 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 6, 76, 246, 274, 281n.7; on bodily movement and agency, 215–216, 258; on bodily understanding and emotion, 154, 155–156, 179; on the central reality of emotional and sensate experience, 179–180; the other as completing the self, 183; on phantom limbs, 104 (see also phantom limbs); phenomenological theory, 173; on skilled musicianship, 155–156; The Visible and the Invisible, 216 Michael, St., 134–136, 190, 191–192 Milton, Kay, 103 minor practices: de Certeau on, 9, 210, 226; defined, 11, 226; persistence of in modernist states, 226–227; persisting in the modernizing state, 226–227; popular religious practice as crime, 59; possession as a minor practice, 62–68; as resistance to power, 270– 271; as source of fruitful hypotheses, 68–69, 275. See also mediumship; possession miscarriage, 114, 151, 198, 199, 206 modernity: an affective project among state intellectuals, 31, 34–36; colonial modernity, 62–63; folk religion and, 57–62; India’s appropriation of, 34–35; as the power to plan, 37–38; and tradition, 40, 41, 42, 43, 262–263, 266 modernity and possession: deconstructionist approaches, 171–172; feminist analysis (see feminist analysis); modernist approaches confounded, 86, 221, 226–227, 272; modernity incorporated into possession states, 272; phantoms and existential ambiguities marginalized, 100–105; possession as affliction, 151–152; possibilities of accommodation and understanding, 271–275; sociological thought (see social theory of possession) modernizing state, persistence of “minor practices,” 226–227 Moore, Erin, 198–199, 209, 212 Morris, Rosalind, 172, 273 motherhood, 107, 126–127; mother and cow as amma, 126; mothers with neglectful children, 203–204. See also maternity

Index 313 Murukaṉ (Hindu deity), 58–59, 126; temple of, 46, 63 Mutamma (Hindu Dalit medium in Chengalpattu District), 138–142, 182–183, 253; the deaths of her children, 141–142; dramatic usage of language, 162–163; healing powers, 142; her court of justice, 163–167; her premature marriage, 140; her striking presence, 139; incarnating the deity, 184; powers inherited from her father, 139–140, 142; prefamiliarity in her mediumship, 182, 184–185, 188; similarities in her mediumship with Mary, 190–193; sorcery and harassment used against her, 140–141 mūṭa nampikkai (idiotic beliefs), 59 mysticism, distinguished from possession, 231–232 Nabokov, Isabelle, 271 Nadar communities, 57; Nadars of Kanyakumari, 128–129 Narayan, J. P., 24 National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), 66–67 nationalism, Indian, 20, 32, 33, 35, 40, 60, 74, 213, 289; Dravidian and Tamil, 60–62, 290; Hindu, 43, 57, 189 Nātyaśāstra aesthetic model of performance, 246. See also Rasa theory Nehru, Jawaharlal, 33, 34, 35; Nehruvian period, 33 neoliberalism, 15, 257 Neuman, Daniel, 259 neuroscience, 177, 178–179 nightmares, 105 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 8, 13, 14, 36, 65, 78, 138, 199, 218; GONGOs (semiautonomous NGOs), 15–16 non-Sanskritic deities, 58–59, 110–111 nritta (pure dance), 247 nurse(s), 18, 19, 26, 29. See also medical professionals Obeyesekere, Gananath, 142–143, 147–148 Orientalism, 61–62, 116 orthodoxy, 267 “Other,” the, 143, 144, 256, 274; as the completion of and elevated witness of self, 183–184 paḻakkam (habituation/familiarity), 133–134, 143, 146, 243, 268

Pandian, Anand, 119 Pandian, M. S. S., 214 parish priests, 44, 47, 74, 135, 137, 197; Fr. Gillet, 13; Fr. John Prakash, 65 Partition (of India and Pakistan), women’s experiences of, 263–264 patrilineal marriage and kinship: alliance model of marriage, 93, 94; among upper-case people, 92–93; can result in cruel violations of intimacy, 204; importance of the dowry, 73–74, 75, 80; inheritance system, 118–119; kinship obligations, 95; marriages with already related kin, 119, 120; relations of in-marrying women with kin, 75, 79–80, 201, 203, 204; removal of bride/wife from her maternal home, 107–109, 200, 201–220. See also marriage perception, patterned forms of, 188–189 performativity, 259–260; in courts of the goddesses and saints, 157; as masquerade, 170–171; performance of gender, 238, 243–244; performing arts, 275–276 (see also ritual performance); Rasa theory of performance and affect, 6, 246, 247; a theological model of, 167–171 personhood, 37–38, 149, 152, 234–235; Indian (South Asian) and Western self, 149–150; non-dualistic conceptions of, 234–238 Perumāḷ, A. K., 56 phantom limbs, 104–105, 178–179; Australian study of (Giummarra), 179–180; challenging both objectivity and subjectivity, 105; Halligan on, 178–179; Merleau-Ponty on, 104 phantoms/phantom experience, 86–87, 95, 100, 178; emotions as, 73. See also demons; goddesses; possession phenomenology, 6–7, 173; and the “body of habit” (Merleau-Ponty), 177–180, 268; Bourdieu misrepresenting, 182; challenging both objective and subjective categories, 174–175; defined, 173; ecstasy/transcendence (Heidegger), 181–182; and habitus (Bourdieu), 180–182; poststructuralist critique of, 173–174 physical pain, and isolation, 217 pietism: bodily movement in, 266. See also Islam: and modern pietism Pinto, Sarah, 30 planning, 32. See also family planning; modernizing state

314

Index

Planning Commission, Indian, 32 Pope, G. W., Tirukkuṟal (trans.), 60–61 popular culture, 86, 87, 118, 157, 185, 189, 192, 214. See also Indian “goddess cinema” popular religion: ancient deities, 55; discourses of reform, 64–65; injustice and revenge in, 91; opposed as primitive or irrational, 36, 60, 62, 65, 267; some practices considered crimes, 59; syncretism and, 189, 192; war on, 60. See also religious shrines population control. See fertility control possession, 1, 50, 149, 209, 271; afflictive possession (Cohen), 145, 232–233; alienation of elites from practices, 63–64; alteration of bodily boundaries in, 151–152; āṭṭam as a feature of, 112–113; characteristics of, 113–115; Christian model within anthropology, 227–231; complaints and curing of, 198, 199; curative practices and family involvement in, 130–131; executive possession (Cohen), 232, 233, 234; gender distinctions in, 2; illuminative aspects of, 272–274; incomprehension of, 3–5, 86, 221, 226–227, 272 (see also modernity and possession); involuntary aspect, 88; local skepticism about existence and nature of, 3; mimicking qualities of the state, 272; more common among women, 76–77, 230; and ordinary experience, 273, 274; performative aspect, 238, 245 (see performativity); performative vs. “real life,” 185–186; in ritual performance, 246–247 (see also ritual performance); and Sanskritic traditions, 52; in Tamil culture, 78–79. See also demons; female possession; goddesses postcolonial theory and scholarship, 7, 43, 58, 100, 189, 225, 256 postmodern theory, 243, 275 poststructuralist analysis, 161–162, 168–169; alternatives to, 174–188; critique of phenomenology, 173–174 precolonial period, 162; precolonial and colonial relations, 57–58; precolonial justice, 183 prefamiliarity, 182, 184–185, 188, 190; as preknowing, 206 pregnancy, 22, 148; agency as accommodation to demands of, 151–154; alteration of body boundaries, 151–152; death of a pregnant women, 128–129; possession and, 151–152 premature marriages: complaints of, 202–203, 204, 280n.7; themes of unpreparedness and untimeliness, 200–203

Price, Pamela, 35 primordial understandings, 214ff proprioception, 179, 180, 248 psychology, 233. See also Freud, Sigmund; hysterical conversion/“hystericizations” puberty/pubescent girls: bodily kaṭṭuppāṭū (discipline) imposed, 244–245, 248; in Brahman and non-Brahman castes, 120; first “blossoming” (pūppu) as auspicious, 98–99, 113, 117–120, 121–122, 133, 202, 292n.4; puberty ceremony (pūppuppuṉita nīrattu viḻā), 99, 119; socialization, 250–251. See also menstruation onset purity, and women, 110, 116, 117 pūvāṭaikkāri (she with flowers), 98 Qadeer, Imrana, 124 Rajan, Sunder, 263 Rajasthan: account of healing in, 198; family planning in, 29–30; ideas about possession in, 145; incident of sati in, 262 Raja Ūr, Catholic shrine at, 113, 134, 135, 136, 251 Ram, Kalpana, 202, 275; on “auspiciousness,” 116, 130, 247, 261; on emotion in rasa aesthetics, 6, 246–247; experiences as an anthropologist in the field, 7–9, 14–15, 248; experiences of caste and class, 249, 250–251; experiences of gender, 250–251; experiences of the Hindu religion, 54–56; on initial distance from rural goddess worship, 46–51 Rapport, N., 82 Rasa theory, of affect and performance, 6, 246, 247. See also Abhinaya darpanā; Nātyaśāstra aesthetic model of performance reform projects, 13, 15–16 religious cults, 272; networks of friendships in, 240; as performative venues, 240 religious experience, 2; cross-boundary aspects, 189–190; magic, 4–5, 273–274; potent models of social theory around, 229, 231; regularly repeated acts, 239; secular thought and, 272–274; sociological objectivity and, 81–82; syncretism as presupposing prefamiliarity, 190–192. See also phantoms/phantom experience religious shrines: designated as mental institutions, 66–67; sites of indigenous healing, 67. See also goddess shrines; and by name

Index 315 reproductive issues and problems, 50, 107, 203; deaths of children and infants, 25, 30, 127; miscarriage, 114, 151, 198, 199, 206; reproductive role central to women’s lives, 39, 44, 46, 113, 123, 202; sexuality and, 39–40, 94; state mandates and, 19, 20–21, 24. See also female body; fertility; infertility; sterilization resistance, the “romance of,” 270 revolutionary, the: Althusser on, 176–177; vanguard, 38; voluntarism, 38 riaz (practice), 259 Rita (Catholic healer of Karingal), 196–197 ritual performance: affective dimensions, 64, 104, 161; and the courts of the goddesses and saints, 163–167; of epics, 132; men dominating, 88–89, 101, 204, 253; possession in, 246–247 (see also possession); skills in, 155–156; vil pāṭṭu (bow song), 9, 24, 103 Rouget, Gilbert, 111, 231–232 rural culture, 43, 86, 185, 214. See also Tamil rural villages rural women: lower-caste women to speak, 98, 127, 128, 199, 204; possession among, 41, 84, 85 (see also female possession); and the state, 13–14; suffering and speech, as “spoken through” rather than authoring speech, 254. See also Tamil rural villages Sahāya Mātā (The Mother Who Helps), shrine of, 74. See also Māta saints. See Catholic saints; cittar saints; courts of the goddesses and Catholic saints; and by name, e.g., Michael, St. Saiva Siddhanta, 60 Sakti (Hindu goddess), 49 Sanskritic traditions, 52; gods and goddesses, 49, 110; non-Sanskritic traditions and deities, 58–59, 110–111 Santi of Katalkarai Ūr, 7; Santi the bride, 107–110, 112–115; spirit possession in, 106–107, 130, 131, 133, 147; a stranger to Kanyakumari district, 106, 107–109 Sarkar, Tanika, and Urvashi Butalia, 263 Sartre, Jean Paul, Being and Nothingness, 216–217 sati (widow immolation): activism against, 262, 265; colonial representations of, 262–263; questions of voluntarism or coercion in, 98, 262–266 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 230

Scarry, Elaine, 217 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 211 Schömbucher, Elisabeth, 164 Schuler, Barbara, 91, 204, 206 Scott, Joan, on experience, 174. See also experience: need for post-structuralists to take account of Scudder, John, 60 séance, 144 secularism: in India, 43, and religious experience, 272–274 Seizer, Susan, 271 Self-Respect Movement, 25, 35–36, 59, 219, 275, 276, 277n.2 semiautonomous, 9 sensation: exteroceptive, 248; proprioceptive, 179, 180, 248 sexual desire, as cutting across alliance model of marriage, 94 Shiva (Hindu god), 48, 49, 54, 55, 62, 159, 185, 257 shubham (auspiciousness), 247 Shulman, David, 103 Siddars/Cittars (saint scholars), 60, 90, 92, 252 Siddha medicine. See Cittavaittiya (Siddha medicine) Singaravelu, C. N., 60 Smith, Frederick M., 57; critique of, 52–53; on existence of possession in Sanskritic tradition, 52 social hierarchy, 149–150. See also caste and class socialist planning/socialism, 34 socialization: dwelling or place relation to, 189, 268, 273; of pubescent girls, 250–251 social practices, as supraindividual (Durkheim), 229–230 social suffering, affecting the body, 211–214, 217 social theory of possession, 82, 225, 230; assumption of strategic consciousness, 82–84; comparativist project(s), 226; cultural relativism and, 225–226; sociological objectivity and, 80–81 somatization: Kleinman on, 208–211; repoliticizing of by Scheper-Hughes, 211–212; symptoms, 210 Sontheimer, Günther-Dietz, 57; on five components of Hinduism, 51–52 sonums (spirits of the dead), source of power for the Sora people, 96 sorcery, 43–44

316

Index

Sorge (care), Heidegger on, 20, 103, 117, 221, 222, 229. See also Heidegger, Martin sovereign power, 170–171, 183, 192–193, 282; female mediums connecting with, 41, 133, 183, 192–193, 282n.2 sovereignty, 31; embodiment of the deity as, 169–170. See also kingship; state spectators of possession, 238, 246 spirit affliction, 1, 43–44, 130–131. See also possession spirit mediums. See female mediums; mediumship spirit possession. See possession spirits: dwelling between villages, 81. See also deities; demons; goddesses; phantoms/phantom experience state, 13; “the everyday state” (Gramsci), 17; “governmentality ” (Foucault), 31–32, 33; handling of the possessed, 67–68; intellectuals affective identification with, 25–31 (see also state intellectuals); intervention and intrusion of, 35, 36, 38; and minor practices (see minor practices); privileging or foregrounding certain practices, 68–69; silent practices of, 27–28, 30; state discourse, 66; welfare functions of the, 15–16 state intellectuals: affective identification with the state, 25–31; class rule, 16–17; functionality of, 17, 25, 26; Gramsci on, 16–25, 30–31, 38; involved with population control, 24–25; limits of state intellectualism, 36–41; modernity as an affective project among, 31, 34–36; social distance from rural villagers, 26–27; in Tamil rural villages, 35, 36 Steedly, Mary, 86; on mediums in Sumatra, 86–87, 254 sterilization, 19, 24, 25, 28–30, 38, 164, 203, 279; aftereffects, 19; genital surgery, 239; as untimely rupture of fertility, 96–97. See also fertility control Stewart, Kathleen, ethnography of attunement, 257 stillbirth, 145 Stoller, Paul, 240 Story of Kuṟukkulāñci, The, 94 strategy, possession as a (view), 231 Strathern, Andrew, 268 subaltern classes, 214 Subaltern Studies, 213, 262. See also Chatterjee, Partha; Guha, Ranajit subjectivity, 2, 111–112; consciousness and, 3, 177, 240–241; as constituted in infancy, 215;

objectivity and, 182; the subject in Western epistemology, 177, 231, 232, 240, 242, 245, 264–265, 278 suffering: entitling rural lower-caste women to speak, 204; life as the source of, 204–205; social suffering affecting the body, 211–214 Sufi mysticism, 231; saints, 158 suicide: existential suicide, 265–266; of Indian women during the Partition, 263–264. See also sati (widow immolation) Sunithi (Tamil Nadu Brahman woman), possession by a benevolent goddess, 241–243 “superagency,” 261 supraindividual entities, 229, 230 Swaminathan Committee Report, 27 “symptoms,” 210. See also somatization syncretism: “ideal types,” 111–112; and popular religion, 189, 192 talaivar (village head), 138, 217–218 tāli (bride’s necklace), 92–93, 101, 114, 121, 131, 140, 186 Tamil epics, songs, and poetry, 58, 78, 92–93, 111; Caṅkam poetry, 78, 97–98; performance of, 132 (see also ritual performance). See also agency: epic heroines having only one means of Tamil film industry, 118; Bombay (Ratnam), 118. See also Indian “goddess cinema” Tamil Nadu, 56; Brahman dominance in, 35, 58; efforts to reform religious traditions, 64–65; modernity and reason in, 60; performative models, 245–248; political leadership and movements, 35–36; religious traditions, 60–61 (see also popular religion); spirit possession in (see mediums; possession). See also Dravidian movement; kingship; nationalism, Indian Tamil rural villages, 1–2, 7–8, 56–57, 58, 125, 134, 199, 205, 219, 221, 279; agricultural villages, 8, 134, 199, 219; Chengalpattu district, 7, 8, 14, 15, 18, 19–20, 96, 128, 138; cultural ideas, 78–79, 235, 280; fishing villages, 1, 8, 43, 65, 73, 106, 108, 136, 278, 279; religious beliefs, 43–44; state intervention and extension into, 35, 36; targeted for population control efforts, 25, 27–28 (see also fertility control); terukkūttu, (street performance), 9; women of, 98, 127, 128, 199. See also Dalit villages; women’s lives Tamil/Teluga history, 58

Index 317 tapas (powers derived from austerity), 92 Taussig, 255–256, 272; The Magic of the State, 256 Taylor, Charles, 37–38 temporality, 173, 175, 244, 245; abrupt change, 181; of bodily involvement, 260–261; slow and processual, 144–145; themes of unpreparedness and untimeliness, 200–203 terukkūttu (ritual theater), 246–247 theater. See performativity: performing arts; ritual performance “third world women”: feminist assumptions of agency, 261–266; Islamic pietism, 266–268 Tirukkuṟal (Tamil classic), 60–61 touch, 220 tragedy: affective experience of justice, 87–88; of kin betrayal, 94; spirit or demonic possession and, 86–87; tragic life stories, 93–95 (see also women’s lives); of violent death (see violent death; women’s death stories). See also demons; goddesses trance states, 231, 240–241 “troubles talk” (Wilce), 194 Tsing, Anna, 39; on gender inequality and mediums in Borneo, 254, 272 unconscious, the (Freud), 210 understanding vs. knowing, 271 undisciplined female bodily movement and meanings of, 49, 245–248, 250, 251, 271 uterine blood, 118–119 Varalakshmi Ammaṉ (benevolent goddess), 241–243 vasectomy, 25, 29 Vellachi (Dalit woman), life narrative, 203–204 Vellalars, dominant Tamil agriculturalists, 58 victimhood: “consenting victims,” 265; in feminist analysis, 261–262, 266; victimization in goddess films, 237 Vijaya (Kanyakumari bride): death of her father, 73–74, 75; love marriage, 74–76, 95; spirit possessed, 73, 80, 206; understanding her possession, 85–86, 90–91, 93–94, 101–102, 104, 105, 147 vil pāṭṭu (bow song), 9, 24, 103. See also ritual performance violent death: deaths of children and infants as, 25, 30, 127; disrupting possibility and

continuity, 87, 100–101, 102; goddesses reborn after, 52, 86–87, 89–92, 93, 102. See also death stories; lament genre; women’s death stories virginity, 98, 117 Virgin Mary. See Māta virtual body scheme, 178–179 Vitebsky, Piers, 96 viṭukatai (mystery narrative), 45 Voluntary Health Service (VHS), 19–20 vulnerability, 216; of women to disorder, 240, 249 Weiss, Gail, 258 Western traditions of thought, 3–4, 5–6, 37, 78, 82, 143, 163, 174, 175, 177, 183, 189, 210, 211, 212, 225, 226, 228, 230, 233, 234, 252, 271, 273, 275; defining assumptions, 225. See also dualism; humanism; intellectualism; modernity; phenomenology; psychology Whitehead, Henry, 61 widowhood, 98, 123–124; child widow(s), 123; upper caste, 123–124. See also sati (widow immolation) Wilce, 194, 206 women. See female body; gender; “third world women”; women’s lives; and by region, village, and name women’s death stories, 93, 96, 102, 204, 214 women’s lives: female attire, 260; the “good life” (gendered), 117; injustice in, 199, 204–205; marriage, 202 (see also bride; marriage; patrilineal marriage and kinship); ontological continuity with the divine, 120–121, 185–186 (see also goddesses); reproductive “blossoming” (see puberty/pubescent girls); reproductive role central, 202 (see also fertility; infertility; reproductive issues and problems); senior women, 30 (see also widowhood); suffering and injustice of, 93–95, 199, 204–205 (see also complaints); suicides during the Partition, 263–264 Young, Iris Marion, 152–153, 154, 250; Pregnant Embodiment, 152–153; Throwing Like a Girl, 250 Young, Katherine, 21

About the Author

Kalpana Ram is an associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, where she lectures on anthropology, phenomenology, gender, and India. She is the inaugural director of a new interdisciplinary India Research Centre at Macquarie University.

Production Notes for Ram/Fertile Disorder Cover design by Julie Matsuo-Chun Composition by Wanda China with display type in Maiandra GL and Arial and text in Times New Roman Printing and binding by Sheridan Books, Inc. Printed on 60 lb. House White, 444 ppi.