‘God must be Liberated!’ A Hindu Liberation Movement in Ayodhya

Abstract

There seem to be at least two elusive concepts in the sociology of India: caste and communalism. On caste Eric Wolf makes the point eloquently: ‘The literature on the topic is labyrinthine, and the reader is not always sure there is light at the end of the tunnel’ (1982: 397). The sociological perspective on caste seems to be obscured by a great deal of confusion about the place of religious values and sentiments in Hindu society. According to Louis Dumont (1970: 6, 7), the primary object of the sociology of India should be a system of ideas and the approach that of a sociology of values. Since the religious ideology, on which the caste system is based in his view, seems to have been fixed already in the classical period of Indian civilization, caste becomes a static, a-historical phenomenon in Dumont's writing and in much of the debate originating from it (cf. Van der Veer 1985). The same may easily happen with that other most elusive concept of the sociology of India, communalism. Again Dumont can be our misleading guide here. He argues that ‘communalism is the affirmation of the religious community as a political group’ (1970: 90). In terms of their religious values and norms there is a lasting social heterogeneity of the Hindu and Muslim communities (95–8). This argument amounts to a ‘two-nation’ theory, based upon an a-historical sociology of values.

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