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WALKING TO KATARAGAMA

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Walking to Kataragama
Sunil Goonasekera
International Centre for Ethnic Studies

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The International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) Sri Lanka Studies
Program assisted by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation
(NORAD) aims at doing cutting edge research on issues of
1. multiculturalism, nationalism and identity 2. Studies on war, suffering and memory
3. Studies on globalization, foreign aid and economic reform
This volume is part of the series of studies on war, suffering and memory
Published by International Centre for Ethnic Studies 2, Kynsey Terrace Colombo - 8
Sri Lanka
Copyright 2007 by ICES
ISBN 978-955-580-110-2
Printed by Kumaran Press Private Limited 361 1/2 Dam Street, Colombo - 12 Tel: +9411242 1388
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CONTENTS
Preamble
Kandy to Batticaloa
Chapter One
Skanda/Muruga
Chapter Two
Batticaloa to Kalavanchikudi
Chapter Three
Kalavanchikudi to Panama
Chapter Four -
Yala
Chapter Five
Kataragama
Chapter Six
Celebrations
Selected Bibiliography
O1
25
91
156
241
298
482
650

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Preamble
Kandy to Batticaloa
July 22, 2003
"Om Muruhal Muruha! Muruha!" whispered Velupillai, my friend from Karaitivu, a village on the east coast of Sri Lanka, as he placed a few flowers that he had picked from my garden and squatted before the large painted icon of the god of Kataragama hanging in my living room. Holding his ears with crossed hands, he stood up and squatted Several times in a gesture of complete Submission to the god. Then he stood up, raising his clasped hands, his elbows bending at his forehead and clasped hands resting on the back of his head, and raised them several times and pointed towards the icon to worship the god. Afterwards, he stretched his arms, held them horizontally across the icon, and bowed to the god. Thereafter he held them diagonally from northeast to southwest and bowed to the god. Then he held them diagonally from north-west to Southeast and bowed to the god. Finally, he prostrated before the icon with his clasped hands stretched towards the icon and lightly knocked his forehead several times on the floor. Throughout this elaborate process, Velupillai whispered "Om Muruha! Muruha! Muruha!ʼ
Having completed his worship, Velupillai tried to smile with me - his facial muscles tight and emotional, and his eyes shining. Recoiling from this state of being and running his fingers through the few strands of hair on his head, Velupillai advised me to light a

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lamp as well as joss sticks before the icon every evening. "It is good for you!” he said gravely.
He came to meet me in Kandy on 12th July 2003, to discuss the details of the pada yatra' (pilgrimage by foot) to Kataragama that I wanted to perform during the festive season in 2003. Velupillai is a retired government servant. I met him twice before in Okanda, a beautiful seashore village with a temple of Muruga, on the Southeastern Seaboard of the island. Velupillai, having worked in government offices in Kandy and Colombo for long periods, is trilingual. The second time I met him, I suggested that he assist me to organize a pada yatra to Kataragama. He readily agreed.
Afterwards, we discussed the trip and decided to hire a cook who would also carry our supplies. He suggested that we add another person who would carry my bag and a part of the supplies, and also wash my clothes and provide general help. He had already found these men, from Akkaraipattu, south of Batticaloa. We agreed that each of them, and Velupillai, be paid one hundred rupees per day. I found such a wage astonishingly low but Velupillai said that because we would feed them and all they had to do would be the simplest of tasks such as carrying fairly light bags, cooking and a few other very light duties, this sum would be more than sufficient. Velupillai spent the night in my house and educated me about the Sinhala-Tamil relations from his point of view.
"They are not as bad as most people think. The problems are not with the Tamils, Muslims and the Sinhalas. The problems are with the politicians on all sides. They invent these problems so that they have issues at the elections. They use these issues to mobilize large numbers of people by creating ethnic fears. But individuals get along fine. Tamil, Sinhala, and Muslim people get along. Not that they completely trust each other. No one trusts anyone else completely, you see. These Tamils, I know them because I am a Tamil, never completely trust each other. It is the same with the Sinhala people; same with the Muslims.”
Velupillai turned out to be an excellent help in every way. Most importantly, having lived among all kinds of people, he was
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comfortable with anyone irrespective of ethnicity or religion. Yet, Velupillai is deeply Tamil and deeply Hindu. There are no doubts about it. He is not afraid of claiming so either. Nevertheless, during our first meeting it was clear to me that Velupillai also thought beyond ethnic and religious identities. Perhaps, decades of living in many different parts of Sri Lanka - Batticaloa, Colombo, Kandy and Badulla- among groups Constituting every possible combination of ethnic and religious affiliations, and facing and surviving two major ethnic riots, have given him perspectives that took into account not only ethnic and religious relations among the citizens but also the affairs of the nation. He had articulate opinions and could express himself in fluent Sinhala and English. I liked him immediately.
The following morning we walked to Kandy town to buy a few items that we would need during the pilgrimage. Velupillai advised me to wear a white sarong and a kurta made of cotton cloth called malpiece and wrap a ritual shawl around my waist during pujas in temples. For the road, he recommended a green shawl with Muruga in Tamil printed in red. Velupillai said I could use it as an all-purpose cloth - towel, handkerchief and mat. He also recommended a deep yellow shawl with two thin green and red lines on the edges. These were to be used on ritual occasions as an apron over the sarong and a shawl around the shoulders.
We parted with Velupillai promising to return on the 21". He would stay at my place. The following morning we would leave for Batticaloa, a major coastal city on the eastern seaboard, stay the night there and begin the pada yatra on the 24".
On the 22" morning, Simon Silva, my faithful hexagenerian driver, brought his rickety old minivan for the trip to Batticaloa. Velupillai performed his worship before we left. Inspired by this act, I went to my front yard, from where I could see the Temple of the Tooth Relic of the Buddha, and bowed to it with clasped hands chanting, as best as I could recall, bits and pieces of a sloka that my father taught me when I was a little boy:

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namah Samantrabhadraya sarva gocara cakshuse karunamrtakalola siddhave Suryabandhave
In my excited mood, I recollected bits and pieces of slokas that my mother taught me long ago to worship the goddess of learning, Saraswati:
Saraswati namosthubhyan varadekamarupini vidyarambham karisyami siddhirbhavatu me sada. aruda sawetahanse bhramati ca gagane dakshine Cakshasutran va me haste ca di vyambarakanakamayan pustakan јтатаgатуат
The phenomenon of recollecting slokas is that once I begin many other slokas keep streaming in a certain order. This order is a Sinhala Buddhist organization of the sacred as I learned. As I walked back to the house:
vande mukunda maravinda dalayatakshan kundendusankadasanan sisugopa vesham indradidevagana vandita pada pitham vrndavanalayamahan vasudevasunum Velupillai was still performing his ritual. I bowed to the icon: Y
kanaka kundala mandita shanmukan kanaka raji virajita locanam
nisita Sastra Sarasana dharinan Saravan0dbhavamisasutan bhaje As soon as Velupillai finished his worship, we were on Our way.
Routes
Iengaged in this pilgrimage as a researcher, not as a pilgrim. However, I have visited Kataragama as a pilgrim, when I was a child, with fear and devotion to the god of Kataragama in my mind. I learned about Kanda Kumara from the older relatives and

neighbors in our village near Galle, a southern port town with a long history of maritime trading. There were Hindu kovils for Kandasamy, as the Tamils called him, in Galle town. Our village temple had a devale where Kanda Kumara had a very special place, second only to Vishnu.
Everyone I knew was aware that a god named Kanda Kumara lived in a divyaloka and that Kataragama is his earthly realm from where he ruled over the Ruhuna, where our village is located. So, somehow, Kanda Kumara had direct authority over everyone in the village. His power became more and more intense as one got closer to Kataragama. In Kataragama, Kanda Kumara ruled like a king. There, his authority was supreme.
In my grandparents' house, there were pictures of two gods - one of the blue god Vishnu, and the other of the red god Kanda Kumara or Kataragama Deiyo. Vishnu had four arms and stood by a gurula bird'; his whirling ring-weapon - the Cakrayudha - spinning round the forefinger of one of the hands, a white conch in another, another hand resting on his golden club, and the right hand opened in a gesture of goodwill and compassion. He and his bird stood inside an ornate chamber. Kanda Kumara, the red god with six faces and twelve arms bearing eight weapons, a flag with a cock emblem, and the head of Taraka - his archenemy, in ten hands. His right hand was open in a gesture of compassion, and the left hand open but turned downwards inviting the viewer. A spear - his kuntayudha - leaned on his right shoulder. He sat on his bird, a peacock with a full spread of plumes, with his left leg bent and resting on the bird, and his right leg bending at the knee. At the feet of his bird was a coiled cobra, its hood open but not to strike. Kanda Kumara, too, resided in an ornate chamber.
Everyone in the house was deferential towards these images. Vishnu was supposed to be a buddhankura, a budding Buddha, a bodhisattva. Kanda Kumara was also supposed to be a bodhisattva but that notion was blurry for Kanda Kumara, as we knew him, had nothing to do with the Buddha or the buddhagama whereas

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Natha was going to be the next Buddha Maitreya, and Vishnu would follow soon after Natha. Furthermore, the Buddha Siddhartha Gautama had ordered Vishnu to take care of the buddhasasana, the country and the Sinhala people. Kanda Kumara did not enter the Buddhist past at all. But, as all great gods are, he too had to be a bodhisattva. But I had no idea when he would become a Buddha. No one else in my family gave much thought to it either.
Later, I discovered that the local discourses on the god of Kataragama are multi-lingual and multi-cultural. Sinhala Buddhist devotees of the god attempt to articulate Kanda Kumara within the local Buddhist universe. Kanda Kumara, also known as Mahasena, is a local god who has been living in Kataragama from time immemorial. But when the Buddha visited Kataragama, as the thirteenth century Dhatuvansa says, Mahasena, also known as Mahaghosha, attended on him, listened to his sermons and became an upasaka. Tamils call him Kandasamy or Muruga. They like to think that Kanda Kumara is the same as Kandasami and Muruga. All these floated in the folk tradition and I learned about them as I grew up.
Now I know that Kanda Kumara had helped kin Dutthagamani, the great king from Ruhuna, to win the war against the invader Elala, for the sake of the buddhasasana. In appreciation, Dutthagamani built a temple for him in Kataragama. Kanda Kumara, I was told, is a foreign god. He had come here from India. He has many names like Skanda, Kartikeya, and Saravanabhava. His parents are various, including Siva and Parvati. He was born to defeat the enemies of the gods and marry goddess Devasena. Kanda Kumara defeated the enemies of the gods, married Devasena and became the devasenapati - commander of the army of the gods. Thereafter Kanda Kumara met Valliamma, a Vadda girl, married her and settled down in Kataragama. Then his first wife Devasena had made various attempts to get him back to India but failed. Unable to bear the separation from her husband,

Devasena came to Kataragama and began to live near the god. Now all three of them live in Kataragama and some people claim to have seen Kanda Kumara and Valliamma in various forms, or frolicking in the forest and on the riverbank, like a pair of Vadda children.
I was only ten years old when I first went to Kataragama and have only cloudy memories of that visit. When the driver started the car everybody cried hard-hara, the traditional shout in praise of the god. On the way, my elder relatives told and retold, recollected and revised, stories about Kataragama Deiyo as the car chugged along the long road to Kataragama. On the way we stopped by the temple of Vishnu in Devundera, and then by the great stupa in Tissamaharama. When we arrived in Kataragama, everybody shouted haro hara!
We bathed in the crystal-clear water in the Menik Ganga, the river that flowed through a thick forest of grand trees and around the temples. The river was not very deep. It had ochre pebbles in the bottom. Huge schools of brown fish gathered around and nibbled at our feet. We threw pori (popped rice) at them as they leaped at the pori creating much excitement. We bathed and put on fresh white clothes. Our mood transformed into one of formality and decorum, as we were about to encounter Kataragama Deiyo in his great temple known as the Maha Devale (great house of the god). All behavior became restrained and orderly. My uncles put together our offerings to the god - fruits, a coconut and a garland that we had brought from home - on a tray. One of them carried the tray on his head as we set forth to worship.
We walked along the dusty streets lined with all kinds of shops and buildings. In some, fresh appa (hoppers) were being baked. In others, people were selling readymade puja vattis (trays of fruits and a garland). These were displayed on racks. The most colorful were the mala kada (shops that sold bead chains). The beads were of a myriad colors and made a strong impression when displayed on a mirror. We walked by the Maha Devale and the great bo (ficus religiosa) tree behind it. I could see the grand stupa of

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Kataragama, known as the Kiri Vehera, rising before me; an enormous gleaming white bubble against the cloudless blue sky. A straight footpath led us to the stupa. Along the way the horrifying sight of various beggars - some displaying their massive legs afflicted with barava (elephantiasis) on their legs, with incurable wounds that attracted many flies, with some others lying in their own urine; men, women and children with ruffled hair and in crumpled dirty rags begging away on the smelly path.
But all that changed when we got close to the stupa. We bought flowers and joss sticks from one of the small kiosks at the entrance. The fragrance of the flowers placed on the large granite slabs around the stupa, of the joss sticks burning in bundles, and the aroma of coconut oil burning in hundreds of small clay lamps hovered about. The murmur of the worshipers clad in white, sitting in various places in the maluwa (yard), whispering gathas' floated around the stupa. We too, joined them. On our way back we went to the Devale.
When we walked into the Devale the puja had already begun. The small room was very crowded. Through the incense smoke I saw a large picture of the Deiyo, hung from the ceiling. It was huge, imposing and awesome, but similar to the picture at home except that the god was with two goddesses. I couldn't make much out of it. The sight produced no fear, only excitement. Unknown devotees rang the two lines of bells on either side of the room crying haro-hara, creating a loud noise. Some men and women began to tremble violently and breathe heavily. Their fellow pilgrims grabbed their arms and tried to control them. Others held pots of fire. Most held their puja vatti above their heads and all tried to move forward to approach the kapurala (priest) who would pick up these trays. I was not tall enough to see all that was going on. But there were people, all kinds of people, all around me. I thought the ones wearing red or yellow clothes, and many necklaces made of some kind of dark brown seeds that were about the size of a marble, were impressive. They had some gray lines drawn on their

foreheads, upper arms and chest, with red dots on their foreheads. The ones with white hair and beards were the most impressive. They resembled the pictures of Brahmana tapasayas (ascetics). My uncles managed to reach the kapurala who stood right in front of the big picture of the Kataragama Deiyo and pass their puja vattiya to him. The kapurala took the tray to a place behind this big picture, left it there for a while and returned it to us. All the fruits in the tray were cut and the coconut was broken. There was some gray powder, the kind that men in red and yellow rubbed on them, wrapped in a betel leaf. As we left, another kapurala poured some water from a kotale (kettle) into our cupped hands. I was supposed to drink it and wipe my hands on my hair. We returned to the car, eating the fruits in the tray, and soon we were on our way back to our village.
That was some fifty years ago. Since then much have changed and remained the same in Kataragama. Three spates of ethnic violence had hit the village, its population has burgeoned, the physical outlay of the old Kataragama reorganized, the busy and dominant Tamil Hindu community reduced to a much smaller size, and Buddhist activities enhanced. Yet the ritual life in Kataragama continues as before. I will discuss the details of these processes later.
Since that first trip, I had gone to Kataragama many times. My trips during the past thirty or so years were exclusively research oriented. This trip too was not a pilgrimage, per se, but a research trip aim of which was to experience the pilgrimage and Kataragama religious life from a sociological perspective. The Sociological perspective was prompted by a particular historical and social context, and the significant issues therein. This context is the ethnic and cultural conflict in Sri Lanka. The scope of the conflict is well known and needs no introduction. The ethnic, linguistic and religious antagonisms that found military and or other forms of violent expression tend to create a mental image of a society that is falling apart because the various social groups do not seem to be

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able to live with each other. Social tolerance seems to have come to a breaking point and every group is suspicious of and hostile towards the other. Even if no bullets are fired or bombs exploded, hostility and mistrust is in the air.
Although social integration has deteriorated in many areas of Sri Lankan social life, there are instances where all these antagonists come together for personal as well as Common purposes and get along fine. The Sri Pada and Kataragama are the most multiethnic multireligious multicultural institutions in Sri Lanka. The Catholic Madhu shrine is also important for its multireligious and multicultural character but the multireligiosity there and in Sri Pada is not nearly as complex as it is in Kataragama because in Kataragama all the major religious groups and the Vadda community gather for common celebrations of the same sacred being, the god of Kataragama.
The history of Kataragama shows that over the last century and half, particularly during the past fifty or so years, events in the larger Sri Lankan polity influenced the ethnic and cultural amity in Kataragama. The most significant interventions have been the extensions of political conflicts from Colombo, the capital city of Sri Lanka. Political conflicts in Colombo spread like rhizomes, along various underground paths, and invade the remote locales that the Colombo neo-colonial culture usually ignores in contempt, for them not being sufficiently culturally neo-colonial, except for political exploitation. They drag the social and cultural life, unique to these locales, with a destructive and totalizing impact, and dissolve them in the antagonisms that the post-colonial Sri Lankan politics Centered in Colombo engender. Owing to these influences, changes occurred in Kataragama, but, unlike some parts of the country, the community in Kataragama bounced back and continues with its traditional ritual activities and inclusive social policy.
The issue, then, is how these various ethnic and religious groups co-exist amicably in Kataragama while they vehemently
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reject one another elsewhere on the island. What is so special in Kataragama not found elsewhere? If social integration in the rest of the nation is in a precarious State while Kataragama remains comparatively calm and well integrated, what variables in the rest of the country disengage Social bonds among the various groups that constitute the nation and what variables exist in Kataragama that make the Kataragama community resistant to disintegrating tendencies? It is not that the rest of the country did not bounce back. In most multiethnic and multi-religious localities, particularly in Colombo and other urban centers, life goes on and the ethnic groups and religious groups get along. But this is a deceptive calm as the riots and the separatist war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the state of Sri Lanka have bred deep mutual mistrust, anticipations of explosions and more riots, rendering coexistence of these groups unstable and precarious. What in Kataragama is conducive to the relative stability of multiethnic multicultural social relationships? Moreover, the presence or absence of what makes this stability possible? In contrast, what in and not in the rest of the country promotes divisiveness?
The idea for this work came from Professor Gananath Obeyesekere. Intellectually involved in the political discourse in Sri Lanka since the emergence of the separatist war, and particularly interested in the ethnic and cultural politics of the period, Professor Obeyesekere suggested that I study the pilgrimages to Kataragama. Radhika Coomaraswamy, the Director of the International Center for Ethnic Studies in Colombo-evinced a keen interest in the project and presented our proposal to the Norwegian Agency Development Cooperation (NORAD) who generously funded the research.
In a sense, the research had already begun long ago. From the 60's, Professor Obeyesekere has been researching and publishing on the theology of the God of Kataragama, the history of, pilgrimage to, psychodynamics of faith and behavior in, and Social and political dynamics of the sacred site. I had my first exposure to conducting anthropological field research, and understanding
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Kataragama as a sociological and anthropological space, in the 80s, when I assisted him on his field trips to Kataragama. When planning this research, we rearticulated these interests for a study of intercultural relations. And that required more field research with a slant on multiculturalism in the theology, ideology, historiography and Sociology of activities and institutions in Kataragama.
From 2002, I visited Kataragama on many occasions, during which I collected information in the oral traditions of the Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists in Kataragama. Chayatri Divakalala, Dhammika Herat, Samuel Holt, W.M.S.M. Kumari, Ira NicholsBarrer, and Maunaguru Siddharthan assisted me during my preliminary survey of Kataragama festivities in 2002.
Subsequently, I collected information about Kataragama as a religious organization and a community. Rev. Dr. Alutwave Sorata of the Kiri Vehera Raja Maha Viharaya, the Bhikkhus of the Abhinavaramaya, the office of the Basnayaka Nilame, the Kapumahatmayas of the Maha Devale and other places of worship, the Swami and the officials of the Teivayanaiamman kovil, and the officials of the Sufi mosque provided information on the oral and textual traditions and ritual organization of the temple complex. Nuwan Munasinghe and many other residents of Kataragama village helped me situate the religious complex within a larger social context and made me aware about the recent historical events that are significant expressions of intercultural relations in Kataragama.
I made use of this information to conduct this pilgrimage on foot from Batticaloa to Kataragama, during the festive season in 2003. Many individuals from the east coast communities joined me on this pilgrimage as fellow walkers, assistants and hosts. I am unable to name them as I fear that a disclosure might endanger their lives under the present circumstances. Yet, the roles they played in the pilgrimage were too significant not to refer to them. Therefore, I use pseudonyms for them.
I tried to understand Kataragama from several religious standpoints, and to investigate how ideas about and as behaviors in
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Kataragama converged to constitute Kataragama as a socio-political entity. Theoretically and methodologically, I used whatever the approach that seemed practicable and meaningful under the existing local conditions. As I see my work now, I have attempted to balance the global and the local, the objective and the subjective, theory and existence, and employed both modern and postmodern perspectives on research, data and analysis without necessarily adhering to either.
This oscillation, or vacillation - if you will, between modern philosophy and methodology of the social sciences and humanities, and their contemporary self-critique -this is how I see the postmodern conditions of intellectual endeavors - parallels a similar movement of attitudes and perspectives in Sri Lanka, and in South Asia in general. Throughout the twentieth century, native South Asian literati encountered and confronted the European Enlightenment philosophy and methodology that challenged the established local notions about the world and local traditions, and attempted to show the scientific character of their native cultures while exploring the cultural meanings of scientific propositions. In all these movements - the debates within modern philosophy, the social sciences and the humanities, the debates within the South Asian cultures and worldviews, and the debates between the modern culture and the cultures of South Asia- scholars in both civilizations attempted to come to terms with the conflicts between the modern sense of reality and the pre-modern and some religiously and politically oriented postmodern sensibilities. These concerns set the intellectual tone for all contemporary social and cultural research irrespective of the various disciplinary specificities and orientations. I functioned as an anthropological field researcher with these concerns in mind.
What I am attempting here is to present events as they unfolded during my pilgrimage and use them as vantage points to explore facets of the theme of this research, namely, cultural coexistence. I attempt to show cultural dialogues among the devotees
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of Kataragama about the world they inhabit. These dialogues - often trialogues and sometimes multilogues - indicate how members of different ethnic and cultural groups define differently their everyday world and the world of Kataragama. They illustrate the social and cultural conflicts the devotees and pilgrims experience in their everyday life. They show attempts made by the pilgrims to establish different claims to the place, to differently defer to the traditional authority of the god of Kataragama and traditions of worship, and yet exhibit a common sense of purpose of and for being in Kataragama. Pilgrims clash with each other, criticize one another and yet manage these conflicts through sacrifice and compromise, and even develop narratives of mutual admiration and appreciation. ,י Thus, the research engages three theoretical orientations of equal significance. One involves the ancient and contemporary local theories about Kataragama that are mostly theological and political in character. Another is concerned with the modern theories that employ the empiricist and the global approach of the philosophy of science. The third involves the Euro-American postmodern theory that deals primarily with local historical subjectivities and criticizes the modern approaches for their Eurocentricism and reduction of complex multi-faceted local realities into totalizing mechanical systems of relations. I adopted the former for description from a local perspective and the second for analysis. The third sensitized me to the hermeneutical problems that I encountered during this research.
Closer to the ground, I focused on four themes: the anthropology of pilgrimage, multiculturalism, secularism, and the role of rules in societal existence. I attempted to ethnographically describe and analyze my pilgrimage as a journey to Kataragama. During that journey, taken, in Victor Turner's sense, as a process as well as an anti-structure, my existence was multicultural. I was the only non-Tamil throughout the process. I lived in a completely multicultural time and space, as there were no monocultural
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possibilities for me, although I could see monoculture all around me. All my social relations were with Tamil Hindus and Sufi Muslims. In the process, (the variable presence in time and space while journeying, and experiencing continuous change that challenged any notions of a stable social structure) as well as in the structure (the relatively more stable presence in a sedentary community at the destination with relatively more stable and predictable relationships) multiculturalism existed in ideological and behavioral encounters, in conflicts, and in compromises.
Perhaps my situation in this pilgrimage was unusual. I went with a research in mind, alone. The average pilgrim went to worship the god, ask for favors from the god and or thank the god for favors granted. The average pilgrim went with a group - his kindred and friends. He was socially at home with his kin and friends and culturally at home on the way, as the communities that he passed through were ethnically and culturally his own, whereas I was socially and culturally a stranger, particularly as a researcher. Therefore, he was functioning in a monoculture until he reached Kataragama. However, he did encounter some multicultural situations, as he passed through Muslim or Sinhala neighborhoods. By contrast, my encounters with other pilgrims and people on the way were entirely multicultural except for brief contacts with Sinhala Buddhists, who nonetheless, except for this label, were strangers to me
The multicultural encounters were not limited to ethnic and cultural interrelations. They included native encounters with modernity as well. The pilgrimage exposed, at least to me as an anthropological participant and observer, the intellectual conflicts in some pilgrims. Those who made competing claims to Kataragama, as self-appointed advocates of the positions of various religious and ethnic groups, supported their claims with 'evidence' that only a cultural insider, a politically motivated one at that, could accept, for these claims were not backed by necessary and sufficient conditions of modern standards of evidence. Interestingly,
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the claimants are 'modern people, neocolonial to boot, with 'modern education' and thoroughly 'westernized lifestyles, making modern style assertions using pre-modern logic.
Another encounter was the philosophical conflicts between certain religions. Some religions ideologically criticized other religions and these criticisms involved attacking whole foundations of other cultures. In others, there were factional disagreements on ideological positions and practices. In yet others, the criticisms articulated in philosophical terms turned out to be wholly anchored in national politics.
A starkly observable instance was the way the local culture dealt with modern consumerism, production technologies, waste disposal and environmental pollution. This observation could be made outside the contexts of pilgrimage as well. The pilgrimage could not avoid this encounter as it involved, even necessitated, a cultural conflict as the modern culture displaced many aspects of the traditional culture of pilgrimage.
Thus, my 'pilgrimage' to Kataragama veered away from the Turnerian paradigm based on the notions of liminality, antistructure, and communitas. Clearly, I did encounter all these but not in the same sense that Victor and Edith Turner discussed them in the contexts of Christian pilgrimages, I found that it is not possible to construct a global theory of pilgrimage based solely on this paradigm.” DO pilgrims to Kataragama exhibit features of being in, to involve Arnold van Gennep, limine? Have they completely separated themselves from the social structures of their daily lives? Can a special case be made for the Durkheimian notions of sacred and profane in these daily lives, and does the pilgrimage point to a particularly sacred form of existence? Are pilgrimages being conducted for being with a communitas? Should the focus of this study of pilgrimage be exclusively Kataragama? What about the journey itself and the encounters on the way? It is true that I made this pilgrimage as an anthropological/sociological researcher. But I was not the only one who had an inquisitive mind. My fellow
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pilgrims also made various inquiries about their encounters although they were not, so to say, 'researchers."
My observations also pointed to the place of secularism in Sri Lanka's multicultural relationships. Modern democratic constitutional politics, developed in the Euro-American cultures, theoretically involves separation of religion and the state. Secularism was articulated during the European Enlightenment as one of the cardinal principles of social management. Accordingly, the business of government and the business of religion must be kept apart from each other and government must not adopt a pro or anti religion approach to support or attack any religion. In short, secularism involves cultural laissez-faire. Individual citizens must take care of their religious interests, any religious group can use every lawful means to convert adherents of other faiths, and the state should not become entangled in these matters. Issues of secularism arose during and after my pilgrimage. During the pilgrimage, I became sensitive to the practices of certain religious groups that functioned in terms of cultural laissez faire and interfered with other religions through public condemnation and conversion of their adherents using, as they have been socially perceived, unethical means, and the serious social, cultural, political and legal issues that these activities entailed. I also discovered situations where factions within the same religion clashed necessitating state involvement. Another aspect was the power of money that some religious groups employed to attract adherents from economically less well-off religions. Whether cultural laissez faire and secularism can survive under such circumstances is an open issue.
The three foci above pointed to the fourth focus - the role of rules of conduct in religious and secular domains of social life. Throughout my research, events drew my attention to the difference between normative conduct in religious and secular spheres. Spatially, this is the difference between Kataragama and the rest of the country. I am not concerned with all the rules of conduct in
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secular life. My focus, within the overall theme of multiculturalism, is on the rights of individuals and groups belonging to various cultures to an equitable existence in these two spheres. I wanted to find how the rights enjoyed by the devotees in Kataragama compared with those enjoyed under the national constitution in the rest of the country.
Back in Kandy, I had the benefit of discussing my materials with T. Kandiah, L. Luchmansingh, P. B. Meegaskumbura, M.A. Nuhman, S. Padmanadan, W. Perera, M. Rajaratnam, M. S. M. Saleem, A. Seneviratne, S. Seneviratne, V. Shashikumar, P. Sothinathan, and N. Velmurugu at the University of Peradeniya. The use of the Central Library of the University of Peradeniya . would have been impossible if not for the support of M. P. Jayatillake and H. Wijetunga, and, of course, John who managed the Ceylon Room. I had profitable discussions with John Holt, Sri Padma Holt, Samuel Holt, Steven Hopkins, Roger Jackson, and Jonathan Walters of the Intercollegiate Sri Lanka Education Program. Ira Nichols-Barrer helped me with library research.
In the United States, the conference on religion that the American Academy of Religion held in 2003, provided me with opportunities to explore the relationship between religion and violence. Paul Courtright, Sheila Davani, William Harmon, Olga Kazmina, Garry Laderman, Ibrahim Moosa, Selva Raj, and Glenn Yocum patiently listened to my chatter on this research and provided suggestions and encouragement. Fred Clothey took a deep interest in my work, and gave important advice and sources for this research. Selva Raj and William Harmon gave me the opportunity to publish some of the materials relevant to the study of ritual procedures in Kataragama in their volume Dealing with Deities.' Later, at a conference of South Asian Religions held at the Albion College in Michigan I articulated some more materials and Corinne Dempsey and Selva Raj present these materials in their volume Miracle as Conundrum. Subsequently, the Bowdoin College in Maine gave me the opportunity to organize my findings
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in a comparative framework in a course I taught titled Anthropology of Pilgrimage.
Simon Silva drove me around without complaining at all odd hours and in all odd places. Gananath Obeyesekere read an earlier draft and made many suggestions ranging from the theoretical and ethnographic issues to the shaping of the text. The current Director of the ICES, Dr. Rama Mani took a particular interest in expediting the completion of this work. Siraj Abeysekere, Taranga de Silva and S. Varatharajan of the International Center for Ethnic Studies in Colombo took care of the administrative aspects of this effort and Harasha Gunewardene patiently edited the text. On the domestic front, my wife Leslie Eileen read the initial compositions and helped me with suggestions for the development of the text. In spirit, all of them participated in this pilgrimage, in their own ways.
In the construction of the text, I left the events and the discussions that they led me to in their ethnographic contexts. Some readers may find this rather confusing, as the information lies scattered. However, I did this in good faith in order to stay close to my field experiences. The reader will find the scattered information converging into themes as s/he goes along with me. I divided the text into six chapters. The division is arbitrary although the themes vary from theology to sociology. The early chapters are more theological and the later ones more sociological.
In Chapter One, I discuss the Sanskritic theology of Skanda/ Kartikeya, and the Tamil theology of Skanda/Muruga.
I present in Chapter Two abrief introduction to the theology of Ganesha/Pulleyar as the god of beginnings, a description of a ritualistic procession, the Sanskritic theory of pilgrimage by foot, Sufi Islam in Sri Lanka, the multicultural theology of Valliammathe second consort of the god of Kataragama, and discuss Tamil aspirations in a society shot through with ethnic tensions. The emphasis here is on the journey itself. From now on I pay increasing attention to describe the actual traveling process and the problems arising in various contexts.
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In Chapter Three, I describe events at a Pattini/ Kannagiamman temple, introduce a discourse on ethnic mistrust in Sri Lanka, examine a Hindu ritual play and its multicultural facets, and describe encounters at a Pulleyar kovil and the organization of pilgrim groups. Thereafter, I describe the multicultural history of a temple for the god of Kataragama, the multicultural character of corruption in Sri Lanka, the impact of the activities of certain religions on multiculturalism and secularism in Sri Lanka, Mahayana Buddhist artifacts and their historical and ethnological significance and social relations in a multiethnic border village.
I introduce a point of departure in the pilgrimage in Chapter Four. I examine the nature of a monocultural religious gathering, social discipline within it, and multicultural relations with the environment, describe the walk through the forest where pilgrims count on each other's support, multiethnic dispute resolution, and the conclusion of the journey in Kataragama.
Chapter Five is an exploration of the history of Kataragama I examine the various claims made by the different religious communities in the light of historical evidence. I show how politically motivated myths were employed to lay claims to the site to satisfy political ambitions of various national politicians and how, in the process, Kataragama was dragged into the violent currents in national politics disrupting local communal harmony and totalizing the character of Kataragama as a multicultural site. In this long chapter, I also examine how these processes occurred during the colonial period as well, albeit through different idioms including faulty epidemiology, as well as the placement and predicament of the Vaddas of Kataragama.
In Chapter Six, I report on the celebrations in Kataragama emphasizing the ethnographic aspects of this study. I also examine the 'histories' of the various shrines and the legalities of their claims to be there. I have included ethnographies of the various rituals of worship, the processions, fire-walking, all of which culminate in
2O

the grand ritual of water-cutting. Thereafter Ireturn to my concerns mentioned above.
In the text, I have made an effort to avoid as much as possible the technical terminology of anthropology and sociology for the convenience of the non-academic reader. For the perusal of scholars, I have addressed the theoretical aspects of the study and other details in the endnotes and provide bibliographic references for further
inquiry.
On the Road
Our plan had to be revised no sooner than we reached Maha Oya where the road forks with one branch to Batticaloa and the other to Ampara, and from there to Akkaraipattu. The LTTE" had organized a hartal' in Batticaloa in protest of the arrest of several of their cadres by the state security forces. They had closed down the town, blocked the roads and were ordering all motorists to Batticaloa to return to wherever they came from. The government security forces refused to let us proceed to Batticaloa and directed us to Ampara. They could not predict when the hartal would be over. The mood inside Simon's minivan was definitely gloomy. After the long drive, we had hit a roadblock.
But Velupillai had an idea. Why don't we go to Akkaraipattu We could proceed from there. There is a Pulleyar kovil in Akkaraipattu also. Even the distance would be shortened by about forty kilometers. I did not like the idea. For no particular reason other than that Batticaloa is an ancient port city - that goes back to, perhaps, thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, then as well as now known as Madakalapu - I wanted to start from there. Given the time I had at my disposal, a pada yatra from Batticaloa was the best I could manage although a pada yatra from Jaffna would have been ideal. The shortening of the distance was not to my liking. I was not interested in taking short cuts. In fact, I wanted to take the longest possible route. I wanted to encounter as many multicultural situations within the two weeks of leave that I had obtained from
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the university. But it looked like I had to compromise. No one had any notion when the hartal would be over. So we proceeded to Akkaraipattu, our only option. On the way, Velupillai blamed Prabhakaran and his LTTE outfit for creating this nuisance out of which Prabhakaran and the LTTE would gain nothing.
We arrived in Akkaraipattu around 4 in the afternoon. The air was salty, hot and humid. It became hotter with apprehension when we found that the hartal had spread to Akkaraipattu too. Shops were closed and tires were burning on empty streets. Velupillai seemed confused by this unexpected turn of events. We were planning to stay the night at a Pulleyar kovil but that idea had to be abandoned. Velupillai had another option. We might try a certain rest house on the beach. He knew the manager. So we drove north through the town which quickly faded into coconut groves lining the seashore. The rest house turned out to be a fairly large building on the beach surrounded by a parapet that enclosed a few acres of beach-front land. The landlining the road had several small houses. The property belonged to an NGO that, as I learned later, held camps for its members from various parts of the country, but mostly from Batticaloa and other parts of the Eastern Province. It had meeting halls, dormitory style facilities for large groups, and a room for two others. Velupillai was going to get that room for the two of us. A very polite Tamil man, about fifty years old, from one of the houses rushed in to find what was going on. He turned out to be the watcher. Velupillai sent him to inform the manager.
It did not take long for the manager, a young man of about thirty, to arrive. It took even less time for him to arrange the room for us. By then the watcher's family had come to take care of the details. From the watcher I gathered that the houses scattered in a walled section of the NGO property were the residences of Tamil families who had migrated to the east coast from Badulla, about twenty years ago. Some of them spoke fluent Sinhala and all seemed to be very familiar with the Sinhala culture, perhaps because of their Badulla tea plantation origins. Later I returned to the road
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and explored the community outside the NGO property. The majority in that community were also migrants from Badulla and similar to those on the NGO compound. They had left Badulla during the ethnic riots in 1983. Back on the beach, I watched the sky slowly turning deep mauve and the night crawling in.
End Notes
t
11
This term appears on numerous Occasions and Ishall not use italics ordiacritical marks hereafter.
Both Sinhala and Tamil people use this term. It is hard to determine its etymology.
A heavenly abode. A mythic bird that often appears in Hindu and Buddhist religious lore. This mudra means “Come, fear not.'
As hard harál recurs in numerous places in this text I shall neither italicize nor use diacritical marks hereafter.
Sacred verses in Pali and Prakrit.
As the term kapurála occurs frequently Ishall neitheritalicize nor use diacritical marks hereafter.
Turner (1969); (1973); (1974a); (1974b); (1974c); and Turner and Turner (1978). van Gennep (1908:1960).
The Turners initiated the anthropological study of pilgrimage. Barbara Myerhoff's (1974) study of the Peyote Hunt by the Huichol Indians of Guadalajara, Mexico is an early elegant product of their paradigm. Since then the Turnerian paradigm has been scrutinized by many scholars who raised issues similar to the above. Of particular interest are the studies by Bharati (1960), (1970); Atiya (1962); Karve (1962);Jha (1971) (1985); Clothey (1972); (Bharadwaj (1973); Pfaffenberger (1979); Sallnow (1981) (1987) and Sallnow and Eade (1990); Aziz ( 1982); Eck (1982); Younger (1982), (1989); Statler (1983); Morinis(1984) and (1992), Van der Veer (1984); Bowman (1985), (1991);Roff (1985); turner (1986); Davies (1988); Gold (1988); Preston (1990); Eickleman and Piscatori (1990); Eade and Sallnow (1991); Coleman and Elsener (1995), (1998), (2003); Bauman (1996), Coleman (2002), Coleman and Eade (2004); Basu (2004). These studies compare pilgrimage with tourism, wandering, migration, as well as pilgrimage centers. Many question the notion of communitas as the culmination of pilgrimage. Others stress the non-religious
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involvements and foci of pilgrimage as well as the complete absence of a communitas orientation that the Turners emphasized.
Raj and Harmon (2006). Raj and Dempsey (in press). Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam.
Hartal is a political protest, a civil disobedience campaign, during which the participants defy the laws of the land and cause mild disturbances such as creating roadblocks and forcing all state and private business to close down.
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Chapter One
Skanda/Muruga
Until late in the night, Velupillai and I talked about
Muruga. He gave me the Tamil, therefore his, version of the god of Kataragama. As we sat on our beds, I initiated a conversation about Muruga. Who is Muruga?
"Muruha is the god of the Tamils,” said Velupillai. "Muruha is the younger son of Siva and Parvati and younger brother of Pulleyar. He is Kumaran, always young and beautiful. He has six faces, twelve eyes and twelve arms. Muruha carries a vel-spear, and has a mayil - peacock, as his seat. He has two wives: Teivayanaiamman and Valliamman.”
"Muruha came to Sri Lanka from India. He was looking for Valliam man. He was already legally married to Teivayanaiamman. But a good friend of his, a rishi named Narathar, had seen Valliamman in Katirkamam. She was very beautiful. This friend told Muruha about Valliamman. So Muruha decided to come to Kathirkamam to see whether this Valli was as beautiful as his friend said she was. First, he came to Jaffna. But the Tamils in Jaffna drove him away thinking he was a beggar. Then Muruha came slowly down the coast and arrived in Ohanda. Muruha decided to stay there. From Ohanda he started to look for Valliamman.
One day he was resting on the banks of the Menik Ganga. Then a group of Tamils hurried along. Muruha was in the guise of an old man. He pleaded with the Tamils to take him across the
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river to the opposite bank. The Tamils refused saying they were in a hurry to go to Hambantota to collect salt. Then a Sinhala man came by. Muruha pleaded with him also. The Sinhala man felt sorry for this old man, and readily carried him on his shoulders across the river and made a small hut with some twigs that he picked up from the madan bushes in the jungle. From that day, Muruha showed gratitude to the Sinhala people. That is why the Sinhala people don't have to do what the Tamils do to express their devotion. Tamils must do it the hard way. Muruha does not trust the Tamils.”
I had heard this story before. Many Tamil friends in Kataragama and Kandy had related variations of the Muruga and Valli romance to me. In contrast, my Sinhala friends had other ideas. They do not worship Muruga. Rather, they worship Kanda Kumara or Kataragama Deiyo. They have not heard of Velupillai's story or its many variations. But they believe that Kanda Kumara fell in love with Valli, a Vadda girl, in Kataragama.
Listening to Velupillai's description of the god of Kataragama brought up an interesting issue in anthropological fieldwork. What goes on when the anthropologist knows more about an institution than his informants do? Velupillai knew a lot about Muruga. His knowledge of the god and the image of the god in his mind, the rituals that he performs to honor and propitiate the god, are all a part of a live phenomenon. Velupillai, my other Tamil friends, and the Sinhala devotees of the god have a definite place for the god in their ontology. For them he is, as a being as well as a symbol. I do not think anyone can compete with them regarding the authenticity of their beliefs. Velupillai's ideas about Muruga are linked with one another organically, with the kind of conviction that is generally associated with any system of notions that is held to be a true and faithful representation of reality.
However, Velupillai's description of Kataragama Deiyo is quite simple when compared to the more complex notions that inhere in the cult belief system. This is to claim that I, an anthropological field researcher and not a cult member, had a more
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complex idea of Kataragama Deiyo than that held by my friend, informant and cult member. For, the cult belief system included literary accounts, historical accounts as well as oral accounts of the phenomenon. The literary accounts themselves varied from the Sanskrit corpus to the Tamil corpus to the Sinhala corpus and the various modern works. Even within the Sanskrit corpus, there are many accounts that vary from one another in significant ways. Velupillai had no notion about this complex, perplexing, convoluted and confusing agglomeration of ideas. Historical accounts from Sri Lankan, Indian and colonial sources were unknown to him. His knowledge of the god comprised one among thousands of various oral accounts that float in the cult belief system. Having read the books and heard the words of a large sample of cult members belonging to Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian communities, my outsider's knowledge was certainly more detailed and complex than his. In fact, I knew, conceptually and descriptively, everything he said about Muruga and his connections with Kataragama in far greater detail and more. Couple of years of intensive and extensive field and literature investigations certainly informed me a great deal about the god and the cult built around him. What I do not possess is the tremendous power that his simpler notions derive from his faith, a faith that I once had but lost in the course of time. It moved him in ways my more complex ideas could not move me. This is to say that an outside observer can know more about a sociocultural institution than a native does, but his knowledge is still incomplete, it lacks apodicticity, absolute certainty, because his knowledge is devoid of the devotional liveliness of the faithful.
Given this caveat, let me first outline the accounts of the god expressed in the Sanskrit tradition because these accounts have influenced both the Sinhala beliefs about Kataragama Deiyo and the Tamil beliefs about Muruga whom they identify with Skanda. I begin with my translation of the story in the aranyaka parvan of the Mahabharata, the great and perhaps the oldest Sanskrit epic. I
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shall give Linus translation in full and paraphrase the other accounts in the Mahabharata and other Sanskrit works. My intention is to provide a sense of story telling in the oral tradition. These and other religious stories were transmitted during recitations of the texts that were available to only a small segment of the population. Others, less fortunate because of their inferior social position, had no access to these recitations but picked up the stories from the oral tradition. Either way, the stories were constructed with a listener in mind.
Skanda Mahabharata Aranyaka Parvan
The earliest references to this god come in the Mahabharata. There is no consensus in the scholarly community regarding the dates of its composition. However, there is general agreement that the epic was composed anywhere between 1000 - 600 BCE and was manipulated and added on through the fourth century of the CE. We shall examine some aspects of this developmental process in the contexts of the theology of Skanda towards the end of this chapter. This epic, attributed to an ancient Brahman rishi named Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa, is about a great ancient war between two groups of siblings Pandavas and Kauravas, born to one king Pandu in the Aryavarta, in northern India. Vyasa uses the character Vaisampayana, an ascetic, to narrate the story. Vaisampayana Strings together a huge amount of other stories and doctrines into the basic structure of the epic. Among them is the story about the birth and career of Kartikeya.
The Pandavas, who were the heirs to the kingdom, lost the kingdom to the Kauravas in a game of dice and had to live in exile. During their exile, the five princes - Yudhishthira, Arjuna, Bhimasena, Nakula and Sahadeva - and their common spouse Draupadi- travelled through many countries and, for a longtime, through a great forest (aranya) named Kamakya where, among many other great and small, holy and unholy encounters, they met a great rshi named Markandeya. From Markandeya they heard
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about the birth of the great warrior god Kartikeya. Markandeya began with a summary characterization of Kartikeya."
Markandeya said: Kartikeya is sagacious and judicious. He is wondrous and of unlimited power. The son of Adbhuta Agni (mysterious fire), Kartikeya is a Brahman. His fame ceaselessly increases.
In the days of yore, there was a great war between the Sura and the Asura segments of the heavenly population. The Sura were the gods, entirely good and auspicious in character and temperament, whereas the Asura were malevolent and were therefore considered as demi-gods. On the battlefield, the Sura were losing the war, and the Asura were slaughtering many battalions of the gods. The Sura army was in distress and disarray. Indra, the king of the Sura, was worried. He needed to find a leader for his army who could destroy the Asura army and reorganize and rejuvenate the forces of the gods. Indra went to Mount Manasa, the mount of the mind, and contemplated this state of affairs.
As he was submerged in his thoughts, Indra heard a loud wailing of a woman:
"Hurry to me, anyone, and save me! Let him show me a husband, or himself be mine!”
The god pacified her with kind words and noticed Kesin, the great Asura, bearing a club and wearing a crown, standing before him like a mountain of metal. Indra accused Kesin for attempting to rape the woman and demanded that Kesin left the woman alone. But Kesin claimed the woman and scornfully asked Indra to withdraw. A mighty battle ensued. In the end Kesin, injured, ran away.
Indra asked the whereabouts of the woman. She proclaimed herself to be a daughter of Prajapati, the creator god, named Devasena. Devasena, her sister Daityasena and their friends used to come to Mount Manasa. Kesin has been scheming to abduct them. Daityasena fell for Kesin and he had already seduced her. Devasena's origins indicated to Indra that she was his first cousin, a daughter of Indra's mother Dakshayani's sister. He wanted
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to know what her powers were. But Devasena replied that she had no powers and needed a powerful husband who would be respected by both the Suras and the Asuras. Indra asked what kind of powers her husband should possess. Devasena replied that her husband should be a manly and famous Brahman who is able to conquer the Suras, Asuras, Yakshas, Kinnaras, Uragas, Rakshasas and Daityas and to subdue all the worlds with Indra. Indra was perturbed by Devasena's words and contemplated that no one fitted her description.
Then he saw the sun rising over the Udagira(sunrise-rock) and Soma (moon) gliding into it. This new moon is the raudra
muhurta, the furious, violent, military moment of Rudra. At that -
moment Indra saw the Suras and the Asuras fighting on the Udagira. He saw the clouds tinged red floating in the morning light and the world of Varuna (the ocean) blood red. He saw Agni, the fire god, carrying oblations and panegyrics from the rishis Bhrigu, Angira and others, entering the Suryamandala, the orb of the sun. The twenty-four Parvans (phases of the moon) gathered around the sun while the terrible Soma was already in the sun.
Watching this conjunction of the sun and the moon, Indra thought that this was a fearful, great and miraculous conjunction full of splendor and that it foreboded a terrible battle in the future. He saw the river Sindhu flowing with currents of fresh blood. Jackals with flaming faces were howling at the sun. He thought that the conjunction was awesome and full of energy. He thought both Soma and Agni were capable of producing a son to fit Devasena's description of a husband. Indra took Devasena to Brahma, the grandfather (pitamaha) of the gods, and asked him to appoint a warrior husband to Devasena. Brahma told Indra that the assignment of a husband to Devasena should occur as Indra thought fit. There shall be a mighty and powerful issue from this awesome conjunction and he shall be the commander of Indra's armies and husband of Devasena.
Having received Brahma's permission Indra went with Devasenato the abode of the great celestial Brahman rishis, ascetics
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of immense virtue headed by Vasistha. Led by Indra, other gods also went to their sacrifice to receive their shares of the offerings, hoping to drink the soma that the rishis obtained through their tapasya.' Following the rules, the great personages performed an isti oblation to the well-kindled bright and blazing Agni, and through him, offered the soma to the gods. With mantras, they summoned the Adbhutagni from the Suryamandala. That lordly fire appeared silently, in accordance with the rules. He, the Carrier of the Oblation, entered theahavaniya (sacrificial) hearth into which the rishis had made various offerings with appropriate mantras, accepted the offerings and proffered them to the gods.
Adbhutagni noticed the seven wives of the great souls as he left the hearth, as they were sleeping at ease in each one's bed, their complexion beautiful as altars of gold, spotless like moonbeams, glowing like flames of the fire, appearing like radiant stars." As he saw the wives of the Indras among the rishis, Adbhutagni became full of lust. But he knew that the wives of the Brahmans were chaste, passionless, and beyond the reach of his desires. He knew he could neither lawfully cast his eyes upon them nor touch them as they were without desire. Thus he decided to become their garhapatya fire (household fire). As that fire he could watch the gold-complexioned ladies, touch them with his flames and find Some satisfaction. Adbhutagni thus spent alongtime in their house under their spell, giving his heart to them, yet failed to gain their affection. His heart tortured by love, Adbhutagni left for the forest to destroy himself.
In the meantime, radiant Svaha, the daughter of Daksha,' has long desired Adbhutagni and looked for an opportunity to lie with him. But this innocent girl failed to find a weak moment in calm and collected Agni. Now that Agni, tortured by love for the wives of the rishis, had left for the forest and since she, too, was sick with lust for him, thought she would appear before him in their guise, and when he becomes deluded by their shapes she would make love to the love-sick god. That way he would be gratified and her lust for him would be satisfied.
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Among the wives of the rishis was the wife of rishi Angira, Siva', the beautiful, virtuous and of spotless character. Svaha assumed the shape of Siva, went to see Agni and said that she was burning with desire for him, that he should make love to her and if not she would end her life. She identified herself as Siva, the wife of Angiras and said that she came to see Agni under the advice of the other wives of the rishis who deliberated much on this matter. Agni asked how Svaha knew that he was consumed by desire for her and how did the others she mentioned know about his lust for them. Svaha replied that they were always fond of Agni but was afraid of him and that they knew that he lusted for them through his gestures. She urged him to lie with her soon for the other wives were waiting for her.
Agni was delighted and joyfully lay with (whom he thought was) Siva. The goddess, having enjoyed the union, held Agni's retas (essence: seed: semen) in her hands. Then she thought that if the people in the forest saw her in that guise they would talk about the unchaste nature of the wives of the rishis that would cast an undeserved slur upon their character. She thought of assuming the shape of a garuda bird to conveniently leave the forest.
Thus in the guise of a garuda, Svaha left the forest and arrived at the Sveta hills covered with reeds and various other plants and trees, guarded by awesome seven-headed serpents whose mere appearance was poisonous, and infested with rakshasas, rakshasis, pisacass, bands of terrible bhutas, and countless birds and other wild animals. Svaha ascended to a peak of the Sveta hills and dropped the retas into a golden lake.
Svaha continued to assume the likeness of each of the wives of the other sages and lay with Agni. She could not assume the form of Arundhati only because of her great ascetic merit and devotion to her husband Vasistha. Thus, Svaha cast Agni's retas into the lake six times on the first lunar day. The six seeds of Agni gathered in the heat that they produced and engendered a male child endowed with great power. The rishis called Agni's retas "cast off” and from that the child became known as Skanda.
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This child, Kumara, had six faces, twelve ears, twelve eyes, as many arms and feet, one neck and one stomach. Guha assumed a form on the second lunar day, grew to the size of a little child on the third, and developed his limbs on the fourth day. He, surrounded by blood-red clouds flashing lightening, shone like the sun rising amid red clouds. He seized an immense and fearsome bow that was used by Rudra, the slayer of Tripurasura, to destroy the enemies of the gods and roared so powerfully, the three worlds with mobile and immobile creatures were stunned with awe.
The great Nagas, Citra and Airavata, heard this roar that was like the rumbling of great masses of rain clouds, and shaken with fear, sprang up. Seeing them falling upon him, Kumara, Son of Agni, glowing with a solar-effulgence held them with two of his hands, grabbed a spear with another hand, and grasped a huge redcombed wild cock with yet another hand. Roaring terribly the long-armed son of Agni began frolicking. Then he picked up a conch with two of his hands, blew it striking great terror in the mightiest of creatures, and frolicked more on the mountaintop beating the air with another pair of arms. Mahasena of unrivalled prowess appeared as if he was about to devour all three worlds, appeared like the Sun on the Udagira.
This being of wondrous prowess and unmatched strength sat on top of that hill, and gazed pointing his many faces at the horizons in all six directions noticing all manner of things, and bellowed his roar again and again. Upon hearing those roars many creatures collapsed; frightened and panic-stricken they sought refuge with him. All those persons of the various orders (varna) who sought refuge of that god are known as his Brahman followers. He then arose from that seat and dispelled their fears, and drawing his bow, shot his arrows at the Sveta hills. With those arrows, he cleaved the Krauncha peak, son of the Himavat. To this day, geese and vultures fly to mount Sumeru through this crack. The shattered peak fell down groaning loudly. Seeing Krauncha fall, other hills groaned in fear. Mighty Kumara was unmoved by the groans of
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the afflicted hills and with unbounded spirit raised his spear and bellowed his war cry. The god of noble spirit then threw his glowing spear at one of the awesome peaks of the Sveta hills and swiftly cleft it. The Sveta hills, wounded and frightened, together with other terrified hills, lifted itself from the Earth and fled. The Earth was greatly afflicted and bereft of her ornaments. Thus hurt she sought refuge of Skanda and became whole again. The mountains too bowed down to Skanda and returned to the Earth. And all creatures then celebrated Skanda on this fifth day of the waxing
OOl.
Markandeya went on: Various awesome events occurred when the powerful, highspirited mighty god was born. Natural opposites such as male and female, heat and cold reversed. The planets, the cardinal points, and the skyglowed, and the Earth rumbled continually. The rishis, witnessing these terrible signs, were worried and, for the welfare of the world, performed various rites to restore tranquility in the universe. The people who lived in the Citraratha forest declared, "This calamity was brought upon us by Agni when he lay with the six wives of the rishis.” Others who saw the goddess go about in the guise of a garuda bird said, "This disaster was caused by a garuda bird.”
No one ever knew that Svaha was responsible for this calamity. When she heard that Skanda was her son she went to him and revealed that she was his mother. The seven rishis divorced six wives excepting the adorable Arundhati, because the dwellers of the forest claimed that those six were responsible for the birth of the child. Svaha told the rishis again and again, "This child is mine. The rest is not true.”
The great muni Visvamitra, after the conclusion of the sacrifice of the seven rishis, followed the lustful Agni from behind unseen. Thus he witnessed everything and Visvamitra was the first to seek refuge with Kumara. He composed divine hymns in praise of Mahasena and the great muni performed for the child all thirteen rites pertaining to childhood from the natal ceremonies on ward.
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He sang the glory of the six-faced Skanda, and performed ceremonies in honor of the cock, the goddess Sakti, and the first companions of Skanda, and he performed ceremonies for the benefit of the world. Thus, Visvamitra became a favorite of Kumara. The great muni told the seven rishis about the transformations of Svaha and that their wives were blameless. Although the rishis learned the truth, they abandoned their wives nonetheless.
The gods heard about Skanda and said to Vasava," "Skanda's power is insufferable. Kill him without delay! For if you do not eliminate him, with his power he will conquer all three worlds, ourselves and you too, and will become the Sakra.” Disorientated by what he heard the Sakra said, "This child is endowed with great prowess. He would overcome in battle even the creator of the three worlds and exterminate him. Therefore I shall not fight with him.” The gods replied to this, “You talk as if you are not manly enough! Let the great Mothers of the world attack Skanda. They can muster at will any measure of Sakti to kill him.”
The Mothers agreed and departed. But when they saw that he possessed great strength they became dispirited, and realizing that he was invincible they sought his protection and said, "Mighty being, become our son! We are full of affection for you and milk oozes from our breasts. Welcome us!”
He received them with due respect and sucked from their breasts. Then Mahasena of unparalleled strength saw his father Agni coming towards him. Agni, the doer of all good deeds, received homage from his son and, in the company of the Mothers, stayed with Mahasena tending him. The Mother who was born of fury guarded Skanda with a spike in her hand, as a nursing mother guards her son. The brutal daughter of the Blood Sea who feeds on blood hugged Mahasena and nursed him like a mother. Agni, transforming himself as a goat-faced trader followed by many children pleased the child with toys in that mountain abode."
The planets and the sub-planets, the rishis and the Mothers, blazing and led by Agni, the bands of Mahasena's followers and
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many other celestials of terrifying countenance, waited on Mahasena with the Mothers. The king of the gods, desiring victory although full of doubt, mounted his elephant Airavata and, followed by other deities, marched on wielding his thunderbolt. Hoping to destroy Mahasena, Indra advanced fast with his awesome celestial army, vigorous, ornate with various flags, banners and bows, adorned by Sri, with warriors decked in various armors and mounting all kinds of animals.
Mahasena beheld the gloriously attired Sakra, dressed in his best clothes, advancing with the intent to kill him and marched out to meet him. Vasava approached Kartikeya's abode swiftly, amid the praise of rishis and tridasa gods,'giving out a loud warcry to encourage the army of gods who were ready to slay Agniputra. The king of gods shouted loudly together with other gods, and Guha, too, roared like the Ocean. Upon hearing that noise the army of gods trembled like the gale-swept sea, stunned out of their wits. Pavakaputra,' seeing the gods approaching him with intent to kill, became full of wrath and belched mighty flames from his mouth. The flames burned the gods writhing on the ground. Their heads and bodies, arms and mounts ablaze, the gods suddenly appeared like clusters of fallen stars. The burning gods deserted Vajradhara' and sought refuge with Agniputra. Thus deserted by the gods, Sakra hurled his thunderbolt at Skanda and split open the right side of Mahasena. From that impact another male came into being, wearing golden body armor, wielding a spear and bearing divine earings. Because he was born out of the cleft from the thunderbolt, he became Visakha. When he saw another arise glowing like the time-ending conflagration, Indra, terrified, clasped his hands and sought refuge with Skanda. Skanda afforded him and his army refuge and the tridasa goods joyfully played their musical instruments.
Markandeya continued asking the listeners to hear about the terrible and astonishing followers of Skanda:
When Skanda was struck by the thunderbolt, many youths emerged together with those who cruelly steal infants, both
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newborn and still in the womb. From the impact of the thunderbolt a number of powerful maidens were also born. The youths adopted Visakha as their father. The great lord Bharaksha with the face of a goat, surrounded by his many sons and the maidens, guarded them during the battle while the Mothers looked on. For this reason earthly inhabitants call Skanda the father of the youths. People who desire sons or have sons always worship in different regions powerful Rudra, Agni, Uma and Svaha. The maidens begotten by the fire Tapa went to Skanda.
He asked them, "What can I do for you?” The maidens said, "Do us this favor, may we become good and respected mothers of the whole world.” He replied, "Be it so.” and repeated noblemindedly, "you shall be of separate kinds, good and evil.”
Having made Skanda their son the Mothers departed. The names of the mothers of the newborn sons are Kaki, Halima, Malini, Vrnhila, Ariya, Palala and Vaimitra.' Skandablessed each of them with a terrifying, powerful, red-eyed son named Sisu. These eight heroes are called those who were born from the mothers of Skanda.' They become nine when the goat-faced being is included - know that the sixth face of Skanda is that of a goat.'
That face is the middle one among the six and is always worshipped by the mothers.’ The foremost among his six heads is called Bhadrasakha by which he created divine Sakti. These various events occurred on the fifth day of the waxing moon, and on the sixth day, a fierce war occurred.
Skanda stood wearing a golden armor, a golden diadem with a golden crest, with gold colored eyes, radiantly. He wore red clothes. His teeth were sharp and he was very handsome, charming, endowed with all the marks of excellence and held dearby all three worlds. He granted boons, was heroic and youthful, wearing glowing earrings. Sri herself, in the form of a lotus, paid him homage. The creatures saw the adorable youth, cherished by Sri, as the full-moon. Great Brahmans honored that mighty being and great rishis said to Skanda:
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"The One born of the Golden Egg! Become the rescuer of the worlds. Although you were born only six nights ago, all the worlds have become awestruck, and you have dispelled their fears, greatest of the gods. Therefore you should become the Indra, freeing the three worlds from fear.”
Skanda said, "Ascetics, what does the Indra do? How does the king of the gods always protect all the gods?"
The rishis said, "Indra gives strength, splendor, progeny and happiness to all creatures. When propitiated, the lord of the gods bestows all the objects of desire. He destroys the wicked and fulfills the wishes of the righteous. The Slayer of Vala assigns to all creatures their various duties. Where there is no sun, he becomes the sun, and where there is no moon, he becomes the moon. When needed he even acts for fire, air, earth and water. These are the duties of the Indra. His capacities are immense. You, too, are mighty. Therefore you should become our Indra."
Sakra said, “Strong-armed one, be the Indra of us all and bring us happiness. Great one, you are fit for the task. We shall anoint you this very day.”
Skanda said, "You shall continue to rule the three worlds with self-possession, with heart bent on conquest. I am your servant. I do not aspire to be Indra.”
Sakra said, "Your prowess is a marvel, hero, vanquish the enemies of the gods. Hero, although I am the ruling Indra I am of lesser strength and was vanquished by you. Amazed by your prowess the world will ridicule me and they will attempt to create dissensions between us. Lord, then they will take either your side or my side. When they form different factions, war will be the consequence. In that war you will defeat me and become Indra.”
Skanda said, "You are the king of the three worlds and of me. May you be prosperous! Tell me if I can obey your commands.” Sakra said, “At your request, powerful one, I will be Indra. If you spoke truthfully and with certainty, listen to me. Mighty one, be anointed to the captaincy of the gods.”
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Skanda said, "To destroy the Danavas and for the benefit df the gods, and for the protection of cows and Brahmans do anoint me to the captaincy."
Markandeya said:
Skanda was anointed by Maghavat' and all the gods. Honored by the great rishis, he appeared splendid. The golden umbrella held over him shone like the halo of a blazing fire. The glorious god, Conqueror of Tripura, himself fastened a divine golden garland made by Visvakarman’ round his neck. The fortunate god had come with the goddess. Enemy-burning human tiger! The god with the bull flag gladly paid him homage. The Brahmans call fire Rudra. Therefore he is called Rudra's son. The seed released by Rudra formed the Sveta peak. It was on the Sveta peak that Pavaka's manhood was placed by the Kirttikas. When the gods saw Rudra honoring Guha, the most virtuous, they called him thereafter the son of Rudra. This child was born after Rudra: permeated fire. Thus born he became Rudra's son. Skanda, best of. the gods, was born of Rudra, Vahni, Svaha and the six women. Thus born he became Rudra's son.
The son of Agni was clad in a pair of clean red cloths. He shone resplendently, like the sun peeping forth through a mass of red clouds. The cock given to him by Agni, his ensign, when perched on top of his chariot, sparkled blood-red like the time-ending fire. This god who commands the power that causes the victory of the gods, the power that guides the actions of all beings and the source of their well-being and glory, advanced before him. A mysterious charm which he was born with surrounded his body and manifested itself when the god was on the battlefield. Lord of the people! Strength, piety, splendor, beauty, truthfulness, righteousness, Brahmanical faith, freedom from confusion, protection of devotees, destruction of enemies, defense of all the worlds were all born with Skanda.
Thus anointed by all the gods he looked confident and of pleasant thoughts, and dressed in his finery looked like the moon
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at its fullest. The sound of the grand Vedic hymns, the music of the gods, and the songs of the gods and the gandharvas rang on every side. Surrounded by the apsarass in their best appearance, and happy paisacas and many gods, the anointed Pavaki'presented himself in all his grandeur. To the celestials, the anointed Mahasena appeared like the sun rising after destroying darkness. "You are our master,” cried all the armies of the gods in their thousands and surrounded him on all sides. All creatures gathered around him, praised, thanked and worshiped him, and the great god received all of them and comforted them.
The performer of the hundred sacrifices, after anointing Skanda as the commander of the army of gods, thought of Devasena whom he rescued. Thinking that Skanda was destined to be her husband by Brahma himself, he brought Devasena there, dressed in her finest ornaments. Then the slayer of Vala' said to Skanda: "Best of the gods This maiden was destined by the Selfexistent one to be your wife, even before you were born. Therefore accept her lotus-like beautiful right hand with the invocation of the mantras in the proper fashion.”
At these words he grasped her hand. Brihaspati recited the mantras and performed the oblations. Thus the gods knew Devasena, she whom the Brahmans call Shashthi, Lakshmi, Asa, Sukhaprada, Sinivali, Kuhu, Sadvrtti and Aparajita asthe chief dueen of Skanda. When Devasena received Skanda as her perpetual husband, Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, attended on him in bodily form. As Skanda achieved celebrity on the fifth day of the waxing moon that day is known as Sripancami. As his success fructified on the sixth, the sixth is a great lunar day.
Markandeya said: When Sri joined Mahasena and he was made the Devasenapati the six goddesses, the wives of the seven rishis, visited him. As those virtuous women of the great vows who were disowned by the rishis, quickly went to the lord, the Devasenapati and said:
"Son, our god-like husbands have divorced us for no reason. We have fallen from our sacred places. Some people have spread
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the rumor that we gave birth to you. Agree that that is untrue and Bray save us from it. Lord! May heaven be ours endlessly. We wish you for our son. Repay the obligation you owe to us.”
Skanda said, "You are my mothers, blameless ladies, I am your son. All shall be yours as you desire.” Having said that, Skanda spoke to Sakra:
“What is there to be done?” Vasava, told to speak up, said to Skanda: "Abhijit, the younger sister of Rohini, is jealous of her seniority, has gone to the forest to perform austerities, for she wishes to be the eldest. A nakshatra has fallen from the sky. Benevolent One! I am confused about finding a substitute. Consult with Brahma its time. Brahma has calculated time from Dhanishta.” Rohini was the first. The number used to be full.”
In accordance with Sakra's advice the Kirttikas went to heaven as a nakshatra, presided over by Vahni,” and shine with seven heads. Vinata said to Skanda:
"You are my son, entitled to offer funerary oblation.' I wish to stay with you forever.”
Skanda said, "It shall be so. Homage to you! Guide me with motherly love. Honored by your daughter-in-law, live here forever.”
Then the entire group of mothers spoke to Skanda, "The poets speak of us as the mothers of the entire world. We wish to be mothers to you. Honor us!”
Skanda said, "You all are mothers to me and I am your son. Tell me what I can do to please you.”
The mothers said, "Let ours be the position of those who, in by-gone ages, were fabricated as the mothers of the world." It shall be no more theirs. Bull among the gods! Let us be worshiped by the world and not them. They have robbed our progeny on your account. Restore it to us!"
Skanda said, "You cannot recover the progeny that have been given away, but I can give you other offspring if you desire so.”
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The mothers said, "We desire to eat up the progeny of those mothers and their gods who are different from you. Give them to us.”
Skanda said, "I shall give you the progeny but your words are painful. Protect with benevolence those that honor you.” The mothers said, "Skanda, we shall protect them with benevolence, as you desire. Skanda, we wish to live with you forever, Lord!”
Skanda said, "Afflict young human children in your various forms until they are sixteen years old. I shall give you a ferocious and immortal soul. With it you shall be happy and worshiped.”
Then a male form with a fiery glow came out of Skanda's body to devour the progeny of mortals. It fell on the ground senseless and starving. With Skanda's permission, it became a fierce form that seizes lives. Eminent Brahmans call this being that seizes lives Skandapasmara.' Vinata is said to be the ferocious Sakunigraha.' Putana is known as a rakshasi. She is Putanagraha. She has a repulsive cruel appearance and with a fearsome appearance she wanders in the night. A pisaci with a horrifying countenance is called Saitaputana. This horrendous specter aborts fetuses in women. Aditi is also called Revati. Her Graha is known as Raivata. This great Graha with a ghastly appearance afflicts small children. Diti, the mother of the Daityas" is also called Mukhamaddika: inaccessible and feasting gluttonously on the flesh of small children. The Kumaras and Kumaris that sprang from Skanda are also fetuseaters and very great Grahas. The Kumaras are known as the husbands of the Kumaris. These doers of horrific acts stay unseen and snatch children. The wise call Surabhi the mother of cows. Sakuni perches on her and devours children on earth.' Lord of men! Sarama is the name of a goddess who is the mother of the dogs. She, too, always snatches humans still in the womb. The mother of the trees lives in the karanja tree. She has a gentle countenance and is always sympathetic towards all creatures. People who desire sons worship her in the karanja. These eighteen snatchers and others of their kind are fond of flesh and liquor and invariably stay in labor-rooms"
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for ten nights. Kadru enters the bodies of pregnant women using a subtle form and eats the fetus, and the mother gives birth to a snake. The mother of the gandharvas snatches the fetus and walks away. Thus conception in the womb of the woman on earth becomes abortive. The mother' of apsaras removes the fetus and the wise call it having lost ability to be born. The daughter of the Blood Sea' is known as Skanda's nurse. She is worshiped as Lohitayani in kadamba trees. Rudra lives in men. Similarly, Ariya lives in women. Ariya is a mother of Kumara and is worshiped specifically to obtain boons. Thus I have described Kumara's great snatchers. Until children become sixteen years of age they are malevolent, and become benevolent thereafter.
The embodied creatures must know that the groups of mothers and the male snatchers thus described as Skandagrahas. They are to be propitiated with burnt offerings, ablutions, incense, collyrium', unguents,figure offering, thrown offerings' and specially the rite known as Skandasyeya. When propitiated in this manner they all bestow everything auspicious; longevity and endurance, when properly honored with correct puja.
Now, after an obeisance to Mahesvara, I shall describe the nature of the Grahas that afflict men after their sixteenth year. The human who sees gods in his sleep or in a wakeful state soon becomes mad and is known as one under a Devagraha.
The human who sees dead ancestors' while sitting or lying down soon becomes mad and is known as being under the influence of a Pitrugraha. He who insults the Siddhas and who in turn curse him soon becomes mad. He is known as one under the spell of a Siddhagraha. He who smells odors and tastes flavors that are not found in his presence soon goes mad. He is known as one under the spell of a Rakshasagraha. When divine Gandharvas blend their existence into the existence of an earthly human he becomes mad in no time. He is called one under the spell of a Gandharvagraha. When Pisacas continually plague a man wherever he goes, he soon becomes mad. He is called one under the spell of a Paisacagraha. When a Yaksha enters the body of a man in time he goes mad. He
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is to be known as one under the influence of a Yakshagraha. When the mind of a man is distorted by the doshas’ he runs mad quickly. The remedy is to be found in the sastras. Perplexity, fear” and ghastly sights' cause madness and the therapy is in bringing about tranquility in the mind.'
There are three kinds of Grahas: frolicsome, gluttonous and lustful. They afflict men until they are seventy years of age. Thereafter fever is the only Graha that afflicts all equally. The Grahas stay away from those whose senses are not scattered, who are self-restrained, of clean habits, and always alert. This is the description of the grahas of the people. The Grahas never touch humans devoted to god Mahesvara.'
When Skanda had fulfilled the wishes of the Mothers, Svaha said to him, "You are my natural son. I wish to obtain from you a rare happiness.”
Skanda said to her, "What happiness do you wish?” Svaha said, "One with strong arms! I am the beloved daughter of Daksha, Svaha by name. From my childhood I have been in love with Hutasana. My son, Pavakadoes not know well enough how I love him. Son, I wish to live with Agni forever.”
Skanda said, "Devil Whatever oblations to the gods and ancestors the twice-born who act well and follow the right path shall from this day onward offer through Agni with the appropriate mantras shall hereafter always be presented with the crysvahal Beautiful woman! Thus you shall always dwell with Agni."
Thus addressed and honored by Skanda, Svaha was happy and conjoined with Pavaka she paid homage to Skanda.
Then Brahma said to Mahasena, "Go to your father Mahadeva, the conqueror of Tripura. Rudra merged with Agni and Uma with Svaha to make you undefeatable for the benefit of all worlds. Rudra, the Grand Soul, poured his sukra“ into Uma’s yoni.' It spilled over, fell upon the rock, and Minjaka and Minjika came into being. Part of the semen fell into the Blood Sea, another portion into the rays of the sun, another on the rainbow and then
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upon the earth bestowing wealth. The wise know that your fierce Ilgsh-eating companions arose from that semen.”
"Let it be sol” said Mahasena, the measureless soul, and worshiped Mahesvara, one with fatherly manners.
Markandeya said: Those who desire wealth should worship these five Ganas with sunflowers and perform pujas to them to alleviate sickness. Those who desire the well being of children should revere Minjaka and Minjika, who came into being because of Rudra's copulation. Those who desire children must worship the human-flesh-eating goddesses known as Vrddhika born in trees. This is how the countless pisaca beings are known.'
Now hear how the bells and the banners of Skanda originated. Airavata had two bells known as the Vaijayanthi.” Wise Sakra himself brought and gave them to Guha. Visakha took one of the bells and Skanda the other. Both Kartikeya and Visakha have blood red banners. .
The mighty god Mahasena played with the toys that the gods had given him. Seated on the golden rock and surrounded by the hosts of pisaca beings and gods he glowed in the company of Sri. That mountain shone with the presence of the hero, as the Mount Mandhara with excellent caves shines with the rays of the sun. Mount Sveta was adorned with blossoming Santanaka woods and karavira, parijata, java, and asoka groves, with kadamva trees,' heavenly deer and celestial birds.” All the gods and all the rishis were there. The music of the rain-clouds in the air resembled the rumble of the sea.’ And the gandharvas danced. So did the apsaras. The great sound of all elated creatures echoed in all ears.' Whole world gathered with Indra on the Mount Sveta. They joyously gazed upon Skanda but never had enough of the sight.
Markandeya said: When the fortunate god, the son of Pavaki,’ was thus anointed as the commander of the celestial army, the radiantly happy god Hara, the dignified god, departed for Bharadvata with Parvati, on a sun-colored chariot. The noble chariot was drawn
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by a thousand lions and goaded by Kala' flew into the shining sky. The lions with golden manes rushed roaring in the sky, causing the mobile and immobile creatures tremble, as if they were devouring the space. Pasupathi stood on that chariot with Uma, shining like the sun with lightening on a rainbow colored cloud. Ahead of the great god went the god of riches who rides a human vehicle. With him was his attendant Guhyakas in his Pushpaka chariot. Sakra, on his Airavata, together with other gods followed the boongranting bearer of the bull-flag. On his right went the great Yaksha Amogha, adorned with garlands, and the Yakshas and Rakshasas with gaping mouths. Also on the right side were the Vasus, the Rudras,' and many gods, bearing various weapons. Yama and gruesome Death went surrounded on all sides by hundreds of ghastly diseases. Behind Yama went the beautifully decorated Vijaya, Rudra's deadly weapon with three spikes.' Varuna, the great god of the ocean, with his deadly noose, slowly walked surrounded by various aquatic beings, carrying his trident. After Vijaya came Rudra's three-bladed spear, amidst clubs, pestles, maces, and other noble throwing weapons. The spear was followed by Rudra's umbrella of great splendor, and after that, the gourd together with the assembly of great rishis. On its right was the staff, moving with Sri, and worshipped by the gods, and the Bhirgus’ and Angiras. Closely behind them hurried Rudra in his spotless chariot; his dignified presence gladdening all the gods. The rishis, gods, gandharvas, Snakes, male and female rivers, oceans, apsaras, constellations, planets, and women of all kinds followed Rudra. Handsome women scattered rains of flowers. Parjanya' followed making obeisance to the bearer of the Pinaka bow.” The moon held a white umbrella over his head and Agni and Vayu held flywhisks' on either side. Regal Sakra, accompanied by Sri and the royal rishis, marched behind the bull-crested god, eulogizing him. Gauri, Vidya, Gandhari and Sumitra together with Savitri followed Parvati. So did all branches of knowledge, created by the wise and of which Indra and the gods are the spokespersons. In the vanguard were Rakshasa Graha, holding a banner, and Pingala,
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the lord of the Yaksas, a friend of Rudra, always active in the burning fields' and giver of bliss to the whole world. The god proceeded in the company of these, sometimes in front, sometimes behind them, as it pleased him, and his movements were unpredictable. Mortals worship Rudra with virtuous actions calling him Siva, also Rudra, the bearer of the Pinaka bow. He, the Mahesvara, is worshipped in all manner of forms. The husband of Devasena, the Brahman son of the Krttikas, Surrounded by the army of gods, followed the great god.
Then Mahadeva spoke these weighty words to Mahasena, “Carefully protect the seventh division of the Maruts at all times.” Skanda said, "Lord, I shall command the seventh division of the Maruts. Tell me right away what else I should do.”
Rudra said, "Son, in all your actions you must always look at me. By looking at me and by being devoted to me you shall attain supreme good."
Markandeya continued: Mahesvara spoke thus, embraced him and let him go. As Skanda was dismissed a great omen appeared to cause perplexity among the gods. The sky and the constellations were on fire. The world was thoroughly shocked. The earth trembled and groaned, and darkness enveloped the world. Seeing these omens Sankara, Uma of great dignity, the gods and the great rishis were all shaken. As they were in this state of bewilderment a great horde appeared, bearing horrible arms of every description, like a mountain, like a great rain cloud. These horrible innumerable beings, uttering various cries, advanced towards Sankara and the gods. They discharged masses of arrows, rocks, satagni."prasas,” parigha,” and maces. As these horrible weapons fell on them the army of gods turned away and dispersed at once. As they turned their backs upon their enemy, the Danavas” cut down the warriors, elephants, and horses, and demolished their arms and chariots. Crushed by the Asuras as a forest burned down by a blaze, the army of gods fell like a wood of tall trees. The gods, their heads severed from
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their bodies, fell with no one to help them as they were slaughtered in the great battle. 4.
Then, seeing his army flee, Purandara, the slayer of Vala, spoke to the troops tormented by the Danavas:
"Heroes! Hail! Do not be afraid. Pick up your weapons Set your minds on heroism! There is no more trouble for you. Vanquish those odious Danavas with horrendous appearance. Come with me and storm these titanic Asuras! Hail!”
Buoyed upon hearing Sakra's words, the gods, relying on Sakra, fought the Danavas. All the thirty gods,” the powerful Maruts, the Sadhyas, and the Vasus fought back in the great war. They furiously hurled their weapons towards the enemy. Their arrows striking the bodies of the Daityas drank great quantities of blood. The sharp arrows piercing their bodies rushed out like snakes from anthills. The corpses of the Daityas, cleaved by the arrows, fell to the ground, like so many shredded clouds, everywhere. The Danava army, terrified at the army of gods showering many kinds of weapons in the battlefield, retreated. The jubilant gods, brandishing their weapons, gave out loud cries of joy, sounding many instruments.
Thus the mutually destructive dreadful war went on. The battlefield was strewn with the flesh and blood of the gods and the Danavas. Suddenly there was indiscipline in the world of the gods and they lost strength and the horrible Danavas massacred the gods in the same way. Various musical instruments were sounded and the loud sound of drums was heard together with the frightful lion-roars of the Danava chiefs. Then, out of the horrendous Daitya forces, a tremendously powerful Danava named Mahisha emerged, bellowing and tearing off a mountain. The gods, seeing him like the sun sunk under thick clouds, fled in confusion. Mahisha, pursuing them, hurled his mountain. That heap of rocks fell upon the army of gods, killing a myriad and crushing them on the ground. Mahisha, together with other Danavas, chased the terrorStruck gods like a lion attacking small deer. Indra and the gods, seeing Mahisha advancing towards them, ran away from the
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battlefield, abandoning their weapons and the banner. Angrily, Mahisha attacked Rudra's chariot. Mahisha ran towards Rudra's chariot and seized its pole. When Mahisha ferociously chased Rudra's chariot the earth groaned and the great rishis fainted. The Daityas, with enormous bodies like rain clouds, roared thinking victory was theirs. The great god, although he was in this plight, did not think of fighting Mahisha to kill him. He remembered that Skanda was the one to kill this evil being. Mahisha, though, recognizing Rudra's chariot, growled fearsomely to the terror of the gods and delight of the Daityas.
When the gods were in this horrible fearsome danger Mahasena appeared, burning with anger like the fiery sun, dressed in a blood-red robe, and decked with blood-red garlands, with blood-red mouth, the strong-armed Lord in a golden armor rode his golden sparkling chariot that glowed like the sun. Seeing him, the Daitya army became suddenly dispirited on the battlefield. The mighty Mahasena threw his blazing cleaving Sakti' at Mahisha. The spear hit the massive head of Mahisha splitting it. With head severed, Mahisha fell as his life left him.
The gods and the Danavas saw that throw after throw the Sakti returned to Skanda's hands after killing thousands of foes. Mostly killed by the shrewd Mahasena with his arrows, the horrible Daitya hordes fell. Frightened and panicked by Skanda's legion they fell and were eaten by the hundreds. They devoured the Danavas and guzzled their blood. In a moment, they gleefully cleaned the world of Danavas as the sun destroys darkness, as the fire burns a forest, as the wind disperses the clouds.
Thus Skanda defeated the enemies by his own strength, famously. Honored by the thirty-gods' he saluted Mahesvara. The son of the Kirttikas glowed like the sun in all its glory. When Skanda destroyed the enemies and approached Mahesvara, Purandara' embraced Mahasena and spoke to him:
"Skanda, you killed Mahisha to whom Brahma had given a boon. The gods were like straw to him. Strong-limbed hero! You removed a thorn from the side of the gods. You killed in the Great
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War a hundred Danavas, the peers of Mahisha. They were forever the enemies of the gods and had harassed us all this time. Your legions have consumed hundreds of Danavas. Great One! On the battlefield you are invincible, like Uma's husband. This deed is your first achievement and your glory shall be imperishable in the three worlds. Great-Armed One! The gods shall be in your power.” Sachi's husband thus spoke and, having obtained permission from the Fortunate Lord Triyambaka, 'left with other gods. Rudra departed for Bharadvata. Other gods went to their abodes. Rudra told the gods, "Look upon Skanda as you look at me!”
The great rishis paid homage to him for destroying the hosts the Danavas. That son of Vahni conquered all three worlds in one day.
From here on, I shall summarize the other birth dramas of Skanda Kumara. Scholars hesitate to provide a definitive chronological ordering of these stories and there are numerous opinions about this matter. All agree that the Mahabharata Aranyaka Parvan account is the earliest as the pantheon in it is the closest to the pantheon of the Rg Veda, considered to be the earliest compendium of South Asian indigenous religious doctrines. For our purposes a perfect chronology is less significant than the dynamics in the dramatis personae and choreography of each plot."
The Ramayana Balakanda
The generally accepted opinion is that Valmiki composed the Ramayana around 200 BCE. 108
He narrates the story of Rama, his brother Lakshmana, Rama's consort Sita, their friend Hanuman and their enemy Ravana. Rama was Vishnu, born to destroy Ravana, a demon king of Lanka who wreaked havoc on the gods. When a rishi named Visvamitra complained to Rama's father, King Dasaratha, that Ravana's demons polluted and destroyed his sacrifices, Dasaratha sent Rama and his brothers to destroy the demons. They destroyed the demons, saved the sacrifice, and on their way back met king Janaka, performed
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heroic deeds and won his daughters as wives. Rama's wife was Sita; Visnu's wife Lakshmi's avatar. Upon their return, as successor to Dasaratha, Rama was to be anointed as the king of Ayodhya. But this was prevented by a junior queen. She plotted against Rama's coronation, had him ousted and banished. Rama, Sita and Lakshmana left Ayodhya and reached the great forest Dandakaranya where they lived near Valmiki's hermitage. Valmiki educated them about Skanda and his might as a child god and as a mighty commander of the army of gods who defeated the Asuras, to encourage Rama and Lakshmana to become great warriors.
Valmiki said that the great ascetic god Rudra married Uma, the younger daughter of Mount Himavat. For one hundred years Rudra and Uma engaged in love making but no son was born to Rudra as the gods, fearing that a son born to Rudra would threaten them, pleaded to Rudra not to have a son. Rudra promised not to have a son but his tejas fell. Only the Dhara, the earth, could bear it. The gods firged Agni to collect it. Agni and Vayu entered Rudra's ejected tejas, and the tejas became the Mount Sveta. In a grove of reeds, Kumara was born out of Rudra's tejas.
However, the story is a bit more complex than this. Valmiki details how Kumara was born in a second story. Brahma had appointed Rudra as the devasenapati, the commander of the army of gods. But Rudra became a tapasvin. The army of gods needed a commander and requested Agni to produce a son out of Rudra's tejas. Agni gave Rudras tejas to Ganga, Umas elder sister. She could not hold it. Rudra's golden seed flooded and everything that it touched-grass, creepers, shrubs and trees - became golden. Its heat formed the metals in the earth. Kumara was born in that golden forest. The six Kirttikas found the child and adopted him. With his six mouths, Kumara sucked milk from their breasts during the first day of his birth. He grew up to be a heroic youth, became the commander of the army of gods, and destroyed the Daityas (Asuras).
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The Mahabharata Salya Parvan
The Salya Parvan is the ninth book of the epic. Maheswara shed his tejas. Agni, in the guise of a pigeon, picked it up with his beak but he could not hold it. He gave it to Ganga. She could not bear it either and sent it to Himavat, her father. In the Himavat it was deposited in a clump of Sara reeds. Kumara was born out of it. The six Kirttikas found and suckled him. Ganga and the Earth attended to his needs. Brihaspati performed the birth rites. Rudra, Uma, Agni and Ganga implored before Brahman to make him the devasenapati. Brahman and the gods anointed him as the commander of the army of gods on the banks of the river Sarasvati. Brhaspati, Himavat, Indra and Brahma performed the ritual with water from Sarasvati. The gods gave him companions who were warriors and his devotees. Among them was a group of goddesses who were also his mothers. These goddesses inhabited trees, open areas, crossings of four roads, caves, cemeteries, mountains and springs." All manner of wild animals, reptiles and birds gathered around him. -
Skanda's parenthood was claimed by Rudra, Parvati, Agni and Ganga. The god produced four forms: Sakha, Visakha, Naigameya, and Skanda. Skanda selected Rudra as his father, Visakha chose Parvati as his mother, Sakha went to Ganga, and Naigameya to Agni.
Then gods presented him gifts. Indra gave an arrow and a banner, Rudra an army of thirty thousand warriors, Visnu a garland, Uma a cloth, Ganga a pot of amrta (elixir), Garuda its favorite son Citrabarbin - a peacock, Aruna, the charioteer of the Sun, a cock, Varuna a snake, and Brahman the skin of a black antelope.
Skanda then killed the Asuras. Taraka was the head of the Asuras and Mahisha was his aid. Skanda killed both of them. But the Daitya Bana, the son of an Asura named Bali, hid in the Krauncha hill and harassed the inhabitants there. Skanda split
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asunder the Krauncha hill and destroyed the Daitya Bana. The gods honored him and called him by many honorific names: son of Mahesvara, Agni, Ganga, Uma or Krttikas. Skanda left for Kailasa
to practice asceticism.
The Mahabharata Anusasana Parvan
The thirteenth book, known as the Anusasana Parvan, provides yet another rendition. Here, Siva is presented as the father of Skanda.
Siva and Parvati engaged in endless dalliance. Meanwhile Taraka the Asura tormented the gods. The gods went to Indra and asked for a leader for the army of the gods. Indra urged them to consult Brahma. In Brahma's opinion, Siva was the greatest of all gods, greater than even Visnu and only a son born to Siva was capable of eliminating Taraka. The gods sent Agni to collect Siva's tejas. Agni, in the form of a dove, collected it and gave it to Ganga. She was overwhelmed and Siva's tejas overflowed, converting everything in its path into gold. Kumara was born in that golden forest and was nursed by the Kirttikas. Since he was raised by the Kirttikas he was called Karttika. Since he was born of Siva's cast off tejas he is called Skanda. Skanda had six faces. He was born in the same way gold (gangeya) originated.
The gods and the rishis visited him in the thicket of reeds. The gods presented to him toys, birds and animals. Garuda gave him a peacock. The Rakshasas gave him a pig and a buffalo. Aruna gave a cock. The moon gave a goat. The sun gave him effulgence. Agni gave a ram. Illa gave fruits and flowers. Varuna gave elephants, lions, tigers, and clawed animals.
The demons tried to kill him but Skanda destroyed them. The gods urged him to be the devasenapati. He joined in the war between the gods (Sura) and the Asuras. With his Sakti (spear), he killed Taraka. The gods won the war. Skanda recaptured the kingdom of gods and gave it to Indra. He was anointed the commander of the army of the gods and was therefore called Guha.
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The Siva Purana
Here, Siva and Parvati are the main dramatis personae. In the Rudra Sanhita, Brahma discusses the children of Siva and Parvati with rishi Narada.
The gods, led by Visnu, pleaded to Siva to destroy Taraka. Siva shed his semen. As soon as it fell on the ground, the gods urged Agni to pick it up. He became a dove and collected it in his beak. This made Parvati angry for spoiling her love play with Siva and making her barren. She cursed Vishnu and other the gods that they would be unhappy and that their wives would be barren. She cursed Agni that he would be an omnivore with a constantly tormented soul.
The gods became pregnant with Siva's seed as they ate food and drink placed in Agni during the sacrifices. They found the seed unbearable and themselves feverishly burning. Thus afflicted they went to Siva and begged him to relieve them of this misery. Siva told them to vomit the seeds. The gods vomited the seeds and were relieved. The golden seeds that fell on the ground were as huge as a Soaring mountain.
But Agni was unhappy. The seeds were still within him. He begged Siva to forgive his misdeed of swallowing Siva's seeds and remove the burning within him. Siva told Agni to deposit the seeds in the womb of a good woman. Agni said no woman would be able to bear the seeds in her womb except Parvati. Siva asked rishi Narada to help Agni. Narada advised Agni to deposit the seeds in the women who bathe at dawn in the month of Magha.'
The wives of seven rishis' went to a lake for water sports. Agni became a fire nearby. All except Arundhati felt cold after bathing and desired to become warm by the fire. Arundhati protested but they went ahead and kept warming themselves. Then Siva's seeds entered their bodies through their hair follicles and they became pregnant. The rishis, finding their wives pregnant, abandoned them. Greatly afflicted with misery the women abandoned the seeds already in fetal form on a peak of the
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Himavat. But Himavat could not bear Siva's seeds for it caused feverish burning in him and he hurled it into Ganga.' Even Ganga could not bear Siva's seed and she threw it on her waves. They took the seeds into a forest of Sara grass.
In the Sara forest (saravana) the seeds became (bhava) a handsome well-endowed boy full of glory and splendor. On the sixth day of the waxing moon in the lunar month of Mrgasirasa' the son of Siva appeared in the world to the great delight of all, particularly of Siva and Parvati. The Ksatriya sage Visvamitra came to pay homage to Siva's son. Son of Agnielevated him to the position of a Brahman and asked him to perform his purificatory rites. Agni visited his son and gifted him a spear.
Guha climbed the peak of Mount Sveta and struck the peak with his spear and the peak fell down. Ten thousand billion heroic demons came to attack him. He killed all of them with his spear. The three worlds trembled. Indra came and hit Skanda's right side with his thunderbolt. Sakha of great strength arose from that side. Sakra struck him again on his left side. Mighty Visakha emerged from that side. Then Indra hit his heart with the thunderbolt. Powerful Naigameya came out of his heart. These three were identical to Skanda. The four of them attacked Indra. The Brahma had to come protect Indra.
The Kirttikas nursed him. The gods anointed him as the commander of the army of gods and gave him various gifts. Thereafter, Kartikeya performed miracles, fought Taraka, whom Indra and Visnu failed to subdue, and killed him, killed Bana who plagued the Krauncha hills, and killed the demon Pralambha. Amid the cheers of all the gods, Kumara went to Mount Kailasa to visit his parents. Siva and Parvati kissed him and showed affection. Parvati petted him on her lap as they sat on the throne.'
This state of affairs was short-lived. Siva and Parvati decided that their sons, six-faced Skanda and his elephant-headed elder brother Ganesha, have attained marriageable age. The sons too were eager to be married. The parents devised a method to determine
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whose marriage should to be celebrated first. They called the two sons and told them that whoever went round the Earth and returned first would have his marriage celebrated first. At once Skanda began to go around the earth. Ganesha placed two seats and asked his parents to sit in them. Ganesha worshipped them by circumambulating them seven times and bowing to them seven times.
Then he said that his marriage be celebrated quickly. The parents said that he should go the way Kumara did and return before him. Ganesha protested: "By circumambulating you I had intelligently circumambulated the Earth extending all the way to the oceans. The Vedas say that he who circumambulates and worships his parents circumambulates the Earth.” The parents agreed. * 2
Prajapati Visvarupa had two exquisite daughters Siddhi' and Buddhi' and he was very happy to give them in marriage to Ganesha. Siva and Parvati jubilantly celebrated the marriage. They invited the gods to the celebration and Visvakarman' made all the arrangements. The rishis and the gods were full of joy. Ganesha derived indescribable happiness from the marriage. After sometime Ganesha begot two sons of each of his wives. Siddhi gave him Kshema' and Buddhi gave him Labha.'
As Ganesha enjoyed inconceivable happiness, the second son returned after circumambulating the Earth. Rishi Narada spoke to him. Narada said that no parent should treat a child the way Siva and Parvati treated Skanda - driving him out under the pretext of circumambulating the Earth and celebrating Ganesha's marriage. He now had two wives and two beautiful sons. Skanda had gone round the world because of his parent's deception. If parents, particularly the masters, deceived would not others also deceive? Skanda's parents had done badly. If the mother were to poison her son, if the father were to sell his son, if the king were to confiscate the assets of his subjects what could be said and to whom? An intelligent man should never look at the face of the person who
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had committed such a harmful deed. Narada thus intimated to Skanda the words in the Vedas, Smrtis and the sacred texts, and asked Skanda to do as he pleased.'
Narada spoke according to Siva's wish.' Skanda, infuriated with his parents, bowed to Siva and went to the Krauncha hills. Siva and Parvati prohibited him to go there but Skanda ignored his parent's prohibition. He said that he would never stay in their abode even for a moment because they had deceived him, denying affection, walked out, and stayed in the Krauncha hills, removing the sins of all by his visions. Ever since, the Son of Siva, Karttikeya remained a bachelor.'
In the month of Karttika,' the gods, rishis and great ascetics go there to see Kumara. It is said that whoever has the vision of Karttika in the Kirttika naksastra' in the month of Karttika is divested of all his sins. He obtains all desired results. Parvati was grief-stricken by her separation from Skanda. She implored to Siva that they visited him. Partly because of Parvati's pleading, Siva went to the Krauncha hills in the beautiful form of jyotirlinga' named Mallikarjuna. Siva and Parvati continue to go there to help his devotees.
When Kumara found out that Siva and Parvati were on the Krauncha hills he tried to go elsewhere. The gods and the rishis pleaded him to stay. But he went to a place three yojanas away.'
On full and new moon days, Parvati and Siva are excited by love towards their son and go there to see him. Siva himselfgoes there on new moon days. Parvati never fails to go on full moon days.
Kumarasambhava
Another important source of information on Skanda is poet Kalidasa's Kumarasambhava. This is a work of art rather than a religious tract. Kalidasa's intention is to tell the story elegantly, with numerous decorative motifs current in his time to exemplify
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his literary skills.' Nonetheless, many devotees of the god obtain information about the god from this source. Kalidasa himself had obtained information from the earlier sources discussed above.
Muruga in Tamil Literature
My friend Velupillai had no knowledge of any of these Sanskrit sources. As I stated above, his knowledge of the god is not that of the scholars. It is derived from the oral traditions among the east coast Tamils of Sri Lanka. These traditions descend from the oral and literary traditions in South India, particularly in Tamil Nadu. Let me now turn to the Muruga face of the god.
The available literature on Muruga from Tamil Nadu shows a more complicated story. Kamil Zvelebil, Fred Clothey, George Hart and David Schulman, researchers on the Muruga cult in Tamil Nadu, found that Muruga worship has pre-historic origins.' The hill tribes of Tamil Nadu have venerated deities named Muruku, Ceyon, Cevvel and Mayon. Muruku, Ceyon and Cevvel were the names of a youthful red colored god. Mayon was the youthful dark god, later identified with Visnu, known in Tamil as Tirumal.' Early Tamilliterature provides significant amounts of information about the linguistic formations around the pre-Tamil or protoTamil deity named Muruku, Ceyon, and Cevvel. The general scholarly consensus is that these linguistic elements and the meaning structures that they signify belonged to the tribes that inhabited the imagined, legendary, or historical hills known as the kurinci in ancient Tamil Nadu.
Muruku referred to "tenderness, tender age” and "youth. The term refers to masculinity when the terminal u is substituted with the suffix an. Murukan is thus, literally, a young man. He was also known as Ceyon and Ceyyon. In old Tamil Cey and Ceey were adjectival terms that referred to "redness.” Thus, Ceyon and Ceyyon meant the "red one” and Cevvel, "the red beloved.” Other names of this deity included Netiyon (great one), Netuvel (great beloved), Vel (desire, love or sacrifice or the lovable one as well as the one who inspires desire), Velan (spearman or lancer).
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Velenti (spear-bearer), Velvallan and Velvalan (strong man with lance). These terms also refer to the Supreme Being, a being beyond thought, known as Katavul.
Muruku, Ceyon, and Cevvel merged to produce Muruga who exhibits all of the above characteristics: youthfulness; virility; warlike nature and adroitness in hunting; red complexion; association with peacock, cock, elephant, goat and snake; bearing of a spear known as the vel; possession of human beings; enmity towards an embodiment of the evil called Cur; and association with Valli.
Muruga inhabited, as he still does, the mountainous regions known as kurinci of Tamil Nadu.' To the tribal peoples such as the Kuravai who lived in those regions he was the beloved hunter. Muruga is the son of Korravai, their goddess of war.'. Curiously, the early Sangam literature does not speak of Muruga's father. Kamil Zvelebil says, "His father's name is never mentioned. Indeed, he has no father." Muruga is eternally youthful. Sometimes he appears as a beautiful little boy. At other times, he appears as a handsome valorous young man bearing a spear. Young women coveted his company and imagined having amorous pre-nuptial encounters with him. Muruga possessed them. Valli, Muruga's beloved, is a Kuravai.
There were many ways to worship this ancient Tamil god. Later Sangam literature, particularly the Tirumurugarruppadai provides details. His priests were known as the Velan. He was offered cooked rice and millet with the blood of cattle, goats or fowl. His devotees rapturously danced the militaristic Kuravai steps to please him. Their involvement with him was, as today, emotional and ecstatic. During such propitiatory activities, he entered the body of the Velan, sending him into a trance state during which he shivered, trembled, gyrated and danced in abandon brandishing a spear that represented Muruga’s Vel. The congregation followed the Velan, dancing in ecstasy. They expected Muruga to bless them with children, luck during hunts, and protection from enemies.
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This idyllic scenario became more complex from about the fourth century BCE, with the gradual introduction of the Vedic religion. Through the expansion and collapse of the Maurya Empire and the subsequent expansion of the Hindu Satavahana dynanstic rule, trade routes that linked the southern peninsula with the northern regions brought about commerce of ideas and knowledge, leading to the sanskritization of the southern indigenous notions about the world and the ways of being in it. The Vedic, epic and puranic ideas were indigenized and absorbed into the southern worldview. We have already examined the entry of Rudra, Siva, Parvati, Uma and other deities of the non-Vedic local religion into the Vedic pantheon, and the accommodation of the Vedic deities within the local religion.
This process of religious transformation engulfed the Muruga worship as well. Perhaps even before the Common Era, the transformation of Muruga into a pan-Tamil deity was complete. For example, the earliest known Sangam literature presents Muruga as the same as Skanda Kartikeya, the son of Siva and Parvati and the husband of Teivayanai.' Even the early Akam and Puram poetry, the sources of information about ancient Muruga worship, began with invocations of Sanskritic deities. Concurrently, the nicknames of Muruga grew in number to include Cuppiramanium, o Kandasvami, Arumugam, Shanmugam, Kumaran, and the like.'
The second Sangam period literature represents a further mutual assimilation of the Muruga and Skanda cults. Two texts are of particular significance: the Paripatal and the Tirumurugarruppadai.*
Paripatal
Although the works of the first Sangam invoke the Puranic deities such as Siva, these deities were not firmly structurally associated with Muruga until the Paripatal, composed by a number of authors during the first four centuries of the CE. Much of the original work is missing. A few verses in the remaining twenty
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four poems provide information about Muruga worship during this period. The Paripatal states that Muruga is Siva's son. Zvelebil paraphrases the account:
Siva abstains from sexual union with Uma. His accumulated semen is ejected. Indra intends to create a powerful deity out of it. He asks the seven wives of the seven risis to bear the child of Siva. They refuse for fear of losing their chastity. Indra then turns Siva's semen into ash in sacred fire. He divides it into seven portions, and gives it to the Kritika nymphs. One of them refuses to eat, but others accept. They become pregnant. They deliver six children on a bed of a huge lotus. The children roar like a lion. Indra throws his vajra to kill the children. But they fuse into one child with six heads and twelve arms, fight Indra with several weapons, and Indra makes peace with the child.'
The Paripatal attests to the Brahmanization of Muruga. The Muruga theology was gradually assimilated into the theology of Siva. We may also assert the reverse, that the Muruga theology assimilated the theology of Siva. It is important to note that the poets who composed the Paripatal were not only Muruga and Siva devotees but also Visnu devotees, and that the poems of Paripatal address this range of deities.' The Brahmanical notions and the southern ideas accommodated each other through mutual redefinition and adjustment. In any event, the association of Muruga/Ceyon/Cevvel with Skanda found the first full-blown bhakti expression in the Paripatal. '
A few centuries later, in the beautiful idyll,
Tirumurugarruppadai, the devotees could immerse in their bhakti devotion for Muruga.
Tirumurugarruppadai
Tirumurugarruppadai was composed around the eighth century by poet Nakkirar. It is a long composition in the aruppadaiarruppadai (six-line; Sinhala: Sayapada) mode in praise of Muruga. Nakkirar's brilliant poem is an excellent example of bhakti religiosity that characterizes a mode of worship developed during
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this era. A comparable current existed in the northern regions as well, where the bhakti was focused on Visnu and Krisna. Arguably, the northern bhakti religiosity was an extension of a southern trend. The ancient Muruga worship, as discussed earlier, involved a passionate attitude towards the deity. It was, in all likelihood, a purely local phenomenon rooted in the Tamil culture."
The Sanskrit term bhakti refers to ardent devotion to a deity. Bhakti devotion lacks a theology because it does not need logical, metaphysical and moral justifications of faith. It is pre-logical, preconceptual and amoral. The devotee cannot express her passionate love for the deity adequately in any logical manner and it is unutterable. She is, personally, unfathomably in love with the deity. She would die for him. She is aware of the deity's love for her, but her love is not, consciously, for a physical union with the deity for such a union is impossible. She is also aware of the universal character of the deity's love, but her focus is his love for her. She expresses her intoxicated devotion through meditation upon the god and singing, dancing, and performing good deeds to express her joy of communion with the deity. She wants nothing from him for he has given her everything she needs; his love. The devotee's dedication of her life to and emotional involvement with the deity culminates in being possessed by him. From the earliest times, Muruga worship involved, in addition to the more utilitarian pleading for boons, a bhakti religiosity. As I noted earlier, Velan, Muruga's priest, as well as others in his congregation, entered trance states during worshipful activities.
The Tirumurugarruppadai is abhakti poem par excellence; an ardent poetic expression with exemplary imagery. I could not appreciate the linguistic beauty of this poem due to my lack of knowledge of the Tamil language. Nevertheless, even in English translations the passionate devotion finds powerful expression.
The Tirumurugarruppadai only vaguely describes Muruga's origins and deeds. Nakkirar follows the Paripatal. He dwells on the god's great effulgent beauty that manifests in places and situations of idyllic glory. He combines the Muruga lore with
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Skandalore without attempting to systematize the identification, mixes images from both, and dramatizes them in the idyllic wilderness of the kurinci to highlight fervent devotion. Muruga plays and dances with the Kuravai maidens and is in love with Valli, a hunter's daughter. He possesses Kuravi girls who are. passionate about him. His priest, brandishing his vel, the lance, is in a trance and dances the veriatal for he is full of veri-inebriated with devotion.'
Nakkirar constructed his poem in six steps." The first step is called Tirupparankunram where he describes the splendor of Muruga, his connection with Teivayanai and the destruction of Curapadman. Nakkirar rapturously describes the dances of celestial maidns in bamboo groves, their roseate feet tinkling with anklets. Muruga wears a crown of kantal or kartigaii malar."“7
Nakkirar describes the tunkai dance of the demoness in praise of Muruga's victory over Curapadman. He includes a description of the glory of Madurai and Tirupparankunram.
In the second step, called Tirucheeralavai, Nakkirar gives an exegesis of the six faces and the twelve arms of Muruga who rides an elephant. He says that one of the faces rejoices forever the company of Valli.'" Nakkirar eulogizes the city of Tiruccendur, referred to as Tirucheeralavai. Muruga illuminates the city as he speedily flies over it.
The third step, Tiruvavinankudi, describes the divine procession of the rishis, the ancient seers. They wear garments made of bark. Their hair gleams conch-white (Sinhala: Saksuda). Their chests are covered with deerskin. Their bodies are reedy because of the fasts and penances. Free from anger and greed, their hearts are cheerful and their appearance is gracious. They lead the way for the procession as the gandharvas, the heavenly musicians, dressed in misty robes play music. Nakkirar describes the march of the puranic pantheon led by Visnu who carries the banner of the fierce dragon-killing falcon.' Siva is on his white bull. Indra rides his four-tusked white elephant. Brahma and numerous other divinities follow. Nakkirar ends this section by glorifying Turivavinankudi,
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also known as Avinankudi. This section clearly borrows material from the Mahabharata.
In the fourth step, Tiruverakam, Nakkirar discusses the Brahmanical aspects of Muruga. He speaks of Brahmans wearing the sacred thread who chant mantras at the temples of the twiceborn and maintain the three fires prescribed in the Vedas. They chant the Vedic lore enshrined in the secret word of six letters.' This section provides the most information on the Sanskritization of the Muruga worship during Nakkirar's time.
The fifth step, Kunrutoratal, describes the ancient Muruga worship by the people of the kurinci. Men, armed with deadly bows, and fair women, dressed like Valli, adorn themselves with kadamba flowers,' rub perfumed sandal paste on their chests, become inebriated with honey aged in bamboo vessels, and worship Muruga with the veriadal dance.' The Muruga priest velan wears garlands of wild jasmine'
and white kuthalam knotted with scented nutmeg and luscious berries. He wears a crimson cloth and warrior's anklets. He dances Swinging his lance, and tender damsels join him as gently as a flock of deer. They all Swing to the lilt of Kuravai dance tunes. In the concluding step, Pazhamuthircholai, Nakkirar celebrates Muruga and the dances and rituals performed by the Kuravai people. Pazhamuthircholai is a temple for Muruga. It is also known as Tirumaliruncholai and is identified with the present day Alagarmalai near Madurai.' After describing the nature of Muruga's abodes Nakkirar gives an account of rituals to propitiate Muruga. In the rituals, the dwellers of the kurinci raise the cock banner of Muruga in a suitable place. They rub ghee and white mustard on their foreheads and tie occult red strings round their wrists. Softly chanting the mystic incantations, they sprinkle popped white rice and offer white rice mixed with goat blood and sprayed with fragrant sandal paste and saffron. Singing the songs of the kurinci, they burn incense. They play melodies with various instruments, offer flowers mixed with millet and blood, and dance
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to the rhythms of the thunkaka drum. There is hornblowing and bell ringing as they dance.
For all its poetic glory, the Tirumurugarruppadai does not systematize the cult stories into a consistent grand narrative. Such systematization had to wait for a long time, until a Brahman priest named Kacciappa Sivacariyar entered the Tamil literary scene and Muruga worship. Kacciappa was an expert in the Saiva Siddhanta philosophy. Undoubtedly, he had a fine command of the puranic literature unknown to the early poets.
Kantha Puranam
Kantha Puranam, the masterwork of the Muruga theologian Kacciappa Sivacariyar, shows the culmination of Skanda/Muruga syncretism. The present day theology of Muruga descends largely from this work. Kacciappa compiled and integrated a vast amount of material that existed during his time. He composed his poem in Kaci, at the Kumarakottam temple where he was a pujari (priest). The date of the work has been variously determined but the most probable date appears to be between the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.' The Kantha Puranam involves one hundred and forty one chapters in six kantams (books).
Kacciappa states at the outset that he based his story on the account of Skanda in the Sivarasyakanda of the Sankarasanhita of the northern Sanskrit Skandapurana. However, he also edits and blends in Murugalore from the Sangam poems and southern oral traditions, incorporates the Skandalore from other puranic sources, integrates the Saiva Siddhanta philosophy of the Kashmiri Saivism, and reinvents Muruga as an expression of Siva.The backdrop to the Kantha Puranam epic is the war between the Suras and the Asuras, as in the Mahabharata. Curapadman, the archenemy of the gods, is harassing them. Meanwhile Siva marries Uma. The gods plead to Siva to produce a son who would protect them. Siva emits sparks from his third eye and orders Agni and Vayu to collect the sparks. Agni deposits them in Ganga. But Ganga becomes dry
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and the sparks fall into the lake Saravana. Muruga rises from the waters of Saravana, on a lotus, as Arumukakkatavul-god with six faces. The gods command the Karttikaippenkal - the Kirttikas of the Mahabharata - to adopt the children. Siva and Parvati (Uma) visit them. Parvati embraces the children and they become one with six faces, twelve arms and one body.' Muruga amuses himself, challenges Brahma on the meaning of the sacred sound Om, and assumes the role of the Creator.
In the meantime, Vishnu has two daughters: Amutavalli and Cuntaravalli. They want to marry Muruga. Amutavalli is reborn as Indra's daughter and is named Teivayanai - after Indra's white elephant.' Cuntaravalli is reborn as the daughter of Civamuni.
Muruga first wages war against Tarakan, kills the demon by splitting its chest with his vel, and then splits Tarakan's mountain hideout Kiravuncam.' The god's rejoice this feat and come to Muruga's refuge. Muruga leaves his Tevakiri' mountain home in the north, goes to the south, and builds a city that Kacciappa calls Ceyanalur or Kumarapuri. He travels in the south and comes to Tiruccentur. There, a sage tells him about the Curans - Asuras. Muruga promises Indra that he will destroy the race of Curans. He sends his messenger Viravaku to Curan leader Curapadman's court. Viravaku informs Curapadman that Arumukan had killed Tarakan, and destroyed the Kiravuncam hill, and that he is going to deliver the gods. Muruga is willing to pardon Curapadman if he sets the captured gods free. Curapadman refuses this request. Thereupon a terrible war rages and Muruga kills Cinkamukacuran.'The Curans are dead leaving only Curapadman. A great dual ensues. Muruga's vel splits Curapadman's body in two, throws the body into the Ocean, goes to Ganga, bathes and returns to Muruga. (The oral tradition has it that in the final scenario of the battle Curapadman runs and jumps in the ocean and becomes a mango tree. Muruga halves the tree with his vel.) The two halves of Curapadman's body return to life because of Siva's intervention and become a cock and a peacock. Muruga orders the cock to be
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his banner and the peacock to be his vehicle. The imprisoned gods are set free. The gods rejoice. Muruga returns to Tiruccentur.
Muruga leaves Tiruccentur for Parankunram where he marries Indra's daughter Teivayannai. He is once again crowned as the king of the gods,' and Siva adores him as a lingam. Muruga spends his time frolicking and merrymaking.
Muruga's marriage to Cunderavalli appears in the last (sixth) book called Takkakantam. I shall present these materials a little later. Let me, for the time being, focus on Muruga. At this point, Muruga is the same as Skanda, son of Siva and Parvati. The SivaParvati stories of the Ramayana, Siva Purana and Skandapurana are recast to establish the parenthood of Muruga where Parvati becomes the mother of both Ganesh and Muruga. Korravai, the ancient goddess of war, the mother of Muruga in the early literature, is paradigmatically substituted with Siva and Parvati. Muruga is paradigmatically aligned with Skanda. In a similar move, Taraka of the Sanskrit tradition is reduced to an Asura warrior and is substituted with Curapadman. Muruga, as Skanda, is born to kill Curapadman, the Asura leader. He kills Curapadman and marries Teivayannai. Devasena of the Sanskrit corpus is substituted with Amurutavalli, reborn as Teivayannai.
Tweaking Culture
This story ties together the two cults tightly enough for a popular syncretic theology but not without tension. Kacciappa, and his Paripatal and Tirumurugarruppadai predecessors, had not resolved the conflicts in the theological identification and social expression of devotion. Skanda/Kandasamy/Kartikeya/ Arumugam/Subrahmanya is a puranic god, a Brahman warrior, and a celibate ascetic although formally married to Devasena. Muruga, by contrast, is a hunter god, a warrior married to a hunter's daughter. As a Brahman Skanda abhors polluting circumstances and follows Brahmanical ethics. Muruga, as a hunter god living among the hunters of the kurinchi, is erotic, possesses his devotees, enjoys blood sacrifices, and is oblivious to pollution.
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Thus, the syncretism has produced a theology that renders Skanda/Muruga an aporetic god; a god who is self-contradictory, a paradox. The worship of the god produced social problems. Muruga, as a pre-sanskritic deity, was worshipped by all and sundry in the ancient Tamil society. But, after sanskritization, together with the sanskritization of the Tamil society, Muruga worship became relegated to the low end of the society while those who assumed the Vedic divija or twice born identity worshipped Skanda/Kandasami. The Tamil royalty, now with Kshatriya identity, and the Tamil Brahmans propitiated the Brahman god Skanda in the sanskritic way, shunning the ancient practices of the Muruga cult.
The Vellalas-Tamil farmer caste - also adopted the sanskritic theory of the god as it comes in the Sanskrit Skanda Purana, a southern rendition called Skanda Puranam, Siva Purana, and Kacciappa's Kantha Puranam. All these were influenced by the Saiva Siddhanta philosophy of Kashmiri Saivism and dissolve Skanda's identity in the theology of Siva. Together with the theology, the Vellalas adopted the sanskritic practices as well, leaving the ancient Tamil religious beliefs to the non-Vellala castes that were not bound by the moral regimes of the Vedic dharmasutras and the dharmasastras. However, as we shall see later when we examine Bryan Pfaffenberger's work, the Vellalas do propitiate Muruga, at least in Sri Lanka, but not together with puranic gods, now defined as agama gods or the gods from the religious texts. The worship of Muruga occurs away from their neighborhoods, in specific places unrelated to their daily life, where pollution by non-Brahmanical elements reigns.
The Paripatal, Tirumurugarruppadai, and the Kantha Puranam save Sakanda/ Kartikeya from oblivion." The Skanda worship in the sanskritic north has declined, the god has become otiose, and the northern religiosity has become centered on the theologies of Vishnu, Krishna and Siva as the Skanda Purana, Siva Purana, Vishnu Purana, Bhagavat Gita etc. indicate. The Tamil discovery of some parallel stems in the Muruga and Skanda
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narratives and their assimilation of the Skanda narratives gave a new lease of life to the Skanda cult, but only in the southern regions, particularly in Tamil Nadu.
According to a recent scholarly opinion, this grand narrative about the syncretism of Skanda and Muruga is based on a misunderstanding. It presumes that the early sub-continental religion existed in two strands - Vedic and non-Vedic. The Vedic religion was brought into the sub-continent by the Indo-Aryans. It engulfed and was in turn engulfed by the non-Vedic local religions. In the process, the Vedic religion became corrupt.' Recent scholars argue that the distinction is incorrect and leads to various irresolvable issues when tested against data. They propose an alternative grand narrative based on the premise that the multifaceted religions of the sub-continent radiated in various directions from a variety of indigenous sources. The southern Muruga and the northern Skanda are the same because they arise from the same kernel of indigenous beliefs in a youthful heroic divinity. In time, these beliefs had undergone numerous transformations in the various regions as they were redefined in the contexts of local cultural systems. In effect, this line of thinking resists the indological reasoning that there are two cultural groups - indigenous and alien, and that the Superior aliens Subjugated the indigenous people and remodeled them. Perhaps, the British colonial experience prompted the indologists to draw ancient parallels with their contemporary situations, that the South Asian sub-continent was periodically invaded by various other more dynamic cultures that continually influenced the sub-continental cultures. The debates go on.'
Whatever the historical movements might have been, the religion of the Tamils in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu now revolves around the concepts of Muruga and Skanda, worshipped as two facets of the same six-faced god. Muruga, as we know him today, is a multiethnic, multicultural product just as much as Skanda was during his glory-days in the north. What are the contours of this multicultural construction?
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The stories about Skanda's birth and exploits can be studied on two axes: a vertical diachronic axis and a horizontal synchronic one. The former places each story and its constituent elements on a temporal dimension irrespective of spatial considerations such as the geographical location of the story and its distribution, and examines the changes that have occurred, in the themes and styles, in time. This way we can understand how the stories transformed in time and under what conditions. The synchronic horizontal axis considers all the stories on the same plane. It examines how the spatial and social structural variations of the thematic elements in the Stories function simultaneously with equal vigor and power. The stories presented so far, when chronologically arranged, show that the theology of Kataragama Deiyo has developed over twenty-five centuries or so. The stories about the birth of the god first appeared in the oral tradition that could have existed before the Mahabharata was constructed. The Aranyaka Parvan where the Mahabharata account first appears belongs to the oldest part of the epic that, perhaps, was compiled between 1000 BCE and 600 BCE. However, during this period the story of Skanda had undergone many changes.
For example, at the beginning of the Aranyaka Parvan story Skanda was born at the Raudra Muhurta - the terrible moment or the moment of Rudra. But he was born from Agni's semen, at the request of Indra, with Brahma's approval, to marry Devasena, at a time when there was a great war between the gods and the demigods. This part of the story is dominated by the Rg Vedic deities. The story specifically asserts that Agni is Skanda's father. Let me call this the Agni motif of Skanda's paternity.
Then Indra's stature is reduced. Although he is still the king of the gods, Skanda defeats him in battle. During this battle, Agni's personality is castrated from a masculine heroic one that begets the commander of the heavenly forces to that of a goat-faced insignificant god, a divine babysitter, who tends Skanda and the children of the Mothers. At the same time Rudra, not the Rudra
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of the Rg Veda but another god with the same name but with a different personality, is pushed forward and is identified with Agni, as Skanda's father. Between Skanda's battle with Indra and Skanda becoming anointed as the commander of the army of gods the Agni motif is terminated. Agni is reduced to just a face of Skanda, the mysterious goat face, and Rudra assumes the role of Skanda's father.
This transformation shows that the versions edited and translated by Roy and Van Buitenan had already accommodated post-Vedic Rudra and Siva who were not members the pantheon of an earlier version. By the time this version was compiled, the Rg Vedic Rudra was in the process of being displaced by a new god who was given the name of the dimmed god, or the Rg Vedic god was completely reconfigured under the influence of a powerful cult of another god. There can be many more possibilities but this is sufficient to establish that many religious strains belonging to a variety of belief systems have coalesced to transform the identity of gods and interrelationships among them.
In any event, the Agni motif of paternity was gradually displaced and the plot was recast to accommodate the Rudra motif. The Aranyaka Parvan story indicates that at the time its beginning was composed the Rudra motif was competing with the Agni motif. Skanda was born at the Raudra Muhurta although Agni was the father. Once the Rudra motif gained ground, the Agni motif became irrelevant. Within the Rudra motif, Agni was given a peripheral role as a bystander. The Raudra Muhurta or the moment of Rudra, as an astrological phenomenon, is also the moment of violence and terror, the moment of the howling wolves with flaming faces, and the moment of despair and wrath of the gods as they were being defeated by the Asuras. The quality of the moment is aligned with the qualities of the newborn god. On the sixth day of Skanda's life, he defeats the Asuras and becomes the commander of the army of gods, husband of Devasena, and son of Rudra. Now Rudra is equated with Agni. The child was born after Rudra permeated Agni. Thereafter Uma is introduced. Now the parentage
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is more complex: Agni, Rudra, Uma, and Svaha are all involved. Then a whole section is introduced through Markandeya to glorify Rudra as Mahesvara and Sankara, quire irrelevantly, and Parvati is also introduced.
Assuming that Krishna Dvaiparayana Vyasa was a historical figure, and he composed the original version of the Aranyaka Parvan either by imagining the whole story or by collating a vast number of stories that floated in the folklore, one may assert that his successors, who carried his work in their memory, manipulated his account to accommodate gods and events that were unknown to him or did not even exist during his time, but extant in their own cultures and times. Markandeya becomes a convenient conduit to introduce these new deities. Notice how various demonologies were incorporated with the story of the god's anointing of Skanda as the commander of the army of gods. Various demon cults, beliefs about the perils of infancy, puberty, transition to adulthood and parenthood - all liminal stages of life, were brought under Skanda's influence and control although these have very little to do with why he was born.
The next stage of this transformation is found in the Ramayana where Rudra is unhesitatingly presented as Skanda's father. This Rudra is an ascetic. He is married to Uma, the younger sister of Ganga. At the request of the gods, he decides not to produce a son. But Rudra begets Skanda on his own. Uma has nothing to do with Skanda's birth. Rudra merely sheds his seed, this time called tejas. Agni, now reduced to a mere transporter, with Vayu picks up Rudra's seed and gives to Ganga. Kirttikas find him in the forest of reeds and take care of him. The rishis are eliminated.
Some structures of the Aranyaka Parvan story remain intact. Skanda is born motherless, six in one, to be nursed by the Kirttikas and to defeat the Asuras. The rest is recast to accommodate Rudra, the erotic ascetic, and various other deities.
The third stage appears in a later chapter, the Salya Parvan, of the Mahabharata. Now Rudra becomes Maheshvara. The roles
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of Ganga and Kirttikas are retained. But Indra is peripheralized. Instead of Indra, Brahma becomes the paramount celestial. Parvati, a new goddess, is introduced as Rudra's consort, to compete with Ramayana's Uma. Perhaps the introduction of Parvati in the Aranyaka Parvan was done as the Salya Parvan was constructed. Visvamitra of the Aranyaka Parvan is displaced by Brhaspati. Brahma, Himawat, Indra and Brhaspati anoint Skanda. Rudra, Parvati, Ganga and Agni claim Skanda's parenthood. Skanda produced four forms: Skanda, Sakha, Visakha, and all new Naigameya. Skanda aligns himself with Rudra, Agni is just a shadow whose place is to adopt insignificant and equally shadowy Naigameya. The new Asura leader is Taraka. Now Mahisha of the Aranyaka Parvan is merely his aid.
Still later, in the thirteenth book called the Anusasana Parvan, the story undergoes further transformations. The basic plot of the war remains. Siva is brought in as the father of Skanda and Parvati as his mother. The Rudra motif is forgotten and instead the Siva motif is introduced indicating the waning of Rudra and assimilation and elevation of Siva. The hitherto unknown Ganesha is introduced as Skanda's elder brother. This book also indicates the waning of the Vedic era and the dawn of the puranic period. These themes culminate in the Siva Purana, composed probably between 7501550 CE, where Siva is the great god.
Later in the Mahabharata’s Anusasana Parvan the Ramayana story is reiterated acknowledging its authority. The Siva motif becomes stable and produces the foundation for the Skanda cult belief system from that period onwards. The later puranas such as the Siva Purana, Skanda Purana, Matsya Purana and the Vayu Purana restate the Siva motif with only minor modifications.
Through all these transformations, the core of the ancient story found in the Aranyaka Parvan remains intact. There is a war between the 'good' and the 'bad, and the 'bad' is winning. The Sura (gods) need a hero to conquer the malignant Asura. The hero is engendered with only sukra (semen). He is never born through
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a vagina. He is always motherless but nursed by adopted mothers. He becomes the commander of the heavenly forces and defeats the Asuras. The world returns to normalcy. It takes six heavenly days for all this to happen. Thereafter the gods celebrate. Skanda's role ends, and he departs to Mount Sveta to live a celebate life. No more stories about him.
Now let me turn to the synchronic spatial axis. As discussed earlier, the stories could have originated anywhere in the subcontinent and could involve themes from others stories about other beings as well. During the ancient period before the stories were committed to writing, and even after that, the stories were conserved mnemonically by those authorized to do so. They were the members of the dvi-ja or twice-born segments of the Vedic varna hierarchy - the Brahmans, Kshatriyas, and the Vaishyas, who alone had the right to learn Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas. This community originally occupied the northwestern regions of the sub-continent and gradually migrated everywhere in the subcontinent. During these migrations as well as in other forms of travel pilgrims, sanyasis or homeless wanderers, traveling priests, traders, thieves, soldiers and refugees disseminated what they knew in the communities that they encountered some of which were of Vedic faith while others were of many other cultures, and assimilated various other stories about other gods from them. Beliefs and practices of the Skanda cult also moved around gathering new cultural materials and accommodating new deities to produce a lore that varied spatially.
Even among the sedentary people, the lore existed scattered among the numerous lineages (gotra) and Schools (gurukuls) that specialized in specific parts of the corpus. These gotras andgurukuls formed schools of thought under leaders known as acarya or preceptor who disseminated knowledge to select groups of disciples. Those who knew the Aranyaka Parvan, for example, adjusted the stories to welcome the local gods and stories about them. The social existence of knowledge was further complicated by the regional, linguistic, and ethnic distribution of the lineages and the gurukuls.
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The spatial component is evident in other details as well. In the Aranyaka Parvan itself, in the concluding section that tells the story of the anointing of Skanda, the author refers to kadamva and asoka trees on Mount Sveta. These species grow only in the warmer southern regions and not in the northern areas. This indicates the involvement of a southern hand either composing of that part or interpolating southern materials into an extant story.
Perhaps, it was in the hands of the Muruga cultists in the south that the Mahabharata stories about Skanda went through most remarkable elaborations as they joined the Siva structures from the deity cult as well as from the Saiva Siddhanta darsana of the Kashmiri Saivites. Kacciappa Sivacariyar either invented the combinations or organized and reduced to a text the many themes of the Skanda cult with those of the Murugan cult that were in the oral tradition. Either way, the result was his brilliant Kantha Puranam. This fourteenth or early fifteenth century literary feat was further embellished and elaborated later in the oral tradition.
The Muruga story, as it appears in the Sangam classics Paripatal, and Tirumurugarruppadai, has many components that are comparable to elements of the Skanda Story. Muruga is also a beautiful, effulgent, mighty boy-god. However, these early works do not relate how Muruga was born. He has always existed as the son of Korravai, the war goddess of the Koravai tribe. Eternally youthful like Skanda, Muruga wandered about in the legendary kurinchi hills (whose present day location is uncertain) in today's Tamil Nadu. He was the favorite deity of the Koravai tribe who inhabited the kurinchi. Like Skanda he rides a peacock and carries a spear. No other deity in the subcontinent compares with Skanda as Muruga does, but only up to a point. Skanda has a father but Muruga has none. Muruga has a mother but Skanda has none. Skanda is married to Devasena, or Deivayanai or Teivayanaiamman as Tamils call her, or unmarried celibate ascetic. Muruga is married to a Koravai maiden named Valli, and is an erotic god. But both are warriors who fight the 'evil in the world led by a powerful enemy. Skanda has the Asura and Muruga has Cur or Surapadman
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as this archenemy. Both are terrible and compassionate. Both are sages. Both are frozen in their tracks after they fulfill the cosmic need to eliminate these enemies. No new stories exist after that need is fulfilled. I ask, what did Skanda/Murugado after defeating the enemy? Skanda becomes an ascetic, so says the Skanda cult literature. I get no response from the Muruga cult. Perhaps he is just there, every where, doing good things and perpetually enjoying marital bliss with Valli.
In any case, Kacciappa put these two together to develop his Kantha Puranam which, to this day, spells out the Skanda/Muruga cult theology in South India. In his imagination, Skanda and Muruga are the same. Muruga, whose other names are Skanda, Cuppiramaniyam and Kartikeya, becomes the younger son of Siva, born to fight the Asura Surapadman, the great Cur. The sacred family Somaskanda of Siva Purana is elaborated with various stories about Muruga and his brother Ganesha, now called Pulleyar. The feats of child Muruga are re-posited in the life of Skanda and Skanda's feats are reworked in Muruga's life. The aristocratic commander of the army of gods in Mahabharata, Ramayana, and the puranas develops a rustic face. The hunter boy Muruga becomes a regal military leader. Additionally, the Koravai hunter's daughter Valli becomes Skanda's consort and a re-born daughter of Vishnu. Now Skanda iconography is fused with Muruga iconography. Muruga develops six faces. Skanda gets two wives, a motif unknown to the northern iconographers who depicted him as a solitary warrior on a peacock throne. In Tamil Nadu, the Skanda iconography includes non-military saintly structures such as Balasubramanium, Balamuruga, Balakumaran - the boy Muruga, as well as Palani Andavar - the ascetic Skanda, and Gnana Pandita - the sagacious Kartikeya in Muruga form.' Many Sanskrit names of Skanda are Tamilized. Hence Subramanium and Cuppiramanium (Subrahmanya), Guhan (Guha), Kumaran or Kumaramuruga (Kumara), Shanmugam and Arumugam (Shanmukha), and Kannasami or Kandasami (Skanda Swami) and so on. Similarly,
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Devadena becomes Deivayanai or Teivayanaiamman. The Skanda celt is relocated in Muruga cult centers and the entire drama of Skanda is re-enacted around Madurai. Concurrently, the northern sanskritic cult of Skanda fades away and becomes extinct - except, perhaps, in Kataragama in Sri Lanka - giving way to Muruga cult centers of various types and significance.
These developments in the Skanda/Kartikeya/Muruga belief system illustrate that during cultural transactions of the knowledge of the 'world as such significant portions of one culture are absorbed by the surrounding cultures. During cultural absorption, assimilation, and domestication the new elements are edited to fit into the existing bodies of cultural knowledge. In cultural tweaking, the domestic culture - the local cosmology, deities, and other motifs, as well as the alien elements become reconfigured and transformed to produce syncretic institutions in which elements of both cultures co-exist, often coinciding, and just as often as functional alternatives. The Skanda/Kartikeya/ Muruga complex also illustrates that cultural tweaking has caused superficial but not structural changes in the beliefs. Superficially, the substitution of paradigmatic motifs has occurred producing instabilities of the motifs that describe the god. These instabilities have to do with the differences between the two gods regarding their paternity, maternity, nomenclature, appearance, insignia and sensuality. However, despite these instabilities the basic timeless structures of the two gods remain the same: the motherless birth of a terrible commander of the forces of the good whose mission in the world is to vanquish evils.
Theoretically, tweaking of cultural elements for accommodation, adoption, adaptation and assimilation occurs through exclusion, inclusion, substitution, reduction and displacement. These activities occur in the narrative domain through the manipulation of the secondary narrative elements. Inclusion occurs when a new element is projected into an existing narrative without changing the narrative but enhancing its overall impact.
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Exclusion also exhibits a similar characteristic. Certain deities could be ignored leaving the syntax of the story undisturbed. Substitution occurs when one element is substituted with a paradigmatically Sustainable functional alternative. Events still occur in the same way although the dramatis personae have changed because the new actors play the same roles to bring about the same effects. This is to say that cultural tweaking, in the Skanda and Muruga narratives discussed above, has been syntactically appropriate and paradigmatically correct so that the overall structure of the narrative, it's aesthetic and psychological impact, and its meaning in Social contexts such rituals, festivals, and pilgrimages remain the Sale.
There is more to tweaking culture than the above exposition of the structure of semantic arrangements. Inclusion and substitution, whether taken synchronically, as in the spatial aspect, or diachronically, as in the temporal aspect of the sacred stories, are the results of multicultural involvements in the stories. Gananath Obeyesekere defines such involvements as dialogues or debates between different perspectives on a story as a whole or on the constituent elements of a story.' Such transformations of a story are products of larger debates between cultures that share the story. These debating cultures may exist concurrently or successively. In any case, the debates are about cultural politics about which interpretation is more powerful and significant and therefore correct. Temporally, they may indicate cultural change. Spatially and Synchronically, they indicate cultural politics through criticism, adjustment, accommodation, and or assimilation. Hugo Nutini and B. Bell, in their theory of syncretism developed out of Latin American Catholic materials, discuss three stages in the syncretic processes. At first,there is an encounter. Then there are debates. Third, a new theology develops thus completing the syncretism.' The foregoing indicates the debates occurred in ancient and medieval India regarding the many aspects of Skanda and Muruga. In Kataragama the debates continue and a common consistent theology is nowhere in sight. The high caste Tamils and low caste Tamils do
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not agree on the nature of Muruga. The Sinhalas debate whether Kataragama Deiyo is a foreigner or a native and whether he, any god for that matter, should be worshipped at all. The Sinhalas and Tamils debate as to who established the shrine first. More of this in Chapter Five. -
Tweaking of culture is necessary for multiethnic multicultural Societies as a form of political discourse to criticize, revise, accommodate, adopt, adapt to, domesticate and assimilate elements from other cultures that spatially co-exist or temporally succeed. It may be ideologically aggressive and even combative, but in storytelling, it is a form of non-violent political confrontation that has the potential to contain violent conflicts.
End Notes
The god had many names. In addition to his Sanskrit names, he is called Muruga, Muruha, Muruka and Murugan in the Tamil tradition. Each devotee chooses the name he/she prefers. I prefer to call him Muruga and shall do so throughout this work.
* Okanda. Velupillai and many other Tamils prefer to call the village Ohanda.
Eugenia jambolana
This translation is based on the text edited by Protap Chandra Roy. Icontinually consulted translations by Roy (1884) and Van Buitenan (1975:1981). In many instances, I borrowed their phraseology.
* Van Buitenan (1975:1981; 647). ’ Deva- of the gods; sena- army.
Daitya Daitya - descendant of Diti, an Asura. Thus, Prajapati produced an army of gods as well as an army of Asuras, that is, both the good and the bad. This theme of the creator producing the good and the bad in his creation, and the constant conflicts between these two with bad apparently winning and the good eventually subduing the bad, involves a structuring of moral notions that is shared by many other "great” and "small” religions. The battle between the Buddha and the Maradivyaputta in Buddhism, Mazda and Ahura in Zoroastrianism, God and the Devil in the Bible and Koran are variations of the same theme. Interestingly, the representative of the “bad” is himself a divine being gone bad. The parallelism between Zoroastrian Ahura and Biddhist/Jaina/Hindu Asura is obvious.
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21
This is a new moon causing a total eclipse of the sun at dawn, a moment when all sources of light are extinguished, a moment astrologically conceived as terrible, ominous and awesome.
At the time this story was composed the lunar cycle was thought to consist of twenty-four phases. Later, in Buddhist astrology, the number of phases increased to thirty. It is interesting that Soma in this context is the Raudra Soma. Ray (1884:681) translated this as "terrible Soma" while Van Buitenan translates it as "the law-coursing moon” implying that it is a stage of the moon's course according to the law of the lunar orbit round the earth. Ordinarily, Soma (the moon) is conceived as benevolent, mild, cooling and charming. But this moon is "raudra" for it is the new moon that also causes a total eclipse of the sun. Ray considers this conjunction as "fearful” whereas Van Buitenan reads it as the conjunction at the Rudra hour.
Tapasya (tap-heat) means burning of the soul's impurities through mental discipline and mortification of the body. It is the fundamental soteriological activity in all South Asian religious systems. Even Buddhism, while rejecting atthakilamatanuyoga or mortification of the body, recommends a moderate degree of denial of social, mental and physical desires and comforts.
Adbhuta means the mysterious, whose being is beyond comprehension, prelogical and numinous. Adbhutagni is the fire of mysteries and the unknown.
Van Buitenan (649) translates this as "while they were bathing at leisure." I use Roy's rendition. Either way it is obvious that the storyteller wants to convey the idea that the ladies were in somewhat compromising positions to arouse erotic feelings in Agni. The rest of my presentation is a blend of Van Buitenan and Roy.
Daksha means cleverness, ingenuity, dexterity and capability.
Siva in this context must be distinguished from Siva, one of the main gods in the puranic trinity. But I shall not use diacritical marks hereafter to indicate correct pronunciation. Siva must be read as Uivá.
Indra.
Indra. Agni the father is humbled before his son.
Tridasa gods have only three stages of life - infancy, childhood and youth. They are exempt from old age (Roy Ibid. n* at 689). Skandais also a classificatory tridasa god as he has no old age. See below.
Skanda. Pavaka is another name for Agni. Indra. He carries the vajra or the diamond.
Agni.
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35
37
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Van Buitenan gives Kaki, Halima, Rudra, Brhali, Arya, Palala and Mitra (2:653). I have given Roy (ibid. 690) and Roy (II: 586).
Newborn (Van Buitenen ibid. 654). Eight includes Skanda and the seven Sisus.
The face of the father Agni, who became a trader with a goat's face, becomes one of the faces of the son.
This is a mystery: location of the middle one among the six faces. It can be both the third and the fourth either way one counts
Indra.
Siva.
The jeweler and the artisan of the heavens.
Agni. Van Buitenan omits this line and Roy is extremely vague. Roy edition is just as confusing. I take it that the god sat in front of the red cock, his emblem. Son of Pavaka, Agni.
Indra.
Indra.
Svayambhu: Brahma.
Constellation: asterism. In astrology, Abhijit and Rohini (Sinhala: Rehena) are nakshatras or asterisms. In the geocentric arrangement of the astrological solar system all the planets, the sun included, pass through the asterism that falls on their circular path round the earth. Abhijit is now an extinct asterism.
Dhanishta is an asterism. Sinhala: Denata.
Vedic astrology counts twenty-seven asterisms on the planetary trajectory. Thus, in order to obtain twenty-seven Abhijit must be included. Until Abhijit fell the system was complete. Now there is a vacancy. Indra's problem is finding a substitute for Abhijit.
Fire: Agni. Vinata is one of the Kirttikas. According to the Vedic tradition, when a twice born (dvija:Brahman, Kshatriya and Vaisya) dies a son must perform funerary rituals of which the offering of pinda-handful of food made into a ball- is an important part. Once these rituals are properly performed the dead are supposed to go to divyaloka or moksha. See Apasthamba Grhyasutra (Olivelle: 1999) and Manu (Donniger and Smith: 1991).
These were the divinities of the early pantheon: Brahmi, Mahesvari etc. (Roy:1884:696). This signifies that the Skanda cult challenged the Vedic pantheon although Skanda was considered a Brahman. Earlier, he defeated
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43
45
5
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Indra and Indra continues to be the king of gods because Skanda allows him to be so. Agni, Skanda's father, a great god in the Vedic pantheon, is now an adoring goat-headed humble father. Van Buitenan translates this term as “Skanda’s forgetfulness” (ibid. 658). Apasmara is the term used in Ayurveda to refer to seizures. Apasmara or seizure is distinguished from unmada or insanity. The latter is caused by physical reasons as well as the various supernatural beings whereas the former is the result of physical factors alone. However, the Skandapasmarais not mentioned in the Caraka Sanhita. This affliction appears to be an exception to the rule in Charaka Sanhita, chikitsitasthana, 9. Roy’s translation of Graha as evilspirit is puzzling. Van Buitenan’s translation as Grasper is meaningful with emphasis on root grah. Van Buitenan translates this as Bird Grasper. I prefer to call her the one who seizes in the form of a bird.
Asuras, Sakuni means bird (Van Buitenan:638). It can also be the name of a being in the form of a bird (Roy:697).
Sutikagrhe.
Janitrau. Van Buitenan translates as progenitrix (658).
Lohistasyodadheh.
An herbal balm for the eyes. Anjana. Sinhala: andun. Pastes used for worship. In Kataragama sandalwood paste and a red paste known as vibhuti are given prominence. Here Roy and Van Buitenan are quite inadequate.
Balikarma pahara. Usually, flowers, popped rice and scented water are thrown at the image. It is unclear who is to be propitiated. Is this a propitiation of each of these beings individually with each ritual culminating in the worship of Skanda or is everything a propitiation of Skanda requesting him to direct them as the devotee wishes, virtually performing the role of Agni? God-Grasped, Van Buitenan (659). Roy translated Devagraha as a celestial spirit (698). I adopt Van Buitenan's interpretation. Pitru-Fathers, Van Buitenan (Op.cit). I use Roy's translation. Siddha - omniscient and liberated ones who are living or in the world of the
Siddhas.
Dosha - humors. There are three doshas: vata, pitta and sleshmaa. Health is sustained when these are in a state of equilibrium. When vata and pitta are
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enraged or in a state of prakopa mental activity is distorted. Roy translates dosha in the text as vices. Here the semantic variant indicates impropriety in conduct. I follow Van Buitenan (Op.cit). See Obeyesekere (1984) for contemporary definitions in Sri Lanka.
Vaikalvya.
Bhaya.
Ghoradarsana. The implication here is that the spells of the grahas and other supernatural beings can cause disequilibrium among the three doshas bringing about these symptoms.
Jvara This section appears to be a laterinterpolation accommodating demonological beliefs. The metaphor of Mothers is used as the portal through which regional or new cultural materials could be introduced into the overall theology of Skanda, thereby strengthening and justifying these materials under the grander notions about Skanda.
Agni: sacrificial fire.
Agni.
Semen.
Vagina.
Lohitodi Roy (text) says capyanyadanyaccaivapatanbhuvi. Roy (1884) ignores the term and Van Buitenan translates this as "fell upon earth, while some stuck to the trees. I take it that one portion produced Minjika and Minjaka and the remaining four portions fell as described. Roy (ibid.700). Van Buitenan translates as, “Your ghastly flesh-eating
companions in their various guises are known to the wise as the Ganas” (Van Buitenan: Op cit. 660).
This, too, appears to be a later introduction. Airawata is Indra's (Sakra's) elephant. Asoka and kadamva (kadamba) trees in this contexts suggests that these sections were inserted by a southern hand as asoka does not grow in the northern regions. Compare this with Buddhist literature, particularly Asvaghosha's Buddhacarita, and the iconography of the Buddha's birth in Amaravati in Andhra Pradesh. As we shall find later, kadamba tree and its flowers are associated with the cult of Muruga, in Tamil Nadu. For divyau both Roy (ibid.) and Van Buitenan (ibid.) use 'celestial' but the connotations of space in 'celestial’ are distracting because divyau means 'of
the Gods.’
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乃
91
97
"...rumbling of clouds serving the purpose of musical instruments sounded like the murmer of the agitated sea,' (Roy: ibid.). "...and the drum sounds of the clouds were thundered like the wind-swept ocean,” (Van Buitenan: ibid.).
"And there arose a great sound of joy from the merriment of all creatures, (Roy:ibid); "...and the grand jubilation was heard there of joyous creatures,' (Van Buitenan: ibid.).
Agni.
Mahesvara: Rudra: Mahadeva: Siva.
Time.
Lord of Animals: Siva.
Kuvera.
Jrumbhaka (Monier-Williams: 1899:2001:425). Nagas, after Vasuki, the serpent king (Monier-Williams:Op.Cit. 948). Van Buitenen translates as Maruts. But this could be a large class of howling, roaring deities (Monier-Williams:Op.Cit.883). Here, Rudra means Siva or Mahesvara. Van Butenan (ibid.661): pattisa in the text.
A variety of deities connected with fire, Angiras, Atharvans, Ribhus, Maruts etc. and producing chariots. Their presence in Indian supernaturalism goes back to the Rg Veda (Monier-Williams:Op.Cit.765).
Descendants of rishi Angiras, the author of the Rg Veda, or of his son Agni (Monier-Williams:Op.Cit.8).
The god of rain clouds.
Rudra.
The god of Winds.
Chamara - emblems of royalty.
Cemeteries where corpses are burnt (Roy:Op.Cit:703).
"Hundred-killers” (Roy:ibid,704).
A kind of missile. A club (Van Buitenanzibid:662) ora hammermade of iron (Roy:ibid).
Asuras.
The sacker of cities: Indra.
Tridasa - three times ten - thirty. This can be rounded thirty three: 12 Adityas, 8 Vasus, 11 Rudras and 2 Asvins (Monier-Williams:Op.Cit: 458). Roy says 'thirty three crores' (Roy:Op. Cit:704-705) - thirty three billion. Roy's translation is probably based on the general South Asian accounts of the
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heavenly population. In Buddhist and Jain literature and popular accounts, there are thirty three billion gods in the various heavens.
The name of the drum could be mallaturya (Monier-Williams:Op.Cit:802). Van Buitenan translates as kettledrums (Van Buitenan:Op.Cit:663).
Skanda's spear is called CEakti. This is probably a later addition.
Tridasa.
The Sacker of Cities: Indra.
god with three eyes: Siva.
Vahni: Agni: fire God. Markandeya concludes his discourse with "He who reads aloud with due
attention the birth of Skanda attains to prosperity here, and, after death, to the world of Skanda.”
For these summaries I have borrowed much from Cellaiya (2003), Clothey (1983), Courtright (1985), Doniger and Smith (1991), Navaratnam (1973) and O'Flaherty (1975).
Some scholars opine that Ramayana was older than all the books of the Mahabharata because the latter refers to characters such as Hanuman in the former whereas the former does not refer to the latter. But it does. The story of Skanda/Kartikeya as presented here is a part of the Balakanda. The Skanda story narrated here is similar to the same story in the later puranic materians as in the Siva Purana. The Ramayana is a Vaishnava classic. The Mahabharata is a more complex epic that begins with Vedic gods and over time incorporates various other pantheons, mainly that of Siva, and demotes and displaces the Vedic gods with other gods. Its connection with the Ramayana tradition is the inclusion of the Bhagavatgita where Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, advises Arjuna on the battlefield and the encounter of Yudhishthira, Bhima, Nakula, Sahadeva and their wife Draupadi with Hanuman in the Aranyaka Parvan. In any event, it is evident from the themes in both works that they have grown in extent and scope over time, absorbing various local themes as they spread to various places and as local authorities included their themes. This gives both epics a complexity that edges on incoherence on the details.
These are generally considered as uninhabitable by humans owing to their terrible and unholy character. To this day, in Sri Lanka and India, such places are considered inauspicious and dangerous, and infested with unholy spirits.
The black antelope, called Ena or Krshnasara, symbolizes the Vedic society. The animal is zoologically known as Antelope cervicapra. It has black hair on its back and sides and white hair under the belly. The Baudhayana dharmasutra (1.2.12) states, "...as far as the black antelope roams, so far does vedic splendour extend.” See Olivelle (1999:134; 349). The gift from Brahman indicates the
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116
118
119
121
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extent of the society that propitiated Skanda at the time the Salya Parvan was composed. This, in turn, signifies the extent of multicultural interpretations that the Mahabharata, the early Vedic corpus and the theology of Skanda had undergone.
Interestingly, Clothey (1983) omits this account. Perhaps he thought the purana is too late a product that merely repeats the essential elements found elsewhere. Nonetheless, I find this a significant account for my purposes because I find the elevation of Siva and dissolution of everything in the ideal of Siva culminating in it. Here, Skanda merges with Siva in a grand centripetal movement of ideas signaling the virtual end of the Skanda cult in the Sanskrit tradition. With the Siva Purana the Puranic career of Skanda comes to a close. More of this later.
The dry month between January and February. The Kirttikas.
The Himalayas.
The Ganges. A psychoanalyst might find this interesting for Ganga is Himavat's daughter. The cold month between December and January, nine to ten months from the time Siva shed his tejas in Magha (see n.111). The Skandashashti or the celebration of six days of Skanda occurs on the New Moon in Mrgasirasa which is also the month of non-Brahman women. See Suzanne Hanchett (1982: 237-238) in Welbon & Yocum (1982). This motif of Siva, Parvati, Ganeoea and Skanda in union - the holy family of Saivite religion - is known as Somaskanda.
Gnosis.
Intelligence and intellect.
The craftsman among the gods.
Compassion.
Gains, profits, accumulations. Here Narada represents the classical position of the pravriya tradition where the ascetics criticize the household, show its defects and advise the laymento renounce the world.
See n.109 supra.
Notice the desexualization of Skanda according to his father's wishes. It should be recalled that Skanda was motherless, arising from his father's semen
only. Parvati was his adopted mother. Also notice that the Palani Andavar
incarnation of Muruga alludes to this event.
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131
132
133
135
137
November-December that begins with waning moon and culminating in the new moon, with Dipavali celebrations (Henchett:Op.cit.).
Constellation Kirttika (the pleades).
The luminous linga. The name of the linga, Mallikarjuna, probably refers to an ascetic named Mallikarjuna who was devoted to Skanda.
Interestingly, here the son rejects the father who comes in the form of a linga. See n. 124 supra.
Clothey (Op.cit.) asserts that the work was composed by two hands.
Zvelebil states that no credible material - archaeological and architecturalevidence exists to provide conclusive evidence of the nature of early Muruga worship in Tamil Nadu. But he traces literary references to early Tamil literature that goes back to first to fourth centuries of the CE. The information in these sources, as Zvelebil suggests, probably came from the oral traditions constructed BCE. Zvelebil finds at least 67-69 direct references to Muruga in Ainkurumuru, Akananuru, Kalittokai, Kurincippattu, Kuruntokiai, Malaipatukatam, Narrinai, Patirruppattu, Pattinappalai, Perumpanarruppatai, Porunararruppatai, and Purananuru. Of these the poet Kapilar's Kuruntokai is dedicated to Muruga (Zvelebil:1991:73-74). The following account is constructed out of materials from Ramanujan (1967: 1985) Zvelebil (1973;1974; 1975; 1981;1991), Hart (1975; 1999) and Clothey (1978).
Zvelebil (1991:37).
See Zvelebil: ibid. 95, n9 for references to the term in the Dravidian English Dictionary that cites the term in various tribal languages as they exist even today. All my references in this context are from Zvelebil.
The ancient Tamil corpus, also known as the early Sangam period of Tamil literature, the landscape was divided into several types: kurinci (hills), mullai (forests), marutam (cultivated fields), neytal (seashore) and palai (wasteland). Muruga inhabited the kurinci.
It is necessary to distinguish between Kuravai the tribe and Korravai the goddess of war. However, it is likely that the latter is a personification of the former, perhaps parallel to the personification of the army of gods as Devasena in Mahabharata Âranyaka Parvan.
Zvelebil (1981:8). Zvelebil contends, "This concept is very probably connected with the very ancient, very primitive idea of women conceiving and bearing children without the participation of males (ibid.)". This indicates the antiquity of the Muruga cult. The Mahabharata aranyaka parvan account, by comparison, appears to be later than the early Murugan cult.
These Sangams are an interesting issue in the history of Tamil literature. The popular notions hold that the first Sangam was held in the hoary antiquity
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predating the Common Era by several millennia. But more recent dating places them around the first to fourth centuries of the CE.
Cuppiramanium derives from the Sanskrit Subrahmanya whose earliest known
reference is in the Baudhayana Dharmasastra. Later, Cuppiramanium became Subramanium.
The sixth century author of the Mahavansa, the Sinhala chronicle, speaks of a god named Kumara on a peacock throne. Geiger identifies this god as Skanda. More of this later in Chapter Five.
These works are generally considered to have been composed around fifth to eighth centuries of the CE.
Zvelebil (1981:8). This indicates that the beliefs in and practices dedicated to the ancient Mayon were also being transformed by the association of Mayon with Visnu that produces the Tamil form of the god as Tirumal.
Zvelebil (1974:48). Zvelebil contends thatbhakti religiosity originated in Madurai (ibid.:49).
I speculate that the Sinhala word veri that means a state of being intoxicated derives from the Tamil word.
I have taken these descriptions from Ratna Navaratnam (1973).
kartigai — of November; malar- flower: Sinhala:niyangala mal: Botanical - Gloriosa Superba. Kartigai malar is a current Sri Lankan Tamil name. Kantal appears to be the term used by Nakkirar. Ramanujan, translating early Sangam poems, gives kantal as Gloriosa superba (1985:317). Hart gives translations from the Kuruntokai where the term used is kantal (1975:22, 167-168). Interestingly, the "Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam” of Sri Lanka adopted this flower, as kartigai malar, as their emblematic flower, to celebrate their fallen war heroes.
Navaratnam calls Vallia Veddha maid. We shall return to this point later on.
This is an adoption of the Sanskritic Garuda, referred to earlier in the sections from the Mahabharata.
SA,RA,VA,NA,BHA,VA. Anthocephalus cadamba (Ramanujan:1967).
The veriadal dance had two forms: veriyattu andkuravaikuttu. The veriyattu is performed to ward off calamities as evil omens inform the devotees. The kuravaikuttu is performed for peace and prosperity (Navaratnam 1973:65 citing Kurinccipattu 208-210).
Girimallika or malaimallika (Holarrhena antidysenterica or Millingtonia hortensis) (Hart:ibid.231). Jasmine was an image of fertility (Hart:ibid.164)
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and, as can be inferred from Holarrhena antidysenterica, was probably used as a medicinal herb to stop dysentery.
Navaratnam (op. Cit.70) and Zvelebil (1975:104). I obtained the materials for this account from Kamil Zvelebil (1973, 1974,
1975, 1981 and 1991). Rasaiah (1981) provides an entertaining rendition of much of the details extracted from the Sri Lankan Tamil oral tradition.
Nilakanta Sastri (1966) brings the lower limit down to 1625. See Zvelabil (1974: 185-190 and 1991) for details.
Clearly, there is a confusion as Arumukakkatavul is one god who later he becomes six children who then become one in Parvati's embrace. But such is theogony The change in the name from Devasenato Teyvayanai is interesting. Zvelebil translated the Tamil name as "the one who is friendly with the divine elephant. It could literally mean "the vehicle of the god.”
Sanskrit: Kraunca, as in the Mahabharata. See Chapter 1. Sanskrit: Devagiri. Sanskrit: Sinhamukhasura.
Notice the difference between the Northern Sanskrit corpus and this one. In the former he is anointed as the Devasenapati - commander in chief of the army of gods. Here, he is crowned as the king of gods. This has to be so with the influence of Saiva Siddhanta and merging of Siva with Muruga.
Currently, the northern Indian Hindus regard him as an inferior god. Bengali Hindus consider Skanda as the god of thieves. How the once adorable yet terrible warrior was reduced to a god of thieves is an interesting issue in early Indian religion. Does this indicate a weakening of Brahmanical authority? Who are these Hindus? What is their social status vis-a-vis the varna hierarchy? These are issues that need further inquiry.
This line of thinking incorporates the diffussionist theories of the kulturkrieslehrer. S. Pathmanadan. Personal Communication. For an interesting discussion of these matters see Rao (1993) and Talageri (1993).
Clothey asserts that Skanda was first constructed in the Shaka kingdoms in the north-west (Personal communication). By that reckoning, the god is at least two thousand years old. Rudra of the Rg Veda is a god of pestilence, disease, and storms, and the father of the Maruts, the storm gods. But the Rudra of the Mahabharata is a great ascetic god, ready to transform into Siva.
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I am not addressing the Kumarasambhava of Kalidasa as it is 1. work but a literary masterwork that employs materials from the Mahabharata and the Siva Purana.
Agrawala (1966) and O'Flaherty (1975).
The latter two are probably the images of Tamil Saiva Siddhanta saints deified and identified with Skanda/Muruga.
Obeyesekere (1990:126-137). Nutini and Bell (1981).
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Chapter Two
Batticaloa to Kalavanchikudi
July 23, 2003
I got up quite early in the morning and walked out of the room. I had been awake all night. Swarms of starving mosquitoes had found me delectable and Velupillai snored like a timber mill working full throttle. It was nice to breathe the early morning breeze on the beach, watching a blood-red sun surface through the gray haze over the surf that glowed in the golden blush of the dawn, my first ever on the eastern flank of the island. The bellies of the distant clouds over the sun and the foam on the surf were becoming blood-red. I waited until the sun was fully up and the gray and red drama transformed into a blue and white composition.
Back in the room Velupillai was up, stretching and loudly yawning. Through the yawn he wished me a good morning, stretched some more and scratched the eczema on his ankles muttering "Muruhal Muruhal Muruha!” Then Sivam, the young man who visited us last evening, showed up with a big basket. It was our breakfast. Velupillai sprang up with newfound energy and talked to Sivam. Soon we were cleaning up and sitting down to a sumptuous breakfast of idly, sambar and pol Sambol. Sivam asked me whether he could join us on our way to Kataragama. Who could refuse such a polite and hospitable individual. By 8.30, we were chugging on our way, packed like coconuts into a dilapidated bus to Akkaraipattu town. We were going to meet one of the helpers Velupillai had arranged for me.
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In the town, the hartal was stillon, but the LTTE had allowed people to go about and attend to their business. Only the government buildings remained closed. Sivam left us to bring the helper. As I looked around I noticed two middle-aged men in Saffron colored kurta and vetti walking about carrying tightlypacked bags. They looked like travellers from elsewhere. Velupillai said these men were performing nadandu poral, a pada yatra that we too will perform from tomorrow. They looked tired. Their clothes were soiled from continuous wear. Velupillai speculated that they might be from the northern parts of the island.
Sivam returned with the helper. His name was Rajaratnam, an agricultural laborer and part-time carpenter from the area. Rajaratnam was fifty three years old, looked very healthy, behaved extremely politely and spoke flawless Sinhala. I gathered that he was born and raised in the tea estates around Badulla. He had moved to Batticaloa with his family following the exodus of Tamils from the hill country during and after the 1983 ethnic riots. Rajaratnam was happy to join me and said it was his great good fortune to receive this opportunity to walk to Kataragama. He promptly took charge of my backpack containing my clothes and supplies. Back in the bus stand, Sivam left us. He would join us again later, when we return to Akkaraipattu on our way to Kataragama. Because of the hartal, there were no direct busses to Batticaloa and we had to get a connection from Kalmunai. Otherwise, it was an unremarkable trip. The anti-government hartal appeared to be largely peaceful and mostly ineffective.
We got off the bus at the roundabout by the bridge, the southern entry point into this ancient port town of Batticaloa. Velupillai took us along narrow streets through a very coloniallooking neighborhood that reminded me of parts of Galle and Negombo where there is an abundance of houses with Portuguese facades. We walked by a number of large missionary schools built at least in the nineteenth century. Finally, we arrived at the Pulleyar temple.
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The temple is situated in the middle of a large compound, about two acres in extent, surrounded by a traditional parapet decorated with the vermilion vertical lines that distinguish Tamil Hindu sacred compounds from the domestic ones. We walked in through the large gate and stood before the grand imposing gopuram with typical Tamil style depictions of the heavenly population presided over by Pulleyar in various dramatizations of scenes from the stories about him. Its verandah with a curved awning is reminiscent of the awning of the Kandasami temple in Nallur in the Jaffna peninsula built by a Sinhala king.
The kurukkal of the kovil was outside drying some cloths. Velupillai went to him and had a conversation. I saw heads shaking and Swinging in approval and agreement. As I suspected, Velupillai had obtained permission to stay the night in the pilgrims' rest.
To the left of the temple, outside the parapet, there is a long single story building. The pilgrims reach this building through a gate. The building is in an overgrown compound with a bathing well. A reedy man appeared from nowhere and, after a rather polite self-introduction, opened one of the rooms. It was empty except for a few threadbare reed mats, rolled up and piled together by the wall. A single electric bulb hung from the roof. The man found an old broom and, with the few strands of coconut fiber that still clung to the stick, swept away the cobwebs, dust and rubbish on the cement floor. In about ten minutes, the formalities were over and the man left. We unrolled the tattered mats and lay around for a while in the muggy room. Rajaratnam commented on the construction of the roof. Nobody paid any attention. It was too hot and humid and we were too tired to attend to academic discourses on carpentry.
Around four in the afternoon we gathered around the bathing well. It was not really a well but a tank. Water had to be brought from outside to fill it. While Velupillai was bathing, I took the time to explore the pilgrim's rest. At the far end of the building, near the tank, there was a small room furnished with a camp bed
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and a rack loaded with books and pamphlets. Under the bed was a rusty steel trunk. Clearly, the occupant lived a spartan life. I later learned that a retired government servant lived there, and worked as a temple helper, eking out a living from the small contributions received from the temple in return for odd jobs. This pattern is common in Hindu temples in Sri Lanka. I knew that Kataragama was a favorite place among the Tamil Hindu retirees until the 1958 ethnic riots forced them to leave and find alternative accommodation in temples in the northern and eastern predominantly Hindu areas. These temple helpers are not always from poor families. This is a quasi Sanyasi existence comparable to that of the Buddhist and Jain upasakas.
After bathing, we returned to our room and put on fresh clothes to attend the evening puja. I had brought the white sarong and the bright yellow shawl with thin green and red borders - the kind of shawl that Tamil Hindu men wrap around their waists when attending pujas. From the moment I bought it, I was keen on wearing it and attending a puja. This was my first time. I first wore it round my shoulders as a shawl and later wrapped it round my waist as we washed our feet at the tap outside the temple.
Pulleyar
As the pilgrim enters the grand curved awning with decorated ceiling and pillars and a large colorful statue of Pulleyar, he sees the main shrine at the center of the temple. From the main hall a corridor, about fifteen feet wide and twenty-five feet long, connected the shrine with the outer hall. Beyond that is a doorway, behind a curtain with a painted icon of the god. The principal icon is in the chamber behind the curtain. It was cool inside the temple, a relief from the heat outside.
Pulleyar is the Tamil name for Ganesha, also known as Vinayaka. Visually, his most distinctive feature is his head. It is that of an elephant. One tusk is broken. There is a complicated story about how he got an elephant's head and a broken tusk.
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Parvati desired a son and pleaded to Siva to give her a son. At first Siva refused, for he preferred the life of the homeless ascetic. When Parvati insisted, Siva tore off a piece from Parvati’s dress and gave it to her calling it a son. Parvati held it against her breast. The piece of cloth slowly assumed the shape of a beautiful boy. Milk flowed from her breast and the boy drank it. Parvati handed the boy to Siva. Just then, the boy's head turned towards the north and caught the glance of Sani, the malevolent planet of death. Siva said the child would die because of Sani’s glance. Just as he said so, the boy's head severed from his torso. Parvati wept. Siva tried to put the head back on the torso but it did not fit. He asked Nandin, the bull who was his companion and vehicle, to find a head for the boy. Nandin roamed the three worlds and found Indra's elephant Airavata sleeping with his head towards the north. As Nandin was beginning to behead Airavata, Indra came and demanded that Nandin leave Airavata alone. A terrible battle ensued and Indra was defeated. Nandin beheaded Airavata and took the head to Siva who fitted it on the boy's torso. That was how Pulleyar got an elephant's head.
As to how Ganesha lost his left tusk, depends on whom one talks to. Two scenarios describe the loss of the tooth. A Sanskrit story in the Brahmananda and Brahmavaivarta Puranas has it that Parasurama, a disciple of Siva, cut down Airavata's tusk with an axe that he received from Siva when he fought Indra. The Brhaddharma Purana says that during the battle between Nandin and Indra, Nandin defeated Indra but, in the final scenario, Airavata arose to attack him. Nandin threw his weapon at Airavata and Airavata took the blow with his left tusk, which broke as it was struck. Then Nandin took the head and Siva fitted it on Ganesha's torso. In an account in Kandyan period Sinhala poem called the Kanda Malaya - Garland for Kanda, the fight is between Skanda and Ganesha. Uma has a mango. The brothers desire it. Uma says whoever goes round the universe gets it. Skanda promptly begins to circle the universe on his peacock. Ganesha merely walks around
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his parents and claims to have circled the universe. Skanda returns later. Siva and Uma, pleased with Ganesha's brilliance, give him the mango. Skanda protests and fights with Ganesha. During the struggle, Ganesha's tusk is broken. Siva becomes angry with Skanda and banishes him to the world of the mortals. Skanda comes to Kataragama and settles down.
Hindus firmly believe that Vinayaka is the olderson of Siva and Parvati, Kandasamy/Muruga being the younger son. Vinayaka is also the wiser one. Not that Kandasamy is unwise; in fact, he is the epitome of wisdom. However, Vinayaka is crafty and cunning. He has a large belly, like that of the Chinese laughing Buddhas, signifying his wisdom. The Kanda Malaya story is a signifier of Sinhala Buddhist beliefs regarding Ganesha's wisdom and the Hindu faith in Ganesha’s intellectual prowess.
Ganesha is usually dressed in Brahmanical attire, complete with a sacred thread across his chest from left to right, and bedecked in many strings of pearls, jewels, and gold ornaments such as bracelets, shoulder covers, necklaces, headbands and belts. He is extremely attractive (atisundera kayastu - very beautiful body, Sobhamanan'- good looking), a bit clownish and funny-looking (vikata'), which makes him all the more darling. Pulleyar is supposed to be a jovial god. He likes pranks and is fond of Sweets. He is always seen with a plate of kudukkattai, a Tamil sweet, often holding a few in one of his hands." Ganesha is an auspicious god who bestows wisdom (buddhi) and prosperity (Saubhagya). His very corpulence is a sign of his own wisdom and prosperity. Ganesha is the god of all beginnings and inaugurations, and the royal Swan of the mind (manase raja hansam"). Therefore before looking any further, I bowed to Vinayaka, citing Vyasa:
Ganapati mabhivande kalpavrikshasya vrnde. I worship Lord Ganesha, the wish-fulfilling tree to the world The puja was a complex string of activities prepared by the temple. Cashiers at a counter in the front area collected money from each devotee and undertook to prepare the offerings
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according to the devotee's needs. Many devotees of Pulleyar have various needs to be addressed in ways the traditions prescribe. These traditions are astrological, medical, or just propitiatory. Additionally, the temple had its own puja, the nature of which was determined by the nature of the day, that is, the prevalent curves and phases of the moon and their particular relationship to Ganesha and so on. The puja at the kovil followed the traditional routines whereby the kurukkal receives the tray of offerings from the devotee, places it before the icon behind the curtain and returns it with some tinnoru- holy ash that Saivite Hindus rub on their foreheads.
Once the puja was over, we went to the Sivakovil at the rear, to the right of the central Ganeshakovil. Having worshipped Siva, we went to the left side to a Durga kovil. From there we proceeded to the Muruga kovil in front, to Ganesha's left, where the kurukkal was arranging to perform Teru, a ritual that proved to be significant to us throughout our pada yatra.
Teru
Teru is the ritual of carrying an image of a deity in procession. Here the image is that of Muruga. The image is placed on the seat (asana) on the altar inside the inner chamber (garbha) of the temple. The asana is a rectangular pedestal, about six inches tall and three to four feet wide. The image of the god is placed at its center. The top of the icon is an arch, formed by the fiery tongues of two dragons (makara) on waist-high pillars on both sides of the icon. These tongues meet above the head of the icon in the mouth of a central dragon.' The entire object is made of metal - generally brass, silver or gold. It is quite heavy and requires two men to move it. Significantly, the image is never exposed during a procession. It is always covered with a piece of gold brocade and garlands. The image may be carried by several individuals, or in a densely decorated massive cart, pulled by many men with thick ropes attached to the cart, or it may be carried on an elephant.
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Inside temples, men carry the image. Outside, any one of the above three forms can occur, depending on the size of the temple, the population of devotees and the amount of available funds. Inside, the procession goes from chamber to chamber. Outside, it may go round the whole town or village. :
The entrance to the inner chamber is covered with a curtain with a painted image of the god. Except for the kurukkal, no one goes beyond the curtain. The only exception occurs during teru when a devotee enters to help the kurukkal bring the heavy image out for the procession. Normally, the helper is a temple attendant or someone who has dedicated his life to the god and lives on the temple premises. The image is taken out on a palanquin. The palanquin has two long poles, each about ten or fifteen feet long and about three inches in diameter. The two poles are placed in parallel, about three feet from each other. In the center of these parallel poles is a flat platform connecting them. The image is placed on this platform.
The small crowd of devotees, about twenty-five in all, gathered on either side of the small Murugan kovil. The priests chanted slokas and performed arati - the clockwise movement of a lamp in front of the icon. This act, I suspect, represents circumambulation, here performed to honor Muruga, but elsewhere, as performed before Ganesha a few minutes ago, to honor any deity presiding over a temple or a puja. Then the head priest called a few men to his side. I was surprised to find Rajaratnam and I among them. He wanted us to carry the teru. I saw Velupillai looking enviously at Rajaratnam whom he had begun to see as a servant. The head priest, probably detecting the curiosity of the devotees about the choice of the teru bearers, declared that the choice was made on the basis of equal height. Rajaratnam, two other men unknown to us, and I happened to be of the same height. I was asked to stand at the right rear position, Rajaratnam stood before me, at right front position. The other two stood on the left side. Then, amidst cheers of harohara from the devotees, the priests opened the curtain, lifted the
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icon of Muruga and placed it on the platform, and stabilized it by tying it to the poles and the platform. Then he asked us to lift it and walk forward. It was very heavy.
The teru began to circumambulate the central Pulleyar shrine. We first stopped at the Sivakovil. We were asked to face the temple. The other three teru bearers began to Swing the teru lightly left to right. I had no idea that this was going to occur. I merely went along with the motions because that was the only way I could maintain my balance. Gradually I realized that the Swinging was purposeful and meaningful. The Swinging represented an elephant. Each of the four teru bearers functioned as a leg of this symbolic elephant. The icon of the god was, for all practical purposes, mounted on this abstract elephant. We stood swinging the icon as an elephant swings while standing, until the Stotram (panegyrics) chanting was over. Then we moved backwards, turned to the right and continued our circumambulation without Swinging until we reached the Durga kovil. We repeated the same action as before the Sivakovil. Once the rituals were over at the Durga kovil we completed our circuit and were standing before Pulleyar. We swung the Teru once again and turned in the clockwise direction. Thereafter we started backing and swaying, into the Muruga kovil. Before I knew it, I found my rear partner and myself right inside the Sacred chamber behind the curtain. The kurukkal asked us to lower the teru slowly, until the platform of the palanquin rested on a table immediately behind the curtain. My rear partner left. For a few minutes, Istood inside that chamber in complete amazement. This far, no one told me what to do except for the initial call to bear the teru. Thereafter, I merely and automatically followed the rest, guessing what I needed to do purely in response to the physical movement of the teru. Now, I was inside the sacred chamber with no cues coming from anyone. I put my hands together and saluted the icon that was to my right. I was too excited to make any 'observations. Then, from the left side a kurukkal entered and gestured that I should help him place the icon on its pedestal on
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the altar. I followed his instructions, and we placed the icon on the altar and I once again saluted Muruga. The kurukkal, who could not speak Sinhala, smiled with me affectionately. We saluted each other, and I left the chamber.
Outside Muruga's sacred chamber, the devotees gathered awaiting distribution of prasad. These are the special food offerings to the gods that, after the rituals, are available for devotees as gifts from the gods who are pleased with their devotees' devotion. Rajaratnam came to me with clasped hands and thanked me for the opportunity to carry the teru. From his point of view, he got this rare opportunity because of me. Other male devotees warmly received me and were unanimous that it was indeed highly auspicious that I was selected to carry the teru. For them, it was even more significant that I had the rare chance to enter Muruga's sacred chamber. Many invited me to their homes to spend the night and discussed their connections with the university. Shortly afterwards, the kurukkal distributed portions of the rice offering and an extremely sweet and delectable salad of dates, dried grapes, sliced bananas and many other ingredients in a honey based syrup. The devotees, after receiving the prasad, dispersed in a pleasant mood. We went to the street on the eastern side of the temple to pick up some dinner.
Back in the room, Velupillai lit mosquito coils to ward off the armies of mosquitoes while Rajaratnam spread the threadbare mats on the floor. Rajaratnam was highly energized by what happened in the temple. He was talkative. The feeling of being so closed to Muruga and the thought of Muruga making him carry the teru seemed to fill him with a sense of well-being. We discussed the many stories about Muruga and Vinayakar.
Men in the dark
Our Conversations and meditations on Muruga abruptly ended when someone loudly banged on the door. The banging was violent and demanding. Rajaratnam moved to open the door. Just as he unbolted the door two young men crashed in like a pair
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of buffaloes, turned the lights off and yelled at Rajaratnam to bolt he door, Stay silent and not to open the door on any account. Rajaratnam looked terrified and Velupillai and I lay motionless. The young men took off their shirts, swept the floor with them, lay down and appeared to fall asleep. Rajaratnam silently returned to his mat. I lay in extraordinary fear and excitement, sweating and imagining the worse. I had read news accounts of gruesome rebel violence and imagined ourselves being violently massacred and dismembered. Who could this be? Obviously, they were running away from someone and they appeared capable of murdering the three of us. They possibly carried guns or other deadly weapons. Then there was another banging and shouting to open the door. No one moved. After a few minutes, the knocking and shouting ended. I heard footsteps fading, and knocking and banging next door, people talking loudly, doors closing and footsteps fading. Then I heard snoring all around me.
July 24, 2003
We were up by four in the morning. Rajaratnam and I were quite stirred by last night's events and neither of us had slept. Only Velupillai and the two men slept and snored. Velupillai woke up while the men were still sleeping. We picked up our belongings and washed at the well. Rajaratnam was whispering that the men could be LTTE or anti-LTTE cadres. They could be running from a scene and others hunting for them. Rajaratnam was offended by the brash, arrogant and demanding manner of these men, and now seemed embarrassed by the fear he had felt and meek obedience that he had offered to the men in the dark.
I decided that my pada yatra should begin right from this temple. We could not enter the inner hall of the temple; the doors were locked. From outside I watched Velupillai and Rajaratnam prostrate before Vinayakar, the god of beginnings. They performed many worshipful acts. I saluted the god with clasped hands and bowed:
Sri Ganeshaya namahal
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We lit camphor pills on coconuts. My companions wanted me to smash my coconut first, on the special coconut Smashing rock surrounded by a fence. However, I felt Velupillai should go first, then Rajaratnam and finally myself. We adopted that order and exclaimed haro hara each time a coconut was Smashed. Another round of saluting the god followed. Then, at 5.15 in the morning, following the ancient South Asian tradition, I put my right foot forward and began our southerly journey. Our destination was Kataragama.
Padayattirei
There are many ways to Kataragama. You choose your way depending on who you are. There is the "modern hi-end" way of traveling in your own luxury automobile. Most prefer that way. Some groups rent a van or travel by bus. Alternatively, you can walk, like the many pada yatra pilgrims. The type and the quality of accommodation also vary. The facilities range from four star European-run hotels down to camping in the shade under a tree. Some say that the god does not care how you get there or where you stay. Others believe that these things matter very much. For the latter, the degree of difficulty suffered by the pilgrim is directly proportional to their level of devotion, the level of effectiveness and power (anubhava) of the pilgrimage, and the extent of the god’s grace on the pilgrimage. In that context, the pada yatra," an ancient South Asian ascetic practice, is sine qua non. Padayattirei is the Tamilized form of the Sanskrit term pada yatra as used by Tamil Hindus of the Jaffna-centered Northern Province. This term is rarely used in Batticaloa. Instead, in the Batticaloa-centered Eastern Province, Tamil Hindus and Muslims alike use the terms nadandu poral or nadandu pora, which in Tamil means “going by foot.” The Sinhala people of Sri Lanka formally call it pagamana and colloquially call it payin yanava. Each term has multiple meanings.
Formally, padayattirei, like its counterparts nadandu poral and payin yanava, means "going by foot.” But there are different
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connotations are associated with different terminologies. Padayattirei and pada yatra apply in two main contexts: religious and political. As religious terms, they refer to pilgrimages by foot. Politically, they mean long distance marches with secular, political goals. Nadandu poral has two contexts also: religious and generalized. As a religious term, it refers to a pilgrimage by foot. As a generalized term, it merely means going anywhere by foot rather than by a vehicle or on an animal. It is not used in a political COIteXt.
The meaning clusters of the Sinhala equivalents payin yanava and pagamana are closer to the generalized Batticaloa clusters as payin yanava and pagamana mean to walk or travel by foot. Pagamana can also be used in a religious context, to mean, for instance, walking to a temple. However, none of the Sinhala terms are used in political contexts. I will continue to use the term pada yatra because it is better known throughout the island.
Pada yatra as a religious institution has a distinguished ancestry. In the puranic tradition, pilgrimages were highly valued. Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the grand classics of the Sanskrit corpus, both involving long journeys by foot, uphold yatra as a personally ennobling and spiritually liberating activity. The Mahabharata and the puranas such as the Agni, Vayu and Matsya Puranas provide detailed lists of pilgrimage centers in early and medieval India extolling the virtues of yatra or pilgrimages to these places and performing sacrifices.
In the Aranyaka Parvan of the Mahabharata, Prince Arjuna leaves for the Indraloka, the world of Indra, and practices severe self-mortification to the great joy of the gods and the rishis. However, his brothers and their wife Draupadi miss him. Without him the Kamakya forest, where they sojourned, is no longer an earthly paradise. Then they meet Narada, the great rishi. Narada asks Prince Yudhisthira, their leader, what the Pandavas need. Yudhisthira requests an answer to the question, "If a man makes a sunwise' tour of the earth to visit the sacred fords, what reward
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accrues to him?” Narada relates to Yudhisthira what rishi Pulasthya told the great warrior and Yudhisthira's grand elder Bhisma about the virtues and rewards that accrue from pilgrimages to the sacred fords, the tirthas.
Pulasthya said that the wealthy can perform costly rituals to obtain these rewards but the poor could not afford them." A poor man cannot rise to the Sacrifices, for they require many implements and a great variety of ingredients. Kings rise to them and some rich people, not those lacking in means and implements, who are alone and without an establishment. But hear to what injunction even the poor can rise, equaling the holy rewards of the sacrifices. This is the highest mystery of the seers - the holy visitation of sacred fords, which even surpass the sacrifices.” Pulasthya went on to extol the virtues of visiting the great ford Puskara and disclosed the rewards from the pilgrimages to the sacred fords for visiting Puskara is equivalent to visiting all the fords, and ten Horse Sacrifices. The pilgrims who mortify themselves at Puskara achieve the highest yoga, are freed from all sins and honored on the rooftree of heaven, and are never reborn in lower forms. A visit on the full moon of Karttika brings inexhaustible rewards and is the same as performing the agnihotra ritual for one hundred years.”
Then he described an itinerary for Bhishma's tirthayatra, with particular emphasis on a visit to Karttikeya's tirtha of Prthudaka. "One should do his ablutions there, intent upon the worship of the gods and ancestors. Whatever improper deed a man or a woman has done in ignorance or knowingly with human resolve, it vanishes as soon as one bathes here. He rises to the fruit of a Horse Sacrifice and goes to the world of heaven.....He who, while intent on prayer, gives up his body at Prthudaka, this foremost of the fords, will not be tormented by fear of an imminent death.....One should go to Prthudaka. No ford has greater sanctity than Prthudaka. It is sacrificially pure, purifying and lustrating.
The wise say that even criminals go to heaven if they bathe at Prthudaka."
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Having related the story of Bhisma's tirthayatra, Narada advises the Pandavas that they must go on the pilgrimage with fishi Lomasa as their guide. They take his advice.
The life stories of the great teachers in 500-600 BCE include descriptions of long religious journeys that they made by foot. Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, and the Buddha were among the great wanderers of the period. Their journeys were dedicated to missionary activities, accepting alms and establishing communities of followers. The places where they and their Vedic counterparts engaged in these activities later became pilgrimage centers for their followers. Such pilgrimage centers are known as tirtha or fords." Going to a pilgrimage center by a ford is also called tirthayatra. Tirthayatras were conducted by foot, on an animal or by animaldriven carts. In Sri Lanka, such pilgrimages have been highly respected from ancient times. In the Buddhist tradition, there are sixteen holy places throughout the island including Kataragama. Theoretically, the Kiri Vehera is the focus of Buddhist pilgrimages to Kataragama. In practice though, pilgrimages to Kataragama focus on the shrine of the Kataragama Deiyo.
Traditionally, throughout South Asia until the first quarter of the twentieth century, all pilgrimages were conducted by foot, on animals or by animal-driven carts. The Vedic and post-Vedic Brahmanical religion involved a stage of life (asrama) called sanyasa. This is the last stage of life, the first three being brahmacarya (student), grhasta (householder) and vanaprasta (forest-dweller) in that order. The Sanyasi (the person in the Sanyasa stage) became completely detached from the life of the household and dedicated her life to performing religious acts, known today as performing Sadhana. Some Sanyasis became wanderers. By wandering, I do not mean that they aimlessly walked about. Wandering as a Sanyasi involves walking in circuits of tirthas. The brahmacaris, the grhastas and the vanaprasta forest-dwellers also went on pilgrimages by foot. However, these were generally to the great tirthas or to lesser holy places close to their households because pilgrimages of
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indefinite duration and distance that lasted for the rest of their lives - the kind practiced by the sanyasis - were impracticable.7
In Sri Lanka, the Indian pattern of and for pilgrimages by foot prevailed until Buddhism was introduced in the fourth century BCE. Thereafter, the Buddhists developed the circuit of sixteen places of worship (solosmasthane) mentioned earlier. Some of these pilgrimages involved large groups of people and long and arduous journeys from which many did not expect to return. However, such feats were uncommon. Most pilgrimages by foot involved short distances. Walking was the only form of pilgrimage available to the vast majority of the people. Very few - usually the members of the ruling elite - could afford the luxury of palanquins. Some used bullock carts (barakaratte).
Until the third decade of the twentieth century, the pilgrims visited Kataragama on four different routes. Thomas Steele noted in 1870:
1) Via Wellawaya, Telulla and Tanamalwila comprised of people from Badulla, Sabaragamuwa, Haputale (about 2000 people); " 2) Via Hambantota, Weerawila, Maliyagastota came people
from Colombo, Galle etc. (about 2000);
3) Via Yala and Katagamuwa people from Trinco, Batticaloa
etc. (about 2000);
4) Via Passara and Buttala people from Jaffna, Matale,
Kandy, Badulla etc. (about 4000). **
The twentieth century changed the face of the pilgrimages in Sri Lanka. The emergent labor organization based on an 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. five-day week did not permit large blocks of time for pilgrimages as were available to their agricultural ancestors. The new market based organization of labor (that spread even into the agricultural sector) monetized labor, created employer-employee relationships based strictly on economic functionality, and provided low wages. The gradual collapse of the earlier mutual help-based (attam) labor organization with long periods of rest during the
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fallow seasons restricted the time and resources of the would-be pilgrims to engage in pada yatras. However, the new Socio-economic order provided motorized transportation and paved roads for quick, easy and comfortable trips to pilgrimage centers for a relatively small fare. Today, among the majority of Buddhists and Hindus, most pilgrimages by foot are to places less than a kilometer away. Currently, for the Buddhists, the longest pilgrimage by foot is to Sri Pada. Nevertheless, they travel to the base of Sri Pada hill using motorized transportation and climb only the hill (a four to six hour walk) by foot. Very few Buddhists, even those living nearby, walk to Kataragama. The Hindus, however, have retained the older tradition. Kataragama is their main pada yatra destination. Nevertheless, even among the Hindus, the pada yatra has become restricted to the ascetically oriented and to those making or fulfilling vows to perform pada yatra. The ascetically oriented pilgrims consider pada yatra and the physical and mental hardships it entails as sacrifices and expressions of devotion of a higher order.
The sky was still dark. The mercury-glow of streetlamps dimly lit the streets. The breeze was cool. I was excited about this journey through unknown regions with unknown people. All three of us seemed to be bursting with enthusiasm and energy. I felt very light on my feet and we passed the first kilometer in less than ten minutes. There was none on the road except for the occasional stray dog, alley cat and cattle lying around chewing the cud. Every building on both sides of the highway was closed.
By 5.30 in the morning, the first glow of the dawn was visible in the eastern sky. We passed Kattankudi, the only exclusively Muslim town in Sri Lanka, which welcomes visitors with large arches across the road. Muslims practically own all shops and their large mosques on either side of the road signify their dominance. Kattankudi has been the locus of many violent confrontations between the east coast Muslims and the LTTE. Quite recently, some group - suspected to be the LTTE - had cut the main telephone lines in Kattankudi preventing electronic communication with the rest of the world. We saw very few individuals on the road. Perhaps
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it was too early in the morning. However Kattankudi and the events there, provided food for thought regarding the Muslims of Sri Lanka especially since some Muslims are deeply involved in the activities of Kataragama. These are the Sufis.
The Sufis
I met the Sufis for the first time at the mosque in Kataragama. They were distinctive in appearance. All sported beards and mustaches. They wore green or white turbans, long green or white shirts and green or white sarongs. Green signifies high office in this religious community. The Sufis have one of their most sacred Sanctuaries in Kataragama. The sacred premises in Kataragama consist of tombs of two Sufi teachers and ascetics, two mosques, a ritual arena, an office and accommodation for a limited number of pilgrims. I will discuss Sufism in Kataragama later. For now, I examine the Muslims and Sufism in Sri Lanka, in general terms.
In all probability, Sufism arrived in Sri Lanka immediately after Islam arrived in the island. However, prior to all that, preIslamic Arabs and Persians were here, together with the Greeks and the Romans, as maritime traders who connected the economies of the Southern, South Eastern and Eastern countries of Asia with the Middle Eastern, African and European countries.
Perhaps, the Arabs and the Persians were among the most seafaring of all societies around the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. In Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, they were friends and business partners long before they became Muslims. They were here before the map of Asia, including the Arabia and Persia, assumed its present shape with well-defined boundaries of the New Nations with specific identities.
The Arabs and the Persians did not come as large groups. Rather, a boatload or two would come at a time and conduct their business through contacts with local families established over generations, Scattered in the littoral as wandering foreign merchants, buying and selling whatever they could but emphasizing the spices,
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pearls, precious stones and ivory. They kept their religion as a private matter. Perhaps, no one knew or cared to know about the religions of the pre-Islamic or Islamic Arabians and Persians. The Sinhala sources do not refer to the religion of these peripatetic traders known first as the yonakas - because they came from the west, and later as marakkalas or hambas - because they came by boats known as Sampans.
They became communities of immigrants from about the tenth century. Perhaps, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire expanded the economic potential of the various Arabs and Persians. Their markets and sources expanded and included substantial interests in Europe, Asia and Africa. The sea routes became busy with east-west traffic and it was necessary to establish trading outposts around the ports of their markets. Those who were stationed, as it were, settled down in the region, taking wives from the local communities. It is also likely that the natives assimilated many pre-Islamic yonakas. Even though the Arabs and the Persians became Muslims in the eighth century, in Sri Lanka they were not identified as such. Since Islam, they had developed distinctive religious identities with patrilineal descent that mandated that the native women and the offspring become coreligionists of the patrilineage.” Nonetheless, their religiosity remained strictly a community matter that did not interfere with their relationships with the other communities.
The emergent Islamic communities in Sri Lanka considered business first and religion next. Thus, they kept their religiosity to themselves and did not make elaborate places of worship. Nor did they attempt to convert the natives to their religion. Facts are different elsewhere. For example, the Muslim invasions of the northern regions of the sub-continent south of the Himalayas, known in the Arabia as the Hind after the Indus river, involved drastic religious policies well documented in the annals of history. However, in Sri Lanka, the Muslims were a quiet group with a quiet private religion. In time, they went beyond the port towns
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into the hinterland and established business contacts with local Sinhala and Tamil non-mercantile agricultural communities.
The most readily observable feature of this community was their loyalty to the regime. That was a sensible policy for doing business involved the patronage of the rulers. In Sri Lanka, the king monopolized the trade in silk, pearls, precious stones, ivory and elephants. Thus, they maintained cordial and profitable relationships with the local authorities who managed the local affairs under the king's authority. The cordiality sometimes went far and some Muslims received titles in the local status hierarchy and highpowered appointments as ambassadors, emissaries and court officials. These Muslims were also respected as Unani physicians. During the Gampola kingdom in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, they were connected with the ruling families and enjoyed substantial influence in the court.
The language of these Muslim communities was their own dialect of Tamil, the language of the vast majority of their trading partners on the island. The Sinhala community did not produce a mercantile culture. From early days of the formation of the State of Lanka, Tamil and other South Indian mercantile groups, known in ancient times as the vanik, carried out the country's trading activities, particularly with foreign nations. The majority among them was Tamil, and its language became the most significant local language employed in business negotiations and transactions. This is evident in the trilingual slab inscription of Galle established in the thirteenth century by the Chinese. They used Chinese, Persian and Tamil in their inscription.
Most of the busy ports of pre-colonial Sri Lanka were located in the northern areas with Mahatittha or Matota (great ford: Tamil - Mantottam) as the principal harbor on the western seaboard and Gokannatittha (Tamil - Tirukkonamalai; Trincomalee) on the eastern seaboard. The early significant Muslim communities developed in these areas with minor communities linked to these groups scattered along the coast, wherever a port existed. Tamil
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speaking vanik families - mostly Malayalis from Kerala, South India, who later adopted Tamil as their language, dominated trading in the ports and they produced substantial communities around these ports. The Muslims, too, were immigrants from Kerala and they married women from these communities. The Muslims adopted Tamil, first as a business tool and thereafter as their own language, as they married women from the Tamil settlements in these port
tOW11S.
The relationship between the various scattered Muslim communities and the State became intense since the arrival of the Europeans. Perhaps, the very success of the Arabian and Persian mercantile ventures in the Indian Ocean had the threat of invasion by their own customers built into it. The Portuguese were the first to succeed in this invasion of the trade routes. Throughout the sixteenth century, they reduced the Arabian and Persian influence as they invaded most of the significant ports of that era. The Portuguese colonial administration was hostile to the Muslims because of economic competition as well as their hostility towards Islam, and attacked them with particular ferocity. The Indian or Coast Muslims virtually ended their activities in Sri Lanka because of Portuguese hostilities.
The Arabian Muslims and the Indian Muslims who had established communities on the island fled to the hinterland. Throughout the Portuguese occupation of the Maritime Provinces, the Kandyan kings Senerat and his son Rajasinghe II accommodated the Muslim refugees in Kandyan villages. Senerat had settled many Muslims in the East Coast that was still under the king's rule. These Muslims adopted an alternative lifestyle and economic activity; they became sedentary agriculturalists and local traders instead of seafaring itinerant merchants.”
As the Dutch expelled the Portuguese from the island towards the middle of the seventeenth century, the maritime contexts changed. The Dutch policy towards trading differed from that of the Portuguese and the Muslims were once again welcome
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in the ports although this time under Dutch supervision and subject to heavy taxes. Nonetheless, the Muslims continued to arrive, now mostly from South India. These newcomers re-established Muslim communities in the littoral and engaged in trading, now under both the Kandyan kingdom and Dutch colonial administration. The Portuguese, perhaps in recognition of an already existing local classification, introduced the term Moor. The established Muslim communities and these new communities distinguished themselves from one another. Yet, the two segments remained connected as co-religionists, and the margins between these groups were blurry because of common faith and intermarriage. Today, Muslims claim that the distinction does not exist anymore.'
The Muslims prospered under the British colonial regime, as that regime liberalized the trade rules. They were loyal to the colonial regime and by the end of nineteenth century the numerically small but economically significant Muslim community lived scattered throughout the island.
As Vijaya Samaraweera and Dennis McGilvray point out, the Muslims did not emphasize formal education and paid more attention to training their young in the various traditional activities - mostly trading but also agricultural, as in the eastern region.’ Politically, the Muslims did not compete in the national arena. However, there were local conflicts, particularly in the Eastern Province where they had to live closely with the east coast Tamil community that accommodated the Muslims within the Tamil community but only as a lower caste. Their language brought them within a common linguistic community with the Tamils although the Muslim dialect was different from Tamil as it included many Arabic and Urdu expressions including the kinship terminology. They were drawn into the national political scene towards the beginning of the twentieth century when Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan - member of the Ceylonese elite community, Scholar, lawyer, Hindu and Colombo Tamil - wrote a history and an ethnography of the Ceylon Muslims (including the Ceylon Moors)
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subsuming them under the Tamil community. Ramanathan's essay, published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch, aroused much criticism from the Muslim elite who repudiated such an ethnic, therefore political, position. Ramanathan was deeply involved in the politics of Ceylon as well as in the politics within the Ceylonese Tamil community that was split in four ways as Jaffna Tamils, Batticaloa Tamils (east coast), Estate Tamils and Colombo Tamils. The Jaffna Tamils, at least a politically active significant number of them, were interested in territorial authority in terms of demographic criteria. The Colombo Tamils opted for all island authority and rejected the Jaffna ambitions of regaining the regional power that they enjoyed during the precolonial era. The Colombo Tamils preferred national status rather than regional hegemony. The Jaffna Tamils rejected the hegemony of a Sinhala dominated government over their regional affairs. It was in the interest of Tamil leaders such as Ramanathan to expand their political bases across ethnic and religious lines.'" Ramanathan's attempt to include Muslim's within the larger identity of Tamil Speakers to enhance the Tamil clout on an island-wide basis backfired, not because the Tamils objected to it but because the Muslims, who did not want a subordinate political position within a group that gave them only a low caste status, rejected it. A prominent Muslim leader M. L. M. Azeez disputed Ramanathan's claim. Ramanathan's claim inadvertently, perhaps as an unintended unfavorable consequence of it, politically sensitized the Muslims to the point of the latter asserting a political position independent of language but on the basis of ethnic and religious identity emphasizing Arabian heritage and Islam.
Among the Muslims of Sri Lanka, the overwhelming majority belong to the Sunni sect. There is also a negligible transient minority of Shia Muslims. A minority of Sunni Muslims are adherents of Sufism.
The Sufi theology descends from the Koran and from preIslamic culture that existed in the Arabian regions and the Maghreb.
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Let me first briefly examine some foundational concepts of the Islamic sense of the world and then turn to a study of Sufi interpretation of these foundational ideas. I am aware that different Sunni and Sufi communities scattered globally interpret these doctrines in a localized manner. The following is a general Overview of the basic concepts that local communities interpret in their own ways.
The Koranic beliefs, descending from the Abrahamic tradition that found earlier systematization and literary expression in the Bible, settled on the pre-existing social and cultural structures. The worship of sacred Stones containing divine power, performed by rubbing, stroking or kissing them, was believed to transfer this divine power to the worshiper. Additionally, the pre-Islamic Arabian peoples venerated spirits dwelling in trees and springs.' The pre-Islamic religion of these cultures, similar to the preAbrahamic religion of the Jews, involved a pantheon of deities with a principal God named Allah, the Creator of the world. The polytheism included the worship of Allat, probably an adoption of the moon goddess of Syria and a reflection of the mother goddess worship widespread in the region; al-Uzza, the deified planet Venus; and Manat, the goddess of fate. Al-Uzza was widely worshipped as the goddess of stone pillars.
These varieties of practices converged in the pilgrimages to Kaba, an unadorned black cubical monument - where al-Uzza was a prominent deity - over the sacred Black Stone. The Black Stone contained the images of the gods and goddesses of the pantheon except that of Allah.' For the above description, I have borrowed much from Smart (1969:1971).
When Muhammad established Islam as its Prophet, the preIslamic beliefs and practices were retained except the polytheism. Instead, Allah was recognized as the only God and Muhammad his Prophet. Under the leadership of Muhammad and his successors, the khaleefas (Caliphs), Islam became a strongly monotheistic iconoclastic religion and a powerful political force that unified the many Bedouin tribes under its banner. Doctrinally, Muhammad
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insisted that there was only one God and that no other person or being, including him, could have divinity. All such claims to divinity by individuals were thoroughly condemned as heresies. Thus, Islam upheld a firm dualism that distinguished the God from his creatures.
Practically, Islam has never been a world-denying religion. It was permissible for Muslims to acquire wealth and power. However, the religion also stressed religious duties based on the arkan or the "Five Pillars of Islam. These are (1) the shahada or the declaration of faith by repetitive chanting of the basic tenets of Islam: La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad rasul Allah! (There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet); (2) the shalat or the five daily prayers performed by the Muslims after ritually cleansing themselves, facing Mecca, at dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, Sunset, and dusk; (3) the zakat or the almsgiving where the donor, in accordance with the Koran, sets aside one fortieth of his income, to be directly distributed among the destitute in the Islamic community; (4) the Shawn or fasting during the month of Ramadan; and (5) and the hajj or the pilgrimage to Mecca.’ During the pilgrimage the pilgrims circumambulate the Kaba and perform the rituals that the pre-Islamic pilgrims performed but in the Islamic idiom. The Sharia or canonical Islam is founded upon these five pillars. They constitute the Outward manifestations of religiosity. In the seventh century, a controversy developed over the assassination of Ali, the fourth Caliph, and Husayn, Muhammad's grandson, and the appropriation of the Caliphate by the Iraqi Umayyad dynasty. The controversy caused an internal schism within the Islamic community. Those who upheld the legitimacy of Ali's Caliphate and resented the assassination of Husayn formed a separate sect that became known as the Shia. Those who accepted the authority of the Umayyad Caliphate and its theory of the illegitimacy of claims of Ali and Husayn to Caliphate became the Sunni Muslims.
Sufism is a branch of Sunni Islam. According to the Sufis, a personal relationship with Allah, therefore with Truth, can be
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cultivated through an individual centered devotional asceticism. They shunned the materialism of the mainstream Islamic society that developed since the Umayyad rule and became worse during the Abbasid Caliphate. As I stated earlier, the Sunnis believe in material success and serving Allah through social work as a part of zakat or almsgiving. The Sufis withdrew from the society claiming that the mainstream society was distracted from Allah as it was preoccupied with power and wealth. The Sufis may have been influenced by Jewish and Christian ascetic schools that existed in various parts of the Middle Eastern region, and by Hellenic philosophy that produced a strain of devotional monism through neo-Platonism.’
The term Sufi is multivalent. On one plane, it derives from suf, the Arabic word for coarse wool. The early Sufis wore garments made of such wool to signify their renunciation of the extravagant life style of the mainstream Islamic society. The term also refers to purity. It also means a Soteriological emphasis on the spiritual and social well-being of the individual rather than the well-being of the community as a whole as sharia Islam demanded.
However, the withdrawal from the society, in virtual repudiation of Zakat, the third pillar of Islam, and the theological contention regarding the possibility of a devotee's personal communion with Allah, known in Islam as tasawwuf, became anathemato the Sunni authorities. In time, the personal relationship with God developed into a religion unto itself where the faithful gathered around various spiritual leaders, known as the Shayks (or Sheik) or marabouts in the Maghreb, who were perceived as intermediaries between God and his devotee. ' Eickelman (ibid.222-235).
The conflict between the orthodox Sunni tradition and the tasawwuf of the Sufi tradition culminated in the tenth century in the crucifixion of a Sufi master al-Hallaj who expressed his inner conviction of a communion with God, by saying, "I am God” or "I am the Truth.” This led to the Sunni execution of many more Sufi leaders who made similar claims.
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Nonetheless, the Sufi groups continued to exist. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Sufis formulated doctrines that harmonized their faith with that of sharia Islam. One of the most prominent among them was a Persian Sunni authority and teacher al-Gazali (1058CE - 1111CE) of Baghdad. He attempted to reconcile the monism of Sufi Islam with the dualism of the orthodox Sunni tradition. As a philosopher, he had become skeptical about the non-theistic philosophical trends prevalent in Baghdad, perhaps the result of the impact of Greek philosophy. He had begun to doubt all evidence through sense perception as well as mental perception. Then he had a religious experience during which he realized that the philosophical method that sought evidence and proof through argumentation did not take him any closer to Truth. Truth he found, not by means of philosophical method but through a light which God cast into my breast....' Thus disillusioned with philosophy, al-Ghazali focused on his experience and discovered that mysticism provided the path to Truth. He left his academic position, and went to Mecca and practiced ascetic living for ten years. Al-Ghazali was a critic of Aristotelian and neo-Platonic philosophy that influenced Islamic philosophy. As a criticism of Avicenna's ideas he wrote,
I realized with certainty that it is the mystics above all others who are on God's path. Their life is the best life their methods the best methods and their character the purest character. Were the intelligence of all intellectuals, the wisdom of all scholars and the scholarship of all professors who are experienced in the profundities of the Revealed Truth brought together in an effort to improve the mystics' conduct and character they would achieve nothing, for all movements and all rest, both external and internal, illuminate the mystic with light from the lamp of Prophetic Revelation and there is no light on the face of this earth which illuminates more than this light of Prophetic Revelation.
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How must one follow this mystic path? Purity, the first condition, means complete purification of the heart from everything but God (to Whom be praise). The Key thereto, and also the password of the ritual prayer, is to sink one's heart in the contemplation of God; its goal is complete identification with God.' Hottinger (ibid.94) cited in Ling (ibid.298-299).
Al-Gazali's turn towards mysticism reconciled the orthodox Sunni position and the Sufi theosis. He introduced into the Islamic community a dread of hell that motivated the Muslims to lead a moral life. Al-Gazzali was followed by many such as Ibn Arabi (1165 - 1240CE) and the Persian Sunni poet and mystic Jalal alDin Rumi, in Turkish naming Mevlana Celaleddin-II Rumi, (1207- . 1273 CE), who established the order of Sufi mystics known as Mevlev that focused on darwash (mendicant) life style. In Turkey, where Rumi lived for the last forty-two years of his life, he established the dance ritual known as sema that involved whirling to music.” The darwash whirling dancers are known in the West as the Whirling Dervishes. Many other mystics emerged to enhance the social networks of the Sufis.
One of the most interesting institutions in Sufi Islam is Khidr - "the green one.” Khidr is considered a servant of Allah and guide to Moosa - Moses of the Old Testament. Sufis cite Koranic verses 72-80 in Sura 18 to identify the personality of Khidr and legitimate their veneration of this figure. There, Allah proclaims that He had bestowed His knowledge upon a servant. Sufis identify this servant as Khidr. The reference to Moses is also clear.
However, the notion of a man of knowledge called hanafigyah had existed in Arabia before Islam. Legends believed to be of preIslamic origin associate Khidr with Alexander the Great of Macedonia (fourth century BCE). The Arabs referred to Alexander as Eskander (also Iskandar) or Dzoul Karnein, the "Sire with the double horns” because of his portrait with ram horns on the Ptolemaic coins. The horns symbolized strength but also spiritual
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power. Often he was called a Nabi; a Prophet: Nabi Eskander. And Alexandria was named after him and is still called Eskandereya. Interestingly, the Sufis use the same lines of the Sura 18 to say that Khidr met Eskander although that name is not mentioned in the Sura. It appears that those who espouse Eskander's connection with the Khidr link the notion with Sura 18 in an attempt to justify the connection theologically.
Khidr is everywhere and immortal. He provides guidance to the needy and teaches through paradoxes. Thus, in the Koranic account, Sufis find him destroying a ship, killing an innocent young man, and building a wall, all prohibited in the Koran. But the destruction, killing and building were all metaphors for other higher ideals. Muslims in many parts of the world hope to encounter Khidr for that encounter is rewarding now and hereafter. Thus, he has many names: al-Khidr, Khizr, Khezar, Kizar, Khadir, Kilur, Kalir, Halir, and Kwaja Khadir.”
In this manner, the Sufis distinguished themselves from other Muslims by
(1) proclaiming the possibility of a union with Godhead;
(2) accepting spiritual masters or Sheiks, perhaps the mortal representatives of the ancient institution of Khidr, as the servant of Allah, as intermediaries between humans
and Allah;
(3) worshiping the tombs of Sufi masters regarded as Auliyas;
and (4) by adopting various activities including singing, dancing, and in some instances the use of psychoactive drugs such as cannabis and hashish, as approaches to communion
with Allah.
The Sufis lived scattered in Turkey, the northeastern parts of Persia and in northern Africa bordering the Mediterranean known in Arabic as the Maghreb. Later they found shrines and homesteads in India, Indonesia and Malaysia, as an internal segment of the Sunni Muslim communities in these countries. In each of
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these countries, the Sufis developed their traditions by merging with local religious traditions. In India, they aligned their faith with the rising bhakti movements in Siva and Vaishnava Hinduism and redefined all these gods as manifestations of Allah and Muhammad as an avatar of these gods."
The Sufis came to Sri Lanka probably during the early
centuries of Islam. By the ninth century, the Arabs called the Samanala Kanda - worshipped by the Buddhists as the Sri Pada, the hill on top of which the Buddha placed his footprint - Adam's Peak. As widely believed in the Arabian world, Allah created Adam. When Adam fell from grace, he landed on the peak where he left his footprint. Muslims worship this footprint as that of their ancestor. An Arab trader and explorer named Sulaiman had visited Sri Lanka in 850 of the CE and written about a pilgrimage to Adam's Peak. Ibn Batuta, a fourteenth century Arab traveler, states in his Rehla information that circulated among his contemporary Arabs. Accordingly, the first Muslim to visit the peak was one Shayik Abu Abdullah Khafif, in 929 of the CE. Undoubtedly, he was a Sufi master.
For centuries thereafter the Arabs ventured into the Sabaragamuva region where the Samanala Kanda is located for business and for worship. As for business, Sabaragamuwa province was a significant source of precious stones. As for worship, the footprint on the Adam’s Peak, as the Sri Pada was known to them, was an ideal point of contact between the deity and his devotee. They established a Sufi site in Balangoda. This is known as Daftar Jilani, named after a Sufi mystic who was entombed there.
By the sixteenth century, the Skanda shrine of Kataragama and the mysteries that made Kataragama a sacred space were known beyond Sri Lanka. The Portuguese knew it as a wealthy shrine and unsuccessfully attempted to plunder it. By the eighteenth century, a considerable number of pilgrims from India and western and central Asia came to Kataragama. Among them were several Sufi Masters.'
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The Sri Lankan Sufi tradition belongs to the Shahdiliya school of Sufism. However, it is directly connected to the overall Sunni Islamic tradition paradigmatically anchored in Mecca. It has no obligatory connections to schools or holy places anywhere else. As an independent school of Sufism, Sri Lankan Sufis have developed their own sense of the sacred presence and a theology to explain it."
They begin by asserting that Allah is the possessor of quarat or the capacity to do things. He alone makes decisions and executes them.
Allah created Adam and passed on His knowledge to Adam. That made Adam superior to the angels who were devoid of such knowledge. Allah made Adam his khaleefa or representative.
All people desire Allah's affection but His love is available only to those who are perfect. Man achieves perfection through constant worship or ibadat, which can be performed only if man has spiritual knowledge. Only the aarifeens have such knowledge. They are ahaldh dikr or possessors of spiritual knowledge.' Allah conveys this knowledge through various signs, remarkable events, his messenger Jibreel (Gabriel of the Bible) and through his servant Khizar." Many holy men of Islam received this dikr and the khilaafat (authority) that came with the knowledge through fina fis Shaikh - their self-denial for the sake of their spiritual masters, the Shaiks. The spiritual knowledge and discipline that such ahaldh dikr imparted and sustained eventually eroded. In that era, Hazarat Mohiyuddin Abdul Cader Zailani revived it.
An aspect of the devotion to Shaiks, the men of knowledge, is the development of two institutions, namely, the Khutb and Auliya. Khutbs are living spiritual masters, the Shaiks, who are like the Nabi or prophets. They are in touch with Khizar. Auliyas are dead spiritual masters who are Allah's friends. Both are considered as wali, saints. Many Sufis consider the Auliyas and Khutbs as intercessors between man and Allah, a position considered blasphemy by the orthodox Sunni Muslims.
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Sufis construct shrines at the tombs of the Auliyas and worship them.This is another activity that is anathema to the orthodox Sunnis, for, according to the Sunni faith worshiping anyone other than Allah is shirk, or worshiping beings other than Allah, which is considered sacrilege. However, the Sufis carry on with their shrines and the Sri Lankan Sufi tradition holds that this island is rich with shrines of Auliyas.
The Sufis of Sri Lanka believe that Hazrat Khizar mysteriously brought an Indian Sufi names Shahul Hameed, also known as Cader Wali or Shahul Hameed Waliullah, who lived in a South Indian town called Nagoor, to Kataragama." When Shahul Hameed was about to be conferred the title of Kutbul Akhtab, the Khizar brought him to the banks of the Menik Ganga, the river that flows on the southern side of the Kataragama sacred complex, where the Khizar placed the robesignifying the title Kutbul Akhtab on Shahul Hameed. While the mysterious transportation of Shahul Hameed by the Khizar may sound rather mythological, a Sri Lankan Sufi adherent has attempted to historicize the story claiming that Shahul Hameed in fact visited Sri Lanka in 1552. He had traveled to the Malabar Coast and from there to the Maldive Islands, and then arrived in Sri Lanka and traveled extensively before he returned to India. The Sufi believes that this is sufficient evidence to give historicity to the belief that Shahul Hameed visited Kataragama.' As mentioned earlier, Kataragama is but one among many Sufi centers in Sri Lanka. Akkaraipattu, Kataragama, Balangoda, Galle, Colombo and Beruwala are well known among the Muslims as places where the Sufis are active. They have been attempting to establish smaller places of worship elsewhere too, but with tragic results, particularly here, in Kattankudi. The events have begun in the 1990s and culminated over a year after my pada yatra through this town. P.K.Balachandran reports:
Life in the Muslim stronghold of Katthankudy in eastern Sri Lanka was brought to a standstill for five days recently as the orthodox Jamiat-ul-Ulema indulged in violent
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protests against a "Sufi" group, which was allegedly spreading "Hindu” ideas. •
The followers of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema demolished the Rahmaniya and Ibrahimiya madrasas (theological schools) in Katthankudy, alleging that these schools, run by the Sufi preacher A.J.Abdur Rauf Mowlavi, were spreading Hindu ideas and rituals among the Muslims, especially the young. What happens in Katthankudy is critical for Muslim society and politics in Sri Lanka because it is the only completely Muslim town in Sri Lanka. Set in the eastern district of Batticaloa, it is believed to have the largest number of mosques per square kilometre in the world. There are 65 mosques in this small town.
In the last ten years, under the influence of the Saudi Arabian Wahabi sect, Katthankudy has become an exceptionally orthodox place in Sri Lanka where practically every woman, no matter of what age group, is shrouded from head to foot. There is also some Pakistani influence with shops and streets named after Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Since the late 1970s, the entrenched Jamiat-ul-Ulema group has been viewing with alarm the activities of the charismatic Abdur Rauf Mowlavi and his band of Sufis.
Rauf Mowlavi's followers say that Sufism is an accepted creed in Islam. The attackers, who are orthodox Wahabis, cannot claim to be the sole arbiters of what is Islamic and what is not. The Wahabis have no right to impose their hegemony on them, they insist. At any rate, Wahabis came to Katthankudy only 10 years ago.
But the Jamiat-ul-Ulema activists say that their quarrel is not with Sufism, which they accept is Islamic, but the "Hindu” character of the group and what it is doing to take away youths from genuine Islam as practiced in Saudi Arabia. According to ULM Haaris Fadahi, General Secretary of the Katthankudy Jamiat- ul-Ulema, what Abdur Rauff Mowlavi is saying is that God has a form, is both male and
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female, is everywhere and in everything, and that Prophet Mohammad, was but an incarnation of God, who came to set right things in the world.
"Rauf Mowlavi has read the Tamil Nadu poets Abdur Rahman and Kannadasan. One can see the influence of Kannadasan's Tamil work, Arthamulla Indumadham. Abdur Rauf Mowlavi incorporates these in his lectures and says that it is Islam!" Haaris Fadahi said.
According to him, Rauf Mowlavi has sanctioned the use of the Kutthuvilakku (the traditional tall oil lamp made of brass) in Islamic worship. Lighting the lamp, especially the Kutthuvilakku, is peculiar to South Indian Hindu temple worship. He has also advocated the use of lamps with seven wicks, with the number seven having clear Hinduistic connotations.
"These ideas and forms crept into Sri Lankan Islam because of its traditional links with India and Pakistan. Earlier, many preachers came from Tamil Nadu and they brought with them Indian practices. But the current trend here in Sri Lanka is to go back to pristine Islam as practiced in Saudi Arabia,” Haaris Fadahi said.
He argues that a Sufi is a person who has reached a very high level of spirituality, and that Sufism is sanctioned only for such spiritually evolved persons. It cannot be arrogated by ordinary folk.
Rauf Mowlavi's arguments and claims to adherence to Sufism were referred to Dar-ul-Uloom in Deoband, in India, and an Islamic University in Pakistan, and both ruled that they were not at all Islamic, Haaris Fadahi said. When the matter was brought before the All Ceylon Jamiat-ulUlema in 1979, it excommunicated the Mowlavi. However, this had had no impact on his activities.
However, the followers of Abdur Rauf Mowlavi say that his utterances are well within the bounds of Islam and are based on the Quran and the Hadees.
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H.M. Ameer Ali Asiriyar, a follower of Abdur Rauf Mowlavi, says that the doctrine that God is everywhere and in every direction, and that God's brilliance is reflected in everything, is sanctioned by the Quran and other accepted Islamic writings and that Rauf Mowlavi can prove it in a debate.
He had said that he was ready for a three-hour presentation and a two-hour question and answer session before Islamic theologians at the Bandaranaike Memorial Conference Hall in Colombo. If he was notable to convince the learned persons assembled there, he was willing to be killed on the spot. But nobody took the challenge, Ameera Ali Asiriyar said. To this, Haaris Fadahi said that Rauf Mowlana had been challenged to come for a debate in Katthankudy, but he was not available. Even now, only his followers were attending the negotiations to restore peace in the town. Rauf Mowlana was in hiding, he alleged.' We walked through Arayampadi, a nondescript strip along the road where we stopped for tea. Velupillai and Rajaratnam busily explained who I was and what I was up to. The men in the tearoom became very polite and attentive. They spoke to me in what ittle Sinhala they knew. We left Arampadi at about half past eight and continued along the main Batticaloa-Pottuvil road.
The Batticaloa-Pottuvil road is remarkably free of traffic and trash. Comparatively, the central, southern and southwestern 'runk roads are extremely dangerous with very high traffic density and maniacal drivers, and thoroughly polluted with diesel fumes and trash. While such dangers and pollutants were absent here, so were the shops bereft of much of the merchandise that one takes for granted in those areas. The twenty-year war between the government and the LTTE had left its mark, isolating these regions economically and politically. This has had good, bad and ugly effects. The good, I already mentioned. The bad, as I learned from my companions, was the high unemployment and emigration of educated, trained and skilled human resources. Whoever could
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get out had already done so. The ugly was the fear, a sort of dread, of the uncertain times these people were living in, not knowing when death or destruction would come for reasons known or unknown. The sight of abandoned and burned down buildings that lay here and there were signs of the overall decrepitude that the social and economic life has suffered due to the absence of a stable and effective political and administrative apparatus.
Every now and then, a rickety private bus crammed with passengers passed by. Velupillai and Rajaratnam opined that these were discarded husks of Japanese reconditioned imports that had already been “used to death” elsewhere on the island. The local entrepreneurs purchase these relics at a very low cost, drag them in and fix them with local resources. I had traveled in one of these from Akkaraipattu to Kalmunai. It was tragically near dilapidation and unsafe. The government owned buses were recent Indian imports and seemed to be on par with government buses elsewhere in the island. Every now and then, a bus driver would slow down as he passed and the conductor would stick his head out of the footboard and shout haro-hara. Velupillai said they slowed down as a mark of concern and respect for those engaging in pada yatra to Kataragama.
So far, at this early stage, our walk did not involve any problems, but Rajaratnam and I detected one in the making. Velupillai was adamant on walking barefoot. The previous day I had suggested that he buy a pair of sandals or rubber thongs for the walk. He disdainfully rejected the idea. He wanted to do it the "right way;” the ascetic way, the way Muruga wants Tamils to do their pilgrimages to Kataragama. His ancestors had done it barefooted. So why couldn't he? Now, Velupillai was a good fifty meters behind us, constantly stopping and withdrawing onto the withered grass on the roadside, grimacing with a sour agonized face, muttering Muruhal Muruhal Muruhal
The reason for all this huffing and puffing was that the road had become very hot, the tar had begun to melt, the soles of his feet were hurting, and his eczema was discharging a fluid. Walking
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on burning soles while the ankles were incessantly itching could not be much fun. There was nothing we could do about it because the nearest shop, either ahead or behind, was many kilometers away. My immediate reaction was not very kind. Iblamed him for rejecting our advice. I pointed out that he was ruining his feet and shocking his nervous system by exposing his eczema to the intense heat of the melting tar. I reminded him that when his ancestors did the nadandu poral they did not walk on tarred roads. They had walked on cool footpaths in the shade of large trees. He merely shook his head, looking very distraught. My harangue was, of course, in bad taste and out of place, and did nothing to help poor suffering Velupillai. After about fifteen minutes, he recovered enough to go some distance before his feet went bad again. Walking and stopping, we trudged along until we unexpectedly came across a Muruga kovil. Velupillai and Rajaratnam could not agree as to where we were. Rajaratnam called it Ondachchikulam. Velupillai called it Kirankulam. I adopted Velupillai's terminology and rushed into the kovil. At the gate, I had to remove my sandals and walk barefoot on the sand for a couple of meters. The sand was hot enough to perform a fire-walking ceremony! Only then did I realize what Velupillai was going through walking barefoot on melting tar.
Kirankulam
It was about eleven in the morning, the sun was hot and getting hotter, the air humid and getting more so. Our throats were dry and bodies and clothes were soaked in Sweat. Our knees and ankles ached. Outside of the kovil-parapet was a bathing well. We cooled down with a bath and lay around in the temple. A Tamil family was bustling about preparing their puja. A young kurukkal was busy readying the kovil for the midday rituals. We were invited to share the prasad once the rituals were over and we gladly accepted the offer.
Kirankulam is a small village bisected by the Batticaloa - Potuvil highway. Apart from the Muruga temple on the west side
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of the road and a small tearoom cum grocery in the adjacent compound, there is nothing in Kirankulam that attracts anyone's interest. The temple, though, turned out to be a highly desirable spot for pilgrims, not only because of the presence of Muruga but also because it is a convenient place to find shade and rest until the road cooled down from the afternoon sun. The temple is of average size and not even remotely comparable to the grand Kandasamy temple of Nallur or the Pulleyar kovil of Batticaloa. It is simply a hall about fifty feet long and twenty feet wide, partitioned into two sections. At the far end is a room, the kovil proper, where the Sacred image of Muruga is placed. The roughly six feet high and five feet wide entrance to this chamber, is covered with a curtain with a painted image of Muruga in his Balasubramanium form. Before the screen is a granite statue of a peacock on a pedestal about four feet high. Behind that is a granite floral platform of equal height. Next to it is a narrow table about six feet long. These are positioned in a linear arrangement with the peacock facing Muruga. The devotees could approach the image from either side of this arrangement of ritual objects.
Above the entrance to Muruga's chamber, the wall has a rectangular cavity about eight feet wide and four feet high. Two rectangular concrete slabs above and below this cavity provide it with a sort of roof and a ground. On the ground slab, the lintel of the entrance, which is shorter and deeper than the slab above it, inside the cavity, there is a row of statues. According to Velupillai and Rajaratnam, and as I too already identified, they are images of Pulleyar, Muruga, Valliamma, a Vadda girl and a Vadda, from right to left.
Regarding Valliamma
I learned the story of Kataragama Deiyo in my childhood. Almost everybody in my native village near Galle knew about the Deiyo's Sri Lankan wife Valliamma. I knew the story in even more detail than most of my village people because, unlike them, I had read books about Kataragama Deiyo and listened to his devotees
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talk about him and Valliamma. I knew that Kataragama Deiyo, the god with six faces, twelve arms, one body, bearing a spear and riding a peacock, was the son of Siva and Parvati and younger brother of Gana Deiyo. Kanda Kumara was married to Devasena, a goddess. He killed an Asura named Taraka and won the great war between the gods (Sura) and the Asuras. For whatever the reason, Kataragama Deiyo had once gone by Sri Lanka and seen Valliamma, a Vadda girl, in Kataragama. He immediately fell in love with her. But, for reasons unknown to me at that time, she did not respond favorably. The Deiyo tried hard but the results were negative. Then his elder brother Gana Deiyo came over and the brothers hatched a plot. When Valliamma was in the forest Gana Deiyo would come as a massive ferocious elephant and chase Valliamma. Kataragama Deiyo would stand in her path as a huge tree with a very large cavity. Valliamma, running for her life, would rush into the cavity and the Deiyo would embrace her. The plan worked and Valliamma found herself in Kataragama Deiyo's arms. She fell in love with Kataragama Deiyo.
Galle town had many groceries owned by Tamil merchants and we used to receive New Year calendars from these grocers. Many calendars were printed in South India and carried colorful pictures of the divine brothers in the company of Valliamma, minutes after the conquest of Valliamma by Kataragama Deiyo, with Gana Deiyo standing by, all beaming divinely. This is what most Sinhala people know, even today, about Kataragama Deiyo's romance with Valliamma.
The statues on the lintel of the Kirankulam kovil reminded me of the story and the pictures in the calendars. I asked Velupillai what he could say about the figures. Velupillai repeated what he had told me about the arrival of Muruga in Sri Lanka, about Valliamma, how Valliamma was reluctant, and later how Pulleyar helped Muruga to win Valliamma. I had more questions about Valliamma's background.
“Who is Valliamma?” I asked. "She is a Vadda lady,” he replied.
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“Who are the Vaddas?” I asked. "Wild people, jungle people,” he said. "Do Tamils call them Vaddas?” I asked. "Tamils call them Vedars,” he answered. "Are they Sinhala or Tamil?” I asked. Velupillai seemed at a loss. This was a hard one. After pondering for a while he said, "Some of them speak Sinhala. When I worked in Badulla I met many Vaddas. They all spoke Sinhala. But there are Vaddas who speak Tamil. Some of the Vanni Vaddas and east coast Vaddas speak Tamil. So, it is very hard to say. They are their own group. They have their own language. They speak Sinhala when they live in Sinhala areas and Tamil when they live in Tamil areas. They also speak their own language. So, it is hard to say. But (puckering his lips and nodding), I think they are mostly Sinhala. They are Sinhala.”
"What about their own language, if they are Sinhala?" I asked. "That is very confusing. Well, Vadda language is more like Sinhala.” He said.
"So, Valliamma is a Sinhala lady?” Velupillai smiled widely and gave me a "You got me there!” look. He replied, "You see, no one thinks like that Valliamman is Sinhala or Tamil? No one asks that question! But it is a very interesting question (smiling thoughtfully and shyly and shaking his head).” -
"How do you imagine her? Like, does she speak Tamil or Sinhala?" I prompted.
Continuing to smile cagily he said, "I am telling you the truth. In my mind she speaks Tamil.”
In the back of his mind, as it occurred to me, he thought I was crazy to ask these questions. That cagey Smile was also a bit sarcastic. When Rajaratnam joined us, there was an explosion of dialogue in Tamil spiced with headshakes, grimaces and gesticulations garnished with chuckles. I figured my unusual questions produced curiosity and hilarity. They were crazy questions that occurred to no one in real life. Nonetheless, they
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did point to certain relevant issues. Rajaratnam quickly got inside those issues. Looking grave, he thought for a minute and concluded that the issue could not be settled because no one knew anything for sure. However, Velupillai didn't let go. He brought in Sunderam, the young and cheerfully hospitable kurukkal of the kovil. Sunderam, with his training in doctrinal matters, could neither afford to see the funny side as Velupillai did nor leave the matters alone as unknowable as Rajaratnam did.
"Valliamman is a goddess. Gods are neither Tamil nor Sinhala. They speak all languages.”
"But what about Muruga? Is he not Tamil?” asked Velupillai. "Muruga is neither Tamil nor non-Tamil. He is a god. Only Tamil people seem to worship him. That does not make him a Tamil. Anyone can worship Muruga and obtain his blessings. Valliamman is a goddess. She was born from the womb of a doe. Nambirajan, the Vadda, only raised her. Therefore she is not truly a daughter of a Vadda,” answered Sunderam.
"What can you say about the statues over there?” I asked him pointing to the images above the entrance.
"That is the marriage of Muruga and Valliamman,” he replied. "Did the marriage occur as soon as Pulleyar came by and caused Valliamman to fall in love with Muruga?” I asked.
"Not at all. Valliamman fell in love with Muruga. But the Vadda king Nambirajan did not want to give Valliamman to a stranger. And, Valliamman wouldn't marry Muruga unless her adopted father allowed her to marry him. The Vaddas tried to drive Muruga away. However, Muruga did not go. Instead, he caused them to die. Then Valliamman pleaded to Muruga to bring them back to life. This made Nambirajan see Muruga for what he was. He then arranged the wedding and Muruga married Valliamman.”
However, the Tamils in Tamil Nadu relate a different story. Their account descends from Kacciappa Sivacariyar's Kantha Puranam described earlier. Kacciappa's account is unique, as no prior Tamil literary work described Muruga's marriage to Valli in
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as much detail. He must have extracted the story from the oral tradition of his time, i.e. late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In the twenty fourth section called the valliyammai tirumanam of the sixth book titled takkakantam, Kacciappa relates the story of Valli.
As discussed earlier, in the first book called the urpatti kantam, two goddesses named Amutavalli and Cuntaravalli, the two daughters of Vishnu, desire to be with Muruga and are reborn. Amutavalli is reborn as Indra's daughter and is named Teivayanai. Cuntaravalli is reborn as the daughter of Civamuni, a great sage. In Tontainadu there is a village named Merpati where there is a hill called Vallimalai. Sage Civamuni performs acts of penance on this hill. Here also lives a hunter named Nampi. Nampi has sons but no daughter.
One day, Civamuni sees a doe and develops passion to be with her. As he looks at her, the doe becomes pregnant and Cuntaravalli becomes incarnate in her womb as an embryo. The doe gives birth to a girl-child in a pit made for a valli vine. The doe abandons the infant and Nampi and his wife discover her. They adopt her and name her Valli because she was found near the valli vine. When she is twelve years old, she goes to watch her father's millet field.
Rishi Narada, a friend of Muruga's, happens to see her. He goes to Tiruttanikai where Muruga lives and tells him about Valli. Muruga assumes the likeness of a hunter and comes to the millet field. Just as Muruga begins a conversation with Valli, Nampi and his hunters appear on the scene. Muruga transforms himself into a venkai tree to avoid them. Nampi and his hunters leave. Muruga resumes his guise of a hunter and asks Valli to marry him. Nampi and the hunters return. Muruga assumes the shape of an old Saiva ascetic. Valli feeds him and gives him water. The Saiva ascetic tells her that because she has fed him she must now make love to him. Valli refuses. Then Muruga's brother Ganesha appears as a wild elephant. Afraid of the elephant, Valli runs into the ascetic's arms asking for protection. Muruga returns to his divine shape and they
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make love. Many obstacles occurthereafter, but Muruga overcomes them and marries Valli. Muruga and Valli go to Kantaverpu and meet Teivayanai, Muruga's first wife. Teivayanai and Valli lived in harmony, like Ganga and Jamuna.
The story is very colorful and its many episodes make it ideal subject matter for a theatrical performance. Wanting more information, I asked my friends why Valliamma is often presented with a green complexion.
Velupillai replied, "Valliamman was not a goddess when Muruga met her. She was a goddess before that but after her birth in human form from a doe she ceased to be a goddess because she was then in a human body. Green complexion indicates that.”
I pointed to Valliamma among the statues above the doorway. She was not green. She was dark purplish pink. So was the Vadda girl standing next to Valli, dressed in a string of leaves and branches and leafy breast cover, wearing a presumably gold necklace, gold earrings and gray (presumably silver) wristbands and upper armbands, holding a garland. And standing arrogantly next to her, the big Vadda, King Nambirajan, was also dark pink wearing a string of leaves and twigs, a crown of leaves gathered by a gold headband, an ivory amulet on a black String round his neck, gray bracelets and a red (presumably floral) upper armband.
The gods were of buttery complexion. Pulleyar stood to the right of Muruga, holding his golden insignia with two of his four arms, right hand held chest high and open in the abhaya mudra with a red swastika inscribed in the palm, and the left hand, chest high, holding something, presumably some modakan Sweet of which he is so fond. Pulleyar wore a vermilion dhoti with a wide gold boarder, beige waistcloth with a blue boarder, and a dark green shawl with a gold boarder. A thin white line slung across his chest from left down to the right indicated that he was a Brahman, at least of the trivarna.
Muruga stood at Pulleyar's left. His lance, placed right before his left foot, leaned on his right shoulder. He had only two arms and one face indicating that he was Muruga rather than one of his
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Sanskritic forms of Skanda/Kartikeya. He wore a light beige dhoti with a gold motif at the boarders, a dark green cloth wrapped around his waist, and a pale ultramarine shawl with a dark blue motif at the boarders. Over the shawl he wore a grand garland of red kadamba flowers for a broad red strip, some narrow stacking of leaves for a thin green ring leading to the broad white jasmine band, again a thin green ring and then a broad red part and so on. The ends of this string came together in a ball-like knot with a red upper part, a green line and a white curved bottom. He was taking Valliamma's right hand with his left hand and placing it on his right hand in a gesture that signifies matrimony. His face, at least here, was expressionless (although in calendar and poster art he is smiling), with his gaze fixed on the ground ahead of him.
Valliamma stood on Muruga's left, turning slightly in his direction, wearing a dark maroon Sari and a vermilion blouse (the same color as Pulleyar's red dhoti). Her gaze went past everyone, fixing on nothing. The rest of her attire was supposed to indicate divine opulence. Presumably, with her marriage to Muruga, Valliamma became a goddess. The three divine beings wore what appeared as crowns, belts, bracelets, armbands with suggestions of carvings, all presumably solid gold jewel-encrusted ornamental hardware that gods and goddesses habitually wear at all times. The contrast between the gods and the humans could not be greater. The only thing that Valliamma had in common with the Vaddas was her complexion. It was dark purplish pink.
"She is not green here,” I said. "Kannagiamman is also green,” said Velupillai, smiling. "Kannagiamman is green, Kannagiamman is green!" said Rajaratnam, gravely nodding, raising and waving his index finger, and grinning widely.
"Sometimes they look like other gods. Not green or black or anything like that but like other gods,” said Velupillai, making another discovery.
"Just like everybody else!” Rajaratnam exclaimed, grinning widely and gyrating his face, as he made the connections.
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"Sometimes she is green and at other times she is pink. It doesn't matter. The idea is to make a distinction between gods and humans. Green, pink, black, blue, all the same,” said Sunderam. The conversation ended when Sunderam went to organize the puja.
Valliamma has a special identity that unites Tamil, Sinhala, and Vadda communities. When and how did this relationship arise?
The bride on the lintel, Valliamma, has a remarkable role to play in the Kataragama drama. Her special identity unites three communities in Sri Lanka - the Vaddas, Tamils and the Sinhalas. This is a point that the devotees of Kataragama have invented over the course of time. Valliamman was unknown in Sri Lanka until recent times although she was a deeply established deity in Tamil Nadu for millennia.
As I discussed earlier the oldest literary sources that mentioned Valliamman were the Tamil poets of the first Sangam period in the first to fifth centuries of the CE. The references are often indirect. Nonetheless, there is sufficient information to establish that the Tamils of this era, and even earlier, believed that Muruga married a maiden named Valli, the daughter of a hunter belonging to the Kuravai community. The romance between Muruga and Valli, similar to the northern Krishna and Radha romance, is a model that poets use to frame all other romances.
The Sangam poets and their successors such as Nakkirar and Kacciappa elaborated this model and the latter rendered it into a well-designed story staged in the hills around Madurai in Tamil Nadu. As I stated earlier, Kacciappa lived between 1350 and 1400 of the CE. After Kacciappa, the poet and Muruga devotee Arunagiri Nathar sang about the romance, still staged in Tamil Nadu. Arunagiri lived in the 1400s.
Throughout this period, no one attempted to relocate the Valliamman story in Sri Lanka. Not a single Tamil source down to the nineteenth century even mentions Kataragama as the native village of Valli. Although Arunagiri visited Kataragama, he still located the Valli story in Tamil Nadu.” −
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It is equally interesting that the early Sinhala sources also do not mention anything about Valliamma. The first known reference to Skanda occurs in the twelfth century, in the second part of the Mahavansa. However, this reference does not connect Skanda (named as Kumara) with Kataragama or Valli. The twelfth century muvadevaavata and Sasadavata specifically mention Kanda Kumara. Bhikku Totagamuve Sri Rahula mentions Kanda Kumara as Mahasena in his fourteenth century epistolary poems Salalihini andparevi Sandesas. Bhikku Rahula indicates that Skanda worship was widespread during his time by referring to the locations where temples for Mahasena existed. What is interesting in the parevi Sandesa is that in poem 42 he says that Mahasena destroyed the arrogance of the Asura named surapiyumai.” This is none other than the Asura Curapadman of the Muruga tradition. However, these are merely mentioned and there are no references to Valli or even Kataragama. His contemporary bhikku Vidagama Maitreya also, in his hansa Sandesa, mentions a temple for Savana (shadanana - six faced). A rock inscription dated to 1344 at the Lankatilake Rajamaha Viharaya near Kandy states that an image of Skanda was constructed at the Viharaya. Again, Muruga is not mentioned in the inscription indicating the sanskritic orientation of the image.
These fourteenth century works indicate that although the main god of the period was Upulvan, identified as Vishnu, Skanda worship was also widespread. However, although Skanda is mentioned in various names in these works, they are silent about Valli, Kataragama, or the Vaddas. Nevertheless, fourteenth century writers, particularly Sri Rahula who was believed to have received Skanda's blessings, were aware of Curapadman of the Kanda Puranam which, too, was composed around the same period. It appears that even Sri Rahula, the Sanskrit and Tamil scholar, was probably familiar with Kacciappa Civacaryar’s Kanda Puranam, accepted Kacciappa's rendition on its face value and did not attempt to relocate the drama in Sri Lanka. -
The first reference to the god of Kataragama is a 1516 Thai work, the jinakalamalini. It indicates the reputation of the god of
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Kataragama in the Buddhist world. This work informs that a god até a place called Khattagama (Kataragama) was one of the guardian deities of Lanka. Joao Rebeiro, a soldier in a Portuguese regiment, states in 1642 that he and one hundred and fifty other soldiers, tempted by the reputation of the temple in Kataragama as full of treasures, went to Kataragama to plunder the temple. In his scanty description of the god of Kataragama, no mention is made of Valliamma. Rebeiro also wrote about the Vaddas. However, again, he makes no connection between the Vaddas and the god of Kataragama or Valliamma. In 1681, Robert Knox published the thus far most elaborate account of the god of Cottragam and of the Vaddas, but Knox also does not mention any relationship between the god of Cottragam, Vaddas and Valliamma. In sum, the Valliamma story had not been re-enacted and relocated in Sri Lanka through the seventeenth century.
However, in some eighteenth century Sinhala literature, the story of Valliamma finds an important place. Several panegyrics, kanda malaya, viyovaga ratna malaya and kanda kumarugE upata, kadira dev upata, kanda kumAra ashthaka, kanda kumara Sahala, kandakumara sirita, kanda parale, kanda sura varuna, kataragama deviyanta dalumura malyahan kavi and kataragama surindunta prasasti written in honor of Kanda Kumara, fall within several genera of Sinhala kavi tradition of the period; the upata (birth), malaya (garland), Sirita (biography), parale (trance), Sahali (account), varuna (in praise) and the prasasti (panegyrics). These can be dated as eighteenth century or later works. They can also be translations of Tamil works.o Of these, the kanda malaya and the kanda upata relate the story of Kanda Kumara, firmly identifying him with Kanda of Kacciappa's Kantha Puranam. These poems situate the Story of Muruga and Valli in Kataragama indicating that the Sinhala devotees had begun to view Kanda Kumara in the image of Skanda of the Kantha Puranam. Beliefs about Muruga became beliefs about Skanda, and the belief that Valli was the daughter of a hunter (and therefore of a Vadda in Sri Lanka) had entered the Sinhala imagination. Balachandra, the author of kanda kumara sirita states
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in the colophon that he composed the poem in Saka era 1630 (1708 of the CE). This trend produced a new wave of Sinhala epistolary poems specifically addressing the god of Kataragama. They were the hemakurulu Sandesaya by Dikvalle Samanera around 1707-39, nila kobo sandesaya of Barana Ganitacarya around 1780-89, katakirili Sandesaya by a poet in Dorapane in 1788, and the diyasavulsandesaya by bhikkhu Tal Arambe Dhammakkhanda in 1813.°
It is difficult to find the exact contexts in which the Sinhala and Sri Lankan Tamil beliefs about Valliamma coalesced in their ritual life but, given the existence of the above literary evidence, it is reasonable to assert that this process occurred during the late seventeenth century or in the early decades of the eighteenth century. However, the existence of a literary tradition is not itself conclusive evidence of a popular tradition as courtly poetry hardly reached the public. On the other hand, it is likely that conservative traditions rejected all of the innovations found in the sources mentioned above. For instance, a bhikkhu informing a Dutch governor named Fewkes about the nature of the god of Kataragama and the annual rituals at Kataragama,in 1765, did not mention Valliamma at all. He described the fifteen annual processions as merely circling the village and returning to the Maha Devale, indicating that the Kataragama Maha Devale functioned in much the same way the devales functioned elsewhere.'
If the bhikkhu's account is accurate, then it is necessary to explain the time lag between the construction of literary motifs and the development of ritual practices based on the literary motifs. Historians concur that from the twelfth century onwards the religion of the Sinhalas was strongly influenced by Hinduism, and, as stated earlier, from the fourteenth century many Hindu deities became the guardian deities of Sri Lanka. But the Sri Lankan elite Hinduism through the eighteenth century was the Hinduism of the Brahmans, courts, courtiers, and of groups who claimed a social standing above the sudras of South India and Sri Lanka. It was not the Hinduism of the common people but the soteriological
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Hinduism of the literati, of the Puranic religion, of the Saiva Siddhanta, where Skanda was seen as a great ascetic, an embodiment of Siva. Although the knowledge of Kacciappa's Kanda Puranam, and Muruga's marriage to Valli Stated therein, circulated in these social classes, they suppressed the folk religion that Kacciappa accommodated because of their Brahmanical agama orientation. Pre-Sanskritic Muruga and Valli belonged in the Tamil folk religion as presiding deities. The Kataragama Devale of Kandy and the Teivayanaiamman kovil in Kataragama were established in the seventeenth century. In both, to this day, Brahmins conduct daily and special ceremonies according to Brahmanical customs that do not accommodate Valliamma. Until the mid-nineteenth century, non-agama practices of the Sudra and mleccha (untouchable or Dalit) groups were not allowed.'
However, the Kataragama Maha Devale retained its traditional position as a Sinhala religious establishment where Sinhalakapuralas conducted the rituals in a non-agama manner, ignored caste distinctions, but retained sedate ritual procedures bereft of possession and other ecstatic practices. Yet, since it was a royally patronized temple, it is likely that the ritual procedures there remained conservative and did not admit the beliefs and practices of the Muruga cult. However, the present day procession takes the god to Valliamma kovil where he spends some time and then returns to the Maha Devale. This is peculiar to Kataragama, and perhaps to a few other satellite Kataragama devales also, but it could be a post - 1765 development.
On the other hand, it is likely that the bhikkhu who provided the information to the Dutch was ignorant of what was actually going on in Kataragama, or merely assumed that the practices in Kataragama was the same as what went on in shrines for the god elsewhere, or deliberately omitted the presence of rituals related to Valliamma in order to construct a purely Sinhala Buddhist image of the god of Kataragama. It is possible that the rise of the Tamil Hindu Nayakkar dynasty towards the end of the seventeenth
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century and the resultant elevation of Hindu deity worship and ritualism as the court religion produced a Buddhist reaction and that the bhikkhu's omission indicates this reaction.
Major Davy, who visited Kataragama in 1819, observed that one road from the Maha Devale ended in a dagaba while the other ended in a small kovil of no consequence. Undoubtedly, this was the Valliamma Devale in its humble original position.” Major Doyle wrote that one Alavvmulla Maha Betme Rala provided him with evidence that in 1819 or thereabouts Viravickrama Sri Kirti, the claimant to the throne, spoke of golden images of Kadaswamy and Valliamma in Kataragama. Clearly, at least by 1819, Valliamma was a significant deity in Kataragama. This was merely fifty years after the bhikkhu reported to the Dutch governor Fewkes. This shows that either the bhikkhu Suppressed information or, during the period between 1765 and 1819, mere fifty two years, a significant change had occurred in the Kataragama beliefs and ritual procedures.
How did the Muruga belief system enter Kataragama beliefs and practices? It is likely that wherever Skanda worship existed in Sri Lanka at least some Tamils identified him with the traditional non-Brahmanical Tamil deity Muruga. This kind of Muruga worship must have existed from the earliest periods of Skanda worship in Sri Lanka as Sri Lankan culture included both Sinhala and Tamil folk beliefs. What is at issue here is not the beliefs in Muruga themselves but the transposition of the Muruga story as it comes in Kacciappa Civacaryar’s Kanda Puranam. Since Kacciappa himself lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and since he stages the story in Tamil Nadu, and since none of the Sinhala or Tamil literary sources from fifteenth to seventeenth centuries indicate Valli in Kataragama, the transposition had to occur after the seventeenth century. I hypothesize that this must have Occurred during or after the seventeenth century.
King Rajasinghe II, during whose reign in the Seventeenth century the Kataragama devale in Kandy and Teivayanaiamman
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kovil in Kataragama were established, instituted the practice of marrying from the Nayakkar clan in Madurai when suitable kSatriya women were unavailable in Sri Lanka. Together with the queen, large numbers of Tamil elite and service castes arrived as her retinue and settled in various parts of the island. The Nayakkar influence reached its zenith when King Vira Parakrama Narendrasinghe, Rajasingha's grandson, died heirless in 1739, paving the way for his Nayakkar queen's brother Vijaya Rajasinghe to be crowned as the king. With the ascendancy of the Nayakkars, until the Kandyan kingdom fell in 1815, there was undisturbed immigration of South Indians, particularly Tamils, into the island. Unlike the previous migrations that were restricted to the highcaste Sanscritized Tamils at service in the court, the new wave that started in the seventeenth century included the non-Sanscritized low caste Tamils as well.
These people brought their folk religion and they found an already existing non-agama Skanda shrine in Kataragama that admitted them irrespective of caste. Kataragama involved two main shrines: one on the hill Vadahitiya Kanda and one by the river. The shrines were surrounded by a Sinhala village of a hybrid population of Sinhala and Vadda ancestry. They practiced hunting as well as millet growing. The geography of Kataragama and the Sacred geography of the kurinci of the Kuravaihunters structurally overlapped. The Kanda Puranam encounters between Muruga, Valli, and the hunters could be easily reimagined in these surroundings. Thus reimagined, the Kanda Puraman story could be simulated in Kataragama.'
The kanda malaya, kanda kumara sirita, kadira devi upata and other non-traditional literary works reflect the influence of this reimagining and simulation on the Sinhala belief system because they describe how Kanda Kumara, now identified with Muruga, met Valli in Kataragama. However, if the Dutch report on the bhikkhu's account is accurate, by 1765, although Kacciappa Civacaryar’s story and its transposition in Kataragama circulated
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among the Sri Lankan literati as a literary fact, the traditions of Kataragama had not accepted Muruga and Valli Oriented rituals. But, as the Hindu religious tradition of the Nayakkar dynasty became a dominant feature in the kingdom, particularly towards the end of the seventeenth century, Kataragama must have adopted the transposition of the Muruga/Valli motif in Kataragama. Yet, the syncretism had left out the name of the Tamil god Muruga and absorbed only the sanscritized part of it. What Alavvmulla Maha Betmetold Doyle, that Viravickrema Sri Kirti, also known as Dorei Sami- the claimant to the throne, knew of a statue of Valliamma in Kataragama, represented the new cultural compromise in Kataragama. However much the Buddhist monastic component of Kataragama resisted this compromise, the larger political reality and the Social acceptance of the syncretism was sufficiently compelling to establish Valliamma as an integral part of Kataragama ritual life. What Davy noticed, that a road from the Maha Devale ended in a decrepit shrine, attests to this cultural compromise and assimilation. Perhaps, Kataragama administration also discovered that by adopting Valliamma they could enhance their revenues and this economic aspect must have been even more compelling than all the politics and social forces.
The other side of the coin is just as interesting. The Buddhists have accepted Valliamma in Kataragama but have not domesticated her to this day. The Sinhala Buddhist iconography of the god portrays him alone. Except for the Sinhala Buddhist core cult members, others do not pay attention to her for they hardly visit the devale dedicated to her and run by a Sinhalakapurala. Further, as stated above, the Sinhala Buddhists adopt her only on the ideological pole of the ritual life and adopt the god without his Tamil name. Interestingly, as Bryan Pfaffenberger noticed, the high caste Vellala Tamils hardly adopt her and distantly participate in the Muruga centered activities in Kataragama, solely when in dire need, for they practice the agama Hinduism of the Sanskritic tradition where the god is an ascetic and his name is Kandasami.
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With the fall of the Kandyan kingdom and with the influx of Tamil workers into the plantations from 1830s, Kataragama traditions had begun to accommodate more and more activities of the Muruga cultists.” The kavadi dancing, body piercing, hookhanging and walking on nailed-sandals were accommodated in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, in full recognition of the religion of the Tamil plantation workers and Kataragama's role in the saga of Muruga's marriage to Valli. The Vadda kinship with Valli and Muruga was also established even though some Vaddas had no notions of Kanda Kumara or Valli even the early twentieth century.’ The first to Vaddas to recognize this connection were those who lived close to the Sinhalas and Tamils. By and by, the entire Vadda community found good economic reasons to uphold this belief for public consumption although privately they may see no connections with Valli, Nambirajan the Kuravai'king and the kurinci.’
The reimagining and relocation of the drama in the Sri Lankan Tamil tradition is significant for several reasons. On the one hand, it shows the flexibility of the Muruga tradition. It is spatially movable. The devotees re-establish their cult wherever they go by defining and sacralizing compatible resources - spatial, structural and human - in their cultic terms. The structures are the culturally constructed physical entities such as temples, institutions such as cults, and landscapes. The devotees ideologically redefine them to establish cult centers in their new environments to continue their religious lives. The relocation of the cult and the adoption of the communities in the new localities indicate their adaptation to and identification with their new country. Amidst all the hardships of forced relocation, they expressed their will to carry on with their lives in a new sacred landscape against all Odds.
On the other hand, the corresponding accommodation of the reimagination of the Muruga story by the Sinhala and the Vadda communities indicate their willingness to embrace the cultural elements of the new comers. As the new comers re-sacralized the
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space, institutions and peoples, on their terms the indigenous groups domesticated the alien peoples and their cultural institutions, and their re-definitions of local entities by absorbing them within the existing institutions. Hence the kanda kumara sirita, kanda malaya and kanda upata etc., the non-traditional Sinhala literature on Kanda Kumara, come up as literary expressions of these assimilations.’
Needless to say, these are not smooth processes. There are elements on all sides that reject the ethno-cultural 'others, desiring to remain pure' and exclusive. As said before, some Sinhalas reject the entire Muruga related beliefs and activities because they are Tamil beliefs. Some Tamils reject the re-enactment of the Muruga/ Vallistory since it is not a part of the agamia religion. Some Vaddas reject any attempt to incorporate the Vaddas into the Kanda Kumara/Muruga traditions as unknown and unrelated to them.' Bailey (op.cit.) in Selligmann and Selligmann (1911:2003 - 187 n2) and Selligmann and Selligmann (ibid. 34).
While the puja was progressing, two other pada yatra pilgrims came in. They were middle-aged men with graying and thinning hair and wiry bodies. Judging by their hands and feet, they had worked hard to make a living. They wore Orange vettis, the traditional outfit for pada yatris, Swamis, and mendicants of various religious descriptions. They appeared to have been on the road for some time. Their clothes were soiled. Rajaratnam tried to start a conversation but our pilgrims were not very talkative. Nonetheless, he learned from them that they were from a village near Valachchenai, north of Batticaloa. They have been on the road for three days.
The puja was over and the kurukkal distributed prasad into our cupped hands. It was rice Sweetened with various ingredients. I was hungry. Soon after eating, Ilay down for a nap. The pilgrims from Valachchenai lay on the floor near the entrance. They bothered no one. No one bothered them.
The food, the heat and the exhaustion made me sleepy. When I woke up Rajaratnam was organizing our baggage. Velupillai
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continued to sleep. He must have been in excruciating pain and sleep must be ablessing to him after the ordeal of walking barefoot on melting tar. The pilgrims from Valachchenai were nowhere around. By half past four, after a word of thanks with the genial Sunderam, we were back on the road; back in the sun, now mellowing, and walking with the wind, now cooling. We all felt energetic although Velupillai kept getting behind because of his sore feet. However, later on, the sheer dullness of the ugly little bazaars and nondescript houses all along the way began to get on my nerves. Fortunately, in the gathering dusk of the late afternoon, the surroundings assumed interesting contours in shades of gray, hiding much of their unsightliness. Velupillai was interested in stopping for the night, the first night of our pada yatra, as he was in pain. We readily agreed.
Kalavanchikudi
We approached a bazaar named Kalavanchikudi just before twilight. A man in a house by the road shouted at Velupillai. Our eager eyes searched the roadside, and located a middle-aged man with a stocky frame, salt and pepper hair down to his shoulders, a thin mustache, and a friendly grin. He walked across the street and greeted Velupillai who seemed ecstatic about this encounter. He was Kanagasabai, a lorry driver. Soon a woman came out of the gate. She was Pushpa, his wife. Following a vigorous conversation that I was clueless about, we entered a kovil premise about twenty meters from Kanagasabai's house. This was another Pulleyar temple, under reconstruction. Kanagasabai said we could stay in the verandah of the old kovil and eat at their house. The proposal was entirely acceptable to us. He showed us a bathing well and a row of latrines on a piece of wasteland beyond the temple boundary. We were to go to their house after we bathed and rested.
The Kanagasabai residence was still in the midst of construction. It was a medium sized square building. The walls were un-plastered brick and the floors were un-cemented but
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smoothened with the traditional earth and cow-dung paste. The roof was well made but covered with cadjans and rusty corrugated galvanized sheets. It was representative of millions of Sri Lankan houses in the making, irrespective of the race, caste or religion of the owners or the region they lived in. Wherever I went, I encountered these same-sized same-shaped structures in the making, built with lower middle class incomes, local bank loans, and occasional windfalls. Kanagasabai offered me the only chair in the verandah as Pushpa rolled out a mat for the others. I sat on the mat among my hosts and companions and sipped plain-tea served in a glass. The open verandah was lit with an un-shaded electric bulb hanging from a rafter. The interior, partially visible through the main entrance, appeared warmly lit. Three children, two in their early teens and one older teenager, were studying. This was everyman's home and family in Sri Lanka.
Velupillai and Rajaratnam had already whispered to the Kanagasabais all the information they knew about me. Pushpa was curious about Peradeniya University. Her eldest daughter was a science student at a local school for the G.C.E. Advanced Level Examinations. Pushpa wanted her to enter the Peradeniya University to obtain the M.B.B.S. degree. She asked many questions about Peradeniya and Kandy. She had only heard about these places. Velupillai vigorously translated:
Is it very cold in Kandy and Peradeniya? The Peradeniya Botanical Gardens must be very beautiful. I heard that Peradeniya University is also a very beautiful place. (Turning towards the children) I keep pushing her to study. She plays too much!
The torrent ended with a particular sense of urgency, with rising Octave and amplitude. Turning towards me, appearing pleased but grave, she said in a low tone,
She studies very hard. She got six distinctions at the G.C.E. Ordinary Level in science subjects. I keep
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hoping Isn't it nice if she could become a doctor someday?'
Although common place, this conversation involves significant issues not only to Kanagasabais' future but also to the futures of hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan families and to the future of Sri Lanka as an island nation. A large class of people to which Kanagasabais belong - not the majority (the peasantry from which they emerge) but a group that is rapidly expanding as Sri Lanka's growing population becomes economically and Socially increasingly urbanized - have begun to think ahead. Through their children, these people are looking for a future that is different from theirs; a more prosperous, respectable and stable future. For this class of people, the education of their children is of paramount importance for it will take them to this future world of imagined well-being, respectability, and happiness. What is significant here is that this class is multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious and multiregional. There are Kanagasabais among the Sinhalas, Muslims and Burghers. Even some Vaddas in the border villages entertain such plans for their future.
Pushpa Kanagasabai is emboldened by her daughter's success at the preliminary examinations. She has her hopes fired-up with cultural images of the successful child's future as an engineer or a doctor. However, like many other ambitious parents of her Social class, she builds these mental images of success without any prior experience. She has little or no idea as to what lies between now and the day her daughter would receive her M.B.B.S. degree from the Peradeniya University.
What lies between, unfortunately, has been a war zone, figuratively, ideologically and empirically, for the past century or so, but most intensely since Independence in 1948. Linguistic, territorial and ethnic conflicts have created walls between the Sinhala and Tamil communities and the areas each community predominates. Each community feels unsafe in the Other's “territories.” Nonetheless, just a year of living without a war has
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energized the minds of the Kanagasabais. The invisible but bulletridden and blood-splattered wall that prevents them from even thinking about the rest of the country (except according to an imposed formula) is now less opaque. Their minds have quickly expanded to roam everywhere in their country as they imagined it. They see the country and this place in it as a whole, not with confining regional identities. The Kanagasabais, in spite of the war and disorientation, look forward to succeed in places over which they have had claims but no access, in places in their native land.
After tea, the Kanagasabais said the public library next to their residence would be more appropriate for our stay. It had a clean lavatory and a convenient water tap. The front verandah was open and we could sleep there. The library had a watcher who would take care of us. We walked over and the Kanagasabais brought us plastic mats, a large basin full of idiappam and a bowl of kiri shodi. After devouring everything, we attempted to sleep. Although Rajaratnam fortified the verandah with a number of mosquito coils, armies of large ferocious mosquitoes braved the smoke and all three of us spent time slapping rather than sleeping. The watcher, an amiable Tamil man, stayed awake all night long with his transistor radio blaring Tamil popular Songs. Sweating in the humid air, Ilay on my mat, wanting but unable to sleep, with shapeless thoughts about the day's encounters lazily wandering in my mind.
End Notes
Pulleyar is the name used by the Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus and some Sinhala Buddhists in the North-Central Province to call the Hindu Puranic god Ganesha. Some also call him Vinayaka. Many Sinhala devotees, particularly in the northcentral, Vanni and northeastern areas of the island also call him Gana Deiyo. Throughout this, Ishall refer to this god using the many names that the Hindus use to call him.
* Brhaddharma Purana in O'Flaherty (1976:262-269). Alternatively, Parvati created him with a little dirt, perhaps some dead skin, that she obtained by rubbing her fingers on her body (Vamana Purana, 28.57-59) cited in Courtright (1985:44). The Sinhala folk story about Gana Deiyo in the kanda
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kumara siriza is a derivative of the Vamana Purana account. The Sinhala story that Parker (1909:157-58) collected has it that Parvati created Ganesa with some grass. Also see O'Flaherty (1980: 321).
Saturn. In Indo-European astrology, Saturn is believed to be a malefic.
Brahmananda Purana (2.3.41.30-2.3.43.42) and Brahmavaivarta Purana (3.4145) as cited in Courtright (1985:75-76).
O'Flaherty (1976: 262-269).
Compare this story with the one in Siva Purana cited in Chapter 1. The Sinhalas have tweaked the Siva Purana account for their own purposes. See Obeyesekere (1984:471) for oral account and Zvelebil (1991:31) for the account in kanda malaya, a Kandyan period work. This and other stories then entered the non-conventional literary tradition through the kanda kumara sirita, kanda malaya and kanda upata. See below for the significance of these literary works in the establishment of the present day deity worship in Kataragama, particularly in connection with Kanda Kumara's consort Valliamma and her connection with the Vaddas. See Obeyesekere (ibid.) for the psychological significance of this story.
See Siva Purana, cited in Chapter 1. Kashyapa in the Ganeshakavaca (4) in De Silva (1955:5-7). Vyasa in Ganeshashthaka (3) in De Silva (Op.Cit.9-10). Yama in Ganehsashtottarasatanamastotra (3) in De Silva (Op.Cit.7-9).
Ganesha's gluttony is thus iconographically celebrated. However, there is no agreement in the greater Indian belief systems regarding the nature of this sweet. Traditionally, in northern communities, a sweet called modaka - Sweet wheat or rice balls - is offered in large quantities, often twenty-one modaka balls at a time. The Tamil korukkattai is a whole class of sweets that also includes the Sanakritic modakas. The korukkattai can be sweet or salty. In Karnataka, he receives a sweet called kudubu. In Andra Pradesh, Ganesha is given undrallu, a sweet. The Keralians offer ghee appam. They satisfy Ganesha's appetite by submerging him in ghee appam in a ceremony called mudappam puja (Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi (1977:546) cited in Courtwright (1985:112). The Sinhalas call it modagan with innuendos of incest (Obeyesekere: 1990: 121-122, citing James Brow). Vyasa (ibid. 2) in De Silva (Op.Cit. 9). Makara is the name of a sea monster who is an emblem of Ananga or the puranic god of love. In this context, the makaras represent the makarasana in yoga. Apte (2003: 1217). As this term occurs frequently, I shall hereafter neither italicize nor use diacritical marks.
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Sunwise refers to traveling from east to west.
The meaning here is at least bivalent. A tirtha is quite literally a ford to set sailing across bodies of water to reach the opposite bank. Figuratively, it means a place where penances are performed to cross the Sansar, the river of births and deaths, to reach moksa.
The Turners (1978) distinguish between two types of pilgrimage centers - the archaic and the prototypical. The archaic are the ones with a nebulous past, unconnected to a founder. The prototypical are the ones that were established by the founder of a cult. In that sense, Kataragama is more an archaic place whereas the Sri Pada, Kalaniya, Mahiyangana and Nagadipa in Sri Lanka are prototypical. The founder's visit need not be historical.
7See Bhardwaj (1973) for details on the circuits of tirthas in ancient India. Also see
Bharati (1963 and 1970), Crooke (1956), Karve (1962), Stanley (1991) and Younger (1991) for accounts on Indian pilgrimages. For classical rules and accounts of pilgrimages, see Mahabharata — Aranyaka Parvan, Apasthamba Dharmasutra, Manu, Vayu Purana, Matsya Purana, Agni Purana and Garuda Purana.
Thomas Steele (1870), in Saparamadu (2004: 21-22).
McGilvray (2001) found that in the distant past the east coast Muslims, similar to some east coast Tamils, were matrilineal. They are all patrilineal groups today although in certain mosque related organizations they still adhere to matrilineal connections.
Epigraphia Zeylanica (3.336). McGilvray (op.cit.), Samaraweera (1997), and Devaraja (1994).
Interestingly McGilvray (ibid.) who studied the east coast Muslim communities in the 1970s and 1980s does not make the distinction. Samaraweera (1997) and Dewaraja (1994) make the distinction with reference to the colonial period. Those who informed me about the composition of the Muslim community refer to the political situation today. There has been a move to unify the Muslims although there is continual bickering between the Kandyan Muslims and east coast Muslims for Kandyan Muslims lead both Muslim parties.
Samaraweera (op.cit.) and McGilvray (op.cit.).
Ramanathan's brother, Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam - lawyer, scholar and high-level administrator-initiated a discourse to establish Tamil claims to the whole of the country that made even Kataragama a contested ground. I discuss Arunachalam's activities in Kataragama in Chapter Five.
Perhaps, the people of the desert saw a special significance in the oases with trees and springs.
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41
42
43
For the above description, I have borrowed much from Smart (1969:1971). See Smart (ibid. 490-493) and Eickelman (ibid.204-208). Smart (ibid. 517) and Ling (1968:295-297).
Eickelman (ibid.223).
Eickelman (ibid.222-235). Al-Ghazaliʼs full name in Arabic is Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad at-Tusi al-Ghazali. See Moosa (2005) for a biography and career of al Ghazali. Hottinger (1963:92) cited in Ling (ibid. 298).
Ling (ibid.298). Avicenna (980-1037) was born in Persia. His Arabic name is Abu Ali alHusayn ibn Abd Allah ibn Sina. Hottinger (ibid.94) cited in Ling (ibid.298-299). Al-Ghazali's monism was criticized by the Spanish Muslim philosopher
Averroes (1126- 1298); in Arabic, Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahamad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushid.
Most elaborate information on Sufi music of the sema ritual and much more are available in David and Kay Parsons (1997) The Music of Islam, Vol.9, Mawlawiyah Music of The Whirling Dervishes, CD No. 13149-2. Tucson, Celestial Harmonies.
Harry E. Tzalas 1998. Hellenic Electronic Center and Harry Tzalas. at www.greece.org/
Patrick Franke (2000). Begegnung mit Khidro Quellenstudien zum Imaginären im traditionellen Islam. Beiruter Texte und Studien 82. Beirut-Stuttgart., appears to be an authoritative research on the Khidr. Unfortunately, this work is not available to me. However, book review by Claudia Liebeskind (2002) in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 6513 provides a general outline of the work.
Today the Maghreb includes Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and some parts of Egypt. See Eicklelman (ibid.).
Ling (ibid.300-302). Encyclopedia of Islam. The Sinhala term samanala has a complex semantic structure. In everyday language Samanala means 'of the butterflies.' But samanala is also a variant of samantakuta, meaning the hill of Saman, the god of the hill and of the Sabaragamuva province where the hill is located.
I guess that the early Sufi interest in Kataragama was kindled by the name of the shrine as a Skanda shrine which echoes Iskandar of the Sufis.
The following account of the Sri Lankan Sufi theology is constructed out of materials from Hassan (1968).
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45
安
49
51
ahaldh (possessor) dikr (knowledge). Khizar is the South Asian derivative of Arabian Khidr.
This location is suspicious. There is no town called Nagoor in South India. Perhaps, it does not appear in the maps of South India. However, there is Nagaur in Rajasthan, a state famous among the Sufis for its grand Sufi center in Ajmeer. Nonetheless, many South Indian Muslims are Sufis, and are derogatorily called 'tomb worshipers' by the orthodox Sunnis. In all probability, the Sri Lankan Sufi tradition was established by them.
Hassan (1968:12) states that the author of this account, titled "Mahan Shahul Hameed, is one A. M.Yusuf, an editor of a Tamil journal titled Marumararchi. Lankan Muslim sect attacked for spreading Hindu' ideas, Saturday, November 6, 2004. www.hindustantimes.com
This has changed since the "cease fire agreement” between the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE. The hysterical drivers and trash dominate these
roads and the shops are full of merchandize.
The valli vine is a tuber that produces an edible yam. Botanically it has been identified as a member of the class Diascoreaceae (Zvelebil: 1975:188).
I extracted this account from Zvelebil (ibid. 188-189). Although Kacciyappa says that Teivayanai and Valli were friends others tell a different story. See Chapter Five for details.
See Arumugam Rasiah (1981). Numerous Tamil films and television dramas celebrate the grand feats of Muruga as well as the entire pantheon of gods, rishis, demons and villainous sorcerers that harness demonic powers that constitute the supernatural in the Tamil culture. Sampurna Ramayanam, Sampurna Mahabharatam, Sarasvati Sabandam are among the film classics. Currently there is a television drama titled Velan that celebrates the child Muruga Balasubramanium. Given the labyrinthine ways in which these performances evolve or devolve, it is hard to saw how Velan's future episodes would develop. Interestingly, film and television have become the media for relating myths - here taken in a sense similar to Donniger's "the history of the gods” and creating, editing and enhancing the repertoire. The introduction of modern information technology - not only the computer based IT but also the earlier technologies for information gathering and preserving such as film and television - has enhanced the traditional myth making by adding new dimensions to the pre-modern media of myth creation, dissemination and preservation: the text and the word of mouth. The oral and written traditions are no less active. Zvelebil reports a story in the oral tradition where Muruga chases Valliamman on a motorcycle. Such stories indicate the spirit in which the devotees of Muruga see him. He is beloved, heroic and
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forever young and contemporary. The awe of the sacred is mixed with a sense of humor. There are no inhibitions to place the gods in contemporary contexts.
The Vadda costume is interesting for another reason. The earliest accounts of the Vaddas, such as Knox's, state that they wore, in whatever meager manner, clothes. However, the twentieth century Sri Lankan imagination has redefined this to a leafy twig skirt of sorts. However, this Sri Lankan image descends from the colonial discourses on primitive places everywhere as the "wild” people who lived in a state of nature (Obeyesekere: undated: Colonial Histories and Vadda Primitivism, Part One, in www.living heritage.org). The Sri Lankan communities also absorbed this idea and imagined Vaddas as such. Ediriweera Sarachchandra's Maname, a tremendously popular Sinhala opera based on the folk story of Maname, involved Vaddas. The opera was produced in 1956. Maname fired the Sinhalatheatrical imagination and set the standards for Sinhala theater. There, Sarachchandra uses costumes for the Väddas to represent the skirts of leafy twigs myth propagated by the colonial writings.
Buddhist Sinhalas venerate Sivali Maha Rahatanvahanse, a legendary monk of Buddha's time. He too is depicted as constantly mixing food in or eating from an alms bowl. There the hand in the alms bowl is symbolic, representing Sivali's good fortune for receiving alms. The Sivali devotees believe that by worshiping Sivali his fortune may be simulated in the lives of the devotees. Pulleyar's modaka-laden left hand is likely to represent a similar intent to produce a simulacrum in the devotee’s life.
Kannagiamman is the Tamil name of the goddess known to the Sinhala and Tamil people of Sri Lanka as Pattini. For details of the goddess Pattini see Obeyesekere (1984).
In Thiruppugazh, in the poem Thanndai Anni (Divine Dance) he rejoices, "Oh! Lord who enjoys the lovely fragrance of Valli, the lady of the Kuravai tribe!"(34-38). Then in Ennaal Pirrakkavum (Nothing can I do of my own accord) he sings, "Oh! King of Valli born of Kura clan!" (ibid:53-57). Once more, in Sinaththavar (Thiruppugazh - Divine Fire), "You admired the charm of the damsel of Kurava clan, Valli.” (ibid:62-65) Arulmiku Arunagirinathar, Selections from the Thiruppugazh of Arunagirinathar (undated). This identification of Valli with the Kuravai goes on in many
other songs and poems but he never connects Valli with the Vaddas or
Kataragama.
Mahavansa (57:6-11). Dit rada pinisasurapiyumai namati ola gat siya atin kotinana mera sidurukala gat teda rasev Mahasendev radunudula sit Satosin namaduva denuva mana dola (parevi sandesa:42)
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61
R.Tennakone, the editor of the poem, says in his exegetical statement that the simpler rendition of Surapiyumai yields padmasura or Surapadma. (Tennakone:1932:23). I translate Tennakone's rendition as follows:
To gain the favor of the god King Mahasena, effulgent with dignity, who with his spear that pierced the Mount Mahameru, gored the Padmasura to destroy his arrogance - worship him with a cheerful mind.
selalihini sandesaya (26), hansa sandesaya (46), parevi sandesaya (42), kokila sandesaya (57 & 82).
See K.D.Somadasa (1995) for details. See Dharmadasa (1995) for a discussion of Sinhala literature of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Dharmadasa states that the rise of the Jaffna kingdom after the death of Parakramabahu VI led to a revival of Tamilliterature. Singai Pararajasekeran (1478-1519) and his brother Segerajasekeran carried out this campaign by importing manuscripts and inviting Scholars from South India to Nallur, the capital of the kingdom. This revival undoubtedly had an impact on the Kotte and Kandyan period religious beliefs and literary activities among the Sinhala literati (Op.Cit.471-490).
Dharmadasa (ibid.) for dating. Pieris (1950: 1995:695-697).
In fact, in the Jaffna area the agama temples were closed to the non-Vellala groups through the 1960s.
However, the Maha Devale did not admit the drummers and washer men, and several other "low-caste' service groups during the ritual procedures. They performed their services from without. Nonetheless, all irrespective of caste were admitted as devotees.
Davy (1821).
Pieris (Op.Cit:196 & 510). Discussing the anthropological aspects of the aesthetic experience Mikel Dufrenne observes that pure aesthetics arise when the cosmological a priori and existential a priori coincide in the affective a priori (1973:501-538). In our context, the bhakti in the established cult (the affective given) arises when the devotee encounters a natural and social environment (the existential given) in which she discovers the kurinci in which Muruga and Valli met (the cosmological given). Large scale free labor migrations from South India began around 1830 and continued well into the middle of the twentieth century at a steadily increasing rate (Wesumperuma: 1986). These, and significant numbers that immigrated were not from the Sanskritized groups. Their religion was not the Sanskritic agamas but the pre-Sanskritic religions mixed with some Sanskritic images.
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75
Their Muruga was more the Muruga of the ancient literature and less Kandasami. Valli was his wife.
Bailey (1863:304-305), wrote that the Vaddas of the interior had no notions of Valli or Kanda Kumara (cited in Selligmann & Selligmann (1911:2003 - 187n2) and the Selligmans, who interviewed the Vaddas of the interior as late as the first decade of the twentieth century, confirm Bailey's contention (Selligmann & Selligmann (ibid; 34).
There are scholarly attempts to connect the Vaddas with the Kuravai, and Kataragama with the kurinci.
A Sinhala attempt to absorb the Vaddas into their community is in the Mahavansa (Ch.37) account of Kuvanna (Kuveni in modern Sinhala), the first consort of the first king of the Sinhalas, and her children who begot the Pulinda, identified as the Vaddas. More recently, around fifteenth century or earlier, the story of Kuveni was retold and the Vaddas were given a new role to play in a ritual known as the kohomba kankariya. See Godakumbure (1963) for details of the ritual and Obeyesekere (1984) for the place of the ritual in larger networks of rituals.
Bailey (op.cit.) in Selligmann and Selligmann (1911:2003 - 187 n2) and Selligmann and Selligmann (ibid. 34).
The translation was reasonable. Velupillai translated from Tamil to English. I checked with Rajaratnam and Velupillai the Sinhala meanings of Pushpa's statements. The translation from Tamil to English to Sinhala and back to English had no semantic problems at least in this context. Rajaratnam's Sinhala agreed with Velupillai's Sinhala and my Sinhala.
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Chapter Three
Kalavanchikudi to Panama
July 25, 2003 Karaitivu
It was five O'clock in the morning. The Kanagasabais returned to the yard of the library, making a big racket to wake us up and brought us tea. They knew I was planning to leave at Six.
Our destination was Karaitivu, Velupillai's native village. By my reckoning, the distance between Kalavanchikudi and Karaitivu is eighteen kilometers. We walked fast because there was nothing attractive about this stretch, nothing to attract us to spend time watching, examining, opining and debating. Perhaps, for me, the novelty of the landscape had worn out. Perhaps, with two days’ experience on the road, I had begun to see patterns, and my visual and auditory perspectives had become more discriminating. The road was plain ugly, similar to all Sri Lankan roads near major towns. Buildings with unbecoming facades discolored with age and because of neglect, piles of garbage, and plastic trash lined the road polluted with the fumes and the noise of motor vehicles. One moves fast to get away from such assaults on one's sensibilities. I did.
But Velupillai had a hard time on the road. His cheerful mood of last evening quickly vanished as the blisters and bruises. on his feet began to bother him. His eczema was getting bad. Nothing surprising there, but the man's plight was visible on his face. We took frequent breaks so that he could rest his feet. That was the only reason that detained us in that stretch of the road.
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After a while, the landscape changed and the road skirted an immense paddy field, bright emerald with pregnant rice plants, their tips bending with the weight of the pods still in the making, waving in the wind. A long parapet with red and white vertical lines and the ornate cupolas of a few temples rising above the wall signified that there was a Hindu temple on the other side of the road.
"Karaitivu, Karaitivul” Velupillai shouted excitedly. "I have come home. This is my home. I was born here. I grew up here. This is the Kannagiamman kovil. We will stay here tonight.” Velupillai could not walk any longer. We decided to spend the rest of the day at the Kannagiamman kovil so that Velupillai could rest his blistered soles.
A little further down the road was a T junction. A narrow road to the left took us to the gate of the temple by a small closeddown bazaar around a huge banyan tree. The temple complex was on the left of the road, in a rectangular compound surrounded by the parapet. On the other side, a long rectangular building functioned as a hall, where pilgrims could stay, with a small kitchen and a small storeroom at the far end. Beyond that was the actual front side of the temple with a huge gopuram, still under construction, and a well. We bathed at the well and lay on plastic mats in the hall. Velupillai said we could eat our first meal of the day at the temple.
Velupillai and Rajaratnam went to the bazaar area to meet their friends. I went into the temple complex. Centrally located and facing east was the Kannagiamman kovil. Its cupola was large and decorated with numerous figurines of puranic deities, yakshi and rakshasa beings and various animals. The actual temple under this cupola is fairly small. The curtain covering the entrance had an image of Kannagiamman. These curtains, as in all Hindu temples, are periodically replaced as devotees make offerings of new curtains. The one that was hanging on the day of my visit was a touch different from the images of Madurai Meenakshi, a synonym for
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Kannagi as she is worshipped at the great Meenakshi temple in Madurai, the ancient Pandyan capital city in Tamil Nadu. As in Madurai, in Karaitivu, her complexion was green. The standard pose for this deity is what Ananda Coomaraswamy calls the "hipshot” position where the deity stands on her right leg with the left leg bent at the knee and resting on the ball of her foot, her left hip protruding. Here, too, this pose was simulated but the overall presentation was toned down with the hip-shot angles muted, like a Sinhala depiction of female deities.
Around the main temple, facing the other three directions, are three smaller shrines for various deities such as Durga. At the four corners of the temple complex, there are four small shrines for Amman, Ganesha, Muruga, and Siva. The rear of one of the cupolas, visible from the main road, is decorated with a line of figurines depicting Kannagi at the court of king Pandu.
The temple for Ganesha is at the entrance. One enters the complex from the gate by this temple, into along corridor running parallel towards the main temple. This corridor may truly be called the Hall of Lakshmi. Its roof rests on ten columns. Each of these columns is decorated with an imposing statue representing a form of Lakshmi. At the entrance, this corridor is joined at a right angle by its eastern wing that terminated in a temple for Muruga.
Surrounded by these two corridors and the main kovil is a courtyard filled with soft sand that was, at midday, hot like fire. One has to step into this hot sand to approach the presiding deity of the kovil - Kannagiamman. Right across from the kovil, across the corridor terminating in the Muruga temple, is the main gopuram.
I returned to the pilgrims' hall outside the temple complex. A short while later, a lanky man, probably in his sixties, came to me as I lay on a mat and sat cross-legged near me. He introduced himself as Gopalan and began a conversation. Mr. Gopalan spoke fluent English. I offered him a cigarette. The smoke seasoned the conversation. He wanted to know what I was doing, my job, where I lived and the purpose of my visit. When I told him that I was on
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a pada yatra to Kataragama he became friendlier and warmer and praised my effort. Mr. Gopalan was a retired government servant. He knew Velupillai, but had nothing good to Say about him. Gopalan said Velupillai was an alcoholic and was interdicted from his job in the government service because he embezzled government funds. The case was still continuing. He warned me to be careful in my dealings with Velupillai for Velupillai is a well known rogue. Mr. Gopalan brought me a glass of tea. As we Smoked cigarettes, sipped tea and chatted, another man, this time a burly, bald aging man, with a forest of gray hair on his bare chest and an enormous mustache, came by and hung around.
We continued our chatting. I asked him when the huge gopuram they were building at the temple would be completed. Gopalan said it would take some time because the temple committee did not have sufficient funds. The temple itself is ancient and was richly endowed with land grants by King Gajabahu. It Owns many paddy fields and other real estate that generated a lot of income. But this income is heavily taxed by the LTTE. Every month tens of thousands of rupees are taken as spurious taxes that the LTTE has invented. Consequently, there is no money to complete the gopuram. Several times artisans had come from Bombay but each time they could only do a small amount of work because the kovil committee ran out of money.
Mr. Gopalan left the scene. The big bald old man came and sat exactly where Gopalan sat, in the same way Gopalan did. He called himself Ramasamy. Mr. Ramasamy spoke fluent Sinhala and enjoyed smoking cigarettes. He also enjoyed complaining.
Ramasamy's Complaints
Our entire conversation focused on his personal problems. Ramasamy is a carpenter by profession. He owns many fine carpentry tools but had no work. He has given up carpentry because work is available only among the Muslims. The Tamils have no money because their resources are wasted by the war and they rarely even repair their houses. The Muslims have money.
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The Muslims seem to find money somehow and they build palatial houses. From Ramasamy's point of view, the Muslims are unreliable employers. They promise to pay a certain sum of money for a job done. However, once the job is finished, they would always pay less than the agreed amount. They give various spurious reasons to justify their breach of promise. But they cheat only the Tamils. They do not cheat the Muslim workers. What is more, when they initially make their promises they agree to pay the Tamils less than they pay the Muslims. The daily wage difference is about two hundred rupees.
I had heard all this Muslim and cross-ethnic bashing before, from other Tamil and Sinhala people, as they blamed both Muslims and each other, and from the Muslims as they blamed all the rest. It is well known that ethnic favoritism is a national issue and ethnic cheating a national pass time. My personal view is that all of them are right, partly.
Ethnic Favoritism and Ethnic Cheating A brief history of ethnic consciousness and conflict
In my experience as a Sri Lankan, ethnic favoritism and ethnic cheating are cross-ethnic national characteristics. Favoritism is centered largely on helping political party supporters and relatives. Many sociologists of the Third World and underdevelopment have observed and analyzed the destructive role of nepotism and favoritism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. In the pre-colonial society, nepotism was the basic principle of power sharing. From the apex to the base of the society the kin group has been the primary group from which political partners, confidants, supporters and dependants were chosen. Nepotism and ethnic consciousness come together in multi-ethnic societies. However, when kinship is transethnic nepotism transcends ethnicity. In the Kandyan kingdom, the king and the aristocrats as well as the peasants in border villages had trans-ethnic kinship relations. Nepotism on these lines was a core feature of the feudal administration.
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In pre-colonial Sri Lanka, recruitment to government service was based on kinship and or personal allegiance to the political leaders. Porous ethnic boundaries facilitated inter-ethnic marriages and the development of multi-ethnickinship networks. The political administration was multi-ethnic through such kinship connections. The strength of such multi-ethnic clans was evident in the way even kingship was determined. In that context, ethnicity did not matter because the rules of succession focused only on kinship. Thus, at the death of King Narendra Singha, the Kandyan kingdom passed from Sinhala Buddhist hands to Tamil Hindu hands and remained there until the kingdom fell.
However, power sharing based upon kinship never worked well with the principles of bureaucratic administration that colonialism introduced from 1815. Kinship was not a consideration for recruitment for the service of the colonial government except at the higher levels in the local administration where traditional doctrines of succession were important considerations for political stability. Nor did the colonial administration consider ethnicity as a significant criterion for employment in the middle and lower level positions. Rather, a working knowledge of English was the principal consideration. Therefore, Tamil Christians from Jaffna and Sinhala Christians from the coastal regions who received education at missionary schools were recruited irrespective of their caste, kinship and ethnicity.
Concurrently, the colonial administration undertook to classify "native types” in terms of regional and demographic criteria - an administrative technique developed in medieval Europe to take account of the population and economic resources in the burghs. For the first time in Sri Lanka, the national population was classified into tight definitions based on ethnicity, region, religion and language. This classification intensified the ethnic and religion consciousness among the Sri Lankan people for they woke up into neatly defined ethnic, linguistic and religious identities as Sinhala Buddhists, Tamil Hindus, Moors, Vaddas and so on.
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By the last quarter of the century, this change in attitude found scholarly support through the works of the orientalists, indologists and the theosophists. They classified Buddhism and Hinduism that hitherto had vague boundaries into a tight typology based not on the Buddhist and Hindu practices in everyday life but according to the texts, focusing on the differences, and reclassified them ethnologically, into Aryan, Dravidian, pre-Dravidian and Semitic types. An unintended consequence of this classification, as of the ethnic classification in the census, was the emergence of a rigid political consciousness among the various ethnic, linguistic and religious groups. Previously, the various groups had fluid identities. With the new classification and the government practices that took into consideration the differences, this identity became rigid.
After the disastrous 1818 rebellion against the British colonial rule, the Sinhala and Tamil political elites became deeply involved with winning Colonial favors to achieve their socioeconomic and political goals. As they competed in the colonial administration and economy, the new social identities played a significant role in defining lines of action destabilizing the multi-ethnic, multilinguistic and multi-religious society of Sri Lanka.
The hardening of the differences virtually ended the precolonial trans-ethnic, trans-linguistic and trans-religious kinship networks. As the ethnic identities solidified, kinship also became restricted and, except in rare instances and in certain border villages, trans-ethnic marriages diminished. The administration also eliminated or minimized the usefulness of kinship and emphasized the European education as the currency for social and economic advancement. Alongside, the Sinhala Buddhist, Tamil Hindu and Christian political platforms emerged to fight for their respective claims from the colonial administration.
The impact of English education in Jaffna, Mannar, Trincomalee and other principal northern towns - where missionary schools maintained by Anglican, American Baptist, Dutch Reformed (Methodist) and Catholic religious establishments
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provided an excellent European education with an emphasis on English language and British and European history - was so strong, the Conservative high caste Tamils feared that Tamil language, sacred to the Tamil people as Muruga's gift to them, would be threatened with extinction.
Thus emerged the great Sri Lankan Tamil culture hero Arumugam Navalar to inform and galvanize the Tamil people here and in Tamil Nadu, about the plight of the language and of the cultural identity of the Tamils. Navalar was active during the second and the third quarters of the nineteenth century.
From the 1820s, Arumugam Navalar raised the ethnic and linguistic consciousness among the Tamils, but not against the other ethnic groups. Nonetheless, oppositions developed as the groups became competitive. During the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Anagarika Dharmapala organized the Sinhala Buddhists against all other communities to claim their suzerainty over the island and to purge the Sinhala Buddhist culture of all non-Sinhala Buddhist elements except those that would enhance their chances in the colonial marketplace. Concurrently, the new political theories of liberalism impacted colonial administration thus providing seats for ethnic representation in the political system. As pointed out earlier, Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan attempted to enhance the political power of the Tamils by absorbing the Muslims.
The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century mass movements that emphasized the purification and enhancement of ethnic/linguistic/religious identities gradually became political organizations within the new administration as each group competed with others. This contributed to the isolation of the various ethnic groups and transformation of trans-ethnic kinship and allegiance structures into intra-ethnic and intra-religious group structures that absorbed the favors that were previously extended across ethnic and religious group boundaries. As a consequence, ethnic favoritism was born, and became a serious matter in the
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ethnic relations on the island. Ramasamy's complaint about the Muslims hinges on such matters.
The Tamils are not alone in their complaints against Muslim ethnic favoritism. The Sinhalas, too, accuse the Muslims of unreasonable ethnic favoritism, particularly in the real estate market. They accuse that the Muslims never deal in real property except with other Muslims. Apparently, all real property transactions are negotiated in the mosques. The story is that anyone who sold property to a non-Muslim is ostracized.
The Sinhalas also accuse the Tamils of ethnic favoritism. This tendency heightened after the Independence in 1948 because of a complicated set of variables operating in the job market.
At the time Independence was granted, both Tamil and Sinhala languages were given low recognition in the administrative, trading, healthcare and education sectors of the society. English remained the official language and a symbol of socio-economic success. All official communication with the government and most private sector establishments such as the trading companies were conducted in English. University education was entirely in the English language. The privately managed urban elite schools emphasized English education and the English teachers, even in the State run rural schools, received higher salaries and social recognition than their Sinhala and Tamil language colleagues of equivalent qualifications except for the knowledge of English. This unequal treatment in their own country embarrassed and angered the Sinhala and Tamil language teachers. The emphasis on English education was perceived as particularly beneficial to certain groups in the society - the Christians, the wealthy Buddhists and Hindus who had adopted European customs, manners and standards and the Tamils from Jaffna who were exposed to English language education through the extensive missionary school system. These groups had an overwhelming advantage over the Sinhala and Tamil educated mostly Buddhist and Hindu, mostly rural and 'out-station' urban groups who were equally ambitious about entering the prestigious administrative, medical and legal professions.”
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The hangover from the colonial policy on language and culture affected other institutions as well. One was the Sinhala/ Pali/Sanskrit based pirivena or Buddhist monastic education. Threatened with oblivion from the lack of colonial relevance and practical interest in these studies, and the disproportionate prestige of the Christian schools and church authorities, the Buddhist monastic establishment had been agitating for recognition even before the Independence. The monastic establishment's diminished position was seen in the fact that even the socially and economically ambitious Buddhists were opting for an English education, preferably from a well-established missionary school in one of the colonial towns. Anagarika Dharmapala's campaign in part addressed these issues.
Along with the vernacular education the Sinhala, ayurvedic (Sanskritic), siddha (Tamil) and yunani (Islamic) medical systems were disadvantaged as the allopathic medical system that the colonial administration introduced and propagated through the university medical schools proved to deliver faster and more effective (and more prestigious) healthcare throughout the government hospitals and dispensaries of private practitioners. The local medical systems and practitioners were fast becoming marginalized.
As these social groups became marginalized, the general discontent among them constituted a considerable political force in post-Independence Sri Lanka. The ruling party - the pro-western United National Party (UNP) - was seen to represent only the English educated colonial bourgeoisie and to be indifferent, if not contemptuous, towards the vernacular educated rural and 'outstation groups and local cultures. Eight years after Independence, during the national elections of 1956, these sentiments came to the foreground as emphasized by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) of Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike. Bandaranaike broke away from the UNP because, after the death of the first Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Don Steven Senanayake, the party seniors appointed Senanayake's son Dudley Shelton Senanayake as the new leader when Bandaranaike believed that he was the
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legitimate successor. Political observers contend that Bandaranaike, an Oxford educated thoroughly anglicized barrister and a member of the very core of the colonial bourgeoisie, exploited the frustrations of the bhikkhus, vernacular school teachers, local medical practitioners, the rural people and the urban workers to create a mass movement against colonialism and the United National Party's pro-western approach to politics. He formed his Sri Lanka Freedom Party with the help of relatives of equal stature and well known representatives of the above groups. The bhikkus, native physicians, and Schoolteachers had tremendous clout in forming political opinions. Bandaranaike promised to make Sinhala the official language of Sri Lanka if he and his party were elected. This was probably the best trump he played during the campaign because it addressed a politically significant issue even if it was to fuel other fires elsewhere. The campaign was a remarkable success and Bandaranaike's party had a landslide victory giving the country a new government with a decidedly Sinhala Buddhist outlook. Bandaranaike lived up to his promise and made Sinhala the official language and Tamil the Second language of the State of Sri Lanka. The Stated purpose was to correct the ethno-linguistic imbalances in the administration, education, and the professions.
When Sinhala and Tamil became the first and second languages respectively, English was relegated to the third place and was no longer Compulsory in the primary, secondary and tertiary education systems. The education system also allowed education in Sinhala-only and Tamil-only classes that further isolated these ethno-linguistic groups, mainly the Sinhalas and the Tamils, but also the Muslims who considered Tamil as their mother tongue. The isolation bred the suspicion that, at crucial public examinations such as the General Certificate of Education (Ordinary and Advanced Levels), the Tamil examiners favored the Tamil candidates by grading their answers loosely and by being generous with marks. Accusations were also made that in Tamil language examination centers, particularly in the Northern and Eastern Provinces, the question papers were leaked to the Tamil candidates.' This serious
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accusation, despite protests from the Tamil communities, was never withdrawn. The seats in the universities and the jobs in the government sector, cherished by all communities, were very limited and the competition was fierce.
The Sinhala fears of Tamil ethnic favoritism do not end here. The federalist platform that emerged from the middle of the last century was always suspect because of fears that autonomous northern and eastern provinces in a federal Sri Lanka would one day break away from Sri Lanka and join Tamil Nadu. These suspicions were major election campaign themes during the '60s when both main Sinhala parties, the UNP and the SLFP, distributed campaign material including maps of Sri Lanka with northern and eastern provinces marked in red to highlight the endangered areas. Both parties accused each other of secret pacts with the Tamil Federal Party to exchange votes for Tamil proposals for Tamil support in the parliament.
The Tamils, on the other hand, accused the Sinhalas of cheating through broken promises and encroachment upon what they believed to be Tamil areas using ploys of various colonization schemes and irrigation projects.' From the Tamil perspective, the maps and propaganda materials disseminated by the Sinhala parties only proved their point, that the Sinhala parties see the Tamils differently, as outsiders to the country when in historical fact’ they were here before the Sinhalas when Sri Lanka was only a part of a greater Tamil empire that reigned supreme.'
The Muslims, as discussed in Chapter Two, resented the Tamils including them as a part of the Tamil community albeit a low caste one, and opted to function as an independent ethnoreligious group linked to other Muslim groups in other countries. They refused to identify with the ethnic Tamils merely because they used Tamil as their domestic language. On the other hand, they resented the new political and economic developments that emphasized the rights of the Sinhala Buddhist community at the expense of their economic interests. They supported mainly the UNP and its pro-western pro-capitalist policies as opposed to the
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nationalist and socialist policies of the new regime. These developments forced them to forge an independent social and political identity that enhanced the already existing identity as a religious group.
The ethnic favoritism and inter-ethnic suspicions flourished under these circumstances further isolating the three main ethnic groups in the nation. Ramasamy's complaints arose in this political atmosphere.
Ramasamy was planning to migrate to the north. With the war over at least for now and reconstruction of the northern towns beginning, he figured that there might be a demand for individuals with his kind of skills. I said it was a brilliant idea. People must go to where work exists rather than staying in one place and complaining. In addition to the northern towns, a huge reconstruction effort was underway in Ratnapura that had recently been thoroughly devastated by earth slips, collapsed hills and floods caused by the monsoons. Hundreds had died and many buildings were destroyed. I suggested that Ramasamy could go to Ratnapura as well.
Ramasamy nodded in agreement, but I noticed his indecision. I asked if he had reservations about Ratnapura because it is a predominantly Sinhala area. Ramasamy said he did not know anyone there. One needed connections. That is true. Even a Sinhala person could not just walk into Ratnapura and find a job. He needed some social contacts. I pointed out that connections could be developed. Ramasamy could talk to the fish merchants in Karaitivu, Batticaloa and other near-by areas. They might know fish merchants in Ratnapura. He could talk to the jewelers who might know gem merchants in Ratnapura. One couldn't forget the Tamil cigar-shop (suruttu kade) merchants who operate in every substantial town. And every town with a substantial Tamil presence in the neighborhood, such as Ratnapura, invariably had a kovil or two. So there were all kinds of possibilities. Before he knew it, he would be sawing timber, chiseling sockets, nailing away beams and
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rafters together and creating roofs, and slapping together doors apud windows.
Ramasamy smiled warmly but still seemed unconvinced by my optimism. The reality, after all, is not logical and predictable. And everyone is not an explorer of possibilities. As the saying goes, things are more easily said than done. Numerous subjectivities intervene - caste considerations, fear of unknown people and places, personal insecurity, and anxieties about ethnic riots are all vectors in, to use A. K. Ramanujan's felicitous phrase, the interior landscapes of the mind, conscience and identity, where important decisions are made. For some, seeming impediments are sources of motivation, while for others they are insurmountable barriers.
Before long, Rajaratnam and Velupillai returned. We went to the kitchen in the pilgrims' rest, ate lunch and lay around. The afternoon was hot and humid and the mosquitoes and flies were in great abundance. As the sun mellowed, we went to the town to purchase medications for Velupillai's inflamed eczema and rubber thongs for his blistered feet. He seemed comfortable in his thongs after suffering the heat of melting tar on the road. I returned to the temple.
When the sun is virtually on the other side of the world, the eastern sky casts a deep mauve glow that warmly receives the Orange beams from the west falling on the figurines on the roofs of the temples. The weathered and peeling greens, blues, oranges, yellows, and reds on a populous heaven weaved clusters of enchanting tonal motifs. A man in his thirties was sitting on a mat in the Lakshmi hall, singing. Facing him, Ramasamy played a mrdangam to keep time and the swing in the melody. About twenty children sat around the man and sang with him - their tender nasal voices lightly and shrilly gliding over his darkly chesty tone. When Ramasamy noticed me, blending the drumming with his speech, he said, that this was a lesson in singing.
I returned to the pilgrims' rest and watched the members of the religious community of this kovil arrive. Neatly and colorfully attired children came along, removed their shoes at the water tap
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by the entrance, washed their feet and entered the temple ground. Others gathered flowers from hedges and bushes in the compound. Adults came in likewise and soon I heard the bells ring. I, too, entered the temple. Velupillai and Rajaratnam joined me. The puja had begun. The Kannagiamman kovil was crowded with devotees. After the puja at the main temple, the whole congregation moved clockwise from temple to temple around the main kovil, performing a teru, making puja at each of them, and returned to it. The puja ended with gifts, prasad from Kannagiamman, being distributed by the temple attendants. Velupillai said a procession was coming to the new gopuram of the temple and that it would be like the teru in Batticaloa. We needed no further information and rushed to the gopuram.
There were several others gathered at the gopuram and more were coming. The lights were not bright enough to illuminate everything but all was clear on the path to the gopuram. Soon people lined up along this path and we heard an approaching drum, a mrdangam beaten to a high pitched quick tempo. In the dark path a movement of blurry white shapes rapidly became discernible as a swaying teru as it approached the gopuram. Although hardly comparable to the one in Batticaloa, this one shared the same structure. Four young men of roughly equal height carried a statue of Pulleyar on a wooden multilevel pedestal on two parallel green poles that ran through two holes at the base of the pedestal. The statue stood about half a meter in height but hardly visible because of the ceremonial shiny green cloth and garlands that covered the torso of the statue exposing only its head. The shiny silver colored dragon arch made of a thin metal sheet provided the halo cum ritual arch. Probably, it was not half as heavy as the Batticaloa icon. The teru bearers were bare-chested, and their lower bodies were covered with vettis and ritual shawls. Another man held a multicolored umbrella over the teru. Several boys, dressed in skirts and headdresses made of margosa twigs and carrying improvised bows and arrows followed the teru.
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The boys marched in Swinging the teru, hollering various religious shouts comparable to haro-hara. Apparently, Vinayaka had come to pay respects to Kannagiamman. He is about to begin an activity and needed Kannagi's blessings. When the teru bearers noticed me, hopping about like a clown aiming my camera at them, they made aggressive gestures of disapproval. Some onlookers hissed at them and they calmed down but continued to frown.
Velupillai said that the teru was just the beginning of a ceremony to expel evil influences on the village. It is called vettei tiruvila or the hunting (vettei) procession (tiruvila). But he had no idea what it was all about.
Vettei Tiruvila Expelling the Evil
A few minutes later, the teru turned around and marched away. Everybody followed it. Velupillai, Rajaratnam and I moved with the crowd through a labyrinth of roads that wound up in a large open space illuminated with many street lamps. A large crowd gathered at the perimeter of the oblong field. Some men were looking at the spectacle from rooftops.
One third of the field towards the edge was a simulated grove made of four transplanted banana trees. Strung across this grove was a line of various gourds and vegetables with elongated shapes, such as brinjals. At the center of this line of gourds was a ritual arena. A plastic mat with red and yellow strips was on the ground and a priest sat on it apparently arranging ritual objects including a couple of coconuts and an ash pumpkin, muttering mantras.
Outside this grove was a flat area with a meager grass cover. The teru was standing close to the far edge of the arena, Swaying. Pulleyar wanted to go into the grove. Suddenly, the group of young men in leafy skirts rushed in. They hopped about and made threatening advances at the teru, aimed their arrows at Pulleyar and the teru bearers, and prevented Pulleyar from getting near the grove. Pulleyar turned around and lunged at these boys. Velupillai
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called the group Vaddas - Vedar in Tamil. Suddenly, a mock king materialized brandishing a red bow and a red arrow. He was dressed in a red dhoti, had a white shawl with a green border around his waist and a white cloth around his neck and shoulders simulating a shawl. A sacred thread hung round his left shoulder and under the right arm indicated that he was not sudra. This kingly figure Stomped around arrogantly, holding his chin high and chest forward, suggesting pride, dignity, and importance. He aimed his arrow at Pulleyar.
But Pulleyar was hard to pin down. The teru constantly swayed and lunged. Even Arjuna, the great archer of the Mahabharata, would not have stood a chance against the swaying, lunging and spinning Vinayakar." All of a sudden the Swaying, lunging and spinning transformed into a whirling activity. In seconds, all the young men in leafy skirts lay on the ground mortally wounded by Vinayakar. Only the Vadda king seemed to have escaped. He kept Swooping and charging at Pulleyar, and pointing his arrow towards the god. But at one decisive moment Vinayakar leaped at him so ferociously the Vadda king, dismayed and completely unnerved, lowered his bow, pointed his arrow to the ground and ran away. Exactly at that time the mock priest, who had thus far been performing his mock rituals inside the banana grove, took a sword and, with a single blow, halved an ash pumpkin displaying its white interior. He threw a shoe flower on it to simulate blood. Vinayakar whirled about like a hurricane and demolished the banana grove. Then the teru bearers brought Vinayakar to the ritual arena and the puja was offered to him. The drama was over.
The young men in twigs got up and started chatting with people who poured into the arena. They grinned, laughed and talked about the play. The crowd began to leave and we walked away with them. Velupillai surprised me again. There was dinner waiting for us at a relative's house.
Velupillai's relative, Gunaratnam, was a somber schoolteacher in his thirties.' He lived in a well-built house. We
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sat in his living room and Velupillai began a conversation in which he did most of the talking. Gunaratnam's wife placed a basin of idiappam and a large bowl of shodi on the dining table and disappeared. We sat down and started working on the idiappam and Shodi. Gunaratnam stood by, Smiling warmly, emitting an occasional oral response to Velupillai's conversation.
We left Gunaratnam's house almost immediately after eating. On the way, I tried to figure out what the ceremony was about. But my companions were not very helpful in this regard. Velupillai, who usually has some information to contribute, was remarkably uninformed about the vettei tiruvila. All he said was that it was a play about Vinayakar defeating the Vaddas. What about the banana grove and the pumpkin cutting? Did I get the story right? Velupillai had no answer. Rajaratnam was of no help at all. We talked to several others but they too didn't seem to know or care much about the details of the play. I guessed that this was how most community members saw the ceremony. But this was hardly surprising. The southern tovil ceremonies and the kohomba kankariyas in the Kandyan areas are comparable in their social significance. They provide entertainment for the moment and the public have no inclination to go beyond that. When the ceremony Occurs, they come because such events give them a reason to get out of the house, meet friends, and spend the evening watching a drama. Since the actors in the play are local people from the village the conversation is often about how so and so performed; about how charming or how clumsy they were. Only a few seem to know or is interested in making sense out of all the drama's component events.
However, Ramasamy was more knowledgeable than others about vettei tiruvila. He said the ceremony was organized by a local schoolteacher. Every year, when the festivities in Kataragama are in progress, this ceremony is organized by someone in the community. It is partly for entertainment, particularly for small children, and partly for the larger community purpose of warding off outside evil influences. These influences arise from the activities
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of unholy spirits as well as persons. In this drama, the Vaddas symbolized these various destructive influences. Pulleyar attacks them and brings tranquility back to the community.
Ramasamy's interpretation of the vettei tiruvila inspired me to make other connections. Valentine Daniel studied the Tamil communities in South India and found that in Tamil Nadu Ganesha is seen as the god of all beginnings, fertility and success and as the obstacle remover and obstacle maker." Paul Courtright observed similar characterizations as obstacle remover and the commander of Siva's troops." In the subcontinent, irrespective of the differences in the languages and particular regional Cultural orientations, these convictions are commonly held by the Hindus. In Sri Lanka also, in the north as well as in the eastern region, Pulleyar is worshiped as the god of beginnings, fertility and success as well as the god who removes obstacles. Failure to propitiate him brings about failures in the household. Pulleyar, as the obstacle remover, also guarantees protection from the evil influences that bring obstacles to achieving goals in life.
The Vaddas are, in the contexts of the vettei tiruvila, the obstacle makers. No one thinks that the Vaddas are harmful. After all, as depicted in the Muruga kovil in Kirankulam, Vaddas raised Valliamman. However, Vaddas are not ethnic Tamils. They are outsiders and symbolically represent the other' and the 'outside. The Vaddas also were, at least in the drama of Muruga's relationship with Valli, obstacle creators. I believe the creators of the vettei tiruvila used the Vaddas from the Muruga lore, as a metaphoric signifier, to represent all that is not within the community and that produces hindrances to the progress of the community. Later inquiries revealed that the community in Karaitivu conceptualizes obstacles in many ways. They include whoever that does injustice, or cause evil by way of concrete activities or black magic. They may involve other ethnic groups as well. For example, Ramasamy saw the Muslims, not all Muslims but those who discriminate against him, as evil represented by the Waddas. Other individuals may have found their conscious or unconscious personal foes in
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the image of the Vaddas." In any event, the jovial audience thoroughly identified themselves with their beloved Pulleyar, the defender of their community. And there are more layers of meaning in the play. For example, while the Stomping, lunging, charging and whirling was going on, something quiet was going on inside the banana grove that Vinayakar was trying to enter. The string of gourds and vegetables represented a homestead and the banana grove the jungle surrounding this homestead. The priest was preparing a puja for Vinayakar. The Vaddas were blocking his way. When Vinayakar defeated the Vaddas the priest cut the pumpkin in a symbolic gesture signifying the demolition of the obstacles to achieve his goal of offering a puja to the god.
But I think the cutting of the pumpkin had another layer of meaning in addition to the warding off of evil obstacles. In southern Sri Lanka, the Sinhala ritual known as the kodivina kapima involves an identical line of action. Kodivina is black magic surreptitiously performed by an individual to harm his enemies. He employs a kattadiya, the priest who performs kodivina. It involves charging a figurine representing the party to be harmed with the power of evil spirits. Sometimes mini alu, ash from a cremation site, is used. The magically charged object is buried, usually at the gate to the victim's home, so that it would be walked over by the victim, preferably the head of the household. Thereafter his whole family becomes afflicted with disease and misfortune caused by the evil spirits. When the victim tries various empirical methods to find relief but fails, he resorts to supernatural help. But the kodivina prevents the gods from helping the victim. Repeated failures convince the victim that an enemy has performed a kodivina.
The way with kodivina is that only a kattadiya equal to or better than the kattadiya who performed the kodivina can nullify it. Thus, the victim finds a suitable kattadiya who performs numerous rituals and finally halves an ash pumpkin with a sword to signify the destruction of obstacles created by the enemies. The kattadiya displays the reddish brown stains on the white interior of the halved pumpkin to indicate the blood of the kattadiya who
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performed the kodivina. The evil effects of the kodivina are thus “cut off.18
The vettei tiru vila and the kodivina have parallel structures. The significations are similar although the signifiers are different except for the pumpkin cutting. The Vaddas, the uncooperative social others and the unholy spirits, represent the obstacles while the shoe-flower and the rust from the Sword signify the success of the ritual, in the blood of the evil-doers, now in grievous jeopardy as the evil they have done returns.
An even deeper signification is that of the cultural kinship between at least some east coast Tamil Hindus and southern Sinhala Buddhists. At least in part, they share the similar existential universe of everyday life and the cosmological universe that describes and analyzes the existential universe. The common concepts of the quality of action as punya and papa, the karma that action engenders, rebirth, and the quality of existence as dictated by karma, overlap the experience of everyday life. The events, involvements, moods, moments of glory and despair in everyday life, are all contexts where the cosmological a priori of the post-vedic grand narrative of what is real, native to Southern Asia, come to life, as the illuminating manifestations of that reality.
The reality of sleeping in the corridor of the Kannagiamman kovil manifested no sooner than we lay down. Rajaratnam created his wall of smoke with the mosquito coils to no avail. The reality of the mosquitoes crept in through the smoke. Until dawn, it was a cacophony of murmuring, slapping and Snoring.
July 26, 2003 Akkaraipattu
We left the Kannagiamman kovil by 5.30 in the morning. The air was cool. The road was quiet. Soon we were crossing what appeared to be a gray ocean, lightly heaving in the wind. The nearest things that emerged from this ocean of undulating gloom were the trees on the land, far away, matchstick-high and black. But this did
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not last long. Gradually the dawn cast a yellowish glow on the gray. A picture emerged of a vast paddy field and a few clouds, still in various tones of gray. As the light turned clearer, the gray vanished and the lower half of the picture turned into an immense bright leaf-green paddy field with an orange glow gliding on the slender leaves, the horizon a blue-black jagged line. Above was a light blue sky with broken strands of clouds, reflecting a volatile orange that slowly turned white as the sun rose. By the time we neared the southern shore of this paddy field, the picture had metamorphosed into a warm, inviting, undulating space split into bright green and light cobalt zones, brighter in the east and cooler in the west.
The road to Nintavur was scenic and welcoming. We walked fast. Before long we were in Kalmunai. This area is populated by Muslims. Interestingly, the Muslims showed a remarkable interest in the pada yatra pilgrims. They saluted the walkers with harohara exclamations. We reached Akkaraipattu by 10:30 in the morning. At a tearoom in the town of Akkaraipattu, I met a group of Sufi Muslims who treated me with kindness and said manythings to encourage me on my pada yatra.
The Kovil
Velupillai said we could spend the night at a Pulleyar kovil known to him. It was located in Rajaratnam's village, only two and a half kilometers away, within walking distance from the tearoom, as if, by now, 'walking distance had any meaning to us. It was a relief to turn away from the main road onto a cart road through residential areas. We crossed another large paddy field and approached a three-way junction.
The junction had two buildings facing each other. The most noticeable was the Pulleyarkovil, still under construction. Across the road was a nondescript grocery cum tearoom. We stopped there for a glass of water. My Sinhala speech drew immediate attention for its sheer unintelligibility. There were a few customers
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who kept the friendly owner busy, and soon, together with them, he was listening to Velupillai's and Rajaratnam's commentaries on my whereabouts. I put my hands together and said, "vanakkams". " Vanakkam vanakkamls" they said. “Ayubowans” one of them said. "Ayubowan ayubowans” I responded. When Velupillai said that I was doing madandu poral to Kathirgamam they all turned in my direction and made noises of approval, shaking their heads with friendly smiles; in the very same way people everywhere on the island show friendship and approval.
Suppiah, the owner of the shop, showed me a white plastic chair in a verandah under a wild manioc tree by the paddy field. As the customers left one by one, some of them turned my way, shook their heads and waved. I shook my head and waved in response. From where I sat I could clearly see the shop and the goings on in it. The shop nicely represented the typical village shop anywhere in the country. From bunches of bananas and coils of rope hanging from the rafters to the arrangement of sacs of dry foods and the owners table with the cash drawer, any villager in the country would feel comfortable in it. Dressed in an old shortsleeved undershirt and a white sarong with large gray plaids, like any shop owner would, Suppiah brought me a glass of plain tea. Like glasses of plain tea anywhere in the country, it was syrupy. Suppiah tried to talk to me but my inability to speak Tamil and his inability to speak Sinhala blocked all verbal communication. Gesticulation conveyed little information and more confusion.
A young man stopped his bicycle, entered the verandah and sat on the bench under the tree. He exchanged a few words with Suppiah and smiled with me. He knew some Sinhala and less English. Suppiah brought him a glass of plain tea. I moved to the bench and offered him a cigarette. He accepted it and said that he was a mason. Previously, the army arrested him on suspicion that he worked for the LTTE. They kept him in custody and interrogated him using violent methods. He said he was severely beaten up by the soldiers. He showed me many scars from cigarette
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burns. But he could not tell the army anything because he had nothing to do with the LTTE. Several weeks later he was released. It took months to recover from the wounds during which time he was unable to work. His poor parents supported him. As he was showing me the scars Rajaratnam and Velupillai returned. He got back on his bicycle and rode away.
We went into the new kovil area. It had three large compartments and a yard where a platform for propitiating the navagrahas or the nine planets was also in the making. The central room is meant for the main hall where devotees gather. The second room, behind the central room, will house the image of Pulleyar. The large room adjacent to the central room will house several smaller shrines for other gods. In the middle of this room was the old shrine, clearly a non-agama folk affair. A long time ago, they had placed a stone image of Pulleyar in a shed and made offerings. A cult grew around it. As the village population increased, a larger establishment was in order. So the people in the village, with the Support of a few prominent persons, began to build a regular agama kovil for the god.
Velupillai said that one Chandrasegaram, a velvidane (village official in charge of distribution of water to farmlands), had invited us to lunch. Just as we were about to leave the kovil, Suppiah called me to his shop. He gave me a glass of buttermilk (moru). Then he gave Velupillai and Rajaratnam each a glass of moru. I asked why Suppiah did this. Velupillai conveyed the question to Suppiah and conveyed his answer to me. Moru is very nutritious and gives a lot of energy. It is good to drink moru when one engages in madandu poral to Kataragama. Besides, Muruga likes those who help his pilgrims. Suppiah pointed to a picture of Muruga on the wall and moved his hands towards the picture and back to his chest several times to indicate the gravity of what he was saying. Muruga's blessings come to the donor, to him, Suppiah, and it is good. It is good that we stopped by his shop for that gave him the opportunity to reap blessings from Muruga.
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Chandrasegaram's residence was about a kilometer away. A tall wiry man with an amiable triangular face, Chandrasegaram welcomed me warmly to his house. We sat in the verandah and Soon a middle-aged woman in Sari came with plain tea in glasses on a tray. This was Mrs. Chandrasegaram. She placed the tray on a table and quickly disappeared into the house. The conversation among Chadrasegaram, Rajaratnam and Velupillai was vigorous, dramatic and completely unintelligible to me. After a few minutes of attempting to make sense out of the gestures I gave up the futile effort and looked around. Perhaps Chandrasegaran detected my boredom and pointed to the bathing well just outside the house and, through my medium Velupillai, communicated to me that I could bathe at the well. That was a welcome offer on that hot afternoon. The lunch after the bath was sumptuous.
We returned to the kovil, and I fell asleep in my makeshift bed on the floor until Velupillai woke me up. He was holding a plate of vade that Chandrasegaram had brought over. Gradually Velupillai's and Rajaratnam's friends gathered and sat chatting in the shop. I lay on my mat writing notes.
Suddenly I heard Rajaratnam shouting, gesticulating and walking back and forth. Others were trying to hold him down but he shook them off insisting on walking. In another corner Velupillai was surrounded by some men including his nephew Sivam. Velupillai was also shouting, pointing his hands in every direction, tucking up his sarong and trying to go forward. As others tried to hold him back, he became even bolder and tried to brush them aside, then calmed down and straightened his sarong, and again burst into a harangue in an uncontrollable expression of rage. This went on for a while. Chandrasegaram was standing by, with a wry grin on his face. Suppiah was behind the counter, intensely watching. Sivam came over to me and explained the situation as best as he could.
As the friends were chatting, Velupillai had begun to make fun of Rajaratnam and ordered him around in front of everyone. For a while Rajaratnam had tolerated Velupillai's behavior, but
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when he reached a boiling point he lunged at Velupillai and grabbed him by the neck. Then others jumped in and separated them. Sivam said Rajaratnam had a reason to be angry. This was his village. His house was nearby. He came to the kovil and the shop practically every day. Velupillai was an outsider. It was one thing to be an educated man but quite another to be an outsider. Besides,Velupillai was not behaving like an educated man. Sivam could not understand why his uncle had to be so nasty towards Rajaratnam, a popular member of the community.
The fussing and fuming subsided and the crowd dispersed. Rajaratnam had disappeared. Velupillai walked into the kovil and sat by the old shrine followed by Chandrasegaram. Soon the men who came to see him in our first evening in that NGO rest house in Akkaraipattu also came in and sat down. A conversation began. They were discussing something important, in a business-like manner. Velupillai kept pouting for a while but gradually got out of his mood and joined in. Sivam sat on my mat and was quiet. Then Rajaratnam came in and sat with us. He was not feeling good either.
The social selves of Velupillai and Rajaratnam were in the background of this explosion of anger. Velupillai always felt that he was socially Rajaratnam's Superior and Rajaratnam resented it. Velupillai considered himself an educated man, a retired government servant who held important positions such as chief clerk. The whole of the island was his homeland. He could live anywhere. He knew important people. He had connections. But Rajaratnam was an uneducated laborer who worked for daily pay of mere 300 rupees. He was an estate Tamil who came to Akkaraipattu as a refugee from Badulla during the ethnic riots in 1983. Since Velupillai had arranged that I hire Rajaratnam for the pada yatra, Rajaratnam should listen to him and obey him, so long as his orders did not clash with mine.
But Rajaratnam did not see Velupillai from this angle. For him, Velupillai was a government servant and knew all kinds of people, but for what? Velupillai was fired from his job because of
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drunkenness, embezzlement and dereliction of duty. None of these big people could or would help him. In reality, Velupillai was a penniless man who could not get along with anyone and no one liked him. Even his wife threw him out of his house because she could not put up with his drunken harassment. It is true that Velupillai hired him, but for someone else. Velupillai was incapable of hiring anyone directly because he was incapable of paying anyone. Merely because he found Rajaratnam did not allow him to consider Rajaratnam as his servant. Besides, the actual employer did not treat him as a servant. And Velupillai did not know how to ask nicely. Instead, he haughtily ordered Rajaratnam to do various things in the presence of others. When it was only the two of them Velupillai would treat him like an equal. But when others were present Velupillai insulted Rajaratnam.
I had noticed this in Batticaloa and Kirankulam. Whenever Rajaratnam tried to say something Velupillai would put him down Sarcastically as if Rajaratnam knew nothingworth knowing. I found Velupillai's arrogance annoying because, I thought, Rajaratnam might have an interesting idea to enhance my understanding of Muruga and Pulleyar. But Velupillai would not let him talk. Until Akkaraipattu I did not worry much about this transformation in Velupillai’s personality. In Akkaraipattu, in Rajaratnam’s village, Velupillai tried to show off his authority'over Rajaratnam. He had not anticipated that Rajaratnam would fire back. But Rajaratnam did.
In fact, I had to talk to Velupillai as soon as we arrived in the fringes of this town. We were walking along. A man in a shop walked out as he saw Velupillai and called him. Velupillai immediately recognized him and a conversation began. The man asked him where he was going. Velupillai said he was performing a nadandu poral to Katirgaman. His tone was sarcastic. He pointed to me and said I was a Sinhala man living in Kandy and he was showing me the way. The man did not like Velupillai's attitude. He immediately harangued Velupillai. As Rajaratnam translated to me, the man told Velupillai that walking to Kataragama is a
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great thing but one must go with serious intention. He pointed to Velupillai's clothes - a shortsleeved shirt and a soiled dark blue Sarong tucked up to shorten it - and said that this was not the way to go to Katirgamam. At least Velupillai must wear appropriate clothes and look like he was on a serious pilgrimage. But Velupillai looked like a scally wag and if Velupillai was helping someone he should not do so in a shoddy manner. He then politely smiled with me, and said haro-hara, smiled with Rajaratnam and went away.
We continued walking. Velupillai was silent and his face darkened with embarrassment. I was angry. I told him that if he was so sarcastic about this trip he should never have come. I could have found someone else. And he should not insult his own religion and the god whose name he mutters at every step he was taking. After all, he was devoted to Muruga. He lived off the Muruga kovil in Okanda, where I met him. I saw him worship Muruga in my house. I saw him in Batticaloa and Kirankulam. He was full of bhakti, and was still walking on hottar barefoot. Why, then, behave like this? −
I believe that these two events were both manifestations of a general phenomenon: a crisis in Velupillai's social presentation of himself. Velupillai was a beaten, reduced and lost man with low self-esteem who made desperate attempts to reassert himself at the expense of others. He attempted to ridicule, belittle and smother others to project an image of himself to a world that rejected his pretensions because the world had information about Velupillai that nailed him to a completely different image: that of an expelled government servant who couldn't keep his job because of drunkenness, corruption and abusive behavior. My own feeling is that Velupillai was a victim of his own irresistible impulses to behave in this manner. Unfortunately, to cover up his damaged self-image, he did not know how to or could not control himself to take a socially acceptable alternative line of action. As a result, his attempts to present himself as an important person, to receive social
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recognition, only brought him more pain of mind as his audience felt insulted and as his victims fought back.
Sivam suddenly remembered why he came this afternoon. He wanted to invite us to dinner at his house. He had forgotten all about it as he was caught up in the commotion. Now he had to face another difficult situation: how to invite both Velupillai and Rajaratnam. I gladly accepted the invitation. We had time to go to his house. That would give the fighting cocks time to cool-off.
Sivam took me to his house on his motor cycle. That left Rajaratnam and Velupillai together. As I sat in Sivam's verandah, they came in, chatting, as if nothing was wrong. It was a relief but it also made me wonder how unstable our moods and selfconsciousness are. Perhaps Velupillai had readjusted himself to walk with Rajaratnam and then to meet his relatives. And Rajaratnam was compelled to calm down to eat a meal at the house of Velupillai's relatives. Compromises were made.
I met Sivam’s family. His parents, brothers and sisters were educated polite people. We engaged in small talk, ate a delicious meal of idiappam, parippu shodi and many other items.
Back in the kovil the three of us planned the next day. Velupillai said we had two options. We could go to Sangamankandi some twenty-two kilometers away. Most of it is through the jungle and there is no place to stay beyond Tirukovil, a few kilometers away from Akkaraipattu. There could be elephant-problems in the jungle. Alternatively, we could go as far as Tirukovil, spend the night there and the following morning we could reach Sangamankandi. But that would mean taking an extra day. I decided on the first option.
Velupillai decided to sleep near the old shrine. I had already settled down in the central hall of the kovil. Rajaratnam came over and asked me if I objected to his sleeping in the same room. He did not want to sleep in the same room with Velupillai although the shrine was attractive. I had no objections. Their bruised egos were still smarting under a film of civility.
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July 27, 2003
I woke up into a surprise. There were about fifteen people outside the kovil. Suppiah had opened one door of his shop. He gave us tea. No charge. But why were these people gathered at four thirty in the morning? They could not be waiting for a bus because buses did not run on that road and they were not dressed to go far. Suppiah said they had come to see us off.
Why did they find our leaving the village significant enough to wake up at four thirty in the morning to see us off? To this Small gathering, our leaving was not insignificant. We were starting another leg in Our pilgrimage to Katirgamam.
Culturally, pilgrimages, not just to Kataragama but to any Sacred place, are significant no matter who engages in it. But if a relative or a member of the community is involved, the pilgrimage is that much more important. It is even more remarkable if the relative engages in padayattirei for its asceticism and real or imaginary dangers. At the center of this enthusiasm was Rajaratnam. Most of those who had gathered were his relatives and friends. Rajaratnam was still in high spirits particularly from his experience in Batticaloa and had described his good fortune to his wide-eyed relatives. All his talk had motivated them also to engage in a pilgrimage to Kataragama. They would meet us in Okanda in three days.
This stirring of religiosity was not, at least consciously, goal oriented in the usual sense, for they were not going to make or fulfill vows. They were not intending to gain anything from this trip. Nor was this trip necessary. In fact, the trip would put them in serious economic jeopardy because they would spend all the money they had during the pilgrimage and return with high spirits but empty pockets. The drive to go, meet their relative on the way, perform pada yatra, and meet him again in Kataragama had only those ends. Its satisfaction was in the act of going, meeting the relatives, walking, praising Muruga and enjoying together the spectacle in Kataragama. One might harshly think all this is a
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superficial, almost childlike, activity of the peasants. But it is not. It is a celebration of kinship in a religious theater. In this society, kindred are one's most important possession and being among them is the best form of socializing. And in spite of the inevitable quarrels and complaints kin are more reliable than the rest of the world.
Suppiah had a gift for us: a bundle wrapped in an old newspaper. Arisima, he said, pointing to it. He gestured with his hands to show that I could eat it. I gratefully accepted it although I had no idea what arisima’ was. Velupillai, with renewed vim, was talking vigorously with those known to him. Rajaratnam wrapped up our belongings. Sivam came to say he would meet us in Panama and join the pada yatra from there. As we stepped off there were loud shouts of haro-hara.
We walked through a beautiful landscape, green with paddy fields on both sides of the road, here and there split by crystalclear but lethargic streams whose only visible movement was the tiny undulations raised by the mild breeze that brushed on their surfaces. By nine thirty in the morning we reached the town of Tirukovil famous in the region for its Muruga kovil. In fact, the only significant institution in this town is this kovil. Whatever exists to justify calling this hamlet a town is somehow connected to the kovil.
The temple festivities had already begun and numerous vendors of a wide variety of goods had set up their makeshift shops all along the roads around the kovil. From far we could hear loudspeakers in the kovil blasting away songs in praise of Muruga. We had to walk around the temple to see its front facing the sea. Across the vast sandy front yard that was also the seashore, we could see the temple inside the compound surrounded by the tall parapet with vermilion vertical lines that signified the holy enshrined within. Together we saluted Muruga and cried harohara.
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Tirukôvil
Tirukovil is formally known as the Tirukovil Citira Velayuta Cuvami Kovil. In the classification of Hindu temples, it is a Velayuta templebecause its main icon (mlamurti) is a Vel, alance, the ayutam (weapon) of Muruga. The kovil has a long history. Tamil tradition recounting the past draws from the Skanda narratives to detail the origins. Skanda destroyed the Asura forces and on his way attacked the Vakura hill with his lance.' The attack produced three rays. One of them fell where the Mantur kovil stands near Batticaloa.' The second ray fell where the kovil in Tirukovil stands.
Then Ravana, the ancient rakshasa king of Lanka of the Ramayana, and an ardent devotee of Siva, on his way to Koneswaran temple in Tirukkonamalai to worship Siva, held pujas to that God at this spot. He established the first Civan kovil in Tirukovil. Thereafter the Vaddas established a shrine on the spot around a Vel that they planted.'
The large and beautiful cupola of the shrine is a product of the thirteenth century Pandyan architectural design. At that time Tirukovil was known as Kandapananturai or the port where Kandan’s (Kandasamy’s) arrow fell. This indicates that Kandapananturai was a link in the chain of ports where the island's foreign trade was conducted. Perhaps the mercantile value of this port, however small that might have been, attracted the Pandyans and Cholas who made frequent incursions into the island's ports in the northern, north-western and eastern seaboards and established mercantile communities. These communities functioned under the suzerainty of Sinhala kings. An inscription found in nearby Tampiluvil states that three hundred and fifty acres were gifted to this temple by King Sri Sangabodhi Vijaya Bahu Devar Chakravarti in the tenth year of his reign.’ This was undoubtedly Vijayabahu III (1232-1236) who belonged to the Sirisangabodhi dynasty. Dom Queyros noticed in the sixteenth century that the temple had three gopurams. But all these were destroyed by the Portuguese general Don Geranimo De Azavedo. During the Dutch
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and British periods Indian merchants, probably the Chettiyars, erected a temple around the remains of the old temple. According to the Taprobanian Nadu Kadu record, a Vadda chief named Pulian held a significant position in the affairs of the kovil.
In 1806, Alexander Johnston, the British Chief Justice in the Maritime Provinces, visited Tirukovil. At that time a Brahman from Tanjore was in charge of the kovil. The kovil, as seen today, faced the ocean. The Brahman told Johnston that originally the temple faced the land but one night it miraculously turned seawards. Eighteen dancing girls, all descendants of Indian slaves, served the temple.’
In 1807, the Dutch administration granted permission for a Kantha Puranam recital. On that occasion, a local Mudaliyar constructed the present day temple and dedicated it to Kantan Kathirai Antavan. Since then the building had undergone various modifications. The architecture of the kovil involves a main hall where the devotees gather and a sacred chamber at the far end under the ancient cupola. Structurally it is similar to the Kataragama Maha Devale although the latter does not have a cupola. The compound also has smaller temples for Pulleyar and Nakatambiran, a local deity.
The religious activities follow the Brahmanical agama pattern, except that they have sixteen alattipenkal or maidens to perform the lamp ritual as the alatti ammas do in Kataragama. Unlike in Kataragama, the Tirukovil alatti penkal are pre-puberty girls. These alatti penkal, similar to the alatti ammas, are supposedly descendants of the Vaddas who initially constructed the shrine. The ritual calendar culminates during the festive season that parallels the Kataragama festivities, ending with a water cutting ceremony on the New Moon day.
The religious procedures of the temple have undergone important changes over the centuries. A Vadda shrine, adopted by the Muruga cult, had become a Siva-centric agama temple that, more recently, due to the protests of the Mukkuvar and other non-Vellala castes, has become a socially open multicultural temple
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that accommodates the non-agama Vadda and Muruga cult beliefs and activities within an agama ritual framework.*o
It is also remarkable that in Tirukovil, Valliamma is not a ritually important deity as she is in Kataragama and Mantur. It is as if the religious community around Tirukovil sustains a social and ritual culture that predates the transposition of the MurugaValli story in Sri Lanka. The minor temples are dedicated to Pulleyar and Nakatambiran, a local deity. The Vaddas have a significant place in the activities of the temple because the temple was originally a Vadda shrine, and because they were, in the distant past, an important community in this region. Today, these Vaddas are Tamil speaking agriculturalists and fishermen, on the surface indistinguishable from the other community members, but with a Vadda Social identity. Living at the margins of the community, their life styles overlap those of the Tamils in the same way the Vadda ways overlap the Sinhala ways elsewhere in the island.
Velupillai met a friend named Thiyagaraja who had a friend who owned a house nearby. Velupillai said we could rest a while at this place. Thiyagarajaled us along a dirt path that ran between the beach on the east and the gardens on the west. All gardens had palm leaf or cadjan parapets and gates. Thiyagaraja opened one such gate and beckoned us in to a lush coconut grove. At the western end of this grove stood a small house with cinderblock walls and a corrugated asbestos roof. Almost in the middle of the grove was a drinking-bathing well that was protected with a fourfoot wall. While we stood near the house, Thiyagaraja went in and came out with another man. He was Ramachandran, the very friendly owner of the property. A rapid-fire conversation led to Ramachandran bringing us abundle of plastic mats from the house. We rolled out the mats in a shady spot close to the road. Ramachandran talked to Thiyagarajah pointing to the well. That meant we could bathe. After bathing, we lay on the mats and rested. Thiyagarajah left. Ramachandran had to go take care of family business.’ His sons had opened a temporary eatery on the festival ground and the whole family had suspended fishing for the time
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being in order to pool their efforts behind the eatery. Velupillai and Rajaratnam were dozing. The shade in the fisherman's garden had a cool greenish glow as the midday incandescent Sun filtered through the canopy of coconut leaves. Leaning on a coconut tree I watched through the gap between the coconut crowns and the palm leaf parapet two zones of blue, one above the other, the upper one of a lighter, deeper hue and its darker reflection on the wavy surface below. There was nothing in between - no birds, no boats, no fishermen but just two zones of blue, meeting on their horizon. We left Ramachandran's place around half past noon. This was unusual because normally we had rested at midday and resumed walking once the Sun mellowed. But today was different because we targeted the Pulleyarkovil at Sangamankandi, sixteen miles south of Tirukovil, and feared the jungle that lay in between. Once we left Tirukovil there wouldn't be another habitation until Sangamankandi. We needed to cross the jungle before sundown. Velupillai's injured feet meant that we needed more time.
After a very bad meal in one of the smelly eateries on the Potuvil-Batticaloa road, we turned west onto a cart road that took us through the residential parts of Tirukovil. The gardens were cool in the shade of large trees, and the road was quiet and clean with hardly any traffic on it. This cart road would eventually rejoin the Potuvil-Batticaloa road but in the meantime, we could walk on the dirt in the shade easing the pain in Velupillai's feet.
The Multicultural Underground
On the way, we had a long conversation with Velupillai. What was he doing with life? How did he lose his job?
"That's a long story. But there is nothing much in it. I used to drink very heavily. I woke up to pour a drink. I was inebriated all day long. I went to bed after a drink," Velupillai said.
"Hoh! Hohl” Rajaratnam exclaimed to express astonishment.
Also astonished, I asked, "How did you do your work and keep your job?”
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“Well, I couldn't keep my job, could I?” replied Velupillai, grinning Sarcastically.
"I mean, what did you do in the office?” I asked. "Nothing much! There were days I didn't go anywhere near the place. Sometimes I didn't go for two or three days. I drank and stayed home or went to see friends and drank some more with them. Then I went back, worked like a slave for a couple of days and cleared my table.” Velupillai described.
"Did everyone drink like that?” I asked. "Not everyone. Some did. Like me,” said Velupillai. "You must have spent a lot of money on the drinks,” I speculated.
"I was always broke. Like many others I also received gifts, you know, Santosam,” He said, repeatedly flicking his middle finger on his thumb.
"You must have had lots of friends,” I prompted. "I have lots of friends. But these things don't come from friends. When friends come to get something done you do it promptly, take them out, buy them tea and entertain them. They cost you money,” he said, grinning. "Actually, these are not 'gifts'.” Looking at me with a guilty smile, he said, "You can call them bribes.”
"You took bribes?" I asked, moved by this unexpected admission.
"Yes, I did. Everybody does. Not 'everybody' but many people do. I can't say I know what everybody is doing because I am not watching everybody. Others in my office, I have seen them receiving these gifts. I mean, no one just receives them. You arrange them. You don't talk to them about it. It is like this. Someone wants to get something done. He finds out whom to contact. There are circles of contacts. All kinds of people are linked to these circles. He also finds out whether whoever handles that work can be influenced to do it fast if that person is given a small help. This help can be money, if money is what he wants. It can be other things, like a bottle of arrack, if he drinks. So he gives the 'gift' to
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someone in the circle who then contacts me and tells me who needs what. Then I give it priority. I do my part of the work, take the rest from desk to desk and complete it. At the end of the day everybody is happy because the giver gets his job done and we have something to share.”
"That means everybody in the office is somehow linked to the circle?” I asked. -
"No, there are all kinds of circles. Inside the office we help each other without expecting anything other than the return of the help later on,” Velupillai replied.
"You probably had a bad reputation in the community as a bribe-taker!” I said.
"Well, everybody did. Don't they say that about government servants in general? Actually, there were some who didn't accept gifts of that nature. Perhaps they didn't know how to accept bribes. Perhaps the whole thing was unacceptable to them. I think most people join the service without knowing about any of this. But they are eventually drawn to it.”
"How are they drawn to it?” I prompted. "People have the need. This salary is not enough to keep you going. The cost of living is always climbing up. But the salaries don't climb up. People also have other needs like dealing with weddings, funerals, illness, children and there is no money to deal with these situations. Then they look around and see how others handle them. Some, like me, have a weakness for alcohol. I learned to accept bribes from others who were in the game before I joined the service. First I received small shares, like a drink or two or a few rupees. Little by little I was drawn to it because it helped me deal with life. Once you are in it there is no way out because you are addicted to it. Then there are obligations to help others. That is how these circles develop. Supposing Rajaratnam and I work in the same office.”
"We don't work in the same office and I have only given bribes!” Rajaratnam cut in.
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"I said 'supposing we worked together. I didn't say we worked together. I know there isn't a chance in hell for you and me to work in the same office. What bloody office work for you, you uneducated bloody fool! Maybe you could sweep the floor!" Velupillai angrily dismissed Rajaratnam. "Alright. You don't. Say one Piyadasa and I work in the same office. In fact, there once was a clerk named Piyadasa in my office. Whenever I needed Piyadasa's help he promptly obliged. And I obliged whenever Piyadasa needed to help one of his parties. That was a mutual obligation. I scratched his back and he scratched my back, and we both benefited from it because our backs itched constantly. Sometimes we shared what we got from our parties. We often drank together. When a relationship develops like that, you can't back off when one needed support. I dealt with a number of people like that. There was Perumal, Jayaratna, several Silvas and de Silvas, one Gunawardana, Sivarajah, a young chap named Samaraweera, one Kanapathipillai, we all supported each other.”
"So Tamils and Sinhalese worked together. No Muslims?” I probed.
"Come to think about it! There weren't many Muslims. I knew a Fareed and one Ismail. One Nizam was notorious. They also did the same. But not in my circles. They had their own. They joined other Tamils and Sinhalese. You see, these Muslims, they are not interested in salaried jobs. They do business and are at the bribe-giving end. Salaried jobs are not very attractive to the Muslims because there isn't any money in them,” Velupillai said.
We returned to the main road linking Batticaloa and Potuvil. The mid-afternoon sun blazed over us and it was very humid. Even the breeze was hot. Velupillai's feet were a little better after applying the medication but the thongs were of no use because they caused blisters between his toes on his left foot. He could wear only the right sandal and that made walking even more difficult. Fortunately, there was grass on the shoulder of the road and we walked slowly on the grass and took frequent breaks whenever we found a shady
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tree. The walk had become tedious and we had apprehensions that we might not reach Sangamankandi before dark.
Coming to a Pulleyar kovil by the road, we lit camphor pills to honor the God and rested under the massive tamarind tree in the yard. Velupillai resumed our conversation.
"Bribery is every where. You might think I am a very corrupt person. I was. I admit that I was corrupt. So was everybody else. You see, I couldn't have taken bribes unless someone was willing to give bribes. You can't clap with one hand”
“Why do people offer bribes?” was my next question. “Why do people give bribes? Because they want to get things done quickly. Government offices receive thousands of requests. People want this done and that done. These things get piled up. They can be cleared up quickly if everybody works everyday but that does not happen. They get sick, there are weddings, funerals, their children get sick, their wives or husbands get sick. Women go on maternity leave. They get transferred and replacements are not sent immediately. Some people retire and the vacancies are not filled. And, of course, there are people like me, hitting the bottle and not doing the work. So the work is slow. Some people want things done in a hurry because their needs are urgent. Others are simply impatient. They want to get their work done by hook or crook. They offer bribes to expedite their work. These jobs get done at the expense of the others. The bribes are attractive because we need the money. Then these things get worked out into systems.”
"What happens when someone can't afford to give bribes?" I asked.
“Aha! What about people like us? I don’t have the money to give bribes!” Rajaratnam joined in.
"Your work! You wait. Eventually it gets done," said Velupillai. "Bribery slows things down for those who can't give bribes. But bribery is not the only thing that slows things down. There are other things. Powerful people can get things done over
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a phone call. Big politicians, people who know politicians, friends and relatives never have to wait.”
"So, when it comes to corruption and bribery, it doesn't matter whether you are Tamil or Sinhalese or Muslim. Everybody is in it and everybody works together.” I said.
"Everybody is in it and everybody works together." Velupillai repeated after me. "You see, when it comes to corruption and bribery, people always look at small people like us. What about the big people, big politicians? They are in it more than everyone else. People talk about two hundred rupees or a bottle of arrack. These fellows, these big-time politicians, steal millions of rupees as kick-backs and commissions from contracts. People talk about that too but the politicians somehow never get caught. It is the clerk or the policeman who takes fifty or hundred rupees that gets caught. The story goes in the newspapers and the TV and we think alright, corruption is over and the government is taking charge. All that is nonsense. That is just to show the public that something is being done. What goes on at the very top is never talked about. They set the example. We only follow.”
"What if the politicians stop taking kick-backs. Would you stop too?" I asked.
"They stop taking kick-backs? That will never happen. They do politics because of these kick-backs and the power they can have over others. At their level everybody is the same. Party politics doesn't exist among them. Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims, Burghers, they don't have ethnic problems. Nor do they care whether a voter is a Tamil, Sinhalese or Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or Christian. All these matter only during the election campaigns. After the elections only the party supporters count. They create ethnic problems so that they have issues for election campaigns. After the elections, winners and losers forget about politics and get down to business. They have one face for us and another face when they are among themselves. Only the poor voters take these ethnic issues seriously and murder each other. I'll tell you. They are all bloody
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rogues. They teach people how to be dishonest and corrupt. That is the only thing they teach,” Velupillai concluded angrily.
Velupillai's experience is common. Wherever I went in Sri Lanka I heard the same stories and expressions of disappointment, despair and anger. Interestingly, Velupillailaments his own conduct but few others like him have an objective view of their participation in corruption. It is always 'other people' who have caused the virtual breakdown of the country's law and order and administration from its highest to the lowest levels. During elections, the political parties blame their opponents for improprieties, defeat them in the election, and once the administration is in their hands, blithely repeat the very conduct they criticized. On the other hand, blaming politicians is easy and the politicians have become an all too easy targets to project blame. However, the politicians are a part of the society and their conduct reflects the values of the society of Sri Lanka. It is not only that the people adopt the corrupt conduct of the politicians, they produce the politicians who merely reproduce people's attitudes and behaviors. What goes on is a cultural discourse on survival and greed. What we have in Sri Lanka is a well established deeply rooted culture of corruption. This phenomenon provokes the thoughts of many knowledgeable people as their articles in the newspapers and speeches and arguments in the radio and television talkshows indicate. But all these have failed to develop self-critical attitudes or behavioral changes in the daily lives of Sri Lankans. Sri Lankans exercise no sense of reflexivity, there is no looking back and ethically and morally evaluating one's own conduct, no adjustments to a moral order as the public culture of everyday life is devoid of such ideological loops to facilitate reflection in spite of the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and Islamic codes of ethics in the formal culture that profess the need to evaluate one's own conduct. Instead of reflecting, all point fingers at others for moral and ethical violations. All the talk merely ends in finger pointing, in ping-pong games of sophistry that does not translate into social conduct.
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We resumed our pada yatra. The landscape became less interesting. The scrub jungle was punctuated by mid-sized trees and there was no human habitation in sight. An occasional bus would slow as it passed us, the driver honking the horn and the conductor hollering haro-hara. The dull road seemed to stretch towards nowhere and we kept trudging along. Climbing the low hill that appeared before us seemed an insurmountable task in our worn out condition. We shouted haro-hara and pulled ourselves forward. When Velupillai said Sangamankandi was just a few kilometers away Rajaratnam and I shouted with joy. But those few kilometers seemed an endless distance. It was dusk when we reached Sangamankandi. All three of us were thoroughly exhausted.
The Pulleyar kovil was on our right. On our left was an eatery and a bus halting place with concrete benches. We dropped our bags and lay on the benches for a while, panting, Scraping Sweat from our faces. The eatery was the most elaborate one I had seen since we left Karaitivu. It was owned by a Sinhala family. Its prosperity depended on the buses from Batticaloa, Akkaraipattu and Kalmunai that stopped for a tea break on their way to Potuvil. It was our bad luck that the owners had decided to close it down for the evening. Our problem was to find food. The owners pointed to a small hut about twenty meters from the kovil. We might be able to get something from that hut.
We dragged ourselves to the kovil as it was the only place where we could stay the night. The kovil, a non-agama affair, was dingy and damp, and without any resident caretaker. Its walls were sooty from camphor burning. A very large image of Pulleyar was at the right of the entrance itself. Above it there were two loudspeakers attached to the crossbeams indicating that collective rituals are held in the kovil, at least occasionally. A large cloth image of Ganesha hung before the door to the inner chamber. Several other images were around and above this curtain image. In front of it was a small wooden table and other puja implements. The floor had a coating of sand mixed with oil spilled from the lamps. At the entrance was a flat rock for coconut smashing. To
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the left of the kovil was a smaller building structurally identical to the Pulleyar kovil. A folk artist had painted numerous images on its walls. Velupillai and Rajaratnam said it was a Amman kovil. Velupillai speculated that elephants might come in the night. We decided to stay in the Pulleyar kovil which seemed safest. We lit camphor pills and saluted the god:
“Om sri ganeshaya namahal.. dakshinahaste vakratundaya namahal
vamahaste.....!" While Rajaratnam cleaned the floor of the kovil Velupillai
and I went to the hut to see if food was available. A young woman and a teenage boy said they could provide us with roti and dahl curry. They also pointed to a nearby well where we could bathe.
Across the road, there was a homestead where the whole family was cleaning their garden. They swept the garden, built a large pile of dry leaves and set fire to it. Huge columns of smoke billowed together with massive flames that lit up the forest, the kovil and the houses with orange light. The three of us thought that the smoke would clear the mosquitoes. We were wrong. Swarms of hungry insects began feeding on us despite the smoke.
The boy came and said the food was ready. We were as hungry as the mosquitoes were and quickly went to the hut. The boy had prepared a stack of rotis. We demolished them all with some kind of shodi, returned to the kovil and lay down to sleep. But we were constantly disturbed by groups of pilgrims on their way to Kataragama. They came in cars, buses, tractors, vans, and lorries, and stopped at the kovil to make a puja. Noticing us lying on the floor, they tiptoed around us politely, lit camphor pills and joss sticks before the icon of Pulleyar, walked out and smashed Coconuts on the flat rock outside. Velupillai and Rajaratnam learned that they were going to spend the night in Potuvil and the following morning they would proceed to Okanda, the last Muruga shrine before the Yala sanctuary. They would stay a day or two in Okanda and walk to Kataragama.
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The stream of pilgrims ceased by nine in the evening but none of us could sleep. We sat on the low wall between the road and the kovil, smoked cigarettes and continued our conversation.
Isaid what we have been talking about earlier in the day was common knowledge, and that no one in Sri Lanka would disagree with us. Both my companions agreed. Sri Lankans, irrespective of their ethnic, linguistic, religious and regional differences, thoroughly enjoy talking politics and analyzing the states of affairs in the country. Wherever they gather, from three-wheeler taxis to tea kiosks to middle class living rooms to university faculty clubs, they ceaselessly addressed, dissected and analyzed these issues with considerable intellectual acumen. Sri Lankans are very knowledgeable about what is wrong with this country. Yet, nothing constructive comes out of all the talk. The very people who analyze and criticize the system turn around and engage in the very evils that they condemn. My companion Velupillai admitted that he, while being a vigorous trade unionist and a politically active citizen, was unable to disengage himself from the corrupt circles with whom he associated. His explanation was that all the knowledge about the system was of no use for him to survive in the highly competitive society. From his point of view, shared by many others, the presence of goals to achieve - goals of consuming the goods and services in the economy and the goals of professional, social and economic advancement - and the lack of legitimate avenues to achieve these goals compel him to stay corrupt. It is necessary to short-circuit the system to achieve these goals.
There are several ways to do this. One is to engage in thievery and bribery. Another is to engage in party, regional, religious and ethnic politics, become a member of this or that group and seek the advantages of such memberships for career and socioeconomic advancement. The third is to socially and professionally undercut and destroy perceived competitors through slander, backbiting, backstabbing, and sabotage. One develops a sense of Satisfaction when no one is above or better than him. In order to achieve this
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end one does not improve his lot. Rather, he attempts to destroy whomever he perceives as better off than he using every trick in the book does. This involves a culture of sabotage that is deeply ingrained in the Sri Lankan habitus. The engagement of the destruction of others - their reputation, economic chances, professional activities - comes all too, invoking no qualms or feelings of guilt but a sense of heroism and satisfaction.
July 28, 2003 Conversions
We were up before sunrise. But the fear of elephants prevented us from leaving until after sunrise. The road ran through a dense forest and through beautiful villages. We stopped by a small tearoom for breakfast.
As we walked along we could not help noticing numerous billboards planted by various evangelical Christian NGOs. The frequency of the billboards gave the impression that the coastal zone of the Eastern Province was densely populated by Christians. I asked Rajaratnam and Velupillai about it. Both denied that there were concentrations of Christians in the area. Both said that Christians live in Batticaloa and Trincomalee but nowhere else, definitely not where we were walking through.
Who are the evangelical Christians? There are many evangelical Christian organizations operating independently of each other. Their common characteristic is that they all claim to have been born again as devotees of Jesus Christ. Their first birth is the biological birth. Thereafter they profess the religion - Buddhism, traditional Christianity, Hinduism, Islam or any other religion - of their families. Later they encounter evangelical preachers and their teaching and, particularly if they are facing a crisis in life, wake up into a Christ-consciousness and in that frame of mind, encounter Christ. This encounter completely transforms them, overhauls their worldview, and causes their spiritual rebirth. Thereafter they live in their ecstatic relationship with Christ and
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God. Theoretically, the evangelical Christians are Protestants who personally encounter Christ and God. They live with a mission - to convert other religionists, even the Christians of the traditional sects, to their brand of ecstatic Christianity, wanting to make their religious rapture available to others. -
Evangelical Christians are mostly concentrated in the United States but are also in other regions of the world. Ethnically they are mostly of Caucasian origins, but include adherents from many other ethnic groups such as African, Kachin Tribal Burmese, Korean, Chinese, Tribal and Dalit Indian, Japanese and even Indonesian groups. Outside the United States, evangelical Christianity is well known wherever severe social inequality exists.” Their presence in Sri Lanka has important cultural and political repercussions and is a necessary consideration when discussing multiculturalism in Kataragama as well as in Sri Lanka. In order to understand these repercussions and the status of evangelical Christians on the island, it is necessary to glance at the relationship between the Sri Lankan community and Christianity from a historical perspective.
Christianity is an evangelical religion. Conversion of nonChristians is one of its avowed policies, and historically the Church has been actively involved in these conversions. Three Christian sects have been in operation in Sri Lanka from the sixteenth century. The first to arrive was the Roman Catholic Church in 1505, with the Portuguese. The Catholic Church converted many Sinhala and Tamil groups in the Southwestern and northwestern coastal regions. Some of these conversions involved the use of violent methods. Some who refused to convert were even killed and their Buddhist/Hindu places of worship destroyed. Many converted just to stay alive. The next to arrive was The Dutch Reformed Church towards the mid seventeenth century, with the Dutch who expelled the Portuguese. The Dutch also used force to convert local people but their method was economic compulsion. Some Buddhists and Hindus baptized their children so that they could
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inherit property for only the baptized were allowed to own real property. The third Christian group was the Anglican Church, arriving in the mid eighteenth century with the British colonial rule. Together with the Anglican Church came the American Baptist Church, the Methodists, and various other schools of evangelical Christianity.
The nineteenth century European liberal philosophy professed separation of the state from the church. Consequently, the colonial government did not overtly help Christian organizations but historians show evidence of covert support. And, with or without the state support, conversions occurred primarily because conversion entailed socio-economic advancement.
The vigorous Christian campaigns to debunk the local religions and to proselytize the local populations subsided after the Independence in 1948 and were replaced by a low-key approach to conversion. Only if a person approached the Church would she be converted. But various incentives were provided to make a Christian life attractive, particularly to the low castes and the poor. Nonetheless these conversions occurred with an easygoing attitude, instead of physical or economic compulsion. The nationalization of the schools in the late 1960s and absence of state support for schools that refused to teach the religion of the local majorities limited the propagation of Christianity through primary and secondary education.
Concurrently, an easy relationship of mutual accommodation grew among the various religious groups in Sri Lanka. Christianity became a separate but domesticated religion. The old colonial aura of the Christian sects as alien invasive religious bodies that are hostile to the local religions remained. However, it was muted by the Christian-local intermarriages that brought Christians within kinship networks, and local discoveries of miraculous powers of some Christian places of worship. At the same time, the Christians who were enmeshed in the local social networks adopted many aspects of the everyday religion of the locals, such as local astrology,
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ayurvedic medicine, demonology, sorcery and deity worship, and Oecasionally belief in reincarnation as well. Some Christians are devotees of the god of Kataragama in the same way some Buddhists and Hindus are devoted to certain saints and the churches where the saints perform miracles. Particularly in the urban areas, commerce of individuals, ideas and practices occurred among the religious communities despite the historical rivalries, despite the cosmological and soteriological differences, across ethnic boundaries. This was not without disagreements, debates and disappointments. But, perhaps, the agreements, tolerance and comity prevailed.
However, from the late 1970s, a new Christian phenomenon entered the scene. In fact, this was not exactly new. What was new was the sheer energy and financial clout of this institution. This was the evangelical Christianity of the born-again Christians of various non-traditional cults such as The Jehova's Witnesses, The Pentacostal Mission, the Seventh Day Adventists and others, that operate with high voltage programs to convert non-Christians (and even Christians of the traditional churches) to their particular cults. These new evangelical cults are not fundamentalist as the Jewish and Islamic fundamentalist cults are. While the latter focus on the orthodox religion without tolerating cultural, ideological, attitudinal and behavioral pollution, the born-again Christian evangelical cults are open to cultural assimilation so long as the assimilated elements contributed to the fulfillment of their ideological end - the creation of a local Christendom out of every nation. They seek political clout to achieve this end. Their campaigns are lavishly supported by wealthy donors and have the access to huge financial resources.
The general mode of operation begins by a few leading figures from abroad, usually from the United States, and establish a residence, an office, an assembly hall where the sect leaders, known as pastors, organize the space for baptisms and preaching to a congregation. They carry out door-to-door campaigns and create
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an interest in their worldview. They distribute Bibles and other literature, translated to Sinhala and Tamil. They invite the interested locals to their establishment for further discussions.
Concurrently, they cultivate an understanding of the social and economic morphology of their locality. Often those who arrive from abroad are well informed by anthropological, sociological, and historiographic literature about the various localities. They create welfare outlets for the economically depressed segments of the society and offer financial support through a variety of grants and credit facilities. By and by, they create employment opportunities in all kinds of enterprises ranging from orchid farms to three-wheeler taxis and fishing boats. While educating the adults in matters of their faith during the sermons and discussions, they also establish daycare centers to assist working parents and deliver pre-school education. They address the issues of caste and provide utopian social environments where the low caste and economically depressed find hitherto unknown experiences of social equality and personal dignity.
Some in their audience join and greatly benefit from these welfare programs and eventually convert to the sect of evangelical Christianity preached by the specific organization. The foreign pastors recruit individuals from these converts to become local pastors who will carry forward their work in the vernacular. They hope that continual conversions and recruitment of local pastors would expand the community in geometrical progression.
The local communities perceive the evangelical sects and conversions with mixed feelings and historical biases. As I said before, Sri Lankans - South Asians, for that matter - associate Christianity with colonialism. It is an alien religion, a monotheism competing with Buddhist agnosticism and Hindu pantheistic polytheism. Christianity defines these local religions as misconceptions, falsehoods, tricks of deception invented by the Devil who thrives in the spiritual darkness that his inventions engender. The new born-again evangelicals unhesitatingly call the Buddha and the Hindu Gods the incarnations or messengers of
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the Devil, figments of delusional imagination that function to trick the people and create sinfulness and misery among them. Such characterization and condemnation provoke hostile sentiments in the adherents of local religions. For the indignant locals these repudiations of the local cultures resonate with the subjugation by early colonialism and become lenses through which all other activities of the evangelical Christians are seen. Thus antagonized, the local communities develop antipathies towards the evangelical Christians.
They perceive the welfare programs of the evangelists as ploys to convert the local people. From their perspectives, the poor and those facing financial difficulties are attracted to the allure of money made available through these programs. Some individuals have negative experiences with the evangelical Christians and talk about them in public. They say that the pastors cajole them to convert once they receive money, jobs, professional equipment and the like. The pastors are said to exert unbearable emotional pressure on the welfare recipients by pointing out that they received the funds from Christian donors who gave the money that God had given to them and now the local recipient, who received the benefit of God's generosity, is morally obligated to accept God as his creator and savior. The local recipient is told of the terrible outcome if they fail to convert. God's wrath will come in a variety of horrors and after his death the recipient, who attempted to deceive God, will burn in hell for eternity. Thus compelled to feel guilty, and frightened out of her wits, the recipient receives baptism. The local communities believe that such bribery and goading are unethical. The local critics also view the pre-schools and daycare centers operated by the evangelical Christians as devious ruses employed to steal the minds of the children. As evidence, they point to some aspects of the domestic behavior of these children. Those who go to these daycare centers and pre-schools have no notions of Buddhist or Hindu religious ideas, stories, songs and so on, but they do sing Christian songs, tell Christian stories, and talk about Christian
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concepts. There are accounts of goading the children to reject the Buddha and Hindu gods by various means. One dramatic example is the gifts from Jesus. An indignant Buddhist complains:
"A Christian missionary (pastor) brings two boxes before little children. He says one belongs to Jesus and the other to Buddha (not even Lord Buddha). Children are asked to select any box of their choice. The Buddhist children select the box of Lord Buddha. They find the box empty. The pastor now says select the box of Jesus. It is filled with so many items. Then the pastor says see how Jesus loves you.'
This strategy is applied in several ways. An eyewitness account appeared in Silumina, a Sinhala language Sunday newspaper.'
It was written by a Sinhala Buddhist man accosted by Sinhala evangelical Christians. Among his many experiences are his visits to pre-schools. I quote him verbatim.
One day I went to a pre-school run by the pastors. A young female teacher asked the children:
"Sons, do you love your mother?”
“Yes”
"Does your mother love you?”
“Yes”
"Do you love your father?”
“Yes”
"Does your father love you?”
“Yes!”
"What if your father abandons you and your mother?”
"No! It won't happen!”
“What if it happens?”
"Our father won't abandon us.”
"Have you gone to the temple?”
“Yes”
"At the temple, who is in the vihara?”
“Budu Sadu.”
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“Budu Sadu's name before he became the Buddha was Siddhartha. Do you know that?”
“Yes!”
"Before Siddhartha became the Buddha he abandoned a small son like you and his mother. Is that a good thing?”
“Nos”
“Then is Budu Sadu a good person?”
"No! A bad person!"
“Is Budu Sadu a bad person?”
“Yes” w
"Then why do you worship him?”
“We won't worship him hereafter!”
In another scenario the teacher presented three boxes.
"Open the first box,” she said. The children opened the box. It was empty.
“What's there?”
"Nothing.”
“Look in the next box.”
Children opened the second box. They put their hands into it and searched.
“What's there?”
“This is a picture of Budu Sadu.”
"Is that all?”
“Yes.”
"Open the next box."
Children opened that box also and searched.
"What's there?”
Children cheerfully replied: "There are toys; horns, little cars, flowers, little dolls.”
"Put your hands inside and search more.”
"This is a baby Jesus.”
Children pull out a picture of baby Jesus.
“Of the three boxes, what was in the first box?”
"Nothing.”
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"In the second box?”
“There was Budu Sadu.”
"Were there any toys in it?'
“Nos”
"In the third box?”
"There were toys. Baby Jesus was also there.”
“Then sons, do you like to be where Budu Sadu is or where baby Jesus is?”
“Where baby Jesus is."
"That's right. We should be with baby Jesus. Alright. Will you go to the temple after this?”
“No”
“Why?"
“Budu Sadu doesn't have toys.”
"Then where should you be?”
“Where baby Jesus is.”
Unfortunately, I have no access to eyewitness accounts of conversion materials of Tamil Hindus but Rajaratnam, Velupillai and several others reported incidents comparable to the above Sinhala Buddhist accounts. I heard Tamil and Sinhala Christians of established churches complain that the evangelicals steal worshipers in their congregations far more than they convert Buddhists and Hindus. Ratnajeevan Hoole's account is sufficient to drive the point home. He describes how, in the 1960s, evangelical Christians attempted to steal a Tamil of Anglican faith. The evangelicals use every trick in the book to hook non-evangelical Christians and individuals of other faiths. Hoole observes that the evangelical Christian preachers are thoroughly trained in the U.S.A., and go doing their business of converting Christians of traditional Christian sects like regular businessmen.
A perception shared by both Sinhala Buddhists and Tamil Christians and Hindus is that the evangelical Christians really do not care whether adults "truly” convert or whether they convert for economic and or social gain. The evangelicals want the children whom they can socialize to become pure Christians, with minds
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uncontaminated by Buddhism, Hinduism and South Asian cultural values. These children, as they reach adulthood, will constitute the foundation of the evangelical Christian community of Sri Lanka, and, one day, see to the demise of Buddhism, Hinduism and local culture.
The local response to these modern day conversion activities began with informal comments and criticisms. In Kandy during the 1980s, people began to speak casually of their general observations that in farms run by Christians - here the term is used very loosely because most Buddhists do not know the subtle differences between Christian sects - non-Christians could get jobs if they converted to Christianity. These were just passing remarks made when the topic of conversation was either unemployment or criticisms of the Sangha and the Buddhist leadership. These did not go far. Perhaps, the war in the north and the violent conflict between the Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) and the government in the south deflected interest and attention away from religious conversions. But in the 1990s, the violent confrontation with the JVPended, the focus shifted to Christian activities. By then many evangelical Christian sects had arrived in Sri Lanka and established themselves as social service Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), a phenomenon that prospered throughout the island. Some people were alarmed by the NGO phenomenon, the presence of Christian missionary organizations among them, and their financial and political capabilities. The critics claimed that through NGOs that disseminated western ideologies and compelled the government to heed to their demands, Sri Lanka was being politically, economically and culturally re-colonized. In addition, the scope, efficiency and discipline of these organizations put every State run organization to shame. That produced mixed results: admiration and antipathy in the same package of attitudes.
By the end of the century, in Sri Lanka as well as in India, the muted remarks had developed into a loud public discourse, uproar - if you will, on conversions by the evangelical Christians. The evangelicals had opened many churches throughout the island
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and many Hindus and Buddhists converted. The conversions assumed a political aura as the Buddhist monastic leaders and Hindu religious authorities began to air their views publicly. An islandwide public discourse focused on the public perceptions of conversions to Christianity while the intelligentsia focused on themes such as multiculturalism, secularism, transparency, democracy and free-market economics. Some claimed that the evangelicals exploited the nation's poverty by buying Hindus and Buddhists. Gradually, the sundry bits of information about the three boxes, and the slur on Siddhartha and practices in the daycare centers ceased to be funny stories and became signs of cultural disaster. The outcome was a public agitation carried out in the newspapers and in public meetings, culminating in a political response.
Velupillai said that a leading Tamil Hindu, a minister in the then government, began the political response by calling for legislation against "unethical conversions. He has been encouraged by a prominent Sinhala minister in the same government, who promised a parallel move from the Sinhala Buddhist side. Despite mutual suspicion and the ethnic conflict Tamils and Sinhalas collaborated in this political action.
The thrust for legislation came when one of its leading exponents of a national cultural need for legislation suddenly died several months after my pada yatra, in December, 2003. This was the death of Ven. Gangodavila Soma Thera. Ven. Soma was a preacher with remarkable oratorical skills. Employing various rhetorical tactics, he preached the dhamma to the delight of many television and radio audiences. Rev. Soma was one of the leading and powerful voices among the Buddhists to protest against conversion of Hindus and Buddhists to Christian faiths. Drawing from colonial history, Ven. Soma launched an influential campaign to create a Buddhist public discussion against the Christian NGOs by tying them to Western imperialism and cultural invasion to the detriment of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Sinhala culture and identity, and sovereignty of Sri Lanka. At the time of my pada yatra, Rev.
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Soma was one of the most powerful figures in the Buddhist eampaign against the activities of the evangelical Christians and advocated legislation against what has been identified as "unethical conversions. The campaign was only vocal and peaceful.
After Ven. Soma's demise, various Buddhist organizations made representations for legislation against 'unethical conversions.' They pointed to the late Ven. Soma's own ideas about such legislation. Encouraged by prior legislation on similar lines in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere in India, the Sinhala Buddhist impetus for legislation and Tamil Hindu moves for similar action coalesced and the ethnic rivals became unlikely partners in this effort. Several Buddhist and Hindu organizations worked together to draft a bill defining the term "unethical conversion borrowing heavily from the parallel legislation in Tamil Nadu. The Christian churches opposed the bill in unison because it violated the fundamental rights of individuals who genuinely desired to convert. However, the bill was approved with little or no debate. Thus passed, the bill was sent to the Supreme Court for approval. The Supreme Court, after examination, returned the bill to the house for several revisions. Since the Buddhist and Hindu agitation in Sri Lanka examine paralleled the Indian experience, it is profitable to the Indian experience with legislation against conversions as the charges and claims are nearly identical. There have been numerous demonstrations in various states of India against the conversion of Hindusto Christianity and Islam. The commotions in India pointed to two reasons why some Hindus converted: redemption from low caste Stigma and abject poverty. Many low caste individuals, believing that they would be able to leave aside their stigma, convert to Buddhism, Christianity or Islam, as these religions, at least doctrinally, did not recognize caste.
For some low castes, particularly among the Hindus, there was no escape from discrimination so long as they remained within a society structured upon Hindu cosmology. Escape was possible only through abandonment of the Hindu worldview, adoption of an alternative worldview that was favorable for social mobility,
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and geographical relocation. Buddhism, Islam and Christianity advocated egalitarian world views bereft of caste distinctions. Converting to any one of these religions provided some solace but not a total escape as these communities in South Asia are themselves caste-ridden although less severely and without the Hindu varna distinctions. However, this is an ineffective move as the society refuses to reconsider their social status merely because they changed their religion. In fact, in India, the mere fact of not being a Hindu (read Hindu, Buddhist, Jain or Sikh as all these religions, native to the sub-continent, are considered as facets of the overarching Hinduism) instantaneously reduces an individual to the status of a mleccha (untouchable/Harijan/Dalit). Even conversion to Buddhism, that rejects Brahmanical authority and the authority of the Vedas, causes loss of caste and most Buddhists are seen as Sudras. Nonetheless, the converted individuals claim that their conversion - to Buddhism, Christianity or Islam - changed the way they saw the world and their place in it. Rather than protesting from within, they challenge the Hindu caste system from without, from a non-Hindu vantage point. Whichever the way the Hindus see them and treat them, they construct a different self-consciousness and a perspective on life since their abandonment of Hindu identity. Their new world view shows them that their birth into an inferior social standing was not due to their own fault or due to their bad karma, for which they must pay as long as they live, but because of social injustices that are ethically and morally wrong. Gauri Viswanathan's observation that religious conversion is a cultural criticism and dissent is remarkably salient in these contexts.’’ Viswanathan (1998).
The low caste status is coupled with a lack of avenues for social mobility. Therefore, even if caste stigma is unchangeable, poverty that accompanies it can be overcome if conversion results in socio-economic benefits. Socially, Buddhists, Christians and Muslims provide educational facilities to a convert to enhance her intellectual, social, cultural and economic conditions whereas some high caste Hindus, as has been reported in the international press
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on numerous occasions, deny such rights to low caste individuals. Jln India, although some measures were taken towards the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century by small groups Such as the Brahma Samaj, Nava Vidhana and Arya Samaj, nothing could assure the low caste persons of their constitutional rights to equal dignity.
The problem here is that no government can achieve equal rights under the constitution unless the citizenry as a whole subscribes to such a value. In India, there is a hiatus between the values of the citizenry and the social ethics enshrined in the constitution. Caste is illegal in India. Although it has been legislated to guarantee various measures to compensate for historically caused socio-economic injustices and to provide concessions to the so-called scheduled castes and tribes, the laws are ineffective in reality as they are still socially considered Untouchable. High caste Hindus' resent their very presence in various institutions including higher education establishments. The lack of social support for remedial measures through legislation renders the relevant laws dead letters, meaningless formal rhetorical devices.
The non-functionality of these laws leaves the gates open for non-Hindus' to intervene socially, ideologically, culturally and economically. This is where the evangelical Christians enter the scene with all their funds, good wishes as well as zealotry. When the socially discriminated accept the alternative faith with the hope of redemption from their socio-economic misery, the high caste Hindus cry foul finding that their Hindu way of life would be threatened if the low caste persons cease to profess Hinduism and accept their low caste station in society. They also notice western imperialism creeping through the back door as the converts embrace Christianity and western culture as a package and become supporters of the western international agendas to the detriment of the integrity and sovereignty of India.
The Hindu position crystallized in the activities of various formal and informal national and local organizations. The national Hindu organs such as the Visva Hindu Parisad and the Rashtriys
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Svayam Sevak Sangh openly criticized the evangelical activities. The local political formations, some of them allegedly related to these national organs, took drastic actions against Christians. As in Sri Lanka, the vast majority of Hindus are not aware of the sectarian differences among the Christian churches. From the late 1990s, there has been a rash of attacks on Christian churches and personnel. A Catholic nun from Tamil Nadu was publicly stripped and humiliated in Bihar. Catholic priests were assassinated in Tamil Nadu. The event that attracted international attention was the killing of an Australian evangelical pastor named Stearns and his two young sons. They were burned alive by a mob in Orissa. These events grew in intensity and spread everywhere in India. The Tamil Nadu government and state governments elsewhere took formal legal action against what it defined as "unethical conversions.”
Indian state government legislation against "unethical conversions' received much criticism from every direction. The leaders of the traditional churches found that the new law prohibited all conversion. Others saw violation of human rights, threats to Indian multiculturalism, and a departure from secularism supposed to have been enshrined in the Indian Constitution.
In Sri Lanka, a nearly identical situation exists regarding caste, particularly among Tamil Hindus. Until the 1970s, only the Brahmans and Vellallas could enter the agama temples, the houses of Brahmans and Vellalas, and even draw water from the wells on Brahman and Vellala owned land. However, the similarity regarding caste ends there because a cross-section of the Tamil community, regardless of caste, converted to Christianity from the sixteenth century, with every caste represented in every Christian sect. This is particularly the case with the highest Vellala caste and the Karayar caste, the second in significance in the Sri Lankan Tamil caste hierarchy. Somehow, social policies of the three older churches were not connected to eradication of caste. Caste has never been used, at least openly, to attract Hindus for conversion. The majority of Tamils remained Hindus and the traditional Tamil social structure continued with Tamil Christians
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as a small minority. Although some non-Vellala groups escaped from discrimination during the colonial era by converting to Christianity, many low caste individuals remain within the Hindu fold and bear their Social and economic predicament. Missionaries of the three traditional churches converted a minority of the socalled Plantation, Estate, or Indian Tamils.
Among the Sinhalas, the situation is different. The Christian community is small but is represented by the upper strata of the caste system. The vast majority of the Christians are of Govigama caste - the highest in the Sinhala hierarchy and parallel to Tamil Vellalas. The Karava caste, parallel to Tamil Karayars, holds the second position in the hierarchy. The remaining Christians belong to Salagama and Durava castes. Individuals belonging to castes below these four only very rarely converted. This was partly because the Methodist and Anglican churches preferred to recruit members only from the Govigama caste. The Catholic Church also, initially, preferred the elite but subsequently accepted the other three castes. However, all three sects recognized that caste was not an impediment to achieve Christian redemption. For the Karavas, Duravas and the Salagamas the Church's non-recognition of caste was a welcome measure. On the other hand, during the Portuguese era, these castes, as maritime populations, had to convert in order to survive in the colonially administrated littoral. Despite all ideological encouragement and socio-political compulsion, the majorities in all four castes remained within the Buddhist fold. Sri Lanka's Hindu community shares this feature. There, too, the majorities in all castes are ardent Hindus and almost all castes are represented in the various schools of Christianity.
Further, Sri Lanka's Christian community, irrespective of ethnic identity, retain the caste system. Conversion has not eliminated caste-consciousness. Rather, the converts and their descendants continue to participate in the pre-Christian local culture as if Christian doctrines have no impact on social identity. In that sense the colonial period conversions do not add up to a cultural dissent or criticism. Rather, they reflect the socio-economic
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ambition and the fear of reprisal during the Portuguese era and economic loss during the Dutch period.
In the new wave of evangelical activities, the Tamil community parallels the Indian Hindu communities. Conversion programs are most successful among the low castes. But among the Sinhala Buddhists, the lowest castes still continue to be Buddhist strongholds. Among the Sinhala Buddhists, poverty or dire economic need appears to be the reason for conversion. Among the all types of Sinhalas and all types of Tamils, the lower middle class and urban working class groups appear to find evangelical Christianity attractive.
Thus, social inequality in these two nations appears to be the principal opening through which the evangelical Christians gain a foothold. The evangelical Christians offer tangible solutions to problems of poverty and deprivation as they offer a variety of facilities to enhance an individual's economic potential. Regarding caste, it is true that conversion does not remove it. However, the evangelical Christian tradition promises an alternative community with egalitarian social relationships and ecstatic religious experiences, Conversion offers perspectives to the deprived individuals to develop an alternative self-image and an alternative attitude towards the world at large.
What have the Hindus and Buddhists done to eliminate caste and poverty? The many Hindu and Buddhist publications that deplore conversions provide no solutions; nothing concrete and convincing has been done except legislation to challenge and compete with evangelical Christian NGOs. Caste continues in Sri Lanka in spite of Buddhism and is an important institution in national politics. On the other hand, what has been done to elevate the would-be converts from degrading and dehumanizing poverty? Virtually nothing, as the various poorly funded social welfare programs run by the government are lost in political favoritism, nepotism, corruption and lethargy. How many civil organizations of local origin are active to address discrimination and poverty? In Sri Lanka, even the private organizations that sprang up in the
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nineteenth century to provide education to the underprivileged strata, such as the school system of the Buddhist Theosophical Society, the Mahabodhi Society, and the schools funded by the wealthy private donors, were absorbed into the inefficient, corrupt and decrepit government department of education and ruined.
As mentioned above, the local solution that the Hindus and Buddhists devised was legislation against unethical conversions. Such legislation is theoretically possible in both countries as the constitutions in each provide for it. In Sri Lanka, the constitutional requirement for the State to protect and propagate Buddhism gives a long arm to the state to intervene in any activity that it defines with evidence as detrimental to the existence of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. In India, despite the secularist rhetoric, many constitutional provisions allow the state to intervene in religious affairs if the state has evidence to show that such activities adversely affect public order, morality and health...' In Sri Lanka, there are no laws to prevent individuals from abandoning their religions to embrace alternative faiths. However, the new law promulgated against "unethical conversions may have some teeth to prosecute those who publicly denigrate and condemn Buddhism or any other religion and disrupt their existence by any means, and to prevent the activities of the daycare centers and pre-schools run by the evangelicals. The financial dealings between the evangelicals and converts, and the Fundamental Rights and ideological issues surrounding the daycare centers and pre-schools, may be framed within Article 9 as detrimental to Buddhism and Hinduism and within Articles 10, 50 and 51.
But is legislation the only creative act that the state could think of? How successful can such legislation be in eradicating the causes of motivation for conversion? Without adequate socioeconomic structures to establish social equality and economic wellbeing, can the State, without violating the fundamental rights of citizens, prevent them from embracing a religion of their choice? How can the state prove in a court of law that an individual's faith is false? Will that not lead to some kind of witch-hunting? Can the
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law prevent people from believing what they want to believe? One can successfully practice Christianity without the churches, ministers and all other external trappings such as rituals and public displays for Christ can be enshrined in the mind and the conduct of the faithful, in much the same way another privately worships the Buddha, Krishna, Siva or Skanda. It is not necessary to advertise once faith. Within these possibilities, will the law not become a joke? On the other hand, what local non-governmental social movements against Social inequality and poverty exist and how effective are they? Can they match the financial resources and organizational effectiveness of the evangelical Christian NGOs? Throughout the better parts of the last century, the left-wing parties have been problematizing caste and poverty. What impact did these discourses have on the actual problems of discrimination and poverty? How involved are the local Buddhist and Hindu religious establishments in these discourses? What tangible contributions have they made in addition to lambasting the evangelicals?
On the other hand, is the evangelical Christian position justifiable? Both in India and in Sri Lanka, the respective constitutions guarantee freedom of religion and accommodate all religions. Without mentioning the new term 'multiculturalism’ they enshrine what is effectively meant by this term. In so many public expressions, the evangelicals have invoked multiculturalism to claim a foothold in the society. But their position is contradictory as their principle is to convert as many non-Christians as possible and carry out vigorous propaganda to achieve this end. Can they convert others into their faith in this manner, using these tactics, and still claim a right to do so under the multiculturalism doctrine? Aren't they attempting to destroy all other faiths as devil worship, false religions and delusions? How can multiculturalism exist under such moves that aim to create an evangelical Christian monoculture? How can they prevent the state from defining their activities as detrimental to the safety of the local religions and legislating against them?
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Another concept in the evangelical Christian claims is seqularism. What is secularism? For a quick definition we may refer to the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. There, it is expressly stated that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;...” This is to separate the state and the church. Accordingly, the establishment and care of religion must be left to the civil society and the state must focus only on secular - meaning strictly non-religious - matters. This is reasonable in a multi-religious society. However, the secularism doctrine, while advocating cultural laissez faire, does not address the problems of well-heeled and politically powerful religions from subjugating the economically powerless religions. Although Hinduism and Buddhism are majority religions in India and Sri Lanka respectively, they cannot match the financial resources of the evangelical Christians. The power of evangelicals' money is already visible in both these countries. Should the state turn a blind eye to these imbalances? Is religion only and merely religion and not politics? Aren't these analytical distinctions rather thin in the empirical world of politics, particularly in the light of the evangelical ambition to create a part of the Christendom out of every heathen society? In that scenario, can the State turn a blind eye and let cultural laissez faire decide and continue touphold a doctrine of multiculturalism? What guarantee is there that the evangelicals, whose interpretation of the Bible is literal, would guarantee secularism if they succeed in creating an evangelical Christian state? Freston shows that elsewhere they have attempted to gain political control over various nations and this has led to political instability, bloodshed and death.'
The third concept used to justify the evangelical activities is the doctrine of human rights. All members of the society must have an equal right to religious beliefs of their choice and raise their children to believe in their religion without hindrance from anyone. The constitutions of India and Sri Lanka conditionally guarantee such rights. Any religion can function in these societies
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as long as it does not disturb public order. The alleged activities of the evangelicals, if true, are unsupported by the human rights doctrine as they violate a person's right to educate her children without external influences. On the other hand, their activities do disturb public order as they arouse public sentiments against their activities. Ample examples are available to show that violence against Christians was contingent upon evangelical activities, and this, ironically, in spite of the exemplary humanitarian services rendered by some of them such as the Stearns family.
Velupillai is indifferent to these issues. As he expressed his views through a yawn, let the people decide and the state must protect their interests. Rajaratnam finds the whole thing confusing and beyond his understanding. I, for one, believe that the evangelical Christians of every sect and creed have a right to be in Sri Lanka and must make their doctrines and approaches to life available to all interested parties and the state is obliged by the constitution to protect their right to be in this country. Multicultural secularist approaches to good governance necessitates such tolerance and magnanimity. However, the evangelical Christian organizations must refrain from denigrating other faiths and employing underhand tactics to compel individuals to embrace their faith. Although a law might not effectively prevent them from converting individuals from other faiths, mobs will-for fanaticism engenders fanaticisms of rival kinds, throwing the whole nation into a religious war that no one wants.
Potuvil
By noon, we arrived in Potuvil and went straight to the Muruga kovil there. Potuvil is an old community. At present, it is mainly a bazaar on the way to Panama from Siyambalanduva and Batticaloa.' The population belongs to east coast Tamil and Muslim communities. The bazaar caters to the needs of Tamil and Muslim rice farmers who cultivate the extensive fields that we walked through. A couple of kilometers to the south of the bazaar, the road to Panama skirts the coast and runs over a causeway that
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links Arugam Bay, a tourist resort. By the Potuvil side of the road a burned down cinema and a few other buildings, and an elaborate camp of the Government's Special Task Force, show the results of the ethnic war. Burned down tourist guesthouses are visible all along the Arugam Bay beach. In addition to these signs of the ethnic conflict, the astonishing and disgusting spreads of plastic trash everywhere one looked indicated the extent to which the environment is polluted in spite of the attempts to convert Arugam Bay into a tourist attraction. On rainy days, the bay is covered with incredible amounts of plastic trash that the overflowing rivulets carry into the bay and the waves deposit on the otherwise charming seashore. During a previous visit to Arugam Bay, much touted as surfers paradise, we could not help but ask, "What surfing? Surfing what? Plastic trash?”
Avalokitesvara
About a kilometer from the causeway, towards Potuvil, there is a Muslim village on the coast. During several previous visits, a walk through this village towards the beach took us to a ruined Buddhist temple. Among the remnants of this Buddhist place of worship are three beautiful granite statues. The principal statue is a standing Buddha reminiscent of the Polonnaruwa era motifs. This statue has been placed in what appears to be the main shrine room of the ancient building. Facing the Buddha are two smaller (still a bit larger than life) statues of a male and a female. The male wears a crown bearing an image of the Buddha in the padmasana (lotus seat).
Nearby, in a small building, a bhikkhu has recently established a vihara. As the bhikkhu told us, Vihara Maha Dewi was set afloat at Kelaniya as a sacrifice to the ocean that flowed inland and caused havoc as a karmic retribution for the sin committed by her father, King Kelanitissa, by killing a bhikkhu in a cauldron of boiling oil. 'The vessel carrying the princess came ashore at this spot. King Kavantissa of Magama, near Tissamaharama, married her. The vihara was constructed by the
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king to memorialize this event. The two figures facing the Buddha arethose of Kavantissa and Vihara Maha Devi. Thebhikkhu ledus to the seashore where he located a spot and claimed that the rest of the ancient vihara is buried under the sand.
Regarding the identity of the male and female figures, the bhikkhu is completely mistaken as the male image clearly indicates by the Buddha image inscribed in its crown that it is an image of the Mahayana bodhisattva Avalokitesvara." The female figure could well be that of a manifestation of the goddess Tara, a major deity in Mahayana Buddhism. The bhikkhu seemed to apply the Dutugemunu ideology, generated during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in the present contexts of the ethnic war in this predominantly Tamil and Muslim area. But it is clear that an ancient Mahayana Buddhist temple complex existed in this area. Who were these Mahayana Buddhists, and what happened to them? Judging by the social and political events in South India and Sri Lanka from the eigth to fifteenth centuries, it is likely that these Buddhists were migrants from South India, probably from the eastern flank of the subcontinent where Mahayana Buddhism flourished until the revival of Saivite Brahmanism. As discussed in Chapter Two, many Buddhists and Jains fled from the various kingdoms in southern countries as the royalty and influential classes embraced Brahmanism and began expelling the sramana schools of thought as heretics. Some of them migrated to Sri Lanka. Judging by the structure of and motifs in the images I figured that they might have been constructed during the late Polonnaruva, Dambadeniya or the Yapahuva kingdoms that flourished from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.'
What happened to this Buddhist community may be explained by referring to the history of the east coast of the island. On the one hand, the east coast was open to migrations from the subcontinent particularly since the fall of the Polonnaruva kingdom. The state economic interests and the political centers shifted from the North-Central Province and the southeastern parts to the southwestern parts of the island. During these periods,
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particularly during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, South Indian migrations were frequent and became even more intensive and extensive during the Kotte and Kandyan periods." Most of these later waves of migrants were of Hindu persuasion. As they settled in these areas, the local Buddhist communities also, following the South Indian trend, adopted Hinduism and gradually abandoned their Buddhist places of worship.
In the afternoon, we shopped for items required for our journey from Okanda to Kataragama through the Yala wildlife sanctuary. We went to the well-stocked grocery of a Tamil merchant whom I had met during my previous visits to Potuvil. When I first met him I thought he was a Sinhala man for his speech in Sinhala is flawless. Later, when I asked about his background he said that he was a Tamil, born and grown up in Badulla. He had come to Potuvil after the 1983 ethnic riots. He is Gunaratnam. He readily recognized me and remembered that I had bought some chocolate from him. When he found that we were performing a pada yatra to Kataragama he immediately offered to host us for the night. And I bought from him all the supplies we needed for the trip from Okanda to Kataragama. He would bundle them up and send them to Okanda by a van the next morning. Gunaratnam lives in a fairly large house on a large compound. He said he built it solely from the profits from the grocery. He also owns a minivan, a major accessory of a successful businessman. At Gunaratnam's house we spent that night talking pleasant things, about Muruga and Valliamman.
29th July, 2003 Panama
We left the house before the Gunaratnams were up and walked fast. When we reached the causeway in Arugambay a blood red sun was emerging behind a veil of purplish haze over the calm sea. Our destination was Panama, about sixteen kilometers south of Potuvil.
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Panama has been a well-known village for several reasons. It is an early colonial era Sinhala outpost that came into being after the 1818 rebellion. Sinhala participants in the rebellion withdrew into the Yala region to escape from the colonial army. This region, known today as the Panam Pattu, was once a significant part of the Ruhunakingdom with many archaeological sites, some of them dating back to the first century BCE. The Sinhala refugees from Vellassa region settled around the Buddhist viharas and in Kumana, today a bird sanctuary within the Yala wildlife preserve. Except for Kumana village and Panama village build on the banks of the Panama tank other settlements gradually decayed with residents concentrating on Panama and Kumana.”
Those who settled in Panama renounced all connections with Vellassa. In order to hide their Vellassa origins they even renounced their family names. Instead, they cultivated relationships with the already existing Tamil and Muslim communities in Potuvil, Komari, Tambiluvil, Akkaraipattu and Panamkodu and joined the administrative structures of this larger region. Thus becoming a border community, they exchanged various cultural traits with these Tamil Hindus and Muslims. Panama residents are related to Tamil Hindus and Muslims by marriage. Intermarriages necessitated cultural exchanges. For example, Panama residents, following the Tamil practice, use the father's name as the 'ge' name to indicate the family to which an individual belongs. Panama Sinhala is a hybrid language that includes many Tamil components."
Panama became well known since Gananath Obeyesekere published his work on the cult of the goddess Pattini for, in this village a fast disappearing ritual drama called ankeliya is annually performed. Ankeliya, as Obeyesekere discusses, is a ribald play of psychological themes concerning repressed sexuality and a variation of a mindset that is found in the peninsular India, particularly in Kerala.' The mindset itself signifies the complex ethnicity and culture of the population of Panama, where Sinhala and Tamil families coexist in harmony, as well as the shared mentalities of the
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inhabitants of the Southern and Eastern Provinces and their South Indian connections.
During the ethnic war, the village, similar to other such border communities, drew the attention of social scientists because of its hybrid population. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, writing about multiculturalism in the border communities in the Vanni area in the north, states that ever since the colonial administrations began census taking and their concomitant classification of Sri Lankans into strict ethnic categories, the hybrid populations in the border villages lost their cultural and ethnic hybridity as strict ethnic identities were administratively imposed upon them. This hybridity existed in pre-colonial Sri Lanka, not only in border villages but practically every where and, until the British colonial administration began census taking, was vibrant in the various ports as well. As discussed earlier, the imposition of the alien classificatory system obliterated the native fluid identities, and the border communities were drawn into the bloody war as the former hybrid villages split into rival ethnic groups. I wanted to test RajasinghamSenanayake's thesis in Panama.
The way to Panama, as soon as we passed Arugam Bay, fell through beautiful villages. Soon we were crossing an immense rice field, fallowing until the monsoons in August. Flocks of peafowl roamed the fields, drying their plumage in the morning sun. I began a conversation about Panama with my companions. Rajaratnam had never been to Panama but Velupillai was familiar with the village. He has relatives there. Moreover, as a frequent visitor to Okanda, he has gone through Panama many times.
"There is nothing much in Panama,” he began to my disappointment. "It is an old village. Very small. Only a few shops, a Pulleyarkovil, a Buddhist temple, a school and an army camp." “I heard that the people there are different from whom we have met so far,” I said.
"What do you mean? They are like everybody else. Nothing special. Only thing is, it is a Sinhala village,” he responded.
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“Only Sinhala people live there?” I asked. "Mostly Sinhala people. There are some Tamils also. Like Arumugam. Remember! In Potuvil!” Velupillai said.
Arumugam is a mutual friend who runs an eatery in Potuvil. "Arumugam's wife is a Sinhala woman from Panama” he added.
That is true. During a previous visit to Potuvil, Arumugam and I had a chat about his family. He said he lived in Panama, his wife was a Sinhala woman and his children grew up as Sinhala people. His wife was Lalita. I met Jayanta, one of his sons, a nice lad. Arumugam said he came to Panama from Akkaraipattu when he was a mere boy. Sinhala families in Panama adopted him. Arumugam found work in the paddy fields, the central theme in the Panama economy. There was work to do practically every day, and he saved the money he earned as food and lodging was free. He would return to Akkaraipattu occasionally. In time, Panama and its community became his community. Then he met Lalita. Her parents were small landholders in Panama. They, too, worked in the paddy fields and gardens of their friends and relatives. They liked Arumugam, and when they found that he and one of their daughters had soft corners for each other, they allowed them to register their marriage and live together. Arumugam speaks fluent Sinhala, and can easily pass-off for a Sinhala. He is a Hindu, an ardent devotee of Muruga and Pulleyar. But his wife and children are Buddhists although they are devoted to Kataragama Deiyo and Pulleyar. I asked him whether he wanted his family to be Hindu like him. He said there is no need to, as they already worship those gods. Do they ask him to be a Buddhist? The issue has never arisen. Do others in Panama ask him to convert? So far no one in Panama has asked him about his religion. He goes to the Buddhist temple with them and the bhikkhu of the temple is a good friend of his. He goes to the Pulleyar kovil with them. He worships in both places. How can anyone tell what his religion is? His religion is their religion, whoever they are.
We reached Panama by half past ten. We entered the village through a security checkpoint. The Buddhist vihara was on my
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right, immediately after the checkpoint. Ahead of me was a roundabout with one road going to my right and the other straight ahead. The way to Okanda, our next destination, was to the right. We took that route. A few yards from the roundabout, on my right, stood the Pulleyar kovil in the shade of several large trees. On my left was the Panama school. Many busloads of Tamil pilgrims sat around in the kovil compound. Some were bathing in the well of the kovil. Others were cooking, chatting and socializing. To the right of the kovil there was an empty hall. Velupillai said we could stay the night in that hall. He called it the visramasalava using the Sinhala word for (pilgrims') resting-hall.
We were hungry. Before settling down, we went to the Panama bazaar: a couple of tearooms and few other shops that provided the necessities to the village folk. We sat on a wooden bench in the verandah of a tearoom, relaxing and stuffing ourselves with gnanakata cakes and bananas, watching a dog's curious attempts to catch a fly.
Sivam was waiting for us at the Pulleyar kovil. He was with another middle-aged tall, wiry man. Sivam introduced the man as one of his uncles, Sirimanna. Sirimanna Smiled politely. We walked to the resting-hall. Rajaratnam cleaned the floor and organized an area for our use. He was in high spirits. He will meet his family and kindred tomorrow, in Okanda. Velupillai went to the kovil area to see some people known to him. Sivam said our lunch was being prepared at Sirimanna's house. Sirimanna suggested that I could go to his house with him.
We walked through the bazaar and turned right, into the village. The gravel road ran along the edge of a vast paddy field. He pointed to an area in the field and said he owned several acres of paddy land in that part. He said he liked "vigovitana, Sinhala term for paddy cultivation. He went on giving an account of his paddy cultivation. We turned right once again, this time up a footpath into the front yard of a house with coconut and mango trees and a few beds of marigolds. Sirimanna's house is a well-made affair with a tiled roof.
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Sirimanna liked to talk about himself. As we sat down he remarked, "My name is a new one. When I first came here, my name was Saravanamuttu. Everybody knew me as Saravanamuttu.”
"How did Saravanamuttu become Sirimanna?" I asked. "The army registered my name as Sirimanna,” he said. "How can the army register you by a wrong name?” I asked in dismay. Panama was not directly affected during the ethnic clashes. But, since nearby Potuvil was badly affected, and since there were suspicions that the LTTE roamed the Yala sanctuary, the government established several camps of security personnel in the area. Because the safety of the Sinhala village and the bhikkus in the Buddhist temple seemed at risk, one of the security camps was established in Panama. We had walked through that checkpoint to enter Panamajust a couple of hours ago. One of the tasks of the security officers was to prepare a register of the inhabitants so that they could be accounted for in the event of a clash with the LTTE. Saravanamuttu, as an established resident of the area, went with his family to the security point. The soldier who registered their names turned to Saravanamuttu.
"What is your name?” the soldier. “Saravanamuttu,” Saravanamuttu. The soldier heard 'Saravanamuttu as 'Sirimanna. “Ha Ha! Sirimanna,” the soldier said and smiled with him. Saravana muttu reacted, “No ! No! Saravana muttu! Saravanamuttu!”
"Alright. Sirimanna. Si-ri-ma-nna. Initials?” the soldier asked. "Not Sirimanna. Saravanamuttul, Sa-ra-va-na-muttul,” he corrected the soldier again.
"Not Sirimanna? What's wrong with a name like Sirimanna? It is a nice name,” the soldier insisted.
"That is also true,” it occurred to Saravanamuttu. “Sirimanna," the name had a nice ring to it. It flowed more musically than Saravanamuttu, easier in the ear. He liked it.
"Fine. Sirimanna. Sirimanna Write it like that!" he said to the soldier.
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Smiling handsomely, the soldier said, "It is a very nice name,” and wrote it like that. V,
"That is how I became Sirimanna,” Sirimanna said. He went on expressing his views. "I like the Sinhala language. It is very easy to speak. It is easy to read also. Tamil has too many letters, Too many loops and dots and all kinds of coils. It is very confusing. I like to speak Sinhala.” . .
"Do you speak Sinhala with your family?" I asked. “Only in Sinhala,” he said. "Do you speak in Tamil with Tamil people?” I probed. “Only in Tamil,” he said. "What did your family say about your new name?” I asked. "They liked it. But at first they found it rather funny. Even I thought so. Even the village people thought so. But we got used to it. Now I am Sirimanna,” he explained.
"Did you officially change your name?” I asked. "That is official, isn't it? The soldier wrote it down,” he declared.
"But don't you have to talk to the government about it, register the new name at the kachcheri and publish in the newspapers?" I asked.
"The soldier was doing that work. I have an ID,” he insisted. "How does your name appear in the ID?” I asked. "Sirimanna,” he asserted. "Initials?” I asked. "Initials? What initials? I never had any. Before, I was Saravanamuttu. After, I became Sirimanna. Now I am Sirimanna. That's all.” He confirmed.
Sirimanna's attitude fascinates me. He did not have to accept that name. The soldier would have complied if he insisted that his name must be registered as Saravanamuttu. From what I heard this far it appeared that the encounter between Sirimanna and the soldier was not a hostile altercation but a joking relationship. He had jokingly suggested the new name. I am tempted to think that the power and authority that the army uniform carried intimidated
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him to accept Sirimanna as his name. But there was not a hint of it in Sirimanna's attitude towards the incident. He recollected it fondly. It still amused him. His attitude towards the soldier had no bitterness, hostility or resentment. Rather, he saw the soldier as a mere boy, a likeable fellow who saw the funny side of life in tense situations. Sirimanna also liked the funny side of life. I hypothesize that Sirimanna wanted to be Sinhala. He liked the people and their language. He married a Sinhala woman and raised a family that socially identifies itself as a Sinhala Buddhist family. The Sinhala community in Panama claimed him as much as he claimed them. In the funny encounter, this mutual claiming, in spite of the war, the uniforms, guns and bombs, surfaced. Perhaps, Sirimanna and the soldier simply liked each other - aliking at first sight, if I may - and forgot the tension between Tamils and the Sinhala-dominated government security establishment. When the two clowns met and joking began the war became irrelevant.
Sirimanna is not the only Tamil I met who wanted to claim a Sinhala identity. I know many Tamils who are comfortable with Sinhala people and want to be parts of the Sinhala community. I also know many Sinhalas who would rather be among socially compatible Tamils than among the Sinhalas of social types that are different from their own. They admire Tamil culture and share their religion devoutly, like Sirimanna's wife Ranmanika, Arumugam's wife Lalita, and their families who claimed these two men. My friend Arumugam has none of these experiences of morphing identities. He is happy with his name and his language. He has no particular desire to be a Sinhala as such but he and his 'Sinhala' and Buddhist family live among Sinhala others in Panama as parts of the community there.
The same thing occurs far away from Panama, in vastly different social circles. I know of Sinhala communities on the west coast whose names are Sinhala, like Mihindukulasuriyage Fernando. At least forty years ago, they were illiterate in Sinhala but literate in Tamil. Their domestic language was Tamil. In my native village near Galle town there was a Sinhala man named Salaman Appu.
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He was a kankanam, a supervisor of teams of mostly Tamil workers in a tea plantation. His best friend was Velu, a Tamil, the chief plumber in the plantation. Socially, they were always together. They got drunk, became involved in village fights, and even womanized (so I heard), together. I also know of a Muslim man in conservative Kandy who went against the grain of his strongly endogamous Islamic community and married a Sinhala Buddhist woman. He never wanted her to convert to Islam or change her life style in any way and he remained a devout Muslim. However, such instances are rare outside Panama. Although the above instances of social hybridity exist today they are exceptions to the rule.
The hybridity in Panama, and in the border villages that Rajasingham-Senanayake discusses, is based on the desire of individuals and groups for mutual assimilation. Socio-cultural hybridity results when two aliens find common grounds and adopt one another. In multi-polar relationships, the conditions are more complex. In Panama, the dyadic absorption is approved by the society and is unaffected by the ethnic, linguistic and religious identities as these are also negotiated in matrices of hybrid kinship, similar prior alliances, mutual tolerance and accommodation. But elsewhere in Sri Lanka, the surrounding community may exhibit mixed attitudes ranging from open-mindedness to opposition and hostility. This is because ethnic and cultural boundaries are strongly demarcated emphasizing differences and otherness. Rather than willingness to assimilate and be assimilated, the tendency is to stay apart. In the border villages in the Vanni region, the colonial census had unwittingly imposed rigid ethnic identities upon constituent communities disrupting the pre-colonial dynamics of fluid identities and social relations in their 'open social structures.’
The intriguing issue here is how Panama people continue to sustain such an open social structure in defiance of the rigid identities forced upon them by the colonial social classification, whereas in other border villages the open social structures had given way to closed and exclusivist social structures that renounced ethnic hybridity and developed ethnic endogamy. However, it is
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dangerous to over-generalize in these matters as each border community is historically and geographically uniquely situated.
Rajasingham-Senanayake's observations were made mainly in the northern and north-eastern areas of Sri Lanka. In these border villages social relations have been thoroughly influenced by the ethnic classifications employed in administrative and political processes. These processes introduced ethnic insularity and otherness leading to the closure of ethnic social structures, and finally to ethnic conflicts that displaced many boarder communities.
Taking a clue from Obeyesekere, I hypothesize that the hybridity of the northern and north-eastern border villages collapsed because of several reasons. During the middle decades of the twentieth century two large social phenomena occurred. One is the dramatic population expansion and concomitant increase in the competitiveness for scarce resources - land and water. The other is the intense politicization of ethnic identities and escalation of north-south divisions rendered by Sinhala and Tamil political parties that pitted Tamils and Sinhalas against one another. But these occurred in Panama as well. What distinguishes Panama from the above is that Sinhala-Tamil relationships in Panama occurred on a completely different social organizational principle. In the northern and north-eastern border villages, two strongly patrilineal communities with patrifocal residence patterns existed. Although there were intermarriages between Tamils and Sinhalas, the bride went to live with the husband's family, i.e. patrifocally.
In the south-eastern parts of the Eastern Province, generally south of Batticaloa, the Vellala caste Tamils were organized matrilineally, as discussed earlier, into kutis or matriclans.
Although the matrilineal character has disappeared in social identity formation owing to the colonial imposition of patrilineal naming, it still survives particularly in the economic and religious spheres.
Consequently, matrifocal residence is acceptable in these regions. Thus, when Tamils from Akkaraipattu and other areas
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south of Batticaloa marry from patrilineal Sinhala Buddhist, mostly Ggvigama (Vellala parallel) families in Panama, the bridegroom settles down in Panama without much personal psychological stress or social opprobrium and the Sinhala patrilineal system has the institution of binna marriage where the residence pattern is matrifocal. In Panama these two principles coalesce. The Tamils who come to Panama settle down with their wives' kindred and become assimilated, Sinhalized, as it were, and the children from such marriages become Sinhala children acquiring social identities from their mother. The families of both Sirimanna and Arumugam exhibited these characteristics. Since the matrifocally residing Tamil husbands merge with their wives' families and become virtually Sinhala as extensions of those families, they are unaffected by the demographic, economic and political trends in the larger Society. The ethnic labeling does not intervene as hybrid identities are encouraged and the offspring belong to the Sinhala community. Economic competitiveness arising from demographic pressures does not lead to ethnic rivalry and none exists, at least for now.
Further, many Sinhala men who receive education through the secondary schools leave Panama, especially for Colombo, looking for their fortunes in the modern society as salaried employees or businessmen and the Panama agricultural enterprises need labor inputs from elsewhere. The Tamil farmers who willingly enter the scene are readily assimilated. Given the strong hostility between the Tamils and the Sinhalas, and given the unconscionable creation and exploitation of these hostilities by politicians who would play any trump to win the elections, it is hard to predict the future of the hybrid community of Panama.
Sirimanna said his daughter Renuka was preparing lunch. Sivam would come and pick it up for us. We walked back to the Pulleyar kovil. On the way Sirimanna described the cordial relationship he enjoyed with the bhikku in the Panama vihara.
I returned to the resting-hall to find an irate Rajaratnam. Velupillai had insulted him again. While talking to pilgrims, Velupillai had begun to order Rajaratnam to do various
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inconsequential things such as bringing him water and setting up a place for Velupillai to rest. From Rajaratnam's point of view, this was a petty strategy to put him down before the pilgrims some of whom were known to him. Rajaratnam had refused and Velupillai had scolded him.
Sivam brought our lunch - massive packages of Sinhala rice and curry. Over lunch, I talked to Velupillai about his tiff with Rajaratnam. He was defensive. He said he had a right to ask Rajaratnam to do things as he hired him, although I paid him, as a laborer. Rajaratnam should obey him. I told him to treat Rajaratnam with respect, as he was a middle-aged family man as we both were and as we were all in this pilgrimage together. Velupillai was indignant. Perhaps my tone of voice was a bit harsh. He ate silently and walked away. After he left Sivam and Sirimanna talked of Velupillai disapprovingly. They left promising to bring our dinner as well.
I lay in my 'bed' throughout the afternoon updating my notes. Rajaratnam stayed near me. Later in the afternoon, I asked Rajaratnam to call Velupillai to go out to have tea. Together we went to the nearby tearoom. Velupillai did not speak a word. Around five in the afternoon a drunken man entered the temple compound and clowned for a while. Dinner arrived early. Velupillai talked only to Sivam. He ate noisily and left. Sivam said Velupillai was going to sleep in the kovil. Rajaratnam opted to sleep where I was. The day ended on a dull restless note despite the fascinating encounters in the morning.
End Notes
1 - See Malalgoda (1976), Seneviratne (1978), Pieris (1956), Holt (1995), Pieris (1950), Dewaraja (1972) for details of Kandyan period ethnicity and kinship.
See Wilson(2000) for details of political implications.
Wilson (op.cit.). During this era, the Sinhalas were not as active against the onslaught of the colonial culture. Although some Kandyan aristocratic clans used the ethnic and religious identities of the Nayakkar kings against those kings, ethnicity as a principle for resistance to royal authority was not adopted by the aristocratic community as a whole until the last king, Sri Wickrama,
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turned completely against aristocrats. There were intermarriages between Tamil Hindu kings and Sinhala and Tamil aristocrats. See Lawrie (1898) for details.
See Obeyesekere (1970) on Anagarika Dharmapala's involvement. Guruge (1965) is the best source of information on Dharmapala.
Wilson (op. cit). On the other hand, the wealthier Muslims are religiously compelled to share their wealth with the less fortunate Muslims. Perhaps, they do not violate promises made to Muslim workers in the spirit of this principle. But they are not compelled to have this attitude towards the non-Muslims. In such relationships, getting the upper hand in a deal, irrespective of the promises, appears to be a more important marker of success in the market place.
During the colonial administration, Colombo was considered as the 'station' and all other towns such as Kandy, Jaffna, Galle, Badulla, Batticaloa etc. were considered as 'out-station' places. As such they had lower social prestige and less exposure to the Anglicized life-style of the groups "in station.' Long after the Independence this terminology was used in the administration and local press. A good example of the distinction between Colombo (the station) and the rest of the country was the way cricket was played. Even in the 1960s, there were two strands of cricketing- one in station' or Colombo based and the other 'out-station. Even when schoolboy cricketers of the year were selected there was separate recognition for the two strands.
This perception is inaccurate. While in practice the UNP favored the colonial culture for political purposes, to win the support of the Sinhala masses, it was J. R. Jayawardane of the UNP who first proposed to establish Sinhala as the official language of the nation. S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike merely stole his idea. See Wilson (2000: 2001) for details.
The intricacies of these developments need not concern us here. I am only presenting a national process with far reaching consequences in ethnic relations in Sri Lanka. For details see Wilson (op.cit. 82-112), K.M. de Silva (1984:97. 107), C.R. de Silva (1984:133-135); Roberts (1979 & 1990), Wickremeratne (1995; 48-80); Tamils showed the opposite side of the coin. They accused the government of naked discrimination. For details see Wilson (ibid.).
See Tambiah (1997) for a discussion of the Gal Oya irrigation project and its ethnopolitical significance and reverberations. Wilson (ibid.) too addresses the issues.
We shall address this theme in Chapter Five.
Another frequently used name for Ganesha. I shall use both Pulleyar and Vinayakar to call the deity.
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2
At a subsequent meeting Velupillai informed me that Gunaratnam and his family perished in the Tsunami.
Daniel (1984:126-127). Courtright (1985:10-11).
Here I refer to Obeyesekere (1981). The private symbolism of the Vaddas may involve unconscious castration anxieties rooted in Oedipal conflicts in individuals. The reversal of the direction of the Vaddaking's arrow signified, at least to me, the reversal of the castration anxiety. In the end the aggressor, who tries to castrate the ego becomes castrated. In all appearances this was a male-centered ritual. Women had no roles to play and there were only a few women in the audience.
See Kapferer (1997) for an extensive discussion of the southern rituals.
This is reminiscent of Skanda splitting the Krauncahills as in the Mahabharata and later renditions of the story of Skanda. See Chapter 1 for details.
I have not visited the Mantur temple. For a recent ethnography of this temple see Mark Whitacker. On the whole, the Mantur kovil ritually functions pretty much within the structures of the Kataragama rituals.
The identification of a Vel here is similar to the identification of a Vel in Kataragama. This theory is problematical as the Veddas of Sri Lanka do not use lances. However, they establish shrines around arrows and worship the arrowhead demon (Itale Yaka). There are no lance bearing deities in the Vedda tradition.
Ponnambalam Arunacalam (1924) was probably the first to 'see'alance in the Vadda arrowhead. We shall return to this point later on.
C. S. Navaratnam (1964:78) citing Hugh Neville.
The Mahavansa states that Sirisangabodhi Vijayabahu III ruled in Vanni from 1232-1236. But there is no agreement on this date among the chroniclers. The Rajavaliya and Pujavaliya give him twenty four years indicating that he perhaps reigned in the Vanni even during the interregnum after Magha's invasion. Vijayabahu III was only a regional king whose authority was limited to the Vanni. But in Vanni he had the allegiance of all the local Sinhala dignitaries. Undoubtedly, he had the support of Adipada Bhuvanekabahu who established a town on the inaccessible Govindamala, an imposing rock twenty miles West of Tirukovil (Mahavansa:81:1-16 and Geiger (1953:135:n4)Geiger thinks this name of the rock is incorrect and suggests instead Govindasela following the current Govindahela. Perhaps it was Govindamalai in Tamil and the Mahavansa uses the Sinhalized form of the Tamil name. The Hindu prefix Govinda indicates a Vaisnava hand in this nomenclature. Possibly, the local Hindu traditions recounting the Ramayana
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located an event involving Rama on this hill. For the first time Mahavansa mentions the Vanni in chapter 81:11, in the contexts of this king.
Johnston (JCBRAS XXXVI plate. No. 98, page No.74); Navaratnam (1964:77).
Navaratnam (ibid. 77).
Turner (1978) would classify this temple as an archaic pilgrimage that later developed prototypical characteristics. By contrast, the Kannagiammankovil that we visited earlier would be a typical prototypical pilgrimage site with its strong associations with King Gajabahu (Tamil: Kacapahu).
Velupillai also informed me that these hosts of ours were wiped away by the Tsunami.
Velupillai related a symbolic story that I have heard many times before. The people of all nations are in hell. The hell is a deep well. People from different nations get together and plan strategies to escape from hell. A few people of one country conceive of a workable scheme. One man stands up. Another man gets on his shoulders. A third man gets on the second man's shoulders and so on until they reach the mouth of the well. Others climb up this human ladder and get out of the well and hell. Those who get out make a rope out of their clothes, put it down the well and get everyone else out of hell. The people of other nations also copy this plan and get out. Then Sri Lankans try it. But when the first man reaches the mouth of the well everybody else feels envious and no one wants to be the second to leave hell and no one trusts anyone else to throw the rope down to take him out. So everybody jumps at the legs of the man who is trying to get out and pulls him down.
This is only the Sri Lankan version of a story found in the other South Asian societies as well. In South Asian societies people see themselves as the most destructive and envious among all peoples on earth.
Evangelical Christianity has a long history much of which is not directly relevant to us. For detailed studies see Ling (1968), and Smart (1969). For an excellent introduction to and overview of evangelical organizations as they operate today see Paul Freston (2001). Archaeological evidence shows that Christianity had visited Sri Lanka during the first few centuries of the Common Era. But there is no evidence to support that Christian communities existed here. Large scale establishment of communities began from 1505.
Gananath Obeyesekere (2006). Personal Communication.
Kamalika Pieries. The Island (8 March, 2000); cited in FocusSriLanka (www.geocities.com/focussirilanka). Many in Kataragama informed me of such patterns of behavior by children who attendevangelical Christian daycare centers in Kataragama.
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(www.geocities.com/focussirilanka/). For further accounts from Indialog on to (www.christianaggression.com/)
Silumina, 11 January 2004. Author's translation.
Ratnajeevan Hoole (1997: 156-160). It is unfortunate that only the Sinhala Buddhists, Sinhala Christians and Indian Hindus report and comment on these issues. The Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus are noticeably quiet in the public media although they are very sensitive to ethnic and religious politics.
But in December 2003, almost five months after my padayatra, the situation changed radically. On December 12, Ven. Soma suffered a heart attack and passed away in Russia. The incident generated a tremendous uproar in Sri Lanka where his followers, both lay and monastic, suspected foul play. The suspicion was aroused by the fact that he died in Russia. What was the venerable bhikku doing in Russia? Why and how did he go to Russia?
Ven. Soma's supporters did not take long to discover the background of his demise. A fundamentalist evangelical Christian pastor named Shanti P. Jayasekera had invited and financed his journey. The invitation was to confer on him the degree Doctor of Philosophy. The institution that conferred the degree is a university in St. Petersburg, allegedly run with funds from American evangelical Christian organizations. Rev. Shanti Jayasekera was its Rector. Ven. Soma went to Russia in October but immediately fell ill and passed away on the 12th of December.
This information became putty in the hands of imaginative individuals. Numerous accounts of the invitation, journey, the degree and the death were spun with extraordinary creativity. The nature of the host and the cause of death were connected using what happened in between as the plot by the host to cause the death. The conclusion of all accounts: the evangelical Christians assassinated their arch critic Ven. Gangodavila Soma Thero. There were separate theories about each scene of this drama. The bare facts of a series of events that led to the renowned bhikku's demise went through various analyses and interpretations. Often even the facts' themselves were reorganized in order to develop a particular analysis.
Rev. Jayasekera and the evangelical church vigorously denied these charges and promptly presented photographs taken during the convocation to prove that the convocation actually occurred, the degree was conferred, and that Ven. Soma passed away because of natural causes. None of these satisfied Ven. Soma's congregations in Sri Lanka and abroad. They found the photographs suspicious.
Many bhikkus, laymen, and Buddhist organizations demanded that the body of the bhikku be flown to Sri Lanka without performing an autopsy because they suspected that during an autopsy performed in Russia by non-Buddhists
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the relevant information material to the determination of the actual cause of death might be tampered with or even removed. The Government of Sri Lanka then requested the Government of Russia to send the body to Sri Lanka without an autopsy against the Russian policy of performing autopsies prior to releasing corpses. Considering the public uproar in Sri Lanka the Russian Government released the body. It was then flown to Sri Lanka on the 18" of December. By then the local press had whipped up a tremendous campaign by accusing the evangelical Christian churches of foul play through news items packed with innuendos.
The autopsy was held in Colombo by Buddhist medical specialists. They found no foul play but natural causes leading to Ven. Soma's death. Even these expert opinions did not satisfy the agitated bhikkus and the public. Soon the public anger enveloped all Christian churches. Immediately after the cremation of Ven. Soma's body, Buddhist mobs, inflamed by the rhetoric in the funeral orations, attacked various Christian establishments. These attackers had little or no knowledge of the differences between the various Christian churches and they unleashed their wrath upon whatever the Christian church in their vicinity. Within a month, more than thirty churches were attacked. The uproar alarmed the leaders of the three older Churches. In the wake of the current disaster, Rt. Rev. Oswald Gomis, the Archbishop of Sri Lanka, defended the Catholic Church by publishing two articles in the local press, severely criticizing the evangelical Christian organizations if they were involved in unethical conversions as alleged. These expressions of concern could pacify only a few. For details of these events log on to www.lankaweb.com.
Viswanathan (1998). Article 9, The Constitution of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. Articles 10, 50 and 51 are also relevant to these issues. Forty second Amendment (1976), The Constitution of India. Article 25:1 &2, Article 26.
Freston (op.cit).
The name of the village is pronounced as Panama. However, in the text I shall not use diacritical marks. When reading this village must not be confused with Panama, the South American nation. This event, believed to have occurred in the first century BCE, is related in the Mahavansa. During this visit the statues were identified by John Clifford Holt. For a detailed discussion of the Avalokiteśvara worship in Sri Lanka, Avalokitesvara
iconography and the connection between Avalokitesvara and god Natha see John Clifford Holt (1991: 27-91).
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This is my hypothesis that needs further investigation.
See Liyanagamage (1986), Obeyesekere (1984), Padmanadan (1986), and Holt (2005) for migrations from South India, transformations of ethnic identity, and cultural exchanges between Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil Hindu traditions.
Medhananda (1980). For 19th century accounts of Panama see Johnston, Hocart and Nicholas.
Gunasekera Gunasoma (1992). Mr. Gunasoma is a native of Panama. Obeyesekere (1984).
Rajasingham-Senanayake (2001). Obeyesekere (ibid.). Obeyesekere's discussion involves, among other things, large psychological themes associated with the traditional ritualankeliya and
the differential South Indian ethnic and cultural backgrounds of the Northern and Eastern Tamils.
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Chapter Four
Yala
July 31, 2003
We left Panama at six thirty in the morning. Velupillai and Rajaratnam were still annoyed with each other. Velupillai was avoiding me for reprimanding him for unnecessarily messing with Rajaratnam. Sivam was offended with Velupillai for being boisterous and pushing Rajaratnam around. The tea kiosk next door was open early. No sooner had we finished tea, Velupillai took off all by himself. Rajaratnam, Sivam and I walked together. The bright dawn threw beautiful reflections of the glowing clouds on the pools and puddles in the paddy fields that extended out from both sides of the road. Except for the slight apprehension over Velupillai's sour feelings everything seemed upbeat and cheerful.
About a kilometer up the road there is a junction and the pilgrim must take the left turn to go to Okanda, out next stop ten kilometers away. At the junction I called Velupillai and offered him a cigarette. He seemed to have mellowed during this walk and trying to find a way to get back to our group. This was his chance. I decided to walk ahead and let my companions walk together and sort out their differences.
On the way, we came across many bus and vanloads of pilgrims going to Okanda. About half way to Okanda we arrived at a place known to the people of Panama as Sanyasimalai. This would be just another place in the jungle except for its small Pulleyar
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kovil. Customarily, the pilgrims to Okanda pay respects to Pulleyar at this kovil. As we had done many times before, we lit camphor tablets to honor Pulleyar and rested there for a few minutes. I reached Okanda by half past nine. My companions arrived shortly thereafter.
Okanda is a gorgeous beach haven on the northeastern flank of the Yala wildlife preserve, adjacent to the Kumana bird sanctuary. The great sprawling rocks on the ochre beach give stupendous views of the ocean to the east and the jungle to the west. The jungle glitters with pools that mirror the sky and host blue and white lotuses, herons, black bill ibis, little green frogs on and silvery fish under the lotus leaves, and myriad other flora and fauna. The coast is lined with thick jungle and, in a clearing not far from the beach, there is a small kovil dedicated to Muruga. This is the Okanda Malai Velayuda Cuvami kovil or the Kantha Cuvami Kovil.
A Residence for Muruga Okanda would have been just another pretty beach if not for Muruga. My Hindu friends in Kataragama and elsewhere know why Okanda is special to Muruga. There are several stories that relate how Okanda became a sacred spot. Muruga's first visit to the island, as I related earlier, was to catch and kill Curapadman, his archenemy. He found Curan's kottan (fort) in Kataragama, where the Kiri Vehera has been standing from about the second century of the CE. Having reduced Curan to mere birds and a mango Muruga returned home to Tamil Nadu.
During this visit to Lanka, Muruga struck the Vakura Hill with his Vel. Three rays of light emanated from the impact. One of them fell on the rock in Okanda. That makes the place sacred to Muruga devotees.
King Ravana, the demon king of Lanka, on his way to Koneswaram temple to worship Siva, rested in Okanda. The Tamil word for sitting down and resting is ukantar. The names of the place, Okanda and Ohanda derive from this. However, the first community to create a shrine here were the Vaddas. They had
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created a simple place of worship by erecting a hut with sticks and palm leaves.
Much later, a friend of Muruga's - the name varies from rishi Narada to Sivalingam, depending on who tells the tale and it really doesn't matter - discovered Valliamman, the great Vadda beauty - not really Vadda, as we found out earlier - in the middle of the jungle in Kataragama, chasing the parrots that came to her father - not really her own father but adopted father-Nambirajan's millet field. Mesmerized by her beauty, this friend, thinking she would make a fine lover for Muruga, hurried back to Tamil Nadu and told what he had seen. Muruga promptly set forth to find the beauty and arrived in Jaffna, in the guise of an old mendicant (sami), approached the Tamils there and asked for food and shelter.
Now, the Tamils of Jaffna are great devotees of Muruga and spare no expense in worshiping him. However, they are rather leery of strangers and people of dubious appearance. They thought this was a rogue, arriving to cause trouble, and threw him out. Muruga, disappointed and angry, wandered down the coast, contemplating how dubious are the rituals, offerings, penances and other such outward expressions of devotion. Desiring to stay away from human beings, he found alonely spot on the beautiful seashore and decided to stay there and look for Valliamman. This spot is Okanda - Ohanda or Okantha as Tamils call it; Muruga's first home in Lanka.
According to another story, Muruga and Valli arrived here on two stone rafts, which are still on the beach, as attested by the grand rocks. They made a home on the large rock in Okanda."
When settling down, Muruga and Valli followed the pattern in Vallimalai in Tamil Nadu. There, Valli is on top of the rock and Muruga is at the foot of the rock. The devotees find in this situation of the two kovils a reflection of the relationship between the god and his consort. Valliamman is Muruga’s kriya sakti (action sakti) whereas Teivayanaiamman is his icca sakti (ambition sakti). As in tantra, Muruga, as the purusa, becomes the devotee and servant of his kriya Sakti.
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On this rock there are thirty two waterholes, considered as tirtham, filled with sacred water. Valliamman had bathed in these waterholes as she does even today. Devotees purify themselves by pouring water from these waterholes on their bodies.
Sinhalas have their own claims to Okanda. Several Pali atthakatha and the Samantapasadika mention an ancient Buddhist monastery named Lokandara Vihara, visited by the famous arahat Maliyadeva. This vihara existed at or near the present-day Okanda. Some remains of an ancient Buddhist establishment exist in the jungle. However, Sinhalas agree with Tamils that the huge rocks on the beach are parts of the golden rafts that brought Kataragama Deiyo to Okanda.
A Point of Departure
For a long time the legends of Okanda made the site an important place for pilgrims traveling by foot. They rested in Okanda, as Ravana and Muruga did, for a day or two, preparing for the most arduous stretch of their long walk. This is the walk through the Yala forest. This far, pilgrims had access to food, water and human support except between Tirukovil and Sangamankandi. But in Yala, there are no human habitations. Pilgrims must collect and carry all of the food, water and other necessities for the crossing.
During their stays in Okanda, the pilgrims had established a small shrine for Muruga, held pujas, and sung songs to show their love and devotion for and fear of him, asking Muruga to give them protection as they crossed Yala. Gradually, as the number of pilgrims grew the shrine also grew into a kovil with its own kurukkal. Thekovil attracted a trickle of pilgrims who would come year round mostly to fulfill vows made during their pada yatra. An enterprising man named Subramanium (originally from Akkaraipattu but now living in Panama with his Sinhala wife Gnanavati and their children) saw business opportunities in the year round arrivals to the Okanda kovil and established a tea kiosk in a cadjan hut. The pilgrims could buy tea, biscuits, Sweets and
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sodas from Subramanium. In time, the government officials who worked for the Department of Wildlife Protection and Forest Conservation also became regulars at Subramanium's tearoom. Later, when the government established an army garrison at the eastern entrance to Yala, the security personnel also became Subramanium's clients. Subramanium began to serve all three meals on demand and the small clientele began to depend on his services. When tourism converted Arugam Bay into a major tourist attraction and an internationally known surfing spot, Okanda beaches also attracted some of the surfers. During the season Surfers, too, became a regular feature in Okanda and patronized Subramanium's tea room.
During the ethnic conflict, the pada yatra pilgrimage thinned as the war rendered the walk dangerous and the warring parties thoroughly regulated the once free movement from place to place. However, the Okanda kovil grew in size and significance. While the war raged, the pada yatra from Jaffna organized by the American scholar Patrick Harrigan sustained the pilgrimage on foot, albeit in an altered form. The government and LTTE allowed this pada yatra to go ahead gathering pilgrims on the way. These pilgrims arrived in Okanda as a large procession providing a boost to the kovil. Several prominent individuals from Batticaloa, Akkaraipattu and other east coast communities established a committee to run the temple and appointed a kurukkal, trained in the kurukkalacademy in Mannar. They converted the small shrine into a midsized Muruga temple, fully equipped with the various ritual platforms, a kovil for Pulleyar, a separate shrine to worship the astrological planets, a separate building as the kurukkal's residence, kitchen, storeroom and office, and a parapet round this complex. They also constructed a small shrine behind the Muruga kovil, comparable to the old one, on the massive and imposing rock surrounded by large banyan trees. This is the Valliamman kovil that comes in the stories about Okanda. As the pilgrims walk to Okanda from Panama this shrine is visible from far-colorful and
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charming against the blue sky. The kovil committee also built wells, pilgrims” rests and latrines to support the pada yatra.
My first visit to Okanda was on a non-ritual day the previous November. Torrential monsoons had pounded the area a few days ago, washing away large portions of the road from Panama, destroying practically all the culverts. Simon's rusty but trusty minivan barely made it through vast pools of water and mud. Surrounded by a large body of water that was still draining into the ocean, the kovil compound appeared like an island. Fortunately for us, the rains were over and the air was cool. We found Subramanium's tea room a god-sent delight. There were only three people in Okanda that day: the kurukkal, Subramanium and another man who happened to stay in the kovil as an attendant. Except for the rumble of the ocean, crickets, bird-cries, and the rustling of the leaves in the jungle, all was quiet and spotlessly clean. In the night we slept in the open space in front of the kovil. Subramanium lit kerosene lanterns and hung them around this space to discourage the elephants from entering. We could see the Milky Way spread above us in the crystal clear night sky.
This tranquility of everyday life was completely absent when I arrived in Okanda on my pada yatra. Several thousand pilgrims were already present and a special bus service organized by the kovil committee was continually bringing in more pilgrims. The kovil was decorated and illuminated with electric lamps powered by a generator brought in for the festive occasion. A special shed was built within the kovil compound, right next to the Pulleyar shrine, where teams of committee members and their helpers were soliciting donations. They broadcast the names of donors through a loudspeaker so that everybody could hear who gave how much. At other times, they played bhajans, tevarams and such Muruga centered devotional music at a very high decibel level. I distinctly remember a portion of a song that ran, "Murugaiya vaval Murugaiya va ta!”
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The Pilgrims
The pilgrims who visit Okanda during the festive season are of two kinds: those who come only to participate in the Okanda activities and those proceeding to Kataragama. The latter are also of two types: those who walk all the way to Okanda and those who arrive by bus but will proceed from Okanda on foot. The vast majority of the pilgrims present on August 1, 2003, were of the latter type. Inquiries from the temple authorities revealed that this is the normal pattern. During the morning hours, I saw groups that arrived on the previous day leave Okanda to cross the Yala Sanctuary while more arrived by buses, some on foot, hoping to leave for Kataragama the next morning.
The pilgrims arrived mostly in groups of about ten or fifteen individuals including children. Both sexes were evenly represented and there were many elderly persons. Each band of pilgrims constituted of either kin groups or neighborhood groups or both. The younger devotees seemed to welcome the elderly in their families and neighborhoods in the pada yatras. The willingness to provide opportunities to the elderly to engage in pada yatras and to take care of them during the difficult walk is in itself an act of devotion. Conversely, getting an opportunity to participate in a pada yatra is a sign of Muruga’s benevolence towards the elderly pilgrims. Banding together to engage in a pada yatra signifies healthy bonds among the family members and neighbors and this act intensifies these day-to-day social bonds.
Those who remained for a night in Okanda stayed in the pilgrims' rests. When these buildings ran out of space, the pilgrims camped under large trees and there are many large nuga,o palu”, bo' and other trees around the large open space in front of the kovil. Irrespective of where they camped, there was a pattern to the way the pilgrims settled down. Each band carved out some space for itself but never invaded another's. They spread a piece of plastic as large as a bed-sheet and placed their belongings around it - large plastic sacks, backpacks, and traveling bags containing
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clothes, medications and food supplies such as rice, lentils, potatoes, onions and spices, and several aluminum pots, plastic cups and plates, a few aluminum spoons, and large plastic water containers. Each group had its own "kitchen” with a couple of fireplaces each made of three rocks. The elderly lay down, the younger women prepared meals, the kids roamed about and the men just hung around, chatting and smoking beedis. Though packed together within their particular space, they disciplined themselves neither to encroach upon the space next to theirs nor to cause any social interference. The bands generally ignored one another but were very polite towards each other. Occasionally, they might become friends as they spent time so close to each other. Then they chatted across groups, helped the elderly, and even exchanged food.
After the meals, they lay around and napped or groups of women would walk about looking around at other camps, often meeting friends. People gathered at the wells and bathed. Usually men and women did not bathe at the same well. I was surprised by the way the women bathed. It has been my understanding that everywhere on the island the Tamil Hindus, similar to the Sinhala people, are socially conservative, and when it came to the affairs of females, are very exclusive. Bathing wells are usually covered so that women have privacy. Here in Okanda, as I have seen in Kataragama, bathing is a public activity that ignores the norms of exclusiveness in domestic life. Needless to say that the norms of exclusiveness exist because, in domestic life, exposure of bathing females to the public eye is considered to be scandalous. This implies the possibility of social misconduct by men.'
But in Okanda, as in Kataragama, this possibility is eliminated by the cultural atmosphere of the place. None wanted to provoke Muruga's wrath.
Clashes of Cultures
The early afternoon was hot and extremely humid. The heat, the noise, the crowds and the bustle were getting on my nerves. I decided to go to the beach with the hope of cooling off with the
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sea breeze and enjoying quietude for a few minutes. The jungle on the edge of the beach and large bushes near the shoreline give shelter from the relentless sun. To my surprise, the jungle on either side of the footpath that connects the kovil with the beach was completely inaccessible because someone was squatting and relieving himself. Compelled to keep, quite literally, a straight face, I proceeded to the beach down the malodorous path hoping that the beautiful Okanda seashore would be like as I remembered it from by visit the previous November. It was not to be so. Under every bush and behind every rock the pilgrims were squatting singly or in groups. Every vacant rock or bush was an abandoned rock or bush because of its inaccessibility owing to overuse.
I returned to Subramanium's tearoom, sat on the bench in the front yard and began updating my notes. After a while, Subramanium came out and sat on the bench. He was free for a while because his wife Gnanawati and his children had come from Panama to help him. Subramanium expressed his displeasure at the newly established tearoom near his. From his point of view, these things mushroomed when big crowds came. But he was there everyday. They brought fancy plastic chairs and tables. He still had only the two benches made of split logs. But the regulars always came to him. They didn't care. He was doing very well. Only if he had more money to bring in more supplies. He didn't care how many new tea kiosks were there. Muruga helped him. He turned towards the kovil, stretched his arms and muttered, "Aiyosami” There certainly were many more merchants and Subramanium's competitor was only one among them. Right by the side of Subramanium's tea room two men were selling vegetables and fruits from a lorry. On the other side of the tea room another man was selling Indian handloombed sheets, towels, plastic sheets, combs, tooth powder, toothpaste, et al, He had spread a plastic sheet in front of the van to display his merchandize. There were also betel sellers, sweets vendors, and even an ice cream van. A large tent was being hoisted for a circus. Some pilgrims were also part-time merchants. They had carried extra quantities of vegetables,
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rice, sugar, tea, milk powder, and peanuts for sale to other pilgrims. Their market place was not exactly here in Okanda, although some did sell their goods, but the Yala jungle where they could fetch a much higher price owing to the complete absence of anything edible in that environment. The pilgrim-merchants hoped to make money to both survive in Kataragama and return to their villages by bus. Therefore, their activity was entirely pilgrimage related. The other merchants were professional itinerant vendors.
As Subramanium chatted with me, two three-wheeler taxis came up to the tea room. "Aussies! Aussies!” he cried excitedly. He seemed to be able to tell the nationality of tourists merely by glancing at them. There were two "Aussies” in one taxi and another "Aussie” and a local man in the other. The "Aussies” had surfboards with them. The local man called himself a "tourist guide” from Arugam Bay. The "Aussies” were beaming, smiling massively, Sunburnt to a maroon, Sweaty, and appeared to be very happy to get to Okanda. They got off the taxis, unloaded their surfboards and bags, stretched for a while, and began to look around. One Aussie said to the guide that the place was very crowded. Another Aussie nodded in agreement and said that he did not expect such a large crowd. The third Aussie had unloaded his surfboard and a backpack and was gazing about in bewilderment. The first Aussie accused the guide for understating the size of the crowd. The guide apologetically said in 'tourist guide' English that he did not expect a crowd as large as this, and on normal days, hardly anyone came there. The Aussies did not seem to care much as the initial shock wore out and were happy to take directions from their guide to the beach. Subramanium went back into his tearoom and I returned to my notebook. X
Before long, the Aussies and their guide were back. The Aussies were not beaming anymore. There smiles were gone. Instead, they were grimacing in disgust and their guide was trying to talk to them but they didn't seem to hear him. They hurriedly reloaded their baggage into the taxis and promptly departed. I knew why.
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A short while later Subramanium rejoined me and talked about the episode while excavating the black stuff inside his fingernails with a matchstick that he chewed and converted to a nail-pick. From his point of view, it was wrong for the guide to bring the tourists during the festive season. Tourists come to enjoy the beach. They want to swim, surf and sunbathe. These activities are not possible when the pilgrims are here. The line of latrines that the kovil committee built is not adequate to cope with the needs of the crowds in the same way the pilgrims' rests are inadequate to house them. It is a good thing that the committee built those things but no one can provide facilities to such large crowds. And calls of nature are not things that can be postponed. So the pilgrims use the jungle and the beach and they cannot be blamed. The rascals that hang around in Arugam Bay, pretending to be tourist guides and authorities on local affairs, know this very well but conceal it from the tourists. They bring the tourists here anyway even though they know the tourists will be disappointed. The disappointed tourists may not pay the guides as agreed, but that is not where the deal is. The real deal is between the threewheeler taxi drivers and the guides. All this is very bad and is contrary to the wishes of the god but, ironically, the so-called tourist guides also must survive.
I was impressed by Subramanium's analysis. The dilemmas of religiosity in a larger world do involve many ironies. Okanda is a serene place. This restful tranquility calms the body and the mind invoking feelings of being in a place charged with the power of the gods. Muruga worshippers who rest here on their way to Kataragama have felt the power of Muruga in Okanda and established a shrine to honor him. In time, the Okanda Muruga shrine has become an established place to spend the night, perform pujas and sing bhajans.
Until recent times, these gatherings posed no significant threats to the calm and serenity of Okanda. Traditionally, the pilgrims carried their possessions in cloth bags or in baskets woven out of cane, coconut or banana leaves. Whatever they discarded
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nourished animals and plants and, in a few weeks, disappeared without a trace. Today this is quite different as the pilgrims discard plastic bags and containers in the same way they traditionally discarded the rags and the leaves thereby polluting the serene environment without intending to do so. At the end of the festive season, Okanda is left with mounds of plastic trash, blown around by the sea breeze and hanging from every tree and bush, as in Potuvil. The sheer ugliness of the remains ruins the attractiveness of Okanda. The pilgrims who were enchanted by the serenity of Okanda sabotage the very serenity that enchanted them. Unlike during the earlier times, modernity, in the form of commercial culture, mediates between the pilgrim and her god. Modern conveniences and technological achievements such as cheap, often free, convenient and indestructible packaging have displaced the Sri Lankan traditional "primitive” alternatives. However, the tradition of discarding waste has not been displaced by an alternative normative order to deal with non-biodegradable refuse. Instead, the same tradition of waste disposal prevails causing severe environmental pollution that sabotages the sanctity of Okanda. The issue is not confined to pilgrimages to Okanda or to Kataragama, or to any other pilgrimage site such as the Sri Pada. It is a national issue in everyday life.
A large bus arrived carrying a full load of pilgrims raising mammoth clouds of fine dust and billowing great wafts of dark gray noxious fumes. All this precipitated on everything along the way including the bodies, plastic sheets spread out under the trees and food frothing in open pots. It immediately drew my attention as another 'culture clash in the sacred space of Okanda and another dilemma of the modern cultural elements incompatibly mixing with the local tradition.
Buses and vans provide cheap transportation to Okanda to many destitute devotees who are too sick, too old or unable to spare the time to engage in the traditional pilgrimage on foot. Late nineteenth century British administrative records indicate that many came to Kataragama via Yala, but this is a trickle compared to the
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vast numbers that go to Kataragama via Okanda since the introduction of automobiles, particularly the bus services that provide cheap mass transportation. The pre-modern pilgrimages consisted of groups of courageous devotees trekking through the jungle, along only vaguely known and beast infested trails, even dying on the way because of senility, cholera and malaria, and decaying like the leaves and rags that they discarded, leaving nothing. In the pre-modern era, those who came to Okanda were already tired, hungry and even quite ill. How many pilgrims survived the trek, reached Kataragama, stayed in the company of Muruga and returned home is anyone's guess. Today, thousands come to Okanda, their point of departure, a true tirtha in the classical tradition, and embark on their walk as healthier, stronger pilgrims protected from wild animals by the government officers. But cheap bus fares are possible only on cheaply run bus services that employ polluting technologies. The bus service pollutes and disrupts the fragile beauty of Okanda. The employment of less polluting technologies involves higher costs that the pilgrims cannot bear.
Again, this is not a problem peculiar to Okanda but a national problem. Throughout the island, uncontrolled emissions from automobiles of every description cloud the highways and nearby areas leaving a black greasy precipitation every where.
Sounds of the Place Noise?
On an ordinary day, Okanda is a quiet place. Other than the sounds of the ocean and the birds, there is no noise in Okanda. Its silence is a part of its delicate charm. It is only temporarily intruded upon during the pujas when invocations are chanted and a small bell rung. Subramanium's transistor radio is small and its weak sound is restricted to his tearoom.
During the festive season, Okanda is bombarded with sounds from the loudspeakers. These are of two kinds: the announcements from the kovil committee and religious music - bhajans from recorded sources and ritual music such as chanting, drumming and
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hornblowing during the festival season rituals. No one can escape from these sounds. Some bands of pilgrims establish their camps in places from where the kovil is not visible. But the presence of the kovil is carried to them by these sounds. Although no one seems to pay attention to these sounds, everyone is aware of the existence of the kovil. What do these sounds do in Okanda?
On the face of it, from my personal standpoint and from a bio-psychological perspective, the sounds appeared to be entirely dysfunctional. Wouldn't the pilgrims be better off without all this 'noise'? Their tired bodies need rest. Many pilgrims' minds are full of personal and family related problems. The pilgrimage is conducted with these in mind. Would not a calmer atmosphere serve to sooth their strained bodies and thoughts? Would not the brief stay in Okanda serve this purpose better if the place is quiet and calm? From this perspective, the bhajans, chants, drumming and horn blowing, particularly when presented to those tired ears and minds at high decibel levels, did not serve any purpose.
Representations? Nonetheless, the sounds were and have always been there. Suspending my personal judgment on the biological and psychological issues, I looked for other reasons. What functions, if any, do the sounds serve, in a sociological sense? Why do these people tolerate this noise?
The sounds were not just auditory stimuli but sacred sounds. They represented Muruga and his kovil. They reminded the pilgrims that in this place their conduct must be in accordance with the god's rules. The lyrics of the bhajans always stated the many names of Muruga - Kandasamy, Arumuga, Kumarasamy, Sanmuga, and the names of his kindred as they are known to the pilgrims - Siva, Parvati, Ganesa, Tirumal, Teivayanaiamman and Valliamman. The lyrics focused on the various heroic deeds of Muruga in his battles with Curpadman, his benevolence towards good people, and his wrath towards the evildoers. The drumbeat and the horn blowing that recreated a sense of the sacred space of the kovil here and elsewhere, and the announcements, mostly about
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donations made by the pilgrims, all contributed to the trapsformation of the calm Serenity of the place into an energized mood-stirring intense religiosity, awe, and a sense of grave responsibility in the pilgrims. All these noisy intrusions addressed the conscience of individuals and forced them to be conscious of the sacred presence of Muruga.
The god and the world
In these contexts, the disparate groups and individuals in Okanda appeared to form a community. This community, however, exhibited its own character that is distinct from the communities in their everyday life. The social and personal concerns of everyday necessities and responsibilities did not seem to occur in this atmosphere. The pilgrims have left such matters behind when they began their journey.
To be sure, most pilgrims were going to Kataragama to make or fulfill a baram (vow). The vows were about matters in everyday domestic life - success in business, victory in legal disputes, success at examinations, recovery from illness, success in procreation, protection from evil astral conjunctions and the like. In that sense they never really left home. Nonetheless, they physically departed from it and left behind the daily domestic activities that produced various states of the mind and now, in Okanda, focus on their problems in a mental state enveloped in the atmosphere of Muruga's power. In Okanda, they were not confronted by the society at large with competitive individuals and situations and other burdens of being members of their families and neighborhoods. Rather, the ad hoc milieu became an alternative community of like-minded people who emphasized cooperation and mutual support rather than divisiveness, competitiveness and hostility.
I must emphasize a point here. Except for the stray Sinhala person, the others in Okanda were Tamils from the Eastern Province. For all practical purposes, the gathering was ethnically Tamil and culturally Hindu. Several Sinhala individuals had come with their Tamil family members from Panama. But these Sinhala
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people have embraced the Tamil Hindu community as their own. The Tamils themselves were not a homogenous crowd. In all appearances, except for the officials at the kovil, everybody seemed to be of working class origins but belonging to various castes. The pattern of camping indicated same caste preference but this was not strictly adhered to when circumstances compelled them to stay in the same hall or under the same tree. They kept a larger distance between themselves when caste identities were different and the caste identities were verified merely by inquiring about the place of residence and form of livelihood. People of the same caste tend to form neighborhoods. Therefore, the bands of pilgrims consisted of individuals and groups of the same caste status. They maintained these group identities. When they formed the community of Muruga devotees, they did not renounce their social identities in their domestic life.
In spite of the maintenance of the everyday social distinctions, this milieu was not governed by the social dictates of everyday existence but by the normative regime of the god - who demands equality among his devotees - and of the tradition of pada yatra pilgrimage - that sets standards of conduct within the frameworks of sacred commands. The milieu in Okanda gave no place to individual desires in social conduct. It emphasized collective responsibilities that necessitated suppression and repression of individual desires. Again, this does not mean that individual pilgrims suddenly became depersonalized upon their arrival. Each, at least the mature ones, entertained her own reasons for coming which the collectivity had neither any notion of nor cared to know. It is just that all felt a power that demanded a kind of civility that was not demanded in everyday life. This feeling compelled them to be in control over themselves even under the difficult circumstances of having to live in a congested space. It was this feeling that the sounds of the pilgrimage site invoked in the pilgrims."
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A Storm in a Glass of Plain Tea
By late afternoon the heat subsided. The pilgrims, having bathed, put on their finer clothes and walked about in groups, visiting, and relaxing. Rajaratnam came by with another younger man and a complaint. The younger man was Sinnadorei. He had crossed the Yala Sanctuary and gone to Kataragama eight times and knew his way around. He was also a cook. He expressed willingness to go with us at one hundred rupees per day. He would carry our Supplies that Gunaratnam sent from Pottuvil. Soon Rajaratnam and he began repacking the Supplies into convenient bundles.
While sorting the supplies Rajaratnam exclaimed that Velupillai was intolerable. Velupillai had contacted Rajaratnam while he was with his relatives and started ordering him around as Velupillai had done in Akkaraipattu. He hated this bossy attitude of Velupillai's, particularly when others were around. Velupillai's showing off that he was bigger than Rajaratnam was humiliating. This time Velupillai had ordered Rajaratnam to go start packing while he looked around for a cook. Rajaratnam had refused, tempers had flared, and Velupillai had scolded him in front of his relatives and left. Rajaratnam thought Velupillai behaved inappropriately, like a beast. Why should he take orders from Velupillai when someone else hired and paid him? Muruga wanted Rajaratnam to make this pilgrimage and the god had arranged the trip. Velupillai was merely an instrument, a means to an end. I, too, was a means to this end but I was special. Muruga wanted Rajaratnam to go with me. That was why the two of us were selected to carry the teru in the kovil in Batticaloa. That was the very proof of Muruga's will. This Velupillai vainly thought that he arranged all this and claimed a right to push him around when, really, someone else arranged the pilgrimage and yet another person paid for it.
Undoubtedly, that my group was breaking up. Velupillai and Rajaratnam were not getting along. I, too, found Velupillai's outbursts intolerable. Velupillai had been nice all the way to Akkaraipattu. It was there he flipped. Perhaps his return to
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Akkaraipattu, a well-known town, emboldened him to belittle Rajaratnam, a resident of Akkaraipattu, to show his Superiority. Perhaps he was jealous of Rajaratnam's good fortune in the Batticaloa kovil. Perhaps he could not stand the somewhat supercilious attitude that Rajaratnam developed since then. All in all, Velupillai became unhappy after Akkaraipattu and it began to show in Panama. He suddenly lost touch with the rest of us and acted as if he was an outsider. When we left Panama he walked all on his own, as if he was no longer with us. Later he calmed down and rejoined us but both Rajaratnam and I were at a loss to determine what prompted this erratic behavior. On several occasions, I intervened when he and Rajaratnam started to quarrel over the authority that Velupillai claimed over Rajaratnam. Several times, I advised him not to talk harshly to Rajaratnam. Perhaps, that soured my relationship with him.
In Okanda, Velupillai wanted to remain two days, resting, and take eight to ten days to cross the Yala sanctuary so that we would arrive in Kataragama on the eleventh. I could not accommodate this plan. I wanted to cross the sanctuary as quickly as possible so that we could rest for a couple of days in Kataragama and I could release them and conduct field research for about a week. Going slowly, approximately five kilometers per day, would not serve my purposes. My plan was to conduct field observations and digest the patterns of crossing the sanctuary and the patterns of monocultural community behavior in about five days to save time for Kataragama where the theater was multicultural. I had to conduct as much research as I could and return to Peradeniya before my leave ran out. Sinnadorei claimed that we could go through Yala in three days if we worked hard or in four days at leisurely pace. Thus, there was no room to accommodate Velupillai's plan. Velupillai, already attempting to be a sort of group leader with his claimed knowledge of pada yatra, was unhappy.
To make things worse Velupillai's feet were in very bad condition. He was suffering from blisters on the sole and cramped muscles. He decided that he would stay on in Okanda for a couple
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of days and join me in Kataragama. The proposition was entirely to-my liking. Rajaratnam readily extended support. Velupillai could go with Rajaratnam's family group who were planning to stay in Okanda for a couple more days. Velupillai was happy with this arrangement. I told him that he could get all he wanted to eat and drink from Subramanium.
Shortly after he left Sivam came by, limping and looking like a banana tree in a drought. He too was suffering from strained muscles. Sivam is heavyset and quite overweight for his age. Could he stay back for a couple of days in Okanda and join me in Kataragama? He needed to rest his knees. Sivam apologized for being such a burden on me. I said I was very grateful for all he had done to help me. It would be nice if Sivam and Velupillai could take care of each other. But Sivam did not like Velupillai. Sivam is a well-composed mild mannered soft-spoken young man who was conscious of being proper at all times. Velupillai morphed during the trip to be the exact opposite. He would assume a position of avuncular authority over Sivam and try to order him around. Sivam would oblige him as a good nephew. But Velupillai would treat Sivam as if he was a little boy. Sivam could not stand this. He liked being instructed politely but not being barked at and pushed around. Still, he agreed to stay with Velupillai.
I could only guess as to what was going on among us. I had no doubt that my being the "financier” of the trip gave me authority over the others. I also had the advantage of being a Sinhala in this otherwise Tamil monoculture and a relatively better-educated university teacher. That gave me some wiggle-room to maneuver. The twenty-year ethnic war has sensitized all ethnic and cultural groups in Sri Lanka to be as polite and accommodating as possible towards each other in face-to-face social intercourse. This mood compelled all of us to be in good behavior. The few times when Velupillai was flippant towards me, Rajaratnam and Sivam took my side and made Velupillai regret his behavior. I was also the oldest in the group. Although both Velupillai and Rajaratnam were in their fifties they were still younger than me. That, too, gave me
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a slight advantage as the South Asian cultural norms provided for deference towards older persons. But Velupillai had none of these advantages except over Sivam and that, too, from Sivam’s angle, he abused. Although he found Rajaratnam it was I who paid him and provided for Rajaratnam’s pada yatra. From Rajaratnam’s perspective Velupillai was yet another person whom I hired and had no authority to tell him what to do. Rajaratnam was willing to take orders only from me. Velupillai, though, saw Rajaratnam as merely an uneducated laborer whereas he was a retired government servant, an educated man. But Rajaratnam knew that Velupillai was fired from his job because of misconduct and drunkenness, and therefore had a hollow claim to respectability. What is more, as Rajaratnam asserted and Subramanium confirmed, Velupillai was driven away from his home by his wife in Batticaloa when she could not stand his drunkenness and that was why Velupillai lived in Karaitivu. Velupillai did not have a job. He merely scrounged from various sympathetic individuals and was a number one crook. He was trying to prolong the pada yatra because it provided him food and something to do.
My team was thus conflict ridden from the beginning. We had no sentimental ties to each other. We met to do a job. Rajaratnam and Velupillai were merely my employees and Sivam only a guest who found an opportunity to engage in a pada yatra. The only non-functional bond was the weak one that came into being between Rajaratnam and me as fellow teru bearers. For Rajaratnam it was the most memorable spiritual achievement in his life and he got it because of me. For both Rajaratnam and Sivam, it was because of me that they even got motivated to engage in a pada yatra. This was the only sentimentality that existed in our group. All the rest was functional. Our group would last only as long as the pada yatra lasted. Once we arrive in Kataragama, I would pay them and the group would split. That was the difference between us as a group of pilgrims and the others around us. Their interrelationships were more permanent, had histories, and were imbued with a sense of belonging to their group that we never could muster.
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I arranged with Subramanium to provide Velupillai and Sivam with all the food and beverages that they could use during their stay and for their journey through Yala. Rajaratnam and Sinnadorei had reorganized our supplies into two neat bundles. I decided to leave at five the next morning. Velupillai returned and expressed his desire to leave with us but atten in the morning. But this was not to our liking.
According to Sinnadorei, who had become our Yala "expert,” if we left at five we would reach Kumbukkan Oya by sunset. There is an Amman kovil and a small shop there. There was nothing in between and camping in the jungle all by ourselves would be risky. I inquired about the distances involved. Sinnadorei said the distance between Okanda and Kataragama is seventy-two kilometers. From Okanda to Kumbukkan Oya the distance is twenty-six kilometers. In between there is only one place for water - Navaladi, twelve kilometers from Okanda. If we hurried up we could go to Kumbukkan Oya by evening. I calculated our probable speed. If we go at three kilometers per hour, we would need about nine hours. But if we also rested for an hour at midday and took two thirty minute breaks it would add two more hours making it eleven hours. And if we started at five in the morning we could walk at a leisurely speed of three kilometers per hour and reach Kumbukkan Oya by four in the afternoon. Sinnadorei was worried about possible rain in the afternoon. If it rains, things would get rougher. So it was necessary to leave as early as possible.
Velupillai withdrew. When I told him that all his expenses in Okanda and during the journey through Yala would be taken care of, his face lit up. But he wouldn't get cigarettes. Instead he would get beedis. He was happy with this arrangement.
Evening
A while later a group of kovil helpers, themselves kurukkals from nearby kovils and some even from Batticaloa, came to Subramanium's tea room. We had already met in the morning when I visited the kovil upon our arrival in Okanda. At that time
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I introduced myself to the kovil helpers who were collecting donations and told them that agentleman from Akkaraipattu who was an important office bearer of the kovil committee had already arranged for me to stay the night in the kovil. They said they would arrange it in the evening. In the tearoom, we talked about my pada yatra. I asked them about the ritual, the beautiful folk drama, that I witnessed in Karaitivu. They said the ritual is enacted annually to ward off evil influences on the village. Ritual experts halved the melon while Pulleyar destroyed the Vaddas. The halving of the melon has the same effect as Pulleyar's slaying of the Vaddas: evil is destroyed. The shoe flower on the cut melon represented the blood of the evil doer. One man added that it also eliminates influences of those who try to divide the country.
That last comment called attention to itself for its political interpretation of the ritual. I thought it was deliberately made to please me. I asked him whether he knew about the very ritual that I saw in Karaitivu. They all said the ritual is common in the east coast. I asked whether it is performed specifically to address the ethnic crisis. They said it is not done that way but now that the ethnic crisis has become one of the evils that affect village life it can also be regarded as one of the evils dealt with by the ritual. That sounded perfectly logical but I remain unconvinced because the immediate political situation of my being there, as a Sinhala man, among them, as Tamil men. They have seen many government supported political pada yatras organized by the various institutions. They also knew the political implications of the “Harrigan pada yatra. Harrigan was taking large numbers of Tamils from the north and the east to Sinhala dominated Kataragama when there was an ethnic war going on. Anything could happen in Kataragama where, in 1958, there was much rioting against the Tamils. If the LTTE carried out a major attack on the Sinhala and Muslim communities while the pada yatra was going on something ominous could happen. It was in these contexts that they saw my pada yatra as well. There was nothing wrong in this because, after all, there was
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politics in my work in the sense that I was conducting field research on multiculturalism with a focus on the ethnic war. I appreciated the diplomatic move. Nonetheless, the ritual, I am convinced, was focused on narrower, more traditional goals of driving away evil spirits from the community and providing an evening's entertainment to all in the neighborhood.
In the evening, I walked around to take another look at the community. Many more pilgrims arrived and settled down wherever they could. Several policemen and infantrymen from the nearby army post were present to make their daily observations. There was nothing to draw anyone's attention except the puja at the kovil.
The puja itself was a regular affair but more elaborate during this festival season. Teams of temple attendants were at service. After the main puja there was teru. The image of the god was taken out on a palanquin similar to the one in the Batticaloa kovil and brought before the small Pulleyarkovil just outside the Muruga kovil but within the kovil premises enclosed by the parapet. Hundreds of devotees gathered at the gates of the kovil and chanted haro-hara! Just like we did in Batticaloa, the pole bearers swayed the teru before Pulleyar and returned to the main kovil. The scene made me nostalgic for my experiences in Batticaloa. I must admit that carrying the teru there, as I see it now, remains a memorable event, a tremendous privilege that I enjoyed, in my career as an ethnographer and as a Sri Lankan. Those thoughts were in my mind as I watched the excited crowd expressed their sentiments awakened by the salutation of Muruga to his elder brother Pulleyar and his return to his abode accompanied by shouts of haro-hara.
Once teru was completed, there was only the sacred fire in the verandah, with its flames waving in the wind. Pilgrims threw flowers and camphor tablets at the fire. Then prasada was distributed and the crowds dispersed. I asked one of the festival helpers whether I could find a room and sleep there. This was promptly granted. I made my bed on a mat on the floor of one of
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the rooms, among many wooden boxes and cupboards. Much later in the night, I went out to see if there was any activity. All was quiet except the sea.
August 1
I woke up at half past four and hurried to Subramanium's tearoom, our predetermined meeting place. Sinnadorei was already there. Subramanium had started to boil water for tea. Sinna and I went to a well to freshen up for the morning. Just as soon as tea was ready, Rajaratnam showed up. As we sipped tea, Velupillai also came by with Sivam. They wanted to see us off. We promised to meet in Kataragama and I gave them my hotel address. Together we went to the kovil and lit camphor tablets to honor Muruga. My teammates began worshiping the god. I, too, saluted to SkandaMuruga:
HriÉ karapranavasvarupalaharan Sri KartikeyaÉbhaje" At five thirty in the morning, we began our trek through Yala with a loud haro-hara! Various groups had already begun their journey across the Yala sanctuary. We, too, joined the string of pilgrims. We could barely see the road until dawn. Although the danger from wild animals, particularly from elephants and bears, still lurked in the darkness, the gravel road constructed by the National Wildlife Authority reduced the risk, and although each group moved on as an independent community all counted on each other. The well-worn expression, "safety in numbers” had meaning in this context. Therefore, although each group tried to keep its distance from the others, none wanted to be too far away. I completely lost track of the dawn because of the overcast sky and the forest cover above me. All I knew was that gradually the day was breaking and the sky was clearing. After the sunrise, I could discern the landscape more clearly. We were getting out of the thick forest, and the road fell between the large bodies of freshwater in the Kumana bird sanctuary on my left and the scrub jungle on my right. With the morning growing rapidly, the initial
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apprehensions about the dark forest withered away. The distances between the groups also increased as each became more confident about its whereabouts.
In Okanda I became curious about the composition of these groups. As I stated earlier, the majority of them came from the east coast stretch from about Valachchenai to Akkaraipattu. Culturally, for a couple of millennia, this region has been open to migration to and from the island and for maritime trading through the many small ports along the coastline, with Batticaloa as a larger central point. This openness to maritime population movements had introduced a large Islamic population into the region. But from the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese established a fort and a Roman Catholic community in Batticaloa and closed the ports for immigration without their permission, the free movements in and out of the island ended.
Thereafter, through the British period, European societies influenced the region's ethnic, cultural, religious, linguistic and economic features. Thus, within the Tamil Hindu community there exist Tamil Christian, Muslim, Burgher and Sinhala Buddhist pockets. This makes my fellow pilgrims from this area the members of a Tamil Hindu monoculture exposed to various other ethnocultural influences.'
However, this monoculture is special to this region. Ethnically, although they speak Tamil and have a Tamil social, cultural and political identity, they are mostly the descendants of immigrants from Kerala and distinguish themselves from the Tamils in the north who, in turn, view the east coast Tamils as a different kind of Tamils. Nonetheless, with regard to their language and core religious beliefs, they share a large common culture with the northern Tamils. This is the reason why they are also Muruga devotees.
Before the war began in 1983, within the northeast region, Tamil Hindu people moved around freely with a common ethnocultural identity. Thus, for example, Velupillai has kinship
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connections from Panama to Valachchenai. These Tamils belong to a multiculturally influenced monoculturally shared moral community that, in a manner of speaking, dictates their social norms; gives them their sense of propriety and social aesthetics. A part of these sensibilities comes from the Hindu culture based on the traditions of the dharmasutras and dharmasastras, and other parts come from the Malayalam culture and the Tamil culture. As a key element of the latter, the Muruga cult exerts major moral pressures upon individuals and groups. The Muruga cult as a moral community is in command during the pilgrimages to Kataragama. Thus, in addition to the moral commands of the Hindu tradition, the pilgrims to Kataragama have to obey the specific commands of the cult.
Classical Tamil literature informs us that in ancient Tamil Nadu a quality known as ananku was held sacred. Ananku was a beneficial but dangerous quality that certain places, times, beings and acts possess. Ananku was a power to cause harm under certain conditions but it could also be benevolent. Wrongdoing exposed individuals to ananku. What was right and what was wrong in a given line of conduct, i.e. the moral quality of an act, activated ananku for better or worse. Muruga possessed ananku. Misconduct led to the wrath of the god. With the power or quality of ananku he punished wrongdoers."
Today, at least in Sri Lanka, the concept of ananku is unknown. In all probability, early Tamils who lived in Sri Lanka were aware of ananku but in time it became obsolete, perhaps superceded by the notion teiva kopam - wrath of the god. The fear of Muruga's power and his wrath is pervasive in the Tamil Hindu community, and the teiva kopam is the contemporary Sri Lankan Sanskritic term for the ancient institution of ananku that lays the foundation for the Muruga cult as a moral community. Muruga is believed to be an entirely ethical god who does not tolerate unethical and immoral conduct. His retribution is believed to be swift and terrible. Pilgrimages to Katirgamam are undertaken
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in this the moral domain. It covers both the Hindu moral domain as yell as the specifically Muruga cult moral domain with the latter in a commanding position since the pilgrimage is to Muruga's current home, Katirgamam. Every group of pilgrims as well as all the groups taken collectively comes under this moral domain
A Sinhala Interlude
A comparable sense of a moral community is present among the Sinhala Buddhist people as well. This is evident in the way they organize pilgrimages to Buddhist places of worship. Most of their pilgrimages are to nearby Buddhist temples (vihare: pansala). Families, kin groups or neighborhood groups walk to these temples on full moon (poya) days to perform religious acts. Nowadays urban people drive to such temples in much the same way the urban Tamil Hindus go to the kovils. In my childhood, the elders in our village, near Galle in the Southern Province, used to talk about the grand pilgrimages their ancestors had made to the places in the north: Anuradhapura, Polonnaruva and the like. There were two major pilgrimage circuits: the atamasthane (eight great places) and the dolosmasthane (twelve great places). The latter includes the former and four more places. Additionally there were two other cirćuits — to Sri Pada and to Kataragama, both included in the dolosmasthane but are also independent pilgrimage sites.'
These Sinhala pilgrimages had the same structure. Southern pilgrims went as a group known even today as the made.' This term is not specific to the Southern Province. A nade consisted of a group of pilgrims - usually kinfolk but it could also include neighbors of the same caste - and a caravan of bullock carts known as the barakarate. A pair of bulls (gon bana) pulled each cart. The carts carried the elderly, children, pregnant women and supplies while men and women walked alongside, riding the carts only if they became exhausted or ill. Each made had an experienced pilgrim, usually an elderly man, who knew how to organize a nade, the route, possible problems on the way, and the pilgrimage
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etiquette. He was, as he still is, known as the madegura or the guide of the group.
The etiquette of the pilgrimage involves general obedience to the madegura for he is the authority on the pilgrimage. The members of the made must behave like a single body, for internal dissent causes unpleasantness and troubles. An unruly nade would cause the pilgrimage to fail by displeasing the gods whose protection is essential to ward off the dangers on the way. From the moment the nade leaves the village until it returns, there is danger lurking at every step. These dangers, traditionally, involved wild beasts (val Sattu), sickness (ledaduk), robbers (horu), influence of evil spirits (bhuta dosa), and the wrath of the gods (deva kopa or deva dosa). The pilgrims must avoid becoming "caught up in pollution” (killata ahuvima) for this brings about desertion by the gods and exposure to evil spirits. Both these could expose the entire made to every other obstacle on the journey. There are many causes of pollution (kill). Death in the family, funerals, menstruation, cohabitation, childbirth, consumption of meats and alcohol are among serious kili producing contexts of which the first is the most serious. The prospective pilgrims must plan their pilgrimage to avoid these contexts, and if they occur despite all precautions, they must abandon the pilgrimage and wait for a more auspicious opportunity.
In addition to the personal "cleanliness” of each pilgrim, which is physical as well as spiritual, proper social conduct is mandated. Thus, every made is polite to every other made and they bless each other with the appropriate exclamations irrespective of the other’s caste, race, region and religion. In Sri Pada, for example, every nade blesses every other nade with verses. Those who descend bless the climbers and those who climb the mountain bless their fellow climbers:
vandinna yana me nadeta (For this group ascending to worship (the buddha's footprint) sumanasaman devi pihitai (may there be the blessings of the god Sumana Saman).
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The climbers bless those who descend with vendala bahina mé nadeta (For this group descending after worshipping) Sumanasaman devi pihitai. (may there be the blessings of the god Sumana Saman), Similarly, the pilgrims to Kataragamabless one another with haro- hara!
The nadegura's task is to ensure that the above conditions are met by every member of his made for the pilgrimage is full of anubhave or anuhase.
The anubhave or anuhase is an ancient Sinhala concept that characterizes religious beings, places, objects and acts. It is comparable to the ancient Tamil ananku. The terms roughly mean the power of the religious. This power is beneficial as long as the acts are properly performed. Then it produces set Santi, well being and peace of mind, the rewards from the power of the sacred. If not, it becomes malevolent and causes vas dos, calamity and misfortune, the punishments from the power of the religious. The aim of every pilgrim is to reap set Santi from the pilgrimage. However, misconduct during the pilgrimage-violation of the ethics and the etiquette (sirit virit: good customs of old times”) of the pilgrimage - brings about was dos that expose the pilgrim to all the dangers of the pilgrimage including its failure as well as the wrath of the gods. Thus, the anubhave oranuhase of Sinhala pilgrimage renders every group of pilgrims a moral community virtually identical to their Tamil counterparts.'
Another feature of Sri Lankan pilgrimages irrespective of their religious orientation is that the authority of the sacred comes into play from the moment the pilgrimage commences. In that sense, pilgrimage centers have flexible boundaries. The boundary is wherever the pilgrimage begins. The pilgrimage rearranges or redefines - expands or contracts - the sacred space depending on the position of the pilgrim. If he begins from Panagamuwa, my native village, on a pilgrimage to Kataragama, the perimeter of Kataragama, for him and for this pilgrimage, extends to
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Panagamuwa. This extension of the boundary is also the extension of the god's jurisdiction, and it lasts until he returns. Thus, until he returns, not only he but also all his family members who remain in the village are under the god's jurisdiction, and come within the Kataragama moral domain. Their conduct at home is just as important as his conduct for his pilgrimage to be successful. This makes the pilgrimage not merely a pilgrim's separation from his everyday society. It includes his family as well, irrespective of whether they join him in his pilgrimage and physically move away from everyday Society or not, and they, as he, become, to use Victor and Edith Turners' concept, liminoid. The pilgrim's family, too, withdraws from the everyday Society by not participating in its polluting circumstances as pollution at home renders the pilgrimage non-functional or dysfunctional. For his home is covered by the ethics of the pilgrimage and the authority of the moral community at the pilgrim's destination.
Navaladi
We must have walked at about four kilometers per hour because we reached Vannati Canal, twelve kilometers into the Yala sanctuary, by eight thirty in the morning. My cook Sinnadorei prepared milk tea on a fireplace that was already there, left by the previous groups of pilgrims. We had tea with Lemon Puff biscuits that we had purchased from Gunaratnam in Pottuvil. Rajaratnam was still mad at Velupillai. He kept saying that Velupillai had no right to tell him what to do. He argued that we could come this far because Velupillai was no longer with us, slowing us down with his foolishness. But I wished he and Sivam were still with us and that I had the leisure enjoyed by my fellow pilgrims who were slower on their feet and rested more often. Velupillai was annoying because of his flippancy and social insecurity. He was also funny and entertaining.
As we rested and drank tea, many groups of pilgrims went by greeting us with haro-hara! We responded in like manner and resumed our pada yatra around nine. Our immediate destination
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was Navaladi, twelve more kilometers away. We had to cross several mutddy streams on the way. The sun became hotter as we crossed a varied landscape that was alternatively devoid of trees followed by thick forest. We reached Navaladi by noon.
Navaladi is, for all practical purposes, a burnt down building in the jungle, edging a lake. It was once a circuit bungalow of the Wild Life Conservation Department. Although the landscape was beautiful, the building was eerie with the ruined granite structure sprayed with LTTE slogans on the walls blackened by the fire from a LTTE attack.
Navaladi was already crowded with pilgrims. Bands of pilgrims put down their sacks of supplies and clothes in the shade of the massive trees. Pots were on the fire and the midday meal was in the making. We, too, found a space between two groups of pilgrims and Sinnadorei immediately began to make our lunch. With his rice and dhal and potato curry in the making, I walked around surveying the crowd and the location.
I had already become a known entity. Rajaratnam and Sinnadorei had been ceaselessly providing the pilgrims with information about me. The pilgrims were curious about me because I did not speak Tamil. Discovering that I was a Sinhala pilgrim they became extremely polite and accommodating. I received many invitations to lunch. This, however, was a common practice. Pilgrims always invited anyone whom they became acquainted with to eat meals or drink tea. Most pilgrims politely declined such invitations for numerous reasons.
Caste was one major reason. Eating with unknown people would cause social pollution that violated the social ethics of their own groups. At this point, it was clear that the pilgrims do not completely separate themselves from their domestic social identities. Rather, the moral authority of the god who does not recognize differences among the devotees represses domestic social identities. Thus, every pilgrim moves about with this conflict of moral imperatives between two worlds that are not completely discontinuous. The pilgrim is at the intersection of the domestic
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world and the religious world. The religious world compels him to recognize his equality with others while the domestic world forces him to recognize his inequality from them. To invite a Stranger to a meal is not to assert equality and to decline to accept the invitation is to assert possible inequality. While Social Superiors can invite their inferiors to meals without sacrificing their social superiority, they cannot accept invitations from possible inferiors without sacrificing their superiority. Further, an invitation does not in itself assert equality. Equality is established in the manner in which food is shared. One can give food to someone of lower status and either not eat alongside him or not eat at all. Caste pollution occurs only when the higher caste person eats food offered by the lower caste person or when he shares his own food and eats it alongside the lower caste person thus asserting equality. Perhaps, lower caste people were keener on food sharing than the upper caste people for that, at least temporarily, levels off the domestic social hierarchy and, gratifyingly, reaches the ideals of the pilgrimage that all pilgrims are equal.
The second reason why they declined invitations was that everybody knew that everyone else carried limited supplies and it was only proper to let them conserve what little they brought for the journey. It was clear to me that these pilgrims were either poor or lower middle class people who embarked on this pilgrimage with very little money. I declined to accept their invitations for the second reason. But when I sat down to eat people brought various curries "just to sample Tamil cooking,” as Rajaratnam told me. A vattakka (squash) and pol (grated coconut) curry was particularly noteworthy.
Our next stop would be Kumbukkan Oya, fourteen kilometers from Navaladi. At our normal pace at four kilometers per hour, we would reach Kumbukkan Oya in three and a half hours. Groups of pilgrims began to leave Navaladi. We, too, left Navaladi at two in the afternoon.
Walking through the forest was very different from walking along the Batticaloa-Pottuvil road at the same time of the day. It
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was warm but not as hot. Perhaps the asphalt road absorbed more heat than the Yala dirt road. Perhaps, walking on dirt and grass was easier on the feet than walking on asphalt. Perhaps, the breeze across the jungle was cooler and helped us beat the heat of the early afternoon sun. Perhaps, since we needed to reach our local destination no matter what, the psychology of the situation pumped enough adrenalin to propel us forward without letting us think of aches and pains and the heat.
Kumbukkan Оya
By mid afternoon, we could see dark gray billowing rain clouds roll in from the east. That was a serious concern. The rain could delay us. We hurried on. The breeze became cooler as the sky became darker. Within a kilometer from Kumbukkan Oya a heavy rain fell for a few minutes. We virtually ran the next kilometer to avoid further rain. But, with the Amman kovil in Kumbukkan Oya in sight, the rain returned with particular , vehemence. We rushed to the kovil but it was of no avail. It was packed to capacity with wet pilgrims with the evening puja was progressing. To our left the Kumbukkan Oya flowed east and to our right smoke curled up from the cadjan and plastic roof of a makeshift kiosk that was also crowded with people. Here and there under massive trees, cooking fires were turning from orange to gray. In the pouring rain, I imagined the warmth of a glass of plain tea between my palms, and rushed to the crowded kiosk and wriggled my way in with Rajaratnam and Sinnadoreibehind me. We stood walled in by the crowd, sipping tea, and looking, like
Wet CrOWS.
Rajaratnam made himself busy contacting the owners and arranging for tea. A Sinhala family from Panama owned the kiosk. Every year during the festive season, they establish the kiosk, transporting everything from Panama, even firewood and sticks as it is illegal to cut down trees in the jungle. They run the kiosk until the diyakapuma (water-cutting ceremony) is performed in Kataragama. In addition to providing tea, coffee, bottled water,
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biscuits, candies, beedis and cigarettes, they provide vegetarian meals. Over the years, this kiosk has become an established spot similar to Subramanium's tearoom in Okanda and is the only means throughout Yala for the pilgrims to replenish supplies.
A Conflict Resolution
While the rain continued, people moved in and out of the kiosk. Through the noisy rain the sounds of bells and chanting came in from the kovil with wisps of incense smoke. No one had expected such a downpour. A group of young men came in and almost immediately started to tease several young women sitting in a corner. The teasing was sometimes verbal and other times by gestures. In the pouring rain, inside this crowded kiosk in the mud, romance was in the air. Chuckles and giggles mixed with the noise of the chatter and the splatter of water. Some of the boys were natural-born comedians who could make the most ridiculous gestures at the girls. Gradually, this teasing and wooing became noisy enough to draw the attention of other pilgrims. The elderly looked at them disapprovingly and some told the boys to leave the girls alone. The boys ignored them. It turned out that these boys had located the girls in Okanda and had been on their trail for several days. This was the latest encounter.
Finally, the Sinhala owner came out and yelled at the boys for misbehaving during their pilgrimage. His point was that pilgrims must not harass other pilgrims. He entertained them because they needed help. In the rain, they needed shelter and he was allowing them to have it. But this was not to be abused. The elderly Tamils seemed to agree with him. The teasing was funny only up to a point. Then it had gone out of control and become a nuisance, most of all to the girls. The kiosk owner told the boys to get out of the kiosk. They were unhappy about this turn of events but left promptly. A man in his thirties introduced himself as a bank employee. He told me in English "hormones hormones!" That made me curious about two things: the romancing and the control of unruliness during the pilgrimage.
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While in Okanda, in the late afternoon, Velupillai, Rajaratnam, Subramanium, the kovil helpers and I discussed whether the pilgrims' social behavior while in Okanda is the same as when they are in their village communities. What interested me was, as I discussed earlier, the public bathing. Does this occur in the villages? All were unanimous that it does not. Then how do these people handle it during the pilgrimage? A man from the kovil said that the kovil premises belonged to the god and the god does not tolerate misconduct. Everybody who comes to the kovil knows this as a fact. Even when opportunities unavailable in daily life arise, such as the view of bathing women, the pilgrims are expected to behave as if such opportunities do not exist. If not, pilgrimages are impossible because all pilgrims are in a helpless state. They undertake pilgrimages expecting the god to take care of them. And the god severely punishes the wrongdoers. This punishment may come immediately or later but it does come. Everybody knows this. Therefore problems do not arise.
Then I asked whether young men and women become attracted to each other during the pilgrimages. I had seen groups of young men and groups of young women, decked in their best, roam about in Okanda. My question produced much hilarity. Subramanium was even comical. Velupillai said it certainly happens. People do get attracted to each other. In fact, young people are on the look out for members of the opposite sex. Pilgrimages, just like visits to local kovils, provide excellent opportunities for such encounters. Young people go to such festivities hoping to meet partners.
Here in Kumbukkan Oya things went a bit out of hand and the boys crossed a boundary against the rules. What the man said about hormones made perfect sense. The teasing was, without their conscious awareness, sexual, loaded with innuendos, and the biology of being young seemed to be at the root of this behavior. Sexuality in a moral domain led to a conflict. My contention is that all the adults there knew that the behavior of the young men was not just teasing but was also obliquely sexual and tolerated it until the boys
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lost their sense of place and time. The kiosk owner's religious tone of voice quickly calmed them down and the community inside the kiosk returned to its earlier polite social intercourse. These young men reached the threshold of social tolerance and were forced to back off.
What was interesting in this situation was that a Sinhala Buddhist kiosk owner stepped in to enforce the rules among the majority Tamil Hindus who accepted his authority. The Tamil elders, although they customarily had the authority over their own younger kin, were reluctant to intervene for they had no authority over unknown youths on someone else's property. They were in the Sinhala man's space and, it was obvious to everybody, they had no social connections with either the boys or the girls. The girls belonged to another group of pilgrims and were only trapped in the kiosk because of the rain. The general rule of non-interference with other pilgrims applied here and the older Tamils, although embarrassed and offended, kept quiet.
The Sinhala man's authority to enforce the rules of conduct had four sources or aspects. First, his authority stemmed from his "ownership” of the place and, as the owner, it was up to him to set things right in his space. Second, he was giving shelter to the crowd who were thereby obligated to go along with him. He was the donor of a facility and others were thankful recipients of that facility. The gift of shelter carried with it a principle of reciprocity that meant that the recipients, in return, accept the donor's authority. Third, his speech, although a lambasting, was not insulting and had a religious tone that won the approval of the rest. Finally, he focused on the sacred character of their being in Kumbukkan Oya and invoked their moral duties as pilgrims. These four qualities of the kiosk owner - ownership, obligation, appropriate tone of speech and the appropriate context - gave his words the moral strength to control the unruly boys. Any of these qualities alone would probably not have sufficed to establish this authority. For example, a Sinhala kiosk owner in Jaffna or a Tamil shopkeeper in Galle doing the same thing might get into serious trouble because
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of his ethnicity. Rights of ownership are freely flouted particularly during times of ethnic unrest. Gratitude is easily overlooked during ethnic conflicts when personal advantage takes precedence. Contexts are constructed and twisted to serve personal and politico-economic purposes and the tone of speech is often taken out of context and ridiculed. But in conjunction, at least in this tea kiosk in the middle of the Yala jungle, they generated moral authority.
Contrary to the notion I constructed in Okanda, pilgrims do encounter conflicting situations. The ordinary normative structures of this pilgrimage, conceived as the divine imperatives governing the social conduct of the pilgrims, are thus occasionally violated. Here I did not see that ethnicity, social class, caste, religion or individual or collective ambition caused the social conflict. I see gender as the cause because the unruliness of the boys was towards the girls and not towards anyone else. Their unruliness was not overtly sexual - there was no physical contact and Rajaratnam informed me that their language had no explicit sexual meanings. The girls had no reason within that social context to tease the boys back or even to ask them to stop teasing. They either made faces, which made teasing worse, or simply cringed. The rules of conduct for girls in public places made it improper for them to do anything strong enough to resist the teasing. Behind this drama was the Tamil (South Asian in general) culture and social ethics that mandated gracious behavior in public places and prohibited women, particularly unmarried women, from being socially assertive. The boys were taking the advantage of this social ethic that placed the girls in a relatively disadvantaged, weaker position.
The rain stopped around seven thirty in the evening and I went for a walk to take a look at the kovil and the pilgrims. Many groups of pilgrims had abandoned cooking their evening meal when the fires could not be sustained. Hurriedly covering the cooking pots with plastic sheets, they gathered under large trees. The runoff into the river had flooded their camps and the kovil and the kiosk could accommodate only a few. Most, including the elderly and the children, were as wet as the fish in the river. Many tried to
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rekindle the fires but the firewood was soaked and the ground was muddy. The kiosk ran out of food. Weate the last few rotis. Many had to do without.
The owner of the kiosk graciously offered to help us prepare a sleeping place. The safest and the driest place was the yard of the kiosk although it was also dirty with beetlejuice that hundreds of beetle chewing pilgrims ejected. They brought a very large mat made by sewing together many plastic bags, swept the ground, and spread it. Then they placed another plastic sheet on top. Practically every group of pilgrims was making do as best as they could to sleep in the mud. They were constantly crying haro-hara! The shop owner said the haro-hara! cries were meant to scare away the elephants. Apparently, herds of wild elephants frequently visited Kumbukkan Oya. Haro-hara! is the vocal weapon that the pilgrims wielded to discourage the elephants and other wild animals such as wild boars from entering this part of the forest that has, for the festive season, become a habitat for transient humans.
This habitat formation and its acoustics took my mind back to Okanda. As I observed there, each group of pilgrims carried on their activities as an independent social unit with its own unique internal organization and normative order. But each shared with others the overall moral order which provided all with a common sense of purpose and common normative frames to achieve these purposes. In a sense, this is not different from the everyday community where many relatively independent social units function together within common rules of conduct. The difference is that at the pilgrimage site the overall community of pilgrims is transient. The everyday communities are relatively more permanent with many lineages Occupying the same locality for generations and with lasting political and economic foundations. This long term living together has also curtailed the independence of these social units for their community obligations are heavy and the community informally supervises the conduct of each. But here, the vast majority of pilgrim groups are unknown to each other and do not hope to meet again. For example, those who were in Okanda
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yesterday might never again encounter the other groups who were there alongside them. Therefore, their mutual obligations and expectations were, in terms of those in their everyday communities, minimal and no group of pilgrims had any right to have a supervisory or advisory role over any other. Under these circumstances, one would anticipate chaotic situations as each group attempted to maximize its own existence at the expense of the others. But this was not the case. The lack of everyday connections did not make them wholly independent of and non-responsible towards the others. Their interrelationships remained structured and controlled. The ephemeral character of the social structure, or to invoke Victor Turner the anti-structure, of a pilgrimage center did not make it any the weaker.
Here in Kumbukkan Oya I observed the same pattern. This order was evident in the incident in the tea kiosk. Now, in this communal haro-harahing, it became even clearer. The source of this order appeared to be the same as that in Okanda. It is the Muruga cult. The moral order that established equality among the pilgrims in their social interactions brought every pilgrim and his group under the authority of Muruga. Muruga's authority was concentrated in various areas such as Tamil Nadu and the Ruhuna, particularly in his six abodes in Tamil Nadu, Kataragama, Nallur and other such villages and townships, and spots such as the Muruga kovils scattered throughout the island. Wherever Muruga pilgrims gather too comes under his direct authority and influence as the perimeter of the pilgrimage site extends to wherever the pilgrims are enveloping them. None dared to flout the god's commands that constituted the moral order of the cult gatherings and mere invocation of the god's authority was sufficient to calm any unruly person. The haro-haras invoked the god's authority as well as his benevolence and protection. When prompted by one group the other groups responded immediately, spreading haro-haras throughout Kumbukkan Oya, reminding each of her obligations towards the god and towards other pilgrims. The need to respond to someone else's haro-hara came habitually and automatically,
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through faith, and the response was not merely vocal. At night, a far away group's haro-hara would call the attention of all groups of pilgrims to a possible need, danger, or any other circumstance that group was facing. Haro-hara is, in addition to a blessing, a complex semantic device that established communication among the disparate groups and sustained them within Muruga's domain.
It was not easy to fall asleep under these conditions and with scorpions crawling by. My clothes were wet and the air was cold. While my companions fell asleep very quickly, I stayed awake listening to a woman's song in a nearby group. Her song was unrhymed and she sang it line by line with each line ending with "Murugal” with the last “a” in a long modulation. Her voice had a sharp, pleading, melancholic timbre. At the end of each line, her group sang a responsorial haro-hara! that was picked up by the next circle of pilgrims around her group, and then by the next circle and so on until it faded away in a series of ripples with the farthest response barely audible. Then she would sing the next line and the whole process would recur. This choral activity continued untill late in the night. Then there was only the cry of a wet bird on a treetop.
August 2
We were up before the sun. In the semi-darkness, I could see other pilgrims preparing to leave. I tried to get to the river but the riverbanks were inaccessible except for a narrow entrance because of feces. I could see pilgrims on the other bank of the river as well. They were bathing and preparing to leave. By the time I returned to the kiosk Rajaratnam and Sinnadorei had rolled up our bedding and returned it to the kiosk owner. I used bottled water to clean my mouth but my stomach turned very badly because of the appalling sight on the riverbanks. I was wondering how I could get into that foul water to cross the river. The minute I tasted toothpaste my stomach violently convulsed and I vomited. But there was nothing I could do to get around the problem. There was no bridge over the fouled waters.
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And with Rajaratnam and Sinnadoreibehind me, I stepped ing the murky fluid. The rain had swollen the shallow river, and at its deepest, water rushed under my armpits. Once I got in the flowing water the initial disgust thinned away and I ploughed my way across the river as the sun peeped through the clouds in the overcast sky. Soon the clouds passed away to the west and bright sunshine lit up the landscape. It was beautiful. With a few heavy rains after the festive season, Kumbukkan Oya with its tiny Amman kovil under the towering trees should be a fine and picturesque resting place.
We headed for a spot known as Niyala, fourteen kilometers from Kumbukkan Oya. The way to Niyala was mostly through open spaces that appeared to be dry lakes with scrub jungle surrounding them. We crossed several extremely muddy streams and apart from that our walk was uneventful. Niyala is known for its well-constructed wells and as a resting spot for pilgrims. Those who leave Kumbukkan Oya in the morning reach Niyala to cook their midday meal, bathe and replenish water supplies.
But, at least for us, this was not to be. The wells contained only stagnant rusty water. My fellow pilgrims used this water regardless but I found myself in a tight situation with my water supplies running out. After Niyala, the next water source was Katagamuwa, thirteen kilometers away. Among the three of us, we had only three bottles of water, making it necessary to reach Katagamuwa by twilight. We figured we could, if we started early enough. Sinnadorei hurriedly made his rice and potato curry and we took off by one in the afternoon. Sinnadorei was not too happy about this. In his experience, it is not wise to go through Yala in small groups. It is usual for several groups to go together particularly in this area, where wild animals are believed to roam. But we took a chance and set forth.
We walked about two kilometers across a landscape of low scrubs, sand dunes and large pools of stagnant water to our left and dense forest to our right. Then, we spotted several wild buffaloes about fifty meters away and we realized that we had
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indeed taken a chance. A hefty bull roamed about appearing to be aggressive even from where we were. We could not proceed because they were too close to the road and we were afraid that they might attack us. Soon they noticed us and started to run across the road towards the jungle on our right. For a moment, we thought they had run away for good but then they turned around, trotted to the road and started grazing once again. Remembering what we learned in Kumbukkan Oya, we loudly yelled haro-hara! They paid absolutely no attention. Sinnadorei lunged forward and shouted in his shrill voice haro-hara! as if haro-hara meant "go away” but to no avail. We back-tracked to a tree, deciding to spend some time making tea with muddy water collected from a stagnant pond. No sooner than we began drinking the foul-tasting fluid, several buffaloes rushed out of the forest and ran towards the sand dune about twenty meters from us. We repeatedly yelled harohara! at the top of our voices but, instead of running away they began to come towards us. What to do now? There was nothing to do except run or climb the tree. Running did not seem prudent as they could chase us. So we climbed the tree carrying our most important items - my camera bag, for instance. We climbed as high as we thought was safe and kept on yelling haro-hara! to no effect. Five buffaloes came towards the tree and, facing it, stood with their heads down in a semicircle, every now and then shaking their heads and kicking the ground with their front legs. Rajaratnam read this posture as an attacking position. Sinnadorei was talking about an incident a few years back: a group of buffaloes attacked and seriously injured several people - they could have been killed. This was not very pleasant news in our circumstances. We stood on the rather flimsy branches of that not so tall tree clutching equally flimsy branches, Sweating copiously, regretting leaving Niyala on our own, scared out of our wits.
This waiting game went on. The buffaloes stood there, shaking their heads and kicking the ground without making any other bodily motion and sometimes even without that, like statues. After a while, the fear subsided and we began to joke about the
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buffaloes, breaking into haro-haras in various threatening tones, kngwing full well that the buffaloes would completely ignore our noise making. By half past three in the afternoon, we saw something moving far away across the plain. Soon the thing took the shape of a line and we heard faint haro-haras. Nothing in the world could be a more welcome sight or sound. Several groups of pilgrims, together making a crowd of about twenty-five, were coming along. As they came closer their haro-haras became louder and finally loud enough to attract the attention of the buffaloes. They all turned their heads in the direction of the pilgrims and suddenly started to run towards the other buffaloes ahead of us. Pandemonium began, as more buffaloes appeared from the other side of the sand dune, perhaps about thirty, all running as fast as they could into the jungle. The pilgrims came, yelling haro-hara! completely unaware of this commotion. Scared and at the same time bored by the long period of inactivity, yet energized by the wild drama occurring before us, the three of us went out of control wildly screaming haro-hara! but our measly yells drowned in the roar of the pilgrims who hardly noticed us clinging to the tree. As they came near the tree, we jumped down and this unexpected fall of human forms from the tree dumbfounded them. "Erumail erumail (buffaloes! buffaloes!),” cried Sinnadorei in his shrill excited voice and it instantly prompted a string of loud haro-harahs from the crowd. Rajaratnam and Sinnadorei explained our perilous situation to the great mirth of the other pilgrims, and even to us, what was a horrific situation just a few minutes ago, now reenacted only in comical form. How soon situations become re-cognized after an interpretation Rajaratnam expressed his perspective on the matter. Muruga sent the people just in time so that we would be out of danger. What if one of us slipped and fell? Muruga wants to see us in Katirgamam. Therefore we would never fall. Haro-hara! cried the crowd and soon we were back on the track. We could see fifty or more buffaloes at a far away water hole raising their heads to listen to the unexpected rumble that the wind carried to them.
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We trekked across the jungle until twilight. When everybody agreed that we had come about five kilometers from Niyala we entered a large open area. In the middle, there was a massive lone tree. All decided to spend the night under the tree. Young men dragged in piles of firewood and lit four large fires around the tree. Within the fires was, as in Kumbukkan Oya, space marked out for the human habitation. The fires alarmed and discouraged the wild animals. I wondered how ingenious all this is. Frail animals keep at bay much stronger animals with mere noise and a few fires that, in fact, would have offered no resistance whatsoever if the elephants, buffaloes and the wild boars decided to come in. But they never did. The worrisome strong breeze from the east was cool and refreshing and kept the fires burning nicely and fiercely.
No one cooked. No one had adequate water. Every group attempted to conserve what little it had for one cup of tea now and one in the morning. We ate our Lemon Puff biscuits and some arisima (a very dry sweet powdery food made of rice flour and Sugar)” that our Akkaraipattu friend Suppiah had given us, washing it down with milk tea. Someone turned on a radio but it was immediately turned off amid the loud protests from others. The seaside sky had large gray clouds that threatened us with rain and we hoped that the wind would carry them away. The western sky was lit with a deep orange glow. The sky above was crystal-clear and glowed with the Milky Way. The fourth curve of the waxing Esala moon was good-looking against the deepening blue.
August 3
My companions were up and busy by five in the morning. The fires lit the night before were still burning but gradually dwindling. After a cup of tea, I walked about and met a middleaged couple from Batticaloa: Tangavelu and his wife Selvamani. He is a fisherman and she keeps the house. They have four children, two boys, both fishermen, and two girls, both married to fishermen. They have many grandchildren also. Tangavelu spoke very fluent Sinhala though Selvamani could not understand a word. He learned
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his Sinhala from the Sinhala fishermen from the south and they learned Tamil from the Tamil fishermen like Tangavelu. They often meet in the sea and on the beach and help each other at times of need. Tangavelu has many good friends in the south, in Hambantota, Matara, Welligama, Galle and Ambalangoda.
Rajaratnam and Sinnadorei came with our baggage. We sat around Selvamani's fireplace Smoking cigarettes and sipping tea that she offered. We would leave a little after daybreak, when we could see clearly. Until then the path across the forest might not be safe. I prompted Tangavelu to talk about the Sinhala fishermen he knew. He knew a lot of them and a lot of Muslim fishermen also. They got along fine. In his experience as a fisherman, there are no differences among the Muslim, Sinhala and Tamil people except for language and religion. In the sea, one forgets all this for in difficult situations they all act together, support each other, and whether one is Sinhala or Tamil or Muslim was immaterial. All the troubles that we experience nowadays are the works of politicians. They create tensions and based on these tensions are elected to the parliament. Once they go to Colombo, they forget all this stuff and start making money. They merely talk about the tensions and do not even mention the actual problems that the people have. Young people don't have jobs. Prices are rising all the time. Hospitals are crowded. Roads are unusable. Cost of transportation is constantly going up and the fishermen can't get a good price for their catch because the war has destroyed their markets elsewhere in the country. Instead of talking about these real problems, they talk about how to stop the war that they themselves have created.
Tangavelu, as an independent entrepreneur, had his own opinions about the war, ethnic relations and politics of Sri Lanka. He was fully aware that his economic well-being was totally under the sway of the politicians no matter how hard he tried to avoid politics. As he said, politics seeps in like the fog. I agreed wholeheartedly. However, unlike the fog, it does not leave. It lingers on corroding everything in its vicinity.
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We started on the next leg of our pada yatra around six in the morning. We all walked close together. Several young men walked ahead of us at a slightly faster pace, virtually barking harohara!haro-hara! loudly, in quick tempo, without the accent on the second and the fourth syllables. The rest of this cluster of groups cried haro-hara! in unison in the usual tempo with the usual accent. Soon the groups separated themselves from the initial huddle and kept about fifteen meters between them and the haro-harahing became more dramatic and resembled the ripple effect in Kumbukkan Oya. The haro-haras moved back and forth in a chain. Soon the wording itself went through various transformations.
haro-hara haro-hara!
haro-hara haro-hara!
aru-hora haro-hara!
haro-hara aru-horal
kauda-hora haro-hara!
aru-hora haro-hara!
The last improvisation was borrowed from the Sinhala devotees in Kataragama who jokingly include an acoustical pun that literally meant "Who is the rogue? He is the roguel” but contextually meant nothing except a rhythmically coherent tonal variation. But, here, I could not be too sure of that because I was the odd man in the crowd. Everybody knew I was Sinhala and I still wonder whether they included this element to tease me or whether they were expressing the usual suspicion between the Sinhalas and Tamils! I like to think it was only the former. Tangavelu said it was not to insult me, but only to tease me. Maybe he was being politel Or, was I being self-conscious and paranoid?
During the first part of the morning, I was apprehensive about the wild animals. Therefore, I, too, cried haro-hara as loudly as I could, in response to another's haro-hara, and as my own spontaneous outburst that others picked up and carried forward. The haro-haras were certainly effective, as we did not encounter any animals except for a lone wild buffalo far away.
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My group had multiplied. Tangavelu and Selvamani became
So friendly that they decided to walk with us in a single group. Between the two of them, there was another piece of singing. Selvamani would sing:
Muruganukku pulleyarunukku Valliammanukku tevaniammanukku Velanukku mayilanukku Muruganukku valiammanukku
And at the end of each line Tangavelu would respond with
haro-haro! The three of us adopted Tangavelu's responsorial and together we moved on like a troupe of singers.
Muruganukku pulleyarunukku haro-haral Valliammanukku tevaniammanukku haro-haral
Velanukku mayilanukku
haro-haral Muruganukku valiammanukku haro-haral Arumuganukku kandasaminukku haro-haral
Velanukku mayilanukku
haro-haras Sometimes Selvamani changed her litany. haro-haral
addo-hara
addo-hara
haro-hara! And so we trekked. Soon we became thirsty and drank the
last of our water. From now on, until we reached Menik Ganga about three kilometers ahead, we had to cope with thirst. I wanted to run to the river but I had to walk slower than my normal four kilometers per hour speed to accommodate Tangavelu and Selvamani. So did Rajaratnam who turned out to be an excellent
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hiker. The best of all was slender and small made Sinnadorei. He carried our supplies on his head and in the backpack that he improvised out of a folded sarong taking the lead with his brisk swinging pace. The scrub jungle with a few trees gradually transformed into thick forest with magnificent trees. The footpath widened to an unpaved road and then we heard the sound of the river. It was a complex noise, the sound of gurgling water, the chatter of people with the rustle of the leaves in the wind. Our pace quickened and then we saw the river on our left, crystal-clear water slowly flowing on gold-brown gravel. Its ample banks were full of people with many children playing in the shallows. Smoke around the fireplaces blurred my view of the cooking pots. I was hungry. Tangavelu said many groups with small children and the elderly must have been resting here for days. They must have been coming through the sanctuary for many days, perhaps a week, and the river and the forest offered comfort to their hot tired bodies.
We walked up the river and around a bend to get away from the crowds and found a clean spot where we neither saw nor heard the others. As soon as we put down our baggage, all of us went to the river and started to throw water on our bodies. Overcome by emotion, with her hands on her head, Selvamani chanted:
Muruganukku valiammanukku!
We joined her,
haro-haral
Valliammanukku tevaniammanukku
haro-haral
Velanukku mayilanukku
haro-haral
Muruganukku pulleyarunukku
haro-haral
Arumuganukku kandasaminukku
haro-haral
Velanukku mayilanukku
haro-haral
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Rajaratnam and Selvadorei unpacked our bags while Taagavelu helped Selvamaniput together two fireplaces. I suggested we cook our meals together. All welcomed the idea. Soon, Selvamani and Sinnadorei were cooking lunch. Tangavelu sat by busy with a special activity. He pulled out a bundle from his backpack. Inside he had a few cigars, a packet of cigarettes and a packet of ganja. Sitting cross-legged and with clinical attention, he unrolled a cigar and removed its outer tobacco leaf, and placed it on his right thigh. Then he opened the packet of ganja and sorted out the stalks and the seeds, and crushed the leaves with his fingers. Taking out a cigarette, he licked it along the joint and opened it, collected the tobacco, mixed it with the ganja and placed the mixture on the cigarette paper and that on the tobacco leaf and carefully rolled it into a conical cigar, expertly placing the cigarette filter at the narrow end and, casting a professorial glance at me, said, "Filtertipped!ʼ
In the meantime, Rajaratnam had begun washing some of my clothes. I stepped into the river, rolled in the shallow water and lay there watching the morning sunshine beam through the foliage of the giant kumbuk trees and blossom on the tiny waves of the calm river. The thick foliage on the banks gained definition as the haze that rendered them a blue-black curtain slowly lifted. Soon all were bathing. We found deeper spots in the river for dipping and Swam in the shallower waters watching schools of small brown nameless fish that were trying to stay still against the
Current.
We returned to the bank. It was good to have the cooling water on my body. As we sat down Tangavelu pulled out his "cigar" and lit it, had a few drags and passed it to Rajaratnam, who gave it to Sinnadorei, who returned it to Tangavelu. This went on several rounds. There was nothing unusual about this activity. Most men, and a few women, smoked ganja during the pada yatra to relax aching muscles and joints. Others like the "sami” I met in Okanda used ganja to communicate with the sacred and "see deeper truths.” In India, the Hindu anchorites carry large quantities of ganja leaves
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(known in Hindi as charas) or small slabs of hashish that they smoke in clay hookas. They too claim that the sight of deep truths is possible with the help of these substances. No one said anything. I returned to the water and lay in it.
When I returned to our camp our lunch of rice and potatolentil curry was ready. Not having eaten since the last evening, everyone sat down and ate voraciously. Immediately after the meal, we spread our sheets on the sand and fell asleep.
We woke at three in the afternoon when a large crowd of several groups of pilgrims crashed in. Last night these groups had slept at Niyala and were planning to spend this night by the river. Several men invited us to eat a meal with them, but we were planning to leave for Katagamuwa about five kilometers away. I wanted to get there before twilight. If we left the river around four, we would reach Katagamuwa by six in the evening. Tangavelu and Selvamani needed frequent breaks.
We left the river a few minutes past four amid tremendous shouts of encouragement and well wishes from our fellow pilgrims:
haro-haral
haro-haras
From there, all the way to Katagamuwa it was
Muruganukku pulleyarunukku
haro-haral
Valliammanukku tevaniammanukku
haro-hara!
Velanukku mayilanukku
haro-harall
Muruganukku valliammanukku
haro-haral
Arumuganukku kandasaminukku
haro-haras
Velanukku mayilanukku
haro-haral
addo hara!
haro-haral
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The road was clear and well maintained for the vehicles of the government departments. We crossed a bridge over Menik Ganga. On the other side of the bridge, to our left, was an elaborate camp of the government security forces. To our right was a makeshift building where the security officers had established a first-aid post. An official there told me many pilgrims come with cuts, bruises and blisters on their feet and some with stomach disorders and colds. They donated their medical supplies and labor to help the pilgrims throughout the festive season. It appeared to be a carry over from the days when the British colonial government, under the recommendations from the Government Agents of Badulla and Hambantota - who had jurisdiction over Kataragama and the Yala forest - combated cholera epidemics in Kataragama during the festive season. Fortunately, we did not need their assistance. Had Velupillai and Sivam been with us we would have needed their help.
Further along the road, the great forest thinned away and became scrub jungle. Now the road was wide, and well prepared for heavy motorized transportation. We reached a low hill and Tangavelu and Selvamani broke into another bout of addo-haral haro-haral with particular excitement and enthusiasm. A few other pilgrims joined in the shout. The cause of this animated behavior became clear when Tangavelu pointed to a faint far away series of humps that appeared blue-black through the afternoon haze and cried "Katirgamam Katirgamam”
The pilgrims have created several makeshift shrines at this spot to celebrate the first sight of Kataragama. The shrine that Tangavelu and his wife selected for worship consisted of a bundle of peacock feathers tied to a bush with a cheap green cloth with gold colored border and then with a purple cloth. At the base of the bush lay another piece of cheap gold colored cloth. A glass jar with coconut oil and a strip of tin bent and contrived as a wickholder stuck at the jar's mouth made a lamp. A bucket made of a tin can and a wire handle hung from another branch. A sort of floor was constructed by scattering many small rocks and chunks
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of concrete. Some of the rocks were blackened with camphor burning. Coins lay on a similarly blackened piece of concrete. Some rice, left from a puja, lay on the rocks near the bundle of peacock feathers. Many ants feasted on it. Several coconut shells lay around indicating that some pilgrims had smashed coconuts on the rocks. All the other shrines were similarly constructed. We lit camphor tablets on a rock crying,
haro-haral
Velanukku mayilanukku
haro-hairal
Muruganukku valiammanukku
haro-haral
addo hara!
haro-haral
Tangavelu and Selvamani began cooking rice. Rajaratnam and Sinnadoreihelped them by collecting firewood. They cooked the rice with grated coconut and other ingredients. When the rice was cooked Selvamani placed some on an aluminum plate and held it before us. Each of us placed our hands on it, clasped our hands and bowed to it in an act of community participation, in the same way worshippers touch, clasp hands and bow to trays of flowers at Buddhist temples. Then she placed the plate on some of the rocks and cried,
addo-haras
haro-haral,
and quietly chanted various things. I could only see her lips
moving silently. Tangavelu also stood by, his hands clasped, and his lips moving. The rest of us merely stood there, hands clasped, not saying anything because we did not know what to say. But we joined in every time Selvamani criedaddo-haral we responded with a haro-hara! When the puja was over Selvamani and Tangavelu held their hands over the flames of the burning camphor and rubbed their palms on their heads and faces. We followed suit. Then Tangavelu held the puja before us and asked us to partake some of it. We did. He wrapped the rest of the rice and placed it in
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his bag. Then a few more times of
Muruganukku valiammanukku
addo-haral
haro-haral
and we were on our way.
The walk to Katagamuwa was unremarkable and tiresome. We were walking on a well-made gravel road and the earlier feeling of walking through forest and jungle beset with dangers was absent. Perhaps we all were very tired and our minds were in Katagamuwa, an unknown village where we would spend the night. We were running out of water once again and everyone hoped that there would be a plenty of water in Katagamuwa. We walked through an army camp and then came across a few makeshift shops made of sticks and plastic sheets. They were full of crates of bottled aerated Sweetened drinks. No one had the stomach for such drinks. We wanted cold fresh water. There was none. The last water pipe was in the army camp. The talk that there would be a plenty of water in Katagamuwa turned out to be wishful thinking. While water was reportedly available in the village itself, we were still at the edge of the village, too tired to go looking for water. We managed with what we collected from the river that tasted soapy even after boiling. Several groups of pilgrims were already at this spot, camping under large trees. We too found a tree for the night. Tangavelu offered the puja leftovers for a meal but I was not hungry. I ate some of the arisima from Akkaraipattu and lay down.
Later in the night we heard the surrounding bushes being trampled. Our worry was that elephants were around. We immediately broke into addo-haral haro-hara assaults on the imagined elephants and were immediately supported by groups lying under nearby trees. The animals, that turned out to be wild buffaloes, ran away, startled by the human roar.
August 4
When I woke up the others were all ready to leave. By six in the morning, we were on the road as were many other groups.
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The last leg of our pada yatra thus began. Kataragama was mere seven kilometers away. Even if we loitered on the way, we would arrive at our destination by nine in the morning. But we walked fast. The very proximity to Kataragama was invigorating. Selavamani’s addo-hara! haro-hara!, myllanukku velanukku addoharaf haro-haral, got more frequent and louder. After a few kilometers through the forest and then on the bund of the abandoned Katagamuwa tank, we were back on the gravel road, rushing through the Katagamuwa village that had all the appearances of resettlement and reconstruction. Several enterprising individuals had set up tearooms in mud huts.
Soon the Sounds of Kataragama, faint murmurs of music broadcast through loudspeakers and automobile noise, were in the air. There was a smile on everyone's face. At long last we had made it. Our padayatra culminated. Before we knew it we were in Kataragama. My companions were overwhelmed by the exhilarating emotion of having finally come to the abode of Muruga. Tears streamed down the cheeks and we put down our baggage, raised our arms over our heads and clasped our hands.
haro-haral,
aiya andavanel
andavane murugal
andavanel
andavanel
End Notes
N. Shanmugalingam at www.kataragama.org (undated). The other two, as I
said in the previous chapter, fell in Mantur and Tirukovil. Shanmugalingam (ibid.).
Shanmugalingam (ibid.). Shanmugalingam (ibid.). This account presupposes that Muruga and Valli came here from elsewhere, presumably from Tamil Nadu. Interestingly, this one counters the first one with regards to Valliamma's origins. It appears to be an expression of a debate within the Muruga cult regarding the identity of Valliamma.
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1.
Shanmugalingam (ibid.) and Rasaiah (op.cit.). In tantric diagrams of two intersecting equilateral triangles the lower triangle representing purusa penetrates the upper triangle representing sakti. Okanda seems to represent this tantric structure.
Shanmugalingam (ibid). The tirtham is reminiscent of what I discussed earlier in Chapter Two. In Sanskrit, tirtha means a sacred ford.
I have not examined these artifacts and the literary sources. The information given here comes from Medhananda (2005: 25-28).
Banyan : Ficus indica. Mimusops hexanda. Ficus religiosa.
In rural communities, women bathe in rivers and streams. These bathing places are not covered. However, normatively, men are not supposed to hang around or gawk when women bathe in these spots. Men who violate this norm are socially condemned as cads.
Is this a "communitas” as Victor Turner and the many researchers who used the concept employed the term? Turner's notion descends from Durkheim's notion of the community in his: "The Division of Labor in Society, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and Sociology and Philosophy'. In his discussions of the most elementary form of religious life he referred to the religiosity of the clan, the totemic group that he considered as the most elementary community. This religiosity is about the sheer power of the community over the individual self consciousness. For Durkheim, the clan is characterized by the nature of solidarity or the desire to live together among the members of the clan. This solidarity is mechanical in that the individual's do not reason out, even to themselves, why they live with the others of the clan and why they defend their clan even at the cost of their lives because their self-awareness is the same as the clan-awareness and the self and the clan are one. This sense of oneness with the clan is most concentrated when the clan gathers for religious acts, which is to worship its totem, the symbol of the clan. Durkheim calls the psychological elation of such gatherings "collective effervescence.’ At this point everything in the gathering is sacred and profanity is not allowed. And the profane is none other than the individualconsciousness particularly with regard to economic interests. The clan periodically - daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, biannually, annually or in any other cyclical form in a calendrical organization of rituals - meets expressly for such a communion.
Turner blends the Durkheimian concept with Van Gennep's (1909) concepts "marginality' and limine.' Pilgrimage is a liminoid phenomenon. Pilgrims constitute a community of marginal people. They are marginal because they
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are no longer members of their domestic communities. Their identities are suspended betwixt and between the social world that they left behind and to which they hope to return. At pilgrimage centers these marginal individuals get together for a common purpose and form the communitas where equality prevails. In this sense the pilgrimage as well as the communitas represent the very opposite of the social structure that they left behind and to which they would return. The pilgrimage and the communitas co0nstitute an anti-structure that rejects all the structured relationships of the society. In the communitas the pilgrims experience the collective effervescence that Durkheim discusses. Addressing speficically the Christian pilgrimages Turner indicates that the purpose of the pilgrimage is to become involved in the communitas.
For Turner there are three kinds of sacred communities which he calls communitas: spontaneous, normative and ideological. What I noticed during this pilgrimage is that the Muruga devotees form both spontaneous and normative communitas. The spontaneous religious community with its exuberance and egalitarianism is coupled with a normative communitas with its status distinctions and rules of conduct. More of this later.
Valentine Daniel (1997), writing specifically about pilgrimages to Kataragama, states that pre-1970 pilgrimages were 'ontic' in the sense that they involved the pilgrim in a total religious experience through re-enactment of the mythic in the belief system. His notion of 'ontic' experience parallels Turner's spontaneous communitas and Durkheim's collective effervescence. I partially agree with Daniel's view. However, my observations indicated that this ontological quality does not always exist. It does, during the pujas. Outside the kovil, however, while the sacred community exists apart from their domestic lives, the domestic social identities remain intact. This is the same with the Durkheimian and Turnerian parallels.
My observation here is that no one engaged in this pilgrimage to celebrate the cult of Muruga or even Muruga. People engaged in pada yatras in self-interest. They never forget their social identities and social selves. Empirically, the pilgrimage is a means to an end that is the fulfillment of wishes for enhancement of personal existence in society. There is no sense of joining a communitas and dissolving of identities in a common identity.
However, I agree with Daniel that the plantation Tamils, at least until their identity was politicized, came to Kataragama without a historical consciousness but with only an ontic consciousness. But this, as I examine in Chapters Five and Six, has not been the case with Sinhala and Tamil consciousness. The ontic always blended with the historical in a continuum of intensity depending on the individual.
Nonetheless, the sense of a community develops in mutual interests and because of the fear of Muruga. More of this in Chapter Six.
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Subrahmanya pancaratna 3 (Anon, in De Silva, Op. Cit: 81).
See Obeyesekere (1984:523-529) and Holt (2005) for detailed discussions on migrations from Kerala to the east coast of Sri Lanka.
See Zvelebil, Clothey and Hart for information on ananku in ancient Tamil Nadu.
There are also the sixteen great places (solosmasthane) that includes the dolosmasthane and four more. But a solosmasthane pilgrimage was virtually impossible in those days as the places were scattered throughout the island, although today, with automobile transportation, the sixteen places are often visited.
The term derives from the Tamil nada (walk (n). More than likely, the Tamil nada became Sinhala made during the linguistic "cross-breeding” at common pilgrimage sites in Kataragama and Sri Pada as well as Madu.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Chettiyars made similar pilgrimages to Kataragama except that they also gathered many others of various castes as helpers. See Thomas Steele (1872).
Obeyesekere (ibid. 129). See Obeyesekere (ibid. 46-47) for an elaboration of these notions.
Ananku, anuhasa and anubhava indicate a condition of being in a dualistic state between auspiciousness and inauspiciousness, safety and danger, good and evil. It begins when the pilgrim leaves home on the pilgrimage and ends when he returns home. The situation is comparable to an initiation ritual as Van Genepp (1909) and Victor Turner (1967; 1969;1973; 1974 (a & b); 1978 with Edith Turner; and 1992) observed. Van Genepp's concepts of separation, marginality and reintegration are useful to understand the three stages of the pilgrimage. The condition of marginality, shot through with danger, is the same as the condition of being liminal, and betwixt and between states of being. The flavor and consistency of arisima are the same as of Sinhalaaluva except that aluva is presented as semi-hard diamond shaped item that, however, becomes powdery in the mouth. Aluva is also a pilgrims' favorite because it does not become stale as long as they keep it dry, Clearly, arisima and aluva are the same food given differential cultural presentations.
Terminalia glabra
See Chapter 6 for the colonial history of Kataragama and the vicissitudes of the pilgrimages under the British colonial rule.
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Chapter Five
Kataragama
August 4-11"
My group temporarily split almost immediately after our arrival.Tangavelu and Selvamani went to the river for a ritual bath to enter the sacred ground of Kataragama. They were planning to camp out near the Kuda Kataragama Devale, just outside the Maha Devale. Rajaratnam and Sinnadorei had friends and acquaintances in Kataragamathrough the connections they made in Okanda. They were going to stay with them until Rajaratnam's family group arrived. Then they would join their kindred. Both of them accompanied me to my hotel. I paid them their earnings and terminated our formal relationship. Rajaratnam was happy to receive all the leftover foodstuff and kitchenware. He would take the pots, plates and cups to his family in Akkaraipattu. He would give the foodstuff to his family group in Kataragama. I would meet Velupillai and Sivam if or when they reach Kataragama. They already knew where I stayed.
I stayed in the hotel for two days and slept. I was tired. The walk from Batticaloa has been a rigorous activity not because of the physical labor that it involved - really, at least for me, that wasn't all that hard; it was a great recreational activity - but because of the social labor that it demanded. Goldfish bowls are not fun places for extended stays. The privacy in the room gave me the headroom to ruminate on my pada yatra experience and the fieldwork that I had previously conducted in Kataragama and elsewhere, and the bookwork that I did.
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The information I had about Kataragama came from various Sources and they formed a tangled mess that needed careful threading together to develop a reasonable perspective. As I investigated further, it became clear to me that a large amount of information needed for a single coherent narrative about the past of Kataragama was missing, perhaps still buried in the Yala jungle or, once buried in the collective memory but faded in the course of time. This makes any account of Kataragama's past a tentative one, open to revision as new information comes in.
From the literature, it is apparent that no one knows exactly when and how Kataragama came into being as a community. Various theories from various standpoints abound but all seem to be founded upon speculations and they all emanate from the intellectual and political activities of the late nineteenth century, when the local tracing of "histories” began with the influence of European efforts to reconstruct the past of Sri Lanka's Society, using textual and archaeological materials. The past discussions of the past of Kataragama were derivatives of such efforts.
The Name of the Place
The meaning of the word Kataragama appears to be a significant topic in the discourses on Kataragama. Various Scholars have invented various etymologies from various angles to establish their own theories. The ancient Sinhala name of the place, as found in the sixth century chronicle Mahavansa, based on a fourth century chronicle known as the Dipavansa, was Kajaragama. The earliest known literary reference to Kataragama is a rock inscription of the first or second century of the Common Era. While the term "gama” is easy to understand as village or settlement, the meaning of the prefix "Kajara” is unclear. This lack of clarity has prompted savants to construct various interpretations of the term and practically all of them are politically motivated since, from the early twentieth century onwards, these interpretations appear in the claims and counter-claims as to who established Kataragama in
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the national ethno-political contexts. Before I delve into these claims, let me present a historiographic account of the past of Kataragama.
A Brief History of the Ancient Kataragama
The earliest material evidence to the existence of Kataragama as an organized community comes in an undated rock inscription. This inscription was found near the Kiri Vehera. Senerat Paranavitana read the inscription as:
(Si) Kadaha(vap(i) gama Daka
-vahanaka-vasiya-Nada
tera ceta vadita (//*) Akuju(ka).
bikujarana samatavaya Cataradorahi patagada atadi (/')
and translated the it as, "(Hail). The elder Nada, residing at Dakavahanaka in the village Kadahavapienlarged the cetiya; (and) laid the steps at the four entrances having made the chief monks at Akujuka acquiesce (therein).” The inscription says that a stupa existed at Kataragama at the time it was composed. Paranavitana dated this inscription on the basis of the character of the script. He found it similar in every detail to the script in other inscriptions from the first and second centuries of the CE.
The next material evidence comes from another undated slab inscription that Paranavitana dates as a fifth to sixth century of the CE. Again, his dating is based on the character of the script, which is similar to the Tissamaharama slab inscription of late fifth century. He read the fragmented inscription as follows:
Siddham Saratarayaha
puta Mahadali-maha
-na-rajemi Kajaragama ra
ji-maha-veherahi Ma
-hala-maha-seya....
јіта-patisa...
ama padana kotu...
tela-mula kotu ca.
hapi-vateha ca.
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payutu karanaka.
-tugami atadaha (Sa).
-hakasalayite...
vatitani ama.
The fragmentation prompted Paranavitana to approximate the various letters and give only a tentative interpretation: "Hail! I, King Mahadali Mahana, son of Prince Saratara...at the great auspicious Cetiya in the royal monastery of Kajaragama...for the repair of dilapidated buildings... for the offerings of sacred food...for defraying the expenses of oil...for lamps of clarified butter...So that (it may be used for)... eight thousand... in... tugama...from what has accrued...sacred food...
Paranavitana's reading discloses that during the fifth and sixth centuries the place was known as Kajaragama. The inscription indicates the existence of a Buddhist monastery in the area around the Mangala Maha Saya or Magul Maha Vehera, including the stupa that is currently known as the Kiri Vehera and the bo tree behind the MahaDevale. This complex was the work of a local ruler named Mahadathika Mahanaga. According to some scholars, he had a Sinhala and Tamil hybrid descent. Mahanaga's hybrid descent rendered his claim to regional lordship in this region, predominantly populated by Sinhala people, questionable. The ruler's strategy was to reach out to the Sinhalas through religion: The Magul Maha Saya and the elaborate inscription are signs of his devotion to Buddhism and of his political ambition. Further, the stupa signifies that Buddhism was not the religion of Sinhala people only but also of at least some Tamils as well.
Several other inscriptions indicate the existence of this monastery, its sacred spaces, and a supportive community up to the sixth century of the CE. They do not mention deity worship at Kataragama.
However, Paranavitana observes that architects of the period annexed shrines of various deities to the stupas. The archeological remains of the buildings of the Magul Maha Saya complex also
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evidence the existence of such shrines. We may speculate that the god of Kataragama, however he was called at that time, was among the deities so propitiated. On the other hand, the material evidence, in the form of inscriptions and other artifacts, may exist in the Yala jungle awaiting discovery and archaeological attention. Responsible and knowledgeable residents of the area insist that many ruins exist in the jungle and in nearby villages such as Katagamuwa.
Where the inscriptions end chronicles begin. According to the Mahavansa, the Buddhist Congregation of Kataragamagoes back to the third century BCE. During this era King Devanampiyatissa, the ruler of Lanka, and a sizeable population of Sri Lanka, converted to Buddhism. As an aspect of this religious transformation of the state and the population a branch from the Bodhi Tree (ficus religiosa), under which the Buddha is believed to have attained his Sambodhi, in Buddhagaya, India, was brought to Lanka and, planted in Anuradhapura with stately celebrations. The Mahavansa says that the Kshatriyas of Kajaragama were among the dignitaries invited by the king to grace the Occasion. A sapling from the grand bo tree in Anuradhapura was planted in Kataragama.
This account is circumstantially corroborated by the above archaeological evidence. In the first century of the CE an existing Stupa was enlarged. By the fifth century of the CE this stupa was in a dilapidated state and was repaired by a Sinhala/Tamil hybrid king. The stupa enlarged in the first century of the CE might have been originally constructed when the bo (ficus religiosa) sapling was planted. The event might have been memorialized with epigraphic and other materials. These are yet to be discovered. Provisionally and tentatively, it seems reasonable to assert that the stupa might have been constructed between the third century BCE and the first century of the CE and that a community of indeterminate ethnic composition existed there professing Buddhism as their soteriological religion.
On the other hand, if Mahadathika Mahanaga was a hybrid king, his religion also might have been a hybrid religion Constituting
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at least of the Puranic religion and Buddhism, comparable to the practical religion of the Buddhists even today. In that scenario, one may speculate that he established or supported an existing shrine for Kartikeya/Skanda. There is slso nothing to rule out that his religion included the generic religion of the Tamils, namely, Muruga worship. Given the present state of knowledge and evidence, Paranavitana's assertion, "...there are, at that place, no vestiges whatever of the prevalence of a Hindu cult in early days,” seems reasonable. However, the current absence of material cultural evidence is not sufficient to eliminate the possibility of Hindu/ Tamil practices in ancient Kataragama.
The next early work that mentions Kataragama is Sihalavatthu, a compendium of stories about religious events in the Rohana or the southern region of Sri Lanka. This work was composed during the Anuradhapura era, before the tenth century. The story of the poor pious woman who gave boiled kara leaves as alms to bhikkhus on a pilgrimage states that the bhikkhus saw the Kiri Vehera.“
The second part of the Mahavansa, also known as the Culavansa, composed in the thirteenth century, begins its accounts from the seventh century of the CE. The Culavansa gives two references to Kataragama. One was that king Dappula Iconstructed Parivena Vihara in Kajaragama in 650 of the CE.” The other account is that one prince Manavamma, who lived in the Ruhuna in the seventh century of the CE, encountered the god who had a peacock as his vehicle. This prince had offered one of his eyes to the god. The peacock pecked the offered eye and drank the fluid in it in acceptance of the offering on behalf of the god. The Pali Mahavansa calls him Kumara, borrowing from the Sanskrit tradition. Wilhelm Geiger speculates that this god was Skanda, the god of Kataragama.' Geiger's contention is reasonable because in the ancient Sanskrit lore that I examined at the outset, the only god who had a peacock as his asana (seat) and vahana (vehicle) was Skanda/Kartikeya. The Sinhala Mahavansa calls him Kanda Kumaru who, too, has a similar seat and vehicle. But the Sinhala Mahavansa that I consulted is a
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recent translation and uses the sixteenth to nineteenth century Sinhala term to translate the Pali term Kumara.
However, the chronicle does not associate the god with Kataragama. Rather, the legendary event had occurred at Gokanna, the present day Trincomalee. Nonetheless, this Culavansa account indicates that the cult of Kartikeya/Skanda was in Sri Lanka, among those who identified themselves as Sinhala people at the time this part of the Culavansa was composed, sometime in the thirteenth century. The god on the peacock throne could well be Kartikeya of Mahabharata because from the eleventh century onwards artifacts of the Skanda/Kartikeya cult, as articulated in the Siva Purana discussed in Chapter One, are found among the ruins of Polonnaruwa that became the center of Sri Lankan politics from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.
Polonnaruwa period artifacts include a broken image of the god on the peacock throne. Given that the Polonnaruva kingdom was heavily influenced by the Tamil culture, it is not surprising that an image of Skanda/Kartikeya was found there. However, we have seen that although the Sangam literature indicates the entry of Brahmanical pantheon into the Tamil culture as early as the first century of the CE, the Skanda/ Kartikeya cult was not canonically merged with the Muruga cult until Kacciappa Civacariyar composed the Kantha Puranam in the fourteenth century. On the other hand, as information from Tamil Nadu indicates, the political leadership in Tamil Nadu preferred the Brahmanical Skanda/Kartikeya cult. The Sanskritization of the upper echelons of the Tamil Nadu society had gone on for several centuries before the Cholas invaded Sri Lanka, captured Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa and established their authority in Polonnaruwa. They also brought in the Siva worship that had become the principal religion of the Tamil seats of power. Skanda worship, by then absorbed into the Siva worship as evidenced in the Siva Purana and the Skanda Purana, also became a significant cult activity. It is also possible that these Tamil kings, while participating in the official Brahmanical cult of Skanda, also
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participated in the native religion of the Tamils - the Muruga worship. Sangam poetry, composed for courtly presentations at the Pandyan court in Madurai, hints of the hybrid religion that existed at the beginning of the Common Era or even earlier. The image of the god on the peacock throne could be a hybrid image that signified both Skanda and Muruga. It is likely that the author of the second part of the Culavansa projected these images and beliefs also into the events in the seventh century without necessarily incorporating Muruga cult with the Sinhala cult of Skanda.
Thus, the reference to the god in the Culavansa indicates two explanatory possibilities. It could be explained as a sign of the pre-Buddhist religion as well as a sign of the Sivagama of the Polonnaruwa period that included, as an aside, Muruga worship, for, it is hard to discount the influence of the latter. As I pointed out at the outset, Nakkirar composed his Tirumurugurruppadai in the nineth century. His work is an eminent example of the Tamil bhakti religiosity that pervaded Tamil poetry. There is no doubt that bhakti religion centered on Skanda/Muruga existed among the Hindus in Sri Lanka. What is at issue is whether this religion existed in Kataragama. The absence of artifacts renders the theories of ancient Skanda/Muruga worship in Kataragama mere speculations of recent origin, at least until such evidence is discovered.
Medieval Kataragama'
The Mahavansa/Culavansa record is silent about Kataragama after the above statement because the Ruhuna, as a political entity, became insignificant when the kingdoms became unstable during their southwesterly drift and received hardly any attention of the chroniclers. The literary references to Kataragama appear again in the thirteenth century Dhatuvansa. The chronicle attempts to account for the sanctity of Kataragama. During the Buddha's third visit to Lanka, he visited many places, established sacred spots in those places and left them in the care of various gods. Kataragama, mentioned in the text as Kadaragama, was among such spots. He
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went there with five hundred arhats, together with them entered into a meditative state of mind, caused the ground to tremble, and assigned the guardianship of that spot to a god named Mahaghosha.' That chronicle, too, does not discuss deity worship in Kataragama although this could well have existed at the time it was composed. The Dhatuvansa is important as a record of events that took place in the Rohana (Ruhuna), only slightly referred to by the Mahavansa chroniclers who focused only on kingship in Sri Lanka and its relationship with the buddhasasana. The Dhatuvansa authors had collected information from various local oral and now extinct literary sources to compose an account of the relics of the Buddha in Sri Lanka. The story of the establishment of the Kiri Vehera, unaccounted for in the Mahavansa, probably came from the oral tradition. The Dhatuvansa is relatively unknown even among the educated Sri Lankans. Among the devotees of Kataragama it is even less known. But the accounts that appear in the Dhatuvansa are still in the oral tradition. It is likely that the Buddhist monastics who read the chronicle disseminated various stories in it during the sermons and in casual conversation and these fed back the oral tradition.
This account is significant for us because it takes the story of Kajaragama back to the sixth century BCE. Although unsupported by any other evidence, this account is still significant. It was composed in a society that was becoming strongly influenced by Brahmanism. Historians show that Brahman authorities on the dharmasutras and the dharmasastras spelled out the courtly and judicial procedures. This feature had existed even during the earliest times but from the Polonnaruwa period onwards, through the influence of the Chola and Kalinga Hindu courts, its presence had become stronger to decisively impact the Buddhist nonsoteriological religion. Brahmans had officiated rituals at the temples dedicated to the Hindu gods as well as those for the local gods.'
By the fifteenth century even many monastics, including Bhikkhu Totagamuwe Sri Rahula, were devotees of various Hindu gods. His poetry indicates that a temple for Mahasena existed in
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the city of Kotte. Temples for other Hindu deities such as Kali and Ganesha existed in the southern littoral. However, the courtly and elite adherence to deity worship was contested by the Buddhist orthodoxy. Bhikkhu Vidagama Maitreya, a monastic poet of the period, composed a poem titled the buduguna alankaraya presenting deity propitiation as a pointless activity.
I take the Dhatuvansa account also as a sign of a similar spirit of the times. The story was constructed probably to counter an extant belief that Kataragama was the abode of Skanda/Kartikeya/ Mahasena, and possibly of Muruga, by presenting an alternative political story of origin for Kataragama.
Bhikkhu Totagamuve Sri Rahula mentions Mahasena in his epistolary poem parevi sandesaya. Mahasena is one of the names of Kartikeya /Skanda. He characterizes this god by referring to his kunta orthespear that split mountains echoing his famiality with the epic and puranic materials. Bhikkhu Rahula was familiar with Sanskrit and Tamil literature and the Hindu beliefs that had gained royal patronage by this time. Undoubtedly, he was aware of the connection between the Puranic god/s and the Muruga cult among the Tamils who, by then, were well established in the northern regions and had many connections with Kotte. Beliefs about Muruga could have permeated into the Sinhala belief system through them. A good indication of it is the poetry of Rahula, discussed in Chapter Two, where he refers to Surapadman as Surapiyumai.
However, plausible as they seem, these are only speculations. The record is firm about the existence of beliefs in a god on a peacock throne and a god named Mahasena but whether this was the god of Kataragama cannot be firmly established. Nonetheless, it is highly possible that there was a shrine for Skanda/Kartikeya/ Mahasena in Kataragama. Buddhist viharas have included shrines for deities from the earliest periods of the history of Buddhism." Sanchi and Bharhut in India are good examples. Kataragama Buddhist complex might well have included shrines for various
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deities including Skanda/Kartikeya/Mahasena. However, we only have circumstantial evidence to support this point."
To recall my earlier discussion in Chapter Two, Sanskrit literature does not refer to Kataragama at all. Early Tamil literature on Muruga, including the Paripadal (fourth to fifth centuries of the CE), Tirumurugarruppadai (nineth century of the CE), and even the Kantha Puranam (fourteenth century), the traditional Muruga cult Corpus that describes the abodes of Skanda/Kartikeya/ Mahasena, does not even mention Kataragama. According to these works, this god has six abodes and they all are located in Tamil Nadu, and the stories of Muruga are not situated beyond the shores of India. If beliefs in such abodes outside India existed, they were unknown to the composers of these works. The famous Skanda/ Valli romance stories were all situated in Tamil Nadu. This shows that a Muruga cult in Kataragama was either unknown to them, or it was known but was not significant enough at that time to be Canonized.
It is likely that Muruga worship in Kataragama is, as Paranavitana asserts,' a relatively more recent and initially localized phenomenon, and that the Muruga/Vallistories were, as discussed in Chapter Two, later reimagined and relocated in Kataragama long after the Kantha Puranam was composed. What is evident in the literary sources is that Kataragama was unknown to the Tamil Nadu Muruga cultists at least until the fourteenth century. Interestingly, the classical period of Muruga cult literature also ends with the Kantha Puranam.
From fifteenth century onwards there are more references to Kataragama as a Buddhist (Kiri Vehera) and Hindu/Buddhist (Skanda/Kartikeya/Mahasena) place of worship. The earliest Tamil reference to Kataragama appears in the poetry of ArunagiriNather in the fifteenth century. For reasons that I will elaborate shortly, even by that time the transposition of the Muruga theology had not occurred in Kataragama.
The historiography of medieval Kataragama is difficult because of the paucity of material evidence. As I said at the outset,
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much of the archaeologically significant material still remains in the Yala jungle and whatever inferences made from the existing material culture may be revised as more information is discovered. What we can infer remains tentative and provisional, particularly with regard to the early and medieval history of Kataragama.
The more recent history is readily discernible. Arunagiri Nathar's fifteenth century references attest to its fame in Tamil Nadu, though not as an Orthodox pilgrimage center. By the sixteenth century Kataragama was a internationally recognized institution dedicated to Skanda worship. The Thai chronicle Jinakalamali, composed in 1516, mentions that the god of Khattagama was one of the four guardian deities of Lanka. By then a new pantheon of guardian deities has been conceived of, in addition to the traditional Sanskrit one of Drtarashtra, Virudha, Virupaksha and Vaisravana. The god of Kataragama, along with Saman, Rama (Visnu) and Lakshman (Vibhishana), had been elevated as one of the four guardian deities of the island." It is likely that the god was concurrently elevated as a bodhisattva during this period. During the same century, European colonialism arrived in Sri Lanka. Various colonial sources provide more information about Kataragama.
Colonial Kataragama
The earliest colonial accounts appear in the seventeenth century. The British prisoner in the Kandyan kingdom, Robert Knox, wrote in the late seventeenth century that the Cingulays of Hanguranketa, today a small town in the hill country, held the god of Cottragam in great awe. Knox does not provide further details.'
According to Captain Joao Ribeiro, a Portuguese soldier, the Portuguese colonial administration had discovered Kataragama as a Source of wealth from international sources such as Jinakalamali and various Hindu and Islamic sources. It was widely believed then, as today, that large amounts of gold, silver and gems were stored inside the devale guarded by fierce men. They intended, as Ribeiro
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puts it, relieving these guards of their burden. Thus, during their expeditions conducted by the mid seventeenth century against the Dutch in the southern province, a regiment under one Gaspar Figueira de Serpe — son of a Portuguese by a Sinhala mother - was sent to Kataragama.' Ribeiro was a member of that regiment. Their attempt failed for reasons that we will discuss a little later. But it furthered the rumors and produced the first European description of the place. According to Rebeiro, Kataragama was, by the seventeenth century, situated in an impenetrably thick, utterly hot and humid, beast and pest infested jungle where one could die of thirst and sickness before he reached his destination. Ribeiro and company never reached the devale but saw a ruined stupa.'
By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many local texts dealt specifically with Kataragama. I have already examined some of these.” The kanda malaya, kanda upata, kanda kumara sirita, kanda kumara sahalla etc. discussed earlier are seventeenth and eighteenth century works produced in the Kandyan provinces about the birth and the career of Kanda Kumara, then firmly identified with Skanda of the Siva Purana. Some of these were translations of Tamil works. The kanda kumara sirita was composed in 1702 by a poet named Balachandra, a Sinhala educated Brahman.’ Undoubtedly, these works were influenced by Kacciappa Civacaryar’s Kanda Puranam for they are based on the motif that he created by blending the Muruga-Valli story with that of Skanda. The Sinhala devotees of the god of Kataragama had accepted the story of Valliamma in Kataragama as Kanda Kumaru was conflated with Tamil Skanda/Muruga. Curiously, the Sinhala works do not refer to the god by his Tamil name Muruga. The translation/composition of these panegyrics indicates the Hindu, particularly Nayakkar, influence on the religious beliefs in the Kandyan kingdom.
A Kandyan Interlude
As today, only the Tamil Hindus and not the Buddhists worshiped Muruga, Valliamma and Teivayanaiamman. Buddhists
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resented Tamil Hindus gaining ground in Kataragama. This resentment was an expression of a larger discontent in the kingdom as a whole.The Kandyan administration was, at least at the center, a political space charged with ethnic and religious sentiments. Sinhala Buddhist aristocrats at the highest levels of the administration and the most powerful bhikkhus resented the Saivism of the foreign Nayakkar kings even when they functioned with political persona of good Buddhists.o The chronicles speak highly of them. Yet, a genre of Sinhala literature, less formal and more expressive, tells a different story.
The Kandyan elite had hostile relationships with the Nayakkars kings. The Hindu law of succession that governed the Sinhala laws of succession necessitated that the king and the queen be of ksatriya social origins. From the mid sixteenth century, the Sinhala royal lineages had run out of eligible princesses. The court, with Brahmans to interpret the laws, looked elsewhere for queens and found them in Madurai. King Rajasinghe II started the practice of marrying Nayakkar women. Rajasinghe's son Vimaladharmasuriya II and Narendrasinghe, Rajasinghe's grandson, both Sinhala/Tamil hybrid kings, adopted the same practice.' But Narendrasinghe died without an issue to inherit the throne. The rules of succession pointed to the queens's brother, a Nayakkar. But the Kandyan aristocrats worried about the throne going away from Sinhala Buddhist hands. They thought the succession should pass on to the next level in the society - the Kandyan aristocrats - rather than to a foreigner whose ethnicity, culture and religion were different. But this was not the law.
Thus, the problem of succession shocked the very core of the Kandyan legal system. Yet, rather than revising the law, they opted to import an heir because they were too jealous of each other. Further, the leading bhikkhu of the era, Valivitiye Sri Saranankara, supported the brahmanical theory of succession.*
However, the new king Vijayarajasinghe proved to be a good king who upheld Sinhala Buddhism irrespective of his personal religious affiliation with Saivaite Hinduism. Kirthi Sri Rajasinghe
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succeeded Vijaya Rajasinghe. During the early phase of Kirti Sri’s rule, his father became a problem in the court. The royal father caused much resentment among the senior and experienced administrators of the regime by embarrassing them, punishing them for trivial offenses, and placing other Nayakkars above them.” Dharmadasa opines that his conduct produced a fundamental prejudice against the Nayakkars - not the local Tamils but the Nayakkar foreigners who were Indian Tamils. Another point of criticism was the new court religion - Siva worship. Nonetheless, Kirti Sri Rajasinghe became one of the most ardent supporters of Buddhism. Thereafter, Rajadhi Rajasinghe, well versed in Sinhala, even composed a poem in Sinhala and performed many acts to play his role as the Sinhala Buddhist king. His successor Sri Wickrema Rajasinghe also, initially, played the role of the good king. Yet, throughout the seventy-five years of Nayakkar rule, the resentment of the foreign Hindu Nayakkars continued.’
It is important to note that this resentment was not necessarily of the Siva worship prevalent among the Tamils. We have no evidence to show that the Buddhists attacked Hindu temples. Rather, evidence shows that they embraced Hindu deities and practices. The resentment was regarding Saivism as the religion of the king who, according to the Sinhala and Buddhist tradition, had to be a primarily a Buddhist. Mere support of Buddhism, Buddhist places of worship and Buddhist practices by the king would not satisfy them.
It is likely that the Sinhala Buddhist resentment of the religion of the Nayakkars began even before their ascent to the throne. Undoubtedly, Muruga worship with all its accompanying beliefs and practices was a significant part of the Nayakkar religion. From the reign of Rajasinghe II through Vimaladhammasuriya II and Viraparakrama Narendrasinghe, the Nayakkar queens and their retinues from Madurai practiced Hinduism. The worship of Kandasamy was an integral part of this religion. The Kataragama Devale of Kandy was constructed during the reign of Rajasinghe II. So was the Teivayanaiamman kovil in Kataragama. Throughout
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the latter part of the seventeenth century and the early part of the eighteenth century, the Sivagama of the queens and their retinues included the worship of Kandasamy. Much of the Sinhala panegyrics were composed or Tamil panegyrics translated into Sinhala during this period, probably under the direct or indirect patronage of the court. Probably, these panegyrics were initially restricted to the court but in time reached the Kanda Kumara cultists. The panegyrics involvded the Muruga/Valli episodes framed as Kandasami/Kanda Surindu/Kanda Kumara/Valliamma dramas.
I speculate that the absence of a major shrine for Valliamma at the Kataragama Devale in Kandy shows that the court religion included Sanskritic Kandasamy worship but kept the Muruga worship that involved Valliamma at bay as it was more the religion of the Hindu low caste commoners. This way they could harmonize Kandasamy worship with the worship of Kanda Kumara. This arrangement was entirely acceptable to the Sinhala elite. The worship of Kandasamy, although officiated by Brahmans, remained within the Kanda Kumara orbit and this explains why the temple in Kandy is known as Kataragama Devale rather than a Kandasamy kovil.
Nonetheless, in addition to the panegyrics, the cult poets had composedyadini or kannallav (supplications) and parale (invocations to influence demons). All these involved some panegyrics as well and all mention Valliamma. Some of these, such as the kanda sura varuna were subtitled valliamma upata indicating the strength of the Valliamma worship. These were aspects of the Sinhalafolk religion by the second half of the eighteenth century. It is likely that the beliefs about Valliamma entered the Sinhala belief system through the Sinhala devotees of the god who interacted with the Hindu devotees and learned the details of their favorite god.
Although the Sinhala Buddhist folk religion adopted these beliefs, the Buddhist authorities, i.e. the bhikkhus, resented this Saivization of the beliefs about Kanda Kumara albeit in muted form. This muted resentment assumed a more active form once
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the Nayakkars became the kings, courtly religion became Saivism, and the power distributed in the social structure transformed into a Nayakkar dominated one, restrained only by the necessity to play the Sinhala Buddhist role as their royal obligation in order to sustain their political power.
With these historical trends in the background, the Dutch administrators compiled information about Kataragama. Paul E. Pieris, in his Sinhale and the Patriots, 1815-1818, gives one of the most informative Dutch administrative reports on the nature of the god of Kataragama and the ritual life and administration of the temple complex. The report, made in 1765, was based on the native responses to a Dutch interrogatory. The respondent gives a Buddhist description of the god Kanda Kumara. Accordingly, he is a Buddhist god and received a boon from the Buddha to cure the sick. He has six faces and twelve arms, holds ten weapons and sits on a peacock.
The Dutch then extracted information about the administration of Kataragama. We get the clearest picture of the pre-colonial administrative system from this account. The king appointed a Mahabathme Maha Nilame as the overall administrator, a Kudabathme Nilame as his assistant and a Basnayaka Nilame to execute the rules of temple management, that included the management of the lands gifted to the temple by the king, and the annual rituals. The Basnayaka Nilame appointed the kapuralas - the temple ritual experts. There is no mention of Tamils or Hindus among the administrators.
However, this report shows that by 1765, Kataragama was a major religious center not only in Lanka but also in the South Asian region for large numbers of Brahmans, Muslims, and various Malabars - Tamils and Keralians - visited Kataragama during the festive season. It was already a multicultural place of worship. Nonetheless, the informant's description of the Asala festival shows a structure common to most Buddhist devales. Valliamma is absent. The annual procession begins from the MahaDevale, goes around the village and returns to the Devale. The rituals end with
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diyakapuma which is similar to any Sinhala Buddhist diyakapuma ritual on the island.
Taken literally, it appears as if the Tamil Hindus were only pilgrims in Kataragama in the eighteenth century. Remarkably, the informant ignores the Teivayanaiamman temple complex adjacent to the Maha Devale, and the Islamic place of worship. There is a tension between the accounts of Kanda Kumara and Kataragama as they appear in the early eighteenth century Sinhala cult literature, discussed above, and this report. The former indicates the transposition of Muruga/Valliamma lore in Kataragama. The latter, written later, does not. Further, the 1765 report states that large numbers of Brahmans, Maurs (Moors - Sufi Muslims), and Pattinis (priests of the cult of the goddess Pattini), came to the Asala celebrations from the coasts of Madurai and Coromandel. The eighteenth century Kataragama was well known in India and beyond as a shrine for Kandasamy/Muruga as well as a powerful Sufi shrine.
Pieris presents five more documents prepared by the Dutch. These were prepared between 1802 and 1811. None of these includes Valliamma although they indicate that the kapuralas of Kataragama worshipped Sakra, Brahma, Visnu, Isvara (Siva), Ganadeviyo, Pattini, Natha, Saman and Vibhisana.” The presence of Hindu gods in the pantheon and the early eighteenth century Sinhala cult literature suggest that the religion of Kataragama was more complex than that the respondants to the Dutch interrogatory describe. Clearly, the respondents to the 1765 interrogatory of the Dutch administration gave a biased account that suppressed the facts of Hindu and Islamic worship in Kataragama. Their bias is evident in their own statement that the South Indians and Muslims visited Kataragama during the festive season.'
Why did the informants conceal the presence of Tamil Hindu and Islamic activities in Kataragama? Clearly, Kataragama had to have a place for Valliamma. The Nayakkar queens had culturally influenced the religion of the Kandyan kingdom for two hundred years. Taken in this sense, beliefs in Valliamma existed in the cultural
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ideological sphere for at least two hundred years. However, the ideology had little political strength until the demise of king Narendrasinghe. It is likely that similar to the Teivayanaiamman kovil, arrangements were made to facilitate Valliamma propitiation in Kataragama. But from then on the Nayakkars had a reign for nearly seventy five years. The Sinhala Buddhist role-play by the Nayakkar kings minimized the Buddhist resentment of their religion to a certain extent but it did not disappear. The already established prejudices culminated in the unsuccessful conspiracy to oust Kirti Sri Rajasinghe in the 1740s. Even by 1760s, the prejudices continued in spite of the king's support for Buddhism. I read these prejudices in the suppression of information on Hindu activities, including Valliamma worship, in the responses to the 1765 Dutch interrogatory.'
Interestingly, the Kataragama Devales of the Kandyan kingdom to this day do not include rituals for Valliamma and even in the Hindu worship, and the god is known as Kataragama Deiyo, Kanda Kumara or Kandasami. Even in Kandyan period iconography, Kataragama Deiyo was depicted as seated on a peacock that holds a snake in its beak. The god sits on the peacock, alone. He holds a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. The consorts of the god and his large Vel (lance), so conspicuous in Hindu images of Kandasami and Muruga, were not depicted. Even in poetry, the god was visualized with bow and arrows in hand. In kanda parale, composed in late nineteenth century:
teda kanda kumarune, ran dunna ata daramine mayura pita gamane, pihiti maya ratata vadimine ragena ata dunnat, ariya viduli Sarayat yakuta gini malayat, nangina gini-kanda yakuta patalat.”
O Kanda Kumara of magnificence, holding the golden bow in hand
Travelling on the back of the peacock, arriving in Pihiti and Maya regions
Taking the bow in hand, sent a lightning stroke
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A blazing fire for the demon, the rising column of fire for the famous demon.
However, other records and events show that by the early nineteenth century Valliamma was a significant deity in Kataragama. In the diya Savul Sandesaya, an epistolary poem composed by Bhikkhu Talarambe Dhammakkhanda in 1813, the bhikkhu prays to Valliamma.oo According to John D’Oyly, Alavvmulla Maha Bathme Rala, the chief official of the Kataragama administration, was caught after the 1818 rebellion. At an inquiry held by the British colonial administration, he had stated that Viravikrama Sri Kirti or Dorai Sami, the claimant to the throne, was anointed the king in Kataragama. He led the rebellion from Kataragama, and ordered the Maha Bathme Rala to conceal the images of Kataragama Hamuduruwo and his Consort Valliamma - made of solid gold and each a cubit in heigh’ This occurred in 1819. Undoubtedly, by 1819 there was a place in Kataragama for Valliamma worship. But this is denied in many nineteenth century Sinhala works that refer to Kataragama indicating two things: the Sinhala religion did not include Valliamma, and these poets suppressed information about Valliamma worship in Kataragama. This was probably because they resented not the Hindu religious activities for they were also steeped in beliefs and practices descending from Hinduism but the enhanced political power of the Tamil Hindus in the country as a whole.
Back in the Colony
Returning to colonial Kataragama, we find from John Davy that by 1819 Kataragama was identified for him, probably by his Sinhala assistants, as the abode of "Kataragama God,” which is a direct translation of the Sinhala"Kataragama Deiyo," and his temple the "Kataragama Dewale.” Davy begins with this local definition and provides a detailed first hand description, morphology of sorts, of the Kataragama complex. Here is an eyewitness account, for the first time, from a foreigner. The local tradition does not describe Kataragama. It presents only an idyllic scenario. ArunagiriNathar
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visited the place but only wrote a sketchy panegyric. Rebeiro never saw it. He only walked around some hill, probably the Vedahitikanda or the ruins of the Kiri Vehera. Knox only heard about it. Davy saw it:
Kataragama has been a place of considerable celebrity, on account of its dewale, which attracted pilgrims not only from every part of Ceylon, but even from remote parts of the continent of India. Aware of its reputation, - approaching it through a desert country by a wide sandy road that seems to have been kept bare by the footsteps of its votaries, - the expectation is raised in one's mind, of finding an edifice in magnitude and style somewhat commensurate with its fame; instead of which, everything the eye rests on only serves to give the idea of poverty and decay.” Perhaps, Major Davy's finding of something humble, contrary to what he imagined on the basis of what he heard, and the disillusionment that he experienced, was a fact of life, not only for Colonial administrators, but also for anyone whose anticipations were betrayed. What is interesting is the difference in attitude between the natives, including Arunagiri, and the foreign observer. Pilgrims, particularly the novices, who endure numerous lifethreatening hardships during their pilgrimage, imagined Kataragama guided by what they heard. But what they heard, pretty much what Davy, Knox and Ribeiro heard, produced different moods and a different sense of a cultural space. Rather than anticipating a grand spectacle comparable to a grand cathedral or, at least, the Dalada Maligava of Kandy, the devotees anticipated signs of the god's power. The fear of and devotion to the god guided the devotee's mind to the quality of the devotee’s relationship with the god and anticipated a response from the god as she stood before the devale. Devotees go to worship the god and witness his power and miracles. They take no notice of the condition of the devale. During the early nineteenth century, the devotees probably hardly had anything to compare it with except for other devales and temples all of which existed in about the same condition. In their cultural
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way of seeing, the devale complex might have looked quite notmal. Their cosmological apriori, to invoke Dufrenne again, were undisturbed by the sight of the shrine. By contrast, Davy came to See a mammoth quantity; a grand edifice full of treasures that the Portuguese also had anticipated and came to plunder, but found only a dilapidated monument to poverty and decay: an interesting conflict of cultures. He found only a few objects worthy of his notice. His apriori collapsed as he saw the shrine.
In any event, Davy's observations also indicate another facet of Kataragama. While Kataragama devale complex might have existed pretty much like any other devale or kovil, as rather poorly maintained group of austere buildings, Kataragama in particular was neglected by the Sinhalas after the loss of the Sinhala throne to the British. As Obeyesekere discusses, the Sinhala devotees of Kataragama Deiyo were disillusioned with him as he failed to perform his role as a guardian deity of the island." A couple of years of neglect are sufficient time for the jungle to creep in and claim the land.
Davy describes the morphology of Kataragama: The village, situated on the left bank of the Parapa oya, consists of a number of small huts, chiefly occupied by a detachment of Malays, stationed here under the command of a native officer.
Besides the temple of the Kataragama God, there are many others, all of them small and mean buildings, within two adjoining enclosures. In the largest square are the Kataragam dewale and the dewale of his brother Ganna; a wihare dedicated to Boodhoo, in a state of great neglect, and a fine bogah; and six very small kovillas, mere empty cells, which are dedicated to the Goddess Patine, and to five demons. In the smaller square are contained a little Karandua sacred to Iswera, the Kalana-madima, a kovilla dedicated to the demon Bhyro, a rest-house for pilgrims, and some offices." Opposite the principal dewale, both in front and rear, there are two avenues of considerable length, one
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terminated by a small dewale, and the other by a very large dagobah of great antiquity, in a ruinous state. These objects are deserving of little notice excepting as illustrating superstitious belief and feelings of the natives.' The small devale at which one of the avenues from the principal devale ends is of considerable importance for us, for, as discussed in Chapter Two, it could be none other than the devale for Valliamma. Even today, this structure of connections between the Kiri Vehera, Maha Devale and Valliamma devale remains firm. The small devale that Davy saw was even less impressive than the principal devale and deserved little notice. Perhaps it existed even by 1765, when the Dutch administered their interogatory, but the informants chose not to mention it. Irrespective of its relative significance in appearance, ritually it could have been as important as it is today during the festive season. But Davy's Sinhala informants dismissed it by not bothering to describe it and Davy, probably already disappointed, disillusioned and even disgusted could not care less about those small dilapidated shrines that dotted the place and never bothered to ask about them. It is also just as likely that Davy's informants were interpreters from Colombo who had little knowledge of the structures in Kataragama. In effect, Davy's informants did exactly what the informants of the Dutch governor did: suppress information about what they did not approve of, or could not draw Davy's attention to these rather new entities in Kataragama because they were ignorant about the significance of such entities. '
Davy speaks of a community living in the Kataragama village. This village existed between and to the north of the Kataragama Devale and the Valliamma kovil. He counted twenty-two resident families in Kataragama. They all lived on the lands belonging to the Kataragama devale and rendered their services to the temple complex. The administrators — principally, the Basnayaka Nilame - and the priests (the kapuralas and the Swamis) also lived in this village." An impressive Hindu priest managed the affairs of the Teivayanaiammankovil that Davy describes in greater detail. From
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Davy we also find that the British administration saw the kapuralas as mischief-makers as they were deeply involved in the rebellion in 1818 against the British rule.
From the mid nineteenth century onwards, many British administrators, particularly the Government Agents of Badulla and Hambantota, wrote accounts of the Kataragama festive season. These reports are proto-ethnographies containing much information about the community in Kataragama during the festival in the native month of Asala. The administrators were keen observers of the social life around them. Their views were biased in favor of the standards of the English culture of their times but that is hardly surprising. To their credit, they were intellectually honest and were not bashful about expressing these prejudices. They unhesitatingly subjected their observations to scientific analysis as science was known to them at that time.
The administrators were unanimous about many things in Kataragama. It was a group of poor and decrepit shrines, based on mammoth superstitions and ignorance, dedicated to a Hindu warrior god, in a hot, humid and unhealthy desolation. The believers annually celebrated a mythological event about this warrior god. These festivities attracted a large multi-ethnic and multicultural crowd that created a reeking disgusting cholera, malaria and dysentery-ridden hell on earth. A normally shallow but periodically violent river lined with magnificent trees skirted the southern boundary of this sacred complex reminding some of abandoned Irish villages. Some even found the place a bit charming in spite of the difficult circumstances.
A Village in the Jungle
The nineteenth and early twentieth century British accounts inform us about the festival. But they hardly describe the community in Kataragama. Nonetheless, by piecing the information scattered in the various sources it is possible to construct an image of a village that existed in Kataragama constituting its social spaces in a dense, beautiful but dangerous
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jungle. We can surmise that the community involved three or four types of people: officials, residents, pilgrims and itinerant traders.
The Officials
During the Kandyan period, Kataragama was an inalienable part of the kingdom and came under the king's authority and patronage. All kings from Rajasinghe II patronized the temple by bestowing land grants upon the temple. The temple property was managed by means of a loose bureaucracy that the king appointed as he wished. Thus, the king appointed a loyal member of the local elite - always Sinhala and always Buddhist - as the Maha Bathme to manage the temple property and organize the rituals. He was assisted by a junior officer named Kuda Bathme. In practice, their authority was delegated to a lower ranking officer, the Basnayaka Nilame, appointed by the Disave or the Rate Mahatmaya of the Wellavaya Pattu. The Basnayaka Nilame's primary function was the management of the temple property and ritual activities."
We have vague notions of how these officials were remunerated. Considering the interest that many showed in holding these positions, and the significance that the king also gave to these offices, there is no doubt that they involved much power and wealth. It is likely that the Bathmes received a share of the produce from the lands that they managed. Given the other factors in the jungle economy such as Scanty population, drought, distances to commercial centers such as Tissamaharama, Hambantota, Ratnapura, Badulla, Mahiyangana, Karaitivu, Kalmunai, Tirukkovil and Akkaraipattu, this could not have been much in terms of agricultural productivity alone. Colonial officers report that the Kataragama Maha Devale owned as much as 60,000 acres of land almost all of which was in the jungle." But the jungle, then not a wildlife sanctuary, was a source of fine timber, elephants, ivory and various other forest products. The maritime Silk Road economy demanded these goods at the various ports along the southern and eastern seaboards. Trading in ivory, elephants, gems and pearls produced much wealth and were strictly under royal
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monopoly thus rendering the Bathme positions lucrative, powerful ånd dangerous.
The Basnayaka Nilame visited Kataragama for official purposes. In fact, as Dewaraja says about the Basnayakas of the Kandyan kingdom, he was an absentee landlord.” His subordinate officer, the Adikaram who lived in Kataragama, Oversaw the dayto-day affairs and the festivities of the temples. The Basnayaka Nilame received a portion of the income from the lands and a portion of the collections at the temples. He was also the possessor of lands attached to his incumbency. There was and there still is much competition to be appointed to this position. During the pre-colonial era, the income from the lands must have been a serious consideration although the collections at the temples were meager." Perhaps, above these economic considerations, the prestige of being the Basnayaka Nilame of one of the most revered, certainly the most feared, temples on the island that also afforded connections to centers of political power must have been the principal incentive. The Bathmes and the Basnayaka Nilame were selected from the feudal hierarchy. It would be unusual for the court to appoint a commoner to these positions as they wielded considerable power and authority in the temples as well as in the regions. Even now, more often than not, the Basnayaka Nilame descends from a feudal lineage in the Sabaragamuva province. The Basnayaka Nilame of the Kataragama Maha Devale up to 2005 was also the Basnayaka Nilame of the Sabaragamuva Maha Saman Devale dedicated to god Saman, a powerful place in pre-colonial Sri Lanka.” However, the Basnayaka Nilame position has never been an incumbency for life although it could be inherited, if the king wished so.
We have very little information about the pre-colonial administration but with gleanings from the colonialadministrative reports, from accounts of senior residents of older families, and from the general structure of the pre-colonial administration of the Kandyan kingdom, the following can be constructed. A few other officials such as a Korale, a Vidane and an Arachchi lived in Kataragama and functioned in that order with the Korale as the
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highest and the Arachchi as the ground level authorities. The Korala came under the authority of a Rate Mahatmaya. It is unclear which Rate Mahatmaya (hereafter R. M.) had authority over Kataragama as there were R. Ms in Buttala, Taldena, Wallavaya and various other administrative units. It appears that the authority at this level shifted from one R. M. to another depending on various circumstances. At the higher level, the R.M. came under the Disava of the Uva-Vellassa region or of Magama. At the local level, the Korala, Vidane and Arachchi came from local families and some were members of the kapu families.
The next most important position was that of the kapuralas and the swami. The kapuralas conducted the rituals at the temples that were run under Sinhala Buddhist authority. These included the Maha Devale, the Buddhist temple within the Maha Devale compound and the Valliamma devale. Sinhala people appear to have had a curious relationship with the Valliamma devale. As I discussed earlier, there are indications that they had ambiguous feelings about Valliamma. The Kataragama cultists accepted Valliamma as a local girl married to the god. They, together with their Tamil counterparts, imagined Muruga/Valli episodes in the Kataragama landscape. At the same time, they suppressed information about her role in Kataragama ritual proceedings, as if she never mattered. However, the devale for Valliamma was firmly under Sinhala control. How did the Sinhala's acquire this authority over the worship of a Tamil deity whose presence produced mixed feelings in them? On the other hand, the Teivayanaiamman kovil is under the management of North Indian Brahmans, and the mosque was under the control of Muslims. Why did they not come under Sinhala authority?
The tradition in Kataragama management had it that all religious establishments there came under the jurisdiction of the Basnayaka Nilame (the Bathmes in the pre-colonial era) and the rituals came under the charge of the kapuralas. As the responses to the 1765 Dutch interrogatory reveal, anywhere in the kingdom,
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devales could only be established with the king's permission and once established the appointment of priests to carry out rituals came under the authority of a Basnayaka Nilame. He, following the tradition, appointed kapuralas as the temple priests. This was how the Valliamma devale came under Sinhala authority.
It is likely that the Teivayanaiamman kovil was established after the Valliamma devale. Even according to the legend of the establishment of a residence for Teivayanaiamman, Muruga first settled down with Valli in Kataragama. He would not return to India, to Teivayanaiamman. She sent a faithful Brahman to get her husband back. The Brahman, one Kalyanagiri, came under Muruga's spell and decided to stay in Kataragama. Then Teivayanaiamman came over to Kataragama and settled down on the left side of Muruga.
Historically, the Kataragama administration probably ignored both Teivayanaiamman kovil and the mosque as insignificant entities that were not strictly unlawful, and therefore tolerable, as long as they did not attempt to function as devales. Traditional rules of Kataragama neither sanctioned nor prohibited these places of worship, as they did not come within the traditional taxonomy of places of worship that came under the king's jurisdiction. Both these places received legal recognition only under the colonial rule. We shall examine these places in detail later.
The Swamis of the Teivayanaiamman kovil belonged to the Dasanami order of Brahman priests. They are, to this day, in charge of the Teivayanaiammankovil complex and the kovil for the Palani Andavar incarnation of Muruga, a recent construction, located within this complex. Additionally, they also administer the Gana devale, Muthulingaswami Sivakovil that emerged shortly after and in the contexts of the Teivayanaiamman kovil, and the Kali kovil located near the Valliamma devale. Although the swamis are the official priests, accountable to the Basnayaka Nilame, they did not function as priests during the regular services. They employed Tamil kurukkals as functional priests. To this day, a Tamil kurukkal holds
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services at the Muthulingaswami Sivakovil and the services at the Kali kovil are held jointly by Sinhala kapuralas and Tamil kurukkals. At the Valliamma devale, two kurukkals function as attendants.
Although the kapuralas and Swamis functioned as temple priests only the Swamis have preached doctrines of any sort. The kapuralas have never preached any doctrines. The only thing that they preached' has been in vociferous and vigorous defense of the theology of Kanda Kumara and his presence in Kataragama. Together with the faith in Kanda Kumara, they have firmly believed in the deities of the Hindu pantheon while maintaining their fundamental religious identity as Buddhists.The Swamis have always practiced vegetarianism but the kapuralas have done so only seasonally, when they served the god. As Buddhists, they have begun their religious practices with Buddhist rituals and proceeded to attend to the god in his bodhisattva warrior form. The Swamis have preached Brahmanical doctrines of varying complexity. What they preach depended on the audience.
The kapuralas pledged to support the temple and the king under all circumstances and, during the 1818 rebellion, they were solidly behind the officials of the collapsed Kandyan kingdom. They paid for it dearly - the Bathmes and the Basnayaka paid even more dearly as the British colonial government abolished the Bathme positions and installed the Basnayake as the chief officer in charge of Kataragama religious affairs under the jurisdiction of the colonial Government Agent of Uva Province. Thus, even the appointment of kapuralas came under the delegated authority of the colonial regime.
The kapu positions are hereditary and go to the patrilineage. Today, these patrilineages claim descent from Nandimitta, one of the ten warriors of king Dutthagamani. The legend has it that when the king waged war against the South Indian Damila usurper Elala he was initially unsuccessful. The king went to Kataragama and prayed to the god for his help. Kanda Kumara appeared before him and pleged support. Dutthagamani won the war, and in
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appreciation of the support he received, the king had a threespreyed temple constructed where the MahaDevale stands today.” He then appointed Nandimitta as its first priest. The kapu lineages descend from him.
The kapu families, to this day, claim rights to lands in Katagamuwa, a village near Kataragama, which they claim Dutthagamani gave to Nandimitta as Sources of remuneration for the services at the temple. The Nandimitta connection appears to be more an origin myth rather than a historically verifiable account even though the kapu families point to an inscription in Katagamuwa. Even as a myth, the story appears to be of recent origin.
A remarkable feature of this 'sthalapurana of Kataragama is that, although in popular 'ethno-historiography' Nandimitta was a great warrior against the Tamil invaders and, presumably, an enemy of the Tamils, his descendants intermarried with Tamils. Even very recently, a young woman from a leading kapu family married a Tamil man and celebrated the wedding in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The histories of kapu families have many affinal connections with Tamil families. Even the Basnayakas were relaxed about intermarriages with Tamils. G.A.Baumgartner, the British colonial Government Agent for Uva, visited Kataragama in 1898 to conduct the Asala Perehara and reported on a land dispute between a Tamil and a Trustee (Basnayaka Nilame):
July 30th A AO O CO O P : There is a dispute as to the right to the fields between Ponnaiya of Badulla (formerly in charge of the Hindoo temple at Kataragama where he made large profits out of the offerings) and the temple trustee. The trustee says Ponnaiya has no right, but proposed to marry a daughter of a previous trustee and to get these fields as dowry, but that the marriage did not take place.... The point is that Ponnaiya and the trustee (Basnayaka) did discuss the marriage and the dowry and that in marital alliances
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race, language and religion were not significant matters. Clearly, in the Kandyan kingdom, Kataragama, like Panama, was a village with a hybrid society and a culture where biological and cultural materials crossed ethnic boundaries.
According to an older legend, the kapu families descend from the Vadda lineages. The present day kapu families do not subscribe to this notion. As discussed above they claim a different origin, that they belong to several traditional Sinhala Buddhist govigama caste lineages descending from Nandimitta. One may speculate though that, in the distant past, the Vaddas were involved in officiating temple rituals, as the community in Kataragama, similar to other communities in the Vellassa region - also known as Maha Vadi Rata or the great Vadda country - was an ethnically mixed one comparable to the one in Tirukkovil and Panama that I encountered on my way. The traditions in Kataragama have given a special place to the Vaddas. The Maha Devale's ritual experts included an official named the Wyadha (or Vyadha) Kangan who had the status of a vidane and access to the stores of the Devale where the god's insignia and various other treasures were kept. The term Wyadha or Vyadha, in Mahavansa, refers to archers, and for the Vaddas, who hunted and gathered food and other economic materials, archery was an indispensable aspect of their economic technology. This Wyadha Kangan supported the rebellion of 1818 and, from the stores of the Maha Devale, sent to the newly crowned king a lance (vel, the most dreaded weapon of Kanda Kumara), a conch, a tray, and a kukul kodiya (flag with cock emblem) - the flag of Kanda Kumara and of the Ruhuna.o“
Given these rights of the Vaddas and their close alliances with the Sinhala community, it is conceivable that at least by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the kapu families had marital relationships with the Vaddas as well. As discussed by many scholars, the Vaddas identify with Sinhalagovigama and Tamil vellala castes. It is highly probable that the kapu lineages were connected with Vaddalineages through such affinal relationships and, through that, the kapu families derived at least a quasi Vadda identity. However,
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at present, perhaps from the mid nineteenth century, this affinity had weakened and the kapu families now have Sinhala Buddhist pure govigama identities. It is likely that the pre-colonial kapu lineages became extinct and the present day kapu lineages appeared in the scene only in the mid to late nineteenth century or even in the early twentieth century. I have not looked into their descent although this might be an important aspect of this study.
Whatever their origin, kapuralas are appointed and initiated through specific ritual procedures. They include swearing for secrecy regarding the objects and actions inside the vadasitina maligava (palace; the Buddhist-Hindu equivalent of Sanctum sanctorum in the Christian tradition) of the Maha Devale, proceedings inside the Valliamma devale during the annual festival, and of the proceedings at the diyakapuma (water cutting) ritual. They swear to protect the contents of the vadasitina maligava (statues and other sacra imbued with the god's presence) at the cost of their lives.
The Residents The Pre-Colonial Community
The remnants of two tanks in Katagamuwa to the east of Kataragama and Detagamuwa to the south, and the villages such as Karivile nearby, indicate that an organized agricultural community existed in the area. These villages existed in the dense Yala forest where the residents engaged in rice cultivation. They had also burnt patches of the forest for hena (chena) cultivation. Additionally, the villagers had unofficially carved out pieces of the forest for agricultural purposes. The productivity of these activities was at subsistence level. They had enlarged their economy by resorting to gathering and hunting in the Yala jungle. Katagamuwa was a part of the royal land grants to the kapu families wheras Detagamuwa and Karivile came directly under the Basnayaka Nilame’s administration as they were the property of the Maha Devale.
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The dominant and perhaps the best off resident families in Kataragama were the kapu families. Even as late as 1870, only ten families lived in Katagamuwa, when the population density of the Wellavaya Pattu was only eight per square mile.
These ten families belonged to the twelve kapuralas each of whom served the temple in a given month. Katagamuwa income was solely their property. But this income was quite meager. The pre-colonial pilgrimages focused on the Asala festival and did not produce much income at other times of the year as relatively few visited Kataragama. Perhaps, the king and dignitaries such as the Adigars, Disavas and Rate Mahatmayas gave substantial gifts to the Maha Devale during their visits. A significant portion of the offerings to the devales and other temples belonged to the kapuralas and the swamis who attended the ceremonies. Some of it also went to the various categories of service groups - the nilakara pangu (shares attached to official duties) in the Kandyan administration - from ritual helpers to drummers and washermen who served the temples but did not live in Kataragama. By the late nineteenth century, these residents must have depended more on hena cultivation, hunting and gathering in addition to income from the temples as there was no rice cultivation owing to the ruined state of the various tanks and other traditional irrigation devices.”
A senior member of a kapu family, now in his late seventies, could recollect what he heard from his elders who heard it from theirs. He was articulate and his memory appeared to be very coherent at the time he and I had conversations about the ancient times, when the king lived in Mahanuvara (Kandy). This folk memory may not be accurate but, to my mind, it points to various aspects of community life during the pre-colonial, even early colonial, period, and in the worst case better than nothing.
Although the kapu families owned land in Katagamuwa, they and those who served them lived in Kataragama, around the devale and the Kiri Vehera complex. This was necessitated by their duties at the devales. As professional ritual experts, they were bound by the law of the Kandyan kingdom to hold pujas at the temples at all
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specific times even if no pilgrims visited them. The dolosmahe pahana (the year-round lamp) could not go without oil and wicks, and the murutan, the food offerings to the gods, had to be made without failing. They took these responsibilities earnestly and not a day went without the mandatory rituals being performed at the temples. The pujas were not always lavish as they could only offer what they had and, during hard times such as droughts, the land produced very little. There were times when the offering was limited to boiled rice and some greens, and the lamp had only one wick. The kapuralas would perform the morning puja, go to the henas and work until about noon, return to hold the midday puja, and go back to work. They would return before sunset to prepare for the evening puja. When an occasional pilgrim dropped in a family member would go to the henas to call the kapuralas to help the pilgrim.
The kapu families lived in mud huts in front of the devale and between the devale and Kiri Vehera which was in ruins. The principal residence in the settlement was the valavva of the Basnayaka Nilame. The next significant residence was that of the maha kapurala, also known as maha ralahamy, the chief kapurala at the Maha Devale. Several other kapuralas performed various ritual duties under his supervision. They lived in the same area. Various service families who were often distant relatives also lived among them.
Several Vadda families also lived in nearby areas such as the present day Sella Kataragama. Perhaps the transposition of the Valliamma story in Kataragama was prompted by their presence in Kataragama. As many speculate, it is possible that Kataragama was important to the Vaddas because a Vadda shrine for Kande Yaka or Itale Yaka, that conflated with the Buddhist Kanda Kumara and Hindu Skanda Kumara and Muruga - as in Tirukovil and Okanda, existed there.” The Wyada Kangan was the Vadda priest who cooperated with the kapuralas. But the elderly residents have no memories of having Vadda neighbors during their lifetime. Given the official roles that the Vaddas played in the activities of
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the Maha Devale and their place in the Kataragama lore, their disappearance from the area is an important ethnic issue that I will address a little later.
The Post-colonial Kataragama
During the colonial period this community had steadfastly stood by the kingdom of Kandy. Its loyalty to the king was partly because it depended on royal patronage and partly because they believed that the god of Kataragamawas a patron of the Ruhuna and one of the guardian deities of Lanka, at least from the Gampola period onwards. As mentioned above, the Portuguese were the first to attempt to plunder the wealth that they presumed to exist in the Maha Devale. As Ribeiro states their attempt was unsuccessful. The Dutch colonial authorities were also interested in Kataragama, not so much for its reputation as a wealthy temple, but because the communities in Kataragama and the Vellassa region were among the most unyielding to their authority. According to the mandaram pura puvata, a poem composed from sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, kings and dignitaries visited Kataragama and the Velassa region as they were parts of the Kandyan kingdom. A Dutch governer, operating from Galle - one of their southern administrative centers - invaded Kataragama and Vellassa and caused havoc. This account coincides with the folk accounts that I heard in Kataragama.
In any event, these Dutch incursions appear to be the first significant colonial encounters that the region experienced. It is likely that the Dutch destroyed the early organization of Kataragama religious establishment and its economy. Several educated individuals, invoking the folk memory, told me that the Dutch demolished tank bunds, sluices, and canals, and reduced the once productive rice cultivations to nothing, and eventually the jungle claimed all that. It is just as likely that the Dutch also destroyed the then existing Devale, and the present edifices were constructed later, perhaps in the seventeenth or early eighteenth
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centuries. Whatever that might have been, it is apparent that since the Dutch incursion, Kataragama was left alone until 1818.
The 1818 Vellassa rebellion against British colonial rule brought Kataragama into focus once again. The rebels intended to reclaim kingship of Sri Lanka and attempted to install a new king. The claimant Dorai Sami and his supporters came to Kataragama to receive the blessings of the god. Kataragama became Dorai Sami's head quarters and he was installed as the king Virawickrama Sri Kirti. The Bathmes, the kapuralas, and the Vaddas lead by Kivulegedera Mohottala were directly involved in these activities. Sri Kirti attempted to run a native government from Kataragama and acted as the king of Lanka. But these attempts were violently suppressed by the colonial administration. Many leaders of the rebellion, including Kivulegedera Mohottala, were put to death. The Vadda community that proved to be one of the most resilient, fought against the colonial regime with their deadly skills in archery, and suffered greatly. The Bathmes and kapuralas were dismissed and were on the run.
As mentioned above, the colonial government reorganized the administration of Kataragama. The Bathme positions were abolished and the Government Agent of the Uva Province, stationed in Badulla, became the chief administrator of Kataragama. He appointed the Basnayaka Nilame. The kapuralas were dismissed and the swamis were appointed as the new caretakers of the Maha Devale. The kapuralas maintain that the swamis declined to hold the key to the devale and that the key was returned to the kapuralas by the Tamil temple attendants who worked under the Swamis. There is no consensus on this matter as Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam states that the kapuralas took it away by force. In any case, the colonial government ignored the return/recovery of the key. The kapuralas resumed their daily rituals.
The above shows the complex character of the Kataragama resident community during the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Buddhists, Hindus, Sinhalas, Tamils, and Vaddas coexisted, had disputes among them and yet together defended the religious
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traditions in Kataragama. Whatever happened over the key to the Maha Devale, the colonial administration left the status quo in ritual procedures alone although they made changes at the higher levels of the administration, as harmonious relationships among these groups were advantageous to the government. Social life seemed to have swung back to its rustic ritualism that existed before the rebellion. But did it?
The Vadda Connection A brief ethnological digression
Governer Robert Brownrigg visited Kataragama in 1819, after quelling the rebellion, and Major John Davy was with him. As discussed earlier, John Davy describes Kataragama as an impoverished, physically crumbling establishment that hosted native superstitions. Interestingly, he presents only Buddhist and Hindu accounts of Kataragama temples and says nothing about the Vadda connection. More than likely, he did not expect to find them in Kataragama. He mentions the existence of six small and empty cells behind the Maha Devale. He identifies them as kovils for the goddess Pattini and five unnamed demons but finds them too insignificant and dilapidated to deserve any attention.' These could have been shrines for local deities. Herbert White, the Government Agent in Badulla, later named them as Ganadevi kovila, Alutdeiyanne kovila, Basnairadeiyanne kovila, Parakasadeiyanne kovila and Kumaradeiyanne kovila.
Of these, the Ganadevi kovila was undoubtedly a temple dedicated to Ganesha. Davy states that the three principal establishments in the Maha Devale compound were the Maha . Devale dedicated to the god of Kataragama, a kovil of god Ganna (Ganesha) and another for Boodhoo (Buddha). The smaller shrine Ganadevi kovila that White noticed in the cluster of six empty cells could be an extra shrine for Ganesha.
The Aluthdeiyanne kovila was a shrine for Kivulegedera Maha Mohottala deified as the Kivulegedera Aluth Deiyo. The Maha Mottala was the father of Kivulegedera Mohottala who
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supported Virawickrema Sri Kirti and who, too, was later deified as Kivulegedera Punchi Aluth Bandara Devi. The Kivulegedera Maha Mohottala belonged to an old family from Viyaluwa and had a Vadda ancestry. Seven members of the Kivulegedera lineage were deified as Ihala Valavve Deviyo, Pahala Valavve Deviyo, Disa Bandara Deviyo, Pata Bendi Aluth Dewiyo, and Kada Vata Aluth Deviyo. The first in this family to be deified was one Bandara Vadda. Kivulegedera Aluth Deviyo was the seventh to be deified. The deification of individuals is a mark of respect and social recognition of their value to the community. The generational depth of this deification of the Kivulegederas indicate their social standing and the positions they held in the Kandyan administration. There was a belief that the Kivulegedera Mohottala who fought in the rebellion sent clothes and other ornaments to the newly installed king. This belief coincides with the information about the Vyadha Kangan given by Alumulle Maha Bathme.° It is possible that this Vyadha Kangan was connected to the Kivulegedera family. Whether they belonged to the same clan or not, it is clear that the Vaddas held a strong political position in the region. The tradition of Kataragama has it that the Vadda community had strong claims over Kataragama. It is likely that the religion of Kataragama was a syncretic belief system resulting from the conflation of a Vadda deity, possibly Kande Yaka, with Sinhala Buddhist Kanda Kumara. The recently discovered knowledge of the Vadda kinship with a Tamil/Sinhala goddess named Valli undoubtedly gave them a significant position over the religious affairs in the region.
The British colonial officers who supervised the pilgrimages in Kataragama point to a remarkable change in these intimate Vadda connections with Kataragama. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Vaddas had disappeared from the region and their presence in the festivities had virtually ended. Whatever happened to the Vaddas?
As the discussion above shows, by the time the British colonial officers began to exercise their authority in Kataragama, the Valliamma/ Vadda connection was firmly established in the
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folk beliefs. During the Asala rituals, the Vaddas were recognized as the kindred of Valliamma and were therefore linked to the god of Kataragama as the god's in-laws. The Vaddas could claim a ritual fee, and were allowed to stop the processions in order to collect it. This right might have been derived long before the Valliamma story was transposed on Kataragama, if Kataragama deity worship had Vadda origins as in Tirukkovil and Okanda. Under these circumstances, one would expect an increase in the Vadda population for, now, the Vaddas have a firm place in the social fabric of Kataragama.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the traditional social and ritual relationships among the Sinhala, Tamil and Vadda groups seem to have gone to the wayside. Given the active role that the Vaddas played in the 1818 rebellion, their absence in the region made the British administrators inquisitive about it. Whatever happened to the Vaddas?
G.A. Baumgartner, the Government Agent of Uva, noted in 1897:
July 25th. In this “Maha Vedirata” or great Veddah country there is not a single Veddah now surviving. The Korala resembles the last survivor Karavila Veddah' or Korala Veddah.'
I am told by Taldena Kach. R.M. who held the R.M.ship here, that the Sinhalese settlements in this part are as recent as this century and that they, disliking and fearing the Veddahs, made an end of them by killing them with poison, and in other ways. So, too, in Buttala Vedirata not a Veddah survives.97 Clearly, there is something missing here. If the Vaddas had all those rights and royal recognition as discussed above, how and why did they disappear from the scene? Why did they stop collecting their ritual dues? Why is it that they do not hold office at the Maha Devale any longer? Interestingly, except for passing references in connection with the Valliamma story and incidental references such as the R.M.'s, there is hardly any mention of the Vaddas in all the administrative reports.“
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The R.M. states three most significant features of Kataragama region: the Sinhala communities inhabited the place only since the nineteenth century; prior to that the Vaddas lived in region; the Sinhalas, finding the Vaddas fearsome and dislikable, killed them and eventually got rid of them from the area. By 1897 there were no resident Vaddas in Kataragama or nearby Buttala, both parts of the great Vadda country of yore.
But this is confronted by another significant fact: the Korala, presumably a Sinhala man, resembles the Korala or Karivile Vadda. This is to say that the Vaddas lived here at one time and had left descendants in Kataragama. What is important here is not the Scientific discourse on genetics and transference of genetic codes in reproductive processes although the biology of resemblance is a most relevant piece of evidence. What is important is that Baumgartner made this observation, made the connection, that some Sinhalas look like Vaddas, and implicitly, they lived like the Vaddas, even when they held high office, such as Korala, and therefore the Vadda appearance and the life style were not something to be looked down upon or a matter for embarrassment. Rather, it was a socially normal and respectable existence. Why, then, get rid of them? Or did they?
If the Sinhalas got rid of them with such hatred and by such violent means as poisoning, surely, the Vaddas would have memorialized their experience in accounts of such a horrendous predicament, and the Sinhalas would have their own spin, in the folklore. So far, no such accounts are in existence. Even after the politicizing of the Vadda rights since the 1980s, such an account had not emerged from the Wadda community. This is to say that neither the Vaddas nor the Sinhalas have any cultural memory of a destructive political confrontation between the two groups.
On the contrary, throughout the eighteenth century, there. had been Cultural exchanges among the Tamils, Vaddas and the Sinhalas. These included the Sinhala and Vadda adoption of the Tamil Valliamma theology, the Tamil and Sinhala adoption of the Vaddas as a theologically significant community, the Sinhala
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adoption of Vaddas as ethnic kindred through the Vijaya-Kuveni Story, and the Sinhala dissemination of the Tamil story about the Vadda connection with the god of Kataragama through Valliamma. This latter exchange could have occurred as early as 1742 or after, as that could be the probable year of composition of this ballad." It is likely that the dissemination of the story by the Sinhala devotees and its absorption by at least some Vaddas, particularly of Dambana, led to the development of a new Dambana clan called the kovila vanama. This clan, now extinct, claimed kinship with Valliamma and had rights to participate in the rituals at Kataragama. During the pre-colonial era, it was their duty to guard the Maha Devale and they lived in the adjoining areas.' The alattiammas and the kapuralas of the nineteenth century claimed descent from the Vaddas and this descent arose from their kinship with the kovila vanama clan. As discussed above, the early nineteenth century history of the region shows that the Vaddas, the Sinhalas and the Tamils took part in the rebellion against the British colonial government in 1818.
Now, if the relationships among the Sinhalas and Vaddas were this warm, how could the Sinhalas begin to fear and dislike the Vaddas in a matter of fifty years or so? The R. M. explained to Baumgartner the absence of the Vaddas in Kataragama and Vellassa despite the folklore about their existence in the region and visible evidence of their biological and cultural presence in the likeness and lifestyle of some Sinhalas in the area. The Sinhala violence against the Vaddas is neither a Vadda complaint nor a colonial administrator's invention or misconception. It is what a Sinhala administrator told his superior officer from the colonial government. Why did the Taldena R. M. tell Baungartner this story when all else pointed to amity, cordiality, and even conjugal affinity between the Vaddas and the Sinhalas? This is even more interesting because his ancestors - the former Taldena R. M.s - directly and indirectly fought against the British rule, and the Vaddas fought alongside.
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I question the R.M.'s story. Superficially, it sounds rather exciting: how the Sinhalas drove away the Vaddas using violence. The Sinhalas, the R. M.'s own people, did a racist, bad thing; at least Baumgartner's language that informs us about the R. M.'s expression indicates such a semantic possibility. The R.M., as a Sinhala person, takes the blame for the disappearance of the Vaddas: his people drove the Vaddas away.
I believe he made this statement, to put it bluntly, merely to ingratiate himself to the British superior officer. Running down one's Own people indicates a critical mindset, a balanced point of view, an intellectual disposition, a mark of self-knowledge, which is attractive and noteworthy. But, parallel to this act, there is another complimentary act of concealment of the historical fact, that the British decimated the Sinhalas and the Vaddas of Vellassa in the aftermath of the 1818 rebellion. It is a complimentary concealment because the massacre was something the British would rather forget. Lawrie wrote in 1896, "The story of the English rule in the Kandyan country during 1817 and 1818 cannot be related without shame. In 1819, hardly a member of the leading families, the heads of the people, remained alive; those whom the Sword and the gun had spared, cholera and Smallpox and privations had slain by hundreds.” Obeyesekere shows that the Kivulegedera Vadda family was among these leading families.’ It is hard to imagine that Baumgartner, who entered the Kataragama scene in 1898, was unaware of the details of the 1818 Vellassa rebellion and Lawrie's 1896 comments. The R.M. was inventing a scenario in which the disappearance of the Vaddas in Vellassa was re-invented and re-staged, a perfect cultural functional alternative for reconstruction of the memory of the recent past. This reconstruction was a discourse on the nature of being conquered. It is the defensive strategy of a subjugated man. I can never know what exactly Baumgartner thought about R. M.'s reconfiguration of an event well recorded by the British authorities. Baumgartner merely reports what he heard but not what he thought about what he heard.
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On the other hand, the veracity of what we have as what Baumgartner heard depends on how he heard it because people hear what they want to hear and ignore all else, particularly whatever is unfavorable. Maybe, the R. M. also said that the Sinhala and Vadda mutual dispositions changed after the rebellion of 1818. Maybe the Vaddas developed contempt towards the Sinhalas as many significant Sinhalas supported the British attempts to quell the rebellion - a fight against colonial rule, for the re-establishment of kingship and an image of sovereignty - whereas not one Vadda abandoned the king, imposter or otherwise. Considering the relative sizes of populations, it is likely that very few Vaddas of Vellassa, particularly of the kovila wanama in Kataragama, survived the rebellion. The relationships between them and the Sinhalas went sour as the latter got adjusted to colonial rule, accepted it as a fact, embraced the monarch of the Great Britain as their king, returned to business as usual, and strove for advancement in the new regime, and the Vaddas felt that the Sinhalas let them down.
Another feature of the post-rebellion Vellassa, and Kataragama in particular, is the colonial interest in colonizing economically viable regions. Kataragama as a seasonal pilgrimage site with an ancient village equipped with a tank, bund and a sluice drew the interest of the administrators. They visited and inspected these economic structures.’ People lived in these villages under the control of the Basnayaka and the kapu families. As the rest of the country was thrown into irreversible processes of colonial urbanization and as urban centers developed elsewhere, particularly in the coastal areas and in the hill country plantation sectors, demand arose for various products - rice, fruits, vegetables, forest products, timber and the like. As the government explored new economic feasibilities of the area, more people migrated to these regions. Thomas Steele was thinking about colonizing the Tissamaharama region as far back as the early 1870s.’ This was probably what the R.M. meant when he said that the Sinhala people settled in the area only during the nineteenth century. In fact, it was only during the late nineteenth century that the region became conceptualized by the colonial
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government as an area with economic potential. From the early twentieth century, the region had become one of the economic frontiers of the region, and people from elsewhere - mostly from Tissamaharama, Hambantota, Tangalle, Dikvella, Hakmana, andeven Matara and Galle - migrated to this region. It was not a mass migration. Senior residents of the village recalled memories that they inherited from their senior generations, memories of very poor people and fugitives from the law coming over and settling down in the jungle. The ancestors of some of my informants, too, had come from the towns mentioned above.
I hypothesize that in this process, the erstwhile colleagues - the Vaddas and the Sinhalas - became competitors as they competed for land, water and forest resources. The numerically and economically stronger Sinhala immigrants marginalized the natives of the area. The Vaddas withdrew from the region as the immigrants, with encouragement from the government, invaded their forests; some of them without knowing but some others with the knowledge that they were invading Vadda territory. Undoubtedly, this process led to clashes between the new settlers and the Vaddas, and the clashes involved all known weaponry and ammunition, including Sorcery and poisoning for both of which the Vaddas were also famous.
Transients The Pilgrims and the Merchants
The principal multireligious spaces in Sri Lanka have always depended on transients and Kataragama is no exception. The population in Kataragama had fluctuated because of the transients. There were many kinds of transients. Officials such as the Bathmes and the Basnayaka Nilame, and the service personnel such as the drummers and washermen, were transients but they arrived to engage in activities directly related to the ritual life of Kataragama. As discussed, the colonial government abolished the Bathme positions. In their place the government agents, their assistants, policemen and various laborers such as prisoners and coolies -
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employed by the government to establish support structures such as latrines and sheds - arrived during the Asala festival and left after the water-cutting ceremony (diyakapuma) that concluded the festival. The more frequent ones were the traders from Tissamaharama and the bullock-cart drivers who transported various goods back and forth. Some of them found wives from the resident families in Kataragama and nearby villages and settled down in the area. The pilgrims constituted the largest number of transients. They arrived in large groups during the festival but only occasionally at other times.
We know very little about pre-colonial pilgrimages to Kataragama. But it is clear that the Buddhists in the area had gone to worship the Kiri Vehera from the earliest times. Only circumstantial evidence provides information about deity worship, particularly the worship of the god of Kataragama. As discussed before, the earliest known source of information about the god of Kataragama is the second part of the Mahavansa composed in thirteenth century. But it does not mention Kataragama and refers to an event that occurred in Gokanna: present day Trincomalee. The thieteenth century Dhatuvansa presents Kataragama solely as a Buddhist place of worship significant only in the southern regions of the island. However, in the same period, the influence of Brahmans was widespread as they were the priests in many temples for deities including those of the local deities. They had redefined local gods in Hindu terms and propagated Hindu worship. It is not possible to ascertain when the conflation of Skanda/Kartikeya with Kanda Kumara was achieved, or whether Kanda Kumara and Skanda/Kartikeya were the same from the beginning. However, it is likely that pilgrimages to Kataragama to worship Skanda/ Kartikeya began at least from the fourteenth century and, as ArunagiriNather's poetry shows, by fifteenth century, the South Indians had inaugurated Muruga worship in Kataragama.
It is likely that local pilgrimages to Kataragama occurred throughout the year albeit in small numbers but these early 'international' pilgrimages were limited to the Asala festival and
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amounted to a trickle when compared to the crowds that gathered from the middle of the nineteenth century. Even then, the arrival of pilgrims from the various parts of the island and the subcontinent must have made a substantial difference in the life of Kataragama for they consumed the local produce and supported the local economy and made substantial gifts to the temples that supported the Basnayaka Nilame, the kapuralas and the Swamis. We have better information about the pilgrimages during the colonial period as the administrative officers maintained records of their activities in Kataragama during the Asala festival.
The colonial administrative reports on Kataragama begin in 1852. In his brief report P.W. Braybrooke, the Assistant Government Agent, Badulla, mentions Kataragama in four
SeteCeS:
"Weather was dreadfully hot, managed to reach Kattaragam just after dusk - put up tents. (July 24"). Detained on account of the perahera festival. Employed myself in looking after the work of the new road from Boothel to Kattaragam which was finished on the 31 July down to the street at Kattaragam. My other duties were confined to keep order in the place, punishing offenses of which but very few were committed (July 25 to August O1).76 Davy, visiting Kataragama in 1819, predicted that in a few years the temple complex would just disappear in the jungle leaving hardly a trace.7 Obeyesekere contends:
After the British conquered Kandy in 1815, there were several minor rebellions against them. The most serious one was by the pretender Vilbave who launched his fight against the British at the shrine of this deity at Kataragama in 1817. But in this case Skanda's help was of not much use for the rebellion was crushed by the British and the pretender executed. ... In the period following the defeat of Vilbave there was a marked decline in the popularity of the deity. The causes are probably the failure of the rebellion, the
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demoralization of the people and their felt lack of ability to oust the British. The Pax Britanica perhaps rendered redundant the deity's heroic role. Older informants have told us that the shrine at Kataragama was desolate, illmaintained, and decrepit up to about 1920. Few Buddhist pilgrims visited the place...” However, by 1852 things have turned around in Kataragama. The pilgrimages to Kataragama had to be events managed by the government. A road was constructed between Buttala - a village on the Jaffna, Kandy, Badulla, Kataragama route - and Kataragama indicating that the traffic was heavy enough for the government to step in. Thereafter, until 1870, the record is silent, indicating that although the pilgrims came from all over the island and a good number from the sub-continent,’ and although there was a significant crowd in Kataragama during the festival, the pilgrimages were not a problem for the government. Undoubtedly, the festivities attracted a very small crowd when compared to the festive season demographics today. Nonetheless, the crowds were probably the largest ever and increasing every year as the number of Hindus imported from South India (as we shall discuss soon) increased. Interestingly, these demographics displayed a remarkable social change in Kataragama. Sinhala pilgrims were in the majority up to about 1818. Since then the frequency of Sinhala pilgrimages decreased while the frequency of Tamil pilgrimages increased. As Obeyesekere points out, this may have been the result of Sinhala disappointment over the loss of the king and the failure of the god to protect the country from foreign invasions. The Sinhala indifference is also detectable in the dilapidated state of the shrines. From the administrative reports from 1870, it is clear that the character of local pilgrimages changed considerably from the late nineteenth century with the impact of the British colonial rule. The pilgrimages to Kataragama during the festival season had become a major headache for the colonial administration. The Sociology of it, particularly its multicultural character, is fascinating.
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The British administration had invented Kataragama as a problem when solving another problem. When the government started coffee plantations they had to solve a labor crisis as the Lankans - Sinhala, Tamil and Muslims alike - were reluctant to work on the plantations. The colonial government began importing labor from South India. From 1830 onwards, hundreds of thousands of individuals and families were brought in along several sea and land routes. They were settled in various plantations in the hill country and in the Southern and Uva provinces. These plantation workers flocked to Kataragama during the festive season. Alongside Hindu devotees from the eastern province, particularly from Batticaloa area, also came in large numbers. The colonial plantations - scattered in many parts of the Central, Uva and Southern Provinces but principally concentrated in the hilly regions in theCoentral Province, and the Eastern Province became the main catchment areas for pilgrims.
With the changes in the festive season demographics, the Chettiyar Tamils began to exert a significant influence on Kataragama. The Chettiyars were, as they still are, the traditional trading and money lending class among the Tamils and ardent devotees of Kandasami/Muruga. Among them, the Natukottis held a leading position. The Chettiyars lived in practically every major town. They have been involved in the internal and external trading and money lending in the island for a considerable length of time. Even in the sixteenth century, they were a significant mercantile community. The Chettiyars were Muruga worshippers, unlike the Sanskritized Vellalas who worshipped Kandasamy and shunned the Muruga cult as the religion of the lower castes but sought Muruga's help at times of need. It is likely that they, if not initiated, at least provided considerable support for the establishment of Muruga worship in Kataragama, and constituted a significant presence during the festivities in pre-colonial Kataragama but even more intensely during the colonial period. The Chettiyars organized the poorer Tamil Muruga devotees, including the plantation workers, into vels or processions in which
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the vel-lance - of Muruga from the main Muruga temple in the area was carried ceremoniously all the way to Kataragama. The vel from Colombo was the largest but the vels from Jaffna, Kandy, Galle, Trincomalee, Batticaloa and Badulla were elaborate with nearly two hundred individuals participating in each of them.
For the Chettiyars, the pilgrimages also provided opportunities to sell various merchandize to the pilgrims.' Thomas Steele, the Assistant Government Agent in Badulla, wrote about the "vels in 1870. The Chettiyars had recruited volunteerpilgrims to accompany them as they carried in procession the "vel of their areas of activity - major commercial towns of the period - to Kataragama. The volunteers would contribute physical labor whenever needed. The Chettiyars would feed them on the way and in Kataragama. These coolies - plantation workers and the imported urban Scavengers - would never have embarked upon the pilgrimage if not for the inducements. The vast majority of the pilgrims were very poor. Steele called the bedraggled men, women and children in rags, mostly from the plantations and the east coast, the scum of the Society. The fact that the Chettiyars could attract thousands of these low caste indigent people shows the enthusiasm and influence the Chettiyars had in the local Muruga cult formations.
The vel processions involved a caravan of bullock carts - a classic Indian institution, often referred to in the Buddhist stories' - carrying large quantities of rice and other food items for use during the pilgrimage and for alms and sale in Kataragama. From the British Administrator's angle, the food so distributed as alms was soggy, Stale and semi-decomposed and contributed to health problems among the pilgrims. Yet the administrators counted on the alms from the Chettiyars to feed the majority of the pilgrims. It appears that most of the recipients were plantation Tamils and very poor Tamils from elsewhere who counted on these alms. Undoubtedly, some Muslims and Sinhalas also benefited from the generosity of the Chettiyars. Most Sinhala pilgrims, mainly from the nearby areas, and the wealthier Tamil and Muslim pilgrims, brought their own foodstuffs and were in no need of alms.”
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Later, another administrator described some humorous aspects of alms giving.
...At the Chetty Madama I was amused by the vigorous protestations of a chetty who was providing breakfast for a crowd of expectant votaries, that this was the only time he would do it, and never any more he was but a poor man etc. I really think that he was afraid he had committed himself, when in answer to my inquiry, "Who was the master of the feast?” he was pushed forward and he wished to make it clear before all that he didn't intend to do this sort of thing for ever. He thought he had been quite generous enough.” By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Chettiyars, particularly the Natukotti Chettiyar clan, were indispensable in Kataragama. In 1870 Thomas Steele wrote, "There is absolutely no accommodation what ever for the pilgrims. They picket under the trees or the banks of the river and wherever they can get any shade.” Within two years, this changed dramatically. In 1872, Steele wrote about Chetty madamas (pilgrim's rests) in Kataragama. The Chettiyars did not use these buildings for their own use as they stayed in the Teivayanaiamman temple complex. The madamas were for the poor and the destitute that came to Kataragama with them. Perhaps the British, concerned with sanitation and accommodation of pilgrims, prompted the Chettiyars to build the madamas as an aspect of their religious activities. The administrators do not describe the nature of these early madamas. It is likely that they simulated the practices of the South Indian Hindu tradition. Following the same tradition, the administrators erected temporary sheds with sticks and cadjans or some other easily obtainable materials for the roofs. The madamas that I saw before the reorganization of Kataragama in the 1980s were long halls with a rear portion that had separate rooms for an office, storeroom, and a residential room for the manager. The more elaborate ones would have more than one residential room for pilgrims of special standing. The pilgrims stayed in the long hall. Some madamas would have a separate dining area. The Chettiyars had dug a well also but it was
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a failure because of the absence of a consistant spring that would feed it all year.
The "vels' organized by the Chettiyars were not the only way the pilgrims arrived. Many practiced the padayattirei that I described in Chapters Two, Three and Four. Small bands of pilgrims, usually neighborhood and kin groups, would go to Kataragama to worship the god, make and or fulfill vows and receive his blessings. This pattern was common even among the Sinhala Buddhist pilgrims from the neighborhoods of Tissamaharama and Buttala. It was only very occasionally that these bands came to Kataragama during the 'off season. Ponnambalam Arunachalam describes such a pilgrimage from Jaffna performed in the 1830s, by the mother of the late Muthu Coomaraswamy and Arunachalam's and the late Ananda Coomaraswamy's grandmother.” Many plantation Tamils also engaged in these pada yatras. The number of this sort of pilgrims increased during the Asalafestival. During the festival, the plantation workers who arrived in the island from the 1830s onwards swelled the transient population in Kataragama beyond all expectations.
As mentioned earlier, the pilgrimages had a significant impact on the local economy. During the festive season, Kataragama had become a fair of sorts. Steele noticed:
The boutique-keepers...brought a large stock of goods which found ready purchasers...The Kandyans who attended the festival invest largely in household vessels and cotton stuffs, rice sold at eighteen or nineteen cents a measure. Venison, honey and deer skins were abundant and very cheap. A large quantity of salt was sold.” Sweatenham observed:
At one corner of the plain the traders, about eighty or one hundred in number, occupied two rows of leaf-huts where they exhibited, for sale, cloths, brassware, baskets, and various other commodities, the usual miscellaneous stock in trade of a Ceylonese bazaar. The business transacted was comparatively trifling, as customers were few. At a little distance were the huts of the sellers of venison, which is
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popular at Kataragama, the consumption of fowls there being considered very unlucky. Nearest in the police station was the temporary tavern of the arrack retailer, who it is Satisfactory to add, had very little custom, having sold only 20 out of a stock of 156 gallons.”
Cholera
Soon these pilgrimages by the plantation workers became a major quandary for the administration. Kataragama had no facilities whatsoever to cope with such large crowds. As many as ten thousand had gathered in the village and defecation became a serious issue as infectious diseases such as cholera and dysentery spread among the pilgrims. The administration feared that the returning pilgrims would carry the diseases into the plantations and spread among the workers there. This would have been ruinous. Further, they feared that the diseases would spread all over the island.
The administration was unable to pinpoint the source of cholera and dysentery. Did the pilgrims bring it to Kataragama or did it appear sui generis in Kataragama? They made no attempts to pinpoint the epidemiology of the disease, but held the view that Kataragama was the source of the disease. It was more than likely that malaria was of local origin whereas cholera and dysentery were imported from South India and from the plantations. Wesumperuma, examining the practices in the plantations, concluded that the source of cholera was South India. The imported laborers carried the disease with them into the plantations.” They carried the disease from the plantations to Kataragama during the festive season. Another source of cholera was the pilgrims from South India. The incidence of cholera was highest along the routes taken to import laborers and the routes taken by the pilgrims from South India. Consequently, cholera spread badly in the Northern and Eastern provinces. Ironically, the administration, obsessed with the situation in Kataragama, paid no attention to these sources of the disease.
The administration adopted a two-pronged approach to curb the spread of diseases. While providing the pilgrims with lavatory
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facilities, the government restricted the number of pilgrims. They used coolies and prisoners to dig long trenches for collection of sewage and established rules to compel the pilgrims to use these latrines and to prevent them from using the river for cleaning after defecation. They took steps to keep the place as clean as possible and brought in a medical unit to treat the sick.
The main prophylactic measure they employed was restriction of the number of pilgrims. Accordingly, the government issued a limited number of tickets to the various groups of pilgrims, i.e. the vels from the various regions. The idea was to contain the total influx to about 2000 pilgrims. The administrators report that these two steps helped prevent the spread of the diseases to the plantations. But, by the second decade of the twentieth century, the administrators had a different view of the ticket system.” From their perspective, the restrictions were a failure and an unwieldy measure because it was impossible to check the authenticity of the ticket holders.
In any event, the restrictions had a serious impact on the pilgrimages as the numbers dwindled. The administrators reported every year that many pilgrims, unaware of the ticket system or in spite of it, attempted to enter Kataragama but the administration sent them back at checkpoints established in Yala, Buttala, and Tissamaharama. The Chettiyars criticized and protested these restrictions but to no avail. w
As a result of these legal measures, pilgrimages to Kataragama ended in 1875. Thomas Steel, citing Captain Lloyd Williams who made observations on his behalf, noted that only fifty-three pilgrims arrived on July 18th of that year, on which full moon day the festivities traditionally began. Out of these, only thirteen remained overnight and they too left the following morning, as there was no reason for them to stay longer. The perahara was cancelled due to lack of participants. There were no traders as there were no pilgrims. The collection at the MahaDevale was less than ten rupees. In 1876, the administrators did not discuss Kataragama in their annual report as the festivities were cancelled. In 1878, W. J. S.
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Boake reported on the 1877 festival: "In consequence of the restrictions placed on pilgrims only a few - and they, people of adjoining districts - visited the place this year. I trust the same restrictions will be imposed this year.” Reporting in 1879 on the situation in 1878 G. S. Williams stated:
I hope this may be regarded as a defunct institution...very small number of pilgrims... (T)his annual nuisance was chiefly kept going by certain traders, who profited by supplying provisions and offerings to the wealthier members of the bands... (N)ow that these profits have become unobtainable owing to the falling off in numbers, due to the precautions taken by the Government no inducement is left for the promotion of this dangerous folly. I take this opportunity of again inviting the attention of the Government to the large number of pilgrims who now visit Tissamaharama, and whose proceedings it would be advisable to bring under sanitary control.' Williams reported again in 1880, "Mr. Hopkins' experience at Kataragama last year very much resembles mine of the year before. I can only again record a hope that the pilgrimage will never revive.”101
The administrative reports do not mention Kataragama until 1895. For fifteen years, Kataragama festivities were held in very rudimentary form without festivities. Perhaps, the pre-colonial festivities occurred on a much smaller scale as far fewer numbers arrived than in the 1870s, prior to the imposition of restrictions. But, these festival activities came to a halt because of remedial measures established by the colonial government as all pilgrimages were restricted thereby eliminating even the traditional Sinhala, Tamil and Sufi Muslim pilgrimages from areas unaffected by the epidemics.
An interesting twist in the administrative attitudes towards Kataragama epidemics and their epidemiology of cholera occurred in 1895. Herbert White, the Government Agent in Uva, could not help becoming poetic about Kataragama:
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O Kataragama where are the charms That sages have seen in thy face Better live in the midst of alarms Than Reign in this horrible place.'
Poetry aside, White made a significant entry in his diary on August 1":
At Kataragama, at 10 a.m. I received by special messenger from the Asst. Agent at Hambantota a telegram from the Kachcheri at Badulla to him running. "Inform Government Agent at Kataragama by special messenger, cholera at Bandarawela, Welimada and Namunukula Estate. Senior Medical Officer recommends that pilgrims be dispersed.” No pilgrims having yet reached Kataragama as they are not admitted until 4 August. I sent two constables to Galge, a halting place. .... (w)ith instructions to back all pilgrims and I sent similar instructions to the Malay guards at Katagamuwa, Yala and Elagala in the Hambantota District.....and I wrote to the A.G.A. Hambantota to ask for his co-operation under the rules which govern the pilgrimage. I have power to disperse the pilgrims only if an epidemic breaks at Kataragama, H.E. the Governor and Executive council only have the power of stopping the pilgrimage if an epidemic breaks out elsewhere.' However as there was no time to communicate with higher authorities I took upon myself the responsibility of doing my best to prevent a large concourse of people here, who, if an epidemic of cholera breaks out here would spread it all over the island. I do not know which is Namunukula Estate referred to in the telegram but I know that the river here from which all the drinking water is taken and along which all the pilgrims on the Badulla route halt, rises in Mausagala Estate on the Namunukula range which renders it imperatively necessary to take every possible precaution. Kataragama itself is clean and there is no sickness at present.'"
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Undoubtedly, the rule governing the pilgrimages was a very sensible one. It took care of epidemics at the sources through central and peripheral authorities at national and local levels respectively. It allowed the local authorities to control local events without having to refer to the national authorities, but if events in a given locality influenced the conditions in another, the national authorities could step in to control the events at their source. White could control what was occurring in Kataragama but not elsewhere. Cholera had broken out in Namunukula Estate (whichever that might have been), and Kataragama, thus far clean, would become contaminated unless the epidemic was not controlled in Namunukula, for it would contaminate the river. Although he had no authority to respond to the events in Namunukula Estate, he used his discretion, as this was an emergency, and stepped in pending approval. The law seemed to allow administrative discretion in emergencies.
Several things surfaced in this drama. One was the way the colonial authorities balanced the central and peripheral rules and the conditions for delegation of authority. Even under a central command structure, it was necessary to allow a reasonable amont of power to the peripheral authorities to create rules to face difficult local circumstances. While retaining a monopoly of authority to intervene in and arbitrate inter-regional matters, and requiring the peripheries to manage local events without violating the overall policies of the central government, the colonial policy had allowed the local authorities to use discretion to respond to sudden disruptive events elsewhere that influenced local life until the central government takes over.
The central government knew that cholera outbreaks occurred in Kataragama from 1858. In that year, the Government Agent recorded that a terrible attack of cholera occurred in Kataragama causing the deaths of a very large number of pilgrims.' Just between Hambantota and Tangalle alone, a distance of mere twenty-eight miles, seventy-six dead bodies were found.' From Thomas Steele to G. S. Williams, administrators describe
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the magnitude of the epidemic in and in connection with Kataragama in graphic detail. The local authorities pleaded to the central government to take charge of the situation in Kataragama as it would, presumably, cause serious repercussions elsewhere; the whole island in general and the plantations in particular. They had no authority to control the influx of pilgrims to Kataragama. They had to demonstrate that Kataragama would unfavourably influence the other parts of the country if the pilgrimages were allowed without restrictions. The central government did not respond to Steele as soon as he made the suggestion to control influx of pilgrims in 1870. The government responded in 1873, with "The Ordinance Relating to the Annual Pilgrimage to Kataragama No. 14 of 1873.” The result, in this drama, was the effective control of a grave situation regarding the spreading of an epidemic, at least in Kataragama. This may have inconvenienced the pilgrims and caused further dilapidation of the temple complex. The execution of the Ordinance had immediate effects. Steele wrote in 1874:
The Ordinance of 1873 had taken effect in 1874: "The total number that attended was computed not to exceed twelve hundred - all, with hardly an exception, healthy and able-bodied persons. When it is remembered that in 1873 upwards of 7,000 of all sorts and conditions, and in 1872 about 5,000 attended, this cannot but be considered satisfactory. Not only were all in good health, but, what was equally important, they were all well found in provisions.” The Government restricted the total number of pilgrims in 1874 to 1200, a remarkable decline. But it did prevent Kataragama community as well as other communities in the path of the pilgrims from contacting cholera.
Second, the events in 1895 turned the the overall understanding of the problem up side down. There was cholera in Namunukula Estate and not in Kataragama. The fear was that the Manik Ganga, originating in the Namunukula range, carried contaminated water and would infect the pilgrims who travelled
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along the river and those already in Kataragama as well as the Kataragama residents. White, however, did not notice another fact that complimented his observation: even the pilgrims who took the kareipadei or the coastal route down the eastern seaboard walked along the river, as I did, and used the river to replenish their water supplies, cooked using river water, and bathed in the river. That too would have contributed to the contamination of Kataragama as they picked up the disease downstream and brought it to Kataragama.
In any case, the facts are clear that cholera did not originate in Kataragama but was brought into Kataragama from elsewhere. The sources of cholera were the plantations that erstwhile administrators attempted to protect from Kataragama, and the migrants from the affected areas in South India. Such an epidemiology never occurred to the administrators. Instead, for a quarter century from 1858 through 1873, the epidemiology of cholera in Kataragama was misrecognized and misunderstood.
What caused this misrecognition and misunderstanding? As Wesumperuma shows, cholera existed in the plantations from the day the Indian laborers were deployed in them. The failure of the plantation managers to identify the contamination of the newfound supply of labor at its source and to provide these workers with adequate sanitation facilities on the plantations was the root cause of the problem." This failure occurred because the plantation owners did not think that the laborers needed any latrines, as the laborers never used latrines as a part of their sanitary culture. They had always gone to the bush in their native land and here, too, they could use some open space. The plantation managers or the administrators were unaware of and or ignored the serious health problems that this mode of excretion would entail. Perhaps, if they paid attention to the health conditions of the regions in South India from where the laborers were recruited they would have discovered the seriousness of the problem. That would have sensitized them to the sanitary issues on the plantations. It is apparent from the administrative reports that even the administrators were
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not aware of the incidence of cholera and dysentery on the plantations.
Thus, when cholera broke out in Kataragama they drew the conclusion that the pilgrims from the plantations would carry the disease to the plantations and that if the administration could prevent the plantation workers from engaging in the pilgrimage they could prevent contamination of the plantations. They had a very poor understanding of the epidemiology of cholera and dysentery in Kataragama. One hardly comes across reports that focus on the issue. Instead, every report treats Kataragama as a 'source' for reasons never discussed.
Why Kataragama was considered as a problem is a multifaceted issue. One, Kataragama was of no practical use to the colonial administration. It generated no income. Another is the fact that all the administrators began their work in Kataragama with two standard and enduring prejudices. They had mixed feelings about the locale. They admired the grand forest and enjoyed hunting in it. But they detested the hot and humid weather, aggravated by the dust in what they saw as the squalid village with its run-down buildings.
They also had mixed feelings about the activities in Kataragama. They were unequivocal about their prejudice towards what they considered as bizarre superstitions, products of monumental ignorance and revolting activities. At the same time, they respected the native rights to believe and practice what they liked. On many occasions, when disputes arose, they deferred to the traditions rather than interfering with local traditions that existed with their own local logic. They saw to it that the traditional ritual procedures occurred without missing a beat and took a great deal of trouble to keep Kataragama clean and sustain good health among the residents and pilgrims. Yet, as Steele wrote, at least he saw the vast majority of the Tamil pilgrims with contempt: “To Kataragama, the organizers of the pilgrimage attract, by the promise of food on the journer, the scum of the population, ill-conditioned, ill-clad, and utterly unprovided with supplies.” He makes the
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same observation in 1874: "The scum of the population, attracted inlarge numbers in previous years by the dole of boiled rice dealt out daily, and by the hope of plunder, was this year conspicuous by its absence.”
The "scum turns out to be the unfortunate human beings thrown, by biology and sociology of their birth, in to an existence that was not of their making. The middle class colonial administrator, accustomed to the middle class amenities for a good life, was appalled and revolted by the uncouth ways and indigence of the vast majority of the pilgrims for whom the only important thing in this pilgrimage was to be in Kataragama, in the presence of their lancer, their beloved and terrible Velan. For them death on the way to Kataragama, no matter how it came, was a blessing from the god.
These prejudices, though paralleled by good intentions, colored the perceptions of the administrators of the nature of Kataragama and its connection with cholera. Steele, always an excellent writer and unafraid of expressing his views, wrote in 1873, the year in which the Ordinance No.14 was legislated:
Evil effects of the festival: The Evil effects of the festival are many. The frequency with which it has been the source of epidemic disease has created feelings of terror in all the districts through which the pilgrims travel, and those of Uva and Hambantota in particular. Too often the way-sides have been strewn with corpses of men, women and children who have perished on their ill-fated journey. Those who die indeed are taught to look upon such a death as a true euthanasia, a certain passport to a better life; but the unfortunate village, to whose homes contagion and infection are carried, have little reason to share ecstatic views, and may well call the pilgrimage a scourge. (Then he went on to present these Evil effects):
Interference with Public and Irrigation Works, and Salt Collection: So well-founded and widespread is the dread entertained by the people, that irrigation and other public
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works have to be suspended while the pilgrimage lasts, the coolies going to their villages and refusing to return to work till the country is freed from the yearly visitation. This is unfortunate as works which might be rapidly carried on during the dry season are thrown-back, working parties once broken up being extremely difficult to collect afresh. So with the salt collection, also notwithstanding the high wages offered, gatherers are loth to come until the pilgrims have gone: and thus the risk is regularly run every year of having losses, which would be altogether avoided were there no dread on the part of the people. Again, when the collection is restarted and rain does not fall, and salt sometimes effloresces and becomes, not chloride of sodium, but silphate of soda, which is useless. This rendered a fine formation at Palatupana utterly useless in 1872 at the period of the festival. (Ironically, Steele, with his scientific insights into salt production, had a very poor understanding of the epidemiology of cholera. Steele continues):
Introduction of Diseases on Coffee Estates: It is not merely in the near neighborhood of Kataragama, however, that evil consequences of the pilgrimage are felt; for I have been assured by the coffee planters that throughout the Kandyan country the approach of the festival is looked forward to by the employers with well-founded apprehension, as cholera and otherepidemics are so frequently introduced upon their estates by means of it. Coolies are induced to join the pilgrimage, and return infected with disease; but for the organized bands of pilgrims it is believed no coolies would go to the place. The festival may thus with perfect accuracy be said to affect injuriously every coffee estate in the island.
Hindrances to Colonization of Tissamaharama: Unless steps are taken in time, the festival appears destined to work very prejudicially in preventing the colonization of Tissamaharama..... on the progress of that colonization the
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festival cannot fail to have mischievous effects. The lands are close to the road taken by the pilgrims to and from Kataragama. Hence, when disease breaks out at the festival, it will, there can be no doubt, cause great mortality among the Tissamaharama settlers....
Mortality caused by the festival: The scenes that occasionally occur in connection with the festival and pilgrimage are very distressing. Fifteen years ago, in 1858, at which time I was stationed at Galle, a terrible outbreak took place, and I may perhaps, although it is an old story now, be permitted to quote some notes made by me at that time:- "The pilgrims when at Kataragama were attacked by cholera and other epidemics, and great mortality ensued. Whether the diseases were brought by them to Kataragama, or sprang into sudden life and energy there spontaneously, all the predisposing causes of unhealthy locality, exposure, unwholesome and scanty food, bodily weakness and weariness, and overstrung nervous excitement, being abundantly present, was disputed; but once introduced, their ravages were appalling. Regardless of the rites they had traveled so far to take part in, regardless of closest ties of kindred or friendship, the painstricken pilgrims fled for their lives, leaving in many cases their companions to perish by the waysides, and spreading pestilence wherever they went. Like wildfire, cholera spread from hamlet to hamlet, from station to station. It was piteous to see forlorn women, forsaken by their husbands, their children dying beside them wailing in all agony - short lived, but incredibly passionate of oriental grief, and recalling forcibly the awful scene of bereavement recorded in Scripture - In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were not.’” (Then he constructed an epidemiology.)
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There are many festivals in Ceylon to which many thousands of people resort on pilgrimage; but there is none so prolific in sickness and mortality as this. One chief reason for this fatal pre-eminence is the prolonged duration of the Kataragama festival extending over a whole fortnight, the object being no doubt to increase emoluments from the offerings; whereas in the other places three days are only customary, one for the pilgrim's arrival, one for whorship, and the third for setting out again homeward. Another reason is that at the other festivals most of the people are of respectable class, well-found in provisions and supplies. To Kataragama, the organizers of the pilgrimage attract, by the promise of food on the journey, the scum of the population, illconditioned, ill-clad, and utterly unprovided with supplies. These, when disease breaks out, perish in great numbers. But the chief cause is the great unhealthiness of the locality; and this nothing can remedy. So long as the place continues what it is, and it will never be materially altered, so long will the risk of engendering and spreading disease cling to the festival.' Steele's presentation of facts is compelling, to say the least. He found two basic reasons to support his proposal for containment of the pilgrimages. One was the economic impact of the epidemics that the pilgrimages caused. The other was the great suffering and mortality that the epidemics brought about. Both are undeniable and objectively observable facts of the pilgrimage. But this is not where the rub is. The problems are in his analysis, precisely, in the epidemiology of the disease.
As Steele admitted, in 1858 there was indecision regarding the point of origin of the disease. There was a suspicion that the pilgrims brought the disease to Kataragama. But this suspicion was smothered by the overwhelming cultural predisposition to pin the causal explanation down in Kataragama. Undoubtedly, some coffee estates in the hill country that did not have cholera became infected after the pilgrims returned. However, other estates already had cholera and the pilgrims from such contaminated estates carried
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the disease to Kataragama. Wesumperuma's description and analysis' shows that the coffee estates were infected with cholera as an aspect of their operational conditions. The laborers were already contaminated when they were imported. These fundamental facts were not included in Steele's epidemiology of the disease.
I suspect that their exclusion was due to at least three reasons. First, some powerful planters did not want to admit that their estates were contaminated year round because of insanitary living conditions of the laborers for rectification of this would incur heavy expenditure and this became a part of the ideology of the epidemics: they originated elsewhere. The administration accepted this ideology. Second, the planters desired to suppress the pilgrimage as it took the laborers away for over a month and their absence was expensive from the perspectives of the management. Thus, the ideology of the disease served two purposes. The administration was, as it should be under normal circumstances, cost-conscious and the ideology of the diseases gained strength when seen from an economic perspective. It also served the purposes of the plantation managers who would rather have the workers on the plantations than on pilgrimages. Third, all were culturally prejudiced towards the religion of Kataragama and socially prejudiced towards the pilgrims and the pilgrimage. For them Kataragama was a symbol of ignorance, misconceptions and superstitions. However, prejudice causes just as many misconceptions as ignorance does. The whole epidemiology of cholera was thus wrongly perceived and wrongly conceptualized.
The problems do not end with these cognitive dissonances. The administration, as shown above in Steele's statement, noticed that epidemics of cholera existed as far back as 1858. Then, too, all the problems associated with the epidemic and the pilgrimage existed just as they did after 1870. But the epidemic was not considered as an issue that deserved urgent national attention. Plantations had cholera. Pilgrims suffered and died from cholera. But there was no whistle blowing as in the 1870s. They merely tried to contain the disease by creating latrines and establishing local rules to compel
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the pilgrims to use the latrines and not to use the river for cleaning purposes, and to maintain general sanitary conditions.
What in 1870 and thereafter sensitized the administration to the ravages of the epidemics on a national scale? It was in 1870's that the coffee plantations were infected also with the coffee leaf fungus Hemileia Vastatrix. Roberts and Wickremeratne write:
It made its appearance around 1869 and extended itself erratically and widely. Smallholder production was severely affected in the 1870's and the export of native coffee began to decline. While the disease undermined the output of coffee per acre on plantations soaring market prices encouraged planters to expand the area under coffee and the volume of exports did not decline much during the 1870's. In fact, the severity of the danger was not grasped by the majority of the planters and officials till about the year 1880. From 1881 the decline was rapid and comprehensive. The coffee grown in Uva showed the greatest resistance to disease and enjoyed an Indian summer in the 1890's, but it succumbed eventually." I hypothesize that Hemileia Vastatrix sensitized the planters as well as the administrators to the impact of epidemics on the plantations far more than all the diseases ranging from Anchylostomiases, Bronchitis, Cholera, Debility, Diarrhoea, Dysentery, Enteric fever, Fever, Influenza, Malaria, Plague, Pneumonia and Smallpox that the plantation laborers suffered from, although lthough these diseases existed on the plantations from the day the laborers were imported. But any compilation of statistical information began only from 1880. Until then only scanty attention was paid to the sanitary conditions on the plantations. As discussed earlier, the planters blamed the laborers and their cultural habits and ignorance.
But the coffee fungus and the destruction of plantations that it brought about introduced the notion of epidemics on plantations with shocking ferocity. This awareness covered not only the coffee fungus, but all other agents of contamination as well - not only of the coffee plants, but also of the workers on plantations. Even the
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rest of the country received some attention through this awareness. Steele condemned Kataragama as a source of disease that would destroy the plantations, in his report of 1870, in this context. Thus sensitized and motivated to have the pilgrimages restricted, he even produced other reasons to justify his epidemiology of cholera in Kataragama and reasons for restricting pilgrimages to Kataragama. The point is that social and cultural prejudices and historical contextual compulsions produce Strange and warped perspectives in otherwise very smart and thoughtful people to perceive the phenomena of the world through warped cultural lenses and miscognize them. That is the phenomenology of Thomas Steele's, and of others who followed him, perception and analysis of the epidemics in Kataragama. Herbert White's experience in 1895 brings forth these facts and genealogies of prejudices and misconceptions buried in letters and time.
Perhaps, the Ordinance 14 of 1873, the ticket system, and the restrictions on pilgrimages to Kataragama that it resulted in, although temporarily ruinous to Kataragama, had its merits. At long last, Ordinance 14, quite unintentionally and in an unexpected and indirect manner, established conditions to develop a correct epidemiology of cholera, dysentery, and diarrhea in Kataragama. As a happy unintended consequence, a truly Scientific methodology came into being sui generis, and forced the method of elimination to identify the actual sources and causes of the epidemic.
As stated earlier, the ticket system was abolished in 1911 as, from the late 1890s onwards, perception of Kataragama also changed. The Ordinance 14 of 1873 was in force until 1911, not to protect the plantations from Kataragama but to protect the rest of the country and Kataragama from the plantations. A good law always works, no matter which way one looks at it.
Dramas
Pilgrimages to Kataragama resumed in 1895 and the detailed reports and the diaries of the colonial administrators provide a
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wealth of anthropologically and sociologically significant information. The pilgrim community, internally structurally separate because of ethnicity, religion, region and caste, was a lively body of people. The space outside the Maha Devale compound was full of life. People got drunk, quarreled, there was attempted murder, and there were tricksters, impresarios, corrupt officials and very sick people. This gathering of priests, pilgrims, villagers, traders and administrators, transients as well as residents, came to virtual extinction from 1873 because of the governmental prohibitions. But it reemerged with fresh vigor in 1895 when the restrictions were relaxed.
Let me now present a few sample extracts from the reports and diaries of colonial administrators who supervised Kataragama festivities. I quote them verbatim as their language offers opportunities to understand not only the Kataragama social and cultural milieu during the late nineteenth century through the first quarter of the twentieth century, but also what it was like to be an English bureaucrat upholding the rule of law in Kataragama (almost like an anthropologist in the field with his theories and methods), what kind of people they were and their values, and how their culture (European culture in general) encountered the socio-cultural milieu of Kataragama. I do not present their diary entries in full, as there is much repetition regarding administrative matters and not relevant for my purposes. I present only the parts necessary to make anthropological sense about what went on in Kataragama in those days.
From the diary of the Government Agent, Uva, G. A. Baumgartner, 1898:
July 21st ...In the afternoon two persons were brought up by the Police for coming without tickets and were fined one rupee each. A destitute woman has been found lying on the ground said to be ill with diarrhea. Went at once and saw her and got the Medical Officer to remove her to a house and give her food and treatment. She says she walked all the
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way from Trincomalee with a party of her friends.' They
came before the authorized date so as to escape the rules. The rest of the party departed on the 19th on a hint from the Police. This old woman, being too feeble to walk, was left
behind....
July 22nd ...There is such high wind and such clouds of dust that writing in the open shed I have to live in is difficult. The roof of the stable has been blown off in two places.
In the evening perambulated the town. Saw the Doctor with reference to the wounded woman who has had a little fever, but is better again. Asked him to discharge the destitute woman who is now well and must find some party of people from Batticaloa or Trincomalee and take care of her.
A guard from Katagamuwa comes and reports that 30 people without tickets came there from Batticaloa but were turned back by the guard. Shower of rain in the afternoon.
July 24th
Was roused by the police between 12 and 1 this morning in consequence of a stabbing, just occurred among boutique keepers from Tissamaharama. Got up and saw the woman and examined her in the presence of the accused within an hour of the occurance. She has received 5 stab wounds with a table knife. The accused Sinno' is at present living in the same boutique or booth with the woman and her husband. He says he has been on intimate terms with her for some time and that it was the husband who stabbed the woman, but gives no particulars to account for the attack. He has a cut in the bend of the little finger of his right hand, on the inner surface, which he says was inflicted by the husband. Again he does not explain how the woman has received one dangerous wound through her breast in the direction of her heart. But she is able to tell a very clear
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story against the accused and I take her evidence at once. She says that the accused tried to attract her attention by touching her leg after they had gone to bed and that she woke her husband and told him, and soon after was stabbed by the accused. The boutique is a temporary booth of small size. The table knife used has been found. Accused is a young man. Has been in the service of Mr. Hopkins, A.G.A. Hambantota, to whom I write about him.
Further witness examined between 9 to 11 a.m.
The Police in accordance with my order bring before me a large number of persons arrived without tickets. All except one show they are traders etc. not strictly taking part in the pilgrimage.
The Sergeant (Isboo) shows his incompetence and want of intelligence by prosecuting a man for easing himself in one of the permitted places.
July 25th
Went to see the tank in disrepair and abandoned fields about 2 miles off to the south. Here is a good sized tank which could hold up a supply of water no doubt sufficient for the fields. I notice two breaches in the bund. The fields belong to the temple. The trustee refused the terms on which Govt. was willing to help, and the fields are relapsing into the jungle.
The path through and beyond the tank is an interesting walk in this dull place.
July 26th
Inspected Police Station and prisoner Sinna there.
A large number of persons, mostly traders who have come without tickets are brought before me. Lectured the R.M. of Buttala as to his duty in regard to crime when his subordinates are recruites.' He acts as though it were no concern of his and all he had to do was to transmit orders
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from the Government Agent to them and report that they fail to reply. He seems very dull. Mr. Murray thought him shrewd. I have seen no signs of it. His headmen appear not to regard his authority. He fails to compel them to obey orders.
Examined register of arrivals here only 344 up to date. There are more boutique keepers and temple tenants etc. than pilgrims so far. -
A complaint is made that the trustee does not carry out the proper ceremonial. There is a perahera daily, and from yesterday there should have been two. The Trustee, however, will not spend the money required for the necessary lights, and wait till the more devout class of pilgrims come, who spontaneously furnish plenty of lights. They are the Tamils. 118
The Trustee is very plunderous, at the same time he shows no sense of responsibility, regarding the income he should get from the temple lands. Forest land with good trees is allowed to be chenard and no share of the crop, no rent is taken by the temple. He has also sold tracts of temple land as his personal property, one case is land at Karawila sold to Kataragam Arachi. I noticed these chena clearings in a walk I took. The destruction of the forest with no benefit to the temple seems very wasteful. But the people of Kataragam is allowed to clear what land they like.' There is no management.....
July 27th
Made careful inspection of surroundings of buildings and found several instances of failure on the part of the Police to detect people easing themselves in forbidden places between the houses and the river. On the other hand they captured those men for this offence and I hope the fines Rs. 2/- each will serve as warning to others.
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The work of enforcing the rules and any other business connected with this pilgrimage cannot occupy more than an hour of my time daily, and I feel that my time is being taken up here over very trivial work when it might be better employed. The tappal comes daily but everything that I should be attending to connected with other parts of the Province cannot come before me in that way, and what does come spends 6 days in going to and fro. Kataragama is in such an uninhabited part of the Province that there is no other business to be found within reach.
The woman Balahamy who was stabbed on the 24th instant is making such a good recovery that I deal with the case and try it here as District judge. I heard part of the evidence today.
July 28th
Heard rest of the evidence in the case, taking that of Balahamy at the boutique where she lives. Convicted the accused Sinno who practically admitted his guilt, and sentenced him to 15 lashes and one year's rigorous imprisonment. Forwarded record to Badulla. The accused will be escorted thither tomorrow. I am sending back on this duty two constables who have not showed themselves very vigilant in stopping nuisances.
Inspected Town. Premises kept well-swept and clean. Health of pilgrims very good, but the number here is very small. The population of settled inhabitants and temporary boutique keepers preponderates a good deal over the number of pilgrims... -
The high wind of 24th, 25th, and 26th instant (which notice were days of cyclonic disturbances) at Colombo etc. has been succeeded by calmer weather and oppressive heat with thunders.
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July 29th
... A heavy downpour of rain in the afternoon. In the evening the Police effected the capture of 16 people arriving without tickets who dodged or bribed the guards at Yala and Katagamuwa. I imposed fines of five rupees on 12 of them... I have reason to believe that many pilgrims without tickets remain on the outskirts of the town till the busy days of the festival and then try to slip in the dusk.
July 30h
Went with Siribaddana who is restoring the dagoba here. He wanted to show me the trace of a road he is making along a direct route to Tissamaharama which is now becoming So populous and prosperous a place....The trace is.....well chosen... It would greately shorten the distance as compared with the present Kataragama road.
Siribaddana's object is avowedly to attract more pilgrims to Kataragama so that he may get more help in his work of restoration....
River rising. There has evidently been rain about Passara.
July 31'
River flooded and I did not care to cross it. It begins to subside again. The Police report a complaint made by a man of Tangalla that another man had asked him to administer poison to a leading boutique keeper. The bottle containing the poison has been cursed. The Medical Officer says it contains chloroform. The Basnayaka Nilame (trustee) accompanying the procession tonight for the first time, though he ought always to do so. It is said that he will not take part unless a sufficiently large personal offering is made to him. Tonight the procession was more imposing, there being more clamour, more music and lights and larger crowds. The lights were supplied not by the Temple but by
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Sinnathanby, of Tissamaharama, a liberal supporter of ceremonies here.
August 01 I heard the P.C. case in which the complainant said accused asked him to administer poison to another. It was proved that the complainant had quaralled with the accused with whom he was living, and had left him before the alleged request was made, also that the chloroform belonged to the complainant).' I discharged the accused. I had no power to punish complainant summarily and he promptly disappeared from Kataragama. A fine of Rs. 10/- as compensation to the accused would have been better than nothing, but if the false charge is only made serious enough, the Magistrate cannot award compensation. I fail to see a reason for this. If I had myself proceeded against the complainant this would have involved a trial in Badulla - a journey of over 100 miles for the parties.
Number of arrivals recorded is 775 only... I have looked through the tickets and find that those issued at Galle and Colombo and also 3 at Jaffna do not give the names. The names ought to be inserted to prevent a ticket being transferred to a person suffering with disease or otherwise unfit to be allowed to take part and for other
CaSOS...
The Batticaloa people are the most determined to get to Kataragam inspite of all obstructions.
August 02"
Went to Karawila, a village just 3 miles from Kataragam on the Tanamalwila road. The Basnayaka Nilame has sold this as his private property though it is temple land. The purchaser is Bas Appu, Aratchi of Kataragam and he gave a promissory note for Rs. 300/- as payment of the purchase money.
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The forest, which is poor, has not a good tree to the acre near Kataragam greatly improves before Kataragam is reached.
The Aratchi was with me and showed me the eastern boundary of his land, 1% miles North of the village. Within his purchase the soil seems more fertile. The forest has good trees in it. Sawing was taking place within 4 of a mile within his boundary. This village formerly had inhabitants and paddy fields but went to ruin and was abandoned. The Aratchi has got some families to live there in about half a dozen huts, has restored the breaches in the tank and got part of the former fields again under cultivation, some 5 acres. There will be 2 or 3 times this extent in the future. Judging by the thick stubble the last crop was a good one. The restoration of the village is a very good thing. A well is being sunk. I asked where the other boundaries mentioned in his Deed were. The western was said to be four miles away. The northern and Southern were both pointed out as lying to the North and said to be 1 % miles away.
This gives an area of say 8 square miles alienated by the Temple Trustee for a promissory note for Rs. 300/-
I mention these matters as a specimen of the management of the temple property by the present and past trustees. Of course a great part of the tract of the land sold, in this arid part of the country, is not fit for any kind of cultivation but making allowances for that there is timber easily accessible from the road that will soon recoup the purchaser. The transaction was a spendthrift one besides being illegal....
In the afternoon inspected precincts of town and found nuisances had been more freely committed in forbidden places. The Sergeant has had them covered with earth. The pilgrims are now at their largest number and ceremonies continue till after midnight and it is very difficult for the Police to watch every possible place all night long. Got the Aratchi to furnish a statement of the tiled houses here.
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Tom-tom beating, shouting, chank blowing, jingling of bells seem to go on all night long, the festival' now being at its height.
August 03" Ceremony of the cutting of water of the river took place about 7 a.m. The whole troop of pilgrims march up the bed of the river about 4 of a mile. The water is quite shallow 6 ins., to one foot deep. Then they march back again after the ceremony which I have not seen. On the way back they throw water as plentifully as they can over themselves and one another with continuous yelling and shouting.
Some further religious ceremonies took place during the day, which was the last of the festival.
The people began to leave and by evening I suppose % had left. ...
The charges framed against the Basnayaka Nilame are failure to render accounts or to give attention to orders of the District Committee on the subject neglect of temple buildings.
Failure to provide food to temple tenants while working at Kataragam, the tenants being legally entitled to such maintenance.
The last account rendered by the trustees was to June 1897.
The temple buildings are in a neglected state. Some plastering and whitewashing has been done but not completed to the chief building. Heaps of debris of mortar and rubbish are still left lying round the walls. Everything about the place looks uncared for, unfinished and decaying. ...
August 04th
Left Kataragama for Tissamaharama.... I was sorry to hear the death of the old Brahmin priest
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Sri Kesapuri Swami, of Kataragama, in Colombo. His body has been sent for burial at Kataragama and passed us on the way. It is placed in a sitting posture in a box. I lately wrote to him regarding a complaint he made against Buttala headmen, sending him the Korala's answer to his claim for his remarks.
August 10th
... Saw Mr. Arunachalam Regr Genl at his request regarding the application of the Hindoos to leave the Kataragam pilgrimage freed from restriction on the number of pilgrims...
. Baumgartner, 1899:
July 08th
The R.M. here is slow and indifferent, and the villagers take their advantage. He informs me that he has just received orders from the Buddhist Prov' Committee to suspend the Kataragama Basnayaka Nilame. This was a step that should have been taken months ago. It is impossible on the very eve of the festival to remove the Basnayaka and advise the R.M. to defer the step till the festival is over, but to keep an account of the offerings received. ...
July 09*
... A barber from Trincomalee cut his throat with razor and nearly killed himself through refusing medical treatment for the wound which he inflicted in pursuance of
2 VOW.
... I received a petition from the Basnayaka Nilame complaining of steps being taken for his suspension without informing of the charges. I enquire into this matter. The District Committee appear first to have discussed the complaints and come to a conclusion, and after that they
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told the Basnayaka Nilame what the charges against him were, and asked for his reply which was sent on with their report to the Provil. Committee. There is a conflict in statements made by the R.M. and by the Chairman of the Provl Committee as to the date when the order of suspension was made. They believe the R.M.' that it was only made last week, not months ago.
Neither Committee pay attention to ordinary rules of procedure or the requirement of the law, and consequently hardly any step they take will be found valid in Court. They have a complicated system of work which it would require great care to carry out correctly in steps for removing a trustee or electing a successor. ...
On the 19th and 20 July some sports took place in which all comers competed and I think more interest was taken in them than in the religious ceremonies. People seem to get much satisfaction out of the sight. ...
Siribaddana Upasaka, who is looking after the restoration of the Kiri Vehera, has since last year got on with the cutting of a road from Tihawa. Some miles on..the Hambantota side of the boundary have been cleared with permission of the A.G.A. Hambantota. As he is an honest man, who is devoting himself to work connected with the temple. I give him a certificate which he wants to assist him in collecting funds for making the road.
Large crowds of pilgrims in the place, all very orderly. The perehara is now carried on with much greater ceremony, more music, torches, noise and enthusiasm than before.
Tamils supply all the expenses on 2 or 3 days.
July 23rd
The ceremony of cutting the water in the river took place this morning, but I did not wait for it, having a long ride of 22 miles before me....
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G. A. Baumgartner, 1901:
July 20th Completed the remaining 9 miles from Galge to Kataragam this morning. Had been disturbed in the night by the growling of a leopard close to the camp at Galge.
Found the R. M. and Medical Officer and Police at Kataragam - place healthy and clean, no change noticeable except the chena cultivation has extended further along the Buttala road. This is in temple land. ...
There is one person in the Doctor's hands ill with pneumonia. I visited him. He is being properly cared for.
July 22nd I made enquiry into the petition of Imam B. D. Mohamadu Sa, who having obtained a written appointment from leading Mohamedans in the Province, claims the Mohamedan enclosure were against Masta Ali Sa who is in occupation, and who claims inheritance Imam Ali Sa, deceased brother. The latter was put in possession by Mr. Fisher.
These two parties were disputing a year ago, and Mr. Horsburgh took the key from Mohamadu Sa and gave it to Masta Ali Sa.
I must uphold the right by possession of the latter and I tell them so. But the question remains and will have to be settled in Court, whether the tenure is by inheritance or by selection. The person who has been selected seems a much more respectable man than the other. ...
July 23rd
... I went and made some further enquiry regarding the Mohamedan's dispute and settled the ownership of some movable articles, which I caused to be handed over by Masta Ali Sa to Mohamadu Sa. Both parties are living in the same house, and as offerings are being made, there is imminent
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risk of the breach of the peace. I advised Mohamadu Sa to quit, which he readily consented to do. He will apply to the Court.
I made a sketch showing the temple buildings at the south end of Kataragam, as there is another dispute regarding the Samadi Madam and the question of its position will be important.
The patient with pneumonia dies this afternoon. Rs. . 5 has to be paid for the coolies burying the body.
July 24th
... The leading headman here had a wrangle that nearly came to blows this evening, arising out of a caste question and the use of a cup for drinking.
July 25th
I visited Tissa in the Southern Province in order to see the new road traced by Siribaddana, the most honest and the most public spirited man at Kataragam. His clear singleness of purpose for the benefit of the place has secured him contributions towards the road, and towards rest-sheds for pilgrims. ...
July 27th
In the afternoon a pilgrim, sickly and without a ticket had a fit and died between the temple and the river. Complaint was made by Manikku Kurukal of his ejectment from the Muthu Linga Kovil. ...
July 28th
... Held an enquiry into complaint of Manikku Kurukal. Illegally ejected under cover of process of law from the temple of which he was in possession as rightful owner. The matter must be put right and I would use my influence
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to secure this now, while at Kataragam, but do not because I think it is better that nothing should be done without due authority, and without such record binding on parties as will present further mistake and dispute.
I have, however, adviced Nayanapuri (put in possession by Fiscal) to allow Manikku the temporary use of the Muthu Linga Kovil for tomorrow only, as that is the chief day for the ceremonies performed there by the Batticaloa pilgrims.
Pilgrims are now arriving in large numbers. A death occurred of a sickly devotee who refused food. Clamour and disturbance took place this evening during the procession of the Perahera to the Kirivehere. The Police and leading men quieted it.
We had some sports this evening which were largely entered into.
July 30th
... Made enquiry into last night's disturbance. The Basnayaka Nilame is solely to blame for it and has no excuse. Last year he did the same thing, which cause such offence to the Batticaloa pilgrims, namely allowing a perahera to the Kirivehera before the last night of the festival. This perahera is to commemorate the visit of the God to the scene of his conflict with Asura at the Kirivehera. He finds the Asura dead, and having come near a corpse, he must purify himself by bathing. Hence the ceremony in the river commemorative of his bathing, must follow immediately after the perahera, this is to say the perahera must be the last thing before the diyakepuna. But the diyakepuma does not take place till the 31* inst: so that the perahera to the Kirivehera last night was quite out of place.
Last year the Basnayaka Nilame promised Mr. Horsburgh he would not again hold any perahera to the
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Kirivehera till the night before the diyakepuna. He has broken his faith and the offence caused might have led to riots.
It was not without equivocation that he at last admitted what I have set out. I now got him to sign agreement never to allow a perahera to the Kirivehera till the last night before the diyakepuna to the great satisfaction of the Batticaloa Tamils. It was also recorded that his personal fee on the occasion should be Rs. 15. A copy of the record is given to the leading Tamils.
His motive for allowing the perahera last night was doubtless again. The irregularity subverted the whole festival in the eyes of the Tamils. They will conduct the perahera again tomorrow, the night proper for it.
More sports for the public this afternoon. At the tugof-war the Tamils beat the Police and the Sinhalese beat the Tamils.
July 31'
The last day of the festival. The ceremony of cutting the water in the river (diyakepuna) took place at 8 a.m. The Kapurala officiating has then to be in seclusion, being brought from the river enclosed in a kind of case of tallipot until after certain ceremonies in the Walliamma Kovil and MahaDevale, where, with the women and other officials engaged in these final ceremonies, he waits and takes a meal. He is then brought out, his face still shrouded from view. He is led up to a tree and then touches a bull, which is a kind of Scapegoat. It is supposed to die in consequence, which would have been the fate of any person who might have looked upon the face of the Kapurala before his evil influence expended itself on the bull.
The pilgrims rapidly quitted Kataragam. ...
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F.H. Price, 1902:
January 04th
Mr. Arunachalam writes to me privately about alleged mismanagement of Kataragam temple. He says that the revenue of the temple are not spent for the benefit of the temple and that the daily services (of which there should be at least three) are not held and that for days together the temple doors remain closed. Suggests that the management of the temples be transferred to Hindus. This cannot be as it is a Buddhist temporality. But Mr. Arunachalam's complaints are, I have reason to know, not without foundation and I have replied to assure him that I will do what I can to give effect to his wishes. Accordingly I have sent for the Basnayaka Nilame (whose advanced age has impaired his energy).
Janyary 06'
Mr. P. Arunachalam wants me to order the Basnayaka Nilame of Kataragama not to touch the offerings at least of the July and November Festivals and that cash offerings be counted in the presence of some Government Officer and be kept at the Kachcheri (or in the custody of a person nominated by me) for the payment of the expenses of the daily services of which the Hindus are obliged to undertake. I reply that I am not prepared to interfere with the offerings in the manner he suggests. (It would not be legal). I will however put pressure on the Provincial Committee acting under the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance to see that the B. N. does not make improper use of the offerings. And further I will take action when at Kataragama next month to ascertain myself what the offerings actually amount to.
Mr. A. also asks for abolition of system restricting number of pilgrims, or failing this that at least 7000 be allowed. In reply I inform him that the number for the festival
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in July 1902 has already been fixed at 2000.
Further, Mr. A. expresses a hope that I have arranged
to take over the road (made by private subscriptions from
the devout) from Tissa to Kataragama. ...
July 16th
... (L)istened to complaints of Batticaloa Hindus against the Buddhist Basnayaka Nilame against maladministration of funds...
... In the afternoon rode to boundary of Hambantota District about three miles off, along along road opened by an Upasakarala' who devotes his time to work of merit connected with Kataragam. On the road as far as Tossamaharama (10 miles) he has spent about Rs. 2000/- collected entirely by public subscription. (I gave him Rs. 50/- from D.R.C. funds).' He is also restoring the Dagoba, as well as building a preaching hall.
The above shows that the administrators were caught in a tangle of duty and personal and cultural preferences. The bureaucratic duty compelled them to be objective and follow the rules - procedural and substantive - to the letter. But they were plagued by physical discomfort, boredom, and a sense of forlornness in a strange environment that was revolting as it was astonishing, depressing as it was entertaining. Some were keen observers of cultural details that they regarded with an ethnographic fascination. Others simply ignored what the natives did and merely carried out their duties, and in the process recorded useful information.
The diary entries of the colonial administrators show a number of features of the Kataragama community as it existed at the turn of the century, some seventy-five or so years after the fall of the Kandyan administration and the subsequent rebellion of 1818. Administratively, although the authority of the Disaves and Rate Mahatmayas came under the superior authority of the colonial
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Government Agent, although the latter abolished the Bathme positions in the temple administration and although the macro level administration structurally changed, the micro level administration remained virtually unchanged. The Basnayaka Nilame (trustee) dealt with the Kataragama temple complex and even the ritual procedures as the tradition demanded, and in selfinterest.
Perhaps, the abolition of the Bathme positions and diminution of the authority of the R.Ms rendered any control over his activities even looser than before. The colonial officers established a District Committee to supervise the conduct of the temple administrators but, to the frustration of the administrators, the Basnayaka Nilame was a member of that committee, rendering its supervisory role meaningless. This loosening of the administration of the peripheral institutions became further complicated by the reluctance of the administrators such as Steele and Baumgartner to tamper with the local traditions. All this was to the advantage of the Basnayaka Nilame, whoever held that position. It is apparent that the incumbent Basnayaka Nilame was not even an official appointee. However, he managed to sell temple land to the extent of eight square miles. Baumgartener took action against the illegal sale.
On the other hand, no one could sell the land belonging to the temple as such sales were prohibited by the Buddhist Temporalities Act. In that case, Baumgarten could take action against the Basnayaka for fraud, a crime under the British Common Law applicable in Ceylon, as any sale of land belonging to the temple by anyone was invalidated by the Act. The administrators could set new rules and make new demands from the Basnayaka Nilame but they could and did go only thus far.
It is also evident that the Basnayaka Nilame paid little or no attention to the condition of the temples. They were, until now, dilapidated. Just eighty years ago, Davy predicted total collapse and disappearance of the entire temple complex. But they survived,
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the construction quality of those buildings being better than Davy expected. However, all the colonial administrators agreed that the buildings were in a state of utter neglect. Baumgarten notes in 1898 that there was trash around the Maha Devale. What is interesting here is not the obvious fact of the dilapidated condition but, given the fear and affection the residents of the village had for the god, why they neglected it. By 1898, the temple administration had begun effecting certain renovations. Yet, throughout the 1898 festive season, the rubbish resulting from renovations were left around the temple. The rubbish and the pre-1898 neglect - even when income had increased exponentially from the mid 1800s - signify a certain mindset in the temple administration: indifference. As Gombrich and Obeyesekere state, since the fall of the Kandyan kingdom and the failure of the 1818 rebellion, the Sinhala people lost confidence in the god. The god failed in his duties as a guardian of the island - the kingdom of Lanka. But the institution survived and began to thrive within just a single generation. The shaken Sinhala faith never returned to its original glory. Yet, the Tamil faith in Muruga remained the same. They continued to come although they could not do anything about the temples as they had no authority. They were joined by the Indian Tamils just as soon as the coffee plantations were established. And the Basnayaka and others who had the access to the growing income plundered it. The Basnayaka also took the advantage of an old rule: that he had the authority to allow individuals to cultivate the land belonging to the temple. As the peripheral authority gradually lost its clout, and the customary laws weakened, the Basnayaka started selling the unmarketable land to which no one could hold legal title.
It is in this context that the Hindus began complaining. The most authoritative voice came from Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, the then Registrar General of the colony, an Oxford educated senior civil servant, lawyer, member of the small community of Ceylonese literati, and a member of the most powerful and elite Tamil Hindu family in the colony. The Hindus knew that they collectively
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donated a large sum of money and other valuable objects, but no orre accounted for what happened to this income. The temples were decaying. The Basnayaka neglected his duties regarding the temples and the festivities. He would even wait until wealthy Hindus offered to provide lights for the perahara. He had to be coaxed with special financial offers to walk in the perehara. He even sold the property of the Maha Devale. Arunachalam, and later the notary from Batticaloa, demanded accountability and even pleaded to the colonial government that the temple administration be transferred to the Hindus. Arunachalam even obtained an order to seal the tills - in whatever the form they existed - and the donations counted before governmental authorities to ensure that these funds were not plundered.
Interestingly, there is a confusion of tongues in this conflict. Arunachalam's voice in this matter was the voice of modernity, demanding a European style bureaucratic administration, what Max Weber would call the rational legal authority. But the temple administration operated on the basis of the traditional customs and authority according to which the temple administrators had great leeway and were not accountable to anyone with regard to the income of the Maha Devale. Also, it was through this income that the administrators and the priests of the pre-colonial regime were remunerated for the services rendered. As I discussed earlier, this income, traditionally, did not amount to much and it is unlikely that anyone in the Kandyan administration even imagined the kind of crowds that colonial Kataragama attracted during the festive season.
Further, the traditional festivities did not involve the Hindu trappings such as special processual presentations at the Valliamma kovil, and later at many other kovils at the madamas: the so-called nadattu (maintenance) stops. Customarily, these did not belong in the orthodox festival procedure. They were extraneous, "newfangled if you will, institutions that mushroomed only recently because of the unprecedented Hindu involvement in Kataragama.
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The administration was unwilling to take these within their responsibilities. The Basnayaka had to be specially compensated for these services. There was nothing that Baumgartner or others could do to compel him.
Further more, the Basnayaka and the kapuralas never had to work as hard prior to the arrival of large crowds that demanded services of much higher intensity than ever before. As tradition allowed the temple administration and the priests to split the collections in the tills as remuneration for services rendered without having to be accountable to anyone they had no concept of what Mr. Arunachalam was expecting them to do as the latters 2xpectations were grounded on alien principles of administration rather than the traditional principles that they adhered to.
Still further, there is another traditional feature that comes through all this neglect and decay, and non-performance of his duties by the Basnayake. While the modern bureaucrats who noticed the neglect and non-performance of ritual duties, the devotees, except those influenced by the modern bureaucratic norms, apparently, did not notice any of this. It was the modern bureaucrats and mechanistic interpretations of the customs that created a part of this administrative problem. In the Kandyan kingdom, the kings often neglected the temples and, perhaps, if they felt lazy, they chose not to show up at the rituals. The Basnayakas of Kataragama did not have to be present in all the peraharas. Their presence in the first and the last peraharas were mandatory and in between they could use their discretion to or not to walk in the procession. The rituals were calendrical and had to be performed as the tradition demanded. But the participation in them by the top officials was not mechanical or perfect. Rather, their culturally given discretionary privileges introduced into the rituals an element of indecision. If the king or the local chief executive - the Basnayaka Nilame - walked in every procession so much the better but they did not have to. When they did for whatever the reason the ritual became that much more elegant and charismatic. Their participation in the rituals was partly religious, partly aesthetic, and through
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the latter, partly political. Indecision and imprecision in and unpredictability of their participation left room for aestheticing and politicizing of the ritual. Sporadic participation established authority rather than weaken it. This was something that the rational bureaucratic norms did not account for as the rationality of bureaucracy involved clockwork precision and dutiboundness. The conflict between the traditional authority of the Basnayaka Nilame and the rational authority of the modern bureaucrat arose from the fact that the two principles of authority were founded on two opposing principles: vagueness, inexactness and unpredictability of the former and the clockwork precision and complete predictability of the latter. In the former, the vagueness reiterated the discretionary powers of the official that the other participants in the ritual could harness through allegiance to him. In the latter, the precise delineation of authority gave the bureaucrat a tremendous power to compel his constituency while binding him to rational legal norms of conduct. -
At the periphery of the colonial administrative structure, political and administrative authority was weak, indecisive, and open to manipulation, exploitation, and justification. Practically all colonial administrators were plagued by what they saw as highly erratic behavior on the part of the Basnayaka Nilame but were reluctant to upset the apple cart in Kataragama. This condition was particularly severe as the Colombo-based colonial administration, focused as it was on the plantations and the export oriented economy that it engendered, paid little attention to these areas in far away places that had no relevance to colonial purposes.
Within these administrative structures and strictures, and contrary to the beliefs in harsh colonial attitudes towards the natives, the colonial administrators had expressed remarkable compassion towards the destitutes and the sick. While Steele expressed utter contempt towards the majority of the pilgrims (the scum of the population) and all were appalled by the complete absence of any sense of cleanliness and excretory restraint among the pilgrims, they also promptly attended to the needy and did whatever they
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could to alleviate suffering. The administrators had taken an interest in whether the poor had anything to eat and compelled the Kataragama traditional authorities and Chettiyars to feed the needy. We do not hear of traditional measures to attend to these situations, probably because these problems did not arise in the pre-colonial Kataragama. The promptness in care-giving might have been a part of the colonial bureaucratic norm but it went beyond that. There was continuity in the attention paid to a needy person as the administrators returned to them to find out about their welfare. Even when the pilgrims abandoned their sick and the elderly, the administrators took them under their care. This comes to relief as we read in our daily newspapers today saddening accounts of utter neglect of the needy, and the politico-economic exploitation of their need - as in the strikes in hospitals organized by the lumpen workers-by using it as a bargaining chip in trade union action for a few more rupees in their salaries, in the independent Sri Lanka where the natives have taken over the administration.' This contemporary cold-blooded and ruthless exploitation of the suffering of the sick and the poor by our fire-breathing socialist and politically manipulated trade unions compare poorly with the diligence and warmth that the foreign colonial administrators showed towards the poor and needy in spite of their social and cultural, even ethnic, prejudices. o
Although the community of pilgrims preferred ethnic aggregations in the shelters, socially they were rather loosely organized. The majority during the festive season was Tamil Hindu and the traditional administrators had awaited their arrival for the wealthy among them were very generous in their expressions of piety and fervor. The colonial administrators do not report any ethnic clashes or clashes among the Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims. In the social sphere, there were exceptionally high levels of social harmony. The community was in a carnival mood. The arrack renters, a social and economic phenomenon that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, lawfully sold their beverage in Kataragama. Some organized gambling dens, unlawful as they
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were, and provided entertainment to the risk-takers and spendthrifts. Loose women who lurked in the jungle during the day came in with the dusk. Some men fell for other men's wives and suffered dire consequences. There were conspiracies to commit murder. All during the day and all night long the sounds of drums, conches, horns, bells, haro harahs and other cries of religious fervor rang, and the kavadi dancers strutted round the temple fulfilling their vows. Every festive night, when the laws permitted and the pilgrims gathered, the processions marched to the rhythms of the place, despite serious conflicts between the Hindu ritual experts and the Basnayaka Nilame, regarding the ritual calendar and ritual procedures that signified astrological confusions as well as ancient rivalries. After Sunset, it all happened in the light of the waxing moon merging with the orange glow of the torches, in this village in the jungle.
20" Century Kataragama
The twentieth century dawned on Kataragama and brought with it many changes. The ticket system was relaxed and withdrawn in 1925 and there was free access to Kataragama. The annual pilgrimages increased in size and vigor. Many rituals of worship were added to the existing structures. Among these were body piercing, hook hanging and fire walking. The nineteenth century administrators never mentioned these activities in Kataragama. But in the early decades of the twentieth century they were astonished by these rituals. Body piercing and hook hanging existed among the Hindus even in the late eighteenth century. James Cordiner, a Minister of the Church of England, arrived in Ceylon on 7 July 1799, and spared no time to make observations of the country and note them down. He witnessed what we today call "hook-hanging” in Colombo:
The ceremony called Swinging to recover cast(e), which is common over all India,' is likewise sometimes practiced by the Malabars in Ceylon. One, however, which took place at Columbo on the ninth August, 1799, having been attended
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with disagreeable circumstances, government interposed its authority to prevent the ceremony in future, and it has not been repeated there since that time.
A strong beam was fixed upright in the ground, and a transverse piece of wood moved on a pivot on top of it. To this hooks, ropes, and pulleys, were attached for the purpose of suspending the victim. In the first place a sheep was sacrificed, and raised by the tackling to the summit of the pole. When it was lowered down the devotee was laid on his breast, and two large hooks inserted through the integuments of his back, just under the shoulders. While the necessary incisions were making, a great noise was kept up with drums and pipes, to drown the cries of the sufferer, if pain should chance to draw forth an involuntary complaint. Unfortunately too deep a cut had been made in the center of the cross-beam, and it giving away, the man fell down soon after he had been suspended, and was killed on the spot. The people immediately attributed this fatal accident to the evil eye of a Moorman, who was standing near the scene of the ceremony; and attacking him with fury, they would certainly have put him to death had he not been rescued from their hands by the interposition of some English officers. Many of the Indian spectators, affecting to feel the displeasure of the Almighty, cut their sides with knives, and put pieces of iron through them, in the same manner that the hooks were inserted in the victim. That evening the yearly feast was not celebrated, and its place was assumed by lamentation and mourning.' Arumugam Rasiah claims that this activity was invented in 1942, in Kataragama.' Obviously, as informative and likeable as he is, he is wrong there. It is more likely that the activity was introduced to Kataragama after the colonial government relaxed the regulations of these activities that they established in 1799 - soon after they expelled the Dutch and took over the Maritime Provinces - and as they relaxed the ticket system since they began
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to control cholera effectively. The Dutch report filed in 1765, referred to in Chapter Two and above, does not mention any hook hanging in Kataragama. Therefore it can be deduced from these that it was introduced to Kataragama for the first time in the early decades of the twentieth century. L. W. Shrader observed hook hanging in 1907:
July 17:h ... A vow requiring no common endurance I witnessed at the Perahara. The votary was capering and plunging wildly ahead of the procession, Straining at a cord acting on a couple of hooks fixed in the flesh and tendons of his back This arrangement was unaccompanied by loss of blood, as far as I could see, but must have been peculiarly uncomfortable.'
In the following year he reported on body piercing for the first time:
August 05th
... The usual self imposed vows are being performed. This morning I watched two men with pins running through their cheeks into the corterie of the mouth, going through the process of having them drawn out by the Kapurala, a one-eyed Sinhalese man. Sacred ash was then deposited on the punctures and dabbed into their open mouths....”
In 1930 E.T. Millington reported, as far as I know, for the first time, on fire walking:
August 07th
Before dawn Iarose and visited the scene of the Fire Walking ceremony. In the precincts of Maha Devale, a very large pile of wood was blazing fiercely. The length of the heap I estimated as about 7 yards and the width 2% yards.
At intervals it was raked over to get an even fire, showers of while hot sparks filling the air. A large crowd had formed a circle round the fire, and those who were to walk through assembled at the main entrance to the Devale.
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Just after the dawn the logs had been consumed and the fire had become a level mass of glowing embers. Amidst shouts of Haro Hara one man dashed through the fire, but was not allowed another turn, having so I was informed started before he should have done. Later I saw about 50 men and a few women go through - the majority ran and some remarkably quickly. One man with a spear through his tongue and a good deal of faith went through at a trot 4 times. It must be remembered that a large number of those who go through are Tamil coolies and have never been accustomes to wearing any protection for their feet, and they would naturally tend to be hard, I had heard that occasionally a man has been known to roll, but no one came forward today....' But, as Obeyesekere noticed, fire-walking in Karagarama is older than that although the administrators did not pay attention to it, and we will examine it later. In any event, it is easy to notice how Kataragama festivities became gradually elaborated to their present shape. The elaborations entered the scene as the colonial government relaxed the various restrictions and the community of devotees became more and more confident in the possibilities of showing their devotion to the god as extravagantly as they could. We do not hear of any enhancements of the Buddhist practices. The explosion of devotional fervor occurred in the Tamil Hindu segments of the community of pilgrims.
Differences
However, all was not well in every corner. Gradually, differences began to appear. These conflicts were not between the Sinhala and Tamil pilgrims. Rather they were between the Hindu ritual experts, bureaucrats and politicians, and the Buddhist temple administrators, in three specific contexts. One was regarding the premises. The second involved the ritual procedures. The third was about temple management. Let me discuss the conflicts over premises first.
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In 1897, the Brahmans of the Teivaiyanaiamman kovil and the Basnayaka Nilame had a dispute. Baumgartner wrote in 1897:
July 19th ...the dispute between the Brahmins and the Buddhists, and made plans of buildings concerned. The Brahmins want to enlarge one of their buildings and extend it close up to the famous bo tree. This is objected to by the Buddhists with good reason. The building however was at first allowed to proceed by the latter for some time, and was not stopped till the walls reached a height of 4 feet. This was in 1893, and then the Basnayaka Nilame prevented further work, and both parties began petitioning. ...
The dispute is a foolish one. The Brahmins want to build much too near the bo tree, quite unnecessarily. The Buddhists unnecessarily object even to a reasonable enlargement of the Brahmins' buildings, and it seems a point of honour on either side not to yield an inch.' The dispute indicates that the Hindus were beginning to resist the authority of the Basnayaka Nilame. It also indicates the growing power of the Hindus in Kataragama. Perhaps, they were never more powerful than during the colonial era. As Obeyesekere pointed out, after the fall of the Kandyan kingdom and the failed rebellion of 1818, the Sinhala Buddhists were disillusioned with Kataragama Deiyo, one of the guardian deities of Lanka. Thus, they virtually abandoned Kataragama.' Just as they did that Tamil Hindus and Sufi Muslims began to come to Kataragama in everincreasing numbers. This was partly due to the arrival of Indian pilgrims in larger numbers because of the relaxation of traveling between the two colonies, India and Ceylon. Then, as discussed earlier, there was large-scale migration of South Indian, mostly Tamil, coolies from 1830 onwards as the colonial government inaugurated the coffee plantations. These pilgrims sustained Kataragama. But the largest body of pilgrims came from the east coast, mostly from Batticaloa and thereabouts. The influx of Hindus and the withdrawal of Buddhists gave greater authority to the
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Hindus. Consequently the Brahmans who occupied the Teivayanaiamman temple became more assertive and decided to carry on with the expansion of their compound and the buildings in it.
The second is also an extension of the above. The burgeoning activities in Kataragama were largely the work of the Batticaloa Tamils. They showed a certain tenacity regarding their right to come to Kataragama during the festive season. They were not willing to go by the commands from the colonial authorities. Thomas Steele noticed that even in 1872 the Batticaloa Tamils resisted colonial authority and refused to adopt the quarters provided by the authorities. When the ticket system was imposed the Batticaloa Tamils were the most resistant and frequent 'miscreants' in the eyes of the administrators as hordes of them attempted to enter Kataragama without tickets.
The Batticaloa Tamil Hindus also donated lavishly to the Maha Devale. In return they expected some say in the ritual procedures. In 1898, Thomas Steele received a complaint that the trustee (Basnayaka Nilame) did not carry out proper ceremonials. He cut back on the number of peraharas appropriate for the day. He would not spend money to obtain the necessary lights. He waited for generous Tamils to come forward and provide these lights. In the same year Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, the then Registrar General and leading Tamil Hindu politician, intervened for the first time to remove restrictions on Hindu participation in the festivities.
In 1901, Baumgartner encountered another dispute. This was regarding the ritual calendar. As the note on July 30, 1901 given in the previous section shows, there was a disturbance in the night of the 29th of July. The Batticaloa Tamils had recast the festivities in terms of their own definitions. Accordingly, Kiri Vehera was where the Asura was killed. The god visits this spot only on the last night of the festival. He finds the Asura dead, and is caught up in death pollution. The water cutting the following morning is his bathing and purification ritual.
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Nothing could be further from the Buddhist imagination of what Kiri Vehera was. The Basnayaka Nilame and other Buddhists probably resented the imposition of this new definition on the festivities. The Sinhala tradition, as the Dutch Report of 1765 describes, did not involve any connection with the Kiri Vehera. The festive procession occurred in the streets of the village in front of the Maha Devale and that route never changed. The god's visit to Kiri Vehera, defined as Suran Kottan, was purely a Tamil invention. I pointed out earlier that the Muruga theology entered the Sinhala Kanda Kumara beliefs from about the seventeenth century, but the transposition of the Kanda Kumara/Valli dramas in Kataragama had not received ritual recognition. It is likely that the Tamil Hindus introduced the full romance and the killing of the Asura into the ritual life of Kataragama in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and not before. Having imposed their version the Tamils expected the Basnayaka to follow suit. But, from his conduct, it is evident that he never considered it his duty to follow these extraneous rituals. This enraged the Tamils as they also made valuable offerings to the Maha Devale and spent lavishly on the festivities. As Marcel Mauss pointed out, gifts are not just giveaways. They entail expectations of reciprocity. Here, they entailed a right to intervene and influence. The Batticaloa Tamils claimedit as their right since the administrators of the Maha Devale accepted all those lavish gifts because the Basnayaka Nilame found them desirable. Then he found the gradual increase in Tamil influence and their demands for reciprocity offensive and refused to comply with their ritual procedures. Finally, he hesitantly signed an agreement as Baumgartner required him to do and the Batticaloa Tamils were pacified.
In 1903, Price faced two crises. First, the Batticaloa Tamils had developed a customary right to conduct the last perahara, and this year the ritual calendars of Hindus and Buddhists clashed:
The harmony of the festival was very nearly broken on the last day by the vacillation of the Basnayake Nilame. It is unwritten law at Kataragama that the Batticaloa Tamils
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should conduct the last perahara on the evening before the festival breaks up. There was some discrepancy between the Hindu and Buddhist calendars in regard to dates - a meeting of both parties was consequently held, the correct time calculated and all agreed the final perahara should take place on the 7th night and the cutting of water on the 8th morning. The perahara, accordingly took place and a very picturesque sight it was ...
This morning (8') the Basnayaka Nilame comes with his supporters and declares it impossible to hold the cutting of waters till tomorrow 9th according to the Buddhist calendar. The Tamils, of course, were furious and it is fortunate, perhaps, that the B. Nilame 'reconsidered his position and gave in without much delay. The results otherwise might have been serious.' Why did the Basnayaka Nilame change his mind? Couldn't he disagree during the previous meeting? Clearly, he was compelled to agree with Tamils by Price although Price does not mention it. But the Basnayaka Nilame returned to Price to withdraw from the agreement. It is likely that the others in the devale administration, realizing what this decision would do to their authority over the ritual procedures, urged him to withdraw his assent to the decision. Price, who saw the kapuralas as cheats carrying out a huge masquerade, disregarded the Basnayaka Nilame's attempt to withdraw from the agreement, and, more than likely, compelled him to stand by his word given the previous day.
But the more significant dissatisfaction was with the way the temporalities belonging to the Maha Devale were managed by the traditional administrative system. This was the third context of conflicts. This situation emerged even in the 1870s. Recalling Thomas Steel's statements cited in the previous section, the colonial administrators found the Basnayaka Nilame corrupt.
In 1903, Tamil Hindus complained again. As quoted in the previous section Ponnambalam Arunachalam complained to F. H.
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Price regarding the mismanagement of the revenue of the temple, and urged Price to transfer the management of the temple complex to the Hindus. Price found this request untenable as Kataragama was a Buddhist temporality. Arunachalam also urged Price to take over the road to Tissa, presumably the one that Upasaka Siribaddana was constructing over the years. Attempts by Price to influence the Commissioner in charge of the Buddhist Temporalities and get a ruling from him to impose the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance upon Kataragama administration failed. Price disagreed with the ruling. The Commissioner, F.S. Crawford, did not want to offend the Buddhists. However Crawford had already informed the government about the indiscipline in the management of vihara and devala property.'
In 1903, the Batticaloa Tamils also complained about accounting practices of the Maha Devale:
... The Batticaloa Tamils who furnish the bulk of the offerings are insisting on a proper account being kept by the temple authorities while there is every reason to suppose that the efforts of the said authorities have been directed against such an account - the check therefore may not be quite accurate, but it will be a fairly good guide to the sums collected.'
I have little doubt that Arunachalam set the tone for this demand. It is even likely that he invented it. In any event, the Tamils from Batticaloa were claiming a legal right to find out what happens to the donations they made.
Later in the 1903 report Price states:
The whole festival is a curious combination of Hinduism and Buddhism. The temple authorities are Buddhists, the worshippers are Hindus, the Kapuralas to whom so much honour is paid are ignorant Sinhalese villagers. Their main business seems to be to see that as large a share of the offering as possible comes their way. One wonders whether, like the Roman Augurs of old, they can meet each other without smiling.'
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Thus, Price, despite Crawford's reluctance and the ruling that was designed more to pacify the Buddhists rather than to apply the law, decided to execute the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance. As for the Basnayaka Nilame, he should have known that "there is no free lunch.' Gifts are a way of buying one's way into power. The Batticaloa Tamil Hindus bought their way. There was a tragic dialectic in the popularity of Kataragama. The more pilgrims and greater the income, the lesser the authority and privileges enjoyed by the traditional administration. The dialectic was not limited to Kataragama but covered all Buddhist temporalities. The success of the colonial economy, the relative growth in the local economy, and the concomitant enhancement of the incomes of the temples carried with them the seeds of destruction of traditional authority. In 1905 Arunachalam's efforts fructified. John O’Kane Murty reported:
August 01" A case beyond my jurisdiction. ... A Tamil Notary from Batticaloa requested me to alter the date of the final religious ceremony of cutting the water of the river from the 5th to the 4th August. Declined to interfere.
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August 04th
The water cutting ceremony took place this morning, after which the pilgrims rapidly disappeared, en route for home.
August 06th
About noon, Santosapuri, the Hindu Priest, brought the brass vessels full of money offered by pilgrims to my bungalow. At the suggestion of the Hon, Mr. P. Arunachalam, Santosapuri asked me to seal the padlocks at the commencement of the festival. The seals were broken, and the vessels emptied out on the floor. The silver money was picked out by Santosapuri and two assistants and counted,
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and the value of the copper money estimated by weight. The total came to Rs. 365. Some thin silver ornaments were also found of the weight of 35 cents in copper.' It appears that the Batticaloa Tamils managed to change the date of the water cutting according to their calendar without any bureaucratic involvement. Why the Buddhists accommodated the Hindus is unknown. Perhaps, Price's imposition of the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance regarding the temple income unnerved the Basnayaka Nilame and he gave in without making a fuss as in the earlier years. It is interesting that when the brass vessels that contained the money were removed from the Maha Devale neither the Basnayaka Nilame nor the kapuralas were present. Instead the Brahmans of the Teivayanaiamman kovil have taken charge of the collections. Murty reports in a separate section on the pilgrimage: ... The Hon. Mr. P. Arunachalam, a leading Hindu, wrote to me stating that there was no legally appointed trustee of the Hindu temples and asking me to get an inventory made of the temple property and to take an account of the money offerings of the pilgrims. With the object of preventing disputes, I sent for the Basnayaka Nilame and the incumbent priest of the Hindu temples when the following agreement was arrived. All cattle bearing the "Sulam” mark to be the property of the Hindu temples, of which Santosapuri is the incumbent; (2) all cattle bearing the "Velaithan” mark to be the property of the temples in charge of the Basnayaka Nilame; (3) all cattle bearing both brandmarks to be common property. Santosapuri willingly adopted Mr. Arunachalam's suggestion, and three brass vessels used to receive the money offerings of pilgrims were sealed in my presence. At the end of the festival the seals were broken and the money was counted in my presence. He was also agreeable to an inventory of the temple property being made, but I do not wish to interfere in this matter." Murty's reluctance to interfere with the affairs of Kataragama is in contrast to Price's willingness. It appears that Arunachalam
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pushed, as it were, Price, and Price, with a more activist mindset, accommodated the senior bureaucrat's urgings. However, Murty showed an indifference to Arunachalam. It appears that the colonial administrators could use their discretion to address issues of the temporalities. In any event, by 1906 Arunachalam and, I believe through him, the Batticaloa Hindus, had gained a strong foothold in Kataragama. This state of affairs continued into the mid century.
Politics and the Temporalities
The politics of ritualism in Kataragama appears to have been caught up in national political trends.' Briefly put, the colonial opening of the economy allowed various hitherto caste-bound groups to engage in economic activities and prosper. The marks of this prosperity were evident from sixteenth century onwards. It produced a coastal class of wealthy and influential native groups converted to Christianity. The Christian groups themselves were internally various in terms of caste and class. The goigama upper class families were colonially selected for administrative positions. But the economically prosperous lower caste groups from the karava, durava, and Salagama castes also enjoyed sociopolitical advantages and many of these groups were aligned with the colonial powers that, in a sense, socially and culturally emancipated them by giving them Socioeconomic and political opportunities.
As Kitsiri Malalgoda discusses, during the last phase of the Kandyan kingdom, the Buddhist monastic organization split into two segments. The Kandy based Siyam nikaya was restricted to the goigama caste as mandated by King Kirti Sri Rajasinghe. But, by the end of the eighteenth century, the coastal non-goigama Buddhists, now living and doing business in the British controlled areas, were economically and politically strong enough to demand and establish a monastic organization of their own. The outcome was was the Amarapura nikaya. Originally established for accommodating all non-goigama renouncers, it became restricted to the three main non-goigama castes - karava, durava, and salagama - who financed the sect formation. By mid
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nineteenthcentury, while the Colbrook-Cameron reforms dis(wstablished most of the pre-colonial rajakari system based on caste, a third nikaya was established as a caste-free monastic organization. This was the Rananna nikaya.'
These new nikayas and their lay supporters were vociferously and actively involved in protests against Christian proselytization. They were also competitively involved in Buddhist scholastic activities and vigorously supported Sinhala language and literary activities of the era. By the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, the scene was set for a major confrontation between the coastal non-goigama Buddhists, Christians, and, ironically, the colonial authorities. Aggressive individuals such as Anagarika Dharmapala, including several bhikkhus such as Mohottivatte Gunananda, played synechdocal roles in this movement. The Tamils had begun this process nearly half a century before them, as an ethno-cultural revival led by Arumuga Navalar. The two movements probably never blended to form a larger national political movement against colonialism.
Into the brew dived Colonel Henry Olcott, the American theosophist, and his European colleague Madam Blavatsky. The theosophists supported the Hindu and Buddhist causes against colonialism and Christian evangelical activities. All this had in the background much orientalist indological research based on archaeology and textual studies. This research introduced, alongside the government census taking, ethnic and linguistic classification of the natives. I have already examined these activities in Chapter Four. Suffice it to say as the century ended the Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim constituents in the island's population had discovered new sharply defined ethno-cultural identities, histories, and characterizations. Perhaps, the Tamil Hindu cultural movement and the Sinhala Buddhist movement could not form a single national movement because of these new-found identities that focused on differences than similarities.
The coastal Buddhists and the theosophical Buddhists established a system of schools to provide modern education in
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English and Sinhala languages. The idea was to produce Western educated Buddhists who would compete with the Anglicized Christian products from the missionary schools. The latter held socially and politically prominent positions because of their knowledge of English and Western culture. These two Buddhist groups had large financial resources. But they could use more funds, and, as De Silva puts it, enviously looked at the temporalities in the Kandyan Provinces. These temporalities belonged to their rival Siyam nikaya. Since the fall of the Kandyan kingdom, there was no organized management of the vast land holdings and other economic resources of these viharas and devalas. With the kingdom, the traditional management structures also fell, leading to widespread abuse and exploitation. The coastal Buddhists were the first to move the colonial government to rein in these properties, use the income to maintain the bhikkhus and the religious structures, and divert the rest to finance the school system that they established. This is the background of the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance." It was unfortunate that this aspect of the Ordinance was completely neglected in the public discourses. Rather, it was the Tamil Hindu demands to execute the act that drew attention creating an apprehension that Tamil Hindus were attempting to dominate in Kataragama. It was in these contexts that another discourse began. This was regarding the ownership of Kataragama.
Claiming Kataragama
The beautiful stories about Kataragama, Muruga, Valli, Dutugemunu and others related to Kataragama have considerable merit as products of fertile imagination although they are of little help in historiography. However, in an ethnography of Kataragama, they are of considerable importance as they constitute the bedrock assumptions of the times on which the various ethnic and religious groups relate to Kataragama and lay claims to it.
Those who are in the ethnic political arena want to claim the place as their own, as a place that "they” established, where "they”
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have superior rights, and that "they” should have the power and authority to make decisions regarding that place. The issue then is whio established Kataragama? This is very hard to answer. Let me turn the question around: which group can claim the longest association with Kataragama.
There are several claims from Sinhala and Tamil sides. The Muslims and the Vaddahs also have there own claims. I am not interested in proving or refuting these claims for, as an ethnographer, my aim here is to explore and describe the beliefs that the devotees of Kataragama Deiyo or Muruga entertain regarding the connection between the ethnic group, deity worship, and Kataragama, and who should have most authority in Kataragama. In short, my focus is on Kataragama as a multiculturally contested space. I find here interesting lines of cultural thought that must be explored further to elucidate the richness of these claims.
All these claims are also of recent origin. None goes beyond the nineteenth century. Certainly, the Muslim, Sinhala, Tamil and Vaddah cultural groups have worshipped the shrines at Kataragama long before the twentieth century. However, there is no evidence to show that any group had made separate claims of priority and privileges until the last century. Until then the stories and accounts in various classical sources remained largely unknown to the majority of the devotees. Only the scholars - who also tended to be monks, priests, or other religious virtuosi such as the upasakas, Sanyasis, and various mystics - had access to literary sources. Such individuals, during casual conversation and preaching, disseminated the knowledge that they gleaned from the manuscripts into the oral tradition. The devotees gleaned their knowledge of and reasons for making pilgrimages to Kataragama from the oral tradition so generated.
As the evidence presented below shows, the information conveyed by a given oral tradition was not from a single linguistic/ religious tradition. The oral traditions contain elements borrowed from whatever the tradition that considered Kataragama as a
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significant place; the god of Kataragama as a significant being in the world as conceptualized by that tradition; and pilgrimage as a meaningful line of action as human conduct is defined within that notion of the world. The devotees, even today, find most information about Kataragama by word of mouth. This is the same for Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim, Vaddah and other devotees. When the devotees accumulate information, they do not question the sources, which may belong to any one or more of the ethnic cultural traditions. The devotees are not after a logical consistency. Rather, they want more and more stories about the god and incidents that buttress their beliefs about the god's character as a loving and punishing power. Every bit of information is roped in by adopting anyone's story, irrespective of the adversarial character of the Source. As melodies in a fuge, storylines encounter at counterpoints at which they resonate in one another. Though adversarial, they are also harmonious and such harmonies are openly admitted into the discourse on the origins of and rights over this space. Events occur in intersecting time frames. The following claims are constructed on these fugal principles.
While these traditional patterns of knowledge construction, dissemination, accumulation, and preservation continues to this day and will continue, a new information dissemination method came into vogue from the mid-nineteenth century. This is the printed text. Multi-lingual textuality of the sources of information became standard from the mid-nineteenth century. In addition to Sinhala and Tamil, the traditional Sri Lankan languages, English became a significant language because of colonialism. The latter language was available to the elite groups of all communities in Sri Lanka and to those Sri Lankans who converted to Christianity. English education opened the doors to the rich and varied international communication system that cut across cultures, languages, religions, literature, philosophy, the arts and the sciences. Sri Lankan cultures began to be bombarded with information from a massive influx of printed materials in English. Globalization of knowledge construction has thus begun. What was discoursed
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through English soon began to appear in the native languages in printed form. Some of this information enriched the belief system of Kataragama and the claims to Kataragama. A good amount of it also entered the oral tradition in which this information was rearranged and redefined to suite local purposes. The discussion below incorporates these as well. However, the stories and thoughts of the devotees given here hardly constitute an exhaustive collection. There is much that is unknown to me and more is continually being invented in various emerging contexts, haphazardly, chaotically, and poetically. Let me begin with the Tamil Hindu claims first because they also appeared first within the larger political debates in the nation from the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
The Tamil Hindu Claims
Claim 1 The Kathirai-malai and the Kathirai-andavar Koyil
Mailvakanan Pulavar, who composed the Sri Lankan Tamil classic Yalpana Vaipava Malai around 1736 for a Dutch Governor named Jan Maccara, makes the earliest recorded claim that even King Vijaya, the first king of the Sinhala people as told in the Sinhala chronicles Dipavansa and Mahavansa, was a Siva and Muruga worshipper. According to Mailvakanam, King Vijaya built a kovil at Kathirai-malai for Kathirai-andavar nearly twenty five centuries ago. Mailvakanan places Katirai-malai in the central parts of the island. Mailvakanan says:
...And Vijaya-raja made constant efforts to obtain colonists from the adjacent countries From Kanya Kumari to the Himalaya mountains, all despised "the country of the Rakshasas,” as they termed Lanka in contempt. The baffled king turned his thoughts to Buddhists of Magadha, who had been driven from their country by reason of their having embraced Buddhism. Some of them had already found permanent seats in the countries lying to the North of the Himalaya mountains; but others, who had traveled eastward
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and crossed the Brahmaputra, were as yet leading a wandering life in Siam and other parts of Burma. Vijaya-raja went to Siam, and successfully induced a number of those wanderers to follow him into the new kingdom. He placed them in various parts of the country, and gave them liberty to follow their own faith. In process of time these Buddhists came to be called Singhalese from the fact of their inhabiting Singhalam.-”Singhalam” being another name for “Langka.”
Vijaya-raja did not himself profess Buddhism, but he only tolerated it as a means of peopling the country. He was a staunch worshipper of Siva: and began his reign by dedicating his city (Kathirai-malai) to that God by building four Sivalayams as a protection for the four quarters of his infant kingdom:- In the East he erected Konesar-koyil at Thampala-kamam: In the West he re-built Thiruk-kethichchuran-koyil, which had long been then in ruins: In the South he raised Santhira-sekaran-koyil at Maththurai: and on the North he constructed Thiruth-thampa-lesuran-koyil and Thiruth-thampa-lesuvari-amman-koyil at Thiruth-thampalai, at the foot of Kiri-malai. Near the last mentioned two koyils he caused a third to be built which he dedicated to Kathiraiandavar. Over these three temples he appointed Vamathevaacharya, the third son of the Kashi-brahman, Nila-Kandaacharya, to be priest, and assigned to him and his wife, Visalakshi-ammal, a habitation in the neighbourhood, which he had carefully supplied with everything necessary for their comfort. From the circumstances of there being three koyils at Thiruth-thampalai its name was changed to Koyilkadavai. 1“o
Mailvakanan takes the Mahavansa claim, that Vijaya came to
Lanka from India for granted and claims, I think correctly, that Vijaya was a Hindu. What is interesting here is not that Vijaya was a Hindu but that Maivakanan's claim that Vijaya tolerated Buddhism as an instrument for peopling the country. He, in his
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attempt to establish Vijaya's Hinduness, edits Mahanama's account to suit his purposes. In the larger picture, this shows the Hindu/ Buddhist and Sinhala/Tamil antagonism that existed in the mideighteenth century. His statements regarding the Buddhists of ancient India, that they were driven away by reason of being Buddhists, reflect an antagonistic belief that perhaps incorrectly refers to the position of Buddhists in Vijaya's times but correctly refers to their position from about tenth century of the Common Era, particularly in South India in general.
Mayilvakanan had obtained this information from the Tamil ithihasa manuscripts and from the Tamil Hindu oral tradition. These manuscripts and the oral tradition continued a South Indian Hindu attitude towards Buddhism into the eighteenth century. What is important to us here is that materials leading to Mayilvakanan’s belief existed in the eighteenth century, as a paradigm for thinking about and laying Hindu claims to Sri Lanka, and that these claims were articulated in ethnic terms. To place the claim in straight forward terms: Vijaya was not a Sinhala king. He was a staunch worshiper of Siva. He came to Lanka from north India. In order to establish a community he tried to find, presumably Hindu, immigrants from India but failed as all countries from Kanya Kumari to Himalayas despised Singalam as a country of rakshasas. Then he picked up a few Buddhists wandering in Siam, brought them to Lanka, another name for Singalam, called them Sinhala after the name of the country, and let them practice Buddhism.
Mayilvakanan wrote his Yalpana Vaipava Malai to describe the Sri Lankan political system to a Dutch governor, at a time when the religion and the ethnicity of the king was a matter of concern as the Sinhala Buddhist majority believed that the king had to be a Sinhala Buddhist. For Mayilvakanan, the kings of the island were Hindus who publicly practiced a policy of upholding the Buddhist faith for political purposes.
I speculate that the model for Mayilvakanan's thesis was free floating in his contemporary Tamil Hindu community. The
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eighteenth century kingship in Sri Lanka provided the ideological and structural materials for the model. As discussed earlier, when king Narendrasinghe died towards the end of the previous century, he did not leave an issue to inherit the kingdom of Kandy. The Court in Kandy was compelled to look for an appropriate candidate with kshatriya origins. They couldn't find any in Sri Lanka. The Court, following the local rules of inheritance, found a suitable candidate from Narendrasinghe's Tamil Hindu queen's kindred, the Nayakkars, in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, the traditional source of "kshatriya' wives for Sinhala kings. This candidate was consecrated as Vijaya Rajasinghe. As the king of Sri Lanka, Vijaya Rajasinghe remained a Tamil speaking Hindu but politically functioned as a Sinhala Buddhist king, following the rules of kingship in this country. He inherited the legal and administrative apparatus of Narendrasinghe to play his role as the Sinhala Buddhist king according to these Sri Lankan rules. He was succeeded by three others, namely Kirti Sri Rajasinghe, Rajadhi Rajasinghe and Sri Vikrema Rajasinghe, in that order. Their role play was modeled on the career of Vijaya Rajasinghe. Let me call this the Nayakkar model.
Mayilvakanan was a contemporary of Kirti Sri Rajasinghe, the Nayakkar king who did most to revive the Bauddha culture by re-establishing higher ordination among the Bauddha Sangha, virtually defunct at least for a hundred years, and patronizing renovation, reestablishment, and construction of viharas. The reputation of the king's devotion to the Buddha - not only the Buddha of the Buddhists but also of the Hindus as an avatar of Visnu, Tirumal in Tamil - is amply illustrated in the story that he swept the table on which what is believed to be the Buddha's Tooth Relic is placed using his hair as a broom, with great humility. Kirti Sri Rajasinghe dramatized the Nayakkar model to the letter. Mayilvakanan reimagined the Vijaya of the Mahavansa through the Nayakkar model and found Vijaya to be the original actor of this model in Sri Lanka. Kings were consecrated according to the principles descending from the Vedic and post-Vedic traditions.
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As such, they functioned according to the locally redefined rules of kingship in the dharmasutras, such as the Apasthambha dharmasutra, dharmasastras, such as the Manavadharmasastra, and the arthasastras such as Kautilya's Arthasastra. Their advisors in these regards, known as the purohita, were Brahmans. The implementation of these principles was visible in Sri Lanka of the mid eighteenth century. Accordingly, the functional principles of the king's religious and administrative practices were Hindu whereas his political practices were Bauddha. Mayilvakanan's statement in Britto's translation, "Vijaya-raja did not himself profess Buddhism, but he only tolerated it as a means of peopling the country,” indicates this bi-partite structure of religious and political practices in the Kandyan kingdom. The coincidence of the two names - Vijaya-raja and Vijaya Rajasinghe — seems to have a metonymic effect in Mayilvakanan's thinking, thus projecting the Nayakkar model onto accounts of the origin of kingship in Sri Lanka, with the term Vijaya metonymically and synechdocally representing the model. In the process he also attributed to Vijaya what Kirti Sri Rajasinghe did — bringing Buddhists to Lanka from Siam.
Then he claims that Vijaya built a temple for Kathirai-andavar on a hill called Kathirai Malai, located in a place called Kirimalai in the north.
Mudaliyar Rasanayagam, renowned historian of the Tamils of Jaffna, disputes this claim stating that Mailvakanan is confused about the name of this hill." For the Mudaliyar, while the events that Mayilvakanan describes are true, the hill concerned, Kathirai Malai, where Vijaya-raja established the Kathirai-andavar kovil, is none other than the present day Kataragama. Rasanayagam, taking his clues from the eighteenth century Rajavaliya, states that Vijaya landed somewhere in Ruhuna and the Tammanna was located in the southern coast of the island. For him, Kathirai-andavar is Muruga. Kathirai Malai is Kathirgamam which is Kataragama. Thus, Kataragama was originally a Hindu institution.
Rasanayagam's account, written in the 1926, signifies yet another aspect of ethnic politics of that era. He disputes the
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Mahavansa statement that Vijaya landed in the north and that for his consecration he obtained a princess from a royal family in Madurai. For Rasanayagam it is highly unlikely that a royal house in Madurai would give a princess to an adventurer who just landed in Lanka. Further, ancient Madurai was long gone by the time Vijaya arrived in Lanka and the new Madurai was not yet in existence. What he tries to do is to eliminate all Sinhala claims to the northern parts of the island and to royal matrimonial alliances with the Tamils while establishing Tamil claims to Kataragama. In order to achieve this end he uses the Sinhala Rajavaliya account which, however, is not the best source for an early history of the
lat1Ol.
Claim 2 Lemuria
One of the most intriguing claims forwarded by a western educated Tamil devotee is that Kataragama Muruga worship could have existed even before the human beings were on earth. Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam develops a thesis on the origins of Muruga worship in Kataragama based on the notion that the ancient Tamil society spread far beyond the confines of what is today Tamil Nadu.' Tamil Nadu was in fact a whole continent that spread all the way to Australia as a single landmass. This might be what is known by the scientists as Lemuria. This is where the original Muruga worship existed. Kataragama was its cult center. This continent sank in the ocean leaving only the island of Sri Lanka. Thus, Kataragama was originally a principal place of worship of the Tamil people. The entire Muruga drama might have occurred on Lemuria.
The word Lemuria is not of Tamil origin.' It was invented by a nineteenth century English zoologist named Philip Sclater. This invention was a byproduct of a larger intellectual activity. Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species” caused a major jolt in the European worldview based on the Judeo-Christian tradition. As that tradition upholds, the world as we know it, including its
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astronomical features, and Man were created by God, the creator deity of the Bible. Darwin claimed that the world was a product of nature and that Man was a product of the evolutionary processes that occur due to natural facts. Various changes in the ecological environment require that living organisms adapt to the changes in order to survive. Those that fail to adapt become eliminated and those who do survive. The success in adaptation for survival and extinction due to failure to adapt, Darwin called natural selection. This led to perhaps the most significant debate in the nineteenth century among the European intellectuals: creationism vs. evolutionism. The debate continues to this day and there is no end in sight. In any event, many evolutionist zoologists conducted research to discover more and more proof to strengthen the Darwinian position. Philip Sclater was among them.
The Darwinists observed that the species of primates classified as the Lemurs had an inexplicable pattern of distribution. The spread was from Madagascar to Indonesia. How could they be so widely distributed? Their hypothesis was that Madagascar and Indonesia were eastern and western regions of a vast continent that existed in great antiquity and that this continent, for some reason, had gone under the sea leaving mere slivers of it on the surface. Lemurs still exist there. Today, of course, it is possible to construct other arguments to explain the dispersion of the species: that over the millennia they traveled over land or humans carried them across. But, at that time, the geological-Sounding theory of a sunken continent probably had great appeal. Whatever that might have been, it was Sclater who christened this hypothetical continent Lemuria, after Lemurs. Later, the German scientist and Darwinist Earnst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919) used Sclater’s concept to explain the absence of paleontological evidence of a link, the "missing link,” between human and humanoid phases of human evolution. The evidence disappeared when Lemuria sank. Haeckel credits Sclater, "Sclater has given this continent the name of Lemuria, from the semi-apes which were characteristic of it." Subsequently, various researchers presented other arguments and
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anthropologists discovered fossilized human/humanoid remains in South East Asia.
Madame Elena Petrovna Blavatsky (born Helena Hahn 18311891), the famous clairvoyant Polish theosophist, bestowing credit upon Sclater for coining the term Lemuria, found the notion of a great sunken continent in the Indian Ocean ringing other bells in her mind. Blavatsky states in her book "The Secret Doctrine” that she read a treatise named "The Book of Dyzan” that she received from certain Mahatmas. The book was composed, apparently, in the Atlantis, before it sank in the Atlantic Ocean. This treatise discusses Lemuria. According to Blavatsky, that continent existed in the Indian Ocean, one hundred and fifty million years ago. Blavatsky had become very familiar with the classical Sanskrit literature. The Rg Veda speaks of three continents one of which was home to a class of deities called the Danavas. Another was known as Ritas, the land of the sun-worshippers. This vast continent fell apart and sank in the ocean because of volcanic eruptions, leaving only a few pieces above the sea. Few survivors reached India and established a priestly community that later produced the Brahmans. In her mind, Ritas and Lemuria were identical.'
About the Lemurians. It occurred to Blavatsky that these Lemurians were viviparous: they laid eggs to produce progeny. They were hermaphrodites and non-sexual. Eventually, like the Biblical Adam and Eve, they discovered sex and that caused their fall. They were devoid of brain but possessed psychic powers through the third eye that they were equipped with. These were the missing link. They were, according to Blavatsky, the "third root race” to inhabit the earth.
Blavatsky's theory stirred the imagination of many of her contemporaries who contributed to develop her theory. W. ScottElliot, an English theosophist, received his knowledge of the Lemurians from the theosophical masters through "astral clairvoyance” and presented his views in a work titled "The Story of Atlantis and The Lost Lemuria.” Accordingly, the Lemurians were once a chosen lot. A certain class of spirit beings known as
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the "Lhas” were to be born in Lemuria as Lemurians, by cosmic design. But, since their fall the Lemurians lost all reason and thoroughly indulged in sexual pleasures. The "Lhas” found this behavior revolting and refused to follow the cosmic law. ScottElliott expanded the geography of Lemuria to cover a region from the east coast of Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean." The Pacific zone of Lemuria received the attention of the twentieth century thinkers who linked Lemuria with the notion of "Mu' that the Pacific Islanders held regarding a lost land.
Back in South Asia, the theosophists played an important role in fashioning the twentieth century thinking of the intelligentsia by influencing several generations of upper class intellectuals. This was particularly the case in Sri Lanka. The impact of the theosophists is of particular significance to the ethnic relations in the nation but I will discuss that later. For now, let me return to how the theosophical ideas about a lost continent in the Indian Ocean impacted Kataragama.
This impact is an aspect of a larger impact of the contemporary knowledge of the ancient cultural traditions of South Asia. The theosophists did not act alone. In fact, they fed on the activities of the indologists who translated the Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pali literature into European languages, wrote numerous books expounding and admiring the philosophical ideas of the Indian cultural traditions. This won the hearts and the minds of South Asian intellectuals. Both the Indologists and theosophists soon became authorities on the native traditions and the natives learned to see their own past through the indological and theosophical conceptual schemes. This is the background of the concept when Arunachalam introduced the notion of Lemuria into Muruga literature.
While Arunachalam takes a particular interest in informing his readers about the Lemuria thesis, Mudaliyar Rasanayagam, the author of Ancient Jaffna' and numerous other learned articles, ignores it indicating that the Tamil intelligentsia was not unanimous about the Lemurian origins of Muruga worship and the Lemurian sacredness of Kataragama.' Arunachalam also merely informs his
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readers without necessarily committing himself to the thesis. Perhaps the theory of Lemuria was too outlandish and preposterous in the face of the theory of evolution that was fashionable in educated discoursing or, from a political perspective, ridiculously too good to be true. Nonetheless, as a Tamil Hindu political activist who professed the all island Tamil rights as opposed to the regional rights, as his northern opponents did, Arunachalam laid claims to Kataragama and in order to do so he used all his erudition to establish this connection, in a move to endear himself to the northern Tamils who saw him as an outsider, and to the Sinhalas by adopting a one nation position. In his arsenal of notions was Blavatsky's interpretation of the "scientific” notion of Lemuria that was, in fact, a European political ideological product in the clash of paradigms about the origin of the species.
The others who wrote about the Tamil tradition found the idea of Lemuria attractive because it jived nicely with the Rg Vedic Ritas and the Tamil cultural belief in a lost empire that was larger than the Sanskritic Bharata Varusa. By the mid twentieth century, the Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu writers about Muruga worship found the authority from Arunachalam's speculation/suggestion to assert its historicity. The Muruga theologians among them staged the Kantha Puranam drama on this new and improved "scientifically proven” idea of a lost continent that was their ancient homeland. For Ratna Navaratnam, who wrote "Kartikeya, The Divine Child,” a rhapsodic Muruga cult classic, Lemuria was as real as India. Writes Navaratnam:
This shrine lies hidden and far removed from the maddening crowd, in the jungles of Southern Sri Lanka, in the Vedha country. Geographically and historically, it has existed even before the coming of the Sinhalese into Sri Lanka. The Tamils claim it as the extant isle while the rest of their kingdom of Lemuria of the First and Second Academy of Letters was washed and submerged by the deluge. Today, as it was in the dim past, it is the main attraction of thousands
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of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life, creeds and faiths. The history goes back to centuries before the dawn of the Christian era and its legends and myths to thousands of millennia. It is a rich hunting ground for the anthropologist, archaeologist and historian, who eagerly scour the place for remains of the past, but Kathirgamam defies all analysis in the hands of the scientists or remakers of the past." The Tsunami of December 26, 2004 reawakened thoughts about the sunken continent. The Tamil Net website carried an account with a map of the lost land to support the new discourse. The account in the website is too important to be left out as it was constructed citing international authorities, but, unfortunately, too long to include here. I present it in the end note.' ነ
Claim 3 The Linguistic Argument
Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam presents a linguistic argument to establish the etymology of the name of the place as Kataragama or Kathirgamam. For Arunachalam, the present day name was originally Kartikeya Grama, the village (grama) of Kartikeya, indicating its connection with Kartikeya, the Vedic god of the Mahabharata, Aranyaka Parvan. The name Kartikeya derives from the Kirttika, the wives of the seven great Rishis who nurtured Skanda as he was born." Later, Kacciappa Civacariyar in his Kantha Puranam rewrote the Aranyaka Parvan account by amalgamating the Siva Purana with the Tirumurugarruppadai and Parippadal of Sangam literature. There he converts the Kirttikas into Karttikai, after Kartikeya. Arunachalam is convinced that the name of the village is a derivative of this Kartikeya.'
But Mudaliyar Rasanayagam is not convinced by Arunachalam's linguistic argument. He finds the whole argument fallacious because there is no etymological link between kathir of Kathirgamam and Kartikeya. Kathir means effulgence. Gamam is derived not from Sanskrit grama but from Tamil kamam which
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means love. For Rasanayagam, the term Kathirai in Kathiraiandavar and in Kathirai Malai derives its meaning from this sense and it is harmonious with the notion that Muruga is the god of effulgence whereas the term Kathirgamam is a Tamil corruption of the Sinhala Kataragama, the name of the village lying at the foot of the hill Kathirai Malaion which Vijaya-raja established the kovil for Kathirai-andavar.* Ratna Navaratnam concurs with Rasanayagam."”
Claim 3 Suran Kotan
For Some Sri Lankan Muruga cultists, Kataragama in Sri Lanka was where Muruga found his archenemy, the Asura Surapadmam. Surapadmam's fortress was exactly where the Buddhist Kiri Vehera now stands. But all this occurred long ago, long before Sri Lanka was colonized by the Sinhala people. Ratna Navaratnam asserts:
The one sure point in the maze of myths and legends is that the origin of Kathirgamam goes back to the earliest Yuga, earlier than the Treta or Dvapara Yugas, when the Ramayana or Mahabharata were enacted. Muruga worship existed long before Rama fought Ravana about 2387 B.C. It was the heroic Age when Gods and Devas fought the Titans and Asuras on earth, and consorted with daughters of men. The sanctuary of Kathirgamam immortalizes one such testament of the victory of the Devas over the Titans - the triumph of good embodied in the commander-in-chief of the Devas, Lord Murugan, over the Asuric forces of evil, personified in Sura Padman and his kin.'
The account of Muruga destroying Surapadman appears in the Kantha Puranam. Kacciappa Civacariyar had taken the account from the Tamil oral tradition. The oral tradition in Sri Lanka informs, as my fellow pilgrims and other Tamil friends in Kataragama and elsewhere represented, that the fortress of this Surapadman was located where the Buddhists established their Kiri
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Vehera. However, the Kantha Puranam stages the war between the Devas and the Asuras in Tamil Nadu. The conflation of the Kiri Vehera with Suran Kottan had occurred in Sri Lanka. This conflation is used to lay Hindu claims to Kataragama, not as a spoil from the war, but as evidence that Muruga was in Kataragama and that Hindus worshipped him there even before the Kiri Vehera was established.
Curiously, as I show in Chapter Two, the fourteenth century Bhikkhu Totagamuve Sri Rahula recognized the story of Surapadman, probably through Kacciappa Civacariyar's work that never connected Muruga's feats with Sri Lanka." Buddhists have never seen the Kiri Vehera as the fortress of an Asura.
Claim 4 Valiammas Kataragama
Claims are often chained to one another. Muruga's arrival in Kataragama to destroy the Suran Kottan is linked to his arrival in search of Valliamma. The Muruga-Valli romance Occurred in the “sylvan” locale around this spot, now known as Sella Kataragama, on the banks of the Manikka Ganga, after the war. At that time, Kataragama was the homeland of Sri Lanka's aboriginal people - the Veddahs, known in Tamil as Vedar. A goddess born of a doe, who was Visnu himself, was adopted by the Vedar chief of Kataragama. He gave her the Vedar name Valli. As outlined in Chapter One and above, Muruga managed to marry Valliamma after his many elaborate schemes.
But, as I discussed in detail in Chapter Two, there are competing claims which are probably older than these. Very early in the theology of Muruga and Valli, the drama was enacted in Tamil Nadu, in Thiruppankundram near Madras. The early Tamil story has it that Valli was raised by one Nambirajan, a Kuravai tribal chief in the kurunchi - the hilly parts of the village. Rasanayagam asserts that Valli is a Tamil name. The Murugalore in the oral tradition of Tamil Nadu, collected by other scholars, has fascinating stories about the Muruga-Valli romance. In the
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Ramnand district, the present day cultists have modernized the basic story to assert that Muruga chased Vallion a motorcycle.'
The Tamil Nadu claims appear to be better located because the rest of the Murugalore has also been constructed in TamilNadu, as far back as the first Sangam period. The Muruga-Vallicycle also must be very ancient although it appeared in textual form only in the thirteenth or fourteenthcentury, in Kacciappa Civacariyer's Kantha Puranam. The cycle is a rich accumulation of stories that incorporates the native Tamil Nadu stories with Siva Purana and Skanda Purana stories. From the native side comes the story of Muruga's encounter with Valli and the Kuravais. From the Puranic side Skanda, Vishnu and Ganesa are brought in to Sanskritize the native story and to domesticate the Brahmanical story.
Since when did this transposition of the Muruga-Valli romance on Kataragama occur? I have examined this claim in detail in Chapter Two.
Claim 5 Dutugemunu
A claim that is common to both Tamils and Sinhalas is that king Dutugemunu built the original temple at Kataragama. The story does not appear in any of the Sinhala chronicles or Tamil sources. No known archaeological evidence supports this claim. The earliest literary reference that links king Dutugemunu with Kataragama Deiyo appears in the early eighteenth century Sinhala literature on the god of Kataragama. Those writers had extracted the story from the oral tradition. Practically all devotees to Kataragama accept the story as a historical fact. During an interview Mr. Somipala Ratnayake, the Maha Kapurala of the Maha Devale, authenticated the story. Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam summarizes:
King Dutugemunu in the first century B.C., according to ancient tradition, rebuilt and richly endowed the temple at Kataragama as a thank-offering for the favour of the God, which enabled him to march from this district against the
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Tamil King, Elala, and, after killing him in battle, recover the ancestral throne of Anuradhapura. Dutugemunu's great-greatgrandfather Mahanaga, younger brother of Devanampiyatissa, had taken refuge in the Southern Province and founded a dynasty there, and Anuradhapura was for 78 years (with a short break) ruled by Tamil Kings, of whom Elala (205-161) was the greatest. Dutugemunu conceived of the idea of liberating the country from Elala. While his thoughts were intent on this design day and night, he was warned in a dream not to embark on the enterprise against his father's positive injunctions, unless he first secured the aid of the Kataragam God. He therefore made pilgrimage thither and underwent severe penances on the banks of the river, imploring divine intervention. While thus engaged in prayer and meditation, an ascetic suddenly appeared before him, inspiring such awe that the prince fainted. On recovering consciousness, he saw before him the great God of war who presented him with weapons and assured him of victory. The prince made a vow that he would rebuild and endow the temple on his return, and started on his expedition, which ended in the defeat and death of Elala and the recovery of the throne.
The incidents associating the Kataragama God with Dutugemunu's victory naturally find no place in the Buddhist Chronicle, the Mahavansa, which glorifies him as a zealous champion of Buddhism. The tradition is confirmed by a Sinhalese poem called Kanda Upata "Birth of Kanda” ...Stanzas 41 and 46 show that King Durugemunu invoked the aid of the God, and received his help and built and endowed the temple at Kataragama in fulfillment of his vOW. 163 It is interesting how Arunachalam argues that the tradition 'naturally finds no place in the Buddhist Chronicle, Mahavansa, which glorifies him as a zealous champion of Buddhism. The implication here is that the chroniclers knew that Dutugamunu built the temple but deliberately excluded this fact as they wanted
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to portray him as a pure Buddhist king. He assumes that by nature' Buddhist chroniclers are predisposed to exclude any 'evidence' that connects the king with Muruga, and this comes from a lawyer. As discussed in Chapter Two, the transplanting of the Murugalore could not have occurred prior to the sixteenth century and the Kanda Upata was constructed therafter. It is likely that a story Connecting Dutugamunu with Kanda Kumara existed in the Sinhala oral tradition and that this was attached to the Skandalore during the medieval period when Kanda Kumara and Skanda were Conflated. The Dhatuvansa account, discussed earlier in this chapter, was a Buddhist reaction to this conflation. But if the Muruga cult, rather than the Skanda cult, absorbed the story it should have appeared in Indian Tamil sources for it establishes an excellent sthala purana for a Muruga Cult center on the island. But the Tamil sources are silent about such a connection.
Somipala Ratnayaka, the mahakapurala of the Maha Devale, does not cite any work to authenticate his story. It is likely that he has 'inherited the story from the Kataragama kapu tradition that establishes its descent from Nandimitta, one of Duttagamani's warriors. It is likely that the Kanda Upata author was informed by the kapu tradition.
Claim 6 Rajasinghe I and Kataragama
Some believe that the present Maha Devale was constructed, together with the Kandaswamy kovil at Nallur in the Jaffna peninsula, by the Sinhala king Rajasinghe I.' The construction of the Nallur kovil is confirmed by Mailvakanan Pulavar but there the name of the king is Puvineya Vaku (for Sinhala Bhuvaneka Bahu) who, prior to his coronation,was known as Sapumal Kumaru, and also known in Tamil as Senpahap Perumal. He was the son of an Indian Panikkan by a Sinhala woman from the Kotte royal family and adopted by Parakrama Bahu II. Pieris provides a translation of the kattiyam that is daily invoked at the Nallur temple:
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Sriman Maharajati rajaya ahanda Pumaòdala pratiyati kandara visvanta kirti Sri Gajavalli mahavalli sameta Subramanya padara vindajanatiruda Sodasa mahadana Suryakula vamsotbhava Sri Sangabodhi Bhuvaneka Bahu smuha."“
However, of our sources, only the Kathiramalai Pallu, a Tamil work, provides information to establish that Rajasinghe I built the Kataragama Maha Devale."o7 Mayilvakanan does not mention Rajasinghe I, who, according to Mahavansa, became a Saivite. This is surprising because, by the time Mayilvakanan composed the Vaipava-malai, Kataragama had achieved national significance and Rajasinghe reigned merely two centuries before. If Rajasinghe did in fact convert to Saivism and build the temple at Kataragama, Mailvakanan would not have failed to know about it and to mention both these events as they were significant Hindu cultural and political events. The Rajavaliya and the Portuguese sources also do not mention that Rajasinghe converted to Saivism. Only the Mahavansa reports on his parricide, becoming a Saivite and causing troubles for the Buddhists. Since none of these sources except the Pallu mentions that Rajasinghe I constructed the Kataragama Maha Devale, the author of Kathiramalai Pallu must have found the notion in the oral tradition.
The Mahavansa and the Pallu, at least circumstantially, corroborate one another regarding the conversion of Rajasinghe I to Saivism. But in that case it is implausible that Mayilvakanan would miss that information for the conversion of the king was too important an event not to enter the Sri Lankan Saiva oral tradition. The lack of corroborative evidence from other contemporary sources to show that Rajasinghe converted to Saivism, and built or rebuilt the temple at Kataragama casts both the Mahavansa account and the Pallu accounts in doubt. But these are all academic arguments. As far as the cultists are concerned, they neither know about these sources nor care to establish proof. So long as the idea comes from another cultist and supports the
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cult, the devotees do not bother to look into the internal consistency and coherence of their beliefs. What is significant to us in this claim is its attempt to establish that the Kataragama Maha Devale was constructed by a Sinhala Hindu king and therefore the Hindus must have authority over it.
Claim 7 Colonial Authority
The seventh claim focuses on certain events that occurred in the nineteenth century. Soon after the fall of Kandy, the British established authority over the entire island, and after the British colonial authorities crushed the 1818 Vellassa rebellion. Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam opines that the British, discovering property mismanagement by the then Sinhala Buddhist authorities at the Kataragama Maha Devale, such as the Maha Bathme, Kuda Bathme, and the kapuralas, dismissed them from office and handed over the control of the Devale to the Hindus. Later the Sinhala Buddhists have retaken the affairs of the Devale by force. Interestingly, the British colonial authorities did not take any action to expel the Sinhala Buddhists and restore the authority of their 1818 appointees.
Nevertheless, in 1908, Sir Ponnambalam Arunacalam and other Tamil Hindu leaders through an organization called Ceylon Saiva Paripalana Sabhai, made the first official Hindu claim to Kataragama on the basis of the colonial appointment in 1818.' It does not appear that this claim received any response from the colonial administration. This is curious because, even though the momentous events in Europe must have preoccupied the British government, the local colonial authorities could have responded to the claim. But they did not.
The larger context in which this claim was made is even more interesting. This was when Arunachalam, who had advocated a one nation principle and territorial representation in the Legislative Council in opposition to communal representation as preferred by the Jaffna Tamil political leaders, abandoned the territorial
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representation principle and adopted the communal representation rinciple feeling that he was betrayed by the Sinhala elite. We shall discuss the details of this situation later on.
Again in March, 1938, under the leadership of Sir A. Mahadeva, an all Ceylon Hindu meeting was convened by the Hindu members of the State Council and by representatives from Hindu institutions from all areas of the island. The meeting was held at the Vivekananda Society Hall in Colombo. At that meeting, a resolution was made to secure for Hindus an effective share in the management of the Kataragama Maha Devale “with the view to have their religious sentiments respected and to see that the unstinted offerings of the Hindu worshippers are utilized for the purpose of the temple.” The resolution was passed unanimously. But the unfolding of the Second World War drowned the move.' This move, I think, clarifies the motives for all Hindu claims to Kataragama. It shows that the Tamil Hindus suspected/discovered/ believed that the Sinhala Buddhist administration was corrupt and that the "unstinted offerings of the Hindu worshippers” were not utilized for the purpose of the temple. Implicit is the assertion that the valuable and numerous offerings, including gold, jewelry, cash etc. were pilfered by the Devale administrators. Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam was quite open about this assertion in 1924. Hence the claim that the Kataragama Maha Devale had pre-Buddhist Tamil Hindu origins and therefore Tamil Hindus should manage it. The aspiration behind the claim is to ensure that the offerings by the Tamil Hindu pilgrims would actually go to the Devale rather than becoming the private property of the Devale administrators.
The point here is Arunachalam politicized Kataragama, perhaps for the first time. The administration of the temple complex had become an ethno-legal issue just as much as the electoral politics and language politics have become ethno-political issues. Arunachalam's approach was clever. He attempted to extend the Tamil political reach all the way to Kataragama through his claims to Kataragama. He attempted to extend his political authority throughout the island-wide Tamil social structure by giving
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primacy to Muruga worship rather than to Kandasami worship of the Jaffna Vellalas. Arunachalam preferred all island territorial representation to ethnic representation. Perhaps, he was encouraged to claim national political support by his brother Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan's electoral victory over Dr. Marcus Fernando in a predominantly Sinhala Buddhist Govigama caste electorate. The Govigama Sinhalas preferred a Vellala Hindu to a Sinhala Karava caste Christian.
This is neither to discredit Arunachalam's faith in Muruga nor to doubt his patriotic intentions. This is only to show the larger discourses within which some Tamil claims to Kataragama were articulated and to illustrate how the ambitions of Colombo politicians prompted them to drag Kataragama into the national political arena Interestingly, none of these claims and arguments appear to matter to the vast majority of the Muruga devotees who flock to Kataragama. These arguments are material to the national ethno-political debates and the politically motivated literati but not to the Muruga cultists themselves.
However, the British colonial administration ignored this as well. Perhaps, although the colonial administration dismissed the 1818 administration of the Maha Devale in the wake of the rebellion, in which the Kataragama Maha Devale administrators including the kapuralas actively participated, they considered the Sinhala Buddhist claims to be more substantial from a historiographic point of view. What are these claims?
The Sinhala Claims
We already discussed the Sinhala geneologies of the god of Kataragama. They are various and form only tenuous unstable relationships with one another. The Sinhala claims to Kataragama, as a village, social unit, geographical area, a town, a temple and its administration are based on their own sense of origins and attachments. Some of these are historiographically sustainable while others are not. Also, some coincide with Tamil claims with a Sinhala Buddhist twist. I have already discussed in detail most of the Sinhala
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claims at the beginning of this chapter. I shall only outline them here.
Claim 1 The Dhatu Vansa
As mentioned above the claim appears in the thirteenth century chronicle Dhatuvansa. This chronicle is also a monastic creation. It is the only chronicle that provides detailed information on pre-colonial Ruhuna.
Although historiographically unsustainable, this claim to Kataragama as originally a Buddhist place of worship is not even entirely Sinhala but Buddhist for the Buddhist community of Sri Lanka of the period under consideration was ethnically diverse including both Sinhala and Tamil, and even various other groups. The story is based on the belief in a visit to Kataragama by the Tathagata in the fifth century before the Common Era. A god named Mahaghosa, a resident of Kataragama, had been devoted to the Buddha's dhamma and had been wishing that the Buddha would visit Kataragama. The Buddha was aware of this god's disposition. When the Buddha visited Kelaniya to intervene in the war between the Nagakings the god invited him to Kataragama. Having accepted the invitation the Buddha one day materialized where the Kiri Vehera stands today. The god had the Vehera constructed as a monument to celebrate and memorialize the visit and as an object of worship. Kataragama holy ground was thus established by the Buddhist god.
As mentioned above, it is important to note that this is not a Sinhala claim but a Buddhist claim, made in the thirteenth century, possibly before the Kotte kingdom was established. Historians generally ignore the Dhatuvansa account for lack of corroborating evidence. The author of Dhatuvansa had written down a story in the Buddhist folklore about the origin of Kiri Vehera and through that the origin of Buddhist involvements in Kataragama. The credibility of this story and its historiographic value are dubious
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for these stories of origin are not always based on historical facts. But its appearance in the Dhatuvansa indicates that the story must have been in circulation in the oral tradition for some time. We can speculate that the intent to make a Buddhist claim reflects the existence of a contrary claim, that Kataragama was originally a Hindu place of worship, perhaps focusing on Skanda/Kartikeya. The story signifies the Buddhist concern that existed at the time the Dhatuvansa was written. This Sinhala/Tamil Buddhist claim and the Sinhala/Tamil Hindu claim reported above seem to indicate that the Buddhists and Hindus have competed to gain authority over Kataragama for some time before the Dhatuvansa was conceived and written down.
Claim 2 The Inscriptions
During the Anuradhapura period the Sinhala as well as the Tamil Buddhist kings and notables had contributed to the construction of Buddhist monuments. Although the Mahavansa asserts that the Tamil political control did not cross the Mahaveli Ganga and extend to the Ruhuna, epigraphic evidence from Kataragama points to the contrary. This inscription was established by a Tamil king indicating that the Tamil political system did have, at least temporarily and nominally, some influence in Kataragama, perhaps because Kataragama was an important religious establishment for the Hindus.
Around the fifth century of the CE the leading South Indian dynasty were the Kalabhras who had defeated the Colas, Pandyas and the Ceras. 17° A Pandyan ruler named Pandu ruled Anuradhapura for nearly twentyfive years. Until the Sri Lankan ruler Dhatusena overpowered them, six foreign Tamil rulers controlled Anuradhapura in the fifth and sixth centuries. A son of Pandu named Parinda reigned for three years and thereafter another son of Parinda named Khuddaparinda ruled. Dhatusena's first unsuccessful attempt to drive away these foreign rulers was
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made during Khuddaparinda's reign. He was succeeded by Tiritara, Dhatiya and Pithiya. Dhatusena succeeded in defeating the last of these six foreign rulers, Pithiya, and reestablishing Sinhala Suzerainty. The Kataragama inscription mentions the names Sarataraya (Pali:Siridhara) and Mahana (Pali: Mahadhathika Mahanaga). Paranavitana identifies them as Tiritara and Dhatiya of the Mahavansa.7
These Tamil kings were patrons of Buddhism. Parinda's inscription in Aragama in Kurunegala district points to two things: that foreign rule extended not only to the Vayamba region but also covered Kataragama. Parinda, a Budhihist patron, had made donations to a Buddhist monastery. According to another inscription, Khuddaparinda's queen also had made donations to a Buddhist monastery and Khuddaparinda was known as Buddhadasa. Paranavitana opines that the Kataragama inscription was established by the foreign "Tamil" king Dhatiya, known in the inscription as Mahadali Mahana (Pali: Mahadhathika Mahanaga), the son of Sarataraya (Pali:Siridhara, Sanskrit: Sridhara), the Tiritara of the Mahavansa. The inscription states that the king contributed to repair dilapidated buildings, to offer sacred food and for defraying the cost of oil for the lamps. The king might have been a Hindu but he had made these offerings to keep the Buddhists happy under his reign, or he did all this because he was himself a Buddhist.
Claim 3 Kiri Vebera
According to another traditional account the Kiri Vehera
was built by King Mahanaga of the third century BCE. But this too is unsupported by other evidence. Paranavitana dates the Brahmi inscriptions found on the bricks from the ancient stupa to be of the first century BCE. The traditional account may contain some truth as the completion of the stupa, with the bricks with the first century BCE markings, might have taken three centuries for completion.
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Claim 4 Dutugemunu
Perhaps the most widely established claim is that it was king Dutugemunu who constructed the Kataragama Devale. We have already examined this claim in the context of Tamil claims. What is significant here is that the Tamil Hindus also use it as it appears to be the only Hindu account that is at least remotely connected with a historical person - Dutugamunu.
The Vadda Claims
The Vaddas hold Kataragama Deiyo in highesteem. But they worship neither the Deiyo nor Valliamma, the god's purported Vadda consort. Their pantheon consists of a hierarchy of spirits that they call na yakku or the spirits of dead ancestors in demonic form. They know about the Buddha and the Hindu gods but do not include any of them in their pantheon.
The Seligmanns who studied the Vaddas during the first two decades of the last century found that the Vaddas who lived in the interior, away from Sinhala and Tamil communities had no notions of Kataragama, Muruga or Valliamma and Valli is not a Vadda name but a low caste Tamil name. More recently, Jon Dart found that the east coast Vaddas do not have anything to do with the Hindu gods including Valliamma.' Punchibanda Meegaskumbure who studied the Vadda religion in the interior of the island also found no referenced to Valliamma or Kataragama in their religion.'
Thus they do not have any claims to Kataragama. Their claims were constructed by others for them. Historically, the Muruga cultists invented a claim as they relocated the Muruga/ Valli romance in Kataragama and converted the Kuravai hunters of the Sangam literature to Vedars of Kataragama, and guardians of Valliamma. This was around late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I discussed this process in Chapter Two.
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In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonial scholars such as H. Parker constructed an alternative set of claims for them. This is by attempting to trace the origins of Kataragama.' They were probably encouraged by the findings at Tirukovil and Okanda where the Sthala puranas of the kovils trace the origins to Vadda shrines with planted arrows as principle objects of worship. Thus they attempted to explain the origins of Kataragama in terms of the Vadahitiya Kanda shrine where, similar to Tirukovil and Okanda, the basic icon, the mula murti, is a spear. This was associated with the sign of the Vadda Itale Yaka or the demon of the arrow. Further, the Kanda prefix of Kanda Kumara and Kandasamy tantalizingly resonate with the Vadda’s Kande Yaka or the demon on the hill. Thus the conclusion that an ancient Vadda shrine had become a Skanda/Kanda Kumara/Muruga shrine. This contention is not implausible. But it remains a speculation as the Vaddas themselves do not make the connection.
However, some Vaddas, particularly those who have contacts with the Sinhala and Tamil communities, have assimilated the Muruga/Valliamma story and consider Valliamma as their own - ape rahe eki (a female of our group), although they do not worship her. During the eighteenth and, perhaps, early nineteenth centuries, this assimilation had led to the development of various Vadda connections with Kataragama. The institution of Vyadha Kangan, discussed earlier is one. The existence of a Vadda clan called the kovila vanama, examined earlier, is another. The establishment of shrines for deified elite with Vadda ancestry near the bo tree behind the Maha Devale, discussed above, is the third. Their purported participation in the Kataragama Maha Devale Perahara with various claims (I shall discuss these in the next Chapter) is the fourth. All these connections appear to have developed through the Hindu tale although it is not possible to rule out a pre-Valliamma claim to an archaic shrine. The important thing is that, as Sumanasekera Banda states, the present day Vaddas do not assert any of the rights mentioned in the folklore.'
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Interestingly, the colonial administrators do not mention Vaddas in Kataragama. In fact, as discussed above, Baumgartner was curious about their absence. The Vaddas had not participated in Kataragama festivities at least during the last half of the nineteenth century.
The Muslim Claims
The Muslim claims are made, as mentioned in Chapter Two, by the Sufi sect that constitutes a minority among the Sri Lankan Muslims the majority of whom are of the Sunni sect. The Sunni’s categorically reject any connections with Kataragama although Some do participate in the Sufi activities in Kataragama when they make vows with Palkudi Bava, the chief Sufi saint in Kataragama. The Sufis claim ancient and spiritual Connections with Kataragama.
Claim 1 The Spring of Immortality
They believe that Kataragama is a chosen place where a spring of immortality exists. Many have come from the Asian mainland, particularly from Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, Searching for this spring. Legendary mystics have come, stayed, practiced rigorous austerities, and passed away on the banks of Menik Ganga.
Where does this spring exist in Kataragama? Underground, the Sufi's say. It is hidden. It is to be discovered, not by digging the earth but by digging one's heart and the soul.
Claim 2 The Nabi
The Sufi ascetics who had come and lived here, practiced austerities, established communication with Allah, and passed away are known as Nabis. The concept of Nabi goes beyond Kataragama into the Islamic community of sacred men who carried with them the message of Allah. As mentioned earlier, this is an open
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community. According to the Sufi Muslim beliefs, all great thinkers who conveyed glimpses of truth necessarily included an Islamic perspective; in the sense that Islam is the embodiment of truth. Non-Islamic individuals may gain access to it by being like good Muslims while holding another faith. Such individuals also can be considered as Nabis. They believe that the god of Kataragama is such a Nabi and that they have a right to worship in Kataragama.
Claim 3 The Tombs
The Sifis believe that the founder of the Sufi shrine in Kataragama, Seyyed Jabbar Ali Shah from Bukhara, Uzbekistan, spiritually discovered that many pious Muslims were buried where the Sufi compound exists today and decided to establish a place of worship. The belief in the existence of these burial sites constitutes their third claim.
The above is by no means an exhaustive list of the claims to Kataragama. New claims are continually being made and old ones are edited and re-presented. The dynamism of these claims is in the mode of dissemination: by word of mouth. In that mode, there is room for editing, modifying, conflating, transforming, and embellishing substantive and communicative aspects of these claims rendering them contextual and lively. The pilgrims of Kataragama maintain their faith in the god in this forest of symbolic statements which not only lay particular claims to the place but link the place to a galaxy of other phenomena some of which are the stuff of historiography and most of it that of mythology and ethnography.
Compliments
There is no doubt that the political currents in the nineteenth century had a significant impact on Kataragama. Abandoned by the Sinhala Buddhists, it had, for over a century, become a Hindu dominated place of worship although Buddhists managed it and
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has been , legally, a Buddhist temporality. This is a remarkable Sociological phenomenon. Structurally, a facet of it is aligned with a defunct system of values, beliefs, power and authority - the precolonial relationships. Another facet linked it with a Buddhist belief system that claimed historical priority and, deriving from that, a Sinhala Buddhist right to it. The third facet is aligned with a modern political and administrative system based on the rule of law imposed by a culturally alien colonial power. Fourth, it is claimed by Tamil Hindus as a center for their deity worship and associated rituals and ceremonies. Despite the animosities between the Tamils and the Sinhalas in the rest of the country, and in spite of these rival claims to the place by the politically oriented individuals, Kataragama devotees have developed a discourse to accommodate each other. This discourse occurred in the construction of various legends. In Chapter One, I presented a sample of such efforts. In these legends and stories, the different sides complemented one another while castigating themselves. Let me return to these briefly.
Tamil legend 1:
Muruga came in search of Valli. The Tamils drove him away. He came to Kataragama. One day, appearing as an old man, he stood on the riverbank when the river had Swollen. A group of Tamils rushed in. Muruga pleaded to them to carry him over to the opposite bank. The Tamils dismissed him saying they were in a hurry and had no time for him. Then a Sinhala man came. Muruga pleaded to him also. The Sinhala man felt sorry for the old man, carried the old man on his shoulders over to the other side of the river, and made him a small hut. Since then Muruga is partial to the Sinhalas. Tamil legend 2:
After many thousand years, king Dutugamunu was going to Anuradhapura to defeat the Tamil king Elala. He had a dream. The god of Kataragama, who is Muruga, appeared in a dream and declared his support. Dutugamunu
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went to Anuradhapura through Kataragama. Dutugamunu sat on the riverbank, meditated, and asked the god to help him. Muruga appeared before Dutugamunu. Stunned by what he saw Dutugamunu fainted. When he recovered, he told the god if the god helped him win the war he would build a temple for him in Kataragama. The god told him not to worry and wage the war. He helped Dutugamunu kill Elala and win the war. Dutugamunu built a seven-storied temple where the Maha Devale stands today.
Sinhala legend 1:
A band of Portuguese soldiers came to plunder the Maha Devale. As they were coming across the jungle the Sinhala kapuralas of the Maha Devale and Tamil pusaris of the Tevaniammakovil learned about it. The Sinhalakapuralas panicked, abandoned the devale, and ran away. The Tamil pusaris (temple priests) were undaunted and hatched a plan to hoodwink the Portuguese. They filled the pintaliya (drinking water tank by the temple) with toddy and waited. The Portuguese, exhausted and thirsty, drank the Sweet toddy as much as they could and soon fell asleep. When they woke up their heads were still spinning and could not understand why. Thinking that there was a great power at the temple they fled. Because of the bravery and intelligence of the Tamils, the temple was saved.
Sinhala compliment:
Sinhala people do not know how to come to Kataragama. They come here as if they are going on a pleasure trip. There is no real involvement. They come singing bailas. Then nonchalantly go to the devale, all the while laughing and joking. They are not serious about the pilgrimage. They buy a cheap pujavatti from the bazaar and offer it to the god because the puja is merely a part of their
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trip. Then they turn around and leave. Sinhala people are nor serious about anything. That is why their vows fail. But look at the Tamils. Look how they come. They walk all the way from Jaffna, Trincomalee, and Batticaloa. Walk all the way (payin maenava). Poor people with very little money come and stay a day or two, living on the alms from the kovil. They roll round the devale (bima peralenava). They pierce their bodies with spikes (katu gahanava). Hang from hooks (elenava). Their devotion has authority (anubhava Sampanna). Their pilgrimage has power (anubhava). They are impressive pilgrims.
In a more lighter and conciliatory vein, a Tamil compliment: I like Sinhalese rice and curry. Very tasty Those fried brinjals are marvelous.
A Sinhala reciprocation:
I like tose and masala vade. Tamil food is very tasty and very healthy.
A Tamil statement: -
All are equal before the god.
A Sinhala concurrence:
All are equal before the god.
A Muslim restatement:
All are equal before Allah.
All the agreements, compliments and pats in the back co
exist with mutual suspicion that seeps in from the larger political 2Cl2S.
The Big Picture
In the big picture, the colonial government, in compliance
with the Colonial Office of Britain, responded to the new political thinking in Europe and gave a modicum of authority to the native elite. Thus in 1833, the first legislative council was introduced and
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the governor appointed three natives from the coastal elite families as unofficial members of this council: a Sinhala, a Tamil, and a Burgher. They all belonged to the Colombo based colonially educated and thoroughly westernized elite. The selection was based on communal representation. The members so appointed were not involved in the promulgation of laws and administration as such. Their role was to inform the governor and the Colonial Office in Britain about the states of affairs in the colony. Nor was there any urgency or inclination on the part of these native representatives to effect any changes in the status quo that had worked remarkably well for them.
But things changed as a later generation of unofficial members assumed their duties. The most significant member of this group was Ponnambalam Ramanathan, a nephew of Sir Muttu Coomaraswamy, the outgoing member, and a grand nephew of the first Tamil Hindu member Arumuganathapillai Coomaraswamy. The Coomaraswamys and their descendants were deeply patriotic Lankans with Tamil Hindu identities. Ramanathan, and later his brother Arunachalam, were among the most prominent politicians of Lanka during this period, and, ideologically, they did not recognize ethnic, linguistic, regional or religious differences in the affairs of the nation, and won the confidence of the nation. They represented Lankans before the colonial regime. They believed in territorial representation, i.e. representation of all in a given area, as opposed to communal representation. Both were lawyers and both aspired to high office in the nation. Both vehemently represented Sinhala and Buddhist interests before the regime in various ways. And both were justly recognized by the nation as a whole as their legitimate representatives.
Crisis of Confidence
But cracks began to appear in this Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil Hindu comity early in the twentieth century. The comity was based on the friendly relationships between the Tamil and Sinhala elite groups in Colombo and on the colonial economy and
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administrative system. As discussed earlier in Chapter Two, as far back as 1888, Ramanathan published an essay titled "The Ethnology of Muslims,” in an attempt to absorb the Muslims into the greater Tamil community in terms of language and an ethnology founded upon the intermarriages between the Arabs and South Indians, particularly the Tamils.' This suggests his attempts to expand the demography of the Tamil community. It is hard to believe that, as brilliant and far seeing a politician as he was, Ramanathan did not foresee the inner problems in the communal representation system in the legislative council. It is likely that he also felt that his Commitmement to territorial representation was not without problems. Thus, while advocating strongly a form of territorial representation, he probably attempted to have a back-up position in case communal representation became the future mode of representation. I see even Arunachalam's involvements in Kataragama in this light, in addition to the inherent merits in his insistence upon the implementation of the rule of law and the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance. Even to promote territorial representation it was perhaps wise to extend the authority of the Tamil leadership throughout the island rather than to focus only on the Jaffna-centered north, Trincomalee and Batticaloa dominated east, and Colombo. Arunachalam's interest in expanding the Tamil territorial representation encompassed the ongoing discourse on Lemuria and in 1906 he lectured in the Legislative Council that Ceylon was a part of the lost continent echoing Tamil rights throughout the island.'
In 1910, the Crewe-McCullum reforms expanded the native unofficial representation to 10 while the official members numbered 11. Thus far, the governor appointed the unofficials on a communal basis. From now on, the appointments would involve the election of a member for the Executive Council. The eligible candidate had to be an "educated Ceylonese.” Ponnambalam Ramanathan was appointed as the first elected member of the Executive Council, signifying the ethnic harmony between the Sinhalas and the Tamils.
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In 1915, when the low country Sinhalas rioted against the coast Muslims because of trade rivalries, the colonial government, wrongly suspecting an anti-government movement, imprisoned prominent Sinhala Buddhist leaders. In this context, Ramanathan took a strongly Sinhala Buddhist stance and defended them against theories of a Sinhala Buddhist conspiracy.
The outcome of this comity was the formation of Ceylon Reform League. Ramanathan was its founding president. It transformed into the Ceylon National Congress in 1919 with Arunachalam as its President. But this comity soon cracked as the territorial representation proved to be disadvantageous to the Tamils who, as mentioned earlier, had the idea that they were equal partners of the nation. After the election they found themselves to be a minority. In order to redress the imbalance, Arunachalam attempted to establish a seat in the Western Province on a communal basis, to represent the Colombo Tamils, and expected the Sinhala elite to support the move. The Sinhala elite, represented in this context by Sir James Pieris and E.J. Samarawickrema, in a loosely worded statement vaguely expressed support indicating that behind the social facade of the race-blindness of the Colombo elite and their insistence on territorial representation, it was in fact quite conscious of the communal issues. At the last minute, the Sinhala leadership disagreed with the move and disagreed with any communal representation. But they asked Arunachalam to go ahead and take the seat. Arunachalam rejected the offer and withdrew in disappointment. But he still hoped that the Sinhalas would go back and urge, pester and plead him, he would refuse a couple more times showing he is hard to get, Sinhalas would try harder to move him to take the seat, and then to reluctantly take it as a favor. This imagined drama did not become reality. Manipulating Arunachalam's withdrawal, and by purposely misinterpreting it as a genuine sign of refusal, nominated Sir James Pieris and had him appointed. Wilson writes:
The Sinhalese leaders had promised the Tamils that they would insist on the retention of a separate seat for the
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Western-Province Tamils, a seat which it was supposed Arunachalam would easily secure for himself. But in the end the Sinhalese leadership changed its position, stating that they were opposed to communal representation and therefore opposed to a separate seat for the Tamils in the Western Province.... After the fiasco over the Western Province seat, the Sinhalese leaders went in a delegation to Arunachalam and requested him to contest the Colombo seat - they promised him their support - but he declined the request. Perhaps he hoped to be persuaded to overcome his objections and be asked again, but the Sinhalese leaders accepted his refusal because they had Sir James Pieris in mind as an alternative candidate..." Clearly, the Sinhala elite did not want a Tamil enclave in the Western Province. When Arunachalam withdrew, they simply Snapped up that seat. Arunachalam, outraged by the dishonesty of the Sinhala leadership, left the Ceylon National Congress and formed the Tamil National Congress, abandoning the principle of territorial representation that he advocated for more than a quarter of a century and accepted communal representation as the only way to bring about adequate representation to the Tamils. The lingering suspicions that the Sinhala leadership with whom he and his brother advcocated territorialism might betray them became reality. The Sinhala and Tamil leadership permanently parted their ways. Arunachalam adopted communal representation as the only way the interests of the Tamils could be promoted. It was in this context that Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam wrote his 1924 essay, "The Worship of Muruka or Skanda: The Kataragam God,” and claimed that Kataragama was originally established by the Tamils, a reflection of his transformed political stance.
Seen from this perspective, the scholarly essay on the ethnology of moors by Ramanathan and the various bureaucratic moves that Arunachalam made in Kataragama in the early years of the century make me believe that both Ramanathan and Arunachalam were not naively idealistic politicians. They wanted
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to expand the Tamil community both numerically and territorially. The declaration that Ceylon Moors were, even as partial descendants, Tamils, however true that might be, is still a political move as it attempted to add an ethnic twist to the already extant linguistic unity. The push to hand over the administration of Kataragama to Hindus - who were ethnically entirely Tamil - is the territorial dimension of it. This is not to blame Ramanathan and Arunachalam for entertaining faint communal sympathies. Such sympathies were needed even on a territorialist platform as a practical matter if some day heads were to be counted and territories were to be accounted for. In democratic politics, numbers and spaces matter.
Numbers mattered after the election in 1920 when only three Tamil members returned to the Council as opposed to thirteen Sinhala members. This shattered an image of Tamils that they entertained thus far. The Kandyan Sinhalas, who had this far claimed a separate identity from that of the low-country Sinhalas, and be treated as a minority, had abandoned this position. The arithmetic of ethnic proportions suddenly changed. The Tamils could even claim a majority status (perhaps if the Ceylon moors were also included as Tamil speakers a clear majority) when the Sinhalas were divided, and saw themselves as equal partners. But when the Sinhalas politically united, Tamils found themselves a minority. The parting of ways between the Sinhalas and Tamils thus occurred and the Tamil leadership opted for communal representation and continued to claim equal status all the way until the late 1970s when they began to move for a separate sovereign state.
In this background, the products of yet another patriotic movement had a severe impact on Kataragama resulting in Some irreversible changes in the Kataragama social structure. This was the svabhasha movement. It clamored for the recognition of vernacular education. Here, too, initially the Sinhalas and Tamils worked together to liberate, as it were, their languages from the hegemony of English education. The entry into the state and private
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sector high prestige and lucrative employment and business opportunities were restricted to the English educated groups. The rural vernacular educated population was significant in national politics particularly after the introduction of universal franchise in the 1930s. They formed the bulk of the voting population and anyone with aspirations to enter politics had to account for their aspirations. As Wickremaratne States, this group consisted of the rural elite, bourgeoisie educationists who began to expatiate on the intrinsic virtues of education in the mother tongue, and the repentant elitist elements who during this period were determined to redress social injustices.'
Among the politicians who became sensitive to the svabhasha movement was J. R. Jayawardene. In 1939, he persuaded the Ceylon National Congress to formally adopt the svabhasha. Wickremaratne writes citing De Silva:
More significantly in 1943 Jayawardene tabled a motion in the State Council for the adoption of Sinhalese as the medium of instruction in schools. The motion also called for the holding of all public examinations in Sinhalese and urged that Sinhalese be adopted as the medium by which the State Council itself would conduct its proceedings. ... By an amendment moved by a Tamil member with the co-operation of Jayawardene, the word Tamil was inserted side by side with the Sinhalese in the original motion. The motion was adopted. ... In 1951 a National Language Commission was established to see the problems of implementation." But, as Wickremaratne states, the Tamils found the svabhasha policy of substituting English with Sinhala having no effect on the Status of their language, and began to worry that, if the policy was followed, their ethnic identity, as a minority, would be threatened because of Sinhala assimilation. They also focused on the reluctance of the Sinhala politicians to accept Tamil as a co-equal language.
Religion, too, entered the language issues as Hinduism found expression in Tamil and Buddhism found its voice in Sinhala. But Soon, the Sinhala language issue broke away from religious
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particularism and the Sinhala wing of the svabhasha movement became an inclusive movement similar to the Tamil wing, with both sides accommodating Christians among them who raised powerful voices for recognition of svabhasha policies. However, in the 1950s, Sinhala and Buddhism fused again and became a politically forceful movement. In 1956, the year of the Buddha Jayanti commemorating the 2500th anniversary of Buddhism, S. W. R. D. Bandaranalike and his Sri Lanka Freedom Party decisively defeated the United National Party that held sway from 1948. One of the key promises that he gave to the large rural crowd was that he would make Sinhala the official language of the state.
Noticing the trends in the Sinhala community, the Tamils politicians adopted a federalist platform and formed the Federal Party that advocated the establishment of a federal constitution that would give the Tamil majority areas, among other things, the use of Tamil as the primary language. When the so-called "Sinhala Only” act was passed in June 1956, the Tamil politicians, led by the Federal Party of S. J. V. Chelvanayagam, demonstrated in Colombo. The Satyagraha protest held on the Galle Face Green was disrupted by organized Sinhala mobs who attacked the protesters, Tamils in Colombo and in the Gal Oya colony. This was the first ever antiTamil riot since the independence. The Tamil politicians organized a second protest pada yatra and a protest rally in Trincomalee during which they formulated four demands from the government. One of the principal demands was the adoption of Tamil language as a co-equal language. This led to the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam pact of July 1957. The United National Party immediately organized a massive campaign against the pact calling it a sell-out to the Tamils. Bandaranaike abrogated the pact.
Wilson states that the Tamils had two theories about Bandaranaike's abrogation of the pact and failure to act on the Tamil issues. One was that he acted in collusion with the Senior bureaucrats in that although he would issue orders they were not obliged to act. The other, which according to Wilson the better theory, was that even if Bandaranaike was sincere his senior
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bureaucrats "... themselves were obstructive and either placed obstacles and delayed the implementation of the Prime Minister's directives, or simply failed to implement them altogether. The Tamil government salariat took the latter view. They were aware of the high level of communal feeling prevalent among the Sinhalese civil servants at all grades....” Wilson continues:
The attitude of the higher bureaucracy was manifested in the decision of senior Sinhalese Ministry of Transport officials to dispatch to the Tamil areas buses of the nationalized transport system that included the Sinhalalanguage 'Sri lettering on their number plates. Given the explosive situation, it was clear that this action would only add fuel to the flames, with the Tamil public already seething with discontent over the imposition of Sinhala as the only State language. A strong reaction was entirely predictable. The FP's MPs and other volunteers tarred over the Sinhala 'Sri on the plates and replaced it with the same letter in Tamil script. The party's leader, S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, was in the forefront of the two anti-Sri protest campaigns in the two principal Tamil cities, Jaffna in the north and Batticaloa in the east, in March and April 1958. The support from the Tamil public was overwhelming: the Tamil people were unmistakably moving towards resistance against Sinhalese domination.
Sinhalese feelings against the FP and Tamils also ran high. Buddhist monks led an island-wide campaign, particularly in Colombo, of painting Sinhala Sri on the perimeter walls surrounding the homes of Tamil families. These Sinhala markings made the identification of Tamil property easier, when anti-Tamil riots broke out in May 1958. ... The vision of a Tamil homeland dawned for the first time. ...? What effects did these events have on Kataragama? Let me first present some of my field observations and information to
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construct a sociology of Kataragama during this period and then examine how, within this community, the ethnic rivalries unfolded.
1958 In Kataragama
Kataragama population is predominantly Sinhala Buddhist. There are very few Tamil families resident in the village. Further inquiries revealed that there were many more resident Tamil Hindus until 1958. Some of these residents lived in the temple complex. They were the caretakers of the various Chetty madams, the staff of the Ramakrishna Mission, and the many sanyasin who resided within the Teivayanaiamman temple complex. The sanyasins were often retired government servants of various capacities ranging from lawyers to clerks who, in their senior age, had decided to spend time in Kataragama meditating and performing religious acts. These people were transients as they resided in Kataragama temporarily, a few months at a time, and return to their families in Jaffna, Mannar, Kayts, Trincomalee, Batticaloa, Badulla, Colombo and so on. Their presence was visible as they donned the saffron clothes of the Hindu sanyasins and rubbed tinnoru on their foreheads, chests and arms indicating their Sivite religious orientation.
All these people left Kataragama in 1958. The ethnic riots of 1958 did not spare Kataragama. What happened in 1958, in Kataragama? My friend Jayasena, now in his seventies, witnessed the riots, as he claimed, as the ringleader of the rioters.
Jayasena
I withhold details of Jayasena's life for obvious reasons. Let us say that he migrated to Kataragama from a village in the Sabaragamuva Province in the 1940s. Initially he made a living by joining the business activities but later found government employment. I am only reporting what he said about how he instigated rioting in Kataragama.
One early evening Jayasena was sitting in the verandah of his house, sipping arrack, listening to the radio in the living room,
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Swinging his knees in rhythmic relaxation when a news broadcast hit him like a bomb. Anti-Tamil riots had broken out in Colombo and been spreading to Kandy, Galle, Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and various other places. The Tamils in Jaffna had begun to rub tar on the Sinhala letter Sri on automobile number-plates and on every Sinhala sign. The Tamil action was also spreading to Kilinochchi, Vavunia, Troncomalee and Batticaloa. Jayasena finished his drink in one quick gulp, tucked up his sarong and walked out of the house, towards the bus-stand by the river. On the way, he talked to known people about this incident. Most residents of Kataragama had no knowledge of this rioting. Only a few had heard about it like he did, over the radio and they had already started to talk about it.
The bus-stand was full of talk. Several passengers, drivers and conductors were talking excitedly about what they heard in Tissamaharama, Galle, Colombo and Badulla. From their accounts it appeared that the situation was a lot more serious than the paltry talk in the radio. Tamils in Jaffna and elsewhere were attacking Sinhala people there with great ferocity and ruthlessness. Some men were killed, shops and houses burned down and looted, infants thrown into wells and women's breasts cut off. That drove him crazy. Thereafter he heard how the Sinhala people were retaliating in Colombo, Kandy, Galle and Matara. Substantial and satisfying damage has been inflicted on Tamil lives and property and was continuing and spreading to the plantations where Sinhala villagers appeared to be carrying on with the retaliatory work. That, however, was not strong enough to pacify the rage that sparked in Jayasena. That only made him even more animated with an irresistible impulse to do his own bit in support of the Sinhala CUSC.
Jayasena returned home, picked up a can of black paint that he had bought for some other purpose and a few paintbrushes, stepped out of the house and hollered the names of a few friends. Some of them showed up. They too had heard about the riots and
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when Jayasena showed them the paint and the brushes, they immediately joined him.
The gang, led by Jayasena, went to the town, yelling and scolding the Tamils, not particular Tamils but Tamils in general, in every smutty word they could muster on the spur of the moment, Spitting and incoherently howling curses, lamenting and inciting whoever they met to join them to teach the Tamils a lesson. They rubbed black paint on everything written in Tamil, drew large Sinhala Sri' letter on the walls of buildings occupied by Tamils. They walked up the atul vidiya along the northern bank of the river towards the Maha Devale, then moved into the mada vidiya towards the mosque and the Valliamma kovil, rubbing black paint and writing the Sinhala Sri letter on the walls. From there they turned left, to the nagaha widiya where the Tamils lived, told the Tamils, many of them recent arrivals, to leave Kataragama and return to wherever they came from, and set fire to the kadjan huts. Those Tamils went to the Teivayanaiamman kovil.
Jayasena and company went to the bus Stand and arranged transportation to various places such as Mannar, Trincomalee, Baticaloa and so on and sent messages to the Tamils in the Kovil that busses were being arranged for them to leave. When they returned to the kovil what they found was shocking. The Tamils were very poor and all they had were a few brass pots and some jewelry. They had started to sell these belongings to raise bus fare. Some Sinhala people were exploiting this opportunity and buying valuable things at unreasonably low prices. Jayasena found this exploitation of poor Tamils utterly repulsive. For Jayasena it was one thing to be patriotic but quite another to exploit the opportunity to make money by exploiting destitute people. He was ashamed of these Sinhala opportunists.
Jayasena is a very special case for many reasons. He instigated, at least he claims he did, the 1958 riots in Kataragama. As such he committed a crime. But he was never apprehended. No one ever blamed him or informed the police that he rioted and committed criminal acts. There was no evidence to prosecute him because there
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were no witnesses. Yet he claims that he did so, without even thinking that he, in fact, is publicly admitting the commission of a grave crime. Unless prosecution now is barred by some statute of limitations, he is providing the best evidence for prosecution. Perhaps, Jayasena came out with his boast only after the relevant statute of limitations passed. Perhaps, now no one takes his account seriously, and only entertain themselves listening to his braggadocio and yarns. Perhaps, the whole thing is an invention that Jayasena rolls out at a time of ethnic war, to become a folk hero because of a deed supposedly done nearly half a century ago. Perhaps there is an element of truth in it, that he actually did something like rubbing tar on some Tamil writing, and he embellishes it by identifying with other things that others did and weaving the details of those deeds into his own tale of heroism.
Yet, Jayasena's story is quite trite as there are many stories like his. Each of these stories focuses on a particular event but they all fall into several common themes. Rioting (ethnic), looting, plundering (seizing the opportunities to seize other people's property) and raping (seizing the opportunities for sexual gratification and exercise of power) are results of pathological reasoning, if such a term could be used in our context. Jayasena has a confused attitude towards Tamil people. He had nothing against these people as individuals, families, traders and so on. He only made a political statement. His reasoning involved doing tit for tat on the basis of a bit of information from the radio station and rumors he heard from bus drivers and passengers who heard it from others in other places ad infinitum. The pathology of reasoning is in his blindness to the reasons for and consequences of his action. He heard for the nth time that the Tamils - everybody that came within that category irrespective of spatial and temporal differences, in fact, an imaginary - were killing and hurting the Sinhalas and rubbing tar on Sinhala language in far away places. The Sinhalas in far away places were, according to these rumors, taking retribution from Tamils who were far away from the locus of the imagined crimes, and were unaware of what was going on.
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He never tried to verify what was actually going on. He, as well as the other Sinhalas who attacked Tamils in the South, saw all Tamils as the "other,” with a common identity but interchangeable and devoid of any personal identity. Every Tamil was a synechdoche of the Tamil community that was in itself a sign of enmity. He had to make, as it were, his contribution to the on going retributive activities of his racial brethren. He wanted to let everybody know that he was a brave son of Ruhuna who would fight the Tamils like the greatest Son of Ruhuna, Prince Dutthagamani. Now he wants everybody to know that he did heroic things. He keeps talking about them so that everybody knows that he is here.
In any event, it is a historical fact that ethnic rioting elsewhere in the country rocked the multicultural community in Kataragama. When I inquired about the impact of the several waves of ethnic disturbances practically all of my acquaintances and friends in Kataragama pointed to the 1958 incidents as the worst. Although on an all-island basis the 1983 rampage was the most devastating, it had a relatively low impact on Kataragama. Even the Tamil residents who suffered all those waves said that 1983 riots were not as severe as the 1958 disturbances. Interestingly, they said that in all instances the rioters came from outside, from Tissamaharama, Hambantota and so on, and that no member of the traditional residents participated in them. A few from the families that arrived in Kataragama more recently - in the 1940s - had joined the rioters but generally, Kataragama Sinhala residents did not riot. It is also interesting that although the news and rumors about riots elsewhere aroused practically everybody's emotions, only a small group rampaged. And it is remarkable that there was a distinction between rioters, looters and opportunists.
Only a few of those Tamils returned to Kataragama.
The Village
Warm wind brushed against my face as we drove down the gravelly road. The sun was getting warmer in the maturing morning.
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The road had many muddy pools that reflected the silhouettes of the Swaying trees against the bright blue of the cloudless morning. Leslie, my wife, and I were in a merry mood. We were whistling a tune and Simon was steering his van grinning from ear to ear. Our friend Rajan was grinning too. Last night's rain had wet the gravel. The tires rolling on them made a pleasant crackling sound. The air was fresh and had a leafy smell. A large crow was making a huge noise, winging to balance itself on a rusty barbed wire. All was well.
Then we saw women running after our van. Rajan said they must have mistaken us for some NGO people. Various NGOs had come during the past years when the area was hit by drought and distributed lunch packets and dry rations. Many people in the village became addicted to these sources of food and developed a total dependency. Now they do not work anywhere. They either sit around at home and wait for lunch packets or simply go to Kataragama town and the sacred ground and beg. Beggary has become a significant profession in Kataragama. We passed several mud huts and Rajan said beggars lived in most of those huts. Apparently, whole families go begging. And they are able-bodied healthy men, women and children. Parents train their children to beg. In the evening, women prowl in the streets looking for CuStO IleS
But we were not an NGO and our van was not loaded with lunch packets and dry rations. We were going to do some anthropological fieldwork. I wanted to interview several people in the village. They were the few Tamil families living there. Some of them had come to Kataragama in the 1940s, faced the 1958 riots, fled and returned. Others have come in the 1980s. Some of them also beg for a living. We stopped by Rasaiah's house.
The women gathered round the van and poked their hands into it through the windows. Rajan shouted that we were not from an NGO. But the women insisted. A couple of them immediately started to beg. “Denna denna denna!” (give give give!) they cried with a great sense of urgency. They started pestering
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my wife, "Give bonbon, bonbon, pencil, schoolbook, you give.” I got down from the van and told them that I was not from an NGO but from a university, and that we had nothing to give them. Then they stepped back. They seemed to be dismayed by the fact that they were not getting any food. Then Rajan came out and told them who we were. The women giggled sarcastically, and walked away. Rajan drove them away.
Rajan, a member of a kapu lineage, said that the village is full of this sort of people. Most of these live in Kataragama illegally, in huts built on land owned by the State. These squatters are a nuisance to the village but now some villagers also have adopted their survival techniques.
We walked into a neatly kept garden with two well-built houses. An old woman came out of the older house. We said we wanted to meet Rasaiah. She invited us into the house. We sat in the modest living room. She went to fetch Rasaiah. Looking around I noticed a portrait of a soldier prominently displayed on a wooden cabinet containing an assortment of crockery and various curio items. Next to this portrait was a photograph of a wedding - a typical middle class cultural acquisition emulating the western wedding photographs with the bride and the groom in the center, the best man next to the groom and the bride's maid standing next to the bride, and a couple of flower girls at the ends holding pink baskets full of pink paper flowers - taken in a studio. The soldier was in full professional regalia. The women wore the Kandyan outfit for women. The best man was in a western suit. Pictures of the Buddha, Ganesha, Muruga, and Siva adorned the walls.
An old man with a small conical head and a dark slightly hunched wiry body walked in. From far one might mistake him for Gandhi. We got up and he received us with an inquisitive perplexed face. He whispered something to Rajan. Rajan said we were not from an NGO but from the University of Peradeniya. His face lit up. As he sat down he said he knew all about that university. He had lived near the Vembily Hall in Kandy, near the Pulleyarkovil. Rasaiah claimed descent from an Indian Tamil family
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who were not tea estate coolies. Along with the influx of plantation workers, many others also immigrated to Ceylon. His family had resided in Kandy and found employment in a tea estate as kankanis. Rasaiah also became a gardener cum factory assistant. He used to come to Kataragama on pilgrimages in the 1940s and decided to migrate in 1942. He, by then, had developed connections in Kataragama. He found work in the old Kataragama religious and commercial establishments as a laborer. The Sinhala residents for whom he worked helped him obtain the right to cultivate a hena. Thereafter he worked exclusively as a farmer and earned a good income, particularly during the festive seasons in April, July, August, November and December. There were many others like him, Sinhala and Tamil migrants, trying to eke out a living and making it. Except for an occasional commotion, the village was peaceful. Life was good.
It turned bad with incredible brutality in 1958. Rasiah had no idea why or how it happened. One night some men whom he could not recognize rushed into his yard, yelling, hooting, and spitting, like an improbable pack of rabid dogs (pissu ballo). He quickly grabbed his money and stuck it in the belt. The men rushed in, grabbed him by the neck, and threw him out of his hut. Dumbfounded and terror-stricken, Rasiah ran as fast as he could. From far he could see smoke billowing and flames emerging from the roof of his hut. He ran to the nagaha vidiya where Tamils lived only to find the street an inferno, with all the huts burning away and people running towards the Teivayanai-amman kovil. He too ran there.
The kovil was full of people, desperate, weeping and wailing. From them he gathered that there were anti-Tamil riots in the South and Colombo, and anti-Sinhala riots in Jaffna, Batticaloa and elsewhere in the north and the east. By next morning, they were asked to take buses and go away from Kataragama. Most people had no money. They were returning to the remnants of their huts to collect whatever was left - mostly brass pots and
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plates. Back in the kovil they sold these things to collect money simply to get out. They were returning to the various places where they came from. Rasaiah left Kataragama and went to Batticaloa where he had some friends.
He lived with his friends for about three months and returned to Kataragama. The village was as calm as asleep, as if nothing happened there, except for the carcasses of the nightmare, the charred remains of the former dwellings of the Tamils. He picked up from where he left, rebuilt his hut, and returned to cultivating his hena. All was well again, sort of. Rasaiah said he was back in his hena all right, but, somehow, there was something missing. Visvase nati una (lost confidence). There wasbaya (fear) in the back of his mind. It was not there before. But, now, he began to lock the doors whenever he left the house or went to sleep. Why did he not leave Kataragama? He could have gone to many other places. Those were my issues. But where else could he go? That was his issue, back then. He was already at his last resort.
Eventually he married a woman from Batticaloa. Together they raised a son and two daughters. The son now works for a security unit of the government. The portrait on the curio cabinet was his. The wedding photograph was also his. He met a girl from Kurunagala, a professional Colleague. As they decided to get married, Rasaiah and the rest of his family went to visit the family of the prospective Sinhala daughter-in-law. That family received them very well. They reciprocated with a visit to Kataragama and approved of the marriage. The son, Balasingham, and the daughter-in-law, Sujata, now have two children. They helped Rasaiah build the other newer house.
The daughters married Tamil men from Batticaloa. One of them remained in Kataragama. She came in while Rasaiah was talking to me. Her Sinhala was flawless. When I complemented her, she said she grew up exclusively among Sinhala people. She has two daughters. Their Tamil is flawed but they speak ordinary Sinhala the way Sinhala people speak.
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What did Rasaiah think now about Kataragama? Well, there were two more eruptions later, one in the 70s and the other in 1983. The 70s events had to do with the Janata Vimukti Peramuna and army activities and had nothing to do with the Tamils. In 1983 some people came in and tried to harass some Tamils but they did not do him any harm. Rasaiah seemed pleasantly surprised that during the 1983 events, when the whole of the country was on fire, Kataragama was relatively calm and no lives were lost. He believed that the 1983 rioters also came from elsewhere - Tissamaharama, Hambantota, and places like that. They were Sinhala people. He believed that those rioters were low caste Sinhala people. From his point of view, high caste Sinhala people did not harass the Tamils. I am not sure what he meant by high and low castes. Did he mean that one lost caste by harassing Tamils or did he mean that people born into low caste families harassed Tamils? Perhaps he meant a little of both. About Kataragama? It was clear that the god did not live there any longer. How could a god live in Kataragama with what was going on? Everything changed. The god did not like that. He withdrew from Kataragama and now lives in Okanda. Valliamman also went there. He only looks at Kataragama, from far.
I said I wanted to see his hena. It was in the back of his house. We walked between the two houses and entered the hena. It looked like Rasaiah owned, at least cultivated, about an acre. Neatly laid out beds of peanuts and various other vegetables, several fecund mango trees, equally fruitful tamarind trees, beds of corn and sorghum, and various other fruit trees crowded this very intensively cultivated piece of land. He worked all day and liked to spend his time in his hena. There was always something to do. His patch of land stood out in the neighborhood, as the other similar patches were overgrown and neglected.
We were back in his front yard. His grandchildren were there. We looked at the plants in the front of the compound. By the time we returned, a granddaughter had built an image with
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sand. She had drawn a square in the sand with her big toe. Then she had drawn two parallel lines from the middle of a side of the square to the middle of a side of another square with a circular mound at its center. She had placed small white flowers around the mound. I asked her what these were. She pointed to the first square and said it was the Maha Devale. Then she pointed to the little mound and said it was the Kiri Vehera.
Everyone was charmed by this work of sand-art. And everyone was surprised by its Buddhist character as the artist was a Hindu child. Rasaiah whispered to me pointing to the Kiri Vehera, "Suran Kottan. The child sees it as a Buddhist”
We left Rasaiah's place and went to see several other Tamil families. They all expressed similar views. Outsiders came and attacked them in 1983. But one woman with a manically shrill voice contradicted them all:
"This is not true. People here also came, and beat us up, and set fire to our house. They were from here. I saw them.”
An older man said, "Maybe some were from here.” "Did they kill anyone?” "No. No one was killed.” The woman insisted. "That is also not true. One died in the hospital. Tell the truth. These people will let others know.”
There was deep mistrust and anger in her voice. Rajan said, "These people think you are from an NGO. The woman certainly does. She wants this information to go out. The man does not think so, because you don't look like someone from an NGO. So he says what works locally. But she is right. Some people from here also joined the rioters that came here from elsewhere. But I don't know about this death.”
Structures, Functions, Conflicts and Transformations
That led me to several discussions of the nature of Kataragama community. I spoke to different types of people regarding this matter: kapu families, several Hindu priests, bhikkhus,
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businessmen, peasants, and various officials, except the police and the Basnayaka Nilame's office who always presented a conflict-free state of affairs and would rather not talk about the larger events.
The gist of what I found presents a pyramidal structure to the Kataragama community. That in itself is not exciting because it is a very typical structure. I already examined the historical development of this structure and its various transformations during several transfers of power during the past five hundred years or SO. To summarize, until 1815, the main transfer was from a Sinhala Buddhist pyramid headed by the king of Kandy - and below him the Disaves/Ratemahatmayas, then the Bathmes, and the Basnayaka as the local representative of the apex of this hierarchy - to a Tamil Hindu led hierarchy in which, except the apex the rest remained intact. During this transfer of power, Tamil Hindus gained a modicum of authority despite the reluctance of the Tamil Hindu Kings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to meddle with the established Sinhala Buddhist structures. In fact, Tamil Hindu kings operationalized the Sinhala Buddhist state and its various institutions including Kataragama. These feudally established structures dealt exclusively with the administration of religious institutions and their properties. Buddhist monks appear to have had some authority at one time but their presence during the period under consideration was minimal and nominal, except in the contexts of the Kiri Vehera which, too, was in ruins until the last decades of the nineteenth century. Apart from these political and administrative status, there were religious specialists like the kapuralas, the Swamis, their attendants, and the pakirs, who functioned exclusively in the ritual sphere. They acted under the authority of the Basnayaka Nilame.
A separate administration existed for the administration of non-religious affairs. This consisted of a Korala and a village level Arachchi and sundry Vidanes that took care of various local level specialized functions under the supervision of the Disawe/ Ratemahatmaya. The lay Community came under their jurisdiction. This lay community had a hierarchical organization in terms of
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class and caste. The landowning Sinhala goigamakapu families, the North Indian Brahmans, the Tamil vellala kurukkals, the Vaddas, and the affines of these groups held the highest position. The Vadda community had its own elite who had a position comparable to those of the Sinhala and Tamil political elite. Various small Sinhala goigama and Tamil vellala groups that worked for the temples and or resided on land owned by the devale and or the kapu families held a position below the priestly families. These groups were migrants from elsewhere. Many of them eventually developed affinal relationships with the priestly families and merged with the upper stratum. Below them were the indigent migrants, whose whereabouts were uncertain, and Sinhala and Tamil lower castes, generally the domestic service castes. The latter constituted the lowest level in the power and prestige hierarchy of seven levels. They lived elsewhere and came to Kataragama only to perform their professional duties.
The second transfer of state power in 1815, led to the loss of kingship and sovereignty and the British colonial authorities, under the supervision of the British Colonial Office, made a few radical changes at the very top of the pyramid. The king, the Adigars, Disawas, and the Bathmes were removed together with the Koralas, Arachchis, and Vidanas and substituted with the king/queen of Britain, the British parliament, the Colonial Office, the Governor General, the Government Agent of a district. At the village level, a Village Headman took the place of the Arachchi. The new administration replaced the traditional and charismatic authority system of the feudal regime with what Max Weber would call a bureaucracy based on rational legal authority under the British Constitution. The transfer was not complete as the traditional and charismatic authority of the feudal classes waned only very slowly. Today it has completely disappeared except for a modicum of authority left with the bhikkhus. In Kataragama, the only aspect of the pre-colonial regime left intact is the authority of the ritual specialists. As discussed earlier, the Basnayaka Nilame's authority has been reduced drastically as his duties came under the
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Government Agent of the Uva Province and sometimes under the Assistant Government Agent of Hambantota.
With the influx of South Indian plantation workers from the 1830s, the pilgrim traffic significantly increased but the Sinhalas had virtually abandobed Kataragama thereby enhancing the authority of the east coast Tamil Hindus during the festive season. I pointed out earlier that the authority of the Hindus gained strength in the early decades of the twentieth century. Although the low country Buddhists and Theosophists attempted to use the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance to obtained funds accruing to the temples for their purposes and although the Hindus used it to establish some accountability in Kataragama administration, if not for the Ordinance Hindus would have, as Ponnambalam Arunachalam proposed, gained complete control of the religious activities in Kataragama.
The third transfer of power occurred in 1948 as the British Government granted political independence to Sri Lanka. The transfer occurred gradually, as outlined above, and was incomplete in 1948 as the British Government retained the final judicial authority in the British Privy Council. Nevertheless, 1948 brought a Sea of change. It produced a dualistic authority system consisting of politicians and bureaucrats. From 1970 to 1977, political authority undermined bureaucratic authority, including the authority of the police. Also in 1972, the country abandoned its colonial name and readopted its pre-colonial name Lanka with a new prefix 'Sri. It also withdrew from the British Privy Council and established its own final judicial authority in the national Supreme Court. Kataragama thus came under the authority of the government bureaucracy and the police as well as the Superceding powers of the local members of the parliament.
In Kataragama other structural transformations also occurred on the eve of the Independence. The first bus came to Kataragama in 1930, from Haputale. This significantly increased the pilgrim traffic from the hill country enhancing the authority of the Tamil
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Hindus in Kataragama. However, as elsewhere on the island, the rising tide of Sinhala Buddhist nationalistic fervor gradually engulfed Kataragama as well. As Obeyesekere writes, the Sinhala Buddhists began to patronize Kataragama once again in the 1930s: One of our most reliable informants, an ex-official at the temple, put it this way: "In 1926 about 5000 people were present at the final day of the procession, and one quarter were Buddhists; in 1950 there were many more and the positions reversed.” With the increase in popularity of the cult, the procession also became more elaborate. According to the same informant, in 1926, the procession contained one elephant, two davul drummers, and an official of the cult, but in 1936 an influential politician introduced Kandyan dancers, more drummers, and elephants and this process of elaboration has been going on ever since.' In 1937 S.C. Fernando, the Assistant Government Agent of Uva Wrote:
... remarkable was the presence of innumerable innumerable Buddhists whose arrival carried a stage further that remarkable cosmopolitanity which Kataragama inspires into diversities of class, caste, and creed. The Buddhists seem to throw into this amalgam the element of race. No doubt Kirivehera rather than the Maha Devale or the Valliamma Temple attracts the Buddhist but who will gainsay that the god of Kataragamamis dear to Buddhist and Hindu alike?
An interesting feature besides was the sudden change of complexion in the crowds about four days prior to the end of the Festival. Till then "Haro Hara” is the rule, the Vetti cloth and bare body the regulation dress and Tamil language the lingua franca of diverse nationalities, but almost imperceptibly with the Full Moon approaching "Haro Hara” is submerged by "Sadhu' and "Karunavai,” Sinhalese is more to the fore and the Sari and the cloth and coat come into prominence.'
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Obeyesekere writes:
The Hindu monopoly of fire-walking was broken by a young Sinhala Buddhist now known as Wijeratne Sami. Young Wijeratne was sent by the great Buddhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapala to study textile manufacture in India. There he became interested in the "occult sciences.” When he came back to Sri Lanka, he determined to test his occult knowledge by walking the fire at Kataragama. In 1942, he brashly crossed the fire-pit without seeking permission from the chief fire-walker, the mendicant Selliah Sami. The latter was outraged; he doused the fire and put a stop to the proceedings. However, the lay trustee of Kataragama, a Sinhala Buddhist aristocrat, reconciled the two. Vijeyaratna fell on his knees and asked forgiveness from Selliah Sami, who then with great magnanimity took Vijeyaratna as his first Sinhala pupil.
While Wijeratna Sami was the first Buddhist to walk the fire, it was another Sinhala Buddhist, Mutukuda Sami, who was responsible for converting the ritual into one dominated by Sinhala Buddhists. Born in 1910 in Kalutara, Western Province, Mutukuda was from a respectable Sinhala Buddhist family. He was educated in Sinhala schools but had a fair knowledge of English. In the middle 1930s, he visited India, where he stayed for four years studying the "occult sciences.” He came back to Sri Lanka, but in the 1940s enlisted in the Royal Army Corps. He went first to Bombay; after four months, he was sent to Egypt. He participated in El Alamein; from there he was sent to Tobruk, Tripoli, and then to Sicily. The critical event occurred when Lieutenant Mutukuda led a convoy of seventeen vehicles past Casino Hill. The following is his own English rendering of the events, as he told it to me:
When we were convoyed through Casino Hill, ... then Italians came and raided. They raided us with bombs and machine guns. Drivers and vehicles were being destroyed.
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At that time only myself and my driver escaped. Italians came and machine gunned and I creeped under my vehicle. I remember at once god Kataragama. All these are fire, the bombs are also fire, I thought. If I escape from this raid I will go back to Sri Lanka and go to Kataragama and do firewalking. This was my vow.
He returned to Sri Lanka in 1945, a captain in the Army. True to his vow, he came to Kataragama in 1947; but unfortunately he arrived after the fire-walking was over. Depressed, he went to the sacred river Manik Ganga to bathe; there, an old man who looked like his dead uncle (father's younger brother) told him: "Son, do not be afraid; you come next time. You must put an end to eating fish and meat. Bathe, purify yourself, and be ready for walking the fire next time.” This apparition was, of course, the god himself. In 1948, he returned to Kataragama and successfully walked the fire, under the guidance of Selliah Sami, the Hindu mendicant. In the following three years, he was joined by three or four acquaintances of his, among them two government officials: the chief of the Colombo fire-fighting unit, and an accountant in the Government Railways Department. This period coincided with the emerging political dominance of Sinhala Buddhists and strong resentment against Tamil Hindus. Thus, in 1951, the Sinhala lay trustee of the shrine gave Mutukuda the title of chief fire-walker, displacing the Hindu Selliah Sami. Thereafter the Sinhala was known by his Hinduized name, Mutukuda Sami. No more Hindus have been nominated to this post since then.
Soon the mass media highlighted the prowess of firewalkers, and Mutukuda Sami came to have an almost national reputation. He resigned his position in 1962, in an argument with the trustee on the timing of the ritual. Wijeratne Sami took his place till 1969; he also resigned after an argument with the trustee - this disagreement over a change in venue
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of the fire-walking ritual from the small compound facing the main shrine to a larger area opposite the trustee's own official residence. Subsequently, the position fell to various persons: a carpenter and part-time priest, a priest of a Colombo shrine, the chief inspector of the public transport system of the city of Ratnapura. In 1975, a young liberal member of the parliament was elected lay trustee by the Kataragama electoral college. He reinstated Wijeratne Sami (although the fire-walking site, over which the latter had originally resigned, was not changed back)."
In 1949 Kataragama was connected to the southern coastal road by a main road, and in 1952 buses were introduced on this route. Within twenty five years,...annual pilgrim traffic was exceeding half a million.' Sometime in the nineteenth century, on top of the Vadahitiya Kanda edging the village of Detagamuwa where the god was supposed to have lived, a Tamil devotee had established a shrine for the god. By 1960s the shrine was attended to by a Tamil named Sangarapillai. According to Obeyesekere:
In 1960 Ratmalane Siddhartha, after practicing Buddhist meditation (bhavana) on Ganadevi Kanda, a hill at Detagamuva, came to Vadahitikanda and employed Sangarapillai as his pusari.... He did not pay Sangarapillai cash, ... but fed him and looked after him till his death in 1963. ... he behaved as pupil does to guru...' Ven. Siddhartha took over the shrine and made it into a Buddhist Hindu shrine.
The rising popularily of the god was partly due to the absence of adequate of pathways for the educated people to achieve socioeconomic goals. The universal education that the colonial authorities and the Hindu and Buddhist nationalist movements developed produced a large number of educated individuals who had remote chances of finding the coveted government jobs that were very few in number. As Obeyesekere contends, “Of the deities of the pantheon Skanda is eminently suited for the new situation.”
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Those who hoped to benefit from the god's grace and benevolence included the entire political hierarchy of the country. With this popularity, the social structure of Kataragama village also changed. While the vast majority of the Tamil residents, including the retirees residing at the Teivayanaiamman kovil, who fled from Kataragama never returned, Sinhala Buddhist lumpens flooded the village as the small bazaar grew into a town of considerable size, and became the majority occupying the second lowest rung of the social hierarchy.
The twentieth century ended bringing hitherto unknown changes and transformations in Kataragama. President Ranasinghe Premadasa turned everything in the Kataragama village up side down. The reorganization of the spatial characteristics of Kataragama and its conversion into a sacred city brought unimagined changes in the Society in Kataragama. The ancient village and its seasonal bazaar, the madamas and various Sundry but lively kovils and shrines were scraped out of existence. Only the Abhinavaramaya - the Buddhist temple and monastery that came up in the mid-1920s, the Ramakrishna Mission building - now a museum, the Muslim complex, the Valliamma devale, the sacred Tamarind tree near it, and the Mutulingaswami Sivakovil survived the restructuring of the space in the 1980s. The restructured space became a quasi-extension of the sacred spaces where the everyday economic activities are prohibited. It is perplexing. The old village was romantic and had an irresistible charm about it. Colorful during the festive season, with Smoke from innumerable joss Sticks wafting about, people bustling around, and the sight and aroma of hoppers in the making - all this was a form of life coming down the ages, and ubiquitous in pre-colonial South Asia. But, from a postcolonial perspective, it became an eyesore with shabby huts, trash, and foul odors.
That 'village split into two and relocated on the south side of the river. One half of it, the bazaar, is now a non-residential shopping complex. It is like any other small town except for the specifically Kataragama ritual oriented merchandize in the shops
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mostly on the riverside. It is more elaborate now than before, with various facilities for the pilgrims. Numerous guesthouses and resting places exist all over the place. The fancier resting places, including an internationally run four-star hotel are located in Detagamuwa. The village was first temporarily located in the space between the Kiri Vehera and the Maha Devale and in an area South of the Kiri Vehera and later permanently located on the east, between Sella Kataragama and the Stupa, where in the pre-colonial times the villagers cultivated their henas. This land was parceled out into small blocks, and given to the displaced villagers. Sella Kataragama itself has developed a big bazaar and a community now notorious for underworld activities.
The village so constructed became the habitat for a wide variety of people. The former elite have carved out an elite neighborhood close to the Kiri Vehera, on the south side of the river. The rest is dominated by the lumpen crowd that I mentioned earlier. This crowd is mostly first and second generation residents of Kataragama. During the riots in 1983, it was this crowd that joined the thugs from Tissamaharama and harassed those Tamil residents.
Structurally, if the 1958 riots removed the Tamil segment, the 1980s reconstruction removed all signs of an era, the signs of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Kataragama. Only the Ramakrishna Mission building remains, as a signifier of what happened to the Kataragama of that era, as a museum. But that removal also signifies the triumph of the Sinhala Buddhists in Kataragama.
The 1971 violence had nothing to do with Kataragama. It had to do with several families of recent migrants, the JVP, and the army. It was not an ethnic conflict but a conflict within the Sinhala community. The 1983 conflict in the macro-political structure in the country had only a minor impact on Kataragama simply because only a few Tamil families lived there. If more Tamils lived there, Kataragama would have erupted just as massively as Colombo, Kandy, or Galle. The potential was there as the few
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incidents indicate. The developments in Sri Lanka's social structure during the last two centuries intervened in the Social and political affairs of Kataragama. Its isolation and calm were disrupted by the active and decisive influence of colonialism and political strategies and blunders in Colombo power blocks. Thus, whenever social structural disturbances occur elsewhere Kataragama village is immediately affected.
Nonetheless, Kataragama ritual life remained reasonably immune to such disruptive and destructive external influences, particularly from political structures centered in Colombo. Even when conflicts arose, such as the conflict in ritual calendars, they were quickly resolved. Even after the spatial rearrangement of the village, the ritual organization continued as before. The disruption of the traditional authority system that controlled the temple property was replaced by the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinances which, when strictly implemented, has been effective, but it did not interfere with the ritual procedures. But this is not where Kataragama is remarkable as there are other grand rituals such as the Perahara in Kandy that carry on as usual in spite of the various external influences including LTTE bombings. Where Kataragama is unique is regarding the multiethnic and multicultural character of its ritual organization during the festive season. We must now go to the sacred area, the puja bhumi as it is now called, participate and look at the rituals of Kataragama.
End Notes
For details of his interpretation, see Epigraphia Zeylanica III:II. According to
Paranavitana, Kadahavapigama refers to the present day Katagamuwa, a village about five miles away from Kataragama. Katagamuwa is the traditional village of the kapuralala or the priests at the Kataragama maha devale. We shall discuss the kapuralas in the next chapter. Paranavitana (ibid.); Jayawardana (1959: 293). "Sometimes the kings carried out their religious enthusiasm to extreme and even to absurd lengths, as, for instance, when Mahadathika gave himself, his
queen, his two sons, his state-elephant and his state-horse to the Sangha; but the latter had the good sense to take advantage of the king's liberality with
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due consideration for property, particularly with regard to the embarrassing gift of the queen.” (Paranavitana: 1959:174).
Paranavitana (EZIII:II: n6).
Buddhadatta (1959(b): vi), in his introduction to the Sahassavatthu Prakarana, contends that of the three compendia of early Buddhist lore the Sahassavattu was composed before the tenth century. The Sahassavatthu is a translation of the Sihalavatthu (Buddhadatta: 1959 (a):iii-ix). This implies that the Sihalavatthu was composed even earlier. Also see Perera in History of Ceylor
Vol.I.
Buddhadatta (1959 (c):89). Culavansa 45.45-46. Culavansa 57. 1-11. Geiger (1953:193:n3).
By medieval I mean the period between the ancient and the modern periods. There are no clear-cut divisions between the ancient and the medieval and the distinction is conventional. By ancient, I mean the earliest period indicated by material evidence. Through this evidence, I infer a particular civilization. The character of material evidence - linguistic, architectural, technological and administrative organization - found in literary and material sources undergoes fundamental transformations to represent a different kind of society. For my purposes, the causes of these transformations are immaterial. The duration of this transformed society is what I refer to as the medieval period. The medieval is, by definition, transitory. It, too, ends for whatever the reason to produce what may be called the modern era. Even this term modern is problematical as it refers to a vaguely defined (there is no agreement as to when the modern began) era in European history. For Sri Lanka, it is more convenient to call it the post-colonial era for Sri Lanka does not represent any of the characteristics of modernity such as found in the European civilization. However, European colonialism that caused the transformation of the medieval society into what is Sri Lanka's present by presenting the European civilization as a functional alternative and causing the extinction of the extant social, political, economic and cultural organizations, to lead to what is today and continuing to impact and define it. Perhaps, the timeline for the transformation of the ancient to the medieval is the end of the Polonnaruwa kingdom and emergence of the Dambadeniya and the period of dynastic instability up to the Kotte period; roughly about three hundred years. The medieval began to decay with the emergence of a tripartite Kotte, Sitavaka and Kandyan regimes towards the end of the fifteenth century. European colonialism commenced soon afterwards in early sixteenth century and thenceforth European civilization has been a parallel and dominant phenomenon. However, none of the
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modernities that that civilization produced from the sixteenth century entered this society except in superficial and coercively enforced forms. Nor did the native society produce anything original to replace the decaying medieval society. Thus, by modern Society I refer to the existing Sri Lankan Society - in all its local formations - a tragicomic blend of decaying and vestigial medieval sociocultural formations and appearances of modern European sociocultural formations.
Dhatuvansa (Kumaratunga:1940:12). Paranavitana (Hist. of Cey. Vol.1 Pt.2). Paranavitana (JCBRAS).
Ponnambalam Arunachalam refers to an ola leaf manuscript titled "Kanda Upata” found at the Ridi Viharaya in Kurunegala to support the story, cited earlier, that King Duttagamani built a shrine in Kataragama for the god of Kataragama. The early constructions in Ridi Viharaya date back to the first century BCE, King Duttagamani's reign. However, the manuscript itself could not have been written at that time. In all probability, the "Kanda Upata” is a late seventeenth to eighteenth century work that recorded an already existing belief among the literati. More of this later.
Paranavitana (EZIII:II:n6).
Jinakalamali – Sihalapatimakatha (Buddhadatta ed. 1962:87). The text reads...Cattaro kira devatayo, Sumanadevaraja, Rama - Lakkhana - Khattagama — nama ca tejiddhika sutthu Lankadipam rakkhanti.
Interestingly, the Jinakalamali presents a Vaishnavite pantheon merged with local deities. Just as interestingly, it remains Vaishnavite to this day. The present day pantheon consists of Natha, Visnu, Kataragama, and Pattini. See Holt (2005) for a discussion of the transformations in this pantheon.
Knox (1961:1681).
Pieris (1983:1914: 303). Ribeiro (1685). English translation P.E.Pieris (1999:1909:81-82). See Chapter 2.
Deraniyagala (1960:47: 105). The dating appears in the colophon in verse 105. The name and the social status of the poet is in verse 2. However, the Tamilyalpana waipava malai of Mayilvakanan Pulavar, composed in 1736, mentions the worship of Kadirai Andavar on the island but does not refer to Kataragama (Yalpana Vaipava Malai of Mayilvakanan Pulavar, translated as The Yalpana-Vaipava-Malai or The History of the Kingdom of Jaffna by C.Britto (1999:1879), pgs. 2-3). Instead, he refers to a temple for Kathirai Andavar in Kathiraimalai in the northern parts of the island. On the other hand, the kanda sura varuna: valli amma upata, composed at the latest in
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24
32
1742 by a Sinhala folk poet named Makulagama of Sat Korale in the Kandyan kingdom refers to the present day Vedahiti Kanda as Kadiramala Kanda (Somadasa (1995: 235-237). The use of the Tamil Kadiramalai confirms the influence of the Muruga cult on courtly religion and composition of panegyrics. But curiously, Mayilvakanan was not aware of it. Instead he situates Kadiramalai somewhere in the north. More of this later.
Dewaraja (1995: 375-397; 1988:1972:72-135).
Dewaraja (1988: 1972:31-34). As Dewaraja (ibid: 36-38) discusses, whether the Nayakkars were of royal blood is another story.
Lewke Adigar objected to the passing of the crown to the Nayakkars at the demise of king Narendrasinghe and supported the enthronement of a Kandyan aristocrat named Unambuwe Bandara. However, Unambuwe Bandara was not theoretically an acceptable choice as he was an issue from a yakada doliya - a govigama aristocratic lady and not a kshatriya princess (Pieris: 1995: 1918:41). However, it is likely that Bhikkhu Saranankara supported Narendrasinghe's desire to pass the crown to his brother-in-law as the latter was, according to the mandaram pura puivata (Lankananda: 1958), Saranankara's pupil. Saranankara was interested in reviving Buddhist monastic order by re-establishing higher ordination (upasampada) among the bhikkhus. He needed royal patronage to achieve this end. However, this seems to have its own dialectic. In order to revive Buddhism through a revival of the sangha he sought the help of Hindus who influenced popular Buddhism in Sri Lanka and revived the worship of Hindu deities by Buddhists. Dewaraja (op.cit.) and Malalgoda (1976: 60-61). Clearly, this was a blatant expression of sheer lack of innovative thinking on the part of the Sinhala leadership. They could have solved the problem by elevating, as is done frequently in India, a local elite family to kshatriya status. However, envy and mistrust among the elite blocked this possibility.
Dewaraja (Op.cit.).
Holt (1996).
Dewaraja (Op.Cit.) and Dharmadasa (1997).
Pieris (1995: 1950: 695-697). See Obeyesekere (1984) for the cult of the goddess Pattini and the role of the Pattinihamis or the ritual experts of the cult. The Sinhala goddess Pattini is a local redefinition of a Jaina-Buddhist deity named Kannagiin TamilNadu and Kerala. The Kannagi cult was particularly strong in the east coast with a cult center in Karaitivu, as I discussed in Chapter Three.
Op. Cit. 697-701.
I already examined some aspects of this issue in Chapter Two.
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It is likely that the Islamic activities in Kataragama in the eighteenth century were negligible and only a few Sufis visited the sacred site. Davy (1983:1821) also does not speak of an Islamic shrine.
Nevill: Or. 6615 (221) in Somadasa (op.Cit. 119). Sannasgala (1962:30).
Correspondence from D'Oyly to Wright on 29th April, 1819, in Pieris (op Cit. 196 and 510: n34).
Many nineteenth century works of poetry, such as the epistolary poems katakirili Sandesaya, kahakurulu Sandesaya and other similar works except the diya Savulsandesaya, refer to Kanda Kumara worship in Kataragama. But the Kanda Kumara that they address is pretty much the Sinhala Buddhist deity whom the 1765 Dutch report describes.
Davy (1821:313).
Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988). This was the Teivayanaiamman kovil (my note).
Davy (ibid). On the other hand, as discussed in Chapter Two, the bhikkhu informant was probably ignorant of exactly what existed in Kataragama. Nothing in the report says that the informant was a resident of Kataragama or was involved in the activities in Kataragama. He appears to be just any bhikkhu who was available and capable of communicating with the governor. Therefore, rather than wilfull suppression lack of or insufficient knowledge could be the reason for this omission.
The Bathme positions were abolished after the 1818 rebellion. The Basnayaka Nilame only visited Kataragama and did not reside there.
Dewaraja (1988; 183-186) gives a general account of devala administration. Curiously, even in the British administration, Kataragama was an unimportant, troublesome and marginal place. It belonged to the Uva Province, as a part of the Wellavaya Pattu, and properly came under the jurisdiction of the Government Agent of Badulla. But it was the Government Agent of Hambantota who policed the festival most of the years... All the administrative reports about Kataragama festivities shift between Hambantota and Badulla G.A.s. For example, Thomas Steele reported from Hambantota while G.A. Baumgartner and Herbert White reported from Badulla. It appears that although Badulla was the administrative center Katataragama came under Hambantotapolice jurisdiction and supervision of Kataragama festivities shifted back and forth between Hambantota and Badulla. The exact character of this pattern of administration is interesting in its own right but beyond the scope of my study of Kataragama.
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Herbert White (1933) footnotes Thomas Steel (1873) that according to the Temple Lands Commissioner the Kataragama MahaDevale owned this extent of land. Cited in Fernando (1985:40).
Dewaraja:ibid. Baumgartner reports: "The Trustee is very plunderous, at the same time he shows no sense of responsibility, regarding the income he should get from the temple lands. Forest land with good trees is allowed to be chenared and no share of the crop, no rent, is taken by the temple. He has also sold tracts of temple land as his personal property; one case is land at Karawila sold to Kataragam Arachi. I noticed these chena clearings in a walk I took. The destruction of the forest with no benefit to the temple seems very wasteful. But the people of Kataragam was (but this howler is Baumbartners!) allowed
to clear what land they like. There is no management. (July 26", 1898 in Saparamadu 2004: 87 and Fernando: Op.cit.:88).
In 2005, he was also elected as the Diyawadana Nilame of the Dalada Maligava in Kandy, the most prestigious position as the caretaker of a temple with royal endowments. The feudal connections of the position remained firm until the 1980s when commoners also were appointed to the position. At present, the incumbent is not a descendant of a feudal lineage but a close relative of a powerful political family. In any event, political connection appears to be the criterion for selection.
This account appears in the Kandyan period folk poem Kanda Upata. Baumgartner (1898) in Saparamadu (Opcit. 90). Pieris(Op.Cit. 257-258, 526. n2).
Parker (1999:1909:19-20) speculates that the Vyadha Deva referred to in the Mahavansa could be the prototype for Kanda Kumara. It is apparent that in official language the Vaddas were referred to as the Vyadhas. As Meegaskumbura (1990) points out the Vaddas do not accept this term to call themselves. Rather, they identify themselves as Vanniyelaatto or the people of the Vanni. The term Vyadha and the Tamil word for Vadda, Vedar or Vetar probably have a common root.
Pieris (ibid.). One reason for my reluctance is the ongoing lawsuits regarding the eligibility of the present kapu families to hold their positions. A challenger claims that the present kapu families, by means of conspiracies and subterfuges, unethically ousted his family from kapu positions early last century. Interestingly, the Teivayanaiamman kovil, the Muthulingaswami Sivakovil, and the mosque have been embroiled on similar lawsuits throughout the colonial period.
Steele (1870) It is likely that more families lived on the land but only these twelve families owned the land. During official census taking only the land
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owning families were counted. I he other families were in all probability transient in character and lived in the village only so long as they worked for the land owning families.
King (1870:136).
"Walauwa (Dutch). The residence of a chief or manorial lord, a word possibly derived from Velavu (Tamil), meaning household, garden; premises' (Goonaratne: 1986: 259).
Parker (op.cit.). Lankananda (op.cit).
I am not sure whether the mandaram pura puvata fed the folklore or whether its authors were informed by the folklore in Kataragama and Vellassa. Possibly, both occurred and the notions current in Kataragama are taken from the text by the educated residents of the area.
Arunachalam (1924). Davy (1821).
White (1933:1893. n). C.L.Ferdinand who visited Kataragama in 1852, found twelve small 6ft x 6ft kovils in this cluster. At that time the Kivulegedera Deiyanne Kovila was identified as the one dedicated to the deified Kivulegedera Mohottala, who was beheaded on December 18, 1818 (Ferdinand:1852:85; cited in Dharmadasa and Tundeniya: 1994: 307-308). For Basnairadeiyo see Dharmadasa and Tundeniya (op.cit. 318-319; for Parakasa Deviyo 295-296; for Kumara Deviyo 214-217). Of these Parakasa Deviyo, who bore a bow and inhabited inaccessible places in the hill country could well be a deified Vadda. There are many Kumara Deviyos. The kanda male in the Hugh Nevill collection states that the Kumara Deviyo who had a devale in Kataragama was born in Goa and migrated to Colombo (161,3:354); cited in Dharmadasa and Tundeniya (Op.cit.215).
Dharmadasa and Tundeniya (ibid.). Also see op.cit (205-209) for further details. Dharmadasa and Tundeniya opine that the devale for Aluth Bandara Devi as mentioned in 1813 by Talarambe Dhammakkhanda in the verse 154 of his diya savul sandeSaya could be the Kivulegedera Devalaya (op.cit. 308). See Pieris (op.cit. 257-258) for Vyadha Kangan.
Many late nineteenth century and early twentieth century European scholars and colonial administrators adopted an ethnological/anthropological attitude - then in vogue in Euro-American intellectual circles and expending considerable effort and resources to compile and analyze a remarkable body of information about people outside the Euro-American and Judeo-Christian civilization - towards native affairs. Some of them were curious about the Vaddas and the origins of Kataragama Supernaturalism. In the seminal concepts of Emile Durkheim the study of these groups and situations pointed to the
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primary states of being human. The Vaddas (conceived as a primitive group) and the ideas about and activities in Kataragama (conceived also as superstitions, primitive beliefs and behaviors that inferior intellects could produce) would produce first hand and intimate knowledge about the basics of being human in some way. Even if there was nothing to gain from this activity there was the thrill of getting on with the current intellectual issues and making discoveries. So, off they went and analyzed the society/ies in Sri Lanka. The Vaddas became the favored group as they represented the most primitive in human existence according to the theory of primitivism: nothing morally or ethically strange here as this way of evaluating and seeing the other is normal and common place in multicultural situations.
Thus examining the Vaddas the administrators could spare only limited time and opportunities to become deeply involved in the affairs of these primitives. Nonetheless, they collected and analyzed a tremendous body of information about the native peoples. Among the aspects of native life social relations, politics within, connections with political authority, wealth, and religion received much attention. Theories of origin and dispersal, the physiometry, economic organization, social, political and psychological organization came up regularly, challenging one another, generating a lively multifaceted discourse.
G.A.Baumgartner (1897) in Saparamadu (op.cit. 77-78).
The omission of the Vadda community in all politically significant discoursing is saddening and wrong. In 2005 December, Sri Lanka was caught up in a Presidential Election. The top candidates and their supporters make numerous statements about ethnic harmony, social justice, peace, and the like - concepts and terminology in vogue since 1983. When they mention ethnic issues they mention Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim, and Burgher communities. If asked why they omitted the Vadda community they would readily apologize and start talking about how great the Vaddas are, their ancient roots and the Sinhala interests in Kuveni and her children (half-sibblings of the Sinhala people), religious connections through Kataragama Deiyo and Valliamma and the like. The point is all this is forgotten when they politically think and talk about ethnicity in Sri Lanka.
Neville notes that he obtained a copy of the Kanda Sura Varuna Valliamma Upata "from the Vaddas of Hurulu or Surulu Pattu, who had obtained it from Singhalese neighbors, as a history of their ancestress” (Neville in Somadasa: 1993:235).
Neville (ibid). Neville in Parker (1909:1999:113-114). Obeyesekere (2005).
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Steele (1870), Baumgartner (1897;1898;1899).
Steele (ibid.).
Needless to say that local people were well aware of the economic potential of the region. The early Ruhuna and Wellassa communities indicate their knowledge of the economic potential of the deep south-east.
P.W.Braybrooke (1852) in Saparamadu (2004:19). Davy (1821).
Obeyesekere (1977:385). Vilbave was also known as Dorei Sami (Pieris: 1950: 1995:222).
The latter is an indicator of the international fame that Kataragama enjoyed at least from the fifteenth century. As said before, Arunagiri Nather made a pilgrimage in fifteenth century. The Thai pilgrims to Sri Lanka were aware of it in the sixteenth century as Kataragama is mentioned in the Jinakalamali as the abode of Kanda Kumara, a guardian deity of Lanka. The Portuguese learned about the real or imaginary treasures in Kataragama, as Ribeiro's account reveals; and we know that the Sufi Muslims in India and even Central Asia made pilgrimages to Kataragama from the sixteenth century. I have no details of these pilgrimages. From John Doyle I gather that when the king visited Kataragama a circuit bungalow (gaman maligava) was built for his
purposes. Obeyesekere (1985).
Rajaratnam (1961a and b); Roberts (1966a, b and c), Wesumperuma (1986).
It is likely that Obeyesekere's (ibid.) informants, similar to mine, spoke of Sinhala Buddhist pilgrimages during this era. The bulk of the pilgrims from the mid-nineteenth century were Tamils from various parts of the country. We shall see later that, as Obeyesekere (ibid. 186) demonstrates, even the Tamil pilgrimages suddenly declined from 1875 and in the 1890s the festivities were abandoned due to the lack of pilgrims.
The urban mercantile classes - the vaisyas according to the dharmasutras - have worshipped Skanda in his Naigameya form. The Chettiyars were the Tamil equivalent of these northern urban classes. In all probability they worshipped Naigameya, and since the fourteenth century canonical conflation of Skanda with Muruga they became Muruga devotees as well. See Chapter 1 for the relationship between the merchant classes and Naigameya.
Obeyesekere (1988).
Pfaffenberger (1979). Ratnajeevan Hoole states that the Vellalas and Chettiyar's never intermarried and that the offspring from such marriages were regarded as untouchables by the Vellalas (Hoole: 1997). Culturally, the Chettiyars unabashedly participated in the Muruga cult and Valliamma worship. The Vellalas considered the very name Vallia low caste name.
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Although we have no information, it is safe to speculate that they performed these vel carrying processions even during the pre-colonial period.
Between 1870 and 1872, the Chettiyars had established not only themselves but also their entire belief system about Muruga.
Steele (1870) in Saparamadu (2004:22).
My inquiries into the religion of the plantation workers revealed that they are members of various amman cults and have very little to do with the Muruga cult. They would consider Muruga as a significant deity to be feared and venerated but the religion of their daily lives revolved around these cults of the goddesses that have no place in the Hindu pantheon. The plantations are dotted with temples for various ammans. Perhaps, their focus on ammans is a relatively more recent phenomenon, which must be examined in its own right. Given their enthusiastic participation during the nineteenth century pilgrimage it is likely that the first two or three generations of these immigrant workers were Muruga worshippers.
The Serivanija jataka and Tapassu and Bhaluka in the story of the Buddha readily come to mind.
Steele (1870; 1871; 1872), Swettenham (1873), Schrader, L.W. (1907) in Saparamadu (op.cit. 144). Steele (ibid.) in Saparamadu (op.cit:21). Arunachalam (1924). Steele (1870) in Saparamadu (op.cit. 31).
Swettenham (1873) in Saparamadu (op.cit. 48). The consumption of fowls was taboo, undoubtedly because the cock bird is the bird of the god of Kataragama, but, curiously, venison was consumed although Valliamma's mother is (Visnu in the guise of) a doe. This shows the secondary status of Valliamma in Kataragama.
Wesumperuma (1986). See note 98 infra.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, the ticket system was abandoned. John Scott, the Assistant Government Agent, Hambantota, wrote in 1911that the system was a farce that was hard to put into action for several reasons. People continually crept in without tickets. There were just too many pilgrims and too few officials to check each pilgrim. A Buddhist procession 1000 strong was allowed to come to the Kiri Vehera without tickets. They could mingle with the crowd and avoid detection. Further, as 99% of the pilgrims could not read English but the tickets carried their names in English these got mixed up. Managing the ticket system was so frustrating John Scott wrote:
...I would do away with it altogether and let any number of pilgrims come here - just as to the other two big pilgrimages to St. Anne and
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Madhu. These pilgrimages are a great success - and there are no outbreaks of sickness there - then why should there be here?
I say there is no reason why epidemics or disease should occur at Kataragama if proper precautions and sanitary measures are taken. Judging by the steps taken in this direction here this year, I would say that sanitary measures and precautions here have been hitherto totally inadequate - and I would ascribe the former outbreaks of disease here to that inadequacy. Greater precautions require greater expenditure of course then without hesitation I would recommend the spending of more money on this pilgrimage; money is spent lavishly enough on the other two big pilgrimages; why not on this? (Scott:1911) in Saparamadu (2004: 169171).
Some notice cultural prejudice on the part of the colonial regime. Arguably,
the better facilities at Madu might have been the result of the modern European style organizational skills of the Madu church authorities who were Europeans. They knew how to deal with the colonial government although the official policy of the government was one of secularism. The Kataragama authorities - the Basnayaka Nilame and the kapuralas - lacked this social and cultural capital to manipulate the government. Probably they never even thought about asking for government help as such were never done before. Until the arrival of the plantation workers pilgrimages to Kataragama were modest even during the festive season. Perhaps, the lack of facilities did produce outbreaks of disease. During my walk through the Yala sanctuary I noticed how scarce water could be. Drinking stagnant water in pools and puddles could produce dysentery and cholera, particularly when contaminated with human excreta. Perhaps the Sinhala saying, danagena giyot Kataragama, nodana giyot ataramaga, taken literally, refers to the problems of physical survival from diseases and many expected to die for various reasons among which death from infectious diseases such as malaria, dysentery and cholera was well known. Nonetheless, in the local culture there were no conceptions as to how to deal with disease as the pre-colonial government was not involved in identifying and preventing these diseases. The traditional explanations of suffering and death during the pilgrimage hinged on the notions of karma and the god's wrath.
Wesumperuma outlines the sanitary conditions in the plantations during the late 1800s and early 1900s. On the plantations there were no lavatories. The workers were allowed to use a plot of land for excretion. However, they defecated wherever they worked and during the rains the run off carried the excreta into the streams which the workers used for bathing, washing and even drinking. The planters claimed that the spread of the diseases through these means was due to the workers' unsanitary habits and superstitious
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inhibitions. This does have a point because the cultures from which the workers were extracted for importation had no institutionalized normative frameworks for excretion. Consequently, in South India, these communities suffer from various diseases. They carried these cultural traits and diseases to Sri Lanka. The routes along which the laborers were transported were also the routes along which cholera and various intestinal diseases, imported from South India together with the laborers, were distributed. But the native habits and customs and lack of cultural normative structures alone cannot explain as to why the diseases should spread in Sri Lanka. Wesumperuma holds, very reasonably, that long hours of work, the wage structure, bad housing, unsanitary conditions and the lack of adequate welfare facilities (I take it that one of these would be education in hygiene) contributed to the general illhealth of the plantation workers (Wesumperuma: 1986: 41-60; 224-239).
Then what is the point of complaining in Kataragama as if pilgrimages to Kataragama would contaminate the plantation labor communities with cholera and other diseases if these diseases were already there on the plantations and the transportation of the laborers into the plantations and living conditions in the plantations were a serious threat to the health on the whole island? In addition, as Scott reported, after all the expressions of concern the sanitary conditions in Kataragama up to 1911 were wholly inadequate and the pilgrims would have carried the disease into the plantations (ibid.). One might argue that the plantation workers brought disease into Kataragama rather than taking diseases from Kataragama into the plantations. In that case, what is the point of restricting the pilgrimages to Kataragama? We shall return to this point a little later.
This, when combined with the fact that the government lavishly spent funds on Madhu and St. Anne's at Talavila indicate a different set of issues least of which might be the concern with sanitation. Within the rules imposed by the administration to restrict pilgrimages one notices colonial cultural prejudice in addition to the native cultural incompetence to harness the colonial administrative system to establish a better healthcare delivery system in Kataragama.
Boake (1878: 117).
Williams (1879: 18). Williams (1880: 128).
White (1895) in Saparamadu (op.cit. 61). Myitalics. White (ibid.) in Saparamadu (op.cit. 62). Steele (1973) in Saparamadu (ibid. 44-45). Saparamadu (op.cit. 11).
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Steele (1874) in Saparamadu (ibid. 50).
Wesumperuma (ibid.). I will discuss these a little later. See infra, Claiming Kataragama. Steele (1873) in Saparamadu (ibid. 45). Steele (ibid.) in Saparamadu (ibid. 42-45). I added the emphases in parentheses and underlined the subject headings of the paragraphs. I detected several typos and, perhaps, printing errors in the text but I left them as they are. See n.98 supra.
Roberts and Wickremeratne (1973:102).
Wesumperuma (op.cit.). Baumgartner or Fernando's notes: Distance of over 350 miles (Fernando: op. cit. 86). Absent in Saparamadu (op. cit. 82). “Sirima” in Saparamadu (op.cit. 85). Emphasis mine. This appears to be a typographical error in Saparamadu (op.cit. 86) that states when his subordinates are provinces.' I use Fernando (op.cit. 87). There were several instances where I made minor editorial changes
such as adding periods and articles. However, dating in Fernando is very chaotic.
Grammatical errors are found in both Saparamadu and Fernando. I wonder if these were standard practices of the times.
See note above.
Fernando (op. cit. 88b) states 'Complt, and Saparamadu (op.cit. 91) gives 'comple amount. It reads and makes sense as complainant.
A typographical error in Saparamadu (op. cit. 100).
I presume this to be Siribaddana whom Baumgartner referred to (my comment).
Ponnambalam Arunachalam referred to this road.
We observe the same in the contexts of the Tsunami and the vast influx of materials in aid of the victims of the Tsunami. The various local government employees, local politicians, and the LTTE (in the Eastern Province) plundered these collections for their own purposes. So much food-stuff was hoarded it all eventually rotted and had to be buried while the Tsunami victims were in dire need of these materials. We heard of political wrangling and greed among the individuals whose professional duty it was to distribute these goods among those for whom the goods were intended.
My note: Cordiner only visited Madras and the vicinities. He could not have seen much outside what is today's Tamil Nadu. Hook Hanging does not exist
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in the northern parts and even in the south it is practiced mainly by the Tamil Hindus. Cordiner (1983: 1807; 83-84). It is interesting how Cordiner did not notice the difference between Sufi Muslim practices and the Hindu practices. The hanging from hooks is a Tamil Hindu activity. But cutting the bodies with knives and piercing the bodies with long steel skewers is a Sri Lankan Sufi activity seen in Kataragama during every festive season. More of this in next Chapter.
Rasaiah (op. cit).
Schrader (1907) in Saparamadu (op. cit.: 151). Schrader (1908) in Saparamadu (op. cit.: 154). Maybe his observation here is a bit inaccurate. Sinhala kapuralas of the Maha Devale have nothing to do with these activities. But there were those who claim to be kapuralas but in the Kandyan kingdom known only as anumatiyas. The anumatiyas experienced trance states and indulged in fortune telling and the like. It is likely that the term anumatiya became obsolete and, by and by, the practitioners were included in an expanded ritual category of Kapurala. Millington (1930) in Saparamadu (op.cit.:243-244). Baumgartner (1897) in Saparamadu (op. cit.: 73). The last clause: how true even today!
Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988: 180-181). Steele (1872: see previous section). Baungartner (1897). See section above for citation. Price (1903) in Saparamadu (op. cit.: 122-123).
De Silva (1973: 207).
Price (ibid).
Price (ibid.). Murty (1906). Saparamadu (op.cit.: 132) omits the line. Fernando gives the line (op.cit.: 111).
Murty (ibid.) in Saparamadu (op.cit.: 133). Murty (ibid.) in Saparamadu (135-136). The following discussion is largely based on materials from De Silva (1973 and 2002), Malalgoda (1976), Roberts (1997; 1973), Wickremasinghe (1995),
Wickremaratne (1996: 1995; 1973; and 1969), and Wilson (2000). I shall not cite these authors individually.
See Malalgoda (1976) for an excellent discussion of these processes. Also see Holt (1996) for details of King Kirti Sri Rajasinghe's career.
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De Silva (1973: 202-207; 2002: 437-440).
The translation of this work is in itself a significant event. It indicates that Sinhala/Tamil ethnic politics in the colonial political contexts were already in full swing. Brito's appendices are significant of the ethnic politics of Brito's times.
Rasanayagam (1926:2003: 56-62). Arunachalam (1924).
For an elaborate discussion of how the notion of Lemuria influenced the Tamil sense of the past see Sumathi Ramaswamy (2004). Ramaswamy presents an excellent array of maps to illustrate her finely detailed study. She shows that Arunachalam's interests in Lemuria thesis went as far back as 1906 (ibid: 172). I developed my thesis on Arunachalam's use of the concept with reference to Kataragama independently and I wish I had access to Ramaswamy's work when I prepared mine. Also see Pillai (1968 in Weiss) and Weiss (unpublished manuscript). I had the access to Weiss's manuscript courtesy of Gananath Obeyesekere.
Blavatsky (1888).
Other work by Scot-Elliot is "The Lost Lemuria with two maps showing distribution of land areas in different periods (1904).
Scott-Elliot (1896). Rasanayagam (1926). Ramaswamy writes:
As early as 1906, P. Arunachalam (1853-1954), a member of the Ceylon Civil Service, insisted in a lecture before the governor in the Legislative Council in Colombo that his island had been a part of "an Oriental continent which stretched... from Madagascar to the Malay Archipelago.” His statement echoed metropolitan labors of loss around Ceylon. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, there had been some discussion among European geologists about the island's relation in paleotimes to the Indian mainland, with some proposing that into the Tertiary period and before the rise of the Himalayas, Ceylon had been connected to the Deccan. Colonial historiography had also resurrected ancient Buddhist contentions that Lanka had once been a much larger land that (had) been overcome by numerous catastrophic floods. Tamil place-making inherits these knowledges. In its labors of loss, there is no question that the island had been once a part of Kumarikkantam, and that once the former homeland began to submerge, Lanka separated from what would become the postlapsarian Tamilakam on the Indian mainland.....(I)n Tamil maps from the 1920s as well, Lanka is an intimate part of Kumarikkantam's antidiluvial landscape. Remarkably, however, Lemuria hardly figures in
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the Tamil nationalist imagination of modern Sri Lanka., and even in the labors of loss of those mainland devotees of Tamil who are Sri Lankan in origin ..., the island's relationship to Kumarinatu is not accorded any special treatment. While it is clearly a surviving remnant of the former homeland, its loss is subordinated to the loss of Kumarinatu, which is what is grieved over. No attempt is made to reclaim the island for the Tamil mainland in the name of the lost homeland (Op. cit.: 172-173).
However the interest remains, particularly in Sri Lanka. See n. 155 below. 1* Navaratnam (1973:190).
* I quote the account verbatim:
Catastrophes of the past: poetic exaggeration or scientific facts?
"To the ancient Tamil world natural calamities like the tsunami that hit the east coast on 26 December 2004 is not unknown,” says professor A.Shanmugathas, head of the department of Tamil, Jaffna University. The Sangam Literature, which is more than 2000 years old, makes reference to similar natural catastrophes (perooly) that have affected the Tamil speaking world - spreading from Cape Comarin in the South to the Vindian ranges in the North. "The history records it that tidal destruction (Kadatkol) has occurred from time to time and these facts are established by the archeological excavations. They are not imaginary accounts,” he adds. This is supported by modern scientific theories.
Professor Karsten M. Storetvedt, the chair in geomagnetism at the University of Bergen, Norway, and an author of the Global Wrench Theory (GWT), says that the equator regions have always been most prone to natural catastrophes like earthquakes and volcano eruptions. A part of explanation is that planet rotation and especially the difference in rotation speed between poles and equator force earth manuel to strain and to break more easily where the strain is strongest, that is at the equator regions. These tectonic processes played important role in the disappearance of the ancient continent known as Lemuria to western scholars. Sri Lanka together with India, Indonesia and Malaysia were a part of this continent. Many islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans are remnants of this continent that in ancient time covered the whole area of today's ocean.
Storetvedt, who seems to reject the theory of continental drift and plate tectonics, says that descriptions of cataclysms in early literature when land suddenly went underwater is logical. But they should be proven to be scientific facts. This can be done with the help of sea-floor analysis that is possible to carry out. Modern theories find supportive evidences both in ancient literature and language history.
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The continent of Lemuria is referred as "Kumari Kandam” in ancient Tamilliterature. Tamil is one of the world's classical languages. Tamil has continuous historical records for more than 2000 years and Tamil language was recognized as a classical language in India (beside the other being Sanscrit). Tamil does not belong to the Indo-European language family.
"One can imagine the strength and magnitude of the Tidal wave required to devour a mountainous area that had existed in the ancient coastal belt of the Tamil world,” says professor Shanmugathas. He also refers to records in Mahavansa, the buddhist chronicle of Sri Lanka.
The ancient Kumari Kandam drawn with the background-knowledge gathered from the literature references.
He also refers to records in Mahavansa, the buddhist chronicle of Sri Lanka.
References in Tamil records speak about devouring of landmass by the sea (kadatkol). "The earliest connected account about kadatkol occurs in
The ancient Kumari Kandam drawn with the background knowledge gathered from the literature references. Courtesy: Gems from the Pre Historic Past
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the commentary on Iraiyanar akapporul,” says Dr. A. Velupillai, department of religious studies, Arizona State University.
Tamil poets were lamenting about "kadatkol" (devouring of the land by the sea) so often that scholars found it difficult to explain these references of devouring the land mass with towns and villages by the sea.
"Even though modern scholars date this commentary to the eighth century CE, the tale refers to three Tamil academies which existed for almost ten thousand years,” Veluppillai adds.
It is believed by some Tamil scholars that the first academy existed at southern Maturai and was terminated by sea devouring the city. The Pandya king established a second academy at Kapadapuram. Again, the sea devoured the city. The Pandya king established the third academy in present Maturai (far away from sea coast).
"What is available now as Cankam literature is mentioned as productions of the third academy,” says Velupillai. "The sea devouringentire sea coast cities in the Indian Ocean area was something that many modern scholars dismissed as unrealistic. It now appears very probable that this tale about devouring of land by the sea, is not just a legend, as some modern scholars surmised,” he says.
"Tamils have by long historical tradition associated themselves with the sea. “Cross the seas and make the fortunes” (Thirai Kadal Odiyum Thiraviam Thedu) is a motto of the ancient Tamils who were driven to make wealth through sea trade," says professor Sittampalam, Dean of the faculty of advanced studies, University of Jaffna.
"International trade ports are mentioned in the Sangam Literature in Tamil, as well as in Greek and Roman literatures. The Chola Empire had the most powerful Navy during its time. Even as late as in the period of 10th - 15th Century Tamil language was the language of sea trade in the Indian Ocean,” says professor Sittampalam. "Tamils engaged in sea trade spread to other countries, especially in Asia and took along their culture and language. For example, there was found a 2000-years-old pot in Egypt that has Tamil letters on it. The 14th Century inscription was found in Galle, Sri Lanka, has inscriptions is in three languages: Tamil, Chinese and Persian". The Cilappatikaram and the Manimekalai, the two earliest epics/narrative poems in Tamil, both refer to a vast landmass that was swallowed by a "cataclysmic landslip” or "on-rush of the sea."
These landslips have submerged vast territory that was called Kumai Nadu
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or Kumari Kandam, known also as Lemuria to western scholars. "Even though there is some controversy on the exact date of these works, certain inferences can be made. Large scale destruction by kadatkol seems to have made deep impressions to the Tamil psyche,” says to Dr. Velupillai. The Manimekalai refers in graphic terms to the sea devouring Poompukar or Kavirippoompaddinam, the Chola capital, port and emporium of foreign trade. The New Indian Express of December 2002 published an article that Poompukar site could be the cradle of world civilization, mentioning discovery of archaeological remains of a port city under the sea and hypotheses of well-known scholars. "Reading this with the background of the magnificent description of the prosperity of this Cosmopolitan port-city, it is possible now to visualize that a huge tragedy of that magnitude could have taken place,” says Dr. Velupillai.
Tamil scholars note that there have been at least three major floods according to the references they find in Tamil literature and vast part of ancient literature was lost as a result of such events.
“Adiyarkkunallar, the medieval commentator to the Cilappatikaram, gives intriguing details about lands devoured by the sea. He mentions about Ezh Tenku nadu, Ezh Panai nadu, Ezh Kunakarai nadu, etc., listing seven such regions. As Ezh can mean 'seven', some later interpreters say that 49 regions (7 by 7) were devoured by the sea,” says Veluppillai.
Some Tamil historians argue that the political power of the Tamils diminished due to repeated re-locations and vast damage that was caused to the ancient Tamil homeland by the deluges.
What we know of the antiquity of Tamil civilization seems to be top of an iceberg. More exciting and interesting prehistory of Tamils may emerge from the jolt applied by the tsunami. Scientific details relating to these catastrophic events, particularly the correlation of the available socioanthropological knowledge from the Tamil literature with geological research is yet to be found or ascertained. There is ample scope for Tamil scholars, socio-anthropologists and geologists to do further research on these topics. (www TamilNet, January 07, 2005.20:19 GMT)
See Chapter One for details. Arunachalam (Op. Cit.). Rasanayagam (Op.Cit). Navaratnam (1974:191-192). Navaratnam (1973: 190-191). Chapter Two, n.53.
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171
173
74
175
176
Zvelebil (1991).
Arunachalam (1924). JCBRAS XXIX, 77. I have two sources for this information. One is Navaratnam (1964:76) and the other is an oral account. The oral account linked the Nallur kovil and Rajasinghe I. Rasanayagam (1926: 368), De Couto, Dec. V, Bk. 1, Chap. 1; JCBRAS XX, 60, at 69; Pieris in JCBRAS XXVI, pt. I, at 16. The Sinhala epistolary poem kokila sandesaya asserts in verse 258 that Sapumal Kumaru was Parakrama Bahu’s own son. Pieris. Supra. Rasanayagam (ibid.: 332). Rasanayagam points out that the kattiyam has Saka year 874 as the year of construction. However, this is untenable. The difference between Saka year and Common Era reckoning is 78 years. This places the event in the eleventh century of the CE. But Sapumal Kumaru A.K.A. Sempahap Perumal reigned as Sri Bhuvaneka Bahu from 1473 to 1480. This kattiyam, however, refutes connection between Rajasinghe I and Nallurkovil in the oral account. Navaratnam (1964:76) citing Kathiramalai Pallu, stanzas 72 and 77. Unfortunately, a Sinhala or English translation of the Kathiramalai Pallu is unavailable to verify this claim.
Navaratnam (1964:76)
Navaratnam (1964:76). The Colas ruled the northern parts of present day Tamil Nadu. The Pandya dynasty ruled the southern regions and the Ceras ruled Kerala. Jayawardane asserts that the South Indian incursions to Sri Lanka of the fifth century of the CE were the results of the unstable political conditions in Tamil Nadu. Epigraphia Zeylanica III: 216-219.
Dart (1990).
Meegaskumbure (1990).
Parker (1909:1999).
Sumanasekera Banda (1993).
See Chapter Two for the impact of this essay on Tamil-Muslim relationships. Here I only very briefly mention the subject.
RamasWamy (Op. cit.: 172). Wilson (op. cit.: 51). Wickremaratne (1996:1995; 51).
Wickremaratne (ibid.: 51-52), De Silva (1986: 74), as cited in Wickremaratne (ibid.: n4:76).
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' Wilson (op. cit.: 88). It is interesting that the Tamils, while basically fighting for communal rights, were complaining about the communal feelings of the * Sinhalas. This problem exists even today. While it is good for the Tamils to claim ethnic rights, for whatever the reason, the Sinhalas are not supposed to entertain similar feelings.
1 Wilson (ibid.:88-89).
Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988: 182-183). * Fernando (1937) in Saparamadu (op. cit.:256-257). 18° Obeyesekere (1978: 460-461). * Gombrich and Obeyesekere (ibid.: 182). 17 Ibid. (44-45).
188 Obeyesekere (1977: 389).
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Chapter Six
Celebrations
August 6' 2003
I went to the Kataragama sacred area. The morning air was still cool. I walked along the Detagamuva tank bund, watching the flocks of cranes on the tree-stumps in the tank, full because of the rain last few days. The light wind from the east blew lazily making pools of tiny waves as it brushed the mirror like surface roughening the reflections of the patches of blue in the partially cloudy sky. The rising sun cast orange light through the clouds on the various gray-green patches of irregular shapes on the bark of young kumbuk trees that line the bank on the lakeside. On the other side of the road, a rice-field sprawls towards the hills. Rice plants bent with the weight of rainwater rose from the watery mirror that reflected the Swiftly blanching orange glow of the sun. Every now and then a bus, car, van or a three-wheeler would pass by either way raising the reddish brown dust on the road - unpleasant but necessary intrusions in an otherwise peaceful scene.
Until the 1940s, visitors to Kataragama would walk all the way from Tissamaharama in the South in much the same manner as we did across the Yala sanctuary in the east. Perhaps they sang various gee, sindu, kavi, and words of encouragement and blessing, such as Sadhu Sadhu Sadhu and karunavai, much like the haro hara and bhajan singing of the pilgrims on the east Coast karaipadai. Then they took footpaths, as there were no paved roads. There were no dust clouds, and no noise except for the chatter and singing among the pilgrims. Bullock-carts would go by to or from
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Kataragama or Tissamaharama. The forest was full of deadly beasts. Various spirits and thieves lurked in the background round the clock. A kingfisher made a cobalt dive in a flash and took off with Something wriggling in its beak.
Commencement
By the time my pada yatra culminated with my arrival in Kataragama, the annual Asala festivities were well under way. The time-frame for Kataragama rituals is astrologically determined. The first ritual associated with the Asala festivities is nakath balima or determination of the auspicious moments - the correct time frame - for ritual action. This is performed by an astrologer at the request of the officials of Kataragama temple administration. He calculates them in accordance with the phases of the moon or the tithi, the position of the sun, and the moment when the asterism or nakshatra correct for each ritual rises at the horizon.
The controlling moment of the ritual season is the auspicious moment for the water-cutting (diyakapuma) ritual at the climax of the festivities. This occurs in the nikini month, in the full-moon morning in mid August, when all tithis come together. By then a certain number of peraharas must be performed. At present this number is twelve, held during the first twelve nights of the waxing nikini moon.
The kap rituals begin fortyfive days before the first perahara, roughly, sixty days before the water-cutting, on the day preceding the full-moon in May. Why forty-five days to the first perahara (for that matter, why twelve peraharas) is never discussed and is therefore socially unknown. The recent history of Kataragama festival shows that this number had changed under various circumstances. In any case, on the first day of the kap rituals the moon is in the asterism called visa. The correct muhurta (moment) is known as nandana.
The kap or kapa is a complex term. Here the term is used in its Sinhala sense. The word brings to mind kalpa, the indigenous
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South Asian sense of the longest time cycle within which reality as we know it comes into being, matures and decays leading to the next cycle, the next kapa or kalpa. It also reminds one of the kalpavriksha in Sanskrit and kapruka in Sinhala - the wish-fulfilling tree, another grand notion in South Asian cosmology. The divyalokas or the worlds of the gods are equipped with kalpavrikshas. Gods only need to go near them and wish if they desire anything and the wish is immediately fulfilled. At the beginning of a kalpa the human world is also equipped with them, but as the kalpa wears away people lose their sense of morality and ethics and the kalpavrikshas disappear and people are left to their own means for survival. In practice, it is only the name of a ritual whose exact meaning is cloudy at best, and never even thought of when the ritual is performed as a matter of custom.
The kap rituals are not a Kataragama specialty. They are performed in the other devales also, as a prelude to the annual festivities. It is uniquely Sinhala Buddhist though, for no other religious or ethnic group appears to have configured such lines of thought and action, although they may resonate with other configurations elsewhere in the region. Not surprisingly, Hindu lore has various permutations.
The Asala festivities begin with the kap situvima or planting of the ritual poles. Prior to that date and time so determined, a Service group of the Maha Devale called gotu mahanno (makers of leaf-cones as containers for offerings) look for an appropriate tree to obtain the kap poles. Traditionally, the tree belonged to a species known as rathkarav. The species is specific to the ritual. Rathkarav is a milk tree and milk trees are deemed auspicious as milk is a symbol of success and prosperity. A Sinhala legend has it that when king Dutthagamani asked Kanda Kumara, then living in the Vadahiti Kanda, where he would like to have a temple built the god shot an arrow made of rathkarav wood. The arrow fell in the riverbank in front of the Maha Devale, and became rooted there to produce the present bo orasatu tree. The Tamils say Muruga
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shot an arrow, not necessarily made of rathkarav wood, from the Wadahiti Kanda, and it fell where the Maha Devale is. Historically, the Vaddas used rathkarav wood to make arrows. Thus, rathkarav itself is a multiculturally symbolic species linking many cultural beliefs.
Rathkaraw used to grow abundantly in Kataragama. Today, however, rathkarav has become extinct in the area and is substituted with a species known as gonapana, which is also a milk tree and is able to symbolize whatever the milk of the rathkarav tree - a white viscous Sticky fluid - signified. Gonapana also has a branching pattern comparable to rathkarav. Therefore, it paradigmatically fits into the syntax of the ritual. The correct gonapana branch must grow upright and fork into two upwardly growing shoots of appropriate diameter and apart from one another by the length of the hand; roughly, nine inches.
On Vesak full-moon day, very early in the morning before the first crow caws, the kapuralas of the Maha Devale and the administrators of the Basnayaka's office go in procession with the mangala hastiya (auspicious chief tusker, also called Athami), carrying the insignia Such as the ritual umbrellas, flags and such decorative elements of the Sinhala tradition, with musical accompaniment, to the designated tree. The tree is ritually harvested to create the kap.
The harvesting ritual is complex. First, Sandalwood paste is rubbed on the tree while incense is burnt to perfume it. This activity is known as pe kirima or ritual preparation of the tree. Then a lamp with nine wicks is lit under the tree and a tray of nine fruits is offered to it. It is clear that the number nine reflects the nine planets (navagraha) of Hindu/Buddhist astrology. The ritual experts address the tree in respectful language and asked to grant permission to harvest a branch for the auspicious purpose. If any god or some other spirit resides in the tree, S/he is politely requested to leave and find another tree. Thereafter the tree is harvested at the auspicious moment. The gotu mahannas clean the tree on the
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spot. The harvested tree and the implement - knife or axe - with which the tree is cut, are bathed in scented water in the same way the bo tree behind the Budumadura/Vishnu Devale is bathed, in a ritual called the nanumura mangalyaya. Thereafter, bunches of ratmal flowers and panduru (coins cleaned with lime and or turmeric wrapped in a String of cloth) are tied to the pole now called kanuva or post. The kanuva is then wrapped in a white cloth known in this context aspiruvata - symbolizing cleanliness and ritual preparedness, taken in procession to the Valliamma devale and placed inside the inner chamber of the goddess where her insignia are placed, away from the public eye. At dawn the next morning, the kap are brought to the MahaDevale. Now a ceremony called kapa gevadima occurs. Literally, kapa gevadima means the "kap pole entering the house. Sorata States that the poles are taken into the Devale only through its left entrance. The reason for this norm is now forgotten. However, it is noteworthy that the Teivayanaiammankovil is also located on the left side of the Devale. Once taken in the kap poles are wrapped in white cloth once again and placed horizontally on a pair of brass pun kalas (water pots containing Coconut flowers - a symbol of prosperity) on the Steps to the maligava - the inner chamber – of the devale. The kap poles stay in this position for three days from the date of kanu kapana mangalyaya. On the third day, the kap are erected by the pillars in the kola pandalama or the portico with the leafy roof. Thus erected, the kap poles remain at the entrance to the Maha Devale until the water-cutting (diyakapuma) ritual is completed. With the planting of the kap, the festivities and the processions begin in Kataragama. Kataragama festival is generally knows as a noisy dramatic public affair. However, the above preparatory rituals are performed away from the public eye and the pilgrims are hardly aware of these proceedings. The rituals associated with the kap erecting are performed in quasi secrecy and are open only to the officials, kapuralas and the Swamis. It is stiff with formality and solemnity. All these were over by the time I arrived in Kataragama. And the celebrations were in full Swing.
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A Musical Interlude
As I went closer, I could hear the festive music of Kataragama. A Tamil bhajan for Muruga Sung by a female singer was in the air through the loudspeakers tied to the trees along the streets of the town. The Muruga bhajan ended and soon a Sinhala song emerged. This was a Buddhist song, copied from a Hindi song from a Hindi Buddhist film called Angulimala, Sung by a Muslim singer named Mohideen Baig. Baig, and his north Indian contemporary Manna Day, sang the energetic melodies with their chesty powerful voices that spanned at least four octaves. The emotional melodies, matched by strong if not always elegant Sinhala lyrics and Baig's powerful delivery, made the song an instant hit among the Sinhala Buddhist Sri Lankans. The lyrics began with the tunsarana or tisarana - Buddhist assertion of the refuge in the Buddha, Dhamma and the Sangha - in Pali. Various lines that prescribed the contexts for seeking their refuge followed. A Roman Catholic singer named Rita Jenin Fernando, popularly known as Lata, assisted Baig. To translate a few lines:
Ghora visati mai polangun men
Minisun mituru vesin e nam
Emavita pavasanu mu vin obe
Buddhan saranan gacchami
Buddhan saranan gacchami Dhamman Saranan gacchami Sanghan Saranan gacchami
Satyaya loke yada nati Vaira gimi avileda niti Hinsapida devido Minisa tirisan vervi do Agati ayukti marutaye Prane obe dedara yado Emavita pavasanu mu vin obe Buddhan saranan gacchami
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When people like fierce and venomous cobras and vipers approach you in the guise of friends,
at that time Say, I take the refuge in the Buddha,
I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dhamma, I take refuge in the Sangha.
If truth disappears in the world and fires of hatred rage ceaselessly, if man causes violence and torture and becomes beastly, if your life shatters in the storm of prejudice and injustice,? Say at that time,
I take the refuge in the Buddha, ...
This was followed by another hit by Baig, this time a
devotional song for Kanda Kumara, again based on a Hindi film
Song:
Saravanabhava kanda surinduge teda bala Palakara turuliya pobayana mada nala.
Simba simba dev sepata menik gan tere Setapuna mena siri yahanata tun hele.
Saya muhunaki net dolasaki pebune Kitu resa meni pil vibidana vahane Bebalena lesa siri lanka sasane
Eka metakin balanu menavi Samine
Kanda, the king of gods,
born in the Sara forest. Breathe the soft breeze that invigorates the trees and vines that express your dignity and power.
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Enjoy the godly comforts on the banks of the Menik river. Relax in the three Sinhala, your resplendent place of rest.
Six faces and twelve eyes joined together, the vehicle that spreads its plumes like beams of splendor. For the glory of the Buddhist community in Siri Lanka, Lord, please merely cast a glance with just one of your eyes.
One more Tamil bhajan and a Sinhala pop song composed and sung by a Roman Catholic Sinhala musician Clarence Wijewardena. The melody and the tempo of the song have Iberian flavors and it is frequently used for Kavadi dancing:
Kanda surinduni obe pihita lebeva apa rata sav siriyen itireval Oba yadumata ava,
арi,
oba pidumata ava.
King of gods, Kanda! Bless us with your favors! May our country overflow with all resplendence Came to pray to you,
We came to worship you.
The Catholic musicians such as Wijewardane found musical and entrepreneurial opportunities in the Kataragama ritual scene. And then a song from the late Sunil Santa, a Christian musician, which is a complaint:
Dudanoda binda banda teda kanda Kanda dev rada samine! Kataragamata ruhunu rate Hinga kaka avida vate Polove ula nanal gate....
Mage kukula nasu eka
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Lord Kanda, the king of gods, greatly esteemed for demolishing the pride of evildoers ..... Having walked begging round (the island) (we) come to Kataragama of the Ruhunu country Rubbing the forehead on the ground.... (I pray) The one who killed my cock... My Lord, do not let a day more pass for him.
Sunil Santa borrowed some of the melody and rhythmic elements from a popular Bengali song known as bondure. The lyrics to his song were composed by the well known Sinhala Buddhist hela writer and poet Arisen Ahubudu. The singer and the lyricist were linked by their common interest in the "hela” strand of Sinhala introduced by the Sinhalalinguist, poet, essayist, and composer of wonderful children's stories, Munidasa Kumaratunga.
The contributions of several Catholic and Christian female singers were constantly at play. Leading them was Daisy Daniels, a Roman Catholic from Sri Lanka's miniscule but significant Barata community. Songstress and pioneering actress in Sinhala cinema and popularly known as Rukmani Devi, she used her remarkable vocal abilities refined in the Catholic church to sing many Buddhist songs. Her song about Patacara, a nun in the Buddhist lore, has been wildly successful from the 1950s.
Soka dhara ekui ei gini jala ma dawa Ane budu samine nivanu mage duk vedana Soken danava.
Streams of sorrow gather and come ablaze, burning me. I pray, Lord Buddha, extinguish my torment and Suffering. Burning with wretchedness!
The tune was borrowed from a Hindi film. One more from
Rukmani:
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Ada andanava himiyani Yasodhara! Me prema rajini raja vimane tamikaradala aho giyal
Lord, today Yasodhara is weeping Abandoning this beloved queen in the royal chamber Alas! (You) went away.
So is Rita Jenin Fernando, referred to earlier, a Roman Catholic, whose radio/film name is Latha. Her song, based on a Hindi film melody, was about the glory of the bodhi tree in Anuradhapura: Jaya sri maha bodhi raja. Both singers presented many Buddhist themes in their respective repertories.
Now a Sinhala film song from the 1950s sung to the dance beat tam tanenam tanentanena tam tanenam tanenatanena by a female singer, K. Rani, a Tamil Hindu from Tamil Nadu, with a distinctive accent:
Kataragame devi piyase ruhunu janapade me
menik gange sunilajalesisila sulanga mesisilai hamana sulanga me hol
Tam tanenam tanentanema tam tamenam tanenatamena
In the region of the god of Kataragama, in this Ruhunu country, the clear blue waters of the Menik river, and the cool breeze, Oh! Cool is this breeze now blowing. Tam tanenam tanena tanena tam tanenam tanen tanena
A Tamil Hindu musician in Tamil Nadu composed the song, a Sinhala Buddhist wrote lyrics for it, and a local Tamil Hindu musician provided the instrumental accompaniment. These are also loud, vociferous, yet tuneful discourses by the middle and working class people on working with cultural others by contributing appropriate elements from one's own culture for mutual enrichment. They occur in the popular domain and are meaningful
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to the vast majority of people in this country irrespective of the ethnic and cultural differences among them. Judging by the sheer complexity of the ethnic and cultural interactions involved in the making of these songs, and their tremendous popularity, one gets the feeling that they were made in an ethnic heaven to be played in utopia.
Padayatra Continued
I passed the bund and reached a T junction. The road ran Straight into Kataragama town. The left turn took me on a road that skirted the tank on my left and various homesteads on my right. My friend Rajan, a native of Kataragama, lived in one of those houses. Rajan was in his twenties, never finished high school and was unemployed and penniless, but a fine young member of a kapu family. Rajan depended on his parents who owned a herd of cattle. The one and only job he could think of was working as a kapurala in the Maha Devale. It has been his only dream but just a dream. He descended from a matri-clan. Kapu jobs are available only to the descendants of patri-clans. He has been a trustworthy Support during my field research. Rajan came out rubbing his eyes. It was 7 o'clock in the morning and too early for him. Soon we were back on the road, heading towards the town taking the back streets along the south bank of the river.
The geography of Kataragama is as follows. Roughly, the river flows from west to east. The sacred area is on the north bank of the river. The bazaar and the pilgrims' resting places including the hotels are on the south bank. A grand steel fence, erected in the early 1980s and running on the north side of the road, separated the south bank from the bazaar. Further to the west, up the river, is Sella Kataragama, believed to be the place where Kanda Kumara/ Kandasami/Muruga metValliamma. Between Kataragama and Sella Kataragama, more to the north from the river, is the Kiri Vehera. Further to the east is Katagamuwa, referred to in Chapter Five. A range of hills is further to the South, rising over Detagamuwa where my hotel was. The Vedahiti Kanda, the hill where Kanda Kumara/
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Kandasami/Muruga had lived before he came down to the valley, is the highest peak in the range.
As can be expected, the bazaar area was full of pedestrians and vehicles. Men, women and children excitedly moved about in this animated atmosphere dominated by red; redshawls, red cloth belts, red Sarongs, Saris, flags, garlands, all red, Kanda Kumara’s color. Some in the crowd looked different and more important. They were what I would call the core cult members dressed in their cult regalia: red and white cloths, rudraksha bead necklaces, tin noru (holy ash), sandal wood paste, and vibhuti (Tamil: kumkumam: vermilion powder) dots on the foreheads, red, white and blue paper or plastic garlands round the neck and brass tridents (trisula) or lances (vels) in hand. These were the Samis and maniyos of the cult. Their faces were intense, their eyes focused, and overall demeanor reserved, arrogant and authoritative. They had personal connections with the god; even the not so tall ones seemed to think they stood taller and above the rest of the crowd. Some young Hindu men had shaved their heads and eyebrows and rubbed Sandalwood paste on their scalps and a lot of holy ash on their bodies, to fulfill their vows. The shaving of hair and eyebrows is a sign of submission to the god.
Occasionally a devotee, with body pierced with numerous miniature lances made of silver or aluminum, would dance to the beat of a small band and walk on towards the river. She would grab much attention.
The rest of the crowd consisted mainly of pilgrims. They were going into and out of the sacred ground on the north bank of the river. They would go about looking at the goods in the shops. Some would buy the puja vattis (trays of offerings) from colorful displays. Young women and small children would gawk greedily at the beautiful colored bead necklaces hung like rainbows against mirrors. Vendors loudly beckoned the pilgrims.
We walked past a 'carnival on our right. It was quiet in the morning. In the evenings, I have heard how they advertised riding two motorcycles inside a 'well made of wood. Someone called
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our attention to the action through a loudspeaker thus:
Two brothers, Ladies and Gentlemen, a man against his own brother born from the same womb. They are in the well of death, riding the speeding motorcycles in opposite directions. (ek k use upan aiyay malliy maraka linde motobishyal padimal) The speeds are incredible. The height of the well, the loops they make, you must come and see. Brother against his brother from the same womb. Come Come! Don't miss this chance to see this brother riding against his own brother from the same womb.”
I bought a coconut and a few packets of camphor pills from one of the makeshift shops.
There are two bridges across the river. The one further east of where we stood is the old bridge. It used to be a val palama or a hanging bridge. Until the 1960s all pilgrims crossed the river using this val palama. During the modernization of Kataragama, it was converted into a modern concrete bridge and a new bridge was constructed to the west of it to accommodate the ever-increasing pilgrim traffic during the festive season. We were standing near the western bridge. The access to this bridge is through a gate in the fence.
We merged with the stream of people that constantly moved through gate in the fence and walked towards the river. The majority in the heaving and moving crowd were pilgrims. They always moved towards or away from the river and the sacred ground on the north bank. Some others stood around along the road and engaged in various activities. These included a large number of beggars who aggressively pursued their profession; the ubiquitious NGO workers carrying out their usual anti-smoking, proenvironment, anti-war etc. campaigns; and hucksters of every description who were noisily trying to attract buyers for the merchandize in their hands. Some even offered to carry the puja vatti (tray of offerings) that the pilgrims purchased from the shops, for a small fee. Several tourists also walked by, their heads spinning
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and faces tense, talking to each other in some European tongue, with their guide who also energetically and incessantly smiled and talked in Some European language pointing to all sorts of things. The tourists, looking dazed, thoroughly confused, and very tired, appeared to listen to their guide's constant chatter while Staring at the unusual sights around them. If they came here to get shocked to speechlessness they got their money's worth. A student of anthropology and religion also moved on turning this or that way, making various observations and mental notes, and aiming his camera at everything that seemed cool, weird, or informative, asking all kinds of questions from his companion - the local informant and guide - who, at times, loudly wondered what made such common place and perfectly uninteresting things So important to Some people and why they asked meaningless questions: kisi terumak nati prasna!
The River
We walked towards the middle of the bridge and looked around. The river was full of people, bathing and purifying themselves. Most pilgrims bathed on the west side of and closer to the northern bridge. We could see up the river all the way to the bend in it. Further up on the south bank, there were two kavadi shops (kavadi kada). Between this area and the bathers, an elephant lay in the water, in the shade of a kumbuk tree.
This is Menik Ganga, the river of gems. It is one of the bestknown rivers in the island, the other two being the Sita Gangula of Sri Pada and the more utilitarian Mahaveli. Of these, the Menik Ganga and the Sita Gangula are sacred rivers. Their sacredness arises from the ability of their waters to purify the bather spiritually. Any bather's all sins wash away once he/she takes a dip in these rivers. Thus cleansed, one qualifies to step into the hallowed ground on the opposite bank. These two rivers fit into the classical Hindu paradigm about holy rivers such as Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati (now, dried up), Aciravati, Godavari, Narmada, and Kaveri. Sacred rivers
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purify their path to the sea. The Anusasana Parvan of the Mahabharata puts it this way:
Just as certain limbs of the body are purer than others, so are certain places on earth more sacred - some on account of their situation, others because of their sparkling waters, and others because of the association or habitation of Saintly people.’ As we have found already, Kataragama is sacred because the god of Kataragama lives here, because of its location, and because the waters of Menik Ganga that sparkle like jewels. That line from the Mahabharata is apt to develop a religious perspective on Kataragama and its river. Bharadwaj writes:
The quality of sanctity of the Ganga and of the Himalaya seems to have been transferred in part to other rivers and to other mountains respectively. Every mountaintop can be a local abode of Siva or his consort Sakti. Every river can be a local Ganga. This transferring of sanctity is a quite frequent phenomenon in India. We know from Chapters One and Two that Skanda/ Kartikeya and Muruga are identified with Siva, and the two consorts of the god of Kataragama, Teivayanaiamman and Valliamman, are identified with Iccha Sakti and Kriya Sakti of the god respectively. This process had occurred when the Hindu model of sacred locality was transplanted in Kataragama. Kataragamais a tirtha (ford) par excellence, with the range of hills to the south with its highest peak, the Vadahitiya Kanda, reminiscent of the Kailasa in the Himalayas, the river skirting the sacred area resembling the Ganga, and Kataragama sacred ground itself structurally isomorphic with Varanasi. Bharadwaj continues:
(There is) a fairly strong association of Hindu sacred places with certain elements of the physical landscape, namely, flowing water and hilltops, and points to the symbolic meaning of these elements in Hindu religion. This, however, is far from a full explanation because Hinduism has absorbed
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many characteristics and sacred spots of Buddhism, of Jainism, and of several former tribal groups.” Watching the hills in the background, the waters in the river, and the sacred ground to the north with the Kiri Vehera to the far west, I thought Bharadwaj's observations are apt in my context in Kataragama. They resonate in Kataragama's multiple frames of reference that bring up Buddhism, the religion of the Vaddas, Sufism, and the worship of Kanda Kumara/Muruga.
I focused on the bathers. The markers of any significant differences among the hundreds that bathed were cultural rather than physiognomic. From where I was, I could notice that the style of dress - particularly among women, the color preferences and the jewelry highlighted cultural differences. To the culturally trained eye, these marked the ethnic differences.
But I wondered whether these differences would be so obvious to the tourists who just walked by me. Around them were many Sinhala, Sufi Muslim and Tamil pedestrians. The middle class westernized women would wear similar designs from tee shirt and trouser combinations to the Punjabi dresses. Even the pottus that Tamil women place on their foreheads are now worn by many middle class Sinhala women. The more traditional Tamil men and women rubbed tinnoru (holy ash) on their foreheads, a distinctively Tamil ethnic marker. Senior Tamil women wore heavier gold jewelry including nose-studs and silver ankle chains. Of late, perhaps following western trends, some younger urban Sinhala women have adopted the nose-studs and ankle chains. Unless the observer is very familiar with these subtleties, it is very hard to determine the ethnicity among the pilgrims of Kataragama. Below the bridge, people washed clothes and spread them on the banks or hung them on strings stretched between sticks planted on the ground for drying. Tamil clothes were of a wide range of lively colors whereas Sinhala clothes tended to be of muted colors.
Each band appeared to carve out a space on the banks in the same way the pilgrims of Okanda did. The Sinhala bands also did
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the same. Generally, there are many reasons for the cohesiveness of the bands. All members of a band depend on one another and no one wants to get lost in the crowd, particularly the women and the children. During the pilgrimage, the sense of family embrace all in the band although the band may consist of many nuclear units and unrelated friends. However, the band identity and boundaries did not signify ethnic segregation because Sinhala bands and Tamil bands bathed in adjacent spots and no one cared as to who bathed up or down stream from them.
The pilgrims appeared to be insensitive to what was in the water. People up stream cleaned their mouths, gargled and spat out, took several dips in the water, rubbed their skin to remove dirt on it, rub Soap on their bodies and dipped again. Some washed soiled clothes. People immediately downstream used that water for the same purposes. Nobody seemed to care that others had already used the water.
The river was only about knee deep except for a few deeper places. The water was very murky and carried a gray-brown sediment. A film of gasoline, fallen from the vehicles over the bridge in Sella Kataragama a few miles to the west, broke the midday light into rainbow patches on the surface. Here and there in tiny, bays where the flow was slower various flotsam gathered: plastic bags, plastic soda bottles and water bottles, plastic plates and cups, paper, rags, old and soaked footwear, plastic garlands, coconut husk, banana peels and mango seeds. Bharadwaj writes about the waters in the holy rivers in India:
The Sipra river at the time of the Simhastha festival fair in 1968 was a foul-smelling stream covered with thick scum over which the birds could walk Yet thousands of devout individuals were bathing, unmindful of the physical state of the stream. Obviously, hygiene and ritual purification by bathing are two widely different concepts." In Kataragama, too, there is a different sense of cleanliness. No one seemed to be even aware of the condition of the river. They just came in, put on their bathing clothes and started bathing.
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They never hesitated nor paid any attention to the physical quality of the river. As they bathed, they opened brand new packages of Soap and simply let the wrapper and the plastic bag in which they carried soap float down the river. The conduct of the pilgrims reflected their insensitivity to unclean surroundings in public places and their lack of a sense of civic responsibility. They trashed the very river that they considered sacred. Nonetheless, these people have reservations about bathing in a spot elsewhere where the quality of water and the condition of the carrier are as questionable. 11
The difference in the senses of cleanliness in sacred and everyday spaces indicates a transformation in the aesthetic sensibilities of the devotees. What they reject elsewhere they accept here. Cleanliness here has nothing to do with the quality of the river. No matter how dirty the water is it is still clean, would do no harm, will still spiritually cleanse the devotees. In Kataragama, pollution is entirely a ritual concept with religious meanings and has nothing to do with what the environmentalists and modern medicine men would call pollution and health hazards. Religions carry paradoxical notions. Here, foul water is cleansing. Mary Douglas's observation, that dirt is matter out of place finds a curious relevance here.' All this flotsom, all the characteristics of secondhand water, is not seen as dirt. They are well placed, I suppose. Traditionally, Sinhala people believe that flowing water is somehow clean no matter what it contains. Thus, whatever floats cannot dirty the water in a river.
The sense of cleanliness in Kataragama deviates from the orthodox Hindu notion of pollution because the devotees mingle with all social groups, and the low caste groups cause social pollution. Traditional Hindu temples are socially exclusive. But Kataragama is socially inclusive. There are status distinctions in Kataragama, as I will discuss later, but there is no connection between social pollution and spiritual pollution. People - Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim alike - mingle with others, with their bodies
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rubbing against each other as they rush back and forth on the bridge or inside temples that are open to all and Sundry. The necessity for spiritual cleanliness precludes social cleanliness. For the belief is that the god treats all equally, and punishes those who harm his devotees. The evenhandedness of the god negates, in his space that is Kataragama, the distinctions, as defined by the Hindu social ethics, made in social spaces elsewhere. This condition exists even in the great tirthas of India. In such places, the everyday notions of social pollution are out of place, therefore spiritual dirt, in Douglas's terms.
As in Okanda, the physical uncleanliness of the river has much to do with this country's economic history. It is likely that people always trashed their refuse with utter disregard for the aesthetics of the place. The point here is not the trashing of the unwanted but the physical nature of the refuse. Before the arrival of modern packaging and transportation, they carried their goods in highly perishable containers that a rain or two and the jungle would consume without leaving a trace. They either walked to Kataragama or used bullock carts. None of these activities produced non-biodegradable refuse or emissions. But today, with the durable, reusable and inexpensive plastic packaging, trash is virtually indestructible and pile up in unsightly accumulations that threaten health.
Given that, it is clear that at least in Kataragama cleanliness, health, and aesthetics have little or nothing to do with physical or social purity and pollution and physical beauty of the place. These conditions have to do with a pilgrim's relationship with the god. It is this relationship that must be pure, uncontaminated with longings for other things. Even if such longings - such as the aims of non-religious vows - exist, they are subsumed under the Overarching longing to receive blessings from the god. This is a primary rule in Kataragama: the pilgrim must have bhakti or devotion to the god and focus only on the god Sacrifiinge all else. All that comes between the god and the pilgrim is pollution. The
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god demands that the pilgrim satisfies this condition before all else. Freedom from lifecycle, dietary and sexual pollution is only a pre-condition. Even if the pilgrim fulfills this condition, she remains polluted unless she has bhakti and her focus on the god as the primary reason to be in Kataragama. Her consciousness must be primarily directed towards the god. Ideally, this purity of focus leads to the fundamental aesthetic in Kataragama: the feeling of being in communion with the god.
This personal orientation towards purity is still incomplete unless the devotee subscribes to a parallel normative structure. I already alluded to this structure in Okanda. This is the equality of all devotees before the god. All social relations in Kataragama must be established with mutual respect. No matter how pure the intent of the pilgrimage it is still in vain unless the pilgrim accepts all other pilgrims on an equal footing. Brian Pfaffenberger observed that many high caste Tamil devotees in the north who subscribed to the Hindu caste values found this egalitarianism in Kataragama a difficult condition. They resented their having to rub shoulders with ethnic and caste social others.'
In my experience, the Sinhala devotees do not find egalitarianism in Kataragama problematical as they already Subscribe to the principle of religious equality in Buddhist places of worship. Here I refer to the everyday practices in Kataragama. Traditionally, it is likely that when the King or the chief officers of the precolonial regime visited Kataragama, the administration made special arrangements to make the visit exclusive as the political norms of the regime demanded unless the visiting dignitaries desired to worship alongside the common people. This is observed even today. However, Kataragama administration does not recognize caste as a condition deserving special recognition. This ideal is sometimes violated and favoritism is observable, as I will discuss later. Nonetheless, this general sense of equality is visible in the conduct of the pilgrims in the river. What one washes away is not reviled by another. Pilgrims suspend social distinctions as they purify
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themselves in the seemingly murky waters. Phenomenologically, purification involves removal of social prejudices and worldly orientations from consciousness and directing it entirely towards the god. There are no reports of any quarrels among pilgrims arising from resentment of the presence of ethnic or caste others.
The Sacred Space
We crossed the bridge and entered the sacred area. There were pilgrims everywhere as far as the eye could see. The first thing one notices is the Valliamma devale (kovil) in the shade of a giant tamarind tree.' The Siva kovil, also known as the Muthulingaswami kovil, is in the next compound to the east. One cannot fail to notice the Sufi shrines to the north of the Valliamma kovil.
We walked towards the Valliamma devale. The tamarind tree in the yard is surrounded by a concrete fence. The tree has a huge cavity. The legend has it that when Valliamma refused to fall for Muruga, Pulleyar appeared in the guise of a wild elephant. Valliamma, scared out of her wits, started running. On her path a huge tamarind tree with a huge cavity appeared. She crept inside the cavity to hide from the elephant only to find that she was in Muruga's arms. Muruga had assumed the form of the tamarind tree as a part of the divine plot. There she agreed to be with him and this is that tree."
Next to the tree, in the yard of the kovil, is a platform with a flight of eight steps leading to it. Tamils call it vasanamedai. We shall have the opportunity to discuss the vasanamedai later on. At the time we reached the kovil its doors were closed. Few pilgrims were sitting on the steps. Judging by their clothes and the pottus and ash on their foreheads it was clear that they were all Hindus. The compound north of the Valliamman kovil is, as said before, the Sufi Muslim holy ground with tombs of two Sufi masters, two small mosques and other related buildings. We did not enter this compound immediately as our destination was the
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Kiri Vehera. But I noticed the beautiful green and silver flag of the mosque hoisted on the flagpole near the entrance.
Looking west, through the foliage of several massive trees, I could see the great yellow arch of the entrance to the Maha Devale compound and parts of the parapet surrounding it. Between the Maha Devale compound and the Valliamma devale is the large rectangular arena that Sinhala pilgrims call maluwa or angane (courtyard of the temple). On the south side it slopes into the river. A line of smaller kovils demarcates its northern boundary.
Standing in front of the Valliamma devale one can see that there are two roads to approach the Maha Devale. One is on the south side of the angane and the other on the north side. The former is called theatul vidiya or the entering street and the latter as the pita vidiya, the departing street.' The road connecting the two in front of the Valliamma devale is the mada widiya or the middle street. Traditionally, one walked along the atul vidiya to approach the Kiri Vehera and the Maha Devale.
As discussed in the previous chapter, the traditional spatial organization of Kataragama has undergone some radical changes since the government declared Kataragama a sacred ground or a puja bhumiya. Before that and the modernization that followed, pilgrims used the eastern bridge to enter the sacred ground. The atul vidiya, as today, began from that bridge and ran between the Valliamma devale and the Mutulingaswami kovil. Today the pilgrims more often use the new western bridge. Consequently, the atul vidiya is busier from the new bridge onwards. The atul vidiya ends right by the gate of the Maha Devale compound and turns north up to the Teivayanaiamman kovil and the former Ramakrishna Mission Madam (now the Kataragama museum) and turns east as the pita vidiya.
The pita widiya has a number of smaller devales dedicated to various gods. The nearest to the Maha Devale compound is a Pulleyar kovil. A few yards away from it is a devale for the four guardian deities. Next to it is the Kuda Kataragama Devale, a secondary or minor (kuda) temple dedicated to Kanda Kumara/
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Muruga but functions like a Muruga kovil. At the eastern end of the vidiya is a Kali kovil. At this end, the pita vidiya joins the mada widiya that connects it with the atul vidiya and connects with the bridge. The Mutulingaswamikovil, Valliamma devale and the Mosque are on the east side of the mada widiya that skirts around the mosque and connects with the old bridge at the eastern end of the sacred complex. Formerly, as Kataragama residents informed me, the mada widiya went north past the mosque and turned east forming the nagaha vidiya where the resident Tamils lived.
Prior to modernization, there were many Chetty madamas - such as the Gnanapandita, Trinco, Vavuniya, and Batticaloa madamas along both main roads. The houses belonging to the kapu families, and many shops stood on the South side of theatul vidiya. The north side of this road had mostly shops. On the pita widiya also this pattern was the same: shops on the South side and madamas, houses and fewer shops on the north side. Each of those madamas had a temple for a specific deity such as Muruga, Siva, Pulleyar, Kali, and the like with facilities for rituals. This made what is today the angane a busy commercial zone surrounded by an elliptical road and an outer ring of houses, madams and temples. Even in the 1950s, Spittle's 1933 description held good. Since its transformation into the angane this space has become a vast rectangular platform with a line of several grand bo (ficus religiosa) and tamarind trees on it. Some of these trees were planted during the reorganization of the space.
I did not like the transformed space when I first saw it a couple of decades ago. I missed the colorful bustle of the old Kataragamabazaar. It was not neat. However, although a collection of flimsy shabby cadian sheds and houses in disrepair, it had its own sense of order and its own spirit and aesthetic. Many Tamil workers constantly swept the place clean. Practically every shop displayed pictures of Kanda Kumara/Muruga and Valliamma with bundles of joss sticks burning before them emitting twirls of
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perfumed smoke that enhanced the religious mood of the pilgrims. As a boy running around gawking at these shops, I used to watch the beautiful displays of bead necklaces arranged before mirrors. I used to watch endlessly the colorful lithographs of gods and goddesses, each in a variety of dispositions, presented using various artistic techniques. I could readily recognize the Buddha, Skanda, Siva, Ganesha, Saraswati, Durga, Visnu, Lakshmi, Hanuman and Kali. The chatter around me used to be a mixture of Sinhala and Tamil voices. I used to be constantly hungry for the hoppers and the sweetmeats displayed in those shabby eateries.
With the modernization, all that shifted to the new town' on the south bank. I missed all that in the new formal-looking space. Nonetheless, as I later discovered, the transformed space has its own dignity. The vast open arena and great trees with their leaves rustling in the breeze produce a different yet kindred aesthetic. Silence, when punctuated with occasional rustle, is charming and enchanting. One can see far across the field and how the arch of the entrance to the Maha Devale rises imposingly. Emptiness has its own allure and mystique.
But at the height of the Asala festivities, the arena becomes a sea of people. About a thousand people camped in this area. They constituted the "Harrigan Group”- the pilgrims who joined the American scholar turned devotee Patrick Harrigan. Apparently, some four hundred pilgrims walked with him, some of them all the way from Jaffna peninsula.' The south side of the angane was not crowded. But its north side was. Thousands of pilgrims, most performing pada yatra, gathered there.
A kavadi group went by. An elderly woman, decked in red and wearing a red and white plastic garland, carried a tall vel and danced in abandon to the beat of a kavadi band consisting of a tavil drum, a flat drum, a pair of large brass cymbals, a trumpet, a clarinet and a trombone. Her face had an intense delirious yet euphoric appearance. Strands of her gray hair flew across her face and in every direction. She lunged forward and contorted her body.
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A man, a woman and a few children followed her. They wore everyday garments and carriedkavadis - the children carried smaller "baby kavadis' (my term). A young woman with a westernized appearance in jeans and tee shirt with Calvin Kline logo boldly printed in front hopped along, self-consciously glancing around. Her modern-looking face was a portrait of embarrassment.
A Flight of Fancy?
There was no way to interrogate this group to find out about their whereabouts. However, there was also nothing to prevent me from imagining and hypothesizing about what might be going on among them using my experience with this sort of people and materials from previous research, in terms of a crudely estimated Statistical model pointing to certain modal patterns and central tendencies. The old woman was probably a maniyo that Gananath Obeyesekere discusses in Medusa's Hair. She had a special relationship with Kanda Kumara. She had to come to pay her annual visit and play her role in the sacred drama. It was likely that she had a shrine for Kanda Kumara at home and her kindred - son/in-law, daughter/in-law, and their children - shared her interest in Kanda Kumara and supported her. They lived in a world that was also populated by many Supernatural beings, as many as the Sinhala Buddhist culture defined, and assimilated from the Hindu religion of the Tamils. The Buddha, great gods Sakra, Natha, Visnu, Kataragama, his older brother Gana Deiyo, their parents Isvara and Parvati or Umayanganava, and other gods like Pattini, and Saman, juniorgods Dadimunda and Huniyam, great demons like Mahasohona and Riri Yaka, demonic clowns or clownish demons like the Kalukumaraya and Gara Yaka, and numerous smelly and despicable pretas inhabited it.’
One day, the grandmother began to breathe heavily, tremble violently, and jump up and down shaking her head and clasping her hands uttering incomprehensible sounds at a ceremony in a devale. She repeated this behavior on many similar occasions. At
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home, the old woman did not behave normally. She was withdrawn, muttering to herself, and unpredictably breaking into trance like states uttering unintelligible words. The family consulted various doctors, astrologers, and Samis who are knowledgeable about this sort of things, and they concluded that the grandmother was possessed by a powerful bhuta (spirit). Arrangements were made to find out who the bhuta was and the consensus among the experts was that this was a possession by a bhuta under the command of Kataragama Deiyo. The family and the experts brought her to Kataragama and performed the pujas for the god. Then they took her to the devale for Kadavara Deiyo, the supernatural specialist and authority in these matters, and appealed to obtain a boon to speak in intelligible words (mukha varama - literally, mouth-boon) to stabilize the possession as an arude; the possession converted into a benign, functional and manageable mode beneficial to the grandmother and to the Society.
From now on, she enters into a trance state willfully under specific ritual conditions on specific days at specific times to make her boon (varama) from the god socially usable. She, with the help of her family, establishes a private domestic shrine. This might be a room easily accessible to visitors or a specially constructed attachment to her residence. It containes a shrine for the Buddha and the deities presided by Kataragama Deiyo. She purchases a tall lance simulating Kanda Kumara's lance, known among the Sinhala devotees as the kunthayudha, has it authenticated by taking it to Kataragama or a local major devale dedicated to Kanda Kumara and placing it in the inner chamber of the devale. Now her private devale is ready to operate. She holds ordinary floral pujas every evening and special pujas simulating those in Kataragama on every Wednesday and Saturday day. Her family participates in them. She and her family first worship the Buddha and then the gods. She chants whatever the stotra or hymns she learns from the experts. Often these are garbled and mispronounced Sanskrit slokas mixed with words from Tamil, Malayalam and various other languages
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but she does not know their meanings nor is she interested in knowing such matters. Her family learns to chant these from her. She continually updates her repertoire as she participates in rituals in devales and picks up stories about the god and slokas, mantras and ritual procedures from the experts in the field. Her first firewalking performance must have been a gut-wrenching experience to her family as she observed the requisite vows and walked on the embers in Kataragama. But the activity must have established her as an authentic maniyo with blessings from the god and tightened her bonds with her kindred and neighbors.
The children grow up in the world defined for them in this manner. They construct their worlds using materials from the family religion in which Kataragama and Kanda Kumara are inalienable aspects, taken for granted as parts of everyday life. They learn to graft whatever their grandmother picks up from various Samis and manios - Tamil and Sinhala, Buddhist and Hindu alike - to this view of the world and connect cosmologies and cultures into a seemingly seamless web of concepts. These form the doxa of their world and their habitus. They engage in the multifarious practices automatically and effortlessly, as they stomped around carrying these "baby kavadis’ right before my eyes, completely unselfconsciously, in total abandon.'That family of Kavadi dancers moved on like a single piece, an organism, each one complementing the others, each moving because all the rest were moving after the entranced elder.
But the westernized-looking young woman seemed different. She was behind the rest and appeared to be utterly self-conscious. Perhaps she was in the age-set that encounters the world at large as a young adult. There was no doubt that she was a schoolgirl, in her late teens, fashion conscious, and aware of the opposite sex. Encouraged by my encounters in Kumbukkan Oya and elsewhere I speculated that she might be wondering if anyone known to her would notice her dancing like that. Her consciousness contained more than bhakti for the god. -
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Back on the rough ground and walking further on we stood by the Buddhist temple and monastery with its own devale for Kanda Kumara, on the south side of the road. This is the Abhinavaramaya temple, constructed in the 1920s, by the late Mr. and Mrs. Baris Appu. Baris Appu was the kapurala of the Valliamma devale at that time. The inside of the east wall of the Budu Ge (shrine for the Buddha) verandah has a large mural depicting the donors. Mr. Baris Appu is depicted wearing the low country national costume made popular by the former Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike. Mrs. Baris Appu wears an osariya, the Kandyan dress, like Bandaranaike's wife and the late Prime Minister Sirimavo. Many Buddhist pilgrims were performing puja before the Buddha statue in the shrine room. I bowed to the Buddha
Sakya sinhan namamyahan....
and moved on.
Next door is the Basnayaka Nilame's office. Adjacent to this is the Valauva - the official residence of the Basnayaka Nilame. Beyond the Valauva there is an open space. At the far end of it there is a shed, a security room of sorts, where the pilgrims leave their footwear. A man takes care of them for a small fee. It is not necessary to leave the shoes in his care. Some pilgrims, like me, prefer to carry them for use between the Maha Devale compound and the Kiri Vehera.
The reason why some prefer to carry their footwear becomes obvious the second the pilgrim removes them during the day. The sand on the ground sizzles in the scorching Sun. I recalled my experience in Kirankulam and Karaitivu. This experience must be similar to firewalking. Most pilgrims with thin skins on their soles hop from one shady spot to another, like me when I am in Kataragama.
We entered through the main gate along with a throng of other pilgrims. Right in front is the Maha Devale. Between it and the gate, slightly to the left, closer to the gate and surrounded by a steel fence is the flat rock on which the pilgrims crack coconuts in
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honor of the god. I had to wait in line with other pilgrims for my turn to Smash the coconut that I brought. When it was my turn, I lit a camphor pill on the coconut and let it melt and become fixed on the coconut while saluting the god:
Om Hrin Shrin namaha sivaya Saravanabhavaya ganesakumaraya namaha !
Om sara vana bhava! Hrin Shankarin ras han mukha
Hrin karasaravanabhavaneis
It is a mantra conceived by many cultures and composed in many tongues: Sanskrit, Tamil, Malayalam and many tribal languages. It is known as the Skanda kumara Shadakshara mantrathe mantra on the six letters of Skanda — Sa Ra Va Na Bha Va — that means 'the one born in the Sara forest making a direct reference to Skanda's birth story in the Aranyaka Parvan of the Mahabharata. The camphor had melted to fix itself on the coconut and was burning brightly in a bright orange flame with a sharp tip and a twirl of pleasantly pungent sooty Smoke. I lifted it over my head with my right hand and dashed it on the rock with all my energy and the coconut landed on the rock, cracked into many pieces sprinkling its water in every direction. Tradition says that the coconut must fall apart on impact. Once before, I performed the same ritual in the company of a few Tamil Hindu friends. That time my coconut landed on the rock but just rolled away. My Hindu friends hissed in disappointment for that was not a good omen. Although I laughed and dismissed the whole event as inconsequential, I did not feel good about it either. But not this time: I felt wonderful. This time the omen was good. The coconut was in smithereens. Not the best, which is the two halves falling on their backs with milky-white meat smiling with you, but good enough. I was happy.
My plan was to first visit the Kiri Vehera in the traditional Sinhala manner. We turned left and walked past the kovil for Ganesa. Thankfully remembering the wonderful hospitality his devotees showered on me I lit several camphor tablets to salute him:
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sittareku genvana asane tanamina uduviyan bandimina vatatirada adimina
deviruvak tanamina sondataluda mukatana isa otunu daramina gajatekuge hisamena
aggala komalina talakarali vilandina mal kawum rotiyena vella vasumut tana
mora himbutu dampana amba dambada atambina paluvira debarina kadali vilikun gena
valandava satutu kota kapuru bulatut sondata sit sama kara evita udahasak novimata
adahasak atuva sita avasara den memata pinsidada vei obata devan silpaya memata
sodiyada genatine kiya sit lesa dane pilam da kiyamine vale da liyamine
kalpavrkshasya vrnde
The next is the shrine for the Buddha. It also contains a shrine for Vishnu. We lit camphor pills for them and saluted:
buddan sarane sirasa daragena
damman Sarane sita pahadagena
Sangan Sarane sivuru daragena
innai tun Sarane adalhagena
perayama buddan sarane gannai madiyama damman sarane gannai aluyama sangan saranegannai tштуатаiата tит Sатате gаттаi
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sambuddhan pundarikakshan sarvagnan karunaspadan samantrabhadran sastaran Sakyasinhan namamiyahan...
kalajaya divasakara alavaka damanakara...
siri visnurnarayanoyamham drdatara viimalam
rajapadmavataran vaikunthoramadevan dasarata vibhavan ketumalavakritan.... As best as I could remember. Right behind the Buddha/Vishnu shrine is the great bo tree believed to be a direct descendant of the great bodhi tree in Anuradhapura. According to the Mahavansa, the great bodhi tree in Anuradhapura, the Sri Maha Bodhinvahanse, was a branch of the greatest bodhi tree in Buddhagaya in India. The branch was brought to Sri Lanka by the great bhikkhuni Sanghamitta, daughter of Emperor Asoka and sister of Arhant Mahinda who converted Devanampiya Tissa, the king of Sri Lanka, and formally converted Lanka to a Buddhist country. The tree was received with great piety and ceremony. Among the dignitaries invited to the festivities were Ksatriyas from Kataragama. When the tree was planted in Anuradhapura, it instantly and miraculously bore a fruit which produced eight seedlings. One of them was given to the Ksatriyas from Kataragama. This is that seedling, grown into a magnificent bodhi-king, respectfully referred to as the bodhinvahanse - His Highness the Bodhi.
As discussed in the previous chapter, when Major Davy visited Kataragama in 1819, this bodhinvahanse was still a grand tree although the sacred complex was, from his perspective, in a state of grand neglect. During the twentieth century, as the pilgrimages to Kataragama increased by thousand-fold, the bodhinvahanse also received much attention. Impressive platforms were built around it and around the other equally grand bo tree next to it. During the last quarter of the last century, a gleaming
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gold-plated fence was erected around the bodhinvahanse, in emulation of the golden fence around the Sri Maha Bodhinvahanse in Anuradhapura. The tree in Kataragama is, as the grand bo trees elsewhere, decorated with many flags of the colors of the Buddha's halo.
The cool shade under the bo tree was inviting. As I stood there a large number of people, all Sinhala Buddhist, gathered around the bodhinvahanse, mostly on its south side. Most were kneeling down in the Sand and worshiping the tree. Others were sitting cross-legged and meditating. Hundreds of coconut oil lamps and joss sticks were burning around it. At the perimeter of this gathering, there was Hindu activity. Several kavadi dancers circumambulated the Maha Devale that included the bo tree. Later I noticed several Hindu devotees roll around the same sacred premises. They rolled by the bo tree. The worshippers readily gave them the way.
A gate in the southern perimeter of the compound leads to a small devale right outside but on slightly lower ground. This is the devale for Kadavara, a demi-god propitiated principally by the samis and maniyos. Kadavara is in charge of dispensing the mouth-boon that the Kataragama Deiyo grants to his devotees.
About forty feet to the west of the bodhinvahanse there is a row of small devales. From Davy, I gather that this row existed even when he visited the place. He describes them as mere empty cells deserving little notice. However, various Sinhala poems indicate that these cells were well known shrines for six deities. As discussed in detail in the previous chapter, in the early nineteenth century there were twelve small rooms. Herbert White who visited Kataragama 1895 gives more details. There were five rooms in the row. One was a devale for the goddess Pattini. The others were fivekovils for Ganadeiyo, Alutdeiyo, Basnairadeiyo, Parakasadeiyo and Kumaradeiyo. These deities were closely associated with the cult of the goddess Pattini. '
During the last century, these cells were converted into a row of four rooms under a single roof with a common open
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verandah. Today, except the Pattini devale, the other rooms are dedicated to specifically Sinhala Buddhist gods such as Saman, Dadimunda Devata Bandara, and Huniyan dewata. Sinhala Buddhists have replaced the gods whom White refers to during the last century with the above deities, indicating the reduction in significance of the Pattini cult and the elevation of the other deities in the twentieth century hierarchy of Sinhala Buddhist supernaturals. Most Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil Hindu devotees, and several Sinhala and Tamil Christians, gathered around the Pattini devale. Significant numbers gathered around the Dadimunda and Suniyam devales. The social scene here was as complex as it was in front of the Maha Devale as people belonging to various cultural groups gathered. We lit camphor tablets at every one of these shrines and proceeded towards the western gate of this complex. To the north of this gate and the Maha Devale is the separate enclosure of the Teivayanaiamman kovil complex. Postponing a visit to that temple complex, we walked out of the western gate.
Kiri Vehera
The first thing anyone notices from this gate is the pure white hemispherical Kiri Vehera spectacularly rising against the clear blue sky. A straight road takes the pilgrim to the stupa. But the paved road and the sidewalks are too hot to walk on. I wore my Sandals and Stepped in. There were many other pilgrims going to the Stupa. On the way, many beggars accosted us. The Scene has changed from what I saw as a child and Obeyesekere described in the early 1980s. Those days there was no road to speak of but a wide footpath. For most of the way, beggars of every description lay exposing their economic capital: incurable wounds, legs Swollen beyond belief because of elephantiasis, lying in their own urine. Women with deformed faces and scrawny arms carrying severely malnourished snotty-faced naked infants stretched their greasy hands for a few cents. The scene, as Obeyesekere observed, caused
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disgust and the pilgrim wanted to flee from the scene.” But it was apt as she walked through these signs of the Suffering in the Sansara towards the symbol of relief from suffering.
Today, those beggars are gone. One could find them in the town on the south bank of the river. They have been driven away since the development and modernization of the sacred area. Instead, Swarms of better-fed and aggressive children run from one pilgrim to the next asking for money to buy Schoolbooks, pencils and pens. Their healthy-looking mothers in clean skirts and blouses, like those women who chased us in the village, would watch them from the sidewalks. These are the squatters in the village as Idiscussed in the previous chapter. The new beggars produce a different kind of disgust: disgust towards the Society of Sri Lanka and its new Social and cultural values. We approached the stupa through the loud calls of women in flower stalls who tried to make a living by selling trays of lotus flowers. I bought a tray of red lotuses. What a contrast between them as the beggars Maybe the beggars make more money.
We climbed the steps and entered the yard of the immense stupa. The yard is wide and paved with ancient granite slabs. Hundreds of Buddhist pilgrims in various bands, almost all dressed in white, sat on the ground and worshiped the Stupa. The four malasanes (seats for the flowers' in small vahalkadas on the perimeter of the stupa) facing the four directions were covered with red and while lotus flowers. We moved some around in order to place the flowers that we brought. Thousands of joss Sticks, hundreds of clay lamps, and camphortablets were burning in special granite receptacles all around the stupa. The low murmur and whispering of the gathas - Pali verses, the muted fragrance of the lotuses permeated with the scent of the joss sticks and the aroma of burning coconut oil, floated around the great white bubble with a Spike atop that stood quietly against the Sapphire sky. This far, my visit to the Kiri Vehera has been a replication of my visit to the stupa in my childhood. Except for the beggars. I bowed to the Buddha:
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namo tassa bhagavato arahato sammasambudhassal
However, the scene is not entirely Buddhist. Over the decades, I have come to know more about the pilgrims to Kiri Vehera. Bands of Tamil Hindu pilgrims also entered the arena, some carrying flowers, camphortablets and joss sticks. All quietly circumambulated the stupa, in the same way the Buddhists did, with clasped hands and in measured steps, as if they adopted the Buddhist style of worship. The untrained eye might even mistake them for Buddhists. But they were nothere to worship the Buddha: he was not their focal deity. Their deity was Muruga. Sura Padman: Muruga's archenemy, the embodiment of evil, lived here. Before Muruga defeated him, this was his kottan or the fortress. When Muruga chased him, Suran ran away and became a mango tree in the middle of the ocean. Muruga went there and threw his vel, splitting him in half. One half became a peacock and the other a cock. The peacock became his mayil vahanam, the peacock vehicle, and the cock became his cock-flag. The place still reminds the devotees of that great battle. In Hinduism, the heavenly villains are no less sacred than the gods are, particularly after the gods vanquish and reform them.
Obeyesekere noted that the atmosphere around Kiri Vehera could not be more different from the atmosphere around the Maha Devale dominated by the bold sounds of the kavadi bands and the sensuous dancing by men and women dressed in vermilion, crimson and ruby brandishing spears and tridents. "There is a very different atmosphere here - serenity, calm, stillness. The noise and the bustle of the god's shrine are not here, not even the cacophony from the loudspeakers that the Sinhalas aptly call the "iron mouth.”
The difference is also the difference between the two
religions. Buddhism focuses on withdrawal from worldly life whereas Hinduism is about success in worldly life. What is significant in this bicultural atmosphere in the two zones in the same religious complex is that each accommodates the other's religion although they deal with the opposite ends of the religious
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continuum in Sri Lanka: South Asia, for that matter. The Buddhists like the noise, the bustle, and the high drama in the Hindu space and join in. The Hindus, whatever their interpretation of the Buddhist space may be, adopt the Buddhist demeanor because they Somehow like it. Buddhists and Hindus do not necessarily disagree with each other about the details, but they do present functionally alternative narratives to describe the ontology of sacredness of the Stupa without discrediting the other. They do agree about the sacred quality of the space in shared native South Asian cosmological terms. Back on the Maha Devale premises. As I walked in through the gate, I saw a man carrying a kavadi, dancing and circumambulating the three temples. Two women walked behind him carrying pots of fire. The shallow clay pots contained tinnoru: Sacred ash. Camphor burned on the ash. The women held the pots with kohomba leaves on their palms as a cushion/heat absorbent. A third woman fed the fire periodically with camphor tablets. A band consisting of a ta'vil drum, a flat drum, a clarinet and a pair of Small cymbals preceded the kavadi dancer. The group was fulfilling a vow. After circumambulating the Maha Devale they would go to the Teivayanaiamman kovil complex, pay obeisance to Teivayanaiamman and Palani Andavar, and to other places to worship as many other deities as they wished. After fulfilling the vow they would take the tinnoru in the pot with them to their house for daily applications on their bodies. From their appearance, it was obvious that they were Tamil as they had tinnoru rubbed on their foreheads. Interestingly, so far, the Sinhala Buddhists have not adopted this form of worship.
We walked around the Maha Devale and came to its yard. Pilgrims gathered around the coconut-smashing rock. They lit camphor tablets on the coconuts, held them over their heads and, their eyes closed and appearing to focus intensely on whatever they had in mind - making or fulfilling vows - and awaited their turn to reach the rock and smash the coconuts. The majority of them were Sinhala Buddhists. Their apparel and body language indicated
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their ethnic identity. As soon as they moved away from the rock and the crowd around it, they rejoined their groups and proceeded to the Maha Devale. There they joined a long line of pilgrims carrying offerings, waiting to enter the temple. The Maha Devale opens only three times a day - at 5 a.m., 11 a.m., and 7 p.m. They were waiting for the 11 a.m. puja. My watch read 10 a.m. and I decided to visit the Teivayanaiammankovil complex until the Maha Devale commenced the puja and opened for the pilgrims.
Teivayanaiamman and Palani Andavar
We entered the Teivayanaiamman kovil through its south gate facing the bo tree, on the north side of the Maha Devale. As the pilgrim enters the complex, he notices on his left the small kovil of Vairuvar, an attendant of Siva. The Sinhalas refers to him as Bhairava or Bahiravaya. Either way he is the guardian of everything including hidden treasures. He carries a trident. A dog - his vehicle - stands near him. He serves Siva as a protector of whatever is in the care of the gods. We lit a camphor tablet in his honor and proceeded.
A short distance away from Vairuvar, on our right, is a small kovil for Perumal or Tirumal - Visnu. As we found in Chapter Two, Tamil hindus believe that when Siva created Muruga, Visnu created two goddesses named Amurtavalli and Cunteravalli. Both of them wanted to unite with Muruga. They performed tapas to achieve this end. Amurtavalli was reborn in heaven as the offspring of a white elephant while Cunteravalli was reborn in the human world as the daughter of a doe who was Perumal himself. Amurtavalli was adopted by Indra and raised her as Teivayanai - the vehicle of the gods. Cunteravalli was raised by a hunter named Nambirajan. We lit several camphor pills at Tirumal's kovil.
Straight ahead of us was along building with several windows and a walkway in the middle right across it. This is the monastery of the Dasanami order of Brahman swamis who own the Teivayanaiammankovil complex. The Teivayanaiammankovil is a
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separate austere building to the South of the monastery adjacent to the Tirumalkovil. It has a fairly large open verandah. A large curtain depicting Teivayanaiamman covers the entrance to its inner chamber where the goddess's insignia are deposited. All worship is conducted before this image. She, in full regalia, stands by a white elephanther vehicle - who holds a red lotus in its trunk.
Her right hand is open with fingers pointing up in the abhaya mudra, and her left hand is open too but pointing down in the varada mudra, just like Skanda/Muruga's open hands, telling the pilgrim, "Come, fear not!” We lit camphor tablets in her honor.
Just east of this kovil is another similar small building. This is the kovil of Palani Andavar, the ascetic form of Muruga. The Tamil tradition has it that after defeating asura Sura Padman Muruga retired into a life of meditation and asceticism at Palani in Tamil Nadu. Rishi Narada brought to him the news of Valli when he was in Palani. The Sri Lankan Tamil tradition has it that Rishi Narada found Valli in Kataragama. Muruga came to Kataragama, married Valliamma and settled down. The Palani Andavar kovil celebrates Muruga in his ascetic form at Palani. The icon painted on the cloth curtain depicted the god as a shaven headed ascetic wearing a loincloth leaning on his vel.
We already found in the previous chapter how Teivayanaiamman came to Kataragama in the previous chapter. To return to it briefly, when Muruga settled down in Kataragama Teivayanaiamman became sad and agitated. She asked a faithdful ascetic named Kalyanagiri to come to Kataragama and persuade Muruga to return to her. After Coming to Kataragama and meeting, Muruga Kalyanagiri found it difficult to convince him to return to Tamil Nadu. In the meantime, he developed such affection for Muruga, Kalyanagiri abandoned the project and remained in Kataragama and practiced asceticism. Teivayanaiamman, finding that Kalyanagiri also stayed in Kataragama, came over with Sivalingam and Nabi, and settled down near Muruga. This is why the Teivayanaiamman kovil is in this location, right by Muruga,
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on his left side, as she is depicted in Muruga iconography. But she has nothing to do with Muruga's affair with Valliamman whom the Sinhala devotees of Kataragama Deiyo call the Deiyo's 'hora gani’ or the illicit woman. In fact, the Teivayanaiammankovil faces north, as if the goddess, to show her disapproval, turns her back to Muruga. This is why only the pre-Valli Muruga is worshiped here.
Palani Andavar is a reflection of Skanda of the Siva Purana. We found in Chapter One that Skanda became angry when Siva and Parvati let Ganesha marry before he found a wife. He thus renounced his family and withdrew to Krauncha hills to practice asceticism.We lit many camphortablets in honor of Palani Andavar and bowed to him.
The monastery of the Dasanami sect is an important addition to the multicultural profile of Kataragama. The Dasanami sect is a north Indian institution. However Sankaracarya, a Keralian Brahmin, was a member of the sect and Keralians consider membership in the sect as a great honor. The monastic descendants of Kalyanagiri own the monastery. As the pilgrim enters through the main entrance he crosses a narrow passage that connects the rooms on either side. These rooms house the monastics and function as storerooms and the like. Then he enters the main hall that the walkway divides into two sections. On his right is a shrine for Kalyanagiri. The special death-seat of Kalyanagiri and his descendants, called the Kalyana Madam (the kalana madima of the colonial administrators), is located there. It is a square-shaped pit. A step-like portion in it works like a seat. Interior of this seat is coated with clay. Around this are various objects that are sacred to the institution. On the other side also, the pilgrim notices many photographs and portraits of the former Swamis of the institution.
There are various stories about the origin of the Teivayanaiammankovil and the connection it has with the Brahman lineage. According to the Tamil tradition, Kalyanagiri was succeeded by his protegé Jayasingiri. Apparently, when Robert Brownrigg and John Davy visited Kataragama in 1819, Jayasingiri received
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them at the Teivayanaiammankovil. Thereafter the 'Giri' lineage disappeared.
Concurrently, though, as Arunachalam contends, an ascetic woman named Balasundari, the daughter of a certain North Indian Maharajah, lived at the kovil, and was much revered by the faithful. The King of Kandy desired to have her as a queen. When she refused to obey, the King wanted to have her taken to Kandy against her wishes. But the god saved her and punished the King. The British troops captured him. The king had to be Sri Vickrema Rajasinghe and the event must have occurred around 1814. Balasundari had appointed one Mangalpuri as the Swami of the kovil on an uncertain date. He died in 1873.
During the mid-nineteenth century, an Indian sadhu named Kesopuri Bava had come to Kataragama and taken the charge of the temple in 1873. An ascetic of the grand tradition, he restricted his diet to milk during the last stages of his life. Therefore he was also known as Palkudi Bava. Kesopuri Bava died in July 1898. Thereafter his pupil Surajpuri inherited the temple. Surajpuri also died in 1898.35
Sumanasekera Banda has collected an interesting piece of Kataragamalore: Kesopuri Bava had a clandestine relationship with a woman and he bequeathed the kovil premises to her by a deed. A descendant of her by the name of Kandiah presented this deed at the Badulla District Court in 1927 and claimed ownership. He succeeded in his claim. In 1938, the kovil came under the care of one Ganeshaji Giri. The Giri lineage thus reclaimed the temple.
The pilgrim walks through this hall into a courtyard enclosed by a wall. On the east and west sides of this enclosure, there are rows of small cubical monuments with conical roofs to commemorate the past Swamis. The chief monument here is for Kesopuri Bava, who died in Colombo. His devotees took his remains to Kataragama, buried in the Teivayanaiamman kovil compound, and built the monument.” Thereafter monuments of similar nature were constructed for his successors. Kesopuri Bava's monument
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contains a pair of very old Spiked-Sandals, bead necklaces, and an arm Stand that he had used when meditating. Others contain only the sandals of the respective Swamis. Paths lined with oleander bushes take the pilgrim to these shrines.
There are several buildings outside the east side of this courtyard. One must go around the monastery to enter these buildings. The pilgrim leaves the monastery and walks across the Teivayanaiamman complex passing the great copper vel placed on a special platform between the kovil of the goddess and the Palani Andavar kovil. The vel has a large blade. At its base two cobra hoods turn outward giving it an awesome and commanding appearance. A temple attendant keeps this spear clean by washing and polishing it everyday. Behind it is the special rock surrounded by a steel fence where, during a previous visit, Ismashed a coconut in honor of Palani Andavar.
Beyond the monastery, at its east end, on the north side, is the offices and the related buildings including a kitchen, an open air cooking space with pit-fires, a Storeroom, and a large multichambered hall wherealms are given to pilgrims everyday. On the South side is a building known as the Madapalli or the kitchen where offerings to the god of Kataragama are cooked. As the pilgrim proceeds, he arrives at the main gate of the Teivayanaiammankovil complex. During the festive season of 2003, the kovil committee had erected a makeshift cloth gopuram. It was a colorful conical structure. At the bottom level there were images of Siva and Parvati on Siva's left. Child Muruga, also known as Balamuruga, and his peacock were on Parvati's side. Child Ganesha and Rishi Narada were on Siva's side. At the upper level, Palani Andavar stood, leaning on his vel, with a cock and an elephant on his right and a peacock on his left, Muruga's trophies from the great battle with Sura Padman.
At the kovil, I noticed a significant sociological feature of Kataragama. The Teivayanaiammankovil premises are an exclusively Hindu Tamil enclave. I did not come across a single non-Tamil
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individual within the bounds of the kovil although I have seen Seray Sinhala groups during my previous visits, usually a part of a larger group, perhaps an adventurous and inquisitive few, visiting and looking around. They did not appear to be at home, as they were around the Maha Devale or the Kiri Vehera. Their conduct was polite and circumspect, as if they were in foreign territory. The only Sinhala pilgrims who purposefully visit the place with knowledge about it and feel comfortable there are the devotees of Kanda Kumara who have dedicated their lives to the god as Samis and maniyos. For them this is familiar territory. The Muslims come here (or visit any place of worship other than their mosques) only if they have some official or business transactions. Earlier in the last century, they were not allowed at all because of mutual conflicts over diet and theology. The rare Christian who comes to the Kataragama Pattini (St. Mary's) devale is hardly aware of its existence. For the overwhelming majority of non-Hindus this whole complex is a meaningless space full of meaningless buildings Occupied by meaningless people who do their own unknown or incomprehensible meaningless things. But for the Hindu Tamils, and to the Sinhala Samis and maniyos, it is a must see and worship, a source of shelter and succor. Already, hundreds of pilgrims were lining up to receive midday alms from the Teivayanaiammankovil. They all appeared to be Tamil pilgrims as all displayed tinnoru and pottus on their foreheads, their ethnic markers.
Maha Devale
We heard the drums and the bells of the Maha Devale. The midday puja had begun. We rushed there. As we were not making any offerings, we were allowed to enter the Devale from its main entrance. The first thing I noticed was that the order of proceedings had changed over the years. Just as the pilgrims with offerings stood in lines along the right wall of the Devale to enter the shrine a few at a time they stood in line even inside the devale, on the right side, and approached the kapurala on first come first served
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basis. Those without offerings were asked to stand on the left side. The middle of the room was empty with pilgrims straying in every now and then. This is a major change inside the Devale. Formerly it used to be that all entered the Devale from its front entrance, and jostled and elbowed each other to reach the kapuralas, with Occasional pilgrims entering trance States. The gathering of devotees used to be much more animated and energetic. Now it appeared to have been rationalized into orderly and bureaucratic-looking lines that, somehow, lacked the energy and the verve of the former unruly-looking scenario. Pilgrims stood in line, patiently waiting for their turn with controlled enthusiasm. When their turn came, they handed over the pujas to the kapuralas and moved to the left, where we stood, and waited to collect the pujas. Once that was returned, they left through the left gate where a kapurala blessed them with some tinnoru and sacred water. At that gate is a small shrine for Kataragama Deiyo, with a smaller Sinhala Buddhist painted icon of the god hanging on the wall that reminded one of the devales in village Buddhist temples. However, the kapuralas here never offeryatika (request) or kannalauva (pleading) as in the village temple devales.
Standing where we were, I could see the large painted icon hung before the inner chamber or the vadasitina maligava of the temple. The image represented Muruga of Kacciappa Civacariyar's Kantha Puranam. The god sat on the peacock - half of the reconstituted Sura Padman. He held a cock flag - the other half of Sura Padman. His two consorts sat on either side of his lap with Valli, his kriya Sakti, on the right, and Teivaiyanai, his iccha Sakti, on his left. His hands indicated the abhaya and varada mudras. This icon dominated the temple. On the left and right walls, there were large framed Indian lithographs of the scenes from the Kantha Puranam - the birth of Kandasami as six infants on six lotuses in the lake full of Sara reeds. Parvati is just about to embrace them. In the story, when she embraced them they fused to form Skanda. This, however, is a far cry from the image of Kanda Kumara in the
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eighteenth century. The oldest known account of the appearance
of the god is reported in the Johnston manuscript No: 13 that I
referred to in the previous chapter. The Dutch asked, and the
Bhikkhus answered:
What God is that which is worshipped in Katteregam? He is one of the Gods upon earth; his place of residence is near a rock called Maha Mere Parkwette, situated between the bottom of the sea and the underground world Assoere looke...
What is his name?
His name is Kando Koemare, having six heads and twelve hands whereof the ten last were made use of for the purpose of using ten warlike weapons, namely - One Trisoele or Harpoen,
One Pallas, A large ring or spring called Parawallale, which is sharp outside and by turning it around on the finger is thrown to the enemy,
A throwing pike,
A line,
A shin-breaker,
A standart with a cock painted in it, A throwing chain,
A bow with its arrow. And the said Kando Koemare is further delineated as standing or riding upon a flying peacock in the same manner as the other Gods are described, each of them in proportion to the praise which he got in the world through his good edification, for example a courageous
has in his coat of arms a Lion; a believer an Eagle; a laborious one, an Ox, and so forth.
What deeds has he performed?
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The following is said of him, namely that when Gauteme Boedoe was at Katteregam in his Pagoda for a few minutes, the said Kando Koemare was on guard upon the offering tree Boodoe called Bogaha, or commonly called Devil's tree, made a bow for Gauteme and got immediately from him the power to cure the sick in general, especially those who are of King's blood, to do wonders, to do good to irrational animals and to assist men in distress, with a direction however that men should respect but not worship him, as one of the powerful inferior Gods; so that the divine respect shown to him by human beings of persuasion of Buddoe became a custom and was propagated, and the offering house erected in his honour at Kattergamme is considered as more sacred than the temple built in Kandia in the residence town of the King for the use of him and his subjects, in honour of Kande Kumarea. Even the presents of the King are sent to Kattergam for the purpose of being offered, and his inhabitants are not
revented from proceeding thither in great numbers. р p 3. 3
38
Clearly, during the next century, this image had gone through a remarkable transformation. In Chapter Two, I already examined the reasons for this transformation. What surprises me in this account, as I have already discussed, is the censoring of all information about Devasena/Teivayanaiamman and Valliamma. Or was it censored? If at that time these goddesses were iconographically associated with the god, the Dutch would have inquired about them. They had not. As I mentioned in Chapter Five, citing Pieris, half a century later, the British found out from Alavvmulla Maha Bathme Rala that there was a cubit high solid gold image of Valliamma in the Maha Devale.” Further, Davy found that a road from the Maha Devale ended in a small devale in front of it." This amounts to the fact that a remarkable change had
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taken place in Kataragama during that half a century. The only cQnclusion I can attempt here is that although the Kantha Puranam story circulated in the Kandyan provinces from about seventeenth century, Kataragama had resisted incorporating it in Kataragama ritual practices until the late Nayakkar period. The then prevelant iconography and ideology of Kanda Kumara until the end of eighteenth century was derived mostly from the thirteenth century Dhatuvansa. Kandyan iconography of Kanda Kumara, as found in the Rupavaliya, is an affirmation of the description in the Jonston manuscript. The present iconography of the god had to be introduced to Kataragama and Kataragama administration accepted it only in the late nineteenth century or thereafter. It was during this period that the Hindus became highly influential in Kataragama, as I elaborate in the previous chapter.
The rest of the temple was decorated with numerous items including a pair of ancient tusks, dark brown with age, believed to be the tusks of Kandula, Dutugamunu's elephant. Large oil lamps were fully lit. The joss sticks were burning in their receptacles. I bowed to Kanda Kumara:
Om Saravanabhaval hrim sankarin ra sanmukha hirimkara Saravanabhavanei
unai Sakala runtu dikta sarihayum kirihayum gnanamum Sadankayum
pur kalir kalir kaliryentra vima saktivel trangimmasamaya vandun
Sav rav vav nav bhav vav omkara Samaya karunyane talei uvanei murugal
Om . My friend Rajan stretched on the ground before the god's large icon and knocked his forehead on the ground several times, like Velupillai in my house on that day, when we began our pada yatra, which seemed like long ago.
Why is the new organization of the devotees so officious? That was my question to Rajan. I missed the animated atmosphere of the pre-rationalization period temple. Rajan Said this has been a
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new festive season procedure adopted to control the crowds. That made sense. The exponential population growth in the country means a parallel growth in the population of devotees and pilgrims. In the 1950s, when the national population was a mere eight million, there was enough room for everyone - a bit tight but still manageable. In half a century, this figure doubled and now, unless thoroughly rationalized methods are employed, the crowds are uncontrollable as there is no room for everyone. The rationalized method is bland and colorless in comparison but it is workable.
We walked out of the temple complex, into the pita vidiya of the arena.
The Angane
The arena was extremely crowded. The density of the crowd was higher in the arena near the atul vidiya and in the north. The vast majority of the pilgrims in the central area were Tamil Hindus. The north side of the pita widiya was also densely crowded with Tamil Hindus. I was looking for my pada yatra companions: Velupillai, Rajaratnam, Sinnadorei, Sivam, Tangavelu and Selvamani. The pilgrims gathered around the kovils and the various bands stayed close to other unknown bands making it difficult to walk across them without stepping through their areas, indicated by plastic sheets stretched on the ground as bedding. Some of them had set up their kitchens' and the pots were on the rocks, with flames from smoky meager fires wrapping around their sooty bottoms. Right next to these kitchens and sleeping areas were mounds of garbage - mostly stale food that emitted an unpleasant odor and invited Swarms of flies. Beyond the garbage were puddles of rainwater, muddy with trash and Stale food stagnating in them. Gangs of laborers employed by the temple administration cleaned up these spaces periodically. But no one could keep up with the density of pilgrims. To be here for extended periods, one needed tremendous religious and ascetic fervor and spirit. Then one imagines the splendor of the god he/she came to worship, the glory
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of the relationship one has with the god, oblivious to the muck in which one stands. The consciouness filled with bhakti, and directed towards the god and stories about him, inverts the perceived physical reality of the environment and converts it to a site of sacrifice and worship. Only the uninvolved visitors objectively noticed the unhealthy and malodorous mess. The devotees subjectively noticed only devotional opportunities in it.
We managed to walk around several groups and wander through this sea of people. Somebody touched my arm and I looked around. It was Tangavelu with a big grin on his face. He said he and Selvamani were camping near the Kuda Kataragama devale. We wiggled through the many bands and camps and reached the devale. Their camp was not different from those of the rest. Selvamani was lying on a plastic sheet. The camp boundaries were demarcated with their meager baggage. We chatted for a while and went to the bazaar on the other side of the river for a glass of tea. Tangavelu and Selvamani had performed their pujas in the previous evening and were relaxing a bit. They had all they needed and the alms from the Teivayanaiamman kovil were, quite literally, a blessing. They walked about and gawked around noticing all kinds of things. For this couple, veteran pada yatra pilgrims (this was their eleventh trip), the walk to Kataragama is a walk in the backyard. They have devised their own methodology for doing all manner of things and Surviving on the way. Leaving the daily chores behind they come over light-heartedly, not to make or fulfill vows but for the sheer thrill of it. There is something moving and charming about these grandparents of two children in Batticaloa. They have not left their childhood behind to mature: they matured with it. They had a good idea about the people in the sacred area. Rajan and I started a conversation with Tangavelu and Selvamani about these people.
According to Tangavelu and Selvamani, most of them were from the eastern province, from places like Batticaloa, Valacchenai, Kalmunai, Akkaraipattu, and Tirukovil. On this day, there were
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very few Sinhala pilgrims in this area. Rajan, who knows about the general patterns of pilgrim behavior as a resident of Kataragama, said that Sinhala pilgrims come to these areas very infrequently. My Subsequent inquiries about the distribution and composition of pilgrim camps confirmed Rajan's observation. Sinhala pilgrims rarely come to spend several days. More usually, they arrive, perform the rituals and depart, if possible on the same day. They Stay overnight if they arrive too late to participate in the evening puja. Perhaps, the economics of their pilgrimages prevent them from staying longer. There is also no custom in Sinhala Buddhist pilgrimages to spend days at a pilgrimage site. Their custom is to arrive at pilgrimage sites, engage in worship, and depart immediately. The Tamil Hindus have a different custom. The longer they stay at a site better it is, as longer stays allow them to remain in the mental comforts of the religious atmosphere.
The comforts of the religious atmosphere are a complex
phenomenon. Tangavelu and Selvamani admitted that the pilgrims bear severe physical discomfort. My pada yatra experience also is that pilgrims put up with various hardships on their way: thirst, hunger, fear, exhaustion, sickness. After arriving in Kataragama, they stay outdoors exposed to the elements under precarious conditions that allow hardly any privacy even to have a wink of sleep in a quiet place. But, as they said, the comforts arise from other sources. During the pilgrimage, they leave the everyday concerns aside and focus on the actualities and purposes of the pilgrimage. Once they arrive in Kataragama, the problematics and logistics of the long walk become irrelevant and are displaced from consciousness by concerns of the relatively less problematical stay in Kataragama. The Teivayanaiammankovil and the Saivaite madam on the other side of the river provide free food. There is no need to be concerned with food unless they prefer to cook their own. All they need to do is to just take care of themselves, perform religious acts or watch and listen to the various religious acts of Others some of which the pilgrims consider as daring and awesome
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feats that come well within the bhakti orientation of their oonsciousness. And there is a lot to do, see and hear without polluting their bhakti. They meet relatives and old friends from places far away from their villages, exchange information and entertain each other. They spend time looking at the merchandize in shops, particularly the brass and stainless steelware, evaluating the quality of the goods and their capacity to own them. They planned to visit the carnival on the other side of the river that evening. I speculate this is comforting, uplifting and enjoyable. Tangavelu and Selvamani make a jolly couple.
The Sinhala and Muslim pilgrims hardly perform pada yatra: at least not since the introduction of mass transportation. Most pilgrims hire vehicles for the pilgrimage and this is a considerable expense. For every extra day spent, they must pay extra. Perhaps, transportation is the most expensive item in their pilgrimage budget. Urban middle class Tamil Hindus also face similar problems. As discussed in the previous chapter, these groups must also manage time as their middle class salary or wage-based employment does not allow them much free time. Therefore, these three groups fall into a common pattern. They enjoy the pilgrimage by converting the trip itself into a pleasure trip with much merrymaking on the way. If they have spare time and money, they extend the trip to visit more places rather than staying in the same place.
The pada yatra pilgrimage is altogether an ascetic activity. Tamil Hindus believe that they should suffer during their pilgrimage. Muruga expects them to atone for the rude reception their ancestors gave him when he first came here. The longer they take to arrive in Kataragama and the longer they stay, greater is their asceticism. Thus, exposure to the elements, pain and suffering during the journey, living on alms like beggars, in a crowded, obviously unhealthy, and physically unpleasant atmosphere are all ingredients of their atonement and asceticism.
By contrast, the Sinhalas and the Muslims are not ascetically oriented. Their religions do not profess self-mortification. Sinhala
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religious attitudes are relaxed and involve only minimal effort and discomfort. Although Sufi Islam involves asceticism only those who have embraced Sufism and dedicated their lives to it practice asceticism. The average Muslim pilgrim to Kataragama is not an ascetic. He comes to make or fulfill vows. This is to say that the pilgrimages of the Sinhalas, middle class Tamils, and Muslims are goal oriented purposeful activities whereas at least for some working class or poor Tamils, the goal is to simply arrive in Kataragama and stay there as long as they can.
We returned to the sacred area and walked with Tangavelu and Selvamani to their camp. They would tell Velupillai, Sivam, Rajaratnam and Sinnadorei that I was looking for them and they could find me at the hotel. Tangavelu and Selvamani would stay in Kataragama until they run out of money and make a hasty departure by bus. We exchanged telephone numbers. We might not see each other next morning.
Bodies in Culture
The Kali kovil at the end of the atul vidiya was a busy place. Many devotees gathered in bands at various ritual arenas in the hall and the yard of the temple. It was easy to tell who the Tamils and the Sinhalas were. In addition to the telltale tinnoru lines on the forehead, the former wore colorful clothes and the women wore jewelry conspicuously whereas the latter were in white and the women wore little or no jewelry. But these were advertisements of cultural difference. In physical appearance such as facial features, they were not so easily distinguishable. However, the body is never presented in public without being wrapped in cultural statements about identity. These outer trappings mould the physical shapes into distinctive ethnic forms. Sometimes the advertising is absent when clothing and ornaments are similar, as among the urban middle class pilgrims who wear white and plain jewelry. Sometimes they are indistinguishable as when a few Sinhala devotees rub tinnoru on their foreheads and when fewer Tamils do not.
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However, ethnic identity can be masked only until the bodies are in motion, as embodied ethnic identity resurfaces in the body language and in the way bodies are used to create symbols of faith unique to the ethnic culture. It is one thing to compare still photographs but quite another to compare motion pictures. Bodies in motion show ethnicity. Pierre Bourdieu would call this a part of the ethnic habitus. They unconsciously and habitually follow a particular choreography. The Sinhalas do the same in their own way. They unconsciously move to a Sinhala rhythm. Here in Kataragama they show-cased it without being aware of it around the Kiri Vehera and the bo tree that I visited a little while ago.
At the junction a body moved. It hung horizontally from a scaffold on a cart, with several hooks piercing its back and ropes attached to the hooks. The body belonged to an elderly man. He thus hung from the scaffolding over the length of the cart, and was being lightly rocked forward and backward by his band of pilgrims. His body was bare except for the soiled white cloth tied round his waist, gathered at the loins, pulled back and stuck in the cloth. His very dark face, unshaven for several days, was covered with tinnoru and in the middle of his forehead was a patch of sandalwood paste with a crimson kunkumam or vibhuti dot at the center. His tongue was pierced with a brass spike that projected out of his mouth in the shape of a nicely designed cobra-hood. He held his open right hand in a gesture of benediction towards those in front of him and hung on to a roped cloth suspended from a contraption above with his left hand.
This presentation of the body has been unmistakably Tamil Hindu. It is known as tukku kavadi or paravaik kavadi. Although, as Obeyesekere discusses, Sinhala Buddhists assimilated fire-walking, it was originally practiced in Kataragama by the Tamils," they have been reluctant to adopt body piercing and hook-hanging that Tamil Hindus consider as Supremely important acts of devotion and self-sacrifice. Thus hook-hangingor paravaik kavadi remained an aspect of distinctively Tamil body language of devotion. But
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not for long. In the 1980s, I witnessed a Kali devotee of Malay Islamic ethnic origin pull a cart with hooks attached to his back. On the cart, his daughter hung vertically from a scaffold with hooks attached to her back and shoulders.' At least in the Kandyan areas, several Sinhala Buddhist men have been using this body language to express devotion for the past few years. In 2004 I witnessed a Sinhala Buddhist man hang from hooks in Talatuoya near Kandy. In 2005, I saw ten Sinhala men hang from hooks at a Kali kovil in Kandy. All of the hook-hangers had received expert help from a Tamil Hindu. I predict that in the very near future Sinhala Buddhist performers will outnumber their Tamil Hindu counterparts in the same way the Sinhala fire-walkers outnumber the Tamil Hindu fire-walkers. This specific form of Tamil body image is fast becoming multi-cultural. In this activity, the ethnic markers are no longer the symbolic activity - floating body hung with hooks - itself but the languages spoken by the supporters and the outward marks of ethnicity discussed above. The floating body itself is becoming inert as a signifier of ethnicity.
What interests me in this Sinhala absorption of a Tamil cultural trait is the psychology involved in the act. My preliminary question is whether the two psychologies are the same. Do the Tamils and the Sinhalas practice hook-hanging to achieve the same ends? I am unable to answer this question as the unconscious goals of each practitioner may vary from all others and may originate from circumstances unique to his life history. On a conscious plane, this is a public act. No one, Sinhala or Tamil, considers hookhanging as abnormal. Despite the newness of this activity in the Sinhala culture, no one in the two contexts in which those men hung on hooks took their performance lightly. Their family members were serious and proud about what was going on.
However, I noticed a difference in the mood. The Tamil use of the body to express devotion is somber. It is filled with a melancholic and frantic devotion. The face of the hanging man was a portrait of tension. He was in a trance state and the few
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people that attended him, his band, gathered round him in an equally somber mood. Few other pilgrims also gathered as the hook-hanger, in his trance, divined their futures, prescribed medications for various illnesses, and prescribed rituals for alleviating evil influences from bad planetary combinations and unholy spirits.
The Sinhala hook-hangers were not in such a somber mood. Rather, they were animated by the spectacle they were creating. In the Talatuoya case that I researched in detail, the mood was light and more carnivalesque. The hook-hanger was not in a trance state - at least not visibly or behavorally. He had performed all the preparatory rituals (pevima) and observed all the abstinences and so on. Yet, there was no sense of a dark atonement. The procession moved on across the townlet of Talatuoya. Excited people followed the man hanging from the scaffold on a long-bed truck. Initially, a Tamil band provided the acoustical ambience for the hook-attaching and hanging rituals and until the procession left the town center. Thereafter Kandyan dancers and drummers took over and preceded the truck. It was a joyous celebration. The hanging man Smiled and swung himself hard to pose for pictures. Seriousness mixed with gaiety. There was no fortune reading or dissemination of supernatural help. He was the center of attraction and he enjoyed it. An individual closely related to him said that the hook-hanger, an unemployed young man, received social admiration and respect because of this act. Without it his community would consider him as yet another unemployed individual who depended on his family for his existence. However, once he performs this act the community perceives and receives him as someone blessed by the god of Kataragama. He engages in these social performances whenever the opportunity arises and, at least as I see it, the performances of hook-hanging recharges his social identity and renews his social respectability. His consciousness is directed towards the god for he has bhakti but also towards his social situation. It is partly an expression of bhakti and partly an acrobatic
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performance to entertain his community. Seriousness and entertainment combine to constitute the mood of his performance. I think that is where the Tamil and Sinhala ritualism in Kataragama are at variance. For the Sinhalas it is a celebration of gaiety. For the Tamils it is a gray atonement. The former is a celebration of an individual's capacity to do the extraordinary. The latter is an act of expiation. Soon this Sinhala alternative hookhanging will come to Kataragama in much the same way Sinhala style kavadi dancing and fire-walking invaded Kataragama and pushed the Tamil kavadi dancing and fire-walking to a side. It is a matter of time and money. I do not see any ethnic politics here. I only see a Sinhala absorption of a Tamil activity because it involves an extraordinary feat that gives the performer public recognition. The Sinhala hook-hangers are working class, jobless young men who, nevertheless, have the need for public recognition and admiration. The psychological causes of this need are what Obeyesekere has already examined in the contexts of Sinhala firewalkers and devotees with matted locks.' The public expression of this need by articulation through cultural symbols produces highly culture specific moods.
Regarding the embodied devotion/atonement/ craving for attention I met a man named Gunapala. Gunapala attended the needs of the Tamil Hindu hook-hanger that I spoke of. He is an expert in attaching hooks and he organizes the whole ritual for devotees for a fee. Tamil devotees come to Kataragama looking for him. During our initial conversation, Gunapala surprised me. How could a Sinhala man develop this expertise when only a very rare Sinhala person, and only during the past few years, practices hookhanging? It turned out that Gunapala, who speaks flawless Sinhala, is a Tamil Hindu. Kataragama community had adopted him and started to call him Gunapala. He reciprocated by adopting the Sinhala community and the name that the Sinhala people gave him. During the rest of the year, he makes a living by running a laundry - Gunapala Laundry - in Vallavaya, close to Hambantota. Here is
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a man with all the signs of a Tamil body and a Sinhala name, living like a Sinhala among the Sinhala people, performing specifically Tamil rituals concerning embodied Tamil religiosity.
The body images that still bear uniquely Tamil cultural markers are the sedilkavadi and angappiratadcanai. The former is the piercing of the skin with silver or stainless steel, even aluminum, miniature spears. The devotee may 'wear as many as a hundred such tiny spears along the arms and across the chest. Additionally, he may attach steel hooks to his back and pull a small cart. Only a rare non-Tamil would engage in this activity. The latter is rolling around the temple. This is harder than it sounds because the sand around the temple could be very hot. The females in their band follow them. They, too, worship the god by touching the ground around the temple with five parts of the body: head, two hands and the knees." These female devotees may kneel, place their hands on the ground before them, bend down and touch the ground with their foreheads. Even carrying the pots of fire is a certain presentation of the body. Sinhala devotees have not yet attempted any of these but in time, they might absorb these aspects of Tamil identity as well.
The issue here is whether adoption of the body images of one culture by another leads to a complete assimilation when the body languages of the two cultures are distinguishable. Under such circumstances, it is hard to imagine the results of the translation of the body image in one language into the language of the other. How much would be lost in translation, and what would be found in its place? The fact that the Sinhala devotees have borrowed much from the Tamil Hindus is obvious: from iconography to kavadi and fire-walking, they have borrowed Tamil Hindu body images. But they have altered and adjusted all these to suit their purposes, to fit into the existing cultural syntaxes, and found them meaningful not as Tamil Hindu activities but as properly Sinhala Buddhist activities. In Kataragama, the body is one of the loci of the communion between the deity and the devotee. It is also a locus of communion between the Sinhalas and the Tamils.
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The Mosque
Our next stop was the mosque, right across from the mada vidiya. We entered through the imposing dark green, bright pink and cream-colored gate. The first thing a visitor notices is the tomb/ shrine of Seyed Jabbar Ali Shah. The tomb is inside a rectangular structure with a roof. It is painted dark green and numerous strings of small green flags constituted a ceiling for the tomb.
As mentioned in Chapter Five, the legend has it that he came to Kataragama from Bukhara, Uzbekistan. He reached his destination overland, through Afghanistan, Lahore in Pakistan, Delhi and Lucknow in India, the South Indian peninsula, and probably Jaffna in Sri Lanka. The faithful believe that he settled down in the Sufi compound around 1845. He had discovered through his supernatural abilities no less than sixty graves of pious Muslims in this compound, and this area is sacred for that reason. There he stayed for the rest of his life, practicing asceticism as a pious Sufi Muslim. Seyed Jabbar Ali Shah is also known as Palkudi Bava as he, too, according to Kataragama Sufi hagiography, had lived on milk alone.' He died in 1872. The Sufi authorities in Kataragama cite Seyed Jabbar Ali Shah’s kinsman and successor Meer Seyed Ali Shah, who occupied the premises from 1910 to 1945, as their authority on the career of his ancestor.
It is unclear who occupied the premises in between. Meer Seyed is credited with organizing the premises as a mosque adequate for Sufi Islamic worship. The legal titles to the premises were established during the occupancy of Meer Seyed Ali Shah. His claim was founded not on inheritance but on the length of his undisturbed occupation for thirty-five years." Nonetheless, the faithful need no further evidence than his claim to establish inheritance. Meer Seyed died and was interned in Kataragama in 1945. His tomb is further to the north on the premises. It is a white structure.
Between the two tombs is a building called Masjidul Hilri. It
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is a prayer hall. To the right of the tomb of Seyed Jabbar Ali Shah is the flagstaff of the establishment. Every year the great green, silver, and white ornate flag is hoisted to mark the commencement of the Asala festival in Kataragama. All responsible persons in Kataragama, including the Basnayaka Nilame, the bhikkhus of the Kiri Vehera monastery and the Abhinavaramaya, the Swami in charge of the Teivayanaiamman kovil, and the kapuralas of the Maha Devale participate in the ritual.
This flag hoisting to commence Kataragama festivals is a recent invention for the Kataragama ritual calendar does not include it. As discussed before, Kataragama rituals begin with the harvesting of the kaps. The Asala rituals proceed without any involvement of the mosque as the Asala festival has nothing to do with Islam. The mosque, too, could function oblivious to the Buddhist and Hindu activities. But it is a happy invention that draws the Sufis into the ritual process and the festivities, and the Buddhist and Hindus into an Islamic function. And it is the only Islamic act performed in connection with the festival in Kataragama.
Slightly to the east of the flagstaff is the main mosque, the Takkiya, of the Sufi complex. In 1956, since the litigation after Meer Sayed Ali Shah's demise, the mosque was renamed Khizar Takkiya.' There are several sundry buildings and a couple of miraculous trees to the north of the Khizar Takkiya. The whole establishment belongs to a sect within Sufism known as the Refai
SeCt.
Hundreds of pilgrims belonging to all three main faiths in Kataragama had established camps within the compound. Many lay in the shade of the trees. Of all the sacred sites in Kataragama, this Sufi compound appeared to be the most multicultural as religionists of all faiths gathered there. The relatively few Buddhists and the Hindus who camp within the Muslim compound do not worship or pray there but respectfully visit the various sacred spots out of curiosity in much the same way the Occasional Christian visits the Kiri Vehera: respectful sight seeing like tourists. The Sufis
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do not visit any other religious establishment in Kataragama. The Buddhists rarely visit the Teivayanaiamman kovil, Valliamma devale, Siva, Ganesha, and Kali kovils. Some Hindus visit the Kiri Vehera. Not all Hindus and Buddhists visit the Sufi compound. But, similar to other religious establishments in Kataragama, it too is open to all pilgrims.
Of all these buildings, an unimpressive shed facing south with an arena before it is notable for an impressive ritual that distinguishes Sufi practices of Kataragama from Sunni mainstream practices. This ritual is known as refai ratheeb.
Refai Ratheeb
Body piercing as an astonishing activity finds Sufi Islamic expression in the refai ratheeb. The ritual is not specific to Kataragama as it is also performed in Daftar Jailani in Balangoda in the Sabaragamuwa district. Nonetheless, its expression is highly dramatic in Kataragama.
During the festive season, the significant members of the Sufi community gather in Kataragama. The contemporary Sufi masters or Shaiks perform a celebratory ritual visiting the tombs of Sayed Jabbar Ali Shah and Meer Sayed Ali Shah, singing devotional songs made of Tamil, Urdu and Arabic linguistic elements to the beat of drums played by all the shayiks and the pakirs." Then they come to the shed, sit in the special stage in it, and continue to sing.
They sit around a variety of steel spikes and other piercing and cutting instruments laid on the ground on a green rectangular cloth. One particular spike stands out. It is about thirtee centimeters long. At one end is a hollow ball that if seen laterally, has an oblong outline. A light chain, roughly twenty centimeters long and made of middle gauge steel wire with links that are about 2 centimeter wide and 34 centimeter long, dangles from the center of this ball. The spike is attached to the opposite side of the ball. It is roughly half a centimeter in diameter where it joins the ball and ten centimeters long, rising rapidly to form the spike. This instrument is known as dabur.
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During the singing, a Sufi priest, known as pakir, picks a dabur and begins to dance in the arena, now surrounded by a crowd about five deep. The crowd includes Muslims and some Hindus and Buddhists. The pakir whirls about and performs various dance movements. Then he comes to the shayiks, the exalted pakirs who are sitting at the middle of the semi-circle of singing and tambourineplaying pakirs, and presents the dabur in his hands to the shayiks. The shayiks, from the most exalted among them to the lesser authorities, bless the dabu by rubbing a little saliva on the spike. The saliva has a mysterious potency to relieve pain. The shayiks have acquired this power by performing the requisite penance in the way the great masters or the auliyas have shown. The dancing pakir then returns to the arena while the tempo of the drumming and singing rises, dances a round and, facing the singing pakirs, drives the dabur into his scalp. The spike is driven at a point slightly above his hairline and in line with his nose, until the spike is firmly placed and able to dangle from the scalp, with the chain dangling from it, swaying in every direction. He then dances a round or two, with his arms stretched in a gesture to display that the dabur dangles on its own without his support. The idea is to display his mysterious power and courage to drive the dabur into the scalp and hold it in this manner, dangling from his, as it were, forehead, with the chain dangling from the spike and whirling, to the amazement of the onlookers who hiss a great deal. There is no bleeding either, illustrating the mysterious potency of the saliva of the shayiks. As an ensemble of expressions, they signify the power of Allah and his approval of the ritual, the Sufi creed, the dancing pakir, his devotion and purity, and his performance. Thereafter, the devotees have skewers driven through their skins to fulfill vows. For the onlookers, it is a miracle that some men have such courage. It is miraculous that the driving and dangling of the spike do not appear to cause bleeding or pain as the dancers smile ecstatically.' And such is the power and the benevolence of the only God. Such are the powers of his servants, the pakirs and the shayiks - the
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spiritual descendants of the auliyas, who themselves were descendants of the great khidr or kizar, one of the servants of Allah, the green man, the man who teaches by means of mysteries, puzzles and enigmas.
And the servants of Allah use their bodies in a manner comparable to the Tamil Hindu uses that we saw a little earlier. One who is in the service of God does not value his body. Rejection of the body is an aspect of body language that speaks mutely of total immersion of the devotees self in communion with the deity. The immersion and the resultant rejection are signified through the mutilation of the body. Attaching spikes to the head, sending skewers through the arms, slashing body parts to spill blood are all aspects of the language of communion with God in Sufi Islam.
The Sufi practice, however, is different from the Tamil Hindu practice. The latter mutuliates the body and sanctifies it. The hookhanger's body becomes a temple for the god. The devotees who stand around him touch the hanging body in the same way they touch other sacred objects so that some sacredness rubs off on them. The Sufis, by contrast, only mutiliate the body without sacrelizing it only to express their dedication to the One God. Theologically, they can never sanctify their bodies as that amounts to heresy. And the Sufis differ from their fellow Sunnis and Shias as they believe, as monists, God is within the individual, not inside the body, but in the spirit.
Thus, the language of the body in the two traditions arise from two different orientations of consciousness although both involve bhakti as the motivating agency to employ this form of body language to express devotion. The Hindu body language sanctifies the body while it is being sacrificed and used to express devotion, to communicate with the god within and the community without. The Sufi Islamic body language does not sanctify the body. For them, the body is only an instrument, a medium through which the devotee communicates with the God within and the community without.
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We left the compound. Right outside the gate two boys, undoubtedly brothers, aged six or seven smiled with us gaily. They both were shaven headed. Traces of tinnoru on their foreheads indicated that they were Tamil Hindus. They both wore identical clothes: miniature camouflage suits with miniature American flags on the right and labels boldly stating U. S. Army on the left, a popular outfit for children of this age. Both wore several rudraksha bead strings round their necks. Each had a small toy drum with the barrel of the drum decorated with black, blue and red bands. They beat those drums, giggled and danced around, and created a ridiculous scene just to entertain themselves.
Valliamma Devale
Many Hindu women sat in the yard of the Valliammankovil. Each had a shallow clay pot filled with rice flour (tinnai). The flour was compacted and leveled. At the center of the pot were three peeled bananas arranged in a triangle. The triangle was filled with honey. Once the flour absorbs the honey they lit it. The ensemble forms a beautiful lamp with multiple significations. This is a specifically Tamil Hindu women's ritual. I have never seen any Sinhala Buddhist women perform it. Hindu women perform the ritual to make various vows. Some ask for fertility. Interestingly, the banana triangle that constitutes the lamp is also a well-known Hindu symbol of female genitalia. Once the lamp is lit, they continue to feed it with honey. I have seen young boys help their older female relatives keep the flame although I have never seen an older man, an adult, participating in the ritual. Once the ritual is over the devotees pile up the bananas on a stone pillar, about four feet tall, planted in the yard like a black granite lingam, near the vasanamedhi. This pillar is known in Sinhala as the ata bandina kanuva (the pillar on which the elephant is tied during the procession in which the god's insignia are carried into the goddesses temple) or the kmba kanuva (rope-pillar). My inquiries revealed that neither Hindus nor Buddhists give any particular religious
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meaning to this pillar. Nonetheless, I found the piling of the bananas that constituted the triangular lamp on this lingam-like object rather curious. The devotees carry the honey-caked rice flour back to their villages and distribute it among the family members and neighbors.
Sinhala Buddhists, except the hardcore devotees such as the Samis and maniyos, hardly visit the Valliammankovil. Nonetheless, the administration of the kovil is under the Basnayaka Nilame, and a Sinhala Buddhist kapurala officiates over the rituals. I find this administration rather unusual because, as we found earlier, Valliamma is generically a Tamil goddess who enters the Skanda cult from the pre-Hindu Tamil pantheon. We also found that Muruga/Valliamma belief structures were introduced to Kataragama around sixteenth century at the earliest but became an integral part of the Sinhala beliefs about Kataragama Deiyo. Even there, the average Sinhala devotee-I should say the majority of the Sinhala devotees - has only a vague idea about Valliamma, as the Vadda consort of Kataragama Deiyo whom also they know only in blurry outlines. But the temple of Valliamma, a Tamil cult center in which only a rare Sinhala Buddhist participates, comes under the authority of the Sinhala Buddhists. Curiously, the Teivayanaiamman kovil, introduced probably concurrently or shortly afterwards, is under the control of north Indian Brahmans. Although the Sinhalas knew, at least from fourteenth century, about Skanda or Mahasena, they had no notions of a Devasena of the Mahabharata. They had acquired these notions much later and that, too, from Tamil Hindus. Today, their original theology of Kataragama Deiyo is completely forgotten and what they know about him now is based on the Tamil Kantha Puranam which is about Muruga and Valli. They have adopted the Tamil Vellala side of the Kantha Puranam - about Kandasamy, but not Skanda/ Kartikeya of the Sanskrit Puranas or Skanda/Muruga of the Kantha Puranam.
To put it succinctly, the Sinhala Buddhists have taken charge of the ritual proceedings and premises of the Muruga cult, even
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when they do not propitiate Valli, but not of the temple of Sanskritic Devasena whom some twentieth century Sinhala Buddhist writers claim is the original wife of the god of Kataragama. They have no claims on the temple of Skanda's legally married' wife - the Teivaiyanaiamman kovil.
Interestingly, Tamil Hindus introduced the Teivaiyanaiamman kovil and the notions of Teivayanaiamman as a goddess, the wife of Skanda, and her immigration to Sri Lanka. Yet they have no claims on this kovil or its satellite temples - the Muthulingaswami Siva kovil, and the Gana Devale right by the Maha Devale. All these, and the kovils at Sella Kataragama, come under Brahmanical authority. Tamil kurukkals function as priests in these temples, and influential Tamils are deeply involved in the management of the Teivayanaiamman kovil premises. But, they too have no legal claims to any of these places.
The reason for this is in the very nature of origins of these institutions and the pre-colonial legal procedures for acquisition of real estate. As in the case of the mosque, or any other organization that hoped to exist on a long-term basis, the Occupation of land was founded not on a right but on a privilege. The Teivayanaiamman kovil, as its sthalapurana has it, came up sui generis, after the relocation of Muruga and Valli in Kataragama, as a trope to that story, reviving the cultural memories of the Sanskrit past of the god, the way the Sanskritic Tamils remembered or wanted to remember it. It was not formally established during the Kandyan kingdom, but existed with only informal courtly patronage. The court allowed the grafting of Muruga cult activities onto the existing ritual procedures of Kataragama but within the traditional pre-Nayakkar legal frameworks that the Nayakkar kings never changed. Accordingly, the kovil was allowed to exist but was not given any land grants. Land grants were made only to formally established temples. As discussed above, titles to the premises of the Teivayanaiamman kovil and its satellite temples were negotiated by the British colonial government in the nineteenth century.
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Nonetheless, although the Teivayanaiamman temple existed only as a trope to the main themes in Kataragama that revolved around Kataragama Deiyo and Valliamma, and the ritual proceedings of the latter institution were grafted onto the ritual proceedings of the Maha Devale, Skanda gets his meals only from Teivayanaiamman's house, everyday, from her kitchen called the Madapalli that we found on the premises. They do not visit each other. But murutan, the food of the god, is cooked in and carried from her kitchen three times a day. That is a part of the grave daily duties of the Sinhala kapuralas. Yet, this kovil is only marginally connected to the Asala ritual processes in Kataragama.
The Valliamman kovil faces the Maha devale. The devale itself is a simple rectangular building with two compartments: an outer area where the devotees gather and the pujas are held, and the inner chamber that plays a crucial role in the perehara (procession). The entrance to this chamber is covered with a cloth curtain with Valliamma's image. She appears as a young woman of blue-gray complexion, indicating her Vadda background. She holds a lotus in her right hand. Her clothes are not sumptuous as those of Teivayanaiamman as she is neither a real goddess nor a real human. A deer on her right, reminiscent of her earthly mother, adoringly gazes at her.
Muthulingaswami Kovil
To the south of the Valliamma devale and facing south is the Muthulingaswami kovil. Prior to the modernization of Kataragama, the road from the old bridge fell between these two kovils. Legend and administration connect this institution with the Teivayanaiammankovil. Tamil Hindus believe that Kalyanagiri Bava whom we encountered earlier in connection with the Teivayanaiamman kovil died in Kataragama sometime in the nineteenth century. He was buried where the Muthulingaswami temple stands today. Over the centuries, Tamil Hindu devotees developed a sthala purana for the kovil. Accordingly, some
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devotees discovered a pearl (muthu in Pali, Sanskrit, Sinhala and Tamil) image in the form of a Sivalingam on the burial site. Because of the miracle of the emergence of the pearly lingam, the devotees built a temple on site and called it the Muthulingaswami kovil. The kovil is owned and operated by the Teivayanaiamman kovil trust. We bowed to Siva:
Nanalankara diptan sphathikamanibhavan parvatishan bhajami
Ruminations
I returned to the hotel. On the way, Rajan remarked that the Tamil Hindus made various parityaga, Sacrifices, that the Sinhala Buddhists never made. The Sinhala people just come, have fun, go to the Maha Devale with a puja that they pick up from the bazaar, give it to the kapurala, and return. Their focus is on the trip itself and Kataragama is one among many such convenient destinations. Undoubtedly, many Sinhala pilgrims come with serious intent, following all the rules of the pilgrimage. But the majority seems to take the pilgrimage lightly. As a descendant of a kapu lineage, Raja disapproved of such conduct.
His remarks reminded me of what several police officers told me the previous year. I met them when I climbed the Vadahiti Kanda with a few companions. The majority of the pilgrims there were Tamil Hindus. An officer said most Sinhala pilgrims do not even try to visit the Vadahiti Kanda because they are too lazy and not as involved in their pilgrimage as the Tamils are. Another said there is power in the way Tamils visit the place. They go through various hardships to get here. They bear all that trouble for the sake of the god. Therefore, their pilgrimage has an uhas: power. The god takes their vows seriously. A third officer observed that the Sinhala Buddhists climb the Sri Pada. So it could not be laziness alone. They even try to make that climb a frivolous trip by singing baila on the way. So, it was a question of frivolousness rather than laziness. The first officer agreed. So it is not just laziness. But, still,
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they do not climb the Vadahiti Kanda even frivolously! The third officer said that the Sinhala pilgrims do not think about Vadahiti Kanda when they come to Kataragama. They know it is here but they do not think that they should visit it. Only the serious devotees among them come.
That took me back to what Velupillai said. The god is kindly disposed towards the Sinhala people. He does not expect them to suffer because they helped him and showed him hospitality. Muruga does not mind if the Sinhala people have fun in Kataragama. But he is angry with the Tamils because they were rude to him. He demands that the Tamils prove the genuineness of their devotion by publicly displaying it. Tamils must walk on fire, pierce their bodies, hang from hooks and roll in the ground. They must humiliate themselves before the god and pay for their arrogance. However, Sinhala people have no idea about such an injunction. As the devotees of the god, they see no distinction between them and the Tamil devotees. When they do, they see Tamils as better pilgrims.
Velupillai is quite right. Sinhala people do not feel guilty about merry making during their pilgrimage. They practice kavadi dancing to fulfill vows while entertaining themselves. Tamils carry the burden of their ancestors' arrogance. But he is not quite right when he says Tamils humiliate themselves. The public humiliation is a high caste middle class problem. The low caste and destitute Tamils who comprise the vast majority of the practitioners of these religious acts have no sense of public humiliation as they are born into such humiliation and putting up with humiliation is an inalienable aspect of their social existence, their habitus. And he is quite wrong when he asserts that Tamils only humiliate themselves. The practitioners' audience includes other Tamils and practically all the Sinhalas around who, awestruck by their pious acts, are very respectful towards them as they engage in their devotional self-mortification. The Sinhala devotees believe, as the policemen said, that their Tamil counterparts are more zealous about their devotion and practice their religion better with sincerity, and their
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practices are more effective. Here, the penniless and the downtrodden find their moments of glory. The voiceless discover speech.
On the other hand, the Tamil talk about the god being kindly disposed towards the Sinhalas is their guilt and justification of Sinhala frivolity. Tamils visit Kataragama feeling guilty, again, an aspect of their habitus. Sinhalas visit Kataragama to join the god in his merrymaking. This is the Sinhala pilgrimage habitus. During the festive season, the Sinhala cultists join the Tamil cultists in their celebration of the god's nuptials and enthusiastically and vicariously participate in it. We shall return to this point later.
August 7th-10th 2003 Ethnic Distribution
I met Rajan at his place in the morning. I decided to explore the scene on the south bank of the river. We walked about in the town. Most pilgrims in the bazaar were Sinhala Buddhists. They arrive by car, van, or bus in groups of all sizes. They stayed in the many visrama Salavas established by various state and private institutions. The well-to-do stayed in hotels and guesthouses.
The ethnic concentrations on the two banks of the river caught my attention. Most Tamils stayed on the north bank and most Sinhalas stayed on the south bank. Relatively few Tamils - middle class people, usually from urban places - stayed on the South bank, particularly in the bazaar and beyond. However, Tamils did mingle with the Sinhalas on the south bank, closer to the river. Some Tamils with business interests had established many different kinds of makeshift shops ranging from barber Salons to bead necklace stalls, tinnoru stands, and stalls selling clay pots, and even medicinal oils. The trading was brisk but the Tamil pilgrim concentration was thin in a manner somewhat similar to the thin Sinhala concentration on the north bank.
Thus, the social organization of pilgrims is spatially roughly bifurcated. This may be due to many reasons. As Rajan once remarked, the Sinhala pilgrims go to the north bank only to make
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offerings and return to the south bank and then go home on the same day, if possible, because they cannot afford to stay longer or because they would rather visit more places than just Kataragama. By contrast, Tamils come to spend time in Kataragama.
During their brief stay, Sinhalas spend what little money they brought in the bazaar. After the puja, the Sinhala pilgrims shop for various souvenirs. They buy bead necklaces, sweets that are in great variety and abundance, posters of various gods, aluminum and stainless steel pots and pans, brass objects and whatever that catches their attention and is affordable. The children appear to be the best shoppers as most of the merchandise is to catch their attention. The Sinhalas patronize the eateries and grocery shops as well. But the vast majority of Tamil pilgrims conserve their money and spend it only on the items essential for their religious practices. On the other hand, they do not have surplus cash to spend on non-essentials displayed in the bazaar. I spoke to several shop owners about the market behavior of the pilgrims. They were all Sinhala Buddhist merchants. They exhibited no prejudices towards the Tamils. In fact, they were unanimous that all pilgrims are alike for they come to worship the god and the god treats them alike - this, despite the Tamil notion that Muruga wants the Tamils to suffer, an idea unknown to the Sinhala pilgrims who see Tamil asceticism as a mark of their deeper and more sincere religiosity. However, the same merchants said that the Tamils, particularly the pada yatra pilgrims, hardly spend money in the bazaar: not even on hoppers and bananas. Their sales depend on Sinhala and Muslim pilgrims because they spend money and COSle lC)e.
Further to not having or reluctant to part with money there is another side To there preference to stay close to the religious establishments. They need not spend their money on food as they get their food from the Teivayanaiamman kovil and the Saivite madam. The former appears to be their favourite because it is also closer to the other kovils and the zone of religious action. Staying close to the goddess' kovil ensures food. This food has a sacred
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quality as it comes from the kovil. They do cook some of their meals with the foodstuffs that they bring with them. But the generosity of the kovil is an economic blessing.
The Sinhala pilgrims, by contrast, do not like to eat in the madamas and kovils. Perhaps they feel culturally out of place inside specifically Tamil Hindu establishments - as noted earlier, very few Sinhala pilgrims visit the kovils of Ganesha, Teivayanaiam man, Palani Andavar, Valliamma and Muthulingaswami - or they, particularly the rural Sinhalas, are uncomfortable eating food other than Sinhala food. They also do not see a religious value in the food distributed by the kovil as they do not worship the deity concerned. They used to bring their own foodstuffs and cook their meals before the modernization of Kataragama. Then there were very few eateries, and hardly any fast food. But today, with the abundance of eateries and packaged food there is no need to cook unless the pilgrims are poor or refuse to eat in the eateries or to eat packaged food cooked by unknown people because of social prejudice.
I investigated whether the ethnic bifurcation is due to ethnic prejudice. I found this not to be the case as some Sinhala bands did stay amidst Tamil bands and appeared to be contented. As during the bathing ritual, there is no physical separation because of ethnic prejudice, although there is a definite tendency for bands of the same ethnic identity to gather. Thus, a complex of religious, social, and economic reasons, rather than ethno-political reasons alone, seems to be in the background of this separation. This is not to eliminate ethnic sensibilities and hostilities but to say that ethnic hostility is not the only or even the main reason why ethnic clustering occurs.
I found the makeshift business enterprises on the south bank sociologically significant. Except for the kavadishops and a couple of ice cream stands, the stalls catered to the needs of the Hindus. Here I found instances where people worked together and purchased each other's services without any ethnic consciousness. Let me begin with stalls where the business had an ethno-religious
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focus.
The most prominent were the tinnoru stalls. These catered exclusively to Tamil Hindus and Sinhala Samis and manios as no one else used tinnoru. The tinnoru dealers obtain the rock from the hills, grind it into a fine powder and market it. Barrels of tinnoru from hundreds of sacs brought to the riverbank were on display and there was no need to advertise to attract buyers: they just came because they simply must. The tinnoru stalls served all needs of gini kavadi performers. They had piles of brand new clay pots, camphor, bundles of peacock plumes, mounds of peanuts, sacks and piles of margosa twigs. Young women sat on plastic chairs awaiting clients. There were about fifteen such open-air stalls lining the south bank.
A couple of barbershops were another ethnic specialty. These were small enclosures made of Sticks, corrugated tin roofing, and walls made of painted icons of Muruga obtained from the Maha Devale. They carried large signboards: one stating it was Murugan Salon and the other Kataragama Salon, in Sinhala and Tamil, Tamil above Sinhala indicating for whom they were meant. I was surprised that there was any Sinhala at all as the stalls were owned by Tamils and not a single Sinhala person required their service as tonsure is not a Sinhala way of making or fulfilling vows. In the open verandahs, men and women sat in plastic chairs or stood around, some with children, for their turn. Two barbers, one in each, did the one thing that their clients demanded - shaving heads. Just outside each shop, there was a generous supply of tinnoru, vibhuti and sandalwood paste on a table supplied by a prominent national bank.
The only other place that seemed to attract only the Tamils was the open-air stall of the medicinal oil vendors. Three men sat cross-legged on a plastic sheet spread on the ground. Before each of them, there was a large aluminum container with handles. Each contained a dark amber pungent oil, in an awesome and mind boggling mixture of a wide variety of roots, barks, seeds, pinecones,
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and leaves. Each seemed to contain a special kind of oil. One was good for snakebites, another for cuts, and the third for burns. Two pieces of wire each with a ball of cloth soaked in oil and lit up stood in two of the vats like two torches. There was a small gold colored plastic statue of Durga, in full regalia and bearing many weapons in six of her hands and the two front hands free with the right hand open in abhaya (fear not) mudra, sitting on her tiger, placed on the substances in the middle vat. A few small plastic vials containing the oil lay around her. At both ends of this display, there were plastic bottles of various shapes containing the oils arranged on a large aluminum tray. Many Tamils and Muslims stood before this exhibition and stared at the awesome looking materials in the vats, appearing to be contemplating purchases. One could by the oils by the quart or in smaller amounts. The Sinhala pilgrims did not show any interest in this merchandize, at least not when I was there.
Then there were bead sellers and, near the old bridge at the east end of the south bank, a stall full of inexpensive but wildly colorful and exciting toys. Children constantly gathered around it and gawked endlessly. The prospective clients were mostly Tamil but there were Muslims and Sinhalas also. They stood staring at those toys, picking their noses, and spinning on their heels drawing circles in the sand with their big toes, probably making important decisions. The display was so bold and Screaming for attention, those who merely walked by were drawn to it. This was the second multi-ethnic attraction so far on the south bank.
Not too far from this stall but further away from the river bank and between the bridges my friend Chulasena, Rajan's distant cousin and a long time resident of Kataragama who was once the representative of Kataragama in the Regional Council but now out of work, operated his eatery. It was made of sticks and corrugated metal and green, pink and Orange plastic sheets, and furnished with plastic tables and chairs, all purple. He swept aside with his feet some cigarette and beedi butts on the sandy floor and
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offered me a seat. I ordered a bottle of soda and settled in one of those purple plastic chairs to watch the proceedings. Chulasena walked about looking authoritative, probably feeling like the CEO of a major enterprise, smiling with everybody, blending the arrogance of ownership and authority with charm. He probably picked up those mannerisms when he was a politician. Chulasena's wife, daughter, and two sons were busy making the eats - hoppers (Sinhala: appa; Tamil: appam), Stringhoppers (Sinhala: indiappa; Tamil: indiappam), pittu, kurakkan halapa, bananas, Sambols, and gravies to go with these items, and modern fastfood like rolls, cutlets and seenisambol buns. There seemed to be no end to supplying these as the younger Tamils, Sinhalas and Muslims, even stray foreigners wandered in and devoured everything in sight. The rattle of the tea-makers spoon stirring Sugar into black tea in an aluminum jug, Chulasena's radio, the loudspeakers blaring popular Songs, and the chatter in the eatery created a particularly animated atmosphere that the colorful decor accentuated. Everybody needs a break from such activity in such an environment, even if he merely watches it.
We walked towards the west end of the south bank where the kavadi shops were. A footpath connected the shops with the main path to the new bridge and there was a steady stream of Sinhala and Tamil but mostly Tamil pedestrian traffic to and from these shops. On the way, many vendors marketed a variety of ritual objects from miniature cutouts of houses, automobiles, human figures and the like to camphor pills and tinnoru.
There were two kavadishops. Apparently, both were owned by Sinhala Buddhists. The Dutugamunu Kavadi Sangamaya and Rantaru Bhakti Kavadi displayed their signboards in bold Sinhala letters, and, to a side in smaller letters, partially covered by banana leaves and margosa leaves, it also said Tutukemunu Kavadi in Tamil. The Rantaru Bhakti Kavadi used both languages - smaller Tamil line on top said Om Sri Murugan Kavadi. A bolder Sinhala line said Rantaru Bhakti Kavadi. At the bottom the same was given in English. A separate Om Sri Murugan Kavadi sign was written only
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in Tamil. It almost spelled out the government language policy - Sinhala with reasonable use of Tamil It, in fact, signified the relative significance of the languages in business terms. There was more demand from the Sinhalas than from the Tamils. There was a greater influx of Sinhala day pilgrims, who would perform kavadi dancing to fulfill vows and quickly depart. However, the more elaborate performances were made by the Tamil devotees whose kavadi dancing included body piercing and hook hanging as well. Therefore, all other notices were exclusively in Tamil. The Sinhala batimattu (bhakti devotees) used the ordinary kavadi for a smaller sum than the Tamil devotees who played much larger amounts to purchase the 'works.’
The kavadi shops were constructed in much the same way the barber salons were made - with sticks and large painted icons of the deities — Muruga and Kali — discarded from the temples. The yard of the shop was surrounded by kavadis, profusely decorated with peacock feathers, arranged in a semicircle. To the left there was a large picture of Kali. There were many tables of cheap pujavattis placed in the shallow river, perhaps to prompt a last minute purchase.
The scene here was disappointing. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a preponderance of Tamil Hindu kavadi shops as many more Hindu pilgrims from all different parts of the country came to Kataragama considering it as, whatever their claims to the place were, the main Muruga ritual center in the country. At that time, although the fire-walking was taken over by the Sinhala devotees, the majority of the kavadi performers were Hindus and the Buddhists had not yet even conceived of hook-hanging. Even after the riots in 1958, and the flight of the majority of the Tamils residents in Kataragama, the spirit of Kataragama festivities attracted Tamil Hindu devotees. The riots in 1983 and the ongoing separatist war had changed all that. Although, as discussed in the previous chapter, there was not much rioting in Kataragama, on a national level, the 1983 riots made a clear division, for, they were connected with the larger macro-political processes set in motion from the
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1920s and culminated in the 1970s when the Tamils in the north and the east began to demand a separate State. This demand precipitated large-scale civil disobedience movements and antigovernment terrorism in the north that led to an all out war between the various Tamil political bodies and the government of Sri Lanka. The Tamil pilgrims from the north and the east abandoned pilgrimages to Kataragama as such were becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous under the emergent political, security, and military conditions. Consequently, the kavadi performances in Kataragama lost most of its Tamil component as Tamil Hindus relocated their Muruga cult activities in Nallur and various other agama temples in the north and the east. Concurrently, perhaps under the influence of the emergent political regime in the north and the east, the agama temples were thrown open to all. Thus the Kandasami temples, hitherto reserved for the Vellalas, became Muruga temples as well, attracted the low caste Tamil devotees. The annual ceremonials at these temples, as seen on the national television, are elaborate with much Tamil Hindu ritual activity including kavadi dancing, hook hanging and body piercing. The kavadi business in Kataragama became restricted to the few Sinhala entrepreneurs.
The disappearance of Tamil kavadi shops is evident in the absence of Tamilkavadi music and dancing. As Obeyesekere stated, the urban Tamils had adopted the Sinhala style sensuous kavadi dancing to simpler rhythmic patterns of music derived from baila and film music. Traditional Tamil kavadi music has restrained melodies and rhythms meant for restrained body movements. The musical instruments used were madaswaram - a long woodwind instrument with a sharp timbre, and percussion instruments such as mrdangam, tavil drums, and small flat tambourine-like drums called kanjira. The musicians receive long and arduous training to play every one of these instruments. All this has disappeared from Kataragama festivities. Instead, the dance bands employ vertically held flat drums and a pair of cymbals as percussion instruments
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with the token presence of a tavil drum, and trumpets and clarinets as wind instruments - highly suitable for creating an animated and sensuous atmosphere appropriate for sensuous dancing.
Ientered one of the kavadishops and interviewed the manager and the musicians. The latter are a mixture of plantation Tamils and urban Sinhala musicians. These bands also play to entertain crowds at cricket matches. I asked whether there was a nadaswaram player. A man came forward and claimed he was a nadaswaram artist. I asked to see his instrument. He cheerfully went inside and brought out a clarinet. "Is this a nadaswaram?” I asked. "This is a madaswaram,” he said. "Let us hear it,” I suggested. He promptly played a tune from a Hindi film. "Is that traditional nadaswaram music?” I asked. "Yes it is!” he insisted. Then the band decided to display how it is employed. All of a sudden, the band began to play with me standing at the center. With the cymbals crashing and the trumpet, the clarinet and the drums sounding I felt the physical presence of the sound waves. I quickly stepped aside. Several more drum rolls and all was quiet. I asked our "nadaswaram artist” where he was from. He was from a tea plantation near Matale. This turned out to be his profession. The rest of the band was a mixture of Tamil and Sinhala musicians from various towns. They work mostly in Colombo.
Many Tamil pilgrims approached the larger Dutugamunu Kavadi Sangamaya. I had no doubts that they all were working class people. One woman about thirty years old dressed in a frilly blouse and a blue skirt with two children aged about seven dressed in red, the boy with a shaven head and the girl of equal size and age, and appearing to be twins, came in. The children were given baby-kavadis. No sooner than the kavadis were placed on their shoulders the woman started to sway, shake her head, and enter into a trance. A man about her age dressed in shirt and sarong, presumably her husband or brother, appeared by her. As she swayed and shook her head, the band exploded into a tune and the woman started to dart across the yard and dance as the two children Stared
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at her. They seemed scared of their mother's transformation. Then a man from the kavadishop, apparently an expert in these matters, came forward, and rubbed some tinnoru on her forehead and muttered what appeared to be some mantras to control her trance. She calmed down. They negotiated with the kavadi shop. Then another group of five women, three elderly and two in their late twenties, came in with a young man and went to the large Kali picture. The expert went and received them. They talked for a while. He arranged what they wanted: agini kavadi. While this was going on another group of three women and a man and three boys came and kept ogling at the scene for a while. The two older boys had shaven heads. The third, a toddler, bare bodied and wearing yellow pajamas, was all smiles. He had a big patch of tinnoru on his forehead. He started to toddle around with that Smile on his face and soon started to emulate a musician who was moving his feet as he played a trumpet. Everybody was utterly charmed by this perhaps the country's finest bowlegged dancer.
The three groups made a cost-sharing deal with the Dutugamunu Kavadi Sangamaya and took off with the band. The entranced mother and her two kids, the two shaven headed boys, the bowlegged toddler, and two other women performed kavadi dancing. Two women from the second group carried clay pots filled with tinnoru with a pile of camphor pills burning at the center. Their elderly kindred carried bottles of oil, bundles of joss Sticks, and camphor pills as a support group. Initially they danced a round in the yard of the shop and the band led them towards the bridge.
We followed them, crossed the river, and stepped into the atul vidiya. They danced their way through the crowd that graciously let them pass. After a round at the Abinavaramaya temple, they moved ahead through the arch into the Maha Devale compound. We left their company and remained in the angane, feeling pangs of hunger. We had not eaten anything all day. And the Teivayanaiamman kovil never looked more inviting.
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We went to the office and expressed our desire to participate in the almsgiving as recipients. The officials were eager to facilitate our participation. Mr. Visvanathan, an official of the temple committee, volunteered to show me around. We walked passed the line of devotees waiting to eat lunch into the backyard of the temple. The chief cook, a bare bodied very dark young man in a Sarong, was stirring a mammoth quantity of rice in a very large aluminum container on a massive fireplace. There were two other pit fireplaces going full blast. On one, a humongous quantity of chickpea curry was frothing in a massive container. Stirring these quantities required a great deal of physical strength. Beads of perspiration continually emerged on the cook's face as he worked near those fires in the sweltering heat of the sun. Many sacs of rice and flour and piles of firewood were lying everywhere. Theivayanaiamman's backyard is a very busy and cluttered space during the festive season. Visvanathan led us into the storage area. Arranged along the wall was an array of vast vats full of various Curries - brinjal, dahl, Cowpea, chickpea, pumpkin, pappadam, and a separate vat of rasam - the Tamil spicey-hot and clear soup. Next to these vats was a micro-Himalaya of cooked rice piled up on palm-leaf mats. Along the opposite wall, barrels of oil, sacks of Sugar and rice, and many cane baskets loaded with onions were lined up. On the other side of this storeroom were huge mounds of cabbage, brinjals, cucumbers, leeks, snake gourds, potatoes, and ash plantains. Nothing Surprising here, for Teivayanaiamman is a wealthy lady, being the wife of Skanda and cousin of Indra. Her kitchen is very well stocked.
We were led out of the kitchen into a small hall where we saw several large blue plastic buckets full of rice and various other curries and pappadam. Several people were sitting on mats along the walls. Then we walked into another long hall where people sat in six long rows, two along the walls and two more rows where people sat back to back leaving three isles like in an airplane. The central isle split the hall. At the far end on the wall was a beautiful
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painted icon of Teivayanaiamman. She was in full regalia, standing by her cheerful white elephant that held a red lotus in its trunk. Her hands were held in the mudras of Skanda - abhaya and varada. The smile on her face was gracious. Her elephant also was decorated with numerous jewelry. Teivayanaiamman has just descended taking the steps from her golden abode in the snowy peaks, presumably of the Himalayas. The picture created an altogether pleasant feeling of being graciously and happily welcomed. Many devotees were bustling around the icon making pujas. We too went there and bowed to the goddess.
At the other end of the hall was an equally beautiful icon of Ganesha, undoubtedly from the brushes of the artist who painted the picture of Teivayanaiamman. He sat in a grand throne in a grand chamber with pink curtains and a floor with blue tiles. At the bottom of the picture was an address written in Sinhala and the signature of the Sinhala artist who painted it. I bowed to Ganesha for the grand hospitality showered on me wherever I go.
I was asked to sit by the icon, on its right. On his left, along the wall was a four foot high pile of banana leaves. At the corner, a bhikkhuni sat cross-legged, her umbrella leaning on the banana leaves. She was offered lunch in an enamel plate, a special consideration. We had banana leaves placed before us. People were looking at me. I raised my clasped hands to salute them. They raised theirs. A guru like elderly man with a long beard and many rudraksha bead necklaces raised a pearl-white conch in his right hand and a stainless steel miniature vel in his left hand to acknowledge my salutation. Soon several young men carrying those blue buckets - rice followed by the curries - served all in a very methodical manner. I had a pile of white rice, brinjal curry, Sambar - Spiced mixed vegetable curry - and some pappadam on my banana leaf. Rajan, sitting next to me, had identical food. Before we knew it, the food on our banana leaves was gone. It was a simple delicious meal. People got up as soon as they finished eating and went to a washbasin. We followed them. We thanked out hosts, the officials
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of the kovil, and left. The line of people had grown longer. We talked to each other about the amazing generosity of the devotees of Teivayanaiamman.
Back in the angane, we noticed a group of excited people in the middle, standing in a ring, as if a special performance was going on. We rushed there. There was a drama unfolding with three characters, two men and a woman. One man was a policeman. The other man was a Tamil man. I could not tell whether he was an independent pilgrim or a member of the Harrigan group. The woman was also a Tamil. The policeman was Sinhala. He held a plastic bag in his hand. The Tamil man accused the woman of drinking kasippu, a Sri Lankan illicit spirit. The policeman confiscated the evidence - the empty plastic bag. All this has gone on before we arrived. I could get only this piece of the trialogue:
Man to the Policeman: (Pointing to the woman) "I saw her
drinking kasippu..”
Policeman to the woman: (Speaking threateningly) "Don't you
know that it is
unlawful to drink alcohol in this
place?” The woman to policeman: "Yes, sir, Yes.” Policeman: (Angrily)”Then why did you drink?" Woman: (grimacing, trying to look miserable
and pointing to her stomach) "I have a stomachache.”
Policeman: (Frowning authoritatively, in a sharp voice) "If you have a stomach ache you must go to the hospital. There is a hospital.” (points in the direction of
the hospital) Woman: "I don't understand Sinhala. Man: "Lies! All lies. All she says is lies. She
speaks Sinhala very well!"
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Policeman: (Showing the plastic bag) "Where did
you find this?"
Woman: (Pointing to the man) "I got it from
him.”
Policeman: “Who is he?”
The man looks away.
Woman: “He is my man.” Policeman: “What? This man is your husband?" Woman: “He is my husband.”
A ripple of laughter from the crowd. Policeman to the man: "Is this your wife?” The man: "Yes she is. She stole my kasippu!”
More laughter from the crowd.
The policeman failed to conceal his mirth. He scolded the couple for consuming alcohol on sacred ground and not knowing how to sort out family matters without involving the police, threw the evidence into a garbage bin, and walked away. He should have arrested both over at least three criminal offences - possession and consumption of illicit substances; possession and consumption of alcohol on sacred premises; and the woman on account of larceny. But how could he arrest a wife for stealing from her husband? So theft was out of the question. Then there was the matter of possession and consumption of kasippu in two contexts - both criminal offences. These were also the husband's complaints. But the policeman considered this too trivial a matter to burden himself with.
August 10th 2003 A Vadda Ceremony
Around midday a special event occurred in front of the Valliamma devale. Several Vaddas held a puja inside the kovil. There were three Vadda ritual experts, a drummer, and a young, perhaps
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teenage, Vadda. The ritual experts were all barebodied and wore freshly laundered white sarongs and red cloth belts similar to the Sinhala aduras who perform tovil and other such rituals. One of them was a dancer. He had pads of small bells tied round his ankles in the same way the Sinhala dancers wear the gigiri, as the Sinhalas call them. A middle-aged Vadda also joined him but he did not wear the bells. They wore no other ornaments except for the tinnoru dot on their foreheads - a Kataragama standard. From their appearance they could be Sinhala because of their dress. They had an elderly drummer whose dress was identical to that of the ritual experts and played a Sinhala davul drum. He looked affluent with a gold amulet hung around his neck with a thick gold chain and a silver one with a silver chain. While the dancers had their hair loose, the drummer had it tied in a knot. All three of them sported ample gray beards and moustaches. The young Vadda wore agreen and yellow batik sarong tied with a red cloth rolled into a belt. His hair was short. He wore a short axe, a component in the traditional Vadda attire, tied to his waist with the red belt. Another man, perhaps in his early thirties and presumably a Vadda, wore a white sarong and a white longsleeved shirt, with sleeves rolled may be two rounds, over the sarong tied with a red cloth belt. He clearly visited barbershops for his hair was neatly dressed and permed, and his moustache neatly trimmed. He could be Tamil or Sinhala, a Schoolteacher, postman or a shopkeeper, even a man from the tourist trade, from Batticaloa, Badulla or Colombo. Yet another man, about thirtyfive or forty, sporting a large moustache, was in a white crewneck undershirt tucked under his sarong tied with a red cloth belt. He, too, had a dark complexion and shorter hair. Like the boy in the batik sarong, he too did not seem to groom his hair much. But he looked authoritative, with a long red shawl around his shoulder, like a Sami. He wore a digital wristwatch and rings.
When I first saw them they were inside the Valliamma devale, holding a puja. The temple was crowded with Tamil devotees. Two
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Tamil temple attendants were at service. The two bearded Vaddas danced waving bunches of margosa twigs as if they were in trance states while the drummer played a low toned beat. The man with the shawl around his shoulders raised both his hands and rapidly brought them together and away from each other, in a gesture of repeated worship. All this created an extremely animated atmosphere inside the devale. The Tamil devotees quietly engaged in their worship but mostly watched the dynamic spectacle before them. The young Vadda and the fashionable one stood in the ring of onlookers, ready to render their services if needed.
The worship ended abruptly and the Vaddas left the kovil quickly. In the yard, preparations were already made for the traditional Vadda ceremony kiri koraha. The Vaddas promptly came to the kiri koraha and performed the ritual. Two foreign photographers equipped with a variety of photographic paraphernalia hopped around the scene aiming their cameras at every move the Vaddas made. A temple attendant from the Valliamma devale came over, put his hands inside the kiri koraha in a gesture of receiving a puja for the goddess. It ended as quickly as it began and the Vaddas departed.
It was apparent that the ritual was performed to celebrate the Vaddas' purported kinship with Valliamma although she is not a member of their pantheon. In that case, this ritual must have gone on ever since the Vaddas were absorbed into the Muruga theology through Valli, perhaps from about seventeenth through eighteenth centuries. However, it is likely that the kiri koraha in Kataragama is older than that as it is principally associated with propitiating Kande Yaka, the chief of the Vadda pantheon of divinities, a thanksgiving ritual after a successful hunt.
Somehow, though, the ritual as I saw it appeared, at least to me, more like a staged performance than the ritual described by the Seligmans and the one I watched in Bintanna. There is much that has been borrowed from the Sinhala culture as the attire and the drums indicated. Also, as the two 'modernized individuals
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and their supervisory behavior signified, the ritual appeared to have been organized for urban tourism oriented performances. Nevertheless, their presence in Kataragama, which is becoming rarer every year, added a significant symbolic statement in which what I examined in the previous Chapter riverberates.
After the sudden performance, all activities returned to the usual bustle. There was some excitement over the Maha Perahara tonight.
The Procession
Kataragama procession develops in stages. The first perahara is held fortyfour days after the planting of the kaps, the first day after the New Moon in July. This is called the magul perahara. The term magul is bivalent. It means "wedding as well as "auspicious.” In the present context, it means "wedding. It signifies the god's second marriage to Valli. The procession leaves the Maha Devale as the asterism (Sinhala: nakata, Sanskrit: nakshatra) Pusha dawns, and goes down the athul vidiya to the Valliamma devale. This is the only time the procession takes this route. The reason for this feature remains to be explored. However, I could not help noticing the fact that its movement, when seen from the Maha Devale, is anti-clockwise as opposed to the clockwise movement of all other peraharas. In Hindu and Buddhist ritualism, anti-clockwise movements are structurally parallel to the unholy, to the the left hand. Perhaps it signifies the meaning of this visit by the god to his extramarital lover Valliamma in a manner that fundamentally contradicts the mores of the society that believes in monogamy.o The rest of the peraharas reverse this and take the clockwise route. This reversal of the direction only highlights the first procession and its deviation from the social norm.
After the first five magul peraharas the Basnayaka Nilame offers vegetarian alms to the bhikkhus at his residence. This occurs in a special chamber in the valauva that the the alatti ammas clean and the re-paste the ground with clay and cow dung mixture. On
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the same day, the kola pandalama, or the front part of the portico of the Maha Devale with a roof made of madan branches, is cleaned and re-roofed with fresh branches.” On the same day a pair of ancient tusks, believed to be the tusks of King Dutugamunu's elephant Kandula's tusks, are taken out of the Maha Devale stores and exhibited near the main hanging icon in the Maha Devale. Although it is not mandatory for the Basnayaka Nilame to walk in the first five processions, he must walk in the sixth procession. Today, it is believed that in the olden days there were two peraharas - one daytime and one nighttime - daily from the sixth day onwards. This has now been abandoned. Instead, there is one perahara per night throughout the first twelve days.
There are various accounts of the history of the perahara but most of these appear to be recent constructions in response to the fluctuations of power and authority in Kataragama. According to the Johnston Manuscript referred to earlier the following is the procedure involved in 1765:
On the first day of the New Moon of the month of July is the day fixed to begin with the ceremonies of the offering; but if according to the prediction of the astronomers that day is not prosperous, then it is put off till the day of New Moon of the following month of August; when the people assemble consisting of a great number, namely, Singalese, Maurs, and other inhabitants of the island, as well as Gentives, Brahmans, Pattanies and Maurs who in great numbers come from the coasts of Madura and Coromendal with a great concourse of people who come there out of curiosity from the Coasts of Madura and Coromendal. ...
On the same day as aforesaid the worshiping begins, and the following ceremonies are observed:-
In the morning three principal servants of the place, namely, the Maha bethimeralahami, Koeda bathmeralahami and Basnayake rallehami come together with the Maka Kappoerales, Koeda Kappoerales, and all other inferior,
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servants, also 16 women, who though married according to their manner, are chosen for the service of the temple to make the necessary preparations for the procession. For this purpose three toothed elephants are brought there, namely, one large and two smaller. The large elephant is adorned with seven valuable pieces of cloth, with gold flowers and other valuable ornaments, consisting of pearls, precious Stones, gold chains and jewels; and on his back an ivory bench wrought with gold, silver and precious stones, is put. Around the bench are six stays, and thereupon an arched roof is laid, which is covered with very valuable silk, and hung with curtains of the same silk; and further a gold sword is laid upon the bench; and on both sides of the large elephant the two smaller ones are placed with their ordinary dress and tools only. Upon each of them sits a Kappoerale each of them having in their hands a hairy tail of an animal called Tjameri in the Palliaa language, and is commonly called Semera, wherewith they move... sword, and in token respect for the same, many open umbrellas are carried near the large elephant, and then the said 16 women appear having each of them two brass bowls with saffran water in the hands. Eight of them go on the right and the other eight on the left, side of the two smaller elephants, saying a short blessing to the whole Council, namely ... May those who assemble here, fare well. And in that manner after sunset, the Sword upon the large elephant, attended by the smaller elephants and followed by all the peoples, with flying colours and beating drums and tom-tom, as well as by blowing trumpets and other blowing instruments, the procession goes round and the houses in the four streets through which the procession passes are illuminated and burning torches are carried before the elephants. This ceremony lasts till night, and the same is repeated in the same manner in the following evening and is continued during 15 days, or till the next day of the Full
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Moon. But the last time the procession lasts longer and even till morning, when the gold sword of the elephant is taken off and he as well as the other elephants are driven away; and a palankeen with a crooked bamboo is brought, very finely adorned with all sorts of valuable things, hung with a very rich cloth. In this is laid the said gold sword, but what it contains more one cannot know. And the palankeen is afterwards carried by two Kappoewas to a shallow river which is situated at one mile distance from the temple, in great procession, and there it is thrown into the water, whilst one of the Kappoerales, by the name of Diyekappenerale, (which signifies one who can cleave or cut the water through) steps to, and taking the Sword by hand, draws it from the scabbard and therewith gives a blow in the water, shewing shewing thereby that the water in a miraculous manner in its quickest stream, stands still for a moment. There are very few that do not believe this false miracle; but those that doubt in it some degree say that all the people when the Palankeen is brought in the water go at once in the water to bathe even without taking off their clothes, and that they surround so that the palankeen in the middle of the shallow water, that thereby the course of the water in the center of the circle made by the people, is stopped.
That ceremony ends at seven or half past seven in the morning when the gold sword with the palankeen followed by the people is carriedback to the temple in great procession, and all the people assemble then together for the purpose of offering, and bring with them the costly things appointed to be offered to the God Kanda Koemare, consisting of gold coin, gold and silver wrought, and slaves, gardens and fields are also given on behalf of the temple as gifts. Those that are sick come in person or send images of gold and silver with their names, for the purpose of being offered, to recover health or to prevent sickness and death amongst cattle, images
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of animals are sent there in the same manner. For the purpose of collecting those valuable things, there are three peculiar bowls namely, the one of gold the second of silver and the third of metal. In the first come the offerings of noblemen and Wellalas, in the second those of fishermen, Chandos, and inferior casts, and in the third those of Berrewais, and other low casts. As often as the basons get full, as often they are emptied by the servants who are present and are put again on the bench of collection. Those rich offerings serve not only to defray great expenses of the Kattergam’s offering place, but also for the purpose of maintaining the Directors of that place, namely, the Maha and Koda Kappoeralahamys, Basnaike Ralehamy, the Maha and Koda Bitmerales, who at the same time decide the complaints of the inhabitants as judges, and besides that a earthen pot with the same fineries is sent to Candia sealed up for the use of the Royal temple, which as above said is situated there. After the offering is done the people must depart the next day from Kattergam according to the ancient Custom those that are very ill may go away when it is convenient to them....” What I witnessed and what the contemporary Sinhala writers present are at variance with the 1765 procedure. In fact, they even vary from the British colonial reports all the way to 1939. Granted that the colonial administrators did not make careful observations of the perahara procedure, there are some elements in the present day procedures that the administrators would not have missed. The olden days that the present day believers refer to must be times before 1765 as the bhikkhus who provided the information refer to one daily perahara throughout the festive season. The devele (twice a day) perahara or the two processions per day procedure must have been adopted in the nineteenth century and soon after abandoned for none of the colonial administrators refer to two daily processions. It appears that there is much myth making about what happened in the days of yore.
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The 10 August was the penultimate day of Kataragama festivities in 2003. The day had begun with a ritual known as the duvana perahara. I went about in the sacred area but found nothing significantly different from the daily routines this far. The pujas were held as usual and the perahara took place as scheduled without any variation from the previous nights.
First three elephants were brought in and made to salute the Gana Devale and then the Maha Devale. The main elephant, the ali ata - so called because he has a profusion of pink skin on the face, trunk and ears - also fondly called Athami, was then taken to the vasanamedhi, a platform under an open shed between the Teivayanaiamman kovil and the Maha Devale, for dressing for the perahara. The elephant was guided into the central open space. On his sides are two steps from where the kapuralas decorated him. They first laid a thick plastic mat on him. On that they placed a rug. Then a wooden box, roughly sixty centimeters long, about forty centimeters wide, and twenty centimeters high, was securely tied to the back of the elephant. It had a triangular back. The sides of the box were ornamented with carvings. The front had a crowing cock bird. The sides had cock birds and floral designs around a trident. A shiny brass chatra (ritual umbrella signifying royalty) was tied to the triangular back. Then the whole thing was covered with several layers of cloth. Sorata states that the cloths are color coded for each day. On Thursdays, they are red. On Fridays, the color is white. Perhaps the color depends on the winning color of the astrological time frames of each day. All the while, two drummers, attired in their ornate ritual dresses, played a davul drum and a tammattam (the tom-tom). A man in a red shirt and a white sarong played the Sinhala horn, the horana. Once the decorations were complete, the kapuralas returned to the Maha Devale. I followed them.
When I entered the Maha Devale it was already crowded with Sinhala and Tamil devotees. The Maha Kapurala, Mr. Somipala Ratnayaka, graciously found me a place very near the activities inside the devale, and I could see what was going on very
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clearly. The perahara rituals started with the activities of the pirit nilaya, a team of bhikkhus who chant pirit to initiate proceedings. This day, Venerable Dr. Alutvave Sorata, the chief incumbant of the Kiri Vehera Rajamaha Viharayaandanotherbhikkhu established the congregation in the refuge of the Buddha, Dhamma and the Sangha and chanted Seth pirit, several popular sutras and noncanonical benedictory Paliverses.
According to Sorata, this is in accordance with procedures outlined in a document called devala sittuva, in possession of the secretary of the MahaDevale administration. Accordingly, in other days or on the day of the Asala perahara, in order to chant pirit and give sermons inside the devale, there must be a chief bhikkhu. of clean character who upholds the dhamma and the discipline, a vidane (organizer), another disciplined (ordained) bhikkhu and three other bhikkhus. Sorata contends that this document refers to the ancient daily practices and that these practices are today restricted to the festive season. He further contends that in order to facilitate this monastic service income from several nindagam (villages donated by the king) were reserved. The rice field dedicated to the pirit nilaya is known aspirit nile kumbura. It has an extent of six amunams and is located in the village of Aluthwala near Buttala.
Interestingly, the 1765 doccument does not refer to this function, and none of the colonial administrators refers to any involvement of bhikkhus in the activities of the Maha Devale. Sorata asserts that because of the depopulation of the region (after 1818 rebellion or long before that, as Rebeiro's account, unreliable as it is, does not mention a Buddhist monastery) and the difficulties in finding bhikkhus for this purpose, these practices were abandoned. But, to this day, the bhikkhus involved in the pirit nilaya receive the income from the rice field and a share of the Maha Devale collections. The 1765 Dutch report or the colonial administrators who paid particular attention to the income of the Devale under the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinances never mention any such offerings to the bhikkhus. It appears that this is a recent addition
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justified by references to ancient practices outlined in a purported ancient document. This needs further scrutiny.
Once the Seth pirit chanting was over, the Basnayaka Nilame - dressed as a Kandyan nobleman in a dhoti and a dupatta (an ornate cloth) over tight white pants, a blue velvet Kandyan jacket with boldly embroidered peacock, sun, moon and linear motifs in silver and gold thread, and a silver Kandyan headdress with various precious stones studded in it - came forward and worshipped the god in front of the large painted icon at the bottom of which was the clearly stated address of the donor - "Mavinnara Piliyandala Tilak Senatilaka and all in the family" - in Sinhala. The Nilame worshipped the god in much the same way Velupillai did in my house except that he did not hold his ears with crossed hands, squatted and stood up three times as Velupillai did. Then the Maha Kapurala worshipped the god in the same manner as the Nilame.
Then he went behind the curtain and brought a long wide black cloth with red boarders. Another kapurala sprinkled kaha diyara (turmeric water) to purify the ground before the icon and the central path towards the main entrance. In the meantime, the Maha Kapurala went behind the curtain into the vadasitina maligava where the god resides, and re-emerged under the black cloth holding the holy of the holies in Kataragama, the nature of which everybody speculates but no one really knows with any certainty.
When the sacred object was thus taken out the devotees gave loud cries of haro hara and sadhu sadhu sadhu. Some were in highly excited states. They threw flowers at the material embodiment of the ultimate sacredness in Kataragama now in the hands of the Maha Kapurala under the black cloth. Some particularly animated individuals prostrated in its path and knocked their foreheads on the ground. Amid much haro harahing, the holy was taken to the vasanamedhi and, with great care and attention, placed inside the seat on the elephant. The crowd went into screams of haro hara. The structure on the elephant was covered with several layers of cloth - some state seven layers but, in the rush, I lost count.
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Numerous wealthy-looking men and women came forward and presented the numerous garlands that they brought to hang on the structure. These were diligently positioned to stream down from its conical top. The kapurala, with his mouth covered with a strip of cloth tied round his jaws, sat to the side behind the structure, Some call it the karanduva, after the Kandyan usage, and held it tightly. And the perahara began to move. The crowd automatically disciplined itself and opened the way for the elephant, rather for the divinity established on it.
This far what the 1765 doccument described occurred to the letter except for the pirit nilaya. The ivory box studded with jewels, gold, and silver that it refers to was perhaps the case of the sacred entity now placed inside the wooden box. I never saw this ivory box.
The front part of the perahara was already organized around the Maha Devale. The elephant carrying the sacred object was taken to the Gana Devale where it was stopped for a while for the god to pay respects to his elder brother. In the meantime the officials of the devale left from the back door of the Maha Devale and walked over to the Kiri Vehera to perform Buddhist observances. A special feature of this is that a casket (karanduva) containing the Buddha's relics, obtained from the Kiri Vehera Raja Maha Viharaya and temporarily held in the Budumadura cum Visnu devale next to the Gana Devale, is carried to the Kiri Vehera.
This, too, is not mentioned in the 1765 report. The Hindus introduced the march of the Maha Perahara to Kiri Vehera in the nineteenth century, to commemorate Muruga's slaying of Sura Padman at his fort, at the Suran Kottan, the Buddhist Kiri Vehera. The introduction of this step clashed with the Buddhist ritual calendar. The Hindus believed that as the god became polluted with the death of the asura he had to be purified by bathing in the river the next morning. This became confused with the Buddhist diyakapuma, the ritual in the river, to be held three days after the final procession. The Buddhists refused to get in the water until
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the third day. For reasons discussed in the previous Chapter the Hindus won in this dispute, established their march to Suran Kottan and staged the bathing of the deity the following morning.
Of late, this Hindu procedure has been reversed. The march to Kiri Vehera, the Hindu step, has been Buddhisized into the god's visit to the Kiri Vehera to worship the Buddha. An elephant carries the relics of the Buddha from the Maha Devale to Kiri Vehera. At the Kiri Vehera, bhikkhus bless the participants in the procession with seth pirit. Thereafter alms are offered to the bhikkhus. The Basnayaka Nilame then thanks all those who helped to hold the festivities successfully. The perahara returns to the Maha Devale and joins the Maha Perahara that has been waiting for them at the Gana Devale. This procedure was followed in 2003. Thereafter it moved clockwise around the devales, stopping for a minute by the Budumadura/Visnu devale and around the bo trees. I was standing by the Maha Devale. The first to emerge from my right were the fire-walkers. A large number of them, all dressed in red or red and white, came and passed me. Others followed them. I rushed to my seat in the angane from where I could get a good view of the proceedings.
The part of the angane near the Maha Devale compound has been converted to a viewing gallery with several rows of seats all round that portion. These seats were hard to come by and there was a mad rush to get tickets from the Basnayaka Nilame's office. Some found the ticket issuing practices rather questionable. Whatever they might have been, thanks to my friend Rajan, we both had tickets to choice seats. But it was obvious to me that most of the seated audience were Sinhala and Tamil middle to higher class people who had just arrived that day and who had good connections. To my disappointment, for the pada yatra pilgrims who were ascetically waiting for this moment there was only standing room in a ten deep throng further down the pita vidiya. .
When compared with the solemn kap rituals, the perahara in Kataragama that begins at the end of the kap rituals, is a partially
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folksy affair, entirely in line with the reputation of the religion of Kataragama.
Traditionally, in Kataragama, the perahara has two sections. It has a preliminary informal introductory and celebratory section and a second formal section. Today, at the head of the introductory section is the large group of fire-walkers. Wielding vels and tridents, these people drew much attention as members of the core community in Kataragama ritual life. They are not residents but transient pilgrims. Yet, because of the relationship that they claim with the god, and their dedication and commitment to the glory of the god of Kataragama, they receive a commanding position in Kataragama celebrations. All other penitents - the gini kavadi, sedil kavadi, and parevi kavadi performers - also receive much respect irrespective of their race, caste, and class. Yet, their moving and inimitable expressions of personal faith in and dedication to the god receive a secondary position in the presence of these pyrophiles, for walking on the embers is believed to be the ultimate test of faith and commitment. Interestingly, although the firewalkers, the kapuralas/swamis and the administrators constitute the core religious community, the fire-walkers are not a necessary component but, as I discussed in the previous chapter, a recent addition. Yet they have entered the core community as the ultimate religious virtuosi who risk their lives to express their devotion to the god. In the perahara they demarcate the front boundary of this core community.
The kavadi performers of various kinds walk after the firewalkers. Then a motley collection of dances and acrobatic feats follows. The mood in this section is frolicsome. Overtly it contradicts the the serious representation of the holy. If the formal part of the act demands politically strictly normative behavior of and towards the official culture at all levels, this part of the procession appears to be an inversion of this normativity. Once the fire-walkers and the kavady performers pass the observers the mood of the procession changes from normative to burlesque, from
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sobriety to celebratory; from ritualistic to carnivalesque; from somberness to flippancy.
This is not to say there is disorder. In all appearances, it is a very orderly and disciplined presentation of public exuberance. But this orderly form has a changeable content. The order of dancers and other frolickers is not fixed and a given day's dance troupes may not appear on the following day or year. This is in direct contrast to the formal part of the procession in which all parts must appear strictly in the same manner every time it is staged. In other words, there is flexibility and unpredictability within rigidity and predictability. There is merriment and laughter, with a touch of facitiousness and erotic humor, within sternness and strict normativity.
Dancers dressed like Hanuman, the monkey-god of the Ramayana, hopped about to the delight of the children. A troupe of southern dancers followed a pair of southern drummers. Sinhala demon Kalu Kumara or the Black Prince, known for his affinity for young maidens at twilight, appeared in a troupe. All members of the troupe were identically dressed in black leotards and skirts made of margosa twigs. They wore tight long-sleeved crew-necked black shirts. Bulging potbellies were improvised by stuffing small pillows inside the shirt. All wore the mask of the demon. The black mask has curly black matted locks and a wide, mischievous and seductive grin. It is structured and displayed in a manner to create mirth rather than fear. Here were the village clowns, stepping forward to the beat of the drums, hopping about and lewdly wagging their loose potbellies and hips, mockingly making passes at young women, village lechers seedily suggesting possibilities of rendezvous. Here was a bold representation of uncouth lowness in actual social life. It was at once cute and disgusting. They all lunged at the audience, shaking their loose potbellies, swinging their hips, and making comic, lewd gestures at the females, bringing out fake fear, genuine coquetry, and real giggles. Somehow, this part of the perahara tied in with its overall theme - the gods visit
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to his concubine, the hora gani - with biting sarcasm, prompting laughter.
A troupe of dancers from the Sabaragamuva province presented a highly acrobatic dance of hopping, 'spinning, and whirling movements. Each of them carried a cane and all the canes were held vertically and by some contrivance gathered at their tips. This guided the rapid acrobatic motions. The spinning and whirling was funny but the hopping in and out of the circle in which they whirled required excellent timing and rhythm or else they would collide with each other. Comedy blended with amazement. Seemingly chaotic motions were strictly ordered and choreographed.
Then the Sokari dancers came. Only one dance from the Sokari repertoire, this was the dance of the Andi. The Andi or those Brahmans from Andhra Pradesh were dressed nicely and colorfully but comically. They, too, wore a mask. Similar to the Black Princes all the Andi were identical. All had big black mustaches and thick black beards. Behind this rough and sinister facade, the faces and the expressions were delicate and effeminate. They moved on in stiff, brisk and bouncy steps, their bodies shuddering and trembling, turbaned heads gyrating, and their arms and legs flinging; altogether a most pleasing comic dance. The audience clapped and cackled. Encouraged, the dancers bounced, flung their arms and legs, and shuddered harder. All these dances were, irrespective of the fact that they derived from various Indian dance forms, Sinhala cultural expressions. Many of them are duplicated in other Sinhala Buddhist processions, as tropes to entertain the crowds. They indicate the Sinhala Buddhist tendency to bring the frivolous into the arenas of the sacred. This act from the Sokari repertoire is particularly popular for its burlesque lampooning spectacle.'
The next segment dramatically reversed the frivolity preceding it and brought in a sense of sobriety. This is where the Tamil performers appeared. A troupe of dancers emulated the
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plantation-Tamil tea-pluckers with colorfully painted mock baskets on their backs. In real life, the tea-plucker's life is poverty-stricken and harsh. Their work-clothes are old and stained. These teapluckers' wore an uncharacteristically tailored costume of yellow blouses and red, blue and yellow striped skirts. The baskets were smaller than usual and brightly painted. Their dance was controlled and synchronized. This dance form is a recent invention. It asserted the plantation-Tamil socio-cultural and political identity. This identity crystallized into an ethnic identity that is different from the northern and eastern pre-colonial ethno-cultural formations. There is no doubt that this troupe appears in other cultural spectacles and rallies that underscore the plantation-Tamil special identity. However, the tea-plucker's dance, too, similar to its Sinhala counterparts, is a deception. It hides the actualities of the teaplucker's existence behind a facade of bountifulness. Once again, reality is inverted in this enactment of a tragic dream.
A troupe of acrobatic women followed them. These brightly attired dancers balanced aluminum pots on their heads. The dance is known in Kataragama as kohomba kale. Each woman balanced two pots. The pots were concealed behind streams of red and yellow plastic flowers. A bunch of margosa (kohomba) twigs crowned this arrangement. The dancers moved to tavil drumbeat, moving their free hands in traditional dance expressions. About a dozen performers in two rows produced a remarkable effect that sent the audience whispering. The whispering became hissing when the last but principal performer of the troupe arrived on the scene. She, dressed in a glistening crimson outfit, carried five times as many pots veiled with strands of simulated flowers. She was a veritable tower of pots on the move. A band of musicians playing two flat drums, a tavil drum, cymbals and a trumpet followed her. This acrobatic act used to be an Indian import from Tamil Nadu. Today, local troupes perform it. The pot balancing appears to be a glamorization of a Tamil rural domestic activity. Rural women carry water-pots on their heads. The balancing of the pot is an art
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in everyday life that every female learns from childhood. The festive performance is an embellishment of this pot balancing into an acrobatic feat. Again, comparable to other dancers such as the teapluckers, the domestic reality is masked by a glittering crimson costume, or glittering green costume as I have seen elsewhere, and other paraphanelia such as the stacks of pots with floral decorations.
Then there were the kavadi dancers. This, too, was a simulation of the actual kavadi dancing. The ubiquitous kavadi dancer wears red or everyday clothes and dances as best as she can, Sometimes in abandon, particularly if she is in a state of avesa (trance). In ritual kavadi, every individual dancer wears whatever he pleases and thinks is appropriate, uses his own footwork and body motions. That makes the dance chaotic but very dynamic. The music sustains the structure of the group of these individual dancers by providing a common rhythm. In the procession, the dancers perform as a theatrical group according to a set choreography. They all wear the same costume to indicate their ethnic Tamilness, carry identical kavadis, step together and turn their bodies together. The idea is to follow others and not be unique, in direct contrast to the ritual kavadi. In the procession, the dance is a public act choreographed to entertain the public. In the ritual, it is a private act, personally and spontaneously performed to please the god, in utter disregard of the public. But both are equally seriously performed. The kavadi troupe consisted entirely of women and they moved on in a measured manner without drawing much public attention. What drew the public attention were a few children, dressed to look like peacocks, pulling Strings attached to a contraption that simulated the movements of the peacock plumes. Their movements were individualistic and the unity among them was sustained by the rhythm of the kavadi music. These were among the prominent features of the front of the sacred procession. It included many other items that did not stand out as much.
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The colonial administrators reported that this section of the perahara was simple until the Chettiyars and their vels arrived. The Chettiyars had spent lavishly to enhance the perahara. As I discussed in the previous Chapter, the Basnayaka Nilame had awaited the arrival of wealthy Tamil Hindus with religious zeal to provide extra lamps and other ritually insignificant but financially and decoratively significant contributions. Thus, over the period during which the perahara was held, there was a heightening of the fervor and glamour as the days advanced towards the final Maha Perahara. However, since 1958, as the Sinhala Buiddhist authority grew the Tamils withdrew their exuberant participation in Kataragama. Nonetheless, the Basnayaka Nilames have sustained the enthusiasm and fervor by incorporating more Sinhala dance forms in lieu or in addition to the Hindu decorative elements. From the perspective of cultural history, many items indicated assimilation of Tamil cultural forms by the Sinhalas. For example, the fire-walkers were, except for a half a dozen Tamils, Sinhala Buddhists. Obeyesekere pointed out in the mid 1970s, that the bhakti religiosity of the Muruga cult was being absorbed by the Sinhala Buddhist devotees of the god from about 1950s. Gradually, Sinhala Buddhists outnumbered Tamil Hindus in many Hindu activities in Kataragama Asala festival. Today, like the fire-walking, the kavadi dancing and the pot balancing, both traditional Tamil activities, have been mastered and taken over by various Sinhala kalayatana or 'art institutes.
Interestingly, when compared to the nineteenth and twentieth century developments, the eighteenth century processions must have been tightly controlled bland affairs that emphasized only the formal part as the 1765 report does not include any of this. Clearly, this portion was introduced by the Hindu Tamils in the nineteenth century, as a serious introduction and celebration with remarkable ascetic feats and restrained dancing to bhajans. The present day carnivelesque character of the introductory part appears to be the result of the Sinhala Buddhist re-taking of the proceedings from the 1950s onwards.'
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As these performances end the formal section, where the Kataragama traditional administration expresses its roots in the Kandyan kingdom, enters the scene. This is where the Basnayaka Nilame, the Bathmes (now redefined and reestablished), the Adikarams, the various Basnayaka Nilames of satellite devales, kapuralas and the officials of the administration walk accompanying the god on his aliata, the Athami, to the beat of the Kandyan drums and dramatized by the Kandyan dancers of many types. The dancers lead the procession followed by the Basnayaka Nilame and his entourage. They are followed by the alatti ammas. Immediately behind them, the elephant carrying the casket containing the insignia of the god moves on. There used to be a red canopy that stated Om Vadivela Varuga, held over the Athhami, but this feature is now absent indicating the withdrawal of the Tamils. Rasaiah states that this canopy was "...held with six poles overhead by twelve pilgrims who have come walking to Kathirkamam for long distances (From the Northern and Eastern provinces in groups covering over three hundred miles) welcoming the Lord.”66
Interestingly, the two Bathmes, reintroduced recently in a diminished capacity as distributors of the collection at the Maha Devale, walk on either side of the elephant. The Maha Bathme walks on the right side between the ear and the tusk and the Kuda Bathme walks in the parallel position on the left. According to one interpretation their new function in the perahara is to protect the god from the Tamils'
This is the Kandyan segment of the perahara. It is formal. It has a definite structure that hardly changes year after year. The various officials of the administrative hierarchy of the Kataragama complex represent the structure of the Kandyan administration.
In all probability, the procession of the Kataragama Maha Devale existed pretty much as the formal section from the elephant onwards with an entourage of a few devotees until about sixteenth century. From then on the Kandasami cult of the Indian immigrants, particularly from Tamil Nadu, conflated with the Kanda Kumara
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cult that was already a product of conflation of the Sinhala Buddhist Kanda Kumara, somewhat akin to Sanskritic Skanda, with the Vadda ancestral deity Kande Yaka/Deiyo. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth, many Tamil elements such as kavadi dancing, gini kavadi and pot-balancing entered the introductory section of the procession.
The time of the procession deserves special mention. In Kataragama, following the procession of the Dalada in Kandy, the perahara is aligned with the month of Asala (mid July-mid August). This is a Sri Lankan peculiarity because in the South Indian ritual calendar Skanda's festival, the Skanda Shashthi, falls between mid October and mid-November and nothing falls between mid-July and mid-August.°* This is because king Kirti Sri Rajasinghe who revived Buddhism in Sri Lanka connected the peraharas of the devales of the four guardian deities of the kingdom Natha, Visnu, Kataragama and Pattini with that of the Dalada Maligava when his guests, Thai Buddhist monks, expressed displeasure that some of the processions in the kingdom did not show Buddhist color.' But the May-June Vesak (Tamil: Vaikaci), June-July Poson (Tamil:Ani) and July-August Asala (Tamil:Adi) months have been the principal ritual season for the Buddhists and the Tamil Hindus have no rituals for Skanda/Muruga in the month of Adi. Further, the Skanda/Muruga oriented South Indian rituals celebrate Skanda Shashti or the culmination of Muruga's career with his destruction of Sura Padman. Was the Kataragama perahara moved from the Skanka Shashthi celebrations from mid-October to mid-November to the Sinhala month of Asala by King Kirthi Sri Rajasinghe's decree, or did it always occur in the month of Asala (Tamil: Adi) but as a separate perahara and was merely joined with the Dalada perahara as the king wished?, According to the 1765 responses to the Dutch interrogatory, Kataragama perahara was held in the month of Asala without any connections with a Buddhist activity. Therefore it is likely that Kataragama Asala perahara was a Sinhala construction similar to the Asala perahara in Kandy until
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about very late eighteenth or nineteenth century, held independently of the Tamil Hindu rituals in connection with Skanda Shashthi. And it began to accommodate or was absorbed by the Muruga cult from then on, particularly from the nineteenth century. The Muruga aspect of the Kataragama perahara focuses on the killing of the asura Sura Padman and Muruga/Valli union with sexual overtone and not on the Skanda Shashthi.' These features were blended with the Sinhala perahara by dislocating them from the Tamil ritual calendar and relocating them in the Sinhala ritual calendar.
However, from Clothey one may draw a hypothesis that the Keralians who migrated to the east coast of the island introduced the Murukan festival, the Machi festival that celebrates Muruga's career as a heavenly commander in the month of Adi (Sinhala: Asala) and that they incorporated the Machi festival with Kataragama perahara. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the Batticaloa Tamils had, by the late nineteenth century, strong claims to manage the last perahara and they had various disagreements with the Basnayaka Nilame regarding the last perahara and the date and time of diyakapuma or water-cutting ritual. Could it be that as Skanda's career was celebrated as Muruga's career, the anointing of the god as the heavenly commander was merged with the Kataragama Asala perahara? But this is unlikely as the Kataragama perahara had never celebrated Muruga's anointing as the heavenly commander. Rather, from nineteenth century the Hindus celebrated Muruga's slaying of the asura and Muruga's amorous affair with Valli: the Hindu foci of the perahara.
The time taken by the procession itself underwent changes as the Valliamma cult was established at least in the early nineteenth century. Kataragama perahara that merely walked around the village that lay in front of the Maha Devale developed a stop right across from the Maha Devale, at the Valliamma devale. Additionally, many nadattu stops have come into existence as many Tamil Hindu groups contributed to the perahara. Nadattu means support and Sustennice.
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It is likely that the nadattu stops are a late nineteenth century phenomenon with the coming of Chettiyars and their madamas each of which had a shrine for a deity. The Chettiyars supported the Muruga festivities in no small way and that deserved a stop at these shrines in recognition of the contributions by the Chettiyar who established the madama.
On the other hand, the Chettiyars and the Tamil Hindus added much to the perahara. As stated above the last perahara was entirely organized and funded by Batticaloa Hindus. British administrators report that conflicts arose between the Hindus and the Kataragama administrators led by the Basnayaka Nilame over the date of the last perahara for the two sides to the dispute employed different versions of astrology to determine the date and the time of the diyakapuma or the water-cutting ceremony in which Kataragama festivities culminate and conclude. According to the Sinhala astrology and theory of Kataragama rituals, the watercutting ceremony should take place three days after the lastperahara. But the Hindus believed it had to be performed in the morning after the last perahara. During the early decades of the twentieth century, because of the Hindu pressure, the last perahara had to be timed for the night before the water-cutting.
As discussed in the previous chapter, the dispute itself reflected an antagonistic relationship between the Buddhists and the Hindus over the activities in Kataragama. I speculate that by late nineteenth century, perhaps during the reign of King Sri Vikrama Rajasinghe, the economics of the perahara gradually allowed an upperhand to Batticaloa Hindus over the last perahara which had to be celebrated grandly. The Chettiyars and Batticaloa Hindus contributed generously to make the perahara a colorful and elaborate celebration and Kataragama benefited from their generosity. But like all gifts, this generosity involved expectations of reciprocal giving of a political nature: the right to determine the time and the space of the ritual. However, the administration reciprocated hesitantly and reclaimed their traditional authority by affirming their own version of the astrology of the ritual.
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According to the British administrators, the parties eventually resolved the conflict amicably with the Basnayaka Nilame always giving in to the Hindu claims. We have no reports on whether the Hindus threatened to withdraw their financial Support unless the administrators adopted the Hindu version of the astrology of the ritual. I think this was more likely the case and the administrators would rather not forego the large financial gains that the adoption of thể Hindu norms resulted. Such an apprehension was a distinct possibility.
However, since the Tamils were expelled or withdrew from Kataragama from the 1950s Sinhala Buddhist ritual calendar has been re-introduced. Accordingly, at present, the water-cutting is performed three days after the Maha Perahara.
As the perahara completely passed a spot, the audience in that area either dispersed or followed the perahara, haro harahing all the way. Thus far, the crowd in this area was disciplined and orderly. But as soon as the spectacle was over the orderliness and the audience's absorption in the drama also collapsed. People around me began pushing and shoving to get out of their confinement in the crowded space. It was impossible to identify any cultural groups as such. Everybody appeared to be in the heaving crowd. I, too, started wiggling my way, pushing and shoving, like everybody else.
When the procession reached the Valliammankovil the haroharas got louder. Tradition has it that when the first perahara approached a Vadda would confront the perahara and block its way, drawing a line across the path, exclaiming:
siri vishnu kandaswami ana atnam me iren mehata avot τνίαιηαυα
(If Sri Vishnu's and Kandaswami’s rules hold, I will shoot if this line is crossed.)
Then an official would give him some coins in a sack wrapped in a handkerchief. The Vadda would step to a side and let the perahara enter the yard of the kovil.’
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I did not see any Vaddas in the perahara. Neither have I witnesses for this line of action. Perhaps it existed prior to the extinction of Vaddas in the area. As I discussed in the previous chapter the colonial administrators do not mention Vaddas in connection with the perahara at least from the late nineteenth century. The Vadda rituals that I witnessed this morning, particularly the kiri koraha, appeared out of context. The Seligmans saw it performed in and out of context - in context after a hunt, and out of context when the Vaddas performed one for them. The rituals that I saw in the morning were a recent addition by whoever desired to complete the Kataragama mythic theater by bringing in the Vaddas. The Vaddas who performed the ritual were professionals.
Granted that the Vadda line of action in the perahara occurred in the distant past, it must have occurred as a ritual, officially sanctioned, in recognition of the Vadda claims over Valliamma and Kataragama. If it was about Kataragama and its sanctity then it had to be the rights over the place on account of a pre-Sinhala claim. But if it was about the right to approach Valliamma the ritual itself must have been invented after the transposition of Muruga-Valliammalore in Kataragama, probably around the sixteenth century or later. I have no information on whether the Tamils in Tamil Nadu had already invented this tribal claim over Valliamma and Sri Lankans adopted the ritual plot and substituted an Indian Tamil character, perhaps a Koravai, in the Indian Tamil ritual syntax with the paradigmatically correct Vaddas, or whether this was a local product.
But, from the late nineteenth century Vadda participation in the perahara dwindled as they withdrew from the area after the 1818 failed rebellion and as the colonial government imposed severe restrictions on public participation in the Kataragama Asala festival. Interestingly, none of the colonial writers of the nineteenth century state that Vaddas participated in the Asala activities, indicating that Vadda participation ended by the mid-nineteenth century.
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However tonight there were no Vaddas to confront the perahara and invoke the Valliamma drama.
Sumanasekera Banda, a former Government Agent of the Monaragala District who had jurisdiction over Kataragama, has Collected a large amount of material about the Vaddas. He states that when the Vaddas actively participated in the Kataragama festival a group of Vaddas from Panama was a part of the first perahara. Three days after the last perahara, known as the Maha Perahara, the Vaddas formed a perahara and went to the Vadahiti Kanda, also known as Sinhasanakanda, held pujas for the god of Kataragama, made and fulfilled vows, and arranged to send offerings to the Maha Devale, Kiri Vehera, the bodhi tree, and Valliamma kovil, in the care of two or three Vaddas from the Sella Kataragama area. This custom became extinct in 1955. Sumanasekera Banda asserts that Vaddas no longer participate in the perahara. Some believe that when the final perahara arrived at the Valliamma kovil the alatti ammas, descending from the Vaddas, presented a dance in the yard of the kovil. The local Korala had informed him that such a dance had not been performed since 1934.’
The Vadda rituals at the Vadahiti Kanda indicate their preHinduized connections with Kataragama. The Vaddas in touch with the Sinhala and Tamil communities were culturally influenced and assimilated into the latter's theogony and they in turn adopted Hindu beliefs about them in a cultural sense. Hence they believe in the Tamil story about Muruga/Kandaswami and the Vadda girl Valli although Valli is not a Vadda name and Valliamma has no place in their religion. The statement that they uttered when the first perahara arrived at the Valliamma devale is entirely in Sanskritized Sinhala, pretty much in the lingo of the kapuralas. They probably adopted that line in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.
The climax of the perahara is the entry of the god into the Valliamman kovil. The Athami carrying the god was taken to the vasamamedhi, and tied to the atabandina kanuva or the kamba kanuva, and amid great shouts of haro hara, the sacra were
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transported to the inner chamber of the devale on the head of the kapurala. Outside, various dancers performed special controlled dance steps. The alatti ammas also performed a similar highly restraind dance movements for a brief period. After about fifteen minutes, the Basnayaka Nilame decided that the god has finished his visit and desired to return to the Maha Devale. Then the kapurala transported the god back to the elephant. The perahara restarted and moved in the athul vidiya towards the Maha Devale. It stopped in front of the Basnayaka Nilame's valauva. Sorata notes that the drumbeat played during this stop is called virapadaya:
Tak takata krataka diguda tak krataka dahidakimi Dik takata krakata diguda dik krataka dahidakimi Tok takata krataka diguda tok krataka dahidakimi Tat takata krataka diguda tok krataka dahidakimi Tat takata munidakimi dik takata dahidakiimi Tok takata rajadakimi tak takata gurudakimi Jahidakim jahidakim jahidakim ...7* The procession returned to the Maha Devale compound. The athami was taken to the vasanamedhi, the sacred objects restrored in the Maha Devale, and the attire of the athhami returned to the store (gabadava) of the Maha Devale. Thereafter, the firewalking occurred. I did not watch the ritual in 2003. But I did watch it several times from the 60s onwards and in 2002.
Fire-Walking 1962
The fire raged, its orange tongues reached great heights, sparks flew high into the dark cavernous envelope of midnight, the night wind blew through the flames towards me, hot and sweaty, and the steel fence around the fire twisted to a mangled mass. An hour ago, frenzied men brought wood from somewhere and created a neat pyre, a meter or so high and wide, and about four or five meters long. Then a few elderly Samis sporting gray manes and beards and wearing orange robes lit it with camphor tablets. The fire came from a lamp inside the MahaDevale. The fire thus kindled
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became this blaze, devouring the logs that burned writhing, belching smoke and flames, and turned into embers. Once all the wood burned down to a massive pile of embers with an ash surface and amber interior, Some men raked it down to a gray, orange and amber carpet of fire.
The fire spread from a few feet from the coconut smashing rock to a few feet from the Maha Devale like a burning path to it. The large audience watched the entire process from the sides. The fire was ready for use around four in the morning. The kapuralas of the devale did not participate in it directly. The entire ceremony was presided over by an elderly Sami, a Sinhala man named Wijeratna. There were others also who appeared to be influential in the ritual. One was a German ascetic named Gauri Bala, better known as German Sami. Another name was Muthukuda. I do not recollect seeing him. There were many Tamil Samis as well. German Sami stood out as an unusual participant but, except for his European appearance, he behaved like a Hindu, sporting long gray hair and a long gray beard, dressed in a yellow cloth, and wearing many rudraksha necklaces. Other Samis and devotees showed him much respect. But the main actor in this unfolding drama was the slightly built bespectacled Wijeratna with a prominent white moustache and a very white mane.
I heard much excited haro harahing at the arched entrance to the Maha Devale compound. I recollect hearing from someone that more than four hundred entranced devotees had lined up at the entrance to walk on the fire. This could be an exaggeration given the propensity of devotees to see things larger than they actually are. But it was clear that a very large number of devotees were waiting to perform. When the time approached for the ritual to begin the excitement was, at that time and to me, scarry. The haro haras became repetitive roarings from the unseen firewalkers awaiting their turn.
Then the ritual began. The first firewalker, Wijeratna Sami, came in. He was in full regalia: red cloth, red shawl, red garlands, tinnoru and pottu on the forehead. He carried a red kavadi with a
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profusion of peacock feathers. As I recollect today what I saw in 1963, it merges with the mental image I had when I read the descriptions of velan, the Koravai priest of the Sangam literature. I do not recollect any Buddhist monks in the scene. But I saw many witnessing the firewalking ritual in 2002. And in 2002 a Buddhist monk officiated at the ritual by sprinkling pirit pan - water rendered sacred by chanting sutras near it - on the fire. More of this later.
German Sami received Wijeratna Sami, and blessed him by rubbing tinnoru on his forehead. Wijeratna put his right foot forward and stepped into the fire amid an intense outcry of haro hara. He walked on the fire medium pace, but his movement had a certain momentum that pushed him forward. Red glow of the embers reflecting on this devotee in red made him look redder. He finished his walk quite easily to ever more increasingharo harahing. Several Tamil Samis received him at the finish line with more tinnoru. The firewalker danced his way into the Maha Devale with the same momemtum. A kapurala gave him some holy water to complete his ritual.
There was a great sense of relief when that happened. He did not fall. No one wanted him to fall. Such a fall would have been ominous, signifying the god's wrath for something amiss and failure of the ritual. Thereafter, one by one, a large number of people walked, danced on, ran over, or hopped across the embers until dawn. The crowd relaxed after a while and one more walking on the embers became rather usual. Repetition is jading. But the crowd retained interest by becoming critical. Some firewalkers stepped in with great gusto, suddenly lost confidence, stepped out of the fire and ran away towards the Maha Devale. The crowed laughed at this exhibition of cowardice. Some others took very long strides - a sign of wanting to get it over with quickly, a cause of derision. Then there were the fire-hoppers, as it were, who received noises of disdain. Awe mixed with hirality, ritual danger blended with theatrical amusement.
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No one knew who the firewalkers were unless a relative, friend or acquaintance performed it. Except for the important Samis who were ritual experts, all other firewalkers were ritually on equal footing. But it was not utopia, although at that time I had no notions of the internal social dynamics of the ritual. On the surface of the fire all seemed equal. But later I found that the structure of authority within the firewalking ritual has been the arena for many conflicts and transformations.
Fire-walking was unknown in Kataragama until the early decades of the twentieth century. As Obeyesekere discovered in the Kataragama oral tradition, fire-walking was performed in South India and elsewhere in this country, particularly in the tea plantations and in the east coast Tamil Hindu communities. Early in the last century, there was a steady increase in the influx of South Indian pilgrims, mendicants and ascetics to Kataragama. These pilgrims performed firewalking sporadically, as individual ritual performances. A South Indian mendicant named Anakutti Sami had organized firewalking into a more regular performance around 1912. The kapuralas of the Maha Devale objected to these practices. Therefore, Anakutti’s performances, too, occurred as his personal performances rather than a group activity. Even so, it was not performed on an annual basis. One Selliah Sami took over firewalking from Anakutti around 1926 and made it into an annual group ritual. Still, the groups were small, all male, and limited to about seven members. Obeyesekere writes:
Hindu monopolization of fire-walking was broken in 1942 by a young Sinhala Buddhist now known as Wijeratine Sami. Young Wijeratne was sent by the great Buddhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapalato study textile manufacture in India. There he became interested in the "occult sciences.” When he came back to Sri Lanka, he determined to test his occult knowledge by walking the fire at Kataragama. In 1942, he brashly crossed the fire-pit without seeking permission from the chief fire-walker, the mendicant Selliah Sami. The latter was outraged; he doused the fire and put a stop to the
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proceedings. However, the lay trustee of Kataragama, a Sinhala Buddhist aristocrat, reconciled the two. Wijeyaratna fell on his knees and asked forgiveness from Selliah Sami, who then with great magnanimity took Wijeyaratna as his first Sinhala pupil.
While Wijeratna Sami was the first Buddhist to walk the fire, it was another Sinhala Buddhist, Mutukuda Sami, who was responsible for converting the ritual into one dominated by Sinhala Buddhists. Born in 1910 in Kalutara, Western Province, Mutukuda was from a respectable Sinhala Buddhist family. He was educated in Sinhala schools but had a fair knowledge of English. In the middle 1930s he visited India, where he stayed for four years studying the "occult sciences.” He came back to Sri Lanka, but in the 1940s enlisted in the Royal Army Corps. He went first to Bombay; after four months, he was sent to Egypt. He participated in El Alamein; from there he was sent to Tobruk, Tripoli, and then to Sicily. The critical event occurred when Lieutenant Mutukuda led a convoy of seventeen vehicles past Casino Hill. The following is his own English rendering of the events, as he told it to me:
When we were convoyed through Casino Hill, ... then Italians came and raided. They raided us with bombs and machine guns. Drivers and vehicles were being destroyed. At that time only myself and my driver escaped. Italians came and machine gunned and I creeped under my vehicle. I remember at once god Kataragama. All these are fire, the bombs are also fire, I thought. If I escape from this raid I will go back to Sri Lanka and go to Kataragama and do fire-walking. This was my vow. He returned to Sri Lanka in 1945, a captain in the Army. True to his vow, he came to Kataragama in 1947; but unfortunately he arrived after the fire-walking was over.
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Depressed, he went to the sacred river Manik Ganga to bathe; there, an old man who looked like his dead uncle (father's younger brother) told him: "Son, do not be afraid; you come next time. You must put an end to eating fish and meat. Bathe, purify yourself, and be ready for walking the fire next time.” This apparition was, of course, the god himself. In 1948, he returned to Kataragama and successfully walked the fire, under the guidance of Selliah Sami, the Hindu mendicant. In the following three years, he was joined by three or four acquaintances of his, among them two government officials: the chief of the Colombo fire-fighting unit, and an accountant in the Government Railways Department. This period coincided with the emerging political dominance of Sinhala Buddhists and strong resentment against Tamil Hindus. Thus, in 1951, the Sinhala lay trustee of the shrine gave Mutukuda the title of chief fire-walker, displacing the Hindu Selliah Sami. Thereafter the Sinhala was known by his Hinduized name, Mutukuda Sami. No more Hindus have been nominated to this post since then.
Soon the mass media highlighted the prowess of fire-walkers, and Mutukuda Sami came to have an almost national reputation. He resigned his position in 1962, in an argument with the trustee on the timing of the ritual. Wijeratne Sami took his place till 1969; he also resigned after an argument with the trustee - this disagreement over a change in venue of the fire-walking ritual from the small compound facing the main shrine to a larger area opposite the trustee's own official residence. Subsequently, the position fell to various persons: a carpenter and part-time priest, a priest of a Colombo shrine, the chief inspector of the public transport system of the city of Ratnapura. In 1975, a young liberal member of the parliament was elected lay trustee by the Kataragama electoral college. He reinstated Wijeratne Sami
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(although the fire-walking site, over which the latter had originally resigned, was not changed back).’ Nearly two dacades after my first encounter with the firewalking that I described above I was in Kataragama, in 1980, assisting Professor Obeyesekere, taking pictures of matted hair on ascetics, and learning to conduct anthropological field research. The structure of the ritual remained much the same except for two changes. The change of the location of the ritual that Wijeratna protested in 1969, three years after I watched my first firewalking ritual, had become established. It continues to be held slightly to the east of the Abhinavaramaya temple and monastery.
Perhaps, the relocation was prompted more because of practical reasons than politics. The ever increasing number of participants and the growing audience, including tourists, needed more space than the Maha Devale compound could provide. Therefore it appears to be a rational choice - goal rational action in Weberian sociology. This is not to discount politics as the relocation was a part of a larger move - several lines of rational action with political goals - to reduce the authority of the Hindus that has already become weak since the 1958 riots, and the Tamil relocation of their fire-walking in the north and the east. Politics was accompanied by a parallel move for an overall renovation program that eliminated the madamas and the Ramakrishna Mission from the sacred ground and introduced greater involvement of the bhikkhus in the affairs of Kataragama rituals.
The political goal achievement was not entirely a modernist move focusing on practical issues and rational choices. It wastinged with Sinhala Buddhist sentiments that were simultaneously antiTamil although not entirely anti-Hindu. These sentiments arose in the national political arenas from the mid nineteenth century, in contexts that I discussed in the previous chapter. They caused reimagination of the past of the country as a Sinhala Buddhist country, a country to be re-established where Sinhala language and Buddhism would reign supreme. But here, the goal rationality was
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neither systematic nor pragmatic. As a frame of action, it was after the realization of a nebulous value that was politically unwise although it had emotional power. Its irrationality is evident today and needs no further elaboration.
Things become murkier when we look at the role of Muthukuda Sami. He resigned because the temple administration changed the ritual calendar as set by Selliah Sami. For Muthukuda and Wijeratna the ritual form, context, content, and procedures as established by Selliah constituted the true and authentic ritual. They had ousted Selliah, their guru, and the Tamil ritual leaders, and established Sinhala authority not as Sinhala Buddhists but as Hindus who upheld the Selliah format. The take-over was political but not hostile from the perspectives of the Hindu ritual ideology.
However, as we found in the previous chapter and in the previous section, the Kataragama administration has been hostile to the Hindu procedures. There had been clashes between the Batticaloa Tamils and Hindu ritual experts and Kataragama administrators regarding the ritual calendar. The Sinhala Buddhist Basnayaka Nilame wanted to stick to the Sinhala Buddhist calendar while the Tamils wanted to establish the Tamil Hindu ritual order for the Maha Perahara and water cutting ceremony. And the firewalking had to be performed immediately after the Maha Perahara and immediately before the water cutting ceremony. It was the Government Agent of Uva, F. H. Price, who settled the matter in August 1903 by mediating between the Basnayaka Nilame and the Tamils. Between Muthukuda and the Basnayaka Nilame, it was the gap between the fire-walking and water cutting that caused the problem. Muthukuda followed the Tamil line and demanded that fire-walking be scheduled on the night before the diyakapuma. But the Basnayake had other ideas. He was returning to the status-quoante. He could do this because the economic rationality of his predecessor in 1903 - income from the Tamil devotees - was no longer an issue as the Buddhists already far outnumbered the Hindus and even if the Tamil Hindus withdrew the economics of
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Kataragama would not change appreciably. In any case, by 1962, when the conflict between Muthukuda and Basnayaka Nilame arose, Tamils Hindus had already substantially withdrawn from Kataragama as a result of the 1958 riots, and it did not matter even if they never returned. Ideologically, he had the satisfaction of removing Tamil Hindu hegemony and re-establishing Sinhala Buddhist hegemony. Obeyesekere continues:
During this period, attendance at the fire-walk also some varations concomitant with changes in internal politics at Kataragama and in the nation. From a handful of fire-walkers in the late forties and the fifties, there were 150-200 in the early sixties; in 1969 there were 250-300 fire-walkers, both Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil Hindu. There was a drop after the 1969 secession of Wijeratna Sami; but numbers picked up again by 1973, when there were about 250 fire-walkers. Though Hindus continued to participate at Kataragama, they resented the Sinhala Buddhist domination there and developed their own fire-walking rituals in the north and the east.'
The fire-walking ritual in 1980 was clearly dominated by the Sinhala Buddhist samis. I do not recollect whether the water cutting rituals were performed the next day or not. My hunch is that they were not. The ritual calendar had stayed in the post-Muthukuda all Sinhala format.
Interestingly, this Sinhala Buddhist ritual calendar is also a nineteenth century invention. The 1765 Dutch report states that the water cutting took place immediately after the Maha Perahara. At least it does not indicate the existence of a three-day gap between the Maha Perahara and the water cutting ritual. Unless the bhikkhus who informed the Dutch omitted the three-day gap, it appears that the gap was a late nineteenth century invention to make a distinction between the Tamil Hindu calendar and the Sinhala Buddhist calendar indicating that there was, on the part of the Sinhala Buddhist administration, a mixed attitude towards the
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involvement of the Hindus. They clearly liked the enlivening of Kataragama by the Hindus but wanted the Hindu activities to be under their control. But, as discussed earler, the status-quo changed and the Hindus began to claim a larger share of the ritualism. This was when the Buddhists re-invented the ritual calendar and attempted to implement it leading to structural tension in the religious community. When they succeeded in changing both the time and the space of the ritual the Tamils found the ritual meaningless on their terms.
2002
In 2002, the Buddhists carried on with the fire-walking according to Buddhist time in the Buddhistically rearranged space. There were hardly any Tamil fire-walkers. They were fewer even in the audience. Except for the hardcore cultists who, perhaps for personal reasons, remained to participate in all the concluding rituals, most Tamil pilgrims had left Kataragama after the Maha Perahara.
The 2002 firewalking was as usual but conducted in the new place on athul vidiya. Those flames rose high into the air in the well-lit angane. The heat rose further up. I watched two street lamps twist and melt in that heat. However, there was a remarkable innovation. Some men prepared a fireplace with three large rocks at the finishing line of the flattened embers and kindled a fire. They placed a large pot on it and filled it with milk and let it boil. Two bunches of kohombatwigs were also placed nearby. The chief fire-walker successfully inaugurated the fire-walk. He was a hefty man with a dark complexion. His dress was comparable to Wijeratna's in 1963. He, too, carried a full-blown kavadi. Thereafter he remained at the finish line and blessed each fire-walker as the latter completed the walk. When the last of them walked through, the chief firewalker introduced a new line of action hitherto unheard of. He took off his shawl and picked up the two bunches of kohomba twigs, one in each hand. The men kept stirring the
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milk. Soon the milk began to produce vapor and then began to froth and boil. They let the milk boil over amid the haro haras from the audience. The chief firewalker stepped towards the boiling milk, dipped the kohomba bunches in the milk and soaked them in the frothing, boiling, and steaming milk and, standing with his legs apart, flagellated himself with the steaming kohomba bunches - the one in the right hand thrashing his left side and the one in the left hand thrashing his right side of his back. The audience oohed, ahed, hissed and aiyoed in shock. After about a half a dozen whacks he dipped them in the milk again and continued his self-flagellation. He was soaked in milk and his body was steaming as the boiling milk dripped down. He did this several rounds. I lost count how many. Then he fainted or appeared to do so. The men lunged forward and held him. Somebody threw some pirit pan on his face and he recovered. The firewalk of 2002 was thus concluded.
August 11th 2003 w Back in 2003. By mid-morning the Tamil pilgrims began to leave in large numbers. I walked into the Maha Devale compound to talk to the fire-walkers resting in the area. I asked the usual questions about their background and what they felt during their fire-walk. They all said they felt good.
One fire-walker drew my attention. He wore a small cross round his neck. The cross had a tiny figure of the Christ. I asked what it was like to be a Christian fire-walker. He said he was a Buddhist. Then why wear the cross, a Christian symbol, particularly during fire-walking? He said he visited Christian places of worship quite often. In his experience his requests for help were promptly granted by God and the saints. His theory was that Christian God and the saints want to attract non-Christians to the churches. When they come, God and the saints readily grant favors. God and the Saints are not so prompt when Christians ask for favors because they take it for granted that Christians would always come even if favors are not granted. It is the same thing with the Buddhist and Hindu gods. They don't care for Buddhists and Hindus and delay granting favors or even ignore Buddhists and Hindus. But when
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Christians come they are ready to grant favors. So he takes the advantage of the situation and goes to churches and prays for help and enjoys the favors. He comes to Kataragama because of habit and his faith. Kataragama Deiyo also has granted some favors and he is thankful. −
By midday, relatively few remained in Kataragama. These constituted the hard core of the Kataragama cult, the créme de la créme among the devotees. They were mostly Snhala but a considerable number of east coast Tamils also lingered about. They waited for the final ritual of the 2003 festive season, the diyakapuma.
August 14th 2003 Diyakapuma
My friend Rajan and I met early in the morning and walked to the bazaar. After a glass of milk tea, we were on our way to the river. The river was calmer than usual. Most of the makeshift shops on the south bank were already gone and there was much less bustle. People walked about nonchalantly. Majority of the pilgrims had already left after the fire-walking ceremony. Only a few that considered today's ritual, diyakapuma, as an all-important ceremonial remained. It was still six thirty in the morning.
We walked along the south shore. The kavadi shops were being dismantled. There was time for pilgrims' personal rituals until last night. Now all that was over. Clients began to disappear after the fire-walking and there was no need to be in Kataragama any longer. I went by the Dutugamunu Kavadi Sangamaya. The owners and workers were packing their wares. The musicians have gone leaving behind the slightly crazy mute drummer. He sat on a broken box by the water's edge and played a tavil drum, oblivious to whatever was happening around him. His face was a picture of complete absorption in the drumbeat.
Across the river, several women bathed. Soon a large number of policemen - I counted twenty five but I might have missed some - came to the spot and waited, chatting, and looking around. Some had rolled their trouser-legs indicating they were ready to get in
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the water. Some carried an official baton or a sturdy stick. No one. seemed to pay attention to the police presence.
We walked up the south shore. The water level was high. The irrigation authorities had released more water for today's ritual. Beyond the kavadi shops, the river was relatively cleaner and was quite attractive still further up. We hopped over the mesh of giant roots that the grand kumbuk trees stood on, roots without which we would have had to step into the mud in the shore. Round the bend, the atmosphere changed dramatically. Both shores of the river were cleaned up. The water was clear and moved languidly. Kataragama ritual authorities had constructed in the river close to the north bank a vaguely square-shaped foundation out of sand, and on that a vaguely cubical hut with a roof made of madan branches. It resembled the kola pandalama of the Maha Devale, and was reminiscent of the Tamil story of how a man carried an elderly Muruga across the swollen river and made him a hut out of madan branches. The walls of this hut were made of yesteryear's curtains from the Maha Devale. They all carried almost identical icons of Muruga with his two wives Valli and Teivayanai. The brightly colored images of the deity, whom Ratna Navaratnam called the 'effulgent lord, were basking in the morning sun that seeped through the foliage, and their reflections on the mild ripples in the unhurried river, dark in the kumbuk shade, glowed like so many millions of jewels, rendering the butterfly symmetry between the images and their reflections into a splendid composition. In a short while the diyakapuma of Kataragama would occur inside this improbable shed in which grandeur fused with utter simplicity. Beyond this shed, on both shores, many policemen lurked around. All had rolled up their trouser-legs to stand in the water. Some carried batons and sticks. They were guarding the shed. No one was allowed to come anywhere near it. Ritually, a polluted person upstream from the shed would pollute the water, ruin the ritual, causing Kanda Kumara's blistering wrath to rain on everyone. The policemen drove away waving their rods the various
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worshippers who wanted to be within the sacred arena. I had to get special permission from a senior officer to approach the shed.
By seven o'clock, a small crowd, perhaps about one hundred, had gathered downstream where the kavadi shops were. By seven fifteen, it had grown to about three hundred. The formerly dispersed people were now in groups, huddled together and gazing in the direction of the shed. Ten minutes later the crowd had come closer and grown ten deep. The police at that end got in the water and created a human fence to prevent the crowd from getting any closer. By seven thirty, this grew into an awesome wall of haro harahing devotees. They had inched their way forward to a position from where they could clearly see the ritual chamber. About ten feet ahead of then, almost in the middle of the river, was a bhikkhu. That surprised me. What was, of all people, a bhikkhu doing there?
There are various theories about diyakapuma. As a Sri Lankan institution, it occurs in every major temple of a god. On all those occasions, the ritual follows a common procedure. In a specific period, in a series of nightly, and towards the end of the ritual period, daily and nightly processions, the deity's insignia are carried with great pomp in an ornate casket on an elephant on a specific route in the community in which the temple exists. In the morning after the last nightly procession, when an astrologically determined auspicious constellation (suba nakata) dawns, a simplified morning procession carrying the deity's insignia and a golden Sword proceeds from the temple to a ford or to the ocean. There, at an auspicious moment, the priest gets in the water, draws with the tip of a ritual sword a circle in the flowing water and parts the water within the circle with a single blow from the Sword, and quickly collects the parted water into a pot. It is firmly believed that this moment is so powerful, encircled and cut-water in the stream remains parted during the moment. The power of this improbable aquatic drama is such that only a designated priest, who had observed penances for a specific period and stayed unpolluted in every way, could perform the water cutting and withstand the awesome forces that
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it unleashes. They are so potent, if the priest who saw spectacle of parted water even glances at another person immediately after the act it could be catastrophic to the person seen. Therefore, the priest covers his head with a cloth and stays that way until the appropriate rituals are performed to neutralize the dangerous impact of his glance.
The meaning of this act has been variously and vaguely defined. The ritual is performed with such awe and secrecy, nothing about it is divulged to the public. When Charles Pridham and others investigated this ritual in Kandy in the early nineteenth century, the practitioners refused to disclose the reasons for the ritual and the meanings of various ritual acts and objects.” Later, Charles Godakumbure opined from an early anthropological angle that water cutting is a rain making magic, and therefore a fertility ritual.” Certainly, a belief exists that it rains after the water cutting ritual. Godakumbure's explanation of the practitioners' refusal to explain is that they did not know anything about it to explain. They had just followed the tradition and mechanically performed it as a magical act. Surprisingly, today, the practitioners of the ritual define it the way Godakumbure did, for public consumption. Gananath Obeyesekere examined the diyakapuma rituals associated with the cult of the goddess Pattini as well as in Kataragama. In the Pattini cult, during the ritual, the practitioners sing the story of the legendary King Gajabahu (Tamil: Kacapahu) who is supposed to have brought the cult to Sri Lanka. The legend has it that a Chola king invaded Lanka and took away, among other things, twelve thousand Sinhala men, and used them as slaves in the construction of a dam across the river Kaveri. Gajabahu or Kachapahu went to India, defeated the Chola king, freed the Sinhala slaves, and brought them back together with twelve thousand Tamil slaves and the anklets of the goddess Pattini. In this endeavor, a giant warrior named Nila assisted him. On their way from Lanka, they had to cross the ocean between Sri Lanka and the tip of South India. Nila parted the sea with a blow from his massive club, and
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the king and his army safely walked over to India. The song is abeut the parting of the sea and appropriation of the goddess' anklets. The powerful parting of the waters is the significant metaphor for water cutting. However, this is also not an explanation of the ritual act but a metaphor for talking about it, for, the ritual could be older than the myth.”
Contemporary writers invoke these stories even in the contexts of Kataragamadiyakapuma. Yet, the practitioners are silent about it. Among other theories is the notion of diyakeli.'
It means playing in water or water sports. Diyakeli is an ancient pan-South Asian cultural activity associated with the royalty but also found in the popular culture. The annual celebrations involved a ritualized madhupanotsava or celebratory inebriation with liquors. This was followed by a madanotsava - celebratory sexual intercourse. These two may be combined with uyankeli or playing in the forest, and dadakeli-hunting. These activities tended to be exclusive to various individuals and groups. In the public sphere, these exclusive activities may include joining the socially inclusive Sanakeli or carnivals. All these, celebrated singly or in various combinations, culminate in the diyakeli or the water sports. These are remarkably absent in the Sinhaladiyakapuma ritual which is a strictly religious and ritually highly sensitive and dangerous activity whereas the diyakeli is a celebration in the secular life which may or may not be related to ritual purification. The diyakapuma in Kataragama has been followed by a diyakeli at least from the eighteenth century, and most probably many centuries before that. The 1765 Dutch report referred to in earlier sections and chapters states that water cutting occurred together with water sports. Still, in Kataragama, diyakapuma is not the same as diyakeli. The latter is only a trope to the former, depending on one's perspective.
The Tamil Hindu tradition that gained prominence in Kataragama in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries first held that the diyakapuma was a purification ritual intimately associated with the Maha Perahara that they funded generously and celebrated with great pomp. For them, as we have already
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found out in an earlier section, the Maha Perahara had to go to the Kiri Vehera that they defined as Suran Kottan, the fortress of Sura Padman, the embodiment of evil and Muruga's archenemy, to commemorate Muruga's triumphal march to this spot and slaying of Sura Padman. The killing involved death pollution. Therefore, the next thing to do was to purify the god. Hence the significance of diyakapuma,
The Hindu ritual was about taking the image of the god to the sacred river and bathing it. This they believed was what the kapuralas did. There was no image of the god but an embodiment of his presence in the yantra that Teivayanaiamman gave to Kalyanagiri, which he deposited in the Maha Devale. It is inscribed on a gold plate, as a pair of intersecting equilateral triangles with the letters Om, Sa, Ra, Va, Na, Bha, and Va, one in each of the six triangles that the intersection produced, with Om located at the center. There is no way to check the validity of this theory as the kapuralas and the ritual administrators such as the Basnayaka Nilame have sworn never to divulge what is in and what happens within the vadasitina maligava or the sanctum sanctorum of the Maha Devale. In any case, Tamil Hindu devotees believed that this yantra was taken in the perahara, and washed during the diyakapuma. The cutting of the water with a sword is merely a prelude to this grand act of purifying the divine image.
This theory is based on a pan Hindu ritual called tirtham, and Hindu Tamils call tirtham aduthal or bathing the deity - any deity - at a ford - any ford. This ritual is often domesticated by bathing the images of deities within the temple premises by pouring water on them. Hindu Tamils are just as much oblivious about the Vedic theory that Godakumbura presented as the Buddhist Sinhalas are. While the Sinhalas actually cut the water in the river as the principal ritual the Tamils ignore it as an unnecessary, even superstitious, activity. This renders 'water cutting a uniquely Buddhist Sinhala ritual. Thus far I have not heard of its existence anywhere else in the subcontinent. If, someday, someone discovers its sub-continental counterpart the discovery might lead to some
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interesting and challenging further discoveries about the ethnology and cultural history of the region.
In any event, the Hindu Tamils later supplemented the purification theory with another one. Interestingly, the supplement wound up superceeding the original. Let me present Arumugam Rasaiah, a Muruga theologian and Kataragama theoretician, whom we encountered many times this far, in his own words:
Water Cutting Ceremony
The water cutting ceremony brings the two weeks intricate and very interesting ritualistic activities to an end. The significance of the water cutting ceremony symbolizes the cutting of the knots of worldly attachments the pilgrims have in their hearts. When the knots are cut asunder, the pilgrims are able to enjoy the divine bliss internally without any disturbance.
This ceremony is performed in an auspicious time especially in the morning, fixed according to astrology. No morning puja is performed on this day and absolute silence prevails all over in the area. The pilgrims throng on both banks of Menik Ganga especially in the area where the actual water cutting ceremony takes place.
A temporary hut made of jungle sticks and leaves is erected at that spot with all sides and roof covered leaving only a small entrance for the deity, the chief Kapurala and his assistants and the Basnayake Nilame to enter in.
At the auspicious time, Lord Murugan comes out of the shrine along with the chief Kapurala in the same fashion as usual. The Lord and the chief Kapurala gets into the Kavady especially made and covered on all sides with Thalapotha palm leaves.
Two Kapuralas, one in front and the other in the rear, carry the Kavady on their shoulders. The Kavady is surrounded and accompanied by the Basnayake Nilame, Kapuralas, Priests, attendants and the elephants. Only the
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tom tom beaters sound their drums so faintly as to be heard only within this circle. No other music or any dances take place. The high priest of the Maha Ganapathy temple and his assistants go in front of the kavady with a camphor torch which is kept burning until the ceremony is over. The pilgrims are not allowed to come near, but enthusiastic devotees follow at a distance. The Kavady is taken round the inner courtyard and then along the usual route to the goddess Valli Amman temple on a quick march speed. All those who accompany the Lord Murugan Kavady are expected to wear turbans on the head by wrapping a red cloth.
As soon as the Lord Murugan Kavady reaches the goddess Valli Amman temple, the chief Kapurala goes in with the Lord into the shrine room by raising the bottom of the curtain. All movements take place under a big cloth cover. The chief Kapurala comes out soon, allowing the Lord to be inside the shrine room in the company of his beloved Valli for sometime. Here, the Muthulinga Swamy temple high priest joins the high priest of the Maha Ganapathy temple with a camphor torch. Both of them stand, each on either side with the usual torch bearers. They escort Lord Murugan and the goddess Valli on their way for the holy bath in the Menik Ganga.
On a call from the Lord, the chief Kapurala rushes into the shrine room and comes back with Lord Murugan and goddess Valli covered and gets into the Kavady.
The Kavady is carried to the Menik Ganga straight away in the usual fashion in a very quick march speed. The area is crowded with thousands of devotees who piously pronounce the holy word "Arro Harra” and "Shadu Shadu Shadu.” The Menik Ganga flows high on this occasion.
Lord Murugan and Vally Kavady and the few within the circle surrounded by the elephants, get into the Menik Ganga, walk upstream (against the flow) for about quarter of a mile to reach the spot where the hut is erected for the
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holy bath. The atmospheric condition there at the time is very pleasant and enjoyable. The police who are guardians of law and order come there without their decorations and are in a helpless position to control the crowd. Anyhow the "Lord Murugan Valli Kavadi” is taken into the specially constructed hut.
The Basnayake Nilame who too goes inside the hut with the Lord and Goddess Valli and Chief Kapurala, comes out of the hut with a well polished brass pot in hand. He washes the pot and dips it in the Ganga and collects the water and carried it on his shoulders into the hut. No one is allowed to go or remain upstream of the hut.
The holy bath ceremony of the Lord and his beloved goddess Valli is performed inside the hut without being seen by other people. A Pooja takes place there in silence. The crowd of devotees become very enthusiastic seized with the current of divine power, try to rush in without fearing even the elephants which guard the spot surrounding it.
Soon the Kavady is brought out of the hut, carried in the usual fashion. Every one tries his best to dip in the Menik Ganga at least once. This becomes impossible for many of the crowd.
Now, the Lord Murugan, and Goddess Valli Kavady goes down stream and reaches the Goddess Valli Amman temple. Lord Murugan and goddess Valli go into the shrine room accompanied by the Kapurala and the Basnayake Nilame. Within a few minutes, the Basnayake Nilame followed by the Chief Kapurala and his assistants come out of the curtain with the wet clothes of Lord Murugan and his beloved consort Valli and wrings out the water in them to fall on the heads of the devotees who piously swallow some of it for self purification.
The holy water is collected by the devotees and taken home with the holy ash to distribute to their relations and to preserve as medicine. (A panacea for all ills).
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Immediately after the water cutting ceremony is over, most of the pilgrims go home.
From the time of returning to Goddess Valli Amman temple, the Lord is left to remain with Goddess Valli in the shrine room for some hours.
By about 1.00 p.m., the Lord gives a divine call. Then the Basnayake Nilame, the chief Kapurala, his assistants, torch bearers, drummers and a small number of devotees gather at Goddess Valli Amman temple. The lord leaves the Goddess Valli Amman temple and returns in the Kavady very quietly covered in the usual way, escorted only by the elephant which carried him during the procession. The drummer beats the drum at a very low pitch. The Lord gets into his shrine room. As soon as the Lord gets in, the Alaththi Ammas who are ready by now do the Allaththi Pooja.
A special pooja is performed only to the Lord. The Chief Kapurala blesses all and distributes special prasatham (holy food). Thus ends the Esala Festivals. Several things stand out in the above description. Mr. Rasaiah never used the Tamil term for the ritual. He only used the English terms 'water cutting and "holy bath ceremony.’ This is unusual because, throughout his highly informative monograph, he always gave the Tamil ritual nomenclature. Further, Ratna Navaratnam, in her 'Kartikeya: the divine child, never gave a Tamil term for the ritual. She used the Sinhala term diyakapuma and its English translation 'water cutting. I found from my companion Velupillai, a non-specialist, that the Tamils call it tirtham aduthal. Tirtham is a well-known standard Sanskrit/Tamil term for ford. Why Rasaiah and Navaratnam failed to produce it is intriguing.
On the other hand, although Rasaiah uses the term 'water cutting, he never discusses what it means in ritual terms. Many colonial administrators, who could not understand any native subjectivities surrounding the ritual, nonetheless found out about the principal line of ritual action involved in the ceremony: the drawing of a circle in the flowing water and cutting it in half using
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a golden ritual sword. It is unlikely that this information was unavailable to Rasaiah. Instead, he declares, "The significance of the water cutting ceremony symbolizes the cutting of the knots of worldly attachments the pilgrims have in their hearts. When the knots are cut asunder, the pilgrims are able to enjoy the divine bliss internally without any disturbance.” Clearly, he dismisses the Sinhala Buddhist line of action by dissolving it in a metaphysical formulation. I think he had trouble reconciling his cultural belief with the Buddhist Sinhala cultural belief.
He also ignores the earlier Hindu theory as he does not mention the connection between water cutting and the Suran Kottan. He presents the Kiri Vehera, as "one of the sixteen holy places visited by Lord Buddha in Sri Lanka, as he discusses the various sacred places in Kataragama, but also calls it the Sooran Kottai.*o In his description of the Maha Perahara he discusses the march to the Kiri Vehera. There, too, he parenthetically calls it Sooran Kottai." Yet, he does not connect it with the water cutting ceremony.
The confusion becomes even more pronounced as he completely ignores the early Hindu Tamil theory of the Maha Perahara which, as we found earlier, conflicted with the Buddhist Sinhala theory of it. This theory had become the officially acknowledged theory in the early twentieth century, as Price, the Government Agent of Uva, who supervised the Kataragama festivities, subtly enforced it by coaxing the Basnayaka Nilame to give in to the Tamil ritual experts who insisted on their theory and procedures for the Maha Perahara. At that time the Buddhists, reduced to a minority economically dependant on Hindu devotion and generosity, although reluctantly, gave in to Hindu demands and held the diyakapuma the morning after the Maha Perahara by acceding to the Hindu need to purify the deity. But now, Rasaiah does not even discuss this Hindu theory. For him, as far as what he has written informs us, the visit to the Kiri Vehera is a Buddhist visit in which the Hindus can participate as the Buddha is, after all, an avatar of Perumal, and is therefore called Putta Perumal.
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But this is even more confusing as he does not omit other Buddhist Sinhala aspects of the perahara. He takes the activities of the bhikkhus from Kiri Vehera for granted: “The blessings of the Triple Gem are bestowed on the Devotees by the Buddhist monks of Kiri Vihare who come to Lord Murugan temple in time for this purpose and start chanting pirith...'
His text has many more such instances that indicate a transformation in the ideology of the rituals in Kataragama. This transformation in turn indicates the transformations of the hegemonies and the conditions under which such transformations occurred. These transformations were transactional - economic, ideological, and political. As I discussed earlier the Hindus appeared to have gained some authority during the late Nayakkar era. The Sinhalas withdrew from Kataragama since 1818. But the Tamil Hindus, particularly from the east coast, continued to come to Kataragama during the festive season. Soon thereafter, from 1830 onwards, as the colonial government introduced Hindu plantation laborers from South India and, as they flocked to Kataragama, the Sinhala Buddhist ritual practices began to take more and more Hindu definitions. Concurrently, Kataragama economy became increasingly dependent on Hindu patronage. By the end of the century, the Hindus had established their ideological authority and, as discussed earlier, imposed their ritual calendar. The perahara became the nuptial visitation of Valliby Muruga and water-cutting became the purification of the deity's death pollution that occurred at Suran Kottan — the Buddhist Kiri Vehera. As the Dutch report of 1765 does not mention a visit to Kiri Vehera during the final procession I am compelled to consider this visit as a Hindu development that re-defined the Kiri Vehera and linked it with Muruga's killing of theasuras and ritual bathing and water sports. The Hindu influence was so strong by the late nineteenth century Ponnambalam Arunachalam claimed Kataragama as a Hindu institution and attempted inventing a myth to justify the claim. Later, as we found out in the previous chapter, the Jaffna scholar Mudaliyar Rasanayagam rejected the Colombo Seven scholar
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Arunachalam's theory and forwarded his own by redefining the yalpana vaipava malai. In the 1980s, Arumugam Rasaiah reconsiders all the Hindu claims and runs a two-faced commentary accommodating Buddhist Sinhala claims in, what Hanson might call, an economy of stances.'
But this hegemony lasted until about 1930s, when the Kataragama traditional administration reasserted its authority and attempted to Sinhala-Buddhicize it. The construction of the Abhinavaramaya by Baris Appu kapurala in 1923 is an early signal of this transition. S. C. Fernando's report on the 1937 festival, discussed in the previous chapter, clearly shows the return of the Sinhala Buddhists. By 1940s the power balance was being tipped in Sinhala Buddhist favor. We examined earlier the roles of disciples of Anagarika Dharmapala, the leading figure of the Sinhala Buddhist movement, who took over the fire-walking ritual while Ratmalane Siddhartha took over the Vadahiti Kanda. The riots in 1958 were the final episode in this transition of ideological and political hegemony in Kataragama.
Rasiah wrote his account in 1980 or thereabouts. From his work it is clear that the Hindus have developed a set of compromises. The definition of the last perahara is withdrawn and Kiri Vehera is given a Buddhist definition with Hindu interests only parenthetically introduced. The involvement of the Kiri Vehera bhikkhus as the initiators is accepted but the true beginning is subtly introduced with the description of the visit to Gana Devale. This also suggests the Hindu acceptance of the involvement of seth pirit at the commencement of the fire-walking ceremony. However, the Hindus retain the definition of the climactic event in the ritual cycle - the water-cutting. The Sinhala Buddhist 'watercutting is ignored and the bathing of the deities after their nuptial nights is introduced and emphasized with the description of the wringing of the wet clothes and sprinkling of the water on the deities as the culmination of the ritual cycle. Rasaiah's work indicates the Tamil Hindu spirit of compromise.
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This is reciprocated by the Sinhala Buddhists. They had not just taken over the control of fire-walking and the Vadahiti Kanda. They retained the Tamil Hindu elements in the Maha Devale activities. The processions are about the sacred nuptials. Valli is a Vadda girl. The god is Kandasami. Kavadi dancing and fire-walking are enthusiastically retained and supported. So is the final night's visit to Kiri Vehera albeit under a Buddhist definition. Tamil Hindus need not accept the Buddhist definition. They could go ahead with their own and still participate in the ritual with their own notions about the spirit of the ritual. The traditional watercutting is, in effect, subsumed under the salu sedima, the Sinhala Buddhist definition of the Hindu bathing of the deities, and the potency of its products is reverentially accepted.
More generally, the ritual ideologies and practices in Kataragama have been flexible and dynamic, transforming as the circumstances changed, freely borrowing and assimilating across cultural boundaries. While the rest of the Sri Lankan society is groping in the dark to find Solutions to linguistic issues Kataragama transcended linguistic politics and achieved a compromise in the sacred domain, within its ideological and normative frameworks. This is multiculturalism at its best.
By seven forty, the crowd had become a very large mass of animated people. Around that time, there was some excitement further down the river. I saw in a cloud of smoke the tips of the palm leaves of the kavadi that Rasiah discussed. Gradually the palm leaf enclosure began to move forward amid a group of ritual experts including the kapuralas, Basnayaka Nilame (now in plain clothes), the swamis of the Teivayanaiamman kovil, Gana Devale and Muthulingaswami kovil, and various assistants including the drummer with a Sinhala davul drum. Except for a few obviously Hindu and Sinhala Buddhist individuals whose Hindu Tamilness or Buddhist Sinhalaness was visible in their attire, the others were indistinguishable from one another. They wore white sarongs and were either bare-bodied or in white shirts or kurtas. They wore white or red turbans. Perhaps another sign of distinction was the
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orange or red wristbands that the Hindus wore and the white pirit aule that some Sinhala Buddhists wore. But this distinction was not conclusive. Nor did a distinction seem to matter. They appeared to function as an organic whole, mutually participating in three theoretically easily distinguishable activities that, in the present context, had merged with each other.
The police had a hard time controlling the crowd but the crowd complied with the police requests to keep their distance. In the rush, the bhikkhu managed to wiggle his way forward. Soon I lost sight of him as what Rasaiah called the "Lord Murugan Goddess Valli Amman Kavadi' marched towards us very rapidly.
The Kavadi reminded me of the 1765 Dutch report where it is described as follows:
But the last time the procession lasts longer and even till morning, when the gold sword of the elephant is taken off and he as well as the other elephants are driven away; and a palankeen with a crooked bamboo is brought, very finely adorned with all sorts of valuable things, hung with a very rich cloth. In this is laid the said gold sword, but what it contains more one cannot know. And the palankeen is afterwards carried by two Kappoewas to a shallow river which is situated at one mile distance from the temple, in great procession, and there it is thrown into the water, whilst one of the Kappoerales, by the name of Diyekappenerale, (which signifies one who can cleave or cut the water through) steps to, and taking the Sword by hand, draws it from the scabbard and therewith gives a blow in the water, shewing thereby that the water in a miraculous manner in its quickest stream, stands still for a moment. There are very few that do not believe this false miracle; but those that doubt in it some degree say that all the people when the Palankeen is brought in the water go at once in the water to bathe even without taking off their clothes, and that they surround so that the palankeen in the middle of the shallow water, that thereby
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the course of the water in the center of the circle made by the people, is stopped.' In appearance it was a far cry from the palankeen that was 'very finely adorned with all sorts of valuable things, hung with a very rich cloth.' And the elephant was conspicuously absent. Clearly, between then and now another transformation had occurred, this time in the material culture of the ritual. Instead of the Sinhala Buddhist preferences, the Tamil Hindu preferences were expressed.
The Kavadi approached the western side of the shed where the curtains were hung loose so that the kapurala carrying the sacred objects and the Basnayaka Nilame could enter it without being seen by anyone. I could not see anything going on except that the Kavadi was brought right next to the shed and all those who accompanied the Kavadi stood around the entrance. Within seconds, the palm leaves were placed to cover the entrance. In a few more seconds, I saw the palm leaves encircling the kapurala. In those few seconds the ritual was completed. In the meantime severalkapuralas went towards the crowd and tried to open a path for the procession to return to the Valliamma devale.
As the procession with the palm leaf Kavadijust managed to go about ten meters towards the south bank and move very quickly away from the venue of the ritual, the crowd rushed in with a tremendous force. The first to lunge at the shed were the policemen who stayed close by. They grabbed the painted icons of the god, now twice sacred as they were exposed to the great power of the water cutting ritual as well. They pulled the curtains away in abandon while the crowd was fast approaching. The uniforms, ritual costumes, the batons, Sticks all ceased to mean anything at all. Within a minute, the whole place was one solid clawing, clutching, grabbing, pulling, elbowing, pushing, writhing, wriggling mass of people. All social distinctions vanished in the commotion. Men, women, children, rich, poor and destitute, Tamil, Sinhala, Hindu, Buddhist - who could tell any of that as these categories collapsed into the mass of people who had become oblivious to the
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world in which these things matter. If, in a Durkheimian sense, there is a difference between the sacred and the profane, this moment dramatized the total elimination of the profane. Those people had only one thing in their minds: grab a mouthful of water from that spot, a piece of the shed - a picture, a twig, a pole, even a leaf. Someone said that some people who managed to lunge into the centerprostrated and ate the sand in the river. Those who managed to grab a piece from the shed held on to it tightly and looked around with triumphant grins on their faces. The rest of the world ceased to exist. At that moment there was the residue of the god and the goddess clinging to everything that became exposed to them and that residual sanctity was everyone's focus. In the rush, over the milling crowd, I saw that bhikkhu standing on the south bank, his mouth gaping and jaws hanging loose, totally blown away by what he was witnessing, and perhaps like me, gazing at the unbelievable scene of collective effervescence, and enchanted by it. If there is anything that deserved to be called collective effervescence this was it. If there is anything that comes within the notion of communitas, this was it.'
Further downstream, the Kavadi, bobbing on the shoulders of the ritual officials, moved away quickly, turned left, climbed the north bank and went out of sight. Perhaps the weakest or the tardiest in the group of devotees were the last to get to the spot to collect the remaining bits of the shed for the shed was all but gone. Clearly, there was a mad rush to get at the spot and to collect a piece of the shed. However, there was no fighting, any injuries, or any other unpleasantness. They aggressively competed without harming anyone. That, I thought, stood in direct contrast to the social world in Sri Lanka where aggressive competitiveness is also extremely destructive, can even be lethal.
The devotees following the Kavadi spent time in the water, dipping in it and throwing it at companions. There was a conspicuous display of gaiety and ecstatic gestures. It was a happy crowd that had abandoned all concerns outside the ritual. As they walked down, some embraced others, and some, who had gone
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ashore earlier and found tinnoru, threw it at those who were still in the water creating a cloudy misty atmosphere. Maybe the Indian Holi festival, now shown on the television, is having an impact on Kataragama.
The Valliamma devale was packed with excited and ecstatic devotees. As Rasaiah states, the kapurala had taken the sacred objects inside the shrine room and pujas were being held outside. Frequent haro hara cries. Athami was quietly waiting outside with the tip of his trunk inside his mouth. Then the kapurala came out of the inner room with the deities' wet clothes, the haro harahing became louder into a frenzied noise, and the kapurala Wrung them and sprinkled the devotees who scrambled to swallow a drop of it. Then sacred water was distributed among the devotees. Those who collected it came out of the devale, triumphantly displaying them . in bottles that contained a pink liquid - holy water with a little vibhuti dissolved in it; nuptial gifts from the divine couple. People drank it, poured it on their heads, or hung onto it as if it was the most precious thing in their lives.
Whatever the other theories of the ritual, what existentially matters here, the lived meaning of the ritual, is in the purification of the deities after their nuptials, and purification of the devotees with the water polluted yet sanctified by purification of the deities. Rasaiah introduces this theme euphemistically in his description of the energy of the ritual act:
The holy bath ceremony of the Lord and his beloved goddess Valli is performed inside the hut without being seen by other people. A Pooja takes place there in silence. The crowd of devotees become very enthusiastic seized with the current of divine power, try to rush in without fearing even the elephants which guard the spot surrounding it. Within a few minutes, the Basnayake Nilame followed by the Chief Kapurala and his assistants come out of the curtain with the wet clothes of Lord Murugan and his beloved consort Valli and wrings out the water in them to fall on the heads of the devotees who piously swallow some of it for self purification.
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The holy water is collected by the devotees and taken home with the holy ash to distribute to their relations and to preserve as medicine. (A panacea for all ills).’
As Obeyesekere states, the ecstatic rush to play in the water in which the divine pollutants are dissolved and to ingest it is to vicariously participate in the consummation of the divine marriage.' Once the distribution of holy water ended, the crowd dispersed. The kapuralas and the Basnayake Nilame also left with other ritual officials and Athami. They would return to take the god back to the Maha Devale when the god communicates with them. That would be around one o'clock in the afternoon.
On the Nature of Pilgrimage
This scenario prompted me to think about what Durkheim called the religious community and Victor turner called the communitas, a liminoid assembly. They both focused on religious gatherings in undifferentiated or relatively less differentiated groups with a common identity. At the simplest known level, for Durkheim, this was the clan, the totemic group. For Turner, this group is relatively more differentiated. However, he developed his notion of communitas in Christian, particularly Catholic pilgrimage contexts. There, the degree of differentiation is less as all pilgrims belong to the same religious tradition. Or, as recent scholarship endeavors to show, Turner assumed as such.
Current pilgrimage studies criticize both Durkheimian and Turnerian paradigms. Durkheim's positivistic and functionalist model of religious gatherings truncates the nature of the pilgrimage to a context of social integration, an overcoming of the individual and economy centered profane by the altruistic, community centered sacred. Durkheim's intention was to show how the social structure is reaffirmed and strengthened, and individuals are integrated to the social structure through religious structures such as pilgrimages and religious gatherings.
Turner attempted to criticize this model of a social structure in equilibrium with various superstructures such as rituals
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functioning to sustain this equilibrium. A student of Max Gluckman, the founder of the conflict school, and influenced by Marxism, Turner showed that religious structures in fact reversed the social structures at times of social conflict and produced utopian structures that he termed communitas, the anti-structures. They are located in rituals, in the ritual phase that Arnold Van Gennep called marginality. Pilgrimage is a kinetic ritual, a ritual in motion, with a sacred destination where the anti-structure culminates in a utopian gathering of devotees. Turner explored the qualitative dimensions of the spontaneous communitas. Pilgrims, until they return to their communities, are in a state of marginality, betwixt and between the community that they left behind and the community that would receive them after the pilgrimage. The marginal existence is a liminal existence devoid of social identities. These liminoid persons experience the exhilarating presence of communitas as they meet other similar pilgrims. The encounter is spontaneous and unbound by the normative structures of the society. Thus released from the social structures and strictures they enjoy a utopian existence among like-minded companions where there is no 'othering or differentiation.
Implicit is a notion of a cyclical social change. Those who experience communitas would carry some of it back to their communities. Those who stay behind at the pilgrimage destinations gradually lose the collective fervor as they settle down to form communities of devotees. The initial spontaneous communitas, the anti-structure par-excellence, develops normative and ideological structures as it settles down as a community and as aspects of the social establishment of the pilgrimage site. It then gradually loses its spontaneity in social stasis and produces ruptures in time in its structured organization necessitating the development of antistructures through rituals. However, this cyclical character does not mean a return to status quo ante. The change that the antistructure introduced is permanent and new anti-structures lead the communities into the future, into new social structures in dialectical
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progression, perhaps, in a Hegelian sense, towards perfection that might never be achieved as long as human frailty remains.
Turner's seminal theory inspired many later researches outside the Durkheimian functionalist model and Marxism inspired Durkheimian research that found isomorphisms between the social structure and the religious structures that justified and reaffirmed the social structure. However, as John Eade and Michael Sallinow, Alan Morinis, and Simon Coleman and John Eade show, it produced its own theoretical ghetto as the research that followed focused on the communitas and its various permutations and could not move beyond.”
Research in the last three decades or so have focused on other aspects of pilgrimage. Of particular significance to this study are the work of Gananath Obeyesekere and Bryan Pfaffenberger on Kataragama, and D. Messerschmidt and J. Sharma, and Peter Van der Veer on north India.” These researchers found that in the contexts that they studied, while some features of the Durkheimian and Turnerian models were observable, many other aspects contradicted them.
For example, Pfaffenberger found that in pilgrimage sites social boundaries became firmer and rather than collapsing thereby poroducing potential for social conflict rather than social integration or anti-structures that negated conflict-ridden social structures. Further, he found that the pilgrims to Kataragama do not go there to be with a communitas as such but to address their private issues. This is in accordance with my observations as well. As discussed earlier, Obeyesekere found political conflicts among the devotees in Kataragama in contexts of fire-walking and Vadahiti Kanda. This is to say that pilgrimage sites are also contested sites and have complex structures of which the communitas is only a part. The political issues in the larger social structure that the pilgrims leave behind invade the sacred sites and influence the ritual proceedings in many subtle and not so subtle ways.
Another set of theories that influenced the anthropological studies of pilgrimage derives from the work of Mercea Eliade. Eliade
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developed a thesis that pilgrimage centers are sacred places, separate from the profane world that surrounds them. They function as axis mundi connecting the heaven and the earth, the divine and the human, timeless centers from where devotees could transcend the mundane and reach spiritual heights. This thesis had influenced Turner's paradigm as well. Turner found similar characteristics in pilgrimage centers where the communitas transcended the Society and merged with the sacred. However, later research found that while these features are extant sacred places in themselves do not complete the picture. For example sacred personages can completely mask places. A good examples is the case of Arunachala in Tamil Nadu where an ancient religious site on a hill that attracted great multitudes to worship a bhuta lingam of Siva lost its significance as a yogi established an ashram at the bottom of the hill and the news of his great yogic abilities and spiritual powers spread. Pilgrims abandoned the ancient sacred space which would admirably fit Eliade's model, and instead began to visit the yogi’s ashram. Today, the pilgrims who visit the site are not even aware of the ancient bhuta lingam. They only visit the late great yogi’s ashram.' Eade and Sallinow (Op.cit.); South Asians believe that the world is primarily constituted of five great elements that they call panca maha bhuta. These are water (apo), fire (tejo), vayo (air), earth (pathavi) and space or ether (akasa). Hindus believe that Siva manifested himself in five lingams each constituted of a particular bhuta. In Arunachala hill the lingam was fire. The early pilgrimages to Arunachala were to worship this lingam. But the yogi’s charisma and reputation completely masked it. Bharati (Op.cit.). Also see Stirrat (1991:2000) for Catholic contexts in Sri Lanka.
Another instance where the place is superceeded is when the pilgrims depend on a text to find the place. Texts determine where the places are rather than places having their own intrinsic significance. In such contexts,” the places can be moved around for various reasons such as politics, historiography, and or archaeology. The emergence of Sinhala Buddhist pilgrimages to the Buddhist sacred places in India after the orientalists and
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indologists described them in their publications is a good South Asian case in point. As I examined in Chapters One, Two, Three and Five this has occurred in places sacred to Skanda/Muruga worship as well. The north Indian events were relocated in Tamil Nadu and events in Tamil Nadu were relocated in Kataragama.
The traditional anthropological studies of pilgrimage focused on destinations, the sacred centers in Eliade. Although the Turners' work considered pilgrimage as a "kinetic ritual involving social and psychological transformations they, too, emphasized the pilgrimage centers. Irawatie Karve's study in India, Barbara Myerhoff's study of Huichol Indian pilgrimage in Central Mexico, Nancy Frey's study of the journey to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and Salnow's trip to Andean pilgrimage centers in South America are among the notable works where the journey itself and the various experiences and encounters therein receive attention. The focus on traveling introduces a variety of concerns such as identity, impact of globalization, multiculturalism, economics and politics among pilgrims. James Clifford found pilgrimage as a synechdoche for the modern world that is constantly on the move, where social and geographical displacement and rootlessness, rather than rooted existence as autonomous communities, and continually changing encounters and interactions are the norm.”
That complicates the theory of pilgrimage by bring it within a larger class of phenomena rather than a special case that does not represent the primary concerns of anthropology - the rooted community in all its complexity. This class is about mobility and may be broadly called 'travelling.' The new classification places pilgrims alongside other travellers such as in tourists, migrant workers, asylum seekers and refugees.
The paradigm of mobility includes tourism. Erik Cohen finds tourism similar to yet distinguishable from pilgrimage. The similarity is in the common desire to find authenticity. Pilgrims travel to discover authentic sacredness and authentic religiosity while “existential tourists' travel to discover cultural authenticity. However, they differ from one another as the pilgrims travel from
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a sociocultural periphery to a sociocultural center existential tourists travel the other way around. Presumably, the tourists' center is his home and he travels away from an inauthentic home to discover authenticity in cultural 'others' existing at his existential periphery or beyond. Cohen hastens to point out that this centripetal and centrifugal movement of the pilgrims and tourists respectively applies to formal pilgrimage centers as opposed to popular pilgrimage centers. I find this distinction rather problematical as the formal and popular distinction is rather meaningless at least in Sri Lankan and, generally, South Asian contexts for formal pilgrimage centers invariably become tourist attractions as an aspect of their globalization through economic incentives of tourism. Only the remote places of worship of purely local significance with no special attractions or historical significance seem to escape from becoming tourist attractions. Nonetheless, Cohen's comparison of existential, or what I may call, spiritual tourism with pilgrimage is useful for South Asian pilgrims often tend to be both, particularly in twentieth century urban middle class contexts. The case of migrant workers is interesting because it is a dual process. On the one hand, as among the Sri Lankan migrant workers who travel back and forth between Sri Lanka and various Middle Eastern countries, leaving the country as well as returning to the country involve a sense of a sacred journey. They take various financial risks to obtain jobs in the Middle East by dealing with highly unreliable agents, who frequently cheat them, idealizing their economic opportunities abroad. Their first trip abroad is thus a trip to idealized centers of opportunity. But, after arriving in these places and while working their they become homesick and begin to idealize Sri Lanka, the Motherland or the Fatherland, its wonderful food, grand stupas, enchanting greenery, familiar people and places and so on and long to return. Their return trip is a veritable pilgrimage.
This sacredness of the native country arising out of loneliness and nostalgia is shared by professionals and students as well. They, too, idealize the countries for which they hope to leave Sri Lanka.
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But after arrival, wherever they live, study or work they all suffer pangs of loneliness, homesickness and nostalgia. They make various arrangements to return. Upon arrival, as soon as the plane lands and they set foot on the ground, some, overcome by emotion, breakdown and weep. But their stay in Sri Lanka is unstable as they have now discovered merits in their newfound lands. Their social relations in Sri Lanka have weakened and their families, relatives, friends and acquaintances have learned to do without them. The Third World conditions in Sri Lanka soon frustrate them and then they long to return to thir new countries. Thus they live within a two-way movement between two contrasting ideals and identities, in a permanent state of social marginality. They have become a part of the globally mobile community.
The asylum seekers and refugees also compare with the above as they, too, are thrown into States of marginality and endless mobility by political and economic circumstances in their native countries.
Another type of traveling renders the semantics of pilgrimage even more complex. This is the kinds of pilgrimages that certain groups make to special events that are not strictly religious in character. The traveling to political rallies that address emerging Social issues, traveling to visit the tombs and monuments of political leaders, traveling to participate in cultural events in which the participants are emotionally involved, and traveling to visit the tombs and monuments of culture heros constitute this special type of pilgrimage and examples abound world over."
But, traveling in the pilgrim mode is complex than movement from one geographical location to another through geographical and Social spaces and time, because, as Morinis points out, in addition to the external traveling, there can be internal traveling as well, as in Hindu and Sufi pilgrimages that include inner pilgrimages to sacred spots in the mind and the body."
An excellent example of such inner traveling is in Kundalini yoga where the yogi moves up the system of cakras at specific points up the Sushumna, a metaphysical path aligned with the spinal cord
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between the end of the vertebral column and the tip of the cranium. At the culmination of the yoga the soul leaves the body through a miniscule hole called brahma randhra at the tip of the cranium. The Jains of the Terapantha sect recently invented a meditation technique called Preksha Dhyan where the soul of the meditator travels up and down the sushumna. In Buddhist meditation on disgust (pilikul bhavana) there is what may be called a 'negative pilgrimage'in which the meditator visits all the disgusting features of the body. Tibetan Buddhists believe that the dying person's life may leave from any of the nine bodily apertures - two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, mouth, urinary or sexual organ or anus. But the departure through the brahma randhra alone can cause the achievement of nirvana. Which aperture is chosen is ultimately . determined by one's karma.
Additionally, there is also meta-travelling in Indian religions. As a generic South Asian concept the Sansara or the never cycles of birth, death and rebirth are also a cosmic path in which all humans travel. Even the cosmos, the loka, is believed to travel in cycles of time called the kalpas.
Morinis compares the semantics of the term tirtha that we examined in Chapter Two. Tirtha means a ford, a pilgrimage destination, a teacher, wife, parents, and virtues such as truth and honesty. All these semantic fields lie within the larger inclusive concepts of rta and dharma, and as such are religious in character. All of them are sacred points that every Hindu visits during his journey through the Sansara.
Sri Lanka is a highly differentiated but hardly modern Society. It is primarily segmented into endogamous ethnic groups, and these ethnic groups are internally differentiated into castes, classes, regional groups, religious groups, life-style groups, cultural groups, professional groups, and political parties. The pilgrims at Kataragama represent all these different groups that are often antagonistic. It is therefore completely different from the groups that Durkheim and Turner examined. Yet, these pilgrims maintain a very cordial atmosphere that, even the clashes between the temple
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administration and Hindu ritual experts and politicians a century ago, could not disturb. This amity among the pilgrims is sustained not by the rules of clan membership, as Durkheim theorized. Comparatively, it is easier for collective effervescence to occur involving all in the society if they have fewer distinctions to make. Turner's examples from the Christian religious gatherings at pilgrimage centers are more complex involving several ethnic groups that are anatagonistic, as in Mexico. There, as he discusses, syncretic beliefs and common religious faith in Catholicism cut across ethnic, cultural, class, and political divisions. Given the nature of Sri Lanka's social segmentation what keeps these pilgrims together?
I speculate that the primary cause of this amity is the strong normative regime that regulates pilgrim behavior. This regime is not spelled out by anyone, or in a document of any sort. It is in the oral tradition. One learns to perform a pilgrimage from previous pilgrims. One of the first things that the novice learns is the basics of ritual conduct for pilgrimage is a ritual. One is caught up in the ritual normative regime even before one embarks on the pilgrimage. In other words, the pilgrimage begins the moment one decides to engage in one. From that moment onwards, one's life is ritualized. He/She observes all the taboos, performs all the necessary qualifying and enhancing religious acts, and prepares for the pilgrimage. As I discussed in Chapter One, the second the decision is made Kataragama comes home, or to put it in another way, she comes under the jurisdiction of Kataragama normative regime. How deeply a pilgrim becomes involved in this regime depends on the individual and the extent of her devotion to the deity. Those who are completely absorbed in the cult, the core communitas in Kataragama, take Kataragama with them, in their consciousness. The phenomenology of being a core cult member is that Kataragama constantly pervades his or her consciousness. Even when one is not a core cult member but only an occasional pilgrim, the decision to make the pilgrimage brings the rules of Kataragama into the consciousness thus controlling her conscience, compelling her to act in accordance with the norms of the pilgrimage.
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One of the principal norms is equality among the devotees irrespective of the social distinctions. What matters is that another devotee and her devotion are as important as one's own. A different kind of kinship develops under these circumstances, a different kind of belonging that is more than camaraderie, where one meets like-minded others, where one can communicate by meaningful words and deeds that are unusual in the everyday Society. Among these individuals, social relations are highly controlled by the affectively and emotionally strongly significant normative regime of Kataragama.
The majority of the Sinhala Buddhist pilgrims come to Kataragama in a light-hearted manner. Their pilgrimage is partly ritual oriented and partly a pleasure trip - vinodeta or for fun, as Obeyesekere found out. Such pilgrims play only marginal roles in Kataragama rituals. They performe personal rituals and quickly depart. Yet, while they are in Kataragamatheir conduct is governed by the rules of conduct that Kataragama ritualism rather than the law of the land imposes.
The diyakapuma ritual is the culminating line of action in this regime. All ritual procedures are diligently followed. Immediately after the ritual, the orderly community becomes chaotic, but only in appearance. The rush to possess, literally, a piece of the action seems to be chaotic but it is also mandated and highly controlled. The devotees are required to be effervescent and energetic in their expressions of bhakti. But this effervescence that abandons the everyday norms of control occurs within the Kataragama normative regime where its basic principals, that all devotees are equal and no devotee should harm another, must be observed. Chaos occurs under these controlling conditions. The divided, compartmentalized, antagonistic structures of everyday Society collapse and its opposite, as Turner would put it, an antistructure, prevails. Incidentally, this was one of the features of Kataragama pilgrim behavior, in ecstasy and in general conduct, that the colonial administrators were impressed with. The ritual
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experts and administrators clashed. The decisions and failures of the administrators enraged some pilgrims. Yet the pilgrims themselves maintained an atmosphere of cordiality. The pilgrims, even under stressful conditions, behaved graciously.
I mentioned the Turnerian anti-structure and that Pfaffenberger and Obeyesekere found in their separate studies that Kataragama rituals are not free from the influences of the Social structures of Sri Lanka. For Pfaffenberger it is the Tamil Vellala caste consciousness. For Obeyesekere it is the impact of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism that introduced conflicts. As I elaborated in Chapter Five, the conflicts between Colombo Tamil politicians and Jaffna Tamil politicians, and the conflicts between Colombo Tamil politicians and Colombo Sinhala politicians - both groups representing the colonially produced westernized bourgeoisie - of the late nineteenth century spilled over to Kataragama creating conflicts between the east coast Tamil Hindu ritual experts and Kataragama temple authorities. These conflicts in Kataragama reflected the larger national themes. Thus, Kataragama pilgrimage as a movement from structure to anti-structure, as Turner would have it, is not entirely sustainable.
However, this correspondence between Kataragama and Sri Lankan political structures was limited to a specific group of people only. The conflict producers were not pilgrims but politicians and administrators. Their ambitions went beyond Kataragama towards Colombo/Jaffna Tamil and Colombo Sinhala/Tamil politics. Their activities in Kataragama were mere signifiers of larger conflicts and ambitions. Similarly, the caste consciousness of northern Vellalas is not a dominant theme in Kataragama pilgrimage. It is not a pervasive divisiveness. As the colonial administrators found, the pilgrims behaved exceptionally well and they do not report any ethnic, caste or religious conflicts among the pilgrims. In that sense, the vast majority of the pilgrims do enjoy an egalitarian Social setting unknown in their daily life. This is anti-structure and communitas in possible in a highly segmented and stratifies Society such as Sri
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Lanka partly because the average Sri Lankan, irrespective of his/ her social identity, is rather indifferent towards the bickerings among the politicians and ignores the conflicts that the politicians introduce.
Nonetheless, the political conflicts outlined above do exist in Kataragama thereby complicating the picture. We might say that Kataragama ritual life is bifurcated into politically sensitive group that converts religion to a political weapon and a politically insensitive group that focuses only on the religious life in Kataragama. Anti-structure and communitas concepts, even a modified Durkheimian notion of collective effervescence, exist among the latter and not among the former. The former introduces the elements of conflict and chaos in spite of their urbane educated stances and pollute the ideology of Kataragama with issues of 'national politics and social bigotry. The latter, mostly uneducated poor devotees, the scum of the society as Thomas Steel found them to be, sustains the order in Kataragama with their bhakti religiosity and their adherence to the normative and ideological frames of Kataragama.
The Turnerian division of the communitas into spontaneous, normative and ideological phases in temporal succession is problematical in Kataragama contexts. In my field experience, they co-exist. Throughout this work, I endeavored to demonstrate instances of spontaneous communitas that culminated in the watercutting ceremony. These spontaneous expressions are located within strict normative domains and ideological constructs. Pilgrims respond to climactic moments spontaneously and not in any programmed manner. However, the moments, the ritual instances, are carefully and rigidly programmed according to regimes of custom and ritual procedures the violation of which is believed to be disastrous. On the ideological plane, several ritual theories coalesce in spite of their differences to pull off the ritual so that individuals can participate in long-awaited moments of sacred dramas. The spontaneity is in each individual's emotional involvement within a highly structured context.
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Kataragama pilgrimage as a journey has received scanty attention. The journey occurs in several modes. As I discussed throughout this work the journey is made by foot, as pada yatra or nadandu poral, or by vehicles. The former is believed to be more auspicious and efficacious both spiritually and ritually. However, the critics among the pilgrims pay more attention to the mood of the pilgrims than the mode of traveling although the correct mood and the mode of traveling are often interconnected. The pada yatra pilgrims are supposed to have a serious mood whereas the pilgrims who travel by vehicles are believed to be frivolous. But a firm generalization is not possible as we found frivolity among pada yatra pilgrims, as in Velupillai and in Kumbukkan Oya, and seriousness among pilgrims who found vehicular transportation. Some of the hook-hangers and firewalkers, the core members of the religious community, arrived in Kataragama by automobiles, usually by public buses.
The connection between pilgrimage and tourism is more complex. Pilgrims to Kataragama are often both although, in a continuum of types, there are pilgrims who shun all distractions and pure thrill seeking tourists who come to Kataragamato witness bizarre activities at its extremes. The bulk of the pilgrims sustain a religious mood while enjoying sight seeing and engaging in pleasurable social activities that are nor proscribed by the normative domains of the pilgrimage. The modern bureaucratic administrators consider Kataragama pilgrimage as an economic event and considere the pilgrimage in terms of a totalizing notion of tourism as their bureaucratic concerns were about the economic dimensions - the income to the local government and businesses, and creation of employment opportunities for local individuals - law and order, and health issues.
It appears to me that where Kataragama differs from the rest of the Sri Lankan society is in the strength of the traditional normative regime of Kataragama and the depth of devotees’ allegiance to it. The conviction and confidence that the devotees
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have in the god's judgment and his sense of justice are absolute, and the devotees maintain their credibility and correctness by ceaselessly finding proofs of the god's hand in the outcome of anyone's conduct in Kataragama.
This is in contrast to the rest of the Sri Lankan society where flouting of the law of the land and getting away with it is a heroic act( is sometimes considered almost a as a heroic deed) (Sinhala: hapankama) that is socially celebrated with bragging, laughter, admiration, and authority. There a variety of loyalties to the various segments of the society clashes with the law of the land. Perhaps, after centuries of rejecting the Anglo-European models for this society, and engaging in organized violation of the colonial laws, quite a few Sri lankans remain aloof to it and find difficulty. in)accepting the laws enacted by their own government. Although the constitution of Sri Lanka, a massive document, spells out the rights and duties of the government and the citizens in fine detail, it is often blithely ignored by many across the social spectrum. The document is unknown to the vast majority of the citizens including, ironically, even most of the legislators of the country. During the colonial period the colonial authorities, under the British constitutional regime, implemented that constitution, and brought the conduct of the government and the citizens within the constitution. But, merely ten years after the Independence, Sri Lankans, often even the law makers and law enforcers, began to pay no attention to the constitution and the laws promulgated within it.
They continue to marginalize the State of Sri Lanka as if it were an an extraneous entity. In fact, it is an extraneous entity. It staged by a colonially created group that has exchanged roles with the colonial authorities. This neocolonial community continues to run a bifurcated nation. This is the Colombo centered English educated westernized bourgeoisie who mimetically dramatize colonialism and consider the vast majority of the population who do not belong to their miniscule group as social others whose
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consciousness is insufficiently colonized and whose social and cultural practices are non-European and primitive. Thus marginalized, the majority marginalizes the state and the state becomes a victim of exploitation. The only role that these urban impoverished groups and the rural masses, irrespective of their ethnic and religious identities, have in national political decisionmaking is at the ballot box. In this context, the politicians manipulate their social identities by creating ethnic, regional and religious antagonisms and panic in order to win the elections so that the political power and control over the state remains firmly within the same group. The political parties that ceaselessly run down the governments of their opponents have only produced power blocs that, from 1960 to 1965, and particularly severely from 1970 onwards, have put party politics, party allegiance, and electoral advantage above the law and sensible statecraft. The result is a deeply fragmented society in which bureaucratic administration at every level, including justice administration, has become thoroughly derailed and corrupted, and in which the different social segments have no recourse other than struggling for their own survival. A
recent survey discovered:
The average Sri Lankan ... o does not believe the judicial system of Sri Lanka could provide redress to litigants within a reasonable period of time;
o believes that wealth, status and power, particularly political power, impact adversely on judicial decisions and that those who go to courts do so mostly on the basis of confidence in their lawyers than because of their faith in the inherent capacity of the judicial system of Sri Lanka to render justice.'
In such a state of affairs, one can hardly expect a normative regime that covers the social conduct of all citizens to survive. This is visible wherever one goes, and its most vivid and destructive expressions are the electoral violence and the ethnic war. The latter
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is a product of political manipulation of ethnic and linguistic identities for the sake of capturing power. We have examined the archaeology and the geneology of these antagonisms in the previous chapter. We found that they run back not to ancient sentiments but to sentiments generated in the nineteenth century, to colonial administrative blunders as well as to the political opportunism of Sri Lanka's colonial bourgeoisie.
The national debates on multiculturalism and secularism arise under these circumstances. The concern with multiculturalism is, in fact, not a national concern. It is a concern invented by the English-speakingbourgeoisie who mimetically adopt concepts from western intellectual discourses. The marginalized majority in Sri Lanka have always been multicultural. Kataragama represents traditional multiculturalism that exists in a domain of creative and sympathetic compromise and accommodation. Uneducated and poverty-stricken masses maintain this multiculturalism in spite of attempts by Colombo politicians to disrupt it and profit from calamity. The very groups that trumpet multiculturalism were the very ones that disrupted the already existing multiculturalism in the country through their political ambitions and manipulations.
Departures
After all the excitement, all was calm. A feeling of emptiness was in the air, and the long and intense period of purposeful activity produced deep exhaustion tinged with exhilaration. I welcomed the respite but with nostalgia. I walked over to the Teivayanaiamman kovil and hung around for a while. I had a pleasant conversation with one of the swamis of the kovil. He was an international man who worked in a circuit of international kovils. The north Indian Brahman was philosophical about Sri Lanka.
The kovil had some pilgrim traffic. Those who stayed for the water-cutting ritual had begun to depart. They, like me, were revisiting the various temples for one last look at them. These people, unlike me, belong to the core community here although they are
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transient pilgrims. They carry Kataragama in their heads wherever they go.
That takes me back to the idea of communitas that Turner introduced, particularly to Bryan Pfaffenberger's employment of it here in Kataragama. Pfaffenberger takes the concept in its generic sense and examines its utility to understand the nature of Kataragama religious community that, as I mentioned earlier, has highly differentiated social roots. Pfaffenberger found that, contra Turner, no one comes to Kataragama just to be with other pilgrims, to experience communitas unavailable in their complicated and strenuous social relations. This, as I examined in Chapter Four, is pretty much what the east coast Tamils and the Sinhalas told me. They come here to establish or enhance their relationships with the god of Kataragama no matter how a particular pilgrim might define who he is. Only the devotee can establish a personal relationship with the deity. No one else can establish it for her. This makes a pilgrim's orientation to Kataragama a private one. Others may accompany her. But they have nothing to do with her relationship with the deity. Then where is the communitas?
Pfaffenberger observed that Vellala Tamil Hindus never found a communitas here, a sense of belonging that they would cherish once they return home. Kataragama is caste blind - not completely though, as the administrators and priests are high caste and some service groups such as drummers and washermen are low caste and are socially treated as such, but largely it is - as the deity does not recognize caste and his temple is open to all devotees. For the Vellalas, the place is socially precarious, too complicated and too polluted with non-Tamils and low caste and untouchable Tamils occupying the same space with them, even making inadvertent yet disturbing physical contacts. Therefore, they only use the place for a technical purpose and withdraw from it as soon as possible. However, the Sinhala pilgrims are not so caste conscious and they have no conceptions of untouchability. Therefore they have a better sense of a communitas in Kataragama where they
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celebrate being Sinhala Buddhists. It is the same with low caste Tamils. For Pfaffenberger the high caste Tamil social and ethnic particularism and Sinhala Buddhist ethno-religious particularistic nationalism make potentially explosive combination in Kataragama. What we have here is a face-off between a prejudiced minority and a prejudiced majority, both feeling insecure in the presence of the other. And where prejudice exists its handmaiden politics also comes in.
Historically, though, the explosion occurred in 1958 and Tamil residents and various other transients departed from Kataragama. Since then Kataragama has been relatively calm even when there were serious eruptions, and then warfare, elsewhere in the country. There are no reports of pilgrim harassment in Kataragama. Why didn't the place erupt under the prevalent external conditions? Does not it indicate the possibility of a multiethnic multi-religious communitas in spite of the prejudices of the minority and prejudices of the majority?
Valentine Daniel, addressing the nature of Kataragama pilgrimage, found that there are two kinds of consciousness among the pilgrims: the historical and ontic. The historical consciousness - not necessarily historiographic but based on the beliefs about the past and claims over the place deriving from such beliefs - renders social interactions across the various ethnic groups politically sensitive and particularistic whereas the ontic consciousness ignores the temporal dimensions of the place and focuses on the meaning of the pilgrimage as an existential fact. Most of the poor uneducated pilgrims such as the low caste native Tamils and the plantation Tamils enter Kataragama with such an ontic consciousness whereas the Sinhala Buddhists and high caste Hindu Tamils enter it with a historical consciousness. I might add that even the poor rural Sinhala pilgrims also exhibit an ontic consciousness of being in the presence of the sacred. Both the Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil Hindu nationalist pilgrims, ironically, come from the more educated segments of the society exposed to history making. The proneness
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to react to the external conditions is higher among those with historical consciousness as the location of Kataragama in time brings in political sentiments.
These two conceptions - the social prejudice factor that Pfaffenberger discussed and the historical consciousness that Daniel introduced - translate into one another quite easily, as if they are the sides of the same coin. On the other hand, the notion of communitas is possible as an ontic state although the two are distinguishable as communitas may involve, as it often does, a historical sensibility.
In my field experience, Kataragama ritual community involves all of the above. Kataragama pilgrims do not give up their social identities to become devotees of Muruga/Kanda Kumara/ Kandasami. As Obeyesekere observes, and as I have this far elaborated, there are conflicts between the Sinhala Buddhists and Tamil Hindus regarding claims to the place and to a right to determine ritual procedures. These conflicts are not just intra-cult conflicts but, as I attempted to discuss earlier, conflicts that reflect national political conflicts. -
What I noticed here is that the sense of community (or communitas) among the pilgrims is socially fragmented but ideologically foundationally unified: there is a warrior god in Kataragama and he is a boon giver. The interpretation of this basic doxic assumption is culture and ethnic group bound, but not too rigidly, as ideas and lines of action move back and forth across these cultures/ethnic groups quite easily. At this level, the being in Kataragama has less historical and more religious awareness. As a rule of the thumb, one might say that religious consciousness is inversely proportionate to political consciousness. Politics bring in nitpicking and make mountains out of molehills, to the advantage of the politicians, and distract pilgrims from their religious foci. The sense of communitas may shift from the religious group to ethnic/cultural group. But pure religious involvement that is completely oblivious to the historical and other irrelevancies is rare and perhaps represented by the religious ecstatics only.
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Such people go to Kataragama because they must. They have
no vows to fulfill, they have no material gains either; they just
come along as a matter of their religious habitus. They walk on fire and are ecstatic at the diyakapuma, and they are happy to be in the company of fellow devotees, renew friendships, exchange information, and feel at home. Here they are not 'unusual' or 'saintly' or 'religiously oriented' or 'sami' or "manio as in the social world. They are like everybody else among the ecstatics. Among
them, their ecstasy needs no explanations or justification. They
just participate in the activities as laid out by tradition. Their focus
is not on organizing, taking leadership, establishing rules, doctrines and the like but on participating in acts of communion with the deity. This, I believe, is the core communitas that exists in Kataragama. It is multiethnic and multicultural. Kataragama's identity as a religious village is based as much on the belief that it is the abode of a god as on the performances of these ecstatics that, seen as miraculous, make the god's existence and power evident and immanent. These ecstatics, Kataragama ritual administrators, and priests constitute the communitas, the core of the religious community.
However, as we found out in the discussion so far, some core-community members among the ecstatics do play political roles as the cases of Wijeratna Sami and Muthukuda Sami illustrate. Both of them were also driven by Sinhala Buddhist sentiments as followers of Anagarika Dharmapala. This is also not to question
the sincerity of their devotion. Perhaps, their acquisition of fire
walking ritual from the Hindus and their addition of Buddhist elements to fire-walking ritual led to the abandonment of fire
walking in Kataragama by high caste Hindus who were already
uncomfortable in Kataragama for reasons of social pollution. This amounts to a structural fission in the communitas. Their appointment as chief firewalkers by the Basnayaka Nilame is a clear indication of the political involvement that perhaps was inevitable. Since then the Hindus established their own fire-walking spots in
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areas where they predominate. On the other hand, the Hindus already see fire-walking from a political angle, as a Hindu activity bulldozed over by Sinhala Buddhists who borrowed the ritual from them forgetting the historical fact that the Hindus, too, attempted to bulldoze Sinhala Buddhist rituals and define the entire Kataragama scene on their own terms. From the Sinhala Buddhist point of view, there is nothing wrong with adding Buddhist elements to Hindu activities as Hindus had incorporated Hindu elements with Buddhist activities from Valliamman, Suran Kottan and divine nuptials to bathing of deities. Perhaps, Vellala Hindus could have been more accommodating and tolerant, as Rasaiah and hundreds of thousands of low caste and lower class Hindus do. Ideas and lines of action change over time as various circumstances compel compromise and adaptation.
Together with the high caste Hindus, pilgrims from the subcontinent also withdrew from Kataragama. This may be due to the inconvenience of having to obtain visas to come to Sri Lanka and the expenses involved. The same economic reasons may also have discouraged many from the north from contemplating to fulfill vows to Muruga in Kataragama. This alone could compel them to establish Muruga/Kandasamy temples in nearby places. Thus, the emergent economic conditions may intervene in their pilgrimages in addition to the caste issues that Pfaffenberger addressed.
The next significant religious community is the community of penitents whose extraordinary expressions of faith and devotion bring them close to the core communitas. Their expressions are temporary and technical in that they are fulfillments of vows and not pure devotional expressions. They are expressions of the deals that the devotee made with the god in order to receive a boon or to obtain forgiveness for violating a religious norm. After their performances, the penitents return to the daily social life and live like everybody else. What is significant here is that some Hindu modes of expressing devotion, such as hook-hanging, are being
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adopted by working class Sinhala Buddhists. Perhaps this may draw the Sinhala Buddhists and Tamil Hindus closer as the ethnic peculiarities are being redefined as ethnic commonalities. On the other hand, this may also influence some Hindus to withdraw from Kataragama if they see hook-hanging and body piercing, like firewalking, as ethno-cultural property that no other religious group should trespass. This very sensitivity prevents such individuals from becoming members of the core communitas in Kataragama for they are, similar to Wijeratnas and Muthukudas, politically oriented.
Further out are the average pilgrims who come specifically to fulfill vows and leave. At the periphery of the Kataragama community are the businessmen and other such categories of people who come to Kataragama not for religious purposes but for strictly commercial, administrative or any other non-religious purposes.
Under the present circumstances, what I observed in Kataragama makes me believe that Kataragama will continue to be, for all intents and purposes, a multiethnic multicultural pilgrimage center despite the political calamities in the larger Sri Lankan social and political system. What keeps Kataragama together under these hostile external conditions is the strong normative regime that applies to all and sundry. If this normative system had been a relaxed or one which could be manipulated, Kataragama would have fallen apart in much the same way the law and administration in the larger Sri Lankan Society had nearly collapsed.
Perhaps, the lesson that the country as a whole can learn from Kataragama is the societal need for a strong set of principles, policies drawn from those principals, a strict normative order that is diligently adhered to both personally and collectively by the citizens, and executed impartially in order to realize the goals associated with the principles. Alongside, Kataragama teaches the lessons of creative compromise that alone can accommodate multiple cultural frames of reference in political life. The learning of that lesson remains a crucial matter in the affairs of the state of Sri Lanka.
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Around one o'clock I saw the Basnayaka Nilame and the kapuralas hurry to the Valliamma devale. Without too much ceremony, they carried the god back to his temple. Soon the final puja of the festive season was offered. It was prepared, as usual, in the Mada Palli, Teivayanaiamman's kitchen. The kapurala brought it, as usual, with his mouth covered with a cloth mask to prevent the offering from being polluted with his breath - in much the same way food was offered to the King of Kandy. Once the puja was over, eight alatti ammas stood in two rows before the painted icon of the god at the entrance to his Vadasitina Maligava, four on each side. Each one of them held a small brass lamp, lit each lamp with fire from the flames of the main lamp of the temple, bent down, and performed alattibama, a routine of charming movements involving rotation and Swaying of the lamps.
The kapurala performed the final worship of the festival. He stood in front of the imposing icon of Kanda Kumara, and bowed to it with his clasped hands on his head. Then he stretched his arms from east to west and bowed to the god. Then he stretched them from northeast to southwest. Thereafter, he stretched them from northwest to southeast. Finally, he stepped down from the platform and prostrated before the icon with his clasped hands stretched forward, towards the god, and knocked his forehead lightly on the ground before Kanda Kumara:
Om ayum kiriyum savvum yena jeldiya krishnarupattidam
andilum Sandilum pandilum vandun munrikta svaha!
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End Notes
1
The same procedures occur simultaneously at the Dalada Maligava in Kandy, the only other place in Sri Lanka this festival is celebrated. The numerology, I think, gives the ritual proceedings some flexibility. Although I have no information on a table of permutations in which the numbers can be substituted by other numbers such a facility is implicit in the way the ritual intervals and the number of peraharas are determined. My hunch is that the numerology involved here is a product of astrology. This area needs further research.
The understanding here is that the arrow produced a rathkarav tree on which a ficus religiosa seed germinated and engulfed the rathkarav tree as it grew. This tree is now an institution known as the Sanhinda bodhiya, or the vas bodhiya because the official in charge of water-cutting bathes after that ritual in the river by this tree in order to free himself from the vas or impact of possible destructive forces emanating from the act. The animals brought as offerings to the tree are retained under this tree until they are offered and set free (Sumanasekera Banda:1993: 30).
Sorata (1993:104 — 105); Sumanasekera Banda (1993: 30 - 31); Malimage (2000: 147 - 148). Sorata and Sumanasekera Banda do not agree on a couple of points. Sorata mentions only rathkaravas the species used. Banda says that rathkarav was used in earlier times but gonapana is the species now being used. Banda states that the nanumura mangalaya occurs before harvesting. Sorata says the mangalaya is performed after harvesting. The empirical situation is that while rathkarav is the ideal species it is no longer easily available and therefore its close kingonapana is used because it is easily available. As a practical matter the nanumura mangalaya occurs after harvesting.
Sorata (Op.Cit.:105).
I give the Sanskrit meaning of the name Saravanabhava. As we found in the Mahabharata Aranyaka Parvan, Skanda was born in a lake full of a variety of reeds then known as Sara. Sara also means the arrow. In the oral tradition and in the tradition of Muruga devotional poetry, the name of the lake in which Skanda/Muruga was born is Saravana. Devotees whom Italked to did not go into a linguistic analysis through the Puranic texts. Instead they simply accepted the term saravana as the name of that lake. It is also a name of Kataragama Deiyo/Skanda/Kanda Kumara/Muruga. This is their interpretation of the term as in this Mohideen Baig song.
In the Hindu tradition the twice-born young men are initiated into their second birth and twice-born group membership with a ceremony called upanayanam. For this ceremony they make a pilgrimage to a tirtha or a sacred ford, and as a preliminary proceding shave their heads leaving only a tuft of hair on the head. The boys in Kataragama did not belong to the twiceborn category. They had shaved their heads to fulfill vows.
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108; 16 - 18. Cited in Bharadwaj (1973:84). Bharadwaj (Op.Cit.: 86).
Bharadwaj (Op. Cit:95). He goes on to make other interesting observations relevant to my study. "At the all India-scale, it appears that the major deities, whose origin is probably pre-Aryan, are associated with more sacred places than the deities of Aryan origin. This observation points to the need for a deeper study of the religious concepts of pre-Aryan people, particularly the proto-Dravidians, because the sacred places of ancient origin may have been the cult spots of the proto-Dravidian people of the Indus civilization"(ibid).
Bharadwaj (Op. Cit.:88, n15). Ganga, a vast river unlike the Menik Ganga or Sipra that Bharadwajspeaks of, is notorious for its pollution. In addition to the other debris, human bodies thrown in as a funerary rite also float down that river. Yet, from a religious point of view, nothing could diminish the sacredness of its water.
Tragically, this is a recent trend that has engulfed religious establishments elsewhere in the country as well.
Douglas (1966:2005).
However, Kataragama and Okanda are not the only places trashed by the very people who come to worship them. It is also not purely a question of consumer economics. The condition of many Buddhist temples, urban and rural alike is similar. Sasanka Perera (2005) discusses the enormity of this problem at the other main multicultural religious establishment on the island, Sri Pada. It indicates a transformation of attitudes towards sacred places and practices therein. About fifty years ago, Buddhist monks kept the Buddhist temples spotlessly clean. They would wake up before sunrise and sweep the entire temple ground to remove leaves fallen from the trees in and around the compound. The devout were conscious about obligations to behave appropriately in the temple ground. An aspect of this normative regime was to keep the place clean and remove trash to a specific place where trash was collected and disposed of. Today, the bhikkhus as well as laymen have forgotten or are not even aware of such norms and practices even when they market these places in the tourist trade. The sacred area around the Temple of the Buddha's Tooth (Dalada Maligava) and the lake in Kandy, the thirteenth century magnificent Buddhist temples such as the Gadaladeniya and Lankatilaka, and the Ambakke Devale provide cases in point. An entire generation of Sri Lankans has grown up without the traditional socialization involving beliefs in the sacred and practices in sacred places.
Pfaffenberger (1979).
The administration of the Kataragama complex and the Sinhala pilgrims call this Valliamma devale but the Tamil pilgrims call is Valliammankovil. I shall use both terms interchangeably.
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19
2.
This story has other versions as we found in the previous chapters.
Wirz (1966; 48-60). This is a Tamil word. There is no comparable Sinhala word. Sorata (Op. cit.) calls it the vasanamadhiya. It is likely that this was introduced in the nineteenth century, together with the celebration of the god's extramarital nuptials. We shall return to this institution later.
Initially this nomenclature confused me as the atul (inner) vidiya is in the outer boundary of the sacred ground while the pita (outer) vidiya was in the inner boundary, as it were. Later I realized that the semantics of atul and pita derive from "enterting' (atulvena) and 'exiting (pitavena). Entering and exiting refers to the pilgrims route as well as the route of the procession. One enters the Maha Devale from the atul vidiya and exits from the pita vidiya.
Harrigan's Pada Yatra is reminiscent of the Vels of the Chettiyars that we encountered in the previous chapter. Here, too, a donor organizes various destitute individuals and families who would engage in a pilgrimage on foot if the donor finances the pilgrimage. Harrigan takes care of the "Harrigan Group” by collecting funds and arranging all necessities during the pilgrimage. It is to his credit that this form on pada yatra, the Chettiyar Veltype, continues. He revives the old Vel, and sustains it.
I learned from Professor Melford Spiro many decades ago that thought experiments are a useful heuristic device that allowed construction of models out of available ethnographic information and speculating how changes in various variables would affect the contours of the model, and how this would help an ethnographer delineate possible approaches to formulate testable hypotheses. Granted that human societies are not communities of mice or rabbits in cages, manipulable at the will of the researcher, and that men are not mice or rabbits, it is not impossible to test hypotheses about human behavior without manipulating them. In fact, one does not even have to be an ethnographer to do this. People in general notice how families or larger groups, even entire nations, undergo changes when conditions change and they do imagine, like I am going to do here, what might have happened and what would happen if conditions of existence change. Therefore I see nothing objectionable in indulging in a flight of fancy.
Further, the thought experiment that I am going to conduct here is not based on figments of imagination but on the experiences of real world individuals and families and the research conducted by sensitive intellectuals. I draw my hypotheses from these resources and construct this model in order to understand what makes a primary religious community a cohesive organization that supports its constituent members normatively and affectively even when doing so might entail social embarrassment and other inconveniences.
Iam thinking of Durkheim and his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Nowadays this great classic is ignored as unreliable, imbued with European
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2
colonial ethnocentricism, a work of imagination rather than a work of science based on empirical study, a work that was founded on the unequal intellectual power relations between the colonizer and the colonized, and a reductionist theory based on a hypothetical most primitive society that probably never existed anywhere. However, leaving out his evolutionary approach, Durkheim's concept of the clan as an elementary social unit, in an elementary or not so elementary society, is an ethnographically observable and useful phenomenon. Here in Sri Lanka, in my personal and sociological experience, irrespective of the multifarious social distinctions, the basic kin group made of the nuclear family and the immediate ring of relatives is still an individual's most significant social group. She depends on it and it stands by her. It is true that clan gatherings, as during various life cycle rituals, involve a collective effervescence.
This is, to borrow Pierre Bourdieu's concept, formation and manifestation of their religious habitus through internalization of the doxic categories of their ever expanding family belief system.
Durkheim would have considered the conduct of this band of pilgrims as an exemplar of mechanical solidarity. In step with him, Victor Turner would have found a communitas in motion.
Prior to that the Lankans were of various faiths: most including the kings were of Brahmanical faith, some were Jains, the Veddahs, then known as Pulinda, had their own religion and some could even have been Buddhists. First, bhikkhu Mahinda converted the king and his retinue. Thereafter the Lankans had converted in vast numbers, and the great bhikkhu had established the Buddha's sasana or the religious community in such a manner so that it would become rooted in the land. Thereafter, the great bhikkhuni Sanghamitta brought the bodhi tree. The bhikkhu and bhikkhuni are mentioned in Sinhala chronicles Dipavansa, Mahavansa, Maha Bodhivansa and Sinhala Bodhivansa. These accounts are not corroborated by the inscriptions of Askoka. White: 1933. See Dharmadasa and Tundeniya for details. Also see Chapter 5. See Obeyesekere (1977; 1978); Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988), and Holt (2004) for details of the significance of these deities in Sinhala Buddhism in Kataragama and in Sri Lanka in general. “As soon as the pilgrim crosses the gate he is confronted he is confronted by with beggars and destitutes lining the street to the Kiri Vehera. Here are the lame, the decrepit, bodies riddled with sores, the sick and the ages hovering near death's door. The contrast in ethos is dramatic: it is as if the pilgrim were confronted with
another aspect of worldly life: suffering, impermanence" (Obeyesekere:1981:4). See also Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988:167).
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31
33
In Buddhism too, like Angulimala. Obeyesekere (ibid.). Also in Gombrich and Obeyesekere (ibid.).
As the Sinhala poem Kanda Sura Varuna: Valliamma Upata says, the Sinhala tradition, at least from the early eighteenth century, adopted Palanias Palaniya.
Nonetheless, according to Kacciappa's Kantha Puranam, they live in complete amity, like Ganga and Yamuna (Clothey). Regarding the Sinhala belief see Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988:99).
See Bharati (1963) for details of the Dasanami sect.
The inheritance is complex as we examined in the previous chapter. Kalyanagiri produced the Giri lineage that became extinct. Thereafter a Puri lineage inherited it. From the Puris it passed back to the Giris. It is also interesting that Keralian Brahmins are connected to the Dasanami sect. It is likely that the inception of the kovil has much to do with Muruga's east coast devotees most of whom are of Keralian origin. The purana of the kovil might be an east coast Tamil invention indicating that the east coast Muruga devotees had some influence in Kataragama during the Nayakkar period or even before that. As we found in the previous chapter the east coast Tamil devotees were influential towards the end of the nineteenth century. Interestingly, the northern devotees of Muruga do not appear to have such influence in Kataragama as the colonial administrators hardly mention them. This requires further inquiry. For details see Chapter Five: Claiming Kataragama: Tamil Claims.
Arunachalam (1924).
Arunachalam claims to have known Kesopuri Bava personally and states that he heard the legend of Balasundari from Kesopuri Bava. The Bava had executed a trust deed on 9th March 1898 in connection with the kovil (ibid.).
Sumanasekera Banda (1993:15). Banda had researched Kataragama when he was the Government Agent of Monaragala. Kataragama came under his jurisdiction. We have historical information from early nineteenth century. What occurred prior to that remains largely legendary.
Arunachalam (ibid). Pieris (1995: 1950; 695). Pieris (ibid: 196). Davy (1821).
1978: 460-461. Also see Gombrich and Obeyesekere (Op. Cit.: 187-191) and the section below on fire-walking.
See Obeyesekere (1981: 142-167) for a psychological anthropological interpretation of this individual's life and his activities in Kataragama. Also see plates 1 and 8 for photographs of vertical and horizontal hook-hanging.
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43
45
51
In plate 1 the same individual, whom Obeyesekere refers to as Tuan Sahid Abdin, carries a male vertical hook-hanger on the cart.
Obeyesekere (1978 : 1981).
Rasaiah (Op.Cit. 45-46). As mentioned earlier, the original Palkudi Bava was Kalyanagiri, the founder of the Teivayanaiamman kovil.
Hassan (Op.Cit:12-14). He probably could not present legally sufficient evidence to the British colonial government to substantiate a claim on the basis of inheritance. It was the length of undisturbed possession that satisfied the legal requirements for fee simple possession under the British Common Law of real property. On the other hand, he could make a legal claim on the basis of the length of undisturbed possession only under the British law as the traditional Sri Lankan property laws as applied to Kataragama would not honor this claim. Traditionally Kataragama was king's property. The king could have given Meer Seyed the title to the property on the basis of a completely different legal proposition: unwavering allegiance to the king and providing him with appreciable services, as a gift.
Hassan (Op. Cit:23).
These resemble tambourines but closer in construction to the kanjira drums of Tamil Nadu.
Refairatheeb involves more than driving spikes and skewers. Some devotees cut their bodies with knives and intentionally shed blood to show their devotion to Allah. See Spittle (1933:1957).
Asthalapurana is an unofficial purana that devotees of local akovil, in India and Sri Lanka, create to describe the origins of the kovil. Sthalapuranas usually exist in the oral tradition.
The Sinhala pilgrims do partake free food but in different contexts. During the Vesak festival in May, many organizations establish dansal (Pali: Sanskrit: danasala) to feed the Vesak pilgrims to temples and sightseers who roam the neighborhoods looking at Vesak decorations and participating in other religious activities. The context is Buddhist. However, middle and upper class pilgrims hardly visit these dansal. They are meant for the poor.
Obeyesekere (1978; 1981) and Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988). Also known as mageswaram.
I shall not describe the ceremony in detail. See Seligmann and Seligmann (2003:1911: 218-237) for a description of the ceremony as held in early
twentieth century.
This is not to say that polygamy does not exist in Sri Lanka. It does but socially disapproved and when practiced it is not to be socially paraded
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Malimage (2000:151).
The belief is that when the Sinhala man who took Muruga across the river built him a hut he used madan branches. The kola pandalama memorializes that event.
Malimage (op. cit.: 152). Pieris (1995:1950; 696-697). Sorata (2000:1993: 57-58).
Sorata (ibid.). I have not verified these statement. Further field research is required.
I borrow the term from Geertz (1983; 36-54).
Victor Turner's notion of anti-structure in ritual situations is relevant here. The anti-structure is found not in the dissolution of orderly public behavior but in the dramatic change in the mood of the perahara. One might even call the transformation of the mood a re-structuring of the consciousness. As far as the conduct of the perahara actors and their audience is concerned, they are strictly bound by the norms of conduct established by the religion of Kataragama. The liminality of the pilgrim is not reduced at all. Her conduct is still under the direct, strict and unforgiving jurisdiction of Kanda Kumara. She is, however, allowed to express her emotions freely within the structured relations. I suppose it is this freedom within restrictions, expression within Suppression and repression, that gives the perahara and Kataragama ritual behaviora dialectical and dynamic structure that is psychologically interesting and challenging. -
Sokari, a dance form from the Satara Korale and Sat Korale in the Kandyan provinces originated around fourteenth century. Sokari is the name of a woman. It involves a cuckolded husband who is from Andhra Pradesh. There are two principal deities involved here: Pattini and Kataragama Deiyo.The theatrical form was originally enacted as a religious ritual toward off pestilence and epidemics and to benefit the harvest. But its inclusion in the Kataragama perahara is recent and has no theological connection with the proceedings in Kataragama. It is included purely to entertain. For details of Sokari see Neville (1954), Sarachchandra (1966), and Goonatilake (1987).
See Obeyesekere (1978) and Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988) for details of the Sihala Buddhist take-over of Kataragama rituals. I believe it is a re-taking and redefining of the Kataragama rituals as it is clear in the 1765 report that in the nineteenth century, with the withdrawal of the Sinhala Buddhist from and large scale entry of Hindu Tamils into Kataragama to take a dominant position in the proceedings. See the previous Chapter for further details.
Rasaiah (op. cit.:79).
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74
76
8.
Malimage (op. cit.: 150). I find this significant as I discussed in the previous chapter, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Tamil devotees, perhaps led by Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, raised the issue of the management of the collections at the Maha Devale under the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance, attempted to hold the temple administrators accountable, and even to take over the entire temple administration. Now, the Bathme positions, abolished by the colonial administration, have been resurrected as the officials in charge of temple collections and distributors. And the Temporalities Ordinance is largely non-functional and, as the colonial administrators discovered, was very hard to implement. The dark half of the Tamil year begins in the months of Adi (July-August) when the Sun enters Cancer. Clothey writes: The cosmic evening has started, and, as in the ritual day, a ritual kind of abstinence is observed. With one exception there are no major festivals addressed to Murukan in this period....The one festival to Murukan which does occur in a few temples in Tamil Nadu during these months takes place in the month of Avani (AugustSeptember). Climaxed on the last full-moon day prior to the autumnal equinox, this festival is a virtual duplicate of the Machi festival in which the total career of the god is re-enacted, including his conquest of the Asuras, his fulfilling the functions of divinity, and his triumphal reign over the cosmos. However this festival is probably a vestige of a new year festival in the old Chera kingdom, brought to Tiruchendur (which temple is the primary celebrant of the festival) by potrs from Kerala in the sixteenth or seventeenth century” (1982:176). Dewaraja (Op.Cit.) and Seneviratne (1963;1978). Obeyesekere (1981; 1984) and Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988). Clothey (ibid.).
Sumanasekera Banda (Op.Cit.:38).
Sumanasekera Banda (ibid.).
Sorata (2000:1993: 110 n1).
Obeyesekere (1978: 460-461).
Obeyesekere (ibid. 461).
Pridham cited in Godakumbura (1970).
Godakumbure (1970). Obeyesekere (1984) and personal communication (2006). Obeyesekere (1984); Sorata (2000:1993). References to these ritualistic celebrations in the puranic, Sinhala and Tamil literature are too numerous to mention. Description of these activities in flowery and rhythmical language is mandatory in the Sanskritic alankara poetic tradition.
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Rasaiah (op. cit.: 87-90). Ibid.:52.
Ibid.: 84.
Ibid.: 72. Rasaiah (op. cit: 78). Hanson (1998). Fernando (1937). Pieris (1995: 1950: 696-697).
According to the Dutch report, the cutting of water was performed in the open. As soon as the palanquin was brought into the river the devotees went "at once in the water to bathe even without taking off their clothes when the Palankeen is brought in the water. This description is questionable. Perhaps there is an omission in the report. It is highly unlikely that the order of ritual action was, even then, what the report describes. The logic of the ritual mandates strongly that the water sports begin after the ritual and not before as that would nullify the ritual. The sequence of ritual procedures given in the report is inaccurate because it ignores the syntax of the ritual. When the syntax is disrupted it becomes, like a mere mass of words, meaningless. The normative order of the ritual that led to the gradual development of the mood of the climactic moment is the missing detail. This mood is the end product, not merely of the water cutting ritual but of the entire ritual cycle. Durkheim's term, 'collective effervescence, is at home in this context.
Obeyesekere (1984). Rasaiah (op. cit.: 89-90). Obeyesekere (1984).
Eade and Sallinow (1991: 2000); Morinis (1984; 1992); Coleman and Eade (2004).
Pfaffenberger (Op.cit), Morinis (1984), Van der Veer (1984).
Eade and Sallinow (Op.cit.); South Asians believe that the world is primarily constituted of five great elements that they call panca maha bhuta. These are water (apo), fire (tejo), vayo (air), earth (pathavi) and space or ether (akasa). Hindus believe that Siva manifested himself in five lingams each constituted of a particular bhuta. In Arunachala hill the lingam was fire. The early pilgrimages to Arunachala were to worship this lingam. But the yogi’s charisma and reputation completely masked it. Bharati (Op.cit.). Also see Stirrat (1991:2000) for Catholic contexts in Sri Lanka.
Eade and Sallnow (Op. cit). Karve (1962); Myerhoff (1974:1976); Frey (1998); Sallinow (1987); Clifford
648

(1997). Cohen (1988). Cohen (1992).
A pioneering study in this regard is Barbara Myerhoff's (1975) comparative study of Huichol Indians and American youth.
Morinis (1992). Morinis (ibid). Marga Institute (2004).
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