The Siri Jatre: A Night of Possession and Healing

Late at night, at a shrine somewhere on the coast, a crowd of women in groups sing a story that every one of them knows. It is the story of Siri, who left her husband’s house, and of her daughter and granddaughters. Within an hour many of the singers have stopped being themselves. They are Siri, or her daughter, or one of the twins, and a man in the middle of the crowd is speaking to each of them in turn.

This page is about the festival as a ritual: who takes part, what happens during the night, and how researchers have understood it. The story of Siri, and a shorter account of the festival, are on Siri, the Princess Who Walked Away. The epic as a work of oral literature is on The Siri Paddana.

Where and when

The festival, called Siri Jatre or Siri Alade, is held on the full-moon night in the months of March, April and May, according to the researcher Yogitha Shetty. She counts 15 to 20 places where it is held, each called an alade, usually the grounds of a temple.¹ The ceremony is held at night and lasts until morning. In the researcher B. A. Viveka Rai’s description, the Siri epic is performed in the festival in several dramatic parts, and the festival is tied to group identity.²

When the folklorist Lauri Honko’s team recorded the public Siri festival at Nidgal in March 1991, they found it “noisy and somewhat chaotic”, with a dramatic performance that included the tragic scene of the twins’ game of chenne.³

Who comes, and why

Most of those who come are women who have been diagnosed as “troubled” by the Siri spirits. The word used in Tulu is upadra. Shetty lists the signs: speaking inappropriately or not speaking at all, shivering, sickness, delayed puberty, loss of appetite. When such behaviour is put down to Siri, relatives are advised to bring the woman to the next festival. She promises to serve the spirits (seve), which means returning in later years as a vehicle for them. Alongside the experienced women, many of those who come each year are newcomers.¹

The night

The women gather in small groups and recite a ritual version of the Siri story. As they sing they are possessed one by one, each taking on a character of the story. The seven spirits are Siri, her daughter Sonne, Ginde, the twins Abbaga and Daraga, the maid Daaru, and Siri’s son Kumara.¹ Experienced women, the adepts, help the newcomers to express the spirit who has come to them.¹

Once the room has become the world of the epic, the leading role passes to a male priest. He is possessed by Kumara, and he is the only man with a central part. He questions the spirits of women who already have a history of being troubled, helps to identify the spirit, and acts as priest and medium in bringing the women back to “normal”. The women who are “healed” vow to come back in later years, as adepts instead of novices.¹ Honko’s team reported that each Siri was asked to tell her “birth story”, and that areca flowers, which stand for the flower in which Siri was found as a baby, are carried and handled during the ceremony.³

At some festivals the twins’ quarrel is acted out. In the story the twins quarrel over a game and die. In the ritual, Shetty writes, the priest-Kumara stops the quarrel before the girls can re-enact their deaths. As Kumara he is the uncle (maamu) of the story, and in a society that traced descent through the mother, the maternal uncle was the man with a duty to the sisters’ children.¹

What scholars see in it

Peter Claus, whose 1975 article described the festival as a “mass possession cult”, saw it as a way of reintegrating a troubled person into a moral order: “recitation of myth and ritual action are brought together in a dramatic model”, as Shetty quotes him.¹

Shetty’s own reading is about women’s voices. She describes a woman who may be treated as secondary in her household arriving in a world where the priest and the other Siris receive her warmly, her family treats her with reverence, and a divine spirit has chosen to live in her body. In trance, she writes, women speak in a different register, called kucchona (“teasing”), and say aloud the anger, grievances and frustrations they cannot voice in daily life, with their families present. Shetty calls the ritual stage “a protected podium for the women to vent out their anger, frustrations” and unfulfilled desires.¹

Shetty is careful to say that she keeps away from explaining why women are possessed. Her paper describes the ritual as an observer can see it, and she leaves medical or psychological explanations aside. She also notes that the male priest’s central role means the women’s story is, in public, “controlled and monitored” by a man.¹ Rai argues that “emancipation” should be judged from the performer’s point of view and not the audience’s.¹

Changing times

Shetty observes that the festival is losing some of the devotion once attached to it, as it becomes a public display of Tulu identity, celebrated with “festivity and pomp”. Some young people are sceptical, and she writes that women are growing more sensitive to being seen in public in trance and so stay away. She adds that the festival is still held every year in many places.¹

What we could not find

• Which shrines hold the festival each year, and on what dates. We have only the general range given by Shetty.
• Present-day numbers of participants. Local press has given figures, but we have not been able to check them for this page.
• How the festival differs from one alade to another. The sources describe a general pattern, and the Nidgal recording is from 1991.
• The Claus article, which we have not been able to open. Its words here come through Shetty’s quotation.

Related

• Siri, the Princess Who Walked Away, the story and a shorter account of the festival
• The Siri Paddana, the epic as oral literature
• Chennemane and the Games of Tulunadu, the board game the twins quarrel over
• Bhuta Kola, another Tulu ritual in which a spirit speaks through a human

Sources & further reading

The books and articles behind the numbered notes on this page.

1. Yogitha Shetty, “Ritualistic World of Tuluva: A Study of Tuluva Women and the Siri Possession Cult”, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 5(2) (read in full on 9 October 2026): timing and places, the signs of affliction, the night, the priest, the readings of Claus and Rai, and recent change.
2. B. A. Viveka Rai, “Epics in the Oral Genre System of Tulunadu”, Oral Tradition 11/1 (1996): the festival’s dramatic parts and its link to group identity.
3. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, review of Lauri Honko, Textualising the Siri Epic, and The Siri Epic as Performed by Gopala Naika (2002): the Nidgal festival of March 1991.
4. Peter J. Claus, “The Siri Myth and Ritual: A Mass Possession Cult of South India”, Ethnology 14(1) (1975): 47–58, JSTOR. Quoted through Shetty; not opened.