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The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c4: Introduction

The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c4

Language
English

Contents

Introduction

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To say that a society and its culture depend on tradition is as good as tautological. Tradition, therefore, cannot but share in the flexibility and adaptiveness of culture. It is not only permissive of change, it can even be seen to be the means to formulate and legitimize change. It is not necessary to revise the long-standing and largely inconclusive tradition-modernity debate and to argue once more the resilience and adaptiveness of tradition¹. Nonetheless "traditional society," if not a term of opprobrium, for all its nostalgic value, still describes a world seen as irrationally resisting change, a world without history other than aberration, decline, and final failure. This notion, though eroded by undeniable economic and technological progress, is still applied with much conviction to India, especially when it comes to her problems and shortcomings. India continues to be seen as the repository of hallowed but obstructive tradition. This seems especially to be the case in the matter of caste, which is considered to hold Indian society in its iron grip. It may be that the lingering notion of India's persistent traditionality owes much to the observer's feeling of having lost his own traditional moorings, which makes him cast around for the certainty of tradition. India thus becomes a screen on which to project our nostalgia for a world we have lost, even when we know that the good old times were not all that good.

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Granted, Indian civilization in no small degree contributes to the notion of a predetermined and immutable order of things. Its scriptures do indeed strongly project the image of a monolithic world order, the *dharma*, although man can and will deviate from it. The rule of dharma may diminish as a result of the progressive decadence of the world but the dharma itself is still there as the incontrovertible and immutable model. Man can always, alone if not collectively, return to the rightful path of the dharma's universal order.

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This is a powerful ideal. Here it will no longer do to invoke the flexibility and adaptiveness of tradition. The well-known statement on the essential dharmic behavior proper to each of the four ages—austerity, knowledge, sacrifice, and gift—is not meant to give a brief for change. It only reflects man’s diminished capacity to live the dharma in full. The atemporal dharma itself, however, remains immune to the changes of the ages.² Man will be ignorant and confused because “Dharma and Adharma do not go about saying here we are, nor do gods, gandharvas, or ancestors say: This is dharma that is adharma.”³ But this does not affect the integrity of the eternal dharma. The proper guideline is the conduct of the correct and well instructed, the *śiṣṭa*, who acts disinterestedly and without any mundane attachment. The essential condition of true dharmic behavior is the absence of worldly cause or motivation.⁴ In this way, the dharma presents itself as the unbroken tradition of a monolithic and eternal order carried forward over the generations by the disinterested conduct of the *śiṣṭas*.

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There is, then, strong support for the notion of India’s unchanging tradition which goes well beyond mere resilience under pressure of changing circumstances. It is even guaranteed against such pressures by the absence of worldly causes or motivations. But it is exactly this unworldliness that brings out a problem. The dharma is universal and as such must take into account worldly concerns and interests, but at the same time its atemporal character requires a total withdrawal from those secular realities. The dharma does not propound a fixed institutional order, as we are all too prone to assume; it poses an insoluble dilemma.

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Tradition is characterized by the inner conflict of atemporal order and temporal shift rather than by resiliance and adaptiveness. It is this unresolved conflict that provides the motive force we perceive as the flexibility of tradition. Indian civilization offers a particularly clear case of this dynamic inner conflict.⁵ The conflict is not just handled surreptitiously by way of situational compromise. Once we look beyond the hard surface of the projected absolute order, it appears subtly, but no less effectively, to be expressed by the same scriptures that so impressively expound the dharma’s absoluteness.

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Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in the Vedic ritual texts and their curiously contradictory place in Indian civilization, at once hallowed and neglected, like the king who is honored by all and obeyed by none. They are the scriptural repository of the revealed *śruti* and as such purport to be the core and foundation of the dharma. Therefore the conduct of the *śiṣṭa*—that is, one who is fully instructed in Vedic lore—is the only guideline in the confusion of dharma and adharma. The dharma essentially proclaims itself to be the ritualistic order of Vedic sacrifice. It stands to reason, then, that we take our cue from an investigation of Vedic śrauta ritual. Most of the following essays are therefore concerned specifically with the śrauta corpus or refer to it.⁶

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Now it is in the consideration of the śrauta ritual that the unresolved dilemma of the dharma's traditional order stands out most clearly, for the revealed śruti has nothing to say about the world, its concerns and conflicts.⁷ It proposes, on the contrary, a separate, self-contained world ruled exclusively by the comprehensive and exhaustive order of the ritual. It has no meaning outside its self-contained system of rules to connect it with the mundane order.⁷ This is already clear from the conspicuous absence of *sacra publica*. Therefore the conduct of the *śiṣṭa* who finds his fulfillment in the śruti is, by definition, free from worldly attachment. The ritual is *adṛṣṭārtha*, without visible purpose or meaning other than the realization of its perfect order, be it only for the duration of the ritual and within the narrow compass of the ritual enclosure. After completing the ritual, the sacrificer formally divests himself of his ritual persona, quits the enclosure, and returns to his worldly life.

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The ritual holds out to man the prospect of a transcendent world he creates himself on condition that he submits to the total rule of the ritual injunction. But at the same time, the open gap between the transcendent order of the ritual and the mundane ambivalence of conflict and interest is all the more obvious.

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In this gap the brahmin stands Janus-faced, attached exclusively to the order of Vedic ritualism and at the same time called upon to play his part in the affairs of the world. His precarious stance is the theme of the second essay, "Brahmin, Ritual, and Renouncer." This involves an investigation of the śruti. It appears that the gap between transcendent ritualism and mundane order is the unique result of a conscious reform. The ritual texts still show, through the cracks, as it were, of the closed ritual system, an earlier and fundamentally different state of affairs. We perceive the original nexus of the potlatch, agonistic sacrifice, combining and opposing the host and guest parties in the sacrificial contests, verbal and otherwise, for the goods of live—contests that were no less violent and destructive for being sacral. In fact, it is the presence of violent death that gives the agonistic nexus of the human and divine worlds its sacrality. Here the brahmin is not yet the exclusive adherent of ritualistic order but a consecrated warrior going out to prove himself in the sacrificial contest. The threatening realities of the original "battle of sacrifice" can still be pieced together from ritual rules such as those that are concerned with heads that are to be buried under an elaborate brick fire altar.⁸ It can be shown that the harmless ritualistic abstraction of "the head of the sacrifice" is no other than the victim's severed head; thus the recurrent threat held out to the imprudent contestant in the Upanisadic debates that he will lose his head was more than empty hyperbole. This head was the head of the defeated brahmin warrior who failed to win and to exchange the *servitude et grandeur* of the knight errant for the settled life of the lordly man of substance.

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It is the cyclically recurring violence and destruction of the "battle of sacrifice" that appears to have led to the reform of the ritual, specifically, of the sacrificial contest itself. By removing the opposite party, the contest was eliminated. The immolation of the sacrificial victim was relegated outside the ritual enclosure. The sacrificial meal was broken up, and the awesome aspects of the myth that connects the meal with the immolation of Iḍā, daughter and wife of the human sacrificer's prototype, Manu, were replaced with the originally unrelated flood story.⁹ The enigmatic *bráhman* formulations that contained the insoluble mystery of life and death and constituted the weapons in the perilous verbal contest were replaced by the flat and perfectly unenigmatic *brāhmaṇa* identifications of ritual elements with elements of the macro- and microcosmos.¹⁰ Identification is indeed given as the new "weapon" that gave Prajāpati, the Lord of Life and prototype of the classical Vedic sacrificer, his decisive victory over his opponent, Death, thereby putting a definitive end to the sacrificial contest and inaugurating the reformed ritual.¹¹ The dismembered elements of the broken cycle of sacrificial violence with its ever-uncertain outcome were, through the artifice of identification, restructured into the fail-safe construct of the śrauta ritual. Henceforth the single sacrificer would stand unopposed by his rivals and unimpeded by his partners in his ritual enclosure, creating a transcendent world all his own and, for that reason, unrelated to society.

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Here the classical brahmin comes into his own. However, he does not do so primarily in a priestly capacity, for he would risk his exclusive attachment to the transcendent rule of the śruti by attaching himself to a patron. Instead he is the archetypal single sacrificer, practicing by and for himself the injunctions of the śruti's transcendent order. From there, the road leads straight to the interiorization of the ritual order. Even when eating his meal, he does so as a sacrifice in the internal fires of the breaths (*prāṇāgnihotra*), thereby realizing in himself the absolute order of the śruti.¹² The ideal brahmin is a renouncer turning his back on the world in order to find transcendence in himself.

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The turning point where the sacral nexus of conflict, violence, and death was cut through can perhaps best be characterized as an "axial breakthrough''.¹³ The once unitary world of agonistic sacrifice was definitively broken and thrown open by the rift between uncompromising transcendence and mundane reality. The axial breakthrough did not, however, restructure the world. It posed a transcendent order that, like the renouncer, turned its back on the world. Having no other meaning than its internal, "rational" order, it left the world to its age-old devices of magic and meaning, to ambivalence and conflict. The mundane sphere remained very much—in Max Weber's terms—an "enchanted" world. But the momentous difference was that the sacral nexus of sacrificial strife had lost its ultimate validity and legitimizing force. These now belonged exclusively to the transcendent order and consequently were taken out of the world. The shimmering potency of the sacred and the numinous was not eliminated but was vitally impaired by the glaring light of renunciatory transcendence—be it the transcendence of ritualism or of another, "heterodox," but no less demanding absolute order.

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From this point on, there was no way back to the unitary world order. Though the Vedic ritualists desperately tried to infuse their transcendent order with meaning and relevance, the encompassment of the worldly sphere could not be achieved anymore.¹⁴ It is only man himself—ideally the brahmin—who can make the connection by alternating between worldly life and submission to the rule of ritualism. Or he may opt for the path of renunciation and leave the world for good. Indeed it is on this point that Vedic ritualism exercises its enduring appeal. It does not require man to leave the world once and for all but allows him to return to his mundane concerns. It remains open to man's life in the world even though it cannot encompass worldly life. This may well be the secret of the Veda's pivotal position and the meaning of its being the hallmark of "orthodoxy."

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Although the axial breakthrough that split the unitary order did not change or reform the world, it did take away the ultimate validity and legitimacy of the mundane sphere. This is particularly relevant for kingship and the state. Three of the following essays are therefore concerned with the king and his order, viewed not so much as given institutions but rather as a problem, and an essentially insoluble one at that.¹⁵ Briefly, the problem is the universal one of authority and legitimacy. These were originally provided by the outcome of the periodic "battle of sacrifice." It can be shown that the so-called royal consecration (*rājasūya*), like other such Vedic rituals (*vājapeya*, *aśvamedha*, or horse sacrifice) and even the standard Soma sacrifice (*agniṣṭoma*), hides an original cycle of setting out after the monsoon harvest on transhumance and conquest and returning again.¹⁶ The turning points of the cycle, at the setting out and at the return, were marked by agonistic sacrificial festivals still apparent in the rājasūya’s series of sacrifices strung out over a couple of years. In his unremittingly repeated circuit, the king joins two opposite and complementary worlds, the peaceably settled community (*grāma*) and the wilds (*araṇya*), where the consecrated warrior band has its being. In this way, the king (or would-be king) vindicated his power and authority over both worlds—or lost out to his rival partners in the cycle of violence. The king’s position of power and authority, dependent on the uncertain outcome of the circuit, was as a consequence unstable and constantly endangered. The ritualistic reform, however, broke the cycle of violence and restructured its disjointed parts into mechanistically devised rituals performed separately by the unaided and unopposed single sacrificer. It is significant that even the royal śrauta rituals are not *sacra publica* but strictly individual affairs in which the royal sacrificer is no different from the commoner. But for the same reason, the realities of the king’s world were unchanged. The king’s order remained the order of conflict and violence. Even as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, we come across the conquering and tribute-gathering circuit then known as *mulkgīrī*, “grasping the realm.” But although institutionalized, it lacks the ultimate legitimizing value the original cycle held out.

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In a comparable way, the *Arthaśāstra*’s description of the process of auditing the state accounts harks back to the agonistic festival.¹⁷ But it also appears that the neatly devised bureaucratic procedure falters and finally founders on the crucial point of who shall control whom. The result is again a conflict in which the king must precariously hold his own among his cosharers in the realm, who in Kauṭilya’s formula of the “circle of kings” include not only his allies but his enemies or potential enemies as well. The situation is one of dispersed and conflictive kingship.

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But if ultimate authority and legitimacy elude him, how is the king to make his writ run, as he obviously does? Part of the answer is in the nature of kingship itself. At the intersection of the conflicting interests and factions, the king fulfills the connective function that the all-pervading conflict requires. His position, then, rests on conflict, and he cannot therefore be called upon to end and eliminate all conflict. But by his connectiveness, he should keep conflict from becoming schismatic. Hence the constantly shifting lines of conflict schematized by Kauṭilya in his “circle of kings.” It is again the royal ritual of the rājasūya that brings out the connective function of the king. It shows that the essence of the king’s sacral or divine quality—so often ascribed to him by the dharma texts—resides in his connectiveness so long as he successfully fulfills this function.

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But as we saw, sacrality has been divested of its decisive potency. It is only transcendence that provides ultimate authority, and it is only the brahmin who has access to it. However, because of his renunciatory stance that gives him transcendent authority, he cannot involve himself with the king on pain of losing that authority and becoming no more than the king. In practice, then, the much-vaunted king-brahmin alliance is a restricted formulation of multiple kingship.

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Here we come upon the Indian formulation of the universal problem of power and authority. To turn power into authority, the king must ally himself with the brahmin, but the brahmin must reject the alliance in order to safeguard the authority for which the alliance was sought. While the king stands for the order of conflict, the brahmin's order is absolute, negating all conflict. The one's order is the other's disorder. The two stand at opposite ends from each other, and there is no mediating priesthood. The dilemma is insoluble, as is the dilemma of the dharma.¹⁸

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It appears that the argument outlined above can be carried forward to the scene of the Mughal Empire.¹⁹ Notwithstanding its strongly marked Muslim character, it was no less an Indian phenomenon, underwritten—to mention only the most obvious feature—by the Mughal-Rajput alliance. One may be inclined to think here of India's well-known "inclusivism,"²⁰ but we can perhaps be more precise. Rather than an integrativeness that accommodates alien elements that otherwise might disrupt the coherent fabric of Indian civilization, we see here the inner conflict of tradition at work. The open rift between the king's order of conflict and the brahmin's, or the renouncer's, absolute order of transcendence called for and actually welcomed new ways to deal with disruption. It is not so much India's integrativeness per se as it is the inner conflict that allowed the "inclusion" of the Islamic conception of transcendent order. The empire that was ostensibly intended to realize this order does not seem to have been seriously challenged as such.

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The Mughal rulers, however, although asserting their claim to universal dominion, were well aware of their limitations. They recognized implicitly an "inner frontier" raggedly and shiftingly dividing taxpaying regulation areas from those held by tributary or rebellious—the two qualifications easily shade over into one another—chiefs or rājās. In many ways, this arrangement recalls the ancient complementary opposition of "village" and "wilderness," of the settled sphere and the sphere of the war band. In this context, an institution like the mulkgīrī circuit easily falls into place.

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Like previous regimes, the Mughal Empire was fully and at all levels involved in conflict, even to the point of submergence, referring at the same time to a universal transcendent order. However, this was to change fundamentally with the introduction of the modern concept of the state by the British regime at the end of the eighteenth century. The essential difference was not its alien origin. The Mughals had also been aliens; nor did the British regime lack Indian allies. The difference was rather that the modern state denies internal conflict and does not know an inner frontier. Instead it is based on the notion of an unbroken and universalist internal order. There are no more cosharers in the realm whose shifting networks of conflict and alliance make up the substance of the state, but only monadic subjects, equal before the law and interchangeable. The modern state, in other words, wants to bring the ideal of universal order from its ultramundane haven down to earth. The inner conflict then becomes explosively schismatic, as eventually became clear in the drama of the Partition.

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The universal order propounded by the modern state implied a novel, analytic view of society.²¹ Rejecting the pervasiveness of conflict, it could only conceive of society as made up of separate, self-contained units. Hence the notion of the self-sufficient "village republic." Hence also the exclusivist census definition of caste as a world unto itself, which disregards the interrelations of castes as well as other, noncaste groupings, such as guilds or brotherhoods. This definition translates the scriptural notion of *varṇa*, but distorts the living realities of *jāti*. Identifying the conflict-free ideal of *varṇa* separation with the conflictive interdependence of *jāti*, the modern state sought to establish its universal order. In this way, an inflexible grid was devised to allow the state to rule society, by remote control as it were, through impersonal, mechanistically conceived rules and agencies. It may well be that this view has in a significant way contributed to the idea of an unchanging or stagnating society held in the unyielding grip of monolithic tradition.

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This idea seems to have gradually developed and hardened during the nineteenth century, together with the growing elaboration of the state. The high water mark was reached in the beginning of this century with the ever-more refined census operations that were specifically directed at recording caste, in the sense of self-contained units. In the same period, the clinching argument for the monolithic tradition of the caste institution was provided by the authority of Max Weber, who ingenuously viewed caste as unbreakably wedded to the karman theodicy.²² Though it is certainly possible to find traditional statements linking caste and karman, this was not a fundamental doctrine. Moreover, on closer consideration it becomes clear that such a doctrine would be untenable even theoretically.

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If we have to view caste in the sense of its census definition as an inflexible, monolithic tradition, it is a tradition of the modern state unknown to the old dispensation.

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The thread that holds the following essays together is the inner conflict of tradition. This conflict is not a peculiarity of Indian civilization. One is, of course, accustomed to the distance, even the opposition, between ideal and reality. But we still tend to view the ideal in a direct line with reality even if at an unreachable distance. India, however, shows us a sharp break in which the two are, as a matter of principle, incompatible. The "axial breakthrough" decisively split the unitary order of the world into two principles; the turbulent order of conflict and the static order of transcendence. The broken connection can be restored, not by somehow forcing or faking unity, but by man, who has the freedom to turn his back on the order of the world and to opt for transcendence. The only connection is in man's voluntary decision.

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From this perspective, we may reformulate the relationship between "great" and "little tradition." The "great tradition" proposes the separative and conflict-free order of transcendence that denies society and its web of relationships. The "little tradition," on the other hand, is the lived-in order of society characterized by conflict and interdependence. It is therefore not exclusively geared to the "little community" of, say, the narrowly circumscribed village. While the renunciation-oriented brahmin is the exemplar of the ultramundane great tradition, the protagonist of the mundane little tradition is the king. The little tradition, then, is the king's order of conflict and connectiveness. Together king and brahmin bear the brunt of the unresolved conflict of civiliation.

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Though the two orders impinge on each other, there is no process through which they can merge. Nor does the great tradition gradually supersede the little tradition, as the well-known phenomenon of "Sanskritization" (or "brahminization") seems to suggest. These terms imply not so much a process as a structure—a structure that is determined by the unbridgeable gap between the two traditions.

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Here, however, a third "tradition" has intervened, the "tradition of modernity," exemplified by the modern state. Its distinctive feature is the principled denial of the gap between the two orders and the total identification of the mundane with the transcendent order. As the sovereignty ascribed to it makes clear, the modern state cannot be transcended. It is itself transcendent and so is its universalist order. Hence the similarity of the brahmanical and the modern tradition. However, the difference is equally obvious. There is no more room for a countervailing order. Modernity, then, means the integration of the mundane and the transcendent orders into one explosive reality.

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