The Hindus
Page 15
As nomadic tribes, the Vedic people sought fresh pastureland for their cattle and horses.be As pastoralists and, later, agriculturalists, herders and farmers, they lived in rural communities. Like most of the Indo-Europeans, the Vedic people were cattle herders and cattle rustlers who went about stealing other people’s cows and pretending to be taking them back. One story goes that the Panis, tribal people who were the enemies of the Vedic people, had stolen cows from certain Vedic sages and hidden them in mountain caves. The gods sent the bitch Sarama to follow the trail of the cows; she found the hiding place, bandied words with the Panis, resisted their attempts first to threaten her and then to bribe her, and brought home the cows (10.108).
The Vedic people, in this habit (as well as in their fondness for gambling), resembled the cowboys of the nineteenth-century American West, riding over other people’s land and stealing their cattle. The resulting political agendas also present rough parallels (in both senses of the word “rough”): Compare, on the one hand, the scornful attitude of these ancient Indian cowboys (an oxymoron in Hollywood but not in India) toward the “barbarians” (Dasyus or Dasas) whose lands they rode over (adding insult to injury by calling them cattle thieves) and, some four thousand years later, the American cowboys’ treatment of the people whom they called, with what now seems cruel irony, Indians, such as the Navajo and the Apache. So much for progress. Unlike the American cowboys, however, the Vedic cowboys did not yet (though they would, by the sixth century BCE) have a policy of owning and occupying the land, for the Vedic people did not build or settle down; they moved on. They did have, however, a policy of riding over other people’s land and of keeping the cattle that they stole from those people. That the word gavisthi (“searching for cows”) came to mean “fighting” says it all.
The Vedic people sacrificed cattle to the gods and ate cattle themselves, and they counted their wealth in cattle. They definitely ate the beef of steers18 (the castrated bulls), both ritually and for many of the same reasons that people nowadays eat Big Macs (though in India, Big Macs are now made of mutton); they sacrificed the bullsbf (Indra eats the flesh of twenty bulls or a hundred buffalo and drinks whole lakes of soma19) and kept most of the cows for milk. One verse states that cows were “not to be killed” (a-ghnya [7.87.4]), but another says that a cow should be slaughtered on the occasion of marriage (10.85.13), and another lists among animals to be sacrificed a cow that has been bred but has not calved (10.91.14),20 while still others seem to include cows among animals whose meat was offered to the gods and then consumed by the people at the sacrifice. The usual meal of milk, ghee (clarified butter), vegetables, fruit, wheat, and barley would be supplemented by the flesh of cattle, goats, and sheep on special occasions, washed down with sura (wine) or madhu (a kind of mead).
There is a Vedic story that explains how it is that some people stopped killing cows and began just to drink their milk.bg The Rig Veda only alludes to this story, referring to a king named Prithu, who forced the speckled cow who is the earth to let her white udder yield soma as milk for the gods.21 But later texts spell it out:
KING PRITHU MILKS THE EARTH
There was a king named Vena who was so wicked that the sages killed him; since he left no offspring, the sages churned his right thigh, from which was born a deformed little man, dark as a burned pillar, who was the ancestor of the Nishadas and the barbarians. Then they churned Vena’s right hand, and from him Prithu was born. There was a famine, because the earth was withholding all of her food. King Prithu took up his bow and arrow and pursued the earth to force her to yield nourishment for his people. The earth assumed the form of a cow and begged him to spare her life; she then allowed him to milk her for all that the people needed. Thus did righteous kingship arise on earth among kings of the lunar dynasty, who are the descendants of Prithu.22
This myth, foundational for the dynasty that traces its lineage back to Prithu, is cited in many variants over thousands of years. It imagines a transition from hunting wild cattle (the earth cow) to preserving their lives, domesticating them, and breeding them for milk, in a transition to agriculture and pastoral life. The myth of the earth cow, later the wishing cow (kama-dhenu), from whom you can milk anything you desire—not just food but silk cloths, armies of soldiers, anything—is the Hindu parallel to the Roman cornucopia (or the German Tischlein dech dich, the table that sets itself with a full table d’hôte dinner on command). Cows are clearly of central economic, ritual, and symbolic importance in the Vedic world.
But the horse, rather than the cow, was the animal whose ritual importance and intimacy with humans kept it from being regarded as food,23 though not from being killed in sacrifices. Horses were essential not only to drawing swift battle chariots but to herding cattle, always easier to do from horseback in places where the grazing grounds are extensive.24 And extensive is precisely what they were; the fast track of Vedic life was driven by the profligate grazing habits of horses, who force their owners to move around looking for new grazing land all the time. Unlike cows, horses pull up the roots of the grass or eat it right down to the ground so that it doesn’t grow back, thus quickly destroying grazing land, which may require some years to recover; moreover, horses do not like to eat the grass that grows up around their own droppings.25 The horse in nature is therefore constantly in search of what the Nazis (also justifying imperialistic aggression) called Lebensraum (“living space”). It is not merely, as is often argued, that the horse made possible conquest in war, through the chariot; the stallion came to symbolize conquest in war, through his own natural imperialism. And the ancient Indian horse owners mimicked this trait in their horses, at first showing no evidence of any desire to amass property, just a drive to move on, always to move on, to new lands. For the Vedic people probably did then what Central Asians did later: They let the animals roam freely as a herd.26 But once they began to fence in their horses and kept them from their natural free grazing habits, the need to acquire and enclose new grazing lands became intense, especially when, in the early Vedic period, there was no fodder crop.27
THE WIDE-OPEN SPACES
All this land grabbing was supported by a religion whose earliest texts urge constant expansion. The name of the king who hunted the earth cow, Prithu, means “broad,” and the feminine form of the word, Prithivi, is a word for the whole, broad earth, the natural consort of the king. Prithu had the connotation of something very much like “the wide-open spaces.” The opposite of the word prithu is the word for a tight spot, in both the physical and the psychological sense; that word is amhas, signifying a kind of claustrophobia, the uneasiness of being constrained in a small space. (Amhas is cognate with our word “anxiety” and the German Angst.) In this context, amhas might well be translated “Don’t fence me in,” since it occurs in a number of Vedic poems in which the poet imagines himself trapped in a deep well or a cave, from which he prays to the gods to extricate him. (Sometimes it is the cows who are trapped in the cave, or the waters, or the sun.) Many of the poems take this form; the poet thanks the god for his help in the past (“Remember the time I was in that tight spot, and you got me out?”), reminds him of his gratitude (“And didn’t I offer you great vats of soma after that?”), flatters him (“No one but you can do this; you are the greatest”), and asks for a return engagement (“Well, I’m in even worse trouble now; come and help me, I beg you”).
Appropriately, it is often the Ashvins who rescue people from such tight spots and bring them back into the good, broad places. For the Ashvins (whose name means “equine”) are twin horse-headed gods, animal herders, sons of the divine mare Saranyu (10.17.1-2). The other Vedic gods generally snub the Ashvins, in part because they are physicians (a low trade in ancient India, involving as it does polluting contacts with human bodies) and in part because they persist in slumming, helping out mortals in trouble. The gods denied them access to the ambrosial soma drink until one mortal (a priest named Dadhyanch), for whom the Ashvins had done a favor, reciprocated by whisper
ing to them, through a horse’s head he had put on for that occasion to speak to their horse heads, the secret of the soma—literally from the horse’s mouth (1.116.12, 1.117.22, 1.84.13-15). Later texts explain that Dadhyanch knew that Indra, the jealous king of the gods, would punish him for this betrayal by cutting off his head, so he laid aside his own head, used a talking horse head to tell the secret, let Indra cut off the horse head, and then put his own back on.28
THE HORSE SACRIFICE
Embedded in the tale of Dadhyanch and the Ashvins is the ritual beheading of a horse. One of the few great public ceremonies alluded to in the Vedas is the sacrifice of a horse, by suffocation rather than beheading but followed by dismemberment. There are epigraphical records of (as well as literary satires on) horse sacrifices throughout Indian history. One Vedic poembh describes the horse sacrifice in strikingly concrete, indeed rather gruesome detail, beginning with the ceremonial procession of the horse accompanied by a dappled goat, who was killed with the horse but offered to a different, less important god:
DISMEMBERING THE HORSE
Whatever of the horse’s flesh the fly has eaten, or whatever stays stuck to the stake or the ax, or to the hands or nails of the slaughterer—let all of that stay with you even among the gods. Whatever food remains in his stomach, sending forth gas, or whatever smell there is from his raw flesh—let the slaughterers make that well done; let them cook the sacrificial animal until he is perfectly cooked. Whatever runs off your body when it has been placed on the spit and roasted by the fire, let it not lie there in the earth or on the grass, but let it be given to the gods who long for it. . . . The testing fork for the cauldron that cooks the flesh, the pots for pouring the broth, the cover of the bowls to keep it warm, the hooks, the dishes—all these attend the horse. . . . If someone riding you has struck you too hard with heel or whip when you shied, I make all these things well again for you with prayer. . . . The ax cuts through the thirty-four ribs of the racehorse who is the companion of the gods. Keep the limbs undamaged and place them in the proper pattern. Cut them apart, calling out piece by piece. . . . Let not your dear soul burn you as you go away. Let not the ax do lasting harm to your body. Let no greedy, clumsy slaughterer hack in the wrong place and damage your limbs with his knife. You do not really die through this, nor are you harmed. You go to the gods on paths pleasant to go on (1.162).
The poet thus intermittently addresses the horse (and himself) with the consolation that all will be restored in heaven, words in which we may see the first stirrings of ambivalence about the killing of a beloved animal, even in a religious ceremony, an ambivalence that will become much more explicit in the next few centuries. We may see even here a kind of “ritual nonviolence” that is also expressed in a concern that the victim should not bleed or suffer or cry out (one reason why the sacrificial animal was strangled).29 The euphemism for the killing of the horse, pacifying (shanti), further muted the growing uneasiness associated with the killing of an animal. Moreover, unlike cows, goats, and other animals that were sacrificed, many in the course of the horse sacrifice, the horse was not actually eaten (though it was cooked and served to the gods). Certain parts of the horse’s carcass (such as the marrow, or the fat from the chest, or the vapa, the caul, pericardium, or omentum containing the internal organs) were offered to Agni, the god of the fire, and the consecrated king and the priests would inhale the cooking fumes (regarded as “half-eating-by-smelling” the cooked animal). The gods and priests, as well as guests at the sacrificial feast, ate the cattle (mostly rams, billy goats, and steers); only the gods and priests ate the soma; no one ate the horse. Perhaps the horse was not eaten because of the close relationship that the Vedic people, like most Indo-Europeans, 30 had with their horses, who not only speak, on occasion,31 but are often said to shed tearsbi when their owners die.32
THE VEDIC PEOPLE
The Rig Veda tells us a lot (as in the passage cited at the start of this chapter, a kind of liturgical work song) about family life, about everyday tasks, about craftsmanship, about the materials of sacrifice, and even about diversity. Evidently the rigid hereditary system of the professions characteristic of the caste system was not yet in place now, for the professions at this time varied even within a single family, where a poet could be the son of a physician and a miller. The Rig Veda tells us of many professions, including carpenters, blacksmiths, potters, tanners, reed workers, and weavers.33 But by the end of this period, the class system was in place.
THE FOUR CLASSES AND THE PRIMEVAL MAN
The Vedic people at first distinguished just two classes (varnas), their own (which they called Arya) and that of the people they conquered, whom they called Dasas (or Dasyus, or, sometimes, Panis). The Dasas may have been survivorsof early migrations of Vedic people, or people who spoke non-Sanskritic languages, or a branch of the Indo-Iranian people who had a religion different from that of the Vedic people.34 (In the Indo-Iranian Avesta, daha and dahyu designate “other people.”35) The early Veda expresses envy for the Dasas’ wealth, which is to say their cattle, but later, “Dasa” came to be used to denote a slave or subordinate, someone who worked outside the family, and the late parts of the Veda mention Brahmins who were “sons of slave women” (Dasi-putra), indicating an acceptance of interclass sexual relationships, if not marriage. We have noted evidence that the Vedic people took significant parts of their material culture from communities in place in India before they arrived, Dasas of one sort or another. The Dasas may also have introduced new ritual practices such as those recorded in the Atharva Veda. (The Nishadas, tribal peoples, were also associated with some early rituals.36)
But the more important social division was not into just two classes (Arya and Dasa, Us and Them) but four. A poem in one of the latest books of the Rig Veda, “Poem of the Primeval Man” (Purusha-Sukta [10.90]), is about the dismemberment of the cosmic giant, the Primeval Man (purusha later comes to designate any male creature, indeed the male gender), who is the victim in a Vedic sacrifice that creates the whole universe.bj The poem says, “The gods, performing the sacrifice, bound the Man as the sacrificial beast. With the sacrifice the gods sacrificed to the sacrifice.” Here the “sacrifice” designates both the ritual and the victim killed in the ritual; moreover, the Man is both the victim that the gods sacrificed and the divinity to whom the sacrifice was dedicated—that is, he is both the subject and the object of the sacrifice. This Vedic chicken or egg paradox is repeated in a more general pattern, in which the gods sacrifice to the gods, and a more specific pattern, in which one particular god, Indra, king of the gods, sacrifices (as a king) to himself (as a god). But it is also a tautological way of thinking that we have seen in the myths of mutual creation and will continue to encounter in Hindu mythology.
The four classes of society come from the appropriate parts of the body of the dismembered Primeval Man. His mouth became the priest (the Brahmin, master of sacred speech); all Vedic priests are Brahmins, though not all Brahmins are priests. His arms were the Raja (the Kshatriya, the Strong Arm, the class of warriors, policemen, and kings); his thighs, the commoner (the Vaishya, the fertile producer, the common people, the third estate, who produce the food for the first two and themselves); and his feet—the lowest and dirtiest part of the body—the servants (Shudras), the outside class within society that defines the other classes. That the Shudras were an afterthought is evident from the fact that the third class, Vaishyas, is sometimes said to be derived from the word for “all” and therefore to mean “everyone,” leaving no room for anyone below them—until someone added a class below them.bk The fourth social class may have consisted of the people new to the early Vedic system, perhaps the people already in India when the Vedic people entered, the Dasas, from a system already in place in India, or simply the sorts of people who were always outside the system. The final combination often functioned not as a quartet but, reverting to the pattern of Arya and Dasa, as a dualism: all of us (in the first three classes, the twice born) versus all of th
em (in the fourth class, the non-us, the Others).bl
“Poem of the Primeval Man” ranks the kings below the priests. The supremacy of Brahmins was much contested throughout later Hindu literature and in fact may have been nothing but a Brahmin fantasy. Many texts argue, or assume, that Kshatriyas never were as high as Brahmins, and others assume that they always were, and still are, higher than Brahmins. Buddhist literature puts the kings at the top, the Brahmins second,37 and many characters in Hindu texts also defend this viewpoint.
The French sociologist Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) argued that the bkIndo-European speakers had been divided into three social classes or functions: at the top, kings who were also priests, then warriors who were also policemen, and then the rest of the people.38 Some scholars find this hypothetical division useful; some do not39 and some think that other cultures too were divided in this way, so that tripartition is not a useful way to distinguish Indo-European culture from any other.bm (It rather suspiciously resembles the reactionary French ancient regime, which put priests at the top, over aristocrats, and the people in the third group below.) In any case, by the end of the period in which the Rig Veda was composed, a fourfold social system that deviates in two major regards from the Dumézilian model was in place: It adds a fourth class at the bottom, and it reverses the status of kings and priests. The kings have come down one rung from their former alleged status of sharing first place with the Brahmins. This, then, would have been one of the earliest documented theocratic takeovers, a silent, totally mental palace coup, the Brahmin forcing the Kshatriya out of first place.