TY - JOUR
AU - Allocco, Amy L
AB - Abstract Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Tamil-speaking South India, this article presents one Hindu invitation ritual to return dead relatives known as pūvāṭaikkāri to the world of the living and install them as household deities. This two-day ceremony demonstrates that prevailing scholarly perceptions of death and what follows it in Hindu traditions have constrained our ability to appreciate other models for ritual relationships between the living and the dead. These vernacular rituals call the dead back into the world, convince them to possess a human host, and persuade them to be permanently installed in the family’s domestic shrine so they may protect and sustain living kin. Rather than aiming to irrevocably separate the dead from the living, these rites are instead oriented toward eventual conjunction with the dead and therefore reveal a fundamentally different picture than that articulated in the majority of Hinduism’s sacred texts and scholarly accounts. AT THE CONCLUSION of a vibrant festival at a popular Hindu goddess temple in my urban South Indian neighborhood in the summer of 2015, Selvam, one of the ritual musicians (pampaikkārar) from the troupe that had officiated, invited me to attend a ceremony designed to bring the dead back into the world.1 I was excited to accompany Selvam’s enormously talented ensemble of musician-priests to one of these two-day ceremonies, which I had first observed in 2006 while conducting fieldwork on snake worship and Tamil goddess traditions (Allocco 2013a; Allocco 2013b; Allocco 2014), because in tracking these complex rites over the intervening decade I had become convinced that there are significant gaps in our scholarly understanding of death and what lies beyond it in vernacular Hinduism.2 This article presents one example of a ritual (pūjā) to return dead relatives to the world of the living and install them as household deities (vīṭṭu teyvam or vīṭṭu cāmi), documented during ten months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in and around Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, between 2015 and 2016.3 Within the broader repertoire of ritual relationships that Tamil non-Brahmins maintain with their deceased kin, my study focuses especially on rituals to honor those known as pūvāṭaikkāri, dead relatives who are entitled to be worshiped first among the beneficent household deities that protect a family. Drawn from dozens of invitation rituals that I witnessed, I argue that the dynamics and goals of this two-day ceremony powerfully demonstrate that predominant scholarly perceptions of death and what follows it in Hindu traditions—predicated as they are on gendered hierarchies and brahminical beliefs and practices—have severely constrained our ability to take account of other models for relationships and ritual engagement between the living and the dead. Focusing on rituals to invite (aḻaippu) dead family members classified as pūvāṭaikkāri back into the world—common among particular middle- and low-caste Tamil Hindu communities—reveals a fundamentally different picture than the one found in the majority of Hinduism’s sacred texts and scholarly accounts. More specifically, I argue that rather than aiming for an irrevocable separation of the dead from the living, effected through cremation and reincarnation, and pursuing the ultimate goal of liberation (mōkṣa), these rites are oriented toward eventual conjunction with the dead. Among families who undertake pūvāṭaikkāri pūjās, at death the door to the home is figuratively and quite deliberately left ajar so that invited dead may at some point return. Through the skills of ritual musician-priests like Selvam and his ensemble, these ceremonies compel deceased relatives to reenter the world of the living, convince them to possess a human host, and persuade them to be permanently installed in the family’s domestic shrine as household deities so that they may protect and sustain the family. As such, these rituals demand that we radically rethink our overreliance on the prevailing cremation-reincarnation-liberation paradigm, which includes practices and ideologies that my research participants reject either in part or entirely. Indeed, the majority of them bury their dead, and most articulate discomfort with, uncertainty about, or outright dismissal of the idea that they must be repeatedly reborn and that their ultimate goal is to achieve release.4 These arguments are informed by my conviction that through sustained, ethical, and intrinsically feminist ethnographic interventions, we can shed light on distinctive and central but little-known features of vernacular Hinduism such as these rituals to honor and invite dead relatives known as pūvāṭaikkāri. Feminist anthropological practices demand that I consistently pursue honesty, transparency, collaboration, reciprocity, intersectionality, and a critical awareness of the power dynamics inherent in the ethnographic process as core values in both fieldwork and writing. So, too, they entail privileging what local consultants themselves have to say about the topics under consideration and attentiveness to embodied, non-verbal, and other forms of knowledge. This sort of ethnography involves the choices to center women and other “peripheral” communities, practices, and religious orientations, to share my developing analyses with participants, and to present in-process work in venues where members of the communities with whom I work will be present. Furthermore, feminist ethnography should demonstrate commitments to abiding relationships with the individual participants, communities, and institutions that populate, facilitate, support, and immeasurably enrich our scholarly (and personal) lives. Over time, for example, I have endeavored to build rapport and nurture meaningful connections with the drummers, ritualists, families, and others who feature in this study and in my broader project on ritual bonds with the dead because I believe that the ideals of feminist ethnography call us to invest in relationships, to allow them to develop organically, and to remain mindful of—and regularly share—our own standpoints and identities with fieldwork interlocutors. Ethnographic relationships are, of course, inescapably human, imperfect, and imbalanced. Nevertheless, by allowing my understandings of ritual practices to emerge over time, via prolonged fieldwork, and by grounding them in sustained relationships, integrating multiple perspectives, and taking account of change over time, it is my hope that I will ultimately be able to produce richer and more nuanced interpretations that more accurately represent life as lived.5 In what follows, I first consider what types of dead may be worshiped as pūvāṭaikkāri before moving on to briefly outline the two types of pūvāṭaikkāri pūjās: annual and occasional rites. Next I focus on the occasional rite, the two-day invitation and installation ritual for three pūvāṭaikkāris named Malarkodi, Mangammal, and Kalaiarasi to which Selvam invited me, and then leverage this case study to demonstrate that our existing scholarly frameworks—too frequently brahminical, textual, and gendered—have impeded our ability to perceive how in some communities the presence of the dead is keenly desired in the family and at home, possession by and counsel with the dead are sought after, the living rely on the dead to cultivate familial prosperity, and kinship relationships between the living and dead continue to be negotiated and performed. WHO CAN BE A PŪVĀṬAIKKĀRI? The Tamil term pūvāṭaikkāri literally means “a woman who wears [a dress made of] flowers” and, in its narrowest sense, refers to an auspicious married woman (Sanskrit: sumaṅgalī; Tamil: cumaṅkali) who died with a living husband and was thus eligible to be adorned with flowers.6 My research participants offered divergent interpretations of the term, evidencing disagreement about whether pūvāṭaikkāris must be auspicious wives (or, as people referred to them euphemistically, those with “pū and poṭṭu,” flowers and the round vermilion forehead mark traditionally worn by married women), or whether this category may also include unmarried girls, who commonly wear fragrant blossoms in their hair in South India. The semantic range of the word is even broader in practice: not only does the word pūvāṭaikkāri include post-menarchal girls who die unmarried (kaṉṉi), it sometimes even refers to pre-pubertal girls. Further, this term may even be applied to those who died unnatural or violent deaths—such as in accidents or by suicide—that might incline them to become troublesome entities (pēy); such figures may also be worshiped as pūvāṭaikkāri in a bid to transform these potentially malevolent, untimely dead into deities (cāmi). The only women this category consistently excludes is widows, to whom the pleasure of being adorned with auspicious flowers is traditionally denied. In a further display of the term’s elasticity and despite its clearly feminine valence, deceased men may also be called pūvāṭaikkāri. In fact, the very first pūvāṭaikkāri investiture that I attended sought to transform a boy who had perished and been buried just a few days shy of his eleventh birthday into a household deity.7 Any dead relative who is worshiped as a protective household or family god (vīṭṭu teyvam or kula teyvam)8 can potentially be classed as a pūvāṭaikkāri, then, whether they are honored with relatively simple yearly offerings or treated to a full-scale invitation and installation ritual (or what I classify as annual and occasional rites, respectively).9 On the night I met Selvam and his ensemble, I had come to this urban goddess temple to participate in the annual pūvāṭaikkāri pūjā performed by a woman named Thangam for her daughter, who had died at age three. These annual remembrance rituals are performed by members of a range of non-Brahmin castes at temple wells and other water sources in the Tamil months of Āṭi and Tai (mid-July to mid-August and mid-January to mid-February, respectively), the first full months after the summer and winter solstices, when the boundary between the living and the dead is believed to be especially permeable. The presence of a well on this temple’s premises is one reason this is such a popular location for these rituals, which are undertaken outside the house for dead women who have not yet been brought back into the world to undergo investiture and for those not eligible to return home.10 The eldest woman in the family typically performs this ritual at a temple well or another accessible water source, since those who are physically gone (but not actually departed) are believed to lurk in watery places. In this rite, the dead woman, represented by a twisted sari placed at the head of a banana leaf, is worshiped as a family goddess, gifted clothing, and offered fruits and other vegetarian food items (paṭaiyal) before being asked to support and safeguard (pātukāppu) the family in the coming year (see figure 1). Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide In this annual pūvāṭaikkāri pūjā at a temple well the dead woman, represented by a twisted sari, is worshiped as a family goddess and offered fruits and other vegetarian food items (paṭaiyal). Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide In this annual pūvāṭaikkāri pūjā at a temple well the dead woman, represented by a twisted sari, is worshiped as a family goddess and offered fruits and other vegetarian food items (paṭaiyal). Annual rituals like Thangam’s are relatively easy to access because they take place in public temple spaces on easily identifiable auspicious days at particular junctures of the year. But the ceremony that Selvam summoned me to was just the opposite: these expensive and elaborate invitation and installation rituals (aḻaittal)—which propitiate the dead, bid them to possess the living, and entreat them to take up residence in the family’s home shrine as protective deities (vīṭṭu teyvam)—are undertaken by families very infrequently, precipitated as they are by specific needs rather than predicated on the ritual calendar, and they are generally closed to outsiders. In them, the ritual musicians combine particular drumbeats, song sequences, lyrical improvisations, and verbal interludes to summon the desired dead and induce them to possess (āvēcam) and speak through surviving kin. Although contacting the dead poses challenges, the most fraught aspects of these invitation rituals are the crucial question-and-answer segments, which begin with the all-important query, “Who are you?”11 The dead person is then asked to supply details about how they died, explain their kinship relationships to the assembled spectators, enumerate their unfulfilled desires, assess the quality of the ritual arrangements, and offer guidance to their living relatives. By turns tense, poignant, and hilarious, these dramatic exchanges with the dead frequently feature deception, manipulation, and recrimination, bringing both current and long-concealed slights out into the open for all to scrutinize and discuss. I was repeatedly told that these ceremonies, which I call “occasional rites,” are performed in advance of planned, auspicious life-cycle rituals (cupa nikaḻcci), particularly weddings and children’s ear-piercings, to formally invite deceased relatives to attend. And this is certainly what Isabelle Nabokov, the only scholar who has treated pūvāṭaikkāri pūjās to a detailed analysis, attests in her eloquent ethnography of Tamil rituals, which draws on research carried out nearly thirty years ago in rural Tamil Nadu (2000).12 In the two chapters of her study dedicated to these ceremonies, she notes that, although the scant accounts of these rites in the academic literature establish that they may be “performed in times of crisis to counteract misfortune,” none among the fourteen investitures that she recorded were motivated by affliction (2000, 201 fn3). Instead, all of those she documents were held immediately preceding a wedding, typically the marriage of a first-born son who had lost one or both of his parents (2000, 127). By contrast, the vast majority of the pūvāṭaikkāri pūjās that I witnessed over the course of my long-term field research in Chennai and the neighboring Kanchipuram district, as well as those I discussed over the course of hundreds of interviews with ritual participants between 2005 and 2019, were mounted in response to trials, tribulations, and tests (cōtaṉai) that manifest as illness, hardship, or a family’s failure to thrive or “grow.” Among other things, this divergence signals that in contemporary times, people are facing adversities significant enough to justify arranging a complex and costly two-day ritual that requires a minimum outlay of $300 for the musicians’ services and extensive ritual supplies. So, too, it suggests that they believe that inviting their dead to take up permanent residence in the domestic shrine in the “middle of the house” (naṭu vīṭu; see Jacob-Pandian 1975) will effectively bring their dead into the pantheon of those protective deities (which includes their kula teyvam) who are most disposed to help them negotiate the challenges of modern social life and effect positive outcomes in the face of setbacks and difficulties. Far from being a purely altruistic tribute to deceased forebears, these performances are directly impelled by the desires and needs of the living, which the dead are openly prevailed upon to facilitate and fulfill. This interpretation aligns with the testimony of families who collectively decide to host this ritual and pool their limited resources to fund it in the hope that their dead kin will accept their invitation to return home and thus serve as a refuge and source of support (tuṇai), both material and emotional, for them. As one of my consultants put it, “These days we face so many difficulties and need help and succor. We call and invite and ask the spirit to come home. If the spirit agrees to protect our family, then we take that help gladly.” RELATIONSHIPS AND RITUAL MOTIVATIONS: PROTECTIVE POWER AND COLLECTIVE FLOURISHING Because they are largely confined to domestic space and private agricultural land, these invitation and installation ceremonies are not the sorts of ritual performances that ethnographers typically happen into via the serendipities of fieldwork. Instead, it was primarily through established relationships with the musicians who serve as the ritual specialists at these ceremonies, built over time and predicated on their remarkable professionalism and generosity, that I was able to access these largely family-only affairs. My knowledge about and inclusion in these performances is, furthermore, grounded in both decades-old personal relationships and a broader network of carefully nurtured research contacts in Chennai that stretch back to 1997, when I first conducted ethnographic fieldwork on a range of rituals in Hindu temples and homes. The ritual example from 2015 under discussion here was the first among what would become many occasions that I was invited to accompany Selvam’s troupe overnight to witness the ritual proceedings from start to finish. Selvam’s father, Subramani, who is an experienced, third-generation musician and ritual specialist from the Āṇṭi Paṇṭāram caste (designated by the government among the “Most Backward Classes”), presides over the group. Although the configuration of their all-male troupe changes from ritual to ritual, the ensemble is typically composed of between six and eight musicians, with one on uṭukkai (the small hourglass-shaped drum associated with the Hindu god Shiva), two playing sets of twin-headed pampai drums, and two members shaking the oblong, anklet-shaped rattles called kai cilampu (see figures 2 and 3). Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide A set of twin-headed pampai drums. There are usually two sets of pampai played by the ritual drummers in invitation ceremonies for the dead. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide A set of twin-headed pampai drums. There are usually two sets of pampai played by the ritual drummers in invitation ceremonies for the dead. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide The hourglass-shaped drum (uṭukkai) and two sets of anklet-shaped rattles (kai cilampu) that are essential percussive instruments in rituals to bring the dead back home as protective household deities. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide The hourglass-shaped drum (uṭukkai) and two sets of anklet-shaped rattles (kai cilampu) that are essential percussive instruments in rituals to bring the dead back home as protective household deities. One or more of Subramani’s four sons, all of whom have learned his craft through careful tutoring, observation, and practice, always participates. Just as the role of ritual officiant shifts among the troupe’s senior members, so too the vocals and instruments are rotated from song to song, with all of the men lending crucial support on the chorus. On this occasion, Selvam’s ensemble had been hired to officiate at the ceremony to honor three dead women—Malarkodi, Mangammal, and Kalaiarasi—all of whom had died as auspicious wives with living husbands, along with other assorted dead relatives (māṇṭavarkaḷ) belonging to an extended, land-owning family from the Yādava Piḷḷai caste.13 The site of the ritual was the old, joint-family dwelling that the family’s five brothers, now all grandfathers themselves, had once together occupied along with their wives and children. Over time, this sprawling family had broken up into smaller units and established separate residences, leaving the eldest son, Ramesh Pillai, and his sons’ families to occupy their original home. Ramesh Pillai had recently divided his property so that his three sons could each construct a new home on their individual portions, and it was now time to demolish this too-small and unfashionable house so that these new ones could be built. Before demolition, however, the family’s two existing pūvāṭaikkāris, Malarkodi and Mangammal, would have to be guided from Ramesh Pillai’s generation’s joint dwelling, in whose shrine they were currently installed, to the newly built house of his oldest son Gopal. The multi-storied house belonging to Gopal, a well-dressed but somewhat rough-mannered local-level administrator, had already been finished and its housewarming ritual (gṛhyapravēṣam) completed. A stylistic hodgepodge reflecting Gopal’s decidedly nouveau-riche status (which relatives imputed to the collections—that is, bribes—acquired via his administrative post), the house was in line with his local prominence and with the emphasis on display and upwardly mobile class aspirations that would characterize the rituals to come. The drummers disapproved of what they regarded as an overwhelming concern with status and spectacle rather than sincere religious devotion on the part of Gopal and his family, a judgment perhaps best substantiated by the fact that their ritual is the only one I have ever attended that included a flashy (and deafening) fireworks display, perhaps intended to impress neighbors and spectators rather than honor deities and the dead. In addition to relocating these two previously installed women from the old house to the new and propitiating the as-yet-uninvited third dead wife, it would be the ritual drummers’ task over the next two days to secure the permission of these pūvāṭaikkāris for their prior residence to be knocked down to make way for “modern” ones that their descendants intended to build on its site. One of the drummers explained that it might take considerable persuasion for them to accede, since they had married into and raised families in this joint family home during their lifetimes and it would “be natural for them to remain attached to the house where they had worshiped the family’s deities and tended the ritual lamp.” Other branches of this kin network had different motivations for collaborating in the ritual: where Malarkodi and Mangammal had been installed as pūvāṭaikkāris seven years prior, when an invitation ritual was last performed, Kalaiarasi had died in the intervening years and had not yet been welcomed back. Kalaiarasi’s widower had remarried, and so he and his sons were seeking to bring her home as a family goddess not only to obtain her blessings, but also to short circuit any jealousy this dead first wife might harbor. This concern and other vītṭ̣u kaṣṭam (household difficulties or trouble in the family) that participants identified notwithstanding, it was the overarching goal of bringing the protective power of these three pūvāṭaikkāris, along with whomever else among their family’s dead wished to return to the world, into the newly built home of the eldest son of the patriline’s oldest brother that was the chief motivating reason for the five households in this kin network to join forces to hold this ritual. This protective power, they believed, was the key to their collective prosperity and flourishing. RITUAL CONTEXT AND PROCESS Located on a newly paved road graced by chickens and livestock in an area that is now considered greater Chennai but that just a decade ago was open agricultural land, the house where the ceremony would be held was being decorated with a colorful tent and rented lights when I arrived. The drummers immediately showed me to the spot where Selvam, the decoration (alaṅkāram) specialist among them, would establish the deities and construct the evening’s focal point: the ritual vessel called the pativiḷakku. Although many deities are invoked in the song sequences that impel these ceremonies, the lavishly decorated vessel represents the sponsoring household’s family deity (kula teyvam), whose cooperation is vital to achieving the ritual’s aims (see figure 4). Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide A close-up of the lamp (viḷakku) set within the elaborate ritual vessel (pativiḷakku) that is constructed on the first night of the invitation ceremony, and which represents the home’s family deity (kula teyvam), Draupadi Amman. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide A close-up of the lamp (viḷakku) set within the elaborate ritual vessel (pativiḷakku) that is constructed on the first night of the invitation ceremony, and which represents the home’s family deity (kula teyvam), Draupadi Amman. The term viḷakku technically refers to the decorated lamp that will eventually be fixed on the stunning, flower-wreathed ritual vessel, however, pativiḷakku is used as an umbrella term for the richly decorated assemblage and the first evening’s ritual, the pativiḷakku pūjā. During this rite, the musicians sing songs that describe, portray, and heap praise (varuṇittal) on a range of deities in order to compel some of them to join the gathering and to “come on” (cāmi vā) and speak through individual participants. One particularly beautiful song, for example, localizes the story of Daksha’s (Tamil: Takkaṉ’s) sacrifice and describes how, as a grief-stricken Shiva dances across the subcontinent with the corpse of Daksha’s daughter (Tamil: Tāṭcāyiṉi), one of her body parts falls in the cremation ground attached to the enormously popular Tamil goddess temple dedicated to Angalaparameshwari (Tamil: Aṅkāḷaparamēcuvari) at Mel Malaiyanur, establishing it in the network of śakti pīṭham (“seats of the goddess”) wherein her power inheres (Cantiracēkar n.d.; Meyer 1986). The musicians’ most passionate songs address the family’s deity, who must be convinced to communicate via the lamp’s flame (and, nearly always, verbally through a human medium) and grant permission (uttaravu) for the full-day ritual to call the dead that will follow. Although securing the family deity’s assent is critical, the first night’s ritual also includes the presence of a wide variety of deities and, almost always, dead relatives who dance (cāmi āṭṭam) and respond to questions in the voices of their human hosts (vākku collutal). As one of my drummer associates put it, “The pativiḷakku is the place where we bring the deities and ask them to stand or stay there. As you have seen, we ask questions of the lamp. We call the deities and ask questions, and that deity will talk in the lamp. … We decorate it with flowers so we call it ‘flower-lamp’ when it is entirely decorated and put together. Through our decorations we give structure or form to it.” During the next day’s ceremony, the family proceeds to a water source for the ritual called Gangai tiraṭṭu (gathering or collecting the Ganges), in which the dead are invited to climb up a thread from the watery depths back into the world (a complex of beliefs and practices that is treated in detail below) and take up residence in a second flower-draped ritual vessel known as the karakam. After many hours of drumming, singing, and dialogue with the dead and other divine entities who join the gathering, the karakam, into which dead relatives have been incorporated, is carried to the family home. When the ritual flame from the gathering-the-Ganges ritual is merged with the one that has been burning in the domestic pativiḷakku since the previous night, the dead have definitively returned home, come from “outside” (veḷiyē) to “inside” (uḷḷē) the house, and are permanently installed as beneficent household deities. Day One: Decorating, Drumming, and Dancing the Deities and Dead The first order of business for the drummers is to undertake the labor-intensive process of decorating the pativiḷakku. Cynthia Packert notes that decoration is an important site of connection as well as of cultural negotiation where “multiple discourses—about visuality, desire, aesthetics, devotion, emotion, history, ownership, practice, time, and space—converge,” and, although the pativiḷakku itself is ephemeral, the discourses she identifies are powerfully present as Selvam and his assistants collaborate to create this sumptuous display (Packert 2010, xvi). The drummers must begin by fashioning a small Ganesha, the lord of beginnings and remover of obstacles, from wet turmeric and honoring him with offerings before they move on to establish Vishnu and the Goddess (see figure 5) in two individual ritual pots (kalacam) and adorn them. There are exacting requirements for establishing these deities: the pot must be made of copper or brass, as these metals have “life” in them; it should be enlivened by placing particular substances and items (e.g., rosewater, lemons, and coins, among other things) into its interior and expertly floating a piece of burning camphor on the surface of the liquid within; and it must be wrapped with clean, white thread and daubed with turmeric and vermilion to allow the life (uyir) to course through these “veins,” thus transforming the ritual pot into the literal body of the divine. Figures 5. Open in new tabDownload slide The drummers decorate two ritual pots (kalacam) and establish Vishnu (left) and the Goddess (right) in them, thus transforming them into bodies of the divine. Figures 5. Open in new tabDownload slide The drummers decorate two ritual pots (kalacam) and establish Vishnu (left) and the Goddess (right) in them, thus transforming them into bodies of the divine. As a next step, Selvam inverts a large pot and, atop it, deftly shapes the pile of clay that will become the anthropomorphic image of the sponsoring family’s deity. In this home, the family deity is Draupadi Amman, the common wife of the heroes from the Hindu epic Mahābhārata and a goddess with a vibrant ritual tradition in Tamil Nadu (see Hiltebeitel 1988 and Hiltebeitel 1991).14 In my fieldnotes from that day, I marvel at Selvam’s meticulousness as he crafts a bust of the goddess on the base of the pot: he sculpts her face and torso; smooths turmeric on her face; draws in her hair, eyes, brows, and lips; and applies makeup. Selvam decorates Draupadi’s body with strips of metallic foil, studs her crown with gems, and ornaments her with glittering jewelry. Other members of his ensemble step in to assist now, filling out her body with a neem skirt and dressing her in a shimmering silk sari before winding spool after spool of flowers and herbs in and out around the carefully fashioned stakes that support the pativiḷakku’s backpiece. Given Asko Parpola’s contention that “the lamp, viḷakku, is one of the most important symbols of the Goddess in South India” (2015, 313), it is unsurprising that the one set in a beautiful cascade of flowers will serve as the focal point of the night’s ritual proceedings (Parpola 2015, 313). After a few last embellishments, we are ready for the night of drumming, dancing, and dialogue ahead (see figure 6). Figure 6. Open in new tabDownload slide The decoration of the beautiful ritual vessel (pativiḷakku) representing the sponsoring family’s deity, the goddess Draupadi, takes Selvam, a full six hours to complete. Figure 6. Open in new tabDownload slide The decoration of the beautiful ritual vessel (pativiḷakku) representing the sponsoring family’s deity, the goddess Draupadi, takes Selvam, a full six hours to complete. For the six hours that it has taken to sculpt and decorate it, the pativiḷakku has remained concealed within a makeshift enclosure of saris, and as the structure is dismantled a murmur of appreciation runs through the crowd as they confront its visual splendor for the first time. An array of food offerings (paṭaiyal) is quickly laid out and chunks of camphor ignited. Drumming begins, the lamps are lit, and lemons are circled and torn in half as one among several deterrents against malevolent spirits or the evil eye, which could disrupt the proceedings. As family members step forward by turn to circle the ritual lamp around the display (i.e., perform ārati), the eight male musicians play their instruments energetically and Subramani sings emotively, invoking Ganesha to “come and enjoy the pūjā.” Singing directly to, gesturing at, and showering Draupadi Amman’s beautiful image with flowers, Subramani entreats her to accept this pūjā, to see to it that the deities and the three desired pūvāṭaikkāris—Malarkodi, Mangammal, and Kalaiarasi—grace us with their presence, and to show her support for the family by conveying her permission for the ritual to proceed through a flame that “stands up as straight as a needle.” Beginning with the village guardians and local goddesses, he lustrates deity after deity with verses describing their unique physical attributes and praising their particular powers and feats, and several of them concede to join the gathering by “coming on” a human medium. The goddess Angalaparameshwari enters the body of a woman from the neighborhood as soon as Subramani begins a song devoted to her, the first among perhaps a dozen deities who will manifest that night. Over the next two hours the drummers sing vigorously, play their instruments, and wave their arms in unison with their percussive rattles. Several deities descend and dance. Finally, the family’s kula teyvam selects one of the family’s daughters-in-law as her medium. In the extended dialogue session that follows, Draupadi Amman verifies her identity, consents to the next day’s ritual, and consults with family members about their concerns: an intergenerational conflict, a questionable real estate transaction, and a still-unmarried son. With the assent of the kula teyvam confirmed, the musicians throw all of their vocal and instrumental energy into ornamenting the three pūvāṭaikkāris with descriptive lyrics designed to induce them to come into our midst to possess and speak through a family member. But when the next member of the family begins to dance and Subramani orders the drums to quiet so that he can ask who has come on this body, we learn that it is instead a dead grandfather, one of the pūvāṭaikkāri’s husbands, who has come to the gathering. This forefather conveys his satisfaction with the arrangements and assures Subramani that the three auspicious wives will appear shortly, and so the drummers launch into another song, followed by another, and then another. Eventually, Mangammal arrives and, shortly thereafter, Malarkodi appears. Their reunion is intensely moving: the two women’s chests heave with sobs as they embrace and stroke one another’s tear-streaked faces. Mangammal addresses Malarkodi as “little sister” and laments that it has been so many years since they have met. Mangammal calls for betel leaf and areca nut and carefully crafts an aromatic digestive for each of them as they converse, quietly and intimately, seemingly focused only on themselves. The assembled family members weep and touch their late elders’ feet reverentially, paying respect and asking them to move from their present quarters over to Gopal’s new house, where Ramesh Pillai and his wife also reside. The drummers shift into an eloquent paean exalting Kalaiarasi and soon another entity descends on a human host, who staggers about and clutches Malarkodi and Mangammal. But whoever has come steadfastly refuses to speak, despite the drummers’ repeated appeals to “just say one word!” and “tell us your name!” Over the next hour, the musicians exhibit an impressive rhetorical range: they move from praising and welcoming the spirit to cajoling and beseeching before finally reprimanding the possessing entity for her uncooperative behavior. They tease the possessed woman, who is Kalaiarasi’s husband’s second wife, telling her that they are tired from playing for so long. “Haaaard work!” one junior drummer yells loudly, flashing a smile at me and shrugging toward the swaying woman, who stands with her eyes closed, and Selvam tells her exasperatedly that if she does not speak soon they will just “pack up and go for tea.” Gambling that he is speaking to Kalaiarasi, Subramani returns to flattery, identifying the many members of the extended family who have come to greet and honor her and improvising some lines about how her approval is imperative to the planned house-construction project. Hearing this, her eyes flip open and her previously slack body goes rigid. “You are here to show me respect? My opinion is being sought, my blessing required?” she snaps. Subramani launches into a standard line of genealogical and biographical questioning intended to establish her identity, but she ignores him and wheels around, searching the crowd for her children, and demands that they step forward. She reproaches them for waiting so long to call her back into the family, not bothering to consult her before their father remarried, and dishonoring her with their frequent quarrels and disputes. Sensing they are losing control of the situation, the drummers attempt to interject, asking her what unfulfilled desires she harbors, but instead this junior pūvāṭaikkāri settles her attention on her nephew, Gopal. His relatives eagerly push him to the front, drawing forward in a tight knot so they can hear what transpires as she addresses Gopal directly. “You say you have called us to consult us, but you have already done the housewarming ritual, and moved into your new home: who invited us for that? And now you say you want to seek my permission to break the house that I lived in when I came to this family as a new bride? I know that the demolition people have already been hired and the date set,” she yells indignantly. Subramani repeatedly tries to interrupt and soothe her, but she continues to levy accusations: she indicts Gopal for benefiting from bribes, enabling him to complete his house first among his brothers, and for being so “money-minded” that he already rented out the upper floors of his new dwelling to strangers even though his brothers will need temporary accommodations during construction. One of the junior drummers steps toward her, and thunders, “Tell us your name and do as we say!” adding that her one and only option is to agree to join them on the family’s agricultural land tomorrow and participate in the Gangai tiraṭṭu ceremony. He cuts off every sentence that she begins by exhorting “tell us your name!” punctuated by a sharp drumbeat. Frustrated, she shouts, “I am Kalaiarasi! Don’t you know me?” and the musicians drown out any further dialogue with triumphant cadences. Finally, amidst apologies and mollifications from her relatives, Kalaiarasi concedes to participate in the next day’s ritual but steadfastly declines to say whether she will in fact “come home” to be installed as a protective household deity for the family, as Mangammal and Malarkodi have previously. “Ask me tomorrow,” she says and the drummers agree—it is nearly 2 a.m., but before they halt the proceedings they vow to Kalaiarasi that her kin will bring soil from her grave to the next day’s pūjā. This powerful dirt is sometimes promised to reluctant spirits to convince them that they are loved, their satisfaction is a priority, and their presence as household gods is keenly desired. Day Two: Gathering the Ganges The next day’s gathering-the-Ganges ceremony entails processing to a local water source that is somehow directly connected to the sponsoring family. The term Gangai tiraṭṭu itself invites several questions and interpretive possibilities, perhaps primary among which concerns the use and semantic range of the word Ganga/Gangai, particularly since the Ganges River does not flow in the far south of the subcontinent. Some of my participants drew a direct connection between the Tamil water sources utilized in these pūjās and the highly revered Ganges River, which Diana L. Eck calls “the archetype of sacred waters,” the “paradigmatic river” to which all others are compared or likened (1996, 138). When I asked, several claimed that their reference to Gangai in this context points to the fact that all waters are metaphorically or symbolically the Ganges, connected to it at some primordial level. Another significant question relates to why the dead are believed to lurk in the waters once their bodily existence has concluded and thus why this is the site from which they must be lured back into the world. The most obvious reason for the association of the deceased with water (especially the Ganges) stems from the widespread Hindu practice of immersing the post-cremation ashes and bones in India’s holy waters. As David R. Kinsley explains, “The Ganges is understood to be a particularly accessible bridge from one mode of being to the other, a sure crossing point in the difficult transition from life to death or from bondage to liberation,” noting further that another prevalent belief in India is that having their ashes or bones cast into this river “guarantees the dead a safe journey to the realm of the ancestors” (1986, 193). Whereas Kinsley’s formulation hinges on a post-mortem trajectory away from the world, with the dead effectively crossing over and departing from it forever, we have seen that pūvāṭaikkāri invitation rites are instead animated by the desire to return the dead to the realm of the living as a lasting support. Moreover, as the drummers’ offer to bring soil from Kalaiarasi’s grave implies, the tidy association between bones/ashes and rivers is insufficient to explain the Tamil ritual context. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the middle- and low-caste dead whose retrievals from the waters I witnessed during my fieldwork were buried, rather than cremated, and so their physical remains were not deposited in the streams, rivers, or oceans that grace Tamil lands. If we look beyond our immediate example of Gangai tiraṭṭu embedded within pūvāṭaikkāri invitation ceremonies and consider the wider ritual repertoire of gathering-the-Ganges rites, however, it becomes apparent that this ritual element accomplishes the broader goal of transferring power (śakti) from a highly charged place or ritual implement to another, potentially powerful location or object. As we shall see, this logic—where the literal and metaphoric significance of South Indian water sources imaged as the Ganges is that they serve as conduits for power in ceremonies that seek to charge ritual items, people, or sites with śakti—undergirds the Gangai tiraṭṭu ritual for Mangammal, Malarkodi, and Kalaiarasi. In this case, the procession’s destination is an irrigation well on the ancestral land that the family owns and has tilled for generations, and thus the water is their “own” Ganges, set in soil that has long nourished their lineage.15 When we arrive in these open fields, the women immediately build a fire in the southeast corner of the ritual area (where the kitchen should be located in the house) and boil the common pot of poṅkal, the rice-lentil porridge that will be offered to the dead as part of the proceedings. Once it has been cooked and transubstantiated as blessed food (prasādam) via the ritual, only members of the patriline (i.e., those designated as paṅkāḷi, or “sharers,” a category that functionally includes daughters-in-law) are entitled to consume it—that is, non-agnatic relatives (such as out-married daughters) and other participants (including visiting anthropologists) who attend are not offered a share. In this way, the sponsoring family performs and also consumes their jointness. This web of lineal relationships is further underscored when, in the days immediately following a successful invitation ritual, the family again prepares poṅkal. On this second occasion, the pot used is the vessel that forms the base of the karakam in which the pūvāṭaikkāri is carried to the family home and installed in the domestic shrine. The karakam is disassembled at this point, and its materials are variously used to protect the home or saved for future rituals before the pot itself is used to cook poṅkal. Again, only members of the patriline are welcome to consume and incorporate this food and, by extension, their dead, in an act that performatively binds, reconstitutes, and sustains the kin group and enables the living to quite literally embody the dead. Descendants effectively assimilate and become nourished by their deceased kin, for, as one man explained, “It is through the interventions of the dead that the family can thrive.” This formulation points to a markedly distinct way of engaging with the dead than the one privileged in brahminical Hinduism, which emphasizes conjoining the dead with the ancestors rather than the living and places the responsibility of keeping the departed satisfied on the living instead of representing the relationship as mutual, with the dead also supporting and sustaining their living kin. Although there is no question that the extended family should eat from a single, common pot of poṅkal during this invitation ritual, Gopal’s father and his four brothers engage in a lively debate with the musicians about how many ritual vessels ought to be used to incorporate the dead. They insist that in addition to the main flower-draped karakam, the drummers should also construct five smaller flower-decorated ritual pots so that each of the five sponsoring branches of the family can establish one in their own respective domestic shrine and, in effect, bring a measure of the pūvāṭaikkāris’ collective power home with them.16 Here, again, the ritual musicians disapprove of the family members’ “selfish nature” and their inability to cooperate or conduct this invitation according to established custom (paḻakkam), which dictates that only one pot be used, but they keep these muttered assessments brief because they must concentrate on constructing and decorating the individual ritual vessels that they have now been pressed into utilizing. As they adorn the karakams with colorful cloth and strings of vibrant flower blossoms, relatives heap trays with offerings—including saris and men’s clothing, bangles, small mirrors, combs, soap, nail polish and makeup items, sweets and snack foods—for their pūvāṭaikkāri. The six flower-swathed karakams are seated on mounds of uncooked rice, and poṅkal along with other cooked food offerings are arranged on banana leaves before them (see figure 7). Figure 7. Open in new tabDownload slide The beautifully adorned flower-pots: the main karakam in the center, flanked by smaller ritual vessels, one for each of the five sponsoring branches of the family to install in their respective domestic shrine. Figure 7. Open in new tabDownload slide The beautifully adorned flower-pots: the main karakam in the center, flanked by smaller ritual vessels, one for each of the five sponsoring branches of the family to install in their respective domestic shrine. The last steps before the drumming and musical invocations can begin focus on the well from which the dead will be called: members of the sponsoring family must bathe in its waters and a decorated lemon tied with string is ritually worshiped before being dropped into its depths (see figure 8). Figure 8. Open in new tabDownload slide A spool of string attached to a decorated lemon serves as the “thread ladder” (nūl ēṇi) that the dead will climb up from the water source to take up residence in ritual vessels (karakams) and, eventually, be carried back to the family home. Figure 8. Open in new tabDownload slide A spool of string attached to a decorated lemon serves as the “thread ladder” (nūl ēṇi) that the dead will climb up from the water source to take up residence in ritual vessels (karakams) and, eventually, be carried back to the family home. The spool of string attached to the lemon is unfurled and looped around each of the karakams; it is this “thread ladder” (nūl ēṇi) that the dead will climb up from the water source so that they may take up residence in these individual containers. This string ladder serves as the vital pathway and means of conveyance for the pūvāṭaikkāri and so it must be guarded as the ritual progresses, for if it is accidentally severed, so, too, will be the sponsoring family’s chances for achieving ritual conjunction with their desired dead. Bringing the Dead Home as Deities In the ensuing day of drumming and dancing, all three pūvāṭaikkāris participate and speak, along with an array of deities and other departed family members. When Kalaiarasi manifests again on her husband’s second wife, relatives catch her up on family news and introduce her to two of her grandchildren, whom the drummers use as leverage in their negotiations: “Don’t you want to come home, so these small ones can worship you as their family goddess? Shouldn’t you safeguard your lineage?” they ask. Although she remains aloof and declines to answer their questions for several hours, eventually Kalaiarasi lays down her terms: she extracts a promise of more attentive future treatment, and demands that the tongue of her human host be pierced with a small silver trident (alaku) in exchange for the permanent ability to speak Kalaiarasi’s “grace,” or prophecy (aruḷ vākku) (see figure 9). Figure 9. Open in new tabDownload slide These three small silver tridents (alaku) will be used to pierce the tongues of the three pūvāṭaikkāri’s human hosts in exchange for the permanent ability to speak their “grace” or prophecy (aruḷ vākku). Figure 9. Open in new tabDownload slide These three small silver tridents (alaku) will be used to pierce the tongues of the three pūvāṭaikkāri’s human hosts in exchange for the permanent ability to speak their “grace” or prophecy (aruḷ vākku). Then she plays her final card: Kalaiarasi declares that she will only agree to be installed as a protective household deity in the family’s existing domestic shrine, wherein Kalaiarasi and the other two pūvāṭaikkāris, with whom she claims she has formed a coalition, wish to dwell. This plot twist means that the family will have to leave the current pūjā room of the humble joint family dwelling standing when they demolish the rest of the house in order to make way for Gopal’s brothers to build their homes. With this proclamation, Kalaiarasi effectively manipulates her living kin and outmaneuvers Gopal in his bid for ascendancy by refusing to relocate to his new home. By insisting that the family leave the middle room of the existing home intact for the three pūvāṭaikkāris to reside in, she effectively allies herself with the family’s second son, whose house will be constructed on that plot and which will now have the original patrilineal pūjā room incorporated into it. The weary drummers see their opening and pounce: they sing jubilant call-and-response lyrics assuring Kalaiarasi that her conditions will be met, thus leaving the family no choice but to comply. The ceremony hurtles toward its conclusion: the thread ladders are cut, effectively fixing the dead in the six pots, possessed women quickly don ornaments and clothing offered to the various dead who inhabit their bodies, and, in various states of possession, pick up the now-heavy flower-swathed ritual vessels to process home. There is a great deal of dancing along the way, and, at long last, we all file in behind the women who carry the pots into the original home’s compound, where the women’s tongues are ritually pierced amid drumming and ululation. When the flame of the lamp from the Ganges-collecting rite is fused with the one in the pativiḷakku that has been tended since the previous evening, members of the five sponsoring families chant, “Protect us! Support us! You are our family deity!” and the drums reach their crescendo. The ritual is a success: the dead have come back home to protect and ensure the growth and continuity of the family. ACCOUNTING FOR THE DEAD AMONG THE LIVING Although the ritual relationships with the dead that I have presented here—both of the annual and the occasional types—are maintained by members of many Tamil castes, the presence of the dead among the living in Tamil Nadu has remained virtually invisible.17 Indeed, there are concentric circles of invisibility at work here: at the local level in Chennai and its surrounds, I found that these rituals are wholly unknown to most local people who do not themselves perform them. I interviewed several daughters-in-law who, despite the fact that they married within their caste, only learned about pūvāṭaikkāri pūjās in their affinal homes, and my Brahmin friends and acquaintances had literally no exposure to or awareness of these rites.18 Even more arresting is the fact that local temple-goers would routinely ask me what kind of rite was underway when they passed by artfully arranged piles of offerings in front of the well at the goddess temple where I conducted much of my fieldwork on annual pūvāṭaikkāri pūjās, for they did not recognize the ritual elements and iconographic vocabulary that marked these as ritual transactions with the dead. Moving farther out, these rituals have largely escaped scholarly notice (save Nabokov’s careful work, discussed further below). It is worth reflecting on why, exactly, ceremonies like the one to invite Malarkodi, Mangammal, and Kalaiarasi back into the family have attracted so little attention from anthropologists and religious studies scholars working in the region, particularly since Tamil scholar George L. Hart suggests that in South India “there is evidence that the belief in possession through the spirits of the dead is older than the belief in possession by gods” (1980, 118; see also Elmore [1913] 1995, 153). Reasons related to pollution and privacy partially explain this oversight, since death and its attendant rituals are generally regarded as inauspicious and polluting in Hindu traditions and thus not open to outsiders. Further, in a cultural context where hospitality is highly valued, the fasting and dietary restrictions associated with death-related rituals confound families’ impulse to generously feed and host a guest. At some points in my fieldwork, I had difficulty gaining access to these kin-only affairs, where much is at stake for sponsoring families and deep-rooted quarrels often reemerge amid tense exchanges characterized by grief, recrimination, and regret. There are, moreover, neither established temples for the dead nor do the deceased have permanent forms—although they are incorporated into decorated ceremonial pots during the invitation ritual, these tangible representations are taken apart shortly thereafter, meaning that in this extraordinarily image-rich tradition, we are confronted with a case where there is no fixed physical form or icon (mūrti) to serve as the focus for the dead’s worship.19 There are other reasons these rituals have gone almost entirely unnoticed, despite the fact that Hindu ritual transactions with the dead are old—the earliest reference to ancestor worship can be found in Ṛg Veda 10.16—and widespread. Let us first consider the thematic issues that have led to a limited scholarly focus on certain types of death and categories of deceased persons, thus obscuring our awareness of other, diverse, ritual engagements with the dead. Stuart Blackburn correctly observes that “the study of Hinduism has overlooked the importance of these cults of the dead, so what we know is largely a Hinduism of birth stories and birth deities” (1988, 216), and, indeed, no ethnographic study exists that focuses on these practices in South India. There is certainly important related scholarship about engagements with the dead elsewhere in India, including Jonathan Parry’s (1994) examination of the Hindu death industry in Banaras and Piers Vitebsky’s (1993; 2017) fascinating work on the emotional dialogues in which a non-Hindu tribal community in eastern India called the Sora engages, via shamans, with their dead. Looking to neighboring Andhra Pradesh, David M. Knipe (2003) has carefully explicated an auspicious, non-textual ritual performed across castes to transform a woman who predeceases her husband into the goddess Gauri and send her off to Gauri’s abode, never to return. Further, the phenomenon of human souls, spirits of the dead, and ancestors crossing boundaries to possess the living is not limited to Hindu traditions, but can also be observed in Indian Islam, Christianity, and Jainism (e.g., Bellamy 2011; Bloomer 2018; and Vallely 2002). Colonial proto-ethnographers and later scholarly literature emphasize that those who suffer violent, heroic, or premature ends are often deified in death; this is particularly true of women who die in pregnancy or childbirth, or via suicide (e.g., Blackburn 1985; Coccari 1989; Elmore [1913] 1995; Foulston 2002; Harlan 2003; Knipe 1989; Masilamani-Meyer 2005; and Whitehead [1921] 1999). Satīs (women who perish atop their husband’s funeral pyre) and other women whose divine status derives from their unassailable wifely devotion and chastity have also been discussed by scholars (e.g., Courtright 1995; Harlan 1992; Hawley 1994; Knipe 2003; Mani 1998; Narayanan 1985).20 Sree Padma (2013), for example, traces stories and processes related to the deification of various types of women in Andhra Pradesh, especially those who perish prematurely or violently or via self-immolation. And, writing about Tamil Nadu, Louis Dumont briefly sketches types of women who may be posthumously deified and argues that “the prototype of the deified deceased woman is without any ambiguity the kaṉṉi, maiden or virgin” ([1957] 1986, 439). The academic literature is noticeably gendered: where studies with these foci highlight women as ritual actors, the attention is most often on how the exceptional circumstance of their death or their marital status or sexuality renders them eligible for apotheosis. Dumont goes on to assert that there are two categories of spirits—gods, who receive regular worship; and demons (pēy-pisāsu), who wander because they are not attached to a temple—and that the dead torment their survivors only for as long as it takes to offer them a cult and transform them into protectors via it ([1957] 1986, 449). But the focus here is on restless dead who must be pacified and placed into the known category of ancestors, not desired dead like pūvāṭaikkāris whose surviving kin engage and invite them home in elaborate rituals. This emphasis is also evident in William Sax’s (2009) ethnography, which describes ceremonies involving ghost possession and exorcism to transform dangerous spirits into beneficent ancestors among Harijans (i.e., Dalits) in the Central Himalayas. A rare example of ritually effected conjunction between the living and the dead is found in Ann Grodzins Gold’s now-classic Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims, which discusses two types of lingering dead who may be identified, appeased, and welcomed back into the family home in Rajasthan, albeit not for a permanent stay (1988, 61–79). The first, unmarried deceased relatives called pattar, favor taking up residence in metal pendants worn on the neck of natal kin. The second are undeparted married persons called jhūjhār, who typically prefer carved stone icons in the home or field (Gold 1988, 64; also see Harlan 2003, 154–55). Both types linger because at death their “desire” remained in the house. They announce their presence through afflictions and disturbances and ensure that identifying and satisfying them is a fraught process (Gold 1988, 66–68). Nonetheless, once they are appeased, they become protective, beneficent household deities whom families strive to keep content and honor with songs (Gold 1988, 69–77). Gold notes that although there are exceptions, unmarried girls and married women do not habitually become pattar or jhūjhār (1988, 67). Significantly, however, given that Kalaiarasi inhabited the body of her husband’s new wife in the pūvāṭaikkāri invitation under consideration here, Gold reports that young wives whose widower remarries quickly are particularly prone to becoming household deities and are worn on the neck of their successor in pendant form and are worshiped (1988, 67–68). Although the disturbing, desirous dead that Gold describes differ in important respects from the much-desired deceased relatives who feature in our ritual example, her emphasis on conjunction between the living and the dead renders this set of practices a particularly productive ethnographic example. LIVING WITH THE DEAD: REASSESSING INHERITED ASSUMPTIONS AND FRAMEWORKS We turn now to a consideration of the ways that predominating scholarly lenses for understanding the dead in Hindu traditions have artificially narrowed our view, limiting our capacity to apprehend entities that do not neatly fit into these frameworks and occluding our ability to appreciate the full array of ritual engagements with the deceased. In 1985, Blackburn observed that “to date, discussions of the problem of death have been based almost exclusively on classical traditions, the mythological, and philosophical texts,” but submitted that there was now enough published research on “folk Hinduism” and tribal traditions to “broaden the basis for discussion” (1985, 256). On the whole, however, the scholarly literature remains heavily weighted toward discussions of Sanskrit texts and brahminic rituals, including funerary rites culminating in cremation, post-death ceremonies to gradually merge the deceased with the forefathers, and ongoing ritual obligations to the ancestors (e.g., Filippi 1996; Knipe 1977, 2019; Nicholas 1982; and Sayers 2013). These elite textual discussions and ritual prescriptions themselves reflect gender hierarchies: men are typically the subjects, intended audience, ritual agents, and beneficiaries of these rites. In addition to centering men and incorporating the dead into the communion of ancestors through successive ritual action, these discussions emphasize the normative model whereby the spirit, well-fed and satisfied, is sent away from this world and its family on a journey toward reincarnation and eventual liberation. These paradigms and ideals are repeated and reinscribed in source after source: Arvind Sharma, for example, writes, “mokṣa is the quintessential concept of Hinduism” (2000, 113). Knipe argues that “with few exceptions, the Hindu rites at the time of death and the procedures for cremation (antyeṣṭi) are fairly uniform throughout the regions of India” (1977, 111). And, in a recently published chapter on Hinduism in the encyclopedic The Routledge Companion to Death and Dying, T. S. Rukmani acknowledges the diversity of rituals, ceremonies, and beliefs in the afterlife but then immediately lists what she calls “core observances” (including cremation, collecting and immersing bones and ashes, observing pollution, giving gifts, purification and celebration marking the end of pollution, and remembering the dead on anniversaries) before concluding, “The notion of an afterlife determined by the karma that one has done in previous life/lives is also uniformly believed in” (2018, 118). These are but a few examples of the dominance of high-caste and textual representations as well as the homogenizing language to which we have grown wholly accustomed and tacitly accepted in representations of fundamental aspects of Hindu traditions. Because we scholars have largely favored and followed these elite scripts—which describe the presence of the dead as polluting; proscribe overt expressions of grief that may taint the corpse or draw the dead back into the world and thus prevent it from attaining rebirth or release; and prescribe elaborate ruses to mislead the dead and thwart its attempt to find its way back home—it was at first difficult for me to recognize how profoundly different the views of my research participants were on these important matters. As I noted above, only a handful of them cremate their dead, very few profess any belief in the so-called Hindu doctrine of rebirth, and even fewer evidence awareness of or investment in the supposed ideal of liberation (see also Gold 1988; Good 1991; Hart 1980). The uncertainty that my questions on these topics elicited seems to confirm what Dumont reported in his classic study of the Piramalai Kaḷḷars; he remarks, “Beliefs about what is to become of the dead person, or about the beyond, are in fact absent. Dead people can manifest themselves under certain conditions; that is all that is known” ([1957] 1986, 278). That the brahminical model emphasizes separation between the living and the dead is unequivocal—consider the address to the burning corpse in Āśvalāyana Gṛhyasūtra, “Go on, go on, by thy ancient paths,” and the mantra uttered as surviving kin depart the cremation ground without looking back, “The living ones are separated from the dead.”21 Juxtapose these with the drummers’ standard exhortation to the pūvāṭaikkāri: “Come home, come to the middle of our house and stay there forever!” To put it even more plainly, whereas the elite tradition seeks to gradually but definitively evict the dead, this vernacular tradition implores them to make themselves very much at home. Isabelle Nabokov’s rich ethnography of Tamil rituals analyzes rites of conjunction with the dead, including the investiture ritual for pūvāṭaikkāris, and points to important disjunctures from prevailing brahminical models (2000; see also Clark-Decès 2007). In her groundbreaking study, now nearly twenty years old, she identifies the spirits of the dead as “the elemental figures of South Indian pantheons” (Nabokov 2000, 16). Nabokov’s work has served as an important conversation partner and counterpoint to my own, particularly since our research contexts differ significantly, as do the motivations for, timing and physical locations of, and the social and economic realities underlying the rituals we recorded. The performance contexts for the invitation rituals Nabokov describes, which were held in rural agricultural fields privately owned by kin groups, were fortunate life-cycle transitions such as marriage and ear-piercing rites. By contrast, the ceremonies that I participated in were largely in responses to crises, family difficulties, or other troubling events and, although they were roughly evenly divided between urban locations and smaller town/village ones, significant portions of each two-day rite were performed in domestic spaces, and many included segments undertaken in temples. In short, they were instantiated in contexts and shaped by currents—including flows such as migration, urbanization, and globalization; changing devotional sentiments and concerns about sorcery; the rise of free market capitalism in India, conspicuous consumption, and display; and shifting gender expectations as well as changes in social patterns and kinship relationships—that Nabokov’s fieldwork from nearly thirty years ago cannot reflect. Finally, although my point of access to many of the rituals I witnessed is the troupe of musicians with whom I have cultivated a long-term relationship, very few of my ritual examples are in the context of stand-alone meetings; I remain connected to and in contact with the majority of the sponsoring families, in some cases in associations of more than a decade. This long-term engagement and commitment to deep relationships cultivated in one region over the course of many years of fieldwork and study are, as I describe above, pillars of my approach to sustained, ethical, feminist ethnographic research and are vital to understanding the textures of vernacular Hinduism more broadly as well as these rituals in particular. Outside of Nabokov’s work, pūvāṭaikkāris have received explicit mention only in a small number of studies, amounting to a few scattered references here and perhaps a footnote there (see Moffatt 1979; Ram 2013; Trawick 1986; Trawick 1990). Helpfully, their worship does occasionally surface in vernacular folktale collections, such as the Nāṭṭuppuṟa Katai Kaḷañciyam (Irāmanātaṉ 2004), and pūvāṭaikkāris are also discussed in a few paragraphs of the Tamil-language place-history of the famous healing temple of the goddess Angalaparameshwari at Mel Malaiyanur (Cantiracēkar n.d.). Given this paucity of sources, however, it was only through painstaking and extended ethnographic fieldwork, relying on the dozens of rituals I documented and hundreds of interviews I conducted and translated on this topic beginning in 2005, that I came to understand the contours and implications of these complex practices and worldviews. KINSHIP TIES AND RITUAL RELATIONSHIPS BEYOND THE GRAVE In addition to the ways in which focusing on vernacular rituals and practices opens up new ways of thinking about death and the afterlife in Hindu traditions, these ceremonies also prompt us to expand our ways of conceptualizing post-mortem kinship ties and the reciprocal, abiding nature of relationships between the living and the dead. Kinship responsibilities and ritual obligations clearly extend beyond the grave in these contexts, and my interviews revealed that investiture rituals are often motivated by the desire to draw the dead into the concerns of the living in ways that are indexed to kinship roles. For example, departed parents are invited to assist in arranging their children’s weddings, asked to oversee the selection of the bride or groom, and consulted for advice about dowry and other expenditures. In the months following an invitation ritual for a dead man named Saravannan that I recorded in Chennai in 2016, for instance, his wife would confer with her late husband through their son, who had been designated his human host and who would light a camphor flame at home to summon his father for brief periods when situations demanded it. On one such occasion, they invited Saravannan to attend his granddaughter’s first birthday celebration and he agreed. On the day of the party, he was checked off on the guest list as “present,” and the birthday girl appears along with Saravannan’s widow in the professional photo album holding a photograph of him. Speaking of her deceased husband, his wife explained, “Before making an important decision I can consult him now. Like, for example, if I am going to lend money to someone or take money from someone, I can get his permission (uttaravu) beforehand. I can get his instructions and then decide how to proceed.” It is through these rites of unification and incorporation that the lineage (or paṅkāḷi—literally, “sharers,” descendants from a common ancestor—but here also including in-married women) is made whole again and its identity ritually performed. Although they also reveal social tensions and highlight the often frayed nature of familial relationships, such performances are intended to repair the kin network and heal what Antonius C. G. M. Robben calls the “laceration of the social body” (2004, 13) that death inflicts, thus restoring ritual and social responsibilities to their rightful executors so that the deceased may effectively facilitate the needs of living kin. These restorations and reconstitutions come at a real cost for the living, though, both in terms of the substantial expenses associated with invitation rituals (at least $300 for a typical ritual and nearly double that for the one I describe here) and insofar as these ceremonies are ripe for the airing of old grievances and discussion of interpersonal conflicts. It is through tense and emotional dialogues like the one with Kalaiarasi that key details about precisely what household difficulties and needs inspire these elaborate and costly ritual undertakings emerge, offering us a glimpse into the motivations and aspirations of the sponsoring families. My extended fieldwork on pūvāṭaikkāri rituals, and this investiture in particular, confirms Ravina Aggarwal’s observation about funeral feasts in Ladakh; she writes that they “are not undertaken solely for the benefit of the dead. They are closely linked with the vicissitudes of daily life, in which kinship and residential alliances are reaffirmed and economic exchange attested to in the habit of the living” (2001, 559). The catalysts for these rituals and the behavior of participants within them are complex, particularly because the living obfuscate and dissimulate, the drummers suppress and trick, and the dead criticize and manipulate. In this class of invitation rituals, then, the struggles and desires of the living are hardly disguised, and it is unambiguous that although the dead typically arrive disgruntled, complaining of neglect, the ritual process aims to satisfy their lingering desires and convince them to resolve the hardships and facilitate the wishes of their living kin (see also Sax 2009, 180; 183–84 on dissatisfied dead). Jealousies, family conflicts, and grievances, both long-suppressed and current and featuring both the living and the dead, often suffuse these dialogues, and the possessing dead are called on as unassailable and powerful adjudicators of these disputes. However, although my fieldwork confirms Sax’s observation that the problems, illnesses, and misfortunes revealed in Garhwali oracular consultations animate what he calls “a world full of affliction and pain” (Sax 2009, 12), in the ritual context he focuses on ghosts must be exorcized whereas in the ones I study the goal is to reassimilate longed-for deceased relatives into the family. Therefore, although I agree with Sax that death disrupts family unity as a fundamental social and ritual principle (2009, 195), I would argue that what is therapeutic about the ceremonies I observe and analyze is not that they successfully divide the dead from the living but rather that they reunite them, thereby effectively reintegrating the family, reconstituting the lineage, and transforming dead kin into household deities. This material from vernacular Hinduism challenges us to reconsider, reconceptualize, and ultimately diversify the categories and frameworks that are currently associated with death and what follows it as well as relationships between the living and dead in Hindu traditions. In addition to pushing us to reassess inherited assumptions and develop models that move beyond the pervasive, brahminical cremation-reincarnation-liberation paradigm, it inspires us to ask when and in what contexts conjunction with the dead is privileged over separation, who cremates and who buries their dead and why, and what Hindus of varied backgrounds imagine happens after death. Indeed, the vibrant ritual traditions associated with pūvāṭaikkāris in Tamil Nadu open up new ways of thinking about death and the afterlife, prompting us to expand our conceptualizations of post-mortem kinship ties and allow for reciprocal, abiding relationships between the living and the dead. In particular, the ritual to invite Malarkodi, Mangammal, and Kalaiarasi back into the world encourages us to take fuller account of how the dead persist among the living in some Tamil communities, entangled in familial and other social relationships and responsible for the well-being and growth of those with whom they remain in literal and metaphorical dialogue. As in the case of Gopal’s family’s pūvāṭaikkāri pūjā, it is frequently the desires and needs of the living that catalyze these invitation rituals and which the dead are shamelessly called upon to facilitate and fulfill. It was primarily for this reason that many of my research participants argued that their dead need not—indeed, should not—depart from their families. Instead, living relatives periodically arrange expensive and elaborate invitation and installation rituals to propitiate the dead, induce them to possess and speak through the living, and persuade them to take up residence in the family’s domestic shrine as permanent, protective deities so that they can sustain the family and serve as an ongoing refuge and support. Living kin continue to leverage these family gods’ wisdom through “graced speech,” spoken through human mediums, to make effective decisions about life’s most important matters: marriage partners, financial investments, progeny, and treatment for illness. Extended families come together to form ritual coalitions on occasions like the ceremony to bring these three auspicious wives back into the family to access their collective power, exploit it for familial prosperity and flourishing, and performatively recreate their kin network. Finally, although the attempted displacement and relocation of this family’s dead must be read against the backdrop of unrelenting urbanization, conspicuous consumption, and the culture of aspiration that characterizes contemporary Tamil society, conversations with Selvam and the other drummers helped me to appreciate the broad range of conditions, both “new” and “old,” where the dead are needed to nourish and support their living kin. These occasional, dramatic invitation rites, like the one honoring Malarkodi, Mangammal, and Kalaiarasi we have considered here, stand within the broader repertoire of Tamil non-Brahmin ritual relationships with the dead and powerfully demonstrate the ways in which, on an everyday basis, many families continue to live with and among their deceased kin. This article is based on a keynote address I delivered at the “Deities, Spirits and Demons in Vernacular Beliefs and Rituals in Asia” conference in 2017 at the University of Tartu in Estonia. I am indebted to Ülo Valk for the invitation and to audience members and participants for their questions. I presented related material at the Conference on the Study of Religions of India at the University of California, Davis, in 2018 as well as at the University of Madras, India (at the kind invitation of James Ponniah), and the University of Oslo, Norway (generously hosted by Kathinka Frøystad), in 2019. My thanks are also due to Emilia Bachrach, Jennifer Ortegren, Matthew Sayers, and Luke Whitmore for offering rich feedback on an earlier draft of this article, and to Anya Fredsell, Vaishnavi Ramanathan, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. As always, I am grateful to Brian Pennington for many years of patient discussion, vigorous encouragement, and generous reading. Footnotes 1 I treat the Hindu goddess festivals staged in the Tamil month of Āṭi (mid-July to mid-August) extensively elsewhere (Allocco 2009a, 269–469). I first recorded rituals to worship/invite dead relatives (pūvāṭaikkāri) back into the world during fourteen months of fieldwork in Chennai spanning 2005–2006 (see Allocco 2009a, 158–59, 275 n78, and 297). All names used for my research participants are pseudonyms. 2 I use “vernacular Hinduism” to point to the distinction between religion as performed (in particular contexts and by particular people) and religion as prescribed. In my usage, this term orients our attention toward the ways that Hindu traditions are experienced, lived, and practiced rather than unduly privileging institutional and textually sanctioned religion. This orientation toward vernacular, lived Hinduism allows us to retrain our gaze on specific, emplaced rituals and narratives that reveal levels of popular practice and experience that have too frequently been overlooked in the study of religion. Here I follow Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, who argues that on the ground, vernacular traditions are lived locally and “are shaped and voiced by individuals in specific contexts;” she notes that to study vernacular traditions “is to identify sites of potential fluidity, flexibility, and innovation in a religious tradition” (2006, 2). I am also interested in capturing the diversity that Leonard Norman Primiano emphasizes when he writes, “understanding religion as ‘vernacular religion’ does justice to the variety of manifestations and perspectives found within past and present human religiosity” (1995, 42). 3 The research and fieldwork for my “Domesticating the Dead: Invitation and Installation Rituals in Tamil South India” project was carried out in South India in 2015 and 2016 with a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship, an American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Fellowship, funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Sabbatical Award with a Faculty Research and Development Grant from Elon University. Funding from Elon University, its Center for Research on Global Engagement, and its Lumen Prize made short-term trips to South India for follow-up fieldwork on pūvāṭaikkāri rituals possible in both 2018 and 2019. I am extremely grateful to each of these institutions for their financial and other critical forms of support and to my research participants for their hospitality, patience, and insight. Although field research stretching back as far as 2005 forms the foundation for this article, here I draw primarily on interviews and fieldwork conducted in Chennai and surrounding districts of Tamil Nadu between 2015 and 2016. All conversations quoted and vernacular sources referenced herein were translated by me from Tamil into English. Underlining represents a word or phrase that was spoken in English in an exchange that was otherwise in Tamil. All of the photographs that appear here were taken by and are held by the author, Amy L. Allocco. 4 Many of my participants reported that a family’s first-born must be cremated because sorcerers (mantiravātis) are keen to make use of their uniquely powerful bones (especially the skull) in black magic, and so the only way to prevent them from being exhumed and utilized in these ways is to cremate their remains. Some participants argued that cremation renders the dead ineligible to return as family gods (i.e., to be invited and installed as a pūvāṭaikkāri). 5 For further discussion of feminist ethnography, reflexivity, and the production of knowledge, see Allocco 2020a. On the deeply intersubjective and relational nature of ethnographic fieldwork, see Allocco 2020b. 6 The Tamil Lexicon (whose transliteration schema I employ in all instances except where the Sanskrit rendering would be more familiar to readers) defines pūvāṭaikkāri as “a woman worshipped as a family goddess on her death during the lifetime of her husband” (Tamil Lexicon [1924–36] 1982, 5: 2851). The word may be parsed as pū (“flower”) + āṭai (“dress”) + kāri (“feminine person”) to mean “she who wears a flower dress” or, more simply, “the woman wearing flowers.” In my fieldwork experience, these women may be worshiped as family goddesses long after their husbands’ demise. 7 This ritual formed the basis of my first conference paper about pūvāṭaikkāri, “‘With Drums We Call Him and with Our Tears We Keep Him’: Transforming Restless Spirits into Household Deities,” (Allocco 2009b) which I presented at the 2009 American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Montréal, Québec. I am grateful to Fred Smith for his response as well as to panel organizers and collaborators Marla Segol, Shana Sippy, Greg Spinner, and Luke Whitmore for their engagement with the ideas that have animated this project from the very beginning. 8 These are not entirely overlapping classes of deities. My participants rarely included their pūvāṭaikkāri in the same category as kula teyvam (“family deities”), but rather almost exclusively designated them as vīṭṭu teyvam or vīṭṭu cāmi (“household deities”). The category of household deities is typified by dead women in the family (whether women who lived long and died good deaths or unmarried girls who died early), who are universally regarded as protective and are entitled to be worshiped first during life-cycle rites and in domestic pūjās. See Mosse for a discussion of vīṭṭu cāmis among Catholics in Tamil Nadu (Mosse 2012, 79) and Moffatt for a distinction between the household god (vīṭṭu teyvam) and the lineage god (kula teyvam) within the schema of deities worshiped by Tamil villagers during his fieldwork in the early 1970s (Moffatt 1979, 221). Moffatt unambiguously identifies “puuvaaDai” (the spirit of a deceased woman in the family who died in an auspicious married state), venerated by every household in his mixed-caste village, among the household deities (1979, 226–29). 9 Commenting on the fact that the term pūvāṭaikkāri is not limited to women, Nabokov writes that it “can apparently designate any and all close relatives who had undergone this investiture” (2000, 126). My fieldwork does not bear out her contention that investiture is crucial for a dead person to be understood as a pūvāṭaikkāri. 10 The category of women who are not eligible to return home includes, minimally, a woman’s own mother (who, via the rules of virilocal marriage, properly belongs in her daughter-in-law’s home rather than her daughter’s affinal home). There is vigorous disagreement about whether other types of dead—such as unmarried girls, outmarried daughters, and those who die in accidents and via suicide—may or may not be invited home. The thinking about unmarried girls is that as presumably “pure” virgins they ought not be brought back into homes that have pollution associated with sexual activity, and also that they were only “on loan” to their birth family and would have married into another family had they lived and therefore should not reside in their parents’ home permanently. (It is because of their “homeless” status that temporary sugarcane “houses” [pantal] are often constructed for kaṉṉis during their annual remembrance rites.) A similar logic is extended to outmarried daughters, who had already taken up their fated places in their in-laws’ homes and should appropriately be worshiped as family deities only in their marital residences. Those whose deaths are violent or untimely are also frequently regarded as unsuitable for reincorporation into the family, given that they may harbor resentments or unfulfilled desires and thus be poised to make trouble. I have, however, participated in rituals that contravene every single one of these norms. Strikingly, many of the participants were self-reflexive about their choice to deviate from standard practices, citing pressing needs for the ritual power accessible via the deified dead, the need to act ritually in the face of overwhelming and persistent grief, or the absence of a brother/sister-in-law to invite a dead mother home. Most poignant in my experience was the ritual sponsored in 2019 by the parents of a young woman who had committed suicide in her marital home: confronted with the painful knowledge that those with the rights to and responsibility of worshiping their loved one had absolutely no intention of doing so, the girl’s parents invited her back into their house and committed themselves to her worship. 11 Important continuities exist between these invitation rituals for the dead and exorcism rituals to ritually remove potentially malevolent entities, such as pēys. The same troupes of ritual musicians preside over these two classes of rituals, which draw on a common repertoire of discursive and bodily strategies to induce a possessing spirit to identify itself. Although the dead may initially resist confirming their identity, they are rarely as obstinate as pēys, who must also respond to this crucial question for the ritual to progress. For one example of a ritual removal (kaḻippu) of a pēy that hinges on its identification, see Allocco 2009a, 206–17. 12 Isabelle (Nabokov) Clark-Decès’s unexpected death in India in June 2017 represents a great loss for the anthropology of South Asia. I am grateful to have spent a morning with her in Bangalore in March 2016 in the midst of my fieldwork for this project and to have been able to test several of my preliminary findings and elicit the fuller context for some of her claims in a wide-ranging conversation that confirmed my instincts about this material. 13 As is the case with many caste designations, it is difficult to characterize and “rank” or socially locate the Yādava Piḷḷai. Adopted in a bid to raise its standing, the Piḷḷai title is a relatively recent addition for this community, which falls in the government’s “Other Backward Classes” category. Although some Yādavas in Tamil Nadu today remain in their traditional shepherding occupation and may be quite poor, those who own land enjoy higher status because of their economic class and, in some cases, levels of educational achievement. The Yādava Piḷḷai family who sponsored this ritual was landed and established and seemed well on its way to becoming middle-class in terms of wealth. 14 I have documented several different types of pativiḷakku; not all feature an anthropomorphic image of the kula teyvam, as the ones produced by Subramani’s troupe typically do, and none match the exceptional beauty of and artistry evident in Selvam’s work. I devote significant attention to the decoration practices (alaṅkāram) of this troupe in my in-progress monograph. 15 See E. Valentine Daniel’s discussion of how the qualities and characteristics of the Tamil territorial unit (ūr) directly affect residents (1984). In theorizing the ūr-person relationship, Daniel references “Tamil beliefs that that the soil substance is ultimately mixed with the bodily substance of the ūr’s inhabitants” (1984, 79). My fieldwork reveals that the ability to stage these pūjās in such an ideal location—at one’s own water source and on one’s own land—is increasingly complicated by migration away from native villages, urbanization, water scarcity, property divisions, and living in rented dwellings. 16 Louis Dumont notes that new temples can be established or duplicated when a lineage divides by carrying a “handful of earth” (piḍimaṇ) to the new site ([1957] 1986, 360). 17 The preponderance of invitation rituals that I participated in and recorded were performed by people who identify as Vaṉṉiyar, Kavuṇṭar, and Nayakar, but I also documented examples from a wide range of other castes, including Muṭaliyārs, Tēvars, and Ādi Drāvidas/“Scheduled Castes.” The ritual musicians routinely declare that “all castes besides Brahmins” sponsor these pūjās. 18 In this regard, I became something of a “party trick” among some of my upper-caste or well-educated friends who, in social settings, would ask me to describe my project for their incredulous friends. Upon hearing the basic outline of my study, standard responses at such cosmopolitan gatherings included expressions of surprise that such observances take place in the modern age, especially in the capital city, marveling at the things the elite do not know about their own neighbors, and appreciation of the diversity of Indian religious and social life. By contrast, one of my Brahmin teachers outright condemned the practices of pressing dead relatives to consult with the living as “torturing” the deceased. He said, “Why should I drag them back here to undergo all sorts of miseries? Shouldn’t I want them to be liberated? Nowadays it is chaos!” 19 Although the dead who are worshiped as pūvāṭaikkāri in these Tamil contexts have no permanent images, a piece of cloth (in some cases a sari but more frequently a thin, towel-like piece of red cloth called a cittāṭai) may be kept and used in family pūjās at specific points in the year (see also Trawick 2017, 80). But other dead do have material reminders, such as the memorial pillars, posts, slabs, and stones (e.g., cumaitāṅki kal) that are erected in some cases (see, e.g., Settar and Sontheimer 1982). Gravestones and simpler markers are decorated and serve as sites for food and other offerings to the dead during the Mayāṉa Koḷḷai (Looting the Burial/Burning Ground) festival (see Allocco Forthcoming), which is one set of practices within the repertoire of ritual relationships and engagements with the dead in Tamil Nadu. 20 There are tantalizing links between satī and pūvāṭaikkāri present here and via the pū-āṭai-pāṉai rite, the flower dress pot ritual, which may be performed at home annually by some Tamil families or in connection with weddings (e.g., cumaṅkali pirārttaṉai) and that entails worshiping female ancestors who predeceased their husbands or died as satīs. Some of my research participants suggested that the unburnt sari/sari remnant of auspicious wives and satīs is stored in this pot, which is only accessed for an annual remembrance ritual and is off-limits and sequestered from pollution on all other days of the year. See Hanchett (1988, 196–204), Narasimhan (2011, 255), Tamil Lexicon ([1924–36] 1982, S371), and Dumont ([1957] 1986, 364 and 436). 21 The translations of these two verses (4.4.6 and 4.4.9, respectively) are drawn from Sharma ([1976] 1997, 198 and 199). Oldenberg ([1886] 1967, 243) renders these mantras thus: “Go on, go on, on the ancient paths,” and “These living ones have separated from the dead.” I am indebted to Matthew Sayers for consulting with me about these and related verses from the Āśvalāyana Gṛhyasūtra and Ṛg Veda. References Aggarwal , Ravina . 2001 . “At the Margins of Death: Ritual Space and the Politics of Location in an Indo-Himalayan Border Village.” American Ethnologist 28 ( 3 ): 549 – 73 . 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TI - Bringing the Dead Home: Hindu Invitation Rituals in Tamil South India
JF - Journal of the American Academy of Religion
DO - 10.1093/jaarel/lfab026
DA - 2021-04-23
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/bringing-the-dead-home-hindu-invitation-rituals-in-tamil-south-india-K7ihmCPOe4
SP - 103
EP - 142
VL - 89
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -