Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  The power of the Brahmans was based upon a monopoly of knowledge. They were the custodians and remakers of tradition, the educators of children, the composers or editors of literature, the experts versed in the inspired and infallible Vedas. If a Shudra listened to the reading of the Scriptures his ears (according to the Brahmanical law books) were to be filled with molten lead; if he recited it his tongue was to be split; if he committed it to memory he was to be cut in two;73 such were the threats, seldom enforced, with which the priests guarded their wisdom. Brahmanism thus became an exclusive cult, carefully hedged around against all vulgar participation.75 According to the Code of Manu a Brahman was by divine right at the head of all creatures;76 he did not, however, share in all the powers and privileges of the order until, after many years of preparation, he was made “twice-born” or regenerate by solemn investiture with the triple cord.77 From that moment he became a holy being; his person and property were inviolate; indeed, according to Manu, “all that exists in this universe is the Brahman’s property.”78 Brahmans were to be maintained by public and private gifts—not as charity, but as a sacred obligation;79 hospitality to a Brahman was one of the highest religious duties, and a Brahman not hospitably received could walk away with all the accumulated merits of the householder’s good deeds.80* Even if a Brahman committed every crime, he was not to be killed; the king might exile him, but must allow him to keep his property.83 He who tried to strike a Brahman would suffer in hell for a hundred years; he who actually struck a Brahman would suffer in hell for a thousand years.85 If a Shudra debauched the wife of a Brahman, the Shudra’s property was to be confiscated, and his genitals were to be cut off.86 A Shudra who killed a Shudra might atone for his crime by giving ten cows to the Brahmans; if he killed a Vaisya, he must give the Brahmans a hundred cows; if he killed a Kshatriya, he must give the Brahmans a thousand cows; if he killed a Brahman he must die; only the murder of a Brahman was really murder.87

  The functions and obligations that corresponded to these privileges were numerous and burdensome. The Brahman not only acted as priest,† but trained himself for the clerical, pedagogical and literary professions. He was required to study law and learn the Vedas; every other duty was subordinate to this;89 even to repeat the Vedas entitled the Brahman to beatitude, regardless of rites or works;90 and if he memorized the Rig-Veda he might destroy the world without incurring any guilt.91 He must not marry outside his caste; if he married a Shudra his children were to be pariahs;‡ for, said Manu, “the man who is good by birth becomes low by low associations, but the man who is low by birth cannot become high by high associations.”92 The Brahman had to bathe every day, and again after being shaved by a barber of low caste; he had to purify with cow-dung the place where he intended to sleep; and he had to follow a strict hygienic ritual in attending to the duties of nature.93 He was to abstain from all animal food, including eggs, and from onions, garlic, mushrooms and leeks. He was to drink nothing but water, and it must have been drawn and carried by a Brahman.94 He was to abstain from unguents, perfumes, sensual pleasure, coveteousness, and wrath.95 If he touched an unclean thing, or the person of any foreigner (even the Governor-General of India), he was to purify himself by ceremonial ablutions. If he committed a crime he had to accept a heavier punishment than would fall upon a lower caste: if, for example, a Shudra stole he was to be fined eightfold the sum or value of his theft; if a Vaisya stole he was to be fined sixteen-fold; a Kshatriya, thirty-twofold; a Brahman, sixty-fourfold.96 The Brahman was never to injure any living thing.97

  Given a moderate observation of these rules, and a people too burdened with the tillage of the fields, and therefore too subject to the apparently personal whims of the elements, to rise out of superstition to education, the power of the priests grew from generation to generation, and made them the most enduring aristocracy in history. Nowhere else can we find this astonishing phenomenon—so typical of the slow rate of change in India—of an upper class maintaining its ascendancy and privileges through all conquests, dynasties and governments for 2500 years. Only the outcast Chandalas can rival them in perpetuity. The ancient Kshatriyas who had dominated the intellectual as well as the political field in the days of Buddha disappeared after the Gupta age; and though the Brahmans recognized the Rajput warriors as the later equivalent of the old fighting caste, the Kshatriyas, after the fall of Rajputana, soon became extinct. At last only two great divisions remained: the Brahmans as the social and mental rulers of India, and beneath them three thousand castes that were in reality industrial guilds.*

  Much can be said in defense of what, after monogamy, must be the most abused of all social institutions. The caste system had the eugenic value of keeping the presumably finer strains from dilution and disappearance through indiscriminate mixture; it established certain habits of diet and cleanliness as a rule of honor which all might observe and emulate; it gave order to the chaotic inequalities and differences of men, and spared the soul the modern fever of climbing and gain; it gave order to every life by prescribing for each man a dharma, or code of conduct for his caste; it gave order to every trade and profession, elevated every occupation into a vocation not lightly to be changed, and, by making every industry a caste, provided its members with a means of united action against exploitation and tyranny. It offered an escape from the plutocracy or the military dictatorship which are apparently the only alternatives to aristocracy; it gave to a country shorn of political stability by a hundred invasions and revolutions a social, moral and cultural order and continuity rivaled only by the Chinese. Amid a hundred anarchic changes in the state, the Brahmans maintained, through the system of caste, a stable society, and preserved, augmented and transmitted civilization. The nation bore with them patiently, even proudly, because every one knew that in the end they were the one indispensable government of India.

  III. MORALS AND MARRIAGE

  “Dharma”—Children—Child marriage—The art of love—Prostitution—Romantic love—Marriage—The family—Woman—Her intellectual life—Her rights—“Purdah”—Suttee—The Widow

  When the caste system dies the moral life of India will undergo a long transition of disorder, for there the moral code has been bound up almost inseparably with caste. Morality was dharma—the rule of life for each man as determined by his caste. To be a Hindu meant not so much to accept a creed as to take a place in the caste system, and to accept the dharma or duties attaching to that place by ancient tradition and regulation. Each post had its obligations, its limitations and its rights; with them and within them the pious Hindu would lead his life, finding in them a certain contentment of routine, and never thinking of stepping into another caste. “Better thine own work is, though done with fault,” said the Bhagavad-Gita,98 “than doing others’ work, even excellently.” Dharma is to the individual what its normal development is to a seed—the orderly fulfilment of an inherent nature and destiny.99 So old is this conception of morality that even today it is difficult for all, and impossible for most, Hindus to think of themselves except as members of a specific caste, guided and bound by its rule. “Without caste,” says an English historian, “Hindu society is inconceivable.”100

  In addition to the dharma of each caste the Hindu recognized a general dharma or obligation affecting all castes, and embracing chiefly respect for Brahmans, and reverence for cows.101 Next to these duties was that of bearing children. “Then only is a man a perfect man,” says Manu’s code,102 “when he is three—himself, his wife, and his son.” Not only would children be economic assets to their parents, and support them as a matter of course in old age, but they would carry on the household worship of their ancestors, and would offer to them periodically the food without which these ghosts would starve.103 Consequently there was no birth control in India, and abortion was branded as a crime equal to the murder of a Brahman.104 Infanticide occurred,105 hut it was exceptional; the father was glad to have children, and proud to have many. The tenderness of the old to the young is one of the
fairest aspects of Hindu civilization.106

  The child was hardly born when the parents began to think of its marriage. For marriage, in the Hindu system, was compulsory; an unmarried man was an outcast, without social status or consideration, and prolonged virginity was a disgrace.107 Nor was marriage to be left to the whim of individual choice or romantic love; it was a vital concern of society and the race, and could not safely be entrusted to the myopia of passion or the accidents of proximity;108 it must be arranged by the parents before the fever of sex should have time to precipitate a union doomed, in the Hindu view, to disillusionment and bitterness. Manu gave the name of Gandharva marriage to unions by mutual choice, and stigmatized them as born of desire; they were permissible, but hardly respectable.

  The early maturity of the Hindu, making a girl of twelve as old as a girl of fourteen or fifteen in America, created a difficult problem of moral and social order.* Should marriage be arranged to coincide with sexual maturity, or should it be postponed, as in America, until the male arrives at economic maturity? The first solution apparently weakens the national physique,110 unduly accelerates the growth of population, and sacrifices the woman almost completely to reproduction; the second solution leaves the problems of unnatural delay, sexual frustration, prostitution, and venereal disease. The Hindus chose child marriage as the lesser evil, and tried to mitigate its dangers by establishing, between the marriage and its consummation, a period in which the bride should remain with her parents until the coming of puberty.111 The institution was old, and therefore holy; it had been rooted in the desire to prevent intercaste marriage through casual sexual attraction;112 it was later encouraged by the fact that the conquering and otherwise ruthless Moslems were restrained by their religion from carrying away married women as slaves;113 and finally it took rigid form in the parental resolve to protect the girl from the erotic sensibilities of the male.

  That these were reasonably keen, and that the male might be trusted to attend to his biological functions on the slightest provocation, appears from the Hindu literature of love. The Kamasutra, or “Doctrine of Desire,” is the most famous in a long list of works revealing a certain preoccupation with the physical and mental technique of sex. It was composed, the author assures us, “according to the precepts of Holy Writ, for the benefit of the world, by Vatsyayana, while leading the life of a religious student at Benares, and wholly engaged in the contemplation of the Deity.”114 “He who neglects a girl, thinking she is too bashful,” says this anchorite, “is despised by her as a beast ignorant of the working of the female mind.”115 Vatsyayana gives a delightful picture of a girl in love,116 but his wisdom is lavished chiefly upon the parental art of getting her married away, and the husbandly art of keeping her physically content.

  We must not presume that the sexual sensitivity of the Hindu led to any unusual license. Child marriage raised a barrier against premarital relations, and the strong religious sanctions used in the inculcation of wifely fidelity made adultery far more difficult and rare than in Europe or America. Prostitution was for the most part confined to the temples. In the south the needs of the esurient male were met by the providential institution of devadasis—literally “servants of the gods,” actually prostitutes. Each Tamil temple had a troop of “sacred women,” engaged at first to dance and sing before the idols, and perhaps to entertain the Brahmans. Some of them seem to have lived lives of almost conventual seclusion; others were allowed to extend their services to all who could pay, on condition that a part of their earnings should be contributed to the clergy. Many of these temple courtesans, or nautch* girls, provided dancing and singing in public functions and private gatherings, in the style of the geishas of Japan; some of them learned to read, and, like the hetairai of Greece, furnished cultured conversation in homes where the married women were neither encouraged to read nor allowed to mingle with guests. In 1004 A.D., as a sacred inscription informs us, the temple of the Chola King Rajaraja at Tanjore had four hundred devadasis. The custom acquired the sanctity of time, and no one seems to have considered it immoral; respectable women now and then dedicated a daughter to the profession of temple prostitute in much the same spirit in which a son might be dedicated to the priesthood.117 Dubois, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, described the temples of the south as in some cases “converted into mere brothels”; the devadasis, whatever their original functions, were frankly called harlots by the public, and were used as such. If we may believe the old abbé, who had no reason to be prejudiced in favor of India,

  their official duties consist in dancing and singing within the temples twice a day, . . . and also at all public ceremonies. The first they execute with sufficient grace, although their attitudes are lascivious and their gestures indecorous. As regards their singing, it is almost always confined to obscene verses describing some licentious episode in the history of their gods.118

  Under these circumstances of temple prostitution and child marriage little opportunity was given for what we call “romantic love.” This idealistic devotion of one sex to the other appears in Indian literature—for example in the poems of Chandi Das and Jayadeva—but usually as a symbol of the soul surrendering to God; while in actual life it took most often the form of the complete devotion of the wife to her mate. The love poetry is sometimes of the ethereal type depicted by the Tennysons and Longfellows of our Puritan tradition; sometimes it is the full-bodied and sensuous passion of the Elizabethan stage.119 One writer unites religion and love, and sees in either ecstasy a recognition of identity; another lists the three hundred and sixty different emotions that fill the lover’s heart, and counts the patterns which his teeth have left on his beloved’s flesh, or shows him decorating her breasts with painted flowers of sandal paste; and the author of the Nala and Damayanti episode in the Mahabharata describes the melancholy sighs and pale dyspepsia of the lovers in the best style of the French troubadours.120

  Such whimsical passions were seldom permitted to determine marriage in India. Manu allowed eight different forms of marriage, in which marriage by capture and marriage “from affection” were ranked lowest in the moral scale, and marriage by purchase was accepted as the sensible way of arranging a union; in the long run, the Hindu legislator thought, those marriages are most soundly based that rest upon an economic foundation.121 In the days of Dubois “to marry” and “to buy a wife” were “synonymous expressions in India.”*122 The wisest marriage was held to be one arranged by the parents with full regard for the rules of endogamy and exogamy: the youth must marry within his caste, and outside his gotra or group.123 He might take several wives, but only one of his own caste—who was to have precedence over the rest; preferably, said Manu, he was to be monogamous,†124 The woman was to love her husband with patient devotion; the husband was to give to his wife not romantic affection, but solicitous protection.126

  The Hindu family was typically patriarchal, with the father full master of his wife, his children, and his slaves.127 Woman was a lovely but inferior being. In the beginning, says Hindu legend, when Twashtri, the Divine Artificer, came to the creation of woman he found that he had exhausted his materials in the making of man, and had no solid elements left. In this dilemma he fashioned her eclectically out of the odds and ends of creation:

  He took the rotundity of the moon, and the curves of creepers, and the clinging of tendrils, and the trembling of grass, and the slenderness of the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant’s trunk, and the glances of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety of sunbeams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock, and the softness of the parrot’s bosom, and the hardness of adamant, and the sweetness of honey, and the cruelty of the tiger, and the warm glow of fire, and the coldness of snow, and the chattering of jays, and the cooing of the kokila, and the hypocrisy of the crane, and the fidelity of the chakravaka; and compounding all these
together he made woman, and gave her to man.129

  Nevertheless, despite all this equipment, woman fared poorly in India. Her high status in Vedic days was lost under priestly influence and Mohammedan example. The Code of Manu set the tone against her in phrases reminiscent of an early stage in Christian theology: “The source of dishonor is woman; the source of strife is woman; the source of earthly existence is woman; therefore avoid woman.”130 “A female,” says another passage, “is able to draw from the right path in this life not a fool only but even a sage, and can lead him in subjection to desire or to wrath.”131 The law laid it down that all through her life woman should be in tutelage, first to her father, then to her husband, and finally to her son.132 The wife addressed her husband humbly as “master,” “lord,” even as “my god”; in public she walked some distance behind him, and seldom received a word from him.133 She was expected to show her devotion by the most minute service, preparing the meals, eating—after they had finished—the food left by her husband and her sons, and embracing her husband’s feet at bedtime.134 “A faithful wife,” said Manu, “must serve . . . her lord as if he were a god, and never do aught to pain him, whatsoever be his state, and even though devoid of every virtue.”135 A wife who disobeyed her husband would become a jackal in her next incarnation.136

  Like their sisters in Europe and America before our own times, the women of India received education only if they were ladies of high degree, or temple prostitutes.137 The art of reading was considered inappropriate in a woman; her power over men could not be increased by it, and her attractiveness would be diminished. Says Chitra in Tagore’s play: “When a woman is merely a woman—when she winds herself round and round men’s hearts with her smiles and sobs and services and caressing endearments—then she is happy. Of what use to her are learning and great achievements?”138 Knowledge of the Vedas was denied to her;139 “for a woman to study the Vedas,” says the Mahabharata, “is a sign of confusion in the realm.”140* Megasthenes reported, in Chandragupta’s days, that “the Brahmans keep their wives—and they have many wives-ignorant of all philosophy; for if women learned to look upon pleasure and pain, life and death, philosophically, they would become depraved, or else no longer remain in subjection.”141