4. ESTADO DE LA CUESTIÓN
4.5. APARICIÓN DE NETFLIX Y LOS CAMBIOS QUE SUPONE EN LA INDUSTRIA
The stories explaining how MÅriyammaË got to be who she is vary from region to region. In the northern areas of Tamilnadu, especially in Chingleput and the Madras area, the story of how the Goddess became MÅriyammaË or one of her sisters tends to be a version of the story of ReæukÅ, found in the MahÅbhÅrata (3.116.1–18). This is one common rendition:
The Story of ReæukÅ
In an űram near the village live Jamadagni and his wife ReæukÅ.
Every day ReæukÅ goes to the river to gather water for her husband’s pâjÅ. She has the gift of bringing water without a vessel of any kind; through the power of her chastity, she forms the water into the shape of a pot and carries it home with her.
One day as ReæukÅ is bending over the river to collect some water, a Gandharva flies overhead, and she sees his reflection in the water. Admiring his beauty, she instantly loses her chas-tity, and with it her ability to collect water without a vessel. So she goes home empty-handed and despondent.
Through his spiritual vision Jamadagni sees his wife re-turning without the water, so he knows she has lost her chas-tity, and in a rage he orders their son Para±urÅma to kill his mother. Para±urÅma assents on the condition that his father grant him a boon, which Jamadagni agrees to do. So Para±urÅma obediently picks up an ax and chases his mother to kill her. ReæukÅ runs and hides in the house of a washerwoman. The washerwoman tries to protect her, but Para±urÅma finds them and chops off both of their heads.
Para±urÅma goes back to his father, reports his deed, and asks for his boon. Jamadagni says, “I will grant you whatever you ask.” Para±urÅma asks that his mother be brought back to life.
Jamadagni gives Para±urÅma a vessel of water and tells him to attach his mother’s head to her body and sprinkle her with water, and she will come back to life.
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Para±urÅma rushes to the washerwoman’s house, attaches two heads to two bodies and sprinkles them with water, and they both spring back to life. But alas, in his haste Para±urÅma has attached the wrong heads to the wrong bodies! Jamadagni refuses to take his wife back, as she now has the body of an untouchable. So ReæukÅ becomes the goddess BavÅËiyammaË, and the washerwoman becomes MÅtan¯kiyammaË [whose shrine is usually located near the main temple.]3
In the version of this story found in the MahÅbhÅrata and in many folk versions of this tale, the action of the male protagonists is played out on the body of the wife and mother. But the MahÅbhÅrata episode is a story of filial piety, whereas the PeriyapŬaiyam version describes the making of a goddess, partly through the Untouchable woman who protects ReæukÅ. The village tale is also about the con-struction of a community: ReæukÅ’s individual dismemberment and reconstruction lead to greater community integration. Some versions of the ReæukÅ story we heard differed in the details, but an important point is that nearly everyone we met in PeriyapŬaiyam knew some version of this story. For them, ReæukÅ is BavÅËiyammaË.
ReæukÅ’s suffering and untimely death is in fact a common path to deification in village cults. Stuart Blackburn details how people who lived or were known in the village and who died violently may be worshiped as part of the most localized realm of the divine hierar-chy (Blackburn 1985, 255–274). Although BavÅËiyammaË is here iden-tified with ReæukÅ, a pan-Indian figure, the playing out of this mythic scenario is influenced by the ways village cults appropriate divine power from local beings. In this story ReæukÅ is a local woman, living in “the village.” Some renditions of this common tale specify that she and Jamadagni live in an űram in PeriyapŬaiyam. When her son chases her with an ax, she runs to another local woman, identified by caste. Her grisly murder echoes the crucial element in the deification of local beings: the innocence of the victim is not what matters, it is suffering and violence that transforms a person into a deity. Blackburn reports that this point was driven home to him when he was discuss-ing why a particular woman, rather than her evil sister-in-law, was deified. He assumed that the sister-in-law wasn’t worshiped because she was evil, but the villagers replied, “No . . . the sister-in-law is not a goddess not because she is evil (ke‡‡a) because she didn’t suffer;
Nalla TaÙkŬ [the goddess] might be evil, too, but we worship her because she suffered and died” (260). A person who has suffered and died a violent and unnatural death has too much power and must be
transferred to an acceptable category—a deity people can propitiate—
rather than left to wander around tormenting people on Earth. By worshiping this deity, people can safely make contact with this force, and that power is made accessible. Although MÅriyammaË, along with her northern sister ÷çtala, may be more widely known throughout India than some of the more narrowly localized goddesses, she em-bodies the inimitable and immediate power of violent death trans-formed that characterizes the most sought after local deities.4
Much of the scholarly discussion of the ReæukÅ myth has cen-tered on ReæukÅ’s sexual transgression and on male fear of dangerous female sexuality (Brubaker 1978; Harper 1969; Hart 1973). But Fred-erique Marglin argues persuasively against the notion that female sexuality is inherently dangerous and must be controlled by a male consort (Marglin 1985, 39–60). She shifts the focus instead to the dan-gers of celibacy for non-ascetic males and females in the world of birth, death, and rebirth—that is, the world of safisÅra. Marglin then reinterprets female sexuality in the context of auspiciousness and in-auspiciousness, which encompass but are not bound by notions of purity and pollution. Sexuality, menstruation, and birth are impure but auspicious processes.
Female sexuality is not only inherently auspicious, but it is also regenerative, for it is linked to childbirth and therefore to creation.
Analogously, in religious ritual, it is sacrifice that makes (re-) genera-tion possible. For example, in ÿg Veda 10.90, the cosmic puru„a is the sacrificial victim from whom is born the entire universe. And in many Tamil village festivals, a buffalo is sacrificed to MÅriyammaË in order to feed her and regenerate her power, as well as to revitalize the connections between the goddess and her devotees.
In the myth ReæukÅ is beheaded; when her head is placed on the Untouchable woman’s body, she is restored as the goddess BavÅËi-yammaË. ReæukÅ is like a sacrificial victim; her violent death catalyzes her regeneration in a more powerful form, as the Goddess who ap-pears on Earth to support her devotees.5 ÷akti, female power, includes both inauspicious, fierce aspects as well as benevolent, auspicious aspects, and in this case ±akti cuts both ways. The fierce power that ReæukÅ gains through her suffering is transformed when ReæukÅ becomes BavÅËiyammaË, whose fierce power is viewed by her wor-shipers as a protective potency that demonstrates a mother’s supreme love.
Devç as ÷akti has cosmogonic/cosmological associations in many contexts, but in the worship of the Goddess in PeriyapŬaiyam, ±akti also means action: ±akti is the Goddess’s ability to make things hap-pen, to act on behalf of her devotees. Women devotees in particular
151 Reconstructing the Split Goddess as ÷akti
worship BavÅËiyammaË in order to maintain their families’ welfare;
they act so that the goddess will act in response. Women’s ability to act on behalf of others is part of their ±akti, which flows from the goddess. It is generally believed that women, by virtue of their fe-maleness, have more ±akti than men. In conversations with BavÅËi-yammaË devotees, I was struck by the way they responded to questions about the goddess. When asked about BavÅËiyammaË’s ±akti, devo-tees would answer with “action-oriented” language: “If X happens, then we worship BavÅËiyammaË by doing Y. In our village when children get sick, we take them to BavÅËiyammaË; in that village over there, if their children get sick, they take them to ChiËËamma.“ In each village, in each place, people are intimately connected to their goddess through ritual interactions; the ±akti that flows from the god-dess to her devotees and back to her is negotiated through the proper ritual actions. The goddess is ±akti because of what she does in re-sponse to devotional rituals performed by her devotees. Hence, her identity as ÷akti is to at least some extent “constructed” through ritual interaction.