Mourning Amma: funerals as politics among south Indian Ezhavas

Abstract

Over the past century the lower ‘impure’ castes in India have brought their funerary rituals in tune with the Brahminical mainstream, a process known as sanskritization. But a sense of oppressed identity persists, in which both cosmopolitanism and particularism are played out. Day-to-day funerals are complex politicized performances in which values in Indian society are condensed, manipulated and polarized. Funerals convey multifarious ways of negotiating the public and the private, the local and the global. In this paper I examine the funeral of Amma, the female eldest (karnavar) of a wealthy business family belonging to the ritually low Ezhava caste of Kerala. The context of Amma's personal history highlights how Ezhavas, and particularly women, have resisted caste-discrimination, availing themselves of educational opportunities and achieving personal agency. I argue that in Amma's funeral contending ritual modes—anti-casteism, modern consumerism and matrilineal revivalism—neutralize the awesome ritual implications of sanskritization. The revival of matrilineal ritual seems to reinstate women symbolically as keepers of male migrants' foreign earnings. More generally, if the central problem of life is to cope with or resist oppression, funerary rituals will exhibit a rich repertoire of tradition and innovation that disclose how history is rewritten as a project for the future.