Laying Out Feast-Offerings

Abstract

In the literature on sacred food in Hinduism, vegetarian offerings to Sanskritic deities (Sanskrit naivedya, prasada; Tamil naivettiyam, pracatam) are privileged. If meat is mentioned, it is in reference to sacrificial worship; and even so, the analysis often stops at ritual killing. Here, however, I focus on the wealth of religious meanings and ritual dynamics inherent to the ritual display and communal feasting—incorporating, if not centred on, meat—known as pataiyal or feast-offerings, performed in or after worship. I describe two forms of these feast-offerings: (1) following sacrificial worship to tutelary deities in rural Tamil Nadu and (2) during worship to divinized ancestors in Singapore. Departing from Brahminical exegeses, I probe the meanings and merits of meat offerings from the perspective of those immersed in the agrarian productive process (farmers and those from farming traditions) for whom eating meat, if not killing animals, is routine. Meat offerings, I argue, are not so much arbitrators of ritual purity-pollution or hierarchy, but more of kinship and commensality, and thus intimacy, between specific deities and their devotees. I foreground a pragmatic everyday theology, not necessarily explicit, but inherent to the lives, worlds, religious beliefs and ritual practices of ordinary peoples living their ordinary lives.