The Flow of Embodiment: Faith Across Three Generations
Niranjan, samai, akshata, samai, niranjan, udbatti, telvati, tuupvati, dharmik pustaka, grantha, strotra — all of this lives in my grandmother’s devghar. A quiet constellation of objects that marks the rhythm of her mornings and prayers, each carrying a scent of ghee, camphor, or old pages, each one remembering countless gestures of devotion folded into its form.
My mother can list them all without looking…..
Recently, my mother came looking for the karanda (करंडा) — the Marathi word for the small, delicate container that holds haldi-kumkum. She came searching in my grandmother’s room while Aajji (grandmother) was bathing. I pointed to the one right in front of us, the one she uses every morning for her daily puja, simple and familiar. But my mother shook her head gently. “No, she said, there’s another one — the one kept aside for guests, for special occasions”. She replied to me.
She knew exactly which drawer it was in, which shelf, which hidden corner. She knew my grandmother’s system of keeping — a knowledge formed not through instruction but through years of observing, living, and moving silently within the same domestic rhythms.
Karanda (haldi-kumkum container) from my grandmother’s devghar (altar), used in special rituals at home.
As I stood there, my thoughts drifted not just to the object itself, but to the word — karanda. A word that feels so textured on the tongue, almost intimate, yet one I realize I will probably never carry forward in my own life. I won’t be concerning myself with a karanda anymore.
In that moment, I felt a quiet ache for the loss of these small linguistic inheritances through this gentle erosion of intergenerational memory that slips away unnoticed, like water soaking into earth. My relationship with these words feels liminal — neither fully mine, nor entirely foreign. They hover in a twilight space, hauntingly familiar yet destined to fade into the soft hush of unspoken family histories.
Aajji has done puja since her childhood but my mother doesn’t do it anymore unless it is during Ganesh Chaturthi, when we bring Ganpati home (jevha Ganpati basavtat). However, she still holds faith in the same gods as my grandmother.
Puja for Aajji means karma-kanda — the detailed ritual procedures, bathing the gods in milk, panchamrut, haldi-kunku, ashtagandha. My mother doesn’t want to do all this. She doesn’t believe in ritual performances; for her, faith is an inner strength, something that doesn’t need to be shown. When I ask her how she knows every detail of Aajji’s habits, she smiles and says, “When I used to wake up in the morning, Aaji (grandmother) would be chanting the strotras — I never used to sit with the door closed, our house wasn’t that big.” (मी सकाळी उठायचे तेव्हा आजी स्तोत्र म्हणायची — मी दर बंद करून नाही बसायचे, आमचं घरच एवढं मोठं नव्हतं.)
In those ordinary mornings, the domestic space became a living text. A place where meanings and rituals flowed softly through observation and everyday participation. My mother didn’t learn through intentional instructions; she absorbed it all simply by being there, by living inside that sacred-mundane rhythm, making her own meanings along the way. The household, in this sense, becomes a sacred ecology — a living system where faith circulates not as rigid doctrine but as soft, persistent breath. To live within this space was to read it with the body, to carry its meanings silently in the palms, in the breath. It was not a learning of words, but a learning of gestures; a fluent, unspoken language of devotion and memory.
My grandmother’s devghar (home altar), carefully arranged with daily ritual objects and offerings.
My grandmother stopped consuming meat when she was sixteen. That year, she had accidentally broken a fast and, overwhelmed by guilt, resolved that she would never touch meat again. Thus, it became her quiet penance, her lifelong repayment of a small, private sin. Even today, her Mondays and Thursdays stretch out longer than the rest. On those days, her rituals become more elaborate, the small gods in her altar bathed in milk and ghee and oil.
From my room, I often hear my grandmother and my mother bickering. My mother’s voice rises, tired and frustrated with what she calls the excess of my grandmother’s faith. She mutters, “People don’t have food to eat. And we offer so much to gods. She doesn’t get it. Our faith speaks volumes of our privilege.” Later, she slips into my room, seeking a quieter air. She repeats this to me, reminding me that this is exactly why she rejects ritual procedures.
I listen to her, and then turn inward. What about my own atheism? Isn’t that a kind of privilege too? The ability to refuse, to walk away from domestic traditions that generations of women before me carried and protected with deep pain. In this tangled web of devotion, rejection, guilt, and choice, I realize that each of our faiths — or refusals of faith — tell more intimate stories about us than any doctrine ever could. Each of us performs our own silent negotiations with belief, each gesture echoing with personal histories.
The Ganpati tradition in our house is a matrilineal one. It has passed from my grandmother to my mother, and then, perhaps, to me? A small silver idol, taken out only during Ganesh Chaturthi, lovingly worshipped for those few festival days before being wrapped again and put away.
When I ask my mother whether I should carry it forward, she refuses bluntly. “Why would you carry it forward? You don’t even believe in God,” she says, almost amused. “I am doing this so ritualistically till your grandmother’s last breath, for her sake. It doesn’t need to be passed on.”
An old photograph of my mother, grandmother, and grandfather during Ganesh Chaturthi, gathered near the Ganesh idol altar when my mother was young.
Her words surprise me. My mother’s faith is practical, reasoned, and sharply honest. Ideas that many people place in opposition — faith and reason — live comfortably together in her. She believes nothing should be beyond the scope of practical sense, including God.
I try to tell her that it is not just about belief. “It’s our family heritage,” I say. “Our history.” I tell her that even though I do not believe in God, I want our stories to be carried forward — not just in words, but in bodies and gestures and small, almost invisible meanings.
My mother laughs, a soft and confused laugh that echoes between us. “Why? There’s no point in keeping a god without faith,” she says.
“But it’s not about God for me,” I tell her quietly. I grew up with the sounds of the taal and manjeera, the smell of camphor and flowers hanging in the air. I spent the weeks before the festival memorizing the aartis with my mother, watching her and Aaji work in perfect sync, decorating the idol, cooking, and singing aarti. Maybe somewhere, I too desired to hold on to that choreography of love and care, even if I could never hold the same belief. Somewhere, I wanted to find belonging in their faith, to trace myself in their stories. But I could only stand at the edge, watching, memorizing, yearning — carrying forward not the god, but the echo.
Three generations of faith move through our family like a quiet, shifting current — my grandmother, my mother, and then me. Each of us carries a different shape of belief, a different arrangement of doubts and meanings. For my grandmother, faith is performance and presence. It is in the strotras she chants each morning and evening, setting the cotton wicks in the lamps, the watchful gaze at the oil in the samai (समई) . Her faith is something you can see, smell, and hear. A physical choreography that orders her day and, in many ways, her world.
My mother’s faith looks different. It is more interior, stripped down. She rejects karma-kanda (कर्मकांड), the elaborate procedures that demand so much time and energy. She believes faith does not need to be worn on the body or proven through offerings. Instead, she holds it as a private strength, a quiet certainty that does not require witnesses.
Then there is me. My atheism stands as a rupture — but it is not a dramatic severing. It is a conscious refusal to continue the flow, a decision that sits somewhere between resignation and clarity. I do not feel the need to perform belief, nor do I hold it within. Yet, I carry the stories, the smells, the echoes of rituals I watched but never fully inhabited.
The transmission of faith and ritual knowledge in our family always relied on the body: touching, seeing, performing. Without that embodied continuity, something falters. My mother learned by proximity, by repetition, by listening to my grandmother’s voice seep into mornings. I learned by standing at the doorway, half-in and half-out, never fully entering the circle.
In that sense, each of our subjectivities is a kind of rupture to that flow of faith. My mother’s choice to simplify, to redefine faith on her own terms, was already a break from her mother’s world. My choice to step away altogether is another. Together, we reveal that faith is not a single unbroken line, but a series of negotiations and quiet rebellions. There is no single inheritance. There are only attempts — to hold on, to redefine, to let go.