The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c4.s3.1

c4.s3.1

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.