Indian conceptions about the earth's recycling of wastes is an important domain for investigation. The use of dust as a cleansing agent leads us to inquire into local notions about elemental processes, the tropic cycle, and the role of the streets as venue and traffic as process in recycling the detritus and castaways of daily life. We relate local expectations about waste disposal to textual sources, utilise Ayurvedic theory and practice to understand traffic as a flow, and examine Samkhya philosophical underpinnings for a humoral world- view. By reviewing ethnographic and Indologic analyses of how bathing, or entering the flow, is experienced, we examine the deep implicit meaning of flows and churning. We argue that the very entering into traffic is transformative, an experience that is further sanctified in the ritual elaboration of some travel as pilgrimage. There emerge from our inquiry recurrent themes on flows, and their outcomes, for which we select an ethnosociological frame on which such patterns, symmetries and inversion may coalesce into a single coherent design.
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