The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c4.s8: 8
The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c4.s8
- Language
- English
8
c4.s8.1
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.
c4.s8.2
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.
c4.s8.3
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.