Finally, there was no unified Hindu consciousness in which Rama was personified as a hero against the Muslims. Indeed, one Hindu Sanskrit inscription from the early seventeenth century regards the Lord of Delhi (“Dillishvara”) as the ruler of a kingdom just like Ram-raj, the mythical kingdom of Rama.143 Vijayanagar yields much evidence of Hindu-Muslim synthesis rather than antagonism. The Vijayanagar empire and the sultanates were in close contact and shared many cultural forms; court dancers and musicians often moved easily between the two kingdoms.144 The kings of Vijayanagar, careless in matters of dharma, used a largely Muslim cavalry, royal fortresses under Brahmin commanders, Portuguese and Muslim mercenary gunners, and foot soldiers recruited from tribal peoples. In 1565, at the battle of Talikota, a confederation of Muslim sultans routed the forces of Vijayanagar and the Nayakas. The usual sacking and slaughter, treasure hunting and pillage of building materials ensued, but without bigotry; the temples were the least damaged of the buildings and were often left intact.145
The Nayakas rose to power after Vijayanagar fell in 1565,146 and they ruled, from Mysore, through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The story of the founding of the Nayaka kingdoms follows lines similar to those of the story of the founding of Vijayanagar: Sent out to pacify the Cholas, the Nayakas double-crossed the Vijayanagar king just as the founding Vijayanagarans had double-crossed the Delhi sultans.147 What goes around comes around. The Nayakas brought dramatic changes, a renaissance in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Tamil country and Andhra, ranging from political experimentation and economic and social change to major shifts in concepts of gender.148
MOSQUE AND TEMPLE
The Vijayanagar kings used their plunder and tribute for elaborate royal rituals, academic patronage, and trophy temples. The plunder of Hindu temples made possible the building not merely of superb mosques but, indirectly, of superb Hindu temples. Just as Hindu temples had vied, in competitive fund-raising, with Buddhist stupas in South India, so under the sultanate, Muslim and Hindu kings competed in architectural monumentalism, the Muslims inclining toward forts and cities (as well as mosques), the Hindus toward temples, temple complexes, and temple cities (as well as palaces). However different the styles may have been, the two sets of rulers shared the grandiosity; they egged each other on: Godzilla meets King Kong.
There was a break in the building of Hindu temples during each new Muslim invasion, with few new commissions and the loss of some temples that the Muslims destroyed, but then there followed an even greater expansion of art in all fields.149 Throughout India, Hindu dynasties responded to the entrance of Islam not only by building forts and massing horsemen but by asserting their power through extravagant architecture, most spectacularly at Hampi, Halebid, and Badami. Indeed, the leveling of the sacred monuments at Mathura and Kanauj coincided precisely with the construction of other great dynastic temple complexes.150 It’s a rather backhanded compliment to the Muslims to say that because they tore down so many temples, they paved the way for the Hindus to invent their greatest architecture, but it is also true. For not only is there a balance between the good and bad karma of individual rulers, but the bad things sometimes made possible the good things; the pillage made possible the patronage. In a similarly perverse way, the withdrawal of royal patronage from the temples and Brahmin colleges may have encouraged the spread of new, more popular forms of Hinduism such as bhakti. The dynamic and regenerative quality of Hinduism was never more evident than in these first centuries of the Muslim presence.
Islamic architecture was introduced into India, and welcomed enthusiastically by Hindu builders, long before the establishment of Muslim rule in the thirteenth century. Trade partnerships between the Gujaratis and the Arabs made it possible for Gujarati painters, working under Hindu and Jaina rulers, to absorb Persian and Turkic techniques.151 Islam gave India not merely the mosque but the mausoleum, the pointed arch, and the high-arching vault, changing the entire skyline of secular as well as sacred architecture—palaces, fortresses, gardens.152 Mosques also provided a valuable contrast with temples within the landscape of India. The Hindu temple has a small, almost empty space in the still center (the representation of the deity is always there), surrounded by a steadily escalating profusion of detail that makes rococo seem minimalist. But the mosque creates a larger emptiness from its very borders, a space designed not, like the temple, for the home of a deity but for congregational prayer. The mosque, whose serene calligraphic and geometric decoration contrasts with the perpetual motion of the figures depicted on the temple, makes a stand against the chaos of India, creating enforced vacuums that India cannot rush into with all its monkeys and peoples and colors and the smells of the bazaar and, at the same time, providing a flattering frame to offset that very chaos.
MOVING TEMPLES: VIRASHAIVAS
Sects of renouncers had always followed a religious path away from houses. But now, during this period when so many great temples were being built and the temple rather than the palace or the house was the pivot of the Brahmin imaginary, one large and influential South Indian Hindu sect differed from earlier renouncers in spurning not houses but stone temples, the very temples that were the pride and joy of South Indian rulers and the bastions of the social, economic, and religious order of South India. These were the Lingayats (“People of the Linga”) or Virashaivas (“Shiva’s Heroes”), also called Charanas (“Wanderers”) because they prided themselves on being moving temples, itinerant, never putting down roots.153 Their founder was Basava (1106-1167), a Brahmin at the court of King Bijjala of Kalyana.154 Basava preached a simplified devotion: no worship but that of a small linga worn around the neck and no goal but to be united, at death, with Shiva. He rejected the worship of gods that you hock in bad times or hide from robbers (a possible reference to the vulnerability of temple images to invading armies): “How can I feel right about gods you sell in your need, and gods you bury for fear of thieves?” 155
The only temple you can trust is your own body:
The rich
will make temples for Shiva.
What shall I,
a poor man,
do?
My legs are pillars,
the body the shrine,
the head a cupola
of gold.
Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,
things standing shall fall,
but the moving ever shall stay.156
And the name “lord of the meeting rivers” resonates, among other things, with the meetings of the community of devotees from every caste and class.157 “Things standing shall fall” mocks the megalomania of the temple builders.
The Virashaivas were militants who attacked the normative social and cultural order of the medieval south; some people regarded them as heretics, and many classified them as “left-hand” (artisans, merchants, servants) in contrast with “right-hand” (agricultural workers). Legends about the early Virashaivas say that the son of a Pariah married the daughter of a Brahmin; the king condemned both their fathers to death; the Virashaivas rioted against the king and assassinated him; the government attempted to suppress the Virashaivas, but they survived. Basava was against caste and against Brahmins. Muslim social customs, unrestricted by caste, influenced him deeply, and the Virashaivas’ rejection of the Brahmin imaginary may be beholden to the influence of Muslim missionaries who were active on India’s west coast just when the Virashaiva doctrine was developed there. On the other hand, the threat of Islamic iconoclasm may have been one reason for the widespread use of portable temple images (or portable lingas).158
The earlier poems of the Virashaivas were composed in Kannada, but the earliest extant full narrative of the Virashaivas is in Telugu, the thirteenth-century Telugu Basava Purana of Palkuriki Somanatha. It is largely a hagiography of Basava, but it is also, in David Shulman’s words, “an extraordinarily violent book . . . the Virashaiva heroes are perpetually decapitating, mutilating, or poisoning someone or other—their archenemies, the Brahmins and Jains,
or their political rivals, or, with astounding frequency, themselves (usually for some minor lapse in the intensity of their devotion).”159 Where does this violence come from? We may trace it back to the Tamil saints of the Periya Purana, or to the wild followers of Shiva as Virabhadra in Andhra, who represent “an enduring strain of potentially antinomian folk religion that breaks into literary expression under certain historical conditions,” such as the political vacuum that existed in twelfth-century Kalyana.160 Much of the aggression and violence in the Basava Purana is directed against conventional religion: The god in the temple murti (icon) is so humiliated that he sneaks out the back door; washer-men, thieves, and Pariahs win out over the political and religious power mongers. A devotee’s dog (actually Shiva disguised in a dog’s skin) recites the Veda, shaming the caste-obsessed Brahmins,161 as the buffalo does, in Kabir’s poem; making the interloper a dog instead of a buffalo intensifies the caste issue. Several stories also describe victories over Jainas, some of whom are blinded.162 Eventually Basava reacted against the Virashaivas’ violence and lived his life away from the community he had founded.
MAHADEVYYAKKA: A VIRASHAIVA WOMAN SAINT
In the twelfth century a woman Virashaiva saint named Mahadevyyakka composed poems in Kannada163 that simultaneously addressed the metaphysics of salvation (including the problem of Maya, [“illusion”]) and the banal problem of dealing with in-laws:
I have Maya for mother-in-law;
the world for father-in-law;
three brothers-in-law, like tigers;
and the husband’s thoughts
are full of laughing women:
no god, this man.
And I cannot cross the sister-in-law.
But I will
give this working wench the slip
and go cuckold my husband with Hara, my Lord.164
On the banal level, the poem refers to the difficult situation of a woman under the thumb of her mother-in-law in a patrilocal society (which means that you live with your husband’s family); “no god, this man” is a direct contradiction of Hindu dharma texts such as that of Manu (5.154), which instructs a woman to treat her husband like a god. There are also more abstract references, some explicit (Maya and the world as mother- and father-in-law), some implicit: The three tigerish brothers-in-law are the three strands of matter (gunas), the components of nature that one cannot escape. A. K. Ramanujan sees the husband as symbolic of karma, “the past of the ego’s many lives,” and the sister-in-law as the binding memory or “perfume” (vasana) that clings to karma. None of the people in the poem is related to the speaker/heroine/worshiper by blood; she defies them all, using a vulgar word for “cuckold” that would surely shock them. The poem presents the love of god (Hara, a name of Shiva) as both totally destructive of conventional life and illegitimate, transgressive. 165
We can reconstruct quite a lot about the life of Mahadevyyakka. She regarded herself as married to Shiva, and tried in vain to avoid marrying Kaushika, a king who fell in love with her. She wrote of this conflict:
Husband inside,
lover outside.
I can’t manage them both.
This world
and that other,
cannot manage them both.166
Eventually she left her husband and wandered naked, clothed only in her hair, like Lady Godiva, until she died, still in her twenties. Ramanujan writes her epitaph: “Her struggle was with her condition, as body, as woman, as social being tyrannized by social roles, as a human confined to a place and a time. Through these shackles she bursts, defiant in her quest for ecstasy.”167 Though hardly a typical woman, Mahadevyyakka nevertheless provides a paradigm precisely for atypicality, for the possibility that a woman might shift the paradigm, im as so many other women have done in the history of Hinduism, so strongly that their lives may have functioned as alternative paradigms for other women.
CHAPTER 17
AVATAR AND ACCIDENTAL GRACE IN THE LATER PURANAS
800 to 1500 CE
CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES ARE CE)
750-1500 Medieval Puranas are composed:
Agni (850), Bhagavata (950), Bhavishya (500-1200), Brahma (900-1350), Brahmavaivarta (1400-1500), Devibhagavata (1100-1350), Garuda (900), Kalika (1350), Linga (600-1000), Mahabhagavata (1100), Saura (950-1150)
1210-1526 The Delhi Sultanate is in power
c. 1200 Early orders of Sufis arise in North India
c. 1200 Virashaivas, including Basava, live in South India
c. 1200 Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda is composed
c. 1336-1565 Vijayanagar Empire is in its prime
c. 1398-1448 Kabir lives
1469-1539 Guru Nanak founds Sikhism in the Punjab
THE PURANAS TELL IT DIFFERENTLY
Listen to the way Brahma himself tells the story of Prahlada; the
Puranas tell it differently.
Padma Purana, c. 750-1000 CE1
The many different ways in which the medieval Puranas tell stories about animals, women, the lower classes, and other religions are the result of a sudden burgeoning of the imaginative range of the texts, nurtured in large part by the ongoing appropriation of ideas from non-Sanskrit, oral, and vernacular cultures. By the ninth century CE, Sanskrit had embraced literary and political as well as religious realms as a cosmopolitan language that was patronized by the literati and royal courts. Some scholars argue that Sanskrit faded away during this period because “the idiom of a cosmopolitan literature” became somewhat redundant in “an increasingly regionalized world.”2 But it seems to me that the producers of Sanskrit Puranas, regionalized though they most certainly were, responded not by closing up shop but simply doing more and more business as usual, welcoming in regional popular, oral, and vernacular themes and translating them into their own kind of Puranic Sanskrit. It was in this spirit too that they welcomed in regional and popular figures and made them into some of the avatars of Vishnu.
THE AVATARS OF VISHNU
We have already met the first two human avatars of Vishnu, Krishna and Rama, who becaome incarnate on earth to fight against antigods (Asuras) incarnate as humans and against ogres (Rakshasas) who are the enemies of humans. We have also noted, without investigating, a number of references to other avatars that Vishnu had attracted by the early centuries of the Common Era, sometimes said to be six, sometimes eighteen, but usually ten (though not always the same tenin). One of the very few surviving Gupta temples, the temple at Deogarh, in Uttar Pradesh (c. sixth-seventh century CE), is called the Temple of the Ten Avatars (Dashavatara). In the fifteenth century the poet Kabir mocked the ten avatars as “divine malarkey/for those who really know”—that is, for those who know that it is all god’s maya that Rama appears to marry Sita, and so forth.3 The Jaina concept of Universal History, which claims nine appearances of a savior in each world epoch, may have played a role in the development of the Hindu schema,4 for Vishnu too usually has nine avatars in the past, the tenth being (like the Kali Age) reserved for the future (Kalki).
Some of the new avatars were assimilated into the Puranas lists from earlier Sanskrit literature, and all of them entered the ten-avatar structure through the usual processes of Hindu bricolage. The texts often describe the avatars centrifugally, as various functions of the god emanating out of him and expressed as many manifestations (with many arms, many heads). But historically they came into being centripetally, as various gods already in existence were attracted to Vishnu and attached themselves to him like iron filings to a magnet. Avatars were particularly popular with kings, whose eulogies often sequentially link their conquests or their qualities to avatars—like the boar, he rescured the earth, like Kalki, he repelled the barbarians—perhaps to suggest that the king too was an avatar.
To fast-forward for a moment, Keshab Chunder Sen (1838-1884) in 1882 noted that the succession of Vishnu’s avatars could be interpreted as an allegory of the Darwinian evolutionary process, “presciently recognized by ancient Hindu sages and now confirmed by modern s
cience”—that is, an ancient Indian theory that Darwin re-invented.5 (Sen may or may not have been inspired by the idea of Avataric Evolutionism that Madame Blavatsky discussed in her Isis Unveiled, published in 1877.6) Since then the ten avatars are often listed beginning with the three least complex life forms and working their way up to humans; sometimes they are also associated with the progression of the ages (Yugas) through time. Thus the list usually goes like this: the fish, the tortoise, the boar, and the Man-Lion (animals, all in the Krita Yuga, the first Age, and all but the Man-Lion aquatic animals); the dwarf, Parashurama, Rama (humans, all in the Treta Yuga, the second Age); Krishna and the Buddha (humans in the Dvapara, the third Age); and Kalki in the Kali Age. But evolutionary theory fits with the Indian theory of the Yugas only if one ignores the little matter of the clash between social evolutionism (things get steadily better) and the Yuga theory of social degeneration (things get steadily worse).
If, however, we take into account the order in which the principal ten figures first surface in texts (including coins and inscriptions), though not necessarily already labeled avatars, let alone historically connected with Vishnu, the list would look more like this: the dwarf (Rig Veda); the fish and the boar (Brahmanas); the tortoise, Krishna, Rama, Parashurama, and Kalki (all mentioned in the Mahabharata); the Man-Lion and the Buddha (mentioned in the Vishnu Purana, c. 400-500 CE).7 Finally, if we group them according to the main issues with which this book is primarily concerned, the order would be animals (the fish, the boar, the tortoise), women (Krishna/Radha, Rama/Sita), interreligious relations (the Buddha, Kalkiio), caste and class (Parashurama, the dwarf, and the Man-Lion). Let us consider them in that order.
The Hindus Page 60