Ritual and Recreation

Abstract Men and women are separated in their religious worship, as they are in their secular lives. When I arrived in Khalapur in 1955, I was immediately recruited by John Hitchcock, the project field director, who had found that many ceremonies are performed only by women, to record women’s religious ceremonies and interview women about them. Purdah restrictions prevented him or other men from entering the bughar courtyards to observe these ceremonies, and the men he asked about them said they knew nothing about women’s ceremonies. After I had participated in a few of the women’s household ceremonies, it was obvious that boys under the age of 14 or 16, who had not yet shifted their residence to the choopars were usually present along with the women and the younger children. It seemed clear that the men must have remembered details of ceremonies from their own childhoods but simply would not talk about women’s activities.