The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c5.11

c5.11

Lest it be thought that the situation in this village is an exception with regard to the overall system, it may be worthwhile to consider for a moment the strikingly parallel right-left division of castes known from South India. This well-known but so far rather hazy phenomenon has been studied in the field by Brenda F. Beck.¹⁰ The right-hand division appears to be composed of the dominant peasants such as the Gaundar, who “are known in legend, ritual and even by title as the ‘kings of the area,’” and the service castes directly dependent on them. They form a closely knit complex, resembling each other in ritual matters and entertaining an elaborate system of exchanges. The left-hand division is made up of vegetarian, brahmin-emulating castes which exhibit various degrees of independence from the “kings” of the area because of their outside contacts through trade and marketable skills. As against the coherence of the kinglike group and its dependents—constituting, as Miss Beck puts it, the “in” group of “allied” castes¹¹—the left-hand castes are far more diverse and exclusive, not least among themselves. They do not form a coherent bloc but a plurality of separate, mutually independent units. Consequently, the ranking that is fairly simple and clear-cut within the right-hand bloc tends to be vague if not irrelevant with the left-hand castes, for in the left-hand division the higher castes do not mediate power and prestige for the lower ones as is the case in the righthand bloc.¹² So here, too, we find an essentially dichotomous picture held together, not by an integrating hierarchy of values, but by the conflict between the two principles of hierarchical interdependence on the one hand and of separation and independence on the other. This case, moreover, is the more interesting because it points up the systematic nature of the dichotomy.