The Kothandaramaswamy temple's month-long annual festival began. The elaborate eagle chariot bearing the icons of Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, and Hanuman wound its way around the streets surrounding the temple. This Garuda Sevai is held on the festival's fourth day. As I joined the deities’ procession, I noticed a mechanical crane doggedly following the palanquin. The chariot, for all its grandeur, was made of wood. Fuelling its movement was human labour. There was little chance of the chariot developing mechanical failure. Even if something were to happen to the chariot, there were plenty of eager volunteers to render assistance. To bear god on his way around his realm is considered a blessing, not something to be taken lightly. So why was the crane there?

Before this annual festival itself, during the celebrations of Rama Navami (Rama's birthday), there is a flag-raising ceremony. The standard of Hanuman, Rama's most ardent devotee, is raised to signify the onset of the annual festival in a month's time. This flag, denoting the imminence of this temple's grandest ritual complex, continues to be raised before the Kallar headmen and under the Vaduvur inter-village regional polity's (natu) aegis. In the south Indian context, the extension of ritual honours, and the order of their distribution, is a medium for establishing and publicly displaying rank (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1976; Appadurai 1981: 73; Dirks 1993: 120–126, 289–292; Fuller 2004: 80–81; Dumont 2000: 156, 337). Here, these ritual honours publicly signal the sacerdotal authorities’ (Brahmin caste’s) acknowledgement of the Kallar natu's authority. The Brahmins have staked prior and primary claim to the Kothandaramaswamy temple. They also increasingly appeal to a far-flung Tamil Brahmin diaspora to fund its rituals and subsistence. Kallar villagers mutter darkly about the Brahmin clergy behaving as though the temple is a diasporic project, unmoored from its situation in Vaduvur. Nevertheless, the temple's annual festival cannot commence without the oversight of Kallar headmen. Whatever the actualities of political authority, this is a symbolic admission of Kallar political dominance in Vaduvur. It ritually demonstrates the assumption by Kallar headmen of the royal role of patrons of this ritual and temple.