Whose Gods Are These? Caste, Erasure, and the Brahminisation of Local Deities by Sanjay Gara
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My amma used to tell me about the gods of the fishing community.
While growing up in the coastal regions of Andhra, I remember asking her about a female deity’s temple I came across as a child. “Is it Durga?”
She would always say they were just their gods. I never accepted that as an answer because it never made sense to me. Much later, I realised why. I was trying to understand their gods through a Brahminical lens.
They were their gods. Gods who held the stories of the geographical regions, the communities, and the histories they belonged to. Gods whose identities existed beyond the Brahminical worldview through which I had learnt to understand religion.
This realisation came back to me recently while reading reviews of Kantara 2 and seeing members of the Tulu community express disappointment over what they perceived as the Brahminisation of their Bhoota Kola traditions.
The representation of Bhoota Kola in mainstream media raises questions about what happens when a tradition is made to fit into what is widely accepted. In the process, the histories and meanings that belong to the community itself risk being pushed aside.
This piece is not a judgement on anyone’s faith. Many people worship with deep sincerity and love. What I want to reflect on is how histories can get lost when traditions are reshaped, and what that can mean for the communities those histories belong to.
Gods Who Carry Histories
The gods and traditions of marginalised communities are not merely objects of worship. They carry histories. They hold the memories of communities, their struggles, their relationships with the land, their experiences of injustice, and their ways of making sense of the world.
Take Peddamma, a local goddess worshipped in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. In accounts of local deity traditions, Dalit communities and their histories are integral to her origin narratives. The people are not incidental to the mythology; their lives and experiences are part of what gives the deity meaning.
Mala discusses in their research paper on the assimilation and appropriation of Peddamma how she was reimagined as Durga, accompanied by a new origin story and rituals (Mala, 2025). In this process, the deity was separated from her community, and the place of Dalit people in a history that was theirs to begin with was lost.
The same people whose histories and beliefs gave meaning to a deity can find themselves excluded from the spaces in which that deity is now worshipped, their practices regarded as impure within the very tradition that absorbed their gods.
That is a deeply painful contradiction.
How This Shapes a Sense of Self
Identity is never formed in isolation. It develops through our relationships, our families, our communities, the stories we inherit, and the ways the world responds to us.
When a community is repeatedly told that its knowledge is inferior, its practices are impure, and its traditions need to be corrected by someone else, these messages do not remain outside the individual. They can become part of how people come to understand themselves.
Humiliation and exclusion can lead to low self-worth. Being denied recognition can damage one’s relationship with one’s own history. Being repeatedly positioned as inferior can make it harder to see one’s community as a source of knowledge, dignity, and belonging.
This is one of the psychological consequences of caste oppression. Its effects extend beyond individual experiences of discrimination, shaping how people understand themselves, their communities, and the world around them. These experiences can also reverberate across generations, contributing to what we understand as intergenerational trauma.
Why Therapy Has to Look Different
The psychological effects of caste oppression and intergenerational trauma cannot be adequately addressed through standard coping mechanisms and therapeutic techniques alone. While these approaches may be helpful, they risk individualising distress when the conditions contributing to it are systemic.
It is important to approach therapy through a decolonial, systemic, and intersectional lens, one that recognises how casteism, classism, and other structures of oppression shape a person’s life in ways that cannot always be understood through individual experience alone.
We cannot ask people to develop self-worth without acknowledging the systems that repeatedly undermine it. We cannot speak about healing without considering the histories of humiliation, exclusion, and dispossession that people carry. And we cannot understand a person’s relationship with themselves without paying attention to the world that has taught them who they are allowed to be.
It can be difficult to see how deeply caste is woven into the systems and structures around us. Whenever we have the opportunity, it is worth reflecting on this with honesty and care, in ourselves and in the spaces we are part of.
- Gara Sanjay, Counselling Psychologist, Feel Fuzzy
Looking for support?
This piece was written by Gara Sanjay, counselling psychologist at Feel Fuzzy. Sanjay works with concerns such as anxiety, stress, trauma, abuse, emotional dysregulation, identity exploration, and interpersonal challenges. As a therapist, and someone who has been in therapy himself, he brings a warm, empathetic, and intersectional perspective to his work, drawing from Narrative Therapy, Person-Centred Therapy, Humanistic Therapy, and CBT to create a collaborative and affirming space for healing and self-exploration.
If this piece has brought up anything for you, or if you are looking for a space to process what you are carrying, you can learn more about working with Sanjay here.
Note:Artwork inspired by Ammoru festivals celebrated by OBC communities in the coastal regions of Andhra Pradesh. Made by Sanjay.
References
Mala, R. (2025). Assimilation and Appropriation of Local Deity Peddamma into Sanskritic Hindu Religion in South India. South India Journal of Social Sciences, 23(5), 123-126.