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“Appe’d kenda?” (Did you ask Mother?) is a common question asked in Kapu, a coastal town 13 kilometres south of Udupi in Karnataka, whenever disease threatens the health of a resident. The phrase signifies an abiding belief, bequeathed from one generation to another, in the local deity, Maariamma, or Kapu D’Appe (Kapu’s mother).
Kapu's residents consider Maariamma a spirit who keeps watch over Tulunadu, the region encompassing Udupi and Dakshina Kannada districts in coastal Karnataka. Today, the deity and her temples have become sites of tension between Hindus and Muslims. The current conflict, fuelled by Hindu right organisations, obscures the syncretic beginnings of the legend of Maariamma, which may not have existed without the contribution of Muslims.
It is believed that Maariamma helps ward off diseases like chickenpox, leprosy and, more recently, COVID-19. Every Tuesday, devotees from varied castes and religious communities throng the Maariamma temple, imploring the darshana patri – a medium who gets possessed by the deity and addresses devotees – for a cure.
This custom follows from the origin myth of Maariamma in Kapu, going back over 250 years, to the second half of the 18th century. Maariamma, or Dandina Maari, as she was known then, was the wartime spirit-deity – dandu meaning army – inside the Mallar fort in Kapu worshipped by the army of Basappa Nayaka, a ruler of the Keladi Nayaka kingdom.
Kapu, which means ‘to wait’ in Tulu, is a reference to soldiers guarding the fort. The Keladi Nayakas were defeated by Hyder Ali in 1763, who merged their lands with the Mysore kingdom. The worship of Maariamma was briefly disrupted under the new rulers but it was mostly soldiers who kept the practice alive. After the fall of Hyder Ali’s successor Tipu Sultan in 1799, Kapu was governed by the British, who called it Kaup. It was during the British rule that ‘Dandina Maari’s influence grew beyond the military and became ‘Maariamma’, resident guardian of Tulunadu.
The ‘ugrani’ or administrator from Tipu Sultan’s rule retained his position under the British as well, according to KL Kundanthaya, who has extensively studied and written about Kapu’s history. A popular legend says that this administrator, a Muslim man whose name is lost to time, was the first human that Maariamma spoke to.
One night, the story goes, the administrator was drawn to the fragrance of jasmine flowers, which led him to the Nandikere, a tank inside Kapu fort. There, he heard the sound of someone taking a bath.
The administrator asked: “Who is there?” He could only see the long strands of a woman’s hair in the water.
A voice answered: “I am Maari. I need a place that I can call home.”
The administrator replied: “This is a fort and it is now ours.”
He added: “And I’m a Muslim too, at that. How can I find such a place for you?”
To this Maari replied: “Unite the castes of this village and build me a gudi (home/shrine).”
This story is detailed in Kundanthaya’s book Nava Nava Durga, published in 2021. According to this account, the administrator then united members of the different caste groups living in the village at the time, and helped build a shrine for Maari in an area called Pallapadpu in Kapu. This shrine still exists and is considered the original home of the Maariamma deity.
The shrine is now in the news due to a concentrated campaign by Hindu right organisations to exclude Muslim traders who have historically been part of the temple’s annual festival – the Maari Pooja. The blatant discrimination against Muslims forms a pattern not only linked to the recent Karnataka High Court verdict in the hijab case, but also to the contemporary cultural appropriation of the temple and its deity, contributing to the incendiary communalisation of coastal Karnataka.
Barricaded by the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, coastal Karnataka or Tulunadu has a long history of coexistence between Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jains going back 13 centuries. Merchants from Tulunadu developed trade relations with ancient Greece, Rome, Arabia, Egypt and China as early as the 3rd century. The Arab explorer Ibn Battuta's works mention the port town of Honnavara and refer to Tulunadu as an important centre of trade and commerce for spices, metals and horses.