Ambivalent Adi

This paper is a counternarrative to how the month of Adi is customarily depicted as wholly inauspicious and requiring avoidance of life cycle events. Instead, I foreground the explicitly polyvalent and especially ambivalent ways in which Adi is lived by Tamil Hindus. Adi is both an inauspiciously sterile and an intensely fertile period; marked simultaneously by sexual/domestic austerity, ritual proliferation, religious piety but also festivity and fun. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and from literary treatments and popular exegeses, I suggest that the equivocal understandings and multifaceted practices of Adi make tangible oscillations between the competing but also connected demands of conjugality, work, piety and play. The usually inchoate tensions between an earthly, earthy life and religious obligations, as well as between subsistence and recreation, are rendered immanent not in scriptural theologies or even articulated exegeses but as part of everyday lives and habitual actions. Tracing how these concerns are being adapted to changing climates, watercourses and people’s desires, I engage with how Adi and its open-ended associations continue to evolve. Only within such a fruitful ambivalence, I suggest, can one make sense of the laden significance of Adi.