Sprouts of the Body, Sprouts of the Field: Identification of the Goddess with Poxes in South India

Perundevi Srinivasan

doi:10.3390/rel10030147

Abstract

In south India, when a person is afflicted with poxes of any variety, it is believed that the goddess Mariyamman has “arrived” in the person. The Tamil term “ammai” means pustules or “pearls” of poxes as well as mother/goddess. Indigenous discourses, gleaned from resources, such as songs and narratives, facilitate our interrogation of the Hindu “religious experience” that underscores the immanent and eminent manifestations of the deity and the dimension of benevolence associated with pox-affliction. Asking what might be the triggering conditions for identifying the pox-afflicted body as the goddess, I problematize the prevalent scholarly characterization of such affliction in terms of “possession” of a body, taken as a “mute facticity,” by an external agent, namely, the goddess. Drawing from ethnographic sources and classical Tamil texts, I argue that the immanent identification of the body as the goddess and conceptualization of her sovereign authority over the body during affliction are facilitated by an imagistic relationship of the afflicted body with an agricultural field, which is conventionally regarded as feminine in the Tamil context.

Highlights

On a summer afternoon many years ago, I lay stretched out on my mother’s cotton sari, writhing from excruciating pain throughout my body
One reference that categorically asserts the goddess’s authority over the body during the affliction of poxes is “muttirai.” We come across the term “muttirai” in Mariyamman songs and narratives, which confirms that the pustules of poxes are perceived to be the sovereign seal of the goddess
In the classical Tamil texts we do not encounter a decisive identification of rain with any particular gender

Summary

Introduction

On a summer afternoon many years ago, I lay stretched out on my mother’s cotton sari, writhing from excruciating pain throughout my body. After hours of discussion with my father and neighbors, my mother asked a physician to visit our house He confirmed that ammai (meaning both poxes and the divine mother/goddess in Tamil) had ‘arrived’ in my body in the form of chickenpox, and he would not, prescribe any medicine other than Crocin (paracetamol) pills to bring down the fever, though he assured us that. The indigenous discourses which I am analyzing in the article form part of the repertoire of such collective practices centred on Mariyamman worship and pox-affliction These discourses are gleaned from narratives and songs of devotees and healers in the districts of Pudukkottai, Dindigul, Chennai, and Sivaganga in Tamilnadu, which I gathered during my ethnographic fieldwork (2004–2006). This may provide a counter-narrative to symbolic and functionalist interpretations of the religious dimension of the disease as representing and serving some other external reality, such as the devotee’s poverty or marginalization or fear.

Understanding the Body as and of the Goddess

Poxes as the Shower of Grace

Conclusion