The Problem of Village Hinduism:

"Fragmentation" and Integration

URSULA M. SHARMA
UNIVERSITY OF DELHI

THE THEORETICAL PROBLEM AND THE &dquo;FRAGMENTARY&dquo; APPROACH

ANYONE WHO studies Hinduism in its village context is liable to be more imme-

diately impressed by the diversity of its local forms than by their unity. In
the first place, the pantheon of any particular village is likely to be complex
enough; the deities of the place may include gods and goddesses whose cults
are sanctioned in the Vedas themselves alongside local godlings whose names
are barely heard of outside a restricted area. The rituals used in worshipping
these deities may be just as diverse; they will include relatively informal and
private acts of worship on the part of individual devotees, whilst on other
occasions highly formalized ritual procedure defined in Sanskrit texts must be
used. Again, some rites are performed at the initiative of the individual and
are directed to ends personal to himself, whilst others are associated with fixed

dates in the calendar.

This diversity poses the following problem for the sociologist: to what extent
do these various forms of religious activity form any kind of system? How
are they related to each other in terms of either common underlying values or

consistency of purpose? If Hinduism can indeed be envisaged as a system of

social behaviour (as opposed to a mere collection of heterogeneous and unco-
ordinated ritual activities, which we associate with each other merely through
the force of tradition) then what gives coherence to this system? Hinduism
is not sustained as a whole by any ecclesiastical or sectarian organization; in
the absence of such an institutional framework, at what level ought we to seek
continuities between the diverse elements of which it is made?’ .

Hitherto, the majority of sociologists who have made field studies of Hinduism

The present article may be seen as a continuation of Dumont and Pocock’s dis-
1
cussion of the same problems in an earlier issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology
(Dumont and Pocock 1959).

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2

have attempted to deal with this bewildering variety of its local forms by trying
to arrange them in some scheme of classification, usually according to more or
less culturological criteria. The origins of this kind of method can be seen
in the pre-occupation of nineteenth century ethnographers with the distinction
between &dquo;Aryan&dquo; and &dquo;pre-Aryan&dquo; deities (e.g. Ibbetson 1883: 115-6) but
the most prominent example of this type of approach in modern sociology is
Srinivas’s formulation of the &dquo;Sanskritic&dquo; /&dquo;non-Sanskritic&dquo; dichotomy, and
also his distinction between &dquo;all-India&dquo; and &dquo;local&dquo; Hinduism. Another
leading example is Marriott’s division of Hindu cultural features into the &dquo;great
traditional&dquo; and the &dquo;little traditional&dquo;. This kind of approach is unsatis-
factory in that it tends to deal with the individual elements of Hindu religious
behaviour (cults, deities, rites) as discrete cultural traits, capable of being
considered in. isolation from each other. This is no doubt justifiable if our
interest does not go beyond the cultural origins of these features; but for the
sociologist it is hardly legitimate to treat them as independent entities, since
in doing so he is obliged to lift them from their social context of meaning and
purpose. Encumbered by frames of reference more suited to culturological
investigation than to sociology, these writers have been able to pay little atten-
tion to such questions as whether for the individual Hindu his religious acti-
vities have any kind of underlying purpose or rationale integrating their diver-
sity. Because the kind of approach which I have described emphasizes, on
the contrary, the ways in which the Hindu’s religious experience and activity
can be broken down and pigeon-holed into different categories I shall term
this the &dquo;fragmentary&dquo; method.
The most influential exponent of this kind of method has been M.N. Srinivas
In his study of the Coorgs (Srinivas 1952) he analyzes their religion in terms
of the distinction between, on the one hand, those forms which they share with
Hindus everywhere in India (all-India Hinduism) and, on the other hand,
those which they share only with members of a restricted locality (regional
and local Hinduism). There are also forms which are entirely peculiar to
themselves as a caste. Besides this formal distinction, Srinivas also distin-
guishes between those elements in Coorg religion which are Sanskritic (a term
which he never adequately or explicitly defines, but by which he seems to mean
&dquo;sanctioned in scriptural texts written in Sanskrit&dquo;) and those which are non-
Sanskritic. In practice, for Srinivas, these two dichotomies often amount to
one and the same distinction, since on the whole Sanskritic Hinduism and all-
India Hinduism are the same thing. &dquo;Sanskritic Hinduism is Hinduism
which transcends provincial barriers and is common to the whole of India,&dquo;
(Srinivas 1952: 75). The process of Sanskritization consists of the adoption
of Sanskritic cults and practices and the giving up of purely local non-Sanskritic
forms. Insofar as Sanskritic forms (being associated with the Brahmans and
the high castes) bear prestige, they may be copied by castes who wish to improve
their status in the local caste hierarchy. The Coorgs, claims Srinivas, have
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 3

Sanskritized many of their practices in recent times.2 Their participation in re-

formist movements such as the Ramakrishna Mission and the Lingayat sect are
cited as evidence of this process, also the fact that they have begun to honour
their ancestors by observing the annual shraddha ritual under the direction of
a Brahman priest where before they made offerings of meat and wine to their
ancestors through a low caste oracle. Because of his tendency to fragment
Coorg religious experience, Srinivas is unable to tell as whether this Sanskri-
tization represents any kind of qualitative change in the mode of Coorg reli-
giosity, or whether it is a purely formal change; that is, when Coorgs offer
shraddha through Brahman priests instead of meat and wine through low caste
oracles, does this mean that they have in any way altered their ideas about
the after-life or their attitudes towards their ancestors, or are these simply new
manifestations of the same religious attitudes? If their acquaintance with the
Lingayat sect has influenced the Coorgs to observe Shivratri and erect images
of Shiva’s Nandi bull, does this adoption of Sanskritized practice indicate the
development of new religious ideas or sentiments, or simply the adoption of
different cultural forms of expression? Does it mean that the Coorgs have
changed the way in which they view their pantheon, or the relative importance
which they give to its various members? Such questions cannot be answered
so long as the practices in question are considered separately from Coorg re-

ligion in general. Whilst the sociologist ought not to concentrate exclusively

on the subjective aspects of religion, Srinivas’s over-concentration
on ritual (as a self-acknowledged follower of Radcliffe-Brown) leads. him to

neglect the role of attitudes and values.3 Hence it is impossible to tell whether
or in what way the Sanskritic elements in their religion and the non-Sanskritic

elements are related to each other so far as the Coorgs themselves are concerned.
Even supposing that this kind of classification is useful, it still poses many
problems of definition. In the absence of any clear statement of what exactly
constitutes Sanskritic Hinduism, are we to use the term only to refer to rites
sanctioned in the Hindu scriptures? Srinivas seems to imply this. Yet, if by
Sanskritic deities we mean scriptural deities, how can we term Bheru (generally
identified as a form of Shiva) and Chamunda (a form of Devi) as non-Sans-
kritic ? (Mathur 1964: 74). At other times Srinivas seems to identify Sans-
kritic Hinduism with the forms of ritual and belief characteristic of the Brahmans

If,
2 asSrinivas suggests, Sanskritization should be viewed as a way of attempting social
mobility, it is difficult to see why the Coorgs should wish to raise their status, since their
position in the local caste hierarchy is already high. Indeed according to Srinivas him-
self they form the aristocracy of the region. The prestige which Sanskritic forms bear
must then surely be due to something more than just their connection with high status
groups.
3
A point also Downloaded
made byfromDumont and Pocock (Dumont and Pocock 1959: 13).
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4

as a caste.4 But if this identification is valid it is hardly consistent to refer to

sects which explicitly challenge the authority of the traditional Brahman priest-
hood as agents of Sanskritization. Mahar describes the Arya Samaj as a Sans-
kritizing influence on the group of sweepers which she studied, yet it is ques-
tionable whether such a term ought to be used of a movement which has aroused
much bitter opposition from orthodox Brahmans (Mahar 1960). If we are
to apply the term Sanskritic to sects which have rejected the religious value of
the Sanskrit language and which have encouraged the development of vernacular
religious literature-as Cohn does when he states that the Shiv Narayan sect
has assisted the Sanskritization of a group of Chamars (Cohn 1955)-then we
are quite evidently not using the term in a literal sense to mean &dquo;connected with
the Sanskrit language&dquo; (a point which Cohn does recognize himself; Cohn
1955: 60).
Srinivas himself cannot, of course, be blamed if others have used the concepts
which he originated somewhat lavishly and loosely. But the fact that he never
gives a strict definition of what the term Sanskritic is supposed to comprise
leaves it open to this kind of use, and especially when he himself seems to use
it to embrace what is actually quite a heterogeneous group of concepts. Staal
makes the same point in his critique of Srinivas’s use of the term Sanskritic
when he complains that &dquo;Sanskritization is a complex concept or class of con-
cepts&dquo; which covers a wide variety of phenomena (Staal 1963: 275). To be
useful to the sociologist, therefore, any typology of Hindu religious forms needs
a much narrower and better defined set of categories.

An approach to the problem of the diversity of local Hinduism which is very

similar to Srinivas’s in certain respects is that of McKim Marriott He dis-
tinguishes between these cultural features of a North Indian village which
belong to what he calls the great traditional culture (the culture of the wider
community of which the village is a part) and those belonging to the little tradi-
tion (the parochial culture of a particular locality) (Marriott 1955). Just as
Srinivas recognizes that there is communication between the Sanskritic and
the non-Sanskritic levels of Hinduism (for instance non-Sanskritic deities such
as village gods and goddesses may be assimilated to the Sanskritic tradition by

being identified with forms of Sanskritic deities), so Marriott recognizes that

there is continual communication between the great and little traditions. Fea-
tures of the great tradition develop local peculiarities and accretions and
likewise what were once no doubt purely local forms and customs come to
have more universal reference and eventually become assimilated to the great

To be quite fair to Srinivas, he has recognized some of the criticisms which others
4
have made of the concept of Sanskritization and has since modified some of the state-
ments he made in "Religion and Society among the Coorgs" (Srinivas 1966). He ack-
nowledges that there may be other models for Sanskritization besides the Brahmans.
But even the qualified version of his theory is still basically a fragmentary approach.
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 5

tradition. But no more than Srinivas does Marriott make it clear whether
these changes have more than formal significance. For instance, if the festival
of Charm Tying can be regarded as a great traditional version of the little
traditional festival of Saluno (which also celebrates the brother-sister relation-
ship), is the transformation one of cultural form alone or is it accompanied by a
reinterpretation of the values and beliefs which Saluno expresses? If, on the
other hand, Saluno and Charm Tying are simply different ways of expressing
the same set of beliefs and values, why does the more universalized form have
an attraction for the villagers when, after all, their own local culture already

provided them with an occasion for celebrating the brother-sister bond ? What
function, if any, does this cultural duplication fulfil? It could be that the
adoption of the priestly great traditional form of the festival signifies some-
thing about changing attitudes to caste and status rather than to the sibling
relationship. But it is impossible to come to any conclusions about what such
changes represent in terms of the meaning of the rites for their participants so
long as we consider the rites in isolation from the rest of the religious activity
of the village. Were Marriott to give us further information about, for in-
stance, local attitudes to the Brahman priesthood, any recent extensions in the
villagers’ religious knowledge or experience, which may have come about
through (for instance) education or greater opportunities for travel, the nature
of the brother-sister relationship and any changes which it may have undergone
in recent times, we might then be in a position to assess the sociological signifi-
cance of this transformation. But as long as this festival is treated only as an
isolable fragment we are permitted to view it in cultural terms alone.
Some progress towards a more integrated view of Hinduism has been made
by E.B. Harper. Describing the &dquo;supernaturals&dquo; worshipped by the members
of a South Indian village (Harper 1959) he divides these beings into three
groups. First, there are the vegetarian, Sanskritic devaru; secondly, there are
the meat-eating devate or local gods; thirdly, there are the blood-thirsty and
demonic devva. On the whole the divinities of the first group are worshipped
predominantly by the Brahmans and the high castes; on the other hand the
Brahmans never participate directly in the non-vegetarian cults of the devva.
The deities thus form a kind of hierarchy according to the status of their devo-
tees. But Harper recognizes that this kind of classification on its own does not
explain very much. He therefore further distinguishes the three classes of
deity on the basis of the different functions they fulfil in village religion. The
devaru are primarily viewed as benevolent beings and are worshipped chiefly
for the purpose of acquiring spiritual merit. The devate are generally wor-
shipped with more this-worldly ends in view; they are believed to be able to
use their powers both to
help and to harass human beings, and correct worship
can persuade them to act benevolently. The devva, on the other hand, are
purely hostile beings and never anything but malevolent in disposition. They
are worshipped only by way of appeasement in order to avert the terrible results
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 6

of their displeasure. Harper leaves unanswered the question of whether the

villager himself visualizes his pantheon as a structured hierarchy in this manner,
or how he relates these cults to each other. To this extent he still treats the
supernaturals as detachable elements in the religious tradition of the village.
But at least he presents these culturally transmitted elements-i.e., beliefs in
different kinds of deity-in the context of the purposes and activities associated
with them by the members of this tradition.
Harper avoids the fragmentary approach more successfully in a later article
(Harper 1964) in which he describes the same supernaturals as members of a
hierarchy of beings which includes both human beings as well as deities and
spirits. The &dquo;pure&dquo; (vegetarian) deities stand in a similar relationship to the
&dquo;impure&dquo; (carnivorous) deities as that of the high castes among human beings
to the low castes. The services of the members of any level in the cosmic

hierarchy are necessary to the members of the next ascending level if the latter
are to maintain their superior ritual status. Thus, just as the members of the
middle castes are only able to retain their purity if members of the lowest castes
perform tasks for them which would be polluting were they to carry them out
themselves, so the deities in turn require the services of the priestly (high)
caste among men to act as their ritual servants or &dquo;purifiers&dquo;. Since on the
whole the same kind of things are held to be polluting for the gods as are
thought to be polluting to men, the purity-pollution principle provides a theme
which does not only relate the different elements in the Hindu’s religious life
to each other, but also integrates his religious activities as a total system to the
rest of his social life.
Some years earlier, Louis Dumont had reached a very similar conclusion on
the basis of fieldwork carried out in another part of South India (Dumont
1957). Writing on the religion of the Pramalai Kallar he observes that the
deities worshipped by the Kallar are seldom considered in isolation from each
other; where they are represented in temples, it is always as members of a
pantheon. Temples contain not one deity but groups of deities-traditionally
twenty one, though sometimes fewer than twenty one can actually be identified
by name. What is important about these temple pantheons, Dumont says, is
the fact that they are invariably divided into two sections, the pure deities and
.
the impure deities. The impure (carnivorous) deities are seen as standing
in a relationship to the pure (vegetarian) deities which is subordinate and yet
complementary. The pure deities are above the impure deities but yet de-
pendent on them both practically (for the services which the impure deities
are held to perform as doorkeepers and guardians of the temples) and concep-

tually (in that purity can only be said to exist in relationship to impurity, and
hence the existence of pure beings has no meaning unless impure beings are
also held to exist). The division between the pure and the impure deities is
reflected both in their separate accommodation in the same temples and in the
different kinds of offering made to them, often also in the existence of dual

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 7

sets of cultic instruments and a dual priesthood. This dichotomy or polar

opposition between the pure and the impure at the divine level is for Dumont
not just a projection of caste values or an intrusion of secular values into the

religious sphere; the principle which activates the caste system is actually iden-
tical with that which the pantheon its structure. &dquo;La caste mele les
gives
hommes et les dieux le dieu veritable, c’est le Brahmane&dquo; (Dumont 1957:
...

419). Herein, according to Dumont, lies the unity of Hindu religious life, since it
amounts to a consistent expression of faith in the polarity of the pure and the
impure. For the worship of impure deities does not constitute a lower or
separate level or tradition of Hinduism which has yet to be assimilated to some
more universal or Sanskritic mainstream, but rather an indispensible adjunct
to the worship of the pure deities-an inseparable part of the same system of

activity.
The objection may be raised, however, that Dumont and Harper no doubt
come to these conclusions as a result of the fact that they have both done their
fieldwork in South India; it is well-known that in peninsular India the ritual
distance between different castes is maintained in a more literal and rigid manner
than in other parts of the subcontinent. Thus it is hardly a matter of surprise
if we find that South Indian Hindus carry this purity-pollution principle into
the religious sphere also. But will we find the same principle operating as an
integrating factor in the religicn of, say, Punjabi or Pahari Hindus, who observe
a much looser system of caste restrictions? Can we argue that the opposition
of the pure and the impure is a universally valid principle of Hindu religious
experience? I hope to show from some field material of my own that the
religious activities of the Hindus of a North Indian hill village can indeed be
equally successfully interpreted according to these terms.

PURITY AND POLLUTION IN PRACTICE: THE CASE OF GHANYARI

Ghanyari lies in District Kangra in the lower ranges of the Himalyan foothills,
at few miles from the border dividing Himachal Pradesh from the Punjabi5
The numerically preponderant and economically dominant caste in the village
is a group of Saraswat Brahmans. These Brahmans, however, perform no
priestly functions but are mainly engaged in agriculture, working their own
landholdings. The other inhabitants of the village are the members of five
intermediate service castes and the untouchable Chamars, whose hamlet lies
at a little distance from the main settlement area. The difference in ritual
status between the Brahmans and the artisan castes is not very conspicuous in

This fieldwork
5 was carried out between May 1966 and June 1967 and was made possible
by the award of a State Studentship from the British Government (Department of Edu-
cation and Science) and a Horniman Scholarship
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from the Royal
at NANYANG TECH UNIV LIBRARY Anthropological
on August 30, 2015
Institute.
8

everyday activities. There are no strongly marked dietary difference between

castes since, unlike Brahmans in most other parts of India, the Brahmans of
Ghanyari may eat meat. (Few in fact do, but this is for economic rather than
ritual reasons; there is no caste prohibition on their taking meat if they wish to
do so.) Brahmans take pakka food from members of all the artisan castes and will
take kaccha food and water from most of them. Only in the case of Chamars is
there a very conspicuous emphasis on ritual distance in daily dealings, since
none of the other castes in the village will take food of any kind or water from a
Chamar. Even physical contact with a Chamar is polluting and strictly avoided,
except in cases where it is quite inevitable, such as when men of different castes
travel together in a crowded bus or when men of different castes are engaged
in work alongside each other (e.g., house construction or harvesting grain).
Nevertheless, the purity-pollution principle is certainly not absent. If pollu-
tion puts less distance between man and man than in other parts of India, the
sources which are held to give rise to ritual pollution are essentially those which
other Hindus believe in. Lack of space prevents me from giving a detailed
account of how the purity-pollution principle operates in daily life, but in
general the ritual idiom is that of what Stevenson calls the &dquo;Hindu Pollution
Concept&dquo; (Stevenson 1954), even if this concept operates somewhat less rigo-
rously compared with the nicety with which it is applied elsewhere. To take
but one example, spittle is generally treated as a source of pollution. Srinivas
mentions the fact that among the Coorgs it is considered necessary for a person
to wash his hands if he has so much as touched his tongue or teeth. (Srinivas
1952: 102). Otherwise he is regarded as having fallen from his normal state
of ritual purity. In Ghanyari no one, not even the Brahmans, would consider
it necessary to wash one’s hands after casually putting a finger in one’s mouth.
But in the context of a mealtime the transmission of food to the mouth is con-
sidered to pollute the hands and a person who is in the process of eating food
ought not to touch any food or vessels other than his own until he has washed
his hands. If he does so, these vessels must be purified before they can be
used again by others by being scoured with ashes, and any food or drink they
contain should be thrown away. These Hindus therefore observe the same
principle as the Coorgs of South India but they apply it in a more narrowly
defined set of situations.
Similarly we find that, as among the Coorgs, the Hindus of Ghanyari regard
death as a strong source of pollution, especially for members of the family of
the dead person. In Coorgs this principle is applied to the extent that relatives
of the deceased must avoid even touching other people during the period of
mourning. In Ghanyari the restriction on bodily contact is observed only
on the day of death itself. During the rest of the mourning period it is only
the cooking of food and eating together which is thought to transmit pollution
to non-relatives.
In brief, the Hindus of Ghanyari as in other parts of India, regard themselves
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 9

as each having a normal ritual status which can be threatened or preserved by

certain kinds of contact. They differ from other Hindus only in the degree of
detail and rigidity with which they apply these principle of purity and pollution
in daily life, and not in the nature of the principles themselves.

THE RANGE OF RELIGIOUS ACTIVITY

How then do these rules apply to the religious sphere, and to what extent can
they be said to order the diversity of religious activities in Ghanyari? Cer-
tainly this diversity is not less apparent here than in other Indian villages for
which we have information. We find the same variety of cults, deities, festi-
vals, etc. that other field investigators have reported. However, for descrip-
tive purposes we can divide the religious activities of Ghanyari into two broad
categories. Firstly, there are private acts of devotion performed by individuals
to deities of their own choice. These acts are carried out without the aid of
priest, either in the home or at a shrine or temple. They are usually perfor-
med at the initiative of the worshipper on a particular occasion, generally either
because he has reason to suppose that the deity in question is troubling him in
some way and demands to be appeased with an offering, .or because he hopes
to seek some positive favour which he believes the deity has in his power to
grant. This kind of ritual act of devotion can however also be performed on
festival days to the deities to which the feasts are dedicated.
The second main category of religious activity consists of rituals addressed to
deities through the offices of a Brahman priest according to forms laid down in
Sanskrit texts and accompanied by the chanting of these sacred verses by the
priest. The rituals which fall into his class are mainly rites of passage but the
preliminary worship which always precedes the reading of a katha (scripture
recital) is also of this kind.
I should emphasize that this scheme is not exhaustive; there are religious
activities (such as for instance the full moon fast which women keep for their
husbands’ welfare) which cannot conveniently be placed in either of these
categories. I must also point out most emphatically that this division is not
intended to have any theoretical significance whatsoever; it is a purely ad hoc
scheme which I have introduced simply in order to reduce the complexity of the
data to proportions manageable in a paper. If I were to ascribe to it more than
this empirical significance I might justly be accused of adopting the very &dquo;frag-
mentary&dquo; approach which I have just deplored. However, this division has
the virtue of corresponding in fact roughly with some of the typologies made
by other sociologists and hence is useful for comparative purposes. The
&dquo;individual&dquo; rites are mainly addressed to what Srinivas would call non-Sans-
kritic deities and belong to what Marriott would call the little tradition. &dquo;Pries-
tly&dquo; rites are Sanskritic and great traditional, and are furthermore confined to
the upper castes since Chamars are unable to hire Brahman priests to serve
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10

them and depend on ritual specialists of their own caste to perform their life
cycle rites for them. If therefore, we can show that there is a common theme
or set of values which integrate these two type of religious activity we shall also
have demonstrated the continuity between the levels of Hinduism which other
writers have distinguished.
I therefore propose now to describe first an example of an individual ritual
of worship and then an example of priestly ritual. We shall then be in a
position to see whether they truly express different kind of religious value or
tradition.

INDIVIDUAL RITUAL AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE PANTHEON

Villagers assert that their deities numberthirty three crore, but this is more an
expression of the general belief that devatas (deities) are legion than the out-
come of any kind of divine census-taking. The number of devatas which
are actually worshipped or of whom the villagers have a detailed knowledge
is much smaller. The devatas with whom any one villager will have regular
dealings of any kind will rarely exceed about a dozen in number and he may
know about a dozen more by repute. These devatas, it is often asserted, are
but forms of the Supreme Spirit, Paramatma or Bhagvan. God, the villagers
say, is really above these manifestations of his, but in fact practically no institu-
tionalized religious activities are directed purely to God conceived as Bhagvan.
The various devatas are held to have various characteristics ranging from the
generally benevolent (such as the local saint Baba Ludru) via the mildly annoy-
ing (exemplified by the mountain spirit Baba Sindhu) to the downright dan-
gerous (such as the Chamar devata Siddh Channo). But all the devatas are
considered to be both potentially troublesome if their wishes are ignored and
potentially helpful of their goodwill is solicited in the right manner. The
correct way to avert their anger as well as to seek their active aid in a particular
project or dilemma is to make offerings to them accompanied by the performance
of certain simple ritual acts. (The orientation of these cults is therefore deci-
dedly pragmatic rather than directed to any species of other-worldly salvation.)
The making of such offerings is the most commonly observed form of religious
activity in the village and such acts are undertaken by individuals according to
their own needs and circumstances. A devata may be worshipped in order to
secure a good harvest for the next year, to seek a cure for some troublesome
disease, to obtain offspring, or in thanksgiving for some fortunate event such
as the birth of a child or the passing of an examination. Not being directed by
a priest, nor carried out with reference to any written text, the details of the

worship can be varied by the individual worshippers; he is at liberty to omit

certain acts and to include others at least to a limited extent; but the general
pattern which these rites follow is fairly constant and is exemplified adequately
in the case I shall describe.
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 11

I shall give an account of the ritual acts carried out by Ratno, a Tarkhan

woman, on the occasion of the maize harvest of 1966. She worshipped the
devata Baba Balak Nath in thanksgiving for the help which she believed him
to have given in ensuring that the harvest was a good one, and in the hope
that a pleasing offering would induce him to render the same aid. in future
years. I shall outline the ritual acts which she performed in the sequence in
which they took place.
I. Ratno rises early and takes a bath. She puts on clean clothes and begins
a fast which she keeps until the ritual of worship has been completed.
2. She replasters her kitchen floor and hearth with cowdung. On the newly
plastered hearth she prepares a quantity of karah-a kind of sweet pudding
which is to be used as the offering.
3. She takes out an image of Baba Balak Nath from the inner room where it
is generally kept. She smears a small area of the verandah floor with the same
plaster of cowdung which she used in the kitchen. She sets up the image on a
small wooden stool placed on this area. No one in the household now approa-
ches this area unless they have first removed their shoes.
4. Ratno removes her shoes before she bathes the image with fresh water.
5. She bows before the image and offers flowers and incense before it. She
takes a quantity of red powder and applies it to the &dquo;forehead&dquo; of the devata
in the form off a tika. She ties a length of the sacred red thread known as moli
round the &dquo;waist&dquo; of the image.
6. Finally she offers a small quantity of the pudding before the image, pres-
sing a little of it to the &dquo;mouth&dquo; of the devata.
7. She distributes the retaining portion of the food prepared for the offering
-which is now known as prasad, i.e. the transmitter of the grace of the devata
-amongst the members of her household and to a few close neighbours who
happen to be around. She then sets the rest aside. It is later offered to other
friends and relatives who happen to call at the house during the course of the
day. Great care is taken that no crumb of this prasad should fall to the ground
or be left where it might accidentally come into contact with any impure sub-

stance, such as leather shoes.

8. Later in the day Ratno removes the image and puts it away. She clears
the area where the worship has been carried out of its ritual debris. The
remains of the items offered are taken and thrown into a nearby stream.
The devata to whom this worship was addressed may be described as belonging
to the regional Hinduism of Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. Baba Balak Nath
is said to have been born on earth in a Brahman family some hundreds of years
ago and to have lived the life of an ascecic at Shah Talai, a village some twenty
miles from Ghanyari. After completing the span of his mortal life on earth
he achieved a state of liberation from the body through his asceticism and saint-
liness. The god Shiva then conferred upon him the gift of immortality,
attained
whereupon heDownloaded the status of a devata himself. He is well known to the
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12

villagers of this region, many of whom have visited his cult centre at Shah Talai.
Those who are literate will have read, and may perhaps own, copies of the popular
booklets relating the story of his life, his exploits, the miracles he is supposed
to have performed and the words of hymns sung in his praise. These booklets
are obtainable at stalls selling religious literature, almanacs, etc. in many towns
of the Punjab and District Kangra. His cult is not recorded in Sanskrit litera-
ture as far as I know, however, and the rituals which are carried out in his
honour (whether at home or at the village shrines dedicated to him) do not
need the services of a Brahman, or indeed of any kind of ritual specialist.
Members ’of any caste may and do worship him in the way described, and accord-
ing to my observation he is not worshipped by members of any particular caste
more than others.
Unlike the Pramalai Kallar, the villagers of Ghanyari do not rank the members
of their pantheon ’explicitly in any kind of hierarchy. The vegetarian/non-
vegetarian distinction in any case hardly exists there. I was told that goats
used to be sacrificed to certain devatas but that this practice has been discon-
tinuted for the past forty years or more. Interestingly enough, goats are still
presented to Baba Balak Nath at his shrine at Shah Talai, but they are never
killed nowadays. They are simply offered live before the image of the devata,
and once the latter has shown his approval of the gift by causing the animal
to shiver and tremble it is then released. Therefore the pure-impure dicho-

tomy cannot be applied to the pantheon of this village at the present time,
whatever the case might once have been. What, however, one does find is
that villagers tend to rank their devatas after a fashion, according to the strength
of the powers they believe them to have. Thus some of the devatas, mainly
the great traditional deities like Vishnu, Shiva and Durga, are attributed more
universal powers than the lesser local, or little traditional deities such as Baba
Balak Nath himself. Certain more educated villagers sometimes dismiss the
latter class of deity, not as having no existence, but as having little power to
influence the lives of men (with the implication that their worship is therefore
a waste of time if not a positive distraction from the true path to salvation,

which consists of doing good Karma and revering Bhagvan through inner prayer.)
The point which I am trying to emphasize here is that the pantheon of Ghanyari
can only with difficulty be divided into Sanskritic and non-Sanskritic, pure
and impure, great and little traditional levels; but to the extent that any such
distinction can be made, or is in fact made by the villagers themselves, we are
obliged to classify the cult of Babf’ Balak Nath as belonging to the inferior (non-
Sanskritic, little traditional) level.

PRIESTLY RITUAL: PUBLIC WORSHIP

In contrast to the ritual which I have just described, let us now look at a rise
which can only be classified as Sanskritic and great traditional (no matter how
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 13

we choose to define these terms). A popular form of religious activity in the

village is the katha, or scripture recital. This consists of a reading by a Brah-
man priest of some story of moral import taken from the scriptures. The
text is recited in Sanskrit and then expounded line by line in the vernacular
by the priest. The reading itself is preceded by a formal rite of worship in
which the householder who is sponsoring the reading worships Ganesh and
the nine planets and seeks their blessing for the meritorious act which he is -

about to have performed. This ritual is carried out under the direction of the
priest who has been hired to read the katha. I shall describe here the form
of this ritual as carried out by a Brahman farmer, Ramanand, when he held
a katha to celebrate the completion of the new house he had been building.

However, there is, as far as I could observe at least, almost no variation in the
way this ritual is performed on different occasions (as there can be in the case
of individual rites of worship) for the very reason that it depends on a written
text. This text is regarded as sacred and hence any intentional variation is
not even envisaged, let alone approved.
The acts constituting the ritual of worship on this occasion were as follows:
i. On returning from the fields on the evening of the day when the katha
is to be held (the auspicious day and time has been ascertained before hand from
the Brahman priest who has consulted his almanac for the purpose) Ramanand
takes a bath and changes into clean clothes.
2. Ramanand’s wife replasters her kitchen hearth and the place in the main
room of the house where the worship is to be offered by resmearing them with

cowdung. She then prepares the prasad which is to be distributed after the
katha (in this case a kind of sweet made from flour fried in ghi and sweetened
with crude sugar).
3. The priest arrives. He has also bathed and changed his clothes before
leaving his house and on arrival once more washes his hands. He then begins
to prepare a mandala, that is a sacred diagram, on the area of the floor which
Ramanand’s wife has previously replastered. This diagram consists of sym-
bolic representation of the nine planets and other deities or sacred beings.
These include Ganesh, Tridev (Vishnu, Shiva and Brahman), Suraj Devata
(the sun), Shesh Nag (the serpent who upholds the world) the sixty four Yoginis
(the wives of the deity Bhairon) and Onkar (the sacred syllable Om conceived
as a divine being). The symbols of these deities are traced on the floor in white
flour. .

4. The invited guests begin to arrive. The priest blows a blast on his
conch shell to signify that the worship is about to begin. He bids Ramanand
sit down beside him before the mandala which he has prepared. He ties a
length of red moli to Ramanand’s wrist and tufts of the sacred kusha grass to
the third finger of each of his hands.
5. The priest recites the appropriate lines from the Sanskrit text which he
has opened in front offrom
Downloaded him as he directs
cis.sagepub.com Ramanand
at NANYANG in the
TECH UNIV LIBRARY on August 30, 2015 of
worship
14

represented in the mandala. To each in turn various substances are offered:

water, rice, flowers, incense. Ritual gestures, such as bowing with folded
hands, are made to the various symbols.
.

6. After this the reading itself begins. The priest chants the Sanskrit
verses and then explains what they mean to his listeners. The text includes
various anecdotes concerning the sage Narada which illustrate the effectiveness
of righteous conduct and the diligent observance of fasting and other ritual
practices as means of obtaining salvation. After the reading is completed the
prasad, which has been placed beside the mandala, is distributed to all present.
Great care is taken that no portion of the prasad should be trodden under foot.
7. After the guests have departed, Ramanand’s wife scrapes up what is
left of the sacred diagram and the items offered to it and puts them by on a
tray. They are removed later by Ramanand and thrown into a stream.
In certain striking respects this ritual quite obviously belongs to a different
strand of the Hindu tradition from the private ritual carried out by Ratno to
Baba Balak Nath, and fulfils a different kind of religious function. The ritual
has a fixed form, as has been pointed out, and depends on a written text. More-
over this text is not written in the vernacular but in a language which is incom-

prehensible to the ordinary villager. The services of a Brahman priest are

essential to the villager for this kind of ritual, not merely because only the
priest has the requisite training to understand the directions for worship con-
tained in the text, but also because only a Brahman is considered fit, by virtue
of his special ritual status, to utter and expound the holy verses in question.
The ritual therefore cannot take place without his aid, or at least without the
presence of a Brahman who can read enough Sanskrit to stumble through the
text. (One katha which I attended was read by a Brahman villager, who had
a little education, when the priest who had been invited failed to turn up.)

Furthermore, the ritual preceding a katha, unlike the rite conducted by

Ratno in her home, is public. It is carried out in the presence of guests formally
invited, whose attendance is considered essential as witnesses that the ritual
has been carried out in the proper manner. The rite is performed by the head
of the household on behalf of his whole family. Individual rites of worship
may be carried out in order to further aims which are of interest or benefit
to the whole household, as indeed was Ratno’s worship of Baba Balak Nath;
but in such cases the worshipper is still acting on his own individual initiative
and not because of his structural position in the kinship group. In such cases
any member of the family may equally legitimately perform the worship.
Priestly lituals seldom involve women (except in cases such as weddings and
naming rites, when the bride and the mother of the new baby have a certain
part to play). A katha could, I was told, be sponsored by a woman in the last
resort in the absence of any male member of the household, but no one could
recall such an occasion. Normally a woman’s inferior ritual status debars
her from taking part in this kind of ritual. One priest said, &dquo;A woman can
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 15

never be as pure as a man and therefore if there is a man in her household, he

should perform the necessary rites&dquo;. Individual acts of worship to devatas
can be performed by members of either sex with equal legitimacy and effecti-

veness.
The deities worshipped through priestly ritual also tend to belong to a different
category. Whilst Shiva, Vishnu and Ganesh are sometimes worshipped through
individual rites of the type described already, the other divinities depicted on
the mandala which Ramanand worshipped are not worshipped by individual
villagers privately. Indeed many of them are only known to the villagers at
all because they feature in the worship offered at weddings, naming rites,
kathas and other priestly rituals. If they are known outside these contexts
at all it is as scriptural figures, but as most of the villagers are illiterate this means
that these beings belong to a literary tradition to which they have little direct
access. Deities like Baba Balak Nath, on the other hand, belong to the oral
traditions of the place and knowledge of them does not depend on written
sources (although written sources in the forms of books and pamphlets may

amplify the villager’s information concerning them if he is literate).

There is also as I have mentioned, a functional difference between the two
kinds of rite. Individual rites are oriented towards the attainment of highly
specific and this-worldly ends rather than towards the attainment of salvation
(in the sense of liberation from this world). Priestly rites to be sure, certainly
have a this worldly reference also; kathas can be held (as Ramanand’s was) to
celebrate the achievement of some material or this-worldly end, and lite cycle
rites such as weddings obviously have a this-worldly reference. But the com-
pletion of these rituals is also conceived as a worthy end in itself, and an aid on
the path to salvation. Life cycle rites should be performed duly and correctly,
since this is fulfilment of c.ne’s dharma and hence a religious necessity. As for
kathas, one informant told me, &dquo;In former times, in the Sat Yug, a man who
sponsored a katha accumulated so much merit through the deed that he was
not reborn in mortal form for thousands of years; even now there is great merit
in performing a katha&dquo;. Individual rites of worship are obviously directed to
much more immediate ends.

CONTINUITIES AND COMMON PRINCIPLES

Having outlined the differences between the two classes of religious activity
which I have described I ought now, if I am to fulfil the intention which I
expressed in the beginning of this paper, to point out where the continuities
between them lie. If we choose to analyze Hinduism in terms of types. or
levels then the two rituals which I have described certainly belong to different
levels of the religious culture of Ghanyari. But it is not difficult to find a
definite consistency in the idiom they employ if we examine the ritual procedure
followed in either case. Obvious similarities, for instance, can be seen in the
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16

fact that in both kinds of ritual the main participant (s) had first to bath them-
selves and change their clothes: in both rituals the site where worship was to
take place was first smeared with cowdung; in both rituals this area was not
approached without shoes being first removed; in either case the ritual equip-
ment used was disposed of after the worship was over by being immersed in
running water; in both cases certain precautions were observed in the disposal
of the prasad. When we take into account both these regularities in practice
and the statements which villagers make in explanation of these practices, it
becomes clear that there is a basis likeness in the rules observed in both contexts
which underlies the more conspicuous differences in their content and
purpose.
The rules which govern both kinds of ritual alike can be summarized accord-
ing to the following scheme:

(a) Rules which maintain or maximize the purity of the worshipper(s)

These comprise the taking of a preliminary ritual bath, changing clothes,
washing hands, fasting. (Fasting can be seen as a means of purification in
that the consumption of food always conveys a certain degree of pollution, and
by avoiding eating one is also avoiding an occasion for pollution).

(b) Rules directed towards maintaining or preserving the purity of the deity or
deities to be worshipped
These include smearing the site of worship with cowdung, removing shoes
before coming near this area, bathing the image with water. All these acts
can be interpreted in terms of the preservation of the purity of the gods (or
more specifically the images and symbols which are used to represent their

presence). Indeed they are so interpreted by the villagers themselves.

(c) Rules governing the purity of the offering

These include the obligation on the woman who is to cook the prasad to take
a bath (whether or not she will participate in the ritual worship herself), the

purification of the hearth before the cooking takes place, and the precautions
taken about the disposal of the prasad after it has been presented to the gods.
Under this heading we may also include the practice of immersing the remains
of the other offerings in running water; this is also explicitly described by
villagers as being carried out in order to ensure that the substances offered to
and accepted by the gods should not become defiled accidentally by being
left lying about where they might come into contact with sources of pollution.
It is clear that the substances which are considered to be sources of pollution
in this context (whether it is the purity of the deity which they threaten or that
of his worshipper) are no different from those which are thought to transmit
pollution in other contexts. For instance, leather (especially in the form of
footwear) is polluting and should not be brought near the area where worship
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 17

is to take place. Exactly the same principle is at work when villagers remove
their shoes before entering a kitchen or cooking area, except that in the latter
case it is the purity of the household’s cooking utensils and foodstuffs which is
at stake rather than purity of a deity or his devotee. And the same rule is in
operation when villagers place ritual distance between themselves and the low
caste Chamars, whose traditional work is the preparation of leather from the
hides of dead cattle. <

Similarly the substances which are conceived as purifiers in the religious

context are also those which are used for purificatory purposes in non-religious
contexts. Cowdung, as the product of that extraordinarily pure animal, the
cow, is used to purify the area where the image or symbols of the deities are to
be placed for worship and to purify the hearth where prasad is to be prepared.
When a housewife smears her kitchen floor and hearth with cowdung as a
regular practice, even when no ritual is to take place, or when a new mother is
made to drink cow’s urine after the birth of her child in order to remove the
pollution which the very act of parturition brings upon her, the very same
principle is being observed. Likewise there is consistency between the religious
and non-religious use of water as an agent of purification. Villagers bathe
themselves and the images of their gods with water and immerse the remains of
their offerings in water in order that everything associated with the divine
should remain pure. In accordance with the same principle, a villager will purify
himself by bathing in clean water if he ever becomes polluted through acci-
dental contact with a person of unclean caste. Bathing is also used as a means
of purification when a birth or death in the household involves its members in
pollution of another kind.
Now that I have made them, these remarks may seem rather obvious-espe-
cially to anyone who has spent any time in an Indian village. But it has been
necessary to make them in order to counter the effects of the &dquo;fragmentary&dquo;
approach which has hitherto dominated the study of Hindu religion in its
village context. I hope I have shown that in spite of the distinctions which
can be made between the different types of Hindu religious activity on the basis
of their different cultural origins or their different functions, there is also an
underlying consistency of idiom. The purity-pollution principle is applied
in the conduct of religious rituals of all types in exactly the same manner.

THE COSMIC HIERARCHY

It should also be obvious from material I have presented that there is in addi-
tion a consistency between application, of the purity-pollution principle in the
religious sphere and its application in the non-religious context. The evidence
from Ghanyari tends to confirm the ideas expressed by Harper and Dumont,
namely that the Hindu pantheon can be viewed as an upwards extension of the
caste system. In Ghanyari, as in the South Indian villages which these writers
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 17
is to take place. Exactly the same principle is at work when villagers remove
their shoes before entering a kitchen or cooking area, except that in the latter
case it is the purity of the household’s cooking utensils and foodstuffs which is
at stake rather than purity of a deity or his devotee. And the same rule is in

operation when villagers place ritual distance between themselves and the low
caste Chamars, whose traditional work is the preparation of leather from the
hides of dead cattle. <

Similarly the substances which are conceived as purifiers in the religious

context are also those which are used for purificatory purposes in non-religious
contexts. Cowdung, as the product of that extraordinarily pure animal, the
cow, is used to purify the area where the image or symbols of the deities are to
be placed for worship and to purify the hearth where prasad is to be prepared.
When a housewife smears her kitchen floor and hearth with cowdung as a
regular practice, even when no ritual is to take place, or when a new mother is
made to drink cow’s urine after the birth of her child in order to remove the
pollution which the very act of parturition brings upon her, the very same
principle is being observed. Likewise there is consistency between the religious
and non-religious use of water as an agent of purification. Villagers bathe
themselves and the images of their gods with water and immerse the remains of
their offerings in water in order that everything associated with the divine
should remain pure. In accordance with the same principle, a villager will purify
himself by bathing in clean water if he ever becomes polluted through acci-
dental contact with a person of unclean caste. Bathing is also used as a means
of purification when a birth or death in the household involves its members in
pollution of another kind.
Now that I have made them, these remarks may seem rather obvious-espe-
cially to anyone who has spent any time in an Indian village. But it has been
necessary to make them in order to counter the effects of the &dquo;fragmentary&dquo;
approach which has hitherto dominated the study of Hindu religion in its
village context. I hope I have shown that in spite of the distinctions which
can be made between the different types of Hindu religious activity on the basis
of their different cultural origins or their different functions, there is also an
underlying consistency of idiom. The purity-pollution principle is applied
in the conduct of religious rituals of all types in exactly the same manner.

THE COSMIC HIERARCHY

It should also be obvious from material I have presented that there is in addi-
tion a consistency between application, of the purity-pollution principle in the
religious sphere and its application in the non-religious context. The evidence
from Ghanyari tends to confirm the ideas expressed by Harper and Dumont,
namely that the Hindu pantheon can be viewed as an upwards extension of the
caste system. In Ghanyari, as in the South Indian villages which these writers
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 19

Even so, unlike the devata’s worshipper, the low caste man might even be
said to have a certain interest in reducing his superior’s ritual status to the
extent that if the ritual distance between them is dimin ished he may be able to
obtain recognition of a higher rank for himself in the hierarchy. (The wor-
shipper has no possible interest in changing his devata’s status.) Thus where
members of a caste which is ritually low, but on the asceadant in socio-economic
terms, succeed in inducing members of a higher caste to take food from them
where there had been no inter-dining before, this might pave the way for con-
firmation of a shift in their relative ritual positions. But the literature on village
Hinduism suggests that it is far more common for a mobile caste to try to pull
themselves up the ritual ladder by purifying their own customs-giving up
meat, liquor, etc.-than by making deliberate assaults on the purity of their
superiors such that the latter would find hard to avoid.
A devata-in spite of the greater power with which he is credited to shape
the progress of events and fortunes at a more general level-can only react
passively by punishing the person who violates his purit:y after the offense has
been committed; punishment is within his power bur: not active avoidance
(although of course this power to punish should not be underestimated as a ’

form of sanction).’ ,

To summarize this discussion, which is admittedly somewhat of a digression

from our main argument, we could perhaps say that the main limitation to our
analogy is that in caste relationships both sides are active agents and both can
help to effect readjustments in the ritual distance which separates them, es-
pecially over periods of time. In particular, the ritual superior may lose out to
his inferior, the more so if he loses the economic and political power which
enabled him to punish the low caste man for breaches of caste etiquette and get
away with it. The man-devata relationship is asymmetrical in that the superior
partner is partly passive; he can punish but not forestall or avoid outrages to
his purity. The relationship is a simpler one in a sense, for it is not complica-
ted by the economic and political considerations which are the secular con-
comitants of the ritual side of caste relationships.
It must also be stressed that villagers recognize the superior purity of their
devatas only indirectly and implicitly. That is, when asked to describe their
pantheon, they will make statements such as &dquo;the devatas are powerful&dquo; rather
than &dquo;the devatas are pure&dquo;. But when asked to account for the details of the
worship they offer to these devatas act by act, they will state, for example, &dquo;we
A Brahman woman was convinced that a rash on her body was an affliction sent by
7
the goddess Durga as punishment for the fact that she had once unthinkingly bought
eggs-a form of food which is impure in the religious context, even though Brahmans
in this area do sometimes take them&mdash;during the festival period dedicated to Durga.
She had kept them in her kitchen along with the ritual equipment she had used in worship-
ping the goddess and in doing so had offended the deity, even though her offense was
quite unintentional.
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20

bathe to make ourselves pure&dquo; or &dquo;we remove our shoes because they are made
of leather and are not pure&dquo;.

CONCLUSIONS

It is only with certain qualifications, therefore, that we can agree with Harper
and Dumont as regards the similarity between the application of the purity-
pollution principle in the religious sphere and in the caste context. However,
this does not prejudice our agreement with these authors concerning the impor-
tance of this principle as an integrator of the Hindu’s experience and activity
within the religious sphere. The villager is, as we have seen, acting on similar
principles whether he worships some local little traditional devata privately or
whether he sits beside his purohit to perform some puja before a mandala pre-
pared by the priest. Whether the little tradition is a parochialized version of
the great tradition, or whether the great tradition is a more generalized version
of a prior folk culture-this is a matter for the cultural historian to decide and
need not concern us here. What the sociologist has to determine is the rela-
tionship of these strands of cultural activity to each other in the context of
modern social organization. For the practical purposes of description I have
found it necessary to divide religious activity in the village into two broad cate-
gories, and indeed the villager himself some times makes such a distinction
between priestly and non-priestly ritual. But, as I have shown, the differences
between these two kinds of activities, or &dquo;traditions&dquo; (if one wishes to use the
term) is greater in terms of their mode of transmission and superficial style
than in terms of thematic content and underlying values. The hierarchical
aspect of the purity-pollution principle is emphasized again and again-from
the explicit exhortation to fast and be pure contained in the priestly kathas to
the practical regard for the devatas’ purity implicit in the villager’s very action
as he worships his domestic devatas. Indeed the ’need to mark off the pure
from the impure not only pervades the Hindu’s social and religious life but also
his attitudes to all the members of his cosmos. Within almost any category
which he distinguishes, the Hindu will rank some items as more pure than others.
Thus among animals the cow is most pure; among trees the pipal and the bor
are pure and the lasura is impure-a &dquo;Musulman&dquo; tree, too polluted to be used
for timber. Among vegetables, carrot and turnips are less pure than pump-
kins and potatoes, which is why it is permissible to eat the latter on fast days
but not the former. Of beverages, milk and clean water (especially Ganges
water) are pure, and alcoholic drinks are impure. These distinctions are not
of equal practical significance, although of course, the distinctions among
foodstuffs are of considerable importance in the ritual sphere. But they are
all of potential religions importance in that during worship the devotee wishes
to exclude what is not pure and to include what is pure as far as he is able. On
the conceptual level these distinctions illustrate the broad dominion of the
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 21

purity-pollution principle which we have been discussing. A detailed study

of the cosmology of popular Hinduism and the way in which the Hindu villager
frames his world view might reveal further elaboration of the purity-pollution
theme and would be a rewarding subject for further research. However our
conclusions in this paper must be limited to the religious sphere, and we can
summarize them by stating that we find in Ghanyari, just as others have found
in South India, that the link between the different cultural levels of religious
tradition and activity lies in the consistent application of the rules of purity
and pollution to the relationship between man and the forces which he reveres
as divine.

REFERENCES

COHN, B., "The Changing Status of a Depressed Caste", Village India (M. Mar-
riott, ed.), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1955.
DUMONT, L. Une Sous Caste de L’inde du Sud, Paris, Mouton, 1957.
DUMONT, L. and D. POCOCK, "Pure and Impure" and "On Different Aspects or Levels
in Hinduism", Contributions to Indian Sociology, No. 3, 1959, 9-39.
HARPER, E.B., "A Hindu Village Pantheon", South Western Journal of Anthropology,
XV, 3, 227-34.
, "Ritual Pollution as an Integrator of Caste and Religion", Religion in South Asia
_____

(E.B. Harper, ed.), Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1964.

IBBETSON, D., Outline of Punjab Ethnography, Superintendent of Government Printing,
Lahore, 1883.
MAHAR, P. (P. KOLENDA), "Changing Religious Practices of an Untouchable Caste",
Economic Development and Cultural Change, VIII, 3, 279-87.
MARRIOTT, M., "Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization", Village India
(M. Marriott, ed.), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1955.
MATHUR, K.S., Caste and Ritual in a Malwa Village, Bombay, Asia Publishing House,
1964.
SRINIVAS, M.N., Religion and Society among the Coorgs, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1952.
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