The ‘Implied Leader’ and the Vedic Discourse on Sovereignty. Rethinking the Exclusion of the Vrātyas from Social Intercourse in the Framework of the Reading Process

.In a long paper on vrātya, now considered to be a classical survey on this topic, the indologist Jan Heesterman states that “the impurity and exclusion of the vrātya from social intercourse is . . . undeniable.” Heesterman’s analysis deserves consideration because of its originality. The Dutch scholar collected a lot of data on vrātyahood from Brāhmaṇa and Śrautasūtra texts, fewer from the Saṁhitā texts, to show that the condition of being vrātya shares several aspects with the Vedic ideal-type of warriorhood. The historical approach led Heesterman to draw a schema of the relationships between kṣatriyas and brāhmaṇas that does not fit in with the structuralist standpoint based on the Dumézilian theory of tri-functionality, still dominant among scholars of ancient Indian culture in the 1960s. As Heesterman noticed, what we learn about the vrātya from the Vedic texts suffers from a series of contradictions that cannot be understood through the interpretations of sovereignty as an organized principle of brāhmaṇahood. The vrātyas, in the words of Heesterman, are “betwixt and between” and share with both the “religious” and “secular” actors some features which cannot be reduced to one or the other. No doubt these and other similarities suggest some links among the vrātyas, the ritual practitioners and the political leaders mentioned in the Vedic texts, but I would like to draw attention to the fact that the negative attributes of the vrātya are, in many points, comparable with what a political leader (kṣatriya) ought not to do or ought not to be in preparing for the ritual performances in the view of many Vedic theologians. In contrast with this picture, according to other ancient authors, the vrātya seems to have also some good qualities that stress a link between the vrātya and the brāhmaṇa. The fact that the warrior-like features of the vrātya are negative enough, while the features evoking the brāhmaṇahood are with no doubt positive, suggests something else that cannot be reduced to an organized social interrelation.