Generating Sacredness in the Domestic Sphere: Wedding Rituals and the Navarātri Kolu Festival in South India

This article examines how domestic sacredness is dynamically generated, negotiated, and undone within South Indian Brahmin households. Based on ethnographic analysis of the wedding first-night ritual and the Navarātri kolu festival, the study shows how ritual doubling—exemplified by the marappācci dolls as symbolic doubles of the bridal couple—and the circulation of miniature utensils link life-cycle rites with annual festivals. The kolu’s stepped display condenses cosmological hierarchies while activating gendered forms of ritual practice, auspiciousness (maṅgalam) and purity (śuddham). Everyday acts such as sweeping threshold, sparkling water, drawing kolam, and lighting lamps function as “religious profane” practices that continually remake the boundaries between the mundane and the sacred. Digital sharing and online kolu competitions further extend domestic sacredness into dispersed social networks. By foregrounding materiality, gender, purity, and the ephemerality of ritual arrangements, the article demonstrates that domestic sacredness is a plural, fragile and continually renewed process of making and unmaking.