Ajji Kulai, the grandmother who never left, reinforces her promise to guard the village
Like the bhūta Ajji Kulai in the Neria household, who think of her as the grandmother who died but never left. The first time she made her presence felt was when the household felt threatened by an approaching gang of dacoits. Feeling helpless, they decided to pack up their most valuable belongings and flee across the river, leaving everything else to the mercy of the dacoits. Except that, in the ensuing confusion, one worker got left behind. Hearing the sound of the approaching hooves, he shimmied up the nearest jack tree, a good hiding place and a good vantage point. However, by the time the dacoits got there, a great sound wafted up from the house. It was like a wedding was in process. The dacoits didn’t know what to do. They could easily be outnumbered by the wedding guests; it was best to leave. It was only the worker, up his jack tree, who really saw what had happened. An old woman in the garb of a Brahmin widow, tonsured head and red sari, was madly swinging up and down in the attic of the house, cleanly visible to the worker from his vantage point. It looked as if she was hollering: the sound that emanated was that of a wedding party.
When the people of the house returned, the worked narrated his story. No one would believe his story at first, but he insisted it was true. Finally an astrologer was summoned. A prashne (question) was put forth and he cast his cowrie shells: yes, it was true. A new bhūta had come to live in the Neria house. She was actually not new; she’d taken asylum at the house when she was living, as a widow with no other place to go. After her death, she had decided to stay back as a mark of her gratitude.
The dacoit incident, the worker’s story, the prashne helped the family form an affective relationship with the bhūta and it is the memory of her role as guardian, that sustains her memory today. Her story is told repeatedly to the children as a cornerstone of the importance of bhūtāradhane. Even though the incident is estimated to have happened about 200-250 years ago, she is an important constituent of the present consciousness of the family. As recent as the year 2000, a newly-married bride claimed to have been visited by Ajji Kulai during the night of her first bhūta kola in her marital home. According to her, she woke up instinctively knowing that someone was looking at her. When she opened her eyes, she saw a fair-complexioned, old lady in a corner. The old lady smiled at her, nodded her approval, and disappeared.
Ajji Kulai is one of the four bhūtas in the house. During her kola, the Parava man, dressed in a red sari, saregu covering his head, black bindi, stands in front of the house and does arati for the house, as she is the one who looks after the well-being of the house. Through this gesture, she invokes her act of valour, but the gestures are limited to reiterating her motive: the well-being of all the householders. Essentially, the figure of the subaltern, the poor widow who had no place to go, gets preserved, but the memory turns this perception on its head. Ajji Kulai is the powerful, invisible matriarch of this intensely patriarchal family.
This need for recognition through the bhūtas, is a familiar thread. Within the household, it is believed that Karlutti is the guardian deity of the women who have married and left the house. In a system that has little to give married daughters, this affective relationship provides a lot of succor, a sense of identity within the household that they’ve left. “We have our very own bhūta, who looks after us,” one of the oldest daughters relates happily. She donated a neck piece to Karlutti, on behalf of the married daughters of Neria, three years ago. One of her grand-daughters flew down from Delhi, to personally give it Karlutti during a kola. As the grand-daughter’s marriage got fixed soon after that, her grandmother believes that it was Karlutti’s special blessing for her as a sign that she is pleased with the offering.
Thus, we see the birth of a separate mnemoculture linked to the bhūtāradhane, as a result of an affective relationship with the bhūta. In fact, there is evidence that a lot of these beliefs about the bhūtā lie in the realm of assumption and belief, and are completely independent of the origin, proliferation and the acts of the bhūta as contained in the pāḍdana. By this I don’t mean to say that the pāḍdana is a unary, definitive text. Every pāḍdana has countless variations depending upon location, community, people, time etc. The only common characteristic is that they’re a record of the past, whereas the affective mnemoculture surrounding the bhūta is framed by contemporaneity and the present suggesting there’s a disconnect with the pāḍdana .
This disconnect is produced by a combination of factors. This happens despite that even within the performative aspect, there is a
Rakteswari and the bhavana legitimise each other's existence
constant attempt to make the past relevant to the present. For example, during the Rakteswari nema, she is accompanied by a bhavana or a clown, who interrupts her serious performance with satire and comedy. As Rakteswari acts out her Puranic origins, the bhavana makes off with tender coconuts of the village. Rakteswari has to interrupt her nema to catch him and punish him. In one sense, Rakteswari has to prove herself as the legitimate guardian of the village by acting out her role. This interlude punctures a retelling of the past, and introduces a thread of the present, firmly rooting it in the now. But despite these practices, there is a disconnect produced by a combination of factors.
An important aspect of the bhuta kola or nema is also the paitri darshana where individuals from the village community approach the bhuta or daiva to seek counsel. They make offering to the bhuta, and discuss their problem with the bhuta. The bhuta in turn offers his advice and blesses the individual.
Seeking counsel and blessings
We see how there’s an affective relationship with the bhuta and everyone in the village feels an obligation to attend the ritual, why is it that the pāḍdana gets disconnected, even though it is performed live, sung in the present, as a part of sacred ritual? It leads us to the concept of disembodies voices where there a separation between the body and the voice. How does this take place? And when the voice is disembodied, how is it reappropriated? These are some of the questions that are briefly explored in the next page.
Bhutas of Memory 