18. introduction
midnight in Banaras’s main cremation ground. It was at that point that his initiating
guru, who bore the lineage-title Bharati, gave him the name Agehananda, “the joy
of being homeless.” Brahminical texts position this act of renunciation as the be-
ginning of the fourth and final stage of life, suggesting that one has to have lived
through the rest and performed all the duties pertaining thereunto before one has a
life truly worth renouncing. Bharati’s path to renunciation was far more direct—he
came to it as a young man—and although other aspects of his story are most un-
usual, this feature is actually far more common than the fourth-stage pattern the
texts enshrine. Here too, lived Hinduism tends not to be Hinduism by the book.
If life is a cycle, cremation’s aim of transforming death to life gives it a hopeful
spin, preparing the way for life to come. A sannyasi’s cremation marks a different
kind of hope: release from the painful, prisonlike round of birth after birth after
birth. Yet the cycling of an individual life is only one of several cycles marked out
in Hindu ritual time; in part 3 we move on to consider others. The two essays in this
section of the volume focus on ritual events that structure the calendar year as it is
experienced in North India, and each of them participates not just in a solar cycle
but a lunar one. Divali, the subject of Om Lata Bahadur’s essay, occurs at the new
moon, and Holi, the spring festival described by McKim Marriott as “the feast of
love,” comes when the moon is full. Divali is an autumn festival, and it has come to
be the single most prominent annual event in the lives of many Indians resident in
the diasporic West. If one Hindu festival deserves to be integrated into the public
calendar of religious festivals observed in Euro-American countries, they feel, it
should be Divali.
Though positioned on the other side of the solar calendar, Holi matches Divali
in a number of interesting ways. Both are harvest festivals with elements that relate
to the renewal of time, and both trace a dramatic progression from chaos to order.
With Divali the chaos is carefully ritualized. Worshippers light lamps to guide
Lakshmi, the goddess of auspiciousness, through the darkness to their homes and
businesses, and play further with the motif of uncertain fortune by gambling on her
behalf. Ritually, she is required to win. At Holi, by contrast, all hell breaks loose.
McKim Marriott describes what it feels like to reenact the dissolution of order in this
way—or at least, he does the best he can. It ’s hard to coax memory back from a fog
of marijuana. On both occasions, fall and spring, order returns resplendent. Laksh-
mi does indeed arrive on the night of Divali, and the day following celebrates the
reestablishment of temporal and spatial order in relation to unshakable Mount Go-
vardhan, an enduring form of Krishna. As for Holi, the clamor of fire-walking and
burning the demoness Holika deep in the night and the dousing of passersby with