Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices)

by Julius Lipner

  Caste is acquiring a radical new flexibility partly because of the well-meaning and effective efforts of leading lights among the upper castes, from the pioneering endeavours of Ram Mohan Roy to the self-denying campaigns of the Mahatma and others, to initiate change, and partly because of initiatives undertaken by dalits themselves. Ambedkar, a so-called Untouchable, played a crucial role in shaping a democratic and egalitarian Constitution for the budding nation. But he could not have made so important a contribution without the support of those among the upper castes within the cultural fold of Hinduism (the secular Nehru included), who formed a majority in the decision-making processes regarding the polity of independent India. In this way, through continuing dialogue with Western ideas, Hinduism has helped establish a framework to bring about social change for the better from within. It remains to be seen whether the nation as a whole is prepared to strive to implement the ideal. This leads to a broader consideration.

  What the likes of Ram Mohan and those who followed, e.g. Dayananda, Vivekananda, Ambedkar and Gandhi did in their several ways was to introduce a new dimension of rational critique into public discourse about Hindu beliefs and practices. Reason, of course, was always a lively part of Hindu intellectual discussion. We shall say more about the traditional use of reason in a later chapter. But as part of its engagement with modernity, public discourse, stemming from Ram Mohan, enabled reason – with all its editorial shapings and selectivities – to shake free from its confines as the hereditary property of certain Brahmin pandits, and enter the public arena. Reason was, in a way, universalized. No longer the preserve of Brahmin cliques, its deployment was open to all who had acquired the educational and other credentials to enter the fray. Thus Ambedkar, an Untouchable, who in a former era would have been consigned to a role of passive acquiescence by virtue of his caste status, now, by virtue of his rational training in the West, could order his formative influences in such a way as to openly challenge the dictates of traditional orthodoxy. British rule created the unitive conditions, politically and otherwise, for this to happen – not only for Ambedkar, but for all those who sought to follow suit, whether they chose to pull in favour of or against his point of view. This universalization of reason was not, of course, confined to discourse about caste. It extended to a consideration of all facets of a Hindu way of life.

  In short, what counted for smṛti – the handing down of tradition, the popular understanding of scripture and its corroborative sources – underwent a revolutionary change. On one level, Hinduism had become more pluralistic and selective than ever, and smṛti had become more open-ended. Perhaps this is a major reason why one reaction to this galloping pluralism has been an effort to stem the tide by a closing of ranks under such conservative banners as that of Hindutva – a belief-and-practice attempt to demarcate what ‘Hinduness’ ‘really’ is.

  Technology – with its iPods, cell phones, laptops and other digitalized communicational advances embodied in the small or larger audio-visual screen – continues to play a large part in the popularization of smṛti. These media are virtually ubiquitous in modern India, and are becoming more and more efficacious in diffusing religious and other lore (smṛti). We shall note an interesting example or two later. But now let us move on to the next topic in our discussion of smṛti – the category of ‘itihāsa’ or sacred narrative.

  8

  The voice of tradition: itihāsa and sacred narrative

  Itihāsa can be rendered literally as: ‘Thus (iti), indeed (ha), it was (āsa)’ – an irony, because as will become clear, exactly ‘thus’ it could hardly have been. The term for ‘history’ in the modern sense in some Indian vernaculars has been derived from this word – a greater irony because itihāsa in its traditional sense is clearly intended to mean the ‘Once upon a time’ of story-telling. Unlike śruti, itihāsa is sacred narrative which is pauruṣeya, that is, composed by personal agents. Western scholars tend to translate it by ‘epic’. In the Sanskrit tradition two compositions represent itihāsa: Vālmīki's Rāmāyaṇa (Ra.) and Vyāsa's Mahābhārata (Mbh.).

  As in the case of the ancient reputed authors of sacred texts in other religious traditions, Vālmiki and Vyāsa are names that may refer to more than one person, though where Vālmīki is concerned there may be more historicity involved since ‘Vyāsa’ simply means ‘arranger’, ‘compiler’. There is a popular tradition that Vālmīki started life as a bandit before turning to religion, and that he acquired his name from the termite-hill (valmīka) which grew around him while he was engrossed in meditation (a tradition that has been rejected in its entirety by some groups as having no historical basis, with good cause1). As for ‘Vyāsa’, much is credited to him: not only the Mahābhārata and works of philosophical import but also the Purāṇas and the arrangement of the Vedas in their received form. In fact, scholarship has it that neither the Rāmāyaṇa nor the Mahābhārata in their traditional versions is the work of a single hand. Both have long existed in at least two major recensions (the northern and the southern), with each recension in both cases containing substantial chunks of material not found in its counterpart, and both epics took full shape by way of numerous interpolations and additions.

  Recent scholarship has produced ‘critical editions’ of the epics based largely on linguistic criteria. The notion of a ‘critical edition’ is quintessentially a modern Western one, derived from the belief that there is an Ur or ‘original’ version of the text which was then ‘corrupted’ by deviations of various kinds with the passage of time. But popular oral tradition, especially in its ancient forms, which one could not seek to ‘fix’ by such devices as tape-recorders and the like, and which is the very lifeblood of Hinduism, does not work in this way. Such oral tradition is by nature a plural phenomenon, adapting to context and circumstance. No doubt later additions or changes to the tradition can be detected on the basis of linguistic and other criteria, but our remarks do put the idea of a ‘critical edition’ in perspective. Critical editions of such originally oral texts as the Sanskrit Rā. and Mbh. have their uses – here is a text that the various fields of scholarship can conveniently converge upon2 – but the text itself transcends the critical edition both as sacred narrative which fosters religious devotion and as a seed-bed for the literary imagination. In his monumental work on the epics, John Brockington writes:

  [U]nlike the Vedas, the epics are popular works, transmitted orally and subject to change, whose reciters would not necessarily be inhibited about updating what they were transmitting. There is therefore general agreement that the oldest parts preserved [of both] are not likely to be appreciably older than about 400 B.C. ... On the other hand, the whole Rāmāyaṇa, including its first and last books, was well known before the Mahābhārata received its final form by the 4th century A.D.

  (1998:26–7)

  We can say that the basic story-lines of the Sanskrit Rā and Mbh. as transmitted to us, together with many of their major sub-plots, were more or less determined between the period 400 B.C.E. and 300–400 C.E. (some scholars favour somewhat later, and more compressed, dates, i.e. 200 B.C.E.-100 C.E. or so). We have seen how the Dharma Sūtras and Śastras are formally concerned with describing dharma: that is their stated purpose. It is important to note that the epics also focus on dharma, but informally; that is, they do not set out to formulate the concept of dharma in its different ramifications but explore it, chiefly through narrative, but also by didactic passages. The word dharma is ubiquitous in them, and their principal characters openly question its meaning in their eventful lives.

  The epics started from a distinct perspective. Whereas the Codes were doubtless originally composed by Brahmins, most scholars contend that the epics stem from eulogies of Kṣatriya heroic action first propagated by non-Brahmin professional bards; this is why there is a great battle at the heart of both epics.3 Their main characters, male and female, are generally of the Kṣatriya varṇa. Thus there is a Kṣatriya slant to the epics’ treatment of dharma. This does n
ot mean that their content does not appeal to society at large. The dharma they are concerned with is not the somewhat abstract dharma of the Codes, which is largely bound up with the demarcations of living ritually pure lives, but mainly the dharma of living life to the full, of coping with the demands of love and hate, war and peace, wealth, ambition and power, in short of what is called ‘gain’ (artha) and ‘desire’ (kāma) in the Vedic tradition, and this, of course, is of interest to all sections of society. The Rāmāyaṇa calls itself the best dharmic narrative (dharmyam ākhyānam uttamam, 1.4.11).

  Nevertheless, like the Codes, the epics are not silent about the ethics of liberation or ‘salvation’. Hindus have generally understood pretty well – at least, in theory – that there can be no ethical pursuit of satisfaction or happiness except against the horizon of mokṣa or freedom from the constraints of worldly life. Hence the epics have important things to say about the ultimate goal of human existence. The Bhagavad Gītā, traditionally a part of the Mahābhārata, is a famous case in point, and the Rāmāyaṇa, as we shall see, waxes strong on saving devotion to Rāma. So, where dharma is concerned, it is a question of the epics’ immediate focus.

  Further, the epics have been Brahminized. At the hands (or mouths) of their Brahmin editors, which is how they have been ratified, their stories are allowed to unfold in a framework of generally Brahminic ideals. The Brahmin varṇa is acknowledged as the highest, and the Kṣatriya heroes observe Brahmin rules of precedence and protect Brahmin interests. But scholars have noted an underlying tension in the epics between the Brahmin and the Kṣatriya. Where does the centre of gravity of the ‘good life’, of Vedic dharma, really lie? In the realm of the transcendent and its other-worldly values, over which the Brahmin has hegemony, symbolized in this world by his control over the ritual of worship, or in this world of ceaseless contestation, of which the Kṣatriya, duty-bound to negotiate violence, is the emblem par excellence? Or to put it in the larger terms of our ongoing analysis of dharma: in the wellspring of the subtle, invisible dimension, or in the manifest world of polycentric expression?

  [D]harma is both earthly and transcendent: the justification for what we do in this world, it has its roots in that other realm to which we aspire ... dharma points toward ultimate things and, by imposing order on chaos, permits the creation of a meaningful world. Yet paradoxically, within that world dharma becomes another kind of limiting order, which legislates against the eruption of ... the unmediated vision of transcendence.

  (Lutgendorf 1991:352–3)

  Further, the stamp of Brahmin approval emerges interestingly in epic religion. On the one hand, traditional Vedic faith incorporating belief in the performance of the sacrifice, its ratifying power, the potency of the Sanskritic word and so on, is still deferred to; on the other hand, an alternative religion of bhakti or devotion to God (especially in a Vaiṣṇava context), of cultic worship, sacred fords and images, portents and austerities, etc., makes its appearance, not least in apparently late strata of the texts. In both cases, irrespective of the non-Brahmin roots that may be discerned in some of the features mentioned, Brahmin authority sits astride the religious teaching.

  Both epics are composed in verse, mainly the śloka, which is in anuṣṭubh metre, consisting of two lines of sixteen syllables each (or four quarter-verses of eight syllables each). ‘This meter presents a very free pattern well suited to narratives’, writes J.A.B. van Buitenen, going on to explain its versatility in the Introduction to his well-known translation of (several Books of) the Mbh. from the Poona critical edition (1973, vol.1:xxxviii). In a suggestive article comparing the origins, style and content of the two epics, J.D. Smith writes that while both works ‘represent the end-products of processes of textual inflation’ of oral songs about heroes, with Brahmins as their literary editors, ‘the Rāmāyaṇa had been composed in the manner of an epic, rather than having evolved [like the Mahābhārata] as an epic’. In other words, the Mbh. is an epic proper, growing from the nucleus of an orally transmitted tradition via Brahminic literary redaction. The Rāmāyaṇa, on the other hand, may well have started out as a literary oral composition in epic style before it was subjected to such editing. This would explain the more sophisticated style of Vālmīki's poem, and the tendency in Hindu tradition to refer to the Rā. as kāvya, i.e. ‘poetry’, whereas the Mbh. ‘is most commonly referred to as itihāsa (J.D. Smith in Hatto 1980 vol.1).

  The Mbh. is by far the longer of the two epics. Traditionally it is said to be 100000 couplets long, although oral narrative being what it is, this number has not generally been adhered to. Still, by any reckoning, it is an enormous work, the Poona critical edition (1933–1966), run-ning to ‘67,314 verses considered to be authentic’ (J.D. Smith 2009: xxi). The Rā. is only about a quarter of the traditional length of the Mbh. Let us consider the Rāmāyaṇa first.

  In its received form, the Rā. consists of seven books (kāṇḍas), though scholars generally agree that most of the first and last books, and some parts in between, are later additions to a basic narrative. This does not imply, as we shall explain, that in a religious sense, the gist of the opening and concluding books is extraneous to what intervenes. Religiously, the Rā. is generally taken as a whole. As its title implies, the Rā. tells the story of the arrival of the Kṣatriya hero and king, Rāma, on the world stage.4 To give an idea of the basic plot and chief characters of this crucial text in Hindu tradition, we summarize the story as follows:

  King Daśaratha, descendant of Ikṣvāku (the founder of the solar dynasty), rules from Ayodhyā in the kingdom of Koṣala in northern India; he is childless and advancing in age.5 To beget heirs he performs the aśvamedha and putreṣṭi (‘son-seeking’) sacrifices (here is an endorsement of Vedic religion).6 Meanwhile, the ‘gods’ – in the role of celestial super-heroes – are meeting to discuss the depredations of the ogre-king of Lakā, Rāvaṇa, who is oppressing both them and the earth. Ravaṇa has obtained a boon that he cannot be killed by any but human hands, and there is no one on earth to dispatch him. The gods petition Viṣṇu, who agrees to take birth as the off spring of Daśaratha by the king's three chief wives (thus the Vedic sacrificial ritual is affirmed as the occasion of divine descent to earth). Half of Viṣṇu descends as Rāma by queen Kausalyā; a quarter of Viṣṇu is born as Bharata from queen Kaikeyī, while the remaining quarter descends as the twins Lakṣmaṇa and Śatrughna from queen Sumitrā. The four brothers grow up amicably in Ayodhyā, Rāma outshining his siblings.

  When Rāma is 15, the sage Viśvāmitra arrives from his forest hermitage at the court; he wants Rāma to get rid of two ogres who are obstructing his sacrifice. Daśaratha finally agrees and Rāma, accompanied by his devoted half-brother Lakṣmaṇa, sets off for the hermitage. In fact, attested by a sage, he has begun his ‘public’ career as the upholder of Vedic dharma. But we shall see that there is more to it than that. Rāma does what is required of him and on the way back home accompanies Viśvāmitra to the court of king Janaka of Mithilā, capital of Videha (apparently the same king who sponsored the great sacrifice with its holy quiz at which the sage Yājñavalkya competed with Gārgī, as recounted in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad; see Chapter 6). Janaka has two treasures in particular (or three, if you include Yājñavalkya): the god Śiva's great bow which no one can string, and his daughter, Sītā (who in fact was not born in the usual way but was found by Janaka as a baby in a furrow). Rāma breaks the bow and is given Sītā in marriage. The ceremony, which also includes the weddings of Rāma's three younger brothers to Sītā’s sister and cousins in the presence of Daśaratha, is a grand affair. Eventually, all return to Ayodhyā.

  Daśaratha wants to make Rāma his successor, but queen Kaikeyī, Bharata's mother, egged on by her maid Mantharā, has other plans. She invokes two boons granted her earlier by the king; with one she wants Bharata and not Rāma to be made king, with the other Rāma is to be got out of the way by being exiled to the Daṇḍaka forest for fourteen years. Daśaratha is distrau
ght, but as king he must abide by his word. In the name of dharma, Rāma calmly agrees to honour his father's promise. Equally in the name of dharma, Lakṣmaṇa argues spiritedly that it should not be obeyed. But Rāma is unmoved and resolves to enter banishment alone. There are famous passages in which Sītā in particular argues that she must follow her lord, and she and Lakṣmaṇa prevail upon Rāma to allow them to accompany him into exile. After they leave, much to the regret of the citizens of Ayodhyā, Daśaratha the king dies of a broken heart.

  Bharata, who has been away, is aghast when he hears what has happened. He has no intention of usurping the throne and hastens to Rāma's hermitage on mount Citrakūṭa to implore him to become king. The dharma of the situation is discussed once more. Rāma's determination to carry out his exile remains unbroken. For his part, Bharata resolves to rule the kingdom as Rāma's representative, and carries back his brother's sandals as the symbol of his authority. As a mark of his determination to rule as Rāma's proxy only, he governs the country not from the capital city of Ayodhyā but from the neighbouring village of Nandigrāma. Rāma and his entourage then move to the ogre-infested parts of the Daṇḍaka forest. Rāma's obedience to his father and his unswerving fidelity to his word, Sītā’s plea to accompany him into exile, Lakṣmaṇa's loving devotion to Rāma, the incident of the sandals, are among the favourite instances of noble behaviour in Hindu tradition. But we must move on with the story. Rāvaṇa is waiting in the wings.