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

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix Preface and Acknowledgments This is a book about the South Indian goddess Gangamma, whose rituals and narratives offer a range of possibilities and debates about gender at both cosmological and human levels.Gangamma becomes most visible and grows into her fullest power during her annual hot-season festival, during which time, for one week, ultimate reality is imagined and experienced as female. The relationship between the everyday lives of women and the mythical lives of goddesses—more specifically, whether or how the goddess may be a model or source of empowerment of women—has been debated in scholarly work and has caught the imagination of many others who have not grown up with goddesses (Hiltebeitel and Erndl 2000; Gold 1994; McDermott 2003). My research with Gangamma worshippers suggests that, in this context, the relationship between the goddess and human women is not of one imitation or modeling, but an empowering relationship in which their shared nature as possessors of shakti (female power) is asserted and performed.During Gangamma’s festival,female celebrants are the “unmarked” gender; they only intensify and multiply what they already do on a daily or weekly basis for the goddess—that is, feed her. Men (and aggressive masculinity), on the other hand, must be transformed (by taking female guises) to be in the presence of an excessive (ugra) goddess. These gendered possibilities are characteristic of the south Indian artisan/trader castes that traditionally celebrate Gangamma’s festival, possibilities that are being threatened both by processes of brahminization of Gangamma’s largest temples and the growth of middle-class aesthetics and gender and sexual mores. The story of how I first entered the worlds of Gangamma is told in the introduction, first as a curious onlooker and then gradually as an Preface and Acknowledgments x ethnographer who was drawn into the imaginative worlds of Gangamma and the lives of many who share that world.My earlier ethnographic research had been conducted in rural central India (Chhattisgarh) and the city of Hyderabad, during which times my primary research language was Hindi/ Urdu and its regional forms. Before I began my long-term research in Tirupati in 1999, I learned the Telugu script and basic grammar in the United States, and then studied Telugu intensively for two months in Hyderabad. Many nouns—such as ugram, shakti, vesham, gramadevata—idioms, narratives and narrative motifs, cultural concepts, and practices are shared between Hindi and Telugu, which contributed to my cultural fluency and confidence, if less-than-desired linguistic fluency. On each research trip, I have worked with Telugu native-speaker fieldwork associates and friends, with whom I studiously translated and discussed the voice recordings of conversations and narratives that appear in this book. Because I worked with three fieldwork associates and numerous friends for longer and shorter periods of time over nearly twenty years, in order to avoid confusion to the reader, I refer to them as “fieldwork associates” or friends, rather than by name in the chapters that follow. I first attended Gangamma’s festival (jatara) in 1992 and 1993 with V. Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Don Handelman; and many of the ideas for this book took root through our long discussions over the days and evenings of those jataras, for which I offer them my deepest thanks. I returned to Tirupati for the 1996 jatara with a friend and fellow folklorist, N. Lakshmi, who is a school teacher in Rajahmundry. That same year, an elder Tamil-speaking friend from Hyderabad, Revati Thangavelu, joined us for the last few days of the jatara; she gave invaluable assistance and wisdom in my initial interactions with the Tamil Gangamma devotee who is the focus of chapter 10. Revati and her husband Thanganne always had an open door waiting for me in Hyderabad in my comings and goings to Tirupati, offering encouragement and support on many levels, including endless cups of tea and a listening ear to both the joys and frustrations of fieldwork. By the time I had attended three jataras, I realized that several of the women with whom I hoped to interact more closely, including the Mudaliar -caste matriarch who used to serve Gangamma at her largest Tirupati temple (chapter 8), were Tamil speakers, although most also spoke Telugu. Therefore, it was serendipitous that the Tirupati-born woman who became Preface and Acknowledgments xi my fieldwork associate for my year-long research in 1999–2000, Krishna...