INES G. ZUPANOV - Ines G. Županov

Prologue • 19
With the influx of immigrant groups and a general reshuffling of
the population which often happened in times of war and changing
political alliances and the economic vicissitudes, the village communities
and urban centres were forced to adjust to new conditions and
restructure their rituals of integration, especially those confirming
hierarchical relations between occupational and kinship groups and
their incorporation into a wider political structure. Similar changes
were evident on the macro-level of South Indian politics such as, for
example, in the most important temple festival in Madurai, the
Cittirai utsavam. It was Tirumalai Näyaka (1623-59), Nobili's contemporary,
who, helped by Brahmans from the Minakshi temple, created
the festival in order to incorporate the powerful and dangerous
Kaljar warrior clan as his 'feudatory'. 58 A Kallar martial god, Alakar,
became a brother-in-law of áiva, Madurai's principal male god, and
an incarnation of a supra-local god, Vishnu.
The temple, kovil in Tamil, denoted formerly a royal palace, just as
the god, iraivan, denoted king 59 The connection is not arbitrary, for
statecraft and temple building or its endowment were traditionally
inseparable in South India. From the eighth century onwards, temples
became the central institutions for determining social stratification
in the locality and supra-local connections. Initially (3rd c. AD-
8th c. AD), it was through temple festivals that the VeHäjas and Brahmans
enacted the drama of their political and ritual superiority over
cultivators and pastoralists. From the same source, Brahman Sanskritic
ideas of the world-order and divine transcendence seeped into
the very different religious landscape of South India, populated
by male and female divinities of blood and power. 60 Outside the
Vejläla-Brahman wet zones, the divinities who continued to dominate
the dry zone of South India populated by warrior pastoralists
and hunters-and-gatherers, were considered both as protectors from
suffering, such as illness or natural disasters, and as 'criminal' gods of
1976; Appadurai, A., 'Kings, Sects and Temples in South India, 1350-1700 A.D.',
Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 14, no. 1,1977; and Worship and Conflict
under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case, New York, 1981.
58 Bayly, S., Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian
Society, Cambridge 1989, p. 43. See also Fuller, C.J., Servants of the Goddess: The
Priests of a South Indian Temple, Cambridge, 1984.
39 Appadurai A. and Breckenridge, C.A., 'The South Indian Temple', p. 191.
60 Heesterman, J.C., The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Ritual, Kingship and
Society, Chicago and London, 1985.