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 Sansk...