Feeding the Dead

This compact volume makes a notable contribution to our understanding of doctrinal and institutional shifts in India in the last centuries before the Common Era. Sayers is one of just a handful of recent scholars to call attention to the importance of the Vedic domestic ritual codes in the creation of what has come to be known as 'classical Hinduism.' He is to be congratulated for setting the complex ritual particulars within a clearly limned overview of the competing religious ideologies being 'marketed' by rival groups of professional 'religious experts.' He manages to do this without trivializing the ideas at stake, and without glibly reifying categories such as 'popular' and 'elite' or 'Brahmanical' and 'non-Brahmanical.' - Timothy Lubin, Washington and Lee University Sayers' history of ancestor worship makes a substantial contribution to the history of South Asian religions, demonstrating in great detail how a new paradigm emerged and how efforts to integrate this paradigm into ideologies and practices exerted a strong and lasting influence. -- Journal of the American Oriental Society Sayers writes well, and the book is accessible at both undergraduate and graduate levels. His signal contribution is a clear recognition of stages in the gradual development of a complex system of ancestor worship within the overall pattern of funerary rites, both extended and domestic, in ancient Vedic India. --he Journal of Religion