Kataragama is, at once, a god and a place (gama means ‘village’) where the god resides. Kataragama, as a god, refers both to the Sinhalese version of the Hindu war god Skanda, second son of Siva, and to the autochthonous South Indian god Murukan with whom Skanda has long been identified. Skanda, of course, has a multitude of other names including Subrahmanya, Kumaran (“the boy”), Velan (“he of the lance”), and Arumukhan (“six-faced”), and was known in the ancient Sanskrit puranas as Karttikeya.
In both India and among Sri Lankan Tamils, Skanda as Murukan has been associated with bhakti (devotional) religiosity. For the Sinhalese, however, Kataragama is one of the four “warrant” (varan) or protector gods of the Kandyan kingdom, which controlled the central highlands of precolonial Sri Lanka (or Ceylon) from the late fifteenth century until 1815.
In form and personality, Kataragama is very much the virile, bellicose lover of ancient South Indian lore. Six-faced and twelve-handed, a vanquisher of asuras (demons), Kataragama wields a lance, rides a peacock, and is most famous and popular, in myth and modern tore, for his love affair with the half-god, half-deer, Vedda goddess Valli. (The Vedda are both the mythological first inhabitants of Sri Lanka, and contemporary tribes.)
Kataragama is first mentioned in a Sinhalese context in the eighth century Mahavamsa, but only briefly and as a god of the Tamils. By the fourteenth century, however, according to Obeyesekere, inscriptions cite him as one of four guardian deities: by the sixteenth century his fame had spread widely enough that he was named in the Siamese Jinakalamali, written in 1516. Captain Robert Knox (1606-1720), an English East India Company sailor captured in 1660 by the King of Kandy, Rajasingha II (r. 1635-1687), also noted the god’s importance in the Kandyan kingdom.
Kataragama, the site, has attracted considerable scholarly attention because of its multivocalic appeal to a variety of ethnic groups and religions. Sinhalese Buddhists, Tamil Hindus, Muslims and Christians all make pilgrimages to Kataragama, a fact of no small interest for a nation rent by decades of interethnic civil war.
Kataragama is located in the jungles of southeastern Sri Lanka on the same longitude as Mount Kailasa. The god’s presence in this remote spot is explained by two myths. As told there, the first describes a duel of wits between Skanda-Kataragama and his brother, the elephant-headed god Ganesha, to win a golden mango from their mother, and Siva’s consort. The goddess tells them she will bestow the mango on the first of them to race around the world. Skanda-Kataragama rushes to do so on his peacock, but Ganesha wins the contest by more sagely circling his parents. Skanda-Kataragama, enraged, departs south towards South India and, eventually, Kataragama.
The second myth recounts how the Vedda girl, Valli, catches Skanda-Kataragama’s eye. Frightened. however, by his godlike appearance, she runs away. Skanda-Kataragama’s brother. Ganesha, ever the cleverer sibling, devises a plan to win her affections for his brother. He appears to Valli as a wild elephant, propelling the frightened girl into Skanda-Kataragama’s willing arms.
It is the consequences of this myth that are acted out every year at Kataragama’s Esala perahera (procession), fifteen days during which the god is brought from his temple to visit the temple of his lover, Valli, while ignoring the temple of his legitimate wife, Teyvanai Amman. The festival is famous for displays of ecstatic devotionalism (including dancing, fire walking, and self-torture) and ends with the water-cutting ritual (diya kapima), in which impurity is washed away.
References
- Gombrich, Richard. and Gananath Obeyesekere. 1988. Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Link, Hilde. 1997. “Where Valli meets Murukan: ‘Landscape’ symbolism in Kataragama”. Anthropos 92: 91-100.
- Obeyesekrre, Gananath. 1978. “The Fire-walkers of Kataragama: the rise of Bhakti religiosity in Buddhist Sri Lanka””. Journal of Asian Studies X XXVII. no. 3: 457-476.
- Winz, Paul. 1972. Kataragama: the holiest place in Ceylon. Translated from the German by Davis Berta Pralle. Colombo, Sri Lanka: Lake House.
- Zwelebil, Kamil. 1991. Tamil Traditions on Subrahmanya
