Abstract
This article is a critical re-evaluation of Louis Dumont’s theory of the opposition between the man-in-the-world and the world renouncer within traditional Indian society. Drawing on new research into gṛhastha, the most common indigenous term for a householder, the article shows that Dumont’s theory is basically flawed. When due attention is paid to historical developments within Hinduism, the grhastha and the renouncer (pravrajita) are seen as complementary and sharing a common ideology. Contrary to Dumont’s basic thesis, the individual is conceptually very much alive within society and not just within its repudiation in the institution of world renunciation.
On 30 October 1958, the French social-anthropologist Louis Dumont gave the 10th Frazer Memorial Lecture at Oxford University. It was entitled ‘Le renoncement dans les religions de l’Inde’. The English translation entitled ‘World Renunciation in Indian Religions’, was published in 1960 in volume four of Contributions to Indian Sociology, a journal that Dumont had co-founded in 1957 with the British anthropologist David Pocock. This journal, in a new incarnation as ‘new series’, was brought to India by Professor T. N. Madan and lives on at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. I am grateful that this journal has accepted my response to Dumont 64 years after the publication of his seminal paper.
Dumont went on to make many significant contributions to the field of Indian social anthropology, including his magnum opus with the Latin title Homo Hierarchicus, the hierarchical man (Dumont 1980 [1970]). Even in his trenchant critique of Dumont, Quigley (1993: 20) concedes: ‘Without doubt the single most influential contribution to the study of caste since the end of the Second World War has been Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus’. Béteille, who had strong disagreements with Dumont, likewise acknowledges the influence and impact of his ideas: ‘Dumont’s work has had a marked impact on Indian studies, since a great deal of what he has written in his books and in the journal founded by him, Contributions to Indian Sociology, has been about India’ (Béteille et al. 1986: 122). Whatever position we take with regard to his sweeping theories of Indian society and religion, no one studying India’s past can ignore Dumont’s contributions. The field is richer for his scholarship and voluminous publications. It was fitting that a volume of essays in honour of Louis Dumont on his 70th birthday, entitled Way of Life: King, Householder, Renouncer was edited by Professor T. N. Madan (1982a).
In Homo Hierarchicus, Dumont explored the ideological foundations of the caste system. He posited that caste hierarchy was founded on the notions of purity and impurity. He enunciates this in clear terms: ‘The caste system is based upon a hierarchical opposition of the pure and the impure’ (Dumont 1980: 270). There have been many challenges to Dumont’s thesis on caste from both anthropologists and historians. 1 Over 20 years ago, in my contribution to the volume in honour of Professor Madan (Olivelle 1999), I too questioned Dumont’s conception of the purity/impurity binary and the centrality he confers on it as the explanatory factor of the caste system. However, a significant and innovative aspect of Dumont’s examination of caste and varn.a is that he took seriously the data found in ancient Sanskrit texts, especially the legal texts known as Dharmaśāstra. This was quite novel and innovative at the time for a social anthropologist. Nevertheless, as I tried to point out in my paper on purity, the data from these texts tell a story very different from the one Dumont narrates.
Here I return to focus, however, on an earlier work of Dumont’s (1960), ‘World Renunciation in Indian Religions’. It has been called ‘probably the most imaginative and insightful attempt to grasp Indian religions as a whole in the history of Indology’ (Collins 1989:15). Dumont himself claims that this relatively brief article ‘provides the main framework for all my later work, both on India itself and beyond that setting’ (Dumont 1980: xix). More substantively he claims that ‘The secret of Hinduism may be found in the dialogue between the renouncer and the man-in-the-world’ (Dumont 1960: 37–38). Further, speaking of caste, he says, ‘It may be doubted whether the caste system could have existed and endured independently of its contradictory, renunciation’ (Dumont 1980: 186).
In brief, Dumont claims that the man-in-the-world lives within the system of caste, and this system does not permit the existence of the individual at the conceptual level. He is explicit: ‘To say that the world of caste is a world of relations is to say that the particular caste and the particular man have no substance: they exist empirically, but they have no reality in thought, no Being’ (Dumont 1960: 42). Therefore, to be in the world, is to lose—or better, to never discover—one’s individuality. Dumont is clear: ‘I regard it as fundamental and would therefore firmly posit, at the risk of being crude, that on the level of life in the world the individual is not’ (ibid.).
So, a man can either be a cog in the wheel of caste by living within the world or become an individual by leaving it, by becoming a world renouncer. There is no third option. Dumont says of the renouncer: ‘He thinks as an individual, and this is the distinctive trait which opposes him to the man-in-the-world and brings him closer to the western thinker’ (Dumont 1960: 46). I will not comment here on the opposition between the Indian man-in-the-world and the ‘western thinker’ posited by Dumont and the gender implications of the very expression ‘man-in-the-world’. 2 Let me focus here instead on the opposition Dumont posits between him and the renouncer, especially concerning the pursuit of individual goals.
I am interested in exploring the intellectual world of Louis Dumont in part because I am indebted to him for a number of reasons. I came to study at Oxford just 10 years after Dumont had given his famous Frazer lecture at which he first articulated his theory of the individual in Indian society. The place was still abuzz with the implications of that seminal paper, especially among those of us who were studying India’s past. That was my first introduction to Dumont and his work. Having just arrived from Sri Lanka into the exalted and often mysterious world of Oxford, I was a neophyte to its ethereal academic realm. Perhaps because of my naiveté, I was fascinated by Dumont’s sweeping view of Indian religious history and came under its spell. Remember, this was the time when scholars such as Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil were spinning broad theories of religion, departments of religious studies were sprouting across American universities, the Beatles were a worldwide phenomenon and mysticism, often connected to mind-altering drugs, was in the air. Dumont’s theory gave me the key to unlocking the mysteries of Indian religious history, or so I thought. My early work as a scholar dovetailed with the beguiling ideas Dumont had laid out clearly and powerfully within the 30 pages of his seminal article on world renunciation.
In my youth, I studied Buddhist monasticism and, in particular, the Brahmanical forms of asceticism and world renunciation often expressed by the term saṃnyāsa, a term also used by Dumont as the Sanskrit term corresponding to his idea of world renunciation. Many of my publications in the first two decades of my scholarly life were devoted to this topic. In a paper published in 1990 with the telling title ‘Village versus Wilderness: Ascetic Ideals and the Hindu World’, a title clearly inspired by Dumont; I say at the very outset: ‘Louis Dumont (1960) in his seminal work “World Renunciation in Indian Religions” drew our attention to the structural conflict existing within the bosom of Hinduism between the ideology of the renouncer and that of the man-in-the-world’ (Olivelle 1990: 125). My work during this period was inspired by and indebted to Dumont’s ideas.
But that was then, and this is now. Although my views of Dumont’s theory evolved over many years, and I began gradually to question some of its presuppositions, it was when the focus of my research shifted from renunciatory forms of religiosity to other areas of Indian culture and history, especially to law and statecraft and later to Ashoka, that my doubts about Dumont’s theory of the opposition between the world renouncer and the man-in-the-world—not just whether it would provide the proverbial key to unlocking the mysteries of the Hindu world and Indian religious history but also whether such an opposition ever existed—came into sharper focus. I began to wonder whether this opposition existed simply in the mind of the scholar, whether it was purely a scholarly invention.
Dumont worked within the structuralist tradition of French anthropology. In his conversation with Jean-Claude Galey, printed in the Dumont felicitation volume edited by Madan (1982a), he acknowledged his debt to the structuralist insights of Claude Lévi-Strauss: ‘I was fortunate … in that Lévi-Strauss gave me a key which … allowed me to capture immediately Tamil representations and preoccupations’ (Galey 1982: 17). He was influenced even more, however, by Marcel Mauss, whose more famous uncle was Émile Durkheim, the father of French sociology. Dumont says: ‘Mauss always taught that the advantage of anthropology as against other disciplines, like history, was the possibility to apprehend social life as one seamless fabric’ (ibid.: 16). Dumont cites an even stronger statement of Marcel Mauss: ‘To do away with the historical method is to be left … with the anthropological’ (Dumont 1960: 33). Through this method, Dumont sought to arrive at what he calls ‘a unitary definition of Hinduism’ (ibid.: 36).
The notion that society is a seamless fabric, I think, is one of the problems with Dumont’s approach. It overlooks the messiness of social life, on the one hand, and its historically dynamic nature, on the other. India is also a vast geographical area with immense ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity—the same goes for what we call Hinduism. Society does not remain at a standstill, posing for the anthropologist to take still pictures. It changes, sometimes drastically, due to internal challenges and external events. The Buddha understood this when he rejected the notion of unchanging essences behind empirical phenomena. It is impossible to find a ‘seamless fabric’ in society or religion, and if we find it, it may well be only in the eye of the beholder. Unlike Mauss, I think history is vitally important to understand and contextualise the anthropology of Indian religion and society. On Dumont’s avoidance of history in the analysis of India, Béteille’s observation is worth noting:
3
The book on India is markedly anthropological, and that too in a specific sense of the term: it relies mainly on contemporary ethnographic data and on insights derived from a reading of classical texts. The passage from the one to the other, spanning a period of 2,000 years, is smooth, easy, and almost effortless. To be sure, Dumont does not deny that India has a history, but historical analysis is quite marginal to the techniques by which he has identified holism and hierarchy in India. In that sense these values and Indian civilization itself are made to appear timeless and ahistorical (Dumont and Béteille 1987: 676).
I will introduce below some features of that history in the critique of Dumont’s analysis. Searching for a unitary definition of Hinduism is a fool’s errand!
All this was percolating in my mind for some time. However, it was in 2015 that a eureka moment happened. The Oxford University Press had asked me to edit a volume on the history of Hindu law, the Dharmaśāstras (Olivelle and Davis 2018). I was engaged in rounding up and persuading reluctant scholars to write the various chapters. Due to her past work on women and marriage in ancient India, I prevailed on my colleague Stephanie Jamison to write the chapter on the householder. It seemed to her like a straightforward project, and she naively took it on. Little did she realise that it would lead her along untrodden paths to one of the major recent discoveries in the religious history of ancient India. Let me take a moment to explain.
The most common term for a householder in classical Sanskrit texts, especially the Dharmaśāstras, is grhastha, literally ‘one staying in a house or at home’. I recently edited a volume (Olivelle 2019a) containing 12 ground-breaking studies of this term based on Stephanie Jamison’s insights. So, I will be brief.
The gṛhastha, householder, is the opposite of Dumont’s world renouncer and appears to correspond to his category of ‘man-in-the-world’. The gṛhastha lives at home and in the world, maintaining social relationships; he is married and lives with his wife and children as an economically productive member of society. In his contribution to the Dumont Festschrift, Madan expresses a similar view. In the context of the Kashmiri Pandits, he says, borrowing Dumontian vocabulary: ‘The ideology of everyday life, then, clearly establishes the Pandit as the gṛhastha. The householder is the man-in-the-world’ (Madan 1982b: 246). Writing a few years later, in 1987, Madan seems to anticipate our conclusions with regard to the ideology of the gṛhastha:
It seems legitimate to suggest that an ideology of the householder exists in Hindu society. The householders are not merely given empirically, in defiance of the ideology of renunciation, but domesticity is also a positive value orientation, just as renunciation is. This raises the important question of the relationship between two apparently antithetical ideologies. (Madan 1987: 9–10)
The Sanskrit equivalent of world renouncer is pravrajita, a person who has gone forth from home into the homeless state. Dumont does not use this term but prefers saṃnyāsa, but, as I have shown elsewhere (Olivelle 1981, 1986), this term enters the renunciatory vocabulary very late, and even then, it is at first restricted to the rite of Brahmanical renunciation. Only in early medieval texts do we see it employed as a generic term for the life of a Brahmanical ascetic, with the companion term saṃnyāsin signifying a renouncer.
So, is the gṛhastha conceptually opposed to the ascetic, called pravrajita most often in ancient literature? Are they, as Dumont assumes, poles apart—indeed, the two poles of ancient Indian religion? Let me walk you through the argument in my edited volume. Jamison’s comments on the very familiar and commonplace term gṛhastha are revelatory:
The term grhastha is nowhere encountered in Sanskrit before the dharma texts, and what we think of as the corresponding figure is called by different names. However, once encountered, grhastha silently replaces previous terms with no signal in the texts themselves as to where the term comes from or why older terms needed replacement. (Jamison 2019: 4)
No pre-Ashokan, that is, pre-3rd century
The first is easy to answer because of the new research on the history of the term gṛhastha. 4 Although absent in Sanskrit, it is present in Prakrit. It appears for the first time in datable history in the inscriptions of Ashoka. It is probable that Ashoka’s use of the term gṛhastha (in Prakrit, gahatha or gihitha) three times, reflects an ascetic or śraman.a vocabulary. In this usage, gṛhastha maintains its literal and etymological meaning: ‘stay at home’. Given that most people in the world live at home or in a house, the statement that someone stays at home becomes meaningful only when contrasted with a paradigmatic holy man who leaves his home, the pravrajita, ‘one gone forth’. This is precisely the context in which Ashoka uses the term.
Without getting into the weeds, it is clear from Ashoka’s usage that we have two coupled terms—pravrajita and gṛhastha—with the latter dependent on the former for its signification. On its face, this contrast between the ‘gone-forth’ and the ‘stay-at-home’ appears to support Dumont’s theory which posits the world renouncer and the man-in-the-world against each other. However, it is just the opposite. The pair in Ashoka are not opposed to, but complement, each other; both are associated with a single conceptual entity and demographic group, which Ashoka calls pāṣan.ḍa. Although this term is used with a pejorative meaning in later texts, it has a neutral and classificatory meaning for Ashoka. Pāṣaṇḍa for Ashoka comes close to what we would call a religion (see Brereton 2019). In Pillar Edict VII (Olivelle 2023: 318), for example, he mentions four pāṣaṇḍas: Buddhist, Brahmanical, Jain and Ājīvaka. It is clear from Ashoka’s discussions of the three categories, pāṣaṇḍa, pravrajita and gṛhastha, that a pāṣaṇḍa contained within its membership or associated with it both pravrajitas and gṛhasthas. This connection is highlighted in the very first sentence of Rock Edict XII (ibid.: 293): ‘The Beloved of Gods, King Piyadasi, pays homage to all Pāṣaṇḍas, to those who have gone forth (pravrajita) and to those staying at home (gṛhastha), with gifts and with various acts of homage’. So, although linguistically contrasted, the two are united in being individuals devoted to religious pursuits, committed to the goals and practices of their respective religious groups. They are both part of, or associated with, religious groups called pāṣaṇḍa by Ashoka.
The position of a gṛhastha-householder as a counterpart of the pravrajita-renouncer is further strengthened by Ashoka’s educational mission that sought to instil moral values, the dharma as conceptualised by Ashoka, in the population. The target of this mission is the householder, even though he does not use the term gṛhastha in this context. The householder is devoted to the moral quest while living at home. Ashoka calls him dharmayukta—a person devoted to dharma. In fact, Ashoka’s remorse at the carnage he caused in the Kalinga war, at least in part, was based on its impact on precisely such householders. Rock Edict XIII states:
This is the regret that the Beloved of Gods has after conquering the Kalingas. For, conquering an unconquered land entails the killing, death, or deportation of people. That is deemed extremely painful and grievous by the Beloved of Gods. But this is deemed even more grievous by the Beloved of Gods, that Brahmins or Sramanas, or other Pāṣan.ḍas or grhasthas and dwelling there who are well cared for — among whom are established obedience to authority, obedience to mother and father, obedience to elders, and proper regard to friends, companions, associates, and relatives, and to slaves and servants, and firm devotion — that they endure there the injury, killing, or deportation of their loved ones. (Olivelle 2023: 295)
Ashoka’s gṛhastha, to use a Weberian category, is devoted to inner-worldly asceticism. He is distinct from the renouncer, the pravrajita, in domicile and lifestyle, but is part of the renouncer’s religious and ideological world. Stephanie Jamison articulates nicely these contrasting and complementary categories:
The implications of this word history are quite striking … It indicates that the grhastha-, so thoroughly embedded verbally in the orthodox Brahmanical dharma texts and so explicitly the foundation of the social system depicted therein, is actually a coinage of and a borrowing from śramaṇic discourse, which discourse, at this period, was conducted in various forms of Middle Indo-Aryan. The grhastha, lit. ‘stay-at-home’, is thus defined against a contrastive role, that of an ascetic of no fixed abode and no domestic entanglements … This contrastive pairing implies that the householder of the Hindu dharma texts was not simply a married man and pater familias in what we might, anachronistically, consider an essentially secular role, but a man with a religious life equivalent to that of a wandering ascetic—but a religious life pursued and fulfilled within the context of a sedentary family existence. (Jamison 2019: 18–19)
Let me now turn to the literary tradition within Brahmanism dealing with dharma, namely the Dharmaśāstras. The major way in which the Brahmanical thinkers incorporated the two categories of holy persons of Ashoka was in the newly constructed institution of āśramas. Here again, I will be brief. In its first articulation as presented in the early Dharmasūtras, the āśrama system envisaged four kinds of holy lives a young adult could adopt. They are: living permanently with a teacher as a student (brahmacārin), being a gṛhastha-householder, being a forest hermit (vanaprastha) and being a wandering renouncer (pravrajita). In this formulation, these modes are not simply stages of life a person goes through as he grows old, which is a feature of what I have called the classical āśrama system. Rather, these are permanent modes or vocations of life that a young adult chooses. 5 Let me emphasise this: The young adult chooses how he wants to live the rest of his life. The Sanskrit term for choice is vikalpa. The centrality of choice within the original āśrama scheme puts, in the vocabulary of Dumont, the individual squarely within the spectrum of Brahmanical institutions, including the gṛhastha-householder. Note Dumont’s pointed statement: ‘He [the renouncer] thinks as an individual, and this is the distinctive trait which opposes him to the man-in-the-world and brings him closer to the western thinker’ (Dumont 1960: 46). Nothing, surely, is more characteristic of the individual than personal choice. Let us note further that āśrama stands at the very heart of the Brahmanical social theology within the central category of varn.āśramadharma. Within Dharmaśāstric theology, however, even though the four āśramas are theoretically equal, one is, to use Orwellian language, more equal than the others. In this theology, the gṛhastha-householder stands supreme.
Two of the early Dharmasūtras, those of Gautama 6 and Baudhāyana 7 , affirm what we may consider to be the extreme position. They contend that there really is only one āśrama, and that is the gṛhastha-householder. So, in a sense, these theologians limit the exercise of a person’s choice to one, which is no choice at all. The ideal is to become a householder.
Others praise the householder as superior to the other āśramas. Here is a eulogy of the gṛhastha by Vasiṣṭha, another author of an early Dharmasūtra:
8
A grhastha alone offers sacrifices, a grhastha performs austerities. Of all the four āśramas, the grhastha is the best. As all rivers and rivulets ultimately end up in the ocean, so people of all the āśramas ultimately end up in the grhastha. As all living beings live dependent on the mother, so all mendicants live dependent on the grhastha.
Not simply the later theology of the bhakti devotional tradition or Tantric texts, which Dumont alludes to, but even Dharmaśāstras from the mainstream of Brahmanism claim that a gṛhastha is able to attain the final goal of the world renouncer, namely liberation or mokṣa from existence tied to rebirth. The Dharmaśāstra of Yājñavalkya is clear: 9 ‘Even a householder is liberated when he acquires wealth by lawful means, is firmly established in the knowledge of the truth, loves guests, performs ancestral offerings, and speaks the truth’.
Dumont’s conclusions on the lack of individuality in the man-in-the-world are based on the view that for those who live in the world the fundamental institution is caste. Caste, thus, defines the life of a man living within society; it is an all-encompassing web smothering the individual and robbing him of his individuality and creativity. So, of course, the empirical individual living in society cannot exercise freedom, choice and ambition. He cannot aspire certainly to the ultimate goal of liberation. But is this a web embedded in social and historical reality, or is it spun by the anthropologist?
The old Dharmaśāstric term for Dumont’s ‘caste’ is varn.a, of which there are four in a hierarchical arrangement: Brahmin, Kṣatriya, Vaiśya and Śūdra. The varṇa system lends its ideology to the related system of jāti arranged once again in a pyramidal hierarchy. Did these social institutions and the pyramidal hierarchy of their arrangement with the Brahmin at the top represent social reality, or are they ideological projects masquerading as sociology? Is Dumont’s hierarchy ‘a theological rather than a sociological concept’ as noted by Béteille (Dumont and Béteille 1987: 673)?
Did ancient Indians living social lives, furthermore, internalise these institutions and identify themselves using these categories: ‘Who are you?’ ‘I am a Vaiśya’, and the like? This is highly unlikely. In all of Ashoka’s writings, which are the rare original texts free of Brahmanical intervention available to us, the entire system of varṇa is missing. The very words Kṣatriya, Vaiśya and Śūdra are never used by Ashoka. Brahmin is used, but only as the name of a particular religious group or Pāṣaṇḍa distinguished from śramaṇa. If we only had Ashoka’s writings, we would not even know that the institution of varṇa existed in ancient India.
We arrive at a similar conclusion regarding the centrality of jāti and varṇa when we look closely at evidence from medieval times. The historian Cynthia Talbot examined a large corpus of inscriptions from medieval Andhra Pradesh for her 2001 book, Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval Andhra. She notes that ‘Inscriptions offer an alternative means for recovering the social world of precolonial India, one that is not distorted by the transformations caused by colonial rule nor restricted to the viewpoint of the elite brahman’ (2001: 49). She notes further: ‘Not only is the word jāti rarely found in thirteenth-century inscriptions from Andhra, but there are also no references to specific subcastes by name’ (ibid.: 52). What we find in the self-identifying terms and titles used by writers of inscriptions is that there was inter-generational social mobility both upward and downward. Talbot concludes:
The Andhra that one sees in inscriptions thus bears little resemblance to the rigid, tradition-bound society implied by the common model of a social system composed of hierarchically ranked and hereditary jātis. Indeed, the reputed centrality of caste in precolonial India is undermined by the inscriptional evidence. (ibid.: 85)
Fame is a topic commonly encountered in traditional India with reference to what Dumont calls a man-in-the-world. In Sanskrit, the two words that correspond to fame are yaśas and kīrti. Generally, fame in India, as elsewhere, is associated with warriors and heroes. It is closely associated with the ambitions of kings. But the quest for fame is more general and ubiquitous. We see the same quest, for example, in the case of poets. Kalidasa’s opening lines in his epic poem Raghuvaṃśa are worth quoting in full:
10
Look at that lineage springing from the sun! And look at my mind so feeble and small! Deluded, I seek to cross in a raft, a mighty ocean that’s so hard to cross. Fool that I am, seeking poetic fame, I am bound to become a laughingstock. Greedy, like a dwarf with his arms outstretched to a fruit reachable only by a tall man.
Fame is a deeply individual quest, and it is pursued within a social context. How does that quest fit in Dumont’s view of the man-in-the-world, who lacks individuality? How does intergenerational social mobility work in a strictly caste-bound society?
The opposition between the world renouncer and the man-in-the-world, the former becoming an individual outside society and the latter living without individuality within society, is, I think, no longer tenable. The relationship between these two ideal types identified by Dumont is historically more complex and subject to constant change and contestation. First, each of these two ideal types contains widely complex social realities. The gṛhastha of the Dharmaśāstras is clearly not just any married man living at home pursuing an essentially secular role but, as Jamison (2019: 19) has pointed out, ‘a man with a religious life equivalent to that of a wandering ascetic—but a religious life pursued and fulfilled within the context of a sedentary family existence’.
World renouncers, on the other hand, vary widely, from Brahmanical pravrajitas, to Buddhist bhikṣus, to Jain munis, to sadhus of various Hindu sects. The specific relationships between people living in society and these religious people differed widely, depending on the kind of householder and the kind of renouncer we are dealing with.
So, how do we come to terms with Dumont’s groundbreaking study? Major visionaries, scholars who have made paradigmatic changes—we can think of Sigmund Freud in psychology, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber in sociology, Albert Einstein in physics—advanced human knowledge even when in some areas their views have been shown to be inadequate or wrong. Often, their mistakes were revealed in the very advances of the respective fields that they pioneered. I think Louis Dumont falls into this category.
I take one significant insight of Dumont as one of these lasting contributions to the field, even though we may disagree with the way the statement is worded: ‘the secret of Hinduism may be found in the dialogue between the renouncer and the man-in-the-world’ (Dumont 1960: 37–38). I am not sure if this dialogue provides a key to ‘the secret of Hinduism’, or even if such a secret exists. Nevertheless, the historical development of religion in India, whether it is Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism or any other sect and tradition, was greatly impacted by the presence of two distinct and contrasting kinds of religiosity—that of people living at home and in society with their innumerable connections and relationships and that of people who have left home and cut themselves off from familial and social relationships and obligations, although most of them did form new kinds of relationships with their fellow monks and ascetics and with those continuing to live at home. Sometimes, the proponents of one kind of religiosity would dismiss the other as irrelevant or harmful. Sometimes, a modus vivendi would be established, where space is found for both kinds of religiosity. Even though Dumont seems at times to depict what he calls a ‘dialogue’ as a one-way street, the original and innovative elements flowing from the renouncer to the man-in-the-world, in reality, I think, made the situation more complex and dynamic. It would be a mistake to think that the householders were simply passive recipients who, at most, systematised the renouncers’ thoughts, as Dumont claims. Even in the realm of religion, with which Dumont was most concerned, this is inaccurate. However, when we go beyond the narrowly religious to the broader area of knowledge, culture and scholarship, it is clearly false.
Innovations in poetry by Kalidasa, in plastic surgery by Sushruta, in aesthetic theory by Bharata, Dandin and Abhinavagupta, in astronomy by Aryabhatta, in linguistics and grammar by Panini and the list can go on; these were all carried out by men—yes, they were primarily men—living full lives within society. So, the dialogue between the renouncer and the man-in-the-world that Dumont points to must be re-imagined as a true dialogue, a two-way street.
It is good to end this article in a note of optimism by citing Dumont’s own view on the interplay between the particular and the general: Theory must be based on facts. He says, ‘It is by humbly inspecting the most minute particulars that the route to the universal is kept open. The more ambitious the outlook, the more meticulous the details must be and the humbler the craftsman’ (cited in Madan 1982a: 8). Humility is a virtue—an essential virtue—in scholarship, as in life. Dumont was right to point this out. And humility is doubly important when studying Hinduism, probably the most complex religion in the world, with one of the longest documented histories. The conversations, dialogues and conflicts among its various strands across geography and time provide at least one key, perhaps a central key, to understanding and explaining the civilisational religious traditions for which we have come to use the shorthand ‘Hinduism’.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.