Power, Presence and Space

South Asian Rituals in Archaeological Context

Henry Albery, Jens-Uwe Hartmann, Himanshu Prabha Ray, Henry Albery, Jens-Uwe Hartmann, Himanshu Prabha Ray

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367749408
• eBook ISBN: 9781000168808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Patterns of ritual power, presence, and space are fundamentally connected to, and mirror, the societal and political power structures in which they are enacted.

This book explores these connections in South Asia from the early Common Era until the present day. The essays in the volume examine a wide range of themes, including a genealogy of ideas concerning Vedic rituals in European thought; Buddhist donative rituals of Gandhara and Andhra Pradesh in the early Common Era; land endowments, festivals, and temple establishments in medieval Tamil Nadu and Karnataka; Mughal court rituals of the Mughal Empire; and contemporary ritual complexes on the Nilgiri Plateau. This volume argues for the need to redress a historical neglect in identifying and theorising ritual and religion in material contexts within archaeology. Further, it challenges existing theoretical and methodological forms of documentation to propose new ways of understanding rituals in history.

This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian history, religion, archaeology, and historical geography.

Part I
POWER

1
IMAGINING SACRIFICE IN ANCIENT INDIA

A genealogy of Heesterman’s Broken World¹

Robert A. Yelle

Introduction: staging the primal scene of sacrifice

In his 1993 work, The Broken World of Sacrifice, the late Dutch Indologist Jan Heesterman (1925–2014) offered a summation of his decades-long argument that the Vedic sacrificial texts contained the traces of an older, lost tradition.² In Heesterman’s reconstruction, sacrifice was originally a life-and-death struggle between competitors for certain material, social and existential goods: ‘the overall contest pattern of preclassical sacrifice . . . was a real struggle for the ultimate stakes of life and death’.³ He describes this primal scene as a ‘battleground’⁴ or ‘undisguised raiding affair’⁵ where the ‘sacred frenzy of the warrior’⁶ endured through the ‘apogee of the sacrifice’ in ‘the unpredictable exuberance of the communal meal’.⁷ According to Heesterman, traces of this original model remain visible in the Vedic corpus, in symbolic chariot races, references to securing the ‘head’ of the sacrifice (which may refer to decapitating one’s opponent) and the vestigial meal that is the odana.

His account is structured by the contrast between an original, ecstatic scene that may be dimly glimpsed behind the extant texts—as if these were palimpsests—and what became of the sacrifice as it degenerated into a mechanistic form of ritual. The Brahmins resolved the tension of the sacrificial agon by removing its competitive element, and making it a solo performance that was, moreover, tightly scripted. The logical end point of this process of denaturalisation was the Upaniṣadic identification between Ātman and Brahman, or self and universal, in which no uncertainty remained and even the sacrifice itself could be reduced to the internal yoga of the prāṇāgnihotram:

While the sacrificial contest reenacted the enigmatic relationship of life and death, ritualism—stripping away the contest—posited the absolute rule of ritual beyond life and death. It thereby opened up a definitive split between the dynamic sacrality of the life-and-death nexus and the static transcendence of the Vedic injunction— between the awesome uncertainty of the sacred and the dead certainty of the transcendent. . . . [I]t is ancient Indian ritualism . . . that offers the clearest and by far the best documented case of such an ‘axial’ breakthrough. . . . When . . . a breakthrough like Vedic ritualism did occur, it ‘disenchanted’ a world held in thrall by the sacred brokenness of the contest.⁸

Before the Vedic period, sacrifice had been a communal affair; indeed, what Marcel Mauss referred to as a ‘prestation totale’, at which social groups came together and reestablished their bonds through the festive rivalry of the ‘Three F’s’—Feasting, Fighting and Falling in Love. The Mahāvrata festival, for example, shows ‘the remnants of a rowdy and orgiastic New Year’s festival’.⁹ After the Brahmin priests domesticated the sacrifice, it became an individualistic, even antisocial, affair that led logically to movements of renunciation and asceticism.

Heesterman’s reconstruction has been admired for its boldness as well as questioned for its speculative leaps by other scholars of the Vedas.¹⁰ Stephanie Jamison posed, among other criticisms, the following:

A more dubious method of reconstruction is the constant derivation of the figurative and symbolic from the literal. Heesterman regularly argues that apparent symbolic representations in śrauta ritual are denatured, ‘deconstructed’ survivals of actual, literal procedures in the older system. For example, the presence of a chariot or even a chariot wheel points to a real, lengthy journey embedded in the older sacrifice; a symbolic contest (with dice or with words) to a real fight to the death. . . . [T]o what extent are we required (or allowed) to assume that a particular element in a ritual is the diachronic schematization of something originally real?¹¹

More cuttingly, Christopher Minkowski stated: ‘The misfortune is that each of [Heesterman’s] brilliant insights is, as it were, dragged up the side of an ideological volcano and sacrificed whole to the angry, catastrophic god of [his] grand theory’.¹²

Despite such critiques, Heesterman’s historical reconstruction of the development of Vedic sacrifice remains as one of the last important interpretations of this key tradition. To my knowledge, there has been no serious effort to trace the genealogy of his account in the history of European ideas, as opposed to that part which may derive directly from a reading of the Vedic texts. I will argue that Heesterman’s account is premised on a series of tropes, mythemes and narratives that reveal much more about the European mind than they do about the ancient history and prehistory of the subcontinent. His depiction of the primal scene of sacrifice as a combat among warriors drew both on his countryman Johan Huizinga’s focus in Homo Ludens (1938) on agonistic play as the key to culture and on various early 20th-century and Weimar- and Nazi-era studies of the Aryan or Indo-German Männerbund, or ‘male band’, as the original social formation. Heesterman’s account of the degeneration of sacrifice at the hands of priests resembles narratives of the decline of ancient Israelite sacrifice from a joyous communal meal into empty ritualism, narratives that received influential expression by the late-19th-century Protestant Bible scholars Julius Wellhausen and William Robertson Smith. More generally, Heesterman’s account echoed Max Weber’s thesis of the routinisation of charisma;¹³ he actually appropriated Weber’s term ‘disenchantment’ to label the ancient Indian developments. The fact that each of these older theories has by now been criticised itself as encoding certain biases, whether theological or racialist, lends urgency to the task of a genealogical critique.

Protestant narratives of the decline from sacrifice to ritual

First let me summarise a few more of the main points of Heesterman’s theory. Sacrifice normally consists of three components: immolation or killing, generally (although not always) of an animal or even a human being; the destruction of an offering and a meal.¹⁴ The element of destruction signals abandonment, and it is what distinguishes the sacrifice from the gift.¹⁵ Heesterman acknowledges that ‘there are well-known cases in which one of the three basic elements is missing. . . . Thus the holocaust or the biblical ’olah is wholly burnt without any part being eaten. Here oblational destruction has taken over from the otherwise normal meal’.¹⁶ However, the presence of the three elements in some combination is what defines sacrifice. Contradicting a long scholarly tradition that regards sacrifice as a type or subset of ritual, Heesterman posits a fundamental distinction between these two categories. Where sacrifice is spontaneous, natural and communal, ritual is artificial, mechanistic and sharply separated from social life: ‘the ritualists have remolded the animal sacrifice so as to eliminate the “inauspicious” awesomeness and excitement of blood and killing. The result . . . is an utterly flat, though intricate, sequence of acts and mantras, perfectly regulated and without ups or downs, which agrees with the ritualists’ aim of taming sacrifice’.¹⁷ Heesterman’s archive is the developed system of Śrauta or ‘solemn’ rites in the Vedic texts, which are complex and carried out by specialists. These rituals are some of the most elaborate and well-documented that we know of. The form of ritual is adapted to its purpose, which is to provide a ‘fail-safe, risk-free mechanism that will automatically deliver the goods of life . . . that took out the sting of death and absolutized the capacity of sacrifice for establishing order’.¹⁸ Ritual replaced the ‘awesome uncertainty’ of sacrifice with ‘dead certainty’.

This required a denaturation of sacrifice, as shown not only by its increasingly scripted nature, but also by the loss of its communal dimensions— represented above all by the displacement of the festival meal—as well as by the rise of a specialised cadre of priests. Tamed by ritual, ‘sacrifice . . . no longer even contains a festive meal’.¹⁹ The burnt oblation, or the element of destruction by fire, took over until ‘little room was left for the direct and tangible manipulation of life and death epitomized in the two other moments of sacrifice, the immolatory kill and its material purpose, the sacrificial meal. . . . Sacrifice was dematerialized as it was desocialized’.²⁰ The focus of sacrifice as a social event had been the communal meal, which, because of its involvement in an ‘ever-shifting web of conflict and alliance’, had to be pushed to the margins.²¹ The potlatch was broken up and the punchbowl taken away; all that remained was the vegetarian odana meal, as an afterthought.

The villains in Heesterman’s drama are the Brahmin priests, who gradually take over as sacrifice gives way to ritual. The original sacrificer was a warrior consecrated unto death, who entered into combat for the goods of sacrifice and enjoyed the Three F’s as previously mentioned. ‘Briefly and crudely, before there were priests there were warriors’.²² A key example is the Vrātya, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: the archaeology of ritual in South Asian contexts
• Part I Power
• Part II Presence
• Part III Space
• Index