A Million Shaktis Rising: Pongala, a Women's Festival in Kerala, India

Each spring, Thiruvananthapuram,¹ the capital city of Kerala, India, shuts down for a day while more than a million women of many religions, communities,² and classes line the streets with their pots to cook porridge for Attukal Amma(Mother).³ They are performing a women's ritual that is deeply rooted in ancient Kerala mythology and cultural tradition and also has powerful meaning for women today, as evidenced by its rapid growth during the past twenty years.

My research of Attukal Pongala, a women's offering to the goddess Bhagavati at Attukal Temple in Kerala, South India, brings to the academy some voices of women speaking about their own ritual experiences. This work attempts to place women "center stage" and to present them as "subjects, not objects, with their own experiences and aspirations."⁴ Although there were differences in women's ritual experiences based on caste, class, and religion, I attempt to understand what, in the experience of offering Pongala, each woman found valuable.

In an issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion that asks the question "Who speaks for Hinduism?" Vasudha Narayanan calls for the inclusion of the voices of women and the rituals of "lower-caste" Hindus, or else, she warns, "portrayals of Hinduism will remain the depiction of a high-caste, male-oriented, textual religion, an 'ism' in the best of post-Enlightenment traditions." She urges us to "listen to the goddesses—not the demure, circumspect ones but the dynamic ones who possess and who are progressive."⁵ This article attempts to answer that call.

Pongala is a ritual from the non-Sanskritic tradition in Kerala, which, unlike high-caste Hinduism, does not have written texts. Rather, its texts are the stories and poetry sung as songs (tottam), the ritual practices, and the dances and dramas offered as part of the festival to Bhagavati. Unless we consider this material, we will miss the worldview and praxis of the majority, that is, women and those who are outside the caste system.

I first witnessed Pongala in 1995 and was fascinated to learn that, although this public cooking of rice by women was traditionally an offering of the Dalit communities in agricultural fields and sacred groves, it spontaneously became a massive ritual in which women from most Kerala communities now choose to participate. To learn about contemporary women's relationship with the Goddess and the meaning of this ritual for the participants, I researched the ritual in the southern Kerala district of Travancore over a period of four years, interviewing women and offering Pongala myself on three occasions.⁶ It seemed to me at first that offering rice porridge is not empowering to women, because it appears to reinforce gender stereotypes concerning food preparation and cooking, but I came to understand the offering of cooked food to deities in South India as an ancient practice with deep ritual significance. Only male priests can make this offering in the Sanskritic temple context, but women have retained this important right in the Dravidian, non-Sanskritic rituals.⁷ Interviews with twenty-nine women representing wide socioeconomic, caste, and religious spectra revealed that they believed the ritual to be empowering for themselves and that their offering was necessary to increase the power (shakti) of the Goddess and her capacity to help all her devotees.⁸

Kerala is a small state in southern India whose socialist policies and funding in education, health care, and social programs give its people a basic security and a quality of life comparable in many ways to U.S. and European standards in spite of a per capita income of less than $500 per year.⁹ Kerala's unique caste system included large Christian and Muslim populations in the elaborate separations that were part of the most complex and most restrictive system of any state in India. (In addition to untouchability between castes, there was the concept of "unseeability," which required persons of lower castes to call out their presence or to vacate the road so that higher-caste persons...