Every society has their own definition of the “ideal wife”.
Many factors, with some discrepancies relative from culture to culture, include
child rearing, cooking, cleaning, and sexual availability. But the most
important quality a woman must have in order to be considered idealistic is
compliance to her husband. For the women in the South Arcot district of
Tamilnadu in South India, they have no choice but to give up their free will
and obey the demands of their male oppressors. In the case study “Expel the
Lover, Recover the Wife: Symbolic Analysis of a South Indian Exorcism” by
Isabelle Nabokov, she explains the rituals of demonic possession and exorcism
in this society. Such rituals are usually seen as taboo or rare occurrences,
but in the Tamil culture, they are used by the
men as a way to further control the female population and keep gender
roles intact.
One of the
main reasons the possession and exorcism processes exist is because the Tamil
men are not willing to accept their inherent sexual and emotional inadequacies
to their wives. They conclude that there must be some sort of supernatural
interference occurring because in their egocentric minds it could not have
anything to do with them. The men target the women by singling out activities
done solely by females, including childbirth and menstruation, say women are
“mentally weak” and use these reasons as a way of convincing the population
that women are vulnerable to the pēy attacks (298). The pēys are also described
as predominantly young males seeking intimacy, so it would make sense that
“young women are their favored prey” (300). One can see male influence in
almost every aspect of these two rituals because not only are they the ones
running them, but in Sinhalese culture, matted hair is said to represent “the
god's lingam, the idealized penis, his sakti, the source of life and vitality”
(309) and a major symbol in the exorcism is the lock of hair on the woman's
head through which the pēy is believed to have entered the body. The pēy
“represents the kind of unbridled sexual energy” (312) that is normally
attributed to men rather than women. The women are always playing a subservient
role because the men constantly feel the need to establish their dominance in
this society, apparently even after death.
The case
of Shanti is a prime example for the endless influence and manipulation that
the men have over the women in the Tamil culture. She was married off to a man
whom after living with for a short period of time, found emotionally abusive.
She tried to run away back to her home village only to be sent back to him by
her father. She began to detach herself
from her husband and reject his sexual overtures. She had also become “increasingly
withdrawn, lost her appetite and … lost
interest in life”. A simple modern explanation for this is that Shanti had
fallen into a depression because although things were looking up, she knew she
was stuck in this way of life forever. But in the Tamil society, her behavior
was interpreted to the conclusion that she had fallen victim to something much
deeper. It was a man who diagnosed her with being possessed by a pēy, men who beat her, pulled her hair and
forced her to dance in order to invoke and destroy said pēy, and in the end, she is returned to a man
as “cured”. She can now see that the life she once viewed as sad and depressing
was actually not so bad in comparison to the brutal and scarring procedure of the
exorcism, and since she has this falsity of happiness ingrained into her brain,
the men think the exorcism ritual is successful in returning the woman to
reason. The whole purpose of the exorcism is not to save the woman nor to
destroy the pēy, but to resubmit the woman into “the safety and structure of
the patriarchal family fold” (312).
These
Tamil women are raised their whole lives to believe in these pēys and by the
time they become of age, they have pretty much become brainwashed into thinking
they need a man to protect them. They have lost their free will before they
even had a chance to use it. Most women accept their fate and submit completely
to their husbands, giving up their rights for sexual and financial freedom, but
for those wise enough, they know how to find an temporary release from this
cycle. Nabokov brings up the proposition that these possessions are really
“opportunities for Indian wives to resist their powerless roles in their new
families, because whatever rights the women demand during these curing rites can
be imputed on their spirits” (297). As one can see with the case of Shanti, her
future was already set in stone just by being born a woman. The strict gender
roles confine the Tamil woman to a life of subjugation, so for a short period
she can use the man's invention of the pēy for her own benefit.
During the possession, the woman can go beyond the village
“to engage in an unrestrained intimacy outside the legitimate sexuality ruled
by their husbands” (308) and it is excused because the prohibited behavior is
blamed on the pēy. As Nabokov says in
“Tamil culture history, such associations between a woman's demonic possession
and her desire for forbidden sexuality seem to run very deep” (308). A Tamil
woman gets to temporarily regain her free will but not without the expense of
the traumatizing exorcism. The cycle will always bring her back under the reign
of her husband.
The
rituals of the possession and the exorcism are the Tamil way of marriage
therapy. The title of Isabelle Nabokov's case study is “Expel the Lover,
Recover the Wife”, but is this really what they are doing? They are not
“recovering” the wife or “expelling” the lover but rather putting these women
on trial in order to force them into what is believed to be the typical role of
a “good wife”. The agency of the Tamil women's free will can only be
transiently acquired through these rituals created by men but ultimately they
stand no chance against the outside force that is the male dominated family
structure.
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