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This chapter describes the basic features of the caste structure. The population of Sripuram is divided into a large number of castes or jatis. Differences between castes are carried in the matter of women’s dress. The differential importance of Sanskrit and Tamil, with regard to the styles of living of the Brahmins and Non-Brahmins, can be seen in the choice of personal names. Brahmins do not accept cooked food from Non-Brahmins or Adi-Dravidas, although both of the latter accept food from the Brahmins. It is shown that Brahmins who are a segment of the rural society of Sripuram themselves constitute a segmentary system. The bulk of the Non-Brahmin population of Sripuram belongs to what may be very broadly described as cultivating castes. Brahmin, Non-Brahmin, and Adi-Dravida are linked with different degrees of social honour or esteem.

Pandas are local brahmins who serve as hereditary pilgrim guides. Each panda family has the rights to pilgrims from a particular Indian region, and pandas protect these rights through written records (bahi) of previous pilgrim visits. Pandas formerly provided for a client’s every need, including food, lodging, travel arrangements, lending money, or religious rituals, for which pandas received fees and gifts. Better infrastructure and wider social changes have eroded panda status from “family members” to ritual contractors, but the pandas’ control over the final death rite, asthivisarjana, provides a secure if marginal economic niche. Pandas have responded to social pressures by forming local associations—both to promote their collective interests and to safeguard Hardwar’s sanctity. The most significant association is the Ganga Sabha (“Ganges Assembly”), which arose during the 1914–17 protest against damming the Ganges.

The first section of this chapter describes the Bullock House and its inhabitants. The headman set aside for the author and his companion three rooms in the Bullock House, one of the five houses he owned in Rampura. The second section describes the author's experience as a tenant, taking notes of its peculiarities, different from urban settings. Except the richest villagers, and the Brahmins and Lingayats, the others took their bath in the central courtyard. The third section describes how he tried to win friends in the village. The fourth section takes into account Putte Gowda's suggestion to move around the village and not settle with the opinions of a few people. The fifth section describes the villagers' curiosity. The next two sections describe the anthropologist as a Brahmin, as a respected outsider. The last section describes his failures as a fieldworker.

This chapter examines interest from south India in an episode originating in the Uttarakanda attributed to Valmiki's Rāmāyana. Among the actions for which Rāma has been most frequently criticized in south India, the story of the beheading of Sambuka, a low-caste ascetic, by Rāma stands out. Three 20th-century plays, one each in Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada, deal with the episode, showing in their portrayal of the main characters, their interaction, and the ethical implications of Rāma's action the debate on the caste system in south India in the early 20th century. All three depart from the original story in responding to the killing of Sambuka with horror and clear him from the taint of adharma, although in one of them the ending is radically changed from the Valmiki original, and Sambuka is not killed by Rāma, who is seen by the playwright as a wise and compassionate ruler who rises above brahminical prejudice. The other two plays are critical of Rāma, one for his refusal to admit the spiritual equality of men, and the other for what it views as his political use of Sambuka's transgression to shut out low-caste people from institutions of privilege.

This chapter looks at the achievement of Robert Lowell as a poet. It discusses Lowell's rebellions against proper Brahmin Boston and other representatives of authority and his popularization of the term confessional poetry. It explains that during his career Lowell looked within and without, devising multiple designs for his articulations and that his style and subjects never stopped changing. Lowell's history and his participation in history received equivalent attention, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes sequentially.

This chapter places Sufis into a competitive Indian geography of multiple holy men whose shrines and other physical outposts competed for followers in early modern and early colonial India. Developing the concept of a ‘narrative landscape’, the chapter traces how India’s geography was made meaningful through the different (and at times conflicting) stories told about its past, stories which mirrored claims over the land in the present. The chapter focuses on stories told in Marathi and Indo-Persian about the great fortress of Daulatabad and how that symbol of military power was linked to stories of the miraculous powers of Brahmin and Sufi blessed men.

Chapter 3 takes up the implications of dharma having never been a central concept in the pre‐Aśokan Vedic canon. It examines most of the Vedic canon's few prominent usages from the Ṛgveda through the mantra texts to the Upanisads in context. It first considers. the implications of dharma, in the form dhárman, having begun in the Ṛgveda as a new concept. It then pursues the use of this concept to generate novel enigmas there and elsewhere in the Vedic canon; its centrality to changing notions of kingship in these texts; and, no less important, to changing notions of the Brahmin in the consolidation of the varṇa or caste system.

This chapter focuses on the title character in Delibes’ Lakmé. In particular, the chapter attempts to illuminate Lakmé’s excessive, melismatic solo utterances by tapping into her devotional fervor and high social status as the daughter of a Hindu Brahmin, rather than relegating her to the realm of the madwoman, seductress, or psychotic—spaces where female characters who “speak” in excessive ornament have traditionally been placed. Investigating connections between “ornament” and “Other,” this chapter aims to situate perceptions of abundance within long-standing discourses on meaning and beauty, in the process invigorating and reshaping the discourse about female singers and coloratura. To do so, the chapter draws on the rarely discussed critical reception and little-known literary sources that inspired the creation of Lakmé, and it analyzes the character’s coloratura as a purveyor of sacred legend rather than as a sign of instability and “otherness.”

This chapter presents the poem Encomium to Saraha by Sakya Chokden. The poem tells about Saraha's family background, his ordination to become Brahmin Rāhula, his practice of mantra, and his writing of tantras and sutras. It also relates Saraha's accomplishments in opening the door to religious liberation and in explaining the importance of primordial awareness and co-emergence.

This chapter narrates a paradigmatic account of hospitality drawn from the Bhaghavata Purana. It tells the simple story of Sudama, a learned but impoverished Brahmin who visits his old school friend Krishna, a wealthy king of Dwaraka. As a gift for Krishna, Sudama takes a heap of puffed rice borrowed from a neighbor and takes it with him to the palace. On Sudana’s arrival, Krishna embraced him warmly, reminisced about their school days, and eagerly ate the puffed rice that Sudama was too ashamed to offer. When Sudama returned to his village, he finds that his humble hut has been transformed into a luxurious palace. According to texts in the Bhaghavata Purana, Sudama was liberated from labor and dedicated his life to living happily, teaching, and practicing austerity and humility.

This chapter fictionalizes a celebrated nineteenth-century event that vividly dramatized the costs of being a Nambudiri Brahmin woman. The Nambudiris of Kerala, at least in their own perception, occupy the very highest rungs of the ladder of caste, and, until the early twentieth century, maintained their eminence in large part through the control of women. Marriage was strictly confined to the Nambudiri fold, and a Nambudiri woman's sexuality was closely watched. The discussion notes that, in many communities, a woman's most important deity is her husband, which has led some observers to urge that such a story actually concerns two castes: Brahmins and women.

This chapter begins with the act of worship itself—the sort of action that constitutes the core of Hindu ritual life, introducing the general vocabulary of Hindu worship by following an observant Brahmin out the door as he begins his day as a computer repairman somewhere in Tamil Nadu. The discussion uses the occasion to speak about vows (vrata), acts of praise and service to the gods (puja), offerings of fire and light (arati), and the food that is exchanged between human beings and divinities (prasada).

The line between ritual and performance is thin. This can be seen in this chapter's portrayal of the ramlilas of Banaras, where the Brahmin boys who take the leading roles are not considered actors, but “intrinsic forms,” of the divine figure they represent: Sita and Rama, and Rama's three brothers. These boys bear the aura of divinity as long as the play continues, and are surrounded by many other figures, including a host of monkeys led by Hanuman. The ramlilas of Banaras, patronized by the Maharaja and performed on his extensive palace grounds at Ramnagar, just across the Ganges, are famous all over India.

As amusing as Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi, Narayan’s Talkative Man presents the career of a compulsive womanizer, Dr Rann. He is yet another rogue in Narayan’s post-Independence gallery. Dr Rann, a PhD, is the apotheosis of Narayan’s intellectuals and academics. From the havoc Rann creates, however, it is almost like the return of the man eater, in the avatar of a specialist woman eater. Towards the end, Rann delivers a talk on a topic he is best qualified for: a pest, the Giant Weed. Set against the ‘slippery’ Rann is his wife, a New Woman of Narayan’s post-Independence era. Ranga Rao notes that the latter period of Narayan’s post-Independence novels is the season of pests.

From the American perspective the ‘Gayangos phenomenon’ was the result of the intersection of four historical processes. The first was the arrival of Romantic historians whose goal was to adumbrate the roots of American history. The second was the need to have adequate libraries in order to write serious history. Extensive libraries were absent in the new republic. The third phenomenon was the emergence of the Bostonian version of the ‘Grand Tour’. The Boston participants who constituted the core of George Ticknor's circle, all travelled to Europe for social and educational reasons as well as to accumulate and purchase books following the disentailment of 1835, which marks the fourth phenomenon. This chapter discusses the intellectual networks forged by the surge of books and book dealers following the disentailment. It focuses on the Brahmin intellectuals of Boston and their relationship with Pascual de Gayangos. Of crucial interest is the scholarly interaction and intellectual outlook of the members of Ticknor's circle. Among the members of Ticknor's circle discussed in this chapter are: Jared Sparks, George Bancroft, Charles Sumner, Edward Everett, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell.

This chapter reconstructs the history of the compilation of the Adi Granth. It looks at the interactions between the Mughal and the Sikh traditions and examines the place of certain early manuscripts in the formation of the Sikh canon. Bhai Gurdas and Jagana Brahmin are believed to have helped Guru Arjan in his preparation of the Adi Granth. In addition, four other scribes — Bhai Sant Das, Bhai Haria, Bhai Sukha, and Bhai Mansa Ram — were also involved. Incidentally, at least four different handwritings were identified at different places, although the primary scribe is responsible for the major portion of the Kartarpur Bir. The making of the scripture was thus a product of teamwork led by Guru Arjan at Ramsar, in the central place of Amritsar. The formation of the Sikh canon commenced with the use in Sikh liturgy of Guru Nanak's hymns, when he was the head of a nascent Sikh Panth. Analysis of the early manuscripts indicates that Guru Arjan worked on a number of pre-canonical texts before coming up with an authoritative text of the Adi Granth in 1604.

The chapter explains how the Jesuit Madurai mission (from 1606) made Catholicism into a kind of Brahmanic religion, which then became embedded in the precolonial regional social and political system. Here Catholic saints were indigenized as power divinities within a local sacred geography, received patronage from Hindu kings, and were worshipped through Tamil temple forms. Meanwhile, missionary priests became crucial mediators of political honors. The chapter traces the ecclesiastical controversies involved in and the transformations brought with British colonial rule, as well as the mass conversion movements of “untouchable” castes in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which changed the profile of both Christianity and of caste in south India.