¹ Heim, Maria, Theories of the Gift in South Asia: Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Reflections on Dana (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 123–124Google Scholar.

² Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai, ‘On Heterochrony: Birthday Gifts to Stalin, 1949’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2006), Vol. 12, p. 356CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ The sangita is a ‘small gift which is said to make up for a possible deficiency in the central gift’. (van der Veer, Peter, ‘The Concept of the Ideal Brahman as an Indological Construct’, in Sontheimer, G. and Kulke, H. (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered (Delhi: Manohar, 1989), p. 74)Google Scholar. Dakshina is a gift frequently interpreted as a form of remuneration for a priest's services. Bhik or bhiksha is equivalent to alms.

⁴ See, for instance, Ladwig, Patrice, ‘Narrative Ethics: The Excess of Giving and Moral Ambiguity in the Lao Vessantara-Jataka’, in Heintz, Monica (ed.), The Anthropology of Moralities (Oxford: Berghahn, 2009)Google Scholar; Simpson, Robert, ‘Impossible Gifts: Bodies, Buddhism and Bioethics in Contemporary Sri Lanka’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2004), 10, 839–859Google Scholar; Spiro, M., Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

⁵ Trautmann, T., Dravidian Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Heesterman, J. C., ‘Reflections on the significance of the Daksina’, Indo-Iranian Journal (1959), 3, 241–258Google Scholar; ‘Brahmin, Ritual and Renouncer’, Wien Z. Kunde Siid-Ostasiens (1964), 8, 1–31; Parry, Jonathan, ‘Ghosts, Greed and Sin: The Occupational Identity of the Benares Funeral Priests’, Man (1980), 15, 1, 88–111Google Scholar; ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the “Indian Gift”’, Man (1986), 21, 3, 453–473; ‘On the Moral Perils of Exchange’, in Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch (eds), Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Death in Banaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Goodwin Raheja, Gloria, The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar; ‘India: Caste, Kingship, and Dominance Reconsidered’ Annual Review of Anthropology (1988), 17, 497–522; ‘Centrality, Mutuality and Hierarchy: Shifting Aspects of Inter-Caste Relationships in North India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (1989), 23, 1, 79–101; ‘On the Uses of Irony and Ambiguity: Shifting Perspectives on Patriliny and Women's Ties to Natal Kin’, in Goodwin Raheja, Gloria and Grodzins Gold, Ann, Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁶ It is notable that non-South Asianists have looked to these scholars' depictions of dan as a source of inspiration in their analyses of non-reciprocal gift-giving in diverse contexts. In particular, Konrad, in her study of ova donors and recipients in Britain finds in the work of Parry, Raheja and Laidlaw rare instances of serious scholarly treatments of anonymous, asymmetrical giving. Konrad additionally draws on Raheja and Parry in delineating different registers of toxicity in gifts of ova. Also of note here is Derrida's reference in Given Time to Raheja's work in a discussion of the gift as being potentially a ‘poisoned present’. Hibbets and Laidlaw have both noted how Derrida's uncompromisingly austere definition of a gift (in essence a gift, for it to be a gift—that is, immune from economic considerations—must be neither given nor received, or at any rate it should be forgotten) is perhaps fulfilled most fully by certain variants of Indic dan. Konrad, Monica, Nameless Relations: Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchange between British Ova Donors and Recipients (Oxford: Berghahn, 2005), p. 139Google Scholar; Laidlaw, James, ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2000), 6, 617–634Google Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, Given time: 1. Counterfeit money (trans. Kamuf, P.), (Chicago: University Press, 1992), pp. 35–36Google Scholar; Hibbets, Maria, ‘Saving Them From Yourself: An Enquiry into the South Asian Gift of Fearlessness’, Journal of Religious Ethics (1999), 27, 3, 437–462Google Scholar.

⁷ Laidlaw, James, Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Laidlaw, , ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’; Lawrence Babb, Absent Lord: Ascetics and Kings in Jain Ritual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Osella, Filippo and Osella, Caroline, ‘Articulation of Physical and Social Bodies in Kerala,’ Contributions to Indian Sociology (1996), 30, 1, 37–68Google Scholar; Säävälä, Minna, ‘Low Caste but Middle-Class: Some Religious Strategies for Middle-Class identification in Hyderabad’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (2001), 35, 3, 293–318Google Scholar; Snodgrass, Jeffrey, ‘Beware of Charitable Souls: Contagion, Roguish Ghosts and the Poison(s) of Hindu Alms’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2001), 7, 4, 687–704Google Scholar; Mines, Diane, Fierce Gods: Inequality, Ritual, and the Politics of Dignity in a South Indian Village (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁸ Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation, pp. 294–295.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Personal communication.

¹¹ Raheja, The Poison in the Gift; Gellner, David, Monk, Householder, and Tantric Priest: Newar Buddhism and Its Hierarchy of Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 119–124Google Scholar; Gregory, C. A., ‘The Poison in Raheja's Gift. A Review Article’, Social Analysis (1992), 32, 95–108Google Scholar; Madan, T. N., ‘Auspiciousness and Purity: Some Reconsiderations’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (1991), 25, p. 293Google Scholar; Raheja, ‘On the Uses of Irony and Ambiguity’, p. 79.

¹² Babb, Absent Lord, Chapter 5.

¹³ Ibid, p. 94.

¹⁴ Quigley, Declan, The Interpretation of Caste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation, p. 294. Some years earlier Fuller also made the point that ‘The Hindu theory of the gift, as elaborated in the classical texts, is not unitary’. Fuller, C. J., Servants of the Goddess: The Priests of a South Indian Temple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 67Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Gregory, C. A., Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange (Chur: Harwood Academic, 1997), pp. 65–66Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Osella and Osella, ‘Articulation of Physical and Social Bodies’.

¹⁸ Ibid, p. 62. Heim likewise downplays the transfer of inauspiciousness in regard to the Indological literature: ‘The most systematic indigenous gift theory that we have, that is, the dannibandha literature, was quite simply not interested in the poison of the gift. . .Such a conclusion should begin to nuance the views of scholars who have taken it as axiomatic that the giver always enjoys higher status than the recipient and that danger or inauspiciousness is always transferred in the South Asian dan’, (Heim, Theories of the Gift in South Asia, p. 63). Despite arguing that a greater range of qualities may be transmissible than had hitherto been acknowledged, Osella and Osella maintain a causal relation between unreciprocated gifts and the passing on of poisons (in this they follow Parry; cf. Laidlaw). Snodgrass's study of the giving of alms to Bhat praise singers in Rajasthan is another valuable contribution to the literature on this theme. His aim is to question the centrality of ‘contagion theories’ of the gift's harmfulness, proposing that ‘we be particularly attentive to alternative explanations for the dangers of alms as they exist in northern India’. Finding that Bhat singers couch their worries about receiving gifts in a spiritual rather than a contagious idiom, Snodgrass suggests that ‘there is no singular “poison” in the Hindu gift, but a range of “poisons”’. Important though this point is, there remains the a priori judgment that a gift's content or effects, whether bio-moral or not, are likely to be harmful. Osella and Osella, ‘Articulation of Physical and Social Bodies’; Parry, Death in Banaras, pp. 134–135; Laidlaw, James, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Theology: Comments on Jonathan Parry's Death in Banaras’, South Asia Research (1996), 16, 1, p. 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Snodgrass, ‘Beware of charitable souls’, p. 698.

¹⁹ Fuller, Servants of the Goddess, p. 67.

²⁰ Laidlaw, ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’.

²¹ Raheja, The Poison in the Gift; Parry, Jonathan, ‘“The crisis of corruption” and “the idea of India:” a worm's eye view’, in Pardo, I. (ed.), The Morals of Legitimacy (Oxford: Berghahn, 2000), p. 44Google Scholar.

²² Laidlaw, ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’, p. 630.

²³ Ibid, p. 629.

²⁴ Bayly, Susan, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 52Google Scholar.

²⁵ Parry, Death in Banaras.

²⁶ Ibid, p. 129.

²⁷ Jenny Huberman, ‘The Dangers of Dalali, the Dangers of Dan’ (n.d.).

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ Mines recently documented the disposal of negative moral qualities through gift-giving in rural Tamil Nadu. Parry, too, in a study of narratives of corruption in the steel town of Bhilai, Chhattisgarh, suggests the fascinating possibility that the taker of a bribe is compromised in a structurally similar manner to the receiver of dan, with both dan and bribes requiring proper ‘digestion’ by those who receive them. Mines, Fierce Gods; Parry, ‘The Crisis of Corruption’, p. 44.

³⁰ Mines, Fierce Gods, p. 72.

³¹ Ibid, p. 68; Raheja, The Poison in the Gift, pp. 85–86.

³² Cf. Grodzins Gold, Ann, Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 292Google Scholar.

³³ See Copeman, Jacob, Veins of Devotion: Blood Donation and Religious Experience in North India (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2009), pp. 50–54Google Scholar.

³⁴ Cohn, B. S., ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’, in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 229Google Scholar.

³⁵ Ibid, p. 250.

³⁶ Errington, Frederick and Gewertz, Deborah, ‘On the Generification of Culture: From Blow Fish to Melanesian’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2001), 7, 509–525Google Scholar.

³⁷ http://www.tnrajbhavan.gov.in/121205.htm [all websites last accessed 28 January 2010]. See also the recent edited book Philanthropy and Cultural Context: Western Philanthropy in South, East and Southeast Asia. The aim of the collection was to explore ‘endogenous approaches to “giving” and to ‘build on [those] traditional/cultural patterns that are positive, and historically work in that culture’. The essays are ‘excellent’, as one reviewer put it, ‘in suggesting how a better understanding of Hindu and Buddhist models of dan could benefit future philanthropic work in Asia’. Hewa, Soma and Hove, Philo, (eds), Philanthropy and Cultural Context: Western Philanthropy in South, East, and Southeast Asia in the 20^th Century (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1997)Google Scholar; Sheila A. Robinson, ‘Development and Philanthropy in the Context of South Asia’ in Hewa and Hove (eds), Philanthropy and Cultural Context, p. 313; Aizawa, Yoichi, ‘Review: Philanthropy and Cultural Context: Western Philanthropy in South, East, and Southeast Asia in the 20^th Century’, The Journal of Asian Studies (1998), 57, 4, p. 1105Google Scholar. Also notable in this respect is an organization called Sampradaan: Indian Centre for Philanthropy, which publishes on themes such as corporate philanthropy and the role of religious organizations in social development. As the name itself suggests, this involves the superimposition of ‘indigenous’ (i.e. ‘culturally appropriate’) dan onto global philanthropic templates. http://www.sampradaan.org; Sundar, Pushpa, Beyond Business: From Merchant Charity to Corporate Citizenship (Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill, 2000)Google Scholar; Kapoor, Rakesh and Sharma, Amit Kumar, Religious Philanthropy and Organised Social Development Efforts in India (Delhi: Indian Centre for Philanthropy, 2000)Google Scholar.

³⁸ K. S. Sripada Raju, ‘Philanthropic Perspectives of Hinduism’, http://www.learningtogive.org/religiousinstructors/voices/phil_persp_of_hinduism.asp (n.d.).

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Raheja, The Poison in the Gift, pp. 152, 160.

⁴¹ Heim, Theories of the Gift in South Asia, p. 74.

⁴² Ibid.

⁴³ Ibid, p. 75.

⁴⁴ Parry, ‘The Gift’, p. 460.

⁴⁵ Laidlaw, ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’.

⁴⁶ Kent too has found that among Sathya Sai Baba devotees in Malaysia (of mainly Indian origin), ‘the ideal recipient of Sai charity is one with the greatest need and therefore, presumably, the greatest interest in the gift’. This is obviously contrary to Parry's assertion that ‘the one who is prepared to accept. . .gifts is almost by definition unworthy to receive them’. Kent, Alexandra, ‘Divinity, Miracles and Charity in the Sathya Sai Baba Movement of Malaysia’, Ethnos (2004), 69, 1, p. 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parry, ‘The Gift’, p. 460.

⁴⁷ Copeman, Veins of Devotion, Chapter 3.

⁴⁸ http://trueeventindia.com/daan-dharam/.

⁴⁹ Bornstein, Erica, ‘No Return: A Brief Typology of Philanthropy and the Sacred in New Delhi’, in Habito, Ruben L. F. and Inaba, Keishin (eds), The Practice of Altruism: Caring and Religion in Comparative Perspective (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), pp. 170–171Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ AccountAid, ‘Accountability and Hindu Dan’, AccountAble (2005), 112, Electronic document, http://www.accountaid.net/.

⁵¹ Ibid.

⁵² Heim, Theories of the Gift in South Asia, p. 74.

⁵³ Reddy, Deepa, ‘Good Gifts for the Common Good: Blood and Bioethics in the Market of Genetic Research,’ Cultural Anthropology (2007), 22, 3, p. 460CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁵⁴ Dresch, Paul, ‘Ethnography and General Theory, Or, People Versus Humankind’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (1992), 23, 1, p. 31Google Scholar; Burghart, R., ‘Ethnographers and their local counterparts in India’, in Fardon, Richard (ed.), Localising Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1990), p. 263Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ DNA India, 8 April 2007.

⁵⁶ The Tribune, 15 November 2006.

⁵⁷ Most medical opinion is now strongly opposed to both paid and replacement donation. Paying donors is said to provide an incentive to conceal disqualifying factors such as HIV/AIDS. Replacement donation is thought to pressurize patients' relatives unduly, pushing many to seek paid donors to donate in their stead, and threatening those who cannot arrange for this kind of donation with denial of life-saving treatment.

⁵⁸ Parry, ‘The Gift’, p. 461; Laidlaw, ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’, p. 624.

⁵⁹ Gold, Fruitful Journeys, p. 9; Laidlaw, ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’, p. 623; Parry, Death in Banaras, pp. 75, 80.

⁶⁰ Titmuss, Richard M., The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (London: LSE Books, 1970)Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Healy, Kieran, Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Organs (London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶² On maha-dan, see Heim, Theories of the Gift in South Asia, Chapter 5.

⁶³ Allen, Tim, ‘Violence and Moral Knowledge’, Cambridge Anthropology (1989), 131, 1, p. 48Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ See Copeman, Veins of Devotion, p. 167.

⁶⁵ Trautmann, Dravidian Kinship; Heesterman, ‘Reflections on the significance of the Daksina’, ‘Brahmin, Ritual and Renouncer’; Parry, Death in Banaras; Raheja, The Poison in the Gift; Mines, Fierce Gods.

⁶⁶ Parry, ‘On the Moral Perils of Exchange’, p. 66.

⁶⁷ Ibid, p. 75.

⁶⁸ Ibid, pp. 68–69.

⁶⁹ Parry, Death in Banaras, p. 136.

⁷⁰ Ibid, p. 129.

⁷¹ Cf. Raheja, The Poison in the Gift, p. 154.

⁷² http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/insideldn/insideout/series5/wk3/donors/donors/shtml

⁷³ Bayly, Susan, ‘Imagining “Greater India”: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode’, Modern Asian Studies (2004), 38, p. 705CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁴ Reddy, ‘Good Gifts’.

⁷⁵ Bayly, ‘Imagining “Greater India”,’ p. 703; Ladwig, ‘Narrative Ethics’; Simpson, ‘Impossible Gifts’, Spiro, Buddhism and Society.

⁷⁶ Waldby, Catherine and Mitchell, Robert, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁷ Dresch, ‘Ethnography and General Theory’, p. 29.

⁷⁸ http://www.giveindia.org/common/spotlight/newsletter/september-2005.htm. I am grateful to Erica Bornstein for drawing my attention to this website.

⁷⁹ http://www.iskonchennai.com/Donations/anna%2520dan%2520donation.htm.

⁸⁰ Hindustan Times, 3 July 2009. The classic anthropological studies by Parry (Death in Banaras) and Raheja (The Poison in the Gift) both contain lengthy sections on pind-dan.

⁸¹ The Telegraph (Kolkata), 19 July 2009.

⁸² Hindustan Times, 3 July 2009.

⁸³ The Telegraph (Kolkata), 19 July 2009.

⁸⁴ Gold, , ‘Sinking flowers at Hardwar’, in Madan, T. N. (ed.), Religion in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 128Google Scholar.

⁸⁵ Ibid.

⁸⁶ Ramanujan, A. K., ‘Is there an Indian way of thinking? An informal essay’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (1989), 23, p. 52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁷ Ibid, p. 55.

⁸⁸ http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/uncategorized/bihar-scraps-online-prayer-for-ancestors_100228757.html.

⁸⁹ Shukla, Sandhya, India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 10Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ Ibid.

⁹¹ http://trueeventindia.com/category/pind-daan/. The Garuda Purana forms part of the body of Hindu texts known as ‘smriti’ and consists of instructions relayed by Vishnu to his carrier, Garuda, the king of birds.

⁹² Pocock, David, Mind, Body and Wealth: A Study of Belief and Practice in an Indian Village (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), p. 66Google Scholar.

⁹³ This rediscovery of context, even as dan is made virtual, is reflective of Ramanujan's further important point that in India the context-free is liable to be assimilated as just another context. Ramanujan, ‘Is there an Indian way of thinking?’, p. 57.

⁹⁴ Reliance on internet sources is notoriously problematic—identities are unreliable and webpages have a habit of changing or disappearing. Postill writes of ‘the heavy burden of suspicion in a cyberspace teeming with urban legends, hoaxes and rumours’: ‘Internet and SMS users can often modify contents without leaving a trace, an ability that casts a long shadow of societal doubt over the trustworthiness of digital representations. Doubts over the veracity of a forwarded email or SMS text can arise at any point in its social life cycle’. A degree of suspicion must also, of course, be retained in reference to the internet sources drawn on here. Postill, John, ‘What is the point of media anthropology?’, Social Anthropology (2009), 17, 3, p. 335Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ See Haynes, Douglas, ‘From Tribute to Philanthropy: The Politics of Gift Giving in a West Indian City’, The Journal of Asian Studies (1987), 46, 2, 339–360CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁶ Tavleen Singh, ‘A Wave of Indifference’, Sunday [Indian] Express, 2 January 2005.

⁹⁷ http://www.livemint.com/2009/07/02203128/Why-Indians-don8212t-give-b.html.

⁹⁸ Gupt-dan refers to a gift given in secret. This form of gift is particularly revered because it is immune from the ‘immediate reward of an increase in a donor's public status, and people say that because of this the unseen reward which comes as merit or good karma will be greater’. Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation, p. 297.

⁹⁹ Sawaal is Hindi for ‘question’.

¹⁰⁰ Argyrou, Vassos, Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: A Postcolonial Critique (London: Pluto, 2002)Google Scholar.

¹⁰¹ Staal, Fritz, ‘The Meaninglessness of Ritual’, Numen (1979), 26, 1, p. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰² India Today, 23 May 2004.

¹⁰³ Ibid.

¹⁰⁴ I do not suggest by this that debate about uses, misuses and differential valuations of dan is an entirely novel phenomenon—it most certainly is not. See, for instance, Kasturi on heated debates in north India in the early twentieth-century about which categories of person constitute worthy recipients of dan. Kasturi, Malavika, ‘“Asceticising” Monastic Families: Ascetic Genealogies, Property Feuds and Anglo-Hindu Law in Late Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies (2009), 45, 3, 1082Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁵ See A. Chatterjee, ‘Welfare, Personalism and Hegel in the Colonial Night: The Forgotten Writings of Brajendranath Seal’, Unpublished essay (2007). Available at: http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/[email protected]/7362752.html.

¹⁰⁶ Parry, ‘On the Moral Perils of Exchange’, p. 67.

¹⁰⁷ http://sawaal.ibibo.com/puja-and-rituals/what-tuladaan-why-done-215180.html.

¹⁰⁸ Parry, ‘On the Moral Perils of Exchange’, p. 75. Tula-dan remains a popularly given gift, even amongst so-called ‘modern’ families in metropolitan areas. It may be given both on the birthdays of male children who are weighed against particular varieties of grain and more generally on Saturdays in order to remove the evil influences of Saturn. It has also been combined with rakt-dan to create a kind of conjunct dan. Gujarat donor recruiters related to me the practice in that state of weighing idols of Krishna against donated blood. ‘A 6-foot Krishna might be 200 units’, said one of them. Also in Gujarat, a blood donation event called ‘Rakt Tula’ was staged in 2005 at the sixtieth birthday celebrations of the guru Swami Adhyatmananda. This involved his disciples donating a quantity of blood equivalent to the guru's body weight (http://www.diyajiva.org/adhyatmananda/DJ_souvenir.pdf). Most frequent of all is the weighing of politicians at political rallies against the blood of activists. At a ‘May Day Blood Donation Camp’ in Rajasthan, 104 Congress workers are reported to have donated blood equivalent to the body weight of Shri B. D. Kalla, President of the Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee (http://www.congressandesh.com/june-2005/june2005.pdf).

¹⁰⁹ http://sawaal.ibibo.com/puja-and-rituals/donation-daan-purify-you-from-sins-407190.html.

¹¹⁰ Flammer, August, ‘Towards a Theory of Question Asking,’ Psychological Research (1981), 43, 407–420CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹¹ Ibid, p. 409.

¹¹² Ibid, p. 410.

¹¹⁴ Ibid, pp. 412, 411.

¹¹⁴ Parry, ‘Ghosts, greed, and sin’, p. 105; ‘On the moral perils of exchange’, p. 75.

¹¹⁵ Miller, Daniel and Slater, Don, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford: Berg, 2000), pp. 180–181Google Scholar.

¹¹⁶ Cf. ibid, p. 191.

¹¹⁷ See Säävälä, ‘Low Caste but Middle-Class’, p. 314.

¹¹⁸ Vinoba Bhave's campaigns were the site of some of the most high-profile proliferations of dan in recent centuries. Gandhi's ‘moral heir’, it was Vinoba Bhave who in 1951 initiated the bhoo-dan (gift of land) movement which sought to encourage landowners to donate land for the landless. Bhave was not original in elaborating a concept of ‘gift of land’—the Dharmasastras focus lengthily on the gift of land (bhumidana) donated by kings, usually to Brahmins (Heim, Theories of the Gift in South Asia)—though Bhave was original in making it an index of Gandhian socialism, with those in need rather than Brahmins becoming the recipients of his reformed mode of land gift. Bhave subsequently enlarged (and radicalized) the category of bhoo-dan to gram-dan (village gift), whereby ‘all land would be legally owned by the village as a whole, but parcelled out for the use of individual families according to need’. Bhave did not stop there. The concept of block-dan soon joined those of bhoo-dan and gram-dan, and was closely followed by other concentrically expanding dan concepts such as district-dan and even state-dan. ‘Vinoba's fertile imagination widened the concept of “daan”. . .and created other forms of it. These included Shramdan (gift of labour), Sampattidan (gift of money, income or wealth), Buddhidan (dedication of one's mental abilities to the realization of Sarvodaya ideals) and Jeevandan (dedication of one's life to the cause)’. Kumar, D. Jeevan, ‘Gandhian Struggles for Land Rights,’ in Jain, Mimmy (ed.), Human Rights Education for Beginners (Delhi: National Human Rights Commission, 2005), pp. 134–136Google Scholar. Some of Bhave's innovations resembled classical dan forms—buddhi-dan, for instance, recalled gyan-dan and vidya-dan (gifts of knowledge or learning)—while others were altogether novel.

¹¹⁹ See, for instance, Mayer, Adrian C., ‘Public Service and Individual Merit in a Town of Central India’, in Mayer, Adrian C. (ed.), Culture and Morality: Essays in Honour of Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 165Google Scholar.

¹²⁰ http://sawaal.ibibo.com/puja-and-rituals/what-good-donation-407210.html.

¹²¹ This is because some of these items are literally transferred along with kanya-dan to the bride's new family, but also because the kanya-dan is itself constituted by all the dan the bride has received from her parents (food, knowledge, money, and so on) and, in a pre-emptive sense, because she will later become productive in providing these forms of dan to her new family and offspring.

¹²² For Vinoba Bhave, jivan-dan meant something quite different—dedication of one's life to a cause (Kumar, ‘Gandhian Struggles for Land Rights’, p. 136). The common exhortatory blood donation slogan ‘Rakt-dan, jivan-dan’ (‘Blood Donation, Life Donation’), on the other hand, encourages prospective donors to give a portion of their biological life rather than a life-time commitment. Perhaps this shift in meaning partakes of the wider change in emphasis, identified by Rabinow and others, from the way life is actually lived (bios) to ‘bare’ or biological life (zoe): ‘Life today is more zoe than bios’ says Rabinow. Rabinow, Paul, ‘French Enlightenment: Truth and Life’, Economy and Society (1998), 27, 2–3, p. 200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²³ See Copeman, Veins of Devotion, pp. 97–99.

¹²⁴ Ibid, p. 44.

¹²⁵ In its classical style maha-dan was a kingly gift, a mode of statecraft suggesting the ‘idealised moral order of the little kingdom, which constitutes an exemplary centre through display, redistribution, and command’. Dirks, Nicholas, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 107Google Scholar. At an event staged before Delhi schoolchildren in order to encourage them to donate their blood when they come of age I witnessed a blood bank doctor enumerate different classifications of dan: ‘There are various types of dan: spiritual, secular, saving life, giving food and the donation of blood’. The accompanying slide read: ‘Rakt-dan: Words fall short’, and the slide that followed displayed the slogans: ‘Rakt-dan, maha-dan’, ‘It feels like heaven’ and ‘Share a gift of love’. The gift of blood was depicted as a euphoric gift, saturated with feeling—an ineffable and great dan.

¹²⁶ http://www.sdmimd.net/chairman_speech.html. For further discussion of vidya-dan see Watt, Carey Anthony, Serving the Nation: Cultures of Service, Association, and Citizenship (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²⁷ Heim, Theories of the Gift in South Asia, p. 138.

¹²⁸ See Reddy, ‘Good Gifts for the Common Good’.

¹²⁹ See Copeman, Jacob, ‘Cadaver Donation as Ascetic Practice in India’, Social Analysis (2006), 50, 1, 103–126Google Scholar; Babb, Lawrence, Alchemies of Violence: Myths of Identity and the Life of Trade in Western India (Delhi: Sage, 2004)Google Scholar.

¹³⁰ Raheja, ‘Centrality, Mutuality and Hierarchy, p. 97.

¹³¹ Heesterman, J. C., The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 27Google Scholar. See also Parry, Death in Banaras, p. 75 on tula-dan.

¹³² Copeman, ‘Cadaver Donation as Ascetic Practice;’ Reddy, ‘Good Gifts for the Common Good’.

¹³³ Parry, Death in Banaras, p. 190.

¹³⁴ Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition, p. 86.

¹³⁵ Copeman, Veins of Devotion. See also Copeman, Jacob, ‘Violence, Non-Violence, and Blood Donation in India’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2008), 14, 277–295CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘“Blood Will Have Blood”: A Study in Indian Political Ritual’, Social Analysis (2004), 48, 3, 126–148. For an exploration of ‘ascetic’ blood donation cross-culturally, see Jacob Copeman, ‘Introduction: Blood Donation, Bioeconomy, Culture’, in Jacob Copeman (ed.), Body & Society: Special Issue on Blood Donation, Bioeconomy, Culture (2009), 15, 2, pp. 8–12.

¹³⁶ Laidlaw, James, ‘Embedded Modes of Religiosity in Indic Renouncer Religions’, in Whitehouse, Harvey and Laidlaw, James (eds), Ritual and Memory: Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Religion (Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press, 2004), pp. 100–101Google Scholar; Babb, Lawrence, The Divine Hierarchy: Popular Hinduism in Central India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), pp. 76–77Google Scholar.

¹³⁷ Joseph Alter, ‘Self, Sacrificed, Sacrifier: Embodiment in Hathayoga and its Theoretical Entailments’ (n.d.); Parry, Death in Banaras, p. 132.

¹³⁸ Indian Express, 12 August 1998. Darshan is the moment of dramatic spiritual interaction in which the devotee exchanges vision with the deity. Laddus are deep fat fried sweets made from a flour-milk mixture, which are offered to the gods and then eaten as prashad.

¹³⁹ Famously, the tonsuring rite is a massive source of revenue for the temple authority which exports much of the hair it receives for the making of wigs.

¹⁴⁰ borrow, I ‘figurative reactivation’ from Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgement (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 65Google Scholar.

¹⁴¹ Bharadwaj, Aditya, ‘Assisted Life: The Neoliberal Moral Economy of Embryonic Stem Cells in India’, in Birenbaum-Carmeli, Daphna and Inhorn, Marcia C. (eds), Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes: Global Encounters with New Biotechnologies (Oxford: Berghahn, 2009)Google Scholar.

¹⁴² Ibid.

¹⁴³ Ibid, p. 250.

¹⁴⁴ Cohen, Lawrence, ‘The Other Kidney: Biopolitics Beyond Recognition’, Body and Society (2001), 7, 9–29Google Scholar; ‘Operability: Surgery at the Margin of the State’, in Das, Veena and Poole, Deborah, (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁵ Cohen, ‘The Other Kidney’.

¹⁴⁶ Ibid, p. 25.

¹⁴⁷ Copeman, Veins of Devotion, pp. 58, 148.

¹⁴⁸ Peter van der Veer, ‘Concept of the Ideal Brahman’, p. 72.

¹⁴⁹ See Gellner, David, ‘Hinduism. None, one, or many?’, Social Anthropology (2004), 12, 3, 367–371CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵⁰ van der Veer, Peter, ‘Religion in South Asia,’ Annual Review of Anthropology (2002), 31, p. 184Google Scholar.

¹⁵¹ http://qna.rediff.com/questions-and-answers/sab-se-bada-daan-kaunsa-hain-6085608/answers.