In some drought-stricken areas of Andhra and other states of South India hungry folk chastise their deities, even threaten to abandon their worship because they have withheld life-saving rains. Not so in Konasima’s garden zone of abundant Godavari waters where first-fruit harvests are thrilling occa
sions and opportunities to reward the gods with first-taste offerings. The bag ging of new rice, ripened in the autumn crop, brings a joyous festival when everyone thanks the goddess in Durga-puja and the Vaidika ahitagni perform agrayana in a sala, a bamboo screened area just outside each house. It is done on a new-moon day following much the same procedure as in the lunar rite that may either precede or succeed it. As noted in Chapter 5, aging and ailing ahitagni observe this new-rice ritual to the furthest limit of their capacities, rekindle fires and perform isti and expiations just for this quintessential cer emony. Baballa and Sundari managed their last agrayana in 1990 when he was eighty-seven and she was eighty-one. No one eats the new rice until it has been offered in sacrifice and then only in proper ritual attire and a state of purity. In the spring, barley is harvested in a minor version of agrayana and a third grain, syamaka, a rainy season millet, is also honored in first fruits with Soma the deity (cf. ApSS 6.29.10). Autumn agrayana involves new-rice dough puro dasa made on twelve sherds offered to Indra-and-Agni, another one made on a single sherd for a second dual deity, Heaven-and-Earth (Dyava and Prthivi), and a cooked rice portion for the Visvedevas, the All-gods.
For many years before advancing to srauta lives Konasima pandits observed the domestic form of agrayana (cf. ApGS 7.19.6–7). This was on the aupasana fire with Agni Svistakrt, Agni as the maker of proper sacrifices, added to a quartet of recipient deities in the earlier srauta schedule laid out in ApSS 6.29.1–31.14. In the domestic rite new rice grains are cooked as sthali-paka in milk or water. At one point the sacrificer swallows a mouthful of new grains, then makes a ball (pinda) of cooked rice meant for the gods and tosses it up onto the roof of his house, perhaps for ancestors, perhaps to protect the dwell
ing and family from hungry ghosts who have a tendency to perch on roofs. Apastamba does not detail this practice but pandits say it is common before anyone in the family eats new rice.
Duvvuri Yajulu was fond of describing a special tradition he guarded well, one stretching back, he said, “many generations before my great-grandfather.” A special yellow-green (paccal) millet, grown on rising upland soil dependent only on rain, not irrigation flooding, is offered along with the new rice or barley in agrayana, homa applying to both autumn and spring seasons per
missible at the same time. He was asked: Why do you add this millet to rice206 vedic voices
or barley? “It promotes vigor (pusti) in one’s semen (indriya),” he explained and continued in colloquial Telugu agrarian terms: “A lot of treatment is nec essary and all the work on the grains has to be done by the somi-devamma alone. The deities of both seasons are always pleased by this offering!” Surya, who delivered fourteen infants, must have prepared this special grain quite properly. Again, as with the two lunar offerings, the samskara, and many other rituals, proliferation of children is at the forefront. The samidheni verses of the standard isti are increased from fifteen to seventeen, the sacred number of Prajapati, lord of procreation. And Soma, recipient of the millet offering, is both the deity and the sacred juice so readily homologized to retas, another Sanskrit word for semen.
An effortless method of performing agrayana is well known but not favored. The agni-hotra cow could be fed with new grain, then milked, and that milk offered in either evening or morning agni-hotra.23A firstborn calf suggested by Apastamba as daksina to the adhvaryu is scarcely realized today and an alternative, a piece of cloth or a dish of honey and curds suffices.24 The daksina does not matter so much as the desire to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature as Baballa and Lanka, both lifelong cultivators, expressed it so many times. Laurie Patton has an appropriate summation: “The gods are given food and return it through their natural bounty; thus, the ecology of sacrificial food production and consumption is the central guiding metaphor for the survival of earthly and celestial worlds.”25