How monsters become gods
Alli and Nambi - AI-generated Question : When does a monster become a goddess? Answer : When society realises it created the monster. Neeli was Kerala’s very own vampire. Her full name in the various legends of the state is Kalliyankattu Neeli. She is not a ‘vampire’ in the Western sense. The idea of a blood-sucking undead being, like Dracula with his ruined castle in a dark forest, comes largely from European Gothic imagination. In Kerala’s folklore, Neeli is a yakshi . A yakshi is a wronged woman who dies unjustly and then returns as a powerful and vindictive spirit. Neeli was originally Alli. She has different names in different legends. I’m taking the version given in Sreekumari Ramachandran’s book, The Evergreen Legends of Kerala . Alli was an extraordinarily beautiful young woman, daughter of a Devadasi in the village of Pazhakannur on the border of ancient Thiruvithamkoor (what the British called Travancore) and the Chola kingdom (9 th -13 th century CE). Alli fell in l...
