Family Custom

(kulachara) Hindu religion is fluid
enough that a family’s customary practices can heavily influence a person’s
individual religious life. For example,
family custom plays an important role
in worship. The Hindu pantheon contains many different gods, and the one
that an individual worships as “God” is
often strongly influenced by the family’s
practice, although other factors such as
personal inclination can also play a role.
Family custom also plays an important
role in setting parameters for religious
practice, both in everyday religious life,
and in setting rules for performing the
rituals of the life cycle. For example,
many families have a customary age for
performing the chudakarana samskara,
the “tonsure” or head-shaving rite of
passage that marks the definitive end of
infancy. Some families perform this in
the first year, others in the third, or the
fifth, or even the seventh. Religious
practice varies widely among families,
although it tends to be very stable within families, since this is one of the ways
in which families create a distinctive
identity for themselves.