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Malavika K Pradeep, English and Foreign Languages University, IndiaAbstract
The Bharani festival held annually at the Sree Kurumba temple, Kodungallur, Kerala, is noted for its remarkable spectacle of the storming of pilgrims into the temple premises, singing ribald songs, and inflicting self-injury on their foreheads with the holy weapon of the Goddess. The performers hurl abuses at the Goddess while simultaneously submitting themselves to her in rapt devotion, addressing her as Amme or the Mother. The act of self-injury in this manner signifies an act of submission of the body as it is believed to engender communion with the Goddess, rendering them as oracles or komaram. Most of these pilgrims hail from various subaltern, marginalized groups across Kerala. Thus, as popularly argued, the temple becomes the ritual site where piety becomes a temporary tool to contest social hierarchies and demand visibility. However, as Nimisha Jayan argues in her thesis, power hierarchies are ingrained at every stage of the ritual through instances like the oracles awaiting permission from the Thamburan (the ruler) to enter the temple. She asserts that Kodungallur Bharani consists of various rites of passage for the subaltern and facilitates the temporary suspension of caste hierarchies. Grounding the research against the paradoxical nature of Bharani, I attempt to further these assertions by conceptualizing the temple site as a heterotopia, where “all the other real sites that can be found in a culture are simultaneously represented, converted, and inverted” (Foucault & Miscowiec, 1986, p. 24). After conceiving Bharani as a heterotopia, I employ psychoanalysis to understand the consequences of it on the performer and how the notions of divinity become operative in this transformation process, promoting negotiations between the social and inner selves of the komaram.
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Conference: ACAH2025Stream: Performing Arts Practices: Theater
This paper is part of the ACAH2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Pradeep M. (2025) Divinity, Selfhood, and Paradoxes: Conceptualizing Kodungallur Bharani Ritual Space as a Heterotopia ISSN: 2186-229X – The Asian Conference on Arts & Humanities 2025 Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 545-555) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-229X.2025.45
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-229X.2025.45
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