Every September, in the fortnight before Navaratri, Hindu households go quiet. No weddings are fixed, no new car is bought, no housewarming is held. Instead, on a particular morning, the men of the family (and increasingly the women) go down to a river or sit before a basin of water at home, face south, and pour water through their fingers for the dead. The fortnight is Pitru Paksha, the fortnight of the fathers, and the rite is shraddha, which is simply the word for faith with a ritual attached.
A visitor could mistake the mood for mourning. It is not. The people being fed may have died fifty years ago or five hundred. The mood is closer to a family reunion in which the guests happen to be invisible.
The pitris and the debt to them
The pitris, the ancestors, are in Hindu thought a class of beings in their own right, with their own world, pitrloka, and their own forms of address. Offerings to the gods are made with the word svaha; offerings to the pitris with svadha. The sacred thread, worn over the left shoulder for the gods, is shifted to the right shoulder for the ancestors. One faces east for the gods and south for the pitris, because south is the direction of Yama, who rules the dead.
The old texts say that every person is born with three debts: to the gods, to the sages and to the ancestors. The first is paid by sacrifice, the second by study, and the third, pitru rina, by raising children and by feeding the dead. Shraddha is the payment on that third debt. Arjuna, in the first chapter of the Gita, gives as one of his reasons for not fighting that when families are destroyed "the ancestors fall, deprived of their offerings of rice and water" (1.42). A war was worth refusing if it meant the offerings would stop.
Three generations are fed by name, father, grandfather and great-grandfather, and in most families the mother's line as well. Everyone further back, and everyone who died with nobody left to remember them, is included in a general offering.
The fortnight
Pitru Paksha is the dark half of the lunar month of Bhadrapada, running from the full moon to the new moon that falls immediately before the first day of Navaratri. It lands in September, sometimes spilling into early October. Each family performs its main shraddha on the tithi, the lunar day, matching the one on which its father or mother died: someone who died on the fifth day of a lunar fortnight is remembered on the fifth day of this one, whatever the month of death. The same tithi is also kept on its own each year as the annual shraddha.
Certain days have special uses. The ninth, Matri Navami, is for the mothers of the family, especially those who died while their husbands were living. The fourteenth is for those who died by accident, violence or suicide. The last day, the new moon, is Sarvapitri Amavasya, the new moon of all the ancestors: for those whose death tithi is not known, those forgotten, and those whose own day was missed.
Tarpana, pinda daan and the crow
The simplest rite is tarpana, from a root meaning to satisfy. Water is taken in the cupped right hand with black sesame seeds (tila), a ring of kusha grass on the finger, and poured out over the part of the palm between thumb and forefinger, which the tradition calls the pitru tirtha, the ancestors' ford. Each ancestor is named with the word svadha and the water is poured three times. Sesame is the ancestors' grain, and kusha the grass that purifies and carries the offering.
The fuller rite is pinda daan. Pindas are balls of cooked rice mixed with sesame, ghee and honey, sometimes with barley flour, and they are the ancestors' meal. Three are offered on kusha grass, one for each generation, with mantras naming the person, their father and their gotra, the clan line. The pindas are then given to the cows, left for the crows or placed in running water. A priest is usually invited for the mantras, and at the end a meal is served to Brahmins, or in many homes simply to guests, who are honoured as the ancestors' representatives. The food is what the dead person liked: kheer and puris in the north, particular vegetables and sweets in Bengal, a strict sattvic meal on a banana leaf in the south. Families differ, and the differences are the point.
Before anyone in the house eats, a portion is set out on the roof or wall for the crows, and the family waits. If a crow comes and eats, the ancestors have accepted the meal. The crow is Yama's messenger, the bird that moves between the worlds, and the tradition says the ancestors come to the shraddha in its form. Many families also feed the cow and the dog, completing the pancha bali, the five offerings: to the cow, the dog, the crow, the gods and the ants.
Karna's fortnight
The story most often told to explain the fortnight is Karna's. The great donor of the Mahabharata, who never refused anyone and gave away even the armour he was born with, died at Kurukshetra and rose to heaven. There he was served a feast of gold and jewels, and could not eat. He asked why. Because, he was told, you gave gold and gems in charity all your life, but never once food to your ancestors; what you gave is what you receive. Karna answered that he had not known his ancestors, having been raised by a charioteer and told whose son he was only at the end. So he was allowed to return to earth for a fortnight to feed them, and that fortnight is Pitru Paksha. The story is told across India rather than fixed in one text, and its meaning is plain: there are gifts that only food can carry, and the dead are owed one.
Gaya and Mahalaya
Shraddha may be done anywhere, but a few places are held to be especially powerful, and the greatest is Gaya in Bihar. Its Vishnupada temple is built over what is honoured as the footprint of Vishnu, pressed into the rock when he subdued the asura Gayasura and promised that whoever offered pindas there would free their ancestors. Pilgrims offer at the temple and on the sands of the Phalgu, a river that flows mostly underground; the local story is that Sita cursed it to hide after it lied about witnessing her offering for Dasharatha, while the Akshaya Vata, the undying banyan that told the truth, still stands. During Pitru Paksha Gaya holds a fair that draws pilgrims from every state, and many families try to make the journey once in a generation. Other seats of shraddha include Kashi, Prayag, Haridwar, Kurukshetra, Rameswaram, and Siddhpur in Gujarat, kept especially for rites to one's mother.
In Bengal the last day of the fortnight has grown into something larger. At dawn on Mahalaya the ghats of Kolkata are crowded with people doing tarpana in the Ganga, and at four in the morning the radio plays Mahishasura Mardini, a programme of chanting from the Chandi, devotional songs and narration first broadcast in the early 1930s. The voice of Birendra Krishna Bhadra reciting the Devi's praises is, for Bengalis everywhere, the sound of the goddess setting out toward her father's house. Pitru Paksha ends, Devi Paksha begins, and the dead give way to the Mother.
What to avoid, and who performs the rites
The fortnight is kept simply. Families do not start new ventures, buy property or gold, hold weddings or engagements, or celebrate birthdays; many give up meat, onion and garlic, and the man performing the rites does not shave or cut his hair. The reason is not that the ancestors bring bad luck. It is that this is their time. The tradition says they are present, and one does not throw a party in front of guests who have come for a different purpose. In the south, and in many city families, the rules are lighter and only the shraddha day itself is kept.
Traditionally the eldest son performs the rites, or failing him another son, a grandson, a brother's son or the widow. But the texts are not of one voice, and the Garuda Purana and others are cited to show that a daughter, a wife or a disciple may perform shraddha when there is no son, or when she wishes to. In recent years the priests at Gaya, Varanasi and Haridwar have welcomed growing numbers of daughters offering pindas for their parents, and in many families without sons a daughter now does the rite as a matter of course. The ancestors, one suspects, are glad to be fed by anyone who remembers their names.
A simple way to begin
Strip away the sesame and the mantras and what is left is this: once a year a family says aloud the names of the people who gave it life, and gives them a meal. The rite insists that we did not make ourselves. Each of us is a link, and the debt owed backward can only be paid forward, by feeding and by remembering.
If your family has not kept Pitru Paksha, start with the last day, Sarvapitri Amavasya. Find out the names of your parents' parents and, if you can, their parents, with the gotra. On the morning, bathe, face south, and pour water with a few black sesame seeds from your right palm three times for each name, saying "svadha". Cook something they loved, put a portion out for the crows before anyone eats, and share the rest. That is a shraddha. The elaborations can come later, once the names are back in the house.