Homo Hierarchicus

Lois Dumont

Lois Dumont In his book “Homo Hierarchicus” presents the Indian caste system and its organizing principles and a provocative advance in comparison of societies on the basis of their underlying ideologies. Dumont moves gracefully from the ethnographic data to the level of the hierarchical ideology encrusted in ancient religious texts which are revealed as the governing conception of the contemporary caste structure. Dumont has also contrasted his Homo Hierarchicus with his modern Western antithesis Nomo Equalis.

Dumont starts his elaboration about the caste system from its definition. While defining it he took Bougle and said that the caste system divides the whole society into a large number of hereditary groups, distinguishing from one another and connected together by three characteristics: separation in matters of marriage and contact, division of labor and hierarchy.

The three principles, as he had said in the book, rest on one fundamental conception and are reducible to a single true principle that is the opposition of the Pure and the Impure. Further, he adds that the coexistence of the two opposite – Pure and Impure underlies hierarchy, which is the superiority of the pure to the impure, underlies separation because the pure caste and the impure caste must be kept separate, and underlies the division of labor because pure and impure occupation must be kept separate.

                                                                                                                      By Ram Ashish Chaudhary