How One Goddess Crossed the Sinhala and Tamil Line

The pairing of Pattini and Kannagi recorded here rests on one of the most detailed single studies of a South Asian deity cult. Gananath Obeyesekere, a Sri Lankan anthropologist, published The Cult of the Goddess Pattini in 1984, tracing how a figure central to the Tamil epic Silappatikaram, the wronged wife Kannagi who curses and burns the city of Madurai in her grief and rage, was received into Sinhala Buddhist devotion as Pattini, a goddess invoked for chastity, fertility and protection from disease, particularly smallpox before its eradication.

Obeyesekere's study argued that the cult's spread across the island's Sinhala Buddhist majority and Tamil Hindu minority was neither a simple borrowing in one direction nor a coincidence of two separate traditions arriving independently at the same figure, but the product of a long history of ritual and pilgrimage contact between Sinhala and Tamil communities that the modern, sharply drawn ethnic and linguistic line between them does not reflect. Pattini temples and Kannagi shrines are documented across both Sinhala and Tamil areas of Sri Lanka, and the goddess has continued to draw devotees from both communities through the island's twentieth century periods of ethnic conflict, a continuity Obeyesekere and later scholars have read as evidence that religious practice at the local level does not always follow the same boundaries as political identity.