Magical Hair as Dirt: Ecstatic Bodies and Postcolonial Reform in South India

ORI GIN AL PA PER

Magical Hair as Dirt: Ecstatic Bodies and PostcolonialReform in South India

Lucinda Ramberg

Published online: 29 September 2009

� Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009

Abstract This paper offers an ethnography of the medicalization of matted locks

of hair (jade) worn by female ecstatics in a South Indian devi (goddess) cult. These

jade are taken by devotees of the devi Yellamma to be a manifestation of her

presence in the bodies of women who enter possession states and give oracles. At

her temples across the central Deccan Plateau, Yellamma women can be seen

wearing heavy locks of matted hair anointed with turmeric, the color and healing

properties of which are identified with this devi. Under a recent government-

sponsored campaign, reformers cut jade and hand out packets of shampoo as a

means of reforming the extended and illicit sexuality of these women. Associations

between sexuality and hair practices have long preoccupied anthropologists inter-

ested in the relationship between the body and culture. In this paper, I draw on this

literature and more than 2 years of field research to consider the encounter between

biomedical and Shakta epistemologies of the body dramatized in these jade cutting

campaigns. This effort to remake the body as a fit site and sign of modernity

elaborates the postcolonial politics of sexuality, gender and religiosity in India.

Keywords The body � Medicalization � Women and Hinduism �Devadasis � Postcolonial governance � Sexuality

If the goddess Yellamma wants a person, there are several ways she might call the

individual to her, all of which manifest in the body of the one she desires. One of the

L. Ramberg (&)

Women’s Studies in Religion, Harvard Divinity School, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138,

USA

e-mail: [email protected]

L. Ramberg

Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Kentucky, 208 Breckenridge Hall,

Lexington, KY 40506, USA

123

Cult Med Psychiatry (2009) 33:501–522

DOI 10.1007/s11013-009-9147-1

most common signs of Yellamma’s vocation recognized by devotees of this popular

South Indian goddess is the appearance of a lock of matted hair. This hair is taken to

be an indication of the presence of the devi in the body. To ignore it, devotees say, is

to risk the wrath of the devi, whose ability to afflict is as well known as her ability to

cure. At her temples in the central Deccan plateau across the states of Karnataka,

Maharastra and Andra Pradesh, Yellamma women can be seen wearing heavy locks

of matted hair anointed with brilliant yellow turmeric. To see one of them is to take

darshan of the devi, to enact a Hindu practice of visual encounter with the deity, to

see the god and for the god to see you (Eck 1996). Devotees worship this hair as the

devi herself and perceive the women wearing it as being especially capable of

entering states of possession and giving oracles. Called jade, these matted locks of

hair mark the bodies of those chosen by the goddess to manifest her presence in the

world. In the words of one Yellamma woman whose jade reached to her knees:

‘‘Not everyone gets matted hair. Only if the Goddess wants you to be her dasi does

she give you matted hair.’’1

Between April 2001 and March 2002, 1,000 such locks were cut from the heads

of Yellamma women according to the report of the nongovernmental organization

(NGO) that organized the cutting.2 This is but one year in an ongoing campaign that

began more than 20 years ago. The primary rationale for this cutting is that jade are

manifestations not of the devi but of dirt, disease and superstition. Jade cutting

campaigns have been an abiding feature of governmental and nongovernmental

efforts to rehabilitate Yellamma women, or devadasis, as they are often called.

Karnataka devadasis (literally, servants of the deity) or jogatis, as they call

themselves, are male- and female-bodied women who are given or give themselves

to Yellamma in a rite of marriage.3 These women are typically members of

communities formerly designated as untouchable, Holeyar or Madiga, generally

referred to within contemporary anticaste movements and scholarly literature as

Dalit (lit. smashed or broken in Marathi). By virtue of their dedication, jogatisbecome responsible to and for Yellamma, whom they embody and whose blessings

of fertility and well-being they are empowered to bestow. ‘‘They call us pujaris

(priests),’’ one explained to me, ‘‘What else would they call us: we keep the devi.’’

As wives of the goddess, they do not take additional husbands, but they may take

patrons or work in brothels.4 In the context of legal, medical and popular discourses,

1 See S. Seethalakshmi. ‘‘Devadasis Substitute One Evil for Snother.’’ The Times of India (Bangalore),

January 25, 1998.2 MASS, Mahila Samakyha Sangha (Women’s Welfare and Protection Association). Ghataprapha,

Belgaum, Karnataka. Progress Report, April 2001 to March 2002.3 Boys, as well as girls, are given or give themselves to Yellamma. Called jogappas, these feminine men

are sacred women who wrap saris, adopt the habitus of women and perform all the same rites as

devadasis. In this paper I focus on the female women, by far the largest number of these wandering

mendicants, who are the focus of reform projects in a way that the male women are not. Although

jogappas too may take patrons or otherwise exchange sexual access for means of livelihood, they have

not provoked scandal as the female women, and putative prostitutes, have.4 Such patrons are typically otherwise properly married to a woman in their jati (subcaste) whose

children fall in their lineage. In such arrangements, jogatis might be framed as mistresses. Their children

fall in their natal family’s lineage and were, within living memory, called devaramakalu (God’s children).

These arrangements are generally known to everyone in a community and taken for granted. In short, they

502 Cult Med Psychiatry (2009) 33:501–522

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they are labeled ‘prostitutes,’ a secularizing designation that elides their sacral

capacities and powers as persons who embody the devi and conduct her rites and

essentializes them as persons wholly defined by their unconventional sexuality.

Ongoing and intense governmental and nongovernmental rehabilitation efforts ban

dedications, call the rites belonging to jogatis superstition and criminalize them.

These interventions aim to eradicate what is widely represented as the systematic

sexual exploitation of Dalit women under the cover of false religion. By framing

them as vectors of disease and embodiments of superstition, however, reformers

also contribute to the social and economic marginalization of jogatis and undermine

their position as figures of religious authority and efficacy. As I detail below, this is

but the most recent wave in more than 100 years of devadasi reform.

The evidence from inscriptions and written accounts places devadasis as a

specialized class of temple servants dedicated to perform elaborate dance forms and

other rites in temples throughout South India from about the 10th century onward

(Kersenboom-Story 1987; Orr 2000).5 Present at major temples, they were

sophisticated choreographers, musicians and ritual performers whose importance

to the wider political life of the deities, temple economies and the institution of

kingship was manifest in the significant land grants and other forms of royal

patronage they received (Srinivasan 1988). For missionary and colonial observers,

however, the active nonconjugal sexuality of temple dancers could only appear as

‘prostitution,’ a corruption of Indian womanhood and sacred spaces. The reform of

devadasis in the colonial period took shape, as did the reform of practices of sati

(widow immolation) and child marriage, in the context of debates between officials

of the British Empire and Indians who sought to demonstrate their worthiness to

self-rule. These debates typically focused on women as the bearers of culture and

‘tradition’ and the embodiment of the future of the nation as elaborated in the work

of Lata Mani, Kumkum Sangari, Mrinalini Sinha and others.6 As I describe below,

even as they enact a radically different organization of sovereignty, postcolonial

projects of devadasi reform reiterate concerns about the status of women in relation

to ‘backward’ practices and national character.

In this article I consider jade cutting campaigns as an instance of the work the

body is made to do in order to become a fit subject of modernity for the Indian

nation. Achieving sexual citizenship in the postcolonial state, as we shall see,

Footnote 4 continued

were not—but in the last two generations they have become—scandalous. In the context of a discussion

about how, two or three generations ago, most significant landowners and important local officials kept

devadasis as a part of marking their status as ‘big men,’ an anthropologist from the region described to me

how his grandmother regularly sent him to retrieve his grandfather for meals or household matters from

the house of the devadasi his grandfather kept.5 Saskia C. Kersenboom-Story dates the first use of the ‘devadasi,’ a translation of the Tamil tevataci ortevaratiyar, to the Chola period (850–1279 CE) based on epigraphical evidence. However, she traces their

origins to female bards of the Cankam period (100–300 CE) supported by the king, whose bravery and

fame they extolled in performance (Kersenboom-Story 1987, p. 11). In her history of Tamil temple

women, Orr (2000) locates the earliest appearance of the term ‘devadasi’ in Vaishnava texts of the

Agamas (10th century). Orr disputes earlier epigraphical references to ‘devadasis’ cited by scholars.6 On child marriage, see Sinha’s (1988) Introduction to the new edition of Mother India. On the sati

debates, see especially Mani (1998). See also Sangari and Vaid (1989).

Cult Med Psychiatry (2009) 33:501–522 503

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precludes opening one’s body to the devi’s desire. This has been established as law.

In the 1984 Karnataka Devadasi antidedication act, the marital relation is

constrained to heterosexual and human unions and marriages to the devi are

annulled. Under the provisions of this act, Yellamma women are enjoined to

abandon their rites, sever their ties to the devi, cut their jades, wash and groom their

hair and marry properly. These measures mark the renunciation of an illicit

sexuality; those who incorporate them render themselves newly eligible for positive

state recognition in the form of loans, job training and access to medical care. In

short, they become sexual citizens of the postcolonial state. Those who do not

incorporate these measures are called ignorant, dirty and backward and are

threatened with imprisonment and fines.

Jade cutting campaigns tell an interesting story about culture, politics and the

body. Somewhat surprisingly, this is a story in which the main protagonist is hair.

How has unruly hair come to represent a threat to social order sufficient to compel

state intervention? How are we to understand the efficacy of hair cutting in the

remaking of sexuality and personhood such that these campaigns have been a

central, if not primary, tactic of reform? How have dirt, disease and vice come to be

seen in place of the devi in the devadasi body? To address these questions, in what

follows I offer some background on jogatis, the broader context of ecstatic

religiosity within which their embodied practices might be situated, and on their

reform. As a means to elucidate the particularly postcolonial nature of this reform, I

discuss colonial histories of the Indian body, and finally, I review anthropological

considerations of magical hair. All ethnographic material included here is based on

more than two years of field research conducted between 2001 and 2007.

The surveillance, normalization and discipline of bodies, as well as projects of

self-fashioning that focus on remaking the body, are by now unsurprising features of

modernity and its forms of power. In addition to specifying this encounter between

modernity and the body at the site of devadasi hair reform, I am here attending to

some limits on how the body is thought. In scholarly analysis as well as projects of

reform, the body is often understood as a surface for the inscription of meanings,

either as a reflection of the social or as an expression of an interior self. However, as

these campaigns demonstrate, hair matters, not merely as a communicative sign, but

as a material mode and medium of power in the body.

Karnataka Devadasis, Postcolonial Reform

Estimates suggest that between 15,000 and 20,000 devadasis are living in

Karnataka.7 Every village in that state, and many more in western Andra Pradesh

and southern Maharastra, has a small Yellamma temple in it. The puja or worship in

these temples is virtually always conducted by a devadasi from the Dalit

7 The Government of Karnataka reported 22,941 identified devadasis to the National Commission on

Women, Andhra Pradesh reported 16,624, and the Government of Maharastra, which has repeatedly

accused Karnataka of being the ‘source’ of devadasis working in the brothels of Bombay and Pune,

reported only those devadasis receiving government pensions and other forms of support (JWP 2001–

2002).


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community. Yellamma is the most popular deity in the region; half a million

devotees from all castes throng to her main temple during the pilgrimage season.

She manifests mostly as an ambivalent amma or Shakta devi, capable of bestowing

or withholding all forms of fertility and well-being, or, in her hot or aroused state, of

causing terrible affliction. As Adishakti, she is the source of all life, born of the

universe itself, dangerous and powerful. Devotees seek to cool her wrath, satiate her

hunger and cultivate her favor by transacting with devadasis. As wives of the devi,

they embody her and disperse her fertility through their communities. Their role as

mediators between the devi and her devotees place them favorably within local

symbolic and material economies. Contrary to the representations of reformers, in

the villages of Northern Karnataka and in provincial and urban red-light districts

extending as far as Bombay, Yellamma women are still very active as ritual

specialists.8 In the village I lived in for nine months, four devadasis were involved

in daily ritual work. Women living in red-light districts are no less ritually active; I

sat in Yellamma temples and participated in festival celebrations with jogatis and

other devotees in brothel communities from Bangalore to Pune.

Dedications are achieved, like Hindu marriages, by the tying of necklace of beads

or muttu (bead, pearl). Once dedicated, devadasis do not marry in the conventional

way. As one explained it to me, ‘‘Yellamma is my husband’’; or another, laughing,

‘‘How many times should I be married? Already I am married to her.’’ As wives of

the deity, always married, never widowed (nityasumangali), they are auspicious

women associated with all forms of well-being and thriving. By virtue of their

dedication, they become responsible to and for the goddess Yellamma. They ‘keep’

her in small temples and villages throughout the Central Deccan Plateau, where they

and only they are authorized to bathe and dress the murti (form of the deity) in

preparation for puja. During the festival of the first harvest season, they made

rounds (phere) walking from farmer’s house to farmer’s house carrying the devi in a

large basket, singing bhajans (devotional songs), dispersing blessings and asking for

the fruits of the harvest. Auspicious occasions—such as a successful harvest or the

healing of an affliction, fixing of a marriage, completion of a house, attainment of a

salaried job or successful drilling of a bore well—are taken to be signs of the devi’s

favor and frequently celebrated by members of the dominant-caste farming

community of Lingayats by calling her and her pujaris to their home for a ritual

called udi tumbuwudu (filling the lap/womb) in which householders put uncooked

rice, betel nut and leaf, new cloth and money in the laps of Yellamma and her

attendants. Yellamma women who actively perform these rites reported earning

enough to sustain themselves and, often, members of their extended household.

Karnataka devadasis come from landless or small land-holding Dalit families eking

out subsistence in an area prone to drought and largely dependent on dry-land

agriculture. Often dedicated to ensuring the line of descent in the absence of male heirs,

they occupy the structural position of sons, remain within their natal families as

economic actors and lineage bearers, are entitled to inherit land and frequently function

as head of household, supporting extended families. They fulfill the obligations and

8 My use here of the term ‘ritual’ is informed by the work of Talal Asad (1993) and Saba Mahmood

(2005).


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claim some of the privileges of sons such as fixing marriages, purchasing land and

making payments for jobs for younger brothers or nephews. A full account of the

implications of sacred marriage for the embodiment of gender and kinship is outside the

scope of this discussion, however, it seems critical to note that devadasis are at once

social men, as I describe above, and sacred women, as all who embody the devi must be.

That is, they are persons whose mode of being in the world confounds binary gender.

As persons who embody both ‘pollution’ and auspiciousness, jogatis also

complicate understandings of caste as a simple hierarchy of purity and pollution.9

Dominant-caste devotees of Yellamma touch the feet of Yellamma women in a gesture

of humility and to take the blessing of the devi. This bodily enactment of respect

otherwise conforms strictly to social hierarchies of age, gender and caste in which, for

instance, daughters-in-law touch the feet of their husband’s parents or agricultural

workers touch the feet of a landlord who has secured a job for a member of their

family. The abolition of ‘untouchability’ in the Indian constitution and enormous gains

achieved by anticaste movements notwithstanding, observance of caste ‘pollution’

remains a regular, if contested, feature of rural social life: regular enough, in short, that

for a dominant-caste devotee to touch the feet of a dedicated woman is remarkable. As

members of Dalit communities, they are ‘untouchable’ for members of dominant-caste

communities; as Yellamma women, they are auspicious, and contact with them confers

blessings of fertility. Ambivalence also marks the position of jogatis in relation to the

endogamous organization of sexuality. They marry Yellamma, who is ‘‘within the

family,’’ but have sexual liaisons with men outside their community.

Once past puberty, many dedicated women begin exchanging sex for means of a

livelihood, either through a local system of patronage by an upper-caste man or via

brothel-based prostitution. Those who work in brothels can earn significantly more

than they could by working as pujaris or by doing seasonal agricultural labor in their

natal villages. Devadasis who take patrons with whom they are typically monogamous

do not see themselves as prostitutes (sule), although they are aware that reformers

assume that they are. When challenged, by me in interviews or by devadasisthemselves, reformers readily admitted that they were aware that most dedicated

women, if they were sexually active at all, were monogamously attached to one man. If

we limit our definition of prostitution to brothel-based transactional sex for cash, the

equation between devadasis and prostitutes fails on empirical grounds. This equation

can work only if, by ‘prostitute,’ we mean an unmarried, sexually active woman and if

we refuse devadasis’ own account of their relationship to the devi as marital. While

perhaps as many as one-third of dedicated women do work in brothels at some point in

their lives, most remain in their natal household and village, where they take a patron

and conduct Yellamma’s rites. All devadasis, however, are equally subject to reform

and are represented as, and increasingly understood to be, sexually illicit.

Until recently, dedications of girls, and sometimes boys, were performed at

Yellamma’s main temple in Saundatti. In the 1990s, as the result of pressure from

reformers of the government to enforce the 1984 law criminalizing dedications, as

9 In Wives of the God-King, Marglin (1985) has elaborated the implications of devadasis being persons

who are simultaneously impure and auspicious for understandings of the axes of purity/impurity and

auspiciousness/inauspiciousness within the symbolic logic of Hinduism.


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well as the significant presence of police and reformers during the pilgrimage time,

dedications began to be performed mostly quietly, in out-of-the-way places. They

also began to decline significantly: with two exceptions, the hundred-some

devadasis I spoke with about the future of the practice said, ‘‘This will end with

us, we will marry our daughters.’’ In short, dedications are ongoing, but fewer and

fewer families ‘with Yellamma in them’ are choosing to give their daughters over to

a life of ecstatic embodiment, mendicant priesthood and illicit sexuality. More and

more dedicated women are taking the path reform has opened to them, forgoing

kinship with the devi to pursue possibilities of positive state recognition and sexual

respectability.

The interests of three social movements converged to produce this contemporary

wave of devadasi reform. Christian feminists concerned about the sexual

exploitation of Hindu women under the cover of ‘false religion,’ Dalit activists

opposed to sexual liaisons between upper-caste men and Dalit women and public

health workers, for whom devadasis were metonymically and inextricably linked to

prostitution and the spread of HIV, together created sufficient publicity and public

pressure to generate the passage of the antidedication act. Each of these movements

conceived of their aims in liberal terms, as emancipatory efforts against exploitative

and harmful practices. The means of reform, however, have often been repressive.

Initial government reform efforts focused on enforcing the 1984 ban on dedications.

According to the police inspector stationed at the main temple complex in the mid

eighties, this often involved violence. At the height of the main pilgrimage season,

at the time of the full moon, his teams of officers would patrol the far reaches of the

temple complex and break up camps of devotees conducting dedication rites, with

billy clubs and shouting. In my conversation with him in 2003, he regretted beating

up poor farmers but described this force as necessary by invoking a pedagogy of

coercive transformation for the ignorant and unreasonable: ‘‘This is the only way

they will learn, through violence, otherwise they won’t understand!’’ This

sometimes violent enforcement of the ban was accompanied by rehabilitation

schemes promoting tailoring, animal husbandry, basket making and so forth as

alternatives to ritual and/or sex work. Widely acknowledged to be ineffective, these

economic rehabilitation schemes have mostly been abandoned in favor of an

approach that more directly cultivates a new subject position, that of the

ex-devadasi.In the early nineties, the Karnataka Women’s Development Corporation

subcontracted with a large development NGO10 to start a new kind of campaign.

The architects of this campaign, whom I interviewed in their Bangalore offices,

determined that, for the devadasi ‘system’ to be eradicated, the auspicious status and

earning power of these ritual specialists would have to be undermined. They

mounted a major education campaign and recruited young Dalit men—often the

sons and brothers of devadasis—to paint posters in bus stations and put on skits

communicating the ‘social evil’ of devadasi dedication and the criminal penalties

that might be imposed on practicers of any of the devadasi rites. This campaign

created incentives for change as well as mechanisms of surveillance and reporting

10 The NGO is Myrada; they have organized the association of ex-devadasis called MASS.


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that extended into the smallest village community. The primary agents of these

mechanisms are ex-devadasis, women who have refashioned themselves though

renunciation of their dedication and participation in reform. They are warned—and,

in turn, warn others—to break the beads tied at dedication and to throw them in the

river, to stop roaming with the devi, playing sacred instruments, singing devotional

songs and asking for grain, to stop practices of divination and possession rituals and

to cut any matted locks of hair.

Dedicated women cultivate different kinds of relationships with ex-devadasi

identity and embodiment. They participate in reform as a means of access to state

benefits as well as to new forms of respectability. Two women I conducted life

history interviews with, Pratima and Anusha, identified as ex-devadasis and were

involved in the reform and policing of other devadasis. Although Pratima had

complaints about how poorly the NGO had delivered on its promises of loans for

small businesses and houses, she described the life she and other ex-devadasis had

chosen as being full of happiness (sukha): ‘‘[Instead of asking for grain], now we

cover our heads with the end of our sari and work into the evening in the fields

earning twenty rupees, there is value in that, we are beautiful and the people call out

to us, amma (mother), tangi (little sister), they regard us with respect.’’ Pratima’s

account of happy conversion and respectable work describes the path some

ex-devadasis have taken; Anusha’s, another. In addition to her reform work, Anusha

also continued to act as a pujari in her community. That is, she was conducting the

very rites she was encouraging others to renounce. As she described, economic

necessity as well as ongoing ties to devotees figured in her decision to pursue both

forms of embodied labor. The investments of dedicated women in reform are

complex, multiple and potentially ambivalent.

Nonetheless, ex-devadasis now throng the temple at the height of pilgrimage

season dressed in uniformly navy saris, sporting visored caps befitting the policing

function they have come to serve. They pass out fliers detailing the banned rites and

threaten those who would dare play the sacred instruments of Yellamma with arrest,

imprisonment and the imposition of fines. One of the condemned practices is the

wearing of jades. I quote at length from a flier distributed at the main Yellamma

temple complex during the height of the pilgrimage season in 2003:

Clean hair makes for a wise head and greater beauty.

Wise people, have you seen people worshipping hair that is unclean, knotted,

dull, smelly, and full of dust, dirt and lice being worshipped as the Goddess’

Jade with turmeric and oil? Join in the meritorious work of social change and

raise the awareness of people. When hair is not properly combed, oiled and

washed clean, it knots and a microorganism called ‘fungus’ [English word]

gets into the hair causing a disease called plica neuropathica. This disease can

easily be cured. [A lengthy description of hair washing and grooming is

omitted here.] It is a misconception that the Goddess troubles those who clean

knotted hair. Some grow such hair, tell people it is god and frighten them as a

means of earning and acquiring position. Such fake practices push society in

the wrong direction. Devotees should not be mislead, they should clean such

tangled hair. Thousands of people have gotten their knotted, dirty hair cleaned


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and are now living a healthy life. This is evidence that the appearance of jadeor knotted hair is not due to the Goddess.11

The language of the flier addresses itself to an audience of would-be reformers

who are enjoined to bring an enlightened perspective to the matter of hair and

religion. Jade, it states, are not a manifestation of the devi but, rather, of dirt and

disease. Yellamma has nothing to do with such hair; she is clean, purified. Dirt can

be detangled from the hair through a careful process of grooming, with disease and

superstition thus averted. The message here is that those who persist in wearing

jade, whose diseased and dirty state can no longer be attributed to ignorance, are

nefarious actors promoting ‘fake practices’ and inspiring fear among people as a

means of self-gain. In this view, jade mark not the dangerous/auspicious power of

Yellamma’s presence, but a threat to social progress. Within the discourse of

reform, jogati embodiment is said to pose a danger, not only to the individual, but to

society at large.

The medical rhetoric of contagion linking diseased bodies, ignorance and social

decline draws on unstated but widely held associations among jogatis, illicit

sexuality and disease. This rhetoric has been successful in raising doubts about the

provenance of jade. In my conversations with devotees and other observers of

reform, I was asked over and over again: ‘‘Is it really from the devi or is it disease?’’

Anxious to dispel the notion that I was somehow especially capable of this

discernment, I tended to respond to this binary choice between divinity and

pathology by introducing a third option: fashion. ‘‘In the U.S., some people go to the

beauty parlor to get such hair,’’ I offered. According to his research assistant,

another anthropologist working at the temple complex in the early 1980s sent a

sample of jade to a laboratory in England for analysis. The idea that the presence or

absence of a fungus in matted hair could ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ the presence or

absence of the devi is consistent with a biomedical logic of single etiology, but not

with Shakta epistemologies of the body, in which some forms of affliction are

understood to be the effect of the heating and troubling presence of the devi in the

body. That white-skinned American or British anthropologists might be seen to have

a particularly reliable grip on biomedical logic and its presumed powers of

discernment is not particularly surprising. Nor is the fact that the state government

would draw on such logic in order to better discipline, police and manage unruly

bodies, ‘for their own good.’ However, this rationality is not the only one at work on

Yellamma’s hill.

On the walls of the main temple complex, painted posters illustrate proper and

improper modes of bodily comportment. One such poster features a woman with

long jade next to another with carefully groomed hair bound at the back of her head.

A big black ‘X’ marks the woman wearing jades; a check mark endorses the

‘properly’ groomed woman. On one of my trips to this temple I encountered two

Yellamma women with long locks sitting under this poster. I asked them what they

made of the poster and the jade cutting campaigns. ‘‘Who is the government to cut

our hair?’’ One of them snorted, ‘‘We have been living here for several years and we

11 This translation was prepared with the assistance of Ambuja Kolwgi.


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know the tradition and customs. If it was dirty, we would have cut it ourselves. They

cannot force us to cut it.’’ In the face of the government’s desire to refashion her as a

proper subject of bourgeois femininity and bodily constraint, this Yellamma woman

was defiant. She claimed superior knowledge of ‘tradition’ and the right to discern

her own cleanliness.

In fact, many Yellamma women have had their jade forcibly cut. In the context of

a discussion about the NGO and government efforts at reform, one devadasi offered

the following account of an incident at a jade cutting campaign she had witnessed:

There was a great pativrata (celibate ecstatic)12 and she had jade. These

people [MASS, the NGO] cut her jade against her will; she was screaming.

There were old women and they were made to bend over and their jade were

cut…. Even though they said we are old and we are not like ‘that’ [not

prostitutes], they beat them and forcibly cut the jade…. The police and the

sangha [NGO] people were here together.

More than packets of shampoo and lessons in hygiene are being dispensed in this

violent enforcement of a hairstyle. According to the architects of the campaign, the

elimination of this ‘superstitious’ practice, along with all the rites and bodily

practices specific to Yellamma women, is necessary to undermine a system that

results in the prostitution of Dalit girls. But not only the extended sexuality of the

devadasi is being rehabilitated, her religiosity is also subject to transformation.

Indeed, as the reformers recognize, the two are inextricable and bound up together

in her hair.

Genealogies of Reform

Contemporary reform projects have been shaped by the colonial encounter and its

legacies in postcolonial forms of government and publics. As regards the

resignification and remaking of the ecstatic body and its capacities, in particular,

the textualization and purification of Hinduism as well as biomedicine have made

their mark. Both of these processes advanced through the logic of what Partha

Chatterjee has called the ‘‘colonial rule of difference,’’ according to which the

putative lack of civilization among colonized peoples provided the moral basis for

colonial rule and its forms of knowledge.13 In this section, I consider these legacies

as a means of elucidating the postcolonial character of jade cutting campaigns.

12 Obeyesekere (1981, p. 65) notes that pativrata is used by many female ecstatics to refer to their vow of

celibacy. The word literally translates as ‘‘vow of devotion to the Lord’’ and is most commonly used to

refer to the Brahmanical ideal of a wife’s conduct toward her husband, whom she treats as a god.

Obeyesekere explains the use of the term to mean sexual renunciation: ‘‘The woman renounces sex with

her husband. She then transfers her allegiance to a god … the etymological meaning of pativrata is

maintained.13 In the account of Dirks (2001, p. 10) this is, ‘‘the historical fact that colonialism could only justify

itself if under the regime of universal history it encountered the limit of alterity, the social fact that India

must always be ruled because it could never be folded into a universal narrative of progress, modernity

and ultimately, Europe.’’


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As technologies of colonial governance, European medicine and hygiene did a

great deal of work to resignify native bodies as dirty, weak and prone to disease,

thus in need of the civilizing influence of empire. In a report to London on ‘‘the real

social state of the mass of Indian people’’ in 1870, British nurse pioneer Florence

Nightingale wrote:

[Gone is] the veil of romance woven by poets over Hindostan … peoples to be

numbered by tens of millions living under social and domestic conditions

quite other than paradisiacal…. [They are living] amidst their own filth,

infecting the air with it, poisoning the ground with it, and polluting the water

they drink with it. (Prakash 1999, p. 130)

Consistent with the science of climatological determinism prevalent in European

science at the time, and crucial to the production of tropical medicine as a particular

set of knowledges and practices for a radically other place and body, this kind of

representation (of which thousands of examples may be found) attributed harmful

superstition, self-destructive practices and a degraded environment to the native

body as the truth of that body (Prakash 1999). Lacking in reason and full of

pollution, this body was figured as one that posed a danger, not only to the empire

but to itself.

As a mode of modern power, biomedicine has established new possibilities for,

and regimes of, life and death and embodiment (Foucault 1978, 1989). Historians

of colonial medicine have documented the ways in which the ‘saving mission’ of

colonization was extended through the spread of discourses and practices of

‘hygiene’ and biomedicine. The ‘barbaric,’ ‘backward’ and ‘uncivilized’ nature

of the Indian body was frequently invoked in terms of the putative lack of health and

dissolute sexuality among the ‘natives’ (Arnold 2000). In addition to situating the

native body as being in need of the civilizing influence of Empire, colonial medicine

secularized the body as a biological being. Biomedical epistemologies locate the

truth of the body in rational science and the material processes of a disenchanted

world (Gordon 1988). Such an understanding of the body does not admit the

capacities of the body cultivated and exploited in ecstatic religiosities, such as the

Shakta or devi religion surrounding Yellamma.

In ecstatic encounters, what Lewis (2003, p. 15) has called ‘‘that most decisive

and profound dramas of religion, the seizure of man by divinity,’’ the body is

permeable. It bridges and incorporates both human and divine territories; it is

predicated on and reiterates a cosmological order in which humans are subject to

divine intervention. As Yellamma women described over and over again to me, the

devi’s presence in their bodies might manifest as affliction (trouble, or kadata in

local idiom) or as power (shakti). But possession states, ecstatic dancing, fire

walking, naked worship and the other bodily practices that Yellamma women have,

and sometimes still do engage, as a means of cultivating the devi’s presence in their

body and renewing their power as healers, do not appear within dominant

interpretive frames to be legitimate expressions of religiosity. This too has a history.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western observers, many of them mission-

aries, saw idolatry and orgiastic frenzy in Indian religiosity, but later scholars

‘discovered’ in Vedic texts evidence of a more philosophical and monotheistic (thus


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‘evolved’) religion (Dalmia and Von Steitencron 1995; Viswanathan 2003). The

production of a textual Brahmanical religion, predominately Vaisnava, as the ‘real

religion of the Hindus’ and the unifying basis for the nation of India had a number

of consequences, one of which has been the resignification of subaltern religiosity.

The ‘folk religion’ of aboriginal people, members of outcaste communities and

women has been increasingly framed as ‘superstition.’ Dalmia and Von Steitencron

(1995, p. 15) write:

The tendency to classify [folk religions] as degenerate or primitive forms of

Hinduism goes back to colonial ethnography and historiography. These cults,

which express themselves in festivals concerned with the winning of power

and the renewal of life in rural and pastoral societies, have been labeled

inhuman, barbaric, orgiastic…. In these cults the supreme self-surrender of the

bhakti movements have formed an insoluble amalgam with ancient practices

of securing prosperity, fertility, and the presence of divine powers…. Though

these cults are still full of vitality in more remote areas, the urban drive to

eradicate superstition and to render ‘Hinduism’ respectable on all levels of

society is penetrating rural areas and interferes with these folk traditions.14

The production of ‘Hinduism’ as a world religion unifying the citizens of India is,

in the language of Foucault, a mode of modern power that has produced new

technologies of the self and forms of governmentality. For instance, as many

scholars have argued, the reliance of colonial courts on the interpretations of

Brahman pundits in the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate religious

practices produced transformations in ‘Hindu’ practices such as sati and ‘hook

swinging’ and recast a vast field of regionally distinct and community-specific

embodied practices enacted for and with the gods as a territory in which ‘true’

textual religion might be distinguished from mere custom or superstition (Dirks

1997; Mani 1998). These transformations in turn implied, and sometimes juridically

enforced, new norms of bodily comportment, for relations to gods and spirits and to

the state. That this process is ongoing is evident in contemporary efforts to

criminalize animal sacrifice and rehabilitate devadasis.

As modes of modern power, both biomedicine and the textualization of Hinduism

have affected how devadasi embodiment is able to appear in public discourse. A

third major factor in the shape of devadasi reform has been the politics of gender

and sexuality under colonialism and within anticolonial movements. In 1885 a

member of the British House of Commons invoked devadasis as an example of the

‘debauched primitiveness’ of India that justified the need for British rule (Nair

1994). This representation was in keeping with the accounts of Christian

missionaries for whom the mix of active sexuality and religiosity was a sign of

the fallen state of both. In his widely read and influential study of South Indian

religion, first published in 1921, Reverend Henry Whitehead wrote: ‘‘The Asadi

girls, however, never marry, but are made basavis, i.e., are consecrated to the

goddess, and become prostitutes. Certainly the degradation of religion in India is

seen only too plainly in the degradation of the priesthood’’ (1999, p. 45).

14 For an elaboration of this process see Sontheimer (1995).


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In her work on colonial era debates over reform of the devadasi institution in

Madras, Kalpana Kannabiran notes that British Victorian and textual Brahmanical

ideals of exclusive conjugal monogamy were wed and the extended sexuality of the

devadasi was set against the law and respectable society. She writes:

Contemporary polygamous relationships among the devadasis … were

aberrations which did not reflect the glory and sacredness of the Hindu

nation. This had marginalized or excluded those women who did not come

within the very narrowly redefined boundaries of the monogamous family: an

adult female has to be either a wife or a prostitute. (Kannabiran 1995, p. 165)

The production of these axes of chaste/unchaste female sexuality and true and

untrue religion made it possible to divest the devadasi of her religious and civil

rights and, as Srinivasan (1988) has argued, to exile her from the temple, thereby

divorcing her practice from its economic base and appropriating her dance form for

the nationalist project.15 The appropriation and the revival of temple dance forms as

aestheticized and purified schools of ‘classical’ Indian dance for the world stage

exemplify the demands postcolonial modernity has made on the Indian body.

In the legacy of this postcolonial feminist scholarship demonstrating the

relationship among the regulation of gender and sexuality, normative and

normalizing religion (Brahmanical Hinduism) and the project of nation building,

I am framing the politics of the native body and the contemporary reform of

Karnataka devadasis as heir to the ‘‘colonial rule of difference.’’ Contemporary

projects of social reform focusing on the distinct sexuality and ecstatic embodiment

of devadasis are driven by many of the same concerns that informed reformist

endeavors in the colonial era: the threat of contagion, the respectability of women,

the legitimacy of Hinduism, the honor of the nation. The legitimacy of governance

continues to be at stake in these projects, but within the context of the new nation,

the ‘civilizing influence’ is located within India and tied to its ancient past. Thus the

aestheticized performer of Indian classical dance represents the sophisticated artistic

history and chaste womanhood of India for the new nation and the devadasi who

continues to embody an active mix of religiosity and sexuality stands in need of

reform.

The legacies of colonial reform projects help make sense of why contemporary

reform efforts focus intensely on devadasi embodiment, but not on prostitutes

generally or on female sadhus at large. Under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act

(1990), prostitution per se is not illegal, but solicitation is. In the context of

international anti-sex-trafficking panic, some activists have begun to push for the

criminalization of prostitution in India (Shah 2008), but as it stands the secular

prostitute is not criminalized or pursued by the state as the devadasi is. Moreover,

sex workers in India have been among the most successful in the world in securing

human rights and dignity in their communities, whereas devadasis have found no

possible ground for collective self-organizing that does not rest on the eradication of

15 See Srinivasan (1988) and Gaston (1996). For accounts of the mid-century legislative debates in the

Madras presidency, see Kannabiran (1995). For more recent debates in the state of Karnataka, see Jordan

(1993).


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the defining rite of their mode of being in the world: their dedication to Yellamma.16

Recent ethnographies of female ascetics, some of whom wear matted locks of hair

and engage in ecstatic practices, attest to their ongoing position in Indian society as

marginal but respected figures of religious virtuosity (Denton 2004; Khandelwal

2004). Each on their own, uncontained sexual activity and female ecstatic

embodiment are marginal and circumscribed practices, but neither is subject to

erasure in the way that jogatis, who incorporate both, are.17

Magical Hair, Asceticism and Sexuality

The postcolonial politics of sexuality, gender and religion as well as the logic of

biomedicine help us make some sense of how devadasi embodiment cannot but

figure as a sign of contamination, superstition and female ruin. However, we have

yet to disentangle the matter of hair. How have jade come to be such potent

representations of everything that is ‘wrong’ with devadasi dedication? Anthropo-

logical reflections on hair practices offer some helpful, not to say provocative, ways

to think about the potency of hair and its sexual implications.

In 1958, Edmund Leach wrote a delightful article entitled Magical Hair, in which

he considers the general problem of the interpretation of symbols through readings

of hair behavior. Leach disparages the use by psychoanalysis of ethnographic

material about hair symbolism from ‘primitive’ societies to extend clinical

observations of individual patients into universal features of the human uncon-

scious. Along the way, he concedes that the ethnographic record does offer many

examples of the sexual significance of hair rituals. Head hair, it seems, has

frequently been taken to be symbolic of the sexual status of a person. Leach cites

examples from the South Asian context including the imposition of celibacy on the

Hindu widow symbolized by the shaving of her head, the tonsured Brahmanical tuft

as an indication of sexual restraint and the wearing of matted locks by ascetics as a

sign of bodily detachment from the phenomenal world. He offers a general formula:

‘‘long hair = unrestrained sexuality; short hair or partially shaved or tightly

bound = restricted sexuality; close shaven hair = celibacy’’ (154). Leach empha-

sizes the public/social character of these ‘phallic’ symbols in India and Sri Lanka,

where ‘‘hair behavior and sex behavior are consciously associated from the start’’

(156).

Both the meaning and the efficacy of symbols are at stake here. As Leach

observes, symbols, like words (Fortune and Malinowski 1932) do not merely say

something, they also do something. Hair rituals are not just communicative symbols

but pragmatic tools for making things happen in the world. But how? Leach argues

with the psychoanalyst Berg’s (1936) claim that head hair is a universal personal

symbol for the penis and that, therefore, cutting or shaving hair constitutes symbolic

16 On the work of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee in Bengal, membership 35,000, see Nag

(2005). See also the statement by VAMP, a ‘collective of women in prostitution and sex work,’ in

Maharastra, at http://www.sangram.org/collective.htm.17 On sex worker rights organizing, see Kotiswaran (2001). On the possible changes in the status of

prostitution under Indian law, see Tandon and Grover (2006).


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http://www.sangram.org/collective.htm

castration. This theory locates efficacy in unconscious association and motivation.

Leach compares Berg’s readings of head shaving as a ritual of mourning with

Malinowski’s (1932) to make the following point: Berg’s logic assumes that the

symbolic form (shaved head) communicates the interior truth of the person (love for

the deceased), whereas Malinowski assumes that the cultural context requires the

person to do specific kinds of symbolic work with his or her body. In short, for

Malinowski the shaved head points to a cultural rule: those who wish to situate

themselves as nonenemies of the deceased must manifest their grief bodily in the

form of a shaved head. For Berg, however, the shaved head expresses the

unconscious of the person. From the psychoanalytic point of view, hair cutting

signifies castration; from an anthropological one, a rite of passage. Both assume that

hair does certain kinds of work, whether personal or cultural. It is significant and

efficacious.

For Leach, hair cutting marks and effects the transition of a person from sacred to

profane, or vice versa. It is the cause-and-effect relationship posed in psychoanalytic

readings that he is arguing against: the idea that hair is expressive of something else

that it is not and that this displacement is what makes it powerful, efficacious. Hair

is not powerful because it represents the phallus, he suggests; it is powerful, phallic

and divine/sacred. For Leach, magical power is libidinous, it is aggressive or ‘‘free

power.’’ Hair relics, he suggests, are magical materials, ‘‘thing[s] of power in

[themselves]’’ (158), which may also be phallic. When the locks of Yellamma

women fall, they are often kept by devotees with other sacred objects in their

household mane devaru (place of the gods); when they are cut off by reformers they

are discarded as so much meaningless dirt. But this is not to say that reformers do

not grasp the efficacy of hair cutting in shifting the sexual status of Yellamma

women.

Within both Hindu conceptions of purity and pollution and biomedical categories

of hygiene and pathology, ‘dirt’ is ‘‘matter out of place’’ (Douglas 2002).

Understood in this way, dirt implies both the presence and the transgression of a

‘‘set of ordered relations’’ (36). As Douglas writes, ‘‘Where there is dirt there is a

system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter,

in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements’’ (36). The ‘dirty’

hair or matted locks of Shaivite/Shakta ecstatics, such as Yellamma women, mark

their rejection of and from the ordinary organization of social and sexual life. Their

bodies have been seized by or given over to another order, Yellamma’s, and this is

what makes them powerful. The power, ‘dirtiness’ and sexual status of these

ecstatics are all aspects of the same thing: the presence of Yellamma in their bodies.

Jade, then, are not simply either personal or cultural symbols, but the thing of power

in itself, Yellamma.

Within the logic of reform, the power of ‘dirty’ matted locks can only be negative

and must be neutralized, cleansed and purified in order to restore Yellamma women

to their proper place within gendered social order. Following Leach, one might say

that whereas the appearance of a lock of matted hair marks the sacred/powerful/

phallic/dirty status of a Yellamma woman, the jade cutting campaigns render them

profane/weak/castrated/purified. But how are we to think of phallic women, or of

their castration?


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Obeyesekere (1981) extended Leach’s thinking about personal and public

symbols in his book Medusa’s Hair, in which he draws on Greek mythology and the

work of Freud to frame matted locks as symbolic of snakes and the fear of

castration. Medusa, you will recall, wore a head of writhing snakes, the sight of

which turned men to stone, until Persius, assisted by Athena, managed to avoid

looking at her directly by watching her reflection in his shield and was able to cut

off her head. Obeyesekere’s study focuses on Sri Lankan Sinhala ecstatics, both

Hindu and Buddhist. Their ecstatic practices of fire walking, entering trance states,

performing rites of divination and speaking oracles are all common to the South

Indian strain of religiosity associated with the worship of Shakti and Shiva

(Shaivism), within which I would situate the Yellamma complex. He describes

shaved heads and matted locks as signs of two variants of asceticism, both of which

imply worldly renunciation, relinquishment of attachment to family and household,

mendicant existence, detachment from bodily existence, pursuit of bodily extremity

and intimacy with a deity. His case studies include narratives of locks as a gift from

the god, a boon, a sign of a vocation, an indication of being called out of marriage

by the god, ecstatic states and healing powers, personal hardship and psychic

distress, as well as psychic power. All the ecstatics he worked with were afraid to

cut their locks.

Many of the devadasis I spoke with who had been given locks were afraid to cut

them, an act that for them amounted to refusing to embody Yellamma, rejecting her

call to serve her. Some whose locks had been cut had renounced the possibility of

such a vocation and proclaimed the truth of the reformer’s claim that jade were

nothing but dirt and disease: ‘‘Look,’’ one said to me, ‘‘they cut them and nothing

has happened to me, the devi has not troubled me.’’ Many others told stories about

intensifying affliction and loss of divinatory and healing powers associated with

failing to embrace and, thus, please her. For all, associations among cutting locks,

ceasing ecstatic practices, marrying in the conventional way and rejecting

Yellamma’s call were explicit.

In a discussion of a female ecstatic, one of his case studies, Obeyesekere (1981)

writes: ‘‘In many of these cases, increasing devotion to the god is accompanied by a

movement away from family responsibility and by a renunciation of sex. The

conflict … comes out beautifully in her statement: ‘It is not me, it is the god who

shoved my husband aside’’’ (25). When he asked another ecstatic why she was

given matted locks, she explained that they were given by Isvara (a form of Shiva)

in order to protect her pativrata: ‘‘The gods give matted hair to their child. In the

trance the gods speak through the relative and tell you to leave the household life,

and they promise that they’ll endow you with power’’ (63). Recall that Obeyesekere

suggests that female ecstatics use the Sanskrit term pativrata, which usually refers

to a wife’s devotion to her husband, to indicate their withdrawal from ordinary

conjugal relations and singular ecstatic dedication to god. This female ecstatic’s

account suggests that matted locks protect her relationship with Isvara from outside

incursion; she is removed from the marital economy, is rendered powerful,

revolting. Her power is related to the distinctiveness of her sexuality, which is

harnessed to the work of the gods, rather than ordinary household labors and

conjugal duties.


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Obeyesekere’s (1981) discussion of the meaning of matted locks of hair offers a

way to think about the distinctiveness of this ecstatic sexuality. For the women he

worked with, the genesis of locks was a painful emotional experience associated

with the ‘‘rejection of the husband’s penis and an emotional-sexual relationship with

him’’ (33), movement away from conjugal relationships and toward god and the

commencement of possession states. These states he characterizes as orgasmic

relations with the deity that establish and strengthen the relationship between

devotee and deity. He writes:

The matted hair, unlike the shaven head of the monk, does not represent

castration for the ascetic, but rather stands for its very opposite: the denial of

castration or loss of the penis. For in all of Hindu asceticism sexuality is not

extinguished but suppressed. (34)

Thus, perhaps we may think of these ecstatic performers not so much as

renouncing sex altogether but, rather, as containing and expressing it differently, as

the embodiment of a cosmic life force rather than a genital act aimed at pleasure

and/or reproduction. Obeyesekere invokes yoga and tantra as territories of Indian

thought in which life energy and sexuality are aspects of kundalini, that serpent

power resting at the base of the spine that can be released and expressed in

possession states as the presence of the deity in the body.

Obeyesekere (1981) begins his analysis by describing the first time he saw a

woman dancing in an ecstatic trance at Kataragama, matted locks flying as she

moved. He was revolted, a reaction he attributes, via reference to Medusa and

Freud, to his own fear of castration. He does not ask, as I must, whether this

response is specific to male-sexed persons. Indeed, and somewhat ironically, given

his sensitive analysis of gendered hardship in the lives of female ascetics, his

analysis remains within a phallocentric logic. If female ascetics have phallic power,

it is because a god gave it to them:

If the hair is the sublated penis emerging from the head, what kind of penis is

it? Clearly it is no longer the husband’s but the god’s. But the relationship with

the god is of a different order: eroticism is sublimated, idealized, and

indirectly expressed. Gods, those idealized beings, cannot have penes like

yours or mine; thus the matted hair is no ordinary penis but the gods lingam,the idealized penis, his sakti, the source of life and vitality. (34)

Feminist scholars offer different avenues of interpretation. In a feminist critique

of psychoanalysis, Helene Cixous describes the economy of feminine creativity as

being rooted in abundance rather than based in lack. Fear of feminine creative

power, she suggests, is a lie we have been taught and an effect of what she calls

‘phallocratic ideology.’ Cixous (1980, p. 255) writes: ‘‘You only have to look at the

Medusa straight on to see her. And she is not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s

laughing.’’ From Cixous’s point of view, an encounter with Medusa, what Freud

glosses as the child’s discovery of the mother’s sexuality, is not, as it is for Freud, a

traumatic confrontation with lack, and thus the possibility of castration, but rather a

splendid and emboldening vision of unbound feminine creativity. Perhaps not


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everyone responds to matted locks of hair as Obeyesekere did; perhaps one’s own

relationship to the social organization of sexuality matters.

To be fair, Obeyesekere’s own analysis suggests this possibility. In an early

review of the subaltern studies project, an effort to tell the history of India ‘from

below,’ Veena Das questions readings of female asceticism as the substitution of

one form of male domination (by a husband) for another. She writes, ‘‘The material

on female ascetics described by Obeyesekere would point to a different direction—

asceticism as a means of transforming the oppressive demands of heterosexuality

into the power to heal’’ (Das 1989, p. 323). In this reading, ecstatic embodiment

appears as a means of sexual conversion, not as a matter of sex acts. What is at stake

is the disposition of sexuality, the uses to which it is put. Indeed, perhaps we might

say that, rather than moving from one phallocentric economy to another (husband to

god), Yellamma women have been implicated in a different sexual order, one in

which generalized and abundant fertility is cultivated and distributed. In this sexual

order, rather than circulating around the phallus, Yellamma women with jadesmight be understood as having incorporated the phallus as a part of their own

bodies. In an essay entitled ‘‘The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological

Imaginary,’’ Judith Butler (1993) offers a queer corrective to the notion that only

penised bodies can have a phallus—a notion Obeyesekere also challenged but only

by recourse to the displacement of the husband’s penis by the god’s lingam. The

jades of Yellamma women might be seen to point to the lingam of Yellamma, the

phallic power of a devi who manifests most often as an autochthonous devi. For

goddesses, as for women, as many scholars of South Asian religiosity have noted,

marriage effects the taming of Shakti (Kapadia 1995; Kinsley 1987). Uncontained,

this fierce feminine energy may become too hot; autochthonous goddesses are

known for their ability to trouble and destroy as well as their ability to heal and

create.

Magical hair marks the bodies of some Yellamma women, called by the devi

away from family life and endowed with the capacity to heal afflictions and disperse

the blessings of fertility and well-being in their communities. These capacities and

powers are locked up in their hair as a sign of their renunciation of conjugal

sexuality and their primary attachment to this hot devi. But this hair is not merely a

communicative sign; it matters forth their bodies in particular ways, as persons who

have incorporated the devi.

Discussion

If we take matted locks of hair to be personal and public symbols of worldly

renunciation, including renunciation of family life, and the embrace of ecstatic

embodiment characterized by the forms of excess and extremity necessary to

embody a very hot goddess, what are we to make of the state’s forcible removal of

jade? Leach suggests reading locks as symbols of a powerful, unbound sexuality.

We might take these matted locks as representations of loosened, fierce and

independent female sexuality, akin to the sexuality of the devi, upon whom devotees

depend for all possibilities of fertility and well-being. When reformers cut jade from


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the heads of Yellamma women, are they stripping them of this ecstatic knowledge

and unruly sexuality in order to render them proper subjects of reason and middle-

class femininity who groom, bind and oil their hair?

But before I proceed any further on this chain of significations, matted locks of

hair, uncontained sexuality, writhing snakes (for Yellamma handles snakes also),

beheaded women (for Yellamma was born of a Renuka, whose head was cut off

when she was distracted by desire and lost her chastity) … let me remember that for

Yellamma women and devotees, jade are a manifestation of the devi herself. Thus

to have their jade cut is to have their body severed from the body of the devi.

A radical and violent refashioning of the sexuality and religiosity of the body is at

stake in these campaigns; also, the very nature of the body itself. The body figured

in jade cutting campaigns is whole in itself, atomistic, self-contained—and matted

hair is a matter of unwanted intrusion of dirt and disease. By contrast, the ecstatic

body is open to incursion, which can manifest as affliction but may be cultivated as

a form of power. One may renounce this possibility of ecstatic embodiment and

undertake this refashioning voluntarily as a modern subject of reform or be forcibly

subjected to it as an object of reform. Subjects of reform gain access to state-

sponsored micro lending programs and new forms of respectability; objects of

reform are disciplined by state power, threatened with fines and punishment.

Within the rhetoric of reform, the cutting of jade from the bodies of devadasisrepresents the surgical removal of superstition and disease from the social body as a

whole.18 I am drawing here on the idea of surgical logic and the concept of

operability developed by Cohen (2004) in his work on state campaigns for

sterilization and kidney selling as modes of biological citizenship. He writes:

…to be operable is to be assimilated to norms of modern citizenship and its

constitutive will—despite oneself—through a radical, here surgical, act of

subsumption. (167)

Jade cutting campaigns serve as an especially dramatic example of the reification

of a social problem as a medical one that can be neatly excised from the body.

Reform campaigns resignify jade as a problem of dirt and disease within the logics

of hygiene and biomedicine, thereby seizing on a potent symbol of social, sexual

and religious distinction but redirecting its efficacy toward the production of

citizens.

To submit one’s jade to the scissors of the state is a means of becoming

assimilable as a citizen-subject, to become embraced, rather than censored by the

law. The effect of this cutting is not simply the redemption of individual outcaste

women from vice, dirt and disease, but the collective uplift of Dalit men and women

who, as participants in reform, become admissible as rights-bearing citizens worthy

of protections and eligible for loans. The biomedical language of isolable disease

and the modernist distinction between superstitious practices and authentic religion

produce reasonable bodies shorn of magic, ‘backwardness’ and contagion and, thus,

eligible for inclusion in the national body.

18 On the social body see Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987). On the need to purify it, see Douglas (2002).


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The medicalization of jade as a manifestation not of the devi, but of disease,

resignifies the body as secular, a biological system vulnerable to infection, virus or

fungus but not to divine incursion. In this way, the medicalization of jade also shifts

the truth value of religion. Ecstatic religiosity, characterized by possession, oracular

powers and renunciation of procreative marital sexuality (janma; family life), is cast

as superstition, and the milder devotional practices consistent with Brahmanical

Hinduism are upheld as true religion. Not only do jade cutting campaigns seek to

rehabilitate Yellamma women—to enforce and incite new modes of bodily

comportment among them, modes that correspond to norms of femininity and

domesticated (contained) sexuality—but also they seek to rehabilitate Yellamma.

Within discourses of reform, she is figured as a goddess who neither claims nor

enters the bodies of those she desires, nor becomes angry if she is thwarted, but

rather as a devi who merely requires a devotional and chaste orientation of the heart.

Acknowledgements I am first and foremost indebted to the Yellamma women who taught me abouttheir lives. Parts of this article were presented at the Anthropology Department at Cornell University,Indiana University and Butler University, on panels at the annual meetings of the Society for MedicalAnthropology (2006) and the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (2007), and the Center for SouthAsian Studies at the University of Hawaii, Manoa Colloquium on the Body in South Asian Contexts(2008). For their inspiring comments and provocations on those occasions, I especially want to thankJanice Boddy, Lawrence Cohen, Elise Edwards, Stacey Langwick, Rachel Prentice, Ramnarayan Rawat,Suman Seth, Micol Siegel, Lee Siegel, Fouzieyha Towghi and Brackette Williams. For useful readings ofthe entire draft, I appreciate Srimati Basu, Erin Koch, Cristiana Giordano, Katherine Lemons and SaibaVarma. I am very grateful to two anonymous reviewers whose generous critiques helped me to reorganizeand clarify this material. Forms of institutional and material support for portions of this research wereprovided by the Study for Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, the American Instituteof Indian Studies, the Mellon Foundation and the University of Kentucky. An earlier version of thisarticle was awarded the Kenneth W. Payne Prize (2006) by the Society for Lesbian and GayAnthropologists.

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Magical Hair as Dirt: Ecstatic Bodies and Postcolonial Reform in South India

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