Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Tamil-speaking South India, this article presents one Hindu invitation ritual to return dead relatives known as pūvāṭaikkāri to the world of the living and install them as household deities. This two-day ceremony demonstrates that prevailing scholarly perceptions of death and what follows it in Hindu traditions have constrained our ability to appreciate other models for ritual relationships between the living and the dead. These vernacular rituals call the dead back into the world, convince them to possess a human host, and persuade them to be permanently installed in the family’s domestic shrine so they may protect and sustain living kin. Rather than aiming to irrevocably separate the dead from the living, these rites are instead oriented toward eventual conjunction with the dead and therefore reveal a fundamentally different picture than that articulated in the majority of Hinduism’s sacred texts and scholarly accounts.

中文翻译：

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将死者带回家：印度南部泰米尔语的印度教邀请仪式

本文借鉴在泰米尔语南部印度进行的长期民族志实地调查，介绍了一种印度教邀请仪式，将被称为 pūvāṭaikkāri 的死去的亲属送回活人世界，并将他们安置为家庭神灵。这个为期两天的仪式表明，学术界对死亡的普遍看法以及印度教传统中的死亡观念限制了我们欣赏其他生者与死者之间仪式关系模式的能力。这些白话仪式将死者召唤回世界，说服他们拥有人类宿主，并说服他们永久安置在家庭的家庭神殿中，以便他们可以保护和维持活着的亲属。与其旨在将死者与生者不可逆转地分开，