"If there is to be a Mission, it must be to the Untouchables and if the Untouchables can be cured, untouchability will vanish. Nothing requires to be done to the Touchable. He is sound in mind, manners and morals. He is whole, there is nothing wrong with him. Is this assumption correct? Whether correct or not, the Hindus like to cling to it. The assumption has the supreme merit of satisfying themselves that they are not responsible for the problem of the Untouchables."
- Babasaheb Dr. Ambedkar, Untouchables or The Children of India's Ghetto
Madi refers to the practice of ritual purity common in Brahmin cultures, especially in the culture of the Madhwa Brahmins, a community of Brahmins from Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and parts of Maharashtra who follow the teachings of the philosopher, Madhwacharya (1199 – 1238 CE). Madi is a state of attained ritual purity taken up for a given period of time: a person pours water on the clothes they are supposed to wear and cleanses it, takes bath and again cleanses the same clothes with water and then wears these clothes to attain the madi state. After this ritual, if they touch anyone/anything (especially clothes) that is not ritually cleansed, they lose their state of madi. When threatened by touch, they cringe like a touch-me-not plant, hence the title of this article.
Though the procedure of taking up madi is the same for everyone within the Madhwa community it works at various levels and is of different kinds: the madi state of the householder Brahmin is different from that of the renouncer Brahmin and so is the madiness of a Brahmin widow different from that of a Brahmin wife. However, all these are still madi states governed by touch. Here it becomes important to look at Sundar Sarukkai's arguments on touch and contact and their planes of action as explained by Srinivasa Ramanujam:
Contact determines the inside/outside in the purity-pollution duality and touch in untouchability… persons classified as Candalas … or menstruating women are located either 'outside' or on the boundary of the given order. The people who are 'inside' the given order cannot have any contact with them. As touch is part of contact, these people become untouched… The untouched people remain as objects for the given subject's sense of touch, but untouched by that subject. That is why though some people may be untouched it does not mean they are subjected to untouchability (Srinivasa Ramajunam, Renunciation and Untouchability in India).
Here, clearly, menstruating women or Candalas are 'outside' the given order. They are anti-normative and so, in this case, contact governs the relationship between the person 'inside' the order and the one 'outside' it. However, a non-madi Brahmin is not 'outside' the given order. In fact, they are the normative and the madi persons are the ideal supra-normative. Non-madi Brahmins, in Sarukkai's phraseology, are not objects of touch sense who remain untouched but rather objects of un-touch sense (for the madi Brahmins). The relationship between them is therefore governed by touch. So, whenever madi is practiced, a binary of a touchable and an untouchable entity is created: where the ritually pure person becomes a touchable, the ritually impure person becomes an untouchable. It must be noted here that both the persons are from the same Brahmin community. This practice could be looked at as a microcosmic reproduction of the practice of untouchability within the Brahmin community.
The analogy between the practice of untouchability and that of madi can be understood further if we look at how convulsed madi is: it works at various levels. The priests of temples and mathas are supposed to be madi before offering the daily worship, a Brahmin widow is supposed to embrace madi for the entire term of her life (the same is true of the renouncer Brahmin), the person offering worship for his ancestors (srarddha) is supposed to take up the state of madi, the people (male and female) who cook the food for madi Brahmins are supposed to be in a madi state and such food is called madi food. There is also madi clothes, madi water etc. The Brahmin widow is sometimes simply called madi hengusu, which literally translates to madi woman. The opposite of the word madi is mailige which translates to impurity/pollution. Bedsheets, mattresses, non-madi clothes are considered to be mailige. It is important to note that the word parai (a word associated with a Dalit caste in Tamil Nadu) is also used as a qualifying adjective to denote things considered to be unclean or polluting. These numerous states of madi and their arbitrariness seem to correspond to numerous sub-castes and their arbitrariness.
Any madi person - when they touch an object considered to be mailige lose their state of madi. A madi person, therefore, corresponds to a touchable whereas anyone in the non-madi state corresponds to an "untouchable". Pandithar Iyothee Thass, the Tamil Neo-Buddhist Dalit scholar, argued that the Brahmin animosity towards Dalits is strongest because it is a result of the Brahmin-Buddhist enmity that existed when the paraiyars were the original Buddhists. The strong Brahmin-Dalit binary closely corresponds to the strong madi-mailige binary, not in intensity but in structure. The practice of madi therefore seems to have been an attempt by the Brahmins to mimic the cruel practice of untouchability within their own community. However, one cannot be sure of which one was the imitation and which the source. It is also quite difficult to pin down the reason(s) for such a mimicry. This practice of "internalised untouchability" might have been an attempt to uphold the social practice of untouchability; both these practices seem to be connected in continuity.
Now let us try to understand how madi works in temples and in ritual spaces. Only the pontiffs (renouncer Brahmins) of the eight mathas (religious monasteries) around Udupi are allowed to offer worship to the main deity of the Udupi Krishna Temple which is the most important shrine of the Madhwa Brahmins. These pontiffs have dedicated their lives to celibacy and are instead married to madi. They are, to use Srinivasa Ramanujam's phrase, "ritually dead, ideal" Brahmins: they ceremoniously remove their sacred thread, they need not perform any of the daily rituals of the householder Brahmins, they literally take up a new name giving up their old one which signifies the death of their old self. The relation between the householder and the renouncer Madhwa Brahmin is something to be noted. The former usually must not touch the latter because his touch is considered polluting.
In most temples, any Brahmin with the required training in agamic scriptures can become the temple priest. Not so in Udupi. Only a celibate pontiff who has embraced a life of perpetual madiness can do the puja in Udupi. Here one is reminded of the story of Kanakadasa, a Bhakthi saint from the Haridasa movement. Kanakadasa was from the kuruba caste (a non-dalit "lower" caste). He was a disciple of Vyasaraja, the famous Brahmin pontiff and the spiritual counsellor of Krishnadevaraya, the king of the Vijayanagara empire. Kanakadasa wanted to enter the Udupi temple to offer worship but was denied entry by the Brahmins of the matha regardless of Vyasaraja asking them to let him in. However, God himself "turned" towards Kanakadasa and gave him a darshan when Kanakadasa was standing outside the temple premises. Even today people are encouraged to look at the Krishna idol through the kanakana kiduki (Kanaka's window) through which Kanaka standing outside the temple is believed to have seen the Krishna idol. This story can be compared with that of Tiruppanalwar, one of the twelve alwar saints (Vaishnavite saints) of Tamil Nadu. Since he was a Dalit, he was denied entry into the Ranganathaswamy temple at Sri Rangam. The Brahmin priest of the temple treated Tiruppan with disrespect. One day, Vishnu appeared to the Brahmin priest in his dream and told him that Tiruppan was one of his greatest devotees and that the priest had sinned by disrespecting him. Vishnu told the priest to carry Tiruppan on his shoulders inside the sanctum sanctorum of the temple as an act of expiation so that he could offer worship to Ranganatha (This is only one way of interpreting this story. Iyothee Thass has interpreted a similar story, that of the Dalit Saivite saint Nandanar quite differently; it is an intelligent interpretation beyond the scope of this article). Interestingly, in the case of Kanakadasa God is carefully safeguarding the normativity; however, in the second case, God is subverting it. This subversion is possible only because madi as a practice is not as strong in the Srivaishnavite Brahmin tradition as it is in the Madhwa tradition. Madi in the Madhwa tradition hinders all reforms.
In other Madhwa temples as well, the worship offered to the main deity should always be in a state of madi. Even the daily puja of the householder Brahmin is supposed to be done in the madi state. Hence, there is a constant awareness of the possibility of touch "within" Madhwa households. This anxiety of being touched manifests itself not just in the relationship between the Brahmin self and the Untouchable self, but also between two Brahmin selves as well.
Madi, therefore, can be seen as a living fossil of untouchability (the social practice of untouchability) which is carefully safeguarded within the Brahmin community. In certain ritualistic spaces, it constantly reminds them of and legitimizes the practice of untouchability (the act of un-touch-ability). This seems to make the practice intraneous in order to make the Brahmins constantly aware and anxious of touch.