Bleeding Foreheads

Blood serves as both a visible substance and a meaningful symbol in two ritual-healing performances from Kerala, India: Kodungallur Bharani and Chottanikkara Verpadu. In these practices, participants in trance or possession states engage in real body mutilation, producing a spectacle of bloodiness and pain. One ritual uses blood as a path to divinity, the other toward healing. The paper argues that blood acts as a mask that enables these transformations. These performances challenge dominant cultural norms about acceptable bodily expression and provide space for alternative identities related to caste, gender, and ethnicity. The analysis explores how blood, mutilation, madness, and healing intersect in ritual contexts, questioning the region's refined and aestheticized self-image.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Undertaking a study on the ritual-healing performances, namely Kodungallur Bharani and Chottanikkara Verpadu, of Keralam, this paper contextualizes blood as a ‘form’ and ‘content’ of the performances. Bleeding bodies of both these practices expose the complex spectacle of real blood and real body mutilation. In both these practices, the mutilated body in a deranged state of trance and possession indicates a strong visual representation of pain and bloodiness – while one is a way to divinity, the other to healing. It examines the visual representation of pain and bloodiness in the mutilated bodies of both practices and considers how blood can become a mask for healing or achieving divinity. Through analysing these practices, this paper tries to understand the explicit nature of blood in Keralam’s ritual practices and how these traditions engage with identities, mutilation, divinity, madness and healing in a ritual context. Kodungallur Bharani and Chottanikkara Verpad offer multi-layered subjectivity that possesses various caste, gender and ethnical identities. While drawing down these expositions, this paper will also create a dialogue between inner narratives on the representation of blood in these practices and address the broader question of mutilation, gender and identity. Therefore, the paper will also explore how these practices challenge the ‘moral’ and ‘aestheticized’ imagination of the region and its ‘refined’ transformation. The use of blood and other forms of bodily expressions in these rituals challenges dominant cultural narratives as to what is acceptable and appropriate and provides a space for the expression of alternative forms of cultural identity. Overall, this paper offers a critical perspective on the use of blood in these ritual performances and its broader cultural and social implications.