Presenter
Harikrishna Deva Nandan - Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, NorwayPanel
109 – Literary islands of Far South : pāṭṭu and other quixotic archipelagos of songsAbstract
The bharanippāttu tradition at the predominantly subaltern Hindu festival Kodungallur Bharani, celebrated annually at the Sri Kurumba goddess temple in Kodungallur, Kerala is unique in its purport and import. Its songs can be ‘raw’, explicit songs, or ‘clean’ devotional songs in Malayalam. The former describe the goddess’s sexual drive, body, and sexual acts in highly irreverent songs that however are also devotional in their context. The songs are meant to placate the goddess in ‘heat’ or to cool her down after her battle with the demon Darika but are also understood as a pre-sowing fertility ritual. In this paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork, I trace the bharanippāttu’s evolution as a subaltern song culture at the festival, focusing on how this oral tradition of embodied knowledge is transmuted from its interplay with Hindutva in the modern era. The larger moral authority that Hindutva groups command at the Bharani and over the temple spaces enables them to exert control over the songs—triggering changes in their text and performance, while also indicating a subaltern-focussed vernacularisation of Hindutva politics and ideology, expanding the ambit of what it deems ‘acceptable/legitimate’ Hindu practices. Further, I also examine how these songs figure in Keralan popular culture as obscenity markers, while often very similar in content to Sanskrit devotional texts in their descriptions of the goddess’s feats and features.
