Book Review (Part II) of McKim Marriott’s India Through Hindu Categories

Hindu Periods of Death “Impurity” by Diane P. Mines

    Diane P. Mines’ chapter is one of those fascinating moments where anthropology stumbles into ritual and mathematics, only to discover that Indian categories play by different rules altogether. At first, the problem she picks looks simple: how many days of impurity (aśauca) must Hindus observe when a relative dies? But if you think the answer is just “ten” or “twelve,” you’ve already fallen into the trap. Because behind those numbers lies a web of kinship, dharmaśāstric injunctions, ritual substance, and relational logic that refuses to fit neatly into Western categories.

    Why is this important? Because what looks like a problem of numbers is, in reality, a problem of categories. Mines shows how anthropologists such as Orenstein, trying to bring order to Hindu mourning rules, end up entangled in contradictions. And yet, if we listen to the Indic categories themselves, sapinda, aśauca, dharma, the picture suddenly begins to make sense.

Sapinda: the heart of the matter

    Let us start with sapinda. What does it mean to be a sapinda? The Sanskrit word literally means “of the same pinda” the rice-ball offered in śrāddha rituals to the ancestors. To share a pinda is to share substance, lineage, obligation. Sapindas are those kin, usually up to three to five generations, who are tied by this shared ancestral food.

    So, when a sapinda dies, those linked by this bond fall into aśauca, ritual impurity. It is important to understand that this is not moral impurity, not sin, but incapacity: they cannot do puja, cannot join in collective ritual, cannot eat or touch in the same way. Why? Because death ruptures a tie, and this rupture must be ritually marked. The mourning period is the time required to recognize and repair that break.

The Numerical Problem: counting days of impurity

    Here comes the apparent clarity. The dharmaśāstras give actual numbers. A Brahmin observing a sapinda death for 10 days of impurity; a Kshatriya for 12 days; A Vaishya for 15 days and a Shudra for 30 days.

    It looks like a neat caste-based arithmetic, pause here, think again!  But scratch beneath the surface, who exactly is a sapinda? Is it only sons and brothers, or cousins too? What about bandhus, relatives just outside the sapinda range, do they observe shorter impurity? Does it differ if the deceased is a child, a parent, or a cousin? Do these rules change across regions? You see how the “table” starts wobbling the moment we test it against lived practice.

Orenstein’s Model: the dream of numbers

    Orenstein (1965), who tried to solve the puzzle like a mathematician. He made charts, mapped genealogies, tried to assign fixed values to kinship and impurity. If Indians follow rules, he reasoned, there must be a single coherent numerical system behind them.

    But he kept finding contradictions. The same kin counted differently in different contexts. A ritual would bend one rule here, intensify another there. Some cases seemed to ignore the table altogether. The neat model cracked under the weight of lived complexity. The western models can’t fit here.  At this point, one could draw two conclusions: either Indians are inconsistent, even “illogical,” or the method itself is flawed.

Marriott’s Critique: from numbers to flows

    McKim Marriott chose the second. He argued that impurity and kinship in India are not binary states, nor universal rules. They are flows, of substance, status, relation. A Brahmin’s ten days and a Shudra’s thirty days are not entries on the same universal scale, but obligations arising from different relational contexts. In other words, the “problem of numbers” exists only if we force Indian categories into Western logic. Within Indic thought, there is no problem at all.

Mines’ Reanalysis: returning to Indic categories

    Mines takes this debate further. Instead of rejecting Orenstein outright, she asks: what if we go back to the categories Indians themselves use to explain impurity? So, she focuses on terms such as Śauca / Aśauca (purity/impurity as ritual states, not moral verdicts. Being impure means being ritually unfit, not sinful); Sapinda (kin tied by shared ritual substance across generations.); Bandhu (relatives outside the sapinda circle, with weaker ritual obligations); Śrāddha (The ritual of feeding ancestors, restoring continuity after rupture) and other. 

    These are not dead words from a Sanskrit lexicon. They are lived categories, used in explanation and practice. Ask a family why they observe impurity, and they will not say, “Because Manusmṛti prescribes 10 days.” They will say, “Because we are sapindas, because we share substance, because dharma requires it.”

Unions and Separations in Domestic Rituals

    Mines highlights how impurity is less about numbers than about dramatizing ties. Death ruptures bonds, and mourning marks separation: shaving one’s head, discarding clothes, refraining from puja. Later, rituals of reunion, the śrāddha feast, re-entry into worship, restore the bonds.

    The length of impurity itself encodes relational intensity. A father mourning a son observes a longer period than a cousin mourning a cousin, because the rupture is deeper. Mourning rules articulate both distance and closeness, separation and reunion. Numbers are just the shorthand; the real measure is relational.

An Alternative Model: kinship as ritual ontology

    Mines therefore suggests that kinship and impurity be understood as part of a relational ontology, not a numerical hierarchy. The question is not “how many days?” but “why these days, for this person, in this context?” The Indic model is already systematic, but in a different way - relational, contextual, layered.

    So, what is at stake here? For anthropologists, the warning is clear. If you go to a village and ask, “How many days of impurity do you observe?” you will collect numbers that look neat in a chart. But if you ask, “Why do you observe them?” the answers will take you into stories of obligation, bonds, flows of substance.

    The lesson is methodological: to study Indic society, one must use Indic categories, not impose alien grids.

    Diane P. Mines shows us that the so-called “problem of numbers” is not a Hindu problem at all. It is a problem of anthropological method. In Hindu thought, through categories like sapinda, aśauca, and dharma, the system is coherent, but it is not numerical. It is relational, processual, alive.

    And so, she stands with Marriott and others in calling for an Indian ethnosociology, a science that listens to India in her own terms, rather than mistranslating her into borrowed ones. Because logic need not be universal to be meaningful, nor numerical to be systematic.

Eating Sins in Karimpur by Susan S. Wadley and Bruce W. Derr

    Karimpur, the pseudonymous north Indian village that Susan Wadley has returned to for decades, is not just a field site, it is a mirror where the categories of Hindu life reveal themselves if we stop importing our own. And what could be a sharper mirror than the very idea of eating sins?

    We moderns, trained in a Western frame, ask: “Is this act sinful?” Wadley and Derr flip the question: “How does sin move?” And once you begin with that question, the entire moral universe of Karimpur comes alive, not as inner guilt or private conscience, but as a social economy of food, ritual, and obligation.

    But this chapter is not abstract anthropology. It begins with fire, literally. On 29 April 1984, at about 8:45 pm, Karimpur saw devastation: 31 houses burned, six lives lost- three women, three children and countless cattle gone. Immediately, the village asked why. Some blamed caste rifts, while others invoked God Sanichar, others said it was karma, and others attributed it to fate (bhagya). And here is where paap and punya were mobilized as explanations. The fire was not only a tragedy; it was proof that accumulated sins, collective lapses, and adharmic living had reached a point where they demanded fruit. Disaster itself was read as a social ledger made visible.

    And then the debate that only India seems to keep alive: to what extent is karma shared? Does one man’s bad deed eat into the fate of his kin? Does one family’s adharm drag down a whole community? In Karimpur, the answer tilts towards yes: sin and merit are not private possessions. They are divisible, distributable, and very often shared across kin lines and even whole caste clusters.

    Reading this chapter actually took me to another thought from Indian society is that the rituals that we have show it best. A house in mourning does not cook in the usual way. Neighbors bring food. Specialists, washermen, sweepers, corpse-handlers, take on the “dirty” work, accepting food and gifts, and in so doing, absorbing paap. Priests take dakshina and meals, redistributing impurity along ritual channels. Food does not just feed; it carries moral weight. Sin flows outward as food does. Balance is restored not by confession, but by feeding, paying, redistributing.

    My understanding is that this is the civilizational pivot. Western systems privatize sin: you confess, you repent, you carry guilt. Karimpur collectivizes it. Sin is managed in public, by ritual, by gift, by who eats with whom. If you want to understand this world, stop asking people whether they “felt guilty.” Ask instead: who sat to eat the karma (suffer), who refused, who washed, who was paid? That is the moral record.

    But, of course, this system is not romantic. It rests on specialists who always take the ritual hit, lower castes who absorb impurity, wash, carry, and clean. Wadley does not whitewash this asymmetry. Yet she shows us that the system works because impurity has channels. Without such designated roles, ritual life would stall. The analytical question is not whether this is just, but how the division of moral labor is stabilized, contested, and renegotiated.

    And crises do come. That fire in 1984 was not just a blaze of straw huts — it was a crisis of moral interpretation. Was this collective karma? Was it the victims’ own sins? Was it fate written beyond human control? 

    Wadley’s genius and Derr’s collaboration is to bring us into these kitchens and courtyards where sin is made edible. Notice who stands at the center? Women. The kitchen is the theatre of morality. A woman’s cooking, abstaining, feeding, or failing these acts decide whether a household remains protected or exposed to paap. Women are both empowered (they control the flows) and burdened (they can be blamed). To miss this gendered labor is to miss the very mechanism of the system.

    So what do we learn as Indic scholars? That philosophy here is not in books alone but in practice. Karma, paap, punya, dharma, these are not abstract Sanskritisms; they are lived categories that structure everyday disaster, ritual, and recovery. And if we want to study them properly, we must stop translating them into alien frames.

    The methodological lesson is clear: Follow the food, not the sermon; Map the ritual sequence: before, during, after; Listen for the emic idioms: paap, punya, asauch, bhāvnā; Trace the compensation flows: dakṣiṇā, gifts, labor; Watch for change: migration, education, market, law.

That is how you read Karimpur.

    And this is why the chapter matters for an Indian ethnosociology. It takes what the West calls “moral philosophy” and shows it as ritual technology. Eating sins reframes sin from metaphysics to mechanism. It is a moral economy, coherent on its own terms, and offers a civilizational alternative to privatized guilt.

    So here’s the blunt challenge to modern scholarship: you can keep mapping shadows of guilt and conscience, or you can step into Karimpur’s kitchens, where the real ledger lies — in pots, in palms, in bowls carried across thresholds. Wadley and Derr are not sentimentalists. They don’t varnish poverty or glorify caste. They show you a working moral technology. Learn it, or keep explaining India with formulas that simply don’t fit.

Humoral Transactions in Two Tamil Cults: Murukan and Mariyamman by Manuel Moreno and McKim Marriott

    If we think we understand Indian ritual through Western logic, through schedules, lists, or rigid categories, we are already lost. Moreno and Marriott’s chapter on the Tamil cults of Murukan and Mariyamman throws that assumption out of the window. Here, the anthropological lens is not a telescope; it is a mirror that reflects the village, its people, and their lived cosmology in their own terms. And what a revelation it is.

    At the heart of the chapter is the concept of the humoral. No, it is not just about “bodily fluids” in some archaic medical sense. Humoral theory in South Indian anthropology refers to the flows of substances, energies, and balances that govern both the body and social relations. Moreno and Marriott demonstrate that in the Murukan and Mariyamman cults, rituals, offerings, and festivals serve as means to manage these flows: who touches whom, what is eaten, and which ritual restores balance after disease, misfortune, or cosmic disturbance. The humoral is thus a lens through which the villagers see health, morality, and social order as inseparable.

    The Tamil cults themselves are fascinating. Murukan, the god of youth, courage, and war, and Mariyamman, the goddess of rain, fertility, and disease, do not operate in isolation. Their rituals intertwine with daily life: the priestly conduct, the offerings, even minor gestures, are transactions, humoral exchanges, between humans, deities, and the environment. A festival is not mere celebration; it is a calibrated balancing act, ensuring that flows of heat, cold, water, and blood remain in equilibrium. One wrong act, one unbalanced offering, and an imbalance may ripple through the social and physical worlds.

    What Moreno and Marriott do so brilliantly is connect the microscopic with the macroscopic. A ritual sacrifice to Mariyamman is a health measure, a social binding act, a moral statement, and a cosmological restoration, all at once. They show that these humoral logics are embedded in everyday life: the dietary rules, the menstrual restrictions, the feasts, the sacrifices, and even the seemingly trivial interactions carry encoded knowledge about maintaining balance.

    For a reader or researcher, the lesson is profound: Western categories: good/bad, pure/impure, ritual/legal, cannot capture this world. You cannot simply chart the rituals and say “here is the rule.” Instead, Moreno and Marriott insist we enter the village’s own categories. “Transactions” are not financial, nor are humors merely medical; they are the grammar of the Tamil social and cosmic world. And it is only when you grasp that grammar that the patterns, otherwise invisible, become clear.

    Terms like humoral, ritual transaction, cosmic balance, and folk deity are not abstractions here. Each has a practical, lived dimension: the humoral is visible in the diet, the touch, the offerings; transactions appear in the flow of milk, flowers, or turmeric to the deity; balance manifests in health, crop success, and social harmony. Moreno and Marriott’s ethnography thus acts as a manual for thinking with the village, not merely about the village.

    Another insight that struck me: the chapter is as much about methodology as it is about Murukan and Mariyamman. For anyone still trained in Western survey logic, here is a challenge. Do not ask “what is the rule?” Ask instead: “how do the villagers reason, feel, and act in their system?” We should observe how the humors move, how the offerings redistribute them, and how the participants experience obligation and balance. Enter the world as an interlocutor, not a calculator.

    In the end, this chapter teaches something wider than Tamil cults. It reminds us that Indian ethnography, when properly approached, is an exercise in relational reasoning, flow, and contextual understanding. Rituals are not fixed, humors are not inert, and the social world is not binary. And for anyone seeking to build an Indian ethnosociology, this is precisely the type of work to emulate: grounded, sensitive, and radically contextual.

The Kerala house as a Hindu cosmos by Melinda A. Moore

    Can a house be only a shelter? The Western sociologist may think so, four walls and a roof, a material solution to climate. But in the Indic world, the house is never just “housing.” It is cosmos in miniature, pind and brahmand reflecting each other. The Vedas, the Purāṇas, and the vāstu texts have insisted for millennia that human life unfolds within patterned space. A Kerala house, as Moore shows us, is not just architecture—it is theology built in timber.

The House as Cosmos

    Moore’s work follows the long Indic conviction that the microcosm (pind) and the macrocosm (brahmand) mirror each other. This is not poetry, it is the logic of ritual life. The Kerala house, with its central courtyard, directional alignment, kitchens, granary, and thresholds, is literally a cosmos scaled down. The courtyard (nālukettu) is the navel of the world; the kitchen is an agni-kunda; the granary is Lakṣmī’s womb; the thresholds guard liminality between purity and danger. Every entry and movement within the house re-enacts dharma itself.

    Padmanabha Menon (1937) had already noted that Kerala houses preserve a “sacred order of space” older than colonial impositions. Raghavan (1932) pointed to the continuity of ritual space between Vedic fire altars and the domestic hearth. Kannippayyur (1979), in his interpretations of traditional architecture, argued that the very measures, proportions, and placements are not aesthetics but sacral mathematics, a geometry of dharma. Moore draws these strands together, making us see the Kerala home as a living cosmogram.

Vāstu and the Foundation Man

    At the heart of this vision is Vāstu Purusha, the cosmic man who lies embedded in the ground, his limbs stretching to the cardinal directions. Every foundation is his body, every beam and wall a rib, joint, or sinew. This is why digging, building, or inhabiting a house in the Hindu world is never a secular act, it is a negotiation with the very body of cosmic order. Kramrisch (1976) famously described the “foundation man” and the slopes and consequences of house-building: if you align wrongly, you invite cosmic disorder; align rightly, and the house breathes in harmony with the universe.

    Moore shows how this is not abstract doctrine but embodied practice. A courtyard is not just ventilation, it is the axis mundi, the center where ritual fires burn, where gods enter, and where social interactions are sanctified. The house is literally populated with gods: thresholds guarded by Bhūta figures, kitchens sanctified by Agni, granaries watched by Lakṣmī, wells under Varuṇa’s eye.

The House as Cube: Sacred Geometry

    One of the most fascinating dimensions of Moore’s analysis is her reliance on Taccuśāstram (the carpenters’ texts) which conceptualize the house as a constituent cube—a modular form that condenses the cosmos into geometric harmony. Every measurement, slope, and axis is consequence-laden: tilt a roof wrongly, and rainfall, fertility, even lineage harmony may be disrupted. Align a doorway incorrectly, and prosperity may flow out. The house is therefore never neutral, it is a moral and cosmic machine, and the family that inhabits it is constantly engaged with this machine.

Why It Matters for Us

    Moore’s chapter forces us to rethink not only Indian architecture but also anthropology itself. Western anthropologists, when they see houses, ask: how do they reflect kinship? Or the economy? Or class? But in Kerala, the house is already a cosmological argument. To study it without Vāstu Purusha, without pind–brahmand logic, is to study a temple without its deity.

    As I read this, I was struck by how much I thought I already knew—that vāstu was “about directions,” or that “Kerala houses are courtyard-centered”—but Moore shows that each of these is a philosophical act. The courtyard is Brahmā’s navel, the kitchen is Agni’s altar, the slope of the roof is dharma’s contour. To ignore this is to impose a Western lens; to embrace it is to enter the Indic world of categories.

    For a researcher, the lesson is sharp: data is not just in numbers or functions, but in symbols lived as real. A questionnaire about “household space” will never uncover what a grandmother in Kerala already knows—that the slope of her roof is her fate, that her kitchen fire is her cosmic offering.

    Melinda A. Moore’s The Kerala House as a Hindu Cosmos thus belongs with Marriott’s ethnosociology and Raghavan’s ritual studies, it is not about “Indians adapting architecture to climate,” but about Hindus living in cosmoses they themselves build. To walk into a Kerala house is to walk into the brahmand itself. And to study it without that recognition is to remain blind, even if you measure every beam and count every room.

My take from the whole book

    The book is too dense, full of insights. It is not a pattern of common Western-style research, but it showcases the lens that we must change to get the real picture of Indian society. This also leads me to the question, why one student till 8th standard has all the style of Indic visions, in his language, in his thoughts and in his stories. It is very unfortunate that Western lenses have started to grapple with infants also in mega urban cities. There is a need to understand, and the new researchers must know this.

• 15 min read
• 2
• 0