ABSTRACT
This essay draws on several examples of literary and folk-liturgical texts from across the caste- and genre-strata of medieval Kerala works to suggest that bhakti, as a discourse and episodically invoked “movement” in this region, deploys a reciprocal pair of rhetorical and ritual strategies of incorporation into the institutions of Hindu deities. These strategies are discursively and ritually evidenced among three kinds of sources: the linguistically and poetically Dravidian register of Pāṭṭŭ; the contrastively elite register of highly Sanskritized Maṇipravāḷam; and finally, varieties of narrative folk-liturgy that continue into contemporary popular worship and community rites of spirit-possession. The dynamics of bhakti, understood as discourses of devotion and the ritual action informed and motivated by it, form the dominant thematic of both the mythical charters and ritual programs of the temples, and within and across these instances of bhakti literature and performance, various notions of “incorporation” reveal the cultural and historical work of devotion. The chapter argues that the assimilative desire exercised toward divine others, to incorporate parts of them and to be incorporated into their being or social sphere, stems from an alienation in oneself, a sensed lack of power or resources which yearns for completion through associative acquisition.
