Write short note: Purushartha. (1989)
Purushartha means the ends proper to a human being — the goals classical Hindu thought recognises as legitimate objects of striving. Four are named: dharma, artha, kama and moksha. Sociologically the scheme matters less as philosophy than as a value-system that ranks motives, subordinating wealth and desire to duty and duty itself to release.
The four ends
| Purushartha | Content | Sociological force |
|---|---|---|
| Dharma | Righteousness; duty by varna and life-stage | Regulates the other two; makes conduct a moral obligation |
| Artha | Wealth, power, worldly means | Legitimises economic and political activity — but only within dharma |
| Kama | Desire, pleasure, aesthetic and conjugal life | Legitimises sexuality and enjoyment, chiefly in the householder stage |
| Moksha | Liberation from rebirth | The transcendent end that relativises all worldly success |
Articulation with ashrama and varna
The four ends map onto the four ashramas: brahmacharya trains in dharma, grihastha is the stage in which artha and kama are pursued, vanaprastha and sannyasa are oriented to moksha. P. H. Prabhu, in Hindu Social Organization (1940), read the purusharthas and ashramas together as a lifelong scheme of socialisation. Because dharma is svadharma — duty specific to one’s varna — the scheme does not offer uniform goals to all; the ends are common, the content of the first is caste-relative, and the Shudra is in the texts excluded from the formal ashrama sequence altogether.
The sociological readings
- Louis Dumont treats the arrangement as a case of hierarchical encompassing: artha and kama are not denied but contained by dharma, exactly as the pure encompasses the impure in Homo Hierarchicus (1966). Moksha stands outside this order, and in his essay on world renunciation he argues that the renouncer is the only true individual in a holistic society — the caste order’s one legitimate exit.
- Robert Redfield and Milton Singer‘s great and little traditions locate the purusharthas in the textual great tradition, filtering downward and being locally reinterpreted. Singer’s When a Great Tradition Modernizes (1972) found Madras industrialists practising compartmentalisation, keeping a modern occupational sphere of artha separate from an unchanged ritual sphere of dharma.
- Yogendra Singh, in Modernization of Indian Tradition (1973), abstracts from such schemes the four attributes of Indian tradition — hierarchy, holism, continuity and transcendence. The purusharthas express all four at once.
Bearing on caste, and the limits
The scheme legitimates caste twice over: it makes duty group-specific, and it makes worldly inequality provisional beside moksha. Critics note that it is a Brahmanical, male and twice-born ideal, recovered from texts rather than observed; the field-view finds households pursuing artha and kama without the graded hierarchy of ends. B. R. Ambedkar‘s answer was not renunciation but exit of another kind — his conversion to Buddhism in 1956 rejected the dharma that assigned him his station.
Conclusion
As description of behaviour the purusharthas are weak; as an account of the values by which Indians have judged behaviour they remain strong. The Maha Kumbh at Prayagraj in 2025, which official estimates put at over sixty crore visits in six weeks, shows a transcendental end still capable of mobilising the largest voluntary gathering on earth alongside, not against, a market economy.