Meet Madurai’s ladies jallikattu bull rearers

R Dhivya Dharsini stood on the entrance of the vaadivasal (enviornment), nose to nose with over 100 bull tamers. A bull proprietor, she had simply untied Manickam, her bull, and needed to cross the tamers to maneuver to security. “I simply had a number of seconds earlier than the bull would cost outdoors,” she says. “I elbowed previous the boys with an vitality I didn’t know existed in me,” she laughs, recalling her first jallikattu as a bull proprietor at Alanganallur. This was in 2022, and the 18-year-old is amongst only a handful of ladies to have stepped into the vaadivasal, a male-dominated zone in a sport historically seen as an opportunity for males to show their masculinity.

Girls jallikattu bull rearers, whereas few in quantity, do make their presence felt within the sport yearly. Dhivya is from a household that has been rearing jallikattu bulls for generations. As the one baby to her dad and mom, she is taking ahead her nice grandfather’s love for elevating sturdy bulls that make heads flip. She helps increase Manickam and Army, bulls which have despatched many tamers flying within the air on the enviornment.

With only a few days left for Pongal, Army is getting stressed. Dhivya, her slender type in a salwar-kameez, leads the bull in direction of a mud pit at Anuppanadi, a locality in Madurai within the night, as he grunts and thrusts his horns forward. “Army…” she chides him gently, as he butts his horns into the mud and flings it within the air. She later wipes his horns and face clear with a handkerchief. Army stays nonetheless having fun with the eye.

“I might discuss to them each time I handed by as I walked to high school and again,” says Dhivya, including that the bulls at her household’s cattle shed took a liking to her. She regularly began helping of their maintenance, and has now turned a bull rearer herself, balancing her work with NEET courses. Dhivya’s mom and grandmother too are likely to the bulls, however it’s she who takes them to jallikattu tournaments, alongside along with her father and uncle.

“Bulls hardly ever assault ladies and kids since they affiliate them with nurturing,” she says, including that she was stunned to see her bull turning protecting of her on the vaadivasal. “He shielded me from different bulls that had been lined up,” she says.

At Alanganallur, set to host the occasion on January 17, the star bull of the village, Muthu, who belongs to the Muniyandi temple is within the care of L Pandiselvi. Because the temple bull, Muthu kickstarts the yr’s event, and there may be an understanding amongst tamers to not contact him out of respect for the deity. “He’s in his prime now,” says the 37-year-old holding considered one of his ropes as he drinks out of an aluminium trough.

Pandiselvi has been helping within the maintenance of jallikattu bulls from the time she was eight. “My father owned a number of bulls, and would contain me in elevating them,” she says. Her day begins at 5.30am when she feeds Muthu straw. “I then take him out to graze.” Bathing the bull requires a number of fingers for which boys from the village help her.

Emotional help

At Sennagarampatti village in Melur, Okay Selvarani is seated alone on a cot close to the cattle shed, listening to Ramu, her favorite bull’s occasional grunts. It’s a windy afternoon and her home, with solely plastic sheets for partitions, is full of a military of chickens and canines. The 56-year-old is well-liked within the area because the ‘jallikattu bull woman’, and has been rearing bulls from her 30s. Her home is full of steel bureaus and metal utensils her bulls received through the years.

She nonetheless remembers the primary time she walked her bull to the vaadivasal. “Heads turned and males stared,” she says. “However they had been all encouraging and respectful.” This was in 2007, when the net token system for bull house owners had not are available in to put. “We needed to stand in queue with our bulls from 8pm to 6pm the subsequent day,” she recollects. These tightly-knit queues inside slim short-term wood frames weren’t solely suffocating, however dangerous as nicely. “I might have horns of different ready bulls piercing me from both facet and behind,” she says.

Girls carry an additional one thing to bull rearing. As an example, Selvarani’s bulls Ramu, Thottichi, and Kangeyan have additionally had unsuccessful runs, changing into ‘pidi maadu’, which means, being introduced underneath management by a tamer. “Ramu would develop into emotionally low each time he received caught,” Selvarani recollects. She would wait to obtain him on the exit to cheer him up: “I might inform him that if not this vaadi, there’s all the time the subsequent one.”