Yajnopavita

The thread is given at the upanayana, the rite that takes a boy to a teacher and makes him dvija, twice-born, the second birth being the one into study. The domestic ritual manuals, the Grihya Sutras, set out the ceremony in detail and prescribe different ages for the three upper varnas, commonly the eighth year for a brahmana, the eleventh for a kshatriya and the twelfth for a vaishya, with latest permissible ages beyond which the omission was held to disqualify.

The cord itself is made of three strands twisted together, each strand in the fuller prescriptions consisting of nine threads, knotted with a particular knot called the brahmagranthi. The material differs by varna in the older texts, cotton, hemp or wool. Interpretations of the three strands are offered in numbers: the three Vedas, the three debts owed to sages, ancestors and gods, the three qualities of nature, the three utterances of the Gayatri. The texts do not choose between them.

At the same rite the boy receives the Gayatri verse from his teacher and takes up the obligations of daily recitation. The thread is a token of that, and traditional teaching insists that the token without the recitation is empty, a point made pointedly and often within the tradition itself.

The thread carries information by where it sits. Worn over the left shoulder and under the right arm it is upavita, the normal position for rites addressed to the gods. Hung round the neck like a garland it is nivita. Worn over the right shoulder and under the left arm it is prachinavita, and that is the position for rites addressed to the ancestors, including the offerings for the dead. A man performing a shraddha shifts the thread before he begins, and the shift is part of the rite rather than an adjustment of dress.

It is replaced whole rather than mended. The annual replacement takes place at Upakarma, known in the south as Avani Avittam, when the old thread is discarded and a new one put on with the recitation of the appropriate verses, and it is also replaced after a death in the family and on other occasions of impurity.

Who may receive it has been argued about for a very long time. The classical texts confine the upanayana to men of the three upper varnas, and passages in the ritual and legal literature have been read as evidence that women underwent it in some earlier period. Nineteenth and twentieth century reform movements, the Arya Samaj among them, conferred the thread across caste lines and on women; other communities hold to the older restriction; and both positions are held today by people who consider themselves Hindus in good standing.