Prasada, the Gracious Gift, in Contemporary and Classical South Asia

Abstract

The importance of prasāda as a “gracious gift” in contemporary South Asian religious practice is hard to overstate. As the central liturgical prop at Hindu pilgrimage centers and local temples alike, prasāda is an everyday part of Hindu religious practice. Yet long before the codification of modern Hindu ritual, prasāda was also a foundational concept in Sanskrit literature. Scholarly works have considered prasāda as an element of Hindu ritual from anthropological perspectives and in specialized textual contexts but they have not been integrated together. In this article, I use a multidisciplinary approach to put prasāda at the center of analysis. First, I present some general principles of contemporary prasāda practice illustrated by examples from four Hindu pilgrimage sites, followed by a brief analysis of prasāda's usage in well-known Sanskrit scriptures (selections from the Purāṇas). Taken together, prasāda is revealed to be a foundational concept for making sense of Hindu religious life in South Asian terms.