Chapter 1
Māriamman
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
—Simone de Beauvoir
First Meeting
My first encounter with Sarasvati was in 1975, while I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation. She did not fit into that dissertation, but what she showed me was more enduring, if less elegant, than what I was able to write about then. The dissertation was about Tamil views of the living body. The people who taught me their views on this topic were a scholar who lectured about Tirumantiram and other difficult Tamil texts, an octogenarian Brahman Ayurvedic doctor who described his work as nāḍḍu vaidyam, “country medicine,” and the women who worked in the fields owned by the doctor. The people who taught me were very different from each other, but their views were remarkably congruent, and so I wrote a well-put-together dissertation.
Sarasvati’s view was completely different from that of my other teachers. She lived with a spirit with whom she struggled, a combative alter ego who told Sarasvati to do things she did not want to do, and not to do things she wanted to do. When Sarasvati rebelled, the spirit punished her. Both Sarasvati and the spirit were female, but they were not the soft interior female that my other teachers spoke about. This spirit was hard as rock. Sarasvati was tough, and torn between living the life of a good married woman and the life of someone else, a life like that chosen by the spirit Māriamman.
The story of Māriamman (aka Rēṇukā Paramēswari) is centuries old, as, I learned later, was attested in a Sanskrit text. She was a woman betrayed by both husband and son, a Brahman woman merged with a woman of untouchable caste via the bloody murders of both. She came back to life as a goddess with the head of a Brahman and the body of an untouchable. She was angry and she controlled bloody diseases, most notably smallpox.
Some say that Māriamman was a much older goddess, pre-Sanskritic, therefore thousands of years old. She was and remains a spirit in control of the rain. But the disease of smallpox may have emerged earlier than Sanskrit, in the Neolithic, when the first cities appeared. A disease like smallpox needs large, close populations to continue, as everyone who contracts this terrible and terrifying disease either dies or is rendered immune. When a small isolated place with a small number of people in it is hit for the first time by smallpox, there remains nobody left to infect. To fight it, there was nothing for people to do but resort to whatever spirit they believed controlled it. Maybe there was a time in human prehistory when the spirits were kinder and gentler. Or maybe there was a time when there were no spirits at all.
The Māriamman that Sarasvati knew had renounced her family and children. But Sarasvati manifestly loved her children and grandchildren, both male and female. She was in addition an attractive woman and she liked to be that way. But Māriamman commanded her not to cook for her family and not to comb her hair or wear ornaments. Sarasvati obeyed the commands of Māriamman.
Some art, not all, as well as some theory, is autobiographical, in the sense that the idea for it comes from experience, from life as lived by the artist or theoretician. Einstein believed in unity and simplicity, in his own life as well as in the universe, and lived his life and developed his theory according to that belief (Holton 1988). Mikhail Bakhtin developed his literary theory as a model of the society in which he desired to live, a nontotalitarian society in which the ideals of Martin Buber held sway, and as a model of the kind of person he wanted to be. He could not describe this social and personal ideal as such, because he lived under the totalitarian regime of Stalin. So he encrypted it in his literary theory (Bakhtin 1978, 1981, 1984; see also Chapter 3 of this volume). Claude Lévi-Strauss (1978) found that the way his mind worked resembled that of the Amazonian people whose myths he described and analyzed.
Similarly, some gods, not all, are models of what their worshippers are, or aspire to be. 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