Wandering with Sadhus: Ascetics in the Hindu Himalayas

Appendix: Literatures on Renunciation & Embodiment

« Author and Pāgalānanda, Kathmandu, circa 1976 Appendix: Literatures on Renunciation & Embodiment The Anthropological Literature on Renunciation in South Asia Over the past few decades, the Indological literature has only indirectly addressed the question of whether Hindu sādhus see the material world in the same way as Hindu householders. The social relationship between the renouncer community and the householder community was a prominent question in South Asian studies in the years after 1960, when Louis Dumont published an article arguing that this structural relationship offered a fundamental tool for understanding Hindu social life (1980[1966]). As Dumont’s structuralist theories were gradually overthrown in the 1970s and 1980s, a number of rich ethnographies about Hindu India explicitly de-emphasized the differences in religious worldview between renouncers and householders (cf. Marriott 1976; Gold 1988; Daniel 1984; Mines 1994; Lamb 2000). My ethnographic discussions draw heavily from the nuanced understandings we already have of Hindu householder concepts of space (cf. Beck 1976; Bhardwaj 1973; Das 1974; Eck 1996; Gold 1988), time (cf. Babb 1975; Berreman 1972[1963]; Cohen 1998; Lamb 2000), and the body (cf. Cohen 1998; Inden and Nicholas 1977; Marriott 1976; Daniel 1984; Parry 1992, Alter 1992). 196 • Appendix Theoretical Models: Louis Dumont and a Defense of Dualism, from an Emic Perspective Structuralist thought argues that social systems are based on oppositional or dualistic relationships. The basic split in Hindu society, Dumont argued, was that between caste society—the hierarchical, interdependent units of Hindu social structure—and the individual renouncers who broke free of it.1 The world of Hindu thought and practice could for Dumont be broken down into two discrete and non-overlapping categories: the thisworldly householder and the other-worldly renouncer. The renouncer and the householder form the two poles of a complementary yet entirely oppositional relationship. The binary is total. Dumont’s model was influenced by both Durkheim and Weber (1958[1920]), although he was more obviously descended from the Durkheimian school that gave rise to structuralism as a way of understanding collective social life (see Levi-Strauss 1969[1949]). In his insistence that renouncers alone live apart from social realms, however, Dumont relied on Weberian sociology. Gellner reminds us that Dumont used Weber in his emphasis on the division between “this-worldly” and “other-worldly,” which Dumont equates to the orientations of the householder and the renouncer respectively (Gellner 2001:86; Dumont 1980[1966]:401). Dumont also relies on Weber’s distinction between “social religion” (which was Durkheim’s exclusive interest) and “soteriology,” or the practical “discipline of salvation” (Gellner 2001:95). For Dumont, the religion of the group could be used to explain the relations of householder society, while the practices of salvation could be applied to the individualistic renouncer. Dumont does explicitly disagree with Weber on a number of points, however, including that “the ultramundane tendency ” lies with the class of Brāhman priests rather than with renouncers (1980[1966]:273). Dumont has been correctly criticized on many counts including that the individualism he attributed to the renouncer is steeped in Western notions of will (Marriott 1976); that householder Hindus have nuanced relations and three-dimensional notions of self or personhood, and are not simply units in a system (Das 1982[1977]; Trawick 1990); that his structuralist conceptions of society are too static and therefore insufficiently historical (Gellner 2001); and that theoretical models of hierarchy, or stark divisions between sacred and profane, eclipse the Appendix • 197 multiple variations of social reality, and the frequent ways people act against systems or combine elements of opposing structures (Raheja 1988). In this book, I have suggested that renouncers live very communal lives, and are no more “individualistic” than members of caste society; on the other side of Dumont’s equation, recent ethnographers have convincingly argued that householders have well-developed senses of individuality (see especially Mines 1994). While Dumont has been widely critiqued, his basic contributions to South Asian sociology are undisputed. My inclination to reclaim Dumont’s position on Hindu renunciation responds in part to a recent call by Gellner, who argues that Dumont’s contributions to South Asian social analysis may be unsurpassed, and that his “achievement is still important and impressive and one that should be built on rather than destroyed” (2001:11). Dumont may be wrong about the nuances of Indian social life on a number of counts, but the ideological relationship that he posited between householders and...