Isabelle Clark-Deces is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and the author of Religion against the Self: An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals (2000).

"In this book, isabelle Clark-Deces gives us a clear-eyed view of the bond between the state of untouchability in India, and the pain of death and irretrievable loss. This is not a distanced work: the reader is always right there with the people Clark-Deces writes about; one can see them and hear their voices as one reads. The author also achieves some powerful theoretical insights that go beyond the words and other communicative acts of her informants." - Margaret Trawick, Professor of Social Anthropology, Massey University, New Zealand"

• Acknowledgments Introduction 1. A Different Grief 2. Songs of Experience 3. Why Should We Cry? 4. Life as a Record of Failure 5. Between Performance and Experience Appendix A: Four Abridged Versions of the Virajampuhan Story Appendix B: The Story of Virajampuhan in Tamil Glossary References