Puṁsavana
The popular claimThe second saṁskāra asks for a son by name, and no honest account of the sixteen can leave that out or soften it.
Of the sixteen, this is the one that is hardest to write about honestly, and the difficulty is not in the ritual. The ritual is small. The difficulty is the name.
Puṁsavana is built from puṁs, a male, and savana, a bringing forth. The word means what it looks like it means. The rite asks for a son.
We could leave this page out of the series and few would notice. We could describe the rite and never translate its name. Both would be a kind of lying, and the whole of this site is an argument against that kind. So: here is what the texts say, plainly, and here is what we think of it, separately and clearly marked.
When it falls
The Gṛhya Sūtras place Puṁsavana in the third month of pregnancy, and several of them are careful to say before the foetus stirs — before the mother can feel movement. Āśvalāyana gives the second or third month; Pāraskara the third; Śāṅkhāyana the third. The rite therefore sits in a specific window: after the pregnancy is certain, before it is felt.
The muhūrta writers add a condition that follows from the rite's purpose: the Moon should be in a nakṣatra reckoned male, and Puṣya is the one most often named. A fixed or dual rising sign, the Sun in Uttarāyaṇa, and the usual exclusions of the eighth from the Moon and of the inauspicious tithis.
What is actually done
The rite is brief and physical. A shoot of the nyagrodha — the banyan — is taken, one that is growing north or east, and it is pounded. Some schools add other substances; the lists differ, and several of the additions are herbs that appear elsewhere in the same texts as general tonics for pregnancy. The juice is instilled into the wife's right nostril, and she is told not to spit it out. A verse is recited. In some versions the husband touches her and speaks a formula over the womb.
That is the whole of the ritual. There is no fire in most versions, no priest strictly required, no expense.
The right nostril matters to the logic: the right side is the male side throughout this literature, as the right ear is pierced first for a boy in Karṇavedha. The rite is consistent with itself.
Suśruta, and a second reading
The medical tradition takes up the same third month and gives it a different emphasis. The Suśruta Saṁhitā treats the third month as the point at which the limbs and the senses of the foetus are held to differentiate, and the regimen it prescribes around this time is nutritive — milk, specific preparations, rest.
Some later commentators use this to read Puṁsavana as a rite of healthy gestation onto which the son-wish was laid, rather than as a sex-selection rite that acquired a medical gloss. The reading is available and it is argued sincerely. It is also not what the name says, and the sūtras do not hedge. We give you the reading; we do not adopt it on your behalf.
Why it is gone
Puṁsavana is among the most thoroughly abandoned of the sixteen. Almost no family in India performs it as a distinct rite today. Where anything survives it has usually been absorbed into the seventh-month observance — Sīmantonnayana, or the godh bharāī — which is a celebration of the pregnancy itself and carries no sex-wish.
It is worth being clear about why it disappeared, because two different reasons get confused. It was already fading before the modern period, along with most of the pre-natal rites, simply because the Gṛhya household ritual receded generally. And separately, the thing it asks for is now something the law of India treats as a serious matter: the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act of 1994 prohibits pre-natal sex determination and sex selection, against a documented history of skewed sex ratios.
A rite of three drops of banyan juice does not determine anything. But a tradition that names a son as the thing to be asked for does sit inside that history, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of tidying-up this series exists to avoid.
The list itself disagrees
The membership of the sixteen is not fixed, and Puṁsavana is one of the entries where authorities differ — some enumerations drop it, some merge it with Sīmantonnayana, some keep all three pre-natal rites and some keep one. A reader who has seen a different list of sixteen has not seen a wrong list.
What this page does not say
It does not recommend this rite. It does not suggest that a son is the thing to want, and it does not repeat the merit-claims the dharma literature attaches to having one. It does not claim that any ritual influences the sex of a child, because none does — sex is settled at conception by which chromosome the sperm carries, and nothing instilled in a nostril in the third month reaches it.
And it does not leave the rite out. It is the second of the sixteen; a series that claims to walk a life from before birth to after death does not get to skip the parts that have aged badly. Describing something is not endorsing it, and the distance between those two is where this whole section lives.
Source — Ashvalayana Grhya Sutra 1.13; Paraskara Grhya Sutra 1.14; Shankhayana Grhya Sutra 1.20; Sushruta Samhita, Sharira-sthana 3, on the third month; Manusmriti 2.27 on the pre-natal rites as a set
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