The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c17.24

c17.24

Returning to our query, the census view of caste created by the modern state will only provide part of the explanation for Weber's monolithic view of caste and karma—and the easy part at that. Perhaps, at a deeper level, Weber emotionally felt the need for the wholeness of a perfectly ordered world under the authority of a rational social ethic, while at the same time fearing its constricting consequences. Hinduism, then, may have been for him the screen on which to project this double and contradictory image. He seems to refer to this when, at the end of his chapter on caste, he points out that the very consistence, as he saw it, of caste and karma is a fearful perspective for the individual who asks for the meaning of life caught in the inexorable mechanism of repeated death.³⁵ Here Weber touches upon the inner rift of the caste order, for the tension created by the perspective of meaninglessness not only sets the mundane order apart from the renunciatory sphere, but breaks open the caste order.