Feeding a Thousand Souls

Every day millions of Tamil women in southeast India wake up before dawn to create a kolam, an ephemeral ritual design made with rice flour, on the thresholds of homes, businesses and temples. This thousand-year-old ritual welcomes and honors Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and alertness, and
Bhudevi, the goddess of the earth. Created by hand with great skill, artistry, and mathematical precision, the kolam disappears in a few hours, borne away by passing footsteps and hungry insects.

This is the first comprehensive study of the kolam in the English language. It examines its significance in historical, mathematical, ecological, anthropological, and literary contexts. The culmination of Vijaya Nagarajan's many years of research and writing on this exacting ritual practice, Feeding
a Thousand Souls celebrates the experiences, thoughts, and voices of the Tamil women who keep this tradition alive.


"Feeding a Thousand Souls is a beautifully written and richly illustrated book with an abundance of color photos befitting the book's visual subject, the kolam." -- Serinity Young, American Museum of Natural History, Religion

"Feeding a Thousand Souls is at once a smart and sweet book. It is sweet because it winds around the author's own experiences and her scholarly journey back into her culture of origin. It is smart because it carries us along unexpectedly from her life through an ever-expanding Tamil Hindu worldview
that is encapsulated but hardly contained in one art-ritual form. Through the exploration of the�kolam�we are treated to a delightful series of thoughtful observations and reflections that reverberate far beyond the Tamil threshold." -- Jack David Eller, Community College of Denver, Reading
Religion

"Vijaya Nagarajan ... refers to the belief in Hindu mythology that Hindus have a "karmic obligation" to "feed a thousand souls," or offer food to those that live among us. By providing a meal of rice flour to bugs, ants, birds, and insects, she writes, the Hindu householder begins the day with "a
ritual of generosity," with a dual offering to divinity and to nature." -- Rohini Chaki, Gastro Obscura

"The kolam is the most beautiful and evanescent artistic form of the goddess in South India, created ritually each and every day by millions of women. This beautiful book is a treasure, bringing to life for the first time the wealth of meanings of this form of women's religious practice."--Diana L.
Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, Harvard Divinity School

"This is the book of a lifetime, and it represents a lifetime's work on Tamil women's daily ritual practice, the artful threshold designs variously known as kolam, alpana and rangoli throughout much of the Indian subcontinent. Vijaya Nagarajan tells local and diasporic stories of the kolam with
passion, sensitivity, and a deep ethnographic identification with the women whose generosity daily feeds a thousand souls."--Kamala Visweswaran, Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego