Classifying the Universe: The Ancient Indian Varna System and the Origins of Caste.

• Author: Smith, Frederick M.

The next time you run into a neo-Hindu chauvinist - say on a train between Varanasi and Lucknow, or at a health food store in New Mexico - who delivers an impromptu (and unwanted) lecture on the unity of all the peoples of ancient India and the absence of the evil of the caste system in the Vedas, you can come prepared to beat this benighted perpetrator of bliss and harmony into submission with a copy of Brian K. Smith's Classifying the Universe. For B.K.S.'s primary contention, which he pursues relentlessly, is that not only was the varna system thoroughly in effect in the "Vedic Age," but it served, at least in the Vedas, as the primary means of organizing and thinking about nearly everything imaginable. Varna was, he contends, "a totalistic classificatory system" (p. 8). If your idealistic rival can find any chink in your armor, it is that B.K.S. admits: "My study is about representations and their persuasiveness, and not about historical, social, economic, and political realities per se" (p. 11). But he seals this breach quickly by demonstrating that ideologies, categories, and taxonomies reflect and encourage their material contexts. In addition, despite the above statement, he strongly and consistently argues that social realities, at least, were indeed reflected in the ideology of varna. The present book, he says, "concerns the ways in which a social hierarchy was integrated into - and therefore ratified and legitimated by - a categorical system with universal scope and persuasive power" (p. 3). More generally, accepting as support Dumezil's tripartite division of religion and society, B.K.S. advocates that religious discourse can be reduced to its social bases.

I began this book shortly after completing J. C. Heesterman's Broken World of Sacrifice: An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993; see my review in Journal of Ritual Studies 9.2 [1996], as well as the preceding review, by C. Minkowski). At first it appeared that Brian Smith and Heesterman had read two entirely different Vedas, each with its own scholastic history and secondary literature. Heesterman's Veda is a historical document, though one that must be deciphered only by denying any poetic, literary, or theological sensibility that the authors of the Vedic texts might have possessed. Brian Smith's Veda, on the other hand, is a massive sociological tract largely decipherable through proper understanding of the Vedic authors' poetic, literary, and theological sensibilities...