ABSTRACT
The incongruence between elite nationalism and popular patriotism was poignantly exposed after India’s independence. Chapters 6 and 7 describe the postcolonial predicament in the early 1990s, where there was a disjunction between the politico-economic sphere based on ‘the logic of the fish’ (where a big fish eats a smaller one) and the socio-ritual sphere based on the logic of the sharing in the community. Chapter 6 explores the socio-cultural sphere of postcolonial Indian rural society through ethnographic data. The order of the body, society and nature is believed to be maintained when a body is born from a union between a man and woman who match each other, ‘eat’ the proper land and perform the prescribed duty as sacrifice in accordance with the ‘tradition’. Here, we find the idea that the balance of the whole is maintained in the service of each one whose position is distinct in terms of food, gender, living space and work. The idea of the connection between body, kinship and land is also closely related to people’s ideas and practices of the agricultural cycle and annual reproduction. Farming and ritual activities related to rice cultivation involve community relationships, the division of agricultural and ritual labour, a cyclic view of time coinciding with the annual cycle of rice farming and an intimate connection with the worship of the earth as goddess, the whole of which has a sense of harmony and contact with the sacred. It is through the ritual processes that the seemingly harmonious and holistic world of ‘traditional culture’ is most prominently represented, enacted, reaffirmed and also transformed and recreated. It should be noted, however, that this idealised ‘organic whole’ is contained within the limited sphere of the socio-cultural and does not constitute the moral basis of the politico-economic sphere, dominated by the cash economy and factional politics. The idealised religio-ontological identity is stressed precisely in contrast to the politico-economic realities.
