Pierced by Murugan's Lance: Ritual Power and Moral Redemption Among Malaysian Hindus
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A devotee preparing Arigandi kavadi, the topmost structure is yet to be assembled. Photographer: Kuet Ee Foo, © Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore
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by by Elizabeth Fuller Collins Northern Illinois University Press, Dekalb, 1997
Reviewed by Carl Vadivella Belle, doctoral candidate, Deakin University, Australia
In the years since World War II, Thaipusam has emerged as the most visible and powerful assertion
of Malaysian Hindu identity. While the Malaysian festival is consciously
formulated on the mythology traditions and modes of worship observed at the
pilgrimage centre of Palani, Tamil Nadu, the processes of relocation and
adaptation have endowed Thaipusam with a distinctively Malaysian orientation,
and a significance and centrality which it lacks in India.
With notable exceptions there has been a puzzling dearth of scholarly interest in Thaipusam.
Most Western material consists either of popular accounts of the "mysterious
East" genre, or of reductive orientalist discourses which speak for rather than
through participants. Collins' book, a reworking an expansion of her doctoral
thesis, is an attempt to redress this balance.
Collins has amassed an impressive body of research, and has subjected the material she has
garnered to a wide array of theoretical perspectives. However, as a long time
participant turned scholar, I found her work strangely unsatisfying, and both
inchoate and disjointed. The book is more notable for what it omits rather than
what it includes, and many of Collins' observations are based on incomplete
evidence.
For Collins, Thaipusam consists of two conjoined festivals, a kingship ritual for the
Dravidian deity Murugan, held on days 1 and 3 of the festival, interspersed
with a day dedicated to lower caste/working class vow fulfilment, inspired by
the egalitarian traditions of bhakti worship, and finding outward expression in the kavadi
ritual (i.e. the stylised bearing of burdens associated with acts of bodily
mortification). Collins maintains that devotees who take kavadis do so while in the grip of a stereotypical trance, an
amnesic form of divine possession which leaves "…no conscious memory of the
thoughts and feelings that accompany the experience". She contends that the kavadi ritual embraces two major themes
- empowerment and moral redemption - which not only construct an ethical and
social sense of personal worth, but taken collectively represent working
class/lower caste political defiance against both the upper class/higher caste
elites who supposedly dominate the broader Hindu community, and the more
general array of oppressive forces which hold them in submission.
This thesis is both deeply flawed and ultimately unsustainable. Firstly, kavadi worship is not, as Collins supposes, restricted to the ranks
of male working class/lower class devotees, but cuts across the entire spectrum
of Malaysian Hindu society, and includes both Western educated professionals
and large numbers of women (whom Collins tends to relegate to the role of
marginalized and passive spectators, most typically of exhibitions of male
sexual beauty). Ostensibly a Tamil festival, Thaipusam in Malaysia draws
participants from all Indian Hindu ethnicities resident in the country, as well
as large numbers of Chinese (especially in Penang and Sungai Petani), and
members of Malaysia's miniscule Sikh and Sinhalese communities.
Moreover, Collins seems unaware that while the kavadi ritual
is quintessentially associated with Murugan worship, in Malaysia kavadis are borne for may deities,
including those representing Saivite and Vaishnavite traditions, as well as a
multiplicity of village and guardian deities. Her failure to grasp this very
basic point leads her to the risible contention that devotees bearing kavadis containing Krishna motifs seem
unaware that Murugan and Krishna are separate deities.
Secondly, Collins' comments on the generic, seemingly uniform nature of the trance state are
grossly simplistic. It seems trite, but the point must be made; the ritual of kavadi worship may be filtered through
conflicting layers of belief, tradition and other influences, but it is
ultimately received at the individual level. Dissociation states range from
"basic" amnesic possession to more complex mystical experiences which are
frequently ecstatic, often life transforming, and which are fully recollected
by the devotee. It seems astonishing that Collins' research did not uncover
personal accounts that would have revealed the entire gamut of trance experience.
Collins generally overstates the extent of Hindu reformist opposition to Thaipusam, especially
among educated Hindus. She fails to distinguish between those who are opposed
to the festival in toto, and those who simply aim at the elimination of perceived abuses and excesses. The former
consist of two basic groups - western educated Hindus, acutely sensitive to
Western perceptions, whether imagined or real, often influenced by the
"scientific" teachings of Vivekananda and his followers (and usually
embarrassingly ignorant of the complex symbology associated with Murugan), and
secular Dravidian nationalists, ideological heirs to Ramasamy Naicker's "Self
Respect" movement on the 1930's. However, the overwhelming thrust of reformist
pressure is directed against practices regarded as "transgressive" and
involving the "left handed" worship of Amman (as village goddess), guardian
deities and lesser spirits.[i]
The weakest section of Collins' work is her attempt to interpret kavadi worship and the sprawling corpus of related puranic
mythology through the lens of Freudian and psychoanalytic theory. The
selectivity involved in this approach leads to conclusions which are both reductive
and jejune, and which occasionally border on caricature. For example, Collins
claims that because the tongue can be construed as a phallic symbol, the act of
piercing the tongue with a miniature vel (spear),
may be seen as symbolic castration. Apart from overlooking the fact that many
women engage in this practice, Collins seems completely unaware that most
devotees explain this action in terms of the ascetic tradition of mauna (silence) - the symbolic and
actual renunciation of the gift of speech and language in order to enable the
devotee might concentrate more fully upon Murugan as Lord of yoga, operating
within and ultimately beyond the sphere of the mind. (As Murugan is also widely
held to be the founder and divine patron or the Tamil language the state of mauna has additional implications for
Tamil devotees.) Likewise in her portrayal of Ganesha's "perpetually flaccid
trunk", held to symbolize impotence, Collins simply ignores the many representations of the deity (e.g. Vira Ganapati) which depict the deity with an outstretched or even rampant trunk.
Collins' discussion of relevant puranic mythology is similarly selective, and her
analysis is rarely rises above the superficial. She gives surprisingly little
space to the main body of justificatory mythology surrounding kavadi worship or the substantial body
of puranas outlining Murugan's defeat of the asura (demon) Surapadman, and she does not consider in any detail
what these imply in cosmological terms. Collins expends much effort in seeking
trances of fraternal Oedipal conflict between Ganesha and Murugan, but does not
seriously explore the more fundamental concept of Siva-Sakti (that is, the
shifting relationship between absolute and generative power), even though this
principle not only pervades all Saiva Siddhanta philosophy, but also
underscores the mythology which attends the creation of both Ganesha and
Murugan, and ascribes roles and functions to each. She is thus unable to
explain the essential significance of Parvati's bestowal of the Sakti Vel (or Vetrivel - electric spear), upon the Siva created Murugan (i.e. a
manifest fusion of Siva-Sakti, involving themes of entropy, dissolution,
renewal and reconstitution, and held to operate upon every level of cosmic
consciousness) which lies at the very heart of Thaipusam in Malaysia.
I believe Collins' work would have been much better informed had she chosen to cast a wider net.
By restricting her study to Penang. The only Chinese majority state and site of
the only Chettiar managed Thaipusam festival in Malaysia, Collins has missed
broader themes which are more clearly evident in the much larger festival
conducted at Batu Caves, Kuala Lumpur, and resonate more obviously within the
overall arena of Malaysian Hinduism. Surprisingly Collins has made no real
attempt to locate Thaipusam and the overarching rubric of Murugan worship
within the context of an ethnically plural society dominated by Malay and
Islamic power brokers. Her cursory reading of the history of the Indian Hindu
experience in Malaya/Malaysia precludes the identification of emergent trends
which are reformulating Malaysian Hinduism. These include the tamilization of
Malaysian Hinduism (and the more general linkages to Tamil resurgence in India,
and to the Tamil diaspora), the
processes of Sanskritization/Agamicization, and the continuing syncretisation
of village/Agamic Hinduism and Saivite/Vaishnavite traditions. All of these
find overt expression in Thaipusam.
But the most glaring omission in this book is the voices of Thaipusam participants
themselves. Collins has not explored the significance of the Hindu pilgrimage
tradition in any depth - the tīrtha yātrā, removal from mundane time and space, and the journey to the
metaphysical centre - and how it operates in Malaysia, or what asceticism
signifies to a Hindu pilgrim in Muslim Malaysia. We learn little about the
backgrounds, motivations, or experiences of kavadiworshippers, nor do Collins' discussions link us to any disquisitions on
the more basic themes of Hinduism, namely karma and dharma (or fate and destiny
their "village" equivalents). Nor, incredibly, is there any reference to the
breaking of fast ceremony, usually dedicated to the demon-turned-devotee
Idumban, in which the devotee is formally released from him/her vow of asceticism
and symbolically returned to society and "ordinary" time. It is though in the
midst of manipulating the detail of her theoretical approaches, Collins loses
sight of the very performers who collectively comprise this multifaceted and
extraordinarily complex festival. And by allowing the participants to fade into
a distant background, Collins squanders the opportunity to pursue many subtly
nuanced and paradoxical lines of enquiry which may have tarnished the compliant
elegance of her theoretical perspectives, but would have encouraged a more
rounded and truly representational analysis.
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