Now available from ConFluence-Film: In the Womb of the Caudron is an essay-style documentary film by Daniel Kremer and William Cully Allen, Ph.D, a philosopher of South Asian religions. The film takes you inside one of the most sacred, ancient and enduring religious rituals in the world. The karaha is a relatively obscure agricultural ritual performed in remote rural India by low-caste priests in concert with high-caste brahmins, dramatizing a shifting and sharing of powers. The ritual is a fusion of caste cultures, memorializing the identity-defining moment when the low caste Yadav family rejected the worship of high caste Indra, in favor of the low caste Krishna, the cow herding incarnation of Vishnu. The viewer is bombarded with a veritable lollapalooza of sights and sounds from the ritual itself -- a ritual that has been legally banned throughout India.
