Influential studies of the ritual arts of India have approached the subject in two ways. One approach has sought to characterize them as ageless traditions. Scholars critical of such presentations have offered alternative narratives. Seen from afar, these alternative narratives tend to run as follows: a ritual art form driven to the brink of “extinction” by the discourses of development and industrial modernity is rescued by curators, designers, and policy makers, who find new connoisseurs, markets, and spaces for it. Once it is remade in new media and variously repositioned as a folk, national, and contemporary artform, its morphology and meaning mutate. Vijaya Nagarajan's method stands in contrast to both these approaches. She interweaves her lifelong relationship with making and viewing kōlams—designs regularly drawn with powdered rice on the thresholds of homes, shrines, and commercial establishments by women just before dawn in Tamil-speaking enclaves in South India and elsewhere in the world—against the backdrop of aesthetic, social, and economic changes.
Nagarajan's encounters with kōlams constitute a strand running through her book. These encounters began in her early childhood, which she spent in South India, where she watched her grandmother make kōlams. After her parents immigrated to the United States, ritualized threshold drawings remained a feature of her teenage life. Executed periodically at her family's suburban home in Maryland, she perceived them as standing in between her twin desires to seamlessly fit into middle-class American society and to embrace her parents’ expectations of upholding brahmanical cultural values. An event held in conjunction with the Festival of India in Washington, D.C., in 1985 that led her mother to make a kōlam before a large audience and Nagarajan to publicly elucidate its meaning serendipitously offered her an opportunity to confront the limits of her knowledge and receive counsel from senior scholars on how she might study the tradition. Dissertation fieldwork in Tamil Nadu in the late 1980s and early 1990s brought Nagarajan into contact with numerous kōlam makers and the meanings they assigned to these rice-powder drawings. Returning to the region first as a newlywed bride, then as an expectant mother, and eventually as a mother of two children allowed her to see continuities and innovations in kōlams in new ways. Finally, watching her now aged mother make kōlams for Nagarajan's grown-up children has led her to critically appreciate a living tradition.
Intertwined with the former strand are stories of how other women understood and used kōlams. Contemporary dancer Candralekha, for instance, saw kōlams as signifiers of female labor, devotion, and creativity. She used the logics guiding their compositions to structure her dance-drama performances. Other Tamil women whom Nagarajan met during her fieldwork perceived kōlams as connected to their individual and collective identities, and as signaling their status as hospitable wives, healthy mothers, energetic sisters, and “modern” daughters.
At the same time, Nagarajan is able to show creases. She reconstructs a transgender individual's interest in making kōlams as a way of performing femininity, and she gleans how male college professors scrutinized kōlams to publicly demonstrate their supposedly refined aesthetic sensibilities.
In addition to deepening our understanding of how kōlams shape and reflect gender identities and sexual orientations in Tamil Nadu, Nagarajan sheds new light on how Tamil women have apprehended the divine. Iyer women described kōlams as pools of Ganges water, a claim that rhetorically turned their dwellings into tīrthas, sacred centers at the edge of holy rivers. Iyengar women told Nagarajan that shining rice-powder drawings reinforced a link between the women of the house and Lakṣmī, the gleaming goddess of prosperity. Other women making kōlams with their fractal-like designs that can be endlessly expanded without distortion explained to her that the ritual art was a means of grasping infinity, a fundamental attribute of divinity.
Ecology is a third strand that runs through the book. We learn how kōlams are linked to agrarian societies. They are ubiquitous in the Kaveri delta that abounds in rice fields and attain their greatest density in the season when rice is harvested. They are rarely encountered in the interiors of Tamil Nadu, where rice cultivation is nearly absent. An environmental ethic also underpins their creation. Women whom Nagarajan interviewed mentioned that they wished to diminish the negative karma accrued daily by trampling upon the life-sustaining earth and inadvertently hurting insects by adorning its surface with beautiful powdered rice patterns that armies of ants might consume.
Each short chapter of Feeding a Thousand Souls stands on its own. This makes it possible to assign individual chapters as required reading in a university classroom. However, one side effect of this organizational approach is that when the book is read straight through, one is struck by the repetition of select arguments and sub-arguments. Some chapters are less developed than others. For example, even as Nagarajan recognizes that certain kōlams are suggestive of the ground plans of temples, she does not investigate and report on this issue. Likewise, had Nagarajan looked at the richly carved moonstones placed at the thresholds of medieval Drāviḍa temples, she may have recognized them as “petrified kōlams,” markers of the absorption of a vernacular idiom into a cosmopolitan architectural language.
These minor quibbles aside, the collective portrait of kōlams as a dynamic living tradition is a compelling one. Just as the impact of ritualized threshold designs on their creators and all those who encounter them persists even after the powdery forms are swept away, so, too, will powerful impressions of this custom linger on in readers’ minds long after they have read Nagarajan's monograph. It will endow them with a framework to study other floor and wall painting traditions of India and inspire them to query intersections of women, ritual, and ecology wherever they encounter them.
