The Sociology of Hinduism: Reading 'Backwards' from Srinivas to Weber

The Sociology of Hinduism: Reading ‘Backwards’ from Srinivas to Weber T.N. Madan Do not stay in the field! Nor climb out of sight. The best view of the world Is from a medium height. - Nietzsche: The Gay Science M.N. Srinivas: Some Reminiscences May I begin with a few reminiscences by way of a personal tribute to Professor M.N. Srinivas (1916-1999)? I first saw and heard him half a century ago, late in 1954. He was then professor of sociology at the M.S. University of Baroda, and had come to Lucknow, where his reputation as the acclaimed author of Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952) had preceded him. He had come, it was said, to consider the possibility of becoming the director of UP government’s newly estab- lished institute of rural analysis. Professor D.N. Majumdar invited him to speak in the Department of Anthropology at the University. An inter- departmental group of teachers and students had gathered to hear him, as had been announced, talk on fieldwork. Srinivas made a strong plea for empiricism in the social sciences and for the method of ‘participant observation’ in anthropological research. Successful fieldwork, he maintained, required total commitment, even the holding in abeyance of family and personal obligations. Incidentally, Srinivas, who was 38, was still a bachelor. All this was of course music to the ears of Majumdar, who was himself an indefatigable and exem- plary fieldworker. The discussion that followed produced some excitement when A.K. Saran, a sociology lecturer respected for his scholarship, accused Srinivas of being a positivist and cavalier to deductive reasoning as a mode of knowing in social research. While the evidence of the senses may not be ignored, he argued, it necessarily is limited. Observation could at best reveal patterns of behaviour; it would not unveil their significance.1 It SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN, 55 (2), May-August 2006, Pp. 215-236 216 T.N. Madan was clear from Srinivas’s terse response that he considered Saran’s objections an exercise in obfuscation. If empiricists might have been compared to polytheists and deductivists to monotheists, we were the audience at an inconclusive theological debate: neither Srinivas nor Saran yielded any ground! The incident was remembered on the campus for quite some time. And Srinivas, with his pipe and beret and formal style, left behind him the image of a soft-spoken and rather reserved professor. A few months later Srinivas was again in Lucknow as an examiner at the University. Also there at the same time were the avuncular A. Aiyappan from the Government Museum of Madras and the debonair S.C. Dube of Osmania University. Dube’s Indian Village (1955) had just arrived in the bookstores. Although the Aiyappan – Majumdar generation was still in command, Srinivas and Dube were in our eyes the new exemplars pointing to new ways of doing anthropology and sociology. Now, Srinivas wanted to buy a pillow for his return train journey to Baroda (his servant had forgotten to pack one in his bedroll), and Majumdar asked me to be his shopping escort. This then was my opportunity. Hopeful that he may have seen my enthusiastic review of his Coorg book in The Eastern Anthropologist, but apprehensive that he may have found it insignificant, I waited for him to say something about it; he didn’t! But he listened to me attentively when I talked to him about my plans for doctoral research involving fieldwork among my own people, the Kashmiri Pandits, and was quite supportive. Later that year, 1955, I wrote him asking if he would write a letter of recommendation supporting my application for the award of a research scholarship at the Australian National University. I enclosed a copy of the review of McKim Marriott’s Village India (1955) that I had written and solicited his advice. To my very pleasant surprise, he responded soon, agreeing to write the letter of recommendation, and also commented on my review at considerable length. From then on, I remained in continuous contact with Srinivas until the very end. In 1959, he was one of the examiners of my PhD disser- tation. I visited him in his office at the Delhi School of Economics, where he had moved recently, for my viva voce examination, which he conducted with solicitude and meticulous care, writing down my answers to the queries of the other two examiners in London and Sydney respectively. His own questions were more in the nature of advice for revision for publication. And he asked me to come home for dinner. I knew I had made it! Six years later, he strongly supported my move from Karnatak University to the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi. As the years The Sociology of Hinduism 217 passed by, I came to respect Srinivas deeply for his seriousness as a scholar and for his unfailing courtesy, charm and wit as a human being. I am sure some people in this audience still remember his gifts as a raconteur. His stories about such diverse topics as the zest for life of Punjabi immigrants in England and the eccentricities of Professor G.S. Ghurye are fresh in my memory! In 1999, the last year of his life, I met Srinivas twice. He invited me to speak on religious fundamentalism at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bangalore, where he held the J.R.D. Tata Visiting Chair. Soon afterwards, he came to Delhi to give the inaugural silver jubilee lecture of the Delhi School of Economics. He told me of his plans to organise an international conference on religion and society at NIAS the following year with the focus on the imperative need to avoid confusion between religion as such and the political abuse of religion. There was a dangerous slippage, he said, from the legitimate disapproval of religious fanaticism to an uncritically negative attitude towards religious faith. He wanted me to participate in the conference. Alas, he died before the year was out. The quiet manner of his going was characteristic of Srinivas’s style of life. When Director Roddam Narasimha invited me to deliver the first M.N. Srinivas Memorial Lecture at NIAS in January 2001, I spoke on the persistence of religion in the modern world in fulfilment of the promise, as it were, I had given Srinivas to participate in his conference (Madan 2001). And now, when the Indian Sociological Society has honoured me by naming me as this year’s M.N. Srinivas Memorial Lecturer, I have decided, once again, to engage with the theme of the relationship of religion and society, this time in the specific context of the sociology of Hinduism. I will highlight some of Srinivas’s own seminal contributions and then move backwards, as it were, to revisit the classic study of Hinduism by Max Weber (1864-1920). A comparison of the two approaches is, I am convinced, worthwhile both for its methodo- logical interest and substantive results. I can only touch upon a few points; a fuller discussion is precluded by lack of time. Is a Sociology of Hinduism Possible? To begin, I would like to briefly address two objections to the project of a sociology of Hinduism. Hinduism, it is said, is not a religion, for it does not have a founder, or a single foundational scripture, or a set of fundamentals of belief and practice. A notion of the supernatural is not central to it, and the idea of moral law that may be considered a substitute is highly relativistic. These and other similar doubts have been 218 T.N. Madan around for a long time. Srinivas himself acknowledged them, and wrote about the ‘amorphousness’ and ‘complexity’ of Hinduism and the diffi- culty of defining it (1952, 1958; Srinivas and Shah 1968). All this did not, however, deter him from writing about it. Weber considered reverence for the Vedas and belief in the sacred- ness of the cow defining features of Hinduism (1958: 27), but he too noted the virtual lack of dogma in Hinduism (ibid.: 21) and the fact that the term itself was a recent western coinage (ibid.: 4). He observed: ‘Hinduism ‘simply is not a “religion” in our [Christian?] sense of the word. What the Occidental conceives as “religion” is closer to the Hindu concept of sampradaya’ (ibid.: 23). He paid no further attention to the issue. Whether Hinduism is a religion or not, and whether religion itself is a meaningful cross-cultural category, it would be pointless to deny that Hinduism is a cultural tradition and thus a legitimate subject for study. But some historians have objected that Hinduism is not an old tradition, that it is only a nineteenth century fabrication of Christian missionaries, Orientalists, builders of the colonial archive, and would-be makers of an Indian nationalism. ‘What has survived over the centuries’, Romila Thapar writes, ‘is not a single monolithic religion but a diversity of sects which we today have put under a uniform name’ (1997: 56). This is, I am afraid, questionable. There are other historians who have documented the continuities as well as the discontinuities between the early religion of the Vedas and the later religion of the Smritis, Shastras, Puranas and the Epics. They have also drawn attention to the ‘family resemblance’ among the regional traditions of myth and ritual to come to the conclusion that, whatever may have been the earlier connotations of the Persian-Arabic term ‘Hindu’, by the medieval times it certainly identified most of the known peoples of India by their religious beliefs and practices (see, for example, Lorenzen 1999 and Michaels 2005).

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