Gayatri Balu
This ethnographic study examines the everyday lives of women velichappad s, possession-based ritual practitioners of Kerala. It reveals how faith-based practices are essential for the daily being and survival of these women. While this chapter is part of a continuum of scholarship on gender and faith, it is mindful of avoiding uncritical attribution of status alterations and transformations of the social position of the subject. The analysis focuses on the roles of gender, labour, and caste in the lives of velichappad s beyond the ritual enactment. Most of the velichappad s belong to the marginalized caste and working-class sections of the society and becoming a velichappad results in certain status transformation, mostly symbolically, sometimes economically and socially. The chapter thus explores the social and material dimensions of the practice in the lives of these women, with the extensive aim of understanding faithbased practices as part of a socio-material reality. Existing studies note that velichappad shares elements of the divine when possessed and then becomes the path of the divine to humans (Caldwell, 1999; Kurup, 1977; Namboodiri, 1989; Payyanad, 1998). Malayalam word velichappad literally translates as illuminators, which may mean the enlightened one, or the one with the light. Velichappad , according to Malayalam Sabdatharavali , does thullal (dance/jump/heap) and gives oracles when possessed or in the presence of a deity (Nair, 1984: 1083). The ritual performance velichappad thullal of velichappad s thus essentially means the ‘dance of the deity’.