Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the bodily poetics of spirit possession via three Tamil Roman Catholic women who claim to be possessed by Mary. Challenging common notions of "textual performance," I investigate the bodily practices of these women as improvisational, anti-hegemonic counter-texts.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I consider the bodily poetics of three women in Tamil Nadu, south India, who claim to be possessed by Mary, the mother of Jesus. Coming from different caste, class, and geographic locations - and drawing hundreds of Christian, Hindu, and Muslim devotees - these women and their attendant communities allow me to investigate issues of religious syncretism, gender, and power in contemporary south India.

Their practices also challenge common notions of what constitutes "textual performance." I argue that these three women's bodily practices and speech acts work as counter-texts to hegemonic discourses, both Hindu and Roman Catholic. I interrogate their cross-references to other texts, bodily and written, classical and modern.

For the sake of time, I attend particularly to one case of Marian spirit possession: a 38-year-old single mother named Rosalind, who lives with an extended joint family in urban Chennai. Like a number of Roman Catholic women in south India who get possessed by Mary, Rosalind enacts healing rituals with both Hindus and Christians who come to her for succor. She speaks "messages" like informal sermons in various registers of Tamil, ranging from high "centamil" or "Pandit tamil" to "low" or "bent" "koduntamil," the type of Tamil spoken on the streets. She also speaks in tongues.

Many scholars of south India have argued that discourses and practices of spirit possession owe their particular forms of expression to symbolic and literary techniques borrowed from classical Tamil and Sanskrit literatures (Frederick M. Smith 2006, Nirmal Selvamony 2011) and modern political discourses (John Bernard Bate 2006). This paper both borrows from and attempts to push beyond such work, suggesting that Rosalind's performances gesture toward concepts of address found in "Tolkaapiyam," the oldest extant work in Tamil literature, as well as from contemporary rhetoric, Hindu possession practices, and Roman Catholic liturgy.