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Pierced by Murugan's Lance: Ritual, Power, and Moral Redemption among Malaysian Hindus. By Elizabeth Fuller Collies. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997. Pp. viii + 246, acknowledgments, 11 illustrations, glossary, notes, bibliography, index.)
The last decade has witnessed the emergence of an incredibly rich and increasingly diverse body of literature on Indian communities living outside ofSouth Asia, which is becoming a subfield of inquiry in and of itself. In this significant publication, Elizabeth Collins provides us with an engrossing narrative of the Thaipusam festival as performed by Malaysian Tamils in Penang. Thaipusam is a three-day festival performed during the Tamil lunar month of Tai (January-February) in honor of Lord Murugan, the South Indian manifestation of the Hindu warrior god Skanda, son of Shiva and Parvati. The festival, among other things, includes acts of bodily modification, such as body piercing of the cheeks, tongue, chest, and back. These acts are usually done as the fulfillment of vows taken by low-caste devotees of the deity. Collins was confronted with the hermeneutic dilemma of sorting out the numerous yet reticent understandings of such devotional performances. Her strategy for dealing with multivocality is a synthesis of approaches culled from anthropological and folkloristic theory, providing an important methodological and theoretical framework not only for understanding such public displays of emotion but also for historicizing performances of empowerment among overseas communities that have a lengthy colonial legacy of oppression.
The Tamils of Penang (as is the case throughout Malaysia) are not a homogeneous community. Although the majority are descendants of indentured...