The Dance of Kuṟatti

Presenters:

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Abstract

Kuṟatti, partly fortune-teller, partly goddess, has been a well-known figure who widely travelled across South India. Primarily a daughter of the hills, her footprints can be found almost everywhere: in poems, plays and songs, courts and stages, sacred groves and shrines. Her wanderings have brought her among the Malayars of North Kerala and into the temporary shrines where the Teyyam is performed (Freeman 2003). An encounter of goddess Kuṟatti with the community of Malayars has been recorded by the most peculiar and still puzzling work, the Tiruniḻalmāla. Here Kuṟatti can be seen worshipped and joined by Malayars in a very special dance by her own shrine erected outside the walls of the magnificent temple of Āṟanmuḷa. Her presence seems vital for a ceremony centred on an elaborate and spectacular rite of purification meant to remove bad effects accrued to the temple’s main deity. But the story of Kuṟatti happens also to make part of another ritual called Niḻalkuttu – the ‘piercing of the shadows’. The figure of Kuṟatti reappears as a golden thread weaving through different domains: the tōṟṟam songs, the Teyyam practices, and the shrines that she is believed to inhabit or visit. All these spheres can be seen as “shrines” marked by specific and distinct materialities and their interactions can only be studied effectively against the background of the communities that activate them. Using textual sources and ethnographic data of different genres, the paper attempts to connect the figure of Kuṟatti to places she visits through a focus on the material aspects of the place and space-making practices associated with her cult in order to offer and extended idea of a shrine.