Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia

3. Negotiating Relationships with the Goddess

3 Negotiating Relationships with the Goddess WILLIAM P. HARMAN Further on in this chapter I shall draw some generalized conclusions about vows that devotees take to the Indian Tamil goddess Mariyamman. But for the moment, I prefer to begin by emphasizing the specific and local nature of my topic. I shall be speaking here about a particular goddess in a particular temple in a particular town. I shall also be concerned with the people who worship her—her devotees—whose understandings of the dynamics of vows to the goddess are shaped by a partly localized and a partly South Asian approach to devotion. Samayapuram is a sleepy village in Tamil Nadu that lies on a major highway 15 kilometers northeast of Tiruchirapalli and 275 kilometers southwest of Chennai (formerly Madras), Tamil Nadu’s largest city and its administrative capitol . Samayapuram has minimal tourist facilities for overnight accommodations, in terms of both quality and quantity, but it is served eighteen hours a day by hundreds of buses running both to and from Tiruchirapalli as well as to and from Chennai. In addition, tourist vans arrive in droves. Nearly everyone coming and going to the town is making a trip to the temple of Samayapuram Mariyamman. This fact is remarkable, in part because the temple of the goddess is so surprisingly unremarkable. It has a relatively recent history and was probably remodeled as a major temple around the middle of the eighteenth century. I have found no literary references to a shrine to the goddess in Samayapuram earlier than the seventeenth century. Moreover, it is small and architecturally undistinguished, but during the 17 hours it is open it is thronged in normal periods and unbearably packed during festivals. Several thousands of people visit and depart this 25 26 William P. Harman Figure 3.1 Small roadside Mariyamman shrine in Tirunelveli District Negotiating Relationships with the Goddess 27 temple every day. What does distinguish the temple, from the point of view of its administrator and the government-appointed manager, is its income. They claim, and offer government records to back that claim, that this small temple has the third largest income of all temples in India, behind the shrines of Venkatesvarar at Tirupati and of Murugan at Palani. Enormous, locked steel contribution boxes (untiyal) are available throughout the temple complex, and by the time for evening retrieval of offerings, they are brimming with gifts in coin, paper, gold, and silver. Because it constitutes a part of a temple network in the same region that includes the enormous and imposing temple of the famous deity Ranganatan at nearby Sri Rangam, a portion of the Samayapuram Mariyamman Temple income is used to support this much larger (probably by a factor of 20), much older, more famous, and more beautiful counterpart. But every day thousands of Mariyamman’s devotees/pilgrims cruise by the great Sri Rangam temple in buses, cars, vans, auto-rickshaws, and on foot proffering barely a nod to this massive temple and its famous but generally otiose form of the deity Vishnu. They have more pressing business as they make their way to visit the Samayapuram shrine and the goddess whose involvement in the most intimate of life’s issues, healing and surviving, is legendary. All are bent on becoming a part of the throng that fills the goddess’s temple, coffers, and consciousness. Strangely, however, during the six weeks I spent poking around the temple and chatting with pilgrims in Samayapuram, I saw not a single distinguishable foreign tourist face, though there were many Indians who spoke no Tamil and who came from the North. There are thousands of temples to Mariyamman in southern India, but none is more famous or more recognized than Samayapuram. This Samayapuram Mariyamman is especially powerful when it comes to matters of health and illness. Traditionally, Mariyamman is associated with fevers and disease, and with the protection of health. This may be one reason why the temple is so unappealing to casual tourists and therefore goes unmentioned in tourist brochures written in English. It is a haven for the ill and the infirm, many of whom suffer obvious pain and discomfort, in addition to being quite needy and dependent on handouts either from the temple or from worshippers. Most goaldirected visitors enter and leave quickly to discharge obligations contracted by vows. Indeed, it is best to have a task to perform, a vow to discharge...