abound with provocative images of Tamil
̄
tta ̄y shackled in chains, or confined to
a dungeon. Her “children” were told that their mother’s body was riddled with
scars and wounds; that her golden figure which was once adorned with mag-
nificent jewels was now trapped in iron manacles; and that she was constantly
in tears (Ramaswamy 1998b, 1999).
In her guise as a frail and endangered mother, the Dravidian and Tamil
nationalists’ Tamil
̄
tta ̄y closely resembled another “nationalist” manifestation of
the goddess in the imagination of those of her devotees who saw themselves
simultaneously as “Tamil” and “Indian.” For these Tamil “Indianists,” Tamil is
one among a larger “family” of “mother tongues,” harmoniously flourishing
within the framework of the Indian nation, rather than outside it. In turn,
Tamil
̄
tta ̄y is a companion to Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄, rather than her victim. Indeed, in their
poetic musings, Tamil
̄
tta ̄y and Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ are imagined in very similar terms.
They are both virginal mothers. They are the most ancient of women, compas-
sionate and nourishing. And they are bothowed allegiance by the Tamil speaker
who is simultaneously “Tamil” and “Indian.” This is in stark contrast to the
radical Dravidianist for whom Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ was a “false mother,” and Tamil
̄
tta ̄y
is the only one who deserves the total and unconditional surrender of every loyal
Tamil speaker.
In my longer work on the goddess, I have also argued that not only is Tamil
̄
tta ̄y
variously imagined thus by her devotees, as the language that she embodies
is variously configured, but that devotion towards her is multiply manifested, as
religious, filial, and erotic. Indeed, this is how Tamil devotion, fundamentally a
network of patriarchal discourses and practices conducted largely by men,
solves the problem of having a female figure enshrined at the very heart of its
enterprise. She is first isolated and abstracted from the real world in which
Tamil-speaking women of all shades have been disempowered through much of
this century; she is then endowed with a plenitude of powers and possibilities
which transform her into a strikingly exceptional Woman, not readily confused
with the flesh-and-blood women on whom she is also obviously modeled. Though
she may be thus empowered, her potential to exceed the control of her (male)
creators is contained through her fragmentation. The plethora of multiple per-
sonae that she is endowed with works to prevent her consolidation as a threat-
ening all-powerful being, even as it simultaneously opens up the possibility that
her various selves may be deployed in contradictory ways for the different pro-
jects of her devotees. Tamil
̄
tta ̄y is thus yet another classic example of the objec-
tification of woman as a thing “to be appropriated, possessed, and exchanged in
the social relations of cooperation and competition among men” (Uberoi 1990:
41). Although some Tamil-speaking women have appropriated her to stake out
independent claims of their own (Ramaswamy 1992), Tamil
̄
tta ̄y, like other ex-
emplary female icons, is far from cutting a feminist figure in her guise as tame
goddess, benevolent mother, and unsullied virgin. Visible and valorized she may
be, but she is very much a figment of the patriarchal imaginations at work in
colonial and postcolonial Tamil India (Ramaswamy 1997).
the goddess and the nation 555