Rāma Jāmadagnya as Symptom and Symbol of Brahmin Ideology offers a sustained reinterpretation of one of the most powerful and troubling figures of the Mahābhārata. Focusing on Rāma Jāmadagnya, later known as Paraśurāma, Brian Collins examines how myth can condense the values, conflicts, anxieties, and political claims of the communities that preserve and reproduce it.At the centre of the study is the fundamental Vedic opposition between brahman and kṣatra, priestly and royal power. Collins shows how this opposition is repeatedly reproduced within the Rāma Jāmadagnya myth: between Jamadagni’s āśrama and the territory of the Kṣatriya king Arjuna Kārtavīrya, between Jamadagni and his Kṣatriya wife Reṇukā, within Rāma’s own combination of Brahmin and Kṣatriya qualities, and ultimately in his campaign to annihilate the Kṣatriya order. These narrative tensions reveal the myth as a tightly structured symbolic system in which individual episodes mirror and reinforce larger ideological conflicts.Restricting its principal focus to the critical edition of the Mahābhārata, the book situates the myth within the longer formation of Brahmin ideology, from the consolidation of Vedic ritual systems and Brahmin lineages to changing forms of Brahmin authority in the post-Mauryan period. It also offers a fresh analysis of Rāma’s encounter with Karṇa, reading the episode alongside the story of Satyakāma Jābāla to illuminate questions of birth, identity, conduct, and the recognition of social status.Combining close textual analysis with a dialectical approach to myth and symbol, Rāma Jāmadagnya as Symptom and Symbol of Brahmin Ideology demonstrates how the figure of Rāma could function simultaneously as an assertion of Brahmin power and as a symptom of the contradictions within that assertion. In doing so, the book offers a broader reflection on the relationship between mythology and ideology, and on the ways powerful symbols give narrative form to both social authority and the anxieties that sustain it.
Brian Collins
Brian Collins is Professor of Religious Studies and the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He received his PhD in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on Hinduism, Indian mythology, Sanskrit epic and Puranic literature, sacrifice, ritual, and comparative religion. He is the author of The Head Beneath the Altar: Hindu Mythology and the Critique of Sacrifice; The Other Rama: Matricide and Genocide in the Mythology of Parasurama; and The Legacy of Soma: Hermeneutics, Religious History, and the God of the Moon; and the co-editor of Bollywood Horrors: Religion, Violence, and Cinematic Fears in India.
Books of related interest