Renunciation and Untouchability in India

The Notional and the Empirical in the Caste Order

Srinivasa Ramanujam

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367432263
• eBook ISBN: 9781000113600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume develops a historically informed phenomenology of caste and untouchability. It explores the idea of 'Brahmin' and the practice of untouchability by offering a scholarly reading of ancient and medieval texts. By going beyond the notions of purity and pollution, it presents a new framework of understanding relationships between social groups and social categories.

An important intervention in the study of caste and untouchability, this book will be an essential read for the scholars and researchers of political studies, political philosophy, cultural studies, Dalit studies, Indology, sociology, social anthropology and Ambedkar studies.

1 The ‘ideal’ Brahmin and the dead being

In his book The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, Nicholas Dirks (2008), writes about his experience with a Brahmin who was one among his ‘principal teachers, informants, consultants and friends’. That Brahmin, called PMS,

was the retired head clerk of the Settlement Office… . He was the descendant of a family of srotriya or learned Brahmins who had been settled on fertile land in Pudukkottai State in the late eighteenth century by the Tondaiman Raja of the time. But, PMS himself was a laukika or secular Brahmin [householder Brahmin], educated in Shakespeare and British History at St. Joseph’s College, Trichy.

(ibid.: xiii)

PMS guided the completion of the Inam Settlement until his retirement from Government service in 1957. This Brahmin was hesitant to receive remuneration from Dirks for his services though he was not economically that well off. What do we make of this behaviour? Is it that of an ‘eccentric’ individual, which cannot be generalised, or as an individual, who manifests the inherent quality of something called Brahmin-ness? Now, in the words of Dirks:

An honest bureaucrat and a true scholar, he was later helpful to academics and others who would come through Pudukkottai and stay for a time as guests of the royal family. He has helped me during my initial stay in the place years earlier, and he agreed to work with me again when I returned in 1981 for intensive fieldwork. But when I first arrived, he was hard to track down; despite his poverty, he refused to enter into any contractual arrangement, and aside from allowing me to pick up the tab for coffee, dosai, and bus trips, refused all payment. In the first few weeks he told me that he could not accept payment because he could not countenance being paid for simply sharing what he knew about the history, land system, and ethnology of Pudukottai: after all, this was the love of his life, and to sell his knowledge would be to prostitute his most valued treasure.

(ibid.)

At the same time, this Brahmin ensured that Dirks was dependent on him. He did not allow Dirks to meet other people who would offer their knowledge and also took him to the places of all his friends and relatives, eager to show the ‘more valued treasure’ he had got. Further, his eyes were failing him, and he was unable to read the 18th-century palm leafs. He also disappeared regularly. In spite of these uncomfortable experiences, Dirks was very particular to pay ‘some form of remuneration’ to him. So, Dirks handed over ‘an envelope full of wads of rupees and told him this was a gift, a dana’. This laukika Brahmin, who refused any remuneration, accepted the money as dana and told this story to Dirks:

Some years before the Maharaja … called PMS to attend upon him. There was a problem with some lands belonging to the royal family, and PMS was asked to find the relevant records and prepare a brief for the family lawyer, who was himself unable to use the old land records of the state. PMS happily did what was asked, and when he had completed his services, the Raja called him over and asked him to take a 100 rupee note. PMS refused to accept it saying ‘O Maharaja, how can I accept payment from you when you are my king?’ The Tondaiman prince, puzzled to see an obviously poor man refuse the money, asked him why he stood on ceremony since he himself was no longer a Maharaja and these were no longer the days of rajadharma. PMS replied first by quoting Shakespeare, ‘Not all the waters of the rough, rude sea can wash away the balm from the anointed king’ … and then by telling the king what he meant to tell me by the recitation of the story: for the services that involve my knowledge, I accept no payment.

(ibid.: xiv)

The problem with this laukika Brahmin is, as Dirks notes, he could not accept formal remuneration for his services but was ready to accept the same remuneration as dana or a gift from Dirks, as he accepted the hundred rupees from the king.

PMS would accept a dana from the king rather than campalam [remuneration] because a dana is ‘freely given’, without expectation of a return. It is not that he did not want to give a return – he offered it to begin with – but rather that he felt that the transaction of salary demeaned his offering, rendering it, too less than freely given. PMS also meant to say that even a king could not control him by contract and that in any case as a loyal subject he has no need to be controlled, thus recapitulating the conundrum of the Brahman’s relation with the king.

(ibid.: xv)

Why then is the Brahmin PMS ready to accept remuneration for this contribution, as a gift and not as a salary? It does not mean that the Brahmins do not involve in an exchange relationship with society. Why is this Brahmin not willing to treat his knowledge as a commodity or his service as sell-able? A Brahmin who conducts rites for events like marriage, death is just selling his labour and knowledge like a washerman or a barber. How then does a Brahmin who is involved in exchange relations with society locate himself above everything and everyone, refusing to acknowledge the fact of the matter that his relationship is essentially based on exchange rules? The behaviour of the Brahmin in Dirks story does not manifest the eccentric behaviour of an individual Brahmin. This is fundamental to the very enterprise of a Brahmin-self. In short, PMS manifests the true ambivalent position of the Brahmins in their social relations. They are in exchange relations with a society which they refuse to acknowledge.

In this chapter, the main focus is to consolidate the social and theological constructs involved in the self-making of the Brahmin. The self-making of the Brahmin is intrinsically related to the sanyasi tradition in Brahmanism. The theological and the social construction of renunciation in Buddhism and Jainism is fundamentally different from the Brahmanical tradition. In Brahmanism, the renouncer tradition did not evolve independently of the householder. So, within the Brahmanical framework, where is the sanyasi located? Is he at the centre of its theological and its social construct, as in Buddhism and Jainism, or at its periphery? As we know, the Vedic worldview is built around the householder-male, and hence, the renouncer has no independent or positive existence. In such a narrative, how and when was the renouncer conceptually accommodated? This story is both about the internal dynamics of the Brahmanical tradition as well as its dialogues with other intellectual and theological worldviews. My thesis is that unless we differentiate the renouncer in the Brahmanical tradition from the one in other traditions like Buddhism (both theologically and as a way of life), we cannot locate the specific features of the sanyasi tradition within the Brahmanical framework. Further, unless we locate the unique features of the Brahmin renouncer, we cannot determine how the idea of Brahmin became an ‘original’. It took many centuries for Brahmanism to arrive at a notion of the ‘ideal Brahmin’, a sanyasi embodied in the householder Brahmin-self.

Historical background

It is generally accepted that, socially, the worldviews of Buddhism and Jainism stand counter to everything that Brahmanism stands for. The Orientalist scholarship read Buddhism and other non-Brahmin movements as an anti-caste movement and the Brahmins as the one who established the caste system to uphold their social and ritual hegemony. This reading got its legitimacy particularly after Ambedkar embraced Buddhism, and continues to have enormous influence even in the modern political discourse. Buddhism became a sort of vehicle to counter Neo-Brahmanism and is seen as a philosophy more sympathetic to the oppressed peoples, in particular the Dalits. In these modes of anti-caste narratives, a sort of monolithic Brahmanism is constructed and counterposed with another monolithic construction, Buddhism. The Brahmins were never a monolithic group. There were not only different philosophical schools but also intense debates on the very idea of Brahmin among the Brahmin intellectuals. So, instead of addressing the social contradiction as between Brahmins and non-Brahmins, we can approach the contradiction as between a householder perspective and renouncer/ascetic perspective. This will enable us to interrogate how the idea of the Brahmin evolved through the centuries. But why did Buddhism and Jainism take to asceticism to counter the Vedic worldview that was centred on the ritualised Brahmin-householder-male? Addressing this issue is of paramount importance because the householder-renouncer/ascetic axis impact on the socio-economic and the cultural world of India is enormous and in the process, the idea of Brahmin became a sort of an ‘original’ that can be recovered or translated continuously.

The normative practice of cutting all ties with society and family can be found in many cultures. For example, if an individual becomes no longer useful to the community because of say, terminal illness, or old age, they may cut all ties with their community and family and retire to the forest. But these normative practices are fundamentally different from the conceptual constructions we are to discuss in detail. Vedic Brahmanism is basically village-centric. Olivelle reads the asceticism conceptualised in Buddhism, Jainism, and even within Brahmanism as a city-centric response to the village-centric ritualistic worldview. Olivelle (2004) is of the view that this response would not have been possible without individualisation, without the life experiences of towns and cities, and the formation of monarchy and trade. The city-centred Brahmins attempted to redefine the very idea of Brahmin. In other words, the social categories of the Vedic world would not sustain their relevance in the environment of towns and cities. If we take the village-centric worldview as a closed one, the new environment was much more open, and individuals in the new environment had to self-define themselves differently. In her book Natural Symbols: Exploration in Cosmology, Mary Douglas illustrates the state of individuals who move from a closed society to a more open one:

When the social group grips its members in tight communal bonds, the religion is ritualistic; when this grip is relaxed, ritualism declines… . The most important determinant of ritualism is the experience of closed groups. The man who has that experience associates boundaries with power and danger. The better defined and the most significant the social boundaries, the more the bias I would expect in favour of ritual. If the social are weakly structured and their membership weak and fluctuating, then I would expect the low value to be set on symbolic performance. Along this line of ritual variation, appropriate doctrinal difference would appear. With weak social boundaries and weak ritualism, I would expect a doctrinal emphasis on internal, emotional states. Sin would be more of an affect than of transgression; sacraments and magic would give way to direct unmediated communion, even to the sacralization of states of trance and bodily dissociation.

(Douglas, 1982: 13, in Olivelle, 2004: 59)

In the new environment, precisely the type of intellectual environment that Douglas predicts – non-ritualistic, individualist, and centred on an ethics of internal virtue − emerged in North India during the period we are discussing. This period, around the fifth and sixth centuries BCE, produced an intellectual and philosophical response that was so rich and varied that these ideas, as Uma Chakravarti writes, ‘indicates the complexity of attempting to understand the rapidly changing society’ (2006: 125).

Culturally constructed worlds cannot be monolithic and stable forever. These constructs are constantly challenged by new life experiences. Vedic culture remained village-centric until sixth century BCE. This village culture is the social background of the Brahmanical theology. The principal feature of the period we are discussing saw a tremendous expansion of the economy and the consolidation of power by the monarch. Chakravarthi (2006: 122) explains in detail the impact of the expansion of agriculture that led to a virtual demographic revolution. The important difference between the village-centric and the city-centric is that cities are basically settlements, composed of people from different villages. This demands new modes of relations that are totally different from those of the villages. Further, cities are primarily political and commercial centres. Gombrich argues that ‘there can be no trade without an economic surplus’ and continues that

though trade seems to be a necessary condition for the creation of towns, it is not a sufficient one. On the other hand, it is too easily forgotten that commerce itself depends on organisation: on an infrastructure of communications and a certain level of legality and security, both products of stable political conditions.

(Gombrich, 1988: 53, in Olivelle, 1992: 31)

City-centric worldview, though not always, is fundamentally an antithesis to all that the village stands for. The city-centred intellectual tradition must necessarily attempt to make sense of their new lived and complex experiences. One such response is Buddhism. Gombrich says that Buddhism is an urban development and ‘Buddha talked to Kings, Pasenadi of Kosala, Bimbisara and his son Ajatasattu of Magadha, who ruled quite sizable territories from their urban capitals’ (in Olivelle, 1992: 32).

In this environment, the idea of the individual, according to some scholars, though located not at the periphery in the social and theological construction of the Vedic world, was brought to the centre in the new world. This was made possible only by monarchy and trade. For the monarch the idea of the individual was indispensable. A monarch can never become part of any social group, and at least conceptually he needs to locate himself above all groups. Universal acceptance is fundamental for the monarch. It is in this environment that asceticism centred on individuals evolved. In other words, kings, traders, and ascetics are city-centric individuals. So, the challenge that the new city-centric worldview posed to Vedic Brahmanism is how a Brahmin, defined as an essential part of the varna scheme, can be made relevant in the environment of individualisation. Vedic Brahmanism is structured around the householder-male (family) category (varna). But for the idea of Brahmin to be relevant in the new world, it has to be individualised. As asceticism is premised on the notion of an individual, the social category Brahmin has to be redefined to accommodate the individualised Brahmin. Olivelle summarises:

Down the centuries the Hindu tradition have been caught in an internal and unresolved conflict not just between two institutions – married householder and celibate renunciation – but also between the two value systems represented by these two institutions. We have seen many and repeated attempts to bring these two poles of the tradition together, always with limited success.

(2011b: 26)

Resolving the conflict between these two institutions means that the Brahmin must evolve as an idealised individual, incorporating both the Brahmin renouncer and the householder Brahmin. This limited success is part of the ambivalent nature of the Brahmin self-making.

This is a long story, but a fascinating one. I am just going to consolidate the scholarly writings of Patrick Olivelle, starting from the position where the householder Brahmin and the Brahmin renouncer are separate entities and then see how attempts were made to unify these two distinct entities into one unified whole: ‘the Brahmin’. The internal tension within the Brahmanism is this: if the sanyasi is defined as a Brahmin, what becomes of the householder Brahmin? If the householder Brahmin essentially defines what it is to be Brahmin, can the sanyasi be sustained as a Brahmin? Both cannot exist within a system as two distinct entities. Olivelle’s readings of the renunciation tradition in Brahmanism in general and the notions of the ‘true’ Brahmin in particular are very important not only to understand the debates among Brahmin intellectuals but also to understand the castes and the relationships between discrete jatis and untouchability. Is the ‘true’ Brahmin a notional entity or an empirical one? In the Brahmanical worldview, the ‘true’ Brahmin becomes a preta (ghost). The question of why Brahmin intellectuals evolved the notion of the ‘true’ Brahmin as a preta, an incorporeal entity, is important in understanding untouchability conceptually. The inherent tension between the householder Brahmin and the Brahmin renouncer was resolved by Sankara (8th century CE). Sankara redefined the ‘true’ Brahmin as one who is not bound by the Dharmas of varna and asrama. Sankara located the ‘true’ Brahmin outside varnasramadharma. For the community of Brahmins to define themselves as Brahmins, the householder Brahmin body must embody the sanyasi, an incorporeal entity. That is, to sustain the ritual-centric householder Brahmin alive and corporeal, the ‘ideal’ Brahmin, a Paramahamsa sanyasi, has to become a notional entity and incorporeal.

City-centric individualism

Olivelle argues that ‘the individualistic spirit permitted the creation of the first voluntary religious organisations in India. The Buddhist and Jain monastic orders are the earliest available examples of such organisations’ (1992: 33). This became possible only through the independent choice of the individuals. People who became associated with asceticism did so on their own as independent individuals. They attempted to define t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: notional Brahmin and the idea of original
• 1 The ‘ideal’ Brahmin and the dead being
• 2 Physical body and social body
• 3 Brahmin householder as renouncer
• 4 Touch-un-ability and ‘ideal’ Brahmin
• 5 Translating touch-un-ability
• Conclusion: the dead being is still alive
• Bibliography
• Index