The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c17.21

c17.21

One question remains. How is it that Weber, who otherwise was so sensitive to the tensions created by transcendental thought and world rejection and who shows the way to analyze such tensions, has failed to recognize and exploit them in his analysis of Hindu society? The answer, at least in part, is simply in the sources he had to use, notably, the Indian census publications and studies deriving from these materials. He had to base his theory on the view of Indian society, and in particular of caste, produced by the modern state for its own purposes. Now the modern state—in contradistinction to the ancien régime—is hived off from society and pretends to govern it by remote control as it were. To that end, it first of all needs an all-inclusive and immutable grid of rigidly bounded and inflexible categories. The grid can be refined, but it cannot be shifted or altered, on pain of losing its universal character and usefulness. This need for an immutable grid of categories was filled with deplorable obviousness by caste, seemingly custom-made for the purpose, especially in its brahmanic form of varṇa separation. Conversely, the modern state and its census grid of caste could not but project the image of an unchangeably fixed order of society. One may wonder whether and how far the notion of a never-changing, utterly tradition-bound, and stagnating India has been formed by the modern state's view of society. But this is another matter. For our present purpose, it may perhaps be relevant that the census definition of caste reached its height of authoritative elaboration with the censuses of 1901 and 1911, that is, at the time of Weber's study of Hinduism.³³