ABSTRACT
Singer’s work on predominantly male and upper-caste devotional groups had established that such groups and the cultural performances they authored were constituent features in south India’s urban landscape. They typified the networks thought to characterize modern social worlds, and they illustrated a pan-Indic model of modernization: one that drew on an indigenous Great Tradition rooted in Sanskritic Hinduism. Smartas, also known as Aiyars, are a community with roots in Tamil-, Telugu-, and Kannada-speaking areas of peninsular South Asia. He argued that they were among the culture brokers who had disseminated Sanskritic Hinduism regionally and transregionally and thereby incorporated localized, orally transmitted, Little Traditions into a composite Great Tradition. The moral value of feminine beauty and adornments, domesticity, hospitality, and fecundity were underscored through association with the goddess. Not surprisingly, it, like other festivals associated with goddesses, was a time when women’s devotional groups, some of long standing, met at temples for prayer and song.
