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particularly with flowers and fruits, also sometimes with incense and other offerings pukka: “ripe” or “cooked,” perfected
    Pulkasa: name of one of the ancient Dalit castes
    puram: in Sanskrit, a city or citadel; in Tamil, the public emotion, in contrast with akam
    Puranas: compendiums of myth, ritual, and history, originally only in Sanskrit, later also in vernacular languages
    purdah: the seclusion of women, particularly behind screens in a house or palace
    Purohita: a family priest or royal chaplain
    purusha: “male,” the Primeval Man in the Vedas; later, any male animal; in Sankhya philosophy, spirit, self, or person
    purusha-arthas: the three (later four) goals of life for a man
    purva paksha: “first wing,” statement of the opponent’s position at the start of an argument
    Pushyamitra: founder of the Shunga dynasty in 185 BCE
    Putana: a demoness who tried to kill Krishna
    Qualified Nondualism: philosophy taught by Ramanuja, moderating the view that god and the worshiper are of the same substance
    Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli: philosopher, the first president of India, 1888-1975
    Raikva: the first homeless person, in the Upanishads
    Raj: short for rajyam [“kingdom”]; in particular, the British Raj, the British colonization of India
    raja: king
    rajas: emotion or passion, one of the three gunas , or qualities of matter
    rajyam: kingdom
    Rakshasas: ogres, demonic creatures on earth
    Rama: a prince, an avatar of Vishnu, hero of the Ramayana
    Ramanuja: a philosopher, exponent of Qualified Nondualism, from Tamil Nadu, c. 1056-1137 CE
    Ramanujan, Attipat Krishnaswami: poet, linguist, scholar of Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada, 1929-1993
    Ramayana: one of the two great ancient Sanskrit epics, the story of Rama, attributed to the poet Valmiki
    Ram-raj (Hindi), Rama-rajya (Sanskrit): perfect reign of Rama
    Ranke, Leopold von: a positivist German historian, 1795-1886
    Ravana: an ogre (Rakshasa), ruler of the island of Lanka, enemy of Rama in the Ramayana
    Rig Veda: the most ancient sacred text in India, composed c. 1500 BCE
    rishi: a sage
    Rishyashringa: a sage with a horn on his head, son of a sage and a female antelope
    Rudra: “Howler,” a wild Vedic god, later a name of the Hindu god Shiva
    sadharana dharma: religious law that applies to everyone in common. See also dharma
    Sagara: a king whose sons dug out the ocean, which is also called sagara
    sa-guna: “with qualities,” the differentiated, visualized aspect of the godhead
    Sahadeva: one of the twin sons of Madri, fathered by the Ashvins, in the Mahabharata
    sahib: “master,” honorific title given to British rulers in India during the Raj
    Sama Veda: the Veda of hymns arranged for chanting
    samkara: mixture, in particular the mixing together of classes and/or castes
    samnyasa: renunciation
    samsara: the circle of transmigration
    sanatana dharma: the eternal religious law. See also dharma
    Sankhya: a dualistic philosophy, dating from the time of the Upanishads, that divides the universe into a male purusha (spirit, self, or person) and a female prakriti (matter, nature)
    Sanskrit: the perfected or artificial language called the language of the gods; the language of the texts of ancient India
    Sanskritization: process by which lower castes, imitating Brahmin ways of eating and dressing, raise their status
    Santoshi Ma: goddess first worshiped in the 1960s, now extremely popular, largely as the result of a mythological film, Jai Santoshi Ma
    Sarama: bitch of the god Indra in the Rig Veda, who found stolen cows and brought them back
    Sarasvati River: once a river in the Punjab, dried up long ago
    sati: a good woman, particularly a devoted wife. See also suttee
    Sati: wife of the god Shiva, daughter of Daksha, who committed suicide
    Satnamis: “Path of the True Name,” a sect, founded in the eastern Punjab in 1657, that worships gurus rather than gods
    sattva: “truth, goodness,” one of the three gunas or qualities of matter in Sankhya