Analysis and Conclusion

Indian women’s trance within historiographical narratives about Indo- Guyanese households and traditional values has largely been characterized by my interlocutors as indecent, immoral, “too sexual,” and “too revealing.” Resonant within the North American context, such conceptions have a historical basis in the disavowal of women’s trance that did not comply with patriarchal gender norms and bourgeois notions of Indian women’s respectability and female virtue as instituted during the post-indentureship periods in Guyana and Trinidad (see Mohammed 2002, 202-214) and harnessed by Hindu nationalists during India’s anti-indentureship campaign (see Niranjana 2006, 73-84). Yet, as I have shown, the multivalent and ambiguous qualities of women’s trance also enable it to become a generative site with the potential to enact transformative gendered realities within the context of a transnational ecstatic religious movement.

On the one hand, much of the appeal for and impetus of the revitalization of Indo-Guyanese ecstatic goddess worship in NYC has been predicated upon individuals’ efforts to maintain distinctly Indo-Guyanese traditions as articulated and mediated via authentic religious practices and the preservation of “ancient Tamil” culture. Many Indo-Guyanese- Americans in NYC who participate in goddess-centered worship remain apprehensive and ambivalent about women’s trance because of how it threatens to present a rupture with the past and a potential corruption of Guyanese traditions or “old way of doing things.” The proliferation of “Madrasi Religion” is a deeply gendered process involving Indo- Guyanese attempts to reappropriate and transform the historical stigma of “Madrasi” heritage by positioning themselves firmly within a Tamil diaspora and equipping themselves with ethnonationalism in the twenty- first century. In other words, there are some limits to women’s trance. For instance, whenever an individual spontaneously trances, they are most often left to trance momentarily until either the Head Pujari or his assistants (marlo pujaris) quell the trance by touching the head with the healing properties of sambrani incense ash. Although it can sometimes be ambiguous as to what is taking place when a person trances, trance is generally perceived as a positive event, and does not disrupt the Head Pujari from conducting the service. Though usually pujaris do not interfere or stop a woman from trancing, upon a few occasions, I have noticed male temple assistants and Head Pujaris physically push trancing women away from the space where rituals and songs were being performed. Also, pujaris often do not approach women while they are manifesting to ask the deity to tell the congregation who they are as is customary during formal “call-up” sessions.

Yet, on the other hand, rather than becoming an impediment, an emergent feminist consciousness and the harnessing of self-assertions about alternative femininities through powerful trance experiences, as well as women’s interpretations of trance, have actually worked to galvanize an ecstatic religious movement by simultaneously reestablishing and reordering notions of tradition and authenticity. As a form of labor, women participate within the patriarchal structuring of Mariamman worship in North America by navigating the often ambiguous interpretations of trance performance. This case study reveals a different instantiation of what Aisha Khan analyzes as the “creative uses of ambiguity in social relations” within the context of legitimizing historically marginalized ecstatic religious practices and those individuals engaged in them (Khan 2010, 72). I also draw from Peter Wilson’s theorization of trance as a technology capable of “remov[ing] the ambiguity of status and transforming] status” (emphasis added; Wilson 1967, 374). Indo-Caribbean women’s trance, as a particular performative modality, has managed to simultaneously become a source of anxiety and attractive appeal for Mother’s devotees. But it is precisely this tension—what Raquel Romberg suggests as the “otherwise elusively emergent and expressly indeterminate reality of spirit possession rituals” and the “visceral yet uncontrollable reality of spirit possession”—that I am arguing Indo-Caribbean women capitalize upon (Romberg 2014, 231, 237). Whereas the ability to manifest Mariamman is seen as enacting strength and a powerful will, so is the ability to be in control of one’s body from manipulative forces equally as empowering for female practitioners.

What my research contributes to Indo-Caribbean feminist theory is a fuller understanding of how Indo-Caribbean women render religion as a vehicle for transformative gender politics and emancipatory agendas. Whereas religious traditions in relation with gender ideologies have often been theorized as restricting women’s physical and social mobilities, my research instead shows how Indo-Caribbean women (re)assert feminist agendas while working within patriarchal structures. As I have shown,

Indo-Caribbean women capitalize upon the multivalent qualities of trance in order that the stigma of women’s ecstatic bodies may be dispelled on the very basis of its own materiality. Furthermore, this study of Indo- Caribbean ecstatic religious practices, particularly trance, and women’s lived experiences thereof, fills a lacuna within Indo-Caribbean feminist theorization of the body as a transformative site and women’s ecstatic religious performances as channeling social mobility.

Through my preliminary analysis, I show how the contingencies of trance possession create a space for imagining and enacting an Indo- Guyanese politics of the body. Indo-Guyanese ecstatic religious practices enable the simultaneous production of emancipatory politics while also striving to maintain ethno-nationalism and racial solidarity. Trance possession not only enacts but substantiates claims of religious authenticity, dia- sporic realities, and spiritual materialities through the embodied presence of the goddess Mariamman, a phenomenon that Indo-Guyanese-American women and men forge together through their different negotiations of post-indentureship and diasporic instantiations of gender and power.