Debating dan

Of particular importance in the debates subsequent to the 1980s' studies by Parry and Raheja has been Laidlaw's insistence that there is no single logic of dan shared by all participants and present throughout the whole of Indian society.Footnote ⁸ The Jain alms-round in Jaipur, documented by Laidlaw, demonstrates this point nicely, because the dan offered by lay to renouncer Jains is explicitly ‘constructed contrastively, as deeply different from other forms of dan, and it is routinely understood by different participants in crucially different ways’.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, the Jain practice only works as it does because the different participants (lay-giver and renouncer-receiver) understand it differently.

Several scholars have found the argument that there is a single logic of dan implicit in Raheja's, The Poison in the Gift, a reading that Raheja strongly contests,Footnote ¹⁰ and that certainly could not be imputed to her subsequent works, which have emphasized the ‘multivocality’ of Indian gift exchange, with its ‘multiple strategic possibilities’.Footnote ¹¹ Nevertheless, a unitary concept of dan has come to assume the status for some scholars of a kind of special access route to Indian cultural logics. In Absent Lord, for example, Babb draws on the work of Parry and Raheja in seeing the principles underlying dan as a connective force underpinning such seemingly diverse ritual practices associated with Saiva Siddhanta, Buddhism and Jain ritual culture.Footnote ¹² Finding the structural principles of dan present in various transfigured and yet readily identifiable ways in a number of seemingly divergent devotional contexts, Babb ultimately concludes that the ritual patterns he documents ‘are neither Hindu nor Jain but variations on a deeper structure that is simply South Asian’.Footnote ¹³

Perhaps the most notable treatment of dan as a special access route to Indian cultural logics is Quigley's The Interpretation of Caste which sees dan as providing a generalized mechanism of caste-ranking through ‘impurity’ transfers that connects with kingship and kinship models in the subcontinent.Footnote ¹⁴ For Laidlaw, Quigley's approach epitomizes a fairly widespread problem in responses to the work of Parry and Raheja: a general acceptance of the idea ‘that there is such a thing as “the Indian gift”, grounded in a hegemonic ideology, which is shared by all participants and which structures relations in determinate ways’.Footnote ¹⁵ Gregory, too, pays attention to the likelihood of dissenting perceptions with his emphasis on the possibility of ‘rival cognitions of the [same] transaction’, which he terms ‘asymmetrical recognition’.Footnote ¹⁶

Osella and Osella's study of giving practices in a Kerala village gives force to the arguments of Gregory and Laidlaw.Footnote ¹⁷ Based on the viewpoints of both donors and recipients, it reveals that different parties to the same transaction may have very different conceptions of the same gift. Landowners view the customary annual feasts they stage for their field labourers as being unreciprocated, and see their gifts of food as transferring their faults to the eaters. Labourers, however, view the food as a sign of reciprocity for the work they do on the land, and conceive the food they eat as transmitting to them the landowners' good fortune. Hence, Osella and Osella suggest, ‘a greater range of qualities may be detached and passed between people’ than previously acknowledged in the literature on this subject.Footnote ¹⁸

None of this is to suggest, however, that there are no emblematic or distinctive ‘traits’ recurrent within different varieties of dan. But recent work on Indian gift exchange has laid emphasis on a dan which is characterized by a multiplicity of form and valuation, with the different parties of particular dan transactions frequently evaluating its significance in dissimilar ways. What is required, then, is a nuanced perspective which notes both the remarkable persistence and prevalence of particular themes in Indian giving (in particular idealized asymmetry and the perilous nature of transfers between donor and donee) and the fact that theories of the gift have been and continue to be subject to considerable alteration over time ‘and the idea that gifts should be avoided is variously ignored, qualified and even contradicted in different sources’.Footnote ¹⁹

Laidlaw also questions certain assumptions about the nature of the gift's transmissibility.Footnote ²⁰ The paradigmatic content of dan in Indian anthropology is ‘sin’ or inauspiciousness. For instance, in the village of Pahansu in Uttar Pradesh, inauspicious gifts are given at many occasions during the yearly cycle of festivals as well as at a plenitude of life-cycle rituals, with the effect of endlessly reinforcing the dominance of a particular caste grouping (the Gujars). Whereas in Banaras, funerary gifts ‘corrupt the recipient body and soul, and result in untold misfortune unless proper expiatory steps are taken’.Footnote ²¹ Laidlaw's argument, however, is that the gift's spirit or ‘poison’ is ‘not some unique or mysterious substance found only in gifts’. What has been taken to be a specific feature of dan was really a manifestation of ‘the dangers attendant on social interaction in general’.Footnote ²² Laidlaw gives the examples of cooked food, cloth and detached parts of the body as ‘powerful media for the flow of bio-moral qualities between persons’.Footnote ²³ According to this argument, Indian gifts should be considered a key context for transmission of ‘spirit’ rather than a specific manifestation of transmission with its own unique properties.

Since social interaction is by no means always harmful or dangerous in South Asia (indeed, in some cases quite the reverse as when the saliva of a sacred teacher is transferred to worshippers ‘as a source of grace and power’),Footnote ²⁴ it follows from Laidlaw's argument that dan need not necessarily poison or pollute. And yet this is a suggestion subtly present in Parry's own analysis of mortuary gift-giving in Banaras.Footnote ²⁵ While Parry's study indeed centres on the sin and misfortune transmissible through dan, the model he elucidates at least implies the possibility of the reverse effect. For if gifts from mourners to Brahmins are imperilling because they are ‘saturated with the evil consequences of the donor's conduct’,Footnote ²⁶ then gifts from those who are of elevated, or enlightened status, such as ‘saintly’ spiritual teachers, might well be saturated with the morally edifying consequences of the donor's conduct. In this light, Parry's priests, in emphasizing the sin they accumulate from donors’ gifts, reveal less that the gift is an exemplary means of sin removal, than their own pessimistic view of their fellow Indians.

A recent essay by Huberman lends support to Laidlaw's argument.Footnote ²⁷ Huberman finds that the dangers attendant on exchange are not particular to dan, but hinge rather on a set of ‘highly pervasive cultural beliefs regarding the relationships between persons, their acts, sin, and its circulation’. Her exploration of the moral perils negotiated by the young boys who operate as commission agents (dalals) in the foreign tourist economy in Banaras leads her to challenge the view ‘that it is only the unreciprocated gift of dan that is believed to transmit inauspiciousness or sin to those who receive it’. Huberman also states that, ‘While [dangerous transmissibility and notions of sin and inauspiciousness] may become more pronounced in. . .contexts [of dan], they are hardly limited to them’.Footnote ²⁸ This is a compelling point on several scores. First, the evidence she presents appears to bear out Laidlaw's argument that the transmissibility associated with dan is far from being specific to dan. Second, the point is conceded that such transmissibility is frequently more pronounced in contexts of dan. What this enables us to see is that the positions of Laidlaw and Parry are perfectly compatible. Laidlaw correctly views the contagiousness of dan as partaking of a very general phenomenon and as present in an array of non-dan contexts. But Parry is also compelling and convincing in arguing for the distinctiveness of non-reciprocal dan in being a particularly effective mechanism of transmission, and also in claiming that this is so in a very wide variety of settings in South Asia.Footnote ²⁹ The examples cited below concerning rakt-dan add further weight to Parry's claim.

So the question should not be: why is dan a mode of (in most but not all cases dangerous) transmission? Rather, the question becomes: why is dan such a pronounced mode of transmission? I put forward several suggestions. The most frequent manifestations of compromising social contact in the subcontinent are contingent or accidental: being pushed up against unknown others on a train or bus, touching the hand of the trader in the market, and so on. If such contact is frequently accidental, the contact entailed in dan rarely is: dan is highly elaborated social contact. For example, Mines notes that, in order to expel and transfer negative moral qualities in the village in which she worked in Tamil Nadu, and also in Pahansu, the Uttar Pradesh village studied by Raheja, these qualities are often ‘transferred from persons to objects and then on to other persons’.Footnote ³⁰ In Pahansu, ‘transfers are effected through simple ritual procedures. . .such as circling an object around a person's body to remove an illness or other negative quality and then transferring it to another person or place’.Footnote ³¹ Negative moral qualities are thus made finite and disposable through their objectification. As elaborated social contact, dan possesses a particular directedness—a ‘vectorial’ quality—that other forms of ‘contagious’ contact do not. In the cases discussed by Raheja, Mines and Parry, by virtue of both the giver's intentionality and the attendant ritual procedures, dan appears to objectify and make explicit those always-present and yet at the same time frequently latent fears concerning the flows of bio-moral qualities between persons. Through dan, one is brought fully face-to-face with the dangers of social contact.

There is, as will have been noted, something else that is distinctive about those cases of dan where transmission is held to occur: its making finite, and in consequence, its making disposable of sins, impurities or inauspiciousness. The ritual procedures mentioned above would seem to be critical determinants of this process of making finite. In order to illustrate the generality of the contagiousness of social contact I gave the example earlier of the sacred teacher whose saliva is a boon to his worshippers. When the saliva is transferred as a source of grace, there is no suggestion that the sacred teacher is himself emptied of grace and power. So dan is not identical with the theme of generalized infectious contact but is a significant variation on it. Dan represents a usage or deployment of this generalized transmissibility in order that particular qualities may be expelled as well as infect—dan in this view may be understood as an attempt to hone and manipulate a more general template in order that the one who infects is simultaneously emptied.Footnote ³² If this were to be accepted, then what is unique about the gift is not that it passes on bio-moral qualities, but that it purifies the giver.

Dan in public

I turn now to the life of dan in public—a key manifestation of dan in contemporary India that has yet to receive sustained analytical attention, perhaps due to the very specific nature of the ethnographic contexts that frame existing studies. Most prominently, an assortment of charitable and philanthropic organizations attempt to employ dan as an instrument to foster a public ‘giving culture’, which they see as either lacking or misdirected in its existing manifestations.Footnote ³³ Critical to these attempts is the objectification of dan: its fixing as a ‘thing’ as a condition of its application. As seen above, the meanings of dan discussed in the literature vary greatly and are elaborated in strikingly contrasting ways. However, attempts to objectify dan so that it may be engaged in support of particular projects give rise to a process of disambiguation. To clarify I turn to Cohn who, in his well-known account of the census and cultural objectification, argues that the ‘Western educated class of Indians’ began in the twentieth century to ‘stand back and look at themselves’, making their own culture into a ‘thing’.Footnote ³⁴ Once culture has been turned into a conscious object, states Cohn, it can be used for ‘political, cultural and religious battles’.Footnote ³⁵ Following from this, I demonstrate below how an objectified—singularized, disambiguated, ‘generified’Footnote ³⁶ —dan is deployed by blood bank medics in the ‘battle’ to increase levels of voluntary blood donation. I would go so far as to suggest that objectified/applied versions of dan are one of the most significant ways in which dan is conceptualized and enacted in present-day India. That said, such versions cannot alone define what dan has become or is becoming. As will become apparent, the case of blood donation demonstrates the different ways in which the suppressed (or ambiguous) elements are continually creeping back in. There is, then, in addition to the key trend of disambiguation, a countervailing trend of re-ambiguation.

In its objectified, public life, dan can appear almost as a free-floating signifier, de-contextualized, and seemingly danger-free. Indeed, far from being morally imperilling, it functions in public largely as an unproblematic indicator of the genius of Indian charity —a kind of triumph of Indian culture. To take one of many possible examples: at a social service awards function in 2005 organized by the Rotary Club of Madras, Tamil Nadu Governor Shri Surjit Singh Barnala suggested that the Rotary movement—a prominent contributor to the national polio eradication programme—was heir to India's ‘great tradition of voluntary service’, as encapsulated in ‘the virtue of dan or free gift’.Footnote ³⁷

Characterizations abound of dan as a pristine philanthropic principle ripe for operationalization. In an essay entitled ‘Philanthropic Perspectives of Hinduism’, written with the express intention of helping to foster an Indian ‘culture of giving’, Raju asserts that the Bhagavad Gita emphasizes ‘the ethical and moral imperatives of practicing philanthropy: datavyamiti yaddaram diyate anupakarine (The meaning of giving is that which is given without any expectations of return and without any strings attached) (dan)’.Footnote ³⁸ Hindu law givers, claims Raju, ‘have built the philanthropic principles into life-cycle rituals and rites of passage. Every vital event of a person's life is an occasion for giving and celebration’.Footnote ³⁹ This de-contextualized, morally unambiguous depiction of dan is fairly typical of the philanthropy literature. The author's insistence that philanthropic principles are embedded in Hindu life-cycle rituals might be considered in the light of those rituals documented ethnographically by Raheja for a village in Uttar Pradesh, during which the giving of dan transmits inauspiciousness from givers towards a class of often extremely reluctant receivers. Raheja notes that terror itself is one of the ingredients of dan in the village of Pahansu.Footnote ⁴⁰ We might take it that Raju was not referring to these life-cycle gifts when declaring that ‘Every vital event of a person's life is an occasion for giving and celebration’.

I emphatically do not mean to suggest that a rough (and indeed productive) convergence between philanthropy and dan cannot be made a reality in diverse lived contexts. Neither, after all, is one thing, and there are certainly points of conceptual overlap. In particular, virtually all ideologies of dan—historically, and in the present—emphasize disinterest and non-reciprocity. Likewise so do many theories—whatever else its variegated practice may suggest—of philanthropy, and what might seem at first glance like a particularly glaring divergence concerning the status of recipients—philanthropy insisting on their ‘neediness’, dan on their worthiness (seemingly quite different things)—might in fact better be viewed as a point of increasing convergence.

In her study of theories of the gift in the Dharmashastras, Heim presents an argument which appears to underscore this variance in respect of the status of recipients, noting that altruistic gifts given out of pity rather than esteem, while not prohibited, do not result in great quantities of merit, and frequently do not rate as dan.Footnote ⁴¹ ‘It is not clear’, writes Heim, ‘how the ethics of esteem could accommodate an ethics of altruism’.Footnote ⁴² If poverty and wretchedness signalled ‘demerit and moral want owing to past wrongdoing’, such people rated not as needy and therefore deserving but as needy and therefore unworthy recipients.Footnote ⁴³ The importance of the worthiness of recipients is also signalled in more contemporary analyses: in the mortuary contexts discussed by Parry, the ‘worthy vessel’ is one who is extremely reluctant to accept the gift.Footnote ⁴⁴ For the Jain communities documented by Laidlaw, supatra-dan—literally a gift to a worthy recipient, and transferred from lay to renouncer Jains—is perhaps the most elaborated and pre-eminent form of dan.Footnote ⁴⁵

The emergent ‘mobilisable’ dan of the contemporary public sphere does not necessarily jettison this concern with worthiness and status, but instead makes need the index of a reformulated notion of worth.Footnote ⁴⁶ For instance, I have sought to show elsewhere how rakt-dan (blood donation) has in many contexts come to possess superior virtue than other varieties of dan offering such as pind-dan (the gift of a ball of grains or rice to the departed) or forms of temple giving in part because it presupposes a need which cannot be guaranteed in the case of temple or mortuary priests who are often viewed with intense suspicion.Footnote ⁴⁷ In this view, part of the virtue of blood donation as a mode of dan is that it possesses built-in means testing—a person (at least in theory) does not receive a transfusion if they do not need one: the transfusion recipient is needy and therefore worthy. The website http://trueeventindia.com, on a page promoting the giving of dan online (discussed further below), demonstrates that the conceptual operation which makes need the index of a reformulated notion of worth is not restricted to rakt-dan: ‘It is imperative that all Daan should be given to Supaatra. Supaatra means whoever is worthy to get it. Donation to unworthy people for that particular Daan is wasting that thing, such as feeding any rich man has no purpose of donating food’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Worthiness thus remains central, but has undergone a key shift in meaning.

A further point proceeds from this which relates to accountability. Modernist philanthropic and charitable organizations in India as elsewhere subscribe to protocols that insist on transparency, which can entail the tracking of donations, the screening of partner NGOs and other measures to promote ‘trustworthiness’. As Bornstein has pointed out, this kind of NGO philanthropy defines a gift that is ‘tied to the guarantee of a receipt’, and as such forms a contrast with the disinterested and entirely alienable character of the dan that is described in scripture and scholarship alike.Footnote ⁴⁹ If dan demands a total relinquishment at odds with accountability protocols, how can NGOs hope to mobilize it? Undeterred, AccountAid India, an organization dedicated to promoting accountability and good practice among NGOs, has produced a document called ‘Accountability and Hindu Dan’, which attempts to locate features of dan compatible with ‘accountability’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The document asks: ‘What, then, is the accountability mechanism used in Hindu society to ensure that dan is used properly?’ The answer focuses on the selection of the donee, arguing that, if worth has been determined through meticulous selection, then a need either to track the gift or receive a receipt for it simply does not arise—relinquishment and accountability are not only possible but positively complementary:

So in this argument, accountability is built into dan but in a temporally different ‘moment’ to models which track the gift and demand to see results—efficacy is assured prior rather than subsequent to the gift. As noted above, Heim has questioned whether an ‘ethics of esteem’ can accommodate an ‘ethics of altruism’.Footnote ⁵² It has been demonstrated how need and worth may be collapsed into one another to create precisely the accommodation about which Heim is understandably sceptical. Once such an operation has been performed, the subsidiary query—can an aesthetic of relinquishment accommodate the bureaucratic protocols of accountability?—can be tackled: careful pre-emptive monitoring of worth-need allows the complete relinquishment of that which is given.

Despite the sophistication of such efforts to effect convergence, those seeking to mobilize dan as an instrument of philanthropy are nevertheless prime movers in a process of disambiguation. They reflect upon the antique, intricate history of giving and receiving dan and in so doing locate a dan as they would like it to be: benign, philanthropic, humanitarian—to employ Raju's term, ‘celebratory’. This selective understanding of dan should not simply be dismissed as inauthentic, since such disambiguated understandings have themselves become an important manifestation of dan in contemporary India. The kind of ‘first-order’ articulation which values dan only inasmuch as it is amenable to operationalizationFootnote ⁵³ has a descriptive power: just as caste under British rule came in fact to be something like the British thought it was,Footnote ⁵⁴ so the sheer prevalence in Indian public life of trouble-free equations between philanthropy and dan suggest that such articulations may be changing dan such that their description of it becomes true.

And yet there do remain strong elements of ambivalence and suspicion concerning dan in public representations. As noted above, dan frequently surfaces in public narratives as an exalted category—a kind of synonym for virtuous disinterest—and it is precisely this public reverence that can give rise to distrust: notably, characters of suspect morality have sought to associate themselves with dan in order to stake claims to virtuous disinterest. To take one notorious and tragic example: during the 2004 Lok Sabha election campaign, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's constituency agent in Lucknow, Lalji Tandon, distributed free saris to voters on his birthday. In the rush to obtain the saris, at least 22 women were crushed to death. According to one news report, Tandon responded to the inevitable accusations that he had been attempting to bribe voters by claiming that the saris were offered to the women as dan (without the expectation of the return of a vote in favour of Vajpayee). However, as the report notes, the official body with the formidable task of regulating electoral conduct took a different view of Tandon's behaviour: ‘the Electoral Commission saw it as a violation of the model [electoral] code of conduct and slapped him with a showcase notice’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Though he probably convinced very few, it is nonetheless evident that Tandon attempted to stake a claim to virtue by invoking the idea of dan. Indeed, the affixing of ‘dan’ to a particular cause, concept or action frequently represents an attempt to assert a relation between it and virtuous disinterest.

Tandon's attempt to defend the distribution of saris to voters during an election campaign by retrospectively labelling the action dan indicates how and why perceptions of dan can switch all too easily from virtue to mistrust. There is a further way in which this can happen, and it is summed up well by Tribune columnist Vepa Rao in an article on ‘How corruption comes from home’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The practices of danadharma and ‘special puja-paath’ can directly facilitate wrongdoing and corruption, says Rao, because they are the means by which ‘the priests suggest a way of “cleansing and purifying” in case of every wrong deed’. Both instruments ‘bail us out regularly’. ‘You can commit a crime, but amply “make up” for it later—baad me dekha jayega! This emboldens us’. Because the giving of dan can, in effect, redeem those acts against which it is defined and stands in opposition, it can also encourage them. The perhaps paradoxical point here is that attempts to mobilize dan depend on the very virtue through which this form of gift retains its dangerous ambiguity. Hence, ambiguity is likely to remain encoded even within its highly sanitized variants.

Rakt-dan

I have demonstrated above that one of the critical life-forms of dan in public resides in its objectified variants. Cultural practitioners attempt to cultivate conceptual convergences between dan and other phenomena—notably ‘philanthropy’—in order to produce practical results. I have also provided some evidence, however, that objectified versions cannot alone define what dan has become or is becoming. Objectifications can be unstable, and the wrong convergences can arise. I turn now to a sustained example from my fieldwork in a variety of blood donation contexts in north India (2003–2005) in order to elucidate in greater detail these concomitant logics of objectification, convergence, and destabilization.

Conceptions of dan are at the heart of campaigns to foster voluntary blood donation in north India. Voluntary, non-remunerated blood donation—as opposed to the still prevalent modes of paid and family-replacement blood donation—is the international standard as advocated by global health organizations such as the World Health Organization and the Red Cross for reasons of safety.Footnote ⁵⁷ As we have seen, dan is very frequently characterized as a gift for which no return can be countenanced.Footnote ⁵⁸ Since blood donation was first practiced in north India, however, rakt-dan has been the euphemistic administrative label for all the varieties of blood donation: paid, replacement and voluntary. For many voluntary donors and blood bank staff, the use of ‘dan’ to denote paid and replacement donation was and is a disgraceful misapplication of a revered term and concept. However, the recent emphasis in India on the promotion of voluntary blood donation, necessitated by a 1998 legal ruling which forbade payment, has made the use of the term ‘rakt-dan’ seem less reprehensible to these donors and staff. This is because in the emergent voluntary system, donors should receive no payment and be unaware of the recipients of their donations. Voluntary donation thus promises to provide both the asymmetry and anonymity held to characterize many classical notions of dan.Footnote ⁵⁹ Indeed, the anonymity and asymmetry of voluntary blood donation, on a conceptual level at least, present striking points of convergence between rakt-dan and key features of classical modes of dan.

Blood bank staff actively seek to translate this conceptual convergence into a highly practical one. Voluntary blood donation, they say, must conform precisely to the highest ideal of disinterested dan since it is seen to ensure the safety of donated blood. This is because of the medical policy axiom that offering donors incentives increases the likelihood that they will conceal risk factors which, if revealed, would disqualify them from donating.Footnote ⁶⁰ The characterization of blood donation as a dan thus becomes an imperative for reasons of safety.

The efforts of blood bank staff to elucidate and publicize this convergence (to make it a living convergence as well as a formal one) reflects Healy's point that the duties of blood banks are not merely technical. Their task is

It is here that dan, as an explicitly moralized asymmetrical mode of giving, becomes a resource for staff in their attempts to not just get the public to donate blood but to get them to donate it in the way they want. Blood donation is thus extolled in publicity materials as being a great dan (maha-dan).Footnote ⁶²Rakt-dan is sometimes depicted as a variant of anna-dan (the gift of food) which is given mostly to wandering ascetics or to the poor. Anna-dan and rakt-dan, of course, are both gifts of sustaining substance.

One donor recruiter, employed by a large government blood bank in Mumbai, though persuaded that notions of ‘dan’ do need to be employed in order to bolster both the quantity and quality of donations, nevertheless finds the employment distasteful, the suggestion being that the public should not need to be taught what it should already know as part of an ‘archive of inceptive moral knowledge’Footnote ⁶³: ‘Yes, I tell them it's dan, pavitra-dan [sacred donation] blah blah blah. Bas’. Another recruiter, from Kolkata, explained the ‘uses’ of dan: ‘dan is a sacred word. Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and Hinduism all teach dan, or free gift. If we [recruiters] and religious leaders teach that blood should be given as dan, then it becomes very useful to the blood donation cause’. Yet another recruiter says of dan: ‘we need to build on this cultural idiom to teach people to give blood without any expectation’. One doctor, founder of a Delhi NGO concerned with promoting voluntary blood donation, complained to me about the giving of incentives such as mugs and t-shirts to donors. He was adamant that ‘blood donors must have the wish to give a dan with nothing in return. If people donate with expectations of receiving a gift, this is impure, selfish (swarth purn) blood’. The doctor's reference to ‘impure, selfish blood’ reflects doctors’ conviction that convergence between non-reciprocal dan and voluntary donation is critical for reasons of safety: ‘impurity’ here seems to allude to the taking of a gift by donors being a contravention of both asymmetrical dan and (consequently) of the protocol meant to ensure the safety of donated blood for transfusion recipients. There is a profound indivisibility of the practical and the ideal in doctors’ appeals to dan: for what is ‘right’ according to the ideal of dan as a mode of enacting high-minded asymmetrical exchange is also that which is practical and necessary in order to ensure the gift's safety for vulnerable recipients: virtue ethical and consequentialist forms of ethical reasoning are also subject to convergence.

I emphasize that blood bank staff do not speak with one voice about the importance of dan, some even contravene the generally agreed position about the need for asymmetrical giving by advocating the offering of material incentives in order to increase donor numbers.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nevertheless, there is clearly a determined attempt by blood bank staff in Delhi and beyond to employ ideas about dan as a means to help foster voluntary giving in the place of paid and deal-like family-replacement donation. Doctors mobilize the accessible public dan variant which, though drained of the dangerous transmissibility inherent in many modes of dan recorded in Indological and anthropological literature,Footnote ⁶⁵ still reflects Parry's summation of the ideology of dan as being ‘that of the “pure gift”. It is a voluntary and disinterested donation made without ostentation or expectation of any kind of this-worldly return, whether material or immaterial’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Parry goes on to demonstrate very effectively the different ways mortuary dan contravenes this ideology in practice. If the giving of dan is capable of removing (and transmitting) the donor's sin, as Parry shows that it is in the Banaras mortuary contexts he documents, then a critical paradox emerges: a gift capable of purifying its giver appears ‘to subvert its own ethic of disinterested generosity’.Footnote ⁶⁷ It is suggested now that the dan applied by blood bank staff—an ‘authorized’ version, sanitized of any trace of sin, poison or purification—despite widespread acceptance among donors and staff alike, is unstable and subject to disruption by ‘unauthorized’, suppressed dan elements. Dan is re-ambiguated in practice. Moreover, its authorized mode is subverted in a manner directly comparable with the way in which the ethic of disinterested generosity is breached in the Banaras case: through purification of the donor. Once again, the ideology of the gift's purity is compromised by virtue of the fact that it is also purificatory.

Given their potential to threaten life through passing on infection, blood donations can, on one level, seem to literalise contagion theories of the Indian gift. Indeed, terrible disease is understood by Banaras priests to be the ultimate effect of accepting pilgrims’ gifts: ‘The sin emerges as excrement vomited at death; it causes the body to rot with leprosy, seeps into the hair (which is why it is necessary to be tonsured on many ritual occasions), and on death it makes the corpse particularly incombustible’.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, I do not wish to merely draw an analogy between the transmission of infection from pilgrims to priests (leprosy, primarily) and that which is all too often transmitted from blood donors to transfusion recipients (AIDS, hepatitis, malaria, and so on). Rather, I argue that what Parry calls the ‘cultural idiom’ of dan-based transmissibility can, in dramatic fashion, exceed the idiomatic and become a fact of matter—that is, converge with, and indeed be the cause of, actual infection.Footnote ⁶⁹ Contagion theory causes literal contagion, with potentially perilous consequences for transfusion recipients.

The situation is acutely ironic given that, as I have explained, disambiguated versions of dan are employed by some doctors in the hope of improving the safety of donated blood in India. To such doctors, dan holds the promise of being the culturally appropriate antidote to the serious problem of the giving of blood with expectation. An official, ‘authorized’ convergence between dan and blood donation is thus pursued by doctors for reasons of safety. What I am suggesting, however, is that an unauthorized convergence between dan principles and blood donation is precisely the source of an unacknowledged threat to safety. The cultural form meant to help alleviate the problem of infected blood comes to exacerbate it.

Evidence suggests that in certain circumstances the expelling of sin, as identified within forms of classical dan, surfaces as an aim of rakt-dan. Bearing in mind Parry's analysis, such an understanding would appear to make blood donation attractive to precisely those it most needs to repel (those who have ‘sinned’ in the conventional senses of engaging in sexual promiscuity or drug use). Non-material ‘karmic’ sin potentially coalesces here with actually transmissible infection. If both the non-material accumulated sins of past actions and medically detectable infection were transmissible through rakt-dan, the attempt at removing the former would heighten the risk of the transmission of the latter—with obviously destructive consequences for recipients. This casts in a new light Parry's observation that dan is ‘saturated with the evil consequences of the donor's conduct’.Footnote ⁷⁰ As noted above, while the transfer of ‘sin’ documented by Parry is understood by his informants literally to result in leprosy for recipient ‘cess-pits’, the practice is still ultimately treated by the anthropologist as a ‘cultural idiom’, and understandably so. However, the personnel involved in collecting, treating and testing donated blood, together with transfusion recipients, are in an analogous and yet profoundly different sense to Parry's informants, also vitally concerned with the gift's purity or otherwise. The retention of the ‘sinful’ aspect of classical dan within the ‘modernist’ context of rakt-dan might result in other ‘literal’ transmissions of infection.

According to numerous blood bank staff and several of his devotees whom I met in Mumbai, the Maharashtrian guru, Narendra Maharaj, encourages his followers to give blood at mass donation camps organized by his seva dal (service volunteers) precisely in order for them to remove their sins (pap). A Delhi-based blood bank doctor provided me with a more detailed example. She told the story of a Sikh man whose wife was suffering from mental illness. He was told by his guru to give three gifts from his body as a means of restoring her sanity. As a Sikh, he did not consider giving his hair. He subsequently attempted to give blood at a Delhi blood bank on three consecutive days. Three months, however, is the officially sanctioned length of time meant to elapse between donations. The man was recognized by blood bank personnel attempting to give for a second time on the second day and barred from making further donations. There is the strong suggestion here that he was attempting to give three gifts of medically utilisable blood as a means of removing the inauspiciousness afflicting his family.Footnote ⁷¹

This example shows the incompliancy of dan in the face of attempts to apply it in a ‘stripped down’ form. Objectification is key to understanding the attempts of blood bank staff to oversee a convergence between blood donation and dan and most cases of dan in public. However, proffered convergences remain unstable. The suppressed elements of dan, though marginalized in theory, often remain compelling in practice.

Kuch sawal dan ke bare me: mobility and reflection. Or: ‘NRI Attention!!!’

In another example of the ‘application’ of dan, the English National Health Service is actively seeking to assist the migration of dan concepts to Britain as a means of boosting organ donation among Indian-origin Britons. Paralleling the examples given above of attempts to mobilize dan as a means to advance philanthropy, the National Health Service invokes the concept as an ‘authentic’ cultural idiom to prove to a reluctant British minority community that it is in their ‘culture’ to donate generously. The National Health Service has produced publicity material which informs South Asian immigrants: ‘There are many references which support the concept of organ donation in Hindu scriptures. Daan is the original word in Sanskrit for donation meaning selfless giving. In the list of the ten Niyamas (virtuous acts) Daan comes third’.Footnote ⁷²

What this example demonstrates is the increasingly ‘uncertain translocality’ and ‘extra-territorial’ nature of dan.Footnote ⁷³ In a further example, Reddy has recently shown how dan is mobilized as a giving-template by Houston Indians asked to provide genetic material for research purposes.Footnote ⁷⁴ In one sense, the situation is not at all novel: dan has, of course, travelled before, and I do not wish to obviate the ‘pre-existing translocalities’ of dan.Footnote ⁷⁵ And yet, it hasn't travelled like this—caught up within the ‘new mobilities of people, capital, technologies, images, and ideas that characterise globalisation’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Anthropologists have long drawn attention to ‘the prominence of identities less attached to place, or less attached obviously’,Footnote ⁷⁷ and dan evidently partakes of wider processes of the loosening of identification between particular concepts and given geographical areas.

To take the example of the Give India organization (http://www.giveindia.org), whose purpose is to facilitate, via its website, donations to a variety of accredited NGOs working in the subcontinent: though it does not itself utilize the idiom of dan as a means of attempting to secure contributions, its feedback section contains testimonies from donors who invoke the concept. For instance, it publishes a thank you note from a British Indian donor: ‘Thank you very much for the feedback that GIVE team has given to me. . .My elders used to tell me that DAAN (Donation) is the path to salvation’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The suggestion is that the donor considered his gift a dan; if so, it was evidently a highly mobile dan, mediated by the GiveIndia website and transferred via credit card between continents. The Chennai ISKON temple also invites web-mediated donations to fund its daily round of anna-dan for the poor, so that one can, wherever one is physically present in the world, directly enable the giving of anna-dan in one particular part of it.Footnote ⁷⁹

But this brand of mobile, virtual dan has not gone uncontested. In 2009 Bihar's Deputy Chief Minister, Sushil Kumar Modi, announced a plan to introduce online pind-dan, so that Indians abroad would be able to give pind-dan to their deceased forebears without actually having to visit the great Hindu pilgrimage centre of Gaya, where the offering is customarily made.Footnote ⁸⁰ This kind of gift, given via Brahmin ritual specialists, usually consists of a round ball made of a mixture of rice and wheat flour and sesame seeds, and is offered in Gaya a year after the death of a family member, or in the Hindu calendar month of Ashvin, to ensure their salvation. The state tourism department's ‘online pinda daan package’ would reportedly involve a videoconferencing facility in order to ‘simulate the physical presence of the devotee’, who would in the conventional procedure shave his head and take a dip in the local Baitarni pond.

Gaya's pandits did not react positively to the announcement. They complained about the government's ‘interference’, considering it an ‘attack on an age-old religious service’. The initiative, they claimed, was ‘the brainchild of those who have no knowledge of this ritual’. A large measure of the pandits’ hostility was connected to a fear that the state was muscling in on their monopoly trade as intermediaries with the world of the sacred: ‘It's an assault on our religion’, said one pandit. ‘The government is also trying to rob us of our livelihood’.Footnote ⁸¹ However, the pandits framed the majority of their criticism in theological terms: ‘We fail to understand the motive to introduce online pinda daan. It is not possible because a devotee's physical presence is necessary to perform the rituals’.Footnote ⁸² The protesting pandits thus retained an insistence on the immobility of dan. Their argument was that virtual pind-dan is theologically incoherent: ‘“Asking Hindus to perform pinda daan online is akin to asking Muslims to do the Haj online without visiting Mecca”, Vishnupad temple managing committee member Shivkumar Bhaiya says. Some find the idea “absurd”—for many of the rituals cannot be performed virtually. “Pinda daan involves taking a bath in the Falgu. Can you do it online”, asks Gaya Bharat Sevashram Sangha head Swami Agamamananda’.Footnote ⁸³

Despite the pandits’ obvious pecuniary imperative, the theological argument about the importance of presence and place finds a strong reflection in the literature on dan. To take just one example: Gold recounts a pilgrimage undertaken by a man from a Rajasthan village to Hardwar and other special ‘crossing places’ following the death of his father.Footnote ⁸⁴ Having submerged his father's old walking stick in the Ganges at Hardwar, the pilgrim purchased two others: one to take home, and another to give to a beggar in Pushkar. Once in Pushkar, however, the son had difficulty finding a beggar who would accept it—Gold is uncertain as to whether this was because of its uselessness or its inauspiciousness.Footnote ⁸⁵ Clearly, however, the son's giving actions bore little relation to the recipient's need, being far more influenced by the time (the aftermath of his father's death) and place (Pushkar) of the offering.

The pilgrim's giving actions in Hardwar are congruent with the pandits’ emphasis on the spatio-temporal circumstances of giving, which also finds a reflection in Ramanujan's well-known description of South Asian ‘context-sensitivity’, where there is ‘a constant flow. . .of substance from context to object’.Footnote ⁸⁶ At the same time, according to Ramanujan, modernity brings with it a movement from the context-sensitive towards the context-free.Footnote ⁸⁷ Virtual dan appears to embody just such a movement, thereby appearing to conflict with the context-sensitivity of established giving practices. The pandits, with the help of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), defeated the government, which is reported to have abandoned its plan several months after the initial announcement.Footnote ⁸⁸

But it was a hollow victory. Websites not affiliated to the Bihar government continue to offer the service. The http://trueeventindia.com website, for instance, specialises in performing rituals in differing parts of India on behalf of those—such as Non-Resident Indians (NRIs)—who, in the words of TrueEventIndia, ‘are unable to perform their Religious, Social and Emotional duties, due to Personal, Professional or any other reason’. In addition to a variety of forms of puja, TrueEventIndia offers pind-dan services for Gaya, Banaras and Allahabad. The company appears cognisant of the predicament of those Non-Resident Indians whose ‘psychic life [resides] in many spaces at once’Footnote ⁸⁹ —indeed, it advertises itself as an ‘incredible concept of taking care of people's emotions’, a veritable ‘emotional courier’—connecting this understanding to another prevalent image of the Non-Resident Indian—his presumed association with ‘flows of wealth’.Footnote ⁹⁰ As one banner on the website states: ‘“NRI Attention !!!” Pind Daan in India Through Us’.

The website follows a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) format, with answers provided to questions such as ‘Is it Important to do Pind Daan?’, ‘How I'll benefit from Pind Daan?’ and ‘What you need for Pind-Daan?’. Needless to say, the necessity of performing pind-dan is underscored in the answers:

The most critical FAQ, however, is that concerning the theological credibility of a dan without presence: ‘Is it really possible that someone else can perform rituals/prayers on my behalf and still I get the religious credit for it?’. Given the differing financial stakes it should not be surprising that the answer provided completely contradicts the ‘line’ taken by pandits in Gaya: ‘Absolutely. According to Garuda Purana, and many Religious books, anyone can perform religious rituals on your behalf. It would be considered successful and all the credit will be yours, as if you performed them’.Footnote ⁹¹ Just as there are clear precedents that lend credence to the pandits’ insistence on the importance of the spatio-temporal circumstances of the gift, an array of examples exist that are perfectly compatible with the assertion that presence is not necessary for accruing the benefits of a ritual. Pocock's Gujarati Brahmin informants, for instance, have been known to employ low-caste people to sacrifice animals on their behalf in order to propitiate an angry god.Footnote ⁹² Shunning both participation in and presence at the sacrifice, it was imperative that the Brahmin remain ‘non-violent’ and avoid pollution. But there was no doubt that it was the Brahmin who would ultimately receive the benefits of the sacrifice.

Clearly the internet has precipitated a set of debates about pind-dan which reveal a preponderance of differing views and real uncertainty about what constitutes ‘good practice’ in respect of dan. If there was no question about the legitimacy of a dan given online then TrueEventIndia would not have deemed it necessary to argue, defensively, in favour of its legitimacy. The irony is that the initiatives proposed by TrueEventIndia and the Bihar state government are both highly contextual. After all, neither scheme proposed pind-dan on the banks of the Thames or Mississippi. The sites of pind-dan remain Gaya and other important pilgrimage centres such as Allahabad and Banaras. Context is retained, but without presence. Or put differently, the ‘giving context’ evaporates—rendered virtual—but all the better to furnish or access the ‘receiving context’, the specificity of which is in fact underscored.Footnote ⁹³ It is precisely because the locations (contexts) of Gaya and Banaras are so indispensable that Non- Resident Indians will go (or are presumed to be prepared to go) to such lengths to access them from thousands of miles away. Online dan would appear to eviscerate the intense co-presence of donor and donee which, as stated above, I judge to be critical to a contact-driven process of removal and transmission of sin/inauspiciousness. So one wonders whether the sin gets eviscerated too; or might it be transmissible through the digital architecture of the internet? If dan were to be understood as ‘non-transmissible’ as a result of these interventions, then perhaps Gaya's donee pandits need not be so upset after all!

The proposal to introduce online pind-dan forced Gaya's priests to reflect afresh on what dan is and is not, with pandits insisting on its immobility and the importance of presence and TrueEventIndia insisting on precisely the reverse. A more general observation concerning dan and the internet follows, namely, that the internet has stimulated new reflection about dan, and has developed into an important arena of debate, learning and critical re-engagement in respect of it. I substantiate this claim through examination of two further websites.Footnote ⁹⁴

In 2009 a column was published on the website of the Hindustan Times financial supplement Mint headlined: ‘Why Indians don't give back to society’. There is a longstanding Indian tradition of self-excoriation concerning the perceived unwillingness of middle class (especially Hindu) Indians to contribute substantially to worthy social causes. With its origins probably lying in colonial attempts to redirect Indian gifting routes from festivals and temples towards disaster relief, schools and other more ‘worthwhile’ causes,Footnote ⁹⁵ self-criticism in respect of this ‘lack’ is an established feature of the Indian public sphere. To take one recent example, in the days following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed more than 180,000 people in coastal regions across South and Southeast Asia, one Indian newspaper columnist commented on the ‘inability of privileged Indians to help their brethren in need’, asking: ‘Is it something to do with the individual spiritual pursuit of the Hindu tradition that makes our compassion so limited?’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Mint column is characterized by similarly pained introspection, concluding ultimately that India is a Hobbesian society with low levels of interpersonal trust. But of greater concern here are the several comments posted by readers of the piece.Footnote ⁹⁷

A number of posts provide compelling evidence of the many ways in which Indians do contribute to social causes. Moreover, several respondents invoke gupt-dan Footnote ⁹⁸ (secret donation) in order to explain how a perception of defective social-mindedness hides a more generous reality. I quote from an ambivalent comment posted by ‘Arun’:

Gupt-dan is thus mobilized as a counter to the quite familiar public accusation that India does not possess a socially favourable ‘giving culture’. Another response, by ‘Prasad’, is worth quoting at length:

According to this argument, agonized reflections about how Indians ‘do not give’ are grounded in a misunderstanding consequent on the secret way in which Indians prefer to make offerings. Dan may thus be invoked online as a response to the hurt national sentiments of the religious patriot; its public life partly consisting of claims that dan is frequently not public.

A further significant online presence is found at http://www.sawaal.ibibo.com, which allows users to post and answer questions on a broad range of themes such as sexuality, astrology, fashion and health.Footnote ⁹⁹ It also possesses a ‘ritual procedures’ category, in which can be found a remarkable array of dan-related queries. Significantly, anyone can provide an answer. The preponderance of queries about the nature of dan demonstrates that it is by no means only anthropologists who are saddled with a ‘will to meaning’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Those who seek clarification about various modes of dan are not content, as Staal might have put it, to view dan as ‘pure activity, without meaning or goal’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ They seek to understand the meaning and relevance of dan in their everyday lives.

Several questions concern kanya-dan, the gift of a bride. Most answers to the question ‘What is kanyadaan?’ proclaim the inestimable virtues of this kind of gift, and these responses are considered below. But focus for the moment is on a more critical answer, which demonstrates that, though valorizations of dan predominate, the idea that dan is a triumph of Indian culture is not universally shared: ‘kanyadaan means to give gift. As goan daan [donation of a cow], same is the kanyadaan. But in modern age no value of these daan’. The author's disparaging remarks remain unelaborated; we are simply instructed that dan is to be dismissed as anachronistic. A similarly curt assessment was recently articulated by the CEO of the Indian operation of the charity ActionAid, whose approach has been to incentivize giving. His ActionAid telemarketers tell donors: ‘“And, madam, with that [donation] you can get tickets to a movie, a holiday package, a discount coupon for a meal in a restaurant, or a Reliance Infocomm cellphone.” Bottomline: If you've got money for charity, [ActionAid India] can make it sweat for you’.Footnote ¹⁰² To mobilize dan, according to this model of solicitation, would make little sense. As the CEO put it: ‘Daan, or donation, has always been a part of the Indian culture, but it has always been mindless’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Such an evaluation is particularly interesting in the light of attempts, discussed above, to find and exploit common ground between concepts of dan and modern philanthropy. The ActionAid CEO instead views dan as a hindrance to the brand of marketized philanthropy he promotes (presumably due to the confusing illogicality, according to the theory of ‘economic man’, of a cultural form whose quintessence, for the idealist, remains disinterest), and seeks therefore to separate rather than to advance convergence between the different conceptual entities.

Such criticism is obviously contrary to the dynamic of reverence and stabilization that I earlier proposed constitutes a large measure of the life of dan in public, attesting to a further important facet of contemporary dan: the noteworthy level of debate and reflective scrutiny to which it is subject.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ These examples of disparagement might conceivably be connected to the internalization by the metropolitan and political class of present-day liberalizing mores, but it remains a fairly marginal counter-trend, and in any case dan has for decades intermittently found itself to be the subject of criticism: the social theorist, Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949), for instance, saw dan as arbitrary and undisciplined. In Sarkar's view, charity bestowed ‘according to personal or religious virtue or duty’ must be replaced by professional techniques of care and the governmentalization of helping services.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ ‘Unruly’ dan, then, has been pitted against institutionalized care provision. As noted above, however, present-day institutions of provision tend to approach the matter differently, viewing dan not as a hindrance but as a resource; dan is stabilized as a less unruly force and made to assist the institutions it has on occasion been considered to compromise.

So there are and have been dissenting voices, but deferential attitudes remain predominant in public representations of dan. Online discussions about dan are, of course, a manifestation of dan in public, but there is a qualitative difference between representations of dan online and elsewhere in the public sphere. The relative anonymity of online discussants distinguishes them from the public figures quoted in newspapers and charitable publications whose raison d’être is to marshal dan as a template for philanthropic activity. These spokespeople provide quotes fit for public consumption and overlook ‘unsavoury’ or unruly aspects of dan—theirs is a ‘politically correct’ dan. The anonymity of online discussion, however, means that this does not hold in quite the same way on the internet. Furthermore, contributors tend to be neither experts nor ‘public figures’, despite the public nature of the conversation. Structural features of the online arena thus enable it to convey a sense that the state of dan is less settled and delimited than its articulators elsewhere in the public sphere would have it. I offer three examples.

1. (1) Posts on http://www.sawaal.ibibo.com declare the critical importance of giving dan during solar eclipses in order to remove its malevolent effects. This recalls Parry's discussion of particularly virulent forms of dan—he mentions that gifts, given in order to counter evil planetary influences, are especially perilous for recipients.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

2. (2) Another post asks: ‘What is “tuladaan?” Why is it done?’ The respondent states: ‘Tuladaan is done to appease Saturn (Shani). Under tuladaan, foodgrains equivalent to your weight can be given to a Brahmin. If the Brahmin accepts this daan you would get the result of that daan’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷Tula-dan has been described by Parry as perhaps the most dangerous of all forms of dan, being the most explicit in connecting the negative aspects of the donor with that which is given: ‘the donor is weighted against some valuable commodity which is thus equated with his “gross body” (and is consequently said to contain his blood, marrow, and excrement), and which is then gifted in dana’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

3. (3) Finally, tackling the question of purification directly, a question asks: ‘Does a donation (daan) purify you from sins?’ The answers provided are equivocal. One response declares: ‘Yes and no both, based on bhavna [sentiment] of the donor’. Another states: ‘I can't say by doing daan your sins are washed away. Depends on how big the sin is. Suppose u don't give food to your parent whatever u do u always end up in hell’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

These questions concerning tula-dan, sin and giving during an eclipse clearly evince less reticence about the ambiguities of dan than we have seen elsewhere in the public arena, and as such connect more strongly with the dangerous complexities of dan as detailed in the ethnographic record. Consider for a moment the critical third question: ‘Does a donation (daan) purify you from sins?’ The psychologist, August Flammer, has developed a theory of question-asking with specific reference to the information-seeking question.Footnote ¹¹⁰ According to Flammer, while an information-seeking question clearly concerns a lack of information, it also presupposes some available knowledge on the part of the questioner. This is partly in order that the question appears ‘reasonable’, but knowledge ‘about’ the knowledge to be obtained is also required in order to indicate the location of the information required.Footnote ¹¹¹ So, paradoxically, ‘in order to ask what one does not know, one already has to know’.Footnote ¹¹² Following from this, the question about dan as a possible means to purify sins indicates a level of knowledge (albeit partial) about dan being precisely a means to purify sins. Even if the answers provided are equivocal, the very fact that the question is asked demonstrates that ideas about the expulsion of sins via dan remain compellingly present.

Flammer presents two additional key postulates about information-seeking questions that can help further illuminate the significance of the third question concerning dan: 1. ‘The class of missing knowledge, about which questions are asked, also includes knowledge at a low level of confidence’; and 2. ‘The need to clear up contradictory knowledge refers to a special case of missing knowledge’.Footnote ¹¹³ Now, dan is frequently characterized as a gift for which no return can be countenanced. (Elsewhere on the website, the answer to the question ‘What is a good donation?’ is specified as: ‘giving without expecting anything in return’.) This perhaps helps to explain why there might be a low level of confidence about the idea expressed in the question that dan might purify sins. For, if dan purifies, it then constitutes its own counter-prestation; thus appearing to ‘subvert its own ethic of disinterested generosity’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The question thus seems to be indicative of the need to clear up contradictory knowledge about dan: the fact that it is expected, on many an occasion, to be both ‘pure’ and to purify.

The internet thus provides a space for reflection and debate about dan, and gives expression to the persistence of the ambiguities it encodes. The point about reflection is consonant with Miller and Slater's observation in respect of their fieldwork in Trinidad that the internet has afforded many Trinidadian internet-users a new level of participation in theological debate and dispute.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Just as the idea of giving pind-dan online may be looked at askance because it appears to bypass proper priestly channels, the fact that anyone registered with http://www.sawaal.ibibo.com may answer questions concerning the nuances of dan bypasses the conventional educational role of the priestly class.Footnote ¹¹⁶ It is also argued here that structural features of the internet enable a freer expression of unruly aspects of dan, but this section concludes with a qualification: though the possibility of a purifying dan is freely debated on the website, I found no mention of the effects of this for recipients. While the removal of sin via dan does not necessarily involve its transfer to a recipient,Footnote ¹¹⁷ the focus on the purity of donors and the concomitant obviation of recipients in each of the questions examined should make one cautious about representing the internet as a refuge of a more unruly dan. There is something to be said for such a representation, but the tendency on the sawaal website to retain a notion of expulsion while jettisoning (or at least failing to acknowledge) the possibility of transfer to recipients is suggestive of the trend to subject dan to decontamination. Dan online, then, is re-ambiguated, but without necessarily being immune to concurrent processes of sanitization.

From kanya-dan to ‘bio’-dan: reactivations

The majority of dan-related questions on http://www.sawaal.ibibo.com pertain to kanya-dan, and several answers are helpful in pointing to emergent themes and contemporary yardsticks of valuation in respect of dan more generally. Critical here is the association between kanya-dan and biological life in terms of the physical person who is given (i.e. the daughter-virgin for marriage) and her prospective generative role in the family she joins. Because of this association, kanya-dan possesses connections with, and may in part help us to comprehend, what is perhaps the greatest present-day site of dynamism and proliferation in respect of dan: its contemporary biological variants, of which rakt-dan is a prominent example. Indeed, ‘bio’-dan is a site of proliferation to rival Vinoba Bhave—a one-man escalator and re-designator of dan, a key agent of its renewal who revisited classical giving-templates in order that they be made to bestow meaning afresh in accordance with Gandhian aims and targets.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The superiority of kanya-dan among the many forms of dan is asserted in several responses to the question ‘What is kanyadaan?’ and scholars have commented on the generality of this evaluation.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But what is it that makes kanya-dan pre-eminent? I referred above to the question ‘What is a good donation?’ One answer is as follows: ‘There may be various variable “DANA” donations like “jivan-dana,” “vidya-dana,” “anna-dana,” “dhan-dana,” “bhoo-dana,” “rakta-dana,” “shrama-dana,” and many more. BUT FOR A HINDU: “KANYA-DANA” IS SUPER, CONSISTING OF ALL’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Here is the idea that kanya-dan encompasses other varieties of dan, and that this capacity of containment makes this form of dan pre-eminent. A respondent to the question, ‘What is Kanya-daan?’, also situates this mode of gift as containing other modes: ‘Kanya Dana includes vidya dana, shram dana, dhan dana, anna dana. . .’.Footnote ¹²¹ Though in the first post cited above rakt-dan is subsumed by kanya-dan, rakt-dan has itself been theorized according to a similar template of containment: for instance, it has been described as a new mode of anna-dan (gift of food), and in publicity materials it is frequently extolled as jivan-dan (gift of life).Footnote ¹²² It has even been construed as a gift of knowledge (vidya- or gyan-dan).Footnote ¹²³ This demonstrates how forms of dan may be assimilated to other forms of dan, whilst also providing an indication of how particular modes of dan attain value (i.e. through containing other dan).

One possible reason why rakt-dan is subsumed by kanya-dan in the above post resides in a conception of their both being gifts of flesh and blood. In answer to the question: ‘Why is kanyadaan considered to be the most auspicious thing?’, a respondent states: ‘It is most auspicious because you are giving away your own flesh and blood for creation of a new family, a new bloodline’. The implication here is that influence and generative potential may be further means by which forms of dan can receive a high valuation. Akin to the foregoing response, another post declares of kanya-dan: ‘It is auspicious because you are enabling a family to procreate and thereby establish a lineage’. Rakt-dan is portrayed by both blood donors and donor recruiters as similarly generative: in saving people who have yet to procreate, it facilitates procreation and the generation of lives that would otherwise have been foreclosed. The solicitation slogan ‘A part (ansh) of your blood can save somebody's generation/family line (vansh)’ explicitly emphasizes the familial reproductive power of donated blood.Footnote ¹²⁴ The high valuation of kanya-dan for a similar reason perhaps indicates a key motive for the frequent portrayal by donors and doctors of rakt-dan as a means of saving family relationships and the generative potential of recipients, and why it, like kanya-dan on http://www.sawaal.ibibo.com, is so frequently declared a maha-dan (great donation).Footnote ¹²⁵

In a final example, a Hindu leader locates a different dan (vidya-dan) as pre-eminent among dan, but judges it pre-eminent for similar reasons that kanya- and rakt-dan have been judged the finest: because the effects it produces are ongoing. In a speech given at the Institute for Management Development, Mysore, in 2005, Dr D. Veerandra Heggade, Chairman of the Lord Manjunatha temple in Dharmasthala, Karnataka, stated:

So online questions and answers about kanya-dan on the sawaal website provide two main pointers for helping to understand how forms of dan may be relatively valued in the present. These are that dan which are judged to contain or encompass other forms of dan are prestigious, and connected to this, dan judged to effect ongoing influence, reproductive or otherwise, are highly valued. The example of kanya-dan also usefully demonstrates that gifts of flesh and blood are hardly novel and do not exist as isolates—there exist important precedents and templates for this kind of giving. As was stated above, forms of ‘bio’-dan have accumulated rapidly in recent years. This, of course, reflects the dramatic increase in forms of donatable corporeal material now utilizable by biomedicine: in addition to rakt-dan, there exist netr-dan (eye donation), ang-dan (organ donation), deh-dan (body donation), bhrun-dan (embryo donation), and other categories.

While these new variants attest to the extensibility of dan, existing precedents for these sorts of gift in theory and in practice suggest that, in addition to defining a ‘new’ terrain of dan, they reconnect with or revivify foundational corporeal features of dan that might have been downplayed (or at least metaphorized) in more recent times. Deh-dan, which in its present-day usage refers to post-mortem gifts of the body for extraction of organs and/or dissection by trainee medics, is a particularly elaborated category of giving in literature such as the Dharmashastras.Footnote ¹²⁷ There are, in addition, literal offerings of body parts, as in the cases of Karna in the Mahabharata,Footnote ¹²⁸ the sage DadhichiFootnote ¹²⁹ and the king Jagdev Singh Panwar, who gave ‘even his own head in dan’,Footnote ¹³⁰ and there are metaphorical gifts of the body, where in complex ceremonies the ritual patron divests himself of his impure self through the giving of ‘gifts (daksina) which represent parts of the body’.Footnote ¹³¹

The mythic sage, Dadhichi, has in particular been mobilized as a template for nurturing campaigns to promote blood and body donation.Footnote ¹³² Said to have sacrificed his bones, made strong through his extraordinary penances, for the fashioning of a weapon to defeat the demon king, Vritrasur, Dadhichi is conceptualized by proponents of deh-dan as the original body donor. The Delhi-based organization the Dadhichi Deh Dan Samiti has been particularly innovative in its utilization of the Dadhichi myth. Declaring that body donors are renouncers of their bodies, the samiti gives prospective donors saffron robes to wear at will-signing ceremonies reminiscent of the ritual taking of vows of sannyas undertaken by initiates. The samiti's use of prestigious tropes of renunciation is an important means of attempting to overcome the reluctance of many prospective donors to forego cremation rites. The fact that this act of renunciation is simultaneously a dan apparently aids the process. This is because dan—as an unreciprocated gift—is ‘officially’ a surrogate for both sacrifice and asceticism in the Age of Kali.Footnote ¹³³ The unreciprocated giving of corporeal substance therefore already implies the asceticism that the samiti seeks to capitalize on in order to assuage the misgivings people have about foregoing rites of cremation.

The purpose of this example is to introduce the critical point that theories of dan lay great emphasis on the substitutive function of the gift, that, in the words of Heesterman, ‘the men of our era are no longer deemed strong enough to cope with the heady excitement and terror of sacrifice. In the dvapara era, sacrifice was the foremost meritorious work, but in our age it has been replaced by the gift’.Footnote ¹³⁴ What the Dadhichi example demonstrates, however, is that present-day corporeal variants of dan, which are frequently conceptualized along sacrificial lines, reactivate the substituted elements. If dan substitutes for animal or even human sacrifice, then the sacrificial nature of biomedical modes of dan re-connects dan with precisely that for which it is substituting. I have documented elsewhere the various ways in which givers of rakt-dan translate blood donation into ascetic practice.Footnote ¹³⁵ Attempts to donate blood despite being physically unfit to do so, or to give twice at one donation event, or three times on consecutive days—all these suggest a conception of blood donation as an austerity. What is significant here is that it is by way of such translations that dan reclaims the asceticism that it is meant to imitate.

A further example is the Tirupati Temple, dedicated to the deity Lord Venkateswara, located in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The temple is thought to be richer than the Vatican and records greater annual numbers of pilgrims. At the foot of the hill leading to the temple are lines of accredited barbers for the tonsuring (shaving heads) of pilgrims (kalyana katta). Tonsuring possesses a rich and varied symbolism in the subcontinent. Jain renouncers pluck each other's hair—a painful practice indicating renunciation of bodily adornment and sexuality; the close family relations of both newborns and the deceased are tonsured in order to rid themselves of birth and death pollution, and when performed at temples the rite has ‘votive overtones’.Footnote ¹³⁶ Interviewees in Delhi gave several reasons for tonsuring at Tirupati, the most commonly expressed being that as pilgrims in god's service, devotees wish to donate parts of their bodies to the deity to show their sincerity towards it. Returnee female pilgrims in Delhi told me that they had their long plaits cut because ‘while I am serving god I want to look ordinary’. Others suggested that it is really the whole head that should be offered, but in modern times the head is surrendered only metonymically in the form of the hair offering. One man, a teacher, told me: ‘they can't give a finger, so they give their hair as a token of their regard’. This again reflects the idea that giving represents the culmination of a ‘developmental sequence’, with offerings a surrogate for sacrifice and asceticism in the present degenerate age.Footnote ¹³⁷

Dr Debasish Gupta, who now works in Delhi for the National Aids Control Organisation (NACO), previously ran the blood bank attached to the temple-affiliated hospital in Tirumala, close to Tirupati. In 1998 he introduced an innovation: ‘Hair is a tissue, blood is also a tissue; so we thought, why not lump it together?’ An agreement was reached between the hospital and the temple authorities: pilgrims who donated their blood for medical purposes rather than or as well as their hair would be offered special temple privileges. It was reported that,

According to Dr Gupta, the practice continues apace today and has solved the problem of blood bank shortages in the area. The giving of hair continues, of course, but is supplemented and in some cases supplanted by gifts of blood. Once again an instance of ‘bio’-dan is assimilated to sacrificial logics through substitution. Just as some devotees view hair as a substitute for head (or finger), medically useful blood now, in some cases, substitutes for hair.Footnote ¹³⁹ While the Tirupati case connotes less the reanimation of latent self-sacrifice (an already present feature) than an effort to redesignate or expand the range of permissible sacrificial substances in a manner beneficial to local medical centres, corporeal variants of dan do suggest the figurative reactivation of substituted-for traits.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ ‘Bio’-dan can, in consequence, appear to collapse into complex simultaneities the developmental sequence whereby dan is said to stand in for asceticism which stands in for sacrifice.

However, the instrumental basis of the Tirupati example also serves as a reminder that in many cases such integrative depictions of dan are hardly ‘organically’ driven. Rather, they are formulated in specific biomedical contexts of procurement that are usually characterized by scarcity and where an accent on sacrifice can be a technique of solicitation. For the case of embryo donation (bhrun-dan), potential donors are explicitly enjoined to sacrifice their ‘spare’ embryos.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The rhetoric of self-sacrifice is utilized partly in order to elide the sense that such embryos are in fact killed. As one of Bharadwaj's Delhi informants declared:

Sacrifice, in Bharadwaj's apt phrasing, is used to encode embryos with a ‘moral provenance’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Institutional-bureaucratic invocations of sacrificial motifs as a means of promoting medical dan variants, such as embryo or blood donation, are equivalent to the processes of operationalization as discussed above; they are self-serving and expedient. But it is because dan already suggests the motif that its invocation can be effective. Indeed there is no guarantee that such an intemperate motif will remain confined to its instrumental representation.

In developing his work on organ transfers in India, Cohen has highlighted, with characteristic brilliance, the several ways in which such transfers intertwine with sacrificial registers.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Cohen dwells in particular on prevalent public representations of the selling, or ‘sacrifice’, of kidneys by family members anxious to raise dowry funds: the gift of an organ (ang-dan) to facilitate the gift of a daughter (kanya-dan) (or the traffic in women, as Cohen puts it).Footnote ¹⁴⁵ A scene from the Hindi film Saaheb (1985) is described. Saaheb has sold a kidney in order to finance his sister's wedding. ‘The film cuts from wedding to operation and back again, repeatedly linking the sacrificial oblations of the marriage ceremony making husband and wife into a new body with the transfusion of Saaheb's anesthetised body’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Elsewhere I have provided examples of comparisons between transfusion and yagna (fire offering rituals). As one doctor told me: ‘In a yagna, you pour ghee, you pour ahutis [oblations of incense and foodstuffs], and it burns up. So similarly in this maha-yagna of blood donation, every drop of blood given by the donor has the highest value of life and starts rejuvenating the dying patient’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Such analogies between ghee dripping into fire and blood dripping into body vividly emphasize the intimacy between gift and sacrifice in the field of corporeal giving. In contexts of Hindu ritual, as noted by van der Veer, fire sacrifice and gift-giving are equal insofar as the Brahmin-as-receiver-of-gifts is considered to be one of Brahma's mouths, the other being Agni (the sacrificial fire). Further, Agni is present in Brahmins as the digestive fire through which they ‘process’ the gifts they receive.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ If it is in the domain of Brahmin-directed gifts that sacrifice has retained more than a latent presence, proliferating variants of ‘bio’-dan similarly thrust sacrifice back to the centre of the gift's signification.