ABSTRACT
Religious processions in India are not a fixed genre. To begin with, they vary in size and the temporal order in which they occur. In South India where I have conducted fieldwork since 1990, processions associated with the great religious festivals gather thousands (at times millions) of people at regular times of the religious calendar. Because they coincide with the life cycle transitions of a family or lineage, processions held in conjunction with marriage and death involve smaller groups and a temporal order that is not as preordained. As for the processions undertaken for the purpose of fulfilling a vow, they are still smaller and less predictable, occurring whenever an individual, often a woman, is determined to have a child or recover from an illness (Dumont 1986: 428-430). There is no point, however, in reducing Indian processions to categories of constituencies and temporalities. In Hinduism there are as many kinds of procession as there are of cults, rites of passages and religious experiences.
