Eclipse: A Ritual for Assorted Tams

Being a Tam Bram, I witness several interesting and sometimes absurd rituals, all largely to do with Preserving Purity or Maintaining Culture and Ritualism and such things. One of the weirder rituals I have observed is the eclipse ritual. Basically, when an eclipse occurs, you are supposed to not touch any clothes or eat anything and just sit in one place. Once the eclipse gets over, you are supposed to put all the clothes you were wearing at that time for wash, including all other clothes that were outside and also take a hair bath. This is undoubtedly a rather irritating and taxing ritual to observe but I don't want to deride it completely due to the firm belief that my family has in it. On Monday, Republic Day, the solar eclipse occurred and the fasting began.

It was a rather entertaining afternoon. My sister and me kept groaning about how very hungry we were and why we had to follow such things and my Mom kept telling us to accept things as they were and shut up. It lead to some rather interesting ideological debates.

"Just be quiet and follow the system."

"But the system is man-made isn't it? It not a divine imposition. So we can always go back and unmake it."

"No you can't, just watch TV now."

The conversation at some point also went to starvation in prisons and my sister and me hastened to point out the similarity between the prisoners and our current state. We were told again to be quiet and resorted to incoherent muttering and grumbling, mainly to irritate our parents, since we'd been through this process too many times before for it to really get to us.

Finally, the golden hour arrived when we could cleanse ourselves of all the impurities acquired during the eclipse. This presented an interesting problem since us Impure Ones were not allowed to touch any clean clothes. My mother had thought I would go for bath first and had put my clothes in a plastic bag to take in. However, my father wanted to go first, being Man of the House and all. The question arose as to how to get his clothes into the bathroom. The problem was finally resolved using a badminton racket to place the clothes inside. My sister and me by this time were rolling on the floor with laughter to see our parents capering about like this. Then my turn came and I was still giggling and asked my Mom:

"But you won't really be able to see what I do inside the bathroom right. I could just go and touch the clean clothes without taking the bath first. Will the sun explode then or something?"

"No but we might. The sun is too powerful and we should not question or make fun of nature like that after all."

This sobered me up. They really do believe in this stuff. So I went in like a good girl, did everything in its right order and emerged Pure, once again.

Afterwords, I tried to google rituals + tamil brahmin + eclipse to find a rational reason for this procedure, since my Good Cultural Upbringing had told me never to make fun of rituals as they always had some important reason. I could not find and rationale but found that there was a fair degree of ritualism associated with solar and lunar eclipses within the Tam Bram community (as there is with most things) and that there were actually mantras for the same and so on. Quite fascinating, really.

But somehow, I don't think I'm going to continue with this particular ritual when I start my own family. But I shall at least break a coconut on the Lotus Feet of the Lord for Thinking such Thoughts and pray for Purity instead, a far simpler exercise!

PS: the title of this post is actually a contortion of "Eclipse: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics", which was supposed to be the title of Pink Floyd's excellent album, "Dark Side of the Moon"

PPS: I hope my Mom doesn't read this blog. Then I'm really screwed!