The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c14.s1.24

c14.s1.24

Multiple kingship and diffusion of power and authority have as their corollary pervasive conflict, which takes care of their periodical rearticulation. The temporal order, then, turns on the institutionalization of conflict, not on its elimination. What this entailed can still be seen in the original pattern that underlies the Vedic śrauta ritual. Its central institution was the periodic sacrificial contest, which was no less violent for being ceremonial.³⁰ Not surprisingly, it is especially in the rituals connected with kingship (rājasūya, vājapeya, horse sacrifice) that the contest has left its clearest traces, in the form of chariot races, mock cattle raids, games of dice, and verbal contests. It is not without interest that, as we saw, many of the ratnins in the rājasūya are connected with chariot racing and fighting. But agonistic features and myths run through the whole corpus of ritual texts. Thus, notwithstanding the exclusive stress on the single sacrificer, his enemy, the *dviṣat* or the rival cousin (*bhrātṛvya*) is well-nigh ubiquitous in the ritual explanations, even though he has no locus standi on the place of sacrifice anymore and is dealt with in abstracto. Occasionally, however, he does still emerge from the limbo of abstraction and so we even saw him take part in the unction ceremony of the royal consecration. Generally the ritual texts do not tire of referring to the continuously recurring battles between the gods and their rivals, the asuras. This agonistic pattern is brought to a high level of all-embracing destructiveness in the epic war of the *Mahābhārata*, which has been called by Marcel Mauss "l'histoire d'un gigantesque potlatch." It is significant that this war between the Pāṇḍavas and their cousins, the Kurus, was set off by the rājasūya sacrifice of the Pāṇḍāva leader, Yuddhiṣṭhira.