A Tangle of Interpretations
Bhaktapur has inherited in one form or another most of the concerns and ideas about purity set forth in the Hindu codes for proper behavior, the Dharmasastras[*] . The subject is, on the surface at least, diverse. "Suddhi (purification) is a very comprehensive topic including within it purification after asauca (impurity on birth and death), purification of a person after contact with an impure object or on account of certain occurrences, purification of pots, wells, food, etc., after they are polluted" (Kane 1968-1977, vol. IV, p. 267). Because among these, birth and death pollution make their carriers unfit for most worship and were traditionally "the most important subject under suddhi . therefore the Suddhi-kaumudi defines suddhi as the state of being fit for or capable of performing the rites that are understood from the Veda" (vol. IV, p. 267). The Sastras also refer to the impurities accrued by contact with the lowest social classes (included along with a multitude of other pollutants) and differentiate the required actions and tempos of purification by hierarchical social status, thus taking account of a "caste-differentiating pollution."
Anthropologists concerned with social structure and organization have selectively treated the complex of purity, impurity, and purification (which we may term the "purity complex") in its external relation to caste segmentation and hierarchy. Dumont, in an influential statement, argued that the opposition between "pure" and "impure" gives the caste system its "intellectual coherence." The opposition is the "single true principle" that underlies those features, which Bouglé's classic formulation (1908) proposed as the "essence" of caste, but which for Dumont are "analytic distinctions introduced by the observer" (Dumont 1980, 43). "It is by implicit reference to this opposition that the society of castes appears consistent and rational to those who live in it . The opposition underlies hierarchy, which is the superiority of the pure to the impure, underlies separation because the pure and the impure must be kept separate, and underlies the division of labor because pure and impure occupations must likewise be kept separate" (ibid., 43 [emphasis added]). Dumont's phrasing—"intellectual coherence," "consistant and rational" appearance, and the like—allows him to avoid giving any precise explanatory force to this intellectually satisfying opposition of pure and impure in the origin or, more relevant to our purposes, maintenance of caste.
Other writers, still centrally concerned on the one hand with Hinduism's exotic social order and on the other with an intellectualistic and cognitive approach to purity and impurity, emphasize the semantic or metaphorical force of purity and impurity: "Physiological pollutions become important as symbolic expressions of other undesirable contacts which would have repercussions on the structure of social or cosmological ideas" (Douglas 1968, 340). "Caste pollution," which is a special case, "is a symbolic system, based on the image of the body, whose primary concern is the ordering of a social hierarchy" (Douglas 1966, 125). For Douglas "pollution is the symbolic expression of an intellectual problem." She suggests that "we treat all pollution behavior as the reaction to any event likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications" (1968, 338 [emphasis added]). Purity keeps categories separated; in the Hindu case, hierarchically ordered categories. Impurity is the blurring and the threatened collapse of categories.
One problem for Douglas's formulation is that although the blurring of any category is by definition problematic for order, "pollution" in its restricted sense of "dirtiness," as suggested by "physiological pollutions," applies only to some cases of the confusion of "cherished classifications." The problems, metaphors, uses, and rectifications of some other categories of confusion are quite different. Veena Das, following Douglas in asserting that "the symbolism of impurity serves basically as a metaphor for liminality" (1977, 115), makes one necessary (and fundamental) distinction. "Liminality" in Hindu social organization is not only the blurred, unpleasant, and polluting mess of contaminated social differentiation; it also represents the "creative transcendence" of the given categories of the social system, as in the religious life of Hindu ascetics. Here liminality and the destruction of "cherished classifications" results in a "transcendence" in which the purity complex is no longer an issue.[1]
Transcendence aside, "liminality," the state of being out of ordinary social categories, is not sufficient in itself to characterize (or explain) impurity. In certain liminal states, such as the early stages of rites of passages, individuals are in heightened states of purity, not in impurity. More problematically, as we have argued, only some kinds of confusion or collapse of categories are "polluting." If "pollution" is not to be endlessly extended in metaphor, many states of confusion, liminality, or mixture are neither pure, impure, nor "transcendent." The question of what kinds of confusion, of what kinds of "cherished classifications" is still open.
The escape from or blurring of social categories has another powerful metaphoric implication. "To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power" (Douglas 1966, 97).[2] Bhaktapur uses the different implications of the delineation and blurring of categories—purity and safety, impurity and danger, membership in the ordinary system of social categories or transcendence of it—in a differentiated way, isolating various implications of categorization for complex differentiated meanings and uses. The purity complex has its meaningful position in this larger context.
Various positions have been taken about the relations of the purity complex to the religious and sacred spheres of South Asian and other societies. Here much depends on the definition of "religious" and "sacred," but we are again in a tangle of assumptions and pronouncements. Thus Dumont proclaims flatly that "in reality, even though the notion [impurity] may be found to contain hygienic associations, these cannot account for it, as it is a religious notion" (1980, 47 [emphasis added]). Srinivas (1952) similarly ascribes impurity to the realm of the "sacred," albeit the "bad sacred" in opposition to the "good sacred." Such statements reflect the attempts made by such earlier social theorists as William Robertson Smith ([1889] 1927) and James Frazer ([1890] 1955) to include ideas regarding pollution and ideas about the sacred together within some larger encompassing "supernatural" realm to which the two sets of ideas were thought to belong.[3] The claim that pollution and purity—that is, the aspects of pollution and purity that were of interest to these theorists—are within a "religious" or a "sacred" or a "supernatural" sphere encourages the implication that their manipulation through purification is a ritual act. Thus Sherry Ortner writes in an article summarizing the literature on the sociocultural aspects of pollution beliefs and practices in various cultures, "Because lost purity can be re-established only by ritual and also because purity is often a precondition for the performance of rituals of many kinds, anthropologists refer to this general field of cultural phenomena as 'ritual purity' and 'ritual pollution'" (1974, 299 [emphasis added]). The procedures used to "reestablish lost purity" in Bhaktapur are conventional but hardly rituals. Furthermore, although purification procedures are in a general sense "preconditions for rituals" in that a person has to be pure to participate in some (but by no means all) religious action,[4] in some cases purification is a direct and immediate preparation for important rituals, while in other cases the immediate
motivation is to free people from the general social restrictions of birth and death impurity, or to remove the contamination produced by contact with a member of a low thar . Such purification is necessary for the eventual later performance of rituals, but is not directed toward a particular one. Later ritual performances will, in fact, require, in addition, the specific purification that always proceeds such rituals.