Non-Renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture

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This book is an attempt to draw the reader's attention away from the ideas of caste and renunciation which dominate academic literature on India, focusing instead on the householder's life in Hindu society. Beginning with an analysis of the ideology of the householder among Kashmiri Pandits, the author deals with asceticism, eroticism, altruism, and death as elaborations of the main theme. The epilogue draws attention to the predicament of the modem Hindu in the face of changing conceptions of the good life.

This book constitutes a reading of Hindu tradition as a rich and sensible philosophy of life in this world. Drawing upon new theoretical and methodological perspectives, the author offers fresh insights into Hindu culture and society and the making of moral choices within this tradition. Based on the author's fieldwork and on a wide range of literary sources, this book will be of interest not only to the specialist but also to the general reader.

T.N. Madan is Honorary Professor (Sociology) at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, and Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. An elected Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, he is Docteur Honoris Causa of the University of Paris (nanterre), and a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Indian Sociological Society (2008).

The essays comprising this book were written over a number of years. In preparing the book, the essays, all but one of which had been published already, were subjected to different degrees of revision and rewriting. I did not eliminate entirely the overlapping of the chapters. While this resulted in some looseness of the structure, it also preserved the possibility of the book being read piecemeal, a chapter at a time. I should like to add, however that what is offered here is a book with a unifying theme, namely, the ideal of the life of the householder as the good life. My interpretations of the various sub-themes will become clear to the reader only if the book is read in the sequence in which the chapters and the argument are laid out.

I have written about the theme and the sub-themes and my interpretations of them at some length in the Introduction I will not therefore write about them here. There are two points, however, which I should clarify.

First, the word 'Hindu' in the subtitle. Strictly speaking this book is about the Brahmanical tradition, but it does not deny the existence of non-Brahmanical traditions in Hindu society. To the extent that each of these traditions is Hindu as well as Brahmanical or Shudra, or even non-sectarian, it may be legitimately seen as illuminating the complex multi-vocal Hindu tradition. To say that the Brahmanical element by itself does not constitute the Hindu tradition is true; but to assert that it has not been of critical importance in the making of this tradition would be obviously false.

Secondly, I would like to point out that the titles of the different chapters are not intended to signify simple-minded binary oppositions: they rather stress the fact that the idea of the 'whole' in Hindu culture is a transcendental concept which encompasses contraries but belongs to a higher level than them. There is a sense in which the contraries are complementary.

Much has been written about the salience of sannyasa, or renunciation, in Hindu culture. The theme of this book, however, is non-renunciation as a value. And it is a book of interpretations.

Hindu society is best known by caste, its most characteristic institution, and by renunciation, perhaps its best-known cultural ideal. The interpretation offered in this book is that, although renunciation is undoubtedly a remarkable value orientation which permeates the world-view of even the worldly householder, it does not bestow its distinctive character upon the everyday life of Hindus. Caste and renunciation are in fact antitherical though complementary': while the former, based on a logic of difference and solidarity, provides a broad social framework for individual and group action in a world of social relations, the latter is its repudiation as both value and empirical condition. What is in consonance with caste is domesticity with its values of auspiciousness, purity and moral equipoise.