Amman as social auditor

Abstract

Between 1983 and 2009, thousands of Tamils displaced from Sri Lanka settled in countries such as the United Kingdom (UK). A prominent practice among diasporic Tamils in the UK has been to establish Hindu temples. These temples are sites for the collection and transmission of funds to Tamils in Sri Lanka for the purpose of charity. In 2005, the UK Charity Commission filed complaints against a few such temples alleging the misappropriation of funds. Such allegations were met with forceful denial by the concerned temple trust leaders. I examine one temple charity trust leader’s mode of address to the UK government from which it becomes evident that (i) the official charges of financial misappropriation were understood by him as charges of moral corruption, indicating a vulnerability to aiding terrorism. He felt the necessity to redress such charges with an openness to external investigation, but also (ii) felt it important to insist that the UK government understand the gift-giving idiom within which the temple’s charity work was located such that any charges of moral corruption had to take into account the goddess deity, the Amman, in whose capacity the temples were collecting charity and who ensured that funds were not misused. She was literally the auditor of funds, and (iii) at the same time, there was an acknowledgement by the wider immigrant community that changing times and motivations for the giving of charity may have made the deity vulnerable to moral corruption.