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This chapter describes some of the chapter's author's peregrinations in the liminality of teaching, notably, “the rocks and stones” laid out in large courses for undergraduates all looking for transcendence. The chapter addresses the question: how can “the continuity between external actions and internal states of being” be taught, when the “gulf” the class sees between lofty texts and meditative ideals is analogous to the gulf between the illiterate rites of the thousands of Indian villages and the textual ideals depicted by the tradition? The chapter puts forward a solution and evidence of gains in cultural understanding brought about by this.

This chapter discusses the strict procedures that are observed in Hindu rituals. These procedures vary, from the movement of either the right or the left hand, to the direction a subject faces when the rite is being conducted. The first section examines the division between the general categorization of space and the right and left hand distinctions in the ritual procedures stated in the Grihya Sutra of Gobhila. It notes that these procedures have a number of variations in the performance of local or domestic ceremonies, which are based on caste, sect, and region. This section also describes these domestic ceremonies and tries to provide an understanding of particular structural aspects of Hindu society. This chapter also argues that structural categories that arise in the analysis of domestic ceremonies are repeated in different field studies of Hinduism.

This chapter addresses the issue that the sacred is divided with reference to the opposition of life and death, instead of good and bad. The discussion relates this to available formulations with regards to the ordering of the sacred in Hindu ritual and belief. It then identifies three arguments that were posed in response to this issue. First, it studies the argument that the dichotomy of profane and sacred that directed the Durkheimian sociology of religion is hardly relevant to the Hindu context. Second, it looks at the argument that accepts the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane, while separating the sacred into the good-sacred and the bad-sacred. Third, the third argument states that events that are viewed as instilled with danger in other societies invite pollution into Hindu society. The chapter also studies concepts such as impurity and liminality.

This introductory chapter discusses Hindu caste and ritual. It examines the religious texts in Sanskrit, which serve as relevant sources of information on Indian society. It takes a look at anthropological research and the formation of a positivist approach, as well as the consequences of defining social reality based on concreteness. It introduces Louis Dumont's writings, where he rejects the dichotomy between behaviour and thought, and insists that an explanatory model cannot be limited to copying observed reality. It then pinpoints the two Sanskrit texts that will be analyzed in detail, namely the Dharmaranya Purana and the Grihya Sutra of Gobhila. The chapter also studies the caste Puranas, who are defined as a class of Sanskrit language that is concerned with the five main themes of creation.

In definitions of rituals, formality ranks first. It includes stylized and repetitive gestures and words, liturgical order as well as a certain invariance of fixed sequences or restricted codes. Actions are prescribed and often scripted. It is a rule-governed behavior, to a certain extent stereotypical, and repetitive (therefore imitable) as well as—in principle—public. It is therefore not primarily spontaneous, private, singular or optional for everyone. This chapter deals with these aspects, especially repetition and variation. It also discusses whether the formal structures of rituals allow for developing and modeling “grammars” of rituals. Although rituals often involve language, strictly speaking they are not themselves a language. So basically any talk of a grammar of rituals is meaningless, or only possible on a metaphorical level. And yet there are two reasons why it makes sense to pursue this figure of speech: on the one hand, because it has long been customary in linguistics to include non-verbal communication in grammars, and on the other, because people are forever attempting to analyze the rules of rituals in linguistic terms. Notions of publicity and notification of rituals are discussed in a section on liturgical texts, especially ritual manuals and local handbooks. All this will be exemplified by elaborating on patterns of Hindu life-cycle rituals.

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).

This chapter explores animal involvement in Hindu ritual and ideology as described in Dharmaśāstra, investigating how and why descriptions and enactments of dharma require and utilize animal bodies. In accounting for animals in Hindu ritual, one observes that animals embody dharma, both literally (materially, in ritual) and figuratively. At times, animals are an extension of one’s own physical body, as property, reasserting the permeability of “animal” and “human” in Hindu ideology. Further, humans may “become animal” during penance or in a karmic rebirth. While bodies are socially constructed and enacted, animals are also the social products of Hindu ritual and thought: for example, the cow. In exploring how humans have constructed their religious world using various animal bodies, we find that these bodies articulate dharma and create and restore religious merit for humans, indicating that animals sometimes mediate human relations with the divine.

This chapter examines a category, “that which is set apart,” which has been crucial for the Durkheimian tradition in the study of religion. Separated from the ordinary, the everyday, or the profane, the sacred is set apart in such a way that it is central to social formations. Exploring the dynamics of the sacred by viewing Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair, which takes us from Christian hair styling to Hindu temple rituals, this chapter shows how the sacred is produced through extraordinary attention, regular ritualization, sacrificial exchanges, and inevitable contestations over the ownership of the sacred.

This chapter presents an example of successful religious coexistence, the case of the Punjabi princely state of Malerkotla, which between 1923 and 1940 encountered a series of disputes concerning the audibility of Hindu and Muslim rituals: the arati–katha–namaz disputes. It seems that no one died in Partition-related violence in Malerkotla, and a large majority of the local Muslim population remained there rather than migrate to Pakistan. The chapter discusses Malerkotla’s complex history of conflict, going back to the state’s foundation in the mid-fifteenth century. The agreement in 1940 between local Hindu and Muslim leaders that resolved the arati–katha–namaz conflict was not to interfere in future in the practices of the other community. In the aftermath, even while Malerkotla too experienced several cases of communal stress, a mode of disciplining dissent seems to have been in place that helped to avert major clashes between Hindus and Muslims.