A Bronze Lineage: Kannagi/Pattini and Karaikkal Ammaiyar of Polonnaruwa

“Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere. Metal is a conductor of all matter … and thought is born more from metal than stone…”

Deleuze and Guattari, A 1000 Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

By Laleen Jayamanne

Professor Gananath Obeyesekere commissioned Tissa Ranasinghe to sculpt in bronze the figure of Kannagi/Pattini, a glistening photograph of which is on the deep blue-black cover of his magnificent book The Cult of the Goddess Pattini. Kannagi/Pattini are the two forms of a South Indian mother goddess worshipped by Tamil Hindus of South India and Sri Lanka and Buddhists, whose human origins are in the Tamil epic Silappadikaram, in which she is the main protagonist. The book, decades in the making, was published by Chicago University Press in 1984, one year after the July ‘83 anti -Tamil pogrom, at the beginning of the civil-war in Sri Lanka. I have read on the internet that Ranasinghe was originally commissioned (I don’t know by whom), to make a large bronze statue of Kannagi to commemorate the 1958 ‘race riots’ in the wake of the S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike government making Sinhala the sole national language of Ceylon, thus demoting the status of Tamil as one of the languages of the country. This commission was never realized and it would appear that Obeyesekere’s commission revived the idea on a miniature scale at a critical juncture in the nation’s interracial history.

Ranasinghe and Obeyesekere clearly had decided, fittingly, that the sculpture would be the final scene of mourning, a gesture lamenting the death of her husband, Kovalan, after her remarkable heroic action. The protagonist of the Tamil epic (Kannagi to the Hindus and Pattini to the Sinhala), in her rage against the king of Madura (for killing Kovalan), tore her left breast, throwing it at the city, destroying it with the ensuing fire.

The sculpture shows the single breasted Kannagi (her self-mutilation a sign of her rage and super human power), lamenting beside her murdered husband’s mutilated body. In choosing to represent the Hindu, Tamil version of the legend for the cover of the book on the Pattini mother goddess cult of the Sinhala folk, centred on the Gammaduwa ritual, Obeyesekere and Ranasinghe have emphasised the syncretic nature of popular religious practices in the case of Hinduism and Buddhism as they are practised in Sri Lanka.

Appadurai’s review of Obeysekere’s book

Arjun Appadurai in his review characterises Obeyesekere’s book in the following way:

“This is a book of unusual scope, quality, and scholarly significance. Ostensibly a description and analysis of a single cult in Sri Lanka, it is in fact a major symbolic, psychological, and ethno-historical study of practical religion in Sri Lanka, and of the relationship of that island to Indic culture and society. It is the product of two decades of field research by Sri Lanka’s most distinguished anthropological interpreter, and its combination of textual analysis, ethnographic sensitivity, and methodological catholicity makes it something of a blockbuster”.

My interest here is to take up what Appadurai calls the relationship of the island to Indic culture and society in order to find a way to discuss a possible link between Kannagi and the 11th Century bronze sculpture of Karaikkal Ammaiyar which is the subject of Sarath Chandrajeewa’s small book, “Emaciated female playing the cymbals: A study of an ancient Hindu bronze figurine in Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka” (2020). The deep history of the co-penetration of Hindu and Buddhist cultures, in relation to bronze sculpture in the late Anuradhapura period has been researched by Chandrajeewa in his doctoral thesis conducted in Russia, on the Veragala Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva sculpture (also published in an elegant book), one among the famous Lankan Bronzes made under the influence of Mahayana Buddhism practised at the Abhayagiri Vihara in the late Anuradhapura period.

These world famous Lankan bronzes were exhibited globally and I saw them here in Sydney at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1994. The small bronze sculpture, of a female musician, identified as Karaikkal Ammaiyar, poet-saint in the Shiva Bhakti (devotional), tradition, according to Chandrajeewa’s analysis, is in a folk idiom made during the Chola rule centred in Polonnaruwa. As a mother goddess, she is worshipped in South India where there are refined, elegant bronze statues of her included in the book. I feel that studying this old ascetic female figure of Karaikkal Ammaiyar, from 11th Century Polonnaruwa period, just might suggest some ways of thinking about female subjectivity, trauma and therapeutic performance modes done under duress, in our time. And perhaps, in so doing, female artists may be able to find new means of expressing new ideas and emotions, which are currently emerging in the most surprising of ways on the streets of Sri Lanka, among its youth or as they call themselves, the ‘Y generation’, especially, people born in the 90’s and now are 30ish.

Earthbound mother goddess

The old ascetic female singer, Karraikkal Ammaiyar, like Kannagi/Pattini, is not a celestial figure like the canonical consorts of the male Hindu deities but terrestrial, an earthbound mother goddess figures from the folk traditions of India and Sri Lanka, in bronze. They were understood to be humans (whether fictional or actual) before their deification. And according to D. D. Kosambi the mathematician, statistician and historian of ancient India, Indian villages in the Deccan area show ample material evidence of ‘primitive icons,’ stones daubed in red, of a multitude of nameless mother goddess figures. He suggests that these folk practices of the adivasis were subsequently incorporated into more orthodox Patriarchal Brahmanical Hindu caste based religious rituals once the tribal forest dwellers were made indigent and brought into the oppressive Hindu caste system at its lowest end to perform essential tasks considered lowly. This large group of people refer to themselves as Dalit. He says, “Indian mother goddess temples are a direct growth from primitive tribal cults, each of local origin, later brahminised”.

His book, Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture, based on extensive fieldwork and brilliant philological analysis of Sanskrit texts, explores these ideas in detail with material evidence, including an array of diverse microliths.

What sort of historical legacy might this little known, non-canonical, folk, bronze sculpture of Karaikkal Ammaiyar in a Polonnaruwa museum suggest to contemporary women artists and performers? Is it even worth looking that far back into our traditions, beyond the modern moment of, say 43 Group and the 20th Century, to imagine how to perform the category of gender beyond the familiar, by now habitual, and perhaps a bit tired moves? What rigorous skills (in developing rich, complex, formal means of poetic abstraction), might it suggest to a receptive mind of a gifted feminist artist or two now? Unlike India, in the absence of hospitable rich local traditions to draw from for women, perhaps casting one’s mind’s eye further afield may not be such a bad thing.

Tough situation for young artists

I am of course not suggesting that women artists ought to start learning to cast bronze now. But rather that young gifted artists should try not to be too circumscribed by formulations often determined by globalised international research protocols, and themes, whether they be those set by the practitioners of American academic art history and its grants and publishing systems or the global art institutions, where artists do have a chance to exhibit and discuss their work. This is probably a tough situation to navigate for young artists. But the effort it takes to be open to one’s own traditions should not be dismissed as ‘oh it’s just traditional’, implying that one shouldn’t go there, as has been done in the past.

Academics and curators should try not to be gatekeepers but mentors who open up possibilities for young artists

The task, as I see it, would be to widen terms of reference and not just fit into researchers’ next book project, which is often determined by professional academic publishing priorities and teaching topics, art-world buzz-words/ideas established elsewhere in the global North.

An idea of the canonical Patriarchal Indian mother goddess popped up recently, in the most unexpected of places, in Asoka Handagama’s controversial film Alborada (2022, in English), about Pablo Neruda’s time in colonial Ceylon as the Chilean consul in 1929-31. There is a kitsch statue of the goddess Parvathi, the dutiful consort of Shiva, in the house that Neruda rents. He created a fantasy around the nameless Dalit woman, who cleaned his toilet daily and whom he raped by likening her to Parvathi. The official Facebook page for the film appears to consist of largely male responses to the film.

I have a general impression that they showed more interest in the figure of the Burmese woman who pursued Neruda relentlessly and whom he rejected violently, rather than with the mother goddess analogy in discussing the rape. Is that because she is presented as the castrating woman archetype, called a ‘Burmese Panther’, ‘the devil’, who arrives with a large knife and is then reduced to a state of melodramatic abjection as a doormat at Neruda’s feet, as though she was saying, ‘sagara jalaya madi anduva oba sanda’ and we are even shown a pool of tears on the floor in a literal minded manner. But at least she is allowed a dignified exit if not much else, our Asian sister, one might say, from Burumaya.

Professor Sunil Ariyaratne’s film, Paththini, a slick epic extravaganza, deals with the Kannagi legend and its Indian lineage just in order to reduce it to reinforcing a Sinhala Buddhist ideology of purity and virginity for women through the exemplary tale of Kannagi and her step-daughter Manimekala, who becomes a Tamil Buddhist. Her dearest wish is to be born a male in her next life so that she can indeed aspire to become a Buddha. The emphasis is on the preservation of virginity (pathiwatha), and the enthroning of male sexuality as the route to attaining Buddhahood.

According to Kosambi the power of the tribal female folk deities, through their ‘unofficial’ proliferation, meant that there was room for women to struggle to find some degree of freedom in the domain of ritual and religious practices even under material constraints of tribal life.

Sinhala Buddhist culture

Given that Paththini is the only guardian mother goddess in Sinhala Buddhist culture it would be interesting to look at a minor figure cast in bronze such as Karaikkal Ammaiyar to see if her image can transmit any ideas to us now. Geeta Kapur the Indian art critic, theorist of modernism and curator, once told me that the way the limbs are modelled on the bronze figurine, the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro (2300-1750 BCE), and also on the Chola bronzes (9th-11th Century CE) are similar, that the limbs are in a tubular form, not sculpted realistically. This tubular form is also perceptible in the arms of the emaciated musician playing cymbals and singing as well. To perceive such similarities is important because they have a strong material basis in craft knowledge but their causality will remain forever obscure, given the vast epochs they straddle.

Nevertheless one can imagine, speculate on what they allow us to think about; the power of visual forms of abstraction, of iconic figures, archetypes of the mother goddess, across epochs in the one sub-continent of great aesthetic and linguistic diversity as in India and in a related adjacent country such as ours, with limited resources.

I feel that there is a powerful formal-conceptual-spiritual link one can draw between Ranasinghe’s sculpture of Kannagi and that of the Karaikkal Ammaiyar presented as an ascetic musician/singer who keeps a rhythmic beat with her cymbals and sings in great abandon, with her ‘eyes wide shut’.

Tissa Ranasinghe’s bronze Kannagi is a thoroughly contemporary icon of a mythical folk mother goddess. It is not a ‘beautiful’ pieta full of pathos. There is such a modern admixture or montage of rasas, rage (raudra), terror (bhayankara), disgust (bhibhatsa), heroism (Veera), evoked by her righteous cry. Whereas, in the state sponsored ideology of Sinhala-Buddhist pure womanhood, encoded in a recent film like Paththini by Professor Sunil Ariyaratne, the Sinhala variant of the goddess is embodied by the ‘pure wife’ Kannagi and her step-daughter Manimekalai, who becomes a Buddhist nun. There is a tradition to this in much liked Sinhala films such as Parasathu Mal (1966), by Gamini Fonseka and Ran Salu (1967), by Lester James Peries, both written by P. K. D. Seneviratne.

In both these films the character played by Anula Karunathilaka brings a new set of attributes into Sinhala cinema. She breaks certain sexual taboos and in Parasathu Mal expresses her anger against the feudal master who exploited her sexually and demands her rights and that of their ‘illegitimate’ daughter. In Ran Salu, however, the narrative problems are resolved by her choice of becoming a Buddhist nun, like Manimekala. While Punya Heendeniya plays the appealing ‘good Sinhala Buddhist woman’ role to perfection and wins the ideal husband, Karunathilaka offers an energetic foil to her, which has its own modern appeal. In relation to this distant history, Ariyaratne’s recent film reinforces feudal ideas of Buddhist, womanly purity, and appears to have linked up with nationalist Sinhala Buddhist state ideology of the postwar period. The mythic epic figure of Kannagi who in her rage enacts heroic justice is converted into an emblem of virginal purity. (To be Continued)