Women and Rituals: The Silent Keepers of Culture

On a late October morning, the courtyard smells faintly of rice paste and incense. My grandmother draws a small alpana near the tulsi plant, the white loops unsteady on the red floor. The design will fade by noon, trampled by errands and the children’s bicycle, but for that moment, the house feels alive in its rhythm — you know it’s not a typical day. The festivities are here—an unspoken continuation of something older than both of us.

Photo by Bibhukalyan Acharya

Cut to my mother and her times. Cooped up in a small 2bhk flat in Bhubaneswar, there’s no aangan to draw a jhotti or a pithar in. There’s a Diwali rangoli made from stencils, which is to be used for Bhai Dooj as well, because there’s simply no time to prepare a pithar for the occasion. Oh, and the kids have already moved out of the house. There’s no point in following rituals that are meant for families, not empty nesters. The joy of festivities disappears just as easily as it arrives.

For many women across India, these quiet acts — alpana before dawn, a bowl of puffed rice before Lakshmi Puja, the pinda pressed gently into the Ganga for ancestors — rarely make it to social media timelines. Why would it? There is no need for cultural appropriation even today for such rituals. You do it because it is customary. And you believe in it, too, through years of celebrations and the feelings they evoke in you. Yet, for generations of women, such gestures have been the most enduring form of cultural continuity. They are performed without spectacle, often with improvisations, and sustained mainly through women whose work in the home has always been both invisible and indispensable.

Finding the Space

Anthropologist Tracy Pintchman writes that Hindu women “control many types of ritual practice … including many household, calendrical, and local devotional practices” (Pintchman 2007). These everyday observances — sometimes dismissed as chhoti pujas or “ladies’ customs” — keep oral traditions and local knowledge alive. In villages of Odisha and Bihar, for instance, women continue rituals like Savitri Brata or Bihula Bishahari Puja, though the scale has changed. The idols may now be of clay instead of silver, the songs shortened to a few remembered verses, and the fasting hours negotiated around office schedules. But the sentiment remains: devotion expressed through domestic routine.

Mary Hancock’s Womanhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India (1999) describes how urban women reconfigure older rituals to suit new lives. The same holds true everywhere in India. The Lakshmi Puja, once performed with neighbours and extended families, is now often a single-woman act — a working daughter lighting the lamp alone after her commute, a homemaker adjusting her ritual calendar to children’s exams. The gestures shrink, but they do not disappear.

Photo by Bhavishya

No matter the protests, my mother ensured I performed the Madhushraavani Puja for 15 days as customary, because I’m a new bride and the vrat is supposed to protect my husband from danger —especially serpents (I hope it extends to humans too, since serpents can take human form too!).

Ideally, the last day of the puja requires a whole community of women who come and bless the bride and eat with her while she breaks her fast. Bihar’s Savitri Vrat also needs a new bride to perform her first puja with five other married women. Since communities these days are barely found in high-rise societies, you have no choice but to befriend women in the neighbourhoods or ask someone to help you find five such women.

The Unfair Ridicule

Now, there has been a lot of criticism around the disappearance of grand rituals and women refusing to follow certain customs. What such men in the garb of Instagram podcasters and influencers forget is that many of these transformations are not about belief alone but also about logistics. The communal scaffolding that once upheld women’s ritual labour — neighbours helping to clean the courtyard, elders guiding the chants — has weakened.

Many younger women I’ve spoken to say they are not turning away from rituals out of irrelevance or “westernisation,” but because there’s simply no one left to show them how.

The grandmother who once supervised Kartik Snan at dawn is gone; the instructions now live half-forgotten in family WhatsApp groups. And let’s face it - men have simply never been taught to uphold such traditions, nor did they ever care.

Sociologist Jaya Tyagi notes that domestic rituals historically gave women a space of agency within patriarchal systems — a realm where “compliance and contestation coexist” (Tyagi 2014). When these practices thin out, the loss is not only spiritual but social: a disconnection from those subtle channels through which women once communicated solidarity and identity.

Also, not all rituals encompass women from varied backgrounds. A lot of them cater to married women only, while some of them are more prevalent among the dominant caste groups. Many rituals have, over time, led to brazen displays of wealth rather than to adherence to the spirit of the customs. And it is also true that men were excluded from most of these customs, since women managed the household.

The Adaptation Role

Photo by Yogendra Singh

Yet, even within their reduced forms, these rituals continue to adapt. In Cuttack, women have begun making eco-friendly Manabasa Gurubar idols from flour and turmeric. In rural Bihar, young women document Chhath Puja preparations on Instagram, turning what was once private labour into digital heritage. The material form shifts — from diyas to reels — but the instinct to record, remember, and pass on remains. It doesn’t matter if the men mock women who make videos and reels of such occasions. Because whatever little is left to follow is being followed, encouraged, and carried on through such digital mediums.

The anthropological journal Frontier Anthropology recently published a study on women and birth rituals among the Mising community of Assam, noting that despite migration and urban pressures, women continue to perform symbolic acts that “anchor life-cycle transitions within a shared moral universe” (Panyang 2023). This insight travels well across India: rituals act as social glue, and when women adapt them, they also redefine what belonging means in modern life.

It would be too simple to mourn these smaller versions as a loss. Instead, perhaps they reflect a quiet resilience — a way of holding on without nostalgia. When a working woman in Bhubaneswar buys ready-made prasad instead of making it from scratch, she’s not abandoning culture; she’s negotiating with time. When a young woman in Patna skips fasting but still lights a lamp at dusk, she’s marking continuity in her own way. One has to look beneath superficial layers to see the struggle that lies beneath.

As Outlook India observed earlier this year, “Indian mothers quietly carry our culture in moments that feel small but are anything but small.” (Outlook India 2025). It’s an inheritance performed in fragments — an alpana drawn hastily before office, a fast that is adjusted to an online meeting, a story retold while kneading dough. The work of keeping culture alive is often women’s work, and it survives not in grand celebrations but in the repetition of care.

When I watch my mother make what she calls a kaam-chalau pithar in our living room, I realise she’s not only decorating the house. She’s mapping a memory — one that I, too, may redraw someday, perhaps smaller, perhaps imperfectly, but still enough to remember.

References

• Hancock, Mary. (1999). Womanhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India. Routledge.

• Pintchman, Tracy (ed.). (2007). Women’s Lives, Women’s Rituals in the Hindu Tradition. Oxford University Press.

• Tyagi, Jaya. (2014). “Redefining Domesticity through Ritual Observances.” In Contestation and Compliance: Retrieving Women’s ‘Agency’ from Puranic Traditions. Oxford University Press.

• Panyang, Tinkumoni. (2023). “Women and Birth Ritual: A Study among the Misings of Dekapam Village, Assam.” Frontier Anthropology, 12(1).

• “The Art of Cultural Inheritance: How Indian Mothers Quietly Carry Our Culture.” Outlook India, 15 April 2025.

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