The Pitris

A pitri is not simply a dead person. The dead are made into fathers by rites performed after the cremation, and until those rites are complete the deceased is in an unsettled condition that the tradition treats as dangerous to itself and to the living. The offerings of rice balls, made in a sequence over a defined period, assemble a body for the dead and then join it to the ancestors already there. What comes out of the process is a member of a class, and the class receives worship.

The obligation that keeps this going is put in the strongest terms the ritual literature has. A man is said to be born owing three debts, and one of them is to the fathers. It is discharged by having sons who will perform the rites in turn, which makes the ancestral cult a chain rather than an event: the reason to have a son is that somebody must feed the fathers, and the reason to feed the fathers is that one will oneself become one. That is a very tight piece of religious engineering and it has held for three thousand years.

The offerings are made to three generations, and the ancestor who passes beyond the third is understood to merge into the undifferentiated body of the fathers. An annual fortnight is given over to them in the Hindu year, when the rites are performed for the line as a whole. None of this is antiquarian. Water offered to the ancestors in the cupped hands, the annual fortnight, and the rites at a death are current practice in households that would not recognise a single other name in the Vedic pantheon.

The Vedic material distinguishes two roads out of this world. One is the road of the gods and one is the road of the fathers, and they do not lead to the same place. Yama, in the funeral hymns, is the first mortal who died and so the first to find the way, which is why he is king of the fathers rather than a judge of them: he is not sentencing anybody, he is the one who went first and knows the route. The dead man is told to go by the path the fathers went, past the two dogs, to a place of light and pasture where his own people are waiting.

The Upanishads take those two roads and turn them into two destinies. The road of the gods leads out and does not return. The road of the fathers leads to the moon, and from the moon back into rain, into plants, into food and into a new birth. A geography becomes a doctrine of rebirth, and the fathers, who in the older material had simply arrived somewhere good, become a stage in a circuit. What had been the desirable destination is now the one that comes back round.

That reframing did not stop the rites. It is one of the more striking continuities in Indian religion that a practice designed to settle the dead in a permanent afterlife carried on unchanged inside a system that had redefined the afterlife as temporary. The offering is still made, the fathers still receive it, and the doctrine and the ritual coexist without either being adjusted to fit the other.