vegetarian food or else ghosts and evil spirits will take possession of the house
under construction; he must avoid bodily contact with members of lower ja ̄tis
or goods in the house will disappear; he must abstain from sexual intercourse or
else the house will be eaten by white ants. Another set of rules concerns the con-
struction. Scarecrows must be planted in the four cardinal directions to ward off
the evil eye. When the roof is laid, only an odd number of beams must be used,
as a result of which it is deemed to be incomplete. Incompleteness is a blemish
and helps in warding off the evil eye. Moreover, incomplete houses may be
expected to grow further.
When a house is ready for occupation, it is said to have been born. A horo-
scope is cast for it to figure out what the future holds for it. In addition to the
nine planets of horoscopes for human beings, the influence of the qualities of
the first occupants also are crucial for a house. Houses acquire the same ja ̄ti
status as the householders and must observe the same rules of intercaste
conduct as is applicable to them. In short, there is a structural homology
between the human body and the house which is culturally constructed.
That the house–householder relationship is an intrinsic one is well illustrated
by the distinction that Bengali Hindus make between the ba ̄sa ̄(“nest,” abode) of
a man, his wife and children, and the ba ̄r.ı ̄(also called gr.ha, house) in which his
parents (and other family members) live. Until his father’s death he and his
immediate family are deemed to be part of the larger family and he may not
claim to have his own separate ba ̄r. ̄ı. Needless to add, not all sons may live away
from the parental home (Inden and Nicholas 1977: 7).
The Bengalis think of a house as shared space, and this makes room for unre-
lated dependents (for example, servants) to live in it along with those who con-
stitute the family and who share bodily substance. The Kashmiri Pandits make
a similar distinction between one’s gara(house, home) and d.era(place of tem-
porary residence), but the latter may be garato someone else. Moreover, a son
may establish his own household even during the life time of his mother, but this
normally does not happen while the father is alive.
The issue here is the manner in which a household is constituted. Among the
Pandits the family (kutumb) usually comprises a number of households, each
living in a house or a part of a house, and known as chulahs(hearth, hearth
group). They make a clear distinction between those members who are born into
the family/hearth group (zamat), and those who are married into it (a ̄mati,
“incomers”). Consanguinity and affinity are mutually exclusive principles.
Besides birth and marriage, fictive kinship in the form of adoption also is a rec-
ognized mode of recruitment to the family. At the household level unrelated
persons may also be present, in some cases on a permanent or quasi-permanent
basis (Madan 1989: chs. 5 and 6). Moreover, families are not thought and
spoken of in terms of a beginning and an end, but the household is subject to a
developmental cycle. Births and marriages are the incremental events; deaths
and partitions result in the loss of members. A household may even die as when
the surviving spouse of a childless couple, or a couple that have only daughters
who have moved out on marriage (Madan: ch. 4).
the householder tradition in hindu society 297