BOOK REVIEWS
Caste and Ritual in a Rural Society
Gouranga Chattopadhyay
Caste and Ritual in a Malwa Village by K S Mathur; Asia Publishing House, Bombay; pp 215 Rs 26
HE book begins with an excellent foreword by S. C. Dube
who quickly surveys various aspects
of caste as highlighted by anthropologists.
He concludes by showing
the importance of studying the force
of ritual factor of the system in
contemporary India, which is the
subject of the book under review.
The author has studied a village in
Malwa in details where he focuses
on the social structure and goes into the details of the role of ritual
in one of the fundamental structures, namely, the caste.
T
The book is divided into four parts,
which are again subdivided
into
nine chapters; a section containing
detailed notes, a bibliography and,
finally, the index completes the
book.
It is a pity that Mathur begins his
introductory chapter with the statement "The former (i.e. Brahmoism
— reviewer) is a Hindu version of
Christianity" (p 2).
The role of
Brahmo religion in shaping the
thought of Bengal in the nineteenth
century should be a subject worthy
of study by anthropologists and social historians. Yet it is dismissed
in a single, and to me meaningless,
sentence.
Obviously there is no
place for a discussion of Brahmoism
ih this book, but that does not mean
that loose reference can be made
about it. Again, on p 3 the author
states that the regional sub-patterns
of social structure are both influenced by and themselves influence
the national pattern. But he does
not attempt to justify this in his
book later on. While generally it
is accepted that local sub-patterns
have a good deal to do with the
Hindu Society at large, I feel that
this acceptance is still in terms of
a very prfobable hypothesis which
needs to be tested many times before it can be taken as a thesis.
From this point of view, one wishes
that Mathur had been less emphatic
in his statement.
On p 7 of the
same chapter the author, while discussing his criteria for selection
states that he chose a village in the
heart of Malwa, away from urban
areas, because proximity to urban
centres shifts the values from an
emphasis on ritual tradition to
wealth, political power and education. Anthropologists have noted in
both tribal and Hindu-Muslim villages in various parts of middle and
cast India the shifts in the values
inspite of their comparative isolation and distance from urban centres. If such shifts have not taken
place in Potlod. then it is unique
to that extent, and perhaps it is
attributable to what the author calls
"local sub-pattern". From this point
of view too it was necessary to
spend some time on this theme.
Economic, Not Ritual, Reasons
The second chapter is devoted to a
description of Malwa region, its climate, soils and an historical account that begins, for some peculiar reason, from the period of the
epic Mahabharata, and rapidly covers century after century to end
on November 1st. 1956.
We also
get some information about the village after that. But unfortunately,
considering the subject matter of the
book, too little information is given
about the temples, shrines and ritual positions of the castes. As a
matter of fact, Table 1 highlights the
obvious numerical strength of various castes and keeps silent regarding
their ritual hierarchy except to
point out which of the castes are
"clean", which are "unclean" and,
finally, which are "untouchables".
There is, quite unnecessarily, a reference to Ambedkar and Ghuriye
in this connection and Mathur rejects Ambedkar's theory regarding
the reason why untouchable castes
are made to live outside the village
boundary "on the basis of intensive
enquiries among the people of Potlod village" (p 188-189). The village map given on p 38 certainly
shows that the untouchables' houses
are situated at the edge of the village, but I am not sure whether this
is synonymous with being situated
outside the village boundary, as is
the case with villages in south India.
Unfortunately this map is not to
scale, but at a rough guess, some of
the Kalis and Malis live within two
hundred yards of untouchables'
houses. Again, if untouchables have
to stay away, what about the Muslims? In Potod their houses brush
shoulders with those of Rajputs and
Malis. It may be that the spatial
distribution of caste and religious
groups in Potlod has more to do
with economic reasons than ritual.
I wish the author had given us
some details about drainage, the
slope of the mound on which it is
situated, the distance and nature of
the river on its south and west
which dries up in summer and so
on. Then at least the readers may
be able to understand the habitation pattern instead of being left to
make guesses.
Chapter I I I tells us about kin groups
and the village community.
Here
we get to know of such new terms
as "household families", which may
also be termed as "households" or
"domestic families", locally known
as ghar or kutumb. While discussing these households, Mathur tells
us that there is one household having seventeen persons. This should
make the total number of households
213 (see Table 2) instead of 212.
Also Table 2 gives the number of
Muslims as 20, while in Chapter If
(p 26) we had been told that there
are 23 Muslims in Potlod. No doubt
these are minor mistakes, but an
abundance of even such minor mistakes right at the beginning leaves
two options for the reader. Either
he has to meticulously cross check
whatever data he comes across, or
he may quickly glance through the
book without seriously reading it,
as he cannot depend on the information he may glean if he reads it
without referring to pages back and
f o r t h - - a n unusual and time-consuming way of trying to gain knowledge.
Later on in this chapter
there are some intriguing absences
of details. For example, a sonless
man gets a gharjamai, i.e.. marries
his daughter to a man who takes
up residence with his wife's family
of origin. When they have a son,
he is adopted by his mother's father.
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August 20, 1966
Thus he js automatically raised to
the same generation as his parents.
One is left wondering how society
adapts itself to this situation, for
surely quite a few families in Malwa will have only daughters, and
out of a number of
daughters'
children one is put one generation
above his siblings and
cousins.
Again there is no mention of the
Gharjamai's rights over property,
either over his wife's father's or
over his own father's. As a matter
of fact chapter I I I is full of such
loose ends. Such terms as grandparents, spouses, etc., leave to the
imagination of the reader the actual relationships, i.e., whether father's parents or mother's parents,
whether husband or wife.
Again
whether a natra caste is one which
allows remarriage or there is any
other characteristic going with it is
not mentioned.
To give a third
example, the difference between a
second marriage and secondary marriage is not clear, and to top it all
on pages 52 and 53 a paramour and
a second husband seem to have been
held as same. Perhaps this is due
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ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL WEEKLY
to the projection of the author's own
values into the society he has chosen
to study.
His statements made in
the Introduction (pp 10-11) seem to
justify such a conclusion. It is unfortunate.
In chapter four, after several pages
of rather unnecessary general discussion about varna and jati we at
last come to the castes in Potlod.
There is a brief but interesting mention of the Rajput values which arc
opposed to Sanskritic values, while
the Rajputs rank next to the Brahmins in ritual hierarchy.
But unfortunately this interesting paradox
is not taken up in any of the later
chapters, although one expects it to
loom large in a book that deals with
caste and ritual.
Chapters five to nine contain a
wealth of data, though the analysis
is rather disappointing.
As little
attempt has been made to summarise the discussions and present the
conclusions for the benefit of the
casually interested reader, the book
makes difficult reading for anthropologists who a re not specifically in-
terested in Central India.
The
trouble with the book is that on
the one hand there is quite an elaborate treatment of the Sanskritic
model of varna and caste relations
in India, and on the other a good
deal of material on caste practices
in Potlod in terms of rituals. But
there remains a big gap between
the all-India model and Mathur's
empirical data.
No systematic attempt has been made to relate the
two. Neither do we really get any
insight into the inter-caste relations
in terms of rituals in Potlod.
Extensive notes, the bibliography
and the index are praiseworthy and
the photographs are good. Perhaps
it would have been well to use the
word " g i r l " instead of "belle" in
the caption under the picture facing
p 96; the existing caption makes it
a bit precocious.
The book will be useful to students
of Indian rural society as well as
to those who like to get initiated in
Indian anthropology without wishing to spend time in poring over old
census reports and scriptures.