The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  At the end of the long interregnum, a kind of scholasticism developed that was capable of sorting out all the intervening chaos neatly—or not so neatly. In the first millennium Sanskrit still dominated the literary scene as “the language of the gods,” as it had long claimed to be. But now it also became a cosmopolitan language, patronized by a sophisticated community of literati and royalty. It was no longer used only, or primarily, for sacred texts but also as a vehicle for literary and political expression throughout South Asia and beyond.26 It was now the language of science and art as well as religion and literature, the language, in short, of the shastras.

  Shastra means “a text, or a teaching, or a science”; ashva-shastra in general is the science of horses, while the Ashva-shastra is a particular textgg about the science of horses. The word shastra comes from the verb shas, meaning “to teach or to punish,” but it also means “discipline” in the sense of an area of study, such as the discipline of anthropology, thus reflecting both of Michel Foucault’s senses of the word. It is related to the verb shams (“injure”), which is the root of the noun for “cruelty,” and it is probably related to our own “chasten,” “chastise,” and “chastity,” through the Latin castigare. Like dharma, the shastras are simultaneously descriptive and proscriptive.

  Like the class and caste system itself, the shastric structures were formulated to accommodate diversity. Yet many Brahmins perceived this same diversity as a threat and therefore set out to hierarchize, to put everything in its proper place, to form, to mold, to repress, to systematize—in a word, to discipline (shas) the chaos that they saw looming before them. They herded all the new ideas, like so many strange animals, into their intellectual corrals, and they branded them according to their places in the scheme of things. Attitudes toward women and the lower classes hardened in the texts formulated in this period, even while those same texts give evidence, almost against the will of their authors, of an increasingly wide range of human options. It was as if the gathering chaos of the cultural environment had produced an equal and opposite reaction in the Brahmin establishment; one can almost hear the cries for “law and order!”

  The spirit was totalizing and cosmopolitan, an attempt to bring together in one place, from all points in India and all levels of society, a complete knowledge of the subject in question. Totality was the goal of the encyclopedic range both of the subject covered in each text (everything you ever wanted to know about X) and of the span of subjects: beginning with the Trio—dharma, politics (artha), and pleasure (kama)—and going on to grammar, architecture, medicine, dancing and acting, aesthetics in fine art, music, astronomy and astrology, training horses and training elephants, various aspects of natural science and, in particular, mathematics—everything you can imagine and much that you cannot.

  The persistent open-endedness, and even open-mindedness, of many of the shastras can be seen in the ways in which they consider variant opinions and offer escape clauses. Each shastra quotes its predecessors and shows why it is better than they are (the equivalent of the obligatory review of the literature in a Ph.D. dissertation). The dissenting opinions are cited in the course of what Indian logic called the other side (the “former wing,” purva-paksha), the arguments that opponents might raise.gh They are rebutted one by one, until the author finally gives his own opinion, the right opinion. But along the way we get a strong sense of a loyal opposition and the flourishing of a healthy debate. The shastras are therefore above all dialogical or argumentative.

  Take medicine, for instance, known in India as the science of long life (Ayurveda ). There are a number of medical texts, of which those of Charaka and Sushruta (probably composed in the first and seventh centuries CE, respectively) are the most famous. The medical texts teach how to care for the mind and body in ways that supplement the advice offered, on this same subject, by the dharma-shastras, the teachings of yoga, the Tantras, and other schools of Hinduism. Surgery was generally neglected by Hindu doctors, for reasons of caste pollution, and taken over by Buddhists; the Hindu shastras on medicine derived much of their knowledge of surgery from Buddhist monasteries.27

  A passage from Charaka is typical of the way that all of the shastras strive to be open-minded and inclusive:

  SECOND, AND THIRD, MEDICAL OPINIONS

  Once upon a time, when all the great sages had assembled, a dispute arose about the cause of diseases. One by one the sages stated what each regarded as the cause of disease: the soul, which collects and enjoys karma and the fruits of karma; the mind, when overwhelmed by energy and darkness [rajas and tamas]; rasa [the fluid essence of digested food]; sound and the other objects of the senses; the six elements of matter [earth, water, fire, wind, space, and mind or soul]; one’s parents; one’s karma; one’s own nature; the creator god, Prajapat; and, finally, time.

  Now, as the sages were arguing in this way, one of them said, “Don’t talk like this. It is hard to get to the truth when people take sides. People who utter arguments and counterarguments as if they were established facts never get to the end of their own side, as if they were going round and round on an oil press. Get rid of this collision of opinions and shake off the darkness of factionalism. Eating bad food is a cause of diseases.” But another sage replied, “Sir, physicians have an abundance of different opinions. Not all of them will understand this sort of teaching . . . ” (1.1.15.3-34).

  Despite the equal time that this passage gives to various approaches, several of which represent major philosophical as well as medical traditions, there is, as always, hierarchy: Not only is the penultimate sage right, and the others presumably wrong, but he even has a riposte ready in anticipation of the fact that they still might not grant that he is right (“It is hard to get to the truth when people take sides”). Yet since they do still refuse to give in to him, the subject remains open after all.

  CLASS AND CASTE TAXONOMIES

  The rise of myriad small social groups at this time created problems for the taxonomists of the social order. Someone had to put all this together into something like a general theory of human relativity. That someone is known to the Hindu tradition as Manu.

  When the authors of the dharma texts set out to reconcile class with caste, they had their work cut out for them. Varna and jati unite to form the Hindu social taxonomy in much the same way that the Brahmin head and Pariah body (and the Sanskrit and Tamil texts) united to form the two goddesses. Whichever is the older (and there is no conclusive evidence one way or another), varna and jati had developed independently for some centuries before the shastras combined them. But their interconnection was so important to ancient Indian social theory that Manu makes it the very first question that the sages ask him at the start of the book, though he does not give the answer until book ten (of the total of twelve): “Sir, please tell us, properly and in order, the duties of all four classes and also of the people who are born between two classes (1.2)”—that is, of people like the Charioteer caste (Sutas), between Brahmin and Kshatriya.

  Manu, elaborating upon a scheme sketched more briefly in the dharma-sutras a century or two before him (he takes a relatively brief passage in the sutras28 and unpacks it in forty verses), lays out a detailed paradigm that explains how it is that a Brahmin and a Pariah are related historically. The only trouble is that the authors of the dharma texts made it all up, for there is absolutely no historical evidence that the jatis developed out of varnas. There are many reasonable explanations of the origins of caste—from professions, guilds, families, tribes outside the Vedic world—and most of them probably have some measure of the whole, more complex truth. Manu’s explanation is the only one that is totally off the wall. Still, you have to hand it to him; it’s an ingenious scheme: “From a Brahmin man and the daughter of a Shudra, a man of the Nishada caste is born. From a Kshatriya man and the daughter of a Brahmin a man of the Charioteer caste is born. Sons of confused classes are born from a Shudra man with women of the Brahmin class, such as the Chandala, the worst of men (10.8-12).”


  And so forth. The Nishadas in these texts form a caste within Hinduism rather than a tribal group outside it, as they do in most of the narrative texts. These all are marriages “against the grain” or “against the current” (literally “against the hair,” the wrong way, pratiloma, hypogamously), with the man below the woman, in contrast with marriages “with the grain” (the right way, anuloma, hypergamously), with the woman below the man. In this paradigm, the higher the wife, and therefore the wider the gap, the lower the mixed offspring. Mind the gap.

  So far so good; but clearly only a limited number of castes (several of which we have already encountered) can result from these primary interactions, and there are castes of thousands to be accounted for. So Manu moves on into later generations to explain the origin of other castes: The Chandala, himself born from a Shudra who intermarried with women of higher classes and regarded as the paradigmatic Pariah, becomes the father, through further intermarriage, of even more degraded castes, people whose very essence is a category error squared (10.12, 15, 19, 37-39). (The Mahabharata makes the dog cookers descendants of a Chandala man and a Nishadha woman [13.48.10. 21 and .28]). And so on, ad infinitum. Manu’s attempt to dovetail castes within the class structure is a masterpiece of taxonomy, though a purely imaginary construct, like a map of the constellations. He created simultaneously a system and a history of the castes.

  Despite the purely mythological nature of this charter, some semblance of reality, or at least anthropology, moves into the text when Manu tells us the job descriptions of the first generation of fantasized miscegenation:

  They are traditionally regarded as Dasyus [aliens or slaves], whether they speak barbarian languages or Aryan languages, and they should make their living by their karmas, which the twice-born revile: for Charioteers, the management of horses and chariots; for the Nishadas, killing fish. These castes should live near mounds, trees, and cremation grounds, in mountains and in groves, recognizable and making a living by their own karmas [10.45-50].

  And reality in all its ugliness takes over entirely in the passage describing the karmas of the Chandalas and people of the second generation of miscegenation, and explaining how they are expected to live:

  The dwellings of Chandalas and Dog cookers [Shva-pakas] should be outside the village; they must use discarded bowls, and dogs and donkeys should be their wealth. Their clothing should be the clothes of the dead, and their food should be in broken dishes; their ornaments should be made of black iron, and they should wander constantly. A man who carries out his duties should not seek contact with them; they should do business with one another and marry with those who are like them. Their food, dependent upon others, should be given to them in a broken dish, and they should not walk about in villages and cities at night. They may move about by day to do their work, recognizable by distinctive marks in accordance with the king’s decrees; and they should carry out the corpses of people who have no relatives; this is a fixed rule. By the king’s command, they should execute those condemned to death, and they should take for themselves the clothing, beds and ornaments of those condemned to death (10.51-56).

  In later centuries the Pariahs were defined by three factors that we can see in nuce here: They are economically exploited, victims of social discrimination, and permanently polluted ritually.29 The only way out, says Manu, is by “giving up the body instinctively for the sake of a Brahmin or a cow or in the defense of women and children (10.72).” This grand scheme is contradicted by another of Manu’s grand schemes; his argument here that the castes came, historically, from the classes conflicts with his statement, elsewhere, that “in the beginning,” the creator created all individual things with their own karmas, which sound very much like castes (1.21-30).

  Once the castes were created, however they were created, they had to remain separate. The nightmare of personal infection by contact with the wrong castes, particularly with Pariahs, is closely keyed to the terror of the infection of the mind and body by the passions; Manu regards the Pariahs as the Kali Age of the body. The horror of pollution by the lowest castes (the ones who did the dirty work that someone has to do: cleaning latrines, taking out human corpses, dealing with the corpses of cows) most closely approximates the attitude that many Americans had to people with the HIV virus at the height of the AIDS panic: they believed them to be deadly dangerous, highly contagious, and afflicted as the result of previous evil behavior (drugs or homosexual behavior in the case of AIDS; sins in a former life for caste). Impurity is dangerous; it makes you vulnerable to diseases and to possession by demons. Pollution by contact with Pariahs is regarded as automatic and disastrous, like the bad karma that adheres to you when you mistreat other people.

  The same lists, blacklists, as it were, recur in different shastras, lists of people who are to be excluded from various sorts of personal contact: people to whom the Veda should not be taught; women one should not marry; people one should not invite to the ceremony for the dead; people whose food one should not eat; people who cannot serve as witnesses; sons who are disqualified from inheritance; the mixed castes, who are excluded from most social contacts; people who have committed the sins and crimes that cause one to fall from caste and thus to be excluded in yet other ways; and, finally, people who have committed the crimes that cause one to be reborn as bad people who are to be excluded.30 Madmen and drunkards, adulterers and gamblers, impotent men and lepers, blind men and one-eyed men present themselves as candidates for social intercourse again and again, and are rejected again and again, while other sorts of people are unique to one list or another. Together, and throughout the work as a whole, these disenfranchised groups form a complex pattern of social groups engaged in an elaborate quadrille or square dance, as they advance, retreat, separate, regroup, advance and retreat again.

  In dramatic contrast with Manu, neither the Kama-sutra nor the Artha-shastra says much about either class or caste. The Artha-shastra begins with a boilerplate endorsement of the system of the four classes and the four stages of life (1.3.5-12) but seldom refers to classes after that, or to caste as such; it refers, instead, to groups of people distinguished by their professional or religious views, who might have functioned as castes, but Manu cares little about their status. Yet even this text takes care to define common dharma as including ahimsa, compassion, and forbearance (just as Manu’s sanatana or sadharana dharma does [6.91-93]) and, just like Manu, warns that everyone must do his sva-dharma in order to avoid miscegenation (samkara) (1.3.13-15). The Kama-sutra ignores caste even when considering marriage (except in one verse), marriage being one of the two places where caste is most important (food being the other). The Kama-sutra’s male protagonist may be of any class, as long as he has money (3.2.1); the good life can be lived even by a woman, with money. This is a capital-driven class system, much closer to the American than the British model.

  Manu’s view of caste became, and remained, the most often cited authority for varna-ashrama-dharma (social and religious duties tied to class and stage of life). Over the course of the centuries the text attracted nine complete commentaries, attesting to its crucial significance within the tradition, and other ancient Hindu texts cite it far more frequently than any other dharma-shastra. Whether this status extended beyond the texts to the actual use of Manu in legal courts is another matter. But for centuries the text simultaneously mobilized insiders and convinced outsiders that Brahmins really were superior, that status was more important than political or economic power.

  Fast-forward: In present-day India, Manu remains the basis of the Hindu marriage code, as it defines itself vis-à-vis Muslim or secular (governmental) marriage law. In a contemporary Indian Classic Comic version of the Mahabharata , Pandu cites Manu to justify his decision to allow Kunti to be impregnated by five gods.31 Manu remains the preeminent symbol—now a negative symbol—of the repressive caste system: It is Manu, more than any other text, that Dalits burn in their protests.32

  ANIMALS

  Manu j
ustifies the law of karma by setting within the creation of the various classes of beings, which he narrates in the very first book, a creation that includes both humans and animals (1.26-50). And when he reverts, in the last book, to the law of karma to explain how, depending on their past actions, people are reborn as various classes of beings, again he speaks of the relationship between humans and animals (12.40-81). Thus animals frame the entire metaphysical structure of Manu. Throughout the intervening chapters, the theme of rebirth in various classes of creatures is interwoven with the problem of killing and eating. More subtle and bizarre relationships between humans and animals are also addressed; there are punishments for urinating on a cow or having sex with female animals (4.52, 11.174).

  The same animals and people recur in many different lists, with particular variants here and there; whenever he sets his mind to the problems of evil and violence, Manu tends to round up the usual suspects. Just as madmen, drunkards, and their colleagues recur in the list of people to be rejected, so too dogs, horses, and cows are the basic castes of characters in the theme of killing and eating. And the animals that are the problem are also the solution; various crimes, some having nothing to do with animals, are punished by animals. Thus an adulterous woman is to be devoured by dogs (if her lover is a low-caste man),33 or paraded on a donkey and reborn as a jackal, and thieves are to be trampled to death by elephants, while cow killing and various other misdemeanors may be expiated by keeping cows company and refraining from reporting them when they pilfer food and water.34 Unchaste women and Shudras are included among the animals whose murders will be punished, as we saw in the passage that opened this chapter. Manu also refers to the Vedic horse sacrifice as a supreme source of purification and restoration (5.53, 11.261), as indeed it was for both Rama and Yudhishthira. Violations of the taboos of killing and eating (that is, eating, selling, injuring, or killing the wrong sorts of animals) furnish one of the basic criteria for acceptance in or exclusion from society. Thus the distinction between good and bad people, a theme that is the central agenda of the text, is further interwoven into the warp of rebirth and the woof of animals.