Migrant Deities: Dislocations, Divine Agency, and Mediated Manifestations

Abstract

What happens to deities when their devotees migrate? Village deities are wrought of a particular landscapes and a specific people. Refusing to remain rooted to icons, shrines, or sites, they wander; albeit only within their own jurisdictions. Examining the resonance of Periyachi—the mother and midwife goddess—originally from rural Tamil Nadu and now in urban Singapore, I document the effects of dislocation from their homelands on intensely local deities. In Singapore, Periyachi acquired more regular veneration and a spectacular ritual complex. But what has she also lost? While the goddess remains potent, her nature has subtly shifted. She who had crossed the seas no longer even crosses her own temple’s threshold. Migration has immobilized a once vital agentic force. From being immanent in her autochthonous landscape, manifesting herself directly and insistent on her own will, Periyachi has become marooned in icons, confined to temples and reliant on humans to represent her. Despite a century-old presence, Singapore is not her home over which she can freely roam. Minimizing divine agency, migration has reinforced human mediation. It has rendered not just a subject but a sovereign into an object; stationary, reactive, and dependent on human realization.