In April 1975, in the village of Panjal in Kerala, Nambudiri brahmin families performed the agnicayana under the observation of an international team of scholars led by Frits Staal, with film cameras, tape recorders and photographers documenting all twelve days. The performance became the most thoroughly recorded large-scale ritual event in the history of scholarship, published by Staal in the two massive volumes of Agni in 1983, and it settled a question that had hung over Vedic studies: whether the srauta prescriptions were a scribal ideal or a performable reality. They were performable, and the Nambudiris performed them from living memory, their patha recitation techniques preserving the Vedic sound with the letter-perfect redundancy that had carried it orally across some three thousand years.
The event was also a negotiation with the modern world, and the record is honest about it: the classical rite prescribes animal sacrifice, and the 1975 performance, after community debate, substituted offerings of rice flour wrapped in leaves, a change some traditionalists contested and most accepted as the price of performing the rite at all. Staal drew from the event his famous and controversial thesis that ritual is a rule-governed activity older than meaning, syntax without semantics; critics answered that a tradition which explains every brick is not meaningless to its performers. Subsequent agnicayanas, including performances at Panjal in 1990 and 2011, have kept the tradition alive, now with wide public attention, and the rite stands as the clearest living window into the ritual world from which Indian religion grew.