Insight Editions · No. 187
Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares
Horses in Indian Myth and History
Wendy Doniger
Wendy Doniger traces horses through Indian mythology, ritual, literature, and military history, from Vedic sacrifice and epic narratives to colonial remount programs and modern India.
A study guide to Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares 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 Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares tracks horses through Indian nature, conquest history, and storytelling from the Vedas to the twenty-first century. The paradox: India seldom offered good horse country, yet produced an enormous mythology of winged stallions and wicked mares.
Core paradox: horse mythology thrives where horses are scarce
| Ch | Title | Gist |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nature and Culture | Climate, fodder, cost, wildness, wings |
| 2 | Indo-European / not Indus | Horses arrive with IE speakers |
| 3 | Vedas | Sacrifice and sacred horses |
| 4 | Epic underworld | Horses and snakes below |
| 5 | Puranic ocean | Horses in the sea |
| 6 | Ashvashastra | Science of horses |
| 7 | Buddhist horses | Kings, Jatakas, symbols |
| 8 | Arabian / Muslim | New stock, new riders |
| 9 | Equestrian epics | Vernacular mares and stallions |
| 10 | British Raj | Colonial remounts and breeding |
| 11 | Rituals without horses | Myth persists after herds thin |
| 12 | Modern India | 1900-2020 continuities |
| 13 | The Gift Horse | Closing ethics of the gift |
1. Horses in Indian Nature and Culture
Life's like Sanskrit read to a pony. -LOU REED, "What's Good: The Thesis" In this book, I want to explore three strands-the nature of horses, the history of India, and the Sanskrit and vernacular storytelling traditions-to see how they twined together to form the mythology of horses in India, paradoxically rich despite the rarity of real horses.
Era ladder 1
Horses in Indian Nature and Culture
Life's like Sanskrit read to a pony. -LOU REED, "What's Good: The Thesis" In this book, I want to explore three strands-the nature of horses, the history of India, and the Sanskrit and vernacular storytelling traditions-to see how they twined together to form the mythology of horses in India, paradoxically rich despite the rarity of real horses. Horses as Invaders Most of the peoples who entered India over the centuries rode in on horseback.
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Horses move around in search of new grazing land, which they need constantly because, unlike cows (who tend to bite off the blades of grass), horses (whose teeth are rather dull) pull up the roots of the grass or nibble it right down to the ground so that it doesn't grow back, thus quickly destroying grazing land, which may require some years to recover. Horse breeders leave such fields fallow from time to time to allow the grass to regenerate, but horses in the wild, left to their own devices, range constantly to find new territory, moving on to literally greener pastures, the broad open spaces, eminent domain.
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(As Virginia Woolf remarks, in Orlando, chapter 3, "The gipsies followed the grass; when it was grazed down, on they moved again.") The ancient Indo-European horse owners mimicked this behavior as they responded to the need to provide grazing for their horses once they had domesticated them and kept them from their natural free-grazing habits. They rode roughshod over other peoples' land and took it over for their own herds. This spirit was expressed in their very vocabulary; the Sanskrit word amhas (constraint)-from which comes our "anxiety" and the German Angst-expressed the terror of being fenced in or trapped.
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Real vs myth 2
Indian Climate and Pasturage
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The best places in the world to breed horses are Kentucky and Ireland, with their blue grass and their Emerald Isle, both of them rich in limestone calcium. But the horses that dominate the equine history of India were bred in, and imported from, Central Asia and the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf states. These horses are the Arabians (who are also the ancestors of all Thoroughbreds).
Parts of that world are often as hot as India, but much of it is significantly cooler, and, more to the point, these areas do not have the Indian monsoon, which is much more of a problem for horse breeders than is the dry heat. Moreover, the soil there has more of the minerals essential for the thriving of horses, particularly calcium, than the Indian soil has. Finally, horses are bred in Central Asia and the Gulf only in some places, not in the middle of the hottest deserts but in adjacent oases, just as it is possible to breed pretty good horses in some parts of India, such as Rajasthan, which have deserts and oases.
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Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art; photo by John C.
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Indian Fodder
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Here is what he says about oats: Oats. This grain, when grown in India, possesses a far larger proportion of husk to flour than that produced in England, hence its lower value as an article of food. Although our Indian oats are far below the standard, still they are much superior, as a food for horses, to any other grain which we can procure.
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Each horse receives for its portion in the morning two or three balls made of wheaten flour and butter, of the size of our penny rolls. There is much difficulty in accustoming them to this kind of food, and often four or five months pass before it can be accomplished. The groom is obliged to hold the horse's tongue in one hand and with the other he has to force the ball down its throat.
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In the sugar-cane or millet season they are given some at midday; and in the evening, an hour or two before sunset. They receive a measure of chick-peas which the groom has crushed between two stones and steeped in water. These take the place of hay and oats.
As neither barley nor oats are to be had in this country, . the horses are given some of these peas every evening, and in the morning they receive about two pounds of coarse black sugar, . kneaded with an equal weight of flour and a pound of butter.
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Cycle 4
The Care of Horses in India
Some have argued that culture, rather than nature, is what kept horses from thriving in India. It has often been said (by people who may or may not have known what they were talking about, and who may or may not have wanted to slander the Indians) that, compounding problems caused by the inhospitable climate and lack of access to appropriate fodder, Indian kings and their servants simply did not know how to care for horses properly, that, in addition to feeding them enormous quantities of ghee and mutton, they made other mistakes in their care that kept their horses from thriving.
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is imperfectly nourished in its early youth. In India it seems impossible to persuade people that money spent on a growing beast is money invested. All they see is present loss.
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Horse chain 5
The Expense and Luxury of Horses in India
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Ancient Sanskrit and Tamil sources (such as the Arthashastra and Sangam texts) observe that horses had to be imported, probably from Parthia, to which the Arabian trade was later added. Ninth- and tenth-century CE Sanskrit inscriptions tell us the northern route: through Kabul, Peshawar, Pindi, Kangra, Ambala, Delhi, and Gwalior,57 the route through which the Vedic Indians and, later, the Turks entered India (and the territory that is also described in Rudyard Kipling's Kim). 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 to ports in South India.
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In addition to being prohibitively expensive, horses in most parts of India have never been very useful. They do not pull the plow or give milk as cows and goats and buffalo do; horses in India seldom carry a pack; and except in Rajasthan, Sindh, and the Punjab, they are seldom ridden. They don't do farmwork as well as bullocks or water buffalo or donkeys (which are, unlike horses, desert adapted) or mules.
Camels and elephants also do most of these jobs better. But at economic subsistence levels, villagers can't afford horses or camels. If a farmer had enough money to buy a horse, he would use it instead to buy a water buffalo, or two bullocks.
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For most Indians, horses are mythical beasts, like unicorns. Yet that equine mythology has always been key to the history as well as to the art, religion, and literature of India. And that paradox is the driving force of this book.
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The Domestication and Wildness of Horses
The history of horses in human religious conceptualization begins with the first evidence of their domestication, with the archaeology not merely of images and texts but of bones and bits. The earliest relationship between horses and humans was that of hunting; before horses were domesticated, they were one of the many animals that galloped across cave paintings as they were hunted for food. But once domestication took place, the primary relationship between horses and humans became that of taming, which becomes a metaphor that dominates the mythology of horses in the historical period.
Hunting and taming are intrinsic to the mythology of horses, whereas nobility, for instance, is not, though nobility appears in many horse myths as a common result of the economic conditions under which horses were kept. When horses were first domesticated rather than hunted, they were still regarded as food, though their ritual importance and their intimacy with humans eventually kept them from being eaten by most horsey cultures,80 even by some of those cultures that did kill them in sacrifices.
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But where horses are known and loved, the metaphor of taming often takes on a more mutual aspect. Many myths testify to the other side of the transaction of taming, to the role of horses in drawing humans from the tame into the wild. In the mythologies of India and Greece, as well as in medieval Europe and Britain, we read of princes who are lured by white stags82 or white hinds or white swans or white unicorns-or white horses-from the safe territory of the royal parks to the thick of the forest, to the Other World, where they may meet their princess or encounter their dragon, or both (or both in one female dragon), but where, in any case, they learn what they need to know.
Horses are liminal creatures, who lead humans from the world of the tame into the world of the wild, the magic, supernatural world of the gods and anti-gods-up to heaven, or down to the watery hell of the cobra people. A twelfth century CE Sanskrit philosophical text, the Yogavasishtha, tells us that King Lavana was sitting on his throne when a magician waved his peacock-feather wand and introduced a man from Sindh, leading a horse. As the king gazed at the horse, he remained motionless on his throne, as if in meditation.
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Many horsemen, and even more horsewomen, speak not of the "breaking" of horses but of their "gentling," the harnessing (or yoking, derived from the Sanskrit word yoga, "joining") of their wildness for our good, but not necessarily for their ill. Humans can never entirely succeed in taming horses; this is the charm and the challenge of an intimate association with an animal that always retains some measure of his primeval freedom. 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 total 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." In the taming of a horse, force is used, but so is persuasion. At a certain moment, force becomes useless; there are some things that no one can make a horse do unless the horse wants to do it, unless he understands what is wanted of him and is willing to give up his physical superiority in exchange for something that he derives from his contact with humans.
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And so horses, both in actuality and in Indian myths and rituals, are not tamed but, on the contrary, they untame the humans. The stallion in the Vedic horse sacrifice was said to wander freely for a year, attended by the king's men, to claim for the king whatever grazing land the horse cared to wander through. This was a symbolic expression of freedom-political, of course, but also sexual, spiritual, what you will.
And when the stallion was killed, he transferred those freedoms to the king. So, too, ordinary horses transfer to their riders some of their own wildness and freedom. One might, perhaps, think of this, too, in sacrificial terms, as a sacrificial exchange, not a sacrifice of a horse, but a sacrifice by a horse.
And it is this exchange that is mythologized in the narratives of people who have horses, narratives about horses that speak, that weep, that love their riders and willingly give their lives for them.
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The Mating of Horses
City kids usually catch their first glimpse of the mating game when they see dogs doing it, but farm kids see horses mating, and no one who has seen horses mating ever forgets it. Cows and bulls go about it in a relatively calm and businesslike manner, but mares and stallions are ferocious in their foreplay, and the violence of their coupling burns into the retina of the unconscious of any witness. Ernest Jones and the Freudians see horses, despite their domestication, as symbolic of raw, natural sexuality.
This is certainly true of horses in Indian mythology. But the basic, brute sexual symbolism is complicated by conflicting concepts of the gender of the horse. Real horses come in both male and female forms, of course, but symbolic horses are usually one thing or the other.
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We Anglophones84 use the word for the male animal, "horse," to designate the breed in general, stallions and mares and geldings, when we refer to "the horses in that field" (just as, contrariwise, we use the word for the female animal, "cow," for cows, bulls, or steers-"the cows in that field"). The horse is "he," unless we specify a mare or stallion. The stallion, a large, powerful, impulsive, and aggressive animal who bites and tramples, symbolizes macho sexuality.
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In India, sexually voracious female monsters had the heads of horses and the bodies of human or demonic females. The ways in which horses interact with humans greatly influence our views and myths of horses and of our relationships with them. Horses have been dramatically altered by the history of their contact with humans.
The physical changes are obvious (greater size, longer legs that are skinny and fragile), but so are the psychological changes, such as their nervousness, particularly in mares subjected to intensive breeding. Mares in the wild breed with far greater success than mares in captivity, who tend to have a relatively low level of fertility, thus requiring multiple matings that waste a lot of stallion power. Of course, it is humans who breed mares for beauty and speed, rather than for ease of conception or parturition; they corrupt them, then stigmatize them for the difficult, dangerous foaling that the humans themselves have purchased in the service of beauty and speed.
A mare will welcome the stallion only when she is in heat, and she may kick him in the head if she isn't. In the wild, where mares and stallions are always together, the gentleman can sense when the lady is or is not in the mood and will generally avoid dangerous and demoralizing rejections. But when you have fenced a mare in, you have to make a special assignation with her, and you can't always tell when she's in season; and when she isn't, watch out.
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Worse still, mares tend to be testy and capricious even (or, indeed, sometimes especially) when in heat, and their unfortunate tendency to kick the stallions who try to mount them often inflicts permanent damage or impotence. The equicidal tendency of such mares would dampen the enthusiasm of the most passionate stud, making such an unfortunate stallion what breeders call a "dud stud." The mare thus comes to represent desirable beauty and speed, purchased at the price of danger (to the male) and infertility.
This then is the naturalistic basis for the myth of the deadly mare, demonized in the eyes of humans (and, presumably, stallions). Despite the availability of artificial insemination (which is used by almost all breeders of prize bulls), most breeders of prize Thoroughbreds insist on going to the considerable expense and trouble of having the stallion cover the mare in their presence, to make sure that the semen actually belongs to the stallion under contract. Deceit and trickery have always been, and are now more than ever, factors in horse breeding.
Think of all the "doubles" and "ringers" that horse copers use, and the ingenious sleights of hand in Dick Francis novels. In fact, blood typing on semen now ensures what stallion it comes from, but still people usually insist on having the stallion there in the flesh, just to be certain (or for the fun of watching?).
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The Wings of Horses
The need to control mares and stallions for breeding is the most dramatic instance of the more general need to tame horses altogether. An Indian story that tells how horses lost their wings functions as a metaphor for the domestication and taming of horses. The Ashvashastra version of the myth features Indra, king of the gods, and Shalihotra, a mythical figure to whom are attributed several important Sanskrit works on medicine, including veterinary medicine.
The story also involves Gandharvas, magical demigods closely associated with horses. (Their name is cognate with the Greek "centaurs," though the Greek and Indian mythologies are quite different.) Gandharvas have wings, as horses no longer do: Formerly horses were born with wings, and moved in the sky like the Gandharvas, wherever they wanted, everywhere. Seeing them so full of power, proud of their power, but capable of becoming vehicles [vahanas], Indra said to Shalihotra, the great sage who was standing beside him, "There is nowhere in the triple world where they cannot go; therefore, take away their wings." Sending for a weapon made of reeds, Shalihotra cut off the wings of the horses, as Indra had commanded.
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When all the horses had lost their wings, they were miserable, overcome with suffering, bleeding heavily, and they said to the sage, "Why have you cut off our wings, when we had not committed any offense? Good people do not act like this. You must therefore be a refuge for all the horses here, so that they will always be happy." The sage was filled with pity, as they were so unhappy, and he replied to them: "I did this because Indra commanded it, even though it was hurtful to you.
Therefore, I will do something to make you happy, to make you thrive and earn respect throughout the universe. Become the vehicles of the gods-the Sun, Indra, and others-and this will make you respected among the kings of the earth. Whatever king nourishes you with pasture grass and water and so forth will certainly become very difficult to conquer.
Lakshmi, goddess of fortune, will never abandon such a king, even if he is devoid of all good qualities and surrounded by powerful enemies. And I will establish the supreme art of healing, to nourish men and cure their diseases. Therefore, some of you go to the earth, or go to the underworld if that will make you happy, and others go to heaven, by my command, wherever you will find peace." And in this way, the sage Shalihotra calmed down the horses.
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Subrahmaniya Bharathi (1882-1921) incorporated into a whimsical satire on the Ramayana an even more whimsical satire on the myth of the horses' wings. His version of this story, which involves Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, and Ravan, the villainous ruler of the island of Lanka, went like this: When Ravan heard the news that Ram had come to invade Lanka, he began to roar with laughter: "Hahaha!" The sound of his laughter was so loud that the sun couldn't bear the noise and fell down, and the horns of the sun's seven horses broke.
The sun came and fell at the feet of Ravan, beseeching him tearfully: "My horses have the boon of immortality. They are swifter than other horses, but their horns have broken. From now on, everyone in the world will laugh at me.
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Horses in This Book
The ancient Indians saddled horses with a wide range of interrelated symbolic phenomena: power, royalty, divinity, sexuality, and, more particularly, flying, taming, and freedom. Horses were essential to the religious imagination of India. This book is an attempt to sketch out the development of that imagination, first in the Vedas, then in the two great Sanskrit epics, the medieval Puranas, the scientific textbooks, the vernacular epics, and contemporary art and folklore.
Horses make a significant appearance in Buddhism, in Mughal art and literature, and under the British Raj. They were important to villagers who had never touched a horse. Even in the modern period, after Independence, Marwari horses inspire controversy over the question of who, among Indians or non-Indians, has the right to define the right sort of Indian horse.
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In each period, we need to understand as much as we can of the actual history of the people telling the stories before we can understand their stories. The Indian ambivalence toward horses is both intrinsic and culturally constructed. Horses are often, if not always, regarded with mixed feelings: they are both tame and wild, both male and female, both divine and demonic, both solar and chthonic, both sexy and infertile, and both native and foreign.
But in India this intrinsic ambiguity is enhanced by a different sort of ambivalence fostered by the place of horses in Indian history, by their association first with the people of the Vedas and the Mahabharata and then with Arab, Turk, Mongol, and British equestrians. In successive phases of mythology, horses are associated first with positive male values, in the Vedas; then with negative, gynophobic values, in the Vedas, Epics, and Puranas; and then with positive female values, in the glorified mares of Arab-influenced Rajput narratives.
Certain basic themes crop up again and again even in different Indian subcultures, but at the same time each subculture has its own ideas about horses. Buddhist horses, Mughal horses, Tamil horses, tribal horses both are and are not like Vedic horses. I will try to trace, in the following chapters, the history behind the stories that Indians told about their horses, and the history of those stories.
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As horses turn out to be an intrinsic part of Indian myth, art, folklore, and literature, anything like an encyclopedic coverage of their full cultural range would be unreadable. Since I never met a variant I didn't like, I have included a number of different versions of stories that were told over and over again, never quite the same, across the centuries. (Readers who find such variations tedious are advised to skip the indented paragraphs and their framing analyses.) In the end, I offer here, embedded in the context of the history of horses in India, my favorite Indian stories about horses.
2. Horses in the Indo-European World but Not in the Indus Valley, 3000 to 1500 BCE
3000 to 1500 BCE The story of horses in India begins outside of India, in the broader Indo-European world, and involves archaeology as well as texts. These sources demonstrate both how central horses have been to Indian civilization from the very start and how they have been, from the start, foreign to the subcontinent.
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Horses in the Indo-European World but Not in the Indus Valley
3000 to 1500 BCE The story of horses in India begins outside of India, in the broader Indo-European world, and involves archaeology as well as texts. These sources demonstrate both how central horses have been to Indian civilization from the very start and how they have been, from the start, foreign to the subcontinent.
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Indo-European Speakers
Nineteenth-century German and British linguists, building on some eighteenth-century hunches, uncovered connections between members of a language family (a rather dysfunctional family, but a family) that included ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite (in ancient Anatolia), Vedic Sanskrit (in ancient India), the Celtic and Norse-Germanic languages, and, ultimately, French, German, Italian, Spanish, English, and their friends and relations. All of these languages are alleged to have broken away from a single parent language sometime in the fourth millennium BCE, a language that linguists call Indo-European (or Indo-Germanic or Indo-Aryan) or, more cautiously, *Proto-Indo-European, as easy as *PIE.
The reconstructed, hypothetical (nowadays we would say virtual) forms of Indo-European are usually designated, like *PIE, with an apologetic or apotropaic asterisk. The Indo-European map is linguistic, linking languages together in a group that is distinct from other groups containing other languages such as, for instance, Chinese, or Hebrew, or Tamil. The evidence that the Indo-European languages are related lies primarily in their grammar and vocabulary.
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If so, where was the hub? Probably somewhere in the area of the Caspian and the Mediterranean, perhaps in southern Russia, the Caucasus or the northern Black Sea or the Sea of Azov. (Arguments that the original *PIE home was India, though not indefensible, are driven more by nationalism than by scholarship.
It is likely that the Indo-European speakers reached India no earlier than 1500 BCE.) But the mythical land of the family home might just as well be thought of as *Indo-Europe, the land East of the Asterisk. The early Orientalists designated the Indo-European speakers with the Sanskrit word "Aryan," the word that the Vedic people had used to refer to themselves, meaning "Us" or "The Good Guys," long before anyone had a concept of race. Properly speaking, "Aryan" designates a linguistic family, not a racial group; there are no Aryan noses, only Aryan verbs, no Aryan people, only Aryan-speaking people.
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The Indo-European speakers were a people only in the sense of a linguistic continuum; the blood of many different peoples flowed in their veins. But the story became a thoroughly racist myth when the Nazis got ahold of it. (The Nazis, incidentally, also grotesquely distorted the ancient Indian good-luck symbol of the swastika, a Sanskrit word that simply meant "a good thing.") And so "Aryan" became a word that, like "gay" or "holocaust," no longer means what it once meant, and we can't forget what we now know about it; we can't regain our earlier naïveté.
Since the Aryans were presumed to come from the Caucasus, they were also called Caucasians, which also became a racial designation. People always think about race when you say "Aryan," even though you tell them not to. It is therefore best (however cumbersome) to avoid using the "A" word, and to call the people who spoke or speak Indo-European languages "Indo-European speakers."
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Indo-European Horses and Horse Sacrifices
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But it is an Irish text that supplies the best counterpart for the Vedic and Roman horse sacrifices, forming a triangle on which the Indo-European evidence rests, however shakily. The facts of congruence are impressive, though grotesquely dissimilar in the weight and substance of the three sources. The Vedic ceremony is by far the best documented, both in terms of the contemporaneity of the ritual with the text describing it (both from 900 BCE, but referring back to Rig Vedic hymns to the horse, perhaps half a millennium earlier) and in the volume of data: hundreds and hundreds of lines of Sanskrit texts.
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In Ireland, the king pantomimed (or performed) copulation with a live mare who was afterward dismembered and cooked; the king bathed in her broth and drank it, and the broth was then distributed to the people. The common thread in all three is the killing of an equine. In two of the rituals (India and Rome), the horse is a stallion; in two of the rituals (India and Ireland), there is a sexual union as well as a death.
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Dravidian Speakers and the Indus Valley Culture
Humans must have ridden astride before they yoked a horse to a chariot; once a horse has been gentled or tamed, it is natural enough to swing one's leg over him. Certainly this is more likely to have happened before anyone got around to constructing anything as elaborate as a horse-drawn chariot. A simple noseband, or even a rope around the neck, could have sufficed for a young boy or girl bareback on a quiet animal.
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The general consensus (among scholars, both Indian and European) is that the Indo-European speakers simply settled gradually and quietly in India, or (among Hindu nationalists) that they started out in India and then conquered the rest of the world. In 1856 came the discovery of the great cities of the Indus Valley, though their importance was fully appreciated by scholars only after 1917, and widely discussed only in recent decades. The extraordinarily rich material remains of this culture, which we call the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) or the Harappan Civilization (named after Harappa, one of the two great cities on the Indus River, the other being Mohenjo-Daro), an area now in Pakistan, date from about 3000 BCE.
Arguments about the identity of the people of the IVC have often turned on the language of the script that appears on numerous small seals: are they in an Indo-European language or in another language, perhaps an ancient form of Dravidian, the non-Indo-European language family of India and Pakistan? Since no one has yet succeeded in deciphering the script,22 the debaters seek their evidence among the archaeological remains. Arguments based on a tantalizing treasure trove of often enigmatic images hover just beyond our reach, taunting us with what might well be the keys to the roots of later Indian civilization.
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Horses became important figures only in the Vedic age. The IVC was therefore neither invented nor destroyed by Indo-European speakers such as, to take a case at random, the authors of the Rig Veda. Most scholars now agree that "there is a gap of some centuries between the two cultures, as the descriptions of ruins and simple mud wall/palisade forts (pur) in the Rigveda indicate.
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The ancestor of the horse, the so-called Dawn Horse, or Eohippus, much smaller than the modern horse, lived throughout Europe as well as North America in the Eocene age, some sixty to forty million years ago. Good, albeit slim, evidence that horses were domesticated in India at a very early period, long before the IVC and even longer before the presence of the Indo-European speakers (however they got there), has been found in various Indian sites. Megalithic remains may represent the source of a pre-Indo-European equine tradition in some Indian tribes or villages.
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3. Horses in the Vedas, 1500 to 500 BCE
1500 to 500 BCE Stallions are heroes, and mares villains, in the oldest Indian text, the Rig Veda (composed in Sanskrit in northwest India, c. 1500 BCE), and in the supplements to the Rig Veda, the Brahmanas (c.
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Horses in the Vedas
1500 to 500 BCE Stallions are heroes, and mares villains, in the oldest Indian text, the Rig Veda (composed in Sanskrit in northwest India, c. 1500 BCE), and in the supplements to the Rig Veda, the Brahmanas (c. 900 BCE) and the Upanishads (c.
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These Vedic texts present a consistent vision of the horse as a stallion, martially and sexually potent, the ultimate macho sacrificial animal. In the Rig Veda, the horse represents the "Aryas," as they called themselves, against the indigenous inhabitants of India, the "slaves" (dasyus), whom they associated with the serpent Vritra. But the Vedic texts also contrast the good stallion with the dangerous mare, a scenario that is rooted in the conditions of breeding horses in India and that continues to dominate Indian mythology until the medieval period.
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George, on horseback, killing the dragon). In a tenth-century temple in Tamil Nadu, a freestanding statue of a winged horse rears up, with his front feet resting on the hoods of a five-headed serpent. David Shulman connects this icon with Pedu: "It is," Shulman says, "almost as if the Tamil village shrine were offering us a graphic representation of this almost forgotten Vedic symbol."2
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The Sacrificial Stallion in the Rig Veda
The sacrificial horse must be male, like all Vedic sacrificial animals. The Rig Veda contains several hymns to the sacrificial horse. One identifies him with the sun and fire, and with several gods, including Indra, King of the Gods and God of the Storm (like his Indo-European cousins Zeus, Jupiter, Wotan, and Odin), the god to whom most horse sacrifices were offered.
The poet closes by imagining the arrival of the winged horse in heaven and reminds him not to forget his human friends: When you whinnied for the first time, as you were born from the ocean, with the wings of an eagle and the forelegs of an antelope-that was your great birth, Swift Runner. These are the places where they rubbed you down when you were victorious; here are the marks where you put down your hooves. From afar, in my heart I recognized your soul, the bird flying below the sky.
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I saw your winged head snorting on the dustless paths that are easy to travel. The chariot follows you, Swift Runner; the young man follows, the cow follows, the love of young girls follows. The gods entrusted virile power to you.
His mane is golden; his feet are bronze. He is swift as thought, faster than Indra. The celestial coursers, reveling in their strength, fly in a line like wild geese, the ends held back while the middle surges forward, when the horses reach the racecourse of the sky.
Your body flies, Swift Runner; your spirit rushes like wind. Your mane, spread in many directions, flickers and jumps about in the forests. The racehorse has come to the slaughter, pondering with his heart turned to the gods.
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Another hymn describes, and blesses, in strikingly concrete images, all the grim paraphernalia of the slaughter, as well as the dismemberment, the cooking, and the eating of the horse. The poet then apologizes to the horse for all of this gruesome ritual and even for possible mistreatment of the horse during his life: This goat for all the gods is led forward with the racehorse. The hewers of the sacrificial stake and those who carry it, and those who carve the knob for the horse's sacrificial stake, and those who gather together the things to cook the charger-let their approval encourage us all.
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Those who see that the racehorse is cooked, who say, 'It smells good! Take it away!', and who wait for the doling out of the charger's flesh-let their approval encourage us. 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 this prayer.
Let not the 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. You go to the gods on paths pleasant to go on. The two bay stallions, the two roan mares are now your chariot mates.
Cycle 19
The Vedic Mare: Saranyu
The Vedic ritual of the sacrifice of a stallion is balanced by the Vedic myth of a goddess who takes the form of a mare named Saranyu ("Fleet"). The Veda wraps the story in a riddle,6 but here is a brief summary of the plot: Figure 5. Brahmins preparing the horse for sacrifice.
Cycle 159
Rishyashringa and the Brahmin priests are severing the limbs of the horse and cleansing them in the sacred waters of the river Sarayu. From a manuscript of the Ramayana originally produced in Udaipur, 1712. (© The British Library Board, Add.
34) The blacksmith of the gods7 gave his daughter, Saranyu, in marriage to the Sun,8 and she gave birth to twins, Yama and Yami. Then the gods concealed the immortal woman from mortals; they put in her place a female of-the-same-kind (savarna), and gave that look-alike to the Sun. Saranyu took the form of a mare; the Sun took the form of a stallion, followed her, and coupled with her.
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From that were born the twin equine gods called the Ashvins. 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 deception. In place of the statement that the gods concealed Saranyu from her husband, later texts blame Saranyu for the separation and speculate on various reasons for her flight from her husband: as the sun, he was too hot for her; as a mortal, he was not fit to mate with an immortal; and so forth.
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In the Rig Veda, the female in this story is explicitly an immortal, while her husband, the Sun, is a mortal (one of those mortals from whom the gods hide her); he was born to die,9 for he dies each night/autumn and is reborn each dawn/spring. That Saranyu's husband and child are closely connected with death is as clear as anything in this riddle. Yama is often said to be the first one who died,10 and he becomes the god of the dead.
Saranyu's double is said to be of-the-same-kind (savarna) as Saranyu, of the same sort, or type, or appearance, or of the same color or class (varna), but, unlike Saranyu and like the Sun, the double is mortal. Folio from a Harivamsha, Lahore, Pakistan, Mughal empire, c. Opaque watercolor, gold, and ink on paper.
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(Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase [M.83.1.7]; digital image © Museum Associates / LACMA, Licensed by Art Resource, NY) The double produces no children, but Saranyu in her own persona produces a child whose name (Yama) means "twin" and who is then usually regarded as twins. As the mare, she produces the twin Ashvins, who are liminally immortal: they are often depicted as centaurs, half horse and half anthropomorphic gods (or half divine horse and half mortal humans), like the Greek Dioscuroi or the Roman Gemini, Castor and Pollux.
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Cycle 164
Out of her husband's sight, Saranyu created a female who looked like her. Tossing the two children to this female, she became a mare and went away. But in ignorance of this, the Sun begat Manu upon that female.
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Then the Sun became aware that Saranyu had departed in the form of a mare, and he took the form of a horse and went quickly after her. Saranyu, knowing that it was the Sun in the form of a horse, approached him for coupling, and he mounted her. But in their haste the semen fell on the ground, and the mare smelled that semen because she desired to become pregnant.
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Doubly Fertile Mares and Barren Mules in the Brahmanas
Saranyu's connection with twins is part of a broader mythology about another sort of "doubleness" that all mares have: the ability to be impregnated by the males of two different species, a stallion or a male donkey (called a jack or a jackass; the female donkey is a jenny). A mare is, in this sense, two-faced. (Donkeys are the victims of another sort of duplicity, vaguely reminiscent of the myth of Saranyu: when breeders put a jack donkey to a mare to breed a mule, some jack donkeys won't do it unless they tease him first with a jenny, a female of his own species, a "shadow" mare, if you will.) The Brahmanas tell us that a mare has "double" seed, since she can accommodate both the stallion and the jack donkey: Prajapati ("Lord of Creatures," the Creator) 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.
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The twelfth-century poet Harsha, for instance, applies this verb to mares who passionately desire the horses (here regarded as stallions) that draw the chariot of the Sun.29
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The Horse Sacrifice in the Brahmanas
The stallion ritually consecrated for the Vedic horse sacrifice "wandered" for a year, returned, engaged in a chariot race (in which he was generally the right-hand horse of the winning team),30 and then was killed by suffocation. The political agenda of this sacrifice is blatant. During the year of his "wandering," the king's men "set free" the consecrated white stallion and an army "followed" him and claimed for the king any land on which he grazed.
But in fact, though a stallion in the wild will indeed wander in search of new grazing land, a horse that has been stabled will not stray far from that stable when he's loose; he'll come back home to be fed. The idea that he will wander away as he used to do in his salad days up in the hills of Central Asia was by this time an anachronism, a conscious archaism. Now he had to be actively driven in order to make him "wander" away from home.
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So restorations were prescribed if the horse mounted a mare, or became lame, or got sick but not lame, or if the horse's eye was injured or diseased, or if the horse died in water. And finally: "If the horse should get lost, [the sacrificer] should make a sacrificial offering of three oblations. And if enemies should get the horse, or if the horse should die, .
they should bring another horse and consecrate it by sprinkling it with water; this is the restoration for that."36 And so there were stand-ins for the horse who was a stand-in for the king.
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The Obscenity of the Horse Sacrifice
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The horse is virility; therefore the priest makes the horse turn around again so that this virility does not turn away from the sacrificer. He places fire in the horse's footprint. The horse is virility; he places the fire in virility.41 .
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The presence of several queens also introduced into the Indian ritual a political factor, the jockeying (sic) for favor among the queens that became a metaphor for political intrigue, "co-wife" (sa-patni) being a synonym, in Sanskrit, for "enemy." A Gupta coin depicts a horse facing a sacrificial post and, on the obverse, a queen. The politics of sex are matched by the eroticism of political power. Gupta coin of a horse sacrifice, with a queen on the obverse side, probably from Samudra Gupta, 330-36 CE.
Obverse: Caparisoned horse facing left before a decorated sacrificial post, which rests on a pedestal. Reverse: Female figure facing left, wearing a gown and earrings, holding a fly whisk (chowrie) over her right shoulder and a cloth in her left hand, with a halo around her head. At her feet, a lotus, and in left field, a spear with ribbons.
Cycle 174
Obverse inscription: The King of Kings, performer of the Ashvamedha, conqueror of heaven. Reverse inscription: One who has the power to perform the Ashvamedha sacrifice. (© The Trustees of the British Museum, 1847, 1201.361) Here the judgment of obscenity rears its head.
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An ancestor of Dasharatha had had Rishyashringa seduced by courtesans and brought to the capital to perform the king's horse sacrifice. (In the Buddhist version, the chaste sage mistakes the courtesans for men with two peculiar but delightful growths on their chests, and something missing from between their legs . Dasharatha now sends again for Rishyashringa (this time without the courtesans) and engages him to perform the sacrifice, and the queens lie down with the horse.
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An illustration of the Ramayana depicts Dasharatha's chief queen, Kausalya, lying down beside the horse. Queen Kausalya performs the horse sacrifice (left). She then spends the night next to the body of the horse (right).
From a Ramayana text originally produced in Udaipur, 1712. (© The British Library Board, Add. 300-500 CE) tells a satirical story about a horse sacrifice begun by King Janamejaya but interrupted by the god Indra, the deity to whom horse sacrifices were offered.
It seems that Indra, overcome by desire for the wife of King Janamejaya, one day took advantage of the occasion of a horse sacrifice to combine the roles of sacrificer, recipient, and victim: Janamejaya was consecrated for the sacrifice, and his queen approached the consecrated stallion and lay down beside him, according to the rules of the ritual. But when Indra saw the woman, with her flawless limbs, he desired her. He himself entered the stallion and mingled with the queen.
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And when this transformation had taken place, Indra said to the priest in charge of the sacrifice, "This is not the horse you consecrated. Get out of here." The king cursed Indra, saying, "From today, kings will no longer offer horse sacrifices to this king of the gods, who is fickle and cannot control his senses." And he fired the priests and banished the queen.
But then the king of the Gandharvas calmed the king 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 consecrated horse, and he had entered the horse. And the woman with whom he had coupled in that way was actually an Apsaras [a celestial nymph, traditionally the wife of a Gandharva]; Indra had used his special magic to make the king think that it was the queen, his wife.
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The Severed Horse Head
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The Ashvins, being only partly divine, as well as part mortal and part horse, are at first not allowed access to the secret hiding place of the elixir of immortality, but they gain it in the course of the story by giving the sage Dadhyanch a horse head (temporarily), mimicking the form that this text (and others) assume that the Ashvins themselves have. This text also adds the secret of the sacrifice-that is, the secret by which the mutilated victim is made whole again, in this case the secret of exchanging a human head for a horse head and then back again.
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Cycle 24
Horses in the Upanishads
The very first words of the oldest of the Upanishads, the Brihadaranyaka, are a meditation on the sacrificial horse: The head of the sacrificial horse is the dawn. His eye is the sun, his breath the wind, and his open mouth is the fire that all men share. The body of the sacrificial horse is the year.
His back is the sky, his stomach the middle region, his underbelly the earth, his flanks the quarters, his ribs the middle quarters, his limbs the seasons, his joints the months and fortnights. The contents of his stomach are the sand, his intestines the rivers, his liver and lungs the hills. The hairs on his body are the plants and trees, his forequarters the rising sun and his hindquarters the setting sun.
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The Incest Myth, the Wild and the Tame
Another passage from this Upanishad takes the core of the Saranyu myth-the idea of a wife taking the form of a mare to flee from her husband (to whom, the text begins by saying, her father had given her)-and combines it with a myth about an incestuous father: The first being split his body into two, creating a husband and wife. He mated with her, and from that mating human beings were born. She thought to herself, "He created me from himself; how could he mate with me?
I will hide myself." She became a cow; but he became a bull and mated with her again, and from that mating cattle were born. Then she became a mare, and he a stallion; she became a female donkey, and he a male donkey. And again he mated with her, and from their mating were born all the animals that have a single hoof.
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And now the mare takes her place, after the cow, among all the other animals in creation. There is a fine symmetry to this list, which encompasses all the defining species of the ancient Indian animal world. At the two ends of the spectrum are humans and ants.
Right after humans come the pairs of other mammals, including the female counterparts of the macho sacrificial trio: the cow (the mate for the bull or buffalo), the mare and the female donkey (which we have seen to be the two consorts of the stallion), and the nanny goat and ewe. (The goat and sheep are often joined in a single Sanskrit noun, ajavi, goat-sheep, and in fact the two animals, though not of the same species, are very closely related.) The central macho trio, and their female counterparts, constitute the main members of the class of animals known in Sanskrit as pashu (cognate with the Latin pecus, the English "impecunious" [out of cash, i.e., cattle]).
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Harnessing the Horses of the Passions
One of the later Upanishads, the Katha Upanishad, uses the metaphor of harnessed horses to describe the control of human emotions: Think of the self as a rider in a chariot, and the body as the chariot. The intellect is the charioteer, and the mind is the reins. The senses are the horses, and the objects of the senses are the paths all around them.
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4. Horses and Snakes in the Underworld in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, 300 BCE to 300 CE
Horses run through the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic composed between 300 BCE and 300 CE, in the Ganges Valley (though the central action takes place in the earlier Vedic world, up in the northwest of India and what is now Pakistan). The conflict and collusion between horses and snakes comes to symbolize the tension between good and evil both on the cosmic scale and on the political level, to which horses in India are always highly relevant.
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Charioteers and Bards
Horses run through the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic composed between 300 BCE and 300 CE, in the Ganges Valley (though the central action takes place in the earlier Vedic world, up in the northwest of India and what is now Pakistan). The conflict and collusion between horses and snakes comes to symbolize the tension between good and evil both on the cosmic scale and on the political level, to which horses in India are always highly relevant. Horses are built into the very structure of the Mahabharata, as it is narrated by Sutas, men who are both charioteers and bards.
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Each charioteer would have gone into battle with one warrior as a combination chauffeur and bodyguard. And then at night, when all the warriors retired from the field and took off their armor and nursed their wounds and sat around the campfire and relaxed with food and drink and women, the bards would tell the stories of their exploits. Later, traveling bards no longer participated in battle, or drove chariots at all, but still recited the great poems at sacrifices and festivals and night-long performances in villages.
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In fact, two of the five Pandava brothers-the twin sons of the twin Ashvins-are also closely associated with horses. Called Nakula (also the name of the author of a famous textbook about horses) and Sahadeva, they work closely with animals. When the five brothers take on disguises in their year in hiding, Nakula becomes the king's groom; he says, "I like that kind of work.
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Clearly the Suta was a person of highly ambivalent status, like the horses that he drove.
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Horses and Snakes
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These ambivalent metaphorical and religious values complicate the use of horses as political symbols throughout Indian history. Precisely how horses and snakes are related, and why, are questions that the Mahabharata addresses in a complex cycle of myths, many of which associate the horse with the underworld. The snake mythology is dominated by Nagas-anthropomorphic above the waist, cobra from the waist down (often with a cobra hood spread over the anthropomorphic head)-and, more particularly, Naga women or Naginis.
Now, a horse sacrifice represents the culmination of the career of a royal Epic hero and the fulfillment of his righteous reign; King Yudhishthira, the eldest of the Pandava brothers, completes a successful horse sacrifice that is the central subject of one of the last books of the Mahabharata (Book 14). But a snake sacrifice is a tragic and broken inversion of a horse sacrifice. The horse is the right animal to sacrifice, the animal on which one rides triumphantly up to heaven; snakes, who drag one down to the watery hells beneath the earth, are the wrong animals to sacrifice.
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Janamejaya fails; his snake sacrifice is interrupted (as was his horse sacrifice in the Harivamsha) and Takshaka escapes, but only after hundreds of thousands of snakes have died in agony in the sacrificial fire. Krishna advising on the horse sacrifice. Probably from a picture-story series of the Mahabharata.
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Betting on a White Horse with a Black Tail
The saga of horses, birds, and snakes in the Mahabharata begins with one of the earliest attested examples of what we would call "fixing" (i.e., corrupting) a bet on a horse (though not the very earliest even in India; recall the "fixed" chariot race in the horse sacrifice in the Brahmanas): Kadru and Vinata, two sisters, were the wives of Kashyapa. Kadru gave birth to a thousand snakes, and Vinata gave birth to Garuda, king of the birds. One day the two women saw the [white] stallion Ucchaihshravas.
Vinata claimed that the horse was entirely white, but Kadru said he had a black tail. They made a wager, the loser to be the slave of the winner. Then Kadru ordered her sons to become like black hairs and to insert themselves in the horse's tail; at first they refused, and so she cursed them to be burnt in the fire at King Janamejaya's snake sacrifice; then they obeyed her.
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(Along the way we discover that this is an impossibility: Originally Varuna, god of the ocean, had created a thousand of such horses, white with one black ear, at the Ford of the Horses, but four hundred of them were taken by a river as they were being led across, and only six hundred of the thousand survived). The great bird Garuda (son of Vinata) carried Galava to a king who gave his daughter Madhavi to Galava. Galava sold Madhavi successively to three kings, each of whom gave him two hundred white horses (each with a black ear); each king also fathered an important son in Madhavi.
Cycle 194
Galava gave Vishvamitra the six hundred horses and (in place of the nonexistent remaining two hundred) gave him Madhavi for his wife, which satisfied him.18 The Garuda bird here, as usual, is the friend of horses and the enemy of snakes.
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A Black Horse with a White Tail in the Underworld
Another story in the first book of the Mahabharata involves snakes and a black horse with a white tail, the inverse of Ucchaihshravas, inverted perhaps because this story takes place in the underworld, where many things are reversed. In this tale, a sage named Uttanka, falling foul of the serpents, becomes the victim of a bizarre series of culinary challenges, including a bull's dung and the fiery farts of a magic horse: Uttanka's teacher's wife asked Uttanka to bring her the earrings that belonged to King Paushya.
Uttanka set out to do this, but on the way, he met a man mounted on an enormous bull. The man said, "Uttanka, eat the dung of my bull. Your teacher ate it in his day." Uttanka ate the bull's dung and drank the bull's urine and went on his way to Paushya's palace.
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When Uttanka asked Paushya's queen for her earrings, she gave them to him willingly, but she warned him that Takshaka, king of the snakes, wanted the earrings too. Uttanka assured her that Takshaka could not overpower him. Uttanka set out with the earrings, but on the way, Takshaka stole the earrings from him and entered a chasm that had suddenly opened up in the ground.
Uttanka followed him down into the field of the snakes. There he saw two women weaving with black and white threads, and he saw a handsome man riding an enormous horse. He asked the man to help him overcome the snake.
The man said, "Blow into the ass of this horse," and Uttanka did so. Then flames shot out from all the openings in the horse's body, and these flames smoked out the world of the snakes. Takshaka gave the earrings to Uttanka.
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The man gave the horse to Uttanka to ride back to his teacher's wife, and Uttanka arrived just in time to avoid her curse. Then Uttanka asked his teacher the meaning of what he had seen, and his teacher told him that the two women were the fates, the handsome man on the horse was the god of rain and his horse was Agni, the god of fire; the bull was the king of snakes, and the man who rode him was Indra, king of the gods.
In any case, a man capable of eating bullshit is surely capable of blowing into horses' asses. But Indra's remark is merely a twist on a statement often made to persuade someone to do something unusual: your teacher used to do it. And the dung turns out to be the best of all foods, the Soma, elixir of immortality.
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By blowing into the horse's ass, Uttanka inverts eating; more particularly, he inverts eating the bull's dung. And it is on this magic horse-who is the god of fire, Agni-that the hero rides away with his stolen treasure, the magic earrings. Here, again, the horse is the enemy of the snakes.
In light of the snake symbolism of the tail of the stallion Ucchaihshravas, it is not surprising that it should be the hind quarters of the horse that Uttanka must deal with in the world of snakes. This may be no more than an expression of the physical resemblance between a snake and a horse's tail, but it may mean something else as well: a reversal in keeping with the inversions generally characteristic of the underworld. The black-and-white imagery also characterizes several pairs of women, who, like Kadru and Vinata, continue the contrast between good and bad women/mothers.
The two women weaving with black and white threads are the ambivalent fates, but we have also met both the greedy wife of Uttanka's guru, who makes the unreasonable demand to have the earrings, and the contrasting generous (and wise) queen in the underworld, who gives him the earrings. The story of Uttanka is repeated, with variations, in the fourteenth book of the Mahabharata (the Ashvamedhika Parvan), the book that tells of Yudhishthira's successful horse sacrifice. This version of the Uttanka story is longer than the one in the first book and makes better sense of some of the incongruities of that version; it also introduces another episode of weird cuisine, involving a Chandala, a Dalit tribal hunter: Once when Uttanka was wandering in the desert, he saw a naked Chandala surrounded by dogs; the Chandala invited Uttanka to drink the copious fluids that were coming out of his penis.
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Horrified, Uttanka refused and the Chandala disappeared, whereupon Krishna appeared and told Uttanka that the Chandala was in fact Indra in disguise and that the fluid coming out of him was the Soma juice that would have made Uttanka immortal. In compensation for this lost opportunity, Krishna promised Uttanka that whenever he was thirsty, he could summon rain clouds, henceforth named Uttanka clouds. Now, Uttanka had been the pupil of the sage Gautama for many years, and when Uttanka grew very old, Gautama made him into a young man again and gave him his young daughter in marriage.
Cycle 29
The Horse in the Ocean
Cycle 199
When prince Rama was growing up, the sage who was educating him told him the story of Sagara: King Sagara had two wives. In order to have sons, he generated ascetic heat [tapas] for a hundred years; then he propitiated a great sage, who blessed him so that one of his wives gave birth to sixty thousand sons and the other bore just one son, Asamanja. But Asamanja took pleasure in seizing children and throwing them into the waters of the Sarayu river, laughing as he watched them drown.
Eventually Asamanja had a son, Amshuman, whom the people loved, as he was always kind. After some time, King Sagara performed a horse sacrifice, but Indra took the form of an ogre (rakshasa) and stole the horse. The priests advised Sagara to find the thief, kill him, and bring back the horse.
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The king sent his sixty thousand sons to search for the horse; they dug down into the earth with spades, digging down sixty thousand leagues, destroying many living creatures, who screamed as they died. The sons reached down into the underworld. Then the gods and anti-gods and serpents, deeply distressed, complained, "The sons of Sagara are digging up the whole earth!
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They shout, 'He has carried off the horse! He has ruined our sacrifice!' and then they slaughter everyone." The sons continued to dig up the entire earth. Eventually they came upon the sage Kapila, with the horse grazing near him.
They ran at Kapila in fury, but he, too, became furious, and he burnt them all to ashes. The sons of Sagara discover the stolen sacrificial horse grazing near the sage Kapila. Mughal dynasty, reign of Akbar, 1597-1605 CE.
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Artist: Syama Sundara; patron: Abd al-Rahim. (Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., F1907.271.1, folio 45 recto) Then the king sent his grandson, Amshuman, to find the horse. Amshuman found the ashes of the sons, and the horse grazing nearby.
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He brought the horse back to Sagara, who completed the sacrifice. Eventually, Amshuman's grandson, Bhagiratha, brought the Milky Way down from heaven to earth, where it became the river Ganges. He brought the Ganges to the ocean [sic] and it entered the hole in the earth where the sixty thousand sons had been burnt to ashes.
The river flowed over the ashes and purified the sons so that they were able to go to heaven, and the waters of the ocean remained in the world.24 Figure 11. Amshuman finds the horse and the ashes of his sixty thousand uncles. His maternal uncle Garuda advises him to return with the horse in order to complete the sacrifice.
Cycle 204
From a manuscript of the Ramayana originally produced in Udaipur, 1712. (© The British Library Board, Add. 117) The bad river Sarayu at the start, the river into which the evil son throws children to kill them, is contrasted with the good river, the Ganges, which revives rather than kills those whom it touches, just as the evil son is contrasted with his own good son.
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The Sarayu, a river known to the Rig Veda,25 echoes the name of Saranyu, the bad mother in the Vedic myth. Here, instead of helping the hero with horses in the underworld, as he helps Uttanka, Indra interrupts the horse sacrifice, as he did when he seduced Janamejaya's wife. In many ways, the river in these variants replaces the horse as the means of moving people.
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5. Horses in the Ocean in the Sanskrit Puranas, 400 to 1400 CE
The Puranas, Sanskrit texts composed from about 400 CE to the early modern period, are encyclopedias that cover all sorts of miscellaneous topics, including medical knowledge, how to build a temple, how to perform a ritual, and everything they think you need to know about elephants and horses. They also have a great deal to say about history and mythology, particularly about the connection between horses and human sexuality, and about the role of horses in the eternal war between the powers of good and evil.
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The Birth of the Fiery Underwater Horse
The Puranas, Sanskrit texts composed from about 400 CE to the early modern period, are encyclopedias that cover all sorts of miscellaneous topics, including medical knowledge, how to build a temple, how to perform a ritual, and everything they think you need to know about elephants and horses. They also have a great deal to say about history and mythology, particularly about the connection between horses and human sexuality, and about the role of horses in the eternal war between the powers of good and evil.
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The fire in the mouth of the underwater horse drinks the waters of the ocean and lets them out again; the fire keeps the waters of the ocean from breaching the shore and flooding the earth, while the water keeps the fire from escaping and burning the earth. Eventually, when it is time for doomsday at the end of the aeon, the supreme deity will whistle to the fiery horse, who will gallop up out of the ocean and burn the universe, and the newly unrestrained waters of the ocean will then also escape and flood the universe.
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The story is told in many different ways in many different texts. The Mahabharata associates the story of the underwater fire with the sage Aurva and with the Fathers, the dead male ancestors: Figure 12. 17 × 10 × 15 in.
Cycle 209
(Collection of Wendy Doniger) A group of Kshatriyas went through the land killing all the children in the womb. The women fled to the Himalayas, but one woman with beautiful thighs hid her child in her thigh. The Kshatriyas found her, but the child split open his mother's thigh and blazed so brightly that he blinded the Kshatriyas.
They begged the child's mother to forgive them and restore their sight. But the child, named Aurva because he was born from his mother's left thigh (uru), blazed with anger toward the Kshatriya class. He generated tapas (ascetic heat) in order to destroy the world and its people, and that great heat heated all the gods.
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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 the Himalayas and generated great ascetic heat to propitiate Shiva; he churned his left thigh with his left hand and from it a mare appeared, followed by a stallion. The stallion covered the mare, who brought forth a foal and disappeared.
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Pippalada then told the foal to devour the gods. The gods sought help from Vishnu, who tricked the foal into eating the gods one by one, beginning with the waters. The foal, haloed in flames, asked to be brought to the waters, but no one but the river Sarasvati could bear the fiery foal.
As Sarasvati carried the foal to the waters, a mountain saw her and asked her to marry him; she refused, and he threatened to rape her. She then agreed to marry him if he would hold the fiery foal while she bathed; he did so and was burnt to ashes. She took up the foal and set out again for the ocean.
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Although the story refers to the Aurva fire, Aurva does not appear. But in place of Aurva's chaste ascetic powers, this text introduces the theme of female chastity: the mother of Pippalada swears by her chastity, and Sarasvati's steadfast chastity enables her to fulfill her role and dispose of the fire. Sarasvati's place in the myth is clear: as a river she is, like the ocean, a viable watery receptacle for the fire.
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Cycle 34
Controlling the Underwater Mare
Aurva's chastity plays a more central role in the Matsya Purana version of the story of the underwater fire, which begins when the gods persuade Aurva to abandon his ascetic vow and to place his tejas (i.e., his fiery power, but also his seed) where it will cease to generate heat-in water: The sage Urva was generating ascetic heat; the gods asked him to stop and to 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 ascetic heat 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 fiery power, for the good of all people.
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And here, briefly but significantly, the underwater fire is associated not with a stallion but with a mare, who is already in the ocean, presumably waiting for Urva to place the fire in her mouth. This mare has a history of her own. One brief passage in the Mahabharata specifies that the fire born of Aurva is not itself equine but lives in the mouth of the underwater mare: "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.
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The Brahma Purana tells a version of the story of Pippalada and Dadhicha (sic) which offers a more blatant rationalization for the presence of the mare in the story: Pippalada the son of Dadhicha generated great ascetic heat in order to kill the slayers of his father, and Shiva gave him the power to kill the gods. The pippala (fig) trees said, "Your mother was said to be a mare," and when Pippalada heard this he became angry, and from his eye an evil spirit came forth blazing in the form of a mare with a deadly tongue; she had the form of a mare because he had been thinking of a mare.
He told her to eat the gods, but she began to eat him, since he had been made by the gods. In terror, Pippalada fled to Shiva, who told the mare not to eat any creature within the distance of a league from that place. Then the mare set out full of fire to burn the universe, terrifying the gods, who sought refuge with Pippalada; but Pippalada could not restrain the mare.
As she came to the Ganges, the gods begged her to begin with the waters of the ocean and then to devour everything. The mare-fire said, "How can I reach the ocean? Let a virtuous maiden place me in a golden pot and lead me there." The gods asked the maiden Sarasvati to do this, and she asked them to join her with four other rivers, the Yamuna, Ganges, Narmada, and Tapati.
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Shiva and Kama and the Underwater Mare
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He deluded Shiva, arousing him, but when Shiva realized that Kama was attacking him he released a fire from his third eye, burning Kama to ashes. This resulted in a fire composed of two sparks: the erotic fire that Kama had kindled in Shiva and the ascetic fire from the third eye in Shiva's forehead. 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 combined 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, ambrosial flames issuing from her mouth. Then Brahma took the mare to the ocean and said, "This mare is the fire of Shiva's anger; it has burnt Kama, and now it wishes to burn the whole universe.
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In Nath versions of Kundalini yoga, the underwater mare is said to be the doomsday fire at the base of the spine, homologized with the Kundalini serpent22-horses and snakes again. The fire of Shiva's anger, the Aurva fire, and the fire of Kama combine in a verse that a lovesick king addresses to Kama: Surely the fire of Shiva's anger still burns in you today, like the fire of Aurva in the ocean; Figure 13. Rati riding a horse made of women.
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Vishnu as the Horse-headed Hayagriva
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Vishnu promised that Lakshmi would be released from the curse when she had a son. Lakshmi, who was the daughter of the ocean, went to the very place where Saranyu had wandered as a mare, generating ascetic heat, at the confluence of the Kalindi and Tamasa rivers. Lakshmi took the form of a mare, meditated upon Shiva, and generated ascetic heat for a thousand years.
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In the Mahabharata, Vishnu purposely takes on a horse head to enter the ocean: When the anti-gods Madhu and Kaitabha stole the Vedas and carried them down into the waters, Brahma became blind, for the Vedas were his eyes. He prayed to Vishnu, who took on a marvelous horse-headed form (Hayashiras): his mane was made of the rays of the sun, the sun and moon were his two eyes, lightning his tongue, and the night of doomsday was his neck. When Vishnu had taken on this horse-headed form, he vanished into the waters.
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Brahma told Vishnu what had happened, and Vishnu took a horse-headed form and entered the underwater world. He took the Vedas back to Brahma and then he resumed his own form, leaving the horse head in the ocean as the dwelling of the Vedas. Then he killed Madhu and Kaitabha.
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The gods propitiated the Goddess, who told them why Vishnu had been beheaded: "Once, Vishnu laughed when he saw the face of his wife, Lakshmi. Fearing that he thought her face ugly or that he had taken a more beautiful woman as her co-wife, she cursed him to have his head fall off, because she thought that being a widow would be less painful for her than having a co-wife. For falsehood, trickery, stupidity, rashness, excessive greediness, impurity, and cruelty are the faults that every woman is born with by her nature.
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Vishnu as Keshava and Kalki
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The Vishnu Purana tells us more: The evil king Kamsa sent Keshi, in the form of a horse, to kill Krishna, but Krishna vowed to knock Keshi's teeth down his throat. Keshi attacked Krishna; his mouth, vast as a cavern, was wide open in rage. Krishna thrust his arm into that mouth, like a serpent entering a hole, knocking out Keshi's teeth, and began to expand until Keshi was split in two pieces, each having two legs, half a back, half a tail, one ear, one eye, and one nostril.
And the Bhagavata Purana, after narrating Krishna's killing of Keshi, says that that is why Krishna is called Keshava.46 Keshi is thus, like Hayagriva, an anti-god identified with his own Vaishnava killer. Krishna killing the demonic horse Keshi. Gupta, fifth century CE, Uttar Pradesh.
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21 × 16 × 4 in. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1991.300, Purchase, Florence and Herbert Irving Gift, 1991) And then there is the equally ambivalent equine form of Vishnu, the inverted centaur, Kalki (or Kalkin), the last of Vishnu's ten avatars. Kalki is the only Hindu god who rides a horse.
Though all of the gods have vehicles (the Sanskrit term, vahana, is cognate with our English word "vehicle")-the bandicoot for Ganesha, the bull for Shiva, the peacock for Skanda, the lion for the Goddess, and so on-significantly, none of the vahanas are animals that people actually ride. And none of the ancient Hindu gods rides a horse as a vahana, though Indra and the sun god drive horses in their chariots. In fact, the gods don't usually ride on their vahanas; some do-the Goddess sometimes rides her lion into battle, and Vishnu often sails through the skies on Garuda-but more often they are awkwardly depicted in sculptures and paintings as just sitting sideways on the animal as if on a bench or a sofa.
Yet the point is that the god is somehow present wherever the animal is present, in much the sense that we say a certain play is a "vehicle" for a particular actor. Kalki is the only god who rides a horse, astride-but he exists only in the future. A groom is presenting the horse Kalki to Krishna.
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Kalki himself has the form of an invader; like them, he comes riding on a white horse. But his purpose is to destroy the invaders, to raze the wicked cities that had been polluted by foreign kings-foreign horsemen-and drive them out of India. His very name is ambiguous: Kalki is one who has kalka-filth, dregs, sediment, impurity, and deceit.
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He "has" the dregs of the Kali Age in one way or another, as the barbarian who is impurity incarnate, or as the god who destroys that impurity. Like the underwater mare, he ushers in doomsday. Thus Kalki is both the invader, the foreigner on the horse, and the Indian horseman who repels the invaders, fighting fire with fire-or horses with horses.
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6. Ashvashastra, the Science of Horses, 200 BCE to 1200 CE
200 BCE to 1200 CE The Sanskrit word shastra designates a knowledge system or a text that contains such knowledge. So ashvashastra in general means the science of breeding and training horses, while an ashvashastra attributed to a particular author is a textbook about the breeding and training of horses.
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Ashvashastra, the Science of Horses
200 BCE to 1200 CE The Sanskrit word shastra designates a knowledge system or a text that contains such knowledge. So ashvashastra in general means the science of breeding and training horses, while an ashvashastra attributed to a particular author is a textbook about the breeding and training of horses. This chapter will consider the science of horses in the broader sense, and so will include discussions of passages in this genre that appear in texts other than the actual textbooks called ashvashastras, as well as some passages from the textbooks themselves.
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Textbooks about the science of horses tell us as much about the ways that ancient Indians imagined horses as they do about their actual treatment.
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The Science of Horses in the Textbook of Politics (Arthashastra)
The textbook of politics, the Arthashastra, attributed to Kautilya, was probably composed in the first centuries of the Common Era. It deals in great detail with all the subjects that a king would need to know in order to govern a kingdom, and one of these subjects is the care and feeding of horses. This is treated in a chapter detailing the tasks of the man in charge of all the king's horses, which begins, like many chapters of this very practical administrative text, with a concern for the book and value of the objects of interest, in this case, horses: The Superintendent of Horses should get the total number of horses recorded in writing-those received as gifts, those acquired by purchase, those gained by war, those born to the herd, those procured in return for assistance, those pledged in a treaty, and those borrowed temporarily-according to their ancestry, age, color, marks, class, and provenance.
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It should have many monkeys, peacocks, spotted deer, mongooses, partridges, parrots, and myna birds. He should have a stall facing east or north constructed for each horse, a stall that is square in shape, with each side the length of a horse and with a floor made of smooth planks, equipped with a hamper for feed and an outlet for urine and dung. Or he may adjust the direction in accordance with the requirements of the stable.
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(In our day, too, valuable racehorses are carefully guarded so that they will not be "nobbled" by someone slipping something bad into their food or water.) The author goes on to distinguish between different conditions and dispositions of horses: Horses unable to work due to war, sickness, or old age should receive sufficient food to maintain themselves. Those that are unfit for battle should be employed as stallions to service mares for the benefit of people in the cities and the countryside.
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The Ramayana specifies that the great kingdom of Ayodhya "was filled with the finest horses, bred in the regions of Bahlika, Vanayu, Kamboja and Sindh,"7 areas also favored by the Arthashastra. Next comes the description of a horse's gaits: Gallop, canter, leap, trot, and dressage movements are the gaits of a riding horse. The gallop when the head and ears remain unaffected is the canter.
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And if any of them neglects his tasks, he should lose a day's wages. If someone rides a horse kept locked up for the rite of lustration [for war horses] or on the orders of the veterinarian, he is to be fined. If a sickness becomes worse because treatment or medicine was delayed, the fine is twice the amount spent for the cure.
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Horses in an Ashvashastra
Many ashvashastras have been preserved in Indian libraries, in large part because rich and royal patrons often had them copied for their private libraries, prizing them particularly but not only for their gorgeous illustrations. One of the most famous of the ashvashastras is the text attributed to Nakula,14 one of the twin brothers in the Mahabharata who are the incarnation of the Ashvins, the children of the mare Saranyu. No reliable date has been established for this text, though it probably reached something like its present form between the eight and twelfth centuries CE.
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After these prefaces, the text of the Ashvashastra proper begins. Here is a summary of the main topics covered in the rest of the text, with selected details of particular interest: Figure 16. A Treatise on Horses (hippology), Nepal.
(The Royal Library, National Library of Denmark and Copenhagen University Library, Shelfmark Nepal.122) Anatomy of horses; Good and bad physical characteristics of various parts of their bodies; Avartas (what we would call cowlicks, more properly here horse-licks): An avarta is a whorl, a twist of hair that curls in a direction against the grain, invested with great meaning according to its position on the horse. The ten permanent avartas are invariably good; a horse without them will be short-lived, unlucky, and possess bad qualities.
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They should twist to the right and be situated two on the chest, two on the head, two on the sheath, two on the phallus, one in the middle of the forehead, and one on the upper lip. Of the 113 impermanent forms, there are thirty-seven good ones found in twenty good places, and seventy-six bad ones in seventy-six bad places; Horses of multiple colors; Neighing: When horses neigh at the sight of a Brahmin or flowers it is a good omen; when it sounds like the sound made by a crow, pig, jackal, ass or camel, it is a bad omen; and so forth; Smell: A horse should smell like a lotus, sandalwood, or honey, and should not smell like a "dog-eating" Dalit (shva-pacha), a tortoise, or bugs, or like the urine and feces of an ass, camel, pig, or owl; Shadows (chaya): A shadow is a kind of overcoat of hair, something like what we would call "roan" (though we generally recognize only bay, chestnut, or black mixed with white, and the ancient Indians had five roan colors), which is said to come over a horse's body like clouds covering the rising sun (recall the "Shadow" who takes the place of Saranyu, wife of the sun).
These are seen when the horse is has just bathed, or is drinking water, grazing, or just waking up. The shadows of earth, water (clear as crystal, like a cloud full of water) and fire (ruby-red, like the rising sun) are good; the shadows of wind (harsh and broken) and sky (thin and coarse) are wild and unsteady; Character: Horses are divided (as humans are) into three basic categories-gentle (sattva), ardent (rajas), and sluggish (tamas); but horses are further subdivided into subcategories (named after various gods or supernatural creatures): Gentle (sattva): The Creator (Brahma): without passion or forgetfulness; Sage (rishi): without desire, hatred, deceit, or lust; King of the Gods (Indra): strong and noble; God of the Dead (Yama ): without treachery; God of Wealth (Kubera ): with visible joy, anger, memory and passion; God of the Waters (Varuna): fond of pleasure, playful, heroic; Gandharva: fond of music and singing and worship (puja).
Ardent (rajas): Anti-God (Asura): fierce and angry; Ogre (Rakshasa): priapic and gluttonous; Ghoul (Pishacha): gluttonous and timid; Cobra (Naga): excitable, nervous, and clean; Father (Ancestor, Pitri): bad-tempered and unresponsive to good treatment; Vulture (Shakuna): greedy for food, lustful, and inclined to frown. Sluggish (tamas): Cattle (Pashu): hungry, dull, timid and lazy; Fish (Matsya): greedy for food and water, and cowardly; Hostile god (Viruddha): sleepy, moody, and lazy. Defects to be avoided: black or broken teeth, bad limbs, extra limbs or missing limbs, etc.; Family line (kula, what we would call "blood stock"); Age: how to determine it, mostly by the teeth; Colors of the coat (the equivalent of our bay, chestnut, and so forth): white, red, black, yellow, and a variety of multi-colors.
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Great emphasis was placed on the colors of horses, here and in the mythological and historical texts as well. The Faras-nama of Hashmi, based in part on a translation of Shalihotra's Ashvashastra, divided horses according to their color,18 as indeed riders and breeders everywhere often do to this day. Horses suitable to different riders (gods, chaplains, kings) and occasions (coronation, warfare, riding), determined not by the character or physique of the horse but by the color of the coat and various auspicious signs on the horse; Lifespan (ayur), mainly the signs of a horse that will live long; Signs of potential disaster on the body of the horse, such as: If a healthy horse refuses food or sheds tears without any cause, it portends evil; if a horse weaves his head back and forth and licks his lips, it portends victory; if a horse strikes the earth with his left leg, it is a bad omen; if a horse looks at his owner on the right side as he mounts, it portends victory; if a horse loses his teeth for no accountable reason, it is an occasion for fear; if a horse swishes his tail on its left side, it portends a journey; on the right side, victory; Training: Again the horses are divided into classes, this time of four types, named after the four classes of Indian society.
The anti-Brahmin, and pro-Kshatriya, bias makes sense considering that the patrons of ashvashastras were most likely to have been kings and nobles: Brahmins (the class from which priests are drawn): the horses tend to be timid, appetitive, and ravenous, and should be trained by the use of force, before dawn; Kshatriyas (kings and soldiers): bold and spirited, these horses should be trained by gentle persuasion, in the morning; Vaishyas (merchants): evil, cunning, and brutal, these horses should be trained with a whip and by sounds, in the evening; Shudras (servants): coarse, cowardly, and cruel, these horses should be trained with a whip, at night. Training horses in general: Irascible or thoughtless people, who have unsteady seats or deal out punishment for no good reason, will not succeed in training a horse, nor will those who tremble when they mount a horse.
The trainer should sit tight, understand the horse's mind and character, and be vigilant, patient, hopeful, and strong. Riding: The rider must maintain good posture and stay calm and must not swing to left or right or bend down or look at the ground. He must keep his eye on the top of the horse's head between the ears.
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His back must be straight but he should not sit stiffly. He should mount from the right. When he first rides a horse, he should bathe and put on red clothes and red flowers and pray to the horse, in the horse's right ear.
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You were born in the family of horses; be my constant friend always. Long ago, when the gods mounted your back, they conquered the anti-gods; now let me mount you and conquer the army of my enemies." And with this final reference to Ucchaihshravas, the horse who emerged from the churning of the ocean and fought against the anti-gods, the Ashvashastra returns from the world of practical advice to the world of mythology with which it began.
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Horses in the Agni Purana
The Sanskrit Puranas incorporate a great deal of shastric material on various topics, including horses. The Agni Purana puts its rich discussion of horses in the mouth of Dhanvantari, the divine physician who is said to have emerged, along with the horse Ucchaihshravas, when the gods churned the ocean: Dhanvantari said, "I will proclaim the essence of riding horses, and the art of curing horses. When the moon is in certain favorable constellations, that is a time recommended for riding a horse for the first time.
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Winter, the cool month, and spring are for riding horses; in summer, autumn, and the rains, the riding or harnessing of horses is forbidden. Do not strike the horse with sharp or inconsistent blows, nor hurt him in his mouth. Do not ride on ground that is strewn with sharp pieces of wood or bones, nor on uneven ground, or ground that is thorny, or covered with sand or mud, or spoilt by ditches or holes.
A professional master of horses or an expert equestrian player can ride a horse better without a stirrup or bridle. A person who rides without knowing the mind of horses, and without the proper methods, is carried along by the horse, stuck on its back. But the wise and accomplished rider, whoever he is, can communicate his wish, and rides by his own ability, by practice and application, without book-learning.
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With a series of chants ending with Om, harness the gods in the body of a horse that has been bathed and faces east: harness Brahma in the mind, Vishnu in the horse's strength, Garuda in his courage, the Rudras in his sides, Brihaspati in his intelligence, and all the gods in his key spots; harness in the horse's eyes the moon and sun, that revolve within the sphere of vision; and the Ashvins in his ears. Agni in his stomach, Svadha in his sweat, speech in his tongue, and wind in his speed; the vault of heaven on his back, and all the mountains in the tips of his hooves.
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The flaws that generally appear in the bodies of horses may be overcome, with great effort, by the best of riders, and appear as good points. And these good points that actually result from the skill of the rider appear to be innate. But other sorts of riders destroy the good points that are there, even when they are actually innate.
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One person knows the good points of horses, and another knows their flaws; the wise and fortunate person knows both the flaws and the good points of a horse, but the fool knows neither. A rider who does not know the proper movements, nor the proper methods, who is impatient and quick to anger, who is fond of using the whip to get his way, who is inconsistent-such a rider does not learn even after he has been taught. But the rider who knows the methods and knows the mind of the horse, who is calm, able to eradicate the flaws of the horse, intent upon bringing out the horse's good points, is always nimble in all the movements.
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The horse that is to be ridden should be grasped by the halter and led into the riding arena by a good rider and should be handled both from the left and from the right. A fine horse should not be mounted suddenly nor struck, for from being struck fear arises, and from fear, panic. In the morning, the rider should make the horse move with the leaping pace of capering, loosening the reins; at the end of the day, the rider should go slowly slowly, holding in the reins.
The equivalents of the political methods of conciliation and giving gifts [according to the Arthashastra],21 when applied to the handling of horses, are talking nicely and soothing; the equivalent of using armed force is striking with the whip and so forth; and the equivalent of bribery is forbearing for a while or allowing the horse to rest. As soon as each lesson is learned, proceed to the next. You should place the bit on a riding horse without touching the surface of the tongue and tighten it at the corners of the mouth.
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A Persian Ashvashastra
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From an eighteenth-century CE Hindi text. (Wellcome Library Collection, CC BY, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/p7b4d2bb) Of the defects in a horse, one is silence: the silent horse has very little value. The sign of this is that when he sees a mare, although he may erect the penis, he fails to neigh.
Then there is the half-blind horse, which is night-blind. The sign of this is that he has no fear at night of those things which horses usually fear; and he will not shy but will venture on to any ground which you ride to, however bad. A deaf horse is also bad.
The sign of this is that the horse does not hear the neighing of other horses and never answers, although he always has his ears forward and open. A "left-legged" horse is also bad, constantly stumbling. The sign of this is that when you lead the horse into a passageway, he puts forward his left fore-leg first.
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The purblind horse is bad because he cannot see in the daytime. The sign of this is that the pupil of the eye is black verging on green, and he keeps his eye always open so that the lids never touch. This may occur in one eye or in both.
Although this defect may appear to be a bad one, both Arabs and non-Arabs are agreed that it is well-omened. The "stockinged" horse has a white fore- or hind-leg; if the left fore- and hind-legs are white it is ill-omened. If the horse is blue in both eyes, that may pass; but if he is blue in one only, then the horse is defective, particularly if it is the left eye.
The wall-eyed horse is bad, that is, the horse that has a white eye; and the blue roan is bad, too; so is the long-necked horse, that is, the one that has its neck stretched out straight. No regard should be paid to a horse of that description. The "crab" horse is bad because both of his hind legs are crooked; in Persian it is called "bow-legged." He frequently falls down.
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The hair-ringed horse similarly is bad because he has hair around his legs and under his hoofs. It is worst if the hair grows on both sides, but it is bad if the hair is around the legs above the hoof on the inner side. If it is on the outer side, it is tolerable.
The horse with distorted hoofs is bad also, that is, one that has the hoofs turned inwards. (It is also called ahnaf.) Bad also is the horse that has an overlong fore- or hind-leg, whether in descent or ascent. (It is called afraq, i.e., "That which has one haunch higher than the other.") The crooked-tailed horse (called a'zal or akshaf) is bad; his genital organs are open to view.
So also is the dog-tailed horse and one whose [hind-]legs are set wide apart in such fashion that they cannot follow in the traces of the fore-legs. It is called afran, if the infirmity is in the hind-legs; and that is equally bad. Bad also are the horses which refuse harness, bore, bite, neigh frequently, break wind, kick, are slow to eject their droppings, or maintain the penis erect.
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Equine Lexicology and More Equine Lexicology
Many Sanskrit terms for parts of the horse (such as vidu or palihasta) do not appear in the principal extant Sanskrit dictionaries. Other terms appear in the standard dictionary by Sir Monier Monier-Williams but are unhelpfully glossed, such as "a particular part of the head of a horse" (for the stuva, or poll). He defines the randhra, or sheath, with vague euphemisms about being situated somewhere under the belly.
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Still other terms are given definitions that apply only to the human body or that have quite a different meaning when applied to a horse, such as manya (top of the poll) as "the nape of the neck," and sthura (hock) as "the ankle or buttock." The problem is that one needs to translate not just from Sanskrit to English but from horsey Sanskrit to horsey English, and Monier-Williams was evidently not horsey. Often the translation depends entirely on the context; here, as so often, it is necessary to take the Sanskrit from the meaning rather than the meaning from the Sanskrit (to paraphrase Dr.
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The Sanskrit word for this is "frog" (manduki or manduka), and so it is in English. Other ancient and modern Indo-European languages have other words for it; the ancient Greeks called it the "swallow" (chelidon). In the late Byzantine period, however, it was called the "little frog" (batrachos), and the late Latin word for it was also "little frog" (ranula).
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Professor Lariviere began by remarking that I had evidently, "with an eye peeled for lurking philistines, felt the compulsion to justify this manifestly helpful contribution" with examples of ways that modern scholars might tumble over the technical vocabulary. Riding to my rescue, he therefore wished both to support my assertion and to add that modern scholars are often misled by commentaries even within the Sanskrit tradition. The example he chose, taking off from my own remark that sthura (hock) was often wrongly translated as the ankle or buttock (the latter being payu in Sanskrit), was one in which the most famous of all Sanskrit commentators, Sayana, had glossed sthura as "a particular part of the flesh found near the anus." Professor Lariviere, pointing out that the sthura is "the closest thing a horse has to an elbow," therefore concluded that "Sayana, in this case at least, did not know his payu from his sthura." He went on to adduce dozens of other examples of commentarial confusions over sthura, and he concluded that the commentators "did not have the necessary familiarity with the lexicography of large animal anatomy." And so he thanked me for my contribution.
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I, of course, have always been grateful to him for joining me in a bit of high-spirited academic horseplay. Though the knowledge of Sanskrit was limited to a privileged few in ancient India, primarily men, and among them primarily Brahmins and some kings and wealthy merchants, the information in the ashvashastras was widely diffused, as we know from its citation in vernacular texts and from the many illustrations of horses of various colors and conformations, corresponding to lists in the textbooks, that appear in paintings and sketches, on palm-leaf pages, ivory, walls, and, throughout India, in any place where there is room for an image of a horse.
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The ideas of Sanskrit texts have always been well known in India, even among people who did not read. The third-century CE Kamasutra, in arguing for this general point in the context of women's access to the Kamasutra, specifically mentions the science of horses. It begins with a challenge from "scholars," a term that in this text designates pedants who are usually wrong: Scholars say: "Since females cannot grasp texts, it is useless to teach women this text [the Kamasutra]." Vatsyayana [the author of the Kamasutra] 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.
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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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7. Buddhist Horses, 500 BCE to 500 CE
500 BCE to 500 CE Buddhism shares with Hinduism many stories and images of horses, as well as the tendency to dichotomize equines in the Vedic manner, contrasting the good stallion with the evil mare. For the good stallion, we will here consider a fundamental Buddhist myth, the story of the faithful horse that carried the future Buddha out of his life as a prince and into his life as the Buddha.
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Buddhist Horses
500 BCE to 500 CE Buddhism shares with Hinduism many stories and images of horses, as well as the tendency to dichotomize equines in the Vedic manner, contrasting the good stallion with the evil mare. For the good stallion, we will here consider a fundamental Buddhist myth, the story of the faithful horse that carried the future Buddha out of his life as a prince and into his life as the Buddha. For the evil mare, we will sample a range of stories about voracious horse-headed female creatures who bedevil Buddhist men.
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Stories about Buddhist horses are inevitably colored by Buddhist ideas about the meaning of life, which differ in many significant ways from their Hindu equivalents. So, from now on, and more and more as we continue to move into Mughal and British and tribal worlds, we will be stretching and qualifying some of the basic paradigms that we have carved out of the Sanskrit corpus. In the field of visual art, too, Buddhism changed the course of the history of representations of horses in India.
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[and] are fed on parched rice drippings, broken meats and grass and red rice-powder (#254). When they become rogue, they bite quiet horses, but when two rogues meet they lick each other's bodies (#156). A horse watching its lame trainer as he tramped on and on in front imitated him and limped too (#184).
A well-bred war-horse will not bathe in the same place where an ordinary horse took its bath (#25). Horses were employed for drawing state-chariots (#22) and cars (#211). Well-bred Sindh horses sheathed in mail were used for war (#23, 547).
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There was a trade in horses (#4, 5). There were valuers employed by kings to fix the proper price of horses, elephants, and the like (#5). Good horses used to fetch high prices.3 Figure 18.
Horse on the Sarnath column abacus. Sarnath, Varanasi Dt., Uttar Pradesh, c. Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art; photo by John C.
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In one Jataka (#23, the Bhojajaniya Jataka), the future Buddha himself actually becomes incarnate as a "thoroughbred Sindh horse" who becomes King Brahmadatta's best warhorse. The horse saves Brahmadatta from seven powerful attacking kings, fighting on though he is mortally wounded. As he lies dying, he makes Brahmadatta promise not to kill the captured kings but to bind them with an oath and set them free; he also reminds Brahmadatta to rule with charity, righteousness, and justice.
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And as they are taking off the horse's armor piece by piece, he dies.
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Kanthaka, the Future Buddha’s Horse
One of the most famous horses in Indian history is Kanthaka,5 the white stallion that Prince Siddhartha (also called Gautama Shakyamuni), the future Buddha (or Bodhisattva/Bodhisatta), rode before he achieved Enlightenment. Kanthaka plays an important part in one of the best-known versions of the story of the Buddha, Ashvaghosha's Buddhacharita or "Life of the Buddha," a Sanskrit poem composed in the first or second century CE. Here is a summary of what Ashvaghosha says about Kanthaka in his poem: One day, Prince Siddhartha set out from the palace on his fine horse Kanthaka, with golden bells swinging from the horse's bridle.
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After a while, the prince dismounted and eventually encountered several gods who had come to earth in disguise to meet him. Then he who had conquered the horses of the senses mounted his horse and returned to the city. After some time, the prince decided to leave the palace forever.
In the night, he awakened his charioteer, Chandaka, and told him to bring Kanthaka to him quickly. Kanthaka had strength, heart, speed and breeding; he had a golden bit in his mouth and a soft cloth on his back. His back, rump and fetlocks were long, his hair, tail and ears short and erect, his back low, his belly and flanks rounded, his nostrils, forehead, hips and chest wide.
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The prince embraced the horse and caressed him, speaking sweetly to him, as if to a friend, saying, "Best of all horses, you often carried the king when he conquered his enemies; now you must help me to conquer death. Use your speed and courage, for your own welfare and for that of the world." The white horse carried him without making a sound that might cause alarm in the night, stifling his neighing and walking with careful steps. Then demigods (Yakshas) bent low to cup the tips of their hands under the horse's hooves.
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Prince Siddhartha's horse Kanthaka with an empty saddle leaves the palace via an elaborate gate (torana). The Bodhisattva is represented by an umbrella held over the horse by a servant. Dome-slab carved in limestone ("Palnad marble") with the Great Departure.
123 × 86 × 11 cm. (© The Trustees of the British Museum, 1880, 0709.51) After riding for a while, the prince entered a grove of trees and, dismounting from his horse and stroking him, told Chandaka to return with the horse to the palace. But Kanthaka licked the prince's feet with his tongue and began to shed warm tears.
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The prince stroked the horse gently with his hand and spoke to him like a companion, saying, "Please do not weep, Kanthaka. You've proven what a good horse you are; bear with me now." And so, though Kanthaka was a powerful horse, he walked on in low spirits, turning back and looking into the grove of trees, neighing loudly again and again, piteously. Though he was hungry, he did not touch the grass or water that he used to enjoy along the path.
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When they arrived back at the city, the women of the city rushed out to see them, but when they saw that the horse had no one in the saddle, they turned back. Chandaka took Kanthaka deep inside the palace. The horse looked around with tears in his eyes and neighed loudly, as if to tell everyone how unhappy he was, but the horses stabled near him, thinking that his neighing meant that the prince had returned, neighed in reply.
So, too, people in the palace near there thought, "Since the horse Kanthaka is neighing, surely the prince must be entering the palace." But when the women saw that it was just the horse, they wept. Yashodhara, Gautama's wife, said, "This horse, Kanthaka, seems to want to destroy me, for, like a jewel-thief, he has carried away the one who is everything to me. Since he could bear the lash of arrows, he could certainly bear the lash of the whip.
Why then did he fear the whip so much that he stole my fortune and my heart? Now, after doing such terrible things, he neighs loudly, filling the king's house. But the wretched horse stayed silent enough when he carried away my beloved.
If he had neighed to wake people up, or made noise with his hooves on the ground, I would not have to bear this terrible grief." Chandaka replied, "Don't blame Kanthaka, or me. We are blameless, for we did not act of our own wills. The prince was a god among men, and he went away with the gods, like a god.
Kanthaka in this text carries the prince on two separate central occasions. Before the episode we have just considered, Kanthaka had carried the prince, by day, out of the palace, where he had been sheltered from the experience of human suffering, into an open place where he encountered the four signs-an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a renouncer-that inspired his ultimate decision to renounce. We learn very little about the horse on this occasion, though the prince himself is described with the familiar Indian equine metaphor, for he is said to have "conquered the horses of the senses [jitendriyashva]." In a Tibetan version of this text, a mendicant says to the Buddha, "The senses of others are restless like horses, but yours have been tamed.
He shows a fine but not unnatural sensitivity later on when he neighs in sorrow, both when he learns that he must leave the prince and, later, when he returns to the palace without the prince. And he demonstrates a fine, but still not miraculous, intelligence when he understands enough human speech to know that he must not make a sound and allows the demigods to cup their hands under his hooves. But it is the moment when he weeps warm tears in sorrow as he is parted from his beloved rider, unlike any natural horse (though we have seen mythical horses weep in other Indian texts), that makes him famous throughout Buddhist literature.
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The Great Departure at Sanchi
One of the most famous of the early sculptural images of the Buddha is the carving at Sanchi, from the first century BCE, illustrating the future Buddha's departure from the palace, the episode that we have just seen represented in Ashvaghosha's poem. In fact, it is not an image of the Buddha himself, for he is not actually represented here but is assumed to be invisibly present on the visible horse, Kanthaka. Thus Kanthaka is the "vehicle" of the Buddha not only in the conventional way (the future Buddha, who is regarded as a human, rides a horse, as humans do) but also in the sense in which, as we have seen, various animals serve as the "vehicles" of the Hindu gods, "carrying" the gods invisibly.
For in the Sanchi carving, wherever we see Kanthaka we understand that the future Buddha is invisibly riding on him-until the two last images, when the Buddha has finally departed and is no longer present (though invisible) on the horse but is still "carried" by him in the more metaphysical sense that the Hindu gods' vahanas carry them. In fact, the Buddha is seldom shown in visual art forms; he is usually represented symbolically-sometimes by the bodhi tree, or a stupa, or a parasol, or his footprint, or, as here in one frame, his sandals, and so forth.
But here the sculptors chose to represent him as a horse, a living creature, more precisely a vahana. The frieze depicts five images of the same horse, Kanthaka, moving from left to right and then, in the fifth scene, from right to left. In the first image, the demigods are holding up his legs to muffle the sound of his hooves on the marble floors of the palace.
In the second and third scenes, Kanthaka continues to carry the invisible Buddha away from the palace. At the extreme right, on the top, when the (invisible) Buddha has dismounted, and the previously only apparently riderless horse is now actually riderless, his groom Chandaka kneels at the feet of the invisible Buddha (here represented by his sandals) first to beg him not to depart and then to bid him farewell. And finally, in the lower image on the far right, turning back to the left, the riderless horse returns to the palace, led by Chandaka.
Sanchi, Madhya Pradesh, second half of the first century BCE. Carved in sandstone on the East Gate of the Great Stupa. (Photo by Anna Lise Seastrand, 2011)
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Half-Horse Creatures: Ashvamukhas and Kimpurushas
Aren't you known as the 'scourge of enemies'? If even a Brahmin like me had a weapon like the discus that you hold in your hand, I would carve up all the Turks, put a horse's head on a soldier's body and a horse's body on a warrior's head- I would cut them, hack away at them, pursue them, chopping them to pieces!19 The violence in this poem is directed against the "Turks" as the usual placeholders for any foreigners, particularly foreign horsemen.
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Dangerous Buddhist Horse-Headed Women
Ancient Buddhist monuments depict horse-headed women,20 and ancient Buddhist texts describe them in lurid detail. A second-century BCE carving at Sanchi depicts horse-headed women carrying off men (and, sometimes, women), and an eleventh-century carving from Barha Kotra represents horse-headed Yoginis (supernatural female magicians) trampling men under their feet. Buddhist sculptures from the second century BCE to the fifth century CE also depict men happily mounted on creatures with the heads of women and the bodies of mares, as well as women happily mounted on creatures with the heads of men and the bodies of stallions.
When she was then reborn as the Yakkhi, though unfortunately addicted to both seducing and eating men, she was also capable of unselfish love both for her lover and for her son, the future Buddha or Bodhisatta: Figure 21. Vedika, northwest quadrant, inner face, pillar, central medallion. (Photo: American Institute of Indian Studies) Once upon a time, when Brahmadatta reigned as king of Varanasi, his queen was unfaithful to him, and when the king questioned her, she swore, "If I have sinned against you, I will be reborn as a horse-headed Yakkhi." She died and was reborn as a horse-headed Yakkhi, who lived in a rock-cave in a great forest at the foot of a mountain.
She used to catch and eat the men who travelled on the road there. Horse-headed Yogini trampling on a man. Barha Kotra, Banda, Uttar Pradesh, 1000-1099 CE.
(Photo: American Institute of Indian Studies) One day a rich, healthy, young Brahmin was traveling on that road with his entourage. When the Yakkhi saw him, she laughed out loud and rushed at him, and all his attendants fled. She seized him and carried him on her back into her cave.
But under the influence of passion she fell in love with him, and instead of eating him she married him, and they lived happily together. And from then on, whenever she captured men, she took their clothes and rice and oil and so forth for him, and cooked delicious food for him, while she continued to eat the men. But whenever she went away, she shut the mouth of her cave with a huge stone to keep him from escaping.
Now, while they were living happily in this way, the Brahmin impregnated the Yakkhi, and she gave birth to the Bodhisatta. Filled with love for them both, she fed them, and as the boy grew up she shut him up in the cave with his father. One day, the Bodhisatta asked his father, "Why is your head different from my mother's?" And his father replied, "Well, my son, your mother is a Yakkhi and lives by eating men, but you and I are men." "If that is so," said the boy, "why do we live here?
Let's go to the places where men live." "My son," replied his father, "if we try to escape, your mother will kill us both." But the Bodhisatta said, "Don't worry, father. I'll make sure that you will return to the place where men live." The next day, when the Yakkhi had left, the Bodhisatta took his father and fled. When she returned and found them gone, she ran with the speed of the wind and caught them and said to the Brahmin, "Why are you running away?
Do you lack anything here?" and he replied, "My dear, don't be angry. Your son took me away with him." Because of her love for her child, she didn't say a word, but brought them back to her home. Then the Bodhisatta realized that her powers extended only over a certain area, and after a few days he carried his father on his shoulders beyond the river that was the limit of her land.
She ran after them and called to them from her bank of the river, begging them to return, but her son replied, "Mother, we are men and you are a Yakkhi. We will never return to you." And so, though she was overwhelmed by great sorrow, she loved her son so much that she gave him a magic stone. And then her great sorrow for her son broke her heart, and she fell down dead on the spot.
The mare's head is the one sign of her evil, and that (well, that and her unfortunate track record of serial murders) is enough to justify her death. But her love for her son, which breaks her heart, might remind us of Kanthaka dying for his love of the Bodhisatta, who is also echoed in the son's decision to leave home as Gautama did. A much retold Jataka tale24 tells of an entire band of man-eating ogresses: Five hundred merchants were shipwrecked on Sinhala Island near a city of man-eating ogresses (rakshasis), who transformed themselves into gorgeous women and approached the merchants, bearing food and carrying children.
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8. Arabian Horses and Muslim Horsemen, 500 to 1800 CE
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Equestrian Rulers and Their Horses
Indians tended to call all of these political groups-including Persians (many of whom had entered India centuries before the Arabs), Arabs, Mongols, and Turks-"Turks." And they usually called their horses Arabians, even when they were really Turkish or Persian. In fact, one of the great qualities of Arabian horses is what breeders call "prepotency": the ability to transmit their characteristics to their offspring. And so each Arabian horse may have had a disproportionate influence on other breeds, so that those "Turkish" or "Persian" horses may indeed have been, to a significant degree, Arabian.
We have noted the influence of Sanskrit ashvashastras on the Persian and Arabic sciences of horses. There are also extensive Persian records about horses under the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire. The founding Mughal emperor, Babur (r.
1589 depicts this scene.8 The historian Abu'l Fazl (1551-1602), in his record of the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605), the A'in-i Akbari, describes Akbar's stables in great detail.9 Akbar had luminous polo balls ("balls of fire") made so that he could play night games,10 and the Mughal emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-1726), too, was fond of playing polo.
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Importing Horses into India
Jahangir on a white horse, playing polo with his three sons: Parviz on the bay horse, Mirza Abu'l-Hasan on the dun, and Khurram (later Shahjahan) on the black. From the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ, 1582-83. (© The British Library Board, Or.7573, f.
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The Foreign Appreciation of Indian Horses
The general foreign consensus, from the time of the Persian and Turkish presence in India, was that Kathiawar and Marwar horses are good for long distances in the desert but, being slightly built, are not big or fast or strong enough for military or parade use. The country-bred horses had much to recommend them. Each type of horse had its place and its virtues suited for that place.
Yet there was usually a clear hierarchy. A notable feature of the attitude to horses among the Delhi Sultans and the Mughals, and one that continued under the British Raj, was a kind of equine caste system. We saw the early stirrings of this way of thinking in the ashvashastras' ranking of horses according to the four classes (or varnas) of Indian society.
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The Indian Appreciation of Foreign Horses
Turning now from the foreigners' attitudes to native Indian horses, let us consider Indian attitudes to the foreigners and their horses. For horses not only affected the practical relationship between Indians and the people they generally called "Turks" but also functioned, in art and literature, as a symbolic gauge of shifting attitudes within those relationships. Many Hindu rituals and myths involve Arabian horses and/or Muslim riders.
Despite or because of the political domination of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire, the Indian stories from this period generally depict both Arabian horses and their Muslim riders in a favorable light. For Muslims had lived in India for many centuries by the time these stories were composed, and were no longer always associated with dominant political groups, and many Hindus welcomed Muslims as the bearers of the gift of horses. Arabian horse lore strongly influenced Indian horse lore, and there are many Indian stories about heroic "Turkish" horses and horsemen.
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Vatavurar and the Horses That Were Jackals
Because of his excessive devotion, the minister spent all of the money on worshipping jangamas. When the money was gone, there was nothing left with which to buy horses. Then, without the slightest hesitation, the minister rounded up all the foxes in the fields, brought them there, and showed them to the Pandya king.
The horses (now foreign) play a far more active, and violent, role, in a fifteenth-century Tamil text, the Tiruvatavurar Puranam of Kadavul Mamunivar, which tells a story about the South Indian saint Vatavurar (also known as Manikkavacakan): The Pandyan king made Vatavurar his prime minister. When news arrived in Madurai that foreign merchants with fine horses had landed on the coast at Perunturai, the king gave Vatavurar a huge sum of money and sent him, with a large retinue, to the east, to the port of Perunturai, to buy the horses.
Shiva took on the form of a guru in Perunturai. Vatavurar became Shiva's devotee and surrendered to the guru all his belongings, including the funds that had been given to him to purchase horses. Vatavurar dressed as a Shaiva ascetic and forgot about everything else.
His aids, thinking he had lost his mind, went back to Madurai and told the king what had happened. When Vatavurar failed to bring the horses, the King became furious and sent a letter, beginning, "You left here with a huge treasure. Without purchasing the horses you put on a loincloth .
." The king ordered Vatavurar to return to Madurai. Vatavurar took the letter to the divine teacher and asked him to listen to its contents. When the guru heard the letter, he smiled.
He said that he himself would bring horses to Madurai at midday on the first day of the month of Avani [August-September]. Meanwhile Vatavurar should return to the king and inform him of the promised arrival of the horses. Vatavurar returned, and the king made him stand in the hot sun, to force him to return the misappropriated funds.
Vatavurar prayed to Shiva, who answered his prayers by arriving in Madurai disguised as a horse-groom, leading a herd of beautiful horses, which he had produced by transforming all the jackals in the region into horses. The king was delighted and restored Vatavurar to his former status. The day, of course, was the first of Avani.
When the Pandyan king presented the horseman with a beautiful piece of silk, Shiva smiled, caught it with his horsewhip, and simply left. This disrespectful behavior angered the king, but Vatavurar mollified him by attributing the horseman's strange manner to foreign customs. The king had the horses examined by experts, who determined that these excellent animals were worth eight times the sum he had sent with Vatavurar to Perunturai.
On the following morning, Madurai awakened to the howling of jackals, for the horses had reverted to their former nature, gobbled up all the horses of the king, and returned to the forests, like lions, their mouths smeared all over with blood. The grooms reported the evil deeds that the horses had committed. The jackals' clamor struck terror in the hearts of the population, causing people to question the righteousness of their king.
The transformation into jackals might be regarded as a transformation from tame to wild, jackals being the untamed form of dogs; or from pure to impure, jackals, like other scavengers, being polluted and polluting, in contrast with the ritually pure horse; the sound of a jackal howling strikes terror into the heart of anyone performing a religious ceremony. Both of these categories would make the jackals inversions of horses. The false horses eat the other horses, as jackals would; but since they appear to be horses, they seem to be cannibals.
Such incidents identify this as a myth told by people who do not know horses, and who fear the horse's mouth, with its big teeth. This is a dangerous misconception, for, as anyone who has been bitten by a horse will testify, a horse's teeth are relatively dull, so that getting bitten by a horse is like getting your hand caught in a door but not cut by a knife. It's the other end of the horse that poses the real danger-the back hooves; it's much worse to get kicked by a horse than to get bitten.
And horses are, in any case, by nature strict vegetarians (pace the recurrent allegation that Indian owners fed their horses meat). The devouring equine mouth is a projection onto the horse of the violence that we inflict upon it in taming it, through the use of the bit in the mouth. (Recall that Krishna kills the demonic horse Keshi by thrusting his arm into Keshi's mouth.) This is a horse myth told by people who do not have horses.
An early sixteenth-century Sanskrit text from South India, Mandalakavi's Pandyakulodaya, adds some details to the central event: "Shiva took the form of a supreme horseman and chose a horse that was swifter than the speed of light, a horse that split open the earth with his hoof in order to adorn the form of Shiva with snakes. The horse reared up, as if to drink cool water from the clouds. Shiva brandished his sword and made all the horses dance before the king, raising a storm of dust.
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The Horse of Karbala
Shiva is depicted as an Arab in the tale of Vatavurar and the jackals. But the Arabs in that myth are there only as objects of the myth, not as a subjective part of it. That is, this is an Indian story about Arabs, not an Indian story borrowed from the Arabs or other Muslims (who, like all great horse people, had their own horse myths) or an Indian story that shows the influence of Muslim stories about horses (which we will consider in the next chapter).
But before considering horse lore among Muslims in India, we should pause for a moment and veer only slightly aside to consider, briefly, horses in Pakistan, where the population is overwhelmingly Muslim. There the land is in general more hospitable to horses than it is in India; and there, for the many centuries when the area was regarded as the northwest part of India, before the creation of Pakistan in 1947, many of the best horses in India were bred. Some of the Hindu and Parsi breeders whom I consulted in 1996 complained that, at Partition, Pakistan got the best grazing land,50 a statement that has a lot of truth in it, as well as resentment.
Muslims in India and Pakistan maintain many of their own equine myths and rituals. One of the most popular of these is the ritual of the horse of Karbala. Each year, during the first ten days of Muharram (late August/September), the first month in the Islamic calendar, but particularly on the tenth day, known as the Day of Ashura, Shia Muslim communities in India and Pakistan (as elsewhere in the Muslim world) celebrate the festival of Muharram.
At this time they mourn the Imam Husain, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, who was martyred in a battle in 680 CE in Karbala, in the Iraqi desert. Central to this celebration is Husain's battle stallion, Zuljenah (in Urdu; Dhu al-Janah in Arabic), "the winged one," the "Horse of Karbala," who is said to have returned, wounded and riderless, after Husain was killed. The horse is sometimes called "the Buraq of Karbala,"52 after the winged horse said to have carried Mohammed to heaven.
Also Zuljenah brought the news of Husain's death to Zaynab (Husain's sister). When Zuljenah comes back with an empty saddle, we know that Husain is dead" (119). All the marchers are male (145), but mothers bring their children (usually infants or toddlers) up to the stallion, to press the child against the horse's flank or to pass the child under the horse's belly.
They pray to the horse for their children's health (146), as Zuljenah himself, incarnate in the village horse, is said to have the power to ward off diseases and satanic influences (197). The crowds on the street weep over him (122). But the horse is also said to weep.
It is said that Zuljenah lowered his head, and teardrops fell from his eyes (124). Informants insist that the horse chosen to represent Zuljenah in the annual procession understands the meaning of the tragedy he helps to commemorate. That is why the horse sometimes weeps during the procession, "not because of its own distress at being led through agitated crowds and ranks of bloody flagellants .
but out of sympathetic solidarity with the Karbala martyrs." Some contemporary paintings of Zuljenah show the horse standing on the battlefield, pierced by arrows, with tears of grief streaming from his eyes (124-25). We have encountered the idea of the suffering horse, the compassionate horse who weeps for his dead or absent master, in stories about Kanthaka, the horse who shed tears at parting from the future Buddha. The wounds of Zuljenah evoke compassion for the horse as well as for his dead rider, but the tears shed by Zuljenah express the belief that the horse is compassionate for his wounded/dead rider.
According to one text, "The animal's ability to recognize truth is greater than man's. At Karbala, Zuljenah's conduct is exemplary" (126). The fact that it is the Shias who celebrate the horse of Karbala-the Sunnis generally celebrate Muhurram merely by fasting-allows the pageant to represent, on another level, the persecution of Shias by Sunnis.
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Khandoba, the Equestrian God of Hindus and Muslims
He makes demonic horses, like his worshippers, into divine horses. Icons of the myth of the battle of the equestrian god against the demons73 depict the victory over the demon not merely in the obvious way-by demonstrating how the god on his horse kills the demon-but also, indirectly, by demonstrating how the god harnessed the evil horse for the good of his worshippers. This story assimilates demonic horses to the Muslim enemies of the Marathi warriors.
But even here, the horse of the enemy, the demon, the conqueror, becomes the horse of the hero, the Indian, the Hindu worshipper. Khandoba is the ruler who turns demonic enemies into willing devotees, domesticated horses. The image of the demon under the hooves of Khandoba's horse owes something to the Indo-European dragon-slaying motif, something to the Indian tradition of equestrian rulers, and something yet again to the assimilative imagination of Indian folklore.
It is therefore particularly tragic to note that though Khandoba used to be worshipped widely in Maharashtra by all castes, and by Muslims and Hindus together, this has changed in recent years. Now, at celebrations of the Khandoba rituals in some parts of India, Hindus have taken over the Khandoba festival and excluded Muslims. The Horse of Karbala would surely weep for them.
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9. Equestrian Epics and Mythic Mares, 600 to 2000 CE
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Rajputs and Their Horses
Though they came to symbolize the proud resistance of native Indian warriors to the Mughals and the British, the Rajputs often intermarried with these foreigners, shared power with them, and rode the horses that they brought into India. To cite just one of many instances, in the Battle of Haldighati, in 1576, Haakim Sur, a Muslim noble, joined Rana Pratap against the Mughals, while the Rajput Raja Man Singh led the army of the Mughals. The origins of the Rajputs have been linked with foreigners such as the Scythians and the Huns, who were assimilated into the Kshatriya class of kings and warriors during the sixth and seventh centuries.
Though Indian nationalist historians often insist that the Rajputs are descendants of the ancient Vedic people, it is most likely that they came from a variety of ethnic and geographical groups, castes, tribes, and nomads who eventually became landed aristocrats and were transformed into the ruling class, assuming the title "Rajput" as part of their claim to higher social positions and ranks. That term acquired its present meaning only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when membership in this class became largely hereditary rather than acquired through military achievements.
All across Central and North India, horses were used as an instrument of social mobility; people who came from low backgrounds managed to rise in the social scale through the use of horses. Horsemanship conferred a higher status; a warrior who had his own horse to ride into battle grew in importance. Horses were valuable booty, given to the king.
1599, wife of 'Ali 'Adil Shah I of Bijapur) out hawking on a white horse, moving across a field in the direction of four flying cranes. A hawk is about to be released from her right hand. A girl attendant stands on the left with a second bird.
Inscribed on reverse in Persian: Portrait of Chand Bibi. (© The British Library Board, Add.Or.3849) Figure 26. (© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)
Era ladder 66
Equestrian Epics
Crowned female figure with a sword riding on a white horse, c. (© The British Library Board, Add.Or.1896) Some aspects of the vernacular equestrian epics-cycles of stories about heroic horsemen, told in languages other than Sanskrit-derive from survivals of the Vedic horse sacrifice or the Mahabharata horse sacrifice, and some from other traditions. It is often hard to separate the Vedic from the Epic, since the Mahabharata tales of horse sacrifices are themselves retellings of the Vedic tales of horse sacrifice, though some of the incidents of the Mahabharata that do not derive from Vedic texts are also recapitulated in folklore, and the charioteers of the Mahabharata are replaced by mounted warriors in the vernacular epics.
It makes better sense to regard the Vedic and Epic traditions as parallel to one another, rather than chronologically sequential, and, indeed, to regard both of them as parallel to, rather than chronologically prior to, other Indian traditions. The regional epics embellish the trope of the end of an era, from the Mahabharata, with sad stories of deaths of the last Hindu kings. The bittersweet Pyrrhic victory of the Mahabharata heroes here becomes transformed into a corpus of tragic tales of the heroic culture and martial resistance of the protagonists and their cultural triumph, despite their inevitable martial defeat.
The vernacular equestrian epics first moved from northwestern and central regions to southern ones and then carried southern religious, martial, and literary tropes back north. The irony is that Islamic culture contributed greatly to these grand heroic poems composed in response to what the authors perceived as the fall of a great Hindu civilization at the hands of Muslims.
Real vs myth 67
Why Coconuts Are Offered to the Goddess
Stories that reflect these medieval interactions are still prevalent in twentieth-century oral traditions. A story of a human and an equine beheading is told in the greater Punjab area (Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Delhi), where horses have remained important throughout Indian history. This story, which was also published in popular bazaar pamphlets in Hindi and Punjabi, is the tale of Dhyanu Bhagat (or, "Why Coconuts Are Offered to the Goddess"): There was once a devotee of the Goddess named Dhyanu Bhagat, who lived at the same time as the Mughal Emperor Akbar.
Once he was leading a group of pilgrims to the temple of Jvala Mukhi, where the Goddess appears in the form of a flame. As the group was passing through Delhi, Akbar summoned Dhyanu to the court, demanding to know who this goddess was and why he worshipped her. Dhyanu replied that she is the all-powerful Goddess who grants wishes to her devotees.
In order to test Dhyanu, Akbar ordered the head of Dhyanu's horse to be cut off and told Dhyanu to have his goddess join the horse's head back to the body. Dhyanu went to Jvala Mukhi, where he prayed day and night to the Goddess, but he got no answer. Finally, in desperation, he cut off his own head and offered it to the Goddess.
At that point, the Goddess appeared before him in full splendor, seated on her lion. She joined his head back on his body and also joined the horse's head back onto his body. Then she offered Dhyanu a boon.
For Jvala Mukhi (literally "Mouth of Fire," a common term for a volcano) is the name of the underwater mare with the doomsday fire in her mouth, known to us from Epic and Puranic sources. This story offers us at least one good clue to the fact that it is a myth about human sacrifice-perhaps a local myth-that has been adapted to take account of the more "Sanskritic" tradition of the horse sacrifice. This clue is the coconut, an essential part of a puja (the most widespread Hindu ritual, a simple ceremony usually offering flowers or fruit to a deity), just as animals are an essential part of a blood sacrifice (yajna or medha).
Now, a coconut closely resembles a human head (a resemblance that is often explicitly alluded to in pujas) but does not at all resemble a horse's head. We might read this text as a meditation on the historical transition from human sacrifice to Vedic horse sacrifice to contemporary vegetarian puja (a coconut sacrifice), subversively incorporating the Vedic myth of Dadhyanch (now called Dhyanu), whose head was temporarily replaced by a horse's head. In fact, coconuts do not grow in the Punjab; the rituals specify that one must use dry coconuts for all offerings, presumably because they have traveled all the way from Gujarat, a long distance.
Since these coconuts must be imported, they may, therefore, represent either the adoption of a myth that is "foreign" (i.e., from another part of India, or connected with the "foreign" ruler Akbar) or a local tradition about a "foreign" ritual that requires imported coconuts, appropriate to a ritual whose myth involves (imported) horses.
Hub 68
The Testing of Harishchandra
I will do anything." Tara told him that it wasn't easy and that he would have to sacrifice his favorite blue horse. He took out his sword and killed his horse. Then she ordered him to sacrifice his beloved son.
Next she told him to cut up the horse and the boy, place them in a cauldron, and cook them. Finally, she told him to dish out the food on five plates: one for Mata [the mother goddess], one for himself, one for the horse, one for the son, and one for her, Tara. When he complied, she told him to start eating his share.
The king, bound to his word, started to eat, but tears welled up in his eyes. The horse and the son both came back to life. The goddess granted him her darshan, appearing before him on her lion.
Cycle 69
Reviving the God’s Horse
A corpus of myths from Maharashtra combines the Vedic theme of the dismemberment and resurrection of the sacrificial horse, the Epic theme of the equestrian journey to the underworld of the serpents, and the later theme of possession by a horse god in a trance. The story concerns Kalbhairi, a local god who protects people from snakes; Yelamma, a goddess; Bhola, a form of Shiva; and Shiva's wife, Parvati: The Goddess Yelamma did not want to let the gods into the continent of Bengal.
She sprinkled magical ashes (vibhut), and the gods' horses fell down. Thus she drove away the horses of the three hundred and fifty gods. Kalbhairi left and came to Bhola and his wife Parvati.
Bhola opened the doors of the house and showed Kalbhairi the rooms that were filled over and over again with ganja (marijuana). "Smoke as much ganja as you want." Kalbhairi dedicated himself to his vice, crushed the ganja, and smoked it until he fell into a state of intoxication. He came to an underground hole where a wind was blowing.
He asked, "What is blowing there?" Parvati said, "That is Bhola's wind." "Give it to me!" "If you want it, take it." He took it. It was a horse, dark black, white on the forehead, with a white tail, and a reddish-brown back. He saddled the horse, fastened the silver saddle straps and the golden stirrups, and mounted it.
Bhola said, "Kalbhairi should be sent to the land where the three hundred and fifty gods are to be found." So Kalbhairi set off to search. When he had traversed the nine continents, and Kashi [Varanasi], the tenth, he came to the eleventh, that is, to the land of Bengal. There Yelamma stood in his path.
When Kalbhairi saw her from far off, he jumped down from heaven with the horse. She sprinkled ashes, and the horse fell down. He lifted the horse high, and again she threw him to the ground.
A third time he lifted the horse up violently. When the horse had fallen to the ground, Kalbhairi dismounted. As Kalbhairi was addicted to ganja, he crushed ganja and took water to help him, and he smoked it.
And then he went to set the horse upright. He grabbed him by the tail, and the tail broke off. "Bhola's horse," he said, "is no good." He grabbed him by the ear, and the ear broke off.
"Bhola's horse," he said, "is no good." He grabbed him by the neck, and the neck broke off. "Bhola's horse," he said, "is no good." Then he grabbed the horse by the leg, and the leg broke off. "The god's horse," he said, "is worthless." Only the body was left.
"How can I ride back now?" he thought. Kalbhairi reached into the bag, and, calling out the name of Bhola, he sprinkled ashes; and the horse stood there again, saddled and bridled. The horse was highly spirited; it flew up to heaven.
Then Yelamma said, "The horse may not pass through." Kalbhairi attacked her with his trident (trishul), put her in his bag, and found the gods. The skeletons of the three hundred and fifty horses lay there. Then he said, "Gather the skeletons together!" So they gathered the skeletons and joined them piece by piece.
Horse chain 70
Mythic Mares
One strong hint that much of medieval Indian horse lore comes from Arabs is the gender of the horses. Arab horsemen (and Turks and Mongols) generally rode mares, regarding them as more intelligent, sensitive, and, above all, loyal and affectionate than stallions. They told stories about Muhammad's magic horse Buraq, often said to be a mare and/or to have a woman's face, and about his five faithful foundation mares.
This would of course apply equally well to Indian cavalries, but their practical concerns were apparently overridden by the mythology of the early Indian texts, the Vedas and Epics and Puranas, which are all about stallions, with their positive symbolism kept entire (virility, fertility, aggressive volatility). These Sanskrit texts code the females of the species, the mares, as evil, as wild animals never really tamed, the familiars of wild, sexually voracious women who deceive their husbands and abandon their children. And so Indians before the Sultanate period generally preferred stallions.
Clearly the authors of these stories are either ignorant of the Vedic and Puranic bias against mares (which seems unlikely) or chose to ignore it in favor of an imported Arabic pro-mare tradition. Here we encounter a narrative pattern of considerable detail repeated in many different stories, suggesting that, once the tradition of good mares took root, it was diffused throughout this area, rather than arising independently everywhere where people rode mares.
Era ladder 71
Pabuji and His Black Mare
At his niece's wedding he promised her, as dowry, a gift of reddish-brown she-camels, which no one there had ever seen. Deval Bai, an old lady, lent Pabuji her magical black mare, named Kesar Kalmi. With the help of his companions, Pabuji captured the camels and delivered them to his niece and returned the mare to Deval Bai.
Then Pabuji's marriage to a princess in Umarkot was arranged. As it was the local custom for the bridegroom to prove his worth in a horse race, Pabuji again borrowed the magic mare, promising Deval Bai that he would come to her aid immediately if she needed him. He won the race, and when the wedding ceremony was almost over, the mare became restless, and a bird told Pabuji that Deval Bai's brother-in-law, Jind Rao Khici, had rustled her cattle, and that Pabuji was urgently needed.
Pabuji went to Deval Bai's assistance without completing the wedding ceremony. He saved the cattle but was killed.25 Figure 28. (Given to the University of Chicago Library by Kali Charan Bahl) Another version of the tale of Pabuji adds several details about the mare: Pabuji Rathore, who lived in the fourteenth century, died at the age of twenty-five.
The beautiful Deval Devi rode on a splendid black mare, Kalimi, while tending her cattle in the desert of Marwar. Deval was an incarnation of the Great Goddess. Jind Raj, a baron of Jayal, saw and coveted the splendid black mare Kesar Kalimi, but Deval would part from her only at the price of his head.
Fearing for her safety after this incident, Deval gave her black mare to Pabuji, who promised to protect Deval and her cattle at the cost of his life. A beautiful princess fell in love with Pabuji on his beautiful mare, and wanted Pabuji to marry her; he agreed, but told her that he had pledged his life to protect Deval and her cattle. Meanwhile, Jind Raj took away Deval's cattle.
Deval took the form of a bird and told Pabuji to keep his word; he left his bride during the wedding rites. With seven men he rode on Kalimi, the black mare, against Jind Raj and his thousand soldiers. He rescued the cattle, but he and the mare were mortally wounded and died.
Deval, however, had been to the far shore of the seven seas and brought back horses of great price. Pabuji said that he had dreamt that he had sported [ram] with Deval's mare Kesar Kalami. And so they saddled their five horses and went to become Deval's beloved guests.
He told her of his dream and asked to have the mare Kesar Kalami to ride. She told him that if he took the mare, Khici would attack. But Pabuji's chieftain held the stirrup for Pabuji's foot, and Pabuji put his hand on the mare's black mane and his other hand on the saddle, and he mounted the mare.
That is, the mare was imported, like the expensive horses cherished by Indians throughout history. The Pabuji story also tells of an interrupted wedding, a widespread theme in equestrian folktales and folk epics. In paintings and actual wedding processions, all over India, the bridegroom rides to the wedding on a horse to whom a kind of puja is offered.
Real vs myth 72
Devnarayan and His Mare
Devnarayan (affectionately known as Dev or Devji or Dev Maharaj) was a legendary Gurjar warrior from Rajasthan who is worshipped as a folk deity with a magic mare, mostly in Rajasthan and northwestern Madhya Pradesh. The oral epic of Devnarayan consists of a number of episodes that the Bhopas, traditional storytellers, sing in all-night performances in the villages of Rajasthan and Malwa. One version of the story, recorded from an oral narrative recited in Rajasthan,37 is a long text for which we have space here only for a summary (laced with quotes from the translation) of the parts of the story that deal with Devnarayan's mare (Lila or Lilagar, "Magic" or "Magical Horse"): Devnarayan's mare, Lilagar, was born at the same time as Devnarayan.
As Dev was an incarnate god (Bhagavan), his mother was his devotee. Lilagar was the foal of Sadu Mata's mare Kalavi.38 When Dev Maharaj became incarnate, Lila, the horse, became incarnate at the same time. Then Lila and Dev Maharaj made a promise.
Then Dev said, "My horse and I will enter through the window." He pulled the mare's reins back at that spot. The mare stepped back, stepped back, stepped back until she stopped at a distance of five miles. At that place, Dev, lord of the three worlds, tightened her saddle, lifted up her reins, and sprang over the door.
The Lilagar mare galloped one and a half arm-lengths above Mother Earth. The saddle stayed one and a half arm-lengths above the mare, and Bhagavan sat half an arm-length above the saddle. After that, the Bhat sang a song of praise of Dev for the king of Ajmer: "Through the blow of Lila's hooves a surge of cold water arose from the underworld and split open the hill." The king said, "The horse has been ridden back and forth superbly." Then the king asked Dev to "ride in" his speckled pony, who was known to be extremely difficult to train.
As soon as he went there he gave the horse a slap. The horse was immediately prepared to be ridden. Dev mounted the horse and he began to move with a gait even better than Lilagar's gait.
The opening episode draws on the Mahabharata mythology of horses and Nagas below the earth, which is echoed in the final episode when a horse is reduced to ashes in what Dev calls a sacrifice to the earth. The details of the saddle and the reins tell of the poet's knowledge of horses, as does the episode in which Dev tames the notoriously unridable horse, which the king asks him to "ride in," that is, to break in, to train. But the poet also incorporates a broader mythology.
Dev sat on Lila, but his mother held the mare's reins. He told her to let go of the reins, but she held on tightly. Dev threw down Lila's whip and looked around and said, "O Mother, see, the horse's whip has fallen down." She would not let go of the reins, but, holding them firmly, she bent down to pick up the whip with the other hand.
As she looked away, Dev shouted out, and the sound made a hundred Devs and a hundred Lilas appear. When his mother lunged for the whip, the rein slipped out of her hand. One of the Devs said, "O Mother, give me the whip," and another said, "O Mother, give me the whip.
Teja/Desingu Raja and His Mare
The hero called Teja or Tej Singh or Desingh in North India (Tecinku or Desingu Raja in South India) rides several great horses, one of which is a mare named Lila. The many stories about Teja are loosely based upon a historical figure, a Raja, the son of the commander of the fort of Senji (also called Gingee) in the reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (r. The story goes that when Tej refused to obey a summons from the Nawab of Arcot, the deputy of Aurangzeb, the Nawab waged war against him, in the course of which Tej rode his horse at the head of the Nawab's elephant; the horse reared and drummed his hooves on the forehead of the elephant, blunting the Mughal advance.
But Tej/Desingu is also celebrated in fable for conquering a celestial horse that a fakir (a Muslim holy man, usually a Sufi) presented to the Mughal emperor. Here is the way one Tamil version of the story goes: A celestial horse named Barasari lost his way from the heavens and came to the earth. The fakir who bought him presented him to the Mughal emperor and departed.
But no one there was able to mount the horse. Dharani Singh tried and failed and was put in jail with other rajas; meanwhile Dharani's wife gave birth to a boy at Senji. The boy, Desingu, grew up and tamed the horse; the emperor offered him his daughter's hand, but Desingu refused; he set free his father and the other rajas, and in due time married.
Then the Nawab attacked the Senji fort. Desingu sent for his friend Mahaboob Khan, who was about to be married. Mahaboob mounted his famous steed Nilaveni and came to the battle.
Desingu's horse, Barasari, had a premonition of the end of the battle and displayed signs of fear. But Desingu comforted him and went to the temple of Ranganatha to take his leave. Mahaboob was killed, and his horse reached Desingu's side.
Mahaboob Khan's noble horse no longer wanted to live, and, out of compassion, Desingu killed the horse. Desingu fought until they cut the legs of his horse under him. Not wishing to live after his friend and his horse had fallen, he threw his sword high up into the air and received it on his breast and died on the sword in the traditional way of Rajput warriors.
The queen gave up her life on his funeral pyre.55 As M. Arunacalam remarks about this epic, "The chief attraction is the exploits of the two horses. Stories of horses are not many amidst us.
It is very difficult; only one who sees her can describe her, but there is no limit to the telling. On the hooves of the mare Buli are horseshoes of gold. The braces on her legs bounce up and down.
Her hair is the color of henna. She has a green-bordered saddle, made in Cittaur With stirrups worth lakhs and lakhs; the goldsmith made them well. On her head is a crest worth one and a quarter lakhs.
Gugga and His Mare
Gugga (also called Goga, Gogo, and Gogaji), a folk god who seems to have originated in Rajasthan,59 is often said to have been a Rajput warrior hero who lived, by various accounts, during the reign of Prithvi Raj (the last Hindu king of Delhi, c. 1168-92 ) or in the time of the last great Mughal ruler, Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707)-that is, at either end of the Muslim reign.
A nineteenth-century Punjabi version of the story of Gugga's birth involves the Epic serpents Basak (Vasuki) and Tatig Nag (Takshaka): Before Gugga was born, his father saw a partridge on the right and a snake on the left. The pandit said, "On the left is a snake, Raja; I think the omen good." . One day, Gugga played his flute and pleased the birds of the forest, but Basak heard the sound and was displeased, because the sound had awakened all the sleeping snakes.
King Basak who is here, the king is happy? As Wadley remarks, "Now the master knows that the possessing deity is well and that the oracle, or horse, is also fit. Note that the image is that of riding, as shown by the use of 'horse' for the oracle himself."67 Figure 29.
(© Victoria and Albert Museum, IS 156-1984) A version of the story told in Chamba (in Himachal Pradesh) calls Gugga Mundalikh and adds equine details: Mundalikh's chief officer, Kailu, rode a horse who leapt over the river to Basak's camp. Kailu disguised himself as a Brahmin and suggested that Basak's chief officer conceal the army of snakes in the grasses and ambush Mundalikh's army as it came by. This they did, upon which Kailu, throwing off his disguise, summoned his horse, who came running; Kailu mounted the horse and struck him once, making him prance and rear.
Indeed, the equine imagery throughout this cycle of myths is, in a sense, subversive, since it argues for a positive valence for mares, whom the Sanskrit Vedas, Epics, and Puranas had demonized.
The Mare Who Was a Buffalo
The pandaram washes the mare's feet and puts a pottu [sacred mark] on her forehead. He offers a puja both to Virakali and to the mare and sprinkles the puja water on the mare. There is a very tense silence among people waiting for the mare to shake her head, and the music stops playing.
When she shakes her head, the headman takes the mare in procession. The mare is sent back to her master, having completed her part. The buffalo is brought near a ditch that has been dug out just in front of the goddess.
She is treated like the goddess and identified with her during the puja. But the foot wash and the sprinkling of the head can be seen as separate elements of the horse sacrifice. Before the [Vedic] sacrificial horse starts on its one year's wandering, he has his feet washed.
But the sacrifice is not performed. It looks as if, as a mare, the goddess were treated as a symbolic victim of a sacrifice that will take place later. Just after the death of the [Vedic] sacrificial horse, a symbolic copulation must take place between him and the main queen-the mahishi.
10. Horses of the British Raj, 1700 to 1900 CE
The British rode over India on horseback, first under the aegis of the East India Company (or Honorable East India Company or John Company or just The Company) in the eighteenth century and then under the flag of the British Raj, after Queen Victoria made India an official part of the British Empire, in 1858. They stayed in India, with their horses, until India won its Independence in 1948.
Hub 73
Finding and Breeding Horses for the British in India
The British rode over India on horseback, first under the aegis of the East India Company (or Honorable East India Company or John Company or just The Company) in the eighteenth century and then under the flag of the British Raj, after Queen Victoria made India an official part of the British Empire, in 1858. They stayed in India, with their horses, until India won its Independence in 1948. John Lockwood Kipling (Rudyard's father) described India as a place where "everybody rides-or ought to ride,"1 a statement that reveals a stunning ignorance of the lives of Indians but was true enough of the British in India.
As the British view of native horses in many ways paralleled the British colonial consensus about native people, the British mythology of Indian horses offers another variant on the link between horses and heroes that we have seen at play in the vernacular epics. Like the native epics, the British writings mixed in with the realistic data-about tack and heights at the withers-a great deal of material that speaks to other concerns: gods and rituals, for the equestrian epics, empire, race, and colonization, for the British.
As "it was not regarded as practicable, or economic, for a regiment's horses to make a voyage of 5,000 miles,"2 at first the British left their horses at home. Though many argued that only "a well-bred hunter breed with Thoroughbred blood" could carry the nearly three hundred pound weight of a trooper with his full gear, and though they did import some Thoroughbreds during their first years in India, they were forced to seek most of their horses closer to India than to England.
Moreover, they used the horses they bred only for cavalry; for racing, they needed to import stallions and mares. The British, by their own accounts, encountered many problems in breeding and maintaining horses for their cavalry, and they wrote books about it. Let's consider two reports, one by William Moorcroft, Superintendent of the Honorable Company's Stud, in 1814, and one by the artist and art historian John Lockwood Kipling, in 1891.
Cycle 74
William Moorcroft, Observations on the Breeding of Horses
The preface to William Moorcroft's book Observations on the Breeding of Horses within the Provinces under the Bengal Establishment, 1814,12 notes that it contains "measures in progress for procuring better Parent Stock, and for re-establishing the North-Western Horse Trade. It exhibits proofs of the general decline of good breeds of Horses in India, and endeavors to detect some of its causes." Moorcroft, an equine veterinarian, shares the negative view of Indian breeds that we have noted in earlier reports by foreigners in India as well as by some of the British.
English Horses, some excellent, some indifferent, were subsequently added" (1). Clearly, in Moorcroft's eyes, the project had been doomed from the start. It gets worse: In an island [like, to take a case at random, the British Isles?], produce accumulates under circumstances favorable to breeding; but in a continent, with a long and pervious frontier [like India, for instance], it is not easy to prevent clandestine exportation into neighboring countries, where it bears a higher price.
Original faulty composition, abuse or mistakes in purchases, local inaptitudes, from the site and from habits of the natives, exportation of improved Fillies, and losses by casualties, diseases, and accidents, have retarded the progress of the Stud generally. Other difficulties derive from the annoyance of insects, from mismanagement, and from diseases brought on by peculiarities of soil, climate, and food. And experience drawn from History proves that there exist causes of rapid decline in the breeds of Horses, not yet sufficiently analysed.
(6, 9) Much of this is the traditional lament of foreign horsemen in India, but in Moorcroft it took on a particularly bitter edge. Moorcroft grants that there were some remote parts of India where people did know how to breed horses: "In India Horse-breeding appears to be somewhat lasting on mountains, somewhat flourishing in grassy wilds and in the oasis of sandy deserts" (44). And he is particularly interested in the horses bred in the Northwest: [In] the Countries beyond the Indus, which most abound with Horses, .
are to be found Mares at a reasonable rate. Represented as strong, healthy, fruitful, well-tempered, and living to a great age, they are perhaps better adapted for breeding in Hindoostan than any other procurable. From Toorkooman Mares, crossed by Arab, Iran, and Irak Stallions, a race of Horses is raised near Khooloom, under the patronage of Meer Quleech Ulee Khan, said to be well suited for Military purposes.
This Chief has a large Stud of his own, and his Cavalry amounts to 12,000. The Stallions now at the Stud have been drawn from England, Arabia, and Asia generally. (20) But, "It is proved that Indian Mares are less prolific and have a shorter period of fertility than those of more Northern climates.
At one season their number and quality seem tolerably respectable, at another so wholly contemptible, as scarcely to warrant leaving a Stallion amongst them" (19, 32). And Moorcroft has a low opinion of most of the horses bred locally: The Arabian Horses now on the Stud Register are nearly worn out, and some are only fit to be given away. Katheewar and Lukhee Jungal Horses will be most serviceable for the Mares of the farmers.
They are preferred by breeders to English half-bred Stallion. This preference may have had its rise in these casts of Horses, originally employed as Stallions, possessing certain predominating forms, which by degrees have been acknowledged as essential to beauty. Long entertained, they are now adopted as standard characters of national choice and are capable of covering gross deformity in parts more important to action, or to strength of constitution.
(20) Moorcroft assumes that the native stock was generally inferior; the only hope of breeding "good" horses was to import the sorts of horses that the British bred in England: The supply from England, considerable in itself, is small relative to its object. Thoroughbred Horses, which are strong, handsome, and have gained great celebrity on the turf in England, soon repay their original cost in this country. They seem also to last longer by coming with their constitution formed and inured to fatigue, than Colts which arrive before they have completed their growth.
(20) Compounding the problem, Moorcroft asserts, was the fact that the "natives of this country are not easily moulded into new habits" (10). He insists, over and over, that the "natives" must be taught British methods of breeding in order for horses to thrive in India. He has nothing but scorn for native Indian ideas about the qualities that distinguished good horses from bad horses: "Prepossessions of natives, resting upon a difference in the turn of the ear or in the shape and length of the neck, may be thought altogether unworthy of notice.
Horse chain 75
The Equine Caste System
The main reason that Moorcroft offers for the failure of Indians to breed "castes" of good horses, as well as his proposal for the solution to that problem, is the Hindu caste system. Noting that "castes of people" have been set apart for the raising of cows, sheep, and goats, he remarks: "But there have been no castes appropriated exclusively for breeding Horses" (44). Indeed, he argues, "No Moosulman of reputation, no Hindoo of respectability will keep a Stallion for hire.
Shame deters the former, caste prevents the latter taking money for such a purpose. Yet the Moosulman is a slave to licentiousness, the Hindoo to the desire of wealth" (46). Maneuvering around the racist slanders, is there any possible truth in Moorcroft's assertion that no Indian castes were breeders of horses?
That depends on what you mean by "breeder." Abu'l Fazl had remarked that "[s]killful, experienced men have paid much attention to the breeding of horses in India,"17 but who were they? There certainly was a caste, an ancient caste, in charge of the care, and perhaps of the breeding, of horses; these were the Sutas, charioteers, grooms, and bards, whom we first encountered narrating the Mahabharata. But castes like the Charans, the Sutas who told the tale of Pabuji, were no longer involved in the care of actual horses, merely in the tales of mythical horses.
Moorcroft says that a "caste of Rajpoots, a dissipated class of Moosulmans, are now the keepers of Stallions for hire [as studs]. But never having the means of buying good Horses, and being greatly deficient in judgment, such animals as they do procure accelerate the ruin of the breed" (46-47). Moreover, "The Hindoo Nalbund is an interloper.
In the Western Province he is of the Bhat or Bard caste. In the lower [provinces], called Oobdesee or foreigner, he is a Rajpoot of inferior caste, of ruined fortune or blighted character" (47). Thus Moorcroft expresses his scorn for several groups of native breeders and stable workers that he regards as fallen Rajput castes.
Such people, he believes, would not breed good horses. The owners of horses, who might well have made the decisions about breeding, would not have constituted a separate caste. A ninth- or tenth-century Sanskrit inscription from Pehowa (in Kurukshetra, Hariyanna) mentions four Brahmin horse traders,20 evidence that individual members even of high castes might be involved in trading, if not breeding, horses without necessarily forming a separate caste.
Nobles, and wealthy land holders distributed also old, or lame Horses of high caste for the same purpose, and some even maintained one or two, at their own expense, for the Mares of their relations, retainers or tenantry.
The same custom is continued by the Sikh Chiefs and by the Murhuttas. And a few respectable natives in the British Provinces occasionally allow the use of a Horse to the neighbouring farmers gratis, but the practice is almost worn out. (47) He also mentions, as we have seen, several studs and breeders in India (as did Rudyard Kipling)21 but (rightly) does not regard them as "castes." By this reckoning, there are only miscellaneous breeders, no Hindu castes of breeders.
Moorcroft goes on to argue why this is so: "The Horse was no favorite with the Hindoo law-givers, or they might not have known this animal in its most attractive form." And he notes: "They were probably aboriginal of the plains of India, for if they had come from any Horse country, they would have brought with them some proof of that fondness for the Horse which is found amongst its inhabitants" (45). This, at least, is complete balderdash. The "Hindoo law-givers" were Brahmins, descended from the people who brought their horses to India during the Vedic period.
Yet Moorcroft goes on to assert: "The Hindoo hierarchs considered the sacrifice of the Horse as the most noble, the most purifying, next to that of man himself, and yet they did not make breeding Horses a business of caste. Did this omission originate in advertency? Were all fine Horses bred in other countries?" (45).
We know that, pace the British, "all fine Horses" were not, in fact, bred in other countries, though many of them were. But there does seem to have been a sharp division between the groups of people who (1) maintained the science of horses in the ashvashastras (people belonging primarily to the Brahmin castes), (2) people who owned and bred horses (primarily but not only Kshatriyas), and (3) people (of low caste) who took care of horses. This is actually the situation in the horse world in Europe and America to this day, where the categories would be (1) bloodline experts and trainers (Brahmins), who are advisers to (2) wealthy businessmen (Kshatriyas), who flaunt their wealth in Thoroughbreds and who employ (3) badly paid, often immigrant stable workers, exercise riders, and jockeys (low castes).
Caste, the problem, is also the solution that Moorcroft proposes here: Were a Brahmun to discover a reading of the Shastras prescribing the pursuit of Horse-breeding to some widely diffused caste of Hindoos, and this were credited, it would only be necessary for Government to find the first materials, and to collect the produce. By an impulse once given through religious authority, the supply would keep pace with the demand, and stability would be ensured. Facts seem to show, that amongst Hindoos no occupation has yet reached a high degree of perfection, has even had a permanent character, which has not been carried on through the channel of caste.
Though there be no caste of Horse-breeders, yet, under patronage of Government, a Colony of Horse-breeders may supply the deficiency. (46, 49) Lest we miss the point, Moorcroft repeats this last statement a few pages later: "And if a Cast of Horse-breeders cannot be created, a colony of Horse-breeders may supply the deficiency" (54). So the potential native horse breeders of India should be literally "colonized" by the colonial government in order to provide the sorts of horses needed by the British Raj.
Moorcroft's most serious mistake was in focusing on castes of breeders rather than castes of horses, which is to say, breeds. There were of course breeds of Indian horses, distinct types of horses, as we learn from the ashvashastras. And there were criteria by which to distinguish a good horse from a bad horse; the ashvashastras had a great deal to say about that, too.
But horses were generally identified not, like human castes, by their genealogy but by their geography; all the horses from one area might be regarded as one caste, and from another as another caste. The ashvashastras identify horses as "those bred in Kamboja, Sindh, Aratta, and Vanayu . those bred in Bahlika, Papeya, Sauvara, and Titala." The Sultans and Mughals labeled horses with geographical designations such as Turki, Yabu, and Tazi.
Era ladder 76
John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India, 1891
John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911) was a professor of architectural sculpture in Bombay and the principal of the Mayo School of Art, Lahore (the present National College of Arts, in Pakistan). He provided illustrations for his son Rudyard's Jungle Books (1894), but before that, in 1891, he wrote and illustrated Beast and Man in India: A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in their Relations with the People, of which chapter 8 discusses horses and mules. It is a work of stunning bigotry and Orientalism; he remarks casually on "the unequestrian character of India," and states, "There are of course many fine horsemen in the country, but they have usually been taught by Englishmen.
The natural affinity between horses and Englishmen becomes a closer bond by residence in India, where everybody rides-or ought to. The horses, however, which serve native masters are born to Purgatory rather than to Paradise. Those in the hands of the upper classes suffer from antiquated and barbarous systems of treatment, and are often killed by mistaken kindness or crippled by bad training, while those of low degree are liable to cruel ill-usage, over-work, neglect, and unrelieved bondage.
(62) We immediately recognize here the familiar colonial tropes of caste, misguided horse management, untrustworthy natives, backwardness, and barbarism-and a total silence about the notorious mistreatment of horses in England, though this was a hot topic at this time, and Black Beauty was translated into Hindustani in 1895. Lockwood Kipling then provides a biting satire on the ashvashastras with their cowlicks or whorls (avartas) and "featherings" or "shadows" (chayas): The ideas current on the qualities, form, and vices of the animal are as antiquated as its treatment.
Many are tied up in aphoristic bundles for better preservation. So many parts of the horse should be round, so many square, so many short, and so many long, and everybody speaks of the five vices and of the eight lucky white points of Mangal-Mars. There is an elaborate science of stray hairs with an obstinate twist, of the colour of the markings and the planting of the hair in the skin.
In Indian horse lore the set of these featherings (they are analogous to the radiating arrangements of birds' feathers), ending sometimes in circles or whorls, are all mapped out like currents on a mariner's chart, and each is named and interpreted for luck, temper, constitution, or quality; but mainly for luck. From the Oriental point of view, . colour and colour markings are the first things taken into account.
[T]here are many similar rules in the East, complicated by moral and fatalistic fancies. (68) And he doesn't think much more of Indian folk knowledge of horses: "Among horse folk, unfamiliar with books, spoken lore takes such fantastic forms that you would think some fabulous creature was being talked of" (68). But he does have some appreciation of some of the native "castes" of horses: "In the Himalaya there is a variety of ponies, sturdy gunths, and yabus that could carry a church and climb up its steeple, Bhutia ponies, and many other hill sorts" (69).
And he grudgingly approves of some of the native breeds: The characteristic all-pervading horse of the hot plains is the tattoo or country pony, a cat-hammed, shadowy animal seldom more than thirteen and a half hands high. Among them you often come across distinctly Arab characteristics, and most are dashed with the noble Arab blood. Though seldom good to look at, lean and unkempt, vicious and ill to handle, he is a beast of immense pluck and endurance.
(70) Lockwood Kipling has, however, very little good to say about the ways in which Indians treat their horses, including the horses that pull the ekka, a small, two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage: In Bengal and Madras, non-equestrian provinces, the animal often shrinks to a framework caricature of a pony; a heavy head hung on a long weak neck, no chest to speak of, inconceivably slender in girth, with weak hind legs working over each other like the blades of a pair of scissors. In the North-West Provinces and the Punjab the creature improves, is useful as a pack pony.
Cruel over-driving and a heartless disregard of the creature's thirst are the worst features of the immense ekka traffic of Northern India. (70) Lockwood Kipling confirms what we have learned about the grand scale of the importing of horses and adds some vivid details: You may see them in Bombay harbor, the horses standing a-row on the bags of dates that form part of the cargo, looking exactly like a Noah's Ark with the lid off. From the countries north of Kabul a constant immigration of the animals we call Northern horses, or sometimes Kabulis, .
still continues at the rate of about two thousand annually. Many horses are annually imported from Australia, but they are mainly for the army and wealthy people on the Bengal side of India. (71, 72) And he alludes to the British attempts to regulate the breeding of horses in India (about which William Moorcroft had so much to say): "The British Government has for some years been trying to improve the horses of the country by importing English thoroughbreds, Arabs, and Norfolk trotters who stand as sires at the service of farmers under certain conditions, which include the branding of approved mares" (72).
At this point we may ask, "Approved by whom?" a question that will recur when we consider the choices made by a British breeder in establishing a Marwari stud. Finally, it occurs to Lockwood Kipling to mention what people in India think about their horses: While speaking of the horse as he is, we are forgetting the popular estimate of him. In spite of ill usage, he stands for honour and state among both Hindus and Muhammadans.
Real vs myth 77
Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, 1900
And in 1870-72, Lockwood Kipling was commissioned by the government to tour the Punjab, North-West Frontier, and Kashmir, where he made a series of sketches of Indian craftsmen as well as of various sights and antiquities in these regions; those adventures are mirrored in the travels of the characters in Kim, to which we now turn. The very first pages of Kim introduce a message about a war, coded in horses, which is also cited at central moments in subsequent chapters: "The pedigree of the white stallion has been fully established." It is a triple code, of which the first two levels are easy enough to crack: ostensibly, on the first level, it means that the Muslim horse trader Mahbub Ali, who has sent the message to the British master spy Colonel Creighton, is able to vouch for a valuable horse that the colonel may buy.
The coded message on the second level is that rebellious natives in the Northwest are planning an attack on British forces there. The third level of signification is more complex. The idea of a pedigree implies that you know all you need to know about a horse when you know its father and mother (or dam and sire); the Ashvashastra lists among the things one should know about a horse, "the family line" (kula, "bloodstock").
(In fact, as Kim's father was a feckless Irishman, Kim is actually subaltern in English eyes. Still, in comparison with an Indian native, he is a white man.) This leads us back in Indian history to the idea of the classes (varnas, literally "colors") of horses and of humans, or the belief that the most important thing to know about another human being is who his or her parents were. And this belief, in British hands, supports more general concepts of racism.
The Indian theory, which we would now say the British "appropriated," was conceived without the support of a proto-racist theory like that of the British; one might say that the Indians imagined caste for themselves before the British imagined race against them. Here is perhaps the moment to comment on the role of the breeding of horses (and to a lesser extent dogs, and other domestic animals) in British ideas about inherited characteristics. The breeding of horses, of "bloodstock," of Thoroughbreds, a theory of race avant la lettre, laid the groundwork for a European theory of the breeding of humans.
These ideas, which played a role in the development of the concept of race, culminated in some ways in Darwin, and in others in the ill-fated eugenics movements. It is no accident that the British upper classes, with their deep investment in the "breeding" of men and women, had an early and deep investment in the breeding of horses. In particular, the British invented the idea of the Thoroughbred (a term soon to be applied to humans) from three horses that they brought to England, ironically, from their colonies in what they called the Orient: the Byerly Turk (actually almost certainly an Arabian), the Godolphin Arabian, and the Darley Arabian.
"Closing the stud book"-that is, decreeing that only the offspring of stallions you have already listed will be accepted legally as belonging to a particular breed-is a vivid metaphor for the barriers of classism, racism, and patriarchy. Caricature of Paul Benfield (1741-1810), hand-colored etching by James Gilray, published by Hannah Humphrey, June 5, 1797. (260 × 361 mm) plate size; 10⅞ × 14⅝ in.
(276 × 370 mm) paper size. (© The British Library Board, P1742) Ideas of class and race are expressed through an equestrian image from British India in the etching Count Roupee in Hyde Park (the rupee being the unit of Indian currency), which depicts a dark-skinned man riding a good-looking horse in Hyde Park. This is James Gilray's 1797 caricature of Paul Benfield (1741-1810), a Madras merchant who bought himself a parliamentary seat and a fine country estate with his somewhat shady Indian profits.
Now, the term "Maltese cat" ordinarily designates a grey cat of indiscriminate breed, a paradigmatic mongrel. But in Kipling's story, it is the name of a horse, a polo pony, presumably also of indiscriminate breed; we are never told its breed, though some of the other polo ponies are identified as Syrian or Arabian, while the Maltese Cat used to pull a vegetable cart. This is the story of a polo team of native troops, called the Skidars, whose horses are not fancy, not pedigreed.
They are playing an important match against the team of the British army, the Archangels, who have better bred, bigger, and more expensive horses, and more of them, so that they can rest one set of horses while riding another set, which the Skidars cannot do. So the Maltese Cat's team are the underdogs, more precisely the underhorses, but they are clever and brave-and in particular, the Maltese Cat is very clever and very brave (he plays to the end with a painful injury that makes this his last game, though he will continue to lead the squad in the parades)-and we are rooting for them, and they win!
To name a native horse, a wise and courageous horse, the hero of the story, after a mongrel cat is to make a strong statement about the superiority of native breeds over Thoroughbreds-and of native Indians over English officers? The Maltese Cat snubs an Arabian horse from the Archangels' team. The story is told from the standpoint of the Maltese Cat, who is the captain and tells the other horses what to do.
Hub 78
Moorcroft and Other Horsey British Spies
In 1812, Captain Hyder Young Hearsey accompanied William Moorcroft on an expedition to discover the source of the Ganges and to visit the sacred lake of Manasarowar, once considered the source of all the sacred rivers of India. They also wanted to seek out prospective trade routes. As Europeans were forbidden to travel to this area, the two travelers disguised themselves as Gosains or Hindu pilgrims.
On the return journey, Moorcroft and Hearsey threw off their disguises and were arrested in October by the Gurkha rulers of Kumaon, who released them at the beginning of November. In that same year, 1812, Hearsey published a watercolor illustrating their trip. Moorcroft's account of the expedition was published in Asiatick Researches, 1818, volume 12.
On the road to Lake Mansarowar (Tibet). The travelers are wearing Indian dress and riding on yaks; they are shown meeting two Tibetans on horseback with a loaded yak. Watercolor by Hyder Young Hearsey, 1812.
Works of English fiction sometimes called upon the symbolism of horses to depict the relationship between the British and their Indian subjects. At the very end of E. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), an Indian (a Muslim, Dr.
It's what you want.' But the horses didn't want it-they swerved apart. ." And the horses were right, of course.
Cycle 79
Horse chain 80
11. Horse Myths and Rituals in the Absence of Horses, 1800 to 2000 CE
1800 to 2000 CE We turn now from people (like the Rajputs and the British) who did have horses to those who did not, particularly people living, in recent centuries, in what Lockwood Kipling called the "non-equestrian provinces,"1 but more broadly people who may once have had but now no longer had horses. Since horses in India were so expensive to buy and maintain, no native, village tradition of farming with horses or riding horses developed there.
Era ladder 81
Horse Myths and Rituals in the Absence of Horses
1800 to 2000 CE We turn now from people (like the Rajputs and the British) who did have horses to those who did not, particularly people living, in recent centuries, in what Lockwood Kipling called the "non-equestrian provinces,"1 but more broadly people who may once have had but now no longer had horses. Since horses in India were so expensive to buy and maintain, no native, village tradition of farming with horses or riding horses developed there. The occasional landowner may ride a small, weedy cob, but even so he is on a high horse, as it were: he dominates the horizon, the terrain, and (like mounted police at parades or riots) he can see everyone, because no one else is on a horse.
Working from art rather than from life leads to inaccuracies, and many folktales and images from non-horsey cultures betray the authors' or artists' innocence of things equine.
Real vs myth 82
The Cruelty of Peddanna
When the stories about magical mares that were told among the equestrians of Rajasthan and other horsey parts of India were retold by people who did not have a firsthand experience of real horses, the stories were distorted by that ignorance. Such is the case with the story of Peddanna, the hero of the Telugu Palnadu Epic (told in the region of Palnadu in Andhra Pradesh), in a version recorded in 1974 but drawing upon a tradition that may go back as far as eight hundred years.
Shankarbhai, one of the sons of Mansingbhai Dhanjibhai Rathwa, a famous Pithora painter, painting horses on the wall of their house. (Photo by Gregory Alles, taken April 7, 2009, in Malaja, Chhotaudepur Taluka, Gujarat) When Dev Narayan in Rajasthan "rode in" the villain's horse, he eventually sent him down to the Underworld (where horses often live in Indian mythology), but he did not hurt him when he taught him to submit to his rider. In the Peddanna story in Andhra, however, the theme of taming the villain's wild horse becomes a metaphor for taming human violence, and the heroic rider who subdues the horse becomes cruel, as the Palnadu Epic projects onto the presumed natural orneriness of the untamed horse the known wicked machinations of evil people who would kill our hero.
The story begins when our hero gets a winged mare from a benevolent older woman, like the heroes of other equestrian epics that we have seen (Pabuji, Dev Narayan, Teja, Gugga): Peddanna Bada Raju was born of a Velama family in Palamacapuri, but he was lovingly brought up by Viravidyala Devi, the Raju's wife. One day she acquired a winged mare and gave her to Peddanna Bada Raju, but she warned him not to go to the south. Peddanna flew down to the south, to Pedda Kancerla, and married the princess Mutyalakomma, the king's daughter.
A pair of celestial horses, a mare named Storm Cloud and a stallion named Fair Cloud, came every day to graze on a field of chick-peas, and went away. The farmers, seeing that their crops were being destroyed, went to the local Raju and complained. He posted horsemen, elephants, and men with drums, war drums, and torches.
Storm Cloud and Fair Cloud came whistling down from the sky and alighted on the chick-pea crop. As they began to graze, the mare, Storm Cloud, whinnied, and at that, all the men lit their torches and beat their drums. The stallion, Fair Cloud, rose into the sky.
The mare, Storm Cloud, tried to follow her husband, but she was in her ninth month of pregnancy. When she tried to flee, the embryo in her womb miscarried and fell to the ground. The Rajus of Kancerla, thinking that she had a belly ache from eating too much, fell on the mare and killed her.
Some of the other Rajus slew the stallion. The Rajus of Kancerla captured the foal, built a paddock, and raised him. But no one could ride him, as he was a celestial horse.
Nor do the men who find the mare, mistake the signs of a recent foaling for a belly ache, and casually kill both the mare and the stallion. The story now turns back to Peddanna: Unable to think of any other way to kill Peddanna, the Rajus decided that he might be slain by means of the unridable colt born of Storm Cloud and Fair Cloud. The Raju called Peddanna to the court and said, "I have a colt in my stables, a most recalcitrant beast.
One way or another, I must have him broken." "Bring him on! Bring him on, Father-in-law," said Peddanna. "As my name is Peddanna, I know horses." He preened his great sharp moustache; he combed his tiger moustache; his eyes reddened; he gnashed his teeth; his eyes glowed like the eyes of a spirit.
He bridled the colt with a bridle made of knives and saddled him with a cutting saddle. He took him to the court. Though his wife feared that the colt would kill him, he promised always to come and save her.
The colt was bridled with a bridle made of knives and saddled with a cutting saddle. When the horse saw Peddanna, he reared and whinnied. The horse shied this way and that, not allowing him to mount.
Then Peddanna called on his patron god, Cennakesvarasvami, and on Ishvara [Shiva]. He leaped a mile into the sky and landed on the horse's back. He spurred the horse, which leaped a mile into the sky and entered the clouds.
No matter how hard Peddanna tried to rein him in, the horse did not slacken his pace. The knives on the bridle cut deep into the horse's neck, and streams of blood poured down. Then, riding the celestial horse, Peddanna disappeared into the sky.
The Rajus took away his wife, Mutyalakomma, and prepared to burn her alive. They tormented her most horribly . She swooned, and when she recovered, they tormented her unmercifully.
Hub 83
Malancha and the Pakshiraj
A particular breed of magic horse, a Pakshiraj ("King of Those Who Have Wings"), plays a similar part in a violent human tragedy in the Bengali saga of Malancha: Prince Chandramanik was born to a king whose favorite horse was a Pakshiraj. At his birth, Chandramanik was doomed to die in twelve days; at this news, the elephants broke their chains and fled from their stalls, the horses died in the stable, and the Pakshiraj refused to touch any food. They married the new-born boy to Malancha, a twelve-year old girl, the daughter of a low caste police chief (kotwal).
When Chandramanik died, the king had Malancha's hands and ears cut off. At that moment, the Pakshiraj went mad. But, unknown to anyone but Malancha, Chandramanik was miraculously restored to life, and Malancha was restored to wholeness.
Malancha raised Chandramanik, who did not realize that she was his wife. He grew up and found out that he could regain his kingdom by winning a horse race. Malancha promised to get a horse for him and return in three days.
She came to the city, where she saw the palace gate closed and the doors of houses all bolted from within. The good luck of the king had left him and the city looked like a desert. The Pakshiraj had gone mad; he ran wild and killed every man that walked in the city.
When Malancha heard all this, she cried out, "Where are you, Pakshiraj? Do you remember Chandramanik?'" Her voice reached the horse, and he ran up to her with ears erect and said, "How could you know the name of Chandramanik? Shall I ever get him back?" Malancha said, "Pakshiraj, come with me." She set out for her home, followed by the horse.
"Chandramanik died years ago," they said. But she had said his name, and she had caught the mad horse. The queen said, "Who is she?
Go and find out." Malancha had returned with the horse. Fire came out of the horse's eyes; his ears were erect, and his sharp hooves cut the earth and made it tremble. Malancha helped her husband ride the horse and said to the horse, "You know what you should do; my husband is a boy; I place him in your charge." At this moment she held up the reins so that her husband might catch them.
You are always near me, but you do not speak to me. Who are you to me?" And she answered, "I am the daughter of the police chief." She hid her face with her hair and then in haste drew out a thread from her cloth, put it round the neck of the horse, and let it go. The thread had been made of all the virtues she had acquired in her past lives, and her tears had cast a charm on it.
The Pakshiraj ran as if flying in the air. Malancha threw herself down on the bare ground in grief, saying to herself, "Alas! Why did I not let him know who I am?
Why did I not tell him when he asked?'" When the prince returned to the palace, pretending to be the gardener's son, everyone was surprised to see the horse. "It is of the Pakshiraj breed; we don't have such a horse in our stable; where could the gardener's son have gotten it?" The race began. Like a newly-fledged bird feeling its wings just grown, the horse could not bear to be checked.
The horse's body moved like a wave; his four feet struck the earth impatiently. But then he struck the Pakshiraj with his whip. The stroke tore off the thread Malancha had tied round the neck of the horse, and it fell into the dust of the earth, unnoticed.
The Pakshiraj drew a heavy breath and set off. The princess saw Chandramanik, fell in love with him, and insisted on marrying him. Now the Pakshiraj came back where Malancha lay on the dusty ground.
Cycle 84
Two Short Tamil Satires
Two stories from South India satirize South Indians who are naive about horses. The first is a simple story in a book for people learning to read Tamil: Once upon a time, a horse saw a cow and envied her. The horse generated ascetic heat in order to get two long horns.
It was successful; horns sprouted and grew on the horse's head, and he had split hooves, and a cow's tail. Then something startled him and he started to run, but he stumbled like a cow. And then he had to chew his cud, which he didn't like.
And he had no tail to brush away flies. Finally, the horse generated ascetic heat in order to get rid of his cow features. "I don't want horns and I don't want cow's hooves.
Another Tamil anecdote about a horse satirizes other sorts of horse myths: The wise minister of a lovelorn king, failing to advance the king's impossible passion for a girl whose painted image the king had seen in a temple, decided to commit suicide. He rode his faithful horse over wilderness, mountains, and forests until they came to the Western ocean. He looked at the horse and said, "O Horse!" [He used the Sanskrit word, ashva.] "You have been with me until now.
We cannot remove the obstacle that has come to our king. There is no further use in our continuing to live. You go somewhere and live on." And so he entered the ocean.
Horse chain 85
The Hermit and His Three-Legged Horse
A story about a three-legged horse was told by Poromananda Chattopadhyay, a Brahmin priest, in Tarakeshvar, in West Bengal, in 1977. It offers a down-to-earth village satire on the many high-toned stories of miraculous horses and miraculous riders in the vernacular Kshatriya epic traditions: I cannot speak with certainty about the history of the Tarakeshvar temple, but what I do know has come from ancient stories [purani kahini]. In the beginning, this place was covered by a dense forest.
In the forest lived an ascetic hermit who worshipped Shiva [Baba]. The people called him Dhumropan Giri, which means "He who is always smoking," because he was fond of marijuana [ganja]. The house of the king of the area was only three miles from where this hermit stayed, and the king often heard about the holy man.
The hermit had a horse with three legs. He looked after this horse like his own child. Now, the villagers started rumors that something was peculiar about a hermit taking such good care of a useless beast.
When the king asked the hermit about these reports of his behavior, a heated argument arose. The hermit maintained that though his horse was three-legged, he was not a useless animal. The hermit said he rode him frequently, far and wide.
The king then offered him a deal. If the hermit could ride this horse, the king would give him all the land that the animal could cover. The hermit then mounted his horse and began to ride.
He rode from Burdwan to Midnapore and from there to Hooghly, to Amdanga Mattha, and to Gorbeta. From there he returned to Tarakeshvar again. The king verified the hermit's journey and found that he had visited the entire area.
Era ladder 86
Aiyanar: Massive Statues of Mythical Beasts
Real vs myth 87
A Tamil Horse Temple
The following notes were written by Father Selva Raj, on September 17, 1990, based on an interview with Mangalanatha Pillai, chief trustee of a horse temple in Tamil Nadu: There is no written document or evidence for the origin or history of this temple. Oral tradition and architectural evidence are the only available documents. According to oral tradition, the temple is a century old.
It includes a gigantic, impressive horse statue located at the entrance of the temple. A seven-foot wall surrounds the temple and the inner sanctum. The horse was built in memory of and dedicated to Gauripulla Thevar, a prince of Sivanga.
And so the temple is known today as the Gauripulla Thevar Kovil temple. The origins of this temple are traced to an amorous adventure of prince Gauripulla Thevar, who fell in love with a woman from the village of Padamathur, about two miles away from his palace, and used to visit her every day. When the villagers of Padamathur heard about this, they became upset and decided to do away with the prince at the village council meeting.
When the prince learned of this plot, he resolved to abduct his beloved. So, accompanied by a few soldiers of the palace, the raja went to the village and rode off with the woman on his horse. But while he was returning to the palace with her, groups of villagers intercepted him along the two-mile road and beat and stabbed the prince and his entourage so severely that they all died of their injuries at Padamathur village.
There are two horses in this temple. The larger one (approximately thirty feet long and thirty-five feet tall), made of bricks, is located at the entrance of the temple, and the other, smaller statue (six feet long and five feet tall), carved out of a single black granite stone (a stone called "Karungal" in Tamil Nadu), is inside the temple. This statue depicts the horse with the king and his lover mounted on its back.
Both horses are adorned with garlands. The temple and the outer horse were built in the same year (1879), and both were renovated in 1980. In addition to the garlands, the outer horse is adorned with all the decorations usually found on royal horses in their artistic depictions as well as with various demonic figures (asuras).
The horse's raised front legs are resting on the heads of two gigantic demons (bhutas), subordinate to the horse. Its significance, according to Mangalanatha Pillai, is "so that the weight of the horse may not fall upon the earth." The horse also stands as a symbol of royal power. Inside the temple, beside the statue of the king and the horse, there is also a statue of the goddess Kali.
Separate pujas are performed for these three principal deities of the temple. Each of these statues represents a different world order: the horse the animal world, the Raja the human world, and Kali the divine world. Assembling these three distinct categories of figures within the confines of a single temple brings together and forms a harmonious relationship between the three worlds that enclose the worshipper.
Separate pujas of appeasement are offered to these three principal figures of the temple. Despite the inclusion and presence in this temple of Kali, who is almost invariably associated with blood offerings, no animal sacrifices or blood offerings are ever made here. Only pujas of coconuts, flowers, incense, and sweetened rice (pongal) are offered to the horse in this temple.
There are, by contrast, many temples in the vicinity of Padamathur where animal sacrifices and blood offerings are made, even though the horse is either the principal figure or very prominent. In Aiyanar Temples, for example, where the horse is given a place of prominence, animal sacrifices are offered, even today, to Aiyanar and his horse. But at the Aiyanar Temples, Aiyanar is the primary, direct recipient of this sacrifice and the horse is only a secondary, indirect recipient, venerated only as the vehicle of Aiyanar.
In the Gauripulla Thevar temple, by contrast, where the horse is the primary object of worship, there are no animal sacrifices.32 Evidently, despite their traditional association with death and battle, horses in some South India temples shun violence.
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Dalit Horses
The equine folklore of India expresses the connection not only between horses and foreigners but also between horses and resident aliens, as it were, such as the Dalits, formerly known as Untouchables, Scheduled Castes, or Other Backward Castes. Dalits, in 1980, made up 52 percent of the country's population. The paradigmatic Dalits, the sweeper castes,33 also called "scavengers,"34 are condemned to perform tasks such as carrying away human waste and human and animal corpses.
Yet Dalits are a key part of the equestrian storytelling tradition. A story about the Lalbagi sweeper caste, recorded in North India during the nineteenth century, may be a satire on the Vedic horse sacrifice: There is a horse miracle story told in connection with Lal Beg, the patron saint of the sweepers. A valuable horse belonging to the King of Delhi died, and the sweepers were ordered to bury it, but as the animal was very fat, they proceeded to cut it up for food for themselves, giving one leg to the king's priest.
The king, suspecting what had happened, ordered the sweepers to produce the horse. They were dismayed by the order, but they laid what was left of the animal on a mount sacred to Lal Beg and prayed to him to save them, whereupon the horse stood up, but only on three legs. So they went to the king and confessed how they had disposed of the fourth leg.
The three-legged horse in this story may be satirical, like the three-legged horse in the story about the hermit who wins land from the king. It may seem strange at first that Dalits should be associated with this elite animal, but a traditional reason is provided to explain it: It is said that many low castes, including Dalits, traded leather to the Portuguese in the seventeenth century in exchange for horses. This caused tremendous anger in high castes, since low castes were not supposed to ride on horses (or elephants or palanquins).
On March 31, 2018, BBC News ran a headline: "Indian lowest-caste Dalit man killed 'for owning horse.'" The article went on to state: A young farmer from the lowest rung of India's caste hierarchy-the Dalit community-has been beaten to death, apparently for owning and riding a horse. Police in Gujarat state said three upper-caste men had been detained for questioning. The victim's father said his son had been warned not to ride the horse as this was an upper-caste privilege.
Owning a horse is seen as a symbol of power and wealth in parts of India. Pradeep Rathod, 21, was found dead in a pool of blood near Timbi village in Gujarat State late on Thursday. The horse was also found dead nearby, his father said.
In a complaint filed to police, his father said his son had loved horses so he had bought him one. "My son's love for horses led to his murder," the father said according to AFP news agency, which has seen the statement. "About a week ago, when I was riding the horse with my son, one of the persons from the upper caste Kshatriya [warrior] community warned us not to ride the horse in the village.
He said that people of Dalit community cannot ride horses, only Kshatriyas can ride horses. He also threatened to kill us if we did not sell the horse," the complaint read. The Hindustan Times, March 30, 2018, ran this headline, "Dalit man killed by upper caste duo in Gujarat for owning, riding a horse," and added some details to the story: The Gujarat police has launched a manhunt for two upper caste men who allegedly killed a Dalit man in Bhavnagar district on Thursday night for owning and riding a horse.
"The body of Pradeep Rathod (21) was found late on Thursday night from a farm house in Timbi village. The horse that he had bought two months ago was also lying dead nearby," said an official of the Umrana police station in Bhavnagar district. Police said the man's father had told them that Pradeep intended to sell the horse following threats from upper caste villagers but that he had convinced him against doing so.
The police said the father had presented his son with a horse as the young man was very fond of riding and raising horses. Though the murdered boy is a Dalit, his surname, Rathod, is a variant of Rathore, which is generally a Rajput name that is a surname of Pabuji and of Rajput families associated with the breeding of Marwari horses. This may explain Pradeep Rathod's fatal attraction to horses.
Tribal Horses
Closely associated with Dalits as people living in India on the blurred fringes of the pale of Hinduism are the tribal people or Adivasis ("First Inhabitants"), formerly called Scheduled Tribes. Adivasis are seldom owners of horses, but the horses in the tribal art and legends of India rode deep into the interior of the country. The creation myths of the Birhors and Munda, tribal people of Chota Nagpur, and the Santal tribals of Bengal share a story in which the creator makes the first man and woman out of clay, but then a winged or fiery horse (sometimes named Pankraj [Pakshiraj]) comes and tramples these first creatures, until the gods invent a dog that keeps the horse away.
4¾ × 111/16 × 5⅝ in. (12.1 × 4.3 × 14.3 cm.) (Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the Stella Kramrisch Fund, 2002-93-13) These tribal horses are often associated with sacrifice-not the sacrifice of a horse (to a god) but the sacrifice of a sheep or a goat to a horse. The Kunbis (who do actually have real horses) wash their (real) horses at Dussehra, decorate them with flowers, sacrifice a sheep to them, and sprinkle the blood on them.
But unlike the tribals, the Vedic priests killed the horse, too.
Bhils and Rajputs: Horses Taken from Tribals
In fact, Rajput memorials generally do not depict horses, or stress the equestrian form of their dead,51 while the Bhils, through their equine and equestrian rituals, confer on their ancestors the nobility of the horseman, the cavalier. The Rajputs emphasize the qualities of the horse that symbolize power and fertility, playing down the closely related death symbolism of the Vedic sacrificial stallion and the Puranic doomsday mare. But the Bhils bring out the horse's ancient power to symbolize death.
Thus the Rig Veda tells us that Indra took back the cows of the Dasas53-the demonized natives of the land to which his people had migrated and whose cows Indra himself had stolen. The story of the Bhils' rustling was supported by the always available mythology of the thieving outsiders (or Dalits or tribals), and the myth took root. Lal Beg, patron saint of the Lalbagi Dalits, is often identified with Zahar Pir, whom we have met as Gugga.
But Pabuji objects: "O goddess, let this blood mingle! These have died in my service, they are my own warriors: let their blood mingle. If their blood remains separate, then (in future) Bhils will not protect Rajputs and Rajputs will not protect Bhils, and nobody in the world will recognize Pabuji.
Honor my oath, and let the blood of my warriors mingle!" The goddess breaks down the bank, the blood flows together, and she drinks it all.55 This episode is a vivid and moving parable of the way in which some lower castes have become a part of the cult of horses.
Horses Myths and Rituals without Horses
People who do not know horses often fear them. To some extent, the natural reaction to any large animal coming fast right at you is, "It's going to eat me!" This misconception was the source of many myths in which horses devour people, or doomsday flames come out of the horse's mouth. In the story of the jackals that became horses, the fear of the horse's mouth was a clue that the authors of that story were not familiar with horses.
The myths of horse-owning cultures may sentimentalize the mind of horses, attributing to them human emotions and loyalties. But the myths of non-horse-owning cultures often lack the intimacy and affection toward horses that marks the myths of horse-keeping people, and this lack leads to fantasies of fear and violence. In this context, our original broad working distinction between people in India who have horses and people who do not have horses must now be more carefully qualified.
Among people who have horses-who know horses and ride them and drive them and feed them and, perhaps, sacrifice them-we must distinguish between ancient kings, who drive white stallions in chariots and are known to us from Sanskrit texts, and more recent aristocrats, like Rajputs, who ride astride black mares and are known to us from contemporary vernacular as well as historical sources. These two subgroups have different, albeit related, horse myths. Within the non-horse-owning group, we must also distinguish further subgroups.
First would be the horse myths of people who have never had any contact with horses at all. Technically, unless one believes (as I do not) that people are born with an archetypal horse in their heads, there can be no such group; people who have literally no contact with horses (even by hearing about them or seeing pictures of them) cannot invent them. But there certainly are people who have never actually seen a real live horse.
For people who do not have horses but may have once had them, the horse still holds the memory of meaning. The symbol got into the folk consciousness and then stayed there even after its referent, the horse, had vanished from the scene. As Claude Lévi-Strauss wisely remarks, "[A]n animal that is absent in a new environment can nevertheless retain a metaphysical existence in mythical imagination.
And the people who told the local stories, and made the local horse images, would not, perhaps, have been the ones who had ridden or even driven horses, let alone sacrificed them. But they may have fed them and groomed them and, indeed, spent more time with them than their owners did. Each of these groups has its own, different sort of horse myths.
12. Horses in Modern India, 1900 to 2020 CE
Cycle 89
Three Twentieth-Century Horse Heads
As the head is more important than the body, the head of each man eventually changes his transformed body back into the same body he had originally had. Meanwhile, the horse-headed creature in the frame keeps trying to get rid of his horse's head and become all human, but in the end, by the same rule that applied to the men, his body changes to that of a horse, to match his head. And that turns out to be the perfect solution.
(Courtesy of the owners, Kent and Marguerite Charugundla) Shiva in disguise visits Kripi, Drona's childless wife, and insists that she serve him food, wearing no clothes at all. She weeps and resists, but finally gives in and serves him naked, with only her long hair covering her vagina. At the sight of her, Shiva is overcome with desire and ejaculates into his rice; he then leaves without eating it.
Kripi orders her servant to feed the rice to a horse. Offstage, the horse (presumably a mare) gets pregnant, delivers, and dies; onstage, Kripi turns around with a little boy on her arm, plucked from the audience. He finds Kripi's story hard to believe, and at first doubts her chastity, as well as expressing concern that the baby's face looks like that of a horse, while his body is human.
But they name the child Ashvatthaman.4 This horseplay satirizes the theme, well known from the vernacular equestrian epics, of the foal and prince born from shared food. More broadly, it makes fun of the Epic heroes, the Epic gods, and the whole mythology of mixed marriages and mixed births of humans and horses.
Horse chain 90
M. F. Husain and Lightning
The artist Maqbool Fida Husain (known as M. Husain), who was born in Bombay in 1919 and died in London in 2011, was widely regarded as India's greatest contemporary artist (or, according to Wikipedia, India's "most prolific, saleable, and world-renowned artist"). But he was harassed by lawsuits and warrants for his arrest and threats against his life because of his portraits of nude Hindu goddesses as well as for paintings with political messages critical of the Indian government, and because he was a Muslim.
Lightning consists of twelve panels, each ten feet high and five feet wide, the largest work Husain ever made. The panels don't connect with one another; they were meant to be moved about and displayed in different sequences from time to time. The ten horses, naked of any saddlery, are bucking and kicking and rearing and plunging, their mouths open.
Gandhi's Emergency: The Emergency came like thunder and lightning: guns, the imposition of state authority, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi riding the whirlwind of power against the forces of corruption, galloping down the streets of the Indian Wild West, fighting the black market, imposing order against Marxist revolt, putting blinders on the unruly horse of history which, reeling from the formation of the Indian nation out of the British Jewel in the Crown, not yet over the tumult of Partition, uneasy with the strong-arm tactics of the Congress Party, could not help but balk. No one expected it any more than anyone can predict the moment lightning will strike.
[The horse of history] balked with the fury of horses unleashed into their own unruliness, rose up and kicked at the air, screamed into the blue of space, thrust its body towards the ground, elongating its neck and twisting its haunches, refusing the beauty of its own shape . the war of rider against horse, horse against horse. This picture of a moment of lightning when the Indian state is on the verge of collapse is the incarnation of an endless battle between warring families, a remaking of the Mahabharata in contemporary times.
[Photograph of a Mughal painting of a man with a woman on a strutting horse; there is a circle in blue drawn around the horse's obvious testicles.] Nowadays, riding horses are kept castrated, to reduce their virity [sic] & power (just reduce . they are still very powerful) without which it's close to impossible for Todays' Generation (Eating GM Food) to ride or even control a Horse! Now, the reason why groom sits on mare is based on above point only.
Mare is docile and easy to handle. No one wants to get embarrassed on Wedding Night! 2: From what I've learnt, the horse and the groom come together to take the bride away and surely two males can't take one female (Pandavas' case not to be considered here);15 hence the animal has to be a mare.
My grandma told me about this, but one thing I've noticed is that there's always a more practical reason for Hindu customs that are very scientific . 3: I think the most logical reason behind this ritual is as follows (this is my assumption): during that era horses are considered as a main source of transport and expensive (may cost more than a BMW). As the best of the best or most of the horses are saved for army, king and royalty, what is left is used by commoners or civilians, hence mares.
4: Not all Indian grooms do. It is a ritual in some parts of the country. 5: The influential, kings and others of nobility, even rode an elephant or a chariot, and some of the tales in Hindu mythology point to that.
But, for others, horse (or a mare) was the practice. I have seen both, bride and the groom, sitting on separate horses, during the marriage procession, in Pandharpur, of Maharashtra. Not only sitting on a mare, the groom is even holding a sword, in parts of north India.
Era ladder 91
Breeding Marwaris in India
Let me conclude these scattered glimpses of horses in contemporary India with a longer tale of a group of horses, Marwaris, that an Englishwoman brought from India to America at the turn of the twenty-first century. The importing of horses has been, as we have seen, a central motif in Indian history, but in this instance that current was reversed, and these horses were exported from India. The story of the Marwaris touches on themes that have been woven throughout this book, questions of rational and irrational attitudes to certain breeds of horses.
They average between 14.2 and 15.2 hands (fifty-eight and sixty-two inches)17 and often exhibit a natural ambling gait, close to a pace. Nowadays they are used for light draught and agricultural work, riding, and carrying bridegrooms at Hindu weddings. They are said to be passionate, showy, quick-tempered, and brave.
Close to the Marwari horse in many ways, including the special ears, but not quite so tall or long,18 is the Kathiawar horse, from the Kathiawar peninsula off nearby Gujarat. Another breed, the Balochi, now found in Pakistan, has "pointed ear tips almost touching each other,"19 a description strongly reminiscent of Marwari horses (which are, after all, bred in that same general area of the subcontinent, Sindh and the Punjab); the Balochi, medium-sized, with a fine head and neck, is noted for its endurance under all conditions.
They bred the Marwari horse for battle, starting with an army of only two hundred animals. Kesar Kalmi, the magical black mare of the Rathore Pabuji, comes from Marwar. Others say that the Marwari is descended from native Indian ponies crossed with Arabian horses (and perhaps some Mongolian influence from the north).
Randhir Singh told us that were he asked that question today he would reply 10% only! He is convinced from reading old texts in Sanskrit (of which he is a scholar) that the finest horses in the world have come from India. I would not mind betting that he could find a text proving that the Arabian himself originated in the sub-continent!26 A very similar argument has been made, by Indian nationalists, about all things Indo-European, including horses.
Marwari horses are prized especially by native chiefs for their size and form. The animals most liked are the stallions of Marvvar or Kathiawar. White horses with pink points, piebalds, and leopard spotted beasts are much admired, especially when they have pink Roman noses and light-coloured eyes with an uncanny expression.
Their rippled, highly arched necks, curby hocks, rocking gait, and paralytic prancing often proclaim them as triumphs of training. (69, 65) And he quoted a British expert who referred to "Arabs, Barbs, Marwars, and Kathiawars" as "the finest horses that India could produce" (62). He also quotes his son Rudyard, who was highly appreciative of the breed: "High above everything else, like a collier among barges, screaming shrilly, a black, flamboyant Marwari stallion, with a crest like the crest of a barb, barrel-bellied, goose-rumped, and river-maned, pranced through the press" (65).
Rudyard Kipling also quotes the positive assessment by the English Master of the Horse in his principality in India: "'We've got one stud at Bellara. They raise Marwaris there too, but that's entirely under native management. We've got nothing to do with that.
The natives reckon a Marwari the best country-bred you can lay your hands on, and some of them are beauties! Crest on 'em like the top of a wave!" (76, 77). But Marwaris did not thrive under the British Raj.
Real vs myth 92
Conserving Marwaris
The danger, they felt, was that "ignorance and indiscriminate breeding"-that is, breeding to mares and stallions of mixed breed and to Marwari horses that lacked the good qualities for which the breed was prized-would lead to the demise of the Marwari as a distinct breed. Most recognized horse breeds are protected by pedigrees that trace the lineages of the "pure" animals back for generations. All registered Thoroughbreds, for instance, are ultimately linked by pedigree to one of the three Arabian stallions brought to England in 1704.
Breeds such as Thoroughbreds and Arabians were standardized in Europe and England and the United States by a method that required records, studbooks, and codified breed standards, which define animals that are suited to produce pedigreed offspring. We have noted the rather unsuccessful effort that the British made to establish "scientific" breeding methods to produce better horses in India. We might view the Marwari affair as a direct descendant of that earlier effort.
But in the case of the Marwari, there were no records, no studbooks, and no codified breed standards by which to preserve the integrity of the breed. Considerable interbreeding had already taken place. Without a useful, agreed-upon description of the Marwari and the introduction of a registration system, the breed would remain highly vulnerable, in a sense porous.
If we consider the language used in the texts reporting on the Marwari breeding projects,45 we find patterns suggestive of European ideas about breeding derived from concepts of purity and pollution of race, class, and caste. We recognize these terms from the idea of the Thoroughbred and the concept of racial purity that we encountered in the discussion of Kipling's Kim. That is what it means to standardize a breed-of horses or humans.
Francesca Kelly riding her Marwari mare Shanti. Shanti, ridden here as always in a bitless bridle, was the first filly of the stallion GajRaj and one of the six horses that Kelly imported into the United States in 2000. (Photo taken in Chappaquiddick in 2015; courtesy of Francesca Kelly) And so the Marwar Horse Society (a branch of Francesca Kelly's Indigenous Horse Society of India) organized, in Jodhpur, the first national breed standards conference, where, as we have seen, they encountered difficulties even in agreeing on the history of the breed.
At first, the breeders of indigenous horses had no collective strategy for preserving the breed. They despaired of tracing the Marwari foundation sire, but they tried to draft a breed standard, beginning by registering those "prime Marwari specimens" whose immediate sires and dams could be identified. Kelly's goal was to conserve, not merely to breed, Marwari horses.
"The fact that the breed wasn't really being taken care of, either through ignorance or lack of money or appropriate breeding practices, pushed me into finding out as much about them as possible," she said. "I saw these horses, all pegged out like slaves, tied at the head and at the back, nose in the manger, no room to breathe. Nobody was going to ride them.
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Exporting Marwaris
Then, between 2000 and 2006, the Indian government allowed a small number of exports. In 2000, Kelly brought six Marwari horses home with her to her stables on Chappaquiddick, at the end of Martha's Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts; after a few years, she moved the horses to Vineyard Haven, at the other end of the island. Since then she has sent a number of mares and stallions to the Kentucky Horse Park, the Musée Vivant du Cheval in Chantilly, Paris,50 and other sites throughout the world.
Under the Raj, the British encouraged the production of Persian carpets, but particularly carpets with the sorts of patterns and colors that would please the British and European market, thus influencing the very nature of the native industry. Then, in the mid-twentieth century, the art historian and British administrator William George Archer (1907-79) first made known in England the stunning paintings made by the desperately poor women painters of Mithila, in Bihar. Near the end of the twentieth century several foundations in the United States began to support these women and their art.
The British used to justify their plunder of various Indian artifacts by arguing that they were saving them from extinction. That memory threatens to cast its shadow over the Marwari breed standardization project.
Cycle 94
Good Breeding, and Other Subjective Cultural Assumptions
European and American ideas of breeding influenced the choice of horses that were registered as pure Marwaris in India. The danger that Francesca Kelly's project would change the Marwaris into horses that suited European rather than Indian tastes at first seemed very real. Insisting on certain criteria for breeders raised the danger of exerting on the Marwaris in India the same external influence that had changed the carpets and the Mithila paintings.
Kelly chooses horses that are sound, but also that are beautiful-in English eyes. Indian standards of equine beauty, which often echo ashvashastra ideals, are very different from British or American standards. For example, although Marwaris can be bay, gray, chestnut, palomino, piebald, skewbald,59 or white, the official breed colors are bay, black, chestnut, roan, piebald, skewbald, dark brown, dun, and gray.
The annual horse and camel fair held in Pushkar, Rajasthan, is the country's largest gathering of horse breeders. There, men who had been excluded from the decision-making process at the conference that decided the "breed standards" continue to breed by far the largest number of Marwari horses in the world. And so the Marwari horse is not, in fact, constrained by the breed standards of the Indigenous Horse Society.
The Persian carpet/Mithila painting/European taste danger is a danger only if it is the only, or primary, available option, and in fact there are many Marwari options. America and Europe are now enriched by a critical mass of magnificent Marwari horses, but not at the expense of India. Some follow the new breed standards and some the traditional ashvashastra standards; there are more Marwari horses, and more varieties of them, and more people get to enjoy their beauty.
This, too, is surely a good thing.
Horse chain 95
Postscript: Two English Horsewomen
When I first heard Francesca Kelly's voice on the phone in 2008, for a split second I thought it was the voice of Penelope Chetwode coming to me from 1986: the strong, confident voice of a well-bred Englishwoman who had been put up on a pony before she could walk, had lived her whole life among horses and was used to telling large unruly animals what to do and having them do it, a voice that often seemed to be set in upper-class upper-case letters. As I began to get to know her, Francesca's all-consuming love of horses and her deep knowledge of them also conjured up Penelope for me.
Moreover, Penelope had actually anticipated, by two decades, Francesca's ambitions to "save" an Indian breed, in Penelope's case the Kathiawari, the closest thing to a Marwari. In December 1979 (when she was sixty-nine years old), Penelope had paid her first visit to the Paddocks, the Government Stud Farm near Junagadh, in Saurashtra, that had been established before Independence by the Nawab of Junagadh. Penelope's concerns ring a familiar bell: A real effort is being made to save and improve the breed.
(Lockwood Kipling had also complained about those heel-ropes, and Francesca Kelly had bemoaned the horses "tied at the head and at the back.") Penelope's great love was Arabians (and, in India, Kathiawaris); Francesca's, Marwaris. But the three breeds are similar in many ways and in their contrast with Thoroughbreds-smaller, more lithe, more curved, more self-willed, more playful, more graceful. Discovering the bonds between Penelope and Francesca, I felt a sense of closure, the two ends of my life with horses, and of my book about horses, rising to touch one another gently, like the ears of a Marwari horse.
Era ladder 96
13. The Gift Horse
Throughout Indian history, horses have belonged only to people who were not merely economically "other" than the Indian villagers but politically and often religiously other. Any Indian equine tradition is likely to reflect the influence of the many foreigners who brought horses into India.
Real vs myth 97
Alien Horses
Throughout Indian history, horses have belonged only to people who were not merely economically "other" than the Indian villagers but politically and often religiously other. Any Indian equine tradition is likely to reflect the influence of the many foreigners who brought horses into India. The first waves of these foreigners established the first patterns of Indian horse myths and horse rituals, patterns that we may still detect in contemporary folklore.
But the themes are not merely repeated, parroted; they are changed, challenged. The fact that they often appear in inversion, or even, perhaps, in subversion, may suggest a submerged, perhaps even repressed, resistance against the imported equestrian forms. Though these foreign equestrians were often of low (or no) social status in the caste system, they had to have had superior political or economic or military powers to be able to afford the cost of maintaining horses in India.
The horse represented this power, the power of the sorts of people that make other people want to tell them to "get down off your high horse." The punitive military expedition rode into the village on horseback, trampling the crops; the tax collector rode into the village and took away nine-tenths of the year's harvest, leaving the villagers to near starvation; policemen and petty officials were mounted and everyone else was not. Materially, the horses and their owners were the enemies of most Indian villagers.
There is still a Hindi saying that advises you, "Stay away from the fore of an officer and the aft of a horse." It was as wise to avoid those people as to keep out of the range of those back hooves. Tribal mythologies in India speak of horses trampling to death the first humans created by the gods, and, over the centuries, Indian artists depicted horses trampling on people. No wonder that horses were demonized and treated cruelly in some of the texts created by Indians who did not have horses.
Rider on a stallion riding over a man. War scene, Narumpunathaswamy Temple, Tiruppudaimarudur, Tamil Nadu, seventeenth century. (Photo by Anna Lise Seastrand, 2007) Horses remained Kshatriya animals, with all the negative connotations of that class-power, domination, extortion, death-to which was sometimes added another factor: some of these equestrian Kshatriyas were not Hindus but Muslims.
They rub out his tilak and break his sacred thread. A horseman tramples a foot soldier. Nata Ragini, made in Malwa Region, Madhya Pradesh, ca.
Opaque watercolor with gold on paper. (Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Stella Kramrisch, 1987-52-3) They want to ride on horses. They use rice to make liquor.
The equine mythology of India reveals a surprisingly affirmative attitude to the many foreign equestrian rulers of India.
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The Myth of Horses from the Water
In many myths, magical horses come down to earth from heaven. This is an old theme in world mythology, reflected in the pervasive Indian notion of the horse as a semidivine creature, and it was enriched in India by the historical memory of horses coming down from the northern mountain passes, as close to heaven as anyone could imagine. In the story of Desingu, the horse comes from the sky but also from the Muslims.
These Muslims are the enemies of the ruler-they kill Desingu-but they are also the source of the magic horses. There are even more stories about magical horses that come from the waters, the old myth compounded by the historical experience of the importation of horses from the sea. (The idea that horses come out of the water may also have been fortified by the easily observed fact that they so often try to get [back] into it.
As Francesca Kelly remarked of her prize Marwari brood mare, Shanti, on the shores of the North Atlantic, "She loves the water. It is hard to keep her out of it if we are near the ocean."5) Before drawing together the threads of this theme, let us consider just one more story (well, two more) about horses coming into India from the water. A group of Chinese pilgrims came to India in the seventh century CE to bring Buddhist texts back to China.
They told a mythologized version of their own story, the story of foreigners who came to India from another world: To the north of a city on the eastern borders of India, in front of a Deva temple, there is a great dragon lake. The dragons, changing their forms, couple with mares. The offspring is a wild species of horse ("dragon-horse"), difficult to tame and of a fierce nature.
Cycle 99
The Seventy-Two Riders of Kutch
Mentioned in the Veda, they are generally supposed to have been a Himalayan tribe with whom the Aryans had dealings, during, or soon after, their entry in India. Who the Cutch Yakshas were is doubtful. Fair horsemen from the west, the fact that their traces remain only on the coast would seem to show that they came by sea.
This excludes from the number of possible Yakshas, the Greeks (324 B.C.), the Yuetchi or Indo-Skythians (100 B.C.-100 A.D.), and the White Huns (500 A.D.). There remain the Romans of the first, the Persians of the sixth, and the Arabs of the eighth centuries. Their invasion is doubtful, and they could hardly have brought horses.
And he offers, instead, from "'memorialized history,' passed down through many generations of the Royal Bards of the Jadeja dynasty, a perfectly consistent and intelligible version of the Jakh affair, which, so far as the present writer knows, is here written down for the first time" (86). This is his version: Early in the reign of Punvro, there arrived on the shores of Kutch seventy-two men and one woman. They had been shipwrecked and they landed on rafts at the anchorage of Jakhao, the name of which still preserves their style or title of Jakhs.
They were tall and of fair complexion, blue- or grey-eyed. It was thought they came from somewhere near Byzantium. They were well-liked and were presented with horses so that they could travel about more easily.
(86) This telling emphasizes the arrival by sea and makes the horses native rather than imported, the gift from rather than to the people of Kutch. As Williams's story continues, eventually the Jakhs' popularity made Punvro nervous; he persecuted them and one of them killed him; his widow, in revenge, had them all murdered. The people revered them as saints and set up temples to them (87).
Williams speculates that they may have been "adventurous members of the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine army," or, more likely, "Zoroastrians from the northern parts of Iran, who, during the whole of this period, were emigrating to India in search of the religious toleration which Islamic persecutors denied them in their own country" (88). And he remarks that the Parsis of Bombay have a tradition that some of the ships bringing their ancestors from the coast of Iran to the coast of India went astray .
Horse chain 100
Levels of Power
The relationship at the heart of all mythologies joins the supernatural powers-gods and demons-with humankind, heaven and hell with earth. In India, the gods have power over humans, sometimes cruelly used, sometimes the source of all that is desired. And what humans are to the gods, horses are to humans.
Like the villagers who worship them, horses have been robbed of their freedom by human beings who made up stories about horses. For people who do not have horses, taming-particularly brutal taming-may appear as exploitation. And, on another level, the relationship between horse-having people and horse have-nots certainly involves exploitation.
The myths of those who do and those who do not own horses differ not merely because one group knows horses better (and hence creates a mythology more accurate in horse lore and, perhaps, more sympathetic to the horse) but because many equine myths are inspired not merely by the horse itself but by the relationship between the horse and humans, a relationship that may come to symbolize other human relationships: sexual, political, parental, or all of the above. And this interactive factor will clearly play different roles in the myths of people who have different sorts of contact with real horses.
A power relationship is expressed through the symbolism of horses in contrast with serpents, on the one hand, and riders, on the other. God is to rider as rider is to horse as horse is to snake. First comes the power structure between gods and humans, then between humans and horses, and then between horses and snakes.
Onto this basic pattern the people of India superimposed, like so many plastic overlays on an anatomical model of the human body, several parallel relationships expressed through horses, between people of power (physical, political, economic, or religious) and people without such power-between men and women, foreigners and natives, British and Indians, and Hindus and Dalits or tribals. These relationships supply not only the background but much of the foreground of the complex equine myths, the message as well as the medium.
Power and domination travel down the line from gods to rulers to villagers as from riders to horses to snakes. But who is represented by the horse in each story, who by the serpent, and who is the rider? Horses are, after all, contradictory symbols of human political power.
Horses are animals that invade other horses' territory, but their first instinct is always not to attack but to run away. Some humans think of horses as lions (or jackals), but horses often behave as if they think of themselves as deer. The fragility of horses is well represented by the fragile, ephemeral medium in which villagers usually represent them: clay.
And think of the tormented horses in Picasso's Guernica and Husain's Lightning. Horses are prey rather than predators, as is evidenced by the fact that they have their eyes toward the back of their heads, the better to bolt, rather than in the front, like the cats and other hunters, the better to attack. Horses flee, fast, from predators, protecting themselves with their best weapon, their hind legs.
When the gods become horses, they kick backward rather than attack from the front. But the myths also suggest a contrast between wild horses as predators and tame horses as prey. Horses are thus seen as simultaneously vulnerable and dangerous, fragile and powerful, frightened and angry, victims and victimizers, a ready-made natural/cultural metaphor apt for the uses and misuses of political power.
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 ruled them on horseback and then identified themselves with the horses, in effect positioning themselves as their own exploiters. A Marxist might view the survival of the mythology of elite horses among the proletariat as an imposition of the lies of the rulers upon the people, an exploitation of the people by saddling them with a mythology that never was theirs nor will ever be for their benefit, a foreign mythology that distorts the native conceptual system, compounding the felony of the exploitation 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 a more powerful person by assimilating that person into oneself, becoming the other,37 a kind of equine Stockholm syndrome. Like all great symbols, horses are often susceptible not only of inversion-the horse of the conqueror becomes the horse of the conquered-but also of subversion, in which the values of the conquerors are first assimilated and then reversed by those who are conquered, expressing, as it were, the snake-eye view of horses, but in a positive light.
At what point do structuralist inversions turn into Marxist subversions? But this is subversion turned on its head, as it were, subversion inverted, subversion from the bottom up. And this is not all that is happening.
Era ladder 101
The Stranger’s Gift
Though there is much to be said for this set of interpretations, in this final lap of the track I would want to augment them by pointing out that horses are potent natural symbols of things other than political and economic power. The village terra-cotta horses may express an implicit wish for the power of the horse itself-horsepower in the true sense of the word: strength and fertility and beauty and freedom. For the taming of horses often functions as a metaphor for the taming of human sexuality as well as human violence.
The myth of horses was, like the horses, a gift from the sea, or from the sky-from another world that was generous, even if only accidentally and ambivalently generous, divine as well as demonic. We know we should not look a gift horse in the mouth (to guess its age from the erosion of its teeth, a fairly reliable criterion), because we don't want to appear ungrateful (and perhaps because people who don't understand horses fear their mouths). But we learn from Indian history that it is often necessary to look a gift horse in the myth.
Where horses gave the nobles power, horse myths gave the villagers another kind of nobility, if only through glimpses of the glamor of the dominant classes (such as the Rajputs) or the political power of the conquerors (such as the Mughals or the British). The association of horses with Indian kings contributed to the continuing popular identification of horses with power and the gods,38 as symbols of royalty and grandeur. The villagers may be worshipping horses in order to gain some of that power for themselves.
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. This yoke, at least, the villagers, like good horses, willingly accepted. 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.
From early times, horses were not just something to be eaten, hunted, or worked; they were valued for the direct impact of their beauty, and were decorated to emphasize that beauty. Horses are numinous; they captivate the eye, they inspire desire, they have magic. Their allure infects even people who know, on a rational level, that horses aren't good for them.
And this allure is what Indian artisans try to capture in their religious images; it is what makes them treat horses like gods. The foreigners' horses became a positive factor in the lives of those whom they conquered or dominated, the myths and images of horses a source of beauty that was a surrogate for the real horses that the conquered people could not own, just as horses were a surrogate for humans in the sacrifice and in the heaviest work in the fields.
Horses have played an essential role in the life and religion of all the people who have had direct contact with them, and India was no exception; horses have been charismatic symbols throughout Indian history. In the end, then, horses are the sign of desire; they symbolize whatever one longs to have. (Perhaps this aspect of horses underlies the old English saying: If wishes were horses, all beggars would ride.) In this, horses are like dreams, in Freud's view: for the poor and the oppressed, they are wish fulfillments.
The Hindus speak of a "wishing-cow," a kama-dhenu, that one can milk of whatever one wants. If cows grant all desires through the metaphor of milk, horses grant all desires through the metaphors of taming and heavenly flight, becoming "wishing-horses" or kama-ashvas. Horses can easily become symbols of sex, politics/economics, and religion (what Hindus call kama, artha, and dharma), holding out great hope for anyone who has been unable to win a share in that triad of human goods.
Horses, who are sexually vibrant, politically luxurious, and supernaturally beautiful, have a strikingly ambivalent hold on the unconscious of people who want sacred/royal power, martial power, economic and political power, as well as fertility, or sexuality, or eroticism. The images of horses also give shape and intensity to those dark forces that are the shadows of the happier human qualities that make people who have horses love them. Hippophilia and hippophobia are two sides of the same coin; we are crazy about horses, one way or another.
In India, where most people don't have horses, horses may well take on their shadow persona, as an unfulfilled wish, as the symbol of what one doesn't have, of what is possessed by someone else. This lends horses, over and above their natural allure, all the glamor and pathos of the interior room watched by the child outside, pressing her nose against the windowpane. This is an exoticism that has been assimilated into the native system of values as a complex source of ambivalent meaning.
The Indian mythology of horses is a evidence to the energy of the imagination and to the human drive to go on and on responding merely to the memory, or to the view from afar, of a charismatic animal.
Real vs myth 102
Hub 103
Cycle 104
Main Points
1. India is poor horse country by climate and pasturage, so horses stay expensive imports. 2. Invaders and migrants repeatedly enter with better or more horses (Vedic, Greek/Scythian, Turk/Mughal, British). 3. Mythology of horses grows surplus precisely where herds are scarce. 4. Three strands twine: horse nature, Indian history, Sanskrit and vernacular storytelling. 5. Indus Valley evidence does not match later Vedic horse centrality in Doniger's framing. 6. Vedic sacrifice makes the horse a sacred political animal. 7. Epics bury horses with snakes in underworld imaginations. 8. Puranas put horses in the ocean and in cosmic drama. 9. Ashvashastra treats horses as a science of care, breeding, and war. 10. Buddhist texts relocate horse symbolism into kings and jatakas. 11. Arabian stock and Muslim horsemen reorganize Indian cavalry realities. 12. Vernacular equestrian epics keep mares wicked and stallions winged in living narrative. 13. British Raj remounts (Cape horses, Walers) industrialize the import paradox. 14. Rituals without horses prove myth can outlive zoology. 15. Modern India still stages horse meaning after automotive war. 16. The gift horse closing ethic warns how gifts of horses bind politics and stories. 17. Marco Polo and other travelers supply critical outsider complaints about Indian horse care. 18. Wings mark the fantasy of harnessing wild equine power. 19. Wicked mares encode gendered danger in horse myth. 20. Compare real and myth horses whenever a text seems only zoological or only symbolic.
Frameworks
| Name | What it says | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Three strands | Nature + history + storytelling | Any chapter feels one-sided |
| Scarcity surplus | Fewer real horses, richer myths | Explaining ritual without herds |
| Import ladder | Successive foreign stocks | Military-cultural periodization |
| Gift horse | Equine gifts bind obligation | Patronage and diplomacy scenes |
About this book
Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History by Wendy Doniger, 2024. 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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