Brahmanic Ritual Traditions In the Crucible of Time (An Old and Rare Book)

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Two major traditions, Brahmanic and Buddhist, brought India on the roster of world's civilizations. Of these, the latter, though culturally contrastive and autonomous, is the off-shoot of the former. The brahmanic tradition is the basic root stock from which have grown a large number of coherent and self-consistent cultures; it is characterized by such elements as are enough to merit the name of a full-grown civilization.

Major civilizations of the world are supranational and multilingual. They are characterized by large population, wide geographical dispersal, aggressive or expansive political organization, scholastic philosophy, monasticism, super-language, literature rooted in mythology, florescences in science and technology, excellence in fine arts, and general continuity with the past in respect of all these details. It is fairly known through the works of the historians of culture and Indologists that these elements of a major civilization are well-grounded in the classical brahmanic tradition. But what is not adequately known is the process by which these elements are culturally patterned and extended both in time and in space. And it is this, rather than mere cataloguing of elements, which the anthropologists of civilizations greatly value.

The process of cultural patterning and the modes of trans-mission of tradition may be studied both at the levels of material culture and social organization. The study of materiai culture is relatively simple, for in it one handles tangible data easily available and verifiable in time profile. The complex organization of ideas, systems, and values cannot be studied with that ease and accuracy. Anthropologists have acquired some competence in dealing with non-literate societies where the absence of historical records, as also the relative isolation and the manageable size of the population make their task simpler. What they obtain in these studies is called the microscopic view of the society. But the same method cannot be fruitfully employed on a large literate society preserving long and continuous textual tradition. The complexity of a literate society grows on account of its wide network of relationship with similar or common cultures, and a continuous development in its creative genius, systems and values. The microscopic method is exceedingly helpful in analyzing short-run-changes, though practically inoperative in the study of a large complex society, usually called civilization. In extending anthropology to the history of living civilization what is required is to develop a method which can provide both microscopic and macroscopic views of culture and society.

For the last few decades, anthropologists have been trying to understand Indian society and civilization. Most of them have employed contextual microscopic method, and have presented either a seemingly static model or a progressively changing profile of the contemporary Indian society. Historians of culture, on the other hand, seem to be too dependent on written records and quite unaware of the happenings in the contemporary society, as if their task ended where the anthropologists began. This attitude towards the compartmentalization of knowledge has deprived us of the true perspective and of a deeper understanding of our own society which is indeed one of the oldest literate societies of the world. Many of the methodological problems confronting complex societies could have been solved only if the anthropologists had striven to develop a less-developed, old-fashioned, but a most useful method of study the macroscopic natural history approach. The present author enters in an adventure of this kind and hopes to identify the processes of cultural patterning in brahmanic ritual traditions.

Every culture tends to be coherent, self-consistent and distinctive. To be so it draws up certain codes, customs, and values which may effectively uniformize social behaviour, harmonize heterodox elements, and help maintain internal consistency.

This is one of the several projected volumes in the Studies in Indian and Asian Civilizations series which the Indian Institute of Advanced Study has undertaken to bring out at planned intervals. I am honoured to record my gratitude to Professor V.K. Gokak, then Director of the IIAS, who provided me an opportunity to contribute to this series, and to Professor S.C. Dube, Director of the Institute, without whose overflowing affection, intellectual stimulation and compelling motive this work would have been far from finished. I had also the rare good fortune of having a colleague like Dr. S.C. Malik, Coordinator of the Source Book Scheme, who was consistently helpful in many ways.

I greatly value the informal dialogues with my learned friends Dr. S.N. Shukla, Dr. L.P. Pande, Sri S.P. Mittal and Pandit Ramchandra Jha. Professor Leela Dube has gone through the last three chapters of the book and has given me the impression of a mind of unique resources. To them I owe more than conventional thanks. I owe a special debt to the Jagadguru Sri Shankaracharya of Sringeri Matha who very kindly enriched me with traditional insights-it was water from a living spring, not from a faucet.

Among the people whose help I want especially to acknowledge are Dr. Shiva Ram Maurya, Miss Kusum Kalekar, and Sri Narsingh Shukla for assistance in the collection of data; Sri Sant Lal Arora for computing the data; Sri S.C. Shankaran, Dr. A.A. Kayande and Dr. K.N. Sharma for providing the invaluable photographs illustrated with this book; Sri O.P. Nagpal for typing the manuscript; and Sri N.K. Maini, the enthusiastic publication assistant of the Institute, for carefully seeing the book through the press.

Fieldwork is a highly emotional as well as a scientific experience. This work would never have been accomplished without the willing cooperation of the informants-the Karma-kandis, the textual scholars; the temple priests, and the non-literate specialists. My fieldwork in Kerala was made possible by my friend Dr. P.R.G. Mathur who is himself a commit-ted field scientist. Mrs. Rajalakshmi Mishra, Dr. P.K. Mishra, Dr. Uma Charan Jha, Pandit Ramchandra Rajhansa Sharma, and Sri Bireshwar Jha introduced me to several learned informants in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, and Mithila, respectively.

Most informants only vaguely understand the aims and methods of the researcher. But I must record with a deep sense of gratitude that my informants have been extremely generous to me with their time, hospitality and the wealth of ideas. For them true payment of debt will only be to publish the results of their aid. I hope the young couples whose wedding rites have been illustrated with this book will endure me for having permanently recorded my gratitude to them.

I owe a debt to my esteemed friends Sri T.R. Kapur and his wife Smt. Savitri Kapur, Professor Savitri Kaushik, and Meena for their celebrated hospitality and warmest affection which they bestowed on me most happily while I was doing the irksome job of proof-reading.

Last, but most lovingly, I thank my wife, Samo, who accompanied me to the field-enduring all the discomforts and making important contributions to the work-and who, more than twentyfive years ago, had made the real participant observation of marriage rites possible to her niskranta husband.