During Navaratri, houses in Thiruvallikeni (Triplicane) keep golu like houses everywhere else. But here people also invite the goshti, the group that recites the Divya Prabandham at the temple, to come home. They stand before the golu and recite one particular work: Thirumangai Azhwar’s Siriya Thirumadal.

Someone asked me for a recording of it, so I recorded myself reciting it at home.

The choice comes from the temple. Navaratri in Thiruvallikeni is Vedavalli Thayar’s utsavam. She has a purappadu every evening, and the goshti that walks with her recites the Madal, as it does on her Friday purappadu through the year. People call it the Madal goshti. So when a house keeps golu, it asks for what Thayar gets.

It is a strange poem to recite in front of a row of dolls, though.

A madal is the last resort of a rejected lover in old Tamil poetry. He makes a horse out of palmyra stalks, gets on it, and goes through the streets telling the whole town what his beloved has done to him, until she or her family give in out of shame. The grammar is clear that only men do this. A woman is not supposed to, however much she is in love.

Thirumangai Azhwar wrote his in a woman’s voice. Parakala Nayaki begins by saying that of all the things people live for, love is the only one she has any use for. She went out to watch a dancer in the street and came home without her colour and her bangles. Her mother called a fortune-teller, who threw some paddy in a winnow and named him: the one who measured this world, who brought Lanka down to dust, who held up a hill against the rain, who stole the butter and got tied to a mortar for it. And then she says what she is going to do about it.

ஊராரிகழிலும் ஊராதொழியேன் நான்
வாரார் பூம்பெண்ணை மடல்

ūrār igazhilum ūrādhu ozhiyēn nān
vārār pūm peṇṇai maḍal

Let the town laugh at me. I will not stop until I have ridden the madal.

That is what gets recited at the golu. Navaratri is the women’s festival, and the golu is the most well-behaved thing in the house. The men of the goshti stand in front of it and recite, in a woman’s voice, the one thing a woman was told she must not do. I have written about her thudukku before. This is the same woman.

The fortune-teller’s list is also more or less what is on the steps: the Dasavataram set, Krishna with his hand in the butter pot. The dolls sit there quietly, and the poem tells you what he has been up to.