The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  Works of art such as the images on the seals and other artifacts provide abundant evidence of imaginative art, perhaps mythological but not necessarily ritual. They may have been purely decorative, or they may illustrate narratives of some sort or convey some sort of symbolic meaning, probably more than one, as symbols often do. But did they necessarily express the symbols of an organized religion? There are no recognizable religious buildings or elaborate burials in the Indus cities (“Clearly, they did not expect huge demands on the dead in the after-life”94), no signs of ancestral rituals or “magnificent icons” or any “specially decorated structures.” The conclusion is clear enough: “If there were temples they are difficult to identify. . . . The cities may not therefore have been the focus of religious worship.”95 Yet the same fact—that no great temple or center of worship has been found as yet at Mohenjo-Daro—has inspired a very different conclusion: One place where such a structure might have been situated, just east of the bath, has not been excavated because a Buddhist stupa (reliquary mound) stands there, and permission has never been granted to move it.ax96 The stupa is indeed a strong hint that the structure underneath it might have been religious, for Buddhism shares with other religions (including, notably, Hinduism and Islam) the habit of sacred recycling, putting one religious building on the site hallowed by another, the funeral baked meats served cold for the wedding breakfast that follows. And one might argue that it would be odd if given the great regulation and standardization of everything else in public life, the governing powers did not also regulate belief. But all speculations about the role of religion in the lives of the IVC people rest on doubtful retrospective hindsight from Hindu practices many centuries later.97

  The assumption of a theocratic elite in the IVC underpins the assertion that the images depicted on pictographic seal inscriptions and terra-cotta figures are divinities and that animism, demonic cults, fertility cults, and the worship of natural forces and mother goddesses flourished in the IVC.98 But surely it’s possible that the people of the IVC had no religion at all, in the sense of a state cult or an enforced dogma. Is it possible that this was the first secular state, anticipating the European Enlightenment by four thousand years? Could they have been more like protoatheists than protoyogis? After all, there were many people in later Hinduism who had no use for religion, people such as the Charvakasand the Lokayatas (“Materialists”).99 (If people are going to argue for religious meanings from hindsight, one might as well also argue against it from hindsight; two can play at that game.) Just as it has been well argued that there is a very good reason why the IVC language remains undeciphered—because the seals may not record any language at all, merely random symbols of ownership100—so too we may argue that the other symbols are not part of a coherent religious system but equally random artistic creations.

  THE END OF THE INDUS

  No one knows how the IVC came to an end. Perhaps it simply ran its course, had its day in the sun, and then the sun, as always, set on that empire. Perhaps it was destroyed by drought. Perhaps the Indus River changed its course, or there was an earthquake.101 Perhaps massive deforestation degraded the environment. Perhaps the people died of diseases such as severe anemia, as the skeletal remains of what was previously interpreted as a “massacre” suggest.102 Perhaps it was destroyed by invasions. Last but certainly not least, perhaps it was destroyed by a flood; whatever caused the actual destruction, floods did eventually bury the cities in many layers of Indus mud, which caused both the ground level and the water table to rise by ten meters. Immigrations of new peoples, droughts, deforestation, floods, or alterations in the course of the life-giving river: any of these may have been contributing factors.103 Whatever the cause, the result was that “on top of the cities, now consigned to oblivion beneath tons of alluvium, other peoples grazed their goats, sowed their seeds and spun their myths. A great civilization was lost to memory.”104 But was it in fact lost?

  The flood that may have destroyed the Indus cities may have been the inspiration for the myth of the great flood that is described in the Shatapatha Brahmana (c. 800 BCE) and that continues to haunt Hindu mythology to the present day. And it is tempting to argue that some or all of these stories are memories of (if not evidence for) a great flood that destroyed the IVC. But it would be better, I think, to resist that temptation and simply to suggest that present-day scholarly (or nonscholarly) theories of a catastrophic flood at the end of the Indus Valley Civilization were inspired by the myth of the flood, that the scholarly theories themselves are merely the latest variants of the myth of the flood.

  TRANSFORMATIONS THROUGH TIME: FAST-FORWARD

  Arguments from hindsight pervade the scholarship on the IVC, underpinning correlations between the quasi unicorn and the sage whose mother was an antelope, between the Lord of Beasts on the seal and Shiva, between various images of women and later Hindu goddesses, between the “Great Bath” and the bathing tanks of Hindu temples, between small conical objects that have been interpreted as phallic stones (but may just be pieces used in board games) and the Shiva linga. The obsession with descendants, arguing that the IVC seal can be explained by what we know of Shiva as Lord of Beasts, is the other side of the coin of the obsession with origins, arguing that the figure of Shiva as Lord of Beasts is derived from, and to some extent explained by, the IVC seal. The two approaches scratch each other’s backs. The fascination with the IVC comes in part from the intrinsic appeal of its artifacts but also from a perceived need to find non-Vedic, indeed pre-Vedic sources for most of Hinduism—for Shiva and goddess worship and all the rest of Hinduism that is not attested in the Vedas.

  On the other hand, it is always tempting to look for the keys to the IVC where there is available light in later Hinduism, to let Hindu phenomena, which have the context of texts to explain them, illuminate the darkness that surrounds many early Indus images and objects that lack such verbal commentaries. But too often scholars read the Indus images like the pictures in the puzzle books of my youth: How many (Hindu) deer can you see hiding in this (Indus) forest? Throughout this chapter, and indeed throughout this book, I have poured into my ears the wax of pedantic caution, in an attempt (sometimes in vain) to resist the siren song of hindsight. For fig trees, horns, bulls, phalluses, and buxom women do play a central role in later Hinduism, and such images may have been important to Hindus in part because they never lost some of the power they had had in the Indus period. Although these images certainly also occur in many other cultures, the hypothesis that Hinduism inherited them from the Indus seems a more efficient explanation than coincidence or independent origination. Nor is there any likely source (with the possible, but by no means established, exception of Elam) from which the two cultures could have borrowed the same images. It is probable that the forms survived; the mistake is in assuming that the function follows the form. The inhabitants of both Mohenjo-Daro and modern Mumbai had bulls, but they surely had very different ideas about bulls.

  It is useful to distinguish hindsight from fast-forwarding. Hindsight often misreads an earlier phenomenon by assuming that it meant then the same thing that it meant later, reading the past through the present, forgetting that we cannot simply lay the present over the past like a plastic map overlay. The false Orientalist assumptions that India was timeless and that the classical texts of the Brahmins described an existing society led to the equally false assumption that the village and caste organization of colonial or even contemporary India was a guide to their historical past.105

  But at times the atavisms, the modern traces of ancient phenomena, are so striking that it would be perverse to ignore them, and from time to time I have fast-forwarded to note them. We should not impose the meaning of the later icons upon the earlier images, but once we have explored the meaning of the Indus representations within the constrictions of their own limited context, we can go on to speculate on how they may have contributed to the evolution of a later iconography that they sometimes superficially resemble.106


  For the resemblances between some aspects of the IVC and later Hinduism are simply too stunning to ignore. As the Late Harappan culture declined, its survivors must have carried some of it into the Ganges-Yamuna basin. There are links between archaeological records among the communities of the third millennium BCE, which used only stone and bronze, and the people of the Gangetic plain and the Deccan in around 1000 BCE, who developed the use of iron. At this time, or even a few centuries earlier (in 1500 BCE), the process of urbanization moved gradually south from the Indus cities to the site of Kaushambi, near modern Allahabad in the Gangetic plain, and to the surrounding villages. The material culture does not show continuities; the use of bricks of standard sizes, the geometrical grids, the seals, the sewers, the large urban plan, none of this is preserved.107 Above all, the technique of administration was lost; not for many centuries would anyone know how to govern such a large community in India. But someone succeeded in preserving on the journey south and east some of the cultural patterns nurtured in the Indus cities, for some of these patterns lived on long after the cities themselves were gone.108 The Indus civilization may not have simply gone out like the flame of a candle or, at least, not before lighting another candle.

  We can see the possible survival, in transformation, of a number of images. The Harappan motif of the fig (pipal)—as a leaf decoration on pottery and as a tree on seals—reappears in the imagery of some later religious sects.109 There is a conch shell, etched in vermilion, that may well have been used as a libation vessel, just as conch shells, etched in vermilion, are used in Hinduism today. Not only individual images but also aspects of the art forms—especially the so-called animal style, stylized and rounded, with just a few meticulous and suggestive details—seem to have survived. Some of the stylized depictions of the animals on the seals bear a striking resemblance to the depictions of the same animals two thousand years later (and magnified many hundredfold) on the capital plinths of the pillars of Ashoka.110 These patterns, and the rough outlines of other images that we have considered, perhaps even the stone lingas and the voluptuous women, may have gradually merged with the culture of the people of the Veda.

  Horse on the Ashokan Column at Sarnath.

  CHAPTER 4

  BETWEEN THE RUINS

  AND THE TEXT

  2000 to 1500 BCE

  CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES BCE)

  c. 4000-3000 *Indo-European breaks up into separate languages

  c. 2100-2000 Light-spoked chariots are invented

  c. 2000-1500 Indus civilization declines

  c. 1900 Sarasvati River dries up

  c. 1700-1500 Nomads in the Punjab compose the Rig Veda; horses arrive in Northwest India

  c. 1350 Hittite inscriptions speak about horses and gods

  c. 900 The Vedic people move down into the Ganges Valley

  VISHNU AND BRAHMA CREATE EACH OTHER

  When the three worlds were in darkness, Vishnu slept in the middle of the

  cosmic ocean. A lotus grew out of his navel. Brahma came to him and said, “Tell

  me, who are you?” Vishnu replied, “I am Vishnu, creator of the universe. All the

  worlds, and you yourself, are inside me. And who are you?” Brahma replied, “I

  am the creator, self-created, and everything is inside me.” Vishnu then entered

  Brahma’s body and saw all three worlds in his belly. Astonished, he came out of

  Brahma’s mouth and said, “Now, you must enter my belly in the same way and

  see the worlds.” And so Brahma entered Vishnu’s belly and saw all the worlds.

  Then, since Vishnu had shut all the openings, Brahma came out of Vishnu’s navel

  and rested on the lotus.

  —Kurma Purana (500-800 CE)1

  THE PROBLEM: THINGS WITHOUT WORDS,

  WORDS WITHOUT THINGS

  What was the relationship between the people who composed the Vedas (the ancient Sanskrit texts beginning with the Rig Veda, in around 1500 BCE) and the people who lived in the Indus River Valley? Where were the people of the Indus Valley Civilization after the end of the IVC? The myth of the mutual creation of the gods Brahma (the creator) and Vishnu (one of the great male gods of Hinduism) provides us with a basic metaphor with which to consider the connections between Vedic and non-Vedic aspects of Hinduism. It is a third way of dealing with false dichotomies: Where the image of the man/rabbit in the moon represented two simultaneous paradigms, and the image of one woman’s head on another’s body represented the fusion of one culture with another, the mutual creation of Brahma and Vishnu represents such a fusion in which neither can claim priority.

  The non-Veda, if I may call it that, has been a largely uncredited partner of Hinduism, for we have heard it only at those relatively late historical moments when it crashed the Sanskrit club. The only way we can tell the story of the literature of the Hindus is to begin with those texts that survived—the Sanskrit texts—but at the same time we must acknowledge, right from the start, from the time of the Rig Veda, the presence of something else in these texts, something that is non-Vedic.

  Between about 2000 and 1500 BCE, one culture in Northwest India was dying and another was beginning to preserve its poetry. Fade out: Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). Fade in: the Vedas. Each of these cultures may have been in some way a prequel to Hinduism. The objects of the IVC, things without words, give us a certain kind of information about the people who lived there, but no evidence of where the people of the IVC went after the death of their cities (and, presumably, their texts). With the Vedas we have the opposite problem, words without (most) things (just a few pots and an altar or two), and many words about things, but without much physical evidence about the daily life of the people who first spoke those words or, again, about where they came from. Before we can begin to talk about people, however, we need to say a word about words, about language, and about the prehistory of the people who composed the Rig Veda.

  *INDO-EUROPE, THE LAND EAST OF THE ASTERISK

  Nineteenth-century German and British linguists, building on some seventeenth-and eighteenth-century hunches,ay demonstrated that Vedic Sanskrit was one of the oldest recorded forms of a language family that included ancient Greek and Latin, Hittite (in ancient Anatolia), the Celtic and Norse-Germanic languages, and, ultimately, French, German, Italian, Spanish, English, and all their friends and relations.2 All these languages are alleged to have run away from the home of a single parent language sometime in the fourth millennium BCE,3 a language that linguists call Indo-European (or Indo-Germanic or Indo-Aryan—more about the overtones of this word, below), more precisely, *Indo-European. We have no attested examples of that language before the breakup; the *Indo-European speakers almost certainly had no knowledge of writing,4 and the earliest example of an Indo-European language that we have is a fourteenth-century BCE Anatolian treaty in Hittite that calls on the Hittite version of several Vedic gods: Indra, Mitra, Varuna, and the Ashvins [Nasatyas]). Therefore, an apologetic or apotropaic asterisk usually hovers over the reconstructed, hypothetical (nowadays we would say virtual) forms of Indo-European (or *Proto-Indo-European, as it is usually called, as easy as *PIE) to indicate the absence of any actual occurrences of the word. For instance, linguists use the Latin equus, Gallic epos, Greek hippos, Sanskrit ashsva, old English eoh, French cheval, and so forth, to reconstruct the *PIE word for “horse”: ayHekwo-, or ayekwos to its pals in the linguists’ club. And *deiwos develops into deus in Latin, deva in Sanskrit, divo in Russian, and, eventually, our English “Tues[day]” as well as “divine.” Sanskrit and Iranian (or Avestan) formed one of the oldest subfamilies, Indo-Iranian, within this larger group.

  How are we to explain the fact (and it is a fact) that people speak one form or another of Indo-European languages from India to Ireland? The hypothesis that a single parent language was the historical source of all the known Indo-European languages is not an observable fact, but linguists regard it as an “inescapable hypothesis.”5 The Indo-European map
is linguistic, linking languages together in a family (a rather dysfunctional family, but a family) that is distinct from, for instance, Chinese or the Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic) or, more significantly for Hinduism, Tamil and the other South Indian languages in the group called Dravidian. The majority of people in India speak an Indo-European language (76 percent), with Dravidian-language speakers accounting for 22 percent, and the remaining 2 percent taken up by Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman, and tribal languages.

  The evidence that the Indo-European languages are related lies primarily in their grammar and vocabulary. Thus the Sanskrit agni (“fire”) is cognate with Latin ignis, English “ignite”; “foot” is pada in Sanskrit, pes, pedis in Latin, pied in French, Fuss in German, foot in English; and so forth. Many Sanskrit words have English cognates: for example, the Sanskrit pashu (“cattle”), preserved in the Latin pecus, is embedded in the English “impecunious” (“out of cattle, or low on cash”).

  But the temptation to draw simple conclusions about nonverbal facts from such verbal correspondences must be resisted; the fact that the word for “hand” is different in most of these languages should not be taken to mean that the Indo-European speakers had feet but not hands. So too, people change while words remain the same; words are often, as the French say, “false friends” (faux amis), the same word meaning something different in two different languages, often the very opposite thing. Meanings change in time even within a single culture. Antigods, Asuras (whose name incorporates the word asu, “breath”), are the equal and morally indistinguishable elder brothers and rivals of the gods in the Indo-European or at least Indo-Iranian period (when Ahura Mazda, the “great Asura,” is the chief god of the Avesta), but they later become totally demonic demons. (“Demons,” for that matter, were once benevolent daimons in Greek, before the Christians demonized them, as it were). Sanskrit then created a back formation, taking Asura to mean “non-Sura” (splitting off the initial a of asu to make an a in its privative sense, as in “a-theist”) and inventing the word “Suras” (now said to derive from sura, “wine”) to apply to the wine-drinking gods, the anti-antigods. Although this sort of reasoning might be called etymologic, certainly not logic, people persist in using lexicons as the basis of history and in building elaborate theories about social systems and homelands on this flimsy Indo-European linguistic scaffolding.