Abstract
This paper offers an ethnography of the medicalization of matted locks of hair (jade) worn by female ecstatics in a South Indian devi (goddess) cult. These jade are taken by devotees of the devi Yellamma to be a manifestation of her presence in the bodies of women who enter possession states and give oracles. At her temples across the central Deccan Plateau, Yellamma women can be seen wearing heavy locks of matted hair anointed with turmeric, the color and healing properties of which are identified with this devi. Under a recent government-sponsored campaign, reformers cut jade and hand out packets of shampoo as a means of reforming the extended and illicit sexuality of these women. Associations between sexuality and hair practices have long preoccupied anthropologists interested in the relationship between the body and culture. In this paper, I draw on this literature and more than 2 years of field research to consider the encounter between biomedical and Shakta epistemologies of the body dramatized in these jade cutting campaigns. This effort to remake the body as a fit site and sign of modernity elaborates the postcolonial politics of sexuality, gender and religiosity in India.
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Notes
See S. Seethalakshmi. “Devadasis Substitute One Evil for Snother.” The Times of India (Bangalore), January 25, 1998.
MASS, Mahila Samakyha Sangha (Women’s Welfare and Protection Association). Ghataprapha, Belgaum, Karnataka. Progress Report, April 2001 to March 2002.
Boys, as well as girls, are given or give themselves to Yellamma. Called jogappas, these feminine men are sacred women who wrap saris, adopt the habitus of women and perform all the same rites as devadasis. In this paper I focus on the female women, by far the largest number of these wandering mendicants, who are the focus of reform projects in a way that the male women are not. Although jogappas too may take patrons or otherwise exchange sexual access for means of livelihood, they have not provoked scandal as the female women, and putative prostitutes, have.
Such patrons are typically otherwise properly married to a woman in their jati (subcaste) whose children fall in their lineage. In such arrangements, jogatis might be framed as mistresses. Their children fall in their natal family’s lineage and were, within living memory, called devaramakalu (God’s children). These arrangements are generally known to everyone in a community and taken for granted. In short, they were not—but in the last two generations they have become—scandalous. In the context of a discussion about how, two or three generations ago, most significant landowners and important local officials kept devadasis as a part of marking their status as ‘big men,’ an anthropologist from the region described to me how his grandmother regularly sent him to retrieve his grandfather for meals or household matters from the house of the devadasi his grandfather kept.
Saskia C. Kersenboom-Story dates the first use of the ‘devadasi,’ a translation of the Tamil tevataci or tevaratiyar, to the Chola period (850–1279 CE) based on epigraphical evidence. However, she traces their origins to female bards of the Cankam period (100–300 CE) supported by the king, whose bravery and fame they extolled in performance (Kersenboom-Story 1987, p. 11). In her history of Tamil temple women, Orr (2000) locates the earliest appearance of the term ‘devadasi’ in Vaishnava texts of the Agamas (10th century). Orr disputes earlier epigraphical references to ‘devadasis’ cited by scholars.
The Government of Karnataka reported 22,941 identified devadasis to the National Commission on Women, Andhra Pradesh reported 16,624, and the Government of Maharastra, which has repeatedly accused Karnataka of being the ‘source’ of devadasis working in the brothels of Bombay and Pune, reported only those devadasis receiving government pensions and other forms of support (JWP 2001–2002).
In Wives of the God-King, Marglin (1985) has elaborated the implications of devadasis being persons who are simultaneously impure and auspicious for understandings of the axes of purity/impurity and auspiciousness/inauspiciousness within the symbolic logic of Hinduism.
The NGO is Myrada; they have organized the association of ex-devadasis called MASS.
This translation was prepared with the assistance of Ambuja Kolwgi.
Obeyesekere (1981, p. 65) notes that pativrata is used by many female ecstatics to refer to their vow of celibacy. The word literally translates as “vow of devotion to the Lord” and is most commonly used to refer to the Brahmanical ideal of a wife’s conduct toward her husband, whom she treats as a god. Obeyesekere explains the use of the term to mean sexual renunciation: “The woman renounces sex with her husband. She then transfers her allegiance to a god … the etymological meaning of pativrata is maintained.
In the account of Dirks (2001, p. 10) this is, “the historical fact that colonialism could only justify itself if under the regime of universal history it encountered the limit of alterity, the social fact that India must always be ruled because it could never be folded into a universal narrative of progress, modernity and ultimately, Europe.”
For an elaboration of this process see Sontheimer (1995).
On the work of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee in Bengal, membership 35,000, see Nag (2005). See also the statement by VAMP, a ‘collective of women in prostitution and sex work,’ in Maharastra, at http://www.sangram.org/collective.htm.
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Acknowledgements
I am first and foremost indebted to the Yellamma women who taught me about their lives. Parts of this article were presented at the Anthropology Department at Cornell University, Indiana University and Butler University, on panels at the annual meetings of the Society for Medical Anthropology (2006) and the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (2007), and the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii, Manoa Colloquium on the Body in South Asian Contexts (2008). For their inspiring comments and provocations on those occasions, I especially want to thank Janice Boddy, Lawrence Cohen, Elise Edwards, Stacey Langwick, Rachel Prentice, Ramnarayan Rawat, Suman Seth, Micol Siegel, Lee Siegel, Fouzieyha Towghi and Brackette Williams. For useful readings of the entire draft, I appreciate Srimati Basu, Erin Koch, Cristiana Giordano, Katherine Lemons and Saiba Varma. I am very grateful to two anonymous reviewers whose generous critiques helped me to reorganize and clarify this material. Forms of institutional and material support for portions of this research were provided by the Study for Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Mellon Foundation and the University of Kentucky. An earlier version of this article was awarded the Kenneth W. Payne Prize (2006) by the Society for Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists.
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Ramberg, L. Magical Hair as Dirt: Ecstatic Bodies and Postcolonial Reform in South India. Cult Med Psychiatry 33, 501–522 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-009-9147-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-009-9147-1