ABSTRACT
Michel De Certeau’s differentiation between the concept of the city and urban practices illuminates disjunctions within modernity. The method that De Certeau proposed was to “analyze the microbe like, singular, and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress”. In these practices might be found a body of procedures constitutive of “the everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization”. The locales in which the women operated were socially distinct in terms of caste and class, and each woman drew on different kinds of material and symbolic resources. The women engaged a temple priest to officiate, and they made several different rice dishes as offerings. As Anandaveli pointed out, in the late 1930s the Shankaracharya had toured areas of the south, urging women among his following to take up public worship of the goddess.
