The original Buddha was a model of what his followers aspired to be, as was Jesus, as was Mohammed. Māriamman is a model of what her worshippers experience themselves to be or aspire to be, as are some other Hindu gods, such as Ganapathi or Murugan.
Like all deities with name and form, Māriamman is a creation of human beings. Why did they create her in this form? Her worshippers say she has many names, many forms, and lives in many places. She is made by and of many people then. Her story, her forms, and her actions were created by many people, out of their own experiences and their own discoveries, and out of themselves. As Māriamman is unambiguously female, it is reasonable to conclude that she is made of and by many women. But it is said by some Western theoreticians that the mother goddess (including Māriamman) is a projection by men of what men imagine a woman, most of all a mother, to be.
Sarasvati, through taped interviews as well as through conversations, showed me something I had never thought of before, which was that the woman and the spirit she worshipped had been through similar life experiences, in particular, problems with men. Māriamman was, then, a model of what Sarasvati experienced herself to be, and Māriamman was struggling with Sarasvati, forcing her, to do what Māriamman in her life story had finally achieved. Māriamman had attained freedom by renouncing the ideal of perfect Tamil womanhood. Māriamman’s is a centuries-old Indian story, but it resonates with what some American women experience today: that you can’t have it all, that you have to choose. In one trance session, Māriamman (through Sarasvati, whose body she possessed on and off) engaged in a conversation with a young woman who had come with her mother. Māriamman aggressively asked the young woman, “Do you want life (vāṛkkai) or do you want work (vēlai)?” The young woman replied that she wanted work (vēlai), and she did not want vāṛkkai, which meant not only life but in particular married life. In Tamil, “life” or vāṛkkai is family life. Life outside of family goes by other names.
This young woman was now saying to Māriamman that she wanted to work and did not want to marry. The young woman’s mother evidently wanted her daughter to marry and had brought her to Māriamman in hopes that Māriamman would bring the girl to her senses. Who, when, and indeed whether to marry are not uncommon disputes between parents and children in Tamil Nadu, but usually the parents win. I don’t know who won in this case.
Sarasvati was intelligent and successful at her work. Unusually for a woman of untouchable caste, Sarasvati grew up in the Mylapore neighborhood of Chennai, had a retired businessman as a father, and spoke a Brahman dialect. Her first name was a common first name for Brahman women. Parvati owns power, Lakshmi owns wealth, Sarasvati owns knowledge. When I played the tape of Sarasvati’s narrative to a Tamil linguist, he asked in surprise if she was a Brahman. Brahmans in South India pride themselves on their mode of speech, which, among other things, differentiates them from lower-caste people. She was not, then, a rural Dalit woman. She was fully urban. But although she could “pass” as Brahman, she still, by birth, belonged to one of the lowest castes and had chosen their side when she might, with difficulty, have gone the other way. The path she chose was hard enough.
I learned from a famous Ayurvedic doctor who lived in the city that some people of untouchable castes learned to speak, act, eat, and appear exactly like Brahmans. That is, they could “pass” as Brahmans. The most famous singer of classical South Indian music, adored by Brahmans, M. S. Subbulakshmi, was said to have been born into an untouchable caste.
Sarasvati was, apparently, one of those of untouchable caste who could be mistaken for a Brahman, or could have been so mistaken had she not assumed the matted hair and unadorned appearance demanded of her by Māriamman. Sarasvati supported her family by working as a medium for Māriamman. Over the years, her clientele grew in size while she tended to her work, which entailed intuiting the problems of others and helping them overcome those problems. Some of her clients were Brahman women. Her sessions with clients were sometimes agonistic. Possessed by Māriamman, she would demand of her clients to say what they wanted, and would make them say it loudly. Through her tutelage, if one can call it that, some of her clients became mediums like herself.
Sarasvati did not speak of passing this work on to her daughters, however. She was more interested in passing it on to me. She spoke of the intelligence of her daughters, and how well they were doing in school. She saw that Tamil women were oppressed, and she worked in her own way to liberate them from the oppressors whose beliefs they had internalized, the men of their own families.
When I first met Sarasvati, in 1975, she was thirty-eight years old and I was twenty-eight. I was living with my husband and baby in Shastri Nagar, near Adayar, in what was then Madras. We were in the second floor of a bungalow on one side of a road. On the other side of that same road was what people called the slum—a settlement of mud huts. I was starting my research on concepts of the body in Tamil culture, casting about for people with whom I could study and from whom I could learn. A young American woman living in the same neighborhood told me I should go and meet a priestess who lived nearby. So I walked over to the hut in which Sarasvati lived, carrying my baby, who was about six months old.
After that first meeting, I visited her regularly, and got to know some members of her family. I called her grandson puli kuḍḍi (“tiger baby”) and my son yānai kuḍḍi (“elephant baby”). This was because my son, normal sized for an American baby, was so much bigger than her grandson, who was the same age as my son. I worried about the health of little Puli Kuḍḍi. I took Puli Kuḍḍi with his mother, Sarasvati’s oldest daughter and first child, to see a doctor because he had scabies all over his legs. The doctor sighed and said, “I can give him medicine, but the scabies will just return. These people live in filth. There is no help for them.”
At our first meeting, Sarasvati asked me questions, and I tried to answer them. I asked her if I could do a tape-recorded interview with her, and she assented, right then and there, but told me to come back a few days later. I think she wanted to assemble her thoughts.
We did the first interview, then the second, and Sarasvati sent her daughter Vasanti to help me transcribe. Slowly, word by word, we went over the tape. It took days; my knowledge of Tamil was sketchy, and Vasanti was manifestly bored. But I wanted to know exactly what Sarasvati had said. At a certain point, while we were transcribing, I looked up at Vasanti and said to her in my broken Tamil, “Your mother has an amazing mind!” Vasanti smiled.
I visited, with my baby, a number of times after that, watching the trance sessions that Sarasvati conducted, taking notes. But Sarasvati would not allow me to be just an observer and recorder. She wanted me to be part of what she did, to take a stand. I was shy and embarrassed, had no desire to commit myself to goddess worship, and did not know what to say. Māriamman was bold and insistent, however, and would not take my confused mumbles for an answer. She stated that I had come to her because I had “troubles with my husband.” But I said that was not the reason. I had come for research.
When I first met Sarasvati, I was married with one child, and was also embarking on a career. I was not a feminist and was not thinking much about gender issues at all. Both my husband and my infant son came with me to this difficult place. I did not understand, then, that ultimately I, too, a Western woman with many roads ahead of me, would have to choose between life and work—or at the minimum, would have to chop off vital parts of both my life and my work if both of them were to survive and somehow thrive.
Although I was not a feminist, Sarasvati was, and so were many other Tamil women I met, whether or not they had heard the word “feminism,” whether or not they could read. The knowledge that it is a misfortune to be born female was part of the air that all Tamil women breathed.1 The knowledge that the gender system was unfair was obvious to them. We Western women had not come to that point yet, or some of us hadn’t. Simone de Beauvoir tried to convince us, but still we refused to believe. We believed we could wriggle out of our misfortune, that biology was not destiny, that we could reach the top of the professional world and also enjoy a fulfilling family life,
