the god Shiva. Bhairava’s symbolic asso-
ciation with an unclean animal clearly
shows his marginal status in the
pantheon—he is powerful, but also
feared, because he is not bound by
normal rules.
Doha
Metrical form in northern Indian bhakti
(devotional) poetry, made up of
two lines of twenty-four metric beats,
divided unevenly after the thirteenth
beat. The metric pattern for the first
line is 6 + 4 + 3, with the second line
being 6 + 4 + 1. The method of counting
the metric beats is based on the
distinction between “heavy” and “light”
syllables. A heavy syllable is any syllable
with a long vowel or a consonant cluster
and is reckoned at two metric beats; all
other syllables are reckoned as light, and
reckoned as one. Aside from the metric
pattern, there are rules about how each
half line should end—that the three
metric beats ending the first line cannot
be a heavy syllable (two beats) followed
by a light one (one beat)—which means
that it must either be a light syllable
followed by a heavy one, or three light
ones—and that the line’s final syllable
must be light. These conventions still
leave a great deal of fluidity, and the
doha is one of the most important
poetic forms for poets writing in Braj
Bhasha (the language of Krishna
devotion) and Avadhi (a dialect of
medieval Hindi). At times the doha can
stand alone, as in the epigrams of the
poet-saint Kabir, which have become
proverbial sayings in much of modern
India. The doha was also used in con-
junction with verses in other meters,
as in the Ramcharitmanas. In this
vernacular rendition of the epic
Ramayana, written by the poet-saint
Tulsidas, the doha usually comes after
four verses in the chaupai(four-line)
meter, and serves to sum up what has
transpired in the preceding verses.
Dom
The model for traditional Indian society
was as a collection of endogamous
subgroups known as jatis (“birth”).
These jatis were organized (and their
social status determined) by the group’s
hereditary occupation, over which each
group has a monopoly. In traditional
northern Indian society, the Doms are a
jati whose hereditary occupation was
cremating corpses. They have extremely
low social status because of their habit-
ual contact with dead bodies, consid-
ered the most violently impure objects
of all. Despite their low status, some of
the Doms are unbelievably wealthy,
particularly the ones who control the
cremation ghatsin the city of Benares,
for without their cooperation, a body
cannot be burned. The word ghatrefers
to any flat area on the bank of a river. In
most cases ghats are used as places for
bathing (snana), but in some other
cases they are also places for burning
bodies, so that the ashes can be placed
in the river to ritually "cool" them.Dorasamudra
Capital city of the Hoysala dynasty, who
ruled the region in southern part of the
state of Karnatakafrom the eleventh to
the thirteenth centuries. Today
Dorasamudra is known by the name of
Halebidand is a village about sixty miles
north and west of the city of Mysore.
Although largely uninhabited, the site is
known for a magnificent collection of
temples, in particular the Hoysaleshvar
Temple, dedicated to the god Shivain
his form as Lord of the Hoysalas. The
Hoysala temples were built out of a par-
ticular type of stone—variously
described as chlorite schist, steatite, or
soapstone—that was quite soft when
newly quarried, but gradually hardened
with exposure to air. This initial mal-
leability made the stone easy to carve,
and facilitated the lush detail that char-
acterizes these temples.Doha