Ritual, history and identity (original) (raw)

2021, Caste and Equality in India

Chapter 8 depicts and analyses the festival of the local goddess, Rāmacaṇḍī. I suggest that we can identify potential cultural resources in the ritual that provide the foundations of people’s moral–ethical agency for overcoming the postcolonial predicament. The ritual goes through three phases: (a) the arrival of the goddess’s power from the forest into the fort-village through the tribal medium, which manifests the value of ontological equality; (b) the union of the divine power with the royal authority mediated by the brāhmaṇa priest, which affirms the value of hierarchy; and (c) the consumption of the product of the union in the form of sacrificial meat, which represents the value of the centrality of power. I argue that this ritual can be seen as an enactment of the sacrificial drama of regeneration, where the three values and social configurations of ‘equality’, ‘hierarchy’ and ‘centrality’ unfold and interact to reproduce the community. The three phases of the ritual represent ‘revolving values’ which are legitimate, plural and multifaceted cultural resources utilised by the people to valorise their existence as well as their social practices. This chapter also analyses how the ritual form and the structure of patronage changed historically (‘ritual in history’) and how the ritual invokes historical memory in the form of myths, legends and family narratives (‘history in ritual’). The ritual can be said to be a representation of local history not in terms of linear transformation but of an accumulation of the past: tribals worshipping the goddess, the gradual migration of peasant-warriors and other caste members into the area, the chief challenging and being defeated by the medium/goddess, royal patronage of the goddess in the form of royal sacrifice, the introduction of the new rich as new patrons of the ritual during the colonial era etc. The entanglement of history and ritual enable the people to reflect upon their past and present. This has the effect of not only legitimising the status and power of the upper castes but also unsettling their hegemony by calling into question the prevailing practices. In the postcolonial situation, there is, on the one hand, the hegemonic attempt by the old and new elites to ritually assert the colonially constructed structure of status and power and, on the other hand, also the subaltern attempts to emphasise the importance of devotion and service, thus placing weight on ontological equality in the face of divine power. It is noteworthy that, in the ritual, there is an increasing number of people making offerings individually and approaching the medium/goddess directly on the hill outside the village. Also, the medium/goddess now enters every house, instead of a chosen few as in the past, to bless family members, particularly married women who cannot come out in public. These changes suggest that more emphasis is now placed on the devotion and service of individuals and direct ties and contact with the goddess. Here, we observe dilemma and contestation between the superalternate values of hierarchy and centrality and the subalternate value of ontological equality. In this way, the ritual not only leads to the reproduction of the structure of status and power, but also illustrates the potential of subaltern resistance against the hegemonic structure.