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
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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
508 Cult Med Psychiatry (2009) 33:501–522
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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.
Cult Med Psychiatry (2009) 33:501–522 509
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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
Cult Med Psychiatry (2009) 33:501–522 511
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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).
512 Cult Med Psychiatry (2009) 33:501–522
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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).
514 Cult Med Psychiatry (2009) 33:501–522
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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).
Cult Med Psychiatry (2009) 33:501–522 519
123
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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