Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies - DUBOIS, Abbé Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Dubois | Page 195

CEREMONIES AFTER CONFINEMENT
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one before their principal entrance door to protect from the
sun persons who may come to visit them, and who could
not with propriety and due regard to custom be invited to
come
inside.
CHAPTER XIV
Ceremonies to be observed after a Woman's Confinement.
performed over Infants.
— Ceremonies
JATA- KARMA.
When a Brahmani begins to feel the pangs of child-birth
her husband should be near her, so that he may carefully
note the date of the month, the day, the star of the day,
the yoga, the Jcarana, the hour, and the moment when the
child is born.
And to prevent any of these details being
forgotten, he puts them down in writing.
The house where a woman is confined, as well as all
those who live in it, are unclean for ten days.
Before this
time is up they must have no intercourse with any one.
On the eleventh day all the linen and clothes that have
been used during this period are given to the washerman,
and the house is purified in the manner I have already
described.
Then they call in a Brahmin purohita. The
woman who has just been confined, holding the child in
her arms, and with her husband by her side, seats herself
on a sort of earthen platform, which is set up in the centre
of the house and covered with a cloth.
The purohita then
approaches them, performs the sam-kalpa, offers puja to
the god Vigneshwara, and goes through the ceremony of
the puniaha-vachana, or consecration of the sacred water.
He pours a small quantity of this water into the hands of
the father and mother of the child, who drink a portion
and pour the rest over their heads. He also sprinkles this
water over the house and all who are living in it, and throws
what remains down the well. The purohita is then pre-
sented with some betel and a small gift, after which he
departs.
This ceremony, which is called jata-karma, re-
moves all uncleanness, but the woman who has been
confined does not become perfectly pure before the end