White Virgin, Tamil Mother: The Virgin Mary and a South Asian Grammar of Finding Place

Throughout the course of the late colonial and early postcolonial eras, the south Indian cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad saw waves of migration of working class, marginalized caste Tamil communities. As with many other South Asian peoples on the move, these groups brought along tutelary figures who would settle down and watch over them in the urban sprawls that characterized their new homes. This has been a shared practice cutting across nominal religious identities, Hindu and Catholic. Thus, along with the Tamil Dalit and Shudra goddesses Mariamman, Ankalamman and Ellaiamman traveled Arogya Madha, the Virgin Mary as ‘Our Lady of Good Health’ whose veneration gravitates towards her famed pilgrimage site in the town of Velankanni.

Shrine spaces for the divine mothers, known as the ammans, and the Catholic saint would be built by their respective confessional adherents or collectively by new Tamil neighborhood committees, allowing the envisioned expansiveness of the divinities’ patronage to reach all. In both cities, devotion to Our Lady of Good Health also saw a burgeoning in popularity as parishes dedicated to the Virgin under this appellation, once built for British colonial troops, were settled and transformed into key pilgrimage sites by Tamil Catholics and their legacy of Marian ritual practice. Similar dynamics have been documented amongst Tamil diasporic communities from Southeast Asia to France. Where Tamil Catholics go, Mary is both brought along and found. 

This paper situates itself within these migrant sacred worlds mapped out by the Tamil Catholics of Bangalore and Hyderabad. In doing so, it suggests that focusing particularly on the devotional tradition directed towards Our Lady of Good Health as Arogya Madha, developed over centuries in the homeland and further evolved in the diaspora, allows us to see the Virgin Mary also as a maternal Tamil tutelary figure, as an amman. Alongside goddesses such as Mariamman, she becomes an intimate, wholly present partner for place-making in the unknown. The configuring of Mary as Arogya Madha, from ‘White Virgin’ to  ‘Tamil mother’, embodying much of the shared attributes, powers and the ritual culture of other ammans, has also transformed her into a site particularly for Dalit and Shudra Tamil Catholics (and often their Hindu and Muslim neighbors) to configure for themselves a sense of rootedness in the midst of both the liminal subjectivities of being Tamil and Catholic and structural and personal experiences of violence, displacement and exclusion. 

Conceiving of Mary as both a Tamil tutelary place-maker and a place can best be understood, I will demonstrate, through a methodology that intersects the study of Sacred Materiality with the Anthropology of Religion. This paper works within major pilgrimage centers, neighborhood shrines and domestic spaces. It will bring into conversation acts of votive ritual, shrine building and popular imagery with ethnographic accounts and oral histories of mystical occurrences amongst Tamil migrants and their descendants in both cities. Attending specifically to narratives of intimate, visceral experiences of seeing, feeling and hearing Arogya Madha through visions and divine voices, animal sacrifice and miraculous images, I map out how the Virgin Mary is spoken of in the grammar of the ammans, enabling her engagement by her followers to attest for them both a Tamil way of being and a mechanism of rootedness amidst the volatility of their migrant caste and class locations in their new homes. The diasporic context transforms Mary into a place for continuity, change and reckoning for those who bring her with them. 

Working ethnographically in contemporary India both attempts to expand upon prior scholarship on Catholicism in South Asia and find new pathways for the same. In attending to the articulation of a diasporic Mary by her devotees, Catholic and beyond, through her ‘Tamil-ness’ and ‘South Indian-ness’, I seek to unsettle the conventional Hindu-Christian/Catholic binary inherent to scholarship on South Asian Christianity in order to make sense of the lived nature of Catholic practice in the region through the categories used by practitioners themselves. This allows for the Tamil Catholic experience, while necessarily brought into conversation with other religious traditions and normativities, to be see on its own terms, rather than solely in reference to both Hinduism and Western Christianity. Doing so also attempts to contribute to previous work on indigenous participation in religious acculturation by unpacking how the contemporary afterlives of these processes manifested through South Asian popular imaginaries surrounding the Virgin, while also accounting for missionary intervention, valorize a praxis of intimate dialogue that connects local peoples directly to the divine.