Hinduism: The Anthropology of a Civilization

Manuwadi bias in Indian anthropology

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Buddhism had been expelled or absorbed, jainism had withdrawn into itself to resist Hindu cultural pressure, and the tribes had been driven into the least habitable parts of the territory although they too were not allowed to ignore the powerful society which contained them on all sides.

Hinduism, the anthropology of a civilization

Kingdoms great and small, ionglasting or ephemeral, even empires, succeeded one another, but brahmanic India continued to adhere to its own norms; its thinkers and authors—all Brahmans— have given her a fundamentally timeless image, intended in their minds to live eternally, since she was the centre of the world, the measure of salvation, and spoke the language of the gods. That is indeed the main justification for an attempt at a systematic presentation. This endeavour consists in taking literally the desire of a whole society, as expressed by its scribes but also no doubt with a very broad consensus, to present itself as a well-ordered whole, as the realization of a socio-cosmic order which promises it eternity or Introduction 3 an everlasting renewal.

This amounts to saying that change, when it does appear, is only superficial and always refers back to a normative foundation, the one source from which spring the most transient phenomena. The psychological, the individual, the momentary collective movement escape us—or are they simply absent?

A rigorous study of mentalities must in fact take care not to see these lacunae as something negative, as a limit on investigation. On the contrary, they have a heuristic value if they are regarded as indices of what the Hindu will or can say of himself.

I do not deny that this is a risky undertaking: how can one be sure that the reduction of the fact to the norm does not conceal the intrusion of a historical contingency the data of which elude us? One cannot hope to make a system of Hindu culture as a whole, without any remainder. In particular, this would be to make light of the centuries of rationalizations which the Brahmans have accumulated in all good faith, deceiving themselves before catching us in their trap.

More modestly, therefore, I shall endeavour to show the probability of an interpretation by examining it from several angles, not forgetting that the most solid pieces of evidence may themselves prove to be deceptive, that the insignificant anecdote takes on-the air of a myth the better to charge itself with meaning. The twofold demand for an overall system and for a meaning immanent in each of its partial manifestations runs counter to an Indological tradition which has been firmly rooted in the West for decades and which has even caught on among contemporary Indian 4 Hinduism intellectuals.

The vast sub-continent of India and its millenia ot history do indeed at first sight give the impression of an irreducible diversity, an incoherent proliferation, even on the socio-religious plane where the inviolable norm ought to prevail: an innumerable pantheon, locai caste systems, variations in marriage rules or diet, etc. The habit has developed of presenting Indian culture as a mosaic from which the unifying pattern seems to be excluded; some writers assert that one would be hard put to find a single belief valid over the whole Indian territory to provide cultural unity.

What is offered here is, by contrast, a sketch of the main articulations of a single organization of the pantheon, whatever the multiplicity of divine names and cultural forms; of the central features of a caste system underlying the regional or local diversities; and of the principles which govern socio-religious relations. The most profound work, however, that of scrupulous philologists with well-kept files, has gone on according to quite different principles, in which specialists of classical antiquity wouid quickly recognize the skeletons in their own cupboards.

Their central concern has been with Vedic literature, in which one might hope to get a grip on things in statu nascendi, or in their relationship to a more distant past, common to the Indo-European peoples who are fast becoming one of the myths of our century. It is in itself an enormous corpus in which the various states of the language betray an evident temporal thickness, even if relative dating remains problematic. Where cleavages were clearly visible, history came in to shed its own light on the problem. Whatever the ethnic and cultural identity of the so-called Indus civilization two to three millenia bc , it seems that largely Dravidian populations occupied the northern plain as well as the peninsula.

We thus have here a clear principle which will serve to organize the fragmentary information given by the texts: if the Veda oppose noble, pure peoples to human groups whom they cast into outer darkness, this is no doubt because the victors had subjugated the vanquished. But if a god, a notion or a word appear in the texts at a given moment, this is, on the contrary, because the presence of the newly subordinated populations is making itself felt in the mental universe of the victors and symbiosis is producing effects that one would expect.

The break in level between the two sets of data is such, without it being possible to situate clearly a transitional phase or intermediate states, that the philologist-historian has no words strong enough to characterize this shift: intrusion, irruption, pressure from the base etc. A social hierarchy based on the sacred integrates the vanquished—the outsiders—at the bottom. So is there a history, at least in very ancient times second milienium bc in which people speaking the Indo-European form of languages penetrate into India and, through their Brahmans, draw up the religious texts which will constitute the Veda?

Professor David Gellner

But what if this seemingly historical structuring only existed in our minds; and perhaps even implicitly took its model from our most recent history? Between the assertion that ethnically and culturally different peoples must have learnt over the centuries to coexist, and the assertion that their cohabitation explains the present-day socio-religious structure of Hindu India, there is a gulf which cannot be crossed without examination. The point has already been made: the most ancient Tamil literature was already aware of Sanskrit literature, and its formal and linguistic properties do not suffice to reconstruct a Dravidian civilization which will therefore remain for us an unknown as is the idea of an Indo-European civilization pre-existing all the realizations of it that can be identified in time and space.

Great hopes were Introduction 7 built up on the excavations of pre-historic or proto-historic sites, some of which were known as early as the Vedas or in the epics and even today have the same names. For the Vedic period, the archaeologists are modest: there is a lack of remains, or of possibilities of carbon dating. But even supposing we had a clear idea of the approximate dates of the Vedic corpus, no significant correlations have yet been found between the two orders of data.

The Theory and Practice of Hinduism

It is true that the archaeologists attribute their meagre results to the excessively small number of sites catalogued and the difficulty of detecting relationships between excavations which are too sporadic. One may think, however, that there is a more fundamental difficulty, as would be shown by exploration of the epic sites.

There is all the more reason to relate the search for a hypothetical Vedic archaeology to the excavations inspired by the epics, inasmuch as the two presumed states of culture must have partially overlapped in time, to judge from the texts alone. On the other hand, there is no reason to think that the material culture of the Vedic authors and the epic authors evolved significantly: iron, horses, cereals, etc.

But what is currently yielded by an exploration of the sites? In the case of the lldmayana, we have a seemingly firm starting-point, since the capitals of Ayodhya and Mithila, north-east of the Ganges valley, are still major centres of population. In the case of the Mahabhdrata , Indian scholars have absolutely no qualms about identifying the present-day sites of Hastinapura and Indraprastha modern Delhi with their epic counterparts. Kuruksetra, the site of the great battle itself, is a place of pilgrimage; even so, Indians are bewildered by the present insignificance of the site.

At Ayodhya and Mithila the existence of modern cities has greatly impeded progress in archaeological surveying of the areas. It is known that the land has been occupied for a very long time, but we are at a loss to say much more. As for the Mahabhdrata capitals, the problems here are very similar to those which were faced by the first archaeologists at the site of Troy, archaeologists who had read Homer. But the fact has to be faced: no dwelling of any but the village type has ever been found at any level: no palaces, no cities, and certainly no battlefield.

It would seem, then, that there is nothing to be gained by holding to the theory that the events related in the Mahdbhdrata are contemporary with such and such a pottery type found at a given level at Hastinapura. There is no proof whatever to support such a correlation, and even if there were, it would tell us but little about the characters who figure in the epic.

But these are not the most difficult of our problems. The great Indian pre-historian, H. He therefore hypothesizes that behind a late, erroneous Rdmdyana lies an original Rdmdyana , characterized, in particular, by a coherent geography, i. For him, Lanka is not Sri Lanka, the sea is only a lake, and the bridge slung by the monkey Hanuman between dry land and the island merely a commonplace walkway builr between the edge of the lake and an islet, by an aboriginal population represented, of course, by the monkeys.

One of the main props of the demonstration and of the definite location of the Ur-Rdmayana is that sal trees abound in the forests where the monkeys fight and that sal only grow in a quite determinate region of India, in the northern part of the Deccan, a long way from Sri Lanka.

As for the later narrators, they were simply talking about things they knew nothing about. The same argument could of course be applied to the Mahdbhdrata: the conventional descriptions take liberties with geography—one need only try to trace the course of the Sarasvati river to understand this—and whereas the palmyra tree, borassus flabellifer, does not particularly flourish in the northern plains of India where the action is set, this tall, straight-trunked palm-tree is constantly evoked in varying contexts. I Introduction 9 It is no doubt more appropriate—and it is the position I have adopted in this book—to follow the hypothesis put forward some time ago by Georges Dumezik if not with exactly the same terminology: whatever the advances of archaeological research in India, one will never find sufficient traces of the epic events or their cultural context, simply because these are mythical events without even the most elementary historical basis.

Without a doubt, a certain relationship obtains between the imaginary and the real, but it is with archaeology in the strict sense of the word, with its buildings and its sculptural representations, that the greatest potential lies for delineating such a relationship.

But by the time that any archaeological data appear for us to contribute to our analysis, the principal themes of the epics have already been fixed. One then has to reverse the perspective: when a sal tree or a wine palm is mentioned, this is not necessarily because it is part of the everyday surroundings of the poet—quite certainly an educated man, a Brahman rather than a bard—but rather, perhaps, because it belongs to his mental landscape by virtue of the symbolic meaning or meanings that are attached to it.

More generally, the regions referred to are not evoked for the sake of their real position on the map sic , but on account of the positive or negative values with which they are charged. What is true of the epic is no doubt even more valid for even the most explicit Vedic texts, those which abound in the proper names of persons and places; if these had any historical foundation, we can be sure that it has long since been lost when the epic narratives re-use them to say something else.

So whatever the specific history of these texts, one can argue that it is forever impossible to reconstitute it, and that in any case this is not the most important task. What do they have to say?

We seek safety in sense, in spite of the moments of apparent non-sense. The epic and Vedic authors have moreover provided the means of access, if not to their system of problems—that would be an excessive ambition—then at least to a way of looking at things that is closer to their own. The answer is 10 Hinduism not simple, because there is no single answer, but the most fundamental texts are nonetheless very clear: to be ary a is first of all to behave in a particular way, governed by precise rules that are taught on the one hand by Revelation the Vedas , and on the other by all the commentaries and the practice of those who have closely studied that Revelation and been guided by it—the tradition, therefore, conceived initially as an oral, lived tradition.

In the epic, the epithet is most often applied to the warrior prince, since he is the central figure. But it cannot be exclusive, for the warrior prince could not be arya if he did not live in the company of iearned and pious Brahmans, or if he were not surrounded by subjects who supply him with the wealth he needs in livestock, cereals and precious metals. We shall see that one has to go further. But the term arya also has a possible geographical connotation, although this is less firmly fixed and ultimately non-essential. The maximum extent of arya country is that given to it by the Laws of Mann , i.

The most aryan of lands would thus be the area encompassed by the Ganges and the Yamuna. It is so difficult to be arya that it gives a fragile status that is easier to lose than to regain. Although birth guarantees, in principle, the possibility of brahma- nic or Ksatnya or vaisya status, it is not sufficient to preserve it.

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The black antelope is indeed linked symbolically to sacrifice, as certain myths and ritual Introduction 11 practices indicate, although it is not possible to explain this in any definite way. The symbolic aspects are too striking for one to be satisfied with a purely ecological origin. However, since wars are waged among aryas as well as between aryas and dasas, we cannotsplace aryas and dasas in opposition to one another as enemies pure and simple; nor can we simply refer to the latter as potential victims of battle.

The Mahdbbdrata multiplies peoples in ail directions of space, and at the same time the notion of arya is diluted in an infinite gradation: the clearly non-arya peoples leave between themselves and the aryas a host of peoples of uncertain status, which the lists classify sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other.

by Madeleine Biardeau

Thus we learn that, setting aside the inhabitants of the northern plain, who are distinctly valorized, there is scant respect for those who live in the mountains—hunters—or those who live near the sea or in marshy regions, and those who come from the south. In the hierarchy of peoples tribes? But perhaps the most important thing is that the epic recounts a war between arya enemy-brothers who fight each other for sovereignty over the earth. But each camp contains a fine mixture of arya and non-arya and every possible intermediate status. The camp of the gods includes many kings from south India, and the camp of the demons has as its war-lords some very pure aryas who are also gods , one of whom, on his death-bed, even instructs the king of the camp of the gods in the duties of the arya king.

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