The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c16.19

c16.19

There is one pitfall here, that of associating both sharing and exchange with our notion of egalitarianism. The sharing brotherhood, because of the formal nature of its arrangements, is particularly expressive of the complications and ambiguities involved. On the one hand, the notion of brotherhood implies equality of shares. On the other hand, however, an elder brother clearly ranks higher than his younger brother. And so we hear of senior and junior shares. But even when the agreement entails equal shares, this does not necessarily mean that each brother holds just one share. Thus the lordly and powerful Sindhia of Gwalior holds six out of seven shares in the muqaddamī of village Jamgaon. This expresses unambiguously his obvious dominance. But there is a significant qualification. The formal arrangements made it possible to differentiate power and status,¹⁷ leaving the ceremonial rights of precedence, defined in meticulous detail, to the elder (selling) "brother." However powerful Sindhia obviously was, precedence went to his one-seventh "brother".¹⁸ Similarly, the equally lordly and powerful Holkar had to pay two-and-a-half times the ordinary price of his share in the headmanship of village Vafgaon for the addition of seniority.¹⁹ Obviously the old-regime brothers knew both the price and the value of everything. And so the institution of the sharing brotherhood managed to square the circle by fusing into one formula equality and inequality. The more informal arrangements of exchange essentially leave this matter open. The asymmetry of giving and receiving may be equalized over time by the working of reciprocity, or the relationship may turn out to be a distinctly asymmetrical one. In the latter case, the relationship will tend to be more stable because of the element of dominance involved.