So why is an onion hot but garlic cold? There are at least three explanations to this phenomena that I have heard from different people. They are
The second and third explanations should be quite clear as belonging to the same framework of theoretical analysis suggested here. The first bears a little explanation. Vishnu is the supreme god who created Brahman. Hence, he has to be completely non-mixing. By metonymic logic, this implies any likeness to Vishnu (or his accouterments) is non-mixing hence cold. The basic point of the story is that theoretical frameworks like the one used here do not provide answers. They provide context in which the relevance of different assertions can be contested and adopted. So there is no Pan-Indian algorithm to assign hot and cold to different items. However, the assignment is not arbitrary either and draws from a deep and lasting world view that provides context but leaves great room for flexibility in interpretation.
Traditional classifications of the concepts of hot and cold were incomplete due to a lack of data, especially of the cross-cultural kind. This made researchers either give context-free and overly general classification schemes (Beck) or suggest that such cross-cultural schemes would be impossible (Valentine Daniel). In this essay, I have attempted to demonstrate that using recent research in metaphor and conceptual categorization theory, combined with the ethnosociological approach of Marriott and his students, we can begin to develop a semantic property space for hot-cold categorizations in different cultural settings. I have confined myself to data from South Asia, but have shown that the analysis covers terms introduced from multiple languages and cultures (Tamil, Hindi, Greek, Hebrew, and Persian). Preliminary investigations of data from Javanese shows good promise and data from other languages and cultures is being culled. Validation of the overall theoretical framework needs much further work. I am currently looking at the Javanese data which I have reproduced in the appendix.
Without much further data analysis, the work proposed here and the theories used could turn out to be like the raft in the following parable from Buddha (as told by A.K. Ramanujan [Ramanujan]). In the parable, a man was drowning in a flood. Just as he was about to drown, a raft appeared. He clung on, and the raft carried him safely to dry land. And he was so grateful to the raft that he carried it on his back for the rest of his life.