Cremation, Caste, and Cosmogony in Karmic Traditions.

less “true”, unimportant, or invalid. By comparison one
may avoid partaking in, and establishing, the dominant
party’s position and worldview as happened during the
colonial reign in India. Brahmans gained their
hierarchical position partly due to British legislation.
Thus, comparison may not only avoid Orientalism when
analysing the East and West, but also delimit the
constructions, which so far, and to a large extent, have
favoured the high castes socially, politically, and
religiously. In India, the legendary archaeologist
Alexander Cunningham thought that a search for
Buddhist ruins would demonstrate that Brahmanism was
not the only religion in India, and this would facilitate
the propagation of Christianity. In other words, he tried
to justify the archaeological investigations in India on
grounds that politically would help the British rule and
their attempts to Christianise India (Chakrabarti
1982:332). From being a political tool of dominance
used by the colonials and Christians, the comparative
methodology might be turned into a science which
creates opportunities and possibilities for all. By
illuminating what real people are doing and what they
have done, comparison may reveal how the established
structures are mechanism of power.
In an archaeology of world religions there are inevitably
many problems, and the two most urgent, which have to
be contextualised when writing social history, are: 1) the
date of the religious texts, and 2) the relation between
material culture and scriptures. Although disputed and
controversial, Rig Veda is most often dated, if only for
conventional reasons, to 1200-800 BCE (Possehl
1999:6). Max Muller (1859) suggested in 1859 a date to
c. 1200 BCE. On linguistic grounds Rig-Veda was later
dated to c. 1000 BC (Ghosh 1952). Recently, other
scholars put the date much later (e.g. Inden 1990) in
accordance with recent developments in Christian
theological discourses (e.g. Lemche 1985, 1998,
Thompson 1987, 1992, 1999, Whitelam 1997).
Regarding the Bible, Thomas L. Thompson says: ‘It is
only as history that the Bible does not make sense’
(Thompson 1999:210), and “to use the biblical traditions
as the primary source for the history of Israel’s origin, is
to establish a hopeless situation for the historian who
wants to write critical, rather than anachronistic, history”
(Thompson 1987:26). The same goes for the Hindu
sacred scriptures.
In short, one has to date the texts as texts when they
appear in the archaeological record, and not perceive the
descriptions as a chronological and culture historical
narrative. Then the problem arises of how to relate text
to context. Based on archaeological material solely,
archaeologists often prefer to write social history
without using written sources. But world religions are
inevitably connected to sacred scriptures, and, an
archaeology of world religions has to include the holy
texts in one way or another. With an emphasis on ritual
practices and material culture one may present an
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understanding of the context from which the written
sources were made and used. Sacred scriptures are
chronotopes in Bakhtin’s terminology. Chronotope
means literally “time space”, and the chronotope
functions as the primary means for materialising time in
space. Chronotopes function as centres for concretising
representations. “Those things that are static in space
cannot be statically described, but must rather be
incorporated into temporal sequence of represented
events and into the story’s own representational fields”
(Bakhtin 1990:251).
Hence, an archaeology of religion solves this problem by
emphasising practice, change, and development.
Whereas chronotopes are frozen, practices are dynamic.
Sacred scriptures do not reveal how religion is practiced,
or even if it was followed, but only what some sages and
seers thought was the eschatologically preferable way to
live. It is through the archaeological record one may
trace lived religion in practice, and not the least, the coexistence
of various religious paths.
From the third and second centuries BCE there are
increasing numbers of finds and evidences for the
Brahmanical cult of Shiva, Vishnu, and many other
divinities. The first Vishnu temples are found in the third
century BCE, and based on archaeological material, the
emergence of an organised Brahamnical framework only
occurred in between 600-200 BCE (Chakrabarti 2001b).
Regarding Buddhism, the date of Gautama Buddha is
uncertain. On the Ashoka column in Lumbini, Nepal, it
is written that Buddha was born on this spot, and the
traditional date is set to the sixth century BCE (Barnes
1995). Ashoka states an edict on the column that 256
years had passed between the death of Buddha and his
own issue of the edict (Chakrabarti 1995a:187, Rijal
1979). Archaeologically, nothing earlier than the third
century BCE has been recovered from the sacred
precincts, and there is neither contemporary evidence of
the person known as the Buddha nor a date of birth and
death, and where it took place are also uncertain
(Coningham 2001:66, 87). Moreover, to complicate the
matter: “It is worthwhile emphasising that Buddhism
represented only one among a number of contemporary
groups which questioned the supremacy of the
Brahmanical tradition…This heterodoxy was against the
Brahmanical tradition of elaborate sacrificial rituals,
which had its primary seat in the Indo-Gangetic divide
or the land between the Sutlej and Yamuna rivers, and
the upper Gangetic valley” (Chakrabarti 1995a:189-
190). One of these religions was Zoroastrianism, which
divided sometime in history from Brahmanism or what
would become Brahmanism. I will discuss
Zoroastrianism both in the past and the present in
chapter 16. Finally, there were numerous religious cults
that we know very little about, and the most famous of
them are that of the munis, the silent ones (Obeyesekere
2002:13).