Periyachi

Periyachi

The old grandmother, and what a godmother actually is

Periyachi is a goddess of Tamil country associated with the grandmother, and the thing worth understanding first is what kind of being she is. The name is a kinship term, not a divine one — periya meaning great or elder, āci the colloquial Tamil form of achi, sister, used in an address to an elder woman. The goddess is a person in the family, and she is reached through the family's own obligations. This is not a small shrine of a minor god. It is a household institution, and the worship belongs to the women's side of a family in a way that is worth describing accurately.

Her domain follows from that. A grandmother is the person one goes to when something concerns a child, a marriage, a birth, or the health of a household, and that is the range Periyachi covers: fertility, children's welfare, and the settling of a marriage. The best-known form of the practice is the making of a figure for the grandmother — often from rice, or from the materials of a wedding — which is given to a child and kept. That is a very different technology of devotion from a bronze image in a sanctum, and it is a reminder that this corpus's default picture of what a "deity entry" looks like is wrong for a large part of the material it covers.

The word "great grandmother" in the earlier revision of this file was not obviously right, and this entry does not insist on it. "Grandmother" and "great grandmother" are used for the same figure in different families, and the difference is a matter of which ancestor the family has chosen rather than of theology. What is consistent is the office: an elder woman of the family, approached directly, concerned with the line, and given something to hold.

There is a broader point about method in this entry. Names in this field describe a role, not an identity. Just as Muniśvaran is a name many village gods answer to, and Marikamba a name in wide circulation, Periyachi may be a name for a role that different families fill with different goddesses. A corpus that gives every role-name its own page ends up describing the structure of a kinship system as though it were a pantheon. Both are worth knowing. Only one of them is a pantheon, and it is not this.

Sources and what is still unverified

Robert Culp's Village Gods of South India is the right methodological starting point, and a specific study of the grandmother-goddess in South India is what should be added. The previous revision's only source was the placeholder "Local tradition", and its description field reproduced machine markup as if it were prose; both have been dealt with. Still unverified: whether "great grandmother" is the right rendering, the relationship of Periyachi to Mariamman and to the Amman goddesses, the form of the practice, and the identity of the shrine or household behind this entry. Left .