The Becoming-Work of Worship: Ritual Possession and Labor in Kerala

In 2008, a group of ritual possession specialists/ oracles in Kerala, known as velichappatus, came together to form a collective for oracles that I will refer to as the Bhagavathy Komaram Sangham (BKS). The BKS was formed to help velichappatus experiencing financial precarity. Their initial demands included better safeguards and protections for velichappatus, such as health insurance, pensions, swords issued by the State with safety seals, welfare schemes specifically for oracles, etc. They are often referred to as a trade union for oracles in regional and national newspapers, and even BKS members speak about the collective (registered as a cooperative trust) as a union. BKS has since expanded its activities to include campaigns for protecting the rights of the Goddess and her oracles. In this paper, I trace the story of Kamala, a velichappatu who was a founding member of this collective. Through her story, I examine  why a group of religious actors felt compelled to organize and model their collective in the image of a trade union. Building on that question, I briefly consider how and why the conceptual categories of work/labor became significant for ritual actors in Kerala, such as the velichappatus in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. As vellichappatus attempted to render worship legible as work/labor, I examine what kinds of ethical subjectivities and communities were made possible through these attempts at translation. I unpack how we might read the challenges mounted by the velichappatus as attempts to problematize the discursive frames of labor and religion and the binary of the secular and the religious (Asad 2010, Bender and Taves 2012).

The velichappatu in Kerala is a ritual actor, primarily from Izhava and Dalit (oppressed caste) communities (Jayan 2020, Balu 2022), specializing in ritual or voluntary possession. Marked by the Goddess (as Kali) through an episode of spontaneous possession in their adolescent years, velichappatus dedicate their lives to serving the Goddess as her oracle/vehicle (Tarabout 1999, Caldwell 2003). In this paper I focus on oracles who serve the Kodungallur Bhagavathy (Goddess). They  are usually initiated by an older, more experienced velichappatu at the annual temple festival of the Kodungallur temple. The neophyte is considered to have successfully demonstrated their ability to carry the Goddess or manage the flow of energy or chaitanyam (Freeman 2019) required to transform into the Goddess once they draw blood after taking the sickle-shaped sword (pallival) to their forehead. Once initiated, many velichappatus describe their lives as marked by hardship and loss. Despite these difficulties, oracles persist in serving the Goddess. In this paper, I unpack the ways in which they conceptualise what it means to serve the Goddess as a form of labor through the narrative of Kamala, a veḷichappatu, who has been serving the Kodungallur Bhagavathy as her oracle since she was nine years old. Having been divinely compelled to serve the Goddess, how does she understand agency and authorial control both when she serves the Goddess’s devotees, and in their abilities to make decisions in/about her own life? I will focus specifically on the ways in which female practitioners understand and engage with the Goddess and navigate their responsibilities to the Goddess alongside the expectations placed on them in their natal or/and marital homes. By teasing out some of the contradictory ways in which Kamala imagines her relationship to the Goddess, and her own ambivalence about serving as the Goddess’s oracle, I hope to present (a) how she understands ritual possession as a form of labour, and (b) how this form of labour is a process of ethical becoming for Kamala. 

Velichappatus are integral to the worship of the Goddess (Adarsh 2013), and for many devotees, the velichappatu offers the possibility of directly convening with the Goddess. In rituals such as kalpana kotukka ("giving the plan") the velichappatu, transformed into the Goddess, answers devotees' questions, usually pertaining to personal issues. Despite their centrality to Goddess worship in Kerala, these ritual actors are often rendered marginal within the institution of the temple itself. I will briefly trace the evolution of the temple as a modern institution (Menon 1994, Roopesh 2020) and examine how fundamental shifts and the dismantling of traditional systems of patronage transformed ritual actors into employees of the State, subject to government oversight and supervision (Fuller 1984, Roopesh 2020). Labor mobilizations and the rise of trade unions in Kerala also accompanied transformations in the temple as an institution. I situate the BKS in this regional history to understand why the collective adopted the trade union model and also to contextualize Kamala’s own insistence that her ritual activity be recognized and understood as a form of labor. 

For Kamala, the Goddess’s presence necessitates embodied participation—acts of puja, shrine maintenance, and divination that sustain the ritual economy. BKS thus becomes a site where the embodied and material demands of ritual work are legitimized and organized, asserting that the act of bearing the Goddess is a labour-intensive practice shaped by historical and socio-economic conditions.