household, which is also the immediate family, may well be characterized as
being “restricted.”
Apart from having a structural or formal aspect, the household also has func-
tional and cultural aspects. Householders do many things together. Most notably
they produce and socialize children. They act as an economic group engaged in
productive and distributive activities, and marked by a division of labor on the
basis of (among other considerations) age and sex. They participate in domestic
rituals focused on particular household members (e.g. birth, marriage, and
death rites) or on other religious concerns (e.g. propitiation of supernatural
“beings”). They gossip, tell tales, sing and dance together. All these and other
related activities comprise a significant part of the way of life of the household-
ers – their culture. What they do not only fulfills certain practical needs, but also
bestows meaning and significance on their lives. The practical and the symbolic
aspects of the householders’ lives, their interests and values, are closely inter-
twined. They are a legacy that is ever being reaffirmed and reformulated.
This brings us to the second term, “tradition,” which is used here to denote
the established ways of living in a society, and their underlying principles and
values, accumulated over time. Traditions may be written or they may be oral.
All that is remembered may not, however, be currently alive, nor may it be dead,
for it may be revived and in the process reinvented. The householder tradition in
Hindu society today had its beginnings in the so-called vedic age about 3,000
years ago, and has inevitably undergone many significant changes. Given such
a length of time, what is remarkable is perhaps not the extent of change, but the
measure of continuity.
This continuity, however, is often questioned because the very idea of Hindu
society is said to be relatively recent. What, then, do we mean when we write of
Hindu society in this chapter? Existentially, Hindu society comprises all those
Indians who consider themselves Hindus and make public acknowledgment
of this identity, for example when the decennial census is taken. It accounts
for four-fifths of the population of India of nearly one billion. If the so-called
Scheduled Castes of officialese, or Dalits (the oppressed) of popular discourse,
formerly known as the “Untouchables,” are excluded – as some vocal Dalit
intellectuals demand (see Ilaiah 1996) – Hindus still account for over two-thirds
of the population.
The word “Hindu” is of course not new: even as term of self-ascription it
has been employed at least since the fifteenth century (Thapar 1989: 224). The
idea of a large, multimillion-strong, community of subcontinental distribution,
however, emerged only in the nineteenth century in response to the western
colonial and Christian missionary challenges, and as a result of improved means
of transport and communication. Such an encompassing idea brought together,
but did not merge into one, a multitude of communities identified by regional
culture and language, religious belief and practice, hereditary occupation and
caste, and other criteria.
Thus, Bengali Brahmans, Tamil S ́aivas or Vais.n.vas, Gujarati Patidars, north
Indian Kayasthas, and numerous other communities acquired an additional
the householder tradition in hindu society 289