As the Kavadi Bhagavathi festivaldraws toward its close, the tempo shifts. The thrilling succession of processions and celebrations gives way to something quieter more intimate. The parades ends. The dust settles. What remains is a moment that surprises first-time witnesses and moves those who return year after year with the warmth of familiarity. Young boys, some barely into their teens, emerge dressed as women.

The boys who dress up as ‘Kodavati’s towards the end of the Kavadhi Bhagavathi festival are not in costume in the theatrical sense. They are dressed with care and, not to forget, fun. Their hair is neatly parted and tied. Their faces are composed, sometimes shy, sometimes solemn. Wrapped around them, usually, are vivid red sarees, unmistakably Kodava in their drape. Atop their heads rests the delicate red vastra, adorned with precision.

For a brief span of ritual time, the boys do not imitate women, they become the feminine form through which the goddess is believed to be made visible.

The Feminine at the Centre
Kavadi Bhagavathi is, at her core, a fierce mother deity. She is a protector, witness and moral anchor of the community. Like many such goddesses in South Indian folk traditions, her power is believed to be active, immediate and embodied.

Toward the end of the festival, when young boys are dressed as women, the ritual focus shifts decisively to this feminine energy, shakti, not as abstraction, but as lived form. The choice of boys seems to be deliberate – their bodies unmarked by adult, inflexible social roles. They radiate their presence as conduits rather than performers.

The red saree matters. In Kodagu, red is not merely festive, it is protective, generative and auspicious. It signals fertility, strength and the life-force itself. The vastra, carefully tied around the head, completes this transformation of the boys not into any specific woman, but into a feminine presence that appears to belong to the goddess herself.

Not Disguise but Invocation
It would be inaccurate to understand this ritual as cross-dressing in the modern sense, or as social commentary in the activist register of our times. There is no element of parody, transgression or provocation here. The boys are not laughed at. They are watched with seriousness, even tenderness.

What is taking place is closer to invocation.

Across many similar ritual systems, the divine is not confined to fixed gender. Deities have always moved between forms. They are known to inhabit bodies temporarily. They are invoked through gesture, costume and discipline. In this context, masculinity and femininity are not opposing identities, but complementary forces that need to be held in balance.

By allowing male bodies to carry feminine form, the community affirms a crucial truth: feminininity is not owned by women alone. It is a cosmic principle. It is creative, protective and even destructive when necessary. And it must be honoured wherever it appears.

A Community at Ease
What is striking is the ease with which this ritual unfolds. There is no self-consciousness, no explanation offered. Elders guide the dressing. Families watch with pride and affection. The boys themselves move carefully as though they are aware that they are part of something larger than themselves.
This ease is instructive.

Long before contemporary language offered terms like “gender fluidity,” Kodagu’s ritual life had already created spaces where the body could move between expressions without threat. Not as identity politics, but as sacred celebration. The festival does not seem to ask, Who are you? It asks, What must be carried today?

The Ecology of Balance
Kodagu’s landscape, too, with all its forests, rivers and coffee estates demands balance. Too much rain destroys crops and too little withers them. Life here is lived through calibration and not excess. The festival mirrors this ecological intelligence.

Earlier days of the Kavadi Bhagavathi festival foreground masculine endurance: speed, stamina and even competition. As the festival closes, the emphasis turns inward seamlessly toward grace and composure. The boys, draped in red, embody this necessary counterweight.

The ritual subtly but unmistakable seems to send the message that strength without softness is incomplete.

What Endures
When the sarees are folded away and the vastra untied, the boys return to being themselves. There is no residue of confusion or no need for explanation. The ritual has done its work.

What lingers instead is an image: of young, small figures in red, standing quietly at the threshold of the sacred, holding for a moment the vastness of the feminine principle.

To witness this closing act of the Kavadi Bhagavathi festival is to understand something profound about Kodagu’s cultural confidence. Here, tradition does not harden into rigidity. It remains porous, responsive and wise. And it is moving in every sense of the word if you are there to witness it.

In allowing its boys to become the goddess, even briefly, the community affirms a truth that feels increasingly rare: that identity can be fluid in ritual without being fragile in life; that reverence does not require categorisation; and that the feminine, in all its power, belongs to everyone.

Sourabha Rao

Sourabha Rao is a professional writer, poet, translator, former freelance columnist and voiceover artist, with literary proficiency in English and Kannada. She deeply cares about producing stories primarily on nature and wildlife, social issues, history and art. She strives to write truthfully and creatively in an earnest attempt to create content that educates and entertains, has impact, and mobilises positive social change. She has written op-eds and photo-stories for leading Kannada and English newspapers, and has collaborated with filmmakers in wildlife conservation and water conservation. Sourabha lives in Bengaluru, while a big chunk of her heart has stayed back in Mysuru, her forever-muse.

Boys Become the Goddess: Feminine Embodiment at Kodagu’s Kavadi Bhagavathi Festival

Sourabha Rao