Beliefs karma

 

A belief widely attested to in the folklore and literature of India is that at the moment of birth, or on the night of the sixth day after birth, a god or god-dess comes to write the destiny of the newborn child on its forehead. The destiny so inscribed often takes the form of a set of verses indicating the most important features of a person’s life: the kind of birth (that is, what caste and family they are born into), length of life, work occupation, level of poverty or affluence, and so forth. Several Indian languages have expressions for this writing on the forehead: 

talaiyeḻuttu (“headwriting”) and talaiviti (“head-fate”) in Tamil; haṇeli barediddu (“what’s written on the forehead”) and haṇebareha (“the writing on the fore-head”) in Kannada; and phālalikhita (“what’s written on the forehead”) in San-skrit (Ramanujan 1991b, 40). Sometimes the image of writing on the forehead is condensed: either the writing is not mentioned, as in the references to kŏpāl (from the Sanskrit kapāla, “forehead”) in Bengali, and kapālāṅti (“what’s on your forehead”) in Marathi (Brown 1978, 254); or the location of the writing on the forehead is not mentioned, as in brahmalipi (“Brahma’s script”) in Sanskrit and in the Hindi phrase hamārī kismat men garībī likhī hai (“Poverty is written in my destiny”) (Wadley 1994, 118). 

When an audience first encounters it in a proverb or folk narrative, the motif of headwriting seems to suggest that fate is inexorable, as in the Tamil phrase talaiyeḻuttu iruntāl atai yār māṟṟa muṭiyum? (“If it is in the headwriting who can change it?”). Similar in some ways to the well-known Indian concept of karma, the motif of headwriting expresses in a highly condensed fashion that one must bear one’s fate, whatever it is, since no amount of effort can alter it

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karma linked to the social ranking of castes. If one abided by one’s caste duty (sva- dharma), one earned good karma and was ensured a better rebirth in the next life. But the neglect of duty unfailingly led to the direst of consequences, either in this life or the next.

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people draw on a wide variety of discourses besides karma to provide a meaningful framework within which the event can be confronted and contained, for example, astrology, ancestor worship, witchcraft, village goddess worship, and headwriting (Hiebert 1983). These theodicies may be broken down into several categories based on the primary cause of fortune or misfortune: a) an impersonal, mysterious force like fate (daiva [divine fate]; vidhi [an injunction that must be followed]; 

bhāgya [one’s portion in life]); b) the will of god or the gods (deva; Iśvara; kuladey-vam); c) the coming to fruition of past karma (karmavipāka); and, d) human effort (puruṣakarma; puruṣakāra).