Reduced to a Generic Goddess: Shifting Sites, Stories, and Sociality of a Tamil Deity

ABSTRACT Through stories and storytelling, this article tells of how a popular Tamil goddess, Veeramakaliamman, is birthed, bodied, placed, and propelled across time and space. Four narratives—derived from ethnographic fieldwork, historic and journalistic accounts, folk narratives, and personal memories—present Veeramakaliamman’s origins in the Tamil Nadu district of Pudukkottai as well as charting her growth, travel, and eventual overseas settlement in Singapore. Ongoing interactions between shifting politico-economic conditions and religious sensibilities frame transformations, not just to ritual cults and deities’ natures and powers, but also to their stories. Mapped through shifts in narrative genres is the gentrification of the goddess from a specific, local, and idiosyncratic being into a universal, abstract, and generic force. Deification has transformed an originally sovereign, incendiary, agentic force into a comparatively more contingent, serene, and human-mediated entity. While stories about her still proliferate, the goddess no longer drives her own narrative. Even while inspiring human actions, Veeramakaliamman herself has become more abstract and inert.