Samskara : a rite for a dead man
(Book)

"Originally published in English in 1976 by Oxford University Press India and reprinted here by arrangement with the publisher"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references.

Samskara is one of the acknowledged masterpieces of modern world literature, a book to set beside Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North. Taking its name from a Sanskrit word that means rite of passage but also moment of recognition, it begins when Naranappa, an inhabitant of a small south Indian town and a renegade Brahmin who has scandalously flouted the rules of caste and purity for years, eating meat, drinking alcohol, marrying beneath him, mocking God, unexpectedly falls ill and dies.