other forms of social organization. Of these perhaps the most striking is the insti-
tution of untouchability whereby members of certain castes are so excluded that
they appear on occasion to be beyond the pale of normal society. One very
common, and perfectly acceptable, way to approach caste is thus by explaining
untouchability.^2
Crudely, though not inaccurately, there are two main explanations for
untouchability, both of which present Untouchables as the “opposites” of
Bra ̄hman.as (spelled in various ways). Both of these approaches envisage caste
organization as “hierarchical,” in the commonly accepted sense of this term: a
ladder-like system of statuses. In both approaches, Bra ̄hman.as are at the “top”
and Untouchables are at the “bottom.” According to one approach this is so
because Bra ̄hman.as are priests and priests are pure, while Untouchables are
polluted because they perform degrading tasks which deal with the inauspicious
facets of life and death. According to the other approach, the superiority of
Bra ̄hman.as is fundamentally based on landed wealth and the power which
derives from it, while the wretched condition of Untouchables results from the
fact that they are typically landless and dispossessed. According to this latter
theory, all talk of purity and pollution, whether by those who practice caste, or
those who analyze it, simply obscures the underlying economic and political
reality.
I will show shortly that neither of these theories is sustainable because the
underlying assumption of a stratified, ladder-like series of caste statuses does not
match certain crucial features of the known ethnography. Before elaborating on
this, however, it is necessary to consider the most celebrated and influential
(though also the most attacked) theorist of caste, Louis Dumont, who argues
against the idea of caste-as-stratification but then confuses the issue by appear-
ing to employ precisely this concept. Dumont (1980 [1966]) attempts to escape
from the notion of caste-as-stratification by introducing us to a second meaning
of “hierarchy,” that of the encompassment of the part by the whole, which
implies also the encompassment of something by its contrary. Thus, for example,
in traditional societies the individual is encompassed by society and in caste
society, argues Dumont, the pure encompasses the impure.
Dumont argues that Western theorists and those influenced by them tend to
see caste through modern, individualistic spectacles and to apply a set of judg-
ments which are not applicable in the “holistic” traditions of caste-organized
communities where the individual is subordinated to, encompassed by, the moral
claims of the collective. He is perfectly correct to state that caste ideology gives
primacy to the whole community and has no place for the modern Western
concept of individualism where people are free to make their own choices about
whom they associate with. In connection with this, everyone will agree with
Dumont that caste involves a “heavy” and pervasive use of ritual for structur-
ing social relations which in many other societies are structured by centralized
political and economic institutions.
In the Indian case, argues Dumont, this holism expresses itself with reference
to two ideological features: the opposition of the pure and the impure, and what
on the relationship between caste and hinduism 497