About the Essay

I produced this unpublished photo-essay in 1987 based on fieldwork conducted during my senior year in college while I was a student on the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Year in India program. The project included participant-observation and interviews to learn about an annual festival for the Tamil goddess, Mariamman, whose small temple sat at the end of my narrow street on Pookara Lane in Madurai. Previously known as the goddess of smallpox, Mariamman is a goddess associated more broadly with her powers to both cause diseases and to heal people from disease. Devotees throughout Tamil Nadu worship Mariamman but she is particularly popular among lower caste communities and mythological stories about her origin point to her willful transgressions of caste boundaries. Using photographs and vivid descriptive narrative, this essay evokes and explains the events of this three-night festival as the goddess is carried on a palanquin through the streets of Madurai to the banks of the Vagai River. There she is submerged in water and then brought to life again in new form to return to the neighborhood temple where she will reside for another year until the next festival. Through a depiction of karagam dancers, mallaipari pot dancers, oilattam dancers, possession, animal sacrifice and elaborate forms of feeding, dressing and worshipping the goddess, I provide phenomenological insight into the meaning and experience of this festival for the participants, including myself. Above all, I show that such annual festivals reinforce intense embodied emotional bonds between devotees and the goddess, and among members of neighborhood communities.