104. the life cycle
finally in telepathic copulation—all this to a frenzied accompaniment of many
drums. I know that I witnessed several hysterical battles, women rushing out of
their houses in squads to attack me and other men with stout canes, while each man
defended himself only by pivoting about his own staff, planted on the ground, or,
like me, by running for cover. The rest was all hymn singing, every street resound-
ing with choral song in an archaic Fakta style. The state of the clothes in which I ul-
timately fell asleep told me the next morning that I had been sprayed and soaked re-
peatedly with libations of liquid dye, red and yellow. My face in the morning was
still a brilliant vermilion, and my hair was orange from repeated embraces and
scourings with colored powders by the bereaved and probably by many others. I
learned on inquiry what I thought I had heard before, that in Kishan Garhi a kitchen
had been profaned with dog’s dung by masked raiders, that two housewives had
been detected in adultery with neighboring men. As an effect of the festivities in one
nearby village, there had occurred an armed fight between factional groups. In a
third, an adjacent village, where there had previously been protracted litigation be-
tween castes, the festival had not been observed at all. (See figure F at the Web site
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/vasu/loh.))
“A festival oflove?” I asked my neighbors again in the morning.
“Yes! All greet each other with affection and feeling. Lord Krishna taught us the
way of love, and so we celebrate Holiin this manner.”
“What about my aching shins—and your bruises? Why were the women beat-
ing us men?”
“Just as the milkmaids loved Lord Krishna, so our wives show their love for us,
and for you, too, Saheb!”
Unable at once to stretch my mind so far as to include both “love” and these per-
formances in one conception, I returned to the methodological maxim of Radcliffe-
Brown: the meaning of a ritual element is to be found by observing what it shares with
all the contexts of its occurrence.^9 Clearly, I would need to know much more about vil-
lage religion and about the place of each feature of Holiin its other social contexts
throughout the year. Then perhaps I could begin to grasp the meanings of Krishna and
his festival, and to determine the nature of the values they might serve to maintain.
There were, I learned by observing throughout the following twelve months in
the village, three main kinds of ritual performances—festivals, individual sacra-
ments, and optional devotions. Among sacraments, the family-controlled rites of
marriage were a major preoccupation of all villagers. In marriage, young girls were
uprooted from their privileged situations in the patrilineally extended families of
their birth and childhood. They were wedded always out of the village, often many