Introduction

We continue our exploration of Kerala masculinities by considering the role of religious activities and devotion in the production of specific male aesthetics and styles at the intersection between homosociality and normative heterosexuality. We focus on the annual pilgrimage to Sabarimala, the main temple of the Hindu deity Ayyappan, visited every year by millions of—predominantly Hindu—male devotees from Kerala and from south India as a whole. We suggest that this pilgrimage, an almost exclusively male arena of religious performance, highlights masculinity while constructing a particular style of maleness which draws creatively on an antagonistic relationship between transcendence and immanence—between the worldly householder and the south Asian figure of the ascetic renouncer.

We stress that these categories and relationships are not fixed within an all-encompassing ‘Hindu tradition’. Rather, as we have argued in previous chapters with regard to the householder and to sexuality, they are reference points—ideals which are historically contingent and constructed discursively within specific political, economic and cultural circumstances. Particularly salient here are two issues: on the one hand Gulf migration, recent economic liberalisation and the consequent rise of a new moneyed middle-class, all contributing to a redefinition of appropriate life-styles and consumer needs which require (as discussed earlier) careful negotiation between saving and spending. On the other, a re-masculinization of renunciate celibacy within colonial and post-colonial Hindu nationalist discourse making renunciation a source of (political) potency for the householder (see e.g. Monti 2004; Vasudevan 2004, Banerjee 2005).