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Hindus of the Himalayas. GERALD

notes. $8.50.
American Anthropologist
D. BERREMAN.
[65, 19631
Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1963. x, 430 pp., 4 appendices, bibliography, 28 illustrations, index, 3 maps,

Reviewed by WILLIAMNEWELL,International Christian University, Tokyo

The village described by Berreman is called Sirkanda, is within ten air miles of
Dehra Dun in Uttar Pradesh and has a population of 384 of whom 249 reside in or near
the village. Ninety percent of the population are high caste (87 percent Rajput and
three percent Brahmin) made up of 30 extended families and nine nuclear families, and
ten percent are low caste made up of three extended families and four nuclear families.
In 1815, when the British took over the territory, there were 16 high-caste cultivating
families, with the cultivable land divided into 16 equal parts (total area unknown).
There are today 1,144 separate land claims for 745 plots over a total area of 205 acres in
Sirkanda itself. The total land owned by villagers is 298 acres, including land outside the
village boundary. The number of persons per cultivable acre compares very favorably
with figures from other parts of Himachel Pradesh, the neighboring territory with
which I am most familiar, so that with the exception of the low caste group, the pressure
on land is relatively low. The village is part of a larger region known as Bhatbair of
about 60 villages with a total population of almost 5,000. Sirkanda is larger than an
average village, both in the district and in the neighboring area of Tehri Garhwal. The
village is mainly agricultural, with the keeping of animals a subsidiary source of income.
In that Bhatbair is a mountainous region, with small areas of cultivated land sur-
rounded by large areas of forests and grassland and village lands limited in size by un-
suitable soil, the district has an ecological pattern very similar to other parts of the
Himalayan foothills. However, administratively the village falls into the province of
Uttar Pradesh where hill villages are in a minority, and where the provincial govern-
ment center is not in the hills itself. Berreman has made a semi-intensive study of
Sirkanda rather than a study of the natural area of Bhatbair. On the Indian plains it is
now recognized, Dube notwithstanding, that village studies are unsatisfactory, as
plains villages have never been the self-contained little communities envisaged by
Metcalfe. Subcaste panchayats, market areas, caste specialization, religious obligations,
etc. have never been confined to the village, and with the rise of more centralized gov-

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ernment agencies, the villages have now become even less self-contained. In the hills
also it seems unduly limiting one’s research to deal only with the internal affairs of a
community such as Sirkanda. The justification for such a limitation of study can be
argued on the grounds that the village is not an exogamous unit and that the majority
of marriages are undertaken in or around Sirkanda. Also, there are no absentee land-
lords, and the face-to-face relationships of a small village give a sort of inter-caste
solidarity on a village basis rarely found on the plains. Yet, on the other hand, the
extreme community-centeredness of this study tells us nothing about the administra-
tion or local representation in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly at all. The word tahsildar
does not occur in the book. And it is really not sufficient in a modern study to mention
policemen or village accountants without telling us their place in the administrative
structure, the nature of their authority, and the bureaucratic rules which keep them in
or out of line. Similarly, it appears from the genealogies and village census that about
one-third of the villagers have left the village, aside from marriage, and the reasons for
this can only be investigated in a wider framework. I n caste and religion certain of the
specialists came from outside, and it appears that every senior male must have visited
Hardwar to throw the pinds of his deceased into the Ganges. Has there been a change
in the outer world such that village emigrants now leave for secular rather than
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religious reasons such as pilgrimages? None of these questions can be dealt with, even in
the hill villages, without looking a t the structure of a field wider than the village
community.
Yet there are a number of interesting similarities between this area and other
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Himalayan foothill areas. Sirkanda is a large village as hill villages go. Yet the propor-
tion of 90 percent high caste and ten percent low caste is very typical of groups of
villages in other hill areas in which I have had experience. It is surprising that this
proportion should be so regular. Firm figures will not be available until the results of the
1961 Census have been published, but nowhere in the hills, as far as I a m aware, are
there areas in which the dominant caste is principally Brahmin or principally low caste.
If one takes a “natural area” of several villages, my experience is that the proportion of
high and low castes throughout the hills is about the same everywhere. B u t if the land
is good, then the villages are larger and one tends to have more castes in a village. But
where the land is poor, the villages are smaller and each village tends to be of only one
caste. So that what are inter-caste ties in a large village become inter-village ties if one
takes the unit of inspection as a n area instead of one nucleated settlement.
So many areas in the hills have a special connection with a particular god found in
the traditional Indian epics. I n the case of Sirkanda this is the Pandava Brothers:

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The villagers’ feeling of respect and admiration for the Pandavas is derived from a long
and close association quite different from the vague feeling they have developed for most other
Hindu deities and heroes as a result of hearing about them from travelling priests and
mendicants. The Pandavas may well be indigenous objects of worship in this area who have
been universalized to become part of the literary tradition of Hinduism. Every village in the
Pahari (hill)region has its shrine to the Pandavas and every village honors them (p. 382).

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Yet they are not exactly the same as in the Mahabharata for here the brothers have
two wives, the second being known in Sirkanda as Basudunta. I n the area of the Him-
alayan foothills with which I a m familiar, the Gaddi section of Chamba State, a very
similar passage might be written about the worship of the god Shiva, whom the Gaddi
villagers regard in rather a special way as a Gaddi god occupying certain mountains and
closely connected with both national folk lore such as the Ramayana and with numerous
local legends such as the story of Triloknath Dev, a low caste tailor who became ab-
ducted into Shiva’s temple at the bottom of Lake Manimahesh. The impression that
both Berreman and I received of these special local cults is of a firm almost permanent
tradition inside the village connected to the society by many myths and folk tales.
The author gives a number of examples of new household gods being adopted and of
various other gods being introduced as a result of local misfortunes, etc. But there is a
distinct difference of feeling towards the Pandavas of ownership and identity. This is
not a case of adopting a custom because of “Sanscritization,” but of the Mahabharata
taking a local cult and spreading i t throughout India. It is a case of the rest of India
adopting a hill deity rather than the hills adopting an all-India deity. This is a totally
different type of adaptation from, say, widow remarriage, both of which are regarded as
part of the Great Tradition. I am of the opinion that the whole idea of Sanscritization,
originally proposed by Srinivas, needs to be considerably modified to include a distinc-
tion between alteration of custom and modification of belief. A study of the way in
which the general corpus of folk tales and behavior concerning the Pandavas in Sirkanda
is actually worked out b y the villages would be a very rewarding task in the study of
myth and behavior.
Berreman gives us little information about this, but he mentions that the Pandavas
only become manifested in the bodies of possessed Rajputs. He also mentions that the
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Pandavas have a village shrine. I am not sure exactly what he means by a village shrine,
but he seems to mean a god occupying a particular shrine a t which all the members of
the village may worship. If this be his meaning, then it is possible to use, as he does.
the term “village god” in this sense for, according to Hindu religious teaching, anyone
may worship anything he wishes. But I believe it to be more worthwhile to look at the
position of the gods rather from the point of view of pollution than from that of direct
reverence. In India the most important source of pollution is connected with what goes
inside a person. All gods require various ceremonial gifts such as betel, food, animals,
etc. Rut just as among humans, if the god of a particular shrine a t a ceremonial occasion
receives official food from a caste lower than the one he identifies with, then his ritual
status is lowered. The responsibility for giving this food rests on a special group or
person usually associated with the pujari of the shrine concerned, and only members of
the pujari’s, or higher than pujari’s, caste may present food. In this sense I have never
found a village shrine in the hills. I n very poor areas, the villages often are of only one
caste so that caste and village god are identical. But in larger villages, there is often
more than one caste and shrine, and the shrine of the dominant caste is often called the
“village” shrine, but with the official pujari or chela always of the dominant caste and
food accepted only from this caste. It is, however, really a caste shrine and not a village
shrine. Berreman does not give a sufficiently detailed account of the ritual practices a t
the Sirkanda village shrine for me to see whether low castes present food to the Pan-
davas. Who buys the goats sacrificed?
This is rather a cold book capably written and one which will need to be supple-
mented in the future by studies of other areas in the hills. The main method of analysis
is based on Murdock, but there is an atmosphere of efficiency about the book so that
the reader suspects that the author has numerous pieces of information which he has

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excluded from the text in an attempt to make the Indian villagers much more rational
and standardized than is in fact the case. But as the author himself states, there are

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few books written about the hills (except in settlement reports) and one has to start
somewhere. This is a worthwhile attempt.

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Gopalpur: A South Ilzdialz Village. ALANR. BEALS.(Case Studies in Cultural Anthro-
pology, GEORGE and LOUISESPINDLER, general editors.) New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1962. x, 99 pp., glossary, 1 map, 4 photographs, recommended read-
ing, 3 tables. $1.25.
Reviewed by MCKIMMARRIOTT, University of Chicago
By far the most vivid, comprehensive, and unified picture of Indian peasant life in
the English language is this modest-appearing community study from Mysore written
for use as an undergraduate text.
Cooperation is the classic theme upon which Beals builds this book-cooperation in
the work of a stable agricultural technology and cooperation in the obligations of kin-
ship and marriage. Cooperation is learned and shaped through the handling of food in
childhood. I t depends for its continuance upon obedience to elder authority. The people

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of Gopalpur are depicted as being “more concerned about the mastery of human rela-
tionships than they are about the mastery of things” and as shaping every effort ultim-
ately toward “exerting control over the unreliable world of other people.” Their efforts
are tragic, for every success in cooperating toward the acquisition of wealth or a wife is
resented as reducing the opportunities for others to do likewise. Village tradition is
nevertheless a self-sustaining “organic whole” : the inevitable conflict and competition