Prayers to Kāli: practicing radical numinosity

ABSTRACT

Prayers to Kāli is an invocation of the radical-sacred as a way into decolonization, liberation, and healing. The radical-sacred, as I conceive of it, is broadly to do with the work of retrieving our spiritual dimensions as an inextricable part of queer, and decolonial futurities. The construction and performance of decolonial, queer-feminist theory, and knowledge discourses as fundamentally located in communities of coalition, new modes of resistance and cosmologies, form the theoretical foil of this paper. The broader aim of the paper is to highlight the significance of spiritual, corporeal, and emotional knowledges in the work of decoloniality and dismantling systems of oppression. I locate this exploration within the narrative specifics of contemporary spirit- poetry from Tamil Nadu; a radical, border site where these connections and dimensions of decoloniality, gender, desire, and resistance play out.

KEYWORDS:

• Radical-sacred
• decoloniality
• spirituality
• feminism
• healing
• resistance

Acknowledgements

This paper owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the following people: The editors of the Series, Dr. Nazia Hussein, and Dr. Saba Hussain for their thoughtful support. My two anonymous reviewers for their intellectual generosity, productive questions and feedback. Sharanya Manivannan, whose poetry, and generosity guided me to many of the poems I engage with, and also gave me the courage to write this paper. Dr. Pavithra Prasad and Dr. Mark Pendleton for their kinship and support as co-panelists at the Association for Asia Studies conference (2018) where the first version of this paper was presented. Dr. Mathangi Krishnamurthy and Niveditha Subramaniam for being such knowledgeable and gentle interlocutors. My grandmothers and guardians, Swarnam pāti, and Vimala pāti: bearers of light, wisdom, and love.

Notes

1. Fernandes, 2002.

2. Keating, Transformation, Now!

3. Holmes, Race and the Cosmos.

4. I use the lower case here to distinguish the practices I am writing about from mainstream, dominant vedic narratives of Hinduism.

5. Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, 248.

6. My simultaneous intimacy with, and distance from Tamil both as language, and cultural-spiritual identity have been shaped by my upbringing in a caste, and class privileged brahmin family. Being born and raised in any preponderant caste milieu in India wields symbolic, and structural, caste-based power. In the specific case of brahminism, as the ritually ‘apex’ caste, its historical claim to authority over vedic scriptures has led to the practice of rituals and religion imbued with oppressive beliefs of caste superiority and purity. I then moved to New Delhi as a child, where I was relentlessly abused for being ‘a dark, stupid madrasi’, resulting in an overzealous effort to learn Hindi, while simultaneously erasing Tamil from my psyche. Later, I moved to the United Kingdom where both racism and diasporic kinships further scrambled my notions of belonging. In each place, I wielded slightly different sets of privileges, and experienced different kinds of exclusions, though, of course, the former often softened the latter. This is my space of borders, where I identify and confront my shadow beasts of privilege, my wounds from abuse, as well as participate in social-justice work and coalition building.

7. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 2003.

8. Keating, Transformation, Now!, Ch 4.

9. Keating, Transformation, Now!, Introduction.

10. See Lata Mani (2009), Leela Fernandes (2001) for detailed reflections on these perceived distinctions between the spiritual and secular. It is also important to note that the idea of the secular is in no way unproblematic, nor is it divested from the religious. I only do not want to place the spiritual in opposition to the secular in the every-day understanding of secular as non-belief in organised religion, and the separation of the same from political life.

11. Rao, et al., Textures of Time, Ch. 1.

12. Ibid.

13. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 15.

14. Fernandes, Transforming Feminist practice, 11.

15. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 15.

16. Naraindas, “Of Sacraments, Sacramentals.”

17. Naraindas, “Of Sacraments, Sacramentals,” 277.

18. Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, 70.

19. See Mani, 2009 for a longer engagement with this concept.

20. Routledge and Simons, “Embodying Spirits of Resistance.”

21. Szerszynski, “Gods of the Anthropocene.”

22. Szerszynski, “Gods of the Anthropocene,” 257.

23. Sefa Dei, ‘Suahunu,’ the Trialectic Space, 833.

24. This is not a move to idealise or orientalise ‘non-western’ cultures, but to take note of important values and practices that have eroded the bonds within communities.

25. See Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing for a more in-depth discussion.

26. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 44.

27. Ibid., 4.

28. Ibid., 36.

29. Holmes, Race and the Cosmos, 23.

30. Maparyan, The Womanist Idea, Ch. 1.

31. Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, 152.

32. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 311.

33. Holmes, Race and the Cosmos.

34. Fernandes, Transforming Feminist Practice, 20.

35. Lorde, Zami, Sister Outsider.

36. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 39.

37. Bhattacharya, ‘Diving Deep’, 496.

38. Keating, Transformation, Now!

39. My work on the radical and healing potential of silence is ongoing, and as such, I do not address it in great detail in this piece. However, I do want to signal to it as an important space for decolonial practice to consider.

40. Sandoval, Methodology of, Introduction.

41. Sandoval, Methodology of, Ch. 2.

42. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 17.

43. Ibid.

44. Chasbar, Another World is Possible, 254.

45. Moewaka Barnes et al., “Feeling and Spirit,” 313.

46. Ibid., 317–318.

47. Langton, “Speech Acts,” 318 (I first encountered Langton’s work through Jacqui Alexander).

48. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 323.

49. Ibid., 112.

50. Keating in Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, xxix.

51. Nagar, Muddying the Waters, Ch. 3.

52. Ibid.

53. Anzaldúa 2015 and 2009 .

54. Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, 137.

55. Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, 243.

56. See Raghavan, 2017, ch. 5 for a longer discussion on the importance of dismantling barriers between literature and theory.

57. Craddock, Siva’s Demon Devotee, 23.

58. Prentiss, The Embodiment of Bhakti, 27.

59. Subramaniam, Eating God, x.

60. Ramanujan Speaking of Siva 107.

61. Tamil name for Vishnu.

62. Venkatesan The Secret Garland, 7.1.

63. Special thanks to my anonymous reviewer for pointing out the need to clarify this point.

64. Dasimayya’s beloved manifestation of Siva.

65. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva, 92.

66. Allama Prabhu in I Keep Vigil, 52; special thanks to my anonymous reviewer for drawing attention to this ‘othering’ in Bhakti poetry.

67. See Rachel Fell McDermott, 2001.

68. Sree Padma, Vicissitudes of the Goddess Ch. 2.

69. Tamil Bhakti poets were sometimes virulently critical of Buddhism and Jainism which they saw as ‘external’ impositions. Many poets also asserted their dominant caste statuses in the poetry they wrote.

70. Malathi Maithri, Wild Words, 10.

71. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 303.

72. Malathi Maithri, Wild Words, 10.

73. Sukirtharani, Wild Words, 85.

74. Anzaldúa Boderlands, 82.

75. Ibid.

76. Rajkumar, Give Us This Day, 35.

77. Anzaldúa Light in the Dark, 49. The story goes that the goddess Coyolxauhqui was dismembered by her own brother, and he scattered her body parts into the sky and earth. Anzaldúa suggests that the Coyolxauhqui imperative, is the deep desire to heal.

78. Rajkumar, Give Us This Day, 9.

79. Ibid.

80. Sree Padma, Vicissitudes of the Goddess, 50.

81. Sukirtharani, Wild Words, 93.

82. Ibid.

83. hooks, all about love, 19. I fully recognise that ‘justice’ is a complex term with a variety of legal-historical implications. I use it here in a more expansive sense, as a combination of ethical and spiritual practice as Leela Fernandes (2003) outlines in her discussion. She expands on the Dalai Lama’s framework of combining love, compassion, harmony etc. with the ethical imperative of avoiding acts of harm and injury against others and it is this kind of configuration that I want to use for justice, in this context.

84. Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, 94.

85. Keating, Transformation, Now!, Ch. 4.

86. Dayam in Dalit Theology, 145.

87. Ramanujan, Hymns for the Drowning, 148.

88. Malathi Maithri, Proscribed Blood-I.

89. Ibid.

90. Malathi Maithri, Wild Words, 27.

91. Craddock, Siva’s Demon Devotee,141.

92. Rajkumar, Give Us This Day, 22.

93. Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, 322.

94. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 79.

95. Holmes, Race and the Cosmos, 31.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anjana Raghavan

Dr. Anjana Raghavan is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Psychology, Sociology and Politics, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Her work is located at the interstices of decolonial and queer feminisms, political philosophies and critical theory-praxis. She has published work on corporeality, cosmopolitanism, global southern feminism and the performance of decolonial identities.