ABSTRACT
Ideas of purity/impurity were present all over Hindu society for centuries: in domestic as well as public life, in exchange of food and water, in practising occupations, in kinship and marriage, in religious action and belief, in temples and monasteries, and in a myriad different contexts and situations. Gods and goddesses and their abodes, the temples, were attributed the highest degree of purity, and therefore protected from every conceivable source of impurity. The concern for purity/impurity decreased as one went down the ladder of hierarchy. The word asprishya, the Sanskrit equivalent of ‘untouchable’, was used even for contexts of highest purity. Although the phenomenon of purity and impurity, including the related one of untouchability, was studied in Indian sociology and social anthropology since the beginning of the discipline around 1920, its modern systematic analysis may be said to have begun with M. N. Srinivas’s work on religion among the Coorgs of south India.
