Indian Fire Ritual.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.
• Position: Brief Reviews - Book Review

Indian Fire Ritual. By MUSASHI TACHIKAWA, SHRIKANT BAHULKAR, AND MADHAVI KOLHATKAR. Delhi: MOTILAL BANARSIDASS, 2001. Pp. xii + 212. Rs. 495.

This volume is primarily a record of a Pavitresti ritual performed in Pune on July 27, 1979. The performance was arranged by S. Bahulkar at the request of M. Tachikawa of the National Museum of Ethnology of Osaka, Japan and was performed by a team of priests brought from Nasik for the occasion. It is not entirely clear from the introductory matter why there was such a temporal gap between the performance and the publication of the volume.

The Pavitresti is a fairly simple (for Vedic ritual) ceremony involving the offering of clarified butter into the sacred fire ritually kindled during the rite, and it is a minor variant of the paradigm isti, the Darsapurnamasa. The book opens with a detailed outline and discussion of the various steps in the ritual, but the heart of the book is a series of 140 illustrations of the progress of the ritual, mostly photographs of the actual 1979 performance. It...