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

5. Gangamma as Ganga River Goddess

113 GANGAMMA AS GANGA RIVER GODDESS As my fieldwork associate and I arrived at Tatayyagunta temple to attend the alankara of the goddess during the Navaratri festival in the fall of 1999, I noticed a young woman wrapped in a wool shawl,1 wearing a large red bottu, sitting in the interior temple mandapam in front of a microphone. She gestured for us to come and sit down next to her and proceeded to ask who I was. When I told her my research interests in Gangamma, she identified herself as a purana pandita (lit., female scholar/reciter of the puranas), and said that she knew the stories (using the words caritra and patalu, history/biography and songs, respectively) of Gangamma. And she immediately launched into the story of the descent of the river goddess Ganga, which proceeded to flow into the narratives of Adi Para Shakti and Yogamaya Devi (the girl child substituted for Krishna when his nemesis , the king whose downfall had been predicted by the birth of this baby, smashed the baby against the ground). Annapurna’s performance voice is extraordinarily strong and confident. But in this case, the performance was rushed, and the clattering fan overhead and crowd noise resulted in an unclear recording. 5 IMAGINATIVE WORLDS OF GANGAMMA 114 Annapurna was scheduled to perform soon, but she invited us to her home, where she said she could sing for us (and the voice recorder) without interruption.When we arrived at her small two-room rented quarters a few days later, she seated us on her bed, served tea, and then, quickly shutting the door to keep out the noise and enquiries of her close-by neighbors, said she was ready to sing.Again,however,the story she told that day was not of the gramadevata Gangamma; rather, she sang the pan-Indian puranic story of the descent to earth of the river goddess Ganga. Initially I was disappointed , thinking I had run into another dead-end of fieldwork. However, after multiple conversations and performances, I learned from Annapurna the ways in which the gramadevata Gangamma can be—and is—narratively identified with the pan-Indian goddesses Ganga and Yogamaya Devi, particularly through emphasis on their shared shakti (and ugram). I observed the ways in which Annapurna has come to know Gangamma narratively, and created relationships with Gangamma in ways she, as a Brahman, may not traditionally have had the opportunity to do ritually. Annapurna experiences Gangamma as one more form of the goddess whom she knows through many forms; and so she easily asserts that she knows stories of Gangamma, proceeding to sing of Ganga Devi, Maya Devi, and Adi Para Shakti. However, not only is Gangamma performatively drawn into pan-Indian traditions, but the river goddess Ganga also becomes Gangamma-ized through the use of local, Gangamma imagery and framing, and by becoming part of a Gangamma narrative repertoire. In the Service of the Goddess through Story Annapurna describes her calling into professional storytelling as a calling into the service (seva) of god/goddess. She laughingly added, “We need both bhukti [food, livelihood] and mukti [salvation], right?”That is, she performs both out of devotion and as a way to make her living. She moved to Tirupati from coastal Andhra in 1994 to study for two years at the Tirupati Tirumala Devasthanam (TTD) Music College, from which she earned a certificate as a purana pandita. The course culminated in an exam, which she described as “testing in Ramayana, Bharata, and Bhagvatam; then an oral exam on stage, in Annamacarya Project Kalamandaram.”2 She was subsequently hired by the Endowments Department to sing in various Gangamma as Ganga River Goddess 115 temples around Tirupati, and this is her sole source of income. She generally performs for one month at a time at a given temple or series of temples in rotation and may also be called to perform at specific temples for specific festivals and rituals. (Her performances at Tatayyagunta temple are an indication of the shifting middle-class, brahminic nature of the temple.) When required to perform in villages, she leaves the house at six or seven in the morning,sings for two to three hours at a given temple and moves on to the next, returning home only late afternoon (without, she emphasized, eating anything while out all day, likely due to brahminic rules of commensality). She reported that many TTD...