The cult of Draupadi was very practiced in the Dharmaraja Temple of Dindigul in a very pronounced manner. The temple was founded about three hundred years around 1700 by one Erumaikkara Etaiyar, presumably an Itaiyar or Konar. There have been drastic and dramatic changes in the temple`s ritual cycle and mythology over the period of one hundred and seventy-five years since it was first established.

In the early 1800s the Dindigul temple celebrated a fire walking festival of basically the same type that one finds today in the more traditional, conservative temples of the core area. The Dindigul temple today, however, no longer holds either a spring festival or a fire walking festival.

A lot of rituals and festivals are part of the Dindugul Temple. It has been said that to retain the basic structure of an eighteen-day Draupadi festival with dramas and processions, a decentralized temple like that at Dindigul would thus have had to improvise, and to use local rather than itinerant professional talent for its ritual and dramatic recreations of epic scenes.

To retain the basic structure of an eighteen-day Draupadi festival with dramas and processions in a decentralized temple like that at Dindigul would thus have had to improvise, and to use local rather than itinerant professional talent for its ritual and dramatic recreations of epic scenes.

Today`s Dindigul Draupadi festival is a ten-day affair, comprising the nine days of Navaratra and the tenth day of Dasara. This rather crude processional drama seems incongruous, as its epic context is all but lost. But it is likely that it is more than just a condensation of the epic themes of violence. As a public drama with local actors, it is probably the last vestige of the eighteen processional dramas that were performed at Dindigul in the early nineteenth century.

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