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

The Virgin Mary as ‘Our Lady of Good Health’ or Arogya Madha is a powerful protectress for migrant, working-class, marginalized caste Tamil communities in South India, across confessional identities. This paper suggests that the roots of this pervasive popularity of the Virgin is rooted in her articulation through the lived ritual grammar of Tamil Dalit and Shudra maternal tutelary divinities, known as the ammans. Attending to ethnographic narratives of seeing, feeling and hearing Arogya Madha through visions and divine voices, animal sacrifice and miraculous images, it demonstrates how the ‘White Virgin’ is configured into a ‘Tamil mother’, both an intimate, wholly present partner for place-making and a place in the unknown. As an amman, Mary's engagement by her followers in turn attests for them a sense of rootedness in the midst of the liminal subjectivities of being Tamil and Catholic and structural and personal experiences of violence, displacement and exclusion.