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3 What Is a Brata? While travelling in rural areas of India, an observer may see young village girls performing bratas. They stand with folded hands before the older women of the village, their mothers and grandmothers and neighbors, and listen to the stories of gods and goddesses. The girls learn to create miniature worlds, small forests and lakes and µelds, and to care for and nurture them. They learn that the deities are merciful toward those who are willing to make sacriµces, and they fast from water or hot food for a day, or go for a day without a bath or a change of clothes. The old and young learn to appreciate each other, because there are bratas which revere both young girls and old women, and the generations are linked together through telling stories and performing rituals. What is a brata? A brata is a vow or promise, usually to a deity, associated with a ritual practice. It is generally performed in order to gain some goal—a husband , a happy family with many sons, wealth, a job, or recovery from disease or disaster. In many brata stories, village women or goddesses save families from danger or rescue the souls of their selµsh and uncharitable dead husbands from a hellish afterlife. While religious elements of austerity and purity often appear, the goal of the brata is not to detach the performer from the physical world, bringing him or her closer to Brahman or Ultimate Reality (or even the heaven world of a worshiped deity), but rather to gain blessings and a desired worldly outcome. There are folk bratas handed down by oral tradition and performed by village women, which ask various local deities for blessings, and there are more formal bratas, which are based on classical, brahmanical Indian religious literature, the Vedas and puranas and dharmashastras. While folk bratas are performed by women of all ages, more brahmanical bratas may be performed by both men and women (though rarely by unmarried men).1 And there are many bratas in between, mixing elements of both. There has been much useful research on bratas, both textual and anthropological . Susan Wadley and Laxmi Tewari have done research on folk brata stories from Uttar Pradesh, and there has been work on women’s story-telling traditions in that area by Gloria Raheja and Ann Gold. The work of Mary McGee and Anne Pearson are both particularly important for the topic. In her dissertation on bratas, Feasting and Fasting: The Vrata Tradition and Its Signiµcance for Hindu Women, Mary McGee examines the Sanskrit traditional texts, the puranas, nibandhas, and dharmashastras, for their understanding of 29 bratas. She notes that women see the rites as obligatory to dharma rather than optional , and that they contribute tosaubha – gya, “the state of marital felicity,” and promote auspiciousness. She calls bratas “the primary vehicle available to women for the recognized pursuit of religious duties and aims,” and she has surveyed the meanings of the term “vrata” (brata) in Vedic literature: as command, religious duty, devotion to a particular deity, proper behavior, and religious commitment; and she notes the debates on the Sanskrit origins of the term.2 According to P. V. Kane, the term “vrata” comes from the tracks or routes that stars and planets trace in the heavens. They are “commands or ordinances, religious or moral practices, or worship and vows,”3 as well as “religious practices or modes of sacred worship .”4 They are associated with the cosmic order and with dharma, as µxed principles which were laid down by the gods. The term “vrata” is found in the Rig Veda, in dharmashastra texts (especially the nibandhas), and in the puranas and histories. The medieval puranas emphasized the access of all people to brata rituals .5 Bratas were simpler, easier, and less expensive than Vedic sacriµces, and they did not always require a priest. Descriptions are found throughout the puranas, and P. V. Kane’s History of Dharmasastra estimates that 25,000 verses in the puranas deal with bratas. Anne Mackenzie Pearson’s book Because It Gives Me Peace of Mind: Ritual Fasts in the Religious Lives of Hindu Women6 explores the sociology of bratas in the Banaras area, observing women of urban Banaras and their practice of bratas. She shows the wide variety of motivations that cause women to perform these rituals, and observes how bratas are complex phenomena, with values of both auspiciousness and purity, care for others...

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