[Pramāṇa](https://indike.org/pramana/) › [Studies](https://indike.org/pramana/ins) › [Polity, law and society](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity) › [The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985) › c16 # The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c16: 12 Caste, Village, and Indian Society The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c16 - **Language:** English ### 12 Caste, Village, and Indian Society ### [c16.1](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.1) Who says India says caste, or so it seems. The first problem is, of course, what precisely one is saying when invoking caste and, second, whether this will give a sufficient basis for analyzing Indian society. If one considers that caste purports to an exhaustive ordering of Indian society in exclusive groups, the answer to the latter would indeed seem to be affirmative. If one further considers that caste should account for both the socioeconomic aspects of a society, such as division of labor, and the religious or ideological ones, it may seem superfluous to try and look elsewhere. Caste, then, in the eyes of the observer, is the hallmark of Indian society. However, this has not always been the case. Although particular features, especially restrictions regarding commensality, connubium, and means of subsistence, did not fail to draw the somewhat puzzled attention of foreign observers, the Portuguese word \*caste\* for a long time kept its general, nontechnical meaning, remaining interchangeable with words like "tribe," "race," or "nation."¹ It was only in the nineteenth century that it acquired its exclusive and specific meaning to the point where it even could be considered by some as an Indian word with a (spurious) Indian derivation.² It was only then that caste began to loom large, until it became in our century a shorthand expression for Indian society at large: Indian society is caste. ### [c16.2](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.2) Clearly our systematic knowledge and understanding of the caste phenomenon has made significant advances since the last century, but there remains a nagging doubt. Has not the attention given to caste—so striking for the Western observer—somewhat narrowed our view? The point is that one can study the relevant Indian texts, as well as the voluminous data and secondary literature about caste, without having to recognize the overarching fact that we are dealing with a peasant society and economy and all that this entails. For that reason we turned to the study of the village. In the village, both caste and facts of peasant life should find their natural junction. Thus there appeared, especially in the fifties and sixties of this century, a flood of village monographs. However, these monographs seem in the main to reflect the dominant concern with caste rather than furthering our understanding of Indian peasant society. Moreover, the carefully constructed caste rankings more often than not are at variance with the actual relationships in the village, and the brahmins as such often do not fit in at all. Dominant castes are seen at ceremonial occasions to eat—that is, sitting in the same row—with their low-ranking servants. Members of other peasant castes in the same village keep to themselves and refuse to participate in these exchanges, breaking the unity and cohesiveness of the ranking order.³ Apparently we have to recognize two different orders of facts that impinge on but refuse to be assimilated to each other. And so our understanding remains stuck between the twin poles of caste and the village that have come to monopolize our view of Indian society. ### [c16.3](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.3) As with caste, the vogue of the village as a predominant focus of Indian sociology seems to be a product of the nineteenth century. It owes its rise to the pointed statements of influential and in many ways remarkable English administrators in the first decade of the last century. Here we encounter the romantic idealization of the village as a "little republic," all but completely self-sufficient, impervious to outside influence, and lasting "where nothing else lasts".⁴ The theme has been reiterated ever since to an extent that borders on ritual incantation. In due time, it even became an emblem of the nationalist movement—the true India that lives in its villages—and the starting point of legislation formalizing village autonomy (\*pancāyatī rāj\*). Ideologically, the notion of the "village community" with its suggestion of egalitarianism, primitive democracy, and pristine harmony has, of course, much to recommend itself, especially when set off against the hierarchic and undemocratic notions of caste. However, neither the vogue of village or caste seems to derive from any real Indian arrangement, but rather from the needs of the modern bureaucratic state as it was introduced at the beginning of the last century. ### [c16.4](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.4) In contradistinction to the strongly personal and particularistic nature of the old regime, the new rule stressed a universally applicable system of rules and regulations. Where the old regime had been intimately involved with overlapping and shifting networks of various right holders, their dependants, and rivals to the point of being submerged in such networks, the new dispensation was calculated to create a distance between government and society.⁵ Standard expressions like "falling upon the neck and importuning" the powerful for help—in spite of the obvious element of criticism—suggest a personal proximity that was unthinkable under the new dispensation. One simply does not "fall upon the neck" of the Rule of Law. Though this change did not alter Indian society, which indeed was very much left to its own devices, it did bring about a fundamentally different view of society; or rather, where no view of society as a separate, objective entity had existed before, there now developed an official view for the purpose of dealing with society from a distance. This official view was an exhaustive grid of narrowly defined categories covering the whole of society and enabling the state to apply its impersonal rules and regulations rationally. ### [c16.5](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.5) This involved two things. In the first place, the whole of the territory had to be uniformly mapped out in neatly separated units, which could not take cognizance of the multidimensional and widely stretched out networks and interests. Here the concept of the village as an autonomous unit came into its own. The "little republic" marvellously filled and legitimized the bureaucratic need for a well-defined basic unit. This took care of territory. Second, the people had to be categorized and counted as well. The inescapably obvious answer to this was caste. Irrespective of the manifold and significant complications of intercaste relationships, the concept of caste was hardened by administration, law courts, and especially the census into a system of tight compartments, each stereotyped by its customs, beliefs, attitudes, means of subsistence, governing institutions, and other attributes. Like the "village republic," each caste came to be seen as a separate world complete in itself. ### [c16.6](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.6) This dual pigeonholing effort had the added advantage of conceptually separating land and people under the two grids of village and caste. Instead of rights in land being subsumed in the relationships between people, land and people could now be separately dealt with. The link between them was to be provided by a new concept of a single-stranded connection between the individual owner and his exclusive property. ### [c16.7](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.7) Thus it would seem that the dual focus of caste and village does not derive its predominance from the realities of Indian society, but primarily from the modus operandi of the modern state, which had to view these realities through a bureaucratic prism. This may also explain the hold of village and caste over our view of Indian society, for it was the modern state that everybody—colonial administrator, reformer, or nationalist politician—wanted. Whether one favored autocratic or democratic forms was hardly relevant. Once state and society were conceptually distanced from each other, the prismatic official view, dissolving reality into neatly defined entities, imposed itself. Even the social anthropologists, detached but naturally on the look-out for primary units and categories, had to follow suit, their main concern being how to unite the two foci. ### [c16.8](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.8) This had another unfortunate consequence, namely, the notion of Indian immobilism and stagnation. Was not caste a religion-based and therefore unchangeable institution and was not the village perennial, lasting where nothing else lasts? It was precisely this quality of supposedly unchanging stability that had recommended caste and village to the bureaucracy. The obstinate “tradition” of caste and village was then no tradition at all, but a consequence of the modern state, which needed immutable basic entities for its own regulating purposes. Paradoxically, whenever the carefully devised construct ran aground on the realities of Indian society, which kept blurring, overflowing, and generally subverting the neat dividing lines in true Schweikian manner, the resulting confusion tended to be blamed on the benighted traditionality of caste and village attitudes. The dichotomy of state and society implied that leadership for change, development, and the millennium devolved on the state, which had precisely for this purpose developed its unchanging system of categories, institutions, and regulations. ### [c16.9](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.9) All this, of course, does not mean that village and caste do not exist in reality. But if we want to obtain a clear view of Indian society, we will have to free ourselves from the dominant hold of the modern official definition of village and caste. One way of doing this is to look at the society before the introduction of the modern state. Although research on this point is still in the beginning stages, sufficient is known for us to try to discern some of the principles of Indian society undistorted by the overlay of the modern official view.⁶ Here, then, we do find the village as the nucleus of agrarian production and taxation—the starting point of the Anglo-Indian notion of the all but autonomous and self-sufficient “little republic.” But what is immediately apparent is precisely the lack of autonomy and proud self-sufficiency. The village appears embedded in a complicated and wide-stretched network of personal rights, holdings, and prestations that passes far beyond the village boundaries and makes the notion of village autarchy untenable. ### [c16.10](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.10) This state of affairs seems to obtain from the time of a village’s founding. An example is found in the report of an English official investigating at the time of the English takeover of the Western Deccan (1818) the administrative structure of the previous regime: ### [c16.11](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.11) In an old account of the village Wing (Vāngī) . . . it is stated that “during the management of the Nubeeyar of the Koolburga Sultanate there was neither a division of the fields nor of the bounds of the village, the plains being covered with grass and the occupation of the people the feeding of cattle, for which a fixed sum was exacted . . . . During the management of the Bureadus (Barīd Shāhīs of Bīdar, 1487–1609) and in the administration of the black and white Khojas (ministers) the village bounds were fixed, portions of land were given to particular persons, whose names were registered and a rent was established” and then there follows a list of their fields.⁷ ### [c16.12](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.12) This quotation suggests that, far from being a spontaneous, grass-roots move, the founding of villages is a large-scale operation of converting waste lands into arable. It does not involve only simple cultivators but powerful men of substance—such as the Khojas mentioned and other state officers—who have the means and influence to bring in the necessary people, divide the fields, and fix the boundaries. It is these men of substance who as de-facto sharers in the realm constitute the state. The process of state formation under the old regime—in this case under the Barīd Shāhī Sultanate of Bīdar—is the settling of villages by the powerful for turning waste into arable and appropriating the agricultural surplus. Fixing, allocating, and registering portions of land and their holders is therefore practically synonymous with "establishing a rent," as the quotation has it. This means that the state is directly involved in and dispersed throughout the countryside and its settled villages.⁸ Conversely, the village appears at its outset to be shot through with all manner of outside interests that far transcend its boundaries and tie it into a widespread network of exploitative and distributional relationships, which cannot but reflect themselves in the inner organization of the village.⁹ ### [c16.13](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.13) In this connection, a related point should be noted. Not only are rights, tax shares, holdings, and even offices such as headmenships fractionized to an often extraordinary degree, but, as appears from the extant documentation, many of these fractional rights of diverse description are held by men of substance, who belong to the wider context and who secure in this way strategic footholds in a wide range of localities. The state—that is, the powerful men who constitute it—is in this way everywhere present and achieves the proximity that we already noticed and that the modern state can only view as next door to corruption. Indeed, the village can be described as a nexus of rights that, far from being closed toward outside powers and their agents, is "the institutionally permissive means" whereby these powers directly take part in its inner life and organization.¹⁰ ### [c16.14](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.14) There is still a persistent notion of the local headmen, who are fondly fabled to form the real and unchanging backbone of the old regime polity, safely cantoned in their "little republics" and turning their back to the wider polity beyond the limits of their jurisdictions. However, the people who really count clearly are not strictly local men, but those who accumulate widely dispersed fractional rights—(part-)headmanships, tax-free or taxed fields, tax shares, tolls—in a variety of localities. In fact, their power can be measured as much by the aggregate of rights as by the geographical extent of their dispersion. The corollary of this is that the rights and holdings of the powerful tend to intermingle to the point where these men are practically at each other's doorsteps in the localities, thus making the notion of the closed village community even more illusory (but giving the locals more room for maneuvering in and out of the village context). The local headman, by contrast, is small fry indeed, distinctly vulnerable and in danger of having sooner or later to sell part or whole of his headmanship to a more powerful man. ### [c16.15](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.15) The interpenetration of rights and holdings is abundantly attested by the surviving documentation.¹¹ For our purpose, the conventional idiom in which these dealings are expressed is particularly interesting. The fact that the proceedings often boil down to a sale of rights under pressure of indebtedness and distress—or even, we may surmise, a measure of duress—is not veiled or glossed over, but it is embedded in a language that stresses "brotherhood": "As we are now two brothers in the office of muqaddamī (headmanship), you shall be the third brother and we will equally enjoy all the rights, privileges etc. of the office and perform the duties"; "he fell upon your neck begging of you to become his brother and received 200 rupees and a mare, for which he gave you his third share of the muqaddamī"; or again, "and of his third share he had given three parts to the above-mentioned Powar (a well-known powerful family), making him his brother." The purchase of a share in a hereditary right is not viewed as an incidental market activity but as establishing a permanent and comprehensive relationship of brotherhood. The sharing brotherhood also is the institutional form for resolving conflict, integrating the contending parties into a corporate unity and thus restoring the wholeness (instead of excluding one of the contenders): "Formerly you damaged and injured the muqaddamī; we now have made you our brother and so let it be."¹² Viewed in this way, the parcelling out of rights and even offices is not a matter of mere atomization, but the means for recombining the actors and restoring the wholeness of society inside and outside the village. ### [c16.16](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.16) Another frequent and telling expression is that of "eating" a hereditary right: "For ages past our ancestors have eaten the muqaddamī of (the) village".¹³ The metaphor is a classical and well-known one, especially with regard to rulers who have a natural right to "eat" their subjects, the rights of the husband over his wife, or the king's on the earth.¹⁴ Here, however, the emphasis is on the exclusive and irrevocable nature of the connection between the holder of the right and its object. Through its "eating," the object or right is integrated with its holder.¹⁵ The metaphor is full of meaning in Indian culture, where always much thought has been given to exchanges of food and the permissibility or otherwise of acceptance.¹⁶ ### [c16.17](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.17) In this connection, the distinction between sharing and exchange seems to be relevant. Sharing food and other goods among brothers is essentially different from exchange. The difference will be immediately evident when we consider that brothers do not as a rule exchange sisters and daughters (though they may share the same wife, as the Pāṇḍava brothers did). In sharing, nothing is passed from one partner to the other. Every sharer knows the dish, his part in it and when to dip in; there are no uncertainties and no further arrangements are necessary once the rules have been agreed upon. ### [c16.18](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.18) The relationship is a permanently fixed and irreversible one. Relationships based on exchange, on the other hand, may be equally permanent, but there always is an element of built-in uncertainty and instability, for the exchange relationship is based on reciprocity. While the sharers "eat" their portions simultaneously so that there are no scores to be settled afterward, the reciprocity of exchange is based on settling the scores over time. At each turn, the partners in the exchange arrangement have to reverse their roles, the previous receivers acting as givers, and so the relationship is perpetuated through reversals. However, one never knows whether the other partner will be able and willing to honor his obligations when it is his turn to reciprocate. At each turn, there is the risk that the relationship will fail and break off. Nevertheless, exchange relationships have the advantage of being capable of indefinite extension to include new partners, while the sharing brotherhood is a formally fixed and exclusive grouping. ### [c16.19](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.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. ### [c16.20](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.20) In sum, then, Indian society, stripped of the modern state's overlay, is not characterized by exclusive social categories on the one hand and separate cohesive blocks of territory on the other, but by interpenetration as well as dispersion of diverse fractional rights and holdings. This fractional character of rights and holdings not only favors dispersion in widening circles, but equally and more importantly enables the right-holding actors of various descriptions to recombine the fractionized whole through inclusion and interpenetration. The formal instrument for this purpose is the sharing brotherhood—the genealogical formula is a special form of the brotherhood, not necessarily its origin. Being a sharing brother involves the least endangered permanent relationship and thereby the strongest title to the shared object. The formal nature of the initial agreement makes its rules enforceable: “We acknowledge that we had become amenable to the Sarkar (government authorities) by the opposition made to your enjoying the rights of the third share in the headman’s office,” as the document already quoted has it. And, at the same time, it facilitates the resolution of conflict by formally admitting rival claimants to the brotherhood according to a reallotment of the shares. ### [c16.21](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.21) The brotherhood institution by itself, however, is not sufficient for the task of recombining and manipulating the fractionized whole. It is, as we saw, an exclusive, formally bounded grouping and therefore lacks the more informal and expansive, though less stable, capabilities of exchange and reciprocity. Thus exchange arrangements are needed in juxtaposition to the institution of brotherhood. Because of their more informal nature, they lend themselves less to documentation. But from all we know, we may suppose that the brotherhoods are afloat in a sea of exchange arrangements. Further on, we shall have occasion to come back to the latter. ### [c16.22](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.22) So far, and somewhat surprisingly, caste seems to be little in evidence. However, this is what we should have expected. As already noted, the facts of peasant society and those of caste belong to two different orders, each with its own orientation.²⁰ This insight we owe to the work of Louis Dumont, who has clarified the sharp ideological separation of power relations on the one hand and authority based on purity on the other.²¹ Now the features of peasant society we have so far dealt with clearly belong to the realm of power and dominance, or, in classical terms, of the king. Caste, by contrast, exclusively refers to the value of purity. As a matter of principle, it lacks common ground with the world of power relations.²² It therefore stands to reason that caste receives little attention in the context of power relations. But by the same token, we touch here on a sensitive and indeed pivotal problem—a problem not only for the observer but for the participants. How should the two orders—the royal order of power relations that pervades society and the equally pervasive caste order based on purity—which regulate the lives of the same people, be related to each other? Dumont’s answer is “encompassment.” The ultimate value of purity encompasses its opposite, the world of power “as the mantle of Our Lady of Mercy shelters sinners of every kind in its voluminous folds”.²³ The encompassment is achieved through the hierarchy of purity which assigns to each part its place with reference to the whole and integrates them in a system of hierarchical interdependence. Power, then, is subordinated to the hierarchy of purity, as the king is hierarchically inferior to the brahmin. ### [c16.23](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.23) But this does not solve the problem, for there still is the chasm between power and hierarchy. The final junction of the two is brought about at the “secondary” level of actual practice by “surreptitiously” assimilating power to the hierarchy of purity.²⁴ The fact that something surreptitious should be needed to achieve the junction of the two opposite orders shows, of course, that the problem remains wide open. Hierarchy “is obliged to close its eyes to this point on pain of destroying itself”.²⁵ The problem cannot be solved, it can only be patched over. But the model of hierarchic interdependence tying together the whole with the encompassing value of purity has much to recommend itself since it seems to transcribe Indian attitudes and utterances. ### [c16.24](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.24) Indeed, recent work on traditional caste literature from Bengal and Gujarat bears out the idea of hierarchic interdependence upheld by graded marriage and food exchanges.²⁶ “Rank is maintained through gift and acceptance,” as one of the texts from Bengal has it.²⁷ Particularly interesting is that the exchanges upholding hierarchic interdependence are equated with “worship.” This term apparently harks back to the hallowed Veda and the transcendent injunctions of Vedic sacrifice. “Thus the whole of caste and rank revolved around what we might call the symbols and ideology of vedic worship. . . . Vedic worship is the attribute often referred to as the relative degree of purity.”²⁸ Society is thus integrated by graded access to the Veda through worshipping the next higher rank, only the brahmin having immediate access to the Veda. In short, Indian society is viewed as a sacrificial universe encompassed by the Veda.²⁹ In this connection, the word \*jajmān\*, used throughout India to refer to the patron or boss and derived from the technical term for the Vedic sacrificer (\*yajamāna\*), seems particularly relevant. Here, it would seem, we have a clear example of the assimilation of dominance by the value-based hierarchy represented by the Veda. ### [c16.25](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.25) But however deftly the assimilation is achieved, the element of “surreptitiousness” becomes immediately evident when we are informed that “the exchanges of wealth and food on the occasion of tantric worship (\*pūjā\*) are often equated with vedic worship (\*yajña\*),” that “the mere offering of food to the gods is seen to be equivalent to vedic worship by the brahmin,” and “that the leavings of the gods accepted by the brahmin and the leavings of the brahmin accepted by the (pure) śūdra come increasingly to be equated with the powerful coded substances of the Veda itself”.³⁰ Not only is the connection with the Veda a pious fiction, but Vedic sacrifice in the classical form we know from the relevant texts is individualized to the extent of intentionally excluding social communication and interdependence. It does not arise from social relationships nor does it establish them beyond the restricted place and duration of its performance. It is resolutely extrasocial and typically is performed, if at all, outside the community.³¹ This exclusiveness gives the Veda and its sacrificial injunctions their transcendent, absolute value, but by the same token, they are cut off from society. But the Veda, precisely because of its transcendent nature, is the repository of ultimate authority and legitimation. The wish, or rather the need, to assimilate social interdependence and exchange to "Vedic worship" stands to reason, but, as we saw, this can only be done "surreptitiously." This has nothing to do with dishonesty or hypocrisy. It is a desperate means of trying to deal with an insoluble problem—the problem of relating the ultramundane order of Veda and purity with the worldly realities of power and dominance. ### [c16.26](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.26) Now one may raise the question whether this was perceived as a problem by the participants. The answer is that it was. Thus hierarchic interdependence requires that the brahmin perform sacrifice for the king, who provides him with sustenance and protection by "worshipping" him with gifts. This relationship is a standard item. But here the problem of the two orders comes out sharply, as is well illustrated by a caste text from Gajarat, dealing with the Modh brahmins. The brahmins, even when entreated by the divine king Rāma, refuse to perform the sacrifice for him and to accept his largesse. The refusal can only be overcome by the supernatural intervention of the gods. But then new obstacles come in the way of the sacrifice: "All the signs were inauspicious, the fire would not take the oblation, the brahmins could not recite the sacred formulas, and the gods were not favorably inclined." Again supernatural intervention is invoked, and finally the sacrifice is successfully completed. Even so, some of the brahmins—significantly called Caturvedis, that is, those who possess all four Vedas—hold out and keep refusing the king's munificent gifts.³² The point of the story is that, although the connection between the king's power and the brahmin's authority is indeed required, the exclusivism of the Veda and the brahmin's purity forbid him to enter into this relationship with the king. Ironically, the same texts that require the connection between king and brahmin threaten the brahmin who responds to the king's advances with losing the purity that was the reason for the king's seeking his association. The brahmin loses his superior status, and the king ends up with an empty shell.³³ The problem is deadlocked—or one compromises, as the situation requires, knowing full well that one does. ### [c16.27](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.27) If we now return to the caste order as governed by hierarchic interdependence, we can easily see that caste in actual practice is the Indian model for ordering and formalizing the informal and inclusive relationships of asymmetrical exchange, whose widespread existence we already assumed. In this sense, we could say that caste complements the exclusive arrangements of the brotherhood. However, the point is that exchange and reciprocity are in no way the ideal. The ideal is precisely the opposite—to break the oppressive circularity of exchange and reciprocity. This is clear from the classical Indian theory of the gift. The gift should be a “free” one, that is, a gift that does not result in any obligation and therefore is without reciprocity. As was already noticed with surprise by Marcel Mauss: “Il faut convenir que sur le sujet principal de notre démonstration, l'obligation de rendre, nous avons trouvé peu de faits dans le droit hindou . . . Même le plus clair consiste dans la règle, qui l'interdit”.³⁴ Though Mauss had no use for this rule in his essay on the gift, the fact is full of significance. It means that exchange and reciprocity are rejected. This may explain why the asymmetrical exchanges of caste are couched in terms of disinterested “worship,” “service,” or “duty”. Equally it may help us to understand the emphasis given to “brotherhood,” for, as we saw, sharing among “brothers” does not involve reciprocity and so is ideologically incontrovertible. It can therefore even bring together adherents of different religions and members of different castes. ### [c16.28](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.28) So far, we have spoken of caste as a single, coherent system. But it is striking that, where we have only a single word, caste, India has at least two terms: the well-known set of four \*varṇas\* and the numerous \*jātis\*. The question then is how the \*jātis\* are related to the \*varṇas\*. The answer is obvious: through mixed unions. But here is the catch. Such unions represent the abomination of \*varṇasaṃkara\*, the confusion of the \*varṇa\* order, which is based on strict separation of the \*varṇas\*. The interesting point is that the \*jātis\* came about through exchange in its weightiest form, namely, marriage. The \*jātis\* stand for asymmetrical exchange relationships, and that is exactly what is rejected by the \*varṇa\* theory. Here we come up against the same problem as before. The \*varṇa\* order and the \*jāti\* order are each other’s opposites. Hierarchical interdependence upheld by “worshipful” and disinterested exchange may mask the pivotal problem, but it will not solve it. ### [c16.29](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.29) Where does this leave us? The institution that stands out clearest is, not caste or village, but the sharing brotherhood. While \*jāti\* is obliged to derive a surreptitious legitimacy from its irreconcilable opposite, \*varṇa\*, the brotherhood is ideologically neutral and therefore can safely raise its ensign. On the other hand, the brotherhood institution is by its nature strictly limited in its capacity to order society. But its formal sharing arrangements point at and exemplify a different order that is directly relevant to peasant society, namely, a jural order of rights. It is this order to which old-regime documents refer and which enables them to bypass the dubious order of jāti and varṇa. While jāti expresses—and varṇa denies—hierarchical exchange and interdependence, the jural order speaks of rights that are independently "eaten" and are free of obligation and reciprocity. Thus at harvest time, the "division of the grain heap" among the participants—including the king and the brahmin as well as the untouchable—may be, and usually is, interpreted in the sense of hierarchical exchange and interdependence.³⁵ To the participants, however, it seems to signify something else, namely, the realization of well-defined, independent, and inalienable rights in the soil and its productivity. These rights may be shared among brothers, or they may be differentially divided among unequal participants, as at the "division of the grain heap," but the essential point is that this is not viewed as a matter of gifts and obligations but of rights and shares.³⁶ ### [c16.30](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.30) Even though these rights obviously imply the rendering of certain services or other prestations, there is no direct relationship between the right or share on the one hand and, on the other, the nature or amount of the counterprestation.³⁷ Or one might say that right and duty are not clearly separated and balanced but are inextricably interwoven in the sense that one has a "right" to serve (including, of course, the perquisites of the service)—in contradistinction to either a contractual relationship specifically balancing service and payment or a comprehensive bond between unequal partners. The background of this conception of rights is not contract, even less purity, but honor or "propriety." For our purpose, the point to retain is that these differential rights are viewed as independent properties defining the particular "propriety" of their various holders. The ultimate integration of these rights and of their holders is based, not on the bonds of hierarchical exchange and interdependence, but on the fact that the differentially distributed rights and shares rest on the same good, the soil's productivity.³⁸ ### [c16.31](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.31) Here we get away from "caste" as the one and only mold of Indian society. What we tend to view exclusively as the equivocal bonds of hierarchical exchange can be and are handled by the participants in terms of shared or differential rights. The brotherhood, then, is not only afloat in a sea of exchange arrangements, as we surmised in a first approximation, but equally and more importantly, it is anchored in the jural order of rights and shares. ### [c16.32](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.32) There is then no single principle for ordering and integrating society. This, far from obstructing change and fostering stagnation, gave the ancient regime a flexibility and adaptiveness that, paradoxically, offered ample scope for instituting the modern state. However, what the modern state needed was not flexibility but fixed, unambiguously defined entities. For this purpose, it had to do away with ambiguities and polarities. The equivocations of jāti and varṇa were replaced by the unitary concept of "caste," which interprets jāti in the sense of varṇa. The village also had to be redefined as a closed, self-sufficient unit, to the exclusion of the wide-ranging web of dispersed and interspersed interests. In other words, the modern state took away, or drove under ground, society's flexibility, suggesting instead an image of motionless stagnation. ### [c16.33](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.33) The first and pivotal point that offered itself as an opening for the operation of the modern state was the jural order of rights and shares. But in order to stabilize itself, the modern state had to withdraw from society, that is, it had to lift its right to a part of the "grain heap" out of the overall order of differential and shared rights. Instead of being the holder of a differential right among other such right holders—albeit the single most important one—it had to levy its revenues under a title of a different nature, whether that of a rent or a tax. But if the state was not to slide back into the order of differential rights and so become again an integral part of society, another concept of property was needed, namely, the single-stranded tie between the owner and his land and the exclusion of other holders of rights in the same land.³⁹ ### [c16.34](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.34) In this way, the nexus of land and the rights in it held by various people could be untied, land and people separated, the taxable fields mapped out, and the taxpaying owners isolated. But this does not mean that the modern state succeeded where the old dispensation failed in definitively ordering and integrating society. The modern state breaks down society into separate, clearly bounded entities. But how, after this operation, all the king's men should put Humpty-Dumpty together again is largely left to society and its diffuse modus operandi—sometimes to the considerable discomfort of the state. This obviously creates a new and often explosive tension between the forces dividing society and society's tendency to seep through, overflow, or subvert the dividing lines. This situation is indeed a new one. The interesting point is that both the old and the new dispensation are not, as a matter of principle, geared to social integration and collective identity. ### [c16.35](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16.35) Here we touch the inner springs of Indian civilization. Its heart is not with society and its integrative pressures. It devalorizes society and disregards power. The ideal is not hierarchical interdependence but the individual break with society. The ultimate value is release from the world. And this cannot be realized in a hierarchical way, but only by the abrupt break of renunciation. Indian society and its ideal are separated by a chasm and cannot be united. Nor are they intended to be united. The chasm is intentional. Therefore all attempts, whether by the observer or the participant, at joining together the two orders in their different forms—king and brahmin, power and authority, jāti and varṇa, "worship" and Veda, society and its rejection—are doomed to failure. Above the Indian world, rejecting and at the same time informing it, the renouncer stands out as the exemplar of ultimate value and authority. ## Linked texts (1) - [Veda](https://indike.org/pramana/in.veda) — Sanskrit --- Source: [https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c16) · Pramāṇa