The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  THE BIRTH OF DRAUPADI

  Drupada performed a sacrifice in order to get a son who would kill his enemy, Drona. As the oblation was prepared, the priest summoned the queen to receive the oblation and let the king impregnate her, but she took so long to put on her perfume for the occasion that the priest made the oblation directly into the fire, and so the son was born out of the fire, not out of the queen. And after the son came a daughter, Draupadi. A disembodied voice said, “This superb woman will be the death of the Kshatriyas.” They called her the Dark Woman (Krishna), because she was dark-skinned (1.155.1-51).

  Draupadi, born of fire, is significantly motherless, like Sita, who was born of Earth and returns into the earth, after she has entered fire and come out of it. Like Sita, Draupadi is an elemental goddess who is often called ayonija (“born from no womb”)24 and follows her husband(s) to the forest. In Draupadi’s case, the absence of the expected mother is balanced by the unexpected presence of the daughter. Unasked for, riding into life on the coattails of her brother, Draupadi went on to become the heart and soul of the Pandavas. She also went on, in India, to become a goddess with a sect of her own, worshiped throughout South India primarily by lower castes, Pariahs, and Muslims.25 The Mahabharata mentions other dark goddesses who may well already have had such sects: the seven or eight “Little Mothers” (Matrikas), dark, peripheral, harmful, especially for children, 26 and the great goddess Kali (Maha-Kali).27 Indeed Draupadi is closely connected with the dark goddess Kali.28 As in the stories of the births of Pandu and Draupadi, as well as the origins of class colors, skin color here has a religious significance but no social meaning, positive or negative.

  A partial explanation for the Mahabharata’s open-minded attitude toward polyandrous women may come from a consideration of the historical context. The text took shape during the Mauryan and immediate post-Mauryan period, a cosmopolitan era that encouraged the loosening of constraints on women in both court and village. The women of the royal family were often generous donors to the Buddhist community,29 and women from all classes, including courtesans, became Buddhists.30 The king used women archers for his bodyguards in the palace, and Greek women (Yavanis) used to carry the king’s bows and arrows on hunts. Women served as spies. Female ascetics moved around freely. Prostitutes paid taxes. The state provided supervised work, such as spinning yarn, for upper-class women who had become impoverished, widowed, or deserted and for aging prostitutes.gd If a slave woman gave birth to her master’s child, both she and the child were immediately released from slavery.31 Thus women were major players in both Buddhism and Hinduism during this period, and the Mahabharata may reflect this greater autonomy. Indeed the tales of polyandry may reflect the male redactors’ nightmare vision of where all that autonomy might lead.

  THE WORLDS OF THE TWO GREAT POEMS

  Indian tradition generally puts the two poems in two different categories: The Ramayana is the first poem (kavya), and the Mahabharata is a history (itihasa) or a dharma text.ge The Ramayana prides itself on its more ornate language, and its central plot occupies most of the text, while the Mahabharata reflects the traces of straightforward oral composition and indulges in a great many secondary discussions or narrations only loosely linked to the main plot. The Mahabharata at the very end sketches an illusory scene of hell that is an emergency balloon to float it out of a corner it had painted itself into. But the Ramayana is about illusion from the very start.

  The Ramayana tells of a war against foreigners and people of another species, with clear demarcations of forces of good triumphing over evil; the Mahabharata is about a bitter civil war with no winners. The Ramayana doesn’t usually problematize dharma; the Mahabharata does, constantly. Where the Ramayana is triumphalist, the Mahabharata is tragic. Where the Ramayana is affirmative, the Mahabharata is interrogative.32 Rama is said to be the perfect man, and his flaws are largely papered over, while the flaws of Mahabharata heroes are what the whole thing is about. When Rama’s brother Bharata is given the throne that should have been Rama’s, each of the brothers, like Alphonse and Gaston in the old story, modestly and generously tries to give the kingdom to the other (R 2.98). In the Mahabharata, by contrast, when the succession is in question, the sons of the two royal brothers fight tooth and nail over it. Where the Ramayana sets the time of Rama’s idyllic rule, the “Ram-Raj,” in an idealized, peaceful Mauryan Empire of the future, the Mahabharata jumps back in time over the Mauryan Empire to an archaic time of total, no-holds-barred war.

  But we cannot say that the Ramayana came first, when people still believed in dharma, and then the Mahabharata came along and deconstructed it. Nor can we say that the Mahabharata first looked the disaster square in the eyes and showed what a mess it was, and then after that the Ramayana flinched and cleaned it up, like a gentrified slum or a Potemkin village. Both views exist simultaneously and in conversation: The Ramayana says, “There is a perfect man, and his name is Rama,” and the Mahabharata says, “Not really; dharma is so subtle that even Yudhishthira cannot always fulfill it.” Or, if you prefer, the Mahabharata says, “Dharma is subtle,” and the Ramayana replies, “Yes, but not so subtle that it cannot be mastered by a perfect man like Rama.”

  Each text asks a characteristically different question to prompt the paradigmatic story: The Ramayana begins when Valmiki asks the sage Narada, “Is there any man alive who has all the virtues? (R1.1.1-2),” to which the answer is the triumphal, or more or less triumphal, story of Rama. By contrast, embedded inside the Mahabharata are two requests by Yudhishthira for a story parallel to his own; when Draupadi has been abducted, he asks if any man was ever unluckier, unhappier than he, whereupon he is told the story of Rama and Sita (3.257-75), and when he has gambled away his kingdom and is in exile, he asks the same question, to which the answer is the story of the long-suffering gambler Nala (3.49.33-34). This contrast between triumph and tragedy could stand for the general tone of the two great poems.

  CHAPTER 12

  ESCAPE CLAUSES IN THE SHASTRAS

  100 BCE to 400 CE

  CHRONOLOGY

  c. 166 BCE-78 CE Greeks (Yavanas), Scythians (Shakas), Bactrians, and Parthians (Pahlavas) continue to enter India

  c. 100 CE “Manu” composes his Dharma-shastra

  c. 78-140 CE Kanishka reigns and encourages Buddhism

  c. 150 CE Rudradaman publishes the first Sanskrit inscription, at Junagadh

  c. 200 CE Kautilya composes the Artha-shastra

  c. 300 CE Vatsyayana Mallanaga composes the Kama-sutra

  RESTORATIONS FOR KILLING A MONGOOSE

  OR AN UNCHASTE WOMAN

  If a man kills a cat or a mongoose, a blue jay, a frog, a dog, a lizard,

  an owl, or a crow, he should carry out the vow for killing a Shudra.gf

  For killing a horse, he should give a garment to a Brahmin; for an

  elephant, five black bulls; for a goat or sheep, a draft ox; for a donkey,

  a one-year-old calf. To become clean after killing an unchaste woman

  of any of the four classes, a man should give a Brahmin a leather bag

  (for killing a Brahmin woman), a bow (for a Kshatriya woman), a

  billy goat (for a Vaishya woman), or a sheep (for a Shudra woman).

  Manu’s Dharma-shastra (11.132, 137, 139), c. 100 CE

  This list (lists being the format of choice for the textbooks known as shastras) groups together animals, social classes, and (unchaste) women around the issues of killing and restorations for killing, all central issues for the shastras. In the long period entre deux empires, the formulation of encyclopedic knowledge acknowledged the diversity of opinion on many subjects, while at the same time, some, but not all, of the shastras closed down many of the options for women and the lower castes.1

  The Brahmin imaginary has no canon, but if it did, that canon would be the body of shastras, which spelled out the dominant paradigm with regard to women, animals, and castes, the mark at which all subsequent antinomian or resistant strains of Hin
duism aimed. The foreign flux, now and at other moments, on the one hand, loosened up and broadened the concept of knowledge, making it more cosmopolitan—more things to eat, to wear, to think about—and at the same time posed a threat that drove the Brahmins to tighten up some aspects of social control.

  THE AGE OF DARKNESS, INVASIONS, PARADOX, AND DIVERSITY

  Both the diversity encompassed by the shastras and their drive to control that diversity are best understood in the context of the period in which they were composed.2 There were no great dynasties in the early centuries of the Common Era; the Shakas and Kushanas were bluffing when they used the titles of King of Kings and Son of God, on the precedent of the Indo-Greeks. Some Euro-American historians have regarded this period as India’s Dark Age, dark both because it lacked the security of a decently governed empire (the Kushanas very definitely did not Rule the Waves) and because the abundant but hard-to-date sources leave historians with very little available light to work with. Some Indian nationalist historians regarded it as the Age of Invasions, the decadent age of non-Indian dynasties, when barbarians (mlecchas) continued to slip into India. But it looks to us now rather more like a preimperial Age of Diversity, a time of rich cultural integration, a creative chaos that inspired the scholars of the time to bring together all their knowledge, as into a fortified city, to preserve it for whatever posterity there might be. It all boils down to whether you think confusion (samkara) is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. Political chaos is scary for the orthodox, creative for the unorthodox; what politics sees as instability appears as dynamism in terms of commercial and cultural development.3 The paradox is that the rule of the “degenerate Kshatriyas” and undistinguished, often non-Indian kings opened up the subcontinent to trade and new ideas.4 The art and literature of this period are far richer than those of either of the two empires that frame it, the Mauryas and the Guptas.5

  Buddhist monuments, rather than Hindu, are our main source of the visual record of this period. The gloriously miscellaneous quality of the culture of the time is epitomized in the reliefs on the great Buddhist stupa at Amaravati, in the western Deccan, which depict scenes of everyday life that defy denomination: musicians, dancers, women leaning over balconies, horses cavorting in the street, elephants running amok, bullocks laboring to pull a heavy (but elegant) carriage, ships with sails and oars. In a nice moment of self-referentiality (or infinite regress), there is a scene depicting masons constructing the stupa that depicts a scene of masons constructing the stupa.6 This sort of self-imaging later became a characteristic of Hindu temples, in which the individual pieces of the temple mirror the grand plan of the whole temple.7

  There was constant movement, constant trade from Greece, Central Asia, West Asia, the ports of the Red Sea, and Southeast Asia.8 Trade flowed along the mountainous northern routes through Central Asia and by sea to the great ports of South India. A book with the delicious title of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, composed by an unnamed Greek in about 80 CE, gave detailed navigational instructions to those planning to sail to what is now Gujarat and thence to gain access to the Deccan, where one could buy and export such delicacies as ginseng, aromatic oils, myrrh, ivory, agate, carnelian, cotton cloth, silk, Indian muslins, yarn, and long pepper. The Indians, for their part, imported “fine wines (Italian preferred), singing boys, beautiful maidens for the harem, thin clothing of the finest weaves, and the choicest ointments.” As always, horses were imported from abroad but now were also bred in various parts of India.9

  In return, Indians traveled to and traded with Southeast Asia and Central Asia,10 exporting Indian culture to the Mekong Delta, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Sinkiang, to Afghanistan and Vietnam, to the Gobi Desert, on the Silk Route. This economic porosity continued well into the fourth century CE, with trade the one thing that was constant.

  SECTARIANISM UNDER THE KUSHANAS AND SHATAVAHANAS

  The Kushanas, nomadic pastoralists, came down from Central Asia into the Indus plain and then along the Ganges plain to Mathura, beyond Varanasi. Like the Vedic people before them, these horsemen herders were also good cavalry-men 11 and, like them, they may well have come as merchants, allies, or even refugees rather than as conquerors. Their empire (from 78 to 144 CE) culminated in the rule of Kanishka (112 to 144 CE)12 who encouraged a new wave of Buddhist proselytizing. The Fourth Buddhist Council was held under his patronage, and at his capital at Peshawar an enormous stupa was built, nearly a hundred meters in diameter and twice as high. Some coins of his realm were stamped with images of Gautama and the future Buddha Maitreya. He was the patron of the poet Ashvaghosha, who helped organize the Buddhist Council and composed, among other things, the first Sanskrit drama and a life of the Buddha in Sanskrit poetry.

  Yet Kanishka also supported other religions.13 The Kushana centers of Gandhara and Mathura in the second century CE produced Hindu images that served as paradigms for regional workshops for centuries to follow.14 A colossal statue of Kanishka has survived, high felt boots and all, though without a head; on the other hand, the Greeks put nothing but heads on their coins.15 This headbody complementarity, familiar to us from the tale of the mixed goddesses, well expresses the delicate balance of political and religious power during this period. Kanishka’s successor issued coins with images of Greek, Zoroastrian, and Bactrian deities, as well as Hindu deities, such as the goddess Uma (Ommo in Bactrian), identified with Parvati, the wife of Shiva, and sometimes depicted together with Shiva. The coins also have images of the goddess Durga riding on her lion and the goddess Shri in a form adapted from a Bactrian goddess.16 Buddhism and Jainism were still vying, peaceably, with Hinduism.

  In 150 CE, Rudradaman, a Shaka king who ruled from Ujjain, published a long Sanskrit inscription in Junagadh, in Gujarat; he carved it, in the palimpsest fashion favored by many Indian rulers (temples on stupas, mosques on temples), on a rock that already held a set of Ashoka’s Prakrit Major Rock Edicts. Himself of uncertain class, Rudradaman leaned over backward to praise dharma and pointed out that he had repaired an important Mauryan dam without raising taxes, by paying for it out of his own treasury. He also boasted that he knew grammar, music, the shastras, and logic and was a fine swordsman and boxer, an excellent horseman, charioteer, and elephant rider, and a good poet to boot.17 His is the first substantial inscription in classical Sanskrit (Ashoka and Kanishka had written in various Prakrits, usually Magadhi or Pali). Rudradaman’s choice of Sanskrit, underlined by the fact that he wrote right on top of the Prakrit of Ashoka, may have been designed to establish his legitimacy as a foreign ruler, “to mitigate the lamentable choice of parents,” as the historian D. D. Kosambi suggested.18

  The Kushanas gradually weakened, while the Shakas continued to rule until the mid-fifth century CE,19 but both dynasties left plenty of room for others, such as the Pahlavas (Parthians) in Northwest India and the Shatavahanas, whose capital was at Amaravati in the western Deccan, to spring up too. The Shatavahana rulers made various claims: that they were Brahmins who had intermarried with people who were excluded from the system, that they had destroyed the pride of Kshastriyas, and that they had prevented intermarriage among the four classes.20 They were orthodox in their adherence to Vedic sacrifice and Vedic gods, and they made land grants to Brahmins, but they also patronized Buddhism, in part because it was more supportive of economic expansion than Hinduism was: It channeled funds into trade instead of sacrifice and waived the caste taboos on food and trade that made it difficult for pious Hindus to travel. (Buddhists, unlike Hindus, proselytized abroad.) Royal grants to Buddhist monasteries would be seed money, quickly matched by donations from private individuals and guilds; the lists of donors in the cave temple inscriptions include weavers, grain merchants, basket makers, leatherworkers, shipping agents, ivory carvers, smiths, salt merchants, and various craftsmen and dealers, some of them even Yavanas (Greeks or other foreigners).

  The Shatavahanas completed building the Great Stupa that Ashoka had begun at Amaravati,21 and mercantile associations liv
ing under the Shatavahanas carved out, also in the western Deccan, between about 100 BCE and 170 CE,22 the magnificently sculpted, generally Buddhist caves of Bhaja, Karle, Nasik, and parts of Ajanta and Ellora. Merchants would cluster around the great Buddhist pilgrimage sites, setting up their bazaars and rest houses, shops and stables.23 This later became the model for Hindu pilgrimage sites and temples. There are no remains of stone Hindu temples from this period, though the ones that appeared later seem to be modeled on now-lost wooden temples.

  The Hindu response to the Buddhist challenge was not only to reclaim dharma from dhamma and but to extend it. Dharma in the ritual sutras had been mostly about how to do the sacrifice; the dharma-shastras now applied it to the rest of life, dictating what to eat, whom to marry. So too, while karma in the ritual texts usually designated a ritual act, in the dharma-shastras, as in the Mahabharata, it came to be understood more broadly as any morally consequential act binding one to the cycle of death and rebirth. Then there was moksha to deal with, not only (as in the earlier period) in the challenge posed by Buddhism and Jainism, but now, in addition, in the more insidious problem posed by the deconstruction of dharma in the Mahabharata. The challenge facing not just the Brahmins but everyone else trying to ride the new wave was to factor into the systematizing modes of thought that were already in place the new social elements that were questioning the Brahmin norms. These cultural changes, shaking the security of the orthodox in an age of flux, were tricky for the dharma-shastras to map, let alone attempt to control,24 and go a long way to explain the hardening of the shastric lines.25 And so the Brahmins began, once again, to circle their wagons.

  SHASTRAS