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When Death Beds Throbb With Life: Understanding the Materialities of Liminal Deaths in Mariamman's Temple

Presenter:

· Sona Prabhakaran South Asian Institute, University of Heidelberg (Heidelberg, Germany)

Timeslot:

07/27 | 16:30-16:50 UTC+2/CEST

Abstract

Deification of death and funeral rituals are an integral part of Paadaikatiya Mariamman Temple in Tamil Nadu. The Temple, which stands on a cremation ground, stages a pseudo-funeral ritual for Goddess Mariamman where devotees perform their funeral rituals to express their gratitude to the Goddess for protecting them from death. This ritual, PaadaiKavadi, celebrated as the annual temple festival among the lower caste communities creates a space for liminal death where devotees are neither alive nor dead. When death and funeral rituals are actively integrated into this temple, the living corpse is not a polluting abject but a deified entity. The spatial configuration and the materialities of the temple, and the oral narratives on Goddess’s divinity play a crucial role to facilitate and validate the oscillation between structure and liminality during this festival. Initially established as a ‘Samadhi’, and then as a ‘shrine’, the structure and the functionality of the present-day temple has been ‘Sanskritised’ very selectively. This paper shall, therefore, attempt to understand how this temple and its rituals, as an emerging rural religiosity, confirms or exceeds the conceptual boundaries of Sankritisation. Furthermore, the paper shall evaluate how validating and performing a pseudo-funeral ritual within the temple premises attempts to re-define what constitutes as ‘Sacred’ for the community that comprise this universe. Lastly, a temple where death is deified, where the Goddess belongs to the marginalised castes and having been situated amidst Brahmanical traditions, one then wonders if the Brahmins are a mere spectator when this ritual theatricality unfolds.