The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  CONCLUSION: CON-FUSION

  What does the geology of the formation of India tell us about the formation of Hinduism? The answer is suggested by a story that A. K. Ramanujan retold, from Tamil sources:

  THE BRAHMIN HEAD AND THE PARIAH BODY

  A sage’s wife, Mariamma, was sentenced by her husband to death. At the moment of execution she embraced a Pariah woman, Ellamma, for her sympathy. In the fray both the Pariah woman and the Brahmin lost their heads. Later the husband relented, granted them pardon, and restored their heads by his spiritual powers. But the heads were transposed by mistake. To Mariamma (with a Brahmin head and Pariah body) goats and cocks but not buffalo were sacrificed; to Ellamma (Pariah head and Brahmin body) buffalo instead of goats and cocks.48

  This text is itself an example of what it tells about: It mixes together the story of Mariamma from two different Indian geographical and linguistic traditions, North Indian Sanskrit literature, where she is called Renuka, and South Indian Tamil oral folktales about the origins of two South Indian goddesses.49 This sort of juxtaposition, in various forms, is widespread in both myth and history, beginning with the piece of Africa stuck onto Central Asia, like a head upon a body, and continuing through all the ideas of women and low castes that get into the heads of Brahmin males. It can stand as a metaphor for all the fusions that make up the rich mix of Hinduism.

  The mixing together of various human streams is so basic to the history of Hinduism that the Brahmins could not stop trying, and failing, to prevent it, even as their fear of the powers of the senses to invade the rational control center made them try, also in vain, to control addiction through asceticism. Their ultimate terror was the “confusion” of classes, the miscegenation brought on by the Kali Age. They visualized the mixing of classes as a form of impurity, which should not surprise anyone who has read the British anthropologist Mary Douglas’s explanation of the ways that throughout the world, “category errors”—things that do not fall entirely into one class or another—are characterized as dirt and as danger.50 Brahmins regarded the woman with the Brahmin head and Pariah body—and her twin and partner, with the Pariah head on the Brahmin body—as monstrosities, a double hodgepodge. But from the standpoint of a non-Brahmin, or a scholar of Hinduism, this rich hybrid or multiple mix is precisely what makes Hinduism the cultural masterpiece that it is.

  Such a conflation is not a monstrosity, nor is it a mistake—or if it is, it is a felix culpa. The transpositions result in two goddesses (read: many Hinduisms), each of whom is far more interesting than the straightforward realignment would have been. Whatever its disparate sources, the resulting creature has an integrity that we must respect, rather like that of my favorite mythical beast, created by Woody Allen, the Great Roe, who had the head of a lion and the body of a lion, but not the same lion.51 The question to ask is not where the disparate elements originated but why they were put together and why kept together. The political implications of regarding Hinduism as either a hodgepodge or, on the other hand, culturally homogeneous or even monolithic are equally distorting; it is always more useful, if a bit trickier, to acknowledge simultaneously the variety of the sources and the power of the integrations. A Hinduism with a Pariah body and a Brahmin head—or, if you prefer, a Pariah head and a Brahmin body—was re-created again and again throughout India history, and these multiple integrities are what this book is about.

  CHAPTER 3

  CIVILIZATION IN THE INDUS VALLEY

  50,000 to 1500 BCE

  CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES BCE)

  c. 50,000 Stone Age cultures arise

  c. 30,000 Bhimbetka cave paintings are made

  c. 6500 Agriculture begins

  c. 3000 Pastoral nomad societies emerge

  c. 2500 Urban societies emerge along the Indus River

  c. 2200-2000 Harappa is at its height

  c. 2000-1500 Indus civilization declines

  “Pashupati” Seal (Seal 420).

  In place of an opening epigram, we begin with an image, whose meaning is much disputed, for one of the many challenges of interpreting the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) lies in deciphering pictures for which we do not know the words. The second challenge is trying to decide what, if anything, of the IVC survives in later Hinduism. For the IVC is older than the oldest extant Hindu texts, the Vedas, and its material remains include many images that may be the earliest-known examples of important Hindu icons that only (re)surface much later.

  EARLY HISTORY: BHIMBETKA CAVE PAINTINGS

  Much of what we now call Hinduism may have had roots in cultures that thrived in South Asia long before the creation of textual evidence that we can decipher with any confidence. Remarkable cave paintings have been preserved from Mesolithic sites dating from c. 30,000 BCE in Bhimbetka, near present-day Bhopal, in the Vindhya Mountains in the province of Madhya Pradesh.1 They represent a number of animals that have been identified as deer, boars, elephants, leopards, tigers, panthers, rhinoceroses, antelope, fish, frogs, lizards, squirrels, and birds. One painting seems to depict a man walking a dog on a leash. The animals represented probably existed there (it would be hard for someone who had never seen an elephant to draw a picture of an elephant), though there may be false positives (an artist could have copied someone else’s picture of an elephant, and the existence of images of a creature half bull and half man certainly does not prove that such tauranthropoi actually existed). On the other hand, animals that are not represented may well also have existed there (the Bhimbetkanese may have had snakes even though they did not make any paintings of snakes); the missing animals may simply have failed to capture the artist’s imagination. False negatives in this realm are even more likely than false positives.

  Several of the animals in the paintings have horns, like gazelles, and one painting shows people dancing with what may be a unicorn with a close-clipped mane.2 This possible unicorn continues to tease art historians when it reappears in the IVC.

  THE INDUS VALLEY

  MATERIAL CULTURE

  There were other early settlements in India, notably the culture of Baluchistan, in the westernmost part of what is now Pakistan, dating to before 6000 BCE. But from about 2300 BCE the first urbanization took place, as great cities arose in the valley of the Indus River, 150 miles south of Baluchistan, also in Pakistan. The material remains of this culture, which we call the Indus Valley Civilization or the Harappan Civilization (named after Harappa, one of the two great cities on the Indus, the other being Mohenjo-Daro), present a tantalizing treasure chest of often enigmatic images that hover just beyond our reach, taunting us with what might well be the keys to the roots of Hinduism.

  The Indus Valley plain, much like the valleys of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates, cradles of Neolithic civilizations, is a semiarid, river-watered region; the “semi” means that on the one hand, the relatively sparse vegetation, not so rich as that of the effluvial plain of the Ganges, for instance, required no iron tools to clear and settle while, on the other hand, the silt from the river floodings provided sufficient natural fertilizer to create the surplus that makes civilization possible.3 The river was also a channel of trade.

  Here’s another origin story. In 1856 an English general named Alexander Cunningham, later director general of the archaeological survey of northern India, visited Harappa, where an English engineer named William Brunton was gathering bricks (including what he recognized as bricks from the IVC) as ballast for a railway he was building between Multan and Lahore. Cunningham took note of the site but did nothing about it, and the trains still run on that route, on the main line from Peshawar, on top of a hundred miles of third-millennium BCE bricks. Only after 1917, when an Indian archaeologist found an ancient knife at a place named, significantly, Mound of the Dead (Mohenjo-Daro), and excavations carried out there revealed artifacts identical with those that had been at Harappa, did this civilization begin to be appreciated. Among the treasures that they found were carved stones, flat, rectangular sections of soapstone about the
size of a postage stamp, which were used as stamps or seals, as well as sealings (impressions) of such stamps.

  The civilization of the Indus Valley extends over more than a thousand sites, stretching over 750,000 square miles, where as many as forty thousand people once lived.4 Four hundred miles separate the two biggest cities, from Harappa on the Ravi tributary in the north (one of the five rivers of the Punjab) down to Mohenjo-Daro (in the Larkana Valley in Sindh) and on down to the port of Lothal in the delta on the sea. Yet the Indus cities were stunningly uniform and remarkably stable over this wide range, changing little over a millennium, until they begin to crumble near the end. They had trade contacts with Crete, Sumer, and other Mesopotamian cultures, perhaps even Egypt.5 There are Harappan sites in Oman (on the Arabian Peninsula), and Indus seals show up in Mesopotamia. There was direct contact with Iran, particularly just before the end, a period from which archaeologists have found a very late Indus seal with Indus motifs on one side and Iranian on the other, together with many seals reflecting Central Asian influences.6 Some Indus images bear a striking resemblance to images from Elam, a part of ancient Iran that was closely linked to adjacent Mesopotamian urban societies.7 Trade with Central Asia continued in the Indus area even after the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization. In a sense, the Hindu diaspora began now, well before 2000 BCE.

  Archaeological evidence suggests that the use of cubical dice began in South Asia and indeed in the IVC.8 Sir John Hubert Marshall, the director general of the Indian archaeological survey from 1902 to 1931, found many cubical terra-cotta dice, with one to six dots, at Mohenjo-Daro,9 and a number of other dice have been identified since then from Harappa and elsewhere, including several of stone (agate, limestone, faience, etc.).10 This is a fact of great significance in light of the importance of gambling in later Indian civilization, from 1200 BCE.

  They had gold, copper, and lead, and they imported bronze, silver, and tin (as well as lapis lazuli and soapstone), but they had no iron; their weapons were made of copper and bronze. There was a huge wheat and barley storage system, and there were household and public drainage works superior to those in parts of the world today, including much of India. Most of the buildings are constructed out of bricks (both sun baked and kiln fired) of remarkably consistent size throughout the extended culture; equally unvarying stone cubes were used to measure weights. The roads too did not just evolve out of deer tracks but were carefully laid out all in the same proportion (streets twice as wide as lanes, avenues twice as wide as streets) and arranged on a grid (north-south or east-west), like the “pink city” of Jaipur in Rajasthan that Maharajah Jai Singh designed and built in the eighteenth century CE. All this uniformity of material culture across hundreds of miles and a great many centuries implies considerable control and planning11 and suggests, to some scholars, a threat of authoritarian or even totalitarian government. Some speak of the “affluent private residences with bathrooms served by a drainage system,” while “the poor, however, lived huddled in slums, the inevitable underclass in a hierarchical system,”12 and others have seen in the tiny identical houses (protohousing projects? ghettos?) and in the massive government structure, regulating every single brick, an “obsessive uniformity.”13 There is evidence that different professions worked out of distinct areas of the cities, suggesting the existence of something like protocastes.14 Some scholars have taken the visible signs of an overarching hand of authority and urban planning as evidence of “urbanity, sophistication, well-being, ordered existence.” 15 One might also see, in the tiny scale of the seals and the figurines, and in the children’s toys, a delicate civilization, whose artwork is fine in both senses—beautiful and small.

  PICTURES AND SYMBOLS: THE SEALS AND THE SCRIPT

  The civilization of the Indus is not silent, but we are deaf. We cannot hear their words but can see their images.ap

  Most of the seals, which are found throughout the Indus Valley Civilization, are engraved with a group of signs in the Indus script, or a drawing or design, or a combination of these.16 There are well over two thousand inscriptions, using about four hundred graphemes, and many people have claimed to have deciphered them, often demonstrating truly fantastic flights of imagination, but no one has definitively cracked the code.17 The individual messages are too short for a computer to decode, and since each seal had a distinctive combination of symbols, there are too few examples of each sequence to provide a sufficient linguistic context. The symbols that accompany a given image vary from seal to seal, so that it’s not possible to derive the meaning of the words from the meaning of the images. Many people have speculated that it is an Indo-European language, or a Dravidian language, or a Munda or “Austro-Asiatic” language18 (supported by the plate tectonics narrative), or not a language at all.aq19 The seals may well have been nothing but devices to mark property in the manner of a signet ring, a stamp of ownership, rather like a bar code,20 probably made for merchants who used them to brand their wares, signifying nothing but “This is mine.” Perhaps the writing is a form of ancient shorthand. Because they present a vivid, highly evocative set of visual symbols, but no text, these images have functioned, for scholars, like Rorschach shapes onto which each interpreter projects his or her own vision of what the hypothetical text should be and should say.ar The ambiguity and subjectivity of the interpretation of visual images are yet another aspect of the shadow on the moon that is, for some, a rabbit, and for others, a man.

  But the images on the seals do make a more general statement that we can decipher, particularly in the realm of flora and fauna. The vast majority of Indus signs can be directly or indirectly related to farming: Typical signs include seeds, fruits, sprouts, grain plants, pulses, trees, farm instruments (hoes, primitive plows, mortars and pestles, rakes, harvesting instruments, etc.), seasonal/celestial or astral signs, and even at times anthropomorphized plowed fields. The images, as well as other archaeological remains, tell us that the winter Indus crop was barley and wheat; the spring crop, peas and lentils; and the summer and the monsoon crops, millets, melons, dates, and fiber plants.21 They also probably grew rice.22 They spun, wove, and dyed cotton, probably for the first time on the planet Earth, and may also have been the first to use wheeled transport.23 They ate meat and fish.24

  INDUS ANIMALS

  Animals, both wild and tame, dominate the representations from the IVC, both on the seals, where they seem to have been drawn from nature, and on figurines, paintings on pottery, and children’s toys. These images tell us that tigers, elephants, and one-horned rhinoceroses, as well as buffalo, antelope, and crocodiles, inhabited the forests of this now almost desert region, which then had riverine long grass and open forest country, the natural habitat of tigers and rhinoceroses.25 (A rhinoceros, a buffalo, and an elephant, all on wheels, were found in a later site in northern Maharashtra, perhaps connected with Harappa.)26 There are also animal figurines of turtles, hares, monkeys, and birds, and there is a pottery model, 2.9 inches long, of an animal with a long, bushy tail, perhaps a squirrel or a mongoose.27

  But it is the representations of domesticated animals, as well as the archaeological remains of such animals, that tell us most about the culture of the IVC, in particular about the much-disputed question of its relationship (or lack of relationship) with later Indian cultures such as that of the Vedic peoples. Millennia before the IVC, people in South Asia had hunted a number of animals that later, in the IVC, they bred and domesticated (and sometimes continued to hunt). Before the IVC, they had also domesticated two distinct species of cattle—the humped zebu (Bos indicus), with its heavy dewlaps, and a humpless relation of the Bos primigenius of West Asia.28 Zebu and water buffalo (Bubalus) were used as draft animals, and elephants (domesticated, more or less) were used for clearing and building.29 Elephants are not native to the lands found west of central India, but they might have been imported into the Indus Valley.30

  They had dogs (which may already have been domesticated at Bhimbetka). Marshall, who participated in
the first excavations of the site, commented on them at length:

  As would be expected, the dog is common, but all the figures but one are roughly modeled and evidently made by children. That this animal was a pet as well as a guard is proved by some of the figures being provided with collars. We have found a very mutilated figure of a dog with a collar, fastened by a cord to a post, which suggests that house animals were sometimes too fierce to be allowed at large. The one well-made exception . . . almost resembles the English mastiff of to-day.31

  He also noted a figure of a dog with its tongue hanging out, “a detail seldom shown in a pottery model.”32 The particular breeds of dogs depicted in small statues at the IVC include pariah dogs and, surprisingly, dachshunds.33

  They had also domesticated camels, sheep, pigs, goats, and chickens. This may have been the first domestication of fowl,as a major contribution to world civilization.34 Apparently they did not have, or at least think it worthwhile to depict, cats. On seals and pottery, and depicted as figurines, the favorite subject is male animals—most frequently bulls with pendulous dewlaps and big pizzles. There are also short-horned bulls,35 but in general they went in for horned males: bulls, water buffalo, rams, and others. One scene even depicts a tiger with horns.36