Discourse on tradition

TRADITION, PLURALISM AND IDENTITY (in honour of T. N. Madan): Veena Das, Dipankar Gupta, Patricia Uberoi - Editors; Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks (California) and London and Post Box No. 4215, Greater Kailash Market I, New Delhi-110048. Rs. 695.

NINETEEN DISTINGUISHED scholars come together in this volume to honour the outstanding contribution of the 67-year-old Professor Triloki Nath (`Loki') Madan to the development of sociology and social anthropology in South Asia. Prof. N. Madan's professional career in social anthropology covers the five decades since Indian Independence. Exposed to very different disciplinary orientations of distinguished teachers and pioneers of sociological and anthropological studies in India such as Radhakamal Mukerjee, D. N. Majumdar, A. Aiyappan, S. C. Dube, Louie Dumont, Irawati Karve and M. N. Srinivas, his doctorate dissertation, Family and kinship among the Pandits of Rural Kashmir published subsequently, was the first comprehensive study of the dynamics of the North Indian household, which sought to expand the scope of anthropology to encompass the study of ``one's own'' society.

In due course, he has expanded the scope of his research to cover new areas such as modern occupations and professions, medical practice, comparative Asian development, ethnicity and nation- building, and religion. Modern Myths, Locked Minds by Prof. Madan was awarded the Hem Ram Chaturvedi Memorial Award for the best published work on the relationship of religion and society in India - among the themes that are studied in this work are the sociological interpretation of communalism and religious fundamentalism and the de-construction of the idea of Indian secularism. The Indian Council of Social Science Research has awarded him its highest honour - a National Fellowship.

This volume of essays, the eighth in the ``Contributions to Indian Sociology - Occasional Studies Series'', carries forward the discussion on themes ``that are critical to the project of the sociology of India''.

In her elegantly written introductory essay, ``Tradition, Pluralism, Identity: Framing the Issues'', Veena Das has put searching questions as: ``Is pluralism something external to tradition or something internal to it? When aligned with the notion of modernity, do we think of tradition as standing in an antagonistic relation to modernity, refusing mutual translatability or do we emphasise circulations within a tradition - between generations, different sexual geographies and different ways of evolving strategies of survival'' and answers: ``I take these three concepts to suggest that human imagination conceives of culture in the plural - i.e. the possibility of exile, of there being an elsewhere, is what makes traditions possible.''

Diana L. Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University, asks whether Benares is the sacred city of Hindus, as Mecca is to Muslims, the centre, the hub, toward which the faithful turn and after closer study, concludes that ``it is not the centre, but one of multiple centres in a polycentric landscape, linked with the tracks of pilgrimage.''

``It is essential to investigate'' (declares Diana) ``the many mythic and ritual strategies for the construction of India's intricately-storied sacred geography..... ``and implicitly asks, ``whether the lifting up of single `tirthas' within this landscape for unique, singular treatment - as has been the case with the exclusivity of attention to the Ram Janmabhumi in Ayodhya, the Kashi Vishvanath temple in Varanasi or the Krishna Janmasthan in Mathura - does not run wholly against the grain of a cumulative tradition in which plurality, not exclusivity, is the matter of significance.''

Patric Olivelle of the University of Texas at Austin, writing about caste and purity observes how the rules and practices relating to impurity in the Dharma texts constitute ``a ritual apparatus rather than a social ideology.'' Frederique Apffel- Marglin, who has been collaborating with several Andean grassroots organisations in Peru and Bolivia, argues in her thought-provoking piece on ``Secularism, Unicity and Diversity'' that unicity is lethal to diversity and that secular nation- states have everywhere adopted science as both a strengthening and legitimising tool, thus endangering diversity.

According to her, newly emergent religious fundamentalisms negatively mirror the unicity of the secular nation-state, whereas much of local practice retains its diversity-generating ways of life. She illustrates it with the example of an important Pir shrine in Orissa which is worth quoting in her own words: ``The shrine is that of Bokhari Baba in Kaipadar, a village near the city of Khurda - it is the most important Muslim shrine in the region. During its most important festival, according to the Khadim on duty when I visited in 1994, 75 per cent of devotees are Hindus. One of the most remarkable features of this shrine is that the flower garland providers as well as the providers of sweets for the daily offerings are Hindus. The Hindu families of garland- makers and sweet-makers are still in possession of the land given by King Ramachandra Deva (of the 18th Century) and continue to discharge their duties at the shrine. What this king institutionalised, namely the worship by two different religious communities at the same shrine, was simply unthinkable in Europe. The most that Henri IV achieved with the Edit de Nantes was to allow the discreet performance of the cult of the minority religion and that did not last very long. Joint worship by two different religions has been inconceivable in European history.''

Arthur Kleinman of the Harward University and Don Seeman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have together contributed on ``the politics of moral practice in psychotherapy and religious healing.''

``The Diaspora comes home: Disciplining desire in DDLJ'' by Patricia Uberoi, Editor of ``Contributions to Indian Sociology'' presents an insightful analysis of two exceedingly popular commercial Hindi films of the mid-1990s: ``Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ)'' and ``Pardes'' - both love stories, involving Indians settled abroad - marking out Indian popular cinema as an important site for engagement with the problems resulting from middle-class diaspora, and for articulation of Indian identity in a globalised world.

Ravindra K. Jain, R. S. Khare, Lionel Caplan, Harold A. Gould, Ashish Nandy, Dennis B. McGilvry, Stanley J. Tambiah, Lloyd I. Rudolph, Paul R. Brass, Lawrence A. Babb, Dipankar Gupta, and McKim Marrioh (of the Chicago University) are the other eminent contributors of this volume on topics as varied as ``Globalisation and multinationalism'', ``Profiling the Mughal Empire'', ``Sacrifice and the social identity of trading communities'', ``Caste and Politics: the presumption of numbers'', ``Gifting and receiving'', ``Sri Lankan Muslim ethnicity in regional perspective'', ``The Babri Masjid and the secular contact'' and other essays on aspects of secularism in this volume making it a treasure house of vital information and intelligent inferences for students and researchers of sociology in South Asia and elsewhere.

The papers in this volume, as Veena Das has pointed out, have taken the discourse on tradition in many unexpected and new directions. This volume in honour of Prof. T. N. Madan is in itself a measure of the esteem in which that doyen of Indian sociologists is held by his colleagues and admirers across the globe.

K. VEDAMURTHY

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