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, with all parts of both intact.
Māriamman exemplified escape of a woman from slavery through sacrifice. In her life story, she went through a kind of domestic slavery and decided to renounce it. Ultimately, Māriamman confessed through Sarasvati, “for Tamil women only I will do much good.” I wondered then what Māriamman meant. I guess I was assuming that Māriamman, as a great spirit, had to be a universalist. In fact, she was enshrouded in the specificities of place, time, history, and culture. Most of all, a belief in the power of self-sacrifice is a significant part of the Tamil world. In this sense, Māriamman was and is very Tamil. However, Māriamman was also, in Simone de Beauvoir’s terms, both immanent and transcendent. She had attained, in her own word, freedom (moḍcam).2
When I returned in 1990 to visit Sarasvati, Puli Kuḍḍi was in his mid-teens, handsome and sleek. By then, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a powerful Tamil militant group fighting against the government of Sri Lanka for freedom from discrimination) was at the front and center of Tamil thinking. I had not yet started research on them, and only thought it was crazy for the LTTE (if it was them) to set off a bomb in the Madras airport, killing many civilians, leaving shreds of bloody flesh all over the walls and ceiling. I imagined that Sarasvati, basically a peaceful woman, would be opposed to the Tigers. And maybe she was. But when I asked her what she thought of the LTTE, Māriamman, speaking through Sarasvati, said, “I wear different colors. Sometimes I am peaceful, and wear sandal-colored clothing. But sometimes it is necessary that I wear red.” I took this statement as a symbolic declaration on the part of Māriamman that she was in support of the LTTE and their violence.
That year was the last time I saw Sarasvati. Though she and most of her family were flourishing, a horrible thing had happened. Vasanti, Sarasvati’s eldest daughter, had died. She had complained of back pain, and then she died. The causes of her pain and her death were unknown. When this happened, Sarasvati told me she fought again with Māriamman, saying, “You were our protector. Is this the way you protect my daughter? By killing her?” To this question, Māriamman replied, “Who is more important? Your daughter or me?”
There is more. At the beginning, I was afraid to ask Sarasvati her caste, because it was impolite. But one day I asked. She answered, “Chakkili.” To me that meant “sandal maker,” and I thought no more of it. Later I learned that Chakkili was not only a caste name but a deeply derogatory term. In some parts of India the main job of Chakkiliyars was removal of human excrement, and some of them still perform that work. The history of antagonism between Paṟaiyars and Chakkiliyars is long-standing.3
During my research on the war in Sri Lanka, I learned that Chakkili is also a derogatory Sinhala term for Tamil. The implication is that all Tamils are as low and foul as excrement. The term Chakkili was most commonly used by Sinhalese for members of the LTTE, the Tamil Tigers, who renounced caste divisions altogether.
Another name for people of the Chakkili caste is Arunthathiyar, named after the unmoving polestar, Arundhati. The activists among them protest the fact that they must remove the contents of sewers, raw excrement, by hand, carrying it in pots or baskets on their heads. A person doing this work can pass out from the toxic fumes of the sewer and fall and die in the sewage. It is terrible work.
Arunthathiyar activists promote literacy and English-language learning for Dalits. They consider that, in India, learning English is essential for success. They search for and publicize white-collar jobs and university scholarships for which Arunthathiyars are eligible. They also publicize violence done against any Arunthathiyar. They protest the fact that Arunthathiyars are too often beaten, murdered, and dismembered with impunity.
In 2011, an Arunthathiyar woman, elected Panchayat president in a village of Tamil Nadu, was beaten by men who did not want to take orders from a Dalit woman. Four reporters, at least one of them himself of Arunthathiyar caste, visited the place of the beating, took notes, and wrote a report. They plan a documentary about this incident. The full report is too long to repeat here, but it includes these words.
On the street next to her house, at the turning past Karuppansamy temple, they attacked her. Opposite the library she had built, upon the road she