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The uses of liminality: society and cosmos in Hinduism

Veena Das Contributions to Indian Sociology 1976 10: 245 DOI: 10.1177/006996677601000203 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cis.sagepub.com/content/10/2/245

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society

The uses of liminality: and cosmos in Hinduism*

VEENA DAS University of Delhi

In this paper I am concerned with some conceptual problems that have arisen in some recent analyses of Hinduism. These relate to (a) the nature

of the sacred/profane dichotomy in Hindu thought and ritual; (b) the internal ordering of the sacred; (c) the place of the opposition of pure and impure especially in relation to notions of sin and mystical danger; and (d) the use of lateral, spatial, and body symbolism in characterizing relations with the sacred.
I THE SACRED
AND THE

PROFANE

In recent years, some scholars have tried to argue that the dichotomy of sacred and profane which dominates the Durkheimian sociology of religion has very little relevance in the Hindu context. Thus, it is asserted that the sacred and profane are not antithetical in Hindu thought and behaviour since the sacred impinges on all aspects of a Hindus life (Nicholas and Inden 1972). A second type of argument traces the uniqueness of Hindus to another source, namely, the encompassing nature of the opposition of pure and impure which relegates notions of sin and mystical danger to a subsidiary encompassed position (Dumont 1970, and, for an opposite view, Das and Uberoi 1971). I shall examine these arguments and then turn my attention to the internal ordering of the sacred in Hindu belief.
*1 am very grateful to Meena Kaushik, T.N. Madan, and J.P.S. Uberoi for their constructive comments on an earlier draft. My thanks are due to Jonathan Parry for helping me to present the argument in a more coherent manner, and to Kuriakose
Mamkoottam for

helping

me

in the preparationof the

manuscript.

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246 Durkheims distinction between the sacred and the profane has come under sharp attack from those who expected to find a division of all things into these two mutually exclusive, antithetical categories at the level of the empirical reality. For instance, Stanner (1967: 229) reports his distress at not being able to apply this distinction to all actions and beliefs of Australian Aborigines in the course of his fieldwork among them. Similarly Nicholas and Inden (1972) seem to imply that the sacred infringes on the profane so deeply in Hindu social life that there is little meaning in insisting on its distinction from the profane. This is, to a large extent, a restatement of the view that Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life. It seems to me that much of the confusion regarding the use of the sacred/profane dichotomy has arisen because Stanner and others have reduced it to an empirical dichotomy. To some extent, Durkheim himself contributed to this confusion. The concept of the sacred, however, seems too fundamental a concept to be discarded simply because it cannot serve as an efficient tool of observation. By formulating the distinction between the sacred and the profane, Durkheim was trying to resolve a fundamental philosophical problem about the nature of the social order. It is well known that, before he wrote The elementary forms of the religious life, he found it difficult to resolve the problem of the stability of the social order, as in his earlier work he had placed too great an emphasis on the criterion of formal obligation. With the concept of the sacred he was able to demonstrate that social control must flow from the axiology of social life and not from the stress on formal obligation. Thus, the concept of the sacred allowed Durkheim to distinguish between society as a mere balance of power between groups and individuals and society as a moral community. The morality of a society lies in the system of meanings within which it locates human existence and which is taken to be axiomatically true. It is interesting to note that in some form or other, the emphasis on the axiomatic character of society came to be placed by many philosophers who were trying to react against the social contract theory of social order. For instance, Whitehead (1958) attributed the stability of a social order to collective prejudices in a society. Though the term prejudices implies a value-judgement, these commonly shared sentiments, Whitehead seems to imply, are above the considerations of rationality, efficiency, and mutual adjustment of interests. The same concern with distinguishing religious discourse from other kinds of discourse is evident in Wittgenstein (1966). He also seems to suggest that religious discourse belongs to an altogether different plane; religious beliefs are marked by an axiomatic character and are, therefore, characterized by words like faith or dogma rather than opinion or

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view. The following quotations from his conversations will be
express these ideas: believer and said: I believe in a Last Judgenot so sure. Possibly. You would say that there is an enormous gulf between us. If he said, There is a German aeroplane overhead, and I said, Possibly, I am not sure, you would say we were fairly near....It isnt a question of my being anywhere near him, but on an entirely different plane...(53).
seen

to

Suppose someone were ment, and I said: Well,

am

At another

place

he remarks:

This is why one would be reluctant to say: These people rigorously hold the opinion [or view] that there is a Last Judgement. Opinion sounds queer....It is for this reason that different words are used: dogma, faith (57).

Thus, the concept of the sacred,

out the domain of

as

Durkheim conceived it, separates

religious discourse from other types of discourse and bestows society with an axiomatic, taken-for-granted cognitive quality. The historically crucial part of religion in legitimizing the particular institutions of a society as axiomatic, is best explained in terms of its unique capacity to locate human phenomena within a cosmic frame of reference. This process of cosmization bestows the inherently precarious and transitory constructions of human activity with a security, durability, and permanence, which takes on an axiomatic character (Berger 1969). It is not only in Hinduism but also in such religions as Islam and Christianity thatt particular social institutions and roles are incorporated within a cosmic design. For instance, Islamic law which regulates so many profane activities of a Muslim is essentially religious law. Similarly, the notions of Christian conduct, Christian marriage, etc., point to the fact that it is not only Hinduism but also Christianity which is conceived as a way of life. The location of human institutions within a sacred, cosmic design is not an evidence of the inadequacy of the concept of sacred, but rather of its encompassing nature.
It will be obvious from the above that the failure to be able to distinguish the sacred and the profane at the empirical level does not provide sufhcient grounds for rejecting the dichotomy. The distinction is heuristically important as long as there is a need to bestow society with an axio-

matic, taken-for-granted cognitive quality. Nevertheless, Stanners discomfort at not

being able

to

reconcile Van

Genneps (1960) theory

of the

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rites of transition with the Durkheimian division of the universe into the sacred and the profane seems real. I shall, therefore, examine the implications of Van Genneps theory regarding Durkheims sociology of religion. There is clear evidence in The elementary forms of the religious life that Durkheim saw the social order as continuously threatened by individual, profane interests. Hence, when he emphasized the integrative functions of ritual, he clearly recognized that the common system of meanings, though having an axiomatic quality, had to be recreated again and again in each individual consciousness through the common enactment of ritual. It is in this sense that I would like to understand his argument about the integrative function of rituals, rather than in terms of a theory of crowd psychology. Van Genneps theory of the rites of transition went further than Durkheims theory in that Van Gennep emphasized the threatening nature of all marginalities-intellectual, social and cosmic. By being unclassifiable, these marginalities have the potential of disrupting the particular classifications imposed by man on his given reality. In this sense, as Berger (1969) says, every system of reality is threatened by lurking irrealities and every mode of being is threatened by the ultimate state of non-being. While Durkheim was aware that the social order, constructed and maintained by the sacred was precariously balanced, he thought that its precariousness was due to the threat of individual, profane, interests. Following Van Gennep, we now realize that religion has to provide not only an all-encompassing sacred order which can transform the empirical tenuousness of institutions by placing them within a cosmic order; but it also has to devise ways and means by which the marginalities experienced by an individual can be dealt with, without any loss of meaning. It seems to me that in Hindu belief and ritual, the lateral and spatial categories provide important symbols for,dividing the sacred, cosmic world into two parts: the sacred associated with life and the sacred associated with death. The state of purity is considered appropriate for dealing with the cosmic when it is experienced as integrated with the social. On the other hand, the symbolism of impurity marks off those liminal situations where the paradigm is provided by birth and death, when an individual experiences his social world as separated from the cosmic and has to be brought back to an earlier reality, enabling him to see society and cosmos as an integrated whole. I shall consider this argument in the next section.
II COSMIC ORDER

SOCIAL

AND

AND

CHAOS
of Dumonts

Implicit

in what I have said above is the

rejection

position

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to which the pure and the impure provide the fundamental and encompassing opposition in Hindu belief and ritual In order to deal with the argument adequately I shall have to recapitulate some of the arguments

according

of my earlier work (Das 1970, 1973, 1975). In this work I have analyzed the symbolism of laterality, the division of the body and the universe into right and left along with the use of spatial categories as found in the Grhya Sutra of Gobhila. I bad intentionally limited myself to a rigorous monographic approach since problems of tractability are more easily resolved if we understand the underlying structure of a single system before approaching the diversities according to region, caste, etc. I had, however, compared my findings with the available ethnography on these subjects. In Hindu ritual great emphasis is laid on a clear specification of the use of right and left sides. In fact, the right/left opposition is so important that it runs through the entire texts of the Grhya Sutras. Three different types of rules are prescribed about the use of right and left. There are some contexts in which the use of the one side is prescribed and the other proscribed. For instance, the oblations to the fire during the wedding ceremony have to be given with the right hand while the oblations to ancestors during the periodic ancestor-worship have to be given with the left hand. Secondly, we find a number of contexts in which the direction of movement is prescribed either from the right to left, or from left to right. For instance, in the fortnightly rituals performed at the domestic fire to mark the advent of the full moon and new moon, the sacrificial food has to be stirred while cooking from left to right. In the rituals to ancestors, the food has to be stirred from right to left. Thirdly, there are contexts in which both the right and left are used but precedence is given to one over the other. For example, while pounding grains during the full moon and new moon ceremonies the right hand is placed above the left but in the ancestor-propitiation ceremonies the same action has to be performed by placing the left hand above the right. Finally, the use of right and left sometimes marks off different stages in a ritual. Thus, while I talk of the
Dumonts 1 formulation of the relation between the two dichotomies of sacred/profane and pure/impure has altered over the years. In the essay on Pure and Impure, he contended that in Hinduism the sacred/profane dichotomy was operative at the cosmic level and the pure/impure dichotomy at the social level. However, he went on to say that The religion of gods is secondary; the religion of caste is fundamental (Dumont 1954: 34). But, his later contention was that the relation between the sacred, pure and impure could be seen as one in which the preceding concept encompasses the following ones (Dumont: 1971). He did not comment on the apparent contradiction between the two formulations.

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dominance of either right or left side in a particular ritual in the following paragraphs, I do not mean to imply that the other side is excluded from it. My analysis of Gobhilas Grhya Sutra shows that the use of the right side dominates in rituals which mark the passage of time, for example the morning and evening oblations and rituals dealing with initiation, pregnancy, childbirth, and marriage. On the other hand, the left side dominates in rituals of cremation, in rites to ghosts, demons, etc., in rites to ancestors, and in rites to serpents. Schematically the argument may be represented as follows:

be seen immediately from this schematic representation that the opposition of right and left is not equivalent to the opposition of pure and impure. The events on which an individual incurs impurity cut across this division. Thus, while the pregnant woman and the new mother are both subjects of rituals on which the right side dominates, it is only childbirth and not pregnancy which involves impurity. Similarly, the left side dominates in cremation rituals as well as in the propitiation of ancestors; yet, the former is associated with impurity and not the latter. No useful purpose is served in trying to deduce the right/left opposition from the opposition of pure and impure. Instead, the right side can be seen to dominate in rituals associated with life processes and the left side associated with death. It is this which leads me to believe that the symbolism of laterality points to a division of the sacred in Hindu belief with reference to the opposition of life and death. Let me elaborate this argument a little further. Durkheim recognized the ambiguities in the concept of the sacred in his analysis of piacular rites. Thus, while he maintained that the sacred always appears as extraordinary and potentially dangerous, though, as Hertz (1960) argued, its dangers can be domesticated, he was emphatic that the distinction between the sacred and the profane was not equivalent to the distinction between good and bad. As Durkheim argued, the sacred can be evil and eminently so. He divided the sacred itself into the good sacred and the bad sacred both of which retained the quality of sticking
can

It

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251
out from the world of the non-sacred. It is my contention here that it was in assigning a universal division of the sacred into good and bad that Durkheim tended to elevate the categories of a particular culture to the level of universal, analytical categories. Not all the followers of the Annee Sociologique school were happy with this ordering of the sacred. For instance, Hertz (1960) used the term profane in much the same sense as Durkheim would have used the term negative sacredness, when he designated the functions of the left hand as dealing with the profane. In this, Hertz was closer to medieval Christianity for the bad sacred activities of Satan and his followers consist in primarily profaning the sacred by black-mass, reading the Bible backwards, wearing the cross upside down, and so on. More recently, Dumont and Beck have expressed their dissatisfaction with the term bad sacred. Dumont (1971: 75) considers it to be a contradiction in terms. Brenda Beck (personal communication) argues that in the Indian case she prefers to use relative and sliding terms such as more sacred and less sacred, but not the absolute distinction involved in dividing the sacred into good and bad. It may be recalled that Srinivas (1952) had a similar argument for conceptualizing the pure and impure - as relatively pure and relatively impure, designating the normal ritual status as that of mild impurity. I would suggest that the difficulties which Dumont and Beck point out arise because of our failure to see that the sacred may be divided and ordered with reference to different kinds of oppositions. It would be readily conceded that whatever the ultimate nature of sacred experiences, for our purpose the sacred is essentially a human construction. As such, it has to be analyzed as all other products of human activity, that is, as a cultural projection which men make in order to impose a system of meanings upon their experience. It follows from this that just as the historical manifestations of the sacred vary widely, so may we expect that the particular ordering of the sacred will also vary historically and cross-culturally. The analysis of the data on domestic rituals strongly suggests that the sacred in Hindu belief and ritual should be conceptualized as divided with reference to the opposition of life and death rather than the opposition of good and bad. The events associated with life such as pregnancy, blessing of a new-born child, marriage, and initiation are events in which contact is established between man and the sacred associated with life. On the other hand, cremation, propitiation of ancestors and worship of deities associated with death and destruction, are events in which contact has to be established between man and the forces of the sacred associated with death. It will be seen that at one level? the sacred associated with life is kept

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completely separate from the sacred associated with death as in the injunction that no weddings should be performed in the month of srddha when the ancestors are being propitiated, or in the rule that a pregnant woman should not be allowed to visit the house in which death has taken pla~ce. At another level, the incurring of impurity cuts across both, affecting the
close relatives of the deceased as well as the new-born child. It seems to me that while both the rites to ancestors and the rites performed at cremation are occasions in which the left side dominates, the former does not involve any impurity because in these rituals one is dealing with those categories (for example ancestors) which do not disturb the cosmization of social reality. On the other hand, every birth and death has to be legitimized by being integrated into the microcosm/macrocosm system of social and cosmic reality. The whole purpose of ritual in these cases is to define each birth or death away from an accidental, contingent event to one which is part of a cosmic design. In other words, whereas ancestors as a category are already integrated into ones cosmic reality, a dead man as ghost (preta) is a category of the sacred which is liminal and which has to be converted into the incorporated category of the ancestor. I hope to show now that the rules of impurity basically serve as a metaphor for liminality. An impressive body of literature has grown in recent years showing how margins are considered to be dangerous in all societies. The events associated with marginal positions are ritualized, dramatized, or dealt with, by linguistic euphemisms (see, for instance, Douglas 1966, Leach 1964, Turner 1969). The profound threat of these marginal positions lies in their power to question the ordering of everyday reality, through their capacity to ignore or transcend normal customary divisions. Of all the marginal positions in a society, those in which the individual experiences his social and cosmic world as dissociated, are especially potent. The paradigm of liminality par excellence is death. It is, as Berger (1969) argues, not only that death poses an obvious threat to the continuity of human relationships but also that it threatens the basic assumption of order on which human society rests. The severe impurity which mourners incur on death and the subsequent taboos are expressive of the liminality of this event. In Hindu religious thought, death releases the individual soul enabling it to penetrate the world of illusions (mdyd) and return to true and eternal brahman. Thus, the act of dying is a very significant act for a Hindu. Hindu scriptures enjoin upon one the duty to prepare oneself for death, preserving the purity of body and spirit. Yet, the only aspect of death which has received some attention in anthropological literature is the attendant pollution of the mourners and the ritual procedures for its removal. I propose to analyze the themes pertaining to death in somewhat

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greater detail here, drawing my data from the Garuda Purfpa, K,rtyakalpataru of Bhatta, Sri Laksmidhara and Antyestipaddhati of NryaI).a-

bhatta. Where possible, I shall compare the ritual injunctions given in the
texts with the available

ethnographies, such as Srinivas (1952), Stevenson (1971) and Kaushik (1976). In describing the method of cremating the dead body, it is said in the Garuda Pur1Ja that if a son cremates the body of his father according to proper ritual procedure, he accumulates merit equal to that which one achieves by giving several types of ddna. Hence, the son is enjoined to overcome his grief and to prepare himself for the performance of the ritual by getting his head shaved and bathing and wearing wet clothes. It is prescribed that for the performance of death rituals, the mourner should wear the sacred thread over his right shoulder, so that it hangs towards his left side. This mode of wearing the sacred thread is prescribed for all
occasions in which a person makes contact with the sacred associated with death, for example, in cremation rituals, rites to ancestors, etc. (Das

1973).
The dead body is bathed, dressed in new clothes, rubbed with sandal wood paste and decked with flowers. The orifices are cleaned and faecal matter removed. They are required to be stuffed with clarified butter and sandal wood paste. A married woman is decked like a bride. The corpse is referred to as Siva in the Garula Purfpa, as when the widow is told that she should consider the corpse of her husband to be Siva. T.N. Madan (personal communication) informs me that among Kashmiri Pandits the dead body, whether of man or of woman, is regarded as Siva and addressed as such. Stevenson (1971) also reports that the corpse of a male is referred to as Visnu and the corpse of a female as Laksmi. All the people in the house are required to circumambulate the corpse in the auspicious direction, for example with their right sides towards the corpse. It should be noted that in contrast, the corpse is circumambulated with the left side towards it when it is laid on the pyre in the cremation ground, and after the kapdlakryd (breaking the skull to release the preta) has been performed. The corpse is guarded in various ways from unclean or impure objects. Stevenson (1971) reports that great care is taken to guard the holy body from the approach of unclean animal such as cats, for its merest touch would pollute the sacred corpse. The Garuda Puri7Va also emphasizes that the preta (ghost) which is imprisoned within the body is in great danger from various types of demons and these have to be appeased by a series of pilt}adna, all along the way to the cremation ground. At the cremation ground, an appropriate place has to be prepared for the pyre. This place should be first swept, then smeared with the purifying

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cow-dung and appropriate lines drawn

grass. As in all fire-sacrifices the vedi

these lines. After consecrating the god) is established on the vedi. He fire-sacrifice is performed with the use of the proper mantra (sacred formulae). The theme of these mantra is a request to Agni to accept the dead man and carry him to heaven. After Agni, the fire-god, has been properly worshipped, a pyre is made with the ritually prescribed woods, such as sandalwood, tulasi (basil) and pipala (Ficus religiusa). Before being placed on the pyre the body is washed with the holy water from the Ganga. The mourners are expected to ensure that cremation does not take place during the inauspicious period of par~caka, and if it becomes necessary to cremate the body during the inauspicious period then further expiatory rituals become necessary. After the cremation, a series of further offerings to the preta are prescribed. The final offering, as is well known, is the one in which the sapindikarana of the preta takes place and it becomes incorporated among the pitr (ancestors). The above description seems to suggest that one important theme in the death ritual is the offering of the dead person, through means of a sacrifice to the gods and ancestors. Stevenson (1971) explicitly states that the dead body is seen as an offering to Agni. If we recall the basic elements in the scheme of a sacrifice, outlined by Mauss (1964), we find striking similarities with the cremation rituals. Thus the site of cremation has to be prepared in exactly the same manner as in fire-sacrifice, as in the prescriptive use of ritually pure wood, the purification of the site, its consecration with holy water, and the establishment of agni with the use of proper mantra. The time chosen for cremation has to be an auspicious one. The corpse is prepared in the same manner as the victim of a sacrifice and is attributed with divinity. Just as the victim of a sacrifice is exhorted not to take any revenge for the pains which the sacrifice has inflicted on him (Hobert and Mauss, 1964: 30), so the mourners pray to the preta to spare them his anger for the burns he has suffered in the fire (Garuda Purana). The successful completion of the death rituals ensures that the spirit of the dead man merges with the cosmic forces. As in the other sacrifices, the sacrificer, who is the son in this case, achieves religious merit through having performed the sacrificial rituals according to correct procedures. It seems to me that the attention which has been given to the condition of the mourners in the sociological analysis of death in Hinduism, to the exclusion of the condition of the corpse, has obscured the importance of sacrifice as a theme in Hindu mortuary rituals.

ground with the sacred kusa (altar) has to be established within vedi (altar) with holy water, Agni (fireis worshipped with flowers, water and a
on

the

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255 It is significant that in cases of sudden death, unnatural death, or in the of sinners, when either one is not deemed fit to be a sacrificial object or where ones intention to sacrifice oneself through death is not established, one is not allowed to be cremated. Similarly, in the case of victims of such diseases as small-pox, when death is seen as an offering to the wrath of the 1n3t (mother goddess), cremation does not take place. In the case of an ascetic also, his tapa is said to burn him internally so that he is not cremated. Whereas several explanations may be given about these exceptions, for example in terms of the hotJcold opposition as in Kaushik (1976), or in terms of the double obsequies (Hertz 1960), I believe that my interpretation enables us to include all the exceptions into a single class of people consisting of those whose intention to sacrifice themselves through death is not established, as in the case of children and victims of sudden death; those who are not fit sacrificial objects such as sinners; and those whose death may be seen as an indication of their having been already offered to gods. Gandhi who was so steeped in the tenets of Hindu religion once remarked that he wished to lead a pure life so that in his death he may not be rejected by the gods. The theme of sacrifice, which we have suggested as a major theme in death, seems somewhat incompatible with the idea that the corpse is impure. Yet, various texts, including the Krtyakalpataru, endow the corpse with such severe impurity, that it has to be destroyed. The contradiction, however, is perhaps more apparent than real. It is significant that the corpse is not referred to by a single term in all contexts. For instance, in the Suddhi KlJ4a of Krtyakalpataru, the corpse is referred to as kunapa in the contexts where its impurity is being discussed. On the other hand, the rites performed at death are known as pret~zsam~lcdra, rites to the preta. Similarly in the instructions about how to carry the corpse, it is referred to as the preta. The common belief is that immediately after his death, the spirit of a man takes on the existence of a ghost. If a person has led a pure life this period of his existence is a transitory one. He is acceptable as a sacrifice to the gods and ancestors and through their acceptance becomes incorporated as an ancestor. His incorporation in the world of ancestors also depends upon the correct performance of rituals and the observance of proper taboos by the mourners. The point is that the preta is seen as trapped in the skull of the dead man. It is released only when the chief mourner breaks the skull of the half-cremated body. At this stage, the ritual fire (agni) which has in his own life-time carried the ritual offerings to the gods, now carries him as an offering to the god of death and the ancestors. The fact that the preta is trapped in the body-indeed, the corpse is referred to as the preta-explains
case

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its treatment as a sacrificial object. However, the corpse is also the matter which the spirit leaves behind. This matter is impure and I believe that when the corpse is described as impure, it is to the corpse as matter and not to the corpse as preta, that reference is being made. The sacrificial fire simultaneously destroys the corpse qua matter and carries the corpse qua spirit upwards to the god of death and ancestors. The dead man remains a preta for a period ranging from ten to thirty days, depending upon his caste. After this period, if the rituals have been performed correctly, he becomes incorporated among the ancestors. This incorporation is symbolized by the crucial rites of sapindikarafla, which convert the preta to a pitr (ancestor). Henceforth, the householder is enjoined to propitiate him as an ancestor of prescribed occasions. His incorporation as an ancestor symbolizes the acceptance of the offering made of the dead man, and he is said to have achieved sadgati, a good end, as opposed to durgati, a bad end, which is reserved for ghosts and demons. The preta of the victims of unnatural deaths and of sinners does not get incorporated and becomes doomed to permanent liminality. Let me now examine the condition of the mourners. Death is said to cause severe impurity for the living kinsmen of the deceased. Of all the mourners, the chief mourner who lights the funeral pyre is the subject of special taboos. Mourners are required to desist from shaving, combing hair, use of footwear and cosmetic items. They are also expected to take only bland and unspiced food, sleep on the floor, and wear white, unbleached clothes. Married women are not allowed to use sindra in the parting of their hair. The impurity of death begins at the moment when the preta is released from the body of the dead man. It gradually decreases with the passage of time. Different rituals mark successive termination of the taboos on the different grades of mourners (Srinivas 1952, Dumont and Pocock 1959). The impurity of the first-grade mourners ends only with the incorporation of the preta as pitr. After this, the first-grade mourners make a re-entry into the social world, as bearers of new roles and statuses. Thus the widow of the dead man cannot make a re-entry as a wife. She is now incorporated into the social world as a widow and a host of taboos define her position. It is clear that the impurity of death marks off the mourners till the liminal category of the preta has been converted into the incorporated category of the ancestor. This incorporation ensures that though the social relation has been terminated by the fact of death, it continues within a cosmic framework. Thus ritual converts death from an accidental, contingent event capable of questioning the entire social order to a part of the design of a cosmic order, As Levi-Strauss (1964: 216) says: Although experience

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contradicts theory, social life validates cosmology by its similarity of structure. Hence cosmology is true. The impurity of death marks off the mourners for the period that they are dealing with the liminal category of the preta; similarly birth impurity marks off the relatives of the new-born, till the child has been incorporated as a person within the cosmic order. The rituals of the first forty days, the period for which the impurity of the mother and child lasts in

communities, emphasize the incorporation of the child as part of a cosmic design. For instance, on sutikasasthi, six days after the birth of the child, he is ceremonially offered to the goddess sasthi. On this day, Brahma is said to come himself and write the future of the child. The rituals on these occasions have the dominant theme of presenting the child to the gods, and of the gods descending to write out the future of the child. Thus individual biography takes on the character of events ordained by gods. It is well known that the complete incorporation of the child in the social world only takes place with the initiation of the boy and marriage of the girl. Therefore, more than symbolizing the emergence of the child as a complete social personality, the end of the childbirth impurity symbolizes his incorporation within a cosmic design. This is why I have stressed the point that impurity symbolizes liminality; it marks off the events in which man experiences his social world as separate from the cosmic world. The termination of impurity in the case of both birth and death is coterminous with the incorporation of the social into the cosmic world, so that they are again experienced as integrated. I suggest that this is a much more satisfactory explanation than the one which traces these impurities to the incurring of pollution through bodily processes. The taboos on the mourner, which I have described earlier, clearly have some similarity with the behaviour of the ascetic. The ban , on shaving, combing of hair, wearing of footwear and the prescription to eat unspiced, bland food and sleep on the floor all point to an ascetic performance which is enjoined on the mourner. Dumont (1971) notes this similarity but fails to explain why an ascetic performance should be enjoined on the mourner for the removal of impurity. However, if we look at impurity as symbolizing liminality, then the similarity between the mourners and the ascetic is easy to explain. The ascetic transcends the categories of the social and the cosmic world. Similarly the mourner stands outside the system while he is dealing with a liminal cosmic category, that of the preta. The renouncers liminality is permanent while the mourner returns to the social world with the incorporation of the preta with the pitr.
most

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THE BODY

AS A

III METAPHOR

IN

LIFE

AND

DEATH

In this section I should like to discuss the use of body symbolism in defining impurity. The use of the body as a metaphor in describing the social system is a recurring theme in Hinduism. In the famous Purusa Scikta which describes the origin of the four varpas, the body is divided into horizontal and hierarchical patterns with the Brahmins emerging from the head, the Kshatriyas from the arms, the Vaishyas from the thighs and the Sudras from the feet of the primeval man. The hierarchical division of the body serves as a suitable metaphor for the hierarchical division of society into four varnas. In contrast, in the Grhya Sutras the body is divided into two inverse and symmetrical parts, the right and the left. This mode of dividing the body is particularly apt for describing the division of the sacred with reference to the opposition of life and death. In the case of the symbolism of impurity, it is the peripheries of the body which become emphasized. Thus hair and nails, which figure prominently in this, have a peripheral position with reference to the body as they can both belong to the body and yet be outside it. It is significant that after the initial shaving of hair to mark the beginning of cremation rituals, both hair and nails are allowed to grow in a natural state to symbolize impurity. Similarly, the extremities are not constrained but are left free. Thus, shoes are not worn on feet and hair is left loose, neither combed nor tied under a turban. For married women, the sindra, which normally divides the head into right and left sides is not permitted to be used. In the case of a widow, hair is required to be cut in a way that the parting (of the hair) is not visible.2 Similarly, in certain communities the wearing of rings, bangles, payjebs (anklets), etc., which constrain the hands and the feet is forbidden during mourning- The use of white which is typically used to symbolize the absence of differentiation, also points to the liminal character of the mourners. Thus, the body in its constrained state stands as a metaphor for the social system representing the containment of categories. Play on hair, nails, and extremities, enables one to use body symbolism to express both the normal containment of categories and a state of liminality. It seems to me that it is the body as a natural, unconsThis 2 information was collected by me during my fieldwork on urban Punjabis of the Arora caste in 1974-75. I have reported some of my findings in an earlier paper

(Das 1976).
communities married women continue to wear glass bangles during the of mourning. These are broken at the end of the period of a and new auca ś ones are worn, There seem to be copsiderable regional variations in this custom.
some

In 3

period

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trained, system which expresses liminality. The end of impurity is symbolized by shaving, combing of hair, putting on footwear and, for the male mourners, the custom of covering the head with a turban. For women the normal parting of the hair is restored by the use of sindura and they are again allowed to use rings to wear on hands and feet. Thus the return of the mourners to normal social life is symbolized by the body as a bounded, cultural system (as distinct from a free-floating, natural system) which symbolizes the constrained containment of categories. It is not surprising that witchcraft and magic should use the body as a natural, free-floating system rather than the cultural, constrained one, for in its bounded position the body cannot be used for magical manipulation. Thus, witches are always represented with flowing hair and long nails. Similarly, body secretions, which by their very nature are ambiguous and
which have to be removed to end impurity, are used as potent elements in witchcraft, sorcery, and magical rituals. In this manner the particular taboos about hair, nails, footwear, etc., also use the body to express the liminal character of the symbolism of impurity. I should like to point out here that the foregoing interpretation fails to take into account the variations in impurity incurred by members of different castes on which a vast array of literature has accumulated (see, for example, Dumont 1971 and Orenstein 1968). It seems problematic to treat birth and death impurity as identical with caste impurity as Dumont (1971) does. First of all, specific terms exist for birth pollution (scitaka, 4 janansalica) and death pollution (mara1)sauca).4 Such terms are missing for caste pollution. Untouchable castes are referred to by terms such as acfihfita (literally, not to be touched). But in such cases the translation of the term chhfita by impurity is a little imprecise. It is true that impurity can be referred to by the term chhf4ta, but this conveys the mode by which impurity may be conveyed rather than its nature. In addition to the difficulties at the level of semantic discourse, it seems to me that any theory of the variations in the period of birth and death pollution must take into account (a) those categories of people who are not affected by pollution, and (b) those categories of people who are doomed to permanent pollution. The former include an officiating priest who has lit the sacred fires, the king while he is performing the duties of the state, an ascetic, a man learned in Vedic lore, who has realized the
taka s The 4 term u can also be used to refer to death impurity but its association with birth impurity is stronger as becomes evident by an examination of other related u terms. Thus the verb s means procreating, begetting, bringing forth; s refers to tri u the female genitals, and s to a woman who has recently delivered. ā tik u

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and transitory nature of the world, and a child who has not cut his teeth. Faced with this category, many scholars take resort to an explanation either in terms of pragmatism or manipulation of rules (for example, Dumont 1971). On the contrary, it seems to me that the people who are exempted from these kinds of pollution have one common trait: they stand outside the system. The extreme purity of the of~ciating priest, while he is in contact with the sacred, separates him from the ordinary profane individuals ; the king while performing duties of the state is above any social classifications which alone allows him to judge impartially; the ascetic as I have already shown transcends the customary social divisions; the man learned in the Vedas recognizes the illusory (mdyd) character of the social world;5 and the child has not yet emerged as an incorporated social category. Therefore, if we understand impurity in terms of a metaphor for expressing liminality, the structure of the exemptions becomes clear. We have no need to resort to the kind of explanations that would trace ambiguities in a particular sociological theory to the manipulative tactics of the Brahmins or the pragmatic psychology of the Hindus. I now come to the category of people who are doomed to permanent impurity, namely those who are guilty of committing the five great sins (mahptaka).6 It may be argued from this that the punishment for sinners shows the dominance of the ideas of pure and impure. However, as Berger (1969) has shown in a different context, at one level the antonym of the sacred is profane, defined as simply absence of sacred status. On a deeper level, he argues, the sacred has another opposed category, that of chaos. Since the sacred cosmos emerges out of chaos, man is continuously threatened by the lurking world of chaos, meaninglessness and anomy. Beyond the dangers of punishment by sacred persons, lie the more acute dangers of being abandoned by the sacred beings, of losing contact with the sacred and thus being drowned in the abyss of meaninglessness. It is in this context that the punishment for a sinner makes sense. He is doomed to a

illusory

I hope to develop the full implications of this argument later. However, seen from 5 this point of view, the Brahmin is subjected to least impurity in case of birth and death since his learning predisposes him towards a better understanding of the illusory character of the social world, whereas the Sudra is supposed to understand this the least. Thus the latter takes the liminal status enjoined on the mourner and the relatives of the new-born. Of course, in case of voluntaristic pollution the Brahmin takes the longest to be purified but this has to be understood in the context of the Hindu idiom for the punishment of sin. The 6 five great sins are: (1) murder of a Brahmin, (2) drinking of intoxicating beverages, (3) sleeping with the wife of a guru, (4) theft, and (5)associating with those; who have committed these sins.

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permanent liminality which in

some ways is like that of the ascetic, but inverse. Whereas the ascetic reaches a state of liminality by a creative only transcending of the ordinary social world, the sinner is reduced to a posi7 tion of mere anomaly? His permanent pollution cuts him off from the sacred completely. Not only can he never make contact with the sacred while he lives but also after his death he is permanently subjected to the existence of a preta. He is not acceptable as a sacrifice to the gods and ancestors and hence cannot become incorporated as an ancestor. In fact, his cosmic existence as a ghost only repeats his ghost-like existence on this earth. Surely, this mode of punishment to the sinner, the denial of the protection of the sacred against the terrors of chaos, is not unique to Hinduism. The Hindu religious code only uses the idiom of impurity, and those who have been led into believing that the notion of impurity encompasses the notion of sin, have perhaps confused the idiom with the content.

IV

CONCLUSION: THE USES

OF

LIMINALITY

I have used the concept of liminality to understand the symbolism of impurity in Hinduism. Liminality may often symbolize a creative transcendence of the given categories of a system. With the exception of Turner (1969), in the current literature in anthropology there seems to be a much greater concern with understanding the threat of liminality, rather than its positive uses. Yet, as early as 1898, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss (1964) emphasized the extraordinary power with which liminality may be imbued. Their essay on sacrifice is full of passages which point to the positive uses of ambiguities in social life. For example:

This ambiguity is inherent in the very nature of sacrifice. It is dependent, in fact, on the presence of the intermediary and we know that with no intermediary, there is no sacrifice. Because the victim is distinct from the sacrificer and the god, it separates them while uniting them: they draw close to each other, without giving themselves to each other entirely

( 100).
Thus,
I 7 find,
has been

it is the

ambiguity of sacrifice which makes any

contact between

to my gratification, that the distinction which I had sensed rather intuitively independently worked out in considerable detail in a recent publication of Rommetveit (1974). In analyzing the philosophical assumptions behind the current research in linguistics, he finds that all creative transcendence tends to be treated as an anomaly due to the trend of analyzing linguistic behaviour vacuo, in

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262 the sacred and the profane possible and it is in this that Hubert and Mauss saw the very source of life. In a similar way, special powers are bestowed in Hindu belief on the holders of the statuses of Brahmin, king, and ascetic. These combine in themselves the opposite forces of the profane and the sacred, the social and the cosmic. The Brahmin, as Hubert and Mauss argued, stands on the threshold of the sacred and the profane, and represents them at one and the same time. He is referred to as Bhudevatd, a deity on earth, who links the cosmic and the social. Similarly, the king is said to have a portion of Visnu in him and the ascetic controls the social and cosmic through his tapa. I have described elsewhere how these very categories are used to define the conceptual order of Hinduism (see Das 1970). The critical importance -of these statuses in which the social and cosmic are linked does not lie in the threat which they pose to the distinction of the social and the cosmic, but in the manner in which they manage to ensure that the social order becomes encompassed in a sacred, cosmic order. If liminality poses dangers these are not only the dangers of darkness but also the dangers of blinding light.

R EFER ENCE S

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