ABSTRACT
In the relative cool of the early morning a bustling crowd of women has already gathered in front of the grouping of stone snake statues (nga cilai or ngakkal) installed under a sacred tree in this Hindu goddess temple’s open-air courtyard. Clad in colourful saris and carrying baskets and bags containing the assorted items necessary to perform their individual ritual worship ceremonies (pj), these women represent a wide spectrum of class and caste backgrounds. It is a Friday in the sultry month of i, the ritually heightened month that spans July to August and is most closely associated with worship of the Hindu Goddess in the south Indian state of Tamilnadu. Fridays are considered especially auspicious days to worship local goddesses in their many manifestations during i, and the temple thrums with ritual activity on this day every week of the festival. Here in Chennai, Tamilnadu’s capital and India’s fourth largest city, the i festival season has been celebrated in increasingly elaborate ways in recent years, and the popularity of the snake goddess in her multiple forms has undergone a corresponding growth as well.1 The snake goddess is one among the goddess’ forms and she, like other local goddesses, attracts the most devotional attention from female worshippers. Because i is understood as a time when the goddess is both particularly powerful and uniquely accessible to her devotees, women visit Chennai’s snake goddess and other temples where stone snake images are available for worship in huge numbers during this period.2
