Kinship

Hindu iconography, mythology, and rituals provide a key insight into the

nature of human relatedness in India. Ideas and practices to do with fertility,

sexuality, birth, siblingship, marriage, selfhood, parenthood, and death are

intertwined with and mutually shaped by conceptions of the Hindu divine

order and its pantheon of celestial beings. The connections between Hinduism

and the ways in which people in India regard themselves as related is most

clearly manifest at the level of a Hinduism that is practiced, performed,

and experienced in ordinary people’s lives: a “popular” Hinduism rather

than in a scriptural sense alone. Popular Hinduism, as C. J. Fuller (1992: 6)

suggests, is signifi cantly informed by the sacred texts of Hinduism and yet

may not in everyday practice emphasize themes that may be central to the

scriptures. One of the best ways to understand how such localized processes

of religion and kinship work is to draw on the everyday accounts of Indian

society by anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural psychologists.