Structure and Cognition, Third Edition: Aspects of Hindu Caste and Ritual

179 Pages·2012·1.26 MB·English

by  Veena Das

Title Pages
Structure and Cognition: Aspects of Hindu Caste
and Ritual
Veena Das
Print publication date: 2012
Print ISBN-13: 9780198077404
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198077404.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Structure and Cognition
(p.iii) Structure and Cognition
‘Essential reading for specialists in Hindu myth, ritual and society.’
—Religious Study, London
‘… Veena Das…adds through her brilliant study a new dimension to the
sociological studies by basing her data on an examination of some select myths
in Puranic and Sutra literature…’
—Journal of Religious Study, Patiala
‘This lucidly written book…is a plethora of de novo ideas and inspires its readers
to ponder over them…impresses by its erudition, originality of ideas and
subtleties of analysis…’
—Spectra of Anthropological Progress, Delhi
‘Veena Das’ book is an important contribution, not only to our understanding of
aspects of Hindu society and culture but also to the refinement of sociological
categories of thought as developed by Durkheim and others since his time.’
—India Quarterly, Delhi (p.ii)
Page 1 of 2
Title Pages
(p.iv)
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Page 2 of 2
Dedication
Structure and Cognition: Aspects of Hindu Caste
and Ritual
Veena Das
Print publication date: 2012
Print ISBN-13: 9780198077404
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198077404.001.0001
Dedication
(p.v) for Dev (p.vi)
Page 1 of 1
Introduction to the Third Edition
Structure and Cognition: Aspects of Hindu Caste
and Ritual
Veena Das
Print publication date: 2012
Print ISBN-13: 9780198077404
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198077404.001.0001
(p.ix) Introduction to the Third Edition
Reflections on the Life of a Text
THE IDEA OF REVISITING A TEXT that was essentially completed in 1970
(though first published in 1977) leaves me with an uncanny feeling of familiarity
and strangeness. A feeling of familiarity comes from the fact that on reading the
text in order to prepare this new Introduction, I discovered to my astonishment
that the guiding question of this text, that is, how to prepare ourselves to receive
knowledge that stands somewhat outside our received templates, call it the
knowledge of the other, continues to animate my work. The strangeness arises
from the feeling that there are passages in the book that I know I wrote but I
have difficulty in imagining that I fully understood them. I can only describe the
years that link my life as a twenty-five-year-old who wrote this book and a sixty-
something now, as those of being bewitched by invitations from the lives and
texts I find in the world. It seems to me that I have not so much moved forward
as made a series of (re)turns. One, of course, never returns to the same place
again—so these turns might be thought of as discovering the same problems in
different forms within my intellectual trajectory.
Structure and Cognition was based on my doctoral dissertation (Das, 1977). I
had chosen to study a series of caste Puranas from Gujarat written between
thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though I published papers based on other
regional Puranas such as the Malla Purana (the Purana of the wrestlers) and the
Vayu Purana, (of the Vayad Brahmans and Vaniks), for this book I chose to
combine the analysis (p.x) of the Dharmaranya Purana regional caste Purana of
the Modh Brahmans and Vaniks from a town called Modhera in Gujarat and a
classical Sanskrit text on the performance of domestic rituals for the book. The
history of how the book came to have this composition is an interesting one.
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Introduction to the Third Edition
Although the title of Dharmaranya Purana is the same as one of the canonical
Puranas included in the eighteen main Puranas, and there are some verses that
are shared, the main text is about regional events that explain the relation
between different segments of the Brahman and Vanik castes from Modhera.
Yet, the text seems to have found it important to not only name itself after a
canonical Purana but also to imagine the local relations within the structural
framework of classical Hinduism, such as the tripartite structure of brahman,
king and, renouncer or the theme of the ambiguity of the gift. I deliberately talk
here of the agency of the text rather than the authors about whom we know
nothing except that they obviously worked within a notion of authorship that
privileged a given genre even for registering newness or innovation. One
objection I faced at that stage, especially from those writing within a Dumontian
framework, (which, as is well-known, posited hierarchy as the key to Indian
society), was that the caste Puranas were not part of classical texts. At best,
some suggested, these were expressions of regional aspirations rather than
classical conceptions underlying Hindu society. I chose then to expand the scope
of the book by including the discussion of domestic rituals in the classical Grihya
Sutra texts as well as the texts on death rituals. Thus, taking caste and domestic
groups as the units for analysis was an opportunity to test if hierarchy and the
opposition of purity and pollution were indeed the dominant oppositions through
which Hindu society was ordered. In addition, though, there were other issues
that cropped up—how was ‘history’ to be conceptualized? The Dharmaranya
Purana was positioned within the text itself as the history of a caste group. Did
the main themes of the eighteen major Puranas, such as stories of creation and
recreation as well as histories of dynasties provide a model for the regional texts
to recount important regional events? What was an event from this perspective?
With a distance of thirty-five years, it is interesting to see how some of the
(p.xi) themes of Structure and Cognition from the first edition in 1977 and the
revised one in 1982, appear in the light of my later concerns.
My most recent book, published in 2007, is entitled Life and Words: Violence and
the Descent into the Ordinary (Das, 2007). On the face of it, the themes of this
book that encompass questions such as, how violence folds into everyday life,
the eventedness of the everyday, and the idea of the ordinary—seem far removed
from the concerns of my first book. Indeed, I often thought that the hope of
growing concepts from the texts that were not recognized as having any claims
over theory—a hope that was palpable in Structure and Cognition had become
all but extinguished by the events of the devastating violence I described in the
later book, Life and Words. I felt that to inherit any Hindu texts had become a
very difficult task, indeed. Yet, in revisiting Structure and Cognition, I am struck
by passages such as the following:
The point to remember is that for every single meaning of the categorical
term that is brought to the surface, there is a class of unexpressed
meanings that form a kind of hidden treasure. In Sanskrit poetics it was
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Introduction to the Third Edition
believed that every word had is own powers, and my analysis of these
categories has persuaded me that words can be thought of as pulsating
with life, and with a dynamism that comes from the totality of meanings
that they can be made to evoke. [Das, 1987: 150].
The idea that words carry not only meaning, that they not only refer to the
world, but that they themselves have some kind of life so that survivors of
violence might be able to narrate what happened to them but that their touch
with life is lost, that words might become frozen slides from which all life has
been drained, is one of the guiding idea of Life and Words (2007). Now
admittedly the idea of language and its intimacy with death, doubt, and
skepticism developed in Life and Words, makes the concept of language much
darker than that of the words that are pulsating with life. Yet, this relation
between life and death, not as polarities but as intensities observed in the
context of myths, rituals, and in expressions of the everyday was a theme in
Structure and Cognition that revealed the flaws in the mechanistic model of
purity and pollution as degrees along a single continuum.1 There are (p.xii)
various places in Structure and Cognition, where the idea of life makes an
appearance—encompassing biological life, life of the individual, life of the
community, as well as the way words themselves become repositories of
intensities that signal the play of life and death. It seems clear to me now that I
needed more experience of life (though I had already encountered death in many
guises) to work out more fully the subtle relations between these different
thresholds of life, as Bhrigupati Singh calls them, in his recent work on the
nomadic lives of gods and other such matters (Singh, 2009). But I am glad that
the beginnings were there much before I could fully grasp the notion of life
without resorting to a philosophy akin to vitalism.
If the idea of life permeates Structure and Cognition and gives dynamism to the
way categories of gods, demons, men, and others evolve—sometimes morphing
into each other and at other times becoming differentiated, the book also
identifies an axiology of social life in the tripartite division between brahman,
king, and renouncer, that it proposes. This idea of an underlying conceptual
structure that went beyond the double-headed hierarchy of priesthood and
kingship was generally received with enthusiasm and some very astute scholars
(for example, Richard Burghart) went on to offer their own modifications to
these categories (see Burghart, 1983). Even after the passage of so many years I
feel very grateful to Adrian Mayer, Audrey Cantlie, and Patrick Olivelle for
recognizing that the category of the renouncer was not one among other
categories—instead, as I argued, it provided a measure of things. I wrote:
… the source of the Brahman’s prestige lies in his personification of the
renouncer’s values…. it is not the Brahman as priest who provides value to
the system but the Brahman as a person charged with the duty of following
renunciatory ideals. In such a system, the renouncer can hardly be
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Introduction to the Third Edition
dismissed as being outside the system, for it is he who provides the
measure of things. [Das, 1987: 136]
In the Dharmaranya Purana, the renouncer serves as a point of reference in the
process of explaining the divisions among the Modh Brahmans—the Chaturvedi
Brahmans being the ones who, in accordance with the renunciatory ideal,
refused to receive the sacrificial gifts even from such a meritorious king as
Rama. Here, we have a hint of how the gift is not only essentially ambiguous,
(p.xiii) a point made by Marcel Mauss, but also that a kind of recounting of the
past through the category of the renouncer is available to all castes—from
Brahmans to lower status Shudras. Indeed, the recounting of a past in which a
strict adherence to the dharma of refusing gifts and accumulation was followed
provides a way in which such lower castes as Doms can also explain their
present low status in the world. Although not many scholars have followed this
lead, it is interesting to see how the boundaries between the category of
Brahman, Vanik, and Shudra sometimes merge with each other and at other
times become separate and distinct. Thus one of the branches of the Chaturvedi
Brahmans were said to have become Vaniks because they took up the vanika
mode of livelihood. In accounting for different jatis within the fold of the Modh
Brahmans, the Purana gives many indications of the influence of ‘foreign
customs or norms’, of economic necessities that make some groups accept such
occupations as wrestling that is clearly distinguished from warfare so that the
wrestlers retain the status of Brahmans. The chapter on jatis in Structure and
Cognition gives a sense of the historical turmoil within which the text emerged.
Although some critics thought that my fascination with structural analysis was
inconsistent with a genuine historical understanding of caste, this particular
chapter seems to have attempted precisely to show that there were Hindu
theories of time that were deployed to understand how to contain the
disruptions of history. The theory of kalivarjya—actions forbidden in the Kaliyuga
(the fourth age in the Hindu cycle of time), even though these actions were
considered right for the earlier three yugas when human beings were considered
to be morally superior—broke the simplistic idea of linear versus cyclical time. It
showed instead how ideas of what is foreign, what is new, and what is being
transformed, in short, the flux in the career of social categories and groups, was
vital to the Hindu understanding of the world in this turbulent period.
Nevertheless, the framing of the text took the social axiology of the tripartite
division into brahman, king, and renouncer as the starting point for its narration.
More recently, I have returned to the conceptual status of the ‘exception’ in
Manu and argued that it provides a distinctive theory of what it is to follow a
rule (Das, 2011). I feel that if we are to take the conceptual claims of categories
(p.xiv) embedded in texts produced within Indian traditions further, we will
need to go beyond words (for example, is dharma to be translated as religion or
law?) and instead ask how meaning and significance are created as we move
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Introduction to the Third Edition
from words to sentences, discourses and even to experiences of inter-textuality
that give texture to such notions as that of historical change.
I can illustrate this idea best with reference to the importance I gave to the
syntagmatic operations, showing that while paradigmatic operations of
oppositions, equivalences, and isomorphism were of great importance, it was
also imperative to consider when and where a category emerged, at what point
in a story did one term (for example, Brahman) merge with another (for
example, Vanik), or what was the sequence when more than one category was
mentioned. Take for example the statement that the Brahmans make in
exhorting the Jain king to restore their grants to them, ‘Whether the king is a
Kshatriya or Shudra, it is his duty to protect the Brahmans’ (Das, 1987: 51).
Here, the string of terms—Kshatriya and Shudra—together forms the domain of
kingship, yet, historical change is signaled by the order of succession of these
terms. There are other texts such as the Bhavishya Purana, in which the series
extends also to Mleccha kings. Too often the claim to ‘indigenize’ anthropology
or sociology comes to rest on little more than asking if there is a word in an
Indian language that corresponds exactly with another in English with the
implicit assumption that the absence of such correspondence implies the
concept is lacking in India. Thus, I have heard scholars of great repute
triumphantly claim that secularism is foreign to Indian thought since there is no
exact equivalent of the term in an Indian language. Surely, though, such hasty
pronouncements ignore the simple fact that to grow a concept from Indian texts
or from the evidence of language must be a more patient undertaking. Indeed,
words grow and are projected further into new domains as new events occur.
Words gather meaning not only from their own traditions but also from other
traditions in whose company they find themselves. If nothing else, I am at least
glad that Structure and Cognition attempted to devise methods for growing
concepts rather than assuming that lists of words would do the trick.
(p.xv) At the time of writing Structure and Cognition, I was fascinated by the
opportunities offered by structuralism to go beyond words and to think of strings
of discourses. I never thought of structuralism as simply finding binary
oppositions and establishing equivalences. I find that I paid much more attention
to the syntagmatic axis of discourse and treated it as analytically equivalent to
the paradigmatic axis, which was not the common practice in structuralist
analysis. I had felt that a close reading of Lévi-Strauss showed that there was a
complex relation between series and structures, that notions of transformation
were not reducible to algebraic operations but had deep implications for how we
think of human societies as playing with what is actualized and made present in
any given system as well as with the paths not taken. I will offer two examples
that had a great impact on my thinking, though I do not explicitly mention them
in Structure and Cognition. First, in his analysis of marriage alliance, Lévi-
Strauss (1969a) did start with positing the distinction between restricted
exchange and generalized exchange but went on to show in the latter parts of
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Introduction to the Third Edition
The Elementary Structures of Kinship that the shadow of the alternate system
that was not chosen, falls on the one what was actualized in any given empirical
formation. Thus, restricted exchange tends toward generalized exchange as the
units exchanging women become larger so that the crisscrossing of descent and
locality, necessary for systems of restricted exchange to become global in scope,
mutate into the simpler forms of generalized exchange. Similarly, he argued that
generalized exchange mutates into a series of smaller cycles—more akin to
restricted exchange than the large single cycle of generalized exchange. This is
not the place to go into any detail on the empirical questions of the impact of
soicio-economic transformations on gumsa and gumlao formations among the
Kachin (see Nugent, 1982)—the conceptual point that is interesting is the idea
that human societies always play with possibilities not realized in actuality.
Moving from kinship to myth, Lévi-Strauss showed that any cycle of myths (for
example, the bird nester stories) leaves residual elements that depend for their
meaning on another cycle of myths that are in the custody of a neighboring
group (Lévi-Strauss, 1969b). I spent many years teaching my students to read a
text for its surpluses—of ideas that somehow (p.xvi) drop out of circulation
because they cannot find ready purchase. I find it interesting that that the
wholesale rejection of structuralism has not led to a total eclipse of these
conceptual ideas, for they do appear in new forms. A genealogical rendering of
the dispersal of notions of series, sequences, residues, and the place of the
neighbour will find some affinity of these ideas with those of structure, axiology,
oppositions, and homologies. Let me then conclude with one of my favourite
passages from the book, which, I wish, I had been able to work out more
cogently.
In our understanding of the Dharmaranya Purana, the syntagmatic
operations hold as much importance as the paradigmatic operations.… To
an extent, the unit, which is carved out as a significant one from a
continuous syntagmatic chain depends upon the judgment of the analyst.
Not only does the text continue with more stories which have been seen
here as constitutive of a second paradigmatic unit but… this Purana may
itself be seen as part of a chain including other versions of the
Dharmaranya Purana, and indeed, other Puranas. From this endless text,
how does one justify the decision to carve out the set of stories that have
been isolated as forming a significant paradigmatic unit? As has been
pointed out earlier, the isolation of the significant unit does depend to a
large extent on the judgment of the analyst, but this is not a judgment that
is formed on criteria that cannot be communicated. In retrospect, it seems
to me that within the significant unit isolated by me, the criterion of
cumulative accretion provided an important clue. In other words, within
this unit the precise order of succession of the stories was important, and
could not be ignored for building up the paradigmatic structure. For
example, it is of some relevance to us that the Purana does not begin with
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