When the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddess

3. Narratives of Excess and Access

75 NARRATIVES OF EXCESS AND ACCESS Gangamma’s narrative repertoire opens up alternative and expanded perspectives on the nature of Gangamma—her excess and access—to those that jatara rituals perform. More specifically, the primary narratives of the goddess are a site of debate about gender roles and the nature of the female. Key to this debate is the nature of and relationship between ugram and shakti: is female shakti inherently ugra—that is, too much to bear? Taken together, the ritual and narrative repertoires create a cultural imaginaire of gender possibilities that reflect a left-hand caste ethos and provide indigenous commentary on the nature of the goddess, rationales for jatara rituals, and its celebrants’ gendered experiences of Gangamma. The two primary stories of Gangamma’s narrative repertoire performed during the jatara are the localized story of the Gangamma and the Palegadu who tries to marry her or makes sexual demands of her, and the myth of Adi Para Shakti, the primordial goddess who creates the three gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, hoping for a male to satisfy her desire. I also heard several other Gangamma narrative fragments outside of the jatara ritual context as commentary on the nature of the goddess or the jatara 3 IMAGINATIVE WORLDS OF GANGAMMA 76 itself. These include the story of the Asadi (sub-caste of Madigas who are ritual specialists) cart driver who must sacrifice his wife, upon the demand of his passenger Gangamma, in order to get her mud-stuck cart moving again.Women, in particular, often recount the story of the two Gangamma sisters’ tension over Pedda Gangamma’s children and Cinna Gangamma’s lack thereof, which results in the elder hiding her children under a basket, and the younger turning them into rocks. Other narratives widespread in South India, but not specific to the jatara, also adhere to the Gangamma repertoire.These include the narrative of the beheading of Jamadagmi Rishi’s wife Renuka (at the hand of her son) when her husband suspected her chastity; when the son attempts to rejoin Renuka’s head to her body, her Brahman head is mistakenly mixed up with that of an untouchable. The woman with the Brahman head and untouchable body becomes Mariamma, and the untouchable head and Brahman body becomes Yellamma (Whitehead 1988:116–117), both of whom become one of the Seven Sister gramadevatas. Since the sisters are often conflated as “one,” the story of these goddesses becomes the story of Gangamma, too. However, the Renuka narrative is an interesting reversal of the local Palegadu story, in which the male rather than the female is beheaded. And in the Renuka story, the beheading is seemingly unjust, and her humiliation at the hands of her husband results in her becoming a goddess; whereas in the second, the Palegadu is justly beheaded when his aggression toward the young women threatens the uru. The two narratives also present different views of female sexuality, representing differences in right- and left-hand caste gender ideologies: Renuka’s sexuality is subject to her husband’s protection/evaluation, whereas Gangamma takes control of her own sexuality (as will become evident in analyses of several variants of this story that follow later in the chapter). Another story that often adheres to a Gangamma repertoire is of the Brahman woman who inadvertently marries an untouchable, who has taken the disguise of a Brahman. Only when his children see him stitching leather (or, in another variant, when his visiting mother recognizes the smell of cooked meat) is his untouchable identity revealed to his wife. In her righteous anger, she transforms into one of the Seven Sisters and curses her husband to be born as a buffalo that will be offered to her during her jatara; her children become the sacrificial chickens and goats. While Narratives of Excess and Access 77 there is certainly a gendered component to this story,its conclusions would seem to emphasize tensions in caste hierarchies. In contrast, the two primary stories associated with Gangamma jatara primarily revolve around and debate gender. The story of Gangamma and the Palegadu is ritually enacted, but not verbally performed during the jatara itself; in contrast, the narrative of Adi Para Shakti is sung by professional performers in Veshalamma’s temple courtyard with the goddess as its primary audience. Most jatara participants know some variation or segments of the Palegadu story, which is visually present to them through...