Anangu

Ancient Tamil literature has a wide variety of terms for ghosts and demons: Oozhi, Paasam, Yaadam, Savam, and Veri being a few of them. But there is not much to say about these beings by way of description. If the words ever referred to specific types of spirits, those shades of meaning are now mostly lost to the mists of time.

Another ancient term is Anangu. This word occurs in the Tholkappiyam, the oldest surviving work of Tamil literature, and is still used today. Its meaning has varied widely over the centuries, making the Anangu a rather difficult spirit to characterize.

But we shall hazard a try.

The most common understanding seems to be that an Anangu is a demoness of hysterical grief — an embodiment of the rage stemming from women’s oppression.

The Anangu has been described as a preternaturally beautiful celestial damsel, an attacking deity from the mountains who wears bright flowers in her long flowing hair; but also as a shapeshifter, or as a formless entity. Some poems paint her as a succubus or Mohini — a temptress who feeds on the souls of weak men drawn to her by lust. Others say that she is the demon unleashed by a woman with disruptive sexuality: a married slut, an unchaste widow. But the Anangu’s activities are driven by a thirst for vengeance rather than by physical desire.

In the ancient Tamil epic Silappathikaram, or “The Anklet Story”, when Kannagi learns that her husband has been wrongly executed, she is described as an Anangu. The term has also been connected to Suparnakha — the Rakshasi of the Ramayana who was humiliated and disfigured for the crime of desiring the wrong man — and to the folkloric character Neeli.