Model answer & approach
- Discuss the debates on the concepts 'duty' and 'worship' while understanding religion in India. (Answer in 150 words)
Introduction
Indian religion can be read as obligation performed or as devotion offered.
Body
1. What each concept asserts about religion: Duty makes religion dharma: right action prescribed by birth and station, discharged through ritual whether or not the heart is in it. Worship makes it a relation to a deity, sustained by puja and bhakti, where surrender counts for more than correct performance.
2. The debate between them: The duty reading is textual and Brahmanical: Weber's in The Religion of India, where karma and dharma bind ethics to caste, and Dumont's, where purity orders the whole. Against it stand the bhakti saints — Kabir, Basava, Mirabai — who set love above rite and birth, and the popular religion Srinivas found beside the Sanskritic.
3. What the debate changes: If religion is duty, it reproduces caste and change must attack dharma; if it is worship, it carries dissent within it, which is how reform movements and conversion are explained.
Conclusion
The same household does both; the argument is over which the sociologist makes central.
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