ABSTRACT
This contribution relies on our respective strengths as two very different scholars on India and specifically Hindu law, religion and society. It answers the three questions put to us by indicating considerable reservations about whether such questions would make sense to most Hindus, either earlier or today. With regard to Hindu ‘religion’ (Knott, 1998), not even to speak of Hindu ‘law’ (Menski, 2003), the ubiquitous phenomenon of co-existence of multiple normative orders and the diversity of the nature of their interactions with each other (which may be cooperative, antagonistic or indifferent) within its fold forces observers and analysts, insiders and outsiders alike, to be intensely plurality-conscious. However, in the available literature, blatantly reductionist assumptions about the uniform nature of Hindu law are often forcefully expressed by scholarly imaginations, 1 powerfully pitted as some kind of essentialised ‘Hindu’ construct against the lived experience of most Hindus themselves, who constantly find themselves required to navigate and balance many competing expectations and often completely contradictory assumptions. While the internally pluralistic nature of Hinduism is actually well known (Sharma, 1996: 61), it remains thus true today that ‘the private law of the Hindus is one of the most complicated in the world’ (Derrett, 1957: 3). In addition, it is a global truism that times constantly change (Sharma, 1996: 5, 7) and that everything is highly dynamic. Change is powered by multiple processes of interaction (Chiba, 1986: 5), not only between indigenous and received elements but also individual needs and rights and cosmic concerns (Sharma, 2004: 36), to which one should today add group rights and human rights concepts. Everything is, following Deleuze and Guattari (1994), constantly becoming something, forever negotiated and contested through multiple engagements of various actors/actants. Aware of such volatile multi-layered processes of development and constant argumentative discussions about them, Amartya Sen (2006: xii) highlights specifically the importance of understanding the long tradition of accepted heterodoxy in India:
In resisting the attempts by the Hindutva activists to capture ancient India as their home ground (and to see it as the unique cradle of Indian civilization), it is not enough to point out that India has many other sources of culture as well. It is necessary also to see how much heterodoxy there has been in Indian thoughts and beliefs from very early days. Not only did Buddhists, Jains, agnostics and atheists compete with each other and with adherents of what we now call Hinduism (a much later term) in the India of the first millennium bce, but also the dominant religion in India was Buddhism for nearly a thousand years . . . Ancient India cannot be fitted into the narrow box where the Hindutva activists want to incarcerate it.
