Draupadi Amman

Draupadi Amman is the heroine of the Mahabharata worshipped as a goddess, a cult distinctive to the Tamil country and strongest in the northern districts around Gingee, Villupuram and Cuddalore. In her temples Draupadi is not merely an epic character but the Goddess herself, fire-born and inviolate, and the epic becomes her sacred narrative, performed as liturgy at her festivals.

The tradition

The cult's heartland is the country around Gingee, and local tradition regards the temple at Melacceri, near the Gingee fort, as its original shrine, from which the goddess's worship spread across northern Tamil Nadu and, with Tamil migration, to Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and beyond. Draupadi's fire-birth and her unbound hair, sworn to remain untied until her humiliation was avenged, are central to her divine character: she is a goddess of purity vindicated through ordeal.

The festival

Her festivals are among the longest and most elaborate in Tamil village religion, running for days or weeks while the Mahabharata is recited and enacted, in recitation by hereditary specialists and in night-long terukkuttu street-theatre performances in which the epic's great episodes are played before the goddess. The cycle culminates in timiti, the fire-walk: devotees who have kept vows of abstinence cross a bed of embers, protected, tradition holds, by the goddess who was herself born of fire. The fire-walking festival at the Sri Mariamman temple in Singapore, observed by that city's Tamil community, belongs to this Draupadi tradition. Aravan, whose battlefield sacrifice the festivals also stage, serves as a guardian deity in her temples.