he calls the “disjunction between status and power.” By the latter he means that
those who are the most politically powerful defer to the representatives of reli-
gious values because the ultimate meaning of the society derives from those
values. This is why, he claims, in everyday life the priest ranks higher than the
king, and in the varn.aschema of the Vedic texts the Bra ̄hman.a ranks higher than
the Ks.atriya.
Dumont’s theory has had pervasive and enduring appeal in spite of a torrent
of criticism from every conceivable angle. The reason for this appeal is simple.
Hindus themselves often claim that Bra ̄hman.as are the “highest” caste and
Untouchables the “lowest” and Dumont’s approach appears to provide an expla-
nation for this. But this common popular formulation of the order of castes runs
into problems immediately. First, there are thousands of Bra ̄hman.a castes whose
members daily dispute each other’s status.^3 Evidently, if one Bra ̄hman.a caste
claims superiority over another Bra ̄hman.a caste, not all of them can be the
“highest.” And if some Bra ̄hman.as are “higher” than others, then the criterion
of being “higher” obviously must be by virtue of something other than simply
being a Bra ̄hman.a. But what? This is one of the trickiest, and most contested,
questions in the explanation of caste.
The evidence needed to resolve this question, however, points overwhelmingly
in one direction. The work of some “priests” (i.e. performers of ritual activities
on behalf of others) is clearly regarded by everyone in caste-organized com-
munities as defiling. This seems relatively uncontroversial in relation to the
members of those castes who deal overtly with death or the disposal of liminal
substances such as cut hair and nails, feces, menstrual blood, and afterbirth.
Which society does not have to deal with these by setting them apart? But the
work of a number of authors (see especially Heesterman 1985; Parry 1980;
1986 and Raheja 1988a) suggests a much more radical view of ritual activity,
for it would appear that it is not merely dealing with the physical byproducts of
human life and decay which is dangerous. It is not just castes such as Barbers
and Tanners, Washermen and Sweepers, they argue, whose status is endangered
by their ritual activities. So too is the status of Bra ̄hman.a priests who are nor-
mally conceived of as the “highest” caste(s) because of their alleged distance
from the polluting functions of Untouchable and other “lowly” specialist castes.
Allpriestly activity is dangerous because it involves the acceptance of “gifts,”
commonly referred to as da ̄n.a, which act as vessels for the inauspicious qualities
which the patron of the ritual is attempting to shed. The evidence for this is both
ethnographic and textual and indicates clearly that members of Bra ̄hman.a
castes who function as priests are tainted, or compromised, by their ritual activ-
ities. Many members of Bra ̄hman.a castes display their awareness of this problem
by their reluctance to take on priestly duties. These nonpriestly Bra ̄hman.as, we
are told, “widely despise Brahman priests” (Fuller 1984: 50; see also Guneratne
2001: 539).
This is not to imply that all ritual tasks enjoy equal esteem or lack of it; man-
ifestly this is not the case. As a rough rule of thumb one might say that those
castes whose functions are most closely associated with death and decay have
498 declan quigley