85. Sanctity of grain-food.
Grain cooked with water is considered as sacred food by the Hindus. It should be eaten only on a space within the house called chauka purified with cowdung, and sometimes marked out with white quartz-powder or flour. Before taking his meal a member of the higher castes should bathe and worship the household gods. At the meal he should wear no sewn clothes, but only a waist-cloth made of silk or wool, and not of cotton. The lower castes will take food cooked with water outside the house in the fields, and are looked down upon for doing this, so that those who aspire to raise their social position abandon the practice, or at least pretend to do so. Sir J.G. Frazer quotes a passage showing that the ancient Brāhmans considered the sacrificial rice-cakes cooked with water to be transformed into human bodies.[209] The Urdu word bali means a sacrifice or offering, and is applied to the portion of the daily meal which is offered to the gods and to the hearth-fire. Thus all grain cooked with water is apparently looked upon as sacred or sacramental food, and it is for this reason that it can only be eaten after the purificatory rites already described. The grain is venerated as the chief means of subsistence, and the communal eating of it seems to be analogous to the sacrificial eating of the domestic animals, such as the camel, horse, ox and sheep, which is described above and in the article on Kasai. Just as in the hunting stage the eating of the totem-animal, which furnished the chief means of subsistence, was the tie which united the totem-clan: and in the pastoral stage the domestic animal which afforded to the tribe its principal support, not usually as an article of food, but through its milk and its use as a means of transport, was yet eaten sacrificially owing to the persistence of the belief that the essential bond which united the tribe was the communal eating of the flesh of the animal from which the tribe obtained its subsistence: so when the community reaches the agricultural stage the old communal feast is retained as the bond of union, but it now consists of grain, which is the principal support of life.