Insight Editions · No. 184
On Hinduism
Wendy Doniger
Wendy Doniger’s essays examine Hindu traditions through their myths, texts, rituals, gods, bodies, gender, animals, and modern political controversies.
A study guide to On Hinduism by Wendy Doniger. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
Wendy Doniger's On Hinduism: . Collected essays on Hindu names, gods, bodies, gender, animals, and politics, written with myth-first irony and historical bite.
Essay collection map: contested Hinduisms
| Ch | Title | Gist |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction: Foreword into the Past | ~4581w |
| 2 | Hinduism by Any Other Name | ~2367w |
| 3 | Are Hindus Monotheists or Polytheists? | ~4159w |
| 4 | Three (or More) Forms of the Three (or Mor | ~5733w |
| 5 | The Concept of Heresy in Hinduism | ~14057w |
| 6 | Eating Karma | ~3256w |
| 7 | Medical and Mythical Constructions of the | ~3657w |
| 8 | Death and Rebirth in Hinduism | ~8911w |
| 9 | Forgetting and Re-awakening to Incarnation | ~3763w |
| 10 | Assume the Position: The Fight over the Bo | ~3685w |
| 11 | The Toleration of Intolerance in Hinduism | ~6290w |
| 12 | The Politics of Hinduism Tomorrow | ~2440w |
| 13 | Saguna and Nirguna Images of the Deity | ~2195w |
| 14 | You Can’t Get Here from There: The Logical | ~5276w |
| 15 | Together Apart: Changing Ethical Implicati | ~9413w |
| 16 | God’s Body, or, the Lingam Made Flesh: Con | ~6257w |
| 17 | Sacrifice and Substitution: Ritual Mystifi | ~11083w |
| 18 | The Scrapbook of Undeserved Salvation: The | ~9836w |
| 19 | Why Should a Brahmin Tell You Whom to Marr | ~4279w |
| 20 | Saranyu/Samjna: The Sun and the Shadow | ~8332w |
| 21 | The Clever Wife in Indian Mythology | ~6195w |
| 22 | Rings of Rejection and Recognition in Anci | ~5590w |
| 23 | The Third Nature: Gender Inversions in the | ~6527w |
| 24 | Bisexuality and Transsexuality Among the H | ~4753w |
| 25 | Transsexual Transformations of Subjectivit | ~7958w |
| 26 | The Control of Addiction in Ancient India | ~3012w |
| 27 | Reading the Kamasutra: It Isn’t All About | ~4160w |
| 28 | The Mythology of the Kamasutra | ~5987w |
| 29 | From Kama to Karma: The Resurgence of Puri | ~4182w |
| 30 | The Ambivalence of Ahimsa | ~6969w |
| 31 | Zoomorphism in Ancient India: Humans More | ~4943w |
| 32 | The Mythology of Horses in India | ~5759w |
| 33 | The Submarine Mare in the Mythology of Shi | ~9094w |
| 34 | Indra as the Stallion’s Wife | ~6491w |
| 35 | Dogs as Dalits in Indian Literature | ~5315w |
| 36 | Sacred Cows and Beefeaters | ~1975w |
| 37 | Impermanence and Eternity in Hindu Epic, A | ~6340w |
| 38 | Shadows of the Ramayana | ~6284w |
| 39 | Women in the Mahabharata | ~3877w |
| 40 | The History of Ekalavya | ~3378w |
| 41 | ‘I Have Scinde’: Orientalism and Guilt | ~3767w |
| 42 | Doniger O’Flaherty on Doniger | ~903w |
| 43 | You Can’t Make an Omelette | ~1523w |
| 44 | The Forest-dweller | ~795w |
| 45 | Appendix I: Limericks on Hinduism | ~483w |
| 46 | Appendix II: Essays on Hinduism by Wendy D | ~4037w |
Introduction: Foreword into the Past
'How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?' -E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927), chapter 5.
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FOREWORD INTO THE PAST
'How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?' -E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927), chapter 5. 'If I had to live my life again, I'd make all the same mistakes, only sooner.' -Tallulah Bankhead
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HOW I CAME TO STUDY HINDUISM
My heart always sinks when a stranger at a dinner party or a conference asks me, brightly, 'How did you [ever] get interested in the study of India?' as if this were some weird perversion that required an elaborate explanation. But perhaps the moment has finally come to answer this question properly, in the foreword to a book about India, and one of the world's great religions, that spans my entire academic life. It all began when I was about twelve years old, and my mother gave me a copy of E.M.
At a time when I was consumed by religious questions, Forster persuaded me (wrongly, I now know) that everyone in India was constantly thinking and talking about nothing but religion, and that they had the answers. I found a copy of Robert Hume's translation of the Upanishads, and was stunned by their beauty and wisdom. My mother also gave me Rumer Godden's The River and Mooltiki, and Aubrey Menen's wicked satire on the Ramayana, and Kipling's Just So Stories and Jungle Book and, later, Kim.
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She was an amateur Orientalist in her own way, and was crazy about Angkor Wat (which she pronounced, in the Viennese manner, Angkor Vat); she cherished her copy of the great four-volume work on the temples of Angkor published in 1930 by the École Française de l'Extrème Orient. All her life she wanted to visit those temples, and she finally did. When I went to live in India for a year, she came to visit me and went on by herself to see Angkor despite the rumbles of war (it was 1964), and when she was dying, thirty years later, she told me that that had been the high point of her whole life.
That old French book remained a kind of icon to me throughout my youth; when my mother died, it came to me, and it still holds for me the mystery and glamour that it had then. I passed it on (together with my mother's politics) to my son, Michael Lester O'Flaherty (born in 1971), who began his graduate study of the history of Southeast Asia at Cornell in 1995. And I finally visited Angkor Wat, too, just this past January of 2012.
But I'm getting ahead of my story. Barely into my teens, I discovered that I loved the glorious excess of things Indian: I preferred Indian painting, with its infinite detail, to Renaissance paintings; I preferred Indian temples, with their rococo carvings, to the great cathedrals of Europe, let alone the sleek Bauhaus that was admired in my day. I rebelled against the moderation and restraint of what was called 'good taste'-clothing of beige, mauve and basic black-and delighted in the reds and purples and oranges and yellows of Rajasthani silks and cottons.
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I liked Indian music, particularly the sarod, which moaned like a human voice as it slid from note to note, far better than Western music where every note had to fit into a rigid slot. My favourite food was Indian food, which I liked eating with my hand(s); I had always hated knives and forks. I watched Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955) more times than I can now remember; it was the most beautiful film I had ever seen.
But most of all, I loved Hindu mythology, the stories of the gods; I particularly loved the way that the stories were told and retold, over and over, each time differently. I had been, from very early childhood, enchanted by stories about other worlds, fairies and gods, a fact that is corroborated by a large portrait of me that my uncle, Harvey Haines, painted (badly) when I was just five years old: I'm holding a fairy tale castle, Disney-turreted and covered with swirls of oil paint patterned like Florentine endpapers, and I'm reading a book that begins, 'Once upon a time …' In high school I continued to flee from what I had come to regard as the excessive reality of the real world by studying Latin and, in unofficial sessions with my devoted Latin teacher, Anita Lilenfeld (now Seligson), ancient Greek.
She casually mentioned to me that Sanskrit, closely related to Greek and Latin, was the language of ancient India, which meant to me the language of A Passage to India (and, by extension, Angkor Wat). By then I was thoroughly hooked, and I chose to go to Radcliffe, rather than Swarthmore, largely because I could learn Sanskrit at Harvard. And so I began the study of Sanskrit as a seventeen-year-old freshman in 1958.
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Surely the long shadow of Angkor fell over me as I sat in the dusty little room at the top of Widener library, studying Sanskrit with Daniel H.H. He taught me not only Sanskrit but Indian literature, Indian history, Indian religion, and something else, harder to define, something about the pleasure of scholarship, the elegance of the written word, the luxury of the world of the mind. So I was trained as a Sanskritist.
But I was not a real Sanskritist; real Sanskritists (Ingalls was not at all typical) are cold-blooded pedants interested only in verbs and nouns, and I was a hot-blooded ex-ballet dancer still interested in stories. Real Sanskritists, on two continents, have been known to turn and leave a room when I entered it. I looked elsewhere for my intellectual nourishment.
I roomed with an anthropologist, Alice Kasakoff, whom the Radcliffe authorities had assigned to me on the very first day; in those times of unspoken quotas, Jewish girls somehow just seemed to end up with Jewish roommates. Alice introduced me to her colleagues (Vogt, Kluckholn, the Whitings, Beidelman, Mayberry-Lewis) and instilled in me an enduring admiration for anthropologists. I also, in the manner of old-fashioned Sanskritists and 'Orientalists', studied Greek with Zeph Stewart, Sterling Dow, John Finley and Adam Parry; English literature with Reuben Brower, William Alfred and Harry Levin; and folklore with Albert Lord.
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And when I moved to England, in 1965, it was again the anthropologists who supplied much of my intellectual nourishment-Evans-Pritchard and Rodney Needham in Oxford, Edmund Leach, Mary Douglas and Claude Levi-Strauss in Cambridge, London and Paris. But I was also sustained by the old Raj crowd (Penelope Chetwode Betjeman, Bill and Tim Archer, Stuart Piggott), even while I worked on a second dissertation with Robin Zaehner (who did know Sanskrit, but not as well as he knew Persian). In 1968, when Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (an anthropologist) wanted to hire me to teach in the School of Oriental and African Studies, where he was acting as Director, he found it impossible to sell me to the Sanskritists, and instead winkled me into the History Department, where Bernard Lewis welcomed me and protected me until I left England in 1975, for Berkeley.
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WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT
This is not a collection of all the essays I've written on Hinduism since I finished my Harvard dissertation in 1968, or even a selection of such essays. It started out to be that. Of the 324 essays I've published (as of autumn 2012), 140 are on Hinduism.
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From those 140, as I reread them, I selected 63 that I thought have something substantial or interesting to say about Hinduism for both the general reader and the scholar. (Of these 63 essays, seven were written under the name of Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, from 1968 to 1988, and 56 as Wendy Doniger, from 1989 to 2012.) The basic criterion of selection was to include only essays that never, in their entirety, became parts of books (though passing references to related books are sprinkled throughout, as the topic of an essay often spun off from a larger, broader discussion in a book).
I also excluded essays that were either deadly boring or dead wrong. (None were both, but in some cases I did cut out the boring or wrong parts of an otherwise salvageable essay.) Some essays that I included were unknown in the sense that they had been published in obscure places where I think only three or four people ever saw them. But I also added material never published before: a few limericks (I could not resist) and five new essays-a couple written for Festschrifts, paved with good intentions, that will probably never appear; others that had fallen into other sorts of unpublished limbos.
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I then condensed those 63 essays into the 43 chapters of this volume. This is a traditionally Indian way of producing a text: boiling down a large text into its essence in a smaller text, and then boiling down that smaller text into a still smaller essence, and so forth.i I had planned to arrange the final selection chronologically, write a brief introduction, and send it off. But it didn't turn out that way.
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As a publisher's daughter, I was born with a red pencil in my hand, which compels me, obsessively, to edit everything I read, no matter what: my students' papers, of course, but also (mentally) the New York Times, subtitles on Hindi films, recipes on cracker boxes, programme notes, everything. (For years I would shout at the opening credits of my favourite television programme, Star Trek, 'Boldly to go! Boldly to go!') So, naturally, I could not resist editing every other sentence as I worked through these essays.
At first, the corrections were trivial, as I updated the essays and tidied them up in the obvious, superficial ways: made the footnotes and endnotes consistent in style, revised the sexist language, removed the italics from dharma and karma (now regarded as English words). I reworded the translationsii in a few places, such as (in Manu) changing 'priest' back to 'Brahmin' where I should have left it in the first place. I simplified the Sanskrit transliteration and made it consistent, changed Ceylon to Sri Lanka, AD to CE, Untouchable to Dalit, Sepoy Mutiny to Great Rebellion.
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I cut out the references to 'today' and 'nowadays' and 'recently' in articles written a quarter century ago. But then I began to do a bit more. I had written all my other books for an American audience, primarily for my students.
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That was one reason why I was totally blindsided by the passionate Hindu response to my book The Hindus: An Alternative History: it hadn't occurred to me that Hindus would read it. I had figured, the Hindus already knew all about their own religion, or at least knew as much as they wanted to know, or in any case didn't want to learn anything more from an American woman (I was right about that last point, but in ways I had not foreseen).
I was therefore pleasantly surprised, at first, that Hindus read The Hindus, but then appalled that some of them read it so confrontationally, or did not read it at all but just parroted what others were saying about it. But now, for the first time, I designed a book specifically for an Indian audience. And so I took out allusions to things that might distract or puzzle an Indian reader, references to American trivia, TV programmes, Hollywood films, New York jokes.
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At first, I was sorry to see them go, particularly the jokes; but then I had to admit that the arguments really did read better without them.
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HOW THIS BOOK DIFFERS FROM THE ESSAYS FROM WHICH IT WAS CONSTRUCTED
At the same time, that invisible red pencil in my hand kept making me clarify the language in more significant ways, cutting some of the asides that now seemed irrelevant, revising myself the way I would revise my own students, changing passive constructions to active, clarifying referents, cutting adjectives, finding ways to say things better, trying to avoid long sentences with strings of clauses like this one. Gradually I started updating not only the language but the content. I started adding new things I had learned on each topic since first writing about it, new ideas, new facts, new sources I had discovered.
I cut out statements that I no longer believe to be true. I revised some of the basic assumptions that had changed in my thinking over the years. But I generally did not update the essays with references to new articles by other people on the subject; that really would have meant writing another, entirely different book.
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I contented myself with an attempt to clarify my own thinking in this book. As I rewrote and rearranged the essays, I found myself generating cross-referencesiii and moving pieces from one file to another, beginning with the first occurrence of essential definitions but then going on to texts, insights, generalizations, changing every single essay with reference to other essays. I cut out of many essays things that were explained better in other essays and citations of texts that were more fully translated in other essays.
And gradually it dawned on me that they were no longer essays but chapters, that I was developing an integrated argument in which the reader needed to have read certain chapters in order to understand other chapters. The separate essays had come together like the broken pot in those films that they run backwards, so that all the broken pieces jump up and form an unbroken pot. I had accidentally written a new book, about what I think about Hinduism now, not what I thought about Hinduism when I wrote the original essays.
It had 'just growed', like Topsy.iv And so I arranged the essays not chronologically but logically, like chapters; the chapters within each of the seven units are connected not nose to tail like elephants in a line but like rays of light shining from different angles upon a single object. Since the book 'just growed' like a banyan tree, the 'original' roots of many central chapters lie in other chapters, one chapter sprouting from roots in another. Some chapters are palimpsests; the chapter on intolerance, for instance, underwent major changes every few years.
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For readers interested in chronology, I have provided, in Appendix II, a list of the original 140 essays on Hinduism, showing when each began, though not when it was finished. There are discernible differences between the early and later essays. There were, to begin with, superficial differences of style and format.
The old essays used the more technical transliteration (Siva, Kali), which I shed in the new ones (Shiva, Kali) and in this book. Some, mostly the older articles, are bristling with endnotes;v some, mostly the later ones, are based on newspaper or journal articles or public lectures that were written for a general audience, and these do not have as much documentation as an academic essay would have. But there were also more significant changes.
As I read through the older essays, the dial on my ego ricocheted wildly back and forth between 'How much I knew then that I've forgotten now' and 'How badly I wrote'. Looking back at the early essays, I am amazed at the density of the data, text after text after text, but generally I find them rather tedious, a bit light on analysis or ideas about the texts; still, some of them are impressive in a mindless, brutal sort of way, flashy with scholastic pyrotechnics.
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Were I to write some of the older articles from scratch today, I probably would not have the patience to pore over quite so many arcane Vedic and Puranic texts, nor would I quote quite so many late nineteenth-century British and German Indologists. In revising, I changed the data-rich articles less than the others, as the data remained pretty much the same for most articles, but even there the framing opinions changed; some softened, others hardened. Nowadays I would also pay far more attention to the historical context of each version of each myth, and to the social significance of the ideas embedded in them.
The early essays are more interested in texts, the later ones in people. The older essays are content to examine into the past; the newer ones are on topics more explicitly relevant to contemporary issues such as gender and race. The early essays on Manu focus on what he said about women, not about caste; only later did I find the question of caste central to my work.
So, too, I used the purusha sukta at first just as a myth of cosmic creation; only later did I value it as a myth of the origin of the class system.
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WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT
Despite these differences among essays written at different times, there are strong continuities throughout the book, as I kept coming back to certain themes and texts that remained central to my thinking. Not surprisingly, there is a lot about women and about animals; more surprisingly, there is also a lot about heresy and dharma and karma. In general, I chose to write about what other scholars were not writing about and to write about texts that were not saying what other texts of their time were saying, about authors who were out of step with their times as I am often out of step with mine, who shared my desire to go against the grain (pratiloma, 'against the hair', as the Sanskrit term so nicely puts it) of current opinion.
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I kept trying to point out things that contradict what most people believe about Hinduism. This concern for people who bucked the system, who swam upstream against the current, is there from the start, in the 1971 essay on heresy. Antinomianism calls the shots-theologically, in the early essays, and politically and socially, in the later ones.
Even my choice of texts to work on was, in its time, Bolshy. As an undergraduate at Radcliffe, 1958-62, I discovered the Puranas, anonymous texts on traditional themes more narrative than philosophical, written in a simple, often pretty bad Sanskrit. Now, at that time, serious Sanskritists disdained the Puranas as the pulp fiction of ancient India.
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The only people who paid any attention to the Puranas were the few wrongheaded historians who tried (in vain) to use them to construct ancient Indian political history. For my undergraduate dissertation, I compared the story of the conflict between Shiva and Kama as it appeared in the poet Kalidasa's Kumarasambhava and in the Shiva Purana. My preference for the Puranic versions of the myth of Shiva and Kama over the 'courtly' literary version horrified my Sanskrit professor, Ingalls, an old-style Virginia gentleman who had exquisitely refined tastes; it was as if I had expressed a preference for Elvis Presley over Mozart.
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But I knew I had found my métier, a literary goldmine, a world of rich and neglected texts that would continue to be my primary sources, increasingly supplemented, as time went by, by the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.vi Each of the seven sections in this book treats of a single theme. The first is about the nature of Hinduism. It begins by defining what Hinduism is ('Hinduism by Any Other Name'), particularly its pluralism ('Are Hindus Monotheists or Polytheists?', 'Three (or More) Forms of the Three (or More)-Fold Path in Hinduism', 'The Concept of Heresy in Hinduism').
Then it explores several of the enduring central themes of Hinduism, all of which involve karma ('Eating Karma'), birth ('Medical and Mythical Constructions of the Body in Sanskrit Texts'), death ('Death and Rebirth in Hinduism') and rebirth ('Forgetting and Re-awakening to Incarnation'). It ends with threats to Hindu pluralism ('Assume the Position: The Fight over the Body of Yoga', 'The Toleration of Intolerance in Hinduism', 'The Politics of Hinduism Tomorrow'). The second section explores concepts of divinity: the material and immaterial aspects of god ('Saguna and Nirguna Images of the Deity'); the changing role of the gods in creation ('You Can't Get Here From There: The Logical Paradox of Hindu Creation Myths', 'Together Apart: Changing Ethical Implications of Hindu Cosmologies') and in sacrifice ('Sacrifice and Substitution: Ritual Mystification and Mythical Demystification in Hinduism'); disputes over the sexual nature of god ('God's Body, or, the Lingam Made Flesh: Conflicts over the Representation of Shiva') and the grace of god ('The Scrapbook of Undeserved Salvation: The Kedara Khanda of the Skanda Purana').
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Section three considers Hindu attitudes to gender, beginning with Manu's attitude to women in general ('Why Should a Brahmin Tell You Whom to Marry?: A Deconstruction of The Laws of Manu') and then looking at stories about several individual females: a goddess who flees from her husband ('Saranyu-Samjna: The Sun and the Shadow'), a Brahmin woman rejected by her husband ('The Clever Wife in Indian Mythology') and a forest-girl seduced and abandoned by a king ('Rings of Rejection and Recognition in Ancient India'). The question of gender is then addressed by essays on several transgressive forms of sexuality: homosexuality and gender-bending ('The Third Nature: Gender Inversions in the Kamasutra'), bisexuality and transsexuality ('Bisexuality and Transsexuality Among the Hindu Gods', 'Transsexual Transformations of Memory and Subjectivity in Hinduism').
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The fourth section deals with desire and the control of desire in Hinduism, beginning with the problem ('The Control of Addiction in Ancient India') and going on to consider the social context of desire ('Reading the Kamasutra: It Isn't All About Sex'), its mythologization ('The Mythology of the Kamasutra') and finally its transformation in history ('From Kama to Karma: The Resurgence of Puritanism in Contemporary India'). Animals, in section five, are taken not as subjects in their own right but as metaphors and keys to the understanding of philosophical and sociological concepts central to Hinduism: the attempt to come to terms with violence ('The Ambivalence of Ahimsa'), the bestial aspects of human nature ('Zoomorphism in Ancient India: Humans More Bestial than the Beasts'), the transformation of political and economic subjugation into theological power ('The Mythology of Horses in India'), the fear of women overlapping with the fear of cosmic destruction ('The Submarine Mare in the Mythology of Shiva'), the tension between miscegenation and incest ('Indra as the Stallion's Wife'), the persecution of Dalits ('Dogs as Dalits in Indian Literature'), and the rise of Hindu supremacy in India ('Sacred Cows and Beefeaters').
Section six considers the question of reality and illusion, the impermanent and the eternal, in the two great Sanskrit Epics. The general consideration of these themes in the Mahabharata and in the visual arts and performance ('Impermanence and Eternity in Hindu Epic, Art and Performance') leads to a more specific analysis of doubles and shadows ('Shadows of the Ramayana'), of women who challenge Hindu patriarchy ('Women in the Mahabharata') and the gradual emergence of a submerged expression of conscience about the treatment of the lower castes ('The History of Ekalavya').
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Finally, four short pieces of autobiography discuss the author's debt to Orientalism ('"I Have Scinde": Orientalism and Guilt'), her agreement with her imagined academic critics ('Doniger O'Flaherty on Doniger'), her clash with her Hindu critics ('You Can't Make an Omelette') and her coming to terms with her life and work ('The Forest-dweller').
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO FRIENDS LIVING AND DEAD
Looking back over what I wrote over forty-four years was like drowning and watching my life pass before my eyes. The ghosts rose up before me, the colleagues I learned so much from, friends whose ideas became a part of my life. Even the bibliographic citations stirred up, like Proust's madeleines of Combray, the ghosts of the books I had read in the old, old days; their titles transported me back to the Bodleian Library, the old India Office, the Indian Institute in Oxford, the stacks of Widener, the godown of Firma K.L.
I could smell the sweet, dusty odour of the old books, with the brown pages that threatened to crumble into powder, each page breaking off the minute I turned it, or the wide, unbound sheets of the Sanskrit texts. I've always written easily and joyously, because I've always assumed that the people who read what I wrote would be on my side, would go the extra mile to meet me when my writing was inadequate, would get the jokes, groan at the puns, be struck with wonder at the amazing stories I had found.
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The reader I have always carried around in my head, even now long after his death in 1971, is my father, who was, as I have said, a publisher. He read every word I wrote, carefully and wisely and generously, and gave me detailed, constructive feedback. He was my ideal reader: someone highly intelligent and erudite but without special knowledge about India, and who wanted to understand and to like what I wrote.
After him came other publishers and editors who became friends and mentors, first the great Betty Radice at Penguin Classics, then Phil Lilienthal in California and Morris Philipson in Chicago. I've never understood the feelings of so many of my writer friends who regard authors and publishers as natural enemies, like snakes and mongooses. All my life I've depended on the kindness of publishers.
After the attacks on me on the Internet, particularly after the publication of The Hindus,vii I almost lost my old sense of trust in my readers, and for a while I actually thought I would stop writing about India altogether; I had other books planned, on other subjects-a novel, a memoir of my mother, and so forth. But I began to waver when I read emails of appreciation from a number of Indian readers and when I saw the sales of The Hindus continue so vigorously in India.
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And then along came Ravi Singh, whom I had gotten to know and to admire when he had edited The Hindus for the edition of Penguin India. Ravi came up with the idea for this book, talked me into doing it, and worked closely with me on it from the very start. He was always on my side; he read my work carefully and appreciatively, got the jokes, encouraged me.
But he also had a sharp eye for what might be offensive, called me to attention when I got careless, asked for examples and expansions when I was vague, caught repetitions and overlaps that I had not noticed, saw opportunities for connections that I had not seen. I could never have written On Hinduism without him. I dedicate this book, which is in a way the book of my books, to him, and to all my other publishers, beginning with my dad.
Hinduism by Any Other Name
'But it isn't a Hedgehog, and it isn't a Tortoise' [said the young Painted Jaguar]. 'It's a little bit of both, and I don't know its proper name.' 'Nonsense!' said Mother Jaguar.
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HINDUISM BY ANY OTHER NAME1
'But it isn't a Hedgehog, and it isn't a Tortoise' [said the young Painted Jaguar]. 'It's a little bit of both, and I don't know its proper name.' 'Nonsense!' said Mother Jaguar. I should call it "Armadillo" till I found out the real one.
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And I should leave it alone.' -Rudyard Kipling, 'The Beginning of the Armadillos', in Just So Stories (1902) For the past few decades, scholars have raised several and strong objections to the use of any single term to denote one of the world's major and most ancient faiths. The name 'Hinduism' that we now use is of recent and European construction. But it is Eurocentric to assume that when Europeans made the name they made the game.
'Hinduism' (dare I use the 'H' word, and may I stop holding up my hands for mercy with quotation marks?) is, like the armadillo, part hedgehog, part tortoise. Yet there are armadillos, and they were there before they had names. I would like to suggest some ways in which the disparate parts of what we call Hinduism have in fact existed for centuries, cheek by jowl, in a kind of fluid suspension.
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It is true that before the British began to categorize communities strictly by religion, few people in India defined themselves exclusively through their religious beliefs; their identities were segmented on the basis of locality, language, caste, occupation and sect. Even today, despite attempts by extreme right-wing groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the more mainstream Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to 'Hinduize' India, most people in the country would define themselves by allegiances other than their religion.
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There is, after all, no Hindu canon; ideas about all the major issues of faith and lifestyle-vegetarianism, nonviolence, belief in rebirth, even caste-are subjects of debate, not dogma. And yet, if we look carefully, there are shared ideas, practices and rituals that not only connect the diverse people generally called 'Hindus' today, but also link the people who composed and lived by the Vedas in northwest India around 1500 BCE with the Hare Krishna converts dancing in the streets of twenty-first-century New York.
It is not, however, a simple matter of listing things that 'all Hindus' believe or, even, that 'all Hindus' do: there are no such things.
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This polythetic Venn diagram might be further grouped into sectors of different colours-one for beliefs or practices that some Hindus share with Buddhists and Jains, another largely confined to Hindu texts in Sanskrit (the ancient literary language of India), a third more characteristic of popular worship and practice, and so forth. But since there is no single central quality that all Hindus must have, the emptiness in the centre suggests that the figure might better be named a Zen diagram, a Venn diagram that has no central ring.
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Among the many advantages of the cluster approach is the fact that it does not endorse any single authoritative view of what Hinduism is; it allows them all. In addition to this cluster of beliefs and concepts that may help us define Hinduism, however loosely, there are other markers of Hindu identity that can be useful, such as sacred and classical texts shared among different linguistic groups, class and caste, and geography. The majority of people in India (approximately seventy-six per cent) speak an Indo-European language derived from the language believed to have been brought into the subcontinent by the Indo-European people.ii Dravidian-language speakers account for twenty-two per cent, and the remaining two per cent are taken up by Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman and tribal languages.
However, while these linguistic groups have different origins, all of the linguistic traditions in India-Sanskritiii and vernacular, liturgical and secular, as well as the Sanskrit-based languages of north India and the Tamil-based languages of the south-have culturally influenced one another. We use the concept of 'intertextuality' to describe the ways in which these different groups refer to, or implicitly assume knowledge of, a corpus of shared oral and written texts. The Ramayana, for instance, and the Mahabharata were first recorded in Sanskrit but have been retold-both written down and orally performed-in Tamil, Bangla and most of the other languages of India.
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And the people who share these texts did have ways of referring to themselves long before they called themselves 'Hindu'. The term 'Hindu' was coined in opposition to other religions, but this self-definition through otherness began centuries before there was contact with Europeans (or, indeed, with Muslims). All of us identify who we are in contrast with who we are not, and the 'who we are not' changes all the time.
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In the earliest preserved text of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, the people who referred to themselves as 'we' defined themselves in contrast with the 'aliens' or 'slaves', who spoke non-Indo-European languages, had dark skin and blunt features, and had been in possession of the Indian subcontinent before the Indo-Europeans (the 'Aryans') entered it from, most probably, Central Asia. But Hindu identity is complicated by the detailed, fluid interplay of caste and class by which Hindu society came to define and hierarchize itself.
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The largest 'not-us' group comprised the castes of people once called Untouchables, now called Dalits, whose deep-rooted pariah status was reinforced by their performing jobs, such as scavenging and sweeping cremation grounds, that higher-caste Hindus, 'the twice-born', did not do. Others in the 'not-us' category included Buddhists, Jains, various sorts of hereticsvii and most foreigners (mlechas). But there were also ways in which the 'us' group attempted to define who they were (as against who they were not).
Our word 'Hindu' originates in the geographical feature of the Indus River. It comes from a word for 'river' (Sindhu) that Herodotus (in the fifth century BCE4), the Persians (in the fourth century BCE), and the Arabs (after the eighth century CE5) used to refer to everyone who lived beyond the great river of the northwest of the subcontinent, still known locally as the Sindhu and in Europe as the Indus.viii It was an outsider's name for the people who inhabited the territory around the Indus River.
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It is not uncommon for one culture to take from another a word to designate a concept for which the original culture had a concept but not a word. Most Hindus still define themselves by geography. But it is not just the word but the very concept of Hindus and Hinduism that is geographically rooted in history.
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Are Hindus Monotheists or Polytheists?
ARE HINDUS MONOTHEISTS OR POLYTHEISTS?1 The wise speak of what is One in many ways. -Rig Veda 1.164.46 Right from the beginning, Hindu texts and practices tell of the simultaneous existence of polytheism and a broader belief in the ultimate oneness of the divine-not exactly monotheism, but a unitary substratum supporting a vigorous polytheism.
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ON HINDUISM
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The answer to this paradox lies in the history of Hinduism. To the question, 'Is Hinduism monotheistic or polytheistic?' the best answer is, 'Yes' (which is actually the answer to most either/or questions about Hinduism). Not only have elements of both theologies been woven through Hindu texts for thousands of years, but different factions have argued passionately for one view and against the other during this entire period, and the issue still raises Hindu hackles today.
The force of the passion comes from the political issues that have often driven this question, particularly since the time of the British Raj and now again in the Age of the Internet.
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KATHENOTHEISM IN THE RIG VEDA
Hindu texts began with the Rig Veda ('Knowledge of Verses'), composed in northwest India around 1500 BCE; the first of the three Vedas, it is the earliest extant text composed in Sanskrit, the language of ancient India. At first glance, it would seem to be unequivocally polytheistic: there are certainly many gods. Indra is the king of the gods and the god of rain (much like his Greek and Roman cousins Zeus and Jupiter); Varuna the god of the heavenly vault and moral law (related to the Greek Ouranos); Agni the god of fire (cf.
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the Latin ignis, and the English 'ignite'); and so forth. Vividly anthropomorphized, these gods are like us, in fact, more so, and understand our appetites and desires since they want what we do-things like physical love, wealth, fame and praise. Each individual worshipper would know, and might use, several different poems to different gods.
Always, there was an awareness of the multiplicity of the gods. At time of war or drought, for instance, one prayed to Indra; and in a sacrifice, one invoked Agni (the sacrificial fire). We can detect in the Veda both what might be called internal polytheism (one person worshipping several gods) and communal polytheism (several people worshipping several gods and respecting, or at the very least acknowledging the existence of, one another's gods).
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But the polytheism of Vedic religion sometimes functioned as a kind of serial monotheism that the Vedic scholar Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900) named 'henotheism' or 'kathenotheism', the worship of a number of gods, one at a time, regarding each as the supreme, or even the only, god while one is talking to him. Thus, one Rig Vedic poem will praise a god and chalk up to his account the credit for separating heaven and earth, propping them apart with a pillar,i but another Vedic poem will use the same words to praise another god: To the unknown creator: 'He by whom the awesome sky and the earth were made firm, by whom the dome of the sky was propped up …' [10.121.5] To Soma: 'He who is the pillar of the sky …' [9.74.2] To Tvastri: 'He measured apart the two item of space … and fixed them in place with undecaying pillars.' [1.160.4] To Varuna: 'He stretched out the middle field of space … placed the sun in the sky.' [5.85.2] To Vishnu: 'Vishnu, who has measured apart the item of the earth, who propped up the upper dwell-place.' [1.154.1] In addition, each god would have characteristics and deeds that were his alone: no one but Indra kills the demonic serpent of drought (Vritra), for instance.
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Bearing in mind the way in which the metaphor of adultery has traditionally been used by monotheistic religions to stigmatize polytheism ('whoring after other gods'), and used by later Hinduism to characterize the love of god (as in the Bengali tradition of Krishna and Radha), we might regard this attitude as a kind of theological parallel to serial monogamy, or, if you prefer, open hierogamos: 'You, Indra, are the only god I've ever worshipped; you are the only one.' 'You, Varuna, are the only god I've ever worshipped; you are the only one.' 'You, Draupadi, are the only woman I've ever loved; you are the only one.' 'You, Subhadra [or Chitrangada, or Ulupi], are the only woman I've ever loved; you are the only one.' This made possible a kind of non-hierarchical pantheon; the attitude to each god was hierarchical ('You are the best'), but the various competing claims of supremacy cancelled one another out, so that the total picture was one of equality: each of several was the best. The idea of 'the [only] one' as applied to several different members of a polytheistic pantheon also appears in some of the later verses of the Rig Veda: 'They call it Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni, and it is the heavenly bird that flies.
The wise speak of what is One in many ways; they call it Agni, Yama, Matarishvan.' [1.164.46]2 And 'The One' is neuter, not male nor female: ekam sad vipra bahu vadanti. Neuter, like brahman (the impersonal Absolute).
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VEDANTIC MONISM
The Atharva Veda too, a fourth Veda composed around 900 BCE, asked how many gods there might be: 'Who and how many were those gods who fastened together the chest and neck of the Primeval Male?ii How many fixed his breasts? How many joined together his ribs and shoulders?' [10.2.4] To this polytheism question ('How many?') of the Atharva Veda, the Upanishads, philosophical texts composed from around the fifth century BCE, suggested a different answer. The gods were often called 'The Thirty-Three'.
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'Thou art that [tat tvam asi]', the Upanishads insist. The doctrine of the Upanishads is also sometimes characterized as pantheism (in which God is everything and everything is God) or, at times, panentheism (in which God encompasses and interpenetrates the universe but at the same time is greater than and independent of it). And as the Upanishads are 'the end of the Vedas' (Vedanta), Upanishadic philosophy is also called Vedanta.
These Vedantic doctrines view the very substance of the universe as divine, and view that substance and that divinity as unitary. The vague monism of the Vedas was, thus, sharpened by the more systematized Vedantic monism of the Upanishads. The term 'Vedanta' later came to be applied to the philosophy of Non-Dualism (that is, the doctrine that there is no distinction between the soul and brahman), particularly with respect to the Shaiva philosopher Shankara (788-820 CE), whose teachings may have been buoyed by a need to respond to the monotheist philosophies of the great proselytizing religion, Islam, which arrived in India around the middle of the seventh century CE.
(Shankara's competitors argued that he championed monism because he was so stupid that he could only count to one.4) Vedantic monism stands in contrast both with Vedic polytheism and with the sort of monotheism that posits a single deity with consciousness and/or a physical form, like some of the deities of the medieval bhakti (devotional) movement. That sort of monotheism, unlike most other forms of Hinduism, did (and does) actively proselytize, and could be doctrinaire, even violently persuasive, at times. The South Indian bhakti authors even mocked their own proselytizing: A Shaiva saint was a great proselytizer.
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He converted those of this world by any means whatever-love, money, brute force. One day Shiva came down in disguise to test him, but the devotee did not recognize Shiva and proceeded to convert him, forcing holy ash on the reluctant-seeming god. When his zeal became too oppressive, Shiva tried to tell him who he was, but the baptism of ash was still forced on him.
Even Shiva had to become a Shaiva.5
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PURANIC POLYTHEISM
But monism and polytheism, growing up side by side as they did in ancient India, learned to live together, to grant one another's existence. Monists acknowledged the reality of the gods of the pantheon but accorded them a secondary, illusory status in comparison with the enduring, real status of the underlying monistic being. Thus the many gods of the Hindu pantheon were often grouped under a monistic umbrella, so that all gods are said to be aspects of one particular god (sometimes Vishnu, sometimes Shiva) or, more often, aspects of the universal, ineffable brahman.
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At other times, individual, effable gods are said to be the manifestations of the true god that is 'without qualities' (nir-guna), but the manifestations are 'with qualities' (sa-guna)-with names, adventures, distinct appearances.iii All of these theological variations, and many more, appear in the Puranas, the encyclopaedic medieval Sanskrit (and later vernacular) texts that expound the myths, rituals and philosophies of sectarian Hinduism. Here we encounter the several avatars (incarnations) of Vishnu, which make Vishnu a kind of walking one-god polytheism; he appears as a fish, as a boar, as half-lion-half-man, as various human beings (Rama, Krishna, even the Buddha), most of which were originally individual deities who later became absorbed into the over-arching figure of Vishnu.
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And Bengalis and Tamils will berate their god if he fails to answer their pleas, and often they will say; 'If you don't come through for me, I will worship another god.' They're joking, but even to be able to say it reveals a profoundly polytheistic turn of mind.
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MONISM AND UNIVERSALISM UNDER THE MUSLIMS AND THE BRITISH
Eventually, the monistic view of the universal brahman turned itself inside out to generate another sort of universalism: it argued not only that all physical and immaterial things were one, but that all religions were essentially the same, or, as it were, one-that Muslims and Christians really worshipped the same god that Hindus worshipped, but just called him Allah or Christ. (An early seed of this belief may be seen in Krishna's much-quoted line from the Bhagavad Gita [9.13]: 'Even those who are devotees of other gods and sacrifice to them with faith, they too worship me,' though those who quote this line often fail to cite the final clause: '-but in the wrong way.') This idea took on new meaning and power in twelfth-century India, when Sufism (a mystical form of Islam) proclaimed that Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians (called Parsis in India) and Hindus were all striving towards the same goal and that the outward observances that kept them apart were false.
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Such a move had obvious political motives, of course, in a country where interreligious tensions were already in evidence, but it also expressed a genuine mystic view of universalism. The Mughal emperor Akbar (1542-1605) sponsored religious debates between different Muslim groups (Sunni, Shia and Ismaili, as well as Sufis), Parsis, Hindus (devotees of Shiva and of Vishnu), Sikhs, Jains, Jews, Jesuits and Materialists, but he was particularly partial to Sufism. He proclaimed that 'the wisdom of Vedanta is the wisdom of Sufism',8 thus further universalizing the two great universalizing religions by equating (which is to say universalizing) them.
The Jesuits misunderstood his pluralism and thought they had converted him; they sent joyous messages back to Rome: the emperor of India has become a Christian! But then, alas, they saw him going into a mosque. Horrified, they asked him, was he not a Christian?
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Of course, he said; but I'm also a Muslim. He could encompass them, but they could not encompass him. When the British took over India from the Mughals, they too entered the arena where polytheism, monism and universalism were duking it out.
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The officers and missionaries under the British Raj-who were, by and large, not just Protestants but Victorian Protestants-regarded polytheism as just one more form of Oriental excess: all those arms, all those heads-all those gods! Moreover, Hindu polytheism reminded them of Catholicism (which Hinduism resembles uncannily in many ways)-all those saints, all those relics. European translations of Indian religious texts in the eighteenth century had included a fraudulent document: the so-called 'Ezourvedam' (presumably a corruption of Yajur Veda, the second Veda), a French text in the form of a dialogue between two Vedic sages, one monotheist and one polytheist, who find that the monotheism of 'pristine Hinduism' points to Christian truth.
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Some Protestants within the British Raj tried to recast Hinduism as a monotheism, with a Bible: the Bhagavad Gita. By positioning the Gita as the Hindu Bible, the British also validated the worship of Krishna/Vishnu as a form of monotheism. But focusing on this single text ignored not only the many other texts in which other gods, such as Shiva, were similarly represented as the one and only god, but other parts of the very text in which the Gita occurs, the Mahabharata, in which Shiva and other gods reveal their powers.
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Moreover, the Gita had never had anything remotely approaching canonical status before this, though it had always been an important text. Other texts-Sanskrit texts like the Upanishads and vernacular texts such as the Hindi and Tamil version of the Ramayana, and, most of all, oral traditions-were what most Hindus actually used in their worship. The British exclusionary focus on the Gita, and on Krishna/Vishnu, amounted to mistaking kathenotheistic polytheism for monistic monotheism.
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But they could not kill it; indeed, most of the rank-and-file Hindus remained as pluralistic and polytheistic as ever. The highly Anglicized Indian elite, however, developed new forms of Hinduism heavily influenced by British Protestantism. The key figure in this movement was Rammohan Roy (1772-1833), who cast aside the polytheistic Hinduism of his family and turned to monotheism instead.
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His intense belief in strict monotheism and his aversion to Puranic Hinduism (small shrines in the house, temple worship, pilgrimage) began early. It was derived from a combination of monistic elements of Hinduism and Islam (he had studied the Qu'ran as well as the Vedas and the Upanishads) and, later, eighteenth-century Deism (belief in a transcendent Creator god reached through reason), Unitarianism (belief in god's essential oneness), and the ideas of the Freemasons (a secret fraternity that espoused some Deistic concepts).
In 1804, he published a tract in Persian, A Gift to Monotheists. Influenced by the Islamic idea of the absolute unity of god, he began issuing critiques of the polytheism of the Hindus and searching Hindu texts for traces of monotheism, trying to prove that textual references to polytheism ('idolatry') were purely allegorical whereas references to an overarching Supreme Deity were the essential nexus of Hinduism. His beliefs were further fuelled by his realization that the colonial government viewed Hindu customs alternately with abhorrence (Vedic polytheism) and fascination (Vedantic monism), and by his desire to rebut the scathing critiques of the missionaries.
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NEO-VEDANTA IN AMERICA
A related form of Neo-Vedanta was carried to Europe and America in 1893, at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. The great sensation at the Parliament was Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), a disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836-86). Ramakrishna, a devotee of Kali at the temple of Dakshineshvar, north of Kolkata (Calcutta), was not a member of the Brahmo Samaj but attracted a different sort of educated lay follower.
His studies and visions had led him to conclude that 'all religions are true' but that the religion of each person's own time and place was the best expression of the truth for that person. He gave educated Hindus a basis on which they could justify their religion to an Indian consciousness increasingly influenced by Western values. Vivekananda, Ramakrishna's disciple, was the first in a long line of proselytizing gurus who exported the ideals of reformed Hinduism to America and, in turn, brought back American ideas that became infused into Indian Vedanta.
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This was in part a response to changes in American immigration policy from 1965 on, allowing far more Hindus to come to America, and to bring their families with them. It was also the age of the Hindu Hippie Heaven. In 1965, in Los Angeles, A.C.
Bhaktivedanta (Prabhupada) founded the Hare Krishna movement, officially known as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). In 1974, followers of Swami Muktananda established the Siddha Yoga Dharma Associates (SYDA) Foundation. In 1981, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later Osho) moved his headquarters from Pune (Poona) to Oregon.
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At this time, the overwhelmingly male, self-conscious form of Hinduism, from Vivekananda through the middle of the twentieth century, began to be supplemented by a more female, uninhibited form of Hinduism, as Hindu men brought their wives with them. The women imported a diverse and ritual-oriented Hinduism, a private, individual Hinduism, a counterweight to the largely philosophical content of American Hinduism until then. And female gurus began to appear, too.
FUNDAMENTALISM AND DIVERSITY IN INDIA
In our day, as fundamentalism raised its ugly head among the major monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), Hinduism in India caught it too. The movement known as Hindutva ('Hindu-ness'), while protesting that it is a reaction against European pressures, actually apes Protestant evangelical strategies, including fundamentalist agendas. Its hatred is directed not only against Hindus of the more diverse traditions-the ones that the British, and Rammohan Roy, taught the Hindus to despise-but also, ironically, against the very monotheisms (Islam and Christianity) that nurtured the Hindu insistence that Hinduism is monotheistic.
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Monotheism and polytheism are not mutually incompatible. Hindus are both monotheists and polytheists.
Three (or More) Forms of the Three (or More)-Fold Path in Hinduism
When King Pururavas went from earth to heaven to see Indra, the king of the gods, he saw Dharma (religion/duty) and the other human goals, Kama (pleasure) and Artha (power), embodied. As he approached them, he ignored the other two but paid homage to Dharma, walking around him in a circle to the right.
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THE HISTORY OF TRIADS IN INDIA
When King Pururavas went from earth to heaven to see Indra, the king of the gods, he saw Dharma (religion/duty) and the other human goals, Kama (pleasure) and Artha (power), embodied. The other two, unable to put up with this slight, cursed him.
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Because Kama had cursed him, he was separated from his wife, Urvashi, and longed for her in her absence. When he had managed to put that right, then, because Artha had cursed him, he became so excessively greedy that he stole from all four social classes. The Brahmins, who were upset because they could no longer perform the sacrifice or other rituals without the money he had stolen from them, took blades of sharp sacrificial grass in their hands and killed him.
This story was told by the commentator Yashodhara in the thirteenth century, to explain the very first line of the third-century Kamasutra:i 'We bow to dharma, artha and kama'. This means, Yashodhara says: 'The three goals of human life are the three divinities in charge of this work; if they were not divinities it would not be right to bow to them. And there is textual evidence that they are in fact divinities.' This text shows us how very important this triad-and, as we shall see, triads in general-are in Hindu intellectual history.
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'Three' was a kind of shorthand for 'lots and lots'; the number three, in Sanskrit, signifies both 'plural' and 'complete'. These triads represented the multivalent, varied, multiform, multi-whatever-you-like nature of the real phenomenal world. Other religions, too, of course, had their trinities, but Hinduism used the concept of the triad in a particularly pervasive way, to produce a consistent, popularly recognized scaffolding on which to organize the otherwise unimaginably chaotic richness of Hindu conceptual thought.
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It is probably significant that guna and dosha in combination mean 'virtues and faults', a dichotomy of moralization that was to prove useful for the formation of hierarchical judgements within the triads, for hierarchy was, as we will see, an essential organizing principle of Hindu thought. Another major triad in Hinduism, which was later to prove unstable in ways that we will consider at some length, is that of the three human goals or purusharthas (also called the triple path or trivarga) that the Kamasutra invokes: dharma, artha and kama.
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For assonance, one might call them piety, profit and pleasure, or society, success and sex, or duty, domination and desire. (Dharma, in a sense the most central goal, is famously difficult to translate; it includes duty, religion, religious merit, morality, social obligations, the law, justice and so forth.) Every human being was said to have a right to all three of these goals, to have a full life; in addition, each individual was also supposed to follow a unique path laid out for him at birth, a path determined primarily by his caste-the social class into which he was born.
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(I use the male pronoun advisedly; these rules were not meant to apply to women.) Each person had his own particular dharma, his svadharma. Sanskrit texts were devoted to each of the three human goals. There are many texts devoted to dharma, but only one to artha-the Arthashastra, or textbook on politics-and one to kama-Vatsyayana's Kamasutra-survive from the earliest period.
Clearly, dharma was both more important and more complex than artha or kama. The Arthashastra is generally attributed to Kautilya ('Crooked'), the minister of the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta in the fourth century BCE, but it was completed in the early centuries of the Common Era, perhaps by 200 CE. The Arthashastra is a compendium of advice for a king, and though it is often said to be Machiavellian, Kautilya makes Machiavelli look like Mother Teresa.
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In addition to much technical information on the running of a kingdom, the Arthashastra contains a good deal of thought on the subject of human psychology. The Kamasutra was probably composed around 300 CE and is attributed to a man named Mallanaga Vatsyayana, about whom we know virtually nothing. The Laws of Manu (in Sanskrit, the Manava Dharmashastra or Manu-smriti, and informally known as Manu, probably composed around 100 CE) is by far the best known of the many dharma texts.iii It is attributed to Manu, but that is almost certainly a pseudonym.
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There are other enduring triads basic to Hindu thinking, such as the three debts that every man traditionally owed-study to the sages, funeral offerings to the ancestors and sacrifice to the gods; the trinity of the gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva (a false construction, since Brahma was never worshipped like the other two); mind, body and speech; the three 'times'-past, present and future; and many others. And each of these triadic systems of classification may be applied on three major levels: the cosmos (which may be, as we shall see, further divided into three worlds), the chain of being on earth (which was divided into three or more classes) and the human body (divided into various members).
Like the gunas and the doshas, these triads remained stable for ever; that is, they were never squared, as were the human goals and other paradigmatic triads that we will soon encounter. Indeed, their resistance to quadripartition is one of the props of the argument that triads, rather than quartets, are the basis of Hindu thinking. But this argument doesn't always hold.
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THE TRIADS OF MATTER IN MANU
It has been argued that all the other Hindu triads are constituted by implicit reference to the three basic qualities of matter itself, the strands or gunas. The Bhagavad Gita, the metaphysical dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna composed after the Sankhya texts and dependent upon them for its typology, presents the version by which the theory of the strands is best known today. It speaks of the triad of knowledge (jnana), action (karma) and actor (kartri), and within each of them it further differentiates three levels: three kinds of knowledge, three kinds of karma and three kinds of actors.
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Know that the mind-and-heart sets in motion the body's (action) here on earth, which is of three kinds and has three bases and ten distinctive marks.iv The three kinds of mental action are: thinking too much about things that belong to others, meditating in one's mind-and-heart about what is undesirable and adhering to falsehoods.v The four kinds of speech (acts) are verbal abuse, lies, slander of all sorts and unbridled chatter. The three kinds of bodily (action) are traditionally said to be taking things that have not been given, committing violence against the law and having sex with another man's wife.
A man experiences in his mind-and-heart the good or bad effects of past actions committed in his mind-and-heart, he experiences in his speech what he has committed in his speech, and in his body what he has committed with his body.vi A man becomes a stationary object as a result of the faults that are the effects of past actions of the body, a bird or wild animal from those of speech, and a member of one of the lowest castes from those of the mind-and-heart. [12.3-11] This passage, which demonstrates the truly baroque quality of the Hindu obsession with triads, also tells us a great deal about the right and wrong ways to lead the religious life and usefully correlates the qualities of matter with the possibilities and consequences of human action.
But it does not really tell us three ways to lead the religious life. Manu, however, goes on immediately to make another, more surprising correlation. He has already introduced us, at the very beginning of his work [1.15-20], to the three strands as attributes of the physical world.
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But now Manu asserts that the self or soul, the atman, which one might regard as transcendent in the most basic sort of way, also partakes of the three hierarchical qualities, which account for the fact that it continues to be trapped in matter through its various incarnations: Know that lucidity, energy and darkness are the three qualities of the self, through which the Great One pervades and endures in all these existences, without exception. Whenever one of these qualities entirely prevails in a body, it makes that particular quality predominant in the embodied (soul).
Lucidity is traditionally regarded as knowledge, darkness as ignorance, and energy as passion and hate; this is their form, that enters and pervades all living beings. Among these (three), a person should recognize as lucidity whatever he perceives in his self as full of joy, something of pure light which seems to be entirely at peace. But he should recognize as energy whatever is full of unhappiness and gives his self no joy, something which is hard to oppose and constantly seduces embodied creatures.
And he should recognize as darkness whatever is full of confusion, undifferentiated, whatever is sensual and cannot be understood through reason or intelligence. Now I will also explain, leaving nothing out, the highest, middle and hindmost fruits that result from these three qualities. The recitation of the Veda, inner heat, knowledge, purification, suppression of the sensory powers, the rites of duty and meditation on the soul are the mark of the quality of lucidity.
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The following should be regarded as the marks of the qualities in a nutshell, in order, as each of these three qualities occurs in the three (time periods).
When someone hopes to achieve great fame in this world by a certain act, but does not feel sorry if it fails, that should be known as (an act with the quality of) energy. But when he longs with his all to know something and is not ashamed when he does it, and his self is satisfied by it, that (act) has the mark of the quality of lucidity.
Pleasure (kama) is the mark of darkness, profit (artha) is said to be the mark of energy, and dharma the mark of lucidity, and each is better than the one before it. [12.24-38] It behoves us to be as lucid as possible, both in body and in soul, and certain religious acts, and religious thoughts, are more lucid than others. Manu tells us how to recognize the signs of the triad in ourselves.
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His discussions of the triad are placed like bookends to frame his entire text, a text which provides obsessively detailed laws for human behaviour. But Manu provides no bridge between the bookends and the legal substance. He never tells us what to do in order to foster the good and fight the evil in terms of his framing triadic paradigm.
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THE TRANSCENDENT FOURTH
The Hindu triads, therefore, are not sufficient paradigms for the religious life. Moreover, most of them did not even remain triadic at all in Indian history. Many, though not all, of the Vedic triads became quartets when later Hinduism added a fourth term, usually a transcendent Vedantic term.
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In this broader sense, 'Vedic' Hinduism may be contrasted with 'Vedantic' Hinduism, which defines itself primarily by reference to the Upanishads (which are technically part of shruti, but are called 'Vedanta', literally, 'the end of the Veda'). Though Vedantic Hinduism has its seeds in the Upanishads, it is fully developed in the great commentaries on the Upanishads, particularly those of the Vedantic philosophers Shankara and Ramanuja, at the end of the first millennium of the common era. The Vedantic shift away from sacrifice and worldliness is at the heart of all the fourths added to the original triads of Hinduism.
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The world of the triads is the India of fabled elephants encrusted with jewels and temples covered with copulating couples, the world of sensuality from which the omphalosceptic yogis fled-but which continues to thrive in India to this day.vii It is also the world of many gods, each with many arms (often many heads), who replace one another, compete with one another and help one another-and one another's worshippers.viii This classical paradigm prevailed in India for many, many centuries, and still prevails in certain traditional sectors of Hindu society. But it came to exist alongside another paradigm that might have subverted or destroyed it altogether, but which, instead, simply came to supplement it as an alternative view of human life.
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For many of the Hindu triads, as we have already noted, became quartets when later Hinduism added a fourth term, usually a transcendent fourth, to accommodate the shift to a paradigm of renunciation and asceticism. This religious revolution took place some time around the sixth century BCE, a time of great religious ferment that saw the rise of Buddhism, Jainism and many other ascetic and renunciant sects. There are many reasons for these changes.
One was a reaction against the worldliness and sense of overcrowding caused by the move down from the nomadic culture of the mountains of the Punjab to the newly-founded great cities of the Ganges Valley. Another was the growth of a merchant class and the impact of many traders from abroad.ix The development of the idea of merit or karma as something to be earned, accumulated, and transferred owes much to the post-Vedic moneyed economy. Where there's trade, people leave home; new commercial classes emerge; and, above all, new ideas spread quickly and circulate freely.
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There was little to stop them when this happened in ancient India: the Vedas did not constitute a closed canon and there was no central temporal or religious authority to enforce a canon even had there been one. Many small kingdoms arose, whose rulers gathered around them philosophers debating the new doctrines. As always, Hinduism adapted, co-opted and carried on, changed, yet unchanged.
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At the same time, to the three human goals of dharma, kama and artha was added moksha, or release, the goal for the renouncer. Release meant freedom from the circle of rebirth (called samsara) and the trap of karma-the actions, good and bad, which accumulate and determine one's rebirth. In Hinduism, from the very start, the idea that transmigration occurred was immediately followed by two other ideas: that it was possible for some people to get free of it and that it was desirable for some people to get free of it.xi Now the triad of goals (trivarga) became a quartet, known as the chaturvarga (the quadruple path).
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THE FOURTH SOCIAL CLASS
For the Rig Veda gives evidence of one of the first recorded political coups: the kings appear here no longer in the first class, as priest-kings, but in the second class of warriors-kings (Kshatriyas), leaving the priests (Brahmins) alone to rule the roost of the first class. The commoners/workers (Vaishyas) remain below both the Brahmins and the warrior-kings. At the same time, these three classes came to be flanked by a fourth class, servants (Shudras),xiv who would have been the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent before the Indo-Europeans arrived, or others with non-Indo-European origins.
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And so the Indo-European triad (priest-kings, warriors and workers) became a Hindu quartet (Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras). The Shudras were the outside class within society that defines the others (just as, later, Dalits, entirely outside society, define Brahmins). The Shudra roughly corresponds to the renouncer (sannyasin) in being both inside and outside the system.
As was the case with the quartet of the human goals, Hindus often viewed the final combination not as a quartet but as a duet: all of Us (who are given several names, such as Aryans or twice-born, the three upper classes) vs. all of Them (the non-Us, the Others, the people who are excluded from privileged society). The hierarchical division of social classes (varnas) in some ways provides an intellectual structure for caste (jati), though castes arose much later than the four classes, are far more numerous, had different origins and have real social effects.xv
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THREE AGAINST FOUR
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It validated the plurality (and the hierarchy) of dharma by calling itself 'the religion of the four classes and the four stages of life' (varnashrama dharma); but at the same time, it validated the unity of dharma by endorsing sanatana dharma.
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To the triad of the three Vedas, the canonical scriptures, was added a fourth Veda, the Atharva Veda, the book of magic (around 900 BCE). The Vedas continue to be regarded as a triad, and many Hindus to this day are named Trivedi, '(Knower) of the Three Vedas'. But the Vedas are also regarded as a quartet, and there are also many Hindus named Chaturvedi, '(Knower) of the Four Vedas'.
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Even that most basic triad, the triad of the gunas, came to be contrasted, as a group (called Prakriti-'nature', female, material, manifest), with their transcendent fourth (Purusha-'spirit', male, pure, unmanifest), especially in the Sankhya texts.xix
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HIERARCHY
The triad, or the quartet, also tended to be hierarchized, though differently hierarchized by different people. The pervasive force of Hindu svadharma, particular dharma, different for each person, ran across the current of the four human goals, ranking them differently according to the point of view of each individual, depending upon the person's gender, social group and so forth. Various unsatisfactory, overlapping correlations between the four goals and the three (upper) classes were attempted: moksha and dharma for Brahmins; dharma for Brahmins and kings; artha for kings and merchants (Vaishyas); and kama for kings.
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There was a slightly better fit with the four stages of life (ashramas): moksha for renouncers and, with modifications, for forest-dwellers; dharma for forest-dwellers, students and householders; artha and kama for householders. But the hierarchies were not uniformly accepted: different disciplines and philosophical schools ranked the goals differently, and each of the Sanskrit words had several secondary meanings which allowed people to rank them differently from their precribed rankings according to their primary meanings. This same not-so-hidden agenda also operates in another passage in the Bhagavad Gita.
We have noted, earlier, the triadization of jnana (knowledge), karma (works, rituals) and the actor (kartri). At first glance, these seem to form a stable triad. But when we look more closely at it, we see that the group was originally constituted as a dualism (of karma and jnana) mediated by a third term (kartri).
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The first term, karma, contains within it the worldly Vedic triad, equivalent to the three human goals and the three stages of life. But karma took on a negative meaning in renunciant Hinduism, where the goal is to get free of all karma, even the merit of good acts (including Vedic rituals, also designated by the term 'karma'). And this bias against any karma reinforced the dualistic contrast between karma (Vedic action) and jnana (the transcendent Vedantic fourth), roughly parallel to the tension between what Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, would have called works (karma) and faith (jnana).
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But that very dualism (of karma vs. meditation) was originally composed of another triad (the three goals or stages of life) plus a fourth (the goal of moksha and the stage of renunciation, sannyasa). And now, each member of the triad of jnana, karma and bhakti was regarded by its adherents as the best, if not the only, path to salvation.
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THE FOUR AGES
In the Puranas, composed after about the fourth century CE, there are also some new quartets that never seem to have been triads, such as the four Ages of time, or Yugas, that formed a quartet in ancient Greece, too.xx The Yugas, which combine to make an aeon, are four ages in which human beings become increasingly wicked and live shorter and shorter lifespans. The ages are characterized by throws of the dice: the first age is the winning throw and the last age is the losing throw.xxi But the fourth age was always, from the start, entirely different from the first three: unlike the other ages, it is now, it is real, it is always our age.
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Historical time starts only when people have children and death enters the world. The first three groups form one group (Eden, the Golden Age, the way it was in illo tempore) and the last item (the Kali Yuga) forms the other group (now, reality). And so, as usual, the quartet can be reduced to a dualism.
The quartet of the four Ages was apparently invented in Hinduism when four had already become the number of choice and had provided many quartets, to which paradigm the four Ages were easily assimilated. Thus the four throws of the dice that name the four Ages, or Yugas, are visualized as the legs of dharma: dharma (imagined as a cow) begins on four legs in the first age (the age of the Krita, or throw of four), then has three legs in the second age (the Treta, the trey), two in the third (the Dvapara, the deuce) and totters on one leg in the Kali Age (snake eyes).
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But in many texts, linear time (four-fold, square) becomes a circle. Instead of remaining linear, as in Greece, time in India becomes both linear and cyclical, a Möbius strip: it declines and is reborn over and over again, as each successive doomsday undergoes its sea change into each successive cosmogony. The four Ages (from the Golden Age to the Kali Yuga) become three cosmogonic stages (creation, maintenance and doomsday); the linear and worldly ages are combined into one whole polar element (an aeon, or kalpa) that is then set in opposition to another polar element: cyclical time, which is transcendent.
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TENSION AND INTERACTION
Indian tradition came up with various solutions to these conflicts between the one and the many, between the unitary dharma of Vedantic Hinduism and the pluralistic dharma of Vedic Hinduism, between renunciation and the other three stages of life. Hindu tradition presents five ways of dealing with these tensions: First, it was said that the stages (or goals) were to be followed not simultaneously, but seriatim, one at a time. Release-moksha-was made a fourth stage, often indefinitely postponed while theoretically extolled.
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Thus it was said that the householder was a renouncer if he played his role correctly, that dharma was moksha (as Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: do your work as a warrior well and you win the merit of renunciation). And now it was also said that one must have sons-usually regarded as the goal of the householder stage-to achieve moksha. Tantrism (and Zen) took this line of argument to the extreme: thus, just as release = enjoyment (moksha = bhoksha), so, in the formulation of the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, the world of rebirth (samsara) = the place or condition of release from rebirth (nirvana).
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Four was thus reduced not only to two but, ultimately, to one. Monism has triumphed-but only in this particular paradigm. The fifth, and ultimate, Hindu solution was hierarchy, which we have examined at some length.
The drive to hierarchize-to rank classes of people in the order of the worth of their social roles, to rank human goals in the order of their sanctity, to rank qualities of matter according to their purity-here, as throughout classical Hindu thought, rides roughshod over the drive to present equal alternatives or even a serial plan for a well-rounded human life. Yet, though monism remained alive and well and living in India, in other parts of the forest, Hindu pluralism-the belief that numberless options are all valuable (if not necessarily equally valuable)-continues to obey the command to be fruitful and multiply.xxii
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The Concept of Heresy in Hinduism
Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. There are no heresies in a dead religion.
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THE CONCEPT OF HERESY IN HINDUISM1
Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. There are no heresies in a dead religion. -André Suarès Heresy is not really a Hindu idea at all.
People have been killed in India because they did or did not sacrifice animals, or had sex with the wrong women, or disregarded the Vedas, or even made use of the wrong sacred texts, but no one was impaled (the Hindu equivalent of burning at the stake) for saying that god was like this rather than like that. Yet, the Hindus did have strong opinions about the difference between good and bad religious ideas, right and wrong doctrines, and their attitude to the people who held such ideas resulted in both dramatic confrontations and subtle accommodations throughout the history of Hinduism.
The Hindu concept of heresy did not develop in a sealed Hindu world. It evolved in response to invasions, the presence of foreign merchants, new intellectual movements and shifting balances of power among the many sects native to India. And the myths changed as historical circumstances changed.
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On the one hand, heresies became fragmented, developing hierarchies within hierarchies and competing allegiances-Hindu heresies versus non-Hindu and, within Hinduism, Shaiva heresies versus Vaishnava, and so on. On the other hand, the Brahmin authors of many Hindu texts devised various, often theologically convoluted, doctrines in order to include many heretics in the Hindu fold. Hinduism has always been noted for its ability to absorb potentially schismatic developments; indeed, one of the prime functions of the caste system has been to assimilate various tribes and sects by giving them a place within the social hierarchy.
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In part, this is made possible by the open-ended quality of the religion itself; in part, it is due to the vagueness of the Hindu definition of heresy.
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THE HINDU DEFINITION OF HERESY
In order to understand the development of the Hindu attitude to heretics, it is necessary to understand precisely who these heretics were-and the texts are exasperating in their imprecision on this point. Our own use of the word 'heresy' is equally imprecise, though in a different way; this further obstructs the attempts of Anglophone readers to come to terms with the Indian issue. The Oxford English Dictionary defines heresy (from the Greek 'haireomai', 'to choose') as theological or religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition, or held to be contrary, to the 'catholic' or orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church, or, by extension, to that of any church, creed or religious system, considered as orthodox.
By extension, opinion or doctrine in philosophy, politics, science, art, etc. in variance with those generally accepted as authoritative. Opinion or doctrine characterizing particular individuals or parties; a school of thought; a sect.
Already the dangers of cross-cultural terminologies become apparent. The fit between two such different metaphysical systems as those encoded in English and Sanskrit is never exact; the word 'orthodox' is an inappropriate term to apply to mainstream Hinduism, which has often been described as more orthoprax than orthodox, i.e. insisting on authority more in adherence to matters of praxis, such as ritual, than in correct belief.i The primary difficulty that arises when the Greek-derived termii is applied to Indian religion is that the element of choice that is basic to the Greek concept is inapplicable to the Hindu concept of heresy.
The element of choice implicit in the English term 'heretic' but absent from the Hindu concept similarly distinguishes 'sin' from some of the more passive Sanskrit equivalents (papa, moha, tamas, etc.), though not, perhaps, from adharma, which often implies a failure of will or judgment. The element of choice, however, re-enters the concept of heresy in some of the later bhakti cults in which individuals have a choice of action and consciously change their lives. But here, again, the choice is not entirely free-for it is conditioned by past karma, and a god must choose the worshipper (offer his love to the worshipper) as well as be chosen (worshipped).
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But, overall, devotional sects seldom displayed the vehement disapproval of heretics that caste-oriented texts such as The Laws of Manu or the early Puranas manifest. The Sanskrit term most closely corresponding in negative tone as well as in denotation to the English 'heresy' as well as 'heretic' is pashanda (also spelt pakhanda or pashandin), which Monier-Williams defines as '[m.] a heretic, hypocrite, impostor, anyone who falsely assumes the characteristics of an orthodox Hindu, Jaina, Buddhist, etc.; [n.] false doctrine, heresy.' The etymology of pashanda is obscure.
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In spite of these differences of connotation, pashanda remains the Sanskrit term that most closely corresponds to the English 'heretic'. And, like the English term, it includes both the non-pejorative force of a 'sect' (in some early texts) and (later) the pejorative force of opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition not to any canonical authority, but to the core beliefs of ordinary pious Hindus (belief in the Vedas, the caste system). The shift in the connotation of this term throughout its period of application supports the hypothesis of a gradual increase in intolerance.
This remained true even after Ashoka: his successor, Dasharatha, also patronized the Ajivikas.10 But things changed over time, and in later texts the term pashanda is usually a pejorative term for heterodox sects.
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THE TWO LEVELS OF HERESY
This, coupled with the second criterion, the importance of caste (the need to obey one's own dharma, one's svadharma), has led to a basic distinction within the general ranks of heretics. The Hindu heretics are the members of those sects, such as the Kapalika, Kaula and Pashupata sects of Shaivism and the Pancharatra and Sahajiya sects of Vaishnavism, which pay lip service, at least, to the Vedas and thus remain technically within the Hindu fold, though they are deemed heretical on other grounds, such as the performance of rituals that involve impure substances or actions.
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One myth of this type shows with great clarity the imposition of specifically anti-Shaiva sentiments upon a typical myth of indeterminate heresy. In the first of two versions of this myth, no Shaiva is involved: There was a Dravidian king named Chitra, who was lustful and greedy and quick-tempered. He reviled Vishnu and hated the Vaishnavas, and he would go about saying, 'Who has ever seen this Vishnu?' He oppressed the Vaishnavas, refused to perform any Vedic ritual, and sided with the heretics.
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The text quotes Shiva himself to this effect: Formerly I created the Pashupata vow, auspicious, subtle, and containing the essence of the Vedas, for the sake of enlightenment. The adept should remain chaste, study the Vedas, smear his body with ashes, go naked or wear a loincloth, control his mind perfectly, and practice the Pashupata yoga … But there are other texts which, though narrated by me, cause delusion in this world and are contrary to the statements of the Vedas, such as the Vama [left-hand or perverse] Pashupata, the Soma, the Lakula [another Pashupata sect], and the Bhairava [Kapalika].
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It may even be that the expected remarks of the bystanders ('This is no man of chastity, this is a lecher')44 have reference to the original sect from which the Pashupatas were descended, a sect that conscientiously offended pious Hindus. The Pashupata Sutra then substituted mere symbolic gestures for the original rituals, and rationalized these as well. The caste dichotomy within the heretic sects serves to explain certain apparently contradictory statements that may be understood in the light of the particular status and affiliation of the author of the text.
Heresy, in ancient India, was in the eye of the beholder. To the Hindus as a whole, Buddhists and Jains (and Charvakas or Materialists, with whom the former two are often confused) were heretics. To many Vaishnavas, Shaivas were heretics, and to many Shaivas, Vaishnavas were heretics.
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MATERIALISTS AND ATHEISTS
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Louis Renou remarks upon the early connection between 'the question of the astitva [existence or identity] of the gods-and, therefore, indirectly that of the Veda';61 clearly, if one does not believe in the gods, one does not believe in a canon purported to have been inspired by them. Moreover, the contrast between the nastika and the astika was soon refined into a distinction between specific doctrines far more complex than simple atheism versus simple faith. There is disagreement upon the constituents of the nastika school.
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In either case, his argument is what the 'Materialists' in non-Materialist Sanskrit texts (there are very few surviving Materialist texts) are always said to say.
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HERESY BASED UPON THE VEDAS
In most cases, the subtle distinction between the two levels of heresy hinges upon a sect's actual or professed relationship to the Vedas. But there is danger of contradiction and confusion when the touchstone of the Vedas is applied to potential heresies. Certain Tantric sects that say that they agree with the Vedas, though actually propounding anti-Vedic, or at least non-Vedic, doctrines, may be accepted on the basis of their own statements of conformity.
On the other hand, doctrines that, like Buddhism, maintain that they are not derived from Vedas, though they agree in fact with many essentials of mainstream Hinduism, are rejected. This situation is made possible by Hindu orthopraxy; one might commit almost any act or believe almost any doctrine, as long as one professes allegiance to the Vedas. The complications arising from this point of view are apparent in Kumarila's discussion of certain heretics' claims to follow doctrines based upon the Vedas or upon a 'lost' branch of the Vedas: The Sankhyayoga, Pancharatra, Pashupata, Buddhist and Jain teachings have a very little bit in common with the Vedas and lawbooks [shruti and smriti], such as the doctrines of non-injury, speaking truth, control of the senses, charity and pity; [but these doctrines occur only occasionally and incidentally], just as herbs and mantras occasionally succeed in curing and expelling poison; and [they occur in small proportion] like [much] water fragrant with [a little] perfume.
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Their major portion consists in other teachings, outcaste texts mixed with barbarian practices; and since they contradict the Vedas and are sceptical [haituka], they are not to be accepted. Even if these sects were based upon a lost branch of the Vedas, they are to be rejected, for they do not themselves accept the fact that the Vedas are the basis [of their teachings], just as an evil son who hates his parents is ashamed to admit his descent from them.
And he includes in his list not only the usual suspects but Sankhya-yoga, a philosophical school rather than a sect. The Matta-vilasa-prahasana of Mahendra Varman, a seventh-century play, similarly satirizes the 'lost Vedas' theory as it appears in the mouth of a corrupt Buddhist monk: Why did [the Buddha] not think of sanctioning the possession of women and the drinking of sura [liquor]? Since he knew everything, it must be that the small-minded and spiteful Elders, envying us young men, erased the sanction of women and sura in the books of the pitaka [the Buddhist canon].
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Where now can I find an uncorrupted original text?71 Thus, the mainline view, which was well established by the time of Kumarila, rejects both levels of heresy in spite of their partial affinity with Vedic doctrine.
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THE HYPOCRITICAL ASCETIC
Popular Hinduism, as it appears in the Puranic texts, does not maintain a strict or even a consistent attitude toward the various Indian heresies. Confusions of doctrine are further complicated by a tendency to equate the heretic with another religious figure well known to the lawbooks and myths: the hypocritical ascetic. The Sanskrit dictionaries themselves maintain this confusion.
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Mockery, and even self-mockery, rather than fanatical disapproval is the motivating spirit of many Indian discussions of the religious hypocrite: 'So, friar [bhiksho], I see you have a taste for meat.' 'Not that it's any good without some wine.' 'You like wine too, then?' 'Better when I dine With pretty harlots.' 'Surely such girls eat No end of money.' 'Well, I steal, you see, Or win at dice.' 'A thief and gambler, too?' 'Why, certainly. What else is there to do?
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The mice made pious circumambulations around him and the cat grabbed and ate the last of the mice returning to the hole each day. The mice, noticing that their number was diminishing, decided to test the cat by sending a mouse named Romasha ('Hairy') to the cat, who ate him. When the rest of the mice saw the bones and hair of Romasha in the faeces of the cat they went to him and said: 'This is not virtue or proper behaviour, to make a living by performing tapas.
Hairy faeces do not come from one who eats roots and fruits.' And so, after calling the cat a hypocrite and a heretic, the mice went away.93 It may be noted here that even in the folk literature the confusion between hypocrisy and heresy persists.
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THE ASSIMILATION OF HERESY AND THE MYTH OF THE FALL
The fact that doctrines so widely divergent as those of the Charvakas, Buddhists, Shaiva Pashupatas, Dalit ascetics and Brahmin hypocrites are all subsumed under the term 'heretic' indicates the extent to which this term was used simply as a catchall to condemn anyone who challenged the religious and social status quo, that is, the authority of the Vedas and the Brahmins. But the vagueness of the term for heresy served not only to exclude various groups of heterodox thinkers but also to include many of them under the equally vague aegis of Hinduism itself.
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EXPLICIT HERESY WITHIN HINDUISM
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Much of the assimilation took place in an earlier, more tolerant period, and more continued to take place on a popular level-as expressed in the mythology of the Puranas-in spite of the exhortations of the Brahmins.
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HERESY CREATED BY THE GODS
We have noted texts that argue that Shiva created the Shaiva heresies; and there are important myths that argue that Vishnu, too, created heresies. Why would the gods do such a thing? In the Parashara Purana, heresy arises through the mistaken ideas of the sectarian gods Vishnu and Brahma: Brahma and Vishnu were arguing, each shouting that he was supreme.
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He made the Brahmins, Vedas and the goddess Shri, and this was the best portion. Then he made Alakshmi and the lowest men, outside the Vedas, and he made adharma. When the goddess Jyeshtha ('the Eldest', goddess of misfortune) appeared from the ocean, the sage Markandeya said, 'Jyeshtha is Alakshmi.
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TANTRIC HERESIES IN THE KALI AGE
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Out of pity for all of them, Shiva teaches heresy, raising them up 'step by step'. A similar concept of 'weaning' was expounded by a British apologist for the Tantras: 'Shiva knowing the animal propensity of their common life must lead them to take flesh and wine, prescribed these [Tantric] rites with a view to lessen the evil and to gradually wean them from enjoyment by promulgating conditions under which alone such enjoyment could be had, and in associating it with religion.
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Humankind may be delivered from the sins of the Kali Age only by being corrupted so completely by heresy that true enlightenment is the only possible consequence. This cyclic effect may be seen in a Buddhist myth of evil in the Digha Nikaya: When virtue is at its lowest ebb, there will not even be a word for good, let alone good deeds. Then for Seven Days of the Sword, men will look on each other as wild beasts and kill each other.
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But a few will think: 'We do not want anyone to kill us, and we do not want to kill anyone. Let us hide and live on the fruits of the forest.' Thus they will survive. And after the Seven Days of the Sword they will come out and embrace one another and say, 'My friend, how good it is to see you still alive.
We have lost so many of our kinsfolk because we took to evil ways; now we must do good. We must stop taking life.' Then they will increase in age and beauty and virtue. India will be as crowded then as purgatory is now.168 And so the next cycle begins with overcrowding on earth or in heaven.
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The myth then continues with a version of the well-known avatar of Vishnu as the Dwarf who tricks the anti-god Bali.xix The corrupting and heretical nature of the Kali Age is expressed in the Mahabharata tale of Nala, in which Kali is again personified: The virtuous king Nala married Damayanti, whom Kali had wanted to marry, and Kali determined to break Nala and take Damayanti from him. For twelve years, Kali waited in Nala's presence, and finally he found an opportunity: Nala urinated at twilight and did not wash his feet.
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His generals were Desire, Anger, Greed, Delusion and others. A Charvaka in the ranks mocked the gods, citing various Buddhist doctrines. Indra became angry and called Kali's troops atheists; Yama called them materialists [Lokayatas], while Varuna called them heretics and atheists.
THE BUDDHA AVATAR OF VISHNU IN THE GUPTA AGE
It is inevitable that the universe should be destroyed at the end of the Kali Age, and for god to destroy us he must first weaken us with sin, just as he must corrupt the anti-gods with heresy before he can destroy them.
This concept underlies the myth of the Buddha avatar of Vishnu. In this myth,176 the enemies of the gods-the anti-gods, asuras-have become so powerful that they take over the three worlds, and the gods are helpless against them because the asuras are protected by the armour of the Vedic religion which they practice religiously. In order to conquer them, the gods must corrupt them, and they do this by persuading Vishnu to descend to earth in the form of the Buddha and convert the anti-gods away from Vedic religion.
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In some of the many versions of this myth, the Great Delusion (Mahamoha) that Vishnu preaches is Jainism, or a casual mixture of Buddhism and Jainism, or a form of Tantrism. The deluded asuras, demonic heretics, then become, or convert, human Buddhists, Jains and Tantrics. The myth of the Buddha avatar, the most important of the anti-Buddhist myths of this period, first appears in the Vishnu Purana, composed between 400 and 500 CE177 under the Gupta Dynasty.
The Guptas ruled all of North India and much of South India, from 320 to 550 CE, ending a long interregnum (after the fall of the Mauryan dynasty in 185 BCE) in which foreign dynasties from Central Asia, such as the Shakas (Scythians) and Kushanas, had ruled in India. The Guptas, though Hindus, also patronized the Buddhists, manipulating them with their patronage; in the Puranic texts composed by Brahmins in this period, the gods corrupt and destroy Buddhists. The religious enemies in these myths, the anti-god heretics of the Kali Age, are often disguised as 'foreigners' (mlechas); in this way, a myth of political extermination was crudely superimposed upon a myth of theological conflict.
As the net of heresy was cast more and more vehemently, to catch an ever-growing school of dissenters, the myth of the Buddha avatar of Vishnu became so well established that it served as the model for pseudo-historical writings. The Skanda Purana relates that, at the beginning of the Kali Age, and under the influence of monks known as kshapanas (i.e., Jains), the people of King Ama's kingdom renounced their Vaishnava faith and became followers of the Buddhist dharma. The king's daughter was influenced by the Jivika (sic; Ajivika?) named Indrasuri (the name of a famous Jain author), and the people followed the Jain teaching and disregarded the Brahmins.
Essay hub 408
He was born in the lineage of Chandramas, the dynasty of the moon, and he was called Pramiti. In a former age, in the era of Manu Svayambhuva, he was born of a portion [of Vishnu]. For twenty years he wandered on the earth, commanding an army with many horses, chariots and elephants, surrounded by Brahmins wielding weapons, by the hundreds and thousands.
He destroyed the barbarians by the thousands and killed all the kings who were born of Shudras, and cut down all the heretics. Those who were not excessively righteous-he killed them all, and those born of mixed classes (varnas), and their dependents. Turning the wheel of conquest, the powerful one made an end of the barbarians … At the age of thirty-two he set out, and for twenty years he killed all creatures by the hundreds and thousands, until this cruel act reduced the earth to nothing but seeds because of a causeless anger from one against another.
Essay cycle 409
On Hinduism flow 410
Agrawala makes a strong case for the identification of Pramati with Chandra Gupta Vikramaditya (380-412 CE):188 the reign of thirty-two years, the twenty-year military campaign, the lands of his conquest, the extermination of Shudra kings (a possible reference to the Shaka or Scythian dynasty that the Guptas uprooted)xx, his birth as the son of Chandramas (this being a name of Samudra Gupta)189-all of these could indicate Vikramaditya. This development would give us a firm basis in time: right in the middle of the Gupta era.
A more explicit reference to Vikramaditya occurs in the Bhavishya Purana, in a text parts of which were certainly composed long after the Gupta period (for parts of the work demonstrate familiarity with British rule in Calcutta)190. But this text nevertheless extends the pseudo-historical tradition (parading the names of the dynasties that preceded the Guptas-Nandas and Mauryas and Shakas-and the historical birth of Gautama the Buddha) that links Vikramaditya with the extermination of heretics at the end of the Kali Age.
Essay ladder 411
Even if we cannot prove that all of the texts in this genre were actually composed in the Gupta age (as we can in fact prove for the earliest layer), we can at least demonstrate the persistence of the hope of the authors of the Puranas, the Pauranikas, that the Gupta kings would exterminate heretics: When King Kshemaka had performed a great sacrifice and destroyed all the barbarians, Kali incarnate begged Vishnu to produce more barbarians as is appropriate to the Kali Age, and Vishnu created Adam and Eve [Adama and Havyavati, in Sanskrit] and their descendants. These barbarians did not penetrate into Brahmavarta [the heart of North India], which was protected by the goddess Sarasvati, but they conquered many areas of India [these are enumerated at great length], and they were lamentably unable to pronounce Sanskrit words.
As the generations passed, at the time of the Mauryas and Nandas, Kali reminded Vishnu of his duty, and so Vishnu was born as Gautama, son of Kashyapa, and he preached the Buddhist dharma. All men became Buddhists, and still the generations passed-Chandragupta, Bindusara and Ashoka. Then a Brahmin performed a Vedic ceremony, and by the power of the Vedic mantras four Kshatriyas were born: Pramara, Chapahani, Shukla and Pariharaka.
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CONCLUSION: HERESY BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER THE GUPTA AGE
It is difficult indeed to tell where politics ends and religion begins in these myths, or even to tell precisely what axes are being ground in a given context. Further complications arise when one realizes that Buddhists and Jains, so often lumped together by the Hindu polemicist, each tended to regard the other as heretics, even as each of two castes may regard the other as lower and polluting; many of the myths of heresy may be expressing inter-caste tensions as well as political tensions on a higher scale.
The precise dates of the relevant texts are extremely difficult to fix, but the relative chronology is reasonably clear. Ashoka had promulgated his tactfully vague dhamma in an ultimately vain attempt to indoctrinate his subjects into an early form of reductionist comparative religion. Heresy and diversity had nevertheless flourished during the period of the Upanishads and the redaction of the Mahabharata and under the more loosely structured era of the Shakas and Kushanas, whose eclectic patronage stimulated the luxuriant growth of sectarian Hinduism and the emergence of highly original forms of Buddhism, from which Hinduism freely borrowed.
Essay hub 413
But the rapprochement with Buddhism and other heterodoxies waned by the time of the early Gupta Puranas. The need to maintain superficial political unity drove the Gupta rulers to play an uneasy game of impartial patronage. And since Buddhists and Hindus were competing, sometimes violently, for political patronage and popular support, the myths of this period depict the Buddha as deluded and destructive, the Buddhists as anti-gods.
Essay cycle 414
The Gupta age may or may not have been the Golden Age for some-for several poets, a lot of architects, and for the privileged in that elitist society-but it may well have been the Kali Age for those outside the inner sanctum, and its much-vaunted gold may have been little more than a thin plate over a tarnished Establishment made of baser stuff. Can we pinpoint the onset of intolerance in the Gupta era? The texts make this a difficult prospect.
We have reasonably clear guidelines at either end of the spectrum: tolerance in the period of the Upanishads and the Ashokan reign, intolerance by the time of the Vishnu Purana in the Gupta age and until the flowering of the bhakti movement in subsequent Puranas after the sixth century CE. In discussing the myths of the heresies of the Kali Age and the Buddha avatar, H.H. Wilson interpreted the Kali Age heresies as Buddhist or Shaiva and remarked: The complaints of the prevalence of heterodox doctrines … indicate a period of change in the condition of the Hindu religion, which it would be important to verify.
On Hinduism flow 415
Eating Karma
Food and eating function in South Asia to define the person more than anything else, even sex. Yet the precise nature of that definition has been debated, often to the death, for over two millennia.
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EATING KARMA1
Food and eating function in South Asia to define the person more than anything else, even sex. Yet the precise nature of that definition has been debated, often to the death, for over two millennia. 'You are what you eat' is a cliché among non-Hindus, and the idea is basic to ancient India as well, though it has different meanings there.
Essay ladder 416
It represents the traditional view set forth by the classical texts on the caste system, which define the person by what he (rarely she) does (and does not) eat. The Laws of Manu, composed in the early centuries of the Common Era, goes into obsessive detail on the subject of food taboos, always emphasizing the negative, the foods not to be eaten. The class of prohibited food follows the general rule that good people have a narrower window of opportunity, of possibilities, than bad people; the higher you are, the less you can eat.
A typical list of forbidden fruits goes like this: Garlic, scallions, onions, and mushrooms, and the things that grow from what is impure, are not to be eaten by twice-born men. The red sap of trees, and any exudations from a cut (in a tree), the 'phlegmatic' fruit, and the first milk of a newly-calved cow-you should try not to eat these. (And do not eat) a dish of rice with sesame seeds, or a spice cake made of flour, butter and sugar, or a cake made of rice, milk and sugar, if these are prepared for no (religious) purpose; or meat that has not been consecrated; or food for the gods, or offerings; or the milk of a cow within ten days of calving, or the milk of a camel or of any animal with a whole, solid hoof, or of an ewe, or of a cow in heat or a cow whose calf has been taken from her; and avoid the milk of women, the milk of all wild animals of the wilderness except the buffalo, and all foods that have gone sour or fermented.
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Essay hub 418
Essay cycle 419
Ajigarta's attempt to sacrifice his son, Shunahshepha, was reported first in a text composed in the eighth century BCE6 and retold many times in ancient India. Though it is true that Ajigarta is not punished as a criminal, the text certainly depicts him as a most unsavoury character, and his son brutally rejects him when he attempts to 're-adopt' Shunahshepha after Shunahshepha has become a king. These moral dilemmas are posed in very different terms in devotional literature a millennium or so later, in texts in which a god may test the faith of a devotee by asking him to kill, cook, serve to the divine guest, and, finally, eat his own son.7
On Hinduism flow 420
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YOU ARE FROM WHOM YOU DO NOT EAT
Yet, there are people with whom many people nowadays in all cultures would not, as the saying goes, break bread … So much for being from whom you (do not) eat.
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YOU ARE WHOM YOU EAT
The law for emergencies (apad) suspends the rules of civilization and returns human beings, temporarily, to the condition regarded as natural to them in a pre-civilized state: anarchy. 'Fish eat fish' is the dominant political metaphor of ancient India, and functions as a synonym for anarchy. There is a chain of food and eaters (dog eat dog, or, in the Indian metaphor, fish eat fish) which both justifies itself and demands that we break out of it.
Essay ladder 421
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YOU EAT WHAT YOU HAVE DONE
One of the most common Sanskrit words for 'eat' is the verb bhuj, which means a whole group of delicious things: the enjoyment or consumption of food, sex, experience, karma, fuel (by fire); it means to enjoy, eat, consume [as fuel], enjoy [as one enjoys sex or music], and burn up [fuel, or karma]. To 'consume' karma is to destroy, through good actions, the residue of your bad actions-or to destroy, through bad actions, the residue of your good actions. In this view, you eat yourself.
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The full range of meanings of 'eat' (bhuj) is enacted in the story of the ogress and the Brahmin's wife, narrated in a Sanskrit text composed in about 700 CE: A certain Brahmin came and with an aching heart said to the king, 'Great king, I am very unhappy; listen while I tell you about it, for the cure for the sufferings of men comes from nowhere but the king. While I was asleep, during the night, someone stole my wife, without even breaking open the door of the house.
You must bring her back.' The king said, 'Don't you know who stole her? With whom am I to fight? From where am I to bring her back?' The Brahmin said, 'While I was sleeping in my house, with the door shut just as tight as could be, someone stole my wife-I've already told you that.' The king said, 'I've never seen your wife.
Essay hub 423
What sort of looks does she have, what sort of body? How old is she, and how patient? Tell me, what sort of character does your Brahmin lady have?' The Brahmin said, 'She has piercing eyes and is very tall; she has short arms, and a bony face.
Essay cycle 424
Her belly hangs down, and she has flat buttocks and small breasts. She is very ugly, your majesty; I am not blaming her, that's just the way she is. Her speech is coarse, too, your majesty, and her nature is not at all gentle.
That is how I would describe my wife; she is hideous to look at. And she has ever so slightly passed her prime. That is what my wife looks like; I am telling you the truth.' The king said, 'You've had enough of her, Brahmin; I will give you another wife.
On Hinduism flow 425
Lack of beauty may sometimes be a cause of a very good character; but a woman who lacks both beauty and character should be abandoned. Your wife was carried off by someone else.' The Brahmin said, 'Every day that I live without a wife, I fail in dharma, because I have ceased to perform the obligatory rituals, and that, too, will cause me to fall. My future line of descendants is in her, your majesty; my lord, bring her back.' The king wandered this way and that way over the earth; he learned that an ogre named Balaka had taken the Brahmin's wife.
Essay ladder 426
And there the king saw the Brahmin's wife, who looked just as her husband had described her. She said, 'I was stolen by a bad ogre named Balaka. He brought me into this very deep forest, but then he abandoned me; I don't know why it is that he enjoys me neither carnally nor carnivorously, neither for the pleasures of the flesh nor for the pleasure of flesh.' The king saw the ogre, who was surrounded by his troops.
The king asked him, 'For what purpose did you bring the Brahmin's wife here, night-wanderer? She is not good-looking; there are other wives, if you stole her for that. And if you brought her here to eat her, why haven't you eaten her?
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Tell me that.' The ogre said, 'We don't eat people; those are other ogres, your majesty. But we eat the fruit of a good deed. And I will tell you about the fruit of a good deed: that is how I came to be reborn in the cruel and terrifying womb of an ogre.
Essay hub 428
When we are dishonoured, we eat the very nature of men and women. But we do not eat flesh; we do not eat living creatures. When we eat the patience of men, they become angry; when we have eaten their evil nature, they become virtuous.
We have gorgeous female ogres who are the equal of the celestial nymphs when it comes to beauty. While they are here, how could we take sexual pleasure in human females?' The king said, 'If you want her neither for your bed nor for your table, night-wanderer, then why did you enter the Brahmin's house and steal her?' The ogre said, 'That Brahmin is outstanding when it comes to knowing mantras; as I went to sacrifice after sacrifice, he would recite the mantra that destroys ogres and prevent me from doing my job.
Essay cycle 429
On Hinduism flow 35
YOU ARE WHAT YOU DO NOT EAT
Rich and fat was one sort of ideal (the Hindus wrote poems about women with breasts like ripe melons and thighs like the trunks of plantain trees), while poor and thin was another. The sect called Aghoris ('those for whom nothing is disgusting') made a practice of eating human excrement, just to prove that they were above it all, above what Hindus call the 'dyads' (pleasure and pain, hot and cold, etc.), even while other sorts of Hindus became notorious for their subtle use of spices and for their gourmandise.iii These various, apparently mutually opposed, agendas live cheek by jowl in India, but, wide-ranging though they are, they do not include any consistent consideration for nutrition or food distribution.iv Concerns of a very different nature in these mythologies of food provide the basis by which people make their decisions about both their own bodies and the bodies of those whom they kill either by consuming them or by dooming them to starvation.
On Hinduism flow 430
Manu damned in the same breath food that was sneezed on and food offered by a strolling actor, mixing practical concerns with dharmic ideals.
Essay ladder 36
Medical and Mythical Constructions of the Body in Sanskrit Texts
Scholars engaged in the wild goose chase of the search for universals once hoped to find support for their quest in the universal human problems posed by the universal structure of the human body. They hoped to ground even religious history in the study of the body.
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MEDICAL AND MYTHICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE BODY IN SANSKRIT TEXTS1
Scholars engaged in the wild goose chase of the search for universals once hoped to find support for their quest in the universal human problems posed by the universal structure of the human body. They hoped to ground even religious history in the study of the body. But, just as history is inevitably mediated by historiography, so the body is always mediated by symbolic expression of the culture.
Essay ladder 431
The deconstructionists argue that the body is not given, but constructed, and that each culture constructs it differently. One could make a study of the Hindu approach to the body through an analysis of every major text, starting with the Rig Veda (which celebrates the body exuberantly) and the Upanishads (which warn of its treachery), through Sanskrit love poetry (predictably pro-body and libertine) and the Yogic texts (also pro-body, though in a rather different key, and certainly not libertine). I have confined this chapter to examples from three Hindu disciplines that have made relatively explicit the assumptions that most Hindus share about the construction of the human body-medical texts, Manu and the Puranas-while at the same time noting the significant differences between the approaches taken by different texts in different periods and different disciplines.
The Hindu boundaries of identity are fluid; acts of eating and sex further blur those boundaries by transgressing the limits of the human body. This is surely one of the factors contributing to the great danger that is thought, in India, to accompany the sexual act (and, indeed, eating): if you are not sure where your body ends, you will be very uneasy about exposing it to intimate contact with someone else's body. This anxiety hedges the openings of the body (Manu tells us to clean them obsessively), the things that fall off the body (nails, hair, mucous and, of course, semen), and, ultimately, sexual intercourse.
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This bias is revealed not just in myths that depict sadistic sexual acts or lethal love; it is regarded as a part of natural, everyday sex. Yet, throughout this discourse, ascetic and renunciant arguments interact with the passages that praise the sexual act as inherently sacred. The ascetic strain, often misogynist, often expressing a deep anxiety about the human body, challenges the other sort of Hinduism, the one that glories in the body both for its fertility and for its eroticism.
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The two traditions remain in tension to this day.i
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THE MEDICAL TEXTS
A basic assumption of Hindu medical texts like the Charaka Samhita (composed sometime between 100 BCE and 100 CE) is the doctrine of the three humours, closely related to the Hindu belief that all matter, including the human body, is composed of the three elements of lucidity (sattva), energy (rajas) and torpor (tamas)ii: Wind, bile and phlegm are said to be the group of humours, the sources of disease, in the body; and energy and darkness are said to be the source of disease in the mind. Pathological changes that are regarded as curable are counteracted by medicines possessing qualities opposite [to the humours of the changes], applied with proper regard for place, dose and time.
Essay cycle 434
One said, 'The individual person is born from the Soul, and so the diseases are also born from the Soul.' Another: 'No. When the mind that is conscious of lucidity is overwhelmed by energy and torpor, then it causes the origin both of the body itself and of pathological changes in the body.' Another: 'No. All creatures are born from rasa [the fluid essence of digested food], and so the various diseases are also born from rasa.' Another: 'No.
On Hinduism flow 435
The individual person is born of the six elements of matter [earth, water, fire, wind, space and mind, or soul], and so diseases are also born from the six elements.' Then another sage replied: 'No. How could someone be born out of the six elements, without a mother and a father? A person is born from a person; a cow from a cow, and a horse from a horse.
Essay ladder 436
Diseases such as urinary disorders are known to be hereditary. So the two parents are the cause.' 'No,' said another, 'for a blind person is not born from a blind person. But a creature is known to be born of his karma, and so diseases are also born from karma.' 'No,' said another.
'An agent must always precede an action [karma]. No, nature is the cause, one's own nature, the cause of both diseases and the person, just as it is the nature of earth to be rough, water to be fluid, wind to move and fire to be hot.' 'No,' said another.
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'The Creator had an unlimited imagination, and it was he who created the happiness and unhappiness of this universe, sentient and insentient.' 'No,' said another. 'The individual person is born of time, and diseases are born of time.' Now, as the sages were arguing in this way, Punarvasu said: 'Don't talk like this. It is hard to get to the truth when people take sides.
Essay hub 438
People who utter arguments and counter-arguments as if they were established facts never get to the end of their own side, as if they were going round and round on an oil press. Not until you shake off the torpor of factionalism from what you want to know will true knowledge emerge. The use of good food is one cause of the growth of a person, and the use of bad food is a cause of diseases.' To which one of the sages replied: 'Physicians have an abundance of different opinions.
Essay cycle 439
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THE BODY IN THE LAWS OF MANU
The Laws of Manu, the paradigmatic text of Hindu religious law, composed in the early centuries of the present era, is a work of encyclopaedic scope. It consists of 2,685 verses on topics as apparently varied-but actually intimately interrelated in Hindu thought-as the social obligations and religious duties of the various castes and of individuals in different stages of life; the proper way for a righteous king to rule and to punish transgressors in his kingdom; the appropriate social relations between men and women of different castes and between husbands and wives in the privacy of the home; birth, death and taxes; cosmogony, karma and rebirth; ritual practices; sin, expiation and salvation; and such details of everyday life as the procedure for settling traffic accidents and adjudicating disputes with boatmen.
The text is an encompassing representation of life in the world-how it is and how it should be lived. Though it is certain that The Laws of Manu is the culmination of the work of several authors, informed by popular wisdom, it is attributed to someone named Manu, a mythological or legendary figure. Manu means 'the wise one', and Manu is the name of a king (an interesting attribution, given the Brahmin bias of Manu's text) who is the mythological ancestor of the human race, the Indian Adam.
On Hinduism flow 440
Thus the obsessional concern for the control of what enters the body (food) is balanced by an equally obsessional concern for the regulating of excretions (including sexual excretions) and the cleansing of the openings of the body. This physical model, of danger flowing in and out of the body at all times, is echoed in the social model of karmic transactions, where social dangers flow in and out of the body through contact with other people-primarily through the exchange of food or sex.
The extreme degree of Manu's fear of pollution through such contact, very much like the traditional attitude to lepers, characterizes his attitude to all people with social diseases-which is to say any diseases at all, since diseases are punishments for sins against society-or with social disabilities-such as birth into a low caste or even, in many ways, birth as a woman. But women and the body also have their uses for Manu: as vessels for the procreation of male heirs. There are two different, conflicting models of paternity in Manu, expressed through two agricultural metaphors, one about plants and the other about animals.
Essay ladder 441
Manu assumes that the field is entirely neutral, and that the crop (son) sown in it will always resemble the seed (the father). Therefore you should never waste your seed by shedding it in another man's 'field' or wife, but you are not harmed if another man sheds his seed in your wife (in that you own the son resulting from that act). Manu thus forbids a man to commit adultery in another man's wife, but encourages him to let a brother produce a Levirate heir in his own wife, through the Indian practice of niyoga, in which the widow of a man who has produced no male heirs is appointed to have a son by that man's younger brother.iv This argument-that the man owns the woman, 'the field'-prevails in India: They say that a son belongs to the husband, but the revealed canon is divided in two about who the 'husband' is: some say that he is the begetter, others that he is the one who owns the field.
The woman is traditionally said to be the field, and the man is traditionally said to be the seed; all creatures with bodies are born from the union of the field and the seed. Sometimes the seed prevails, and sometimes the woman's womb; but the offspring are regarded as best when both are equal. Of the seed and the womb, the seed is said to be more important, for the offspring of all living beings [have] the mark of the seed.
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Whatever sort of seed is sown in a field prepared at the right season, precisely that sort of seed grows in it, manifesting its own particular qualities. For this earth is said to be the eternal womb of creatures, but the seed develops none of the qualities of the womb in the things it grows. For here on earth when farmers at the right season sow seeds of various forms in the earth, even in one single field, they grow up each according to its own nature.
Manu also discusses the question of the ownership of the crop (the son) in terms of a livestock image, the point of which is not quite so obvious: Just as the stud is not the one who owns the progeny born in cows, mares, female camels and slave girls, buffalo-cows, she-goats and ewes, so it is too (with progeny born) in other men's wives. If [one man's] bull were to beget a hundred calves in other men's cows, those calves would belong to the owners of the cows, and the bull's seed would be shed in vain.
Essay hub 443
Essay cycle 444
Even the relatively simple seed-and-field image proves ambiguous; the livestock image introduces further complications, especially when, as Manu admits in the last line of the passage cited, humans mate with animals. And, when it comes to human beings, a third factor is introduced: the behaviour of the child, which must be regarded as a factor separate from the genetic contribution of either of his parents.v It may well be that it is because men have given most of our texts their final form that those texts speak primarily of a man as the active knower of the passive woman-as-field (of knowledge, and of progeneration), just as they speak of the soul as 'the knower of the body-as-field'-kshetrajna (which forms a natural pun with kshetraja, 'born in the [husband's] field'; but which is the book and which the echo?).
On Hinduism flow 445
On Hinduism flow 40
THE PURANAS
The Puranas (the popular medieval Sanskrit compendiums of myth and ritual) offer several explanations of conception and birth, which differ both from one another and from the ones that we have seen in Manu and the medical texts. The Markandeya Purana assumes that the menstrual blood (rajas, also the term for the quality of energy) is the woman's seed; hence the seed of which the child is born is regarded as two-fold, male and female: The impregnation of human women is the emitting of the seed in the menstrual blood.
As soon as [the soul] is released from hell, or from heaven, it arrives (in the womb). Overpowered by that [soul], the two-fold seed becomes solid. It becomes a speck of life, and then a bubble, and then flesh.
Essay ladder 446
And just as a shoot of a plant is born from a seed, so from the flesh the five limbs (two arms, two legs and the head) are born, with all their parts. The subsidiary limbs, too-fingers, eyes, nose, mouth and ears-grow out of the (five) limbs; and out of the subsidiary limbs, in the same way, grow the nails and so forth. The hair on the body grows in the skin, and the hair of the head grows after that.
The birth-sheath grows larger as it takes on flesh. Just as a coconut grows big along with its shell, so the sheath of the embryo, that opens out on the bottom, grows bigger. The embryo grows up in the bottom of the womb, placing its two hands beside its knees, with its two thumbs on top of its knees, the fingers in front; behind the two knees are the two eyes, and in between the knees is the nose; the buttocks rest on the two heels, and the arms and shanks are outside.
In this way, the living (human) creature gradually grows up inside the woman's womb; other living creatures position themselves in the stomach according to their shapes. The fire inside the stomach makes the embryo hard, and it lives on what is eaten and drunk [by the mother]. The sojourn of the living creature inside the stomach is meritorious and is made of retained merit.
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There is, however, a third player here too: the embryo, who brings his own karma-carried on his transmigrating soul-to the construction of his body. For many Hindu philosophical texts view the body primarily as an obstacle to the freedom of the soul, a view that challenges some of the ideas, held by less philosophically-inclined Hindus, that we have considered in this chapter. But that is another story, for another chapter.vii
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Death and Rebirth in Hinduism
When people depart from this world, they go to the moon. Those who do not answer the moon's questions become rain, and rain down here on earth, where they are reborn according to their actions [karma] and knowledge-as a worm, an insect, a fish, a bird, a lion, a boar, a rhinoceros, a tiger, a human, or some other creature.
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DEATH AND REBIRTH IN HINDUISM1
When people depart from this world, they go to the moon. Those who do not answer the moon's questions become rain, and rain down here on earth, where they are reborn according to their actions [karma] and knowledge-as a worm, an insect, a fish, a bird, a lion, a boar, a rhinoceros, a tiger, a human, or some other creature. Those who answer the moon's questions correctly pass to the heavenly world: They go on the path to the gods, to fire, and finally to brahman.
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-Kaushitaki Upanishad 1.1-4 There are many different approaches to death and rebirth in the Hindu tradition, offering many different non-solutions to the insoluble problem, many different ways that the square peg of the fact of death cannot be fitted into the round hole of human rationality. These approaches are often aware of one another; they react against one another and incorporate one another, through the process of intertextuality.
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DEATH IN THE RIG VEDA
Surprisingly for a document so devoted to war and sacrifice, both of which involve killing, the Rig Veda says relatively little about death. It says a lot about the victory of life, and its central myth is the story of the triumph of Indra, the god of rain, of fertility, of war, of the phallus, of expansion in all senses of the word, over the serpent Vritra, the symbol of drought and restriction. What the Rig Veda does say about death, however, is not easy to reduce to a single idea.
Essay cycle 449
On Hinduism flow 450
That hymn begins by addressing the funeral fire, Agni: 'Do not burn him entirely, Agni, or engulf him in your flames. Do not consume his skin or his flesh. When you have cooked him perfectly,i only then send him forth to the fathers.'4 Not only is the fire not to destroy the body, but it is to preserve it.
Essay ladder 451
Take root in the plants with your limbs.'6 Another hymn says to the dead man: 'Creep away to this broad, vast earth, the mother that is kind and gentle. [And to the earth:] Open up, earth; do not crush him. Be easy for him to enter and to burrow in.
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But these are, at best, but the early, murky stirrings of a doctrine of rebirth that will become clear only in the Brahmanas and Upanishads.
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RE-DEATH AND REBIRTH IN THE BRAHMANAS
In the texts that follow the Rig Veda and gloss it, the Brahmanas (c. 700 BE), death is far more explicitly feared, but also more explicitly transcended. 'Evil Death' is a cliché, an automatic equation throughout this corpus: death is evil, and the essence of evil is death.
The fear of death, and the obsessive search for rituals that can overcome it, is the central concern of the Brahmanas. The phrase 'recurring death' or 're-death' (punar mrityu) is an essential key to our understanding of the Hindu attitude to reincarnation.ii Most Hindus continued to believe that death was something to be feared, avoided. Many myths began with the natural premise of someone grieving, for the death of a loved one or for their own impending death, and being assured, in the course of the myth, that death was inevitable (for otherwise there could be no birth) or even desirable (for otherwise the world would be overcrowded: one myth about a time when death took a holiday says that, in heaven, everyone had to stand with their arms above their heads), or that if people lived forever they would be without ambition or a moral law.
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The Brahmanas' fear of death, single or repeated, led to an entirely different approach to death in the texts that follow, and gloss, the Brahmanas: the Upanishads, composed from about 600 BCE. Like the Brahmanas, the Upanishads speak of re-death (punar mrityu) long before they begin speaking of rebirth (punar janma). The Buddha, preaching at roughly the same time, taught that misery (dukkha) is not so much suffering as the inevitable loss of happiness, a chaos from which nirvana (the Buddhist equivalent of moksha) offered deliverance.
This recurrent loss of happiness is the problem faced by the Upanishads, the problem of re-death. The Upanishads reverse the Rig Vedic equation of death with chaos, life with order, and state, instead, that life (sex, birth, one damn thing after another) is chaos, a dream, or rather a nightmare, while death (or final release from life, moksha) is order, a dreamless sleep, or an awakening. Though there are tantalizing precursors of a doctrine of rebirth in the Brahmanas and even in the Rig Veda, the first explicit discussion of the doctrine of rebirth in Indian literature occurs in the Upanishads.
A king asks a young man named Gautama (no relation to the Buddha) if he knows the answer to the following questions: 'Do you know where created beings go from here?' 'No, sir.' 'Do you know how they come back again?' 'No, sir.' 'Do you know about the separation between the two paths, the path of the gods and the path of the fathers?' 'No, sir.' 'Do you know how the world (of heaven) over there does not get filled up?' 'No, sir.' 'Do you know how, in the fifth oblation, water comes to have a human voice?' 'No, sir.' This Socratic routine goes on for some time until, eventually, the king tells the boy the answers: When the embryo has lain inside the womb for ten months or nine months, or however long, covered with the membrane, then he is born. When he is born, he lives as long as his allotted lifespan.
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When he has died, they carry him to the appointed place and put him in the fire, for that is where he came from, what he was born from. Those who know this, and those who worship in the forest, concentrating on faith and asceticism, they are born into the flame, and from the flame into the day, and from the day into the fortnight of the waxing moon, and from the fortnight of the waxing moon into the six months during which the sun moves north; from these months, into the year; from the year into the sun; from the sun into the moon, from the moon into lightning.
There a Person who is not human leads them to the ultimate reality. This is the path that the gods go on. But those who worship in the village, concentrating on sacrifices and good works and charity, they are born into the smoke, and from the smoke into the night, and from the night into the other fortnight, and from the other fortnight into the six months when the sun moves south.
They do not reach the year. From these months they go to the world of the fathers, and from the world of the fathers to space, and from space to the moon. That is the food of the gods.
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When they have dwelt there for as long as there is a remnant (of their merit), then they return along that very same road that they came along, back into space; but from space they go to wind, and when one has become wind he becomes smoke, and when he has become smoke he becomes mist; when he has become mist, he becomes a cloud, and when he has become a cloud, he rains. These are then born here as rice, barley, plants, trees, sesame plants and beans.
It is difficult to move forth out of this condition; for whoever eats him as food and then emits him as semen, he becomes that creature's semen and is born. And so those who behave nicely here will, in general, find a nice womb, the womb of a Brahmin or the womb of a Kshatriya or the womb of a Vaishya. But those whose behaviour here is stinking will, in general, find a stinking womb, the womb of a dog or the womb of a pig or the womb of an Untouchable.
Then they become those tiny creatures who go by neither one of these two paths but are constantly returning. 'Be born and die'-that is the third condition. And because of that, the world (of heaven) over there is not filled up.
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This being so, the fact that major schools of Hindu (and Buddhist) philosophy strive not to be reborn, strive to attain release (moksha) from ever being born again, has struck many non-Hindu thinkers as a pessimistic or nihilistic attitude: such Hindus (the non-Hindu critic reasons) are throwing away not merely the present life but all those potential future lives as well, committing a kind of multiple proleptic suicide, a preventative euthanasia. But this line of reasoning entirely misses the point of the Hindu doctrine.
In the Hindu view, the cycle begins with death, not birth; texts explaining it always begin: 'When a man dies …' and go on to describe various adventures that the soul endures before finally alighting in some womb or other, and then progressing to death. What the authors of these early texts feared was not life but death-more precisely, 'old age and death' (jaramrityu). And what they feared most of all was what they called punar mrityu, recurrent death: how terrible to go on getting old and dying, over and over again.
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KARMA AND REBIRTH
The first and most basic meaning of karma is action. The noun karma comes from the verb kri, cognate with the Latin creo, 'to make or do'-to make a baby or a table or to perform a ritual. It is often contrasted with mind and speech: one can think, say, or do [kri] something, with steadily escalating consequences.
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The second meaning of karma is ritual action, particularly Vedic ritual action; this is its primary connotation in the Rig Veda. Its third meaning, which begins to be operative in the Upanishads, is morally charged action, good or bad, a meter that is always running, that is constantly charging something to one's account. And its fourth meaning, which follows closely on the heels of the third, is morally charged action that has consequences for the soul in the future, that is retributive both within one's life and across the barrier of re-death: you become a sheep that people eat if you have eaten a sheep.
(We see the germ of this theory in the Brahmana descriptions of people soundlessly screaming in the Other Worldv and in statements that sacrifice generates merit which guarantees an afterlife in the other world.) In this sense, karma determines the nature of your future rebirths. Consequences have consequences, and first thing you know, you're born as a sheep. Turned on its head, this link led to a fifth meaning of karma, not as the cause of future lives but as the result of past lives and the agenda for this life, the inescapable role in life that one was born to play; one's work, or innate activity.
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The Hindu view extends the operative past and future beyond the boundaries of this lifespan. Scott Fitzgerald captured the spirit of karma in the final sentence of The Great Gatsby: 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.' In Hinduism, we are also borne back ceaselessly into the future. The sixth, and last, meaning of karma is the implication that good and bad karma may also be transferred from one person to another under certain circumstances, not merely between parents and children and between sacrificial priest and patron, but between any people who meet.
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The idea of the cyclicity of time leads to the circle of karma and rebirth in each individual life, which carries with it from the start the idea of escaping from that very circularity. The assumption is that we are all on the wheel of re-death, transmigration (samsara), but all Hindus do not at all agree as to whether it is good or bad to be on the wheel, or how best to go about getting off it if one does want to get off.vi
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HEAVEN AND HELL IN THE MAHABHARATA
As we have seen, the Rig Veda already has a vague idea of heaven; it also has a rather vague idea of hell. But later texts rushed into this vacuum, with a vengeance. One might think that the cyclic concept of reincarnation would obviate any need, or indeed any use, for a heaven or hell in which one would be rewarded or punished for all eternity, but this is not the case.
The older Vedic idea of heaven and hell was simply folded into the newer Upanishadic idea of rebirth. This was how the combination worked: We have already seen, in the Upanishads, a bifurcation or dichotomy in the cycle of reincarnation: reincarnating souls go either to the flame, the sun, and finally to freedom or ultimate reality; or to the smoke, the moon, and the cycle of rebirth. In the case of heaven/hell and rebirth, it was simply said that after death, the reincarnating soul takes one of two paths: if good karma predominates over bad karma, the soul goes first to hell for a relatively brief period, where it works out or consumes its bad karma by being tormented, and then to heaven for a long period, where it enjoys the fruits of its good karma.
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If bad karma predominates, the soul goes first briefly to heaven and then for a longer sojourn in hell. In either case, after the two sorts of karma are consumed, the soul is reborn in a station in life determined by the original balance of good and evil karma. The final book of the Mahabharata, Book 18, the Svargarohana Parvan ('The Book of Climbing to Heaven') is devoted to a description of the final journey of King Yudhishthira, the son of Dharma.
First he asks to see his brothers, and is taken on what appears to be a descent into hell: In front went the messenger of the gods, and behind him the king, on a path that was inauspicious, dangerous and frequented by evil-doers, covered with darkness, horrible, reeking with the smells of evil-doers, with hair for its moss and grass, flesh and blood for its mud, filled with flies and mosquitoes with their stings fixed sticking up, and crickets, surrounded on all sides with corpses, on this side and that, strewn with bones and hair, full of worms and maggots, surrounded on all sides by a blazing fire, overrun by crows and owls and vultures with iron beaks, and covered with ghosts the size of the Vindhya mountains but with mouths like needles, with severed arms, thighs, and hands covered in fat and blood, and amputated entrails and legs scattered here and there. In the midst of that inauspicious, hair-raising path that stank with the stench of corpses, the king who was the soul of Dharma walked, pondering a great deal.
He saw a river full of hot water, hard to go through, and the forest whose leaves were swords, the ground covered with sharp razors. Heated mud and sand, free-standing iron rocks, and iron pots of simmering sesame oil were all around. Yudhishthira also saw spikey salmalika trees with sharp thorns, painful to touch, and the tortures of the evil-doers.
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When he saw that bad-smelling path, he said to the messenger of the gods, 'How far must we go on such a road? To whom of the gods does this place belong? I want to know that.' Having heard the words of the Dharma king, the messenger of the gods stopped and said to him, 'This is as far as you go.
For I must turn back; this is what I was told by those-who-dwell-in-heaven. If you are tired, lord of kings, you should come along.' And Yudhishthira, disgusted and fainting from that smell, set his mind on turning back and turned around. But when he turned around, suffering from unhappiness and sorrow, he heard there the wretched words of people speaking on all sides: 'Royal sage!' 'Son of Dharma!' 'Noble Pandava!' 'Stop as a favour to us, just for a little moment.
When you come near, an auspicious breeze blows, carrying your smell, which brings us comfort. We here will obtain relief for a long time, as long as you are here, by looking at you. Stay here, even for a moment.
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While you stay here, torture does not hurt us.' He heard in this place many sorts of words like that, pitiful words of those who were suffering, crying out on all sides. And he said, 'Alas, how painful,' and stayed. He had heard those voices before again and again, long ago, but he did not recognize them as they came from those wasted, suffering people.
Then they told him that they were his brothers, and his wife. Then King Yudhishthira, the son of Dharma, spoke his sharp anger; he reviled the gods and even Dharma. Heated by the sharp smell, he said to the messenger of the gods: 'Go, good sir, to the presence of those whose messenger you are.
For I will not go there; I am staying. For taking refuge with me brings comfort to my brothers.'16 The gods then come to try to persuade him to leave, and as soon as they arrive, hell vanishes: That darkness disappeared. The tortures of evil-doers were not seen there, nor the river of hell, with its spikey trees.
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The frightful iron pots and the rocks were not seen, and the distorted bodies which the king had seen there all around, became invisible. Then a good wind, pleasant to touch, carrying a good smell, very cool, blew from the presence of the gods. Then Indra, the lord of the gods, said to Yudhishthira this speech, which began with words of conciliation: 'My son, inevitably all kings must see hell.
There are two piles of good and evil. Whoever enjoys the good deed first (in heaven) goes afterwards to hell. And whoever experiences hell first, goes afterwards to heaven.
A person who has a record of mostly bad deeds experiences heaven first; therefore I made you come here this way because I wished to do what was best for you. Since you once deceived an enemy, you were shown hell in the form of a deception. And just like you, so too your brothers went to hell just in the form of a deception.
Now they have been freed from guilt, and all the people on your side, princes killed in battle for you, have reached heaven. You will dive into this auspicious river of the gods, the Ganges in the sky, which purifies the triple worlds, and depart. And when you have bathed in it your human nature will go away.
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You will have no more grief, no exhaustion, no enmity. Inevitably all kings must see hell. But you have experienced this supreme misery just for a moment; none of you deserve hell for a long time.' The story does not quite end there, however.
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REBIRTH IN THE PURANAS
500-1000 CE, fleshed out, as it were, the philosophical concept of reincarnation developed in the Upanishads, in narratives about reincarnation. These texts, with their inevitable tendency to the rococo, posited many heavens and many hells, a complex mandala of retribution. The Puranas add psychological details to the basic Mahabharata concept of the time-sharing aspects of heaven and hell: Sometimes a man goes to heaven; sometimes he goes to hell.
Sometimes a dead man experiences both hell and heaven. Sometimes he is born here again and consumes his own karma; sometimes a man who has consumed his karma dies and goes forth with just a very little bit of karma remaining. Sometimes he is reborn here with a small amount of good and bad karma, having consumed most of his karma in heaven or in hell.
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HINDU GODS AS DRAMATIS PERSONAE IN THE DRAMAS OF DEATH
Each of the great Hindu gods plays god-which is to say, plays death-but each plays it in a different way. And even though a Hindu generally gives his or her devotion primarily to one particular god, all of the gods are available at all times to all Hindus, and many Hindus draw upon several different mythological traditions.viii With this in mind, let me provide a kind of overview of the major myths of death that characterize each of the great Hindu gods and goddesses.
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Although the Hindus, and Indologists, often describe a trinity of gods (Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer),ix in fact Brahma is hardly worshipped at all, and the other two great gods, Vishnu and Shiva, are each both creators and destroyers, as is the other great deity who forms the real quasi-trinity, Devi, the goddess. Each deity, therefore, is death, though they are different sorts of death. Vishnu Vishnu appears as death on many occasions.
On the narrative level, he kills demons (asuras, anti-gods). He takes the form of the Man-lion, Narasimha, to kill a demon named Hiranyakashipu ('Golden Cushion'), who had been given a promise that he could not be killed by man or animal, by day or by night, on earth or in the sky, and so forth. Vishnu, therefore, took a thoroughly composite form: as the man-lion he was neither man nor animal; he attacked at sunset, neither day nor night; and he held the demon across his knees, neither in the sky nor on earth.
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The serpent, named Kaliya, lived in a swimming hole where the child Krishna used to play with the little boys who were his friends. As the serpent's poison polluted the water, Krishna resolved to subdue him. He plunged into the pool and danced on the cobra's many heads until he surrendered.
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The bow that Shiva uses is made of the Year, and his own shadow, the Night of Doomsday, is the bowstring, for Shiva himself is Time and Death. This is a myth of cosmic destruction by means of combining disparate elements, the mirror image of the myth of cosmic creation by means of dismemberment. To separate and put in order is to create, in this context; to cause oppositional pairs to unite, and thus to lose their separate identities, is to produce chaos and annihilation.
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When Yama, the king of the Dead, comes to lead away one of Shiva's devotees, Shiva fights him, kicks him in the chest, and forces him to promise immunity to all who worship Shiva. In the early mythology, this amazing grace leads to problems of a union nature: Yama complains that he is out of work, since everyone worships Shiva and goes to Heaven instead of Hell.x Ultimately, however, the mythology resorts to the open-ended, 'break-through-the-roof' system in which it is, in fact, possible to cheat not only evil but death forever.xi The world to which the devotees of Shiva are translated now is an infinity of something, of the love of god, perhaps, in place of the infinity of nirvana or moksha, the Vedantic/Buddhist infinity of emptiness.
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REINCARNATION FOR NON-HINDUS
Although ideas about reincarnation have occurred in many cultures, South Asian civilization has developed the most elaborate, subtle and varied forms of this belief, and is often regarded as its fountainhead. Belief in reincarnation has long appealed to non-Hindu consciousness. Karmic thinking continues to surface in New Age circles, in Hollywood (both in films and in the personal beliefs of stars like Shirley MacLaine), and in what might be called American folk belief.
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Most scholars of Hinduism and Buddhism tread lightly upon the karma theory for reasons of inter-cultural tact (or raging relativism, depending on your point of view); some (including myself) go farther, and grant the theory some degree of useful wisdom, at the very least as a powerful metaphor. But a more critical stance is taken by scholars such as Robert P. Goldman, who has characterized the karma theory as 'nonsense'.
He asks, 'What is going on here? What could possibly induce intelligent and well-educated people to take this nonsense seriously?' Then he exhorts us to ask down-to-earth questions about it: How do events in our real, as opposed to imaginary, pasts affect our later lives? What is our responsibility for events to which we were unwilling or even unwitting parties?
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The karma theory exaggerates and dramatizes a situation that is entirely banal; it expresses the intuition that the things that happen to us now, and that make us who we are, consist, in large part, of forces from the past over which we have no control and of which we have little or no knowledge. The karma theory, however, goes on to add the less obvious assertion that the other people who take the guilt or credit for our deeds, or for whose deeds we take the guilt or credit, are forms of ourselves; these are people 'who-we must take it on faith-were somehow identical with us.
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Even an American, however, will acknowledge that a parent's crime may ruin the life of his or her child precisely because they are, in some significant sense, the same person. The ignorance (of the identification) also sticks in the American craw; and yet, even within one life, never mind the karma theory, we are, more often than not, ignorant of the precise deeds committed by the people (usually our parents) who have made us what we are-people who are part of the very substance of our minds and (in the case of parents) our bodies.
We are ignorant of them either because we have forgotten (or repressed) them or because they took place before we were born. After all, we all forget many of our former selves-the infant altogether, much of the child, some of the adolescent, or the former marriage, the pain of childbirth, and so forth; one door opens and another shuts; we awaken from one dream not to full wakefulness but only to fall into another. The Hindu mythology of reincarnation analogizes the forgotten past life not to the lost or suppressed memories of childhood but to our lost memories of our dreams.
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There is a long continuum of parental influence: closest are the things we remember that our parents did for/to us relatively recently, and then the things that they did when we were so little that we cannot remember them clearly or at all, then the things (like smoking or contracting AIDS) that our mothers did to us while we were in the womb, then the things that our parents did before we were born, and finally both the genetic stock and the cultural memories transmitted from earlier generations: the things that happened during the pogroms in Russia, the traumas suffered during the Depression in America or Partition in India. The weight of these influences, the realization that we cannot simply invent ourselves as we would wish to be, is one of the insights that drive the karma theory.
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The karma theory tells us that we have lived other lives, that our souls have had other bodies. But how can we feel, as well as accept intellectually, the reality of those other lives if we cannot remember them? It is easier for Hindus to feel the theory of rebirth, as they feel themselves to be a part of a larger human group in a way that other people do not; they believe that they are joined in nature as well as in culture not only with the people in the past and future to whom they are related (people whom non-Hindus, too, regard as part of their physical substance) but also with the other people with whom they have present contact (people whom non-Hindus do not generally regard as physically connected with them).
The Hindu texts tell us that we are karmically linked to all the other people in the world; 'they' are 'us'. For those of us who lack the imagination to perceive the infinity of our lives in time, it might be possible to perceive the infinity of our lives in human space. My relationship with the karma theory changed in major ways over the half century since I first encountered India.
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In my book The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, published in 1975, I argued that the theory of karma was not regarded as an adequate explanation of evil even in its own country, as evidenced by the fact that the Hindus developed many other approaches to evil, including the myths that I wrote about in that book. In the preface to the second edition of The Origins of Evil, I remarked that I had changed my evaluation of the karma theory, had come to respect it more, in part by editing a 350-page book about it, Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions (1980).
And in 1986, in Other Peoples' Myths, I took it very seriously indeed. I had gradually come first to think with and then to feel with the karma theory. But my realization of this understanding happened at one particular moment.
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Forgetting and Re-awakening to Incarnation
In the Hindu view, as we have seen,i reincarnation happens whether we know it or not; it is therefore an unfalsifiable proposition. But this did not stop Hindus from imagining, in glorious technicolour, people who did know about their past lives.
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FORGETTING AND RE-AWAKENING TO INCARNATION1
In the Hindu view, as we have seen,i reincarnation happens whether we know it or not; it is therefore an unfalsifiable proposition. But this did not stop Hindus from imagining, in glorious technicolour, people who did know about their past lives. The mythology of reincarnation jumps the barrier of rebirth, imagining the survival of consciousness on the other side.
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In this mythology, the new self is literally a part of the past not merely of the present life but of other, previous lives. At any moment, any of us may be awakened to the memory of another, lost life. We are constantly reinventing ourselves out of the scraps of the past; we are always imitating our past selves.
The signals we send to ourselves from our former lives are wake-up calls, like the message the Chippendale Mupp, one of the creatures in Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book, sends to himself: at bedtime, he bites the end tuft on his very long tail, so that the ouch will work its way up the whole tail and, finally, wake him up in the morning.
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THE LINGERING SCENTS OF MEMORY
In Hinduism, the myths of karma ask: Where is memory, in the mind or in the body? How can our bodies remember things that our minds have forgotten? Hinduism assumes that when the body dies, the soul transmigrates, taking with it the dead person's karma, the moral record of good and bad actions committed in all former lives.
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Indian philosophy locates memory in the manas, a combination of mind and heart: like the heart, it is a physical organ in the body, and like the mind, it is where you learn calculus; and like both mind and heart, it is where you fall in love-thus doubly blurring the Cartesian distinction between mind and body. But some branches of Indian philosophy locate memory in the soul, without, however, totally divorcing it from the body. For, although the transmigrating soul in Hinduism usually loses its memory as it crosses the boundary of rebirth and sheds its body, some particularly gifted and/or lucky people can remember their previous births.
Some branches of Indian philosophy, therefore, locate memory along with karma in (or, more precisely, on) the soul, without, however, totally divorcing it from the body. The karma theory tells us that we have lived lives that we cannot remember and hence cannot feel. We can remember some things in life in our minds, and perhaps, therefore, in our souls, but other things can only be remembered with our bodies, which do not survive the trip across the barrier of death.
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Vasana, the singular noun, is derived from the Sanskrit term vas, meaning 'to perfume' … The term is used to explain why a person has a tendency to react to a situation in a particular way. We find it useful to adopt this philosophical term in our classification of human social chemosignals because both its etymology and its functional definition are so close to the findings from our empirical psychological data … Vasanas are those unconscious chemosignals whose functional effects are related to or predicted by their odour qualities when they are experienced consciously … The power of subconscious odours to evoke emotional memory-derived experience in humans is widely recognized … Because they are not necessarily conscious, the term vasana may be more appropriate than 'unconscious odours', which is an oxymoron.7
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THE CYCLE
The unconscious memories of past lives, the vasanas, predispose the transmigrating soul to act in one way or another in its new life. It retains some sort of magnetic attachment to its old body and, with it, to its old personality. Even if we cannot remember who we were, we are reborn in the shadow of our previous personality.
Hindu texts imagine the reincarnating soul meditating on its next life in the womb of the soul's future mother, where it (not yet he or she) not only remains fully conscious but remembers its previous lives in agonizing detail: Then it begins to remember its many previous existences in the wheel of rebirth, and that depresses it, and it tosses from side to side, thinking, 'I won't ever do that again, as soon as I get out of this womb. I will do everything I can, so that I won't become an embryo again.' It thinks in this way as it remembers the hundreds of miseries of birth that it experienced before, in the power of fate.
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Then, as time goes by, the embryo turns around, head down, and in the ninth or tenth month it is born. As it comes out, it is hurt by the wind of procreation; it comes out crying, because it is pained by the misery in its heart. When it has come out of the womb, it falls into an unbearable swoon, but it regains consciousness when the air touches it.
Then Vishnu's deluding power of illusion assails him, and when his soul has been deluded by it, he loses his knowledge. As soon as the living creature has lost his knowledge, he becomes a baby. After that he becomes a young boy, then an adolescent, and then an old man.
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The goal of liberation theology, Hindu style, is to untangle the knots of karma, to achieve moksha, freedom from the same old same old in life after life. For a Hindu, this means to break out altogether from samsara (the cycle of transmigration), but it could also mean to be free to go forward without the compulsion for self-imitation. For people find it difficult to kick the Lethe habit.
In many ways the vasanas that return to the reborn soul correspond not just to the unconscious as we have come to understand it but more particularly to the repressed unconscious that returns, in Freud's formulation.10 Freud also referred to a 'memory trace' (Erinnerungsspur) that was not yet a part of conscious memory.11
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THE MAN WHO FORGOT HE WAS GOD: THE MONK’S DREAM
This is the tale of a man who dreams he is the god Rudra, a form of the god Shiva who is, in this text, the Supreme God: Once upon a time there was a monk who was inclined to imagine things rather a lot. One day, he happened to imagine a man named Jivata, who drank too much and fell into a heavy sleep. As Jivata dreamt, he saw a Brahmin who read all day long.
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One day, that Brahmin fell asleep, and as his daily activities were still alive within him, like a tree inside a seed, he dreamt that he was a prince. One day that prince fell asleep after a heavy meal, and dreamt that he was a great king. One day that king fell asleep, having gorged himself on his every desire, and in his dream he saw himself as a celestial woman.
The woman fell into a deep sleep in the languor that followed making love, and she saw herself as a doe with darting eyes. That doe one day fell asleep and dreamed that she was a clinging vine, because she had been accustomed to eating vines; for animals dream, too, and they always remember what they have seen and heard. The vine saw herself as a bee that used to buzz among the vines; the bee fell in love with a lotus and was so intoxicated by the lotus sap he drank that his wits became numb; just then an elephant came to that pond and trampled the lotus, and the bee, still attached to the lotus, was crushed with it on the elephant's tusk.
As the bee looked at the elephant, he saw himself as an elephant in rut. That elephant in rut fell into a deep pit and became the favourite elephant of a king. One day the elephant was cut to pieces by a sword in battle, and as he went to his final resting place he saw a swarm of bees hovering over the sweet ichor that oozed from his temples, and so the elephant became a bee again.
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The bee returned to the lotus pond and was trampled under the feet of another elephant, and just then he noticed a goose beside him in the pond, and so he became a goose. That goose moved through other births, other wombs, for a long time, until one day, when he was a goose in a flock of other geese, he realized that, being a goose, he was the same as the swan of the Creator. Just as he had this thought, he was shot by a hunter and he died, and then he was born as the swan of the Creator.
In this metaphysical world, we remember both our dreams and our rebirths-much the same thing-when we awaken from our primary amnesia, which makes us forget that we are god. The story goes on to raise other metaphysical issues, but these passages make several important points for the topic at hand. The transition to a new life can take place either by thinking of something or by suffering a violent death, for dreaming and dying are conflated.
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Both dreaming and dying are brought on by over-indulgence in the pleasures of the senses, and those same pleasures of the senses determine the content of the dream or the new life. Indeed, sensual appeal is what attracts the soul to the next life: love, admiration (even, sometimes, in its negative aspect of jealousy), obsession, fascination. Rudra himself (the supreme deity, who is regarded here, as often in Hindu mythology, as existing on a level that encompasses the tasks and powers of the Creator) is caught up in this round of attraction, but he is also the source of our own attractions, the book to which we return when the cycle has played itself out.
The story does not reveal to us the entire rebirth of each of the characters; none of them is born, and most of them do not die within the story. Significantly, the first person the monk dreams of is named Jivata, a word derived from the word for a life or a soul, jiva. Some of the subjects are women (and female animals), with whom the male actors have no lasting attachments, merely brief physical encounters.
These people dream and become what they have habitually dreamed about and are thinking about as they die. We awaken from ignorance, or from sleep, or from life; the same verb (budh) covers all three. The creatures in the monk's dream form a pattern that is a masterful combination of order and chance.
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Though anything can happen, certain things are more likely to happen; this is how karma skews and orders the chaos of the universe. The text tells us: 'Again and again these lives revolve in creation like the waves in water, and some [rebirths] are strikingly similar [to what they were before], and others are about half the same; some are a little bit the same, some are not very much alike at all, and sometimes they are once again just the same.' This flexibility, together with the elements of pure chance and the gravity of karmic tendencies, makes certain coincidences not only possible but probable.
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THE GOD WHO FORGOT HE WAS GOD
All of us tend to forget that we are (a) god, according to the doctrine of Hindu idealism in the Yogavasishtha. But divinity is a continuum; some creatures are more divine than others, and some gods are more divine in certain texts than in others. The philosophical and mythological assertion that all humans are (conscious or unconscious) incarnations of a deity is enacted in the many rituals in which the worshipper masquerades as the god (through the use of masks, for instance).
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And to be truly human is to forget that you are god, which Rama must do-at least until after Ravana's death. Moreover, taking on a human body is the consequence of wrong knowledge,21 for true knowledge would have brought enlightenment and freedom from the wheel of rebirth. The very act of incarnation would destroy the incarnation's true knowledge of his divinity, but, in addition (as we have seen), in the process of being born, the newborn child must also lose his knowledge.
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Assume the Position: The Fight over the Body of Yoga
In India and abroad, particularly in America, yoga is big business, a cash sacred cow: about 15 million people in America practice (and generally pay for) something that they call yoga, making it a multi-billion dollar industry. The high stakes have led some American Hindus to express (in phrases dripping with heavy capitalist overtones) concern that Hinduism has 'lost control of the brand' of yoga and has been the victim of 'overt intellectual property theft' by people who have 'offered up a religion's spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism'.
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ASSUME THE POSITION: THE FIGHT OVER THE BODY OF YOGA1
In India and abroad, particularly in America, yoga is big business, a cash sacred cow: about 15 million people in America practice (and generally pay for) something that they call yoga, making it a multi-billion dollar industry. The high stakes have led some American Hindus to express (in phrases dripping with heavy capitalist overtones) concern that Hinduism has 'lost control of the brand' of yoga and has been the victim of 'overt intellectual property theft' by people who have 'offered up a religion's spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism'.
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Activists of Hindu-American identity politicsi have made a two-fold historical claim: that yoga (a) was already described in the ancient Vedic texts of Hinduism and (b) has always been the core of Hinduism. Hindu Americans' deep investment (to continue the capitalist metaphor) in these claims about history has its own history. For, given the human obsession with roots, those claims generally take the form of arguments about the origins of yoga, a quest for purity of lineage, for undefiled racial descent, here as always a mad quest, since the history of yoga is, like most histories, a palimpsest.
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The Hindu arguments, and the evidence for or against them, can be sorted into a chronology of four claims: Claim 1: Yoga began before 2500 BCE, in the Indus Valley Civilization, in what is now Pakistan and northwest India (a civilization that left substantial archeological remains but no deciphered script). Evidence: There are a few tiny soapstone seals bearing the image of a man seated in what might be either just the way many people sit-knees apart, feet together or legs crossed-or a basic yogic posture, like the 'lotus' [padma] or 'perfect' [siddha] postures attested in much later yoga texts.
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Aside from its unverifiability, this claim assumes the position that the essence of yoga is in its 'positions' or 'postures' (asanas, literally 'sittings'), rather than, for instance, in its philosophical or religious concepts, or its breathing techniques. This assumption is contradicted by the next claim: Claim 2: Yoga began in around 1500 BCE, in the oldest Sanskrit text, the Rig Veda. Evidence: The word 'yoga' occurs in this text, though only in the primary sense of 'yoking' horses to chariots or draft animals to ploughs or wagons (the Sanskrit and English words are cognate, as is the English 'junction'); and then, secondarily, designating the effort of 'yoking' oneself to do physical labour.
Here we have neither philosophical nor postural yoga. Let's try again: Claim 3: Yoga began sometime in the middle of the first millennium BCE in the Sanskrit philosophical texts known as the Upanishads. Evidence: The word 'yoga' occurs in a few (just a few) passages in the early Upanishads,3 designating a spiritual praxis of meditation conjoined with breath-control, 'yoking' the senses in order to control the spirit, and then 'yoking' the mind, 'yoking' the body to the spirit, and the soul to the mind of god, in order to obtain an immortal body 'made by the fire of yoga'.
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This is the yoga that Mircea Eliade's Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1958) illuminated for a generation of Americans. Buddhist sources in this same period also speak of techniques of disciplining the mind and the body, and the word 'yoga', owing as much to Buddhism as to Hinduism, soon came to mean any mental and physical praxis of this sort.ii This is the general sense in which the word 'yoga' is used in the Bhagavad Gita, a few centuries later, to denote each of three different religious paths (the yoga of action, the yoga of meditation and the yoga of devotion).
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But these texts say nothing about the physical 'positions' or 'postures' that distinguish contemporary yoga. Claim 4: Yoga began in India in Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, probably in the third century CE. (Some would put it earlier, and it does draw on earlier sources.) Many contemporary yoga practitioners cite this text as the basis of their praxis.
But Patanjali says nothing about the 'postures' other than remarking that the adept should sit in a manner that is relaxed and conducive to meditation and breath-control [2.49-53]. On the contrary, he speaks of cultivating 'aversion to one's own body' [2.40]. But he describes magical powers (siddhis, literally 'perfections') that result from the mastery of the mind, which include flying, becoming invisible, walking on water, foreknowledge of death, knowledge of past and future, entering the minds of others and understanding the languages of animals [3.16-34]-claims that were later made by Hindu ascetics who called themselves 'yogis' (or 'yogins').
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A degree of confusion arises from the fact that Patanjali's text is foundational for one of the six classical philosophies of ancient India, the meditational school known as Yoga. This philosophy is often called 'Raja Yoga' ('royal yoga') or the Eight-fold (ashtanga) Yoga, to distinguish it from common or jungle varieties of yoga in the sense of any spiritual discipline, as well as from the later 'Hatha Yoga' ('the yoga of force'). The word 'yoga/yoga/Yoga' thus became a triple homonym, referring sometimes to a physical praxis, sometimes to a mental praxis and sometimes to a particular philosophical school.
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The confusion is compounded by the existence of various ascetics often called 'yogis' and connected to yoga in many different degrees. Scattered evidence for these traditions begins in the Rig Veda's reference to naked ascetics who use (consciousness-altering) drugs and 'mount the wind' (i.e., both fly and control their breath); they are associated with Rudra,4 the antecedent of the god Shiva who is closely associated with yogis, himself a great yogi and the Lord of Yogis (Yogeshvara). Some later yogic traditions cultivated 'the aversion to one's own body' in more extreme ways.
Texts from the early centuries of the Common Era deconstruct the body (particularly, but not only, the female body) into its disgusting components of shit, piss, pus, and so forth, while others tell of men and women who, going after a kind of god one could find only by breaking away into madness and horror, subject themselves to extremes of heat and cold, fasting and other forms of physical mortification, going naked, sometimes eating out of human skulls, or eating carrion or faeces, generally demonstrating their indifference to both physical pain and social conventions, thumbing their nose at the body. These disciplines often included difficult postures, such as standing on one leg for days at a time.
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By the seventh century CE, such postures became so notorious as to be subject to satire; the great frieze at Mamallapuram (Mahabalipuram) depicts a cat (a symbol of ascetic hypocrisy in Hinduism)iii standing on one leg in mimicry of a human ascetic in this posture. Many texts reflect the uneasiness and suspicion with which conventional householder Hindus regarded fringe groups of yogis, depicting them as lunatics or magicians with paranormal powers. Hindus were well aware that power corrupts, and divine power corrupts divinely.
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One yogic text composed sometime between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Hatha-yoga-pradipika ('Illumination of the Yoga of Force'), describes fifteen yogic postures. It also describes the Tantric technique of raising the coiled serpent power (the Kundalini) up the spine, through the series of chakras (centres of force), to the brain, and a related technique whereby the adept draws fluids (such as the secretions of his female partner in the Tantric sexual ritual) up through his penis (the vajroli process). The followers of the Vedantic philosopher Shankara (c.
788-820 CE) rejected the physical discipline and engaged only the philosophy and the meditational praxis. By that time, most educated Hindus had nothing but scorn for postural yoga, though there was still respect for yoga as a spiritual discipline. Later, the Hatha-yoga-pradipika became an embarrassment for Hindus, who invented an apocryphal story about Dayanand Sarasvati (1824-83), the founder of the Bengal reform movement called the Arya Samaj, who allegedly pulled a corpse from a river, dissected it to see if the chakras were there, didn't find them, and threw his copy of the Hatha-yoga-pradikipa into the water.
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Well-born Bengalis considered exercise in general lower class. When the British arrived in India in the eighteenth century, they came to share many of the Hindu anti-yogic biases, compounded by the European horror of the nakedness and self-torture of the extreme yogis. The yogi on a bed of nails became the stock European symbol of India's moral and spiritual backwardness.
In addition to the individual yogis, bands of yogis often posed military threats, using yoga to strengthen their bodies for martial purposes. Warrior ascetics are a very old Indian tradition, going back to the menacing troops of Vratyas mentioned in the Veda. Under the Raj, militant yogis engaged in exercise regimes to make them tough, in order to oppose the British; they were generally indistinguishable from violent militants whose training centres for resistance masqueraded as centres of yogic instruction.
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In this period, to be a yogi often meant to train as a guerilla. The British rounded up many of the ascetic mercenaries and broke up their organizations; some yogis became beggars or itinerant carnival performers who displayed as circus tricks the more extreme postures, such as a handstand from the lotus posture. But at this point, something transformative happened, which is the basis of a new claim, not made by Hindus, about the origins of yoga: Claim 5: Contemporary postural yoga was invented in India in the nineteenth century.
This is the provocative assertion made by Mark Singleton, who sets out (in his book, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice) to demolish the assertion that the roots of modern yoga lie in ancient India. He argues that a transnational, Anglophone yoga arose at this time, compounded of the unlikely mix of British body-building and physical culture, American transcendentalism and Christian science, naturopathy, Swedish gymnastics and the YMCA, grafted onto a rehabilitated form of postural yoga adapted specifically for a Western audience.
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The Toleration of Intolerance in Hinduism
When India and Pakistan turned on one another in violence after Partition in 1948, Western intellectuals were astonished that the nonviolent, tolerant Hindus could do such a thing. And when India invaded and annexed Goa in December 1961, Western intellectuals were again astonished that the nonviolent, tolerant Hindus could do such a thing.
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THE TOLERATION OF INTOLERANCE IN HINDUISM1
When India and Pakistan turned on one another in violence after Partition in 1948, Western intellectuals were astonished that the nonviolent, tolerant Hindus could do such a thing. And when India invaded and annexed Goa in December 1961, Western intellectuals were again astonished that the nonviolent, tolerant Hindus could do such a thing. But when, in 1992, Hindus stormed the Babri mosque in Ayodhya that Babur had built over the place where many Hindus believe Rama was born, and over a thousand people died in subsequent riots, they were no longer so astonished.
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The world had become used to the almost daily bloodshed in India, to the killing of Sikhs by Hindus, Hindus by Sikhs, Muslims by Hindus, Hindus by Muslims, Tamil Hindus by Buddhists, Buddhists by Tamil Hindus, Dalits by Brahmins, Brahmins by Dalits, and on and on. Today, hardly anyone is surprised by reports of violence and hate crimes in Gandhi's India, a predominantly Hindu and overwhelmingly religious society. But what was the source of the earlier belief in Hindu tolerance?
Is there any basis for it in the intellectual history of India? Tolerance, of course, is an English word, expressing the outsiders' view of what they think happens in India. There is no word in any of the Indian languages that corresponds to the English term 'religious tolerance', which covers everything from mere 'endurance of' or 'putting up with' religious difference (as one 'tolerates' pain) to a more active endorsement, even celebration, of religious difference.
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(Here I should make it explicit that I am speaking about Hindu intolerance, not 'Indian' intolerance in general, which would include not only Buddhism and Jainism but Indian Islam and Indian Christianity.) The concept of tolerance in the positive sense is a product of the Western Enlightenment. Yet, just because Hindus do not have a word for it does not mean that they do not have a set of intellectual concepts that might approximate the Western concept of 'tolerance' and that, more important, might lead to the active embodiment of tolerance-that might make people actually be tolerant.
It is, I think, the intellectual rather than the political history of India that has given rise to the outsiders', especially Westerners', idea of Hindu tolerance. And Western ideas about Hindu tolerance are closely tied up with Western ideas about Hindu pluralismi: if they can tolerate all those gods (the argument goes), with all those heads and all those arms, if they can entertain all those different concepts of divinity, they must be able to tolerate the different concepts of divinity expressed in different religions.
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But we must distinguish between two significantly different sorts of pluralism, sociological and intellectual. Contemporary pluralism is a sociological phenomenon that can itself be approached on two levels, both the fact of the existence of many religions in our world today, and our reaction to that fact. In this latter sense, pluralism is a conscious attempt to harmonize different religious beliefs in a spirit of tolerance and mutual appreciation, in the hope of reducing the kinds of fanaticism that lead to everything from bigotry to holy wars.
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This is an intellectual phenomenon, a pluralism of ideas within a single social group that regards all of these ideas, some of which might seem contradictory to us, as valid-though not necessarily equally valid. We might subsume under intellectual pluralism the category of internal or individual pluralism, the problem of personal dissonance. More emotional than purely intellectual, internal pluralism might be regarded as a kind of mediating category, between the mental constructs of intellectual pluralism and the physical reality of sociological pluralism incarnate in real, flesh-and-blood people.
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Internal pluralism is eclectic: one person holds a toolbox of different beliefs more or less simultaneously, drawing upon one on one occasion, another on another. A central example of such individual pluralism can be found in the law text of Manu, which argues, within a single chapter, passionately against and then firmly for the eating of meat.ii The two basic sorts of pluralism, sociological and intellectual, are interconnected in any number of (plural) ways. We might ask if the intellectual pluralism of Hinduism has led to the sort of sociological pluralism that is often the basis of religious tolerance.
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I will argue that ancient Hindu intellectual pluralism has not, in the past, led to ancient Hindu sociological tolerance, but that it might do so in the future.
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THE VEDIC BACKGROUND
The world of traditional, Vedic, worldly Hinduism was plural in several senses. Sociologically, it maintained the pluralist-even if inegalitarian-and relativist caste system, with separate, different dharmas for each social group and individual dharmas for each person (svadharma). Intellectually, it recognized a pantheon of many gods.
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This pluralism, like everything else in the literature of Hinduism, begins with the Rig Veda, at the start of the first millennium BCE, and it begins with polytheism. But the polytheism of the Rig Veda is of a peculiarly monistic hue-monistic in viewing the very substance of the universe as divine, and viewing that substance and that divinity as unitary-as one, and indivisible. Monism, however passive, often conceals a submerged form of intellectual imperialism.
Beneath all the flickering images of all the different gods lies brahman, the undying divine substratum of the universe. Thus the Rig Vedic poet says, 'The wise speak of what is One in many ways' [RV 1.164.46]. In this view, though pluralism does in fact arise out of the original monism, it has a secondary, illusory status in comparison with the enduring, real status of the underlying monism.iii There is, thus, a clear hierarchy that privileges monism over pluralism.
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It may be argued that there is always some sort of hierarchy in the Vedas, and that, more broadly speaking, you cannot have intellectual pluralism at all without some sort of hierarchy. But then, there is always grammar, and where there is grammar there is subordination. There is implicit hierarchy any time that we use language, and perhaps implicit hierarchy is even more insidious than explicit hierarchy.
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Any time that we speak, and state our own views to someone else, someone Other, we imply that we believe that what we are saying is better than the alternatives, and in that sense all religious statements are attempts at conversion. Only if we refrain from applying a hermeneutic of suspicion can we regard the absence of explicit hierarchical statements in the Rig Veda as a step in the right direction: indeed, even in the Vedic Hymn of the Primeval Maleiv, the purusha sukta, we may see the implicit belief that 'we' Aryans are better than 'those' servants (also called aliens or 'other people', Dasyus or Dasas).
However, the leap from making a (necessarily hierarchical) statement-as the Vedas do-to insisting that the person to whom we make it renounce his or her opposing views (let alone the further leap to threatening death or other punishment if our view is not accepted) is the leap from tolerance to intolerance. The texts of Vedic Hinduism don't quite take this leap (though, as we will soon see, other forms of Hinduism do). The monistic polytheism of the Vedas, therefore, establishes a base for religious tolerance.
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The vague monism of the Vedas was sharpened by the more systematized monism of the Vedanta, beginning in the Upanisads a few centuries later. In these texts, the sense of the unity of ultimate reality (brahman) with the souls of all embodied creatures (atman) could, theoretically, make people see the unity of all peoples; this is, in fact, one of the arguments of the Bhagavad Gita [6.29-30], many centuries later. Certainly, in this sense, a monistic religion is likely to be more tolerant than a monotheistic religion.
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The Hindu evidence supports this correlation.
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CATEGORIZING THE ONE AND THE MANY
Post-Vedic Hindu cosmogonies attempt to reconcile our experienced, worldly multiplicity with an ideal monistic unity.v Beginning with the Rig Veda and continuing through the Puranas, Indian cosmogonies have mingled, seemingly at random, abstract entities (the year, the metres, desire) and material entities (the moon, snakes, people.)vi Post-Vedic texts set out the various groups in these Hindu cosmogonies in a particular hierarchical order: like the pigs in George Orwell's Animal Farm, all ontological categories are equal, but some are more equal than others. Thus, although the three goals of life (trivarga or purusharthas: kama [pleasure], artha [profit] and dharma) are often said to be separate but equal, there is a tendency to rank dharma first.
At the same time, textbooks of erotic love give pride of place to pleasure, political handbooks privilege profit, and dharma texts rank dharma above the other two goals. And later, when release [moksha] is introduced as the fourth goal, there is complete hierarchy: moksha is said, by Vedantists, to be far superior to the other goals, indeed, to be in an entirely different class from the other goals.vii Even within the pluralistic, non-monistic texts of later Vedic Hinduism, the Puranas and the Shastras, the rococo lists were ultimately made hierarchical: not only are the categories different, but one is definitely better than another.
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We can see the ways in which Hinduism deals with these hierarchies in the triads and quartets based upon the social paradigm of the four varnas or classes of society.viii Hierarchy also explains the importance of the priest in cosmogonies. The social or, more precisely, socio-religious element-the priest, the sacrificer, the human being in a particular class or stage of life-recurs in Hindu cosmogonies as a defining factor in the basic framework of the cosmos: the sacrificer and priest must perform the rituals that keep the universe going, that make the sun rise and the rain fall.
That is, the belief that brahman is all that is real takes precedence over the belief in the ability of multiple gods to offer help in particular situations; the vision that those situations are ultimately unreal generally siphons off the impulse to take action against social injustices, against poverty and cruelty, that the texts explicitly remark upon.
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MONISM, HIERARCHY AND INTOLERANCE
What do we learn from the ancient texts of this monistic/pluralistic Hinduism? We learn that the two sorts of pluralism, sociological and intellectual, are not connected in the way that might seem most obvious, and has indeed seemed obvious to many Orientalists and Western theologians. That is, ancient Hindu intellectual pluralism does not lead to ancient Hindu sociological tolerance8; the belief that all the gods are equally real and equally useful to their different worshippers does not lead to the belief that all the castes are equally useful to society.
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One reason for this may simply be that ancient Hindu pluralism did not ultimately carry the field. As we have seen, intellectual pluralism was successfully challenged and supplanted by two different sorts of non-pluralism that determined the course of subsequent Hindu thinking: the hierarchy of Vedic/Puranic Hinduism and the strict monism of the Vedanta. (I am using the term 'Vedanta' here to designate the strain of Indian philosophy that begins with the Upanishads, climaxes with the great commentaries of Shankara and Ramanuja, and survives in the thought of Vedantas such as Ramakrishna and Vivekananda.
And by Vedic/Puranic I mean not merely the Vedas but the entire strain of Hinduism, including the Puranas, that endorses Vedic sacrifice and the worship of a pantheon of gods, as it is carried on to this day in Hindu temples and households.) Both hierarchical pluralism and monism continued (and continue) to exist in India cheek by jowl in uneasy symbiosis. The pluralistic world, the world of Vedic/Puranic ritual, was primarily orthoprax, not orthodox.ix That is, it did not insist on doctrine (doxis) as long as ritual and social behaviour (praxis) satisfied the standards of the particular group (usually a small caste group).
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It was intellectually pluralistic in that each sect acknowledged the existence of gods other than their own god(s), suitable for others to worship, but whom they did not care to worship themselves. On the other hand, when it came to sociological pluralism, there was a further split. The orthoprax world saw all social roles as equally valid-from the god's eye view: everyone, from Brahmin priest to the burner of corpses, is necessary for a complete social world; and it saw the world of action as cumulatively pluralistic, exemplifying a desirable plenitude: everything that exists and that happens, even suffering and injustice, is necessary to make the universe perfect, in the sense of having everything possible in it.
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This was plenitude that extended, ultimately, to a proposed solution to the problem of evil, or theodicy, justifying cancer and moral evil as essential cogs in the universal wheel of life. But it gave the individual no choice at all in his or her social role, no pluralism of action, though the hierarchy of values assigned to different roles might well have inspired the wish to make such choices. For, though all social roles were equal (in the eyes of god), some were more equal than others (in the eyes of men and women).
The strictly monistic world of the Vedantists, by contrast-the world of philosophy-was primarily orthodox. That is, renunciant sects (including Buddhism and Jainism), monistic both sociologically and intellectually, were far less doctrinaire about the behaviour of the layperson (though certainly not about the behaviour of the monk, which was in many ways far more important) than orthoprax Hinduism was; but they believed that there was only one correct belief. Thus, unlike orthoprax Hindus, these sects proselytized-that is, they went around telling people that they were right and everyone else was wrong.
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Later, the monistic view turned itself inside out to generate a different sort of tolerance: it argued not only that all physical and immaterial things were one, but that all religions were also one, that Muslims and Christians really worshipped the same god that Hindus worshipped, but just called him Allah or Christ. This led to interesting misunderstandings when Christian missionaries fired their canons across the bows of South Asians.x The monistic view has influenced reformers and rulers through the centuries.
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Polytheism and Islam feel after Thee. Each religion says, 'Thou art one, without equal.' If it be a mosque people murmur the holy prayer, and if it be a Christian Church, people ring the bell from love to Thee. Sometimes I frequent the Christian cloister, and sometimes the mosque.
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While thou art one with me, I seem no longer like a lonely man In the king's garden, gathering here and there From each fair plant the blossom choicest-grown To wreathe a crown not only for the king But in due time for every Mussulman, Brahmin, and Buddhist, Christian, and Parsee, Thro' all the warring world of Hindustan. Well spake thy brother in his hymn to heaven 'Thy glory baffles wisdom. All the tracks Of science making toward Thy Perfectness Are blinding desert sand; we scarce can spell The Alif of Thine alphabet of Love.' Later in the poem he speaks of wanting to 'beat back/The menacing poison of intolerant priests, Those cobras ever setting up their hoods.' Then he tells Abul Fazl his dream: Well, I dream'd That stone by stone I rear'd a sacred fane, A temple, neither Pagod, Mosque, nor Church, But loftier, simpler, always open-door'd To every breath from heaven, and Truth and Peace And Love and Justice came and dwelt therein.
But while we stood rejoicing, I and thou, I heard a mocking laugh 'The new Koran!' And on the sudden, and with a cry 'Saleem' Thou, thou-I saw thee fall before me, and then Me too the black-wing'd Azrael overcame, But death had ears and eyes; I watch'd my son, And those that follow'd, loosen stone from stone, All my fair work; and from the ruin arose The shriek and curse of trampled millions, even As in the time before; but while I groan'd, From out the sunset pour'd an alien race, Who fitted stone to stone again, and Truth, Peace, Love and Justice came and dwelt therein. Nor in the field without were seen or heard Fires of Suttee, nor wail of baby-wife, Or Indian widow; and in sleep I said 'All praise to Alla by whatever hands My mission be accomplish'd!' but we hear Music: our palace is awake, and morn Has lifted the dark eyelash of the Night From off the rosy cheek of waking Day.
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Tennyson still cannot resist, through his Akbar, an intolerant slur against 'the warring world' of Hinduism (suttee, the mistreatment of widows, child brides and all that), but the poem ends with a hymn to the sun which is Hindu in its inspiration, if-in Tennyson's version of history-Anglican in its execution: for after the 'son' of Akbar has undone all his good works (it was actually Akbar's grandson, Aurangzeb), the 'alien race' that will pour 'from out the sunset' (i.e., the West) to rebuild the shattered pluralistic dream is, of course, the British. (The description of the demolishing of Akbar's dream temple now conjures up the memory of the demolishing of Babur's temple in 1992.) Logically, the sort of universalism that argues that 'in every temple I see people that see Thee' should have led polytheistic Hindus to the belief that there was no point in trying to convert a Muslim to Hinduism, yet this was not always the case.
Vedic/Puranic, orthoprax Hindus certainly made no efforts to convert anyone to Hinduism, arguing that you had to be born a Hindu to be a Hindu. But Vedantic Hindus lapsed back into the shadows of orthodoxy and argued that their particular brand of monism was more monistic than thou. Such Vedantins went about proselytizing like mad.
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(Similarly, Krishna in the Gita allows that all other gods are aspects of himself, but still suggests that the best-quickest, most secure-way to God is directly through him: 'When their wits are stolen away by their desires, people seek other gods … but whatever body a devotee wishes to honour with faith, I confirm that faith in him, making it unwavering. But the reward of those men of small minds is limited. Those who sacrifice to the gods go to the gods, but those who are devoted to me and sacrifice to me go to me' [Bhagavad Gita 7.20-23].
And: 'Even those who are devoted to other gods and sacrifice to them, filled with faith, they too really sacrifice to me. For I am the one who enjoys all sacrifices, but they do not recognize me truly, and so they fall away. Those who dedicate themselves to the gods go to the gods, but those who sacrifice to me go to me' [9:23-5].) It might well be argued that this sort of conversion is a form of intellectual violence commensurate with the physical violence of enforced behaviour.
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On Hinduism flow 65
THE RIDDLE OF NONVIOLENCE
Tolerance is not the same as nonviolence,xi but the two have often been conflated, and one can see why: when intolerance is put into action, it can result in religious violence. The Vedantic emphasis on nonviolence, ahimsa, that Gandhi made so famous in the West, is far from typical of Hindu thinking, let alone Hindu action. Of course, Gandhi did not invent ahimsa; Hindus-Vedic/Puranic, pluralistic Hindus, as well as Vedantic Hindus-have sworn allegiance to the concept of nonviolence at least from the time of The Laws of Manu; 'Hindu tolerance' is certainly not an idea imposed upon Hindus by Orientalist, imperialist pressure.
But it may well be that Hindus doth protest too much about their tolerance. As Krishna pointed out in the Bhagavad Gita, it is quite possible to adhere to the mental principles of nonviolence while killing your cousins in battle. Nonviolence became a cultural ideal for Hindus precisely because it holds out the last hope of a cure, all the more desirable since unattainable, for a civilization that has, like most others that we know of, always suffered from chronic and terminal violence.
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Nonviolence was an ideal propped up against the cultural reality of violence. Classical Hindu India was violent in its politics (war being the raison d'être of every king), in its religious practices (animal sacrifice, ascetic self-torture, fire-walking, swinging from hooks in the flesh of the back, and so forth), in its criminal law (impaling on stakes and the amputation of limbs being prescribed punishment for relatively minor offences), in its hells (cunningly and sadistically contrived to make the punishment fit the crime) and, perhaps at the very heart of it all, in its climate, with its unendurable heat and unpredictable monsoons.xii Violence is as Hindu as curry.xiii It is against this background that we must view the doctrine of nonviolence.
Hindu sages dreamt of nonviolence as people who live all their lives in the desert dream of oases. In The Laws of Manu, the two views, violent and nonviolent, are juxtaposed in an uneasy tension in the context within which Manu debates most problems: the ritual. Indeed, ahimsa may itself derive primarily from the ritual, from the argument that the priest does not actually injure the animal but merely 'pacifies him' (sham, 'to pacify,' is the usual euphemism for the ritual slaughter) and that, therefore, its primary meaning is in fact to do injury without doing injury, a casuist argument from its very inception.xiv In their ambivalent attitude to violence, the Hindus are no different from the rest of humanity.
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On the lighter side, the widening gap between the 'tolerant' scriptures and the intolerant interpretation of them was evinced in India Today in 1991: The recent Indo-Pak seminar to foster bilateral amity might have succeeded to some extent. While the generals on both sides were optimistic, there seemed little amity on the Indian side. Ram Jethmalani observed that India had always been a tolerant society.
After all, the Pandavas were accommodating enough to share one wife. This raised the hackles of journalist Mrinal Pande. She laid into the hapless lawyer by quoting a character in the Mahabharata who had pointed out, 'If the shastras say this, then the shastras are wrong.' This demolished an apologetic Jethmalani's tolerance argument.
On Hinduism flow 545
Thus, for example, Hindus, and Indologists, often cite as an example of Hindu tolerance the story of the incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu as the Buddha. But a closer look at this myth reveals its hidden agenda: Vishnu became the Buddha in order to teach the wrong-headed doctrine of Buddhism to a group of dangerously pious demons in order to lead them away from the Vedas, disarm them of their sacrificial merit, and kill them.xvii In 1990, a garbled version of the myth of the Buddha avatar was used in Pakistani textbooks to support anti-Hindu arguments, explaining the decline of Buddhism as in fact the Hindus do explain it in the myth of the Buddha avatar: 'The Hindus acknowledged Buddha as an avatar and began to worship his image.
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The world of pluralistic divinities and open-ended cosmogonies existed, after all, in the minds of people already shackled by the realities of social oppression and mutual hatreds. But perhaps we can learn from Hinduism's long and complex history of pluralism some of the pitfalls to avoid, some of the mistakes that we need not repeat. And, on the other hand, perhaps we can emulate some of India's successes, some of the ways in which individuals like Akbar or Gandhi transcended the cultural agendas that had bred as much violence as nonviolence.
We can also take heart from movements within Hinduism that rejected both hierarchy and violence, of which the most obviously significant is the bhakti movement that included women and Dalits within its ranks, rejected violent sacrifice, and advocated a theology of love. Yet here, too, we must curb our optimism by noting that bhakti did not overthrow the caste system and that it was in the name of bhakti to Rama that the militant Hindus tore down Babur's mosque. We learn from the history of Hinduism that would-be pluralists must realize and avoid two dangers, that they walk a razor's edge between denying diversity and hierarchizing it.
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As for the first danger, the Hindu example suggests that, for those who hope to 'enhance diversity' and celebrate plenitude, to create a world where difference is a value, the hypothesis of an original unity from which all religions derive may not be as useful as the hypothesis of an original and essential pluralism. The Hindu example shows us the perils of universalism. Granted, the universalistic hypothesis makes dialogue possible, for Hindus and others today as well as for ancient Hindus: it shows that all religions share some of the same problems.
But we must take the harder but ultimately more rewarding path of going on to acknowledge that various religions offer rather different solutions to the basic human problems, and, indeed, that they also recognize different problems. On the other hand, when we consider the second danger, the danger of hierarchization, it is evident that, although the rigid social system of ancient Hinduism does make possible a kind of pluralism in which various religions are acceptably different, as are men and women, Brahmins and Dalits, with complementary talents and weaknesses, it renders the Other separate but unequal.
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And this essential hierarchical modification of the democratic paradigm renders that social system intolerant. Here it may be useful once again to distinguish the essentialist pluralism of Buddhism and Gandhi from the hierarchical pluralism of Hinduism. There are, moreover, sociological disadvantages even to tolerance itself.
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The Politics of Hinduism Tomorrow
The genius of Hinduism has always been grounded in its malleability and diversity, its ability to grow and change through its receptivity to the ideas and customs of people other than Hindus. This gives it a terrific edge over those branches of the monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) that are straitjacketed by a single canon (Bible or Qu'ran) and/or a single governing body (Pope or Ulema).
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HINDU DIVERSITY AND POLITICAL CHAUVINISM
The genius of Hinduism has always been grounded in its malleability and diversity, its ability to grow and change through its receptivity to the ideas and customs of people other than Hindus. This gives it a terrific edge over those branches of the monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) that are straitjacketed by a single canon (Bible or Qu'ran) and/or a single governing body (Pope or Ulema). Yet a serious threat to the future of Hinduism is posed by a bad habit that some Hindus have recently caught from the extreme fringes of those monotheisms: fundamentalism.
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Fundamentalism is as much a political as a religious phenomenon, and so is Hinduism. Hinduism didn't wake up one morning and discover that it had been metamorphosed into a giant political bug during the night. It was not suddenly politicized by the nineteenth century nationalists or the twentieth century Hindutva demagogues.i It was, like most religions, born political, in the sense that it was shaped and constantly changed by its relationship with political actors such as kings with the power to bestow land, Buddhists vying for royal patronage, Muslim rulers who did or did not allow the building of temples, and finally by the British Raj and the contending factions after Independence.
Even the caste system, that quintessentially Hindu phenomenon, was configured from the start by the Brahmins' and kings' desire to assimilate and control various foreigners (Scythians, Greeks, Kushanas) and marginal people (such as Adivasis) as well as different political, ethnic and economic factions within the body of Hinduism. Despite occasional conflicts between competing religions, Hindu interactions with Buddhism and Jainism were generally creative and constructive on both sides, as ideas such as karma, compassion and non-injury (ahimsa) passed back and forth between the groups, picking up new spins as they moved on.
On Hinduism flow 550
The presence of Muslims in India, too, added momentum to movements such as bhakti, in part by the positive example set by sects such as the Sufis and in part by inspiring Hindus to change in order to survive in the face of negative aspects of the Muslim challenge. Christianity, too, contributed new approaches to already developing Hindu movements for social action in defence of human rights for women and the lower castes. But the serpent in this inter-religious Eden was the monotheistic itch to convert, which often soured Hindu relations with both Islam and Christianity.
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(Judaism did not, for the most part, proselytize, and the Jews in any case remained a small minority in India.) A more deadly sting than conversion, however, came from those Protestants within the British Raj who, in the nineteenth century, tried to recast Hinduism as a monotheism.ii In lifting up this monolithic form of Hinduism, the British (and the many Hindus who followed them) trampled down and largely wrote off the dominant strain of Hinduism that celebrated the multiplicity of the divine, the plurality of forms of worship. But they could not kill it; indeed, most Hindus of this type didn't even know that they were regarded as either beneath contempt or entirely non-existent.
As monotheistic fundamentalism emerged in the twentieth century, the constricted, sanitized form of Hinduismiii caught the fundamentalist virus too, and used the Western weapons of mass cultural destruction-television, the blogosphere-to broadcast its message of repression and hate. The hatred of the fundamentalist Hindus is directed not only against Hindus of the more diverse traditions but also, ironically, against the very monotheisms that started the rot (including the insistence that Hinduism is monotheistic) in Hinduism: Islam and Christianity. These new resentments reinforced older beefs (if I may use that word), many of them stemming from the still gaping wound left in India by the centuries of British occupation.
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There is a further irony in the way that Hindu fundamentalism, while protesting that it is a reaction against European pressures, actually learned from the West much of its anti-Western identity politics as well as many Protestant evangelical strategies. Its emphasis on the priority of personal experience (conversion and re-affiliation) justifies a new definition of 'Hindu' that has to do with an experience of Hindu-ness ('If you do not meditate, you cannot understand the Upanishads,' someone objected after one of my lectures).
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Hindus of this persuasion have attempted, as Amartya Sen eloquently expressed it, 'to miniaturize the broad idea of a large India-proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist present-and to replace it by the stamp of a small India, bundled around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism'.2
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HINDUTVA AND HISTORY
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It would admit to Savarkar's initial agreement with Jinnah's two-nation theory on Nov 15, 1943, and the cover-up thereafter. It would implicate the RSS in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. It would reveal the complexities of the Sangha's ambivalent position on the caste system.
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There are also lessons to be learned from the academic discipline of the history of religions. If we could prove that human sacrifice was attested in the ancient Sanskrit texts (and humans were, at least theoretically, included in the list of sacrificial victims or pashus, in the Brahmanas, c. 700 BCE, along with horses, cows, goats and sheep),iv would that justify human sacrifice today?
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Not logically or legally, but to a certain type of reactionary religious mind, it would indeed; the past is a very important template for the present; we must do in the present what our ancestors did in the paradigmatic past. And for many centuries, people in India have supported their arguments for particular religious ideas by insisting that those ideas come from the Vedas, and that the Vedas date from the dawn of time. The word 'Veda', that for centuries has evoked a beautiful, mysterious, wise ancient text, now often signals a rallying call for fundamentalism, jingoism, chauvinism.
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MYTH AND HISTORY
Hinduism is as rich in history as it is in myth, but they are not the same thing; and we have to be careful how we use history and myth to understand each other. In this context I would define a myth as a story that a group of people believe for a long time despite massive evidence that it is not actually true; the spirit of myth is the spirit of Oz: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
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When we read a text that says that a Hindu king impaled eight thousand Jains,5 we need to use history to understand myth-that is, we need to know a bit of history to understand why such a text was composed and retold many times: that means knowing the reasons for the tensions between Hindus and Jains at that time (such as the competition for royal patronage). But we cannot use the myth to reconstruct the actual history behind the text; we cannot say that the text is evidence that a Hindu king actually did impale Jains.
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People who heard or read that story about the impaled Jains may well have acted differently towards Jains and/or Hindus (better or worse) as a result. More often than not, we do not know precisely what happened in history, but we often know the stories that people tell about it. In some ways, the stories are not only all that we have access to but all that people at the time, and later, had access to and hence all that drove the events that followed.
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Real events and sentiments produce symbols, symbols produce real events and sentiments, and real and symbolic levels may be simultaneously present in a single text. Myth has been called 'the smoke of history',7 and we must constantly strive to separate the smoke of myth from the fire of historical events, as well as to demonstrate how myths, too, become fires when they do not merely respond to historical events (as smoke arises from fire) but drive them (as fire gives rise to smoke).
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Rama left no archeological or inscriptional record. There is no evidence that anyone named Rama did or did not live in Ayodhya; other places, too, claim him, in South India as well as North India, for the Ramayana was retold many times, in many different Indian languages, with significant variations. There is no second Troy here for a Schliemann to come along and discover.
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Or, rather, there is a second, and a third, and a nineteenth Troy for anyone to discover. Placing the Ramayana in its historical contexts demonstrates that it is an epic poem created by human authors who lived at various times, and that it shows how the human imagination transformed the actual circumstance of the historical period into something far more beautiful, terrible, challenging and elevating than, perhaps, the circumstances themselves. Texts reveal histories, but we need to find out about those histories and ground them in solid evidence to read against, not into, the texts' narratives.
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The televised Ramayana shown in India has, for many ideologues, become the only acceptable form of what were once, and still should be, the many Ramayanas. The … textual tradition [is] threatened by those who claim to be its guardians, and who would make of something as rich as myth something as routine as religion.11
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On Hinduism flow 70
THE HINDUISM OF THE FUTURE
Through the ages, most Hindus have gone on worshipping their gods, singing their songs, telling their stories. Hindutva will not have the last word. The good news is that the other sort of Hinduism, the full-screen, pluralist, creative sort, remains in the majority, and it, too, can call up mass media to rally its forces.
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The film industry-both in Bollywood and among the many fine independent filmmakers of India-has broadcast, throughout India and abroad, powerful tales of inter-religious tolerance and protests against injustice, as have individual Hindu artists and writers, jamming the mindless transmissions of the bigoted blogs. The Hinduism of the future will have to survive in a multi-cultural, multi-religious India that simply will not be homogenized; it will have to flow with, rather than against, the currents of modernization and globalization. It will have to open its doors wide to welcome change, for in any case, it is too late to shut them.
As India's prosperity continues to grow, so too its connections with the wider world, and its participation in global concerns for human dignity, will increasingly nourish native movements working for social reform and for the protection of individual rights, both for women and Dalits within Hinduism and for Muslims, Christians and others whose ancestors made India their home many centuries ago.
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Saguna and Nirguna Images of the Deity
If you say he exists, he does; his forms are these forms. If you say he does not, his formlessness is of these non-forms.
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SAGUNA AND NIRGUNA IMAGES OF THE DEITY1
If you say he exists, he does; his forms are these forms. If you say he does not, his formlessness is of these non-forms. If he has the qualities of existence and non-existence, he is in two states.
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Here Nammalvar refutes those (particularly but not only Buddhists) who say that there is no Veda, no god and no universe.i On the contrary, Nammalvar argues, god participates in 'two states', both in the world of forms and existence and qualities (saguna) and in the world of formlessness and non-existence, without qualities (nirguna). For existence and non-existence are themselves the very form of god, and whether you say he exists or he does not exist, he still exists. Even where he does not seem to be, he is the inner soul of everything and, therefore, he exists.
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The hypothesis of this chapter is that the nirguna image of the deity-the god without qualitiesii-in Hinduism is a graft onto Puranic and temple bhakti that never really took, that the nirguna line was taken up by grass-roots Hindus with a strictly limited degree of success. The logical outcome of merging with a nirguna deity-moksha-would be the disappearance of bhakti, with no god to be the object of devotion; the ultimate nirguna deity is brahman, the impersonal divine substance of which all living things are elements.
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For nirguna bhakti is a concoction that monistic Hindu philosophers imposed upon a saguna bhakti tradition that managed, somehow, to absorb it. Hindu philosophers have much more practice, and can bring it off; but what about the rest of India?
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Nowhere on earth can one find a people more eager than the Hindus to revel in specific, concrete, multitudinous detail. This is immediately obvious from a brief glance at any Sanskrit kavya or Puranic stotra-the descriptions of jewellery and of trees, the lists of attributes, the enumeration of physical qualities. And in temple architecture, the epitome of a saguna entity is surely the South Indian gopuram with its staggering, overwhelming baroque superabundance of detail that so nauseated the early European observers with their cool Greek ideals.
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Where, then, does the nirguna image play a role in this side of Hinduism? It begins in the Rig Veda, with the hymns of the late tenth book that play word-games with the ineffable that is neither being nor non-being.iii But the down-to-earth Hindus were quick to turn the nirguna question into a saguna answer. Epic and Puranic Hinduism abound in examples of resistance to the nirguna ideal.
Theoretically, one cannot reconcile a nirguna deity with avatars; yet the Kabir-panthis tended to treat Kabir as a kind of avatar. Avatar may also colour the nirguna Sant tradition both in the tendency to divinize Sants and in the magnetic attraction of the name of God, a cult that impinges upon the very murti (idol)-worship and celebration of incarnation that is elsewhere sharply mocked by the Sants. This tension is even more evident in the Puranas, where the Brahmin authors attempted to channel the emotional current of prema (love) bhakti into the classical furrows of Advaita monism, stubbornly ignoring their basic incompatibility.
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(The philosopher Ramanuja tackled the problem in a far more sophisticated way; though the Puranas do not quote him as much as they quote a kind of third-rate version of Shankara, Puranic thought owes much to Ramanuja's resolution of saguna with nirguna.) The avatar is constantly bumping into his own nirguna image; the texts never fully accept this resolution of the nirguna-saguna tension. When, in the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna naively asks Krishna to demonstrate his full nirguna form and Krishna complies, Arjuna quickly begs him to turn back into the aspect he can handle-his old pal Krishna, the tricky saguna charioteer.
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This request is couched in terms of striking intimacy and specificity, the essence of the saguna deity, in sharp contrast with the nirguna god that Arjuna has just praised: Your strength is infinite, and your power is infinite; You achieve everything; you are everything. It was madness of me to think of you as a friend, to say, 'Hey, Krishnna, Hey Yadava, Hey friend!' I did this because I did not know how great you are- or else, perhaps, in carelessness because I love you.
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Despite this bias, the nirguna philosophy is expounded at great length from time to time in the Puranas, in the typically simplified Puranic version of Vedantic philosophy. But these speeches never seem fully integrated into the main plot-lines; they do not affect the characters who speak them, or cause them to exchange their world-attached, earthy goals for the high ideals inspired by the nirguna deity. The Puranas are not so much by common people as for common people; they are often manipulated by Brahmins to teach people ideas that Brahmins think people should have.
The Sants, on the other hand, choose to mix nirguna and saguna. One can see a similar interaction in the structure of the Hindu temple, in shrines as far removed and different in form as the Minakshi temple at Madurai in South India and the caves at Elephanta in Central India. On the outermost periphery, the quintessence of saguna worldliness is expressed in a mind-blowing variety of detail: the temple market, the piles of vermilion powders and rows of shining brass pots, brilliant flowers and garish postcards-the chaotic and noisy world of profane life.
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But even here there is a sacred tug: for what is being sold is food for gods (prasada), and vessels for holy water; this is the borderline of the two worlds. Immediately afterwards, in South India, one encounters the incredible gopuram, the epitome of saguna detail; now nothing is being bought and sold, and the detail is all god's detail, not humans'. But detail it certainly is: we have moved a little farther into the centre, and the layers concealing the divinity are dropping away.
We enter the next courtyard and encounter less colour and shape than in the gopuram, but still a lot: carved pillars, images depicting mythological scenes, and the actual human and animal activity of the temple-painted elephants, pious beggars, chanting priests. At Elephanta, we see the elaborate panels depicting the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, their quarrels at dice, Shiva squashing Ravana under Kailasa, Shiva in yogic meditation, the Ganga descending on Shiva's head, the androgynous form of Shiva and Parvati (Ardhanarishvara), Shiva impaling the demon Andhaka, Shiva dancing to create the universe, Shiva dancing to destroy the universe-one's head begins to spin, the mind boggles, the eye cannot absorb it all.
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You Can’t Get Here from There: The Logical Paradox of Hindu Creation Myths
Creation myths tackle the problem of the ultimate origin of it all, of the beginning of life out of non-life, at three different basic levels: creation of the universe, of the human race, or of the individual human being, the embryo. What sort of origins do we regard as 'our' origins?
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INTRODUCTION
Creation myths tackle the problem of the ultimate origin of it all, of the beginning of life out of non-life, at three different basic levels: creation of the universe, of the human race, or of the individual human being, the embryo. What sort of origins do we regard as 'our' origins? Scholars often mimic believers in this regard: The search for origins in religious texts has also been a scholars' search for the origins of religious texts.
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The idea, seldom expressed but generally operative, is that the earliest texts will somehow be closest to the origins of the world and, therefore, most likely to have the truth about it, just as texts closer to the time of the Buddha are thought to be more likely to have the truth about the Buddha. The scholarly equivalent of the religious quest for origins is the quest for the Ur-text, a nineteenth-century obsession that still lingers in many backwaters of the academy.
A somewhat more sophisticated corollary to this belief is the assumption that any idea that is shared by a number of cultures has a kind of truth in it. In fact, all that it proves-and this is still something worth knowing, the basis of the discipline of comparative religion-is that human beings in several cultures have had some roughly similar ideas about, say, the origins of the world, and even then we must quickly add that they have had some very different ideas, too.
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Many patterns extend through many religions on both the cosmic and the social level; but these patterns vary according to the specific historical and social conditions of the cultures that create them. Though myths have a life of their own, they are embedded in human culture, and as science changes, myth changes: astronomy, botany, geography, embryology, methods of measurement-each has its effects upon the formulation of mythological concepts of creation. The problem that most creation mythologies, including, I think, scientific theories of creation, must face is the basic problem of creation ex nihilo, getting from the original putative moment of nothing to the present moment of something.
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But creation myths do not usually take this cowardly way out, preferring instead to wrestle with the problems of beginnings. Perhaps the mythological mind, unlike the philosophical, just can't accept the mind-boggling concept of a time without beginning or end. Most people, after all, even mythographers, are more interested in what happened to our first ancestors than in more philosophical paradoxes, and many myths are designed not to answer peoples' questions but to make them start asking those questions in the first place.
Essay cycle 579
Some myths inspire questions but also constrain the answers by leading people to frame them in specific theological terms. Many mythologies do tackle this paradox of getting something from nothing, and when they do, the resulting mental gymnastics always remind me of the old joke about the native city-dweller trying to give complicated street directions to an out-of-towner and finally admitting, 'You can't get there from here.' No mythology can get here (the present) from there, and most of them fudge this fact by positing the unexplained sudden appearance of an original something-god, or a kind of chaotic primeval matter-and moving quickly off this highly debatable point into a labyrinth of baroque elaboration, a proliferation of detail: from this original something came water, and then an egg, and then a bird, and then fourteen kinds of snakes, and twenty-nine tribes of human beings, and so forth and so on.
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This is a false trail that lures the listener or reader away from the opening point, the inevitable weak point, the question that cannot be answered. For the ultimate moment of transition from pre-creation to post-creation is a moment that no one can actually know, and that presents a logical dilemma that no argument can resolve. Instead, the texts devise indirect strategies to give the false impression that that basic question has been answered when it has not; they try to explain it by adopting various attitudes (ranging from dogmatic certainty to humble confessions of ignorance) and various techniques of obfuscation, all designed to cover up the unavoidable but inadmissible fact of (the origin of) life, the fact that you can't get here from there.
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THE ORIGINS OF THE UNIVERSE
In India, texts begin with the Rig Veda, a canonical collection of 1,028 hymns composed in the hills of the Punjab, about 1500 BCE, by the inspired priests of a migratory people who rode their horses, and grazed their cattle, down into the Ganga Valley by about 900 BCE. So let me begin with the Rig Veda, the oldest Indian text (and hence, presumably, closest to the moment of creation). The first thing to note is that there is no one, single theory of creation in this text, nor in Hinduism as a whole; there are a number of different, more or less compatible, theories, which no one ever tried to fit systematically into a canonical doctrine.
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Several models of creation are imagined in a poem that combines the earthy details of a woman giving birth to a baby with philosophical questions about the role of the gods in the creation of the universe. This woman, called Aditi ('Without Limits', 'Infinity'), is the feminine power paired with Daksha, the male principle of virile efficacy (or dexterity, a word that is related to the Sanskrit daksha): Let us now speak with wonder of the births of the gods-so that some one may see them when the poems are chanted in this later age.
In the earliest age of the gods, existence was born from non-existence. After this the quarters of the sky, and the earth, were born from her who crouched with legs spread, and from the earth the quarters of the sky were born. From Aditi, Daksha was born, and from Daksha Aditi was born.
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It is later associated with yoga, and might have yogic overtones even in this period.i Another Vedic hymn tries another tack, this time in a more theistic vein, demonstrating that the basic principles of creation prevail whether or not the author of the text believes that one god created the universe. The Sanskrit verb 'ma' means both; it means 'to make' not only in the sense of creating ex nihilo, or even of fashioning a pot out of clay, but of making something by arbitrarily delineating it from what it is not, as people once 'made' political units such as Bangladesh not by dredging mud up out of the Bay of Bengal but by drawing a line across a piece of land that might have been India or Burma and saying: 'This is now Bangladesh.' This Austinian speech act alters reality.
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But the propping apart of heaven and earth, measuring out and establishing the three worlds for all creatures to dwell in, is a central Vedic cosmogonic act,ii usually attributed not to Vishnu but to more important Vedic gods like Indra (Vedic king of the gods and god of the sky and rain) or Varuna (god of the vault of heaven, of the waters, and of morality and truth). This time-sharing property of the Vedic gods turns out to be one of a number of ways to keep the existence, and/or number, of the authors of creation an open question in Vedic religion.iii If several gods existed, then, in the life of a single worshipper, how many gods were there?
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This short, linguistically straightforward poem, that explicitly lays out an open-ended attitude to the first things, has provoked hundreds of complex commentaries among theologians and scholars, both Hindu and non-Hindu, for it raises unanswerable questions, piling up paradoxes: There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the field of space nor the sky that is beyond. There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day.
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That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse. Other than that there was nothing beyond … Who really knows? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
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THE CREATION OF THE HUMAN RACE
The same principles that permeate the mythology of cosmogony operate on the next level of creation, the creation of the human race, or anthropogony. The most explicit Vedic discussion of the origins of the human race, the 'Hymn of the Primeval Male' (the purusha sukta), is also the most explicitly hierarchical hymn in the whole of the Rig Veda. For, when the texts get down to the nitty-gritty level of the creation of the human race, it is the affirmative rather than the questioning tone that dominates, and the concept of hierarchy that has the last word.
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Like many myths of the origin of the human race that instil ideals of social hierarchy that they construct as natural, this famous hymn seems to have abandoned all sense of scepticism in order to present a clear-cut social theory in the guise of a myth of creation. The purusha sukta is about the dismemberment of the cosmic male giant (purusha later comes to designate any male creature, indeed the male gender), who is the victim in a Vedic sacrifice that creates the whole universe.
Out of the Primeval Male, the four classes of society (the varnas) are born. This is the central passage: The Primeval Male has a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet. With three quarters the Male rose upwards, and one quarter of him still remains here.
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From this (quarter on earth) he spread out in all directions, into that which eats and that which does not eat. From the Male, the female was born, and from the female came the Male. When they divided the Primeval Male, his mouth became the Brahmin; his arms were made into the Raja; his thighs the people [Vaishya]; and from his feet the servants [Shudras] were born.
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The moon was born from his mind; from his eye the sun was born. From his navel the middle field of space arose; from his head the sky evolved. From his two feet came the earth, and the quarters of the sky from his ear.
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Then comes the Raja, the King, generally taken to refer to the class of warriors, policemen and kings (Kshatriyas); and then Vaishyas (the common people, the Third Estate, who produce the food for the first two and themselves). The fourth class, Shudras, servants, are set apart, the outside class within society that defines the other classes. Viewed historically, the hymn takes the three Indo-European social classes (according to the paradigm of Georges Dumézil: king-priest at the top, then warriors and policemen, and then the rest of the people) and adds, at the bottom, a fourth class, servants.v The hierarchical distinction is clear from our relationship with the gods, where we are the bottom quarter: 'All creatures are a quarter of him; three quarters are what is immortal in heaven.
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With three quarters the Male rose upwards, and one quarter of him still remains here.' And it is mirrored in the structure within that human quarter, where the bottom quarter consists of the servant class. This distinction makes it possible to view the final combination in both cases not as a quartet but as a dualism: all of us (in the first three classes, who are already given several names, such as Aryans or twice-born) vs. all of them (in the fourth class, the non-us, the Others).
That the Shudras were an afterthought is evident from the fact that the third class, Vaishyas, is sometimes said to be derived from the word for 'all' and, therefore, literally to mean 'everyone', leaving no room for anyone below them-until someone added a class below them.vi The purusha sukta ranks the kings below the priests. The supremacy of Brahmins was much contested throughout later Hindu literature and, in fact, may have been primarily a Brahmin fantasy; there is much evidence of resistance to the concept that the priests and kings ever shared power at all.
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That is, many texts argue, or assume, that priests never were as high as kings, and others assume that kings never fell below priests. Buddhist literature simply puts the kings at the top, the Brahmins second,16 and many characters in Hindu texts also defend this viewpoint. If we accept the Dumézilian view that the king shared the first position with the Brahmin in the putative Indo-European world, it appears that the king slips down, in the Rig Veda, to share the second position with the warrior.
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Two for the price of one. Moving right along … This circular creation appears in later myths as well, such as the oftretold story of the origins of Vishnu and Brahma: When the three worlds were in darkness, Vishnu slept in the middle of the cosmic ocean. A lotus grew out of his navel.
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THE BATTLE BETWEEN THE GODS AND THE ANTI-GODS
Later texts begin to distinguish gods (devas) not merely from humans but from anti-gods (or demons, asuras), no simple task in India. Indeed, in the Indo-European stageix the asuras were not anti-gods at all but simply a particular sort of sky-gods; the great god in the Avesta, the ancient Persian counterpart to the Rig Veda, is called Ahura Mazda, the great asura, a benevolent spirit. Even in the Rig Veda, several gods are still called asuras (Varuna, in particular).
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And, just as benevolent asuras became malevolent demons in later India, so, too, benevolent Greek daemons (another sort of god) became malevolent demons in Christianity, and the devas of ancient India and Persia (gods, cognate with deus in Latin) became the devils of Christianity. These linguistic clues to the fungibility of the moral attributes of the powers that be-to the absence, as it were, of any real moral distinction between gods and anti-gods-were categorically expunged by later Manichaeanism and Hinduism. But the arbitrary nature of the later distinction between gods and demons, both sons of the Creator, is emphasized by a circular logic that resembles, in form, the tautologies we have already encountered in the Veda: the Creator makes the demons evil because they are evil, and he creates them out of darkness, but he then makes their substance into night.
The text that first tells this story, the Shatapatha Brahmana, composed a few centuries after the Vedas, in about 700 BCE, replicates the Vedic model of dismemberment, in a modified form: The Creator creates from his mouth not the Brahmins but the gods, and they are not made out of his mouth but simply emerge from it, leaving him intact: The Creator was born to live for a thousand years. Just as one might see in the distance the far shore of a river, so he saw the far shore of his own life.
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He desired progeny, and so he placed the power to produce progeny in himself. From his mouth he created the gods, and they entered the sky. Then with his downward breath he created the demons, and they entered this earth, and there was darkness for him when he had created them, and so he knew then that he had created evil.
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Then he pierced them with evil, and it was because of this that they were overcome. Therefore it is said, 'The battle between gods and demons did not happen as it is told in the narratives and histories, for the Creator pierced them with evil and it was because of this that they were overcome.' The daylight which had appeared for him when he had created the gods he made into day; and the darkness which had appeared for him when he had created the demons he made into night.
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Its version of creation begins with one variant of the usual image of undifferentiated chaos: 'Once upon a time this (universe) was made of darkness, without anything that could be discerned, without any distinguishing marks, impossible to know through reasoning or understanding; it seemed to be entirely asleep.' But then, ex nihilo, a creator god appears, and goes to work: 'First he emitted the waters, and then he emitted his semen in them. That (semen) became a golden egg. He divided the egg into two.
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There is simply no time to ask, 'Where did the creator god come from?' as the Vedic hymn, a thousand years earlier, had asked. The numbers in these myths are part of the technique of obfuscation, lending an air of mathematical precision to what is in fact pure speculation, or, rather, what the legal profession calls a tap dance. Instead, we progress to the creation of the human race.
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The Laws of Manu takes up this aspect of creation right after the bit about cracking the egg and before we get into the constellations and human emotions. Manu speaks of innate activities, that is, karmas, inherent in each creature from its birth; an individual is born to be a king, or a servant, or, more precisely, in terms of the actuality of caste rather than the theory of class, a potter or a shoemaker. This is what the text says: And in the beginning he made the individual names and individual innate activities (karmas) and individual conditions of all things precisely in accordance with the words of the Veda.
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And to distinguish innate activities, he distinguished right from wrong, and he yoked these creatures with the pairs, happiness and unhappiness and so forth. And whatever innate activity the Lord yoked each (creature) to at first, that (creature) by himself engaged in that very activity as he was created again and again. Harmful or harmless, gentle or cruel, right or wrong, truthful or lying-the (activity) he gave to each (creature) in creation kept entering it by itself.
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Together Apart: Changing Ethical Implications of Hindu Cosmologies
The basic structures of Hindu cosmology, constantly reinterpreted, served as an armature on which authors in each generation sculpted their musings on the structure of human society. We may read these musings, the frequently retold stories about the primeval egg, about heaven and earth, gods and anti-gods, gods and ascetics, as paper-thin overlays on the ongoing-debates about very real social classes and sectarian and religious conflicts.
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TOGETHER APART: CHANGING ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF HINDU COSMOLOGIES1
The basic structures of Hindu cosmology, constantly reinterpreted, served as an armature on which authors in each generation sculpted their musings on the structure of human society. We may read these musings, the frequently retold stories about the primeval egg, about heaven and earth, gods and anti-gods, gods and ascetics, as paper-thin overlays on the ongoing-debates about very real social classes and sectarian and religious conflicts. They merely begin to indicate the rich variety of ways in which the imagined shapes of the cosmos shifted and changed to accommodate, first, an ethics of equilibrium and, later, an ethics of egalitarianism in the visible, everyday world.
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COSMOGONIES-OR THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE-OF THE RIG VEDA In the Rig Veda (c. 1500 BCE), the Hindu universe was an egg,i the two halves of the eggshell forming heaven and earth, with the sun as the yolk in the middle; it was a sealed, perfectly enclosed space with a given amount of good and evil, and a given number of souls. It was a world of balance, an ethics of equilibrium.
Several different cosmogonies are found in the Rig Veda,ii but two, especially in combination, raise intriguing ethical questions. One is the myth of the separation of heaven and earth; the other is the myth of the marriage of heaven and earth. The separation is usually more abstract than the marriage; in the separation, heaven and earth may not be personified at all, while in the marriage they usually are.
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Because of the greater anthropomorphism of the marriage model, one would expect to find it more susceptible to ethical and psychological glosses than the separation, and this is generally the case. But when the separation is anthropomorphized, and particularly when it is then combined with the marriage, peculiar ethical conflicts arise. For, if the combination of heaven and earth is regarded as a marriage, then what can the separation of heaven and earth be but a divorce?
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And how can this be held to be auspicious by the same society that, by sanctioning the marriage cosmogony, affirms marriage as auspicious? These are some of the problems raised by the transformations in the myths of separation and marriage of heaven and earth in the Rig Veda and, hundreds of years later, by the Jaiminiya Brahmana. We can, I think, see a definite ethical shift in the treatment of cosmogonic themes during this period.
The earliest myths, in the Rig Veda, regard the separation of heaven and earth as a good thing (for the cosmos), and do not draw any conclusions at all as to its implications for human ethical behaviour. But other Rig Veda hymns speak of another kind of separation of heaven and earth, the separation of humans from god, which is directly connected with the first, more mechanistic cosmogonic split. This second split is a bad thing, something to be avoided, with clear implications for human ethical behaviour: humans must act in such a way-offering sacrifice, keeping the laws of the gods, speaking the truth, and so forth-that the gods will not go away.
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Only the first of these actions-the sacrifice-remains significant as a way to prevent the cosmogonic separation in the next set of texts, from the Brahamanas (c. 800-600 BCE), and sacrifice, by this time, is largely devoid of its ethical components. Instead, it is a means to power, and the 'reunion' of humans and gods is regarded as a way in which power may flow from humans to gods (through the offering) and from gods to humans (through rain and all that rain symbolizes).
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Such sexual paradoxes are a favourite stock-in-trade of the Vedic poets,v but their use in this hymn may be a result of the poet's awkwardness in grafting a set of symbols onto a myth that was not originally a sexual myth. These images of children and seed at first seem more appropriate to the myth of the marriage than to the myth of the divorce of heaven and earth, a marriage that is not directly narrated at all in the Rig Veda.
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Presumably, this seed, like the sun, was creatively shed at the moment when the two worlds separated. These ambiguities suggest that the mixing of the metaphors of separation and marriage had begun even at the time of the Rig Veda. These problems are compounded by the existence of two other, secondary myths of cosmogony in the Rig Veda, myths that can be seen as forming a kind of prologue and epilogue, a temporal frame, to the two that we have begun to examine (see fig.
The first is the myth that distinguishes between cosmogony and theogony; the second is the myth of the departed god (deus absconditus). In the hymn of Aditi and Daksha,vi the origin of the universe (cosmogony) and the origin of the gods (theogony) seem to have taken place at the same time, and through the actions of an earth-mother, not, significantly, in conjunction with the sky-father. Instead of the male sky, this hymn speaks of four female quarters of the sky, who are, moreover, the sisters, not the husband(s), of the earth, for all of them are born from the same mother.
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This mother is simultaneously highly abstract-she has no name and corresponds to no physical part of the universe-and highly anthropomorphic: all we know of her is her posture, which is that of a woman in the throes of childbirth. STAGES OF HINDU COSMOGONY When the Vedic abstractions are fleshed out, they become embroiled in complex human entanglements. In order for heaven and earth to mate, they must first become created as separate entities; only then can they produce their children.
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One Vedic hymn combines this myth with the theme of the sky-father and earth-mother: 'The sky is my father; here is the navel that gave me birth. This great earth is my mother, my close kin. The womb for me was between the two bowls stretched apart; here the father placed the embryo in the daughter.
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She recoils from him, thus apparently separating heaven and earth forever after. Here, for the first time, we may see a glimmer of moralizing in the theme of separation, though it is certainly a faint glimmer. On the most elementary level, we can see that the unacceptable results of an incestuous mating, even on the most abstract cosmogonic level, would highlight the prohibition against incest in the human world.
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God’s Body, or, the Lingam Made Flesh: Conflicts over the Representation of Shiva
Until February of 2010, the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Hinduism included this sentence about the god Shiva: 'In temples and in private shrines, Shiva is […] worshipped in the form of the lingam, or phallus, often embedded in the yoni, the symbol of the female sexual organ.' That definition was based on the one established by the standard, nineteenth century Sanskrit dictionary of Sir Monier Monier-Williams, which defines the lingam (or linga-the 'm' is optional) as 'the male organ or Phallus (esp. that of Siva worshipped in the form of a stone or marble column which generally rises out of a yoni, q.v., and is set up in temples dedicated to Siva|).' But in February of 2010, in response to a number of complaints from Hindu readers, Britannica replaced their original sentence with the following rather cumbersome paragraph: In temples and in private shrines, Shiva is worshipped in the form of the lingam, a cylindrical votary object that is often embedded in a yoni, or spouted dish.
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GOD’S BODY, OR, THE LINGAM MADE FLESH: CONFLICTS OVER THE REPRESENTATION OF SHIVA1
Until February of 2010, the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Hinduism included this sentence about the god Shiva: 'In temples and in private shrines, Shiva is […] worshipped in the form of the lingam, or phallus, often embedded in the yoni, the symbol of the female sexual organ.' That definition was based on the one established by the standard, nineteenth century Sanskrit dictionary of Sir Monier Monier-Williams, which defines the lingam (or linga-the 'm' is optional) as 'the male organ or Phallus (esp. that of Siva worshipped in the form of a stone or marble column which generally rises out of a yoni, q.v., and is set up in temples dedicated to Siva|).' But in February of 2010, in response to a number of complaints from Hindu readers, Britannica replaced their original sentence with the following rather cumbersome paragraph: In temples and in private shrines, Shiva is worshipped in the form of the lingam, a cylindrical votary object that is often embedded in a yoni, or spouted dish.
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Together they symbolize the eternal process of creation and regeneration. Since the late 19th century, some scholars have interpreted the lingam and yoni as being aniconic representations of the male and female sexual organs, respectively. This change was a response to a dispute about the symbolism of the lingam that has been going on for many centuries: Is its primary meaning inexorably tied to the physical body (iconic), or is it abstract (aniconic)?
The Britannica hedged.i The Shiva-lingam is well known throughout India, a signifier that is understood across barriers of caste and language, a linga franca, if you will. Many Hindus have, like Sigmund Freud, seen lingams in every naturally occurring elongated object, including the so-called self-created lingams, objets trouvés such as stalagmites, the most well-known being the ice stalagmite inside the Amarnath cave in Kashmir, which is a popular Hindu pilgrimage site. But recently, many Hindus, especially bloggers on the Hindu internet (sometimes called the Hindernet), have insisted that the lingam has nothing at all to do with any part of the body of any human or any god, and the Britannica acted in response to that groundswell, or, rather, air-swell.
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Where did this argument come from? This question about present-day Hindu sensibilities is greatly illuminated by setting it in the context of the history of the usages of the word lingam in ancient texts and the evidence of material images of the Shiva-lingam in Indian art, as well as the historical role of foreign empires in the formation of contemporary attitudes to the lingam.
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THE INDUS VALLEY
The story begins in the Indus Valley Civilization in what is now northwest India and Pakistan, a culture (dating from well before 2500 BCE) with rich archeological remains but no deciphered script. The textual silence has allowed scholars to draw wild conclusions, often politically motivated, about the nature of the many physical objects discovered there. Some people have seen a kind of proto-lingam on one of the many carved stones found there, rectangular sections of soapstone about the size of a postage stamp, which were used as seals or stamps.
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Marshall's suggestion was taken up by several generations of scholars, who made much of this tiny bit of soapstone; the millimetre of the putative erection on this seal (the whole seal is barely an inch high) has, like the optional inch of Cleopatra's nose, caused a great deal of historical fuss. The 'upward-phallus-or-is-it-perhaps-just-his-waistband-or-the-knot-in-his-dhoti?' has a lineage in Indian art history that comes to rival the 'snake-or-is-it-perhaps-just-a-rope?' in Indian philosophical idealism, as a trope for the power of illusion. And there is a general resemblance between this image and later Hindu images of Shiva.
The Indus people may well have created a symbolism of the divine phallus. But even if this is so, and we cannot know it, it does not mean that the Indus images are the source of the Hindu images, or that they had the same meaning.
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THE VEDAS AND THE UPANISHADS
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THE MAHABHARATA
Gradually the word lingam took on the more particular meaning of a sign of gender, then the sign of the male gender, and finally the sign of the male gender of the god Shiva. 300 BCE to 300 CE), we first encounter the word lingam unequivocally designating the sexual organ of Shiva:iv The creator, Brahma, wishing to create creatures, said to Shiva, the first being, 'Create creatures, without delay.' Shiva said, 'Yes,' but seeing that all creatures were flawed, he who had great ascetic heat plunged into the water and generated ascetic heat.
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Brahma waited for him for a very long time and then created another creator, a Prajapati ('Lord of Creatures'). The Prajapati, seeing Shiva submerged in the water, said to his father, Brahma, 'I will create creatures, if there is no one who has been born before me.' His father said to him, 'There is no other male (purusha) born before you. This is just a pillar (or, Shiva who is called The Pillar) submerged in the water.
Rest assured, and do the deed.' And so the Prajapati created creatures. They were hungry and tried to eat the Prajapati, until Brahma provided them with food, plants and animals, and then they began to procreate and increased in number. Then Shiva stood up from the water.
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When he saw those creatures of various forms, increasing by themselves, he became angry, and he tore off his own lingam and threw it down on the ground, where it stood up just as it was. Brahma said to him, hoping to conciliate him with words, 'What did you accomplish by staying so long in the water? And why did you tear out this lingam and plant it in the ground?' Then Shiva, becoming truly furious, said to Brahma, 'Since someone else created these creatures, what will I do with it?
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Shiva in this myth is both a potentially procreative phallus (a fertile lingam) and a pillar-like renouncer of sexuality (an ascetic lingam). The word lingam has the same double edge as the word 'Pillar.' Shiva's castration does not render him asexual but, rather, extends his sexual powers to the universe, just as his destruction of Kama, the god of erotic love, actually releases the power of Kama into the world at large.10
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THE GUDIMALLAM LINGAM
A lingam that scholars generally regard as the earliest physical depiction of the god Shiva was made sometime between the third and first centuries BCE, in Gudimallam in southeastern Andhra Pradesh. Its anatomical detail is highly naturalistic (apart from its size: just under five feet high), and on the shaft is carved the figure of Shiva, also naturalistic, two-armed, holding an axe in one hand and the body of a small antelope in the other. His thin garment reveals his own sexual organ (not erect), his hair is matted, he wears large earrings, and he stands upon a dwarf.
The details of its carving define this image unequivocally as an iconic representation of the male sexual organ; the hypothesis that it is a form of the god Shiva is suggested by the iconography of the axe, antelope, matted hair and dwarf, and supported by the three horizontal lines, the sign of Shiva, that were painted on it some time after its original creation. Visitors to the Gudimallam lingam in the early twenty-first century noted that while the large lingam as a whole remains entirely naked, with all its anatomical detail, a chaste cloth was wrapped around the small image of the naked Shiva on the front of the lingam, a kind of loincloth (or fig leaf) simultaneously covering up the middle of the figure in the middle of the lingam and the middle of the lingam itself.
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Here is a tradition driving with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake.
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STORIES ABOUT THE SHIVA LINGAM IN LATER SANSKRIT TEXTS
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I am not a Christian at all. I am a Hindu and she is my goddess. Every orgasm is an offering to her, and every erection is a manifestation in me of Shiva-lingam.' He shut his eyes so that he could not see his idol.
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The two traditions remain in tension to this day.vii The stories of Shiva in the Pine Forest occur in two sets of variants along this divide. In both sets, Shiva enters the Pine Forest naked, often 'with his seed drawn up' ('upward seed', a variant of 'upward-phallus'), either in order for his seed not to fall down in the act of procreating, or in order to procreate, or both at once-another striking instance of the sort of ambiguity that haunts this debate.
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Then Brahma and Vishnu humbly prostrate themselves before Shiva, recognizing that he had created both of them, as well as everything else in the universe.22 There is nothing sexual about this lingam, though it is perhaps significant that it is the star witness in a debate about fatherhood.
THE LINGAM IN VERNACULAR TEXTS
Later Sanskrit and vernacular texts depict the Shiva-lingam alternatively, and in combination, as a part of his body and as an abstract symbol of the god, worshipped with offerings of fruit and flowers. Hindus for many centuries have seen their god(s) simultaneously in two forms: the true form of god is without any qualities (nirguna), unimaginable; but out of compassion for us, and so that we can love him, the god also manifests himself in a form with qualities (saguna),x perhaps as a human with two arms, or with particular features (a blue skin for Krishna, a third eye for Shiva).
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Each is real in its own way; sometimes you reach for one, sometimes for the other. In this way, too, many Hindus have regarded the lingam as both abstract, without (sexual) qualities, and particular, with (sexual) qualities. The lingam can also be real, and human, and particular, without being sexual.
A number of South Indian texts in Tamil tell of a miracle: a stone image of Shiva, with a face, bleeds in response to, or to test, the devotion of a pious worshipper. Some versions of this story refer to this image simply as 'the Lord', that is, Shiva, but other versions assume that what is meant is a statue of the Lord, a lingam. The many representations of this episode in both paintings and sculpture depict the form of a Shiva-lingam with a face and eyes.
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Such an image seems to be assumed, but never named as such, in this story about Shiva told in the Periya Puranam, a popular South Indian Tamil text from the twelfth century: One day, Kannappar, the chief of a tribe of hunters, found [a stone] Shiva in the jungle. Filled with love for the god and pity that he seemed to be all alone, Kannappar resolved to feed Shiva. He kicked aside the flowers that a Brahmin priest had left on the head of Shiva and gave him the flowers that he had worn on his own head.
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His feet, and his dogs' paws, left their marks on Shiva. He stayed with him all night, and left at dawn to hunt again. In order to demonstrate to the Brahmin priest the greatness of Kannappar's love, Shiva caused blood to flow from one of his own eyes.
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(An-kuRi and peN-kuRi-'male sign' and 'female sign' represent the Sanskrit pum-lingam and stri-lingam.) The term kuRi is still common today as a respectable or medical term for the sign of sex. But the Periya Puranam never uses the term lingam (or kuRi) at all, merely saying: 'The eyes of the Lord were bleeding.' Nevertheless, many scholars subsume the Kannappar story under the category of bleeding lingams,24 and the Tamil tradition assumes that the stone has the form of a lingam. Yet that stone has nothing to do with any part of Shiva's body but his eyes.xi
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THE LINGAM AND MUSLIM RULERS
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(One bit of comic relief in this area is P.N. Oak's argument, in Tajmahal: The True Story, first published in 1965,32 that the Taj Mahal is not a Islamic mausoleum but an ancient Shiva temple, which the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan commandeered from the then Maharaja of Jaipur; that the term 'Taj Mahal' is a corrupt form of the Sanskrit term 'Tejo Mahalaya,' signifying a Shiva temple; and-the crowning argument-that persons connected with the repair and maintenance of the Taj have seen the Shiva lingam and 'other idols' sealed in the thick walls of the monument and in secret chambers below its marble basement.)
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THE LINGAM IN THE RAJ
British historiographers made much of the Muslim destruction of Hindu temples and lingams, in order to claim that the British had rescued the Hindus from oppression by Muslims. And many of the British in India, particularly at the start, in the eighteenth century, appreciated all forms of Hindu culture, including its art forms and its eroticism. But the puritanical Protestant ministers who evangelized India after 1813 were not amused by the copulating couples on the walls of the temples of Khajuraho (built between 900 and 1100 CE in Madhya Pradesh).xii What the British missionaries most despised was what they regarded as the obscene idolatry of the lingam.
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(The exception is the final section of the Kamasutra, Book Seven, about the use of drugs and sex-tools, which has an entirely different tone from the rest of the text and is probably a later addition; this section of the text does use lingam for the male sexual organ several times.38) Yashodhara, the thirteenth-century commentator on the Kamasutra, sometimes uses lingam and yoni to gloss other terms that the Kamasutra uses for the sexual organs, but he also uses various other words. So for Burton to use the terms lingam and yoni consistently to translate, as it were, other Sanskrit words for the sexual organs was to create a weird linguistic back-formation.
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Second, by Burton's time, the terms lingam and yoni had taken on strong religious overtones, as both Indian English and Indian vernacular languages used these words primarily to designate the stone icons of Shiva and his consort. The exclusive application of these two terms to human genitals, therefore, may have had, at the very least, inappropriate overtones and, at the most, blasphemous implications for some Hindus. Yet Burton and Arbuthnot knew the religious meaning of the lingam.
(Indeed, in some instances National Geographic actually darkened the skin colour of a partially naked Polynesian woman 'in order to render her nudity more acceptable to American audiences'.40) The use of the term lingam enabled the authors to pretend that the book was not obscene because it was about India, when they really thought it was about sex, and knew that English readers would think so too. And so Sir Richard Burton is the one who really made lingam, in English, into a dirty word.
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No wonder that the Hindus recoiled from that implication. One begins to see why some Hindus began to be very sensitive about the interpretation of the word lingam.
CONTEMPORARY HINDU ATTITUDES TO THE SHIVA LINGAM
The Skanda Purana text that argued that all human beings are born marked with the signs of Shiva and his consort on their bodies-the lingam and pinda-implies that humans are born marked with the symbol of their faith, as a Christian might be born with a birthmark in the shape of a cross, or might receive the mark of the stigmata on her palms. Arbuthnot actually wrote a book about what he called The Masculine Cross,43 that is, the Shiva lingam.
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But by the late nineteenth century, for many Hindus, a Hindu lingam was no more a sexual organ than a cross was a Roman instrument of execution. To continue this parallel, some Christians see in the cross a vivid reminder of the agony on Calvary, while others see it as a symbol of their god in the abstract or of Christianity as a religion; this dichotomy corresponds to that between the anatomically detailed saguna, phallic lingam (such as the Gudimallam lingam) and the abstract, nirguna, elongated-object lingam, which have different resonances for worshippers.xvi But some Hindus, particularly those who advocate a sanitized, 'spiritual' form of Hinduism,xvii do not merely see the lingam as an abstract, nirguna symbol but go on to object to, and attempt to censure, the interpretations of those who view it in more somatic terms, as a saguna lingam.
They would be the counterparts of Christians who would refuse to acknowledge that the cross ever referred to the crucifixion of the historical Jesus. There is nothing new in the tension between abstract and earthy interpretations of the lingam in India; what is new is the insistence that one of them, the earthy one, is wrong, and must be silenced.
THE GENERAL PROBLEM OF LINGAM SYMBOLISM
To read all the myths of the lingam as the revisionist Hindus would insist on doing would be a travesty. If we return to the central episode of the myth about the creation of the lingam, and translate the word lingam as such Hindus would have us do, this is what we get: Shiva stood up from the water. When he saw those creatures of various forms, increasing by themselves, he became angry, and he tore off his own abstract symbol of god and threw it down on the ground, where it stood up just as it was.
Brahma said to him, 'Why did you tear out your abstract symbol of god and plant it in the ground?' And Shiva replied, 'Since someone else created these creatures, what will I do with my abstract symbol of god?' And so forth. Foolish as this story sounds if we limit ourselves to the non-sexual meaning of the lingam, we would be equally wrong to distort the story of Kannappar's lingam with the bleeding eye by translating 'the Lord' in that text as the 'male organ of Shiva': One day, Kannappar, the chief of a tribe of hunters, found the male organ of Shiva in the jungle; filled with love for the god and pity that he seemed to be all alone, Kannappar resolved to feed the male organ of Shiva.
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He kicked aside the flowers that a Brahmin priest had left on the head of the male organ of Shiva and gave him the flowers that he had worn on his own head. His feet, and his dogs' paws, left their marks on the male organ of Shiva … [and so forth] This story is about the presence of the god in a very physical, but not at all sexual, form. To conclude by returning to the beginning, let us recall that the word lingam primarily means a sign.
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Ambivalence towards the lingam was built into the Hindu tradition from that first moment when the Upanishads sketched out a parting of the ways, two divergent paths. But that ambivalence remained a matter of peaceful coexistence until the bigoted or the prudish among two of India's non-Hindu rulers intervened: some Muslims destroyed lingams, and the British made the Hindus ashamed of them. The history of interpretations of the lingam in India reveals the ways that the actions of the state-in this case, the Muslim dynasties and the British, who viewed the lingam negatively-have deeply affected native Hindu perceptions of the body of their own god.
And this set the stage for the final blow, when yet another bigoted and prudish political movement, the twentieth-century Hindutvaxviii faction, condemned and outlawed what they regarded as unacceptable aspects of their own religion, such as the sexual aspects of the Shiva lingam. But in this renewed battle over god's body, the god himself may deny either side victory. For Shiva-the ascetic god of the yogis as well as the erotic god of the Tantrics; the Lord of dance who dances the dance of both destruction (the tandava) and pleasure, hence, creation (the lasya); the thoroughly male god who also becomes a woman-has always gloried in ambivalence.
The contrasting aspects of the lingam, phallic and abstract, like all the other contrasting aspects of the god, are not in conflict but always simultaneously present, each illuminating the other.
Sacrifice and Substitution: Ritual Mystification and Mythical Demystification in Hinduism
Sacrifice might be minimally defined as the act of giving up something in order to receive something of greater worth. Sacrifice is central to Hinduism throughout its history, and though it has meant very different things to different Hindus at different times, it has always involved a transaction between humans and gods.
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SACRIFICE AND SUBSTITUTION: RITUAL MYSTIFICATION AND MYTHICAL DEMYSTIFICATION IN HINDUISM1
Sacrifice might be minimally defined as the act of giving up something in order to receive something of greater worth. Sacrifice is central to Hinduism throughout its history, and though it has meant very different things to different Hindus at different times, it has always involved a transaction between humans and gods. In the Vedic period, there was full reciprocity: the gods needed humans to offer sacrifice to them, usually in the form of butter or the pressed essence of the Soma plant, but also in the form of animals (usually goats, sometimes horses), while humans needed the gods' goodwill to be sure of good crops, healthy children and success in war.
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The gods themselves sometimes sacrificed to themselves,i while the offerings that humans made sustained not merely the gods but the whole universe. In later periods, the gods sometimes became jealous of humans and interfered with their sacrifices,ii while, still later, actual sacrifice was abandoned or internalized and transformed into other forms of religious expression.iii The Sanskrit texts detailing the philosophy as well as the actual performance of the sacrifice are so detailed that Vedic sacrifice was often taken as the paradigm for the category of sacrifice anywhere in the world, a fundamental category in the study of religion that sometimes functioned as a kind of placeholder for all religious ritual, or as the foundation of all morality and ethics.
Sacrifice has even been identified as the origin of civilization itself in the classical works of modern sociology and psychology by Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud, and there is a certain sense in which all life-human and non-human, cultural and natural-might be regarded as a series of deaths and rebirths, that is, as a continuous process of sacrifice. But the operation of the ritual of sacrifice, it seems, depends on a kind of sleight of hand or self-deception, a shell game of displacement and replacement.
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Sacrifice is defined in relation to three crimes from which it is otherwise indistinguishable-suicide, murder and deicide (or the killing of gods); and it becomes distinguishable from them only by a confusion of roles and a set of characteristic acts of substitution. This apparently sacrilegious conclusion has been reached not only by the major modern theorists of the sacrificial ritual but was also reached, long ago, by the philosophers and mythologists of the sacrifice or yajna in ancient India.
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SACRIFICE AND SUBSTITUTION AMONG THE THEORISTS
The victim represents or 'becomes' (and thus substitutes for) both the invisible divine recipient of the offering and the human being who makes the offering. 'Through this proximity the victim, who already represents the gods, comes to represent the [sacrificer] also. Indeed, it is not enough to say that it represents him: it is merged in him.
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As this victim itself serves as a substitute for all the members of the community, the sacrificial substitute does indeed play the role that we have attributed to it, protecting all the members of the community from their respective violence-but always through the intermediary of the surrogate victim … Ritual sacrifice is founded on a double substitution. The first, which passes unperceived, is the substitution of one member of the community for all, brought about through the operation of the surrogate victim.
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Secondly, all theorists considered here emphasize the critical importance of the victim to the sacrificial process, and all see this victim as a multivalent substitute and symbol for a pair of opposites: the sacred and the profane, god and the human, recipient and giver, father and son, society as a whole and its individual members. The substitute victim is, as a symbol, a representative of two (or more) different and even contradictory things or beings. And because it is a symbol, it is not critical to the efficacy of the sacrificial process itself who or what is selected to act as the symbol.
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It could be, and in the comparative view, is, almost anything: humans (of any number of culturally constituted types), animals, vegetables, non-sentient physical objects, physiological functions (as in the 'sacrifice of breath' in the Upanishads), even ideas ('individuality', 'desire', 'faith', 'truth', etc.) can and do function as the symbolic victim. This is not to say, however, that within particular cultures and particular religious traditions the choice of the appropriate victim is left to the whims of individuals. The appropriate sacrificial victims are, as Girard says, 'predetermined'.
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VEDIC THEORIES OF SUBSTITUTION IN SACRIFICE
In the texts of the Vedas, as well as in subsequent Hindu thinking about sacrifice, we encounter people inside one particular religious tradition wrestling with the complexities, even conundrums, of sacrifice and substitution. Vedic ritualism was first and foremost an exercise in and the product of a philosophy of resemblances and connections. Supposedly similar or resembling entities and phenomena were linked by 'connections' (bandhus or nidanas) and human beings could, therefore, claim to understand and to exert an influence on the natural, supernatural and social item from within the confines of their ritual world: what the sacrificer did to the sacrificial offering was thought to have a direct effect on the natural force-such as the sun, or the rain-symbolized by the god to whom the offering was made.
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Put otherwise, ritual action on wholly accessible things and beings was said, by means of the connections, to work simultaneously and sympathetically on their natural, supernatural and social analogues. Vedic ritualism in its entirety, like 'sacrifice' as a category within the study of religion, is thus based on and made possible by substitution. The Vedic ritualists assume that it is not possible to have direct contact with the supernatural forces (the gods of sun or rain) that are the transcendent prototypes and, therefore, the ritual must use immanent counterparts or symbols (fire or the Soma juice) for the 'real thing'.
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In relation to others, however, the sacrificer himself functions as a prototype with his own counterparts. A chain of potential substitutes for the sacrificer is thus created. An animal, more nearly resembling the sacrificer than vegetable oblations, in its turn stands as the prototype in relation to the lesser forms within the series.
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If these items are 'unavailable', the text continues, a much more modest (and inferior) substitute is prescribed: a gift of edible fruits and roots. 'If even this is not [within reach of the sacrificer],' the teacher concludes (perhaps with some exasperation), 'he should not offer the sacrifice.' Just as one could not offer a sacrifice to the gods without providing some (indeed, almost any) oblation in the fire for them, so one is prohibited from sacrificing without offering something to the Brahmin priests, the 'human gods'.
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And it may not be out of place here to recall who the creators of these ritual rules were. Such a hierarchical gradation of counterparts which may function as substitutes for an original can also be observed when one looks at lists of sacrificial victims or pashus. One such enumeration is found in a passage whose purpose is to explain the etymology of the term 'pashu': Prajapati turned his attention to the forms of Agni.
He searched for that boyx who had entered into the [various] forms [of Agni]. Agni became aware [of this and thought], 'Father Prajapati is searching for me. I will take a form unrecognizable to him.' He saw those five sacrificial victims: man, horse, bull, ram and goat.
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He desired, 'May I emit food, may I be reproduced.' He measured out the pashus from his breaths. From his mind [he measured out] the man; from his eye, the horse; from his breath, the bull; from his ear, the ram; from his voice, the goat. And since he measured them out from his breaths, they say, 'The pashus are the breaths.' And since he measured out the man from his mind, they say, 'The man is the first, the most potent of the pashus.' The mind is all the breaths, for all the breaths are firmly established in the mind.
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It may now be viewed as an act that 'redeems' the sacrificer from death and increases his longevity: When he sacrifices with the animal sacrifice, he renews the fires. And along with renewing the fires, the sacrificer renews himself, and along with the sacrificer, his house and pashus. The redemption of his self (by offering the animal substitute) is for his longevity.
For while he is sacrificing, the fires of the sacrificer hunger for meat. They turn their attention to the sacrificer himself; they long for the sacrificer. People cook meat taken at random in various other fires, but these (sacrificial fires) look for no other meat than that of him to whom they (the fires) belong.
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SACRIFICE AND SUBSTITUTION IN HINDUISM
These many varieties of religious substitutions in the Vedic texts are themselves 'simplified' and reduced in later Hinduism in two basic ways that then serve as justifications for new Hindu practices. The first of these is the argument by necessity. As we have seen, the Vedic texts describe substitutions of a most practical sort: if one could not for some reason obtain a certain substance, another could be used in its place.
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Vedic sacrifice thus provides a basic category that Hinduism inherits and continues to cherish-but not always uncritically. Where in Vedism all sacrificial substitution is justified on the grounds of necessity, in Hinduism at least some substitutions are rationalized on an ethical basis. This is the second form of the justification of Hindu beliefs and practices, the argument by morality.
Thus, while in Vedic ritual texts, the vegetable offerings may have to serve as the substitute victim because of, say, economic necessity, in Hinduism offerings of rice and barley are claimed to be better than those of animals, because they avoid the sin of killing.xviii Not only was the sacrifice of animals discontinued in upper-caste Hindu temples, the entire mythology supporting that ritual was turned on its head. The Epics and Puranas contain Hindu myths in which the Vedic concept of the sacrificial victim as symbolic of the sacrificer, or of the god, or of both, was not ignored but, on the contrary, was taken so literally that it called the Vedic hand, as it were, and revealed the hidden deception inherent in the symbolic identifications.
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When Shiva refused to attend the sacrifice, since he had not been invited, Sati insisted on going there without him. After she arrived, she rebuked the sages who were there, but Daksha continued to revile Shiva and to look upon Sati with hate. In anger and humiliation, Sati killed herself by burning her body in the fire of her own power of yoga.
When Shiva learned of this, he tore out a clump of his matted hair, from which a horrible demon was born. He instructed the demon to burn up the sacrifice of Daksha and all who were there. The demon and his demonic throng seized the sacrifice, which had taken the form of a wild animal to flee, and beheaded it.
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They mutilated the other gods, desecrated the goddesses, and polluted the sacrificial fire with excrement and filth. Then the demon found Daksha hiding in terror behind the altar; he dragged him out, tore off his head, and cast it into the fire into which oblations were placed. The gods went to Shiva and praised him, begging him to restore Daksha and all the others, and promising to give him a share in the sacrifice.
Because Daksha is both the victim and the sacrificer, when Shiva beheads Daksha he simultaneously ruins the sacrifice (by injuring the sacrificer) and accomplishes the sacrifice (by injuring the victim). Moreover, the oft postulated identity of the priest and the god is also actualized literally here: Shiva himself (or rather, his surrogate, the demon) performs the act of immolation. The 'sacrifice of Daksha' is a theological pun (in English as in Sanskrit: Daksha-yajna), a sacrifice that Daksha thinks is 'by' Daksha but that he comes to learn is 'made of' Daksha when he substitutes for the sacrificial beast.
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Some myths, such as the Brahmana myth of Shunahshepha, establish the paradigm of the sacrifice of an animal or a vegetable through the rejection of human sacrifice: a human is slated to be sacrificed as a surrogate for the animal victim (that is in itself a surrogate for the human sacrificer), and this sacrifice is at the last minute prevented.xix The myth of Daksha is a reversal of such a myth. Its narrative begins at a time when animal sacrifice had long been established, and then moves back to the primitive time (which might have never really existed at all) when human sacrifice had not yet come to be replaced by animal sacrifice; the myth moves behind the symbolic sacrifice of a goat to the actual sacrifice of the sacrificer.
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THE VEDIC HORSE SACRIFICE DECONSTRUCTED
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This is the story: Janamejaya was consecrated for the sacrifice, and his queen approached the designated stallion and lay down beside him, according to the rules of the ritual. But Indra saw the woman, whose limbs were flawless, and desired her. He himself entered the designated stallion and mingled with the queen.
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But then Vishvavasu, the king of the Gandharvas, calmed him down by explaining that Indra had wanted to obstruct the sacrifice because he was afraid that the king would surpass him with the merits obtained from it. To this end, Indra had seized upon an opportunity when he saw the designated horse, and had entered the horse. But the woman with whom he had made love in that way was actually Rambha, a celestial nymph; Indra had used his special magic to make the king think that it was his wife, the queen.
(He steals the sacrificial horse of King Sagara to prevent Sagara from surpassing his record.88)xxiii He thus (unlike the usual human worshipper) combines the roles of sacrificer and recipient. In the story of Janamejaya's wife, Indra adds to these roles that of the victim.
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MYTHS AS TRUTH-TELLING
The story of Janamejaya, which ends with an exclusion of the deity and a refusal to worship him, is thus in many ways an inversion of the story of Daksha, which begins with the exclusion of the god Shiva and ends with the promise that Daksha will in fact sacrifice to Shiva, after Shiva has both ruined and accomplished the sacrifice by making the sacrificer take the form of the animal.
Where the myth of Daksha reminds us that we would not like it if the sacrificer really did become the sacrificial animal, as the ritual texts say he does, the story of Janamejaya reminds us that we would not like it if the god really did become the sacrificial animal either, as the ritual texts also say he does.
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These myths are hard-hitting exposés of substitution in sacrifice, demythologizing within the structure of mythical discourse the ritual assumption that the sacrificial animal is a surrogate for the worshipper (Daksha) or the god (Indra). It may appear paradoxical that myths, which live in the field of the imagination, should provide the tools to uncover the illusory nature of rituals, which actually happen. But of course it is all taking place in the imagination: the Hindu myths are not actually dealing with the Vedic ritual at all, but merely demystifying the Vedic myths about the Vedic ritual by imagining what ritual ideology would be like if realized, mythically.
Here, as so often, the myth, in fact, tells the truth about a painful paradox that other social forms-in this case, ritual-have had to keep in the dark. These myths move back behind the Vedic sacrifice to a mythical time in which the sacrificial animal was really, not just symbolically, something more than just an animal. Texts such as the myths of Daksha and Janamejaya represent moments when a tradition says two different things at once: 'We used to do that, but now we do this.
We used to do sacrifice, but now we don't anymore; we are, therefore, better than the old religion that we have evolved out of. On the other hand, what we do now is essentially the same as what we did; what we do now is really sacrifice still, but a better kind of sacrifice.' Hindus, Buddhists and Jains all rejected the Vedic sacrifice, especially the animal sacrifice; but Hindus also dressed up their new doctrines and religious activities in the guise of the Vedic sacrifice.
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The previous sacrificial tradition was in this way made to appear as relatively inferior to newly revealed 'sacrifices'. But even anti-sacrificial traditions often found it necessary to call up the ancient category of sacrifice as a form of legitimation of the new in the guise of the old. New doctrines and practices were lent the air of archaic authority by being encoded in the vocabulary of sacrifice.
Sacrifice, then, may function to conceptualize and articulate the new in terms of the old. The category serves to traditionalize innovations. The rice cakes do not, in fact, so much replace the offering of animal flesh as supersede it.
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CONCLUSION
We have seen how Vedic ritualism and the Hindu myths about the Vedic sacrifice explore the mysteries of sacrifice: the mysterium fascinans et tremendum of an act that is separated from profane, criminal acts of suicide and murder only by a convenient compromising of its own ideological principles. Sacrifice, we have observed, is an act that is always a shadow of itself. It is always an act of surrogation, an imitation of an ideal, a counterpart of an unrealizable prototype.
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Furthermore, it is an act whose own claims for itself, when taken literally and seriously, become the nightmares of mythology. Sacrifice, in sum, is paradoxically an act that becomes indistinguishable from suicide, murder and deicide only when it substitutes for its own ideal form. In one sense, then, sacrificial substitution is absolutely necessary for the integrity of the category 'sacrifice'.
It is substitution, in other words, that defines sacrifice as sacrifice. Substitution makes sacrifice possible: the surrogate victim that stands in for the sacrificer and the deity redeems the act from criminality. Sacrifice is thus an act that necessarily compromises its own principles through substitution.
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Further substitutions-substitutes for substitutes-are similarly compromises, and are treated as such in traditions like Vedism; that is, surrogates, necessary though they may be, are regarded as inferior to originals (which are unattainable or undesirable). Substitutions in sacrifice may always be necessary; but, making the best of a bad situation, the substitute may also come to be valued higher than the original as substitution by necessity is recast as substitution by morality.xxiv The inversion of the worth of the vegetable oblation as one moves from Vedism to Hinduism-from the hierarchically inferior to the ethically superior-is one case in point of such a phenomenon.
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The Hindu myths about the Vedic sacrifice argue with a paradoxical logic, looking back on their sources in a self-deceptive way. The tradition is saying, 'It is a rice cake, and therefore a moral improvement on human or animal sacrifice, but it is also flesh, with all the power of the sacrifice that it came to replace; we are doing the same thing, but we are doing it differently.' And this phenomenon might be generalizable far beyond the Indian context, and far beyond the context of the fortunes of sacrifice in Indian history.
The Scrapbook of Undeserved Salvation: The Kedara Khanda of the Skanda Purana
Scholars of Hinduism often assume that the Sanskrit Puranas (composed between c. 250 and 1350 CE) were made, like camels in the old joke, by a non-communicating committee, or that, like the elephants in another old joke, they continued to be perceived blindly by different members of the tradition as a composite of several distinct, non-communicating sorts of texts, to which anyone was entitled to add a snake here (the trunk, a hymn of praise), a rope there (the tail, a local folktale) and so forth.
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THE SCRAP PURANA
Scholars of Hinduism often assume that the Sanskrit Puranas (composed between c. 250 and 1350 CE) were made, like camels in the old joke, by a non-communicating committee, or that, like the elephants in another old joke, they continued to be perceived blindly by different members of the tradition as a composite of several distinct, non-communicating sorts of texts, to which anyone was entitled to add a snake here (the trunk, a hymn of praise), a rope there (the tail, a local folktale) and so forth.
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And indeed there is some truth in this, as in most wrong ideas. Certainly the authors of the Puranas did not share our respect for the integrity of an inherited written script. For one thing, they worked as often from oral as from written texts, and, for another, their tradition was one that encouraged improvisation.i In this world of ever-shifting Puranic sands, the Skanda Purana is surely the shiftiest, or perhaps the sandiest, of all.
The longest and most sprawling of all the Puranas, though it was usually grouped with the Maha- rather than the Upa-Puranas, it was regarded even by the native Indian tradition as a 'scrap-bag'; its name forms a pun to this effect in Tamil, where it is the 'scrap' Purana (Kantal-Puranam). Its open-endedness has proved most useful to Indian authors through the ages; whenever the author of a Purana (called a Pauranika) came upon a story that seemed to be, or ought to be, old, but did not seem to have any known provenance, he could remark, without fear of contradiction, 'It's in the Skanda Purana,' just as family members assure one another, when looking for a misplaced object, 'It's probably in that old closet in the attic.' Many a naive Indologist (myself included) has wasted days searching in the extant editions of the Skanda Purana for stories said to be there, but not there now.
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But this is its strength, not its weakness. The Skanda Purana is, in a very real sense, a living Purana, one of the few living Puranas still extant in Sanskrit, and certainly one of the most popular.4 Why has it survived where other Puranas have become literary dinosaurs? Clearly, it has served someone's purposes, perhaps even several conflicting purposes.
On the one hand, it has proved a means whereby the Sanskrit tradition could encompass rival traditions, could 'kill by embracing', as the saying goes. Or, to look at it from the other standpoint, it has been a door through which the local, vernacular Puranas could enter into the so-called mainstream tradition. It has enabled the vernacular tradition to legitimize itself by claiming to be a part of an infinitely expansible Sanskrit text.
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It also introduces into many traditional myths a cynical and feminist point of view that is, in its own quiet way, subversive.
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PAURANIKAS AND INDOLOGISTS
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Indologists comb through the texts of ancient India in search of pieces of a new puzzle that they hope to construct (and, perhaps, to solve) from the fragments of the rather different, often insoluble, puzzles posed by the texts themselves. And so we go about, snipping a few pieces from the Rig Veda, a few from the Mahabharata, and so forth, in order to produce our new Purana, our own monograph on 'Horses in Ancient India' or, more narrowly, 'Evidence for the Use of the Stirrup in Ancient India'.
Naturally, our agendas are different from theirs; most basically, of course, they were usually composing texts related to worship, while we compose texts related to academic tenure or the narcissism of publication. But there are also a number of less obvious, more intellectual agendas that we as Indologists may very well share with the authors of the texts that we study.
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THE KEDARA KHANDA
A case in point: the redactor of the Kedara Khandaii (the first book of the first section, the Maheshvara Khanda, of the Skanda Puranaiii) seems to me to have had an agenda very like that of many Indologists. That is, he sifted through the texts of his own tradition and selected those myths that seemed to him to have certain themes in common. And then, in retelling them, he added bits and pieces of his own interpretation to make their inherent correspondences more blatantly apparent and, in some cases, to use them in entirely new ways.
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This process could well stand as a mirror for the academic discipline of Indology. True, the author's plan is coloured by a devotional agenda-he is setting out to magnify his god, Shiva-but there, too, I wonder how far he is from the spirit of those anthropologists who regard the people among whom they do their fieldwork as 'their' tribe. Other Puranas, of course, have unifying themes, though these are often of a more traditional character.
For instance, many Puranas weave their stories around the central theme of the place in which they were composed: all the great events of the mythical past are said to have taken place here.iv Or there may be a theme of pilgrimage: as the author moves through a sacred geography, he tells us what happened in each special place along the way.v Or there may be a genealogy: stories are told about each of the ancestors in a long line.vi Or, finally, there may be episodes in the biography of a single god.
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Thus, instead of producing yet another local, self-aggrandizing sthalapurana, this text does what we always thought only Indologists did: it looks at its own mythological tradition, selects from it, rearranges it, and restructures it into a thematic essay.vii It does this in two ways: it winds a set of old stories together into a new text, adding just enough to each story to make its point, and it adds new stories that are not found elsewhere. The text puts a particular spin on each tale that it retells, and that spin, picking up the impetus already present within the older story, like a good judo player, throws the separate stories together into an orchestrated constellation of new movement.
The new stories add up to make a statement that will go on to be echoed in many vernacular texts: the grace granted to the 'accidental devotee' or 'immoral or undeserving devotee' through the worship of the lingam, the symbol of the god Shiva.viii And the old stories are retold in a satirical and quasi-feminist vein. Both of these new projects involve major reversals of conventional moral expectations, positioning marginal figures (sinners, women) at the centre of the grace of God.
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Let us consider the two projects one by one.
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THE UNDESERVING DEVOTEE OF THE LINGAM
But where most of the other texts tell just one story, often (like the Devaraja story) as a kind of extreme phalashruti (advertisement for the benefits of reading/hearing the work in question), the Kedara Khanda tells a number of interrelated stories of this genre and even uses it as a kind of armature on which to build the text as a whole. The theme of the undeserving devotee implicitly repositions ritualism, apparently 'mindless' ritualism, over bhakti. It argues that feelings, emotions, intentions, do not count at all; that certain actions are efficacious in themselves in procuring salvation for the unwitting devotee.
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In this it mirrors another sort of bhakti, one that is, significantly, characteristic of the Shaiva Siddhanta philosophies of South India: the bhakti of the kitten, who goes limp to let god the mother cat pick him up by the scruff of the neck, in contrast with the bhakti of the baby monkey, who holds on tight to god the mother monkey.ix But the accidental devotion of the Kedara Khanda is far from a return to Vedic ritualism. For knowledge (an essential criterion of Vedic ritualismx) does not count any more than emotion, in this line of argument; the actions have an automatic efficacy, like the elements of a magic formula or the words in a mantra.
But the deity is not automatically compelled to respond; he (or, in the case of the goddess, she) is the one moved by emotion, moved by love, even unrequited love, for the unrepentant sinner. The particular inflection of this motif that is presented in the Kedara Khanda, the theme of 'great sinners who were saved from hell by an accidental act of lingam worship', incorporates (and reverses) an old story, told elsewhere, not of a sinner, but of a good man, a devotee of Shiva, who is saved from death (Yama) or Kala ('Time') by Shiva in the form of Yamantaka ('the ender of Yama') or Kalantaka ('the ender of Kala').
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No one grieved for the death of a son, and there was no disrespect and no murder, nor any poverty. Yama and Kala came to take him one day when he was worshipping Shiva. Then Shiva, the Destroyer of Kala, saw Kala, and he looked at Kala with his third eye and burnt him to ashes in order to protect his devotee.
Shveta awoke from his meditation to see Kala burnt in front of him. He praised Shiva and asked him what had happened, and Shiva told him, 'Kala eats all creatures, and he came here to eat you in my presence and so I burnt him. You and I will kill evil men who violate dharma, heretics who wish to destroy people.' But Shveta said, 'This world behaves properly because of Kala, who protects and creates by destroying creatures.
If you are devoted to creation, you should revive Kala, for without him there will be nothing.' Shiva did as his devotee suggested; he laughed and revived Kala with the form he had had. Then Kala praised Shiva the Destroyer of Kala, he who made Kama disembodied and destroyed the sacrifice of Daksha,xi and who pervades the universe with the form of the lingam. And Kala told his messengers, 'The devotees of Shiva, with their matted hair and rosaries and Shaiva names, wear the garb of Shiva.
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Even if they are parasites who terrify people, even if they are evil and do bad things, you must not bring them to my world [of death].' (32.4-96) Despite its general advocacy of lingam worship, the Kedara Khanda does not specify what sort of worship Shveta is engaged in at the moment when death comes for him. Instead, this text assimilates the killing of Yama to the burning and revival of Kama, which it has just narrated (Kedara Khanda 21.68-126; see below).
There are many other stories of this type,13 in which the criterion (which Shveta embodies) is a combination of virtue and Shiva-bhakti. (2) Midway, the criterion shifts to virtue, with no reference to sectarian orientation, when Shiva proposes that, usurping the task of the now-defunct god of the dead, he and Shveta should punish evildoers and heretics (even, supposedly, evildoers who are also Shiva worshippers). (3) But then the evil bhakta is exonerated: the god of death is forced to spare all worshippers of Shiva, even if they are evildoers or evil-thinkers: hereticsxii and liars too go to heaven if they worship Shiva [5.101]).
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Thus, the paradigmatic story of virtue rewarded is subtly twisted into a tale of (possibly virtueless) devotion rewarded. Finally, in another story in the Kedara Khanda, we encounter a man who is neither good nor (consciously) a bhakta: A thief, who killed Brahmins, drank wine, stole gold and corrupted other men's wives, lost everything in a game of dice. That night, he climbed on the head of a Shiva-lingam and took away the temple bell [inadvertently ringing it].
At that moment, Shiva sent his servants from Kailasa to that temple. When the thief saw them, he wanted to run away from the head of the lingam, but Virabhadra, Shiva's servant, said, 'You fool, what are you afraid of? Shiva is pleased with you today.' And they put him in the heavenly car and brought him to Kailasa and made him a servant of Shiva (8.1-13).
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The thief himself is unaware of the theological twist that makes him, as Shiva tells his servants, 'the best of all my devotees' (8.8). But the god saves him despite himself. The thief's brush with accidental bhakti does nothing at all to change him; presumably, he goes on dicing, womanizing and drinking until he dies.
Although in some stories the accidental act of worship changes the worshipper, more often the sinners remain unreformed like this, and therefore go to heaven. For now the heaven of the god can accommodate not only all reformed sinners but even unreformed sinners, and, as we shall soon see, people of all classes.xiii Indeed, this heaven is particularly partial to unreformed sinners. This is a world of not only unlimited good but undeserved good, of what might be called accidental grace.
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None of these sinners reforms as a result of his accidental encounter with the god; no one sees the light, or turns over a new page; all go on sinning until they die, presumably of syphilis, cirrhosis or impalement. But the mere encounter is enough to save them. You don't even have to know how to do the ritual, but you do it 'naturally', almost like the 'natural' (sahaja) acts of Tantric ritual.
In this sense, at least, these stories present a Tantric argument for the efficacy of a ritual useful for sinners in the Kali Age.xiv The narratives seem counter-intuitive and were perceived as perverse by some subsequent Hindu commentators. Three variants on this theme are collected together in a single chapter of the Kedara Khanda. The first story in the series is the tale of Indrasena: Indrasena was a king who was crazy about hunting, a cruel man who nourished his own life-breath by the life-breaths of others.
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He was a thief and an adulterer, a drunkard and Brahmin-killer, and a seducer of his guru's wife. When he died, Yama's messengers bound him and brought him to Yama, but then Yama rose, bowed his head to Shiva, reviled his own messengers, and set Indrasena free from his bonds. He promised to send him to glorious worlds, saying, 'For you are a great devotee of Shiva.' Indrasena said, 'I don't know Shiva.
I've always been addicted to hunting.' Then Yama said, 'You always used to say (when hunting), 'Get that! [praharasva]' [phrases containing 'Hara,' the name of Shiva]. And by the ripening of that karma you have been purified.' Then Yama's messengers took Indrasena to Shiva, who embraced him and made him his servant, named Chanda.
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(5.64-85) Directly after this story we are told another brief vignette of accidental grace: An evil thief was killed by the king's men. A dog came to eat him, and accidentally, unconsciously [chaitanyena vina], the dog's nails made the mark of Shiva's trident on the man's forehead. As a result, Rudra's messengers took him to Kailasa.
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THE FEMINIZATION OF VISHNU
The very first triad of stories about undeserving devotees introduces the corollary to the theorem of Shiva-worship that will be the basis of the rest of the book: that it is the worship of the lingam, rather than any other form of Shiva worship, that opens all doors and rights all wrongs. Implicit in this assertion is another dogma that the Kedara Khanda shares with many other Shaiva Puranas: that Shiva subsumes Vishnu within him. But here the Kedara Khanda begins to weave its own secondary agenda, a quasi-feminist agenda.
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It retells the familiar story of the argument between Brahma and Vishnu-about who has fathered the other-which is settled when Shiva appears in the form of the lingam of flame and Brahma and Vishnu compete to find the top and the bottom of this enormous pillar.xxi As a result of lying about having seen the top of the lingam, Brahma is cursed never to be worshipped again; this is also said in other Puranas. But this time Vishnu, who did not lie, is also subjected to a change in worship status: When the lingam raged out of control, Brahma and the sages praised Shiva, and he, pacified, told them to ask Vishnu for help.
They praised Vishnu, and he laughed and said, 'In the past I saved you from demons, but I can't save you from this lingam.' Then a voice in space, reassuring the gods, said to Vishnu, 'Envelop this lingam, Vishnu, become the base [pinda], and save everyone that moves and that is still.' And the lord assented to this in his mind. (7.1-21) Since, in other versions of this story, it is the goddess, or Shiva's Shakti, who is called in to support and control the lingam by taking the form of the pinda base (also called the yoni, 'vagina', or pitha, 'seat'), the assignment of this role to Vishnu in this text amounts to the feminizing of Vishnu, the subordination of Vishnu to Shiva, through the incorporation of Vishnu into the goddess's role in the worship of the lingam.
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And the text goes on to tell us that the whole universe is made of Shiva and Shakti; the clear proof of this is the fact that all men have the lingam and all women the pinda (8.18-19). This affords incidental support to the argument about the 'naturalness' (and hence the possibility of accidental performance) of lingam worship: every human being is walking around with the essential materials for worship. Moreover, the lack of vertical distinction between the male god and human males, on the one hand, and the female goddess and human females, on the other, is then given a horizontal counterpart: there is no distinction between Shiva (the male part of the lingam) and Vishnu (its female base, the pinda).
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A similar feminization takes place in the telling of the story of the churning of the primeval ocean,xxii which follows the standard plot until the moment when the devastating halahala poison appears. Then the text continues: Vishnu and Brahma and the others, pervaded by the poison, sought the help of Heramba (Ganesha), who propitiated Shiva until the supreme Shakti appeared in the form of the yoni. Ganesha praised Shiva united with Shakti, and the lingam, pleased by Heramba's praise, swallowed the poison.
(10.7-11, 39-56) This episode does not appear in the extant Sanskrit Mahabharata version of the churning of the ocean (where Shiva in his anthropomorphic form, rather than as the lingam, swallows the poison, and Ganesha does not yet exist), but it resonates with another Epic episode that is subsequently related by the Kedara Khanda: When the Soma appeared from the churning, the demon Vrishaparvan stole it and carried it down to the underworld. At the behest of the gods, Vishnu took the form of Mohini, a beautiful enchantress, bewitched the demons, took back the Soma, and gave it to the gods.
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(12.1-74) Where the Mahabharata describes the feminization of Vishnu as Mohini in just two verses,17 and later Puranas add an episode in which Shiva is enchanted by this enchantress and embraces her (giving birth to Hariharaputra-'the son of Vishnu and Shiva'),18 xxiii the Kedara Khanda inserts into the story a wonderfully cynical conversation between Mohini and Bali, king of the demons: Bali said to Mohini, 'You must distribute the elixir [Soma] right away.' She smiled and said to Bali, 'A smart man shouldn't trust in women. Lies, violence, deception, stupidity, excessive greed, impurity and cruelty are the natural flaws of women.
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Like sadistic jackals among beasts of prey, like crows among birds and like swindlers among men-that's how women should be recognized by wise men. How can I make friends with you? Consider who you are, and who I am.
But you do not belong among those women you have been talking about. No more talk; do what we ask.
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Distribute the elixir; we will take what you give us, I promise you.' (12.18-28) The self-hating misogyny of Mohini's speech repeats the serious statements of many other texts, beginning with the Rig Veda, which puts similar words into the mouth of Urvashi ('There are no friendships with women; they have the hearts of jackals'19), and continuing in Manu ('The bed and the seat, jewellery, lust, anger, crookedness, a malicious nature and bad conduct are what Manu assigned to women.'20) But in the Kedara Khanda, this can only be a satire on Hindu misogyny, as becomes apparent from a survey of the subversive role of women in this text.
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PRIMITIVE FEMINISM IN THE KEDARA KHANDA
It is worth noting the strong human women in this text, women like Chanda's wife. When the gods murder Dadhicha to take his body to make their weapons, his wife, Suvarcha, curses the gods and does not mince her words: 'O you gods, you're worse than anyone, impotent and greedy. Therefore you gods who dwell in heaven will have no progeny' … So, too, when the dwarf (Vishnu) has taken only two steps and has had Garuda bind Bali with the nooses of Varuna, Bali's wife, Vindhyavali, goes into action.
She goes to the dwarf and asks him to step on the heads of her child, herself and Bali; he does so and sets Bali free to live in Sutala, where he promises that he, Vishnu, will dwell as Bali's doorkeeper (a significant reversal of the Shaiva pattern, where the devotee becomes the doorkeeper). (17.7-14, 19.32-58) But it is the goddesses Indrani and Parvati (or Devi; the Goddess) who best express the powers of women; after all, they are called 'power', Shachi and Shakti.
We have already seen some instances of the text's quasi-feminism in the goddess's mocking remarks about the resemblance between Shiva and his devotees and in Indrani's mockery of Indra. Other stories are also told about the goddess and about Indrani, in other traditional episodes that become, through the strength of character attributed to the women, much less traditional. Thus, whereas in the Mahabharata, when Nahusha usurps the throne of Indra, Indrani weeps and seeks the help of Brihaspati and Indra, who tell her how to trick Nahusha so that he loses the throne and is cursed to become a snake,21 in the Kedara Khanda she dries her tears and thinks up the plot all by herself: When Narada urged the gods to install Nahusha on the throne of Indra (who was once again recuperating from Brahminicide), Shachi, hearing the words from the mouth of Narada, burst into tears and retired into the inner apartments of the palace.
The gods installed Nahusha as king of the gods, and he summoned Indrani to come to him. Indrani laughed and said, 'If he lusts for me, another man's wife, let him come to get me in a non-vehicular vehicle.' When Nahusha, deluded with lust for Indrani, heard what she had said, he considered what might be non-vehicular and decided that it was a Brahmin rich in asceticism. So he harnessed two of them to his palanquin, and as he drove them on he shouted, 'Go!
Go!' [sarpa sarpa], and so Agastya, one of the sages drawing the palanquin, cursed him to become a serpent [ajagara, also known as a sarpa]. Shachi then sent the gods to search for Indra, and she cursed Brihaspati: 'Because you brought two surrogates to me [Nahusha and Yayati, Nahusha's son] while Indra was still alive, someone else will do what you should do while you are alive; he will have your marital luck and beget a famous son in your 'field' [i.e., your wife].xxiv Go and look for Indra with the rest of the gods; if you don't, I'll give you another curse.' When he heard what Shachi said, Brihaspati went with the other gods.
Narada then came to Rati and asked whose she was. Furious, Rati said, 'I know you, Narada, you're a virgin boy, for sure. Go back wherever you came from, and don't delay.
You don't know anything, and all you do is make quarrels. You are the first among lovers of other men's wives, rakes, and low adulterers, people who do not work, parasites.' When Rati had reviled him in this way, Narada went and told the demon Sambara to abduct Rati. Sambara, deluded by lust for Rati, asked her to come with him, and wanted to grab her by the hand, but she said, 'If you touch me, you will be burnt.' He took her to his house and put her in charge of the kitchen, where she was known as Mayavati.
THE DECONSTRUCTION OF SHIVA
Parvati herself takes complex revenge against Shiva in the final myth told in the Kedara Khanda, right after the tale of the Kirata, a myth that not only recapitulates all the myths of lingam-worship that recur in this text but goes on to satirize them. (And we might see in Parvati's masquerade as a mountain woman, a Shabari, a variant of the theme of the mountaineer who worshipped the lingam.) The story begins as a variant on the well-known,26 though not particularly early, theme of the dice-game quarrel of Shiva and Parvati: One day the sage Narada came to visit Shiva and Parvati on Kailasa and said, 'There would be greater pleasure for the two of you in playing dice than in making love.' They began to play dice and began to argue, and, as the hosts of Shiva joined in the quarrel, Shiva's servant, Bhringi, reminded Parvati of the time when Shiva had burnt Kama, and the time when Shiva had been reviled at the sacrifice of Daksha and Sati committed suicide.
Then Parvati got mad and said to Bhringi, 'You're always trying to come between us. But how can there be any separation between us two? I will give you a curse: be without flesh.' Then, in fury, she put her hand on the serpent Vasuki and took it down from Shiva's neck, and [then she took] many other things, ornaments, and the crescent moon, and elephant skin, and then, laughing, she took even his loincloth.
When all the troops of Shiva averted their faces in modesty, Shiva said, 'All the sages are laughing at this joke, and Brahma and Vishnu. How can you, born in a good family, do this? If you have won, then at least give me back my loincloth.' Then she laughed and said, 'Why do you need a loincloth, you hermit?
You were naked enough when you went into the Pine Forest, begging for alms and seducing the sages' wives. The sages made your loincloth fall down there. And that's why I took it from you in the game of dice.' Hearing that, Shiva was angry and looked at her in fury with his third eye.
Everyone was terrified, but she laughed and said, 'Why are you looking at me with that third eye? I'm not Kala or Kama, nor am I Daksha's sacrifice. I'm not the triple city, or Andhaka.
You're wasting your time with that third eye on me.' She said a lot of things like this to him, and he set his heart on going to a deserted spot in the forest. When Shiva had gone to the forest, Parvati was tormented by longing in separation (viraha). Still, she laughed and said, 'I beat him and reduced him to poverty.
Without me he is ugly; I made him beautiful. Watch me play a new game with him now.' And with that, she set out to go to Shiva, taking the form of a magnificent mountain woman [Shabari], dark and slender, with lips like bimba fruits, and she went where Shiva was meditating. He woke up and saw her and was filled with lust.
He took her by the hand, but as soon as he touched her, she vanished. Then he, who was the destroyer of mistaken perceptions, himself was enveloped in a mistaken perception. Unable to see her, he was tormented by longing in separation.
But then he saw her again, and he asked who she was and she said, teasing him, 'I am seeking [my/a] husband,xxvi a man who is omniscient, independent, unchanging and the best lord of the universe.' He replied, 'I am a suitable husband for you, but no one else is.' She smiled and said, 'You are indeed the husband that I seek. But let me tell you something. You are devoid of virtue.xxvii For a woman chose you before and won you by her great inner ascetic heat, and you abandoned her in the wilderness.' Shiva denied that he had abandoned a woman with great inner ascetic heat.
When he continued to insist that she marry him, she said he must ask her father, Himalaya. She took him to her father, stood with him at the door, and said, 'This is my father. He will give me [to you], there is no doubt about that.
Don't hesitate.' Shiva bowed to Himalaya and said, 'Best of mountains, give your daughter to me today.' Hearing this pitiful speech, Himalaya stood up and said to Shiva, 'What kind of a joke is this? You're the one who gives everything in the universe.' Just then Narada arrived, laughed, and said, 'Contact with women always leads to the deception [vidamba] of men. You are the lord of the universe.
You should speak as befits you.' Thus enlightened by Narada, Shiva woke up and laughed and said, 'You spoke the truth, Narada. Mere contact with women is the downfall of men. Today she deluded me and brought me here; this act was like [a rape] by a ghoul.
Therefore I won't stay near this mountain; I'll go to another part of the forest.' Then Shiva vanished, but they all praised him, and he came back. Drums sounded, and all the gods, Indra and the others, sent a rain of flowers, and the great Shiva reigned there with Parvati. (34.20-153, 35.1-58) The arguments about the supremacy of Shiva versus Shakti recapitulate arguments that have been made throughout this text about Shiva versus Vishnu and Vishnu as Shakti, beginning with the reviling of Shiva at the sacrifice of Daksha.
Indeed, this episode, the final story in the Kedara Khanda, refers several times to the first story of Daksha's sacrifice, in which Sati, as usual, defends Shiva with great spirit and reminds her parents and the gods of his great deeds: [Sati said:] Once upon a time, Brahma, you became five-headed in your pride, and Shiva made you four-headed-do you remember? Once upon a time, he wandered begging in the Pine Forest, and you cursed him, and his mere limb filled the whole universe, which became a lingam at that moment.
There are also several different sorts of references here to Shiva's burning of Kama and of Kala/Yama; these references bring out a parallelism between the two incidents that is reflected in two parallel epithets of Shiva (Kamantaka and Yamantaka, or Kalantaka) but is seldom explicitly remarked upon in Sanskrit texts. The myth of Kama is also recapitulated in the episode of Shabari as a whole, which is a satire on the well-known myth that we have already heard in this text, the episode in which Parvati, having been rejected by Shiva as a lovely young girl, returns to him in another form, as an ascetic woman, when he is meditating, inspires him with love, and causes him to ask her father for permission to marry her.
APPENDIX: THE CONTENTS OF THE KEDARA KHANDA
This is how Ludo Rocher describes the entire contents of the Kedara Khanda: The Kedara Khanda (1.1) begins with the destruction of Daksha's sacrifice. It devotes several chapters to the churning of the ocean, and proceeds to describe the birth and activities of Parvati, up to her marriage with Shiva. The description of Karttikeya's birth is followed by that of his successful fight with the demon Taraka.
Here, in brief, is what is in the Kedara Khanda: 1.1.1. Introduction: The sages in the Naimisha Forest question Lomasha about Shiva. 1.1.5 Indrasena, a very evil man, says 'Hara' unconsciously and is saved from hell.
A Kirata (mountaineer and hunter) is taken to Shiva's heaven. 1.1.6 The Pine Forest sages cause Shiva's lingam to fall. 1.1.7 The lingodbhava: the flame lingam appears to Vishnu and Brahma.
1.1.8 A man steals a bell and is saved from hell. Ravana worships Shiva and Vishnu becomes incarnate as Rama. 1.1.9 The demon Bali takes Indra's throne.
The gods and demons churn the ocean for Soma. 1.1.10 Vishnu and Brahma and the others, pervaded by the halahala poison, seek help from Ganesha, who invokes the supreme Shakti in the form of the yoni, and praises Shiva in the form of the lingam, united with Shakti. This united form then swallows the poison.
1.1.11-14 Vishnu appears as Mohini, and the gods get the Soma. 1.1.15 Indra kills Vishvarupa and suffers from Brahminicide. Nahusha takes Indra's throne but is undone by his lust for Indra's wife.
His Brahminicide dispelled, Indra kills Vritra and incurs Brahminicide again. 1.1.18 Kitava (Bali in a former life) is saved from hell and takes Indra's throne. 1.1.19 Indra wins his throne back from Bali, with Vishnu's help.
1.1.20-31 Shiva burns Kama, marries Parvati, and begets Skanda. 1.1.32 Shveta, the devotee of Shiva, is saved from hell. 1.1.33 A Kirata is saved from hell.
1.1.34 The goddess tricks Shiva at dice and almost into adultery by becoming a mountain woman (Shabari).
Why Should a Brahmin Tell You Whom to Marry?: A Deconstruction of the Laws of Manu
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THE LAWS OF MANU1
To what extent was marriage-and, more broadly, sexual activity-legislated by religious law in ancient India? How did the authors of the religious texts justify their authority? To what extent was that authority actually recognized and that law actually enforced?
We may begin to answer these questions by considering The Laws of Manu,i long regarded as the most authoritative textbook of Hindu religious law (dharmashastra).
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WOMEN IN MANU’S DHARMASHASTRA
Manu is notorious for his attitude to women,ii whom he holds responsible for men's desire.iii He regards women as a sexual crime about to happen: Drinking, associating with bad people, being separated from their husbands, wandering about, sleeping and living in other people's houses are the six things that corrupt women. Good looks do not matter to them, nor do they care about youth; 'A man!' they say, and enjoy sex with him,iv whether he is good-looking or ugly. [9.12-17] Therefore, men should watch women very carefully indeed: A girl, a young woman, or even an old woman, should not do anything independently, even in her own house.
In childhood a woman should be under her father's control, in youth under her husband's, and when her husband is dead, under her sons'. [4.147-9; 9.3] This lack of independence meant that, in Manu's ideal world, a woman had very little space to manoeuvre within a marriage, nor could she get out of it: A virtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust and is devoid of any good qualities.
A woman who abandons her own inferior husband … is reborn in the womb of a jackal and is tormented by the diseases born of her evil. [5.154-64] And she is not set free from this loser even when he dies: When her husband is dead she may fast as much as she likes, living on auspicious flowers, roots and fruits, but she should not even mention the name of another man. Many thousands of Brahmins who were chaste from their youth have gone to heaven without begetting offspring to continue the family.
A virtuous wife who remains chaste when her husband has died goes to heaven just like those chaste men, even if she has no sons. She reaches her husband's worlds after death, and good people call her a virtuous woman. [4.156-66] Not only may she not remarry, but her reward for not remarrying is that she will be her husband's wife 'in the hereafter', which, 'if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust and is devoid of any good qualities', may not have been her first choice.
The good news, at least, is that Manu does expect her to live on after her husband dies, not to commit suicide on her husband's pyre, becoming a sati. Yet Manu's fear that the widow might sleep with another man was an important strand in the later argument that the best way to ensure that the widow never slept with any man but her husband was to make sure that she died with him. The man, of course, can and indeed must re-marry.
[4.167-9] All that there is to set against all of this misogyny is Manu's grudging 'keep the women happy so that they will keep the men happy' line of argument: 'If the wife is not radiant she does not stimulate the man; and because the man is not stimulated the making of children does not happen. If the woman is radiant, the whole family is radiant, but if she is not radiant the whole family is not radiant.'[3.60-63] Well, it's better than nothing.
[9.31, 191-5] Most often, women's wealth consisted in gold jewellery, which they could carry on their bodies at all times; though men controlled land, cattle and money, women had some resources-diamonds have always been a girl's best friend. This one claim to independence made Manu nervous: he warns against women hoarding their own movable property without their husbands' permission.
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THE BRAHMIN’S AUTHORITY OVER SEX
Here we may pause to reiterate our opening question: Why should a Brahmin legislate such things? There are two sides to this question: Why should a Brahmin want to interfere in this area, and why should people allow him to do so? As for the first side, sex is among the most basic of human needs, the key to the survival of human life within the lineage or species.
To control sex means to control everything else that stems from it-politics, power, everything. And, as for the second side, the fact that this force is so deeply embedded in the human organism means that it is, like death, an area of great vulnerability, mystery, danger; it is ultimately inaccessible to reason or science. This is the shadowy place in which people feel a need for religion, where Brahmins are invited to enter or offer to enter.
Manu presents both 'because' arguments (explicit dogmas or appeals to authority) and 'this is why' arguments (implicit rationalizations or appeals to persuasion) for the Brahmins' hegemony over all women. The necessity of the purity of women is established by the 'because' argument of the other world and the life after death: only a son born of the right sort of woman can give the food that feeds the ancestors: Two kinds of sons are born in other men's wives, 'the son of an adulterous woman' and 'the son of a widow': the former is [born] while the husband still lives and the latter after the husband has died.
But … they cause the offerings to the gods and ancestors to be lost to those who give them, both here on earth and after death. [3.174-5] And the afterlife effects of a woman's misbehaviour redound not only upon her male relatives but upon herself as well: A woman who violates her [vow to her dead] husband because she is greedy for offspring is the object of reproach here on earth and loses the world beyond. [5.161] It is, therefore, very important to keep women pure so that they can bear the right sorts of sons to feed the ancestors.
Or one might put it this way: the importance of inheritance law in a patrilineal society leads to an emphasis on the chastity of women. Marriage, therefore, may also be regulated through both 'this is why' and 'because' arguments. The list of women whom one can marry makes a lot of sense-at first: A woman who is neither a close relative on her mother's side nor belongs to the same ritual lineage on her father's side, and who is a virgin, is recommended for marriage to twice-born men.
When a man connects himself with a woman, he should avoid the ten following families, even if they are great, or rich in cows, goats, sheep, property, or grain: a family that has abandoned the rites, or does not have male children, or does not chant the Veda; and those families in which they have hairy bodies, piles, consumption, weak digestion, epilepsy, white leprosy, or black leprosy. A man should not marry a girl who is a redhead or has an extra limb or is sickly or has no body hair or too much body hair or talks too much or is sallow; or who is named after a constellation, a tree, or a river, or who has a low-caste name, or is named after a mountain, a bird, a snake, or has a menial or frightening name.
He should marry a woman who does not lack any part of her body and who has a pleasant name, who walks like a goose or an elephant, whose body hair and hair on the head is fine, whose teeth are not big, and who has delicate limbs. [3.5-10] It does not take a particularly profound knowledge of ancient Hindu culture to make sense of most of this. But are we justified in claiming that the items that do not at first make sense to us (What's wrong with red hair, or being named after a tree or a river?) are 'because' factors?
We must assume that if we knew enough about the culture, we would at least know why something puzzling to us made sense to them, though it is likely that we may still find it irrational in light of our present assumptions about the world. In discussing the begetting of children, Manu begins with remarks about fertility that may well be grounded in observation, but he moves quickly into the more convenient sphere of the logical but unverifiable: The natural fertile season of women is traditionally said to last for sixteen nights, though these include four special days that good people despise.
Among these [nights], the first four, the eleventh, and the thirteenth are disapproved; the other ten nights are approved. On the even nights, sons are conceived, and on the uneven nights, daughters; therefore, a man who wants sons should unite with his wife during her fertile season on the even nights. [3.46-8] There is a nice symmetry to this paragraph, but, as Sudhir Kakar once calculated, if a man avoids his wife on all the nights that Manu disapproves of, he can make love to her on minus three days every month.
There is also, perhaps, some human truth in the psychological portrait of children born of 'mixed marriages': 'From those [four] … bad marriages are born cruel sons, liars who hate the Veda and religion'. [3.41] In a society such as Manu's, which is constitutionally required to mistreat such children, they would indeed be likely to become sociopaths. But are class considerations 'because' or 'this is why' arguments?
It depends, of course, on how natural one regards class to be. This is what Manu says: Not a single story mentions a Shudra woman as the wife of a Brahmin or a ruler, even in extremity. Twice-born men who are so infatuated as to marry women of low caste quickly reduce their families, including the descendants, to the status of Shudras.
A Brahmin who climbs into bed with a Shudra woman goes to hell; if he begets a son in her, he loses the status of Brahmin. No redemption is prescribed for a [twice-born] man who drinks the saliva from the lips of a Shudra woman or is tainted by her breath or begets a son in her. [3.14, 16-17, 19] By saying that this is so, Manu makes it so, even as Manu, the Son of the Creator, makes women lustful and malicious.
Lens compare 112
RATIONAL AND IRRATIONAL ARGUMENTS IN MANU
To appreciate fully the specific arguments about sex, it will be useful to set forth some of the general principles of authority and argument in The Laws of Manu. The three main criteria are eyewitness perception, inference (or reason) and the teachings found in various religious texts. And 'if [the question] should arise, "What about the laws that have not been mentioned?" [the reply is]: "What educated Brahmins say should be the undoubted law."' [12.105-6] In fact, Manu has an even higher card to play in the game of authority, which he plays, significantly, in the context of the control of women: 'The bed and the seat, jewellery, lust, anger, crookedness, a malicious nature and bad practices are what Manu assigned to women.' [9.17] Manu is, as his own text makes explicit, not merely the primeval lawgiver but also the son of the Creator and, hence, a creator himself.
He thus assigns these qualities to women in both capacities, by making them originally and by recognizing them in his laws. Manu's assumptions about Brahmin authority are revealed in many different ways, but they can, as we have seen, be usefully classified into 'because' and 'this is why' arguments.
(In his long lists, by contrast, Manu really does seem to use genuine 'this is why' arguments, in that he gives, or rather assumes, ethical, moral or medical reasons, rational or empirical reasons, for doing something. Yet, on close examination, his lists do not explicitly explain anything. He does not, for instance, tell us why a leper or an arsonist should not be invited to the funeral meal; he assumes we can work that out for ourselves.) In a certain sense, the 'because' arguments may be better arguments than the 'this is why' arguments precisely because of their power to mystify, to shut off any possibility of challenge.
And yet, it is not fair to claim that the items that do not at first make sense to contemporary readers are 'because' factors. Perhaps Manu was, at many points in his text, striving to accommodate what he perceived to be a 'because' argument to a 'this is why' argument. That different parts of The Laws of Manu were added at different times, and that divergent traditions were brought together in the final redaction of Manu, is certain.
The themes and lists in The Laws of Manu are inherited pieces of the bricolage of ancient Indian culture. The text encompasses as much as possible; its goal, like that of Hindu culture itself, is not consistency but totality. It is, then, particularly hard for us to 'crack the code' of Manu if we think that there is one code; in fact, there are several different (and not necessarily incompatible) codes, any one of which may be invoked to justify a particular verse, and none of which can explain the 'system' as a whole.
It is really not a code at all, except perhaps in the sense that it is a shorthand to be deciphered or, like the genetic code, an encapsulation of the whole culture in nuce. But the gymnastics that Indian commentators go through to justify some of these items (often in blatant disagreement not only with one another but also with the patent meaning of the original verse) indicate that they, too, sometimes no longer know why it makes sense. In those cases, for them as for us, the answer is just 'because'.
Essay hub 113
LAW IN EXTREMITY
Manu himself implicitly acknowledges the ultimate inadequacy of all arguments, both 'because' and 'this is why', by providing us with a mechanism that effectively deconstructs his own system. This is the mechanism of apad, which may be translated as 'in extremity'-an emergency, when normal rules do not apply.v Apad is further supplemented by other loophole concepts such as adversity (anaya), distress (arti) and near-starvation (kshudha). In a famine, according to Manu, a father may kill his son.
[10.105]vi Apad dharma is the ultimate 'this is why' argument, the bottom line of realism in Hindu law. The concept of apad recognizes the inevitability of human fallibility: Don't do this, Manu says, but if you do, this is what to do to fix it. This two-edged sword is, after all, the rationale for any system of legal punishments and religious restorations: the system is designed primarily for people who disobey it.
When, for instance, Manu both condemns and recommends the appointment of a widow to sleep with her dead husband's brother, he does mean both things: he is saying that this is what one has to do in an emergency, but that it is really a very bad thing to do, and that if you do it, you should not enjoy it, and you should do it only once. If you have to do it, you must be very, very careful. Ideally, a man should not sleep with his brother's wife, but there are times when he cannot help doing it, and then Manu is there to tell him how to do it.
This is what one does when caught between a rock and a hard place, between the Devil and the deep blue sea; it is the best one can do in a no-win situation to which there is no truly satisfactory solution. The Sanskrit term for the rock and the hard place is apad. The emergency escape clause is further bolstered by recurrent references to what is an astonishingly subjective standard of moral conduct: The root of religion is the entire Veda, and [then] the tradition and customs of those who know [the Veda], and the conduct of virtuous people, and what is satisfactory to oneself.
[4.161] A person should recognize as lucidity [sattva] whatever he perceives in his self as full of joy, something of pure light which seems to be entirely at peace … When he longs with his whole [heart and mind] to know something and is not ashamed when he does it, and his self is satisfied by it, that [act] has the mark of the characteristic of lucidity. [12.27, 37] Thus, the elaborate web of rules, which, if followed to the letter, would paralyze human life entirely, is equally elaborately unravelled by Manu through the escape clauses.
Every knot tied in one verse is untied in another. The constrictive fabric that he weaves in the central text, he unweaves in the subtext of apad. The need for apad might be taken as an indication of the ultimate failure of Manu to provide a code of human conduct that can be realistically applied.
But it must be conceded that emergencies are the stuff that human life, and certainly human law, are made of. If Manu himself acknowledged the need to escape from his system, how seriously did other Hindus take it? Many a young man must have seduced, or been seduced by, his guru's wife (a situation that must have been endemic, given both Manu's paranoid terror of it and its inevitability in a world in which young women married old men who had young pupils).
How likely was such a young man, afterwards, to 'sleep on a heated iron bed or embrace a red-hot metal cylinder … or cut off his penis and testicles, hold them in his two cupped hands and set out toward the southwest region of Ruin, walking straight ahead until he dies'? [11.104-5] Would any but the most dedicated masochist turn down the milder alternatives that Manu, as always, realistically offers: 'Or he may carry a club shaped like a bedpost, wear rags, grow a beard, concentrate his mind and carry out the "Painful" vow for a year in a deserted forest.
Or, to dispel [the crime of violating] his guru's marriage-bed, he should restrain his sensory powers and carry out the "Moon-course" vow for three months, eating food fit for an oblation or barley-broth.' [11.106-7] How do we know that anyone ever did any of this? How was the Laws of Manu used? The Hindus themselves have always taken Manu seriously in theory.
By the early centuries of the Common Era, Manu had become, and remained, the standard source of authority in the orthodox tradition for social and religious duties tied to class and stage of life. The text attracted no fewer than nine complete commentaries, attesting to its central significance within the tradition, and it is cited far more frequently than any other dharmashastra in other ancient Indian texts. In the field of the ideal, The Laws of Manu is the cornerstone of the Brahmin vision of what human life should be, a vision to which some Hindus have always paid lip service and to which, in many ways, many still genuinely aspire.
It influenced expectations, tastes and judgments, beneath the level of direct application of given cases. However, whether this status extended beyond the texts to the actual use of Manu in legal courts is another matter. One could not actually run a country using Manu alone; Hindus soon developed, for that purpose, a network of local authorities (panchayats) that actually decided legal disputes.
Essay cycle 114
Saranyu/Samjna: The Sun and the Shadow
Over the years, I have found myself drawn back, time and again, to one particular figure from Hindu mythology who has survived in the texts for well over two millennia: Saranyu. She stands at the watershed of the Indian goddess tradition and is relevant to us even today, especially in the context of ideas about gender, class/caste and race.
On Hinduism flow 115
THE SUN AND THE SHADOW1
Over the years, I have found myself drawn back, time and again, to one particular figure from Hindu mythology who has survived in the texts for well over two millennia: Saranyu. She stands at the watershed of the Indian goddess tradition and is relevant to us even today, especially in the context of ideas about gender, class/caste and race. It is a complex story, with many strands for us to keep track of as we follow it through many texts and many centuries.
Essay ladder 116
SARANYU IN THE VEDAS
The story of Saranyu begins in nuce in the Rig Veda. Since this text purposely conceals the story, it is helpful to have a brief summary of the plot before we try to decipher the riddling text: Tvastri ('the Fashioner', also named 'the All-Maker', Vishvakarman) was the artisan of the gods. His daughter, Saranyu, married Vivasvant ('the Shining One'), the Sun, and gave birth to twins, Yama and Yami.
Then she put in her place a female of-the-same-kind (savarna), took on the form of a mare herself, and fled. The Sun took the form of a stallion, followed her, and coupled with her. From that were born the twin equine gods called the Ashvins.
Now, this is how the Rig Veda plays with the story: Tvastri is giving a wedding for his daughter': people come together at this news. The mother of Yama, the wedded wife of the great Vivasvant, disappeared. They concealed the immortal woman from mortals.
As the later Indian tradition attempts to unlock the riddle of Saranyu, it draws upon many deep-seated, often conflicting, ideas about human and divine sexuality and masquerade. Although it is useful to begin with a straightforward philological approach to establish our textual footing, following in the steps of the old boys, Bloomfield and co., it is now time for us to go on to raise questions of gender that did not concern them. In the Rig Veda, the female is explicitly an immortal, while her husband is a mortal (one of those from whom 'they' hid her).
At the same time, as the mare she produces the twin Ashvins (half horse and half human, like the Greek Dioscuroi or the Roman Gemini), who are liminally immortal: at first denied the privilege of sharing the elixir of immortality (Soma, the juice pressed from the Soma plant), they eventually get it. That Saranyu's husband and child are mortal is as clear as anything in this riddle. Yama is in many texts said to be the first mortal [RV 10.14.2; AV 18.3.13], and the Sun is explicitly said to be a mortal, to have been born to die, in contrast with his seven immortal brothers.
[RV 10.72.8-9; SB 3.1.33] These same texts also state that the Sun was, even in the womb, inadvertently mutilated and consciously abandoned by his own mother. Thus, the theme of rejection by the mother can be traced back from Yama, rejected by his mother, to Vivasvant, Yama's father, who is rejected by his mother. And that same rejection is taken to explain why the Sun is deformed.
The gods cut off his excess flesh and it became an elephant (or a human: there is a pun on hastin, 'one with a trunk' and 'one with a hand'). [SB 3.1.3.4] He is called Martanda ('dead in the egg' or 'born of a dead egg'). Indeed, the daily rising and setting of the sun was seen by many cultures as the continual process of death and rebirth.
Though someone other than Saranyu herself makes the female of-the-same-kind, she herself abandons both the twin (Yama) and the equine twins (Ashvins); there are no other children. But Yaska, glossing the Vedic verses in his Nirukta [12.10] (c. 500 BCE), adds another significant child: Tvastri's daughter Saranyu gave birth to twins from Vivasvant.
Putting in her place another female, a female of-the-same-kind (savarna), [and] taking on the form of a mare, she fled. Vivasvant, taking the corresponding form of a horse, followed her and coupled with her. From that were born the two Ashvins.
Of the female of-the-same-kind Manu was born. In the earlier text, 'they' (the gods, we assume) substituted someone else for Saranyu, with or without her consent. Here she explicitly produces the substitute herself.
This is a significant shift, which raises a question that we would do well to bear in mind throughout this inquiry: Who is the agent? Does the woman masquerade of her own will, or does someone else force her to do it? This also brings us to the critical question of points of view: Who wants this to happen?
That Saranyu and her double are regarded as the mothers of the two ancestors of the human race is even more significant a fact than might at first appear-for Saranyu and her double mark the dividing line between abstract goddesses who have children and anthropomorphic goddesses who do not. Before her, Aditi (the mother of the Sun, and of Indra) and Tvastri (Saranyu's father, and later said also to be the father of Indra) produce immortal children, as do Sky and Earth and a few other deities.
Lens compare 117
SARANYU IN THE HARIVAMSHA
In several later variants, the goddess is named not Saranyu but Samjna, which means, significantly, 'sign' or 'image' or 'name'.iv At the same time, Samjna's surrogate is no longer said to be of the same kind or type but is rather her chaya, her mirror image or shadow-a creature who is not exactly like her but is her opposite in terms either of inversion (the mirror image) or of colour (the shadow). This is the version given in the Harivamsha, an appendix to the great epic, the Mahabharata, composed in about the fifth century CE: Vivasvant was born of Kashyapa and married Samjna, the daughter of Tvastri.
She had beauty and youth and virtue, and she was not satisfied by the form of her husband, the greathearted one called 'Dead-Egg'. For the form of Dead-Egg, the Sun, was burnt by his own fiery glory in all his limbs, and so became unlovely. 'Let him not be dead while he is still in the egg,' his father, Kashyapa, had said in love and ignorance, and so he became known as 'Dead-Egg'.
But the Sun's fiery glory was constantly excessive, and with it he overheated the three worlds. The Sun produced a daughter and two sons: Manu and the twins Yama and Yamuna. But Samjna, seeing that the form of the Sun had a dark colour (syamavarna), unable to bear it, transformed her own shadow (chaya) of-the-same-kind (or colour, savarna).
Her own shadow became a Samjna that was made of magic illusion. Samjna said to the female of-the-same-kind, 'I am going to my father's house; you stay here in my house. Treat my three children well, and do not tell this to my husband.' The female of-the-same-kind replied, 'Even if I am dragged by the hair, even if I am cursed, I will never tell your husband.
Go wherever you like, goddess.' Somewhat embarrassed, the wise woman went to her father's house. But her father reviled her and kept telling her, 'Go back to your husband.' And so she took the form of a mare, concealing her form, and grazed in the land of the northern Kurus. But the Sun, thinking, 'This is Samjna,' produced in the second Samjna a son who was his equal.
And because the Sun thought, 'This one looks like (sadrisha) the former Manu,' his name was 'Manu of-the-Same-Kind' (savarna). But the earthly (parthivi) Samjna gave extra affection to her own child and did not behave in the same way to the older children. Manu put up with her, but Yama could not put up with her.
In his anger and childishness, and through the force of future destiny, Yama threatened Samjna with his foot. Then the mother of-the-same-kind, who was very unhappy, cursed him in anger: 'Let that foot of yours fall off.' But Yama, terrified by the curse and agitated by Samjna's words, reported this to his father. 'Turn back the curse!' he said to his father.
'A mother should behave with affection (sneha) to all her children, but this one rejects us and is good to the younger one. I lifted my foot at her but I did not let it fall on her body. If I acted out of childishness or delusion, you should forgive that.' The Sun said, 'You must have had very good cause indeed if anger possessed you who know dharma and speak the truth.
But I can't make your mother's words fail to come true. Worms will take flesh [from your foot] and go to the surface of the earth. Thus your mother's words will come true, and you will be protected from the blow of the curse.' Then the Sun said to Samjna, 'Why do you show excessive affection [to one] among your children when they are all equal?' She avoided this question and said nothing to the Sun, and he wanted to curse her to destroy her.
Therefore, she told everything to the Sun, and when the Sun heard this he became angry and went to Tvastri. Tvastri assuaged the Sun's anger and trimmed him on his lathe, removing his excessive fiery energy. Then he was much more handsome.
He saw his wife the mare, and, taking the form of a horse, he coupled with her by joining with her in her mouth, for she was struggling since she feared it might be another male. She vomited out that semen of the Sun from her nose, and two gods were born in her, the Ashvins, the healers. Then the Sun showed her his lovely form, and when she saw her husband she was satisfied.
But Yama was greatly tormented in his mind by his karma, and as the overlord of the ancestors, the king of dharma, he ruled over these creatures with dharma. And Manu of-the-Same-Kind will rule in the future during the era of Manu of-the-Same-Kind. His brother, Vivasvant's second son, became [the inauspicious] planet Shanaishcara ['slow-moving', Saturn].
Essay hub 118
MORTAL AND IMMORTAL
But the more important meaning of varna in the story of Samjna is 'sort' in the sense of mortal vs. Thus the Harivamsha refers to the shadow as 'earthly' (parthivi), belonging to the earth, in contrast with the other, the heavenly mother. The mortality and/or mutilation of the Sun (and, more significantly, of the sons of the Sun) is a central point of the myth in all its variants.
Some versions, such as the Harivamsha passage cited above, argue that Samjna, herself a goddess, left the Sun because he was inadequate for her (mutilated and mortal, or black); some, such as the Markandeya passage to be cited below, that she left him because he was too glorious for her, a fact that resulted in his mutilation. The mare's motives are correspondingly reversed: in the Brihaddevata she receives the stallion willingly, while in the Harivamsha she tries to avoid him. Whereas the Brihaddevata took conception through the nose as testimony that she did want to conceive by him and turned her face towards him as a willing human woman would, the Harivamsha takes it as testimony for just the opposite reaction, and she turns her face towards him (and her haunches away) as an unwilling mare would.
In neither case does she present her hindquarters to him. And the reason that she avoids him in the Harivamsha is that, unlike him, she is (in this case, wrongly) suspicious of the identity of her sexual partner; she does not trust her eyes. There is also a significant development in the nature of the mother of the human race: while Yaska and the Brihaddevata explicitly state that Manu was the son not of the first wife, the true wife, but of the replica, the Harivamsha says that the first wife bore Manu (presumably Manu the son of Vivasvant, Vaivasvata) and the twins.
This text also says that the second wife, the double (no longer called Savarna), bore another Manu, a double of Manu, called Manu Savarni; the subsequent evolution of the text indicates that we are the descendants of the second Manu, not the first. Thus we are descended not only from a replicated mother (as we were even in the Brihaddevata) but now from a replicated Manu, as well. The name of the second Manu is a pun.
The shadow of Saranyu is now called not only the savarna (the female of-the-same-kind), as in the earlier versions, but also the chaya (shadow) and sadrisha ('look-alike'). Therefore, Manu's usual epithet, 'Of-the-Same-Kind' (savarni) is explicitly interpreted not with reference to her but in the sense of 'Of-the-Same-Kind [as his brother]'-although we know that he is also, implicitly, 'Born of the Female of-the-Same-Kind.' In the earlier text, the epithet 'Of-the-Same-Kind' was a matronymic, because Manu's mother was the double and there was no other Manu for him to resemble.
But now that the epithet has also become descriptive of a sibling relationship, Manu himself is the double, and the other Manu is given the patronymic (Vaivasvata) that was originally Manu's. Finally, since in this text Manu is given this epithet by the Sun-who, as usual, thinks that the double is the real Samjna (both he and Yama refer to her as Yama's mother)-the Sun cannot name her child, Manu, after a resembling mother, but he can name him after his resemblance to the previous child.
Manu's epithet of Savarni thus reveals yet another punning meaning: he is the son of the woman of-the-same-kind as his father. This makes Manu not merely a double but a triple: he is of-the-same-kind as his replicated mother, his older brother (son of the true mother) and his (dark, mortal, lower-class) father. Indeed, by changing the name of the mother from Saranyu to Samjna, this text makes both the mothers of the human race unreal, for the name of the first wife (Samjna) means 'the sign' or 'the image' or 'the name', and the name of the second wife (Chaya) means 'the shadow'.
(Her name contains the verbal root jna, cognate with the Greek gnosis and English know.) Since the word or name is the double of the thing or person, Samjna is her own double from the start. And perhaps it is relevant to note here that chaya is also used in Sanskrit to refer to a commentary on a text. Thus, if Samjna is the text, Chaya is the commentary; if Samjna is the dream, Chaya is the secondary elaboration.
A feminist might well read this myth as a powerful astronomical image of male domination, inasmuch as the female images are regarded by the texts as mere reflections of the energy of their husband, the Sun. (Here it is relevant to recall that in both the Vedas and the Puranas, despite the fact that the Sun is mortal and Samjna immortal, the Sun is worshipped and Samjna is not.) And this interpretation is supported by other expressions of domination, as well.
One manuscript of the Harivamsha inserts a short passage11 describing Samjna's thoughts while she contemplates becoming a mare, thoughts about the nature of women's subordination to men: She became very worried, and thought, 'To hell with this behaviour of women.' She kept blaming herself and her own womanhood: 'No one should remain a woman, ever; to hell with this life with no independence. In her childhood, youth and old age she is in danger from her father, husband and sons, respectively.vi It was stupid of me to abandon my husband's house; I did the wrong thing.
Even though I have not been recognized, I have suffered now in my father's house, and there she is, the female of-the-same-kind, with all her desires fulfilled. I have lost my husband's house because of my naive stupidity, and it is no better here in my father's house.' And with that, she decides to become a mare, perhaps because mares, unlike human women, are free-both to reject unwanted stallions and to indulge in their unbridled sexuality.vii This passage strikes a contemporary reader as a strange mix of a quasi-feminist perception of male persecution and a male chauvinist justification for that persecution, projected (by the male author of the text) into the mind of the victim (the woman).
Essay cycle 119
SARANYU IN THE MARKANDEYA PURANA
In the context of a Purana that is so concerned with dynasties, this Ur-mother is clearly central. The Markandeya tells the story of Samjna/Saranyu twice (chapters 103-5 and 74-75). Neither variant says anything about the Sun's ugliness or dark colour; instead, the text [74.8] tells us that Samjna could hardly bear her husband's splendour (or semen: tejas) and that she also feared his anger.
When her father threw her out of his house, she took the form of a mare, 'not wanting the sun's heat, and frightened of his energy/semen'. [74.23] That the word for 'energy' (tejas) is also a word for 'semen' is surely relevant: Saranyu in her anthropomorphic form avoids the Sun's 'energy', while in her mare form she avoids the stallion's semen. When the look-alike curses Yama, the curse is subtly different from that of the Harivamsha, for it makes explicit that it is the foot that is the object of the curse: 'Since you threaten your father's wife with your foot, your foot will fall' [103.20], or 'Your foot will fall to the earth' [74.29].
In both Markandeya variants, the father, Vivasvant, also specifies that worms will take flesh from Yama's foot and fall to earth. The pun or riddle about the foot ('Worms will take flesh and go to the surface of the earth; thus your mother's words will come true, and you will be protected from the blow of the curse'), as well as the mutilation that it so vividly describes, is a recurrent theme in this corpus. The Sanskrit curse and counter-curse turn upon a double pun, for 'foot' (pada, cognate with Latin pes, pedes, French pied, and English foot) has two other meanings that are relevant here.
Pada also means 'a quarter, a part' (that is, only one of the four assumed feet), so that the counter curse invokes a kind of implicit synecdoche, pars pro toto: Yama will lose not his whole body but only part of it, the part that the worms will take away. And pada also means a word or a line or measure of poetry (that is, only one of the four assumed quarters of a verse), a meaning that 'foot' also has in English.
Thus the trick of the part (pada) and of the word (pada) is what saves Yama's foot (pada). The Markandeya prefaces one of its retellings of the story of Samjna with a brief but stunning sequence: Samjna was the daughter of Tvastri and the wife of Martanda, the Sun. He produced in her Manu, called Manu Vaivasvata, since he was Vivasvant's son.
But when the sun looked at her, Samjna used to shut her eyes, and so the sun got angry and spoke sharply to Samjna: 'Since you always restrain (samyamam) your eyes when you see me, therefore you will bring forth a twin (yama) who will restrain (samyamanam) creatures.' Then the goddess became agitated by terror, and her gaze flickered; and when he saw that her gaze darted about, he said to her again, 'Since now your gaze darts about when you see me, therefore you will bring forth a daughter who will be a river that darts about.' And so because of her husband's curse Yama and Yamuna were born in her. [74.1-7] Where Manu is named after his father, and is blessed, Yama is named after his mother, and is cursed; for he is named not after her name but after her evil deeds.
The pun here is not on feet but on eyes. Here, a pair of rather awkward puns on the actions of the mother's eyes (restraining and darting) makes Yama 'the Restrainer' (one of his famous epithets), instead of lame. The injured eye here replaces the injured foot.
In both Markandeya variants, unlike the Harivamsha, the look-alike cleverly avoids calling herself a mother and merely claims, correctly, to be Yama's father's wife. But Yama suspects her, judging not by appearances (as his father does) but by actions. He says, 'I do not think she can be my mother, for a mother does not behave badly even toward badly behaved sons.' [103.22-32] His father, however, persists in referring to her as a mother, although he adds that he will modify the curse 'because of his affection for his son'.
But finally, he, too, 'realizes that the look-alike is not the true mother', even though, in this version, she does not break her promise to remain silent. And he says, 'Surely you are not the mother of these [children]. You are some Samjna or other who has come here.
For how could a mother curse a son even among children with no good qualities?' [103.27-32]. In the other version, the Sun's words are given to Yama, who says, 'Daddy, this great wonder was never seen by anyone, that a mother rejects her calf-love (vatsalya) for her son and gives him a curse. This woman does not act like a mother to me as Manu told me she did (to him); for a mother would not act with no good qualities even toward sons who had no good qualities.' [74.31-32] (In the Amar Chitra Katha comic book version of the myth, Yama says to his father, 'Father, that woman is not our mother!' His father replies, 'I agree.
A son may change in his affections but a mother never ceases to care.' And the Sun realizes, 'The children are right. She must be an impostor.') When the look-alike still avoids giving an answer to his question about whether she is the mother of his children, the Sun thinks about it and realizes the truth. [103.33] He summons the look-alike Samjna and says, 'Where has she gone?'-a question that seems to imply that he knows the look-alike is not the real Samjna.
But the look-alike nevertheless continues, at first, to say what Samjna had told her to say: 'I am Samjna the daughter of Tvastri, your wife, and these are the children you begat in me.' Subsequently (as in the Harivamsha), when he is about to curse her, she tells him all the details of what had happened. [74.33-35] In both variants, he goes to Tvastri, who puts him on the lathe and trims away his excessive energy, which he makes into weapons (as in the Harivamsha).
Finally, the text tells us: Then Vivasvant's body was beautiful, and had no excessive fiery energy. He went to his wife, the mare, in the form of a stallion. But when she saw him approaching she feared it might be another male, and so she turned to face him, determined to protect her hindquarters.
Their noses joined as they touched, and the seed of the Sun flowed from his two nostrils into the mare and came out of her mouth, and in that way the equine twin gods called the Ashvins were born. And as the seed stopped flowing (retaso'ante) a son named Revanta was born, mounted on a horse. Then the Sun showed her his own form, and when she saw that it was peaceful she was full of joy, and she took on her own form and was full of love, and he took her home.
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THE FATHER OF THE BRIDE
All three of these Puranic variants (the Harivamsha and the two Markandeya passages) give new prominence to an old, silent character: the father-in-law, Tvastri, who at first receives Samjna when she flees from her husband, then forces her to leave his house, and finally mutilates her husband in order to make him acceptable to her. Tvastri is the artisan of the gods, the blacksmith, who is in many Indo-European mythologies crippled and consequently abandoned by his wife, or cuckolded; thus, in Greek mythology, Hephaestus's wife, Aphrodite, betrays him with Ares.
Here it is Tvastri's son-in-law (Vivasvant) and his grandson (Yama) who are crippled and abandoned by their wife/mother, while his son (the three-headed Trishiras) is beheaded. This is an unhappy family: the Sun is rejected and mutilated by his mother; Yama is tormented by his karma; the female of-the-same-kind is miserable; and the first children (Manu Vaivasvata, Yama and Yamuna) are rejected by the first mother and mistreated by the foster mother. Only the child of-the-same-kind, Manu Savarnika, is not rejected: he alone is treated well by the mother of-the-same-kind.
The theme of the substitute mother (who rejects her husband because he is too far away from her, being mortal when she is immortal) is closely conflated with the theme of the resistant brother (who rejects his sister because she is too close to him, being his sibling).17
SARANYU: THE CLASSIC COMIC BOOK
Are you sure you will be able to bear his brilliance in all seasons?' To this she replies, veiling her face from him, 'I am sure, father'-and she has a dreamy look in her eyes when she muses, 'I was wondering how long I would be able to revel in Surya's warmth.' One of the women who dress her for her wedding remarks, 'Let me darken your eyes. You will need protection from his glances,' whereupon another woman adds, 'Glare, you mean.' But Sanjna (which is how the comic book spells her name) replies, 'Need protection from Surya's glances?
Me?' When Manu grows up, we are told, 'Surya and Sanjna were proud of him.' The delighted father remarks, 'He is brilliant!' to which his mother replies, 'Like his father!' Thus the Sanskrit pun on tejas as 'brilliance' or 'semen' is given a third twist-'brilliance' in the contemporary sense of intellectual power. And the cosmic question of resemblance is reduced to the cliché compliment/complement of fathers and sons: 'Chip off the old block.' But Surya's brilliance reverts to its cosmic, solar meaning soon enough, when he says to his wife, 'Come Sanjna, sit by me.' Here, as usual, the Amar Chitra Katha editor bowdlerizes what was a more intimate sexual contact in the Sanskrit text.
But even this contact is too much for Sanjna, and the text elaborates upon the theme of closing the eyes: 'Sanjna, what's the matter?' 'My lord! Why do you glare at me so! I cannot open my eyes.' He says, 'Sanjna!
Will you repel me?' 'I am sorry, my lord.' 'Then listen carefully. Since you closed your eyes on me, the sustainer of all living beings, the son you bear now shall be Yama, the god of death.' Since the pun on 'restrain' is lost here, the curse makes no sense, except through an implicit connection between blindness and death.x But the sexual squeamishness of the Amar Chitra Katha cannot cope with the subsequent equine issue. Sanjna's only reason for turning into a mare is avoidance: 'I cannot face Surya.
I will turn myself into a mare. Then no one will find me.' When Surya goes to Vishwakarma in search of her, Vishwakarma says, 'I have divined that she turned herself into a mare.' On the way to find her, they ask a passer-by, 'Have you seen a mare go by?' 'Yes! A quaint one … by the river.' Surya then says, 'Why do you call it a quaint one?' 'I speak the truth, sir.
This mare talks!' To which Surya makes the wonderful reply, 'It must be Sanjna.' The talking horsexi is persuaded to resume her own form, and there is not a whisper about the mating of horses or the birth of the Ashvins. The shadow (chaya), like the Sun, is interpreted literally and naturalistically in the comic book; she is both a reflected image and a shadow. At first, the shadow is Sanjna's reflection in the water, which Sanjna draws out.
But when Sanjna remarks, 'You, Chaya, are safe from the glare of Surya,' Chaya replies, 'I shelter all who fear it'-a reference to the Shadow as shade, which is, on the literal level that this text favours, indeed safe from the sun. Chaya is happy with Surya, although she thinks, 'Poor Sanjna had to give up all this. I must not forget that I am only Sanjna's shadow.' Thus, in a single speech she expresses the banal, all-too-human materialism of the second wife and the reminder that she is merely a natural phenomenon, a shadow.
As in the Sanskrit text, the shadow is a good mother only to her own children (two sons and a daughter): 'But alas! She did not care for Sanjna's children in the same manner.' This time we learn more about the stepdaughter, who is (as in the Sanskrit) cursed by Surya because of the sins of her true mother. But despite the generally naturalistic bent of this text, the stepdaughter's curse is not naturalistic (a darting river) but psychological (a fickle woman, more appropriate to the nature of both her mother and her stepmother): 'You tremble before me?
Then you shall bear a daughter too. And she, Yamuna, shall be as fickle as you.' Now, as the Shadow beats Yamuna, Yamuna thinks, 'How I wish I were motherless.' Still the text tries to salvage Sanjna's good-motherhood, or at least her good-wifehood. The Shadow says to Surya, 'I am Chaya, the shadow of Sanjna.
She did not want to leave you uncared for. So she sent me here instead.' And when Sanjna turns back from mare into goddess, the first thing she says is, 'My lord! How are our children?' to which he replies, 'Manu, Yama and Yamuna will know a mother again.' And finally everyone is a good mother.
Sanjna says, 'I shall never again wander away from home,' and Surya adds, 'Chaya shall be forgiven and shall live with us.' 'So Surya and Sanjna went back to his abode in the skies and lived there in happiness with Chaya and the children.' And all the children, of both generations, are depicted in a final family snapshot. This text has travelled a long way from the Sanskrit corpus in which the tragic story of Samjna and Manu attributes the origin of the human race to an abandoning mother.
SARANYU : KUNTI = YAMA : KARNA The theme of the abandoning mother, the wife of the sun, resurfaces in a transformation in a myth that is central to the Mahabharata: The princess Kunti was given the boon of invoking a god to give her a child, and she tried out her boon on the sun god, merely out of curiosity. The sun god split himself into two by his power of yoga, so that he came to her but still went on shining in the sky.
As soon as Kunti saw him, she begged him to go back, pointing out that she was still a child, but he insisted on having her, threatening that if she did not give in to him, he would burn to death 'your foolish father, who does not know of your misconduct'. Karna was thus born, but to conceal her own misdeeds, Kunti threw the boy into the Horse River (ashvanadyam), lamenting, 'Fortunate is the woman from whose breast you will drink.
What dream will she have?' Then she returned to the palace, sick with sorrow and in fear of awakening her father. Karna was retrieved by a charioteer whose wife adopted him. Now, Karna was born with golden armour and earrings grafted right onto his body.
He always competed with Arjuna, one of Kunti's five 'legitimate' sons, the Pandavas, who feared Karna's invincible armour. In order to help Arjuna, one day Indra [the father of Arjuna] came to Karna in disguise as a Brahmin and begged the armour from him. Indra suspected that the sun god had warned Karna that Indra would come in disguise, but Karna did not refuse the request, though he asked in return for a magic spear that Indra had.
CONCLUSION
As anthropogonies, these stories are saying that the primeval children, our ancestors, were abandoned by their mother. And on the metaphysical level the myth of Saranyu/Samjna seems to be saying that we, the descendants of Manu, are the children of the image-the children of maya, not the children of the real thing. These myths embody the Vedantic view that we are born into illusion, live in illusion, and can only know illusion.
Clearly, this is a deeply religious story, not merely (or, perhaps, not even primarily) a story about men and women, or parents and children, or skin colour. For, in addition to psychological questions regarding incest, stepmothers, rejected children and unwanted husbands, the Saranyu story raises theological questions about the origin of the human race and of human death, about appearance and reality, about the relationship between male and female divine powers, and about the nature of the relationship between humans and the divine.
The metaphysical question of the origin of the human race is posed in the fate of Saranyu's second son, Manu, and the metaphysical question of death is posed in the mythology of Saranyu's first son, Yama. But that is yet another story, best left for another time.
The Clever Wife in Indian Mythology
Many cultures tell the story of a husband who challenges his wife to get a child fathered by him, though he spurns her bed; and she succeeds by tricking him into an attempted adultery. Stith Thompson, the Linnaeus of folklore, included in his wide survey of folktale motifs this cycle of myths known to folklorists as 'The Clever Wench' or 'The Clever Wife'.
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THE CLEVER WIFE IN INDIAN MYTHOLOGY1
Many cultures tell the story of a husband who challenges his wife to get a child fathered by him, though he spurns her bed; and she succeeds by tricking him into an attempted adultery. Stith Thompson, the Linnaeus of folklore, included in his wide survey of folktale motifs this cycle of myths known to folklorists as 'The Clever Wench' or 'The Clever Wife'. Thompson gives it the evocative title of 'AT 891D', subtitled 'The Rejected Wife as Lover.' The story, which has a very long shelf life indeed, always embodies a paradox about a child and often poses a riddle about a ringi: The central task requires the production of an heir by the wife, and the supplementary tasks all involve obvious symbols of male and female sexuality-the obtaining of rings, swords, or the husband's stallion, the digging of a well … the filling of a trunk.
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THE STORY OF MULADEVA’S CLEVER WIFE
One of the earliest recorded variants of the story, probably the ultimate source of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, is the tale of Muladeva and the Brahmin's daughter, the final tale in Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara, or 'Ocean of the Rivers of Story', composed in Sanskrit in Kashmir in the tenth or eleventh century CE. It's a massive text, which shared its streams of story with yet another narrative ocean, the Arabian Nights, and this particular story is the ultimate riddle in a great book of riddles.
The protagonist, named Muladeva, tells it in the first person: I went to Pataliputra with my friend Shashin, to test the cleverness of the people there. I met a young boy who was crying over a bowl of warm rice, and I chided him for his foolishness, but he replied, 'You are the fool, not I. I am crying in order to cool my rice and to clear my head of phlegm.' Embarrassed by our own lack of cleverness, we went on.
Then we saw a beautiful girl gathering mangoes, and we asked her for some. 'Do you want to eat them warm or cool?' she asked. Wishing to understand this mystery, I said to the girl, 'Let us eat the warm mangoes now, and afterwards the others, my lovely one.' Thereupon she threw some mangoes on the ground, in the dust.
When we had removed the dust by blowing on them with our mouths, we ate them. Then she laughed and said, 'First I gave you the warm mangoes, which you must have had to cool with your breath. Now catch these cool ones in your clothes, since you don't have to cool them with your breath.' And with this she threw some mangoes into the hems of our clothes.
We took them and went away from that place, embarrassed. And I said to Shashin, 'I must certainly marry that clever girl. I must pay her back for making such fun of me.' We found out her father's house and went there in disguise.
He promised to give me whatever I asked if I would stay there for four months, and when, at the end of the four months, I asked him for his daughter he said, 'I have been deceived! What fault can there be, since he is virtuous.' And he gave her to me in the proper way. That night, in the bridal chamber, I laughed and said to my wife, 'Do you remember those warm and cool mangoes?' When she heard that she recognized me, and she smiled and said, 'City slickers trick country hicks like that.' Then I said to her, 'I hope you're happy, you city slicker.
This country hick is going to abandon you and go far away, I promise you.' To which she, too, made a promise: 'I swear that you will be bound and brought back to me by means of a son fathered by you.' When we had made these mutual vows, she turned her face from me and went to sleep, and I put my own ring on her finger while she slept. Then I went back to my native city, Ujjain, in order to test her cleverness.
When the Brahmin's daughter awoke in the morning she did not see me but she found the ring with my name on it, and she realized, 'He has kept his promise and abandoned me. Well, I will keep my promise, too, and abandon all regrets. His name, on this ring, is Muladeva, a famous trickster.
Everyone says he lives in Ujjain. That's where I'll go.' She lied to her father, saying, 'My husband has already abandoned me. How can I live without him?
So I will go on a pilgrimage, to torment this cursed body.' Unwillingly, he gave her his permission. She went to Ujjain, dressed as a courtesan named Sumangala, set up an establishment, and became famous there. But she turned away all of her suitors, including my friend Shashin, and I became curious and went to see her.
I entered and saw my own darling, whom I did not recognize, because she was wearing the clothes of a courtesan. But she recognized me again, and received me like a trickster courtesan. Then I passed the night with her, the most beautiful woman in the world, and I became so bound to her by passion that I could not leave the house.
She, too, was bound to me through sexual passion, and never left my side until, after some days, the blackness of the tips of her breasts showed that she was pregnant. She then forged a summons from the king, and left me to return to Pataliputra. Though I was in love with her, I did not follow her, because I supposed that she belonged to someone else.
She gave birth to a son, and when he was twelve years old another boy said to him, 'No one knows who your father is, for someone or other fathered you when your mother was wandering around in foreign lands.' The boy, embarrassed, asked his mother, 'Mommy! Who is my father, and where is he? Tell me!' And his mother, the Brahmin's daughter, thought for a moment and said to him, 'Your father is named Muladeva.
He abandoned me and went to Ujjain.' When she told him the whole story, the boy said, 'Mommy, I will bind him and bring him back, and so I will fulfil your promise.' He went to Ujjain and recognized me from the description his mother had given him. Then he stole my bed right out from under me while I was asleep, lowering me gently onto a pile of rags on the floor. When I woke up I felt a mixture of embarrassment, laughter and amazement.
I went to the market place and wandered around, and I saw the boy selling the bed. I asked him, 'What price will you take for this bed?' But he replied, 'You can't buy it for money, O crown-jewel of tricksters, but by telling me a marvellous tale never heard before.' I said to him, 'I will tell you a marvellous tale never heard before. If you understand it and admit that it is true, you may keep the bed.
But if you do not, you must be the son of a lover and you must give me the bed. Once when there was a famine, a certain king watered the back of the boar's beloved with spray from the chariots of the snakes, and with the grain that grew there he put an end to the famine.' The boy laughed and said, 'The chariots of the snakes are clouds; the boar's beloved is the earth, whom Vishnu loved in his incarnation as a boar; the rain from the clouds made grain grow on earth.' And then that boy, who was a trickster, said, 'I will tell you a tale never heard before.
If you understand it and admit that it is true, I will give you the bed. But if you do not, you will be my slave.' I agreed to this, and then the boy trickster said, 'Once upon a time, O lord of tricksters, a certain little boy was born here. As soon as he was born, he made the earth tremble by the weight of his foot, and then, when he grew big, he put his foot into another world.' I didn't understand what the boy said, and I replied, 'This is a lie.
There is absolutely no truth at all in it.' Then the boy said to me, 'Didn't Vishnu, as soon as he was born, take the form of a dwarf and make the earth tremble at the strides of his feet? And then, when he grew big, didn't he put his foot into the world of heaven? So I have conquered you, and you are my slave.' Then he bound me and took me back to his mother in Pataliputra.
When she saw him she said to me, 'My husband, today my promise has been fulfilled. You have been bound and brought here by a son fathered by you.' And then she told the whole story, in front of everyone. Then her relatives all congratulated her on having achieved her wish through her own wisdom and on having the stain on the family honour wiped away by her son.
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THE REJECTED WIFE
Do these stories have a happy ending? Does the clever wife really get what she wants? Sometimes the clever wife's husband comes to love her after she has his child.
The logical paradox, the 'Catch-22', is to get the child before he loves her; once she solves that riddle, she wins. But do we accept the statement that he loves her after she has borne him a male child? That depends very much on the very different cultural and individual expectations of the women in different variants of the tale.
Often, the upper-class wife attempts to overcome her husband's paralyzing respect through a change in class (she dresses like a whore) or culture (she dresses like a foreigner); but when the wife is of a lower class, that, too, as we have seen, may be the reason for her rejection. The clever wife is usually 'foreign', not merely in the explicit political sense (she may wear the costume of another culture-Muladeva's wife goes from Pataliputra to Ujjain), but in the psychological sense of alienation or defamiliarization: she makes herself strange to her husband, and hence desirable, no longer the boring legitimate partner, but fresh again.
In several well-known Hindu myths, after a god has impregnated a woman (Kunti, Satyavati), he restores her virginity,37 as some husbands re-sealed the boxes that belong to the clever wives; this is what the fantasy of the wife-as-mistress does for the husband. Too high or too low, too clever by half, she seems to begin in a no-win situation. Her only way out is to escape from all of these superficial labels and turn her cleverness from a liability into an asset.
Becoming someone else, she makes him see who she really is. If the wife's goal is to win back her husband's heart forever, then it is she who seems self-deceived. She has won her husband's respect for her perseverance and ingenuity, but this is likely to be a temporary victory.
In some texts, even, perhaps, the tale of Muladeva's wife, the husband is, in the end, quite pleased to have such a clever wife, precisely the quality for which he rejected her in the beginning. Other texts may reflect a cultural suspicion that intelligence, like complexion, can be partly inherited, even from the distaff side, so that it's a good idea for the dynasty in a world of dangerous court intrigues to find a really smart wife. But some texts are either ignorant of these genetic factors or, as was the case in classical Indian legal texts,iv assume that only the father, not the mother, hands on his character traits to the child.38
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PATERNAL INSECURITY
The usual legal process is for a woman to get a ring and then get a baby; the usual physical process is first sex, then baby. To have the baby but not the ring is, of course, the defining situation of every unwed mother, the fate worse than death that has haunted women throughout recorded history. The narrative paradox seems to reverse this process, requiring the woman to have a baby in order to get both the ring and the sex, but in fact, here, too, the sex must come first; it merely appears to come second.
The clever wife gets a child as the result of her masquerade, and is then legally and physically acknowledged by her husband. And the father wants to be sure that the kid is his. Paternal nervousness is well expressed in the saying, pater semper incertus est, as Roman law remarks drily-which means, I think, both that the father is uncertain in his mind and that fatherhood is an uncertain thing.
The ghost of this sentiment hovers over these stories of clever wives, which regard the ring as proof of paternity, against all logic, because the father in the stories (and telling the stories) wants something hard, like a piece of jewellery (which, after all, can get lost but not so easily broken as a heart), to prove what can in fact never be proven: that the child is his own. (Nowadays, DNA can offer a kind of proof of paternity, and is resorted to by an astonishing number of nervous men, fifteen per cent of whom turn out to have good cause to be nervous.
But not even DNA can prove chastity or fidelity, or cure sexual jealousy.) The stories pit male fears about legitimacy against women's knowledge about sexuality, and men's power against women's cleverness. But there is more than paternal nervousness at issue in these tales. Two different female virtues are at stake here: on the one hand, the subversive virtue of actively resisting, fighting for what you want (usually the legacy of your child), honestly or dishonestly; and, on the other hand, the noble, passive virtue of being innocent of sin (though often wrongly accused).
The clever wife, though usually spurned for her wit at the start of the story, is praised for it at the end; defending her marital fidelity with a subversive intelligence, she proves that she has innocence as well.
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Rings of Rejection and Recognition in Ancient India
A piece of circular jewellery-a ring or a necklace, sometimes a bracelet or an anklet-plays a central role in three separate but related bodies of mythology in classical Sanskrit literature, each of which deals with the theme of sexual rejection and recognition. The first cycle tells of a woman who is married but rejected by her husband before she is able to get pregnant; the second tells of a woman who is impregnated before a public marriage has taken place and is then denied by her husband; and the third tells of a woman who disguises herself as a non-wife and is identified as a legal wife by her necklace.
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ANCIENT INDIA1
A piece of circular jewellery-a ring or a necklace, sometimes a bracelet or an anklet-plays a central role in three separate but related bodies of mythology in classical Sanskrit literature, each of which deals with the theme of sexual rejection and recognition. The first cycle tells of a woman who is married but rejected by her husband before she is able to get pregnant; the second tells of a woman who is impregnated before a public marriage has taken place and is then denied by her husband; and the third tells of a woman who disguises herself as a non-wife and is identified as a legal wife by her necklace.
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THE RING OF SHAKUNTALA
For the clever wife, the ring is the solution to the problem of her legitimation, when she uses it to prove who impregnated her. For Shakuntala, the ring is both the problem (when she loses it) and the solution, when she finds it again); but now the ring is also the solution (the excuse) for her husband, king Dushyanta (also called Duhshanta). The ancient story of Shakuntala and the lost ring of memory is told in a famous Sanskrit play-Abhijnana-shakuntalam-by the poet Kalidasa, in the fourth century CE, but it is based upon a story in the Mahabharata (composed between about 300 BCE and 300 CE) in which there is no ring: When King Duhshanta was hunting in the forest, killing all the animals, he came to a hermitage where he met Shakuntala and persuaded her to marry him by the gandharva rite of private, mutual desire; but she made him promise that the son she bore to him would become king.
Then he left, promising to send for her. Shakuntala gave birth to a boy and brought him to court, saying to Duhshanta, 'This is your son.' When the king heard her words, he remembered perfectly well, but he said, 'I do not remember. I don't remember ever having had anything to do with you.
I do not recognize this son that you have. Who will trust what you say? Your son is too big, and too strong, to have been born as recently as you claim.' She left in fury, and a disembodied voice from the sky said, 'The mother is the father's leather water-bag; the son belongs to the man who begets him.
But a divine voice forces him to acknowledge his son, whose extraordinary size and strength had previously led the king not to accept him as divinely blessed but to reject him as begotten by some other, previous lover. That voice's statement about the importance of mothers is hardly feminist; it is of the 'hen is a way for an egg to make another egg' school of embryology. But its surprisingly violent image of a woman in childbirth-split in two-evokes sympathy for mothers and suggests the classic, violent response of a woman to a double-dealing man: become two women, as clever wives do when they masquerade as mistresses.
He seduced her and she conceived.] He gave her the signet ring from his finger and dismissed her with these words: 'If it be a girl, spend this ring on her nurture; but if it be a boy, bring ring and child to me.' [She gave birth to a boy, and the children teased him, calling him 'No-father'. He asked his mother about his father, and she told him. At his wish, she took him to the palace and said], 'This is your son, sire.' The king knew well enough that this was the truth, but shame before all his court made him reply, 'He is no son of mine.' 'But here is your signet-ring, sire; you will recognize that.' 'Nor is this my signet ring.' Then said the woman, 'Sire, I have now no witness to prove my words, except to appeal to truth.
Wherefore, if you be the father of my child, I pray that he may stay in mid-air; but if not, may he fall to earth and be killed.' So saying, she seized the Bodhisattva by the foot and threw him up in the air. [The child, suspended in the air, told the king he was his son. The king received him in his arms and made him heir to the throne.]8 This text is one of very very few, among thousands of retellings of this tale, that mentions the commonsense fact that a ring doesn't actually prove anything at all unless other people recognize it.
(In fact, another Buddhist Jataka reverts to the more conventional assumption that the ring is an absolute proof: when the seducer, this time the king's Brahmin chaplain, says to the child, 'I gave your mother a token, where is it?' the boy hands him the ring, which the Brahmin recognizes and acknowledges.9) It also perpetuates the gender bias in the hard-headed value of a ring: if the child is a boy, it's all well and good to use the ring to secure his patrimony, but if it's a girl, you might as well use it for her dowry. These rational moments lead, however, back into irrational religion, an act of truth reminiscent of Sita's fire ordeal in response to Rama's rejection and of the voice from the sky in the Mahabharata tale of Shakuntala: a miracle, a suspension of the law of gravity, which proves the identity of the child and epitomizes the liminality of the child torn between two parents.
The king here quite blithely accepts the possibility that his son may crash and die. The Buddhist text spells out, as the Mahabharata does not, the king's embarrassment and his total disregard for the child as well as the mother. The poet Kalidasa had his work cut out for him to transform the king (whom he calls Dushyanta) from a lying rapist to a sympathetic lover, and he fell back upon the tried and true device of the magic ring and the curse of forgetfulness: King Dushyanta met Shakuntala in the forest, and they fell in love.
She did not yet know that he was the king (he told her he was the king's minister in charge of religious affairs); then he offered her his signet ring with his name engraved on it, and when her friends read the name on the ring and acted surprised, he said, 'Do not misunderstand; the ring is a gift from the king.' Shakuntala refused the ring at first, but eventually, after she had found out that he himself was the king, she slept with him (by the gandharva rite of mutual desire). He placed his ring on her finger as he left to return to court, telling her to count off one day for each letter of his name, and at the end he would send for her.
One day, Shakuntala, lost in thoughts of the king, ignored the hot-tempered sage Durvasas, who cursed her: 'Since you were so lost in thought of someone so that you had no mind for anyone else, he will not remember you even when you try to awaken him, just as a drunk does not remember the story that he told before.' Shakuntala didn't hear the curse, but her friends did, and persuaded the sage to limit it; he said: 'The power of the curse will cease the moment she presents some ornament as a token of recognition.' When the king failed to send for her, and Shakuntala discovered that she was pregnant, she set out for court, and her friends advised her, 'If the king is slow to recognize you, be sure to show him the ring inscribed with his name.' Meanwhile, at court, the king's neglected chief queen was singing a sad song: 'How have you forgotten your love?' When the king saw Shakuntala, who was veiled, he wondered who she was; when he was told that she was bearing his child, he was full of doubt; and when she removed her veil, he said, 'Did I take this beauty before, or not? No matter how hard I try, I cannot remember ever making this woman my own.
And how can I accept her when she shows clear signs of pregnancy and I have doubts about being the one who sowed the field,ii as it were?' Shakuntala thought to herself, 'When his passion has undergone such a change, what good would it do even if I were to make him remember? But I must prove my own purity.' And she said to the king, 'If you have doubts, thinking that I am another man's wife, I will dispel your doubt by this token of remembrance … O god, my finger does not carry the ring!' Her chaperone said, 'It must have been lost when you went into the water at the shrine.' The king smiled and said, 'This is why people say that women are so cunning.' But he continued to waver: 'Am I deluded, or is she lying?
Which is worse for me, to be a wife-abandoner or a man defiled by the touch of another man's wife?' The chaplain made a helpful suggestion: 'Since it has been predicted that the king's son will be a sovereign of the world, wait until Shakuntala has the child and see if he has the marks of sovereignty.' The king agreed, but Shakuntala ran away and was snatched up to heaven by the celestial courtesan who was her mother. The king lamented, 'Though I do not remember the sage's daughter, or any marriage, still my aching heart contradicts me.' Sometime after this, a fisherman found the king's ring inside a fish and brought it to the palace.
As soon as the king saw the ring, he remembered that he had married Shakuntala and that he had denied her in the delusion that overcame him when she had lost the ring. But one of the women in his court argued, 'Such a passion should not need a token of remembrance or recognition.' To which the king replied, 'So, let me blame the ring.' One day, in heaven on a mission for the gods, Dushyanta met the child that Shakuntala had borne.
The boy was playing with a lion cub. When a bystander remarked, 'Miraculous, astonishing, the speaking resemblance between this boy and you,' the king began to suspect that it was his own son. The boy had lost his bracelet while playing with the cub, and the king picked up the bracelet, to the astonishment of the bystanders, who recalled that it was a magic bracelet that no one but the boy or his parents could pick up; if anyone else touched it, it would change into a serpent and bite them.
The sceptical king asked, 'Have you yourself ever been eye witnesses to this transformation, with your own eyes?' To which two women among the bystanders replied, 'Many times.' But the king was convinced only when the boy said, 'You are not my father; Dushyanta is my father.' Then Shakuntala entered and said, 'Even after I heard that the bracelet didn't turn into a serpent, I was afraid to believe it.' But when she saw the king she said, 'He is not like my husband. Who is he, who defiles by the touch of his limbs my son, who was protected by that bracelet?' The boy said, 'Mommy!
This stranger embraces me and calls me his son.' Then Shakuntala and the king began to argue: King: 'My dear, it is only fair that you should turn my cruelty to you against me, as I see that you now refuse to recognize me. The darkness of my delusion has been pierced by the light of memory …' Shakuntala: 'It must have been the ripening of my past deeds that made you, who had been so compassionate, become so cold. But how did you come to remember unhappy me?
Ah, I see your ring.' King: 'Yes, it was by getting back this ring that I got back my memory. It does seem to me strange that, through a loosening of my memory, I denied Shakuntala and then, afterwards, as a result of seeing the ring, I understood that I had formerly married her.' Shakuntala: 'Thank goodness! My husband did not refuse me without any reason.
Essay cycle 129
THE RING OF COINCIDENCE
Several episodes in Harsha's Ratnavali turn upon the symbolism of jewellery. The play enacts this story: It was predicted that King Udayana, married to the jealous (with good reason) Queen Vasavadatta, must marry Ratnavali ('The [Lady with the] Jewelled Necklace'), the daughter of the king of Simhala. Udayana's prime minister spread a rumour that Vasavadatta had died in a fire [so Ratnavali could be brought to the kingdom] but while Ratnavali was sailing to Kausambi, the ship was wrecked.
Ratnavali was rescued from the water by a merchant and given to the minister, who recognized her by the jewel necklace which she always wore. He put her in Vasavadatta's service as a handmaid named Sagarika ('Oceanic'). Vasavadatta tried to keep the king from seeing Sagarika, who was very beautiful, but Sagarika saw him and fell in love with him.
One day the king found a portrait that Sagarika had painted of him with herself and declared his passionate love for the unknown maiden who had painted it. Then Sagarika and the king met, but she ran away and the king said, 'My beloved, who is like a jewel necklace, slipped out of my hand before I could get her around my neck.' Vasavadatta entered; the jester hid the portrait, as the king told him to do, but then he dropped it and the queen saw the portrait, recognized Sagarika, and asked the king who the other woman painted next to him was.
The king smiled nervously and said, 'Don't get the wrong impression, your majesty. I painted this girl out of my own imagination and never saw her before (adrishtapurva).' The jester added, 'I swear by my sacred thread, this is the truth, if we ever saw such a woman before.' The queen's companion added, 'Your majesty, this sort of coincidence does happen.' But the queen left in anger, with a headache, and sent her servants to have Sagarika put in prison. As she was led to prison, Sagarika gave the jewel necklace to her friend to give to a Brahmin; the friend gave it to the jester, who realized that Sagarika must be of noble birth.
Just then the chief counsellor of Ratnavali's father, the king of Simhala, arrived, with his escort; he had accompanied Ratnavali on the voyage and had survived the shipwreck but thought that Ratnavali had died. The counsellor saw the necklace on the jester and thought he recognized it as Ratnavali's but then decided that this might be sheer coincidence. He told king Udayana that the king of Simhala had sent Ratnavali to him, but she had been shipwrecked and drowned.
Then Sagarika appeared, and the counsellor from Simhala said to the escort, looking at Sagarika, 'She looks just like the princess.' And the escort said, 'This very thought was in my mind.' The counsellor asked about Sagarika, and Vasavadatta replied to the king, 'Your minister told me that she had been rescued from the sea; that's why she was called Sagarika.' Then the counsellor, recalling the necklace, decided that this must in fact be Ratnavali, and he said aloud, 'Princess Ratnavali! How did you fall into such misfortune?' Vasavadatta asked the escort, 'Is this Ratnavali?' and when he said, 'It is,' she embraced Ratnavali and said, 'My sister!' The king said, 'Is this the daughter of the king of Simhala, a man of high birth?' The jester said, 'As soon as I saw the jewel necklace I knew that this was the property of no common person.' Vasavadatta had Ratnavali's chains taken off and embraced her.
The minister entered and explained how he had set it all up, including putting Ratnavali/Sagarika in the harem so that the king would see her and fall in love with her. Vasavadatta smiled, adorned Ratnavali with her own ornaments, took her hand and joined it with the king's, and said, 'My lord, accept this Ratnavali.' Vasavadatta addressed Ratnavali as 'Queen', and they all lived happily ever after. Thus Vasavadatta, the chief queen, apparently forgets her sorrow and anger and accepts Ratnavali as her co-wife.
And the king gets them both; Hindu kings are, after all, no different from kings the world over. It suggests, if it does not prove, Ratnavali's identity. The king likens Sagarika to a jewel necklace, not realizing that 'jewel necklace' is really her name, Ratnavali.
This is a kind of Freudian slip, suggesting that on some deep level the king may suspect that Sagarika is in fact Ratnavali. The necklace, like the ring, invites this sort of buried recognition, and, like the ring, is associated with a hidden name: the Oceanic girl at first is like a necklace, and is known to have a necklace (by which Udayana's minister recognizes her before the play begins, and her father's counsellor half-recognizes her at the end), and finally is recognized as being named a necklace.
The necklace is at first taken as evidence, but is then ruled inadmissible. The argument about coincidence deflects the power of the jewellery clue so that it isn't the essential clue after all, but just evidence to corroborate the more profound recognition when it comes. The counsellor at first invokes coincidence to explain away the striking resemblance between the necklace last seen on Ratnavali and now seen on the jester: princesses have so many jewels that 'It is not hard to find a coincidence (literally, a conversation) of ornaments', like the 'speaking resemblance' that identified the true son of King Dushyanta in Kalidasa's Shakuntala.
But in the end the counsellor decides, 'Since the necklace on the jester's neck bears such a strong resemblance, and since this girl came from the ocean, it's clear that this is Ratnavali, the daughter of the King of Simhala.' The question of coincidence has already been raised on another occasion, too: trying to explain the fact that the king claims to have painted a woman he has never seen, the queen's companion refers to it as a coincidence, ghunakshara, literally an alphabet letter eaten into a page by a bookworm. The jester tries to explain the portrait away with a pun, remarking that he and the king never 'saw such a woman before'; he uses the term adrishtapurva, which can mean either that such a woman was never seen before, that she is marvellous and unique, which is the truth, or that the king never saw Sagarika in real life, which is a lie.
Other forms of jewellery and clothing, too, are used to perpetrate other sorts of disguises and machinations. Thus the king bribes Sagarika's friend with his own earring and rewards the jester with his own bracelet; the queen gives Sagarika's friend her own clothes and adorns Ratnavali with her own ornaments. But the truth that the necklace reveals from the start is not Ratnavali's particular identity (which is finally established by her face, her resemblance to herself) but her class.
She is the daughter of a foreign king, masquerading as someone of a lower class, the princess as the pauper. Here again, like the Jataka text that used the magic ring to provide for the rearing of a child, the text suddenly plays a harsh rational light on a traditional romantic theme: anyone who has a fabulous necklace of emeralds and rubies must be a princess, if not necessarily the particular princess you are looking for. And Sagarika's class is eventually the key to her individual identity, just as it was a clue to Shakuntala's ('Surely she is fit to be the wife of a man of royal birth, since the heart of a nobleman like me yearns for her; for the inner inclinations of good people are their authority toward doubtful objects').
Class precipitates Vasavadatta's fury against Sagarika: on one occasion, the queen overhears the king remark to Sagarika that he values the queen only for her 'naturally noble birth', while genuine passion inspires his feelings for the apparently lower-born Ratnavali-as-Sagarika. Then Vasavadatta, the queen, steps forward and rejects the king's efforts to conciliate her by throwing himself at her feet; through clenched teeth she says, 'Get up, get up, your majesty. Why should you suffer even now by serving a woman who is "of naturally noble birth"?' Here is a new (or is it new?) plot use for the ring of recognition, further enhanced by the near-homonym, in Sanskrit, between the word for noble birth (abhijana, the quality that the king instinctively recognizes in Shakuntala) and recognition (abhijnana, the word used in the title of Kalidasa's play about Shakuntala).
Thus, although the necklace is not, as in the folk tradition, the single clue by which all stands or falls, it is still an essential piece in a more complex puzzle.
On Hinduism flow 130
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE RING
Some rings, such as signet rings, are extensions of the hand; they have the personal emblem of the owner, the stamp of approval. In this way they are signifiers, semiotic objects with the ring of truth. The signet ring (the semiotic ring) is a sign of both identity and memory, particularly the memory of love; it is, as A.K.
The two-way power of rings, which serve as much to make people forget the truth about someone's identity as to prove true identity, may explain why they are so often doubled: sometimes a single ring plays a double function, simply by being first present then absent, first lost then found. The ring is often made to take the blame: its loss, or, on the other hand, its evil power, clouds the memory of the husband. These two layers of symbolism, of personal identity and recognition on the one hand and of sexual union on the other, unite to make the ring the pivot of myths about the identity of a sexual partner.
More specifically, the ring plays a role in stories told in ancient India about the tension between illicit eroticism and legal marriage and progeny. Why do narratives so often connect circular jewellery, particularly rings, with women's sexuality? The sexual symbolism of finger rings is not subtle; the ring's obvious sexual meanings may have been suggested by the analogy between putting your finger through a ring and putting one sexual organ into another.
But rings also have detailed historical and sociological implications. The ring gives the woman her authority; the marriage ring validates the married woman's chastity, and the ring of love makes public a lover's private promises. The ring also gives a woman some degree of financial independence; for most of recorded history, jewellery has been the only property that women have been allowed to own, and we have seen the hard-headed acknowledgement of its usefulness in building a dowry.
Jewellery has, moreover, the advantage of being portable property: if a woman wanted to leave her husband, few legal or economic sanctions were available to her, but she was usually allowed to keep the jewellery that she had brought into the marriage (her dowry), and sometimes also the jewellery that she had been given in the course of it. The ancient Indian tales build upon these deep symbolic resonances of rings, adding to the cross-cultural theme of memory and forgetfulness the particularly Hindu resonances of the theory of karmaiii and the Indian folk wisdom of the ways that a woman can manoeuvre to keep her husband and legitimize her child within the constraining structures of Hindu patriarchy.
Essay ladder 131
Lens compare 132
The Third Nature: Gender Inversions in the Kamasutra
Essay hub 133
THE KAMASUTRA1
To appreciate the Kamasutra's liberalism toward women, it is useful briefly to recall the attitudes to women in two important texts that precede it.i Though women are not the worst of all the addictions,ii they are the only universal one, and the authors of the shastras apparently found them more fun to write about than any of the others. We have discussed in another contextiii the attitude to women in the dharmashastra of Manu, the flag-bearer for the Hindu oppression of women.
But both of them greatly limit women's sexual and economic freedom.
Essay cycle 134
WOMEN IN VATSYAYANA’S KAMASUTRA
We've encountered Manu's assumptionvii that every woman desires every man she sees ('Good looks do not matter to them, nor do they care about youth; "A man!" they say, and enjoy sex with him, whether he is good-looking or ugly'20). The Kamasutra takes off from this same assumption, but then limits it to good-looking men and modifies it with an egalitarian, if cynical, formulation: 'A woman desires any attractive man she sees, and, in the same way, a man desires a woman.
There is no future in it; his thoughts are attached to someone else'; or she is nervous, thinking, 'He does not conceal his signals'; or she fears, 'His advances are just a tease'; or she is diffident, thinking, 'How glamorous he is'; or she becomes shy when she thinks, 'He is a man-about-town, accomplished in all the arts'; or she feels, 'He has always treated me just as a friend'; or she cannot bear him, thinking, 'He does not know the right time and place,' or she does not respect him, thinking, 'He is an object of contempt'; or she despises him when she thinks, 'Even though I have given him signals, he does not understand'; or she feels sympathy for him and thinks, 'I would not want anything unpleasant to happen to him because of me'; or she becomes depressed when she sees her own shortcomings, or afraid when she thinks, 'If I am discovered, my own people will throw me out'; or scornful, thinking, 'He has gray hair'; or she worries, 'My husband has employed him to test me'; or she has regard for dharma. [5.1.23, 25-6, 28-9, 31-35, 37-41] Vatsyayana here brilliantly imagines the resistance of a woman who is tempted to commit adultery, in ways that rival the psychologizing of Gustave Flaubert and John Updike.
This discussion is ostensibly intended to teach the male reader of the text how to manipulate and exploit such women: 'A man should eliminate, from the very beginning, whichever of these causes for rejection he detects in his own situation.' [5.1.43] But, perhaps inadvertently, it provides a most perceptive exposition of the reasons why women hesitate to begin an affair. And the Kamasutra is equally informative about women's (more precisely, courtesans') thinking about ways of ending an affair. It describes the devious devices that the courtesan uses to make her lover leave her, rather than simply kicking him out: She does for him what he does not want, and she does repeatedly what he has criticized.
She talks about things he does not know about. She shows no amazement, but only contempt, for the things he does know about. She intentionally distorts the meaning of what he says.
She laughs when he has not made a joke, and when he has made a joke, she laughs about something else. When he is talking, she looks at her entourage with sidelong glances and slaps them. And when she has interrupted his story, she tells other stories.
She talks in public about the bad habits and vices that he cannot give up. She asks for things that should not be asked for. She criticizes men who have the same faults.
And she stalls when they are alone together. And at the end, the release happens of itself. [6.3.39-44] A little inside joke that may not survive the cross-cultural translation is the word used for 'release'-moksha-which generally refers to a person's spiritual release from the world of transmigration;viii there may be an intended irony in its use here to designate the release of a man from a woman's thrall.
The rest comes through loud and clear, however: the woman employs what some would call passive-aggressive behaviour to indicate that it is time to hit the road, Jack. There is no male equivalent for this passage, presumably because a man would not have to resort to such subterfuges: he would just throw the woman out. The woman's method is an example of what James Scott has taught us to recognize as the 'weapons of the weak', the 'arts of resistance'.22
On Hinduism flow 135
WOMEN’S VOICES IN THE KAMASUTRA
Passages such as the woman's thoughts about beginning an affair, or a courtesan's thoughts about ending one, may express a woman's voice, or at least a woman's point of view. The Kamasutra often quotes women in direct speech, expressing views that men are advised to take seriously, and it is clearly sympathetic to women, particularly to what they suffer from inadequate husbands. [5.1.51-4] But if parts of the text are directed toward women, is it also the case that they reflect women's voices?
This is what we now recognize as the rape mentality: disregarding a woman's protests against rape.ix Vatsyayana lists rape as one of the worst, but still acceptable, of the eight wedding devices [3.5.26-7], and takes for granted the type of rape that we now call sexual harassment, as he describes men in power who can take whatever women they want: A young village headman, or a king's officer, or the son of the superintendent of farming, can win village women just with a word, and then libertines call these women adulteresses. And in the same manner, the man in charge of the cowherds may take the women of the cowherds; the man in charge of threads [presumably the supervisor of women engaged in sewing and weaving] may take widows, women who have no man to protect them, and wandering women ascetics; the city police-chief may take the women who roam about begging, for he knows where they are vulnerable, because of his own night-roamings; and the man in charge of the market may take the women who buy and sell.
[5.5.7-10] These women, at least, have absolutely no voice at all, let alone agency. We must admit that we find women's voices in the Kamasutra carrying meanings that have value for us only by transcending, if not totally disregarding, the original context. Were we to remain within the strict bounds of the historical situation, we could not notice the women's voices speaking against their moment in history, perhaps even against their author.
Essay ladder 136
GENDER IN THE KAMASUTRA
We can learn a lot about conventional and unconventional Hindu ideas of gender from the Kamasutra. Vatsyayana tells us that, 'By his physical nature, the man is the active agent and the young woman is the passive locus. The man is aroused by the thought, "I am taking her," the young woman by the thought, "I am being taken by him." [2.1.10] These gender stereotypes-the passive woman, active man-underlie other gender arguments in the text, too.
Vatsyayana tells us what he thinks of as typically female behaviour: 'dress, chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty and bashfulness.' The closest he has to a word for our 'gender' is tejas, a Sanskrit term designating light and heat, rather as we might say, 'It is what someone shines at,' or, perhaps, 'natural talent' or 'glory': A man's natural talent is his roughness and ferocity; a woman's is her lack of power and her suffering, self-denial and weakness. [2.7.22] And the commentator, Yashodhara, explains that people can sometimes deviate from these norms: Sometimes, but not always, there is an exchange when they make love, out of the pull of passion or according to the practice of the place.
Then the woman abandons her own ways and changes to what the man has a natural talent for, doing the slapping, while the man abandons his own way, of slapping the woman, and takes up her ways, moaning and screaming. But after a short time, they change back. And in the absence of passion or this particular technique, they do it just as before, and there is no occasion to switch.
The Kamasutra tells us that people do switch genders sometimes when they engage in the sexual position with the woman on top, which is heavily laden with gender implications for women. What we call the 'missionary position' is also the assumed norm in most Hindu texts.x But when the Kamasutra describes this position among all the other, more exotic positions that 'take practice', the commentator scornfully remarks, 'How does he penetrate her in this position? It is so easy that there is nothing to worry about!' [2.6.17] Most Sanskrit texts refer to the position with the woman on top as the 'perverse' or 'reversed' or 'topsy turvy' position (viparitam), the wrong way around.
Vatsyayana, however, never uses this pejorative term. Instead, he refers to the woman-on-top position only with the verb 'to play the man's role' (purushayitva). Vatsyayana acknowledges that people do, sometimes, reverse gender roles [2.7.23], and this switch of 'natural talents' is precisely what happens when the woman is on top: 'She does to him in return now whatever acts he demonstrated before.
The acts he demonstrated before are acts that he executed with roughness and ferocity, the man's natural talent; she now does these acts against the current of her own natural talent. She hits him hard, with the back of her hand and so forth, demonstrating her ferocity.
And so, in order to express the woman's natural talent, even though she is not embarrassed, nor exhausted, and does not wish to stop, she indicates that she is embarrassed and exhausted and wishes to stop. Now, since Vatsyayana insists that the woman 'unveils her own feelings completely when her passion drives her to get on top' [2.8. 39], the feelings of the woman when she plays the man's role seem to be both male and female.
The interrelationship between gendered actions (male on top, female on the bottom), gendered natures (males rough, females modest) and gendered bodies, together with the loss and recovery of a sense of one's own body balanced against the holding and releasing of the body of a sexual partner, is complex indeed.xi
Lens compare 137
SAME-SEX MEN
What about more extreme challenges to gender roles? What, for instance, does the text have to say about people who engage in homosexual acts? Classical Hinduism is in general significantly silent on the subject of homoeroticism, but Hindu mythology does drop hints from which we can excavate a pretty virulent homophobia.
The dharma textbooks, too, either ignore or stigmatize homosexual activity. Male homoerotic activity was punished, albeit mildly: a ritual bath27 or the payment of a small fine28 was often a sufficient atonement. But the ascetic aspects of Hinduism create a violent dichotomy between marriage, in which sexuality is tolerated for the sake of children, and a renunciant priesthood, in which asceticism is idealized and sexuality entirely rejected, or at least recycled.
The Sanskrit word kliba has traditionally been translated as 'eunuch' but almost certainly did not mean 'eunuch', since eunuchs-in the sense of men intentionally castrated, particularly in order to serve as guardians in the royal harem-did not exist in India before the Turkish presence in the ninth century and, therefore, cannot be recorded in texts such as the Mahabharata, composed long before that date. Men were castrated in punishment for various crimes in ancient India (and animals were gelded to control them), but such men were not employed as eunuchs.
Thus, when Krishna, the incarnate god in the Bhagavad Gita, wishes to stir the martial instincts of the conscience-stricken human hero Arjuna, he says to him, 'Stop behaving like a kliba!'xii The Kamasutra departs from the dharmic view of homosexuality in significant ways. It does not use the pejorative term kliba at all, but speaks instead of a 'third nature' (tritiya prakriti, a term that first appears a few centuries earlier, in the Mahabharata) or perhaps a 'third sexuality' in the sense of sexual behaviour: There are two sorts of third nature, in the form of a woman and in the form of a man.
The one in the form of a woman imitates a woman's dress, chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty and bashfulness. She gets her sexual pleasure and erotic arousal as well as her livelihood from this, living as a courtesan.
That is the person of the third nature in the form of a woman. [2.9.1-5] The Kamasutra says nothing more about this cross-dressing male, with his stereotypical female gender behaviour, but it discusses the fellatio technique of the closeted man of the third nature in considerable sensual detail, in the longest consecutive passage in the text describing a physical act, and with what might even be called gusto: The one in the form of a man, however, conceals her desire when she wants a man and makes her living as a masseur.
As she massages the man, she caresses his two thighs with her limbs, as if she were embracing him. Then she becomes more boldly intimate and familiar … pretending to tease him about how easily he becomes excited and laughing at him. If the man does not urge her on, even when he has given this clear sign and even when it is obvious that he is aroused, she makes advances to him on her own.
If the man urges her to go on, she argues with him and only unwillingly continues. [2.9.6-11] And so forth, and so on. This is a remarkably explicit analysis of the mentality of the closet, the extended double entendre of an act that is cleverly designed to appear sexually innocent to a man who does not want, or does not want to admit that he wants, a homosexual encounter, but is an explicit invitation to a man who is willing to admit his desire for such an encounter.
And a massage is a massage in the Kamasutra: 'Some people think that massaging is also a kind of close embrace, because it involves touching. For a massage takes place at a particular time set aside, has a different use, and is not enjoyed by both partners in the same way.' [2.2. Consider this: 'But when a woman who is giving the man a massage makes sure he has understood her signals and rests her face on his thighs as if she had no desire but was overcome by sleep, and then kisses his thighs, that is called a kiss [of] "making advances."' [2.3.
31] And this: '"Gooseflesh" is made when nails of medium length are brought close together and moved over the chin, breasts, or lower lip, so lightly that they leave no line but by the mere touch cause the thrill of gooseflesh and make a sound as they strike one another. A man can do this to the woman he wants, in the course of massaging her body …' [2.4.12-13] The legitimacy of this person of the 'third nature' is supported by a casual remark in the passage describing the four sorts of love, and the contexts in which they arise.
One remark, in a passage warning the bridegroom not to be too shy with his shy bride, suggests that some people disapprove of men of the third nature: '[Certain scholars] say, "If the girl sees that the man has not spoken a word for three nights, like a pillar, she will be discouraged and will despise him, as if he were someone of the third nature."' [3.2.3] So, judgmentalism appears to creep in after all. But when we look closer we see that the people who make this judgment are the 'scholars' with whom Vatsyayana almost always disagrees, as he does here, for he goes on to remark: 'Vatsyayana says: He begins to entice her and win her trust, but he still remains sexually continent.
When he entices her he does not force her in any way, for women are like flowers, and need to be enticed very tenderly. If they are taken by force by men who have not yet won their trust they become women who hate sex. Therefore he wins her over with gentle persuasion.' [3.2.4-6] This is the sort of man whom the wrong sort of scholar, but not Vatsyayana, might fear that some people might stigmatize as someone of the third nature.
It is evidence, all the more impressive for being so casual, of the prevalent homophobia of that time and place. Men of the third nature are always designated by the pronoun 'she', basically because the word 'nature' is feminine in Sanskrit (as it, and most abstract nouns, are also in Latin and Greek). Indeed, the idea of a third gender, rather than a binary division, may come from the basic habit of Indo-European languages to assign three genders-neuter as well as masculine and feminine-to all nouns.
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SAME-SEX WOMEN
Vatsyayana is unique in the literature of the period in describing lesbian activity. He does this at the beginning of the chapter about the harem, in a brief passage about what he calls 'Oriental customs'. [5.6.2-4] (The use of the term 'Oriental'-or 'Eastern'-for what Vatsyayana regards as a disreputable lesbian practice in what was soon to be a colonized part of the Gupta Empire-indeed, the Eastern part-suggests that 'Orientalism' began not with the British but with the Orientals themselves.) These women use dildos, as well as bulbs, roots, or fruits that have the form of the male organ, and statues of men that have distinct sexual characteristics.
But they engage in sexual acts with one another only in the absence of men, not through the kind of personal choice that drives a man of the third nature: 'The women of the harem cannot meet men, because they are carefully guarded; and since they have only one husband shared by many women in common, they are not satisfied. Therefore, they give pleasure to one another with the following techniques.' [5.6.2] Yashodhara's commentary helpfully suggests the particular vegetables that one might employ: 'By imagining a man, they experience a heightened emotion that gives extreme satisfaction.
These things have a form just like the male sexual organ: the bulbs of arrow-root, plantain and so forth; the roots of coconut palms, bread fruit, and so forth; and the fruits of the bottle-gourd, cucumber, and so forth.' One can imagine little gardens of plantain and cucumber being cultivated within the inner rooms of the palace, the harem. The Kamasutra makes only one brief reference to women who may have chosen women as sexual partners in preference to men: the text says that a girl may lose her virginity with a girlfriend or a servant girl, and the commentator specifies that 'They take her virginity by using a finger.' [7.1.20] Manu and Kautilya say that a woman who corrupts a virgin will be punished by having two of her fingers cut off [Manu 8.369-70, AS 4.12.20-22]-a hint of what Manu and Kautilya-like Yashodhara-think lesbians do in bed.
Vatsyayana never uses the verb 'to play the man's role' when he describes lesbian activities [5.6.1-4], nor does he ever refer to women of this type as people of a 'third nature.' But the commentator's belief that the children produced when the woman is on top might be 'a little boy and little girl with reversed natures' [2.8.41] refers to the view that the 'reverse' intercourse of parents might wreak embryonic damage, resulting in the reversed gender behaviour of the third nature-significantly, for a girl as well as a boy, the female type not spelt out by the text's discussion of the 'third nature'.
BISEXUALITY
In addition to male and female homosexual acts, there are a few oblique, passing remarks that suggest bisexuality.xvi The female messenger may have had bisexual behaviour in mind when, praising the man's charm, she says, according to the commentator, 'He has such luck in love that he was desired even by a man.' [5.4.15] So, too, in the Buddhacharita [4.12], composed in roughly the same period as the Kamasutra, the court chaplain encouraging a group of women to seduce the Buddha tells them, 'By your knowledge of the telltale signs of emotion, your flirtation, your perfect beauty, you are able to enflame the passion even of women, so how much more is this so of men?' In the Kamasutra, two verses embedded within the passage about fellatio performed by women describe men who engage in oral sex not by profession, like the men of the 'third nature', but out of love: Even young men, servants who wear polished earrings, indulge in oral sex only with certain men. And, in the same way, certain men-about-town who care for one another's welfare and have established trust do this service for one another.
[2.9.35-36] These men, who seem bound to one another by discriminating affection rather than promiscuous passion, are called 'men about town', nagarakas, the term used to designate the heterosexual heroes of the Kamasutra. In striking contrast with men of the third nature, always designated by the pronoun 'she', these men are described with nouns and pronouns that unambiguously designate males, yet they are grouped with women. The commentator on the Kamasutra even makes Dattaka, the author of the part of the text commissioned by the courtesans, a serial bisexual.xvii [1.1.11] The double knowledge of bisexuals such as Dattaka is the special expertise of serial androgynes such as the female-to-male bisexual Chudala,xviii who says, when she is a woman, that a woman has eight times as much pleasure (kama) as a man, which could also be translated as eight times as much desire.
Yashodhara may well have this mythology in mind when, glossing Vatsyayana's statement [2.1.36] that 'It is commonly said: "The man runs out of fluid before the woman runs out of fluid," he remarks: 'He runs out of fluids first because the woman has eight times as much fluid as a man. And so it is commonly said: 'A fair-eyed woman cannot be sated by men.' [Y on 2.1.14] Thus, despite the caution with which the text broaches this topic of homosexuality, and even more cautiously, bisexuality, it is possible for us as readers to excavate several alternative sexualities latent in the text's somewhat fuzzy boundaries between homoeroticism and heteroeroticism.
This sort of reading suggests various ways in which the Kamasutra's implicit claim to sexual totality-everything anyone could ask to know about sex-might be opened out into a vision of gender infinity.
Bisexuality and Transsexuality Among the Hindu Gods
Before we consider the evidence and significance of bisexuality in Hindu mythology, it would be useful to talk a little about the term itself. Does the word 'bisexual' refer to what one does or what one is?
Essay cycle 139
THE HINDU GODS1
Before we consider the evidence and significance of bisexuality in Hindu mythology, it would be useful to talk a little about the term itself. Does the word 'bisexual' refer to what one does or what one is? Bisexuality refers, in common English parlance, primarily to the nature of a person's sexual partners; thus the Britannica Online defines bisexuality actively, as 'in human sexuality, sexual interest in and attraction to members of one's own and the opposite sex.
A bisexual is a person with both heterosexual and homosexual desires.' That is, a bisexual does something bisexual. But Merriam Webster gives as the first meaning the existential definition, 'possessing characteristics of both sexes, hermaphroditic', and only as the second meaning the active definition, 'sexually oriented toward both sexes'. That is, a bisexual is something bisexual, primarily, and only secondarily someone who does something bisexual.
Later Hindu mythology attempts, though in a most roundabout way, to visualize the possibility of divine bisexuality. The Hindu gods are more often serially than simultaneously bisexual, more precisely transsexual, transformed physically into the other sex. The Vedic Indra on occasion changes both gender and species.i Each of the two great male gods, Vishnu and Shiva, is transformed into a female in a famous cycle of myths, and both goddesses and supernatural women become male in certain texts.
Serial transformation, which in a sense appears to be chronological, first one sex and then another, is really existential: it is an attempt to recover a lost possibility, to express an ambiguity that is present from the start, revealed when it seems to be transformed. Many Hindu myths attest to both the existential perception of the self as bisexual (as having a body of one sex and a mind/soul/personality/gender of another) and active bisexual (or transsexual) transformations, from male to female (known as MTF in the trade these days) or female to male (FTM).
With these concepts in mind, let us consider a few myths about bisexual or transsexual Hindu gods and supernatural beings, leaving for the next essay considerations of human beings who go through similar transformations. THE COUPLING OF VISHNU/MOHINI AND SHIVA In the Mahabharata, the gods and anti-gods churn the ocean to obtain the ambrosia, the Soma juice that maintains their immortality, and the anti-gods claim it as theirs. Then, just three verses tell this story: Vishnu took on an enchanting [mohini] illusion, the marvellous body of a woman, and he went to the anti-gods.
Vishnu presumably takes on merely the outer form of the anti-god; he never forgets that he is Vishnu; he retains his male memory and his male essence and resumes his own form after returning the Soma to the gods. But when the story is retold and greatly expanded in the Brahmanda Purana (350-950 CE), several centuries after the Mahabharata, Vishnu resumes his Mohini form at Shiva's express request on a second occasion, and although Vishnu still remembers who he really is, Shiva seems to forget that the enchantress is Vishnu: When the anti-gods stole the elixir of immortality from the gods, Vishnu meditated on the great goddess [Maheshvari], and by concentrating on nothing but her he took on her form: a beautiful enchantress.
She seduced the anti-gods and returned the ambrosia to the gods. Shiva asked Narada, 'What has happened to the ambrosia?
Who has won it, the gods or the anti-gods? What is Vishnu doing about it?' Narada told him how Vishnu had taken the form of Mohini, deluded the anti-gods, and brought the ambrosia back to the gods. Shiva dismissed Narada and went with Parvati to see Vishnu, unknown to anyone, even his sons Nandin, Skanda and Ganesha.
Vishnu rose to greet Shiva and Parvati, and Shiva asked Vishnu to show him the form he had taken before, enchanting everyone. Vishnu smiled a little and again meditated single-mindedly on the goddess; then he vanished, and Shiva saw a gorgeous woman [described in fifteen more or less boilerplate verses]. Immediately Shiva ran after her, abandoning Parvati, who stood with her head lowered in shame and envy, silently.
In this text, composed in honour of the goddess, whose worship had developed during the centuries after the brief Mahabharata story, Vishnu does not have to produce the woman out of his own power of feminine illusion, but is able to do so by meditating on an already existing goddess. This somewhat weakens the original idea that Vishnu himself actually becomes transformed, for there Mohini does not go on to have an enduring separate existence; she is absorbed back into Vishnu.
But the existence of the goddess as a separate person gives a kind of feminine reality to the creature, who now actually mimics a real female, and perhaps that is what inspires the author to imagine that she inspires Shiva with desire. The statement that Vishnu 'smiled a little' before agreeing to Shiva's request suggests that he, too, knew that this was one of those boons that the asker would come to regret. In this and other variants of this myth, Shiva's seed-shed on the ground, with no reference to a male or female partner-gives birth to a child, here called Mahashasta ('The Great Chastiser'), but variously identified as Skanda, Hanuman, Aiyanar, or 'Hariharaputra' ('the son of Vishnu and Shiva').
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SHIVA IN THE MAGIC FOREST
Yet all the subsequent texts that retell this story-and it is retold often-reverse that causal sequence and specify either that Shiva accidentally became female after the whole forest was cursed, or that he alone of creatures in the forest did not became female, being explicitly excepted by Parvati. The idea that Shiva became a woman with Parvati in the forest, explicit in this text, may well have been implicit in all the others that follow, some of which specify neither that Shiva was transformed nor that he was not.
The fourteenth-century Vedic commentator Sayana, for instance, simply says that when making love with Shiva, the goddess said, 'Let any man who enters here become a woman,'13 leaving ambiguous the question of whether Shiva himself became a woman. The Brahmanda Purana is stunningly inconsistent on this point: Once upon a time, Shanaka and other young boys came to see Shiva, and they saw him making love with the goddess in a hidden place. They all turned back, embarrassed, and the beloved goddess said to her beloved god, to do what he would like, 'Let any man who enters my ashrama become a woman as beautiful as a celestial courtesan.' Then all the creatures, goblins and beasts became females, sporting with Rudra [Shiva] like celestial courtesans.
Are we to assume that he carries on in that form? If he continues, this raises the same ambiguity that we considered in the myth of Mohini: if Shiva is merely superficially transformed into a female, but remains essentially male, we might expect him to continue despite the transformation. This interpretation is supported by one Hindu view of gender, the view that when the body changes, the mind and the memory remain the same and that gender is not fluid or superficial but embedded in memory.
But if it is a complete transformation, a change of inner essence, and Shiva does not stop, it would involve him in a rare but not unprecedented situationiii in the Sanskrit literature of Hinduism15 and a parallel to those variants of the myth of Mohini in which Shiva continues to desire Mohini when she changes back into Vishnu in inner essence as well as superficial form. This would support the other Hindu view of gender, also expressed in many of these Sanskrit texts, as fluid and superficial, changing completely when the body changes.iv Sometimes Shiva himself becomes female for a different reason: The gods begged the goddess Kali to rid the earth of demonic kings, and she agreed to become incarnate as Krishna.
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THE TRANSSEXUALITY OF THE WORSHIPPER OF PARVATI
A Tamil text from the late sixteenth-century imagines a human man who changes to a woman under the combined influence of the goddess Parvati and her agent on earth, a pious devotee. Although the protagonist in this myth is a human being, the fantasy of sexual transformation is built entirely out of divine imagery: Two Brahmin boys learned that a certain pious woman named Cimantani would give lavish gifts to Brahmin sages who came to her with their wives, for she imagined the sage as Shiva and the sage's wife as Parvati.
With some misgivings, one of the boys dressed up as a woman; women expert in the arts of adornment came to make him up. They made him breasts out of some other substance, plastered him with kunkum and sandal paste, hung a pearl necklace around his neck and fashioned a long braid so black it put night to shame. His eyes they shaded with kohl; stuck earrings in his ears; and draped him in a sari that was worth at least as much as the entire cosmos.
In short, by the time they were finished he looked as ravishing as Mohini, the female form assumed by Vishnu. They arrived at the palace of Cimantani, whose eyes were too long to be hidden by her hands. When she saw the young man and his friend, who had taken on woman's form, Cimantani came toward them, offered the guest offering, worshipped them, and invited them to sit down together with all the other Brahmins.
While she was ministering to these guests, she took a good look at the faces of the two boys and realized at once that they were, indeed, both males. Although she was a rather compassionate person, she frowned. She always thought of whoever came to her, in whatever guise or mode (ettirattanum), as Shiva and Uma.
So now, too, holding to the order of the Vedas and the Agamas, she performed puja in devotion (patti) and fed them all a rich meal of milk, fruit, honey, sweet drinks, rice and snacks, served on golden plates. Then she presented them with fragrant garlands, sandal paste, flawless clothes and jewels, white camphor and areca nut. She praised all the Brahmins as Shiva and Uma and then gave them leave to depart.
On the way back, the boy who had dressed as a woman turned into a woman-exactly like the guise he had worn-all because of Cimantani, who had imagined them as Uma and Shiva. 'He' totally forgot that he used to be a man. What is more, he now turned to his companion with the idea of making love, like a woman.
The Brahmin lad, still not realizing how fully his inseparable friend had become feminine, turned, a little scornful, to study 'his' face. Not an iota of the masculine was left in it. Amazed, he saw that everything about his friend had melted into a lithe, vine-like grace.
Her luminous, budding breasts, smeared with sandal paste; her long, thick curls, black as night; her face radiant as the full moon and-like fish darting through the moon-the long eyes shooting lethal looks; the red glow of her body, like an unfolding bud; her bangled wrists, delicate fingers, bejewelled belt, the perfection of her loins … She smiled and said, 'My dear husband! I used to be your friend Camavan. Now I'm a woman named Camavati.
Desire to make love to you drove me to speak. Have a good look with your own eyes. I am not a man.' With this, she revealed her whole body to her lord.
He saw, to his astonishment, that no other woman in the whole wide world had such a beautiful body as this courtesan. He realized that all this had happened because of the imagination exercised by Cimantani in her heart. He protested and tried to resist her, but she was by now very disturbed by Kama's arrows and far beyond thinking about what was or wasn't right.
She took his wrist and raped him, then and there, to her great satisfaction. He, on the other hand, felt no pleasure. In fact, he was deeply distressed.
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THE TRANSSEXUALITY OF CHUDALA
A brilliant example of female to male transsexuality, and back again, is the story of Queen Chudala, which is narrated at great length and with many labyrinthine triple crosses in the Yogavasishtha, a philosophical Sanskrit text composed in Kashmir between the tenth and twelfth centuries: Queen Chudala and her husband King Shikhidhvaja were passionately in love, like two souls in one body. In time, the queen became enlightened and acquired magic powers, including the ability to fly, but she concealed these powers from her husband, and when she attempted to instruct him he spurned her as a foolish and presumptuous woman.
Yet he remarked that she seemed to have regained the bloom of her youth, and he assured her that he would continue to make love to her. Eventually, the king decided to seek his own enlightenment and withdrew to the forest to meditate; he renounced his throne and refused to let her accompany him, but left her to govern the kingdom. After eighteen years she decided to visit him; she took the form of a young Brahmin boy named Kumbha ('Pot') and was welcomed by the king, who did not recognize her but remarked that Chudala-as-Kumbha looked very much like his queen, Chudala.
After a while, the king became very fond of Chudala-as-Kumbha, who instructed him and enlightened him, and she began to be aroused by her handsome husband. And so Chudala-as-Kumbha went away for a while. When she returned, she told the king that a sage had cursed her to become a woman, with breasts and long hair, every night.
That night, before the king's eyes, Chudala-as-Kumbha changed into a woman named Madanika, who cried out in a stammering voice, 'I feel as if I am falling, trembling, melting. I am so ashamed as I see myself becoming a woman. Alas, my chest is sprouting breasts, and jewellery is growing right out of my body.' Chudala-as-Kumbha-as-Madanika slept beside the king every night in the same bed like a virgin, while Chudala-as-Kumbha lived with him during the day as a friend.
After a few days Chudala-as-Kumbha said to him, 'Your majesty, I sleep beside you every night as a woman. I want to marry you and to enjoy the happiness of a woman.' He consented to this, and so one day Chudala-as-Kumbha bathed ceremonially with the king, and that night Chudala-as-Kumbha-as-Madanika married him. And so the couple, whose previous state of marriage was concealed, were joined together.
They lay down on the marriage bed of flowers and made love all night. Thus they lived as dear friends during the day and as husband and wife at night. Eventually, she changed from Chudala-as-Kumbha-as-Madanika to Chudala.
The king said, 'Who are you and how did you get here? He embraced her passionately, and said, 'You are the most wonderful wife who ever lived.
She has already played the first role but is now denied it, and he refuses to grant her the second role. But the queen wants to get her husband into bed as well as to enlighten him; the story is, after all, not merely a parable of enlightenment but a very human, very funny story. And the text is not so antinomian as to image a consummated male homosexual relationship.
Eventually, Chudala manages to enjoy her husband as a male friend by day and as a lover and wife by night, and she does this by getting him to marry her again. The double woman whom she creates-Chudala-as-Kumbha-as-Madanika-is her real self-the negation of the negation of her femininity; the jewellery that actually grows out of her body is what she would have worn as Queen Chudala at the start of the story, and the description of her transformation-'I feel as if I am falling, trembling, melting'-is surely a double-entendre for female orgasm.
This double deception works well enough and may express her full fantasy: to be her husband's intellectual superior under the sun and his erotic partner by moonlight. But since the two roles belong to two different personae, she wants to merge them and to play them both as her original self. That is, she wants to reintegrate herself and abandon her double, and in the end, she does.
The playful juggling of the genders demonstrates both the unreality of appearances and the falsity of the belief that one gender is better than the other; the male and female forms of Chudala are, in a sense, all alike in the dark. Moreover, the woman is wiser than the man, enlightens the man, and so forth. This extraordinary openness to gender bending in ancient India may be an indirect benefit of the rigid social order: since social categories are taken for granted, there is more room for role-playing.
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CONCLUSION
Myths in which gods change their sex are often coded human bisexual fantasies. The stories about the gods have their human models and their human moments. To the extent that they are composed by humans and clearly reflect human attitudes, we might, with caution, use them to attempt to formulate hypotheses about ancient Hindu attitudes to various sexual acts.
But myths about transsexual deities are also stories about the way the world is, about the ambiguity of all existence. On that level, they may express a desire that transcends not only appearance but even gender itself, a desire that desires the soul no matter what bits of flesh may be appended to various parts of the body. When male deities are magically transformed into women but change only their superficial physical genitalia, they do so usually in order to kill a male enemy; this is the case with Vishnu as Mohini.
The man retains his male memory, and it is this male consciousness that kills-or, at least, fights. But when the transformation is deeper and the male takes on a female memory, it is this female consciousness that enjoys sex; this is the case with Shiva and Mohini, and in all those myths in which the mind and memory change, too, change their gender when the body changes its sex. This double pattern reaffirms gender stereotypes: males kill, females make babies.
But it also suggests that male memory is the killer. Female-to-male transformations reinforce this pattern: the retained female memory makes love, as in the myth of Chudala. Bisexual desire is not an inevitable component of the myths of sex change, but in Hindu texts like the story of Queen Chudala, the change may be effected in the service of heterosexuality and occasionally bisexuality.
Some of these myths may, therefore, be read as tales about bisexual desire. The Hindu texts challenge our own ideas about gender; they tell us that the desire for sexual pleasure both with and as members of both sexes is real, though ultimately unrealizable by all but the magically gifted-or cursed. Some of them may express a wish for androgyny and offer, in subversion of the dominant homophobic paradigm, closeted images of a happily expressed and satisfied bisexual desire.
The episode of Chudala as the master of enlightenment, and some variants of the magic forests of Shiva and Parvati, epitomize this playful, relaxed attitude toward gender boundary-jumping.
Essay cycle 144
Transsexual Transformations of Subjectivity and Memory in Hindu Mythology
On Hinduism flow 145
MYTHOLOGY1
Both are stories of sexual transformation: in one, a man becomes a woman (MTF, male to female), and in the other, a woman a man (FTM, female to male). Let us consider these stories of male and female sexual transformation one by one, and then together.
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THE TRANSFORMATION OF ILA
The Mahabharata tells us, rather cryptically, that a woman named Ila gave birth to Pururavas and became both his mother and his father. 33-69] In the Ramayana, Ila's birth is sexually ambiguous, and his/her adult sexual life is so problematic that it sometimes becomes convenient, in discussing this myth (and others in this chapter), to use at ambiguous moments the otherwise awkward modern non-sexist pronoun s/he to describe him/her. The story takes place in the magic forest in which Shiva turns all the males, including himself, into females.
We have considered the implications of this transformation for the god;iii now let us consider what it does to the mortal: One day, King Ila, the son of Kardama, went hunting and killed thousands of animals, but still his lust for hunting was unsatisfied.iv As he came to that place where Shiva was making love with Parvati, he was changed into a woman, and when she approached Shiva to seek relief from her misery, Shiva laughed and said, 'Ask for any boon except manhood.' Ila pleaded with Parvati, who said: 'Shiva will grant half of your request and I the other half. In that way you will be half female, half male.' Rejoicing at this wonderful boon from the goddess, Ila said, 'If you, whose form is unrivalled by any copy, are truly pleased with me, let me be a woman for a month, and then a man again for a month.' 'So be it,' said Parvati, 'but when you are a man, you will not remember that you were a woman; and when you are a woman, you will not remember that you were a man.' 'So be it,' said the king, and for a month he became the most beautiful woman in the world.
During that first month, she was wandering in the forest [outside the magic grove] with her female attendants, who had formerly been men, when she came upon King Budha, the son of the moon, immersed in a lake and immersed in meditation. She was struck by his stunning good looks and started splashing the water; he noticed her and was pierced by the arrows of lust. He thought to himself, 'I have never seen a woman like this, not among goddesses or snake women or demon women or celestial courtesans.
If she is not married, let her be mine.' He asked her followers whose she was, and they replied, 'This woman with superb hips rules over us; she has no husband and wanders with us in the woods.' When he heard this speech, whose meaning was hidden, Budha used his own magic powers and discovered the entire truth of what had happened to the king. He transformed the women into centaurs [kimpurushas], and they ran away. Then he smiled and said to Ila, 'I am the son of king Soma; look upon me with loving eyes, and make love with me.' In that deserted place, deprived of all her attendant women, she spoke pleasingly to him, saying, 'Son of Soma, I am free to do as I wish, and so I place myself in your power.
Do with me as you wish.' Hearing that astonishing speech from her, the king was thrilled, and he caused Ila to enjoy the exquisite pleasures of love-making-for a month, which passed like a moment. But when the month was full, Ila awoke in bed [as a man] and saw Budha immersed in the water, immersed in meditation. He said to Budha, 'Sir, I came to this inaccessible mountain with my attendants.
But now I don't see my army; where have all my people gone?' When Budha heard these words from Ila, whose power of recognition had been destroyed, he replied with a persuasive, conciliating speech: 'Your servants were all destroyed by a hailstorm, and you were exhausted by your terror of the high winds and fell asleep on the grounds of this hermitage. Don't be afraid; live here in comfort, eating fruits end roots.' Though the wise King Ila was encouraged when he heard those words, he was greatly saddened by the death of his servants, and he said, 'I will renounce my own kingdom; I cannot go on for a moment without my servants and wives.
Please give me leave to go. My eldest son, named Shashabindu, will inherit my throne.' But Budha said, 'Please live here. At the end of a year, O son of Kardama, I will do you a great favour.' And so Ila decided to stay there.
Then, for a month she became a woman and enjoyed the pleasure of making love ceaselessly, sleeplessly, and then for a month he increased his understanding of dharma, as a man. In the ninth month, Ila, who had superb hips, brought forth a son fathered by Budha, named Pururavas. And as soon as he was born, she placed him in the hands of Budha, for the child looked just like him and seemed to be of the same class.
And then when she became a man again, Budha gave him the pleasure of hearing stories about dharma, for a year. Then Budha summoned a number of sages, including Ila's father, Kardama, and asked them to do what was best for him/her. Kardama suggested that they propitiate Shiva with a horse-sacrifice and ask his help.
Shiva was pleased by the horse-sacrifice; he came to them, gave Ila his manhood, and vanished. King Ila ruled in the middle country of Pratishthana, and his son Shashabindu ruled in their country of Bahli. The story of Ila is told in many of the medieval Sanskrit texts called the Puranas, since s/he founded both of the two great Indian dynasties, the lunar and the solar, and dynastic succession is a central concern of the Puranas.
The myth tells of the joining of the descendant of the Sun (Ila, grandson of Vivasvant, the Sun) with a descendant of the Moon (Budha, son of Soma, the moon; his son is named Shashabindu, 'Hare-marked', an epithet of the moon, in which the Hindus see a hare where other cultures see a man). The sexual labyrinths of the text may have been generated, at least in part, through a desire to account for the joining of two great dynasties, each claiming descent from a male cosmic body (for both the sun and the moon are usually male in Sanskrit), without demoting either partner to the inferior status of a female.
The solution: to imagine two cosmic patriarchs, and to turn one-only temporarily, of course-into a woman. (The parallel desire, to have a child born of both the gods Shiva and Vishnu, was resolved by turning Vishnu, temporarily, into a woman, Mohini.v) The form of the curse in the Ramayana is no accident; the founding of the lunar dynasty is linked, by natural association, with the monthly vacillation between female and male. On the other hand, the fact that one person, Budha, has the power and the knowledge and undiminished masculinity throughout the episode, while the other, Ila, does not, would seem to privilege the status of Budha and the lunar dynasty over Ila and the solar dynasty; and that may well have been one of the intentions of this text.
There are scattered references here to the problem of recognition, all refractions of the central problem, namely, that when s/he is transformed into a woman, Ila does not recognize himself. One aspect of recognition is resemblance: Does one self resemble another? Thus, in praising the goddess, Ila says that her form is 'unrivalled by any copy' (pratima, a reflected image); Budha says that he has never seen 'a woman like this'; and their child is said to look just like him or to 'seem to be of the same class or kind' (savarna).vi When Ila does not recognize himself after he has been restored to his primary form as a man, he is said to be someone whose power of recognition (samjna) has been destroyed; as a woman, in his secondary form, she is not himself, but only his (female) shadow or inverted mirror image (pratima).
But recognition also involves memory, and part of the curse (or is it the boon that balances the curse?) is to make Ila forget one gender when s/he is immersed in another. In the initial transformation, in the enchanted forest, Ila apparently does retain his memory, for he asks the gods to change him back; at this stage, he would seem to have the body of a woman and the mind of a man. When, however, the transformation has settled into monthly alternations, Ila forgets who she is; her servants tell Budha the story that we must assume Ila, too, believes, that she is a woman without a husband, wandering in the woods.
Ila doesn't remember her pleasure in bed when he is a man. In fact, Parvati explicitly states that s/he will not remember the altered states; is this because normally one would, or normally one would not, remember? Budha doesn't tell Ila who she is, though he knows this through powers of his own; he withholds Ila's memory from her/him and keeps him/her in his power.
As soon as s/he becomes a woman, even while s/he still has servants (class), s/he loses his/her ownership of his/her self; Budha asks her followers not who but whose she is. (This is the standard way of inquiring about a woman's identity in ancient India, to which the standard answer consists of her father's name, if she is unmarried, or her husband's, if she is married.vii) This is the question that the followers answer with 'hidden' meaning. And of course s/he also loses his/her political power, both because s/he forgets that s/he is a king and because a woman cannot (except in extraordinary circumstances) be a king.
When Budha pulls out from under him/her the one remaining prop, his/her servants, she finds herself alone with him in the middle of the forest, helpless. Naturally, she gives in to his sexual demands. But even when Ila becomes retransformed into a man, he remains helpless for reasons of class that remain even when gender has been restored.
Thus he remarks, 'I cannot live without my servants and wives.' He has lost a significant part of his identity by losing his social world. Men, in this worldview, are dependent on women for services, and women are dependent on men for protection. But they are also mutually dependent for sex.
We have already been told that Ila is, as it were, 'asking for it'. We know that she lusted for Budha before he lusted for her, and, indeed, that even as a man, Ila suffered from the fatal and quasi-sexual lust to hunt. One text makes explicit this connection between hunting (especially hunting people whom you have mistaken for animals)viii and gender transformation: 'One day, a female goblin [yakshini] who wanted to protect her husband from King Ila took the form of a deer expressly in order to lure him into the magic part of the forest.
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THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMBA
The transformation of a male into a female, as in the stories of Ila and Riksharaja, is the predominant form of transformation in India. The corresponding transformation of women into men is both rarer and more destructive. A typically lethal transsexual from the Mahabharata is Amba, whose story is told in fragments scattered throughout the long text: Bhishma had taken a vow of eternal celibacy, to assure his stepmother that he would never have progeny who might challenge her son's right to become king.
He went to find wives for his (half) brother Vicitryavirya and abducted Amba and her three sisters from their svayamvara (self-choice of a husband/mate). But when he learned that Amba had given her heart to another man who loved her, Bhishma sent her back to her betrothed lover, King Shalva. [1.96.45-53] Shalva, however, refused to accept a woman who had been carried off by another man.
Caught in the middle, Amba cursed Bhishma and became an ascetic in order to amass the power to kill him. The river Ganga, Bhishma's mother, tried at first to dissuade Amba and then cursed her to become a crooked river, dried up except in monsoon and teeming with crocodiles. Amba did become a river, but only with one half of her body; the other half remained a woman and propitiated Shiva, saying, 'Because of Bhishma I have come to this eternally miserable state, neither a man nor a woman.
I am disgusted with the condition of being a woman and have determined to become a man. I want to pay Bhishma back.' Shiva promised her that she would become a man who would kill Bhishma, and that she would remember everything when she had taken on a new body. Then she entered the fire and died.
[5.170-187] Now, King Drupada, whose wife had had no sons, asked Shiva for a son, but Shiva said, 'You will have a male child who is a female.' In time, the queen gave birth to a daughter, but she and the king pretended it was a son and raised the child as a son, whom they called Shikhandin. Besides the parents, only Bhishma knew the truth, which he learned from a spy, from Narada's report, from the words of the god [Shiva], and from Amba's asceticism.
When the child reached maturity, 'he' married a princess; but when the princess found out that her husband was a woman, she was humiliated, and her father waged war on King Drupada. Drupada, who had known all along, pretended that he had been deceived by the queen, and she swore to this. When Drupada's daughter, Shikhandini, saw the grief and danger she had caused her parents, she resolved to kill herself, and she went into the deserted forest.
There she met a goblin [yaksha] named Sthuna ('Pillar') and begged him to use his magic to turn her into a man. The goblin said that he would give her his own sign of manhood [pum-lingam] for a short time, if she would promise to return it to him after the armies left the city; meanwhile, he would wear her sign of womanhood [stri-lingam]. They made this agreement and exchanged sexual organs.
When Drupada learned from Shikhandin what had happened, he rejoiced and sent word to the attacking king that the bridegroom was in fact a man. The king sent some fine young women to learn whether Shikhandin was female or male, and they happily reported that he was absolutely male. The father of Shikhandin's bride rebuked his daughter and went home, and Shikhandin was delighted.
Meanwhile, Kubera, the lord of the goblins, found out what had happened and cursed Sthuna to remain female forever and Shikhandin to remain male forever-or, rather (in response to Sthuna's pleas) to remain male until Shikhandin's death, when Sthuna would regain his own form. When Shikhandin returned to Sthuna to keep his part of the bargain, he learned of Kubera's curse and returned to the city, rejoicing. [5.188-93] In the battle of Kurukshetra, Shikhandin joined the Pandavas' army in order to kill Bhishma, who was in the Kaurava camp.
Now, Bhishma had vowed not to shoot at a woman, anyone who used to be a woman or had a woman's name or appeared to be a woman. [5.193.60-65] Shikhandin attacked Bhishma, but Bhishma, regarding him as someone made of a woman [strimaya], did not return the attack. [6.99.4-7] Arjuna said, 'Put Shikhandin in front; Bhishma has said he won't fight with him because he was born a woman.' [6.103.100] When Shikhandin shot arrows at Bhishma, Bhishma repelled them playfully, laughing as he remembered the femaleness of Shikhandin.
But he did not strike Shikhandin, and he [Shikhandin] did not understand. Then Arjuna and the rest of the Pandavas used Shikhandin as a shield in their vanguard, and Bhishma fell under the rain of their arrows. [6.112.80] Later, in the night raid, Shikhandin attacked Ashvatthaman and struck him between his two eyebrows.
Furious, Ashvatthaman attacked Shikhandin and cut him in half. [10.8.58-9] After Bhishma died, Ganga, his mother, lamented, 'At the svayamvara in the city of Varanasi he conquered the warriors and carried off the women, and no one on earth could equal him. How is it that my heart did not break when I heard that Shikhandin killed him!' Krishna said, 'Do not grieve; he was killed by Arjuna, not by Shikhandin'.
[13.154.19-29] Amba is caught in limbo between two men, her beloved and the man who abducted her; she is socially, if not physically, raped by Bhishma (for his abduction of her made her second-hand goods from the standpoint of the man she loved) and then rejected by Bhishma as well as by her betrothed lover. In her own view, this makes her neither man nor woman; that is, she equates her liminal sexuality with androgyny. The phrase she uses,'Neither man nor woman', is the phrase often used to describe a kliba.xi A kliba, as we have seen, is not merely an androgyne; where androgyne implies a male-female equality and a creature of mythological status, with power and dignity,xii a kliba is a defective male, a male suffering from failure, distortion and lack.
His/her sexual ambivalence is itself ambivalent, or at least doubled: s/he is a female first masquerading as a male and then transformed into a male. And there are further echoes of Shikhandin's tendency to split in two: before undertaking asceticism herself, Amba chooses as her champion Rama-with-an-Axe, Parashurama, the annihilator of the Kshatriyas, who had cut his own mother in two, just as Ashvatthaman cuts Shikhandin in two when he kills him. And Amba is cursed by the motherly river, Ganga, to become a deadly river, devoid of fluids and teeming with toothy crocodiles, and then is further split between that river and the form of a woman.
Shikhandin does not seem to remember that s/he was Amba, even though Shiva expressly promises her that she will remember (just as Parvati promised Ila that he would not remember-is there a significant gendered difference here?). Shikhandin knows he was Shikhandini, but apparently not that he was Amba. Indeed, since Shikhandin/i has no voice, we don't really know what s/he knows; s/he can't even act but is merely used as a screen.
Because s/he does not remember, s/he doesn't 'understand' when Bhishma won't fight with him/her. Despite Shiva's promise, memory here does not survive rebirth, even rebirth as someone of the same sex (though a different gender!). And the killing of Bhishma by Shikhandin is rather anticlimactic and further blurred by its diffusion: Shikhandin does not kill Bhishma outright but merely functions as a human bulwark for Arjuna;xv and Bhishma does not die immediately of his wounds but withdraws and dies long, long afterwards.
Later, Shikhandin himself takes part in the night raid that violates the injunction against killing someone asleep, just as Budha violates the injunction against violating someone asleep. But if Shikhandin does not remember, Bhishma certainly does; he has the whip hand over her in this, too, though it seems to be more important to him that Shikhandin was born a woman (Shikhandini) in this life than that she was a woman in a former life (Amba), let alone a woman who died cursing his name and vowing to kill him.
Thus the text implies that Shikhandin retained her female gender when she lost her female sexuality. Indeed, it is imperative for Bhishma that Shikhandin is in essence (in this case, in gender) a woman, despite her outer male form. This mythological loophole is a variant of the observation that men, by ignoring the differences between women (or others whom they dominate), can be tricked and overcome by them, by what James Scott has called the weapons of the weak.
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The Control of Addiction in Ancient India
So overpowering are the senses that they can be kept under control only when they are completely hedged in on all sides. It is common knowledge that they are powerless without food, and so fasting undertaken with a view to control the senses is helpful.
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ANCIENT INDIA1
So overpowering are the senses that they can be kept under control only when they are completely hedged in on all sides. It is common knowledge that they are powerless without food, and so fasting undertaken with a view to control the senses is helpful. Gandhi Mind is at the root of all sensuality … Brahmacharya means control of the senses in thought, word and deed.
There is no limit to the possibilities of renunciation.
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ADDICTION AND RENUNCIATION
The renunciant movements of ancient India addressed precisely this problem, which was of great concern also to the wider tradition. Renunciation and asceticism were like dykes built to hold back the oceanic tides of sensuality. While only a small number ever went to the extreme of renouncing the material world, fasting and vows of chastity were, as they still are, widely accepted, in moderated forms, even among Hindu householders.
Most sorts of renunciation were peaceful, both for the individual renouncer and for the society from which the renouncer withdrew, hors de combat, while remaining perceived as broadly beneficial to the community at large. But other kinds of renunciation were violent both to the physical body and to the social body, to the world of families. Hinduism was violent not only in its sensuality but in its reaction against that sensuality-violent, that is, both in its addictions and in the measures that it took to curb those addictions.
Study the Kamasutra, but also use your head.7
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ADDICTIVE VICES IN THE THREE TEXTS OF THE THREE GOALS OF LIFE
The main arena in which ancient India tackled the subject of addiction for householders, rather than for renouncers, was the corpus of scientific texts known as the shastras, particularly the texts dealing with the three Goals of Life (the purusharthas): dharma, artha and kama, known collectively as the trivarga. (Later, as we have discussed elsewhere, a fourth goal of moksha, release, was added for renunciants, but we will deal in this section only with the earlier triad.iii) The Kamasutra shares with both the Arthashastra and Manu (as well as with other important Indian traditions such as yoga) a strong sense of the need for the control of addiction, though each text has its own reasons for this.
Kings were allowed to have the vices that kill the rest of us, but even kings could be killed by an excess of them. Addiction to the vices marginalized some rajas by stripping them of their power and status; kings, at least in stories, lost their kingdoms by gambling or were carried away by hunting and landed in dangerous or polluting circumstances. The Mahabharata remarks that the four vices are the curse of a king,9 and indeed all four cause serious trouble in the Mahabharata story: Pandu, the father of the protagonists, is doomed by excessive hunting and forbidden sex (Book 1); two kings, Yudhishthira and Nala, are undone by gambling (Books 2 and 3); and the entire clan is destroyed by men who break the law against drinking (Book 16).
It is not just an ignorant man, but even a learned man of the world, too, that a wanton woman can lead astray when he is in the control of lust and anger. No one should sit in a deserted place with his mother, sister, or daughter; for the strong cluster of the sensory powers drags away even a learned man.26
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THE NATURE AND RANKING OF ADDICTION
In the Mahabharata, Nala becomes an addictive gambler only after he has been possessed by the spirit of the Kali Ageix, an indication that addiction in general was perceived as coming from outside the individual. There is no idea here of an addictive personality; the vices, rather than the people who have them, are blamed. The gambler is not doomed by birth, by his character; he has somehow fallen into the bad habit of gambling, and if he made an effort, he could get out of it.
Free will, self control, meditation, controlling the senses-this is always possible. So, too, there are no alcoholics, just people who happen, at the moment, to be drinking too much. Anyone exposed to the objects of addiction is liable to get caught.
Sex is the only inborn addiction: we are all, in this Hindu view, naturally inclined to it, exposed to it all the time, inherently lascivious. Manu sums up the shared underlying attitude toward the addictions: The ten vices [vyasanas] that arise from desire all end badly. Hunting, gambling, sleeping by day, malicious gossip, women, drunkenness, music, singing, dancing and aimless wandering are the ten vices born of desire.
But then the Arthashastra adds, 'But gambling is worse than drink-indeed, for a king, it is the worst of the vices,'29 changing the order of vices for a king: now gambling is the worst, then drink, women and hunting last. There was room for an even wider divergence of opinions. Hunting was classified as a vice only when it was pursued when there was no need for food, just as gambling became a vice when undertaken independent of a need for money, and sex when there was no need for offspring.
Both the senses and horses were a Good Thing for high-spirited warrior kings but not such a Good Thing for more bovine priests and householders whose goal was control. And as Brahmins were perceived (at least by Brahmins) as needed to control kings, so asceticism was thought necessary to rein in the treacherous senses. The other classes, too, presented special cases in the consideration of addiction.
Hunting, for instance, is not a vice for poor people, who hunt for rabbits or whatever they can find to eat, though tribal hunters were regarded as unclean because of their habit of hunting. To some extent, these vices levelled the playing field. No one was exempt from addiction.
Though the great gods Vishnu and Shiva are often depicted as entirely immune to the dangers of addiction, and, therefore, able to capitalize upon the addictions of their demonic enemies, there are notable exceptions. In the Puranas, Shiva plays dice with his wife to the point where she strips him of everything he owns, and he is overcome by desire for a woman (when he sees Mohinix). In the folk tradition, Shiva is said to be addicted to bhang (marijuana); and in the Mahabharata he is a famous (though not particularly addicted) hunter, who appears to Arjuna as an angry mountain boar-hunter, a Kirata.
As for the minor gods, Indra as the paradigmatic king is of course the paradigmatic addict, particularly notorious for his lust and his drunkenness. The powers of the gods, that dwarf our own meagre abilities, seem not necessarily to include self-control; or perhaps it is just that their addictions, like everything else about them, are larger than (human) life.
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Reading the Kamasutra: It Isn’t All About Sex
The Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love, and one of the oldest in the world. It was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, probably sometime in the second half of the third century of the Common Era,2 in North India, perhaps in Pataliputra (near the present city of Patna, in Bihar).
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INTRODUCTION: THE POSITION OF THE KAMASUTRA
The Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love, and one of the oldest in the world. It was composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, probably sometime in the second half of the third century of the Common Era,2 in North India, perhaps in Pataliputra (near the present city of Patna, in Bihar). The two words in its title mean 'desire/love/pleasure/sex' (kama) and 'a treatise' (sutra).
Virtually nothing is known about the author, Vatsyayana Mallanaga, other than his name and what little we learn from the text. Nor do we know anything about Yashodhara, who wrote the definitive commentary on the Kamasutra in the thirteenth century. But Vatsyayana tells us something important about his text, namely, that it is a distillation of the works of a number of authors who preceded him, authors whose texts have not come down to us.
Palm Pilot had a copyrighted 'Pocket Sutra: The Kama Sutra in the palm of your hand', which offered 'lying down positions', 'sitting positions', 'rear-entry positions', 'standing positions', 'role reversal' and many more. There is a Kamasutra wristwatch that displays a different position every hour. A typical Roz Chast cartoon entitled 'The Kama Sutra of Grilled Cheese' began with '#14: The Righteous Lion' ('place on hot, well-lubricated griddle.
The real Kamasutra, however, is not just about the positions in sexual intercourse. It is a book about the art of living-about finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs-and also about the positions in sexual intercourse. The Kamasutra was certainly not the first of its genre, nor was it the last.
But the many textbooks of eroticism that follow it eliminate most of the Kamasutra's encyclopaedic social and psychological narratives and concentrate primarily on the sexual positions, of which they describe many more than are found in the Kamasutra.
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CLASS IN THE KAMASUTRA
It is difficult to assess how broad a spectrum of ancient Indian society knew the text first-hand. It would be good to have more information about social conditions in India at the time of the composition of the Kamasutra, but the Kamasutra itself is one of the main sources that we have for such data; the text is, in a sense, its own context. Much of the Kamasutra is about culture, which belonged to those who had leisure and means, time and money, none of which was in short supply for the text's primary intended audience, an urban (and urbane) elite consisting of princes, high state officials and wealthy merchants The production of manuscripts, especially illuminated manuscripts, was necessarily an elite matter; men of wealth and power, kings and merchants, would commission texts to be copied out for their private use.
It is often said that only upper-class men were allowed to read Sanskrit, particularly the sacred texts, but the very fact that the texts dealing with religious and social law (dharma) prescribe punishments for women and lower-class men who read the sacred Sanskrit texts suggests that some of them did so. The Kamasutra is almost unique in classical Sanskrit literature in its almost total disregard of class (varna) and caste (jati). Where classical texts of dharma in India might have said that you make love differently to women of high and low classes, Vatsyayana just says you make love differently to women of delicate or rough temperaments.
But, of course, power relations of many kinds-gender, wealth, political position, as well as caste-are implicit throughout the text. The lovers must be rich, yes, but not necessarily upper-class. When the text says that the man may get his money from 'gifts, conquest, trade, or wages, or from inheritance, or from both,' the commentator (Yashodhara) explains, 'If he is a Brahmin, he gets his money from gifts; a king or warrior, from conquest; a commoner, from trade; and a servant, from wages earned by working as an artisan, a travelling bard, or something of that sort.' [1.4.1] Varna is mentioned just a few times, once in a single sentence admitting that it is of concern only when you marry a wife who will bear you legal sons, and can be disregarded in all other erotic situations [1.5.1]; once when the go-between is advised to tell the target woman stories about 'other virgins of equal caste' [jati, 3.5.5]; and later in a discussion of possible sexual partners: 'Sex with a coarse servant' takes place with a lower-class female water-carrier or house-servant, until the climax; in this kind of sex, he does not bother with the acts of civility.
Similarly, 'sex with a peasant' takes place between a courtesan and a country bumpkin, until the climax, or between a man-about-town and women from the countryside, cow-herding villages, or countries beyond the borders. [2.10.22-25] Vatsyayana disapproves of sexual relations with rural and tribal women because they could have adverse effects on the erotic refinement and sensibility of the cultivated man-about-town; he would have been baffled by any Lady Chatterji's sexual transports with a gamekeeper. But for all the rest of the discussion of pleasure, class is irrelevant.
THE LIFE OF A MAN (AND WOMAN) ABOUT TOWN The protagonist of the Kamasutra, literally a 'man-about-town' (nagaraka, from the Sanskrit nagara, city), lives 'in a city, a capital city, a market town, or some large gathering where there are good people, or wherever he has to stay to make a living' [1.4.2]. He has, as we say of a certain type of man today, no visible source of income. His companions may have quite realistic money problems [1.4.31-33]; his wife is entrusted with all the household management, including the finances; and his mistresses work hard to make and keep their money.
He bathes every day, has his limbs rubbed with oil every second day, a foam bath every third day, his face shaved every fourth day, and his body hair removed every fifth or tenth day.
And he continually cleans the sweat from his armpits. In the morning and afternoon he eats.
[1.4.5-7] Now, ready to face the day, he goes to work: After eating, he passes the time teaching his parrots and mynah birds to speak; goes to quail-fights, cockfights and ram-fights; engages in various arts and games; and passes the time with his libertine, pander and clown. In the late afternoon, he gets dressed up and goes to salons to amuse himself. And in the evening, there is music and singing.
After that, on the bed in a bedroom carefully decorated and perfumed by sweet-smelling incense, he and his friends await the women who are slipping out for a rendezvous with them. He sends female messengers for them or goes to get them himself. And when the women arrive, he and his friends greet them with gentle conversation and courtesies that charm the mind and heart.
If rain has soaked the clothing of women who have slipped out for a rendezvous in bad weather, he changes their clothes himself, or gets some of his friends to serve them. That is what he does by day and night. [1.4.8-13] Busy teaching his birds to talk, he never drops in to check things at the shop, let alone visit his mother.
Throughout the text, his one concern is the pursuit of pleasure. That is not to say, however, that the pursuit of pleasure didn't require its own work. Vatsyayana details the sixty-four arts that need to be learned by anyone (male or female) who is truly serious about pleasure [2.10.35]: singing; playing musical instruments; dancing; painting; cutting leaves into shapes; making lines on the floor with rice-powder and flowers; arranging flowers; colouring the teeth, clothes and limbs; making jewelled floors; preparing beds; making music on the rims of glasses of water; playing water sports; unusual techniques; making garlands and stringing necklaces; making diadems and headbands; making costumes; making various earrings; mixing perfumes; putting on jewellery; doing conjuring tricks; practicing sorcery; sleight of hand; preparing various forms of vegetables, soups and other things to eat; preparing wines, fruit juices and other things to drink; needlework; weaving; playing the lute and the drum; telling jokes and riddles; completing words; reciting difficult words; reading aloud; staging plays and dialogues; completing verses; making things out of cloth, wood and cane; woodworking; carpentry; architecture; the ability to test gold and silver; metallurgy; knowledge of the colour and form of jewels; skill at nurturing trees; knowledge of ram-fights, cockfights and quail-fights; teaching parrots and mynah birds to talk; skill at rubbing, massaging and hairdressing; the ability to speak in sign language; understanding languages made to seem foreign; knowledge of local dialects; skill at making flower carts; knowledge of omens; alphabets for use in making magical diagrams; alphabets for memorizing; group recitation; improvising poetry; dictionaries and thesauruses; knowledge of metre; literary work; the art of impersonation; the art of using clothes for disguise; special forms of gambling; the game of dice; children's games; etiquette; the science of strategy; and the cultivation of athletic skills.
[1.3.15] And while we are still reeling from this list, Vatsyayana immediately reminds us that there is, in addition, an entirely different cluster of sixty-four arts of love [1.3.16], which include eight forms of each of the main erotic activities: embracing, kissing, scratching, biting, sexual positions, moaning, the woman playing the man's part and oral sex. [2.8.4-5] A rapid calculation brings the tab to 128 arts, a curriculum that one could hardly master even after the equivalent of two Ph.Ds and a long apprenticeship-and one that not many could afford.
Vatsyayana argues at some length that some women, at least, should read this text, and that others should learn its contents in other ways: A woman should study the Kamasutra and its subsidiary arts before she reaches the prime of her youth, and she should continue when she has been given away, if her husband wishes it. Scholars say: 'Since females cannot grasp texts, it is useless to teach women this text.' Vatsyayana says: But women understand the practice, and the practice is based on the text.
This applies beyond this specific subject of the Kamasutra, for throughout the world, in all subjects, there are only a few people who know the text, but the practice is within the range of everyone. And a text, however far removed, is the ultimate source of the practice. 'Grammar is a science,' people say.
Yet the sacrificial priests, who are no grammarians, know how to gloss the words in the sacrificial prayers. 'Astronomy is a science,' they say. But ordinary people perform the rituals on the days when the skies are auspicious.
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THE KAMASUTRA AS A PLAY
Beneath the veneer of a sexual textbook, the Kamasutra resembles a work of dramatic fiction more than anything else. The man and woman whose sex lives are described here are called the hero and heroine, and the men who assist the hero are called the libertine, pander and clown. All of these are terms for stock characters in Sanskrit dramas-the hero and heroine, sidekick, supporting player and jester.
Is the Kamasutra a play about sex? Certainly it has a dramatic sequence, and, like most classical Indian dramas, it has seven acts. In Act One, which literally sets the stage for the drama, the bachelor sets up his pad; in Act Two, he perfects his sexual technique.
Then he seduces a virgin (Act Three), gets married and lives with a wife or wives (Act Four); tiring of her (or them), he seduces other men's wives (Act Five) and when he tires of that, he frequents courtesans (Act Six). Finally, when he is too old to manage it at all, he resorts to the ancient Indian equivalent of Viagra: aphrodisiacs and magic spells (Act Seven).
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THE KAMASUTRA AND US
Two worlds in the Kamasutra intersect for contemporary readers, both Indian and non-Indian: sex and ancient India. We assume that the understanding of sex will be familiar to us, since sex is universal, and that the representations of ancient India will be strange to us, since that world existed long ago and (for some of us) in a galaxy far away. This is largely the case, but there are interesting reversals of expectations: some sexual matters are strange (for Vatsyayana argues that sex for human beings is a matter of culture, not natureii), or even sometimes repugnant, to us today, while some cultural matters are strangely familiar or, if unfamiliar, still charming and comprehensible, reassuring us that the people of ancient India were in many ways just like us.
Consider the description of the man's day: his morning toilet is much like ours, but we do not, alas, schedule in things like teaching mynah birds to speak. It is the constant intersection of these perceptions-'How very odd!', 'Oh, I know just how she feels!'-that constitutes the strange appeal of the Kamasutra. Many readers will recognize the man who tells the woman on whom he's set his sights 'about an erotic dream, pretending that it was about another woman' [3.4.9], and the woman who does the same thing.
[5.4.54] Others will feel a guilty pang of familiarity when reading the passage suggesting that a woman interested in getting a man's attention in a crowded room might find some pretext to take something from him, making sure to brush him with her breast as she reaches across him. [2.2.8-9] This is an amazingly intimate thing to know about a culture, far more intimate than knowing that you can stand on one leg or another when you make love. Sometimes the unfamiliar and the familiar are cheek by jowl: the culture-specific list of women the wife must not associate with, which include a Buddhist nun and a magician who uses love-sorcery worked with roots [4.1.9], is followed in the very next passage by the woman who is cooking for her man and finds out 'this is what he likes, this is what he hates, this is good for him, this is bad for him', a consideration that must resonate with many contemporary readers, cooking for someone they love, balancing the desire to please (perhaps with a Béarnaise sauce?
Or a curry made with lots of ghee?) with the concern for the rising cholesterol level. The Kamasutra is a unique text, but it is firmly situated within the value system of what might be called the ancient 'Hindu way'; it shares more of its values with those of traditional Hindu texts than one might have expected. Some of it, like the magic formulas, remains truly foreign to us: If you make a powder by pulverizing leaves scattered by the wind, garlands left over from corpses, and peacocks' bones, or pulverize a female 'circle-maker' buzzard that died a natural death, and mix the powder with honey and gooseberry, it puts someone in your power.
If you mix the same powder with monkey shit and scatter the mixture over a virgin, she will not be given to another man. [7.1.25-30] And so forth, and so on. A comparison with Viagra is superficially useful here, but it does not get you far enough to take this paragraph seriously on its own terms.
Magic and drugs, the life in the harem, the world of courtesans-these parts of the Kamasutra make you think, 'How very different these people are from us.' For the South Asians among us, there are bits of the text that are startlingly familiar from our everyday world. For the rest of us, these become accessible only through rather distant analogies. Betel, for instance, tambula, nowadays called paan, is still popular across India (though not used quite in the manner, or for the purpose, prescribed by Vatsyayana).
It is a delicacy made of a betel leaf rolled up around a paste made of areca nuts (sometimes called betel nuts), cardamom, lime paste and other flavours, sometimes with tobacco or other stimulants (including, sometimes, cocaine). The finished product, shaped rather like a stuffed grape-leaf, is eaten as a stimulant, to redden the mouth and to freshen the breath. Throughout the Kamasutra, lovers give one another betel, take betel out of their own mouths and put it in their lover's mouth.
This basic part of the erotic scene in ancient India can best be understood by non-Indians through an analogy with the overtones that champagne has, or the post-coital cigarette.iii On the other hand, the woman's thoughts on such subjects as how to get a lover and how to tell when he is cooling ring remarkably true for every twenty-first-century reader, regardless of his or her culture. Another part of the text that surely speaks to the modern reader is the description of a man who wants to seduce a married woman.
In the would-be adulterer's meditations on reasons to do this, there are self-deceptive arguments that still make sense in our world: He thinks: 'There is no danger involved in my having this woman, and there is a chance of wealth. And since I am useless, I have exhausted all means of making a living. Such as I am, I will get a lot of money from her in this way, with very little trouble.' Or, 'This woman is madly in love with me and knows all my weaknesses.
If I reject her, she will ruin me by publicly exposing my faults; or she will accuse me of some fault which I do not in fact have, but which will be easy to believe of me and hard to clear myself of, and this will be the ruin of me.' (1.5.12-14) This is a brilliant portrait of a self-serving rascal who has no illusions about himself. This constant alternation of the familiar and the strange teaches us a great deal about human nature.
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THE POSITIONS
Our reaction to the central subject, the act of love, should surely be one of recognition, of familiarity, but no. Here, rather than in the cultural setting, is where we are, unexpectedly, brought up short by the unfamiliar. The Kamasutra describes a number of contortions that 'require practice', as the text puts it mildly, and these are the positions that generally make people laugh out loud at the mention of the Kamasutra.
What are we to make of these gymnastics? Did people in ancient India really make love like that? True, they did have yoga, and great practitioners of yoga can make their bodies do things that most of us would not think possible (or even, perhaps, desirable).iv But just because one can do it is no reason that one should do it.
(Or, as Vatsyayana remarks, first at the end of his passage about oral sex and same-sex sexv [2.9.41], and again at the end of his Viagra passage, 'The statement that "There is a text for this" does not justify a practice.' [7.2.55] I think the answer lies elsewhere: 'Vatsyayana says: Even passion demands variety. And it is through variety that partners inspire passion in one another. It is their infinite variety that makes courtesans and their lovers remain desirable to one another.
Even in archery and in other martial arts, the textbooks insist on variety. How much more is this true of sex!' [2.4.25] The user's-manual approach does not account for positions that do not invite imitation. These may simply be the artist's free-ranging fantasies on a theme of sexual possibilities: they are not instructive but inspiring, and inspired.
They represent a literally no-holds-barred exploration of the theoretical possibilities of human heterosexual coupling, much as the profusion of compound animals-heads of ducks on bodies of lions, or torsos of women on the bodies of fish, and so forth-pushed back the walls of our imagination of the variety of known and unknown animal species. It is a fantasy literature, an artistic and imaginative, rather than physical, exploration of coupling. The text is a virtual sexual pas de deux as Balanchine might have choreographed it, an extended meditation on some of the ways that a naked man and a naked woman (or, rarely, several men and/or women) might move their limbs while making love.
And though sexual reality may in fact be universal-there are, after all, just so many places that you can put your genitals-sexual fantasy seems to be highly cultural. This, then, is what is new to us in the brave new world of this ancient text.
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The Mythology of the Kamasutra
The Kamasutra has become part of the Orientalist mythology of India, the non-Indian's, or even the non-Hindu's, fantasy of the otherness of the sexuality of other cultures imagined as simultaneously over-sexed and impotent. The West's mythology about the Kamasutra is based in large part on the Victorian Orientalist fantasies of Sir Richard Francis Burton, who was the first to translate the Kamasutra into English, well over a century ago, in 1883.i But the Kamasutra has a mythology of its own, a corpus of stories that it invokes to explain and to authenticate its ideas about sex and gender.
Essay hub 163
THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE KAMASUTRA1
The Kamasutra has become part of the Orientalist mythology of India, the non-Indian's, or even the non-Hindu's, fantasy of the otherness of the sexuality of other cultures imagined as simultaneously over-sexed and impotent. The West's mythology about the Kamasutra is based in large part on the Victorian Orientalist fantasies of Sir Richard Francis Burton, who was the first to translate the Kamasutra into English, well over a century ago, in 1883.i But the Kamasutra has a mythology of its own, a corpus of stories that it invokes to explain and to authenticate its ideas about sex and gender.
And it is this mythology in the Kamasutra that we will explore here.
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MYTHOLOGY IN THE KAMASUTRA: TALES TOLD TO WOMEN
Between the text and the commentary, we can excavate a rich sexual mythology. The Kamasutra tells us how people told the myths, how they regarded them as relevant and didactically powerful. The basic plot of the Kamasutra is boy meets girl; boy sets out to get girl into bed, often with the help of a go-between; boy gets girl.
In instructing the go-between messenger about ways to persuade a young girl to sleep with a man before he marries her, Vatsyayana says, 'And she tells the girl stories about other virgins of equal caste, such as Shakuntala, who found a husband by their own resolve and made love with great joy.' [3.5.5] The commentator here describes Shakuntala simply as 'the king's wife', and he says nothing at all about her when Vatsyayana mentions her a second time, as one of the women whose stories are to be told by the messenger trying to persuade a married woman (rather than, as in the first case, a virgin) to take a lover. On that occasion, Vatsyayana says: 'As the woman listens, the messenger tells her well-known, relevant stories, about Ahalya, Avimaraka, Shakuntala and others.' [5.4.14] But Shakuntala's story did not work out so well as Vatsyayana implies; Shakuntala suffers greatly in the version of her story told in the Mahabharata-the king impregnates her and then publicly denies and insults her; only years later does he acknowledge her.
(She suffers less, but still significantly, in the version told by the poet Kalidasa a few centuries later.)ii The commentator does tell us about the other two people in this particular list, Ahalya and Avimaraka, of whom Ahalya is by far the more famous; she is to Indian mythology what Helen of Troy was to Greek, and the Ramayana tells her story not once but twice.iii All that the commentator says here, where he is using her as the model of the successful adulteress, is: 'Ahalya was the wife of [the sage] Gautama; the king of the gods fell in love with her and she desired him.' [Y on 5.4.14] But Vatsyayana has already mentioned Ahalya in the first chapter, in a very different context indeed, when he remarks that 'Indra, the king of the gods, with Ahalya … and many others afterwards were seen to fall into the thrall of desire and were destroyed.' [1.2.34-36] And there the commentator tells a longer story, not a story of encouragement at all, but a cautionary story: The king of the gods, Indra, was aroused by Ahalya; for when he saw her in the hermitage of her husband Gautama, he desired her. When Gautama returned with the fuel and sacred grass, his wife Ahalya hid Indra in the womb of the house, but just at that moment Gautama took his wife into the inside of the house, with an invitation to make love.
Then he realized, with the magic gaze that he had achieved through yoga, that Indra had come there, and seeing that a third seat had been drawn up for him he said, 'What is this for, since only the two of us, my wife and I, are here?' Then he became suspicious, and by meditation he saw what had happened; in fury he cursed Indra: 'You yourself will have a thousand vaginas!' And so, even though Indra was the king of the gods, desire brought him to this sorry state, which was regarded as his destruction. Even to this day that mark that makes people call him 'Ahalya's Lover' has not vanished.
[Y on 1.2.36] Unique to this version is the suggestion that Ahalya's husband, Gautama, had intended to make love to her himself. Other versions of the story generally make it quite clear that Gautama is far too ascetic to do justice to his young wife in bed, and that is what makes her vulnerable to the king of the gods; Ahalya knows quite well that, even when Indra is disguised as Gautama, he is not Gautama, precisely because he wants to make love with her.
Other variants, moreover, attribute the form of Indra's curse (to have the mark of vaginas all over his body) to the fact that Indra was caught in the 'womb' of Ahalya, not of the house; Gautama catches them in flagrante, the telltale piece of furniture being not a 'third seat drawn up' but the bed. Here, however, it appears that Gautama returns before Ahalya goes to bed with Indra, and so, of course, she is not punished, as she usually is, by being cursed to turn into a stone.
Unlike most other variants of this myth, moreover, Yashodhara's version does not mention that the king of the gods, Indra, took the form of Gautama to seduce Ahalya, making her, to some extent, less culpable: she did not intend to commit adultery, but was tricked into it, a factor that makes her story less useful for the purposes of the Kamasutra's messenger. The Kamasutra commentator's version has been bowdlerized, cleaned up. Vatsyayana regards the story here, when he tells it as a caution to men, in a much more negative mode than when the messenger is later [5.4.14] told to use it to persuade the woman, and Yashodhara's longer gloss in the cautionary passage also adds much more detail, as a warning to a man about the trouble that desire can cause him.
Clearly, Vatsyayana uses the tale of Ahalya (and Yashodhara tells it) in one way to warn men about adultery, and in another way to encourage women to it. The third person in the list of people to be cited by the messenger encouraging married women to commit adultery is a man named Avimaraka; Yashodhara tells his story: The fire-priest instructed his wife to care for the fire. Agni, the god of fire, so desired her that he took on a form and arose out of the fire altar.
When she became pregnant, her father-in-law, fearing a stain on the family, abandoned her in the forest. She gave birth to a son, whom the general of the Shabaras [a wild, savage tribe of mountaineers] raised as his own child. That son, in his childhood, played among the herds of sheep and goats and wandered around with them.
By drinking their milk he became very strong, so strong that even though he was just a little child, he killed goats and sheep with his bare hands. And for that reason, the general gave him the appropriate name of Avimaraka ['Sheep-killer']. When Avimaraka reached the prime of his youth, one day an elephant attacked the daughter of a king who was sojourning in the forest, and he killed the elephant and saved her.
After that she fell in love with him and of her own will gave him her hand in marriage. These stories are relevant to a discussion of the seduction of other men's wives. [Y on 5.4.14] Avimaraka is the hero of a Sanskrit play by Bhasa that follows this general plot-line.iv Since, however, Avimaraka is neither a woman nor an adulterer, it is not immediately clear how his tale is, as Yashodhara claims, relevant to a discussion of the seduction of other men's wives.
Avimaraka does, according to Yashodhara, benefit from two seduced women, one married and seduced by someone else (this woman is his mother) and one unmarried and seduced by him. Is he dragged in through his association with these women who transgress sexual boundaries, because Vatsyayana could not think of any more women who benefited from adultery? Indeed, of any such women at all, since it is not at all clear how Shakuntala or Ahalya benefited from it, either?
This is the story of Karna and of Krishna in India, as well as Kipling's Mowgli, and of Oedipus, Moses, Tarzan and many others.v Thus, even while the author of the Kamasutra pretends to give advice to persuade women to transgress, the actual content of the stories is designed to warn them, as they are explicitly said to warn men, to look before they leap. Vatsyayana manifests his ambivalence about sexual freedom at many points in his book, particularly in the verses at the end of each chapter, which often raise doubts about matters that he has recommended in the prose passages.
So, too, the stories that he refers to may be intended to raise doubts in the minds of the women being tempted to commit adultery, even while they are expressly said to be intended to quell such doubts.
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MYTHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND
In addition to these stories designed to be told to women within the text, Vatsyayana tells some stories to the reader as part of a more general mythological background. The very first chapter begins, after a few lines of introduction, with a classically mythological passage: When the Creator emitted his creatures, he first composed, in a hundred thousand chapters, the means of achieving the three aims of human life [religion, power and pleasure]: Manu the son of the Self-born One made one part of this into a separate work about religion, Brihaspati made one about power and Nandin, the servant of the Great God Shiva, made a separate work of a thousand chapters, the Kamasutra, which Shvetaketu Auddalaki cut down to five hundred chapters.
And then Babhravya of Panchala cut this down further to a hundred and fifty chapters. [1.1.5-10] Manu the son of the Self-born One, the Creator, is, of course, the Indian Adam, a mythical creature but not a god; indeed, he defines the beginning of the human species, and is the mythical author of The Laws of Manu.vi The other two authors are gods. Brihaspati is the guru of the gods, the secretary or minister of defence, as it were, for Indra, the king of the gods, and, in his spare time, he is the planet Jupiter.
He is also the putative author of a Machiavellian handbook of politics that is the source of the extant text known as the Arthashastra, the textbook of political science, the book 'about power' to which the text refers, composed perhaps a century, or less, before the Kamasutra. The Arthashastra is usually attributed to a human being, Kautilya or Chanakya, the prime minister of the Mauryan king Chandragupta, in the fourth and third centuries BCE. To make the divine Brihaspati the author of the Arthashastra is to bring heaven down to earth (or, if you prefer, earth to heaven).
The third author, Nandin, is the ultimate source of Vatsyayana's Kamasutra, even as Brihaspati is the source of the Arthashastra: Nandin is not some other person named Nandin, for the scripture says: 'While the Great God Shiva was experiencing the pleasures of sex with his wife Uma for a thousand years as the gods count them, Nandin went to guard the door of their bedroom and composed the Kamasutra.' [Y on 1.1.8] Yashodhara is here making explicit the fact that the Nandin in question is actually a god, not merely a human named after a god (as people often are, in India and elsewhere). Nandin, a bull or a bull-headed deity, is the son of the Great God, Shiva, and is often stationed to guard the door to the bedroom of his parents.
In the earthly parallel to this situation, a statue of Nandin often guards the door to a temple of Shiva (and Uma). It is most appropriate for a bull, and for the god Shiva, to be associated with the textbook of sex and pleasure. The text then turns from gods to semi-mythical sages from ancient times, beginning with Shvetaketu, who is cited often in the Kamasutra as a sexual authority and who also has a mythology of his own, as the commentator, Yashodhara, reminds us: Once upon a time, there was so much seduction of other men's wives in the world that it was said: 'Women are all alike, just like cooked rice, your majesty.
Therefore a man should not get angry with them nor fall in love with them, but just make love with them.' But [Shvetaketu] forbade this state of affairs, and so people said: '[Shvetaketu] forbade common people to take other people's wives.' Then, with his father's permission, Shvetaketu, who had amassed great ascetic power, happily composed this text, which distinguishes those who are eligible or ineligible for sex. [Y on 1.1.9] This story is told at greater length in the Mahabharata.vii Shvetaketu is well-known as a hero of the Upanishads, the ancient Sanskrit philosophical texts that make the case for renunciation; in those texts, his father teaches him the central doctrines of Indian philosophy.
It is surprising to find Shvetaketu here in the Kamasutra, cited as an expert sexologist, and this seeming incongruity may have inspired Vatsyayana to allude to, and Yashodhara to tell, this story here: it explains how a sage became simultaneously chaste, an enemy of male adultery, and an authority on sex. Finally, the text mentions another mere human being: 'Dattaka made a separate book out of the sixth part of this work, about courtesans, which the courtesans de luxe of Pataliputra commissioned.' [1.1.11] But the commentary recites (or invents?
I have not been able to find them in other sources) two stories about Dattaka, the second of which makes him supernatural, if not divine: One day Dattaka had the idea of learning the finest ways of the world, best known by courtesans. And so he went to the courtesans every day, and learned so well that they asked him to instruct them. A woman speaking on behalf of the courtesans said to him, 'Teach us how to give pleasure to men.' And because of that commission he made a separate book.
But another quite plausible story is also widely believed: Dattaka once touched Shiva with his foot in the course of a festival to bless a pregnant woman, and Shiva cursed him to become a woman; after a while he persuaded Shiva to rescind the curse and became a man again, and because of that double knowledge he made the separate book. If he had simply made a separate work out of what Babhravya had said, how would his own book have demonstrated such originality that people would say that he knew both flavours?
It is an inspired move on the part of Yashodhara to make the author of this text a bisexual, who 'tastes both flavours' (I use 'bisexual' here both in its now popular sense of a person of fixed gender who has both male and female sexual partners, and in its other sense-of an androgyne or hermaphrodite). Yet this is also a move that greatly mitigates the strong female agency in the text: where Vatsyayana tells us that women had this text made, Yashodhara tells us that an extraordinary man knew more about the courtesans' art than they knew themselves.
All in all, there is a supernatural pedigree for the authors of this earthiest of all books. And there is also a supernatural pedigree for the very process of its recension, the boiling down of an enormous divine text into a manageable human text: Shvetaketu cut [the text] down to five hundred chapters. And then Babhravya of Panchala cut this down further to a hundred and fifty chapters … Charayana made a separate book about general observations, Suvarnanabha about sex, Ghotakamukha about virgins, Gonardiya about wives, Gonikaputra about other men's wives and Kuchumara about erotic esoterica.
When many scholars had divided it into fragments in this way, the text was almost destroyed. Because the amputated limbs of the text that they divided are just parts of the whole, and because Babhravya's text is so long that it is hard to study, Vatsyayana condensed the entire subject matter into a small volume to make this Kamasutra. [1.1.9-14] The word for 'scholars' (acharyas), normally a term of great respect, almost always has a pejorative tone in the Kamasutra, perhaps best translated as 'pedants'.
The texts cited here no longer exist, but almost certainly existed at the time of Vatsyayana, since he and, later, Yashodhara often quote directly from them. Other Hindu texts are also said to have been reduced from a supernatural source in this way,5 perhaps on analogy with the human body, for, according to classical Hindu physiology, it takes ten drops of food to make a drop of digestive fluid, ten drops of that fluid to make a drop of blood, ten drops of blood to make a drop of semen.ix The Kamasutra was produced in this same way.
We have seen him refer to Shiva, a famously erotic god,7 and to Indra, the king of the gods and a god who, like Shiva, has a significantly phallic mythology. Indra's wife, Indrani, appears only in the name of a particular sexual position [at 2.6.11], which can be translated as 'Junoesque' but is literally 'of Indrani'. Indrani resembles Juno, the wife of Jupiter, king of the Roman gods (or Hera, wife of the Greek Zeus), in many ways, including her own enormous sexual appetite and her jealousy about her husband's notorious adulteries.
Vatsyayana first refers to Indra in this not particularly erotic verse: Fate made Bali into an Indra, king of the gods, and fate hurled Bali back down, and fate is what will make him an Indra again. [1.2.29] And the commentary tells the story: Even though Bali was unworthy, because he was a demon, and should have been spurned, he ascended to the throne of Indra, king of the gods, and established himself there until the wheel of fortune turned around, and he was thrown out of that seat and hurled back down into Hell.x But when the wheel of fortune turns back around again, it will once again send him out of Hell and back onto the throne of Indra.
And so people say: Time ripens and cooks all beings, time absorbs all creatures, time is awake when all are asleep, for no one can fight against time. [Y on 1.2.29] The commentary on the first book of the Kamasutra also mentions Indra, in passing, in the context of a myth about the divine embodiments of the three goals of life-dharma, artha (power) and kama (pleasure):xi The three aims of human life are the three divinities in charge of this work; if they were not divinities it would not be right to bow to them.
And there is textual evidence that they are in fact divinities. For the historian tells us: 'When King Pururavas went from earth to heaven to see Indra, the king of the gods, he saw Dharma and the others embodied.
The other two, unable to put up with this slight, cursed him. Because Kama had cursed him, he was separated from his wife, Urvashi, and longed for her in her absence. When he had managed to put that right, then, because Artha had cursed him, he became so excessively greedy that he stole from all four social classes.
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STORIES OF WARNINGS TO HUMANS
The rest of the mythology of the Kamasutra, which punctuates the entire text, consists primarily of warnings against the abuse of the power of sex, warnings that we have already seen applied to mythological figures and that now reappear in the human field. For example, in warning against the use of certain violent forms of slapping (called the 'wedge', the 'scissor' and the 'drill'), Vatsyayana says: The King of the Cholas killed Chitrasena, a courtesan, by using the 'wedge' during sex.
And the Kuntala king Shatakarni Shatavahana killed his queen, Malayavati, by using the 'scissor'. Naradeva, whose hand was deformed, blinded a dancing-girl in one eye by using the 'drill' clumsily. [2.7.28-30] And Yashodhara explains: He embraced Chitrasena so tightly, at the start of their love-making, that she suffered greatly, because she was so delicate.
And even when he realized her condition, and knew that she had to be handled delicately, he was so blind with passion that he did not take account of his own strength and destroyed her by using a 'wedge' on her chest. Shatakarna's son Shatavahana, born in the territory of Kuntala, saw his queen, Malayavati, one day when she had not long recovered from an illness and did not have her full strength, but was dressing for the festival of Kama.
Passion arose in him and he made love to her, but his mind was carried away by passion and by using an excessively powerful 'scissor' on her chest, he killed her. Naradeva was the general of the Pandya king. His hand had been deformed by a blow from a sword.
When he saw Chitralekha, a dancing girl, dancing at the king's residence, his passion was aroused, and when he made love with her, blind with passion, he used the 'drill' clumsily because of his lame hand; he missed her cheek and instead hit her eye, blinding her in that eye. The kings who commit these excesses are all from South India, where Vatsyayana (a North Indian) generally locates sexual excess. In contrast with such figures as Ravana and Ahalya, these kings are not well-known to Sanskrit mythology.
Another excessive king is an adulterer: 'For when Abhira, the Kotta king, went to another man's home, a washerman employed by the king's brother killed him. And the superintendant of horses killed Jayasena the king of Varanasi.' So it is said. [5.5.29] The 'it is said' may cast some doubt on this pair of adulterers, but not necessarily so.
Yashodhara tells a bit more (which I have indicated in added italics), but not a lot more: In Gujurat there is a place named Kotta, whose king, named Abhira, went to another man's house in order to sleep with the wife of Vasumitra, the head warrior. There, a guard employed by his brother, who deserved the kingdom, killed him. Jayasena the king of Varanasi [too] had gone into another man's house to make love with that man's wife.
[Y on 5.5.29] The commentator has added the details of individual people and places, and the sexual purpose of the housebreaking. Evidently these kings do not have the licence that many European kings, for instance, were able to make use of licentiously. Elsewhere, Vatsyayana insists: Kings and ministers of state do not enter into other men's homes, for the whole populace sees what they do and imitates it.
The three worlds watch the sun rise and so they too rise; then they watch the sun moving and they too start to act. [5.5.1-2 But then Vatsyayana descends from the ideal to the actual: 'Therefore, because it is impossible and because they would be blamed, such men do nothing frivolous. But when they cannot help doing it, they employ stratagems.' [5.5.1-4] So much for the mythology of warning.
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THE FANTASY OF THE HAREM
All of this, even the part about the gods, is fairly realistic, even banal. But there is another genre of myth that enters into the discussion, and that is the genre of fantasy literature, erotic adventure literature, Romantic literature, best known from fairy tales: the prince who falls in love with the inaccessible princess, sneaks into the harem at night, and eventually wins her. This fantasy appears, disguised as sensible advice, in a section of the Kamasutra devoted to adultery: He disguises himself as a guard and enters at a time that she appoints.
Or he goes in and out clothed in a bedspread or a cloak. Or he makes his shadow and his body disappear by means of a magic trick: He cooks the heart of a mongoose, the fruits of a fenugreek plant and a long gourd, and snake eyes, over a fire that does not smoke. Then he rubs into this the same measure of the collyrium used as eye makeup.
When he has smeared his eyes with this, he can move about without a shadow or a body. And on the nights of the full moon, he can move about by the light of many lamps, or by a subterranean passage. [5.6.22-26] The assumption was that, normally, your eyes projected the vision of you to someone else's eyes; light rays bounce off you onto the person looking at you.
The fantasy of sneaking into the harem is yet another myth that informs the imagination of the Kamasutra.
Essay hub 168
From Kama to Karma: The Resurgence of Puritanism in Contemporary India
A pervasive and often violent moral policing has taken over parts of the Indian world today. A typical instance of this occurred in 2007, when a twenty-three-year-old student of Fine Arts at Baroda University named Chandramohan Srilamantula mounted an exhibition for other students and staff.
Essay cycle 169
THE PROBLEM OF CONTEMPORARY INDIAN PURITANISM
A pervasive and often violent moral policing has taken over parts of the Indian world today. A typical instance of this occurred in 2007, when a twenty-three-year-old student of Fine Arts at Baroda University named Chandramohan Srilamantula mounted an exhibition for other students and staff. He had previously received awards for his work, including the Lalit Kala Akademi National Exhibition award in 2006; later he won first prize in the 2009 Bhopal Biennale.
(He was later released.) When the acting Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Shivaji Panikkar, refused to close down the exhibition, the Vice-Chancellor, Manoj Soni, suspended him. Panikkar, stating that he feared for his life, went into hiding. Students and spokespersons of the Indian art community held protests throughout India, claiming that the closing of the exhibition was a direct assault on the rights of freedom of expression.
Ramanujan, a world-famous scholar of Indian literature who had been awarded the Padma Shri honour by the government of India in 1976, was included in the 2006 BA, History, syllabus of Delhi University. Entitled 'Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations', it was about some of the many versions of the Ramayana that contradict the versions of Valmiki and Tulsidas. A student wing of the BJP opposed its inclusion in the syllabus, and in Oxford University Press's in-print catalogue, on the grounds that it hurt Hindu sentiments.
In October 2011, the academic council of Delhi University voted to remove the essay from its syllabus. A widely publicized international protest against the censorship of Ramanujan's essay met with qualified success. The Hindutvavadis often blame Western influence on the people whom they censor, while, ironically, many of the Hindutvavadis' own actions closely resemble censoring frenzies in the United States.
But the Indian incidents are better seen as part of a separate logic of Hindu Puritanism, which has a long history of its own.
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THE EARLY HISTORY OF HINDU EROTICISM AND ASCETICISM
This is a very early instance of the interpretation of human sexual matters in terms of non-sexual, sacred matters (or, if you prefer, the reverse). Sensuality continued to keep its foot in the door of the house of religion throughout the history of India. But the Upanishads also introduced into India the concept of two paths, one the path of family life, society and children, the other the path of renunciation, solitary meditation and asceticism.
The tension between the two paths, the violent (sacrificial), materialistic, sensual and potentially addictive path of worldliness on the one hand, and the non-violent (vegetarian), ascetic, spiritual and controlled path of renunciation, on the other,v was sometimes expressed as the balance between bourgeois householders and homeless seekers, or between traditions that regarded karma-the accumulated record of good and bad deeds-as a good or a bad thing, respectively. The tension remains in the Tantras, a large body of texts, composed between about 650 and 1800 CE, which proposed strikingly transgressive ritual actions, violating all the taboos of conventional Hinduism, such as drinking wine and menstrual blood, eating meat and engaging in sexual activity with forbidden women.
Far from the spirit that bowdlerized the intentionally obscene horse sacrifice,vi this tradition spawned works of art like the 'Century' of the poet Amaru, a hundred poems that are simultaneously erotic and ascetic. And so the two paths of Tantra, meditation and ritual action, lived side by side, sometimes coexisting in a single worshipper, sometimes within a group, as, for instance, in some texts that say that beginners actually do the ritual, while advanced practitioners just meditate. The split-level connotations were present from the start.
Given the attention that Indian literary theory pays to double meanings, to words and indeed whole literary works that simultaneously mean two different things,9 it seems wise to assume that the Tantrics were capable of walking and chewing imaginary gum at the same time. The erotic tradition continued to thrive in Hinduism. Many poems to gods in the medieval devotional tradition of bhakti imagine the god as a lover, often an unfaithful lover, and depict the relationship with all the sensual details of good erotic poetry.
The poet Kshetrayya, who may have lived in the mid-seventeenth century, and who worshipped a form of the god Krishna, imagined a courtesan speaking to her customer who is both her lover and her god. Kshetrayya's songs survived among courtesans and were performed by male Brahmin dancers who played female roles. His poems speak of such down-to-earth matters as a woman's concern to find a drug or a magic potion to abort the child that she conceived from her lover-the god and her customer.10
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SIR RICHARD BURTON’S VERSION OF THE KAMASUTRA
In addition to these religious texts that incorporated eroticism, there were more worldly texts that treated the erotic tout court, of which, of course, the Kamasutra is the most famous. There is nothing remotely like it even now, and for its time it was astonishingly sophisticated; it was already well known in India at a time when the Europeans were still swinging in trees, culturally (and sexually) speaking. The Kamasutra's ideas about gender are surprisingly modern, as we have already seen, and its stereotypes of feminine and masculine natures are unexpectedly subtle.vii It also reveals attitudes to women's education and sexual freedom, and non-judgmental views of homosexual acts, that are strikingly more liberal than those of other texts in ancient India-or, in many cases, contemporary India.viii The Kamasutra was a revolutionary document for such people, and for women.
It exerted a profound influence on subsequent Indian literature, particularly in court life and in the privileged, classless society that it describes at great length. But, at the same time, the dharma texts like Manu's dharmashastra, with their deep suspicion of women and eroticism, retained their stranglehold on much of Hindu society. One reason why the Kamasutra plays almost no role at all in the sexual consciousness of contemporary Indians is that it is known, in both India and Europe, almost entirely through the flawed English translation by Sir Richard Francis Burton.
But it did not bring the sexual freedom of the Kamasutra into Hindu consciousness. Victorian British attitudes to Hindu eroticism ricocheted between the pornographers and the prudes, and Burton, a connoisseur of eroticism in Arabic as well as Indian culture, was certainly not a prude. His main contribution was the courage and determination to publish the work at all; he was the Larry Flynt of his day.ix W.H.
Second, 'misconduct' is not so much a mistranslation as an error of judgment, for the word in question (apacara) does have the general meaning of 'misconduct', but in an erotic context it takes on the more specific meaning of 'infidelity', a choice that is supported by the remedy that the text suggests (and rejects): love-magic. But the most serious problem is the word 'not' that Burton gratuitously adds and that negates the wife's right to use abusive language against her straying husband, a denial only somewhat qualified by the added phrase, that she might 'rebuke him with conciliatory words'.
Was this an innocent error or does it reflect a sexist bias? It is free (at first poached from the illegal editions, then long out of copyright) and recognizable as what people think the Kamasutra should be.
Indeed, it is quite a wonderful text: great fun to read, extraordinarily bold and frank for its time, and in many places a fairly approximate representation of the Sanskrit original. It remains precious, like Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, as a monument of English literature, but it is certainly not a monument of Indian literature. An adolescent girl in Vikram Chandra's story 'Kama' says, 'Sister Carmina didn't want to tell us.
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DETUMESCENCE UNDER THE BRITISH
Sanatana Dharma is the banner of Hindutva, which presides over the censorship of art, film, literature and social behaviour. The British lion, even after its official death in India in 1947, dealt another blow to Indian freedom of expression through the Film Censor Board, which, from the early 1950s, implemented a policy basis that had roots among the British (who had worried more about sedition than about sex). The Film Censor Board's concern for visual pedagogy, nationalism and publicity cast a shadow that extended over Indian visual arts and literature as well as film.
Hindu attitudes to sexuality were further confused by the very public, and very contradictory, sexuality of one of the most important Hindus of the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi's insistence on celibacy among his disciples caused difficulty for some of them, as did his habit of sleeping beside girls young enough to be called jail-bait in the US, to test and/or prove his own celibate control. His celibacy drew not so much upon the Upanishadic and Vaishnava ascetic traditions, which were the source of many of Gandhi's practices, as upon the hydraulic Tantric techniques of internalizing power, indeed creating quasi-magical powers, by first stirring up the sexual energies and then withholding semen.
Naipaul in his book Half a Life offers his own, rather jaded, version of this accusation: … [I]n our culture there is no seduction. There is no art of sex. Some of the boys here talk to me of the Kama Sutra.
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THE FALL OF KAMA AND THE RISE OF KARMA
Among the other bad habits they picked up from the West, from seeds sown, perhaps, during colonization but flowering only in the more recent contacts with American imperialism, was the Protestant habit of censorship. Never before has the old tension between the erotic and ascetic strains of Hinduism taken the form of one path telling the other path that it has no right to exist. But the India of the ancient erotic past is not so easily stamped out.
Even in the nineteenth century, most Hindus continued cheerfully on the path that celebrated the earthier aspects of life. And now they live on in 'a reported two thirds of young adults who would have casual, pre-marital sex before an arranged marriage'30, and who, since 1991, can buy condoms called KamaSutra-and chocolate-, vanilla- and strawberry-flavoured condoms, too, marketed freely on Indian television channels, circa 2012. And through all this, many hundreds of folk songs and stories-often sung or told by women-have remained robustly bawdy.
Clearly the attempt to transform the culture of the Kamasutra into what many people, Hindus and non-Hindus alike, mistakenly refer to as the Karmasutra (presumably a Vedantic text about reincarnation) has not succeeded.
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The Ambivalence of Ahimsa
You do not really die through this, nor are you harmed. You go to the gods on paths pleasant to go on.
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THE AMBIVALENCE OF AHIMSA1
You do not really die through this, nor are you harmed. You go to the gods on paths pleasant to go on. -Rig Veda 1.62 (from a hymn to the sacrificial horse) Religion, and particularly mythology, which is my beat, deals with questions that can't be answered, problems that can't be solved.
The problem of our relationship to animals is one of those religious problems, and it is, therefore, shot through with ambivalence. We have always killed animals to live, often despite feeling that there was something wrong about it. We like to have pets because they make our lives so much better, draw us deeper into nature, make us live longer, lower our blood pressure, as all the surveys show; but animal neuroses are now a major industry, because we drive our pets mad keeping them the way we do, cooped up and alone much of the time.
In general, religion, in India and elsewhere, has often papered over or sidelined the natural human ambivalence about the treatment of animals. Against the religious rhetoric of lions of Judah and the good shepherd, against the occasional St Francis or the not so occasional Jain saint, we must confront the truly appalling track record of religions in the lives of animals on the planet Earth. At last, during the past decades, people the world over have taken up the cause in so many arenas, besides the immediate issues of meat and pets: the culling of wild horses, the importing of ivory, the treatment of farm animals, and above all, perhaps, the realization that so many species are endangered.
After all the creatures we have abused over the centuries-slaves, women, homosexuals, children-animals are the last frontier of compassion. Indeed, two of these groups-slaves and horses-have often been linked together in works calling for reform: recall the colour of the horse in Anna Sewell's novel Black Beauty, written in 1877 by a woman who was born in 1820 and whose mother was a devout abolitionist. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and European literature, the image of a man cruelly beating a horse who had fallen under an impossible burden became an immediately recognized symbol of human evil.
Hinduism has dealt vividly and explicitly, and over the longest historical period of any culture, with the agonizing religious question of how to treat animals. India knew, long ago, that, in a sense, all of us, humans and animals, are a single endangered species. Yet, contrary to widespread misconceptions, Hindus have not always been vegetarians, nor are most of them vegetarians today.i (Indeed, since the human species is by nature carnivorous, what is surprising is that there ever were vegetarians, not that we were all, once, and generally remain, meat-eaters.) Nor are Hindus particularly kind to animals.
When you watch a dog die, even a very old, very sick dog, the moment between the time when it is alive, perhaps asleep, and when it is dead, is a terrible, vivid moment, one that makes an indelible impression on a child, or even a grown up. Imagine what it must be like to see a young stallion killed. One Vedic poem describes the horse sacrifice in strikingly concrete, indeed rather gruesome detail: Whatever of the horse's flesh the fly has eaten, or whatever stays stuck to the stake or the axe, or to the hands or nails of the slaughterer-let all of that stay with you even among the gods.
If someone riding you has struck you too hard with heel or whip when you shied, I make all these things well again for you with prayer. Let not your dear soul burn you as you go away.
Let not the axe do lasting harm to your body. Let no greedy, clumsy slaughterer hack in the wrong place and damage your limbs with his knife. You do not really die through this, nor are you harmed.
Moreover, unlike goats and other animals that were sacrificed, many in the course of the horse sacrifice, the horse was not actually eaten (though he was cooked and served to the gods). Perhaps this taboo arose because of the close relationship that the Vedic people, like most Indo-Europeans,4 had with their horses, who not only speak, on occasion,5 but often shed tearsiii when their owners die. Still, they did slaughter the stallion.
900 BCE A few centuries later, in the Brahmanas, commentaries on the Vedas, when the sacrificial narratives come to the point of actually killing the victim, the prose becomes heavily euphemistic and mystifying. They then go back again (to the altar) and sit down turning towards the ahavaniya fire, 'so that they should not be spectators of its being made to acquiesce (to its own death)'. They do not kill it by striking it on the forehead, like humans, nor behind the ear, for that is the way (of killing) among the ancestors.
They either keep its mouth closed (and thus suffocate it), or they make a noose (and strangle it to death). Thus he does not say, 'Kill! Put it to death!' for that is the way of humans.
(Rather, he says) 'Make it acquiesce! It has passed away!' for that is the way of the gods. For when he says, 'It has passed away,' then this one (the victim of the sacrificer) passes away to the gods.
It is by no means clear that all hunters or sacrificers experience guilt or regret at the death of the animal. But some evidently do have some misgivings, by their own testimony (or at least the testimony of their Brahmin priests). The sacrificial experts of ancient India included a rationale of ritual killing specifically aimed at obviating such guilt.
The Brahmanas also recorded a story justifying our treatment of animals: In the beginning, the skin of cattle was the skin that humans have now, and the skin of a human was the skin that cattle have now. Cattle could not bear the heat, rain, flies and mosquitoes. They went to humans and said, 'Let this skin be yours and that skin be ours.' 'What would be the result of that?' humans asked.
But cattle also, apparently, won the boon of eating humans (and, perhaps, flaying them) in the other world, presumably a place where people go after dying, though the text never spells it out like that. Nakedness, by reducing humans to the level of the beasts, establishes a reciprocal relationship, rendering human beings vulnerable to the sufferings of beasts-being eaten-when they enter the other world. But when a man puts (back) on his 'original' cattle hide he somehow undoes the bargain, which allows him to masquerade as someone who does not (yet) eat cattle, and thus to escape the consequences of his carnivory.
Another narrative elsewhere in this same text adds more detail to the basic idea of reciprocity between humans and animals in the other world: Bhrigu went beyond this world to the world beyond. There he saw a man cut another man to pieces and eat him; and then a man eating another man, who was screaming; and then a man eating another man, who was soundlessly screaming. He returned from that world and told his father [Varuna] what he had seen.
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PRESENT-DAY INDIA
In addition to rethinking the nature of the Vedic animal sacrifice in myths, later Hinduism took further steps to come to terms with the ritual killing of animals. We have seen that in the Vedic sacrifice vegetable oblations were the minimally acceptable lowest form of the sacrificial victim, the pashu. Under the influence of Buddhism or, more generally, of the doctrine of ahimsa that became a part of both Hinduism and Buddhism, a revisionary attitude toward the use of vegetable offerings came to the fore, one which continues to the present day.
The carnivorous Vedic gods were generally replaced by strictly vegetarian Hindu deities who are said to accept no blood offerings, but only rice, fruits, flowers and so forth. The vegetable offerings are obviously not animal victims; they are, however, often symbols of the now objectionable blood sacrifices of the Vedic past. The deity in the centre of the Hindu temple (an aspect of Shiva or Vishnu or a goddess) is often a strict vegetarian who accepts no blood offerings, only rice, or rice cakes, as well as fruits, flowers and so forth, while there may be another deity, outside the temple, to whom blood sacrifices are made.
When a Vedic sacrifice was recently performed in India under the auspices of Western scholars,50 and objections were raised against the slaughter of goats, rice cakes alone were used. But the rice cakes were wrapped in leaves, tied to little leashes, and carefully 'suffocated' before they were offered, a clear atavism from the Vedic sacrifice in which, as we know, a living animal was suffocated.xii When a Vedic sacrifice was performed in London in 1996, there was not even a vegetable substitute for the sacrificial beast; the beasts were 'entirely imagined'.
Just as cow protection became a political, anti-Muslim cause, so did vegetarianism become one of the banners of Nationalism and, in our day, of Hindutva.xiii On my visit to New York on the occasion of the National Book Critics Circle Awards in 2009, the Hindus who picketed against me there made sure that the media coverage included the fact that they would afterwards go and eat vegetarian samosas, as if their vegetarian habits gave them the moral high ground over me, as if it gave all Hindus, all vegetarians, the high moral ground. Ironically, one of the objections by Hindu readers of that ilk to my book The Hindus was that it was demeaning to Hindus because I spent so much time talking about dogs and horses.
Clearly the ambivalence of ahimsa has been dichotomized, but never resolved. Every human and every animal dies, every human and every animal must eat, and eating requires that someone or something (since vegetables are part of the continuum of life, too) must die. The replacement of animal with vegetable offerings obviates neither the need to represent the rice cakes as real animals nor the necessity to 'kill' them in the sacrifice.
The ambivalence toward the killing of an animal in Hinduism is another manifestation of the paradoxical conflict between the need to offer oneself to the god and the need to stay alive, which is a variant on the more basic paradox at the heart of all sacrifice: one must kill to live.xiv
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On Hinduism flow 180
Zoomorphism in Ancient India: Humans More Bestial than the Beasts
Sanskrit texts are rich in anthropomorphism, projecting human qualities upon animals, but they more particularly abound in zoomorphism, imagining humans as animals. Anthropomorphism, though more common than zoomorphism in India (as elsewhere), tells us comparatively little about animals; an anthropomorphic text assumes a basic identification, such as lion as king, and then, although the object of discourse is, theoretically, an animal, the text imagines the animal as behaving the way the human does, betraying the fact that the author is interested only in kings and not at all in lions.
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HUMANS MORE BESTIAL THAN THE BEASTS1
Sanskrit texts are rich in anthropomorphism, projecting human qualities upon animals, but they more particularly abound in zoomorphism, imagining humans as animals. Anthropomorphism, though more common than zoomorphism in India (as elsewhere), tells us comparatively little about animals; an anthropomorphic text assumes a basic identification, such as lion as king, and then, although the object of discourse is, theoretically, an animal, the text imagines the animal as behaving the way the human does, betraying the fact that the author is interested only in kings and not at all in lions.
Zoomorphism is more complex: although this time a human being is the explicit object, the bestial qualities imputed to the human usually reveal an observation of animals that is more detailed (if no more accurate) than that of anthropomorphism, and the text teaches us simultaneously what sort of person the author thinks that animal is like and what sort of animal the author thinks that sort of person is like. And where anthropomorphism simply leaps over our knowledge that most animals cannot speak, zoomorphism seizes upon language as a point of potential difference between humans and animals, and worries that point in various ways, imputing human speech to certain individual animals, and to certain individual humans, either muteness or the ability to understand animals.
Let us begin with a quick survey of the relatively straightforward texts of anthropomorphism in India and progress to the more challenging texts of zoomorphism.
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ANTHROPOMORPHISM
Sanskrit literature abounds in animal imagery. India is famous for its beast fables, in which animals stand for human types and point human morals: the lion as king, the cunning jackal as his chief minister, clever monkeys and foolish donkeys, the ongoing battle of the crows against the owls. The most famous collection of these stories is the Panchatantra, probably composed about 500 CE but drawing upon much older Buddhist sources.
These tales, known to Europeans from Aesop's fables, were tracked to their lair by nineteenth-century German folklorists: a Pahlavi (literary Persian) translation perhaps as early as 550 CE was translated first into Syriac and then into Arabic c. 750, whence it entered European literature through Moorish contacts in Spain and elsewhere. The Panchatantra is a textbook of political science, probably intended for the education of princes, but its cast of characters was widely diffused into all levels of Indian literature, from folktales in the vernaculars to court poetry in Sanskrit.
The heron or the cat, for instance, is a widespread image of the religious hypocrite.i Animals also serve as metaphors more broadly in Indian culture: the dominant metaphor, indeed cliché, for anarchy is the law of the fishes (matsya-nyaya): the big fish eat the little fish. Indian mythology also used fish as a metaphor for an alternative consciousness. One tale, in a Sanskrit text, assumes that we can know about the happiness of fish, but that this very understanding may lead to the problem of human involvement: There was once a sage named Saubhari, who spent twelve years immersed in a pond.
In that pond there lived a great fish who had many children and grandchildren. The young fish played around the great fish all day, and he lived happily among them. Their games began to disturb the sage's meditations; he noticed them and thought, 'How enviable is that fish, always playing so happily with his children.
We might ask if the sage could have been made aware of the pleasures of child-rearing by a vision not of fish but of humans and their children, but the text implies that the sage has left human company and hence would not see human children. Moreover, the sage understands the fish (where he might not have understood his fellow men and women) because he has become, in effect, a kind of animal himself: fish-like, he lives underwater, in a trans-human condition made possible by his extraordinary ascetic powers.
But the sage is mistaken in believing that he personally can be happy like a fish, or rather that such happiness is desirable for him: he comes to learn that though other people may be like fish (in enjoying their children), he himself is not like them, and hence, though fish-like (in being non-human), he is not like a fish (in procreation).
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TALKING ANIMALS, LISTENING HUMANS
Already in the Upanishads, the Creator's daughter takes the form of a series of animals, beginning with a mare, in her vain attempt to flee from her father's incestuous attacks [BAU 1.4.1-6], and the Vedic goddess Saranyu becomes a mare to flee from her husband's unwanted sexual demands. [RV 10.72]iii The ultimate result of this conflation is that human hunters often mistake other humans for animals, particularly when they are mating-a mistake that has fatal consequences not only for the animals but for the unlucky hunter.
Near the beginning of the Mahabharata [M 1.109], Pandu, the father of the Pandavas, is cursed to die in the embrace of his own wife because he killed a sage whom he mistook for a stag when the sage was mating with his wife (they had taken the form of a stag and a doe to do this, because they were too embarrassed to do it as humans). Elsewhere in the Mahabharata [M 1.173], another king who has been cursed to become a man-eating demon devours a sage who is making love to his wife (still in human form) and the wife, furious because she had not 'finished', curses the king to die if he embraces his own wife.
These mistakes are not limited to the sexual arena. Later in this text [M 8.20], the warrior Karna kills a young calf by mistake (presumably mistaking it for a wild animal) and is cursed to fail in a central battle. And at the end of the story [M 17.5], the incarnate god Krishna dies when a hunter named Old Age mistakes him for an animal and shoots him in the foot, the only part of him that is mortal, like Achilles' heel or the spot on Siegfried's back.
In the Ramayana, Rama's father, king Dasharatha, out on a hunt, mistakes a boy for an elephant and is cursed by the boy's parents to lose his own son. [R 2.57-8] Later, when Ravana plots to capture Sita, he gets another demon to take the form of a marvellous golden deer, who captivates Sita and inspires her to ask Rama to pursue it for her. Rama suspects that it is a demon in disguise (he wishes that he could talk to it), but Sita insists.
The deer leads Rama far away from Sita, and, when Rama kills the deer, and it assumes its true demonic form, Rama realizes that he has been tricked and has thereby lost Sita, whom Ravana has captured in Rama's absence. [R 3.41-44] Thus, once again, the killing of a human (here a demon) in animal form causes the hunter to suffer the curse of separation from his partner. The theme of language first enters this corpus on the outside frame of the Ramayana, where we learn that the author, the poet Valmiki, was searching for a poetic language in which to tell the story when he went to bathe in a river.
There he saw a hunter kill the male of a pair of mating cranes (Indian saras cranes), and when the hen grieved, Valmiki cried out, 'Hunter, since you killed one of these birds at the height of its passion, you will not live very long.' Then Valmiki realized that he had instinctively uttered this curse in verse, in a meter (the meter in which both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are composed) that he called the shloka, because it was uttered in sorrow (shoka). [R 1.1-2] With this link added to the narrative chain, the corpus of stories combines five major themes: succumbing to the lust for hunting; mistaking a human for an animal and killing the 'animal'; interrupting the sexual act (by killing one or both of the partners); understanding the language of animals; and creating a poetic language.
Killing an animal interrupts the sexual act, the animal act, killing sex, as it were, and producing in its place the characteristic human act, the making of language. Another tale in the Ramayana also ties together the themes of the interruption of sexuality, the curse of separation from a beloved, the deadly nature of erotic love, and the language of birds: A king, the father of Rama's evil stepmother, had been given the boon of understanding the cries of all creatures, but he was warned that he must not tell anyone about it.
This story is in many ways the inversion of the story of Valmiki, who sees a bird who is killed in a sexual situation, hence separated from his mate, which makes him cry and inspires him to invent an unusual language of humans. Or, to forge another link, this king (Rama's step-grandfather, as it were) is forced to become separated from his wife, just as Rama's father is cursed to become separated from his son Rama. The two episodes are related: the stepmother, daughter of the woman who wanted to know why the bird laughed, is the paradigmatic evil co-wife, who uses sexual blackmail to force Rama's father to disinherit Rama, an act that is regarded as directly responsible for the father's death; so she does kill her husband, as her mother failed to do.
Significantly, the man in this story is allowed to understand the speech of animals, and the woman is not. This is in keeping with the underlying Hindu misogyny of the Sanskrit mythological texts that depict men as more gifted with special powers than women are; it may also reflect the actual sociological fact that men in India were allowed to read and speak Sanskrit, while in general women were not.iv In a broader sense, as we will see, all hyper-sexualized women are represented as talking animals-but not as talking with animals.
In this corpus as a whole, there are logical links between, on the one hand, killing a human (who has human speech) whom you mistake for an animal (which lacks human speech) or who has become an animal (to express the bestial sexual impulse) and, on the other hand, becoming a human who has a uniquely poetic language. That is to say, these stories express the idea that the possession of human speech is a prerogative that may deprive humans of their sexuality but may deprive animals of their lives-and may deprive of their lives humans who resort to animal sexuality.
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ZOOMORPHISM
We have now seen one reason why, in Hindu myths, humans become animals: to partake of animal sexuality. But there are other reasons why humans-and even gods-become animals, and this takes us deeper into the field of zoomorphism. The god Dharma takes the form of a dog in the Mahabharata;v the god Vishnu becomes incarnate as several animals (including a fish, tortoise, boar, half-lion and horse-head); and the god Indra becomes a stallion in order to seduce a queen.vi And mortals become animals too.
Humans are animals in several different senses in the Kamasutra of Vatsyayana.vii Here, humans are distinguished from animals precisely by their sexuality, in the argument that the author puts forward to justify his text [KS 1.2.16-20]: Scholars say: 'It is appropriate to have a text about religion (dharma), because it concerns matters not of this world, and to have one about power (artha), because that is achieved only when the groundwork is laid by special methods, which one learns from a text. But since even animals manage sex (kama) by themselves, and since it goes on all the time, it should not have to be handled with the help of a text.' Vatsyayana says: Because a man and a woman depend upon one another in sex, it requires a method, and this method is learnt from the Kamasutra.
The mating of animals, by contrast, is not based upon any method, because they are not fenced in, they mate only when the females are in their fertile season and until they achieve their goal, and they act without thinking about it first.viii Yashodhara's thirteenth-century commentary on the Kamasutra expands upon these ideas: Even animals like cows, whose intellects are shrouded in torpor, visibly manage sex without instruction from a textbook; how much more must this happen among humans, whose intellects consist primarily of passion? As it is said: For desire is satisfied without instruction, and does not have to be taught.
Who is the guru for deer and birds, for the methodology to give and take pleasure with those they desire? And desire goes on all the time, because the qualities of wanting and hating are always there in the soul. These scholars are people who talk about religion, power and release (dharma, artha and moksha).
There is no guarding or any other form of concealment, because the females of the species are loose. Animals mate only during their fertile season. Humans who want children, however, do it during a woman's fertile season but also outside her fertile season, in order to enjoy and please the woman.
So animals and humans are not the same. And so the law book says: You may have sex with a woman in her fertile season -or any time when it is not expressly forbidden. And animals engage in sex just until they achieve a climax; they do not wonder, 'Has he reached his climax or not?' and, therefore, wish to mate a second time.
And so, since the goal of animals and humans is not the same, animals need no method for sex. Animals, moreover, do not first think, before engaging in sex, 'What will happen to religion, power, sons, relatives and the prosperity of our faction?' Sex just happens to animals in their own way. The commentator here alludes to the Hindu belief that matter consists in three 'strands' (torpor, passion and lucidity; tamas, rajas and sattva), and that different creatures are made up of different proportions of these strands: cows have an abundance of torpor, where human beings abound in passion.
(Only higher creatures like gods have a preponderance of lucidity.) He also belittles the views of scholars who substitute moksha (the fourth human goal, according to another paradigm) for kama (the third and final human goal in this paradigm).ix Here again human language is explicitly contrasted with animal sexuality: humans, whose sexuality is more complex, more repressed ('fenced in', as the text puts it), require language, where animals do not. Humans, therefore, have a different sexuality from animals, and need a text for it, where animals do not.
But when we move from the world of science to the world of metaphor, within this same text, the Kamasutra, it appears that some humans are very much like animals precisely in their sexuality. The text offers a sexual typology according to size: The man is called a 'hare', 'bull' or 'stallion' according to the size of his sexual organ; a woman, however, is called a 'doe', 'mare' or 'elephant cow'. And so there are three equal couplings, between sexual partners of similar size, and six unequal ones, between sexual partners of dissimilar size.
Among the unequal ones, when the man is larger there are two couplings with the two sexual partners immediately smaller than him and one, when he is largest, with the smallest woman. But in the opposite case, in a coupling when the man is smaller, there are two sorts of couplings with the two women immediately larger than him and one, when he is smallest, with the largest woman. Among these, the equal couplings are the best, the largest and the smallest are the worst, and the rest are intermediate.
Even in the medium ones, it is better for the man to be larger than the woman. Thus there are nine sorts of couplings according to size. [KS 2.1.1-4] As usual, the commentary is enlightening: The sexual organ is called the 'sign' [lingam], because it is the sign of femaleness and so forth.
From texts and from experience it is known that the male organ is convex and the female organ concave. If the man's penis is small, like a hare's, he is called a 'hare'; if medium, a 'bull'; if large, a 'stallion'. The word 'however' indicates that women are distinct; they have a different nomenclature because they have a different sexual organ.
Knowing this, scholars called them 'doe' and so forth instead of 'hare' and so forth. The horse, hyper-sexualized, is the only animal that appears in both male and female form, though these two are not regarded as equal; the stallion is the largest male, while the mare is merely a middle-sized woman.
21] And the cow does not appear here as one of the three sexual types at all, though she epitomizes the 'animal' position in sexual intercourse, the equivalent of the English term 'doggy-style': 'When she gets on the ground on all fours and he mounts her like a bull, that is "sex like a cow."' [KS 2.6. 39] Clearly the six paradigmatic animals are chosen for their size rather than their established cultural symbolism, but the disparity in their sizes reveals their deeper symbolic implications for the relationship between men and women.
This is because women are by nature bigger, in the sense that their sexuality, according to almost all Hindu texts that refer to the subjects of procreation/sex, women, marriage and so on, is bigger; they are harder to satisfy.
On Hinduism flow 185
LANGUAGE AND COMPASSION FOR ANIMALS
Language is the place from which compassion springs. It is difficult, though not impossible, to torment-or eat-the people we speak with. Elaine Scarry made the first point, in reverse, when she argued that torture takes away speech,8 and Lewis Carroll made the second when the Red Queen, having introduced Alice to the roast ('Alice-mutton: Mutton-Alice'), commanded: 'It isn't etiquette to cut any one you've been introduced to.
The time of this animal paradise finds a close parallel in the myth that tells of the time when gods walked among people or people walked among gods. The place, like the magic place in the Looking-Glass forest where things have no names, where Alice could walk with her arms around the neck of a fawn, is like the high mountains where people mingle with the gods. And the particular individual with these special powers finds a parallel in the myth of a particular person (often a shaman or a priest) who has the special ability to traffic with the gods.
Hindus made this decision again and again throughout their history, insisting on the equal consciousness, the equivalent if not identical souls, of humans and animals despite the very different paths that the two groups walk on this planet.
Essay ladder 186
The Mythology of Horses in India
Horses are not indigenous to India, and while there is some evidence that they were found in the Indus Valley Civilization, it is slender: among the many other animals, from monkeys to rhinos, that figure abundantly on Harappan seals, the horse (probably imported even back then) rarely if ever appears. It became an important-even central-figure only in the Vedic age.
Lens compare 187
THE MYTHOLOGY OF HORSES IN INDIA1
Horses are not indigenous to India, and while there is some evidence that they were found in the Indus Valley Civilization, it is slender: among the many other animals, from monkeys to rhinos, that figure abundantly on Harappan seals, the horse (probably imported even back then) rarely if ever appears. It became an important-even central-figure only in the Vedic age. The most widely accepted, though by no means unchallenged,i theory now is that the horse was brought to India, along with the Sanskrit language, by the Indo-Europeans.ii The history of the mythology of horses in India demonstrates the ways in which the people of India first identified horses with the people who migrated to their part of the world, or invaded them, on horseback, and then identified themselves with the horses, in effect positioning themselves as their own exploiters.
The paradox of the Hindu horse lies in its persistence as an image of glamour and power among people who could not afford to own horses.
Essay hub 188
THE HORSE IN ANCIENT INDIA
Most of the peoples who entered India rode in on horseback and then continued to import horses into India: the people formerly known as Indo-Europeans (who brought their horses with them), the Turkish people who became the Mughals (who imported Arabian horses from Central Asia and Persia, overland and by sea) and the British (who imported thoroughbreds and hunters from England at first, and then Walers from Australia). In the Rig Veda, the horse represented the 'Aryas', as they called themselves, against the indigenous inhabitants of India, the Dasyus or 'slaves', whom they associated with the serpent Vritra.
This is a mythology in which the horse that conquers the snake represents 'us' against 'them'.vi The political symbolism of the Vedic royal horse sacrifice is blatant: the king's men 'set free' the consecrated white stallion to wander for a year before he was brought back to the home and killed. During that year, he was guarded by an army that 'followed' him and claimed for the king any land on which he grazed. The king's army, therefore, drove the horse onward and guided him into the lands that the king intended to take over.
The horse is constantly in search of new territory. And the ancient Indian horse-owners mimicked this behaviour, as they responded to the need to provide grazing for their horses once they had captured them and kept them from their natural free-grazing habits. They rode over other peoples' land and took it over for their own herds.
After Independence, Indian breeders found some places suitable for breeding (though I heard Hindu and Parsi stud owners complain, still in 1996, that Pakistan got the best grazing land). Today, in Punjab, Maharashtra and Karnataka there is some horse-breeding, and Pune, Mumbai and Calcutta are breeding centres for thoroughbred horses. But the difficulties in breeding large horses are perennial.
Ancient Sanskrit and Tamil sources (such as the Arthashastra and Cankam texts) observe that horses had to be imported, probably from Parthia. Sanskrit inscriptions from the ninth and tenth centuries tell us the northern route,18 which is also described in Kipling's Kim, set in Northwest India: through Kabul, Peshawar, Pindi, Kangra, Ambala, Delhi and Gwalior, the route through which the Aryans and, later, the Turks entered India. But from the earliest recorded period in Indian history there was, in addition to the overland route from Central Asia, also a southern route, by sea from Arabia.
Essay cycle 189
MUSLIM HORSES
Shiva appeared to Vatavur and said, 'I will bring excellent horses; go to Madurai.' Days passed and no horses arrived. The king imprisoned Vatavur, who prayed to Shiva. Then Shiva, transforming a whole pack of jackals into horses, himself put on the costume of a horse-dealer.
Having taken the form of a supreme horseman, he himself chose a horse that was splitting open the earth with his hoof in order to adorn the form of him [i.e. of Shiva] with the snakes [that lived underground], and the dust on Shiva's face was blown away by the hissing of the snakes that he wore in his hair. The king had the horses brought to his palace.
This Kutch tradition may or may not know the ancient Vedic myth of the hegemonic horse trampling the native/demonic serpent; we have here the anthropomorphic, and quasi-historical, form of the mytheme: horsemen trampling natives. But the Vedic bias is maintained: the invading horsemen are the heroes. The Vedic horsemen are replaced by Muslims or Anatolians, even by Dalits and Tribal peoples in some variants,46 while the Dasyus, or Vedic Others, are replaced by a demon, a Patan tyrant or, by implication, the British.
This plasticity kept the myth alive in widely varying contexts47 which express, in very different ways, the connection between horses and aliens or foreigners. The confusion of the villains and the heroes in the story of Punvaro is no accident; the myth is rife with obfuscation, as well as a kind of inverted subversion, subversion from the top down: it speaks of the assimilation of the values of the conquerors by those who are conquered, expressing, as it were, the snake-eye view of horses, but in a positive light.
We must take account of the people who constructed this myth, who perpetuated it, recorded it, translated it, selected it.
On Hinduism flow 190
BRITISH HORSES, AND KIPLING’S KIM
The myth of the liberating invader riding his stallion continued to cast its ole white magic over the British. Kipling immortalized the white stallion in his novel Kim. The very first chapter of Kim introduces a message about a war, coded in horses: 'The pedigree of the white stallion is fully established.' Ostensibly, it means that the Muslim horse-trader Mahbub Ali, who is in the service of the British spymaster Creighton, is able to vouch for a valuable horse that the colonel may buy; the coded message on the second level is that a provocation has occurred that will justify a British attack.
But the idea of a pedigree implies that you know the horse when you know its father and mother (or dam and sire); the breeding of horses, of 'bloodstock', of thoroughbreds, was at the heart of a theory of the breeding of humans, a theory of race. Kim is even said to have 'white blood', an oxymoron. I need not point out the significance of the colour of the stallion in a book by Kipling (who coined the phrase 'the white man's burden'xi).
Clearly, horses were deeply implicated in the British subjugation of India.
Essay ladder 191
THE GIFT HORSE
Despite all of these negative political associations, the religious symbol of the horse became imbedded in the folk traditions of India and then stayed there even after its referent, the horse, had vanished from the scene, even after the foreigners had folded their tents and gone away. To this day, horses are worshipped all over India by people who do not have horses and seldom even see a horse, in places where the horse has never truly been a part of the land.
A Marxist might view the survival of the mythology of the aristocratic horse as an imposition of the lies of the rulers upon the people, an exploitation of the masses by saddling them with a mythology that never was theirs nor will ever be for their benefit, a foreign mythology that produces a false consciousness, distorting the native conceptual system, compounding the felony of the invasion itself. A Freudian, on the other hand, might see in the native acceptance of this foreign mythology the process of projection or identification by which one overcomes a feeling of anger or resentment or impotence toward another person by assimilating that person into oneself, becoming the other.xii Though there is much to be said for these interpretations, I would want to augment them by pointing out that myths about oppressive foreigners and their horses sometimes became a positive factor in the lives of those whom they conquered or dominated; and that the horse did not supplant but rather supplemented the continuing worship of other, more native animals-such as snakes.
The corpus of Hindu myths that depict the Turks and Arabs bringing horses into India seems to have assimilated the historical experience of the importation of horses not only to the lingering vestiges-the cultural hoofprints, as it were-of Vedic horse myths, but also to the more widespead theme of 'magical horses brought from heaven or the underworld'. The myth is, like the horse, a gift from the sea, or from the sky-from another world. And like all great symbols, the horse is often susceptible to inversion as well as subversion: the horse of the conquerors becomes the horse of the conquered.
This mythology lends the horse, over and above its natural allure, all the glamour and pathos of the interior room as watched by the child outside, pressing her nose against the windowpane. This is an otherness not loathed but admired, not despised but coveted; it is an otherness that has been assimilated into the native system of values. The villagers who recognize that the horse belongs to those who have political power may be worshipping the horse in order to gain some of that power for themselves.
But this is not all that is happening. Several parallel power relationships are expressed through the symbolism of the horse in contrast with the serpent, on the one hand, and the rider, on the other. Rider is to horse as horse is to snake: power, and domination, travels down the line.
First comes the power structure between humans and horses; then between people of power and people without such power; between foreigners and natives; and, specifically, between British and Muslims, on the one hand, and Muslims and Hindus, on the other. But who is represented by the horse, who by the serpent, and who is the rider? For the horse is, after all, a contradictory symbol of human political power.
It is an animal that invades other horses' territory but whose first instinct is always not to attack but to run away. Horses are prey rather than predators, as is evidenced by the fact that they have their eyes towards the back of their heads, the better to flee, rather than in the front, like the cats and other hunters. Like the villagers who worship him, the horse has been oppressed and robbed of his freedom by human beings who made up stories about horses.
The fragility of the horses is well represented by the fragile, ephemeral medium in which villagers usually represent him: clay. The horse is thus both victim and victimizer, a ready-made natural/cultural symbol of political inversion. The most basic power beyond manpower, horsepower is what we still use as a touchstone, a basis for other sorts of mechanical power.
But horses are not machines; people who work with horses know that you are never in control, that you never entirely tame a horse, who remains at some level always wild. There is a cowboy saying about this: 'Never was a horse that couldn't be rode; never was a rider who couldn't be throwed.' This tension, too, nourishes the image of the wild horse as predator and the tame horse as prey. And, finally, the horse is a potent natural symbol of things other than political power.
Though the village terracotta horse may express an implicit wish for the power of those who have horses, its worshippers seem to seek the power of the horse itself-horsepower in the true sense of the word: strength and fertility. But horses are also worshipped for their beauty, which people continue to care about even when it is clearly not in their best interests to do so. Horses are numinous; they captivate the eye, they inspire desire, they have magic.
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The Submarine Mare in the Mythology of Shiva
Fire and water are natural symbols, individually and in combination, in mythologies throughout the world. They assume a unique meaning in the Hindu context, where tradition has attached particular significance to each element.
Essay hub 193
THE SUBMARINE MARE IN THE MYTHOLOGY OF SHIVA1
Fire and water are natural symbols, individually and in combination, in mythologies throughout the world. They assume a unique meaning in the Hindu context, where tradition has attached particular significance to each element. Together, as an apparent conjunction of opposites, fire and water resolve some of the major paradoxes of Hindu mythology.
The most striking instance of this symbolism is the image of the mare who wanders beneath the ocean, breathing fire, which comes to symbolize the latent force of doomsday always poised to break out and destroy the universe. It is the dangerous power of both suppressed lust and ascetic control; and insatiable appetites of all kinds. Since, of all the Hindu gods, Shiva is most closely associated with these forces, the submarine mare plays a particularly important role in his mythology.
Essay cycle 194
THE BACKGROUND SYMBOLISM OF FIRE AND WATER IN INDIA
Therefore, he supplies the fire with food. Water, moreover, is female and Agni is male; so that he thereby supplies the latter with a productive mate.'26 Fire and water express the related appetites of hunger and desire, and are mutually productive.
On Hinduism flow 195
FIRE AND WATER IN THE MYTHOLOGY OF SHIVA
Shiva then fell into the Kalindi river and the waters were burnt up and became as black as collyrium. And still Shiva found no peace. Then, when Parvati departed to perform asceticism, as Shiva had instructed her to do, Shiva was overcome with desire.
But the joys of love-making did not satisfy his thirst, just as all the floods of the ocean do not quench the fire blazing within.46
Essay ladder 196
THE SUBMARINE DOOMSDAY FIRE
The mind grows dizzy thinking of their greatness. The first keeps drinking greedily its dwelling and yet its thirst by water is not quenched; the other is so great it never suffers the slightest loss of water in extent.64
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THE FIERY MARE: SAMJNA AND THE CONTROL OF TEJAS
Lakshmi, the wife of Vishnu and daughter of the ocean, follows in the footsteps of Samjna: Vishnu cursed Lakshmi to become a mare because she had lusted for Revanta (the child of Samjna and the Sun) when he was mounted on the marvellous horse Ucchaihshravas. Vishnu promised that she would be released from the curse when she had a son. Lakshmi went to the very place where Samjna had wandered as a mare, performing tapas, at the confluence of the Kalindi and Tamasa rivers.
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THE SYMBOLISM OF THE HORSE
THE MYTHS OF SEARCH: DADHYANCH AND SAGARA
The Ashvins who give the horse-head (and the Soma) are the sons of the mare Samjna; the seeking of the horse-head by Indra is the seeking of fire hidden in water; and the bones of Dadhyanch appear in Puranic mythology as the bones of Dadhichi, which are, as we shall see later, a direct cause of the birth of the submarine mare. The search for Soma and for fire, the Sun's search for his wife (Samjna/Saranyu)-all are associated with the flight of the horse.
The seeking of the horse-fire itself is the central theme of the myth of Sagara, which appears in several slightly different versions: King Sagara had two wives. In order to obtain sons, he performed tapas for a hundred years; then, by the favour of Shiva [or by propitiating Aurva, the author of the submarine fire] he obtained 60,000 sons from one wife and one son, named Amshuman, from the other. After some time, the king performed an ashvamedha sacrifice; as the horse wandered over the earth, protected by the king's sons, it reached the ocean which was at that time empty of water, and there it disappeared.
(Or: it was snatched away by a wave as it wandered by the ocean. Or: Indra took the form of a demon and stole the horse, for Indra was jealous of his own reputation as the giver of horse-sacrifices.ix) The king sent his 60,000 sons to search for the horse; they dug with spades in the earth, destroying many living creatures, digging out the ocean which is the abode of sea-demons. They reached down into Hell, and there they saw the horse wandering about, and they saw the sage Kapila there haloed in flames, blazing with tapas.
The sons were angry and behaved disrespectfully to Kapila; in fury, he released a flame from his eye and burnt all the sons to ashes. Then Amshuman came and propitiated Kapila and obtained the horse, with which Sagara completed his sacrifice. Sagara made the ocean his son, called Sagara.
When the old king handed over his throne to Kuvalashva and entered the forest, he met the sage Uttanka, who told him that an anti-god named Dhundhu was performing great tapas there by his hermitage, in the sands of the ocean, burning like the doomsday fire with flames issuing from his mouth, causing the waters to flow about him in a whirlpool. Brihadashva asked Kuvalashva to subdue the anti-god; he and the other sons dug down into the sand, but Dhundhu appeared from the ocean, breathing fire, and he burnt all but three of the sons with his power of tapas.
THE ORIGIN OF THE SUBMARINE MARE-FIRE: AURVA
Vedic elements persist in the Puranic myths. Bosch has discussed at some length the 'inverse order' and 'inversion' of the Dadhyanch myth and the myth of Aurva,102 and parallels between the two are clear. A brief prediction of Aurva's birth appears in the Mahabharata: A sage named Aurva will be born, blazing like a fire, and he will create a fire of anger to destroy the three worlds and reduce the earth to ashes.
The problem of dispersal is explicitly the central point of the myth in the Mahabharata, which tells it to the sage Parashara in order to persuade him to dispose in a similar manner of his own destructive wrath;105 the epic here introduces the Aurva story as a conscious multiform. The Brahmana concept of water as food for fire is central to the myth, as is the theme of the seduction of an ascetic to disperse his tapas; the gods persuade Aurva to abandon his vow and to place his tejas (i.e.
his seed) where it will cease to generate heat, in water (i.e. The importance of chastity in this context is indicated by a more explicit description of the tapas involved in the birth of Aurva: The sage Urva was performing tapas; the gods asked him to stop and begin family life. He replied, 'This is the eternal dharma of sages, to live in the forest in a hermitage, in chastity.
I will not take a wife, but I will create a son nevertheless.' Then by his tapas Urva placed his thigh in the fire and churned it; a halo of flames broke out of his thigh and became a son, named Aurva. Aurva blazed so fiercely that he terrified the universe; he said, 'Hunger binds me: I will eat the universe.' He grew great, burning all creatures, until Brahma said to Urva, 'Restrain your son's tejas, for the good of all people.
The Skanda Purana tells another myth of Aurva's birth, related to the Vedic tradition of the horse-head of Dadhyanch (here called Dadhichi): The gods placed their weapons in the hermitage of Dadhichi for safekeeping, and Dadhichi made them into liquid and drank their essence. One day Subhadra, his wife, put on his loincloth for a menstrual cloth, and she became pregnant with the seed that was on the cloth. When she brought forth a child, she cursed the father, in ignorance, saying, 'I swear by my chastity: let the man who engendered this child die.' At this time the gods returned to take back their weapons; and Dadhichi abandoned his body so that the gods could make their weapons of his bones.
When Subhadra learned that Dadhichi was the father of her child, she rejoiced; but the child, named Pippalada, wished to kill the gods who had killed his father. He went to Himalaya and did great tapas to propitiate Shiva; he churned his left thigh with his left hand and from it a mare appeared, followed by a stallion. The mare was covered by the stallion, brought forth a child, and disappeared.
Pippalada then told the child to devour the gods. The gods sought help from Vishnu, who tricked the fire-child into eating the gods one by one, beginning with the waters. The mare, haloed in flames, asked to be brought to the waters, and no one but Sarasvati could bear the fire.
As Sarasvati carried the fire to the waters, a mountain saw her and asked her to marry him; she refused, and he threatened to abduct her by force. She then agreed to marry him if he would hold the mare-fire while she bathed; he did so and was burnt to ashes. She took up the fire and set out again for the ocean.
The story of Dadhichi's bones is connected with the horse-head of Dadhyanch in the Rig Veda, but this connection is submerged in the Skanda Purana and seems to have little to do with the birth of Pippalada except to supply the motive for his anger. The image of the mare, which is introduced only as an afterthought at the end of the Mahabharata story of Aurva and is absent entirely from the story of Urva, appears here in an awkward and elaborate form unrelated to the horse-head of Dadhichi-Dadhyanch.
The role of chastity is transferred in this version from Urva himself to the two women in the myth: the mother of Pippalada, who swears by her chastity, and the bearer of the fire, Sarasvati, whose steadfast chastity enables her to fulfil her role and dispose of the fire. The tricking of the lustful mountain by Sarasvati is a multiform of the double trick played upon the chaste mare: first, to make the fire drink the waters, and then to reduce the size of the mouth to a needle (which, with Vishnu's gift to the ocean of inexhaustible waters, supplies an explicit rationalization of the eternal balance of food [water] and eater [fire]).
SHIVA AS THE MARE-FIRE BENEATH THE SEA
In some texts, Shiva engenders the mare-fire with the blaze of his third eye. Certain descriptions of the battle between Shiva and Kama allow Shiva to restrain or distribute in various ways the fire of anger which has reduced Kama to ashes;117 but as this fire is expressly said to be the fire of doomsday, there is one inevitable resting place for it: the ocean. Kama deluded Shiva, arousing him, and when Shiva realized that Kama was attacking him he released a fire from his third eye, burning Kama to ashes.
The fire, having come from Shiva's eye, could never return to Shiva; moreover, Brahma had paralyzed the fire in a vain attempt to shield Kama. When Shiva had vanished, the fire began to burn the gods and all the universe. The gods sought refuge with Brahma, who made the fire of Shiva's anger into a mare with gentle [saumya, literally, 'like Soma'] flames issuing from her mouth.
He is the ascetic that rages against the erotic power; and he is the fire of passion that cannot be controlled by asceticism. He is in this the image of the balance of powers in the universe; his flame blazes eternally, unquenched by all the floods of nature, like the mare-fire within the sea.
Indra as the Stallion’s Wife
Among the many myths with which the Rig Veda tantalizes us, dropping a few bold clues but casually neglecting to provide anything like a full report, there is one unsolved mystery that has remained on the books for close to three thousand years: the case of Indra as the wife (mena) of the seed-bearing stallion (or bull-stallion, vrishanashva). The episode is mentioned several times in the Rig Veda, and every time that Karl F.
Essay cycle 199
INDRA AS THE STALLION’S WIFE1
Among the many myths with which the Rig Veda tantalizes us, dropping a few bold clues but casually neglecting to provide anything like a full report, there is one unsolved mystery that has remained on the books for close to three thousand years: the case of Indra as the wife (mena) of the seed-bearing stallion (or bull-stallion, vrishanashva). The episode is mentioned several times in the Rig Veda, and every time that Karl F. Geldner, for instance, comes to it,2 he calls it dunkel (dark) and refers the reader to its other, equally dunkel, occurrences.
This darkness remains, in Geldner's view, despite the potential illumination offered by several Brahmana explanations of the incident, some of which Geldner cites in his despairing notes, though he does not seem to take them seriously. The myth is alluded to in three cryptic Rig Veda passages: You [Indra] became the wife of the bull-stallion … [1.51.13] The unfailing [Indra] made a wife for a bull.[10.111.3]. As a buffalo, [Indra] desired the seductive female born from himself.
It thus might be translated as a seed-bearing stallion. The bull-stallion, however, highlights the overtone of a mixed species, central to the myth.
On Hinduism flow 200
ANIMALS AND INCEST
The myth of Indra as the bull-stallion depends upon a contrasting opposition between incest and the mixture of species, or, structurally speaking, between a process of procreation in which the partners are abnormally closely related (incest) and a process of procreation in which the partners are abnormally distantly related (mixture of species). They are by no means the same process, nor do they pose the same problems; but juxtaposing them, as the Rig Vedic texts themselves do, forces us to consider the ways in which they may explain one another.
And if we read this pattern back into the specific myth of Indra as the stallion's wife it may help us to interpret that myth. Indra in the three verses that tell this story is a buffalo who becomes a bull; he makes a female buffalo who becomes a mare and then functions as a cow. By committing incest with his daughter, Indra transgresses the normal barrier between himself and a female who is of the same class or family (varna) as he is;5 by blurring the line between mare and cow, he transgresses the normal barrier between species.
The connection between transformation into an animal, the act of incest, and the sexual union between a god and a mortal may be even older than the ancient Indian connection;12 it may be Indo-European.iv
Essay ladder 201
INDRA AND THE SAGE’S WIFE
Sayana, commenting on the Rig Veda in the fourteenth century CE, meditates on gender and the animal field in explaining the third Vedic verse in our story of Indra as the stallion's wife ('As a buffalo, [Indra] desired the seductive female born from himself. He made the wife of a horse into the mother of a bull.'): The buffalo is Indra in the form of the sun, and the woman is the dawn (Ushas), or night, born of him. He lusted after her, even though she was born of him, for the sun does look lustfully at the night and the dawn.
And then there is another marvel, concerning the wife of the horse. For this is the name of a female, and the female, the mare, became the mother or the producer of a bull. He made a transformation and a reversal.
One would give a great deal to know precisely what verse it is that Sayana so blithely regards as rendering this whole mess 'quite clear'. What was Indra's species, and what was Indra's gender? We have already seen, in the context of the connection between animals and incest, that these two questions are closely related: one may change one's species in order to side-step a problem related to one's gender.
Let us, therefore, set the species aside and consider the question of the gender, or more precisely the change of gender, of Indra in this myth, bearing in mind that Hindu gods do at times change their gender.v And we will soon see that the problem of gender leads us back, this time with a plausible solution, to the problem of species. A later Vedic text provides a clue to the ambiguity of Indra's gender in the tale of the stallion's wife: Nirriti [Disorder, incarnate as a Fury] seizes the woman who has the form of a man and the man who has the form of a woman.
In the Rig Veda, Indra is called a ram,19 and in the Ramayana the testicles of a ram are used to restore Indra after he is castrated in punishment for having seduced Ahalya, the wife of a human sage named Gautama.ix In the course of the sacrifice, it is implied, the testicles that the ram loses are somehow transferred to Indra. Moreover, at the end of it all, Indra is stronger than ever: the testicles of a ram are even better than the ones that he had to begin with.
First of all, we can surmise that the virile animal is a symbolic form of the virile Indra, for throughout the Rig Veda Indra is routinely praised for his powers as a stallion, a bull, a ram. But then Indra temporarily loses his sexual powers; the Brahmanas regard Indra's sexual transformation, however motivated, as evidence of a problem rather than a miracle, as one of the tight spots that Indra gets himself into from time to time (like his Indo-European cousins Zeus and Wotan), rather than as one of his glorious deeds, that are also celebrated in these texts.
He becomes female in order to indulge his sexual appetites, and then finds that he must 'become' an animal-the sacrificial surrogate-in order to regain the powers that he has lost through that very indulgence. He pays for his amours but is ultimately strengthened by them. All of this is relevant to the tale of Indra and the stallion.
But there is one final way in which the transformation of Indra's gender is connected with the transformation of his species. We have noted that Hindu mythology tends to lump together various different forms of non-masculinity: change of sex, androgyny, castration and impotence. There is yet another term in this series, however, that holds the key to the mystery of Indra and the stallion, and that is infertility or barrenness.
This concept will supply the final piece in our Vedic jigsaw puzzle.
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FERTILE MARES AND BARREN MULES
The Brahmanas furnish us with evidence that Indra's act in fathering a bull on a mare is not really the 'marvel' that Sayana suggests. For they tell us that the mare has 'double' seed and can accommodate both the stallion and the donkey. Thus one might argue (rather literally) that since the mare gives birth to both foals and baby mules, why not to calves?
The ancient Indians may not have felt it as convenient as we do to regard horses and mules as members of a single species (equines), and cows (and buffaloes) as bovines. But the general pattern of the mixture of species that emerges from this cycle of myths indicates a general structure of symbolic thinking, rather than a specific policy of animal husbandry, and that pattern makes good sense of our problem text. This cycle of myths revolves around the relationship between the mare and the seed of a series of male animals other than stallions.
The simplest version of this myth goes like this: Prajapati created the creatures and then laid hold of them in the twelfth month; therefore the females bear their young for ten months and bring them forth in the eleventh. From these female creatures as Prajapati was laying hold of them, the she-mule went away. Prajapati followed the mule and took away her seed, which he then wiped off on the mare.
Either of these implications may already be present in the Brahmanas' statement that Prajapati took away the seed of the she-mule. But in explaining the barrenness of the mule, one Brahmana gives us an expanded version of the myth of Prajapati and the mule, a version that explains the mare's doubleness by linking her with another counterpart, the jack donkey, and describes the transfer of seed not from a female mule to a mare but from a male mule to a jack donkey.
The double seed of cattle (a term that may include horses or even humans, but here probably designates cows) may refer to twins, which do occur, though equally rarely in cows and mares, but what are we to make of the double seed of plants? This text is conspicuously silent on this issue, but yet another passage is not: When Prajapati laid hold of these creatures, the he-mule went away from them. [Prajapati] followed [the mule] and took his seed, which he then wiped off on the donkey.
Therefore the donkey has double seed. They also say, 'He wiped it off on the mare.' Therefore the mare has double seed. They also say, 'He wiped it off on the plants.' Therefore plants glisten even though they are not anointed.
The donkey's double seed is not for the two female animals that he is 'for', the cow and the ewe; it is for the jenny and the mare. The combination of these two different sorts of equivalences yields us four female animals arranged in two pairs: the sacrificial cow and sheep, and the procreative jenny and mare. The male donkey provides the pivot around which the others move, even as Indra is the pivot for the cow, mare, stallion and bull in the vrishanashva cluster.
Four animals in two different pairs appear in the last text in this series, in which the mule provides a more homogeneous substitute for the ram, so that we have three equines and one bovine (two males and two females): Agni ran the chariot race using a chariot drawn by female mules. As he drove them on he burned out their wombs; therefore they do not conceive. Dawn (Ushas) raced with a chariot drawn by cows; Indra with horses.
The double seed of the donkey is linked with other special qualities in another text, which does not mention the other animals in the group but simply concentrates on the donkey, though the female mule is also present by implication: One gathers things with a donkey, and therefore the donkey is the best of all domestic animals [pashus] for bearing burdens. One gathers things with a donkey, and therefore the donkey grows fat beyond all other domestic animals even on bad grazing, for people gather food and the arka plant with him.
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Essay cycle 204
Dogs as Dalits in Indian Literature
Animals play important roles in the Hindu religious imaginary. Gods become incarnate as animals and have animal vehicles; cats and herons are used as symbols of ascetic hypocrisy; yogic asanas and sexual positions are named after animals.
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DOGS AS DALITS IN INDIAN LITERATURE1
Animals play important roles in the Hindu religious imaginary. Gods become incarnate as animals and have animal vehicles; cats and herons are used as symbols of ascetic hypocrisy; yogic asanas and sexual positions are named after animals. The process works in two opposite directions at once.
On the one hand, the observation of the local fauna provides images with which people may think of their gods; whether or not people get the gods that they deserve, they tend to get the gods (and demons) that their animals deserve. On the other hand, the ideas that people have about the nature of the gods, and of the world, and of themselves, will lead them to project onto animals certain anthropomorphic features that may seem entirely erroneous to someone from another culture observing the same animal.
Clearly the two-the animals of the mind and the animals of the terrain-are intimately connected, and both are essential to our understanding of Hinduism.i Texts about the lower castes are sometimes masked by narratives about dogs, standing for the people now generally called Dalits, formerly called Untouchables. Many Dalit groups were also called 'Dog-Cookers' (Shva-Pakasii), because caste Hindus thought that these people ate dogs,iii who in turn ate anything and everything, and in Hinduism, you are what you eat.iv Some texts covertly critical of the caste system reverse the usual symbolism of dogs and speak of breaking the rules for dogs, treating them as if they were not impure.
Moreover, the dog that doesn't barkv generates a silence that speaks; it is a good metaphor for the voice of marginalized people that we can sometimes hear only when it does not speak. Countless terms have been coined to designate these lowest castes, the dispossessed or underprivileged or marginalized groups, including the tribal peoples. Sanskrit texts usually named them by specific castes (Chandala, Chamara, Pulkasa, etc.) or called them 'Low and Excluded' (Apasadas) or 'Born Last' (Antyajas).
Much later, the British called them Untouchables, the Criminal Castes, the Scheduled Castes, Pariahs (a word borrowed from Tamil), the Depressed Classes, Outcastes and so forth. Gandhi called them Harijans ('the People of God'vi). Beginning in the 1930s and 40s and continuing now, the members of these castes have called themselves Dalits (using the Marathi/Hindi word for 'oppressed' or 'broken' to translate the British 'Depressed').
Post-colonial scholars call them (and other low castes) Subalterns. Many Dalits, particularly but not only the activists, don't consider themselves Hindu; one, Kancha Ilaiah, wrote a book entitled, Why I Am Not a Hindu. But his book argues within the categories and mythologies of the very Hindu traditions that he denies; even in rejection, there's Hindu influence.
While no actual reforms took place in Hinduism in this regard till the nineteenth century, there have been protests against the mistreatment of the lower castes from a very early age in India. But such challenges, in Hinduism's religious texts, generally took the form of renouncing caste society and forming an alternative society in which caste was ignored. The Brahmins, after all, did not produce a great literature in a vacuum, and they did not control the minds of everyone in India.
They drew upon, on the one hand, their own lives and those of the political actors of their time, and, on the other hand, the lives of the non-literate classes. Because of the constant incursion of oral and folk traditions into Sanskrit texts, Dalits do speak, not always in voices recorded on a page but in signs that we can read if we try. Certainly the Sanskrit texts argued that the lower castes would pollute any sacred text that they spoke or read, like milk contained in the skin of a dog.vii But this probably applied only to a limited corpus of texts, probably Vedic texts, rather than Sanskrit in general.
It is also surely significant that there are strong sanctions against lower castes teaching the Vedas, but not necessarily against them learning it. The fact that the Vedas, the most ancient Sanskrit texts (c. 1500 BCE), scorned the horse-headed gods called the Ashvins for teaching the Vedas to the wrong sort of people, should alert us to the possibility that this, too, might be a rule honoured at least sometimes in the breach as well as in the observance.
We can ferret out voices of many castes in the ancient texts, and once we have access to the oral and folk traditions, we can begin to write the alternative narrative with more confidence. And dogs play an important role in that narrative.
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DOGS IN THE VEDAS
During the period in which the Rig Veda was composed (c. 1500-1000 BCE), dogs lived with the family, under the same roof or right outside the house. A watchdog is the object of a sleeping spell spoken by (according to various interpretations) a thief trying to break into a house, a lover on a secret nocturnal rendezvous in his mistress's house, mothers singing it as a lullaby to their children, or the family priest praying for a peaceful slumber for the inhabitants of the house.
Some of the verses are: White and tawny son of Sarama, when you bare your teeth they gleam like spears in your snapping jaws. Bark at the thief or the marauder, as you run up and back again, son of Sarama. Tear apart the wild boar, for he would tear you apart.
But you are barking at those who sing Indra's praises; why do you threaten us? Fall fast asleep!2 'Son of Sarama' means 'dog', because Sarama, Indra's beloved brindled bitch, is regarded as the mother of all dogs. The story goes that the Panis, tribal people who were the enemies of the Vedic people, had stolen cows from certain Vedic sages and hidden them in mountain caves.
She is more sinned against than sinning. For the point of the Brahmana is that the dangerous bitch (in either canine or human form) is not, ultimately, dangerous-for the man who knows the mantras. Dogs are satirically transformed from the lowest to the highest caste in an Upanishadic passage (c.
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DOGS IN THE SANSKRIT EPICS
For caste-minded Hindus, dogs are as unclean as pigs are to orthodox Jews and Muslims, and they are, as we have observed before, symbols of the sorts of people that Sanskrit authors sometimes called 'Dog-cookers'. Dogs are also associated with the Adivasis, the so-called tribal peoples of India. Animal attendants, leather workers, people who touch human waste are often referred to as pigs and dogs.
300 BCE to 300 CE) generally upholds the basic prejudice against dogs, as in this story, which also makes clear the analogy between dogs and upwardly mobile Dalits: Once there was an ascetic of such goodness that the flesh-eating wild animals-lions, tigers, rutting elephants, leopards, rhinoceroses and bears-were like his disciples. A dog was his companion, devoted, tranquil, living on roots and fruits, with a heart like that of a human being. One day a hungry leopard came there and was about to seize the dog as his prey when the dog begged the sage to save him.
The phrase 'his own proper form by birth' can also be translated as 'his own proper form by caste', for jati means both birth and caste. Both the dog and the sage are all wrong from the very beginning; the dog violates dog dharma by being a vegetarian, where he should be a carnivore, and the sage is wrong, too, to protect the dog by making him bigger and bigger instead of putting him in safer and safer places. But the sage does not reciprocate the dog's devotion or attachment to him.
Let him come with me, for I do not wish to be cruel.' Indra said, 'Today you have become immortal, like me, and you have won complete prosperity, and great fame, your majesty, as well as the joys of heaven. There is nothing cruel in that. There is no place for dog-owners in the world of heaven; for evil spirits carry off what has been offered, sacrificed or given as an oblation into the fire, if it is left uncovered and a dog has looked at it.
Therefore you must leave this dog, and by leaving the dog you will win the world of the gods.' Yudhishthira said, 'People say that abandoning someone devoted to you is a bottomless evil, equal-according to the general opinion-to killing a Brahmin. I think so too.' When the god Dharma, who had been there in the form of the dog, heard these words spoken by the Dharma King, he appeared in his own form and spoke to King Yudhishthira with affection and with gentle words of praise: 'Great king, you weep with all creatures.
(In later Hinduism, Dharma occasionally becomes incarnate as a Dalit, a Chandala.) Clearly animals are being used here, as usual, to make a powerful ethical point; it is a way of arguing about the sorts of humans who should or should not go to heaven (a topic that the Mahabharata also explicitly addresses) or even, perhaps, by extension, about the castes who should or should not be allowed into temples. All good Hindus go to heaven, but they do so after dying and being given a different, heavenly body; Yudhishthira is unique in being given the gift of going to heaven in his own body.
(Cats, in Hinduism, are depicted as religious hypocrites.xii) But bhakti at this period meant little more than belonging to someone, dedicated to someone as a servant or loyal friend; it almost certainly did not yet have the specific overtone of passionate love between a god and his devotee that was to become characteristic of a branch of medieval Hinduism. Yet as the word expanded its meaning, the story of Yudhishthira and his dog often came to be read as a model for that sort of devotion.
The commentator approves of Indra's action in rejecting contact with someone-the dog-who is literally untouchable, a-sprishya-the Hindu party line at this time, which Yudhishthira here challenges. For Yudhishthira, heaven will not be heaven if he cannot bring his dog with him. Indra's argument, that dogs would pollute the sacrificial offerings merely by looking at them, let alone touching them, is a common one.
Rama summons the Brahmin, who confesses that he struck the dog in anger when he himself was hungry and begging for food; when he told the dog to go away, the dog went only a short distance and stayed there; and so he beat him. Rama asks the dog to suggest an appropriate punishment for the Brahmin, and the dog asks that the Brahmin-whom he describes as filled with anger and bereft of dharma-be made the leader of a Tantric sect.
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DOGS IN THE PURANAS
Now, there was a dog there who had been a man in a previous life but had been sinful and hence reborn as a dog. The dog came to the Sarasvati river and swam there, and his impurities were shaken off and his thirst slaked. Then he was hungry, and entered Vena's hut; when Vena saw the dog he was afraid.
Vena touched him gently and the dog showered him with water from the tirtha. Vena plunged into the water, and by the power of the shrine, he was saved. Shiva offered Vena a boon, and Vena said, 'I plunged into the lake out of fear of this dog, for the gods forbade me to bathe here.
The dog, therefore, intercedes for him: he makes him a little less polluted, so that he becomes eligible for real purification. Vena is not finished yet; there are other rebirths before he is finally freed, but the dog makes it possible for him to proceed on that path. And finally, at the end of the myth, and a millennium or two after Yudhishthira's dog in the Mahabharata vanished before he could enter heaven, this dog enters Shiva's heaven, the world of the one Hindu god who does not treat dogs as polluting.
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DOGS IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA
According to Hindu texts, dogs are supposed to be treated badly, and, as we have seen, usually are; but on many occasions, dogs are, perversely, honoured. One of those occasions today is the Tantric worship of Shiva in his aspect as Bhairava, who often has the form or face of a dog or a dog as his vehicle. All over India, there are Bhairava temples where people offer puja to both statues of dogs and living dogs.
In the temple to Kal Bhairava in Varanasi, there are images of Shiva astride a big white dog, as well as black plaster statues of dogs, paintings of dogs, metal dogs, and real live dogs who sleep and wander inside and outside the temple. Pilgrims to Varanasi worship the dogs, both the live ones and the images, and decorate them with garlands of Indian doughnuts and other things delicious to dogs, which the live dogs of course immediately shake off and eat.
All of which is evidence either that (some) dogs are more sacred than cows in Hinduism or, perhaps, that Hindu views of animals are far too complex to capture by words like 'sacred' or 'impure'. Other peoples' zoological taxonomies look bizarre only to people who view them through their own rather ethno-centric lenses. A number of castesxiv take hounds with them during their long expeditions when they graze their sheep in mountain forests.
They regard dogs as forms of their god, Mallanna (or Mailara), whom hounds follow in his expeditions and who also takes the form of a dog on occasion. In rituals, the priests (or, sometimes, the householders themselves) enact the roles of dogs and drink milk that they regard as fed to Mallanna. Kal Bhairava may be a Sanskritized (and Tantricized) version of this folk-god.
The worshippers of the Maharashtrian horseman god Khandoba (a form of Shiva, often assimilated to Mallanna and called Martanda) sometimes act as his dogs, and bark in the course of his rituals, as Bhairava is said to have told them to do. These devotees are called 'Tigers' in Marathi and Kannada; it is said that they originally were tigers, but that through the darshan of the god Martanda their bodies became human32-a fascinating inversion of the Mahabharata story about the dog who got into serious trouble by trying to become a tiger.
The first (BBC News, Thursday, 8 November 2007) reported on a Police Dog Training School in Nepal that trains dogs for rescue and search, for tracking criminals, explosives and drugs, and for patrol. There are fifty-one dogs, some born on the premises, others from outside. For most of the year, the dogs are not well treated, and many are left to forage for themselves and feed on scraps, but for one day a year, they are honoured and garlanded (presumably with edibles).
The article began: 'According to the Hindu scripture, the Mahabharat, dogs accompanied Dharmaraj Yudhisthir on his journey to heaven. There is also a Hindu belief that dogs guard the underworld.' Aside from giving Yudhishthira more than one dog, this was a good, historical approach, and the article concluded: 'It's recognized that no animal has a closer relationship with people.' The compassion here is limited to some dogs, some of the time. The second story, carried by the Hindustan Times and CNN from New Delhi (CNN.com Europe, 13 November 2007) is worth reporting in its entirety: A man in southern India married a female dog in a traditional Hindu ceremony in a bid to atone for stoning two dogs to death, a newspaper reported Tuesday.
Selvakumar, left, garlands his 'bride', Selvi.] The 33-year-old man married the sari-draped dog at a temple in the southern state of Tamil Nadu on Sunday after an astrologer said it was the only way to cure himself of a disability, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported. Selvakumar told the paper that he had been suffering since he stoned two dogs to death and strung them up in a tree 15 years ago. 'After that my legs and hands got paralyzed and I lost hearing in one ear,' the paper quoted him as saying.
Family members chose a stray female dog named Selvi who was then bathed and clothed for the ceremony. The groom and his family then had a feast, while the dog got a bun, the paper said. Again the special moment of compassion is balanced by a memory of more typical cruelty.
As we have seen, the tension between cruelty and compassion has marked the entire span of the history of dogs in India. A contemporary Tamil poem, entitled, simply, 'Dog', turns upon the plantain leaf on which strict South Indian Brahmins eat their meals, as a leaf is disposable and hence not as vulnerable to pollution as a reusable plate would be: The Brahmin in the house opposite ours Eats late, and tosses His leaf on the street. Two dogs tear each other apart In the deserted street.
Their howls Wake up dogs sleeping elsewhere In town. Even dogs in the outskirts Jump into the fray. The noise travels- Beyond the rice-fields and orchards.
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Sacred Cows and Beefeaters
Essay ladder 211
SACRED COWS
In US journalism the word came to mean 'someone who must not be criticized', and in American literature, 'An idea, institution, etc., unreasonably held to be immune from questioning or criticism,' a sense in which Margaret Mitchell used it in 1936 in Gone with the Wind: 'I think of my brother, living among the sacred cows of Charleston, and most reverent towards them.' The idea of a 'sacred cow' is an 'Irish bull' (the old British chauvinist term for an oxymoron), which the OED defines as 'A self-contradictory proposition; in mod. use, an expression containing a manifest contradiction in terms or involving a ludicrous inconsistency unperceived by the speaker.
Now often with epithet Irish; but the word had been long in use before it came to be associated with Irishmen.' The word 'sacred' is in any case a Christian term that can be, at best, vaguely and inadequately applied in India, but cows would not in any case qualify for the adjective: there are no cow-goddesses or temples to cows or icons of cows to which worship is offered, though there are festivals in which people decorate cows and give them fruits and flowers. Since cows are not deities, there is no need for cow statues.
Benign bulls are beautifully depicted at the doors of Shiva temples, and there are temples to monkeys, tiger temples, temple elephants, shrines to snakes, and even a temple or two to dogs, who are closely associated with Bhairava (an aspect of Shiva).i But not to cows. 'Holy' (or 'sacred') means a lot more than not-to-be-killed. Few of us kill, or eat, our children, but none would argue that they are sacred.
Cows are, in fact, one of the few animals that are not the object of worship in India. Yet cows have been, for centuries, cultural symbols of non-violenceii and of the passive, bovine aspect of women, in sharp contrast with mares,iii whom the mythology depicts as oversexed, insatiable and Fatally Attractive.
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COWS IN ANCIENT INDIA
Nor was the appeal of remaining superior to beef-eating Muslim invaders and mlechas (unclean invaders, such as the British) relevant in the ancient period, though such concerns did indeed eventually contribute to the cow-protection case. It was more a symbolic argument about female purity and docility, and a religious argument about Brahmin sanctity, that prevailed from the start. And the social-hierarchy reasons for not eating the meat of the cow persisted, as the sociologist M.N.
It visualizes the cow as the paradigmatic animal that yields food without being killed. The earth-cow later becomes the wishing-cow (Kama-dhenu), from whom you can milk anything you desire-not just food but silk cloths, armies of soldiers, anything. (The same function was sometimes assigned to wishing-trees [Kalpa-vriksha] or the ocean of milk, from which one can pick or churn whatever is desired.)
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COWS IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA
Gandhi's attitude to cows was an essential component of his version of nonviolence.vi Gandhi used the image of 'calf love' (vatsalya), the calf's love for and from a mother cow, particularly the Earth Cow, Mother Earth, as a key symbol for his imagined Indian nation. He tried to include Muslims in the family, but cow protection was a factor in his failure to attract large-scale Muslim support, for, by the nineteenth century, one of the objects of the cow-protection movement was to force Muslims, who killed cows, to leave India.
The present-day fundamentalist movement of 'Hindutva'vii (literally, 'Hindu-tion') has attempted to use the alleged sanctity of the cow to disenfranchise Muslims, some of whom eat beef and/or slaughter the cows that many Hindus-in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, for instance-eat. Such Hindus argue that 'We Hindus have always been here in India, and have Never Eaten Cows; Those Muslims have come in, and Kill and Eat Cows, and therefore must be destroyed.'viii And it is not only the beef-eating Muslims (and Christians) who are the target of Hindutva's hate brigade.
In 2002, five Dalits were lynched in Jhajjar, Haryana, for skinning a cow; days later, eighty Dalits from the villages of those killed converted to Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.13
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THE ATTACK ON THE MYTH OF THE HOLY COW
In 2001, Dwijendra Narayan Jha, Professor of History at the University of Delhi, published The Myth of the Holy Cow, a dry, straight academic survey of the history of Sanskrit texts dealing with the eating, or not-eating, of cows. The book marshals indisputable evidence proving what every scholar of India has known for well over a century: that [a] the ancient Indians ate beef; [b] almost as early, the practice of vegetarianism in general, and, somewhat later, the prohibition of beef-eating in particular, spread throughout India, in Buddhism and Jainism as well as Hinduism, and continued alongside an on-going practice of meat-eating; and, finally, [c] several reformers, most famously Gandhi, made vegetarianism, particularly the taboo against eating beef, a central tenet of Hinduism.
Professor Jha traces the history of the doctrine forbidding the eating of cows or the killing of cows, soundly and thoroughly covering both the classic texts and cutting-edge scholarship, both Indian and European. The only shocking thing about this book is the news that someone had found it shocking, had been shocked, shocked by the argument that people used to eat cows in ancient India. Yet the cover of the book proudly proclaims: 'A Book the Government of India Demands be Ritually Burned', and the flyleaf assures us that the book was 'banned by the Hyderabad Civil Court and the author's life has been threatened.' The Observer likened the book's reception to that of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, and even the more-PC-than-thou Lingua Franca felt that the case was sexy/trendy enough to justify a notice that the book 'was pulled from the country's shelves'.
Apparently what makes this a shocking book is the simple fact that it contradicts the Hindutva party line (the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] was in power in India when Jha's book was published). Ironically, the pejorative phrase 'sacred cow' designates precisely the sort of fanaticism that has dogged the attacks on Professor Jha's book. His basic point stands and is proved beyond dispute: the claim that Hindus have never eaten cows is false.
But who will listen to him? Have any of the people making the Hindutva arguments-which are not historical or scholarly but religious and politicalix-read-or, indeed, will they ever read-Professor Jha's book? Michel Foucault and Edward Said, among others, have taught us that scholarship is often deeply implicated in creating the political mess in the first place; but scholarship has demonstrated far less power to clean the mess up.
Like the sorcerer's apprentice, or Frankenstein, or the scientists on the Manhattan Project, scholars create imperialist monsters that they cannot control but merely watch, aghast, from the sidelines, crying, 'No, no, put it down!!!' Yet the fact that The Myth of the Holy Cow was attacked is a good sign, a sign that someone among the Hindutva thugs reads, and worries that the pen may still be, if not mightier than the nuclear arsenal, at least a weapon worth scanning for, like knives at airports, a weapon capable of subversion.
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Essay ladder 216
Impermanence and Eternity in Hindu Epic, Art and Performance
The forms taken by the classics of India challenge many common assumptions about permanence and impermanence as well as the corollary distinctions between written and oral texts. In India, we encounter more oral traditions than written ones, and more fluid traditions than frozen ones.
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ORAL AND WRITTEN PRESERVATION
The forms taken by the classics of India challenge many common assumptions about permanence and impermanence as well as the corollary distinctions between written and oral texts. In India, we encounter more oral traditions than written ones, and more fluid traditions than frozen ones. But more than that, we find a reversal of the assumed link between what is written and fixed, on the one hand, and what is oral and fluid, on the other.
Let us define a classic in a rather broad sense, as a work of art (particularly, but not necessarily, a work of literature) that comes to be accepted by a tradition over a great period of time as embodying what is good and true. Traditions pride themselves on their classics, and that pride is based upon two different but related assumptions: that the classics are in a sense eternal-forever fixed, frozen in the amber of carefully preserved written documents-and that they provide a shared communal base for all educated members of the culture.
The Hindu examples to follow, however, show us that neither of these assumptions is true. Each generation is inspired differently by their classics and retranslates them. It may even be that the very defining characteristic of a classic is that it is a work that must be retranslated by each new generation.
Still, the core of meaning is preserved, even when the words of the translations change. Classics define themselves as being tied to a fixed core in the distant past, but the ties that bind the classic to its past change all the time. The Sanskrit tradition in India was continuous, unbroken for over three thousand years, but it changed constantly in the course of written retranslation and reinterpretation.
And even more radical are the changes that occur through performance. Yet when the classics are transformed in performance, we experience them as a group; this shared moment is an important source of the belief that such works are 'unchanging' classics. Thus even some of the 'written' classics are in fact experienced, in their most important form, orally.
India has two sorts of Sanskrit classics, typified by two great texts, the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata. The Rig Veda is a massive collection of hymns, a text of over 350,000 words (as long as the Iliad and Odyssey combined) that was preserved orally for over three thousand years; and the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, is a text of over three million words (almost ten times as long as the Rig Veda) that was preserved orally and in manuscript form for over two thousand years.
The relationship between orality and fluidity in these texts is the reverse of what one might expect if one simply extrapolated from what we think we know of classics. The Rig Veda was preserved orally even when the Hindus had used writing for centuries. They refused to preserve the Rig Veda in writing because it was a sacred magic text, whose power must not fall into the wrong hands.
Unbelievers and infidels, Dalits and women, were forbidden to learn Sanskrit, the sacred language, because they might defile or injure the magic power of the words; if the sacred chants were to be spoken by such people, it was believed, the words would be polluted like milk contained in the skin of a dog.i The text was, therefore, memorized in such a way that no physical traces of it could be found, much as a coded espionage message would be memorized and then destroyed (eaten, perhaps-orally destroyed) before it could fall into the hands of the enemy. This exclusively oral preservation also ensured that the Rig Veda could not be misused even in the right hands: You couldn't take the Rig Veda down off the shelf in a library, for you had to read it in the company of a wise teacher or guru, who would make sure that you were not injured by its power.
Now, one might suppose that a text preserved orally in this way would be subject to steadily encroaching inaccuracy and unreliability, that the message would become increasingly garbled like the message in a game of 'telephone'; but one would be wrong. For the same sacredness that made it necessary to preserve the Rig Veda orally rather than in writing also demanded that it be preserved with meticulous accuracy. The Rig Veda is regarded as a revealed text, seen in a vision or 'heard' (shruti) by the human seers to whom the gods dictated it.
And one does not play fast and loose with revelation. There are no significant variant readings of the Rig Veda, no detailed critical editions or textual apparatus. So much for the inevitable fluidity of oral texts.
For the Mahabharata grows out of the oral tradition and then grows back into the oral tradition; it flickers back and forth between Sanskrit manuscripts and village storytellers, each adding new bits to the old story, constantly reinterpreting it. The anonymity of the text makes it appear to be a part of communal experience, like a ritual, like the whole sky; the author is as fluid as the text. So much for the inevitable fixity of written texts.
To use the inside means to use the text in a fluid way, as one might use an oral text: to interrupt the recitation in order to ask about the meaning, to write a commentary, to choose only appropriate passages to recite on a particular occasion. However, to use the outside of the text means to use it in a rigid way, to read or recite it without necessarily knowing its meaning at all, to recite it without any care for the choice of an appropriate message.
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THE FLUIDITY OF TRUTH
A wonderful example of the degree to which this sort of plurality is both a widely shared cultural assumption and a still-debated open question is the manner in which the Jains told the story of the end of the Mahabharata: The great Jain sage Hemacandra went about lecturing to great crowds, telling them, among other things, that the Pandavas, the heroes of the Mahabharata, had become Jain monks at the end of their lives. Upon learning of this, the Brahmins of that city complained to the king, pointing out that in Vyasa's Mahabharata, the Pandavas died in the Himalayas, after propitiating Shiva.
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THE IMPERMANENCE OF MATERIAL ART
Like the fixity of written texts, the fixity of works of art turns out to be a mirage in India. We tend to think of art as permanent, perhaps as the only permanent thing there is. Storytelling is the only way that we know to ward off death; if only we could tell stories forever, like Scheherazade, we would never die at all.
We tend to embalm the written word, to accord enduring status to physical incarnations of art. Our libraries are full of books, our museums full of paintings, and these books and paintings are often the only surviving traces of lost civilizations. But in India, by and large, neither books nor paintings are assumed to have that sort of permanence.
In India, where the neglect of material objects is an article of Vedantic faith, all material art is fluid. It is the spoken word, not the written word, that is eternal. Sacred literature is eternal in being handed down first from god to mortals and then from one mortal to another (the infinite parampara), just as the individual soul survives in eternity by being handed over from one body to another.
In Maharashtra, large clay idols of Ganesha are similarly consigned to rivers or the sea at the end of the Ganesha Chaturthi festival. In Benares, too, life-sized clay images of Rama and Sita are made for the Ramlila festivals and then thrown away. The word used to describe this 'dismissal' or 'throwing out' of the statue is visarjana (cognate with visarga), the word used to describe the 'emission' of the universe-that is, its creation-by Brahma.
A fixed canonical tradition survives like a thread on which successive generations string their new interpretations and translations of the text. On the other hand, a fluid tradition survives like a series of interlocking beads, one fitting into the next, with no connecting physical thread. This lack of a centre corresponds to what has been observed of the concept of the self in India.
Some people tend to think of a person as analogous to an artichoke-peel away the leaves of the external, nonessential characteristics until you find the self at the centre. South Asians tend to think of a person as analogous to an onion: peel away the leaves and at the centre you find-nothing. Painting in India is not always intended to last.
In many domestic celebrations, women trace detailed designs in rice powder-kolam (or rangoli in North India)-on the floors and courtyards of houses. After the ceremony these are blurred and smudged into oblivion by the bare feet of the family, or, as the women think of it, the feet of the family carry into the house, from the threshold, the sacred material of the design. The material traces of ritual art must vanish in order that the mental traces remain intact forever.
So, too, the smearing out of the kolam is a way of defacing order so that one has to recreate it; it is a fleeting stay against inevitable confusion. It is as if a choice were made, somewhat like the choice that you make when viewing a beautiful scene in a foreign land: If you photograph it, you have preserved it (more or less) forever, but the act of photographing it may interfere not only with the full experience of it at the moment but with your own power to preserve it in memory.
The women who make these rice-powder designs sometimes explicitly refer to them as their equivalent of a Vedic sacrificial hall (yajnashala). Their sketches are referred to as 'writing'-once the only form of writing that women were allowed to have-and the designs are merely an aide-memoire for the patterns that the women carry in their heads, as some men carry the Vedas. So, too, the visual abstraction of such designs as the South Indian kolam is the woman's equivalent of the abstraction of Vedic literature, based as it is on geometry (the measurement of the sacrificial altar, one reason why mathematics developed so early in India) and grammar (the central paradigm out of which all sacred commentary develops).
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THE SURVIVAL OF MYTH THROUGH PERFORMANCE
In contrast with material art, verbal art has an astonishing survival power in India. Of all literary forms, drama best reproduces the effects of myth, most powerfully through the catharsis of the tragic drama, but also in the surreal humour of great comedy. In our day, drama (or film) often takes the place of the communal ritual that was a frequent (though certainly not inevitable) complement to traditional mythology.
And the myths survive in other modern avatars: Amar Chitra Katha ('Immortal Picture Stories') comics present the ancient Hindu classics in a strangely Westernized but still recognizably Hindu form. Although these comics are ostensibly written for children, many adults read them; and for some, they provide the only remaining source of the classical mythology. And there are other, even more unlikely cartoons in which the myths live on.
Hindus who may not know from the Rig Veda or the Mahabharata the story of the aged sage Chyavana, who was rejuvenated so that he could marry a beautiful young girl,35 may know the story from newspaper advertisements for a patent medicine called Chyavanprash ('Chyavana-food'). The ad begins with a Sanskrit verse that can be translated thus: 'This is the story of the Chyavana food that the sage Chyavana ate; even though he was worn out with old age, he became a joy to the eyes of women.' The verse is followed by a series of cartoon illustrations with descriptions below them, in English, telling the story of Chyavana.
This 'rejuvenating tonic', containing gooseberry, is said to be the one that the Ashvins, the divine physicians, gave to the old sage: 'Thus Chyavana was blessed with the special yoga and having consumed it he became a full-grown youth pleasing to the eyes of the women. Kottakkal Arya Vaidya Sala manufactures this potent tonic prescribed by the Divine Physicians in the traditional and conventional manner with scrupulous care and attention.' One way or another, through oral or written exposure, Hindus know their myths so well that the retelling of the myths takes on the function of communion rather than communication.
Many children's books function as classics, and as myths, in a way that no other works do. For these books provide a shared culture, as we give our children the books that we loved when we were children. Here is the one universal parampara or unbroken lineage of transmission in our world.
And in addition to this shared content, there is the shared form of the transmission, the performance of the classics: reading aloud to children is for many people the only moment when the oral element of the mythological traditions is still actively preserved. For India, too, is under pressure from the mobs of rationalists and modernizers to demythologize. True, the plays re-enacting the lives of Krishna (Krishna-lila) and Rama (Ram-lila) are still celebrated even in many highly urbanized settings, and people still travel from the cities to the country to see performances in their traditional settings.
But as people move from the villages to the cities, the professional storytellers-those who present the dance dramas of the myths or recite the long epics, in Sanskrit or in the vernacular of the district-lose part of their audience. And even more threatening than the possibility that the particular craft of the storytellers will die out is the undeniable fact that, already, the contexts for storytelling are fast dying out-the occasions when stories are told, the moments of quiet work at the loom or during the mending of nets, the long winter evenings around the fire.
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Shadows of the Ramayana
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SHADOWS OF THE RAMAYANA1
Rama enlisted the help of an army of monkeys and finally killed Ravana and brought Sita back home with him. But then he said he feared that his people worried that Sita's reputation, if not her chastity, had been sullied by her long sojourn in the house of another man. He forced Sita to undergo an ordeal by fire: she swore that she had always been faithful to Rama, called on the fire to protect her, and entered the blazing flame; but the god of Fire placed her in Rama's lap, assuring him that Sita had always been pure in thought as well as deed.
Rama is an incarnate god in the original Sanskrit text, though often he seems to forget that he is, and has to be reminded of it,4 and more often it does not seem to be an issue at all.i But even in Sanskrit, god is in the details, and the details of the Ramayana are what give it its character. More precisely, each of the major human characters has at least two doubles, a double among the monkeys who help Rama kill Ravana and retrieve Sita, and a double among the demons in the family of Ravana.
All the fun is in the monkeys and demons. The humans, and indeed the demons, also have a number of temporary doubles, illusions created at particular moments in the epic to fool someone. And, finally, in the later retellings of the Ramayana, the ones that came after Valmiki's Sanskrit text, the doubles proliferate to an even greater extent.
In addition, a number of myths are introduced as narrative shadows of the central plot, a few inserted in the main story, but most of them added in the first and last books (1 and 7).
These myths supply a constant commentary on the central story, within the text, developing over the centuries.
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HUMAN SHADOWS
Let us begin with human characters who serve as doubles of other characters within the Ramayana, and let us start with the females. There are a lot of females. The childless king Dasharatha obtains a magic porridge, infused with the essence of Vishnu, to share among his queens; he gives half to Kausalya, who bears him Rama; three-eighths to Sumitra, who bears him the twins Lakshmana and Shatrughna (each made of three-sixteenth of Vishnu); and one-eighth to Kaikeyi, who bears him Bharata.
When it is time for Rama, the eldest, to ascend the throne, Kaikeyi combines a reminder of past promises with sexual blackmail to force Dasharatha to put her son, Bharata, on the throne instead, and send Rama into exile, where Ravana steals Sita and the plot, as they say, thickens. Kaikeyi is the evil shadow of the good queen, Kausalya. But Kaikeyi herself is absolved of her evil by having it displaced onto the old hunchback Manthara, a servant, who corrupts Kaikeyi and forces her, against Kaikeyi's better judgement, to act as she does.
Shatrughna puns on Manthara's name, saying that it was she who churned up (manth) for them the ocean of grief, in which Kaikeyi was the sea-serpent (graha). [R 2.71.13] And much later, when Sita sees Ravana coming to kill her, she curses Manthara and blames her sinister counsels for bringing about the sufferings that will overwhelm Kausalya, the mother of Rama. On the other hand, when Shatrughna drags Manthara around, he yells curses on Kaikeyi.
In this text, even the shadows have shadows. Turning now to the male human doubles, we have seen that all four brothers are fragments of a single person, incarnations of Vishnu. Lakshmana functions as the shadow of Rama: Rama is called 'Saha-Lakshmana' ('With-Lakshmana') as if the accompaniment of his brother were a constant quality,5 like the colour of his eyes, and Lakshmana is the one who speaks out what Rama is too well-behaved to say.
After Dasharatha has disinherited and banished Rama, and Rama has quietly acquiesced, other people, but never Rama, complain loudly: first, briefly, Rama's mother, and then Lakshmana, who says, 'I don't like this. The king is perverse, old and debauched by pleasures. What would he not say under pressure, mad with passion as he is?
What son would take to heart the words of a king who has become a child again? Before anyone learns of this, let me help you seize control of the government. I will slaughter everyone who takes Bharata's side.
Now that the king has made me and you his enemies, who will help him make Bharata the king?' But Rama replies, 'It is not within my power to defy my father's bidding. I bow my head in supplication; I wish to go to the forest. I appreciate your love and loyalty, but you don't understand the meaning of life; give up your violence and be righteous like me.' Lakshmana can't bear it; he sighs and his eyes bulge.
Rama and Sita, after all, are human incarnations of the gods (Vishnu and Lakshmi) and must, therefore, display human emotions. This tension between the two brothers is a significant motivation for the plot. In the forest, Rama goes off to hunt a deer, and tells Lakshmana to guard Sita.
Sita thinks she hears Rama calling (it is a trick, about which more below) and urges Lakshmana to find and help Rama. Lakshmana says Rama can take care of himself. Sita, in her anxiety for her husband's safety, rages at Lakshmana, saying, 'You are so perverse.
You think that if Rama dies you can have me, but I will never let you possess me. Bharata has gotten you to follow Rama as his spy. And you've stayed here in order to get me … while pretending to be a friend.
And that's why you won't come to his aid. But I will never have anything to do with any man but Rama.' Lakshmana gets angry and stalks off, leaving Sita totally unprotected; and Ravana comes and gets Sita. When Rama returns, he says to Lakshmana, 'You should not have come here just because an angry woman teased you.
Submitting to Sita and to your own anger has caused you to violate dharma.' But Sita's accusation of Lakshmana is unfounded: when Rama, hunting for Sita, finds the cloak and jewels that she dropped as Ravana abducted her, and says to Lakshmana, 'Do you recognize any of this?' Lakshmana replies, 'I have never looked at any part of Sita but her feet, so I recognize the anklets, but not the rest of her things.' Finally, after Sita has been restored and rejected (about which, more below), Rama is tricked into having to kill Lakshmana. This happens as the result of a rather elaborate (but not atypical, in this epic) set of vows and curses.
Death, incarnate, comes to talk with Rama and makes him promise to kill anyone who tries to interrupt them; Lakshmana guards the door. An ascetic arrives and threatens to destroy the world if Lakshmana won't let him see Rama; Lakshmana therefore interrupts Rama and Death, choosing the lesser of two evils: his own death. Rama then says that, for Lakshmana, being separated from him (Rama) would be so terrible that it would be the equivalent of death, and so he satisfies the curse by merely banishing Lakshmana-who then commits suicide.
When he approaches Sita, on the island of Lanka [5.30], he anxiously debates with himself precisely what language he will use to address her: 'If I assume a human form and speak Sanskrit like a sage, Sita will think I am Ravana [as she mistook the real Ravana, a notorious shape-changer, for an ascetic sage] and will be terrified. But I must speak with a human tongue, or else I cannot encourage her. Yet she will think I am Ravana, who can take any form he wants.
And she will scream, and we will all be killed.' He finally does address her in Sanskrit, and she is suitably impressed. Monkeys are like people, and special monkeys are the sons of gods, as special people are.iv Monkeys function as the shadows of Lakshmana, Rama and Bharata. In the human world, Rama's father Dasharatha has put Bharata, the younger brother, on the throne in place of Rama, the eldest, and exiled Rama to the forest; Lakshmana and Sita go with him.
In the forest, where humans understand the speech of monkeys, after Ravana has stolen Sita, Rama and Lakshmana meet Sugriva, who used to be the king of the monkeys and claims that his brother Valin stole his wife and throne. Rama sides with Sugriva and murders Valin by shooting him in the back, an episode that has troubled the South Asian tradition for centuries, to this very day. Apparently because Rama senses a parallel between his situation and that of Sugriva and, therefore, sides with Sugriva against his brother: each of them has lost his wife and has a brother occupying the throne that was to be his.
But if Sugriva is Rama, who is Valin? The answer to this question lies in the more specific parallels between the things that happen to the monkey brothers and the things that happen to the human brothers. For instance, when Sugriva first sees Rama and Lakshmana, he thinks Valin sent them, just as Lakshmana, seeing Bharata approach them in the forest, thinks he has come to fight them.
Both of them are wrong, overreacting with a kind of paranoia. After Lakshmana has told Hanuman of Rama's troubles, Hanuman says to Rama, speaking of Sugriva, 'He is exiled from his kingdom and is hated by his brother Valin, who has stolen his wife and left him abandoned in the forest.' Now, this is not exactly true of Sugriva; the first point is pretty true (he is exiled), but the second is not (Valin doesn't hate Sugriva; Sugriva hates Valin), and the third is not exactly true either: Sugriva carried off Valin's consort first, and when Valin retaliated, Sugriva fled out of guilt and terror.
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ILLUSORY DOUBLES IN THE RAMAYANA: THE SHADOW SITA
The deer that lures Rama away so that Ravana can gain access to Sita is not a real deer: Ravana persuades his pal the demon Maricha to appear as a golden deer to lure Rama and Lakshmana away from protecting Sita, and then he himself appears as an ascetic to lure Sita out of the safe area. From the very start of this episode, Sita is fooled and insists that Rama go after the deer; she is also fooled when the demon mimics Rama's voice calling for help, and she insists that Lakshmana go to him, ignoring Lakshmana's wise warning that it is probably just a demonic imitation.
[R 3.42.14, 3.43.1-10, 21-3] Demons, of course, are masters of illusion: Ravana's son produces an illusion of Sita being killed in order to dishearten Rama in the battle, [R 6.68.1-28] and Ravana attempts, in vain, to bed Sita by producing the illusion of the severed head of her husband; Sita falls for it but grieves without seeking comfort from Ravana, and the illusory head vanishes when Ravana leaves. [R 6.31] In later Ramayanas, many more illusory doubles spring up, but by far the most important is the shadow Sita.
The fifteenth-century Adhyatmaramayana found it necessary to exculpate Sita not only from being present in Ravana's home but from the weakness of asking Rama to capture the golden deer for her. This illusory deer, however, may have inspired the Adhyatma-ramayana to create the illusory Sita who now desires the deer: Rama, knowing what Ravana intended to do, told Sita, 'Ravana will come to you disguised as an ascetic; put a shadow of yourself outside the hut, and go inside the hut yourself.
Now he is dead, and that Sita has disappeared.' Thus Rama creates the shadow but suffers as if he had been helpless to protect his wife. And where Sita's desire for the deer in the Valmiki text proves that she can't recognize a substitute deer, in this text she gets a substitute who can't recognize the substitute deer. In a later Sanskrit text, the shadow Sita goes on to have a life of her own as a woman notorious for having five husbands: One day when Sita and Rama were in the forest, the god of Fire came to Rama, took the true Sita, constructed an illusory shadow Sita, with qualities, form and limbs equal to hers, and gave her to Rama.
He told Rama not to divulge the secret to anyone; even Rama's brother Lakshmana did not know. Eventually, Rama subjected (the shadow) Sita to the ordeal of fire and Fire restored the real Sita to Rama. But then the shadow Sita asked Rama and Fire, 'What shall I do?' Fire told her to go to the Pushkara shrine, and there she generated tapas and was reborn as Draupadi.
In the Golden Agevii she is called Vedavati; in the Second Age, she is [the shadow] Sita. And in the Third Age, the shadow is Draupadi. This shadow, who was in the prime of her youth, was so nervous and excited with lust when she asked Shiva for a husband that she repeated her request five times.
As history (in the form of epigraphs and inscriptions, proclamations and panegyrics) claimed the epic for its paradigms, religious texts claimed it all the more for the ahistorical item of eternity. The Hindus developed the shadow Sita over centuries of occupation by an invasive foreign presence. For, in the twelfth century, the Ramayana became a paradigm for a certain sort of history in response to the Turkic presence in India;19 it began to be used to demonize historical figures, to cast them as actors in the Ramayana battle.
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SHADOWS OF THE PLOT: RAVANA AS SEXUAL PREDATOR
Over the centuries, Sita's fire ordeal has proved problematic for different reasons to different South Asians, from pious apologists who were embarrassed by the god's unfair treatment of his wife, to feminists who saw in Sita's acceptance of the 'cool' flames, in Tulsi's telling, and in the connection with Sati, an alarming precedent for women who become satis. Both North and South Indians identified Rama with the North and Ravana with the South; but the North demonized the 'Dravidian' Ravana, the South the 'Aryan' Rama.
And as the Ramayana became increasingly problematic, even during the centuries immediately following its recension, another kind of shadowing took place: a number of myths were introduced into the text as shadows of the central plot. Many of these myths occur in Books 1 and 7, a kind of prelude and postlude that were most likely afterthoughts, composed after the other books. Though only loosely connected to the plot, these myths set the stage by establishing precedents for some of the irregular behaviour that we will encounter once the central story gets under way; their relevance to the main story inspired the storyteller[s] to select them rather than some of the many other myths that were available at that time.
The ascetic Rishyashringa, born when his father is aroused by a female antelope, introduces us to intimate contact with animals, preparing us for the lustful monkeys; the demoness Tataka poses a moral dilemma (Should you kill a woman if she is herself a murderess?) that Rama will face with Shurpanakha. Most relevant of all is the story of Ahalya, which tells us the origin of adultery, and tells it twice. Both times, Indra, the king of the gods, seduces Ahalya, the wife of the sage Gautama.
The second time, in Book 7, Indra simply takes Ahalya by force. Though Gautama curses her for being loose, or unsteady, and led astray by her beauty, the text gives no evidence of this. The fact that she was raped should, we might assume, absolve Ahalya of any misdoing: she was helpless.
Indra takes the form of Gautama, but merely by putting on the sage's clothing; Ahalya immediately recognizes him but nevertheless willingly goes to bed with him, 'because she was sexually curious about the king of the gods'. Gautama curses her to become invisible; Sita, too, was rendered invisible when she was merely vulnerable to a rape. The complexities of the tale of Ahalya with Indra nuance and to some extent problematize the parallel but not identical complexities of the tale of Sita with Ravana.
But that story, too, has explicit multiple variants, one of which is in the last book, the book of afterthoughts. Rama banishes Sita twice (just as Indra seduces Ahalya twice); the first time, in Book 6, Sita goes into the fire but comes back again; the second time, in Book 7, she plunges down into the earth, her mother, and does not come back again. Was there something unsatisfactory about the first banishment, to inspire all those doubles to go into the fire in Sita's place?
Perhaps it moved some poet to add on another, more final and more noble exit for Sita. Book 7 also resolves a puzzle, closely related to the puzzle of Rama's banishment of Sita, that must have baffled readers and hearers: why does Ravana, demonic in every other way, not use force to make Sita submit to him? When Ravana carries Sita off, he tries to seduce her with words and threats, but never by force.
The author of Book 7 explains Ravana's reticence by citing a curse put upon him after his rape of Rambha: One day, when Ravana was full of passion, he saw the celestial courtesan Rambha and went mad with lust for her. She reminded him that she was his daughter-in-law, more precisely the wife of Nalakubara, the son of Ravana's brother Vaishravana. But Ravana replied, 'You say you are my daughter-in-law.
For those who have but one husband, this argument is valid, but in their world the gods have established a law said to be eternal, that celestial courtesans have no appointed consorts, nor are the gods monogamous.' Then he raped her. When he released her she ran home, trembling with fear, and told her husband, who said, 'Since he raped you brutally, despite your lack of desire for him, he will never be able to approach another young woman unless she shares his desire.
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Women in the Mahabharata
As soon as she was born, a disembodied voice said, 'This dark, fair-waisted woman, best of women, will be the death of the Kshatriyas.
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WOMEN IN THE MAHABHARATA1
As soon as she was born, a disembodied voice said, 'This dark, fair-waisted woman, best of women, will be the death of the Kshatriyas.
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THE BIRTHS OF THE AUTHOR AND THE HEROES
The new attention paid to women in the Mahabharata emerges clearly from the stories of the births of both its legendary author, Vyasa, and its heroes: Once a fisherman caught a fish, found a baby girl in its belly, and raised her as his daughter. A powerful Brahmin sage seduced the fisherman's daughter, Satyavati, as she ferried him across the river. She gave birth to her first son, Vyasa, on an island in the river, and abandoned him (he had instantly grown to manhood).
The sage restored her virginity (and removed her fishy smell). [1.57.32-75] Vyasa is of mixed lineage, not merely Brahmin and Kshatriya (for though Satyavati's mother was a fish, her father was a king; it's a long story) but human and animal (for his grandparents were a Kshatriya, a female fish, and, presumably, a Brahmin man and woman). This double miscegenation will be repeated several times, always with variations, in this lineage.
The birth of Vyasa's natural sons (Satyavati's grandsons) is more complex and problematic: Satyavati later married king Shantanu and gave birth to another son, who became king but died childless, leaving two widows, the Kshatriya princesses Ambika and Ambalika. Satyavati, who did not want the lineage to end, summoned Vyasa to father children with his half-brother's widows. Vyasa was ugly and foul-smelling; his beard was red, his hair orange.
Since Ambika closed her eyes when she conceived her son, Dhritarashtra, Vyasa cursed him to be born blind. Ambalika turned pale and conceived Pandu the Pale. When Vyasa was sent to Ambika a second time, she sent in her place a slave girl (dasi).
Where Rama and his three brothers have three mothers and separate wives but share both a single human father and a single divine father, the five Pandavas have two mothers (and one wife) and one human father but different divine fathers. In this disastrous Levirate, two wives give birth to three sons (two of whom have, for great-grandparents, a female fish, two Brahmins and five Kshatriyas, while the third has a Kshatriya, a female fish, two Brahmins and four slaves. In fact, the arrangement was originally more symmetrical, for there had been a third woman, Amba,ii who had been carried off by Bhishma, yet another son of Satyavati's husband Shantanu (it's another long storyiii); but she departs before Vyasa arrives on the scene, and she eventually dies in a complex transsexual act of revenge against Bhishma (yet another long storyiv).
Ambika's and Ambalika's hatred of their surrogate lover, though much milder than Amba's hatred of Bhishma, results not in their deaths or his but in a confusion over the throne, because the women's recoiling from Vyasa produces physical disabilities in their children that disqualify them from the kingship: blindness, pallor, and low class. This confusion leads to war and ultimately to the destruction of almost all the descendants of Pandu and Dhritarashtra. The Mahabharata goes on to tell us how, in the next generation, Pandu was cursed to die if he ever made love with any of his wives, for having mistaken a mating man for a mating stag.
[1.90.64; 1.109.5-30]v Fortunately, Pandu's wife, Kunti, had a mantra that allowed her to invoke gods as proxy fathers of Pandu's sons: Dharma (who fathered Yudhishthiravi), the Wind (father of Bhima), and Indra (father of Arjuna). [1.90, 1.101] Kunti then generously lent her mantra to Madri, Pandu's second wife, who invoked the Ashvins to father the twins Nakula and Sahadeva. Years later, Pandu seduced Madri one day when he was overcome by desire for her; he died, in fulfilment of the stag's curse and in imitation of the stag's death: a fatal coitus interruptus, the sweet death transformed into a bitter death.
But Kunti had already had one son, secretly, out of wedlock: when she was still a young girl, she had decided to try out her mantra, just fooling around. The Sun god, Surya, took her seriously; despite her vigorous protests and entreaties, he raped her and afterwards restored her virginity.vii She gave birth to Karna, whom she abandoned in shame; a charioteer and his wife adopted him and raised him as their own. [1.104; 3.290-294; 5.144.1-9] Karna is in many ways the inverse of Vidura: where Vidura is an incarnate god, raised royally, and has both a surrogate father (Vyasa) and a surrogate mother (the maid in place of Ambika), Karna is of royal birth, raised as a servant, and has a divine father (Surya), a royal mother (Kunti), and two low-class surrogate parents (the charioteers).
Beneath the sterile or impotent fathers lie angry women. The lineage of the heroes is a series of seductions and rapes: of Satyavati, Amba, Ambika, Ambalika, Kunti and Madri. For Satyavati and Kunti, the seducer or rapist restores the woman's virginity afterwards and the resulting children are abandoned, as if to erase the entire incident, or at least to exculpate the women.
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POLYANDRY
Other events in the lives of these women suggest their unprecedented and, alas, never again duplicated freedom. Polyandry (multiple husbands) is rampant in the Mahabharata, and the text offers us, in four consecutive generations, positive images of women who had several sexual partners (sometimes premarital). Satyavati has two sexual partners (her legitimate husband Shantanu and the sage who fathers Vyasa on the island).
Ambika and Ambalika have two legitimate partners (the king who dies and Vyasa, through the Levirate). Kunti has one husband (Pandu, legitimate but unconsummated) and four sexual partners (gods, quasi-legitimate). Madri has three partners (Pandu, legitimate and fatally consummated, and two quasi-legitimate gods).
Another Mahabharata queen, named Madhavi, sells herself to four kings in succession, for several hundred horses each time, and restores her own virginity after each encounter. [5.113-117] But the prize goes to Draupadi, who has five legitimate husbands-the five Pandavas. Her polyandrous pentad is truly extraordinary, for though polygyny (multiple wives) was the rule, and men could have several spouses throughout most of Hindu history (as, indeed, each of the Pandavas, except Yudhishthira, had at least one wife in addition to Draupadi-Arjuna had three more), women most decidedly could not.
Since there is no other evidence that women at this time actually had multiple husbands, these stories can only be suggestive, if not incontrovertible, evidence either of women's greater sexual freedom or, perhaps, of men's fears of what might happen were women to have that freedom. Draupadi's hyper-sexuality may simply have validated an ideal that was understood to be out of reach for ordinary women-imagined precisely in order to be disqualified as a viable option. What else, then, can these stories mean?
Hindus at this period were apparently troubled by Draupadi's polyandry, for which the Mahabharata gives three different excuses (always a cause for suspicion). First, it says that Arjuna won Draupadi in a contest and brought her home to present her to his mother; as he and his brothers approached the house, they called out, 'Look what we got!' and she, not looking up, said, as any good mother would say, 'Share it together among you all.' [1.182] And so all five brothers married Draupadi.
Not content with this rather far-fetched explanation, the Mahabharata tries again: Vyasa says that all five Pandavas are really incarnations of Indra,viii and Draupadi the incarnation of Shri (the goddess of Prosperity, the wife of Indra and of all kings).ix Still not satisfied, Vyasa offers a third explanation: The daughter of a great sage longed in vain for a husband; she pleased the god Shiva, who offered her a boon, and she asked for a virtuous husband. But she asked again and again, five times, and so Shiva said, 'You will have five virtuous husbands.' And that is why she married the five Pandavas.
She objected, saying that it is against the law for a woman to have more than one husband, for then there would be promiscuity; moreover, her one husband should have her as a virgin. But Shiva reassured her that a woman is purified every month with her menses and therefore there would be no lapse from dharma in her case, since she had asked repeatedly for a husband. Then she asked him if she could be a virgin again for each act of sexual union, and he granted this, too.
[1.189; 1.1.157] Like other polyandrous women whose virginities were restored, sometimes after premarital seduction or rape, Draupadi will be restored to purity each month after willing conjugal sex. In this case there is no need to justify or purify her, but there is a perceived need, if she has a different husband each month, to avoid promiscuity-samkara, 'con-fusion' or 'mixing', the same word that is used for the reprehensible mixture of classes. The mythological extemporizings were not sufficient to protect Draupadi from frequent slurs against her chastity.
When Duryodhana has Draupadi dragged into the assembly hall (much as Rama summons Sita to the public assembly) and Duhshasana attempts to strip her, despite the fact that she is wearing a garment soiled with her menstrual blood (the same blood that was supposed to purify her), the enemies of the Pandavas justify their insults to her by arguing that a woman who sleeps with five men must be a slut. [2.61.34-36] Yet all her children are legitimate; they are called the Draupadeyas, 'Children of Draupadi', by a matronymic, which may be nothing more than a way of getting around the awkward fact that, though she is said to have one son from each husband, people often lose track of which Pandava fathered which son.
Yet the power of Draupadi's own dharma-her unwavering devotion to her husband(s)-is what protects her when Duhshasana tries to strip her; every time he pulls off her sari, another appears to cover her nakedness, until there is a great heap of silk beside her, and Duhshasana gives up; the implication is that her chastity protects her. [2.61.40-45]xi The text often reminds us that Draupadi is no mere mortal but a creature from another world; there is a prediction that Draupadi will lead the Kshatriyas to their destruction, fulfilling the gods' intention.
[1.155] How different the lives of actual women in India would have been had Draupadi, instead of Sita, been their official role model! Many Hindus name their daughters Sita, but few name them Draupadi. Yet Kunti and Draupadi are two of the panchakanya, the "five virgins" that Hindus remember daily at dawn.
It is always possible that the Mahabharata was recording a time when polyandry was the custom (as it is nowadays in parts of the Himalaya), but there is no evidence to support this contention. Indeed, Pandu tells Kunti another story explicitly remarking upon an archaic promiscuity that is no longer in effect, pointedly reminding her, and any women who may have heard (or read) the text, that female promiscuity was an ancient option no longer available to them:xii The great sage Shvetaketu was a hermit, people say.
Once, they say, right before the eyes of Shvetaketu and his father, a Brahmin grasped Shvetaketu's mother by the hand and said, 'Let's go!' The sage's son became enraged and could not bear to see his mother being taken away by force like that. But when his father saw that Shvetaketu was angry he said, 'Do not be angry, my little son. The women of all classes on earth are not fenced in; all creatures behave just like cows, my little son, each in its own class.' The sage's son could not tolerate that dharma, and made this moral boundary for men and women on earth, for humans, but not for other creatures.
And from then on, we hear, this moral boundary has stood: A woman who is unfaithful to her husband commits a mortal sin that brings great misery, an evil equal to killing an embryo, and a man who seduces another man's wife, when she is a woman who keeps her vow to her husband and is thus a virgin obeying a vow of chastity, that man too commits a mortal sin on earth. [1.113.9-20] What begins as a rape somehow concludes with a law against willing female adultery, as uncontrollable male sexuality is projected onto the control of allegedly oversexed women.
Pandu tells this story to Kunti in order to persuade her that it is legal for her to give him children by sleeping with an appointed Brahmin,xiii an emergency plan that prompts her then to tell him about the mantra by which she can summon the gods to father her children; he is thus carefully distinguishing the permitted Brahmin from the loose-cannon Brahmin in the Shvetaketu story. We recognize Shvetaketu as a hero of the Upanishads, the boy whose father teaches him the doctrine of the two paths;xiv here, his father defends promiscuity, using cows as paradigms not, as is usual, of motherly purity, but of bovine licence-so cows, of all things, here become the exemplars of primeval female promiscuity.
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FIERY WOMEN
Other women in the Mahabharata show remarkable courage and intelligence, too, but their courage is often used in subservience to their husbands. The wives of the two patriarchs, Pandu and the blind Dhritarashtra, are paradigms of such courage. Gandhari, the wife of Dhritarashtra, kept her eyes entirely blindfolded from the day of her marriage to him, in order to share his blindness.
Pandu's widows vied for the privilege of dying on his pyre. When he died, Madri mounted his funeral pyre, for, she insisted, 'My desire has not been satisfied, and he too was cheated of his desire as he was lying with me, so I will not cut him off from his desire in the house of death.' [1.116.26] This is a most unusual justification for a sati, Madri's intention being not merely to join her husband in heaven (as other satis will state as their motivation), but to complete the sexual act in heaven.
Yet Kunti, too, wishes to die on Pandu's pyre, without the peculiar justification of coitus interruptus, but simply because she is the first wife. One of them must remain alive to care for both their children; Madri gets her way and mounts the pyre.xvii Kunti and Gandhari later die alongside Dhritrarashtra in a forest fire from which they make no attempt to escape. [15.37] Finally, the four wives of Vasudeva (the father of Krishna) immolate themselves on Vasudeva's pyre and join him in heaven; they were all permitted to die because by this time all their children were dead.
[16.8.16-24] The association of women with fire is worthy of note. Draupadi, who does not die on her husbands' funeral pyres (because [a] she dies before them and [b] they don't have funeral pyres-they walk up into heaven at the end of the story), begins rather than ends her life in fire: she is born out of her father's fire-altar: Drupada performed a sacrifice in order to get a son who would kill his enemy, Drona. As the oblation was prepared, the priest summoned the queen to receive the oblation and let the king impregnate her, but she took so long to put on her perfume for the occasion that the priest made the oblation directly into the fire, and so the son was born out of the fire, not out of the queen.
And after the son came a daughter: Draupadi. As soon as she was born, a disembodied voice said, 'This dark woman, best of women, will be the death of the Kshatriyas.
[1.155.1-51] Draupadi, born of fire, is significantly motherless, like Sita, who was born of the Earth and returns into the Earth-after she has entered fire and come out of it. Like Sita, Draupadi is an elemental goddess who is often called ayonija ('born from no womb') and follows her husband(s) to the forest. In Draupadi's case, the absence of the expected mother is balanced by the unexpected presence of the daughter.
Indeed, the tales of polyandry may reflect the male redactors' nightmare vision of where all that autonomy might lead.
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Essay cycle 234
The History of Ekalavya
How does one go about telling the story of Hinduism by including the maverick as well as the mainstream Hindus in the story? The ancient Sanskrit texts, usually dismissed as the work of Brahmin males, in fact reveal a great deal about the lower castes, often very sympathetic to them.
On Hinduism flow 235
THE HISTORY OF EKALAVYA1
How does one go about telling the story of Hinduism by including the maverick as well as the mainstream Hindus in the story? The ancient Sanskrit texts, usually dismissed as the work of Brahmin males, in fact reveal a great deal about the lower castes, often very sympathetic to them. Tracing these stories through the centuries, we can see how the attitudes to these marginalized groups constantly shifted.
One important group of oppressed peoples is constituted by the Adivasis ('original inhabitants'), the so-called tribal peoples of India, on the margins both geographically and ideologically, sometimes constituting a low caste, sometimes remaining outside the caste system altogether. As we have seen elsewhere in this book,i there have been protests against the mistreatment of the lower castes from an early age in India. Evidence of this can be found, if we look carefully, in the Sanskrit texts: the lower castes leave their traces in upper-caste literature, as themes and voices from oral and folk traditions find their way into the texts.
These signs represent a beginning, a prelude to reform; they do change the world, even if only by imagining a world in which people treated Dalits well.
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EKALAVYA CUTS OFF HIS THUMB
Let me take as my example the story of Ekalavya. The earliest version that we have is from the Mahabharata. It goes like this: Drona was the Pandavas' archery tutor, and Arjuna was his star pupil.
One day a boy named Ekalavya, the son of a Tribal (Nishada) chieftain, came to them. When Drona, who knew dharma, refused to accept the son of a Nishada as a pupil, Ekalavya touched his head to Drona's feet, went out into the jungle, and made a clay image of Drona, to which he paid the respect due a teacher. He practiced intensely and became a great archer.
One day the Pandavas went out hunting with their dog. The dog wandered off and got lost; he came upon Ekalavya, who was black, wrapped in black deerskin, hair all matted, dressed in rags, his body caked with dirt. The dog stood there barking at him until Ekalavya shot seven arrows almost simultaneously into the dog's mouth.
The dog, with his mouth full of arrows, went whimpering back to the Pandavas, who expressed their admiration for the man who had accomplished this amazing feat of archery and went to find him. They found him and asked him who he was, and he told them he was the Nishada Ekalavya, a pupil of Drona's. Only then did they recognize him.
The Pandavas went home, but Arjuna kept thinking about Ekalavya, and one day he asked Drona why he had a pupil, the son of a Nishada, who was an even better archer than he, Arjuna. Drona then resolved to do something about this. He took Arjuna with him to see Ekalavya, and when he found him he said to Ekalavya, 'If you are my pupil, pay me my fee right now.' Ekalavya, delighted, said, 'Command me, my guru.
There is nothing I will not give my guru.' Drona replied, 'Give me your right thumb.' When Ekalavya heard this terrible speech from Drona, he kept his promise. His face showed his joy in it, and his mind was entirely resolved to do it. He cut off his thumb and gave it to Drona.
And after that, when Ekalavya shot an arrow, his fingers were not so quick as before. [M 1.123.10-39] This is a brutal story, even for the Mahabharata, which tells many a brutal tale. How are we to understand it?
First of all, who is Ekalavya? He is a prince among his own people, but that wins him no points with the Pandava princes. The Nishadas here are a low-caste tribal group who embrace Hindu dharma and Hindu forms of worship but are still beneath the contempt of the caste system.
For such a person to stand beside the Pandava princes in archery classes was unthinkable; that is what Drona, who 'knew dharma', realized. In order to protect both dharma and the reputation of his own world-class archery student, Drona claims his retroactive tuition, called the guru-dakshina, the gift to the guru. Of course we are shocked; to add insult to injury, Drona really didn't teach Ekalavya at all, and hardly deserves any tuition fees, let alone such a grotesque payment.
But where is the author's sympathy? It is hard to be sure. It is arrogant of Ekalavya to push in where he does not belong; someone of his birth and family cannot join the royal archers.
But Ekalavya does not act arrogant. His outward appearance invokes all the conventional tropes for Nishadas: he is described as black, wrapped in black deerskin, hair all matted, dressed in rags, his body caked with dirt. He is made of the wrong stuff (or, as we would say, has the wrong genes).
But his inner soul, reflected in his behaviour, is pious and respectful; he does what the teacher tells him to do; not only is he a brilliant archer, but he is honest and humble. To this extent, at least, the Mahabharata likes him and, presumably, pities him; it refers to Drona's command as 'terrible' (daruna). Yet the act by which Ekalavya proves his mettle as an archer is one of gratuitous and grotesque cruelty to a dog, the animal that is in many ways the animal counterpart, even the totem, of a Nishada.ii The dog barks at him, betraying the class attitude that dogs often pick up from their masters; the dog doesn't like the way Ekalavya looks and, probably, smells.
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THE LEGACY OF EKALAVYA
Whatever the spirit in which the tale of Ekalavya was originally told, it continued to be remembered among people crying out for social reform. A glance at later versions of the same story supports some of the hypothetical meanings that we have hunted out of the original telling and suggests, but certainly does not prove, that the seed of those later responses may already have been there in the Sanskrit text, or at least that there may have been other readings of this episode besides the original one we have, with other evidence of moral conscience, to bridge the gap between the first recorded telling and the later versions that explicitly call out for justice.v There is a Jain text from the sixteenth century that begins much like the Mahabharata story of Ekalavya, but then gives the protagonist a different tribe (he is a Bhilla rather than a Nishada), and a different name, and veers in a very different direction: Arjuna learned the entire science of archery from Drona and became as it were another image (murti) of Drona, and honoured him with many gems, pearls, gold, elephants, horses and so forth.
The guru said to him, 'Arjuna, choose a boon.' Arjuna replied, 'Sir, if you are satisfied with me, let there be no one but me who knows such a science of archery.' Thinking, 'The words of great gurus can never fail to come true,' Drona agreed. One day, a certain Bhilla, named Bhimala, living on the banks of the Ganga in the land of Karnata, came and asked Drona to be his guru; obtaining his promise, he went back to his own place and made an image (murti) of Drona out of mud, and honoured it with flowers and sandalwood and so forth, and said, 'Drona, give me the knowledge of archery,' and practised the science of archery in front of him.
And with his mind and heart full of the emotion of passionate devotion to him (bhakti), the Bhilla after a certain time became like a second Arjuna. One day, Arjuna, following Drona who had gone in front to take a bath in the Ganga, saw that the mouth of his dog was filled with arrows that had not pierced his upper lip, lower lip, palate, tongue or teeth. Thinking, 'No one but me has such a power,' Arjuna was amazed, and going forward by following along the arrows from his dog's mouth he saw the Bhilla and asked him, 'Who shot these arrows into the dog's mouth?' 'I did.' 'Who is your guru?' 'Drona is my guru.' Hearing that, Arjuna reported this to Drona and then said, 'Hey, master.
This is the fruit of my bhakti.' But the sneaky, cheating Arjuna said to him, 'Bhilla, with your great zeal, you must do puja with the thumb of your right hand for this Drona whom you met through us.' The Bhilla said, 'Yes,' and did it.
Indeed, Drona has agreed to be the Bhilla's guru at the start, and, at the end, grants him superior skill in archery, despite Arjuna's attempts to nobble him. The image of Drona that the Bhilla makes of mud is now matched by other, flesh-and-blood images: Arjuna is the image of Drona, and the Bhilla is the image of Arjuna, hence of Drona. Altogether, the Bhilla comes off smelling like a rose, and Arjuna does not.
Another Jain telling of this story, from the seventeenth century,4 veers back towards the Mahabharata reading of the event. The tribal hunter does pierce the dog's mouth with his arrows, and Arjuna uses this in his argument to Drona, saying, 'O lord, that hunter in the forest, invoking your name, kills beings. Surely an art shines only when it is practised by the righteous.
O lord, only a jewel set in gold attracts the heart of the world, not one set in tin. In the same manner this art when practised by a hunter does not appear proper.' And the text continues: So Drona asked the tribal for his thumb. For indeed, arts are fruitful only to those who do what is pleasing to the teacher.
Hearing his words, that hunter, brave and courageous, constrained by the weight of his devotion, cut off his thumb and offered it to him. The teacher destroyed his art (of archery) by a pretext but pleased that lowly hunter by offering him his own thumb ring. Then he returned home with Arjuna.
Thinking only thus, 'An art that has been imparted to an unworthy person might quickly lead to evil acts. But the same art, when it is associated with one who is well-qualified with accomplishments, yields sweet results,' the venerable teacher, who knows the result of compassion towards beings, took back that art from him, and not out of hatred towards him. This text does not name Ekalavya, but calls him an alien (Dasyu) and a forest-dweller.
This time he does not take pains to save the dog from suffering, and this is Arjuna's excuse to destroy him on what the text admits is Drona's 'pretext' (the rule of the guru-dakshina), designed to destroy his art of archery. The text then leans over backwards to justify Drona's action, insisting that he was compassionate and that he did not hate the hunter, and stating that he 'pleased that lowly hunter by offering him his own thumb ring,' a dubious compensation.
Knowing all of this, we can see other possible multiple readings of the story even in the Mahabharata. There is a two-way conversation going on between the Hindu and Jain texts, an intertextual conversation. The Jain texts quote the Hindu Mahabharata, an example of the widespread intertextuality between religions in India, not just within Hinduism.
Eklavya, whom the film calls an Untouchable Tribal, is the king's bodyguard and has secretly fathered the son and daughter of the impotent king. The film opens with a sequence in which Eklavya tells the story of Ekalavya to the royal children, who are still very young and subject it to an innocent moral commentary. This is how Eklavya tells the story: In the ancient times of the Mahabharata, a tribal boy wanted to learn the art of archery.
He went to the great guru Drona, but Drona refused. He was mentor to princes and kings. How could he teach a low-caste tribal?
He made a statue of Drona, called it his guru, and practiced archery night and day. One day, Drona was out hunting. Seven arrows had sealed its mouth shut.
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Essay cycle 239
On Hinduism flow 240
‘I Have Scinde’: Orientalism and Guilt
'I HAVE SCINDE': ORIENTALISM AND GUILT1 Let me begin with a story about General Sir Charles James Fox Napier, who was born in 1782 and in 1839 was made commander of Sind (or Scinde, as it was often spelled at that time, or Sindh), an area at the western tip of the Northwest quadrant of South Asia, directly above the Rann of Kutch; in 1947 it became part of Pakistan. In 1843, Napier manoeuvred to provoke a resistance that he then crushed and used as a pretext to conquer the territory for the British Empire.
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ON HINDUISM
'I HAVE SCINDE': ORIENTALISM AND GUILT1 Let me begin with a story about General Sir Charles James Fox Napier, who was born in 1782 and in 1839 was made commander of Sind (or Scinde, as it was often spelled at that time, or Sindh), an area at the western tip of the Northwest quadrant of South Asia, directly above the Rann of Kutch; in 1947 it became part of Pakistan. In 1843, Napier manoeuvred to provoke a resistance that he then crushed and used as a pretext to conquer the territory for the British Empire.
In 1851 he quarrelled with James Broun-Ramsay, the Marquess of Dalhousie (Governor General of India from 1848 to 1856) and left India. In 1844, the following item appeared in a British publication in London, under the title 'Foreign Affairs': It is a common idea that the most laconic military despatch ever issued was that sent by Caesar to the Horse-Guards at Rome, containing the three memorable words, 'Veni, vidi, vici' ['I came, I saw, I conquered'], and, perhaps, until our own day, no like instance of brevity has been found.
The despatch of Sir Charles Napier, after the capture of Scinde, to Lord Ellenborough, both for brevity and truth, is, however, far beyond it. The despatch consisted of one emphatic word-'Peccavi,' 'I have Scinde' (sinned). The joke here depends upon the translation of the Latin word peccavi, which is the first person singular of the perfect tense, active voice, of the verb pecco, peccare, 'to sin', from which are derived our English words 'impeccable' (someone who never sins) and 'peccadillo' (a small sin).
The shift from the text of history to the hypertext of journalism is significant: the idea of the sin was initially a writer's idea, not a general's. With this in mind, let us unpack the myth a bit more. Besides the two meanings I've mentioned ('I have conquered Sindh' and 'I have committed a moral error'), there is a third, which we discover if we heed the good advice of Marshall McLuhan, who taught us that the medium is the message; for the medium in this case is Latin.
But it is not easy to make Satan obey when one is a conquerer.'21 Napier was also capable of equivocating, as when he wrote of the Sind campaign: 'I may be wrong, but I cannot see it, and my conscience will not be troubled.
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GUILT AND ANTI-ORIENTALISM
The sense of sin is not usually a part of the discussion of the story of Napier, but it may indicate a moment when some of the British felt moral ambivalence about their conquest of India. And this possibility may help us to dig our way out of the ambivalence which we who study India have inherited and which threatens to poison scholarship about the country in our period, bracketed as it is between ante/i-Orientalism before and postcolonialism after. The question is not whether Napier slept sound, but whether we Anglophone non-Indians engaged in the study of India can sleep sound.
Said's book Orientalism, published in 1978, changed our way of thinking forever. Until then, we had admired the British scholars who had recorded dialects and folklore that otherwise would have been lost to posterity, who had established the study of Sanskrit in Europe and made available throughout India as well as Europe many of the classical texts recorded in that language. We felt indebted to them for our own knowledge of and love of India.
But the anti-Orientalist critique taught us that those British scholars, too, had sinned, that they had been caught up in the colonial enterprise, sustained it, fuelled it, facilitated it. It taught us about the collusion between academic knowledge and political power, arguing that we, too, are implicated in that sin when we carry on the work of those disciplines-that it did not stop, like a Latin perfect tense, in the past. At the heart of the postcolonial enterprise was the argument that scholars, then and now, affect and often harm the people they study.
It is also anthropology-another form of the discipline once known as Orientalism, or more specifically Indology, the study of India, my game. For I would describe myself as a recovering Orientalist. Kipling is one of the most dastardly of villains in the comic tragedy now playing in contemporary Indology.
The White Man's Burden that he named now falls upon our shoulders, to embarrass us in the opposite way: the burden of being White Men (or, as the case may be, White Women) is what hobbles us in our study of Hinduism. Or so Edward Said tells us, and his words are echoed by those who would deconstruct the study of 'the Orient' in general and Hinduism in particular. Since Said's shattering denunciation, Orientalists-Westerners who study Eastern religions and societies-have perceived themselves to be hopelessly tarred by the brushes of racism, colonialism, Eurocentrism and sexism.
Some have become so self-aware and self-critical that they have begun to self-destruct; others argue that it is not possible for non-Indians to study India, and, on the other hand, that we ourselves have created the India that we purport to study. We can no longer think without the postcolonial critique. The Freudian and post-Freudian Marxist agendas tell us to look for the subtext, the hidden transcript, the censored text; the Marxist and to some extent the Freudian assumption is that this subtext is less respectable, more self-serving, but also more honest, more real than the surface text.
In India the British surface text-'We are bringing civilization to these savages'-reveals a subtext-'We are using military power to make England wealthy by robbing India.' But there are more than two layers to any agenda, and we must not assume that it's self-interest all the way down. The peccavi anecdote suggests that beneath the subtext of self-interest may lie a nobler self-perception, a place where guilt is registered. And perhaps, beneath that, there may be yet another layer, an admiration of India, a desire to learn from India, perhaps even a genuine if misguided desire to give India something in return, like British law, for instance, or railroads.
But the sense of guilt that the excavation of the imperialist subtext has generated has taken a terrible toll on the study of the text itself. Anti-Orientalism has led in many quarters to a disregard for the philology and basic textual work that the Orientalists did very well and that still remains the basis of sound scholarship about Hinduism. But the original anti-Orientalist agenda was monolithic in ways that soon came to be modified, by Edward Said himself, among others, and by James C.
And then the British came and sat in a circle, holding hands, eyes squashed shut, chanting a mantra ('Rule Britannia'), until, like Athena from the head of Zeus, like a file called forth from a hard disk, India popped up on the map, on the screen of the world, full grown, complete with the word for Hinduism and The Laws of Manu translated by Sir William Jones and the Rig Veda in Max Müller's edition. India, brought to you by the people who brought you the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Hong Kong!
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FORGIVING KIPLING FOR WRITING WELL
Edward Said, in a long essay that served first as an introduction to Kim, in 1987, points out the significance of the moment when the 'white-bearded Englishman' who is the curator of the museum (a figure modelled on Kipling's father, Lockwood Kipling) gives his own glasses to the Tibetan lama to see through. (Said does not, however, note the parallel, and equally significant, gift that the Tibetan gives to the Englishman: an antique box for pens, the gift of creating texts.26) The metaphor of the gift of glasses can stand not only for the colonizers' distortion of the vision of the colonized but for the distortion of our own vision by any ideology, including the ideologies of both Orientalism and anti-Orientalism.
Obsessed with the nineteenth century, the postcolonial critique has forced us to look through monolithic, and hence skewed, spectacles that prevent us from seeing anything but our previous spectacles, the ones bequeathed to us by British Orientalism. It is time to stop merely looking at those flawed lenses and to try to see through them, that is, beyond them and also by means of them, this time correcting for the Orientalist myopia. In his surprisingly appreciative essay on Kim, Said wrestles with his conflicted feelings about Kipling.
On the one hand, he demonstrates how deeply embedded, indeed coded, in Kim is the racist and imperialist view for which Kipling became notorious. But, on the other hand, Said speaks of Kim as 'profoundly embarrassing'27-for Said, and for us, for any readers caught between their warm response to the artistry of the book and their revulsion at the racist terminology and ideology. Said speaks of Kipling as 'a great artist blinded in a sense by his own insights about India', who sets out to advance an obfuscating vision of imperial India, but 'not only does he not truly succeed in this obfuscation, but his very attempt to use the novel for this purpose reaffirms the quality of his aesthetic integrity'.
Salman Rushdie, too, has written of his ambivalence toward the good-and-evil Kipling28 and, I think, modelled the hero of Midnight's Children on Kim: a boy with English blood who appears to be both Hindu and Muslim. But Rushdie reverses the point about race: unlike Kim, who turns out to be English (and Protestant) because of his blood, despite being raised as a Hindu and among Muslims, the English blood of the protagonist of Midnight's Children doesn't matter at all, nor his Hindu blood; the boy is a Muslim because he is raised as a Muslim.
It is time to go back to the Orientalists with what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a 'second naiveté':32 an innocence that has travelled through loss of innocence to an apparently unchanged but actually quite different sort of innocence. Where, in our first naiveté, we did not notice the racism, and in our subsequent hypercritical reading we couldn't see anything else, in our second naiveté we can see how good the Orientalists are despite the inhumanity of their underlying world views.
Works of great scholarship will survive this new reading; others will not. There is much in the colonial scholarship on India that is worth keeping; I am unwilling to throw out the baby with the bath-a judgment call that depends on how good you think the baby is. Considerations such as these might inspire us to appreciate the tarnished but valuable gift bequeathed to us by British Orientalists.
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Doniger O’Flaherty on Doniger
[The graduate students in the study of South Asia at the University of Chicago publish a newsletter in which they include book reviews solicited from both students and faculty. In the autumn of 1999, they sent out, as usual, a list of books for review, and included one of mine: Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).
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DONIGER O’FLAHERTY ON DONIGER
[The graduate students in the study of South Asia at the University of Chicago publish a newsletter in which they include book reviews solicited from both students and faculty. In the autumn of 1999, they sent out, as usual, a list of books for review, and included one of mine: Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999). The book compared several clusters of myths, from ancient Greece and from ancient India, in which men or women were beheaded, doubled, split in half, or reversed in gender; it compared the myths of the shadow Sitai and the shadow Helen of Troy, the seductions of Ahalyaii and Alcmena, and the gender-shifting of Ilaiii and Teiresias.
6.] This book is itself split: it simultaneously pursues two agendas, which are not always well integrated and, indeed, often work against one another: agenda A is to demonstrate the enduring sameness of certain underlying plots about split women across cultural boundaries (as, for instance, when a woman writes a book under one name and reviews it under another), and agenda B is to show the differences among numerous Indian variants of the same myths (as when an author tells the same myth in every book she writes, but glosses it differently each time). The comparative and Indological agendas join forces in the central argument that patterns of gender remain more stable than patterns of culture; that when the same story is told (as the author demonstrates) of an Indian woman, an Indian man, a Greek woman and a Greek man, the story of the Indian woman more closely resembles that of the Greek woman than that of the Indian man.
Both in their objectification by male authors and in their own subjective strategies of subversion, women in Hindu (and, occasionally, Buddhist) stories are more like women in Greek stories than they are like men in Hindu (or Buddhist) stories. Thus the story of the shadow Sita develops in the South Asian tradition in ways that resemble the development of the story of the shadow Helen in the Greek tradition; whatever their origins, common or disparate, and however divergent their historical developments, both Hindu and Greek traditions resorted to the story of the surrogate double to generate a revisionist history of a rape or a seduction in the epic.
Though both Sita and Helen are quasi-goddesses, recovering goddesses-one married to a god (incarnated as a human), the other to a mortal-they seem to lack the agency to produce their own doubles, and what divine power they have to begin with is eroded in much the same way in the course of retellings. The presentations of the individual texts represent a compromise, not always satisfactory, between the two agendas, which are addressed to two different sorts of readers, generalists (A) and specialists (B): neither literal translations nor paradigmatic summaries, the tellings of the myths offer too much detail for the more general reader who wants to cut to the chase of the basic paradigm and too little detail for the serious Indologist who would prefer to have a closer rendition of the text.
The reader, particularly reader A, often has to strain to see the forest (or, rather, the luxuriant jungle) of the overarching pattern that is sometimes obscured by an overgrowth of individual textual trees. They are, for the most part, interesting trees (particularly for reader B), but the excursion into Hollywood films, though amusing (and presumably directed at reader A), is not tied carefully enough either to the Indological analysis or to the central argument, nor is the relevance of the Japanese myth of Amaterasu or Freud's analysis of Schreber immediately apparent.
The reader has to work too hard to find the path, but it is there: a pattern that tells the persevering reader why it is that women fool men so much more often than men fool women in these stories, why the beheading of women has both different causes and different results from the beheading of men, and why men who become women face problems so different from those encountered by women who become men. The first few chapters pay at least some attention to historical context (agenda B), but clearly the author's heart is not in this enterprise, and the contextualization becomes sketchier and sketchier and is jettisoned entirely as the comparison spills over beyond India and Greece to the world at large (more precisely, to Victorian England and Hollywood).
This broader range of texts then prompts such theological and philosophical questions as why immortals so often prefer mortal lovers and why feet are so often mutilated in the course of the quest for immortality. The trees do, finally, make a coherent jungle of texts that dance in and out of an detailed and finally persuasive pattern and even a conclusion: that gender trumps culture, or, to put it differently, that culture is the shadow of gender.
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You Can’t Make an Omelette
One of the many reasons why I took up the study of ancient Hinduism and Sanskrit as a freshman at Radcliffe in 1958i was to escape from my red diaper childhood; to avoid politics, to hide in an arcane subject far, far from the real (i.e. far left-wing American) world.
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YOU CAN’T MAKE AN OMELETTE1
One of the many reasons why I took up the study of ancient Hinduism and Sanskrit as a freshman at Radcliffe in 1958i was to escape from my red diaper childhood; to avoid politics, to hide in an arcane subject far, far from the real (i.e. And indeed that worked for many decades, in which I published several books about Hinduism without stirring up more than the usual academic criticism. But in view of more recent developments, my reasoning seems to have resembled that of the man who, in the 1930s, realized that a great war was gathering in Europe and decided to escape it by moving to a far-off place no one had heard of or cared about-Iwo Jima (smack in the middle of the South Pacific theatre of war).ii For writing about the ancient history of Hinduism has now become highly politicized, and the fight raging around the issue of Hindu pluralism in Indiaiii has come back to haunt me in the United States.
The problem arises with Hindutva ('Hindu-ness'), a territorial, racial and fundamentalist form of Hinduism; the word was coined by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his 1923 pamphlet entitled Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? Hindutva has inspired violence against Muslims, violence against Christians, and the pervasive infection of fundamentalism, particularly on the Internet. It has made many Hindus orthodox as well as orthoprax.iv There are many ways to define fundamentalism, but, as US Justice Potter Stewart remarked of pornography, I know it when I see it, and in this context I would define fundamentalism as a fanatical disapproval of people, both inside one's own religion and outside, who deviate from a narrowly defined essence of that religion.
He listed some of the most egregious examples of the rewriting of school history books in India and general misrepresentations of the history of Hinduism, a list to which, alas, many new examples have been added, or resurrected, since he wrote, in 2005. And he mentioned the egg affair: Last November, I was chairing a lecture on the great Hindu epic, the Ramayana, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The lecture had been sponsored by a wealthy Hindu philanthropist, and was given by the celebrated Sanskrit scholar, Professor Wendy Doniger … Midway through the lecture, a man stood up, walked threateningly towards the podium and threw an egg at Doniger, which narrowly missed her.
Critics complained, justifiably, that the book was stronger in the ancient period (where I know what I am talking about) than in the Mughal, British and modern periods (where I do not, and relied on not always reliable secondary sources), but they enjoyed the writing and they applauded the agenda. Several critics used the word 'courageous', the full significance of which I was then too naive to appreciate. The book was one of the five finalists in non-fiction for the National Book Critics Circle Award.vii In India, The Hindus (published by Penguin Books, Delhi), hit the top of the bestseller list in non-fiction for a while and then remained further down on the list for a while longer; it is still selling very well.
But at the same time, the book came under attack by the Hindutvavadis. I was not the first, nor the worst; the attacks on Jeffrey Kripal et al. But the popularity of my book, its visibility in bookstores, and, I think, its intimate and occasionally tongue-in-cheek(y) tone, its emphasis on the earthier and more narrative forms of Hinduism and its de-emphasis on the philosophical and 'spiritual' aspects that the Hindutvavadis prefer,viii made it a particularly attractive lightning rod for Hindu rage.
Hindu bloggers accused me of hating Hinduism and of sexualizing and/or psychoanalyzing Hindus. They flooded Amazon.com with their lurid opinions of the book. They sent me obscene and, occasionally, threatening emails.
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The Forest-dweller
In the midst of the great city of Chicago, I live as a forest-dweller. Forest-dwelling is where I am now in my life, and I am satisfied-or, more precisely, grateful-to be there.
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THE FOREST-DWELLER1
In the midst of the great city of Chicago, I live as a forest-dweller. Forest-dwelling is where I am now in my life, and I am satisfied-or, more precisely, grateful-to be there. Ancient Hindu texts wisely divide life into three basic stages of life: in the first, you study; in the second, you marry and become a householder; and in the third, you go and live in the forest.i (It has similarly been said about dogs that in the first stage, they play; in the second, they eat; and in the third, they sleep).
The Hindu texts say that when you see your first grey hairs, or your grandchildren, it is time to take your wife or husband and head for the forest, where you live simply but not grimly, and have time to think about things. (Some texts also suggest a fourth stage, of total renunciation, all by yourself, but I am, like most Hindus, temperamentally ill equipped for that sort of thing.) Forest-dwelling is not necessarily retirement; it is more a state of mind than a plan of action.
It is the time in which things do not matter in the same way they did when we were younger, the time when we achieve the attitude prescribed in the Bhagavad Gita, 'action without ambition' (nishkama karma). At last I am content with where I am in my life.
Race horses usually keep on running after they pass the finish line, no longer running for the prize, nor running quite so hard, running just for the sheer joy of running.
I lived for a year in India, for a year in Moscow (during the Cold War!), for ten years in England, other places, too. But I am always happy to come home to my dog. Some years ago, I gave up riding Arabian horses, as I had given up ballet dancing many years before that.
I'm not ready to die yet. I still have wonderful students whom I want to see through the final writing of their dissertations, and to guide into their first jobs. There are still a number of books I want to write (a memoir of my mother, perhaps my own memoir) or rewrite (my novel, of which little but the title has survived massive revisions, but it's a good title: Horses for Lovers, Dogs for Husbands) or write about (the ancient Indian textbook of politics, the Arthashastra) or finish (my half-completed book on the cross-cultural mythology of women and their jewellery).
There are still places I'd like to visit-see the penguins in Antarctica, the fjords of Norway, visit Shimla, go back to the west coast of Ireland-novels I want to read, films I want to see, music I want to listen to. But there's something satisfying in the knowledge that, if I were to die today, no one could possibly say of me, 'Tragically struck down in her youth, so much promise unfulfilled.' There's something liberating about living on borrowed time. There are of course things about aging that I don't enjoy.
I hate it when various parts of my body stubbornly refuse to do their jobs. And it irks me that some of the younger generation of scholars in my field regard my work as vieux jeu; somehow I went to bed one night an enfant terrible and woke up an old fuddy-duddy. Yet I would not for a minute change places with those young scholars, who must make their way with such caution, afraid that, if they say the wrong things, make the wrong enemies at this point, they might be kicked out, denied tenure, their careers blighted.
I can say, and write, whatever I really think, one of the privileges of an éminence grise (or old fuddy-duddy). Best of all, I have finally discovered the pleasures of solitude, of sitting on the deck of a house overlooking a freshwater marsh in Cape Cod, with the waves streaming in onto the beach of the Bay beyond, just sitting there, listening to the wind in the trees, looking at the sky, at the water, watching the red-tailed hawks cruising, and the otter making his way up the river, and the doe with her fawn coming to the bank of the river to drink.
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Appendix I: Limericks on Hinduism
On Being Hindu A worshipper of Minakshi Objected to strict orthodoxy. He said, 'If I wish to I'll also praise Vishnu In person, or else by proxy.' A Jew with cirrhosis of liver Jumped into the pure Ganges river.
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LIMERICKS ON HINDUISM
On Being Hindu A worshipper of Minakshi Objected to strict orthodoxy. He said, 'If I wish to I'll also praise Vishnu In person, or else by proxy.' A Jew with cirrhosis of liver Jumped into the pure Ganges river. His sons all drew lots On the funeral ghats And the loser was forced to sit Shiva.
There once was a Rig Vedic hotr Whose birth was within the wrong gotra. He made some oblations To change his relations And wrote his own family stotra. Gods, Humans and Anti-gods 'A goddess's fury when scorned,' Said a Babu, 'is not to be borned.' So this pious Bengali Made statues to Kali And argued, 'Four-armed is fore-warned.' A learned young man from Barbados Decided to study the Vedas.
For he wanted to see If Prajapati Was really the true god who made us. Women and Other Genders 'In India,' said the Mahatma, 'We honour the thin or the fat ma. That a wife should be modest And act like a goddess We hold not as dogma but catma.' Kama and Other Seductions The Kamasutra's Vatsyayana (An expert on Indian fauna) Wrote a law of the fishes For unconscious wishes: A sexual Matsya Piranha.
A Hindu who didn't like kama Refused to take off his pajama. When his bride's lustful finger Reached out for his linga He jumped up and ran home to Mama. Horses and Other Animals There once was a young Bengali Who covered his dog, a Kali, With snakes and an eel Till it looked so surreal That his friends shouted, 'Hello, Dali!' There once was a farmer, a Tamil, Who mated a cow with a camel.
When friends would insist That the varnas were mixed, He denied it, 'For each is a mammal.' Illusion and Reality in the Hindu Epics The yogis and naths and hakkims Tell their pupils, 'It's not as it seems. Though you think that your mind Made up God, you may find You're a figment of one of His dreams.' 'The Indian sage,' said the Pope, 'Theologically is just a dope. For the world, so it seems, Is just one of His dreams, And He can't tell a snake from a rope.' The story of Parashurama Is truly a Freudian drama.
He over-reacts To his dad, takes his axe And cuts off the head of his mama. Poor Renuka lost her head When she saw Kartavirya, and said: 'My dear son will find One more axe he must grind, And behead a Pariah instead.' On Not Being Hindu A scholar named Coomaraswamy Learned Sanskrit and Greek from his Mommy. But the Doctrine Perennis Became such a menace, His colleagues all thought he was balmy.
The Sanskritists find it a treat To tell the tales of the élite, While folklorists pillage The lore of the village, Thus working both sides of the street.
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Appendix II: Essays on Hinduism by Wendy Doniger
Under the name of Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty: 1. 'The Post-Vedic History of the Soma Plant', in Robert Gordon Wasson, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968, 95-147.
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ESSAYS ON HINDUISM BY WENDY DONIGER
Under the name of Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty: 1. 'The Post-Vedic History of the Soma Plant', in Robert Gordon Wasson, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968, 95-147. 'Asceticism and Sexuality in the Mythology of Siva.' Parts 1-2.
4 (May 1969), 300-337; 9, no. 'The Symbolism of the Third Eye of Siva in the Puranas.' Purana Bulletin 11, no. 'In Defense of Sir John Marshall.' South Asian Review (The Journal of the Royal Society for India, Pakistan and Ceylon; London) 3, no.
Reprint, Journal of Tamil Studies 2, no. 'The Symbolism of Ashes in the Mythology of Siva.' Purana Bulletin 13, no. 'The Origin of Heresy in Hindu Mythology.' History of Religions 10, no.
'A New Approach to Sanskrit Translation, with an Application to Kalidasa's Kumarasambhava, Canto VIII.' Mahfil: A Quarterly of South Asian Literature (Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University) 7, no. 'The Submarine Mare in the Mythology of Siva.' Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1971.1), 9-27. Review of Two Plays of Ancient India: The Little Clay Cart, The Minister's Seal, translated from the Sanskrit and Prakrit, with an introduction by J.A.B.
van Buitenen (1968) and Review of Sanskrit Poetry from Vidyakara's Treasury, translated by Daniel H.H. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1971.1), 78-84. 'Disregarded Scholars: A Survey of Russian Indology.' South Asian Review 5, no.
4 (July 1972), 289-304; follow-up in South Asian Review 6, no. 'In Praise of the Nineteenth-century Hindoo Mythologists.' South Asian Review 6, no. 'Hinduism', in Peoples of the Earth, vol.
12, edited by Christoph von Fuerer-Haimendorf, 20-26. New York: Tom Stacey and Grolier, 1974. 'Bhagavad Gita', 'Bhagavata Purana', 'Bhakti', 'Dharmasastra', 'Mahabharata', 'Nalopakhyana', 'Purana', 'Sastra', 'Smrti', in Dictionary of Oriental Literature, vol.
2, South- and Southeast Asia, edited by D. London: George Allen and Unwin for Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 1974. 'The Hindu Symbolism of Cows, Bulls, Stallions and Mares.' Art and Archaeology Research Papers (London) 8 (December 1975), 1-7.
'Contributions to an Equine Lexicology, with Special Reference to Frogs.' Journal of the American Oriental Society 98 (1978), 475-78. Review article on the Mahabharata translation by J.A.B. 'Mediation in the Sant Tradition.' In Sikh Studies: Comparative Perspectives on a Changing Tradition, edited by Mark Juergensmeyer and N.
Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley Religious Studies Series, 1978. 'Sacred Cows and Profane Mares in Indian Mythology.' History of Religions 19, no. 'Death as a Dancer in Hindu Mythology.' In Sanskrit and Indian Studies: Festschrift in Honor of Daniel H.
Ingalls, edited by Masatoshi Nagatomi, 201-216. 'Hinduism', in The Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations, edited by Arthur Cotterell, 192-196. 'Hinduism', in Mythology: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, edited by Richard Cavendish, 14-33.
'Inside and Outside the Mouth of God: The Boundary between Myth and Reality.' Daedalus (Spring 1980), 93-125. 'Dionysos and Siva: Parallel Patterns in Two Pairs of Myths.' History of Religions 20, no. 'Puranic Encyclopedias.' South Asia Library Notes and Queries 9 (March 1980), 2-3.
'The Indo-European Mare and the King.' Slavica Hierosolymitana, Slavic Studies of the Hebrew University V-VI (1981), 23-33. 'Illusion and Reality in the Yogavasistha.' The Sir George Birdwood Memorial Lecture, London, 20 May 1980. Reprint, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 5294, no.
'The Mythological in Disguise: An Analysis of "Karz".' India International Centre Quarterly 8, no. Reprint, Debonair (Bombay), January 1982, 30-34. 'Manifestations of Siva.' Connaissance des Arts (May 1981), 72-79; French version, 'Manifestations de Siva,' Connaissance des Arts (Paris), no.
'Illusion and Reality in the Yogavasistha, or The Scientific Proof of Mythical Experience.' Quadrant: Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology (Spring 1981), 46-65. 'Kailasa', 'Linga', 'Nataraja', 'Pasupati', 'Siva' and 'Yoni', in Abingdon Dictionary of Living Religions, edited by Keith Crim, Roger A.
'The Shifting Balance of Power in the Marriage of Siva and Parvati.' In The Divine Consort, edited by John S. Hawley and Donna Wulff, 129-143, notes 342-343. Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley Religious Studies Series, 1982.
[Reprinted by Beacon Press, Boston, 1987]. 'The Dream Narrative and the Indian Doctrine of Illusion.' Daedalus (Summer 1982), 93-113. 'Epilogue' to 'The Last Meal of the Buddha' by R.
The Journal of the American Oriental Society 102, no. 'The Image of the Heretic in the Gupta Puranas', in Essays on Gupta Culture, edited by Bardwell L. 'Die Wolkenstadt im Himmel', in Sehnsucht nach dem Ursprung, zu Mircea Eliade, edited by Hans Peter Duerr, 406-421.
'Emotion und Karma: Uberlegungen zu Max Webers Interpretation der indischen Theodizee', in Max Webers Studie uber Hinduismus und Buddhismus, edited by Wolfgang Schluchter, 87-103. 'Siva Erect and Supine', in Discourses on Siva: Proceedings of a Symposium on the Nature of Religious Imagery, edited and with an introduction by Michael W. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Bombay: Vakils, Feffer and Simons, 1984.
'Ethical and Non-Ethical Implications of the Separation of Heaven and Earth in Indian Mythology', in Cosmogony and Ethical Order: New Studies in Comparative Ethics, edited by Frank Reynolds and Robin Lovin, 177-199. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985. 'The Role of Myth in the Indian Life Cycle', in Aditi: The Living Arts of India (Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 184-201.
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Main Points
1. Hinduism is a contested name, not a single essence. 2. Mono/poly and path schemes multiply under pressure. 3. Heresy, karma, and body essays join medicine to myth. 4. Death, rebirth, and yoga stage fights over incarnation and practice. 5. Tolerance and politics refuse simple liberal comfort. 6. Creation, cosmology, and lingam essays track paradox and conflict. 7. Sacrifice and Kedara show scrapbook salvation and substitution. 8. Marriage, Saranyu, clever wives, rings gender recognition plots. 9. Third nature and transsexual myths unsettle fixed gender gods. 10. Kamasutra to karma tracks puritan resurgence and addiction control. 11. Ahimsa, zoomorphism, horses, cows, dogs animal ethics as caste mirror. 12. A closer look: treat essays as arguments, not scripture about Hinduism.
Frameworks
| Name | What it says | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Name fights | Who gets to define Hinduism | Intro and naming essays |
| Body politics | Yoga, lingam, karma eating | Medical/mythical body chapters |
| Animal mirrors | Cow, horse, dog, mare | Zoomorphism and ahimsa cluster |
About this book
On Hinduism by Wendy Doniger, 2014. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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