ANNA LAINE
LOOKING AND DRAWING
EXPLORATIONS INTO AN ETHNOGRAPHICALLY COLLECTED
SOUTH INDIAN OBJECT
This article is part of the project
The State of Things
www.varldskulturmuseerna.se/etnografiskamuseet
Copyright © Anna Laine 2013
ISBN 978-91-85344-67-3
The project “The State of Things: Openings towards Methodological
Development in Research on Ethnographic Collections” was carried out
at the Museums of World Culture during 2011 and 2012, with funding
from the Swedish Arts Council. A weeklong workshop was arranged by
the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg in cooperation with the
University of Gothenburg. At the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm,
research was carried out that comprised studies by Tina Hamrin-Dahl,
Ph.D. historian of religion and a member of the SFII research college,
and Assistant Professor Anna Laine, anthropologist at Dalarna University and research fellow at Goldsmiths College. See the articles The State
of Things: Towards Methodological Development in Research on Ethnographic
(https://www.varldskulturmuseerna.se/forskning-samlingar/
forskning/publicerat/sakernas-tillstand/) by Gustafsson Reinius and The
Kava Bowl Wonders: Can the Fetish Be Named? (https://www.varldskulturmuseerna.se/forskning-samlingar/forskning/publicerat/sakernas-tillstand/)
by Hamrin-Dahl.
Collections
Keywords: look at/with, vision, senses, material objects, movement,
closure, method, representation, Hinduism, Tamils, Christian missionaries, mantiravaadi, kolam.
INTRODUCTION
This article describes an encounter with a palm leaf manuscript that
is part of a South Indian collection at the Ethnographic Museum
in Stockholm. The collection was compiled in the Tamil region1 by
missionaries of the Swedish Church in Uppsala, from 1912 until the
1930s, and it was donated to the museum in 1997, together with objects assembled from Africa and China. Between the end of the 1930s
and the 1960s, a large part of the collected items were displayed at
the church premises in Uppsala and regularly open to the public. A
smaller part was presented as an itinerary exhibition by missionaries
travelling through Sweden. The palm leaf manuscript is one of several that were temporarily held by the museum in connection with
an exhibition shown in 1968.
The following investigation of the manuscript is positioned in the
overlap between artistic and anthropological research, or to rephrase
it in line with the anthropologist Tim Ingold, the practitioner’s aim
for improvising engagements and the analyst’s aim for concluding
descriptions (Ingold 2011). The tension embodied in the overlap is
examined through a parallel tension between a materials-centred
and an object-centred orientation towards material culture. The former focuses on movements through processes of making and circulating things, while the latter is concerned with closure in the form
of results and final objects (ibid.). Drawing has been explored as a
The Tamil region was named Tamilnadu in 1956, but as the article concerns earlier historical periods, from 1706 to 1950, it will use the former term.
1
3
method to make these separations interact, and they will be further
discussed in relation to the description of the drawing process below.
A further concern of the exploration is the act of looking. The orientation towards movements suggests a way of looking that works,
or looks, with materials, and the orientation towards closure implies
a distanced look at objects (ibid.: 6). From a perspective based in a
phenomenological, multi-sensuous approach, the way one looks is
formed through an education of perception in relation to the material environment and communities of practice. In interaction with the
other senses and a reflecting mind, visions become enskilled (Grasseni 2007). Various ways of looking, from the tactility of Hindu vision to the idea of surveillance as a colonial practice, will be brought
together in the investigation of the palm leaf manuscript. The article
also tries to pose questions concerning differentiations in ways of
looking in encounters between South Indian Tamils and Swedish
missionaries. In addition, effects of the author’s way of seeing the
manuscript will be accounted for.
The points of entry into the study of the manuscript have been
limited. In addition to information about the donor, the only available facts were the names and numbers attributed to the objects by
the missionaries which accompanied the collection in a box of labelled cards. No other data, for example concerning the motivations
and whereabouts of the people obtaining the items, were available.
My first impressions of the objects and their names were therefore
primarily based on previous fieldwork in the same region where the
collection was formed,2 and preconceptions of missionary intrusions.
There was a certain clash between these spheres of knowledge, and
it directed me towards objects named with the prefix troll, which
is associated with potent witchcraft as well as ideas of superstition.
The lack of accessible data was another reason for limiting the investigation. Beyond drawing, literature studies, contacts with previThe main part of the author’s fieldwork in the Tamil region was carried out in
2005–06, and was focused on the kolam practice.
2
4
ous informants, and a visit to the church archive in Uppsala towards
the end of the study have provided means to expose and probe this
clash. The study focuses on the practice embodied and visually represented in the chosen manuscript, and therefore the ancient Tamil
tradition of making books in the form of palm leaf manuscripts is not
discussed.
The article continues with a close-up of my personal encounter
with the manuscript. This is followed by contextualization through
a historical account of relationships between Protestant missionaries
and Indian religions between 1706 and 1950, a missionary description of objects with a similar content to the manuscript, ethnographic accounts of related subjects, and a discussion of various forms of
looking. The article ends by opening up for the way reskillments of
vision may be incorporated in museum practices.
ENCOUNTERING THE OBJECT
Surrounded by shelves of knowledge represented in printed books, I
was seated in the Ethnographic Museum library beholding a palm
leaf manuscript that forms part of the South Indian collection. The
missionaries had named the manuscript Trolldomsbok (Trolldomsbok
1968.31.0022), which translates as “Book of Witchcraft”.3 An attached
paper label reads: “Book of Witchcraft acc. to A. B. Johansson”.4 Another manuscript with the same name (Trolldomsbok 1968.31.0042)
was placed beside it on a tray presented to me by the museum personnel. The second object has a handwritten label glued onto its
wooden binder that states: “Manthra [undecipherable letters] Spells
The author has made the translations from Swedish to English in this article.
Johansson was a minister from Everöd whom the Swedish Church positioned as
a missionary in the Tamil region between 1895 and 1916. Other labels on objects
name Johansson as a middleman, and a book by his colleague Johannes Sandegren
confirms that Johansson received gifts from a convert, which were later sent to
Uppsala (Sandegren 1924).
3
4
5
and incantations to cause and avert evils on men”. Vague associations
of events told during fieldwork began to emerge. As I opened both
books, it was the first one that caught my main attention.
Palm leaf pages are dry and brittle, and my reverence along with
the museum context of preservation and requirement of gloves
bounded my movements. Slowly and with as much avoidance of
surface contact as possible, I untied the string that held the pages
and their content in place. The pages folded out and revealed finely
etched Tamil texts and geometrical diagrams. Previous attempts to
learn Tamil made the letters familiar to me, but I lacked the skill to
read and therefore felt somewhat distanced from them. The sight
of the diagrams, however, engendered an immediate connection related to my previous acquaintance with kolam patterns, another form
of geometrical figures made by Tamils. Kolams are symmetrical images that women draw in white lines at the entrances to their houses
to invite the deities and thereby create auspiciousness and well-being
for their families. The size and elaboration of the images varies according to life-rituals and festivals, and they affect the mood in the
surrounding community (Laine 2009).
My perception of the manuscript depended on my previous interactions with kolam. Being partly a practitioner trained in image
making in various techniques, I had experimented with kolam drawing during fieldwork. Learning the skill from my informants was a
valuable method in understanding the meaning and effect of the tradition, particularly its relation to rhythms. The emergence of this
understanding occurred unexpectedly. As I saw a design in the street
that I had been practising on several times, I perceived an intensified
awareness and sensed my rhythm of drawing it. After this occasion,
I began to pay attention to rhythms of other people’s drawing, and
to kolams connection to rhythms of life from a wider perspective.
Beholding the diagrams in the manuscript, I felt a comparable intensified awareness, and an urge to investigate these images through a
similar method.
Some of the diagrams in the manuscript resemble a category of
6
kolams called yantra kolams, which women only draw indoors at altars. They are constituted by circles, triangles, and squares, and they
incorporate Tamil letters that represent holy words, mantras, and
names of deities. To write and pronounce the mantras in the yantra kolams is an additional means to invite god to the kolam and to
the house. The subsequent presence of god in these diagrams makes
them unfit to be drawn in the street. There are yantra kolams for the
planetary deities, Navagrahas, and an astrologer may suggest that a
woman of any caste should draw one of them during a certain period
as a remedy. In general however, it is upper-caste women who are acquainted with this type of diagrams. Yantra kolams are differentiated
from yantras as the latter are etched in more precise detail on copperplates, and kept as more permanent forms of deities. Certain forms of
these are referred to in Tamil as cakkarams (Laine 2009: 201f.).
Exact symmetry is an essential part of kolam patters, as well as of
yantras and cakkarams, and the capacity of kolam to generate prosperity depends on this visual character. Drawn in front of the house,
its balanced appearance makes the image of the house complete, it
makes the house into a home. My vision, as well as my other senses,
had been trained to perceive the exact symmetry of the kolam designs
as a central element of the auspiciousness they are aimed to produce.
When I encountered a diagram in the manuscript that was similar to
a kolam, but asymmetrical, I sensed that it did not have good intentions. As I moved further into the fragile pages, I came across several versions of disruptive asymmetrical images. Seeing them caused
worry. Eager to understand the practice of making these diagrams,
to get into the meaning and effect of the patterns, I began to draw
them. Their composition became clearer, and an interesting overlap
between text and image revealed itself. However, my repeated acts of
following the hands that had drawn the diagrams in the manuscript
instigated a fear of being involved in constructing negativity. I eventually had to hide what I had drawn.
What was embodied within the firm binders and delicately etched
leaves? What was untied by loosening the string and drawing the
7
Drawing: the author.
diagrams? I wanted to understand the manuscript as an object, but
even more so what kind of practices the diagrams were intended for,
what kind of work they were supposed to do. The first aim resonates
with Ingold’s object-centred orientation. The material object is perceived here as closed and settled in a final form. As an analyst, one
can conduct a backward investigation and study how the object was
made. The resulting account will be as complete as the object itself
(Ingold 2011: 3).5 In the present exploration this orientation contains
facts and interpretations of missionary work in India, and about the
collecting of ethnographic things. The second aim, to understand
the practice, resonates with the materials-centred orientation. This
perspective concerns the practitioner’s following of material which
has not yet proceeded into a final form. It involves an interaction
with things as they take shape and dissolve, a participation in a forIngold argues that scholars of material culture who focus on object-agency react
towards the closure implied by an object-centred perspective (Ingold 2011: 4).
5
8
Drawing: the author.
ward-moving process. It means investigating effects of one’s learned
skills as one improvises with existing models (ibid.). Through pen
and paper, I tried to improvise on the diagrams in the manuscript
and learn how to make them. Being a practitioner, I perceived that
drawing the lines would bring me nearer to what the enclosed practice was about. This kind of engagement made it possible to open
the manuscript and perceive the practice as ongoing. Although the
manuscript was a complete object, the drawing made the content
present and moving. It also drew me closer to fieldwork experiences
that emphasized the seriousness contained in practices that spells
and witchcraft could be associated with.
At a later stage I also made photographs of the manuscript. This
provided a possibility to handle it once more, and to look at it from
various angles. I sensed that the brittle palm leaves held powerful
knowledge that the reference to witchcraft in the missionary context
did not seem to value. To achieve a better understanding of missionary aims, I turned to historical literature.
9
Photo: the author.
HINDU AND CHRISTIAN INTERACTIONS
While the Syrian Christians in India attribute their background to
the supposed arrival of Saint Thomas in A.D. 52, and the Portuguese began their Catholic Christianization in the sixteenth century
(Robinson 2003), later encounters between Protestant missionaries
and Hindus form a more relevant context for the museum collection. This context began to emerge in the Tamil region, as two German Protestants were sent by the Danish government to their colony
Tranquebar in 1706 (Bugge 1994: 56). The Danish-German mission
held that reading the Bible was an important means to convert local
“heathens”, and they established schools and printing presses to spread
vernacular translations of the book. Their mission was mainly directed
towards lower castes, but as will be discussed further below, they relied
on high-caste Brahman knowledge in their interpretation of Indian
ideas and practices (ibid.: 58). The Tranquebar mission expanded,
and it soon became financially supported by the British. At the end
10
of the eighteenth century, British missionaries arrived in the Tamil
region and their initial activities were performed in cooperation with
the already present Protestants (ibid.: 60; Oddie 2006). As the British
gained power in the Indian subcontinent, other actors lost ground.
Tranquebar was taken over from the Danish, and its missionary
work was transferred to a German society, later named the Leipzig
Evangelical Lutheran Mission (LELM) (Bugge 1994: 61). Swedish
Lutheran missionaries had worked in the region since the mid nineteenth century, and by 1876 the responsibilities of their work were
taken over by the Church of Sweden Mission (SKM). This mission
was a partner of LELM until 1913, but during both world wars, when
British and Indian administrators were suspicious of German activities, SKM was temporarily in charge of LELM. In their growing aim
to meet local wishes to form an independent national church, the
Swedish-German mission established the Tamil Evangelical Lutheran Church (TELC) in 1919. It did not gain full independence, however, until 1950 (Gregersen 2011: 47, 49).
CONSTRUCTIONS OF HINDUISM
At the end of the eighteenth century, Europeans constructed the
plurality of religious sects in the Indian subcontinent into a unified
system and named it Hinduism. Missionaries, in collaboration with
secular orientalist scholars, equated Hinduism with Brahmanism,
which was understood as a religious model based on the points of
view of Brahman priests as well as on Brahman exercise of control
over all other castes. The religious historian Geoffrey Oddie points
to two possible foundations for the European preference for Brahman
knowledge. The first is a preconception of priestly wisdom inherited
since the Greek contacts with ancient India (Oddie 2006: 44). The
second, and perhaps more acknowledged, is that the European focus
on texts as a source of “true knowledge” directed them to Brahmans
as they were in charge of this knowledge locally (ibid.: 54). Accord-
11
ing to the Indian historian Romila Thapar, the definition of Hinduism includes the European construction of the Aryan theory, which
held that Hindu religion and civilization were created by an invading
Indo-Aryan race superior to local non-Aryans upholding their power
and racial difference through caste (Thapar 2000: 81).
The Europeans of the Enlightenment period held that religion
“should in some degree be subject to the rules of enlightened rational enquiry” (Oddie 2006: 74). However, religious practices in India were perceived as completely irrational. The majority of early
travellers’ accounts published in Europe described external forms of
local religion, particularly those that appeared different and peculiar
and therefore suitable to entertain readers back home. Ritual suicide,
ascetics’ use of magical power, hook swinging and widow burning
triggered the imagination of the Europeans. These images were later
re-emphasized by Protestant missionaries in their quest to find support
for their work, and remained part of their popular forms of literature for
a longer period. Hindu religion was described as immoral, superstitious, barbarous and cruel, its idols were ugly monsters and demons,
and its devotees were deluded fanatics (ibid.: 51; Ward 1853). When
local religion had been constructed as a coherent religious system
with clear boundaries, it became easier to present as a dichotomy in
relation to Christianity. Overlaps between the two were considered
impossible. However, during this period the missionaries based their
historical understanding on the Old Testament and, like themselves,
the Hindus were believed to be the descendants of Noah. In this
way, they were not completely “other”. Beneath the burden of an evil
religious system, people of India still retained some reason and consciousness (Oddie 2006: 289).
Following from the European focus on Brahmanism, Hindus who
belonged to other castes were understood as having no agency of
their own; they were victims of the harsh domination of the Brahman priests (ibid.: 73). Early British missionary accounts depicted
Brahmans as oppressors who kept the lower castes in ignorance,
while the missionaries presented themselves as the guardians of the
12
underprivileged and poor (ibid.: 61). The Brahman scriptures were
received more positively, as they did not sanction idolatry or the
cruel practices that were part of popular religion. The discrepancy
between the ancient texts and actual popular practices made the Europeans perceive Hinduism as being in a state of degeneration (ibid.:
106). The lack of textual sanction also made it easier for the colonial
administrators to prohibit hook swinging and widow burning and
still argue that they did not interfere in religious traditions. At the
same time, they claimed that texts and practices were part of the
same Brahmanical system (ibid.: 280).
The caste issue was highly debated, by colonial administrators and orientalist scholars as well as by Protestant missionaries.
Among the missionaries, the British-American and the GermanSwedish sections differed in their approach. While the former
strongly condemned caste as an evil cause of social injustice and
a phenomenon that had to be eradicated, the latter were more
relaxed towards its continuation (Bugge 1994: 63). The Leipzig
mission regarded caste as an idea and practice that would wither
away by itself as Christianity took hold, but the British prohibited
all expressions of caste in their churches and criticized the attitude of less strict missionaries (ibid.: 72). The British missionaries were more aligned with the colonial administrators who held
themselves as legitimate rulers of a society perceived as degenerate
and in need of salvation.
The orientalist scholars were not interested in popular religion;
they focused their studies of Hinduism on the ancient Brahman
scriptures. The missionaries, on the other hand, were involved
in both aspects; they studied the texts and interacted with lower
castes and their religious practices. The outcomes of their research
were not only texts aimed at propagating for their mission, they
also participated in the field of scholarly studies in religion and
wrote articles for intellectual journals. In this way, they collaborated with the orientalists although they partly produced different
forms of knowledge. According to Oddie, the missionaries’ stud-
13
ies were concerned with ethnography and they hereby anticipated
anthropological research. Therefore, he argues, missionary representations of Hinduism from this period should be conceived of as
more contemporary and balanced than those of orientalists (Oddie
2006: 110).
CHANGING ATTITUDES
During the second half of the nineteenth century, European attitudes towards Hinduism began to change. One of the reasons was
an increase in information sources, such as the missionary experiences mentioned above. Missionaries were no longer only sent from
Europe; they were also children of missionaries born in India who
had not been raised with the same images of evil as their predecessors. Further, they were also women who conducted mission in Hindu homes, previously inaccessible to their male colleagues (although
still limited to the upper-caste environment), and increasingly local
Indians, also of various belonging (ibid.: 232ff., 270). The expanding
knowledge of local and regional variations of Hinduism caused European doubts of their construction of a coherent system controlled by
Brahmans. There were non-Brahman ideas and practices, and the
Brahmans also varied in their points of views. The missionary and
linguist Robert Caldwell focused on the Tamil region and he challenged the position of the Sanskrit language as well as Brahmanism
as a system dominating Hinduism. He argued that there had been a
particular Tamil/Dravidian culture, even older than the Brahman/
Aryan thus far held to be the foundation of Hinduism (ibid.: 276).
Orientalists and missionaries debated the existence and content
of Hinduism, and they increasingly turned towards its inner qualities. Certain parallels with Christianity were found in scriptures and
these became difficult to ignore. Hinduism had become a religion
that could be compared with others, and through the perspective
of evolutionism, it was believed that it would soon develop into the
14
highest religious stage of Christianity. The orientalists argued that
religions are expressions of fundamental instincts common to all
men and that missionaries should search for this common ground
and build their work on what was best within local religion rather
than condemn all that was Hindu (ibid.: 250). These arguments influenced the missionaries, and they were now less sure that Hindus
should be perceived as victims. They increasingly used local conceptions, such as Ishwan and Devan, to convey Christian notions of “the
true God” (ibid.: 303).
There were also changes in Europe that affected perceptions of
Hinduism and the missionary task. Christian theology increasingly
questioned the doctrine of eternal punishment, and it was no longer
self-evident that people of other religions would burn in hell. Instead
of interpreting Hinduism as the work of the devil, Europeans learned
that it incorporated aspects that counteracted evil. The missionaries
directed their work towards benefits in the here and now rather than
what might become of the future, and many focused on conveying
God’s love rather than his wrath. Social welfare and progress were
leading ideals, and they were claimed to be better accounted for by
Christianity than Hinduism (ibid.: 244f.). Christ was considered to
treat people bodily as well as spiritually, and this idea was also part
of the Swedish mission. The establishment of hygienic hospitals and
the training of local doctors and nurses was a central part of their
medical mission (Gregersen 2011: 52).
LOCAL RESPONSE
The European understanding of Hinduism was further influenced by
socio-religious reform movements and nationalism in India. What
the Europeans regarded as a lack of local agency produced an increasingly organized anti-European and anti-Christian sentiment
which had to be taken into account in further interactions. According to Bugge and Oddie, many of the reformers had been influenced
15
by European rationalism and Protestantism, and shared their views
that certain popular practices were unacceptable (Bugge 1994: 59;
Oddie 2006: 300). However, the Indian social scientist M. S. S. Pandian articulates this sharing in terms of strategic action. He describes
the Indian response to the Christian mission on a scale between indifference and rage (Pandian 2007: 18, Ch. 2). The missionary condemnation of Hinduism during street preaching was sometimes met
with assault and mockery. The first organized resistance was a public meeting held in Chennai (then Madras) in 1846. This meeting,
like the establishment of a number of previously non-existent Hindu
institutions, was arranged in line with European and Christian conventions. Due to the outer denunciation of Hindus as irrational and
superstitious, Indians developed practices familiar to the missionaries
and colonial administration in order to make themselves intelligible.
Members of the new institutions appropriated Christian forms of
worship such as the Trinitarian Benediction (invocation of Brahma,
Vishnu and Shiva), scripture reading and singing. They organized
the printing and distribution of texts on Hinduism and on how to
counteract missionary misrepresentations of their faith, and boarding schools focused on religious teachings were constructed. These
activities were established by upper and middle class Hindus, largely
of Brahman belonging (ibid., see also Thapar 2000).
The Brahmans had lost their high position to the British, and hence
they also directed their strategies towards regaining lost power. To
negotiate with the ambiguous European attitudes, of the orientalists who respected the highly educated Brahmans as founders of the
Sanskrit texts and Hinduism, and of the missionaries who accused
them of imposing the immoral caste system on the innocent poor,
they responded by reconstituting their identity as both authentic and
modern. They appropriated the ideas of Brahmanical Hinduism as a
single authentic Hinduism tainted by popular practices, and hereby
Brahmans and orientalists reconfirmed each other’s constructions.
At the same time, the Brahmans appropriated the European medical
discourse of hygiene and sanitation to explain the marginalization
16
of the low castes. By representing them as potential health risks due
to filthy habits, rather than embodying ritual pollution, Brahman
refusal of proximity with “untouchables” became an understandable part of modern science (Pandian 2007: Ch 2). The assertion
of Brahmanical orientations as the essence of Hinduism developed
into claims of Brahmanical Hinduism as the essence of India. Nationalists appropriated the construction of Hinduism as a unified
identity based on Brahman perspectives as a means for political
mobilization.6
The Europeans initially encountered a society in which the concept of conversion had not been part of religious belief, as people
historically had identified with a particular caste and sect from birth
and throughout their lives (Thapar 2000: 78). Missionary attacks on
Hinduism had proven to be counterproductive and causing resistance,
and the sympathetic approach that began as tactics to increase the
number of converts developed into a generally more positive attitude adapted to local religious and political movements. Following from Oddie, the most liberal approach among the missionaries,
even anticipating contemporary interfaith relations, was represented by William Miller, principal of the Madras Christian College.
Miller argued that no religion was complete, they all had to borrow
from each other. He preached that Christ cared for the whole of
the world, and that Hindus should be able to choose whether they
wanted to follow Christ through baptism or find other ways (Oddie
As the missionaries were not active in political struggle, the further development
of nationalism is minimized in this article. In the quest for economic resources and
political independence, Hinduism became a nationalized community that downplayed differences between various sects and castes and sought converts from other religious communities to enhance their possibilities for independence (Pandian
2007, Ch. 2; Thapar 2000: 84f.). This process excluded the majority of people from
being both Hindu and Indian, and from being rational and modern. Experiences
of having become imperfect Indians were part of the reasons for the development
of the political non-Brahman movement in the Tamil region. Details of the nonBrahman movement, including the importance of Caldwell’s construction of a Dravidian civilization, and an epilogue articulating its relation to the Dalit movement
of the 1990s, are provided by Pandian (2007).
6
17
2006: 313). Baptism appears to have been a self-evident part of conversion among the Swedish missionaries (Envall 1949; Sandegren
1924). Although influenced by the reform movements, they did not
incorporate a particularly liberal attitude.
NAMING THE MANUSCRIPT
Protocols at the SKM archive in Uppsala reveal that their missionaries began to show explicit interest in collecting ethnographic objects in 1906 (Missionsstyrelsens prot. 8 March 1906). This was one
year before the Ethnographic Missionary Exhibition was shown in
Stockholm, and shortly after Erland Nordenskiöld, director of the
ethnographic section at the Swedish Museum of Natural History,
called on Swedish missionaries to participate in gathering objects
and accounts suitable for the planned exhibition (Gustafsson Reinius
2005: 7). SKM presented a minor collection of items from Africa,
but the only object from South India in their possession at the time,
a bronze statue of the goddess Bhuma Devi obtained from a small
town temple,7 was not shown. In 1912, a specified budget instigated an organized collection practice among the SKM missionaries
(Missionsstyrelsens prot. 16 October 1912). Just one year later, chests
containing 219 objects were shipped to Sweden from Coimbatore,
some of them bought and others presented as gifts.8 By the end of
the 1930s, several of the collected objects were displayed at the SKM
premises in Uppsala and publicly available twice a week (SKM årsbok 1943). The exhibition was rearranged once, and therefore the archive holds two separate listings of displayed items. The first includes
The archive refers to a place called Sinneapuram, which might be the same as
Sinnayapuram in Ramnad district, represented on a map of missionary stations
(Sandegren 1924), but none of these places occur on contemporary Tamil maps of
Ramnad.
8
The last documented financial contribution for obtaining ethnographic objects
was made in 1934 (Missionsstyrelsens prot. 6 September 1934).
7
18
a “Book of Witchcraft” under the heading “Lower Hinduism” (SKM
Utställningskatalog Indien), the second refers to “Manthra book, contains spells that can cause and counteract misfortunes”, placed under the heading “Magic and Witchcraft” (SKM Utställningskatalog
Sydindien).
The objects were catalogued and given names according to the
understanding of the missionaries. The present investigation has
paid particular attention to the several objects defined with the prefix
troll, and the manuscript was singled out among these. Troll, and its
association with witchcraft, refers to the Swedish missionaries’ home
environment, and I therefore suggest that this classification should
be understood through the missionaries’ perception of themselves as
well as of the Tamils they encountered in South India.
The historian Malin Gregersen discusses encounters between
Swedish missionaries and Tamil inhabitants through a discursive
analysis of texts composed by missionaries in the field (2011). She
describes the missionaries as incorporating Lutheran ideals of performing good deeds to serve your fellow beings, combined with the
bourgeois European ideal of civilizing the uneducated and superstitious lower classes. In the examined texts, the missionaries represent themselves as “involved in a struggle between superstition and
science, tradition and modernity, Hinduism and Christianity” (Gregersen 2011: 67). The missionaries perceived educated higher-class
Hindus as embodying a potentiality to become part of “we”, while
those who belonged to lower classes were considered to be subjugated victims that lacked agency. Following from bourgeois morality,
the latter had to be uplifted and fostered, and it was the missionaries’
duty to accomplish this task (ibid.: 184). Civilization projects were
also performed within Europe. In Sweden, the Lutheran Christian
mission became important in the task of “rescuing and reforming”
lower social groups such as the working class, prostitutes and alcoholics (ibid.: 27). When the missionaries arrived in South India, they
transposed the framework of fostering to local social hierarchies.
A large part of SKM’s work was focused on medical mission.
19
Although a person’s body and soul were considered to be separate,
the mission had an aim to care for both (ibid.: 119). The professionalization of medical practices in Sweden required a high level of hygiene, and this reform developed a discourse that was equally applied
at home and in India. The Tamil midwife became a symbol of the
antithesis of the hygiene discourse. She performed her practices in
homes that were defined within the missionary framework as dirty
and dark, and she used local medical practices that the missionaries dismissed as superstitious and unscientific. Gregersen describes
how the hygiene discourse was connected with seventeenth-century
European notions of women healers as witches, and the Tamil midwives were thereby placed within the same category. They were a
dangerous threat to rational progress, and missionary narratives of
midwife practices and their causing of maternal deaths legitimized
the SKM establishment of clean and bright hospitals as acts of mercy
(ibid.: 72). Other forms of local healing which connect medicine and
religion were not acknowledged and hardly mentioned in the missionary texts.9
The Swedish bishop Johannes Sandegren was sent as a missionary
to the Tamil region in 1906. He participated in SKM’s collecting of
objects, and his attempt to categorize the plurality of Hinduism was
published in 1924, and later reproduced in the organization of the
objects displayed at the SKM exhibition in Uppsala. Sandegren’s representations may therefore be understood as what the Swedish missionaries at the time held as actual facts. The categorization is based
on the Aryan theory that claims the Aryan race as invaders from
A different attitude has been recognized within the Danish mission. The higherlevel church officials shared the values of the Swedish missionaries, but there were
lower-level catechists who participated in curing people from possession. The
Danish reproduced differences between Brahman and non-Brahman practices by
placing higher church officials on the level of Brahman priests, and the lower-level
catechists on the level of non-Brahman priests. As priests of lower-level goddess
temples cured possession, the catechists could do the same among lower-class
Tamils (Bugge 1994: 135).
9
20
the north and the founders of Hinduism, and it is also influenced by
Caldwell’s claim of the particular character of the Dravidians as an
indigenous race. Sandegren places the Dravidians in his first category “Primitive Hinduism”, the second, “Popular Hinduism”, is an
outcome of the interaction between Dravidians and Aryans, and
the third “Propagating Hinduism”, or higher Hinduism,10 incorporates the Aryan Brahmans whom Sandegren perceived as a form
of missionaries in relation to the Dravidians (Sandegren 1924). For
the purpose of understanding the naming of the manuscript as
a book containing witchcraft, the first category is of particular
interest.
Sandegren’s account explored a group of non-Brahman castes,
mainly kallars and maravars, and he positioned them under the
heading robbers and thieves,11 and within the category “Primitive
Hinduism”. The text partly expresses a sympathetic attitude and suggests that missionaries should be careful in their aims in order to not
ruin the positive aspects of the Dravidian character and beliefs. But
denigrating undertones are revealed in Sandegren’s assertion that the
missionaries should help the kallars and maravars to leave their present occupation behind (ibid.: 246).
It is mainly people’s interaction with spirits, pey, and the fact that
spirits can be malevolent and possess people, that cause Sandegren
to define their religion as primitive. The Ammans, which are various
forms of goddesses central to non-Brahman religious practices in
the Tamil region, have the same capacity of being both benevolent
and malevolent as well as possessing people. Here, as in many other
early European definitions of Hinduism, it appears unthinkable that
a deity can have both creative and destructive aspects. This contraAccording to the first listing of the SKM display, this category could not be illustrated by objects. Instead, bhakti saints and Indian reformers such as Vivekananda
and Gandhi are presented in this section (SKM Utställningskatalog Indien).
11
The British criminalization of particular castes as bandits and robbers during
the early nineteenth century has recently been re-examined by the historian Kim
Wagner (2007).
10
21
dicts Christian ideas of what a god is, and instead conjures up the
idea of the devil. Another negative aspect from this perspective is
that Amman worship sometimes includes animal sacrifice. Thus,
the spirits and Ammans are classified as blood-thirsty devils and
demons. According to Sandegren, primitive Hinduism centres on
demonolatry, of which the main components are bloody sacrifices,
possession and devil dancing (ibid.: 128). The attitude towards the
Ammans can be seen as an example of what Gregersen discusses as
the patriarchal aspects of the bourgeois Lutheran morality, where
women were valued according to their competence in performing
motherhood and making homes (Gregersen 2011: 143). Sandegren is
aware that Amma means mother, but he argues that “those terrible
furies have nothing to do with what we associate with the concept of
mother” (Sandegren 1924: 122). He also contends that South Indian
women are too outward in their conduct, and therefore predisposed
to become demons in their afterlife. The overall evaluation of the
“primitive” practices is expressed through concepts such as hocuspocus, troll-doctors and witches.
There are other missionary accounts of practices such as possession and ritual insertions of sharp items into the body that stress
an experience of resignation in the face of the strength embodied
in people’s belief. They bear witness to a power which is beyond
missionary control (Gregersen 2011: 123). In a comparatively late description one of the missionaries express his troubles regarding the
fact that Indian souls, whether Christianized or not, are held in a
firm grip by magic and heathenism: “Christ’s struggle for the souls of
India is primarily a struggle against magic” (Envall 1949: 396).
The missionary understanding of the manuscript and its diagrams
was guided by Protestant aims to convey the only right religious
system in combination with aims of scientific progress. The casting
of spells among Tamils was considered as an evil obstacle to this
development, and its clients as oppressed and deprived of their rights
to enlightenment. But at the same time as the missionaries placed
their religion above the Tamils’, the sense of resignation about lo-
22
cal beliefs and practices might have evoked Swedish narratives of
strong belief in the efficacy of witchcraft and hereby brought about
a certain level of recognition.
The evaluation of the manuscript may also have been affected by
the orientalists’ construction of Indian art history. Ancient temple
architecture and sculptures were admired, but current artistic works
were perceived as degenerate and monstrous. Abstract indigenous
forms, such as diagrams, were categorized as expressions of superstition and opposed to the new realism and progression taught at
colonial art schools (Guha-Thakurta 1992). This resonates with how
Sandegren connects his classification of Hinduism to the way temples look; those belonging to the Aryans were finer and nobler while
the Dravidians’ were simple and dark (Sandegren 1924: 126). However, the general growth of sympathetic attitudes towards Hindu
practices among the Europeans increasingly affected the Swedish
missionaries.
MANTIRAVAADI PERFORMANCES
Booklets with a content resembling the palm leaf manuscript found
in the museum collection have been described by the Swedish missionary Carl Gustav Diehl. Diehl was positioned in the Tamil region
between 1932 and 1953, and his PhD dissertation Instrument and Purpose: Studies on Rites and Rituals in South India, presented at the University of Lund (1956), reflects the deeper interest and increasingly
respectful attitude towards Hindu practices among missionaries in
general described above (Oddie 2006). Diehl also follows the earlier
missionary tradition of contributing to the production of scholarly
knowledge in religious studies. He attaches importance to textual
as well as ethnographic accounts, although the former dominate the
particular review of the booklets.12
12
Diehl was later criticized by the anthropologist Louis Dumont for being too
23
Diehl refers to booklets printed on paper, and although these objects are different in form and means of production from the handmade palm leaf manuscript, their content of geometrical diagrams
including mantras is similar. Well versed in the vernacular, Diehl
explains that the publications provide guidelines on how to perform maantiriikam, rituals that make the diagrams and mantras into
effective spells (ibid.: 267). The performances of these rituals are
described as remedies for unforeseen crises, and presented in a context of other treatments such as private worship in temples, pilgrimages, vows and votive offerings, as well as sacrifices and festivals.
Methods for finding out the causes of a crisis, its most suitable remedy, and how to anticipate a crisis, are presented as astrology, marks,
omens and divination.
The separation between popular and Brahmanical Hinduism, as
well as between Swedish superstition and Lutheranism, is related
to the distinction between magic and religion declared by the Protestant Reformation in the early seventeenth century. The reformers
considered magic, enacted through spells and rites, as false inefficacious attempts to manipulate God’s sovereignty, while religion,
enacted through prayers, was declared as the true form of belief
(Tambiah 1990: 19).13 Diehl questions the separation of these two
domains. He argues that it is a theoretical construct inapplicable
in real life, it is artificial and misleading (Diehl 1956: 20). Maantiriikam has the same aim of helping people in distress as the rituals
performed by Brahman temple priests. The performances may be
disparate at first appearance, but they have many similarities in
their details. Yet, maantiriikam is described as belonging to popular,
and thus lower, religion. Diehl might have appropriated the orientalist discussions of how religions are expressions of fundamental
focused on instrumentality regarding Hindu rituals (Diehl 1965).
13
The anthropologist S. J. Tambiah holds that the Protestant Reformers’ distinction between magic and religion was taken over by Victorian anthropologists in
the 1870s. Together with the domain of science, their differentiations and overlaps
were polemically debated until the 1980s (Tambiah 1990: 2).
24
instincts common to all men (cf. Oddie 2006: 250). In a later publication, he argues that that the main concern underlying all religion
is our human need for security (Diehl 1965).
BOOKLET CONTENTS
The publications on maantiriikam, according to Diehl, were available in most bookshops and hence it was possible for any person to
attempt to become a practitioner. However, maantiriikam was usually performed by professionals, referred to as mantiravaadis or mantiriikars (Diehl 1956: 268). The knowledge of maantiriikam was sometimes transmitted within the family, or from a guru to a disciple. It
was considered helpful to practise yoga in order to develop control
over one’s body and mind. The practitioner could be a priest of a
non-Brahman temple, but also a Muslim. Diehl describes how mantiravaadis put up sign-boards in city streets to advertise their services.
In the villages, the professionals were commonly known and such
announcements were not needed. The people who came for help
were affiliated to high as well as low castes, and had various levels of
education. Further, Diehl contends that when people were in crisis
because of maantiriikam, they approached another mantiravaadi to
receive the right remedy.
To make spells effective, the performer must be able to collaborate
with spirits and deities. Their powers can be used to cause as well
as to counteract harm (vision is another force central to Tamil life,
but will be further discussed in the next section). The use of mantras,
and diagrams, yantras and cakkarams, is central, and gestures, sounds
and sight need to be mastered. Diehl does not differentiate between
material and immaterial instruments; according to him the drawn
diagrams and the spoken words have the same purpose. He even
refers to the use of god’s name in the mantras as something tangible.
It is said to clean the air and protect against evil forces (ibid.: 291).
The spells described in the handbooks are categorized into eight
25
or six types of karmas (or cittis), according to the effects of their performance. They refer for example to “bringing under control a person, spirit or deity”, “the art of arresting and paralyzing”, and, in the
worst form, killing (ibid.: 269f.). One karma concerns driving away
evil spirits as well as making them cause harm, which can be interpreted as meaning that the boundary between positive and negative
aspects is fluid. The ambiguous definition may refer to the fact that
the deities and spirits turned out to have both benevolent and malevolent qualities. According to the anthropologist Margaret Trawick,
ambiguity is an important notion of Tamil understandings of the
world that pervades people’s everyday life (Trawick 1996).
Diehl points out that the eight booklets he has translated do not
define any karma as exclusively malevolent (Diehl 1956: 269). But
he also refers to the practice of pillicuuniyam, which he describes as
black magic. Pillicuuniyam can only have negative effects, while mantririikam can be both positive and negative. When Diehl had asked
mantiravaadis if they performed pillicuuniyam, they had all refused to
have anything to do with it. In addition to their practices of maantiriikam, they all claimed that they only get involved in stopping the
effects of pillicuuniyam (ibid.: 315).
According to Diehl, maantiriikam begins with worship, puja, of a
particular deity, chosen as appropriate for the specific spell to be
commanded. The rituals were never performed in temples where the
deities are permanently installed, and hence impermanent forms were
made. The god Vinayakan became embodied in a heap of dough
made of flour and turmeric, and a local goddess in a water-filled pot,
karakam. The mantiravaadi sometimes used the previously mentioned
yantra that contains particular deities, and these could be used repeatedly. Mantras, composed of syllables, words and sentences, were
chanted in worship of the deity. Diagrams containing syllables that
directed the mantiravaadi to the right spell were then materialized into
visible forms. They were usually etched onto metal sheets or drawn
on paper and then put in place to work. One place Diehl mentions is
metal containers worn around the neck as amulets (ibid.: 329f.).
26
Four diagrams are visually represented in Diehl’s book, and they
resemble some of the symmetrical diagrams in the palm leaf manuscript. They are based on circles, triangles and squares, and Tamil
syllables are inserted in various fields. Another similarity is that the
lines that many diagrams are composed of end with tridents, which
according to C. Muneeshwaran, curator for anthropology at the Government Museum in Chennai, is significant for diagrams pertaining
to witchcraft and sorcery (pers. comm. 29 October 2011). The trident
embodies shakti, the divine feminine power which is the source of all
gods’ and goddesses’ acts. A dissimilarity between the manuscript
and the booklets, however, is that the many asymmetrical diagrams
in the former are not mentioned in Diehl’s account.
RELATED ETHNOGRAPHY
The anthropologist Isabelle Nabokov presented her study Religion
against the Self: An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals almost half a century
after Diehl’s account. She explores rituals of divination and commanding of spells, and draws attention to the lack of ethnographic
accounts, particularly on the latter type of practices.14 Diehl remains
an important source of knowledge, and his definitions of maantiriikam
and pillicuuniyam are reiterated (Nabokov 2000: 190 n1). However,
Nabokov chooses the term sorcery as she claims that both practices
correspond to the anthropological definition of this concept. She
here cites to Evans-Pritchard’s account from 1937 where he holds
that sorcery is “the acquired knowledge of specific spells and ritual
procedures that enable a specialist (the sorcerer) to control mystical
forces or spiritual agents for the deliberate purpose of harming or
Tamil and Sinhalese accounts of the Sri Lankan versions of these practices have
received much more attention, predominantly in anthropological works by Bruce
Kapferer, 1983: 88, 97, and Gananath Obeyesekere 1976: 76 (Nabokov 2000: 190
n. 3).
14
27
even eliminating another person” (ibid.). It might be this definition
that causes Nabokov to refer to the mantiravaadi as a person who
only casts malevolent spells. She calls the religious specialist who
in turn neutralizes these spells a counter sorcerer, locally referred
to as caami, or caamiyar, which literally means God (Nabokov 2000:
20). This person is in close contact with the deities, and through
possession he or she also has the capacity to predict the future and
find remedies for people’s problems. Caamis pointed out that people
who perform maantiriikam and collaborate with the fierce aspects of
deities put themselves at risk; they might lose their senses and even
their lives (ibid.: 47). Diehl does not distinguish between magic and
sorcery/witchcraft, but he traces pilli in pillicuuniyam to the Sinhalese
billi which he translates as “sorcery” (Diehl 1956: 20 n3). Thus sorcery
would be black magic, which also is Nabokov’s usage of the word.
Both Nabokov and Diehl try to separate black from white magic,
but it appears as though we are again presented with a dichotomy
which does not hold in practice, where Tamils often trace positive
and negative effects from the same source.
Nabokov mentions the drawing of cakkarams in the context of
counter sorcery. During a ritual she attended, the caami asked his
client to sit on the ground, and then he drew a cakkaram in turmeric
around this person as protection. Inside he drew Sanskrit and Tamil
syllables. The caami said that the cakkaram could be formed as a circle, rectangle or square, and the syllables connected life and truth
to create a protective order. The man was illiterate and explained
that the goddess aided him in drawing the syllables in the correct
way. On this occasion, the caami also used an effigy. Mantiravaadis sometimes make small dolls as representations of the person the
spells are aimed at, in order to enhance the effects of their work.
To counteract the effects of such spells, the caami has to make a
duplicate of the doll. In this particular case, the doll was given life
through the opening of its eyes, and then it was ritually buried and
inserted with nails by the client to neutralize the negative effects of
the spell, now considered to be embodied in the duplication. Later,
28
the doll was taken to the river for a final completion of the funeral.
The caami drew a cakkaram in rice flour, consisting of a single line
and combined with a written mantra, around the doll to emphasize
that it could not return to life. Finally, the effigy was cremated and
regarded as completely neutralized (ibid.: 57).
Mantiravaadi practices were not part of my research in Tamilnadu,
but the topic did surface a couple of times. One family described how
enemies had cast a spell on them with the help of a mantiravaadi.
They knew because they had found a copper plate inscribed with
mantras in their garden, and they had to approach another specialist, the caamiyar, to neutralize the effects. I was told that the copper
plate was the vehicle of the mantiravaadi, and as he was able to move
it through water, earth and air, he did not have to enter their garden to place it there and make it work. Another informant told me
about ceivinay, which she defined as black magic. She explained it as
a means to attack your enemies through the use of evil spirits, and
that it was considered bad to engage in this practice (Laine 2009:
140). It also became clear that there is a lack of Hindu mantiravaadis
in the cities nowadays, and therefore people increasingly approach
Muslims when they need this kind of specialists. However, others
argued that few believe in the effect of spells.
A second object in the South Indian collection at the museum that
relates to the manuscript is a wooden board in which a diagram is
carved (Platta 1997.17.0083). It consists of fifteen squares each containing a Tamil letter, forming a mantra. The central letter is oom,
which according to Diehl is the most important mantra, together
with svaahaa, to make a spell effective (Diehl 1956: 286). Each line
separating the squares ends with a trident. Next to the middle is a
hole, suggesting that the item has been nailed onto something. In
the listing of the SKM display, under the same heading as the manuscript, the description “Two wooden boards, one with Tamil letters,
used during magic” (Utställningskatalog Indien) indicates that this
object was exhibited in Uppsala. With reference to the incident retold during my fieldwork, I suggest that this object has been used to
29
put spells cast by a mantiravaadi to work.
Bishop Sandegren was also aware of mantiravaadi practices. He
describes an incident where a Christianized man approached him in
fear of a deadly spell cast upon him. The man presented a palm leaf inscribed with mantras which he declared had been placed in his house
by a mantiravaadi (also referred to as a troll-doktor by Sandegren). The
missionary stated that such work could not affect a converted Tamil,
but just in case, he kept the object in his own house (Sandegren 1924:
101). However, it has not been found in the collection.
There was reluctance about discussing matters of maantiriikam
during my fieldwork, and at the time I interpreted people’s hesitation as effects of outer condemnation, by missionaries as well as the
modernizing Indian state, which also had made people avoid talking
about caste.15 In addition, it might have been related to personal risks
during involvement with ambiguous forces, which was explicitly referred to in other cases. The inaccessibility of knowledge concerning
commanding of spells was also experienced by Nabokov. After fourteen months of fieldwork, she had not been able to take part in sorcery rituals, or found any informants who said that they performed
such acts. Most local caamis she met performed counter sorcery, but
they never identified with being a mantiravaadi or sorcerer. People
gave accounts of how they counteracted effects of spells, and Nabokov attended such events, but the spells were always said to have
been cast by others (Nabokov 2000: 44f.). Diehl had a similar experience, although expressed in different terms; he never met people
who commanded malevolent spells, pillicuuniyam, only people that
counteracted them, mantiravaadis (Diehl 1956: 269). While spells
were rarely spoken about, the effects of vision was a much more
pronounced matter.
Caste has been perceived as an obstacle to progress, and officially condemned as
a symbol of backwardness and traditional degeneration (Fuller 1996).
15
30
SKILLED VISIONS
In Tamil everyday life, as well as in its ritual contexts, the act of
looking is a central phenomenon. Seeing is closely connected to the
other senses, and this relationship is realized in the conceptions of
darshan and drishti. Darshan, vision, refers to forms of knowledge,
and an act of exchanging gazes. This act brings about a contact experienced as “touching” (Babb 1981; Eck 1981). The main object of
this contact is to accomplish a merging between deity and devotee,
which is constantly sought in Hindu worship. The deities are considered to be present in material objects and images, and their efficacy
depends on the devotees’ sensory engagement with the images in
everyday practices. Drishti, the evil eye, is understood as a negative
form of seeing, and is ubiquitous in the daily lives of South Indians.
To be seen by a person who carries thoughts of envy, or other excessively intense emotions, can cause you physical harm and even death.
There are several ethnographic accounts that discuss Hindu vision
among Tamils (Daniel 1984; Fuller 1992; Mines 2005; Nabokov 2000;
Trawick 1996), and it is emphasized within an increasing amount of
visual culture and media studies (Gell 1998; Jain 2007; Pinney 2001;
2004; Ramaswamy ed. 2003; Herman 2010).
The importance of vision and its tactile effects are also discussed
in earlier accounts on South India. According to the anthropologist and museologist Edgar Thurston, the evil eye carries subtle
substance.16 This substance proceeds from a person’s eye and mixes
with the objects the person sees. Food which is seen by a low-caste
man will thus contaminate any Brahman who eats it (Thurston 1912:
110). Thurston refers to popular practices as well as a Brahmanical
theory of vision presented in Sanskrit texts. Neither Sandegren nor
Diehl elaborate in detail on the effects of the evil eye, but the lat-
Thurston’s reference to the transmission of substances can be related to McKim
Marriott’s ethno-scientific theory of the exchange of substances as a central aspect
of meaning within Hinduism (Marriott 1976).
16
31
ter describes the importance of darshan during temple visits. Diehl
translates the concept as auspicious sight, and mentions the negative
effects of seeing inauspicious objects or persons first thing in the
morning (Diehl 1956: 154).
The importance of a correct way of looking in relation to the pronouncement of mantras is described by the orientalist and indologist Jan Gonda. His studies of ancient texts reveal that the effects
of powerful mantras were held to become stronger if the performer
used a conscious and directed look. Certain Vedic texts prescribe the
right kind of look in combination with the correctly chosen mantra
to achieve the intended purpose, whether constructive as in creating
auspiciousness, or destructive as in counteracting witchcraft (Gonda
1969: 19, 21). Like Babb and Eck, Gonda represents Hindu vision
as a form of physical contact. To cast one’s eye upon a person is an
activity related to touching (ibid.: 19). According to the texts, looking
can bring forth purification as well as contamination. The sight of a
powerful being as well as an influential object makes the beholder
share their positive qualities. Bad influences can be applied as well as
removed through negative and positive sights respectively. Looks are
intended to enter into direct communication, to facilitate reciprocity
between divinity and devotee. Gonda connects the divine look on
devotees as an act of grace to the Bible where the Lord’s eyes are
protecting the righteous (ibid.: 64).
Auspicious persons, for example brides, are according to Gonda immune to the evil eye. During my fieldwork, however, this did not
apply. Beautified for the wedding, they were considered to be extraordinarily vulnerable to envious looks and had to be protected by
black spots on their cheeks (see also Mines 2005). In general, people
regarded drishti as part of everyday concerns, while darshan was less
talked about. The avoidance of seeing an inauspicious person first
thing in the morning, for example, was clearly heeded. One of my
informants explained that if a particularly inauspicious acquaintance
passed by and happened to look at her, this informant cast down her
32
eyes and redirected them to a tree in her garden that embodied a local goddess. She argued that: “one gaze of that miserable woman will
cause my skin to bleed.”
EUROPEAN LOOKS
In contrast to the intimacy embodied in the notions of darshan and
drishti, studies concerned with how Europeans looked at Hindus
present a distanced way of seeing. During the Enlightenment period,
European natural scientists were taught to observe and represent
flora and fauna in a detached and meticulous manner. As with the
ethnographic collecting, objects were removed from their context
and rearranged through categories of Western design. The historian
Daniela Bleichmar describes how this distant naturalist way of seeing became part of the European expansion and soon incorporated
the classification of human beings. Thus, visual practices were part of
how the foreign and unknown was put under control. Drawing and
painting was their main method of representation, but when photography was invented, the camera became their new tool. Theoretical
analysis was considered unnecessary; by looking at something you
could decide how an object should be categorized and controlled
(Bleichmar 2010). This detached attitude is further linked to the hierarchy of the senses that developed in Europe at the same time. Vision
was considered as the noblest sense, and multi-sensory engagement
in, for example, an image was an act associated with women, along
with lower classes and races (Freedberg 1989).
Following from the colonial execution of power, a common conceptualization of the early European looks on their new subjects involves
the idea of surveillance and the philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon. The literary critic David
Spurr uses surveillance as a trope in his study of colonial rhetoric in
journalism and travel writing (Spurr 1993). He builds on the principle
33
of the Panopticon as an architectural construction designed to enable disciplining prison guards to control inmates through effective
glances. This form of looking makes it possible for the observer to
execute control at a distance. In the colonial context, it represents a
strategically commanding colonial gaze from which the observed
natives were unable to escape. According to Spurr, its detached character makes it into a non-corporeal vision (ibid.: 16), and in such case
it places the European gaze in opposition to the tactile Hindu visions
described above.
Another analysis of European travel writing from the colonial period is composed by the literary critic Mary Louise Pratt. She discusses “imperial eyes [that] passively look out and possess” (Pratt
2008: 9), but through her intention to nuance the understanding of
the colonial gaze, she also presents a vision that is reciprocal (ibid.:
79). She finds this reciprocity in the writings of the traveller Mungo
Park. Instead of the “pass and see”, which Pratt holds is the common way of seeing among travellers, Park represents a “sit still and
be seen” that allows local people to express their curiosity about the
newcomer (ibid.: 78). His texts convey an open attitude towards local
knowledge and culture, and according to Pratt, he makes the others’
points of view intelligible to the European reader. Pratt argues that
the imperial eye could not let reality pass through until local people
were listened to. While most of the inland travellers Pratt refers to
were sent by the colonial administration with the aim of territorial
surveillance, Park represents a different attitude influenced by humanitarian values.
Gregersen attaches importance to visual aspects of encounters between missionaries and Tamils, and she reiterates the idea of surveillance. With reference to the missionary writing she states that: “The
image conveyed in the text is filtered through the eye and pen of the
beholder, and hereby descriptions of that which is different become
expressions of the beholder’s and writer’s view of the world” (Gregersen 2011: 14). With reference to Spurr, Gregersen argues that the
texts represent the missionaries as participating in the field through
34
a distanced, supervisory way of looking, a gaze of surveillance.
Through this confrontational gaze, the missionaries penetrated local
space and decided which images were suitable to their intended audience (ibid.: 138). As stated above regarding general European evaluations, Protestant missionaries initially focused their representations
on the outer appearance of Hinduism. They were overwhelmed and
shocked by what they saw, and the majority were not interested in
going beyond the surface. According to Gregersen, the missionary
texts reveal the notion that exterior aspects of bodies and homes
determine their inner states. In line with the hygiene discourse, those
that looked bright and clean were constructed as beautiful and desirable, while those that looked dark and dirty were connected to despair and old local traditions. These tropes were linked to European
ideals of bodily control as part of civilization (ibid.: Ch 3 & 4).
When the missionary Herman Sandegren articulated the aim for
a deeper understanding of Hinduism and the failure to realize its
inner values such as sincere devotion, bhakti, he referred to a previous blindness among the missionaries (Sandegren, H., 1924: 275).
Gregersen also describes a change towards a more humanitarian attitude and an interest in comprehending what lay behind the surface
of Hindu practices. This resonates with Pratt’s analysis of reciprocal vision, but Gregersen does not discuss the growth of interest in
relation to a changed way of actual looking. Her focus remains on
missionary incorporations of ideologies and discourses as the cause
of their response.
Neither Gregersen nor Pratt discusses vision in relation to the other senses, but some of the texts they cite include such references. For
example, Swedish missionaries complained about the painful sound
of temple music which scared their children, and this experience is
contrasted with the soft sound of Christian hymns (Gregersen 2011:
99). Their condemnation of uncontrolled bodies did not only concern the sight of intense gestures and dirt, it also involved loudness
and odour. The physical presence of dirt is also mentioned, as it had
to be cleaned away from the hospital to restore order after Tamil vis-
35
its. The new environment was not only evaluated by how it looked,
Gregersen describes how the missionaries saw it as crowded, hot,
smelly and noisy. During holidays, they took refuge at the hill station Kodaikanal, which was perceived as a sanctuary resembling the
calmness of Swedish climate and nature (ibid.: 130f.). It is possible to
imagine that the descriptions of horrifying rituals where devotees
inserted sharp items into their bodies reflect perceptions of pain, and
that the confrontation with the strength of people’s belief made the
missionaries sense powerlessness as a tactile experience rather than
through a supervisory gaze. The latter would not have enabled the
missionaries to feel empathy, but on the other hand, the perception of
pain might have been what partly caused the missionaries to develop
a detached way of looking.
According to Ingold, perceptual skills become fine-tuned through
an “education of attention”, learnt in interaction with the surrounding environment (Ingold 2000:22). The anthropologist Cristina Grasseni argues that vision is a skill embedded in sensory practice and
that it is situated in particular professional and everyday contexts.
For example, what a laser surgeon learns to see differs from what cattle breeder needs to pay attention to (Grasseni 2007). Grasseni connects Ingold’s emphasis on perception with the anthropologist Jean
Lave and the computer scientist Etienne Wenger’s theory of learning
(peripheral participatory learning), where reflection and embodied
involvement interact in a learning process that takes place in communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 2003: 34). The enskillment of
vision includes the learning of local norms for moral and aesthetic
appreciation. As knowledge of how to employ one’s vision is successively obtained, it becomes part of a person’s identity (Grasseni
2007: 11). By introducing the concept of skilled vision, Grasseni aims
to challenge the idea of vision as detached observation and, as such,
opposed to, and more highly valued than, other sense perception.
The missionary perceptions of the Tamil environment can be
understood as showing that their vision and other senses had been
differently skilled. They were not used to the intensity they encoun-
36
tered, and their evaluations were based on their previous enskillment. The morality and aesthetics their skills embodied made them
condemn what they saw. The condemnations included attacks on
material forms of the deities. Rather than only referring to outer appearance, this response might include a differentiation regarding representations of God more generally. In line with Plato’s denigration
of materiality, Protestants hold that God cannot be represented in
material form (Freedberg 1989: 61). His presence is not perceived by
seeing him, or an object that represents him, it is induced verbally
through prayer. This idea was part of the missionary teachings in
India, directed towards Hindus as well as Catholics. In his second
book, Diehl cites a Swedish journalist on the matter: “Here [in the
Roman Catholic Church] the church has taken the place of the gospel, not to say the place of Christ. It is hardly possible to go further.
The invisible realities have become visible. Spiritual things have received a concrete form. You can touch them, look at them, eat them.
But was it so our Lord wanted it? I doubt it very much.” (Göteborgs
veckotidning 1 March 1963, J. B-g., in Diehl 1965: 176). According to
Lutheran morality, you earn the grace of God through belief, not actions (Gregersen 2011: 202). Like the emphasis on surveillance and a
detached gaze, these ideas reiterate a denigration of multi-sensuous
experiences.
In relation to colonial administrators and orientalist scholars, the
missionaries interacted with Tamils in various settings. Homes and
festivals were visited, and Tamils visited churches and hospitals and
also worked in missionary homes. As Gregersen points out, the hospitals became contact zones of mutual engagement (Gregersen 2011:
203). Following from Pratt, this everyday proximity could have led
to reciprocal vision. From Grasseni’s perspective, it was likely to engender reskillments of vision among missionaries as well as Tamils.
Speculating due to lack of sources, it seems plausible that Tamils
would have perceived the condemning missionaries as carrying
drishti, and that this also might have changed in reciprocal situations.
The missionaries’ initial focus on outer appearance resonates with
37
Bleichmar’s account of the naturalist way of seeing, but their texts
also express a multi-sensuous perception. The development of the
sympathetic attitude seems to have occurred in interactional contexts where reskillments of vision and the other senses also took
place. Increased reflections on what they saw and how this related to
norms and values beneath the surface would therefore have enabled
the missionaries to see in new ways. The growing intention to look
beyond in order to increase understanding can also be articulated
through Ingold’s terms looking at and looking with (Ingold 2011).
The detached “looking at” successively transformed into a “looking
with” in a continuous moving forward where Tamil notions of the
world became part of constituting something shared. Parts of the
missionary texts written during the compilation of the ethnographic
collection do represent distance, but others express a change in attitude that looks and works with. It can be assumed that the increased
interest not only was related to changing discourses and a detached
gaze, but also to reflections during sensuous experiences of intimate
encounters.
DISCUSSION
This investigation of an ethnographically collected palm leaf manuscript containing mantiravaadi practices has been looking both backwards and forwards. It has been positioned in an object-centred orientation in which historical and ethnographic data have been looked
at and analysed, and in a materials-centred orientation in which the
practices enclosed in the manuscript have been explored through
drawing and looking with. The study remains in an overlap between
these two orientations, it has not yet moved into a final analysis.
The drawing of the asymmetrical diagrams in the manuscript increased the intense awareness I felt when I saw them, and I experienced a sense of sharing in the mantiravaadi practice. I was not sure at
the time exactly where the drawing would take me; it was not a pur-
38
poseful act. After some time, I allowed myself to admit that the act
of drawing had given me part of the answer as to what the practices
aimed at. Relying on knowledge derived from fieldwork and previous literary studies on the Tamil region, I gave in to an understanding of the manuscript as harmful in this non-academic manner. The
anthropologist Amanda Ravetz discusses moments of heightened
awareness experienced during drawing and filming, and how they
brought her into productive situations of sharing and understanding
during fieldwork. Playing around with materials is considered to be
a valid research method among artists, as a “thinking through making” and Ravetz suggests that this method and way of knowing also
can be useful in a forward-moving anthropology (Ravetz 2011). According to the artist Eirin Marie Solheim Pedersen, drawing is meaningful practice that involves emotions, senses and thought (Solheim
Pedersen 2004). In her research on the potential of life drawing at the
Art Academy in Oslo, participation in drawing classes was central to
fieldwork as well as analysis. Solheim Pedersen paid attention to her
own emotional experiences during drawing sessions, and through a
self-reflexive process she reached a conclusion about how her personal experiences were related to the social context being studied.
This development resembles my process of understanding the manuscript. But while Solheim Pedersen’s drawing focused on the relationship between the line and the contour in the constitution of bodies
and selves, my line making and reflection were directed towards the
relationship between symmetry and asymmetry in performing spells.
The inclusion of some of my drawings in this article is an attempt to
represent how the act of making them changed my way of looking
into an intensified tactile mode, and how this kind of exploration of
the diagrams connected me to the meaning of mantiravaadi practices
in their local context. It also made me reflect in new ways about how
a practice can be understood and described as continuous. However,
this is not to deny that the fulfilment of casting and counteracting
spells also calls for other forms of workmanship, such as how to pronounce mantras and how to approach Hindu deities. It also calls for
39
an appropriate environment in which to perform the acts.
The asymmetrical diagrams in the manuscript will have to be
examined by a professional practitioner to be fully understood, and
the Tamil texts need to be translated. But as mantiravaadi practices
contained in the manuscript still are considered to have effects, the
content does not have to be understood as a final representation. The
manuscript embodies processes of learning the practice as well as of
learning more about the object. Depending on how further investigations are performed, the manuscript may remain open through a
continuous looking with or become closed through a looking at.
Ingold suggests the incorporation of drawing into ethnographic
practice as a means to overcome the gap between moving observation during fieldwork and the final written description. With reference
to H. Miyazaki, he highlights the problem of always representing
ongoing life experienced among informants as retrospective closures
lacking future (Ingold 2011: 15). Drawing here refers to the graphic,
incorporating both written text and textuality, with a further aim to
question boundaries between text-based and image-based anthropology. It is not confined to making lines with a pen, but can also be
made by one’s eyes and presented through a camera, or constitute a
weaving together of everyday movements. The method of drawing
with a pen or a camera opens up new possibilities to reconnect making, observing and describing, and hereby position representations in
ongoing processes. We need not necessarily focus on verbal results,
but may think about description as line-making. Ingold uses an abstract line drawing as an example of how to describe an observation,
and he argues that the beholder has to look with it, rather than at it,
to grasp what it aims to convey (ibid.: 1).
The problem of how to translate and represent experiences might
also have been felt by the missionaries. Compared to the openness of
Diehl, many of the SKM missionaries represented a hesitant attitude
towards the Tamils they encountered. They considered the casting
of spells as magic superstition, and believed that it was their responsibility to eradicate these practices through mission and civilization
40
(Gregersen 2011). According to available SKM sources, the person
who spent most time cataloguing the collected objects and organizing them into the exhibition in Uppsala had not been registered as
a missionary. Her lack of experience of Tamil practices, perhaps in
combination with an aim to make the exhibition intelligible to the
Swedish audience, might have been the reason for using the name
“Book of Witchcraft” rather than “Mantra Book”. But the archive in
Uppsala does not provide any further facts about this person, and we
cannot be entirely sure how she related to either Tamil or Swedish
witchcraft.
To conclude, how may we integrate the exploratory material-centred orientation and looking with into the museum context? Ingold
hints at the curator, in relation to the improvising engagements of the
practitioner, as being a person who handles completed objects. Even
if the curator might hold other points of view, is it possible to produce
displays that allow the visitor to become a practitioner? I would like
to suggest larger space for interaction with objects and increased
use of exhibitions that aim at multi-sensuous engagements. Rather
than focusing on retrospective displays of final objects, the museum
could aim at constructing communities of practice that the audience perceives as shared. Participation in doing within this shared
space could open up for processes of learning based on practices
that improvise with materials and skills. In addition, environments
outside the museum building might be used as interactive space. In
conjunction with reflections on ideologies and morality, this exploratory perspective holds a potentiality to reskill the perception and
understanding of the visitor.
41
REFERENCES
Babb, Lawrence. 1981. “Glancing: Visual Interaction in Hinduism”.
Journal of Anthropological Research. 37, 4, pp. 387–401.
Bleichmar, Daniela. 2007. “Training the Naturalist’s Eye in the Eighteenth Century: Perfect Global Visions and Local Blind Spots”.
Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards, ed. C. Grasseni. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Bugge, Henriette. 1994. Mission and Tamil Society: Social and Religious
Change in South India (1840–1900). Richmond: Curzon Press.
Daniel, E. Valentine. 1984. Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Diehl, Carl Gustav. 1956. Instrument and Purpose: Studies on Rites and
Rituals in South India. Lund: CWK Gleerup.
Diehl, Carl Gustav. 1965. Church and Shrine: Intermingling Patterns of
Culture in the Life of Some Christian Groups in South India. Uppsala.
Eck, Diana. 1981. Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. Chambersburg, Pennsylvania: Anima Books.
Envall, Bertil. 1949. “Där fälten vitna”. Svenska kyrkans mission sjuttiofem år. Svenska kyrkans mission: Uppsala.
Freedberg, David. 1989. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and
Theory of Response. Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press.
Fuller, Christopher J. 1992. The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and
Society in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fuller, Christopher J. 1996. “Introduction”. Caste Today. Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. New
York: Clarendon Press.
Gonda, Jan. 1969. Eye and Gaze in the Veda. Amsterdam and London:
North-Holland Publishing Company.
Grasseni, Cristina. 2007. “Introduction: Rehabilitation of Vision”.
Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards, ed. C. Grasseni. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
42
Gregersen, Malin. 2011. Fostrande förpliktelser: Representationer av ett
missionsuppdrag i Sydindien under 1900-talets första hälft. Ph.D. thesis,
Lund University.
Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. 1992. The Making of a New Indian Art: Artists,
Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal 1850–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gustafsson Reinius, Lotten. 2005. Förfärliga och begärliga föremål: Om
tingens roller på Stockholmsutställningen 1897 och Etnografiska missionsutställningen 1907. Stockholm: Etnografiska Museet.
Herman, Phyllis. 2010. “Seeing the Divine through Windows: Online Darshan and Virtual Religious Experience”. Online – Heidelberg
Journal of Religions on the Internet 04.1. http://www.online.uni-hd.de/.
Accessed 5 December 2010.
Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill: New York: Routledge.
Ingold, Tim. Ed. 2011. “Introduction”. Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements and Lines. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate.
Jain, Kajri. 2007. Gods in the Bazaar: Economies of Indian Calendar Art.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Laine, Anna. 2009. In Conversation with the Kolam Practice: Auspiciousness and Artistic Experiences among Women of Tamilnadu, South
India. Ph.D. thesis, University of Gothenburg. http://hdl.handle.
net/2077/19290.
Lave, Jean & Wenger, Etienne. 2003 [1991]. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Marriott, McKim. 1976. “Hindu Transactions: Diversity without
Dualism”. Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of
Exchange and Symbolic Behaviour, ed. Bruce Kapferer. Philadelphia:
Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
Mines, Diane. 2005. Fierce Gods: Inequality, Ritual, and Politics of Dignity in a South Indian Village. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press.
Muneeshwaran, C. 2011. Anthropology curator at the Government
43
Museum in Chennai, personal communication. Email. 29 October
2011.
Nabokov, Isabelle. 2000. Religion against the Self: An Ethnography of
Tamil Rituals. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Oddie, Geoffrey. 2006. Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793–1900. New Delhi and London:
Sage.
Pandian, M. S. S. 2007. Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of Tamil
Political Present. Delhi: Permanent Black.
Pinney, Christopher. 2001. Piercing the Skin of the Idol. In Beyond
Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment, ed. C. Pinney and
N. Thomas. Oxford and New York: Berg.
Pinney, Christopher. 2004. Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and
Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion Books.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 2008 [1992]. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation. New York and London: Routledge.
Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 2003. Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and
Ideologies in Modern India, ed. S. Ramaswamy. Delhi: Sage.
Ravetz, Amanda. 2011. “‘Both Created and Discovered’: A Case for
Reverie and Play in a Redrawn Anthropology”. Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements and Lines, ed. T. Ingold. Farnham and
Burlington: Ashgate.
Robinson, Rowena. 2003. Christians of India. New Delhi and London:
Sage.
Sandegren, Herman. 1924. Svensk mission och Indisk kyrka. Stockholm:
Svenska kyrkans Diakonistyrelses Bokförlag.
Sandegren, Johannes. 1924. Om Sydindiens rövarekaster och deras religiösa
värld. Stockholm: Svenska kyrkans Diakonistyrelses Bokförlag.
Solheim Pedersen, Eirin Marie. 2004. Om teckning, tecken, text och teori:
Aktteckning i ett kontextuellt, diskursivt och paradigmatiskt perspektiv.
Oslo: Arkitekthøgskolen, Ph.D. dissertation in artistic research.
Spurr, David. 1993. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration. Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
44
Tambiah, S. J. 1990. Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thapar, Romila. 2000 [1992]. Interpreting Early India. In History
and Beyond. New Delhi, Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press.
Thurston, Edgar. 1912. Omens and Superstitions of Southern India. Madras: Government Press. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35690/35690h/3690-h.htm#p086. Accessed 1 October.
Trawick, Margaret. 1996. Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Wagner, Kim. 2007. Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth Century India. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ward, F. de W. 1853. India and the Hindoos. London: William Collins.
SKM ARCHIVE
Kyrkokansliets arkiv
Sysslomansgatan 31
751 70 Uppsala
Missionsstyrelsens protokoll, A1, vol. 4, 8 March 1906.
Missionsstyrelsens protokoll, A1, vol. 5, 16 October 1912.
Missionsstyrelsens protokoll, A1, vol. 9, 9 September 1934.
SKM Utställningskatalog Indien, D2, vol. 4.
SKM Utställningskatalog Sydindien, D2, vol. 4.
SKM Årsbok 1943.
ETHNOGRAPHIC OBJECTS
Etnografiska museets magasin
Djurgårdsbrunnsvägen 34
102 52 Stockholm
Platta 1997.17.0083.
Trolldomsbok 1968.31.0022.
Trolldomsbok 1968.31.0042.
45