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

by J.C. Heesterman

Tradition is characterized by the inner conflict of atemporal order and temporal shift rather by resilience and adaptiveness. It is this unresolved conflict that provides the motive force we perceive as the flexibility of tradition. Indian civilization offers a particularly clear case of this dynamic inner conflict. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in the Vedic ritual texts and their curiously contradictory place in Indian civilization, at once hallowed and neglected, like the king who is honored by all and obeyed by none. They are the scriptural repository of the revealed sruti and as such purport to be the core and foundation of the dharma. Most of the following essays are therefore concerned specifically with the srauta corpus or refer to it.

Genres: India

255 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1985

Reviews

[Richard]

Fat bunch of learning in this here book. Old school.

[Elzira Rai]

Two reservations temper my appreciation of this otherwise brilliant collection of essays. First, Heesterman's conjectures regarding the transition from an agonistic ritual model grounded in interdependence and reciprocity to an individualized yajamāna system are as erudite as they are unconvincing, resting on thin evidence and precarious assumptions about largely unintelligible materials. Second, these essays devote excessive attention to Dumont and the role of renunciation in Indian thought, with the effect (if not the explicit intent) of downplaying kingly power and authority. Much of Heesterman's analysis is structured around a reformulation of Dumont's theory of encompassment (and even anticipates something akin to a theory of "substantialization"), accepting the premise that Brahminical authority derives its legitimacy from a sphere beyond society — a framework that reproduces, rather than interrogates, the ideological self-representation of Brahminical tradition. Heesterman’s insightful forays into early modern and modern history could have provided ample material for testing such self-representations against historical realities beyond Brahminical literature, but these possibilities remain largely unexplored. The irony is thus hard to miss: a scholar who devoted his life to exploring the inner contradictions of Brahminical tradition proves reluctant, perhaps as a corollary of the premise that this tradition lies beyond society, to explore the contradictions between such self-representations and the weight of historical materials.