introduction. 19
brightly colored water and a lot else the following morning is followed by a com-
plete reversal of mood at noon. People don their whitest clothes and reconstitute so-
ciety by visiting one another with a sense of peace and decorum that is unrivaled at
any other time of year. What was upside down is right side up again, the insecuri-
ties grounded, the injustices of life revenged for another year.
It is interesting to see that Om Lata Bahadur concludes her essay on Divali with
a recipe, a practice she adopts for every chapter of her Book of Hindu Festivals and
Ceremonies.This one is for mandhi,a fried sweet especially associated with Divali.
While Bahadur’s habit of providing recipes is especially driven by her desire to
write a book that will be useful to women set adrift from traditions their mothers and
grandmothers knew by oral transmission, food is hardly just a woman’s corner in
the house of Hinduism—and hardly a corner at all. “Food is Brahman,” as A. K.
Ramunujan once underscored in a well-known essay, and Brahman is ultimate re-
ality.^9 Food is the cycling of that reality through all beings, including the gods them-
selves. No wonder so many Hindu rituals are unabashedly about food, as indicated
by the foregrounding ofprasadain the very first essay in this volume. Food is even
important in its absence, as one can see in the widespread Hindu practice of under-
taking self-denying vows (vrata).^10 Here the gender element surfaces again, for
vows are often a women’s activity and often adopted for the benefit of men. Yet as
Huyler’s opening essay reminds us, men too can saddle themselves with vows, as in
the case of his Tamil computer mechanic. Intriguingly, however, this man’s vow
was dedicated to a female divinity.
In part 4 we move from ritual to performance, but the line between the two is thin.
We see this immediately in Linda Hess’s portrayal of theramlilasof Banaras, where
the Brahmin boys who take the leading roles are not considered actors butsvarups,
“intrinsic forms,” of the divine figure they represent—Sita and Rama and Rama’s
three brothers.^11 These boys bear the aura of divinity as long as the play continues, and
are surrounded by many other figures, including a host of monkeys led by Hanuman.
Theramlilasof Banaras, patronized by the Maharaja and performed on his extensive
palace grounds at Ramnagar, just across the Ganges, are famous all over India. People
come from far and wide to see them. Of course, Hess is interested in the dramatic par-
ticulars of what transpires “on stage”—a stage that ambles through fields and groves
that become, in the course of a month, theRamayana’s primal landscape of exile, bat-
tle, and homecoming. But she is even more interested in what happens to the pilgrims,
the vow-fulfillers(nemis),the regulars who follow thesvarupswherever they go. This,
then, is Hess’s “Ramlila: The Audience Experience,” and like so many other experi-
ences recounted in this volume, it is a chronicle of collective self-transformation.