The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  But there is no evidence that any of this actually happened, other than the story, and that story is told, in the ancient sources, only by the tradition that claims to have committed the violence (the Hindus), not by the tradition of the people whom the story regards as the victims (the Jainas). The only historical fact is that there is a strong tradition among Hindus celebrating their belief (right or wrong) that a Hindu king impaled a number of Jainas, that for centuries, Hindus thought that it was something to brag about and to carve on their temples, and to allude to in their poems. Telling this story both generated tension between the communities and reflected already extant tensions.

  There are other stories, on both sides. Inscriptions from the sixteenth-century in Andhra Pradesh record the pride that Virashaiva leaders took in beheading white-robed (shvetambara) Jainas. They are also said to have converted one temple of five Jinas into a five-linga temple to Shiva, the five lingas replacing the five Jinas, and to have subjected other Jaina temples to a similar fate.99 An inscription at Ablur in Dharwar praises attacks on Jaina temples in retaliation for Jaina opposition to the worship of Shiva.100 A dispute is said to have arisen because the Jainas tried to prevent a Shaiva from worshiping his own idol, and in the ensuing quarrel, the Shaivas broke a Jaina idol. When the dispute was brought before the Jaina king Bijjala, he decided in favor of the Shaivas and dismissed the Jainas.101 This crossover judgment of a Jaina king in favor of Hindus is matched by a case from the fourteenth century in which Jainas who were being harassed by one band of Hindus sought protection from another Hindu ruler.102 Evidently there were rulers on both sides who could be relied upon to transcend the boundaries of any particular sectarian commitment in order to protect pluralism. A ray of light in a dark story.

  Indeed, when conflict arose at this time, it was not generally the Shaivas versus the Jainas (let alone the Vaishnavas), but the Pandyas against the Cholas, and both kings might well be Shaivas or, for that matter, Buddhists. From time to time too, Shaivas tore down Shaiva temples, or Vaishnavas Vaishnava temples, looting the temples and hauling the images home.103 In other words, as was the case later with the Turkish invasions, warfare had political and economic motives more often than religious ones. Yet the debate between Shaivas and Vaishnavas sometimes became quite heated. Descriptions of intersect discourse are peppered with verbs like “pummel, smash, pulverize,” and, above all, “hate.”104

  CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISM

  Jainas and Buddhists had been conversation partners, friend or foe, with Hindus since the sixth century BCE. But from the early centuries CE, the Abrahamic religions joined the conversation, first Christianity, then Judaism, and then Islam.

  According to the apocryphal Acts of St. Thomas (perhaps from the first century CE), the apostles drew lots and the Apostle Judas Thomas, who was a carpenter, got India. When Jesus appeared to him in a vision that night, Thomas said, “Whithersoever Thou wilt, our Lord, send me; only to India I will not go.” Jesus nevertheless eventually indentured him, for twenty pieces of silver, to an Indian merchant, who took him to work on the palace of the ruler of Gandhara, sometime between about 19 and 45 CE.105 After a second voyage, in 52 CE, Thomas landed in Kerala or Malabar and there established the Syrian Christian community that thrives there today; he then traveled overland to the east coast, where he was martyred in the outskirts of Chennai. As usual, the interchange went in both directions; in exchange for the goods and ideas that the Christians brought to India, they took back, along with Kerala’s pepper and cinnamon, always in demand in Rome, equally palatable stories—elements of Ashvaghosha’s life of the Buddha (in the second century CE), such as the virgin birth and the temptation by the devil—that may have contributed to narratives of the life of Christ.106

  Judaism was there in South India too. We have noted Solomon’s probable Malabar connections, and according to legends, Jews have resided there since the period of the destruction of the Second Temple (c. 70 CE).107 The earliest surviving evidence of a Jewish presence, however, is a set of copper plates, dated between 970 and 1035 CE, written in Tamil, and referring to the settlement of Jews in a town north of Cochin, on the Malabar Coast in Kerala; the plates grant one Jacob Rabban various privileges, including the rights to hold a ceremonial parasol and to bear weapons.108 The Angadi synagogue, the oldest in India, was built in 1344; a second synagogue was constructed in 1489.

  ISLAM AND BHAKTI

  Islam too was established on the Malabar Coast during this early period. Arabs came to India before there was such a thing as Islam, trading across the Arabian Sea to India’s southwest coast, to the cities of the Chalukyas and Cheras, and to Sri Lanka. Arab horses were a major item of trade, imported by land in the north and by sea in the south, to the Kerala coast. Shortly after the Prophet’s death, a group of Arabs, whom the Indians called Mapillai (“newly wed grooms” or “sons-in-law”), settled in the northern Malabar area of Kerala; when Arab merchants, newly converted to Islam, arrived there later, they converted many of the Mapillai to Islam, and they have remained there to this day. By the mid-seventh century there were sizable communities of Muslims in most of these ports.109

  Islam thus came to India when the bhakti movement was first developing, long before Islam became a major force in the Delhi Sultanate in the eleventh century CE. These first Muslims had opportunities both to provide positive inspiration and to excite a response in opposition, to interact with South Indian bhakti on the individual and communal level. A text often appended to the tenth-century Vaishnava Bhagavata Purana contains a much-quoted verse that has been used to epitomize the negative relationship between bhakti and Islam. Bhakti herself speaks the verse: “I [Bhakti] was born in Dravida [South India] and grew up in Karnataka. I lived here and there in Maharashtra; and became weak and old in Gujarat. There, during the terrible Kali Age, I was shattered by heretics,hg and I became weak and old along with my sons. But after reaching Vrindavana I became young and beautiful again.”110 Who are these heretics (pakhandas)?111 They may very well be Jainas,112 the traditional enemies of Shaivas in South India, but this is a Vaishnava text and probably northern rather than southern (Vrindavana being the center of pilgrimage for worshipers of Krishna in North India). The “shattering” is not mentioned until Bhakti has moved to North India, to Gujarat (an important Jaina center). Yet the verse has traditionally been interpreted to be referring to Islam, not to Jainism, as the villain of the piece.

  At the same time, there were many opportunities for positive interactions between Islam and bhakti in South India. For instance, the idea of “surrender” (prapatti), so important to the Shri Vaishnava tradition of South India, may have been influenced by Islam (the very name of which means “surrender”). More generally, the presence of people of another faith, raising awareness of previously unimagined religious possibilities, may have inspired the spread of these new, more ecstatic forms of Hinduism and predisposed conventional Hindus to accept the more radical teachings of the bhakti poets.

  PROSELYTIZING

  It is not always appropriate to refer to shifts in religious affiliation, between Buddhism, Jainism, and the Vaishnava and Shaiva bhakti sects, as “conversion”; it is generally better to reserve that term for interactions with religions that have jealous gods, like Islam and Christianity. For ordinary people in ancient South India, religious pluralism was more of a supermarket than a battlefield. Laypeople often gave alms to Buddhist monks or, later, prayed to Sufi saints and still visited Hindu temples. But there were some people who really “converted,” in the sense of reorienting their entire lives in line with a distinctive worldview and renouncing other competing worldviews; these were the relatively small numbers of monks, nuns, or saints, as well as the members of certain philosophical sects and—the case at hand—some of the more fanatical bhaktas.

  Though Buddhism and Jainism were proselytizing religions from the start, Hinduism at first was certainly not; a person had to be born a Hindu to be a Hindu. But the renunciant religions and, after them
, some of the heterodox, bhakti, and philosophical sects argued that you might be born one sort of a Hindu and become another sort or even that you could be born a Jaina (or, later, a Muslim or a Protestant) and then belong not to some sort of umbrella Hinduism but to a particular ascetic or bhakti sect. And so some of the bhaktas proselytized like mad, and this made them a threat to the other religions in India in ways that Vedic Hinduism had never been. This zealous proselytizing, I think, justifies the use of the word “conversion” in some instances. The possibility of shifting allegiance entirely, from one Hindu sect to another or even to a non-Hindu religion, may be encoded even in the refrain of the god-mocking poem with which this chapter began: “Can’t we find some other god?”

  The bhakti authors even mocked their own proselytizing:

  SHIVA BECOMES A SHAIVA

  A Shaiva saint was a great proselytizer. He converted those of this world by any means whatever—love, money, brute force. One day Shiva came down in disguise to test him, but the devotee did not recognize Shiva and proceeded to convert him, forcing holy ash on the reluctant-seeming god. When his zeal became too oppressive, Shiva tried to tell him who he was, but the baptism of ash was still forced on him. Even Shiva had to become a Shaiva.113

  The violent power of bhakti, which overcame even the god, transfigured the heart of religion in India ever after.

  CHAPTER 14

  GODDESSES AND GODS IN THE EARLY PURANAS

  300 to 600 CE

  CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES CE)

  320-550 The Gupta dynasty reigns from Pataliputra

  c. 400 Kalidasa writes Sanskrit plays and long poems

  405-411 Faxian visits India

  455-467 The Huns attack North India

  c. 460-77 The Vakataka dynasty completes the caves at Ajanta

  350-750 The Harivamsha (c. 450) and the early Puranas are composed: Brahmanda (350-950), Kurma (550-850), Markandeya (250-550), Matsya (250-500), Padma (750-1000), Shiva (750-1350), Skanda (700-1150), Vamana (450-900), Varaha (750)

  THE FIRE OF SHIVA AND KAMA

  Surely the fire of Shiva’s anger still burns in you today,

  like the fire of the mare in the ocean;

  for how else, Kama, could you be so hot

  as to reduce people like me to ashes?

  Kalidasa, Shakuntala,1 c. 400 CE

  The mythology that pits Shiva’s ascetic heat against Kama’s erotic arrows of flame (Shiva burns Kama’s body to ashes, as we shall see) and the ever-present threat of the doomsday mare remain at the heart of both Puranic mythology and Sanskrit court literature sponsored by the rulers of the Gupta Empire. As popular traditions infuse Sanskrit texts and rituals, the sectarian male gods Shiva and Vishnuhh continue to grow in power and complexity, though goddesses now begin to take center stage.

  THE AGE OF GOLD

  Leaving South India for the north and doubling back a bit in time, we encounter another trunk of the banyan tree that was growing steadily all the time we were sojourning in the south. While the Pallavas and Pandyas and Cholas were sorting one another out, the Gupta Empire, founded by Chandra Gupta I, spread across all of northern and much of central India: the largest empire since the fall of the Mauryas in the third century BCE. The Guptas confused matters by using the second half of the first name of the first Maurya as their dynastic name, so that Chandra Gupta I echoes Chandragupta Maurya, a kind of palimpsest of names. (The Gupta founding date [c. 324 CE] also mirrors the Maurya founding date [c. 324 BCE].) The Guptas wrote over the Mauryas: The Allahabad inscription of 379 CE (detailing the conquest of North India by Samudra Gupta [c. 335-76 CE] and his humiliation of the southern rulers) is a palimpsest written on an Ashokan pillar.2

  Chandra Gupta II (376-415 CE), inheriting a large empire from his father, Samudra Gupta, completed the Guptas’ subjugation of North India (the “conquest of the world,” or dig-vijaya) and continued his father’s policy by extending control over neighboring territories, whether by war or diplomacy (war by other means). The evidence for this control now begins to be quite a bit more substantial than the usual megalomaniac epigraphical chest beating. As there were Greek visitors to the Mauryas, so there are Chinese visitors to the Guptas, whose testimony often substantiates other sources; though they are often no more resistant to local mythmaking than were their Greek predecessors, it is always useful to have a foreign bias to set against the native bias to give us a cross fix.

  The Chinese Buddhist Faxian (also spelled Fa Hsien) made a pilgrimage to India in 402 and, after his return to China, translated into Chinese the many Sanskrit Buddhist texts he brought back. He also left detailed descriptions of India, particularly Pataliputra, from 405 to 411, in his “Record of Buddhist Kingdoms.” He noted with approval the means for dispensing charity and medicine and the free rest houses and hospitals that the emperor maintained. He also corroborated the claim, made in a Gupta inscription, that no one who deserved to be punished was “over-much put to torture”;3 according to Faxian, “Even in cases of repeated rebellion they only cut off the right hand.” And, he added, “throughout the country the people kill no living thing nor drink wine, nor do they eat garlic or onions, with the exception of the Chandalas only.”4 (Chandalas are Pariahs.) As usual, the foreigner misinteprets the ideals of non-violence and teetotaling as actual practices. As for class conditions, one of Faxian’s few criticisms of the Gupta social system was that the Chandalas were forced to do degrading tasks such as carrying out corpses and had to strike a piece of wood as they entered a town to warn upper-caste people to turn away as they approached.5 (A later Chinese visitor, Xuan Zang, in the seventh century, observed that executioners and scavengers were forced to live outside the city.)

  The Gupta style was imperial, widely exported to make its mark in Southeast Asia as well as South Asia. European historians, themselves imperialists, quite naturally thought that Empire was Good for You, that culture flourished under widespread political consolidation. The extent and the character of the rich Gupta art-historical record inspired European historians to stamp the label of “classical” on the art, architecture, and literature of the Guptas, which they also regarded as “classical” in the sense of “classics”: They reminded them of Greek art. They praised the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” (Winckelmann) of Gupta art in contrast with the “florid” Hindu temples and texts of subsequent periods that they regarded as decadent.6 They particularly loved the art of the Gandhara region in the Northwest, which is far more Greek than Indian (lots of drapery on everyone) and which they praised for its anatomical accuracy. They called this the Golden Age of Indian culture, a Eurocentric term, since it was the Greeks who labeled the first age Golden (while the Hindus called it the Winning Age).

  MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMY

  The Gupta court was famous for its “nine gems,” the ancient equivalent of MacArthur geniuses, including several scientists who helpfully paid attention to data relevant to their birth dates. The astronomer and mathematicianhi Aryabhata,7 born in 476, was first to calculate the solar year accurately; he also made an explicit statement that the apparent westward motion of the stars is due to the spherical earth’s rotation about its axis, and he correctly ascribed the luminosity of the moon and planets to reflected sunlight. His works circulated in the northwest of India and contributed greatly to the development of Islamic astronomy.

  The astronomer Varahamihira (505-587) composed a masterful compendium of Greek, Egyptian, Roman, and Indian astronomy; made major advances in trigonometry; and discovered a version of Pascal’s triangle. He is also well known for his contributions to iconography and astrology. The mathematician Brahmagupta (598-665) defined zero as the result of subtracting a number from itself. Committed to the theory of the four Ages, he employed Aryabhata’s system of starting each day at midnight but rejected Aryabhata’s statement that the earth is a spinning sphere. He also dismissed Jaina cosmological views. Like Aryabhata, Brahmagupta profoundly influenced Islamic and Byzantine astronomy. The astronomical and mathem
atical achievements of the Gupta court show that this period’s efflorescence of art and literature—both religious and secular—was part of a broader pattern of creativity and innovation.

  Other forms of inventiveness also flourished under the Guptas. Around this time someone in India invented chess. It began as a four-player war game called chaturanga (“four-limbs”), a Sanskrit name for a quadripartite battle formation mentioned in the Mahabharata. Chaturanga flourished in northwestern India by the seventh century and is regarded as the earliest precursor of modern chess because it had two key features found in all later chess variants: Different pieces had different powers (unlike games like checkers and Go), and victory was based on one piece, the king in modern chess. (“Checkmate” is a word derived from the Persian/Arabic shah-mat [“the king is dead].”) There was therefore an atmosphere in which many branches of learning thrived.