Divine Power and Fluid Bodies: Tirunaṅkais in Tamil Nadu

Abstract

This article analyzes the complex ways in which religious practices influence the formation of identity and community among tirunaṅkais, male-to-female transgender people in Tamil Nadu. I argue that tirunaṅkais draw on longstanding religious resources to enact nonnormative identities that operate outside of the secular constructions of the modern subject that undergird governmental “uplift” efforts as well as the liberatory projects of Western feminist scholars such as Judith Butler. I focus in particular on three arenas in which tirunaṅkais negotiate their identities in specific religious and social contexts: the kinship network, the annual Kūttāṇṭavar festival, and public rituals associated with Hindu goddesses in Tamil Nadu. The tirunaṅkai kinship network deploys multiple religious rituals while at the same time transcending boundaries of religion, caste, and class in its inclusivity. The enactment of marriage and widowhood at the annual festival to Kūttāṇṭavar foregrounds the divinity of the male-female form that tirunaṅkais emulate. Serving as vehicles of the divine who embody particular goddesses through ritual possession in public temple spaces provides affirmation of their ritual efficacy and power to mediate between the human and divine worlds.

This article maps the temporal and spatial sites in which tirunaṅkais (tirunaṅkaikaḷ), or male-to-female transgender people in Tamil Nadu, negotiate their identities at the intersections of caste, class, and religion and also across the boundaries between tirunaṅkai kinship communities and mainstream society.¹Tirunaṅkais perform gender in ways that register as “alternative” in the larger society but that also incorporate conventional forms of gendered comportment. Tirunaṅkais embody multiple roles, some of which are restricted to the tirunaṅkai community, and others, such as serving as ritual experts in temples, that are significant in the larger social arena. In the ethnographic work in the state of Tamil Nadu that I have conducted with my fieldwork associate, Mr. M. Thavamani, I aim to understand identity as emerging in a localized web of actions, concepts, and meanings that reflect intersecting national and global influences.² My research includes some work in Chennai but is mostly located outside of this major urban center in smaller towns and rural areas, and I am therefore particularly interested in how nonelite individuals with limited means negotiate nonnormative identities.

In recent years multiple governmental reforms based on medicalizing, normalizing frameworks have been implemented in Tamil Nadu with the aim of integrating tirunaṅkais into mainstream society. I argue that tirunaṅkais draw on longstanding religious resources to enact nonnormative identities that operate outside of the secular constructions of the modern subject that undergird the rights-based discourse of governmental “uplift” efforts as well as the liberatory projects of Western feminist scholars such as Judith Butler.

In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), Butler advances a performative theory of gender in which she argues that sexed and gendered subjects are formed continuously through practices repeated over time:

Construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms; sex is both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration. As a sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice, sex acquires its naturalized effect, and, yet, it is also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm. This instability is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition, the power that undoes the very effects by which “sex” is stabilized, the possibility to put the consolidation of the norms of “sex” into a potentially productive crisis (10; emphasis in the original).

Butler’s theory of gender performativity grounds resistance to regulatory norms in the constitutive processes themselves. Butler’s theory is helpful in illuminating certain ways in which the constitution and subversion of norms are intertwined in the reiterative practices through which tirunaṅkais construct alternative bodily identities and an alternative kinship system, the “gaps and fissures” in their reiterative practices opening up productive possibilities for destabilizing heterosexual norms. However, there are limits to the applicability of Butler’s theorizations of gender performativity to the case of the tirunaṅkais, because, as Saba Mahmood (2012) has emphasized, Butler’s theorizations are based on “secular-liberal assumptions” that do not take into account the role of traditional religious practices in the construction of authentic selves.

In her ethnography of an Islamist women’s piety movement in Cairo, Mahmood explores the work that orthodox Islamic self-cultivation practices perform in constituting subjects. She focuses on women who are part of a religious movement that operates outside of secular-liberal assumptions about the modern subject, and in this context she critiques Butler’s discussion of agency, which rests on a dualistic model of performativity in which “norms suppress and/or are subverted, are reiterated and/or resignified—so that one gets little sense of the work norms perform beyond this register of suppression and subversion within the constitution of the subject” (Mahmood 2012: 22). Mahmood argues that, on the contrary, “norms are not only consolidated and/or subverted…but [are] performed, inhabited, and experienced in a variety of ways” (2012: 22), and she conceptualizes agency as not limited to resisting norms but as a modality of action, of performative behavior, that is critical to self-cultivation (157). For the women in the piety movement, “bodily behavior does not simply stand in a relationship of meaning to self and society, but it also endows the self with certain kinds of capacities that provide the substance from which the world is acted upon” (Mahmood 2012: 27). In contrast to Butler’s understanding of the materiality of the body in terms of the model of language, in which she “analyzes the power of bodily performatives in terms of processes of signification whose disruptive potential lies in the indeterminate character of signs” (Mahmood 2012: 165), Mahmood emphasizes that the women in the piety movement understand the body as a medium for constructing a self rather than as a site of signification. Mahmood’s insightful study of how women in the piety movement in Egypt employ orthodox Islamic practices to construct virtuous selves brings to light the religious dimensions of gender performativity that are also important to my own study, which seeks to illuminate how tirunaṅkais in Tamil Nadu draw on traditional Tamil religious practices to create authentic selves.³

In this article I explore three arenas in order to illuminate how tirunaṅkais negotiate their identities in specific religious and social contexts: (1) the kinship network; (2) the annual festival that celebrates marriage to the Mahābhārata hero Aravāṉ, or Kūttāṇṭavar; and (3) public rituals associated with Hindu goddesses in Tamil Nadu.

The Tamil Context

The word hijra, which is commonly used in much of India to refer to transgender persons, is not widely used in Tamil Nadu. Historically, male-to-female transgender individuals were called alis, and then for many years they were called aravāṇis (aravāṇikaḷ) because of their marriage to the Mahābhārata hero Aravāṉ. However, this word has been supplanted by the secular term tirunaṅkais (tirunaṅkaikaḷ), a word that can mean either “auspicious women” or “half male, half female,” that was originally proposed by the transgender classical dancer Narthaki Nartharaj and was subsequently promoted by former Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi (Vasudevan 2020: 2, 18n13). In other parts of India hijras occupy a culturally sanctioned and remunerated role in blessing newborn infants and newlywed couples, but for the most part tirunaṅkais in Tamil Nadu do not play this ritual role in mainstream culture.⁴ Consequently many tirunaṅkais engage in the stigmatized activities of begging and sex work. Although prostitution is legal in India, solicitation is not, so in addition to the violence that tirunaṅkais suffer at the hands of clients and gangs of thugs, they are regularly harassed by the police, who have also targeted them for engaging in homosexual behavior, which was illegal until the Supreme Court of India decriminalized homosexuality on September 6, 2018.⁵

The need to categorize gender and sexual variance arose in India in the 1990s in response to the spread of AIDS. International nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) aided the Indian government in mapping disease transmission, marking high-risk groups to receive the funding tied to AIDS work. There was a recognition that Western labels for behavior and identity, such as “gay,” may not apply in local Indian contexts. Over time the behavioral category of MSM, or “men who have sex with men,” became a subject position and umbrella term. Kothi, or koti, emerged as a subset of MSM, signifying males who express differing degrees of femininity, with hijra and tirunaṅkai as one subcategory.

In recent years the state and central governments have made some attempts to ameliorate the discrimination that gender and sexual minority communities face. In 2003 tirunaṅkais began petitioning the Tamil Nadu government to address their need for legal rights, including ration and voter identity cards to establish a legal identity (Govindan and Vasudevan 2011: 84–92; Menon 2007). In 2004 the High Court of Tamil Nadu allowed individuals to choose either “female” or “male” on identity documents but not a third gender, as petitioners had requested. The state government responded to the appeals of tirunaṅkai activists such as Priya Babu by establishing the Aravani Welfare Board in 2008 and granting other rights such as reserved seats in universities and colleges and some financial subsidies. The government established free sex reassignment surgery (SRS), or gender-affirming surgery, at Chennai’s Government General Hospital in 2009, but a state subcommittee on transgender welfare recommended counseling against SRS (Govindan and Vasudevan 2011: 89, 102). Other recommendations included making a study of tirunaṅkais “with the aim of ‘giving full rehabilitation for their improvement and upliftment of life’” (Govindan and Vasudevan 2011: 90), language that pathologizes the community. In 2014, in National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) v. Union of India, the Supreme Court of India confirmed the legal right to choose one’s gender as male, female, or third gender. In 2019 the Indian Parliament passed the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, which, among other controversial issues, requires an individual’s gender identity to be certified by a District Screening Committee (Raghavan 2017: 97–99; Reddy 2018: 54–55). Since it passed, the bill has been challenged by protests and movements throughout India.⁶

In my research I only recently heard the word “transgender” used in self-identification outside of Chennai. As Aniruddha Dutta and Raina Roy note in their article “Decolonizing Transgender in India”:

As an emergent hegemonic category, transgender may offer representation and upward mobility for people who fit official definitions, but it may elide or delegitimize working-class and dalit discourses and epistemologies of gender/sexual variance that are not entirely legible in terms of hegemonic usages of transgender—even as these groups, particularly kothi-hijra communities, must increasingly represent themselves as TG to be intelligible to high-level networks of large nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), transnational funders, and the state (2014: 323).

Although these governmental moves are intended to more fully integrate a marginalized community that falls outside of normative gender and social roles, the requirement to conform to a singular stable identity in order to gain official recognition cannot adequately address the complexities of identity and self-expression of tirunaṅkai individuals (Dutta and Roy 2014: 333). A consistent refrain that I heard from tirunaṅkais is that the NGOs, with their narrow focus on sexual behaviors, have not done anything to provide needed material benefits and alleviate suffering. Consequently many tirunaṅkais draw on other longstanding resources to construct their livelihoods.

Kinship, Nirvāṇam, and the Pāl Ceremony

Butler’s work seeks to open spaces for those individuals who are excluded by normative regulatory structures, many of whom cannot inhabit a livable life without psychic and physical violence. In Undoing Gender (2004) she emphasizes that “a more radical social transformation is precisely at stake when we refuse, for instance, to allow kinship to become reducible to ‘family,’ or when we refuse to allow the field of sexuality to become gauged against the marriage form” (129–30). Butler’s theory of gender as performative, along with her call to reimagine kinship relations that are not based on heteronormative marriage and reproduction, can help to illuminate some of the ways in which tirunaṅkais negotiate, embrace, and at the same time subvert gender norms in a localized web of actions, concepts, and meanings. Integral to the construction of tirunaṅkai personhood is the refiguring of the body through repeated citational practices that materialize a felt sense of gender and sexual identity. In addition, constructed kinship relationships provide tirunaṅkais with a distinctive social system and ties to regional and even national networks.

Like hijras in other parts of India, tirunaṅkais maintain a complex kinship system that is not based on marriage or reproduction and includes individuals from a variety of social locations. In this context tirunaṅkais repeatedly claim that among them there is no caste, class, or religion. The crucial social system that this kinship network provides is constructed and legitimated within the community by the persistent enactment of roles that involve varying degrees of personal and economic responsibilities and rewards. In this kinship network individuals speak a distinctive language, maintain strict rules of etiquette, and participate in required tirunaṅkai life-cycle rites that can take up a great deal of time and energy. In this system a novice will initially become a celā, disciple, to a guru through the ritual of putting rīt, allegiance, on a guru and a house. In addition to having fellow celās under one guru, tirunaṅkais build relationships with each other based on affection: mothers adopt daughters, who may become sisters to each other, aunts to their sisters’ daughters, and so on. The guru-celā relation is the axis that anchors a web of female kinship relations in which a tirunaṅkai is increasingly embedded and that often replaces the birth family.⁷ According to Kalki (n.d.), founder of the transgender rights foundation Sahodari:

We are an all women’s family and no men—no husbands, fathers, uncles, sons or grandsons. It is a women’s world.…This [is] a family hierarchy which is fully matriarchal.…The chronological age has no value here, whoever joins the family becomes the part of the hierarchy.…This is a unique family system which the transwomen have been following for more than 100 years and it is a strong bond which unites us as a family network throughout the country.

The hierarchical guru-celā relationship is the central axis of the matriarchal network. The guru is essentially a mother to the celā, and in many aspects the celā is like a daughter to her guru. But when a guru dies, her celās play the role of widows and, adopting the white garb of a widow, perform conventional rites of widowhood. On the fortieth day after the funeral, the widowed celās attend a jamāth, or meeting, with their leaders at which they are given colored saris and jewelry to put on, signifying the end of their widowhood and enabling them to become the celā of another guru.⁸ The funeral rites are performed according to Muslim traditions regardless of the religion of the individuals involved. These tirunaṅkai kinship networks provide a social identity within a potentially stable community, one that integrates as well as transcends religious differences and allows for a certain degree of fluidity in positions and roles.⁹

Although these kinship groups include individuals who present as men in the outside community, tirunaṅkais who undergo genital excision, nirvāṇam (nirvāṉ), assume the highest status in these networks. Lawrence Cohen (1995) has noted both the violence and the pleasure at the root of hijra identity. Penectomy and castration are bloody acts in which the body is refashioned into a more feminized individual. The nirvāṇam surgery is increasingly performed by medical doctors but was traditionally performed by a tirunaṅkai called a tāyammā. Many tirunaṅkais still consider the tāyammā procedure more prestigious and more successful in making them into a “real woman.”¹⁰Hijra and tirunaṅkai communities in India worship a form of Bedhrāj Mātā, or Bahuchāra Mātā,¹¹ the goddess whose vehicle is a rooster and whose main temple is in Gujarat.¹² If the rite is performed by a tāyammā, Bedhrāj Mātā is worshiped before and during the procedure. She is also worshiped during the ceremony that is performed on the fortieth day following the surgery, after which the newly operated person is considered a “full” tirunaṅkai. This ceremony is called pāl, which means both “milk” and “sex” or “gender” in Tamil.

The pāl ceremony is a huge celebration that draws a large number of tirunaṅkais for a night of feasting and dancing. The rites for the celebrant begin in the middle of the night, when she is anointed with henna, turmeric paste, oil, and sugar water and elders bathe her and dress her in the required green sari. Elaborate offerings are placed in front of Bedhrāj Mātā’s photo, which is bathed in milk that is kept in a brass pot. The celebrant worships Mātā with her face covered so that she cannot see the goddess. The guru places the pot of milk from the altar on her head, and the guru and celā go to the nearest body of water to pour the milk from the pot into the pond or tank. The celebrant returns and stands in front of Mātā, uncovers her eyes, and worships her for the first time as a “full” tirunaṅkai.¹³ The pāl ceremony is a happy celebration of an individual gaining full membership in the tirunaṅkai community, engendered through an intentional re-making of the body. Excising the genitalia takes away the individual’s reproductive ability but replaces it with power from the goddess.

Butler describes the construction of sexed and gendered bodies as “a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (1993: 9; emphasis in the original). Cohen similarly emphasizes the processual nature of the refiguring of hijra identity and argues that “the absent phallus is an inadequate marker of authentic gender; hijras locate their essential difference processually, along a path of self-awareness” (1995: 295).¹⁴ Genital surgery may be accompanied by other practices to refigure the body according to the norms of conventional Tamil womanhood, including receiving hormone treatments, modulating the voice, walking in a feminine manner, growing the hair long, plucking the beard, and wearing feminine clothes and jewelry. Such stylization reveals the potential disjunctions between normatively perceived sex and gender and both reworks and subverts gender norms. Butler remarks:

“[R]eality” is given to certain kinds of gender appearances over others, and…those who are transgendered are regularly debased and pathologized for “not being real.” The point is that the ontological field is mobilized by power relations, and that what we come to regard and affirm as “real” or “unreal” can and does undergo critical change depending on social mobilizations of various kinds (2006: 282).

The ideal of femininity, of being able to “pass” in the outside community as a woman, is a powerful trope in the tirunaṅkai community, but there is necessarily slippage that opens a potential space between embracing and resisting dominant norms. Tirunaṅkais aim to embody a notion of “woman,” but with a difference. Sheethal, the director of Sahodaran and a tirunaṅkai nāyak (leader) in Pondicherry, commented in an interview after her nirvāṇam surgery, “Now I am a real woman. I can have sex like a woman.”¹⁵ But in another interview she said, “Why shouldn’t I be able to sit on the bus wearing a sari yet speak in my normal voice?”¹⁶Tirunaṅkais repeatedly declare that it is only because of their unique strength, their courage (tairiyam), that they are able to embody their authentic selves every day.

In their article “The Razor’s Edge of Oppositionality: Exploring the Politics of Rights-Based Activism by Transgender Women in Tamil Nadu” (2011), Padma Govindan and Aniruddhan Vasudevan note that the hierarchical kinship system “frequently fosters violent and coercive behavior between gurus and chelas, in no small part due to the pressure to earn money and support community members in the context of a larger social stigma” (93). Many if not most tirunaṅkais engage in begging and sex work, at least for part of their lives—activities that stigmatize the community as a whole and make it difficult to obtain any mainstream jobs. The state government has given jobs to a few tirunaṅkais,¹⁷ but most are unable to get mainstream jobs. Sheethal, the Sahodaran director in Pondicherry, told me that some tirunaṅkais will not stay in other jobs even if they get them because there is so much more money to be made doing sex work, a claim that was echoed by many other tirunaṅkais whom Thavamani and I interviewed.¹⁸ Some tirunaṅkais talk about being able to fulfill sexual desires through sex work. A. Revathi comments:

I must admit that in my early days of sex work, I did look for sexual gratification. There were a few caring, loving male clients and such rare opportunities allowed me to experience heterosexual love that I so desired as a woman. But such beautiful experiences were more of an exception than a rule (2016: 46; emphasis in the original).

Governmental reforms aim to normalize tirunaṅkai individuals and raise their profile in society, but the attempt to move tirunaṅkais away from sex work further stigmatizes a livelihood that has been integral to tirunaṅkai lives. Some social scientists have critiqued the tendency to view material transactions as incompatible with “true” sexual intimacy. As Lucinda Ramberg emphasizes:

Conjugality is no more a guarantor of intimacy, equality, and the absence of coercion than the selling of sex is de facto devoid of affection, mutual regard, and willing participation. The presence of material interests in the context of sexual activity is not a necessary or sufficient indicator of coercion (2014: 174).

Part of the normalizing project in Tamil Nadu is for birth families to accept their tirunaṅkai children and allow them to continue living at home. In March 2016 Thavamani and I attended a tirunaṅkai awareness workshop for village leaders in Gingee. One of the presentations was a mock debate about accepting tirunaṅkai children, in which one side argued that if a family accepts a disabled child, they should accept a tirunaṅkai child. The other side argued that they are not able to accept a tirunaṅkai child until society accepts them because they cannot do anything to harm their standing in society, and they claimed further that if they keep the child then no one will marry their other children. In interviews some tirunaṅkais said that life would have been easier if they could have stayed in their natal homes, but some expressed concern that then they would have had to follow the family’s practices, including those of caste.

Some tirunaṅkais whom Thavamani and I interviewed continue to live in their natal homes, like Velan, who is higher caste, dresses as a man, and keeps their tirunaṅkai network activities hidden from their natal family.¹⁹ Velan was trained to be a priest in Chennai and performs pūjā in temples to Murugan and Muthumāriyammaṉ for a salary. As a child they would perform pūjā to dolls and started to serve in a temple at the age of fourteen. When they hit puberty, they were increasingly teased for being a feminine boy, but they felt called by the goddess and continued to do pūjā, which gave them cover for things like putting on kumkum and wearing their hair long. They were possessed by the goddess Aṅkāḷammaṉ as a teenager, but they now perform their possession rituals only at festivals. They paid for their sister to get married but will not attend any family functions so that people do not ask questions. They spoke disparagingly of tirunaṅkais who do sex work. They loved a man many years ago, but since his death they have not had any sexual partners. Velan’s work provides a steady income and some room to enact feminizing behaviors for the goddess, but the respectability that they feel their natal family demands leaves comparatively little room for self-expression.²⁰

The tirunaṅkai kinship network, in contrast to the natal family, allows some individuals to construct more authentic identities and to engage in patterns of caring (Ramberg 2014: 194–95) that can sustain people who are exiled from normative structures. Violence at times plagues tirunaṅkai kinship groups, but violence can plague “normative” families as well. Although some natal families may successfully embrace a tirunaṅkai child, the tirunaṅkai kinship network provides an invaluable alternative support system.

Marrying Kūttāṇṭavar

Although tirunaṅkais emphasize that men are not part of their kinship network, many tirunaṅkais voice the desire for a boyfriend or husband, a panthi or panti, who would stay with them and with whom they could perform the role of a wife.²¹ Marriages between tirunaṅkais and men are sometimes performed, but they remain supplemental to the tirunaṅkai kinship network.²² For some tirunaṅkais, the desire for a perfect husband is enacted in the annual festival to Kūttāṇṭavar that is celebrated in many Tamil villages. Tirunaṅkais draw on Hindu tradition to legitimate their embodiment and identity, and one deity whom they invoke is Mohinī, Kṛṣṇa’s female incarnation who appears on earth to marry Kūttāṇṭavar—the name by which the Mahābhārata hero Aravāṉ (Sanskrit, Irāvān) is commonly known in Tamil folk traditions. As mentioned earlier, tirunaṅkais were previously called aravāṇis because of their marriage to the hero Aravāṉ. In the Mahābhārata Aravāṉ is the son of Arjuna who must sacrifice himself in order for the Pāṇḍavas to win the war. Alf Hiltebeitel (1995) has traced the evolution of Aravāṉ from a minor hero known as Irāvān in the Sanskrit version of the Mahābhārata into a central figure in Tamil narrative and ritual traditions. Here I highlight just a few elements from this hero’s genealogy to help set the context for the festival.

In the Sanskrit version of the Mahābhārata Irāvān is the son of Arjuna and a serpent maiden called Ulūpī. Irāvān sides with the Pāṇḍavas in the war, and on the eighth day he engages in a prolonged, fierce, and bloody battle but is ultimately decapitated. This heroic figure appears in Peruntēvaṉār’s ninth-century Tamil version of the Mahābhārata,²³ in which Kālī is the goddess of the battlefield, and Irāvān, now known as Aravāṉ, agrees to sacrifice himself to Kālī to ensure the Pāṇḍavas’ victory in return for dying a hero’s death on the battle’s eighth day (Hiltebeitel 1998: 145). Over the centuries, in later versions of the narrative, Aravāṉ’s boons increase. In Villipūttūr Āḻvār’s fourteenth-century version, Aravāṉ demands a second boon: to watch the war, which requires that his severed head survive so that his eyes can see the battlefield. In later Tamil folk traditions, Aravāṉ is called Kūttāṇṭavar, and he asks for a third boon: he does not want to die unmarried, or ancestral rites will not be performed on his behalf following his death. But of course no woman would want to marry a man who is destined to die the next day, so Kṛṣṇa incarnates as Mohinī, usually described as a female form but considered by many tirunaṅkais to be a tirunaṅkai—half male, half female—form.²⁴ It is the marriage to Aravāṉ/Kūttāṇṭavar and subsequent widowhood that tirunaṅkais ritually reenact at contemporary Kūttāṇṭavar festivals in Tamil Nadu—most famously at Kuvakam near Villupuram, which draws tirunaṅkais from all over Tamil Nadu, other parts of India, and even other parts of the world.²⁵

The celebration of the eighteen-day Kūttāṇṭavar festival at Kuvakam can be traced to as early as 1878, which included the participation of men dressed as women who got married to Kūttāṇṭavar and then the following day performed the rites of widowhood (Hiltebeitel 1999: 279). In contemporary festival reenactments of the marriage to Kūttāṇṭavar, some men may still dress as women. In addition, many people of all ages and genders participate in the festival and marry Kūttāṇṭavar, although married women do not tie the tāli, marriage necklace, for Kūttāṇṭavar. In recent years tirunaṅkais have been increasingly numerous and visible participants during the two central days of the Kūttāṇṭavar festival. According to Hiltebeitel (1995: 454, 469), tirunaṅkais have come to Kuvakam in large numbers only for the last few decades, beginning when a tirunaṅkai named Tēvi became an ardent devotee of Kūttāṇṭavar and told other tirunaṅkais about the festival. Whatever the origin of their participation is, it is clear that in the last few decades the Kūttāṇṭavar festival at Kuvakam has become an important space for tirunaṅkais to come together in large numbers to maintain bonds across geographic regions and also to embrace norms of feminine comportment and enact the role of a wife who becomes a widow, highlighting important ways in which desire is constructed in devotional and social realms.

Thavamani and I attended the two “marriage” days of the Kūttāṇṭavar festival at Kuvakam in 2009. On the first of these two days, the tirunaṅkais go inside the temple along with other devotees, where the priests tie the tāli, the necklace signifying their marriage to Kūttāṇṭavar. The day of marriage is a festive one involving a lot of dancing and celebrating with friends and kin from other parts of Tamil Nadu and India. During the night, in the area outside of the temple grounds, many of the tirunaṅkais engage in liaisons or perform sex work, some say to consummate the marriage.²⁶ The following day Kūttāṇṭavar’s temple image, a giant red head, is placed on top of his newly constructed and decorated body, and then in his fully embodied form Kūttāṇṭavar is pulled on a chariot through the crowds, signifying his readiness for the battlefield sacrifice. At this point the tirunaṅkais begin streaming to the lamentation ground (aḻakuḷam), where they break their bangles, cut their tālis, and sing songs of lamentation. Some may begin a period of widowhood during which they wear white and remove all jewelry for up to thirty days.²⁷

Unlike other participants at the festival who only temporarily become Mohinī, tirunaṅkais embrace a transgender form in their daily lives, which they repeatedly stress takes a great deal of strength and courage.²⁸ One of the most eloquent testaments to the importance of the Kūttāṇṭavar festival for tirunaṅkais came from Bharathi, a guru in Tiruvannamalai, who said that at the festival they become Kūttāṇṭavar’s bride and are therefore treated like Kṛṣṇa in his form as Mohinī. She went on to say, “He [Kūttāṇṭavar] is going to die tomorrow, so they lose the husband. How can a real woman become a widow? [She cannot.] So Kṛṣṇa incarnated as an aravāṇi.”²⁹ She talked about tirunaṅkais’ singular ability to be completely devoted to a husband.

I will labor for you. I will give water to you. Only you are there to my eyes. I will not look for my parents’ house.…For our husband we go [to Kuvakam] and tie the tāli and remove the tāli; when we remove the tāli we really feel that our own husband died. The tears come automatically.³⁰

Bharathi then broke into a series of Kuvakam songs, the first one describing in detail the preparations for and celebration of the wedding and the subsequent mourning for a husband who died so quickly that the bride’s jasmine garland had not yet wilted.

That good Aravāṉ, who came here for the bride, why didn’t he come on Wednesday, why did he come today? The pandal that was made [for the marriage] is not yet removed; the guests who came are not yet gone, the drummers who came to play, they didn’t even cross the field. The devadāsī was called for the dance; she did not cross the riverbank.…The jasmine that we brought is not yet withered on my head, the sari that I wore is not yet wrinkled.…I was looking for him through the window, I stood in the courtyard, I thought the cart would come.…And he took all my people and he went to the battle, and he made me suffer in all the eight directions.³¹

Bharathi then sang a lamentation song (oppāri) that is sung when the tirunaṅkais cut their tālis at the Kuvakam festival.

Father, didn’t any astrologer tell you that I’m going to cut my tāli soon?…Now the golden cart is coming. My parents’ things will come; my good husband I don’t want the gold, I don’t want things, I want to be a wife. My good husband, you told me the golden cart filled with things is coming for me from your house, but I don’t want all those things, I just want you. [You] went away [and] I don’t know where to turn.³²

In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Butler remarks about transgender individuals:

The strategy of desire is in part the transfiguration of the desiring body itself. Indeed, in order to desire at all it may be necessary to believe in an altered bodily ego which, within the gendered rules of the imaginary, might fit the requirements of a body capable of desire. This imaginary condition of desire always exceeds the physical body through or on which it works (71).

The rituals at Kuvakam distill and channel multiple modes of desire and identity performed in a communal space. Celās play the role of a widow when a guru dies, ensuring that proper death rites are performed for individuals in a kinship network in which marriage to a man is not the central relationship. The tirunaṅkais’ reenactment of marriage to Kūttāṇṭavar embraces a romantic image of a courageous warrior willing to sacrifice himself for his kin, and it celebrates the desire for a heroic husband whose death makes them widows but also divinizes them.³³

The Kūttāṇṭavar festival at Kuvakam has come to be widely identified as a transgender festival. The visibility that this popular Hindu festival affords tirunaṅkais has brought some positive media attention as well as negative repercussions. Thavamani and I returned to the Kuvakam festival in April 2016, visiting the Kūttāṇṭavar temple during the day to observe the tāli-tying rituals. Tirunaṅkais who came with offerings and to worship at the temple were thronged by photographers jockeying for advantageous positions to capture their every move; the tirunaṅkais were the main spectacle. On the way from Villupuram to Kuvakam we saw the activist Kalki Subramaniam with a camera. She told us that she was documenting the sexual harassment occurring at the festival. Some media sources have suggested that increasing sexual harassment and violence at the festival might be deterring some tirunaṅkais from attending.³⁴ However, tirunaṅkais have worked to gain more control of the event, which continues to be an important arena for religious expression and community identity.³⁵

Embodying the Goddess

For some tirunaṅkais, certain religious resources that have long been a part of the broader Tamil culture are deployed to help construct identities that allow them to move more easily between tirunaṅkai and mainstream communities.³⁶ Although tirunaṅkais claim that in their kinship network there is no caste, class, or religion, these identities can influence how individuals negotiate their tirunaṅkai identities in financial and other ways. The activist A. Revathi describes moving from a small town in Tamil Nadu to Bengaluru in 1999 to work for the NGO Sangama, where for the first time she met English-speaking individuals who identified as gay or lesbian.

I realized that there was a huge gulf that separates working class, non-English speaking sexual and gender minorities from their affluent and educated counterparts. Later, as an activist, I decided to focus exclusively on the needs and rights of non-English speaking gender and sexual minorities as they are disadvantaged in every possible way (Revathi 2016: 44).

Revathi (2016: 77) further notes that tirunaṅkais who come from Dalit families that own no property can struggle much more than others.³⁷ Some tirunaṅkais who come from higher caste and middle-class families in which there are opportunities for college education and desirable jobs may opt to navigate two facets of identity, inhabiting tirunaṅkai identity only in certain contexts apart from the family so that they can continue to be employed and abide by their families’ gender norms. Caste and class status may thus offer some opportunities to thrive but can also preclude opportunities in myriad ways.

Goddesses like Kālī, Māriyammaṉ, and Aṅkāḷammaṉ have always been integral to the cultural fabric of Tamil Nadu. These goddesses are central deities for many different individuals and communities, but they are particularly important to those at the lower rungs of the social and economic hierarchies and to those who struggle at the margins. For some tirunaṅkais, especially those who come from lower caste or class backgrounds, the special connection to the goddess whom they embody through ritual possession provides public affirmation of their ritual efficacy and can lead to lifelong work. Hindu temples are terrains in which the instabilities of gender can be visible, where tirunaṅkais who are regular vehicles of the divine accommodate themselves to receiving the goddess in their bodies in order to mediate between the goddess and human devotees from a wide variety of social locations.

One central place for tirunaṅkai ritual activity is Mēl Malaiyaṉūr, which is considered the most important temple to the goddess Aṅkāḷammaṉ, or Aṅkāḷaparamēcuvari. It is built next to a cremation ground where the god Śiva is said to have come as a beggar after cutting off one of the creator Brahmā's heads; Āṅkāḷammaṉ then appeared in her fierce form to relieve Śiva of his curse of brahminicide. According to the temple narrative, once when Ammaṉ (Aṅkāḷammaṉ) returned to Kailāsa, both Śiva and Brahmā were seated there (Meyer 1986: 36–38, 58, 176–84). Since each of them has five heads, she could not tell which one was her husband and mistakenly bowed down before Brahmā to receive his blessings. When Brahmā laughed because she had inadvertently betrayed her faithfulness to her husband, both Ammaṉ and Śiva got very angry. Śiva cut off one of Brahmā’s heads, and Brahmā in turn cursed Śiva to wander around in the cremation ground begging for alms. Śiva went begging for food, but Brahmā’s skull, which served as his begging bowl (kapāla), was stuck to his hand and ate all the offerings. Thus unable to eat, Śiva started rolling around in the cremation ground at Mēl Malaiyaṉūr. Ammaṉ saw Śiva lying there, so she scattered food in the cremation ground. All of the demons in the cremation ground came to eat the food, and Brahmā’s skull left Śiva’s hand and ate the food also. When the skull dropped off his hand, Śiva regained his normal state and ran to Ammaṉ, who trampled Brahmā’s skull and cursed him. Ammaṉ thereby attained her place of honor at Śiva’s left side.

Tirunaṅkais enact this myth during the annual festival of mayāṉakkoḷḷai, “pillage in the cremation ground.” After Aṅkāḷammaṉ restored Śiva to his normal state, she took her place as part of him in his form as Ardhanārīśvara, half male, half female. Tirunaṅkais identify with this divine form; as mentioned earlier, the word tirunaṅkai can be glossed as “half male, half female.” Tirunaṅkais assert that they are therefore the ones Aṅkāḷammaṉ speaks through, aruḷ vākku, when they perform rituals of kuṟi, divination, and kaṟippu, expelling malignant forces. As Velan from Chennai claimed:

Aṅkāḷaparamēcuvari [says], aravāṇis are the most important children for her. Ammā says, half male and half female formed as a human. For me, all the pūjās will be done by that person. Ammā will never say vākku with a female form.…She says vākku only through a half male, half female person. That vākku is the only real vākku.…Three-fourths of people who get possessed by Māriyammaṉ are my people.³⁸

Many non-tirunaṅkais get possessed in Mēl Malaiyaṉūr by Aṅkāḷammaṉ, who is a lineage deity for many Hindus, and the temple draws all kinds of people. However, the connection between Aṅkāḷammaṉ and tirunaṅkais is not just part of the tirunaṅkai community’s self-identification. Many devotees agree that tirunaṅkais have a special connection to Aṅkāḷammaṉ and are particularly powerful ritual experts. In addition to identifying with Aṅkāḷammaṉ’s half male, half female form, many tirunaṅkais explain their close relationship with this goddess in ways that resonate with the following statement by Gangadevi, a priestess in her own Kālī temple in Vellore:

We left our parents, mother, father, everyone. We think only the goddess supports us. Whatever goddess we worship, she supports us. So most of us will worship Aṅkāḷammaṉ. Because she has lots of āvēcam [being in a state of frenzy or of being possessed], she is strong, angry; like that, tirunaṅkais get āvēcam. The anger (kōpam) is too much with a tirunaṅkai. If anyone knocks into us on the road, the tirunaṅkai will ask, why did you hit and kick me? Like that Aṅkāḷammaṉ has so much āvēcam, like us, that’s why we worship her. Tirunaṅkais worship Kālī and Aṅkāḷammaṉ only.³⁹

Gangadevi, as the priestess in her Kālī temple, hosts annual festivals, including the festival of mayāṉakkoḷḷai, that draw tirunaṅkais and devotees from the larger community. Gangadevi is a powerful tirunaṅkai nāyak (leader); she has many celās, is widely respected, and wields a great deal of clout in the tirunaṅkai community. She has had the nirvāṇam surgery and speaks forcefully about the power that this embodiment gives an individual in the tirunaṅkai community. Although many women are ritual specialists for the goddess, priests are still most often men.⁴⁰ Yet Gangadevi has successfully assumed the role of priestess as a feminized tirunaṅkai, possibly due to the status that she has established for herself within the tirunaṅkai community, which then bleeds out into the larger society.

Other individuals who identify as tirunaṅkais maintain a more masculinized persona that may permit them more “unmarked flexibility” than a feminized comportment, which can invite stigmatization (Dutta and Roy 2014: 324). Some of these individuals are also popular priests with their own temples. Kumar, for example, has their own Kālī temple in a small village near Pondicherry,⁴¹ and, like Gangadevi, is from a Scheduled Caste (SC) or Dalit family.⁴² They do not wear saris but dress as a male priest in everyday life and attend some jamāths but do not participate regularly in the tirunaṅkai social network. Like Gangadevi, Kumar also claims that Ammaṉ possesses only tirunaṅkais because they have the strength and fierceness to be her vehicle. Kumar told a familiar story of a male discovering both a feminine or gender-fluid identity and a close relationship to the goddess beginning in childhood and continuing through the period of puberty. When asked how they perform rituals, they fervently say that it is Ammā (Ammaṉ), the goddess, who does everything; everything is her will. Like many mediums, they do not remember the possession, which highlights the complicated intercorporeal embodiment of tirunaṅkais who serve the goddess (Ram 2013: 145–46). When asked if the devotees who come to their temple see them as a tirunaṅkai, they replied, “They see me as Ammā, as the goddess.”⁴³

Tirunaṅkais who are ritual specialists for Tamil goddesses such as Aṅkāḷammaṉ or Māriyammaṉ develop a subjectivity that includes the goddess. They adjust and accommodate to being possessed, developing the skills to negotiate ritual interactions between the goddess and devotees through the medium of their own bodies (Ram 2013: especially 142–56). The anthropologist Kalpana Ram claims that “[t]he agency of mediumship goes beyond mere acceptance. It entails developing a skilled form of comportment in relation to a…being that seems to want to consume a great deal of one’s life. The medium develops skilled forms of attunement” (2013: 154–55; emphasis in the original).⁴⁴ Central to Ram’s theorizing about the cultivation of agency in possession is the Tamil word paḻakkam, “habit, practice, familiarity”: over time, through the ritual practice of possession, a medium and those who come to her for healing become habituated to the embodied presence of the goddess. Paḻakkam also refers to intimacy, to the relational interdependence between goddess and medium that is most visible during possession rituals but that defines a medium’s entire life (Ram 2013: 132–34, chapter 5 passim). In addition, Ram notes that “habit is not the opposite of innovation, it is the prerequisite for it” (2013: 155). Successful ritual specialists learn to perform the goddess’s presence in response to their clients’ needs.

Raju is a particularly innovative and popular ritual specialist who has built their own temple in a small remote village.⁴⁵ Unlike Gangadevi and Kumar, they come from a higher caste, the Mudaliar caste, but a modest economic background; they are not middle class. Like Kumar, they identify as a tirunaṅkai and participate in some tirunaṅkai community events, but they wear the male dress of a shirt and a luṅgī outside of the temple. Raju told a particularly vivid narrative about how the goddess Māriyammaṉ called them when they were a child, from which I give a few excerpts here:

When I was a child I love[d] Māriyammaṉ. I used to keep stones [as images of the goddess] everywhere. Whether I played or talked I acted like Ammaṉ. While playing I dressed up like Ammaṉ. Like this I became mad for Ammaṉ. [One night a small girl] came in my dream and said, “I am the one, why are you afraid?” She came again later that night and said, “I am as a stone in the well, if you come and pick me up and worship me privately I will give you power.” I was twelve or thirteen years old. So the next morning I went to the lake to look for a stone. The Ammaṉ [stone] I have now is the Ammaṉ I took then. The villagers started to come one by one [to the place where I had installed the stone]…and said “Raju, you have the cāmi (deity), bring the cāmi on you.”…The aruḷ (deity’s grace) came. This was the first time I got the cāmi.…I did not know what I was doing. It was Muthumāriyammaṉ.…Then slowly it got famous. No one told me to tell kuṟi, I got the wisdom [from her]. The śakti only speaks from inside. Śakti used to dress like Ammā, on my body she decorated herself as Ammā, with sari and half sari, earrings. In my heart I felt that I myself am Ammaṉ. I also have the power of Ammaṉ. So I don’t like men. Because of that I became [a tirunaṅkai].…Outside they call me Ammā only.⁴⁶

Raju’s temple is centered around a large Kālī image built near the road by a client, down a path from a small preexisting temple to the village goddess Piṭāriyammaṉ that is nestled among the rocks of a hillside.⁴⁷ Raju regularly performs kuṟi and kaṟippu on full moon and new moon days. I observed the full moon kuṟi on February 7, 2012, which was sponsored by a woman from Villupuram. After an elaborate abhiṣekham (ritual consecration) of the Kālī image and of their beloved original Ammaṉ stone, which is set in front of the large Kālī image, Raju walked uphill along the path to the Piṭāriyammaṉ temple. Behind the temple only the sponsor and a few of us were allowed to watch as Raju slowly transformed into the image of Kālī using the items that the sponsor had brought: they put turmeric paste on their face, kājal on their eyes and eyebrows, and red paste on their lips, and they donned ankle bracelets, earrings, necklaces, and glass bangles. They put flowers in their long hair and ash on their forehead, drew fangs extending from their mouth, and then tied a red sari around their waist and legs something like a Bharatanatyam skirt.

Raju came in front of the temple and worshiped the image of the goddess Piṭāriyammaṉ, concentrated on her, then started hissing and throwing their hands and arms back, moving like a snake, sticking their tongue out, and dancing with a trident. Raju then assumed Ammaṉ’s sitting position as they continued to dance on one leg. They then took a firepot, held it in their right hand, and danced awhile holding this increasingly fiery pot. I was close enough for the heat to be uncomfortable. Raju danced with the firepot on their head awhile, then took it back in their hand and started moving downhill toward their roadside temple centered around the image of Kālī. The crowd walked ahead of Raju, and then most people lay down on the path so that Raju could walk on their bodies all the way to the other temple. There Raju took the pot off of their head and told the helper to pour water on the pot so that it steamed and we could all see how hot it was, giving us proof that only the power of the goddess could allow them to hold it.

Many ritual specialists perform kuṟi, but this was the first time I witnessed devotees lying down on the ground for the goddess’s vehicle to walk over them. Raju told us that some time ago they began carrying the firepot every Friday, and one day the goddess said to the devotees that she would take whatever disease they had into her body and that her feet only needed to touch their bodies for her to absorb the disease. So the devotees spontaneously began to lie down on the ground so that Raju could walk over them during their dance as the goddess. Having a publicly legitimated role as a vehicle for the goddess allows Raju to perform a fully female divine persona for devotees, who are not predominantly tirunaṅkais. But at festival time the boundaries between the two worlds grow more porous. At an even bigger function later that year, in August 2012, Raju again danced the goddess, and a small group of tirunaṅkais including Raju’s guru attended this festival event. The guru is from the same caste as Raju and also lives as a man in a regular day job in an office. During this festival to the goddess at Raju’s temple, both Raju and their guru were wearing saris in a public space. In an interesting moment of shifting hierarchical roles, as Raju gave out prasād and put ash on their guru’s forehead, the guru touched Raju’s feet. In this arena porous boundaries of body and community are open to desirable encounters with the goddess that allow fluid constructions of self.

Modernizing Subjects

Ramberg’s (2014) work on devadāsīs in Karnataka highlights another context in which nonnormative gender and sexuality coexist with religious practice. Devadāsīs are ritual specialists empowered by the goddess who exist outside of normative kinship structures. Girls are given as jogatis, wives, to the goddess Yellammā, so they never marry human men. Property passes through them, not men, to their children, and they may conduct sexual relations of their choice, including transactional sex. Jogatis perform the work of the goddess, cultivating exchange relations with her, embodying her, and performing rites that they learn through apprenticeships (Ramberg 2014: 87). Their livelihood depends on devotees’ offerings to the goddess and to them. However, these jogatis have been the focus of several modernizing reform efforts, which resulted in the 1982 law that criminalized devadāsī dedications; dedications continue to occur, but they are waning. Jogatis are Dalits, and Dalit men see these women as historically exploited victims without agency and seek to give them respectability by reintegrating them into patrilineal marriages. Secularizing reform efforts focus on jogatis, as in the case of tirunaṅkais, as a high-risk population for AIDS. Ramberg remarks:

The reform of devadasis is a story about what kind of work the body is made to do to become modern…[and] how categories of sexual and religious personhood come to specify who does and who does not qualify as secular, modern, and thus admissible to the rights and protections of citizenship in its broad sense as positive state recognition.…Devadasi dedication is subject to reform not as a marginal form of kinship or religion but as illicit sex and superstition. This character of reform is a feature of modernity as a normalizing project (2014: 13).

One highly visible sign of the goddess’s presence is matted hair, and women who are chosen this way are seen as more capable of possession and oracles (Ramberg 2014: 94). But the reformers view the matted hair as the locus of dirt and disease, and in some cases it has been forcibly cut. Cutting the hair severs the jogati’s body from the goddess. Ramberg comments regarding the cutting of a devadāsī’s hair:

The body figured in jade-cutting campaigns is a whole in itself, atomistic, and self-contained, and matted hair is a matter of unwanted intrusion of dirt and disease. In contrast, the ecstatic body is open to incursion, which can manifest itself as affliction but may be cultivated as a form of power.…Cutting reorients the sexuality of dedicated women, turning it from the generalized cultivation of auspiciousness and the devi to the reproduction of the heteronormative patrilineal family form and the state (2014: 101).

Devadāsīs are like sons in their natal homes, but they are not men; they are reproductive women who exist outside of the patrilineal network. Ramberg dedicates only a few pages of her book to jogappas, individuals designated as male who are tied to Yellammā and become sacred women. The jogappas whom Ramberg interviews define themselves through their ritual service to the goddess and are seen as particularly powerful priests, serving at large popular temples. Some jogappas engage in behaviors that parallel those of hijras and tirunaṅkais: they live in groups led by a guru, some have male partners, and some engage in sex work. Some jogappas move between the Yellammā kinship network and their natal families in that jogappas traditionally give up fathering children when they marry Yellammā, but some perform the other roles of a son in the house. As Ramberg notes, because of the reform efforts against dedication to Yellammā, more individuals are opting for “normal” conjugal life (2014: 200–211).

Concluding Remarks

The state government of Tamil Nadu is not targeting Tamil tirunaṅkais’ religious practices, but Ramberg’s analytical insights about how reform campaigns can destroy lifeways sheds light on normalizing projects in Tamil Nadu. Much has been written about how moral and ideological battles are fought on the bodies of women such as devadāsīs, and I would argue that the reforms aimed at feminized, gender-fluid individuals such as tirunaṅkais expand the categories of bodies over which modernizing projects are battling. Some tirunaṅkais affirm that the legal recognition of a transgender identity and the accompanying reform measures have bestowed more legitimacy and respect on their community, and consequently life is better for some. However, governmental normalizing efforts to integrate tirunaṅkais more fully into mainstream society are insufficient, at least at this point, to eradicate the long history of stigmatization and marginalization that tirunaṅkais have endured. Some tirunaṅkais construct their authentic selves in ritual spaces, and in particular serving the goddess provides the spatial and temporal terrain for tirunaṅkais to construct fluid and porous gender identities that accommodate divine embodiment in a public sphere, thereby achieving a social legitimacy that does not depend on bureaucratic affirmation.