The Hindus
Page 71
At the same time, many worshipers in the Chaitanya tradition, recoiling from the antinomian Tantric variations on the theme of Krishna and Radha that had made them the target of social opprobrium,21 developed a different tradition and went back to the Gita-Govinda for their central imagery, emphasizing not the union but the separation (viraha) of the two lovers and the suffering of longing for the otiose god, the renunciation rather than the passion of love. Once again, a Tantric tradition had split in two. These Goswamins, anxious to prevent the story of Krishna and Radha from becoming a model for human behavior, hastened to sanitize the myth by reversing the locus of the real people and the shadows; where in earlier texts the Gopis had left shadow images of themselves in bed with their husbansds while they danced with Krishna, now some of the Goswamins specified that the real Gopis remained in bed with their husbands and merely sent their shadow doubles to dance with the god. The quasi-Tantric Bengal traditions debated for centuries whether Krishna and Radha were married or, as they put it, whether Radha was Krishna’s wife (“his own” [svakiya]) or his mistress (“someone else’s” [parakiya]), and they decided, in 1717, that adulterous love was in fact orthodox.22
The question of role models was a pressing one, for in Bengal Vaishnavism the worshiper is inspired to decide not which of the personae dramatis s/he would like to play, but who s/he is: the mother, lover, servant, or friend of Krishna.23 Bhakti was better suited for women, who could be god’s lovers and mothers, the most intimate roles, whereas male worshipers had to pretend to be women (some of them withdrawing to menstruate every month). This gave women a great measure of spiritual authority, though not necessarily practical authority. Rupagosvamin wrote of “the devotion that follows from passion” (raganuga bhakti), in contrast with scriptural devotion (vaidhi bhakti). In the familiar pattern, both paths lead to Krishna.
Yet another branch of Bengali Vaishnavas rejected the renunciation espoused (if one can espouse renunciation) by both the Goswamins and the lineages of the philosophers Ramanuja and Madhva. These were the Radhavallabhas (“Radha’s Darlings”), who venerated the householder stage, rejected renunciation, and regarded Krishna not as the supreme deity but as the servant of the goddess Radha. As one British scholar put it, Krishna “may do the coolie-work of building the world, but Radha sits as Queen. He is at best but her Secretary of State.”24 Many of the Bangla verses of Chandidasa and the Maithili verses of Vidyapati (in the fourteen and fifteenth centuries) are written from the standpoint of a Radha who is more powerful than Krishna.
Continuing the Bengali tradition, the celebration of poverty by the poet Ramprasad (1720-1781) served both as solace for other people truly in need and as a metaphor for spiritual poverty, though the upper castes supported Ramprasad quite well and he gave no opposition to caste. His poetry bristles with references to real life: to poverty, farmers, debts, absentee landlords, lawyers, leaking boats, merchants, and traders.25 Strong Tantric influences are also evident in the wine and drunkenness that pervaded both his poetry and (as the stories go) his life.26
TUKARAM’S DOGS IN MAHARASHTRA
Tukaram was a Shudra who lived in Maharashtra from 1608 to 1649. None of his poems were written down in his lifetime; all that we have were later transcribed from oral traditions, along with legends about him. According to one story, which bears a suspicious resemblance to the story of the floating South Indian texts and, closer to home, to the buoyancy of Tulsidas’s text, angry Brahmins forced Tukaram to throw all his manuscripts into the river in his native village. Tukaram fasted and prayed, and after thirteen days the sunken notebooks reappeared from the river, undamaged.27 He married, but since his wife was chronically ill, he took a second wife. When the great famine of 1629 killed his parents, his first wife, and some of his children, he abandoned the householder’s life, ignored his debts and the pleas of his (second) wife and his remaining children, and went off into the wilderness. He became a poet, devoted to the god Vitthal, speaking in the idiom that the Marathi poets had fashioned out of the songs that ordinary housewives sang at home and that farmers, traders, craftsmen, and laborers sang at popular religious festivals. Some say he ended his life by throwing himself into the same river where his poems had sunk and reemerged. His poems, which challenge caste and denounce Brahmins, also denounce the ascetic: “He must consume a lot of bhang, and opium, and tobacco;/ But his hallucinations are perpetual.”28
His poems often imagine the relationship between god and his devotee as the relationship between a secret lover and an adulteress (as many bhakti poets do) or, more unusually, as the violent relationship between a murderer (in this case a Thug, a member of a pack of thieves, stranglers, and worshipers of the goddess Kali) and his victim: “The Thug has arrived in Pandhari./ He will garrotte his victim with the cord of love.”29 He also imagines the divine relationship as a bond between a master and a dog:
GOD’S DOGjr
I’ve come to your door
Like a dog looking for a home
O Kind One
Don’t drive me away . . .
Says Tuka,
My Master’s trained me hard
I am allowed to eat
Only out of his own
Hand.30
MUGHAL HORSEMEN AND HINDU HORSE GODS
Dogs were one sort of religious symbol; horses were another. And real, as well as symbolic, horses played a major role in Hindu-Muslim relations under the Mughals; horse trading, both literal and figurative, was the common theme. A great deal of the revenue drawn from taxing the peasants was spent on royal horses. In Haridwar, in the Mughal period, the great spring horse fair coincided, not by coincidence, with a famous religious festival that drew thousands of pilgrims to the banks of the Ganges each year. This combination of trade and pilgrimage was widespread; the Maharashtrian and Sikh generals and their troops came to the fairs to pay their devotion at the holy places in the morning and secure a supply of warhorses in the afternoon.31
When the Europeans arrived in India in the Mughal period, horses were very expensive animals, the best ones costing up to ten thousand dollars.32 More than 75 percent of Mughal horses were imported, mostly from Central Asia. Babur seems to have spent more time in the saddle than on the ground, and took a personal interest in the horses.33 Akbar had 150,000 to 200,000 cavalry-men, plus the emperor’s own crack regiment of another 7,000.34 Abu’l Fazl tells us how important horses were to Akbar, for ruling, conquest, presentation as gifts, and general convenience;35 Akbar even had luminous polo balls made so that he could play night games.36 The horses, as always, were mostly imported: “Merchants bring to court good horses from Iraq, Turky, Turkestan . . . Kirghiz, Tibet, Kashmir and other countries. Droves after droves arrive from Turan and Iran, and there are nowadays twelve thousand in the stables of his Majesty.”37
Abu’l Fazl insists, however, that the best horses of all were bred in India, particularly in the Punjab,js Mewat, Ajmer, and Bengal near Bihar. He continues:
Skilful, experienced men have paid much attention to the breeding of this sensible animal, many of whose habits resemble those of man; and after a short time Hindustanranked higher in this respect than Arabia, whilst many Indian horses cannot be distinguished from Arabs or from the Iraqi breed. There are fine horses bred in every part of the country; but those of Cachh [Kutch] excel, being equal to Arabs. It is said that a long time ago an Arab ship was wrecked and driven to the shore of Cachh; and that it had seven choice horses, from which, according to the general belief, the breed of that country originated.38
This, then, is the answer to the apparent contradiction: Indian horses (or, rather, some Indian horses) are Arab horses, and there is no contest.
The Arab horses from Kutch were probably the sires of the most distinctive native Indian breed. Sometime before the eleventh century, a clan of Rajput warriors developed a new breed of warhorses from Arab and Turkmen stock in Marwar (a state whose capital was the city of Jodhpur, the city from which the riding pants and short boots adopted by the
British in the nineteenth century take their name). The Marwari is a desert horse with a thick, arched neck, long-lashed eyes, flaring nostrils, and distinctive ears, which curve inward to a sharp point, meeting to form an almost perfect arch at the tips. Aficionados compare the shape of the Marwari’s ears to the lyre, to the scorpion’s arched stinger, and to the Rajputs’ trademark handlebar mustaches, turned upright and set on their thick, bushy ends. (The Kathiawar horse from Gujarat has the same special ears but is not quite so tall or so long.)39
Despite these occasional breeding successes, negative factors made the Indian horse into a beast so rarefied that it became more mythical than practical. Ever since the Arabs entered India, then the Turks, and then the Mongols who were to become the Mughals, and despite a few passing references to the Scythians and the British, it has almost always been the Muslims who play the role of good and evil foreign horsemen in the local equine rituals and mythologies of India. These myths and rituals, though not always documented in the Mughal period, are often about the Mughals. The corpus of Hindu myths that depicts the Turks and Arabs bringing horses into India seems to have assimilated the historical experience of the importation of horses not only to the lingering vestiges—the cultural hoofprints, as it were—of Vedic horse myths but also to the cross-cultural theme of magical horses brought from heaven or the underworld. 40
There are some negative responses too: In the seventeenth century, for instance, a Hindu from Afghanistan insisted that when he died, he wanted to be buried where he couldn’t hear the hoof steps of Mughal horses.41 But despite or because of the political domination that the Mughals maintained, their contribution to the equine legends of Hinduism was generally positive, and the Muslims in the stories are often depicted in a favorable light, both because the Mughals strongly influenced Hindu horse lore and because some Hindus welcomed them as the bearers of the gift of horses. The shadow of the hated and loved Muslim horse may also fall across the highly ambiguous equine figure of Kalki.
Many Hindu rituals involve Muslims and horses. The Muslim saint Alam Sayyid of Baroda was known as the horse saint (Ghore Ka Pir). He was buried with his horse beside him, and Hindus hang images of the horse on trees around his tomb.42 In Bengal, people offer clay horses to deified Muslim saints like Satya Pir, and Hindus as well as Muslims worship at the shrines of other Muslim “horse saints.”43 Then there is the South Indian Hindu folk hero named Muttal Ravuttan.44 “Ravuttan” designates a Muslim horseman, a folk memory of the historical figure of the Muslim warrior on horseback, “whether he be the Sufi warrior leading his band of followers or the leader of an imperial army of conquest.” At Chinna Salem, Muttal Ravuttan receives marijuana, opium, cigars, and horse gram (kollu) for his horse. The offerings are made to an image of him mounted on his horse, sculpted in relief on a stone plaque, or to a clay horse (or horses) standing outside the shrine in readiness for him. The horse is canonically white and is said to be able to fly through the air.45
Muslims are deeply involved in the worship of the god Khandoba, an incarnation of Shiva, in Maharashtra, and many of Khandoba’s followers have been Muslim horsemen, though it is sometimes said that Aurangzeb was forced to flee from Khandoba’s power.46 In Jejuri, the most famous center of the worship of Khandoba, a Muslim leads the horse in the Khandoba festival and a Muslim family traditionally keeps Khandoba’s horses. The worshipers of Khandoba act as the god’s horse (occasionally as his dog47) by galloping and whipping themselves, 48 and at the annual festival in Jejuri, when, as in many temples, the worshipers carry a portable image of the deity in a palanquin or wheeled cart in procession around the town, devotees possessed by the power of the god move like horses in front of the palanquin.49 In the myth associated with this ritual, the god Shiva arrives on his bull Nandi50 before he mounts a horse to fight the demon Mani; some texts say that Nandi turns into the horse,51 while others52 say that Shiva ordered the moon to become a horse and, seated on it, cut off the head of the demon.53 The pan-Indian image of Nandi stands at the bottom of the hill at the shrine of Khandoba; the local horse of Khandoba stands at the top and is regarded as an avatar of Nandi, just as Khandoba is an avatar of Shiva. Both are waiting for Khandoba/Shiva to mount them. Khandoba is not a horse god or a horse; he rides a horse, which is, in this context, the very opposite of being a horse. In the myth, he rides a demonic horse; in the ritual, he rides his human worshipers. He is the subduer of horses, the tamer of horses. He makes demonic horses, like his worshipers, into divine horses.
THREE TALES OF EQUINE RESURRECTION
A story about horses and Mughals is still prevalent both in oral tradition and in popular printed bazaar pamphlets in Hindi and Punjabi in the great Punjab area—Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Delhi—where real horses have remained important throughout Indian history. This is the story of Dhyanu Bhagat:
WHY COCONUTS ARE OFFERED TO THE GODDESS
There was once a devotee of the Goddess named Dhyanu Bhagat who lived at the same time as the Mughal emperor Akbar. Once he was leading a group of pilgrims to the Temple of Jvala Mukhi [at Kangra, in Himachal Pradesh] where the Goddess appears in the form of a flame. As the group was passing through Delhi, Akbar summoned Dhyanu to the court, demanding to know who this goddess was and why he worshipped her. Dhyanu replied that she is the all-powerful Goddess who grants wishes to her devotees. In order to test Dhyanu, Akbar ordered the head of his horse to be cut off and told Dhyanu to have his goddess join the horse’s head back to its body. Dhyanu went to Jvala Mukhi where he prayed day and night to the Goddess, but he got no answer. Finally, in desperation, he cut off his own head and offered it to the Goddess. At that point, the Goddess appeared before him in full splendor, seated on her lion. She joined his head back to his body and also joined the horse’s head back to its body. Then she offered him a boon. He asked that in the future, devotees not be required to go to such extreme lengths to prove their devotion. So, she granted him the boon that from then on, she would accept the offering of a coconut to be equal to that of a head. So, that is why people offer coconuts to the Goddess.54
The devouring goddess appears both in the deity who demands blood sacrifices and, at the very start of the story, in the shrine of Jvala Mukhi, the holy place where she takes the form of a flame. For Jvala Mukhi (“Mouth of Fire,” a common term for a volcano) is the name of the submarine doomsday mare. In this story about her worship, the heads of the devotee and his horse are not transposed (as they are in Hindu myths about doubly decapitated women and men) but merely removed and restored in tandem, while Dhyanu asks for and receives a boon: that henceforth people can prove their devotion by giving the Goddess coconuts rather than their own heads.
Now, a coconut resembles a human head but does not at all resemble a horse’s head. The coconut, as essential to many pujas as animals are to a blood sacrifice, is a clue to the fact that this is really a myth about human sacrifice—perhaps a local myth—that has been adapted to take account of the more “Sanskritic” tradition of the horse sacrifice. There are changes: the horse beheaded in the story is not killed in a horse sacrifice, and it is beheaded rather than strangled as the horses in the horse sacrifice generally are (though they are often beheaded in the mythology). We might read this text as a meditation on the historical transition from human sacrifice to Vedic horse sacrifice to contemporary vegetarian puja, a progression already prefigured in the Brahmanas. Moreover, coconuts do not grow in the Punjab; the rituals specify that one must use dry coconuts for all offerings, presumably because they have traveled all the way from somewhere where they do grow, a long distance. Since these coconuts must be imported, they may therefore represent either the adoption of a myth that is “foreign” (i.e., from another part of India) or a local tradition about a “foreign” ritual that requires imported coconuts, appropriate to a ritual about imported horses.
A similar myth collected in Chandigarh substitutes a child for the worshiper himself:
THE HORSE AND THE BOY IN THE CAULDRON
We may see behind this story not merely the Vedic horse sacrifice but the South Indian story of Ciruttontar and the curried child and the well-known Puranic myth of King Harishchandra,56 whose son died and was eventually restored to him. What has been added is the horse.
A story about a low-caste travesty of a horse sacrifice was recorded in North India during the nineteenth century:
THE HORSE OF LAL BEG, THE SWEEPER
There is a horse miracle story told in connection with Lal Beg, the patron saint of the sweepers, a Pariah caste. The king of Delhi lost a valuable horse, and the sweepers were ordered to bury it, but as the animal was very fat, they proceeded to cut it up for themselves, giving one leg to the king’s priest. The king, suspecting what had happened, ordered the sweepers to produce the horse. They were in dismay at the order, but they laid what was left of the animal on a mound sacred to Lal Beg, and prayed to him to save them, whereupon the horse stood up, but only on three legs. So they went to the king and confessed how they had disposed of the fourth leg. The unlucky priest was executed, and the horse soon after died also.57