There is no evidence that the ogres represent any historical groups of human beings or that the conquest of the ogres of Lanka represents any historical event. On the other hand, just as dogs can symbolize general types of human beings (castes regarded as unclean), so too, particular types of ogres and antigods can symbolize general types of human beings. Ogres and animals belong to social classes (varnas), just like human beings; Ravana, a king born of a Brahmin father and an ogress mother, is often regarded as a Brahmin/Kshatriya/human/ ogre mix (though sometimes as a Brahmin, making Rama guilty of Brahminicide), and the vulture Jatayus, a Kshatriya, is buried both as a king and as a vulture (with pieces of meat that would not be given to a king). There are many other Kshatriya ogres and antigods, as well as Brahmin ogres.53
Ogres are also symbolic of dark forces outside us that oppress us and sometimes of dark forces within us, the worst parts of ourselves, the shadows of ourselves. In Freudian terms, Ravana is a wonderful embodiment of the ego—proud, selfish, passionate—while Vibhishana (Ravana’s pious brother, who sermonizes Ravana and finally defects to Rama) is pure superego, all conscience and moralizing, and Kumbhakarna (Ravana’s monstrous brother, who sleeps for years at a time and wakes only to eat and fight) is a superb literary incarnation of the bestial id. The triad is even more significant in Indian terms, in which they might be viewed as representations of the three constituent qualities of matter (the gunas): Ravana is rajas (energy, passion; ego), Vibhishana sattva (lucidity, goodness; superego), and Kumbhakarna tamas (entropy, darkness; id).
But the major function of the ogres in the Ramayana, apart from their role as the Bad Guys, a role not to be underestimated, is as the projected shadows of individual human figures. Lakshmana says this explicitly to Rama, regarding the ogre Viradha: “The anger I felt towards Bharata because he desired the throne, I shall expend on Viradha (3.2.23).” We have seen how the ogresses cast a shadow on the unrelenting goodness of Sita, and how the monkey brothers illuminate the relationship of the human brothers; the male ogres do much the same. The thorny questions of dharma that the humans express from time to time (in Bharata’s outburst, or Sita’s scolding) are echoed in the arguments of the monkeys and ogres (when Valin upbraids Rama or Vibhishana preaches to Ravana).
More specifically, just as Rama, Lakshmana, and Bharata form a sort of triad,ex so too Ravana, Vibhishana, and Kumbhakarna form a parallel triad.ey Ravana remarks, after Kumbhakarna’s death, that Kumbhakarna had been his right arm and that Sita is no use to him with Kumbhakarna dead (6.56.7-12), precisely what Rama says about Lakshmana and Sita when he thinks Lakshmana is dead. But the parallels are often contrasting rather than identical: Whereas Lakshmana and Bharata love Rama, both Vibhishana and Kumbhakarna revile Ravana.
THE GOOD OGRE
Some ogres stand for human beings of a particular type rather than a particular class. Some powerful, and often virtuous, ogres and antigods amass great powers through generating inner heat (tapas) and usurp the privileges of the gods, following the pattern of the second alliance. The throne of Indra, king of the gods, is made of twenty-four-carat gold, a notorious conductor of heat. When an ascetic on earth generates too much tapas through a non-Vedic do-it-yourself religion, the heat rises, as heat is wont to do, and when it gets to Indra’s throne, he finds himself literally sitting on a hot seat. At that point he usually sends a celestial nymph (an Apsaras) to seduce the ascetic, to dispel his heat either through desire or through anger.54
Ravana is a major player in the second alliance. He wins the boon of near invincibility from Brahma by generating extreme tapas. (It is only because Ravana fails to take seriously the fine print in his contract, specifying every creature but humans, that Rama is able to defeat him.) Sita inspires Ravana with both desire and anger. Indeed, in terms of the mythological paradigm, it is Sita, as celestial nymph (or, in Vibhishana’s view, great hooded serpent), who defeats Ravana.
Such ogres may stand for humans who, through precisely that sort of religious activity, unmediated by priestly interventions, usurped the privileges of the Brahmins. As shape shifters who pretend to be what they are not, the ascetic ogres are (super)natural metaphors for people who try to become more powerful than they have a right to be, the wildcat yogis who are not members of the Brahmin union. Vibhishana is an early instance of this paradoxical figure. He remains an ogre, indeed becomes king of the ogres after Ravana’s death, thus maintaining his own particular dharma, still going into the family business, as it were, but he fights on the side of Rama against Ravana and the other ogres, thus supporting more general dharma (sadharana dharma). Maricha, the ogre who takes the form of the golden deer, tries hard, in vain, like Vibhishana, to dissuade Ravana from going after Sita. But Maricha also confesses to Ravana that after an earlier encounter with Rama, he began to practice yoga and meditation and now is so filled with terror of Rama that he sees him everywhere he looks: “This whole wilderness has become nothing but Rama to me; I see him in my dreams, and think of him every time I hear a word that begins with an ‘R’ (3.38.14-18).” This emotion is what bhakti theologians later describe as “hate-love” (dvesha-bhakti), which allows other demonic opponents of the gods (such as Kamsa, the enemy of Krishna) to go straight to heaven when the god in question kills the demon. The reference to the R also foreshadows (hindsight alert!) the importance of the name of Rama in later bhakti.
The Ramayana does not worry about the paradoxes involved in these clashes between sva-dharma and sadharana dharma. When the antigod Bali defeats the gods, including Indra, and performs a great sacrifice, in which he gives away anything that anyone asks him for, Vishnu becomes a dwarf and begs as much land as he can cover in three paces; he then strides across the three worlds, which he takes from Bali and gives back to Indra (1.28.3-11). Bali’s name, significantly, denotes the offering of a portion of the daily meal—or taxes, the portion of the crop paid to the king. That it is Bali’s Vedic virtue of generosity that destroys him may signal a challenge to that entire sacrificial world. But the Ramayana, remaining firmly within the second alliance, does not ask why Bali’s virtue had to be destroyed. The later Puranas, in retelling this story, will tackle head-on the paradox of the good antigod.
CHALLENGES TO THE CLASS SYSTEM
The gods (and Brahmins) are also threatened from the other side by human beings who are not too good but too bad, including people highly critical of Vedic religion. When Rama is arguing with Bharata about honoring his father’s wishes, the Brahmin Jabali presents the atheist position, satirizing the shraddha, the ritual of feeding the ancestors, as well as the idea of the transfer of karma: “What a waste of food! Has a dead man ever eaten food? If food that one person eats nourishes another person, then people who journey need never carry provision on the way; his relatives could eat at home for him.” He anticipates the Marxist argument too: “The scriptures with their rules were invented by learned men who were clever at getting other people to give them money, tricking the simple-minded. There is no world but this one (2.108.1-17).” When Rama objects violently to this, others assure him that Jabali has presented the atheist argument only to persuade Rama to do what was best for him, that he wasn’t really an atheist, that it was all maya (“illusion”) (2.102.1).” Jabali’s argument is the standard Materialist critique of the Veda, as well as the straw man set up in order to be refuted.
A more serious threat to the social order is posed by Shambuka:
RAMA BEHEADS SHAMBUKA
A Brahmin’s child died of unknown causes, and the father blamed Rama for failing to maintain dharma, accusing Rama of being guilty of Brahminicide. The sage Narada warned Rama that a Shudra was generating tapas, a practice permitted to Shudras only in the Kali Age, and that this violation of dharma was causing disasters such as the death of the child. Rama gave instructions to preserve the child’s body in oil. Then he explored the country and found, south of the Vindhyas, a man generating tapas, hanging upside down. Rama asked him his class (“Are you a Brahmin, or a Kshatriya,
or a Vaishya, or a Shudra?”) and the purpose of his tapas, and the man replied, “I was born in a Shudra womb, and I am named Shambuka. I am doing this in order to become a god and to conquer the world of the gods.” Rama drew his sword from his scabbard and cut off Shambuka’s head while he was still talking. And at that very moment, the child came back to life (7.64-67).
Shambuka is upside down, both as a form of tapas and because a world in which a Shudra generates tapas is topsy-turvy. The central episode of mutilation of an uppity low-caste man is framed, indeed justified, by another story, the stock narrative of a hagiographical miracle, usually used in the service of Brahmins (like Vrisha) rather than of kings, the death and revival of a child. Was there enough pressure on the caste system at the time of the Ramayana’s recension to force the narrator to invent this frame to justify Rama’s action? Perhaps. We learn nothing at all about Shambuka but his class and the fact that he lives south of the Vindhyas, the no-man’s-land of North Indian mythology; he is dehumanized.
Rama also had an uncomfortable relationship with Nishadas, including a hunter named Guha, chief of the Nishadas. When Rama came into the jungle, Guha met him and offered him things to eat and drink; Rama declined for himself, arguing that as an ascetic he could not accept gifts and ate only fruit and roots (an assertion directly contradicted by the fact that after killing the ogre Maricha in the form of a deer, he killed another deer and took home the meat [3.42.21]), but he gladly accepted fodder for the horses, which were the pride of Dasharatha’s stable (2.44.15-22). Yet, when Bharata later came looking for Rama, Guha came to meet him too, bringing him fish, flesh, and liquor (2.78.9), and his guide said to Bharata, “He’s an old friend of your brother’s (2.78.11).” Bharata, unlike Rama, accepted the food, and when Guha told Bharata about his meeting with Rama, he said, “I offered Rama a variety of foods, but Rama refused it all, because he was following the dharma of a Kshatriya, and Kshatriyas must give but never receive (2.82.14).” There are too many excuses, and conflicting excuses at that, to explain why Rama will not eat Guha’s food, and the commentaries on this episode are troubled by it.55
A famous story about a king’s relations with Nishadas and other tribals, as well as Pariahs, is only loosely connected with Rama (it is told to him):
TRISHANKU HALFWAY TO HEAVEN
Vishvamitra was a great and just king. One day he tried to steal from the Brahmin Vasishtha the wish-fulfilling cow, who could produce anything that one asked her for. At Vasishtha’s request, she produced armies of Persians and Scythians and Greeks, and then aliens (mlecchas) and tribals (Kiratas), who destroyed the king’s armies and his sons. Realizing that the power of a Brahmin was greater than that of a Kshatriya, Vishvamitra resolved to become a Brahmin himself. He generated great inner heat but merely became a royal sage, still a Kshatriya.
Meanwhile a king named Trishanku wanted to go to heaven in his own body. Vasishtha told him it was impossible, and Vasishtha’s sons in fury cursed Trishanku to become a Pariah (Chandala), black and coarse, wearing iron ornaments, his hair all uncombed, his garlands taken from the cremation ground. His people ran away from him, and he went to Vishvamitra. Vishvamitra promised to help him get to heaven, and to do this, he prepared a great sacrifice for him. When Vedic scholars refused to attend a sacrifice performed by a Kshatriya for a Pariah patron, Vishvamitra cursed them to become reviled, pitiless tribals (Nishadas) and hideous Pariahs (Mushtikas), living on dog meat in cemeteries.
The gods refused to attend the sacrifice, but Vishvamitra used his inner heat to raise Trishanku toward heaven. Indra commanded Trishanku to fall back to earth, but Vishvamitra stopped his fall, so that Trishanku was stuck halfway up in the sky. Vishvamitra created a new set of constellations for him and was about to create a new pantheon of gods as well, but the gods persuaded him to stop. And so Trishanku lives forever like that, upside down, in his alternative universe (1.51-59).
What begins as a conflict between members of the two upper classes leads to an unsatisfactory compromise: Vishvamitra becomes both a Kshatriya and a sage. When he then takes on the entire Brahmin academic establishment and, finally, the gods themselves, this results in yet another uneasy compromise, Trishanku suspended between heaven and earth. Along the way, however, the fallout from these high-class wars creates first a passel of foreigners (the usual Central Asian suspects), then even more alien (mlecchas) and tribals, and finally a combination of Pariahs and other tribals. When the dust settles, the moral seems to be that although, as Vishvamitra believes, Brahmins are better than Kshatriyas in some ways (the gods come to their sacrifice), inner heat--the religious power available to non-Brahmins and non-Vedic sacrificers--can do what even sacrifice cannot: Like sacrificial merit, or karma in general, it can be transferred from sacrificer to patron, but unlike them, it can get your body at least halfway to heaven, which the Brahmin Vasishtha said could not be done at all. At least one Kshatriya, moreover, Vishvamitra, makes many Brahmins into Pariahs and forces the gods to meet him literally halfway. This story, well known both in India and in Europe and America,ez provides us with yet another vivid image of liminality, fusion, and the partial resolution of irresolvable conflicts.
Just as the alternative universe that Vishvamitra creates is entirely real to Trishanku, so the world of the Ramayana that Valmiki created is very real indeed to the many Hindus who have heard it or read it, and Sita and Rama continue to shape attitudes to women and to political conflict in India to this day.
CHAPTER 10
VIOLENCE IN THE MAHABHARATA
300 BCE to 300 CE
CHRONOLOGY
c. 300 BCE-300 CE The Mahabharata is composed
c. 200 BCE-200 CE The Ramayana is composed
327-25 BCE Alexander the Great invades Northwest South Asia
c. 324 BCE Chandragupta founds the Mauryan dynasty
c. 265-232 BCE Ashoka reigns
c. 250 BCE The Third Buddhist Council takes place at Pataliputra
c. 185 BCE The Mauryan dynasty ends
c. 185 BCE Pushyamitra founds the Shunga dynasty
73 BCE The Shunga dynasty ends
c. 150 BCE The monuments of Bharhut and Sanchi are built
c. 166 BCE-78 CE Greeks and Scythians enter India
YUDHISHTHIRA’S DILEMMA
King Yudhishthira walked alone on the path to heaven, never
looking down. Only a dog followed him: the dog that I have already
told you about quite a lot. Then Indra, king of the gods, came to
Yudhishthira in his chariot and said to him, “Get in.” Yudhishthira
said, “This dog, O lord of the past and the future, has been constantly
devoted to me. Let him come with me; for I am determined not to
be cruel.” Indra said, “Today you have become immortal, like me,
and you have won complete prosperity, and great fame, your majesty,
as well as the joys of heaven. Leave the dog. There is nothing cruel in
that. There is no place for dog owners in the world of heaven; for
evil spirits carry off what has been offered, sacrificed or given as an
oblation into the fire, if it is left uncovered and a dog has looked at it.
Therefore you must leave this dog, and by leaving the dog, you will
win the world of the gods.”
Yudhishthira said, “People say that abandoning someone devoted to
you is a bottomless evil, equal—according to the general opinion—to
killing a Brahmin. I think so too.” When the god Dharma, who had
been there in the form of the dog, heard these words spoken by Yudhishthira,
the Dharma king, he appeared in his own form and spoke
to King Yudhishthira with affection and with gentle words of praise:
“Great king, you weep with all creatures. Because you turned down
the celestial chariot, by insisting, ‘This dog is devoted to me,’ there is
no one your equal
in heaven and you have won the highest goal, of
going to heaven with your own body.”
Mahabharata, 300 BCE-300 CE (17.2.26, 17.3.1-21)
As the Hindu idea of nonviolence (ahimsa) that emerged from debates about eating and/or sacrificing animals was soon taken up in debates about warfare, the resulting arguments, which deeply color the narratives of the Mahabharata on all levels, were simultaneously about the treatment of animals, about the treatment of Pariahs symbolized by animals, and about human violence as an inevitable result of the fact that humans are animals and animals are violent. The connection between the historical figure of the Buddhist king Ashoka and the mythological figure of the Hindu king Yudhishthira, and their very similar attempts to mitigate, if not to abolish, violence, particularly violence against animals, are also at the heart of this chapter.
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