  The characteristically Mīmāṃsaka claim that the Vedas are eternal can thus be understood to inform a pan-Sanskritic episteme such as lends itself to the sort of analysis that is characteristic of Pierre Bourdieu, according to whom “every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees and with very different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.” (Bourdieu 1977, 164) The enormous influence of philosophical projects such as Kumārila’s, that is, arguably had the effect of masking the specifically located and interested character particularly of Brahmanical claims to authority, giving historical and contingent claims the status that goes with their supposedly just reflecting the way things are. It is not unreasonable, then, to see in the success of Kumārila’s project a paradigm case of the kind of historical situation in which, as Bourdieu puts it, “the established cosmological and political order is perceived not as arbitrary, i.e. as one possible order among others, but as a self-evident and natural order which goes without saying and therefore goes unquestioned.” (ibid., 165–6) To that extent, Kumārila’s philosophy would seem readily to admit of the kind of ideology critique advanced, following Bourdieu, by Pollock.