Capillary Action, Demonstrated on Camera

Within days, the physicist T. Jayaraman of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai published and publicly demonstrated the mechanism: many of the statues involved are cast from porous stone, plaster or metal with a grainy surface, and when a spoon of milk is held close to the mouth or trunk, capillary action and surface tension draw a thin film of the liquid out across the porous surface, where it spreads and quickly becomes nearly invisible against the wet stone, aided by gravity pulling the remainder down the front of the statue rather than into it. What looks like drinking is milk being drawn out of the spoon and spread thin, not absorbed or consumed.

Jayaraman and other scientists reproduced the same visible effect on ordinary porous household objects with no religious significance at all, which made the explanation easy to demonstrate directly to a skeptical or curious public rather than merely assert. The demonstration was widely accepted, including by many Hindu commentators and by Indian scientific bodies invited onto television alongside the original reports, and the episode is not seriously defended as physically inexplicable today, unlike claims such as the Guadalupe tilma or San Gennaro's blood, where the material itself has never been made available for direct, controlled testing.