Kingship and ‘contrapriests’

Abstract

In 1967 Harold Gould published an influential article with the main title of 'Priest and contrapriest.* The article began by praising Tor a sociology of India,' the essay with which Louis Dumont and David Pocock launched the journal Contributions to Indian sociology in 1957. Gould affirmed the 'essential unity' of India and linked the idea of Indian society as a 'whole' to Emile Durkheim's opposition of the sacred and profane, two domains which together provided, Durkheim believed, the entire field of religious concepts. Gould then assimilated this opposition, by way of Claude L?vi-Strauss and Henry Orenstein, to the cultural 'code* of caste values. The structure of this code, he asserted, was in terms of 'an opposition between pollution ('Involvement with life substance and process") and purity ("the absence of biological involvement")' (Gould 1967: 31; emphasis in original). This, in turn, was joined to the 'fundamental assumption* of hierarchy in Hinduism which we see clearly exposited in the work of Dumont and Pocock and before them in C?lestin Bougie (1908). To diese ideas which could be attributed to others, Gould added some observa tions of his own. One was