Eliade's Sojourn in India and the Megalithic Culture of Indigenous Indian Societies

From the Theory of Archaic Religion to Religions in the Human History

Abstract

This paper examines the formation of Mircea Eliade's theory of Archaic religion with reference to recent studies in anthropology, cognitive science, and primatology, among other related fields, and from the context of his stay in India from 1928-31, particularly with regard to his perspective on the megalithic culture of the Indian indigenous people. By going back to the cradle of the theory of Archaic religion before the influence of the Romanian Legionary Movement, the paper examines the possibility of overcoming the challenges of Eliade's viewpoints. In particular, this paper focuses on the Munda community of the Jharkhand state, an indigenous people in India that Eliade referred to as “the most ancient tribe,” and uses the case of a consecration ritual on gravestones to reveal the meaning of megalithic culture as inseparable from kinship and land ownership relations. Through this, the methodological significance of Eliade's “total hermeneutics,” which aims to “decipher and explicate every kind of encounter of man with the sacred, from prehistory to our day” is recaptured, and its potential to open up the history of religion since prehistory is examined.