The Right Spirit

Shambu Kallkuda, a sculptor living in Karkala was commissioned by king Bhaira to make a statue of Gomateshwara. He left home, when his wife Eeravadi was pregnant with twins, to do the king's bidding.
Several years passed and the twins, a boy and a girl, grew up.
Beru Kallakada, Shambu's son, decided to look for his dad who had still not returned. This story had a happy ending as without too much angst, the two happened to bump into each other on the banks of some lake. If this incident had happened in modern Bangalore, it wouldn't have been possible. So for instance if they had gone to Bellandur lake, they would have found it frothing with all the pollutants and run away from there. Luckily our protagonists lived in cleaner ages and didn't have to roam for several years before making each other's acquaintainship.

Shambu, probably proud of his workmanship showed what he had carved to Beru. However, not having been around while his kids grew up, he obviously didn't know that kids are always critical of everything parents do. Beru pointed out several flaws in the execution of the work, making Shambu fearful that the king would also find flaws. Worried by the repercussions, he decided that death by stabbing himself would be preferable to whatever the king meted out. Anyone could have told him that it was silly to be so fearful. Doesn't my daughter who is all of five explain to me everyday that my creative skills are not a patch on hers? If I were to take everything she said to heart, I would have been a nervous wreck by now. Parenting is being able to take large amounts of torture by a slow increment of the dosage. Shambu unfortunately got a single, large but lethal dose.
Beru, naturally, was very upset at his father's death and returned home. However the king having heard of his skills sent for him and so he returned to be the official sculptor.

I'm going to take a leap of faith and postulate that Beru was a Capricornian. I live with two Capricornians. They are perfectionists and cannot stomach the idea that anyone could be casual in their approach and that something may be a little wrongly aligned. Luckily for me I have had some genetic modification which makes me impervious to any criticism.
Coming back to our story, the king summoned him and asked Beru to make the statue of Gomateshwara. Beru, then proceeded to create a masterpiece and asked for emoluments commensurate with his incredible talent. In a suitably modern twist, just like the Iraqi interpreters who were rewarded by the US government by being denied entry into America, Beru Kallkuda was also rewarded by the king who instructed that his right leg and left hand be chopped off to ensure that he never made anything as magnificent again!

You might wonder why I am relating this story. Just hold on for a bit, I'm coming to it.
Anguished by the turn of events, Beru was sitting by the lakeside contemplating his current misery. Meanwhile his twin sister Kaalamma who had come looking for him, found him there. Both of them, demented with grief at his mutilation, jumped into the lake and became spirits or as we Tuluvas (tulu speaking people) say, 'daivas' or 'bhutas'.

The Bunt community from which I hail, as well as most of South Canara has managed to hold on to many archaic traditions which are intriguing and interesting.
I witnessed the custom of Kola and it threw up several dichotomies.
Before I get to that let me first explain that the world according to the Tuluvas is divided into three realms, one is the realm of the cultivated lands or gramya, the second is the jungle or wastelands -jangalya and the third is the realm of the spirits (also known as daiva or bhuta). The word bhuta makes people believe that we are devil worshippers as they believe the root is from the word Bhooth which means ghost in Hindi. But a truer translation would be spirit as opposed to ghost. Many of the spirits have animal origins, like the Panjurli who is one of the two bhutas on our land. The Panjurli is supposed to be the spirit of a boar blessed by Shiva and Parvathy. The bhutas can belong to the village, a manorial estate like ours or can even belong to the royal family.

So the two bhutas that we, as a family, pray to are Kallurti (pronounced with the 'r' silent) who is Kaalamma from the story I related above and the Panjurli.

                                 Kallurti


Every house that has a bhuta usually conducts an annual ritual of 'kola' in which ritual specialists from the scheduled caste impersonate the spirit. They supposedly get possessed by the spirit and answer questions by anyone in the gathering. These questions are however always asked through the head of the estate/ house/ village.
The Lord of the gramya is obviously the king but the lord of the jungle and the lord of the spirits is one and the same and goes by the name of Bermeru. Maybe because of that, the ritualistic impersonators were usually people living on the periphery, the ones who subsisted on forest produce.
They transgressed the boundaries between the forest and the village and maybe people believed that they could transgress the boundary between the tangible and the intangible and could reach the spirits.
These people who impersonate the spirit are the oracles who guide the seeker.

There were a couple of strange conflicts here. The kallurti who is our bhuta is only one of two female daivas, but the strange thing is that women do not get up when she comes close; whereas the men get up and receive her blessings. The enactment is always by a male attired in the female garb. For a strong matrilineal community where the family name is through women and inheritance is heavily loaded in favour of women; this practice intrigued me. My aunt stated matter-of-factly that if everyone were to get up, people sitting behind wouldn't be able to see what was happening. I'm going to go with that explanation. It's reasonable and lets me live with the illusion that we practise gender equality.
The other thing that disturbed me was that the person impersonating the daiva, being of a lower order in the caste system, doesn't actually enter the temple; the dancing and the oracles all happen outside the temple.
So the interesting thing is that the rituals are not conducted by a brahmin, but by two sets of people: one, the feudal lord or the house head who pays and organizes for everything and through whom questions are put to the kallurti and answered by her and two the spirit embodied by the member of the scheduled tribe who doesn't enter the temple. It is feudal, but gives primacy to a person from a tribe, at the same time keeping him firmly in his place by drawing impermeable boundaries.

My great grandfather had bought the property in 1930. The person who owned the land before that, another bunt family, had taken kallurti away with them when they sold the land. My great grandfather refused to install another idol of kallurti on the property reasoning that the previous owner had taken her away. Apparently, this angered kallurti who started giving lots of trouble to our family. Finally my grandfather succumbed and in the sixties reinstalled kallurti. Meanwhile, the family that had displaced kallurti was also given grief by her and left with little choice, they allowed her idol to float away in a river. They started paying obeisance two years ago at the temple on our land by attending the annual kola. She was finally where she belonged and everybody had been shown their place!
My uncle through whom all requests to the kallurti are made, asked her to let go of her anger towards the previous owners of the land, saying "their forefathers might have erred, but they have suffered for it and have followed your wishes." Kallurti angrily threw a leaf (of a jackfruit tree smeared with sandalwood paste) down three times. All three times it landed on the reverse side meaning that their request was denied and that they would have to appease her some more.

The whole ritual starts at night and goes on till the wee hours of the morning which obviously is the most sensible thing to do in that brain melting cauldron-Mangalore. The only addition that I can suggest to improve the festivities would be a tea seller and an ice cream hawker. The ring side entertainment would then be complete!