make a virtue of necessity. At a deeper level, however, one might detect a fear of
the renouncer, for he poses a threat to the ideology of the ga ̄rhasthya. The
sam.nya ̄sı ̄is too powerful an adversary to be contemplated with equanimity.
Individual renouncers, if judged to be genuine, will be accorded respect. But
renouncers as a category are caricatured: that the caricature is only too often
an accurate enough portrait of the “holy men” one actually meets is another
matter through not totally irrelevant. The real point seems to be that only when
the renouncer is thus portrayed may he be convincingly employed as a foil to
highlight the virtues of the life of the householder. These are said to flow from
“detachment in enjoyment,” which is the essence of renunciation. Ga ̄rhasthya
is not to end in renunciation, but it should be guided by the values ofsam.nya ̄sa.
For the rest, everything is dependent upon divine grace (anugraha).^5
The foregoing summary of the Pandit ideology of the householder is based on
my fieldwork in the village of Utrassu-Urnanagri (southeast Kashmir) carried
out mainly in 1957–8. It is noteworthy that, despite over 500 years of life lived
as a small minority (about 4 percent of the population in the 1950s) amongst
Muslims – who are mainly descendants of Hindus converted to Islam en masse
in the fourteenth century – and under Muslim rule between the early fourteenth
and mid-nineteenth centuries, the Pandits have managed to preserve many core
ideas and values of the Brahmanical tradition via oral transmission. In an essay
based on Sanskrit texts of the medieval period (ninth to thirteenth centuries)
unknown to the rural Pandits among whom I engaged in fieldwork, Alexis
Sanderson observes:
The Brahmanism of the middle ground...offered the Brahman householder a
monism for the ritual agent which admitted renunciation but tended to confine it
to the last quarter of a man’s life (after the payment of the three debts), and at the
same time made it an unnecessary by propagating a doctrine of gnostic liberation
within the pursuit of conformity to the householder’s dharma.... [Moreover, the
householder] was to protect himself through disinterested conformity to God’s will
manifest as his dharma. (Sanderson 1985: 197–8)Needless to emphasize, it is the continuities between the ideas of the two
periods (pre-Muslim and Muslim) that are remarkable rather than the differ-
ences, which are essentially those of emphasis. It follows that in the study of the
householder tradition in Hindu society, the bringing together of the perspectives
of Indology and sociology is not only justifiable but indeed imperative.
Concluding Observations
The two most characteristic institutions of Hindu society are caste and the
family/household. Kane in his monumental survey of the Dharmas ́a ̄stras
the householder tradition in hindu society 301