This volume of fourteen essays, the tenth volume in the Ethno-Indology: Heidelberg Studies in South Asian Rituals series, brings together a wide variety of scholars, each of whose contribution assists in the construction of this detailed study of initiatory rites in South Asia. The title of the volume makes explicit the religious and geographic diversity covered therein, but one of the volume's greatest strengths is its methodological diversity. The essays range from strictly Indological (Einoo's essay on the use of āñjana, or eye-salve, in Vedic ritual texts) to strictly ethnographic (Hüsken's essay on the 2006 intervention of the Tamil Nadu state government in Vaiṣṇava priestly training programs). The majority of the essays, however, bridge this gap by reading Vedic (C. Zotter), Tantric (Isaacson), and Newar Buddhist (Michaels, von Rospatt) texts in the context of contemporary performances.

This methodological diversity allows for a nuanced approach to South Asian initiations, rituals that are referred to with a number of terms depending on their form and function (e.g. saṃskāra, dīkṣā, abhiṣeka) (pp. 8–9). With this nuanced approach, the authors can collectively extend the well-known structural and processual rites of passage models put forth by Arnold van Gennep and Mircea Eliade, thus attending to the “social significance of initiation rituals and their role in constructing identity” (p. 7). Further transgressing the tidy boundaries of these more traditional approaches, the authors clearly and variously communicate the social and historical dynamics of rites of initiation. This attention to the dynamics of ritual—in terms of economics, gender, and modernization, to name but a few relevant variables—accounts for the ways that people change rituals as much as, per the more traditional scholarly approaches, rituals change people.

Though it will not be possible in this review to detail each of the volume's essays, a few comments regarding several of the essays will be helpful in gaining an understanding of the content and thrust of the entire project. Christof Zotter's opening essay on the Nepalese vratabandha, the rite by which a boy becomes a twice-born member of his caste and lineage, raises a number of issues that recur throughout the volume. Performed among the Bāhun and Chetri of Kathmandu, the contemporary vratabandha draws heavily on its Vedic heritage. Approaching this ritual from both Indological and ethnographic perspectives, Zotter is able to analyze the developments of the ritual within one Vedic school and to trace those developments through the modern period. Still a Vedic ritual, the vratabandha is ultimately the result of “a constant process of accumulation or accretion” that, despite its ancient appearance, is “not a faithful imitation of the ancient original” (p. 23). Kesler-Persaud handles similar issues in her essay on the “economizing” processes at play among Hindus in the Kangra Valley in Himachal Pradesh, as rites from multiple saṃskāra “may be embedded into a single paradigm” (p. 45). Dealing here with the performative inter-relationship between upanayana (admission to marriage), vivāha (marriage), and samāvartana (return from the house of the teacher), Kesler-Persaud details the strategic combination, elaboration, and, sometimes complete, elimination of certain rites in certain contexts.

Six essays towards the middle of the volume form a relatively tight unit that takes up the initiation rituals of the Newars, the Tibeto-Burman speaking residents of the cities of the Kathmandu Valley. The essays by Gögge, Gutschow, and Gellner specifically take up the initiation rites of Newar children. Gögge's essay, complete with thirteen photographs, compares Parbatiyā and Newar rituals, focusing on the ways that purity and lineage are variously ritualized. Gutschow describes the role of urban geography and urban boundaries that structure the rite of ihi, a girl's marriage to the bel fruit; significant in the girl's step-wise passage from child to adult is her newfound ability to cross urban boundaries in order to venerate the ancestors. Gellner details the Buddhist initiation rites of Newar children and the contentious politics that have begun to play a role in their recent changes; at the center of many of these debates is the challenge that Theravada Buddhism has recently posed to the local Newar Buddhism, with its local caste hierarchy and difficulty of access to Newars living outside the Valley. The other three essays in this unit, those by Michaels, Lewis, and von Rospatt, deal with more Indological issues, viewing contemporary practices in light of the texts used; these three essays take up the following issues, respectively: the Sanskrit-Newar hybrid language of ritual handbooks; the use of Hindu practices from dharmaśāstra texts that allow Newars to “define their high caste status as well as their Buddhist identity” (Lewis, p. 189); and the use of life-cycle rites to consecrate Buddhist images for worship, thus establishing an intimate relationship between image and ritualist.

This volume will not only appeal to scholars of South Asian religion and culture, but its clear focus on rites of passage will make it of interest to those whose work dovetails with cultural anthropology, ritual studies, and childhood studies.