introduction. 17
was perfectly in keeping with the deep meaning of all ritual events. It was an act of
transformation, a time when life came to life.
In part 2 we focus on the sorts of rituals that hallow and structure transformations
that occur in any individual life. We select one of the most important for our initial
attention: marriage. Then in place of an obvious second—death, which certainly
commands a series of rituals all its own^8 —we turn to a description of self-inflicted
“death,” the death that brings release from worldly involvements. Like religious
people everywhere, Hindus use rituals as ways to draw out the significance of bio-
logically given events, thereby transmuting them into something beyond what na-
ture commands. The ceremonies we introduce in this section of the volume come
from the middle and north of India, and no one would claim that they are invariant
from region to region. Even what is written in Brahminical textbooks varies from
place to place, and practice introduces many more variations. But there are common
threads, one being that the life cycles of girls and women are regarded differently
from those of boys and men, even when, as in marriage, they obviously converge.
If the reader comes away with the impression that the persons involved are actu-
ally constructedby these events, that would be directly in line with the way these life-
cycle ceremonies are often described as a class. They are called samskaras ( = san-
skars)—events in which a person is “put together, perfected.” These samskaras are
prescribed in Sanskrit texts, but less clearly for girls than boys. Puberty rites for girls
tend to be transmitted orally from women to women, not written in any book. To
show us how such traditions work, Doranne Jacobson takes us to a village in Chat-
tisgarh, a state in Central India, where we meet an upper-caste Thakur girl called
Munni. Jacobson follows Munni from menstruation through marriage, “the most
important event in her life,” and she uses that occasion as a chance also to cast a com-
parative glance at a range of other locations in North India.
One of these is Banaras, or, as it is formally called nowadays, Varanasi, the Hindu
city that is famous for death. For millennia Hindus have believed that to die in Ba-
naras, city of Shiva and the Ganges, is to secure for oneself the best chance of a fa-
vorable rebirth—or, better yet, release from the cycle of birth and death altogether.
But one need not wait for death. Death can also be induced—a death to self that
makes a man a renouncer, a sannyasi.(Women also adopt this role, but rarely.) This
sort of death ritual is chronicled by Agehananda Bharati, an Austrian who was born
Roman Catholic in Vienna, became attracted to Hinduism in his early teens, for
years lived as a teaching sannyasiin India, and concluded his life as a university pro-
fessor in the United States. Bharati describes the radical reconstruction of person-
hood that made it possible for him to become a sannyasi:ritual death on a full-moon