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Religious Change in an Industrial City of South India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Mark Holmström
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Extract

My subject is the relation between Hindu religion and morality. After some comments on this relation in traditional Indian society, I describe changes in religious thought and practice in a village which has become part of the industrial city of Bangalore; and I use this local example to support general conclusions about the development of values of autonomy in Indian industrial society.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 103 , Issue 1 , January 1971 , pp. 28 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1971

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References

1 I wish to thank Heather Wood, Richard Gombrich, and my wife for their comments on an earlier version of the paper, which I read at the Dublin Conference of the British Association of Orientalists in March 1968. The fieldwork was made possible by grants from the Astor Foundation, the British Council, the Cyril Foster Fund, the Frederick Soddy Trust, the Ministry of Education, Nuffield College, and the Nuffield Foundation.

2 This view has been argued most strongly by von Fürer-Haimendorf, C., in Morals and merit, 1967Google Scholar; “Moral concepts in three Himalayan societies”, in Madan, T. N. and Sarana, G. (eds.), Indian anthropology, Asia Publishing House, 1962Google Scholar; and “Freedom and conformity in tribal, Hindu and Buddhist societies of India and Nepal”, in Bidney, D. (ed.), The concept of freedom in anthropology, The Hague, 1963.Google Scholar

3 Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, Paris, 1932.Google Scholar

4 I owe this part of my argument largely to Dorothy Emmet, especially Function, purpose and powers, 1958. On heteronomy and autonomy see Piaget, J., The moral judgment of the child, 1932.Google Scholar

5 See Marriott, M. (ed.), Village India, Chicago, 1955Google Scholar, Srinivas, M. N., Religion and society among the Coorgs of South India, Oxford, 1952Google Scholar, O'Malley, L. S. S., Popular Hinduism, Cambridge, 1935, and many others.Google Scholar

6 “World renunciation in Indian religions”, in Contributions to Indian Sociology, IV, 1960, 32–62.Google Scholar

7 On both kinds of movement, see Heimsath, C. H., Indian nationalism and Hindu social reform, Princeton, 1964CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Scott, R., Social ethics in modern Hinduism, Calcutta, Y.M.C.A., 1953.Google Scholar

8 On the problems of “normative relativism” see Emmet, Dorothy, Rules, roles and relations, 1966, 92 ffGoogle Scholar. Radhakrishnan has expounded a modern version of the brahmanical theory of ethics in The Hindu view of life, 1926, and Religion and society, 1947. For a strikingly similar ethical doctrine, independently developed in the West and justified in the terms of a Western tradition going back to Hegel and Plato, see Bradley's, F. H. essay “My station and its duties” in his Ethical studies, Oxford, 1927.Google Scholar

9 “In such a hierarchy there is no room for a radical principle of evil … It is tempting to think that the Indian trilogy dharma, artha, kāma on many occasions plays the same role as our distinction between good and evil. This is not to say, of course, that any conception of evil analogous to our own is absent, but where we condemn and exclude, India hierarchizes and includes.” (Dumont, op. cit., 42.)

10 See SirBerlin, Isaiah, Two concepts of liberty, Oxford, 1958.Google Scholar

11 Radhakrishnan, Religion and society, 111.