Kerala's Pulluvas and Pampum Tullal- An Ethnography of Ritual Practice

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In Kerala, the south-west tip of the Indian subcontinent, the Hindu religious rituals are an all-pervading phenomenon cutting across the still-dominant caste hierarchy and enveloping the community as a whole. While some of the rituals are rather perfunctory, certain others command considerable authority and significance, as they are capable of profoundly intervening in the daily life of countless devotees. The ritual, pampum tullal, belongs to the latter.

The serpent worship tradition in Kerala is composed of two parallel streams the performative ritual of pampum tullal executed by Pulluvas, a subaltern community, and the highly esoteric serpent puja, named sarppabali (sacrificial offerings to the serpent-deity), the prerogative of the high-caste Brahmin priests. While the former is extremely popular in select areas of Kerala, the latter is mostly restricted to a few well-known temples and Brahmin families. An eternally inquisitive cultural anthropologist, Deborah Neff deliberately chose the aesthetically elaborate pampum tullal, its performative and sociocultural dimensions, middle-class patrons, and subaltern performers, as her subject of research from the 1980s onwards.

I have been a close follower of the classical performing arts of Kerala for over four decades. Yet, accompanying Deborah on much of her early research was no easy task for me. As one hailing from Kerala, I had taken some of the key components found within and outside of the ritual for granted. As an outsider, Deborah was drawn even to the microscopic aspects related to the performance, the subtleties involved, and the lives of patrons and performers outside of ritual. It took some time for me to realize her full intentions and help her hit the bull's eye within the specific time frame of her study. My role was to act 25 a sort of cultural broker". as I accompanied Deborah in the early months of her research, and through all these years, I have performed nuanced translations of her recorded interviews and performances.

It was during my first months in Thiruvananthapuram, during an earlier visit to India in 1983 that I had a glimpse of Kerala's ever- present tradition of serpent worship. In the kalari, or martial arts studio, I was introduced to Nagabhagavati, the serpent Goddess, and to the "Seven Sisters", an ancient pantheon of goddesses worshipped by the Kerala's martial caste, Nayars. Each day as I walked past the tailor shop, I would stop to admire a large and quiet assemblage of ancient carved stone serpent icons in the shape of cobrahoods, nestled beneath a large and voluptuous banyan tree, while the loud and busy city and its shopping hustle hastily zoomed by.

Further down the road and always in view, the towering Sri Padmanabhaswami Temple had enshrined in its innermost sanctum an immense image of Lord Visnu reclining upon the coils of the sacred serpent, Ananta, for which Thiruvananthapuram is named (the dwelling place of Ananta). Serpent worship seemed to be everywhere: it was even central to the Kerala origin myth. where the Brahmin sage, Parasurama, mandated the installation of serpent groves to honor the sacred serpent deities (nagas), the earliest inhabitants of the land. Kerala has long been known as the land of nagas, or ahibhumi, and myths and stories about naga kings, women, and serpent deities abound.

This research project was first envisioned in 1983, while I was in Thiruvananthapuram for seven months studying Ayurveda and Kalarippayattu at the CVN Kaļari Sangham. It was during a visit to the University of Kerala Library that I learned about wampum tullal, the elaborate "ritual of the dancing serpent deity".