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Louis Dumont: Perspectives on the Study of Caste Systems

Dumont’s main areas of interest are social anthropology and Indology. He has written on wide range of subjects such as Hinduism, caste, kinship and social and political movements in India.

Dumont’s perspective on caste system was primarily concerned with the ideology of the caste system. His understanding of caste lays emphasis on attributes of caste that is why his approach is called attributional approach to the caste system.

1. For him caste is set of relationships of economic, political and kinship systems, sustained by certain values which are mostly religious in nature. Dumont says that caste is not a form of stratification but a special form of inequality whose essence has to be deciphered by the sociologists. Here he identifies hierarchy as the essential value underlying the caste system supported by Hinduism.
2. According to Dumont caste divides the whole Indian society into a larger number of hereditary groups distinguished from one another and connected together by three characteristics:
   • Separation on the basis of rules of the caste in matters of marriage and contact whether direct or indirect (food).
   • Interdependent of work or division of labor each group having in theory or by tradition, a profession from which their members can depart only within certain limits.
   • Gradation of status or hierarchy which ranks the groups as relatively superior or inferior to one another.
3. Dumont highlights the state of mind which is expressed by the emergence in various situations of castes. He calls caste system as a system of ideas and values which is a formal comprehensible rational system.
4. His analysis is based on a single principle-the opposition of pure and impure. This opposition underlies hierarchy which means superiority of the pure and inferiority of impure.
5. This principle also underlies separation which means pure and impure must be kept separate. According to Dumont the study of the caste system is useful for the knowledge of India and it is an important task of general sociology.
6. He focused on the need to understand the ideology of caste as reflected in the classical texts, historical examples etc. He advocated the use of an Indological and structuralist approach to the study of caste system and village social structure in India.
7. Dumont in his book Homo Hierarchicus has built up a model of Indian civilization based on non-competitive ritual hierarchical system.
8. Louis Dumont was primarily concerned with the ideology of the caste system. His understanding of caste lays emphasis on attributes of caste that is why; he is put in the category of those following the attributional approach to the caste system. Dumont identifies ‘hierarchy’s is the essential value underlying the caste system, supported by Hinduism.

In Dumont views:

1. India is composed of many small territories and castes;
2. Every caste is limited to particular and definite geographic area; and
3. Marrying outside one’s own caste is not possible in the caste system.

Dumont’s Concept of Pure and Impure:

While considering the concept of pure and impure, Dumont had two questions in mind: Why is this distinction applied to hereditary groups? And, if it accounts for the contrast between Brahmins and untouchables, can it account equally for the division of society into a large number of groups, themselves sometimes extremely sub divided? He did not answer these questions directly. But, the opposite has always been two extreme categories, i.e.. Brahmin and untouchables.

1. The Brahmins assigned with the priestly functions, occupied the top rank in the social hierarchy and were considered ‘pure’ as compared to other castes.
2. The untouchables, being ‘impure’, and segregated outside the village, were not allowed to draw water from the same wells from which the Brahmins did so.
3. Besides this, they did not have any access to Hindu temples, and suffered from various other disabilities.
4. Dumont said that this situation was somewhat changed since the Gandhian agitation and when India attained independence. Untouchability was considered illegal; Gandhi renamed untouchables as ‘Harijan’s or ‘Sons of Hari’, that is, creatures of God Untouchables are specialized in ‘impure’ tasks, which lead to the attribution of a massive and permanent impurity to some categories of people. Dumont highlights temporary and permanent impurity.
5. In larger areas of the world, death, birth and other such seclusion of the affected persons, for instance, the newly delivered mother was actually excluded from the church for forty days at the end of which she would present herself carrying a lighted candle and would be met at the church porch by the priest.
6. In India, persons affected by this kind of event are treated as impure for a prescribed period and Indians themselves identify this impurity with that of the untouchables. In his work. The History of Dharmashastra, P.V. Kane writes that a man’s nearest relatives and his best friends become untouchable for him for a certain time as a result of these events.

For the body, the main thing is the morning attention to personal hygiene, culminating in the daily bath. Even, the objects are considered as pure and impure; silk is purer than cotton, gold than silver, than bronze, than copper. These objects are not simply polluted by the contact but by the use to which they are put and used by the person. Now-a-days, a new garment or vessel can be received from anybody. It is believed that a person’s own bed garments, wife, child and water pot are pure for his own self and family and for others they are impure.

This notion of purity and pollution is not an individual prescription, rather it is a cultural prescription.

Dumont feels one cannot speak of the castes without mentioning the varna, to which Hindus frequently attribute the castes themselves, India has the traditional hierarchy of varna, ‘colours’ or estates whereby four categories are distinguished:

1. The higher is or that of the Brahmins or priest, below them are the Kshatriyas or warriors, then the Vaishyas, in modern usage merchants, and finally, the Shudras, the servants or have-nots.
2. There is one more category, the untouchables, who are outside the classification system.
3. Dumont maintains that many of the Indologists confuse the Varna with caste, mainly because the classical literature is concerned almost entirely with the varnas.
4. Caste and Varna are to be understood with relationship of hierarchy and power.

In opinion of demont, ideological framework of Varna and the empirical reality of caste has not much difference he argues that Varna is all India phenomenon, known to all and emergence lies in cultural concept While caste is regional phenomenon, castes rise and fall because they are born not of occupation. Caste is concerned with access to power.

Therefore he argues for study of India from Varna point of view, not hat of caste. Varna has pan India character while caste is regional and has local origin. This dual structures evident in India.Varna forms it’s rigid and static part So he argues for this view point According to him if one study from caste view she/he will end up over glorifying change in society.

By his interpretation, caste was different from other forms of social stratification through the ‘disjunction’ of ritual status and secular ( political and economic) power within the same social system. The subordination of the political and economic criteria of social stratification to that of ritual status in Dumont’s model however, plays down the significance of social change in colonial and contemporary times. Did caste lose its political significance as late in the 18th and 19th centuries? As for what has happening at the 20th century, although Dumont explicitly recognized the emergence of inter-caste competitiveness in place of a structure of independence as a departure from tradition. He regarded this as behavioural change, rather than a radical transformation of the system as a whole, at the level of values or principles.

In the last, Dumont discusses the significant changes in the casts

1. He views that traditional interdependence of castes has been replaced by “a universe of impenetrable blocks, self-sufficient, essential and identical and in competition in one another.” Dumont calls this the ‘substantialization of castes’.
2. An inventory of sources of change in the caste system lists judicial and political changes, social religious reforms, westernization, and growth of modern professionals, urbanization, spatial mobility and the growth of market economy. But, despite all these factors making for change; the most ubiquitous and the general form, the change has taken in contemporary times is one of a ‘mixture’, or ‘combination’, of traditional and modern features.

Critical Analysis

1. Nevertheless Dumont’s magnum opus remains his Homo hierarchicus published in French in 1967 (1970 and 1972 for the English translations). It is an impressive synthetic work with a strong theoretical background in which the author presented his understanding of the Indian caste society as a whole. According to Dumont, people were ascribed an unequal status from birth and ranked from the Untouchables (who did not then call themselves Dalits) at the bottom to the Brahmins at the top according to the degree of purity attached to each caste collectively as well as to each individual.
2. Dumont wrote ‘Home equal’s for French readers to see and compare Indian society with their own society. He argues that Indian society is pessimistic in its nature while western society is optimistic. There is slavish orientation to Indian culture while European culture is liberal. Indian society is entangled by other worldly values while European society has embraced this worldly values. Therefore Indian society lacks innovation while European society progresses through innovation.
3. Hierarchy based on cultural notion exists in India as compared stratification based on interest in Europe. Therefore his comparison based on ‘Homo hierarchicus’ and homo equalis’ proposes euro centric view of Indian society.
4. After this publication, Dumont distanced himself from the sociology of India, feeling that he had achieved what he wanted to say on the caste system. He started a new field of research that dealt with the genesis of the modern individualism grounded on an egalitarian basis, which he contrasted with the inegalitarian caste system. It was the subject of his Homo aequalis (1977), followed by Essays on individualism (1983), and German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back (1991).
5. Dumont’s oeuvre has been discussed and debated by anthropologists in Europe as well as in India. His sociological interpretation of the caste system is both widely acclaimed and highly criticised Andre Beteille is ardent critic of Dumonts Eurocentric, cultural view of Indian society. In his opinion dumont talks about India from Brahmaric, culture specific hierarchical perspective. Where India producers hierarchy and Europe produces stratification. Rejecting this view Andre Beteille writes that “Ideology of equality and resistance to inequality is universal phenomenon’. In vase of Europe, Renaissance to J.S. Mill all were speaking about ideology of equality. While in case of India, from Buddha to Gandhi all were speaking the same. Further, He writes that “No society is absolutely open and no society is absolutely closed Openers and closeness are matter of degree than kind”. He questions Dumont on the basis that, caste persists in India despite legislation, reform movement In the same way role persists in Europe despite civil rights movement.
6. Therefore one can’t conclude that caste in India is hierarchicus and that in Europe is stratification. With respect to traditional values, he writes that in economically progressive Europe pope is appointed on the basis of conventional standards instead of Merit Therefore tradition is not replaced by modernity, both in Europe and India. So India cannot be considered as hierarchical as against egalitarian Europe. He rejects dumont’s argument of orthodox Indian writes if India is orthodox then it would have been be accepted Brahmanic supremacy. But movement, Buddhism, Jainism, Backward caste movement Dalit mobilization rejects the ideas of Brahmjanic Supremacy.
7. He concludes by saying that, in every society there present a dialectical news between idea of equality and pursuit of inequality. The most radical criticism emphasised that Dumont’s brilliant analysis of the caste system is taken from a dominant internal viewpoint, whether from its priests (Brahmins) or its princes (Kshatriya), which is well expressed in and legitimised by the classical Sanskrit texts that Dumont widely used From a sociological point of view, however, scholars need to question, first, the social conditions of the production of these representations that cannot be taken for granted and second their social usages.
8. The relations of power and domination that structure the Hindu caste system, which are partly denied from a textual viewpoint (and this, of course, cannot be ignored), have to be clearly recognised and analysed Furthermore, the comparative sociology that Dumont developed was quite often reduced to a binary opposition between individualism and holism, or to a radical confrontation between the equalitarian West and the hierarchical traditional pre-modern societies, like India, towards which the anthropologist publicly confessed to having a nostalgic inclination.
9. Nevertheless, the Indian part of his oeuvre stands for a rare coherent sociological enterprise that cannot be ignored or brushed away if one wants to understand the social making of contemporary India.

The End of the Blog: Louis Dumont: Perspectives on the Study of Caste Systems