Singing the Goddess into Place

Locality, Myth, and Social Change in Chamundi of the Hill, a Kannada Folk Ballad

Caleb Simmons

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781438488677
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Hindouisme

Singing the Goddess into Place examines Chamundi of the Hill, a collection of songs that tells the stories of the gods and goddesses of the region around the city of Mysore in southern Karnataka. The ballad actively transforms the region into a land where gods and goddesses live, embedding these deities within the social worlds of their devotees and remapping southern Karnataka into sacred geography connected through networks of devotion and pilgrimage. In this in-depth study of the songs and their context, Caleb Simmons not only provides the first English-language translation of these songs but brings to light the unstudied folk perspectives on the foundational myth of Mysore and its urban history. Singing the Goddess into Place demonstrates how folk narratives reflect local context while also actively working to upend social inequities based on caste and ritual/devotional practices. By delving into this world, the book helps us understand how a landscape is transformed through people's relationship with it and how this relationship helps build meaning for the communities that call it home.

Chapter One

Introduction

Singing Place and Situating Deities in the Kannada Folksong Chamundi of the Hill

Merit comes to all who have told the story of Chamundi and to all who have heard her story. Dharma should be with us.

—“Dharma Should Be With Us,” Chamundi of the Hill

The focus of this book is the Kannada ballad Chamundi of the Hill (Kannada: Bettada Chamundi), a collection of songs that tells the stories of the gods and goddesses of the southern portion of the South Indian state of Karnataka. The ballad narrates the romantic relationship between the goddess Chamundi and her consort, Nanjunda, with Chamundi’s younger sister Uttanahalli acting as their “go-between.” While the story is about gods and goddesses, the lives of the deities reflect everyday life in southern Karnataka. The deities are embedded within the same social worlds in which their devotees live, work, love, and worship. The original date of this group of songs is unknown, and it is sung in its many variants throughout the region, mostly by castes that are classified as agriculturalists. The version that provides the content for this book can be dated to the late 19^th or early 20^th centuries and is traditionally performed outside of temples and at important village festivals throughout southern Karnataka by Kamsales, traditional performers from the Devaragudda subcaste of the Kuruba caste. The ballad, therefore, is situated within and preserves their specific local system of knowledge. By delving into the world of Chamundi of the Hill, we can begin to better understand how the physical environment is transformed through people’s relationship with it and how this relationship helps build meaning for the communities that call it home.

The narratives of the ballad are quite novel within the broader genre of Indian mythology as they focus not only on three deities but the identitities of those deities are tied to specific places and their local temples: Chamundi is the city deity of Mysore, her consort Nanjunda is the city deity of nearby Nanjangudu, and Uttanahalli is the goddess of Uttanahalli, whose name literally means the “in-between village.” Consequently, through the performance of these songs, the balladeers sing the goddesses and gods into the region, situating the deities within a local religious and social landscape and creating a local sacred history or sthalapurana of the region. The ballad Chamundi of the Hill is not only a mythology of the place, but it places myth, actively transforming southern Karnataka into a land where gods and goddesses live and remapping the region into a sacred geography where temples, deities, villages, and cities are connected through networks of devotion and pilgrimage.

The Story of Chamundi

In order for us to understand the significance of the narrative, it is first important that we introduce the ballad itself. This section is meant to serve this purpose. It begins with a brief introduction to the style and structure of the ballad before summarizing its central plot. This summary is intentionally laconic since the narrative is discussed in greater detail in the chapters of this book and the full translation of the story is provided in the final chapter.

The Form and Style of Chamundi of the Hill

The form and style of the songs in Chamundi of the Hill reflects its broad applicability and appeal. The ballad is comprised of ten songs, two frame hymns and eight narrative songs. The two hymns provide the anchors for the narrative, directly addressing the goddess Chamundi. The opening hymn asks the goddess for a boon or wish, and the concluding hymn restates the wish and describes the merits of singing and listening to the story contained in the ballad. The interior narrative songs tell the story about the goddess’s establishment in Mysore and how her romance with Nanjunda unfolded.

Chamundi of the Hill has been described as a “mythic ballad” and a work of “natural poetry” (Kannada: naisargika kavya), both of which help us to understand its form and function.¹ These folksongs easily fall into the layperson’s definition of “myth” because they are songs about deities or what some have called “casually effective divine personalities.”² However, as a mythic ballad, Chamundi of the Hill does so much more than just tell a story about gods, goddesses, and demons. It is a story “about something significant;” that is, its effectiveness lies in its ability to make sense of the complex modern physical and social worlds of southern Karnataka through the subjectivity of their divine protagonists.³ The worlds that it creates with its stories about the goddess and her lover reflect the same world in which its performers and audiences live. By singing the goddess into the places that they all live, work, play, and worship, the balladeers ground the region’s institutions (and their critique of these institutions) within a worldview of broader significance that is rooted in the divine past but uniquely situated in the local present.⁴

The composition of Chamundi of the Hill is a simple narration, “natural poetry,” that is primarily prose with the occasional insertion of verse, a style that in Kannada is called janapada champu, a folk version of the traditional Indian literary genre of champu that consists of mixed prose and verse. The prose portions occupy a space somewhere between prose and poetry, the form of which has been compared by some Kannadiga scholars to the famous vachanas or spoken word poems of the Shaiva Sharana saints (c. 12^th–13^th centuries CE) of medieval Karnataka.⁵ The lines of the songs do not rhyme, nor do they adhere to traditional Indian rules of poetic meter, neither in length (jati) nor in sequences (vritta) of syllables. Instead, the lyrics of Chamundi of the Hill are sung to a tune that mixes several ragas (melodies), a style known as ragamalika or “garland of melodies” in Carnatic music. Within the melodies, there is a great deal of space for improvisation, and performers do not strictly adhere to traditional melodies, nor can it be said that there is a standard tune for the songs.⁶

While the narrative certainly evokes emotions of devotion (bhakti) within Chamundi’s devotees, I would not classify Chamundi of the Hill only as a collection of devotional songs or as bhakti poetry.⁷ Instead, the ballad also serves as a mahatmya (glorification text) of the goddess Chamundi and a sthalapurana (local sacred history) of the region with a narrative that functions like any Sanskrit or vernacular Purana (ancient mythic story) upholding a religious and ideological position.⁸ To put it another way, Chamundi of the Hill, like all Puranas, operates within what Madeleine Biardeau has called “the universe of bhakti.”⁹ The songs and their lyrics assume a theological position, in this case devotion and ritual practice to the goddesses Chamundi and Uttanahalli, and, to a lesser extent in this collection of songs, Nanjunda. That said, within the ballad, there are instances in which the performers and certain characters express themselves in forms that are very closely aligned with bhakti devotional songs (e.g., “Mother, Grant Me a Wish” or Uttanahalli’s words to Nanjunda in the song “Have You Lost Interest in Your Wife?”). Therefore, while Chamundi of the Hill might not be classified as a devotional ballad, devotion to these deities and the networks that support that devotion is taken for granted within its lyrics.

Summary of Chamundi of the Hill’s Narrative

The story begins on top of Chamundi Hill outside of the city of Mysore, as the goddess Chamundi fights the buffalo demon Mahisha. After slaying the mighty demon, Mahisha’s brother, Aisu, appears and challenges the goddess. Chamundi quickly becomes overwhelmed fighting Aisu because of his supernatural power that produces demons from his blood; however, as she wipes the sweat from her brow and slings it to the ground, her sister, Uttanahalli, is born from Chamundi’s perspiration. Together they are able to defeat the demon foe, confirming Chamundi’s place on the hill as the protector of Mysore and establishing the goddess Uttanahalli in the village of Uttanahalli at the base of her hill.

After the battle, Chamundi goes to the confluence of the Kapini and Kaveri Rivers to bathe, and, as luck would have it, Nanjunda, a local form of Shiva, had also come to the rivers to worship. Spotting the lovely young goddess, the deity Nanjunda approaches her. After some negotiation, Nanjunda, despite already having two wives, convinces Chamundi to join him in a love marriage, which they consummate there on the riverbank. For several weeks after their marriage, Nanjunda and Chamundi enjoy their honeymoon in Chamundi’s temple on Chamundi Hill. As the festival season approaches, Nanjunda has to take leave of Chamundi to attend to the needs of his devotees; he forgets about Chamundi and returns home to Nanjangudu and his two other wives, Deviri and Somaji.

Missing her husband and feeling like he had tricked her into a fleeting romantic tryst, Chamundi calls upon her sister, Uttanahalli, to go to the homeland of Nanjunda and his wives and bring her husband back to Chamundi Hill. In order to convince Uttanahalli to go on this seeming suicide mission, Chamundi describes a horrific dream wherein bloodthirsty goddesses attacked Mysore, the Sharana poet Channabasava married a tribal woman and performed a ritual animal slaughter, and her husband’s wives mourned, having become widows. Uttanahalli is convinced and goes to fetch Nanjunda for her sister.

In the middle of the night, Nanjunda hears Uttanahalli’s calls to return to Chamundi. He is eager to return but has to manage to free himself from his wives with whom he is sharing a bed. After tricking his wives by using a log in his stead, Nanjunda goes to join his new lover. After borrowing money from his brother-in-law Kalinga, a local serpent deity, and a brief run-in with Nandi, his other brother-in-law, Nanjunda reaches Chamundi, who immediately welcomes him back into her bed. As the couple lies in postcoital bliss, Deviri and Somaji arrive at Chamundi’s temple and catch Nanjunda red-handed. As Deviri hurls insults at Chamundi, Nanjunda sneaks back home hoping to avoid a fight; however, when his elder co-wives returned home, Deviri stripped him naked and kicked him out of their home.

Naked and homeless, Nanjunda devises a plan to not only get Deviri and Somaji to accept Chamundi as their younger co-wife but to beg her to join their union. First, Nanjunda goes to the divine abode of Brahma and instructs him to go the Nanjangudu to give Deviri and Somaji a false shastra or incantation that is made entirely of gibberish. Next, Nanjunda goes to Chamundi and tells her to take the form of a fortune-teller and to go by his home claiming to have the power to use any shastra to raise the dead. Finally, he goes home and pretends to be dead. Brahma comes by shortly thereafter and gives Deviri and Somaji the false incantation. Not long after, the co-wives hear Chamundi in the guise of the fortune-teller on the streets proclaiming her gift of necromancy and run to inquire about her services. The fortune-teller, however, explains that the incantation will not work because they have cursed the goddess Chamundi.

Immediately, Deviri and Somaji repent of their maltreatment of Chamundi and resolve that she must be their co-wife and that Nanjunda can live with her six months out of the year. With that, Chamundi-as-fortune-teller leaves, and Nanjunda opens his eyes. Deviri and Somaji give Nanjunda their jewels and instruct him to give them to Chamundi. Then, all three deities go to Chamundi Hill and convince Chamundi to join their family, splitting time between Chamundi Hill and Nanjangudu.

Place and Locality in Chamundi of the Hill

Place-Making and Locality Production

As can be seen even within this short summary of the story of Chamundi of the Hill, its events, themes, and deities are intimately tied to specific sites of the region of southern Karnataka, especially Mysore, Uttanahalli, and Nanjangudu. This ballad does the work of both making place and producing locality for the community that performs these songs and the common folk who are its usual and intended audience. It is this commitment to place-making and locality that ties this book together. When I say that the songs make place and produce locality, I am using both terms in a technical and theoretical sense. By “place,” I refer not to physical environments but the result of when these environments have been transformed through people’s “perception, attitude, value, and world view.”¹⁰ Place is space that has been overlaid with meaning. Place, therefore, is not naturally occurring, but it is made by and reflected through those whose identities are linked to that particular environment.¹¹ Locality, on the other hand, is more relational and more agentive.¹² Locality is an expression of a community’s perception of place that can be part of a broader negotiation of multiple and, perhaps, competing perspectives on one particular space.¹³ Therefore, while place is made and perpetuated within local communities and their social systems and rituals, locality is produced and exhibited through “performance, representation, and action.”¹⁴ To put it another way, place builds the community; locality is the demarcation of its boundaries.

The stories of Chamundi of the Hill that are discussed in this book are primarily intended for an internal audience as they are typical...