Playing Host to Deity

Abstract In the South Indian religious tradition, there are grand ten‐day festivals held each year in the streets around the temples, mosques, and churches. This tradition is found not only inTamil Nadu and Kerala but also in Sri Lanka and in a variety of diaspora settings as well. These festivities remind one in certain ways of the earthy, lower class ”carnival” activities of medieval Europe, around which the Soviet scholar, M.M. Bakhtin, built some of his theories, except that the South Indian festivals are intensely religious and still very popular. Festivals that go back to ancient times often reflect issues in hunting tribal society, those dating from the medieval period reflect the concerns of complex agricultural societies (with landlords, kings, and priests, prominent), and others that started more recently are concerned with dealing with specific changes in the immediate social setting. Most of the festivals are held near Hindu temples and involve the worship of a number of deities. Many center on the worship of a particular Goddess, or a Goddess linked to either Visnu or Sivan (Siva) in some interesting way. Subplots about Muslim saints or warriors are commonly woven into the celebration, and a few of the most prominent festivals center on Buddhist or Christian figures, even though the patterns of worship are very similar to the more Hindu‐oriented festivals. Festivals with ancient roots usually include dramatic ascetic practices such as “fire walking”, where practitioners walk across beds of burning coals, and “hook swinging”, where a person is swung from a scaffold by ropes attached to a hook in the flesh of his back. In Goddess festivals, many worshipers go into a trance and become possessed by the Goddess so that they are enabled to perform healings and exorcisms for others. Animal sacrifice was also central to traditional Goddess festivals, but it is now discouraged in India and is found primarily in diaspora settings where South Indians went as indentured laborers in the nineteenth century. The crowds for the best‐known festivals can be in the hundreds of thousands, but whatever the size, the community that attends the festival considers itself a sanctified version of its everyday self, and it takes great delight in “playing host” to its favorite deities. This rich religious tradition seems to have roots in the earliest periods of South Indian history, but it is still a vibrant religious form that South Indians seem to be using with new enthusiasm as they face the social changes of the present generation.

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