Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion
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Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822376415 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/17/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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Given to the Goddess
South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion
By Lucinda Ramberg
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7641-5
CHAPTER 1
Yellamma and Her Sisters
Kinship among Goddesses and Others
"You Will Always Be My Sister"
"Yellamma was hungry," Durgabai began one afternoon over steel tumblers of tea, resting her back against the cool stone wall of my rented house in one of the Dalit lanes of Nandipur. I had asked her to come over and tell me one of the stories she had learned from her uncle, a jogappa in Nandipur who was, as she was, dedicated as a child. She was proud of her uncle, whose devotion to Yellamma was renowned and who was a great weaver of tales. He had commissioned the construction of Matangi's multicolored jaga, as Durgabai liked to remind people. As a child she accompanied him and the devi to perform rites in the homes of upper-caste landholders. "We used to stay up all night, singing songs and telling stories," she said with evident pleasure. "But now devotion (bhakti) has declined among the people and hardly anyone celebrates the devi this way anymore." Wrapping the end of her sari over her head, she eased her way into the devotional tale, displaying the rhetorical grace and skill I had come to expect from her in such telling:
Yellamma was hungry. She was walking through a farmer's fields and she was hungry. Her stomach was empty and the fields were full. She was walking in the fields and she plucked some green onions and brinzal [eggplant] to eat, to fill her stomach. The landlord saw her eating from his fields and became angry. He ran into the fields swinging his scythe and shouting. Shouting and shouting, swinging his arms and that scythe. Yellamma ran and ran to escape him. She ran into the Dalit quarter (harijan keri), she was running and running to get away from the landlord. Even into the harijan keri she ran to escape him. Yellamma ran into Matangi's house and Matangi said, "Here, hide under these skins," and Yellamma concealed herself in the tanning pits under an elephant hide. The landlord followed Yellamma into Matangi's house. Rushing into Matangi's house he demanded, "Where is she?" "Tell me where she is or I will cut you," he said, holding up his scythe. But Matangi did not say. She did not reveal Yellamma. "Who are you, what are you looking for?" she asked calmly. In anger, he cut off her nose and left. Yellamma came up out of the tanning pits. Seeing what he had done, she restored Matangi's nose, saying: "Because of what you have done, you will always be my sister. When people come to worship on my hill, they will worship you first."
What kind of kinship is this between Yellamma and Matangi? When Yellamma proclaims Matangi her sister, what is she asserting about the nature of the relationship between them? She is not claiming shared parentage or, in the Kannada idiom, of having come from the same stomach (hotte). Neither does her tale offer any suggestion of a marriage that would affiliate the two devis through one or the other's husband. This kin making transgresses caste endogamy, according to which affiliation should only occur within one's own community. Matangi—whose tanning pits indicate her membership in the leather-working Madura jati (community, subcaste), formerly designated as untouchable—is claimed as kin by Yellamma, whose desperate rush into the Dalit community is evidently into unfamiliar territory. This is an affiliation underwritten by something other than what the father of modern kinship theory, Lewis Henry Morgan ([1870] 1997) identified as the two organizing structures for human kin making: "consanguinity" and "affinity."
I began to wonder about the nature of this tie between two goddesses, and its seeming inextricability from questions of caste, gender, and property, when I first encountered Yellamma and Matangi together on Yellamma's hill at Saundatti. It was during the annual pilgrimage season, the day before a full moon festival, and the hill was thickly carpeted with the encampments of thousands of devotees. Each encampment represented a group of people who had traveled together from a village or town, bringing the Yellamma of that place with them. But she did not come alone. Virtually every encampment had another traveling deity who, like Yellamma, took the shape of a brass or silver face fastened to a dowel set in the center of a jaga. In one encampment I watched a woman prepare the devi for puja. After polishing the brass murti, she wrapped around the dowel a new sari, the ends of which fell in folds in the bottom of the basket. In the basket next to Yellamma was another basket with two murtis. I walked from encampment to encampment asking devotees who was in this second basket.
"That's Matangi—Yellamma and Matangi."
"Who are they to each other? Why are they together?"
"They are sisters (akkatangi)."
Jogatis told me the story of how Yellamma and Matangi came to be sisters. As I learned, jogatis are the keepers of this story and other devotional songs (bhajans) and stories about the life of Yellamma and her work in the world. These oral texts constitute a body of knowledge transmitted through a lineage of Dalit male and female women dedicated to Yellamma, and sometimes to Matangi. It is a body of knowledge that falls into a tradition of non-Sanskritic Shakta religion that is widely practiced all over South India. It overlaps and interweaves with the Sanskritic Shaivite tradition that Yellamma is associated with at her main temple, where Lingayat pujaris conduct her puja. The Dalit body of knowledge transmitted by jogatis in the villages and towns where they conduct the puja, however, offers a distinct perspective on the life of Yellamma. The particularity of this knowledge and its implications for being and acting in the world are a central preoccupation of this book. What sort of knowledge is this that jogatis keep?
I take this body of knowledge and its transmission to be productive of particular ways of conceiving, enacting, and being in the world. That is, this knowledge generates not only a particular perspective or way of seeing, but also a specific world or way of being in it. The oral performances of jogatis constitute a mode of creative cultural agency: "Like any art form, [folklore] is a reformulation of the world" (Blackburn and Ramanujan 1986, 30). What kind of world do jogatis conjure up in their oral and ritual performances? What sort of knowledge do they produce?
As Durgabai recounted, Yellamma is hungry and, finding herself in the midst of an abundant field, helps herself to the crops. The landlord, apparently more alarmed by this encroachment on his property than concerned about Yellamma's hunger, sets out after her, prepared to do violence. Yellamma finds escape in the untouchable community, in the lane of the lowest among outcaste jatis—the Madura (or Matiga), whose hereditary occupation is understood to have been the removal of dead animals and the tanning of hides. Once in Matangi's home, Yellamma conceals herself in the most polluted place possible according to Brahmanical reckoning—the tanning pits—but when she emerges, she has lost none of her powers and is easily able to restore Matangi to wholeness. Her power thus reveals itself to derive from something other than ritual or caste purity. Matangi stands between the violent enforcement of private property rights and upper-caste entitlement, on the one hand, and Yellamma's access to sustenance and bodily integrity, on the other hand. Matangi's bodily sacrifice becomes the occasion for inclusion in the family of Yellamma, restoration to wholeness and the privilege of being worshipped first.
The kinship between Yellamma and Matangi forges itself in opposition to the violence of gender, caste, and land relations. In addition to being a celebration of the power of Yellamma, Durgabai's story offers a critique of the property relation in which the labor of landless outcastes is extracted in order to produce the surplus wealth of the landholding farmers. This is no abstract matter in a context where most of the arable land is held by upper-caste farmers, and virtually all of the field labor is performed by largely landless Dalits, among whom subsistence living is not uncommon. Hungry men, women, and children from the communities designated as outcaste are surrounded by fields of grain, vegetables, and sugarcane. They might labor in these fields, but they have no right to the harvest except, possibly, as payment for their labor.
In a variation of this tale told about Yellamma, it is not the farmer who chases Yellamma, but Parashurama, her warrior son, who cuts off her head at his father's bidding. In this version, as told by Dalit women pujaris, Parashurama pursues but does not kill Yellamma, who escapes into Matangi's home. Parashurama is upset because he doesn't know who or where his father is. Parashurama is angry, running after Yellamma with his axe and demanding, "Who is my father? Why do people call you randi [widow/whore]?" The critique of gender relations and the violent regulation of female sexual purity is even stronger in this version of the story. Here sisterhood between Yellamma and Matangi emerges in the face of a son's brutal demand for his patronym.
Jogatis, who tell this story, have no father's name to give their children. Indeed, reformers seize on this lack as a prime indicator of the tragic condition of children of devadasis. In street plays sponsored by a government reform project, young Dalit men dramatize the stigma that children who can claim only devaru (god) as a father are made to feel. In one dramatic skit that I observed performed at Saundatti during the high pilgrimage season in 2003, the daughter of a jogati was singled out among a classroom of children as the one child unable to provide a patronym. The quiet effort of the child—"My mother is a devadasi"—was drowned out by the teacher's demand: "Who is your father? Who is your father?" The relative advantages or disadvantages of having a father one can claim as such notwithstanding, the stigma of being fatherless is difficult to bear, a fact many of the sons of devadasis I knew made clear to me. But the image of Parashurama chasing after his mother brings another stigma into view: the one attached to the rande whose uncontained sexuality is felt to stain family honor. This, then, is also a story in which a kinship between two goddesses emerges in the face of the violent attempt to tether female procreative power to the patrilineal family form. Within living memory it was told regularly, and it is still sometimes told on auspicious occasions in upper-caste landholding households by Dalit female pujaris (jogatis). This story, and Durgabai through its telling, worlds a world in which dominant constructions of kinship, land, and gender relations are cast in a negative light by and through the devi's manifestation.
Durgabai puts several themes into play in this story about the kinship between Yellamma and Matangi: the political economies of land, caste, and gender in rural northern Karnataka; devi-centered religiosity; and the question of critical consciousness in relation to social position. In this chapter, I offer the reader a set of empirical and analytic orientations to these questions, through which the meanings of Durgabai's devotional tale and the effects of her telling might be considered. In relation to rural economies of gender and caste, Durgabai's position, like that of other dedicated women, is marginal at best. Her relationship to Yellamma, however, complicates this marginality, converting it into possibilities of critique and livelihood that run counter to upper-caste and male-centered conceptions of family. These effects of kinship with Yellamma have implications for feminist appraisals of relationships between goddesses and women, as well as understandings of Dalit women's consciousness. They also speak to the limitations of secular understandings of both kinship and religion.
Gender, Caste, and Land Relations
Rural poverty is centrally a question of land relations. In their analysis of structural inequities in Karnataka, R. S. Deshpande and D. V. Gopalappa write: "Land is a major determinant of access to resources in rural areas ... [that affects] the intensity and extent of poverty" (2004, 76). Those without access to land lack the means of producing their own sustenance. They must labor on someone else's land or depend on someone who does. Land relations both mediate and are mediated by questions of caste and gender. To put the point somewhat differently, gender and caste are the primary determinants of one's possible relationship to land, whether that relationship is one of ownership, management, or labor. The recent history of land relations in Karnataka, as in South Asia broadly, has been marked by three significant shifts: under British colonialism, there was a consolidation of systems of land tenure and taxation; after independence, tenancy acts assigned land back to tenant farmers; and more recently there have been changes driven by trade liberalization and corporate globalization.
Under British rule, three types of land administration were stabilized in the subcontinent: the landlord system (zamindari), the system of individual cultivators (ryotwari), and the village collective system (mahalwari). Under all three systems, which aimed to produce greater and more reliable land revenues and worked through bureaucratization and privatization of landholding, women and Dalits tended to lose rights in and access to lands previously held in common and open to foraging. Although the ryotwari system prevailed in South India, in some areas landlords were able to maintain their tenure. This was the case in Nandipur, a village in the Belgaum District of Karnataka State, part of the Bombay Presidency during the colonial period. Prior to that, the village was part of the Maratha Empire, which ruled the territory from 1674 until 1818. The medieval Maratha stone gate framing the entrance to the homestead of the once headman of the village stands as evidence of this history. Direct descendants of a Maratha sirdar (feudal landlord), this Brahman family's landholdings included the entire village within living memory.
Under the colonial administration, feudal lords who had been tax collectors over large territories became proprietors, and working farmers—often called peasants—were transformed into tenants. This system disempowered the tillers of the land and produced a whole new class of intermediary managers and moneylenders. Tenancy laws enacted all over India after independence sought, by assigning agricultural lands back to tenant farmers and establishing ceilings on the size of landholdings, to abolish such concentrations of land in the hands of a few and the abuses by intermediaries associated with them. In Karnataka—a state formed in 1956 from territories formerly part of the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, the kingdom of Mysore, and the princely state of Hyderabad—a tenancy act was first passed in 1961. This law remained largely ineffective until landholding ceiling amendments were adopted in 1974 (Appu 1966; Hanstad, Nielsen, and Brown 2004; Rajan 1986).
Across most of northern Karnataka, the greatest beneficiaries of the tenancy act were the Lingayats who had been tenant farmers. Brahmans dispossessed of lands went into industry whenever possible. Partnerships of Brahman men whose landholdings had been radically reduced under the tenancy act owned the two sugar factories closest to Nandipur. This industry was second only to the agricultural sector as a local source of regular paid work. Lingayats are the regionally dominant caste, making up approximately 16 percent of the state population but holding 36 percent of seats in the Karnataka Legislative Assembly (Shastri 2009, 252). In the northern districts of Dharwad, Belgaum, and Bijapur, where they are concentrated and "dominant," they account for 35 percent of the population (McCormack 1963). The concept of a dominant caste was developed by M. N. Srinivas (1955) to convey the social fact that Brahmans are not always or everywhere the most economically and politically powerful caste, although they rank at the top of the Varna system. In his words, "a caste may be said to be 'dominant' when it preponderates numerically over the other castes, and when it also wields preponderant political and economic power" (18). A majority of Yellamma devotees are members of dominant castes, either Lingayats from Bombay Karnataka or Marathas from southern Maharastra.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Given to the Goddess by Lucinda Ramberg. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: Gods, Gifts, Trouble 1
Part I. Gods
1. Yellamma and Her Sisters: Kinship among Goddesses and Others 39
2. Yellamma, Her Wives, and the Question of Religion 71
Part II. Gifts
3. Tantra, Shakta, Yellamma 113
4. The Giving of Daughters: Sexual Economy, Sexual Agency, and the "Traffic" in Women 142
Part III. Trouble
5. Kinship Trouble 181
6. Troubling Kinship 213
Notes 223
Glossary 247
Bibliography 251
Index 270
What People are Saying About This
"Lucinda Ramberg has written a book that charts new conceptual terrain in the anthropology of South Asia. Given to the Goddess indicts both liberal reformism and secular progressivism for their investment in an all too-easy politics of gender that occludes the power (and experience) of stigmatized sexuality. Instead, Ramberg shows how practices coded as anachronistic, or coerced, constitute the conditions of possibility for capacious, non-individuated accounts of sexed agency. This is an exquisite ethnography of the queer embodiments and ritual imaginaries by which women come to be 'given to the goddess.'"
"The ethnographic data that Lucinda Ramberg obtained while living with the devadasis is unique. The conversations she relates bring much-needed nuance to representations of these women. Ramberg insists that anthropologists need to take the religious lives of the devadasis seriously. For scholars of South Asia, her most interesting contribution is likely her masterful rethinking of theoretical models of kinship in India."
"Lucinda Ramberg's powerful combination of ethnographic observation and theoretical reflection connects the study of a particular social group in South India (devadasis or jogatis) with general issues in anthropology and feminist and queer studies. Given to the Goddess will prove relevant to those, such as myself, who know very little about India but who are concerned with related issues in different contexts."
"A compassionate and rigorous account of the much reviled and celebrated figure of the devadasi, Lucinda Ramberg's book analyzes the central role women's sexuality continues to play in religious and secular political orders. Rather than diagnose this as a moral problem, the author forces us to rethink how the biopolitical state has transformed both religion and sexuality in modern India."
"Lucinda Ramberg's powerful combination of ethnographic observation and theoretical reflection connects the study of a particular social group in South India (devadasis or jogatis) with general issues in anthropology and feminist and queer studies. Given to the Goddess will prove relevant to those, such as myself, who know very little about India but who are concerned with related issues in different contexts."