by John Keay
Hinduism as a religion with accepted doctrines was unknown. Arguably it remained so until the nineteenth century. The criteria of orthodoxy lay – and lie – in conduct rather than belief. Deference and support to brahmans, acceptance of one’s caste, public participation in traditional rituals, festivals and pilgrimages, and the propitiation of familial or local deities remained of the essence. As already noted, concepts like those of dharma, karma and the transmigration of souls, though originally aired in the Upanisads and nowadays considered quintessentially Hindu, had hitherto been more zealously championed by the Buddhists. To the Buddhist practice of erecting and adorning stupas of dressed stone have also been traced the first experiments in stone architecture and in the devotional use of sculptural iconography. Only after achieving remarkable expertise in the portrayal of the Buddha figure and of animal and human, mainly female, figures did the stonemasons of Mathura and elsewhere turn to producing images of the deities of the orthodox ‘Hindu’ pantheon.
How the personae of these deities, especially Vishnu, Shiva and various forms of the mother-goddess, emerged – or converged (for all were composites) – and how they eventually displaced most of the earlier Vedic deities is not well-documented. Vedic sacrifices like the aswamedha remained essential to kingship during and long after the Gupta age, but from about this time onwards ‘we do not come across the case of a single individual ascribing his greatness or luck to a Vedic deity’.18 Personal seals found in Bihar and UP usually bear the emblems of either Shiva or Vishnu, and the inscriptions of nearly all the dynasties of the age protest their devotion to some form of these same two deities. Indeed the convergence of the various Shaiva and Vaishnava personae, as well as their growing popularity, may have been partly the outcome of dominant dynasties like the Guptas co-opting the resources, divine and supernatural as well as political and economic, of their conquered feudatories.
This certainly seems to have been the case with many of the legends, incarnations, consorts and relatives associated with Vishnu, including his identification with Krishna (the Yadava deity) and with Vasudeva and Narayana, all cults which seem to have originated in the Mathura region and western India. In Malwa and central India a more popular Vaishnava cult of the period was that of Vishnu in his Varaha incarnation as a colossal wild boar who, not unlike King Kong, hoists to safety a small and naked nymph representing the earth. The famous fifth-century sculptural representations of this myth at Eran, Udayagiri and elsewhere in eastern Malwa may well celebrate the incorporation of a local boar cult into the Vishnu persona as a result of Chandra-Gupta II’s long sojourn in the region while he fought the Satraps.
Whatever their genesis, sanction for this accretion and fusion of cults was provided by the Puranas and the epics as they were recast, expanded and written down during and after the Guptas. Brahmanic authority was thus gradually accorded to the new composite deities, and the sculptor responded by giving them concrete form. Awesome figures of legend, obscure local deities, and various fertility and tutelary spirits were duly transformed into worshippable images. Their identity with the gods and goddesses of orthodox scripture conferred prestige on them; at the same time it brought them within the brahmanic mainstream of what is now called the ‘Great Tradition’ of Hinduism.
It remained only to refine the nature of man’s relationship to the new generation of deities and to develop forms of worship suitable to it. This process may also have been influenced by Buddhist precedent in that the new relationship assumed a degree of divine proximity and compassion which is not often evident in the Vedas but is fundamental to legends concerning the Buddhist Boddhisatvas. The supplicant’s more personalised response, with its emphasis on devotion rather than propitiation, is evident in the famous Bhagavad Gita whose interpolation into the Mahabharata probably dates from the third to fourth centuries AD. But it was the much later Bhakti movement, drawing its inspiration and fervour from devotional practices in the south of India and Bengal, which would eventually endow Hinduism with its public fervour and its private intimacy of communion. Though seemingly at odds both with the dangerous business of Vedic ritual and the mind-boggling subtleties of Upanishadic metaphysics, this new devotional emphasis would become the most distinctive and endearing characteristic of what we now call Hinduism.
Instead of ‘Hinduism’, scholars sometimes use the term ‘brahmanism’ to distinguish the pre-Bhakti orthodoxies of the post-Vedic era from the teachings of the heterodox sects like the Buddhists and Jains. ‘Brahmanism’ would have been as meaningless to its supposed adherents as ‘Hinduism’, but the term does have the advantage of accommodating a variety of orthodox traits, including the authority accorded to the brahman caste, the innumerable cults to which brahmanical acceptance was extended, and the complex philosophical notion of brahman as an impersonal monotheistic entity which, like the Word in Christianity, subsumed all deities, the human soul as well as the divine, and indeed all creation.
In the Vedas brahma(n) denotes hymn, prayer, sacred word, formulation of truth, substratum etc., ideas that developed later to signify, on the practical level, the title brahman for the person who possessed the qualities conveyed by such ideas, and, on the conceptual level, their abstract summation as the immutable universal principle.19
Thus we learn that ‘the brahmanas attributed brahma power to the brahmans’, an unassailable observation but one of such elliptical import that it deters further enquiry by anyone ignorant of Sanskrit – a category which then as now included most Indians as well as nearly all non-Indians. For as will already be apparent, abstract terms like brahman pose insurmountable problems of translation. Their connotations change over the centuries and their associations, ramifying through the literary canopy like lianas, defy the lexicographer’s search for equivalent words in other languages. Dharma (‘religion’, ‘duty’, ‘order’), artha (‘wealth’, ‘politics’, ‘motive’), danda (‘authority’, ‘coercion’, ‘government’) and many other such concepts of crucial importance prove no less elusive. Conversely, English words like ‘divinity’, ‘sovereignty’, or ‘power’ have no exact Sanskrit equivalents. Torchless, the cultural explorer feels his way as through an unlit cave whose sculpted figures, traced with the fingertips and not unfamiliar, yet remain unrecognisable.
THEORIES AND DREAMS
‘Here is a lovely face – a madonna face. What eyes! … I wish I could make out this story; there is certainly a story. What can this all be?’
‘The fewer theories you form, the fewer blunders and dreams you will make.’
‘But we must form theories – we cannot remain awake and not do so.’20
In 1836 two English sportsman, an excited Captain Gresley and a cautious Mr Ralph, bivouacked in a gallery of caves above the Vagha river, a headwater of the Godavari river in Berar, anciently Vidarba, in the northern Deccan. To the sculpted façades, the chaitya halls and the pillared viharas of Ajanta’s now-famous cave temples the Englishmen were comparatively indifferent. Such wonders were familiar to Europeans from sites like Karli and Kanheri near Bombay. What sent Captain Gresley into such rhapsodies of delight (which he later related in the unusual form of a verbatim transcript), and what stirred even Ralph’s critical reserve, were the paintings. Already sadly vandalised, they covered great areas of wall and ceiling and, displaying an incredible brilliance of colour and form, preserved courtly scenes of opulence and sophistication far more convincing than anything conjectured by Sanskrit scholars or culled by archaeological research. At Ajanta more than anywhere the golden age of the Guptas is made manifest. Theories and dreams, like epigraphic uncertainties and semantic niceties, crumble into dry-as-dust irrelevance beside such spectacular evidence of an age of artistic eloquence. The confidence of the draughtsmanship and portraiture, the vitality and intricacy of the compositions, and the skilful use of the palette combine in scenes martial, devotional and sublimely sensual to convey irrefutable proof of a remarkable age.
Ajanta lay in Vakataka territory and, so far
as is known, owed nothing to Gupta patronage. The pictorial themes are exclusively Buddhist, their narratives deriving from the Jatakas like those of the earlier stupa reliefs of Sanchi and Amaravati or the later ones of Borobudur in Java. Yet frescoes similar to Ajanta’s are well attested in domestic and public contexts; and from literary sources we know that Gupta society regarded painting as both a respected profession and a desirable social accomplishment. The art of Ajanta was not exceptional. Nor was its clarity and classicism unique. In terracotta and stone, as well as in language and literature, artists of the Gupta age excelled in conveying just such ordered and appealing visions – visions which, like Gupta imperialism itself as proclaimed in the Allahabad inscription, confidently balanced respect for a credible reality with reverence for an idealised abstraction.
Gupta sculptures have been distinguished as strongly intellectual in flavour and ‘composed deliberately as aesthetic objects’.21 The smooth serenity of the famous Buddha countenances is heightened by framing them within a hairstyle of tight knobbly curls and a large and intricately carved halo; grace of pose is accentuated by the hard outline of an evanescent robe or the ridged symmetry of its folds; the contours of the body are made flesh by the tightness of a waistband or the introduction of metallic accoutrements. Virtuosity is restrained; understatement is preferred. The sculptor of the Gupta age matched mastery of his art with an astonishing maturity of vision to create ‘some of the greatest sculptures ever produced anywhere in the world’.22 Emanating from the workshops of Mathura, inspiring the great school of Sarnath, and influencing a host of lesser centres throughout the Guptan arya-varta, this aesthetic set a standard of excellence, and established a canon of iconographic conventions which, as with Hellenic art, would last long and travel far. It may, in short and with complete confidence, be called ‘classical’.
As the carvings of Mathura and Sarnath are to Indian sculpture, and as the frescoes of Ajanta are to Indian painting, so are the compositions of Kalidasa to Sanskrit literature. Other dramatists of the Gupta age are highly regarded, most notably Sudraka, whose ‘Little Clay Cart’, a risqué and action-packed charivari, has obvious appeal and has been much revived. Likewise other poets wrote courtly kavya (verses) in an impeccable and even more ingenious Sanskrit: Samudra-Gupta’s Allahabad inscription as composed by Harisena, one of his principal ministers, contains passages of great dramatic elegance; and the emperor himself, like Rudradaman, is said to have been a master of the style. But only Kalidasa wrote both plays and poetry, and he did so with an excellence which, by unanimous consent, justifies the inevitable comparisons with Shakespeare. It was Sir William Jones’s English version of Kalidasa’s famous Sakuntala which first roused the West to the merits of Sanskrit drama, and it was adaptations of Meghaduta (‘The Cloud Messenger’) which found their way into nineteenth-century anthologies and won for Sanskrit verse a reputation for superb evocations of nature.
Unfortunately all Sanskrit literature is so rich in metaphors, synonyms, allusions, double meanings and all manner of grammatical and phonetic pyrotechnics that satisfactory translation is impossible. To the uninitiated the word-play, the conventions of metre and the variants of meaning smack of the recherché mystique of the cryptic crossword. But ignorance may be compounded by our own conventions. Translations, according to A.L. Basham, merely ‘tarnish’ the beauty of the original; still more sadly, they have a habit of shying away from the erotic and explicit. Thus renderings of Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava, a long poem which deals with the courtship of Lord Shiva and his consort, often omit as ‘abhorrent to Western taste’ the climactic canto in which this divine union is consummated – a subject of exquisite and eminently communicable interest which later probably inspired the famed sculpture of the Khajuraho temples and to which Kalidasa is said to have done glorious justice. Indeed, to witness the delight with which a Sanskritist savours the lines of Kalidasa is to be convinced that the considerable effort of learning a long-dead Indian language would not be wasted. ‘Few who can read [Kalidasa] in the original would doubt that, both as poet and as dramatist, he was one of the great men of the world.’23
When and where Kalidasa lived remains a mystery. He acknowledges no links with the Guptas; he may not even have coincided with them. Familiarity with Ujjain and telling descriptions of the lush Narmada valley suggest that he belonged to Malwa rather than Magadha. Tradition insists that he adorned the court of a shadowy King Vikramaditya whom chronology assigns to the first century BC. On internal evidence, however, he seems unlikely to have preceded the Guptas; and it may be significant that Vikramaditya was also one of the many epithets used by Samudra-Gupta. In another long poem, the Raghuvamsa, Kalidasa traces the lineage of King Rama of Ayodhya with particular emphasis on the empire-building exploits of Raghu, Rama’s grandfather. Raghu led his forces north, south, east and west. He conquered Bengal, erected victory pillars along the Ganga, overran Kalinga, crossed the Kaveri and exacted a tribute of pearls from the Pandyas; the dust clouds raised by his cohorts soiled the hair of the ladies of Kerala; his horses rolled in the sands of the Indus; hill-peoples quailed before his onslaught; and the winds of the Himalayas, soughing through the reeds, sang of his victories. In this poem it was as if Kalidasa, while celebrating India’s immensity, was consciously expanding on Samudra-Gupta’s Allahabad pillar inscription. ‘In this spirited and martial narrative we may justly see the reflex in the poet’s mind of Samudra-Gupta’s great conquests.’24
Not just the conquests but the poet’s vivid awareness of the terrain of the entire subcontinent argues strongly for a Guptan provenance. Though politically the empire of the Guptas was fragmentary, its culture was pervasive. Kalidasa may have been a great traveller; more probably he was a beneficiary of the traffic and trade which under Gupta rule enabled a stranger like Fa Hian to pass unmolested from one end of India to the other – and which tempted him to explore the south as well. The ideals of the Guptan age transcended frontiers and spanned seas. Gupta-style Buddhas have been found in Malaya, Java and even Borneo. There and in Indo-China the Sanskrit inscriptions which begin to appear during the third and fourth centuries mark the beginnings of literacy, nearly all the pre-Islamic scripts of south-east Asia being derivatives of Gupta Brahmi. In all these places as throughout India itself, Sanskrit now triumphed as the language of scholarship, record and courtly discourse. Moreover the reworking and recording of the Puranas, one of the most important achievements of the Gupta age, plus the raiding of the epics for suitable literary themes, ensured that Sanskritisation meant a universal currency not just for the language but for the influence and ideals of the brahman caste which these works inculcated.
On the conformity of these Sanskrit-borne religious, cultural, social and political ideals rests the case for India’s national integrity in pre-Islamic times. Many would argue that it was no more than an elitist veneer. Sanskrit was understood only by that minute percentage of the population whose sophisticated tastes and opulent lifestyle are so vividly portrayed in the Ajanta frescoes. It was for this leisured and aristocratic society that Kalidasa composed, a fact borne out by the convention that servants, members of the lower castes and all the female characters in his dramas speak and understand only Prakrit; Sanskrit is reserved for the ‘twice-born’ principals.
To this same courtly society the increasingly recherché exercises in Sanskritic obfuscation provided a delicious diversion. It was partly the fault of the language itself. As Patanjali, the second-century writer, had put it, one may order a particular design of pot from a potter but no one goes to a grammarian and says ‘Make me such and such a word.’ The vocabulary was constant, the grammar frozen. ‘Perfected’ by Panini, elevated by all, yet spoken by few, Sanskrit was the victim of its own prestige. Borrowings, once significant, became few. Ingenuity replaced innovation as writers strove to achieve succinctness by ever greater compression, and to extract additional meaning by repetition and juxtaposition. Sentences got longer and longer, sometimes running to several pag
es, while compound words ran to several lines. A word of twenty components with a total of fifty-four syllables is used in the Allahabad inscription to describe the nature of Samudra-Gupta’s feudatory sway. No doubt it is an elegant construction, but historians would willingly trade it for a single clear statement of policy.
There were astounding mnemonic developments, but they too contributed to the same end by over-specialisation and [the creation of] particular jargons for every discipline. There still exist sastris who can recite the whole of one veda in any order (literally backwards or forwards) without making a mistake in a single letter or accent. Others know the whole of Panini’s grammar and the Amarakosa dictionary without exciting special comment. Yet there is no individual who really knows the Sanskrit language as a whole.25
Important works on astronomy and, to a lesser extent, medicine indicate that science was not neglected under the Guptas. The length of the solar year was calculated with a precision which even the Greeks had not achieved, and Indian mathematics was probably the most advanced in the world. ‘At the lower level of achievement was the perfection of the decimal system and at the higher the solution of certain indeterminate equations’; pi was correctly calculated to four decimal places, and it was also at about this time that the concept of zero made its epigraphic debut, usually in the form of a dot.