ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on devotees of the manitatteiyvankal. The gendered nature of cakti, for example, demands an awareness of the patriarchal sexual politics of Tamil homes and home-places. But in addition to faster cakti, and an ability to adjust lives to fit in newly globalized circumstances, manitatteiyvankal such as Shirdi and Sathya Sai offered followers protection, access to a kind of sacred happiness linked to an increased ability to achieve inner focus, and a locally powerful form of multi-religious cosmopolitanism. the solution was localized too, though drawn from a slightly wider geographic field; that is, seeking the cakti of a god, Pillaiyar , occupying a well-established if modest temple, long popular among Sri Lankans, and holding a key place in the kind of day-to-day Hinduism practised there. This kind of cakti-seeking to solve locally generated “bad cakti” problems illustrates one pole of the continuum of strategies devotees seemed to be deploying.
