71

For women it is almost impossible except for a few oddballs even if they do possess brilliant minds, they must cover them with a sari of conventionality and submission.

It is difficult for a non-Hindi speaking foreigner to judge properly, because our white skin constantly attracts bad elements, showoffs, panderers etc. and it becomes tiring and colors your views.

I have met many genuine, sensitive, good people here - it just seems that they are rarer. Perhaps they are rare anyplace.

May 16, 70

"The same theory may perhaps be the origin of the familiar 'caste mark' placed in front of the forehead just between the eyebrows. The Angmi Naga tribe regard this particular place as the special seat of the soul, conceived as a diminutive human shape, which it is necessary to guard from the infectious influence of strangers by means of disinfectant. This is done by attaching to that particular spot on the forehead a small fragment of the leaf of the wormwood - an effective disinfectant of spiritual influence, like other aromatic plants. It seems likely that it is in a practice of this sort and as a protection against danger to the soul that the use of the so-called caste mark may have first originated. Caste In India p 232-233

72

On Holi

Magical fertility rites, originally regarded as necessary to ensure the process of nature, are thus conserved and crystallized and continue to be accepted as a natural feature in the ceremony when the reason of their being there is forgotten. So, too, features of such rites which in the beginning are natural and inevitable, since they are regarded as essentially necessary to make the rite effective, and for this reason are performed without any sense of impropriety or obscenity, become, when they cease to be effectively indecent, but are not recognized as long as the traditional form of the ceremony continues unquestioned. In this form ceremonies and practices survive long after the conditions of society in which they originated have changed. p 233 Caste In India

Ochre has definitely some ceremonial association with fertility, probably being associated with blood and semen. C in I. p 241

. . . the Angami Naga who never drink liquid without applying on the tips of his fingers a drop to his forehead for the benefit of the material soul resident within. (note) C.In I. p 243

. . . the location of the soul in the head is illustrated by the Hindu belief that it escapes through the 'crevice of Brahma,' through which societies can project their soul (and so die) at will, while for less holy persons it is necessary to fracture the skull with a conch shell. C In I. p 251