The-Hindus-An-Alternative-History---Wendy-Doniger

Table of ContentsTitle PageCopyright PagePREFACE:

CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION: WORKINGWITH AVAILABLE LIGHTCHAPTER 2 - TIME AND SPACE IN INDIA 50 Million to 50,000 BCECHAPTER 3 - CIVILIZATION IN THE INDUS VALLEY 50,000 to 1500 BCECHAPTER 4 - BETWEEN THE RUINSAND THE TEXT 2000 to 1500 BCEBCECHAPTER 5 - HUMANS, ANIMALS, AND GODS IN THE RIG VEDA 1500 to 1000CHAPTER 6 - SACRIFICE IN THE BRAHMANAS 800 to 500 BCECHAPTER 7 - RENUNCIATION IN THE UPANISHADS 600 to 200 BCECHAPTER 8 - THE THREE (OR IS IT FOUR?) AIMS OF LIFE IN THE HINDUIMAGINARYCHAPTER 9 - WOMEN AND OGRESSES IN THE RAMAYANA 400 BCE to 200 CECHAPTER 10 - VIOLENCE IN THE MAHABHARATA 300 BCE to 300 CECHAPTER 11 - DHARMA IN THE MAHABHARATA 300 BCE to 300 CECHAPTER 12 - ESCAPE CLAUSES IN THE SHASTRAS 100 BCE to 400 CECHAPTER 13 - BHAKTI IN SOUTH INDIA 100 BCE to 900 CECHAPTER 14 - GODDESSES AND GODS IN THE EARLY PURANAS 300 to 600 CECHAPTER 15 - SECTS AND SEX IN THE TANTRIC PURANAS AND THETANTRAS 600 to 900 CECHAPTER 16 - FUSION AND RIVALRY UNDER THE DELHI SULTANATE 650 to1500 CECHAPTER 17 - AVATAR AND ACCIDENTAL GRACE IN THE LATER PURANAS800 to 1500 CECHAPTER 18 - PHILOSOPHICAL FEUDS IN SOUTH INDIA AND KASHMIR 800 to1300 CECHAPTER 19 - DIALOGUE AND TOLERANCE UNDER THE MUGHALS 1500 to1700 CE

CHAPTER 20 - HINDUISM UNDER THE MUGHALS 1500 to 1700 CECHAPTER 21 - CASTE, CLASS, AND CONVERSION UNDER THE BRITISH RAJ1600 to 1900 CECHAPTER 22 - SUTTEE AND REFORM IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE RAJ 1800 to1947 CECHAPTER 23 - HINDUS IN AMERICA 1900 -CHAPTER 24 - THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 1950 -CHAPTER 25 - INCONCLUSION, OR, THE ABUSE OF HISTORYAcknowledgementsCHRONOLOGYGUIDE TO PRONUNCIATION AND SPELLINGOF WORDS IN SANSKRIT ANDOTHERINDIAN LANGUAGESABBREVIATIONSGLOSSARY OF TERMS IN INDIAN LANGUAGES AND NAMES OF KEY FIGURESNOTESBIBLIOGRAPHY: WORKS CITED AND CONSULTEDPHOTO CREDITSINDEXABOUT THE AUTHORALSO BY WENDY DONIGERSiva, the Erotic AsceticThe Origins of Evil in Hindu MythologyDreams, Illusion, and Other RealitiesSplitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India

TRANSLATIONS:The Rig VedaThe Laws of ManuandKamasutra

THE PENGUIN PRESSPublished by the Penguin GroupPenguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • PenguinGroup (Canada),90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of PearsonPenguin CanadaInc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St.Stephen’s Green,Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250Camberwell Road,Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • PenguinBooks India Pvt Ltd,11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67Apollo Drive,Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • PenguinBooks (South Africa)(Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South AfricaPenguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, EnglandFirst published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.Copyright © Wendy Doniger, 2009All rights reservedAcknowledgments for permission to reprint copyrighted worksappear on page 754.Illustration credits appear on page 754.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataDoniger, Wendy.The Hindus : an alternative history / Wendy Doniger.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.eISBN : 978-1-101-02870-41. Hinduism—Social aspects—History. 2. Women in Hinduism—History.3. Pariahs in Hinduism—History.

4. Hinduism—Relations. I. Title.BL1151.3.D66 2009294.509—dc222008041030Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publicationmay be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form orby any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the priorwritten permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any othermeans without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchaseonly authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy ofcopyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.http://us.penguingroup.comKATHERINE ULRICH—student, friend, editor supreme—andWILL DALRYMPLE—inspiration and comrade in the good fightINDIA’S MAJOR GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURES

INDIA FROM 2500 BCE TO 600 CE

INDIA FROM 600 CE TO 1600 CE

INDIA FROM 1600 CE TO THE PRESENT

PREFACE:THE MAN OR THE RABBITIN THE MOONAN ALTERNATIVE HISTORYThe image of the man in the moon who is also a rabbit in the moon, or the duck who isalso a rabbit, will serve as a metaphor for the double visions of the Hindus that this book willstrive to present.Since there are so many books about Hinduism, the author of yet another one has a dutyto answer the potential reader’s Passover question: Why shouldn’t I pass over this book, or, Whyis this book different from all other books? This book is not a brief survey (you noticed thatalready; I had intended it to be, but it got the bit between its teeth and ran away from me), nor, onthe other hand, is it a reference book that covers all the facts and dates about Hinduism or a bookabout Hinduism as it is lived today. Several books of each of those sorts exist, some of themquite good, which you might read alongside this one. 1 The Hindus: An Alternative History differsfrom those books in several ways.[TOP] The Mark on the Moon, [MIDDLE] Wittgenstein’s Duck/ Rabbit, and [BOTTOM] TheRabbit in the Moon First, it highlights a narrative alternative to the one constituted by the mostfamous texts in Sanskrit (the literary language of ancient India) and represented in most surveysin English. It tells a story that incorporates the narratives of and about alternative people—peoplewho, from the standpoint of most high-caste Hindu males, are alternative in the sense ofotherness, people of other religions, or cultures, or castes, or species (animals), or gender(women). Part of my agenda in writing an alternative history is to show how much the groupsthat conventional wisdom says were oppressed and silenced and played no part in thedevelopment of the tradition—women, Pariahs (oppressed castes, sometimes calledUntouchables)—did actually contribute to Hinduism. My hope is not to reverse or misrepresentthe hierarchies, which remain stubbornly hierarchical, or to deny that Sanskrit texts were almostalways subject to a final filter in the hands of the male Brahmins (the highest of the four socialclasses, the class from which priests were drawn) who usually composed and preserved them.But I hope to bring in more actors, and more stories, upon the stage, to show the presence ofbrilliant and creative thinkers entirely off the track beaten by Brahmin Sanskritists and of diversevoices that slipped through the filter, and, indeed, to show that the filter itself was quite diverse,for there were many different sorts of Brahmins; some whispered into the ears of kings, butothers were dirt poor and begged for their food every day.Moreover, the privileged male who recorded the text always had access to oral texts aswell as to the Sanskrit that was his professional language. Most people who knew Sanskrit musthave been bilingual; the etymology of “Sanskrit” (“perfected, artificial”) is based upon animplicit comparison with “Prakrit” (“primordial, natural”), the language actually spoken. Thisgives me a double agenda: first to point out the places where the Sanskrit sources themselvesinclude vernacular, female, and lower-class voices and then to include, wherever possible,non-Sanskrit sources. The (Sanskrit) medium is not always the message; a it’s not all aboutBrahmins, Sanskrit, the Gita. I will concentrate on those moments within the tradition that resistforces that would standardize or establish a canon, moments that forged bridges between

factions, the times of the “mixing of classes” (varna-samkara) that the Brahmins alwaystried—inevitably in vain—to prevent.Second, in addition to focusing on a special group of actors, I have concentrated on a fewimportant actions, several of which are also important to us today: nonviolence toward humans(particularly religious tolerance) and toward animals (particularly vegetarianism and objectionsto animal sacrifice) and the tensions between the householder life and renunciation, and betweenaddiction and the control of sensuality. More specific images too (such as the transposition ofheads onto bodies or the flooding of cities) thread their way through the entire historical fabric ofthe book. I have traced these themes through the chapters and across the centuries to providesome continuity in the midst of all the flux, 2 even at the expense of what some might regard asmore basic matters.Third, this book attempts to set the narrative of religion within the narrative of history, asa linga (an emblem of the god Shiva, often representing his erect phallus) is set in a yoni (thesymbol of Shiva’s consort, or the female sexual organ), or any statue of a Hindu god in its baseor plinth (pitha). I have organized the topics historically in order to show not only how each ideais a reaction to ideas that came before (as any good old-fashioned philological approach woulddo) but also, wherever possible, how those ideas were inspired or configured by the events of thetimes, how Hinduism, always context sensitive, 3 responds to what is happening, at roughly thesame moment, not only on the political and economic scene but within Buddhism or Islam inIndia or among people from other cultures entering India. For Hinduism, positioning kings asgods and gods as kings, seldom drew a sharp line between secular and religious power. In recentyears a number of historians of religions, particularly of South Asian religions, havecontextualized particular moments in the religious history of the subcontinent. 4 This bookattempts to extend that particularizing project to the whole sweep of Indian history, from thebeginning (and I do mean the beginning, c. 50,000,000 BCE) to the present. This allows us to seehow certain ongoing ideas evolve, which is harder to do with a focus on a particular event or textat a particular moment.This will not serve as a conventional history (my training is as a philologist, not ahistorian) but as a book about the evolution of several important themes in the lives of Hinduscaught up in the flow of historical change. It tells the story of the Hindus primarily through astring of narratives. The word for “history” in Sanskrit, itihasa, could be translated as “That’swhat happened,” giving the impression of an only slightly more modest equivalent of vonRanke’s phrase for positivist history: “Wie es [eigentlich] gewesen ist” (“The way it [really]happened”). But the iti in the word is most often used as the Sanskrit equivalent of “end quote,”as in “Let’s go [iti],” he said. Itihasa thus implies not so much what happened as what peoplesaid happened (“That’s what he said happened”)—narratives, inevitably subjective narratives.And so this is a history not of what the British used to call maps and chaps (geography andbiography) but of the stories in hi-story. It’s a kind of narrative quilt made of scraps of religionsewn in next to scraps of social history, a quilt like those storytelling cloths that Indian narratorsuse as mnemonic devices to help them and the audience keep track of the plot. The narratorassembles the story from the quilt pieces much as the French rag-and-bones man, the bricoleur,makes new objects out of the broken-off pieces of old objects (bricolage). 5Like any work of scholarship, this book rests on the shoulders of many pygmies as wellas giants. I have kept most of the scholarly controversies out of the text, after laying out the rulesof the game in these first two chapters of methodological introduction and in the pre-Vedicperiod (chapters 2 through 4), which might stand as paradigms for what might have been done

with all the other chapters, as well as a few other places where the arguments were so loony thatI could not resist the temptation to satirize them. Many a “fact” turns out, on closer inspection, tobe an argument. There is another story to be told here: how we know what we know, what weused to believe, why we believe what we believe now, what scholars brought up certainquestions or gave us the information we now have, what scholars now challenge thatinformation, and what political factors influenced them. Those arguments tell a story that isinteresting in itself but to which I merely allude from time to time. I also write in the shadow of abroad scholarship of theories about religion and history, and I will keep that too out of the text. Ihave tried to avoid setting my opinions against those with whom I disagree or using them as fallguys, beginning an argument by citing the imagined opponent. I have, rather, simply presentedeach subject in what I believe to be the best scholarly construction, in order to concentrate on thearguments about it within the Hindu texts themselves.Many crucial questions remain unanswered, and I hope that this book will inspire somereaders to go back to the sources and decide for themselves whether or not they agree with me.The relevant materials can be found in the bibliography as well as in the notes for each chapter,which will also provide browsing material for those readers (I confess that I am one of them)who go straight to the back and look at the notes and bibliography first, reading the book likeHebrew, from right to left, to see where the author has been grazing, like dogs sniffing oneanother’s backsides to see what they have eaten lately. bSANSKRITIZATION, DESHIFICATION, AND VERNACULARIZATIONSanskrit texts from the earliest period assimilated folk texts that were largely oral andcomposed in languages other than Sanskrit, vernacular languages. But even in the Vedic age,Sanskrit was not what has been called a kitchen language, c not the language in which you said,“Pass the butter.” 6 (Actually, Brahminsprobably did say, “Pass the butter,” in Sanskrit when theyput butter as an oblation into the fire in the course of the sacrifice, but those same Brahminswould have to have known how to say it in another language as well, in the kitchen.) At the veryleast, those male Sanskritists had to be bilingual in order to talk to their wives and servants andchildren. d It was through those interactions that oral traditions got their foot in the Sanskrit door.Henry Higgins, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, is said to be the author of SpokenSanskrit, and many priests and scholars can speak Sanskrit, but no one ever spoke only pureSanskrit. Sanskrit and oral traditions flow back and forth, producing a constant infusion oflower-class words and ideas into the Brahmin world, and vice versa.It must have been the case that the natural language, Prakrit, and the vernaculars camefirst, while Sanskrit, the refined, secondary revision, the artificial language, came later. ButSouth Asianists often seem to assume that it is the other way around, that the dialects are“derived from Sanskrit,” because Sanskrit won the race to the archives and was the first to bewritten down and preserved, and we only encounter vernaculars much later. So we say thatSanskrit is older, and the vernaculars younger. But Sanskrit, the language of power, emerged inIndia from a minority, and at first its power came precisely from its nonintelligibility andunavailability, which made it the power of an elite group. 7 Walt Kelly’s Pogo used to use theword “Sam-skrimps” to describe highfalutin double-talk or manipulative twaddle. ManyEuro-Americans mispronounce it “Sanscript,” implying that it is a language without (sans) an(intelligible) script, or “Sand-script,” with overtones of ruined cities in the desert or a lostlanguage written in sand.The sociologist M. N. Srinivas, in 1952, coined the useful term “Sanskritization” to

describe the way that Vedic social values, Vedic ritual forms, and Sanskrit learning seep intolocal popular traditions of ritual and ideology (in part through people who hope to be upwardlymobile, to rise by imitating the manners and habits, particularly food taboos, of Brahmins, and inparticular avoiding violence to animals). 8 Indian society, in this view, is a permanent floatinggame of snakes and ladders (or, perhaps, snakes and ropes, recalling that Vedantic philosophersmistake snakes for ropes and that you can climb up on ropes in the Indian rope trick), which youenter in a state of impurity, gradually advancing over the generations toward the goal ofBrahminical purity, trying to avoid the many pitfalls along the way. 9 Tribal groups (Bhils,Gonds, etc.) might undergo Sanskritization in order to claim to be a caste, and therefore, Hindu. 10But the opposite of Sanskritization, the process by which the Sanskritic traditionsimultaneously absorbs and transforms those same popular traditions, is equally important, andthat process might be called oralization, or popularization, or even, perhaps, Deshification (fromthe “local” or deshi traditions) or Laukification, from what Sanskrit calls laukika (“of the people”[loka]). Let’s settle on Deshification. The two processes of Sanskritization and Deshificationbeget each other. Similarly, through a kind of identificatio brahmanica, 11 local gods take on thenames of gods in Sanskrit texts: Murukan becomes Skanda, a kind of Sanskritization, while atthe same time there is an identificatio deshika, by which Sanskrit gods take on the characteristicsof local gods, and to the people who worship Murukan, it is Murukan who is absorbing Skanda,not the reverse. “Cross-fertilization” might be a good, equalizing term for the combination of thetwo processes.“Written” does not necessarily mean “written in Sanskrit,” nor are oral texts always in thevernacular (the Rig Veda, after all, was preserved orally in Sanskrit for many centuries before itwas consigned to writing). We cannot equate vernacular with oral, for people both write andspeak both Sanskrit and the vernacular languages of India, though Sanskrit is written more oftenthan spoken. The distinction between Sanskrit and the vernacular literatures is basicallygeographical: Though there are regional Sanskrits, the vernaculars, unlike Sanskrit, are definedand named by their place of origin (Bangla from Bengal, Oriya from Orissa, and so forth), whilethe script in which Sanskrit is most often written allegedly has no particular earthly place oforigin (it is called “the [script of the] city of the gods [deva-nagari]”). Once people departedfrom the royal road of Sanskrit literary texts, there were thousands of vernacular paths that theycould take, often still keeping one foot on the high road of Sanskrit.The constant, gradual, unofficial mutual exchange between Sanskrit and the vernacularlanguages, the cross-fertilization, underwent a dramatic transformation toward the middle of thesecond millennium: Local languages were now promoted officially, politically, and artistically, 12replacing the previously fashionable cosmopolitan and translocal language, Sanskrit. Instead ofnourishing and supplementing Sanskrit, the vernacular languages as literary languages began tocompete with Sanskrit as the language of literary production. This process has been called, inimitation of Srinivas’s “Sanskritization” (and in contrast with both Deshification and the moremutually nourishing, two-way process of cross-fertilization) vernacularization, “the historicalprocess of choosing to create a written literature, along with its complement, a politicaldiscourse, in local languages according to models supplied by a superordinate, usuallycosmopolitan, literary culture,” 13 or “a process of change by which the universalistic orders,formations, and practices of the preceding millennium were supplemented and graduallyreplaced by localized forms.” 14The great divide is between written and nonwritten, not between Sanskrit and thevernaculars, particularly as the Sanskrit corpus comes to be Deshified and the vernaculars

eventually became Sanskritized themselves, imitating Sanskrit values and conventions, sharingmany of the habits of the Sanskrit Brahmin imaginary, such as grammars and lexicons. 15 The badnews is that some of the vernacular literatures are marred by the misogynist and class-boundmental habits of Brahmins, while the good news is that even some Sanskrit texts, and certainlymany vernacular texts, often break out of those strictures and incorporate the more open-mindedattitudes of the oral vernaculars.Many ideas, and in particular many narratives, seem to enter Sanskrit literature eitherfrom parts of the Sanskrit canon that have fallen away or from non-Sanskrit sources (two entirelynonfalsifiable speculations). It’s an old joke among linguists that a language is a dialect with anarmy, e and this is sometimes used to explain the dominance of Sanskrit texts, since as usual, thevictors wrote the history, and in ancient India, they usually wrote it in Sanskrit. (The earliestinscriptions were in Prakrit, not Sanskrit, but from about 150 CE, Sanskrit dominated this fieldtoo.) Sanskrit is perched on top of the vernacular literatures like a mahout on an elephant, likeKrishna riding on the composite women that form the horse on the jacket of this book.SELECTIVITY AND SYNECDOCHESuch a luxurious jungle of cultural phenomena, truly an embarrassment of riches,necessitates a drastic selectivity. I have therefore provided not detailed histories of specificmoments but one or two significant episodes to represent the broader historical periods inquestion. 16 The result is not a seamless narrative that covers the waterfront but a pointillistcollage, a kaleidoscope, made of small, often discontinuous fragments. Synecdoche—letting oneor two moments in history and one or two narratives stand for many—allows us to see alternityin a grain of sand, 17 taking a small piece of human history and using it to suggest the full rangeof enduring human concerns. These small fragments alternate with a few exemplary narrativesquoted in considerable detail, where Hindus speak in their own words (in translation f ).I have tried to balance my translations of the classic, much-translated texts with citationsof more obscure, previously unnoticed texts, using as my framework the usual suspects thatscholars have rounded up over and over, the basic curry and rice episodes of Hinduism, butmoving away quickly, in each chapter, to a handful of lesser-known episodes, things usually leftout of survey books on Hinduism. These are not the great imperial moments but episodes thatgive us an inkling of what religious life was like for some people, including ordinary people, inIndia long ago. I have also included a few episodes of interaction (both friendly and hostile)between Hindus and non-Hindus in India, such as Buddhists, Jainas, Sikhs, and Muslims, thoughwithout paying direct attention to those other religions in their own right. Beginning with aminimal backbone or infrastructure of basic historical events and concepts that many peoplewould agree upon (data never value free but still valuable), we can then move from this pointoutward to other points, and from social history to literary texts, to search for narratives of andabout alternative people. That selectivity makes this book alternative in another sense, in that itleaves wide open a great deal of space for others to select from in writing their histories,alternative to mine. Someone else would make different choices and write a very different book.This is a history, not the history, of the Hindus.THEMES AND VARIATIONSThe central actors and their actions are threads around which the great narratives ofHinduism coalesce like crystals in a supersaturated solution. The actors and actions connect invarious ways: Sanskrit texts usually regard women and hunted animals as primary objects of

addiction, and the senses that cause addiction are likened to horses; animals often represent bothwomen and the lower classes; the tension between sexuality and renunciation results in anambivalence toward women as mothers and seductresses; and violence is first addressed largelyin the form of violence against animals. Violence and tolerance also interact in attitudes not onlyto other religions but between the upper and lower castes, between men and women, andbetween humans and animals. I will highlight in each period those moments when intrareligious(including intercaste) or interreligious interactions took place, marked by either tolerance orviolence, the deciding factor between the two options often being historical circumstances. Eachchapter deals with several themes, but not every chapter has instances of every theme or treatsthe same theme in the same way (chapter 12 for instance, is about women more than aboutgoddesses, while chapter 14 is about goddesses more than about women), and indeed I haveoften noted the activities of women in other contexts, without explicitly highlighting theirgender. But wherever the evidence allows, I will organize each chapter around these centralthemes.(NON)VIOLENCEIn the Introduction (chapter 1), I spell out the assumptions behind my attention to historyand to the particular actors in this story (women, lower classes and castes, and animals). Here letme just say a few words about the central action: (non)violence.The term “nonviolence” (ahimsa) originally applied not to the relationship betweenhumans but to the relationship between humans and animals. Ahimsa means “the absence of thedesire to injure or kill,” a disinclination to do harm, rather than an active desire to be gentle; it isa double negative, perhaps best translated by the negative “nonviolence,” which suggests bothmental and physical concern for others. The roots of ahimsa may lie in Vedic ritual, in animalsacrifice, in the argument that the priest does not actually injure the animal but merely “pacifieshim”; the primary meaning of ahimsa is thus to do injury without doing injury, a casuistargument from its very inception. In the Rig Veda’ (the earliest Sanskrit text, from c. 1200 BCE),the word ahimsa refers primarily to the prevention of injury or violence to the sacrificer and hisoffspring, as well as his cattle (10.22.13). 18 The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the verbon which ahimsa is based, han, is ambiguous, meaning both “to strike or beat” and “to kill.”Ahimsa, therefore, when applied to cows, to take a case at random, might mean refraining eitherfrom beating them or killing them—quite a difference. In any case, ahimsa represents not apolitical doctrine or even a social theory, but the emotion of the horror of killing (or hurting) aliving creature, an emotion that we will see attested from the earliest texts. gArguments about whether or not to kill, sacrifice, and/or eat animals were often at theheart of interreligious violence, sometimes the grounds on which human beings attacked otherhuman beings (usually with words, though occasionally with blows). h Arjuna, the heroic warriorof the Mahabharata, the great ancient Sanskrit poem about a tragic war, excuses the violence ofwar by saying, “Creatures live on creatures, the stronger on the weaker. The mongoose eatsmice, just as the cat eats the mongoose; the dog devours the cat, your majesty, and wild beastseat the dog. Even ascetics [tapasas] cannot stay alive without killing” [12.15.16-24]. The texthere justifies human violence by the violence that is rampant in the animal world. Yet the mostcommon sense of ahimsa refers to humans’ decision to rise above animal violence.Vegetarianism, both as an ideal and as a social fact in India, challenges Arjuna’s belief thatanimals must inevitably feed on one another and attempts to break the chain of alimentaryviolence simply by affirming that it is not, in fact, necessary to kill in order to eat.

Nonviolence became a cultural ideal for Hindus precisely because it holds out the lasthope of a cure, all the more desirable since unattainable, for a civilization that has, like most,always suffered from chronic and terminal violence. Non-violence is an ideal propped up againstthe cultural reality of violence. Classical Hindu India was violent in ways both shared with allcultures and unique to its particular time and place, in its politics (war being the raison d’être ofevery king); in its religious practices (animal sacrifice, ascetic self-torture, fire walking,swinging from hooks in the flesh of the back, and so forth); in its criminal law (impaling onstakes and the amputation of limbs being prescribed punishments for relatively minor offenses);in its hells (cunningly and sadistically contrived to make the punishment fit the crime); and,perhaps at the very heart of it all, in its climate, with its unendurable heat and unpredictablemonsoons. Hindu sages dreamed of nonviolence as people who live all their lives in the desertdream of oases.It is against this background that we must view the doctrine of nonviolence. The historyof Hinduism, as we shall see, abounds both in periods of creative assimilation and interactionand in outbursts of violent intolerance. Sometimes it is possible to see how historicalcircumstances have tipped the scales in one direction or the other. Sometimes it is not. In theirambivalent attitude to violence, the Hindus are no different from the rest of us, but they areperhaps unique in the intensity of their ongoing debate about it.THE MAN/RABBIT IN THE MOONI have organized several of these tensions into dualities, for dualism is an (if not the)Indian way of thinking, as the folklorist A. K. Ramanujan pointed out, speaking of his father: “I(and my generation) was [sic] troubled by his holding together in one brain both astronomy andastrology. I looked for consistency in him, a consistency he didn’t seem to care about, or even tothink about. . . . ‘Don’t you know, [he said,] the brain has two lobes?” 19 But some of the mostinteresting developments take place in the combinations of the two cultural lobes, whether wedefine them as Brahmin and non-Brahmin, written and oral, or male and female. One medievalHindu philosophical text defined a great teacher as someone with the ability to grasp both sidesof an argument. 20 It is, I think, no accident that India is the land that developed the technique ofinterweaving two colors of silk threads so that the fabric is what they call peacock’s neck, blue ifyou hold it one way, green another (or sometimes pink or yellow or purple), and, if you hold itright, both at once.Another metaphor for this sort of double vision is the dark shape visible on the moon:many Americans and Europeans (for convenience, let us call them Euro-Americans) see the faceof a man in the moon (whom some Jewish traditions identify as Cain, cursed to wander), andother cultures see a woman, a moose, a buffalo, a frog, and so forth. But most Hindus (as well asChinese, Japanese, and Aztecs) see a hare. i (I am calling it a rabbit to avoid theunfortunateEnglish homonym “hare/hair,” another bit of double vision, though calling it a rabbitlands me in the middle of a rock group called the Rabbit in the Moon). The man’s right eye canbe read as the rabbit’s ears, his left eye the rabbit’s chest, and his mouth the rabbit’s tail. (Therewas a time, in the 1930s, when some people in India saw the image of Gandhi in the moon. 21 )The Buddhists tell how the moon came to have the mark of a rabbit:THE RABBIT IN THE MOONThe future Buddha was once born as a rabbit, who vowed that hewould give his own flesh to any beggar who came to him, in order to protect the beggar fromhaving to break the moral law by taking animal life. To test him, Indra, the Hindu king of thegods, took the form of a Brahmin and came to him; the rabbit offered to throw himself into a fire

and roast himself so that the Brahmin could eat him. Indra conjured up a magical fire; when therabbit—who first shook himself three times so that any insects that might be on his body wouldescape death—threw himself into the fire, it turned icy cold. Indra then revealed his identity asIndra, and so that everyone would know of the rabbit’s virtue, he painted the sign of a rabbit onthe orb of the moon. 22 The convoluted logic of the rabbit’s act of self-violence, in hisdetermination to protect anyone else from committing an act of violence against any otheranimal, is a theme that we will often encounter. The rabbit in the moon is one of so many ideasthat Hinduism and Buddhism share.As an approach to the history of Hinduism, seeing both their rabbit and our man in themoon means maintaining an awareness both of what the tradition says (the insider’s view) and ofwhat a very different viewpoint helps us to see (the outsider’s view). Hindus may approach theirscriptures as a part of their piety or as scholars who study Hinduism as they would study anyother human phenomenon, or both simultaneously. j There are certainly things that only a Hinducan know about Hinduism, both factual details of local and private practices and texts and theexperiential quality of these and other, better-known religious phenomena. This is what inspiresinterreligious dialogue, an often interesting and productive conversation between individualswho belong to different religions. k But there are also advantages in a more academic approach,such as a religious studies approach, to which the religion of the scholar in question is irrelevant.I would not go so far as some who would insist that a Hindu is not the person to ask aboutHinduism, as Harvard professor Roman Jakobson notoriously objected to Nabokov’s bid forchairmanship of the Russian literature department: “I do respect very much the elephant, butwould you give him the chair of zoology?” Nor would I go to the other extreme, to insist that aHindu is the only person to ask about Hinduism. For no single Hindu or, for that matter,non-Hindu can know all of the Hinduisms, let alone represent them. So too there are manydifferent ways of being an academic: Some are careful with their research, others sloppy; somemake broad generalizations, while others concentrate on small details.Nowadays most non-Hindu scholars of Hinduism strike the familiar religious studiesyoga posture of leaning over backward, in their attempt to avoid offense to the people they writeabout. But any academic approach to Hinduism, viewing the subject through the eyes of writersfrom Marx and Freud to Foucault and Edward Said, provides a kind of telescope, the viewfinderof context, to supplement the microscope of the insider’s view, which cannot supply the samesort of context. 23 Always there is bias, and the hope is that the biases of Hindus and non-Hinduswill cancel one another out in a well-designed academic study of any aspect of Hinduism. Theancient Persians (according to the Greek historian Herodotus, c. 430 BCE) would debate everyimportant question first drunk, then (on the next day) sober or, as the case may be, first sober,then drunk (1.133). So too, in our scholarly approach, we need to consider the history ofHinduism first from a Hindu viewpoint, then from an academic one. Different sorts of valuableinsights may come to individuals both inside and outside the tradition and need not threaten oneanother. To return to those elephants, you don’t have to be an elephant to study zoology, butzoologists do not injure elephants by writing about them. To change the metaphor and apply itmore specifically to Hindu texts, a story is a flame that burns no less brightly if strangers lighttheir candles from it.To return to my central metaphor, once you’ve seen the rabbit (or hare) in the moon, it’shard to see the man anymore, but the double vision is what we should strive for. This means thatwhen we consider, for instance, the burning of living women on the pyres of their dead husbands(which we call suttee, to distinguish it from the woman who commits the act, a woman whom the

Hindus call a sati), we must try to see their rabbit, to see the reasons why some Hindus thought(and some continue to think) that it is a good idea for some women to burn themselves to deathon their husbands’ funeral pyres, while other Hindus strongly disagree. On the other hand, wecannot, and need not, stop seeing our American man (or, perhaps, woman) in the moon: thereasons why many Americans think that suttee is not a good idea at all. The philosopher LudwigWittgenstein pointed out that the image of a duck-rabbit (also, actually, a duck-hare) was either arather smug rabbit or a rather droopy duck 24 but could not be both at once. l But this is preciselythe goal that a non-Hindu should have in studying Hinduism: to see in the moon both our manand their rabbit.YOU CAN’T MAKE AN OMELET . . .Hindus nowadays are diverse in their attitude to their own diversity, which inspires pridein some, anxiety in others. In particular, it provokes anxiety in those Hindus who are sometimescalled Hindu nationalists, or the Hindu right, or right-wing Hindus, or the Hindutva(“Hinduness”) faction, or, more approximately, Hindu fundamentalists; they are againstMuslims, Christians, and the Wrong Sort of Hindus. Their most powerful political organ is theBJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), with its militant branch, the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh),but they are also involved in groups such as Hindu Human Rights, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, andthe ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad). I will generally refer to them as the Hindutvafaction or the Hindu right. This book is also alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that theytell.There’s a personal story that I should tell about my relationship with this group of Hindushere at the start, in the interest of full disclosure. In the middle of a lecture that I gave in Londonon November 12, 2003, chaired by William Dalrymple, a man threw an egg at me. 25 (He missedhis aim, in every way.) A message that a member of the two-hundred-strong audience posted thenext day on a mailing list Web site referred to a passage I had cited from Valmiki’s Ramayana inwhich Sita, the wife of Rama, accuses her brother-in-law, Lakshmana, of wanting her forhimself. The Web message stated:I was struck by the sexual thrust of her paper on one of our most sacred epics. Who lusted/laidwhom, it was not only Ravan who desired Sita but her brother-in-law Lakshman also. Thenmany other pairings, some I had never heard of, from our other shastras were thrown in to weavea titillating sexual tapestry. What would these clever, “learned” western people be doing for aliving if they did not have our shastras and traditions to nitpick and distort? 26 After a bitmore of this, the writer m added:Her friends and admirers certainly made their applause heard, Muslims among them. In the foyerbefore the lecture I shook hands and asked a Muslim if he had attended the other lectures in theseries and if he was ready for conversion. He said that someone (did he name Vivekananda in thehubbub?) at a similar sort of function had taken off his clothes and asked the audience if theycould tell if he was a Hindu or a Muslim. The deeper political agenda of the author of theposting was betrayed by that second set of remarks, particularly by the gratuitous reference toMuslim conversion, and I am grateful to the unnamed Muslim in this vignette for so aptlyinvoking the wise words of Vivekananda (or, as the case may more probably be, Kabir). Mydefense now, for this book, remains what it was in the news coverage then, about the lecture (andthe egg):The Sanskrit texts [cited in my lecture] were written at a time of glorious sexual openness andinsight, and I have often focused on precisely those parts of the texts. . . .The irony is that I have

praised these texts and translated them in such a way that many people outside the Hindutradition—people who would otherwise go on thinking that Hinduism is nothing but a castesystem that mistreats Untouchables—have come to learn about it and to admire the beauty,complexity and wisdom of the Hindu texts. 27 And, I should have added, the diversity of theHindu texts. To the accusation that I cited a part of the Hindu textual tradition that one Hindu“had never heard of,” my reply is: Yes!, and it’s my intention to go on doing just that. The partsof his own tradition that he objected to are embraced by many other Hindus and are, in any case,historically part of the record. One reason why this book is so long is that I wanted to show howvery much there is of all that the egg faction would deny. And so I intend to go on celebratingthe diversity and pluralism, not to mention the worldly wisdom and sensuality, of the Hindus thatI have loved for about fifty years now and still counting.CHAPTER 1INTRODUCTION: WORKINGWITH AVAILABLE LIGHTSEARCHING FOR THE KEYSomeone saw Nasrudin searching for something on the ground.“What have you lost, Mulla?” he asked. “My key,” said the Mulla. Sothey both went down on their knees and looked for it. After a timethe other man asked: “Where exactly did you drop it?” “In my ownhouse.” “Then why are you looking here?” “There is more light herethan inside my own house.”Idries Shah (1924-96), citing Mulla Nasrudin(thirteenth century CE) 1 This Sufi parable could stand as a cautionary tale for anyonesearching for the keys (let alone the one key) to the history of the Hindus. It suggests that wemay look for our own keys, our own understandings, outside our own houses, our own cultures,beyond the light of the familiar sources. There’s a shortage of what photographers call availablelight to help us find what we are looking for, but in recent years historians have produced studiesthat provide good translations and intelligent interpretations of texts in Sanskrit and other Indianlanguages and pointers to both texts and material evidence that others had not noticed before. Ihave therefore concentrated on those moments that have been illuminated by the many goodscholars whose thick descriptions form an archipelago of stepping-stones on which a historiancan hope to cross the centuries.This book tells the story of Hinduism chronologically and historically and emphasizes thehistory of marginalized rather than mainstream Hindus. My aims have been to demonstrate: (1)that Hindus throughout their long history have been enriched by the contributions of women, thelower castes, and other religions; (2) that although there are a number of things that have beencharacteristic of many Hindus over the ages (the worship of several gods, reincarnation, karma),none has been true of all Hindus, and the shared factors are overwhelmingly outnumbered by thethings that are unique to one group or another; (3) that the greatness of Hinduism—its vitality, itsearthiness, its vividness—lies precisely in many of those idiosyncratic qualities that some Hindustoday are ashamed of and would deny; and (4) that the history of tensions between the variousHinduisms, and between the different sorts of Hindus, undergirds the violence of thecontemporary Indian political and religious scene.History and diversity—let me lay them out one by one.HISTORY: AVAILABLE LIGHT

The first European scholars of India believed that Hindus believed that everything wastimeless, eternal, and unchanging (“There always was a Veda”), and so they didn’t generallyvalue or even notice the ways in which Hindus did in fact recognize change. We now call theirattitude Orientalism (a term coined by Edward Said in 1978, in a book by that name), which wemay define for the moment—we will return to it when we get to the British Raj—as thelove-hate relationship that Europeans had with the Orient for both the right and the wrongreasons—it’s exotic, it’s erotic, it’s spiritual, and it never changes. n Like many of the Indianbranch of Orientalists, Europeans picked up this assumption of timeless, unified Hinduism fromsome Hindus and then reinforced it in other Hindus, 2 many of whom today regard Hinduism astimeless, though they differ on the actual dating of this timelessness, which (like Hindu scholarsof earlier centuries) they tend to put at 10,000 BCE or earlier, while the British generally used toput it much later. The “eternal and unchanging” approach inspired Orientalist philologists totrack back to their earliest lair some concepts that do in fact endure for millennia, but withouttaking into account the important ways in which those concepts changed or the many otheraspects of Hinduism that bear little relationship to them.The so-called central ideas of Hinduism—such as karma, dharma, samsara—arise atparticular moments in Indian history, for particular reasons, and then continue to be alive, whichis to say, to change. They remain central, but what precisely they are and, more important, whatthe people who believe in them are supposed to do about them differ in each era and, within eachera, from gender to gender, caste to caste. And many new ideas arise either to replace or, moreoften, in Hinduism, to supplement or qualify earlier ideas. Some Hindus always knew this verywell. Many Hindu records speak of things that happened suddenly, without precedent (a-purva,“never before”), right here, right now; they are aware of the existence of local dynasties, ofregional gods, of political arrivistes. The Hindu sense of time is intense; the importance of timeas an agency of change, the sense that things that happen in the past come to fruition at aparticular moment—now—pervades the great history (itihasa) called the Mahabharata. Thatsense of history is different from ours, as different as Buddhist enlightenment is from theEuropean Enlightenment (what a difference a capital E makes). But in India, as in Europe,human beings compose texts at some moment in history, which we strive with varying degrees ofsuccess to discover, and those texts continue to develop and to be transformed throughcommentary, interpretation, and translation.Hinduism does not lend itself as easily to a strictly chronological account as do someother religions (particularly the so-called Abrahamic religions or religions of the Book, ormonotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, Islam), which refer more often to specific historical events.Many central texts of Hinduism cannot be reliably dated even within a century. Since earlyBuddhism and Hinduism grew up side by side in the same neighborhood, so to speak, historiansof Hinduism have often ridden piggyback on historians of Buddhism, a religion that has for themost part kept more precise chronological records; the historians of Buddhism figure out wheneverything happened, and the historians of Hinduism say, “Our stuff must have happened aroundthen too.” Historians of early India have also depended on the kindness of strangers, of foreignvisitors to India who left reliably dated (but not always accurately observed) records of theirvisits.The chronological framework is largely imperialistic—dates of inscriptions, battles, theendowment of great religious institutions—because those are the things that the people who hadthe clout to keep records thought was most important. And though we no longer think that kingsare all that matter in history (siding more with D. D. Kosambi, who urged historians to ask not

who was king but who among the people had a plow), kings (more precisely, rajas) do also stillmatter. They are, however, no longer all that we would like to know about. The crucial momentsfor cultural history are not necessarily the great imperial moments, as historians used to thinkthey were, the moments when Alexander dipped his toe into India or the Guptas built theirempire. For some of the richest and most original cultural developments take place when thereisn’t an empire, in the cracks between the great dynastic periods. And although the historicalrecords of inscriptions and coins tell us more about kings (the winners) than about the people(the losers), there are other texts that pay attention to the rest of the populace.When we cannot date events precisely, we can often at least arrange things in a rough butready chronological order, though this leads to a house of cards effect when we are forced toreconsider the date of any text in the series. The periodizations, moreover, may give an oftenfalse suggestion of causation. o We cannot assume, as philologists have often done, that the textsline up like elephants, each holding on to the tail of the elephant in front, that everything in theUpanishads was derived from the Brahmanas just because some Upanishads cite someBrahmanas. We must also ask how the new text was at least in part inspired by the circumstancesof its own time. Why did the Upanishads develop out of the Brahmanas then? What about thestuff that isn’t in the Brahmanas? “Well (the speculation used to go), maybe they got it from theGreeks; it reminds me of Plato. Or perhaps the Axial Age, sixth century BCE and all that? Orhow about this? How about the Indus Valley civilizations? Lots of new ideas must have comefrom there.” Since there is no conclusive evidence for, or against, any of these influences, beforewe look to Greece we must look to India in the time of the Upanishads to find other sorts offactors that might also have influenced their development—new forms of political organization,taxation, changes in the conditions of everyday life.Even an imported idea takes root only if it also responds to something already present inthe importing culture; 3 even if the idea of reincarnation did come from Greece to India, or fromMesopotamia to both Greece and India (hypotheses that are unlikely but not impossible), wewould have to explain why the Indians took up that idea when they did not take up, for instance,Greek ideas about love between men, and then we must note how different the Upanishadsarefrom Plato even in their discussion of ideas that they share, such as reincarnation.Moreover, to the mix of philology and history we must add another factor, individuality.The question of originality is always a puzzle, in part because we can never account forindividual genius; of course ideas don’t arise in a vacuum, nor are they nothing but the sum totalof ideas that came before them. Individuals have ideas, and those ideas are often quite differentfrom the ideas of other people living at the same time and place. This is particularly important tokeep in mind when we search for the voices of marginalized people, who often achieve asindividuals what they cannot achieve as a group. People are not merely the product of a zeitgeist;Shakespeare is not just an Elizabethan writer.In Indian history, individuals have turned the tide of tolerance or violence even againstthe current of the zeitgeist. The emperors Ashoka and Akbar, for example, initiated highlyoriginal programs of religious tolerance, going in the teeth of the practices of their times.Someone with a peculiar, original, individual bent of mind wrote the “There Was Not”(nasadiya) hymn of the Rig Veda, and the story of Long-Tongue the Bitch in the JaiminiyaBrahmana, and the story of Raikva under the cart (one of the earliest homeless people noted inworld literature) in the Upanishads. And these individual innovators in the ancient period did notmerely compose in Sanskrit. They also lurked in the neglected byways of oral traditions,sometimes in the discourses of women and people of the lower classes, as well as in the

oader-based Sanskrit traditions that those local traditions feed. For original ideas are rare bothamong people who have writing and among those that do not. Public individuals too—such asAshoka, Akbar, and Gandhi, on the one hand, Aurangzeb, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, andM. S. Golwalkar, on the other, to take just a few at random—brought about profoundtransformations in Hinduism.The question of flourishing is less puzzling than the question of innovation, and we canoften ask how a particular king (or political movement, or climactic change) helped the horsesacrifice (or the worship of a goddess or anything else) to survive and thrive. Often history canexplain why some ideas take hold and spread while others do not; ideas take root only when theybecome important to people at a particular time, when they hitch on to something that thosepeople care about. An understanding of the social context of the Upanishads, reintroducing theworld into the text, may go a long way to explain not who first thought of the story of Raikva butwhy the Brahmins were willing to include his story in their texts despite the ways in which itchallenged their social order.MYTH, HISTORY, AND SYMBOLISMIn addition to understanding the history of the texts, we need to understand therelationship between records of historical events and the construction of imaginary worlds aswell as the symbolism that often joins them. To begin with the symbolism of physical objects,sometimes a linga is just a linga—or, more often, both a linga and a cigar. Numerous Sanskrittexts and ancient sculptures (such as the Gudimallam linga from the third century BCE) definethis image unequivocally as an iconic representation of the male sexual organ in erection, inparticular as the erect phallus of the god Shiva. So too a verse from the “Garland of Games” ofKshemendra, a Brahmin who lived in Kashmir in the eleventh century, refers to the humancounterpart of the Shiva linga: “Having locked up the house on the pretext of venerating thelinga, Randy scratches her itch with a linga of skin.” 4 The first linga in this verse is certainlyShiva’s, and there is an implied parallelism, if not identity, between it and the second one, whichcould be either a leather dildo or its human prototype, attached to a man. And many Hindus have,like Freud, seen lingas in every naturally occurring elongated object, the so-called self-created(svayambhu) lingas, including objets trouvés such as stalagmites. The linga in this physical senseis well known throughout India, a signifier that is understood across barriers of caste andlanguage, a linga franca, if you will.

The Gudimallam Linga.But other texts treat the linga as an aniconic pillar of light or an abstract symbol of god(the word means simply a “sign,” as smoke is the sign of fire), with no sexual reference. Tosome, the stone lingas “convey an ascetic purity despite their obvious sexual symbolism.” 5 Thereis nothing surprising about this range; some Christians see in the cross a vivid reminder of theagony on Calvary, while others see it as a symbol of their God in the abstract or of Christianityas a religion. But some Hindus who see the linga as an abstract symbol therefore object to theinterpretations of those who view it anthropomorphically; their Christian counterparts would bepeople who refuse to acknowledge that the cross ever referred to the passion of Christ. Visitorsto the Gudimallam linga in the early twenty-first century noted that while the large linga as awhole remains entirely naked, with all its anatomical detail, the small image of a naked man on

the front of the linga was covered with a chaste cloth, wrapped around the whole linga as a kindof total loincloth (or fig leaf) simultaneously covering up the middle of the man in the middle ofthe linga and the middle of the linga itself. Here is a fine example of a tradition driving with onefoot on the brake and the other on the accelerator. We need to be aware of both the literal andsymbolic levels simultaneously, as we see both the rabbit and the man in the moon.Similarly, we have to be careful how we use history and myth to understand one another.In this context I would define a myth as a story that a group of people believe for a long timedespite massive evidence that it is not actually true; the spirit of myth is the spirit of Oz: Pay noattention to the man behind the curtain. When we read a text that says that a Hindu king impaledeight thousand Jainas, we need to use history to understand myth—that is, we need to understandwhy such a text was composed and retold many times; that means knowing the reasons for thetensions between Hindus and Jainas at that time (such as the competition for royal patronage).But we cannot use the myth to reconstruct the actual history behind the text; we cannot say thatthe text is evidence that a Hindu king actually did impale Jainas. To take another example, whenthe Ramayana speaks of ogres (Rakshasas), it may be simultaneously constructing an imaginaryworld in which evil forces take forms that can destroy us and using ogres as a metaphor forparticular types of human beings. But it does not record an actual event, a moment when peoplefrom Ayodhya overcame real people in India (tribals, or Dravidians, or anyone else), nor doesthe story of the building of the causeway to Lanka mean that Rama and a bunch of monkeysactually built a causeway to (Sri) Lanka. Such myths reveal to us the history of sentiments ratherthan events, motivations rather than movements.The history of ideas, even if not a source of “hard” history, is still a very precious thing tohave. For stories, and the ideas in stories, do influence history in the other direction, into thefuture. People who heard or read that story about the impaled Jainas may well have acteddifferently toward Jainas and/or Hindus (better or worse) as a result. More often than not, we donot know precisely what happened in history, but we often know the stories that people tell aboutit. As a character in a Garrison Keillor novel remarks, “There are no answers, only stories.” 6 Insome ways, the stories are not only all that we have access to but all that people at the time, andlater, had access to and hence all that drove the events that followed. Real events and sentimentsproduce symbols, symbols produce real events and sentiments, and real and symbolic levels maybe simultaneously present in a single text. Myth has been called “the smoke of history,” 7 and myintention is to balance the smoke of myth with the fire of historical events, as well as todemonstrate how myths too become fires when they do not merely respond to historical events(as smoke arises from fire) but drive them (as fire gives rise to smoke). Ideas are facts too; thebelief, whether true or false, that the British were greasing cartridges with animal fat started arevolution in India. For we are what we imagine, as much as what we do.DIVERSITYIs there a unique and distinct phenomenon worth naming that covers the religion(s) of thepeople from the Veda (c. 1200 BCE) to the Hare Krishnas in American airports and that tells uswhere Hinduism ends and Buddhism begins? It is useful to distinguish the objection that there isno such thing as Hinduism in the sense of a single unified religion, from the objection that thepeople we call Hindus lack a category, or word, for Hinduism and identify themselves not asHindus but as Indians or as Bengali Vaishnavas (worshipers of Vishnu, living in Bengal). Thatis, we may ask: (1) Is there such a thing as Hinduism?; (2) is that the best thing to call it?; and (3)can we do so even if Hindus didn’t/don’t? These are related but separate questions. Let’s

consider the phenomenon and the name one by one.ARE THERE SUCH THINGS AS HINDUS AND HINDUISM?There are several objections to the use of any single term to denote what, for the sake ofargument, we will call Hindus and Hinduism. pHindus did not develop a strong sense of themselves as members of a distinct religionuntil there were other religions against which they needed to define themselves, like the invisibleman in the Hollywood film who could be seen only when he was wearing clothing that was not apart of him. Until as late as the seventeenth century, many Indian rulers used titles that identifiedthem with a divinity or with their preeminence over other rulers or with their personal qualitiesor with all their subjects, but not merely with the Hindus. Cultures, traditions, and beliefs cutacross religious communities in India, and few people defined themselves exclusively throughtheir religious beliefs or practices; their identities were segmented on the basis of locality,language, caste, occupation, and sect. 8 Only after the British began to define communities bytheir religion, and foreigners in India tended to put people of different religions into differentideological boxes, 9 did many Indians follow suit, ignoring the diversity of their own thoughts andasking themselves which of the boxes they belonged in. 10 Only after the seventeenth century dida ruler use the title Lord of the Hindus (Hindupati). 11Indeed most people in India would still define themselves by allegiances other than theirreligion. 12 The Hindus have not usually viewed themselves as a group, for they are truly arainbow people, with different colors (varnas in Sanskrit, the word that also designates “class”),drawing upon not only a wide range of texts, from the many unwritten traditions and vernacularreligions of unknown origins to Sanskrit texts that begin well before 1000 BCE and are stillbeing composed, but, more important, upon the many ways in which a single text has been readover the centuries, by people of different castes, genders, and individual needs and desires. Andthis intertextuality is balanced by an equally rainbow-hued range of practices, which we mightcall an interpracticality, on the model of intertextuality, practices that refer to other practices.Another objection to regarding Hinduism as a monolithic entity is that it is hard to spellout what “they all” believe or do (even if we exclude from “all” people like Shirley MacLaine).There is no single founder or institution to enforce any single construction of the tradition, to ruleon what is or is not a Hindu idea or to draw the line when someone finally goes too far andtransgresses the unspoken boundaries of reinterpretation. Ideas about all the majorissues—vegetarianism, nonviolence, even caste itself—are subjects of a debate, not a dogma.There is no Hindu canon. The books that Euro-Americans privileged (such as the BhagavadGita) were not always so highly regarded by “all Hindus,” certainly not before theEuro-Americans began to praise them. Other books have been far more important to certaingroups of Hindus but not to others.One answer to this objection is that like other religions—Christianity, Buddhism,Islam—Hinduism encompasses numerous miscellaneous sects. Religions are messy. Butintertextuality (as well as interpracticality) argues for the inclusion of this unruly miscellanyunder the rubric of Hinduism. The fact that later texts and practices often quote earlier ones, rightback to the Rig Veda, allows us to call it a single tradition, even though there are many otherHindu texts and practices that have no connection with any Sanskrit text, let alone the Veda.What literary critics call the anxiety of influence 13 works in the other direction in India. Theindividual artist composing a text or performing a ritual can make innovations, but shedemonstrates first her knowledge of the traditions of the past and only then her ability to build

upon them and even to reverse them. The assumption is that if she thinks she has an originalidea, it means that she has forgotten its source.Moreover, some of the people we now call Hindus did, when they wanted to, for morethan two millennia, find ways to describe themselves as a group, in contrast with Buddhists orMuslims (or particular subsects of Buddhists or Muslims). They called themselves the people ofthe Veda, or the people who revere the Brahmins who are the custodians of the Veda, or thepeople who have four classes and four stages of life (varna-ashrama-dharma, in contrast withBuddhists). Or they called themselves the Aryas (“nobles”), in contrast with the Dasyus or Dasas(“aliens” or “slaves”) or barbarians (mlecchas). The texts called the Brahmanas, in the seventhcentury BCE, define mlecchas as people of unintelligible speech, as does a dharma text of theperiod, which adds that they also eat cow flesh, 14 implying that the Aryas do not. The lawmakerManu too, in the early centuries CE, treats mleccha as a linguistic term, contrasted with Arya(which he correctly regards as a linguistic term) rather than with Dasyu (an ethnic term); thoseoutside the four classes (varnas) are aliens (Dasyus), whether they speak barbarian (mleccha)languages or Arya languages (10.45). A commentator on Manu, named Medhatithi, glossesmleccha with the Sanskrit word barbara, cognate with the Greek barbaroi (“barbarian,”someone who babbles, “barbarbar”). No one ever comments on the religious beliefs or practicesof these people.But religious belief and practice are aspects of Hindu identity that both we and they canand do recognize. Caste, the most important of the allegiances by which the people whom wecall Hindus do identify themselves most often, is closely regulated by religion. Some peoplewould define a Hindu through exclusion, as someone who doesn’t belong to another religion; 15qofficials of the British Raj used the term “Hindu” to characterize all things in India (especiallycultural and religious elements and features found in the cultures and religions of India) thatwere “not Muslim, not Christian, not Jewish, or, hence, not Western.” 16 Taking the opposite tack,the inclusive tack, the Indian Supreme Court, in the Hindu Marriage Act (1955), 17 ruled that anyreference to Hindus shall be construed as including “any person who is a Buddhist, Jaina or Sikhby religion,” as well as “persons professing the Sikh, Jain or Buddhist religion,” a blatantappropriation that most Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists would resent bitterly. r It also defines aHindu as someone who is not a Muslim, Christian, Parsi, or Jew, but who is (in addition to aSikh, Buddhist, or Jaina) one of a rather arbitrary selection of people whose marginality madethe court nervous: “any person who is a Hindu by religion in any of its forms or developments,including a Virashaiva, a Lingayat or a follower of the Brahmo, Prarthana or Arya Samaj.”Significantly, the definition was needed because different religions have different marriage laws;the horror of miscegenation, always lurking in the Brahmin heart of darkness, was exacerbatedby the British legacy within the law code.But in addition to the circularity, mutual contradictions, and blatant chauvinism of the“not a Muslim” definition, such paraphrases list only other religions available in India (theyseldom specify “not a Navajo, not a Confucian”); otherwise the word “Hindu” might simplyhave replaced “gentoo” or “heathen.” The political problems that arise from this geographicalassumption will resurface below when we consider the word, rather than the concept,“Hinduism.”In what seems to me to be something like desperation, a number of people have definedHinduism as the religion of people who cannot or will not define their religion. This view wasonly somewhat sharpened by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (president of India from 1962 to 1967),who defined Hinduism as the belief “that truth was many-sided and different views contained

different aspects of truth which no one could fully express,” which would, I think, make allUnitarians Hindus, or by the militant nationalist B. G. Tilak (1856-1920), who added helpfullythat “recognition of the fact that the means to salvation are diverse; and realization of the truththat the number of gods to be worshipped is large, that indeed is the distinguishing feature ofHindu religion.” 18 The Supreme Court of India in 1966, and again in 1995, codified andreconfirmed these two nondefinitions of Hinduism.In 1966 the Indian Supreme Court was called upon to define Hinduism because theSatsangis or followers of Swaminarayan (1780-1830) claimed that their temples did not fallunder the jurisdiction of certain legislation affecting Hindu temples. They argued that they werenot Hindus, in part because they did not worship any of the traditional Hindu gods; theyworshiped Swaminarayan, who had declared that he was the Supreme God. The court ruledagainst them, citing various European definitions of Hinduism and others, includingRadhakrishnan’s cited above. 19 But the Satsangis had brought their case to the court in order tochallenge the 1948 Bombay Harijan Temple Entry Act, which guaranteed Harijans (Pariahs,Untouchables) access to every Hindu temple; if the Satsangis were not Hindus, this law wouldnot force them to open their doors to Harijans. Thus the legal ruling that defined Hinduism by itstolerance and inclusivism was actually inspired by the desire of certain Hindus to exclude otherHindus from their temples.THE ZEN DIAGRAMIn answer to several of the objections to the word “Hinduism,” some scholars have triedto identify a cluster of qualities each of which is important but not essential to Hinduism; notevery Hindu will believe in, or do, all of them, but each Hindu will adhere to some combinationof them, as a non-Hindu would not. Scholars differ as to the number and nature of those forms, 20and we have seen the attempts of the Indian Supreme Court to come up with an inoffensivecluster, but perhaps we can be a little more specific. The elements from which the clusters areformed might include some combination of belief in the Vedas (which excludes Buddhism andJainism), karma (which does not exclude Buddhism and Jainism), dharma (religion, law, andjustice), a cosmology centered on Mount Meru, devotion (bhakti) to one or more members of anextensive pantheon, the ritual offering (puja) of fruit and flowers to a deity, vegetarianism as anideal (though only between about 25 and 40 percent of Indians are actually vegetarian 21 ),nonviolence, and blood sacrifice (which may or may not be mutually exclusive). This polytheticapproach, which owes much to the concept of family resemblance laid out by the philosopherWittgenstein, 22 could be represented by a Venn diagram, a chart made of intersecting circles. Itmight be grouped into sectors of different colors, one for beliefs or practices that some Hindusshared with Buddhists and Jainas, another largely confined to Hindu texts in Sanskrit, a thirdmore characteristic of popular worship and practice, and so forth. But since there is no singlecentral quality that all Hindus must have, the emptiness in the center, like the still center of astorm, suggests that the figure might better be named a Zen diagram, which is not, as you mightthink, a Venn diagram with just one ring or one that has an empty ring in the center but one thathas no central ring. 23There is therefore no central something to which the peripheral people were peripheral.One person’s center is another’s periphery; 24 all South Asia was just a periphery, for instance, tothose Delhi sultans and Mughal emperors who viewed everything from a Central Asianperspective. We may speak of marginalized people in the sense that they have been dispossessedand exploited, but Hinduism has porous margins and is polycentric. The Brahmins had their

center, which we will refer to as the Brahmin imaginary, but there were other centers too,alternative centers.The configuration of the clusters of Hinduism’s defining characteristics changes throughtime, through space, and through each individual. 25 It is constantly in motion, because it is madeof people, also constantly in motion. Among the many advantages of the cluster approach is thefact that it does not endorse any single authoritative or essentialist view of what Hinduism is; itallows them all. Any single version of this polythetic polytheism (which is also a monotheism, amonism, and a pantheism), including this one, is no better than a strobe photograph of achameleon, a series of frozen images giving a falsely continuous impression of something that isin fact constantly changing. Like the man who proudly displayed a roomful of archery targets,each with an arrow in the bull’s-eye, but was forced to confess that he had shot the arrows firstand then had drawn the targets around them, we can decide what aspects of Hinduism we want totalk about and find the cluster of qualities in which that aspect is embodied—and, if we wish,call it Hinduism. Or backing off ever so slightly, we can speak of beliefs and practices that manyHindus share, which is what I intend to do.It is often convenient to speak of a Brahmin-oriented quasi-orthodoxy (ororthopraxy—see below), which we might call the Brahmin imaginary or the idealized system ofclass and life stage (varna-ashrama-dharma). But whatever we call this constructed center, it is,like the empty center in the Zen diagram of Hinduisms, simply an imaginary point around whichwe orient all the actual Hindus who accept or oppose it; it is what Indian logicians call the strawman (purva paksha), against whom one argues. The actual beliefs and practices ofHindus—renunciation, devotion, sacrifice, and so many more—are peripheries that theimaginary Brahmin center cannot hold.HINDUS AND HINDUISM BY ANY OTHER NAMES 26If we can agree that there is something out there worth naming, what shall we call it? Themain objections to calling it Hinduism or to calling the people in question Hindus are that thosewere not always the names that Hindus used for themselves or their religion and that they aregeographical names. Let us consider these two objections.Most of the people we call Hindus call themselves something else, like GolkondaVyaparis, 27 or, on the rarer occasions when they do regard themselves as a group, refer tothemselves not as Hindus but as people with the sorts of definitions that we have just considered(Aryas, people who revere the Veda, who follow the system of class and stage of life, and soforth). Moreover, “Hindu” is not a native word but comes from a word for the “river” (sindhu)that Herodotus (in the fifth century BCE 28 ), the Persians (in the fourth century BCE), and theArabs (after the eighth century CE 29 ) used to refer to everyone who lived beyond the great riverof the northwest of the subcontinent, still known locally as the Sindhu and in Europe as theIndus. James Joyce, in his novel Finnegans Wake, in 1939, punned on the word “Hindoo” (as theBritish used to spell it), joking that it came from the names of two Irishmen, Hin-nessy andDoo-ley: “This is the hindoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy.” 30 EvenJoyce knew that the word was not native to India. It was an outsider’s name for the people whoinhabited the territory around the Indus River, which the Persians called Hindustan, 31 as did theMughal emperor Babur in his memoirs in the sixteenth century CE: “Most of the people inHindustan are infidels whom the people of India call Hindu. Most Hindus believe inreincarnation.” 32 It is noteworthy both that Babur singles out reincarnation for the defining beliefof Hinduism (one of the circles in our Zen diagram) and that he does not ascribe this belief to all

Hindus (implicitly acknowledging their diversity). “Hindu” has, however, been an insider’s wordtoo for centuries, and it is the word that most Hindus do use now to refer to themselves. And it isnot uncommon for one culture to take from another a word to designate a concept for which theoriginal culture had a concept but not a word.That the word has a geographical basis is, as we have seen, absolutely true. But it is notjust the word but the very concept of Hindus and Hinduism that is geographically rooted inhistory. The textbook of legal code (dharma) attributed to Manu (first century CE) does not usethe word “Hindu” but does offer a geographical definition of the people to whom his dharmaapplies (a definition that, it is worth noting, uses animals to define humans):From the eastern sea to the western sea [the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal], the area inbetween the two mountains [the Himalayas and the Vindhyas] is what wise men call the Land ofthe Aryas. Where the black antelope ranges by nature, that should be known as the country fit forsacrifices; and beyond it is the country of the barbarians. The twice-born [the upper classes andparticularly Brahmins] should make every effort to settle in these countries [2.23-24]. Muchhas happened since the time when one could define India as the land where the (deer and the)antelope play from sea to shining sea (eastern to western). The belief that all Hindus (should)live in India may have been strong once, though more honored in the breach than in theobservance. The Hindus are, after all, one of the great merchant civilizations of the world, andthe diaspora is very old indeed. Even Manu merely expresses the pious hope that the upperclasses “make every effort” to stay within the boundary lines. Granted, many Hindus did sufferloss of caste status when they headed west across the Indus (particularly under the British Raj).Nevertheless, Hindus spread first through Southeast Asia and later through the British Empire,and they now live all over the world; there are approximately one and a half million Hindus inthe United States, some 0.5 percent of the population.So it has been said for much of Indian history that ideally, all Hindus should live in India.But the corresponding implication, that everyone in India is (or should be) a Hindu, was nevertrue, not true during the millennia of cultures before either the Indus Valley or the Vedas, nottrue of most of India even after those early settlements of North India, and certainly never trueafter the rise of Buddhism in the fifth century CE. Nowadays there are still enough Muslims inIndia—15 percent of the population, almost as many Muslims as in Pakistan 33 —to make Indiaone of the most populous Muslim nations in the world, and Muslim input into Indian culture isfar more extensive than the mere numbers would imply. Yet Hindu nationalists have used thegeographical implications of the word to equate Hinduism with India and therefore to excludefrom the right to thrive in India such people as Muslims and Christians; in 1922, V. D. Savarkarcoined the term “Hindutva” to express this equation. But not everyone who uses the word“Hinduism” can be assumed to be in their camp, an assumption that would reduce an intellectualproblem to a political problem and a move that we need not make. When we use the word, wecan, like Humpty Dumpty, pay it extra, in this case to mean not “the people of India” but theintersecting clusters of Hinduisms outlined above.What’s in a name? We might take a page from Prince and call it “the religion formerlyknown as Hinduism” or “Hinduism après la lettre.” Despite the many strikes against the word“Hinduism,” Hinduism by any other name would be just as impossible to categorize, and it isstill useful to employ some word for it. We cannot insist that Hindus rethink the name they wantto use for their tradition (as they have renamed not only streets in cities but whole cities, likeMadras/Chennai, Bombay/Mumbai, and Calcutta/Kolkata), no matter how recent or troubled thename may be. 34 “Hinduism” is, in any case, the only poker game in town right now; s it is by far

my adult life in the paddy fields of Sanskrit, and since I know ancient India best, I’ve lingered inthe past in this book longer than an anthropologist might have done, and even when dealing withthe present, I have focused on elements that resonate with the past, so that the book is drivenfrom the past, back-wheel-powered. 37 I have also, for most of the same reasons, inclined moretoward written, more precisely ancient Sanskrit traditions than oral and vernacular andcontemporary ones. But this book is, when all is said and done, and despite my acknowledgmentof the baleful influence of text-oriented scholarship, a defense of the richness of texts as thesource of information about the sorts of things that some people nowadays assume you neednontextual sources for: women, the lower classes, the way people actually lived.WOMENWomen are sometimes said to have been excluded from the ancient Indian texts andtherefore to have left no trace, history having been written by the winners, the men. But in factwomen made significant contributions to the texts, both as the (usually unacknowledged) sourcesof many ancient as well as contemporary narratives and as the inspiration for many more. SomeHindu women did read and write, forging the crucial links between vernacular languages andSanskrit. Women were forbidden to study the most ancient sacred text, the Veda, but the wives,whose presence was required at Vedic rituals, both heard and spoke Vedic verses, 38 and theymay well have had wider access to other Sanskrit texts. Later, in the second or third century CE,the Kama-sutra tells us not only that women had such access but even that they sometimescommissioned such texts to be written (1.3). Women in Sanskrit plays generally speak onlydialects (Prakrits), while men speak only Sanskrit, but since the men and women conversetogether, generally without translators, the women must understand the men’s Sanskrit, and themen the women’s dialects. Moreover, some women in plays both speak and write Sanskrit, andsome men speak in dialects, t trampling on what is left of the convention. It is a basic principle ofone school of Indian logic that something can be prohibited only if its occurrence is possible. 39The fact that the texts keep shouting that women should not read Vedic texts suggests thatwomen were quite capable of doing so and probably did so whenever the pandits weren’tlooking. Women as a group have always been oppressed in India (as elsewhere), but individualwomen have always succeeded in making their mark despite the obstacles.We can also look for the implied author 40 and identify in men’s texts the sorts of thingsthat a woman might have said. 41 Within the Sanskrit texts, women express views of matters asbasic as karma in terms quite different from those of men, and these views become even moreprominent when women compose their own tales. 42 There is an “ironic” presence of women inthe Mahabharata, “perhaps beyond earshot, but definitely heard,” and their physical absencemay lend a kind of invisible luster to the highly visible women in that text. 43 The Kama-sutra, inits instructions to the would-be adulterer, presents a strong protofeminist view of what womenhave to put up with at the hands of inadequate husbands (5.1). Such texts at least keep women inthe picture, however biased a picture that may be, until they do finally get to speak as namedauthors, much later.Of course, excavating women’s voices in male texts must always be qualified by therealization that there may be ventriloquism, misreporting of women, and false consciousness; themale author of the Kama-sutra may have sympathy for women but not true empathy; his interestin their thoughts is exploitative, though no less accurate for all that. But ventriloquism is atwo-way street; there is also a ventriloquism of women’s voices in male minds. For even when amale Brahmin hand actually held the pen, as was usually the case no matter what the subject

matter was, women’s ideas may have gotten into his head. We can never know for sure when weare hearing the voices of women in men’s texts, but we can often ferret out (to use an animalmetaphor) tracks, what the Hindus call “perfumes” (vasanas), that women have left in theliterature. A hermeneutic of suspicion, questioning the expressed motivations of the author, istherefore required, but it is still worth reading between the lines, even making the texts talk aboutthings they don’t want to talk about. Moreover, texts are not our only source of knowledge ofthis period; women also left marks, perfumes, that we can find in art and archaeology. We cantry to resurrect the women actors in Hindu history through a combination of references to them,both unsympathetic (to see what they had to put up with from some men) and sympathetic (toshow that other men did treat them humanely), and moments when we can hear women’s ownvoices getting into the texts and, more rarely, discover actual female authorship.FROM DOG COOKERS TO DALITSBrahmins may have had a monopoly on liturgical Sanskrit for the performance of certainpublic rites, but even then the sacrificer uttered some of the ritual words and performed thedomestic rites. And the sacrificer need not have been a Brahmin, a member of the highest class;the other two twice-born social classes—warriors/rulers (Kshatriyas) and, below them,merchants, farmers and herders (Vaishyas)—were also initiated and therefore could besacrificers. The three upper classes were called twice born because of the second birth throughthe ritual of initiation (the ancient Indian equivalent of becoming born again), in which a manwas born (again) as a fully developed member of the community. u The lowest of the fourclasses, the servants (Shudras), were excluded from these and many other aspects of religiouslife, but the exclusion of Shudras doesn’t automatically make something “Brahminical.”There have been countless terms coined to designate the lowest castes, the dispossessedor underprivileged or marginalized groups, including the tribal peoples. These are the people thatSanskrit texts named by specific castes (Chandala,Chamara, Pulkasa, etc.) or called Low andExcluded (Apasadas) or Born Last (or Worst, Antyajas) or Dog Cookers (Shva-Pakas v ), becausecaste Hindus thought that these people ate dogs, who in turn ate anything and everything, and inHinduism, you are what you eat. Much later the British called them Untouchables, the CriminalCastes, the Scheduled (they pronounced it SHED-YULED) Castes, Pariahs (a Tamil word thathas found its way into English), the Depressed Classes, and Outcastes. Gandhi called themHarijans (“the People of God”). The members of these castes (beginning in the 1930s and 1940sand continuing now) called themselves Dalits (using the Marathi/Hindi word for “oppressed” or“broken” to translate the British “Depressed”). B. R. Ambedkar (in the 1950s), himself a Dalit,tried, with partial success, to convert some of them to Buddhism. Postcolonial scholars call them(and other low castes) Subalterns. Another important group of oppressed peoples is constitutedby the Adivasis (“original inhabitants”), the so-called tribal peoples of India, on the margins bothgeographically and ideologically, sometimes constituting a low caste (such as the Nishadas),sometimes remaining outside the caste system altogether.It is important to distinguish among Dalits and Adivasis and Shudras, all of whom havevery different relationships with upper-caste Hindus, though many Sanskrit texts confuse them.So too, the Backward Castes, a sneering name that the British once gave to the excluded castes ingeneral, are now regarded as castes separate from, and occasionally in conflict with, certain otherDalit castes; the Glossary of Human Rights Watch defines Backward Castes as “those whoseritual rank and occupational status are above ‘untouchables’ but who themselves remain sociallyand economically depressed. Also referred to as Other Backward Classes (OBCs) or Shudras,”

though in actual practice the OBCs often distinguish themselves from both Dalits and Shudras.All these groups are alike only in being treated very badly by the upper castes; precisely howthey are treated, and what they do about it, differs greatly from group to group. All in all, whenwe refer to all the disenfranchised castes below the three upper classes known as twice born, it isconvenient to designate them by the catchall term of Pariahs (a Tamil word—for the caste thatbeat leather-topped drums—that finds its way into English) up until the twentieth century andthen to call them Dalits.But whatever we choose to call them, the excluded castes play an important role in thehistory of the Hindus. Thanks to the Subaltern studies movement, there is a lot more availablelight for Dalits, particularly in the modern period (from the time of the British); this book aims tocontribute to that movement by including more information about Dalits in the ancient period.There have been protests against the mistreatment of the lower castes from a very early age inIndia, though such protests generally took the form of renouncing caste society and forming analternative society in which caste was ignored; no actual reforms took place until the nineteenthcentury and then with only limited success. Much of what I have said about women also appliesto Pariahs, and vice versa; Brahmin ventriloquism functions similarly to male ventriloquism, andthe lower castes, like women, leave their “perfumes” in upper-caste literature. The positiveattitudes to Pariahs in such texts represent a beginning, a prelude to reform; they change theworld, even if only by imagining a world in which people treated women or Pariahs better.The Brahmins did produce a great literature, after all, but they did not compose it in avacuum. They did not have complete authority or control the minds of everyone in India. Theydrew upon, on the one hand, the people who ran the country, political actors (generally Brahminsand kings, but also merchants) and, on the other hand, the nonliterate classes. Because of thepresence of oral and folk traditions in Sanskrit texts, as well as non-Hindu traditions such asBuddhism and Jainism, Dog Cookers do speak, w not always in voices recorded on a page but insigns that we can read if we try.For the ancient period, it’s often harder to find out who had a plow than to find out, frominscriptions, who endowed what temple. Some people today argue that the Brahmins erasedmuch of the low-caste contribution to Indian culture—erased even their presence in it at all.Certainly the Sanskrit texts stated that the lower castes would pollute any sacred text that theyspoke or read, as a bag made of the skin of a dog pollutes milk put into it. 44 But this probablyapplied only to a limited corpus of texts, Vedic texts, rather than Sanskrit in general. The factthat a sage is punished for teaching the Vedas to the horse-headed gods called the Ashvins, whoassociate with the class of farmers and herdmen, should alert us to the possibility that teachingthe Vedas to the wrong sorts of people might also be a rule honored at least sometimes in thebreach as well as in the observance. And we can, as with women’s voices, ferret out voices ofmany castes in the ancient texts, and once we have access to the oral and folk traditions, we canbegin to write the alternative narrative with more confidence.ANIMALS: HORSES, DOGS, AND COWSAS POWER, POLLUTION, AND PURITYAnimals—primarily not only dogs, horses, and cows, but also monkeys, snakes,elephants, tigers, lions, cats, and herons—play important roles in the Hindu religious imaginary,both as actual living creatures and as the key to important shifts in attitudes to different socialclasses. Yogic postures (asanas) and sexual positions, as well as theological schools, are namedafter animals. Gods become incarnate as animals and have animal vehicles in the human world.

The process works in opposite directions at once. On the one hand, the observation of the localfauna provides images with which people may think of their gods; whether or not people get thegods that they deserve, they tend to get the gods (and demons) that their animals deserve—godsinspired by the perceived qualities of the animals. On the other hand, the ideas that people haveabout the nature of the gods, and of the world, and of themselves will lead them to project ontoanimals certain anthropomorphic features that may seem entirely erroneous to someone fromanother culture observing the same animal. And knowing what animals, real live animals,actually appeared in the material culture at a particular time and place helps us place aspects ofthat culture geographically and sometimes chronologically. Thus animals appear both as objects,in texts about the control of violence against living creatures (killing, eating), and as subjects, intexts where they symbolize people of different classes. Clearly the two—the animals of theterrain and the animals of the mind—are intimately connected, and both are essential to ourunderstanding of Hinduism. If the motto of Watergate was “Follow the money,” the motto of thehistory of Hinduism could well be “Follow the monkey.” Or, more often, “Follow the horse.”Three animals—horses, dogs, and cows—are particularly charismatic players in thedrama of Hinduism. The mythological texts use them to symbolize power, pollution, and purity,respectively, and link them to three classes of classical Hindu society: Kshatriyas or rulers,particularly foreign rulers (horses), the lower classes (dogs), and Brahmins (cows). x Horses anddogs function in our narrative as marginalized groups on both ends of the social spectrum(foreigners and Pariahs), y while cows are the focus of the ongoing debate about vegetarianism.These three animals pair up first with one and then with another in a complex symbolic dance.Horses and cows provide mirror images of each other’s genders. The cow (f.) is the defininggender for the bovine species and the symbol of the good human female (maternal, docile); thenegative contrast is provided not by bulls and steers, who have a rather ambivalent status(Shiva’s bull, Nandi, is generally docile and benign), but by male buffalo, who have taken overthis spot in the paradigm and symbolize evil in both myth and ritual, as well as being oftenassociated with Pariahs. By contrast, the stallion (m.) is the defining gender for equines, maresgenerally being the symbol of the evil female (oversexed, violent, and Fatally Attractive). 45Cows and horses can also represent religious contrasts; the Hindu cow and the Muslim horseoften appear together on chromolithographs.Because horses are not native to India and do not thrive there, they must constantly beimported, generally from western and Central Asia. 46 The reasons for this still prevail: climateand pasture. 47 The violent contrast between the hot season and the monsoon makes the soilricochet between swampy in one season and hard, parched, and cracked in another. The grazingseason lasts only from September to May, and even then the grasses are spare and not good forfodder. Moreover, since the best soil is mostly reserved for the cultivation of grains andvegetables to feed a large and largely vegetarian population, there is relatively little room forhorses even in those places where more nutritious fodder grasses are found (such as the easternextensions of the arid zone in the north and northwest of India, particularly in Rajasthan, wherehorses have in fact been bred successfully for centuries). There is therefore no extensivepasturage, and horses are stabled as soon as they are weaned, unable to exercise or developstrength and fitness. Here, as elsewhere, wherever conditions are poor for breeding, “a regularinjection of suitable horses is vital for the upkeep and improvement of the breed,” to keep it fromdegenerating. 48It is therefore part of the very structure of history that India has always had to importhorses, 49 which became prized animals, used only in elite royal or military circles. And so the

horse is always the foreigner in India, the invader and conqueror, and the history of the horse inIndia is the history of those who came to India and took power. There is still a Hindi saying thatmight be translated, “Stay away from the fore of an officer and the aft of a horse” or “Don’t getin front of an officer or behind a horse.” It dates from a time when petty officials, especiallypolice, revenue collectors, and record keepers, were mounted and everyone else was not. Thesehorsemen were high-handed (“ . . . on your high horse”) and cruel, people whom it was as wiseto avoid as it was to keep out of the range of those back hooves.The horse stands as the symbol of the power and aristocracy of the Kshatriyas, the royalwarrior class; the horse is the key to major disputes, from the wager about the color of a horse’stail made by the mother of snakes and the mother of birds in the Mahabharata (1.17-23) (anearly instance of gambling on horses), to heated arguments by contemporary historians about theseemingly trivial question of whether Aryan horses galloped or ambled into the Indus Valley orthe Punjab, more than three thousand years ago. Horses continued to be idealized in religion andart, in stark contrast with the broken-down nags that one more often actually encounters in thestreets of Indian cities. Under the influence of the Arab and Turkish preference for mares overstallions, the Hindu bias in favor of stallions and against mares gave way to an entire Hindu epicliterature that idealized not stallions but mares. Finally, horses are also metaphors for the sensesthat must be harnessed, yoked through some sort of spiritual and physical discipline such as yoga(a word whose basic meaning is “to yoke,” as in “to yoke horses to a chariot”).The cow’s purity is fiercely protected by Brahmins and is at the heart of often hotlycontested attitudes to food in the history of Hinduism. In the Vedic period, people ate cattle(usually bulls or bullocks or castrated bulls), as they ate all other male sacrificial animals (withthe exception of the horse, which was not eaten). But though the Vedic people also occasionallyate cows (the female of the species), cows soon became, for most Hindus, cultural symbols ofnon-violence and generosity, through the natural metaphor of milking; unlike most animals (butlike other lactating female mammals—mares, female camels, buffalo cows, nanny goats), cowscan feed you without dying. Cows therefore are, from the earliest texts to the present moment,the object of heated debates about vegetarianism.At the other end of the animal spectrum are dogs. For caste-minded Hindus, dogs (notsignificantly gendered like horses and cows) are as unclean as pigs are to Orthodox Jews andMuslims, therefore symbols of the oppressed lowest castes, of the people at the very bottom ofhuman society, indeed outside it, the sorts of people that we call underdogs and Sanskrit authorssometimes called dog cookers. z Dogs are also associated with the Adivasis, the so-called tribalpeoples of India. Animal keepers, leatherworkers, people who touch human waste are oftenreferred to as pigs and dogs. aa The ancient Indian textbook of political science, the Artha-shastra,even suspects dogs of espionage; the author warns the king not to discuss secrets when dogs ormynah birds are present (1.15.4). The mynah bird of course could talk, but the dog? Would hereveal secrets by wagging his tail? (He might recognize a secret agent and blow his cover by notbarking in the night.) ab But texts covertly critical of the caste system reverse the symbolism andspeak of breaking the rules for dogs, treating them as if they were not impure. The dog whodoesn’t bark is about a silence that speaks; it is a good metaphor for the Pariah voice, the dog’svoice, that we can sometimes hear only when it does not speak.The shifting tracks of these animals form a trail of continuity within the diversity ofalternative Hinduisms.PLURALISM AND TOLERANCE 50

The proliferation of polythetic polytheisms may pose problems for the definition ofHinduism, but they are its glory as a cultural phenomenon. Pluralism and diversity are deeplyingrained in polylithic Hinduism, the Ellis Island of religions; the lines between different beliefsand practices are permeable membranes. Not only can we see the Hindu traditions as dividedamong themselves on many central issues throughout history, but we can see what the argumentswere on each point, often far more than two views on major questions. The texts wrestle withcompeting truths, rather than offer pat answers.One sort of pluralism that has always prevailed in India is what I would call eclecticpluralism, or internal or individual pluralism, a kind of cognitive dissonance, 51 in which oneperson holds a toolbox of different beliefs more or less simultaneously, drawing upon one on oneoccasion, another on another. 52 Multiple narratives coexist peacefully, sometimes in one openmind and sometimes in a group of people whose minds may be, individually, relatively closed. acA pivotal example of such individual pluralism can be found in the law text of Manu, whichargues, within a single chapter, passionately against and then firmly for the eating of meat(5.26-56). Or as E. M. Forster once put it, “Every Indian hole has at least two exits.” 53 When itcomes to ritual too, an individual Hindu may worship several different gods on differentoccasions, to satisfy different needs, on different festival days, in fellowship with differentmembers of the family (a bride will often bring into the home a religion different from that of herhusband’s), or as a matter of choice as new gods are encountered.The compound structure of Sanskrit and the fact that most words have several meanings(it used to be said that every Sanskrit word means itself, its opposite, a name of god, and aposition in sexual intercourse ad ) enabled poets to construct long poems that told two entirelydifferent stories at the same time and shorter poems that had multiple meanings, depending onhow you divided up the compounds and chose among the various connotations of each word.This poetry, rich in metaphors, could itself stand as a metaphor for the Hindu approach tomultivalence.Eclectic pluralism between religions is more cautious, but it has allowed many anindividual, such as a Hindu who worships at a Sufi shrine, to embrace one tradition in such a wayas to make possible, if not full engagement with other faiths, at least full appreciation and evenadmiration of their wisdom and power. 54 The sorts of permeable membranes that marked onesort of Hinduism from another also marked Hinduism from other religions; the dialogues wereboth intrareligious and interreligious. Hinduism interacted creatively with, first, Buddhism andJainism, then Judaism and Christianity, then Islam and Sikhism, as well as with tribal religionsand other imports (such as Zoroastrianism). The interactions were sometimes conscious andsometimes unconscious, sometimes appreciative borrowings and sometimes violent butproductive antagonisms (as we will see, for instance, in the sometimes positive and sometimesnegative attitudes toward the story of Vishnu’s incarnation as the Buddha). In Rohinton Mistry’snovel Such a Long Journey, there is a wall in Bombay/Mumbai that the neighborhood menpersist in peeing and defecating against, creating a stench and a nuisance of flies. The protagonistof the novel hires an artist to paint images of all the religions of the world on the wall, amultireligious polytheistic dialogue of gods and mosques (respecting the Muslim rule againstrepresenting figures), so that no one, of any religion, will foul the wall. 55 (It works, for a while,until the city knocks down the wall to widen the road.) This seems to me to be a fine metaphorfor both the hopes and the frailty of interreligious dialogue in India.Hindus, Jainas, and Buddhists all told their own versions of some of the same stories.Hindus and Buddhists (and others) in the early period shared ideas so freely that it is impossible

to say whether some of the central tenets of each tradition came from one or the other; often twoHindu versions of the same story, composed in different centuries, have less in common than doa Hindu and a Buddhist version of the same story. The stories change to fit different historicalcontexts, and often one can date one telling later than another (the language is different, itmentions a later king, and so forth), but where it comes from, and when, nobody knows. Many ofthe same religious images too were used by Buddhists and Jainas as well as Hindus. 56 To this dayHindus and Christians, or Hindus and Muslims, often worship the same figure under differentnames; Satya Pir, for instance, is a Muslim holy man (pir) who had come, by the eighteenthcentury, to be identified with a form of the Hindu god Vishnu (Satya Narayana). 57The great Indian poet and saint Kabir, who self-consciously rejected both Hinduism andIslam, nevertheless built his own religious world out of what he would have regarded as the ruinsof Hinduism and Islam, as did many of the great Sufi saints, at whose shrines many Hinduscontinue to worship. Building a shrine on the site where a shrine of another tradition used tostand is thus both a metaphor of appreciation and an act of appropriation in India, unhindered byany anxiety of influence.This open-mindedness was supported by the tendency of Hindus to be more orthopraxthan orthodox. That is, most Hindus have not cared about straight opinions (ortho-doxy) nearlyso much as they care about straight behavior (ortho-praxy). Although there is a very wide varietyof codes of action, each community has a pretty clear sense of what should and shouldn’t bedone, and some things were Simply Not Done. People have been killed in India because they didor did not sacrifice animals, or had sex with the wrong women, or disregarded the Vedas, or evenmade use of the wrong sacred texts, but no one was impaled (the Hindu equivalent of burning atthe stake) for saying that god was like this rather than like that. Each sect acknowledged theexistence of gods other than their god(s), suitable for others to worship, though they might notcare to worship them themselves.Hindus might therefore best be called polydox. 58 Yet renouncers, certain monists, andsome of the bhakti sects tended to be more orthodox than orthoprax, and those movements thatchallenge Brahmins, the Veda, and the values of class and caste are generally called heterodox,or even heretical (pashanda or pakhanda). 59 The Hindu concept of heresy was thus applied tosome people within the Hindu fold, though more often to Buddhists and Jainas.HYBRIDITY AND MULTIPLICITYThe “solitarist” approach to human identity sees human beings as members of exactlyone group, in contrast with the multiple view that sees individuals as belonging to severaldifferent groups at once. Visualize our friend the intra-Hinduism Venn/Zen diagram, now in aninterreligious guise. The multiple view is both more appropriate and more helpful for peoplecaught up in the confrontation of communities, such as Hindu and Muslim in India. 60People sometimes make a further distinction between multiplicity and hybridity.Multiplicity implies a combination in which the contributing elements are theoreticallyunchanged even when mixed. Hinduism in this sense of multiplicity is perceived to haveelements that a Muslim would recognize as Muslim, a Buddhist would recognize as Buddhist,and so forth. An example of religious multiplicity in an individual: On Sunday you go to churchand attend a basic Catholic mass much as you would experience it in many (though certainly notall) churches in another city or another country, mutatis mutandis, and on Tuesday you go to aHindu temple and assist at a ceremony of killing a goat, much as you would experience it inmany (though certainly not all) Hindu temples in another city or another country, mutatis

mutandis. Hybridity, by contrast, implies fusion. An example of religious hybridity in anindividual: On Monday you attend the same sort of basic Catholic mass, but in place of theEucharist you kill a goat, or you attend the same sort of basic Hindu puja but the goddess towhom you pray is Mary, the mother of Jesus, with all her epithets and physical characteristics.The Oxford English Dictionary defines “hybrid” as “anything derived from heterogeneoussources, or composed of different or incongruous elements,” which, when applied to acommunity, leaves conveniently open the question of whether those elements remain unchanged.The OED definition applies to individuals rather than communities: “the offspring of twoanimals or plants of different species, or (less strictly) varieties.”Both hybridity and multiplicity can be applied to both communities and individuals. Thetrouble with both multiplicity and hybridity (as well as syncretism) lies in the assumption that thecombinatory elements are separate essences that exist in a pure form before the mix takes placeand that the combination either does (for hybrids) or does not (for multiplicities) change them insome way. But there are seldom any pure categories in any human situation, certainly not by themoment when history first catches up with them. Long before 2000 BCE, the Indus ValleyCivilization was already a mix of cultures, as was Vedic culture at that time, and eventually thetwo mixes mixed together, and mixed with other mixes. Hybridity defies binary oppositions andunderstands reality as a fluid rather than a series of solid, separate boxes.Hyphens can be read as multiple or as hybrid. The hybrid, hyphenated word“Anglo-Indian” confusingly denotes two opposite sorts of people: The OED defines“Anglo-Indian” as “a person of British birth resident, or once resident, in India,” or “a Eurasianof India,”which is to say either a privileged Englishman ruling “Inja” or a hybrid, anunderprivileged person whom the British regarded as the lowest of all castes, a mixed breed.Hybridity, traditionally, has had the additional disadvantage of carrying a largelynegative attitude to the mixing of categories, an attitude that we now regard as reactionary. Thusthe hybrid has been despised as a hodgepodge, a mix in which both (or all) of the contributingelements are modified; the OED adds, gratuitously, to its definition the phrase, “a half-breed,cross-breed, or mongrel,” the racist overtones of its definition echoing the Hindu fear of themixture of social classes (varna-samkara). But nowadays both postcolonial and postmodernthinkers prefer hybrids, define “hybrid” more positively, and indeed argue that we all arehybrids, 61 all always mixed and mixing. 62The Parsis (“Persians”—i.e., Zoroastrians) in several communities in India tell a positivestory about social hybridity. They say that when the Parsis landed in India, the local Hindu rajasent them a full glass of milk, suggesting that the town was full. The Parsi leader added sugarand returned the glass, indicating that his people could mix among the Arabs and Hindus likesugar in milk, sweetening it but not overrunning it. 63 The metaphor of sugar in milk ae suggeststhe extreme ideal of communal integration, in which individuals change the community bymelting into it, flavoring it as a whole with their qualities (Zoroastrianism, or sweetness). TheParsis did not in fact dissolve into Islam and Hinduism; they remained Parsis and indeed wereoften caught in the crossfire during the riots that followed the Partition of India and Pakistan in1947. This seems to me the more accurate way to view such cultural mixes: as a suspension ofdiscrete particles rather than a melting pot.Despite their shortcomings, the concepts of hybridity and multiplicity are useful, if usedwith care. The phenomenon is basically the same in either case; it’s just a matter of points ofview, and it doesn’t really matter whether you call it multiple or hybrid (or even syncretic). Whatdoes matter is how you evaluate the fused mix. Whatever word you use for it, I think it applies to

Hinduism, and I think it is a Good Thing. af I once (in a very different context) characterizedHindu mythology as a pendulum of extremes that are never resolved and that are also constantlyin motion: “By refusing to modify its component elements in order to force them into asynthesis, Indian mythology celebrates the idea that the universe is boundlessly various, thateverything occurs simultaneously, that all possibilities may exist without excluding each other . .. [that] untrammeled variety and contradiction are ethically and metaphysically necessary.” 64Keeping both extreme swings of the pendulum in mind simultaneously means realizingthat an individual actor in the drama of the history of the Hindus may regard herself as a fusedhybrid of Muslim and Hindu or as a fused multiple, fully Muslim in some ways and fully Hinduin others, as many Indians have been, throughout history. In either case, there would be noperfectly pure category of Muslim or Hindu anywhere along the line of fusion. Such a personmight worship at a Hindu temple on certain days and at a Sufi shrine on others, might read boththe Upanishads and the Qu’ran for spiritual guidance, and would celebrate both the great Muslimholy days and the great Hindu festivals.I would therefore argue for the recognition of the simultaneous presence of a number ofpairs of opposites, throughout the history of the Hindus, the both/and view of community. Thehistoriographic pendulum of reconciliation, never resting at the swing either to one side or theother, forces us to acknowledge the existence, perhaps even the authenticity, of the two extremesof various ideas, and also their falseness, as well as the fact that there is no pure moment at eitherend of the swing, and leave it at that. With apologies to Buddhism, there is no middle way here.Or rather, the middle way has got to take its place alongside all the other, more extreme ways inthe Zen diagram.CHAPTER 2TIME AND SPACE IN INDIA50 Million to 50,000 BCETHE BIRTH OF INDIAThe Ganges, though flowing from the foot of Vishnu and throughSiva’s hair, is not an ancient stream. Geology, looking further thanreligion, knows of a time when neither the river nor the Himalayasthat nourished it existed, and an ocean flowed over the holy places ofHindustan. The mountains rose, their debris silted up the ocean, thegods took their seats on them and contrived the river, and the Indiawe call immemorial came into being.—E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924) 1 TIMEORIGINS: OUT OF AFRICATo begin at the beginning:Once upon a time, about 50 million years ago, ag a triangular plate of land, moving fast(for a continent), broke off from Madagascar (a large island lying off the southeastern coast ofAfrica) and, “adrift on the earth’s mantle,” 2 sailed across the Indian Ocean and smashed into thebelly of Central Asia with such force that it squeezed the earth five miles up into the skies toform the Himalayan range and fused with Central Asia to become the Indian subcontinent. 3 Or sothe people who study plate tectonics nowadays tell us, and who am I to challenge them? ah Notjust land but people came to India from Africa, much later; the winds that bring the monsoonrains to India each year also brought the first humans to peninsular India by sea from East Africain around 50,000 BCE. 4 And so from the very start India was a place made up of land and people

from somewhere else. So much for “immemorial.” Even the ancient “Aryans” probably came,ultimately, 5 from Africa. India itself is an import, or if you prefer, Africa outsourced India.This prehistoric episode will serve us simultaneously as a metaphor for the way thatHinduism through the ages constantly absorbed immigrant people and ideas and as the firsthistorical instance of such an actual immigration. (It can also be read as an unconscious satire onhistories that insist on tracing everything back to ultimate origins, as can the E. M. Forsterpassage cited at the start.) The narratives that Hindus have constructed about that stage and thoseactors, narratives about space and time, form the main substance of this chapter. The flood myth,in particular, is about both space (continents sinking) and time (periodic floods marking theaeons). Often unexpressed, always assumed, these narratives are the structures on which all othernarratives about history are built. We will then briefly explore the natural features ofIndia—rivers and mountains—that serve not only as the stage on which the drama of historyunfolds but as several of the main actors in that drama, for Ganga (the Ganges) and Himalayaappear in the narratives as the wife and father-in-law of the god Shiva, respectively.GONDWANALAND AND LEMURIAFrancis Bacon was the first to notice, from maps of Africa and the New World firstavailable in 1620, that the coastlines of western Africa and eastern South America matchedrather neatly. Scientists in the nineteenth century hypothesized that Antarctica, Australia, Africa,Madagascar, South America, Arabia, and India all were connected in the form of a single vastsupercontinent to which an Austrian geologist gave the name of Gondwana or Gondwanaland.(He named it after the region of central India called Gondwana—which means “the forest of theGonds,” the Gonds being tribal people of central India—comprising portions of the present statesof Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh, 6 the latter a region famous for itsenormous rocks, the oldest on the planet.) Scientists then suggested that what were later calledcontinental shifts ai began about 167 million years ago (in the mid- to late Jurassic period),causing the eastern part of the continent of Gondwana to separate from Africa and, after a while(about 120 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous period), to move northward. It broke intotwo pieces. One piece was Madagascar, and the other was the microcontinent that eventuallyerupted into the Deccan plateau and crashed into Central Asia. aj Australian Indologists joke thatthe Deccan is really part of Australia. 7The Gondwanaland story takes us to the farthest limit, the reduction to the absurd, of themany searches for origins that have plagued the historiography of India from the beginning(there, I’m doing it myself, searching for the origins of the myth of origins). Bothnineteenth-century scholarship and twenty-first-century politics have taken a preternaturalinterest in origins. Nineteenth-century scholars who searched for the ur-text (the “original text,”as German scholarship defined it), the ur-ruins, the ur-language carried political stings in theirtales: “We got there first,” “It’s ours” (ignoring the history of all the intervening centuries thatfollowed and other legitimate claims). They viewed the moment of origins as if there were a kindof magic Rosetta stone, with the past on one side and the present on the other, enabling them todo a simple one-to-one translation from the past into the present ever after. But even if theycould know the ur-past, and they could not (both because logically there is no ultimate beginningfor any chain of events and because the data for the earliest periods are at best incomplete and atworst entirely inaccessible), it would hardly provide a charter for the present.Other scientists in the colonial period agreed about the ancient supercontinent butimagined its disintegration as taking place in the opposite way, not when land (proto-India)

oke off from land (Australia/Africa) and moved through water (the Indian Ocean) to join upwith other land (Central Asia), but rather when water (the Indian Ocean) moved in over land (astationary supercontinent like Gondwanaland) that was henceforth lost under the waves, likeAtlantis. According to this story, water eventually submerged (under what is now called theIndian Ocean) the land that had extended from the present Australia through Madagascar to thepresent South India.In 1864 a geologist named that supercontinent Lemuria, because he used the theory toaccount for the fact that living lemurs were found, in the nineteenth century, only in Madagascarand the surrounding islands, and fossil lemurs were found from Pakistan to Malaya, but nolemurs, living or dead, were found in Africa or the Middle East (areas that would never havebeen connected to Lemuria as Madagascar and Pakistan presumably once were). 8 Animals, asusual, here define human boundaries, and the myths about those boundaries, as usual,proliferated. In 1876, Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist of a Darwinian persuasion, publishedhis History of Creation, claiming that the lost continent of Lemuria was the cradle of humankind;in 1885 a British historian argued that the Dravidian languages had been brought to India whenthe ancestors of the Dravidians came from Lemuria; 9 in 1886 a teenager in California“channeled” voices that suggested that the survivors of Lemuria were living in tunnels underMount Shasta in California; 10 and in 1888, in The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky claimedthat certain Indian holy men had shown her a secret book about Lemuria.This myth nurtured among the colonial powers was then taken up, in the 1890s, by Tamilspeakers on the southern tip of South India, who began to regard Lemuria as a lost ancestralhome from which they all were exiled in India or to argue that the extant India, or Tamil Nadu,or just the southernmost tip of India, Kanya Kumari (Cape Comorin), was all that was left ofLemuria; or that when Lemuria sank, Tamilians dispersed to found the civilizations ofMesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Americas, Europe, and, in particular, the Indus Valley. 11Nowadays some Tamil separatists want to reverse the process, to detach Tamil Nadu from therest of India, not, presumably, physically, to float back over the Indian Ocean likeGondwanaland in reverse, but politically, in order to recapture the glory of their lost Lemurianpast.The passage from E. M. Forster cited above, “The Birth of India,” begins with theHimalayas rising up out of the ocean, Gondwanaland fashion, but then, as it continues, it slipsinto the other variant, the story of the submersion of Lemuria, and regards that submersion aspreceding the Gondwanaland episode, pushing back the origins even farther: “But India is reallyfar older. In the days of the prehistoric ocean the southern part of the peninsula already existed,and the high places of Dravidia have been land since land began, and have seen on the one sidethe sinking of a continent that joined them to Africa, and on the other the upheaval of theHimalayas from a sea.” 12 Forster concludes his passage with a third aspect of the myth, itsperiodicity or cyclicity, its prediction that the flooding of South India will happen again andagain: “As Himalayan India rose, this India, the primal, has been depressed, and is slowlyre-entering the curve of the earth. It may be that in aeons to come an ocean will flow here too,and cover the sun-born rocks with slime.”So that’s how it all began. Or maybe it didn’t. Forster of course has the carte blanche of anovelist, but even the plate tectonics people may be building sand castles, for the plate tectonicstheory is after all a speculation, albeit a scientific speculation based on good evidence.Whether or not a subcontinent once shook the dust of Africa off its heels and fused ontoAsia, the story of Gondwanaland reminds us that even after the Vedic people had strutted around

the Ganges Valley for a few centuries, all they had done was add a bit more to what was alreadya very rich mix. The multiplicity characteristic of Hinduism results in part from a kind offusion—a little bit of Ravi Shankar in the night, a Beatle or two—that has been going on formillions of years, as has globalization of a different sort from that which the word generallydenotes. The pieces of the great mosaic of Hinduism were put in place, one by one, by the manypeoples who bequeathed to India something of themselves, planting a little piece of England, orSamarkand, or Africa, in the Punjab or the Deccan.APRÈS MOI, LE DÉLUGEHinduism is so deeply embedded in the land of its birth that we cannot begin tounderstand its history without understanding something of its geography and in particular thehistory of representations of its geography. The central trope for both time and space in India isthe great flood. The myth of the flood is told and retold in a number of variants, some of whichargue for the loss of a great ancient civilization or a fabulous shrine. The telling of a myth ofsuch a flood, building upon a basic story well known throughout India, allows a number ofdifferent places to imagine a glorious lost past of which they can still be proud today.The myth of the flooding of Lemuria, or Dravidia, builds on the traditions of other floods.There is archaeological evidence for the flooding of the Indus Valley cities by the Indus River (c.2000 BCE), as well as for that of the city of Hastinapura by the Ganges, in about 800 BCE. 13There is also textual evidence (in the Mahabharata) for the flooding of the city of Dvaraka, thecity of Krishna, at the westernmost tip of Gujarat, by the Western Ocean (that is, the ArabianSea), 14 in around 950 BCE. (Sources differ; some say 3102 or 1400 BCE.) 15 The appendix to theMahabharata also tells of the emergence of Dvaraka from the ocean in the first place. WhenKrishna chose Dvaraka as the site for his city, he asked the ocean to withdraw from the shore fortwelve leagues to give space for the city; the ocean complied. 16 Since the sea had yielded theland, against nature (like the Netherlands), it would be only fair for it to reclaim it again in theend. Later texts tell of a different sort of bargain: Krishna in a dream told a king to build a templeto him as Jagannatha in Puri, but the ocean kept sweeping the temple away. The great saint Kabirstopped the ocean, which took the form of a Brahmin and asked Kabir for permission to destroythe temple; Kabir refused but let him destroy the temple at Dvaraka in Gujarat. And so he did. 17Even so, some texts insist that the temple of Krishna in Dvaraka was not flooded; the sea was notable to cover it, “even to the present day,” 18 and the temple, able to wash away all evils, remainsthere, 19 just as in the periodic flooding of the universe of doomsday, something always survives.(The physical location of the shrine of Dvaraka, at the very westernmost shore of India, wherethe sun dies every evening, may have inspired the idea that the town was the sacred gate to theworld of the dead. 20 ) In direct contradiction of the Mahabharata’s statement that the entire citywas destroyed, these later texts insist that it is still there. Dvaraka is said to exist today inGujarat, and archaeologists and divers have published reports on what they claim to be itsremains. 21We may also see here the patterns of the myths of both Lemuria (the ocean submergingDvaraka) and Gondwana (Dvaraka emerging from the ocean to join onto Gujarat). Other mythstoo follow in the wake of this one, such as the story that the ocean (called sagara) was firstformed when the sixty thousand sons of a king named Sagara dug into the earth to find the lostsacrificial horse of their father, who was performing a horse sacrifice. 22 (Some versions say thatIndra, the king of the gods, stole the horse.) 23 A sage burned the princes to ashes, and years laterBhagiratha, the great-grandson of Sagara, persuaded the Ganges, which existed at that time only

in the form of the Milky Way in heaven, to descend to earth in order to flow over the ashes of hisgrandfathers and thus purify them so that they could enter heaven; he also persuaded the godShiva to let the heavenly Ganges River land first on his head and meander through his mattedhair before flowing down to the earth, in order to prevent her from shattering the earth by a directfall out of the sky. 24 According to another text, when Sagara performed the horse sacrifice, theoceans began to overflow and cover all the land with water. The gods asked the great asceticParashurama to intercede; he appealed to Varuna (the Vedic god of the waters), who threw thesacrificial vessel far away, causing the waters to recede and thereby creating the westernkingdom of Shurparaka. 25 (In a different subtext of this version, when Parashurama was banishedfrom the earth and needed land to live on, Varuna told him to throw his ax as far into the oceanas he could; the water receded up to Gokarna, the place where his ax finally fell, thus creating theland of Kerala. 26 )There are other legends of submerged cities or submerged lands or land-masses. ak27 Thecities where the first two assemblies that created Tamil literature were held are said to have beendestroyed by the sea. 28 In the seventeenth century, people claimed to be able still to see the topsof a submerged city, temples and all, off the coast of Calicut. 29 For centuries there were said tobe seven pagodas submerged off the coast of Mamallipuram, near Madras, and on December 26,2004, when the great tsunami struck, as the waves first receded about five hundred meters intothe sea, Frontline (an Indian news Web site) reported that tourists saw a row of rocks on thenorth side of the Shore Temple and that behind the Shore Temple in the east, architecturalremains of a temple were revealed. “When the waves subsided, these were submerged in the seaagain.” 30 Archaeologists denied that there could be any submerged temples there. 31 Ourknowledge of the long history of the imaginative myth of the submerged Hindu temple inclinesus to side with the more skeptical archaeologists.Behind all these traditions may lie the story of another great flood, first recorded in theShatapatha Brahmana (c. 800 BCE), around the same time as one of the proposed dates for theMahabharata flood, a myth that has also been linked to Noah’s Ark in Genesis 32 as well as tostories of the flood that submerged the Sumerian city of Shuruppak and is described in theGilgamesh epic. Indeed flood myths are found in most of the mythologies of the world: Africa,the Near East, Australia, South Seas, Scandinavia, the Americas, China, Greece. They arewidespread because floods are widespread, especially along the great rivers that nurture earlycivilizations (and even more widespread in the lands watered by the monsoons). There aresignificant variants: Some cultures give one reason for the flood, some other reasons, some none;sometimes one person survives, sometimes several, sometimes many (seldom none—or whocould tell the story?—though the creator sometimes starts from scratch again); some survive inboats, some by other means. 33In the oldest extant Indian variant, in the Brahmanas, Manu, the first human being, theIndian Adam, finds a tiny fish who asks him to save him from the big fish who will otherwise eathim. This is an early expression of concern about animals being eaten, in this case by otheranimals; “fish eat fish,” what we call “dog eat dog,” is the Indian term for anarchy. The fishpromises, in return for Manu’s help, to save Manu from a great flood that is to come. Manuprotects the fish until he is so big that he is “beyond destruction” and then builds a ship (the fishtells him how to do it); the fish pulls the ship to a mountain, and when the floodwaters subside,Manu keeps following them down. The text ends: “The flood swept away all other creatures, andManu alone remained here.” 34 The theme of “helpful animals” who requite human kindness(think of Androcles and the lion) teaches two morals: A good deed is rewarded, and be kind to

(perhaps do not eat?) animals.Centuries later a new element is introduced into the story of the flood, one so importantand complex that we must pause for a moment to consider it: the idea that time is both linear andcyclical. The four Ages of time, or Yugas, are a series named after the four throws of the dice.Confusingly, the number of the Age increases as the numbers of the dice, the quality of life, andthe length of the Age decrease: The first Age, the Krita Yuga (“Winning Age”) or the SatyaYuga (“Age of Truth”), what the Greeks called the Golden Age (for the four Ages of time, orYugas, formed a quartet in ancient Greece too), is the winning throw of four, a time ofhappiness, when humans are virtuous and live for a long time. The second Age, the Treta Yuga(“Age of the Trey”), is the throw of three; things are not quite so perfect. In the third Age, theDvapara Yuga (“Age of the Deuce”), the throw of two, things fall apart. And the Kali Age is thedice throw of snake eyes, the present Age, the Iron Age, the Losing Age, the time when peopleare no damn good and die young, and barbarians invade India, the time when all bets are off.This fourth Age was always, from the start, entirely different from the first three in one essentialrespect: Unlike the other Ages, it is now, it is real. The four Ages are also often analogized to thefour legs of dharma visualized as a cow who stands on four legs in the Winning Age, thenbecomes three-legged, two-legged, and totters on one leg in the Losing Age.But time in India is not only linear, as in Greece (for the ages steadily decline), butcyclical, unlike Greece (for the end circles back to the beginning again). The cosmos is rebornover and over again, as each successive Kali Age ends in a doomsday fire and a flood thatdestroys the cosmos but is then transformed into the primeval flood out of which the cosmos isre-created, undergoing a sea change in a new cosmogony. al The idea of circular cosmic time is inpart the result of Indian ideas about reincarnation, the circularity of the individual soul. Theending precedes the beginning, but the end and the beginning were always there from the start,before the beginning and after the end, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot. amIn later retellings of the story of the flood, therefore—to return at last to our story—thefish saves Manu from the doomsday flood that comes at the end of the Kali Age, the finaldissolution (pralaya):THE FISH AND THE FLOODManu won from the god Brahma, the creator, the promise that hewould be able to protect all creatures, moving and still, when the dissolution took place. Oneday, he found a little fish and saved it until it grew so big that it terrified him, whereupon herealized that it must be Vishnu. The fish said, “Bravo! You have recognized me. Soon the wholeearth will be flooded. The gods have made this boat for you to save the great living souls; bringall the living creatures into the boat, and you will survive the dissolution and be king at thebeginning of the Winning Age. At the end of the Kali Age, the mare who lives at the bottom ofthe ocean will open her mouth and a poisonous fire will burst out of her, coming up out of hell; itwill burn the whole universe, gods and constellations and all. And then the seven clouds ofdoomsday will flood the earth until everything is a single ocean. You alone will survive, togetherwith the sun and moon, several gods, and the great religious texts and sciences.” And so ithappened, and the fish came and saved Manu. 35 In this text, Manu saves not himself alonebut all creatures, and this time the gods, instead of Manu, build the boat. This variant also givesus a much more detailed, and hence more reassuring, image of what is to follow the flood; a newworld is born out of the old one. These stories suggest that floods are both inevitable andsurvivable; this is what happens to the world, yet the world goes on.More significantly, the myth is now part of the great story of the cycle of time, involvingfire as well as water, so that the flood now appears more as a solution than as a problem: It puts

out the mare fire that is always on the verge of destroying us. For a mare roams at the bottom ofthe ocean; the flames that shoot out of her mouth are simultaneously bridled by and bridling thewaters of the ocean, 36 like uranium undergoing constant fission, controlled by lithium rods. Inseveral of the myths of her origin, the fire is said to result from the combined fires of sexualdesire and the fire of the ascetic repression of sexual desire, 37 or from the fury of the god Shivawhen he is excluded from the sacrifice. 38 The submarine mare is (to continue the nuclearmetaphor) like a deadly atomic U-boat cruising the deep, dark waters of the unconscious. Itshould not go unnoticed that the mare is a female, the symbol of all that threatens male controlover the internal fires of restrained passions that are always in danger of breaking out indisastrous ways. This delicate balance, this hair-trigger suspension, is disturbed at the end of theKali Age, the moment of doomsday, when the mare gallops out of the ocean and sets the worldon fire, and the newly unchecked ocean leaves its bed and floods the ashes of the universe, whichthen lie dormant until the next period of creation. 39 And then, like the ashes of Sagara’s sons, theashes of the entire universe are revived as it is reborn. A remnant or seed, a small group of goodpeople, is saved by a fish (usually identified as one of the several incarnations of the great godVishnu), who pulls a boat to a mountain, where they survive to repeople the universe. 40 (Themountain, the Hindu equivalent of Ararat, is identified with numerous sites throughout India. an )The myth expresses the barely controlled tendency of the universe to autodestruct (and perhaps akind of prescientific theory of global warming: When it gets hotter, the ice caps will melt, andthere will be a flood 41 ).Recent attempts to excavate both Lemuria and the submerged city of Dvaraka, 42correlated with recent oceanographic work carried out in 1998-99 around the Kerguelen plateauin the southernmost reaches of the Indian Ocean, have rekindled speculations about a “lostcontinent” in the Indian Ocean. What surprised the excavators most was not the enormousplateau that they found in the middle of the Indian Ocean but signs that “near the end of theplateau growth, there is strong evidence of highly explosive eruptions.” 43 The volcanic activityof the submarine mare, perhaps?SPACEMAPSSo much for origins.Whatever fused with India had to make its peace with what was already there, its uniqueclimate, fauna, and, eventually, culture. The land and its people transformed all who came tothem; they did not simply passively receive the British, or the Mughals before them, let alone thepeople of the Veda, or that migratory bit of Africa.

Geographical and Mythological Map of India.Ancient Indian cosmology imagined a flat earth consisting of seven concentriccontinents, the central one surrounded by the salty ocean and each of the other roughly circularcontinents surrounded by oceans of other liquids: treacle (molasses), wine, ghee (clarifiedbutter), milk, curds, and freshwater. (This prompted one nineteenth-century Englishman’snotorious tirade against “geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.” 44 ) In thecenter of the central mainland (the “Plum-tree Continent” or Jambu-Dvipa) stands the cosmicmountain Meru, from which four subcontinents radiate out to the east, west, north, and south,like the petals of a lotus; the southernmost petal of this mainland is Bharata-varsha, the ancientSanskrit name for India. If you bisect the lotus horizontally, you see India as a kite-shapedlandmass with mountains in the north and (salt) oceans on all other sides, much as it appears onany Rand McNally map. ao The watery world under the earth, which the cobra people (Nagas)inhabit, is also there, in the water table that we encounter every time we sink a well anywhere inthe world.Cosmography and cartography overlie each other, as do the rabbit and the man in themoon, myth and history. It has been rightly remarked that texts are just maps, and map is notterritory; 45 but when the maps are big enough, they become territories of their own. There is ashared core underlying both maps and territories, from which myths and political narrativesspread out in different directions. There was a flood, and now there is a politically useful mythabout it; there is an arrangement of water and land, and there is a politically inspired diagram ofit (for different countries draw the borders of Kashmir, to take a case at random, in very differentways). The map of the Plum-tree Continent is to a Rand McNally map as the flood myth is to thegeological record. The natural layout of water and land serves as the basis of the myth of a floodand the diagram of the cosmos, which in turn support the construction of a politically usefulchart of time and space.TERRITORY: MOUNTAINS, RIVERS, MONSOONMany people have imagined the Himalayan Mountains as posing an impregnable barrier,but this image of Inaccessible India is simply a part of the Unchanging India package. India

functioned, throughout history, less like Shangri-la than like Heathrow or O’Hare. TheHimalayas are indeed high, and no one ever strolled casually across them, but they did not keeppeople out of India. Alexander the Great managed to get into India over the HimalayanMountains (probably through the Khyber Pass), horses, mules, camels, and all, and many othersfollowed. Not without reason was the Hindu imagination haunted by the specter of invasion,expressed in the persistent myth of the degenerate Kali Age, a nightmare of barbarianpenetration. The physical boundaries of India were as porous as those between its internal beliefsystems. Silk came from China across the Central Asian silk route (the word for “silk” inSanskrit is china), and just about everyone in the ancient world—beginning with traders fromMesopotamia, Crete, Rome, and Arabia—washed up sooner or later on some coast of India.So too the Vindhya Mountains form the barrier between North and South India, but thestories about the Vindhyas tell how that barrier was breached, not how it kept people apart:When the Vindhyas began to grow so tall that even the sun had to go around them (just as itcircumambulates Mount Meru), the great sage Agastya asked them to bow their heads beforehim so that he could cross from North to South India (bringing Sanskrit and the Vedas to theDravidian lands) and to remain that way until he returned; the Vindhyas agreed to this, and sinceAgastya never returned from South India, where he established the Tamil language, theVindhyas remain conveniently low.In South Asia, history flows with the rivers. Three great river systems divide the northernsubcontinent: first the Indus (“the River”) in Pakistan, with its five tributaries, the rivers of thePunjab (Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej) that give the Punjab its name (“Five Waters”);then the Doab or “Two Rivers,” the Ganges (Ganga, “Going to Earth” [from heaven, where sheis the Milky Way]) and the Yamuna (“Twin Sister,” now Jumna) in North India; and then theBrahmaputra (“Son of Brahma”) in Bangladesh. All three rivers originate in a single region ofsouthwestern Tibet, their sources so close that they may once have belonged to a single icy lakethat was shattered when the piece of Africa that crashed into Central Asia drove off the waters indiverse directions. 46 The Indus flows eighteen hundred miles before it empties into the Arabiansea. The Narmada (“Jester”), the great river that, like the Vindhya Mountains, divides the northfrom the south, has inspired an extensive mythology that balances that of the Ganges in thenorth.What is the relationship between climate and culture in India? Is there some causal linkbetween, on the one hand, “the ambivalent natural environment, where lush harvests coexist withbarren soil, drought with flood, feast with famine,” and, on the other, the fact that Hindulogicians were the first to posit the coexistence of the elements of contradiction? 47 Othercountries have “ambivalent natural environments” too; farmers the world over are at the mercyof the elements. But the violence and uncertainty of the monsoon create an ever-presentpsychological factor that may well be related to Hindu ideas about the capriciousness andviolence of fate and the gods.CONCLUSION: CON-FUSIONWhat does the geology of the formation of India tell us about the formation of Hinduism?The answer is suggested by a story that A. K. Ramanujan retold, from Tamil sources:THE BRAHMIN HEAD AND THE PARIAH BODYA sage’s wife, Mariamma, was sentencedby her husband to death. At the moment of execution she embraced a Pariah woman, Ellamma,for her sympathy. In the fray both the Pariah woman and the Brahmin lost their heads. Later thehusband relented, granted them pardon, and restored their heads by his spiritual powers. But the

heads were transposed by mistake. To Mariamma (with a Brahmin head and Pariah body) goatsand cocks but not buffalo were sacrificed; to Ellamma (Pariah head and Brahmin body) buffaloinstead of goats and cocks. 48 This text is itself an example of what it tells about: It mixestogether the story of Mariamma from two different Indian geographical and linguistic traditions,North Indian Sanskrit literature, where she is called Renuka, and South Indian Tamil oralfolktales about the origins of two South Indian goddesses. 49 This sort of juxtaposition, in variousforms, is widespread in both myth and history, beginning with the piece of Africa stuck ontoCentral Asia, like a head upon a body, and continuing through all the ideas of women and lowcastes that get into the heads of Brahmin males. It can stand as a metaphor for all the fusions thatmake up the rich mix of Hinduism.The mixing together of various human streams is so basic to the history of Hinduism thatthe Brahmins could not stop trying, and failing, to prevent it, even as their fear of the powers ofthe senses to invade the rational control center made them try, also in vain, to control addictionthrough asceticism. Their ultimate terror was the “confusion” of classes, the miscegenationbrought on by the Kali Age. They visualized the mixing of classes as a form of impurity, whichshould not surprise anyone who has read the British anthropologist Mary Douglas’s explanationof the ways that throughout the world, “category errors”—things that do not fall entirely into oneclass or another—are characterized as dirt and as danger. 50 Brahmins regarded the woman withthe Brahmin head and Pariah body—and her twin and partner, with the Pariah head on theBrahmin body—as monstrosities, a double hodgepodge. But from the standpoint of anon-Brahmin, or a scholar of Hinduism, this rich hybrid or multiple mix is precisely what makesHinduism the cultural masterpiece that it is.Such a conflation is not a monstrosity, nor is it a mistake—or if it is, it is a felix culpa.The transpositions result in two goddesses (read: many Hinduisms), each of whom is far moreinteresting than the straightforward realignment would have been. Whatever its disparatesources, the resulting creature has an integrity that we must respect, rather like that of myfavorite mythical beast, created by Woody Allen, the Great Roe, who had the head of a lion andthe body of a lion, but not the same lion. 51 The question to ask is not where the disparateelements originated but why they were put together and why kept together. The politicalimplications of regarding Hinduism as either a hodgepodge or, on the other hand, culturallyhomogeneous or even monolithic are equally distorting; it is always more useful, if a bit trickier,to acknowledge simultaneously the variety of the sources and the power of the integrations. AHinduism with a Pariah body and a Brahmin head—or, if you prefer, a Pariah head and aBrahmin body—was re-created again and again throughout India history, and these multipleintegrities are what this book is about.CHAPTER 3CIVILIZATION IN THE INDUS VALLEY50,000 to 1500 BCECHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES BCE)c. 50,000 Stone Age cultures arisec. 30,000 Bhimbetkacave paintings are madec. 6500 Agriculture beginsc. 3000 Pastoral nomad societies emergec.2500 Urban societies emerge along the Indus Riverc. 2200-2000 Harappa is at its heightc.2000-1500 Indus civilization declines

“Pashupati” Seal (Seal 420).In place of an opening epigram, we begin with an image, whose meaning is muchdisputed, for one of the many challenges of interpreting the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) liesin deciphering pictures for which we do not know the words. The second challenge is trying todecide what, if anything, of the IVC survives in later Hinduism. For the IVC is older than theoldest extant Hindu texts, the Vedas, and its material remains include many images that may bethe earliest-known examples of important Hindu icons that only (re)surface much later.EARLY HISTORY: BHIMBETKA CAVE PAINTINGSMuch of what we now call Hinduism may have had roots in cultures that thrived in SouthAsia long before the creation of textual evidence that we can decipher with any confidence.Remarkable cave paintings have been preserved from Mesolithic sites dating from c. 30,000BCE in Bhimbetka, near present-day Bhopal, in the Vindhya Mountains in the province ofMadhya Pradesh. 1 They represent a number of animals that have been identified as deer, boars,elephants, leopards, tigers, panthers, rhinoceroses, antelope, fish, frogs, lizards, squirrels, andbirds. One painting seems to depict a man walking a dog on a leash. The animals representedprobably existed there (it would be hard for someone who had never seen an elephant to draw apicture of an elephant), though there may be false positives (an artist could have copied someoneelse’s picture of an elephant, and the existence of images of a creature half bull and half mancertainly does not prove that such tauranthropoi actually existed). On the other hand, animals thatare not represented may well also have existed there (the Bhimbetkanese may have had snakeseven though they did not make any paintings of snakes); the missing animals may simply have

failed to capture the artist’s imagination. False negatives in this realm are even more likely thanfalse positives.Several of the animals in the paintings have horns, like gazelles, and one painting showspeople dancing with what may be a unicorn with a close-clipped mane. 2 This possible unicorncontinues to tease art historians when it reappears in the IVC.THE INDUS VALLEYMATERIAL CULTUREThere were other early settlements in India, notably the culture of Baluchistan, in thewesternmost part of what is now Pakistan, dating to before 6000 BCE. But from about 2300 BCEthe first urbanization took place, as great cities arose in the valley of the Indus River, 150 milessouth of Baluchistan, also in Pakistan. The material remains of this culture, which we call theIndus Valley Civilization or the Harappan Civilization (named after Harappa, one of the twogreat cities on the Indus, the other being Mohenjo-Daro), present a tantalizing treasure chest ofoften enigmatic images that hover just beyond our reach, taunting us with what might well be thekeys to the roots of Hinduism.The Indus Valley plain, much like the valleys of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates,cradles of Neolithic civilizations, is a semiarid, river-watered region; the “semi” means that onthe one hand, the relatively sparse vegetation, not so rich as that of the effluvial plain of theGanges, for instance, required no iron tools to clear and settle while, on the other hand, the siltfrom the river floodings provided sufficient natural fertilizer to create the surplus that makescivilization possible. 3 The river was also a channel of trade.Here’s another origin story. In 1856 an English general named Alexander Cunningham,later director general of the archaeological survey of northern India, visited Harappa, where anEnglish engineer named William Brunton was gathering bricks (including what he recognized asbricks from the IVC) as ballast for a railway he was building between Multan and Lahore.Cunningham took note of the site but did nothing about it, and the trains still run on that route,on the main line from Peshawar, on top of a hundred miles of third-millennium BCE bricks.Only after 1917, when an Indian archaeologist found an ancient knife at a place named,significantly, Mound of the Dead (Mohenjo-Daro), and excavations carried out there revealedartifacts identical with those that had been at Harappa, did this civilization begin to beappreciated. Among the treasures that they found were carved stones, flat, rectangular sections ofsoapstone about the size of a postage stamp, which were used as stamps or seals, as well assealings (impressions) of such stamps.The civilization of the Indus Valley extends over more than a thousand sites, stretchingover 750,000 square miles, where as many as forty thousand people once lived. 4 Four hundredmiles separate the two biggest cities, from Harappa on the Ravi tributary in the north (one of thefive rivers of the Punjab) down to Mohenjo-Daro (in the Larkana Valley in Sindh) and on downto the port of Lothal in the delta on the sea. Yet the Indus cities were stunningly uniform andremarkably stable over this wide range, changing little over a millennium, until they begin tocrumble near the end. They had trade contacts with Crete, Sumer, and other Mesopotamiancultures, perhaps even Egypt. 5 There are Harappan sites in Oman (on the Arabian Peninsula),and Indus seals show up in Mesopotamia. There was direct contact with Iran, particularly justbefore the end, a period from which archaeologists have found a very late Indus seal with Indusmotifs on one side and Iranian on the other, together with many seals reflecting Central Asianinfluences. 6 Some Indus images bear a striking resemblance to images from Elam, a part of

ancient Iran that was closely linked to adjacent Mesopotamian urban societies. 7 Trade withCentral Asia continued in the Indus area even after the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization.In a sense, the Hindu diaspora began now, well before 2000 BCE.Archaeological evidence suggests that the use of cubical dice began in South Asia andindeed in the IVC. 8 Sir John Hubert Marshall, the director general of the Indian archaeologicalsurvey from 1902 to 1931, found many cubical terra-cotta dice, with one to six dots, atMohenjo-Daro, 9 and a number of other dice have been identified since then from Harappa andelsewhere, including several of stone (agate, limestone, faience, etc.). 10 This is a fact of greatsignificance in light of the importance of gambling in later Indian civilization, from 1200 BCE.They had gold, copper, and lead, and they imported bronze, silver, and tin (as well aslapis lazuli and soapstone), but they had no iron; their weapons were made of copper and bronze.There was a huge wheat and barley storage system, and there were household and publicdrainage works superior to those in parts of the world today, including much of India. Most ofthe buildings are constructed out of bricks (both sun baked and kiln fired) of remarkablyconsistent size throughout the extended culture; equally unvarying stone cubes were used tomeasure weights. The roads too did not just evolve out of deer tracks but were carefully laid outall in the same proportion (streets twice as wide as lanes, avenues twice as wide as streets) andarranged on a grid (north-south or east-west), like the “pink city” of Jaipur in Rajasthan thatMaharajah Jai Singh designed and built in the eighteenth century CE. All this uniformity ofmaterial culture across hundreds of miles and a great many centuries implies considerablecontrol and planning 11 and suggests, to some scholars, a threat of authoritarian or eventotalitarian government. Some speak of the “affluent private residences with bathrooms servedby a drainage system,” while “the poor, however, lived huddled in slums, the inevitableunderclass in a hierarchical system,” 12 and others have seen in the tiny identical houses(protohousing projects? ghettos?) and in the massive government structure, regulating everysingle brick, an “obsessive uniformity.” 13 There is evidence that different professions worked outof distinct areas of the cities, suggesting the existence of something like protocastes. 14 Somescholars have taken the visible signs of an overarching hand of authority and urban planning asevidence of “urbanity, sophistication, well-being, ordered existence.” 15 One might also see, inthe tiny scale of the seals and the figurines, and in the children’s toys, a delicate civilization,whose artwork is fine in both senses—beautiful and small.PICTURES AND SYMBOLS: THE SEALS AND THE SCRIPTThe civilization of the Indus is not silent, but we are deaf. We cannot hear their words butcan see their images. apMost of the seals, which are found throughout the Indus Valley Civilization, are engravedwith a group of signs in the Indus script, or a drawing or design, or a combination of these. 16There are well over two thousand inscriptions, using about four hundred graphemes, and manypeople have claimed to have deciphered them, often demonstrating truly fantastic flights ofimagination, but no one has definitively cracked the code. 17 The individual messages are tooshort for a computer to decode, and since each seal had a distinctive combination of symbols,there are too few examples of each sequence to provide a sufficient linguistic context. Thesymbols that accompany a given image vary from seal to seal, so that it’s not possible to derivethe meaning of the words from the meaning of the images. Many people have speculated that it isan Indo-European language, or a Dravidian language, or a Munda or “Austro-Asiatic” language 18(supported by the plate tectonics narrative), or not a language at all. aq19 The seals may well have

een nothing but devices to mark property in the manner of a signet ring, a stamp of ownership,rather like a bar code, 20 probably made for merchants who used them to brand their wares,signifying nothing but “This is mine.” Perhaps the writing is a form of ancient shorthand.Because they present a vivid, highly evocative set of visual symbols, but no text, these imageshave functioned, for scholars, like Rorschach shapes onto which each interpreter projects his orher own vision of what the hypothetical text should be and should say. ar The ambiguity andsubjectivity of the interpretation of visual images are yet another aspect of the shadow on themoon that is, for some, a rabbit, and for others, a man.But the images on the seals do make a more general statement that we can decipher,particularly in the realm of flora and fauna. The vast majority of Indus signs can be directly orindirectly related to farming: Typical signs include seeds, fruits, sprouts, grain plants, pulses,trees, farm instruments (hoes, primitive plows, mortars and pestles, rakes, harvestinginstruments, etc.), seasonal/celestial or astral signs, and even at times anthropomorphized plowedfields. The images, as well as other archaeological remains, tell us that the winter Indus crop wasbarley and wheat; the spring crop, peas and lentils; and the summer and the monsoon crops,millets, melons, dates, and fiber plants. 21 They also probably grew rice. 22 They spun, wove, anddyed cotton, probably for the first time on the planet Earth, and may also have been the first touse wheeled transport. 23 They ate meat and fish. 24INDUS ANIMALSAnimals, both wild and tame, dominate the representations from the IVC, both on theseals, where they seem to have been drawn from nature, and on figurines, paintings on pottery,and children’s toys. These images tell us that tigers, elephants, and one-horned rhinoceroses, aswell as buffalo, antelope, and crocodiles, inhabited the forests of this now almost desert region,which then had riverine long grass and open forest country, the natural habitat of tigers andrhinoceroses. 25 (A rhinoceros, a buffalo, and an elephant, all on wheels, were found in a later sitein northern Maharashtra, perhaps connected with Harappa.) 26 There are also animal figurines ofturtles, hares, monkeys, and birds, and there is a pottery model, 2.9 inches long, of an animalwith a long, bushy tail, perhaps a squirrel or a mongoose. 27But it is the representations of domesticated animals, as well as the archaeologicalremains of such animals, that tell us most about the culture of the IVC, in particular about themuch-disputed question of its relationship (or lack of relationship) with later Indian cultures suchas that of the Vedic peoples. Millennia before the IVC, people in South Asia had hunted anumber of animals that later, in the IVC, they bred and domesticated (and sometimes continuedto hunt). Before the IVC, they had also domesticated two distinct species of cattle—the humpedzebu (Bos indicus), with its heavy dewlaps, and a humpless relation of the Bos primigenius ofWest Asia. 28 Zebu and water buffalo (Bubalus) were used as draft animals, and elephants(domesticated, more or less) were used for clearing and building. 29 Elephants are not native tothe lands found west of central India, but they might have been imported into the Indus Valley. 30They had dogs (which may already have been domesticated at Bhimbetka). Marshall,who participated in the first excavations of the site, commented on them at length:As would be expected, the dog is common, but all the figures but one are roughly modeled andevidently made by children. That this animal was a pet as well as a guard is proved by some ofthe figures being provided with collars. We have found a very mutilated figure of a dog with acollar, fastened by a cord to a post, which suggests that house animals were sometimes too fierceto be allowed at large. The one well-made exception . . . almost resembles the English mastiff of

to-day. 31 He also noted a figure of a dog with its tongue hanging out, “a detail seldomshown in a pottery model.” 32 The particular breeds of dogs depicted in small statues at the IVCinclude pariah dogs and, surprisingly, dachshunds. 33They had also domesticated camels, sheep, pigs, goats, and chickens. This may have beenthe first domestication of fowl, as a major contribution to world civilization. 34 Apparently they didnot have, or at least think it worthwhile to depict, cats. On seals and pottery, and depicted asfigurines, the favorite subject is male animals—most frequently bulls with pendulous dewlapsand big pizzles. There are also short-horned bulls, 35 but in general they went in for horned males:bulls, water buffalo, rams, and others. One scene even depicts a tiger with horns. 36By contrast, they do not seem to have found female animals very interesting, andsignificantly, no figurines of cows have been found. 37 Marshall even comments on this absence,the cow that does not moo in the night, as it were: “The cow, even if it was regarded as sacred,was for some reason, at present unexplained, not represented in plastic form or carved instone.” 38 Of course they must have had cows, or they couldn’t very well have had bulls (andindeed there is material evidence of cows in the IVC), but the art-historical record tells us thatthe Indus artists did not use cows as cultural symbols, and why should we assume, withMarshall, that they were sacred? Why, in fact, do archaeologists reach for the word “sacred”every time they find something for which they cannot determine a practical use? (This is aquestion to which we will return.)The seals depict animals that have been characterized as being “noted for their physicaland sexual prowess—bulls, rhinoceroses, elephants, and tigers—or, as is true of snakes andcrocodiles . . . widely regarded as symbols of sexuality, fertility, or longevity.” 39 Of course wedon’t really know how good crocodiles are in bed; our culture thinks of them (or at least theirtears and smiles) as symbols of hypocrisy; why should they be symbols of sexuality, and towhom (other than, presumably, other crocodiles)? It has even been suggested that “the presentuntouchability of dogs could originate from their being sacred [in the IVC] and thusuntouchable.” 40 The equation of sacrality and untouchability is as unjustified as the assumptionthat the attitude to dogs did not change in four thousand years.THE UNICORN (AND OTHER POSSIBLY MYTHICAL BEASTS)This question of symbolic valence becomes more blatant in the case of more fantasticanimals, like unicorns.The most commonly represented Indus animal, depicted on 1,156 seals and sealings outof a total of 1,755 found at Mature Harappan sites (that is, on 60 percent of all seals andsealings), is “a stocky creature unknown to zoology, with the body of a bull and the head of azebra, from which head a single horn curls majestically upwards and then forwards.” 41 What isthis animal? Is it just a two-horned animal viewed from the side or a kind of gazelle with a hornon its nose? Is it a horse with a horn? (It doesn’t have the proportions of a horse.) Or a stylizedrhinoceros? 42 Or is it, by analogy with its European cousin, a mythical beast? The quasi unicornalways (like other Indus animals sometimes) has a manger in front of him. The manger issometimes said to have “religious or cultic significance,” since one seal shows an image of aunicorn being carried in procession alongside such a manger. 43 Often the manger is called sacred(presumably on the basis of the sacrality of mangers in Christianity).The unicorn lands us on the horn of a dilemma: Are the animals represented in the art ofthe IVC religious symbols? Though many Indus animal figurines are simply children’s toys, withlittle wheels on them, scholars persist in investing them with religious meanings. Some of the

fossil record too has been invoked as religious testimony. The excavation, in 1929, of twentysevered human skulls “tightly packed together,” along with what the excavator interpreted asritual vessels and the bones of sacrificed animals, has been taken as evidence that human headswere presented to a sacred tree, 44 a scenario reminiscent of the novel The Day of the Triffids orthe film The Little Shop of Horrors (“Feed me! Feed me!” cried the carnivorous plant). And whyshould an archaeologist have identified the image of a dog threatening a man with long, wavyhair as the hound of Yama, the god of the dead, 45 simply because the dog appears on the burialurns at Harappa? Why can’t it just be a dog faithful in death as in life?Unicorn Seal from Harappa.And why are the two figures in front of a pair of cobras “a pair of worshipers”? 46 Whynot just two, probably nervous blokes? Yet the rest of the scene does indeed suggest somethingother than common or garden-variety snake charming. The couple with the cobras is kneelingbeside a seated figure; another human figure holds back two rearing tigers; a monster half bulland half man attacks a horned tiger. This is not a snapshot of everyday life in the IVC. Scenesand figures such as these may give us glimpses of rituals, of episodes from myth and story, yetwe have “nothing to which we can refer these isolated glimpses to give them substance.” 47Other seals too seem to be telling a story that we cannot quite make out. One scenedepicts what has been called “a three-horned deity” (but may just be a guy, or for that matter agal, in a three-horned hat) apparently emerging from the middle of a tree, while another figureoutside the tree is bent “in suppliant posture” with arms raised; a bull stands behind it, and sevengirls below them. 48 (This is one of a small number of scenes that occur on seals found in fourdifferent cities: Harappa, Kalibangan, Mohenjo-Daro, and Chanhujo-Daro). Another seal depictsa similar scene, this one involving a fig (pipal) tree: at A nude figure with flowing hair and “ahorned headdress” (or his own horns?) stands between the upright branches of a pipal tree;another figure, much like the first but seen from the side, kneels at the base of the tree; a hugegoat towers over him from behind. On yet another seal a figure squats among a group of animals

on his left, while on his right a tiger is looking upward at a tree in which a man is seated. 49Something is certainly going on here, but what? A folktale, perhaps? A ritual? These wordlessscenes remind me of those contests that magazines run, inviting readers to supply the caption fora cartoon. But a lot more is at stake here than a cartoon.GENDERED FIGURESTHE LORD OF BEASTSMarshall began it all, in 1931, in his magisterial three-volume publication, Mohenjo-Daroand the Indus Civilization, which devotes five pages of a long chapter entitled “Religion” to seal420: “There appears at Mohenjo-Daro a male god, who is recognizable at once as a prototype ofthe historic Siva. . . . The lower limbs are bare and the phallus (urdhvamedhra) seeminglyexposed, but it is possible that what appears to be the phallus is in reality the end of thewaistband.” 50 (Urdhvamedhra [“upward phallus”] is a Sanskrit term, like the Greek-basedEnglish euphemism “ithyphallic,” for an erect penis.) Theurdhvamedhra-or-is-it-perhaps-just-his-waistband-or-the-knot-in-his-dhoti? has come to rival theVedantic snake-or-is-it-perhaps-just-a-rope? as a trope for the power of illusion and imagination.The image suggested to Marshall an early form of the Hindu god Shiva, and Marshall’ssuggestion was taken up by several generations of scholars. This was to have far-reachingramifications, for if this is an image of Shiva, then an important aspect of Hinduism can be datedback far earlier than the earliest texts (the Vedas).Much was made of this tiny bit of soapstone (remember, the whole seal is barely an inchhigh); the millimeter of the putative erection on this seal has, like the optional inch ofCleopatra’s nose, caused a great deal of historical fuss. Scholars have connected the “big-nosedgentleman . . . who sits in the lotus position with an erect penis, an air of abstraction and anaudience of animals” 51 with well-known images of the ithyphallic Shiva. 52 The discovery atIndus sites of a number of polished, oblong stones, mostly small but ranging up to two feet inheight, and probably used to grind grain, has led some scholars 53 to identify these stones asreplicas of the erect phallus (linga) of Shiva and the vagina (yoni) of his consort, and to linkthese stones with “the later aniconic representations” of Shiva in the form of the linga. 54 Otherscholars have suggested that “the Vedic criticism of ‘those who worship the phallus’” may referto this “early Indus cult.” 55 There are so many assumptions here that it makes your head spin:that the Indus had a “cult” (a rather pejorative word for a religious sect), that the people of theVeda knew about it, that they disapproved of it instead of assimilating it to their own worship ofthe phallic Indra—no lawyer would go into court with this sort of evidence.These all are arguments from hindsight. Marshall identified the figure as Shiva because(1) the Indus figure is seated on a low stool with knees pointed to the sides, feet together at hisgroin, and arms resting on his knees, a posture that many have identified as yogic (though it isthe way that South Asians often sit), and Shiva is the god of yogis; (2) the Indus figure wears ahorned headdress (or has horns), perhaps a buffalo mask as well as buffalo horns, 56 just as Shivawears the horned moon, or a trident, in his hair; [3] in two examples of this scene the Indusfigure has faces (or masks?) on the sides as well as the front of his head, while Shiva is often“Five-faced” (Pancha-mukha); (4) the figure is flanked by an elephant, a rhinoceros, and a waterbuffalo; smaller horned animals—antelope or goats—huddle beneath his stool, and he wears atiger’s skin on his torso, while Shiva is called the Lord of Beasts, Pashupati, and wears an animalskin, sometimes of a tiger, sometimes of an elephant; 57 and (5) both figures are ithyphallic.I bought into the identification with Shiva in 1973, 58 as most scholars have continued to

do right up to the present day. Yet many other candidates have also been pushed forward, 59another good example of the Rorschach (or Rashomon au ) phenomenon that produced such richfantasies about the decipherment of the script. A list of just a few of the figures with which theso-called Lord of Beasts has been identified, a list that the reader should not take seriously butmerely skim over to see how creatively scholars can run amok, might run like this (in more orless chronological order):1. A goddess, on whom the bulge previously identified as an “erect phallus” is nothing but agirdle worn by female IVC figurines. 60 2. Mahisha, the buffalo demon killed, in later mythology,by the goddess Durga, who is often represented as a riding on a tiger 61 (or a lion).3. Indra, theVedic king of the gods, 62 a conclusion supported by taking the first syllables of the Sanskritwords for three of the animals (eliminating the tiger, because it was much larger than the otheranimals, and the deer, because they are seated apart from the others, and repeating the firstsyllable of the word for “man,” because he was twice as important as the others), so that theyspell out ma-kha-na-sha-na, an epithet of Indra (though also of Shiva), “destroying thesacrifice.” av 4. Rudra, a Vedic prototype of Shiva, surrounded by animals who are incarnations ofthe Maruts, the storm gods who serve Indra and Rudra. 63 5. Agni. The pictograms are read tomean “burning in three ways” and so to identify the figure as Agni, the god of fire, who has threeforms. 64 6. A chief named Anil, who ruled over the clans whose totems were the animals on theseal. 65 7. A “seated” bull. 66 8. A sage (named Rishyashringa [“Antelope-horned”]) who had asingle antelope horn growing out of his forehead (his mother was a white-footed antelope; it’s along story); he appears in the earliest layers of Hindu and Buddhist mythology. 67 9. Part of “a bullcult, to which numerous other representations of bulls lend substance.” 68 10. A yogic posture, 69even if the link with Shiva is tenuous. 70 Most, but not all, of these fantasies assume that theimage is a representation of either a priest or a god, more likely a god. 71 In each case, theinterpretation was inspired or constrained by the particular historical circumstances and agendasof the interpreter, but I’d love to know what the scholars who came up with these ideas weresmoking.There is, in fact, a general resemblance between this image and later Hindu images ofShiva. The Indus people may well have created a symbolism of the divine phallus, or a hornedgod, or both. But even if this is so, it does not mean that the Indus images are the source of theHindu images. We must keep this caution in mind now when we consider the images of womenin the IVC.MOTHERS AND MOTHER GODDESSESThe widespread depiction of women in the IVC artifacts suggests that they were highlyvalued. In contrast with the predilection for macho animals (includingmen) on the seals, themany terra-cotta figurines are mostly women, some wearing a wide girdle, a necklace, and anelaborate headdress. They are “Pop-eyed, bat-eared, belted and sometimes mini-skirted.” 72 Someof them seem to be pregnant, or to hold, on their breasts or hips, small lumps that might beinfants, “evidence perhaps that they expressed a concern for fecundity,” a reasonableassumption; 73 they may have been symbols of fecundity in a “loosely structured householdcult.” 74 But why assume any cult at all? Why need they symbolize fertility? Or even if they do,why should fertility have to be ritual? (I must confess to having fallen for this too more than aquarter of a century ago: “[S]trong evidence of a cult of the Mother has been unearthed at thepre-Vedic civilization of the Indus Valley [c. 2000 B.C.].” 75 Live and learn.) But not every image

is symbolic; not every woman is a goddess. The “prominent and clumsily applied breasts” ofthese figures have been taken as evidence that they were “fertility symbols,” 76 but they may havebeen valued simply for what P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster used to refer to as a “wonderfulprofile.” Big breasts are as useful to courtesans as to goddesses. Are the buxom centerfolds ofPlayboy magazine fertility symbols, or the voluptuous women that Rubens loved to paint? Oneseal shows a woman, upside down, with a child (or is it a scorpion?) coming out of (or into?) her,between her spread thighs. 77 This has been taken to refer to “a possible Mother Earth myth,” 78but what was the myth, and is the upside-down woman a goddess, let alone an earth goddess?Why is she not simply a woman giving birth?Scholars have seen connections between the alleged Lord of Beasts and a goddess,particularly the Hindu goddess who rides on a lion; some (casually conflating lions and tigers)connect the tiger on the seals with Hindu goddesses of a later period or with goddesses of ancientEgypt, the Aegean, Asia Minor, and the whole of West Asia, who were thought to consort withlions, leopards, or panthers. 79 The assumption that the figures of women found at the Indus sitesare goddesses is then used to support the argument that the goddesses in later Hinduism—or theminor Vedic goddesses, Yakshinis and Apsarases, associated with trees and water 80 —may betraced back to this early period. 81Hindsight speculations about fertility sects associated with female figurines, the bull, thehorned deity, and trees like the sacred fig (pipal) are tempting. The seal with the person emergingfrom the middle of a fig tree may or may not prefigure the later Indian iconography of fig treesand banyan trees. 82 But it is going too far to interpret something so straightforward as a gravecontaining a male and female skeleton as “possibly the first indication of the well-known Hinducustom of sati” (live widows burning themselves to death on their dead husbands’ cremationpyres or entombing themselves in their husband’s graves). 83 The couple may simply have beenburied side by side, whenever they died.Some of the figures of well-endowed women are “curiously headless,” and in some casesof actual adult burial the feet had been deliberately cut off, a fascinating correspondence, perhapsjoined in a Procrustean syndrome. These headless female figures 84 may foreshadow the headlessgoddesses who people later Hindu mythology, such as the Brahmin woman who exchangedheads with the Pariah woman. (Or is it just that the neck is the thinnest part of such figures andmost likely to break?) The prevalence of images of women may well indicate “a greater socialpresence of the female than in later times, which may also have been a generally more assertivepresence.” 85One tiny (ten-centimeter) bronze image supports the hope that some Indus women did infact have an “assertive presence” and that is the so-called dancing girl of Mohenjo-Daro, inwhom Marshall saw a “youthful impudence.” John Keay describes her wonderfully well:Naked save for a chunky necklace and an assortment of bangles, this minuscule statuette is not ofthe usual Indian sex symbol, full of breast and wide of hip, but of a slender nymphet happilyflaunting her puberty with delightful insouciance. Her pose is studiously casual, one spindly armbent with the hand resting on a déhanché hip, the other dangling so as to brush a slightly raisedknee. Slim and attenuated, the legs are slightly parted, and one foot—both are nowmissing—must have been pointed. . . her head is thrown back as if challenging a suitor, and herhair is somehow dressed into a heavy plaited chignon of perilous but intentionally dramaticconstruction. Decidedly, she wants to be admired; and she might be gratified to know that, fourthousand years later, she still is. 86 Others too admired her “gaunt and boyish femininity,” herprovocative “foot-less stance, haughty head, and petulantly poised arms,” 87 and found

“something endearing” in “the artless pose of an awkward adolescent.” 88 She is said to have“proto-Australoid” features that are also attested in skeletons in the Indus Valley. 89 This nativegirl mocks us, perhaps for our clumsy and arrogant attempts to figure out what she, and hercompatriots in bronze and clay and soapstone, “mean.”IS INDUS RELIGION A MYTH?The larger archaeological remains are equally ambiguous. Consider the very largeswimming pool or bathing tank or public water tank in the citadel at Mohenjo-Daro,approximately forty feet by twenty-three feet and eight feet deep. There are wide steps leadingdown to it at each end and colonnaded buildings with small rooms around it. From this somehave concluded that it was the site of a “Great Bath” where ritual bathing took place as part of astate religion. 90 But all that this structure tells us is that the IVC people liked to bathe, just to getclean or to cool off on hot days or to splash about, same as we do. Cleanliness is next togodliness, but not synonymous with it. The great attention paid to the sewage system in the IVCsuggests a hard-headed approach to hygiene (unless, of course, one wants to view the sewers assacred underground chambers). Why does the bath have to be a ritual bath? awBronze Dancing Girl from Mohenjo-Daro.The answer is simple enough: because the so-called Great Bath resembles the ritualbathing tanks of Hindu temples that began to appear in the subcontinent in the first few centuriesCE 91 and because such a tank reflects a concern with ritual purification through water, animportant idea in Hinduism. 92 Four thousand years later, indeed, every temple has its tank.Therefore, the argument goes, the tank must have served the same function in the IVC. Similarly,the so-called College of Priests in Mohenjo-Daro has been taken as evidence for the existence of

a widespread priesthood. 93 Well, it’s a big building, true, but why couldn’t it be a dorm, or ahotel, or a hospital, or even a brothel?Works of art such as the images on the seals and other artifacts provide abundantevidence of imaginative art, perhaps mythological but not necessarily ritual. They may have beenpurely decorative, or they may illustrate narratives of some sort or convey some sort of symbolicmeaning, probably more than one, as symbols often do. But did they necessarily express thesymbols of an organized religion? There are no recognizable religious buildings or elaborateburials in the Indus cities (“Clearly, they did not expect huge demands on the dead in theafter-life” 94 ), no signs of ancestral rituals or “magnificent icons” or any “specially decoratedstructures.” The conclusion is clear enough: “If there were temples they are difficult to identify. .. . The cities may not therefore have been the focus of religious worship.” 95 Yet the samefact—that no great temple or center of worship has been found as yet at Mohenjo-Daro—hasinspired a very different conclusion: One place where such a structure might have been situated,just east of the bath, has not been excavated because a Buddhist stupa (reliquary mound) standsthere, and permission has never been granted to move it. ax96 The stupa is indeed a strong hint thatthe structure underneath it might have been religious, for Buddhism shares with other religions(including, notably, Hinduism and Islam) the habit of sacred recycling, putting one religiousbuilding on the site hallowed by another, the funeral baked meats served cold for the weddingbreakfast that follows. And one might argue that it would be odd if given the great regulation andstandardization of everything else in public life, the governing powers did not also regulatebelief. But all speculations about the role of religion in the lives of the IVC people rest ondoubtful retrospective hindsight from Hindu practices many centuries later. 97The assumption of a theocratic elite in the IVC underpins the assertion that the imagesdepicted on pictographic seal inscriptions and terra-cotta figures are divinities and that animism,demonic cults, fertility cults, and the worship of natural forces and mother goddesses flourishedin the IVC. 98 But surely it’s possible that the people of the IVC had no religion at all, in the senseof a state cult or an enforced dogma. Is it possible that this was the first secular state, anticipatingthe European Enlightenment by four thousand years? Could they have been more likeprotoatheists than protoyogis? After all, there were many people in later Hinduism who had nouse for religion, people such as the Charvakasand the Lokayatas (“Materialists”). 99 (If people aregoing to argue for religious meanings from hindsight, one might as well also argue against itfrom hindsight; two can play at that game.) Just as it has been well argued that there is a verygood reason why the IVC language remains undeciphered—because the seals may not recordany language at all, merely random symbols of ownership 100 —so too we may argue that the othersymbols are not part of a coherent religious system but equally random artistic creations.THE END OF THE INDUSNo one knows how the IVC came to an end. Perhaps it simply ran its course, had its dayin the sun, and then the sun, as always, set on that empire. Perhaps it was destroyed by drought.Perhaps the Indus River changed its course, or there was an earthquake. 101 Perhaps massivedeforestation degraded the environment. Perhaps the people died of diseases such as severeanemia, as the skeletal remains of what was previously interpreted as a “massacre” suggest. 102Perhaps it was destroyed by invasions. Last but certainly not least, perhaps it was destroyed by aflood; whatever caused the actual destruction, floods did eventually bury the cities in manylayers of Indus mud, which caused both the ground level and the water table to rise by tenmeters. Immigrations of new peoples, droughts, deforestation, floods, or alterations in the course

of the life-giving river: any of these may have been contributing factors. 103 Whatever the cause,the result was that “on top of the cities, now consigned to oblivion beneath tons of alluvium,other peoples grazed their goats, sowed their seeds and spun their myths. A great civilization waslost to memory.” 104 But was it in fact lost?The flood that may have destroyed the Indus cities may have been the inspiration for themyth of the great flood that is described in the Shatapatha Brahmana (c. 800 BCE) and thatcontinues to haunt Hindu mythology to the present day. And it is tempting to argue that some orall of these stories are memories of (if not evidence for) a great flood that destroyed the IVC. Butit would be better, I think, to resist that temptation and simply to suggest that present-dayscholarly (or nonscholarly) theories of a catastrophic flood at the end of the Indus ValleyCivilization were inspired by the myth of the flood, that the scholarly theories themselves aremerely the latest variants of the myth of the flood.TRANSFORMATIONS THROUGH TIME: FAST-FORWARDArguments from hindsight pervade the scholarship on the IVC, underpinning correlationsbetween the quasi unicorn and the sage whose mother was an antelope, between the Lord ofBeasts on the seal and Shiva, between various images of women and later Hindu goddesses,between the “Great Bath” and the bathing tanks of Hindu temples, between small conical objectsthat have been interpreted as phallic stones (but may just be pieces used in board games) and theShiva linga. The obsession with descendants, arguing that the IVC seal can be explained by whatwe know of Shiva as Lord of Beasts, is the other side of the coin of the obsession with origins,arguing that the figure of Shiva as Lord of Beasts is derived from, and to some extent explainedby, the IVC seal. The two approaches scratch each other’s backs. The fascination with the IVCcomes in part from the intrinsic appeal of its artifacts but also from a perceived need to findnon-Vedic, indeed pre-Vedic sources for most of Hinduism—for Shiva and goddess worship andall the rest of Hinduism that is not attested in the Vedas.On the other hand, it is always tempting to look for the keys to the IVC where there isavailable light in later Hinduism, to let Hindu phenomena, which have the context of texts toexplain them, illuminate the darkness that surrounds many early Indus images and objects thatlack such verbal commentaries. But too often scholars read the Indus images like the pictures inthe puzzle books of my youth: How many (Hindu) deer can you see hiding in this (Indus) forest?Throughout this chapter, and indeed throughout this book, I have poured into my ears the wax ofpedantic caution, in an attempt (sometimes in vain) to resist the siren song of hindsight. For figtrees, horns, bulls, phalluses, and buxom women do play a central role in later Hinduism, andsuch images may have been important to Hindus in part because they never lost some of thepower they had had in the Indus period. Although these images certainly also occur in manyother cultures, the hypothesis that Hinduism inherited them from the Indus seems a moreefficient explanation than coincidence or independent origination. Nor is there any likely source(with the possible, but by no means established, exception of Elam) from which the two culturescould have borrowed the same images. It is probable that the forms survived; the mistake is inassuming that the function follows the form. The inhabitants of both Mohenjo-Daro and modernMumbai had bulls, but they surely had very different ideas about bulls.It is useful to distinguish hindsight from fast-forwarding. Hindsight often misreads anearlier phenomenon by assuming that it meant then the same thing that it meant later, reading thepast through the present, forgetting that we cannot simply lay the present over the past like aplastic map overlay. The false Orientalist assumptions that India was timeless and that the

classical texts of the Brahmins described an existing society led to the equally false assumptionthat the village and caste organization of colonial or even contemporary India was a guide totheir historical past. 105But at times the atavisms, the modern traces of ancient phenomena, are so striking that itwould be perverse to ignore them, and from time to time I have fast-forwarded to note them. Weshould not impose the meaning of the later icons upon the earlier images, but once we haveexplored the meaning of the Indus representations within the constrictions of their own limitedcontext, we can go on to speculate on how they may have contributed to the evolution of a latericonography that they sometimes superficially resemble. 106For the resemblances between some aspects of the IVC and later Hinduism are simply toostunning to ignore. As the Late Harappan culture declined, its survivors must have carried someof it into the Ganges-Yamuna basin. There are links between archaeological records among thecommunities of the third millennium BCE, which used only stone and bronze, and the people ofthe Gangetic plain and the Deccan in around 1000 BCE, who developed the use of iron. At thistime, or even a few centuries earlier (in 1500 BCE), the process of urbanization moved graduallysouth from the Indus cities to the site of Kaushambi, near modern Allahabad in the Gangeticplain, and to the surrounding villages. The material culture does not show continuities; the use ofbricks of standard sizes, the geometrical grids, the seals, the sewers, the large urban plan, none ofthis is preserved. 107 Above all, the technique of administration was lost; not for many centurieswould anyone know how to govern such a large community in India. But someone succeeded inpreserving on the journey south and east some of the cultural patterns nurtured in the Induscities, for some of these patterns lived on long after the cities themselves were gone. 108 The Induscivilization may not have simply gone out like the flame of a candle or, at least, not beforelighting another candle.We can see the possible survival, in transformation, of a number of images. TheHarappan motif of the fig (pipal)—as a leaf decoration on pottery and as a tree onseals—reappears in the imagery of some later religious sects. 109 There is a conch shell, etched invermilion, that may well have been used as a libation vessel, just as conch shells, etched invermilion, are used in Hinduism today. Not only individual images but also aspects of the artforms—especially the so-called animal style, stylized and rounded, with just a few meticulousand suggestive details—seem to have survived. Some of the stylized depictions of the animals onthe seals bear a striking resemblance to the depictions of the same animals two thousand yearslater (and magnified many hundredfold) on the capital plinths of the pillars of Ashoka. 110 Thesepatterns, and the rough outlines of other images that we have considered, perhaps even the stonelingas and the voluptuous women, may have gradually merged with the culture of the people ofthe Veda.

Horse on the Ashokan Column at Sarnath.CHAPTER 4BETWEEN THE RUINSAND THE TEXT2000 to 1500 BCECHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES BCE)c. 4000-3000 *Indo-European breaks up into separatelanguagesc. 2100-2000 Light-spoked chariots are inventedc. 2000-1500 Indus civilizationdeclinesc. 1900 Sarasvati River dries upc. 1700-1500 Nomads in the Punjab compose the RigVeda; horses arrive in Northwest Indiac. 1350 Hittite inscriptions speak about horses and godsc.900 The Vedic people move down into the Ganges ValleyVISHNU AND BRAHMA CREATEEACH OTHERWhen the three worlds were in darkness, Vishnu slept in the middle of thecosmic ocean. A lotus grew out of his navel. Brahma came to him and said, “Tellme, who are you?” Vishnu replied, “I am Vishnu, creator of the universe. All theworlds, and you yourself, are inside me. And who are you?” Brahma replied, “Iam the creator, self-created, and everything is inside me.” Vishnu then enteredBrahma’s body and saw all three worlds in his belly. Astonished, he came out ofBrahma’s mouth and said, “Now, you must enter my belly in the same way andsee the worlds.” And so Brahma entered Vishnu’s belly and saw all the worlds.Then, since Vishnu had shut all the openings, Brahma came out of Vishnu’s naveland rested on the lotus.—Kurma Purana (500-800 CE) 1 THE PROBLEM: THINGSWITHOUT WORDS,

WORDS WITHOUT THINGSWhat was the relationship between the people who composed the Vedas (the ancientSanskrit texts beginning with the Rig Veda, in around 1500 BCE) and the people who lived in theIndus River Valley? Where were the people of the Indus Valley Civilization after the end of theIVC? The myth of the mutual creation of the gods Brahma (the creator) and Vishnu (one of thegreat male gods of Hinduism) provides us with a basic metaphor with which to consider theconnections between Vedic and non-Vedic aspects of Hinduism. It is a third way of dealing withfalse dichotomies: Where the image of the man/rabbit in the moon represented two simultaneousparadigms, and the image of one woman’s head on another’s body represented the fusion of oneculture with another, the mutual creation of Brahma and Vishnu represents such a fusion inwhich neither can claim priority.The non-Veda, if I may call it that, has been a largely uncredited partner of Hinduism, forwe have heard it only at those relatively late historical moments when it crashed the Sanskritclub. The only way we can tell the story of the literature of the Hindus is to begin with thosetexts that survived—the Sanskrit texts—but at the same time we must acknowledge, right fromthe start, from the time of the Rig Veda, the presence of something else in these texts, somethingthat is non-Vedic.Between about 2000 and 1500 BCE, one culture in Northwest India was dying andanother was beginning to preserve its poetry. Fade out: Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). Fade in:the Vedas. Each of these cultures may have been in some way a prequel to Hinduism. Theobjects of the IVC, things without words, give us a certain kind of information about the peoplewho lived there, but no evidence of where the people of the IVC went after the death of theircities (and, presumably, their texts). With the Vedas we have the opposite problem, wordswithout (most) things (just a few pots and an altar or two), and many words about things, butwithout much physical evidence about the daily life of the people who first spoke those words or,again, about where they came from. Before we can begin to talk about people, however, we needto say a word about words, about language, and about the prehistory of the people whocomposed the Rig Veda.*INDO-EUROPE, THE LAND EAST OF THE ASTERISKNineteenth-century German and British linguists, building on some seventeenth-andeighteenth-century hunches, ay demonstrated that Vedic Sanskrit was one of the oldest recordedforms of a language family that included ancient Greek and Latin, Hittite (in ancient Anatolia),the Celtic and Norse-Germanic languages, and, ultimately, French, German, Italian, Spanish,English, and all their friends and relations. 2 All these languages are alleged to have run awayfrom the home of a single parent language sometime in the fourth millennium BCE, 3 a languagethat linguists call Indo-European (or Indo-Germanic or Indo-Aryan—more about the overtonesof this word, below), more precisely, *Indo-European. We have no attested examples of thatlanguage before the breakup; the *Indo-European speakers almost certainly had no knowledge ofwriting, 4 and the earliest example of an Indo-European language that we have is afourteenth-century BCE Anatolian treaty in Hittite that calls on the Hittite version of severalVedic gods: Indra, Mitra, Varuna, and the Ashvins [Nasatyas]). Therefore, an apologetic orapotropaic asterisk usually hovers over the reconstructed, hypothetical (nowadays we would sayvirtual) forms of Indo-European (or *Proto-Indo-European, as it is usually called, as easy as*PIE) to indicate the absence of any actual occurrences of the word. For instance, linguists use

the Latin equus, Gallic epos, Greek hippos, Sanskrit ashsva, old English eoh, French cheval, andso forth, to reconstruct the *PIE word for “horse”: ay Hekwo-, or ay ekwos to its pals in thelinguists’ club. And *deiwos develops into deus in Latin, deva in Sanskrit, divo in Russian, and,eventually, our English “Tues[day]” as well as “divine.” Sanskrit and Iranian (or Avestan)formed one of the oldest subfamilies, Indo-Iranian, within this larger group.How are we to explain the fact (and it is a fact) that people speak one form or another ofIndo-European languages from India to Ireland? The hypothesis that a single parent languagewas the historical source of all the known Indo-European languages is not an observable fact, butlinguists regard it as an “inescapable hypothesis.” 5 The Indo-European map is linguistic, linkinglanguages together in a family (a rather dysfunctional family, but a family) that is distinct from,for instance, Chinese or the Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic) or, more significantly forHinduism, Tamil and the other South Indian languages in the group called Dravidian. Themajority of people in India speak an Indo-European language (76 percent), withDravidian-language speakers accounting for 22 percent, and the remaining 2 percent taken up byAustro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman, and tribal languages.The evidence that the Indo-European languages are related lies primarily in theirgrammar and vocabulary. Thus the Sanskrit agni (“fire”) is cognate with Latin ignis, English“ignite”; “foot” is pada in Sanskrit, pes, pedis in Latin, pied in French, Fuss in German, foot inEnglish; and so forth. Many Sanskrit words have English cognates: for example, the Sanskritpashu (“cattle”), preserved in the Latin pecus, is embedded in the English “impecunious” (“outof cattle, or low on cash”).But the temptation to draw simple conclusions about nonverbal facts from such verbalcorrespondences must be resisted; the fact that the word for “hand” is different in most of theselanguages should not be taken to mean that the Indo-European speakers had feet but not hands.So too, people change while words remain the same; words are often, as the French say, “falsefriends” (faux amis), the same word meaning something different in two different languages,often the very opposite thing. Meanings change in time even within a single culture. Antigods,Asuras (whose name incorporates the word asu, “breath”), are the equal and morallyindistinguishable elder brothers and rivals of the gods in the Indo-European or at leastIndo-Iranian period (when Ahura Mazda, the “great Asura,” is the chief god of the Avesta), butthey later become totally demonic demons. (“Demons,” for that matter, were once benevolentdaimons in Greek, before the Christians demonized them, as it were). Sanskrit then created aback formation, taking Asura to mean “non-Sura” (splitting off the initial a of asu to make an ain its privative sense, as in “a-theist”) and inventing the word “Suras” (now said to derive fromsura, “wine”) to apply to the wine-drinking gods, the anti-antigods. Although this sort ofreasoning might be called etymologic, certainly not logic, people persist in using lexicons as thebasis of history and in building elaborate theories about social systems and homelands on thisflimsy Indo-European linguistic scaffolding.Indo-European is a language group; technically, there are no Indo-Europeans, merelyIndo-European speakers. But since European scholars also assumed, quite reasonably, thatwherever the languages went, there had to be people to carry them, Indo-European speakers areoften called Indo-Europeans. Moreover, we are able to construct some of Indo-European culture,not merely from isolated words and parallel grammar structures but from the more substantialhistorical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence. For instance, we know that cattle rustling wasthe basic trade of all of the Indo-European speakers, from the Celts to the Indians, becauseclosely parallel myths from Greece, India, Iran, northern Europe, the Near East, and Scandinavia

allow us to reconstruct a *Proto-Indo-European cattle raiding myth. 6Who were these cattle rustlers? More broadly, what is the relationship between thelanguage and the geographical origin and ethnic identity of the *PIE people? Or to put itdifferently and to limit it to the culture that is the subject of this book . . .WHERE WERE THE PEOPLE WHO COMPOSED THE VEDASBEFORE THEY COMPOSED THE VEDAS?We do not know for sure, but we can guess, and the craze for origins makes us guess.Some guesses make more sense than others. Here are the four most often cited.FIRST GUESS: THE ARYANS INVADED INDIA FROM *INDO-EUROPE“Once upon a time,” the story goes, “blue-haired, blond-eyed people from the north drovetheir chariots into India and beat the hell out of the dark-skinned people who lived there.” (Thenorthern element was often taken to the extreme. In 1903, Bal Gangadhar Tilak argued, in hisThe Arctic Home in the Vedas, that the Aryans had composed the Vedas at the North Pole and,on the journey south, divided into two branches, one of which went to Europe, the other toIndia.) Not surprisingly, nineteenth-century European scholars, serving colonial powers, favoredtheories of cultural interaction involving invasions or colonization, and the theory that the Vedicpeople invaded India still has general currency. Behind this guess lies the assumption of adiffusionist, centrifugal cultural movement; like an airline hub dispersing planes, the politicalcenter sends out armies and imposes its rule on the neighboring lands. The paradigm of thismodel is Latin, which did indeed diffuse outward from Rome to all the lands that the Romansconquered and that therefore speak the so-called Romance languages. Linguists then constructed,on the Roman model, an earlier family tree of languages diverging from the center, in this casenot from Rome but from the Caucasus, somewhere east of the southern Urals, in southeasternRussia, perhaps on the shores of the northern Black Sea or the Sea of Azov. 7 (This is where, aswe will see, someone—probably, though not certainly, the *Indo-European people—probablydomesticated horses, an event of great significance for the history of Hinduism.) Therefore, the*Indo-European people were also called Caucasians. The mythical land of their family home,recently rechristened Eurostan, 8 might just as well be thought of as *Indo-Europe, the land Eastof the Asterisk.According to this scenario, one branch of this group traveled down the east side of theCaspian Sea and continued east through Afghanistan, reaching the Punjab before the middle ofthe second millennium BCE. 9 But to say that the languages formed a family is not to say that thepeople who spoke them formed a race. There is nothing intrinsically racist about this story oflinguistic migration. On the contrary, the eighteenth-century discovery of the Indo-European linkwas, at first, a preracial discovery of brotherhood; these people are our (linguistic) cousins. Butthen the nineteenth-century Orientalists, who now had a theory of race to color their perceptions,gave it a distinctly racist thrust. Their attitude to the nineteenth-century inhabitants of India cameto something like “Well, they are black, but their skin color is irrelevant; they are white inside,Greek inside, just like us.” There were also anti-Semitic implications: One reason why Britishand German scholars were so happy to discover Sanskrit was that they were delighted to find alanguage older than Hebrew (which they regarded as, on the one hand, their own language, thelanguage of what they called the Old Testament and, on the other hand, the language of the

despised “others,” the Jews, for whom the book was the Hebrew Bible). At last, they thought,Hebrew was no longer the oldest language in the world.Racism quickly came to color the English usage of the Sanskrit word arya, the word thatthe Vedic poets used to refer to themselves, meaning “Us” or “Good Guys,” long before anyonehad a concept of race. Properly speaking, “Aryan” (as it became in English) designates alinguistic family, not a racial group (just as Indo-European is basically a linguistic rather thandemographic term); there are no Aryan noses, only Aryan verbs, no Aryan people, onlyAryan-speaking people. Granted, the Sanskrit term does refer to people rather than to a language.But the people who spoke *Indo-European were not a people in the sense of a nation (for theymay never have formed a political unity) or a race, but only in the sense of a linguisticcommunity. 10 After all those migrations, the blood of several different races had mingled in theirveins.Nevertheless, the Orientalist version of the Aryan hypothesis boasted not only of thepurity of Aryan blood but of the quantity of non-Aryan blood that the Aryans spilled, and thismyth was certainly racist. The “invasion of the blonds” story took root and prevailed for manyreasons, among them that the British found a history of invasions of India a convenient way tojustify their own military conquest of India. And of course the story became an even more racistmyth when the Nazis got hold of it and made “Aryan” a word that, like “gay,” or “holocaust,” or“adult” (in the sense of “pornographic,” as in “adult books and films, adult viewing”), no longermeans what it once meant. az People always think about race when you say “Aryan,” even thoughyou tell them not to; we can’t forget what we now know about the word; we can’t regain ourearlier naiveté. “Hindu” is a somewhat tainted word, but there is no other easy alternative;“Aryan,” by contrast, is a deeply tainted word, and there are easy alternatives. It is therefore bestto avoid using the A word, and to call the people who spoke Indo-European languagesIndo-European speakers (or, less cumbersome, Indo-Europeans, though this implies an ethnicgroup).And since the people who composed the Veda left few archaeological footprints, and allwe know for certain about them is that they composed the Veda, let us call its authors, and theircommunity, the Vedic people.A frequent corollary to the Indo-European invasion theory is the hypothesis that theVedic people were responsible for the end of the Indus Valley cities. Invasion implies conquest,and who else was there for them to conquer in India? The advocates of this theory cite statementsin the Veda about knocking down the fortresses of the barbarians, for the Indus cities did havemassive fortification walls. 11 They also cite what they interpret as archaeological evidence ofsudden, mass deaths in the Indus Valley, and the verses of the Rig Veda that refer to the Dasas asdark-skinned (7.5.3) or dark (1.130.8, 9.41.1, 9.73.5), though the term in question more oftenrefers to evil than to skin color, 12 as well as the one Vedic verse that describes them assnub-nosed (“noseless” ba ) (5.29.10). Put these data together and you have blond Vedic peopleresponsible for mass death to dark-skinned people in the Indus Valley.But there is no reason to make this connection. The Vedic people had other enemies, andthe Indus Valley people had other, more likely sources of destruction, nor is there reliableevidence that their cities were ever sacked. 13 Moreover, it is more likely that the Indo-Europeanincursions came in a series of individual or small group movements, rather than the one, bigcharge of the light(-skinned) brigade scenario imagined by this first guess.The smug theory that a cavalcade of Aryans rode roughshod into India, bringingcivilization with them, has thus been seriously challenged. The certainty has gone, and new

answers have thrown their hats into the ring, just as politically driven as the Aryan invasiontheory, and, like most politically driven scholarship (but is there really any other kind?), rangingfrom plausible (if unsupported) to totally bonkers.SECOND GUESS: THE CAUCASIANS STROLLED IN FROM THE CAUCASUS“Once upon a time,” the story goes, “people from the north brought their families andtheir agriculture into India and settled among the people who lived there.” The first guess, theAryan invasion theory, is one of the great testosterone myths: They’re guys, they beat everyoneup. This second guess, by replacing the word “invasion” with “migration,” takes the militarytriumphalism out of the theory but retains the basic mechanism and the basic structures: Migrantsmay have brought an Indo-European language into India. 14 This approach accounts for a gradualcultural linguistic infusion into India, still with all the baggage that linguists load ontolanguages—the social classes, the mythology—and supported by the same linguistic evidence,archaeological evidence (such as burial customs 15 ) and pottery that support the invasion theory. 16Those who hold by either of these two theories (invasion or migration) have recourse to laterIndian history. The two powers that built the greatest empires in India, the forces of CentralAsian Turks and of the British Raj, first entered India not as military conquerors but as tradersand merchants, but in the end, it took force majeure to establish and maintain the control of thesubcontinent.Martin West, a leading scholar of Indo-European languages, disdains the idea that theIndo-European speakers came not as conquerors but as peaceful migrants: “In the last fifty yearsor so there has been a scholarly reaction against the old idea of militant hordes swarming out ofEurostan with battle-axes held high and occupying one territory after another. It has beenfashionable to deride this model and to put all the emphasis on peaceful processes of populationand language diffuision.” 17 But, he continues, both on the analogy with the way that inobservable history, other linguistic groups (such as Arabic, Turkic, Latin, Celtic, and German, aswell as English and Spanish in the New World, which West does not mention) “grewmultitudinous and poured across the length and breadth of Europe,” and considering the fact that“there are constant references to battles and descriptions of fighting” in Indo-European poeticand narrative traditions, it appears “by no means implausible that similar bouts of aggressivemigration in earlier eras played a large part in effecting the Indo-European diaspora.” Thistheory, which is quite plausible, is no longer regarded as PC (in the double sense of“postcolonial” or “politically correct”), because of its political history, and the aptly namedProfessor West can make it only because he is privileged to belong to a generation of Western(more precisely British) scholars for whom “PC” stands for nothing but “police constable.”THIRD GUESS: THE VEDIC PEOPLE ORIGINATED IN INDIA“From the dawn of history, *Indo-European speakers lived in India, in the Punjab, wherethey composed the Rig Veda.” A stronger version of the theory adds: “They emigrated to Iran(where they composed the Avesta), Anatolia (leaving that early Hittite inscription), Greece andItaly (where they incorporated local languages to develop Greek and Latin), and, finally, ancientBritain.” (The most extreme version of this guess adds: “All the languages in the world arederived from Sanskrit.” 18 ) In this view, the Vedic people may have been, rather than invaders (orimmigrants) from southern Russia, “indigenous for an unknown period of time in the lower

Central Himalayan regions,” 19 particularly in the Punjab. A variant of this argument presupposesnot the same centrifugal diffusion that underlies the first two guesses (simply radiating fromIndia instead of the Caucasus) but a centripetal convergence, into India rather than from theCaucasus: Separate languages came together in India, influencing their neighbors to produce afamily resemblance; the people who spoke those separate languages came together and then tookback home, like souvenirs, bits of one another’s languages.Why couldn’t it have happened that way? In reaction to the blatantly racist spin andcolonial thrust of the first two guesses, which imply that Europeans brought civilization to India,this theory says, “Look, we in India had civilization before you Europeans did!” (This iscertainly true; no matter where they came from or what their relationship was, the people of theIndus were building great cities and the people of the Vedas creating a great literature at a timewhen the British were still swinging in trees.) And then it goes on to say, “You came from us.The people who created Vedic culture did not enter India; they began in India.” As a theory, it isreasonable in itself, but there is considerable evidence against it, 20 and both linguistic andarchaeological arguments render it even more purely speculative than the Aryan invasiontheory. 21 It has the additional disadvantage of being susceptible to exploitation by the particularbrand of Hindu nationalism that wants the Muslims (and Christians) to get out of India: “Wewere always here, not even just since the Rig Veda, but much, much earlier. This land wasalways ours.”FOURTH GUESS: THE VEDIC PEOPLE LIVED IN THE INDUS VALLEY“Once upon a time, the people of the Indus Valley Civilization composed the Vedas.”The final step is simply to assume that some or all of the inhabitants of the cities of Harappa andMohenjo-Daro were themselves Indo-European speakers; that the people who built the cities alsocomposed the Vedas, 22 that the Indus civilization itself is the site of the mythological Vedicage. 23 In favor of this is the evidence of some continuity between both the space and the time ofthe Indus and Vedic civilizations, 24 which almost certainly shared some of the territory of thegreater Punjab during some part of the second millennium BCE, as well as a number of culturalfeatures. One variant of this theory argues that (1) since there are Dravidian (and Munda) loanwords in the Vedas (which is true), and (2) since the Harappan script is a form of Sanskrit (whichis almost certainly not true, and certainly unproved, though reputable scholars as well as crankshave identified the Indus inscriptions as part of “the Indian/Persian/ Indo-European religioussystem and Sanskrit language” 25 ), therefore (3) the IVC is a hybrid Sanskrit/Dravidian cultureproduced by (4) Indo-European speakers who came from Europe to North India to interact withDravidian speakers from India, starting in the middle of the fourth millennium BCE. 26This theory still assumes a migration into India from Europe, but one that is met by anearlier Dravidian presence. Some see in the Indus Valley not merely the seeds of later Hinduismbut the very religion described in the almost contemporaneous Rig Veda; they argue, forinstance, that the brick platforms found in the Indus were used for Vedic sacrifices. 27 This hybridis sometimes called the Sarasvati Valley culture, or the Indus-Sarasvati culture, because therewere Indus settlements on the Sarasvati River (though it dried up around 1900 BCE) and the RigVeda mentions a Sarasvati River. 28 But even when we grant that some sort of gradual culturalinteraction took place, and not simply an invasion, it is not likely that the same people couldhave built the Indus cities and also composed the Rig Veda.The linguistic and archaeological evidence against this fourth guess is pretty conclusive.

It is hard work to fit the ruins of the IVC into the landscape of the Rig Veda. 29 The Rig Veda doesnot know any of the places or artifacts or urban techniques of the Indus Valley. 30 None of thethings the Veda describes look like the things we see in the archaeology of the Indus. The RigVeda never mentions inscribed seals or a Great Bath or trade with Mesopotamia, despite the factthat it glories in the stuff of everyday life. It never refers to sculptured representations of thehuman body. 31 It has no words, not even borrowed ones, for scripts or writing, for records,scribes, or letters. 32 After the Indus script, writing was not used again in India until the time ofAshoka, in the third century BCE.Many of the words that the Rig Veda uses for agricultural implements, such as the plow,as well as words for furrow and threshing floor and, significantly, rice, come from non-Sanskriticlanguages, suggesting that the Vedic people learned much of their agriculture from communitiesin place in India before they arrived. But the Indus people, who obviously did have plows andmortar, presumably would have had their own words for them. Even in the Vedic period, therewas multilingualism. But how could the Vedic people have forgotten about architecture, aboutbricks, about mortar (let alone about writing)? The answer is simple enough: They had never hadthem. In the good old days they had always slept on their saddlebags, and once they got to thePunjab they built in wood and straw, like the first two of the three little piggies, not in brick, likethe third (and like the Indus people).It is therefore extremely unlikely that the Indus people composed the Rig Veda. The finalnail in the coffin of this theory comes not from the rather technical linguistic arguments but fromthe testimony of animals, particularly horses.LIONS AND TIGERS AND RHINOS, OH MY!Animals in general provide strong clues; they make suggestions, sometimesoverwhelmingly persuasive suggestions, if not airtight proofs. The evidence of animals suggeststhat the civilizations of the Indus Valley and the Vedas were entirely different, though this doesnot mean that they did not eventually interact. The Rig Veda mentions (here in alphabeticalorder) ants, antelope, boars, deer, foxes, gazelles, jackals, lions, monkeys, rabbits, rats, quail, andwolves, and other Vedas mention bears, beaver, elk, hares, lynxes, and otters. 33 The Rig Vedaalso mentions lions (10.28.11), though the Vedic people had to invent a word for “lion” 34 (and toborrow a word for “peacock” 35 ). (Lions may or may not be depicted in the Indus Valley; there’sa figurine that might be a lion or a tiger.)The Vedic people knew the elephant but regarded it as a curiosity; they had to make up aword for it and called it “the wild animal with a hand” (mrigahastin ). But they do not mentiontigers or rhinoceroses, animals familiar from the Harappan seals. Nor are there any references tounicorns, mythical or real. 36 The zoological argument from silence (“the lion that didn’t roar inthe night”) is never conclusive (beware the false negative; the absence of evidence is notevidence of absence), but all this suggests that the Vedic people originally lived north of the landwhere the tiger and the elephant roam, and generally north of the Indus rhinoceroses, on thenonfalsifiable assumption that people who had seen an animal as weird as a rhinoceros wouldhave mentioned it.TALKING HORSESCattle are central to both cultures—though the Indus Valley Civilization favored bulls,the Vedas cows—as well as to many other ancient cultures and therefore of little use asdifferentiating markers. But the IVC does not seem to know, or care about, the horse, who speaks

loudly and clearly in the Vedas (as horses are said to do, beginning in the Vedic tale of theAshvins—twin horse-headed gods). Let us consider first the possible existence and then thesymbolic importance of the horse in each of the two cultures.On the one hand, wherever Indo-European-speaking cultures have been identified,evidence of horses has been found. 37 This does not in itself prove that an ancient culture with nohorses is not Indo-European, 38 nor does it follow that wherever people had horses, they spokeIndo-European languages. Indo-European culture is contained within the broader range ofancient horse-having cultures, such as China and Egypt. For one thing, the ancestor of the horse,the so-called Dawn Horse, or Eohippus, much smaller than the modern horse, lived throughoutEurope as well as North America in the Eocene age (“the dawn of time”), some sixty to fortymillion years ago. The horse was probably domesticated in several places, and it didn’t happenall at once even in Central Asia.Nevertheless, the spread of the Central Asian horse (and, after around 2000 BCE, thechariot, for people rode astride for a long time before they began to drive horses) suggests that ingeneral, when Indo-Aryan speakers arrived somewhere, horses trotted in at the same time, andthe archaeological record supports the hypothesis that Indo-European speakers did in fact rideand/or drive, rather than walk, into India. For the horse is not indigenous to India. There isarchaeological evidence of many horses in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent only in thesecond millennium BCE, after the decline of the IVC. Horse bits and copper and iron objectswere used in Maharashtra, and horse paraphernalia (such as bits) south of the Narmada during orafter this period suggest an extensive network of horse traders from northwestern India. 39By contrast, the absence of a thriving horse population in the IVC, the fact that evenadamant opponents of Guesses One and Two must admit that the horse seems not to have playeda significant role in the Harappan economy, 40 supports the hypothesis that the Indus Valleypeople were not Indo-European speakers. 41 Yet the ink was scarcely dry on such statementswhen people started racing around trying to find horse skeletons in the Indus Valley closet. Now,though it has been asserted with some confidence that no remains of horses have been foundanywhere in the Indus Valley culture 42 or, somewhat more tentatively, that “the horse wasprobably unknown” to the Indus people, 43 there is archaeological evidence for the possibleexistence of some horses in the IVC, if very few. From time to time people have come up withwhat appear to be the bones of quasihorses, protohorses like the donkey, or the Dawn Horse, orthe ass or onager; but horse bones are hard to decipher, and these are much disputed. All in all,there may well have been, here or there in the Indus Valley, a horse that loped in from CentralAsia or even West Asia.But such horses were probably imported, like so many other items, in the course of thevigorous IVC international trade. 44 India’s notorious lack of native bloodstock may have been,already in the Indus Valley, as ever after, “the Achilles heel of its ambitious empire-builders.” 45For from the time of the settlements in the Punjab, the Indian love of horses—perhaps imprintedby the early experience of the Indo-Europeans in lands north of India, where horsesthrived—was challenged by the simple fact that horses do not thrive on the Indian subcontinentand therefore need to be imported constantly. The evidence for the importing of horses can beused to support Guess One (or at least to counter Guesses Three and Four): The IVC had nohorses of its own, so could not have been Indo-European speakers. And so the IVC could haveplayed no part in the most ancient Hindu text, the Rig Veda, which is intensely horsey.But in fact the existence of trade in horses at this time, which seems very likely indeed,can be used to undercut rather than support the argument that the Indo-Aryans invaded India on

horseback (Guess One), for one could argue that the Vedic people too imported their horsesrather than rode (or drove) them in. Assuming that the Indo-Europeans began in India, one canargue that they eventually emigrated to the Caspian and Black Sea coasts and domesticated thehorse there, perhaps learning the trick from the natives; then they sent both the horses and thehorse-taming knowledge back to their Indian homeland, and that’s how horses got into theVedas. 46 According to this scenario, it was the horses, not the Indo-European-speaking peoples,that were imported. By separating the entrance into India of the people and their horses,hypothesizing that the people came quite early and only later began to import their horses fromthe Caucasus, once someone else had domesticated them, 47 one might still argue for Guess Three(Indo-Europeans first began in India and, later, imported horses) or even for Guess Four(Indo-Europeans began in the IVC and, later, imported horses).So much for the rather iffy archaeological record of real horses. The cultural use of thehorses of the imagination, however, makes a more persuasive argument against Guess Four.Talking horses, like real horses, are Indo-European but not only Indo-European. Tales ofintimate relationships between heroes and their horses are, like the historical mastery of thehorse, the common property of Indo-Europeans and the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. 48 Aspecific historical tradition from Indo-European prehistory is strongly suggested by parallelepithets and other predicates applied to horses in the Greek and Indo-Iranian texts. 49 Afourteenth-century BCE Hittite text on the training of horses uses words of Indo-Europeanprovenance. Horses, observed in affectionate, minute, often gory, detail, pervade the poetry ofthe Rig Veda. The Vedic people not only had horses but were crazy about horses.But horses are not depicted at all in the extensive Indus art that celebrates so many otheranimals. The Indus people were crazy about animals, but not about horses. So widely accepted isthe “horse = Indo-European” equation that even when one or two clay figurines that appear todepict horses were found at a few Indus sites, these were said to “reflect foreign travel orimports,” though the same arguments for the importing of horses applies to the importing ofimages of horses and disqualify these figurines as evidence one way or another. But moretellingly, “The horse, the animal central to the Rig Veda, is absent from the Harappan seals” 50and “unimportant, ritually and symbolically, to the Indus civilization.” 51 Such statements toohave acted as a gauntlet to provoke rebuttal. Recently an animal on an Indus seal was identifiedas a horse, 52 but it soon appeared that the seal was upside down, and the animal wasn’t a horse atall, but a fabrication, a unicorn bull made to look like a horse—that is, a (real) unicornmasquerading as a (mythical) horse. 53 In Europe, people constructed unicorns by sticking a hornon a horse, either tying a horn onto a real horse or drawing a horn onto a picture of a horse. Onlyin India does it work the other way around, for on Indus seals, unicorns are real and horsesnonexistent.The absence of representations of horses in the IVC does not mean that they did not havereal horses; they might have had them without regarding them as any more worthy ofrepresentation than the cows that we know they had and did not depict. Arguments from silence,it will be recalled, may prove to be false negatives, though this particular argument is somewhatsupported by the archaeological evidence that there were few, if any, horses. The absence ofequine imagery therefore neither proves nor disproves the first three guesses. It does, however,argue strongly against Guess Four, for it is very hard to believe that the hippophiles whocomposed the Veda would exclude the horse from the stable of animals that they depicted ontheir seals.Thus horses do furnish a key to the Indus/Vedic mystery: No Indus horse whinnied in the

night. Knowing how important horses are in the Vedas, we may deduce that there was little or noVedic input into the civilization of the Indus Valley or, correspondingly, that there was littleinput from the IVC into the civilization of the Rig Veda. This does not mean, of course, that theIVC did not contribute in a major way to other, later developments of Hinduism.AN ALTERNATIVE ANSWER: FUSION AND BRICOLAGEIt is therefore unlikely that both the Vedas and Harappa were “a product of thecivilization of these two peoples,” 54 but it is more than likely that later Hinduism was a productof both of them, a linguistic and cultural combination of Vedic words and Indus images, as wellas other contributions from other cultures. In some areas this combination was a fusion, amelting pot, a hybrid, while in others the elements kept their original shape and behaved morelike a tossed salad, a multiplicity. This is of course quite different from saying that the Veda wascomposed in the Indus Valley cities. But even if the languages and cultures were distinct, assurely they were, people from the two cultures must have met. Ideas already current in Indiabefore the entry of the Vedic people or arising outside the Vedic world after that entry may haveeventually filtered into Vedic and then post-Vedic Sanskrit literature. 55 (These ideas may havecome not only from the IVC but also from the so-called Adivisis or “Original Inhabitants” ofIndia, or from the Munda speakers and Dravidian speakers whose words are already incorporatedin the Rig Veda, though that is another story.) Survivors of the Indus cities may have taughtsomething of their culture to the descendants of the poets who composed the Vedas. The peopleof Harappa may have migrated south, so that their culture could have found its way into thestrand of Hinduism that arose there. 56 Some elements of pre-Vedic Indo-European civilizationmay have been taken up by the last inhabitants of the Indus Valley. Some elements of the Induscivilization may have been adopted by the authors of later Vedic literature. Some combination ofall of the above seems extremely likely.A good example of this possible fusion is the case of bricks. The authors of the Rig Vedadid not know about bricks; their rituals required only small mud altars, not large brick altars. Butlater, around 600 BCE, when the Vedic people had moved down into the Ganges Valley andtheir rituals had become more elaborate, they began to build large brick altars. The size of themud bricks was a multiple or fraction of the height of the patron of the sacrifice, and a fairlysophisticated geometry was developed to work out the proportions. 57 We know that the Induspeople had mastered the art of calculating the precise size of bricks, within a system of uniformand proportionate measurement. The use of bricks and the calculations in the Vedic ritual maytherefore have come from a Harappan tradition, bypassed the Rig Vedic period, and resurfacedlater. 58 This hypothesis must be qualified by the realization that kiln-fired (in contrast withsun-fired) brickwork does not reappear until the last centuries BCE, 59 a long time for that secretto lie dormant. But other aspects of brickmaking, and other ideas, may have been transmittedearlier.Though the Vedic people told the story of their early life in India, and their descendantscontrolled the narrative for a very long time, most of what Hindus have written about and talkedabout and done, from the Mahabharata on, has not come from the Veda. In part because of theintertextuality and interpracticality of Hinduism, one text or ritual building on another throughthe centuries, right back to the Veda, scholars looking at the history of transmission haveassumed that the Veda was the base onto which other things were added in the course of Indianhistory, just as Central Asia was the base that absorbed the impact of that interloping piece ofAfrica so long ago. And in the textual tradition, at least, this is true enough of the form in which

the ideas were preserved, the chain of memorized texts. But from the standpoint of the ideasthemselves, it was quite the opposite: The Veda was the newcomer that, like the African islandfusing onto a preexisting continental base, combined with a preexisting cultural world consistingperhaps of the Indus Valley, perhaps of any of several other, more widely dispersed non-Vediccultures.The non-Veda is the fons et origo of Hinduism; new ideas, new narratives, new practicesarose in the non-Sanskrit world, found their way into the Sanskrit world, and, often, left it again,to have a second or third or fourth life among the great vernacular traditions of India. These newnarratives and practices fitted into the interstices between the plot lines of the great Sanskrittexts, as stories told in response to the protagonists’ questions about places encountered on theirtravels or to illustrate a relevant moral point, or any other reason why. The non-Veda is not onething but so many things. We have noted, briefly, and can rank in the order that their recordsappear in history, the existence of at least five cultures: (1) Stone Age cultures in India longbefore the Indus are the foundation on which all later cultures built. (2) At some point,impossible to fit into a chronology or even an archaeology, come the Adivasis, the “OriginalInhabitants” of India, who spoke a variety of languages and contributed words and practices tovarious strands of Hinduism. Many of them were there long before the IVC and may have been apart of it; many of them have never been assimilated to Hinduism. Next come (3) the Induscivilization and (4) the village traditions that preceded, accompanied, and followed it, and afterthat (5) the culture of the Vedic people. Along the way, other language groups too, such as (6)the Tamils and other Dravidian speakers, 60 who may or may not have been a part of the IVC,added pieces to the puzzle.Hinduism, like all cultures, is a bricoleur, a rag-and-bones man, building new things outof the scraps of other things. We’ve seen how the British used the stones of Mohenjo-Daro asballast for their railway before (and after) they realized what those stones were and that aBuddhist stupa stands over some of the ruins there. So too Hindus built their temples on (and outof) Buddhist stupas as well as on other Hindu temples, and Muslims their mosques on Hindutemples (and Buddhist stupas), often reusing the original stones, new wine in old bottles,palimpsest architecture. In the realm of ideas as well as things, one religion would take up aword or image from another religion as a kind of objet trouvé. There are no copyrights there; allis in the public domain. This is not the hodgepodge that the Hindus and the early Orientalistsregarded as dirt, matter out of place, evidence of an inferior status but, rather, the interaction ofvarious different strains that is an inevitable factor in all cultures and traditions, and a GoodThing.MUTUAL CREATIONA good metaphor for the mutual interconnections between Vedic and non-Vedic aspectsof Hinduism is provided by the myth with which this chapter began, “Vishnu and Brahma CreateEach Other.” Each says to the other, “You were born from me,” and both of them are right. Eachgod sees all the worlds and their inhabitants (including both himself and the other god) inside thebelly of the other god. Each claims to be the creator of the universe, yet each contains the othercreator. In other versions of this myth, each one calls the other tata, a two-way word that a youngman can use to call an older man Grandpa, while an older man can use it to call a younger manSonny Boy; the word actually designates the relationship between young and old.The myth of Vishnu and Brahma is set at the liminal, in-between moment when theuniverse has been reduced to a cosmic ocean (dissolution) and is about to undergo a new

creation, which in turn will be followed by another dissolution, then another creation, and so onad infinitum—another series of mutual creations. Vedic and non-Vedic cultures create andbecome one another like this too throughout the history of Hinduism. This accounts for a numberof the tensions that haunt Hinduism throughout its history, as well as for its extraordinarydiversity.CHAPTER 5HUMANS, ANIMALS, AND GODS IN THE RIG VEDA1500 to 1000 BCECHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES BCE)c. 1700-1500 Nomads in the Punjab region compose theRig Vedac. 1200-900 The Vedic people compose the Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, and AtharvaVedaDIVERSE CALLINGSOur thoughts bring us to diverse callings, setting people apart:the carpenter seeks what is broken,the physician a fracture,and the Brahmin priest seeks someone who presses soma.I am a poet; my dad’s a physicianand Mom a miller with grinding stones.With diverse thoughts we all strive for wealth,going after it like cattle.Rig Veda (9.112) (c. 1500 BCE) In this chapter we will encounter thepeople who lived in the Punjab in about 1500 BCE and composed the texts called the Vedas. Wewill face the violence embedded in the Vedic sacrifice of cattle and horses and situate that ritualviolence in the social violence that it expresses, supports, and requires, the theft of other people’scattle and horses. We will then consider the social world of the Vedas, focusing first on thetension between the Brahmin and royal/martial classes (the first and second classes) and thespecial position of the fourth and lowest class, the servants; then on other marginalized people;and finally on women. Marginalization also characterizes people of all classes who fall prey toaddiction and/or intoxication, though intoxication from the soma plant (pressed to yield juice) isthe privilege of the highest gods and Brahmins.Turning from the people to their gods, we will begin with the pluralism and multiplicityof the Vedic pantheon and the open-mindedness of its ideas about creation. Then we willconsider divine paradigms for human priests and kings, the Brahminical god Agni (god of fire)and the royal gods Varuna (god of the waters) and Indra (the king of the gods). We will concludewith ideas about death and reincarnation that, on the one hand, show the same pluralistic rangeand speculative open-mindedness as the myths of creation and, on the other hand, set the scenefor a major social tension among Hindus in centuries to come.THE TRANSMISSION OF THE RIG VEDAWe have just considered at some length the question of the prehistory of the people whocomposed the Rig Veda, people who, sometime around 1500 BCE, in any case probably notearlier than the second millennium BCE, 1 were moving about in what is now the Punjab, inNorthwestern India and Pakistan. They lived in the area of the Seven Rivers (Sapta Sindhu), thefive tributaries of the Indus plus the Indus itself and the Sarasvati. We can see the remains of theworld that the people of the Indus Valley built, but we are blind to the material world of theVedic people; the screen goes almost blank. The Vedic people left no cities, no temples, scantphysical remains of any kind; they had to borrow the word for “mortar.” 2 They built nothing but

the flat, square mud altars for the Vedic sacrifice 3 and houses with wooden frames and walls ofreed stuffed with straw and, later, mud. Bamboo ribs supported a thatched roof. None of this ofcourse survived.But now at last our sound reception is loud and, for the most part, clear. Those nomads inthe Punjab composed poems in an ancient form of Sanskrit; the oldest collection is called the RigVeda (“Knowledge of Verses”). We can hear, and often understand, the words of the Vedas,even though words spoken so long ago are merely clues, not proofs, and interpretation, with allits biases, still raises its ugly head at every turn. The social and material world is vividly presentin Vedic texts. What sort of texts are they?The Rig Veda consists of 1,028 poems, often called mantras (“incantations”), groupedinto ten “circles” (“mandalas”). (It is generally agreed that the first and last books are lateradditions, subsequent bookends around books 2-9.) The verses were rearranged for chanting asthe Sama Veda (“Knowledge of Songs”) and, with additional prose passages, for ritual use as theYajur Veda (“Knowledge of Sacrifice”); together they are known as the three Vedas. A fourth,the Atharva Veda (“Knowledge of the Fire Priest”), devoted primarily to practical, worldlymatters, and spells to deal with them, was composed later, sharing some poems with the latestparts of the Rig Veda.The Rig Veda was preserved orally even when the Indians had used writing for centuries,for everyday things like laundry lists and love letters and gambling IOUs. 4 But they refused topreserve the Rig Veda in writing. bb All Vedic rituals were accompanied by chants from the SamaVeda, which the priests memorized. The Mahabharata (13.24.70) groups people who read andrecite the Veda from a written text (rather than memorize it and keep it only in their heads) withcorrupters and sellers of the Veda as people heading for hell. A Vedic text states that “a pupilshould not recite the Veda after he has eaten meat, seen blood or a dead body, had sexualintercourse, or engaged in writing.” 5 It was a powerful text, whose power must not fall into thewrong hands. Unbelievers and infidels, as well as Pariahs and women, were forbidden to learnthe Vedas, because they might defile or injure the power of the words, 6 pollute it like milk keptin a bag made of dogskin.The oral text of the Rig Veda was therefore memorized in such a way that no physicaltraces of it could be found, much as a coded espionage message would be memorized and thendestroyed (eaten, perhaps—orally destroyed) before it could fall into the hands of the enemy. Itsexclusively oral preservation ensured that the Rig Veda could not be misused even in the righthands: you couldn’t take the Rig Veda down off the shelf in a library, for you had to read it in thecompany of a wise teacher or guru, who would make sure that you understood its application inyour life. Thus the Veda was usually passed down from father to son, and the lineages of theschools or “branches” (shakhas) that passed down commentaries “from one to another”(param-para) were often also family lineages, patriarchal lineages (gotras). Those who taughtand learned the Rig Veda were therefore invariably male Brahmins in this early period, thoughlater other classes too may have supplied teachers, and from the start those who composed thepoems may well have been more miscellaneous, even perhaps including some women, to whomsome poems are attributed.The oral nature of the Rig Veda (and of the other Vedas too) was expressed in its name; itwas called shruti (“what is heard”), both because it was originally “heard” (shruta) by the humanseers to whom the gods dictated it but also because it continued to be transmitted not by beingread or seen but by being heard by the worshipers when the priests chanted it. 7 The oralmetaphor is not the only one—ancient sages also “saw” the Vedic verses—but it does reflect the

dominant mode of transmission, orality. It made no more sense to “read” the Veda than it wouldsimply to read the score of a Brahms symphony and never hear it.Now, one might suppose that a text preserved orally in this way would be subject tosteadily encroaching inaccuracy and unreliability, that the message would become increasinglygarbled like the message in a game of telephone, but one would be wrong. For the very samesacredness that made it necessary to preserve the Rig Veda orally rather than in writing alsodemanded that it be preserved with meticulous accuracy. People regarded the Rig Veda as arevealed text, and one does not play fast and loose with revelation. It was memorized in anumber of mutually reinforcing ways, including matching physical movements (such as noddingthe head) with particular sounds and chanting in a group, which does much to obviate individualslippage. According to the myth preserved in the tradition of European Indology, when FriedrichMax Müller finally edited and published the Rig Veda at the end of the nineteenth century, heasked a Brahmin in Calcutta to recite it for him in Sanskrit, and a Brahmin in Madras, and aBrahmin in Bombay (each spoke a different vernacular language), and each of them said everysyllable of the entire text exactly as the other two said it. In fact this academic myth flies in theface of all the available evidence; Müller produced his edition from manuscripts, not from oralrecitation. (It is of these manuscripts that Müller remarks, “The MSS. of the Rig-veda havegenerally been written and corrected by the Brahmans with so much care that there are novarious readings in the proper sense of the word.” 8 ) Yet like many myths, it does reflect a truth:People preserved the Rig Veda intact orally long before they preserved it intact in manuscript,but eventually it was consigned to writing (as were the originally oral poems the Mahabharataand the Ramayana).Sanskrit, the language of authority, was taken up by the various people in India whospoke other languages. At the same time, Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic languages (such as theMunda languages) began to enter Vedic Sanskrit. As usual, the linguistic traditions invented oneanother; Sanskrit influenced Tamil, and Tamil influenced Sanskrit. The Vedic tradition shows itsawareness that different groups spoke different languages when it states that the four priests inthe horse sacrifice address the horse with four different names, for when it carries men, they callit ashva (“horse”); when it carries Gandharvas, bc they call it vajin (“spirited horse”); for antigods,arvan (“swift horse”); and for gods haya (“racehorse”). 9 Presumably they expect each of thesegroups to have its own language, 10 which is evidence of a consciousness of multilingualism 11 ormultiple dialects.THE VIOLENCE OF SACRIFICETheirs was a “portable religion,” 12 one that they carried in their saddlebags and in theirheads. As far as we can reconstruct their rituals from what is, after all, a hymnal, they madeofferings to various gods (whom we shall soon encounter below) by throwing varioussubstances, primarily butter, into a fire that flared up dramatically in response. The Vedic ritualof sacrifice (yajna) joined at the hip the visible world of humans and the invisible world of gods.The sacrifice established bonds (bandhus), homologies between the human world (particularlythe components of the ritual) and corresponding parts of the universe. Ritual was thought to haveeffects on the visible and invisible worlds because of such connections, meta-metaphors thatvisualize many substances as two things at once—not just a rabbit and a man in the moon, butyour eye and the sun.All the poems of the Rig Veda are ritual hymns in some sense, since all were sung as partof the Vedic ceremony, but only some are self-consciously devoted to the meaning of the ritual.

The verses served as mantras (words with powers to affect reality) to be pronounced duringrituals of various sorts: solemn or semipublic rituals (royal consecrations and sacrifices of thesoma plant), life cycle rituals (marriage, funeral, and even such tiny concerns as a baby’s firsttooth), 13 healing rituals, and both black and white magic spells (such as the ones we will soonsee, against rival wives and for healthy embryos). Yet even here pride of place is given to theverbal rather than to the physical aspect of the sacrifice, to poems about the origins and powersof sacred speech (10.71, 10.125). The personal concerns of the priests also inspire considerableinterest in the authors of the poems (most of whom were priests themselves): The priest whosepatron is the king laments the loss of his royal friend and praises faith and generosity, while otherpriests, whose tenure is more secure, express their happiness and gratitude (10.33, 101, 117, 133,141).Although detailed instructions on the performance of the rituals were spelled out only inthe later texts, bd the Rig Veda presupposes the existence of some protoversion of those texts.There were animal sacrifices (such as the horse sacrifice) and simple offerings of oblations ofbutter into the consecrated fire. The more violent sacrifices have been seen as a kind of“controlled catastrophe,” 14 on the “quit before you’re fired” principle or, more positively, as lifeinsurance, giving the gods what they need to live (soma, animal sacrifices, etc.) in order that theywill give us what we need to live.FAST-FORWARD: THE THREE ALLIANCESAt this point, it might be useful to pause and group ideas about the relationships betweenhumans and gods (and antigods) in the history of Hinduism into three alliances. The three unitsare not chronological periods but attitudes that can be found, to a greater or lesser degree, acrossthe centuries. It would be foolhardy to tie them to specific times, because attitudes in Hinduismtend to persist from one period to another, simply added on to new ideas that one might haveexpected to replace them, and archaic ideas are often intentionally resurrected in order to lend anair of tradition to a later text. Nevertheless such a typology has its uses, for each of the threealliances does begin, at least, at a moment that we can date at least relative to the other alliances,and each of them dominates the texts of one of three consecutive periods.In the first alliance, which might be called Vedic, gods and antigods (Asuras) are opposedto each other, and gods unite with humans against both the antigods, who live in the sky with thegods, and the ogres (Rakshases or Rakshasas), lower-class demons that harass humans ratherthan gods. The antigods are the older brothers of the gods, the “dark, olden gods” in contrast with“the mortal gods of heaven,” 15 like the Titans of Greek mythology; the Veda still calls the oldestVedic gods—Agni, Varuna--Asuras. The gods and antigods have the same moral substance(indeed the gods often lie and cheat far more than the antigods do; power corrupts, and divinepower corrupts divinely); the antigods are simply the other team. Because the players on eachside are intrinsically differentiated by their morals, the morals shift back and forth from onecategory to another during the course of history, and even from one text to another in any singleperiod: As there are good humans and evil humans, so there are good gods and evil gods, goodantigods and evil antigods. In the absence of ethical character, what the gods and antigods haveis power, which they can exercise at their pleasure. The gods and antigods are in competition forthe goods of the sacrifice, and since humans sacrifice to the gods, they are against the antigods,who always, obligingly, lose to the gods in the end. It is therefore important for humans to keepthe gods on their side and well disposed toward them. Moreover, since the gods live onsacrificial offerings provided by devout humans, the gods wish humans to be virtuous, for then

they will continue to offer sacrifices.The Vedic gods were light eaters; they consumed only a polite taste of the butter, or theanimal offerings, or the expressed juice of the soma plant, and the humans got to eat theleftovers. What was fed to the fire was fed to the gods; in later mythology, when Agni, the god offire, was impregnated by swallowing semen instead of butter, all the gods became pregnant. 16Not only did the gods live upon the sacrificial foods, but the energy generated in the sacrificekept the universe going. The offerings that the priest made into the fire kept the fire in the sunfrom going out; if no one sacrificed, the sun would not rise each morning. Moreover, the heat(tapas) that the priest generated in the sacrifice was a powerful weapon for gods or humans touse against their enemies. Heat is life, in contrast with the coldness of death, and indeed Hindusbelieve that there is a fire in the belly (called the fire that belongs to all men) that digests all thefood you eat, by cooking it (again). When those fires go out, it’s all over physically for theperson in question, as it is ritually if the sacrificial fires go out; you must keep the sacrificial firein your house burning and carefully preserve an ember to carry to the new house if you move.But since antigods had no (legitimate) access to sacrificial tapas, the best that they (andthe ogres) could do in their Sisyphean attempt to conquer the gods was to interfere with thesacrifice (the antigods in heaven and the ogres on earth) in order to weaken the gods. Thoughhumans served as mere pawns in these cosmic battles, it was in their interest to serve the gods,for the antigods and ogres would try to kill humans (in order to divert the sacrifice from thegods), while the gods, dependent on sacrificial offerings, protected the humans. In theUpanishads, the gods and antigods are still equal enemies, though the antigods make an error inmetaphysical judgment that costs them dearly. 17 Throughout the history of Hinduism, beginningin the Vedas, the antigods and ogres often serve as metaphors for marginalized human groups,first the enemies of the Vedic people, then people excluded from the groups that the Brahminsallowed to offer sacrifice. This first Vedic alliance is still a major force in Indian storytellingtoday, but it was superseded, in some, though not all, ways, by two more alliances.To fast-forward for just a moment, the second alliance begins in the Mahabharata andcontinues through the Puranas (medieval compendiums of myth and history). In this period, thestraightforward Vedic alignment of forces—humans and gods versus antigods andogres—changed radically, as sacrificial power came to be supplemented and sometimes replacedby ascetic and meditative power. Now uppity antigods and ogres, who offer sacrifices when theyhave no right to do so or ignore the sacrificial system entirely and generate internal heat (tapas)all by themselves, are grouped with uppity mortals, who similarly threaten the gods not withtheir acts of impiety but, on the contrary, with their excessive piety and must be put back in theirplace. Often the threatening religious power comes from individual renunciants, a threat to thelivelihood of the Vedic ecclesia and an open door to undesirable (i.e., non-Brahmin) types, akind of wildcat religion or pirated religious power. For like the dangerous submarine mare fire,these individual ascetics generate tapas like power from a nuclear reactor or heat in a pressurecooker; they stop dissipating their heat by ceasing to indulge in talking, sex, anger, and so forth;they shut the openings, but the body goes on making heat, which builds up and can all too easilyexplode. (Later Tantra goes one step further and encourages adepts to increase the heat bygenerating as well as harnessing unspent desire.)Old-fashioned sacrifice too now inspires jealousy in the gods, who are, paradoxically,also sacrificers. Indra, who prides himself on having performed a hundred horse sacrifices,frequently steals the stallion of kings who are about to beat his record. (We have seen him do thisto King Sagara, resulting in the creation of the ocean.) The result is that now it is the gods, not

the antigods, who wish humans to be diminished by evil. The idea that to be too good may be totempt fate, threaten the gods, or invite the evil eye is widespread, well known from Greektragedies, which called this sort of presumption hubris (related in concept, though not etymology,to the Yiddish hutzpah). The second alliance is full of humans, ogres, and antigods that are toogood for their own good.The balance of power changed again when, in the third alliance, devotion (bhakti) enteredthe field, repositioning the Vedic concept of human dependence on the gods so that the godsprotected both devoted men and devoted antigods. This third alliance is in many ways thedominant structure of local temple myths even today. But that is getting far ahead of our story.CATTLE AND HORSES: INDIANS AS COWBOYSWhat the Vedic people asked for most often in the prayers that accompanied sacrificewas life, health, victory in battle, and material prosperity, primarily in the form of horses andcows. This sacrificial contract powered Hindu prayers for many centuries, but the relationshipwith horses and cows changed dramatically even in this early period.As nomadic tribes, the Vedic people sought fresh pastureland for their cattle and horses. beAs pastoralists and, later, agriculturalists, herders and farmers, they lived in rural communities.Like most of the Indo-Europeans, the Vedic people were cattle herders and cattle rustlers whowent about stealing other people’s cows and pretending to be taking them back. One story goesthat the Panis, tribal people who were the enemies of the Vedic people, had stolen cows fromcertain Vedic sages and hidden them in mountain caves. The gods sent the bitch Sarama tofollow the trail of the cows; she found the hiding place, bandied words with the Panis, resistedtheir attempts first to threaten her and then to bribe her, and brought home the cows (10.108).The Vedic people, in this habit (as well as in their fondness for gambling), resembled thecowboys of the nineteenth-century American West, riding over other people’s land and stealingtheir cattle. The resulting political agendas also present rough parallels (in both senses of theword “rough”): Compare, on the one hand, the scornful attitude of these ancient Indian cowboys(an oxymoron in Hollywood but not in India) toward the “barbarians” (Dasyus or Dasas) whoselands they rode over (adding insult to injury by calling them cattle thieves) and, some fourthousand years later, the American cowboys’ treatment of the people whom they called, withwhat now seems cruel irony, Indians, such as the Navajo and the Apache. So much for progress.Unlike the American cowboys, however, the Vedic cowboys did not yet (though they would, bythe sixth century BCE) have a policy of owning and occupying the land, for the Vedic people didnot build or settle down; they moved on. They did have, however, a policy of riding over otherpeople’s land and of keeping the cattle that they stole from those people. That the word gavisthi(“searching for cows”) came to mean “fighting” says it all.The Vedic people sacrificed cattle to the gods and ate cattle themselves, and they countedtheir wealth in cattle. They definitely ate the beef of steers 18 (the castrated bulls), both rituallyand for many of the same reasons that people nowadays eat Big Macs (though in India, Big Macsare now made of mutton); they sacrificed the bulls bf (Indra eats the flesh of twenty bulls or ahundred buffalo and drinks whole lakes of soma 19 ) and kept most of the cows for milk. Oneverse states that cows were “not to be killed” (a-ghnya [7.87.4]), but another says that a cowshould be slaughtered on the occasion of marriage (10.85.13), and another lists among animals tobe sacrificed a cow that has been bred but has not calved (10.91.14), 20 while still others seem toinclude cows among animals whose meat was offered to the gods and then consumed by thepeople at the sacrifice. The usual meal of milk, ghee (clarified butter), vegetables, fruit, wheat,

and barley would be supplemented by the flesh of cattle, goats, and sheep on special occasions,washed down with sura (wine) or madhu (a kind of mead).There is a Vedic story that explains how it is that some people stopped killing cows andbegan just to drink their milk. bg The Rig Veda only alludes to this story, referring to a kingnamed Prithu, who forced the speckled cow who is the earth to let her white udder yield soma asmilk for the gods. 21 But later texts spell it out:KING PRITHU MILKS THE EARTHThere was a king named Vena who was so wicked that thesages killed him; since he left no offspring, the sages churned his right thigh, from which wasborn a deformed little man, dark as a burned pillar, who was the ancestor of the Nishadas and thebarbarians. Then they churned Vena’s right hand, and from him Prithu was born. There was afamine, because the earth was withholding all of her food. King Prithu took up his bow andarrow and pursued the earth to force her to yield nourishment for his people. The earth assumedthe form of a cow and begged him to spare her life; she then allowed him to milk her for all thatthe people needed. Thus did righteous kingship arise on earth among kings of the lunar dynasty,who are the descendants of Prithu. 22 This myth, foundational for the dynasty that traces itslineage back to Prithu, is cited in many variants over thousands of years. It imagines a transitionfrom hunting wild cattle (the earth cow) to preserving their lives, domesticating them, andbreeding them for milk, in a transition to agriculture and pastoral life. The myth of the earth cow,later the wishing cow (kama-dhenu), from whom you can milk anything you desire—not justfood but silk cloths, armies of soldiers, anything—is the Hindu parallel to the Roman cornucopia(or the German Tischlein dech dich, the table that sets itself with a full table d’hôte dinner oncommand). Cows are clearly of central economic, ritual, and symbolic importance in the Vedicworld.But the horse, rather than the cow, was the animal whose ritual importance and intimacywith humans kept it from being regarded as food, 23 though not from being killed in sacrifices.Horses were essential not only to drawing swift battle chariots but to herding cattle, alwayseasier to do from horseback in places where the grazing grounds are extensive. 24 And extensiveis precisely what they were; the fast track of Vedic life was driven by the profligate grazinghabits of horses, who force their owners to move around looking for new grazing land all thetime. Unlike cows, horses pull up the roots of the grass or eat it right down to the ground so thatit doesn’t grow back, thus quickly destroying grazing land, which may require some years torecover; moreover, horses do not like to eat the grass that grows up around their owndroppings. 25 The horse in nature is therefore constantly in search of what the Nazis (alsojustifying imperialistic aggression) called Lebensraum (“living space”). It is not merely, as isoften argued, that the horse made possible conquest in war, through the chariot; the stallion cameto symbolize conquest in war, through his own natural imperialism. And the ancient Indian horseowners mimicked this trait in their horses, at first showing no evidence of any desire to amassproperty, just a drive to move on, always to move on, to new lands. For the Vedic peopleprobably did then what Central Asians did later: They let the animals roam freely as a herd. 26 Butonce they began to fence in their horses and kept them from their natural free grazing habits, theneed to acquire and enclose new grazing lands became intense, especially when, in the earlyVedic period, there was no fodder crop. 27THE WIDE-OPEN SPACESAll this land grabbing was supported by a religion whose earliest texts urge constantexpansion. The name of the king who hunted the earth cow, Prithu, means “broad,” and the

feminine form of the word, Prithivi, is a word for the whole, broad earth, the natural consort ofthe king. Prithu had the connotation of something very much like “the wide-open spaces.” Theopposite of the word prithu is the word for a tight spot, in both the physical and thepsychological sense; that word is amhas, signifying a kind of claustrophobia, the uneasiness ofbeing constrained in a small space. (Amhas is cognate with our word “anxiety” and the GermanAngst.) In this context, amhas might well be translated “Don’t fence me in,” since it occurs in anumber of Vedic poems in which the poet imagines himself trapped in a deep well or a cave,from which he prays to the gods to extricate him. (Sometimes it is the cows who are trapped inthe cave, or the waters, or the sun.) Many of the poems take this form; the poet thanks the godfor his help in the past (“Remember the time I was in that tight spot, and you got me out?”),reminds him of his gratitude (“And didn’t I offer you great vats of soma after that?”), flatters him(“No one but you can do this; you are the greatest”), and asks for a return engagement (“Well,I’m in even worse trouble now; come and help me, I beg you”).Appropriately, it is often the Ashvins who rescue people from such tight spots and bringthem back into the good, broad places. For the Ashvins (whose name means “equine”) are twinhorse-headed gods, animal herders, sons of the divine mare Saranyu (10.17.1-2). The other Vedicgods generally snub the Ashvins, in part because they are physicians (a low trade in ancientIndia, involving as it does polluting contacts with human bodies) and in part because they persistin slumming, helping out mortals in trouble. The gods denied them access to the ambrosial somadrink until one mortal (a priest named Dadhyanch), for whom the Ashvins had done a favor,reciprocated by whispering to them, through a horse’s head he had put on for that occasion tospeak to their horse heads, the secret of the soma—literally from the horse’s mouth (1.116.12,1.117.22, 1.84.13-15). Later texts explain that Dadhyanch knew that Indra, the jealous king ofthe gods, would punish him for this betrayal by cutting off his head, so he laid aside his ownhead, used a talking horse head to tell the secret, let Indra cut off the horse head, and then put hisown back on. 28THE HORSE SACRIFICEEmbedded in the tale of Dadhyanch and the Ashvins is the ritual beheading of a horse.One of the few great public ceremonies alluded to in the Vedas is the sacrifice of a horse, bysuffocation rather than beheading but followed by dismemberment. There are epigraphicalrecords of (as well as literary satires on) horse sacrifices throughout Indian history. One Vedicpoem bh describes the horse sacrifice in strikingly concrete, indeed rather gruesome detail,beginning with the ceremonial procession of the horse accompanied by a dappled goat, who waskilled with the horse but offered to a different, less important god:DISMEMBERING THE HORSEWhatever of the horse’s flesh the fly has eaten, or whateverstays stuck to the stake or the ax, or to the hands or nails of the slaughterer—let all of that staywith you even among the gods. Whatever food remains in his stomach, sending forth gas, orwhatever smell there is from his raw flesh—let the slaughterers make that well done; let themcook the sacrificial animal until he is perfectly cooked. Whatever runs off your body when it hasbeen placed on the spit and roasted by the fire, let it not lie there in the earth or on the grass, butlet it be given to the gods who long for it. . . . The testing fork for the cauldron that cooks theflesh, the pots for pouring the broth, the cover of the bowls to keep it warm, the hooks, thedishes—all these attend the horse. . . . If someone riding you has struck you too hard with heel orwhip when you shied, I make all these things well again for you with prayer. . . . The ax cutsthrough the thirty-four ribs of the racehorse who is the companion of the gods. Keep the limbs

undamaged and place them in the proper pattern. Cut them apart, calling out piece by piece. . . .Let not your dear soul burn you as you go away. Let not the ax do lasting harm to your body. Letno greedy, clumsy slaughterer hack in the wrong place and damage your limbs with his knife.You do not really die through this, nor are you harmed. You go to the gods on paths pleasant togo on (1.162). The poet thus intermittently addresses the horse (and himself) with theconsolation that all will be restored in heaven, words in which we may see the first stirrings ofambivalence about the killing of a beloved animal, even in a religious ceremony, an ambivalencethat will become much more explicit in the next few centuries. We may see even here a kind of“ritual nonviolence” that is also expressed in a concern that the victim should not bleed or sufferor cry out (one reason why the sacrificial animal was strangled). 29 The euphemism for the killingof the horse, pacifying (shanti), further muted the growing uneasiness associated with the killingof an animal. Moreover, unlike cows, goats, and other animals that were sacrificed, many in thecourse of the horse sacrifice, the horse was not actually eaten (though it was cooked and servedto the gods). Certain parts of the horse’s carcass (such as the marrow, or the fat from the chest, orthe vapa, the caul, pericardium, or omentum containing the internal organs) were offered toAgni, the god of the fire, and the consecrated king and the priests would inhale the cookingfumes (regarded as “half-eating-by-smelling” the cooked animal). The gods and priests, as wellas guests at the sacrificial feast, ate the cattle (mostly rams, billy goats, and steers); only the godsand priests ate the soma; no one ate the horse. Perhaps the horse was not eaten because of theclose relationship that the Vedic people, like most Indo-Europeans, 30 had with their horses, whonot only speak, on occasion, 31 but are often said to shed tears bi when their owners die. 32THE VEDIC PEOPLEThe Rig Veda tells us a lot (as in the passage cited at the start of this chapter, a kind ofliturgical work song) about family life, about everyday tasks, about craftsmanship, about thematerials of sacrifice, and even about diversity. Evidently the rigid hereditary system of theprofessions characteristic of the caste system was not yet in place now, for the professions at thistime varied even within a single family, where a poet could be the son of a physician and amiller. The Rig Veda tells us of many professions, including carpenters, blacksmiths, potters,tanners, reed workers, and weavers. 33 But by the end of this period, the class system was inplace.THE FOUR CLASSES AND THE PRIMEVAL MANThe Vedic people at first distinguished just two classes (varnas), their own (which theycalled Arya) and that of the people they conquered, whom they called Dasas (or Dasyus, or,sometimes, Panis). The Dasas may have been survivorsof early migrations of Vedic people, orpeople who spoke non-Sanskritic languages, or a branch of the Indo-Iranian people who had areligion different from that of the Vedic people. 34 (In the Indo-Iranian Avesta, daha and dahyudesignate “other people.” 35 ) The early Veda expresses envy for the Dasas’ wealth, which is tosay their cattle, but later, “Dasa” came to be used to denote a slave or subordinate, someone whoworked outside the family, and the late parts of the Veda mention Brahmins who were “sons ofslave women” (Dasi-putra), indicating an acceptance of interclass sexual relationships, if notmarriage. We have noted evidence that the Vedic people took significant parts of their materialculture from communities in place in India before they arrived, Dasas of one sort or another. TheDasas may also have introduced new ritual practices such as those recorded in the Atharva Veda.(The Nishadas, tribal peoples, were also associated with some early rituals. 36 )

But the more important social division was not into just two classes (Arya and Dasa, Usand Them) but four. A poem in one of the latest books of the Rig Veda, “Poem of the PrimevalMan” (Purusha-Sukta [10.90]), is about the dismemberment of the cosmic giant, the PrimevalMan (purusha later comes to designate any male creature, indeed the male gender), who is thevictim in a Vedic sacrifice that creates the whole universe. bj The poem says, “The gods,performing the sacrifice, bound the Man as the sacrificial beast. With the sacrifice the godssacrificed to the sacrifice.” Here the “sacrifice” designates both the ritual and the victim killed inthe ritual; moreover, the Man is both the victim that the gods sacrificed and the divinity to whomthe sacrifice was dedicated—that is, he is both the subject and the object of the sacrifice. ThisVedic chicken or egg paradox is repeated in a more general pattern, in which the gods sacrificeto the gods, and a more specific pattern, in which one particular god, Indra, king of the gods,sacrifices (as a king) to himself (as a god). But it is also a tautological way of thinking that wehave seen in the myths of mutual creation and will continue to encounter in Hindu mythology.The four classes of society come from the appropriate parts of the body of thedismembered Primeval Man. His mouth became the priest (the Brahmin, master of sacredspeech); all Vedic priests are Brahmins, though not all Brahmins are priests. His arms were theRaja (the Kshatriya, the Strong Arm, the class of warriors, policemen, and kings); his thighs, thecommoner (the Vaishya, the fertile producer, the common people, the third estate, who producethe food for the first two and themselves); and his feet—the lowest and dirtiest part of thebody—the servants (Shudras), the outside class within society that defines the other classes. Thatthe Shudras were an afterthought is evident from the fact that the third class, Vaishyas, issometimes said to be derived from the word for “all” and therefore to mean “everyone,” leavingno room for anyone below them—until someone added a class below them. bk The fourth socialclass may have consisted of the people new to the early Vedic system, perhaps the peoplealready in India when the Vedic people entered, the Dasas, from a system already in place inIndia, or simply the sorts of people who were always outside the system. The final combinationoften functioned not as a quartet but, reverting to the pattern of Arya and Dasa, as a dualism: allof us (in the first three classes, the twice born) versus all of them (in the fourth class, the non-us,the Others). bl“Poem of the Primeval Man” ranks the kings below the priests. The supremacy ofBrahmins was much contested throughout later Hindu literature and in fact may have beennothing but a Brahmin fantasy. Many texts argue, or assume, that Kshatriyas never were as highas Brahmins, and others assume that they always were, and still are, higher than Brahmins.Buddhist literature puts the kings at the top, the Brahmins second, 37 and many characters inHindu texts also defend this viewpoint.The French sociologist Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) argued that the bk Indo-Europeanspeakers had been divided into three social classes or functions: at the top, kings who were alsopriests, then warriors who were also policemen, and then the rest of the people. 38 Some scholarsfind this hypothetical division useful; some do not 39 and some think that other cultures too weredivided in this way, so that tripartition is not a useful way to distinguish Indo-European culturefrom any other. bm (It rather suspiciously resembles the reactionary French ancient regime, whichput priests at the top, over aristocrats, and the people in the third group below.) In any case, bythe end of the period in which the Rig Veda was composed, a fourfold social system that deviatesin two major regards from the Dumézilian model was in place: It adds a fourth class at thebottom, and it reverses the status of kings and priests. The kings have come down one rung fromtheir former alleged status of sharing first place with the Brahmins. This, then, would have been

one of the earliest documented theocratic takeovers, a silent, totally mental palace coup, theBrahmin forcing the Kshatriya out of first place.Thus, even in “Poem of the Primeval Man,” supposedly postulating a social charter thatwas created at the very dawn of time and is to remain in place forever after, we can see, in thepositioning of the kings in the second rank, movement, change, slippage, progress, or decay,depending upon your point of view. This sort of obfuscation is basic to mythology; thesemblance of an un-moving eternity is presented in texts that themselves clearly documentconstant transformation. “Poem of the Primeval Man” may have been the foundational myth ofthe Brahmin class, establishing social hierarchies that are unknown to poems from an earlierlayer of the Rig Veda, such as the poem “Diverse Callings.”One Vedic poem that may incorporate a critique of Brahmins bn is a tour de force thatapplies simultaneously, throughout, to frogs croaking at the start of the rainy season and toBrahmin priests who begin to chant at the start of the rains. It begins:THE FROGSAfter lying still for a year, Brahmins keeping their vow, the frogs have raised theirvoice that the god of the rainstorm has inspired. When the heavenly waters came upon him, driedout like a leather bag, lying in the pool, then the cries of the frogs joined in chorus like thelowing of cows with calves. As soon as the season of rains has come, and it rains upon them whoare longing, thirsting for it, one approaches another who calls to him, “Akh-khala,” as a sonapproaches his father. One greets the other as they revel in the waters that burst forth, and thefrog leaps about under the falling rain, the speckled one mingling his voice with the green one.One of them repeats the speech of the other, as a pupil that of a teacher (7.103.1-5).Though this poem may have been a satire, its tone is serious, a metaphor in celebration ofa crucial and joyous matter, the arrival of the rains.OTHER OTHERS: MARGINALIZING INTOXICATION AND ADDICTIONThe marginalized people in the lowest social levels of the Veda—Dasas, Shudras—mayhave included people who were Other not, or not only, in their social class but in their religiouspractices, such as the wandering bands of warrior ascetics the Vedas refer to as the Vratyas(“People Who Have Taken Vows”), who practiced flagellation and other forms ofself-mortification and traveled from place to place in bullock carts. 40 Vratyas were sometimesregarded as inside, sometimes outside mainstream society; 41 the Brahmins sought to bring theminto the Vedic system by special purification rituals, 42 and the Vratyas may have introducedsome of their own beliefs and practices into Vedic religion.Or the Others may have been drop-out and turn-on types like the protohippie described inanother poem:THE LONG-HAIRED ASCETICLong-Hair holds fire, holds the drug, holds sky and earth. . . .These ascetics, swathed in wind [i.e., naked], put dirty saffron rags on. “Crazy with asceticism,we have mounted the wind. Our bodies are all you mere mortals can see.” . . . Long-Hair drinksfrom the cup, sharing the drug with Rudra (10.136).” The dirty rags identify these peopleas either very poor or willingly alienated from social conventions such as dress; that they wearsaffron-colored robes may be an early form (hindsight alert!) of the ocher robes that later markedmany renunciant groups. Rudra is the master of poison and medicines, but also ofconsciousness-altering drugs, one of which may have been used here, as such drugs often are, toinduce the sensation of flying and of viewing one’s own body from outside. Rudra was theembodiment of wildness, unpredictable danger, and fever but also the healer and cooler, whoattacks “like a ferocious wild beast” (2.33). He lives on the margins of the civilized world as one

who comes from the outside, an intruder, and is excluded from the Vedic sacrifice. He is ahunter. He stands for what is violent, cruel, and impure in the society of gods or at the edge ofthe divine world. 43The Rig Veda also tells us of people marginalized not by class or religious practices butby their antisocial behavior under the influence of some addiction. One Vedic poem lists “wine,anger, dice, or carelessness” as the most likely cause of serious misbehavior (7.86.1-8). Wineand dice are two of the four addictive vices of lust (sex and hunting being the other two), towhich considerable attention was paid throughout Indian history. We have seen dice in the IndusValley Civilization, and we will see gambling with dice remain both a major pastime (along withchariot racing and hunting) and the downfall of kings. Ordinary people as well as kings could beruined by gambling, as is evident from the stark portrayal of a dysfunctional family in this Vedicpoem:THE GAMBLER“She did not quarrel with me or get angry; she was kind to my friends and tome. Because of a losing throw of the dice I have driven away a devoted wife. My wife’s motherhates me, and my wife pushes me away. The man in trouble finds no one with sympathy. Theyall say, ‘I find a gambler as useless as an old horse that someone wants to sell.’ Other men fondlethe wife of a man whose possessions have been taken by the plundering dice. His father, mother,and brothers all say of him, ‘We do not know him. Tie him up and take him away.’ When Iswear, ‘I will not play with them,’ my friends leave me behind and go away. But when the browndice raise their voice as they are thrown down, I run at once to the rendezvous with them, like awoman to her lover.” . . . The deserted wife of the gambler grieves, and the mother grieves forher son who wanders anywhere, nowhere. In debt and in need of money, frightened, he goes atnight to the houses of other men. It torments the gambler to see his wife the woman of othermen, in their comfortable rooms. But he yoked the brown horses in the early morning, and atevening he fell down by the fire, no longer a man (10.34). Like a character in a Dostoyevskynovel, the gambler prays not to win but just to stop losing, indeed to stop playing altogether; hisinability to stop is likened to a sexual compulsion or addiction. The “brown horses” that he yokesmay be real horses or a metaphor for the brown dice; in either case, they destroy him. (Thegambler’s wife who is fondled by other men reappears in the Mahabharata when the wife of thegambler Yudhishthira is stripped in the public assembly.) At the end of the poem, a god (Savitri,the god of the rising and setting sun) warns the gambler, “Play no longer with the dice, but tillyour field; enjoy what you possess, and value it highly. There are your cattle, and there is yourwife.”DRINKING SOMAIntoxication, though not addiction, is a central theme of the Veda, since the sacrificialoffering of the hallucinogenic juice of the soma plant was an element of several important Vedicrituals. The poets who “saw” the poems were inspired both by their meditations and by drinkingthe soma juice. The poems draw upon a corpus of myths about a fiery plant that a bird bringsdown from heaven; soma is born in the mountains or in heaven, where it is closely guarded; aneagle brings soma to earth (4.26-7) or to Indra (4.18.13), or the eagle carries Indra to heaven tobring the soma bo to humans and gods (4.27.4). This myth points to the historical home of thesoma plant in the mountains, probably the mountain homeland of the Vedic people. We do notknow for sure what the soma plant was 44 (pace a recent lawsuit bp over a copyright for it 45 ), butwe know what it was not: It was not ephedra (Sarcostemma) or wine or beer or brandy ormarijuana or opium. bq It may have been the mushroom known as the Amanita muscaria or fly

agaric (called mukhomor in Russian, Pfliegenpilz in German, tue-mouche or crapaudin inFrench). 46 It appears to produce the effects of a hallucinogen (or “entheogen” 47 ): “Likeimpetuous winds, the drinks have lifted me up, like swift horses bolting with a chariot. Yes! Iwill place the earth here, or perhaps there. One of my wings is in the sky; I have trailed the otherbelow. I am huge, huge! flying to the cloud. Have I not drunk soma? (10.119).” Another somahymn begins with the same phrase that ends the poem just cited (“Have I not drunk Soma?”),now no longer a question: “We have drunk the soma; we have become immortal; we have goneto the light; we have found the gods. What can hatred and the malice of a mortal do to us now?The glorious drops that I have drunk set me free in wide space (8.48.3).” The feeling ofexpansiveness, of being set free “in wide space,” is not merely a Vedic political agenda, anexpression of the lust for those wide-open spaces; it is also a subjective experience ofexhilaration and ecstasy. Human poets drink soma only in small quantities and in the controlledcontext of the ritual. But for the gods who depend upon it, soma can become an addiction (thebolting horses in the hymn cited above recur as a metaphor for senses out of control). Later poetsdepict Indra, the great soma drinker, as suffering from a bad hangover, in which he cannot stopsubstances from flowing from all the orifices of his body. 48MRS. INDRA AND OTHER FEMALESThe gambler’s wife is one of a more general company of long-suffering wives, devotedbut often deserted, who people ancient Hindu literature and the society that this literaturereflects. In the Rig Veda, a text dominated by men in a world dominated by men, women appearthroughout the poems as objects. Like the gambler whom Savitri warned, every Vedic manvalued equally his two most precious possessions, his cattle and his wife. A man needed a wifeto be present when he performed any Vedic sacrifice, though she had to stay behind a screen. 49Women also appear occasionally as subjects, even as putative authors, of Vedic poems (10.40,8.91). 50 And women may have had a voice in poems that treat women’s interestssympathetically, such as magic spells to incapacitate rival wives and to protect unborn childrenin the womb (10.184), and in the Vedic ritual that an unmarried virgin performs to get ahusband. 51 One of these latter poems is appropriately dedicated to Indrani (“Mrs. Indra”), thewife of Indra (who is, like his Indo-European counterparts—the Greek Zeus and the Norse Odin,German Wotan—a notorious philanderer). It says, in part: “I dig up this plant, the most powerfulthing that grows, with which one drives out the rival wife and wins the husband entirely foroneself. I will not even take her name into my mouth; he takes no pleasure in this person. Makethe rival wife go far, far into the distance. [She addresses her husband:] Let your heart run afterme like a cow after a calf, like water running in its own bed (10.145).” Some spells, like thisspell to protect the embryo, are directed against evil powers but addressed to human beings, inthis case the pregnant woman: “The one whose name is evil, who lies with disease upon yourembryo, your womb, the flesh eater; the one who kills the embryo as it settles, as it rests, as itstirs, who wishes to kill it when it is born—we will drive him away from here. The one whospreads apart your two thighs, who lies between the married pair, who licks the inside of yourwomb—we will drive him away from here. The one who by changing into a brother, or husband,or lover lies with you, who wishes to kill your offspring—we will drive him away from here.The one who bewitches you with sleep or darkness and lies with you—we will drive him awayfrom here (10.162).”There is precise human observation here of what we would call the three trimesters ofpregnancy (when the embryo settles, rests, and stirs). Though the danger ultimately comes from

supernatural creatures, ogres, such creatures act through humans, by impersonating the husband(or lover! or brother!) of the pregnant woman. This poem provides, among things, evidence thata woman might be expected to have a lover, a suspicion substantiated by a Vedic ritual in whichthe queen is made to list her lovers of the past year, br though that moment in the ritual mayrepresent nothing more than a “jolt of sexual energy” that the wife, as locus of sexuality,particularly illicit sexuality (since most forms of sex were licit for men), was charged to providefor the ritual. 52 More substantial is the early evidence in this poem of a form of rape that came tobe regarded as a bad, but legitimate, form of marriage: having sex with a sleeping or druggedwoman. It appears that a woman’s brother too is someone she might expect to find in her bed,though the Rig Veda severely condemns sibling incest; 53 it is also possible that the brother inquestion is her husband’s brother, a person who, as we shall see, can have certain traditional,though anxiety-producing, connections with his brother’s wife. bsWomen were expected to live on after the deaths of their husbands, as we learn fromlines in a funeral hymn addressed to the widow of the dead man: “Rise up, woman, into theworld of the living. Come here; you are lying beside a man whose life’s breath has gone(10.18).” The poet urges the widow to go on living. Certainly she is not expected to die with herhusband, though “lying beside a dead man” may have been a survival from an earlier periodwhen the wife was actually buried with her husband; 54 the Atharva Veda regards the practice ofthe wife’s lying down beside her dead husband (but perhaps then getting up again) as an ancientcustom. 55 On the other hand, women in the Vedic period may have performed a purely symbolicsuicide on their husbands’ graves, which was later (hindsight alert!) cited as scriptural supportfor the actual self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ pyres called suttee.Several poems explore the relationships between men and women, mortal and immortal.These poems present narratives centering on courtship, marriage, adultery, and estrangement,often in the form of conversations (akhyanas) that zero in on the story in medias res, taking it upat a crucial turning point in a plot that we are presumed to know (and that the later commentariesspell out for us). 56 The conversation poems, which often involve goddesses and heavenlynymphs, are particularly associated with fertility and may have been part of a special ritualperformance involving actors and dancers. 57 The dialogues with women present situations inwhich one member of the pair attempts to persuade the other to engage in some sort of sexualactivity; sometimes it is the woman who takes the role of persuader, 58 sometimes the man. 59 Ingeneral, the mortal women and immortal men are successful in their persuasion, while thequasi-immortal women and mortal men fail. 60Apala, a mortal woman, has a most intimate relationship with Indra, as we gather fromthe story told in the poem attributed to her (a story spelled out by later commentaries) (8.91). Shewas a young woman whose husband hated her (“Surely we who are hated by our husbandsshould flee and unite with Indra,” v. 4) because she had a skin disease (the ritual makes her“sun-skinned,” v. 7). She found the soma plant (“A maiden going for water found soma by theway,” v. 1), pressed it in her mouth, and offered it to Indra (“Drink this that I have pressed withmy teeth,” v. 2). Indra made love to her; she at first resisted (“We do not wish to understand you,and yet we do not misunderstand you,” v. 3) and then consented (“Surely he is able, surely hewill do it, surely he will make us more fortunate,” v. 4). She asked him to cure her and to restorefertility to her father and to his fields (“Make these three places sprout, Indra: my daddy’s headand field, and this part of me below the waist,” v. 5-6). Indra accomplished this triple blessing(“Indra, you purified Apala three times,” v. 7) by a ritual that may have involved drawing Apalathrough three chariot holes (“in the nave of a chariot, in the nave of the cart, in the nave of the

yoke,” v. 7), making her slough her skin three times (according to later tradition, the first skinbecame a porcupine, bt the second an alligator, and the third a chameleon 61 ).Apala wants to be “fortunate” (subhaga), a word that has three closely linked meanings:beautiful, therefore loved by her husband, bu therefore fortunate. In other poems, a husbandrejects his wife not because she lacks beauty but because he lacks virility (10.40); “fortunate”then assumes the further connotation of having a virile husband. bv Finally, it means having ahealthy husband, so that the woman does not become a widow. For his failing health too may bethe woman’s fault; certain women are regarded as dangerous to men. For instance, the blood ofthe bride’s defloration threatens the groom: “It becomes a magic spirit walking on feet, and likethe wife it draws near the husband (10.85.29).” The blood spirit takes the wife’s form, as theembryo-killing ogre takes the form of her husband/lover/brother. Sex is dangerous.One long poem (10.85) celebrates the story of the marriage of the moon and the daughterof the sun, and another (10.17.1-2) briefly alludes to the marriage of the sun to the equinegoddess Saranyu. But these are not simple hierogamies (sacred marriages), for the celestial godsalso share our sexual frailties. To say that a marriage is made in heaven is not necessarily ablessing in the Vedic world; adultery too is made in heaven. (In the Ramayana [7.30], Indra’sadultery with a mortal woman creates adultery for the first time on earth.) The moon is unfaithfulto the sun’s daughter when he runs off with the wife of the priest of the gods (Brihaspati)(10.109). And the sun’s wife, Saranyu, the daughter of the artisan and blacksmith Tvashtri, givesbirth to twins (one of whom is Yama, god of the dead) but then runs away from the sun. Sheleaves in her place a double of herself, while she herself takes the form of a mare and gives birthto the horse-headed gods, the Ashvins (10.17.1-2). 62 Saranyu belongs to a larger pattern ofequine goddesses who abandon their husbands, for while stallions in Vedic ritual thinking aredomesticated male animals (pashus), fit for sacrifice, mares belong to an earlier, mythicIndo-European level 63 in which horses were still thought of as wild animals, hunted and perhapscaptured but never entirely tamed.Not all the females in the Rig Veda are anthropomorphic. Abstract nouns (usuallyfeminine) are sometimes personified as female divinities, such as Speech (Vach) 64 andDestruction (Nirriti). There are also natural entities with feminine names, such as Dawn andNight and the Waters (including the Sarasvati River) and terrestrial goddesses, such as thenymphs (Apsarases), the forest, and Earth (Prithivi), who is regarded as a mother. And there aredivine wives, named after their husbands (Mrs. Indra, Mrs. Surya, Mrs. Rudra, Mrs. Varuna,Mrs. Agni) 65 and at least one divine husband, named after his rather abstract wife: Indra is calledthe Lord of Shachi (shachi-pati), pati meaning “husband” or “master” (literally “protector”) andshachi meaning “power” (from the verb shak or shach). Together, they suggest that Indra is themaster of power or married to a goddess named Shachi, which became another name for Indrani.So too later goddesses played the role of the shakti (another form derived from the same verb)that empowered the male gods. But no goddesses (except Vach, “Speech”) have any part in thesacrifice that was the heart of Vedic religion. 66Most Vedic creator gods (like most Vedic gods in general) are male, but one Vedic poemimagines cosmic creation through the down-to-earth image of a female, called Aditi (“WithoutLimits,” “Infinity”), who gives birth to a baby:ADITI GIVES BIRTHLet us now speak with wonder of the births of the gods—so that some onemay see them when the poems are chanted in this later age. In the earliest age of the gods,existence was born from nonexistence. After this the quarters of the sky, and the earth, were bornfrom her who crouched with legs spread. From female Infinity (Aditi), male dexterity (Daksha)

was born, and from male dexterity (Daksha), female infinity (Aditi) was born. After her wereborn the blessed gods, the kinsmen of immortality (10.72.1-5). The dominant visual image ofthis poem is the goddess of infinity, who crouches with legs stretched up (uttana-pad), moreparticularly with knees drawn up and legs spread wide, bw a term that designates a positionprimarily associated with a woman giving birth. 67 This position is later associated with yoga andmight have yogic overtones even in this period.Again we encounter the paradox of mutual creation: bx The female principle of infinityand the male principle of virile dexterity create each other as Brahma and Vishnu will later createeach other. A Vedic commentary takes pains to explain that for the gods, two births can mutuallyproduce each other. 68 The creator often has the tautological name of “self-existing” or“self-created” (svayambhu ): by He creates himself, as does circular time itself, and the cosmos,according to the theory of the four Ages.POLYTHEISM AND KATHENOTHEISMIn the house of the Rig Veda there are many divine mansions. We have noted theimportance of multiplicity to Hindus and Hinduism, and it begins here. The Rig Veda has a kindof polytheism, but one that already has in it the first seeds of what will flower, in thephilosophical texts called the Upanishads, into monism (which assumes that all living things areelements of a single, universal substance). A much-quoted line proclaims this singularmultiplicity, in a context that is clearly theological rather than philosophical: “They call it Indra,Mitra, Varuna, Agni, and it is the heavenly bird that flies. The wise speak of what is One inmany ways; they call it Agni, Yama, Matarishvan” (1.164.46). This is a tolerant, hierarchical sortof devotional polytheism: The worshiper acknowledges the existence, and goodness, of godsother than the god that he or she is addressing at the moment. This creative tension betweenmonism and polytheism extends through the history of Hinduism.The polytheism of Vedic religion is actually a kind of serial monotheism that Müllernamed henotheism or kathenotheism, the worship of a number of gods, one at a time, regardingeach as the supreme, or even the only, god while you are talking to him. Thus one Vedic poemwill praise a god and chalk up to his account the credit for separating heaven and earth, proppingthem apart with a pillar, but another Vedic poem will use exactly the same words to praiseanother god. (In addition, each god would have characteristics and deeds that are his alone; noone but Indra cures Apala.) Bearing in mind the way in which the metaphor of adultery hastraditionally been used by monotheistic religions to stigmatize polytheism (“whoring after othergods”), and used by later Hinduism to characterize the love of god, we might regard this attitudeas a kind of theological parallel to serial monogamy, or, if you prefer, open hierogamos: “You,Vishnu, are the only god I’ve ever worshiped; you are the only one.” “You, Varuna, are the onlygod I’ve ever worshiped; you are the only one.” “You, Susan, are the only woman I’ve everloved; you are the only one.” “You, Helen, are the only woman I’ve ever loved; you are the onlyone.” Vedic kathenotheism made possible a quasihierarchical pantheon; the attitude to each godwas hierarchical, but the various competing practical monotheisms canceled one another out, sothat the total picture was one of equality; each of several was the best (like the pigs on GeorgeOrwell’s Animal Farm: They’re all equal, but some are more equal than others).This time-sharing property of the Vedic gods is an example of individual pluralism: Eachindividual worshiper would know, and might use, several different poems to different gods. Andthe text is intolerant of intolerance. One Rig Vedic poem curses people who accuse others ofworshiping false gods or considering the gods useless (7.104.14). When the double negatives in

this statement cross one another out, we are left with an extraordinary defense of heretics andatheists. But the broader intellectual pluralism of the Vedas regards the world, or the deity, ortruth itself as plural; the Vedas tackle the problem of ontology from several (plural) differentangles, branching off from an ancient and still ongoing argument about the way the world is,about whether it is basically uniform or basically multiform.One Vedic poem ends: “Where did this creation come from? The gods came afterward,with the creation of this universe. Who then knows where it came from? Where it camefrom—perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not—the one who looks down on it, in thehighest heaven, only he knows—or perhaps he does not know (10.129).” There is a charminghumility and open-mindedness in this poem, which begins, most confusingly, with the statement“There was neither existence nor nonexistence then”—easy enough to say, impossible actually tovisualize. Its final phrase (“or perhaps he does not know”) seems almost to mock the rhetoric inthe line that comes right before it: “—the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, onlyhe knows.” The poem asks a question about the very nature, perhaps the very existence, of god.The unanswered cosmic question (“Who really knows?”) recurs in the Rig Veda inanother cosmogonic poem, in which each stanza ends with the questioning refrain: “Who is thegod whom we should worship with the oblation?” Thus: “He by whom the awesome sky and theearth were made firm, by whom the dome of the sky was propped up, and the sun, who measuredout the middle realm of space—who is the god whom we should worship with the oblation?(10.121).” The Veda shows a tolerance, a celebration of plurality, even in asking unanswerablequestions about the beginnings of all things.AGNI, INDRA, AND VARUNAThe great gods of later Hinduism, Vishnu and Shiva (in the form of Rudra), make onlycameo appearances in the Veda. 69 By contrast, the most important gods of the Veda, such asAgni, Soma, Indra, and Varuna, all closely tied to the Vedic sacrifice, become far less importantin later Hinduism, though they survive as symbolic figures of natural forces: fire, the moon, rain,and the waters, respectively. Other Vedic gods too are personifications of natural forces,particularly solar gods, as Müller rightly noted but overemphasized. (He was mocked for it too;one scholar wrote an article proving that by his own criteria, Max Müller himself was a solargod. 70 ) There are exquisite poems to the goddesses Dawn (1.92) and Night (10.127) and to thegod Surya, the sun.But most of the gods, even those representing natural forces, are vividlyanthropomorphized. The gods are like us, only more so. They want what we want, things likemarriage (and adultery), and fame, and praise. And most of the gods are closely associated withparticular social classes: Agni is the Brahmin, Varuna the Brahminical sovereign, Indra thewarrior, and the Ashvins the Vaishyas. There are no Shudra gods in the Vedas.Agni, god of fire, serves as the divine model for the sacrificial priest, the messenger whocarries the oblation from humans to the gods, brings all the gods to the sacrifice, and intercedesbetween gods and humans (1.26.3). When Agni is pleased, the gods become generous. Thebuilding of the fire altar is a foundational Vedic ceremony, 71 and the kindling and maintaining ofthree fires—the household fire (Garhapatya), the ceremonial fire (Dakshina), and the sacrificialfire (Ahavaniya)—were a basic responsibility of every householder.Agni and Soma connect in many ways. As fire and liquid they are complementaryoppositions that unite in the concept of the fiery liquid, the elixir of immortality, or ambrosia;Soma is the fiery fluid and Agni the fluid fire. As ritual elements, the embodiments of the

sacrificial fire and the sacrificial drink, they are invoked more than any other gods of the RigVeda. As metaphorical symbols they are the pivot of speculations about the nature of the cosmos.Their mythologies join in the image of the sunbird, a form of Agni (the firebird) who bringsSoma to earth (10.123, 177). They are two contrasting sources of the inspiration that enables theVedic poet to understand the meaning of the sacrifice and of his life: Where Soma is Dionysian,representing the wild, raw, disruptive aspect of rituals, Agni is Apollonian, representing thecultivated, cooked, cultured aspects of rituals. The Vedic sacrifice needs both of them.Indra, the king of the gods, the paradigmatic warrior, and the god of rain, is (in English) ahomonym: He reigns and he rains. As the great soma drinker he appears often in the somapoems, and he is the one who brings Agni back when the antigods (Asuras) steal him (10.51,124). The poets also praise Indra for freeing the cows that have been stolen and hidden in a cave(3.31, 10.108), but his greatest deed is the killing of the dragon Vritra, who is called a Dasa, andwho dams up the waters, causing a drought (1.32). Both Indra and Vritra are drinkers, but Vritracannot hold his soma as Indra can (on this occasion). By killing Vritra, Indra simultaneouslyreleases the waters or rains that Vritra has held back and conquers the enemies of the Vedicpeople, getting back the waters and the cows trapped in the cave.This myth of dragon slaying, linked to the myth of the cattle raid, 72 is foundational to theKshatriya class, bz as “Poem of the Primeval Man” is for the Brahmin class. Indra’s famousgenerosity—particularly when he is high on soma—and his endearing anthropomorphismemboldened at least one poet to imagine himself in Indra’s place (8.14). But these same qualitiesmay have led worshipers even in Vedic times to devalue Indra; ca one poem records doubts abouthis existence: “He about whom they ask, ‘Where is he?’ or say, ‘He does not exist,’—believe inhim! He, my people, is Indra (2.12.5).” Yet even that poem ultimately affirms Indra’s existence.Varuna combines aspects of the roles of priest and king. His original function was that ofa sky god, in particular the god of the waters in the heavenly vault (Ouranos, also a sky god, ishis Greek counterpart). But by the time of the Rig Veda Varuna had developed into a god whoseprimary role was watching over human behavior (as a sky god was well situated to do) andpunishing those who violated the sacred law (rita) of which Varuna was the most importantcustodian. He would snare miscreants in his bonds (pasha), which often revealed their presencethrough disease.One hymn to Varuna is extraordinary in its introspective tone, its sense of personalunworthiness and uncertainty (“What did I do?”):VARUNA’S ANGER AND MERCYI ask my own heart, “When shall I be close to Varuna? Willhe enjoy my offering and not be provoked to anger? When shall I see his mercy and rejoice?” Iask myself what the transgression was, Varuna, for I wish to understand. I turn to the wise to askthem. The poets have told me the very same thing: “Varuna has been provoked to anger againstyou.” O Varuna, what was the terrible crime for which you wish to destroy your friend whopraises you? Proclaim it to me so that I may hasten to prostrate myself before you and be freefrom error, for you are hard to deceive and are ruled by yourself alone. Free us from the harmfuldeeds of our fathers and from those that we have committed with our own bodies. The mischiefwas not done by my own free will, Varuna; wine, anger, dice, or carelessness led me astray. Theolder shares in the mistake of the younger. Even sleep does not avert evil. As a slave serves agenerous master, so would I serve the furious god and be free from error (7.86). The poemassumes that on the one hand, one may not be blamed, or perhaps not entirely blamed, for errorscommitted under the influence of passionate emotions, and on the other hand, one may bepunished not only for conscious errors but also for errors committed unconsciously, in sleep, or

even by other people (both one’s parents and one’s children). The idea that one person can bepunished for the crime of another person is the flip side of an idea implicit in the Vedic sacrifice,which the priest performs for the benefit of someone else, the sacrificial patron (yajamana, inSanskrit). This idea becomes much more important in later Hinduism, in texts that characterizethe Vedic transaction as one in which the ritual transfers to the sponsor the good karma that thepriest generates. Eventually—to fast-forward for a moment—the idea of the transfer of goodkarma in a ritual act with effects in this life develops into the idea of the moral consequences ofany act, not only in this life but also in future lives.DEATHJust as the Vedic poets speculate in various contrasting, even conflicting ways about theprocess of creation, so too do they vary in their speculations about death and in the questionsthey ask about death. The poets view death and sleep as a part of chaos, in contrast with theordering of life in the hierarchy of social classes. cb Death in the Vedas is something to beavoided as long as possible; one hopes only to escape premature death, never to live forever; theprayer is that people should die in the right order, that children should not die before their parents(10.18.5). Surprisingly for a document so devoted to war and sacrifice, both of which involvekilling, the Rig Veda actually says relatively little about death. What it does say, however, iscomforting: For the virtuous, death is a hazy but pleasant place.The poet says, speaking of the creator, “His shadow is immortality—and death,” and heprays, “Deliver me from death, not from immortality (7.59.12).” By “immortality” the ancientsages meant not an actual eternity of life—even the gods do not live forever, though they livemuch longer than we do, and they never age—but rather a full life span (usually conceived of asseventy or a hundred years). When it comes to the inevitable end of that span, the Rig Vedaoffers varied but not necessarily contradictory images of a rather muted version of life on earth:shade (remember how hot India is), lots of good-looking women (this heaven is imagined bymen), and good things to eat and drink. There is also some talk about a deep pit into which evilspirits and ogres are to be consigned forever, but no evidence that human sinners would be sentthere (7.104).The poems also propose many different nonsolutions to the insoluble problem of death,many different ways that the square peg of the fact of death cannot be fitted into the round holeof human rationality. These approaches are often aware of one another; they react against oneanother and incorporate one another, through the process of intertextuality. And there is generalagreement on some points, such as that the dead person would go to the House of Clay, to bepunished, or to the World of the Fathers, to be rewarded. 73FAST-FORWARD: REINCARNATIONThe Rig Veda is more concerned with the living than with the dead, as is clear from theway texts address mourners (10.18), but they also address the corpse: “Leaving behind allimperfections, go back home again; merge with a glorious body (10.14.8).” Despite this“glorious body” with which the dead person unites, another poem expresses concern that the oldbody be preserved and confidence that this will be so. The poem begins by addressing the funeralfire: “Do not burn him entirely, Agni, or engulf him in your flames. Do not consume his skin orhis flesh. When you have cooked him perfectly, only then send him forth to the fathers(10.16.1).” Not only is the fire not to destroy the body, but it is to preserve it. cc Speaking to thedead man, the poem says: “Whatever the black bird has pecked out of you, or the ant, the snake,

or even a beast of prey, may Agni who eats all things make it whole (10.16.6).” (Something verysimilar was said of and to the sacrificial horse, as we have seen.)When this poem addresses the dead man, it speaks of the ultimate cosmic dispersal of theold body: “May your eye go to the sun, your life’s breath to the wind. Go to the sky or to earth,as is your nature; or go to the waters, if that is your fate. Take root in the plants with your limbs(10.16.3).” (This dismembermentis reversed in “Poem of the Primeval Man” (10.90): “The moonwas born from his mind; from his eye the sun was born.”) And then it asks Agni to let the deadman “join with a body (10.16.5).”The fate of the dead was a site of contention that was not tackled head-on until theUpanishads began to meditate philosophically on the ritual and mythology of the Vedas, and itwas not fully explored until the full flourishing of Indian philosophy. Yet ever dogged byhindsight, our unshakable bête noire, we might note even in the Vedic poems some rather vagueintimations of transmigration. 74 “Take root in the plants with your limbs (10.16.3)” might be ahint of the sort of rebirth in plants that the Upanishads are going to describe in detail, especiallywhen that verse is coupled, later in that same poem, with a rather suggestive, if cryptic, allusionto rebirth: “Let him reach his own descendants, dressing himself in a life span (10.16.5).” Thisverse can be interpreted to mean that Agni shold let the dead person come back to his formerhome and to his offspring. 75 The dead in the Upanishads come back to the earth in the form ofrain, and that idea may be encoded here too. Though a line in another poem, which expressesseveral rather different views of the fate of the dead, reverts to the idea of heaven, it also hints atthe importance of the record of good deeds—which is to say, good karma: “Unite with thefathers, with Yama [king of the dead], with the rewards of your sacrifices and good deeds, in thehighest heaven (10.14.7).” But these are, at best, but the early, murky stirrings of a doctrine thatwill become clear only in the Brahmanas and Upanishads.CHAPTER 6SACRIFICE IN THE BRAHMANAS800 to 500 BCECHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES BCE)1100-1000 Vedic texts mention the Doab (the areabetween the two [do] rivers [ab], the Ganges and the Yamuna)c. 1000 The city of Kaushambi inVatsa is foundedc. 950 1 The Mahabharata battle is said to have taken placec. 900 The city ofKashi (Varanasi, Benares) is foundedc. 800-600 The Brahmanas are composedHUMANS ANDCATTLEIn the beginning, the skin of cattle was the skin that humans havenow, and the skin of a human was the skin that cattle have now. Cattlecould not bear the heat, rain, flies, and mosquitoes. They went tohumans and said, “Let this skin be yours and that skin be ours.”“What would be the result of that?” humans asked. “You could eatus,” said the cattle, “and this skin of ours would be your clothing.”And so they gave humans their clothing. Therefore, when the sacrificerputs on a red hide, he flourishes, and cattle do not eat him in theother world; for [otherwise] cattle do eat a human in the other world.Jaiminiya Brahmana (c. 600BCE) 2 Concerns for the relationship between humans and animals, and with retribution in “theother world,” are central issues in the Brahmanas. Many new ideas are introduced in the form offolktales, some of which are alluded to, but not narrated, in the Rig Veda, while others may comefrom non-Vedic parts of Indian culture.

THE CITIES ON THE GANGESWhere the Rig Veda expressed uncertainty and begged the gods for help, the Brahmanas(mythological, philosophical, and ritual glosses on the Vedas) express confidence that theirinfallible Vedic verses (mantras) can deal with all dangers. Troubled by the open-ended refrainof the Rig Vedic creation poem that could only ask, “Who is the god whom we should honor withthe oblation?” the Brahmanas invented a god whose name was the interrogative pronoun Who(ka, cognate with the Latin quis, French qui). One text explained it: The creator asked the godIndra (whose own existence, you may recall, was once in doubt), “Who am I?,” to which Indrareplied, “Just who you just said” (i.e., “I am Who”), and that is how the creator got the name ofWho. 3 So too in one Vedic ceremony, 4 when the ritual subject goes to heaven and comes backagain, he must say, on his return, “I am just who I am.” Read back into the Vedic poem (as it wasin later Vedic commentaries 5 ), this resulted in an affirmative statement: “Indeed, Who is the godwhom we should honor with the oblation,” somewhat reminiscent of the famous Abbott andCostello routine “Who’s on first?” But this sacerdotal arrogance closed down some of thoseopenings through which fresh theological air had flowed. The question became the answer.What can account for this dramatic shift in tone, from questions to answers? In part, itwas caused by a major change in the living conditions of the authors of these texts. For theBrahmanas were composed during one of the most significant geographical and social shifts inthe history of Hinduism, a period that has been called the second urbanization 6 (the first beingthat of the Indus Valley), a time of social and intellectual transformation so extreme that it couldwell be called revolutionary. Let us, as usual, ground our discussion of the religious texts in aquick snapshot of the material lives of their authors.From about 1100 to 1000 BCE, Vedic texts begin to mention the Doab (“Two Waters”),the land between the Ganges and the Yamuna (Jumna), the site of the city of Hastinapur (east ofthe present Delhi), and the scene in which most of the Mahabharata is set. Then, in about 900BCE, we find references to an area farther down in the western and middle Ganges Valley,where people built palaces and kingdoms. Just as the migrations of the Vedic people into thePunjab probably took place gradually, through several different incursions, so too the move tothe Ganges took place incrementally over several centuries. The political changes werecorrespondingly gradual. Though the Vedas refer to kings, they were really rulers of relativelysmall, and transitory, political units, numerous small chiefdoms; so too the leaders of the earlypolitical units on the Ganges were said to be “kings in name only” (raja-shabdin), and a laterBuddhist text mocked them, remarking that each one said, “I am the king! I am the king!” 7 Now,however, a few big, powerful kingdoms begin to emerge.Among the first cities were Kashi, later known as Varanasi (or Benares, the capital ofKoshala/Videha), and, southeast of Hastinapur and west of Kashi, the city of Kaushambi (inVatsa, now Uttar Pradesh), whose stratigraphy suggests a founding date of between 1300 and1000 BCE. 8 The Brahmanas must have been composed a few centuries after the founding ofthese cities, for considerable time must have passed since the composition of the Rig Veda (evenof the first and last books, one and ten, which are already noticeably later than the other eight),since the language of the Brahmanas is significantly different, somewhat like the shift fromBeowulf to Chaucer in early English. The Brahmanas cite Vedic verses and explain them,describing the circumstances under which those verses were first created. Not only the languagebut the nature of the texts changed: Between 1000 and 500 BCE, Vedic rituals spawned moreand more commentaries, and by the sixth century BCE the different schools, or branches

(shakhas), had been well established. 9During the first millennium BCE, the Vedic people settled down and built things to last.They continued to move east across North India and to take control of the river trade, forests, andrich deposits of minerals. 10 First they moved east from the Punjab to Magadha (Bihar) and thelower Ganges and later, in a backflow, west from the Ganges to Gujarat. The main crop nowshifted from wheat to rice, which yielded a far greater surplus, and they used water buffalo in itscultivation. Eventually they formed cities and states, building urban societies along the Ganges,utilizing the agricultural surplus of wet rice and other crops that benefited from irrigation andcontrol of the river floodings.They moved partly in search of deposits of iron, which they developed from about 800BCE (though a better quality was developed by about 600 11 ); its use was predominant in thewestern Ganges plain in the first millennium BCE and spread from the Indo-Gangetic watershedto the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna. 12 In the Rig Veda, the word ayas means “bronze”;later the Atharva Veda distinguishes red ayas (“bronze”) from dark ayas (“iron”). First used forpins and other parts of horse harnesses, as well as for weapons, iron was not imported but wasdeveloped in India, primarily from rich lodes in what is now southern Bihar. 13CLASS CONFLICTSThe surplus that became available along the banks of the Ganges meant a new kind ofsocial and economic power. It meant the organization and redistribution of raw materials and thegreater stratification of society, in part because the growing of rice is a complex process thatrequires a higher degree of cooperation than was needed for herding or for simpler forms ofagriculture. As labor became more specialized, sharper lines now divided each of the three topclasses one from another and divided all of them from the fourth class, of servants.More extensive kingship also meant more extravagant sacrifices, which in turn requiredstill more wealth. New forms of political and social organization required new forms of ritualspecialization. The early cities were ritual complexes, living statements about royal power. 14 Thegreat kingship rituals such as the royal consecration rites and the horse sacrifice responded to aperceived need for an outward justification of the power exercised by “the emerging kingdomswith their increasingly stratified societies and their multi-lingual, multicultural and multi-racialpopulations.” 15 The ceremony of royal consecration became a highly elaborate affair, involving aperiod of symbolic exile, a chariot race, and a symbolic gambling match, all of which were tohave long-lasting resonances in the narrative literature. And such complex sacrifices required amore complex math, astronomy, geometry; they also led to a more precise knowledge of animalanatomy. 16 Above all, the importance laid upon the precise words used in the rituals, the mantras,inspired the development of an elaborate system of grammar, which remained the queen of thesciences in India (as theology was for medieval Christianity). The more complex sacrifices alsorequired a more complex priesthood, leading to questions about the qualifications of thoseclaiming the title.Thus texts of this period define a true Brahmin in terms that transcend birth: “Why doyou enquire about the father or the mother of a Brahmin? When you find knowledge in someone,that is his father and his grandfather.” 17 And other texts similarly question class lines. Onefollows the typical Brahmana pattern of explaining the circumstances under which a sage “sees”or “hears” a particular Vedic hymn.THE SAGES AND THE SON OF A SLAVE WOMANSages performing a sacrifice on thebanks of the river Sarasvati drove Kavasha, the son of Ilusha, away from the soma, calling him

the son of a slave woman and saying: “How did he ever come to be consecrated among us? Lethim die of thirst, but he must not drink the water of the Sarasvati.” When he was alone in thedesert, tormented by thirst, he composed a Vedic poem [10.30], and the Sarasvati came to himand surrounded him with her waters. When the sages saw this, they realized, “The gods knowhim; let us call him back.” 18 In this story, a person from outside the society of the upper classesis assimilated into the inner sanctum of the Vedic priesthood. The sages call him a son of a slavewoman, Dasi-putra, a term usually designating the son of a Shudra mother, in this case also theson of a man named Ilusha, presumably a Brahmin.Shudras and Vaishyas play increasingly important roles in the Brahmanas. The surplussupported kings and an administrative bureaucracy and made a greater demand on the peoplewho produced the wealth, taxation of a portion of the whole crop (according to Manu, a sixth ofthe crop). 19 The word bali, which originally meant (and continued to mean) an offering to gods,now also came to mean a tax paid to kings. This burden alienated at least some of the people, aswe learn from one Brahmana:THE KING EATS THE PEOPLE“When a deer eats the barley, the farmer does not hope tonourish the animal; when a low-born woman becomes the mistress of a noble man, her husbanddoes not hope to get rich on that nourishment.” Now, the barley is the people, and the deer is theroyal power; thus the people are food for the royal power, and so the one who has royal powereats the people. And so the king does not raise animals; and so one does not anoint as king theson of a woman born of the people. 20 Though this text, like most texts of the ancient period, wasultimately passed through a Brahmin filter and therefore surely represents the interests ofBrahmins in criticizing the king, it just as surely also captures (if only to use it for Brahminicalpurposes) the abuse, and the resentment, of people who, not being Brahmins, did not haveimmediate access to the text. Yet in addition to proclaiming the brutality of the king, it assumesthat class lines cannot be crossed, a lowborn man should not allow his wife to have a highbornlover, and a man of the people (a Vaishya) cannot be king.The sacrifice was far from the only royal concern, as the historian Romila Thaparexplains:The point at which wealth could be accumulated and spent on a variety of adjuncts to authoritymarked the point at which kingship was beginning to draw on political authority, rather thanritual authority alone. However, the ritual of the sacrifice as a necessary precondition to kingshipcould not become a permanent feature. Once kingdoms were established there were otherdemands on the wealth that went to support the kingdoms. 21 Rit ual aut horit y was thussupplemented by other trappings of authority, including armies and tax collectors. Theseexpenses would drain the money that had previously been given to the priests for sacrifices,fueling the growing animosity between rulers and priests, an animosity so central to the historyof Hinduism that it has been called “the inner conflict of tradition.” 22KINGS AND PRIESTSThe move down from the Punjab to the Ganges also sowed the seeds of a problem thatwas to have repercussions throughout the history of Hinduism: The Vedic people no longer hadgood grazing lands for their horses, and so it was no longer possible for every member of thetribe to keep a horse. The horse became a rich man’s beast, now a hierarchical as well animperialist animal, but it retained its power as a popular cultural symbol, one whose meaningcontinued to shift in each new age all through subsequent Indian history. Horses and their powerto destroy are at the heart of a story about conflicts between the two upper classes. In battle, the

warrior stood on the left of the two-man chariot, holding his bow in one hand and his arrows inthe other, while the charioteer, literally the warrior’s right-hand man, held the reins in his righthand and a shield in front of both of them with his left hand, so that the archer would have bothhands free to shoot. In this story, the king stands in the place of the warrior, holding not aweapon but a whip, while his royal chaplain or domestic priest (Purohita) serves as thecharioteer, literally and figuratively holding the reins:THE KING AND THE PRIEST IN THE CHARIOTVrisha was the royal chaplain (Purohita) ofTriyaruna, king of the Ikshvakus. Now, in the old days the royal chaplain would hold the reins inthe chariot for the king in order to watch out for the king, to keep him from doing any harm. Asthe two of them were driving along, they cut down with the wheel of the chariot the son of aBrahmin, a little boy playing in the road. One of them [the king] had driven the horses forward,while the other [the priest] had tried to pull them to one side, but they came on so hard that hecould not pull them aside. And so they had cut down the boy. They argued with each other aboutit, and the priest threw down the reins and stepped down from the chariot. The king said, “Theone who holds the reins is the driver of the chariot. You are the murderer.” “No,” said the priest,“I tried to pull back to avoid him, but you drove the horses on. You are the murderer.” Finallythey said, “Let us ask,” and they went to ask the Ikshvakus. The Ikshvakus said, “The one whoholds the reins is the driver. You are the murderer,” and they accused Vrisha, the priest.Heprayed, “Let me get out of this; let me find help and a way out. Let that boy come to life.” Hesaw this mantra [9.65.28-29] and brought the boy to life with it. cd . . . For this is a mantra thatcures and makes restoration. And it is also a mantra that gives you what you want. Whoeverpraises with this mantra gets whatever he wants. 23 The text, right from the start, casts ajaundiced eye upon the king; it assumes that you can’t let a king out alone without his keeper, theBrahmin, who goes along “to keep him from doing harm”—that is, from indulging in the royaladdictions, here consisting of reckless driving. This is a transformation of the court chaplain’susual task of washing the blood of battle and executions off the king’s hands after he hassinned. 24 In this case, between the two of them they manage to murder an innocent child, in oneof the earliest recorded hit-and-run incidents in history. That child is a Brahmin, related to Vrishaby class; in another variant of this story, the dead boy is actually Vrisha’s own son. 25 The jury ishardly impartial, being made up entirely of the king’s people, the Ikshvakus, a great northerndynasty, and it is therefore not surprising that they reject the priest’s argument that it was all theking’s fault, whipping the horses on, and rule that it was the priest’s job to rein the horses in.(The text’s statement that this incident happened “in the old days” implies that court chaplains nolonger drove chariots, if in fact they ever did; the text metaphorically puts the chaplain in thedriver’s seat or makes him the king’s right-hand man, jockeying for power.) The chariot of thesenses that a person drives with one (priestly) foot on the brakes and the other (royal) foot on theaccelerator is a recurrent image in Hindu philosophy; we have seen a Vedic poem (10.119) inwhich someone exhilarated (or stoned) on soma says that the drinks have carried him up andaway, “Like horses bolting with a chariot.” 26 In the Upanishads, as we will soon see, theintellect/charioteer reins in the senses/horses that pull the chariot of the mind. 27 In the BhagavadGita, the incarnate god Krishna holds the reins for Prince Arjuna, though there Arjuna holdsback, and Krishna goads him forward. Charioteers are major players in both the martial and thenarrative/ philosophical world.The point of this story of Vrisha seems to be that royal power trumps priestly power inthe courts, since the jury is stacked; the only way that the priest can avoid punishment is by usingpriestly power to erase the entire crime. The mantra that he uses to do this has wider

applications; it assures him that he will always get what he wants, even, apparently, when hewants to raise the dead. This same power will belong to the person who hears the story and thusgains access to the mantra known as the “fruits of hearing” (phala shruti) that comes at the endof many stories of this type: “Whoever knows this” (yo evam veda) gets whatever the protagonistof the story got. (It is guaranteed to work, though it is not foolproof: If you say it and do not getthe promised reward, you must have said it wrong somehow.) This is a major innovation of theBrahmana texts: Where the Vedas asked, and hoped, that the gods would help them, theBrahmins of these later texts arrogantly assure the worshiper that they can fix anything.But the story then goes on to tell us that Vrisha did not get all that he wanted; he did notget justice, vindication.THE FIRE IN THE WOMANBut Vrisha was angry, and he went to Jana [his father] and said,“They gave a false and prejudiced judgment against me.” Then the power went out of the fire ofthe Ikshvakus: If they placed food on the fire in the evening, by morning it still had not beencooked; and if they placed food on the fire in the morning, the same thing happened to it [byevening]. Then they said, “We have displeased a Brahmin and treated him with dishonor. That iswhy the power has gone out of our fire. Let us invite him back.” They invited him, and he cameback, just like a Brahmin summoned by a king. As he arrived, he prayed, “Let me see this powerof fire.” He saw this mantra and sang it over the fire. Then he saw this: “The wife of Triyaruna isa flesh-eating ghoul [pishachi]. She is the one who has covered the fire with a cushion and sitson it.” Then he spoke these verses from the Rig Veda [5.2.12, 9-10], and as he finished sayingthem, the power of the fire ran up into her and burned her all up. Then they dispersed that powerof the fire properly, here and there [in each house], and the fire cooked for them properly. 28The Rig Veda verses that Vrisha cites refer, obscurely, to the myth in which Agni, thegod of fire, is first lost and then found, which is precisely what has happened (again) here.This part of the story seems to have little to do with the earlier episode, the fight betweenthe king and his priest. Apparently Vrisha is still full of resentment when he recollects what he(but no one else) regards as the injustice of it all, the insolence of royal office. (The jury’sjudgment is not, on the face of it, unfair; it is, I should think, reasonable to hold responsible theperson who controlled the chariot’s brakes.) Yet the fire vanishes immediately after Vrisha seekshelp from Jana, his father, and though Jana does nothing explicit to help his son, there are manyother stories (some in this same text) in which Agni (who is, after all, a priest himself) vanisheswhen a priest is offended, and still others in which an offended Brahmin conjures up a demoness(a ghoul [Pishachi], as here, or an ogress [Rakshasi] or a female antigod [Asuri]) to avenge himwhen he has been harmed. Either or both of these may be implied here. The point of the secondhalf of the story is therefore a warning never to offend a Brahmin.But the text also makes a gratuitous swipe at the dangerous sexuality of women, for thefire that the queen hides under her lap and that destroys her by entering her between her legs isessential to the life of the whole community, which needs it to cook not only the sacred oblationsbut all profane food. Both these types of cooking belong to the wife, who cooks the everydaymeals and (by her mere presence at the ritual) makes it possible for her husband to offer theoblations into the fire. 29 We will have more occasions to consider the connections betweenwomen and fire in Hinduism.ANIMALSTHE HORSE SACRIFICE REVISITED, IThe Brahmanas now tell us more about the way in which the horse sacrifice, which began

as a relatively simple ritual at the time of the Rig Veda, developed into a far more complex andexpensive ceremony in this later period. The political symbolism of the Vedic horse sacrifice isblatant: The consecrated white stallion was “set free” to wander for a year before he was broughtback home and killed, a ritual enactment of the actual equine wandering typical of Vedic culture.During that year the horse was guarded by an army that “followed” him and claimed for the kingany land on which he grazed. By the late Vedic period, when the Vedic people had begun togrow fodder crops, the stallion would have been stabled, and a stabled stallion behaves quitedifferently from one in the wild; he tends to return to the stable where he has been fed. The ideathat he will wander away in the Ganges Valley, as he used to do in his salad days up in thePunjab, was by this time an anachronism, a conscious archaism. The king’s army therefore drovethe horse onward and guided him into the neighboring lands that the king intended to take over.(“Doubtless some manipulated the wandering of the horse to save face,” Romila Thapar remarksdryly. 30 ) It is not hard to imagine the scene. People would suddenly run out into the fields,shouting, “Get your goddamn horse out of my field; he’s trampling the crop,” and suddenly afew, or a few hundred, armed men would appear over the brow of the hill and growl, “Say thatagain?” and the people would reply, “Oh, I beg your pardon, sirs, I didn’t realize—do let yourlovely horse graze here, and can we bring you a little something for yourselves?” and the soldierswould then claim all the land the horse had grazed. Thus the ritual that presented itself as acasual equine stroll over the king’s lands was in fact an orchestrated annexation of the lands on aking’s border; a ritual about grazing became a ritual about political aggrandizement. The Vedicdrive toward wandering (without settling) had developed into what the Nazis called,euphemistically, incorporation (Anschluss) and nineteenth-century Americans called manifestdestiny. No wonder the Sanskrit texts insist that a king had to be very powerful indeed before hecould undertake a horse sacrifice, and very few kings did in fact perform this ritual.In addition to its political purposes, this sacrifice, like most, was designed to restorethings that had gone wrong, in this case to restore the king who had been sullied by thebloodshed necessitated by his office. But new things could go wrong during the period when thehorse was said to wander freely. So restorations were prescribed if the horse mounted a mare, orbecame lame, or got sick but not lame, or if the horse’s eye was injured or diseased, or if thehorse died in water. Finally:If the horse should get lost, [the sacrificer] should make a sacrificial offering of three oblations. .. . And even by itself, this ritual finds what has been lost; whatever other thing of his is lost, lethim sacrifice with this ritual, and he will surely find it. And if enemies should get the horse, or ifthe horse should die . . . , they should bring another horse and consecrate it by sprinkling it withwater; this is the restoration for that. 31 At the end of the ceremony, there is even arestoration for the obscene language that has been an obligatory part of the ritual: “The vitalbreaths go out of those who speak impure speech in the sacrifice. And so they utter at the end asweet-smelling mantra, and so they purify their speech and the vital breaths do not go out ofthem. . . . Thus they purify their speech to keep the gods from going out of the sacrifice.” 32 Youcan fix anything, if you know how and if you are a Brahmin.DOGSA dog too played a part in keeping evil out of the sacrifice, and the negative role of thedog is evidence that the lower castes were still essential to the ritual. It may well be that thegrowing acknowledgment of class distinctions in this period and the formulation of more intense

ules of purity and impurity began to find the omnivorous dog a useful symbol of the impureeater, the outsider, in contrast with the noble, herbivorous (i.e., vegetarian) horse. Another factorin the fall of the dog’s status may have been the progressive decline of the Vedic gods Indra,Yama, and Rudra, who were associated with dogs. 33Early in the ceremony the stallion stood in water. Collateral relatives of the king andqueen brought to the stallion a “four-eyed” dog (probably a reference to the two eyes plus thetwo round marks above the eyebrows that many dogs have to this day). Then, when the dogcould no longer touch bottom in the water, the son of a whore killed him with a wooden club,saying, “Off with the mortal! Off with the dog!” For, a Brahmana explained, “Truly the dog isevil, one’s fraternal enemy; thus he slays his evil, his fraternal enemy. . . . They say that evilseeks to grasp him who offers the horse sacrifice. He throws the dog beneath the feet of thehorse. The horse has a thunderbolt. Thus by a thunderbolt he tramples down evil.” 34 The horsethen put his right front hoof on the dead dog, while another spell banished any man or dog whomight harm the horse. 35 The association of the dog with an unclean woman (the whore whoseson kills him) and with feet, as well as explicitly with evil, is an indication of his status as a kindof scapegoat, more precisely a scape-dog, onto whom the sins of the community weretransferred. The sacrifice of a “four-eyed dog” at the beginning of the horse sacrifice also takeson deeper meaning when interpreted in the context of the ancient Indian game of dice, for thedice are also said to be four-eyed 36 —that is, marked by four black spots.Bitches too lose cachet between the Rig Veda and the Brahmanas. The Rig Veda regardedall dogs as the sons of Indra’s beloved brindled bitch Sarama; dogs were called Sons of Sarama(7.55.2-4). In the Brahmanas, Sarama is still a somewhat positive figure; she still finds the cowsthat the Panis have stolen and resists their bribes of food, as in the earlier text. Indra says, “Sinceyou found our cows, I make your progeny eaters of food,” and the brindled dogs who areSarama’s descendants “kill even tigers.” 37 But now Sarama eats the amniotic sac that containsthe waters—just as dogs (and other animals) do eat the afterbirth—which the text regards as anact of murder. The same ambivalence hedges the curse/boon that her progeny will beomnivorous; it’s good to kill tigers but bad to eat the amniotic sac.Sarama, the ancestress of all dogs, is a good dog, but dogs as a species are bad, for theypollute the oblations by licking them in their attempt to eat them. A number of texts thereforeban dogs from the sacrificial area. The Rig Veda warns the sacrificer to keep “the long-tongueddog” away (9.101.1), and the lawbook of Manu (7.21) warns that if the king does not enforce thelaw, crows will eat the sacrificial cakes and dogs will lick the oblations. Several Brahmanas tellof ways to destroy an ogress named Long-Tongue (Dirgha-jihva), who licks the milk offeringand curdles it 38 or licks at the soma all the time. 39 Though she is an ogress (Rakshasi), notspecifically called a dog, her name is the name of a dog in the Rig Veda, and she does just whatdogs are supposed to do: She licks the oblation. This Long-Tongue also just happens to havevaginas on every limb, like another ogress whom Indra destroyed by placing penises on each ofhis joints and seducing her. 40 And so Indra equips Kutsa’s son (Indra’s grandson) in the sameway. Then:LONG-TONGUE AND INDRA’S GRANDSONThey lay together. As soon as he had his waywith her, he remained firmly stuck in her. He saw these mantras and praised with them, and withthem he summoned Indra. Indra ran against her and struck her down and killed her with histhunderbolt that was made of mantras. Whoever praises with these mantras slays his hatefulfraternal rivals and drives away all evil demons. 41 Long-Tongue’s long tongue makes herritually dangerous, and her equally excessive vaginas make her sexually both threatening and

vulnerable (eventually immobilized, in an image perhaps suggested by observations of matingdogs, often similarly paralyzed). Despite her grotesque and bestial sexuality, Long-Tongue doesno harm, yet she is destroyed. She is more sinned against than sinning. For the point of theBrahmana is that the dangerous bitch (in either canine or human form) is not, ultimately,dangerous—for the man who knows the mantras.COWS, VEGETARIANISM, AND NONVIOLENCECows are not themselves dangerous (compared with horses and even dogs, not to mentionbulls), but they are indirectly responsible for a great deal of trouble in Hinduism. The Brahmanasadvise the sacrificer never to stand naked near a cow, for, as we learn from the story that opensthis chapter, “Humans and Cattle,” the skin of cattle (pashus) was once our skin, and (the textcontinues), if a cow sees you naked, she may run away, thinking, “I am wearing his skin,” theimplication being that she fears that you might want to take back your skin. The transaction inthe other world is here interpreted as the reversal of a reversal: Humans and cattle traded placeslong ago, and as a result, cattle willingly undertook to supply humans with food and clothing butalso, apparently, won the boon of eating humans (and, perhaps, flaying them) in the other world.Nakedness, by reducing humans to the level of the beasts, establishes a reciprocal relationship,rendering human beings vulnerable to the sufferings of beasts—being eaten--when they enter theother world.Another text adds more detail to the basic idea of reciprocity between humans andanimals in the other world; it is a long text, and I will just summarize the main points relevant tothis discussion. The story concerns Varuna, the Vedic god of the waters and of the moral law,and his son, Bhrigu, who was a famous priest:VARUNA’S SON GOES TO HELLBhrigu, the son of Varuna, thought he was better than hisfather, better than the gods, better than the other Brahmins. Varuna thought, “My son doesn’tknow anything. Let’s teach him a lesson.” He took away his life’s breaths, and Bhrigu faintedand went beyond this world to the world beyond. There he saw a man cut another man to piecesand eat him; and then a man eating another man, who was screaming; and then a man eatinganother man, who was soundlessly screaming. He returned from that world and told Varuna whathe had seen. Varuna explained that when people who lack true knowledge and offer no oblationscut down trees for firewood, or cook for themselves animals that cry out, or cook for themselvesrice and barley, which scream soundlessly, those trees, and animals, and rice and barley take theform of men in the other world and eat those people in return. “How can one avoid that?” askedBhrigu. And Varuna replied that you avoid it by putting fuel on the sacred fire and offeringoblations. 42 This text is not just about animals, since trees and barley play an equallyimportant role, but more broadly about all the things used in preparing food (vegetables, animals,and fuel), about consumerism in a very literal sense. Being eaten in the other world is not apunishment for sins but rather a straight reversal of the inevitable (and not condemned) eating inthis world. Other Brahmanas confirm this: “Just as in this world men eat cattle and devour them,so in the other world cattle eat men and devour them.” 43 And: “Whatever food a man eats in thisworld, that [food] eats him in the other world.” 44 In the Brahmanas, you are, as usual, what youeat, but now in the sense of becoming food for your food.This experience in the other world is therefore as inevitable as death itself, and just as

unpleasant. The soundlessly screaming rice and barley resurfaced in the writings of the greatIndian botanist Jagadish Chandra Bose, who moved George Bernard Shaw deeply with hisdemonstration of an “unfortunate carrot strapped to the table of an unlicensed vivisector.” 45 Thesilent screams in the Sanskrit text have the quality of a nightmare, from which the unconsciousBhrigu flees.Nowhere, however, does the text suggest that people should stop eating animals (or rice,for that matter). It is possible to avoid the unpleasant consequences of eating; the solution is, asusual in the Brahmanas, to perform the proper rituals, to fix it, to restore anyone who has eatensomething alleged to produce unfortunate consequences—if left unrestored. Dangers arise in thecontext of profane eating and are warded off by sacred feeding (the oblations offered to thegods). Indeed the two are inextricably linked by the belief that it is wrong to take food withoutoffering some, at least mentally, to the gods; in the broadest sense, all human food consists ofdivine leftovers (later known as prasad [“grace”]). The text is not saying, “Do not eat animals,for then they will eat you,” but, rather, “Be sure to eat animals in the right way, or they will eatyou.” One word for “avoidance” (of this retributive devouring) or “restoration” is nishkriti(“undoing”), designating a careful plan by which to repair a mistake that will otherwise bringunwanted consequences, as well as the repayment or redemption of a debt and the expiatorypayment for an error. The proper sort of “avoidance” makes the meat safe to eat, as if it werekosher or halal. This accomplishes what the Vedic sacrificial priest achieved when he gave theoffering first to Agni and only after that invited the people to eat it; in both cases, a preparatoryritual makes the food safe. This sort of “restoration” (also called prayash-chitta, often wronglytranslated as “expiation”) first refers to the measures taken to restore the ritual when it goeswrong (such as fixing the horse in the horse sacrifice). But then it comes to mean the ritual youuse to restore something else that might go wrong (the oblation you perform when you eatanimals), and finally, the text or the priest tells you how to restore your entire life when it goeswrong (getting rid of your bad karma, making a pilgrimage, surrendering to the god, or whateverelse may be prescribed).The word ahimsa (“nonviolence”) occurs in the Brahmanas primarily in the sense of“safety,” “security.” Yet we can also see the stirrings of another, later meaning of ahimsa—adesire not to harm animals, as well as an uneasiness about eating animals at all. ce Indeed we sawthis discomfort even in the Rig Veda in the idea of the cow that yields food without being killed,the cow that Prithu milked, and the reassurance that the sacrificial horse doesn’t really die. Theidea of reversals in the other world was easily ethicized (in Jainism and Buddhism and, later, inHinduism) into the stricter belief that the best way to avoid being eaten in the other world wasnot merely to eat animals in the proper (sacrificial) way but to stop eating them altogether. Thestory of Bhrigu does not yet espouse the ideals of nonviolence or vegetarianism, though itprobably contributed to the rise of such doctrines.For it is evident that people did eat meat, including beef, at this period, though in waysthat were becoming increasingly qualified. People ate meat mainly on special occasions, such asrituals or when welcoming a guest or a person of high status. 46 Eating meat in a sacrifice is notthe same as eating meat for dinner, and killing too can be dichotomized in this way, cf as can theeating of cows versus other sorts of meat, though several texts combine the permission for eatingmeat (including cow) at a sacrifice (where the gods are, after all, the guests) and meat offered toa human guest. “Meat is certainly the best kind of food,” says one text. 47 The Brahmanas say thata bull or cow should be killed when a guest arrives, a cow should be sacrificed to Mitra andVaruna, and a sterile cow to the Maruts, and that twenty-one sterile cows should be sacrificed in

the horse sacrifice. 48 For “the cow is food.” 49 The grammarian Panini, who may have lived asearly as the fifth or sixth century BCE, glossed the word goghna (“cowkiller”) as “one for whoma cow is killed,” that is, a guest (3.4.73). 50 A dharma-sutra from the third century BCE specifies:“The meat of milk cows and oxen may be eaten, and the meat of oxen is fit for sacrifice.” 51 Thistextual evidence is further supported, in this period, by archaeological indications, such as cattlebones found near domestic hearths, bearing marks of having been cut, indicating that their fleshwas eaten. 52On the other hand, one Brahmana passage forbids the eating of either cow or bull (dhenuor anaduha), cg concluding that anyone who did eat them would be reborn as something sostrange that people would say, “He committed a sin, he expelled the embryo from his wife.” Thetext then adds, “However, Yajnavalkya said, ‘I do eat [the meat of both cow and bull], as long asit’s tasty.’ ” 53 Yajnavalkya was an in-your-face kind of guy. Some people, however, did not eatthe meat of cows, as Thapar points out: “This may have contributed to the later attitude ofregarding the cow as sacred and inviolable, although association with the sacred need not beexplained on rational grounds. . . . Eventually it became a matter of status to refrain from eatingbeef and the prohibition was strengthened by various religious sanctions. Significantly, theprohibition was prevalent only among the upper castes.” 54 The ambivalence that is embedded inthis historical development is not really so hard for us to understand if we cast its light upon ourown casual combination of affection for our pets and appetite for filet mignon. We can see herethe Indian insight into the conflicted belief that there is a chain of food and eaters (dog eat dogor, in the Indian metaphor, fish eat fish) that both justifies itself and demands that we break outof it: It happens, but it must not happen. 55The transformation in attitudes toward eating meat developed at this time in part throughthe sorts of philosophical considerations evident in the narratives and in part through changes inmethods of livestock breeding, grazing grounds, and ecology as a result of the basic transitioninto the urban life of the Ganges Valley, as well as by the social tensions exacerbated by thesechanges. The breeding of animals in an urban setting may have introduced both less humanegrazing conditions and a heightened awareness of those conditions (though some urban dwellersmay have been, like many contemporary city dwellers, insulated from farming conditions). Thenew uneasiness about killing animals may also have been a reaction to the increasing number ofanimals sacrificed in more and more elaborate ceremonies. Sacrifice was still violent, andsacrifice was still power, but a murmur of protest and discontent was growing steadily stronger,soon to find its voice, faintly in the Upanishads and loudly in the Mahabharata.HUMANS AS SACRIFICIAL ANIMALSThe texts of this period regard humans as the pawns of the gods. The Vedas andBrahmanas often list (in addition to human beings, a rule that we consider below) five basickinds of sacrificial animals, or pashus, all male: bull, stallion, billy goat, ram, and ass (ordonkey), often divided into three groups, bovines, equines (horse and ass), and extended ovines(sheep and goat). The Rig Vedic “Poem of the Primeval Man” (10.90) tells us: “From thatsacrifice in which everything was offered, the melted fat was collected and made into thosebeasts who live in the air, in the forest, and in villages. Horses were born from it, and those otheranimals that have two rows of teeth [such as asses]; cows were born from it, and from it goatsand sheep were born.” These last are the five pashus. Pashus are generally distinguished fromwild animals, who are called mrigas, a word derived from the verb “to hunt” (margayati, alsoconnected with the noun marga [“a trail or path”]), designating any animal that we hunt,

particularly a deer. The ancient Indians thus defined animals according to the manner in whichthey killed them, either in a hunt (mrigas) or in a sacrifice (pashus). Hunting is one of the vicesof addiction, but sacrifice too often becomes excessive, a threat to the gods, who take measuresto limit and control it (a feature of the second alliance).Sometimes a male human being replaces the ass in the list of pashus. 56 Were humansacrifices actually performed in ancient India? 57 Perhaps, but certainly no longer at the time ofthe Vedas, and even for the pre-Vedic period, the scattered evidence sometimes cited to argue forits actual occurrence is not persuasive. Yet the Vedas refer to human sacrifices, and the texts tellyou how to do one. 58 Whenever the priests consecrated a Vedic ritual fire altar (agnicayana)made of bricks, they placed within it five golden images of the five pashus, including a goldenman. And archaeological evidence of human skulls and other human bones at the site of such firealtars, together with the bones of a wide variety of other animals, both wild and tame (horses,tortoises, pigs, elephants, bovines, goats, and buffalo), suggests that humans may once actuallyhave been sacrificed in these rituals. The golden man, then, would have replaced a man of fleshand blood. 59 It is also possible that the Vedic horse sacrifice originally involved the sacrifice of aman as well as a horse. 60 But the human sacrifices are never described in anything like the detailof the horse sacrifice, and it is likely that the human victims, like many of the animal victims,were set free after they were consecrated, before the moment when they would have beenkilled. 61 It may well be that the human sacrifice (purusha-medha [“sacrifice of a man”]) wassimply a part of the Brahmin imaginary, a fantasy of “the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.” 62What is most likely is that these texts are saying that human beings are, like all otheranimals, fit to be sacrificed to the gods, that they are, as it were, the livestock of the gods. 63 Whatanimals are to us, we are to the gods. There was a strong symbolic connection (explicit in manysacrifices and perhaps implicit in all of them) between the ancient Indian human sacrificer andthe animal victim. When the sacrificer was initiated, he was consecrated as the victim in theanimal sacrifice: “When he performs the animal sacrifice he ransoms himself, a male by meansof a male. For the sacrificial victim is a male, and the sacrificer is a male. And this, this flesh, isthe best food to eat, and that is how he becomes an eater of the best food to eat.” 64 In a sense,every sacrifice ransoms the sacrificer from death.Even if human sacrifice was not a part of the extant Vedic ritual, it continued to cast itsshadow upon that ritual. 65 One Brahmana text arranges the five victims in what seems to be achronological order:HOW HUMANS CEASED TO BE SACRIFICIAL BEASTSIn the beginning, the gods used theMan (purusha) as their sacrificial beast; when he was used, his sacrificial quality went out of himand entered a horse. They used the horse for their sacrifice; when he was used, his sacrificialquality went out of him and entered a bull. They used the bull for their sacrifice; when he wasused, his sacrificial quality went out of him and entered a ram. They used the ram for theirsacrifice; when he was used, his sacrificial quality went out of him and entered a billy goat.Theyused the billy goat for their sacrifice; when he was used, his sacrificial quality went out of himand entered this earth. The gods searched for it by digging, and they found it; it was this rice andbarley. And that is why people even now find rice and barley by digging. And as much virilepower as these sacrificial beasts would have for him, that very same amount of virile power is inthis oblation of rice for him. And that is how the oblation of rice has the completeness that thefivefold animal sacrifice has. 66 This text explains how “sacrificeability” travels down theline from the human (male) through the other pashus until it lodges in grains (such as rice andbarley, which, it may be recalled, “scream soundlessly”), each substituting for the one above it.

The sacrificial rice cake is a substitute or symbol ( pratima) for the animal sacrifice by which thesacrificer redeems himself from the gods. 67 The sacrificial quality that goes from the man to thehorse, bull, ram, and goat sets the pattern for the myth in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad(1.4.3-4) in which the father god rapes his daughter, who flees from him in the form of a cow, amare, a donkey, a goat, and a ewe, only to be caught and raped by him in the form of a bull,stallion, male donkey, goat, and ram. ch In both of these texts, the first victim in the series is ahuman being, and the rest of the group consists of the (other) sacrificial animals.A similar substitution of a plant prevents a human sacrifice in another Brahmana myth: Aking’s son is to be sacrificed to Varuna; a Brahmin sells his young son Shunahshepha (“DogPrick,” a most unusual name for a Brahmin) as a substitute for the king’s son; the Ashvins rescueShunahshepha by substituting a soma plant for him ci as the sacrificial offering. 68 This is hardly abrief for human sacrifice; the king obtained the son in the first place only by promising that hewould sacrifice him (a self-defeating scenario that we know from Rumpelstiltskin), andShunahshepha’s father is denounced as a monster who has committed an act for which there isno restoration, an act unprecedented even among Shudras. These myths are not historicalexplanations of a transition from human sacrifice to animal and vegetable sacrifice; they aremeditations on the nature of ritual symbolism, explaining how it is that plants or mantras standfor animals, and animals for humans, in the sacrifice.An early Upanishad, shortly after the composition of the Brahmanas, spelled out themalevolent implications of the inclusion of humans as sacrificial victims: “Whoever amonggods, sages, or men became enlightened became the very self of the gods, and the gods have nopower to prevent him. But whoever worships a divinity as other than himself is like a sacrificialanimal [pashu] for the gods, and each person is of use to the gods just as many animals would beof use to a man. Therefore it is not pleasing to those [gods] that men should becomeenlightened.” 69 Thus, human men and women are the gods’ sacrificial sheep. 70 This is thesecond alliance with a vengeance.WOMENTHE HORSE SACRIFICE REVISITED, IIWomen played an essential role in the second phase of the horse sacrifice, where thegoals of political domination and religious restoration were joined by a third goal, fertility. Fourof the king’s wives (the chief queen, the favorite wife, the rejected wife, and a fourth wife 71 )mimed cj copulation with the stallion, and other women (one maiden and four hundred femaleattendants) played subsidiary roles. 72 The stallion stood both for the king and for the god (usuallyPrajapati, the Lord of Creatures, but sometimes Indra), 73 while the queen represented the fertileearth that the king both ruled and impregnated; the ceremony was intended to produce a goodcrop for the people and offspring for the king. 74 The stallion, generally the right-hand horse ofthe chariot team, 75 was probably killed, suffocated, before this part of the ceremony. Even in theRig Veda there are hints that the ritual may have included the mimed copulation of the queenwith the stallion; one obscene Vedic poem (10.86) may be a satire on the horse sacrifice, with asexually challenged male monkey playing the role of a mock stallion. 76 But the Brahmanas arethe first texts to describe it in any detail; only there is there available light to let us see it clearly.One text that we have already considered, the text that speaks of the king’s eating thepeople, also glosses several lines from the obscene banter with the queens that accompanies theritual copulation in the horse sacrifice: “‘The little female bird rocks back and forth as he thruststhe penis into the slit.’ Now, that bird is really the people, for the people rock back and forth at

the thrust of the royal power, and the slit is the people, and the penis is the royal power, whichpresses against the people; and so the one who has royal power is hurtful to the people.” 77 On theanalogy of the ritual copulation, this text is saying that the king rapes the people. It thusproclaims, in brutal and obscene language, the violence of royal oppression.Just as evil females (female antigods), in the form of queens or bitches, threatened todestroy the sacrifice (and the sacrificer), so good women (wives) posed a danger to the sacrificerthrough the likelihood that they would stop being good. This danger affected even the gods:INDRA’S WIFE AND INDRA’S SONKutsa Aurava (“Thigh-born”) was made out of the twothighs of Indra. Just as Indra was, so was he, precisely as one would be who is made out of hisown self. Indra made him his charioteer. He caught him with his wife, Shachi, the daughter ofPuloman, and when he asked her, “How could you do this?” she replied, “I could not tell the twoof you apart.” Indra said, “I will make him bald, and then you will be able to tell the two of usapart.” He made him bald, but Kutsa bound a turban around his head and went to her. This is theturban that charioteers wear. 78 Mingled in with an arcane etiology (the origins of theturbans of charioteers) is a tale of a wife who fails, or claims to fail, to tell her husband from hisson. That Kutsa and Indra are indistinguishable is an idea that begins in the Rig Veda (4.1.10)and is reflected more generally in the Hindu view that the son is made out of the father’s self, oractually is that self reborn, and is therefore essentially identical with him.As wealth accumulates in the Ganges Valley, inheritance becomes an issue, and so doesthe fidelity of married women. The relatively lax attitude to women in the Rig Veda has largelysunk into the fertile mud of the Ganges Valley; things close down for women, the gates of sexualfreedom clang shut. Urbanization gave some women both property rights and more sexualfreedom, but that very freedom inspired fears that led others to marry off their daughters at ayounger age and to lower the ritual status of married women. We cannot take stories aboutgoddesses (or, for that matter, stories about real women) as information about real women, andattitudes to women are often the inverse of attitudes to goddesses, but changes in what isimagined as possible for goddesses in their anthropomorphic roles as wives and mothers dosuggest general shifts in attitudes to women.We can see hints of the attrition of women’s independence in the transformations of themyth of Urvashi. In the Rig Veda, Urvashi is a heavenly nymph (Apsaras) and swan maiden whosleeps with King Pururavas and abandons him after bearing him a son; she advises him, as sheleaves him forever, that “there are no friendships with women; they have the hearts of jackals(10.95.15).” Like other immortal women who live with mortal men, particularly equinegoddesses ck (Urvashi is compared with a horse in three verses [10.95.3, 8-9]), she bears him achild and stays with him until he violates his contract with her (“I warned you on that very day,for I knew, but you did not listen to me,” she says to him), whereupon she leaves him and thechild and returns to her world. 79 The Vedic Urvashi complains that he made love to her too often(“You pierced me with your rod three times a day, and filled me even when I had no desire. I didwhat you wanted”) and against her will (“You who were born to protect have turned that forceagainst me”). 80 But when the story is retold in the Shatapatha Brahmana, she begs Pururavas tomake love to her just that often (“You must strike me with the bamboo reed three times a day”),though she has the forethought to add, “But never approach me when I have no desire.” 81 TheVedic text implies that his desire is greater than hers, while the Brahmana implies that hers is atleast as great, if not greater, an expression of the stereotype of the insatiable woman that willplague Hindu mythology forever after. She threatens to leave him when he fails to keep hispromise not to let her look upon him naked. The final transformation is that in the Rig Veda he is

left longing for her, with a vague promise of reunion in heaven, whereas in the Brahmanas sheloves him so much that she not only stays with him but teaches him how to become immortal (aGandharva). By this time cl it has become unthinkable that she would leave the father of herchild. 82DEATHSacrifice in the Brahmanas was designed to allay the fear of death, a relatively minorconsideration in the Rig Veda but a pressing concern in the Brahmanas, for which death becamethe irritating grain of sand that seeded the pearls of thought. The Vedas spoke of another world towhich people were presumably assigned after death, and the Brahmanas maintained and refinedthis belief: Through the sacrifice a man could become immortal, for offering sacrifices generatedmerit that created for the sacrificer a rebirth after death in heaven (“in the next world”). “EvilDeath” is a cliché, an automatic equation throughout this corpus: Death is evil, and the essenceof evil is death. 83 Death is the defining enemy of the Lord of Creatures (Prajapati), the creator,but also, sometimes, identical with him or his firstborn son. 84 The Brahmanas attempted to tamedeath by gradual degrees, to enable the sacrificer first to live out a full life span, then to live for athousand years, and finally to attain a vaguely conceived complete immortality: “Whoeverknows this conquers recurring death and attains a life span; this is freedom from death in theother world and life here.” 85But there are always nagging doubts that even the perfect ritual cannot really succeed inconquering death. One can never be made entirely safe; the catch-22 of the sacrificial warranteeis the ever-present danger that one will not live long enough to complete the sacrifice that willgrant immortality. This danger appears to threaten even the Lord of Creatures. One text tells usthat “even as one might see in the distance the opposite shore, so did he behold the oppositeshore of his own life.” 86 For he had already tangled with death: “When Prajapati was creatingliving beings, evil death overpowered him. He generated inner heat for a thousand years, strivingto leave that evil behind him, and in the thousandth year he purified himself entirely; the evil thathe washed clean is his body. But what man could obtain a life of a thousand years? The man whoknows this truth can obtain a thousand years.” 87 Prajapati is uniquely qualified to do this ritualbecause “he was born with a life of a thousand years.” 88 But once again, “whoever knows this”will, like the god, live long enough to do the ceremony that will let him live forever.What the authors of these early texts feared was “old age and death” (jaramrityu ). cmWhat they feared most of all was what they called recurrent death, a series of redeaths (and therebirths that are preludes to them). For the Brahmanas already mention transmigration: 89 “Whenthey die they come to life again, but they become the food of this [Death] again and again.” 90 ToEuro-American thinkers, reincarnation seems to pose a possible solution to the problem of death:If what you fear is the cessation of life (we set aside for the moment considerations of heavenand hell), then the belief that you will in fact live again after you die may be of comfort. Hownice to go around again and again, never to be blotted out altogether, to have more and more oflife, different lives all the time, perhaps a horse or a dog next time, or an Egyptian queen lasttime.But this line of reasoning entirely misses the point of the Hindu doctrine. If it is a terriblething to grow old and die, once and for all, how much more terrible to do it over and over again.It is like being condemned to numerous life sentences that do not run concurrently. “Recurrentdeath” may have meant merely a series of ritual deaths within a natural life span 91 or what thepoet T. S. Eliot had in mind when he said, “We die to each other daily.” cn But it probably

foreshadowed an actual series of rebirths and redeaths. These were not described in detail untilthe Upanishads, which transform into a vision of the next life, in this world, the things thatBhrigu saw in the other world in the Brahmanas.The story of Bhrigu’s journey to the other world was briefly retold in another Brahmanatext 92 in which the boy, now called Nachiketas, annoys his father (now no longer the god Varunabut a human sacrificer who is giving away all that he has) by asking him three times whom hewill give him to; his exasperated father finally blurts out, “I’ll give you to Death!” (in a laterversion he shouts, “I’ll send you to Yama!”—that is, “The devil take you!” or “Go to hell!” 93 ),and Nachiketas takes him literally and goes down to the world of the dead. But his father alsogives him detailed instructions about what to say and do in the house of Death. Eventually Deathoffers him three boons, the last of which is that Death teaches Nachiketas how to avoid redeath.And whoever knows the Nachiketas fire and kindles it, the text assures us, conquers redeath.Whereas Bhrigu had a confrontation with animals and learned a lesson about the afterlife fromhis father, Nachiketas learns the secret from Death himself. And whereas only gods (likePrajapati and Varuna, Bhrigu’s father) confronted Death in the first Brahmana text, here a humanboy does this and gains not merely a way of eating animals without unfortunate consequencesbut liberation from death.FOLKLORE, SACRIFICE, AND DANGERThe story of Bhrigu shares much with other tales of journeys to the underworld, 94 andthe text about exchanging skins is one of a number of widely attested folktales about suchexchanges and about animals transformed into people and the reverse. 95 The inclusion offolktales in the Brahmanas is an exampleof the co-opting of alternate histories, of othervoices—including non-Brahmin voices—sneaking into the text. The Brahmanas are the vehiclefor a great deal of material virtually indistinguishable in tone and basic plot from the storiescollected by folklorists in nineteenth-century farmhouses. co The Sanskrit of these passages ismuch more informal and straightforward, even colloquial, than the technical language in whichthe rest of the Brahmanas are set. 96 There are several different sorts of Sanskrit in theBrahmanas, each with its own vocabulary, one for mythology, one for philology and etymology,one for ritual instructions, and so forth. And there is one for folklore. Here again the Brahmanasare revolutionary, in opening up the ritual literature to the narration of folktales.What are these stories doing in these texts, otherwise so dry, so full of abstruse ritualpedantry? cp97 What is such juicy folklore doing in such dusty old ritual attics? Well, theBrahmanas themselves offer many explicit excuses for telling these stories: to restore detailsomitted in the Rig Vedic text in question, to gloss an allusion or the special circumstances underwhich a certain sage saw a poem, or to explain why the sacrifice is done in a certain way. 98 Someauthors of the Brahmanas tamper with the tale to make it serve their purposes. Others, however,make no attempt to connect the story with the sacrifice and tamper with it somewhat less; wemay assume that these stories represent at least something of the popular, non-Brahmin world.The deeper reasons for telling the stories, in both instances, are less obvious than theexcuses and are more loosely related to the sacrifice; they illuminate certain shadows of thesacrifice, fears that lie behind the sacrifice. In 700 BCE, the only texts that were memorized andpreserved were the Brahmanas, and the sacrifice was the focal point for all forms of creativeexpression. Thus these texts purporting to gloss the sacrifice attracted to themselves, likemagnets, everything else that could be dragged in to express the meaning of life in ancient India.Or rather, since the sacrifice was believed to symbolize everything that was meaningful in

human life, any compelling insight into that life would eventually gravitate to the traditionalliterature that was constantly coalescing around the sacrifice. A certain number of myths werealready associated with the sacrifice, as is clear from the tantalizing allusions in the Rig Veda,but that text did not have a systematized mythology. The Brahmanas tell many “grand” tales ofthe victory of gods over antigods, but since they also tell folktales about everyday life, the Vedicritual cannot be the only key to their meaning.Yet it is the key to a part of their meaning, for these stories too are connected to thesacrifice on a profound level. In particular, images that express the dangers inherent in death andsex became embedded in narratives about sacrifice since the sacrifice itself (as we saw in thehorse sacrifice) is about death and sex. Rituals tend to tame those dangers and to express them interms of a limited range of human actions, to make them public and to make them safe for thesacrificer; they allow people to order and structure their reactions to these dangers in real life, tocreate a framework that they can then reintroduce into real experience. Stories about monstrouswomen help us (especially, but not only, if we are men) to express our nightmares about ourmothers (and wives). Participating in the formalized structures of someone else’s funeralprovides us with a framework within which to contemplate our own death; the “controlledcatastrophe” of the sacrifice allowed the sacrificer to offer up a victim who was a substitute forhimself, as if to say, “Kill him and not me.”But the ritual itself introduces new dangers and new fears. What happens if somethinginterferes with the ritual so that it doesn’t work? We have seen the elaborate countermeasuresproposed in response to every foreseeable glitch in the horse sacrifice. The soma sacrifice too, socentral to Vedic religion, was threatened by the increasing difficulty of obtaining soma, whichgrew in the mountains cq that the Vedic people had left behind when they moved down to theGanges. 99 This problem was solved in several ways. There had already been, in the Rig Veda, amyth of soma coming from afar. Now the Brahmanas elaborated upon the rituals for buyingsoma and punishing the soma seller and for deciding what things could be used as substituteswhen soma was unavailable; some surrogates may have looked like soma, while others may havehad a similar effect. 100 The need for soma surrogates played into one of the ideas underlying thesacrifice itself, that it was, in essence, already a substitute, the victim in the sacrifice substitutingfor the sacrificer. The need for a substitute for the consciousness-altering soma may also have ledto the development of other ways of creating unusual psychic states, such as yoga, breath control,fasting, and meditation.Nor does the danger in the sacrifice come only from the possibility that one may fail tocarry out the ritual properly. The power aroused by the correctly performed ritual may get out ofhand, for the ritual involves potentially fatal dangers, which compounded the threats to thesacrificer in normal life. These dangers may come from within, from the sacrificer himself, fromthe pollution inherent in his human vulnerability and mortality, or they may come from the gods.THE POWERS OF EVIL AND ADDICTIONIn the Brahmanas, in a pattern typical of the first alliance, the enemies of the gods (bothantigods in the sky and ogres on earth) threaten the sacrifice, break into it, and pollute it fromoutside. A significant proportion of the energy of the priests was devoted to fending off theantigods and ogres and to repairing the breaks that they made in the sacrifice, and this activitywas part of the ritual. But during this period the balance of power shifts to the second alliance,and it is no longer gods and humans against the powers of evil but gods against humans and the(other) powers of evil. The antigods became more like ogres, more clearly distinguished from the

gods by evil rather than merely by competition.Evil originates in the gods themselves and spreads to both antigods and humans. Moreprecisely, it originates in Prajapati, who, as he attempts to create, falls into the grasp of evil. Inone myth, a Brahmin rids him of the evil by transforming it into prosperity (Shri) and placing itin cows, in sleep, and in shade. 101 It is rare, however, for evil to be so simply transformed intosomething good; usually it remains evil and is distributed in that form, to the detriment of thosewho receive it. Thus, in a kind of reverse savior mythology, the gods create forms ofevil—delusion (moha), a stain (kalmasha), evil tout court (papa)—that they transfer to humans,who suffer from it forever after. Humans are thus the scapegoats of the gods. In a much-retoldmyth, Indra becomes infected with Brahminicide—the gold standard of sins—after he killsVritra (whom the Brahmanas, and all subsequent texts, regard as a Brahmin—a Dasyu Brahminbut a Brahmin). Sometimes Indra gets drunk on soma—his notorious addiction—and on oneoccasion the Brahminicide flows out of him with the excess soma; from what flows from hisnose, a lion arises; from his ears a jackal, from the lower opening of his body, tigers and otherwild beasts. 102 Thus the divine hangover leaves us to deal with man-eating beasts.When Indra kills another enemy, also a Brahmin, he distributes the Brahminicide, withcompensations:INDRA TRANSFERS HIS BRAHMINICIDEHe asked the earth to take a third of hisBrahminicide, and in return he promised her that if she should be overcome by digging, within ayear the dug-out portion would be filled again; and the third of his Brahminicide that she tookbecame a natural fissure. He asked the trees to accept a third, and promised that when they werepruned, more shoots would spring up; the Brahminicide that they took up became sap. Womentook a third of the Brahminicide and obtained the boon of enjoying intercourse right up to thebirth of their children; their Brahminicide became the garments stained with menstrual blood. 103The boons explain why the distribution is willingly accepted: As long as Indra ispolluted, fertility on earth is stymied; it is in the best interests of earth, trees, and women to helpIndra out, so that they themselves can remain fertile. (One version of the story inverts theprinciple and ultimately transfers the sin to abortionists, the enemies of fertility. 104 ) But evilcannot be destroyed; the best that one can hope for is to move it to a place where it will do lessharm. Therefore the gods in these stories draw evil’s fangs by breaking it up, sometimes intothree pieces and sometimes into four. Blatant self-interest operates in a variant in which Indra’sBrahminicide is “wiped off,” as the text puts it, onto people who make offerings without payingthe priests; 105 such deadbeats, the bêtes noires of the Brahmin compilers of these texts, are theperfect scapegoats.Evil on earth in general results from fallout from heaven, from the cosmic struggles ofgods and antigods:GODS, ANTIGODS, HUMANS, AND EVILThe gods and antigods were striving against oneanother. The gods created a thunderbolt, sharp as a razor, that was the Man [Purusha]. Theyhurled this at the antigods, and it scattered them, but then it turned back to the gods. The godswere afraid of it, and so they took it and broke it into three pieces. Then they saw that thedivinities had entered humans in the form of Vedic poems. They said, “When this Man has livedin the world with merit, he will follow us by means of sacrifices and good deeds and ascetic heat.We must do something to prevent this. Let us put evil in him.” They put evil in him: sleep,carelessness, anger, hunger, love of dice, desire for women. These are the evils that assail a manin this world. . . . But the gods do not harm the man who knows this, though they do try todestroy the man who tries to harm the man who knows this. 106 The gods here do not merely

accidentally burden humans with evil that they themselves, the gods, cannot manage; they do itpurposely, to prevent humans from going to heaven. cr107 And this evil includes two of the fourmajor addictive vices, love of dice and desire for women. The implications of this major shift inthe human-divine contract will continue to spread in generations to follow.Why does this change take place at this moment? The hardening of the lines betweenstates, the beginning of competition for wealth and power, the scramble for the supremacy of therich Ganges bottomland may have introduced into the myths a more cynical approach to theproblem of dealing with evil. And the growth of both power and the abuse of power among thetwo upper classes may explain why the gods at this time came to be visualized less like morallyneutral (if capricious and often destructive) forces of nature—the fire, soma, rain, and rivers ofthe Veda—or brutal and sensually addicted but fair-minded human chieftains and more likewealthy and powerful kings and Brahmins, selfish, jealous, and vicious.CHAPTER 7RENUNCIATION IN THE UPANISHADS600 to 200 BCECHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES BCE)c. 600-500 Aranyakas are composedc. 500 Shrauta Sutrasare composedc. 500-400 Early Upanishads (Brihadaranyaka [BU], Chandogya [CU], Kaushitaki[KauU]) are composedc. 500 Pataliputra is founded; Vedic peoples gradually move southwardc.483 or 410 Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, diesc. 468 Vardhamana Mahavira, the Jina,founder of Jainism, diesc. 400-1200 Later Upanishads (Katha [KU], Kaushitaki [KauU],Shvetashvatara [SU], and Mundaka [MU]) are composedc. 300 Grihya Sutras arecomposedSATYAKAMA’S MOTHEROnce upon a time, Satyakama Jabala said to his mother,Jabala,“Ma’am, I want to live the life of a Vedic student. What is the lineof my male ancestors [gotra]?” She said to him, “My dear, I don’tknow the line of your male ancestors. When I was young, I gotaround a lot, as I was working, and I got you. But my name is Jabala,and your name is Satyakama [‘Lover of Truth’]. So why don’t yousay that you are Satyakama Jabala?” Satyakama went to Gautama,the son of Haridrumata, and asked to study with him; when askedabout his line of male ancestors he repeated what his mother hadsaid. Gautama replied, “No one who was not a Brahmin would beable to say that. You have not deviated from the truth, my dear. Iwill initiate you.”Chandogya Upanishad (c. 600 BCE) 1 A woman who is not ashamed to tellher son that she had multiple partners when she conceived him is one of a number ofastonishingly nonconformist characters, often discussing new ideas about karma andrenunciation, whom we meet in the Upanishads, philosophical texts composed from around thesixth century BCE.THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL WORLD OF THE UPANISHADSThe eastern Ganges at this time, the seventh through the fifth century BCE, was a placeof kingdoms dominated by Magadha, whose capital was Rajagriha, and Koshala-Videha, whosecapital was Kashi (Varanasi, Benares). Trade—especially of metals, fine textiles, salt, pottery,and, always, horses—flourished, 2 and the towns were connected by trade routes; all roads led to

Kashi. The development of the idea of merit or karma as something “to be earned, accumulated,occasionally transferred and eventually realized” 3 owes much to the post-Vedic moneyedeconomy. More generally, where there’s trade, people leave home; new commercial classesemerge; and above all, new ideas spread quickly and circulate freely. They certainly did so at thistime in India, and there was little to stop them: The Vedas did not constitute a closed canon, andthere was no central temporal or religious authority to enforce a canon had there been one.Commerce was facilitated by the rise of prosperous kingdoms and social mobility by therise of great protostates, or oligarchies (maha-janapadas or ganasanghas ), 4 governed byKshatriya clans. One Brahmin source describes these clans as degenerate Kshatriyas and evenShudras, accusing them of having ceased to honor the Brahmins or to observe Vedic ritual,worshiping at sacred groves instead, 5 and of paying short shrift to sacrifices, using their funds fortrade (behavior that goes a long way to explain why the Brahmins called them Shudras). Theclans were said to have just two classes, the ruling families and the slaves and laborers, anarrangement that would have posed a serious threat to Brahmin supremacy. Significantly, bothVardhamana Mahavira (also called the Jina), the founder of Jainism, and Siddhartha Gautama,the founder of Buddhism, were born into distinguished clans in one of these alternative,nonmonarchical state systems. Such systems fostered greater personal freedom and mobility,nurturing individuals as well as social groups—the trader, the shopkeeper, the artisan, thegovernment official.This rise in individual freedom was, however, offset by the growing bureaucracy andstate institutions in both the kingdoms and the oligarchies, which eroded the traditional ruralsocial order and replaced it with new kinds of social control. 6 So too, perhaps in response to thegrowing social laxity, class lines laid down in texts such as the Brahmanas now began to harden.The first three classes (Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Vaishya) became more sharply delineated notonly from the Shudras (the fourth class, below them) but, now, from a fifth category, Pariahs.A vast transformation of society was taking place in response to the social, economic, andpolitical reorganization of northern South Asia, as small-scale, pastoral chiefdoms gave way tohierarchically ordered settlements organized into states. Students and thinkers moved over awide geographical area in search of philosophical and theological debate, encountering notmerely royal assemblies of Indian thinkers but new peoples and ideas from outside South Asia.Much of the new literature on religious and social law (the Shrauta Sutras and Grihya Sutras)may have been designed to incorporate newcomers or social groups into a ranking system or toaccommodate local power relations. 7 The emergent system recognized the authority of village,guild, family, and provincial custom, so long as they did not conflict with some higher authority.Political and intellectual diversity thrived. This may go a long way to explain not where the newideas in the Upanishads came from but why the Brahmins were willing—perhaps under pressurefrom other people who had gained access to power—to incorporate these ideas into new textsthat were regarded as part of the Vedas, despite the ways in which they contravened the Brahminimaginary. 8THE TEXTUAL WORLD OF THE UPANISHADSThe Upanishads are often referred to as “the end of the Veda” (Vedanta cs ), for they arethe final texts in the body of literature called shruti (“what is heard”), unalterable divinerevelation, in contrast with the rest of Hindu literature, called smriti (“what is remembered”), thetradition attributed to human authors, thereforefallible and corrigible. Just as the Brahmanas are,among other things, footnotes to the Vedas, so the Upanishads began as Cliffs Notes to the

Brahmanas, meditations on the meaning of the Vedic rituals and myths. The differentUpanishads belong to different branches of the Vedic traditions, different family lineages, butthey share so many stories and ideas that they are clearly in conversation with one another.Bridging these two sets of texts, the Brahmanas and the Upanishads, and actuallyoverlapping with both of them are the Aranyakas (“Jungle Books”), so called presumablybecause they were composed in the wilderness, or jungle, outside the village; they dealt morewith ritual and less with cosmology and metaphysics than the Upanishads did. The earlyUpanishads (meaning “sitting beside,” a name that may refer to the method of placing one thingnext to another, making connections, or to pupils sitting beside their teacher) probably 9 werecomposed in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. ct Again we find a major shift in language,between the Sanskrit of the Brahmanas and that of the Upanishads, not merely in the grammarand vocabulary but also in the style, which is far more accessible, conversational, readerfriendly; if we liken the Brahmanas to Chaucer (in their distance from modern English), theUpanishads are like Shakespeare. The grammarian Panini wrote about spoken Sanskrit (bhasha),in contrast with Vedic, ritualistic Sanskrit. In North Indian towns and villages, people spokePrakrits, the “natural” or “unrefined” languages, often regarded as dialects, in contrast withSanskrit, the “perfected” or “artificial” language. The Buddha, preaching at roughly the time ofthe Upanishads, was beginning to preach in Magadhi, the local dialect of Magadha, in order toreach a wider audience; the decision to preserve the Buddhist canon in such a dialect, Pali, hadan effect much like that of the elimination of Latin from the Catholic mass after Vatican II: Itmade the liturgy comprehensible to all the Pali-valent Buddhists. The Upanishadic authors toowere probably reaching out in that more vernacular direction, stretching the Sanskrit envelope.Like other great religious reform movements, such as those inspired by Jesus,Muhammad, and Luther, the Upanishads did not replace but merely supplemented the earlierreligion, so that just as Catholicism continued to exist alongside Protestantism withinChristianity, so Vedic Hinduism (sacrificial, worldly) continued to exist alongside VedanticHinduism (philosophical, renunciant). The tension between householders and renouncers beginshere and exerts an enormous influence over the subsequent history of the Hindus. But inHinduism, unlike Christianity, there never was an official schism. Certain words from earlierperiods—karma, tapas—took on new meanings at this point, though their original meaningsnever disappeared, resulting in a layering that served as one of the major sources of multiplicitywithin Hinduism.KARMA AND DEATHWhere did the potentially revolutionary ideas of karma and renunciation come from? Wecan identify both Vedic and non-Vedic sources. Let’s begin with the Vedic.In the Upanishads, as in the Rig Veda, the body of the dead man returns to theelements—his eye to the sun, the hair of his body to plants, the hair of his head into trees, hisblood and semen into water, and so forth—but the Upanishadic sages regard this as thebeginning, not the end, of the explanation of death. The sage Yajnavalkya listed thecorrespondences between the parts of the body and the cosmos, whereupon his pupil asked,“What happens to the person then?” The person is the individual soul, the atman, or self, whichis identical with the brahman, the world soul (sometimes also called atman, often transcribed asAtman to distinguish it from the individual soul), as salt becomes identical with water into whichit is dissolved (BU 2.4.12). This is the central teaching of the Upanishads, a doctrine ofpantheism (or panentheism, the world made of god), most famously expressed in the phrase

generally translated “You are that” (tat tvam asi) (CU 6.8.7) 10 In answer to his pupil’s question,the Upanishad continues, Yajnavalkya drew him aside in private: “And what did they talk about?Nothing but karma. They praised nothing but karma. Yajnavalkya told him: ‘A man becomessomething good by good karma and something bad by bad karma’ (BU 3.2.13).”The first and most basic meaning of “karma” is action. The noun “karma” comes fromthe verb kri, cognate with the Latin creo, “to make or do, cu to make a baby or a table or toperform a ritual.” It is often contrasted with mind and speech: One can think, say, or do (kri)something, with steadily escalating consequences. The second meaning of “karma” is “ritualaction,” particularly Vedic ritual action; this is its primary connotation in the Rig Veda. Its thirdmeaning, which begins to be operative in the Upanishads, is “morally charged action, good orbad,” a meter that is always running, that is constantly charging something to one’s account. Andits fourth meaning, which follows closely on the heels of the third, is “morally charged actionthat has consequences for the soul in the future, that is retributive both within one’s life andacross the barrier of redeath”: You become a sheep that people eat if you have eaten a sheep.(We saw the germ of this theory in the Brahmana descriptions of people soundlessly screamingin the other world and in statements that sacrifice generates merit that guarantees an afterlife inthe other world.) In this sense, karma is action whose retributive moral charge determines thenature of your future rebirths. Consequences have consequences, and first thing you know,you’re born as a sheep.Turned on its head, this link led to a fifth meaning of karma, not as the cause of futurelives but as the result of past lives and the agenda for this life, the inescapable role in life that onewas born to play, one’s work, or innate activity. Euro-Americans believe too that we oftencannot remember the past causes of present circumstances and that the present will influence thefuture, but the Hindu view differs from this in extending the past and future beyond theboundaries of this life span. F. Scott Fitzgerald, of all people, captured the spirit of karma in thefinal sentence of The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne backceaselessly into the past.” In Hinduism we are also borne back ceaselessly into the future.The last (sixth) meaning of karma is the implication that good and bad karma may also betransferred from one person to another under certain circumstances, not merely between parentsand children (as we saw in the Vedic poem to Varuna) and between sacrificial priest and patron,but between any people who meet. This transfer may take place either intentionally orunintentionally: The dharma texts say that if someone lets a guest depart unfed, the guest willtake away the host’s good karma and leave behind his own bad karma. 11 In the Brahmana storyof Nachiketas, Nachiketas remains in the house of Death for three nights without eating and thentells Death that in effect, on the three nights of fasting he ate “your offspring, your sacrificialbeasts (pashus), and your good deeds (sadhu-krityam).” This last is an example of the transfer ofgood karma; unfed, Nachiketas “eats” (which is to say, consumes) Death’s good deeds (which isto say, he siphons off Death’s good karma) as well as his children and cattle. This blackmail iswhat forces Death to tell Nachiketas his secrets.It is not always clear which of these meanings of karma is intended in any particularpassage in the Upanishads (or in other texts). Moreover, the idea of karma was certainly notaccepted by everyone as the final solution to the problem of death (or the problem of evil); manyother, conflicting ideas were proposed and widely accepted, alongside the karma theory. 12The Upanishads continue to speak of “recurrent death” (BU 3.2.10, 3.3.2) and nowdescribe the process in cruel detail (BU 4.3.36, 4.4.2). For heaven is no longer the end of theline, as it was in some of the Brahmanas; it is simply another place that eventually everyone

leaves. The Upanishads spell out the assumption, sketched in the Brahmanas, that we all are onthe wheel of redeath, transmigration (samsara, “flowing around”). From the very start, the ideathat transmigration occurred was qualified by two other ideas: that some people wanted to getout of it and that there was a way to do this, a restoration not merely for one of life’s mistakesbut for life itself, a way to put the fix in on death. When the Upanishads retell the story ofNachiketas, Death explains to the boy the process of dying and going to heaven in much greaterdetail, and at the end, Nachiketas “became free of old age and death, and so will anyone whoknows this teaching (KU 1-2, 6.18).” Significantly, where the Brahmanas promise the conquestof redeath to anyone who knows the ritual, the Upanishad promises it to anyone who knows theteaching, a shift from a way of acting to a way of knowing.OVERCROWDING AND RECYCLINGThe theory of reincarnation, a recycling not of tin cans but of souls, may reflect ananxiety of overcrowding, the claustrophobia of a culture fenced in, a kind of urban Angst(amhas). The Upanishadic discussion of the doctrine of transmigration begins when a teacherasks his pupil, “Do you know why the world beyond is not filled up, even when more and morepeople continuously go there?” and it ends with the statement “As a result, that world up there isnot filled up (CU 5.10.8; BU 5.1.1 and 6.2.2)” cv The idea of an overcrowded earth is a part of themyth of the four Ages (people live too long in the first Age and become too numerous) andrecurs in the Mahabharata as a justification for the genocidal war (when the overburdened earthbegins to sink beneath the cosmic waters). 13 Is this fear of crowds related to the shock of the newexperience of city life in the Ganges Valley? Were there already slums in Kashi (as there mayalready have been in Harappa)? If a fear of this sort is what inspired the theory of reincarnation,who precisely was it who was afraid?The “second urbanization,” the spread of paddy rice cultivation into the Ganges Valley,producing a surplus that could support cities, the emergence of societies along the Ganges,created an unprecedented proximity of people. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in thefifth century BCE, said that the Indians were the most populous country on earth (5.3).Population densities had significantly increased, the result of a combination of the incorporationof indigenous peoples, a soaring birthrate, and the creation of agricultural surpluses. 14 This ledto a burgeoning of all the things that people who like to sleep on their saddlebags at night don’tlike about sleeping indoors, things that are for them a cultural nightmare. The movements torenounce the fleshpots of the Ganges Valley may have been inspired in part by a longing toreturn to the good old days preserved in the texts, when life was both simpler and freer, moreheroic. 15 Such a longing is reflected in the name of the Aranyakas (“Jungle Books”), in thevillage settings of so much of the Upanishads, and in the forest imagery that abounds in thewritings of the early sects, both inside and outside Hinduism. Within the cities the Buddha sat inan isolated spot under a tree to obtain enlightenment, and he first preached in a deer park. TheUpanishads seem to have been composed by people who left the settled towns for rustic settingswhere master and student could sit under some tree somewhere, the ancient Indian equivalent ofthe bucolic liberal arts college; the renunciants are said to live in the wilderness, in contrast withthe conventional Vedic sacrificers who live in villages. No individuals in the Ganges Valleycould have remembered the old days up in the Punjab, but there was certainly a group memory,or at least a literary memory, of an idealized time when people lived under the trees and sleptunder the stars, a cultural memory of wide-open spaces. Many of the old rituals and texts too,such as the tales of cattle raids, no longer made sense but still exerted a nostalgic appeal.

A striking insight into the psychology of the forest dweller stage comes from anunexpected source, Philip Roth’s 1998 novel I Married a Communist, in a passage describing ashack that the hero, Ira, retreats to in times of trouble:The palliative of the primitive hut. The place where you are stripped back to essentials, to whichyou return—even if it happens not to be where you came from—to decontaminate and absolveyourself of the striving. The place where you disrobe, molt it all, the uniforms you’ve worn andthe costumes you’ve gotten into, where you shed your batteredness and your resentment, yourappeasement of the world and your defiance of the world, your manipulation of the world and itsmanhandling of you. The aging man leaves and goes into the woods . . . receding from theagitation of the autobiographical. He has entered vigorously into competition with life; now,becalmed, he enters into competition with death, drawn down into austerity, the final business.” 16Beneath the specifically American concerns lies an understanding of ways in which, inancient India too, the forest offers individual purification from the corruption of collective urbanlife.The whole tradition was becoming individualistic, not just renunciant; we begin to see atransition from group to individual, a perceived need for personal rituals of transformation,forming a certain sort of person, not just a member of the tribe. At the same time, collectiverather than individual choices needed to be made in order to start and maintain alternativesocieties, such as Buddhism, and monastic communities, as well as to engage in the highlycollective enterprise of growing rice.Reincarnation addressed this social problem and formulated it in terms of individualsalvation. It seldom, if ever, occurred to anyone, then or at any time before the nineteenthcentury in India, cw to attempt to change the world; but many people made judgments against itand opted out or tried to solve the problem of suffering within the individual. The new religiousmovements located the problem of the human condition, of human suffering, within theindividual heart and mind (where Freud too located it), rather than in a hierarchical society(where Marx located it). The Upanishads emphasize a more personal religious experience thanthe one addressed by the Brahmanas. 17 In this way, at least, these movements wereindividualistic—“Look to your own house” (or, in the Buddha’s metaphor, “Get out of yourburning house” cx )—rather than socially oriented, as nonrenunciant Hinduism was—“Youridentity is meaningful only as one member of a diverse social body.” This in itself was atremendous innovation.THE PATHS OF REBIRTH AND RELEASEThe Upanishads assume, like the Vedas and Brahmanas, that people pass into heaven orhell when they die, but they are far more concerned with the fate of the dead beyond heaven orhell. Here is how the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad describes the possible trajectories of peoplewho have died and are being cremated:THE PATHS OF SMOKE AND FLAMEThe people who know this [the Upanishadic doctrine ofthe identity of the soul and the brahman], and the people there in the wilderness who veneratetruth as faith—they pass into the flame (of the cremation fire), and thence into the day . . . intothe world of the gods, into the sun, and into the region of lightning. A person made of mindcomes to the regions of lightning and leads them to the worlds of brahman. These exalted peoplelive in those worlds of brahman for the longest time. They do not return.The people who winheavenly worlds, on the other hand, by offering sacrifices, by giving gifts, and by generatinginner heat [tapas]—they pass into the smoke, and then into the night . . . into the world of the

fathers, into the moon. There they become food. There the gods feed on them, as the moonincreases and decreases. When that ends, they pass into the sky, then into the wind, then the rain,and then the earth, where they become food. They are offered in the fire of man and are born inthe fire of woman. Rising up again to the heavenly worlds, they circle around in the sameway.Those who do not know these two paths, however, become worms, insects, or snakes (BU6.2.13-16). This text tells us that people within the Vedic fold at this time had a choice of twoways of being religious.The people of the wilderness end up in the world of brahman, the divine substance ofwhich the universe is composed. Brahman, which in the Rig Veda designates sacred speech, isthe root of a number of words in later Sanskrit distinguished by just one or two sounds (or letters,in English): brahman (the divine substance of the universe); Brahma (the creator god); Brahminor Brahman (a member of the first or priestly class cy ); Brahmana (one of a class of texts thatfollow the Vedas and precede the Upanishads); and Brahma-charin (“moving in brahman,”designating a chaste student). The world of brahman is a world of monism (which assumes thatall living things are elements of a single, universal being), cz sometimes equated withmonotheism, in contrast with the world of rebirth, the polytheistic world of sacrifice to multiplegods. The doctrine of the Upanishads is also sometimes characterized as pantheism (in whichgod is everything and everything is god) or, at times, panentheism (in which god encompassesand interpenetrates the universe but at the same time is greater than and independent of it). Itviews the very substance of the universe as divine and views that substance and that divinity asunitary. The pluralistic world has a secondary, illusory status in comparison with the enduring,real status of the underlying monistic being.The people who reach brahman have lived in the wilderness, the jungle, eitherpermanently as some sort of forest ascetics or merely on the occasions when they held theirreligious rituals there. By contrast, the sacrificers, who follow the Vedic path of generosity (togods and priests or to people more generally) or engage in the ritual practices that generateinternal heat (tapas), go to heaven but do not stay there; they die again and are reborn. This textdoes not tell us where these people have lived but a parallel passage in the ChandogyaUpanishad (5.10.1-8) tells us that the people who devote themselves to giving gifts to gods andto priests (this text specifies the recipients, where the other did not) live in villages. This groupno longer generates internal heat as the sacrificers did in the Brihadaranyaka, an activity that theChandogya assigns to the people in the wilderness, who venerate (in place of truth, in theBrihadaranyaka) internal heat as faith. Tapas therefore can belong to either group, for it is atransitional power: For sacrificers, it is the heat that the priest generates in the sacrifice, while forpeople of the wilderness, it becomes detached from the sacrifice and internalized, just as thesacrifice itself is internalized; now tapas is the heat that an individual ascetic generates withinhimself. The only criterion that marks the sacrificers in both texts is their generosity, and theonly criterion that marks the people of the wilderness is their life in the wilderness.The people who reach the moon in the Brihadaranyaka are eaten by the gods (as theywere eaten by animals in the Other World in the Brahmanas), but the gods in the Chandogyamerely eat the moon, a more direct way to account for its waning. The Chandogya also has aslightly different ending for the second group, the sacrificers who pass through the smoke:THE THIRD OPTIONThey return by the same path by which they came—first to space and tothe wind, which turns into smoke and then into a cloud, which then rains down. On earth theygrow as rice and barley, plants and trees, sesame and beans, from which it is very difficult toescape. When someone eats that food and sheds his semen, one is born again from him.Now,

people here whose behavior is charming can expect to enter a nice womb, like that of a womanof the Brahmin, Kshatriya, or Vaishya class. But people whose behavior is stinking can expect toenter a nasty womb, like that of a dog, a pig, or a Pariah woman.And there is a third state, forpeople who take neither of these paths: They become tiny creatures who go around and aroundceaselessly. “Be born! Die!” A person should take measures to avoid that (5.10.1-8). It isclear from the Chandogya, and implicit in the Brihadaranyaka, that one does not want to end upin the company of the worms and other tiny creatures in the third state, the place from which notraveler returns. It’s better to be a dog.But it is not so clear from these texts that the path of Vedic gift giving is undesirable, thateveryone wants to get off the wheel and onto the path of flame. For renouncers, the very idea ofgood karma is an oxymoron: da Any karma is bad because it binds you to the wheel of rebirth. Butthe Chandogya spells out the belief that for sacrificers, some rebirths are quite pleasant, thereward for good behavior. Their fate corresponds to Yajnavalkya’s statement “A man becomessomething good by good karma and something bad by bad karma.” The Brihadaranyaka saysmuch the same thing: “What a man turns out to be depends on how he acts. If his actions [karma]are good, he will turn into something good. If his actions are bad, he will turn into somethingbad.” But then it adds that this applies only to the man who has desires; the man who is freedfrom desires, whose desires are fulfilled, does not die at all; he goes to brahman (BU 4.4.5-6). dbSo too the funeral ceremonies include instructions that ensure that the dead man will not remainin limbo but will move forward, either to a new life or to final Release (moksha) from the cycleof transmigration, 18 further evidence of a deeply embedded tension between the desire to assure agood rebirth and the desire to prevent rebirth altogether. The fear of redeath led to the desire forRelease (including Release from the values of Vedic Hinduism), but then the ideal of Releasewas reabsorbed into Vedic Hinduism and reshaped into the desire to be reborn better, in worldlyterms: richer, with more sons, and so forth. These two tracks—one for people who want to getoff the wheel of redeath and one for those who don’t want to get off the wheel ofrebirth—continue as options for South Asians to this day.The Kaushitaki Upanishad describes the fork in the road a bit differently:THE FINAL EXAMWhen people depart from this world, they go to the moon. Those who donot answer the moon’s questions become rain, and rain down here on earth, where they arereborn according to their actions [karma] and knowledge—as a worm, an insect, a fish, a bird, alion, a boar, a rhinoceros, a tiger, a human, or some other creature. Those who answer themoon’s questions correctly pass to the heavenly world: They go on the path to the gods, to fire,and finally to brahman. On the way, he shakes off his good and bad deeds [karma], which fallupon his relatives: the good deeds on the ones he likes and the bad deeds on the ones he dislikes.Freed from his good and bad deeds, this person, who has the knowledge of brahman, goes on tobrahman (1.1-4a). The deciding factor here apparently has nothing to do with the sort ofworship the dead person engaged in while alive, or whether he lived in the village or thewilderness; there is just one final postmortem exam (proctored by the rabbit in the moon?) thatdetermines everything. dc The good and bad deeds weigh in only later and then only for the manwho gets a first on the exam and proceeds on the path to brahman (not, as in the Chandogya, forthe man on the path of rebirth). Nor does this text spell out what deeds are good, and what bad;that will come in later texts. The important doctrine of the transfer of karma from one person toanother is harnessed to the trivial human frailty of liking some relatives and disliking others andcaring about the disposal of one’s worldly goods (in this case, one’s karma). And the worms andinsects no longer form a third place of No Exit, but are simply part of the lesser of the only two

paths.THE PATH OF SMOKE: THE PLEASURES OF SAMSARAThe path of smoke, of Vedic generosity, of procreation and samsara survives intact thejourney from the Vedas to the Upanishads, though the Upanishads provide very little detail aboutit, perhaps assuming that everyone knew it because it had been around for centuries. The case infavor of samsara, in its positive aspect of passion, family, love, loss (what Nikos Kazantzakis’sZorba the Greek called “the whole catastrophe”), is strong. The Upanishads reopen some of theoptions of the Vedas that the Brahmanas closed down and open up other options. Individualtexts, as always, often go against the grain of the general zeitgeist.There’s some pretty hot stuff in the Upanishads. The paragraph that introduces thedescription of the two paths refers to the act of progeneration as an offering in the fire of manand a birth in the fire of woman and analogizes a woman’s genitals to the sacrificial fire: Hervulva is the firewood, her pubic hair the smoke, her vagina the flame; the acts of penetration andclimax are the embers and the sparks (BU 6.2.13; 6.4.1-3; CU 5.8.1). One text takes the bliss ofsexual climax as the closest available approximation to the ineffable experience of deep,dreamless sleep (BU 2.1.19). A woman in her fertile period is described as splendid andauspicious, and her fertility is so important that if she refuses to have sex with her husband atthat time, he is advised to bribe her or beat her with a stick or with his fists (BU 6.4.6-7). A moretender attitude is advocated in the mantra that a man should use to make his wife love him, and amore practical one in the mantra for contraception if he does not want her to be pregnant (BU6.4.9-10), an intention that flies in the face of the dharma texts that insist that the only purpose ofsex is procreation.A remarkably open-minded attitude to women’s infidelity is evident in the mantrarecommended to make a sexual rival impotent:MANTRA AGAINST YOUR WIFE’S LOVERIf a man’s wife has a lover whom he hates, heshould place some fire in an unbaked pot, arrange a bed of reeds in reverse order from the usualway, apply ghee to the tips of the reeds, also in reverse order, and offer them in the fire as herecites this mantra: “You (he names the man) have made an offering in my fire! I take away yourout-breath and your in-breath, your sons and livestock, your sacrifices and good works [or goodkarma], your hopes and plans.” If a Brahmin who knows this curses a man, that man will surelyleave this world stripped of his virility and his good karma. One should therefore never foolaround with the wife of a learned Brahmin who knows this (BU 6.4.12). In contrast withalmost all of later Hinduism, which punished a woman extremely severely for adultery, this textpunishes only her partner. Moreover, this punishment is intended (only) for a lover of his wifethat the husband hates and therefore not necessarily for a lover that he does not hate, a mostpermissive qualification, suggestive of a Noel Coward drawing room comedy or a Frenchménage à trois. The men for whom these mantras are intended would have little use for the pathof Release. Their primary concerns were Vedic: family, women, offspring, sons, the lineage ofthe flesh. For them the sacrifice of semen into a womb was a Vedic sacrifice of butter into thefire; the hated lover is cursed for making such an offering in another man’s spousal fire.THE PATH OF FLAME: MOKSHA AND RENUNCIATIONOn the other hand, one of the later Upanishads mocks the sacrificial path (MU 1.2.10-11),and other passages in the Upanishads assume, like the Brahmanas, that repeated death is a BadThing, that the whips and scorns of time make life a nightmare from which one longs for final

Release or freedom (moksha ), a blessed awakening or, perhaps, a subsidence into a dreamlesssleep. The cycle of rebirth was another way of being fenced in (amhas), a painfully restrictingprison, from which one wanted to break out, to be sprung, which is what moksha means; theword is used for the release of an arrow from a bow or of a prisoner from a jail. It is sometimestranslated as “Freedom.”Brahman, ineffable, can be described only in the negative: “Not like this, not like that”(neti, neti) (BU 4.5.15). Given that the positive goal, what one is going to, moksha, is neverdescribed, one might at least hope to be told what one was going away from. Precisely what wasone freed from? At first, moksha meant only freedom from death, a concept firmly groundedwithin the Vedic sacrificial system that promised the worshiper a kind of immortality. The wordappears in the Upanishads in various forms, often as a verb, “to set free.” Through the sacrifice,the patron of the sacrifice frees himself from the grip of death, the grip of days and nights, thegrip of the waxing moon and climbs up to heaven: “It is freedom, complete freedom (BU3.1.3-6,34-35). Or: “Shaking off evil, like a horse its hair, and freeing myself, like the moonfrom the jaws of the demon of eclipse, I, the perfected self [atman], cast off the imperfect bodyand attain the world of brahman (CU 8.13.1).” Moksha sometimes comes to designate Releasenot merely from death or evil in general but, more specifically, from samsara, from the cycle ofrebirth (SU 6.16,18). And then, in later Upanishads, moksha is associated with renunciation(samnyasa): “The ascetics who have full knowledge of the Vedanta are purified by the disciplineof renunciation. In the worlds of brahman, at the time of the final end, they become fullyimmortal and fully freed (MU 3.2.6).” And whoever knows this (yo evam veda) will realize thatunity with brahman upon his death and be freed from redeath.The Brihadaranyaka promises freedom from the very things that the Vedic pathvalued—namely, children and family, the whole catastrophe: “It is when they come to know thisself that Brahmins give up the desire for sons, the desire for wealth, and the desire for worlds,and undertake the renunciant life. . . . It was when they knew this that men of old did not desireoffspring (BU 3.5.1, 4.4.22).” Such a man no longer amasses karma. He does not think, “I didsomething good” or “I did something bad,” nor is he stained by bad karma/deeds. He is beyondgood and evil. dd We recognize the confident assurance of the Brahmanas: Even redeath can befixed, if you know how, but now you do not even have to be a Brahmin to fix it, as long as youhave the proper knowledge. This is yet another major innovation.CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES FROM THE VEDASThe belief that souls are reborn for richer or for poorer, sickness or health, according totheir conduct in their previous life, has roots in Vedic ideas of heaven and hell, reward andpunishment. 19 So too the idea of the identity of the individual soul (atman) with the world soul(brahman) is a natural expansion of the Vedic idea that the individual body is overlaid upon thecosmic body, the eye on the sun, the breath on the wind (although now new questions arise aboutthe definition of the self). 20 The initiated Vedic ritual patron practiced a kind of renunciation, 21and the sacrificer would say a mantra renouncing the fruits of his offerings. Even the idea of thetransfer of karma, so central to Buddhism (where it is usually called the transfer of merit), has itsroots, as we have seen, in the Vedic poems to the god Varuna (whom the poet asks to forgivehim for the sins of his fathers) and in the transfer of evil from gods to humans, in the Brahmanas,22 though it got an added boost from the growth of a moneyed economy.The Upanishadic sages take the Vedic themes and run with them in new directions andfar. Indeed, they openly challenge the Vedas; one sage quotes the Vedic line about existence

coming from nonexistence (10.72.1-5) but then remarks: “How can that possibly be?” and arguesinstead: “In the beginning, this world was simply what is existent [CU 6.2.2].” The Rig Vedapassage cited in the Brihadaranyaka mentions a slightly different version of the two paths: thepath of the fathers and the path of the immortal gods. But in the Rig Veda, living creatures onthese paths go not through the smoke to the moon or through the flame to the sun, but betweenthe mother (both the female parent and the earth) and the father (both the male parent and thesky) (RV 10.88.15; BU 6.2.2).Much of Upanishadic thought represents a radical break with the Vedas. Though therealization that each soul was one with the infinite soul was hardly breaking news in theUpanishads, the earlier Vedic sources hardly mention this idea and certainly do not develop itsystematically. What was particularly new was the suggestion, only in the later Upanishads, thatunderstanding the equation of atman and brahman was a call to action: You must change yourlife. de Most people did not change their lives. But eventually, as the lower classes gained moremoney, time, and education, some of them had the resources to act on ideas that they might havenourished for a long time and break away from the Vedic world entirely. 23 Aspects of theUpanishads certainly appealed to people who no longer wished, or were never allowed, to playball with the Brahmins. Although the early Upanishads, as we have seen, regard renunciation asa live option only for some people, the later texts, the Renunciation Upanishads (SamnyasaUpanishads), encouraged a person heading for the path of Release (or Freedom) to seek mokshaas soon as possible, 24 to make a vertical takeoff from any point in his life. For such a person,moksha is just another word for nothing left to lose. dfWe have some knowledge of the people who might have contributed these new ideas.The Upanishads refer to already existing renunciants who operated within the Vedic tradition,and Buddhist texts tell us that such people were also there before the time of the Buddha, who, inthe story of his enlightenment, meets a sick man, an old man, a dead man, and then arenunciant, 25 perhaps a Vedic renunciant. The fringe mystics that the Rig Veda mentions, theVratyas and the long-haired ascetic, may also have belonged to some of these motley andmarginalized Vedic groups. The Upanishads attest to the existence of ascetic traditions that, bythe sixth or fifth century BCE, had developed within the bounds of Vedic tradition, though notnecessarily within the Brahmin class. 26 Speculation about the nature and purpose of Vedic ritualbegan eventually, for some thinkers, to subordinate ritual action to spiritual knowledge, whichcould be attained by asceticism, world renunciation, or the disciplines that came to be known asyoga, designed to transform behavior through their emphasis on refining, controlling, andtransforming the mind and the body. 27Some people rejected the world of heaven that the Vedas promised them but remainedwithin the Hindu fold, on the path to Release; others suspected that the Brahmins could not keeptheir promises of either path and left the Vedic world entirely, to become Buddhists or Jainas.Some non-Brahmins who were still not ready to leave the Vedic fold entirely may have beenreacting against the excesses of the priests, seeking, through asceticism or meditation, freedomfrom an increasingly regulated society or from a religious life dominated by elaborate andexpensive rituals that the Brahmins monopolized. 28 Other non-Brahmins may have been keen tointroduce into the Vedic mix ideas, perhaps even ideas about karma and death, that have left notrace elsewhere, while at the same time they hoped in that way to crash the Brahmin party at last.Within Hinduism, the transition was from meditating on the Vedic sacrifice while doing it (in theBrahmanas and early Upanishads) to meditating upon the sacrifice instead of doing it (from thetime of the Renunciation Upanishads), a move implicit in the renunciation of the householder

life.NON-BRAHMIN SECRETSThe Upanishads attribute some of their new doctrines to an important group ofnon-Brahmins within the Vedic world, Kshatriyas. It is a king, Jaivali Pravahana of Panchala,who teaches the doctrine of the two paths to the young Brahmin Shvetaketu. In theBrihadaranyaka, Shvetaketu approaches the king “while people are waiting upon him,” and helater refers to the king (out of his earshot) as a “second-rate prince” (rajanya-bandhu). The kinginsists that both Shvetaketu and his father must beg him to be their teacher, as they do, andbefore he teaches them, he says, “This knowledge has never before been in the possession of aBrahmin. But I will reveal it to you, to keep you or an ancestor of yours from doing harm to me(BU 6.3.8).” (Note that he still acknowledges the Brahmins’ power to curse.) In the Chandogya,the king adds, “As a result, throughout the world government has belonged exclusively to royalty(CU 5.3.6).” In the Kaushitaki, Shvetaketu’s father explicitly regards his royal teacher (anotherking) as an “outsider,” and the king praises the father for swallowing his pride (KauU 1.1-7). Theeclectic Upanishadic kings as gurus, such as Janaka of Videha (BU 3.1.1.1, 2.1.1), may havebeen drawing upon that legacy when they summoned the leading philosophers of their day, holymen of various schools and persuasions (surely including some Brahmins), to compete in theirsalons and to debate religious questions at royal gatherings.Of course the kings in these texts may never have existed; they may simply have beendreamed up by Brahmin authors, purely a literary convention, a fantasy. dg Texts recordsentiments, not events. But it is surely significant that such a positive fantasy, if it is just afantasy, about royal sages found its way into the texts of the Brahmin imaginary; certainly it istelling that the Upanishads attributed to the Kshatriyas ideas questioning the centrality of theritual and thus challenging the power of the Brahmins. When the Brahmin Gargya asks KingAjatashatru of Kashi to be his teacher, the king says, “Isn’t it a reversal of the norm for aBrahmin to become the pupil of a Kshatriya?” But he does it anyway (BU 2.1.15). Thesepassages may represent a Kshatriya reaction to the Brahmin takeover during the precedingcenturies, the period of the Brahmanas.Nor were Kshatriyas the only non-Brahmins who contributed new ideas to theUpanishads:RAIKVA, THE MAN UNDER THE CARTKing Janashruti was devoted to giving a great dealof everything, especially food, thinking, “People will eat food from me everywhere.” One nightsome wild geese were flying overhead, and one said, “Look, the light of Janashruti fills the sky!”The other replied, “Why speak of Janashruti? For just as the person with the highest throw of thedice wins all the lower throws, Raikva, the gatherer, takes the credit for all the good things thatpeople do. So does anyone who knows what Raikva knows.” Janashruti overheard them. Hesummoned his steward and repeated to him what the geese had said.The steward searched in vainand said to the king, “Can’t find him.” The king said, “Look for Raikva in a place where onewould search for a non-Brahmin.” The steward saw a man under a cart scratching his sores. Heapproached him respectfully and asked, “Sir, are you Raikva, the gatherer?” The man replied,“Yes, I am.” The steward returned to the king and said, “Got him!” Janashruti offered Raikvahundreds of cows and gold if he would teach him the deity that he worshiped, but Raikvarefused, saying, “Take them back, Shudra!” When, however, Janashruti offered him all this andhis daughter, Raikva lifted up her face and said, “With just this face you could have bought mecheap (CU 4.1-2).” Janashruti is a rich man and a king. Raikva is, by contrast, evidently a

homeless person or a street person. He is also a man who despises cows and gold (two things thatBrahmins always like best) and who likes women. It is extremely cheeky of him to callJanashruti a Shudra. Raikva is said to be a gatherer, which may refer to his knack of gathering upeveryone else’s good karma, dh as a successful gambler gathers up the dice of the losers, anotherearly example of the transfer of karma from one person to another. But “gathering” may alsorefer to Raikva’s poverty, for he may have been a gleaner (like Ruth in the Hebrew Bible),gathering up the dregs of the harvest after everyone else has taken the real crop, or even, like somany homeless people, gathering up other people’s garbage for his own use. The two meaningswork well together: The man who lives on richer people’s garbage also lives off their gooddeeds. (Much later, in the Mahabharata [14.90], several people, including a mongoose, tell KingYudhishthira about the great virtue of “the way of gleaning.”) At first the steward presumablysearches for a Brahmin, for he has to be specifically instructed to search elsewhere. ThatJanashruti can understand the talking animals (wild geese, which often carry messages in Hindumythology) is evidence of his high spiritual achievement, but the non-Brahmin Raikva is higherstill; his secret knowledge (about the wind and breath as gatherers) trumps Janashruti’s ace ofVedic generosity.An innovator of unknown paternal lineage and hence questionable class appears in thestory that immediately follows the tale of Raikva, the story of Satyakama Jabala, the hero of thevignette at the head of this chapter. For Satyakama’s mother had slept with many men. (“I gotaround a lot” [bahu aham caranti] has the same double meaning in Sanskrit as it has inEnglish—to move from one place to another and from one sexual partner to another—as well asa third, purely Indian meaning that is also relevant here: to wander as a mendicant.) An ancientIndian text that makes the son of such a woman a spiritual leader is a feminist tract. Such a textalso takes truth rather than birth as the criterion of Brahminhood, though it still maintains thatonly a Brahmin, however defined, may learn the Veda. (Here we may recall the Brahmanastatement “Why do you inquire about the father or the mother of a Brahmin? When you findknowledge in someone, that is his father and his grandfather.”) 29 Satyakama needs to know hismale lineage in order to prove that he was born in a family that has a right to learn the Veda; byconventional rules, he cannot matriculate in Varanasi U and sign up for Upanishads 108 unlesshe knows who his father is. But this text says it is enough for him to know who he himself is.Eventually Satyakama’s teacher sends him out to herd a hundred lean, weak cows. They thriveand increase to a thousand, and after some years the bull speaks to him, and so do the fire, and agoose, and a cormorant, each telling him one foot of the brahman, here imagined as a quadruped(CU 4.4-8). His ability to make weak cows into strong cows is a Vaishya trait, but his ability toconverse with these animals is a sign of his extraordinary religious talent, rare in any class.SHRAMANAS AND BRAHMANASThough the idea of karma seems to have strong Vedic roots, strong enough that it seemsalmost inevitable that someone would have come up with it sooner or later (it was, one mightsay, the karma of the Upanishads to have that idea), ideas such as the identity of the atman withbrahman, transmigration, and the Release from transmigration through renunciation andasceticism don’t have such strong Vedic ties and send us out, like Janashruti’s steward, to lookfor non-Vedic sources.There were already in existence at this time a number of ascetic movements that werenon-Vedic either in coming from some other, indigenous pool of ideas or in rejecting the Vedas,and these movements too may have come into, or influenced, the Upanishads. 30 The karma

theory may have developed many of its crucial details within Jainism and moved from there toBuddhism and Hinduism; 31 the Jainas have always taken vegetarianism to the greatest extremes,taking pains to avoid injuring even tiny insects, and this too heavily influenced Hindus. Thebreakaway groups not only abhorred sacrifice but also rejected the Veda as revelation anddisregarded Brahminical teachings and Brahminical claims to divine authority, 32 three morecrucial points that distinguished them from Hindus, even from those Hindus who were beginningto take up some of the new doctrines and practices. The Buddhists also denied the existence of anindividual soul, scorned the gods (particularly Indra di ) as insignificant and/or ridiculous and, likethe authors of some of the Upanishads, argued that conduct rather than birth determined the trueBrahmin, all significant departures from Hindu doctrines. Moreover, Buddhist monks livedtogether in monasteries, at first only during the rainy season and later at other times as well,while the Hindu renouncers during this period renounced human companionship too andwandered alone.A number of groups engaged in friendly intellectual combat at this time. There wereprobably early adherents of what were to become the six major philosophical schools ofHinduism: Critical Inquiry (Mimamsa ), Logic (Nyaya), Particularism (Vaisheshika), Numbers(Sankhya), Yoga, and Vedanta. Ajivikas (contemporaries of the Jainas and Buddhists) rejectedfree will, an essential component of the doctrine of karma. Lokayatas (“This Worldly” people,also called Materialists and Charvakas, followers of a founder named Charvaka) not onlyrejected the doctrine of reincarnation (arguing that when the body was destroyed, the spirit thathad been created specifically for it dissolved back into nothingness) but believed that physicalsense data were the only source of knowledge and that the Vedas were “the prattling of knaves,characterized by the three faults of untruthfulness, internal contradiction, and useless repetition.”33 But most of what we know of the Materialists comes from their opponents and almost surelydoes not do them justice. Even the permissive Kama-sutra (c. second century CE) gives asimplistic version of the Materialist position: “Materialists say: ‘People should not performreligious acts, for their results are in the world to come and that is doubtful. Who but a foolwould take what is in his own hand and put it in someone else’s hand? Better a pigeon today thana peacock tomorrow, and better a copper coin that is certain than a gold coin that is doubtful(1.2.21-23).’ ” The Materialists, as well as the Nastikas, common or garden-variety atheists(people who say “There is no (na-asti) [heaven or gods]”), were among a number of rebelliousintellectual movements that gained momentum in the vigorous public debates of the fifth centuryBCE.Renunciants are sometimes called Shramanas (“toilers,” designating wanderers, ascetics),in contrast with Brahmanas (the Sanskrit word for Brahmins; the name of Shramanas stuck inpart because of the felicitous assonance). dj “Shramana” at first often referred to ascetics bothwithin and without the Hindu fold, 34 including Ajivikas, Nastikas, Lokayatas, and Charvakas. 35But the Brihadaranyaka groups Shramanas with thieves, abortionists, Chandalas and Pulkasas(two Pariah groups), and ascetics (BU 4.3.22), and eventually the word “Shramana” came tomean anyone low or vile or, finally, naked.Shramanas and Brahmins were said to fight like snakes and mongooses 36 or as we wouldsay, like cats and dogs. Many Brahmins loathed the non-Vedic Shramanas (Buddhists andJainas), who had entirely rejected, in favor of forest meditation, the sacrificial system that wasthe Brahmin livelihood. But the Shramanas within the Hindu fold, who still paid lip service, atleast, to the Vedas and sacrifice but rejected the householder life (also a factor in Brahminlivelihood), were even more loathsome, a fifth column within the ranks. Both Shramanas and

Brahmins must have been the source, and the audience, for the Upanishads, some of which theywould have interpreted in different ways. Thus Brahmins, or the upper classes more generally,would take “renounce karma” to mean renouncing Vedic ritual, while to the Magadhi crowd thatthe Buddha preached to, it would have meant renouncing the fruits of actions of all kinds.Largely in response to the Shramana challenge, the Brahmins themselves absorbed a great dealof the renunciant ideal 37 and came to epitomize one sort of renouncer—a paradigm of purity,self-denial, and self-control—even while they excoriated the other sort of renouncer, thelow-caste drifter.But in addition to the Brahminic and Shramanic strains enriching the Upanishads, therewas, as always, the great Indian catchall of “local beliefs and customs,” 38 or that ever-readysource of the unknown, the Adivasis or aboriginals, to whom more than one scholar attributes“some more or less universal Hindu beliefs like rebirth and transmigration of the jiva [soul] fromanimal to human existence.” 39 There is also always the possibility of infusion of ideas from thedescendants of the Indus Valley Civilization, an unknowable pool of what might be radicallydifferent ideas, a tantalizing source that some would, and others would not, distinguish from theAdivasis and Dravidians. But another, better answer for the source of these ideas aboutindividual salvation, better perhaps than a pool whose existence can’t be proved, might be simplyto admit that some individual, some brilliant, original theologian whose name is lost to us,composed some of the Upanishads. Lining up the usual suspects like this—a naturaldevelopment from Vedic ideas (no genius required); Kshatriyas; some brilliant person in theVedic camp; the IVC and its descendants; Adivasis—is often nothing more than confessing, “Ican’t find it in the Veda.”WOMEN AND OTHER LOWLIFEThe criterion of individual intellectual talent colors an Upanishadic story of a Brahminwith two wives, who are distinguished not by their class (as multiple wives often are) but by theirminds:THE THEOLOGICAL WIFE AND THE WORLDLY WIFEYajnavalkya had two wives,Maitreyi and Katyayani. Of the two, Maitreyi was a woman who took part in theologicaldiscussions, while Katyayani’s understanding was limited to women’s affairs. One day, as hewas preparing to set out to wander as an ascetic, Yajnavalkya said, “Maitreyi, I am about to goaway from this place. So come, let me make a settlement between you and Katyayani.” Maitreyireplied, “What is the point in getting something that will not make me immortal? Tell me insteadall that you know.” Yajnavalkya replied, “I have always been very fond of you, and now youhave made me even more so. Come, my dear, and I will explain it to you. But do try toconcentrate (BU 4.5; cf. BU 2.4).” And he explains the doctrine of the self to her and goesaway. Katyayani never even appears. dk Presumably she (like Martha in the gospel story) takescare of the house (which, also presumably, she will inherit when their husband abandons bothwives to take the ascetic path) while the other woman talks theology.Some women therefore took part in the new theological debates, though none is depictedas an author. Gargi, the feistiest woman in the Upanishads, dl is a staunch defender ofYajnavalkya. On one occasion she questions him about a series of increasingly important worlds,culminating in the worlds of brahman. Then Yajnavalkya says, “Don’t ask too many questions,Gargi, or your head will shatter apart!” And she shuts up (BU 3.6) (as do, on other occasions,several men who are threatened with having their heads shatter 40 ). Another time, she asksYajnavalkya two questions in front of a group of distinguished Brahmins; she likens herself to “a

fierce warrior, stringing his unstrung bow and taking two deadly arrows in his hand, rising tochallenge an enemy,” an extraordinarily masculine, and violent, simile for a woman. When heanswers her, at some length, she cries out, “Distinguished Brahmins! You should countyourselves lucky if you escape from this man without paying him anything more than yourrespects. None of you will ever defeat him in a theological debate (BU 3.8).” This is one toughlady, cast from the same mold as Urvashi and, later, Draupadi. (A later text even suggests that inaddition to his other two wives, Yajnavalkya was also married to Gargi. 41 )Women also had other options. Buddhism offered women security within a sociallyapproved institution as well as a double liberation, on both the worldly and the spiritual planes,glorying in the release not just from rebirth but from the kitchen and the husband. 42 Yet theBuddhists did not value nuns as highly as monks; there is even a tradition that the Buddhahimself cautioned against admitting women, which, he warned, would spell the downfall of theorder in India within five hundred years, 43 a prophecy that did, more or less, come true.This period also saw the beginning of the composition of a large literature ofsupplementary Sanskrit texts, the Shrauta Sutras (c. 500 BCE), which describe the solemn,public rites of the Vedas (the shruti), always performed by Brahmins, and the Grihya Sutras (c.300 BCE), the texts of the household (griha), describing the domestic and life cycle rites, oftenperformed by householders who were not necessarily Brahmins. The Grihya Sutras regulated andnormalized domestic life, bringing about the penetration of ritual regulation into the daily life ofthe household, on a scale not seen before. We may look at this development in two differentways, both as a greater power among householders who now had many rituals that they couldperform without the help of a Brahmin and as the extension of Brahmin power, through thecodification of texts about householders’ rituals that had not previously been under Brahminregulation. 44 While the earlier Shrauta Sutras had made mandatory large-scale ritualperformances, in some of which (such as the horse sacrifice) the sacrificer’s wife had to bepresent and even to speak, though not to speak Vedic mantras, the Grihya Sutras that regulateddaily practices to be performed in the home required the more active participation of thesacrificer’s wife and other members of the household. This too may explain the proactivebehavior of some of the women in the Upanishads.ANIMALSLow or excluded people are often associated with animals, like Raikva and Satyakamawith geese and bulls, and the fact that certain animals actually proclaim new Upanishadicdoctrines tells us something important about the porosity of the class structure in religious circlesat this time.Dogs are satirically transformed from the lowest to the highest caste in an Upanishadicpassage that may have been inspired by the Vedic poem likening priests (who begin their prayerswith the sacred syllable “Om!”) to frogs singing in the rainy season:THE SONG OF THE DOGSA group of dogs asked a Vedic priest, “Please, sir, we’d like to findsome food by singing for our supper. We are really hungry.” He asked them to return the nextmorning, and so the dogs filed in, sliding in slyly as priests slide in slyly in a file, each holdingon to the back of the one in front of him. They sat down together and began to hum. Then theysang, “Om! Let’s eat! Om! Let’s drink. Om! May the gods bring food! Lord of food, bring food!Bring it! Bring it! Om! (CU 1.12-13).” Apparently they are rewarded, for the passageconcludes with a statement that anyone who understands the secret meaning of the word “hum”(a meaning that the text supplies) “will come to own and to eat his own food.” To have dogs, the

most impure of animals, impersonate Brahmins makes this remarkable satire, so reminiscent ofOrwell’s Animal Farm, truly bolshie. For dogs are already stigmatized as eaters of carrion; whensomeone annoys Yajnavalkya by asking where the heart is lodged, he replies, impatiently, “Inthe body, you idiot! If it were anywhere other than in ourselves, dogs would eat it, or birds wouldtear it up (BU 3.9.25).” The author of this text may be poking fun at Brahmins or pleading formore sympathy for dogs (and therefore for the lower castes), or both or none of the above.At the other end of the animal spectrum, the horse’s continuing importance in theUpanishads is a constant reminder of the Kshatriya presence in these texts. A horse auspiciouslyopens the very first line of the very first Upanishad: “The head of the sacrificial horse is thedawn; his eye is the sun; his breath the wind; and his gaping mouth the fire common to all men. .. . When he yawns, lightning flashes; when he shakes himself, it thunders; and when he urinates,it rains. His whinny is speech itself (BU 1.1.1).” The Vedic Dawn Horse (Eohippus ) has cosmiccounterparts; his eye is the sun just as, in the funeral hymn in the Rig Veda, the eye of the deadman is dispersed (back) to the sun, and the sun is born from the eye of the Primeval Man. Thestallion’s gaping mouth of flame is later echoed in the submarine mare with fire in her mouth.Another equine image, the chariot as a metaphor for the control of the senses, familiarfrom the Brahmana story of Vrisha, reappears now: “A wise man should keep his mind vigilantlyunder control, just as he would control a wagon yoked to unruly horses (SU 2.9).” A moreextended passage explains this metaphor:Think of the self as a rider in a chariot that is the body; the intellect is the charioteer, and themind the reins. The senses are the horses and the paths around them are the objects of the senses.The senses do not obey a man who cannot control his mind, as bad horses disdain the charioteer;such a man continues to be subject to reincarnation. But the senses obey a man whose mind isalways under control, as good horses heed the charioteer; such a man reaches the end of thejourney (KU 3.3-6). The senses must be harnessed, yoked, yogaed. dm (Sometimes anger ratherthan desire is the sense that must be controlled, and desire is positioned as the charioteer; desirereins in anger like a charioteer with horses.) 45 For horses, like the senses, straddle the linebetween wild and tame, always under hair-trigger control like that mare who holds the doomsdayflame in her mouth. Indeed the image of the driver of the chariot gives way in later texts to theimage of the tiny elephant driver (the mahout) who is barely able to control the enormous ruttingelephant on which he rides. Eternal vigilance is the price of moksha.REBIRTH, NONVIOLENCE, AND VEGETARIANISMAnimals also appear in the lists of unwanted rebirths, in comparison with the twopreferable options of rebirth as upper-class humans and Release from rebirth entirely. Dogs inparticular represent the horrors of low birth; people who behave badly can expect to enter a nastywomb, like that of a dog. Significantly, the Good Animals, horses and cows, do not appear in therebirth lists as likely options. One might assume that the belief that we might become reincarnateas animals contributes to the rise of vegetarianism in India, but no sympathy is extended to theanimals in the rebirth lists, nor do the early Upanishads betray as many misgivings about eatinganimals (even reincarnated and/or talking animals) as the Brahmanas did toward the animals inthe Other World. Yet the belief that humans and animals were part of a single system of therecycling of souls implies the fungibility of animals and humans and could easily sound awarning: Do not kill/eat an animal, for it might be your grandmother, or your grandchild, or (inthe other world) you. For you are who you ate, and you may become whom you eat.Nonviolence toward animals is mentioned only glancingly, twice, in the early Upanishads

and then not as a word (such as ahimsa) but as a concept. The Brihadaranyaka stipulates that ona particular night, “a man should not take the life of any being that sustains life, not even that ofa lizard (BU 1.5.14).” But presumably this is permissible on other nights. And the very lastpassage of the Chandogya states that the man who studies the Veda, becomes a householder,rears virtuous children, reins in his senses, “and refrains from killing any creature except onspecial occasions” dn reaches the world of brahman and does not return again (CU 8.15.1). Herenonviolence against animals is specifically connected with the householder life, the path ofrebirth, and is qualified in the usual way: There are occasions when it is good to eat animals,such as hospitality to honored guests. 46Yet most Indian traditions of reincarnation advise the renouncer to avoid eating meat, 47and renouncers were likely to be vegetarians; to renounce the flesh is to renounce flesh. Morever,since the renouncer renounces the sacrificial ritual (karma), he thereby loses one of the mainoccasions when it is legal to kill animals. 48 The Brahmanas and Upanishads sow the seeds for theeventual transition away from animal sacrifice. Where Indra in the Vedas ate bulls and buffalo,now the gods neither eat nor drink but become sated by just looking at the soma nectar (CU3.6.1), just as the king merely smells the odor of the burning marrow in the horse sacrifice. Evenin the Vedic ritual, vegetable oblations (rice and barley) were the minimally acceptable lowestform of the sacrificial victim, the pashu, but the original animal victim lingers on in the way thatthe Vedic texts treat even the rice cake like an animal: “When the rice cake [is offered], it isindeed a pashu that is offered up. Its stringy chaff, that is the hairs; its husk is the skin; the flouris the blood; the small grains are the flesh; whatever is the best part [of the grain] is the bone.” 49Gradually many branches of Hinduism banished all animal sacrifices. Though this lattertransition is almost always couched in terms of morality (ahimsa), there may also have been anelement of necessity in it, the need to answer the challenge posed by the antisacrificial polemicof Buddhism and Jainism, which had converted many powerful political leaders. The Buddhistsand Jainas too may have had moral reasons to abolish the sacrifice (as they said they did), butthey may also have wanted to make a clean break with Hinduism by eliminating the one elementby which most Hindus defined themselves, Vedic sacrifice. It was politic too for the Buddhists topromote a religion that did not need Brahmins to intercede for individual humans with gods,indeed that denied the efficacy of gods altogether, and this was the final move that distinguishedBuddhists and Jainas from Hindu renunciants, who may not have employed Brahminsthemselves but did not deny their authority for others. It was factors such as these, more thancompassion for furry creatures, that made Buddhists and Jainas abjure animal sacrifice. do (Thestricter ahimsa of the Jainas, which forbade them to take any animal life, prevented them fromfarming, which killed the tiny creatures caught under the plow; they were therefore forced tobecome bankers and get rich.)But when we fold this mix back into the broader issues, we must distinguish amongkilling animals, tormenting animals, sacrificing them, eating them, and, finally, worshiping them.Nonviolence, pacifism, compassion for animals, and vegetarianism are not the same thing at all.Indeed Manu equates, in terms of merit, performing a horse sacrifice and abjuring the eating ofmeat (5.53). It is usual for an individual to eat meat without killing animals (mostnonvegetarians, few of whom hunt or butcher, do it every day) and equally normal for anindividual to kill people without eating them (what percentage of hit men or soldiers devour theirfallen enemies?). We have noted that the horse in the Vedic sacrifice was killed but not eaten.Similarly, vegetarianism and killing may have been originally mutually exclusive; in the earliestperiod of Indian civilization, in places where there was no standing army, meat-eating

householders would, in time of war, like volunteer firemen, become soldiers and consecratethemselves as warriors by giving up the eating of meat. 50 They either ate meat or killed. dpIn later Hinduism, the strictures against eating and killing continued to work at odds, sothat it would have been regarded as better (for most people, in general; the rules would varyaccording to the caste status of the person in each case) to kill a Pariah than to kill a Brahmin,but better to eat a Brahmin (if one came across a dead one) than to eat a Pariah (under the samecircumstances). The degree of purity/pollution in the food that is eaten seems to be an issuedistinct from the issue of the amount of violence involved in procuring it. It makes a difference ifyou find the meat already killed or have to kill it, and this would apply not only to Brahminsversus Pariahs (admittedly an extreme case) but to cows versus dogs as roadkill.Nevertheless, the logical assumption that any animal that one ate had to have been killedby someone led to a natural association between the ideal of vegetarianism and the ideal ofnonviolence toward living creatures. And this ideal came to prevail in India, reinforced by theidea of reincarnation. Thus, in the course of a few centuries, the Upanishads took the Vedicdepiction of the natural and social orders as determined by power and violence (himsa) andreversed it in a 180-degree turn toward nonviolence. The logical link is the realization, so basicto Hinduism in all periods, that every human and every animal dies, that every human and everyanimal must eat, and that eating requires that someone or something (since vegetables are part ofthe continuum of life too) must die. The question is simply how one is going to live, and kill tolive, until death.FAST-FORWARDADDICTION AND RENUNCIATIONOne reason why the renunciant movements were accepted alongside the moreconventional householder religion was that such movements addressed a problem that was ofgreat concern to the wider tradition, the problem of addiction. A profound psychologicalunderstanding of addiction (sakti, dq particularly excessive attachment, ati-sakti dr ) to materialobjects and of the true hallmark of addiction, the recurrent failure to give them up even when onewants to give them up—the “just one more and I will stop” scenario—is evident throughout thehistory of Hinduism. Manu puts it well: “A man should not, out of desire, become addicted toany of the sensory objects; let him rather consider in his mind what is entailed in becomingexcessively addicted to them (4.16).” One reaction to this perceived danger was the movement tocontrol addiction through renunciation and/or asceticism, building dikes to hold back the oceanictides of sensuality. Fasting and vows of chastity were widely accepted, in moderated forms, evenamong householders.The Hindu appreciation of the value of exquisite pleasure (kama) was balanced by anawareness of the dangers that it posed, when cultivated to the point at which it became a vice (adanger appreciated even by the Kama-sutra), and by a number of religious disciplines designedto control the sensual addictions to material objects. Most sorts of renunciation were peaceful,both for the individual renouncer and for the society from which the renouncer withdrew,offsides, hors de combat, while remaining perceived as broadly beneficial to the community atlarge. But other kinds of renunciation were violent both to the physical body and to the socialbody, to the world of families. Hinduism was violent not only in its sensuality but in its reactionagainst that sensuality—violent, that is, both in its addictions and in the measures that it took tocurb those addictions (acknowledging, like Dr. Samuel Johnson, that it is easier to abstain than tobe moderate).

The senses, as we have seen, were analogized not to unglamorous tame animals like pigsor dogs or to more violent wild animals like lions or crocodiles, but to noble, beautiful,expensive horses. Both the senses and horses were a Good Thing for high-spirited warrior kings(though dangerous even for them; remember King Triyaruna and his chariot) but not such aGood Thing for more bovine priests and householders whose goal was control. And as Brahminswere perceived (at least by Brahmins) as needed to control kings, so asceticism was thoughtnecessary to rein in the treacherous senses.Some renouncers chose to marginalize themselves socially in order not to fall prey to theviolence and tyranny of the senses—that is, to addiction. At the opposite end from renunciationon the spectrum of sensuality, addiction, like renunciation, served to marginalize upper-castemales and consign them to the ranks of the other marginalized people who are a central concernof our narrative, women and lower castes. Addiction to the vices marginalized some Brahminsand rajas by stripping them of their power and status; kings, at least in stories, lost theirkingdoms by gambling or were carried away by hunting and landed in dangerous or pollutingcircumstances. Hunting was classified as a vice only when it was pursued when there was noneed for food, just as gambling became a vice when undertaken independent of a need formoney, and sex when there was no need for offspring. Hunting therefore is not a vice for poorpeople, who hunt for squirrels or whatever they can find to eat, though tribal hunters wereregarded as unclean because of their habit of hunting. To some extent, these vices leveled theplaying field.ASCETICISM AND EROTICISMBut sensuality continued to keep its foot in the door of the house of religion; the eroticwas a central path throughout the history of India. Though asceticism remained alive and welland living in India, in other parts of the forest, householders continued to obey the command tobe fruitful and multiply. Material evidence, such as epigraphy, has recently indicated thatHinduism (like Buddhism) on the ground was less concerned with soteriology and more withworldly values than textual scholars have previously assumed. But the religious texts too showthis ambivalence. The tension between the two paths, the violent (sacrificial), worldly,materialistic, sensual, and potentially addictive path of smoke and rebirth, on the one hand, andthe nonviolent (vegetarian), renunciant, ascetic, spiritual, and controlled path of flame andRelease, on the other, was sometimes expressed as the balance between worldly involvement andwithdrawal from life, between the outwardly directed drive toward activity (pravritti) and theinwardly directed drive toward withdrawal (nivritti), between bourgeois householders andhomeless seekers, or between traditions that regarded karma as a good or a bad thing,respectively.From time to time one person or one group raised its voice to accuse the other of missingthe point. Hostility was rare but not unknown. One Brahmana depicts the renunciant life inunflattering terms: “Fathers have always crossed over the deep darkness by means of a son, for ason gives a father comfort and carries him across; the self is born from the self. What use is dirtor the black antelope skin [of the ascetic]? What use are beards and asceticism? Brahmins, get ason; that is what people keep saying.” 51 The householder’s tendency to regard ascetics with amixture of reverence, envy (perhaps tinged with guilt), pity, and distrust 52 sometimes fueled thewidespread image of false ascetics, fake fakirs, and mendacious mendicants, an image just aboutas old as the tradition of genuine ascetics. 53 The 1891 census listed yogis under “miscellaneousand disreputable vagrants” 54 (think of Raikva), and to this day villagers express “considerable

skepticism about yogis in general in Hindu society.” Throughout India, people tell stories aboutyogis who are “mere men” and succumb to temptation by women. 55 The householder couldexpress his ambivalence by honoring “real” ascetics and dishonoring the fakes. Hindus havealways been as skeptic as they are omphaloskeptic.A related tension runs between the vitality of the Hindu sensual and artistic traditions, onthe one hand, and the puritanism of many Hindu sects, on the other. It also led to an ongoingambivalence toward women. Renouncers tended to encourage a virulent loathing and fear ofwomen, while worldly Hindus celebrated women in their sculptures, their poetry, and,sometimes, real life. In addition to various options that were later developed to accommodatemoksha, one solution was to remove from men entirely the responsibility for the conflict betweensexuality and chastity and to project it onto women. 56 For men who took the option of fertility,therefore, women were revered as wives and mothers, while for those who were tempted bychastity, women were feared as insatiable seductresses. This schizoid pattern emerges again andagain in attitudes to women throughout the history of Hinduism.These differences fueled debates on a number of key philosophical and practical issues inHinduism. For Hindus continue to drive, like King Vrisha in the Brahmana story, with one footon the accelerator of eroticism and one foot on the brake of renunciation. The tension appears,for instance, in the interaction of two forms of worship: on the one hand, a form that visualizesthe god with qualities (sa-guna), as an animal, or a man or a woman, with arms and legs and aface, a god that you can tell stories about, a god you can love, a god that becomes incarnate fromtime to time, assuming an illusory form out of compassion for human beings who need to be ableto imagine and love and worship the deity, and, on the other hand, a worship that sees godultimately without qualities (nir-guna), beyond form, ineffable and unimaginable, an aspect ofbrahman. This second viewpoint is often a force for tolerance, rather than difference: If youbelieve that the deity is ultimately without form, you are less likely to insist on the particularform that you happen to worship or to stigmatize the different form that your neighbor worships.Yet the creative tension between renouncers and Hindus who chose to remain in the thick ofhuman things at times threatened the tolerance and diversity of Hinduism.We must, in any case, beware of essentializing these oppositions, as the early Orientalistsdid, as even Karl Marx did, when he characterized Hinduism, in an article in the New YorkTribune, in June 10, 1853, as “at once a religion of sensualist exuberance, and a religion ofself-torturing asceticism; a religion of the Lingam and of the juggernaut; the religion of theMonk, and of the Bayadere [dancing girl].” Rather, we should regard these dichotomies asnothing more than general guidelines or intellectual constructs that help us find our way throughthe labyrinth of ancient Indian religious groups. Just because the Hindus themselves oftenformulated their ideas in terms of polar opposites—and they did—there is no reason to believethat these categories corresponded to any sort of lived experience. For though the ideal ofrenunciation seemed in ways to challenge or even to threaten the traditional Vedic system, it wasentirely assimilated by Hinduism, the world’s great “have your rice cake and eat it” tradition. Topracticing Hindus, it was all part of the same religion, one house with many mansions; theirenduring pluralism allowed Hindus to recognize the fissures but to accept them as part of aunified world. In a way somewhat analogous to the attitude of lay Buddhists or Catholics to nunsand monks, many Hindu householders were happy to support renouncers in order to gainsecondhand merit from a regimen that they themselves were not willing to undergo, andrenouncers were happy to be supported by householders in exchange for their blessings and,sometimes, their teachings. Despite the recurrent conflicts and occasional antagonisms between

the two paths, by and large the creative tension between them was peaceful; the two optionsgenerally respected each other and lived together happily for centuries, carrying on in tandem.The idea of nonviolence supplemented rather than replaced the Vedic demand for bloodsacrifice. Renunciation remained a separate live option alongside the earlier options. Wholegroups—the lower castes, for instance—never saw any conflict between the two ideals or simplyignored both. Where a less vigorous, or less tolerant, tradition might have burned theUpanishadic sages at the stake, where most other religions would have either kicked out orswallowed up the antinomian ascetics, Vedic Hinduism moved over to make a place of honor forthem.In general, the followers of the path of Release attached no opprobrium to the path ofrebirth. Time and again the road forks, but the two paths continue side by side, sometimesjoining, then diverging again, and people can easily leap from one to the other at any moment.Vedic tapas, outward-directed heat, seems at first to conflict with Upanishadic tapas,inward-directed heat. But ultimately both forms of spiritual heat, as well as erotic heat (kama ), 57are aspects of the same human force, simply channeled along different paths. Asceticismricochets against addiction and back again. Indian logic used as a standard example of inferenceone that we use too: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, smoke being the sign (linga, the sameword as the “sign” for male gender) of fire. Which is to say, wherever there is the option oftransmigration, the path of smoke (samsara), there is also the option of Release fromtransmigration, the path of fire (moksha). Less obvious but equally true: Wherever there is theoption of Release from transmigration, fire, there is the option of transmigration, smoke.CHAPTER 8THE THREE (OR IS IT FOUR?) AIMS OF LIFE IN THE HINDU IMAGINARYCHRONOLOGY300-100 BCE The dharma-sutras are composedc. 100 CE Manu composes hisDharma-shastrac. 200 CE Kautilya composes the Artha-shastrac. 300 CE VatsyayanaMallanaga composes the Kama-sutraTHE THREE AIMSNo one enjoyed pleasure just for sexualecstasy; no one hoardedwealth for the sake of pleasure. No one performed acts of dharma forthe sake of wealth; no one committed acts of violence for the sake ofdharma.Ashvaghosha, Buddhacharita (first century CE) 1 In the ideal Hindu world that thepoet Ashvaghosha described, none of the three aims is used in the service of the ones below it:Dharma is more important than wealth, which is more important than pleasure (which is moreimportant than mere sexual thrills). The complex hierarchical relationship among the three aimsof pleasure, wealth, and dharma is what this chapter is all about. It is an interlude, its subjectneither any particular historical period nor any of the main actors in this book (women, lowcastes, dogs, horses), but certain basic ideas that undergird the practice of Hinduism as well as itshistorical development. Central among these is the tension between the paths of rebirth andrenunciation and between a general dharma that includes renunciation and a specific dharma thatoften includes violence, both the violence of war and the violence of sacrifice.THE THREE QUALITIES OF MATTER—PLUS SPIRITThe Upanishads began to assimilate Release (moksha) within an overarching intellectualframework that was only later fully articulated but that had already laid out the basic taxonomiesthat moksha challenged. Alternating with the basic dualisms that we have seen at work, these

taxonomies often linked key concepts together in triads, such as the triad of aims inAshvaghosha’s poem, and, later, quartets. “Three” was a kind of shorthand for “lots and lots”;there are three numbers in Sanskrit grammar: one, two, and plural (consisting of all numbersthree and above). “Three” also became a symbol for interpenetration, interconnectedness, acollectivity of things that go together, a representation of the multivalent, multifaceted,multiform, multi-whatever-you-like nature of the real phenomenal world.One basic triad is attested in brief references as early as the Atharva Veda and theChandogya Upanishad: that of the three strands or qualities of matter (gunas), 2 woven togetherlike the three strands of a braid—lucidity or goodness or intelligibility (sattva), energy or activityor passion (rajas), and darkness or inertia or entropy (tamas). 3 Classical Sankhya philosophy,which provides us with the earliest detailed discussion of the three strands, 4 overlays the initialtriad upon several others, such as the classes of gods, humans, and animals-plants, and the threeprimary colors, not red, blue, and yellow but white (lucidity), red (activity), and black (inertia).So too sattva is thought to predominate in cows and Brahmins, rajas in horses and Kshatriyas,and tamas in dogs and the lower classes.Enduring triads, besides the three qualities of matter, include the three times (past,present, and future); mind, body, and speech; the three humors of the body (doshas: phlegm, bile,and wind); and the three debts that every man owed (study to the sages, funeral offerings to theancestors, and sacrifice to the gods). 5 There are generally said to be three worlds, usuallyidentified as heaven, earth, and hell in Indo-European texts, 6 then sky, ether, and earth in the RigVeda (which also uses the dual model of sky/heaven and earth), and then, in the Puranas, heaven,earth, and hell again, reverting to the Indo-European model. The expedient of simply adding boththe ether and hell to the basic pair of sky and earth is not taken, perhaps because the idea of threeworlds was already so firmly embedded in Hindu cosmology. The number of worlds remainedstable forever—that is, they were never squared, as were other paradigmatic triads that we willsoon encounter. Indeed their resistance to quadripartition is one of the props of the argument thattriads, rather than quartets, are the basis of Hindu thinking.Yet other important clusters began as triads and then became quartets.THE THREE AIMS OF LIFEOne of the most significant shifts from three to four took place within the paradigm of theaims of life (the purusha-arthas). Originally they were a triad, dharma, artha, and kama, knowncollectively as the Trio (trivarga). For assonance, one might call them piety, profit, and pleasure,or society, success, and sex, or duty, domination, and desire. More precisely, dharma includesduty, religion, religious merit, morality, social and ritual obligations, the law, and justice. TheRig Veda had spoken of rita, a cosmic order that came to mean “truth” and was absorbed by thelater concept of ritual dharma in the legal codes. “Dharma” is derived from dhri, “to hold fast, tomake secure,” just as “karma” is derived from kri, “to make or do.” Dharma holds the universetogether; dharma, rather than love, is what makes the world go ’round. Dharma is both the waythings are and the way they should be. 7 Artha is money, political power, and success; it can alsobe translated as goal or aim (as in the three aims of human life), gain (versus loss), money, themeaning of a word, and the purpose of something. Kama represents pleasure and desire, notmerely sexual but more broadly sensual—music, good food, perfume, paintings. Every humanbeing was said to have a right, indeed a duty, to all these aims, in order to have a full life.Sanskrit texts were devoted to each of the three aims; the most famous of these are thedharma text of Manu, the Artha-shastra of Kautilya, and the Kamasutra of Vatsyayana.

Significantly, there are many texts devoted to dharma, but only one Artha-shastra and oneKama-sutra survive from the earliest period. Clearly, dharma was both more important and morecomplex. The codification of dharma at this time is in a sense a reaction to moksha (moreprecisely, to the formulation of moksha as an alternative goal). But moksha must, of course, alsobe reacting to dharma (more precisely, to the still uncodified general concept of social order thatunderlay the Vedas and Brahmanas), for what is it that the renunciant renounces but thehouseholder life, the heart of dharma? Here is another chicken-and-egg process, like Brahma andVishnu creating each other. No one needed a text to justify the householder life in such detailuntil some people started saying they didn’t want to be householders.The earliest texts about dharma are the dharma-sutras, ds from between the third centuryBCE and the first century CE. 8 Close on their heels came the more elaborate texts known as thedharma-shastras, of which the best known is Manu’s Dharma-shastra (in Sanskrit, theManava-dharma-shastra or Manu-smriti, and informally known as Manu), probably composedsometime around 100 CE. The text consists of 2,685 verses and calls upon widely dispersedcultural assumptions about psychology, concepts of the body, sex, relationships between humansand animals, attitudes to money and material possessions, politics, law, caste, purification andpollution, ritual, social practice and ideals, world renunciation, and worldly aims. The claimsmade about the author himself give us a hint of what to expect. Manu is the name of a king (aninteresting attribution, given the priestly bias of Manu’s text) who is the mythological ancestor ofthe human race, the Indian Adam. “Manu” means “the wise one.” Thus manava (“descendedfrom Manu”) is a common word for “human” (which, in terms of the lexical meaning of Manu as“wise,” might also be the Sanskrit equivalent of Homo sapiens). The title therefore conceals apun: Manava, “of Manu,” also means “of the whole human race.”The Artha-shastra, or textbook on politics, is generally attributed to Kautilya(“Crooked”), the minister of the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta in the fourth century BCE. Itmay contain material from that period, though it was completed in the early centuries of theCommon Era, perhaps by 200 CE. But since we cannot know which parts of it were actuallycomposed in the Mauryan period and tell us what really happened then, and which portions are alater fantasy of what things might have been then, we can’t assume that any particular piece isMauryan. The Artha-shastra is a compendium of advice for a king, and though it is often said tobe Machiavellian, Kautilya makes Machiavelli look like Mother Teresa. In addition to muchtechnical information on the running of a kingdom, the Artha-shastra contains a good deal ofthought on the subject of human psychology.Kautilya has a particularly low opinion of religious sensibilities. He advises the king togo out in public in the company of several friends dressed up as gods, so that his people will seehim hobnobbing with them (13.1.3-8); to get a reputation for foreseeing the future by predictingthat someone will die and then having him killed (1.11.17-18); to kill an enemy by arranging tohave the image of a god fall on him (and then presumably proclaiming that the gods killed him)(12.5.1-5); to imitate, in water, the god Varuna or the king of the Cobra People (13.2.16); to playupon people’s faith in sacred texts by staging an elaborate charade with a holy man (13.2.1-9); topretend to be an ogre (13.2.30-37); and to have his agents use the blood of animals to cause ahemorrhage to flow from images of deities in the territory of the enemy and then have otheragents declare defeat in battle in consequence of the bleeding of the deity (3.2.27-8). Evidently,Kautilya shared the opinion often attributed to P. T. Barnum that you cannot fool all of thepeople all of the time, but it isn’t necessary. Images of deities (of which we have absolutely nophysical evidence in the Mauryan period) play a surprisingly prominent role in legal affairs in

this text; there is a specific punishment for people who so forget themselves (anatmanah) thatthey have sex with animals or with images of gods (4.13.28-31) (lingas, perhaps?). dtThe Kama-sutra was probably composed in the second or third century CE, and isattributed to a man named Vatsyayana Mallanaga, who was almost certainly a real human being(in contrast with the entirely mythical Manu), but about whom we know virtually nothing.Vatsyayana, as an author, is therefore more mythical than Kautilya but less mythical than Manu.DIVERSITY AMONG THE THREE MAIN TEXTS OF THE THREE AIMSIn a pattern of mutual creation that should by now be familiar, Manu and theArtha-shastra quote each other; 9 in particular, Manu borrowed from the Arthashastra thesections pertaining to the king, civil administration, criminal and civil law. 10 The Artha-shastra,roughly contemporaneous with several Buddhist texts about kingship, 11 may have contributed to,and taken from, such texts ideas about the importance of taxation and the endowing ofstupas/temples. Clearly this is a shared corpus of ideas. duYet there are significant differences in the attitudes of the three texts toward religion.Manu describes Vedic rituals in great detail but does not mention temples, while both theKama-sutra and the Artha-shastra speak of temples and of festivals of the people but make noreference to any Vedic rituals; different texts apparently catered to people who engaged indifferent religious practices. Kautilya, like Vatsyayana, frequently advises the ruler (asVatsyayana advises the lover) to make use of, as spies, precisely the people whom Manuspecifically outlaws, such as wandering ascetics and wandering nuns (both Buddhist and Hindu).Renunciants, with no fixed address, are most useful to the Artha-shastra politicalmachine, for holy men and women who beg for their living are, along with courtesans, uniquelyable to move freely among all levels of society. (Actors too have such freedom, and all theshastras except for the textbook for actors, the Bharata Natya Shastra, agree that actors are notto be trusted and that sleeping with the wife of an actor does not count as adultery.) Like theArtha-shastra, but perhaps for the opposite reason, the Kama-sutra is wary of nuns; it advises amarried woman not to hang out with “any woman who is a beggar, a religious mendicant, aBuddhist nun, promiscuous, a juggler, a fortune-teller, or a magician who uses love-sorceryworked with roots (4.1.9).” Manu spends page after page in praise of ascetics, but theArtha-shastra has political agents of the king pretend to be wandering ascetics and advises theking to employ genuine ascetics in espionage (1.11.1-20). This surely did further damage to thealready poor reputation of many ascetics, whom the Artha-shastra further denigrates with talesof false prophets (1.13.15).The members of the Trio are often said to be separate but equal. Sometimes they worktogether; thus, for example, one can have sex for the sake of offspring (dharma), for the sake ofgaining political power (artha), or for sheer pleasure (kama), or for some combination of thethree (KS 1.5.1-12). Yet the Trio tended to be hierarchized. 12 The Artha-shastra and Kama-sutrarank dharma first and kama last, but Manu, oddly enough, hedges: “Dharma and artha are said tobe better, or kama and artha, or dharma alone, or artha alone, here on earth. But the fixed rule isthat the Trio is best (2.224).” The three aims form a sort of rock-paper-scissors arrangement, inwhich one is constantly trumping the others in an eternal merry-go-round. Some peopleattempted to correlate the three aims with the triad of the qualities of matter in a kind of unifiedfield theory, (dharma with sattva, kama with rajas, and artha with tamas). The members of theTrio are, like the strands of matter, dynamic, inescapably interrelated, and in constantly shiftingrelationships to one another.

The poet Ashvaghosha was born a Brahmin but converted to Buddhism. He lists the aimsin what was generally agreed to be their ascending order of importance: One should not useartha for kama, since artha is more important than kama, nor dharma for artha, since dharma ismore important than artha. To supply the first element, kama, with a precedent, he invokes anexaggerated, hence less desirable form of the element itself (ecstasy in contrast with merepleasure), and when he reaches the last aim, dharma, which, to continue the pattern, should notbe allowed to compromise a subsequent element higher than itself, he invokes as that subsequentelement violence (himsa). One might have expected ahimsa here, but himsa, in its place, evokesthe specter of Vedic sacrifice, which makes a very different point: In an ideal (pre-Buddhist)world, no one should perform Vedic sacrifices (involving violence to animals) for the sake ofdharma.Yet even dharma must not be honored at the expense of the other aims. Thethirteenth-century commentator on the Kama-sutra (1.1.2) tells this story of the interdependenceof the three aims, here regarded as divinities:KING PURURAVAS AND THE THREE AIMSWhen King Pururavas went from earth toheaven to see Indra, the king of the gods, he saw Dharma and the others [Artha and Kama]embodied. As he approached them, he ignored the other two but paid homage to Dharma,walking around him in a circle to the right. The other two, unable to put up with this slight,cursed him. Because Kama had cursed him, he was separated from his wife and longed for her inher absence. When he had managed to put that right, then, because Artha had cursed him, hebecame so excessively greedy that he stole from all four social classes. The Brahmins, who wereupset because they could no longer perform the sacrifice or other rituals without the money hehad stolen from them, took blades of sharp sacrificial grass in their hands and killed him.Pururavas, a mortal king, is married to the celestial nymph and courtesan Urvashi. Arthamakes Pururavas so greedy that he violates one of the basic principles of dharma—never, ever,steal from Brahmins—and that is his undoing. dvSQUARING THE CIRCLEThe texts we have considered above, and many others, regard the Trio as triple. Butsometimes the aims of life are listed not as a Trio but as a quartet (chatur-varga), in which thefourth aim is moksha. The texts on each of the aims of life do not, by and large, deal withmoksha when they deal with the other three aims, either because they did not take it seriously or,more likely, because they felt it operated in a world beyond the range of their concerns. Thethree worldly aims of life generally resisted the arriviste renunciant fourth; significantly,Ashvaghosha uses the Trio rather than the quartet in the verse we have cited. To use the Indianmetaphor of the Yugas, the dice are loaded three to one in favor of worldliness; kama, artha, anddharma (as defined in the dharma-shastra s) are all for householders. Yet moksha was far tooimportant to be ignored, and that is where the problems arise. From the time of the Upanishads,the interloping fourth was usually transcendent, the banner of a shift away from worldliness (thepath of rebirth) to a life of renunciation and asceticism (the path of Release).Not surprisingly, the Kama-sutra in general gives very short shrift to moksha (1.2.4) andeven applies the term, surely tongue in cheek, to the courtesan’s successful jettisoning (“settingfree”) of an unwanted lover (6.4.44-5). On the other hand, other texts regard moksha as farsuperior to the other aims, or, rather, in a class apart. Some authors also attempted variousunsatisfactory, overlapping correlations between the four aims and other quartets/triads, such asthe three (twice born) classes, with moksha and dharma for Brahmins; all three of the original

Trio for Kshatriyas; and artha for Vaishyas. It works better with the colors and qualities: whitelucidity for Brahmins, red energy for Kshatriyas, and black torpor for the lower classes. But thematchmaking is generally a doomed attempt to put a square peg in a round hole.To this basic triad-become-quartet others were soon assimilated. 13 The Vedas are usuallyregarded as a triad, and many Hindus to this day are named Trivedi (“Knower of Three Vedas”).But the Vedas are also regarded as a quartet, including the Atharva Veda, and other Hindus arenamed Chaturvedi (“Knower of Four Vedas”). (A foolish Brahmin in a seventh-century CE playnaively brags that he will be honored even by Brahmins who are Panchavedi,Shadvedi—Knowers of Five Vedas, Six Vedas. 14 ) Even the triad of qualities (gunas) wassquared, when female prakriti (“matter, nature,” consisting of the three qualities) was contrastedwith male purusha (“spirit, self, or person”), the transcendent fourth. Similarly, where once theHindus had formulated a group of three passions—lust (kama), anger (krodha), and greed (lobha,or, in some formulation, fear [bhaya])—now a fourth metaphysical, epistemological emotion wasadded: delusion (moha). The new fourth often involved the concept of silence: To the threepriests of the sacrifice was added a fourth priest (called the Brahmin) who was merely the silentwitness; to the three Vedic modes of experience (waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep) wasadded a fourth stage, just called the fourth (turiya), a stage of merging completely intobrahman. 15 When keeping time in music too, Indians count three “heavy” beats and a fourth“empty” beat. 16There are also some quartets that never seem to have been triads, such as the four Ages oftime, or Yugas, named after the four throws of the dice. Yet the first three ages form one group(Eden, the way it was in illo tempore), while the last (the Kali Age) forms the other group (now,reality). The score, as usual, was not four, but three plus one.FIVE SOLUTIONS TO THE FOURTH ADDITION TO THE THREE AIMSHinduism came up with various solutions to the potential conflicts between renunciationand the householder life resulting from the addition of the fourth aim, moksha. 17First, it was said that the goals of sacrifice and renunciation were to be followed notsimultaneously but seriatim, one at a time in sequence. When the aims are four and in sequence,they are sometimes grouped with what came to be known as the four stages of life (ashramas,also, confusingly, the word for a hermitage). But in the earliest texts that mention them (the earlydharma-sutras), the four ashramas were not stages at all but four options for lifestyles that couldbe undertaken at any period in a man’s life: the chaste student (brahma-charin), the householder(grihastha), the forest dweller (vanaprastha), and the renouncer (samnyasin). 18 The system wasan attempt, on the part of Brahmins who inclined to renunciation, to integrate that way of lifewith the other major path, that of the householder. The first ashrama, that of the chaste student,always retained its primary meaning of a vow of chastity undertaken at any time of life. 19 But bythe time of Manu, the four ashramas had become serial (M 6.87-94), rather than choices that onecould make at any time. From then on they were generally regarded as stages, and eventually thethird stage in the quartet, that of the forest dweller, became highly problematic, especially whenattempts were made to distinguish it from the fourth stage, that of the renouncer. 20The fourth aim, moksha, clearly corresponds to the fourth stage of life, the renouncer’sstage, and because of that, scholars have often constructed a false chronology regarding thestages as yet another system of an original three plus a later one. But the first three aims do notcorrelate so easily with the first three stages. This is how the Kama-sutra attempts to put themtogether and to specify the age at which each should be undertaken:

A man’s life span is said to be a full hundred years. By dividing his time, he cultivates the threeaims in such a way that they enhance rather than interfere with each other. Childhood is the timeto acquire knowledge and other kinds of artha, the prime of youth is for kama, and old age is fordharma and moksha. Or, because the life span is uncertain, a man pursues these aims as theopportunity arises, but he should remain celibate until he has acquired knowledge (1.2.1-6).The Kama-sutra hedges. It speaks of three aims but then sneaks moksha in on thecoattails of dharma to include it after all. It does not actually mention the stages of life(ashramas) but speaks instead of childhood (brahma-charya, where, instead of Vedic learning,the boy presumably learns a trade), the prime of youth (the householder stage), and old age(which might be forest dwelling, renunciation, or neither, just staying home and getting old).And though the author assigns (three) ages for the (three, actually four) aims, he then unsays thatdivision with his remark that one must carpe the diem at any time. The suggestion that you canindulge in kama at any stage of life (except childhood) reflects (or perhaps even satirizes?)widespread arguments about whether you can engage in renunciation (samnyasa) at any stage. 21Most Hindus regarded renunciation as something that one did after having children andgrandchildren, a decision often indefinitely postponed while theoretically extolled. Many Hindusprayed, with St. Augustine, “Make me chaste, O Lord, but not yet,” while for some, the ideal ofrenunciation, even of forest-dwelling, functioned as an imagined safety valve to keep them goingin the householder stage: “I can always get out if and when I want to.” But making the fourth aiman optional fourth stage trivialized the claims of the full renunciant philosophy, which wasfundamentally opposed to the householder life. Other resolutions were therefore proposed.Second was the argument from symbiosis, or plenitude: The two groups of people,worldly and transcendent, need each other, to compose society as a whole, the householder tofeed the renouncer, the renouncer to bless the householder. There are two forms of immortality,one achieved through one’s own children and one through renunciation. 22 Thus the renouncer’sholiness and knowledge are fed back into the society that supports him, 23 and the paradox of therenunciant Brahmin is that he must remain outside society in order to be useful inside. 24The third solution was compromise: Sometimes a householder would renounce for awhile (following a particular vow) or in some ways (giving up meat or fasting at regularintervals). The forest-dweller life too, the third stage, was a compromise between thehouseholder and renunciant stages, though, like all compromises, it was hedged with problems. 25The fourth solution was identification. Thus it was said that the householder was arenouncer if he played his nonrenunciant role correctly, that fulfilling one’s worldly obligationwas Release (as the god Krishna tells Prince Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: Do your work well, asa warrior, and you win the merit of renunciation). Thus Manu (5.53) promises that a person whogives up eating meat amasses the same good karma as one who performs a horse sacrifice. Aperson who understood things properly (yo evam veda) could win the merit of the goal he hadnot chosen, even while following the goal he had. It was also said that one must have sons,usually regarded as the goal of the worldly life, to achieve Release. Some Tantrics took this lineof argument to the extreme and argued that there was no difference between the apparentlyopposed paths of Release (moksha) and the enjoyment of sensuality (bhoksha). So too, in theformulation of the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, the world of rebirth (samsara) was not, asmost people thought, the opposite of the world of release from rebirth (nirvana), but the sameplace. This was a solution that many people gratefully accepted.The fifth and ultimate Hindu solution was hierarchy, but mutual hierarchy: For some,renunciation outranked family life, and for others, family life outranked renunciation. The drive

to hierarchize, throughout classical Hindu thought, rides roughshod over the drive to presentequal alternatives or even a serial plan for a well-rounded human life. The Mahabharata claimsthat the three other stages of life cannot surpass that of a good householder, 26 while the rewardthat most of the shastras promise to the reader/hearer “who knows this” is moksha. 27RENUNCIATION AND VIOLENCE IN PARTICULAR AND GENERALDHARMAWe have noted the preeminence of dharma among the three aims both in its status and inthe number of texts devoted to it. Dharma is complex, in part because it is a site of contestationbetween renunciation and violence.Universal Hindu dharma was an overarching, unitary, nonhierarchical category of thereligion for everyone, a shared human aim. 28 This single dharma (sometimes called perpetualdharma [sanatana dharma] or dharma held in common [sadharana dharma]) involved generalmoral precepts for all four classes, though different texts had different ideas about what thoseprecepts were. Even a single text, Manu’s dharma text, lists them differently in different places.In one verse, “Nonviolence, truth, not stealing, purification, and the suppression of the sensorypowers are the dharma of the four classes, in a nutshell (10.63).” Nonviolence also comes first inanother, related verse in Manu: “Nonviolence, the suppression of the sensory powers, therecitation of the Veda, inner heat, knowledge, and serving the guru bring about the supreme good(12.83-93; 10.63).” But Manu includes only one of these (suppression of the sensory powers, notnonviolence) in the ten commandments for the top three classes in all four stages of life: “Truth,not stealing, purification, suppression of the sensory powers, wisdom, learning, patience,forgiveness, self-control, and lack of anger (6.91-4).” Significantly, he does not includegenerosity, the primary Vedic virtue, in any of these lists. The general thought behind all the listsis a vague social ethic.Indeed, the code was so nebulous that one would not think that as an ideal it would pose aproblem for anyone. At the same time, however, each individual was supposed to follow aunique path laid out for him at birth, a path determined primarily by the class and, eventually, thecaste (jati) into which he was born. This was his own particular dharma, his sva-dharma, the jobthat every man in any particular family was supposed to do, further constrained by such factorsas his stage of life and his gender. (I use the male pronoun advisedly; these rules were not meantto apply to women, whose only sva-dharma was to obey their husbands, and their onlysacrament, marriage.) A person’s sva-dharma was sometimes called his innate activity (karma inits fifth meaning).Manu explains how this came about in terms of his own take on the theory of karma,which in his usage means something like assigned work:THE ORIGIN OF INDIVIDUAL KARMASIn the beginning the creator made the individualnames and individual karmas and individual conditions of all things precisely in accordance withthe words of the Veda. And to distinguish karmas, he distinguished right from wrong, and heyoked these creatures with the pairs such as happiness and unhappiness. And whatever karma theLord yoked each creature to at first, that creature by itself engaged in that very karma as he wascreated again and again. Harmful or harmless, gentle or cruel, right or wrong, truthful orlying—the karma he gave to each creature in creation kept entering it by itself. Just as theseasons by themselves take on the distinctive signs of the seasons as they change, so embodiedbeings by themselves take on their karmas, each his own (1.21-30). The circularity of karma isexplicitly set from the time of creation: You must be what you are; you cannot change your

qualities. The re-creation of individual characteristics is inevitable, likened to the natural processof the seasons. An individual is born to be a king, or a servant, or, more precisely, in terms of theactuality of caste rather than the theory of class, a potter or a shoemaker. How are their karmasassigned to them? How does Manu know? It’s quite simple: He claims to have been aneyewitness, even a participant, in the creation of the world.The innate characteristics also include what we might regard as individual nature, forwhich there is another term in Sanskrit, sva-bhava. Thus it is the innate, particular nature(sva-bhava) of a tiger to be cruel and of a dove to be gentle, just as it is the karma of a tiger tokill and eat smaller animals and of a dove to coo. This too is sva-dharma, which is built into you,leaving you few choices in many realms of action, though you have free will in other realms,such as the amassing of karma.We therefore are trapped within a basic social paradox: If your sva-dharma was to be awarrior or a butcher, how were you to reconcile this with the universal dharma that gave pride ofplace to nonviolence, the stricture against taking life? Hinduism validated the plurality (and thehierarchy) of dharma by endorsing sva-dharma, but at the same time, it validated the unity ofdharma by endorsing general dharma. As in parliamentary rules of order, the shastras state thatthe particular rule generally overrides the general rule; sva-dharma trumps general dharma. Butthe larger paradox of absolutism and relativism remained, and there are no easy answers.CHAPTER 9WOMEN AND OGRESSES IN THE RAMAYANA400 BCE to 200 CECHRONOLOGYc. 300 BCE-300 CE The Mahabharata is composedc. 200 BCE-200 CE TheRamayana is composed327-25 BCE Alexander the Great invades Northwest South Asiac. 324BCE Chandragupta founds the Mauryan dynastyc. 265-232 BCE Ashoka reignsc. 250 BCEThird Buddhist Council takes place at Pataliputrac. 185 BCE The Mauryan dynasty endsc. 185BCE Pushyamitra founds the Shunga dynasty73 BCE The Shunga dynasty endsc. 150 BCE Themonuments of Bharhut and Sanchi are builtc. 166 BCE-78 CE Greeks, Scythians, Bactrians, andParthians enter IndiaTHE POET, THE HUNTER, AND THE CRANEAfter the poet Valmikilearned the story of Rama, he went to bathein a river. By the river a pair of mating cranes were sweetly singing.A Nishada hunter, hostile and plotting evil, shot down the male ofthe couple. When the hen saw her mate writhing on the ground, hislimbs covered in blood, she cried out words of compassion. Andwhen Valmiki saw that the Nishada had brought down the malecrane, he was overcome with compassion, and out of his feeling ofcompassion he thought, “This was not dharma, to kill a sweetly singingcrane for no reason.” When he heard the female crane crying, hesaid, “Nishada, you will never find peace, since you killed the male ofthis pair of cranes at the height of his desire.” Then Valmiki realizedthat he had instinctively spoken in verse, in a meter that he called theshloka, because it was uttered in sorrow (shoka).Ramayana (400 BCE to 200 CE) (1.2.81.1-17)This vignette that the Ramayana tells about itself weaves together the themes ofdangerous sexuality, the violation of dharma, compassion toward animals, attitudes toward tribalpeoples, and the transmutation of animal passions into human culture—all central to the concerns

of this chapter. At the same time, the story of Rama and Sita raises new questions about deitieswho become human and women who are accused of being unchaste. Where the Brahmanasdocumented a period of new, though dispersed, political stability, and the Upanishads gaveevidence of a reaction against that very stability, the Ramayana (R dw ) and the Mahabharata(MB), the two great Sanskrit poems (often called epics), were composed in this period (c. 300BCE to 300 CE) that saw the rise and fall of the first great empire in India, followed by a periodof chaos that rushed into the vacuum left by that fall.NORTH INDIA IN 400 BCE TO 200 CEThis is the moment when we have the first writing that we know how to decipher, dxengraved in stone in the form of the Ashokan edicts, as well as other historicalsources—monuments, coins—to supplement our knowledge of the Sanskrit texts. Another majornew source of our knowledge of this period comes from the reports of Greeks and other visitors.There is also a wealth of art history, ranging from terra-cotta figures, both human and animal,made in villages, to polished stone pillars with capitals, for the rich and powerful in the cities.We learn from these sources that the extension of agriculture into forested areastransformed the lives of forest dwellers; that craft specialists often emerged as distinct socialgroups; and that the unequal distribution of wealth sharpened social differences, 1 though newaccess to economic resources raised the social position of slaves, landless agricultural laborers,hunters, fishermen and fisherwomen, pastoralists, peasants, village headmen, craftspeople, andmerchants. 2 In addition to the ongoing tension between Brahmins and Kshatriyas, new tensionsarose as the lower classes gained economic and political power and began to challenge the statusof the upper classes. dyJust as the doctrines of Buddhism and Hinduism have much in common at this period, sotoo the same snakes spread their hoods over the heads of the Buddha and Vishnu, the samebuxom wood nymphs swing around trees in Hindu and Buddhist shrines, and both traditionscarve images of the goddess of luck (Lakshmi). 3 The design of some of the Hindu temples mayhave borrowed from the Buddhist precedent, for in some of the oldest temples the shrine, withthe image in the center, was surrounded by an ambulatory path resembling the path around astupa. Buddhism and Jainism remained friendly conversation partners, their rivalry withHinduism often spurring both factions to borrow from each other in a positive way. But thenon-Vedic religions also became more competitive, powerful rivals for political patronage aswell as for the hearts of men and women, and a source of ideas that challenged the very core ofemergent Hinduism. One of those ideas was a more insistent concern for the treatment ofanimals, leading to a great deal of soul-searching about the meaning of dharma. The attitude toanimal sacrifice was also much affected by the rise of the two great male Hindu gods Shiva andVishnu in sectarian movements that had no use for Vedic ritual.THE RISE OF THE MAURYASRajagriha (in Magadha, the present-day Bihar) and Kashi (Varanasi, in Koshala), whichhad come to prominence in the time of the Upanishads, remained great centers of power but werenow rivaled by Kaushambi in Vatsa. There were still oligarchies at this time, about whoseorigins legends now began to circulate. These legends insisted that the founders were of highstatus but had, for one reason or another, left or been exiled from their homeland. 4 The theme ofKshatriyas in exile is reflected in the narrative of both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana,whose heroes, before they assume their thrones in the capital cities, are forced to endure long

periods of exile in the wilderness, where the plot, as they say, thickens. dz But exile is also a partof a much earlier theme embedded in the ceremony of royal consecration, 5 a ritual of the king’sexile among the people that is in turn mythologized in the many tales of kings cursed to liveamong Pariahs.Magadha controlled the river trade, forests, and rich deposit of minerals; in 321 BCEPataliputra (the modern Patna), then said to be the world’s largest city, with a population of150,000 to 300,000, 6 became the capital of the first Indian Empire, the Mauryan Empire. 7 In 327BCE, Alexander the Great managed to get into India over the mountain passes in the Himalayasand crossed the five rivers of the Punjab, no mean accomplishments, though thousands of othervisitors to India did it too, before and after him. But his soldiers refused to campaign any farther,and so, in 326, he followed the Indus to its delta and, apparently regarding that as a sufficientaccomplishment, went back to Babylon, though not before allegedly slaughtering manyBrahmins who had instigated a major rebellion. 8 In India, it seems, he wasn’t all that Great.But the Indo-Greeks remained, primarily but not only in the Gandhara region. Theybrought with them Roman as well as Greek trade; they imported Chinese lacquer and sent SouthIndian ivory west to Pompeii. In the Gandhara marketplace, in the northwest, you could buystone palettes, gold coins, jewelry, engraved gems, glass goblets, and figurines. The art ofGandhara is heavily influenced by Greek tastes, as are the great Buddhist monuments of Bharhutand Sanchi, from the first century BCE, which powerful guilds (shrenis) endowed. The SoutheastAsia and China trade (both by sea and over the Central Asian silk route) also involvedmanuscripts, paintings, and ritual objects. The trade in ideas was just as vigorous; Greeceimported the teachings of naked philosophers, ea and many sects—Materialists, Ajivikas,ascetics, Jainas, and Buddhists—publicly disputed major religious questions. 9Out of this culturally supersaturated mix, the Mauryan Empire crystallized. MahapadmaNanda, the son of a barber (a Shudra of a very low caste indeed, and said, by the Greeks, to havemarried a courtesan 10 ), had founded a short-lived but significant dynasty, the first of a number ofnon-Kshatriya dynasties, during which he waged a brief vendetta against all Kshatriyas. 11Chandragupta Maurya usurped the Nanda throne in 321 BCE and began to build a great empire.Buddhist texts say that the Mauryas were Kshatriyas of the clan of Moriyas (“Peacocks”) andShakyas (the clan of the Buddha himself), while Brahmin texts say they were Vaishyas or evenShudras, and heretics. A story goes that a Brahmin named Chanakya (“chickpea”), nicknamedKautilya (“Crooked” or “Bent” or “Devious”), was Chandragupta’s chief minister and helpedhim win his empire, advising him not to attack the center of the Nanda Empire but to harass theborders, as a mother would advise a child to eat a hot chapati from the edges. Chanakya is said tobe the author of the great textbook of political science, the Artha-shastra, which, though it wasnot completed until many centuries later, may in some ways reflect the principles of Mauryanadministration, 12 particularly the widespread use of spies, both foreign and domestic; theMauryan emperor Ashoka too talks unashamedly about people who keep him informed. 13According to Jaina traditions, when Chandragupta, under the influence of a Jaina sage,saw his subjects dying of a famine that he had failed to counteract, he abdicated and fasted todeath at Shravana Belgola, in Southwest India. Bindusara succeeded him in 297 BCE. And thenBindusara died, and Ashoka became king, ruling from 265 to 232 BCE and further extending theboundaries of the Mauryan Empire.THE AFTERMATH OF THE MAURYASLet us bracket until the next chapter the details of Ashoka’s reign and move on to the

subsequent history of this period.In 183 BCE, Pushyamitra, a Brahmin who was the commander of the army, assassinatedthe last Maurya (who was allegedly a half-wit), took control of the empire through a palace coup,and founded the Shunga dynasty. Buddhists say that Pushyamitra persecuted Buddhists and gaveincreasing patronage to Vedic Brahmins, and an inscription proclaims his renewed sponsorshipof sacrifices, including not one but two horse sacrifices, by which he established his dynasty. It ispossible that Pushyamitra himself eb acted as the officiating priest. 14 He is also alleged to haveperformed a human sacrifice in the city of Kaushambi . 15 Be that as it may, by killing the lastMauryan king, he overthrew a Kshatriya ruler and established a renewed Vedic order. Like theKshatriya sages of the Upanishads, Pushyamitra reinstated the ancient priest-king model, thoughfrom the other direction: Instead of an Upanishadic royal sage—a Kshatriya with the knowledgethat Brahmins usually had—he was a warrior priest, a Brahmin who played the role of a king. Apassage in a much later text implies that the Shungas were of low birth, 16 but other sourcesidentify Pushyamitra’s Shunga dynasty as an established Brahmin clan. Whatever his origins,Pushyamitra seems to have established a new Brahmin kingship and reigned for a quarter of acentury (c. 185-151 BCE). On these shifting political, religious, and economic sands, Brahminsconstituted the most consistently homogeneous group, because of their widespread influence ineducation and their continuing status as hereditary landholders. 17 Long after many of the Hindukingdoms had fallen, the Brahmin class within them still survived.Yet Buddhists thrived, as their sources of income shifted to a wider base. Buddhistmonuments depict many scenes of popular devotion and were often financed not by dynasticpatronage but by individual benefactors, both monks and nuns within the institutions and,outside, merchants increasingly interested in the security and patronage that religious centersoffered in an age of political uncertainty. 18 During this period the wholecommunity—landowners, merchants, high officials, common artisans—funded major Buddhistprojects. In Orissa (Kalinga), King Kharavela, a Jaina, published a long autobiographicalinscription in which he claims to have supported a Jaina monastery and had Jaina texts compiledand to have respected every sect and repaired all shrines. 19 Women, including women frommarginal social positions (such as courtesans), also patronized Buddhists and Jainas. Thewidespread public recognition of such women both as donors and as renouncers also had animpact on the role of women within Hinduism and on the development of Hindu religious ritualsthat came to replace the Vedic sacrifice.Kingdoms now began to dominate the political scene and to have enough of a sense ofthemselves to be almost constantly at war with one another. The ancient Indian king was called“the one who wants to conquer” (vijigishu). That, together with the “circle” theory of politics,according to which the country on your border was your enemy, and your enemy’s enemy wasyour ally, and so forth, made for relentless aggression. Kings killed for thrones; parricide wasrampant. 20The historian Walter Ruben summarized the period well:According to Buddhist tradition Bimbisara of Magadha was killed by his son Ajatasatru and thefour following kings were also patricides; then the people supplanted this dynasty of murderousdespots by electing the minister Sisunaga as king. The last [descendant of Sisunaga] was killedby the first Nanda, allegedly a barber and paramour of the queen. The last Nanda was killed bythe Brahmin Kautalya. The last Maurya was killed by the Brahmin Pushyamitra, founder of theSunga dynasty. Then followed centuries of war and political trouble caused by foreign invadersfrom the North-west. . . . Thus, in the course of five hundred years between 500 B.C. and 30

B.C., people in Northern India became accustomed to the idea that it was the right and even theduty of this or that man to assassinate a king. . . . These five hundred years were basic for theevolution of Indian civilization, for the growth of epic and Buddhist literature and for thedevelopment of Vaisnava and Saiva mythology and morals. 21 And with that grim historicalprelude, let us consider the story of Rama.THE TRANSMISSION OF THE RAMAYANA AND MAHABHARATAThe Ramayana may have begun as a story as early as 750 BCE, 22 but it did not reach itspresent form until between 200 BCE and 200 CE. Its world therefore begins in the North Indianworld of the Upanishads (characters such as Janaka of Videha play important roles in both theUpanishads and the Ramayana) and continues through the world of the shastras (c. 200 CE). TheRamayana and Mahabharata mark the transition from the corpus of texts known as shruti, theunalterable Vedic canon, to those known as smriti, the human tradition. They are religious texts,which end with the “fruits of hearing” them (“Any woman who hears this will bear strong sons,”etc.). Hindus from the time of the composition of these poems to the present moment know thecharacters in the texts just as Euro-Americans, even if they are not religious, know Adam andEve and Noah’s Ark. Hindus can ask, “What would Rama do?” This popularization also meansthat we now find more input from non-Brahmin authors and that new issues arise regarding thestatus of the lower classes. We also have more information about women, who, in these stories,at least, are still relatively free, though that freedom is now beginning to be challenged.The Ramayana and Mahabharata were probably composed and performed first in theinterstices between engagements on a battleground, to an audience that probably consistedlargely of Kshatriyas and miscellaneous camp followers. The first bards who recited it were acaste called Charioteers (Sutas), probably but not certainly related to the chariot drivers whoappear frequently in narratives, like Vrisha with King Triyaruna. Each Charioteer would havegone into battle with one warrior as a combination chauffeur and bodyguard. And then at night,when all the warriors retired from the field and took off their armor and had their woundspatched and got massaged and perhaps drunk, the bards would tell the stories of their exploits aseveryone sat around the campfires. Thus the Charioteer served not just as a driver but as a herald,friend, and confidant, providing the warrior with advice, praise, and criticism. 23 Thiscombination of roles ec made the Charioteers, on the one hand, trusted counselors in court circlesand, on the other, so far below the courtiers in status (being, through their connection withanimals, roughly equivalent to Vaishyas) that when the warrior Karna, in the Mahabharata, wasthought to be the son of a Charioteer, the princes scorned him.Later, traveling bards no longer participated in battle, or drove chariots at all, but stillrecited the great poems in villages and at festivals and still retained their low social status; inaddition, priestly singers praised the king in the course of royal sacrifices, while later in theevening the royal bard would sing poems praising the king’s accomplishments in war andbattle. 24 The Mahabharata says that the Charioteers told their stories during the intervals of agreat sacrifice, and the audience in this later period would have been, on the one hand, moreBrahminical—for the Brahmins were in charge of both the sacrifice and the literature ofsacrifice—and, on the other hand, more diverse, as the camp followers would now be replacedby men and women of high as well as low class, who would have been present at the publicceremonies where the tales were recited. At this point the texts were probably circulated orally,as is suggested by their formulaic, repetitious, and relatively simple language. 25Later still, the reciters, and improvisers, were probably the Brahmins who were

officiating at the sacrifice and recited the Ramayana and Mahabharata in the interstices betweenrituals on the sacrificial ground and probably also at shrines (tirthas) along pilgrimage routes.These Brahmins eventually committed the texts to writing. Some scholars believe that the textswere composed by Brahmins from the start, 26 Brahmins all the way down. But the Sanskrittradition itself states unequivocally, and surprisingly, that non-Brahmins, people of low caste,were originally in charge of the care and feeding of the two great Sanskrit poems, whichBrahmins took over only sometime later, one of many instances of the contributions of low-castepeople to Sanskrit literature. And the bards really did memorize all of it. ed27 The literate too knewthe texts by heart and wrote commentaries on written versions of them.The texts of the two great poems, originally composed orally, were preserved both orallyand in manuscript form for more than two thousand years. ee Their oral origins made it possibleboth for a great deal of folklore and other popular material to find its way into these Sanskrittexts and for the texts to get into the people. Scenarios in the texts may have been re-created indramatic performance in towns and villages. 28 But the texts were also eventually consigned towriting and preserved in libraries; since the climate and the insects tend to destroy manuscripts,they have to be recopied every two hundred years or so if they are to survive; someone has tochoose them and to go to the trouble and expense of having them copied. Buddhism and Jainismhad bequeathed to Hinduism, by the seventh century CE, the tradition of gaining merit by havingsacred manuscripts copied and donating them to libraries, and that is how these texts werepreserved, generating merit for the patrons and income for the scribes. 29THE RAMAYANAValmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana, the oldest-surviving version of the tale, a text of sometwenty thousand verses, establishes the basic plot:RAMA, SITA, AND RAVANARavana, the ogre (Rakshasa) king of Lanka, was a Brahmin anda devotee of Shiva. He had obtained, from Brahma, a boon that he could not be killed by gods orantigods or ogres or any other creatures—though he neglected to mention human beings, asbeneath contempt. The god Vishnu therefore became incarnate as a human being, the princeRama, in order to kill Ravana. Sita, who had been born from a furrow of the earth, becameRama’s wife. When Rama’s father, Dasharatha, put Rama’s younger brother Bharata on thethrone instead of Rama, Rama went into exile in the jungle with Sita and another brother,Lakshmana. Ravana stole Sita and kept her captive on the island of Lanka for many years. Withthe help of an army of monkeys and bears, in particular the monkey Hanuman, who leapedacross to Lanka and then built a causeway for the armies to cross over, Rama killed Ravana andbrought Sita back home with him. But when he began to worry about talk that her reputation, ifnot her chastity, had been sullied by her long sojourn in the house of another man, he forced herto submit to an ordeal by fire. Later he banished her, but she bore him twin sons, who came tohim when they were grown. Sita too returned briefly but then disappeared forever back into theearth. Rama ruled for many years, a time of peace and justice. Rama’s brothers arefractional brothers, not even half brothers. The childless king Dasharatha had obtained a magicporridge, infused with the essence of Vishnu, to share among his queens; he gave half to his firstwife, Kausalya, who gave birth to Rama; three-eighths to Sumitra, who bore Lakshmana andShatrughna (each made of three-sixteenths of Vishnu), and one-eighth to Kaikeyi, who boreBharata. efThe Ramayana, composed at a time when kingdoms like Videha were becomingpowerful in a post-Mauryan era, legitimates monarchy through the vision of the golden age of

Ram-raj, Rama’s Rule. This vision occurs twice in the Ramayana, once at the end of the sixth ofthe seven books, when Rama and Sita are united after her fire ordeal (6.130)—“There were nowidows in distress, nor any danger from snakes or disease; people lived for a thousandyears”—and then again at the end of the last book, when Sita has departed forever:As the glorious and noble Rama ruled, striving for dharma, a long time passed. The bears andmonkeys and ogres remained under Rama’s control, and he conciliated kings every day. The godof storms rained at the proper time, so that there was abundant food; the skies were clear. Happy,healthy people filled the city and the country. No one died at the wrong time; no living creaturesgot sick; there was no violation of dharma at all, when Rama ruled his kingdom (7.89.5-10).This time of peace and prosperity became the template for a kind of theocracy thathaunted Indian politics for centuries to come. But the actual historical scene, with its parricidesand usurpations, also produced a royal paranoia that is revealed in the underside of Ram-raj,surfacing in palace coups such as the plot to have Bharata take the throne in place of Rama(2.8.18-27) and the machinations of the “bears and monkeys and ogres” that are said to remainunder Rama’s control in Ram-raj.THE FORGETFUL AVATARValmiki’s Rama usually forgets that he is an incarnate god, an avatar (“crossing down”from heaven to earth) of Vishnu. He genuinely suffers and despairs when he’s separated fromSita, as if he had lost touch with the divine foreknowledge that he would win her back.Sometimes Valmiki too treats Rama as a god, sometimes not. For the Ramayana is situated onthe cusp between the periods in which Rama was first a minor god and then a major god. Hindusin later periods often took the devotion to Rama expressed by Hanuman and Lakshmana as aparadigm for human devotion (bhakti) to a god. Yet in the Ramayana these relationships lack thepassionate, often violent qualities that characterize the fully developed bhakti of the Tamil textsand the Puranas from the tenth century CE.As the bhakti movement increasingly imagined a god who combined the awesomepowers of a supreme deity with the compassion of an intimate friend, it reinforced the vision ofRama as someone who was both limited by human constraints and aware of his divinity.Commentators argued that Rama had intentionally become ignorant 30 or that he merelypretended to forget who he was, 31 and in some later retellings, Rama never does forget that he isVishnu. But it is worth noting that though the Ramayana tells a long, detailed story to explainwhy the monkey Hanuman, the great general of the monkey army, forgets that he has magicpowers (to fly, to become very big and very small, etc.), except when he needs them to get toLanka (7.36), it never explains why it is that Rama (who does not have such magic powers)forgets that he is an incarnation of Vishnu. Both Rama and Krishna (who is an avatar of Vishnuin the Mahabharata) flicker between humanity and divinity in spatial as well as temporal terms;they are not only part-time gods but partial or fractional parts of Vishnu, who remains there, fullyintact, always a god, while his avatars function on earth, always human. The two avatars are bornof human wombs, and when they die, they merge back into Vishnu. Like Rama, Krishnasometimes does, and sometimes does not, act as if he (as well as the people with whom heinteracts) knew that he was an avatar of Vishnu.In a sense, the double nature of incarnation develops in a direct line from the Upanishadicbelief that we are all incarnations of brahman but subject to the cycle of reincarnation. And somegods appear on earth in disguise already in the Veda, particularly Indra, the great shape shifter,while, later, Shiva often appears briefly in human disguise among mortals in the Mahabharata. If

you put these ideas together, you end up with an all-powerful god who appears on earth in acomplete life span as a human. Why do these two great human avatars appear at this moment inIndian history? Perhaps because an avatar was a way to attach already extant divinities to thegrowing sect of Vishnu, a way to synthesize previous strands and to appropriate other people’sstories. Not only did some of these strands and stories come from Buddhism and Jainism, but theavatar was an answer to one of the challenges that these religions now posed for Hinduism.For by this time the Buddha and the Jina had successfully established the paradigm of areligious movement centered upon a human being. eg But Rama and Krishna beat the Buddhistsand Jainas at their own game of valorizing the human form as a locus of superhuman wisdomand power, for Rama and Krishna are humans with a direct line to divinity, drawing their powerfrom a god (Vishnu) far greater than any Vedic god and at the same time, through theincarnations, grounded in humanity.WOMEN: BETWEEN GODDESSES AND OGRESSESBeing human, Rama is vulnerable. Despite his divine reserves, he is tripped up again andagain by women—his stepmother Kaikeyi, Ravana’s sister the ogress Shurpanakha, and,ultimately, his wife, Sita.Sita is not only the ultimate male fantasy of the perfect woman but has as her foil a groupof women and ogresses who are as Bad as Sita is Good. No one, male or female, could fail to getthe point, and no one did. When Rama, the eldest, the son of the oldest queen, Kausalya, is aboutto ascend the throne, the youngest queen, Kaikeyi, uses sexual blackmail (among other things) toforce Dasharatha to put her son, Bharata, on the throne instead and send Rama into exile: Shelocks herself into her “anger room” (India’s answer to Lysistrata), puts on filthy clothes, liesdown on the ground, and refuses to look at the king or speak to him, and the besotted Dasharathais powerless to resist her beauty (2.9.16-19). Kaikeyi is the evil shadow of the good queen,Kausalya. But Kaikeyi herself is absolved of her evil by having it displaced onto the oldhunchback woman who corrupts Kaikeyi and forces her, against her better judgment, to act asshe does. For bringing about the sufferings that will overwhelm Kausalya, Sita curses notKaikeyi but the hunchback, whose deformation is itself, in the Hindu view, evidence that shemust already have committed some serious sin in a previous life. On the other hand, whenShatrughna (Lakshmana’s twin brother) abuses the hunchback, he yells curses on Kaikeyi. In thistext, even the shadows have shadows.THE LOSS OF SITASita never dies, but she vanishes four times. First she vanishes when Ravana carries heroff, and Rama gets her back. Then she parts from Rama three times, into three naturalelements—a fire, the forest, and the earth—as a direct result of that first estrangement: Ramakeeps throwing her out now because Ravana abducted her years ago.First, right after the defeat of Ravana, Rama summons Sita to the public assembly. Then:SITA ENTERS THE FIRERama said to her: “Doubts have arisen about your behavior. Go, then,wherever you wish. I can have nothing to do with you. What man of good family could takeback, simply because his mind was so tortured by longing for her, a woman who had lived in thehouse of another man? How can I take you back when you have been degraded upon the lap ofRavana? Set your heart on Lakshmana or Bharata, or on Sugriva [the king of the monkeys], or[Ravana’s brother] Vibhishana, or whoever will make you happy, Sita. For when Ravana sawyour gorgeous body, he would not have held back for long when you were living in his own

house.” Sita replied to Rama, “You distrust the whole sex because of the way some womenbehave. If anyone touched my body, it was by force.” Then, to Lakshmana: “Build a pyre for me;that is the medicine for this calamity. I cannot go on living, ruined by false accusations.” As thefire blazed, she stood before it and said, “As my heart never wavered from Rama, so may thefire, the witness of all people, protect me.” And she entered the blaze. As the gods remindedRama who he was, Fire rose up with Sita in his lap and placed her in the lap of Rama, saying,“Here is your Sita; there is no evil in her. Though she was tempted and threatened in variousways, she never gave a thought to Ravana. She must never be struck; this I command you.”Rama said, “Sita had to enter the purifying fire in front of everyone, because she had lived solong in Ravana’s bedrooms. Had I not purified her, good people would have said of me, ‘ThatRama, Dasharatha’s son, is certainly lustful and childish.’ But I knew that she was always true tome.” Then Rama was united with his beloved and experienced the happiness that he deserved(6.103-6). 32 “Dasharatha’s son is certainly lustful” is a key phrase. Rama knows all too wellwhat people said about Dasharatha; when Lakshmana learns that Rama has been exiled, he says,“The king is perverse, old, and addicted to sex, driven by lust (2.18.3).” Rama says as muchhimself: “He’s an old man, and with me away he is so besotted by Kaikeyi that he is completelyin her power, and capable of doing anything. The king has lost his mind. I think sex (kama) ismuch more potent than either artha or dharma. For what man, even an idiot like father, wouldgive up a good son like me for the sake of a pretty woman? (2.47.8-10).” Thus Rama invokes thetraditional ranking of dharma over sex and politics (kama and artha) and accuses his father ofvaluing them in the wrong way, of being addicted to sex. He then takes pains to show that whereDasharatha made a political and religious mistake because he desired his wife too much (kamaover artha and dharma), he, Rama, cares for Sita only as a political pawn and an unassailablychaste wife (artha and dharma over kama). Rama thinks that sex is putting him in politicaldanger (keeping his allegedly unchaste wife will make the people revolt), but in fact he has itbackward: Politics is driving Rama to make a sexual and religious mistake; public concernsmake him banish the wife he loves. Rama banishes Sita as Dasharatha has banished Rama.Significantly, the moment when Rama kicks Sita out for the second time comes directly after along passage in which Rama makes love to Sita passionately, drinking wine with her, for manydays on end; the banishment comes as a direct reaction against the sensual indulgence (7.41).Rama’s wife is above suspicion, but Rama suspects her. His ambivalence, as well as hers, isexpressed in the conflicts between the assertions, made repeatedly by both of them, that Ravananever touched her, that he did but it was against her will, and that physical contact is irrelevant,since she remained true to him in her mind.When Rama publicly doubts Sita and seems unconcerned about her suffering, the godsask how he can do this, adding, “Can you not know that you are the best of all the gods? You aremistreating Sita as if you were a common man.” Rama, uncomprehending, says, “I think ofmyself as a man, as Rama the son of King Dasharatha. Tell me who I really am, and who myfather is, and where I come from (6.105.8-10).” Rama is not thinking straight; the gods have toreveal his avatar to him and use it as an argument to catapult him out of his trivial and blindattitude to Sita. Later still, when Rama has renounced Sita, and Brahma has again reminded himthat he is Vishnu, Shiva gives Rama and Sita a vision of the dead Dasharatha, who says to Sita,“My daughter, don’t be angry because Rama threw you out. He did this in your own interest, todemonstrate your purity. eh The difficult test of your chastity that you underwent today will makeyou famous above all other women. My daughter, you need no instructions about your duty toyour husband, but I must tell you that he is the supreme god (6.107.34-35).” And when Sita has

vanished again into the earth, this time for good, and Rama is raging out of control, Brahmacomes with all the gods and says to him, “Rama, Rama, you should not grieve. Remember yourprevious existence and your secret plan. Remember that you were born from Vishnu (7.88).” 33Sita walks into fire determined either to kill herself or to win back the right to go onliving with the very much alive Rama. The ordeal is not, however, a suicide, though she says she“cannot go on living”; on the contrary, it is an antisuttee, ei in which she enters the fire when herhusband is very much alive, not to join him in heaven (as suttees usually do) but as a kind ofthreat either to leave him or to win back the right to go on living with him here on earth. ej As athreat it works: Rama takes her back, and they plan to live happily ever after, a fairy-tale ending.But we may see a touch of irony in the closing statement that he “got the happiness that hedeserved,” for it does not last; the rumors return, and Rama banishes Sita, though she ispregnant; she goes to Valmiki’s hermitage and gives birth to twin sons. That is the second timeSita leaves him after her return from Lanka.Perhaps Valmiki ek thought there was something unsatisfactory about this banishment thatinspired him to add on another, more final and more noble departure for Sita. It begins yearslater, when the twins, now grown up, come to Rama’s horse sacrifice and recite the Ramayana,as Valmiki has taught it to them. The Ramayana lays great emphasis on the paternity of Rama’stwin sons, on their stunning resemblance to Rama; the crowds of sages and princes at Rama’scourt “waxed ecstatic as they seemed to drink in with their eyes the king and the two singers. Allof them said the same thing to one another: ‘The two of them look just like Rama, like tworeflections of the same thing. If they did not have matted hair and wear bark garments, we wouldhave no way of distinguishing between the two singers and Rama’ (7.85.6-8).” Yet Ramapointedly recognizes them el as “Sita’s sons” but not necessarily his own (7.86.2). This is anessential episode, for male identity and female fidelity are the defining desiderata for eachhuman gender in these texts; no one is interested in female identity or male fidelity. 34 Theseconcerns play an important role in the treatment of Sita.This is the moment when Rama summons Sita again, for the last time, and she herselfbrings about the final separation:SITA ENTERS THE EARTHRama sent messengers to Valmiki to say, “If she is irreproachablein her conduct and without sin, then let her prove her good faith.” Valmiki then came with Sita,and swore by his unbroken word of truth that the two boys were Rama’s children and that he hadseen Sita’s innocence in a vision. Rama replied, “I agree entirely; Sita herself assured me before,and I believed her and reinstated her in my house. But there was such public condemnation that Ihad to send her away. I was absolutely convinced of her innocence, but because I feared thepeople, I cast her off. I acknowledge these boys to be my sons. I wish to make my peace with thechaste Sita in the middle of the assembly.” Then Sita swore, “If, even in thought, I have neverdwelt on anyone but Rama, let the goddess Earth receive me.” As she was still speaking, amiracle occurred: From the earth there rose a celestial throne supported on the heads of CobraPeople [Nagas]; the goddess Earth took Sita in her arms, sat her on that throne, and as the godswatched, Sita descended into the earth.His eyes streaming with tears, head down, heartsick,Rama sat there, thoroughly miserable. He cried for a long time, shedding a steady stream oftears, and then, filled with sorrow and anger, he said, “Once upon a time, she vanished intoLanka, on the far shore of the great ocean; but I brought her back even from there; so surely Iwill be all the more able to bring her back from the surface of the earth (7.86.5-16, 7.87.1-20,7.88.1-20).” But he cannot bring her back. When Sita enters the earth, she leaves the kingalone, without his queen. She abandons and implicitly blames him when she leaves him, turning

this second ordeal (again she asks for a miraculous act to prove her complete fidelity to Rama)into a sacrifice as well as, this time, a permanent exit.Sita’s two ordeals prove her purity, but they are also a supreme, defiant form of protest. 35Sita is no doormat. She does not hesitate to bully her husband when she thinks that he has made aserious mistake. When Rama tries to prevent her from coming to the forest with him, she says:“What could my father have had in mind when he married me to you, Rama, a woman in thebody of a man? What are you afraid of? Don’t you believe that I am faithful to you? If you takeme with you, I wouldn’t dream of looking at any man but you—I’m not like some women whodo that sort of thing. But you’re like a procurer, Rama, handing me over to other people, though Icame to you a virgin and have been faithful to you all this long time.” Rama then insists that hehad said she couldn’t come with him only in order to test her (2.27.3-8, 26). Yeah, sure; she willhear that “testing” line again. Her assertion that Rama is confusing her with other, less faithfulwomen is also one that we will hear again, for she repeats it years later, when Rama accuses herof having been intimate with Ravana.When they first enter the forest, Sita asks Rama why he carries weapons in this peacefulplace, especially when he has adopted the attire (and, presumably, the lifestyle and dharma) of anascetic. em Rama claims that he needs the weapons to protect her and all the other defenselesscreatures in the forest. In an impassioned discourse against violence, Sita tells Rama that shefears he is by nature inclined to violence and that simply carrying the weapons will put wickedthoughts in his mind (3.8.1-29). (Indeed he kills many creatures in the forest, both ogres thatdeserve it and monkeys that do not. Even the ogress Shurpanakha echoes Sita’s concerns byquerying Rama’s apparent commitment to the conflicting dharmas of asceticism and married life[3.16.11].)THE GODDESS SITASita is not, however, just a woman; she is very much a goddess, though never asexplicitly as Rama is a god. In contrast with Rama, whose divinity increases in the centuries afterthe Valmiki text, Sita was a goddess before Valmiki composed her story. Sita in the Ramayana isan ex-goddess, a human with traces of her former divinity that the story does not erase butlargely ignores, whereas Rama is a god in the making, whose moral imperfections leave tracesthat future generations will scurry to erase. The two meet in passing, like people standing onadjacent escalators, Rama on the way up, Sita on the way down.One Rig Vedic poem to the deity of the fields analogizes the furrow (which is what theword “Sita” means) to the earth cow who is milked of all foods (RV 4.57.6-7). When Rama wedsSita, he actually marries the earth, as the king always does; the goddess Earth is the consort ofevery king. But this time he also marries someone explicitly said to be the daughter of the Earthgoddess. Sita’s birth, even more supernatural than Rama’s, is narrated several times. 36 On oneoccasion, Sita’s father, King Janaka of Videha, tells it this way:THE BIRTH OF SITAOne day in the sacrificial grounds, I saw the ultimate celestial nymph,Menaka, flying through the sky, and this thought came to me: “If I should have a child in her,what a child that would be!” As I was thinking in this way, my semen fell on the ground. Andafterward, as I was plowing that field, there arose out of the earth, as first fruits, my daughter,who has celestial beauty and qualities. Since she arose from the surface of the earth, and wasborn from no womb, she is called Sita, the Furrow. 37 Rama is well aware of the story.Grieving after Sita has entered the earth, he says to Earth, “You are my own mother-in-law,since, once upon a time, King Janaka drew Sita out of you when he was plowing.” More

particularly, Sita was born when Janaka was plowing the sacrificial arena, in preparation for theceremony of royal consecration, and she goes back down to earth during Rama’s horse sacrifice;both her birth and her death are framed by sacrifices. Like Rama, Sita becomes incarnate as partof the divine plan to kill Ravana. Sita, not Rama, is primarily responsible for the death ofRavana. Ravana’s brother Vibhishana (who eventually abandons Ravana and fights on Rama’sside) tries in vain to persuade Ravana to give Sita back to Rama and finally says to Ravana,“Why did you bring here that great serpent in the form of Sita, her breasts its coils, her thoughtsits poison, her sweet smile its sharp fangs, her five fingers its five hoods?” 38 Shiva promises thegods that “a woman, Sita the slayer of ogres,” will be born, and that the gods will use her todestroy the ogres (6.82.34-37).At the end of the Ramayana, when Sita keeps disappearing and reappearing in a series ofepiphanies, she is scorned and insulted until she commits two acts of violence that prove both herpurity and her divinity. In this pattern, she resembles a god, particularly Shiva, who vandalizesDaksha’s sacrifice when Daksha disdains to invite Shiva to it (MB 12.274). But Sita’s story moreclosely follows the pattern of equine Vedic goddesses like Saranyu and Urvashi: She comes fromanother world to a mortal king, bears him children (twins, like Saranyu’s), is mistreated by him,and leaves him forever, with only the twin children to console him. She can be set free from herlife sentence on earth, her contract with a mortal man (Rama), only if he violates the contract bymistreating her.Male succession is the whole point of the old myth of the equine goddess who comesdown to earth to have human children, and female chastity is essential to that succession, anotherreason for the trials of Sita. Rama experiences the agonies of love in separation (viraha) that latercharacterized the longing for an otiose divinity; in this, as in so much of the plot, Rama is to Sitaas a devotee is to a deity. His separation from Sita is also part of the divine plan to destroyRavana: Long ago, in a battle of gods against antigods, the wife of the sage Bhrigu kept revivingthe antigods as fast as the gods could kill them; Vishnu killed her, and Bhrigu cursed Vishnu,saying, “Because you killed a woman, you will be born in the world of men and live separatedfrom your wife for many years (7.51).” So Rama has a previous conviction of abusing womeneven before he is born on earth. And as we will soon see, he has an even stronger track record forkilling ogresses. Rama’s mistreatment of Sita creates a problem—the justification of Rama—thatinspires later Ramayanas to contrive ingenious solutions.Sita walks out on Rama in the end (as Urvashi does in the Veda but not in theBrahmanas), an extraordinary move for a Hindu wife. Moreover, unlike the paradigmatic goodHindu wife, Sita very definitely is not reunited with her husband in heaven. For while she goesdown into the earth, returning to her mother, he goes (back) up to heaven when he dies yearslater, returning to Vishnu. Both of them revert to their divine status, but in opposite places. WhenBrahma is chastising Rama for doubting Sita, he reassures Rama that Sita is an incarnation of thegoddess Lakshmi and will be reunited with him in heaven (6.105.25-26), but we never see thathappen. Rama’s return to heaven as Vishnu is described in great detail, and the monkeys revertto their divine form, and everyone you’ve ever heard of is there to welcome him in heaven(including the ogres), but not Sita (7.100).Yet the more Sita is a goddess, the more the pattern of the myth of equine goddessesrequires her to be mistreated—as if she were nothing but a human woman. Like Urvashi, Sita istreated less like a goddess and more like a mortal as her husband takes over the position of theimmortal in the couple. Her banishing is portrayed in entirely mortal terms, and she suffers as amortal woman. Like Rama, she regards herself as a mortal and forgets her divinity; she says,

when she is imprisoned on Lanka, “I must have committed some awful sin in a previous life tohave such a cruel life now. I want to die but I can’t. A curse on being human, since one can’t diewhen one wants to (5.23.18-20).” Since she (wrongly) thinks she is a mortal, she thinks shecannot die, which goes against common sense; moreover, the ironic implication follows that ifshe were an immortal (as she is), she could die when she wanted to—precisely what she does inthe end when she enters the earth. And just as Rama has to be mortal to kill Ravana, so Sita playsthe mortality card in order to resist Ravana and hence to destroy him; Ravana’s ogress consortsremind her that she is a human woman, and she acknowledges this fact, incorporating it into herresistance: “A mortal woman cannot become the wife of an ogre (5.22.3, 5.23.3)” (a remark thatcould also be read as a warning against intercaste marriage).Sita is subject to mortal desires and delusions and is vulnerable even though she is said tobe invulnerable. For instance, Rama insists (when he claims that he knew all along that Sita waschaste and that he made her go through fire only to prove it to everyone else), “Ravana could noteven think of raping Sita, for she was protected by her own energy (6.106.15-16).” Yet that veryverb, meaning “to rape, violate, or assault,” is used when Ravana grabs Sita by the hair (3.50.9),a violation from which her chastity does not in fact protect her. When Ravana plots to captureSita, he gets the ogre Maricha to take the form of a marvelous golden deer, thickly encrustedwith precious jewels, which captivates Sita—the princess in exile is delighted to find thatTiffany’s has a branch in the forest—and inspires her to ask Rama to pursue it for her.Lakshmana rightly suspects that it is the ogre Maricha in disguise, and Rama agrees, but Sitainsists that Rama get it for her. The deer leads Rama far away from Sita, and when Rama killsthe deer and it assumes its true form as an ogre, Rama realizes that he has been tricked and hasthereby lost Sita, whom Ravana (by taking the form of an ascetic and fooling Sita) has capturedin Rama’s absence (3.40-44). So while Rama ultimately yields to the addiction of hunting,following the deer farther and farther than he knows he should, Sita falls for two illusions (thedeer and the ascetic) that make her vulnerable to Ravana and, for many years, lost to Rama.SHADOW WOMEN: OGRESSESWhen Sita defends herself against accusations that she has broken her marriage vows,and earlier, when she scolds Rama in the forest, she explicitly contrasts herself with “somewomen” who behave badly, unnamed shadows who may include not only Kaikeyi and thehunchback woman but also, perhaps, the lascivious ogre women as well as mythological womenlike Ahalya, the archetypal adulteress, whose story the Ramayana tells not once but twice. 39 Thepolarized images of women in the Ramayana led to another major split in Hinduism, for thoughthe Brahmin imaginary made Sita the role model for Hindu women from this time forward, otherSanskrit texts as well as many vernacular versions of the Ramayana picked up on the shadowaspect of Sita, the passionate, sexual Sita, 40 an aspect that is also embedded in this first text, onlypartially displaced onto other, explicitly demonic women. Yet the later Brahmin imaginarygreatly played down Sita’s dark, deadly aspect and edited out her weaknesses to make her theperfect wife, totally subservient to her husband. How different the lives of actual women in Indiawould have been had Sita as she is actually portrayed in Valmiki’s Ramayana (and in some otherretellings) been their official role model. The Valmiki Ramayana thus sowed the seeds both forthe oppression of women in the dharma-shastric tradition and for the resistance against thatoppression in other Hindu traditions.Rama’s nightmare is that Sita will be unchaste, and the sexually voracious ogresses thatlurk inside every Good Woman in the Ramayana express that nightmare. In a later retelling, the

Bala-Ramayana, the ogress Shurpanakha takes the form of Kaikeyi, and another ogre takes theform of Dasharatha, and they banish Rama; Dasharatha and Kaikeyi have nothing to do with it atall! The entire problem has been projected onto ogres, and the humans remain pure as the drivensnow. In Valmiki’s text, however, Kaikeyi and Sita still have their inner ogresses within them,expressed as the natural forces that prevent women from realizing the ideal embodied in theidealized Sita. The portrayals of rapacious ogresses hidden inside apparently good women makeus see why it was that Sita’s chastity became a banner at this time while the other aspects of hercharacter were played down; they help us understand why women came to be repressed sovirulently in subsequent centuries: to keep those ogresses shackled.There are three particularly threatening ogresses in the Ramayana. Rama kills the ogressTataka (1.25.1-14), after a sage reminds him of the mythological precedents for killing a woman(1.24.11-19). Lakshmana cuts off the nose and breasts and ears of Ayomukhi (“Iron Mouth”)after she suggests to him, “Let’s make love (3.65.7),” and he cuts off the nose and ears ofShurpanakha when she similarly propositions Rama (3.16-17). en This multilation is thetraditional punishment that the dharma texts prescribe for a promiscuous woman, an adulteress.The mutilation of Shurpanakha is the only assault against a woman that has seriousconsequences for Rama, because she is Ravana’s sister. When she attempts to seduce Rama, heteases her cruelly: “I am already married and couldn’t stand the rivalry between co-wives. ButLakshmana is chaste, full of vigor, and has not yet experienced the joys of a wife’s company; heneeds a consort. You can enjoy him and you won’t have any rival (3.17.1-5).” That’s whenLakshmana cuts off her nose. eo She flees in agony and humiliation and tells Ravana about Sita,praising her beauty and thus triggering the war, for Ravana takes the bait (Sita) as the godsintended from the start. Shurpanakha’s attempt to replace Sita in Rama’s bed, which Rama andLakshmana mock, exposes a deep resemblance between the two women and a deep ambiguity inthe text’s attitude to Sita’s sexuality. On the one hand, Sita is the epitome of female chastity. Onthe other hand, she is, like Shurpanakha, a highly sexual woman, 41 a quality that may explain notonly why Ravana desires her but also why he is able to carry her off.ANIMALSTHE HORSE SACRIFICESita’s final disappearance takes place on the occasion of a horse sacrifice. This isappropriate, for she herself lives out the paradigm of an equine goddess, and she is brought to thehorse sacrifice by her twin sons, who are bards, related to the Charioteer bards who perform inthe intervals of the ritual. The names of the sons, Kusha and Lava, are the two halves of the nounkushilava, designating a wandering bard, as if one son were named “po-” and the other “-et.” Bycoming to Rama’s horse sacrifice, Kusha and Lava preserve Rama’s family, and as the kushilavathey preserve the story of Rama’s family. So too Valmiki both invents the poetic form, theshloka, and raises the poets.The horse sacrifice plays a crucial role at both ends of the Ramayana. At the start KingDasharatha, childless, performs the horse sacrifice not for political and martial aggrandizementbut to have a son, another express purpose of the ritual. Yet the list of kings whom he invites tothe sacrifice constitutes a roll call for the territories that had better come when he calls them, andit is a wide range indeed, from Mithila and Kashi to the kings of the east and the kings of thesouth (1.12.17-24). The stallion roams for a year and is killed, together with several aquaticanimals, while three hundred sacrificial animals, reptiles, and birds are killed separately. QueenKausalya herself cuts the stallion open with three knives and then lies with him for one night, as

do the two other queens (1.13.27-28). The king smells (but does not eat) the cooked marrow. Thesacrifice, described in great detail, is a total success: Vishnu becomes incarnate in Rama and hishalf brothers.Years later, after Rama has banished Sita, he resolves to perform a ceremony of royalconsecration, but Lakshmana tactfully persuades him to perform, instead, a horse sacrifice,“which removes all sins and is an infallible means of purification (7.84.2-3).” To persuade him,Lakshmana tells him stories of two people who were restored by a horse sacrifice: Indra waspurged of Brahminicide after killing a Brahmin antigod, ep and a king who had been cursed tobecome a woman regained his manhood. Thus Rama performs the ceremony to expiate his sins,which are never mentioned, but which surely include his killing of Ravana (a necessaryBrahminicide, but Brahminicide nonetheless, for Ravana, though an ogre, is not only a Brahminbut a grandson of Prajapati), corresponding to Indra’s killing of several Brahmin antigods, andthe banishing of Sita, a sin against a woman that corresponds, roughly, to the error of the kingwho became a woman. Lakshmana follows the horse as it “wanders” for a year. But since Ramahas banished Sita, there is no queen to lie down beside the stallion or to bear the king an heir. eq Itis therefore necessary for Sita (and the heir[s]) to return, and they come to the horse sacrifice(7.86-8).These two horse sacrifices are successfully completed, though the second one is flawedby the absence of the queen, who reappears only to be lost again. This second sacrifice, intendedto produce offspring, does so indirectly (by attracting Kusha and Lava), but it is also intended togive the king, through the queen, the fertile powers of the earth. er In the end Rama loses both thequeen and his connection, through her, with the earth, her mother.MONKEYSThe central characters of this text—Rama, the perfect prince; Sita, his perfect wife, andLakshmana, his perfect half brother (later to form the template for the perfect worshiper of thefully deified Rama)—were born to be paradigms, squeaky clean, goody-goodies (or, in the caseof the perfectly ogric ogre Ravana, a baddy-baddy). If that were all there were to the Ramayana,it would have proved ideologically useful to people interested in enforcing moral standards or inrallying religious fanatics, as, alas, it has proved all too capable of doing to this day in India, butit would probably not have survived as a beloved work of great literature, as it has also done. Wehave seen how the ogresses express the shadow side of Sita. The bears and monkeys, the twospecies often said to be closest to the human in both their appearance and their behavior, give themale characters their character. Let us concentrate on the monkeys, as the bears play only aminor role.Neither so glamorous as horses nor so despised as dogs, the monkeys are the star animalact in the Ramayana. The Ramayana draws a number of parallels, both explicit and implicit,between the humans and the monkeys. 42 The appropriateness of these parallels is supported bysuch factors as the human characters’ assumption that though they cannot understand thelanguage of the deer (Rama explicitly laments this fact when he runs off after the golden deerthat he suspects—rightly—of being an ogre in disguise), they do not comment on the fact thatthey can understand the language of monkeys, who are called the deer of the trees. Hanuman notonly speaks a human language, but he also speaks Sanskrit. When he approaches Sita on theisland of Lanka, he anxiously debates with himself precisely what language he will use toaddress her: “Since I’m so small, indeed just a small monkey, I’d better speak Sanskrit like a

human. I must speak with a human tongue, or else I cannot encourage her. But if I speak Sanskritlike a Brahmin, Sita will think I am Ravana, who can take any form he wants [as she mistook thereal Ravana, a notorious shape changer, for a Brahmin sage]. And she’ll be terrified and scream,and we’ll all be killed.” He finally does address her in Sanskrit (he begins to tell a story: “Onceupon a time there was a king named Dasharatha . . . ”), and she is suitably impressed. She doesnot scream (5.28.17-23, 5.29.2).Special monkeys are the sons of gods, as special people are. Sugriva is the son of Surya(the sun god), Valin is the son of Indra (king of the gods), and Hanuman is the son of Vayu, thewind. (Hanuman later became a deity in his own right, worshiped in temples all over India. 43 )But monkeys also unofficially double for each of the major human characters of the Ramayana.These monkey doubles are, ironically, more flesh and blood, as we would say, more complexand nuanced, indeed more human than their human counterparts. Or rather, added to thoseoriginal characters, they provide the ambiguity and ambivalence that constitute the depth andsubstance of the total character, composed of the original plus the shadow. All the fun is in themonkeys.After Ravana has stolen Sita, Rama and Lakshmana meet Sugriva, who used to be king ofthe monkeys and claims that his brother Valin stole his wife and throne. Rama sides with Sugrivaand murders Valin by shooting him in the back when he is fighting with Sugriva, an episode thathas continued to trouble the South Asian tradition to this very day. Why does Rama kill Valin atall? Apparently because he senses a parallel between his situation and that of Sugriva andtherefore sides with Sugriva against Valin. But Rama sides with the wrong monkey. Theallegedly usurping monkey, Valin, is, like Rama, the older half brother, the true heir; the“deposed” king, Sugriva, the younger brother, originally took the throne (and the monkey queen)from the “usurping” brother, and Valin just took it back. Valin, not Sugriva, is the legal parallelto Rama. Yet Rama sympathizes with Sugriva because each of them has lost his wife and has abrother occupying the throne (and the queen) that was his. The plots are the same, but the villainsare entirely different, and this is what Rama fails to notice. Moreover, unlike Sita, but in keepingwith Rama’s fears about Sita, Valin’s wife was taken by the brother who took the throne. Onanother occasion, Rama says he would gladly give Sita to Bharata (2.16.33). Does he assumethat you get the queen when you get the throne? He kills Valin because the rage and resentmentthat he should feel toward his half brother and father, but does not, are expressed for him by hismonkey double—the “deposed” monkey king, Sugriva—and vented by Rama on that double’senemy, Valin. We have noted that when Bharata is given the throne instead of Rama, the halfbrothers graciously offer each other the kingdom (2.98). But the monkeys fight a dirty battle forthe throne, and for the queen too.Even if we can understand why Rama kills Valin, why does he shoot him in the back?The monkeys’ access to human language also grants them access to human ethics, or dharma.The dying Valin reproaches Rama, saying, “I’m just a monkey, living in the forest, a vegetarian.But you are a man. I’m a monkey, and it’s against the law to eat monkey flesh or wear monkeyskin (4.17.26-33).” Rama defends himself against the charge of foul play by saying, “Peoplealways use snares and hidden traps to catch wild animals, and there’s nothing wrong about this.Even sages go hunting. After all, you’re just a monkey, but kings are gods in human form(4.18.34-38).” Rama is on thin ice here; the text judges him to have violated human dharma inhis treatment of the monkey. And the monkeys remind him that he is a man (i.e., higher than amonkey), just as the gods elsewhere remind him, when he behaves badly, that he is a god (i.e.,higher than a man).

Valin also takes on the displaced force of Rama’s suspicions of another half brother,Lakshmana. The text suggests that Rama might fear that Lakshmana might replace him in bedwith Sita; it keeps insisting that Lakshmana will not sleep with Sita. It doth protest too much.(Recall that when Rama kicks Sita out for the first time and bitterly challenges her to go withsome other guy, he lists Lakshmana first of all.)The tension between the two half brothers, over Sita, is a major motivation for the plot.When Rama goes off to hunt the golden deer and tells Lakshmana to guard Sita, Sita thinks shehears Rama calling (it’s a trick) and urges Lakshmana to find and help Rama. Lakshmana saysRama can take care of himself. Sita taunts Lakshmana, saying, “You want Rama to perish,Lakshmana, because of me. You’d like him to disappear; you have no affection for him. For withhim gone, what could I, left alone, do to stop you doing the one thing that you came here to do?You are so cruel. Bharata has gotten you to follow Rama, as his spy. That’s what it must be. ButI could never desire any man but Rama. I would not even touch another man, not even with myfoot! (3.43.6-8, 20-24, 34).” Lakshmana gets angry (“Damn you, to doubt me like that, alwaysthinking evil of others, just like a woman [3.43.29])” and stalks off, leaving Sita totallyunprotected, and Ravana comes and gets Sita. When Rama returns, Lakshmana reports a slightlydifferent version of what she said to him: “Sita, weeping, said these terrible words to me: ‘Youhave set your evil heart on me, but even if your brother is destroyed, you will not get me. Youare in cahoots with Bharata; you’re a secret enemy who followed us to get me.’ ” Rama ignoresall this and simply says to Lakshmana, “You should not have deserted Sita and come to me,submitting to Sita and to your own anger, just because an angry woman teased you(3.57.14-21).”But why would Sita have said such a thing if she didn’t fear it on some level? And whywould it have made Lakshmana so mad if he did not fear it too? When Rama, hunting for Sita,finds the cloak and jewels that she dropped as Ravana abducted her, he says to Lakshmana, “Doyou recognize any of this?” And Lakshmana replies, “I have never looked at any part of Sita buther feet, so I recognize the anklets, but not the rest of her things.” Yet, evidently, Rama hadexpected him to recognize the jewels that had adorned higher parts of Sita’s body. So too, thoughthe text, insisting on Rama’s infallibility, displaces the error onto Sita and insists that Ramaknew it was an ogre all along, the vice of hunting carries him along in its wake nevertheless:Rama follows the ogre as deer too far and so is unable to protect Sita from Ravana, thusinadvertently engineering his own separation from her. Just as Sita was prey to her desire for thedeer, and Rama to his desire to hunt it, so Lakshmana too is vulnerable to Sita’s taunts about hisdesire for her; their combined triple vulnerabilities give Ravana the opening he needs.At the very end of the Ramayana, Rama is tricked into having to kill Lakshmana. Thishappens as the result of an elaborate (but not atypical, in this text) set of vows and curses. Deathincarnate comes to talk with Rama, to remind him that it is time for him to die. Death makesRama promise to kill anyone who interrupts them; Lakshmana guards the door. An asceticarrives and threatens to destroy the world if Lakshmana won’t let him see Rama; Lakshmana,caught between a rock and a hard place, chooses the lesser of two evils, his own death rather thanthe destruction of the world. He interrupts Rama and Death, whereupon Rama says that forLakshmana, being separated from him (Rama) would be so terrible that it would be theequivalent of death, and so he satisfies the curse by merely banishing Lakshmana, who thencommits suicide. Does this episode represent a displaced, suppressed desire of Rama to killLakshmana? If so, it is thoroughly submerged, one might even say repressed, on the humanplane, but it bursts out in the animal world when Rama kills Valin, the monkey who took away

his brother’s wife.This is the sense in which the monkeys are the side shadows of the human half brothers: 44They suggest what might have been. They function in some ways as the human unconscious;both Valin and Sugriva (4.28.1-8; 4.34.9) are said to be addicted (sakta) to sensual behavior, towomen, and to drinking. There is no monkey gambling or hunting to speak of, but the monkeysas a group get blind drunk in one very funny scene that resembles a frat party out of control. Themonkeys are not merely Valmiki’s projections or projections from Rama’s mind; they are, rather,parallel lives. The monkey story is not accidentally appended; it is a telling variant of the life ofRama. But it does not mirror that life exactly; it is a mythological transformation, taking thepieces and rearranging them to make a slightly different pattern, as the dreamwork does,according to Freud. Animals often replace, in dreams, people toward whom the dreamer hasstrong, dangerous, inadmissible, and hence repressed emotions. 45 Or to put it differently, thedreamer displaces emotions felt toward people whom he cannot bear to visualize directly in hisdreams and projects those emotions onto animals. In the Ramayana, poetry has the function ofthe dreamwork, reworking the emotions repressed by political concerns (such as the need to denyRama’s all too obvious imperfections) and projecting them onto animals. When Rama’s culturalrole as the perfect son and half brother prevents him from expressing his personal resentment ofhis father and half brother, the monkeys do it for him. In the magical world of the monkey forest,Rama’s unconscious mind is set free to take the revenge that his conscious mind does not allowhim in the world of humans.TALKING ANIMALS, BESTIAL HUMANSMonkeys are not the only talking animals who stand in for humans in the Ramayana. 46 Ina related corpus of myths, hunters mistake people for animals in sexual (or quasisexual)situations. These myths offer yet another set of implicit arguments for the growing movement infavor of vegetarianism.The underlying theme is the interruption of sexuality. The Ramayana briefly narratessuch an incident, in the story of Shiva and his wife, Parvati:THE GODS INTERRUPT SHIVA AND PARVATIParvati (“Daughter of the Mountain[Himalaya]”) won Shiva’s heart and they married. Shiva joyously made love to her night andday—but without ever shedding his semen. The gods were afraid that Shiva and Parvati wouldproduce a child of unbearable power, and so they interrupted them. The god of fire took upShiva’s seed, from which the six-headed god Skanda, general of the gods, was born. But Parvati,enraged, cursed the wives of the gods to be barren forever, since they had thwarted her while shewas making love in the hope of bearing a son (1.34-35). Shiva places his seed in Fire, ratherthan in Parvati, as an anthropomorphization of the ritual act of throwing an oblation of butter intothe consecrated fire that carries the oblation to the gods, acting out the Upanishadic equation ofthe sexual act and the oblation. The curse of childlessness that the frustrated Parvati gives to thewives of the gods has resonances throughout Hindu mythology. As a result of Parvati’s curse,many children of the gods (including Sita) are born from male gods or sages who create childrenunilaterally merely at the thought, or sight, of a woman, ejaculating into some wombsubstitute—a flower, a female animal, a river, a furrow—to produce a motherless child, “born ofno womb” (a-yoni-ja). es Another variant of the interruption theme appears at the end of theRamayana, in the passage we have just considered, when Lakshmana is forced to interrupt Ramaand Death when they are closeted together under strict instructions not to be interrupted. This isthe ultimate fatal interruption, interrupting Death himself.

At the same time, interrupted sexuality is often conjoined with the theme of addictive,excessive, careless hunting. Human hunters mistake other humans (or ogres) for animals,particularly when the humans as animals are mating, a mistake that has fatal consequences notonly for the human/animals but for the unlucky hunter. In the Mahabharata, Pandu, the father ofthe heroes, is cursed to die if he makes love with any of his wives, his punishment for havingkilled, while he was hunting, a sage who had taken the form of a stag and was coupling with adoe et and whom Pandu mistook for a stag (1.90.64; 1.109.5-30). So too five years afterDasharatha has banished Rama, he suddenly wakes Kausalya up in the middle of the night andtells her about this episode, which he has only now remembered:DASHARATHA SHOOTS AN ELEPHANT“When I was young I was proud of my fame as anarcher who could shoot by sound alone. We were not married yet, and it was the rainy season,which excites lust and desire. I decided to take some exercise and went hunting with bow andarrow. I was a rash young man. I heard a noise, beyond the range of vision, of a pitcher beingfilled with water, which sounded like an elephant in water. I shot an arrow.” He had shot anascetic boy, on whom an aged, blind mother (a Shudra) and father (a Vaishya) depended. Thefather cursed Dasharatha to end his days grieving for his own son. And as Dasharatha nowremembered that curse in bed with Kausalya, he died (2.57.8-38, .58.1-57). Theconnection between blindness (aiming by sound alone at the child of sight-less parents) anddesire (hunting as the equivalent of taking a cold shower to control premarital desire) indicatesthat desire was already Dasharatha’s blind spot long before Kaikeyi manipulated him by lockinghim out of her bedroom. He is as addicted to sex as he is to hunting.Another tale in the Ramayana also ties together the themes of the interruption ofsexuality, the curse of separation from a beloved, and the deadly nature of erotic love but nowadds the element of the language of animals, particularly birds:THE BIRD’S JOKEA king had been given the boon of understanding the cries of all creatures,but he was warned not to tell anyone about it. Once when he was in bed with his wife, he heard abird say something funny, and he laughed. She thought he was laughing at her, and she wanted toknow why, but he said he would die if he told her. When she insisted that he tell hernevertheless, he sent her away and lived happily without her for the rest of his life (2.32). 47Significantly, the man in this story is allowed to understand the speech of animals, andthe woman is not. (As the king happens to be the father of Kaikeyi, sexual mischief runs in thefamily.) This is in keeping with the underlying misogyny of the Sanskrit mythological texts thatdepict men as more gifted with special powers than women; it may also reflect the sociologicalfact that men in India were allowed to read and speak Sanskrit, while in general women werenot, as well as the custom of patrilocal marriage, so that a woman often did not speak thelanguage of her husband’s family. These stories express the idea that sexuality makes somehumans into animals, while language makes some animals into humans.In the Mahabharata a king who has been cursed to become a man-eating ogre devours asage who is making love to his wife (still in human form), and the wife, furious because she hadnot yet achieved her sexual goal, curses the king to die if he embraces his own wife (MB 1.173),a combination of Pandu’s curse and Parvati’s curse of the wives of the gods. Nor are thesehunting errors limited to the sexual arena. Krishna, in the Mahabharata, dies when a hunterfatally mistakes him for a deer:THE DEATH OF KRISHNAAngry sages predicted that Old Age would wound Krishna when hewas lying on the ground. Krishna knew that this had to happen that way. Later he realized it wasthe time to move on, and he obstructed his sensory powers, speech, and mind and lay down and

engaged in terminal yoga. Then a fierce hunter named Old Age [Jara] came to that spot greedyfor deer and mistook him for a deer and hastily pierced him with an arrow in the sole of his foot.But when he went near him, to take him, the hunter saw that it was a man with four arms,wearing a yellow garment, engaged in yoga. Realizing that he had made a bad mistake, hetouched the other man’s two feet with his head, his body revealing his distress. Krishna consoledhim and then rose up and pervaded the two firmaments with his glory (MB 16.2.10-11,16.5.18-21). Three different stories seem to be told here at once. In one, Krishna, a mortal, iswounded by a hunter, like an animal or, rather, as a human mistaken for an animal. In another,Krishna seems to die of old age. eu In the third story, Krishna, an immortal, decides to leave theworld by withdrawing his powers, like a god or a very great yogi. But he didn’t need the hunteror old age if he really just died by his own will. Are traces of one story left ghostlike in another?These stories from the Mahabharata argue that humans are different from animals andmust rise above animal sexuality and, sometimes, animal violence; the Ramayana adds that it islanguage, particularly poetry, that makes this possible. ev The theme of language appears in thiscorpus on the outside frame of the Ramayana, in the vignette of “The Poet, the Hunter, and theCrane” cited at the beginning of this chapter, about the invention of the shloka meter (the meterin which both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are composed). In that story, the female crane(they are Indian sarus cranes) is so moved at the sight of her dying mate that she utters words ofcompassion (karunam giram). (Some later commentaries suggested that it was the female cranewho died and the male crane who grieved, foreshadowing the disappearance of Sita and the griefof Rama. 48 ) Compassion at the sight of the dying bird inspires Valmiki too to speak. He sees acrane who is killed in a sexual situation, hence separated from his mate, making him cry andinspiring him to invent an unusual language of humans. This story is in many ways the inversionof the story of the king who hears a bird talking when he is in a sexual situation and laughs,exposing him to the danger of death and separating him from his mate.But it is the grief of the female crane and Valmiki’s fellow feeling with her—as well as,perhaps, the touching example of the cranes, who are said to be “singing sweetly” (immediatelyequated with “at the height of desire”) as the hunter strikes—that inspire Valmiki to make hissecond, more significant utterance; the birdsong turns to compassionate speech and then inspireshuman poetry. As a result, the Nishada, a member of a tribal group regarded as very low caste, iscursed, and poetry is born. The text treats the Nishada as a nonperson, hostile and evil, a manwho violates dharma, kills for no reason, and is cursed to be forever without peace; in directcontrast with the compassionate crane hen and the compassionate poet, the Nishada neverspeaks. Since the animal he killed was just an animal, not a human in animal form, he receivesonly a relatively mild punishment—restlessness, perhaps guilt—prefiguring the more seriouscurse of Dasharatha in the story that is to follow, the tale of the boy mistaken for an elephant.With this link added to the narrative chain, the corpus of stories combines five major themes:succumbing to the lust for hunting; mistaking a human for an animal and killing the “animal”;interrupting the sexual act (by killing one or both of the partners); understanding the language (orsong) of animals; and creating a poetic language. Killing an animal interrupts the sexual act, theanimal act, killing sex, as it were, and producing in its place the characteristic human act, themaking of language.What binds the humans and animals together is compassion, a more nuanced form of theguilt and concern for nonviolence that have colored Hindu stories about animals from the start.The Ramayana is compassionate and inclusive in its presentation of animals, including Jatayus,an old vulture, a scavenger, who is to birds what dogs are to mammals, normally very

inauspicious indeed. But Jatayus bravely attacks Ravana when Ravana is carrying off Sita; whenJatayus lectures Ravana on dharma, Ravana responds by cutting off Jatayus’s wings and flyingaway with Sita, and the dying vulture tells Rama where Ravana has taken Sita. Rama says that heholds the old vulture, Jatayus, in the same esteem that he holds Dasharatha (3.64.26) (which mayalso be a backhanded indirect dig at Dasharatha), and he buries him with the full royal obsequiesas for a father. Rama does, however, use balls of stag’s flesh in place of the balls of rice that areusually part of these rituals (3.64.26, 32-33), a reversal of the historical process that led manyHindus to use balls of rice in place of a sacrificial animal.Another unclean bird plays a role in Rama’s story, and that is a crow. When Hanumanvisits Sita and asks her for a sign that will prove to Rama that Hanuman has seen her, she tellshim of a time when a crow attacked her until his claws dripped with blood; Rama had the powerto kill the bird but, in his compassion, merely put out his right eye and sent him away(5.36.10-33). The crows are said to be eaters of offerings, greedy for food, terms often applied todogs, and Manu (7.21) explicitly links crows and dogs. The crow is a Pariah. Sita compares thecrow with Ravana, and the scene foreshadows the abduction of Sita by Ravana. Yet Rama hascompassion for the crow, merely taking out his eye, a mutilation that will become part of thevocabulary of bhakti, when a devout worshiper willingly gives his own eye to the god.Dogs too occupy a moral space here. During the period of Sita’s exile, a (talking) dogcomes to Rama and complains, first, that dogs are not allowed in palaces or temples or the homesof Brahmins (whereupon Rama invites him into the palace) and, second, that a Brahmin beggarbeat him for no reason. Rama summons the Brahmin, who confesses that he struck the dog inanger when he himself was hungry and begging for food; when he told the dog to go away, thedog went only a short distance and stayed there, and so he beat him. Rama asks the dog tosuggest an appropriate punishment for the Brahmin, and the dog asks that the Brahmin, whom hedescribes as filled with anger and bereft of dharma, be made the leader of a Tantric sect. (Thedog himself had this position in a former life and regarded it as a guaranteed road to hell.) Thisgranted, the Brahmin feels certain he has been given a great boon and rides away proudly on anelephant, while the dog goes to Varanasi and fasts to death (7.52). 49 Clearly, the dog is morallysuperior to the Brahmin, and Rama treats him with great respect throughout this long and ratherwhimsical episode.SYMBOLIC OGRESDogs in these stories stand both for dogs (a cigar is just a cigar) and sometimes forPariahs or Nishadas (more than a cigar), often for both at once. Tribal people stand forthemselves (a Nishada is just a Nishada), but can Nishadas stand for anyone else? (Apparentlynot.) On the other hand, can anyone else, besides dogs, stand for Nishadas? More precisely, canogres stand for Nishadas?Unlike dogs and Nishadas, ogres and antigods cannot represent themselves because, inmy humble opinion, they do not exist; they are imaginary constructions. Therefore they arepurely symbolic, and the question is, What do they symbolize? Later in Indian history, they areoften said to symbolize various groups of human beings: tribal peoples, 50 foreigners, low castes,Dravidians, South Indians, or Muslims. Various Hindus have named various actual human tribesafter ogres and antigods and other mythical beasts (such as Asuras and Nagas), and others haveglossed ogres such as the ogress Hidimbi, who marries the human hero Bhima, in theMahabharata, or the Naga princess Ulupi, who marries Arjuna, as symbolic of tribal people whomarry into Kshatriya families. One scholar identified the ogres of Lanka as Sinhalese Buddhists,

oppressed by hegemonic Brahmins represented by Rama; 51 another argued that the ogresrepresented the aboriginal population of Australia, 52 a loopy idea that has the single, questionablevirtue of correlating well with the Gondwana theory that Australia and India were once linked.Indeed writers have used the ogres as well as other characters of the Ramayana ew throughoutIndian history to stand in for various people in various political positions. But what role do theogres play in Valmiki’s Ramayana?There is no evidence that the ogres represent any historical groups of human beings orthat the conquest of the ogres of Lanka represents any historical event. On the other hand, just asdogs can symbolize general types of human beings (castes regarded as unclean), so too,particular types of ogres and antigods can symbolize general types of human beings. Ogres andanimals belong to social classes (varnas), just like human beings; Ravana, a king born of aBrahmin father and an ogress mother, is often regarded as a Brahmin/Kshatriya/human/ ogre mix(though sometimes as a Brahmin, making Rama guilty of Brahminicide), and the vulture Jatayus,a Kshatriya, is buried both as a king and as a vulture (with pieces of meat that would not begiven to a king). There are many other Kshatriya ogres and antigods, as well as Brahmin ogres. 53Ogres are also symbolic of dark forces outside us that oppress us and sometimes of darkforces within us, the worst parts of ourselves, the shadows of ourselves. In Freudian terms,Ravana is a wonderful embodiment of the ego—proud, selfish, passionate—while Vibhishana(Ravana’s pious brother, who sermonizes Ravana and finally defects to Rama) is pure superego,all conscience and moralizing, and Kumbhakarna (Ravana’s monstrous brother, who sleeps foryears at a time and wakes only to eat and fight) is a superb literary incarnation of the bestial id.The triad is even more significant in Indian terms, in which they might be viewed asrepresentations of the three constituent qualities of matter (the gunas): Ravana is rajas (energy,passion; ego), Vibhishana sattva (lucidity, goodness; superego), and Kumbhakarna tamas(entropy, darkness; id).But the major function of the ogres in the Ramayana, apart from their role as the BadGuys, a role not to be underestimated, is as the projected shadows of individual human figures.Lakshmana says this explicitly to Rama, regarding the ogre Viradha: “The anger I felt towardsBharata because he desired the throne, I shall expend on Viradha (3.2.23).” We have seen howthe ogresses cast a shadow on the unrelenting goodness of Sita, and how the monkey brothersilluminate the relationship of the human brothers; the male ogres do much the same. The thornyquestions of dharma that the humans express from time to time (in Bharata’s outburst, or Sita’sscolding) are echoed in the arguments of the monkeys and ogres (when Valin upbraids Rama orVibhishana preaches to Ravana).More specifically, just as Rama, Lakshmana, and Bharata form a sort of triad, ex so tooRavana, Vibhishana, and Kumbhakarna form a parallel triad. ey Ravana remarks, afterKumbhakarna’s death, that Kumbhakarna had been his right arm and that Sita is no use to himwith Kumbhakarna dead (6.56.7-12), precisely what Rama says about Lakshmana and Sita whenhe thinks Lakshmana is dead. But the parallels are often contrasting rather than identical:Whereas Lakshmana and Bharata love Rama, both Vibhishana and Kumbhakarna revile Ravana.THE GOOD OGRESome ogres stand for human beings of a particular type rather than a particular class.Some powerful, and often virtuous, ogres and antigods amass great powers through generatinginner heat (tapas) and usurp the privileges of the gods, following the pattern of the secondalliance. The throne of Indra, king of the gods, is made of twenty-four-carat gold, a notorious

conductor of heat. When an ascetic on earth generates too much tapas through a non-Vedicdo-it-yourself religion, the heat rises, as heat is wont to do, and when it gets to Indra’s throne, hefinds himself literally sitting on a hot seat. At that point he usually sends a celestial nymph (anApsaras) to seduce the ascetic, to dispel his heat either through desire or through anger. 54Ravana is a major player in the second alliance. He wins the boon of near invincibilityfrom Brahma by generating extreme tapas. (It is only because Ravana fails to take seriously thefine print in his contract, specifying every creature but humans, that Rama is able to defeat him.)Sita inspires Ravana with both desire and anger. Indeed, in terms of the mythological paradigm,it is Sita, as celestial nymph (or, in Vibhishana’s view, great hooded serpent), who defeatsRavana.Such ogres may stand for humans who, through precisely that sort of religious activity,unmediated by priestly interventions, usurped the privileges of the Brahmins. As shape shifterswho pretend to be what they are not, the ascetic ogres are (super)natural metaphors for peoplewho try to become more powerful than they have a right to be, the wildcat yogis who are notmembers of the Brahmin union. Vibhishana is an early instance of this paradoxical figure. Heremains an ogre, indeed becomes king of the ogres after Ravana’s death, thus maintaining hisown particular dharma, still going into the family business, as it were, but he fights on the side ofRama against Ravana and the other ogres, thus supporting more general dharma (sadharanadharma). Maricha, the ogre who takes the form of the golden deer, tries hard, in vain, likeVibhishana, to dissuade Ravana from going after Sita. But Maricha also confesses to Ravana thatafter an earlier encounter with Rama, he began to practice yoga and meditation and now is sofilled with terror of Rama that he sees him everywhere he looks: “This whole wilderness hasbecome nothing but Rama to me; I see him in my dreams, and think of him every time I hear aword that begins with an ‘R’ (3.38.14-18).” This emotion is what bhakti theologians laterdescribe as “hate-love” (dvesha-bhakti), which allows other demonic opponents of the gods(such as Kamsa, the enemy of Krishna) to go straight to heaven when the god in question killsthe demon. The reference to the R also foreshadows (hindsight alert!) the importance of the nameof Rama in later bhakti.The Ramayana does not worry about the paradoxes involved in these clashes betweensva-dharma and sadharana dharma. When the antigod Bali defeats the gods, including Indra,and performs a great sacrifice, in which he gives away anything that anyone asks him for, Vishnubecomes a dwarf and begs as much land as he can cover in three paces; he then strides across thethree worlds, which he takes from Bali and gives back to Indra (1.28.3-11). Bali’s name,significantly, denotes the offering of a portion of the daily meal—or taxes, the portion of the croppaid to the king. That it is Bali’s Vedic virtue of generosity that destroys him may signal achallenge to that entire sacrificial world. But the Ramayana, remaining firmly within the secondalliance, does not ask why Bali’s virtue had to be destroyed. The later Puranas, in retelling thisstory, will tackle head-on the paradox of the good antigod.CHALLENGES TO THE CLASS SYSTEMThe gods (and Brahmins) are also threatened from the other side by human beings whoare not too good but too bad, including people highly critical of Vedic religion. When Rama isarguing with Bharata about honoring his father’s wishes, the Brahmin Jabali presents the atheistposition, satirizing the shraddha, the ritual of feeding the ancestors, as well as the idea of thetransfer of karma: “What a waste of food! Has a dead man ever eaten food? If food that oneperson eats nourishes another person, then people who journey need never carry provision on the

way; his relatives could eat at home for him.” He anticipates the Marxist argument too: “Thescriptures with their rules were invented by learned men who were clever at getting other peopleto give them money, tricking the simple-minded. There is no world but this one (2.108.1-17).”When Rama objects violently to this, others assure him that Jabali has presented the atheistargument only to persuade Rama to do what was best for him, that he wasn’t really an atheist,that it was all maya (“illusion”) (2.102.1).” Jabali’s argument is the standard Materialist critiqueof the Veda, as well as the straw man set up in order to be refuted.A more serious threat to the social order is posed by Shambuka:RAMA BEHEADS SHAMBUKAA Brahmin’s child died of unknown causes, and the fatherblamed Rama for failing to maintain dharma, accusing Rama of being guilty of Brahminicide.The sage Narada warned Rama that a Shudra was generating tapas, a practice permitted toShudras only in the Kali Age, and that this violation of dharma was causing disasters such as thedeath of the child. Rama gave instructions to preserve the child’s body in oil. Then he exploredthe country and found, south of the Vindhyas, a man generating tapas, hanging upside down.Rama asked him his class (“Are you a Brahmin, or a Kshatriya, or a Vaishya, or a Shudra?”) andthe purpose of his tapas, and the man replied, “I was born in a Shudra womb, and I am namedShambuka. I am doing this in order to become a god and to conquer the world of the gods.”Rama drew his sword from his scabbard and cut off Shambuka’s head while he was still talking.And at that very moment, the child came back to life (7.64-67). Shambuka is upside down,both as a form of tapas and because a world in which a Shudra generates tapas is topsy-turvy.The central episode of mutilation of an uppity low-caste man is framed, indeed justified, byanother story, the stock narrative of a hagiographical miracle, usually used in the service ofBrahmins (like Vrisha) rather than of kings, the death and revival of a child. Was there enoughpressure on the caste system at the time of the Ramayana’s recension to force the narrator toinvent this frame to justify Rama’s action? Perhaps. We learn nothing at all about Shambuka buthis class and the fact that he lives south of the Vindhyas, the no-man’s-land of North Indianmythology; he is dehumanized.Rama also had an uncomfortable relationship with Nishadas, including a hunter namedGuha, chief of the Nishadas. When Rama came into the jungle, Guha met him and offered himthings to eat and drink; Rama declined for himself, arguing that as an ascetic he could not acceptgifts and ate only fruit and roots (an assertion directly contradicted by the fact that after killingthe ogre Maricha in the form of a deer, he killed another deer and took home the meat [3.42.21]),but he gladly accepted fodder for the horses, which were the pride of Dasharatha’s stable(2.44.15-22). Yet, when Bharata later came looking for Rama, Guha came to meet him too,bringing him fish, flesh, and liquor (2.78.9), and his guide said to Bharata, “He’s an old friend ofyour brother’s (2.78.11).” Bharata, unlike Rama, accepted the food, and when Guha told Bharataabout his meeting with Rama, he said, “I offered Rama a variety of foods, but Rama refused itall, because he was following the dharma of a Kshatriya, and Kshatriyas must give but neverreceive (2.82.14).” There are too many excuses, and conflicting excuses at that, to explain whyRama will not eat Guha’s food, and the commentaries on this episode are troubled by it. 55A famous story about a king’s relations with Nishadas and other tribals, as well asPariahs, is only loosely connected with Rama (it is told to him):TRISHANKU HALFWAY TO HEAVENVishvamitra was a great and just king. One day hetried to steal from the Brahmin Vasishtha the wish-fulfilling cow, who could produce anythingthat one asked her for. At Vasishtha’s request, she produced armies of Persians and Scythiansand Greeks, and then aliens (mlecchas) and tribals (Kiratas), who destroyed the king’s armies

and his sons. Realizing that the power of a Brahmin was greater than that of a Kshatriya,Vishvamitra resolved to become a Brahmin himself. He generated great inner heat but merelybecame a royal sage, still a Kshatriya.Meanwhile a king named Trishanku wanted to go toheaven in his own body. Vasishtha told him it was impossible, and Vasishtha’s sons in furycursed Trishanku to become a Pariah (Chandala), black and coarse, wearing iron ornaments, hishair all uncombed, his garlands taken from the cremation ground. His people ran away from him,and he went to Vishvamitra. Vishvamitra promised to help him get to heaven, and to do this, heprepared a great sacrifice for him. When Vedic scholars refused to attend a sacrifice performedby a Kshatriya for a Pariah patron, Vishvamitra cursed them to become reviled, pitiless tribals(Nishadas) and hideous Pariahs (Mushtikas), living on dog meat in cemeteries.The gods refusedto attend the sacrifice, but Vishvamitra used his inner heat to raise Trishanku toward heaven.Indra commanded Trishanku to fall back to earth, but Vishvamitra stopped his fall, so thatTrishanku was stuck halfway up in the sky. Vishvamitra created a new set of constellations forhim and was about to create a new pantheon of gods as well, but the gods persuaded him to stop.And so Trishanku lives forever like that, upside down, in his alternative universe (1.51-59).What begins as a conflict between members of the two upper classes leads to anunsatisfactory compromise: Vishvamitra becomes both a Kshatriya and a sage. When he thentakes on the entire Brahmin academic establishment and, finally, the gods themselves, this resultsin yet another uneasy compromise, Trishanku suspended between heaven and earth. Along theway, however, the fallout from these high-class wars creates first a passel of foreigners (the usualCentral Asian suspects), then even more alien (mlecchas) and tribals, and finally a combinationof Pariahs and other tribals. When the dust settles, the moral seems to be that although, asVishvamitra believes, Brahmins are better than Kshatriyas in some ways (the gods come to theirsacrifice), inner heat--the religious power available to non-Brahmins and non-Vedicsacrificers--can do what even sacrifice cannot: Like sacrificial merit, or karma in general, it canbe transferred from sacrificer to patron, but unlike them, it can get your body at least halfway toheaven, which the Brahmin Vasishtha said could not be done at all. At least one Kshatriya,moreover, Vishvamitra, makes many Brahmins into Pariahs and forces the gods to meet himliterally halfway. This story, well known both in India and in Europe and America, ez provides uswith yet another vivid image of liminality, fusion, and the partial resolution of irresolvableconflicts.Just as the alternative universe that Vishvamitra creates is entirely real to Trishanku, sothe world of the Ramayana that Valmiki created is very real indeed to the many Hindus whohave heard it or read it, and Sita and Rama continue to shape attitudes to women and to politicalconflict in India to this day.CHAPTER 10VIOLENCE IN THE MAHABHARATA300 BCE to 300 CECHRONOLOGYc. 300 BCE-300 CE The Mahabharata is composedc. 200 BCE-200 CE TheRamayana is composed327-25 BCE Alexander the Great invades Northwest South Asiac. 324BCE Chandragupta founds the Mauryan dynastyc. 265-232 BCE Ashoka reignsc. 250 BCE TheThird Buddhist Council takes place at Pataliputrac. 185 BCE The Mauryan dynasty endsc. 185BCE Pushyamitra founds the Shunga dynasty73 BCE The Shunga dynasty endsc. 150 BCE Themonuments of Bharhut and Sanchi are builtc. 166 BCE-78 CE Greeks and Scythians enter

IndiaYUDHISHTHIRA’S DILEMMAKing Yudhishthira walked alone on the path to heaven,neverlooking down. Only a dog followed him: the dog that I have alreadytold you about quite a lot. Then Indra, king of the gods, came toYudhishthira in his chariot and said to him, “Get in.” Yudhishthirasaid, “This dog, O lord of the past and the future, has been constantlydevoted to me. Let him come with me; for I am determined not tobe cruel.” Indra said, “Today you have become immortal, like me,and you have won complete prosperity, and great fame, your majesty,as well as the joys of heaven. Leave the dog. There is nothing cruel inthat. There is no place for dog owners in the world of heaven; forevil spirits carry off what has been offered, sacrificed or given as anoblation into the fire, if it is left uncovered and a dog has looked at it.Therefore you must leave this dog, and by leaving the dog, you willwin the world of the gods.”Yudhishthira said, “People say that abandoning someone devoted toyou is a bottomless evil, equal—according to the general opinion—tokilling a Brahmin. I think so too.” When the god Dharma, who hadbeen there in the form of the dog, heard these words spoken by Yudhishthira,the Dharma king, he appeared in his own form and spoketo King Yudhishthira with affection and with gentle words of praise:“Great king, you weep with all creatures. Because you turned downthe celestial chariot, by insisting, ‘This dog is devoted to me,’ there isno one your equal in heaven and you have won the highest goal, ofgoing to heaven with your own body.”Mahabharata, 300 BCE-300 CE (17.2.26, 17.3.1-21)As the Hindu idea of nonviolence (ahimsa) that emerged from debates about eatingand/or sacrificing animals was soon taken up in debates about warfare, the resulting arguments,which deeply color the narratives of the Mahabharata on all levels, were simultaneously aboutthe treatment of animals, about the treatment of Pariahs symbolized by animals, and abouthuman violence as an inevitable result of the fact that humans are animals and animals areviolent. The connection between the historical figure of the Buddhist king Ashoka and themythological figure of the Hindu king Yudhishthira, and their very similar attempts to mitigate,if not to abolish, violence, particularly violence against animals, are also at the heart of thischapter.ASHOKAAshoka claimed to have conquered most of India, though evidence suggests that he didnot venture beyond southern Karnataka to attempt to conquer South India. But in the eighth yearof his reign, he marched on Kalinga (the present Orissa) in a cruel campaign that makesSherman’s march look like a children’s parade. Afterward he claimed to have been revolted bywhat he had done, and issued an edict that was carved into the surfaces of rock in several placesin India (not including Kalinga, significantly). It is a most remarkable document, allowing us aglimpse into the mind—or, at least, the public mind— of a ruler who regrets what he regards as amajor crime committed in the line of duty. This is how the edict begins:ASHOKA ON THE ROAD FROM ORISSAWhen he had been consecrated eight years, the

Beloved of the Gods, the king Piyadasi, conquered Kalinga. A hundred and fifty thousand peoplewere deported, a hundred thousand were killed, and many times that number perished.Afterward, now that Kalinga was annexed, the Beloved of the Gods very earnestly practiceddhamma, desired dhamma and taught dhamma. On conquering Kalinga, the Beloved of the Godsfelt remorse, for when an independent country is conquered, the slaughter, death, and deportationof the people are extremely grievous to the Beloved of the Gods and weigh heavily on his mind.What is even more deplorable to the Beloved of the Gods is that those who dwell there, whetherBrahmanas, Shramanas, or those of other sects, or householders who show obedience to theirsuperiors, obedience to mother and father, obedience to their teachers, and behave well anddevotedly toward their friends, acquaintances, colleagues, relatives, slaves and servants—allsuffer violence, murder, and separation from their loved ones. Even those who are fortunate tohave escaped and whose love is undiminished suffer from the misfortunes of their friends,acquaintances, colleagues, and relatives. This participation of all men in suffering weighs heavilyon the mind of the Beloved of the Gods. 1 That Ashoka renounced war at this point is perhapsless impressive than it might seem, given that he now already had most of India under his control(or at least more than anyone else had ever had and apparently all that he wanted); he waslocking the stable door after the horse was safely tethered in its stall. But his repentance did notmean that he had sworn off violence forever; in this same edict he warns “the forest tribes of hisempire” that “he has power even in his remorse, and he asks them to repent, lest they be killed.”In another edict he refers, rather ominously, to “the unconquered peoples on my borders” (i.e.,not conquered yet?) and acknowledges that they may wonder what he intends to do with/for/tothem. 2 He may have hung up his gun belt, but he still had it. What is most remarkable about theinscription about Kalinga, however, is its introspective and confessional tone, its frankness andsincerity, and the decision to carve it in rock—to make permanent, as it were, his realization thatmilitary conquest, indeed royal vainglory, was impermanent (anicca, in the Buddhist parlance).Here is evidence of an individual who took pains to see that future generations would rememberhim, and this is a new concept in ancient India.The dhamma to which Ashoka refers in his edict is neither the Buddhist dhamma (thePali word for the teachings of the Buddha in the oldest layer of Buddhist literature) nor Hindudharma, nor any other particular religion or philosophical doctrine but is, rather, a broader codeof behavior, one size fits all, that is implicit in the various good qualities of the people whom heitemizes here as those he regrets having killed, people who might be “Brahmanas, Shramanas[renouncers], or those of other sects.” That code of dhamma included honesty, truthfulness,compassion, obedience, mercy, benevolence, and considerate behavior toward all, “few faultsand many good deeds” (or “little evil, much good”) as he summarized it. 3 He urged people tocurb their extravagance and acquisitiveness. He founded hospitals for humans and animals andsupplied them with medicines; he planted roadside trees and mango groves, dug wells, andconstructed watering sheds and rest houses. This idealistic empire was reflected in the perfectworld of Rama’s Reign (Ram-raj) in the Ramayana.Ashoka made his thoughts known by having them engraved on rocks and, later in hisreign, on pillars. These edicts show a concern to conform to the local idiom and context. All inall, nineteen rock edicts and nine pillar edicts, written in the local script, are to be found scatteredin more than thirty places throughout India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The sandstone forthe highly polished pillars was quarried at Chunar near Varanasi (Kashi) and shows remarkabletechnological expertise; averaging between forty and fifty feet in height and weighing up to fiftytons each, the pillars were dragged hundreds of miles to the places where they were erected, all

within the Ganges plain, the heart of the empire. Ashoka adapted older, existing pillars thatsymbolized the pillar that separates heaven and earth and were expressions of an ancient phallicworship of Indra. 4 The lions (symbolizing the Buddha as the emperor) on the capitals of thepillars show Persian influence, for Iranian journeyman carvers came to Ashoka’s cosmopolitanempire in search of work after the fall of the Achaemenids. But the bulls and elephants aretreated in an unmistakably Indian way, 5 stunningly similar to some of the animals on the Indusseals; the horses too are carved in the distinctive Indian style. Thus the pillar combined, for thefirst time, the technique of representing animals in a uniquely naturalistic but stylized way thatwas perfected in 2000 BCE in the Indus Valley, and was the first representation of the horse, ananimal that the Indus Valley artisans did not have. Indus form (the Indian style) expressedIndo-European content (the horse). (See the image on page 84.)Ashoka cared deeply about animals and included them as a matter of course, along withhumans, as the beneficiaries of his shade trees and watering places. In place of the royal traditionof touring his kingdom in a series of royal hunts, he inaugurated the tradition of royalpilgrimages to Buddhist shrines, thus substituting a Buddhist (and Hindu) virtue (pilgrimage) fora Hindu vice of addiction (hunting). In one bilingual rock inscription, the Aramaic version says,“Our Lord the king kills very few animals. Seeing this the rest of the people have also ceasedfrom killing animals. Even the activity of those who catch fish has been prohibited.” 6 ElsewhereAshoka urges “abstention from killing and nonviolence [avihimsa] to living beings” 7 andremarks that it is good not to kill living beings. 8But he never did discontinue capital punishment or torture or legislate against either thekilling or the eating of all animals. This is what he said about his own diet: “Formerly, in thekitchens of the Beloved of the Gods, the king Piyadasi, many hundreds of thousands of livinganimals were killed daily for meat. But now, at the time of writing of this inscription ondhamma, only three animals are killed [daily], two peacocks and a deer, and the deer notinvariably. Even these three animals will not be killed in future.” 9 Why go on killing these three?Perhaps because the emperor was fond of roasted peacock and venison. 10 Perhaps he was tryingto cut down on meat, the way some chain-smokers try to cut down on cigarettes. And his ownparticular dhamma became prototypical, since the people are to follow the king’s example; theimplication was: “This is what I eat in my kitchen; you should eat like that too.” But his personaltastes cannot explain the other, longer list (rather approximate in translation, for some of thespecies are uncertain) of animals that the edicts “protected” from slaughter: parakeets, mynahbirds, red-headed ducks, chakravaka geese, swans, pigeons, bats, ants, tortoises, boneless fish,skates, porcupines, squirrels, deer, lizards, cows, rhinoceroses, white pigeons, domestic pigeons,and all four-footed creatures that are neither useful nor edible. Also nanny goats, ewes, and sowslactating or with young, and kids, lambs, and piglets less than six months old. Cocks are not to bemade into capons. One animal is not to be fed to another. On certain holy days, fish are not to becaught or sold; on other holy days, bulls, billy goats, rams, boars, and other animals that areusually castrated are not to be castrated; and on still others, horses and bullocks are not to bebranded. 11What are we to make of these lists? Ashoka is hedging again. He recommends restraint ofviolence toward living beings in the same breath that he recommends the proper treatment ofslaves, 12 but evidently it is all right to kill some of the creatures some of the time. In particular,Ashoka allows for the slaughter of the pashus—male goats, sheep, and cattle, the animals mostoften used both for sacrifice and for food. There is no ecological agenda here for theconservation of wildlife, nor can the lists be explained by the privileging of certain animals for

medicinal purposes. What there is is the expression of a man who finds himself between a rockedict and a hard place, a man who has concern for animals’ feelings (give them shade, don’tcastrate them—sometimes) but recognizes that people do eat animals. It is a very limited sort ofnonviolence, not unlike that of the Brahmana text that pointed out that eating animals is bad butthen let you eat them in certain ways, instead of outlawing it entirely, as one might haveexpected. Ashoka is the man, after all, who gave up war only after he had conquered all NorthIndia.His attitude to the varieties of religion was similarly politic. As a pluralistic king he had asocial ethic that consisted primarily of inclusivity: 13 “Whoever honors his own sect or disparagesthat of another man, wholly out of devotion to his own, with a view to showing it in a favorablelight, harms his own sect even more seriously.” 14 Not a word is said about Vedic religion orsacrifice, aside from the casual and entirely neutral references to Brahmanas (Brahmins) alongwith Shramanas, nor does Ashoka mention class or caste (varna or jati), aside from thatreference to Brahmins. But he does not hesitate to criticize the more popular religion that was thelivelihood of lower-class priests: “In illness, at the marriage of sons and daughters, at the birth ofchildren, when going on a journey, on these and on similar occasions, people perform manyceremonies. Women especially perform a variety of ceremonies, which are trivial and useless. Ifsuch ceremonies must be performed, they have but small results.” 15 Small-time superstition isfoolish but harmless, he seems to be saying, with an incidental swipe at women. He approves ofpublic religion, however, and expresses his pride in the increase in displays of heavenly chariots,elephants, balls of fire, and other divine forms, 16 as a means of attracting an audience to create aninterest in dhamma. 17 This sort of bread and circuses is cynically developed in the Arthashastra(13.1.3-8), which devises a number of ingenious things to do with fire and also advises the kingto have his friends dress up as gods and let his people see him hanging out with them. It is one ofthe great pities of human history that Ashoka’s program of dhamma died with him, in about 232BCE.Far more enduring were Ashoka’s services to Buddhism, which he spoke of not to thepeople at large but to other Buddhists. He held the Third Buddhist Council, at Pataliputra, andsent out many missionaries. He built a number of stupas and monasteries. His patronagetransformed Buddhism from a small, localized sect to a religion that spread throughout India andfar beyond its borders. Both Ashoka and his father, Bindusara, patronized not only Buddhists andJainas but also the Ajivikas, to whom Ashoka’s grandson may have dedicated some caves. 18 Themore general program of dhamma continued to support all religions, including Hinduism.Fast-forward: Myths about Ashoka became current shortly after his own time, whenBuddhist texts discoursed upon the Kalinga edict, the confession of cruelty, and the subsequentrenunciation of cruelty in favor of Buddhism. This resulted in a fantasy that Ashoka killed hisninety-nine brothers to attain the throne and then visited hell, where he learned how to constructa hell on earth, equipped with fiendish instruments of exquisite torture, which he used on anyonewho offended him. 19 The mythmaking never stopped. In 2001 a film (Asoka, directed by SantoshSivan) depicted a youthful Ashoka (Shahrukh Khan) who, traveling incognito, meets theregulation heroine in a wet sari under a waterfall (Kareena Kapoor). She is, unbeknownst to him,the queen of Kalinga, also traveling incognita. So when he eventually massacres Kalinga andfinds her wandering in despair amid the wide-angle carnage, he is very, very sorry that he haskilled all those people. And so, after three hours of nonstop slaughter, in the last two minutes ofthe film he converts to Buddhism.THE RISE OF SECTARIAN HINDUISM

Despite (or because of) the rise of Buddhism in this period, both Vedic sacrificers andmembers of the evolving Hindu sects of Vaishnavas and Shaivas (worshipers of Vishnu andShiva) found new sponsors among the ruling families and court circles. 20 The keystone for theBrahmin establishment was the new economic power of temple cities. 21 From about 500 BCE,kings still performed Vedic sacrifices to legitimize their kingship, 22 but the sectarian worship ofparticular deities began partially to replace Vedic sacrifice. 23 As the gods of the Vedic pantheon(Indra, Soma, Agni) faded into the background, Vishnu and Rudra/Shiva, who had played smallroles in the Vedas, attracted more and more worshipers. Throughout the Ramayana andMahabharata, we encounter people who say they worship a particular god, which is the start ofsects and therefore of sectarianism.Pilgrimage and puja are the main forms of worship at this time. Pilgrimage is described atlength in the Mahabharata, particularly but not only in the “Tour of the Sacred Tirthas”(3.80-140). Sacred fords (tirthas) are shrines where one can simultaneously cross over (which iswhat tirtha means) the river and the perils of the world of rebirth. As in Ashoka’s edicts, the“conquest of the four corners of the earth” (dig-vijaya), originally a martial image, is nowapplied to a grand tour of pilgrimage to many shrines, circling the world (India), always to theright. Puja (from the Dravidian pu [“flower”]) 24 consisted of making an offering to an image of agod (flowers, fruits, sometimes rice), and/or moving a lamp through the air in a circular pattern,walking around the god, and reciting prayers, such as a litany of the names of the god. Krishna inthe Bhagavad Gita fa says that pious people offer him a leaf or flower or fruit or water (9.26).Sometimes the image of the god is bathed and dressed, and often the remains of the food that hasbeen offered to the god is then distributed to the worshipers as the god’s “favor” or “grace”(prasada), a relic of the leftovers (ucchishta) from the Vedic sacrifice.There is rich evidence of the rise of the sectarian gods. The Mahabharata includes aHymn of the Thousand Names of Shiva (13.17), and in 150 BCE Patanjali, the author of thehighly influential Yoga Sutras, foundational for the Yoga school of philosophy, mentions aworshiper of Shiva who wore animal skins and carried an iron lance. Gold coins from this sameperiod depict Shiva holding a trident and standing in front of a massive bull, presumably the bullthat is Shiva’s usual vehicle. In the first century BCE, under the Shungas, artisans produced whatis generally regarded as the earliest depiction of the god Shiva: a linga just under five feet high,in Gudimallam, in southeastern Andhra Pradesh. (See page 22.) Its anatomical detail, apart fromits size, is highly naturalistic, but on the shaft is carved the figure of Shiva, two-armed and alsonaturalistic, holding an ax in one hand and the body of a small antelope in the other. His thingarment reveals his own sexual organ (not erect), his hair is matted, and he wears large earrings.He stands upon a dwarf. A frieze from the first or second century CE suggests how such a lingamight have been worshiped; it depicts a linga shrine under a tree, surrounded by a railing, justlike the actual railing that was discovered beneath the floor in which the image was embedded. 25The Mahabharata tells a story about the circumstances under which Shiva came to beworshiped:SHIVA DESTROYS DAKSHA’S VEDIC SACRIFICEOnce upon a time, when Shiva wasliving on Mount Meru with his wife, Parvati, the daughter of the mountain Himalaya, all thegods and demigods thronged to him and paid him homage. The Lord of Creatures named Dakshabegan to perform a horse sacrifice in the ancient manner, which Indra and the gods attended withShiva’s permission. Seeing this, Parvati asked Shiva where the gods were going, and Shivaexplained it to her, adding that the gods had decided long ago not to give him any share in the

sacrifice. But Parvati was so unhappy about this that Shiva took his great bow and went with hisband of fierce servants to destroy the sacrifice. Some put out the sacrificial fires by dousing themwith blood; others began to eat the sacrificial assistants. The sacrifice took the form of a wildanimal and fled to the skies, and Shiva pursued it with bow and arrow. The gods, terrified, fled,and the very earth began to tremble. Brahma begged Shiva to desist, promising him a share ofthe sacrificial offerings forever after, and Shiva smiled and accepted that share (12.274.2-58).This important myth, retold in various transformations several times in the Mahabharata26 and in other texts through the ages, is in part a historical narrative of what did happen in thehistory of Hinduism: Shiva was not part of the Vedic sacrifice, and then he became part of theHindu sacrifice. The gods, particularly Daksha (a creator, mentioned in the Rig Veda hymn ofAditi [10.72.1-5]), exclude Shiva from their sacrifice because Shiva is the outsider, the Other, thegod to whom Vedic sacrifice is not offered; he is not a member of the club of gods that sacrificeto the gods. 27 He appears to Arjuna, in a pivotal episode of the Mahabharata, in the form of anaked Kirata, a tribal hunter (3.40.1-5). The myth of Daksha’s sacrifice verifies Shiva’sotherness but modifies it so that Shiva is in fact given a share in some sacrifices, still not part ofthe Vedic world but the supreme god of the post-Vedic world, at least in the eyes of the Shaivaswho tell this myth. 28In the Ramayana, the god Rama is on his way to becoming one of the great gods ofsectarian Hinduism. The god Krishna too now enters the world of Sanskrit texts, in theMahabharata. The grammarian Panini, in the fifth century BCE, mentions a Vasudevaka, whomhe defines as a devotee (bhakta) of the son of Vasudeva (Krishna), an avatar of Vishnu. This wasthe time of the beginning of the Bhagavata sects, the worship of Bhagavan, the Lord, a name ofVishnu or Shiva. In 115 BCE, Heliodorus, the son of a Greek from Taxila and himself the Greekambassador to one of the Shungas, 29 set up a pillar in Besnagar in Madhya Pradesh (not far fromthe Buddhist stupas at Sanchi), topped by an image of Vishnu’s eagle (the Garuda bird) and aninscription. Heliodorus said he had done this in honor of the son of Vasudeva and that he himselfwas a Bhagavata. 30 This is significant evidence of the conversion of a non-Indian not toBuddhism but to a new form of Hinduism. These are the early stirrings of communal sects thatwere beginning to supplement, sometimes to replace, the royal and domestic worship of theVedic gods.THE ERAS OF THE TWO GREAT POEMSThe Mahabharata story may have begun earlier than that of the Ramayana, but the textthat we have was probably composed in North India between approximately 300 BCE and 300CE, fb after the Mauryas and before the Guptas. It therefore shares the general chronology of theRamayana, entre deux empires, a time of shifting political and economic power.The two texts have much in common: They are long poems, in Sanskrit (indeed mostly inthe same meter), and both are about war. They quote the same sources and tell many of the samestories. But their differences are more interesting. The geographical setting of the Mahabharatasignals a time earlier than that of the Ramayana. The Mahabharata is set in and around theearlier capital of Hastinapur, fc already a great city in the age of the Brahmanas, instead of theRamayana’s cities of Rajagriha in Magadha and Kashi in Koshala, which were settled later. 31The Mahabharata calls itself the “Fifth Veda” (though so do several other texts) and dresses itsstory in Vedic trappings (such as ostentatious Vedic sacrifices and encounters with Vedic gods).It looks back to the Brahmanas and tells new versions of the old stories. 32 Indeed, it looks backbeyond the Brahmanas to the Vedic age, and may well preserve many memories of that period,

and that place, up in the Punjab. The Painted Gray Ware artifacts discovered at sites identifiedwith locations in the Mahabharata may be evidence of the reality of the great Mahabharata war,which is sometimes supposed to have occurred between 1000 and 400 BCE, 33 usually in 950BCE, the latter being the most reasonable assertion in light of what we know of Vedic history. fdYet its central plot is really about the building of a great empire far more Mauryan thanVedic. In other ways too it is very much the product of its times, the interregnum between theMauryan and Gupta empires in the Ganges plain. 34 The text often refers to the quasi-MauryanArtha-shastra, particularly when seeking textual support for hitting a man below the belt or whenhe’s down (10.1.47). The authors react in nuanced ways to the eddying currents of AshokanBuddhism and the Brahmin ascendancy of the Shungas, striving somehow to tell the story of thedestruction and reconstruction of entire groups or classes of people and, at the same time, toreconcile this political flux with the complex values of the emerging dharmas.Moreover, according to Indian tradition, the Ramayana took place in the second age(right after the Golden Age), when the moral life was still relatively intact, while theMahabharata took place later, at the cusp of the third age and the fourth, the Kali Age, when allhell broke loose. The Ramayana imagines an age of order preceding that chaos, while theMahabharata imagines the beginning of the breakdown, the planned obsolescence of the moralworld. In keeping with the basic Indian belief that time is degenerative, the Ramayana, which ismore optimistic and imagines a time of peace and prosperity, is said to precede theMahabharata, which is darker and imagines a time of war and the collapse of civilization.The Mahabharata is generally regarded as having reached its final form later than theRamayana but also to have begun earlier; the Ramayana is shorter and in many ways simpler,certainly more coherent, but not necessarily chronologically prior. Both texts were in gestationso long, and in conversation during so much of that gestation period, that each of the great poemsprecedes the other, like Brahma and Vishnu, or dharma and moksha. The Ramayana cites theMahabharata from time to time, and the Mahabharata devotes an entire long section to retellingthe Ramayana (3.257-75), a version of the story that is probably later than the one told in theRamayana itself. 35 Characters from each make cameo appearances in the other. Intertextualityhere hath made its masterpiece; the two texts may have anxiety (amhas) about a lot of things butnot about influence. 36 There is a famous Sanskrit poem that can be read, depending upon howyou divide the compounds and choose among the multiple meanings of the words, to tell thestory of either the Mahabharata or the Ramayana. 37 In many ways, the two stories are two sidesof the same coin.THE INTEGRITY OF THE MAHABHARATAThe Mahabharata is a text of about seventy-five thousand verses fe or three million words,some fifteen times the combined length of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, or seventimes the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, and a hundred times more interesting. (The Ramayanais about a third of the length of the Mahabharata, some twenty thousand verses against theMahabharata’s seventy-five thousand.) The bare bones of the central story (and there arehundreds of peripheral stories too) could be summarized like this, for our purposes:The five sons of King Pandu, called the Pandavas, were fathered by gods: Yudhishthira byDharma, Bhima by the Wind (Vayu), Arjuna by Indra, and the Twins (Nakula and Sahadeva) bythe Ashvins. All five of them married Draupadi. When Yudhishthira lost the kingdom to hiscousins in a game of dice, the Pandavas and Draupadi went into exile for twelve years, at the endof which, with the help of their cousin the incarnate god Krishna, who befriended the Pandavas

and whose counsel to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra is the Bhagavad Gita, theyregained their kingdom through a cataclysmic battle in which almost everyone on both sides waskilled. The Mahabharata was retold very differently by all of its many authors in the long line ofliterary descent. It is so extremely fluid that there is no single Mahabharata; there are hundredsof Mahabharatas, hundreds of different manuscripts and innumerable oral versions (one reasonwhy it is impossible to make an accurate calculation of the number of its verses). TheMahabharata is not contained in a text; the story is there to be picked up and found, salvaged asanonymous treasure from the ocean of story. It is constantly retold and rewritten both in Sanskritand in vernacular dialects; it has been called “a work in progress,” 38 a literature that “does notbelong in a book.” 39 The Mahabharata (1.1.23) describes itself as unlimited in both time andspace—eternal and infinite: “Poets have told it before, and are telling it now, and will tell itagain. What is here is also found elsewhere, but what is not here is found nowhere else.” 40 Itgrows out of the oral tradition and then grows back into the oral tradition; it flickers back andforth between Sanskrit manuscripts and village storytellers, each adding new gemstones to theold mosaic, constantly reinterpreting it. The loose construction of the text gives it aquasinovelistic quality, open to new forms as well as new ideas, inviting different ideas tocontest one another, to come to blows, in the pages of the text.Clearly no single author could have lived long enough to put it all together, but that doesnot mean that it is a miscellaneous mess with no unified point of view, let alone “the mostmonstrous chaos,” “the huge and motley pile,” or “gargantuan hodgepodge” and “literary pileup”that scholars have accused it of being. 41 European approaches to the Mahabharata often assumedthat the collators did not know what they were doing, and, blindly cutting and pasting,accidentally created a monstrosity. But the Mahabharata is not the head of a Brahminphilosophy accidentally stuck onto a body of non-Brahmin folklore, like the heads and bodies ofthe Brahmin woman and the Pariah woman in the story. True, it was like an ancient Wikipedia,to which anyone who knew Sanskrit, or who knew someone who knew Sanskrit, could add a bithere, a bit there. But the powerful intertextuality of Hinduism ensured that anyone who addedanything to the Mahabharata was well aware of the whole textual tradition behind it and fittedhis or her own insight, or story, or long philosophical disquisition, thoughtfully into the ongoingconversation. However diverse its sources, for several thousand years the tradition has regardedit as a conversation among people who know one another’s views and argue with silent partners.It is a contested text, 42 a brilliantly orchestrated hybrid narrative with no single party line on anysubject. The text has an integrity that the culture supports (in part by attributing it to a singleauthor, Vyasa, who is also a major player in the story) and that it is our duty to acknowledge.The contradictions at its heart are not the mistakes of a sloppy editor but enduring culturaldilemmas that no author could ever have resolved.THE POLITICAL WORLD OF THE MAHABHARATAThe Mahabharata challenged the relationships between the two upper classes, onlyultimately to reconfirm them. For example, the career of King Pushyamitra, the Brahmin whobecame a general and reinstated Hinduism over Buddhism in his kingdom, may have inspired animportant episode in the Mahabharata, the tale of Parashurama (“Rama with an Ax”), the son ofa Brahmin father and Kshatriya mother. When a Kshatriya killed Parashurama’s father, heavenged the murder by killing the entire class of Kshatriyas, over twenty-one generations. Healso avenged the theft of the calf of his father’s wishing cow by pursuing the king who stole her,killing him, and taking back the calf (3.116). This variant of the ancient cattle-raiding myth has a

Brahmin rather than a Kshatriya protagonist; it turns a famous Kshatriya myth around in order toattack Kshatriya despotism and royal greed and to undo the bifurcation of temporal and spiritualpower. The fantasy of Brahmins exterminating Kshatriyas and becoming Kshatriyas (a goal thatwas also attributed to an early historical king, Mahapadma Nanda) may also have been aprojection of Brahmin fears that the Kshatriyas would exterminate Brahmins, by converting toBuddhism or Jainism or by encouraging renunciant Hindu sects. 43VIOLENCE OF AND TOWARD ANIMALSWe may see a parallel, perhaps a historical influence, between the ambivalence towardnonviolence (ahimsa) expressed in the Ashokan edicts and in the Mahabharata.The Mahabharata is about what has been called “grotesque, sanctioned violence,” 44 andviolence not only toward animals but among them is a central theme. The assumption that therelationship between the animals themselves was, one might say, red in tooth and claw, ff wasenshrined in a phrase cited often in both the Mahabharata and the Artha-shastra: “fish eat fish”(matsya-nyaya), the big fish eating the little fish. fg In the myth of the flood, the tiny fish asksManu to save him from the big fish who will otherwise eat him, a literal instance of the metaphorfor the vicious, cannibalistic aspect of human nature, the dark things that swim deep in the watersof the unconscious. This image of virtual anarchy was used to justify a law and order agenda andto promote the strict enforcement of restrictive versions of dharma, in order to keep people frombehaving like animals. The assertion that without a king wielding punishment the stronger woulddevour the weaker as big fish eat small fish (or, sometimes, that they would roast them like fishon a spit [Manu 7.20]), is often used as an argument for coercive kingship.Characters in the Mahabharata also, however, sometimes use “fish eat fish” to justify theopposite agenda, anarchy, more precisely the jettisoning of the ancient India equivalent of theGeneva Convention (or the Marquess of Queens-berry’s rules), on the assumption that people tooare animals and cannot be stopped from acting like animals. When Arjuna urges Yudhishthira toaction, he says: “I see no being that lives in the world without violence. Creatures exist at oneanother’s expense; the stronger consume the weaker. The mongoose eats mice, just as the cateats the mongoose; the dog devours the cat, your majesty, and wild beasts eat the dog (12.15).”Scenes of the violent death of hundreds of animals, like miniatures of the violent death ofhuman beings at the center of the Mahabharata, stand like bookends framing the introductorybook. 45 It begins with King Janamejaya’s attempt to murder all the snakes in the world inrevenge for his father’s death by snakebite. This is an inverted horse sacrifice, an antisacrifice.The horse, a creature of light, the sky, fire, flying through the air, is the right animal to sacrificein a Vedic ceremony, while the snake, a creature of darkness, the underworld, water, cold,sliding under the ground, is the wrong animal. To the ancient Indians, a snake sacrifice musthave been an abomination, 46 for though Hindus have worshiped snakes from time immemorial,they do so by making small offerings of milk to them, not by killing them. The snake sacrifice inthe first book sets the stage for the central Mahabharata story. The story of a sacrifice that goeshorribly wrong, it is a dark mirror for the Mahabharata as a whole, brilliant, sinister, and surreal.For not only is the snake sacrifice the wrong sort of sacrifice to undertake, but Janamejaya’ssacrifice is never even completed: Snake after snake is dropped into the fire, writhing in agony,until a sage stops the ritual before the massacre is complete.And the first book of the Mahabharata ends with an attempt by Arjuna, Krishna, and Fire(Agni) to burn up the great Khandava forest, ignoring the plight of the animals that live there:“Creatures by the thousands screamed in terror and were scorched; some embraced their sons or

mothers or fathers, unable to leave them. Everywhere creatures writhed on the ground, withburning wings, eyes, and paws (1.217).” Only a few snakes still remained alive when acompassionate sage stopped the snake sacrifice, and only six creatures survived (one snake, fourbirds, and Maya, the architect of the antigods) when Agni, sated, stopped burning the forest.YUDHISHTHIRA’S DOGStories about animals are sometimes really about animals, the treatment of whom was, aswe have seen, both a public concern of rulers and an issue that Vedic and non-Vedic people oftendisputed. But stories about animals also function as parables about class tensions in this period.Take dogs. Hindu dharma forbids Hindus to have any contact with dogs, whom it regardsas unclean scavengers, literally untouchable (a-sprishya), the parasites of Pariahs who arethemselves regarded as parasites. Even Yudhishthira uses dogs as symbols of aggression whenhe says that humans negotiating peace are like dogs: “tail wagging, a bark, a bark back, backingoff, baring the teeth howling, and then the fight begins, and the stronger one wins and eats themeat. Humans are just exactly like that (5.70.70-72).” 47 Even after he has won the war, he says:“We are not dogs, but we act like dogs greedy for a piece of meat (12.7.10).” As for dogssymbolic of low castes, though the Gita insists that wise people cast the same gaze on a learnedBrahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog, or a dog cooker (5.18), the Mahabharata generally upholdsthe basic prejudice against dogs, as in this story, which also makes clear the analogy betweendogs and upwardly mobile Pariahs:THE DOG WHO WOULD BE LIONOnce there was an ascetic of such goodness that theflesh-eating wild animals—lions and tigers and bears, as well as rutting elephants, leopards, andrhinoceroses—were like his disciples. A dog, weak and emaciated from eating only fruits androots, like the sage, became attached to him out of affection, tranquil, with a heart like that of ahuman being. One day a hungry leopard came there and was about to seize the dog as his preywhen the dog begged the sage to save him. The sage turned him into a leopard, and then, when atiger attacked, into a tiger, and then a rutting elephant, and a lion. fh Now that he was carnivorous,all the other animals feared him and stayed away, and finally he wanted to eat the sage, who readhis thoughts and turned him back into a dog, his own proper form by birth [jati]. The dog mopedabout unhappily until the sage drove him out of the hermitage [12.115-19]. This dog even has ahuman heart, but he must not be allowed to get ideas above his station. The phrase “his ownproper form by birth” (jati) can also be translated, “his own proper form by caste,” for jati meansboth “birth” and “caste.” Both the dog and the sage are all wrong from the very beginning. Thedog violates dog dharma by being a vegetarian, whereas he should be a carnivore, and the sage iswrong too to protect the dog by making him bigger and bigger instead of, like Manu with theexpanding fish, putting him in bigger and bigger places. But the sage does not reciprocate thedog’s devotion or attachment to him. Whereas the dog misrecognizes himself as a human, thesage in the end is as cruel as a dog. 48A very different point of view is expressed by the tale of a dog with which this chapterbegan, “Yudhishthira’s Dilemma,” an episode in which Yudhishthira refuses to go to heavenwithout the stray dog who has attached itself to him, as the dog who would be lion attachedhimself to the ascetic—though Yudhishthira’s dog proves true to the end. What is most strikingabout this passage is that the god of Dharma himself becomes incarnate in this animal; it is as ifthe god of the Hebrew Bible had become incarnate in a pig. fiDharma uses the dog to make a powerful ethical point; this is surely a way of arguingabout the sorts of humans that should or should not go to heaven (a topic that the Mahabharata

also explicitly addresses) or even, perhaps, by extension, about the castes that should or shouldnot be allowed into temples. All good Hindus go to heaven (in this period), but they do so afterdying and being given different, heavenly bodies; Yudhishthira is unique in being given the giftof going to heaven in his own body. fj Perhaps in acknowledging his bond with animals, treatinghis dog like “someone who has come to you for refuge” or “a friend,” Yudhishthira hassomehow preserved the animality of his own body (that very animality denied by the sages, whoregard both dogs and women as dirty). And so he enters heaven not merely as a disembodiedspirit but as his entire embodied self. 49Yudhishthira refuses to abandon a dog who is “devoted” (bhakta) to him; heaven will notbe heaven if he cannot bring his dog with him. ‡ The dog, the loyal dog, is, after all, the naturalbhakta of the animal kingdom; it’s no accident that it’s a dog, not, say, a cat, who followsYudhishthira like that. (Cats, in Hinduism, are depicted as religious hypocrites. § ) But bhakti atthis period meant little more than belonging to someone, being dedicated to someone as a servantor loyal friend (or, occasionally, lover, as the term is sometimes also used for carnal love); it didnot yet have the specific overtone of passionate love between a god and his devotee that was tobecome characteristic of a branch of medieval Hinduism. Yet as the word expanded its meaning,the story of Yudhishthira and his dog often came to be read as a model for that sort of devotion.Indra’s argument, that dogs would pollute the sacrificial offerings merely by looking atthem, let alone touching them, is a common one. Manu (7.21) warns that if the king did not wieldthe rod of punishment justly, the dog would lick the oblation and everything would be upsidedown. In the Mahabharata version of the story of Rama and Sita, when Rama throws Sita out forthe first time, he compares her, after her sojourn in Ravana’s house, to an oblation that a dog haslicked (3.275.14). Much of the trouble in the Mahabharata begins with a dog who does not lickan oblation:When Janamejaya and his brothers were performing a sacrifice, a dog, a son of the bitch Sarama,came near. The brothers beat the dog, who ran howling back to his mother and told her that theyhad beaten him though he had neither looked at nor licked the offerings. Sarama then went to thesacrificial grounds and said to Janamejaya, “Since you beat my son when he had not doneanything wrong, danger will befall you when you do not see it coming (1.3.1-18).” As aresult of his prejudiced mistreatment of this pup, Janamejaya soon gets into serious trouble withother animals (snakes). Thus the Mahabharata both begins and ends with a story about justicefor dogs.But in Yudhishthira’s case the conflict remains unresolved; the text equivocates. Thesudden intrusion of the voice of the author in the first person at the beginning of the episode(“the dog that I have already told you about quite a lot [17.2.26]”) is highly unusual, almostunprecedented. It is as if the author has anticipated the end of the story and begins to remind theaudience that it is just a story—and not only just a story, but just a test (as they used to say ofair-raid signals on the radio), one of a series of tests that Dharma set for his son, all of which hepassed (17.3.18). For the dog never does go to heaven, never violates Hindu law, because therewas no dog; it was all an illusion. In case of a real dog . . . what then? The story shows just howrotten the caste system is but does not change it. No dogs get into heaven.NONCRUELTY AND NONVIOLENCE“I am determined not to be cruel,” says Yudhishthira. The term that he uses for “not to becruel” is more literally “not to harm humans [a-nri-shamsa].” fk It is a doubly weakened word: adouble negative (it doesn’t refer to doing something good, just to not doing something bad) and

species specific (specifying harm to humans); to apply it to the treatment of an animal istherefore rather forced, given the usual Hindu distinction between cruelty to humans and toanimals. The term (“not to be cruel”), which occurs here three times in four verses (17.3.7, 8, 10,and 30), is sometimes translated as “compassion,” fl but the usual Sanskrit word for that iskaruna, a more positive word. 50 Indra praises Yudhishthira for “weep[ing] with” all creatures(anukrosha), a word sometimes translated as “compassion,” but more than compassion, a vividform of sympathy. Yudhishthira is damning himself with faint praise if all he can muster up, inplace of either “compassion” or “weeping with,” is that he doesn’t harm humans. He is hedging,just as Ashoka did when he stopped short of embracing nonviolence entirely but merelymitigated some of the brutality to animals in his kingdom.The issue of noncruelty to animals is a minor variant on the heavier theme of nonviolence(ahimsa) toward both animals and humans, in an age when violence—toward humans as well astoward animals—is inevitable. Ahimsa (“the absence of the desire to kill”) is another of thosedouble negatives, like “noncruelty.” (The Indian nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak[1856-1920] translated ahimsa, in the Gita, as “harmlessness,” 51 another double negative.)Elsewhere too (3.297.72), Yudhishthira says that noncruelty is the highest dharma. On anotheroccasion, when Yudhishthira threatened to renounce the world, Arjuna had urged him to resignhimself to violent action, invoking a host of Vedic gods and one new, sectarian god (Skanda), aswell as mongooses and cats and mice, and saying: “People honor most the gods who are killers.Rudra is a killer, and so are Skanda, Indra, Agni, Varuna, Yama. I don’t see anyone living in theworld with nonviolence (ahimsa). Even ascetics (tapasas) cannot stay alive without killing(12.15.16, 20-21, 24).” Similarly, Rama, defending himself against charges of foul play againstan animal, the monkey Valin, argued: “Even sages go hunting.” Arjuna’s own consideration ofrenouncing action prompts Krishna’s reply in the Bhagavad Gita, a text that mentions ahimsaonly in the course of four lists of conventional virtues (10.5, 13.7, 16.2, and 17.14) and neverdiscusses it.Many Hindus continued to engage in animal sacrifice at this time, while Buddhists andJainas and, significantly, an increasing number of Hindus rejected it. Replacing the animalslaughter included in the major Vedic sacrifices, 52 ahimsa as a Hindu term claims a space closelyassociated with Jainism and Buddhism. 53 Yet the Brahmin redactors of the Mahabharata createda text that accepted the political implications of the violence of the universe, in part precisely inorder to distinguish themselves from the nonviolent Buddhists and Jainas. 54Commentators have sometimes regarded Yudhishthira as a Brahmin king (likePushyamitra) or a Buddhist king (like Ashoka), or both, a Brahminical Ashoka, who is temptedto reject violence much as Ashoka, by the testimony of his edicts, hoped to do. fm Yudhishthira’srefusal to rule after the war may have been a response to Asoka’s thirteenth Major Rock Edict orto legends about Ashoka that circulated after his death. 55 (Aspects of the life and character ofArjuna too may have been created in response to Ashoka. 56 )The Mahabharata, like Ashoka, is torn between violence and nonviolence, andoccasionally, as in the story of Yudhishthira’s dog, rests for a moment in the compromiseposition of avoiding cruelty. Both Ashoka and Pushyamitra left their marks on Yudhishthira. Allthree kings responded, in different ways, to the challenge of Buddhists and Jainas, particularly toJainas, who really did preach an uncompromising ahimsa. And all three kings created versions ofthe new ahimsa agenda that they could live with, a negotiated peace with both extremes. Butnonviolence is not a Buddhist or Jaina monopoly, nor is compassion; everyone was wrestlingwith these problems at this time, though in different ways, and gradually compassion came to

supplement, or sometimes even to replace, generosity (dana, “giving”) as the primary virtue ofhouseholders and sacrificers.The Brahmins’ ultimate credibility as a religious elite depended on disassociatingthemselves from the direct cruelties of governing, 57 despite their close advisory association withkings. For since the particular dharma, the sva-dharma, of Indian kings was inherently violent,they needed royal chaplains to wash off from their hands, every day, the blood of war dead andexecuted criminals, and they had to perform horse sacrifices to make restorations time after time(horse sacrifices that created yet more violence against animals). The ancient composite image ofthe royal sage or the warrior priest was compromised once and for all by that division of labor,and all of King Yudhishthira’s horses and all of his men could not put those images togetheragain.Even nonviolence could be violent in India; the urge to refrain from killing animals forfood, for instance, or to control violent addiction, often burst out in violence against the self. Wehave seen the tale of the rabbit in the moon, who offered his own flesh to Indra. This is a variantof a much repeated paradigm, the popularity of which shows us how deeply embedded inHinduism is the ideal of self-sacrifice, often to the point of martyrdom and self-torture. One ofthe most famous, and often retold, fn examples is this one:KING SHIBI SAVES THE DOVE FROM THE HAWKThe fame of King Shibi’s extraordinarygenerosity reached the gods in heaven, and Indra and Agni decided to put him to the test. Agniassumed the form of a dove, and Indra a hawk, pursuing the dove. The dove flew in terror toShibi. But the hawk objected, “I live on the meat of small birds; if you deprive me of my food,you are condemning me to death. Is this dharma?” King Shibi asked the hawk if he would acceptsome other flesh as a substitute. “Hawks eat doves,” countered the hawk, but eventually he said,“If you love this dove, cut off a piece of flesh that weighs as much as the dove.” Shibi had ascale brought and sliced off pieces of his flesh, but no matter how much he cut, the dove stillweighed more. Finally, he climbed into the scale altogether. The hawk revealed that he was Indraand the dove was Agni, and he promised Shibi that his fame would last forever (3.130-31).The Shylockian precise pound of flesh and the use of hawks and doves to symbolizemilitary aggression and peacefulness are themes that we can recognize from our own world. Inthe Pali Buddhist version, King Shibi (sometimes called Shivi) vows to give his living heart, hisflesh, his blood, or his eyes to anyone who asks for them; Indra, disguised as a blind Brahmin, fo58asks him for his eyes, which Shibi has his court physician cut out, causing him excruciating pain,and gives to him; eventually Indra restores Shibi’s eyes. 59 The king’s indifference to physicalpain is both a macho Kshatriya virtue and a badge of ascetic conquest of the body; 60 as a kingShibi draws upon the Kshatriya tradition, in which the warrior Karna, for instance, pretending tobe a Brahmin and wrongly believing that he is in fact a Charioteer’s son, betrays his hiddenKshatriya blood by remaining silent and motionless while a worm eats right through his thigh.(He does not want to disturb the sleep of his guru, whose head is resting upon Karna’s thigh[12.3]).The logical reductio ad adsurdum of the vegetarian agenda—letting animals eat one’sown body, as in the Other World in the Brahmanas—also results from a combination of the bitterrealism of the Mahabharata and the challenge of nonviolence. The story of Shibi resolves theaporia by the familiar illusio ex machina: There was no dove, no hawk; it was just a test. But in aworld where there are, after all, hawks who eat doves, a human may avoid personally takinganimal life by eating vegetables. Extending ahimsa into a universal law, however, a Kantiansanatana dharma beyond the human world (taking into account those screaming carrots and the

trees soundlessly screaming), would make most creatures starve to death.SACRIFICE AND ANTISACRIFICENonviolence toward animals clashes head-on with animal sacrifice. The Mahabharatasays there are seven wild sacrificial beasts (pashus) fp —lion, tiger, boar, monkey, bear, elephant,and buffalo—and seven domestic sacrificial beasts, which we know from the Brahmanas: theusual first four—bull, stallion, billy goat, and ram—plus ass, mule (a mixed breed, bred from ahorse and a donkey) and a human man (6.5.12-14). But despite including humans as pashus, thetext leans over backward to deny human sacrifice. Krishna says to a king who is threatening tosacrifice a number of captive kings, “What pleasure is there for the kings who are anointed andwashed like sacrificial beasts in the house of Pashupati? You have captured kings and you wantto sacrifice them to Rudra. . . . No one has ever seen a sacrifice of men. So how can you intend tosacrifice men to the god Shiva? How can you give the title of sacrificial beasts to men of thesame species as yourself (2.14.18; 2.20.8-11).”To prevent human sacrifice, the Brahmanas prescribed a course of substitutions.In theVedic myth of the sage who used a horse head to tell the Ashvins about the soma, 61 the head of ahorse stood in for the head of a human in a sacrificial beheading. In the Mahabharata, whichrules out human sacrifice, debate centered on the horse sacrifice, the most spectacular ofsacrifices, which reaches so high to heaven that it is the first place where the antisacrificiallightning strikes. Daksha’s sacrifice is a horse sacrifice, and so is Yudhishthira’s.YUDHISHTHIRA’S HORSE SACRIFICEAfter the final, victorious battle, Yudhishthira renounces his previous desire to renouncekingship and decides to perform a spectacular horse sacrifice, making public his seriousintentions for the future: to rule with justice as well as with power. But the ritual also looksbackward to the past, expiating his sins and exorcising his grief (as Rama’s horse sacrifice doesfor him). For almost everyone has been killed in the great battle; the Pandava brothers remainalive, Pyrrhic victors, to rule their decimated kingdom. Soon even they will die, after most oftheir remaining comrades kill one another in a stupid drunken brawl.The great horse sacrifice of Yudhishthira should be a triumphant event. And to a certainextent it is: The consecrated stallion is set free to roam for a year, guarded by Arjuna, who, in thecourse of his wanderings, fights a number of battles and kills a number of people (despiteYudhishthira’s pleas to him to avoid killing whenever possible) until he himself is killed by hisson Babhruvahana and revived by Babhuvahana’s mother, Chitrangada. 62 Arjuna and the stallionreturn safely to the capital; three hundred animal victims, including bulls and birds and aquaticanimals, are tied to sacrificial stakes. The Brahmins set some of the animals free, “pacify” others,and “take” and “pacify” (i.e., suffocate) the horse. Draupadi lies down beside the suffocatedstallion (14.91.2). (Other wives of other Pandavas, including Arjuna’s wives Ulupi andChitrangada, are present but are not said to lie with the stallion.) The Brahmins remove the fat(or marrow) from the horse and boil it; the Pandavas inhale the fumes, which purify them of allevils. (They do not eat the flesh.) The priests offer the remaining pieces of the horse as oblationsinto the fire. The ceremony is intended not only to purify the Pandavas but to fortify the kingdomfor Yudhishthira and to produce an heir for Arjuna, because Draupadi’s five children, one bornfrom each husband, all were killed at the end of the great war. The horse therefore stands notonly for Yudhishthira but also for Arjuna. Yudhishthira ascends his throne.But the success of the sacrifice is undermined by a story told right after it ends and the

guests depart. A mongoose came out of his hole there and declared, in a human voice, “Thiswhole sacrifice is not equal to one of the grains of barley that were given by a Brahmin wholived by observing the vow of gleaning.” fq He then told a story about this Brahmin: During afamine he gave his few remaining grains of barley to a guest who turned out to be Dharma indisguise; the gleaner promptly went to heaven, with his family. When the mongoose finishedtelling this tale, he vanished (14.92-93), and the storyteller concluded, “Indeed, nonhostility[adroha] to all creatures, contentment, clean conduct, tapas, self-restraint, truthfulness, andgenerosity all are regarded as equal (14.94.1).” King Janamejaya, listening to the story, thenreplied, “Kings are addicted to sacrifice, and sages are addicted to inner heat. The Brahmins busythemselves with pacification, tranquilization, and restraint.” He went on to argue that since Indrahad become ruler of heaven through sacrifice, surely Yudhishthira, who (with Bhima andArjuna) resembled Indra in wealth and power, was right to perform the horse sacrifice, and themongoose was wrong to criticize him. The storyteller then told him another story:INDRA’S ANIMAL SACRIFICE DEBATEOnce upon a time, Indra began a great sacrifice,involving the slaughter of many animals. But as the sacrificial animals [pashus] were seized forslaughter, the great sages saw how wretched they were and were overcome by pity (kripa). Theysaid to Indra, “This is not the right way to sacrifice. Domestic animals (pashus) were not createdfor sacrifice. This brutality of yours is destructive of dharma, for injury (himsa) cannot be calleddharma. Sacrifice instead with seeds of grain that have been kept for three years.” But Indra, Godof a Hundred Sacrifices, in his delusion and pride, did not agree to their words. They put thematter to King Vasu: “What is the ruling about sacrifice? Should it be done with domesticanimals that are designated for sacrifice, or with infertile seeds? With horses or with fruits?”King Vasu, without thinking, said, “You can sacrifice with whatever is at hand,” and for sayingthis, which was not true, he went immediately to hell. For a sacrifice performed with materialswrongly obtained, or with an evil mind, does not yield the fruits of dharma. People—Brahmins,Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras—do go to heaven by giving away what they have gleaned,and also by compassion to all creatures, and chastity, and sympathy (14.94.1-34). Indrapresumably completes his sacrifice, since he disregards the sages’ words. But we are told that hedid this not out of wisdom but out of his pride and delusion; King Vasu too is punished fordisregarding the sages’ question. Janamejaya’s pluralism (some people have one addiction;others have another) is not the right answer, but the text never tells us what the right answerwould be, because there is no right answer. These stories cast a serious shadow of doubt on theglory of the horse sacrifice.So too the unofficial “black” ritual of witchcraft, the snake sacrifice, shadows both ofYudhishthira’s official, “white” rituals, the consecration and the horse sacrifice. TheMahabharata sees a vice behind every virtue, a snake behind every horse, and a doomsdaybehind every victory.CHAPTER 11DHARMA IN THE MAHABHARATA300 BCE to 300 CECHRONOLOGYc. 300 BCE-300 CE The Mahabharata is composedc. 200 BCE-200 CE TheRamayana is composed327-25 BCE Alexander the Great invades Northwest South Asiac. 324BCE Chandragupta founds the Mauryan dynastyc. 265-232 BCE Ashoka reignsc. 250 BCE TheThird Buddhist Council takes place at Pataliputrac. 185 BCE The Mauryan dynasty endsc. 185

BCE Pushyamitra founds the Shunga dynasty73 BCE The Shunga dynasty endsc. 150 BCE Themonuments of Bharhut and Sanchi are builtc. 166 BCE-78 CE Greeks and Scythians enterIndiaDharma is subtle. Mahabharata, passimTHE SUBTLETY OF DHARMASome Hindus will tell you that the Mahabharata is about the five Pandava brothers, somethat it is about the incarnate god Krishna. But most Hindu traditions will tell you that it is aboutdharma; sometimes they call it a history (itihasa), but sometimes a dharma text(dharma-shastra). To say that the long sermons on dharma are a digression from the story, a lateand intrusive padding awkwardly stuck onto a zippy epic plot, would be like saying that the ariasin a Verdi opera are unwelcome interruptions of the libretto; dharma, like the aria, is thecenterpiece, for which the narration (the recitative) is merely the frame.Time and again when a character finds that every available moral choice is the wrongchoice, or when one of the good guys does something obviously very wrong, he will mutter or betold, “Dharma is subtle” (sukshma), thin and slippery as a fine silk sari, elusive as awill-o’-the-wisp, internally inconsistent as well as disguised, hidden, masked. People try againand again to do the right thing, and fail and fail, until they no longer know what the right thing is.“What is dharma?” asked Yudhishthira, and did not stay for an answer. As one of the earlydharma texts put it, “Right and wrong [dharma and adharma] do not go about saying, ‘Here weare’; nor do gods, Gandharvas, or ancestors say, ‘This is right, that is wrong.’” 1 TheMahabharata deconstructs dharma, exposing the inevitable chaos of the moral life.Dharma had already been somewhat codified from between the third and first centuriesBCE, when the dharma-sutras set forth, in prose, the rules of social life and religiousobservance. 2 By now the Brahmins were circling the wagons against the multiple challenges ofBuddhist dhamma (the teachings of the Buddha), Ashokan Dhamma (the code carved oninscriptions and preserved in legends), Upanishadic moksha, yoga, and the wildfire growth ofHindu sects. Buddhists presented their own ideas about what they called (in Pali) dhamma, ideasthat overlapped with but were certainly not the same as Hindu ideas about dharma. BeforeBuddhism became an issue, there had been no need to define dharma in great detail. But nowthere was such a need, for the Buddha called his own religion the dhamma, and eventuallydharma came to mean, among other things, one’s religion (so that Hindus would later speak ofChristianity as the Christian dharma).Dharma continued to denote the sort of human activity that leads to human prosperity,victory, and glory, but now it also had much more to do. For now the text was often forced toacknowledge the impossibility of maintaining any sort of dharma at all in a world where everyrule seemed to be canceled out by another. The narrators kept painting themselves into a cornerwith the brush of dharma. Their backs to the wall, they could only reach for another story.THE KARMA OF DHARMADharma is not merely challenged in the abstract; as a god he is also called to account, foreven Dharma has karma, in the sense of the moral consequences of his actions. Dharma (whichcan often best be translated as “justice”) at this time was clearly being assailed on all sides bycompeting agendas that challenged the justice of justice, as this story does:MANDAVYA AT THE STAKEThere was once a Brahmin named Mandavya, an expert ondharma, who had kept a vow of silence for a long time. One day robbers hid in his house, and

when he refused to break his vow to tell the police where they were, and the police then foundthe robbers hiding there, the king passed judgment on Mandavya along with the thieves: “Killhim.” The executioners impaled the great ascetic on a stake. The Brahmin, who was the verysoul of dharma, remained on the stake for a long time. Though he had no food, he did not die; hewilled his life’s breaths to remain within him, until the king came to him and said, “Greatest ofsages, please forgive me for the mistake that I made in my delusion and ignorance.” The sageforgave him, and the king had him taken down from the stake. But he was unable to pull thestake out, and so he cut it off at its base, thinking it might come in useful for carrying things likeflower baskets. And so he went about with the stake still inside him, in his neck, ribs, andentrails, and people used to call him “Tip-of-the-Stake” Mandavya.Mandavya went to the houseof Dharma and scolded him, saying, “What did I do, without knowing what I had done,something so bad that it earned me such retribution?” Dharma said, “You stuck blades of grassup the tails of little butterflies when you were a child, and this is the fruit of that karma.” ThenMandavya said, “For a rather small offense you have given me an enormous punishment.Because of that, Dharma, you will be born as a man, in the womb of a Shudra. And I willestablish a moral boundary for the fruition of dharma in the world: no sin will be counted againstanyone until the age of fourteen (1.101; cf. 1.57.78-71).” That the Brahmin who knowsdharma is mightier than the king should not surprise anyone who has been following the Vedictexts, but that a man who trots around cheerfully with a stake through his intestines is mightiereven than the god Dharma himself is worthy of note. The moral law is stupid—children shouldnot be so grotesquely punished for their mischief, even when it involves cruelty to insects—andso the moral law must undergo its own expiation. Dharma, the god, must undergo the curse formiscarriage of dharma. Being born as a human is different both from fathering a child (asDharma fathers Yudhishthira) and from spinning off an incarnation (as Vishnu does for Ramaand Krishna), for when Dharma is born on earth (as Vidura; see below), he ceases to exist inheaven until Vidura dies; that is the nature of the curse. That being born of a Shudra is a terriblecurse, one from which you cannot escape in this life, is an attitude that endorses the extant classsystem. On the other hand, the Mahabharata challenges that system by imagining that the morallaw might become incarnate in a person born of a woman of the lowest class, a Shudra mother. Italso implicitly challenges the ideal of nonviolence toward animals, implying that you can take ittoo far; people are not the same as animals, and so impaling a butterfly (anally) is not as seriousas impaling a man (also anally, by implication).THE TRANSFER OF KARMAThat even Dharma has karma is an indication of how powerful a force karma hadbecome. Buddhism in this period was already preaching the transfer of merit from one person toanother, and early Hindu texts too had hinted at such a possibility. The Mahabharata totters onthe brink of a full-fledged concept of the transfer of karma, in a passage that takes up the storyafter Yudhishthira has entered heaven (with Dharma, no longer incarnate as a dog). There he wasin for an unpleasant surprise:YUDHISHTHIRA IN HEAVEN AND HELLWhen Yudhishthira, the dharma king, reached thetriple-tiered heaven, he did not see his brothers or Draupadi. He asked where his brothers were,and Draupadi, and the gods commanded their messenger to take him to them. The messengertook Yudhishthira to hell, where he saw hideous tortures. Unable to abide the heat and the stenchof corpses, he turned to go, but then he heard the voices of his brothers and Draupadi crying,“Stay here, as a favor to us, just for a little while. A sweet breeze from your body wafts over us

and brings us relief.” Yudhishthira wondered if he was dreaming or out of his mind, but hedetermined to stay there, to help them.The gods, with Dharma himself, came to him, andeverything disappeared—the darkness, the tortures, everything. Indra said to Yudhishthira, “Myson, inevitably all kings must see hell. People who have a record of mostly bad deeds enjoy thefruits of their good deeds first, in heaven, and go to hell afterward. Others experience hell firstand go afterward to heaven. You saw hell, and your brothers and Draupadi all went to hell, justin the form of a deception. Come now to heaven.” And Dharma said, “I tested you before bytaking on the form of a dog, and now this was another test, for you chose to stay in hell for thesake of your brothers.” And so Yudhishthira went with Dharma and the gods, and plunged intothe heavenly Ganges, and shed his human body. And then he stayed there with his brothers andDraupadi. Eventually, they all reached the worlds beyond which there is nothing (18.1-5).Yudhishthira’s ability to ease his brothers’ torments takes the form of a cool, sweetbreeze that counteracts the hot, putrid air of hell, through a kind of transfer of merit. fr Hetherefore wants to stay with his brothers in hell, even though he himself does not belong there,just as he wanted to stay with the dog outside heaven, again where he did not belong. Elsewherein the Mahabharata (3.128), when a king wants to take over the guilt of his priest in hell (aninteresting role reversal: The priest had sacrificed a child so that the king could get a hundredsons), Dharma protests, “No one ever experiences the fruit of another person’s deed.” The king,however, insists on living in hell along with the priest for the same term, and eventually both heand the priest go to heaven. He does not save the priest from suffering, but he suffers with him.In the case of Yudhishthira in hell, this time no one tries to persuade him; they all learned howstubborn he was the last time. What, then, is the solution? A sure sign of a moral impasse in anynarrative is the invocation of the “it was just a dream” motif at the end, erasing the aporiaentirely. Another is the deus ex machina. The Mahabharata invokes both here, a double red flag(triple if we count the two gods plus the illusion).But the illusory cop-out—it wasn’t really a dog; it wasn’t really hell—is contradicted bythe need for people to expiate their sins in a real hell. The heroes go to hell, go to heaven, and inthe end go on to worlds “beyond which there is nothing,” a phrase that speaks in the tantalizingnegatives of the Upanishads and leaves us in the dark about the nature of those worlds.Janamejaya, to whom the story is told, asks a set of questions about the “levels of existence”(gatis)—that is, the various sorts of lives into which one can be reborn: “How long did thePandavas remain in heaven? Or did they perhaps have a place there that would last forever? Or atthe end of their karma what level of existence did they reach? (18.5.4-5).” The bard does notreally answer these questions, but the reference to the worlds “beyond which there is nothing”and the fact that they are not said to be reborn on earth imply that their karma did come to anend, in worlds that are the equivalent of moksha. The authors of the Mahabharata are thinkingout loud, still trying to work it all out. They are keeping their minds open, refusing to reach afinal verdict on a subject—the complex function of karma—on which the jury is still out.DHARMA, MOKSHA, AND BHAKTI IN THE GITADharma needed all the subtlety it could muster to meet the challenges of Buddhism buteven more those of moksha, which had made major headway since the early Upanishads. Ideasabout both dharma and moksha had been in the air for centuries, but now they were brought intodirect confrontation with each other, in the Bhagavad Gita.The Gita is a conversation between Krishna and Arjuna on the brink of the great battle.Krishna had been gracious enough to offer to be Arjuna’s charioteer, an inferior position, though

appropriate to Krishna’s quasi-Brahmin nature. fs Arjuna, assailed by many of the doubts thatplagued Ashoka, 3 asks Krishna a lot of difficult, indeed unanswerable age-old questions aboutviolence and nonviolence, this time in the context of the battlefield, questioning the necessity ofviolence for warriors. The sheer number of different reasons that Krishna gives to Arjuna,including the argument that since you cannot kill the soul, killing the body in war (like killing ananimal in sacrifice) is not really killing, is evidence for the author’s deep disquiet about killingand the need to justify it. The moral impasse is not so much resolved as blasted away when afterKrishna has given a series of complex and rather abstract answers, Arjuna asks him to show himhis true cosmic nature. Krishna shows him his doomsday form, and Arjuna cries out, “I see yourmouths with jagged tusks, and I see all of these warriors rushing blindly into your gapingmouths, like moths rushing to their death in a blazing fire. Some stick in the gaps between yourteeth, and their heads are ground to powder (11.25-290).” And right in the middle of theterrifying epiphany, Arjuna apologizes to Krishna for all the times that he had rashly andcasually called out to him, saying, “Hey, Krishna! Hey, pal!” He begs the god to turn back intohis pal Krishna, which the god consents to do.The worshiper (represented by Arjuna) is comforted by the banality, the familiarity ofhuman life, but inside the text, the warrior with ethical misgivings has been persuaded to kill,just as the god kills, and outside the text, the reader or hearer has been persuaded that since waris unreal, it is not evil. And this political message is made palatable by the god’s resumption ofhis role as an intimate human companion. The Mahabharata as a whole is passionately againstwar, vividly aware of the tragedy of war, despite the many statements that violence is necessary.Nor, despite the way that Krishna persuades Arjuna to fight, is the Gita used in India to justifywar; it is generally taken out of context and used only for its philosophy, which can be used tosupport arguments for peace, as, notably, in the hands of Gandhi.Krishna’s broader teaching in the Gita resolves the tension between dharma and mokshaby forming a triad with bhakti (worship, love, devotion) as the third member, mediating betweenthe other two terms of the dialectic. When Arjuna can choose neither dharma (he doesn’t want tokill his relatives) nor renunciation (he is a Kshatriya), Krishna offers him a third alternative,devotion. The Gita sets out a paradigm of three paths (margas) to salvation, also called threeyogas: karma (works, rituals), jnana (cognate with “knowledge” and “gnosis”), and bhakti (2.49,3.3). Karma contains within it the worldly Vedic path of rebirth, the world of dharma (here, aselsewhere, functioning as the equivalent of sva-dharma), in contrast with jnana, whichrepresents the meditational, transcendent Vedantic path of Release, the world of moksha. ft Bhaktibridges the conflicting claims of the original binary opposition between what Luther would havecalled works (karma) and faith (jnana). But each member of the triad of jnana, karma, and bhaktiwas regarded by its adherents as the best, if not the only, path to salvation. One way in whichbhakti modifies moksha is by introducing into the Upanishadic formula—that you are brahman(the divine substance of the universe)—a god with qualities (sa-guna) who allows you to lovethe god without qualities (nir-guna). By acting with devotion to Krishna, Arjuna is freed fromthe hellish consequences of his actions.The Gita employs some Buddhist terminology (“nirvana,” for instance, the blowing outof a flame, which is a more Buddhist way of saying moksha), and Arjuna starts out with whatmight appear to be a quasi-Buddhist attitude that Krishna demolishes. But “nirvana” is also aHindu word (found, for example, in the Upanishads), and it is the tension within Hinduism itselfthat the Gita is addressing, the challenge to assimilate the ascetic ideal into the ideology of anupper-class householder. 4 The Gita’s brilliant solution to this problem is to urge Arjuna (and the

eader/hearer of the Gita) to renounce not the actions but their fruits, to live with “karma withoutkama,” actions without desires. This is a way to maintain a renouncer’s state of mind, a spiritualstate of mind, in the midst of material life, a kind of moral Teflon that blocks the consequencesof actions. “Karma without kama” means not that one should not desire certain results fromone’s actions, but merely that one should not expect the results (for so much is out of ourcontrol) or, more important, regard the results as the point; it’s the journey that counts, not whereyou end up. fu In the Gita, this means that each of us must perform our own sva-dharma—inArjuna’s case, to kill his kinsmen in battle—with the attitude of a renunciant. This is a far cryfrom the social ethics of Buddhism. “Had the Buddha been the charioteer,” says Romila Thapar,“the message would have been different.” 5CASTE AND CLASS CONFLICTSThe adherence to one’s own dharma that the Gita preaches is part of a new social systemthat was taking shape at this time, 6 the system of castes, which could not be neatly andautomatically subsumed as subcategories of classes (though Manu tried to do it [10.8-12]). Class(varna) and caste (jati) began to form a single, though not yet a unified, social system. Newcommunities were beginning to coalesce, their identities defined by a shared occupation andcaste status, or by religious sectarian affiliation, or by the use of a particular language. 7 Most ofthe castes probably derived from clans or guilds, in which, increasingly, families specialized inprofessions. (The Sanskrit word for caste, jati, means “birth.”) But other castes might haveconsisted of alien sects, tribes, and professions, of people of various geographical, sectarian, andeconomic factions. Now invaders like the Shakas or Kushanas and tribal forest dwellers like theNishadas, as well as other groups on the margins of settled society, could also be absorbed into aspecific caste (jati), often of uncertain class (varna), or sometimes into a class, mainly Kshatriyafor rulers, seldom Brahmins. Tribes such as Nishadas and Chandalas sometimes seem to haveamounted to a fifth varna of their own. 8The division of society into castes facilitated the inclusion of new cultures and groups ofpeople who could eventually be filed away in the open shelving of the caste system, “slotted intothe caste hierarchy, their position being dependent on their occupation and social origins, and onthe reason for the induction.” 9 This was an effective way to harness the energies and loyalties ofskilled indigenous people who were conquered, subordinated, or encroached upon by a societythat already observed class distinctions. For while the system of classes (varnas) was already atheoretical mechanism for assimilation, 10 the system of castes (jatis) now offered the practicalreality of a form of integration, 11 from outside the system to inside it. Caste thus paved the wayfor other conversions, such as that of Hindus to Buddhism or Jainism or to the new non-Vedicforms of Hinduism—renunciant or sectarian.Many of the assimilated castes were Shudras, who were excluded from participating inthe Vedic rituals but often had their own rituals and worshiped their own gods. 12 Below theShudras were the so-called polluted castes; beside, rather than below them, were the tribals andunassimilated aliens (mlecchas). The logic of class placed some tribal groups in a castelikecategory, albeit one standing outside the caste hierarchy; tribals are relegated not to a distinctlevel within a vertical structure, but rather to a horizontal annex that could not be integrated intoany cubbyhole in the system. 13 But some tribals are peculiarly intimate outsiders, recognized asneighbors whom the system can ultimately assimilate within the system more easily than alieninvaders like Turks or Europeans. The system of castes was rationalized through an ideology ofpurity and pollution that was applied to the subgroups, both ethnic and professional, within the

four classes. As some professions were defined as purer than others, the hierarchy took over.Like the Buddhists and Jainas, many of the new sects disavowed caste or at leastquestioned its assumptions. 14 At the same time, there was an increasing tendency, which Ashokadid much to popularize, to define a dharma that could be all things to all men, a dharma/dhammaso general (sadharana, “held in common”), so perpetual (sanatana) that it applied to allright-thinking people always, transcending the differences between various sects. And though theBrahmins quickly manipulated the system to keep individuals from moving up in the hierarchyof castes, vertical mobility was possible for the caste as a whole, if the entire group changed itswork and, sometimes, its location. In this way, a particular caste might begin as a Shudra casteand eventually become a Brahmin caste. Some of the assimilated castes did become Brahmins,Kshatriyas, or Vaishyas and thus had access to the rites of the twice born. So many kings were ofShudra or Brahmin origin rather than Kshatriyas that by the time the Muslim rulers reached Indiathey found it difficult to make a correct identification of either a class or a caste among theiropposite numbers. 15The Mahabharata both challenges and justifies the entire class structure. The word for“class” (varna) here begins to draw upon its other meaning of “color.” In the course of one of thelong discussions of dharma, one sage says to another: “Brahmins are fair [white], Kshatriyasruddy [red], Vaishyas sallow [yellow], and Shudras dark [black].” The adjectives can denoteeither skin color or the four primary colors that are symbolically associated with the fourclasses, 16 as well as with the three qualities of matter plus yellow (saffron? ocher?) for thetranscendent fourth of spirit. In one passage, someone asks a sage a series of questions that showus something of the perceived need, at this time, newly to justify the (mis)treatment of the lowerclasses:THE ORIGIN OF CLASS COLORS“If different colors distinguish different classes among thefour classes, how is it that there is a mixture of colors in all classes? Desire, anger, fear, greed,sorrow, worry, hunger, and exhaustion affect all of us. How then are the classes distinguished?Sweat, urine, feces, phlegm, mucus, and blood flow out of all our bodies. How then are theclasses distinguished? And how can you tell one class from another among all the species [ jati]of the countless creatures, moving and still, that have such various colors?” The sage replied:“Actually, there is no difference between the classes; this whole universe is made of brahman.But when the creator emitted it long ago, actions/karmas divided it into classes. Those Brahminswho were fond of enjoying pleasures, quick to anger and impetuous in their affections,abandoned their own dharma and became Kshatriyas, with red bodies. Those who took upherding cattle and engaged in plowing, and did not follow their own dharma, became yellowVaishyas. And those who were greedy and fond of violence (himsa) and lies, living on all sortsof activities, fallen from purity, became black Shudras. And that’s how these actions/karmas splitoff the Brahmins into a different class, for there was never any interruption of their dharma andtheir sacrificial rituals (12.181.5-14). The implication is that in the beginning, everyone had notonly the same general physical makeup (the Shylock argument: Cut us and we bleed) and thesame general dharma of good behavior, but the same sva-dharma, “one’s own-dharma,” theparticular dharma of each class (and, later, each caste), and that that primeval sva-dharma wasthe sva-dharma of Brahmins: maintaining dharma and sacrificial rituals. But then each of theother classes voluntarily took up other activities—the Kshatriyas indulged in pleasure and anger(a contradiction of the earlier statement that we all share these emotions), the Vaishyas incommerce, and the Shudras in violent and unclean professions—leaving the Brahmins alone inpossession of the original dharma that had been meant for everyone, that had been intended as, in

effect, the common (sadharana) dharma.Krishna’s declaration to Arjuna in the Gita that “it is better to do your own duty poorlythan another’s well” (echoed in Manu [10.97]) ignored the fact that Arjuna’s own duty as awarrior would forever doom him to relative inferiority vis-à-vis Brahmins whose sva-dharmajust happened to conform with the universal dharma that dictated nonviolence. Here is thecatch-22 that Manu perpetuates: the hierarchically superior prototype is also the generalizablearchetype. Although, in reality, power was largely in the hands of the rulers, the Brahminimaginary relegated the violent ruler to a place inferior to that of the nonviolent prototype, theBrahmin.The conversation about the colors thus brings the argument for equality into theopen—where it must have been at this time, when various social barriers were beingchallenged—but the old argument from creation comes to the rescue, and the class differencesare affirmed in new ways. Now the class system is not created ab initio, by the gods, as in theVedic “Poem of the Primeval Man”; now it results from the bad karmic choices of the classesthemselves. It’s their own damn fault. This is a major transition from authoritative decree toapologia.THE NISHADASThe four classes were the central concern of a broader social agenda that included (byexcluding) both Pariahs (even lower than the Shudras) and tribal people, epitomized by theNishadas. A typically cold-blooded disregard of the Nishadas is evident in a story told early inthe Mahabharata:THE HOUSE OF LACWhen the Pandavas were still young, and living with their mother, Kunti,their enemies tricked them into staying in a highly combustible house made of lac [a kind ofnatural resin], which they intended to burn. Yudhishthira decided that they should put six peoplein the house, set fire to it, and escape. Kunti held a feast to which she invited a hungry Nishadawoman and her five sons. The Nishadas got drunk and remained after the other guests had left;the Pandavas set fire to the house and escaped, and when the townspeople found the charredremains of the innocent Nishada woman and her five sons, they assumed that the Pandavas weredead (1.134-37). Only the single word “innocent” (“without wrongdoing” [1.137.7])suggests the slightest sympathy for the murdered Nishadas. They are sacrificial substitutes,whom the author of this text treats as expendable because he regards them as subhuman beings.Perhaps their drunkenness (one of the four addictive vices of lust) is meant to justify their deaths.A somewhat more sympathetic story about Nishadas is the tale of Ekalavya:EKALAVYA CUTS OFF HIS THUMBDrona was the Pandavas’ archery tutor, and Arjuna washis star pupil. One day a boy named Ekalavya, the son of a tribal Nishada chieftain, came tothem. When Drona, who knew dharma, refused to accept the son of a Nishada as a pupil,Ekalavya touched his head to Drona’s feet, went out into the jungle, and made a clay image ofDrona, to which he paid the respect due a teacher. He practiced intensely and became a greatarcher. One day the Pandavas went out hunting with their dog. The dog wandered off, came uponEkalavya, and stood there barking at him until the Nishada shot seven arrows almostsimultaneously into the dog’s mouth. The dog went whimpering back to the Pandavas, who wereamazed and went to find the man who had accomplished this feat. They found him and askedhim who he was, and he told them he was the Nishada Ekalavya, a pupil of Drona’s.They wenthome, but Arjuna kept thinking about Ekalavya, and one day he asked Drona why he had a pupil,the son of a Nishada, who was an even better archer than he, Arjuna. Drona then resolved to do

something about this. He took Arjuna with him to see Ekalavya, and when he found him, he saidto Ekalavya, “If you are my pupil, pay me my fee right now.” Ekalavya, delighted, said,“Command me, my guru. There is nothing I will not give my guru.” Drona replied, “Give meyour right thumb.” When Ekalavya heard this terrible speech from Drona, he kept his promise.His face showed his joy in it, and his mind was entirely resolved to do it. He cut off his thumband gave it to Drona. And after that, when the Nishada shot an arrow, his fingers were not soquick as before. Arjuna was greatly relieved (1.123.10-39). This is a brutal story, even for theMahabharata. How are we to understand it? First of all, who is Ekalavya? He is a prince amonghis own people, but that wins him no points with the Pandava princes. The Nishadas hereembrace Hindu dharma and Hindu forms of worship but are still beneath the contempt of thecaste system. For such a person to stand beside the Pandava princes in archery classes wasunthinkable; that is what Drona, who “knew dharma,” realized.In order to protect both dharma and the reputation of his own world-class archery student,Drona claims his retroactive tuition, the guru-dakshina. Of course we are shocked; to add insultto injury, Drona really didn’t teach Ekalavya at all and hardly deserves any tuition fees, let alonesuch a grotesque payment. But where is the author’s sympathy? It is hard to be sure. It isarrogant of Ekalavya to push in where he does not belong; he cannot be a noble archer, for hewas born into the wrong family for nobility. But Ekalavya does not act arrogant. His outwardappearance invokes all the conventional tropes for tribals: he is described as black, wrapped inblack deerskin, hair all matted, dressed in rags, his body caked with dirt. He is made of thewrong stuff (or, as we would say, has the wrong genes). He is physically dirt. But his inner soul,reflected in his behavior, is pious and respectful; he does what the teacher tells him to do; notonly is he a brilliant archer, but he is honest and humble. To this extent, at least, theMahabharata likes him and presumably pities him; it refers to Drona’s command as “terrible”(daruna).Yet the act by which Ekalavya proves his mettle as an archer is one of gratuitous andgrotesque cruelty to a dog, the animal that is in many ways the animal counterpart, even thetotem, of a Nishada. The dog barks at him, betraying the class attitude that dogs often pick upfrom their masters; the dog doesn’t like the way Ekalavya looks and, probably, smells. DoesEkalavya’s unsympathetic treatment of this dog cancel out our sympathy for Ekalavya as thevictim of interhuman violence? Does it justify Drona’s cruel treatment of him—what goesaround comes around, travels down the line—or, at least, remind us of the cruelty inherent in thesva-dharma of a hunter? But the text shows no sympathy for the dog and therefore nocondemnation of Ekalavya for his treatment of the dog.Here, as in the tale of Yudhishthira’s dog, the story shows just how rotten the castesystem is but does not change it. No dogs get into heaven; Ekalavya loses his thumb. I read thetext as deeply conflicted; it assumes that this is the way things must be, but it does not like theway things must be. It paints Ekalavya sympathetically despite itself. If we compare this storywith the Ramayana tale of Shambuka, we can see one significant difference: The central episodeof mutilation of an uppity low-caste man is no longer framed and balanced by another story (therevival of a child) or by the interloper’s evil goal (usurping the gods’ privileges). The basic pointis the same as for Shambuka—don’t get ideas above your station—but here it is starker,unjustified by anything but uppitiness. And where we learned nothing at all about Shambuka buthis class, now Ekalavya’s physical repulsiveness is contrasted with his high moral qualities. Isthis progress? Perhaps. It shows a more complex view of dharma, though it still upholds thatdharma. 17

In the face of his defense of the class system, the author of this story saw the humanity inEkalavya, saw that tribals were human beings of dignity and honor. It doesn’t necessarily meanthat tribals tried to break into the professions of Kshatriyas. Nor does it mean that Kshatriyaswent around cutting off the thumbs of tribals. It means that the author of this text imagined thesituation and was troubled by it. The people who heard and, eventually, read the text must haveseen that too; maybe some of them, as a result, treated the tribals whom they encountered withmore humanity. The imagination of a better world may have made it a better world.Moreover, during the long history of both this story and the story of the Nishada womanand her sons, different people did read the story differently; the reading of the Brahminimaginary was certainly not the only one. This is a moment that justifies a bit of fast-forwarding.There is a Jaina text from the sixteenth century CE that begins much like the Mahabharata storyof Ekalavya but then gives the protagonist a different name and a different tribe (a Bhil or Bhilla,even more scorned than a Nishada) and veers in a very different direction:In Hastinapura, Arjuna learned the entire science of archery from Drona and became as it wereanother image [murti] of Drona, and honored him with many gems, pearls, gold, elephants,horses, and so forth. The guru said to him, “Arjuna, choose a boon.” Arjuna replied, “Sir, if youare satisfied with me, let there be no one but me who knows such a science of archery.”Thinking, “The words of great gurus can never fail to come true,” Drona agreed. One day, acertain Bhil named Bhimala, living on the banks of the Ganges, came and asked Drona to be hisguru; obtaining his promise, he went back to his own place and made an image of Drona out ofmud, and honored it with flowers and sandalwood and so forth, and said, “Drona, give me theknowledge of archery,” and practiced the science of archery in front of him. And with his mindand heart full of the emotion of passionate devotion to him [bhakti], the Bhil after a certain timebecame like a second Arjuna.One day, Arjuna, following Drona, who had gone in front to take abath in the Ganges, saw that the mouth of his own dog was filled with arrows that had notpierced his upper lip, lower lip, palate, tongue, or teeth. Thinking, “No one but me has such apower,” he was amazed, and going forward by following along the arrows from his dog’s mouth,he saw Bhimala and asked him, “Who shot these arrows into the dog’s mouth?” “I did.” “Who isyour guru?” The Bhil said, “Drona is my guru.” Hearing that, Arjuna reported this to Drona andthen said, “Hey, master. If people like you leap over the boundary markers of words, then whatcan we wretched creatures do?”Drona went there and asked the Bhil, “Where is your guru?” andthe Bhil showed him the representation that he himself had made and told him what he had done,saying, “Arjuna! This is the fruit of my bhakti.” But the sneaky, cheating Arjuna said to him,“Bhil, with your great zeal, you must do puja with the thumb of your right hand for this Dronawhom you met through us.” The Bhil said, “Yes,” and did it. But then the guru said, “Arjuna!You are a sneaky urban crook, and you have deceived this artless, honest, unsophisticated forestdweller. But by my favor, even without a thumb these people will be able to shoot arrows.” Andas he said this, the guru gave the Bhil this favor and went back to his own place. And so, eventoday, a Bhil can shoot arrows using his middle finger and his forefinger. 18 The entire moralweight has shifted; now it is Arjuna, not Drona, who makes the cruel demand, and Drona whoobjects to it and who calls Arjuna deceitful and cunning, in contrast with the artless, honest Bhil,who does not hurt the dog, as the text takes pains to tell us. Indeed Drona has agreed to be theBhil’s guru at the start and, at the end, grants him superior skill in archery, despite Arjuna’sattempts to hobble him. The image of Drona that the Bhil makes of mud is now matched by otherflesh and blood images: Arjuna is the image of Drona, and the Bhil is the image of Arjuna, henceof Drona, once removed. Altogether, the Bhil, with his grotesque guru gift (no longer a Vedic

tuition gift, but a Hindu puja), comes off smelling like a rose, and Arjuna, with his gift of goldand precious jewels and horses and elephants, does not.The forefinger is called the tarjaniya, the finger that points, that accuses, and here itpoints straight at Arjuna. Knowing all this, we can see other possible multiple readings of thestory even in the Mahabharata. For there is a two-way conversation going on between the Hinduand Jaina texts, an intertextual conversation. The Jaina text quotes the Hindu Mahabharata, anexample of the widespread intertextuality between religions in India, not just within Hinduism.But Hindus would probably know the Jaina version too, a supposition justifiable on the basis ofour understanding of the relationship between Hindus and Jainas at this period, and this mayhave contributed to the eventual use of the story of Ekalavya by contemporary Hindu Pariahs, forwhom he is an important hero.Whatever the spirit in which the tale of Ekalavya was originally told, it continued to beremembered among people crying out for social reform. A glance at later versions of the samestory supports some of the hypothetical meanings that I have hunted out of the original tellingand suggests, but certainly does not prove, that the seed of that later response may already havebeen there in the Sanskrit text (hindsight alert!), or at least that there may have been otherreadings of this episode besides the original one we have, with other evidence of moralconscience, to bridge the gap between the first recorded telling and later versions that explicitlycall out for justice.Whether the situation was equally encouraging for women is a subject that we must nowconsider.WOMENThe women of the Mahabharata are extraordinarily prominent, feisty, and individualistic,in part as a result of changes that were taking place in the social structures at the time of therecension of the text (such as the widespread public recognition of women as donors andrenouncers, and their more active role in the pujas of sectarian Hinduism), in part as a result ofthe infusion of the Sanskrit corpus with stories from village and rural traditions that were lesshide-bound in their attitudes to women. The new attention paid to women in the Mahabharataemerges clearly from the stories of the births of both its legendary author, Vyasa, and its heroes:THE BIRTH OF VYASAOnce a fisherman caught a fish, found a baby girl in its belly, andraised her as his daughter. A powerful Brahmin sage seduced the fisherman’s daughter,Satyavati, as she ferried him across the river. She gave birth to her first son, Vyasa, on an islandin the river and abandoned him (he had instantly grown to manhood). The sage restored hervirginity (and removed her fishy smell) (1.57.32-75). Vyasa is of mixed lineage, notmerely Brahmin and Kshatriya (for though Satyavati’s mother was a fish, her father was a king;it’s a long story) but human and animal (for his grandparents were a Kshatriya, a female fish,and, presumably, a Brahmin man and woman). This double miscegenation will be repeatedseveral times, always with variations, in this lineage.The birth of Vyasa’s natural sons (Satyavati’s grandsons) is more complex andcorrespondingly more subtly problematic:THE BIRTH OF VYASA’S CHILDRENSatyavati later married King Shantanu and gave birth toanother son, who became king but died childless, leaving two widows, the Kshatriya princessesAmbika and Ambalika. Satyavati, who did not want the lineage to end, summoned Vyasa to goto the beds of the two widows in order to father children with his half brother’s widows. Vyasawas ugly and foul-smelling; his beard was red, his hair orange. Since Ambika closed her eyes

when she conceived her son, Dhritarashtra, Vyasa cursed him to be born blind. Ambalika turnedpale and conceived Pandu the Pale. When Vyasa was sent to Ambika a second time, she sent inher place a slave girl [dasi]. The girl gave Vyasa great pleasure in bed, and he spent the wholenight with her; she gave birth to a healthy son, Vidura, but since his mother was not a Kshatriya,he could not be king (1.99-100). Though Hindu law allows the levirate (niyoga), the law bywhich a brother begets children on behalf of his dead or impotent brother (the Artha-shastra[3.4.27-41] says any male in the family can do it), it is often, as here, disastrous. 19 Vyasa appearsin the Mahabharata as a kind of walking semen bank, the author both of the story of thePandavas and of the Pandavas themselves (just as Valmiki not only invents the poetic form of theRamayana, the shloka, but tells the story and raises, though he does not beget, the poets). Thewidows reject him because he is old and ugly and smells fishy, a characteristic that he apparentlytook from his mother when she lost it. He is also the wrong color, and this, plus the mother’stemporary pallor, results in the birth of a child, Pandu, who is the wrong color—perhaps analbino, perhaps sickly, perhaps a euphemism for his future impotence. 20 Dhritarashtra’smother-to-be closes her eyes (and, presumably, thinks of Hastinapur), and so her son is blind. Aslave girl who functions as a dispensable, low-class stand-in (like the Nishadas burned in thehouse of lac) gives birth to Vidura, the incarnation of Dharma in fulfillment of Mandavya’s cursethat he should be born as the son of a Shudra woman. Where Rama and his brothers havedifferent mothers and different wives but share both a single human father and a single divinefather, the five Pandavas have one mother (and one wife) and one human father but differentdivine fathers.In this disastrous levirate, two wives give birth to three sons (two of whom have, forgreat-grandparents, a female fish, two Brahmins, and five Kshatriyas, while the third has aKshatriya, a female fish, two Brahmins, and four slaves. Are you still with me?). In fact thearrangement was originally more symmetrical, for there had been a third woman, Amba, fv whohad been carried off by Bhishma, yet another son of Satyavati’s husband Shantanu (it’s anotherlong story fw ); but she departs before Vyasa arrives on the scene, and she eventually dies in acomplex transsexual act of revenge against Bhishma (yet another long story). 21 Ambika’s andAmbalika’s hatred of their surrogate lover, though much milder than Amba’s hatred of Bhishma,results not in their deaths or his but in a confusion over the throne, because the women’srecoiling from Vyasa results in physical disabilities in their children that disqualify them fromthe kingship: blindness, pallor, and low class. This confusion leads to war and ultimately to thedestruction of almost all the descendants of Pandu and Dhritarashtra.The Mahabharata goes on to tell us how in the next generation, Pandu was cursed to dieif he ever made love with any of his wives, for having mistaken a mating man for a mating stag(1.90.64; 1.109.5-30). Fortunately, Pandu’s wife, Kunti, had a mantra that allowed her to invokegods as proxy fathers of Pandu’s sons: Dharma (who fathered Yudhishthira fx ), the Wind (fatherof Bhima), and Indra (father of Arjuna) (1.90, 1.101). Kunti then generously lent her mantra toMadri, Pandu’s second wife, who invoked the Ashvins to father the twins Nakula and Sahadeva.Years later Pandu seduced Madri one day when he was overcome by desire for her; he died, infulfillment of the stag’s curse and in imitation of the stag’s death: a fatal coitus interruptus, thesweet death transformed into a bitter death.But Kunti had already had one son, secretly, out of wedlock. When she was still a younggirl, she had decided to try out her mantra, just fooling around. The sun god, Surya, took herseriously; despite her vigorous protests and entreaties, he raped her and afterward restored hervirginity. She gave birth to Karna, whom she abandoned in shame; a Charioteer and his wife

adopted him and raised him as their own (1.104; 3.290-94; 5.144.1-9). Karna is in many waysthe inverse of Vidura: Where Vidura is an incarnate god, raised royally, and has both a surrogatefather (Vyasa) and a surrogate mother (the maid in place of Ambika), Karna is of royal birth,raised as a servant, and has a divine father (Surya), a royal mother (Kunti), and two low-classsurrogate parents (the Charioteers).Beneath the sterile or impotent fathers lie angry women. The lineage of the heroes is aseries of seductions and rapes: of Satyavati, Amba, Ambika, Ambalika, Kunti, and Madri. ForSatyavati and Kunti, the seducer or rapist restores the woman’s virginity afterward, and theresulting children are abandoned, as if to erase the entire incident or at least to exculpate thewomen.POLYANDRYOther events in the lives of these women suggest their unprecedented and, alas, neveragain duplicated freedom.Polyandry (multiple husbands) is rampant in the Mahabharata, and the text offers us, infour consecutive generations, positive images of women who had several sexual partners(sometimes premarital). Satyavati has two sexual partners (her legitimate husband, Shantanu, andthe sage who fathers Vyasa on the island). Ambika and Ambalika have two legitimate partners(the king who dies and Vyasa, through the levirate). Kunti has one husband (Pandu, legitimatebut unconsummated) and four sexual partners (gods, quasilegitimate). Madri has three partners(Pandu, legitimate and fatally consummated, and two quasilegitimate gods). AnotherMahabharata queen, named Madhavi, sells herself to four kings in succession, for severalhundred horses each time, and restores her own virginity after each encounter (5.113-17). But theprize goes to Draupadi, who has five legitimate husbands, the five Pandavas. Her polyandrouspentad is truly extraordinary, for though polygyny (multiple wives) was the rule, and men couldhave several spouses throughout most of Hindu history (as, indeed, each of the Pandavas, exceptYudhishthira, had at least one wife in addition to Draupadi; Arjuna had three more), womenmost decidedly could not. Since there is no other evidence that women at this time actually hadmultiple husbands, these stories can only be suggestive, if not incontrovertible, evidence either ofwomen’s greater sexual freedom or, perhaps, of men’s fears of what might happen were womento have that freedom. Draupadi’s hypersexuality may simply have validated an ideal that wasunderstood to be out of reach for ordinary women, imagined precisely in order to be disqualifiedas a viable option. What else, then, can these stories mean?Hindus at this period were apparently troubled by Draupadi’s polyandry, for which theMahabharata gives two different excuses (always a cause for suspicion). First, it says thatArjuna won Draupadi in a contest and brought her home to present her to his mother; as he andhis brothers approached the house, they called out, “Look what we got!” and she, not looking up,said, as any good mother would say, “Share it together among you all (1.182).” And so all fivebrothers married Draupadi. Not content with this rather farfetched explanation, the Mahabharatatries again: Vyasa says that all five Pandavas are really incarnations of Indra (which does notcontradict the statement that only Arjuna was the son of Indra, since as we have seen, these aretwo different processes: Dharma becomes incarnate in Vidura and fathers Yudhishthira), andDraupadi the incarnation of Shri (the goddess of prosperity, the wife of Indra and of all kings). fyStill not satisfied, Vyasa offers a third explanation:DRAUPADI’S FIVE HUSBANDSThe daughter of a great sage longed in vain for a husband;she pleased the god Shiva, who offered her a boon, and she asked for a virtuous husband. But she

asked again and again, five times, and so Shiva said, “You will have five virtuous husbands.”And that is why she married the five Pandavas. She objected, saying that it is against the law fora woman to have more than one husband, for then there would be promiscuity; moreover, herone husband should have her as a virgin. But Shiva reassured her that a woman is purified everymonth with her menses and therefore there would be no lapse from dharma in her case, since shehad asked repeatedly for a husband. Then she asked him if she could be a virgin again for eachact of sexual union, and he granted this too (1.189; 1.1.157). Like other polyandrouswomen whose virginities were restored, sometimes after premarital seduction or rape, Draupadiwill be restored to purity each month after willing conjugal sex. In this case there is no need tojustify or purify her, but there is a perceived need, if she has a different husband each month, toavoid promiscuity—samkara (“con-fusion” or “mixing”), the same word that is used for thereprehensible mixture of classes.The mythological extemporizings were not sufficient to protect Draupadi from frequentslurs against her chastity. When Duryodhana has Draupadi dragged into the assembly hall, muchas Rama summons Sita to the public assembly, and Duhshasana attempts to strip her, despite thefact that she is wearing a garment soiled with her menstrual blood (the same blood that wassupposed to purify her), the enemies of the Pandavas justify their insults to her by arguing that awoman who sleeps with five men must be a slut (2.61.34-36). Yet all her children are legitimate;they are called the Draupadeyas (“Children of Draupadi”) by a matronymic, which may benothing more than a way of getting around the awkward fact that though she is said to have oneson from each husband, people often lose track of which Pandava fathered which son. So too themultiply fathered sons of Kunti are often called Kaunteyas (“Children of Kunti”) although theyare also called Pandavas, since they have a single legitimate, if not natural, father, Pandu.The later tradition was not satisfied by any of the official excuses; various retellings inSanskrit and in vernacular languages during the ensuing, less liberal centuries mocked Draupadi.In one twelfth-century CE text, the evil spirit of the Kali Age incarnate suggests to five gods thatare in love with one woman, “Let the five of us enjoy her, sharing her among us, as the fivePandavas did Draupadi.” 22 Even the permissive Kama-sutra quotes a scholar (or pedant) whosaid that any married woman who is known to have had five men is “available” (i.e., can beseduced without moral qualms). For “five men or more” (panchajana ) is an expression for acrowd, a group of people, as in the panchayat, the quorum of a village (KS 1.5.30-31). Thethirteenth-century CE commentator unpacks the implications: “If, besides her own husband, awoman has five men as husbands, she is a loose woman and fair game for any man who has agood reason to take her. Draupadi, however, who had Yudhishthira and the others as her ownhusbands, was not fair game for other men. How could one woman have several husbands? Askthe authors of the Mahabharata!”Yet the power of Draupadi’s own dharma, her unwavering devotion to her husband(s), iswhat protects her when Duhshasana tries to strip her; every time he pulls off a her sari, anotherappears to cover her nakedness, until there is a great heap of silk beside her, and Duhshasanagives up; the implication is that her chastity protects her (2.61.40-45). fz The text often reminds usthat Draupadi is no mere mortal but a creature from another world; there is a prediction thatDraupadi will lead the Kshatriyas to their destruction, fulfilling the gods’ intention (1.155). Howdifferent the lives of actual women in India would have been had Draupadi, instead of Sita, beentheir official role model! Many Hindus name their daughters Sita, but few name them Draupadi.It is always possible that the Mahabharata was recording a time when polyandry was thecustom (as it is nowadays in parts of the Himalayas), but there is no evidence to support this

contention. Indeed Pandu tells Kunti another story explicitly remarking upon an archaicpromiscuity that is no longer in effect, pointedly reminding her, and any women who may haveheard (or read) the text, that female promiscuity was an ancient option no longer available tothem:THE END OF FEMALE PROMISCUITYThe great sage Shvetaketu was a hermit, people say.Once, they say, right before the eyes of Shvetaketu and his father, a Brahmin graspedShvetaketu’s mother by the hand and said, “Let’s go!” The sage’s son became enraged and couldnot bear to see his mother being taken away by force like that. But when his father saw thatShvetaketu was angry he said, “Do not be angry, my little son. This is the eternal dharma. Thewomen of all classes on earth are not fenced in; all creatures behave just like cows, my little son,each in its own class.” The sage’s son could not tolerate that dharma and made this moralboundary for men and women on earth, for humans, but not for other creatures. And from thenon, we hear, this moral boundary has stood: A woman who is unfaithful to her husband commitsa mortal sin that brings great misery, an evil equal to killing an embryo, and a man who seducesanother man’s wife, when she is a woman who keeps her vow to her husband and is thus a virginobeying a vow of chastity, that man too commits a mortal sin on earth (1.113.9-20). Whatbegins as a rape somehow concludes with a law against willing female adultery, asuncontrollable male sexuality is projected onto the control of allegedly oversexed women. Pandutells this story to Kunti in order to convince her that it is legal for her to give him children bysleeping with an appointed Brahmin, ga an emergency plan that prompts her then to tell him aboutthe mantra by which she can summon the gods to father her children; he is thus carefullydistinguishing the permitted Brahmin from the loose cannon Brahmin in the Shvetaketu story.We recognize Shvetaketu as a hero of the Upanishads, the boy whose father teaches him thedoctrine of the two paths; here his father defends promiscuity, using cows as paradigms not, as isusual, of motherly purity, but of bovine license, as cows, of all people, here become theexemplars of primeval female promiscuity. (Perhaps because they are so pure that nothing theydo is wrong?)The Mahabharata keeps insisting that all this is hearsay, as if to make us doubt it; itinvokes a vivid, quasi-Freudian primal scene to explain a kind of sexual revulsion. A Brahmin’sright to demand the sexual services of any woman he fancied 23 evoked violent protest in ancientIndian texts, gb and Draupadi herself is subjected to such sexual harassment (unconsummated) onone occasion when she is in disguise as a servant and not recognized as the princess Draupadi(4.21.1-67). We may read the story of Shvetaketu in part as an anti-Brahmin (and anticow purity)tract, depicting, as it does, a Brahmin as sexually out of control, and cows as naturallypromiscuous animals, as well as an explicit rejection of archaic polyandry. The Kama-sutra(1.1.9) names Shvetaketu as one of its original redactors, and the commentary on that passagecites this Mahabharata story to explain how a chaste sage became simultaneously an enemy ofmale adultery and an authority on sex.The persistent polyandry in the lineage of the heroines is therefore, I think, a remarkablypositive fantasy of female equality, which is to say, a major resistance to patriarchy, and theMahabharata women—Satyavati, Kunti, and Draupadi—are a feminist’s dream (or a sexist’snightmare): smart, aggressive, steadfast, eloquent, tough as nails, and resilient. Draupadi, inparticular, is unrelenting in her drive to help her husbands regain their kingdom and avenge theirwrongs.Other women in the Mahabharata show remarkable courage and intelligence too, buttheir courage is often used in subservience to their husbands. The wives of the two patriarchs,

Pandu and the blind Dhritarashtra, are paradigms of such courage. Gandhari, the wife ofDhritarashtra, kept her eyes entirely blindfolded from the day of her marriage to him, in order toshare his blindness. Pandu’s widows vied for the privilege of dying on his pyre. When he died,Madri mounted his funeral pyre, for, she insisted, “My desire has not been satisfied, and he toowas cheated of his desire as he was lying with me, so I will not cut him off from his desire in thehouse of death (1.116.26).” This is a most unusual justification for suttee, Madri’s intentionbeing not merely to join her husband in heaven (as other suttees will state as their motivation)but to complete the sexual act in heaven. Yet Kunti too wishes to die on Pandu’s pyre, withoutthe peculiar justification of coitus interruptus, but simply because she is the first wife. One ofthem must remain alive to care for both their children; Madri gets her way and mounts the pyre. gcKunti and Gandhari later die alongside Dhritrarashtra in a forest fire from which they make noattempt to escape (15.37). The four wives of Vasudeva (the father of Krishna) immolatethemselves on Vasudeva’s pyre and join him in heaven; they all were permitted to die because bythis time all their children were dead (16.8.16-24).The association of women with fire is worthy of note. Draupadi, who does not die on herhusbands’ funeral pyres (because [1] she dies before them and [2] they don’t have funeral pyres;they walk up into heaven at the end of the story), begins rather than ends her life in fire; she isborn out of her father’s fire altar:THE BIRTH OF DRAUPADIDrupada performed a sacrifice in order to get a son who would killhis enemy, Drona. As the oblation was prepared, the priest summoned the queen to receive theoblation and let the king impregnate her, but she took so long to put on her perfume for theoccasion that the priest made the oblation directly into the fire, and so the son was born out of thefire, not out of the queen. And after the son came a daughter, Draupadi. A disembodied voicesaid, “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, issignificantly motherless, like Sita, who was born of Earth and returns into the earth, after she hasentered fire and come out of it. Like Sita, Draupadi is an elemental goddess who is often calledayonija (“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 theheart and soul of the Pandavas. She also went on, in India, to become a goddess with a sect ofher own, worshiped throughout South India primarily by lower castes, Pariahs, and Muslims. 25The Mahabharata mentions other dark goddesses who may well already have had such sects: theseven or eight “Little Mothers” (Matrikas), dark, peripheral, harmful, especially for children, 26and the great goddess Kali (Maha-Kali). 27 Indeed Draupadi is closely connected with the darkgoddess Kali. 28 As in the stories of the births of Pandu and Draupadi, as well as the origins ofclass colors, skin color here has a religious significance but no social meaning, positive ornegative.A partial explanation for the Mahabharata’s open-minded attitude toward polyandrouswomen may come from a consideration of the historical context. The text took shape during theMauryan and immediate post-Mauryan period, a cosmopolitan era that encouraged the looseningof constraints on women in both court and village. The women of the royal family were oftengenerous donors to the Buddhist community, 29 and women from all classes, includingcourtesans, 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 servedas 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’schild, both she and the child were immediately released from slavery. 31 Thus women were majorplayers in both Buddhism and Hinduism during this period, and the Mahabharata may reflectthis greater autonomy. Indeed the tales of polyandry may reflect the male redactors’ nightmarevision of where all that autonomy might lead.THE WORLDS OF THE TWO GREAT POEMSIndian tradition generally puts the two poems in two different categories: The Ramayanais the first poem (kavya), and the Mahabharata is a history (itihasa) or a dharma text. ge TheRamayana 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 agreat many secondary discussions or narrations only loosely linked to the main plot. TheMahabharata at the very end sketches an illusory scene of hell that is an emergency balloon tofloat it out of a corner it had painted itself into. But the Ramayana is about illusion from the verystart.The Ramayana tells of a war against foreigners and people of another species, with cleardemarcations of forces of good triumphing over evil; the Mahabharata is about a bitter civil warwith no winners. The Ramayana doesn’t usually problematize dharma; the Mahabharata does,constantly. Where the Ramayana is triumphalist, the Mahabharata is tragic. Where theRamayana 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 thewhole thing is about. When Rama’s brother Bharata is given the throne that should have beenRama’s, each of the brothers, like Alphonse and Gaston in the old story, modestly andgenerously 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 MauryanEmpire 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 theMahabharata first looked the disaster square in the eyes and showed what a mess it was, andthen after that the Ramayana flinched and cleaned it up, like a gentrified slum or a Potemkinvillage. Both views exist simultaneously and in conversation: The Ramayana says, “There is aperfect man, and his name is Rama,” and the Mahabharata says, “Not really; dharma is so subtlethat 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 masteredby 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 allthe virtues? (R1.1.1-2),” to which the answer is the triumphal, or more or less triumphal, story ofRama. By contrast, embedded inside the Mahabharata are two requests by Yudhishthira for astory parallel to his own; when Draupadi has been abducted, he asks if any man was everunluckier, unhappier than he, whereupon he is told the story of Rama and Sita (3.257-75), andwhen he has gambled away his kingdom and is in exile, he asks the same question, to which theanswer 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 12ESCAPE CLAUSES IN THE SHASTRAS100 BCE to 400 CECHRONOLOGYc. 166 BCE-78 CE Greeks (Yavanas), Scythians (Shakas), Bactrians, andParthians (Pahlavas) continue to enter Indiac. 100 CE “Manu” composes his Dharma-shastrac.78-140 CE Kanishka reigns and encourages Buddhismc. 150 CE Rudradaman publishes the firstSanskrit inscription, at Junagadhc. 200 CE Kautilya composes the Artha-shastrac. 300 CEVatsyayana Mallanaga composes the Kama-sutraRESTORATIONS FOR KILLING AMONGOOSEOR AN UNCHASTE WOMANIf a man kills a cat or a mongoose, a blue jay, a frog, a dog, alizard,an owl, or a crow, he should carry out the vow for killing a Shudra. gfFor killing a horse, he should give a garment to a Brahmin; for anelephant, 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 womanof 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), abilly 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 knownas shastras) groups together animals, social classes, and (unchaste) women around the issues ofkilling and restorations for killing, all central issues for the shastras. In the long period entredeux empires, the formulation of encyclopedic knowledge acknowledged the diversity of opinionon many subjects, while at the same time, some, but not all, of the shastras closed down many ofthe options for women and the lower castes. 1The Brahmin imaginary has no canon, but if it did, that canon would be the body ofshastras, which spelled out the dominant paradigm with regard to women, animals, and castes,the mark at which all subsequent antinomian or resistant strains of Hinduism aimed. The foreignflux, now and at other moments, on the one hand, loosened up and broadened the concept ofknowledge, making it more cosmopolitan—more things to eat, to wear, to think about—and atthe same time posed a threat that drove the Brahmins to tighten up some aspects of socialcontrol.THE AGE OF DARKNESS, INVASIONS, PARADOX, AND DIVERSITYBoth the diversity encompassed by the shastras and their drive to control that diversityare best understood in the context of the period in which they were composed. 2 There were nogreat dynasties in the early centuries of the Common Era; the Shakas and Kushanas werebluffing when they used the titles of King of Kings and Son of God, on the precedent of theIndo-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 verydefinitely did not Rule the Waves) and because the abundant but hard-to-date sources leavehistorians with very little available light to work with. Some Indian nationalist historiansregarded 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 thetime to bring together all their knowledge, as into a fortified city, to preserve it for whateverposterity there might be. It all boils down to whether you think confusion (samkara) is a GoodThing or a Bad Thing. Political chaos is scary for the orthodox, creative for the unorthodox; whatpolitics sees as instability appears as dynamism in terms of commercial and culturaldevelopment. 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 literatureof this period are far richer than those of either of the two empires that frame it, the Mauryas andthe Guptas. 5Buddhist monuments, rather than Hindu, are our main source of the visual record of thisperiod. The gloriously miscellaneous quality of the culture of the time is epitomized in the reliefson the great Buddhist stupa at Amaravati, in the western Deccan, which depict scenes ofeveryday life that defy denomination: musicians, dancers, women leaning over balconies, horsescavorting 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 masonsconstructing 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. 7There was constant movement, constant trade from Greece, Central Asia, West Asia, theports of the Red Sea, and Southeast Asia. 8 Trade flowed along the mountainous northern routesthrough Central Asia and by sea to the great ports of South India. A book with the delicious titleof The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, composed by an unnamed Greek in about 80 CE, gavedetailed navigational instructions to those planning to sail to what is now Gujarat and thence togain access to the Deccan, where one could buy and export such delicacies as ginseng, aromaticoils, myrrh, ivory, agate, carnelian, cotton cloth, silk, Indian muslins, yarn, and long pepper. TheIndians, for their part, imported “fine wines (Italian preferred), singing boys, beautiful maidensfor the harem, thin clothing of the finest weaves, and the choicest ointments.” As always, horseswere imported from abroad but now were also bred in various parts of India. 9In return, Indians traveled to and traded with Southeast Asia and Central Asia, 10exporting Indian culture to the Mekong Delta, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Sinkiang, toAfghanistan and Vietnam, to the Gobi Desert, on the Silk Route. This economic porositycontinued well into the fourth century CE, with trade the one thing that was constant.SECTARIANISM UNDER THE KUSHANAS AND SHATAVAHANASThe Kushanas, nomadic pastoralists, came down from Central Asia into the Indus plainand then along the Ganges plain to Mathura, beyond Varanasi. Like the Vedic people beforethem, these horsemen herders were also good cavalry-men 11 and, like them, they may well havecome as merchants, allies, or even refugees rather than as conquerors. Their empire (from 78 to144 CE) culminated in the rule of Kanishka (112 to 144 CE) 12 who encouraged a new wave ofBuddhist proselytizing. The Fourth Buddhist Council was held under his patronage, and at hiscapital at Peshawar an enormous stupa was built, nearly a hundred meters in diameter and twiceas high. Some coins of his realm were stamped with images of Gautama and the future BuddhaMaitreya. He was the patron of the poet Ashvaghosha, who helped organize the BuddhistCouncil and composed, among other things, the first Sanskrit drama and a life of the Buddha inSanskrit 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 regionalworkshops for centuries to follow. 14 A colossal statue of Kanishka has survived, high felt bootsand all, though without a head; on the other hand, the Greeks put nothing but heads on theircoins. 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, aswell as Hindu deities, such as the goddess Uma (Ommo in Bactrian), identified with Parvati, thewife of Shiva, and sometimes depicted together with Shiva. The coins also have images of thegoddess Durga riding on her lion and the goddess Shri in a form adapted from a Bactriangoddess. 16 Buddhism and Jainism were still vying, peaceably, with Hinduism.In 150 CE, Rudradaman, a Shaka king who ruled from Ujjain, published a long Sanskritinscription in Junagadh, in Gujarat; he carved it, in the palimpsest fashion favored by manyIndian rulers (temples on stupas, mosques on temples), on a rock that already held a set ofAshoka’s Prakrit Major Rock Edicts. Himself of uncertain class, Rudradaman leaned overbackward to praise dharma and pointed out that he had repaired an important Mauryan damwithout raising taxes, by paying for it out of his own treasury. He also boasted that he knewgrammar, music, the shastras, and logic and was a fine swordsman and boxer, an excellenthorseman, charioteer, and elephant rider, and a good poet to boot. 17 His is the first substantialinscription in classical Sanskrit (Ashoka and Kanishka had written in various Prakrits, usuallyMagadhi or Pali). Rudradaman’s choice of Sanskrit, underlined by the fact that he wrote right ontop of the Prakrit of Ashoka, may have been designed to establish his legitimacy as a foreignruler, “to mitigate the lamentable choice of parents,” as the historian D. D. Kosambi suggested. 18The Kushanas gradually weakened, while the Shakas continued to rule until the mid-fifthcentury 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 hadintermarried with people who were excluded from the system, that they had destroyed the prideof Kshastriyas, and that they had prevented intermarriage among the four classes. 20 They wereorthodox in their adherence to Vedic sacrifice and Vedic gods, and they made land grants toBrahmins, but they also patronized Buddhism, in part because it was more supportive ofeconomic expansion than Hinduism was: It channeled funds into trade instead of sacrifice andwaived 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 beseed money, quickly matched by donations from private individuals and guilds; the lists ofdonors in the cave temple inscriptions include weavers, grain merchants, basket makers,leatherworkers, shipping agents, ivory carvers, smiths, salt merchants, and various craftsmen anddealers, some of them even Yavanas (Greeks or other foreigners).The Shatavahanas completed building the Great Stupa that Ashoka had begun atAmaravati, 21 and mercantile associations living under the Shatavahanas carved out, also in thewestern Deccan, between about 100 BCE and 170 CE, 22 the magnificently sculpted, generallyBuddhist caves of Bhaja, Karle, Nasik, and parts of Ajanta and Ellora. Merchants would clusteraround the great Buddhist pilgrimage sites, setting up their bazaars and rest houses, shops andstables. 23 This later became the model for Hindu pilgrimage sites and temples. There are noremains of stone Hindu temples from this period, though the ones that appeared later seem to bemodeled 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 thesacrifice; the dharma-shastras now applied it to the rest of life, dictating what to eat, whom tomarry. So too, while karma in the ritual texts usually designated a ritual act, in thedharma-shastras, as in the Mahabharata, it came to be understood more broadly as any morallyconsequential act binding one to the cycle of death and rebirth. Then there was moksha to dealwith, not only (as in the earlier period) in the challenge posed by Buddhism and Jainism, butnow, in addition, in the more insidious problem posed by the deconstruction of dharma in theMahabharata. The challenge facing not just the Brahmins but everyone else trying to ride thenew wave was to factor into the systematizing modes of thought that were already in place thenew social elements that were questioning the Brahmin norms. These cultural changes, shakingthe security of the orthodox in an age of flux, were tricky for the dharma-shastras to map, letalone attempt to control, 24 and go a long way to explain the hardening of the shastric lines. 25 Andso the Brahmins began, once again, to circle their wagons.SHASTRASAt the end of the long interregnum, a kind of scholasticism developed that was capable ofsorting out all the intervening chaos neatly—or not so neatly. In the first millennium Sanskritstill dominated the literary scene as “the language of the gods,” as it had long claimed to be. Butnow it also became a cosmopolitan language, patronized by a sophisticated community of literatiand royalty. It was no longer used only, or primarily, for sacred texts but also as a vehicle forliterary and political expression throughout South Asia and beyond. 26 It was now the language ofscience 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 thescience of horses, while the Ashva-shastra is a particular text gg about the science of horses. Theword 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, thusreflecting 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 aresimultaneously descriptive and proscriptive.Like the class and caste system itself, the shastric structures were formulated toaccommodate diversity. Yet many Brahmins perceived this same diversity as a threat andtherefore 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, andthey branded them according to their places in the scheme of things. Attitudes toward womenand the lower classes hardened in the texts formulated in this period, even while those same textsgive evidence, almost against the will of their authors, of an increasingly wide range of humanoptions. It was as if the gathering chaos of the cultural environment had produced an equal andopposite reaction in the Brahmin establishment; one can almost hear the cries for “law andorder!”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 theTrio—dharma, politics (artha), and pleasure (kama)—and going on to grammar, architecture,

medicine, dancing and acting, aesthetics in fine art, music, astronomy and astrology, traininghorses 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 canbe seen in the ways in which they consider variant opinions and offer escape clauses. Eachshastra quotes its predecessors and shows why it is better than they are (the equivalent of theobligatory review of the literature in a Ph.D. dissertation). The dissenting opinions are cited inthe course of what Indian logic called the other side (the “former wing,” purva-paksha), thearguments that opponents might raise. gh They are rebutted one by one, until the author finallygives his own opinion, the right opinion. But along the way we get a strong sense of a loyalopposition and the flourishing of a healthy debate. The shastras are therefore above all dialogicalor argumentative.Take medicine, for instance, known in India as the science of long life (Ayurveda ). Thereare a number of medical texts, of which those of Charaka and Sushruta (probably composed inthe first and seventh centuries CE, respectively) are the most famous. The medical texts teachhow to care for the mind and body in ways that supplement the advice offered, on this samesubject, by the dharma-shastras, the teachings of yoga, the Tantras, and other schools ofHinduism. Surgery was generally neglected by Hindu doctors, for reasons of caste pollution, andtaken over by Buddhists; the Hindu shastras on medicine derived much of their knowledge ofsurgery from Buddhist monasteries. 27A passage from Charaka is typical of the way that all of the shastras strive to beopen-minded and inclusive:SECOND, AND THIRD, MEDICAL OPINIONSOnce upon a time, when all the great sages hadassembled, a dispute arose about the cause of diseases. One by one the sages stated what eachregarded as the cause of disease: the soul, which collects and enjoys karma and the fruits ofkarma; the mind, when overwhelmed by energy and darkness [rajas and tamas]; rasa [the fluidessence 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 ofthem said, “Don’t talk like this. It is hard to get to the truth when people take sides. People whoutter arguments and counterarguments as if they were established facts never get to the end oftheir own side, as if they were going round and round on an oil press. Get rid of this collision ofopinions and shake off the darkness of factionalism. Eating bad food is a cause of diseases.” Butanother sage replied, “Sir, physicians have an abundance of different opinions. Not all of themwill understand this sort of teaching . . . ” (1.1.15.3-34). Despite the equal time that thispassage gives to various approaches, several of which represent major philosophical as well asmedical traditions, there is, as always, hierarchy: Not only is the penultimate sage right, and theothers presumably wrong, but he even has a riposte ready in anticipation of the fact that they stillmight not grant that he is right (“It is hard to get to the truth when people take sides”). Yet sincethey do still refuse to give in to him, the subject remains open after all.CLASS AND CASTE TAXONOMIESThe rise of myriad small social groups at this time created problems for the taxonomistsof the social order. Someone had to put all this together into something like a general theory ofhuman 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 sameway that the Brahmin head and Pariah body (and the Sanskrit and Tamil texts) united to form thetwo 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 combinedthem. But their interconnection was so important to ancient Indian social theory that Manumakes it the very first question that the sages ask him at the start of the book, though he does notgive 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 centuryor two before him (he takes a relatively brief passage in the sutras 28 and unpacks it in fortyverses), lays out a detailed paradigm that explains how it is that a Brahmin and a Pariah arerelated historically. The only trouble is that the authors of the dharma texts made it all up, forthere is absolutely no historical evidence that the jatis developed out of varnas. There are manyreasonable explanations of the origins of caste—from professions, guilds, families, tribes outsidethe Vedic world—and most of them probably have some measure of the whole, more complextruth. Manu’s explanation is the only one that is totally off the wall. Still, you have to hand it tohim; it’s an ingenious scheme: “From a Brahmin man and the daughter of a Shudra, a man of theNishada caste is born. From a Kshatriya man and the daughter of a Brahmin a man of theCharioteer caste is born. Sons of confused classes are born from a Shudra man with women ofthe 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 atribal group outside it, as they do in most of the narrative texts. These all are marriages “againstthe 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” (theright way, anuloma, hypergamously), with the woman below the man. In this paradigm, thehigher 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 havealready encountered) can result from these primary interactions, and there are castes of thousandsto be accounted for. So Manu moves on into later generations to explain the origin of othercastes: The Chandala, himself born from a Shudra who intermarried with women of higherclasses and regarded as the paradigmatic Pariah, becomes the father, through furtherintermarriage, of even more degraded castes, people whose very essence is a category errorsquared (10.12, 15, 19, 37-39). (The Mahabharata makes the dog cookers descendants of aChandala man and a Nishadha woman [13.48.10. 21 and .28]). And so on, ad infinitum. Manu’sattempt to dovetail castes within the class structure is a masterpiece of taxonomy, though apurely imaginary construct, like a map of the constellations. He created simultaneously a systemand a history of the castes.Despite the purely mythological nature of this charter, some semblance of reality, or atleast anthropology, moves into the text when Manu tells us the job descriptions of the firstgeneration of fantasized miscegenation:They are traditionally regarded as Dasyus [aliens or slaves], whether they speak barbarianlanguages or Aryan languages, and they should make their living by their karmas, which thetwice-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 mountainsand 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 andpeople 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; theymust use discarded bowls, and dogs and donkeys should be their wealth. Their clothing shouldbe the clothes of the dead, and their food should be in broken dishes; their ornaments should bemade of black iron, and they should wander constantly. A man who carries out his duties shouldnot seek contact with them; they should do business with one another and marry with those whoare like them. Their food, dependent upon others, should be given to them in a broken dish, andthey should not walk about in villages and cities at night. They may move about by day to dotheir work, recognizable by distinctive marks in accordance with the king’s decrees; and theyshould carry out the corpses of people who have no relatives; this is a fixed rule. By the king’scommand, they should execute those condemned to death, and they should take for themselvesthe clothing, beds and ornaments of those condemned to death (10.51-56). In later centuries thePariahs were defined by three factors that we can see in nuce here: They are economicallyexploited, victims of social discrimination, and permanently polluted ritually. 29 The only wayout, says Manu, is by “giving up the body instinctively for the sake of a Brahmin or a cow or inthe defense of women and children (10.72).” This grand scheme is contradicted by another ofManu’s grand schemes; his argument here that the castes came, historically, from the classesconflicts with his statement, elsewhere, that “in the beginning,” the creator created all individualthings 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 regardsthe Pariahs as the Kali Age of the body. The horror of pollution by the lowest castes (the oneswho 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 Americanshad to people with the HIV virus at the height of the AIDS panic: they believed them to bedeadly dangerous, highly contagious, and afflicted as the result of previous evil behavior (drugsor homosexual behavior in the case of AIDS; sins in a former life for caste). Impurity isdangerous; it makes you vulnerable to diseases and to possession by demons. Pollution bycontact with Pariahs is regarded as automatic and disastrous, like the bad karma that adheres toyou when you mistreat other people.The same lists, blacklists, as it were, recur in different shastras, lists of people who are tobe excluded from various sorts of personal contact: people to whom the Veda should not betaught; 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 aredisqualified 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 beexcluded in yet other ways; and, finally, people who have committed the crimes that cause one tobe reborn as bad people who are to be excluded. 30 Madmen and drunkards, adulterers andgamblers, impotent men and lepers, blind men and one-eyed men present themselves ascandidates for social intercourse again and again, and are rejected again and again, while othersorts 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 elaboratequadrille 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 thesystem of the four classes and the four stages of life (1.3.5-12) but seldom refers to classes afterthat, or to caste as such; it refers, instead, to groups of people distinguished by their professionalor 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, andforbearance (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 oneverse), marriage being one of the two places where caste is most important (food being theother). 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 forvarna-ashrama-dharma (social and religious duties tied to class and stage of life). Over thecourse of the centuries the text attracted nine complete commentaries, attesting to its crucialsignificance within the tradition, and other ancient Hindu texts cite it far more frequently thanany other dharma-shastra. Whether this status extended beyond the texts to the actual use ofManu in legal courts is another matter. But for centuries the text simultaneously mobilizedinsiders and convinced outsiders that Brahmins really were superior, that status was moreimportant 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 contemporaryIndian Classic Comic version of the Mahabharata , Pandu cites Manu to justify his decision toallow Kunti to be impregnated by five gods. 31 Manu remains the preeminent symbol—now anegative symbol—of the repressive caste system: It is Manu, more than any other text, thatDalits burn in their protests. 32ANIMALSManu justifies the law of karma by setting within the creation of the various classes ofbeings, 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, dependingon their past actions, people are reborn as various classes of beings, again he speaks of therelationship between humans and animals (12.40-81). Thus animals frame the entiremetaphysical structure of Manu. Throughout the intervening chapters, the theme of rebirth invarious classes of creatures is interwoven with the problem of killing and eating. More subtle andbizarre relationships between humans and animals are also addressed; there are punishments forurinating 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 hereand there; whenever he sets his mind to the problems of evil and violence, Manu tends to roundup the usual suspects. Just as madmen, drunkards, and their colleagues recur in the list of peopleto be rejected, so too dogs, horses, and cows are the basic castes of characters in the theme ofkilling 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 isto be devoured by dogs (if her lover is a low-caste man), 33 or paraded on a donkey and reborn asa jackal, and thieves are to be trampled to death by elephants, while cow killing and variousother 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 theanimals 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 ofkilling and eating (that is, eating, selling, injuring, or killing the wrong sorts of animals) furnishone of the basic criteria for acceptance in or exclusion from society. Thus the distinction betweengood and bad people, a theme that is the central agenda of the text, is further interwoven into thewarp of rebirth and the woof of animals.WHY YOU MAY, AND MAY NOT, EAT MEATThe dharma-shastras, like the texts that precede them, wrestle with the question ofvegetarianism. The Kama-sutra, in the course of a most idiosyncratic definition of dharma, takesmeat eating to be a normal part of ordinary life but, at the same time, regards vegetarianism asone of the two defining characteristics of dharma (the other being sacrifice, which often involvesthe death of animals): Dharma consists in doing things, like sacrifice, that are divorced frommaterial life and refraining from things, like eating meat, that are a part of ordinary life (2.2.7).In one verse, Manu seems actually to punish a person for not eating meat at the propertime: “But when a man who is properly engaged in a ritual does not eat meat, after his death hewill become a sacrificial animal during twenty-one rebirths (5.35).” Thus he encourages peopleto eat meat—if they follow the rules. Elsewhere he describes meat eating too as an addiction thatsome people cannot give up entirely: “If he has an addiction [to meat], let him make a sacrificialanimal out of clarified butter or let him make a sacrificial animal out of flour; but he shouldnever wish to kill a sacrificial animal for no [religious] purpose (5.37).” Clearly Manu hassympathy for the vegetarian with his veggie cutlets, but also for the addicted carnivore.At first Manu reflects the Vedic view of limited retribution in the Other World: “Atwice-born person who knows the rules should not eat meat against the rules, even in extremity;for if he eats meat against the rules, after his death he will be helplessly eaten by those that heate. ‘He whose meat in this world do I eat/will in the other world me eat.’ Wise men say that thisis why meat is called meat (5.33.55).” But then Manu switches to the post-Vedic view oftransmigration, rather than an Other World, and to vegetarianism with a vengeance:As many hairs as there are on the body of the sacrificial animal that he kills for no [religious]purpose here on earth, so many times will he, after his death, suffer a violent death in birth afterbirth. You can never get meat without violence to creatures with the breath of life, and the killingof creatures with the breath of life does not get you to heaven; therefore you should not eat meat.Anyone who looks carefully at the source of meat, and at the tying up and slaughter of embodiedcreatures, should turn back from eating any meat (5.38.48-53). The last line alone expressesactual sympathy for the suffering of the slaughtered animals.Manu flees from the horns of his dilemma (on one horn, sacrifice; on the other,vegetarianism) to several lists of animals and classes of animals that you can or, on the otherhand, cannot eat, lists that rival in unfathomable taxonomic principles not only Deuteronomy butAshoka’s edicts; clearly, you can eat a great number of animals, if you know your way aroundthe rules (5.5-25). The authors of shastras make many different lists involving animals: classesof beings one should and should not eat; situations in which lawsuits arise between humans andlivestock; punishments for people who injure, steal, or kill various animals; animals (includinghumans) that Brahmins should not sell; and vows of restoration for anyone who has, advertentlyor inadvertently, injured, stolen, killed, or eaten (or eaten the excrement of) various animals. 35

The passage with which this chapter began, “Restorations for Killing a Mongoose or anUnchaste Woman,” spells out one subset of this enormous group, as some animals are given(presumably to be killed) in restoration for killing other animals or for killing unchaste, hencesubhuman, women.But in addition to the specific times when it is OK to eat meat—for a sacrifice, when ithas been properly consecrated, when you would otherwise starve to death (10.105-08),etc.—Manu expresses a general philosophy of carnivorousness:The Lord of Creatures fashioned all this universe to feed the breath of life, and everythingmoving and stationary is the food of the breath of life. Those that do not move are food for thosethat move, and those that have no fangs are food for those with fangs; those that have no handsare food for those with hands; and cowards are the food of the brave. The eater who eatscreatures with the breath of life who are to be eaten does nothing bad, even if he does it day afterday; for the creator himself created creatures with the breath of life, some to be eaten and someto be eaters (5.28-30). Recall the similar verse in the Mahabharata: “The mongoose eats mice,just as the cat eats the mongoose; the dog devours the cat, your majesty, and wild beasts eat thedog (12.15.21).” Manu’s terror of piscine anarchy—“fish eat fish”—is a direct extension ofVedic assumptions about natural violence. But Manu also says that “Killing in a sacrifice is notkilling. . . . The violence [himsa] to those that move and those that do not move which issanctioned by the Veda—that is known as nonviolence [ahimsa] (5.39, 44).” By defining thesacrifice as nonviolent, Manu made it nonviolent. In this way, he was able to list the Veda andnonviolence together in his final summary of the most important elements of the moral life, thebasic principles of general and eternal dharma (12.83-93; 6.91-94; 10.63).The two views, violent and nonviolent, are juxtaposed in an uneasy tension in the contextwithin which Manu debates most problems, the ritual. 36 Manu transforms five of the earlierVedic sacrifices (animal sacrifices in which violence is assumed) into five Hindu vegetariansacrifices that avoid violence (3.70-74). He goes on to argue that these five sacrifices themselvesare restorations for the evils committed by normal householders in “slaughterhouses” wheresmall creatures are, often inadvertently, killed (an idea that now seems more Jaina than Hindubut in its day was widely shared): “A householder has five slaughterhouses, whose use fettershim: the fireplace, the grindstone, the broom, the mortar and pestle, and the water jar. The greatsages devised the five great sacrifices for the householder to do every day to redeem him from allof these [slaughter-houses] successively (3.68-69).” The justifications of violence in both Manuand the Mahabharata lie behind a later text in which the Brahmins tell the king, “Violence iseverywhere and therefore, whatever the Jaina renouncers say is blind arrogance. Can anyonekeep alive without eating? And how is food to be got without violence? Is there anyone on earthwho does not have a tendency toward violence? Your majesty! People live by violence alone. . . .If a person thinks of his good qualities and thinks badly of others—then also he commitsviolence.” 37 It is ironic that in this very text, the “violence” of thinking badly of others—what wewould call intolerance—is committed against Jaina renouncers, who are (blindly and arrogantly)accused of “blind arrogance.”Manu offers far fewer promeat than antimeat verses (three pro and twenty-five anti). Yethe ends firmly on the fence: “There is nothing wrong in eating meat, nor in drinking wine, nor insexual union, for this is how living beings engage in life, but disengagement yields great fruit(5.56).” The implication is that these activities are permitted under the specified circumstances,but that even then it is better to refrain from them altogether. Manu’s final redaction bringstogether both a Vedic tradition of sacrifice and violence and a later tradition of vegetarianism

and nonviolence. To him goes the credit for synthesizing those traditions and structuring them insuch a way as to illuminate his own interpretation of their interrelationship.This is a dance of the victims and the victimizers. For the same people and animalsappear on both sides of the line, and the assertions that certain animals should not be killed andthat people who are leprous or blind have no rights are causally related: People who have killedcertain animals are reborn as certain animals, but they are also reborn as lepers or blind men. Sotoo not only are there punishments for humans who eat or sell certain animals, but there are alsopunishments for humans who eat or sell humans, including their sons and themselves, or whosell their wives (which Manu both permits and punishes) or drink the milk of women (5.9, 9.46,174, 11.60, 62).Finally, Manu invokes the argument from equivalence: “The man who offers a horsesacrifice every year for a hundred years, and the man who does not eat meat, the two of themreap the same fruit of good deeds (5.54).” That is, to sacrifice (to kill an animal) or not to (killand) eat an animal is the same thing. And if that fails, Manu invokes the attitude towardsubstitution that eventually leads to rituals such as “strangling” rice cakes, a clear atavism froman earlier sacrifice of a living creature. 38The Kama-sutra too regards abstention from meat eating as the paradigmatic act ofdharma, yet it notes that people do generally eat meat. Elsewhere too it assumes that the readerof the text will eat meat, as when it recommends, after lovemaking, a midnight supper of “somebite-sized snacks: fruit juice, grilled foods, sour rice broth, soups with small pieces of roastedmeats, mangoes, dried meat, and citrus fruits with sugar, according to the tastes of the region(2.10.7-8).” But even Vatsyayana draws the line at dog meat. In arguing that one should not dosomething stupid just because a text (including his own) tells you to do it, he quotes a verse:Medical science, for example,recommends cooking even dog meat,for juice and virility;but what intelligent person would eat it? (2.9.42) It seems, however, that he objects to dogmeat on aesthetic rather than dogmatic grounds.THE CONTROL OF ADDICTIONThe Brahmins emitted the shastras, as frightened squid emit quantities of ink, todiscipline the addiction that could invade the rational faculties, as the barbarians from the northwould invade India in the Kali Age. The Kama-sutra shares with both the Artha-shastra andManu (as well as with other important Indian traditions such as yoga) an emphasis on the needfor the control of addiction, though each text has its own reasons for this.The texts often call the four major addictions the vices of lust, sometimes naming themafter the activities themselves—gambling, drinking, fornicating, hunting—and sometimesprojecting the guilt and blame from the addict onto the objects of addiction: dice, intoxicants(wine, various forms of liquor, as well as marijuana and opium), women (or sex), and wildanimals. The addictions are also called the royal vices, and indeed the typical member of theroyal or warrior class is “a drinker of wine to the point of drunkenness, a lover of women, a greathunter—killing for sport,” as well as a gambler and (beyond the four classical vices) a slayer ofmen and eater of meat. 39 That is, it was the king’s job to indulge in what were, sometimes forhim and always for people of other classes, deadly vices. Kings were allowed to have the vicesthat kill the rest of us, but even kings could be killed by an excess of them; the Artha-shastraadvises a king to have a secret agent tempt the crown prince with all four vices and another

secret agent dissuade him from them (1.1.28-29). gi The Mahabharata (2.61.20) remarks that thefour vices are the curse of a king, and indeed all four play a major part in the Mahabharata story:Pandu is doomed by excessive hunting and forbidden sex (book 1); Yudhishthira and Nala areundone by gambling (books 2 and 3); and the entire clan is destroyed by men who break the lawagainst drinking (book 16). The four addictive vices of desire were also associated with violence,in the double sense of releasing pent-up violent impulses and being themselves the violent formof otherwise normal human tendencies (to search for food, take risks, drink, and procreate).Hunting is the most obscure of the vices to the mind of nonhunting Euro-Americans, butit shares the quality of “just one more”—there are many stories of hunters who kept going evenafter they knew they should turn back, until they found themselves benighted or in a dangerousplace, or both, gj as well as the quality of blindness (as in “blind drunk”) that makes the huntermistake a human being for an animal, with disastrous consequences. Both Draupadi (MB 3.248)and Sita (R 3.42) are abducted when their men are away, hunting; King Parikshit, obsessed withhunting, impatiently insults a sage who obstructs his hunt, and is cursed to die (MB 1.26-40); anddeer appear to King Yudhishthira in a dream, complaining that their numbers are dwindlingbecause of his family’s incessant hunting (MB 3.244).We have seen the lament of the compulsive gambler, in the Rig Veda, and noted theself-destructive gambling of two great kings in the Mahabharata (Yudhishthira and Nala). TheArtha-shastra ranks gambling as the most dangerous vice a king can have, more dangerous than(in descending order) women, drinking, and hunting (8.3.2-6). But gambling, in the form of agame of dice, was an integral part of the ceremony of royal consecration, the metaphor for thedisintegrating four Ages, and a central trope for the role of chance in human life. WhereasEinstein remarked that God does not play dice with the universe, Hindu texts state thatGod—Shiva—does indeed play gk dice. 40 The Vedic consecration ritual includes a ritual dicegame of multiple symbolic meanings: the four Ages, the risk implicit in the sacrifice itself, theelement of chance in getting and keeping power, the royal vice of gambling that must bechanneled into political daring, and the king’s hope of “gathering” in all the winning throws ofall the other players (as Raikva did). The king is regarded as the maker of the age, and theceremonial dice game played at his consecration is said, like the gambling of Shiva in Shaivamythology, to determine what kind of cosmic age will come up next: Golden Age or Kali Age. 41But one particular king, Yudhishthira, happens to be, as an individual rather thansomeone in the office of king, a compulsive and unsuccessful gambler, gl and his enemies takeadvantage of this: They send in to play against Yudhishthira a man known to be invincible,almost certainly dishonest, and Yudhishthira gambles away his possessions, then his brothers,himself, and his wife. Only Draupadi’s courage and wit and legal knowledge are able to savethem from slavery, and even so, they lose the kingdom and must go into exile for twelve years,and remain disguised for a thirteenth. Thus the human vice of addictive gambling intrudes uponthe controlled ritual of gambling.As for drinking, and intoxication more generally conceived, we have encountered Indra’scolossal hangover in the Brahmanas. There were at least twelve types of alcohol popular inancient India: sura (also called arrack, made from coconut or from other fermented fruits orgrains, or sugarcane, the drink most often mentioned, particularly as used by non-Brahmins 42 ),panasa (from jackfruit), draksha (from grapes, often imported from Rome), madhuka (fromhoney), kharjura (dates), tala (palm), sikhshiva (sugarcane), madhvika (distilled from the flowersof Mahue longifolia), saira (from long pepper), arishta (from soapberry), narikelaja (fromcoconut), and maireya (now called rum). 43

The Artha-shastra advises the king to appoint only teetotaling counselors (to guardagainst loose talk) and to keep his sons from liquor, which might make them cast covetous eyeson his throne (1.5, 2.16). Against enemy princes, however, liquor is a useful weapon: An enemyprince should be weakened by intoxication so that he can be more easily compelled to become anally (2.17).Finally, addictive lust. The Kama-sutra, working the other side of the street, as it were,teaches the courtesans how to create, and manipulate, sexual addiction in others. Advice to thecourtesan: “A brief saying sums it up: She makes him love her but does not become addicted tohim, though she acts as if she were addicted (6.2.2).” And the clear signs of a man’s addiction toher are that “he trusts her with his true feelings, lives in the same way as she does, carries out herplans, is without suspicion, and has no concern for money matters (6.2.73).” Once he is hooked,she can control him: “When a man is too deeply addicted to her, he fears that she will make lovewith another man, and he disregards her lies. And because of his fear, he gives her a lot(6.4.39-42).” The Kama-sutra also offers advice to anyone, male or female, professional oramateur, on the uses of drugs to put lovers in your power (7.1-2).More generally, renunciants regarded sex as a snare gm and a delusion, gn and householderlife as a deathtrap. Manu even admits that what makes women so dangerous is the fact that menare so weak:It is the very nature of women to corrupt men here on earth; for that reason, circumspect men donot get careless and wanton among wanton women. It is not just an ignorant man, but even alearned man of the world, too, that a wanton woman can lead astray when he is in the control oflust and anger. No one should sit in a deserted place with his mother, sister, or daughter; for thestrong cluster of the sensory powers drags away even a learned man (2.213-15). Manu’s entiretext is an intricate regimen for the control of the senses, essential for anyone on the path toRelease but also a desideratum for people on the path of rebirth. Kautilya, by contrast, tosses offthe need for control of the senses with just a few, rather unhelpful lines: “The conquest of thesenses arises out of training in the sciences [vidyas] and is accomplished by renouncing desire,anger, greed, pride, drunkenness, and exhilaration (1.6.1).” And later: “Absence of training in thesciences is the cause of a person’s vices (8.3.1-61).” But Kautilya also prescribes what we wouldcall aversion therapy for a young prince who is addicted to any of the four vices of lust:If in the overflowing of adolescence he sets his mind on the wives of other men, the king’sagents should turn him off by means of filthy women pretending to be noble women in emptyhouses at night. 44 If he lusts for wine, they should turn him off by a drugged drink [a spikeddrink that makes him nauseated]. If he lusts for gambling, they should have players cheat him. Ifhe lusts for hunting, they should have him terrified by men pretending to be robbers blocking hispath (1.17.35-38). The Kama-sutra too knows how dangerous the senses can be and likensthem, as usual, to horses: “For, just as a horse in full gallop, blinded by the energy of his ownspeed, pays no attention to any post or hole or ditch on the path, so two lovers blinded by passionin the friction of sexual battle are caught up in their fierce energy and pay no attention to danger(2.7.33).” How to guard against that danger? Study the Kama-sutra, but also use your head(2.7.34).In the Mahabharata, Nala becomes an addictive gambler only after he has beenpossessed by the spirit of the Kali Age, an indication that addiction in general was perceived ascoming from outside the individual. There is no idea here of an addictive personality; the vices,rather than the people who have them, are hierarchically ranked. The gambler is not doomed bybirth, by his character; he has somehow fallen into the bad habit of gambling, and if he made an

effort, he could get out of it. Free will, self-control, meditation, controlling the senses: This isalways possible. So too there are no alcoholics, just people who happen, at the moment, to bedrinking too much. Anyone exposed to the objects of addiction is liable to get caught. Sex is theonly inborn addiction: We are all, in this Hindu view, naturally inclined to it, exposed to it all thetime, inherently lascivious.Manu sums up the shared underlying attitude toward the addictions:The ten vices [vyasanas] that arise from desire all end badly. Hunting, gambling, sleeping byday, malicious gossip, women, drunkenness, music, singing, dancing, and aimless wandering arethe ten vices born of desire. Drinking, gambling, women, and hunting, in that order [i.e., withdrinking the worst], are the four worst, and, though they are universally addictive, each vice ismore serious than the one that follows (7.45-53). Elsewhere (9.235 and 11.55), Manu equatesthe vice of drinking liquor with the three major sins of Brahmin killing, theft, and sleeping withthe guru’s wife. Those verses assume a male subject, however; drinking by women, by contrast,Manu associates with the milder habits of keeping bad company, being separated from theirhusbands, sleeping, living in other people’s houses, and aimless wandering (9.13).The Artha-shastra basically agrees with Manu: “Four vices spring from lust—hunting,gambling, women, and drink. Lust involves humiliation, loss of property, and hanging out withundesirable persons like thieves, gamblers, hunters, singers, and musicians. Of the vices of lust,gambling is worse than hunting, women are worse than gambling, drink is worse than women(8.3.2- 61).” All this is clear enough; in the Artha-shastra, as in Manu, drink is the worst vice oflust, women next, then gambling, and hunting the least destructive. But then Kautilya adds, “Butgambling is worse than drink—indeed, for a king, it is the worst of the vices (8.3.62-64),”changing the order of vices for a king: Now gambling is the worst, then drink, women, andhunting last.There was room for an even wider divergence of opinions: A Sanskrit text composed justa bit later (in the fifth or sixth century CE, in Kanchipuram) satirizes both the Artha-shastra andManu: A young man whose father had banished him for bad behavior encouraged the king toengage in all the vices; he praised hunting because it makes you athletic, reduces phlegm,teaches you all about animals, and gets you out into the fresh air, and so forth; gambling makesyou generous, sharp-eyed, single-minded, keen to take risks; kama is the reward for dharma andartha, teaches you strategy, and produces offspring (here assumed to be a Good Thing); anddrinking keeps you young, uproots remorse, and gives you courage. 45WOMENWOMEN IN THE DHARMA-SHASTRASThough women are not the worst of all the addictions, they are the only universal one,and the authors of the shastras apparently found them more fun to write about than any of theothers. Manu, in particular, regards women as a sexual crime about to happen: “Drinking,associating with bad people, being separated from their husbands, wandering about, sleeping,and living in other peoples’ houses are the six things that corrupt women. Good looks do notmatter to them, nor do they care about youth. ‘A man!’ they say, and enjoy sex with him,whether he is good-looking or ugly (9.12-17).” Therefore men should watch women verycarefully indeed: “A girl, a young woman, or even an old woman should not do anythingindependently, even in her own house. In childhood a woman should be under her father’scontrol, in youth under her husband’s, and when her husband is dead, under her sons’. Sheshould not have independence (4.147-49; 9.3).”

This lack of independence meant that in Manu’s ideal world, a woman had very littlespace to maneuver within a marriage, nor could she get out of it: “A virtuous wife shouldconstantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and isdevoid of any good qualities. A woman who abandons her own inferior husband . . . is reborn inthe womb of a jackal and is tormented by the diseases born of her evil (5.154-64).” And she isnot set free from this loser even when he dies:When her husband is dead, she may fast as much as she likes, living on auspicious flowers, roots,and fruits, but she should not even mention the name of another man. Many thousands ofBrahmins who were chaste from their youth have gone to heaven without begetting offspring tocontinue the family. A virtuous wife who remains chaste when her husband has died goes toheaven just like those chaste men, even if she has no sons. She reaches her husband’s worldsafter death, and good people call her a virtuous woman (4.156-66). Not only may she notremarry, but her reward for not remarrying is that she will be her husband’s wife in the hereafter,which, “if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and is devoid of any good qualities,” maynot have been her first choice.The good news, at least, is that Manu does expect her to live on after her husband dies,not to commit suicide (suttee) on her husband’s pyre. Yet Manu’s fear that the widow mightsleep with another man was an important strand in the later argument that the best way to ensurethat the widow never slept with any other man but her husband was to make sure that she diedwith him. The man of course can and indeed must remarry (4.167-69). All that there is to setagainst all of this misogyny is Manu’s grudging “keep the women happy so that they will keepthe men happy” line of argument: “If the wife is not radiant, she does not stimulate the man; andbecause the man is not stimulated, the making of children does not happen. If the woman isradiant, the whole family is radiant, but if she is not radiant, the whole family is not radiant(3.60-63).” Well, it’s better than nothing. I guess.But we must not forget the gap between the exhortations of the texts and the actualsituation on the ground. The records of donations to Buddhist stupas offer strong evidence thatcontradicts the dharma-shastras’ denial to women of their rights to such property. 46 In thisperiod, many women used their personal wealth to make grants to Jaina and Buddhist orders.Hindu women too could make donations to some of the new Hindu sects, for they received fromtheir mothers and other female relatives “women’s wealth” (stri-dana), what Wemmick inCharles Dickens’s Great Expectations called “portable property,” and they were often given abride-price on marriage, the opposite of dowry (Manu is ambivalent about this), and theirchildren, including daughters, could inherit that (9.131, 191-5). Most often women’s wealthconsisted of gold jewelry, which they could carry on their bodies at all times. This one claim toindependence made Manu nervous; he warns against women hoarding their own movableproperty without their husbands’ permission (9.199).Manu is the flag bearer for the Hindu oppression of women, but the shastras are just asdiverse here as they are on other points. The Artha-shastra (3.2.31) takes for granted the womanwith several husbands, who poses a problem even for the permissive Kama-sutra (1.5.30).Kautilya is also more lenient than Manu about divorce and widow remarriage; he gives a womanfar more control over her property, which consists of jewelry without limit and a smallmaintenance (3.2.14); she continues to own these after her husband’s death—unless sheremarries, in which case she forfeits them, with interest, or settles it all on her sons (3.2.19-34).Thus Kautilya allows women more independence than Manu, but both of them greatly limitwomen’s sexual and economic freedom. Though men controlled land, cattle, and money, women

had some other resources. Diamonds have always been a girl’s best friend.WOMEN IN THE KAMA-SUTRAControl of the senses was always balanced by an appreciation for the sensual, and if welisten to the alternative voice of the Kama-sutra, we hear a rather different story.The Kama-sutra, predictably, is far more open-minded than Manu about women’s accessto household funds, divorce, and widow remarriage. The absolute power that the wife in theKama-sutra has in running the household’s finances (4.1.1-41) stands in sharp contrast withManu’s statement that a wife “should not have too free a hand in spending (4.150),” and hiscynical remark: “No man is able to guard women entirely by force, but they can be safelyguarded if kept busy amassing and spending money, engaging in purification, attending to theirduties, cooking food, and looking after the furniture (9.10-11).” And when it comes to femalepromiscuity, Vatsyayana is predictably light-years ahead of Manu. Vatsyayana cites an earlierauthority on the best places to pick up married women, of which the first is “on the occasion ofvisiting the gods” and others include a sacrifice, a wedding, or a religious festival. More secularopportunities involve playing in a park, bathing or swimming, or theatrical spectacles. Moreextreme occasions are offered by the spectacle of a house on fire, the commotion after a robbery,or the invasion of the countryside by an army (5.4.42). Somehow I don’t think Manu wouldapprove of meeting married women at all, let alone using devotion to the gods as an occasion forit or equating such an occasion with spectator sports like hanging around watching houses burndown.Here we encounter the paradox of women’s voices telling us, through the text, thatwomen had no voices. Vatsyayana takes for granted the type of rape that we now call sexualharassment, as he describes men in power who can take whatever women they want (5.5.7-10).But he often expresses points of view clearly favorable to women, 47 particularly in comparisonwith other texts of the same era. The text often quotes women in direct speech, expressing viewsthat men are advised to take seriously. The discussion of the reasons why women becomeunfaithful, for instance, rejects the traditional patriarchal party line that one finds in mostSanskrit texts, a line that punishes very cruelly indeed any woman who sleeps with a man otherthan her husband. The Kama-sutra, by contrast, begins its discussion of adultery with anegalitarian, if cynical, formulation: “A woman desires any attractive man she sees, and, in thesame way, a man desires a woman. But after some consideration, the matter goes no farther(5.1.8).” The text does go on to state that women have less concern for morality than men have,and does assume that women don’t think about anything but men. And it is written in the serviceof the hero, the would-be adulterer, who reasons, if all women are keen to give it away, whyshouldn’t one of them give it to him? But the author empathetically imagines various women’sreasons not to commit adultery (of which consideration for dharma comes last, as anafterthought), and the would-be seducer takes the woman’s misgivings seriously, even if only todisarm her (5.1.17-42). This discussion is ostensibly intended to teach the male reader of the texthow to manipulate and exploit such women, but perhaps inadvertently, it also provides a mostperceptive exposition of the reasons why inadequate husbands drive away their wives(5.1.51-54).Such passages may express a woman’s voice or at least a woman’s point of view. In aculture in which men and women speak to each other (which is to say, in most cultures), wemight do best to regard the authors of most texts as androgynes, and the Kama-sutra is noexception. We can find women’s voices, sometimes speaking against their moment in history,

perhaps even against their author. By asking our own questions, which the author may or maynot have considered, we can see that his text does contain many answers to them, embedded inother questions and answers that may have been more meaningful to him.The Kama-sutra assumes a kind of sexual freedom for women that would have appalledManu but simply does not interest Kautilya. To begin with, the text of the Kama-sutra wasintended for women as well as men. Vatsyayana argues at some length that some women, at least(courtesans and the daughters of kings and ministers of state) should read his text and that othersshould learn its contents in other ways, as people in general were expected to know the contentsof texts without actually reading them (1.3.1-14). Book 3 devotes one chapter to advice to virginstrying to get husbands (3.4.36-37), and book 4 consists of instructions for wives (the descriptionsof co-wives jockeying for power could have served as the script for the opening of theRamayana). Book 6 is said to have been commissioned by the courtesans of Pataliputra,presumably for their own use.Vatsyayana is also a strong advocate for women’s sexual pleasure. He tells us that awoman who does not experience the pleasures of love may hate her man and may even leave himfor another (3.2.35; 4.2.31-35). If, as the context suggests, this woman is married, the casualmanner in which Vatsyayana suggests that she leave her husband is in sharp contrast withposition assumed by Manu. The Kama-sutra also acknowledges that women could use magic go tocontrol their husbands, though it regards this as a last resort (4.1.19-21). 48 Vatsyayana alsocasually mentions, among the women that one might not only sleep with but marry (1.5.22), notonly “secondhand” women (whom Manu despises as “previously had by another man”) butwidows: “a widow who is tormented by the weakness of the senses . . . finds, again, a man whoenjoys life and is well endowed with good qualities (4.2.31-34).”MARRIAGE AND RAPEThe basic agreement of the three principal shastras, as well as their divergent emphases,is manifest in their different rankings of the eight forms of marriage that all three list.Let’s begin with Manu, who ranks the marriages in this order, each named after thepresiding deity or supernatural figure(s):1. Brahma: A man gives his daughter to a good man he has summoned.2. Gods: He gives her, inthe course of a sacrifice, to the officiating priest.3. Sages: He gives her after receiving from thebridegroom a cow and a bull.4. The Lord of Creatures: He gives her by saying, “May the two ofyou fulfill your dharma together.”5. Antigods: A man takes the girl because he wants her andgives as much wealth as he can to her relatives and to the girl herself.6. Centaurs (Gandharvas):The girl and her lover join in sexual union, out of desire.7. Ogres (Rakshasas): A man forciblycarries off a girl out of her house, screaming and weeping, after he has killed, wounded, andbroken.8. Ghouls (Pishachas): The lowest and most evil of marriages takes place when a mansecretly has sex with a girl who is asleep, drunk, or out of her mind (3.20.21-36). Manu insiststhat the marriages of the ghouls and the antigods should never be performed and that for allclasses but Brahmins, the best marriage is when the couple desire each other. gpThe Artha-shastra defines marriages much more briefly, names them differently, andputs them in a different order:1. Brahma.2. Lord of Creatures.3. Sages.4. Gods.5. Centaurs.6. Antigods (receiving a dowry).7.Ogres (taking her by force).8. Ghouls (taking her asleep or drunk) (3.2.2-9). Kautilyaregards the first four as lawful with the sanction of the father of the bride, and the last four withthe sanction of her father and the mother, because they are the ones who get the bride-price for

her (3.2.10-11). Here, as usual, where Manu’s hierarchy depends on class, Kautilya’s depends onmoney. The Kama-sutra never lists the marriages at all, nor does it discuss the first four, but itgives detailed instructions on how to manage the three that are ranked last in Manu: the centaur,ghoul, and ogre marriages (3.5.12-30).A dharma-sutra in the third century BCE lists only six forms of marriages; 49 it was leftfor all three of the later shastras to add the two last and worst forms, rape and drugging, a changethat signals a significant loss for women. By regarding these two as worse than the other formsof marriage, but not to be ruled out, the shastras simultaneously legitimized rape as a form ofmarriage and gave some degree of legal sanction, retroactively, to women who had been raped.The inclusion of rape in all three lists might be taken as evidence that a wide divergence ofcustoms was actually tolerated in India at that time, though as we have already heard Vatsyayanaexplicitly state, the fact that something is mentioned in a text is not proof that people should (ordo) actually do it. That is, where Manu tells you not to do it and then how to do it, theKama-sutra tells you how to do it and then not to do it. But both instances are evidence that theshastras acknowledge the validity, if not the virtue, of practices they do not like.As for their differences, not surprisingly, the Kama-sutra ranks the love match (thecentaur wedding of mutual consent) as the best form of marriage (“because it gives pleasure andcosts little trouble and no formal courtship, and because its essence is mutual love [3.5.30]”),while Manu ranks it the best for all classes except Brahmins, and Kautilya, ever the cynic, ranksit with the bad marriages (though as the best of that second quartet). Clearly there was quite arange of opinions about the way to treat brides at this time, some hearkening back to the earlierfreedom of women at the time of the Mahabharata, others anticipating the narrowing ofwomen’s options in the medieval period.THE THIRD NATURE: MEN AS WOMENOne subject on which Manu and Vatsyayana express widely divergent opinions ishomosexuality. Classical Hinduism is in general significantly silent on the subject ofhomoeroticism, but Hindu mythology does drop hints from which we can excavate a prettyvirulent homophobia. 50 The dharma textbooks generally ignore, stigmatize, or penalize malehomosexual activity: Manu prescribes either loss of caste (11.68) or the mildest of sanctions, aritual bath (11.174), in dramatic contrast with the heavy penalties, including death, forheterosexual crimes like adultery; the Artha-shastra stipulates the payment of just a small fine(3.18.4, 4.13.236). Most Sanskrit texts regard atypical sexual or gender behavior 51 as an intrinsicpart of the nature of the person who commits such acts and refer to such a person with theSanskrit word kliba, which has traditionally been translated as “eunuch,” but did not primarilymean “eunuch.” Kliba includes a wide range of meanings under the general rubric of “a manwho doesn’t do what a man’s gotta do,” gq a man who fails to be a man, a defective male, a malesuffering from failure, distortion, and lack. It is a catchall term that the shastras used to indicatea man who was in their terms sexually dysfunctional (or in ours, sexually challenged), includingsomeone who was sterile or impotent, a transvestite, a man who had oral sex with other men,who had anal sex, a man with mutilated or defective sexual organs, a man who produced onlyfemale children, a hermaphrodite, and finally, a man who had been castrated (for men werecastrated in punishment for sexual crimes in ancient India, though such men were not used inharems). “An effeminate man” or, more informally and pejoratively, a “pansy” is probably asclose as English can get.But the Kama-sutra departs from this view in significant ways, providing, once again, an

alternative view of Hindu social customs. It does not use the pejorative term kliba at all, butspeaks instead of a “third nature” or perhaps a “third sexuality” in the sense of sexual behavior:tritiya prakriti, a term that first appears in this sense in the Mahabharata. Prakriti (“nature”;more literally, “what is made before”), from pra (“before”) and kri (the verb “to make”), is aterm that we have encountered twice in other forms: as the natural language Prakrit in contrastwith the artificial language Sanskrit and as the word for “matter” in contrast with “spirit”(purusha). gr Here is what the Kama-sutra has to say about the third nature:There are two sorts of third nature, in the form of a woman and in the form of a man. The one inthe form of a woman imitates a woman’s dress, chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity,innocence, frailty, and bashfulness. The act that is done in the sexual organ is done in her mouth,and they call that “oral sex.” She gets her sexual pleasure and erotic arousal as well as herlivelihood from this, living like a courtesan. That is the person of the third nature in the form of awoman (2.9.6-11). The Kama-sutra says nothing more about this cross-dressing male, withhis stereotypical female gender behavior, but it discusses the fellatio technique of the closetedman of the third nature, who presents himself not as a woman but as a man, a masseur, inconsiderable sensual detail, in the longest consecutive passage in the text describing a physicalact, and with what might even be called gusto (2.9.12-24). Two verses that immediately followthe section about the third nature describe men who seem bound to one another by discriminatingaffection rather than promiscuous passion (2.9.35-36). These men are called men-about-town,the term used to designate the hetero (or even metro) sexual heroes of the Kama-sutra. Instriking contrast with workingmen of the third nature, always designated by the pronoun “she”no matter whether she dresses as a man or as a woman, these men who are bound by affectionare described with nouns and pronouns that unambiguously designate males, yet they aregrouped with women. Vatsyayana remarks casually that some people list a person of the thirdnature as a “different” sort of woman who may be a man’s lover (1.5.27). Perhaps, then, they arebisexuals.Vatsyayana is unique in the literature of the period in describing lesbian activity. He doesthis at the beginning of the chapter about the harem, in a brief passage about what he calls“Oriental customs” (5.6.2-4). (The use of the term “Oriental,” or “Eastern,” for what Vatsyayanaregards as a disreputable lesbian practice in what was soon to be a colonized part of the GuptaEmpire—indeed, the eastern part—suggests that “Orientalism” began not with the British butwith the Orientals themselves.) These women use dildos, as well as bulbs, roots, or fruits thathave the form of the male organ, and statues of men that have distinct sexual characteristics. Butthey engage in sexual acts with one another not through the kind of personal choice that drives aman of the third nature, but only in the absence of men, as is sometimes said of men in prison orEnglish boys in boarding schools: “The women of the harem cannot meet men, because they arecarefully guarded; and since they have only one husband shared by many women in common,they are not satisfied. Therefore they give pleasure to one another with the followingtechniques.” The commentary makes this explicit, and also helpfully suggests the particularvegetables that one might use: “By imagining a man, they experience a heightened emotion thatgives extreme satisfaction. These things have a form just like the male sexual organ: the bulbs ofarrowroot, plantain, and so forth; the roots of coconut palms, breadfruit, and so forth; and thefruits of the bottle-gourd, cucumber, and so forth (5.6.2).” One can imagine little gardens ofplantain and cucumber being tenderly cultivated within the inner courtyards of the palace. TheKama-sutra makes only one brief reference to women who may have chosen women as sexualpartners in preference to men (7.1.20; cf. Manu 8.369-70), and it never refers to women of this

type as people of a “third nature.” Still, here is an instance in which ancient Hindu attitudes tohuman behavior are far more liberal than those that have prevailed in Europe and America formost of their history.THE ESCAPE CLAUSEThe shastras present, from time to time, diametrically opposed, even contradictoryopinions on a particular subject, without coming down strongly in favor of one or the other. Onestriking example of an apparent contradiction is Manu’s discussion of the levirate (niyoga), thelaw that allows a woman to sleep with her husband’s brother when the husband has failed toproduce a male heir, a situation that frames the birth of the fathers of the Mahabharata heroes.Manu says that you should carry out the niyoga; in the next breath, he says that you should not,that it is not recommended, that it is despised (9.56-63, 9.64-68). The commentaries (and laterscholars) explicitly regard these two sections as mutually contradictory. But Manu does meanboth of them: He is saying that this is what one has to do in extremity, but that it is really a verybad thing to do, and that, if you do it, you should not enjoy it, and you should only do it once. Ifyou have to do it, you must be very, very careful.That is the way in which one should regard other apparent contradictions in Manu, suchas the statement (repeated ad nauseam) that one must never kill a Brahmin and the statement: “Aman may without hesitation kill anyone who attacks him with a weapon in his hand, even if it ishis guru, a child or an old man, or a Brahmin thoroughly versed in the Veda, whether he does itopenly or secretly; rage befalls rage (8.350-51).” One can similarly resolve Manu’s diatribesagainst the bride-price with his casual explanations of the way to pay it (3.51-54, 9.93-100,8.204, 8.366). But it is not difficult to make sense of all this: Ideally, you should not sleep withyour brother’s wife or kill a Brahmin or accept a bride-price; but there are times when youcannot help doing it, and then Manu is there to tell you how to do it. This is what you do whencaught between a rock and a hard place; it is the best you can do in a no-win situation to whichthere is no truly satisfactory solution.The Sanskrit term for the rock and the hard place is apad, which may be translated “inextremity,” an emergency when normal rules do not apply, when all bets are off. Apad is oftenpaired with dharma in the phrase apad-dharma, the right way to act in an emergency. It is themost specific of all the dharmas, even more specific than one’s own dharma (sva-dharma), letalone general dharma; indeed, it is the very opposite of sanatana or sadharana dharma, thedharma for everyone, always. Apad is further supplemented by other loophole concepts such asadversity (anaya), distress (arti), and near starvation (kshudha). In a famine a father may kill hisson and Brahmins may eat dogs (10.105-08), which would otherwise make them “dog cookers.”The polluting power of dogs is overlooked in another context as well: “A woman’s mouth isalways unpolluted, as is a bird that knocks down a fruit; a calf is unpolluted while the milk isflowing, and a dog is unpolluted when it catches a wild animal (5.130).” That is, since you wantto eat the animal that the dog has caught, you need to redefine its mouth as pure, for thatoccasion.The emergency escape clause is further bolstered by recurrent references to what is anastonishingly subjective standard of moral conduct (2.6, 12, 223; 4.161, 12.27, 37). Thus theelaborate web of rules, which, if followed to the letter, would paralyze human life entirely, isequally elaborately unraveled by Manu through the escape clauses. Every knot tied in one verseis untied in another verse; the constrictive fabric that he weaves in the central text he unweavesin the subtext of apad, as Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey carefully unwove at night what she had

woven in the day.Other apparent contradictions turn out to be conflations of realistic and idealizedapproaches to moral quandaries. Idealism, rather than realism, asserts itself in the framework ofthe shastras. But if the shastras themselves acknowledged the need to escape from the system,how seriously did rank-and-file Hindus take it? Many a young man must have seduced, or beenseduced by, his guru’s wife. (This situation must have been endemic, given both Manu’sparanoid terror of it and its likelihood in a world in which young women married old men whohad young pupils.) How likely was such a man, afterward, in punishment, to “sleep on a heatediron bed or embrace a red-hot metal cylinder . . . or cut off his penis and testicles, hold them inhis two cupped hands, and set out toward the south-west region of Ruin, walking straight aheaduntil he dies (11.104-05)”? Surely none but the most dedicated masochist would turn down themilder alternatives “to dispel the crime of violating his guru’s marriage-bed” that Manu, asalways, realistically offers: “Or he should restrain his sensory powers and eat very little for threemonths, eating food fit for an oblation or barley-broth (11.106-07).” How do we know thatanyone ever did any of this? gs Who believed the Brahmins? How was Manu used? The shastraswere composed by the twice born, for the twice born, and (largely) of the twice born, but “twiceborn” is a tantalizingly imprecise term. Often it means any of the three upper classes, but usuallyit means Brahmins alone.There was a curious lack of communication between theory and practice at this time; theinformation on pigments and measurements in the shastras on painting and architecture,respectively, do not correspond to the actual pigments and measurements of statuary, nor, on theother hand, is the extraordinary quality of the metal in the famous “Iron Pillar” of Mehraulisupported by the known existence of any treatise on metallurgy. 52 The Kama-sutra commentsexplicitly on this gap between theory and practice, and for Manu there are several quite plausiblepossible scenarios that will apply in different proportions to different situations: Manu may bedescribing actual practices that everyone does, or that some people do, that some or all do onlybecause he tells them to, or imagined practices that no one would dream of doing.Nor was Manu the basis on which most Hindus decided what to do and what not to do;local traditions, often functioning as vernacular commentaries on Manu (much as case lawfunctions as a commentary on the American Constitution), did that. Manu is not so much a lawcode as it is a second-order reflection on a law code, a meditation on what a law code is allabout, on the problems raised by law codes. But in the realm of the ideal, Manu is thecornerstone of the Brahmin vision of what human life should be, a vision to which Hindus havealways paid lip service and to which in many ways many still genuinely aspire. Like all shastras,it influenced expectations, tastes, and judgments, beneath the level of direct application of givencases. Often it set a mark that no one was expected to hit; sometimes it acknowledged thelegitimacy of practices that it did not in fact encourage. The Kama-sutra too makes thisdistinctionnicely when it argues, in the only verse that appears twice in the text, once in regard tooral sex and once in regard to the use of drugs: “The statement that ‘There is a text for this’ doesnot justify a practice (2.9.41; 7.2.55).” The shastras therefore do not tell us what people actuallydid about anything, but as theoretical treatises they constitute one of the great cosmopolitanscientific literatures of the ancient world.CHAPTER 13BHAKTI IN SOUTH INDIA100 BCE to 900 CE

CHRONOLOGY 1 c. 300 BCE Greeks and Ashoka mention Pandyas, Cholas, and Cherasc. 100CE Cankam (“assembly”) poetry is composedc. 375 CE Pallava dynasty is foundedc. 550-880CE Chalukya dynasty thrivesc. 500-900 CE Nayanmar Shaiva Tamil poets livec. 600-930 CEAlvar Vaishnava Tamil poets livec. 800 CE Manikkavacakar composes the Tiruvacakamc.880-1200 CE Chola Empire dominates South IndiaCAN’T WE FIND SOME OTHER GOD?Idon’t call to him as my mother. I don’t call to him as my father.I thought it would be enough to call him my lord—but he pretends I don’t exist, doesn’t show an ounce of mercy.If that lord who dwells in Paccilacciramam, surrounded by poolsfilled with geese, postpones the mercies meant for his devotees—can’t we find some other god?Cuntarar, eighth century CE 2 The image of god (Shiva, whodwells in Paccilacciramam) as a parent, as a female parent, and finally as an abandoning parent iscentral to the spirit of bhakti, as is the worshiper’s bold and intimate threat to abandon this god,echoing the divine mercilessness even while responding to the divine love. Bhakti, which is morea general religious lifestyle or movement than a specific sect, was a major force for inclusivenesswith its antinomian attitudes toward Pariahs and women, yet the violence of the passions that itgenerated also led to interreligious hostility. This was the third alliance, in which gods were notonly on the side of devout human worshipers (as in the first alliance) but also on the side ofsinners, some of whom did not worship the god in any of the conventional ways.TIME AND SPACE, CHRONOLOGY AND GEOGRAPHYWe have now reached a point in the historical narrative where a work of fiction wouldsay, “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” or “In another part of the forest . . .” Until now it has beenpossible to maintain at least the illusion (maya) that there was a single line of development in anintertextual tradition largely centered in North India, a kind of family tree with branches that wecould trace one by one, merely stopping occasionally to note the invasion of some South Indiankingdom by a North Indian king or the growing trade between north and south. But now eventhat illusion evaporates. For Indian history is more like a banyan tree, 3 which, unlike the mightyoak, grows branches that return down to the earth again and again and become the roots andtrunks of new trees with new branches so that eventually you have a forest of a banyan tree, andyou no longer know which was the original trunk. The vertical line of time is intersectedconstantly by the horizontal line of space. And so we will have to keep doubling back in time tofind out what has been going on in one place while we were looking somewhere else.Now we must go south.ANCIENT SOUTH INDIATo understand the origins of bhakti, we need to have at least a general idea of the worldin which bhakti was created, a world in which there was a synthesis between North Indian andSouth Indian cultural forms, active interaction between several religious movements andpowerful political patronage of religion. There was constant contact and trade between North andSouth India at least by Mauryan times, in the fourth century BCE. South India was knownalready at the time of the Hebrew Bible (c. 1000 BCE) as a land of riches, perhaps the place towhich King Solomon gt sent his ships every three years, to bring back gold, silver, ivory,monkeys, and peacocks. 4 The southern trade route brought pearls, shells, and the fine cottons ofMadurai to western lands. 5 There was bustling contact with Rome (the Romans imported mostly

luxury articles: spices, jewels, textiles, ivories, and animals, such as monkeys, parakeets, andpeacocks), 6 with China, and with Indianized cultures in Southeast Asia. 7 Oxen and mules werethe caravan animals, camels in the desert, and more nimble-footed asses in rough hill terrain. 8Not horses.The empires of South India endured far longer than any of the North Indian kingdoms,and some of them controlled, mutatis mutandis, just as much territory. The Greek historianMegasthenes, ambassador to the Mauryan king Chandragupta, in c. 300 BCE, says that thePandya kingdom (the eastern part of the Tamil-speaking southernmost tip of India) extended tothe sea and had 365 villages. Ashoka in his edicts mentions the Pandyas as well as the Cholas(the southern kingdom of Tamil Nadu), the sons of Kerala (the Cheras, on the western coast ofSouth India), and the people on the island now known as Sri Lanka. gu The Tamils, in return, werewell aware of the Mauryas in particular and North India in general.The Chola king Rajaraja I (985-1014 CE) carved out an overseas empire. The Cholaswere top dogs from the ninth to the early thirteenth century, pushing outward from the Kaveririver basin, 9 attacking their neighbors, Cheras and Pandyas, as well as the present Sri Lanka tothe south, and almost continually at war with their neighbors to the north, the Chalukyas. TheChalukya Pulakeshin I (543-566 CE) performed a horse sacrifice and founded a dynasty inKarnataka, with its capital at Vatapi (now Badami); it spread through the Deccan, 10 makingtreaties with the Cholas, Pandyas, and Cheras. 11 The Cholas finally took over the Chalukya landsin about 880.In addition to the three great South Indian kingdoms, the Cholas, Pandyas, and Cheras,which endured for centuries, the Pallava dynasty that ruled from Kanchipuram (Kanjeevaram),directly north of the three kingdoms, was a force to be reckoned with from 375 CE on. Pallavaports had been thriving centers of trade with China, Persia, and Rome from Roman times, but thePallavas achieved some of their greatest works of art and literature in the sixth century CE, afterthe disintegration of the Gupta Empire; northern artisans contributed to many of the innovationsin Pallava Sanskrit literature and temple-based architecture.EARLY TAMIL BHAKTI LITERATUREAs Pallava and Chola political power and architecture spread, so did bhakti, becoming ariptide that cut across the still-powerful current of Vedic sacrifice, just as moksha had donecenturies earlier. Beginning among Tamil-literate people, 12 bhakti soon entered the literatures ofother Dravidian languages and then reached nonliterate people. It swept over the subcontinent,fertilizing the worship of Krishna at Mathura and of Jagannatha at Puri, as well as widespreadtraditions of pilgrimage and temple festivals. Always it kept its Tamil character and thustransported Tamil qualities to the north, transforming northern bhakti into a mix of northern andsouthern, Sanskrit and Tamil forms. 13The geographical divide is matched by a major linguistic shift, from Sanskrit and theNorth Indian vernaculars derived from it (Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, and so forth) to Tamil (aDravidian language, from a family entirely separate from the Indo-European group) and its SouthIndian cousins, such as Telugu in Andhra, Kannada in Mysore, and Malayalam in Kerala.Although we have no surviving literature in Tamil until anthologies made in the sixth centuryCE, other forms of evidence tell us a great deal about a thriving culture in South India, much of itcarried on in Tamil, from at least the time of Ashoka, in the third century BCE. As with Sanskritand the North Indian vernaculars, Tamil was the language of royal decrees and poetry for manycenturies before texts in Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam began to be preserved.

Tamil as a literary language appears to have developed from traditions separate fromthose of Sanskrit. The inscriptions in Tamil dedications of caves were written in a form of TamilBrahmi script, probably brought not south from the Mauryan kingdom but north from SriLanka. 14 The earliest extant Tamil texts are anthologies of roughly twenty-three hundred shortpoems probably composed by the early centuries of the Common Era, then anthologized underthe Pandyas and later reanthologized under the Cholas in the ninth to thirteenth century. 15 Thepoems are known in their totality as Cankam (“assembly”) poetry, named after a series of threelegendary assemblies said to have lasted for a total of 9,990 years long, long ago. The sea is saidto have destroyed the cities where the first two assemblies were held, yet another variant of thatmost malleable of myths, the legend of the flood. “Cankam” is the Tamil transcription of theSanskrit /Pali word sangham (“assembly”) and may have been applied to this literature as anafterthought, as a Hindu response to the challenge of Buddhists and Jainas, who termed theirown communities sanghams. The Cankam anthologies demonstrate an awareness of Sanskritliterature (particularly the Mahabharata and Ramayana), of the Nandas and Mauryas, and ofBuddhists and Jainas.Brahmins who settled in the South when kingdoms were first established there graduallyintroduced Sanskrit into the local language and in return learned not only Tamil words but Tamildeities and rituals and much else. 16 This two-way process meant that Tamil forms of religioussentiment moved into Sanskrit (which had had Dravidian loanwords already from the time of theRig Veda) and went north. The Sanskrit Puranas (compendiums of myth and history) arose in thecontext of the development of kingdoms in the Deccan—Chalukyas and Pallavas in particular. 17The Tamil “local Puranas” (sthala puranas) both echoed the Sanskritic forms and contributed tothe contents of the Bhagavata Purana, composed in South India.A few of the Cankam poems are already devoted to religious subjects, singing the praiseof Tirumal (Vishnu) and the river goddess Vaikai, or of Murukan, the Tamil god who had bynow coalesced with the northern god Skanda, son of Shiva and Parvati. But the overwhelmingmajority of these first Tamil poems were devoted to two great secular themes, contrasting theintimate emotions of love, the “inner” (akam) world, with the virile public world of politics andwar, the “outer” (puram) world. The poems that praised kings and heroes in the puram genrewere the basis of later hymns in praise of the gods.The akam poems used geographical landscapes, peopled by animals and characterized byparticular flowers, to map the five major interior landscapes of the emotions: love in union(mountains, with monkeys, elephants, horses, and bulls); patiently waiting for a wife (forest andpasture, with deer), anger at infidelity (river valley, with storks, herons, buffalo); anxiouslywaiting for the beloved (seashore, with seagulls, crocodiles, sharks); separation (desertwaste-land, with vultures, starving elephants, tigers, wolves). 18 Akam poetry also distinguishedseven types of love, of which the first is unrequited love and the last is mismatched love (whenthe object of desire is too far above the one who desires). The bhakti poets took these secularthemes, particularly those involving what Sanskrit poetry called “love in separation” (viraha),and reworked them to express the theological anguish of the devotee who is separated from theotiose god, not because the god does not love him in return but because the god is apparentlyoccupied elsewhere. gv The assumption seems to be that of the old blues refrain “How can I missyou if you never go away?”Beginning in about 600 CE, the wandering poets and saints devoted to Shiva (theNayanmars, gw traditionally said to number sixty-three) and to Krishna-Vishnu (the twelveAlvars) sang poems in the devotional mode of bhakti. The group of Nayanmars known as the

first three (Appar, Campantar, and Cuntarar, sixth to eighth century) formed the collection calledthe Tevaram, 19 which departed from the Cankam style in using a very different Tamil grammar.Nammalvar (“Our Alvar”), the last of the great Alvars, writing in the ninth century, called hiswork “the sacred spoken word” (tiruvaymoli), and Manikkavacakar (late ninth century) called hisShaiva text “the sacred speech” (Tiruvacakam ). 20 These works were clearly meant to beperformed orally, recited, and since the tenth century they have been performed, both in homesand in temples.Bhakti in the sense of supreme devotion to a god, Shiva, and even to the guru as god,appeared in the Shvetashvatara Upanishad (6.23). Ekalavya in the Mahabharata demonstrates akind of primitive bhakti: great devotion to the guru and physical self-violence. The concept ofbhakti was further developed in the Ramayana and the Gita, which established devotion as athird alternative to ritual action and knowledge. But South Indian bhakti ratchets up the emotionfrom the Gita, so that even a direct quotation from the Gita takes on an entirely differentmeaning in the new context, as basic words like karma and bhakti shift their connotations.The Tamils had words for bhakti (such as anpu and parru), though eventually they alsocame to use the Sanskrit term (which became patti in Tamil). But the Tamil poets transformedthe concept of bhakti not only by applying it to the local traditions of the miraculous exploits oflocal saints but by infusing it with a more personal confrontation, an insistence on actual physicaland visual presence, a passionate transference and countertransference. A typically intimate andrural note is evident in the Alvars’ retelling of the legend in the Valmiki Ramayana about asquirrel who assisted Rama in building the bridge to Lanka to rescue Sita; the Alvars add that ingratitude for this assistance, Rama touched the squirrel and imprinted on it the three marksvisible on all Indian squirrels today. gx21 The emotional involvement, the pity, desire, andcompassion of the bhakti gods causes them to forget that they are above it all, as metaphysicsdemands, and reduces them to the human level, as mythology demands.Despite its royal and literary roots, bhakti is also a folk and oral phenomenon. Many ofthe bhakti poems were based on oral compositions, some probably even by illiterate saints. 22Both Shaiva and Vaishnava bhakti movements incorporated folk religion and folk song into whatwas already a rich mix of Vedic and Upanishadic concepts, mythologies, Buddhism, Jainism,conventions of Tamil and Sanskrit poetry, and early Tamil conceptions of love, service, women,and kings, 23 to which after a while they added elements of Islam. This cultural bricolage is therule rather than the exception in India, but the South Indian use of it is particularly diverse. As A.K. Ramanujan and Norman Cutler put it, “Past traditions and borrowings are thus re-worked intobhakti; they become materials, signifiers for a new signification, as a bicycle seat becomes abull’s head in Picasso. Often the listener/reader moves between the original material and thework before him—the double vision is part of the poetic effect.” 24 This too was a two-way street,for just as Picasso imagined someone in need of a bicycle seat using his bull’s head for thatpurpose, 25 so the new bhakti images also filtered back into other traditions, including Sanskrittraditions.Unlike most Sanskrit authors and Cankam poets, the bhakti poets revealed details of theirown lives and personalities in their texts, so that the voice of the saint is heard in the poems. Theolder myths take on new dimensions in the poetry: “What happens to someone else in a mythicscenario happens to the speaker in the poem.” 26 And so we encounter now the use of the firstperson, a new literary register. It is not entirely unprecedented; we heard some voices, evenwomen’s voices (such as Apala’s), in direct speech in the Rig Veda, and a moment in theMahabharata when the narrator breaks through and reminds the reader, “ I have already told

you” (about Yudhishthira’s dog). But the first person comes into its own in a major way inCankam poetry and thence in South Indian bhakti.SECTARIAN DIVERSITY IN SOUTH INDIAN TEMPLESThe growth of bhakti is intimately connected with the burgeoning of sectarian temples.We have seen textual evidence of the growth of sectarianism in the Mahabharata and Ramayanaperiod, supported by epigraphs and references to temples in texts such as the Kama-sutra and theArtha-shastra. We have noted the cave temples of Bhaja, Karle, Nasik, Ajanta, and Ellora. Andwe will soon encounter the sixth-century Vishnu temple in Deogarh in Rajasthan, and otherGupta temples at Aihole, Badami, and Pattadakal. Now is the moment to consider the firstsubstantial groups of temples that we can see in the flesh, as it were, in South India, for under thePallavas, temples began to grow into temple cities.Building temples may have been, in part, a response to the widespread Buddhist practiceof building stupas or to the Jaina and Buddhist veneration of statues of enlightened figures.Hindus vied with Buddhists in competitive fund-raising, and financing temples or stupas becamea bone of contention. One temple at Aihole, dedicated to a Jaina saint, has an inscription dated636, which marks this as one of the earliest dated temples in India. 27 The Pallavas supportedBuddhists, Jainas, and Brahmins and were patrons of music, painting, and literature. Manycraftsmen who had worked on the caves at Ajanta, in the north, emigrated southward to meet thegrowing demand for Hindu art and architecture in the Tamil kingdoms. 28Narasimha Varman I (630-638), also known as Mahamalla or Mamalla (“great wrestler”),began the great temple complex at Mamallapuram that was named after him (it was also calledMahabalipuram); several other Pallavas probably completed it, over an extended period. AtMamallapuram, there is a free-standing Shaiva Shore Temple, a cave of Vishnu in his boarincarnation, an image of Durga slaying the buffalo demon, and five magnificent temples, calledchariots (raths), all hewn from a single giant stone. gy There is also an enormous bas-relief on asculpted cliff, almost one hundred feet wide and fifty feet high, facing the ocean. The focus ofthe whole scene is a vertical cleft, in the center, through which a river cascades down, with halfcobra figures (Nagas and Naginis) as well as a natural cobra in the midst of it. There are also lotsof terrific elephants, deer, and monkeys, all joyously racing toward the descending river. (Realwater may have flowed through the cleft at one time.) Sectarian diversity within Hinduism (asIndra and Soma and the Vedic gods were being shoved aside in favor of Vishnu, Shiva, and thegoddess) is demonstrated by the dedication of different shrines to different deities and, within thegreat frieze, by the depiction of both an image of Shiva and a shrine to Vishnu. The frieze alsocontains a satire on ascetic hypocrisy: The figure of a cat stands in a yogic pose, surrounded bymice, one of whom has joined his tiny paws in adoration of the cat; Sanskrit literature tells of acat who pretended to be a vegetarian ascetic and ate the mice until one day, noting theirdwindling numbers, they discovered mouse bones in the cat’s feces. 29

[TOP] Great Frieze at Mamallapuram, Descent of the Ganges. [ABOVE] The CatAscetic.Among many other figures on this frieze is a man standing on one leg in a yogic posture,about whom art historians have argued for many years. Some say he is Arjuna, generating innerheat to persuade Shiva to give him a special weapon, as he does in the Mahabharata (3.41).Others say it is the sage Bhagiratha, who also appears in the Mahabharata (3.105-08), and in theRamayana (1.42-3), generating inner heat to persuade the heavenly Ganges (the Milky Way) tocome to earth to revive the ashes of his grandfathers. The wisest suggestion, I think, is that thefrieze represents both at once, 30 that it is a visual form of the usual verbal panegyric, inspired bya great military victory, in 642 CE, by Mahamalla, and that it contains references to both Arjunaand Bhagiratha and to both Shiva and Vishnu. This would make it a stone realization of theSanskrit figure of speech called a shlesha (“embrace”), a literary expression that refers to twodifferent stories at once, like the rabbit/man in the moon.Rajaraja I began building the great temple to Shiva in Thanjavur (called the temple ofBrihad-ishvara [“Great Lord”] or Raja-rajeshvara [“the Lord of the King of Kings”]) in 995 butdid not live to see it completed in 1012. An inscription credits him with introducing the practiceof singing hymns in that temple. One of the largest and tallest temples in all of India, it had amonumental linga in the main shrine and was a major economic venture. Rajaraja donated a

great deal of war booty, including the equivalent of 230 kilos of gold, even more silver, and pilesand piles of jewels. Villages throughout the Chola kingdom were taxed to support the temple,which gave back some of that wealth by functioning as a bank that made investments and loansto those same villages. 31The Chola kingdom was watered by the Kaveri River, sometimes called the Ganges ofthe South, and indeed the Kaveri basin is to South India what the Ganges basin is to North India.Eventually (in 1023), the Cholas decided to go for the real thing: They hauled quantities ofwater, presumably in jars, all the way from the Ganges, more than one thousand miles away, toThanjavur, and so claimed to have re-created the holy land of the north in the middle of TamilNadu. 32 The water was presented to King Rajendra (1014-1044) for the ceremonial tank(henceforth known as “the Chola-Ganga”) in his capital. 33 The Cholas may have been inspiredby a similar project that the Rashtrakutas had undertaken in the eighth century, when they addedto the great Shiva temple at Ellora a shrine with images of the three great northern rivers—theGanges, Yamuna/Jumna, and Sarasvati—and actually brought the waters of these rivers south inlarge jars. 34 Closer to home, they may have had in mind the real water flowing through thesculpture of the Ganges at Mamallapuram.The Chola temples were a major source of employment for the community. Engraved onthe walls of each temple were the numbers of architects, accountants, guards, and functionariesthat it employed, as well as its land revenue. 35 Numerous nonliterate assistants and ordinarylaborers worked under the direction of the chief architects and master sculptors who knew thetextbooks of architecture and art (the vastu-shastras and shilpa-shastras). 36 The lists also includethe names of numerous temple dancers, some of whom danced only for the god, while othersalso danced for the king and his friends, and still others were both dancers and high-classcourtesans. Dancers are often represented in sculptures on temples. 37The temples were not central to all aspects of worship; private worship in the home(puja) always remained at the heart of Hinduism, and on the other end of the spectrum, enormouscommunal festivals (melas) marked the religious year for specific areas and, on some occasions,for a great deal of the subcontinent. But temples filled a number of important roles that werecovered neither by private puja nor by the crush of festivals. One of the innovations of bhaktiwas to shift the center of public activity from the courts to the temples. Now the temples, not thecourts, were the hubs of pilgrimage, meeting places, and markets for souvenirs. Hinduism did notkick the moneylenders out of the temples, as some other religions (which shall remain nameless)made a point of doing.The worlds of the temple radiated outward in concentric circles of temples like theconcentric continents in the cosmographic mandala, growing more complex and detailed as theymoved away from the core. 38 At the still center was the womb house (garbha griha), where thedeity was present in a form almost (but not quite) without qualities (nir-guna), often a hidden orabstract symbol, a simple image, naked or swathed in thick layers of precious cloth. On the nextlevel, in the chambers around the womb house, there were often friezes or freestanding images ofdeities, displaying more and more qualities (sa-guna), characteristic poses or weapons ornumbers of heads or arms. The most extravagant and worldly images appeared on the outer wallsof the temple and beyond it on the walls of the entire temple complex, rather like a temple fort,and on those two sets of outer walls artisans carved the more miscellaneous slice-of-life scenesas well as gorgeous women and occasional erotic groups. Just inside and outside the outermostwall, merchants sold the sorts of things that visitors might have wanted to give the deity (fragrantwreaths of flowers, coconuts and bananas and incense and camphor) or to bring home as a holy

souvenir.TEMPLES AND VIOLENCEThe downside of all this architectural glory was that sooner or later a bill was presented;there is no free temple. As endowing temples came in this period to complement and later toreplace Vedic sacrifice as the ritual de rigueur for kings, the older triad of king, ritual, andviolence was newly configured.The great temple-building dynasties were people of “charm and cruelty,” to borrow aphrase that has been applied to kingdoms in Southeast Asia. 39 Death and taxes were, as always,the standard operating procedure, the death consisting, from Chola times, in a series of martialexpeditions to conquer the world (dig-vijayas). In 1014, Rajendra I invaded (the present-day) SriLanka, sacked Anuradhapura, plundered its stupas, opened relic chambers, and took so muchtreasure from the Buddhist monasteries that the Buddhist chronicles compared his forces toblood-sucking fiends (yakkhas). But Buddhism was not the only Chola target. A westernChalukyan inscription, in the Bijapur district, accuses the Chola army of behaving withexceptional brutality, slaughtering Hindu women, children, and Brahmins and raping high-castegirls. 40 Clearly both of these are heavily slanted evaluations.Such violence against temples had little, if anything, to do with religious persecution. TheCholas were generally Shaivas, but within their own territories they protected and enriched bothShaiva and Vaishnava temples, as well as Jaina and Buddhist establishments. 41 It was, however,the Cholas’ custom to desecrate the temples of their fellow Hindu rivals and to use their owntemples to make grandiloquent statements about political power. Plunder was a prime motive forChola military aggression; Rajaraja looted the Cheras and Pandyas in order to build theThanjavur temple. gz42 Often the Cholas replaced brick temples with grander stone ones,particularly on their borders with the Rashtrakuta kingdom to the north. 43 Though kings and localrulers maintained large amounts of capital, the temples were the banks of that period, and theinvading kings kept knocking off the temples because, as Willie Sutton once said when askedwhy he robbed banks, “That’s where the money is.”The Chalukyas, by contrast, did not destroy the Pallava temples but were content merelyto pick up some of the Pallava architectural themes to use in their own capital, 44 importingworkmen from both the north and the south. Some of the Chalukya buildings are thereforeamong the finest extant examples of the southern style, with the enormous front gate (gopuram),while others are in the northern style (later epitomized in Khajuraho) and still others in theOrissan style. At first the Chalukyas cut temples right into the rock, but Pulakeshin II (610-642),using local sandstone, built some of the earliest freestanding temples in a new style at Badamiand at the neighboring Aihole, Mahakuta, Alampur, and Pattadal. 45 The Chalukya VikramadityaII (733-746), in 742, left an inscription on the Pallavas’ Kailasanatha temple boasting that he hadcaptured it but spared both it and the city, returning the gold that he had taken from the temple.Clearly this was a most unusual thing for a king to do.KINGSHIP AND BHAKTISouth Indian religion under the Cholas and Pallavas was fueled by royal patronage, andkingship provided one model for bhakti, which, from its very inception, superimposed the divineupon the royal. Some of the early Tamil poems praise the god just as they praise their patronking; you can substitute the word “god” wherever the word “hero” or “king” occurs in some ofthe early royal panegyrics, and voilà, you have a hymn of divine praise. 46 While the secular

poems praised the king’s ancestors, the bhakti poems praised the god’s previous incarnations; thebattles of gods and of kings were described in much the same gory detail. But there is a crucialdifference: The god offered his suppliants personal salvation as well as the food and wealth thatkings usually gave to bards who sought their patronage, spiritual capital in addition to plain oldcapital.We have noted the close ties between kingship and devotion in the image of Ram-raj inthe Ramayana, Rama as king and god. The Cholas regarded themselves as incarnations (not theofficial avatars but earthly manifestations) of Vishnu but were by and large worshipers ofShiva. ha Thus Vishnu (the king), the god manifest within the world, was a devotee of Shiva, thegod aloof from the world. As the subject was to the king, so the king was to the god, a greatchain of bhakti, all the way down the line, but the king was also identified with the god. Thedivine married couple, Shiva and Parvati or Sita and Rama, served as a template for the imagesof a number of kings and their queens hb who commissioned sculptures 47 depicting, on one level,the god and his goddess and, on another, the king and his consort. hc The bronzes commissionedby the Chola kings are the most famous, and surely among the most beautiful, of this genre of thecouple standing side by side. Rama and Krishna, the primary recipients of bhakti in North India,were already kings before they were gods; the worship of Rama was by its very nature politicalfrom the start. But this was a two-way street, for the rise of bhakti also influenced the way thatpeople treated kings and the games that the kings themselves were able to play.Sacred places are the counterparts to the king’s domain, his capital and his forts. 48 Thetemple was set up like a palace, and indeed Tamil uses the same word (koil, also koyil or kovil,“the home [il] of the king [ko]”) for both palace and temple. Temples were central to the imperialprojects of the upwardly mobile dynasties; every conquering monarch felt it incumbent upon himto build a temple as a way of publicizing his achievement. Brahmins became priests in templesas they had been chaplains to kings. Temples also brought puja out of the house and into publiclife, making group puja the center of religious activity, mediating between the house and thepalace. These manifestations of the divine were specifically local; the frescoes in the greatThanjavur Brihadishvara temple depicted not just the images of Shiva and Parvati, or of Shiva asLord of the Dance and Destroyer of the Triple City, images that were known from northerntemples, but also scenes from the legends of Shaiva saints (Nayanmars), while other temples didthe same for the Vaishnava saints (Alvars). 49 By building temples, making grants for templerituals, and having the bhakti hymns collected, the Cholas successfully harnessed andinstitutionalized bhakti. The deep royal connection goes a long way to explaining the ease withwhich religious stories and images were swept up in political maneuverings throughout thehistory of Hinduism.DARSHANA feudal king, subject to a superior ruler, had to appear in person in the court of hisoverlord, publicly affirming his obedient service through a public demonstration of submission,so that he could see and be seen. 50 So too the temple was both the god’s private dwelling and apalace, a public site where people could not only offer puja but look at the deity and be looked atby him. Many temples have annual processions in which the central image of the god is taken outand carried around the town in a wooden chariot (rath), in clear imitation of a royal procession.Darshan (“seeing”) was the means (known throughout North and South India, from thetime of the Alvars and Nayanmars to the present) by which favor passed from one to the other ofeach of the parties linked by the gaze. One takes darshan of a king or a god, up close and

personal. Darshan is a concept that comes to the world of the temple from the world of the royalcourt. To see the deity, therefore, and to have him (or her) see you was to make possible atransfer of power not unlike the transfer of karma or merit. And this was the intimatetransference that South Indian bhakti imagined for the god and the worshiper. 51 Darshan mayalso have been inspired, in part, by the Buddhist practice of viewing the relics in stupas. But itwas also surely a response to the new bhakti emphasis on the aspect of god in the flesh (“rightbefore your eyes” [sakshat]), with flesh and blood qualities (sa-guna), in contrast with the aspectof a god “without qualities” (nir-guna) that the philosophers spoke of.Artists, both Hindu and Buddhist, have always painted the eyes on a statue last of all, forthat is the moment when the image comes to life, when it can see you, and you can no longerwork on it; that is where the power begins. 52 Rajasthani storytellers, who use as their main prop apainting of the epic scenes, explained to one anthropologist that once the eyes of the hero werepainted in, neither the artist nor the storyteller regarded it as a piece of art: “Instead, it became amobile temple . . . the spirit of the god was now in residence.” 53 The Vedic gods Varuna andIndra were said to be “thousand-eyed,” because as kings they had a thousand spies, overseeingjustice, and as sky gods they had the stars for their eyes. The sun is also said to be the eye of thesky, of Varuna, and of the sacrificial horse (BU 1.1) and we have noted analogies betweenhuman eyes and the sun. Varuna in the Rig Veda (2.27.9) is unblinking, a characteristic that laterbecomes one of the marks that distinguish any gods from mortals. 54In Buddhist mythology (the tale of Kunala 55 ), as well as South Indian hagiography (thetale of Kannappar, which we will soon encounter), saints are often violently blinded inmartyrdom. The hagiography of the eighth-century Nayanar saint Cuntarar tells us that Shivablinded him (darshan in its negative form) after he deserted his second wife but restored hisvision (darshan in its positive form) when he returned home to her again. Many of Cuntarar’sbitterest poems are ascribed to the period of his blindness, including the poem cited at theopening of this chapter, which is in the genre of “blame-praise” or “worship through insult” thatalso became important (as “hate-devotion”) in the Sanskrit tradition. Cuntarar was known for theangry tone of his poems and sometimes called himself “the harsh devotee,” though the Tamiltradition called him “the friend of god.” 56 His poems, which range from humorous teasing totragic jeremiads, combined an intimate ridicule of the god with self-denigration.The sense of personal unworthiness and the desire for the god’s forgiveness that we sawin the Vedic poem to Varuna is also characteristic of attitudes toward the bhakti gods, who are,like Varuna, panoptic, as is Shiva in this poem by the twelfth-century woman poet Mahadevi:People,male and female,blush whena cloth covering their shame comes loose.When the lord of liveslives drowned without a facein the world, how can you be modest?When all the world is the eye of the lord,onlooking everywhere, what can youcover and conceal? 57 The divine gaze makes meaningless the superficial trappings of bothgender (“male and female”) and sexuality (“covering their shame”).WOMEN IN SOUTH INDIAN BHAKTI

Gender and sexuality are front and center in bhakti poetry. The gender stereotype ofwomen as gentle, sacrificing, and loving became the new model for the natural worshiper,replacing the gender stereotype of men as intelligent, able to understand arcane matters, andhanding down the lineage of the texts. The stereotypes remained the same but were valueddifferently. And so men imitated women in bhakti, and women took charge of most of thefamily’s religious observances. At the same time, a new image, perhaps even a new stereotype,arose of a woman who defied conventional society in order to pursue her personal religiouscalling. Only one of the Alvars, in the eighth century, was a woman, Antal, who fantasized abouther union with Vishnu as his divine consort until he finally took her as his bride. Her life story isbest known of all the Alvars, 58 and many women saints followed her example; her poems expressher protest against the oppression of women. 59 Two of the Nayanmars were women whose wordswere never preserved, one a Pandyan queen and the other the mother of the poet Cuntarar. 60 Buta third Nayanmar woman did leave us four poems, Karaikkal Ammaiyar.Karaikkal Ammaiyar probably lived in the mid-sixth century CE or perhaps in the fifthcentury. 61 According to Cekkiyar’s Periya Purana (twelfth century), she was born the beautifuldaughter of a wealthy and devout merchant family. Shiva rewarded her devotion by manifestingin her hand delicious mangoes, which magically disappeared. When her husband saw this, he lefther. Thinking that he might one day return, she continued her dharmic wifely responsibilities,keeping her husband’s house and taking care of herself. One day, however, she discovered thather husband had taken another wife. Feeling that she had no more use for her physical beauty,she begged Shiva to turn her body into a skeleton and made a pilgrimage to Shiva’s Himalayanabode, walking the entire way on her hands, feet in the air. Shiva granted her request that shejoin his entourage as an emaciated ghost or demon (pey), singing hymns while Shiva danced inthe cremation ground. Eventually she settled in a cremation ground in Alankatu. 62 Four of herpoems found a place in the Tamil Shaiva canon, the Tirumurai. Here is one:She has shriveled breastsand bulging veins,in place of white teethempty cavities gape.With ruddy hair on her belly,a pair of fangs, knobby ankles and long shinsthe demon-woman wails at the desolate cremation groundwhere our lord,whose hanging matted hairblows in all eight directions,dances among the flamesand refreshes his limbs. His home is Alankatu. 63The female saints flagrantly challenge Manu’s notorious statement about a woman’sconstant subservience to her father, husband, and son. They are not usually bound to a man at all,and “It is more common for a married woman saint to get rid of her husband than to endurehim.” 64 Defying her parents, she may escape marriage in any of several ways. She may become acourtesan, transform herself into an unmarriageable old woman, or terrify her husband byperforming miracles (as Karaikkal Ammaiyar does). Or she may become widowed, presumablyby chance (though those women saints were capable of almost anything). Widowhood is not

normally a fate that any Hindu woman would willingly choose, but in this case the woman wouldregard herself as married to the god. hd Or she may simply renounce marriage, walking out on herhusband, leaving him for her true lover, the god. A woman named Dalayi deserted her husbandwhile he was making love to her, at the call of Shiva (a rare reversal of the more usual pattern ofthe worshiper’s interrupting the god when he is engaged in lovemaking). Or transgressing thetransgression, she may refuse to have the god as her lover: The Virashaiva woman saint namedGoggavve was so obstinate that she refused to marry the disguised Shiva, even when hethreatened to kill her. 65The early, secular Tamil male poets often adopted a woman’s point of view and awoman’s voice. So basic was the woman’s voice to the language of bhakti that the bhakti poetstook up this convention and developed it into a complex theological argument about menspeaking with the voices of women; the fifteenth-century Telugu poet Annamayya wrote manypoems in a woman’s voice. The female saints of course did not have to undergo any genderconversion (though some of the hagiographies tell of women who, with double-back perversity,“transformed . . . into a male by God’s grace.”) 66In a poem to Krishna, Nammalvar imagines himself as a woman abandoned by Krishna,the Dark One:Evening has come,but not the Dark One.Without him here,what shall I say?how shall I survive?The bulls,their bells jingling,have mated with the cowsand the cows are frisky.The flutes play cruel songs,bees flutter in the brightwhite jasmineand the blue-black lily.The sea leaps into the skyand cries aloud. 67 Sometimes the male poet, as worshiper, takes over from the earlier genresof love poetry (akam) the voice of the lovesick heroine, or of her mother, and addresses the loveras the god. Here the male poet assumes the voice of the heroine’s mother addressing Rama asdestroyer of Lanka:Like a bar of lacor waxthrust into fireher mind is in periland you are heartless.What shall I do for you,lord who smashed Lanka,land ruled by the demon? 68 The fire that is already a cliché for lovesickness now alsorepresents the fire of bhakti, and the expectation is that the lover/Rama can save theheroine/worshiper, as the incarnate god saved Sita from Ravana, but also that he may destroyher, as he destroyed Ravana, or even perhaps that he may just let her burn, as Rama let Sita walk

into the fire of her ordeal.Even the thoroughly male god Shiva, whom the poet calls “the lord of meeting rivers,”sometimes becomes a woman in Kannada bhakti myth and poetry:As a mother runsclose behind her childwith his hand on a cobraor a fire,the lord of meeting riversstays with meevery step of the wayand looks after me. 69 The poem, quite straightforward, needs no gloss. But a Kannadalistener/reader would hear echoes of this story:SHIVA AS MIDWIFEA devotee’s daughter was about to give birth to her first child. Her mothercould not cross the flooding Kaveri River and come in time to help her waiting daughter. SoShiva took the form of the old mother—“back bent like the crescent moon, hair white asmoonlight, a bamboo staff in hand”—and came to her house. Uma [Parvati, Shiva’s wife] andGanga [the river, often said to be a wife of Shiva] had been sent ahead with bundles. When laborbegan, Shiva played midwife; a boy was born and Mother Shiva cradled and cared for him as ifhe were Murukan. Soon the floods abated, and the real mother appeared on the doorstep. Shivabegan to slip away. Seeing the two women, the young couple were amazed. “Which is mymother?” cried the girl. Before her eyes, Shiva disappeared into the sky like lightning. 70 “As ifhe were Murukan” is one of those switchbacks that the mythology of doubling andimpersonation, so dear to Shaiva literature, delights in: A human woman might indeed treat hergrandson like a god (in this case, Murukan, the son of Shiva), but in this story the god pretendsthat the child is his very own son, pretends that he himself is a woman pretending to be Shiva—adouble gender switch too, by the way. Careful, down-to-earth details, such as Shiva’s sending“bundles” on ahead with his two wives, strongly suggest that this is a story about “women’sconcerns,” surely a place to hear women’s voices. Shiva clearly enjoys being a woman, or elsewhy did he not just stop the river from flooding so that the real mother could get to her daughter?He wanted to be there himself, to be intimately involved with this most basic of women’sexperiences.CASTEPARIAHSOne of the great bhakti legends is the story of the Nayanar saint named Kannappar, toldin several texts, 71 perhaps best known from the Periya Purana of Cekkilar, dated to the reign ofthe Chola king Kulottunka II, 1133-1150 CE:KANNAPPAR’S EYESKannappar was the chief of a tribe of dark-skinned, violent hunters, wholived by hunting wild animals (with the help of dogs) and stealing cattle. One day he found Shivain the jungle; filled with love for the god and pity that he seemed to be all alone, Kannapparresolved to feed him. So he took pieces of the meat of a boar that he had killed, tasted each oneto make sure it was tender, and brought the meat to him. He kicked aside, with his foot, theflowers that a Brahmin priest had left on Shiva’s head and spat out on him the water from hismouth. Then he gave him the flowers that he had worn on his own head. His feet, and his dogs’paws, left their marks on him. He stayed with him all night, and left at dawn to hunt again.TheBrahmin priest, returning there, removed Kannappar’s offerings and hid and watched him. In

order to demonstrate for the Brahmin the greatness of Kannappar’s love, Shiva caused blood toflow from one of his eyes. To stanch the flow, Kannappar gouged out his own eye with an arrowand replaced the god’s eye with his. When Shiva made his second eye bleed, Kannappar put hisleft foot on Shiva’s eye to guide his hand, and was about to pluck out his remaining eye whenShiva stretched out his hand to stop him, and placed Kannappar at his right hand. 72Kannappar may be a Nishada or some other tribal beyond the Hindu pale; one Sanskritversion of the story calls him a Kirata. The Periya Purana says that his mother was from thewarrior caste of Maravars and his parents had worshiped Murukan, but Kannappar does not seemto know the rules of Brahmin dharma, such as the taboo on offering flesh to the gods. (Or with ahistorian’s distance, we might say that he does not know that high-caste Hindus, like theBrahmin for whose benefit Shiva stages the whole grisly episode of the eyes, no longer offerflesh to their gods.) He does not know about the impurity of substances, like spit, that come fromthe body, the spit that he uses to clean the image as a mother would use her spit to scrub a bit ofdirt off the face of her child. (Or again, he is unaware of the centuries that have passed sinceApala, in the Rig Veda, offered the god Indra the soma plant that she had pressed in her mouth.)He reverses the proper order of head and foot by putting his foot on the head of the god insteadof his head on the god’s foot, the usual gesture of respect.Kannapar does not understand metaphor: The normal offering to a god is a flower,perhaps a lotus, and in fact he gives the god flowers (though ones that have been polluted, inhigh-caste terms, by being worn on his own head). But Sanskrit poets often liken beautiful eyesto lotuses, and Kannappar offers the god the real thing, the eye, the wrong half of the metaphor.Moreover, Kannappar’s gruesome indifference to his self-inflicted pain may have had consciousantecedents in similar acts committed by King Shibi and by Ekalavya, in the Mahabharata (notto mention the blinding of Kunala in the Buddhist tradition).Many texts retell this story, generally specifying that the form of Shiva that Kannapparfound in the forest was a linga and occasionally adding details designed to transform Kannapparfrom a cattle thief and hunter with dogs (like the Vedic people) into a paradigm of bhakti; thusthe animals that he kills are said to be ogres offering their bodies as sacrifice to Shiva. 73 But inthe Periya Purana his “mistakes” are felix culpas that make possible an unprecedentedly directexchange of gazes; instead of trading mere glances, he and the god trade their very eyes. This isdarshan in its most direct, violent, passionate form.BRAHMINSLike the second of the three alliances, in which religious power (conceived of as innerheat) could be generated by individuals without the mediation of Brahmins, the third or bhaktialliance placed the power in the individual and hence by its very nature threatened the hegemonyof the Brahmins. Chola records of demands for the lower castes to have equal access to templesfurther demonstrate that the bhakti movement had originally contained an element of protestagainst Brahmin exclusivity. 74 As the tale of Kannappar demonstrates so powerfully, some sectsof South Indian bhakti regarded non-Brahmins as superior to Brahmins; at the very least, bhaktisometimes sidetracked Brahmin ritual by emphasizing a direct personal relationship between thedevotee and the deity. 75 The devotion to the guru that played such a central part in bhakti wasalso a threat to Brahmins, for the guru was not necessarily a Brahmin. But it did not stop there.As Ramanujan noted, “In the lives of the bhakti saints ‘the last shall be first’: men wish torenounce their masculinity and to become as women; upper-caste males wish to renounce pride,

privilege, and wealth, seek dishonor and self-abasement, and learn from the untouchabledevotee.” 76 Some bhakti groups cut across political, caste, gender, and professional divisions.Some members were Pariahs, and many were non-Brahmins.The questioning, if not the rejection, of the hierarchies of gender and caste, coupled witha theology of love, has sometimes inspired an image of the bhakti worshipers as some sort ofproto-flower children, Hinduism “lite.” But on the one hand, the hierarchical categories arereified even as they are challenged—reversed sometimes, and mocked at other times, but alwaysthere. On the other hand, the Brahmin hegemony was still firmly entrenched. Shortly after thetale of Kannappar, the Periya Purana tells the story of Tirunalaippovar Nantanar, a Pariah whowent through fire to purify himself since he was not allowed to enter a temple; he wastransformed into a Brahmin, a solution that simultaneously vindicates this particular Pariah butenforces the superiority of all Brahmins and upholds the exclusion of Pariahs from temples. 77Later Nantanar became the hero of tales of caste protest. 78 Like Buddhism and all the otherso-called ancient reform movements that protested against the injustice of the Hindu socialsystem, the bhakti movement did not try to change or reform that system itself; reform of casteinequalities came only much later, and even then with only limited success. Rather, bhaktimerely created another, alternative system that lived alongside the Brahmin imaginary, a systemin which caste injustices were often noted, occasionally challenged, and rarely mitigated.But unlike the alternative universe that the mythical sage Trishanku created, a double ofours down to the stars and the moon, the bhakti universe was bounded by that permeablemembrane so characteristic of Hinduism. The good news about this was that bhakti thereforeleaked back into the Brahmin imaginary from time to time, improving the condition of womenand the lower castes even there. Although the leaders of many bhakti sects came from the lowestcastes, particularly in the early stages of the bhakti movements, high-caste Vaishnavas andShaivas eventually accepted their literature. 79 But the bad news was that since all permeablemembranes are two-way stretches, bhakti also often made concessions to the caste system evenwithin its own ranks—and I do mean ranks. And so what once may have been non-Brahmin textsbecame tangled in Brahmin values as the price of their admission to the written record. Theywere compiled in writing long after the period of their oral circulation and compiled in theservice of an imperial project of what was essentially Shaiva colonization. Despite thenon-Brahminic elements in the bhakti saints of South India, the movement by and large servedBrahmin ends.With the passage of time caste strictures often reasserted themselves; Ramanuja, thephilosopher who founded a major Vaishnava bhakti sect, accepted caste divisions in somelimited form, and even Chaitanya, a much later Bengali Vaishnava leader, failed to do away withthem completely. 80 Nammalvar was from a low-caste farming family; all the hagiographiesunanimously declared that he was a Shudra. 81 But the Shri Vaishnava Brahmins who claimedhim as a founder were aware of the shadow that this ancestry cast on their legitimacy in theBrahmin imaginary and took various measures to minimize the implications of Nammalvar’s lowcaste. For instance, one hagiographer claimed that the infant Alvar neither ate with nor looked athis family, even refusing the milk of his Shudra mother’s breast, 82 as any self-respectingBrahmin would refuse the food prepared by someone of a lower caste. One step forward, twosteps backward.THE VIOLENCE OF SOUTH INDIAN BHAKTIBhakti, like the ascetic movements, was strong on nonviolence to animals, generally

(though not always) opposing animal sacrifice (as the story of Kannappar’s meat offeringdemonstrates), but it was not so strong on nonviolence to humans. Love, particularly in the formof desire, can be as violent as hate, as the poet Robert Frost said of fire and ice. The ability todemonstrate indifference to physical pain was an intrinsic part of the narrative traditions of bothascetics (mortifying their flesh in various ways) and warriors, like Shibi and Karna,demonstrating their machismo. But the violence of bhakti was not always directed against theself (Kannappar tearing out his own eye) or the god (Cuntarar threatening Shiva with apostasy).Sometimes the violence was for god and, though usually directed against Hindus who refused toworship the god, occasionally in conflict with other religions. The violence inherent in greatpassion is evident in even the most superficial summary of the acts committed by the Nayanmarsin the Periya Purana: One or another engages in violent conflicts with Jainas, attempts orcommits suicide (in various ways), chops off his father’s feet or his wife’s hand or a queen’snose or someone else’s tongue, slashes his own throat, massacres his relatives, grinds up his ownelbow, sets his hair on fire, or kills and/or cooks his/her son.Bhakti sometimes resulted in physical violence from the god toward the worshiper’sfamily:CIRUTTONTAR AND THE CURRIED CHILDA Shaiva ascetic came to Ciruttontar and askedfor a little boy to eat, cooked into a curry by the child’s parents. Ciruttontar and his wife cut uptheir only child, a son, and cooked the curry. When they were about to serve it, the guest insistedfirst that they, too, share the meal and then that they call their son to join them, too. They calledhim, and he came running in from outside. The ascetic then revealed his true form, as Shiva, inthe form of Bhairava, together with Parvati and his sons. He took Ciruttontar and his wholefamily to Kailasa. 83 This was just a test, of the type that we know from the testing ofYudhishthira and Shibi in the Mahabharata. But it was a gruesome test, even more tragic thanthe testing of Abraham in the Hebrew Bible (for Ciruttontar’s child was actually killed, thoughlater revived) and even more horrible than the trick played on Thyestes in Greek tragedy (whoseenemy served him a meal that was made of his sons, though Thyestes did not know it at thetime). As in the cases of Yudhishthira and Shibi and Abraham and Job (though not Thyestes), thetragedy proves illusory or, rather, reversible: Just as Job’s losses are reversed and Abraham’s sonis spared at the last minute, Ciruttontar’s child comes back to life unharmed. (In some versions ofthe Ciruttontar story—the tale is told in Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada—different parts of thechild’s body smell of different spices as he comes running in at the end.) But surely the agony atthe moment when the parents thought the child had been cooked for them was very real indeed;that too is bhakti: terrible suffering at the hands of a god. In a text from a later and ratherdifferent South Indian tradition, the Virashaiva Basava Purana, one of the saintsexcommunicates Shiva for having forced Ciruttontar to sacrifice his son. That too is bhakti:punishing the god. At the same time, we must not forget the other side of bhakti, the positiveemotion of ecstasy, the rapture of being so close to the god.INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE IN ANCIENT SOUTH INDIAA poet writing in the eleventh century in Kerala said that in the capital city, “differentdeities coexisted in peace like wild beasts forgetting their natural animosity in the vicinity of aholy hermitage.” 84 But at times they remembered. heBUDDHISM AND JAINISMThere is a long, sad history of stories of mutual cruelty between Hindus, Buddhists, and

Jainas in South India, though there is little evidence that such stories accurately represent actualhistorical events. The rise of this sort of polemical literature at a time when actual relationsbetween religions were fairly tolerant, on the whole, can perhaps be explained by the fact thatHinduism had to compete, for followers and patrons, with Jainism and Buddhism, both of whichwere well established in the south well before the time of the Chola ascendancy. 85 Jainism wasparticularly prominent in Karnataka and the Deccan, and Buddhism, from the time of Ashoka,had been firmly established among the Cholas and the Pandyas. The shift from Vedic sacrifice toother forms of temple-based Hinduism, such as sectarian worship in general and bhakti inparticular, meant that ordinary people began using their surplus cash to support religious leadersand institutions other than Vedic priests. The competition for their patronage as well as for royalpatronage, sometimes friendly rivalry, sometimes not so friendly, often generated tensions thatbhakti intensified rather than alleviated, as it gathered force from the ongoing popular resistanceto the ascetic and renunciant traditions, within Hinduism but also in Buddhism and Jainism. Eventhe bhakti caste reforms may be seen, at least in part, as an attempt to preempt much of theBuddhists’ and Jainas’ claim to be a refuge from Brahmin authority and caste prejudice. 86 Bywinning over people of all castes, the Hindu Alvars and Nayanmars may have hoped to stem thegrowth of Buddhism and Jainism in the South. 87 At times this competition became hostile andbroke out in angry rhetoric, especially against Jainas, 88 and in competing propaganda. 89The Pallava king Mahendra Varman I (600-630), a Jaina, wrote a Sanskrit comedy, theFarce of the Drunkard’s Games (Mattavilasa-prahasana), about an inebriated Shaiva asceticwho accused a Vaishnava ascetic and a Buddhist monk of stealing the human skull that he usedas his begging bowl, a bowl that, they eventually discovered, a stray dog had stolen. The Jainasalone escaped Mahendra’s razor-sharp satire, but that was the only blade he ever used againstany religious group. The Shaiva saint Appar, who had been a Jaina ascetic, converted toShaivism, bitterly attacked Jainas (his former people) and Buddhists, and allegedly convertedMahendra Varman from Jainism. But the Pallavas continued to support Buddhists and Brahminsas well as Jainas.In other parts of India, from time to time, Hindus, especially Shaivas, took aggressiveaction against Buddhism. At least two Shaiva kings hf are reported to have destroyed monasteriesand killed monks. The Alvar Tirumankai is said to have robbed a Buddhist monastery, stolen thecentral image, pounded it into dust, and used the gold for the gopuram at Shrirangam. 90 Some ofthe hymns of both the Alvars and the Nayanmars express strong anti-Buddhist and anti-Jainasentiments. The Tiruvatavurar Purana and Tiruvilaiyatal Purana tell this story:MANIKKAVACAKAR STRIKES THE BUDDHISTS DUMBThree thousand Buddhistemissaries came from Sri Lanka to the Chola king, who told Manikkavacakar to defeat them indebate and proclaim the truth of the Shaiva doctrine, whereupon he, the king, would eliminatethe Buddhists. After the debate, Manikkavacakar appealed to the goddess Sarasvati to keep theBuddhists from profaning the truth, and she struck them all dumb. When the leader of theBuddhists converted to Shaivism, his daughter regained her ability to speak and began to refutethe Buddhists, who converted, adopted the costume of Shaivas, and remained in Citamparam. 91Interreligious debate surely hit a low point at that moment. Only in Bihar and Bengal,because of the patronage of the Pala dynasty and some lesser kings and chiefs, did Buddhistmonasteries continue to flourish. Buddhism in eastern India was well on the way to beingreabsorbed into Hinduism, the dominant religion, when Arabs invaded the Ganges Valley in thetwelfth century. After that there were too few Buddhists left to pose a serious challenge, butJainism remained to fight for its life, and there are many stories about the torture and persecution

of Jaina missionaries and rulers in the Tamil kingdom.In the seventh century the Shaiva saint Tirujnana Campantar, whom the Jainas (accordingto the Hindus) had attempted to kill, vanquished (also according to the Hindus) the Jainas not inbattle but in a contest of miracles and converted the Pandya ruler from Jainism to Shaivism. ThePeriya Purana (which narrates several episodes in which Shaivas confound Buddhists as well asJainas 92 ) tells the story like this:CAMPANTAR AND THE IMPALED JAINASThe wicked Jainas, blacker than black, likedemons, plotted against Campantar. They set fire to the monastery where he was staying, butCampantar prayed and the fire left the monastery and, instead, attacked the Pandyan king, in theform of a fever. The king said that he would support whichever of the two groups could cure hisfever; the Jainas failed, and Campantar cured the king. Then the Jainas proposed that they andCampantar should inscribe the principles of their beliefs on a palm leaf and throw the leaves intoa fire; whichever did not burn would be the winner, the true religion. The fire burned up theJainas’ leaf, but not Campantar’s. Then the Jainas proposed that they subject another pair ofpalm leaves to a floating test on the Vaikai River at Madurai. And, they added, “If we lose in thethird trial, let the king have us impaled on sharpened stakes.” Only the Shaiva texts floatedagainst the current, which washed away the Jaina texts. Eight thousand Jainas impaledthemselves upon the stakes. 93 The king saw which way the holy wind was blowing and went withCampantar. The story of the three miraculous contests is not generally challenged; it is acceptedas hagiography and left at that. But the part about the impalings, which does not defy the laws ofnature and has been proposed as history, is much disputed. 94 Impaling was, as we saw in the taleof Mandavya, a common punishment in ancient India. But while Campantar himself reviles theJainas in his own poetry, he doesn’t mention the impaling, nor does Appar (usually regarded asslightly older than Campantar), who tells only the story of the three contests, in the early seventhcentury. References to the impaling begin only centuries later, and this lapse of centuries castsdoubt on the historicity of the impaling. Nampi Antar Nampi, in the reign of the Chola kingRajaraja I (985- 1014), refers to it, and it is illustrated in a frieze from the reign of Rajaraja II(1150-1173), in the main shrine of the Shiva temple at Taracuram (south of Kumbhakonam, inThanjavur district, Tamil Nadu). 95 Cekkiyar, the author of the Periya Purana version of the storycited above, was known for his anti-Jaina sentiments. 96 Parancoti Munivar reworked the story inhis Tiruvilayatal Purana, and it is illustrated in paintings in the great tenth-century Brihadishvaratemple in Thanjavur. 97 One panel shows Campantar at the left, with the river and the texts uponit; the king and his queen(s) and minister in the middle; the impaled Jainas on the right. 98 Themass execution of Jainas is carved in frescoes on the wall of the Mandapam of the Golden LilyTank in the temple of the goddess Minakshi in Madurai.But there is no evidence that any of this actually happened, other than the story, and thatstory is told, in the ancient sources, only by the tradition that claims to have committed theviolence (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 celebratingtheir 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 alludeto in their poems. Telling this story both generated tension between the communities andreflected already extant tensions.There are other stories, on both sides. Inscriptions from the sixteenth-century in AndhraPradesh 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 asimilar fate. 99 An inscription at Ablur in Dharwar praises attacks on Jaina temples in retaliationfor Jaina opposition to the worship of Shiva. 100 A dispute is said to have arisen because theJainas tried to prevent a Shaiva from worshiping his own idol, and in the ensuing quarrel, theShaivas broke a Jaina idol. When the dispute was brought before the Jaina king Bijjala, hedecided in favor of the Shaivas and dismissed the Jainas. 101 This crossover judgment of a Jainaking in favor of Hindus is matched by a case from the fourteenth century in which Jainas whowere being harassed by one band of Hindus sought protection from another Hindu ruler. 102Evidently there were rulers on both sides who could be relied upon to transcend the boundariesof any particular sectarian commitment in order to protect pluralism. A ray of light in a darkstory.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 beShaivas 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 otherwords, as was the case later with the Turkish invasions, warfare had political and economicmotives more often than religious ones. Yet the debate between Shaivas and Vaishnavassometimes became quite heated. Descriptions of intersect discourse are peppered with verbs like“pummel, smash, pulverize,” and, above all, “hate.” 104CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISMJainas and Buddhists had been conversation partners, friend or foe, with Hindus since thesixth century BCE. But from the early centuries CE, the Abrahamic religions joined theconversation, first Christianity, then Judaism, and then Islam.According to the apocryphal Acts of St. Thomas (perhaps from the first century CE), theapostles drew lots and the Apostle Judas Thomas, who was a carpenter, got India. When Jesusappeared to him in a vision that night, Thomas said, “Whithersoever Thou wilt, our Lord, sendme; only to India I will not go.” Jesus nevertheless eventually indentured him, for twenty piecesof 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 inKerala 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 theChristians brought to India, they took back, along with Kerala’s pepper and cinnamon, always indemand in Rome, equally palatable stories—elements of Ashvaghosha’s life of the Buddha (inthe second century CE), such as the virgin birth and the temptation by the devil—that may havecontributed to narratives of the life of Christ. 106Judaism was there in South India too. We have noted Solomon’s probable Malabarconnections, and according to legends, Jews have resided there since the period of thedestruction of the Second Temple (c. 70 CE). 107 The earliest surviving evidence of a Jewishpresence, 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 inKerala; the plates grant one Jacob Rabban various privileges, including the rights to hold aceremonial parasol and to bear weapons. 108 The Angadi synagogue, the oldest in India, was builtin 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 toIndia before there was such a thing as Islam, trading across the Arabian Sea to India’s southwestcoast, to the cities of the Chalukyas and Cheras, and to Sri Lanka. Arab horses were a major itemof trade, imported by land in the north and by sea in the south, to the Kerala coast. Shortly afterthe 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, newlyconverted to Islam, arrived there later, they converted many of the Mapillai to Islam, and theyhave remained there to this day. By the mid-seventh century there were sizable communities ofMuslims in most of these ports. 109Islam thus came to India when the bhakti movement was first developing, long beforeIslam became a major force in the Delhi Sultanate in the eleventh century CE. These firstMuslims had opportunities both to provide positive inspiration and to excite a response inopposition, to interact with South Indian bhakti on the individual and communal level. A textoften appended to the tenth-century Vaishnava Bhagavata Purana contains a much-quoted versethat has been used to epitomize the negative relationship between bhakti and Islam. Bhaktiherself speaks the verse: “I [Bhakti] was born in Dravida [South India] and grew up inKarnataka. 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 withmy sons. But after reaching Vrindavana I became young and beautiful again.” 110 Who are theseheretics (pakhandas)? 111 They may very well be Jainas, 112 the traditional enemies of Shaivas inSouth India, but this is a Vaishnava text and probably northern rather than southern (Vrindavanabeing the center of pilgrimage for worshipers of Krishna in North India). The “shattering” is notmentioned until Bhakti has moved to North India, to Gujarat (an important Jaina center). Yet theverse has traditionally been interpreted to be referring to Islam, not to Jainism, as the villain ofthe piece.At the same time, there were many opportunities for positive interactions between Islamand bhakti in South India. For instance, the idea of “surrender” (prapatti), so important to theShri Vaishnava tradition of South India, may have been influenced by Islam (the very name ofwhich means “surrender”). More generally, the presence of people of another faith, raisingawareness of previously unimagined religious possibilities, may have inspired the spread of thesenew, more ecstatic forms of Hinduism and predisposed conventional Hindus to accept the moreradical teachings of the bhakti poets.PROSELYTIZINGIt 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 toreserve that term for interactions with religions that have jealous gods, like Islam andChristianity. For ordinary people in ancient South India, religious pluralism was more of asupermarket than a battlefield. Laypeople often gave alms to Buddhist monks or, later, prayed toSufi 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 renouncingother 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 morefanatical 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 renunciantreligions and, after them, some of the heterodox, bhakti, and philosophical sects argued that youmight be born one sort of a Hindu and become another sort or even that you could be born aJaina (or, later, a Muslim or a Protestant) and then belong not to some sort of umbrella Hinduismbut to a particular ascetic or bhakti sect. And so some of the bhaktas proselytized like mad, andthis made them a threat to the other religions in India in ways that Vedic Hinduism had neverbeen. This zealous proselytizing, I think, justifies the use of the word “conversion” in someinstances. The possibility of shifting allegiance entirely, from one Hindu sect to another or evento a non-Hindu religion, may be encoded even in the refrain of the god-mocking poem withwhich this chapter began: “Can’t we find some other god?”The bhakti authors even mocked their own proselytizing:SHIVA BECOMES A SHAIVAA Shaiva saint was a great proselytizer. He converted those ofthis world by any means whatever—love, money, brute force. One day Shiva came down indisguise 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 triedto tell him who he was, but the baptism of ash was still forced on him. Even Shiva had to becomea Shaiva. 113 The violent power of bhakti, which overcame even the god, transfigured the heartof religion in India ever after.CHAPTER 14GODDESSES AND GODS IN THE EARLY PURANAS300 to 600 CECHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES CE)320-550 The Gupta dynasty reigns from Pataliputrac. 400Kalidasa writes Sanskrit plays and long poems405-411 Faxian visits India455-467 The Hunsattack North Indiac. 460-77 The Vakataka dynasty completes the caves at Ajanta350-750 TheHarivamsha (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 ANDKAMASurely 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 hotas to reduce people like me to ashes?Kalidasa, Shakuntala, 1 c. 400 CE The mythology that pits Shiva’s ascetic heat againstKama’s erotic arrows of flame (Shiva burns Kama’s body to ashes, as we shall see) and theever-present threat of the doomsday mare remain at the heart of both Puranic mythology andSanskrit court literature sponsored by the rulers of the Gupta Empire. As popular traditionsinfuse Sanskrit texts and rituals, the sectarian male gods Shiva and Vishnu hh continue to grow inpower and complexity, though goddesses now begin to take center stage.THE AGE OF GOLDLeaving South India for the north and doubling back a bit in time, we encounter anothertrunk 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 largestempire 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 thatChandra Gupta I echoes Chandragupta Maurya, a kind of palimpsest of names. (The Guptafounding date [c. 324 CE] also mirrors the Maurya founding date [c. 324 BCE].) The Guptaswrote over the Mauryas: The Allahabad inscription of 379 CE (detailing the conquest of NorthIndia by Samudra Gupta [c. 335-76 CE] and his humiliation of the southern rulers) is apalimpsest written on an Ashokan pillar. 2Chandra Gupta II (376-415 CE), inheriting a large empire from his father, SamudraGupta, completed the Guptas’ subjugation of North India (the “conquest of the world,” ordig-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 tobe quite a bit more substantial than the usual megalomaniac epigraphical chest beating. As therewere Greek visitors to the Mauryas, so there are Chinese visitors to the Guptas, whose testimonyoften substantiates other sources; though they are often no more resistant to local mythmakingthan were their Greek predecessors, it is always useful to have a foreign bias to set against thenative bias to give us a cross fix.The Chinese Buddhist Faxian (also spelled Fa Hsien) made a pilgrimage to India in 402and, after his return to China, translated into Chinese the many Sanskrit Buddhist texts hebrought back. He also left detailed descriptions of India, particularly Pataliputra, from 405 to411, in his “Record of Buddhist Kingdoms.” He noted with approval the means for dispensingcharity and medicine and the free rest houses and hospitals that the emperor maintained. He alsocorroborated the claim, made in a Gupta inscription, that no one who deserved to be punishedwas “over-much put to torture”; 3 according to Faxian, “Even in cases of repeated rebellion theyonly cut off the right hand.” And, he added, “throughout the country the people kill no livingthing nor drink wine, nor do they eat garlic or onions, with the exception of the Chandalasonly.” 4 (Chandalas are Pariahs.) As usual, the foreigner misinteprets the ideals of non-violenceand teetotaling as actual practices. As for class conditions, one of Faxian’s few criticisms of theGupta social system was that the Chandalas were forced to do degrading tasks such as carryingout corpses and had to strike a piece of wood as they entered a town to warn upper-caste peopleto 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 wellas South Asia. European historians, themselves imperialists, quite naturally thought that Empirewas Good for You, that culture flourished under widespread political consolidation. The extentand the character of the rich Gupta art-historical record inspired European historians to stamp thelabel of “classical” on the art, architecture, and literature of the Guptas, which they also regardedas “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 particularlyloved the art of the Gandhara region in the Northwest, which is far more Greek than Indian (lotsof drapery on everyone) and which they praised for its anatomical accuracy. They called this theGolden Age of Indian culture, a Eurocentric term, since it was the Greeks who labeled the firstage Golden (while the Hindus called it the Winning Age).MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMYThe Gupta court was famous for its “nine gems,” the ancient equivalent of MacArthurgeniuses, including several scientists who helpfully paid attention to data relevant to their birth

dates. The astronomer and mathematician hi Aryabhata, 7 born in 476, was first to calculate thesolar year accurately; he also made an explicit statement that the apparent westward motion ofthe stars is due to the spherical earth’s rotation about its axis, and he correctly ascribed theluminosity of the moon and planets to reflected sunlight. His works circulated in the northwest ofIndia 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 discovereda version of Pascal’s triangle. He is also well known for his contributions to iconography andastrology. The mathematician Brahmagupta (598-665) defined zero as the result of subtracting anumber from itself. Committed to the theory of the four Ages, he employed Aryabhata’s systemof starting each day at midnight but rejected Aryabhata’s statement that the earth is a spinningsphere. He also dismissed Jaina cosmological views. Like Aryabhata, Brahmagupta profoundlyinfluenced Islamic and Byzantine astronomy. The astronomical and mathematical achievementsof the Gupta court show that this period’s efflorescence of art and literature—both religious andsecular—was part of a broader pattern of creativity and innovation.Other forms of inventiveness also flourished under the Guptas. Around this time someonein India invented chess. It began as a four-player war game called chaturanga (“four-limbs”), aSanskrit name for a quadripartite battle formation mentioned in the Mahabharata. Chaturangaflourished in northwestern India by the seventh century and is regarded as the earliest precursorof modern chess because it had two key features found in all later chess variants: Different pieceshad 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 learningthrived.THE AGE OF FOOL’S GOLD?The dynasty soon gave way to a number of weaker kingdoms and to the Huns, whonipped any subsequent budding Gupta emperors in the bud until the Turks and SassanianPersians finally stopped them for good. 8 Samudra Gupta had performed a horse sacrifice atwhich he allegedly gave away ten thousand cows, and his prolific gold coins abound inmagnificent horses. 9 But when the Huns severed trade routes in the north, they cut off the vitalsupply of equine bloodstock overland from central Asia to India. From now on, horses had to beimported to India by sea from Arabia, which made them even more expensive than before andput the Arabs entirely in control of the horse trade. The Guptas’ famous gold coinage becamefirst debased, then crudely cast, increasingly stereotyped, scarce, and finally nonexistent, 10 as theempire disintegrated into multiple small kingdoms. But how golden was the Gupta age even inits prime?Again we encounter a trick of the available light: Because we have Faxian and a lot ofinscriptions, we think we know the Guptas, and many historians have been caught up in the spiritof the Guptas’ own self-aggrandizement. The Guptas did their boasting in Sanskrit, the languagethey chose for their courts, a move of conscious archaism. Prior to this, kings had done theirboasting in the language that ordinary people spoke, one of the Prakrits, like the Magadhi of theBuddha and of Ashoka. Brahmins had continued to use Sanskrit in such a way that a bilingualliterary culture underlay such great texts as the Mahabharata and the Puranas, the medievalSanskrit (and, later, vernacular) compendiums of myth and ritual, which began to be assembledduring the Gupta age. 11 The Guptas’ use of Sanskrit and patronage of Sanskrit literature also

contributed to the Euro-American identification of their age as classical.But Gupta art, however pretty, was not nearly as imaginative or vigorous as that of theages that preceded and followed it; it seems lifeless and bloodless, classical in the sense of“boring,” in comparison with the earlier Kushana sculpture and, later, the voluptuous statues ofthe Cholas, the vibrant images of Basohli painting. In my humble opinion, Indian art is betterthan Greek art and therefore much better than art (such as Gupta art) that imitates Hellenistic art(which is second-rate Greek art). The architecture of the first Gupta temples, such as those atAihole, Badami, and Pattadakal, or the temple of the Ten Avatars (Dashavatara) at Deogarh, inUttar Pradesh (c. sixth to seventh century), cannot compare with the temples built from the tenthcentury, the “dazzling ornamented surfaces” of Khajuraho, Konarak, Tanjavur, and Madurai, toname just a few. 12 Other scholars too have judged the Gupta Age to be one of “extraordinaryrestraint,” which eliminated options and alternatives for those “living in the strait-jacket oforthodox Hinduism.” 13It is a general perversity of Indian history that its greatest architectural monuments—boththe great temple clusters and the great palaces and forts—were created not in the centers ofpower like Pataliputra but in relatively remote provinces, and this is certainly true of the GuptaAge. 14 It was in Ajanta, a fairly remote town in the Deccan, that Harisena of the Vakatakadynasty (c. 460-477), who owed nothing to Gupta patronage—or, more to the point, to Guptacontrol—completed the great caves whose walls are alive with the first examples of what hasbeen called narrative painting: hj scenes depicting the life of the Buddha, his previous lives(Jatakas), a storm at sea, a shipwreck, and the only panoramic battle scene known from ancientIndia. 15 Great things, golden things, did happen in the Gupta Age, but not always at the hands ofthe Gupta rulers.Moreover, the artisans who carved the temples and who ranked socially with musiciansand dancing girls, types that always made the Brahmins nervous, 16 did not thrive in this period,as Romila Thapar points out:The description of the Gupta period as one of classicism is relatively correct regarding the upperclasses, who lived well according to descriptions in their literature and representations in theirart. The more accurate, literal evidence that comes from archeology suggests a less glowinglife-style for the majority. Materially, excavated sites reveal that the average standard of livingwas higher in the preceding period. 17 Yet, as we are about to see, that lower-class majority madeits mark upon the upper classes.FROM THE VILLAGE TO THE COURT: LOST IN TRANSLATIONSanskrit court poetry drew on earlier Sanskrit texts, as one would expect from the generalforce of tradition and intertextuality. But it also drew upon folk traditions, as indeed the earlierSanskrit texts had often done. In translating the plot from one idiom to another, or even fromoral/written epic to court dramas, the Gupta poets edited out a great deal, but not all, of thepower and dignity of women. One example will stand for many.The poet Kalidasa, generally regarded as the greatest poet in the Sanskrit tradition, theShakespeare of India, reworked in his play Shakuntala (more precisely “The Recognition ofShakuntala”) a story that the Mahabharata tells at some length: King Dushyanta encountersShakuntala in the forest while he is hunting, killing too many animals and terrifying the rest. Hemarries her with the ceremony of mutual consent (the Gandharva marriage or marriage of thecentaurs) and returns to his court; when she brings their son to him at court, he lies, swearing thathe never saw her before, until a disembodied voice from the sky proclaims the child his, and then

he says he knew it all along (1.64-69). Dushyanta’s cruelty to his sexual partner is foreshadowedby his out-of-control hunting—the two vices are closely connected in the Hindu view—andhardly mitigated by his statement that he rejected Shakuntala because of his fear of publicdisapproval, an argument that rang equally hollow when Rama used it to reject Sita. Dushyantais one of a large crowd of Mahabharata kings who had children secretly, and Shakuntala one ofmany women who had them illegitimately.Whereas the story in the Mahabharata is about power and inheritance, Kalidasa turns itinto a story about desire and memory. Kalidasa probably had the patronage of the Gupta dynasty,perhaps Chandra Gupta II. hk (His poem The Birth of the Prince, ostensibly about the birth of theson of Shiva and Parvati—the god Skanda, also called Kumara [“the Youth” or “thePrince”]—may also be an extended pun to celebrate the birth of Kumara Gupta.) The story ofShakuntala was important to the Guptas, for the child of Shakuntala and Dushyanta, namedBharata, was one of the founders of the dynasty that the Guptas claimed for their lineage. hlKalidasa had his work cut out for him to transform Bharata’s father from a lying cad hm to asympathetic lover, 18 and to give credit where credit’s due, he did at least feel that Dushyantaneeded some sort of excuse for treating Shakuntala as he did. And so he fell back upon thetried-and-true folk device of the magic ring of memory 19 and the curse of an angry Brahmin (thepresbyter ex machina): A sage whom Shakuntala neglected in her lovesick distraction put a curseon her, ensuring that the king would forget her until he saw the ring that he (the king) had givenher. Shakuntala lost the ring; Dushyanta therefore honestly did not remember her until afisherman found the ring in a fish that had swallowed it (and was caught and served atDushyanta’s table). Then Dushyanta was terribly, terribly sorry about it all, and he searched untilhe found Shakuntala and his son at last. In this retelling, Shakuntala’s mistake (a trivial breach ofascetiquette) injures Dushyanta’s mind, through a kind of transfer of karma, or transitiveimagination; it’s really all her fault. Dushyanta suffers for actions committed by someone else,actions of which he is completely innocent, 20 but of course he is also guilty of an even moreserious forgetfulness than the one that Shakuntala suffers for. At the same time, the curse onShakuntala merely activates what is already there in nuce in Dushyanta, his forgetfulness. Thewhole fishy story gets Dushyanta (and Kalidasa) out of what subsequent Indian scholarsrecognized as a true moral dilemma.Shakuntala loses her agency in Kalidasa’s hands. In the Mahabharata she is a wisewoman who discourses at length on dharma; in Kalidasa she is hardly more than a child and sayslittle when the king accuses her of lying; indeed most of her words reach us only because theking tells us she said them. Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, still pregnant, is snatched up by her celestialmother, just as Sita is after Rama has abandoned her, also pregnant. Indeed the parallels with Sitago further: Both women are daughters of supernatural women (Shakuntala the daughter of thecelestial nymph Menaka, Sita the daughter of the earth) and are themselves supernatural (in onereading, Shakuntala is a celestial nymph 21 ), both come from another world to bear the king a son(or sons), and both disappear when the king abuses them. Sisters in the plot, they are also thecousins of the equine goddesses Saranyu and Urvashi.Kalidasa’s treatment of Shakuntala suggests the declining power and status of women inthis period, though at least some real women exercised considerable power in the highestcorridors of Gupta polity. Chandra Gupta I married a Nepalese (Lichavi) princess, an alliancethat extended his territory through Pataliputra to parts of Nepal; she, and her dowry, were soimportant that their son referred to himself as a “son of a Lichavi daughter” rather than of aGupta father, and coins showing the king and queen together bear her name as well as his. 22

Chandra Gupta II arranged a marriage between his daughter Prabhavati (whose mother was aprincess of the Naga people) and Rudrasena II, king of the Vakatakas, to strengthen his southernflank; when Rudrasena died, Prabhavati acted as regent for her sons, thereby increasing Guptainfluence in the south.How are we to explain this discrepancy between the literary and political evidence?General considerations of the relationship between myth and history operate here: The mythsreflect attitudes toward women rather than the actual history of real women, but they alsoinfluence the subsequent actual history of real women. We might also discount either thepolitical evidence (to argue that the women who were married to the Gupta kings were simplypawns with no real power or that they are the exception to the general rule about the powers ofordinary women) or the literary evidence (to argue that Kalidasa’s presentation of women is nottypical of attitudes toward women expressed in other literature of this period, such as thePuranas, which we will soon encounter). Both are possible. A third argument, that there is aninverse correlation between the powers of goddesses or supernatural women in texts and naturalwomen on the ground, is one that we will soon consider in the context of shakti.DIVERSITY AND SECTARIAN WORSHIPIn tandem with the general tendency to clamp down on such matters as the rights ofwomen, the narrow-minded attitude to deviation implicit in the concept of heresy took on newpower in the Gupta Age. 23 Yet there was a great deal of variation in religious life under theGuptas, in part because the basic political conditions provoked different reactions in differentsectors of the population. This had been the case in the centuries preceding the Guptas: TheRamayana and the Mahabharata, though roughly contemporaneous, had very different attitudesto dharma, as did Manu and the Artha-shastra and the Kama-sutra, also roughlycontemporaneous. Such variations were facilitated by the looser political reins of the preimperialage, but under the Guptas too there was room to kick over the traces from time to time. Thesectarian diversity of the Guptas, which at times approached a kind of mellow inclusivism, mayhave been inspired by a need to bring the various sects and religions under the new yoke ofempire or simply to differentiate themselves from other rulers, such as those in South India, whowere more partisan.Some Gupta kings sponsored Vishnu and seemed to believe that in return, Vishnusponsored the Gupta Empire. They put his boar incarnation and the figure of Lakshmi, Vishnu’sconsort, on their coins and made mythology “a state concern, enlisting particularly Vishnu andhis heroic incarnations for their politics.” 24 The Allahabad inscription of 379 CE identifiesSamudra Gupta with Vishnu. 25 But royal patronage was, all in all, even-handed, and the Guptakings took the names of various gods; some Guptas leaned one way, some another, and somewere pluralistic, but all in all a thousand pujas bloomed. And what imperial overlay there wasran pretty thin by the time it trickled down to individual texts, as is evident from the sectariandistribution of the Puranas, some devoted to Shiva, some to Vishnu, some to a goddess, whileeven a Purana officially devoted to a particular god often devoted considerable space to othergods. 26 Chandra Gupta II was a devout Hindu, but he also patronized Buddhism and Jainism. InPataliputra, Faxian witnessed an annual festival in which twenty chariots carrying Buddhiststupas covered with images of the gods and bodhisattvas and figures of the Buddha, all in silverand gold, entered the city after the brahma-charins (probably the Brahmins as a whole, notmerely the students or the celibates) invited them to do so, an impressive demonstration of

ecumenism. Gupta emperors dedicated many Buddhist buildings (stupas, monasteries, and prayerhalls), while some of the earliest Hindu temples were built and Hindu icons sculpted during thisperiod (the fifth to eighth centuries). Rock-cut temples and structural temples shared a widelydisseminated set of conventions. 27The burgeoning religious diversity that the Guptas had encouraged came to an abrupt endwhen the Huns, who were literal iconoclasts of an extreme sort, especially hostile to Buddhism,began to attack North India in the second half of the fifth century CE; they overran Kashmir andthe Punjab and Malwa as far as Gwalior. Buddhism in the Indus basin never recovered from thedepredations of the Huns, who killed monks and destroyed monasteries. 28 Adding insult toinjury, some Shaiva Brahmins, also hostile to Buddhism, took advantage of the Huns’anti-Buddhism and accepted grants of land from the Huns. 29POPULAR TRADITIONS IN THE EARLY SANSKRIT PURANAS: FOUND INTRANSLATIONThe complex interactions between Hindu sects, between Hinduism and Buddhism andJainism, and between court and village are manifest in various ways in the principal religioustexts that developed in this period, the Puranas. Gupta literature came first and reworked folk andepic materials in its own way; then the Puranas came along and reworked both folklore andGupta literature. The Puranas are far less fastidious than the Vedic texts or even theMahabharata, more relaxed about both language and caste than anything that we have so farencountered. Scholars of Sanskrit poetry poke fun at the bad Sanskrit of the Puranas, which theyview as the pulp fiction of ancient India or, as one of my students suggested, the hip-hop of themedieval world, 30 in comparison with court poetry that has the cachet of Shakespeare.There are often said to be eighteen Puranas and innumerable “Sub-Puranas”(Upa-puranas), but the lists vary greatly, as do their dates, about which no one is certain, 31 andtheir contents. The Puranas are not about what they say they are about. They say they are aboutthe “Five Signs,” which are listed at the start of most Puranas: creation (sarga, “emission”),secondary creation (pratisarga), the genealogy of gods and kings, the reigns of the Manus (adifferent mythical Manu was born in each age, to help create the world), and the history of thesolar and lunar dynasties. The genealogies of gods, Manus, and kings form an open-endedarmature; into these rather vague categories (which some Puranas ignore entirely in any case)individual authors fit what they really want to talk about: the way to live a pious life, and toworship the gods and goddesses. This includes the rituals (pujas) that you should perform athome, in the temple, and on special festival days; places to visit on pilgrimage; prayers to recite;and stories to tell and to hear. The closed totality thinking of the shastras gives way to openinfinity thinking in the Puranas, which often seem to swing at everything that comes across theplate.Purana means “ancient,” and these Sanskrit compendiums of myth and ritual faceresolutely back to the hoary past, a conservative stance; the new genre positions itself as age-old,anonymous. It also strikes an imperial stance: The improved communications across the empireand the sense that it was all part of a single cultural unit, from sea to sea (as Manu put it),inspired a kind of literary cosmopolitanism. Kalidasa’s poem The Cloud Messenger uses thepoetic fallacy of a banished lover who enlists a cloud to carry a message to his faraway beloved;it presents a positively imperial survey of the aerial route from Ramagiri (near Nagpur) viaUjjain to Mount Kailasa in the Himalayas.But the Puranas also provided a Sanskrit medium for popular material transmitted

through all classes and places in India, fusing the cosmopolitan, translocal vision of the Guptacourt with new local traditions, the praise of the particular tirtha in our village, this temple, ourriver, and instructions on how to worship right here. What set the Puranas apart from one anotherwas primarily the sectarian bias, all the stories (as well as rituals and doctrines) about our god,our pilgrimage place. Their sectarian view says not “This is the whole world” but “This is ourwhole world.”The treatment of low castes and especially tribals in the Puranas reflects a nervousnessabout absorbing these groups into the empire. The early Puranas continued to appropriatepopular beliefs and ideas from people of various castes. 32 The very different challenges posed byrenunciation, on the one hand, and the luxuriant growth of sectarian diversity, on the other,which the authors of the dharma-shastras worked so hard to reconcile with their own agendas,looked like the chance of a lifetime for the authors of the Puranas. Doctrinally orthopraxHinduism functioned, as ever, to include everything under the Indian sun. The excluded people(rural storytellers, lower classes, women) who until now had had only episodic success inbreaking into Sanskrit literature (Raikva’s walk-on part in the Upanishads, Draupadi’sembarrassing polyandry) managed now to get major speaking roles. Nurtured first by thepatronage of the Guptas and then by the less structured political systems that followed them, thenonhegemonic, non-Vedic traditions supply the major substance of the Puranas.The growth of temples also led to the greater use of ritual texts, both the Puranas and thetexts called agamas, which instructed worshipers in the way to perform pujas. 33 One of the greatinnovations of the rise of temple worship is that it eventually made it possible for people whocould not read Sanskrit texts to have access to Sanskrit myths and rituals. The images carved ontemples brought into the public sphere the mythology of the Puranas. For iconography transcendsilliteracy; people get to see the images even if they can’t read the texts, and somebody—possiblybut not necessarily the priest in the temple—knows the story and tells it. Often someone sittingbeside the person reciting the Purana would explain it to those innocent of Sanskrit; these publicrecitals, collective listenings, were open to everyone, regardless of caste or gender. 34 Moreover,once the images are on the outsides of temples, people can see them even if they are Pariahs andnot allowed inside the temples. And in return, the temples were part of a system by which folkdeities and local religious traditions entered the Brahmin imaginary.THE BRAHMIN FILTERThe Puranas mediate between the Sanskrit of court poetry and the oral or vernaculartraditions. Sometimes, but not always, there was a social and/or economic distance between theclasses that produced the vernacular texts, Puranas, and court poetry, but we cannot assume thatthe Puranas come from poor people. The Puranas cut across class lines and included wealthymerchants among their patrons. One reason why it was possible for the Puranas to assimilate anastonishingly wide range of beliefs and for Hindus to tolerate that range not only within theirscriptures and communities but within their own families was their lack of strict orthodoxy.Storytellers smuggled new ideas in under the Brahmin radar, stashing them in older categories,often categories to which the new ideas did not really belong. Significantly, most of the ritualsdescribed in the Puranas do not require the mediation of a Brahmin priest; 35 so much for thestranglehold of Brahmin ideology. Moreover, the folk materials made their way into the Sanskritcorpus because the Brahmins were no longer able to ignore them—they were part of suchwidespread religious movements—and also because the Brahmins, like the privileged in allperiods, knew a good thing when they saw it, and these were terrific stories, in many cases the

Brahmins’ own household stories.The village traditions and local folk traditions, which the anthropologist Robert Redfielddecades ago labeled “little,” 36 in fact constitute most of Hinduism and are one of the mainsources even of the so-called pan-Indian traditions (such as the Puranas), which Redfield calledthe “great” tradition. “Little” carries pejorative as well as geographical connotations, not justsmall individual villages but a minor, cruder, less civilized tradition beneath scholarly contempt.Yet in terms of both the area that the villages cover in India as a whole and their populations(even now 72.2 percent of the national total, according to the 2001 census 37 ), not to mention thesize of their creative contributions, the terms should really be reversed: the pan-Indian traditionis little, while the village cultures are a (the) great tradition. 38What the so-called pan-Indian tradition in effect designates is the lettered, writtentradition, the literary tradition, which can claim to be “pan” to the extent that the names of sometexts—the Veda, the Ramayana—are known all over India (and well beyond), though noteveryone in India knows more than an outline of their contents.We might better use the Sanskrit/Hindi terms and call the local traditions deshi or sthala(terms meaning “local” or “from our place” or “from our homeland”). The sthala Puranas are agenre glorifying not a specific deity but a specific temple or town, usually composed in thevernacular language of that special place. History is local; the texts respond less to the policies ofthe emperor a thousand miles away than to the mood swings of the local tax collector. Thevillage is also one of the places where we will find the comic vision of the common people,glorying in Hinduism’s ability to laugh at its own gods, defying the piety of the more puritanicalmembers of the tradition. The folk tradition in particular takes pleasure in mocking Brahmins.The concepts of the pan-Indian tradition, widely but not universally known to Hindus from allparts of the subcontinent and beyond, and even less universally believed, are embroidered on topof a much larger fabric woven in each local community. Tribal people too were beingacculturated into Hindu society during this period, resulting in both their contribution of storiesto the Puranas and scattered depictions of them in those texts. 39Set against this flow of often non-Brahmin ideas into Sanskrit literature was, however,the final filter of the Sanskrit texts, a Brahmin filter, which tried to domesticate it all, or at thevery least to frame it in Brahmin ideology, a process that we have noted even in the transitionfrom the Mahabharata to Kalidasa. Brahmins’ attitudes to oral folk traditions range fromcomplete ignorance to condemnation but most often amount to appropriating them into their owntexts, sometimes in bowdlerized and sanitized forms. Oral (or, better, unwritten) traditions arethus “overwritten” by the literary traditions, which “Hinduize” or “Puranicize” them byconsistently changing, in addition to language, food (from meat eating to vegetarianism), caste(from low-caste priests to high Brahmins), and gender (from female storytellers to male). 40 Inlater centuries we can trace actual transitions from folktales in various vernaculars (such asTamil, Bangla, Telugu, and Hindi) to Sanskrit versions that the Brahmins thoroughly reworked,but (hindsight alert!) we cannot assume that the same things happened in the same way centuriesearlier; there may have been less, or perhaps more, revision then.For example, if we take a folktale originally told, in Telugu, by a caste of traders andmerchants who were “left-hand” (unclean, lower caste), and compare it with the same tale retold,in a Sanskrit Purana, by the same caste when it has moved up to the status of Vaishyas, somethings change: In the folk version, the woman protagonist makes decisions for herself as well asfor the caste, while in the Sanskrit version, the Brahmin priest makes all the decisions. 41 Yet vastamounts of folklore do slip through the filter and get into the Puranas more or less intact, so that

the Brahmin interpretation of the material does not necessarily erase local color and regionalflavor. Sometimes the value system survives the journey, like a wine that travels well, andsometimes it does not. But we need not assume that the Brahmin redactors squeezed all the lifeout of the stories. The Brahmin sieve was not subtle enough to block entirely the currents of folkliterature, which flowed in through every opening, particularly in matters concerning goddesses.Moreover, by this time the Brahmin hold on Sanskrit had begun to be eroded; Vaishyascould read Sanskrit too, and non-Brahmins used Sanskrit in many secular spheres. More to thepoint, there were many different sorts of Brahmins, Brahmins of various ranks, oftendistinguished simply by their geographical location or by the degree of their learning, adistinction we saw even in the Brahmanas. Brahmins were not homogeneous; some were more athome with oral presentations than with reading and writing. We have seen that, in the myths,there were Brahmins among the ogres; now there are references to human Brahmins whoseancestors were said to be ogres. 42 So too in actual life there were Shudra Brahmins, mlecchaBrahmins, Chandala Brahmins, and Nishada Brahmins (who are said to be thieves and fond offish and meat). 43 Some were very close indeed to the folk sources that they incorporated into thePuranas.SECTARIAN CONTESTSThe tensions between the worshipers of Vishnu and Shiva were relatively mild butimportant enough to be explicitly addressed in narratives. The concept of a trinity, a triumvirateof Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva (the Trimurti [Triple Form]), which both Kalidasa and theMarkandeya Purana mention, is a misleading convention. (The triumvirate may have beensustained, though not invented, in response to the Christian trinity.) The idea that Brahma isresponsible for creation, Vishnu for preservation or maintenance, and Shiva for destruction doesnot correspond in any way to the mythology, in which both Vishnu and Shiva are responsible forboth creation and destruction and Brahma was not worshiped as the other two were. Thefifteenth-century poet Kabir, mocking Hinduism in general, also mocks the idea that the trinityrepresents the trio of the qualities of matter: Vishnu lucidity (sattva), Brahma passion (rajas),and Shiva darkness (tamas). 44 If one wanted to find a trinity of important deities in Hinduism (aspeople still do, both as a shortcut through the pantheon and to decorate inclusive weddinginvitations), it would be more accurate to speak of Vishnu, Shiva, and Devi, but since there areso many different Vishnus, Shivas, and Devis, even that trinity makes little sense. Therelationship between the two major male gods is better viewed as an aspect of Hinduism’spenchant for fusing, with Vishnu and Shiva frequently functioning as a pair, often merged asHari-Hara.The relative status of the three members of this trinity is explicitly discussed in a myththat begins with an argument between Brahma and Vishnu (a much-told theme of which we havealready encountered one variant) and then segues into another popular myth, the tale of Shiva’sfirst appearance out of the linga, in the form of a pillar of fire. Vishnu tells the story:SHIVA APPEARS OUT OF THE LINGAOnce upon a time, when I had swallowed up thewhole triple world in darkness, I lay there alone, with all the creatures in my belly. I had athousand heads and a thousand eyes, and a thousand feet. Then, all of a sudden, I saw thefour-headed Brahma, who said to me, “Who are you? Where do you come from? Tell me, sir. Iam the maker of the worlds.” I said to him: “I am the maker of the worlds, and also the one whodestroys them, again and again.” As the two of us were talking together in this way, each wishingto get the better of the other, we were amazed to see a flame arising in the north. Its brilliance

and power made us cup our hands in reverence and bow to it. The flame grew, and Brahma and Iran up to it. It broke through heaven and earth, and in the middle of the flame we saw a linga,blazing with light. It was indescribable, unimaginable, alternately visible and invisible. At first, itmeasured just a hand’s-breadth, but it kept getting much bigger.Then Brahma said to me,“Quickly, go down and find out the bottom of this linga. I will go up until I see its top.” I agreed.I kept going down for a thousand years, but I did not reach the bottom of the linga, nor didBrahma find its top. We turned back and met again, amazed and frightened; we paid homage toShiva, saying, “You create the worlds and destroy them. From you all of the goddesses wereborn. We bow to you.”Then he revealed himself and, filled with pity, laughed, like the roar ofthunder, and said, “Don’t be afraid. Both of you, eternal, were born from me in the past; Brahmais my right arm, and Vishnu my left arm. I will give you whatever you ask for.” Ecstatic, wesaid, “Let the two of us always be devoted to you.” “Yes,” said the god of gods, “and createmultitudes of progeny.” And he vanished. 45 This myth about the origins of linga worshiprecognizes it as a new thing, just as the worship of Shiva was a new thing in the myth of Daksha.The author does not try to authenticate the practice by claiming that it was already there in theVedas; he has a sense of history, of change, of novelty. In the jockeying for power and statusamong the three gods, Shiva is clearly supreme, in this text, and Vishnu is second to Brahma.(Other variants of the myth reverse the hierarchy and even account for Brahma’s historical lossof status altogether: Brahma lies, pretending that he did find the end of the linga, and is thereforecursed never to be worshiped again.) By regarding the goddesses as emanations from Shiva, thetext subordinates them to him but also emphasizes his connection with them. The hymn of praisefor Shiva, which I have greatly abbreviated, is what the worshiper takes away with him or her, aparadigm for the proper worship of the Shiva linga. Here, as so often, beginning with the Vedas,you cannot grasp the power of the text aside from the ritual that is its raison d’être; you have to,as the saying goes, be there.As the erotic god of the linga as well as the ascetic god of yogis, Shiva straddles the twopaths of renunciation and Release. As Lord of the Dance (Nataraja) he dances both the dance ofpassion (lasya) and the dance that destroys the universe (tandava). 46 This ambivalence isbrilliantly expressed in the myth of Mankanaka:SHIVA STOPS MANKANAKA FROM DANCINGThe sage Mankanaka cut his hand on ablade of sharp kusha grass, and plant sap flowed from the wound. Overjoyed, to excess, hestarted to dance; and everything in the universe danced with him. The gods, alarmed, reportedthis to Shiva and asked him to stop Mankanaka from dancing. Shiva took the form of a Brahminand went to him and asked him, “What has occasioned this joy in you, an ascetic?” “Why,Brahmin,” said the sage, “don’t you see the plant sap flowing from my hand?” The god laughedat him and said, “I am not surprised. Look at this,” and he struck his own thumb with the tip ofhis finger, and ashes shining like snow poured out of that wound. Then Mankanaka wasashamed, and he fell at Shiva’s feet and said, “You must be Shiva, the Trident-bearer, first of thegods. Grant me a favor; let my ascetic heat remain intact.” Shiva replied, “Your ascetic heat willincrease a thousand-fold, and I will dwell in this hermitage with you forever. Any man whobathes in this river and worships me will find nothing impossible to obtain in this world and theother world, and then he will reach the highest place, by my grace.” 47 The mortal asceticdances with joy when his magic transmutes blood (flowing from a wound made by a blade of thesacred grass that is used in Vedic rituals) into plant sap (a vegetarian move), but his dancing is asexcessive as his asceticism was; extreme vegetarianism has turned his very blood to vegetablesap. Shiva uses his own far greater ascetic power to change blood to ashes, the ashes of corpses

ut also the ashes of the god Kama, whom he has both destroyed and absorbed—the symbol ofthe seed of life transfixed in death. In this way he teaches the sage that death is more amazingthan life. The ending grants a blessing not to the person who hears the story, as earlier textsgenerally do, but to the person who bathes in this river, the tirtha. This is a good example of thetransition from a pan-Indian ideal (for the basic text could be recited anywhere) to a more localconcentration of sanctity, a particular point of pilgrimage.PURANIC GODDESSESThe Puranas begin to tell stories about goddesses. Though there are a few independentgoddesses in the Rig Veda, they are generally personifications of abstract nouns or little morethan the wives of their husbands, such as Indrani, “Mrs. Indra,” the wife of the god Indra. Thebirths of Draupadi and Sita reveal that they began as goddesses (and Draupadi went on tobecome a goddess with a sect of her own), though the Mahabharata and Ramayana treat them byand large as mortal women. Now, however, in the early Puranas, we begin to get a vibrantmythology of independent goddesses.Though Hindu gods are often grouped under a monotheistic umbrella, so that all gods aresaid to be aspects of one particular god (sometimes Vishnu, sometimes Shiva) or, more often,aspects of the ineffable monistic brahman, people seldom speak of the God, Deva. hn Yet thoughthe goddesses of India are equally various, people (both scholars and the authors of Sanskrittexts) often speak of the Goddess, Devi, and tend to treat all the other goddesses as nothing morethan aspects of Devi, whereas they all are actually quite different. One gets the impression that inthe dark, all goddesses are gray. (So too while gods, ogres, and antigods often have extraheads—Brahma has four, Shiva five, Skanda six, Ravana ten—Puranic goddesses not onlyseldom have more than one—they have lots of arms, but not heads—but often have less thanone; several of them are beheaded. This is a gendered pattern that makes one stop and think.)I would prefer to treat the Hindu goddesses individually, though reserving the right togeneralize about them.CHANDIKA, THE BUFFALO CRUSHER (MAHISHA-MARDINI)We will never know for how many centuries she was worshiped in India by people whohad no access to Sanskrit texts and whose voices we therefore cannot hear. Kushana coins depictDurga and Parvati, and a Kushana image from Mathura, perhaps from the second century CE,depicts a tree spirit (Yakshi), perhaps prefiguring Durga, with a cringing dwarf under her feet. hoWe have noted a few distant early warnings, such as possible sources in the Indus Valley, andthere are more substantial hints of the worship of a goddess in the Mahabharata: tantalizinglybrief references to the seven or eight “Little Mothers” (Matrikas), dark, peripheral, harmful,especially for children, and the Great Kali (Maha-Kali), and to the goddess of Death and Nightwho appears in a vision in the Book of the Night Raid, right before the massacre begins (10.8.64).The Mahabharata also tells of gorgeous supernatural women who seduce antigods so that thegods can overpower them; one of these, Mohini, is really just Vishnu in disguise (1.15-17), andthe other, Tilottama, is an Apsaras (2.201-2). But these females do not kill the antigodsthemselves; Mohini merely distracts them so that the gods can steal the soma (back) from them,and Tilottama gets the antigods Sunda and Upasunda to kill each other over her. It remained forthe Puranas to tell of a goddess who killed the antigods herself.Such a goddess, first under the name of Chandika (“the Fierce” hp ), later often calledDurga (“Hard to Get [To]”), bursts onto the Sanskrit scene full grown, like Athene from the head

of Zeus, in a complex myth that includes a hymn of a thousand names. Many of the names alludeto entire mythological episodes that must have grown onto the goddess, like barnacles on a greatship, gradually for centuries. The founding text is “The Glorification of the Goddess”(Devimahatmya ), a long poem probably interpolated into the Markandeya Purana (which alsotells a number of other stories about powerful women and goddesses) between the fifth andseventh centuries of the Common Era. It is clear from the complexity of “The Glorification ofthe Goddess” that it must be a compilation of many earlier texts about the goddess, either fromother, lost Sanskrit texts or from lost or never preserved vernacular sources, in Magadhi orTamil, perhaps. Some of the stories may have come from villages or tribal cultures where thegoddess had been worshiped for centuries; early in her history she may have been associatedwith the periphery of society, “tribal or low-caste peoples who worshiped her in wild places.” 48Yet by the time of the Markandeya Purana, goddesses were worshiped in both cities andvillages, by people all along the economic spectrum.“Glorification of the Goddess” is the Devi’s “crossover” text, from unknown rituals andlocal traditions to a pan-Indian Sanskrit text. Why does the Markandeya Purana pay attention togoddesses at this moment? Why now? For one thing, it was a time when devotional texts of allsorts flourished, and since people worshiped Chandika, she too needed to have texts. What mayhave started out as a local sect began to spread under royal patronage inspired by bhakti.Centuries earlier the Kushanas had put goddesses on their coins; now the stories behind the coinsbegan to circulate too as more valuable narrative currency. At some moment the critical mass ofDevi worship forced the Brahmin custodians of Sanskrit narratives to acknowledge it. ThePurana goes out of its way to tell us that merchants and kings worshiped her; in the outer frameof the Purana, a sage tells the story of the Goddess of Great Illusion (Mahamaya) to a king whohas lost his kingdom and a Vaishya who has lost his wealth and family; at the end of the story thegoddess grants each of them what he asks for: The king gets his kingdom (and the downfall ofhis enemies), while the Vaishya gets not wealth, which he no longer covets, but the knowledgeof what he is and what he has (and the downfall of his worldly addictions). Clearly the Vaishyais the man this text greatly prefers.This is the story it tells about Chandika:THE KILLING OF THE BUFFALOOnce upon a time, the antigods, led by Mahisha [“Buffalo”],defeated the gods in battle. The gods were so furious that their energies came out of them one byone, and these energies formed the goddess Chandika. The gods also gave her weapons doubledfrom their own weapons, as well as necklaces and earrings and garlands of lotuses. They gaveher a lion for her mount, and the king of snakes gave her a necklace of snakes studded with thelarge gems that cobras have on their foreheads. When Mahisha, in the form of a water buffalo,saw her, he cried, “Now, who is this?” and he attacked her lion. Eventually, she lassoed him andtied him up. As she cut off the head of the buffalo, he became a lion; as she beheaded the lion, hebecame a man, with a sword in his hand; then an elephant, and finally a buffalo again. Shelaughed and drank deep from a divine drink, and her eyes shone red, and the drink reddened hermouth. Then she kicked him on the neck, and as the great antigod came halfway out of thebuffalo’s open mouth, she cut off his head with her sword. 49 The final moment in thisstory is a scene particularly beloved of artists, who often depict Chandika’s lion chomping on thebuffalo’s head while the goddess disposes of the head of the anthropomorphic antigod, whocomes out not from the buffalo’s mouth but from his neck after he has been beheaded. Thegoddess rides on a lion, a Vedic animal; in later centuries, when lions become rare in NorthIndia, Chandika and other goddesses are often depicted riding on tigers or sometimes just great

ig pussycats, as depicted by painters and sculptors who have evidently never seen a tiger, letalone a lion. The myth has been convincingly linked to a ritual that has been documented inmany parts of India to this day, the ritual sacrifice of a buffalo, often associated with a sect ofDraupadi. 50 Goats too and other animals are frequently sacrificed to the goddess Kali; the animalis decapitated, and its blood is offered to her to drink. In some variants of this ritual, a man,dressed either as the buffalo or as a woman, bites the neck and drinks the blood of the sacrificialanimal (usually a lamb or a goat).We can see patriarchal Sanskritic incursions into this early textual version of the myth,the Brahmin filter as always extracting a toll as the story crossed the linguistic border.Chandika’s power in this text comes not from within herself but from the energy (tejas) of themale gods, as the light of the moon comes from the sun. She is created by re-memberment (theinverse of dismemberments such as that of the Man in “Poem of the Primeval Man”), a notuncommon motif in the ancient texts. Manu, for instance, says (7.3-7) that the first king wascreated by combining “lasting elements” or “particles” from eight gods. hqA. K. Ramanujan once said that you can divide the many goddesses of India into thegoddesses of the tooth and the goddesses of the breast. 51 The goddesses of the breast are wives,more or less subservient to husbands, but they do not usually give birth to children (though theysometimes adopt children). Devi is the Great Mother, but we hear little or nothing about hermythological children; we are her children. The tooth goddesses (not at all like tooth fairies) areunmarried, fierce, often out of control. They are killers. They too are generally hr barren ofchildren, celibate mothers; indeed some of them wear necklaces made of the heads of childrenand low-slung belts made of children’s hands; with habits like these, it’s a very good thing thatthey don’t have children of their own. Chandika, whom “Glorification of the Goddess” also callsAmbika (“Little Mother”), ‡ is the paradigmatic tooth goddess in India. She is also both theparadigmatic shakti (“power”) and the paradigmatic possessor of shakti.Shakti is a creative power that generally takes the place of the power to have children;men give birth without women in many myths, while the goddesses, for all their shakti, arecursed to be barren. Shakti is generally something that a male god, not a goddess, has and thatthe goddess is. One Upanishad depicts Shiva as a magician who produces the world through hisshakti. 52 Eventually the Puranas used the word to designate the power/wife of any god, often anabstract quantity (a feminine noun in Sanskrit) incarnate as an anthropomorphic goddess. Manyfemale deities, as well as abstract nouns, came to be personified and “wedded” to great gods astheir shaktis, such as Lakshmi or Shri (“Prosperity”), the wife of Vishnu. Unlike the independentVedic goddesses Speech and Night, who stand alone, these consort goddesses appear in Sanskrittexts almost exclusively as wives. Shiva, who inherits much of Indra’s mythology when Indrafades from the pantheon, also inherits Indra’s wife Shachi (a name related to shakti), and so, inmany texts, Shiva’s wife—whether she be Parvati or the goddess Kali or Sati—is the mostimportant shakti of all, the role model for the other goddesses who become known as the wives(and shaktis) of other gods. In one text, Shiva emits his own shakti, who then becomes theGoddess that the gods beg to kill the buffalo. 53But the Chandika of “Glorification of the Goddess” is definitively unmarried,independent, a tooth goddess. Shiva is not her husband but merely the messenger that she sendsto challenge other rebellious antigods, in the battle that follows immediately after Mahisha’sdeath, nor does she become the wife of Mahisha. Therefore she is not the shakti of any particulargod, and her shaktis, whatever their origins, ultimately belong to no one but herself; they are theshaktis of a shakti. In the next battle, Chandika emits her own shakti (which howls like a hundred

jackals) and absorbs all the gods’ shaktis into her breasts. 54 In its intertextual context, therefore,“Glorification of the Goddess” stands out as a feminist moment framed by earlier and later textsthat deny the shakti her independence.The pious hope of goddess feminists, and others, that the worship of goddesses is Goodfor Women is dashed by observations of India, where the power recognized in goddessescertainly does not necessarily encourage men to grant to women—or women to take frommen—political or economic powers. Indeed we can see the logic in the fact that it often worksthe other way around (the more powerful the goddess, the less power for real women), howevermuch we may deplore it: If women are made of shakti—like Chandika, who is her own shakti,rather than like Parvati, who is Shiva’s shakti—and men can only get it by controlling women,women pose a constant threat to men. The conclusion that many men seem to have drawn fromthis is that women should be locked up and silenced. One defiance of this scenario is thewidespread phenomenon of women who are possessed by fierce goddesses, thereby eitheracquiring or becoming shaktis and being empowered to say and do many things otherwiseforbidden. 55 But in taking the mythology of goddesses as a social charter, the goddess feministsare batting on a sticky wicca.SATI, THE WIFE OF SHIVAOne goddess who has played an important role in the lives of real women is Sati, the wifeof Shiva, who is occasionally implicated in justifications for the custom of widows immolatingthemselves on their husbands’ pyres, called suttee.The Mahabharata versions of the story of Daksha’s sacrifice do not mention Daksha’sdaughter Sati at all, though sometimes they mention Shiva’s other wife, Parvati (who is notrelated to Daksha in any way, nor does she herself go to the sacrifice, or die, though herwounded amour propre spurs Shiva to break into the sacrifice). At that stage the conflict, aboutRudra’s non-Vedic status, is just between Daksha and Shiva. Several early Puranas too tell thestory of Daksha and Rudra/Shiva without mentioning any wife of Shiva’s, or mention her just inpassing. 56 Even in versions that name Sati as the daughter of Daksha, the conflict is stillprimarily between Vaishnava Brahmins and more heterodox Shaivas. This story is narrated inseveral of the early Puranas:SATI COMMITS SUICIDEDaksha, the father of Sati, insulted Shiva by failing to invite him orSati to a great sacrifice to which everyone else (including Sati’s sisters) was invited. Sati,overcome with shame and fury, committed suicide by generating an internal fire in which sheimmolated herself. Enraged, Shiva came to Daksha’s sacrifice, destroyed it, and—after Dakshaapologized profusely—restored it. 57 Sati is not a sati (a woman who commits suttee). Herhusband is not dead; indeed, by definition, he can never die. But she dies, usually by fire, andthose two textual facts are sometimes taken up as the basis for suttee in later Hindu practice. Thecompound sati-dharma thus has several layers of meaning: it can mean the way that any GoodWoman (which is what sati means in Sanskrit), particularly a woman true to her husband, shouldbehave, or it can mean the way that this one woman named Sati behaved. Only much later does itcome to mean the act of a woman who commits the religious act of suttee, the immolation of awoman on her dead husband’s pyre (for which the Sanskrit term was usually “going with” thehusband [saha-gamana] or “dying after” him [anu-marana]).PARVATI, THE WIFE OF SHIVASati dies and is reborn as Parvati (“Daughter of the Mountain”), the daughter of the great

mountain Himalaya, the mountain range where Shiva is often said to live, generally on MountKailasa. Parvati is a typical breast goddess, confined and defined by her marriage. But beforeParvati could marry Shiva, she had to win him, no easy task, since Shiva had undertaken a vowof chastity. She did it with the help of the god of erotic love, Kama incarnate. The Mahabharatarefers, briefly, to the encounter between Kama and Shiva, the latter here referred to as abrahma-charin (that is, under a vow of celibacy): “Shiva, the great brahma-charin , did not givehimself over to the pleasures of lust. The husband of Parvati extinguished Kama when Kamaattacked him, making Kama bodiless.” 58 An inscription of 474 CE refers to the burning of Kamaby Shiva, 59 so the story must have been fairly well known by then; Kalidasa tells the story in hispoem The Birth of the Prince. Here is a slightly fuller Puranic version of the episode:PARVATI WINS SHIVAParvati wished to marry Shiva. She went to Shiva’s hermitage andserved him in silence; meditating with his eyes shut, he did not notice her. After some time, Indrasent Kama to inspire Shiva with desire for Parvati; Kama shot an arrow at Shiva, and the momentit struck him, Shiva opened his eyes, noticed Parvati, and was ever so slightly aroused. But thenhe looked farther and saw Kama, his bow stretched for a second shot. Shiva opened his third eye,releasing a flame that burned with the power of his accumulated ascetic heat, and burned Kamato ashes. (Kama continued to function, more effective than ever, dispersed into moonlight andthe heady smell of night-blooming flowers; his bow became reincarnate in the arched eyebrowsof beautiful women, his arrows in their glances). Shiva then returned to his meditation.Parvatiengaged in fierce asceticism to win Shiva for her husband, fasting, enduring snows in winter,blazing sun in summer. Shiva appeared before her disguised as a brahma-charin and tested herby describing all those qualities of Shiva that made him an unlikely suitor, including hisantipathy to Kama. When Parvati remained steadfast in her devotion to Shiva, the god revealedhimself and asked her to marry him. After the wedding, Kama’s widow begged Shiva to reviveher husband, and he did so, just in time for the honeymoon. 60 Himalaya, who is regarded asthe source of priceless gems, a king of mountains, disdains Shiva as Daksha had done (thoughfor different reasons), and their fears turn out to be well founded. Shiva is a strange god, theepitome of the sort of person a man would not want his daughter to marry: He is a yogi who hasvowed never to marry, he has a third eye in the middle of his forehead, he wanders around nakedor wearing nothing but a loincloth woven of living snakes, he has no family, and he lives not in ahouse but in a cremation ground, smearing his body with the ashes of corpses. It is therefore notsurprising that both his potential fathers-in-law object strenuously to him. In one Puranic versionof the story, Shiva in disguise tells Parvati’s father, Himalaya: “Shiva is an old man, free frompassion, a wanderer and a beggar, not at all suitable for Parvati to marry. Ask your wife and yourrelatives—ask anyone but Parvati.” 61 The litany of undesirable qualities is a variant of the genreof “worship by insult” that is both a Tamil and a Sanskrit specialty, and that appears in its darkeraspect when Daksha curses Shiva and then worships him for the same qualities for which he hadcursed him. Redolent of virility and transgression, Shiva’s qualities cast their dark erotic spell onParvati, as on his worshipers.The marriage of Shiva and Parvati is celebrated in texts and in ritual hierogamiesperformed in temples and depicted in paintings and sculptures throughout India. Their marriageis a model of conjugal love, the divine prototype of human marriage, sanctifying the forces thatcarry on the human race. The marriages of other gods and goddesses too, often local couplescelebrated only in one village, constitute a popular theme in temple art and literature, bothcourtly and vernacular. As in South India, the divine couple often served as a template for theimages of kings and their queens who commissioned sculptures depicting, on one level, the god

and his goddess, and on another, the king and his consort, or the queen and her consort.The conflict between Shiva and Kama is only on the surface a conflict between opposites,between an antierotic ascetic power and an antiascetic erotic power. They are two sides of thesame coin, two forms of heat, ascetic heat (tapas) and erotic heat (kama). 62 For it is through histapas that Shiva generates the power that he will use first for his perpetual tumescence and thento produce the seed of a spectacular child. Some variants of the myth express the connectionbetween Kama and tapas through an additional episode that brings into this myth a figure that wehave encountered before:THE SUBMARINE MAREKama deluded Shiva, arousing him, and when Shiva realized this, hereleased a fire from his third eye, burning Kama to ashes. But the fire could not return to Shiva,and so when Shiva vanished, the fire began to burn all the gods and the universe. Brahma madethe fire into a mare with flames coming out of her mouth. He took her to the ocean and said,“This is the fire of Shiva’s anger, which burned Kama and now wants to burn up the entireuniverse. You must bear it until the final deluge, at which time I will come here and lead it awayfrom you.” The ocean agreed to this, and the fire entered the ocean and was held in check. 63The fire is not just made of Shiva’s anger; it gained special power when it burned Kama,for it absorbed the heat of Kama too. The two fires released by Shiva and Kama meet andproduce a fiery weapon of mass destruction that maintains a hair-trigger balance of mutualsublimation. (The Mahabharata says that Shiva himself is the mouth of the submarine mare,eating the waters [13.17.54].) But what is repressed must return, and the strain of tapas in thetradition is always poised to burst through in any monolithic construction of kama, just as kamaconstantly strains to burst out of extreme tapas. The three elements—Shiva’s anger, Kama’spassion, and the mare—are combined in a verse that Dushyanta, madly in love with Shakuntala,addresses to Kama, the verse cited at the start of this chapter. The balanced extremes implicit inthis image are also evident from a Sanskrit aphorism about the two excesses (fire and flood) aswell as one of the four addictive vices of lust: A king, no matter how physically powerful, shouldnot drink too much, for the mare fire herself was rendered powerless to burn even a blade ofgrass, because she drank too much. 64PARVATI’S CHILDRENThe most serious problem in the marriage of Shiva and Parvati is the lack of any childrenborn of both parents, a lack that is explicitly regarded as problematic by the gods on someoccasions and by Parvati on others, but never by Shiva, who, despite his marriage, remainsadamantly opposed to having children. Skanda, as we have seen, is born of Shiva alone, an eventthat triggers Parvati’s resentful curse that all the wives of the gods should be barren too. Thewidespread patriarchal belief that all goddesses are mother goddesses is contradicted by Parvati’scurse, as well as by Hindu mythology as a whole. In defiance of her own curse, Parvati in severaltexts begs Shiva to give her a child, but he never relents. She does want to be a mother; it isShiva, and the gods, who keep her from being one. The closest she comes to motherhood is withGanesha.Many different stories are told about the birth of Ganesha, but one of the best knownbegins with Parvati taking a bath and longing for someone to keep Shiva from barging in on her,as was his habit. (This is yet another example of the ritus interruptus, the interruption of asleeping, meditating, or conferring god or king or of an amorous couple or a bathing woman orgoddess.) As she bathes, she kneads the dirt that she rubs off her body into the shape of a child,who comes to life. When Shiva sees the handsome young boy (or when the inauspicious planet

Saturn glances at it, in some variants that attempt to absolve Shiva of the inverted Oedipalcrime), the child’s head falls off; it is eventually replaced with the head of an elephant,sometimes losing part of one tusk along the way. 65 Thus, just as Skanda is the child of Shivaalone, Ganesha is the child of Parvati alone—indeed a child born despite Shiva’s negativeintervention at several crucial moments. Ganesha’s name means “Lord of the Common People”(gana meaning the “common people”) or “Lord of the Troops” (the ganas being the goblin hostsof Shiva, of whom Ganesha is the leader). He is the god of beginnings, always worshiped beforeany major enterprise, and the patron of intellectuals, scribes, and authors.Parvati’s problematic relationship with her son Viraka (“Little Hero”), usually equatedwith Skanda, is narrated in several Puranas, of which the earliest is the Matsya Purana, dated tothe Gupta age, though this passage may be later and is reproduced, with variations, in the stilllater Padma and Skanda Puranas:THE SPLITTING OF GAURI AND THE GODDESS KALIOne day the god Shiva teased hiswife, the goddess Parvati, about her dark skin; he called her “Blackie” [Kali] and said that herdark body against his white body was like a black snake coiled around a pale sandalwood tree.When she responded angrily, they began to argue and to hurl insults at each other. Furious, shewent away to generate inner heat in order to obtain a fair, golden skin. Her little son Viraka,stammering in his tears, begged to come with her, but she said to him, “This god chases womenwhen I am not here, and so you must constantly guard his door and peep through the keyhole, sothat no other woman gets to him.”While she was gone, an antigod named Adi took advantage ofher absence to attempt to kill Shiva. He took the illusory form of Parvati and entered Shiva’sbedroom, but Shiva, realizing that this was not Parvati but an antigod’s magic power of illusion,killed Adi. When the goddess of the wind told Parvati that Shiva had been with another woman,Parvati became furious; in her tortured mind she pictured her son and said, “Since youabandoned me, your mother who loves you so, and gave women an opportunity to be alone withShiva, you will be born among humans to a mother who is a heartless, hard, numb, cold stone.”Her anger came out of her body in the form of a lion, with a huge tongue lolling out of a mouthfull of sharp teeth. Then the god Brahma came to her and granted her wish to have a golden bodyand to become half of Shiva’s body, in the form of the androgyne. She sloughed off from herbody a dark woman, named the goddess Kali, who went away to live in the Vindhya Mountains,riding on the lion.Parvati, now in her golden skin [Gauri, “The Fair” or “The Golden”], wenthome, but her son Viraka, who did not recognize her, stopped her at the door, saying, “Go away!An antigod in the form of the Goddess entered here unseen in order to deceive the god, whokilled him and scolded me. So you cannot enter here. The only one who can enter here is mymother, Parvati, who loves her son dearly.” When the Goddess heard this, she thought to herself,“It wasn’t a woman; it was an antigod. I cursed my son wrongly, when I was angry.” Shelowered her head in shame and said to her son, “Viraka, I am your mother; do not be confused ormisled by my skin; Brahma made me golden. I cursed you when I did not know what hadhappened. I cannot turn back my curse, but I will say that you will quickly emerge from yourhuman life, with all your desires fulfilled.” The Goddess then returned to Shiva, and they madelove together for many years. 66 The goddess Parvati sloughs her black outer sheath (thegoddess Kali, often called Kaushika [“the Sheath”]) to reveal her golden inner form (Gauri).(This act of splitting apart reverses the act of coming together that creates the South Indiagoddess from the head of one woman and the body of another.) In the end the golden Gauri,goddess of the breast, has the son, and the dark goddess Kali, very much a tooth goddess, has thetoothy lion.

But the original Parvati, who contains both of the other two goddesses in her in nuce, isalready a cruel mother. Not only does she ignore her son’s pitiful pleas as she goes away,abandoning him, but she even throws his words back in his face when she curses him, accusinghim of abandoning her by failing to restrain his father’s sexuality. Viraka fails to recognize herwhen she returns, mistaking her for a non-Parvati (just as his father had mistaken the antigod forParvati); his failure to recognize her seems to be superficial—she has changed the color of herskin—but it has deeper, darker overtones, for he believes his mother loves him, and this womanhas cursed him (though he does not yet know it); indeed she has cursed him to have (another)unloving mother. The peeled-off goddess Kali is banished to the liminal area of the VindhyaMountains (the southern region that composers of ancient Sanskrit texts in the north of Indiaregarded as beyond the Hindu pale, the place to dump things that you did not want in the storyanymore), and so she is called Vindhya-vasini (“She Who Lives in the Vindhyas”). (The mythmay be reversing the historical process, for the goddess Kali may have come from the Vindhyas,or from the south in general, into Sanskrit culture.) The remaining golden form, the one thatcounteracted her son’s curse, becomes the female half of the androgyne.Though Shiva and Parvati are depicted in both sculpture and painting together withSkanda or Ganesha or both, clearly this is not a Leave It to Beaver type of family: Each memberis really a separate individual, with a separate prehistory and a separate role in Hindu worship.Nor are they joined together as members of a family usually are: Parvati does not bear the twochildren that are depicted with her, nor does Shiva father them in the normal way. The familyrepresents, rather, the forces of the universe that humans must sometimes contend with,sometimes call on for help, though they are often clustered together in a group that presents theform, if not the function, of a family. The family is a way of grouping them together in an imagethat is “with qualities” (sa-guna), in this case, the qualities of a human family, while in theirmore commonly worshiped forms, they are not a family at all.ANIMALSVEHICLESMany Shaiva family portraits include the pets. Skanda has his peacock, Ganesha hisbandicoot, Shiva his bull, and Parvati her lion. For this is another way, in addition to full-lifeavatars and periodic theophanies, in which the Hindu gods become present in our world. Mostgods and goddesses (apart from the animal, or animal from the waist or neck down, or animalfrom the waist or neck up forms of the deities) are accompanied by a vehicle (vahana), an animalthat serves the deity as a mount. In contrast with the Vedic gods who rode on animals you couldride on (Surya driving his fiery chariot horses, Indra on his elephant Airavata or driving his bayhorses), the sectarian Hindu gods sit cross-legged on their animals or ride sidesaddle, with theanimals under them presented in profile and the gods full face. Sometimes the animal merelystands beside the deity, both of them stationary.The Vedic Indra also rode on the Garuda bird, which later became the mount of Vishnu.Garuda is sometimes represented as an eagle from the waist down or the neck up, otherwiseanthropomorphic. Some South Indian Vishnu temples have a special landing post for Garuda toalight upon. Shiva’s vehicle is the bull Nandi, a symbol of Shiva’s masculine power andsexuality; the bull expresses something of the god’s own nature as well as his ambivalentrelationship to that nature: As the greatest of all ascetics and yogis, Shiva “rides” his own virilityin the sense that he controls, harnesses, and tames it. We have met Chandika’s lion, and thegoddess Kali’s lion or tiger (which she sometimes lends to Parvati too). Skanda’s vehicle is the

peacock, a brilliant choice that needs no explanation for anyone who has ever seen a general infull ceremonial dress, medals and all.Even some of the half-animal deities have their own entirely animal vehicles: Ganesha’svehicle is an Indian bandicoot or bandicoot rat, a large (six-pound) rodent (the name is derivedfrom the Telugu word for “pig-rat,” pandhikoku), chosen for Ganesha not because elephants (oreven elephant-headed, potbellied, anthropomorphic gods like Ganesha) are likely to canter abouton rats, however big, but because rats, like elephants, can get through anything to get what theywant, and Ganesha is the remover of obstacles. The bandicoot shares Ganesha’s nimbleness ofwit, as well as his path-clearing abilities. The rat has now more recently become a mouse, withintellectual pretensions appropriate to Ganesha; there are modern representations of Ganesha infront of a computer with his bandicoot serving as the mouse. 67Images of animals are very old indeed in India, as we saw in the Indus Valley, but theymay have become newly attractive in the Gupta period because of the need to produce visualrepresentation of icons and emblems to distinguish different gods under sectarianism. Thevahana is also a vehicle in the sense that a particular drama is sometimes said to be the perfectvehicle for a particular actor, or in the sense of (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) “amaterial embodiment or manifestation, of something.” Or perhaps it is a vehicle in the sense thatmosquitoes may “carry” malaria. Wherever the animal is found, the deity is also present. Thusthe animals carry the gods into our world as a breeze “carries” perfume. This may be seen as amore particularized expression of the basic Hindu philosophy that the ultimate principle ofreality (brahman) is present within the soul of every living creature (atman).HORSE SACRIFICESIn the horse sacrifice, as we have seen in the ancient texts as well as in the Mahabharata,the chief queen pantomimed copulation with the slaughtered stallion, which was said to be boththe sacrificing king (to whom he transferred his powers) and a god, usually Prajapati or Indra.Indra is one of several gods designated as the recipients of the horse sacrifice, but he himself notonly sacrifices (as the Vedic gods did, in “Poem of the Primeval Man”) but is unique in that as aking (albeit of the gods), he is famed for having performed more horse sacrifices than anyoneelse and is jealous of this world’s record (a jealousy that made him steal the hundredth horse ofSagara, whose sons dug out the ocean searching for it). Indra thus (unlike the usual humanworshiper, who may combine the roles of sacrificer and victim) normally combines the roles ofsacrificer and recipient. That paradox came to the attention of the author of this medievalcommentary on the Ramayana: “There are two kinds of gods, those who are gods by birth andthose who have more recently become gods by means of karma, such as Indra. The gods by birthreceive sacrifice but cannot offer sacrifice; the karma gods, like Indra, perform sacrifice and poseobstacles to sacrificers.” 68 The higher gods include not only the rest of the Vedic gods but thenewer gods, the bhakti gods.In the Harivamsha (“The Dynasty of Vishnu”), an appendix to the Mahabharata thatfunctions much like a Purana, Indra combines all three roles: sacrificer, recipient, and victim:JANAMEJAYA’S HORSE SACRIFICEJanamejaya was consecrated for the sacrifice, and hisqueen approached the designated stallion and lay down beside him, according to the rules of theritual. But Indra saw the woman, whose limbs were flawless, and desired her. He himself enteredthe designated stallion and mingled with the queen. And when this transformation had takenplace, Indra said to the priest in charge of the sacrifice, “This is not the horse you designated.Scram.”The priest, who understood the matter, told the king what Indra had done, and the king

cursed Indra, saying, “From today, Kshatriyas will no longer offer the horse sacrifice to this kingof the gods, who is fickle and cannot control his senses.” And he fired the priests and banishedthe queen. But then the king of the Gandharvas calmed him down by explaining that Indra hadwanted to obstruct the sacrifice because he was afraid that the king would surpass him with themerits obtained from it. To this end, Indra had seized upon an opportunity when he saw thedesignated horse and had entered the horse. But the woman with whom he had made love in thatway was actually a celestial nymph; Indra had used his special magic to make the king think thatit was the queen, his wife. The king of the Gandharvas persuaded the king that this was what hadhappened. 69 Like his snake sacrifice, Janamejaya’s horse sacrifice is interrupted. TheArthashastra (1.6.6) remarks that Janamejaya used violence against Brahmins and perished, anda commentator on that text adds that Janamejaya whipped the Brahmins because he suspectedthem of having violated his queen, though in reality it was Indra who had done it. 70 At the startof this episode, Janamejaya defies Indra implicitly simply by doing the extravagant sacrifice atall, making him the object of the god’s jealousy. 71 At the end, he defies Indra explicitly, byexcluding him from the sacrifice because the god has spoiled it.This story of Janamejaya, which ends with an exclusion of the deity and a refusal toworship him (reflecting the historical fact that Indra, a Vedic god, was not worshiped any longerin the Puranic period), is thus in many ways an inversion of the story of Daksha, which beginswith the exclusion of the god Shiva and ends with the promise that Daksha will in fact sacrificeto Shiva, after Shiva has both spoiled and accomplished the sacrifice (reflecting the historicalfact that Shiva, a non-Vedic god, was not worshiped until the Puranic period). This inversion wasmade possible in part because Indra, the god of conventional Vedic religion, the most orthodoxof gods, is in many ways the opposite of Shiva, the unconventional outsider. 72In the epilogue to the story of Indra and Janamejaya’s queen, the king is persuaded (by anappropriately equine figure, a Gandharva, a kind of centaur) that it all was an illusion. This is acommon device used to undo what has been done in a myth, as is the device of the magicaldouble that conveniently replaces a woman in sexual danger. (Or who is said to have replacedher; is the Gandharva telling the truth?) Here it also recapitulates precisely what the centralepisode of the myth has just done: It has revealed the illusion implicit in the sacrifice, the illusionthat the sacrificial horse is the god Indra and not merely a horse. The horse sacrifice is similarlydemystified and satirized in a twelfth-century text in which Kali, the incarnate spirit of the KaliAge, watches the coupling of the sacrificer’s wife with the horse of the horse sacrifice andannounces, being no pandit, that the person who made the Vedas was a buffoon, 73 which is to saythat Kali takes it literally and misses its symbolism. As the cachet of the horse sacrifice and ofanimal sacrifices in general fell during this period (as satires like this suggest), kings oftenendowed temples instead of sacrificing horses 74 —sacrificial substitution in a new key.RESTORING THE MAHABHARATAPuranic rituals often replaced Vedic rituals. We have noted how Vedic rituals weredevised to mend the broken parts of human life. Puranic rituals are devised for this too but alsoto cure the ills of previous ages and, indeed, of previous texts. Though many Puranas offer theirhearers/readers Release, most of them are devoted to the more worldly goals of the path ofrebirth, and the end of the line is not absorption into brahman but an eternity in the heaven of thesectarian god to whom the Purana is devoted. Moksha is ineffable, but the texts often describethe bhakti heaven.The Puranas return to the moral impasses of the Mahabharata, some of which were

esolved only by the illusion ex machina, and offer new solutions that were not available to theauthors of that text. Yudhishthira’s dilemma in hell was occasioned by a kind of transfer ofmerit: Yudhishthira sent a cool breeze to ease the torment of his brothers and Draupadi, as wellas a few other relatives. That concept, merely sketched there, is more fully developed a fewcenturies later in the Markandeya Purana:MERIT TRANSFER IN HELLOnce, when his wife named Fatso [Pivari] had been in her fertileseason, King Vipashchit did not sleep with her, as it was his duty to do, but slept instead with hisother, beautiful wife, Kaikeyi. He went to hell briefly to expiate this one sin, but when he wasabout to leave for heaven, the people in hell begged him to stay, since the wind that touched hisbody dispelled their pain. “People cannot obtain in heaven or in the world of Brahma,” saidVipashchit, “such happiness as arises from giving release [nirvana] to suffering creatures.” Andhe refused to leave until Indra agreed to let the king’s good deeds [karma] be used to releasethose people of evil karma from their torments in hell—though they all went from thereimmediately to another womb that was determined by the fruits of their own karma (14.1-7,15.47-80). The episode is clearly based on the Mahabharata, and uses some of the samephrases. (It also gives the sexually preferred second wife in this story the name of the sexuallypreferred second wife in the Ramayana, Kaikeyi.) But significantly, the people in hell now arenot related to the king in any way; his compassion extends to all creatures. Now also the textbegins to speak of Buddhist/Hindu concepts like nirvana and the transfer of karma, making itpossible for the real, heaven-bound king to release real sinners from a real hell. Karma andsamsara have the last word, though: In the end, having passed through heaven and hell, thesinners are reborn according to their just deserts, a theory that the final chapter of theMahabharata had chosen not to invoke.The Puranas expand upon the basic Mahabharata concept of the time-sharing aspects ofheaven and hell, adding psychological details:Sometimes a man goes to heaven; sometimes he goes to hell. Sometimes a dead man experiencesboth hell and heaven. Sometimes he is born here again and consumes his own karma; sometimesa man who has consumed his karma dies and goes forth with just a very little bit of karmaremaining. Sometimes he is reborn here with a small amount of good and bad karma, havingconsumed most of his karma in heaven or in hell. A great source of the suffering in hell is thefact that the people there can see the people who dwell in heaven; but the people in hell rejoicewhen the people in heaven fall down into hell. Likewise, there is great misery even in heaven,beginning from the very moment when people ascend there, for this thought enters their minds:“I am going to fall from here.” And when they see hell they become quite miserable, worrying,day and night, “This is where I am going to go.” 75 The misery of hell is thus somewhatalleviated by schadenfreude, and the pleasures of heaven are undercut by the attitude of LewisCarroll’s White Queen, who cries, “Ouch!” before she pricks her finger. 76The sins that send you to hell and the virtues that send you to heaven are often describedin detail that rivals that of the shastras, as the texts seem to vie with one another in imagininggruesome and appropriate punishments to fit the crime. After hearing the spine-curdlingdescriptions of the tortures of hell, the interlocutor (who is, as in the Mahabharata, built into theframe) often asks: “Isn’t there anything that I can do to avoid having that happen to me?” Andyes, you will be happy to hear that there is: just as there was a Vedic ritual to protect you, nowthere is a Puranic ritual, or a Puranic mantra, or a Puranic shrine, or a Puranic pilgrimage, thatthe text mercifully teaches you right then and there. There are many pilgrimage sites described inthe Mahabharata, particularly in the great tour of the fords (tirthas); but now each Purana plugs

one special place.For the moral dilemma posed by the massacre in the Mahabharata, the Puranic solutionis a pilgrimage to Prayaga (Allahabad), the junction of the two sacred rivers (the Ganges and theYamuna), above Varanasi, the site of the greatest annual festival in India, the Kumbha Mela:AN EXPIATION FOR THE MAHABHARATA WARWhen King Yudhishthira and his brothershad killed all the Kauravas, he was overwhelmed by a great sorrow and became bewildered.Soon afterward, the great ascetic Markandeya arrived at the city of Hastinapur. Yudhishthirabowed to the great sage and said, “Tell me briefly how I may be released from my sins. Manymen who had committed no offense were killed in the battle between us and the Kauravas.Please tell me how one may be released from the mortal sin that results from acts of violenceagainst living creatures, even if it was done in a former life.”Markandeya said, “Listen, yourmajesty, to the answer to your question: Going to Prayaga is the best way for men to destroy evil.The god Rudra, the Great God, lives there, as does the self-created lord Brahma, together withthe other gods.” Yudhishthira said, “Sir, I wish to hear the fruit of going to Prayaga. Where dopeople who die there go, and what is the fruit of bathing there?” 77 And the sage obliges him, inconsiderable detail.Yudhishthira is haunted by the same problem that troubled Arjuna centuries earlier in theGita: “Many men who had committed no offense were killed in the battle between us and theKauravas.” In the Mahabharata, Yudhishthira performed a horse sacrifice to restore himself andthe kingdom; in the Puranas, he makes a pilgrimage to Prayaga. The format of this myth—first astatement of a sin (the mess I got myself into), then the promise of a restoration, a solution—is aset piece, new Puranic wine poured into old Brahmana bottles.The Puranas tackle other Mahabharata trouble spots too. In the Mahabharata, Balaramais the brother of Krishna, renowned for his physical power and his prowess with the mace. In theVaishnava Puranas, Balarama becomes far more important and is sometimes regarded as one ofthe avatars of Vishnu. But he is also a notorious drinker, and the Puranas tell a striking storyabout this:A RESTORATION FOR DRUNKENNESS AND MANSLAUGHTEROne day Balarama, thebrother of Krishna, got drunk and wandered around, stumbling, his eyes red with drinking. Hecame to a forest where a group of learned Brahmins were listening to a bard, a Charioteer,reciting stories in the place of a Brahmin. When the Brahmins saw Balarama and realized that hewas drunk, they all stood up quickly, all except for the Charioteer. Enraged, Balarama struck theCharioteer and killed him. Then all the Brahmins left the forest, and when Balarama saw howthey shunned him and sensed that his body had a disgusting smell, the smell of bloodshed, herealized that he had committed Brahminicide. He cursed his rage, and the wine, and hisarrogance, and his cruelty. For restoration, he undertook a twelve-year pilgrimage to theSarasvati River “against the current,” confessing his crime. 78 Since the Charioteer belongsto a low caste that is said to go “against the current” 79 (born from a father of a caste lower thanthe mother’s), Balarama undertakes the appropriate pilgrimage “against the current”—that is,from the mouth to the source of the Sarasvati River. (Balarama is famous for having altered thecourse of the Yamuna/Kalindi River. 80 ) Yet he understands that he has killed someone who is insome way the equivalent of a Brahmin, not in his caste but perhaps in his knowledge and in hisstatus in the eyes of actual Brahmins, so that in killing him he has committed Brahminicide, andhe accuses himself of arrogance for expecting the Charioteer to rise in deference to him. Thepilgrimage and confession are his ways of dealing with what he acknowledges as his rage andcruelty, though he curses the wine rather than his own addictive drunkenness. In the Puranas,

there is a cure for everything.CHAPTER 15SECTS AND SEX IN THE TANTRIC PURANAS AND THE TANTRAS600 to 900 CECHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES ARE CE)550-575 Kalachuris create the cave of Shiva atElephanta606-647 Harsha reigns at Kanauj630-644 Xuan Zang (Hsuan Tsang) visitsIndia650-800 Early Tantras are composed765-773 Raja Krishna I creates the Kailasa temple toShiva at Ellora900 and 1150 The Chandellas build the temples at Khajuraho1238-1258Narasimhadeva I builds the temple of KonarakWHAT USE ARE IMAGINED IMAGES?If theshapes that men imagine in their minds could achieve Releasefor them, then surely men could become kings by means of thekingdom that they get in their dreams. Those who believe that theLord lives in images made of clay, stone, metal, wood, or so forth andwear themselves out with asceticism without true knowledge—theynever find Release. Whether they waste themselves away by fasting,or get potbellies by eating whatever they like, unless they have theknowledge of the ultimate reality—how could they be cured? Ifpeople could get Release by performing vows to eat nothing but air,leaves, crumbs, or water, then the serpents and cattle and birds andfish would be Released.Mahanirvana Tantra hs1 The texts called the Tantras mock physicalicons and dream images, as part of their general challenge to most aspects of conventionalHinduism (including fasting and asceticism), but they go on to replace these physical processesand mental images with ones of their own, produced in Tantric rituals, claiming that they havethe power to transform the worshipers into deities. Tantra is one of the many actual peripheriesthat survive against an imagined non-Tantric center, an all-encompassing religious movementthat rivaled Hinduism as a whole and indeed explicitly turned upside down some of the mostcherished assumptions of the Brahmin imaginary.How you define Hindu Tantra is largely predetermined by what you want to say about it;some scholars define it in terms of its theology (connected with goddesses and usually withShiva, though this is not unique to Tantrism), some its social attitudes (which are generallyantinomian, also not unique to Tantrism), and some its rituals (often involving the ingesting ofbodily fluids, particularly sexual fluids, which is indeed a Tantric specialty ht ). Like Hinduism ingeneral, Tantra is best defined through a Zen diagram combining all these aspects.INDIA IN THE TIME OF HARSHAAfter the Gupta Empire fragmented, in the seventh and eighth centuries CE, once againwe enter a period when there is no single political power, which seems to be the default positionfor most of ancient Indian history; empires are the exception. Again it is a fruitful period ofchange and creativity, when new castes, sects, and states emerged, and new regional kingdoms. 2One of these was the kingdom of Harsha, who reigned from 606 to 647. We have far moreinformation about him—more available light—than we have about most kings of this period,largely because of three witnesses. His court poet, Bana, wrote a prose poem about him, theHarshacharita, which offers, hidden between the layers of fulsome praise and literaryostentation, quite a lot of information about life as it was lived at Harsha’s court. And the

Chinese Buddhist traveler Xuan Zang (also spelled Hsuan Tsang, Hiuen Tsiang, Hsuien-tsang,Yuan Chwang), a monk and scholar, inspired by Faxian, who had visited the Guptas two hundredyears earlier, visited India between 630 and 644, returning to China with twenty horses loadedwith Buddhist relics and texts. He wrote a long account of India, including a detailed eyewitnessdescription of Harsha’s administration. 3 Since both Bana and Xuan Zang were under Harsha’spatronage, we must take their testimonies with a grain of salt, but much of what each says isconfirmed by the other, as well as by the third, even more biased witness, Harsha himself, whowrote three Sanskrit plays, two of which describe life at court.Harsha came of a powerful family and ruled over the fertile land between the Ganges andYamuna rivers, an area that he extended until he ruled the whole of the Ganges basin (includingNepal and Assam), from the Himalayas to the Narmada River, besides Gujarat and Saurashtra(the modern Kathiawar). He shifted the center of power from Ujjain and Pataliputra to Kanauj(near modern Kanpur). After Harsha’s initial conquests, there was peace in his empire. He diedwithout leaving an heir; on his death one of his ministers usurped the throne. His empire did notsurvive him.Harsha was descended from the Guptas through his grandmother, and his sister, RajyaSri, was married to the Maukhari king at Kanauj. According to Bana, after her husband waskilled in battle, Rajya Sri was taken hostage. She escaped and fled to the Vindhyas, where shewas about to commit suttee, but Harsha snatched her from the pyre. She then hoped to become aBuddhist nun, but Harsha dissuaded her, because through her he could control the Maukharikingdom. 4 That Bana regarded the practice of suttee as a serious problem is apparent from apassage worth quoting at some length:Life is relinquished quite readily by those overcome by sorrow; but only with great effort is itmaintained when subjected to extreme distress. What is called “following in death” [anumarana]is pointless. It is a path proper to the illiterate. It is a pastime of the infatuated. It is a road for theignorant. It is an act for the rash. It is taking a narrow view of things. It is very careless. All inall, it is a foolish blunder to abandon your own life because a father, brother, friend, or husbandis dead. If life does not leave on its own, it should not be forsaken. If you think about it, you willsee that giving up your own life is only an act of self-interest, for it serves to assuage theunbearable agonies of sorrow that you suffer. It brings no good whatsoever to the one who isalready dead. In the first place, it is not a way to bring that one back to life. Nor is it a way to addto his accumulations of merit. Nor is it a remedy for his possible fall into hell. Nor is it a way tosee him. Nor is it a cause of mutual union. The one who is dead is helpless and is carried off to adifferent place that is proper for the ripening of the fruit of his actions. As for the person whoabandons life—that person simply commits the sin of suicide, and nothing is achieved for eitherof them. But, living, he can do much for the dead one and for himself by the offering of water,the folding of hands, the giving of gifts, and so forth. 5 This remarkable statement combines,with no contradiction whatsoever, the religious assumptions of a pious Hindu and a sensible,compassionate, and highly rational argument against the ritual suicide of a widow. This is avaluable piece of evidence of resistance to such ritual immolations during Harsha’s reign. huHarsha was a most cosmopolitan king, known as a patron of the arts and of all religions.Besides the poet Bana and another famous poet, Mayura, he also kept at his court a man namedMatanga Divakara, a critic and dramatist who is said either to have come from one of the Pariahcastes (a Chandala) or to have been a Jaina. 6 Harsha does not mention temple worship in hisplays; he writes, instead, of a spring festival that the whole city participates in, dancing in thestreets and sprinkling one another with red dye (as people do during the Holi festival even

today), and of an individual puja to the god Kama that the queen carries out at a small outdoorshrine. 7 Harsha was a religious eclectic; two of his three plays (the ones about court intrigue) arededicated to Shiva, while the third, Nagananda, invokes the Buddha. But the plot of Naganandais as Hindu as it is Buddhist: A prince gives up his own body to stop a sacrifice of serpents to themythical Garuda bird, a myth that clearly owes much to the snake sacrifice in the Mahabharataas well as to the story of King Shibi (in both Buddhist and Hindu traditions). Xuan Zang noted amovement of nonviolence toward animals during Harsha’s reign: Indians are “forbidden to eatthe flesh of the ox [or cow], hv the ass, the elephant, the horse, the pig, the dog, the fox, the wolf,the lion, the monkey, and all the hairy kind. Those who eat them are despised and scorned.” 8Harsha may have became a convert to Buddhism in his later life; we know that he sent aBuddhist mission to China and held assemblies at the holy Hindu site of Prayaga, wheredonations were made to followers of all sects. 9 During this period Buddhism still thrived in largemonasteries in Bihar and Bengal, though it had begun to vanish from South India and was fadingin the rest of North India. Xuan Zang says that the king of Sindh was a Shudra, but a good manwho revered Buddhism. 10TANTRIC PURANASPROTO-TANTRIC SHAIVA SECTSScholars have scrambled to find the sources of Tantra, the ur-Tantras, during this period,but those sources are numerous, hard to date, and widely dispersed. A number of sects with someTantric features, though not yet full-blown Tantra, arose in the early centuries of the firstmillennium CE and later came to be regarded as Tantric—through our bête noire, hindsight. Anda number of Shaiva Puranas describe sects that share some, but not all, of the characteristics ofShakta Tantras (that is, Tantras dedicated to the goddess Shakti). Tantric ideas doubtlessdeveloped in sources long lost to us, but they appear textually first in the Puranas and after thatin the Tantras. We must therefore look to the mythology of Puranas composed during thisgeneral period (600 to 900 CE) for the mythological underpinnings of Tantric rituals.Besides the Puranas, there is scattered textual and epigraphical evidence of movementsthat may be considered proto-Tantric. In the first century CE, a sage named Lakulisha (“Lord ofthe Club”) founded a sect of Pashupatas, worshipers of Shiva as Lord of Beasts (Pashupati), 11and in the next centuries more and more people identified themselves as Pashupatas. 12 APashupata inscription of 381 CE counts back eleven generations of teachers to Lakulisha. 13 TheMahabharata refers to them, but examples of their own texts begin much later. 14 The KurmaPurana condemns them, and the Linga Purana reflects some of their doctrines. 15 They lived incremation grounds (hence they were Pariahs, polluted by contact with corpses), and their ritualsconsisted of offerings of blood, meat, alcohol, and sexual fluids “from ritual intercourseunconstrained by caste restrictions.” 16 The imagery of the cremation ground comes from olderstories about renouncers and finds its way later into the mythology of Shiva and then into Tantricrituals.The Pashupatas give a new meaning to passive aggressive; they went out of their way toscandalize respectable folks. The Pashupata Sutra, which may be the work of Lakulisha himself,instructs the novice Pashupata to seek the slander of others by going about like a Pariah (preta),snoring, trembling, acting lecherous, speaking improperly, so that people will ill-treat him, andthus he will give them his bad karma and take their good karma from them, 17 a highly original,active spin on the usual concept of the intentional transfer of good karma or the inadvertentaccumulation of bad karma. Now we have the intentional transfer of bad karma. For in fact these

Pashupatas were perfectly sober and chaste, merely miming drunkenness and lechery (two of thefour addictive vices of lust). The onlookers were therefore unjustly injuring the Pashupatas, andthrough this act their good karma was transferred to the Pashupatas, and the Pashupatas’ badkarma to them. 18 (No one seems to comment on the fact that through their deception, thePashupatas were harming the onlookers and hence would presumably lose some of their owngood karma through this malevolence.)An early text describes the Pashupatas as wandering, carrying a skull-topped staff and abegging bowl made of a skull, wearing a garland of human bone, covered in ashes (the ashes ofcorpses), with matted hair or shaved head, and acting in imitation of Rudra (the Vedic antecedentof Shiva). 19 This behavior closely resembles the vow that Manu prescribes for someone who haskilled a Brahmin: “A Brahmin killer should build a hut in the forest and live there for twelveyears to purify himself, eating food that he has begged for and using the skull of a corpse as hisflag (11.73).” Why was this said to be in imitation of Rudra/Shiva? Because Shiva was theparadigmatic Brahmin killer, indeed, the Brahma killer.SHIVA, THE SKULL BEARERThe Pashupatas were eventually transformed into a sect called the Skull Bearers(Kapalikas), who no longer followed the philosophy or stigmatizing behavior of the Pashupatasexcept for the skull begging bowl and who developed their own texts. Several Puranas tell themyth of the origin of the Skull Bearers; one version runs like this:SHIVA BEHEADS BRAHMABrahma desired Sarasvati and asked her to stay with him. Shesaid that he would always speak coarsely. One day when Brahma met Shiva, his fifth head madean evil sound, and Shiva cut it off. The skull remained stuck fast to his hand, and though Shivawas capable of burning it up, he wandered the earth with it for the sake of all people, until hecame to Varanasi. 20 This story may be traced back to the Vedic myth in which Rudra beheadsPrajapati to punish him for committing incest with his daughter, Dawn, 21 and to the myth ofIndra’s pursuit by the female incarnation of Brahminicide, who sticks to him like glue. 22 Alreadymany things have been cleaned up, at least a bit, to the credit of the gods: Brahma now assaultsnot his own daughter but Sarasvati, who is to become his wife, and who, being the goddess ofspeech, upbraids him for talking obscenely. Brahma, who often has four heads but is sometimescalled Five-Headed (Panchamukha), in this myth is imagined to go from five to four. And nowShiva is not, as in earlier versions, forced helplessly to endure the relentlessly adhesive skull 23but is entirely in control and submits to the curse “for the sake of all people.” This retroactivejustification of the god as the power of his sect increases (a transformation that Rama too wentthrough) is an essential move in the theology of the Tantras, as we will see.Other texts went even further to absolve Shiva of any implication that he might have beenpunished against his will, by simply removing him from the scene of the crime altogether. Oneversion begins with the familiar tale of Brahma, Vishnu, and the flame linga but then moves onin new directions:BHAIRAVA BEHEADS BRAHMAOnce when Brahma and Vishnu were arguing about whichof them was supreme, a flame linga appeared between them, and from it there emerged athree-eyed man adorned with snakes. Brahma’s fifth head called the man his son; thereupon theman, who was Rudra, became angry. He created Bhairava [“The Terrifying One”] andcommanded him to punish Brahma. Bhairava beheaded Brahma, for whatever limb offends mustbe punished. Then Shiva told Bhairava to carry Brahma’s skull, and he created a maiden namedBrahminicide [Brahma-hatya] and said to her, “Follow Bhairava as he wanders about, begging

for alms with this skull and teaching the world the vow that removes the sin of Brahminicide.But when he arrives at the holy city of Varanasi, you must leave him, for you cannot enterVaranasi.” And she said, “By serving him constantly under this pretext [of haunting him inpunishment], I will purify myself so that I will not be reborn.” Then Bhairava entered Varanasiwith her still at his left side, and she cried out and went to hell, and the skull of Brahma fell fromBhairava’s hand and became the shrine of the Release of the Skull [Kapala-Mochana]. 24Bhairava first appears as a replacement for Shiva in the Daksha myth, where several textsstate that Shiva created him and sent him to do the dirty work of creating mayhem in Daksha’ssacrifice. 25 Here he frees Shiva both from the stigma of having committed the original crime ofBrahminicide and from submitting to any punishment at all; Shiva creates the avenger himselfand even arranges for the punishment incarnate to serve her own vow of penance and findRelease. The Release of the Skull thus has a triple meaning; it is the place where Bhairava wasreleased from the skull but also where the skull itself—indeed the very crime of Brahminicideincarnate—was released from its own pollution and became a shrine. hw And it is the place ofRelease (mochana is closely related to moksha) for those human worshipers who know the mythand/or make a pilgrimage to the shrine. Brahma is saved from the embarrassment of a sexualcrime (however bowdlerized) by the substitution of another familiar myth, the myth of theargument between Brahma and Vishnu that we have encountered before. Most important, themyth accounts for the creation of what remains one of the great Shaiva shrines, the Release ofthe Skull in Varanasi.The reverse savior myth of Indra’s Brahminicide is here reversed back in the otherdirection so that it becomes a savior myth after all, reformulating the Vedic faith in divineintervention, the worshiper asking the god for help: The god Shiva, or his creature, commits a sinexpressly in order to establish a cure for other people who will commit that sin, or other, lessersins, in the future. According to many versions of the story, Shiva could have rid himself of theskull if he wanted to, but he kept it on his hand until he reached Varanasi, delaying his ownsalvation, in order to pave the way for humans in need of salvation; his role as savior may havetaken on some new qualities at this time as a result of contact with the Mahayana Buddhist idealof the bodhisattva (potential Buddha) who willingly postpones his own final Release in order tohelp others to find theirs. Shiva also acts as a savior in the many bhakti myths in which he bringssalvation to sinners and in the Mahabharata myth of the churning of the ocean: When a fierypoison comes out of the ocean and threatens to burn the universe to ashes (yet another form ofthe submarine mare fire), Shiva swallows it and holds it forever after in his throat (1.15-17).Shiva’s bhakti toward his worshipers also explains why he marries despite his vow to remain achaste yogi forever 26 and, on the other hand, why he persists in generating ascetic heat evenwhen he has decided to marry; in both cases, he does it to keep the universe alive or for the sakeof his devotees. 27 The Skull Bearer may also represent a Shaiva response to the avatars ofVishnu. The transition from the pattern of the Indra myth to that of the Shiva myth is madepossible by the shift from the second alliance, in which Indra fears or even hates humankind, tothe third alliance, the bhakti alliance, in which Shiva loves humankind.The logic of the myth of a god who commits a sin in order to establish a cure for otherpeople who will commit that sin in the future is made more circular in yet another variant of thestory:THE SKULL BEARER BEHEADS BRAHMAOnce Brahma’s fifth head said to Shiva, “Be aSkull Bearer” [Kapalika or Kapalin], addressing Shiva by his future name. Shiva became angryat the word “skull” and cut off the head, which stuck to his hand. 28 The myth seems aware of the

confusion of time cycles, for it notes the incongruity of Brahma’s use of Shiva’s “future name.”Shiva becomes a Skull Bearer because he is a Skull Bearer, apparently deciding to have the gameas well as the name. Since the name is the person, the word the thing, in the Hindu conception ofspeech acts such as curses, by naming Shiva, Brahma makes him what he calls him, a SkullBearer, just as Daksha cursed Shiva to be a heretic because he was one. Shiva, who committedthe prototypical Brahminicide—beheading not just any old Brahmin but Brahma himself—alsoinvented the vow to expiate Brahminicide.Daksha often accuses Shiva and his followers of being, or curses them to be, “SkullBearers” and “Death Heads” (Kalamukhas). 29 The myth of Daksha sometimes involves themutual exchange of curses, as the result of which two groups of sages are cursed to becomefollowers of reviled religious sects or false doctrines. 30 Daksha curses all of Shiva’s servants tobe heretics, Pariahs, beyond the Vedas, and Shiva’s servant Nandi (the bull in anthropomorphicform) or Dadhicha curses Daksha and his allies to be hypocrites, false Brahmins, 31 or to bereborn in the Kali Age as Shudras and to go to hell, their minds struck down by evil. 32 Onceagain the apparent results of the curses are actually their causes: Because Shiva was already aPariah, denied a share in the sacrifice, Daksha curses him and his followers to be such, andbecause Daksha heretically denies the true god, Shiva’s servant curses him to be a religioushypocrite.SATI, SECOND TAKE: SHAKTA SHRINESThe story of Sati and Daksha from the early Puranas was now retold, combining thatstory with the myth in which Shiva wanders with Brahma’s head. The result was a myth in whichShiva beheads Daksha and wanders with the corpse of Sati:SATI’S CORPSE IS DISMEMBEREDDaksha conceived a hatred for Shiva and also for his owndaughter Sati, who had married Shiva. Because of her father’s offense against her husband, Satiburned her body in the fire of her yoga, to demonstrate Sati-dharma. Then the fire of Shiva’sanger burned the triple world, and Shiva beheaded Daksha; eventually, Shiva gave Daksha thehead of a goat and revived him. But when Shiva saw Sati being burned in the fire, he placed heron his shoulder and cried out over and over again, “Alas, Sati!” Then he wandered about inconfusion, worrying the gods, and Vishnu quickly took up his bow and arrow hx and cut away thelimbs of Sati, which fell in various places. In each place, Shiva took a different form, and he saidto the gods, “Whoever worships the Great Mother with devotion in these places will find nothingunattainable, for she is present in her own limbs. And they will have their prayers answered.”And Shiva remained in those places forever, meditating and praying, tortured by separation. 33Again, “Sati-dharma” means both what Sati did and what any Good Woman should do.Daksha is beheaded in place of the goat that is the usual sacrificial animal, and when he isrevived, he is given the goat’s head, for his own is lost. The idea that the sacrifice itself was inessence already a substitute, 34 the victim in the sacrifice substituting for the sacrificer, eventuallydeveloped into this myth in which the sacrificer, Daksha, was himself substituted for the goatwho was to be the substitute for him, another myth about a sacrifice gone disastrously wrong bybeing literalized. hySati is dismembered, as the Primeval Man was in the Vedas. And just as the place wherethe skull of Brahma (the antecedent of Daksha 35 ) falls becomes the great shrine of the Release ofthe Skull in Varanasi, so Sati’s limbs, as they fall, become the plinths (pithas) of pilgrimageshrines, 36 with both Shiva and Sati eternally present to answer prayers. Other texts say that Shivatook the form of a linga in each pitha, and the place where her yoni is said to have fallen became

the central Tantric shrine in Assam (Kama-rupa). 37PROTO-TANTRIC GODDESSESCHANDIKA /DURGA, SECOND TAKE: SHAKTI BHAKTIIn “Glorification of the Goddess,” Chandika was said to have been created from the gods’energies (tejas), though she quickly assumed command. Now she is created from her own power,and she is eroticized. Indeed, this process began indirectly even in “Glorification of theGoddess,” when, after killing the buffalo, Chandika seduced and killed another antigod:CHANDIKA SEDUCES AND KILLS SHUMBHAShumbha fell madly in love with Chandikaand proposed marriage. She replied that she would only marry someone who vanquished her inbattle. There was a battle, in which the shaktis came out of the gods Brahma, Shiva, Skanda,Vishnu, and Indra to aid her: whatever form, and ornaments, and weapons, and animal vehicleseach god had, his shakti took that very form. Even Chandika emitted her own shakti, howlinglike a hundred jackals. And after she had absorbed all the gods’ shaktis, she killed Shumbha. 38Shumbha has an ally, Nishumbha, whom Chandika kills too; the names suggest that thismyth is modeled on the earlier story of the seduction of the antigods Sunda and Upasunda by thenymph Tilottama, who leaves their killing to the gods. This myth is then a combination of theolder theme of “dangerous upstart seduced by nymph” with the new theme of “d.u. killed bygoddess.” Chandika gives Shumbha death in lieu of sex; he dies in the battle that she demands asa prelude to marriage, a marriage that never happens, and goes straight to heaven, since hislove-war relationship with the goddess is regarded as a form of dvesha-bhakti , devotion throughhatred (as well as love). Though dozens and dozens of antigods who lack Shumbha’s passion arevanquished by the gods on every page without seeing the light, his passion makes his death incombat a form of enlightenment, a popular Hindu theme that is foreshadowed by theheaven-guaranteeing heroic battle deaths in the Mahabharata.THE SEDUCTION AND KILLING OF MAHISHAMost Sanskrit texts play down the erotic relationship between the goddess and thebuffalo, and some (beginning with “Glorification of the Goddess”) omit it altogether. But othertexts revel in it, and it bursts out again and again in the art-historical traditions, in both paintingsand sculptures, which emphasize, as do the texts, the extraordinary beauty of Chandika or, rather,of Durga, as she is now usually called. Even “Glorification of the Goddess” tells us that the godsgive her some rather good jewelry and specifies that of all the parts of her body made from partsof the gods, her genitals were made of energy itself. 39 But a later Sanskrit text, the SkandaPurana, states that Durga was already a powerful goddess when Mahisha defeated the gods andthat the gods went to her to beg her for help in dispatching him. 40 Another text from roughly thesame period brings out the erotic element more vividly:CHANDIKA SEDUCES AND KILLS MAHISHAMahisha had forced Brahma to promise that ifhe had to die, it would be at the hands of a woman; he asked this in order to ensure that he wouldnot die, since he regarded it as unthinkable that a mere woman, beneath contempt, shouldoverpower him. The gods created Durga. She enticed Mahisha, who proposed marriage. But shereplied that she wanted to kill him, not to sleep with him, that she had become a woman in thefirst place only in order to kill him; that although she did not appear to be a man, she had a man’snature and was merely assuming a woman’s form because he had asked to be killed by a woman.Moreover, she said to Mahisha’s messenger, “Your master is a great fool, and certainly no hero,to want to be killed by a woman. For to be killed by one’s mistress gives sexual pleasure to a

pansy (kliba) but misery to a hero.” The besotted Mahisha, however, was persuaded by acounselor who suggested that this clearly antierotic speech was the amorous love talk of apassionate woman: “She wishes to bring you into her power by frightening you. This is the sortof indirect speech that enamored women use toward the man they love.” Mahisha then dressedup in his best suit and boasted to Durga that he was a man who could make a woman very happy.She laughed and killed him by beheading him. 41 Mahisha’s boon is a variant of Ravana’s,narrowing the field of his killer to someone regarded as impossible, a mere woman. And so onceagain the gods had to create someone to kill the upstart without violating the fine print of thedemonic contract. Though Durga here is so beautiful that she inspires the antigod with adestructive erotic passion, she herself is so devoid of erotic feelings that she insists not only thatshe is a man rather than a woman but that her would-be consort is not a man, but a mere pansy.To clinch this argument, she insists that only a pansy would wish to experience a Liebestod witha woman. The aggressive woman rides astride the buffalo, and her sexual supremacy isexpressed through a martial image: She holds an erect phallic sword in paintings and sculpturesdepicting the slaying of Mahisha.The explicit meaning of this image is that the proposed battle is, by implication, a sexualunion. But the image also plays upon the notion (which it self-consciously inverts) that everyactual sexual act is, by implication, a fatal battle, a notion basic to Indian thinking about thedangers of eroticism and the need for the control, even the renunciation, of sensuality. In a morepositive vein, the fact that Mahisha desires to marry and/or battle Durga, despite her clearlyantierotic warning, implies that either marriage or battle may be a way of achieving unity; thateither may serve as an initiatory death leading to a desired transformation; that strong emotion,be it lust or hatred, seeks a conflict that leads ultimately to the resolution of all conflict in death.It is this deep intertwining of sex and violence that seems to underlie Durga’s extraordinaryappeal, for she is one of the most popular Hindu deities, worshiped by both men and women.The image of Durga on top of the helpless Mahisha, placing her feet on shoulders andhead as she beheads him or on the back of the cowering buffalo, an image much reproduced inboth sculpture and painting, seems to me to be mirrored in the well-known Tantric image of thegoddess Kali dancing on the (ithyphallic) corpse of Shiva, with her sword in her hand, oftenholding in another hand a severed head, an inversion of the myth in which Shiva dances allaround India carrying the corpse of Sati. Often the goddess Kali stretches out her tongue to drinkthe streams of blood spurting from the severed heads or necks; in this she is the descendant of thefemale antigod Long Tongue in the Brahmanas. Some contemporary Hindu glosses of this icon(particularly in Bengal) attempt to minimize the violence inherent in it; they say, “She sticks outher tongue in shock when she realizes that she is trampling on her own husband,” and they saythat the severed head represents the severing of the ego, interpretations that reduce thedominating demonic goddess Kali to the properly submissive wife Parvati. But others say thatshe is the letter i that turns the corpse (shava in Sanskrit) into Shiva; she brings him to life.Indeed sometimes the Goddess holds the severed head while she straddles a copulating couple.Whose is the severed head that the goddess holds in many of these icons? Sometimes sheherself is headless, Chinnamastaka (“The Severed Head”), and we might think that the head sheholds is her own, for it matches her headless body in color and other qualities. One strangevariant of the Mahisha myth, which appears in texts in both Sanskrit and Tamil, suggests that thehead might be Shiva’s. In this myth, after the goddess has killed Mahisha, his head sticks to herhand just as Brahma’s head sticks to Shiva’s after Shiva beheads Brahma. After bathing in ariver shrine (tirtha), the goddess discovers that there is a Shiva linga on Mahisha’s headless

torso—that is, in the place where his head was. 42 In the context of this particular story, the mainfunction of the epiphany is to identify Mahisha as a devotee of Shiva and hence to plunge thegoddess into an agony of guilt, necessitating a complex expiation. But in the context of thepatterning of the myth as a whole, this linga functions to demonstrate the fusion of Mahisha andShiva and, moreover, of Mahisha’s head and Shiva’s phallus. hzYet another possible victim as donor of the severed head may be the devotee of thegoddess. Puranic and Tantric mythology, as well as contemporary local mythology and earlyTamil literature, abound in tales of male devotees who cut off their own heads in an act ofdevotion to Durga, and Mahisha himself is such a devotee.TANTRICSWith this mythological corpus as a prelude, let us now consider Tantra itself.The Zen diagram of Tantra (that is, a cluster of qualities, not all of which need be presentin any particular text or ritual) includes the worship of the goddess, initiation, group worship,secrecy, and antinomian behavior, particularly sexual rituals and the ingesting of bodily fluids.There are Tantric texts, Tantric rituals, Tantric myths, Tantric art forms, and, above all, Tantricworshipers. There are Tantric mantras (repeated formulas), Tantric yantras (mystical designs),and Tantras (esoteric texts), as well as Tantric gods and their consorts. Within Hinduism, thereare Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Shakta Tantras, as well as Tantras devoted to other gods, and thereare, in addition, Buddhist Tantras and some Jaina Tantras; Buddhism and Hinduism once again,as in the Upanishadic period, share a number of features, in this case certain rituals and images. iaTantra originated, both in Buddhism and in Hinduism, sometime between the sixth andeighth centuries of the Common Era, 43 but it truly hit its stride in the tenth century, havingchanged significantly in the course of those centuries. 44 In particular, from the tenth century theTantras were infused with the spirit of bhakti. Tantra probably began in the northern fringes ofIndia, Kashmir, Nepal, Bengal, and Assam—places where Buddhism too flourished—but it soontook hold in central and South India. Something in the social conditions of the time inspired theTantric innovations, a combination of the growing anti-Brahmin sentiment of some bhakti sectsand the impulse, always present from the days of the breakaway Vratya ascetics of the Veda andthe extreme renunciants of the later Upanishadic period, to find new religious ways to alterconsciousness. In both yoga and Tantra the transformation was controlled by meditation.Similarly, the flying, drug-drinking, long-haired sage of the Veda reappears in the flying,fluid-drinking Tantric.Much of Tantric ritual took place during secret initiations in relatively remote areas, butthese rites were not a particularly well-guarded secret. The secret was that there was no secret. ibTantra and Tantric practices were well publicized, esoteric but not necessarily marginal or evensubversive; much of it was public, even royal. 45 Like the sages of the Upanishads, as well as thebhakti movements, Tantrics maintained a close association with kings, ‡ who made good use ofthe Tantras themselves 46 as well as lending to the Tantras the symbolism of kingship. Kings hadparticipated in sexual rituals for many centuries (recall the horse sacrifice), and every king waswedded to at least one goddess, Shri (Good Fortune) or Lakshmi (Good Luck) or Earth itself(Bhu-devi). Moreover, if you transform your body so that you become a god, as Tantrics claimedto do, you are also becoming a king. And Tantra is all about power, and power is catnip forkings.Using the MO that had served it well for many centuries, the Brahmin imaginaryabsorbed many of the new sects, 47 but this time it met its match in Tantra.

There are several different sorts of Tantrics. Within the wider landscape of the two pathsthat had forked apart at the time of the Upanishads, Tantra effected a new resolution. OutsideTantra, Hindu renouncers on the path of Release still hoped for moksha at death, by which theymeant casting off all constraints of form and individuality to be absorbed in brahman. But Hinduhouseholders on the path of rebirth, whose texts were now the Puranas, expected, at death, to bereborn either on earth or—the new option—in the heaven of Shiva or Vishnu or the goddess,from which they would not be reborn again and might even achieve Release; indeed, someHindus referred to rebirth in such a heaven as a kind of Release. Both groups thereforeacknowledged Release as an ultimate goal, but understood it in distinctive ways. Entering thisscene, the Tantric “path of mantras,” open to both ascetics and householders, promised to grantnot only Release (which the Tantras often call nirvana) from the world of transmigration butmagical powers (siddhis) and pleasures (bhogas) on the way to Release, 48 thus combining therewards of the paths of rebirth and Release. The third path, the horrible dead-end reincarnation,mired in the worlds of corals and insects, still threatens the person who neither sacrifices normeditates, but the Tantric path guarantees to protect the worshiper from that dreadful default.Tantra thus offered the best of both worlds, or, as the Tantric mantra has it, bhukti-mukti,bhoksha-moksha, or bhoga-yoga, “enjoyment-Release,” which has been nicely translated as thebiunity of “sensual delight and spiritual flight.” 49Another useful way to view the place of Tantra within the Hinduism of this period wouldbe to divide the options slightly differently, into a devotional world of bhakti (guru/god/goddess)and a philosophical world further divided into Vedanta (meditation) and Tantra (ritual), a triadthat comes out of the Gita synthesis of devotion, knowledge, and action. This formulation alsodivides Tantra into its “left-hand” or transgressive traditions (those that violated caste laws ofpurity—trafficking in blood, death, skulls, sex, all impure) and its “right-hand” or conservativetraditions. Most non-Tantric Hindus regard all Tantrics as following a left-hand path (vama),while the right-hand Tantrics look askance at the Tantrics whom they regarded as left-hand,themselves being more right-hand than thou.TANTRA AS SALVATION IN THE KALI AGEShiva’s role as a savior is not limited to establishing the sect of the Skull Bearer or theshrine in Varanasi that will save future sinners. In the Shaiva Tantric tradition, Shiva does more;he actively seeks out sinners and instructs them, by teaching them the very doctrines that, in theeyes of someone like Daksha, mark them as Pariahs.Several Shaiva Puranas disapprove of the Tantras and stand behind “the Vedas,” whichprobably means not actual Vedic sacrifice but “Vedic religion” in the sense of Puranic religion,in this case the worship of Shiva. These Puranas nevertheless assert that Shiva is the author ofthe Tantras and that the Tantras serve a useful purpose—for some people, but not for them. Theynarrate the tale of a group of sages, cursed to be barred from the use of the Vedas, who weresaved by Shiva. How they are cursed takes many forms; sometimes they are the sages who standwith Daksha against Shiva and are cursed in punishment for that. This is one version:SHIVA TEACHES TANTRIC TEXTSWhen Vishnu learned that the sages had been cursed tobe outside the pale of the Vedas, he went to Shiva and said, “There is not even a drop of merit inpeople who are beyond the Vedas. But nevertheless, because of our devotion [bhakti] to them,we must protect them even though they will go to hell. Let us make texts of delusion to protectand delude these evil people.” Shiva agreed, and they made the Kapala, Pashupata, Vama[“Left-hand,” i.e., Tantric], and other texts. For the sake of the sages, Shiva descended to earth

when the force of the curse had come to an end, and he begged alms from those who wereoutcast, deluding them as he came there adorned with skulls, ashes, and matted hair, saying,“You will go to hell, but then you will be reborn and gradually work your way to the place ofmerit.” 50 The ambivalent moral status of the sages in this version of the myth is evidentfrom Vishnu’s statement: The sages are evil and doomed to hell, but the gods must protect anddelude them (an interesting combination) so that they will ultimately find merit. Moreover, eventhough the doctrines that Shiva teaches them are mediating ones—below the Vedas but abovedamnation—he cannot teach those doctrines while the sages are still cursed to be heretics (whichis what being debarred from the Vedas amounts to in these stories); he must come to them “whenthe force of the curse had come to an end” to teach them new false texts. That is, they need tohave worked off the curse, to have started on the path upward, before he can give them theTantras.How can Shiva “protect” the sages by teaching them a new heresy? The “left-hand”doctrines help them by giving them some religion, albeit a heresy, since they are denied theVedas; the heresy serves as a staircase between non-Vedic and Vedic religion, 51 bridging the gapbetween complete darkness and true religion, purifying them enough so that they can enter thewaters of purification. They need an orthodox heresy (an oxymoron, but it fits the situation) tobreak the ritual chain of impurity. This concept of weaning is expounded by apologists for theTantras, who argue that Shiva knew that the animal leanings of certain people made them needmeat and wine and therefore invented Tantric rites in order gradually to wean them from thispleasure “in associating it with religion,” the idea being that it is better to bow to Shiva with yoursandals on than never to bow at all. 52 Shudras and the victims of curses are forbidden to study theVedas; some other people are simply incapable. Out of pity for all of them, Shiva teaches heresy,raising them up “step by step,” a doctrine that may have been influenced by the Buddhist idea ofskill in means, suiting the teaching to the level of the person to be enlightened. The assumption(often stated explicitly) is that he gives them a religion that is “natural” to them (sahaja, “bornwith” them), that makes use of the things that everyone naturally enjoys—sex, wine, meat.Tantra in this view is Hinduism with training wheels. Thus Shiva makes some people heretics inthe first place so that he can ultimately enlighten them. This enlightenment at first appears as aheresy, which they reject, and indeed it is a heresy, in comparison with the ideal, Vedic orPuranic worship. But for some, this heresy is their only salvation, and their own god has createdit for a good reason.The final Puranic rationalization for the Tantras is that heresies taught to heretics makethem so evil that they must reach the furthest point of the cycle and then rebound from theextreme, to become good again, to go back to the head of the queue, to go back to GO, like allthe creatures of the Kali Age. Indeed the “orthodox heresies” are also justified by the doctrine ofthe forbidden acts in the Kali Age (kali-varjya): Some things that were forbidden in the past(such as Tantric rituals) are permitted now because we are too corrupt to meet the old standards.This argument was then sometimes inverted to argue that some things that were permitted then(such as female promiscuity, or Draupadi’s polyandry) are forbidden now for the very samereason: because we are corrupt, in this case too corrupt to commit these acts without being totallydestroyed by them.TANTRIC RITUAL: FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE THE FIVE MSWhat are these terrible, dangerous things that the Tantric texts taught people to do?Central to Tantric ritual is what the Tantras call the Five Ms, or the Five M Words (since all five

terms begin with an m in Sanskrit), which might be called, in English, the Five F Words: madya(fermented grapes, wine), mamsa (flesh, meat), matsya (fish), mudra (farina), and maithuna(fornication). Like so much of Tantra, the Five Ms are an inversion, in this case an inversion ofother pentads in more conventional forms of Hinduism. Puranic Hindus ingested the “fiveproducts of the cow” (panchagavya) to purify themselves of pollution: clarified butter, milk, andyogurt, plus bovine urine and feces. ic Tantrism, which accepts this schema, has, in addition, itsown version of the five ritual elements, the Five M Words, or, in one variant, the Five Jewels(semen, urine, feces, menstrual blood, and phlegm) or Five Nectars (with marrow in place ofphlegm). 53 One Buddhist Tantra further divides flesh (mamsa) into Five Meats (beef, dog,elephant, horse, and human flesh), together with Five Ambrosias (semen, urine, feces, blood, andmarrow, slightly different from the Five Jewels). 54 All these pentads were probably a deliberateantinomian travesty of the “five products of the cow”; one Tantric text substitutes for the bovineurine and feces the blood and flesh of the cow, a bovicide abomination that deliberatelysubverted orthodox categories of purity, 55 forcing participants to look beyond the dualities ofpurity and impurity and the conventions of food and sex that drive so much of Hinduism. 56 Onecan hardly imagine a more blatant, in-your-face, maithuna-you attitude than the one at the heartof this substitution.The Mahanirvana Tantra elaborates upon each of the Five Ms: Wine may be made fromsugar (or molasses), rice, honey, or palm tree juice and made by someone of any caste. Meat maybe from animals that come from the water, the land, or the sky, and again, it doesn’t matterwhere it comes from or who kills it; the only stipulation is that the animals be male, not female(as is the case for Vedic sacrifices too). Fish are best without bones, though the ones that havelots of bones may also be offered to the goddess if they are very well roasted or fried. The bestfarina (mudra) is made from rice, barley, or “earth-smoke” wheat, which is especially nice whenfried in butter. 57 And fornication may involve one’s own wife, another man’s wife, or a womanwho belongs to the group in common.Wine, flesh, and fish were prohibited for high caste Hindus, and there is little debateabout the basic lexical connotation or the denotation of these terms, 58 though as we will see,there is much debate about whether they are to be taken literally. But the other two Ms, mudraand maithuna, have proved more problematic even to define in their primary meanings. Mudra,here interpreted as a fourth material article, farina, or parched grain (sometimes kidney beans, or“any cereal believed to possess aphrodisiac properties” 59 ), has a primary lexical meaning of“stamp” or “seal” (as in “seal ring”); it also means “signal” or “hand gesture,” and may indicate,in some texts, not farina but either of two other Fs: finger positions (physical movements of thehands corresponding to imagined acts) or the female sexual organ, which “seals” the male organin the sexual act. 60 The uncertainty of the referents of words used in the Tantras compounds thequestion of their literal or figurative meaning.As for the last element, maithuna is usually translated as sexual intercourse, moreliterally “pairing,” but since all the other terms seem to be material substances, it may mean moreprecisely “what is derived from sexual intercourse”—that is, the fluids produced in sexualintercourse. This gloss is a bit of a stretch, but it is lexically correct, does assimilate maithuna tothe other substances consumed as food at the forbidden feast, and has the added virtue of linkingthe Five Ms with another widely attested characteristic of South Asian Tantra in its earliestdocumented stage, a ritual in which what Sterling Hayden in Doctor Strangelove called“precious bodily fluids” (in this case sexual or menstrual discharge) were swallowed astransformative “power substances.” 61

For the Tantras do say things like “The body of every living creature is made of semenand blood. The [deities] who are fond of sexual pleasure drink semen and blood.” 62 Drinkingblood and seed together is a very Tantric thing to do. In one of the Puranic antecedents of theTantras, “Glorification of the Goddess,” the goddess Chandika came up against an antigod thatwas actually named Blood Seed (Raktabija), from every drop of whose blood (or, if you prefer,semen) a new antigod appeared. To conquer him, Chandika created the goddess Kali andinstructed her to open wide her mouth and drink the blood as well as the constantly appearingprogeny of Blood Seed; then Chandika killed him. 63 The goddess Kali effectively aborts the birthof offspring of Blood Seed by prophylactically swallowing his seed, the drops of his blood. 64 Inother Puranas, the goddess emits multiforms of herself who extend their tongues to lick up eachdrop of the semen-blood before it can fall to the ground. 65 The long tongue of the goddess Kali,like that of the female antigod Long Tongue, the bitch that licks up the oblations, is the upwarddisplacement of her excessive vaginas, a grotesque nightmare image of the devouring sexualwoman, her mouth a second sexual organ.But it is not semen-blood but female blood (together with male semen rather than maleblood) that plays the central role in the Tantras. The menstrual blood of the female participant isconnected to the polluting but life-giving blood of the menstruating goddess, which flows to theearth each year, 66 and the blood of her animal victims, decapitated and offered in sacrifice. Notjust the goddess, but the Yoginis, a horde of ravishingly beautiful, terrifying, and powerfulfemale deities, participated in the drinking of the sexual fluids. These Yoginis were oftenplacated with blood offerings and animal sacrifices but also propitiated by exchanging sexualfluids with the male practitioners and by consuming those fluids (as well as other prohibitedfoods). In return the Yoginis granted the practitioners, at the very least, “a powerful expansion of. . . the limited consciousness of the conformist Brahmin practitioner” and, at most, supernaturalpowers, including the power of flight. 67SANITIZING THE SYMBOLISM OF TANTRIC RITUALIn protest against these transgressive forms of Tantra, many texts insisted that the ritualinstructions were never intended to be followed literally but were purely symbolic. The sanitizedinterpretation of the Five Ms, for instance, introduced new ritual substitutes, glossing madya(wine) as a meditational nectar, mamsa (flesh) as the tongue of the practitioner, matsya (fish) ashis breaths, mudra as inner knowledge, and maithuna as “supreme essence.” 68 We can view thesymbolic as a historical development from the actual (as may have been the case with referencesto human sacrifice at a much earlier period), or we can assume that the ritual was always purelysymbolic, never real (like the ogres in the Ramayana), or that both were always already presentfrom the start (like the linga that is and is not the phallus of Shiva). We might summarize thequestion, Did the Tantrics actually have Tantric sex? and respond with three guesses:FIRST GUESS: They Did.Variant 1: Once They Did It; Now They Talk About It.Variant 2: First They Talked About It, and Then They Did It.SECOND GUESS: It was Always All in Their Heads.THIRD GUESS: They Always Did It and Imagined It at the Same Time. Let us consider themone by one.The historical argument implies that the Hindus themselves bowdlerized their owntradition: “No one is swallowing anything; we’re all just meditating.” The argument for historicaldevelopment begins by asserting that Tantra began as a non-Brahmin (sometimes evenanti-Brahmin), antihouseholder movement and then was taken up by Brahmins and

householders. Since we don’t have access to the earliest layers of Tantra, before the extant texts,we can’t know who the original worshipers were or what they did then; perhaps they did drinkblood at first and then stopped, perhaps not. But we do have Tantric texts that seem to indicatethat their authors drank blood and performed the sexual ritual. One can argue that Tantric ritualtexts tell us precisely what the practitioners did, and that they mean what they say. 69Later, the historical argument continues, many Hindus merely imagined that part of theritual and/or declared that it never had taken place at all, 70 while Hindus who continued toperform the rituals described them in a code that made it appear that they were merelyperforming them symbolically. Certain elite Brahmin Tantric practitioners, led by the greatsystematic and scholastic theologian Abhinavagupta in Kashmir (975-1025 CE), sublimated theritual into a body of ritual and meditative techniques “that did not threaten the purity regulationsrequired for high-caste social constructions of the self.” The Tantra of the cremation ground wascleaned up and housebroken so that it could cross Brahmin thresholds. The theoreticianseliminated the major goal of the unsanitized Tantrics, the consumption of the substances, andkept only the minor goal, the expansion of consciousness, now viewed as the cultivation of adivine state of mind homologous to (rather than actually produced by) the bliss experienced insexual orgasm. This sanitized High Hindu Tantra was a revisionist transformation “from a kindof doing to a kind of knowing,” abstracted into a program of meditation mantras. 71 It led to asplit into householder sects, which worshiped Shiva but regarded the ritual texts as merelysymbolic meditations, not as prescriptions for action, and more extreme cults, which continued toworship goddesses through rituals involving blood, wine, and erotic fluids, rituals that wereentirely real. 72The relatively straightforward historical thesis is complicated, or nuanced, by severalfactors. Even after the period of transition there was still a place in the secret initiations for theconsumption of prohibited foods and sexual fluids; the earlier, unreconstructed form of Tantramay also have persisted as a kind of underground river, flowing beneath the new, bowdlerized,dominant form of Tantra. Another sort of compromise consisted in sexual rituals performed onlywithin the confines of coitus reservatus, eliminating the release of the fluids. But where sometexts speak of meditation instead of maithuna, and others talk of coitus reservatus, yet otherscontinue to talk about drinking fluids.A third compromise consisted in performing the original rituals but shifting the goal fromthe development of magical powers or the transformation of the worshiper to “the transformativepsychological effect of overcoming conventional notions of propriety through the consumptionof polluting substances.” 73 Finally, a system of overcoding may have permitted some high-caste,conformist householder practitioners to have it both ways, to lead a double life by livingconventionally while experimenting in secret with Tantric identities; thus they might put on apublic face to claim (to eighteenth-century missionaries, for instance) that they were “shocked”(like Claude Rains in Casablanca) by Tantric practices, in which they themselves covertlyparticipated. 74The bowdlerizing effect may also have been a result of the Tantrics’ concern to makecrystal clear the line between the use of antinomian elements in the ritual and any sort of casualorgiasticism. That is to say, “Kids, Don’t Try This at Home.” The original Tantric sources onsexualized ritual seldom mention pleasure, let alone ecstasy, though the later texts do speak ofananda (bliss). 75 Indeed the Tantras seem sometimes to lean over backward to be plus royalisteque le roi in hedging their sexual ceremonies with secrecy, euphemism, and warnings of danger,realizing that in harnessing sex for their rituals, they are playing with fire. In this, the Tantras

share in the more general Hindu cultural awareness of the dangers of sex, which even theKama-sutra emphasizes.This is a strong argument for the original physical reality of the Tantric substances; whywarn people to be careful about them if they don’t exist? Wine, for instance, is, like sex,dangerous. The passage in the Mahanirvana Tantra glossing the Five Ms includes this caveat:“Meat, fish, parched grain, fruits and roots offered to the divinity when wine is offered areknown as the purification [shuddhi] of the wine. Drinking wine without this purification, byitself, is like swallowing poison; the person who uses such a mantra becomes chronically ill andsoon dies, after living only a short life span.” 76 The text, well aware of the fact that intoxicatingliquors are one of the addictive vices, returns to this issue later on, taking pains to distinguish theritual use of wine (which is regarded as a goddess) from casual drinking, which it abhors:Mortals who drink wine with the proper rituals and with a well-controlled mind are virtuallyimmortals on earth. But if this Goddess wine is drunk without the proper rituals, she destroys aman’s entire intellect, life span, reputation, and wealth. People whose minds are intoxicated fromdrinking too much wine lose their intelligence, which is the means by which they achieve thefour goals of life, and such a man does not know what to do or what not to do; every step hetakes results in something that he does not want and that other people do not want. Therefore, theking or the leader of the Tantric group should torture and confiscate the property of a man whomdrink has made grotesque, with unsteady speech, feet, or hands, wandering in his wits and out ofhis mind; and he should heavily fine a man whom drink has made foul-mouthed, crazy, or devoidof shame or fear. 77 Even wine that has been purified by the ritual is a danger if taken inexcess. The social symptoms of alcoholism (“every step he takes results in something that hedoes not want and that other people do not want”) are as closely observed as those in the equallyperceptive description of the compulsive gambler in the Rig Veda.Another argument for the historical reality of the left-hand Tantric rituals is the fact thatsuch rituals apparently continue to this day, particularly among the Bauls of Bengal and theNizarpanths (“Hinduized” Ismai’ilis of western India). An unbroken line of teachers anddisciples culminates in present-day living Yoginis, who endure for the most part in the greatlyreduced form of aged, poor, widowed, and socially marginalized women, who are sexualityexploited, often accused of practicing witchcraft when an untimely death or some other calamitybefalls a village, and still occasionally put to death. 78 At the same time, the bowdlerizingcontinues too; in modern Kolkata, priests at the Kalighat temple sometimes “Vaishnavize” thegoddess Kali by removing reminders of her Tantric background. 79In passing, we might consider the variant of the first argument that, in Tantric fashion,reverses it, turning history on its head and arguing that left-hand Tantra was at first just a mentalexercise, and then someone took it literally. (First They Talked About It, and Then They Did It.)This too would account for the two levels of Tantra, and it is logically possible, but there is littlehistorical support for it.So much for the historical argument that Tantra was a ritual that became, for thedominant culture, a kind of myth (or a myth that became a ritual).The second argument—that the left-hand Tantric ritual was always just a myth (or It wasAlways All in Their Heads)—is precisely the viewpoint of the people that those who hold withthe historical hypothesis regard as the bowdlerizers, the people who insist that Tantra was neverreal, that the left-hand Tantric rituals were never actually performed and were only symbolicfrom the very start. These are probably the majority of educated Hindus today. In keeping withthe doctrines of illusion (which were, like Tantra, being developed in eleventh-century Kashmir),

this philosophical approach argues that all the Tantric rituals were illusory mental images ofrituals that were never real, that Tantric sex was never a ritual but only a myth, as cannibalismhas sometimes been thought to be, something that some people thought other people were doing,when in fact no one was doing anything of the sort. This would mean that even the people whowrote the early Tantric texts merely imagined that they were doing what they said they weredoing. After all, people have imagined that they have flown to heaven and walked among thegods, so why not imagine that you’re drinking your sister’s menstrual blood?But it is also possible that there were two levels of myth and ritual from the start, as therewere in the early Upanishads, and this is the third argument: Some people would meditate on thesacrifice and perform the sacrifice (or They Always Did It and Imagined It at the Same Time),which also allows for the possibility that others would merely meditate, and still others wouldmerely perform the ritual without meditating. In this view, the two paths of Tantra, meditationand action, jnana and karma, lived side by side, like the two paths in the Upanishads, andsometimes even coexisted in a single worshiper. I have argued that stories about Pariahs,goddesses, and antigods may simultaneously reflect actual attitudes to real Pariahs, women, andtribal people and symbolic attitudes to imaginary goddesses, antigods, and, indeed, Pariahs. Sotoo Tantric rituals could be simultaneously real and symbolic. Few would deny that the dominanttrend in Tantric interpretation has long been, and remains, metaphorical or metaphysical. Buthow do we know that the unsanitized school did not interpret their texts, too, metaphorically?The Mahanirvana Tantra recognizes three grades of humans: men who are like beasts,capable only of conventional worship, such as image worship (corresponding perhaps to the thirdgroup in the Upanishads, below the main two paths); heroic men, who practice Tantric rituals(the path of rebirth); and godlike men, who practice Tantric meditation, having transcended andinternalized Tantric ritual (the path of Release). 80 Yet as we saw in the passage “What Use AreImagined Images?” this text also seems to mock people who are satisfied with mere mentalimages of rituals without performing them, to argue that it is better to meditate upon the ritualthan to perform the ritual, but only if the worshiper has reached a high level of understandingthrough internalizing the ritual—that is, by performing it many times.An even closer parallel might be seen in the Upanishadic passage (BU 6.4) in which theworshiper in a sexual embrace with his wife imagines each part of the act as a part of the Vedicoffering into the fire, while presumably anyone making the offering into the fire could alsoimagine each action as its sexual parallel. id Tantra collapses the metaphor and says that the act ofintercourse with the ritual female partner is itself a ritual, like making an offering into the fire.Thus the Tantras fold back into the path of Release the Upanishadic sensuality that the Brahminshad filtered out. The mudras, the gestures, may form a mediating bridge between the act actuallyperformed and the mere imagination of the act; they gesture toward the act. This understandingof the multiple layers of ritual symbolism supplements rather than replaces the chronologicalhypothesis, for if, as appears most likely, both levels were present from the start, historicalfactors over the centuries may have caused one level, the purely symbolic and mythical, to rise inimportance as the other, the unsanitized ritual, lost power and status.Given the attention that Indian literary and erotic theory pays to double meanings, to thelinguistic “embrace” that simultaneously means two different things, it seems wise to assumethat the Tantrics too engaged in split-level symbolism. The substances would be both/and as wellas neither/nor: both literal and metaphoric, but also neither of these, being signs pointing to a setof meanings—the irrelevance of pollution or the relevance of nonduality—for which thesignifiers (in this case, the Five Ms) are arbitrary. What is significant is not whether these

antinomian acts were imagined or performed, but that the higher-order discourse in which thedebate about them took place was of central concern not only to the Tantrics but to mainstreamIndian religion. 81In part because some people argue that the early Tantrics never actually did any of thetransgressive things they said they did (the second argument), one might be tempted to insist thatthey always did (the first argument). But the texts, like many, if not most, religious texts, areambiguous; you can read them to say that they did or that they did not. Thus Tantra was for somepeople a ritual and for others merely a myth, or for some people a sexual ritual and for others ameditational ritual. And for some, both. Not only does imagination not preclude doing, but doingdoes not preclude imagination; they can be simultaneous. Tantrics were certainly capable ofwalking and chewing imaginary gum at the same time.WHAT’S IN IT FOR THE WOMEN? 82Since sex is both dangerous and central to Tantrism (vama means both “left-hand” and “awoman,” and so to call Tantra the Vama path, as was often done, was to feminize as well asstigmatize it), Tantric sexual rituals, and Tantric women, are very carefully controlled. ManyTantric rituals involve women both as sexual partners and as channelers of the goddess, thereforeobjects of ritual worship. 83 The centrality of women to Tantric ritual may have had a positiveinfluence on more general attitudes to women during this period, such as Bana’s enlightenedattitude to the ritual immolation of widows. There is also much talk of shakti and goddesses.Where the Mahabharata and Ramayana and the early Puranas are framed as conversationsbetween two men, one of them a professional narrator (Charioteer), most Shaiva Tantras (andeven some of the Vaishnava ones) are framed as dialogues between Shiva and Parvati. But it isby no means clear that Tantra benefited rather than exploited the women involved.In the central Tantric ceremony, the male Tantric invokes Shiva, who enters him, whilehis female partner invokes Shiva’s shakti, the goddess, who enters her. The body of the Tantricthus becomes the icon (murti) of the god, and when he unites with his partner, the power of thegoddess in her (or in her sexual fluids) unites with his semen and travels up his spine through aseries of wheels of power (chakras), or stations of the spine, until they reach the top of his headand produce what is variously described as bliss, complete enlightenment, or Release. Theparticular power involved in this ritual, called the Kundalini (“the Coiled One”), takes the formof two channels of bodily fluids imagined in the shape of two serpents, male and female,intertwined around the spine (like the medical caduceus, symbolizing the human body in perfecthealth). Yoga had already established ways of raising the Kundalini to maintain health and,sometimes, to attain immortality; Tantra added the idea of stirring it up with ritual sex. In Nathversions of Kundalini yoga, the submarine mare is said to be a fire at the base of the spine,homologized with the Kundalini serpent (for horses are often connected with snakes in India).The centrality of semen in this ritual suggests that it was designed for men, though some Indiantexts (including medical texts) do assume that women, like men, have semen and can draw it upthrough the spine to the brain. Some texts go so far as to assume that the male Tantric is able todraw the female’s fluid back into his own sexual organ and up his spine, the so-called fountainpen technique. 84There is a lot of Tantric talk about how wonderful women are: “Women are gods, womenare life, women, indeed, are jewels. One should always associate with women, whether one’sown wife or another’s. What I have told you is the secret of all the Tantras.” 85 Yet there is noevidence that actual Tantric women were equal partners in any sense of the word; to the question

What’s in it for the women? (once called “the most embarrassing question you can ask anyTantric” 86 ), it would appear that the answer is: Not much. 87 Yet though Tantric ritualperformance may construct rigid gender roles, it also allows possibilities for the subversions ofthose roles. 88 Some women found a kind of autonomy, freedom from their families, in theTantric community, but for the most part the rituals were designed to benefit people who hadlingas, not yonis.Though many Tantrics probably had no concern whatsoever for the way they appeared toothers, 89 and most of them were “less concerned with shocking the conventional sensibilities ofthe wider South Asian society than they were with the transformative effects,” 90 some did seemto thumb their noses at the bourgeois who condemned them. We can see this attitude in thepassage with which this chapter began, “What Use Are Imagined Images?” which mocksconventional religion—fasting and the worship of icons. (The extremists among this sort ofTantric were the Aghoris, “to whom nothing is horrible,” who would do, or eat, anything at all tocultivate and then to demonstrate their indifference to conventional ideas of pleasure and pain.)Since, as we have seen, texts like the Kama-sutra assume that sex and carnivorousness areperfectly normal, you have to go out of your way to make them godlike; hence, for someTantrics, the ritual involved sex not just with your wife but with your sister and/or a low-castewoman.The Mahanirvana Tantra distinguishes between one’s own wife (svakiya), who ispermitted as a partner for the sexual ritual, and two forbidden women, another man’s wife and awoman used in common by the entire group (sadharana). ie Other Tantric texts from which theauthor of the Mahanirvana Tantra takes pains to distinguish himself permit both one’s own wifeand another man’s wife as partners. (His distaste for these texts is an instance of the sanitizingeffect.) The ritual contact with one’s own wife involves the use of her “flower,” a commoneuphemism for menstrual blood. The other women present in the ritual are referred to as shaktis,a term that may designate the women who are the partners of the other men participating in theritual.CASTE INVERSIONSTantra combines with the indifference to caste characteristic of many renunciantmovements the antipathy to caste characteristic of many bhakti movements.By the eleventh century the Tantras had been available in Sanskrit for some centuries,and Tantra had filtered into Brahmin circles, 91 particularly in Kashmir (in part through thewritings of Abhinavagupta), and into Kashmiri court circles. 92 But this did not by any meanslimit Tantric audiences to Brahmins; group worship in temples made possible the disseminationof Sanskrit texts to Sanskritless people, and the same would have been true of Tantric circles too.In contrast with the equivocal position of women in Tantra, there is massive evidence that evenmore than the bhakti movements, Tantra from the very start involved low-caste people. TheTantrics co-opted impurity, using human skulls for their begging bowls, eating nonvegetarianfood, and drinking alcohol; they included in their ranks cremation ground ascetics, who werecertainly not Brahmins, though not all were from the very lowest castes. 93 Tantra turns PuranicHindu forms upside down; many of its rituals and myths invert, literally or symbolically,Brahmin concepts of power and pollution.Some Tantras argue that there are only two castes, male and female; one Purana of aTantric hue argues that all creatures in the universe are the natural worshipers of Shiva andParvati, since all males are marked with the sign of the god Shiva (the linga) and join with

females, who have what Shiva’s consort has, a yoni. 94 In this view, just as our souls (atmans)replicate brahman within us, so our genitals are semiotic images of the divine, images that we allare born with and always carry on us, as others might acquire and carry a cross or a six-pointedstar or, closer to the Tantric home, a Shaiva trident.Some Tantrics refer to their group as one big happy family, a Kula, and the members oftheir sect as Kaulas. if The Mahanirvana Tantra uses this terminology as it flaunts its inclusion ofPariahs. As usual, Shiva is talking to Parvati:THE IRRELEVANCE OF CASTEAs the footprints of all living creatures disappear inside thefootprint of an elephant, so, all dharmas merge into the Kula dharma. How full of merit are theKaulas! They are themselves the very forms of places of pilgrimage, who by their mere contactpurify aliens, Pariahs, and the vilest people. As all the waters that flow into the Ganges becomethe Ganges, even so all who join in the Kula practice become Kaulas. As the water that flowsinto the sea is no longer separated [from the other waters in the sea], even so the people whoplunge into the water of the Kula are no longer separated [from the other people in the Kula]. Allthe two-footed creatures on the surface of the earth, beginning with Brahmins and ending withPariahs, all become masters in the Kula practice. . . . Any member of the Kula who will not allowinto the Kula a Pariah or a foreigner [Yavana, “a Greek”], thinking him low, or a woman,despising her, he, being truly low, goes to the lowest place. 95 The text assumes that on theone hand, Pariahs and aliens (mlecchas) are impure, as it boasts that contact with Tantrics willpurify them and that most people will not treat them (or women) with respect, but also, on theother hand, that they are not too low to be allowed into the Tantric circle, and if they join theFamily, they are to be treated with respect. The primary concern is not to uplift Pariahs but toextol the power of the Tantras: “If they can save Pariahs, imagine what they will do for aBrahmin!” Thus the text offers evidence of people on both sides of the fight for and againstcaste.The Tantras, like some of the Puranas, offer several related arguments to justify, on theone hand, the antinomian nature of certain Tantric texts and rituals and, on the other, theinclusion of people that caste Hindus generally exclude—even certain manifestations of the godShiva himself. Some Puranas say that Shiva himself is a Pariah, lower than a Shudra, 96 and invernacular folktales he is often sexually involved with Pariah women. 97 When Shiva appears asthe wandering beggar (Bhikshatana-murti), well known from Chola bronzes and stone carvingsin temples, he has a bell tied to his leg; as bells were worn by Pariahs in order to warn the uppercastes of their approach, the iconography “emphasizes in a way the belief that the god wasoutside the pale of orthodox Vedism.” 98 In this form, as well as in the form of Bhairava, Shiva isoften accompanied by a dog, the Pariah of the animal world.DEAD ANIMALSThe passage with which this chapter begins rejects the “natural” (sahaja) path to Release,denying that “the serpents and cattle and birds and fish” are instinctively pious. Yet animals playan essential part in Tantric ritual; the five substances of the cow are the model inverted by theFive Ms (or Five Fs), two of which are animal substances (fish and flesh). Various animals wereto be sacrificed to the goddess, including two of the Vedic pashus (goat and sheep) as well asdeer, buffalo, pig, porcupine, hare, lizard, tortoise, and rhinoceros. The animal was to be killedwith a sharp blow from a knife; then the officiating priest would place a lamp on the head of theanimal and offer the head to the goddess. 99Despite the linguistic overlay of the Vedic Gayatri hymn ig that the priest whispers into

the right ear of the animal, the sacrifice is not at all Vedic; it uses non-Vedic as well as Vedicsacrificial animals (omitting cattle and horses but including porcupines), with a non-Vediclaxness (almost any animal will do) and a non-Vedic bluntness (calling a spade a spade whenthey kill the animal). Moreover, where the Vedic ritual went out of its way to suffocate theanimal in order to minimize the spilling of blood, here the blood, so central to Tantra, is the mainpoint of the ritual.When it comes to vegetarianism, the Tantrics, like other Hindus, compromise: Theyallow the eating of meat sometimes and with a few restrictions, some of which are the same andsome different from those of the Brahmin imaginary:MEAT NOT TO EATAnyone who knowingly eats human flesh or the flesh of a cow will bepurified if he fasts for a fortnight; this is the prescribed restoration. A man who has eaten theflesh of an animal that has the form of a man, or the flesh of an animal that eats flesh, may purifyhimself of this evil by a three-day fast. A man who has eaten food cooked by foreigners, Pariahs,men who are like beasts, or enemies of the Kula—he may become pure by fasting for a fortnight.If he should knowingly eat the leftovers of these people, he should fast for a month; ifunknowingly, for a fortnight. If he eats food prepared by lower castes, even once, he should fastfor three days to purify himself.But if food prepared by a man who is like a beast, or by a Pariahor a foreigner, is placed within the Tantric circle or in the hand of a Tantric, one can eat itwithout incurring any evil. Anyone who eats forbidden food to save his life in time of death orfamine, in an emergency, or when it is a matter of life and death does not incur evil. No sins ofimproper eating count when food is eaten on the back of an elephant, on stones or logs so bigthat they can only be carried by several men, or where there is no one to notice anythingreprehensible. One should not kill animals whose flesh is not to be eaten, or diseased animals,not even for the sake of a divinity; anyone who does this commits an evil act. 100 This passagehas a fairly high-caste orientation. The flesh of cows is as special as that of humans, and thepenance for eating either one is the same as the one for eating food prepared by Pariahs, and notnearly as heavy as the penance for eating their leavings. The usual dharma-shastra rules foremergencies (anything goes) are here extended rather whimsically to eating on elephants or onvery large stones (why?) and rather cynically to moments when no one is looking. But the escapeclause of permission to eat animals for religious reasons is here ruled out of court. Indeed, if themeat has a different effect for someone who knowingly eats it, but not for the animal that knowsit is being killed for a sacrifice, the mental state of the sacrificer must matter more than that ofthe animal; eating meat is therefore no longer a moral or medicinal problem but a psychologicalproblem.The rules for not killing are not as complex as the rules for not eating:ANIMALS NOT TO KILLA man who knowingly kills a cow should fast for a month and theneat nothing but crumbs for a month; then for a third month he should eat only food that he hasbegged for. At the end of the penance, he should shave his head and feed members of the Kula,and both distant and close relatives. If he does it unknowingly, he should do half the penance,and he should not shave or cut his nails or wash his clothes until he has completed his vow. If acow is killed as a result of lack of care, a Brahmin is purified by fasting for eight days, aKshatriya for six days, a Vaishya for four, and a Shudra for two.If anyone willingly kills anelephant, camel, buffalo, or horse, he should fast for three days and then he is free of evil. If hekills a deer, ram, goat, or cat, he should fast for a day; for a peacock, parrot, or goose, he shouldfast as long as there is daylight. If he kills any other animals that have bones, he should eat noflesh for one night. If he kills living creatures that have no bones, he is purified merely by feeling

sorry. Kings who, when they are hunting, kill beasts, fish, or birds do not commit evil, for this isthe eternal dharma of kings. But one should always avoid injuring creatures except for the sakeof the gods; a man who injures creatures according to the sacred rules is not smeared by evil. 101Here, in contrast with the previous passage, there is a dispensation for killing for the sakeof the gods. And kings are forgiven their hunting, for Tantra is always inclined toward kings.The distinction between knowing and unknowing action, willing and (by implication) unwillingaction, is crowned by the unusual acknowledgment of remorse, a factor that is implicit butseldom explicit in earlier texts about vegetarianism; here it is enough merely to be sorry forcertain animals that you kill.SHAIVA TEMPLES, TANTRIC TEMPLESELEPHANTA AND ELLORARight before, during, and particularly after the reign of Harsha, the great phase of Hindutemple building that has been called the iconic or canonic period began, when structural templesbegan to supersede excavated ones, and each region developed in a different way. 102 InMaharashtra, the temple to Shiva on the island of Elephanta off the coast of Bombay testifies tothe power and prestige of the worship of Shiva at this time and illustrates several of the dominantmyths of Shiva, forming a base that the Tantrics often reversed in building their very differentrituals and myths. And the Kailasanatha (or Kailasa) temple of Shiva at Ellora demonstrates instone what Tantra did in ritual: turns conventional Hindu forms on their head.These two magnificent stone temples capture on the wing the transition betweenexcavated caves and freestanding rock-cut structural temples, for both of them aresimultaneously a cave and a temple. Michelangelo once remarked that the form of the figure thathe carved out of a stone was already there, hidden within the stone, and all he had to do was toremove those parts of the stone that were not a part of the figure. The same explanation could bemade for these extraordinary temples: The artisans simply (!) cut into the rock and removed allthe earth and stone that were not a part of a massive Hindu temple. They seem at first glance tobe purely natural caves, and the convex carvings within them are like the so-called self-created(svayambhu) lingas formed of natural rock growths (stalagmites and stalactites) or the temples inOrissa that look, from a distance, like gigantic mushrooms growing there. But then the artistrycomes into focus.Elephanta is almost certainly earlier than Ellora, generally attributed to Krishnaraja I ofthe Kalachuri dynasty (c. 550-55), who, together with other possible patrons, 103 was a devoutmember of the Shaiva Pashupata sect that was becoming prominent in this region at this time. 104The temples were created by carving out rock in such a way as to leave intact the forms of therows of columns and crossbeams, the internal spaces and the images. Sculptures depict Shiva andParvati marrying and, later, playing dice; Shiva bringing the Ganges from heaven to earth byletting it flow through his hair, Shiva dancing, Shiva as the great yogic teacher Lakulisha, Shivaimpaling an antigod on his trident, Shiva as the androgyne (Ardhanarishvara); and the linga. Onescene represents the myth, told in the Ramayana (7.16) and elsewhere, in which Ravana,objecting to the lovemaking of Shiva and Parvati on Kailasa, lifted up the mountain, whereuponShiva simply put his foot down hard on the mountain and imprisoned Ravana under it.As only 150 miles and two hundred years separate the great Shiva temples at Elephantaand Ellora, it is likely that the artisans of Ellora knew about Elephanta; they certainly adoptedtechniques from Elephanta, such as the use of basalt. More than thirty temples were carved fromthe hillside at Ellora between the sixth and ninth centuries CE. The Rashtrakutas built the

Kailasanatha temple to Shiva in the eighth century CE, taking over a site where there wasalready a much smaller cave temple. The Kailasa temple took fifteen years to complete. Many ofthe craftsmen were imported from the kingdoms of the defeated Chalukyas and Pallavas. As aresult, the temple tower resembles the “chariots” at Mamallapuram, and the style of theKailasanatha temple echoes, though on a far grander scale, aspects of the Pallava shore temple atMamallapuram built during the same period.The architects of Ellora excavated the great cave right out of the living basalt of thehillside, leaving, on the floor of the courtyard at the base, freestanding, life-size rock-cutelephants and two massive rock-cut columns, as well as the temple itself, whose tower rises to aheight of about ninety feet, or, one might say, whose base is cut down to about ninety feet. Theresult is an inverted or inside-out temple that one has to climb down into in order to enter, anegative temple like a negative number, turning conventional architectural forms upside down. Itsolves the problem of decorating the outside of a cave. For since worshipers wouldcircumambulate outside the temple (or stupa), people grew to expect temples to have theirdecorations on the outside. But the early cave temples could be decorated only inside. Thesolution was to hollow out the hill and then build a temple whose outside was inside the hill. Theornate exterior of the mass isolated by the deep trenches, replete with columns and parapets andmoldings, becomes an extended trompe l’oeil, or optical illusion, looking as if it had been builtup like other temples. The artisans also hollowed out the inside (leaving the columns to supportit), so that one can also wander inside it just like any other temple. But unlike other temples, thisone is a combination of a cave and a mountain.The temple as a whole was conceived as a replica of the Himalayan peak of MountKailasa, the home of the god Shiva. 105 Most of the individual scenes and figures, exquisitelycarved, depict Shiva and Parvati, but there is also a magnificent image of Durga killing thebuffalo. The artists even went so far as to carve, under the temple, at the bottom of the wholecolossal edifice, the image of Ravana being trapped by Shiva under Mount Kailasa, 106 a scenealso carved at Elephanta. But the Ellora version has a difference, which echoes the bold negativecarving of the temple as a whole: The image of Ravana, connected to the mother rock only at hisknees and his many arms, is otherwise completely detached from the background and carved inthe round. 107 Ravana is thus finally separated from the rest of the monument and left connectedto the dark underworld from which the artists had freed the temple, the “mother rock” that gavebirth to everything else but held him back. Later Ramayanas, beginning in the Tamil tradition,tell of a shadow Ravana (“Peacock Ravana,” Mayili-Ravana) who lived in a shadow universeunder the earth, 108 like this Ravana underground at Ellora. We might also see the Kailasa templeas an image of the upside-down world that Trishanku created.

The Kailasanatha Temple at Ellora.KHAJURAHO AND KONARAKTwo other great temple complexes deserve our consideration here; though both were builtsomewhat later than the period covered by this chapter, they are best understood in the context ofTantra. The images in the temples of Khajuraho and Konarak are solid evidence of the widespread of sectarian worship at this time, and some of the Shaiva sects represented there wereTantric.Khajuraho, the capital of the small kingdom of Bundelkhand that the Chandellas ruled,was a busy cultural center where poets, grammarians, and playwrights rubbed shoulders withaffluent Jaina merchants and court officials. 109 Monastic Hindu establishments that arose andgrew powerful during this period encouraged the kings to build extravagant temples between 900and 1150 CE. 110 The great complex of twenty-five temples at Khajuraho and the smaller,exquisite temple in the shape of the chariot of the sun at Konarak, as well as other temples inBhubaneshwar in Orissa (and in Assam and Katmandu), are noted for the carvings of couples inerotic embraces—often called maithuna figures—that decorate their outer walls. Some of thecouples are quite demure, gently kissing or fondling each other, but others are in full sexualpenetration, “making ingenious love,” 111 some in positions that the Kama-sutra warns can onlybe mastered with practice.

The Temple of the Sun at Konarak, in Orissa, decorated with such figures, was built bythe young Narasimhadeva I (1238-58 CE), allegedly to please his mother (a strangely Oedipalgift). It is entirely in the form of a chariot, and the sun is depicted on it in miniature, with his owncharioteer driving his seven horses, another instance of the whole replicated within itself.Enormous, three-dimensional animals—kneeling elephants crushing warriors and warhorsesoverwhelming demons—flank the chariot that is the temple, and a frieze depicting both wild andtame elephants, as well as amorous couples, encloses the lower wall. “Colossal stone wheels,each intricately carved, were positioned along its flanks and a team of massive draught horses,also stone-cut, reared seawards, apparently scuffing and snorting under the strain.” 112 Thoughimages carved on the temple show the Man-Lion (Narasimha, one of the avatars of Vishnu)worshiping images of Durga and Jagannatha (another form of Vishnu), it is dedicated to theworship of the sun (Surya), a Vedic god who still had the power to inspire the ruling family toconstruct this monument.Less explicit (i.e., noncopulating) erotic figures are carved on many other Hindu templesthroughout India. (Even Buddhist stupas are often graced by the buxom tree spirits calledYakshis or Yakshinis and the gorgeous courtesan nymphs called Apsarases.) These more mutederotic scenes are a part of the attempt to represent the whole of the material world on the outerwalls of temples, both to celebrate the beauty of the world and, perhaps, to gather up all thesensual forces there so that the worshipers can leave them behind as they progress deeper towardthe still center of the temple. Such images promise the worshiper the blessings of fertility as wellas eroticism. Three levels of eroticism are depicted with very different degrees of prominence:The sexy women are the largest images; the amorous couples are not nearly so large; and thescenes of group sex, stylized and geometrically arranged, are smaller still. The few obscenefriezes are very small indeed and placed at difficult-to-spot places, perhaps a private joke on thepart of the sculptors who carved the temples.The actual maithuna couples on Khajuraho and Konarak also partake of these generalpowers of fertility but may be meant to invoke, in addition, the magical efficacy that the sexualact was supposed to have to protect monuments, which may explain why the erotic images areoften placed at the ritually vulnerable parts of temples. 113 Alternatively, the images may havebeen placed at meeting points of buildings so as to play on “a visual pun between juncture andcopulation.” 114 The erotic couples on these temples are often said to be Tantric; Khajuraho wasan important center for various Tantric sects, 115 and the Chandellas were probably Tantrics. 116 Afew friezes at Khajuraho and more in Assam may be specific references to Tantric rituals. 117 Foron them, the positioning of the couples (and sometimes groups of three or more) agrees withdetails of some Tantric texts. Some of the gorgeous women seem to be not Yakshis or Apsarasesbut Tantric Yoginis, more particularly in some temples the sixty-four Yoginis that the Tantrasspeak of, 118 some with animal faces. 119 The significant number of Yogini temples constructedbetween the eighth and twelfth centuries lends weight to the argument that these were the placeswhere Tantric rituals took place. 120 One art historian has commented on the “curious paradox”that some of the temples at Khajuraho “can only be fully appreciated today by being viewedfrom the air.” 121 Were they meant to be viewed by flying Yoginis?The Chandellas built one temple at Khajuraho at the time of Mahmud of Ghazni’s firstinvasion of India 122 and the Khandariya Mahadeva temple, the greatest of them all, during thesubsequent Ghaznavid invasions, though the invading forces never came near Khajuraho. Whiletemples were not necessarily built in response to these invasions (they are equally, if not more, aresponse to the erosion of Vedic ritual and the rise of new forms of sectarian worship), the

uilding of temples took on new meaning in the presence of Islamic kingdoms and armies. Thetemple carvings abound in martial themes—warriors, weaponry, elephants, big horses rearingand leaping. 123 To the limited extent that temple building is a political act, these templeseloquently express the Hindu rulers’ defiance of the Muslim invaders. 124It is perhaps puzzling that though the erotic images on these temples would have beenanathema to pious Muslims, they were never the victims of Muslim iconoclasm. They may havebeen spared because the Ghaznavids did not get to Khajuraho and the Mughals got there onlyafter the Chandellas had deserted the temples, which had then faded from prominence andweren’t marked on Aurangzeb’s maps. 125 The Orissan temples, as well as the temple ofJagannatha at Puri (built during Muhammad bin Tughluq’s reign, in the late tenth to late eleventhcenturies), 126 may have escaped because they were too remote to attract Muslim attention. Orcould it be that the Muslims, who were, after all, themselves past masters of erotic poetry andpainting, cast an appreciative eye upon the carvings and simply rode by?CHAPTER 16FUSION AND RIVALRY UNDER THE DELHI SULTANATE650 to 1500 CECHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES CE)570-632 Muhammad livesc. 650 Arabs reach theIndus711-715 Arabs invade Northwest India1001 Mahmud of Ghazni (979-1030) raids NorthIndia1192-1206 Muhammad of Ghor establishes Ghorid capital at Delhi1210-1526 The DelhiSultanate is in power1325-1351 Muhammad bin Tughluq reignsc. 1200 Early orders of Sufisarise in North Indiac. 1200 Virashaivas, including Basava, live in South Indiac. 1336-1565Vijayanagar Empire is in its primec. 1398-1448 Kabir lives1469-1539 Guru Nanak foundsSikhism in the PunjabRAMA AND RAHIMThe Hindu says Ram is the beloved, the Turk saysRahim. Then theykill each other.Kabir, 1398-1448 1 Even if I am killed, I will not give up repeating the names of Rama andRahim, which mean to me the same god. With these names on my lips, I will die cheerfully.Mahatma Gandhi, 1947The prophetic words of Gandhi, which he spoke just nine months before he was killed,apparently with those names on his lips, ih turn the more cynical words of Kabir on their head. Itwould be good for us to keep the two sides of this paradigm in mind as we consider the history ofHindus among Muslims in India. As Hindus responded to the various cultural transformationswrought by the Muslim presence, new religious ideas also arose to challenge the Brahminimaginary.SUNNIS AND SUFIS AND SHAIVAS, OH MY!In dealing with all but the earliest periods of Indian history, we gave up even thesemblance of tracing any single historical center and settled for a selection of peripheries. Westill have those peripheries, more than ever, in both the Hindu and the Muslim worlds, thoughnow we also have two moments when there are serious contenders for a center, first the DelhiSultanate and then the Mughal Empire. But even when there was a center for government, there

was never a center for religion. Here, as so often, the main action, and the main evidence, are tobe found not so much among the ruins of Delhi and in the chronicles of its sultans as in therecords and remains of a dozen other capitals scattered across the subcontinent—Jaunpur,Ahmedabad, Mandu, Chitor, Vijayanagar, Gaur, and many others. 2 Both the Hindu and theMuslim rulers are plural, not only in generally succeeding one another rather quickly but in beingvery different one from another. The messages from Delhi were therefore very different atdifferent periods, and so were the messages sent back to Delhi.Just as the term “Hindu” dissolved upon closer examination at the very start of this story,so now does the category of “Muslim.” Historians often invoke terms like “Hindu kingdom” incontrast with “Muslim sultanate,” but “Hindu” and “Muslim” are seldom the most basic way todistinguish one group from another. For religious differences were often overridden bydifferences in language, ethnicity, food, clothing, and much more. Most of our sources refer toethnicities, not to religion; the Hindus generally thought of the Delhi sultans and their people notas Muslims but as Arabs and, later, Turks, often confusing the two groups, calling them all(Arabs as well as Turks) Turks (“Turuskas”) and regarding them all, like all non-Hindus, asbarbarians (mlecchas). The Hindus also had very different attitudes toward the rulers, on the onehand, and the resident traders and clerks, on the other; though some Turkish or Arab rulersdestroyed Hindu temples, breeding lasting resentment, the ordinary Muslims who worshiped inmosques and Sufi shrines were seldom a problem for Hindus, who had high regard for most Araband Turkish traders, particularly horse traders.The terms by which Hindus (more precisely, the people we call Hindus) referred to thepeople we call Muslims suggest assimilation rather than hostility. The term “Mus-ala-mana”(“one who submits to Allah”) is seldom used; this left Hindus the options of designatingMuslims by their different ethnic and spatial origins or by using any of several generic terms fornon-Hindus. Inscriptions and Sanskrit texts have no single term for the foreigners that the Hindusknew, but use Yavana (“Ionian” or “Greek”), mleccha (“barbarian”), and Turuska (“Turk”)interchangeably for Greeks, Persians, and Turks. There is irony in the fact that the stereotype ofthe Turk who destroys temples and idols, appropriates the temple lands of Brahmins, and eatsbeef became so clichéd, so generalized to the Terrible Other, 3 that the Kashmir chronicle, in1148 CE, describing a Hindu king who plundered temples and had excrement and wine pouredover the statues of gods called him a Turk (Turuska). 4Some Hindus assimilated the Turks by creating ingenious, and positive, Sanskrit glossesfor Arabic words and names: Thus the Ghorids became the Gauri-kula (“family of fair people” or“family of the golden goddess [Parvati]”), sultans became Sura-tranas (“protectors of the gods”),and Muhammad (or Mahmud) became Maha-muda (“great joy”). An inscription, in Sanskrit andArabic, from 1264 CE about the construction of a mosque in Gujarat, at Somnath (a place ofgreat historical controversy, as we will see), describes the mosque in Hindu terms, as a site ofdharma (dharma-sthana), where people did puja in order to gain merit ( punya karma). 5 Mostsignificantly, the inscription begins by using the same word ii to denote both Shiva and Allah,invoking (“Om! Namah!”) Shri Vishvanatha (“Lord of the Universe”), meaning both the Hindugod Shiva as Somanatha and “the divinity to whom those whose prophet (bodhaka) wasMuhammad were attached ( pratibaddha).”On the other side, the Arabs and Turks usually did not think of the Hindus as Hindus; ijthey thought of them as Vaishnavas, or Bengalis, or brilliant artists or airheads, as the case mightbe. Yet they certainly did notice that there were in India people who belonged to religionsdifferent from their own, including Buddhists, and they labeled themselves now with a word for

Muslim (or, more particularly, Sunni or Sufi), in contrast with the general Hindu sectarian labels(Vaishnava or Shaiva) or, more likely, specific Hindu sects (Virashaiva or Sahajiya). With thisinitial caution, let us proceed, still using the indispensable terms “Hindu” and “Muslim” butattempting, wherever possible, to nuance them.ISLAM IN INDIA BEFORE THE DELHI SULTANATEThere is abundant and fascinating evidence, an embarrassment of riches, about therelationship between Hindus and Muslims in India from shortly after the time of the ProphetMuhammad, in the seventh century CE. The sources now include many more foreign visitors; inplace of the occasional Greeks or Chinese in earlier periods, we now have a full Arabic andPersian historiography, beginning with Al-biruni (973-1048), who came to India, learnedSanskrit, translated Hindu texts, and wrote about the religion (sic: he regarded it as unified) ofIndia. After him came a succession of other great historiographers of India who wrote in Persianand Arabic, such as Ziya’-ud-Din Barani (1285- 1357), Abu al-Malik ’Isami (d. 1350), and IbnBatuta (1304-1368/1377). 6 After the first few more or less contemporary Turko-Persianchroniclers, it was later Arab rather than Turkish historians who generally kept the record of thetimes (often in retrospect), even for the Turkish rulers.Islam in India began not with the political conquest of India by Mahmud of Ghazni butmuch earlier, when the Muslims entered India not as conquerors but as merchants. We havenoted the Arab presence in South India from before the time of the Prophet. Before 650, Arabshad made desultory raids by sea on the lower Sind, to protect the trade route carrying Arabianhorses to India and Indian spices to Arabia. By 650 Arabs had also reached the Indus River, andthough they rarely crossed it, 7 their ideas swam across. In the sixty years after Harsha’s death in647, Arabs established a Muslim bridgehead in Sind, a region that the Huns had devastated,Harsha had later infiltrated, and now was largely Buddhist. 8 Then, in around 663, Arab forcescrossed the Bolan pass (near Quetta in Pakistan) 9 from Afghanistan into Sind. 10 Peacefully, theytraded horses for spices. Only later did the martial invasions come, first by Arabs and then byTurks (from many parts of Central Asia) and Mongols.In 713, Muhammad ibn Qasim invaded Sind, offering terms of surrender that included apromise to guarantee the safety of Hindu and Buddhist establishments and to allow Brahmin andBuddhist monks to collect alms and temples to receive donations. Hindus and Buddhists wereallowed to govern themselves in matters of religion and law; Ibn Qasim’s people did not regardnon-Muslims as heathens who had to be subdued. 11 He kept his promises, though he did imposedthe jizya, 12 a tax on male adults who would have been liable to military service if they had beenMuslims; non-Muslims were excused from this duty but required instead to pay for their militaryprotection. His forces could not hold Sind, but the soldiers stayed on, intermarried, and broughtMuslim teachers and mosques into the subcontinent. At the same time, in the wealthy Gujaratiport of Bhadreshwar, the local Jaina rulers, eager to trade with the Arabs, had allowed theresident Ismaili merchants to build mosques in that area. 13THE DELHI SULTANATEAlmost three centuries later, the Turks, Persians, and Afghans entered India through thetraditional routes of the northwest. On November 27, 1001, the Turkish Mahmud of Ghazni (inAfghanistan) successfully invaded India, near Peshawar. The ruler whom he captured bought hisfreedom for fifty elephants but acknowledged the loss of caste implicit in capture, abdicated infavor of his son, and climbed on his own funeral pyre. 14 In 1004 Mahmud crossed the Indus,

fought again, and established a base in the Punjab, from which he continued to carry out raids; in1018 he sacked Mathura (a great pilgrimage center on the Yamuna River, for worshipers ofKrishna) and then Kanauj (which had been Harsha’s capital) and is said to have come away withfifty-three thousand slaves and 350 elephants. 15 Turkish communities were also established inthe region of Varanasi and elsewhere. 16 It was a boom area for immigration from Persia andCentral Asia, and this greatly added to the cosmopolitanism of the subcontinent, since cultureunder what became the Ghaznavid Empire in India (that is, the empire ruled by people fromGhazni) was “a blend of Greek philosophy, Roman architecture, Hindu mathematics, and thePersian concept of empire.” 17For the next four centuries, the northern and central part of the subcontinent saw analmost bewildering array of kings and dynasties, with constant warfare between (and within)them, punctuated by sibling power struggles. From 1192 to 1206 Muhammad of Ghor ruled fromhis capital at Delhi. One of his successors was a woman named Raziya, who ruled for four years,ending in 1240. She was said to be wise, just, and generous, as well as an effective general, andshe brought peace to the country. Disdaining the veil, she went among her people in a cap andcoat, like a man. She appointed as her personal attendant an Abyssinian who was probably oncea slave and definitely an African. 18 Conspirators captured her, killed her Abyssinian friend, andimprisoned her. She married one of the conspirators and marched with him (and with an army inwhich there were many Hindus) on Delhi, where she let her ally play the general, badly; she wasmuch more at home than he in the saddle. They were defeated. 19 In 1350, a century afterRaziya’s death, the historian Isami objected to her blatant interracial liaison, 20 remarking that awoman’s place was at her spinning wheel (charkha). This may be the earliest reference in Indiato a spinning wheel, which the Turks apparently imported from Iran. (The sexism they alreadyhad in India, thank you.)Several of Muhammad of Ghor’s successors were regarded as slaves, ik and their dynastyas a slave dynasty, because they had once been Turkish captives. 21 Ala-ud-din Khalji, an Afghanwho ruled from Delhi for twenty years (1296- 1316), captured, redeemed, and made a seniorcommander a Hindu eunuch and slave named Kafur, who converted to Islam. 22 Holy wars(jihads) flared up from time to time, more often politically motivated than religiously inspired,but playing the religion card to rally support, and royal policy toward Hinduism and Islam duringthese five centuries varied widely. Ala-ud-din sacked and plundered Devagiri but then madepeace, married a Maharashtra woman, prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol, and leftthe kingdom and its religions otherwise intact. 23 His son is best remembered for parading a lineof naked prostitutes on the terraces of the royal palaces and making them pee on the nobles asthey entered below. 24Then came Muhammad bin Tughluq, whom some regarded as a cruel, bloodthirsty,lunatic tyrant, others as a philosopher king and a genius. 25 He challenged the Muslim ulama (thearbiters of Shari‘a law, a kind of Muslim conservative supreme court), the intellectual elite, bypromoting Indian Muslims of low-caste origin, newcomers to the court, 26 both because he wasnot a religious bigot and because he saw the advantage of accommodating non-Muslims inIndia. 27 He took a great interest in Jainas, one of whom was very influential at his court. 28 Onething that can be said of Tughluq is that although many suffered under his rule, at least he waseven-handed. 29His successor, Feroz Shah Tughluq (1351-1388), desecrated the shrine of Jagannath atPuri, was said to have massacred infidels, 30 and extended the jizya to Brahmins (who had been,until then, exempt). On the other hand, Feroz Shah redeemed a number of Hindu slaves as well

as an African eunuch slave who founded the Sharqi kingdom of Jaunpur; 31 the eunuch’ssuccessors, whom he had to adopt, being unable to beget them, were also of African origin andbecame a powerful dynasty. 32 The sultanate continued until Babur founded the Mughal Empirein 1526.In general, the sultanate rulers did not attempt a mass conversion of Hindus, 33 but manyHindus did convert to Islam during this period, usually but not only low-caste laborers andcraftspeople and, frequently, captives. 34 On the northwest frontier, some Hindus switched bothpolitical allegiance and religion and fought for the Ghaznavids. 35 In the course of conversion,Islamic figures (such as gods and saints) and concepts might be added to Hindu ones, identifiedwith Hindu ones, or, occasionally, taken up in place of Hindu ones, eliminating them from thepantheon. 36The Delhi sultans levied the jizya, graduated according to income, with exemptions forpeople at both ends of the social spectrum, the poorest 37 and (until Feroz Shah changed the rule)the purest, the Brahmins. 38 There is also evidence of the existence of a “Turkish” (Turuska) tax,which may have been a poll tax on Muslims in India, a Hindu equivalent of the Muslim jizya. 39Taxes under the Delhi Sultanate seem to have been motivated much more by the need forrevenue than by religious sentiments. Some Hindus also responded to the presence of Islam by aseries of measures designed to strengthen their own religion, such as enormous land grants toBrahmins, which meant more taxes to generate revenues that could be converted into thosegrants (exacerbating social oppression and caste discrimination 40 ), as well as endowing templesand providing social services on the local level (which mitigated that same oppression anddiscrimination).The Brahmins were in a bind: They wanted to keep the barbarians out, but they also hadto assimilate and legitimize the foreign rulers in order to keep temporal support for themselves.Their two options for the representation of mlecchas were either to legitimize them, as acontingent strategy, or to blame them for the destruction of social order. Within the first option,legitimation, lineages could be appropriated; an inscription from 1369 traces the descent of asultan from the lineage of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata.As for blame, the Brahmins could always fall back on myths such as the flood, as in alate-fourteenth-century poem from South India that describes the desecrated temples: “Like theTurushkas who know no limits, the Kaveri has forgotten her ancient boundaries and bringsfrequent destruction with her floods.” A Chandella inscription from 1261 speaks of a king who,like Vishnu (in his avatar as the boar), lifted up the earth when it was submerged in an ocean ofTurushkas; another calls the Turushkas the great burden of the earth, and likens to Vishnu as theboar the Hindu ruler who conquers them and relieves the earth’s burden. 41 But the very samemyth is used in reverse in another inscription, from 1491, which depicts Turushkas, Shakas(Scythians), and mleccha s as shouldering the great burden of the earth and relieving Vishnu ofhis worries. It is difficult to argue that chronologically one representation replaces the other. 42The negative and positive views coexisted, as did the people who held them.HORSES AND HORSE TRADERSWe have noted the role played by horses in the invasion of India from the time of theIndo-Europeans and Vedic peoples, and then, at regular intervals, by horsemen from Greece,Scythia, and Central Asia. Intimacy with, and mastery of, horses are the common property ofIndo-Europeans and the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. 43 We have also noted in passing theconstant need for native rulers to import horses into India and the importance of the horse trade

in bringing Arabs and Turks (and, with them, Islam) to South India. Horses continued to play acentral role in the activities of the Turkic peoples who founded the Delhi Sultanate. Here is alsothe place, however, to remark upon the importance of elephants, 44 which supplemented horses inessential ways, the tank corps division that supported the cavalry. Elephants were far bettersuited to the environment, but they were even more expensive than horses (the Mughal emperorBabur complained about how much it cost to feed them: as much as two strings of camels 45 ).Together, horses and elephants were simultaneously essential military equipment and luxurystatus symbols, like Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces.Central Asia, probably one of the first places where horses were domesticated, producedgreat horses as well as great horsemen and horse breeders. Mahmud of Ghazni had the advantageof having his forces mounted on Central Asian horses; the most an Indian could hope for in anencounter with them was “perhaps a fleeter horse.” 46 Al-biruni remarked that the Turks werefamous for their horses, Kandahar (in Afghanistan) for its elephants, and India for its armies. 47When Muhammad bin Tughluq recruited men from western and Central Asia, he made themsubmit to a test of equestrian skill before he signed them on. 48 The Turkish conquerorsintroduced polo into India in the thirteenth century; 49 Muhammad of Ghor’s successor was killedin 1210 when his polo pony fell on him in the course of a game. 50Once they got to India, the Turks had to import most of their horses rather than breedthem in India. A steady stream of Central Asian imports was “seemingly vital to the virility ofMuslim rule.” 51 The Deccan sultans and their opposite numbers, the martial Hindu Kshatriyas ofMaharashtra and the kings of Vijayanagar, imported Arabian horses on a large scale, “in order toimprove the breed of cavalry horses in their own districts.” 52 The best horses were imported fromCentral Asia (“Turki” horses), Iran or Arabia (“Tazi” horses). 53 Marco Polo (1254-1324), whovisited India in around 1292, remarked that the Pandyan ruler of Madurai imported two thousandhorses a year, “and so do his four brothers.” 54 South Indians, particularly in the vicinity ofMadurai, still tell stories about the Pandyan kings’ energetic importation of horses. 55 There isample testimony from both foreign il and Indian sources that South Indians imported as many asfourteen thousand horses a year. 56 One of the sixteenth-century South Indian kings ofVijayanagar is reputed to have imported thirteen thousand horses annually for his own personaluse and for his officers, 57 and ten thousand Arab and Persian horses were imported into Malabarevery year. 58Vijayanagar was a conspicuous consumer of foreign imports, including “the desiderata ofevery Indian army, namely horses, mostly from the Persian Gulf, and some fire-arms.” Manyhorses died onboard ship, for they cannot throw up, and so their seasickness is almost alwaysfatal; they develop severe colic and often die of a twisted gut. Since shipping such fragile andvaluable cargo in a pitching ship was a costly and risky venture, 59 to encourage people toundertake the risk of shipping horses who might well die at sea, “it was said that the Vijayanagarrulers would pay even for dead ones.” 60 When Vijayanagar was at war with Portugal, thePortuguese monopoly of the horse trade simultaneously deprived Vijayanagar of importantrevenues and interfered with the supply of remounts. 61The need to import horses was exacerbated, according to many foreign observers, from atleast the time of the Delhi Sultanate, by the Indian habit of feeding their horses inappropriatefoods. 62 Marco Polo insisted that horses in India died from the climate and from unsuitablefeeding; even if they bred, they produced “nothing but wretched wry-legged weeds.” 63 A fewcenturies later Akbar’s historian Abu’l Fazl testified that in addition to grass when available, andhay when there was no grass, horses were fed boiled peas or beans, flour, sugar, salt, molasses,

and, to cap it all, ghee. 64 Other sources agree that lacking the right sort of fodder grasses and hay,people in India fed horses mainly wheat, barley, and gram and mixed these grains with all sortsof stuff: cow’s milk, coarse brown sugar, sometimes even boiled mutton mixed with ghee, 65 tothe horror of Middle Eastern and European visitors. 66No oats were grown in India until the nineteenth century. By that time Rudyard Kipling’sfather, who was a veterinarian, concluded that the Indian diet was detrimental to the horse’s liverand caused many diseases and high mortality rates. 67 Much of this criticism, from the Delhisultans to the Kiplings, smacks of foreign prejudice and imperial self-justification. Surely theforeign horsemen could use their own good horse sense when it came to feeding, as well as bringalong some of their own grooms. The ghee mash legend may be one of those canards that justgot repeated over and over. On the other hand, people do tend to feed their most precious horses(and dogs) the things that they themselves like best (like chocolates), which often provedisastrous.The importing of bloodstock was therefore “India’s main extravagance.” 68 During thesultanate period, Persian and Arabian horses were called bahri (“sea-borne”), because they wereimported, perilously, by sea. 69 Many were brought in overland, but they too underwent hardshipsand losses. Horses were far too expensive 70 to use as farm animals or beasts of burden, and inany case, the heat and humidity made them fairly useless for that sort of work, 71 which wasusually done by water buffalo or oxen. Horses were mostly used for war, as cavalry,supplemented by elephants. 72 Thus the horse remained a Kshatriya animal, with all the negativeconnotations of that class—power, domination, extortion (by tax collectors who rode into thevillages on horseback), death—to which was now added a major new factor: Many of theseKshatriyas were not Hindus but Muslims. Horses therefore both affected the practicalrelationships between Hindus and Muslims and functioned, in art and literature, as a symbolicgauge of shifting attitudes within those relationships.DESECRATION OF TEMPLESAs we turn now to less positive aspects of interactions between the Delhi sultans and theHindus, this is a moment for a hindsight alert: Nowadays the story of Hinduism as told by Hindunationalists always includes a chapter on the Horrid Things Those Bad Muslims Did. Hindunationalism has given prominence and importance to stories of victims and victimizers thatotherwise would have been just drops in the ocean of vicious battles that have plagued thesubcontinent, indeed the planet, for millennia. Yet it is true that some Muslims did Do HorridThings, including that great breeding ground of resentment, the desecration of temples.The Muslim rulers of India in this period were not all alike in their treatment of Hindutemples. Some Muslim rulers, like some Hindu rulers before them, destroyed Hindu temples. 73Desecration was not necessarily prompted by bigotry, 74 though some rulers might well havebeen motivated (or have claimed to be motivated) by religious fanaticism, a hatred of idolatry orpolytheism or any religion but Islam. Some, lured by the legendary wealth of the temples, 75 did itto get the plunder, and others went for the temples because as we saw in South India, the templeswere the centers of political and economic power. Piety and greed, so often paired, operated heretoo: Images of gods were made of solid gold, 76 and the temples were also filled with treasuresthat Hindu rulers had already stolen from other Hindu temples and from Buddhist stupas. 77Moreover, temples were not only places of worship and banks but also political symbols and, attimes, military strongholds. They could also be hostages: In parts of Sind in the tenth century,Arab families that ruled what was still a largely non-Muslim population would threaten to

vandalize the city’s most revered temple whenever “trouble stirred or invasion threatened.” 78Think “marauding nomads” rather than “fanatical Muslims.”Mahmud of Ghazni, an observant Sunni, took a great deal of gold, silver, and preciousstones from the images of the Mathura temple in 1004 and then burned it to the ground. 79 In1026 he attacked the temple of Somanatha (Somnath), which held a famous Shiva linga; thismuch, at least, seems to be historical fact. Then comes the mythmaking. According to someversions of the story but not others, he stripped the great gilded linga of its gold and hacked it tobits with his sword, sending the bits back to Ghazni, where they were incorporated into the stepsof the new Jami Masjid (“Friday Mosque”). 80 Triumphalist early Turko-Persian sources paid agreat deal of attention to this event; medieval Hindu epics of resistance created acountermythology in which the stolen image came to life and eventually, like a horse returning tothe stable, returned to the temple to be reconsecrated; 81 and British historiographers made muchof it for their own purposes (such as the claim that they had rescued the Hindus from oppressionby Muslims). Other sources, including local Sanskrit inscriptions, biographies of kings andmerchants of the period, court epics, and popular narratives that have survived, give their ownversions of the event. 82 Here is a good example of history making mythmaking history.When Muhammad of Ghor routed the Rajputs in 1192, his armies massacred the peopleand plundered and destroyed many monuments. 83 In Varanasi, according to the rather boastingaccounts of some of the Arab chroniclers, his forces demolished the idols in a thousand temples,carted away fourteen hundred camel loads of treasure, and rededicated the temples “to theworship of the true God.” 84 They left intact the exquisite Jaina temples carved out ofnear-translucent white marble between 950 and 1304 CE in Gujarat, most famously at MountAbu, the exterior of which is rather plain, not unlike a mosque. The plain façade may have beenan intentional reversal of the pattern of Hindu temples, which kept the interior plain and saved allthe ornamentation for the outer wall, and may have been intended precisely as “a protectionagainst Turko-Afghan attacks.” 85Ala-ud-din, who had left Devagiri more or less intact in 1296, two years later attackedSomnath (which the Hindus had rebuilt after Mahmud of Ghazni’s depredations more than 250years earlier) and, allegedly, redemolished it, again hammering the (replacement) linga intofragments to pave the ground for Muslim feet, this time in Delhi. 86 (Romila Thapar’s study ofSomnath 87 documents the Hindu claim that the Muslims destroyed the same shrine again andagain. 88 ) In Citamparam, Ala-ud-din’s forces attacked the Nataraja temple and destroyed thelingas that “the kick of the horse of Islam,” as one Indo-Persian poet put it, had not previouslyattempted to break. 89 Ala-ud-din’s successor, the redeemed slave Kafur, conquered Andhra, richin diamonds, which was ruled by a queen acting as regent for her grandson; he stripped thetemple cities of Madurai, Shrirangam, and Citamparam of their solid-gold idols, and carried off612 elephants and 20,000 horses. 90 The attack on Shrirangam inspired a rich mythology,according to which, when the image of Vishnu as Ranganatha was captured by the sultan’s armyand taken north, it came to life by night and seduced the sultan’s daughter (who, in one account,died of a broken heart and in another was absorbed into the image), and was eventually returnedto the Shrirangam temple, often with the help of the theologian Ramanuja. To this day theRanganatha image receives daily puja in the style of the sultan’s court, complete with foodcooked in the North Indian style. 91Some of the theft, rather than destruction, of Hindu images by Muslim conquerors was akind of recycling, Indian style. Like cannibalism, consuming the parts of someone else’sreligious monument may either dishonor the source (destroying and desecrating it) or honor it

(taking to yourself the power and status of the source). But putting the stones on the ground to betrodden on by people of another religion was unequivocally adding insult to injury. It was theorder of the day to destroy other people’s religious monuments and steal their treasures; theMuslims had no monopoly on that. The whole basis of Hindu kingship, beginning with the cattleraids of the Rig Veda, was the desire for land and plunder. In the sultanate period, an invadingarmy was expected to loot the local temple, and when people told stories about invasions, theyalways mentioned such looting, whether the teller was a court historian or an old fellow in thelocal toddy shop, and whether the looting had happened or not. Certainly there was exaggeration.With each telling, the temple got richer and richer, and the army had more and more elephants. 92Not surprisingly, these acts provoked some resistance, and the tall stories provoked both tallerdeeds and taller stories, such as the claim, made by contemporary Muslim sources, that a Hindunamed Bartuh killed 120,000 Muslims in Awadh in Uttar Pradesh in around 1220. 93“Here be dragons,” the maps of medieval Europe used to say, and a map of medievalIndia should certainly say, “Here be monsters.” The landscape was peopled by inhuman humanrulers on both sides. The difference is not merely that some Muslims may have had theadditional incentive of iconoclasm but that for the most part during this period the Turks hadmore power to destroy Hindus than Hindus to destroy Turks. But the will, including, in manyquarters, goodwill, was there on both sides.ON THE OTHER HAND . . .In addition to the monsters on both sides, there were on both sides if not angels at leastpeople who resisted the infinite regress of bloodbaths and retributions, who respected otherpeople’s religions or, at the very least, were indifferent to them. Dear reader, you will not besurprised to learn that some of the Delhi sultans were horrible, and others were decent blokes.Some of the Muslim rulers of India have been called “India-oriented, mystical and inclusive,”while others were “Mecca-oriented, prophetic and exclusive.” 94 The conquests, like mostconquests, were pretty brutal: temples sacked, people murdered. But when the battles ended, theconquerors, dramatically outnumbered, had to administer a gigantic territory, and compromiseswere made. The situation itself was unbalanced; one group had power over the others. Butindividual rulers shifted the balance for better or for worse. And the same Hindu political theorythat caused so much of the trouble (“the country on my border is my enemy; the enemy of myenemy is my friend”) also mitigated some of it; the Rashtrakutas, for instance, encouragedHindu-Muslim relations and protected Muslim merchants, not through any particularly liberalprinciples of tolerance but because their enemies, the Gurjara Pratiharas, were the enemies of theArabs of Sind, making said Arabs the Rashtrakutas’ natural allies. 95In the culture at large, Hindus adopted a number of Muslim social customs. When theroyal women of the Turks and the Rajputs first met, the Muslim women did not keep particularlyrigidly to purdah; they joined in the drinking parties and literary salons (as we know, forinstance, from Babur’s memoirs). It was after they had lived in India for a while and encounteredthe Rajput codes of modesty and honor that the women were more strictly concealed by thecurtain of purdah and the zenana (harem) and at the same time also adopted some aspects of theHindu caste system. Hindu women, in turn, adopted a modified version of the Muslim purdah.What a pity that each side took the worst of both worlds; why not ditch both purdah and caste?How very different world history would have been if they had. Even within these restrictions,however, some women asserted themselves; the ten thousand women allegedly sequestered inthe harem of one sultan set up what has been called a feminist republic, with their own

administration, militia, manufacturing system, and market. 96This was a time when agricultural frontiers expanded, extensive commercial networksdeveloped, gradual technological change took place, and new political and religious institutions(including Hindu ones) developed. 97 Even under Muhammad bin Tughluq, most trade, industry,and financial services remained in Hindu hands, and some Hindu converts to Islam achievedparticularly high office. Throughout the Delhi Sultanate, Hindus controlled the royal mints andgenerally ran the economy. Hindu bankers got rich by helping Muslims, newly arrived fromCentral Asia, to buy slaves, brocades, jewels, and even horses (previously imported from CentralAsia) that they would then present to the sultan. Particularly among working people, amongartisans, cultivators, and the commercial and secretarial classes, Indian Muslims and lower-casteHindus lived and worked together and changed each other. 98 Women circulated like money (as isgenerally the case); many Muslims took Hindu wives. And when you add in the gardens andmelons and fountains that the Mughals gave to India, not to mention the art and architecture, thepicture of cultural exchange brightens considerably.In dramatic contrast with Buddhism, which was driven out of India by a combination oflack of support, persecution, and the destruction of religious monuments and monasteries (byHindus as well as Muslims), Hinduism rallied and came back stronger than ever. Though mostsultanate rulers condemned idolatry, they did not prevent Hindus from practicing Hinduism. AHindu inscription of c. 1280 praises the security and bounty enjoyed under the rule of SultanBalban. 99 In 1326 Muhammad bin Tughluq appointed Muslim officials to repair a Shiva templeso that normal worship could resume, and he stated that anyone who paid the jizya could buildtemples in Muslim territories. Another Delhi sultan, ruling in Kashmir from 1355 to 1373,rebuked his Brahmin minister for having suggested that they melt down Hindu and Buddhistimages in his kingdom to get the cash. 100Indeed, in general, despite the evidence of persecution of varying degrees in differenttimes and places, Hinduism under Islam was alive and well and living in India. The same sultanswho, with what Hindus would regard as the left hand, collected the jizya and destroyed Hindutemples also, with the right hand, often married Rajput princesses, patronized Hindu artists andSanskrit scholars, and employed Hindus in the highest offices of state. In Bengal in 1418 a Hinduactually became sultan, Raja Ganesh. His son, converting to Islam, ruled under his father’sdirection until 1431. He was succeeded by an Arab Muslim, Ala-ud-din Husain (r. 1493-1519),who revered the Vaishnava saint Chaitanya, in return for which the Hindus regarded the sultan asan incarnation of Lord Krishna. On the other hand, during a war, the same Ala-ud-din Husaindestroyed a number of temples, particularly in Orissa. 101Yogis and other ascetics on the fringes of society appear to have been open to friendlyexchanges with Muslims from an early date. The Persian merchant and traveler Buzurg ibnShahriyar, writing around 953, commented that the Skull Bearer (Kapalika) ascetics of Ceylon“take kindly to Musulmans and show them much sympathy.” 102 The Tibetan Buddhist historianTaranath, writing in the thirteenth century, was critical of the Nath yogis for following Shivarather than the Buddha and for saying “They were not even opposed to the Turuskas [Turks].” 103A new generation of Indo-Aryan languages, the linguistic and literary ancestors of all the modernNorth Indian languages, was evolving. The new languages drew their genres, conventions, andthemes from both Muslim literary languages (Persian, Arabic) and Hindu languages—classical(Sanskrit) and vernacular (dialects and Prakrits). Persian and Arabic words and concepts enteredthe vocabularies of Indian languages at all levels.SUFISM

Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, heavily influenced and was influenced byHinduism. By the middle of the eleventh century Sufis had reached the part of Northwest Indiathat was under Ghaznavid control. 104 Khwaja Muin-ud-din (or Moin-al-din) Chishti is said tohave brought to India the Chishti Sufi order; he came to Delhi late in the twelfth century andsettled in Pushkar in Ajmer, a place of Hindu pilgrimage. 105 He had many disciples, both Muslimand Hindu. The Chishti Sufi masters were powerful figures in the cultural and devotional life ofthe Delhi Sultanate (where their followers were often influential members of the court), despitethe fact that they regarded “going to the sultan” as the equivalent of “going to the devil.” 106For many Hindus (though, of course, not for the Sufis themselves), Sufism was Islam lite,or a walking incarnation of interreligious dialogue. Early Indian Sufism proclaimed thatMuslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Hindus all were striving toward the same goal andthat the outward observances that kept them apart were false. This idea was then incorporatedinto Hinduism as a major strand of the bhakti movement, which was growing in both power andcomplexity in this period. In court literature, the Sanskrit theory of the aesthetic emotions (rasa),particularly the erotic emotion, fused with the Islamic metaphysics of the love of God to producea Sufi narrative simultaneously religious and erotic; the Sufi romances made their hero a yogiand their heroine a beautiful Indian woman. 107Our main subject here is the Muslim contribution to Hinduism, but we must at leastacknowledge, in passing, the flow in the other direction during this period, Hindu influence onMuslim culture. Azad Bilgrami (d. 1785) attempted to prove that India was the true homeland ofthe Prophet, 108 which is perhaps going too far, but India was indeed the homeland of manyimportant Muslim cultural traditions. One text, The Pool of Nectar, which circulated in multipleversions and translations, made available to Muslim readers certain practices associated with theNath yogis and the teachings known as Hatha Y oga. 109 A school of Kashmiri Sufis, whosemembers call themselves rishis (the name that Hindus use for their pious sages), are strictvegetarians and recite the verses of Lal Ded, a fourteenth-century poet and Hindu holy womanfrom Kashmir. Sufis appropriated the Sanskritic poetic language of emotion and devotion fromthe sects devoted to the worship of Krishna and incorporated much of the philosophy of yoga.Arabs and Iranians learned much about storytelling in India, and passed on thisknowledge to Europeans; many of the same stories are told both in the Hindu Ocean of theRivers of Story, in which the gods are Shiva and Vishnu, and in The Arabian Nights, in whichthere is no god but Allah; some of the stories that these two texts share (such as the plot ofShakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well 110 ) got to England long before the English got to India.Al-biruni made excellent use of Sanskrit and Indian scholarship 111 and produced a fine study ofHindu culture. 112 The Delhi sultans employed Hindu temple building techniques and Hinduartisans to build their mosques, 113 which was less expensive than outsourcing to Afghanistan. Asa result, some mosques are decorated with carved Hindu temple moldings that reveal, in subtleways, “the unmistakable hand” of Indian artisans. 114 This use of Hindu temple techniques notonly gave employment to Hindu artisans but was also much easier on Hindus than the use of theactual stones from Hindu temples to build the mosques.KABIRSufi mysticism heavily influenced the North Indian tradition of bhakti Sants (“saints”),who emphasized the abstract aspect of god “without qualities” (nir-guna ). 115 Many of the Santswho straddled Hinduism and Islam were both low caste and rural, such as Ravidas, who was a

Pariah leatherworker (Chamar); Dadu, a cotton carder; Sena, a barber. 116 But not all bhaktaswere of low caste; Guru Nanak (who founded Sikhism) was a Kshatriya, and Mirabai a Kshatriyaprincess. Sants from the thirteenth to seventeenth century in Maharashtra were drawn from allcastes. 117The most famous of the Sants was Kabir, who was born in Varanasi around the beginningof the fifteenth century into a class of low-caste weavers who had recently converted fromHinduism to Islam. 118 One early hagiography mentions that Kabir had previously worshiped theShakta goddess, suggesting that Kabir’s Muslim family may have converted to Islam from ayogic sect related to the Shaktas, such as the Naths. His mixed birth gave rise to many differentstories, some of which attempt to show that Kabir was not really a low-caste Muslim by birth butwas adopted by Muslims. Sometimes it is said that Kabir was a Brahmin in a former life or thathe was of divine origin but adopted by Muslim weavers of the Julaha caste, who had beenBrahmins but had fallen from dharma and become Muslims. Or that he was adopted byBrahmins, worshipers of Shiva, whom some foreigners (perhaps Muslims) forced to drink waterfrom their hands, making them lose caste and become weavers. 119 One version says that aBrahmin widow conceived him immaculately, gave birth to him through the palm of her hand,and set him afloat in a basket on a pond, where a Muslim couple found him and adopted him 120(an episode that follows the Family Romance pattern of the birth of Karna in the Mahabharata),or it is said that the Brahmin widow became pregnant when a famous ascetic blessed her, but sheexposed the baby in order to escape dishonor. 121 All these stories attempt to drag Kabir back overthe line from Muslim to Hindu.Kabir is widely believed (on scant evidence) to have become one of the disciples of theHindu saint Ramananda (c. 1370-1440), who was said to have been a disciple of the philosopherRamanuja and who preached in Hindustani and had many low-caste disciples. There’s a storyabout Kabir’s tricking Ramananda into accepting a Muslim disciple: Kabir lay down across thestairs where Ramananda bathed every morning before dawn; Ramananda tripped over him andcried out, “Ram! Ram!” thus (Kabir argued) transmitting to him Ramananda’s own mantra, ineffect taking him on as a pupil. 122 This Ram is not Sita’s Ram, however, but a god “withoutqualities” (nir-guna), whose name, evoking no story, is complete in itself, a mantra.Scholars believe that Kabir probably married, and indeed had a son named Kamal, but theSadhus of the Kabir Panth insist that Kabir was celibate, just as they are. 123 There are, in anycase, stories about Kabir and his wife, such as this one.KABIR, HIS WIFE, AND THE SHOPKEEPERKabir had no food to give to the dervishes whocame to his house; his wife promised the local shopkeeper that she would sleep with him thatnight if he gave them the food on credit. When she hesitated to keep her promise, Kabir carriedher to the shopkeeper that night, as it was raining and muddy; when the shopkeeper learned ofthis, he was ashamed, fell at Kabir’s feet, gave everything in his shop to the poor, and became asadhu. 124 This is also a story about the exploitation of women and the lower castes by menof the higher castes. Despite his casual attitude to his wife’s fidelity in this story, Kabir oftenused a wife’s impulse to commit suttee, in order to stay with her husband forever, as a positivemetaphor for the worshiper who surrenders his ego to god. 125 And he described Illusion (maya)as a seductive woman to whom one becomes addicted and from whom one must break away. 126Women evidently meant several different things to him.Kabir preached in the vernacular, insisting, “Sanskrit is like water in a well; the languageof the people is a flowing stream.” With the social identity of a Muslim and both the earlierfamily background and the belief system of a Hindu, 127 being a weaver, he wove the woof of

Islam onto the warp of Hinduism (or, if you prefer, the reverse) to produce a religion of his ownthat emphatically distanced itself from both. He once described the two religions, disparagingly,in terms of the animals that Hindus offered to the goddess Kali and that Muslims killed at the endof a pilgrimage: “One slaughters goats, one slaughters cows; they squander their birth inisms.” 128 Not surprisingly, both groups attacked him during his life; more surprisingly, bothclaimed him after his death. For this is the sort of thing that he said:Who’s whose husband? Who’s whose wife?Death’s gaze spreads—untellable story.Who’s whose father? Who’s whose son?Who suffers? Who dies? . . . If God wanted circumcision,why didn’t you come out cut?If circumcision makes you a Muslim,what do you call your women?Since women are called man’s other half,you might as well be Hindus. . . .If putting on the thread makes you a Brahmin,what does the wife put on?That Shudra’s touching your food, pandit!How can you eat it?Hindu, Muslim—where did they come from?Who started this road?Look in your heart, send out scouts:where is heaven? 129 Religious affiliation was just window dressing, as far as Kabir wasconcerned:Veda, Koran, holiness, hell, woman, man. . . .It’s all one skin and bone, one piss and shit,one blood, one meat. . . .Kabir says, plunge into Ram!There: No Hindu. No Turk. 130 Kabir challenged the authenticity of the amorphous word “Hindu”in part because it was beginning to assume a more solid shape at this time, precisely in contrastwith “Turk” (standing for Turks, Arabs, and other non-Hindus).Kabir regarded caste as irrelevant to liberation, 131 and many stories are told about hischallenges to the caste system. For instance:KABIR AND THE PROSTITUTEWhen Kabir became famous, he was mobbed by so manyvisitors that he had to get rid of them. So he went to the house of a prostitute, put his arm aroundher neck, grabbed a vessel of holy water as if it were liquor, and drank; then he went to thebazaar with her, and the townspeople laughed at him, and his devotees were very sad. TheBrahmins and traders reviled him, saying, “How can low-caste people engage in bhakti? Kabirtried it for just ten days and now has taken up with a prostitute.” The king showed him norespect, and everyone was astonished. 132 The willful seeking of dishonor bears a strikingresemblance to the methods used by the Pashupatas, though for an entirely different purpose.Another story about caste is also a story about talking animals:KABIR AND THE BUFFALOOne day Kabir and some of his disciples came amongRamanuja’s spiritual descendants, all Brahmins who would not eat if even the shadow of aPariah fell on their cooking places. They did not want Kabir to sit and eat with them. Rather thansay this outright, and knowing that low-caste people were forbidden to recite the Veda, they said

that only someone who could recite Vedic verses could sit with them. Kabir had a buffalo withhim. He put his hand on the buffalo’s head and said, “Listen, buffalo! Hurry up and recite someof the Veda!” The buffalo began to recite. Everyone was astonished and begged Kabir to forgivethem. 133 But the strongest testimony to Kabir’s attitude to caste comes from his ownpoetry:Tell me where untouchabilitycame from, since you believe in it. . . .We eat by touching, we washby touching, from a touchthe world was born.So who’s untouched? asks Kabir.Only shewho’s free from delusion. 134 Yet Kabir was not a revolutionary in any political or even socialsense. Iconoclastic, yes; anti-institutional, to be sure; poor and low in status, you bet, but notconcerned about putting an end to poverty. His goal was spiritual rather than economic orpolitical liberation. 135HINDUISM UNDER THE DELHI SULTANATEHinduism in this period turned in new directions not only in response to Islam, thoughthat too, but in response to new developments within the Hindu world itself, some of which wereand some which were not directly influenced by the Muslim presence. Because of the importanceof Vijayanagar and the abundance of available light there, let us let it stand for all the otherHindu kingdoms that thrived at this time.VIJAYANAGARVijayanagar (“City of Victory”), the capital of the last extensive Hindu empire in India,between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, had an estimated population of five hundredthousand and was the center of a kingdom that controlled most of southern India, from theuplands of the Deccan plateau to the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent, and, at varioustimes, the Doab, the Deccan, Orissa, and points east and west.Located just south of the Tungabhadra River in Karnataka, in South India, Vijayanagar,five kilometers square, was founded in 1336 136 by Harihara I (r. 1336-1357), a warrior chief fromthe Sangama dynasty, and Harihara’s brother Bukka (r. 1344-1377). The story goes that that thebrothers had been captured by the army of the Delhi sultan and hauled up to Delhi, where theyconverted to Islam and accepted the sultan as their overlord. The Delhi sultan then sent themback home to pacify the region. Upon their return south, they promptly shed their allegiance tothe sultans, blocked Muslim southward expansion, and were reinstated as Hindus, indeedrecognized as reincarnations of Shiva. 137Vijayanagar is a sacred site, which many Hindus regarded as the location of the kingdomof the monkey Hanuman, studded with spots identified with specific places mentioned in theRamayana, an identification that didn’t politicize the Ramayana so much as it polis-ized it,turned it into a city-state. Inscriptions, historical narratives, and architectural remains suggestthat the concept of Rama as the ideal king, and Ayodhya as the site of the Ramayana legend,came alive in central and North India in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, but only during theVijayanagar Empire did the cult of Rama become significant at the level of an imperial order. 138The Ramayana had long been an important source for the conceptualization of divine kingship,

ut now for the first time historical kings identified themselves with Rama and boasted that theyhad destroyed their enemies as Rama destroyed Ravana; in this way, they woulddemonize—more precisely, Ravana-ize—their enemies. Scenes from the Ramayana appear intemple wall friezes from at least the fifth century CE, but the figure of Rama was not the objectof veneration, the actual installed icon, until the sudden emergence of a number of temples at thistime. 139 Now Rama and Hanuman became the focus of important sects in northern India,especially around Janakpur, regarded as Sita’s birthplace, and Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh,regarded as Rama’s birthplace.But this was only in part a reaction to the Muslim invasions and the rapid expansion ofthe Delhi Sultanate. True, Devaraya I (1406-1422) built the first Rama temple at Vijayanagar inthe midst of the power struggle with the Delhi sultans. But the story of Rama’s defeat of Ravanawas celebrated in rituals before the rise of Islam in India, and there are no anti-Muslimstatements in any inscriptions relating to the Vijayanagar temples. The fact that Shri Vaishnavasbuilt many of the Rama temples in Vijayanagar, 140 with endowments by a variety of groups,including royal agents, subordinate rulers, private citizens, and merchant guilds, suggests that thecult of Rama had a life of its own, with theological motivations, in addition to its significance forthe ideology of kingship. 141The Vijayanagar temples may well have been built in part as a response to theologicalchallenges posed by the Jainas, for there was still considerable conflict at this time betweenJainas (who were now on the decline) and both Shaivas and Vaishnavas (from the fast-growingsects of Basava and Ramanuja). When the Jainas complained to Bukka I, in 1368 CE atVijayanagar, about the injustice done to them by the Shri Vaishnavas, the king proclaimed thatthere was no difference between the Jaina and Vaishnava philosophies and that the ShriVaishnavas should protect the Jaina tradition. 142 The king would not have to have made an edicturging the Hindus to treat the Jainas well if they hadn’t already been treating them badly.Finally, there was no unified Hindu consciousness in which Rama was personified as ahero against the Muslims. Indeed, one Hindu Sanskrit inscription from the early seventeenthcentury regards the Lord of Delhi (“Dillishvara”) as the ruler of a kingdom just like Ram-raj, themythical kingdom of Rama. 143 Vijayanagar yields much evidence of Hindu-Muslim synthesisrather than antagonism. The Vijayanagar empire and the sultanates were in close contact andshared many cultural forms; court dancers and musicians often moved easily between the twokingdoms. 144 The kings of Vijayanagar, careless in matters of dharma, used a largely Muslimcavalry, royal fortresses under Brahmin commanders, Portuguese and Muslim mercenarygunners, and foot soldiers recruited from tribal peoples. In 1565, at the battle of Talikota, aconfederation of Muslim sultans routed the forces of Vijayanagar and the Nayakas. The usualsacking and slaughter, treasure hunting and pillage of building materials ensued, but withoutbigotry; the temples were the least damaged of the buildings and were often left intact. 145The Nayakas rose to power after Vijayanagar fell in 1565, 146 and they ruled, fromMysore, through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The story of the founding of theNayaka kingdoms follows lines similar to those of the story of the founding of Vijayanagar: Sentout to pacify the Cholas, the Nayakas double-crossed the Vijayanagar king just as the foundingVijayanagarans had double-crossed the Delhi sultans. 147 What goes around comes around. TheNayakas brought dramatic changes, a renaissance in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Tamilcountry and Andhra, ranging from political experimentation and economic and social change tomajor shifts in concepts of gender. 148MOSQUE AND TEMPLE

The Vijayanagar kings used their plunder and tribute for elaborate royal rituals, academicpatronage, and trophy temples. The plunder of Hindu temples made possible the building notmerely of superb mosques but, indirectly, of superb Hindu temples. Just as Hindu temples hadvied, in competitive fund-raising, with Buddhist stupas in South India, so under the sultanate,Muslim and Hindu kings competed in architectural monumentalism, the Muslims incliningtoward forts and cities (as well as mosques), the Hindus toward temples, temple complexes, andtemple cities (as well as palaces). However different the styles may have been, the two sets ofrulers 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 thenthere followed an even greater expansion of art in all fields. 149 Throughout India, Hindudynasties responded to the entrance of Islam not only by building forts and massing horsemenbut by asserting their power through extravagant architecture, most spectacularly at Hampi,Halebid, and Badami. Indeed, the leveling of the sacred monuments at Mathura and Kanaujcoincided precisely with the construction of other great dynastic temple complexes. 150 It’s arather backhanded compliment to the Muslims to say that because they tore down so manytemples, 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 badthings sometimes made possible the good things; the pillage made possible the patronage. In asimilarly perverse way, the withdrawal of royal patronage from the temples and Brahmincolleges may have encouraged the spread of new, more popular forms of Hinduism such asbhakti. The dynamic and regenerative quality of Hinduism was never more evident than in thesefirst centuries of the Muslim presence.Islamic architecture was introduced into India, and welcomed enthusiastically by Hindubuilders, long before the establishment of Muslim rule in the thirteenth century. Tradepartnerships between the Gujaratis and the Arabs made it possible for Gujarati painters, workingunder Hindu and Jaina rulers, to absorb Persian and Turkic techniques. 151 Islam gave India notmerely the mosque but the mausoleum, the pointed arch, and the high-arching vault, changingthe entire skyline of secular as well as sacred architecture—palaces, fortresses, gardens. 152Mosques also provided a valuable contrast with temples within the landscape of India. TheHindu temple has a small, almost empty space in the still center (the representation of the deity isalways there), surrounded by a steadily escalating profusion of detail that makes rococo seemminimalist. But the mosque creates a larger emptiness from its very borders, a space designednot, like the temple, for the home of a deity but for congregational prayer. The mosque, whoseserene calligraphic and geometric decoration contrasts with the perpetual motion of the figuresdepicted on the temple, makes a stand against the chaos of India, creating enforced vacuums thatIndia cannot rush into with all its monkeys and peoples and colors and the smells of the bazaarand, at the same time, providing a flattering frame to offset that very chaos.MOVING TEMPLES: VIRASHAIVASSects 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 thepalace or the house was the pivot of the Brahmin imaginary, one large and influential SouthIndian Hindu sect differed from earlier renouncers in spurning not houses but stone temples, thevery 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 pridedthemselves on being moving temples, itinerant, never putting down roots. 153 Their founder wasBasava (1106-1167), a Brahmin at the court of King Bijjala of Kalyana. 154 Basava preached asimplified devotion: no worship but that of a small linga worn around the neck and no goal but tobe united, at death, with Shiva. He rejected the worship of gods that you hock in bad times orhide 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?”155The only temple you can trust is your own body:The richwill make temples for Shiva.What shall I,a poor man,do?My legs are pillars,the body the shrine,the head a cupolaof 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 andclass. 157 “Things standing shall fall” mocks the megalomania of the temple builders.The Virashaivas were militants who attacked the normative social and cultural order ofthe 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 aBrahmin; the king condemned both their fathers to death; the Virashaivas rioted against the kingand 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 bebeholden to the influence of Muslim missionaries who were active on India’s west coast justwhen the Virashaiva doctrine was developed there. On the other hand, the threat of Islamiciconoclasm may have been one reason for the widespread use of portable temple images (orportable lingas). 158The earlier poems of the Virashaivas were composed in Kannada, but the earliest extantfull narrative of the Virashaivas is in Telugu, the thirteenth-century Telugu Basava Purana ofPalkuriki Somanatha. It is largely a hagiography of Basava, but it is also, in David Shulman’swords, “an extraordinarily violent book . . . the Virashaiva heroes are perpetually decapitating,mutilating, or poisoning someone or other—their archenemies, the Brahmins and Jains, or theirpolitical rivals, or, with astounding frequency, themselves (usually for some minor lapse in theintensity of their devotion).” 159 Where does this violence come from? We may trace it back tothe 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 literaryexpression 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 isdirected against conventional religion: The god in the temple murti (icon) is so humiliated that hesneaks out the back door; washer-men, thieves, and Pariahs win out over the political andreligious power mongers. A devotee’s dog (actually Shiva disguised in a dog’s skin) recites theVeda, shaming the caste-obsessed Brahmins, 161 as the buffalo does, in Kabir’s poem; making theinterloper a dog instead of a buffalo intensifies the caste issue. Several stories also describevictories over Jainas, some of whom are blinded. 162 Eventually Basava reacted against theVirashaivas’ violence and lived his life away from the community he had founded.MAHADEVYYAKKA: A VIRASHAIVA WOMAN SAINTIn the twelfth century a woman Virashaiva saint named Mahadevyyakka composedpoems in Kannada 163 that simultaneously addressed the metaphysics of salvation (including theproblem 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 thoughtsare full of laughing women:no god, this man.And I cannot cross the sister-in-law.But I willgive this working wench the slipand go cuckold my husband with Hara, my Lord. 164 On the banal level, the poem refers to thedifficult 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 directcontradiction of Hindu dharma texts such as that of Manu (5.154), which instructs a woman totreat her husband like a god. There are also more abstract references, some explicit (Maya andthe world as mother- and father-in-law), some implicit: The three tigerish brothers-in-law are thethree 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 thesister-in-law as the binding memory or “perfume” (vasana) that clings to karma. None of thepeople 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 ofgod (Hara, a name of Shiva) as both totally destructive of conventional life and illegitimate,transgressive. 165We can reconstruct quite a lot about the life of Mahadevyyakka. She regarded herself asmarried 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 worldand that other,cannot manage them both. 166 Eventually she left her husband and wandered naked, clothed onlyin 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

oles, as a human confined to a place and a time. Through these shackles she bursts, defiant inher quest for ecstasy.” 167 Though hardly a typical woman, Mahadevyyakka nevertheless providesa paradigm precisely for atypicality, for the possibility that a woman might shift the paradigm, imas so many other women have done in the history of Hinduism, so strongly that their lives mayhave functioned as alternative paradigms for other women.CHAPTER 17AVATAR AND ACCIDENTAL GRACE IN THE LATER PURANAS800 to 1500 CECHRONOLOGY (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 powerc. 1200 Early orders ofSufis arise in North Indiac. 1200 Virashaivas, including Basava, live in South Indiac. 1200Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda is composedc. 1336-1565 Vijayanagar Empire is in its primec.1398-1448 Kabir lives1469-1539 Guru Nanak founds Sikhism in the PunjabTHE PURANASTELL IT DIFFERENTLYListen to the way Brahma himself tells the story of Prahlada; thePuranas tell it differently.Padma Purana, c. 750-1000 CE 1 The many different ways in whichthe medieval Puranas tell stories about animals, women, the lower classes, and other religions arethe result of a sudden burgeoning of the imaginative range of the texts, nurtured in large part bythe ongoing appropriation of ideas from non-Sanskrit, oral, and vernacular cultures. By the ninthcentury CE, Sanskrit had embraced literary and political as well as religious realms as acosmopolitan language that was patronized by the literati and royal courts. Some scholars arguethat 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 thatthe producers of Sanskrit Puranas, regionalized though they most certainly were, responded notby closing up shop but simply doing more and more business as usual, welcoming in regionalpopular, oral, and vernacular themes and translating them into their own kind of PuranicSanskrit. It was in this spirit too that they welcomed in regional and popular figures and madethem into some of the avatars of Vishnu.THE AVATARS OF VISHNUWe have already met the first two human avatars of Vishnu, Krishna and Rama, whobecaome incarnate on earth to fight against antigods (Asuras) incarnate as humans and againstogres (Rakshasas) who are the enemies of humans. We have also noted, without investigating, anumber of references to other avatars that Vishnu had attracted by the early centuries of theCommon Era, sometimes said to be six, sometimes eighteen, but usually ten (though not alwaysthe same ten in ). One of the very few surviving Gupta temples, the temple at Deogarh, in UttarPradesh (c. sixth-seventh century CE), is called the Temple of the Ten Avatars (Dashavatara). Inthe fifteenth century the poet Kabir mocked the ten avatars as “divine malarkey/for those whoreally know”—that is, for those who know that it is all god’s maya that Rama appears to marrySita, and so forth. 3 The Jaina concept of Universal History, which claims nine appearances of asavior in each world epoch, may have played a role in the development of the Hindu schema, 4for Vishnu too usually has nine avatars in the past, the tenth being (like the Kali Age) reservedfor the future (Kalki).

Some of the new avatars were assimilated into the Puranas lists from earlier Sanskritliterature, and all of them entered the ten-avatar structure through the usual processes of Hindubricolage. The texts often describe the avatars centrifugally, as various functions of the godemanating out of him and expressed as many manifestations (with many arms, many heads). Buthistorically they came into being centripetally, as various gods already in existence wereattracted to Vishnu and attached themselves to him like iron filings to a magnet. Avatars wereparticularly popular with kings, whose eulogies often sequentially link their conquests or theirqualities to avatars—like the boar, he rescured the earth, like Kalki, he repelled thebarbarians—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 thesuccession of Vishnu’s avatars could be interpreted as an allegory of the Darwinian evolutionaryprocess, “presciently recognized by ancient Hindu sages and now confirmed by modernscience”—that is, an ancient Indian theory that Darwin re-invented. 5 (Sen may or may not havebeen inspired by the idea of Avataric Evolutionism that Madame Blavatsky discussed in her IsisUnveiled, published in 1877. 6 ) Since then the ten avatars are often listed beginning with the threeleast complex life forms and working their way up to humans; sometimes they are alsoassociated with the progression of the ages (Yugas) through time. Thus the list usually goes likethis: the fish, the tortoise, the boar, and the Man-Lion (animals, all in the Krita Yuga, the firstAge, and all but the Man-Lion aquatic animals); the dwarf, Parashurama, Rama (humans, all inthe Treta Yuga, the second Age); Krishna and the Buddha (humans in the Dvapara, the thirdAge); and Kalki in the Kali Age. But evolutionary theory fits with the Indian theory of the Yugasonly if one ignores the little matter of the clash between social evolutionism (things get steadilybetter) 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 surfacein texts (including coins and inscriptions), though not necessarily already labeled avatars, letalone historically connected with Vishnu, the list would look more like this: the dwarf (RigVeda); 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 VishnuPurana, c. 400-500 CE). 7 Finally, if we group them according to the main issues with which thisbook is primarily concerned, the order would be animals (the fish, the boar, the tortoise), women(Krishna/Radha, Rama/Sita), interreligious relations (the Buddha, Kalki io ), caste and class(Parashurama, the dwarf, and the Man-Lion). Let us consider them in that order.ANIMALSTHE FISH (MATSYA)The myth of the fish and the flood is not originally associated with Vishnu; as we haveseen, at first the fish was just a fish. But in the Mahabharata (3.185), the fish tells Manu that heis Brahma, Prajapati, the Lord of Creatures, and since the fish expands from a minnow to a kindof whale, and since he is a savior, the Puranas make him one of the avatars of the god Vishnu,who is both an expander (as the dwarf who becomes a giant) and a savior (as Krishna oftenclaims to be).THE BOAR (VARAHA)Like the avatar of the fish, the boar avatar was not originally associated with Vishnu; inthe Brahmanas, the boar, an amphibious animal, is Prajapati, the Lord of Creatures, who spreads

earth out on the waters to make her into a disk and who marries her. 8 The Vishnu Puranaidentifies Prajapati with Narayana (a name of Vishnu). 9 At Udayagiri, in Malwa, a shrine carvedout of the rock-face and dated to the opening of the fifth century CE depicts Vishnu’s incarnationas the boar, rescuing the earth depicted as a female boar. This may have been a political allegoryof Chandra Gupta II’s conquest of Malwa, 10 making the image simultaneously Vishnu married tothe earth-boar and a king married to the earth goddess.THE TORTOISE (KURMA)The tortoise appears in the Mahabharata when the gods and antigods decide to churn theocean of milk to obtain the elixir of immortality, the soma, using Mount Mandara as the churn.All that is said there is: “The gods and antigods said to the king of tortoises, the supreme tortoise,‘You are the one suited to be the resting place for the mountain.’ The tortoise agreed, and Indraplaced the tip of the mountain on his back, fastening it tightly (1.15-17).” Vishnu is not thetortoise here; indeed he appears in this version of the story in a different form, as the nymphMohini, who bewitches and seduces the antigods so that they lose their opportunity to drink thesoma. But the tortoise goes on to be quite famous in Hindu cosmologies and in images of themyth of the churning, and the Puranas identify the tortoise as an avatar of Vishnu. Usually he isdepicted as anthropomorphic from the waist up, tortoise from the waist down, but sometimessimply as a tortoise tout court.WOMENKRISHNA (AND THE WOMEN WHO LOVED HIM)Major changes were beginning to be made in the worship of Krishna at this time. Whenwe meet Krishna in the Mahabharata, he is already an adult; the Harivamsha, the appendix tothe Mahabharata, composed a century or two after it (c. 450 CE), gives him a childhood. Thischildhood may have been derived, in the early centuries CE, from popular, vernacular,non-Brahminical stories about a village boy who lived among the cowherd people, 11 a far cryfrom the powerful prince Krishna of the Mahabharata. In a stroke of genius, the Harivamsha putthe two mythologies together, the Mahabharata story of the prince and the folk/vernacularstories of a cowherd child, by bridging them with a third story, a variant of the story that Freudcalled the family romance, 12 the myth of a boy of noble blood who is raised by animals, or by theherders of animals, until he grows up and finds his real parents. ip The family romance is aready-made, off-the-rack story right at hand to be picked up and used when there is a suddenneed to plug a gaping hole, to construct a childhood for a god who has appeared only as an adultin earlier texts. Once the join was made, the Harivamsha quickly absorbed the cowherdmythology and developed it in its own ways. Krishna in the Mahabharata was already a doublefigure, a god pretending to be a prince, but now he was doubly doubled: a god pretending to be aprince pretending to be a cowherd. This opened up the way to the worship of the child Krishnaand a theology of the hidden god, revealed through a series of charming miracles that puzzle allbut the reader who is in the know.The Harivamsha tells the story of Krishna’s birth into his double life:THE BIRTH OF KRISHNAThe wicked king Kamsa heard a prophecy that the eighth child bornof his cousin Devaki and her husband, Vasudeva, would kill Kamsa. He let Devaki live, oncondition that Vasudeva would deliver to Kamsa every child she bore, and Kamsa killed seveninfants in this way. iq Vishnu placed himself in the eighth embryo, and, at his request, the goddess

of sleep took the form of the goddess Kali and entered the womb of Yashoda, the wife of thecowherd Nanda. One night Krishna was born to the princess Devaki and the goddess Kali wasborn to the cowherd woman Yashoda. Vasudeva carried the infant Krishna to Yashoda andbrought the infant girl to Devaki. When Kamsa saw the girl, he dashed her violently to the stonefloor. She went to heaven and became an eternal goddess, Kali, to whom sacrifices of animalsare made, for she is fond of flesh. And Krishna grew up in the village of cowherds. When he wasgrown, he killed Kamsa. 13 Krishna’s birth is doubled in yet another way, by the simultaneousbirth of Sleep as Kali and the daughter of Devaki as the daughter of Yashoda. The worship of thegoddess Kali, a new, specifically Hindu element injected into the basic formula, signals thebeginning of a new prominence of women in the worship of Krishna, starting in this text, whereDevaki, in a manner reminiscent of Draupadi, harasses her husband, Vasudeva, and forces him tostop saying, “It is all fated,” and to do something to save her baby. Indeed bhakti texts generallychallenge the more fatalistic construction of karma, believing that people’s actions in theircurrent lives can produce good or bad fortune in this life and that devotion to the gods, inparticular, pays off in this lifetime 14 as well as in the next.YASHODA AND THE GOPISThe Harivamsha makes Krishna’s foster mother, Yashoda, a major character, as does thetenth book of the Bhagavata Purana, which bears the imprint of the bhakti wind blowing fromthe south and develops in glorious detail the other mothers of Krishna, the Gopis or cowherdwomen, who become his foster mothers and cluster around him in adoration. There are alsonegative foster mothers: The infant Krishna kills (among many ogres and ogresses) the ogressPutana, who tries to poison him with the milk from her breasts but is killed instead when hesucks out her life’s breath with her milk . 15The Bhagavata also domesticates the myth of looking into the mouth of god (Krishna),which, in the Gita, reveals to Arjuna the unbearable image of doomsday. In the Purana, Yashodalooks into the mouth of her toddler Krishna and sees in it the universe and herself (as Brahmasees the universe and himself in Vishnu), a vision that she finds unbearable, just as Arjuna did. Inboth cases, Krishna grants, in his infinite love, the boon that Arjuna and Yashoda will forget thevision. 16GOPIS AS LOVERSWhen passion, even religious passion, is the game, the erotic is always a heavy hitter.Krishna in the Mahabharata is a prince with many wives, sixteen thousand by some counts,though he had his favorites. ir The Puranas depict Krishna as a handsome young man who danceswith the many Gopis, the wives of the cowherd men. In the great circle dance in the moonlight(rasa-lila), he doubles himself again and again so that each Gopi thinks that Krishna is with her.Similarly, the Gopis double themselves, leaving shadow images of themselves in bed with theirunsuspecting husbands. The Gopis are both his mothers and his lovers; the Puranas tend to blurthe distinction between the love of Krishna’s mothers (“calf love” [vatsalya]) and the love of hislovers (“honey-sweet love” [madhurya ]). 17 Here is yet another example of the astounding Hinduability to combine ideas that other religions might feel constrained to choose between or at leastto keep separate.RADHAIn later Puranas, one Gopi in particular is the lover of Krishna: Radha, who is virtually

unknown to the Sanskrit mythology of Krishna until the seventh century and does not becomeimportant to the devotional community until the sixteenth century, 18 when bhakti has feminizedsectarianism and made women more important. The story of Krishna and Radha inspired theSanskrit Gita Govinda, “The Song of [Krishna] the Cowherd,” by Jayadeva, the court poet of theBengali King Laksmanasena (c. 1179-1209), an important text for Vaishnava worshipers.Jayadeva’s Radha is powerful; Krishna bends down before her and puts her feet on his head. Theromance of the two adulterous lovers may owe something to the Persian romances that werebecoming known in India through the Muslim presence at this time, in some Sufi sects. 19In the Bhagavata Purana, Krishna would disappear from the circle dance from time totime, and the Gopis searched for him in an exquisite agony of longing, the great Indian theme oflove and separation (viraha), here in the familiar bhakti mode of longing for the absent god (thedeus absconditus or otiosus ). But in the later Puranas, often under Tantric influences, it wasRadha alone with whom the worshiper, male or female, identified. As a Gopi, Radha was alsoone of Krishna’s foster mothers, a role that she does not entirely abandon when she becomes hislover. In the Brahmavaivarta Purana, probably composed in Bengal in the fifteenth or sixteenthcentury, the mature Radha is put in charge of the infant Krishna, to her intense annoyance;suddenly he turns into a gorgeous young man, with whom she makes love joyously for manydays—until he turns back again into a demanding, and wet, infant. 20RAMA (AND SITA)Images from the life of Rama are represented at the Dashavatara temple at Deogarh,though in general there is little evidence of Rama worship in temples at that time (the Guptaperiod), nor, in dramatic contrast with Krishna, is Rama’s story elaborated upon to anysignificant degree in the early Puranas. But Valmiki’s Ramayana was not only still widely readin Sanskrit at the time of the later Puranas (800-1500 CE) but was now beginning to be translatedinto the vernacular literatures, as well as retold in other Sanskrit texts. The Mahabharata,Harivamsha, Vishnu Purana, and several other Puranas omit the fire ordeal of Sita entirely, 21 butthe fifteenth-century Adhyatma-Ramayana used it to exculpate Sita not only from being presentin Ravana’s home but from the weakness of asking Rama to capture the golden deer for her. Thisillusory deer, however, may have inspired the Adhyatma-Ramayana to create the illusory Sitawho now desires the deer:THE ILLUSORY DEER OF THE ILLUSORY SITARama, knowing what Ravana intended todo, told Sita, “Ravana will come to you disguised as an ascetic; put a shadow [chaya] of yourselfoutside the hut, and go inside the hut yourself. Live inside fire, invisible; when I have killedRavana, come back to me as you were before.” Sita obeyed; she placed an illusory Sita[maya-sita] outside and entered the fire. This illusory Sita saw the illusory deer and urged Ramato capture it for her. 22 Ravana captures the illusory Sita, and Rama then pretends to grieve forSita, pretends to fight to get her back, and lies to his brother Lakshmana, who genuinely grievesfor Sita. Sita herself is never subjected to an ordeal at all; after Ravana has been killed and thefalse Sita brought back and accused, the illusory Sita enters the fire and vanishes forever, whilethe real Sita emerges and remains with Rama. Thus the text quells the uneasiness that the reader(or hearer) may well share with Rama at the thought of Sita’s living in Ravana’s house for solong: Rama never intended or needed to test Sita (since he knew she wasn’t in Ravana’s house atall) but had the shadow Sita enter the fire merely in order to bring the real Sita back from thefire, to make her visible again. The shadow Sita protects the real Sita from the trauma of life withRama as well as with Ravana.

But Rama seems to forget what he has done; he grieves terribly for Sita and orders theshadow Sita into the fire as if she were real. The illusory Sita is part of the greater illusion thatRama, as a great god, is now in charge of; he is play-acting (through his lila, his artistic game)the whole time anyway, so why not playact his grief for Sita? Probably in order to maintain thepower of the narrative, the author has Rama seem to forget about the shadow at crucial moments;only when the gods come and remind him of his divinity (as they do in the Valmiki text) doesFire (incarnate as the god Agni) return Sita to Rama, remarking, “You made this illusory Sita inorder to destroy Ravana. Now he is dead, and that Sita has disappeared.” 23 And whereas Sita’sdesire for the deer in the Valmiki text proves that she can’t recognize a substitute deer, in thistext she gets a substitute who can’t recognize the substitute deer, while Ravana can’t recognizethe substitute Sita.The Brahmavaivarta Purana develops the idea of the subjectivity of the surrogate Sita,who goes on to have a life of her own as Draupadi, of all people:The shadow Sita asked Rama and Fire, “What shall I do?” Fire told her to go to the Pushkarashrine, and there she generated inner heat and was reborn as Draupadi. This shadow, who was inthe prime of her youth, was so nervous and excited with lust when she asked Shiva for a husbandthat she repeated her request five times. And so she obtained five husbands, the five Pandavas. 24Fire gives the shadow Sita a sexual future as Draupadi, who, like the shadow Sita, is bornof a fire; 25 indeed it may have been the shared theme of birth from fire that attracted Draupadifrom her own epic into Sita’s story in the other epic, as if Lady Macbeth somehow popped up asa character in King Lear.INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUETHE BUDDHAThe Buddha avatar is mentioned in of the Mahabharata: 26 “At the beginning of the KaliAge, Vishnu will become the Buddha, son of Shuddhodana, and he will preach in the Magadhadialect. All men will become bald, like him, and wear the ocher robe, and priests will cease tooffer oblations or recite the Veda.” 27 The precise historical detail of preaching in Magadhi,together with the reference to the name of the Buddha’s father as it appears in the Pali canon(and in later lists of historical Hindu dynasties 28 ), lulls us into a false sense of historicalreality—until it gets to the crucial point: “Those who sought refuge with Vishnu [as Buddha]were deluded.” The myth of Vishnu’s incarnation as the Buddha is established in full detail inthe Vishnu Purana, represented on the sixth- to seventh-century Dashavatara temple at Deogarhand mentioned in a seventh-century Pallava inscription 29 and an eighth-century Tamilinscription. 30The Buddha avatar was not originally, as it might seem at first glance and is oftenadvertised as being, a genuine attempt to assimilate the teachings of the Buddha into Hinduism(though this was certainly done in many other ways). On the contrary, although Vishnu asBuddha expresses the anti-Vedic sentiments that Hindus (rightly) attribute to Buddhists, Jainas,Materialists, and other heretics, he does this in order to destroy the antigods by teaching them anevil doctrine, Buddhism, on the second alliance principle that the gods cannot destroy a virtuousperson unless they first corrupt him:VISHNU AS THE BUDDHA CORRUPTS THE ANTIGODSThe antigods conquered the godsin battle, and the gods went to ask Vishnu for help, saying, “The antigods have stolen ourportions of the sacrifices, but they take pleasure in the duties of their own class and they followthe path of the Vedas and are full of inner heat. Therefore we cannot kill them. Please find a way

for us to kill them.” Then Vishnu emitted from his body a deluding form of his magic power ofillusion and said, “This magic deluder will bewitch all the antigods so that they will be excludedfrom the path of the Vedas and therefore susceptible to slaughter.” The gods went back home,and the magic deluder went to the great antigods.Naked, bald, carrying a bunch of peacockfeathers, the magic deluder taught the antigods what he called “the dharma that is the open doorto moksha.” He said: “This would be dharma, but it would not be dharma. This would givemoksha, but it would not give moksha.” And so on and so forth. Then he put on red robes andspoke to other antigods, saying, “If you wish for heaven or for nirvana, you must stop these evilrites such as killing animals. If an animal slaughtered in the sacrifice is thus promised entry intoheaven, why doesn’t the sacrificer kill his own father? If the oblation to the ancestors that iseaten by one man satisfies another, then people traveling abroad need not take the trouble tocarry food.” He caused them all to abandon the dharma of the three Vedas, to be free thinkers,and they became his disciples and persuaded others. The armor of their sva-dharma had formerlyprotected them, but now it was destroyed, and so were they. The gods attacked them and killedthem. 31 The antigods are destroyed because they abandon their antigod sva-dharma in order tojoin the new religious movement. The great deluder, whose defense of nonviolence (ahimsa) ishere regarded as part of the great lie, is both a Jaina (with peacock feathers) and a Buddhist (inocher robes); sometimes he is said to be “the Buddha, the son of the Jina.” 32 His argument aboutone man’s eating for another is a standard Hindu satire on the heresy of Materialist satire on theHindu rite of feeding the dead ancestors (shraddha); the same argument is used against theVedas in the Tamil Nilakeci (tenth or eleventh century), and the remark about the sacrificer’skilling his own father correctly quotes a real argument in a Buddhist Jataka text. 33 Anotherversion of the myth says that Vishnu founded the Materialist and similar sects “for the seeking ofliberation through eating flesh, drinking wine, and so forth,” 34 a policy that seems more Tantricthan Materialist.But the conversion of humankind to Buddhism (or Jainism, or Materialism, or Tantrism,or any other heresy) is merely an unfortunate side effect of Vishnu’s attack on the antigods, akind of theological fallout; and the fact that the doctrine is directed against the antigods indicatesthe degree of anti-Buddhist sentiment that motivated the author of this myth. It is thedemonization of Buddhism (as well as the Buddhification of demons). As an unfortunate bit ofcollateral damage from the wars in heaven, the earth is left with human Buddhists when the godshave succeeded in turning the antigods into Buddhists, like the eucalyptus trees or cane toads thatpeople introduced into new continents in order to destroy something else, not realizing that theywould then be stuck with too many eucalyptus trees and cane toads. Similarly, a fierce Hindugoddess (sometimes named Kali) is from time to time created to kill antigods, and she does, butthen sometimes she begins to kill the people who created her. 35 There is also a Sanskrit saying:“Like the king’s men” (raja-purusha-nyaya), referring to the fact that when you call in thesoldiers to get rid of bandits who are bothering you, the bandits do go away, but then you arestuck with the often even worse depredations of the soldiers. The corruption of the Buddhists/antigods is stated in terms of orthopraxy (people are made to stop sacrificing), but there is also atouch of orthodoxy: Teach them the wrong belief, and they will do the wrong things.Yet the spirit of the narrative is more like a playful satire on Buddhism and Jainism thana serious attack. And some of the later Puranas, and other Sanskrit texts of this period, put apositive spin on the Buddha avatar. The Bhagavata Purana says that Vishnu became the Buddhain order to protect us from lack of enlightenment and from fatal blunders. 36 The Varaha Puranaadvises the worshiper to worship Kalki when he wants to destroy enemies and the Buddha when

he wants beauty. 37 The Matsya Purana describes the Buddha as lotus-eyed, beautiful as a god,and peaceful. 38 Kshemendra’s eleventh-century “Deeds of the Ten Avatars” 39 and Jayadeva’stenth-century Gita Govinda tell the story of the Buddha avatar in a straight, heroic tale based onthe standard episodes of Gautama’s life as related in the Pali canon, and Jayadeva says thatVishnu became the Buddha out of compassion for animals, to end bloody sacrifices. 40 TheDashavatara-stotra, attributed (most probably apocryphally) to Shankara (who was oftenaccused of being a crypto-Buddhist), praises the Buddha avatar. 41 The Devibhagavata Puranaoffers homage to Vishnu, “who became incarnate as the Buddha in order to stop the slaughter ofanimals and to destroy the sacrifices of the wicked,” 42 adding a moral judgment to Jayadeva’smore neutral statement; although the last phrase might be translated “to destroy wickedsacrifices” or taken to imply that all sacrifices are wicked, it is also possible that only wicked (ordemonic, or proto-Buddhist) sacrificers, not virtuous Hindu sacrificers, are condemned. Thesetexts may express a Hindu desire to absorb Buddhism in a peaceful manner, both to winBuddhists to the worship of Vishnu and to account for the fact that such a significant heresycould prosper in India. 43 They may also reflect the rising sentiment against animal sacrificewithin Hinduism. Yet Kabir, in the fifteenth century, mocking the avatars, says, “Don’t call themaster Buddha/he didn’t put down devils.” 44 And in some texts and visual depictions, theBuddha is left out of the list of ten avatars; often Balarama, Krishna’s brother, takes theBuddha’s place. is Hindus spoke in many voices about the Buddha, some positive, some negative,and some indifferent or ambivalent.The myth of Vishnu as Buddha then ricocheted back into Buddhism in India. For manycenturies, Hindus worshiped as a Hindu god the image of the Buddha at the Mahabodhi temple atBodh Gaya in Bihar (where the Buddha is said to have become enlightened, a major pilgrimagesite for Buddhists). 45 And a legend apparently originating in medieval Sri Lanka refers to tenbodhisattvas, one of whom is Vishnu, 46 who is also represented as one of the ten bodhisattvas inSinhalese temples, notably at Dambulla, 47 and becomes the protector of Buddhism throughoutSri Lanka. 48We can trace these shifting attitudes through three broad stages. First, Buddhism wasassimilated into Hinduism in the Upanishads, Ramayana, and Mahabharata. This was a periodof harmony (sometimes competitive, but always civil) among Hindus and Buddhists and Jainas,in actual history, and between gods and humans (the first alliance), in mythology. Then, in thesecond stage, around the turn of the millennium and after, the Buddhists (in history) becamemore powerful and were sometimes seen as a threat. The first set of Puranic myths about theBuddha were composed at this time (the Gupta period), when Hinduism was still fighting apitched battle against Buddhism, Jainism, and other heresies; the scars of the battle may be seenin these Puranic stories that contemptuously denounce the shastras of delusion (i.e., the Buddhistand Jaina scriptures) and the people who use them, 49 assimilating this conflict into the pattern ofsecond alliance myths of the corruption of the virtuous antigods. 50But then, in the third stage, when Buddhism, though still a force to be reckoned with inIndia, was waning, the texts have a more conciliatory attitude, and the Hindus once againacknowledged their admiration of Buddhism. In mythology, the texts revise the myth of Vishnuas the Buddha to make it generous and tolerant. 51 A Kashmiri king of the tenth century had amagnificent frame made for “an image of the Buddha Avatara,” and the image that he used was aBuddha figure that had probably been under worship by Buddhists; this frame may have beenmade for the Buddhist figure in order to “Hinduize” it, 52 just as the doctrine of the Buddha wasplaced in the “frame” of Puranic mythology to Hinduize it and as Hindu temples were built on

Buddhist stupas and, later, Muslim mosques on Hindu temples.KALKIKalki, usually listed as the final avatar, is the only one yet to come in the future, themessiah who will appear at the end of the present Kali Age, to destroy barbarians and atheists(Nastikas). The myth may represent a reaction against the invasion of India by Greeks,Scythians, Parthians, Kushanas, and Huns, but it owes its own conception to those very invaders.For Kalki may have been inspired in part by the future Buddha Maitreya, who will reinstate thenorms of Buddhist belief and behavior, 53 though both Kalki and Maitreya might have developedfrom the image of the purifying savior that the Parthians may have brought into India in the firstcenturies CE. 54 The idea of the final avatar may have entered India at this time, when millennialideas were rampant in Europe and Christians were proselytizing in India; the Hindu rider on thewhite horse may have influenced, or been influenced by, the rider on the white horse in Christianapocalyptic literature, 55 his cloak soaked in blood, sent to put the pagans to the sword. Thecircularity of historical influence is such that Kalki’s purpose is to destroy the barbarianinvaders, to raze the wicked cities of the plain that have been polluted by foreign kings, the samehorsemen who may have brought the myth of Kalki into India.Kalki appears first in the Mahabharata, after a long description of the horrors of the KaliAge. Then: “A Brahmin by the name of Kalki Vishnuyashas will be born, impelled by Time, inthe village of Shambhala.” He will be a king, and he will annihilate all the barbarians and destroythe robbers and make the earth over to the twice born at a great horse sacrifice. 56 Nothing is saidhere about his being an avatar of Vishnu, except that he is named Fame of Vishnu(Vishnu-yashas), and nothing is said about a horse, except for his horse sacrifice. The point aboutthe avatar, but not about the horse, is somewhat clarified in the Vishnu Purana:KALKI WILL KILL THE BARBARIANSThe Scythians, Greeks, Huns, and others will polluteIndia. 57 Unable to support their avaricious kings, the people of the Kali Age will take refuge inthe chasms between mountains, and they will eat honey, vegetables, roots, fruits, leaves, andflowers. They will wear ragged garments made of leaves and the bark of trees, and they will havetoo many children. No one will live more than twenty-two years. Vedic religion and the dharmaof the shastras will undergo total confusion and reversal.But when the Kali Age is almost over,Vishnu will become incarnate here in the form of Kalki, in the house of the chief Brahmin of thevillage of Shambala. it He will destroy all the barbarians and Dasyus and men of evil acts and evilthoughts, and he will establish everything, each in its own sva-dharma.And at the end of the KaliAge, the minds of the people will become pure as flawless crystal, and they will be as ifawakened at the conclusion of a night. And these men, the residue of humankind, will be theseeds of creatures and will give birth to offspring conceived at that very time. And theseoffspring will follow the ways of the Winning [Krita] Age. 58 The transition between theend of the Kali Age and the beginning of the Winning Age is usually a cosmological upheaval,fire and flood. Here it is translated into a political upheaval: The barbarians and Dasyus (the oldenemies of the Vedic people) are put to the sword. In both cases, however, all the bad people aredestroyed and a remnant of good people survives to begin the new world. The doomsday Shaivamare, with her fire and flood, seems to vanish from the junction of the ages, but at the very endof the passage, the text casually remarks: “Vishnu is the horse’s head that lives in the ocean,devouring oblations.” So she is there after all.The Buddha and Kalki appear together in sequence in many of the Puranic lists of avatarsand on reliefs of the ten avatars from the Gupta period onward. 59 Vishnu first initiates the Kali

Age when he becomes the Buddha to destroy the antigods and make them into heretics, and then,at the end of the Kali Age, he becomes Kalki to destroy both heretics and barbarians. One latePurana makes this connection explicit and sets both Buddha and Kalki in the past, the right timefor the Buddha but the wrong time for Kalki:KALI AND KALKI, BUDDHA AND JINAAt the end of the Kali Age, Adharma and Kali (theincarnation of the Kali Age) were born. Men became lustful, hypocritical and evil, adulterers,drunkards. Ascetics took to houses, and householders were devoid of discrimination. Menabandoned the Vedas and sacrifices, and the gods, without sustenance, sought refuge withBrahma. Then Vishnu was born as Kalki. He levied a great army to chastise the Buddha; hefought the Buddhists, who were led by the Jina, and he killed the Jina and defeated the Buddhistsand the barbarians who assisted them. The wives of the Buddhists and barbarians had also takenup arms, but Kalki taught them the paths of karma, jnana, and bhakti. He defeated Kali, whoescaped to another age. 60 Kalki comes, as usual, to counteract the doctrines of the Buddhistsand Jainas and barbarians. But as time has now passed—the Kalki Purana may be as late as theeighteenth century—the barbarians (mlecch"s) 61 may be Christians or even Muslims. Whoeverthey are, Kalki teaches their women the three paths of karma, jnana, and bhakti, the paths of theBhagavad Gita. This late bhakti text assumes that the women, with their special gift for bhakti,can still be redeemed, if the men cannot. The incarnate Kali Age escapes, because it is inevitablethat, after the Winning Age that Kalki here introduces, time will inevitably degenerate, and theKali Age will be with us again.KALKI’S HORSEEventually Kalki as or with a stallion replaced the underwater mare as the doomsdayhorse; in later texts, Kalki is said to ride on a horse 62 (a swift horse that the gods give him), 63and, later still, he himself is said to be a horse or horse-headed. When the Muslim sect of theImam Shahis reworked the stories of the avatars, Kalki, the tenth avatar, became the imam, whorides on a horse. 64 The horse head may be the result of merging Kalki with earlier equine mythsabout good horse heads, such as the head of the Upanishadic sacrificial horse and the horse headthrough which the Vedic Dadhyanch tells the secret of soma to the Ashvins. There is alsoanother good horse-headed Vishnu, Hayagriva (“horse-necked”), iu who is sometimes regarded asa separate, minor avatar of Vishnu. 65 In the Mahabharata (12.335.1-64), Vishnu takes this formto dive into the ocean to retrieve the Vedas from two antigods who have stolen them; Puranicretellings of the story say that when he resumed his own form, he left the horse head in theocean, where it becomes our old friend the head of the submarine mare, though now devouringoblations instead of water. 66But there are also demonic horses in Vaishnava mythology. A still-later text states thatHayagriva was not a god at all but a horse-headed antigod that had won the boon that onlysomeone horse-headed could kill him, and so when Vishnu was once accidentally beheaded (yes,another story: His head falls into the ocean iv ), the gods had their blacksmith take an ax, cut thehead off a horse, and put it on Vishnu; Vishnu then killed the horse-headed antigod. 67 Krishnaalso fights with a horse antigod named Keshin (“Long-haired,” like the Vedic sage, or here,perhaps, “Long-maned”), whom he kills by wounding him in the mouth and splitting him inhalf. 68 A Gupta image depicts a young Krishna kicking a horse, presumably the horse antigodKeshin, in the stomach and jamming his elbow in the horse’s mouth. 69 The negative image of theShaiva mare fire joined to the positive images of Vaishnava horses may have resulted in theambiguous equine Vaishnava figures of both Keshin and Kalki.

CLASS AND CASTE STRUGGLESPARASHURAMAParashurama (“Rama with an Ax”) is not an avatar in the Mahabharata, though he is animportant figure there in his own right. The son of the insanely jealous Brahmin sage Jamadagniand his Kshatriya wife, Renuka, Parashurama is an awkward interclass mix and gets tragicallycaught in the crossfire between his parents. One day, as Renuka bathes in the river she catchessight of a king playing in the water with his queen, and she desires him. Her husband, sensingthis change, has their son Parashurama, the Lizzie Borden of Hindu mythology (forty whacksand all), behead her. But beheading is seldom fatal in a Hindu myth. Pleased by his son’sobedience, Jamadagni offers him a boon, and Parashurama has him bring Renuka back to life(MB 3.116.1-20). (The Tamil version of this story has Parashurama accidentally give his motherthe head of a Pariah woman. 70 ) Parashurama also requests, and is granted, as an additional boon,“that no one would remember her murder, that no one would be touched by the evil (MB3.116.21-25).” Thus nothing really happens; at the end, all wrongs are righted. All that is lostwhen the head has been restored is memory—perhaps not merely the memory of the murder butalso the memory of the sexual vision that threatened Renuka’s integrity as a chaste wife bythreatening to unveil in her the conflicting image of the erotic woman. It is not entirely clearwhether the evil consists in the murder or in the original lapse of chastity, nor, therefore, whetherParashurama is asking that his mother, or he himself, or everyone else should never againexperience lust.But Parashurama later lashes out against his mother’s class (the whole race of Kshatriyas)and kills them all. 71 What is most puzzling is why this out-of-control boy of mixed birth, whocomes from a broken home that he did much to break, is regarded as an appropriate addition tothe list of Vishnu’s avatars. All he has going for him is a fanatical anti-Kshatriya bias that mayhave appealed to the Brahmin authors of the Puranas and the irony that he acts like a Kshatriya,not a Brahmin, when he wipes out the Kshatriyas. Perhaps that is enough. Kings invoke him as arole model: “Like Parashurama, he cleansed the earth of his enemies.” Like Kalki, Parashuramadestroys his own people; where Kalki is modeled on barbarian invaders and kills barbarianinvaders, Parashurama is a Kshatriya who kills Kshatriyas.THE PARADOX OF THE GOOD ANTIGODThough the dwarf is the earliest of the avatars, and the Man-Lion the last, they bothinteract with the paradoxical figure of the good antigod. This figure—first the antigod Bali,whom the dwarf conquers, then Prahlada, whom the Man-Lion saves—seems to be what theanthropologist Mary Douglas would have called a category error, matter out of place: As anantigod he is by definition anti the gods, but he is devoted to, hence pro, at least one god (Indrafor Bali, Vishnu for Prahlada). The texts recognize this connection, though they reverse thehistorical sequence, in making Prahlada Bali’s grandfather.In each of the three alliances, antigods grow strong by amassing the paramount virtue ofthe period. Thus in the first alliance the antigod Bali poses a threat because he has the Vedicvirtue of generosity; in the second alliance, the good antigods in the Buddha myth, as well asogres like Ravana, have amassed dangerous amounts of inner heat; and in the third alliance,Prahlada becomes a category error through his bhakti to Vishnu. This last instance, however, aswe shall see, ultimately offers the solution to the problems of all three alliances.Humans, not antigods, were the real problem here. iw The mythology of the good antigod

is the Puranas’ coded way of talking about the challenge of people born into low castes, hencecondemned to do unclean tasks, who nevertheless aspire to a life more in keeping with higherforms of dharma. Most of the Brahmins in charge of Vedic religion would still have nothing todo with such people, but many of the new sects, Puranic or Tantric, were casting about for waysto allow people of all castes to join them without compromising their status as pukka Hindusects. These myths explore various possible ways of accomplishing this.At the same time, these are not just stories about human beings interacting; they are alsoabout what they say they are about, the nature of god and salvation. Moreover, a myth thatimagines a new relationship between humans and gods makes possible, in turn, new relationshipsbetween humans.THE DWARF (VAMANA)Very little is said about Vishnu in the Rig Veda, but his main appearance is as theprotagonist of an important creation myth in which he takes three steps by which he measuresout, and therefore creates, the earthly realms, propping up the sky (1.154.1-6). The Brahmanastell the story in more detail: “The gods and antigods were at war, and the antigods were winning,claiming the whole world as theirs. The gods asked for a share in the earth, and the antigods,rather jealousy, replied, ‘We will give you as much as this Vishnu lies on.’ Now Vishnu was adwarf, but he was also the sacrifice. The gods worshiped with him and obtained this wholeearth.” 72 In the Ramayana, Bali alone, not the antigods in general, poses the threat. The Puranasnow make Vishnu a Brahmin as well as a dwarf:VISHNU BEGS FROM BALIWhen the antigod Bali, son of Virochana, controlled all theworlds, Vishnu became incarnate as a dwarf and went where Bali was performing a sacrifice. Hebecame a Brahmin and asked Bali to give him the space that he could cover in three strides. Baliwas pleased to do this, thinking that the dwarf was just a dwarf. But the dwarf stepped over theheaven, the sky, and the earth, in three strides, stealing the antigods’ prosperity. He sent theantigods and all their sons and grandsons to hell and gave Indra kingship over all the immortals.73The cosmology implicit in the Brahmana myth is stated explicitly in this text: “Vishnurevealed that the whole universe was in his body.” Bali is not allowed to excel as a sacrificer;Vishnu sends him to hell, where all antigods, even, or especially, virtuous antigods, belong.THE MAN-LION (NARASIMHA)Although the Man-Lion does not appear until the Puranas, the antigods whom heopposes—Prahlada and his father, Hiranyakashipu—have a history that stretches back to theBrahmanas. Prahlada in the Brahmanas and in parts of the Mahabharata is a typical, demonicdemon—angry, lustful, opposing the gods. 74 But in the Mahabharata he becomes a type that werecognize from the second alliance of gods, humans, and antigods, a too-virtuous antigod:INDRA BEGS FROM PRAHLADAPrahlada stole Indra’s kingdom, and Indra could not get itback because Prahlada was so virtuous. Indra went to Prahlada disguised as a Brahmin, and atIndra’s request, Prahlada taught Indra about eternal dharma [sanatana dharma]. Pleased with hispupil, Prahlada asked the Brahmin to choose a boon, and Indra as the Brahmin said, “I wish tohave your virtue.” Indra left, taking Prahlada’s virtue and dharma with him, and Prahlada’s truthfollowed, and his good conduct, and his prosperity [Shri] (MB 12.124.19-63). We recognizehere the pattern not only of second alliance myths that assume the need to steal or corrupt thereligious power and/or virtue of anyone who threatens the gods, but also of a transformation ofthe pattern of the story of Ekalavya (who gave his teacher the very essence of what made him

great, even as Prahlada gives his pupil his greatness), with perhaps a bit of a spin taken from theTantric Pashupatas who stole the good karma of people whom they tricked into wronging them.We may also recognize the pattern of the story of Bali (an antigod whose generosity to Vishnu ishis undoing); indeed, in many versions of the Bali myth, Prahlada, Bali’s grandfather, warns Balithat the dwarf is Vishnu, 75 and in one text, Prahlada complains bitterly that Vishnu as the dwarfdeceived and robbed his grandson Bali, who was “truthful, without desire or anger, calm,generous, and a sacrificer.” 76 (In a late version of the Bali myth that is even more stronglyreminiscent of Ekalavya, Indra himself begs from Bali’s father, Virochana, who generouslyoffers him anything he wants, “Even my own head,” to which Indra without batting an eyereplies, “Give me your own head,” and the antigod cuts it off and gives it to him. 77 ) The virtue ofthe antigod king—his eternal dharma—leads him to lose everything, even his sva-dharma asking of the antigods. The Vedic quality of generosity is still regarded as desirable here, but nowwe see its disadvantage.But then the Puranas rewind back to an earlier generation and make the villain of thepiece no longer the virtuous Prahlada but his evil father. Now too the antigod’s opponent is notIndra but Vishnu as the Man-Lion, usually depicted as a lion’s head on a man’s body, thoughwith many arms, equipped with terrible claws:THE MAN-LION KILLS HIRANYAKASHIPUThe antigod Hiranyakashipu obtained a boonfrom Brahma that he could not be killed by man or god or beast, from inside or outside, by dayor by night, on earth or in the air, or by any weapon animate or inanimate. Confident of hisinvulnerability, he began to trouble heaven and earth. His son, Prahlada, on the other hand, was afervent devotee of Vishnu. Hiranyakashipu threatened to kill Prahlada, who insisted neverthelessthat Vishnu was the god who pervaded the universe. Hiranyakashipu kicked a stone pillar andasked: “Is he in this pillar too?” Vishnu emerged from the pillar in the form of a Man-Lion anddisemboweled Hiranyakashipu with his claws, at dusk, on his lap, on the threshold. ThenPrahlada became king of the antigods; devoted to Vishnu, he abandoned his antigod nature andsacrificed to the gods. 78 The more general theme of the antigod who thinks he has afoolproof list of noncombatants but leaves out an essential clause of the contract (humans forRavana, females for Mahisha) is joined with the theme of the Mahabharata tale of Indra and theantigod Vritra (or the antigod Namuchi), who had to be killed at twilight (neither night nor day),on the shore of the ocean (neither on land nor on sea), and with foam (a weapon neither wet nordry) (MB 12.272-3).Here Prahlada is a devotee of Vishnu from the start, steadfast despite the threats andattacks by his father, who is furious not because Prahlada is virtuous but merely because he hasno respect for his father and the family traditions—that is, because he is violating hissva-dharma, a matter of partisan loyalties as well as ethics. Hiranyakashipu tries in vain to havehis prodigal son educated in antigod etiquette: rape and pillage. Ultimately, as always, Vishnukills the antigod, but in the process he upholds bhakti in the face of caste law. Where Vishnu hasto cheat Bali by using his virtue against him, now it’s OK for Prahlada to be a good antigod.Something has changed. Sva-dharma is abolished, while general dharma is preserved andassimilated to bhakti. The texts that tell the story this way do not even bother to explain why theyoung antigod should serve the gods in the first place, against all laws of antigod nature. By thistime, bhakti is taken for granted.AMAZING GRACEWhat made it OK for Prahlada to go against the rules of his birth as an antigod? It

equired a shift in the shape of the universe.THE ZERO-SUM WORLD EGGThe basic structures of Hindu cosmology, constantly reinterpreted, served as an armatureon which authors in each generation sculpted their musings on the structure of human society. Inthe Rig Veda, the Hindu universe was an egg, the two halves of the eggshell forming heaven andearth, with the sun as the yolk in the middle; it was a sealed, perfectly enclosed space with agiven amount of good and evil and a given number of souls. This is why the sage in theUpanishads asks why heaven does not get filled up with all the dead souls going into it. Thisclosed structure began to prove problematic when many Puranic myths acted as or pamphlets fora particular shrine, magnifying its salvific powers, presumably to drum up business by boastingthat anyone—even women and people of low castes—could go straight to heaven after anycontact with the shrine. In reaction against this, therefore, the gods (read: Brahmins) in somemyths worry that so many people are being saved at the new shrines that people in heaven willhave to stand with their hands above their heads, like people in a rush-hour subway. To keepheaven a more exclusive club, the gods take measures to destroy the shrines, flooding them orfilling them with sand or simply corrupting people (as in the Buddha avatar) so that they stopgoing to the shrine. 79 Here, as throughout this corpus, we may read these debates aboutimaginary creatures as paper-thin overlays on the ongoing debate about very real social classesand sectarian and religious conflicts; both Hindu and Muslim rulers did indeed, before, after, andduring this period, destroy great Hindu shrines.Ethically, this is a world of limited good or a zero-sum game: If someone is saved,someone else has to be damned. For Brahmins to be pure, Pariahs have to be impure. This is thejealous world of the second alliance: If you win, I lose. Since evil is a substance, space is aproblem. This means, among other things, that evil, once created, cannot get out of the universe;the best you can do is just move it over to some spot where it will do the least possible harm, asthe fire that fused Shiva’s anger and Kama’s erotic power was temporarily stashed in thedoomsday mare at the bottom of the ocean.The good antigod is the figure that ultimately triggers a paradigm shift in this cosmology.At first, he is caught in the clash between a form of general dharma (sadharana dharma) andspecific dharma (sva-dharma, in this case, the duties of an antigod), a conflict that already affectsthe good ogres such as Vibhishana in the Ramayana. One story about a good ogre is based upona typical myth told at some length in the Ramayana (7.5-8), in which an ogre named Sukesha isat first very good (he and his three sons study the Veda and make generous gifts), then good butthreatening (they amass great amounts of inner heat and are given boons of invincibility), andfinally corrupted by pride (they harass the gods); Vishnu destroys them all in battle and sendsthem down to hell. When a Purana retells this story, it raises new issues:THE OGRE SUKESHIN GOES TO HEAVENA great ogre named Sukeshin received fromShiva the boon that he could not be conquered or slain. He lived according to dharma, and oneday he asked a hermitage full of sages to tell him about dharma. They began by describing thespecific dharma of gods (to perform sacrifice), ogres (raping other men’s wives, coveting others’wealth, worshiping Shiva), and others. Then they went on to explain general dharma, the tenfolddharma for all classes, such as noninjury, restraint, and generosity. They concluded: “No oneshould abandon the dharma ordained for his own class and stage of life or hissva-dharma.”Sukeshin taught all the ogres about general dharma, and when they practiced it,their brilliant luster paralyzed the sun, moon, and stars; night was like day; owls came out and

crows killed them. Then the sun realized the ogres’ one weakness: they had abandoned theirsva-dharma, a lapse that destroyed all their general dharma. Overpowered by anger, the sun shothis rays at them, and their city fell from the sky.But when Sukeshin saw the city falling, he said,“Honor to Shiva!” and Shiva cast his glance at the sun, which fell from the sky like a stone. Thegods propitiated Shiva and put the sun back in his chariot, and they took Sukeshin to dwell inheaven. 80 The first of the three parts of this myth states the problem: the clash betweengeneral and specific dharma. The second defends sva-dharma, and the third overrules it, whenSukeshin plays the bhakti card to trump at least some of the aces of the caste system.At the start, Sukeshin is in a bind: He must not abandon his dharma of rape and pillage,but he must also practice self-restraint (not easily compatible with rape) and generosity (noteasily compatible with stealing). The one ray of light in this dark conflict is the fact that thesva-dharma of an ogre here apparently includes the worship of Shiva. Sukeshin seizes upon thisloophole and proselytizes, with devastating results: Innocent owls die, and the sun is disastrouslystill. The midnight sun (which drives Scandinavians and Russians to commit suicide in summer)is even worse than the midwinter, when there is no sun; human beings (and, apparently, gods)cannot stand too much light—too much goodness in the wrong place. This is the traditional view:For an ogre, evil is its own reward, and a good ogre (virtuous) is by definition a bad ogre (thewhite sheep of his family). The jealous sun puts an end to it—but no. The marines land, as thetroops of bhakti blow sva-dharma out of the water. The solution, however, is implied rather thanstated: Sukeshin alone goes to heaven, the token antigod there; the other antigods, whosemassive luster caused all the problems, conveniently vanish. Not everyone can go to heaven, itappears. Even with bhakti, at this point, not all are saved; the masses, the lower castes, andunreformed sinners are not saved. Not yet, at any rate.BLOWING OFF THE ROOFBut later bhakti texts blast through this impasse. The spirit of these texts is what MirceaEliade celebrated as “breaking open the roof ” (briser le toit), 81 and the later Puranas did it,cracking open the egg of the closed universe. We have seen one example of this sort ofcosmological transformation in two different versions of hell, first with a Mahabharata king(Yudhishthira) who cannot transfer his personal good karma and then with a Puranic king(Vipashchit) who can. Now we will encounter a mythology in which, again, sinners are givengood karma that they don’t deserve, but since now it is a god, rather than a human king, whotransfers his powers, his compassion and forgiveness, the god, unlike the king, loses nothing byit, none of his good karma. The world of limited good gives way to a world of infinitelyexpansible good karma and bhakti; the generous donor keeps it all while the sinners benefit fromit too, just as in the avatar the god remains entire in heaven even while he gives a portion ofhimself to the avatar on earth. Unlike texts such as the Gita, these texts are saying that evenwithout bhakti on your part you can be saved from your sins; the god has enough bhakti for bothof you.In several of the late Puranic texts, when a shrine offers universal access to heaven,raising the gods’ hackles, Shiva intervenes, preserves or restores the shrine, and takes everyoneto “the abode of Brahma.” 82 When the god of hell, Yama, complains that women, Shudras, anddog cookers all are going to heaven through one particular shrine, the Shaiva shrine of Somnath,putting Yama out of work, Shiva replies that they all have been purified by the sight of theshrine, and he dismisses Yama without another word. 83 To the complaint that heaven is full ofevil people, Shiva simply replies that the people in question are no longer evil, ignoring the other

half of the complaint, that heaven is full, or Yama on the dole. (Somnath is, the reader will recall,the temple that Mahmud of Ghazni so notoriously destroyed in 1025, perhaps before this textwas composed.) Apparently, Shiva’s new heaven cannot be filled; these texts imagine a newheaven that can stretch the envelope to accommodate everyone. 84 Earlier the shape of theuniverse seemed to constrain the ethical possibilities, but when those possibilities grow intense,the cosmos changes its shape, and this in turn can change the way that human beings treat oneanother, at least in theory and perhaps in practice. As in the Gita, the payoff is still in the nextlife. Most of these texts are not saying that a Pariah can act like a Brahmin in this life, merelythat he too can be freed from this life. But some of them seem to imply that people of all castescan change their forms of worship in this life and thus gain a better rebirth. And here again wemust acknowledge that these stories are not merely about Pariahs but also about the relationshipbetween all humans and their salvation.ACCIDENTAL GRACEUnder the combined influence of bhakti, Deshification, and Islam, some texts take thechallenge one step further. Now the god to whom the antigod is devoted comes to him andannounces that he and all the other antigods are to be taken forever to the heaven of the god,which can accommodate not only all reformed sinners but even unreformed sinners too, as wellas people of all classes. 85 Indeed this heaven is particularly partial to unreformed sinners. This isthe culminating myth of the third alliance: The gods love all of us, even the good (hence bad)antigods and, especially, the bad antigods. This is a world of not only unlimited good butundeserved good, of what might be called accidental grace.We can see a kind of development here. First comes the story of the good bhakta, a goodman, a devotee of Shiva, whom Shiva saves from death; there are many stories of this type. 86Then comes the evil bhakta. The god of death is forced to spare all worshipers of Shiva, even ifthey are evildoers (or evil thinkers; heretics and liars also go to heaven if they worship Shiva) orantigods who worship Shiva against their sva-dharma of being evil; 87 we have seen some ofthese. Then comes the story of a man who is neither good nor a bhakta:THE THIEF WHO RANG THE BELLA thief who killed Brahmins, drank wine, stole gold, andcorrupted other men’s wives lost everything in a game of dice. That night he climbed on the headof a Shiva-linga and took away the bell [inadvertently ringing it]. Shiva sent his servants to thethief and brought him to Kailasa, where he became a servant of Shiva. 88 Three of the thief’ssins are those of lustful addiction—wine, women, and dice—and the fourth and fifth are the twodefining sins of the Brahmin world: killing Brahmins and stealing (Brahmins’) gold. The thief’sbrush with accidental bhakti does nothing at all to change him; presumably, he goes on dicing,womanizing, and drinking until he dies. Although in some stories the accidental act of worshipchanges the worshiper, more often the sinners remain unreformed like this and therefore (sic) goto heaven.Here is another story, about a very bad man, this one ironically named Ocean of Virtues(Gunanidhi):THE ADULTERER WHO LIT A LAMPGunanidhi abandoned his wife for a prostitute and wentto a temple at night to rob it; he made a new wick for the lamp in order to see what was worthstealing, found the treasure, took it, and then returned to his wicked ways. Years later, when hedied, he won deliverance from hell and eternal life in heaven because he had lit a lamp for thegod. 89 (Robbing temples, you will recall, was a very real problem at this time: South Indiankings, Muslim conquerors, everyone was doing it.) Similarly, Devaraja (“King of the Gods”), a

thoroughly no-good fellow, accidentally heard the Shiva Purana being recited when he waspassing by on some foul errand, paid no attention to it at all, but was still saved, by that contact,from the consequences of his sins. 90 Then there was the man of equally dastardly deeds, namedRogue (Kitava), who tripped while hastening to bring flowers to his whore; he fell down,dropped all the flowers, and cried out, “Shiva!” ix For offering flowers to Shiva, not only was hesaved from being thrown into hell but he was given the throne of Indra, king of the gods, thusfulfilling his name. (He was eventually reborn as the antigod Bali, but that is another story.) 91None of these sinners reforms as a result of his accidental encounter with the god; no onesees the light or turns over a new page; all go on whoring, robbing, and so forth until they die,presumably of syphilis, cirrhosis, or impalement. But the mere encounter is enough to save them.The theme of the undeserving devotee implicitly repositions ritualism, even apparently“mindless” ritualism, over bhakti. It argues that feelings, emotions, intentions do not count at all,that certain actions are efficacious in themselves in procuring salvation for the unwitting devotee.You don’t even have to know how to do the ritual, but you do it “naturally,” almost like the“natural” (sahaja) acts of Tantric ritual. In this sense, at least, these stories present a Tantricargument for the efficacy of a ritual useful for sinners in the Kali Age.These narratives seem counterintuitive and were perceived as perverse by somesubsequent Hindu commentators. But where did the idea come from?Retracing our footsteps, we can see the early stirrings of this concept of the sinner whogoes to heaven despite his intentions, in the South Indian idea of “hate-devotion,” which takes onnew dimensions in the late Puranas. By trying to kill the god, the antigod becomes passionatetoward the god, and so the god loves the antigod, with or without repentance. 92 After Krishnakilled the ogress Putana (“Stinky”), her body gave off a sweet smell when it burned, for she hadbeen purified by her death at his hands and by suckling him—even though she had done it withthe intention of poisoning him. This doctrine, though sometimes challenged in bhakti texts thatdemanded a conscious turning toward god, was often upheld in texts justifying heresies: “Thosewho become non-Vedic Pashupatas and decry Vishnu really worship him through the spirit ofhatred [dvesha-buddhi].” 93 The Bhagavata Purana makes explicit the effect of this belief:“Desire, hatred, fear, or love toward the lord, filling the heart with bhakti, destroy all sins andbind one to the lord: The Gopis by desire, Kamsa by fear, the wicked kings by hatred, and hiskinsmen by affection were bound to him as we are by bhakti.” 94 Other elements too contributedto the development of the idea of accidental grace, such as the Tantric goal of merging with thegod by flouting all the rules of conventional dharma.BY THE GRACE OF DOGIn keeping with the other reversals of caste rules, dogs often play important roles in thistheology:THE TRIDENT PAWAn evil thief was killed by the king’s men. A dog came to eat him, andaccidentally, unthinkingly, the dog’s nails made the mark of Shiva’s trident on the man’sforehead. As a result, Shiva’s messengers took the thief to Kailasa. 95 Now the dog, insteadof the sinner, performs an accidental act of worship, as the three scratches of his nails (part of hisfoot, the lowest part of this lowest of creatures) form the triple lines of Shiva’s trident (trishula),just as Kannappar’s dogs left their paw marks on Shiva, and the natural genitals of male andfemale Tantrics are read as the signs of Shiva and Parvati. The thief’s generosity to the dog ispart of his bhakti to the god. The dog who intends to eat the thief (and perhaps succeeds; the textdoes not say) unthinkingly blesses him. The thief goes to heaven, though the dog does not.

Another dog blesses the sinner who feeds him in a retelling of the story of Kannappar, inthe Skanda Purana:THE ACCIDENTALLY FED DOGOnce upon a time there was a certain Kirata named Chanda[“Fierce”], a man of cruel addictions. He killed fish and animals and birds and even Brahmins,and his wife was just like him. One night, on the great Night of Shiva, he spent the night in abilva tree, wide awake, hoping to kill a wild boar. There happened to be a Shiva linga under thetree. The leaves of the bilva tree [used in Shiva worship] that the hunter cut off to get a betterview fell on the Shiva linga, and mouthfuls of water that he spat out chanced to land there too.And so, unknowingly, he performed a puja. His wife too stayed up all night worrying about him,for she feared he had been killed. But she went and found him and brought him food, and whilethey were bathing before their meal, a dog came and ate all the food. She became angry andstarted to kill the dog, but Chanda said, “It gives me great satisfaction to know that the dog haseaten the food. What use is this body anyway? Don’t be angry.” And so he enlightened her.Shivasent his messengers with a heavenly chariot to take the Kirata to the world of Shiva, with hiswife, because he had worshiped the linga on the Night of Shiva. But the Kirata said, “I am aviolent hunter, a sinner. How can I go to heaven? How did I worship the Shiva-linga?” Then theytold him how he had cut the bilva leaves and put them on the head of the linga, and he and hiswife had stayed awake and fasted. And they brought the couple to heaven. 96 By eating thefood, the dog inadvertently causes the Kirata and his wife to give food, a part of the puja that,like staying up all night, is prescribed for the Night of Shiva. Thus this story recapitulates andintegrates three stories: of linga worship by mouthfuls of unclean food from a hunter (the tale ofKannappar), of inadvertent worship by someone violating Hindu dharma, and of salvation for aman touched by a dog. It also includes the man’s wife in the process of his salvation. Luck playsa part too.The Tantric argument that low people have to have low (or at least very simple and easy)sources of grace underlies a more complex story of salvation by dog, a variant of the myth of theevil king Vena, 97 father of the good king Prithu:THE DOG THAT BROKE THE CHAIN OF EVILAs a result of his sins, Vena was born amongthe barbarians, afflicted with leprosy. He went to purify himself at the shrine of Shiva the Pillar(Sthanu), but the gods forbade him to bathe there. Now, there was a dog there who had been aman in a previous life but had been sinful and hence reborn as a dog. The dog came to theSarasvati River and swam there, and his impurities were shaken off and his thirst slaked. Then hewas hungry and entered Vena’s hut; when Vena saw the dog, he was afraid. Vena touched himgently, and the dog showered him with water from the bathing place. Vena plunged into thewater, and by the power of the shrine, he was saved. Shiva offered Vena a boon, and Vena said,“I plunged into the lake out of fear of this dog, for the gods forbade me to bathe here. The dogdid me a favor, and so I ask you to favor him.” Shiva was pleased and promised that the dogwould be freed from sin and would go straight to Shiva’s heaven. And he promised Vena that hetoo would go to Shiva’s heaven—for a while. 98 The unclean dog first is cleansed and thentransfers the water from his body to that of Vena, by shaking himself (as wet dogs always do);only then does he frighten Vena so much that Vena jumps into the water. I take the text to meanthat Vena could jump into the water only after the dog had sprinkled him. He cannot enter theshrine before that, for reasons that are spelled out in another version of the story: As heapproaches the shrine of Sthanu, the wind in the sky says, “Do not do this rash deed; protect theshrine. This man is enveloped in an evil so terrible that it would destroy the shrine.” 99 This is thecatch-22: The sinner would pollute the shrine before the shrine could purify the sinner; the sick

man is too sick to take the medicine. The idea of contamination by contact with evil, transfer ofevil, a variant of transfer of karma, comes from the zero-sum world of caste pollution; itdetermines whom you should avoid touching, the basis of the concept of untouchability. Bycontrast, the world of bhakti brings an open cosmogony and a new vision of the accidental graceof god (and of dog), both a response to and an inspiration for new visions of the grace that ispossible for and between all human beings, including those of the excluded social classes. It’s away of making room for people who have been kept outside the system, either by birth or byactions, since actions, as well as birth, can pollute people and marginalize them.The dog therefore intercedes for the sinner. He makes him a little less polluted, so that hebecomes eligible for real purification. Similarly, the heretics to whom Shiva teaches the Tantrasneed to have worked off the curse, to have started on the path upward, before he can give themthe Tantras, and in the view of some non-Tantrics, the Tantras make the Tantrics a little lessbenighted, so that they become eligible for real religion. Vena is not finished yet; there are otherrebirths before he is finally freed. But the dog makes it possible for him to proceed on the path tohis salvation. And finally, at the end of the myth, and a millennium or two after Yudhishthira’sdog in the Mahabharata vanished before he could enter heaven, this dog enters Shiva’s heaven.CHAPTER 18PHILOSOPHICAL FEUDS IN SOUTH INDIA AND KASHMIR800 to 1300 CECHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES ARE CE)c. 788-820 Shankara, nondualist philosopher, lives inKeralac. 975-1025 Abhinavagupta, Shaiva philosopher, lives in Kashmir1021 Ghaznavid(Turkish) Muslim capital established at Lahorec. 1056-1137 Ramanuja, qualified nondualistphilosopher, lives in Tamil country1192 Ghorid Muslim capital established at Delhic. 1200Jayadeva lives in Bengal1210-1526 The Delhi Sultanate is in powerc. 1238-1317 Madhva,dualist philosopher, lives in Karnatakac. 1300 Shri Vaishnavas split into Cats and MonkeysInthose long-gone days the Valley, which is now simply K, had othernames. . . . “Kache-Mer” can be translated as “the place that hides aSea.” But “Kosh-mar” . . . was the word for “nightmare.” iySalman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) 1The sea that Kashmir hides (in this wordplay by Salman Rushdie) is the great SanskritOcean of Story, composed in Kashmir, which Rushdie imagines submerged like other floodedlands in the Indian imagination. Kashmir is also the home of several famous debates about thephilosophy of illusion, the belief that this world is nothing but a dream—or a nightmare. In thischapter we will consider those debates in narratives about quarrelsome philosophers,philosophical animals, and the recurrent Hindu nightmare of becoming a Pariah or a woman.PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLSBack to the banyan. Again we must double back to take a look at another branch of thattree, the philosophical branch, returning to the era of the beginning of bhakti in South India andthe beginning of the Arab presence in India. The chapters on those two themes also provide thehistorical background for this chapter, which is about philosophy not as philosophy but as part of

Hindu myth and ritual, in part because I am no philosopher and in part because that is not whatthis book is about, two not unrelated considerations. So I will deal with philosophy only when itgets out of the hands of the philosophers and into the hands of the people who tell stories aboutthe philosophers and incorporate philosophical theories into their myths. For philosophy in Indiais debated in the worship life of ordinary people.My focus in this chapter will be on the myths that Hindus told about three great Vedanticphilosophers, particularly (continuing the theme of inter- and intrareligious dialogue) stories thatthe followers of one philosopher told about another philosopher, and on myths that apply thephilosophy of illusion to caste and gender and to the householder/renunciant tension, since oneof the main arrows in the quiver of renunciation is the argument that the material world is notmerely a deathtrap but an unreal deathtrap.Since this approach will ignore many other important philosophical themes, let me atleast set the stage by briefly outlining the basic positions of the major schools of Hinduphilosophy, the six Darshanas or “Points of View.” These schools had taken root in earliercenturies but became more fully developed from the twelfth century on, in conversation with oneanother.1. Mimamsa (“Critical Inquiry”) began with Jaimini (c. 400 BCE) and was devoted to theinterpretation of the Vedas, taking the Vedas as the authority for dharma and karma. Jaiminiguaranteed the sacrificer life in heaven after death and decreed that women could sacrifice butShudras could not. 2 2. Vaisheshika began with Kanada (c. third century BCE), who presented anatomic cosmology, according to which all material objects are made of atoms of the nineelements: the four material elements—earth, water, fire, and air—plus five more abstractelements—space, time, ether, mind, and soul. In this view, god created the world, but not exnihilo; he simply imposed order on pre-existing atoms. Shankara called the Vaisheshikas halfnihilists. 3 3. Logic and reasoning began with Gautama (c. second century BCE, no relation to theBuddhist Gautama) and was an analytical philosophy basic not only to all later Hindu philosophybut to the scientific literature of the shastras.4. Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutras (c. 150 BCE) codifiedyogic practices that had been in place for centuries. Yoga assumes a personal god who controlsthe process of periodic creation and dissolution and is omniscient and omnipotent. This schoolemphasized exercises of the mind and the body, “including the very difficult exercise of notexercising them at all.” 4 It believed that moksha came not from knowledge but from theconcentration and discipline of the mind and the body.5. Sankhya as a philosophy has roots thatdate from the time of the Upanishads and are important in the Mahabharata (especially in theGita) but were first formally codified by Ishvarakrishna (c. third century CE). Sankhya isdualistic, dividing the universe into a male purusha (spirit, self, or person) and a female prakriti(matter, nature). There are an infinite number of similar but separate purushas, no one superior toanother. 5 Early Sankhya philosophers argued that god may or may not exist but is not needed toexplain the universe; later Sankhya philosophers assumed that god does exist.6. And then comesVedanta, the philosophical school that reads the Upanishads through the lens of the unity of theself (atman) and the cosmic principle (brahman). Often expressed in the form of commentarieson the Upanishads, on the Gita, and on Badarayana’s Vedanta-Sutras (c. 400 BCE), differentbranches of Vedanta tend to relegate the phenomenal world to the status of an epistemologicalerror (avidya), a psychological imposition (adhyaya), or a metaphysical illusion (maya). Evil too,which the myths struggle to deal with, and, especially, death turn out to be nothing but anillusion. The great phase of Vedanta began with three great South Indian philosophers, allof whom were Brahmins. 6 A basic schism separated the dualists, who argued that god and the

universe (including the worshiper) were of two distinct substances, and the nondualists, whoargued that they were of the same substance. Shankara, from Kerala, was a Shaiva exponent ofpure nondualism (Advaita) and idealism. Ramanuja, from Kanchipuram (Kanjeevaram), in Tamilcountry, was a Tamil Vaishnava exponent of qualified nondualism (Vishishta Advaita) and of thereligion of the Shri Vaishnavas (see below), who call their tradition the dual Vedanta because itcombines the Sanskrit of the Veda with the Tamil of the Alvars. 7 Madhva, also known asMadhvacharya (“Madhva the Teacher”), from Kalyan (in Karnataka), was the founder of thedualist (Dvaita) school of Vedanta. The followers, and opponents, of these three philosopherstold many stories about them, from which we can gather some of the human implications of theirphilosophies and the wide range of diverse voices encoded in them. They were the subjects of abody of mythology in the style of the Puranas, which dramatized their views and assimilatedthose views to the hagiographic and folk traditions. For their philosophies were not limited to anelite circle of intellectuals but deeply affected devotional Hinduism, trickling down throughmythology and folklore.VEDANTIC VENDETTAS IN MEDIEVAL NARRATIVESIn medieval India, people cared about philosophy enough to fight about it. The “Conquestof the Four Corners of the World” (dig-vijaya), originally a royal and military concept, then ametaphor for a great pilgrimage tour, also became the term for the conquest of one philosopherby another. 8 The philosophers fought mostly with words, occasionally with miracles (like thetexts that floated upstream in the South Indian contest), more often with (and for) the purses oftheir patrons, and rarely with fisticuffs. They met on the page or the debating platform, not thebattlefield. (Or almost always. It did come to fisticuffs at least once, according to an amazingpainting in an illustrated copy of the Akbar-nama , said to depict “the Emperor Akbar watching afight between two bands of Hindu devotees at Thaneshwar, Punjab, 1597-8.” There is closecombat between dozens of yogis and ascetics and devotees of all stripes, shooting arrows frombows and slashing away at one another with swords, knives, and what appears to be anythingelse at hand. 9 )We have already encountered myths about the preaching of false philosophical andtheological doctrines, in the course of Shiva’s conflicts with Daksha and Vishnu’s avatar as theBuddha. We have traced a rough (and not precisely chronological) progression of the myths ofthe Buddha avatar through three stages, from the assimilation of Buddhism into Hinduism, to theantagonistic myths of opposition to a Buddhism on the rise, and then to more appreciative mythsabout a Buddhism on the wane. Now we encounter a fourth stage, in which Buddhism once againcontributed in positive ways to the philosophy of idealism in South India and Kashmir (seebelow), while much of the former animosity against the Buddhists was channeled into animosityagainst Shankara, in myths modeled in many ways on the myth of Vishnu as the Buddha. Let usconsider some of those myths.SHANKARA STORIESShankara’s texts speak for his ideas, but the legends about him speak for his life. He issaid to have started a reform movement, proposing a moral agenda that could compete with thenoble eightfold path of the Buddhists 10 (he was, as we will see, sometimes accused of owing toomuch to Buddhism) and a philosophy that may have been buoyed up by a need to respond to themonotheist philosophies of Islam. Shankara, regarded as a guru and proselytizer as well as aphilosopher, is said to have founded the centers of learning (matts) that still thrive in his name in

India today; his argument that the phenomenal world of everyday experience and its biologicalround of birth and death (samsara) was ultimately unreal and the source of our bondage wastaken as the basis for a monastic or ascetic life of renunciation (samnyasa). 11But Shankara argued that only Brahmins could renounce, 12 and some of the more generalanimus against renunciation was channeled into hostility against him. While there had beenrenouncers in Hinduism since before the time the Upanishads mapped out the path of flame andRelease, they lacked the institutional backing to become a major force—until Shankara. ButShankara took the idea of formal monastic orders and institutions from Buddhism and reworkedit for Hinduism, an action that stirred up some Brahmins like a saffron flag waved in front of abull. Ramanuja called Shankara a “crypto-Buddhist” (prachanna -bauddha). 13Shankara’s nondualism was challenged first by Ramanuja’s qualified nondualism and,later, by Madhva’s dualism; the followers of Madhva argued that Shankara championed monismbecause he was so stupid that he could only count to one. 14 Nondualism has the disadvantage thatyou cannot love god or worship god if you are god, or if your god is without any qualities(nir-guna), a technicality that Shankara allegedly ignored when he wrote the passionate,beautiful poems to Shiva that are attributed to him. Nondualists could get around this byworshiping god with a kind of “as if” for the forms “with qualities” (sa-guna): He appears “as if”he were a god with qualities. If, however, you assume that there is a dualism separating you fromgod and that god has qualities, as Madhva assumes, worship poses no problem.The hagiographies of Shankara arise at a time when (1) bhakti is rampant, spreading sofast that it even gets into philosophy, like ants at a picnic, and (2) Buddhists and Muslims, aswell as Christians in Kerala (Shankara’s home territory), are gaining ground. And so, just as thehuman avatars were in part a response to the human dimension of Buddhism in an earlier age,Shankara, someone who was, like the Buddha (and Muhammad and Jesus), a human founder of areligion, was the answer now.Born into a high-caste Brahmin family, Shankara taught and debated with many otherphilosophers. In his journeys throughout India, his biographies claim, he vehemently debatedwith Buddhists and tried to persuade kings and other influential people to withdraw their supportfrom Buddhist monasteries. One text depicts Shankara as an incarnation of Shiva, sent to earth tocombat Vishnu’s Buddha avatar:SHIVA AS SHANKARA VERSUS VISHNU AS BUDDHAThe gods complained to Shiva thatVishnu had entered the body of the Buddha on earth for their sake, but now the haters of religion,despising Brahmins and the dharma of class and stage of life, filled the earth. “Not a single manperforms a ritual, for all have become heretics—Buddhists, Kapalikas, and so forth—and so weeat no offerings.” Shiva consented to become incarnate as Shankara, to reestablish Vedicdharma, which keeps the universe happy, and to destroy evil behavior. 15 As usual, the heresygoes too far, destroying the allies as well as the enemies of the gods, and must be combated bythe intervention of god.The myths from this period reveal that it wasn’t only non-Hindus in conflict withShankara; Mimamsa philosophers and other Vedanta schools also apparently had tense relationswith Shankara, some of which turned on the question of renouncing desire and sexuality:SHANKARA AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S WIFEThe Mimamsa philosopher namedMandanamishra had a wife, Bharati, who challenged Shankara to a debate about the art of love,about which he was woefully ignorant, since he had always been chaste, a renouncer. Stymied bya question about sex, he asked for time out and took on the body, but not the soul, of a king whohad a large harem, to the relief both of the exhausted king and of the unsatisfied women. After a

month of pleasant research and fieldwork, Shankara returned to his philosophical body and wonthe argument. Both Bharati and her husband then became nondualists. 16 This tale contrasts sexand renunciation in such a way that the renunciant philosopher is able to have his cake and eat it,to triumph not only in the world of the mind (in which, before this episode begins, he wins aseries of debates against the nonrenouncing male Mimamsa philosopher) but in the world of thebody, represented by the philosopher’s wife (not to mention the harem women who clearly preferShankara to the king in bed). This double superiority—for it appears that, like Shiva, thisShankara stored up impressive erotic powers during his years of chastity—rather than theinherent power (or relevance) of nondualism, is apparently what persuades both the philosopherand his wife.Renunciation took its toll on parents as well as partners, and this story addresses thatissue:SHANKARA AND THE CROCODILEAs a young boy of eight, Shankara is said to have vowedto become a renouncer, to the dismay of his mother, who kept postponing the moment when shewould give him her permission. One day while he was bathing in a river a crocodile grabbed hisleg. He shouted out, and his mother came to the riverbank. As he was presumably going to dieright away, and this was his last chance to achieve Release, the only hope was for him to becomea renouncer there and then. His mother agreed, whereupon the crocodile let him go. He became arenouncer but promised his mother he would be with her during her last days and perform herfuneral rites, which he did. 17 This is a story about the need to compromise, to satisfy theconcerns of family as well as renunciation—parents want to see their grandchildren—but it isbuilt upon an old story that had been told before to make very different points. The Rig Veda(10.28.11) mentions crocodiles that drag people away by their legs; the bodhisattva (in a Jatakastory carved at Amaravati) and Vishnu 18 are said to have rescued an elephant whose leg had beengrabbed by a crocodile, and the Shaiva saint Cuntarar (the same one said to have contested withthe Jainas) saves a Brahmin boy from a crocodile. It is easy to see how this story could have beenpicked up and adapted to the needs of the hagiographers of Shankara.STORIES OF RAMANUJA AND MADHVAThe chain of sectarian myths does not end with Shankara. Many stories are told aboutRamanuja’s clash not with disciples of Shankara but with other Shaivas. Ramanuja is said tohave challenged the Shaivas in a great temple in Andhra Pradesh; he won not by debate but bythe god’s action in “picking up and wearing the Vaishnava emblems, while leaving the Shaivaemblems unused on the floor.” 19 On another occasion, the Chola king, a Shaiva, tried to makeRamanuja sign a declaration that there was no god but Shiva, but Ramanuja sent two of hisdisciples, one of them dressed to look like him, in his place; when one of them made a pun on theword “Shiva,” the king ordered both men’s eyes put out. Ramanuja escaped to Mysore, where heis said to have converted the Hoysala king from Jainism to Shri Vaishnavism and persuaded himto endow a number of Vaishnava temples with lands that had previously belonged to many Jainatemples.There are also stories of Ramanuja’s actions against Muslims, as when he went to Delhito help recover the lost image of Ranganatha: he found the image, cried, “Beloved son!” and theimage jumped into his arms. 20 Ramanuja is also said to have defeated a thousand Jaina asceticsin a debate involving a contest of miracles, whereupon the Jaina monks committed suicide ratherthan convert. 21 The martyrdom by blinding, the miraculous debate, and the deaths of thousandsof Jainas are reminiscent of other South Indian tales told about Shaiva saints, and these about

Ramanuja are equally mythological: The historical record documents no mass suicides (or, forthat matter, miracles). Most of the kings of that era were not fanatics but supported Shaiva,Vaishnava, Jaina, and Buddhist institutions, nor is there any evidence that the Hoysala king wasoriginally a Jaina or withdrew his supported from the Jainas. 22 But the stories have survived forcenturies.Shankara’s followers often came into conflict with the followers of the Vaishnavaphilosopher Madhva, who is said to have accomplished a number of miracles, some of whichwere also attributed to Christ in the New Testament: walking on water, 23 feeding many with afew loaves of bread, calming rough waters, and becoming a “fisher of men.” 24 Madhva (or hishagiographers) may have been influenced by Christians, who had been established, since at leastthe sixth century CE, in Kerala and at Kalyan (in Karnataka), Madhva’s birthplace. But it isBuddhism, rather than Christianity, that figures officially in Madhva’s conflict with Shaivas. ForMadhva placed another new twist on the myth of the Buddha avatar, substituting the Shaivascriptures for the Buddhist doctrines: Citing a Puranic text in which Shiva agrees to teach falsedoctrines, 25 Madhva said that Shiva composed the Shaiva scriptures at Vishnu’s command, inorder to delude humans with false doctrines, to destroy the true religion (the worship of Vishnu),to reveal Shiva, and to conceal Vishnu. 26 And this was just the beginning: 27MADHVA VERSUS SHANKARAAt the beginning of the Kali Age, the earth was under thesway of Buddhism. Then an ogre named Manimat was born as a widow’s bastard’s son, namedSankara [sic]. He seduced the wife of his Brahmin host and made many converts by his magicarts. He studied the shastras with Shiva’s blessings. The depraved welcomed him and theantigods hailed him as their savior. On their advice, he joined the Buddhists and taughtBuddhism under cover of teaching the Vedanta, and he performed various wicked deeds. Hisdoctrines were like those of the Materialists [Lokayatas], Jainas, and Pashupatas, but moreobnoxious and injurious. His followers were tyrannical people who burned down monasteries,destroyed cattle, and killed women and children. He had people whipped because they were notVedic and converted others by force. When he died, the god of the wind became incarnate asMadhva, to refute the teachings of Manimat-Sankara . 28 The accusation that Shankaraseduced the wife of his Brahmin host may be an allusion to the story of Shankara’s vying withthe Mimamsa philosopher’s wife on the subject of erotic seduction (and using his magic arts tosleep with a king’s wives), and the accusation that he pretended to be teaching Vedanta when hetaught Buddhism is a product of the recurrent suspicion of Buddhist elements in Shankara’sbrand of Vedanta. In this text, Manimat joins the already extant Buddhists (instead of foundingthem, as Vishnu as Buddha does), reverses the incarnation of Shankara (who is now an avatar notof Shiva but of an ogre named Manimat), and is followed by a third avatar, of the god of thewind as Madhva. iz The idea that the gods are sent to corrupt the antigods (as in the myth of theBuddha avatar), combined with the implication that the resulting heretics are antigods (or relatedto antigods in some way), undergoes a major reversal: The antigods now are not the ones whoare corrupted but the ones who do the corrupting. The Madhvas’ identification of Shankara as anantigod is particularly harsh in light of the fact that the Madhvas, almost alone among Hinduphilosophers, believe that antigods and heretics are doomed to eternal damnation in hell. Finally,this corruption takes place, as usual, in the Kali Age, and the Madhvas take advantage of this topun on the name of their enemy: Shankara (“he who gives peace,” an epithet of Shiva given tomany Shaivas) becomes Sankara (also written sam-kara), a word that denotes indiscriminatemixture, particularly the breaking down of barriers between classes that is the principal sign ofthe advent of the Kali Age. In keeping with this name, Sankara is said to be the bastard son of a

widow. 29MONISM AND CONVERSION IN VEDANTAOne of the philosophical reactions against the excessive hierarchy of the caste systemwas to devise (or, rather, to revise, for it began in the Upanishads) a philosophical system devoidof hierarchy, indeed of any distinctions at all: monism (which assumes that all living things areelements of a single, universal being). But many of the Vedantic philosophical orders organizedthemselves into groups that were in fact highly hierarchical (for example, as we have seen,Shankara excluded Shudras) and often intolerant of other orders.The monistic philosophers asserted that there was one truth, which they knew, and sothey proceeded to proselytize. Logically, Hindu universalism (of the sort that assumed that allreligions have access to the truth) should have led polytheistic Hindus to the belief that there wasno point in trying to convert anyone else to Hinduism, yet this was not always the case.Orthoprax Vedic Hindus certainly made no efforts to proselytize, assuming that you had to beborn a Hindu to be a Hindu. But some of the Vedantic Hindus, lapsing into the shadows oforthodoxy, ja argued that their particular brand of monism was more monistic than thine and didindeed proselytize. And although proselytizing is not in itself necessarily intolerant, it does closethe open-ended door of pluralism.PHILOSOPHICAL ANIMALSThe quarrels of these great South Indian philosophers had repercussions throughout India,particularly in far-off Kashmir. It all began with two South Indian sects that expressed theirdoctrines primarily through animal metaphors.SHAIVA SIDDHANTA BEASTS IN A SNAREOne movement for which animal metaphors were central was the Shaiva Siddhanta,which arose at this time in South India to cast a net of theory around some of the unrulier aspectsof bhakti. Among other things, it theologized the doctrine of accidental grace.The philosophy of Shaiva Siddhanta traces its roots back in a general way to thedevotional hymns that the Shaiva Nayanmars had written from the fifth to the ninth century. Thattradition found its way up to Kashmir, to become one of the elements of Kashmir Shaivism in theninth century CE. But then Tirumular, a mystic and reformer, is said to have come from Kashmirto South India to found the Shaiva Siddhanta philosophical school, and others jb systematized thedoctrines of the Nayanmars. The Shaiva Siddhanta in Kashmir had taken elements of KashmirTantrism and fused them into a householder’s religion, 30 and the Southern Shaiva Siddhantinscontinued and intensified this transformation. It thrived under royal Hindu patronage and inpowerful temple centers, reinfused with Tamil bhakti and transformed, in effect, from aphilosophy into a powerful religious culture that thrives there today. Though the ShaivaSiddhantins paid lip service to the Vedas, they rejected caste (or, rather, they were open toeveryone but women, children, the old, the mad, and the disabled 31 ) and asceticism, andbelieved, like the Virashaivas, that the body is the true temple of Shiva. Theirs was a separatesect, established in Shaiva temples, into which members had to be initiated. 32 Like other aspectsof bhakti, it spread north, reinfusing the Kashmir Shaivism that had in part inspired it.In conscious opposition to the idealism and nondualism of both Shankara and KashmirShaivism, which regarded god and the soul as one and the universe as illusory, the ShaivaSiddhanta was a realistic and dualistic philosophy. It taught that the lord (pati) was not identical

with the soul but connected to the soul (pashu [“the sacrificial or domesticated animal”]) by abond (pasha), as a leash connects a dog (the ultimate bhakta) to its owner. The bond consists ofShiva’s will and his power of illusion (maya), the illusion made of the universe of all mental andmaterial phenomena—phenomena that, in contrast with the teachings of pure idealism, were realbecause they were divine. 33 Just as in Tantra Shiva makes some people heretics in the first placeso that he can ultimately enlighten them, so in Shaiva Siddhanta he makes people into beasts sothat he can release them from the condition of beasts; he deludes people in order to reveal theirbeast nature, lust and hatred, and then he releases them from that nature. The bond, which wasthe functional equivalent of bhakti in connecting the worshiper to the god, had negative as wellas positive valences. 34The central metaphor of the Shaiva Siddhanta became so well known in Hinduism that itwas eventually adopted for uses far from its original meaning for the theologians who coined it,uses such as the literalizing of the metaphor in the actual sacrifice of a beast in a snare. Foranimal sacrifices continued to take place despite the growing force of the doctrine ofnonviolence; the philosopher Madhva (like Manu before him) encouraged Hindus to substituteanimals made of dough for real animals in sacrificial rituals, 35 and his need to make thissuggestion, again, suggests that animals were still being sacrificed. The Agni Purana prescribesan animal sacrifice in the course of the initiation of a Vaishnava pupil by his guru, but it cloaksthe ritual in euphemisms derived from the Shaiva Siddhanta:LIBERATING THE BEAST FROM THE SNAREEnter the temple of worship and worship theimage of Vishnu while circumambulating him to the right, saying, “You alone are the refuge forRelease from the snares that bind the beasts sunk in the ocean of rebirth; you always look uponyour devotees as a cow looks upon her calf. God of gods, have mercy; by your favor, I willrelease all these beasts that are bound by the snares and bonds of nature.” When you haveannounced this to the lord of gods, have the beasts enter there; purify them with the chants andperfect them with fire. Place them in contact with the image of Vishnu and close their eyes. 36“Close their eyes” is a euphemism for killing the sacrificial animals: the Vedic texts useda different euphemism, speaking of “quieting” the animal. The killing is said to give the beastultimate Release, here equated with release from the snares (or noose, or bonds) that we knowfrom Shaiva Siddhanta terminology. In this text, however, these philosophies are embodied in anactual rather than a metaphorical beast and a real snare.SHRI VAISHNAVA MONKEYS AND CATSAnother South Indian movement, this one devoted to Vishnu rather than Shiva, used ananimal analogy, and a maternal metaphor, to express a fork in the road to salvation. This was theShri Vaishnava sect, which took shape when, in support of the rising sectarian movement ofdevotion to the child Krishna, Vaishnava theologians in the early medieval period (900-1300 CE)in South India established new scholastic and monastic lineages. 37 In the fourteenth century theybranched into the Cat school (Tenkalai, in Tamil) in the south and the Monkey school(Vadakalai) in the north of the Tamil country. 38 Originally a split about a theological belief,epitomized by these two animals, it was caught up into the clash between two separate monasticcenters vying for the control of temples, a dispute in which the king played a major adjudicatingrole: 39 Two Vijayanagara royal agents established the Cat school, and the priest of another kingestablished the Monkey school by setting up a temple at Tirupati.In the Monkey school, the devotee actively clings to god, who saves him through hisgrace, just as a baby monkey clings to its mother as she moves through the trees. In the Cat

school, by contrast, the devotee is passive and is saved through grace alone, as kittens allow amother cat to pick them up by the scruffs of their necks and carry them without any effort ontheir part. Indeed the Cat devotee should not make any effort, should go limp as a kitten, sinceany effort would simply get in the way of the mother cat. The passive, accidental bhakti of theCats toward the grace of god was echoed in the doctrine of accidental grace toward unrepentantsinners in the theology of the later Puranas.Both Cats and Monkeys value bhakti, but less than they value prapatti (“surrender”), jc anidea that may owe something to the Muslim idea of surrender (which is what Islam means).Members of the Monkey school, who regarded themselves as twice born people liberatedthrough ritual devotion, sometimes said that the Cat school was designed for the lower castes,because they were not allowed in temples and hence were unable to perform the rituals and couldbe liberated only through surrender. They therefore regarded Cat bhakti as necessary for thosecastes, like the Tantras in the Puranic view.THE SNAKE AND THE ROPEAnother important philosophical animal was the illusory snake that was really a rope. Forthe Vedantins, the claim that the world is unreal does not mean that it is entirely unreal in theway that the son of a barren woman (a favorite Vedantic example) is unreal. There is, in somesense, a rope, and, at a deeper level, brahman does in fact exist. The error lies, rather, in ourperception of the rope as something it isn’t (the snake).Unlike other topics that only erudite Indian philosophers wrestled with, illusion got intothe very fabric of Hindu culture, so that just about everyone knows about maya and the difficultyof telling a snake from a rope. Maya (from the verb ma [“to make”]) is what is made, artificial,constructed, something that seems to be there but has no substance; it is the path of rebirth, theworship of gods with qualities (sa-guna). It is magic, cosmic sleight of hand. Maya begins in theearliest text, the Rig Veda (1.32) in which the god Indra (the first great magician; magic is calledIndra’s Net [indra-jala]) uses his magic against his equally magical enemy Vritra (for all theantigods are magicians): Indra magically turns himself into the hair of one of his horses’ tails,and Vritra magically conjures up a storm. Magic illusions of various sorts play a crucial role inthe Valmiki Ramayana, in the shadow Sita of later traditions, and in Hindu thinking across theboard.As we have seen, the idea of darshan, of seeing the god and, more important, of knowingthat the god sees you, is central to Hinduism and accounts for the extraordinary emphasis on theeyes in Hindu mythology. It was therefore a brilliant move of nondual Vedanta to reverse thevalence of vision/sight/gaze by making the image of false seeing—of classically mistaking arope for a snake or a piece of shell for a piece of silver—an enduring trope for the larger mistakeof taking the visual world to be the real world. Nondualists imagined gods to be without anyvisual form or physical qualities (nir-guna) but to take on, for various reasons, apparent visualform and physical qualities (sa-guna) so that we can worship them. The gods themselvesproduce the illusion, just as they produce the deluding texts in the story of the Buddha avatar.The Upanishads speak of four stages of consciousness: waking, dreaming, dreamlesssleep, and “the fourth,” the supernatural, transcendent state of identity with brahman. 40 Wakingis the most distorted image of brahman, furthest from it; dreaming is a bit better, dreamless sleepbetter yet. To be enlightened is to realize that the stage of waking is the illusory end of thespectrum and to begin to progress toward the fourth stage. Or to put it differently, to realize thatthe stage of waking is the illusory end of the spectrum is to realize that dreaming is more real

than is conventionally understood. 41 It is no accident that the word svapna in Sanskrit meansboth the physical state of “sleep” (the English word is a cognate of the Sanskrit) and the mentalconstruct of “dream”; there is no difference between matter and mind.Mistaking one thing for another, such as a rope for a snake, is easily rectified upon closerinspection, but the recollection of our false mental state before we took that second look maytrigger our acknowledgment of the far more important mistake that we make all the time, intaking the material world to be real (brahman) when it is merely maya. When you realize that thesnake is not a snake but a rope, you go on to realize that there is not even a rope at all.ILLUSIONS OF CASTE AND GENDER IN THE YOGAVASISHTHAThe philosophy of illusion was developed in a particularly imaginative and brilliant wayin the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Kashmir, with heavy input from South India. We havenoted the communication back and forth between North and South India in the development ofbhakti, Tantra, and the Shaiva Siddhanta. The extreme idealist position in the philosophy ofillusion was developed by the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, who is said to have been born aBrahmin in South India, converted to Buddhism, moved to Kashmir (where his school ofidealism flourished during the Kushana period), and, when Buddhism came under attack inKashmir, moved back to South India. Shaiva philosophers in Kashmir combined all theseelements, including the Buddhist ideas, with the monistic ideas of Shankara and fused them intoa new philosophy of their own, known as Kashmir Shaivism, also called the Recognition(Pratijna) school. 42 A key figure in this movement was the great Shaiva philosopherAbhinavagupta (975-1025), who was also largely responsible for developing the right-handhouseholder form of Tantrism. Jettisoning the dualism of Shaiva Siddhanta (while retainingmuch of its ritual), Kashmir Shaivism was relentlessly monistic.Kashmir Shaivism had died out in Kashmir by the end of the twelfth century, in large partbecause of a hostile Muslim presence there, 43 and Shaiva Siddhanta went back south, taking itsdualism with it. But other traditions developed in Kashmir in this period not in spite of butbecause of the foreign presences there. The school of the Muslim philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi(1165-1240), who argued that all that is not a part of divine reality is an illusion, is said to havehad a major influence on Hindu philosophy at this time, while in return the use of heterosexuallove as a symbol for divine love in a few Sufi scriptures from the Mughal period may have beeninspired by Kashmiri Tantrism. 44Located as it is on the northern border of India, Kashmir is close to the Central Asianstrongholds of Buddhism (whose philosophers developed their own major doctrines of illusion)and a number of Muslim (Turkish and Arabic) cultures with highly developed storytellingtraditions that rivaled those of ancient India. Eventually a brand of idealist philosophy that wasalready a mix of Buddhism and Hinduism married a brand of storytelling that was already a mixof Hinduism and Islam, enlivened by a dash of Abhinavagupta’s writings on the artistictransformation of the emotions. It was here, therefore, and at this time that the great Indiantraditions of storytelling and illusion blossomed in the text of the great Ocean of Story(Katha-sarit-sagara) and, above all, in the Yoga-vasishtha (in full, theYoga-Vasishtha-Maha-Ramayana or “The Great Story of Rama in Which Vasishtha Teaches HisYoga”). This text heavily influenced the collection of stories often called the Arabian Nights, aconstantly shifting corpus with narrative traces as early as the tenth century, probably puttogether in the thirteenth century. Another, later contribution from Hinduism to Islam was madewhen the great Mughal emperor Akbar had the Yoga-vasishtha translated from Sanskrit to

Persian; Nizam Panipati dedicated his abridged Persian translation to the crown prince Salim,who (when he became the emperor Jahangir) commissioned a new, illustrated translation. 45 Thebook became so famous that there were Persian and Arabic satires on it. 46That Kashmir Shaivism was called the Recognition school is not irrelevant to the maintheme of the Yoga-vasishtha narratives, which turn on an individual’s recognition of his or herown identity and ontological status. But the glory of the Yoga-vasishtha is that it transforms arather difficult philosophy into a series of engaging narratives. jd It all goes back, like so muchelse, to that fork in the road in the Upanishads. For Vedantic thinkers like Shankara, followingthe path of Release meant awakening from the dream of the material world to the reality ofbrahman. The twist that the Yoga-vasishtha adds is that you cannot wake up from the dream,because it may be someone else’s dream. je For householders on the path of rebirth, Releasemeans staying asleep but being aware that you are dreaming. This is also the message of a largecorpus of myths in which kings, beginning with Indra, king of the gods, become enlightened,wish to awaken (that is, to renounce material life), but must be persuaded to renounce even thewish to renounce, to remain engaged in life with the major distinction of understanding that it isan illusion. It is a variant of the final advice that Krishna gives to Arjuna in the Gita (though theYoga-vasishtha arrives at that point after a very different journey): Continue to act, though with anewly transformed understanding of the unreality of actions and therefore without the desire forthe fruits of actions.The frame story of the Yoga-vasishtha presents the text as an episode that Valmiki leftout of his version of the Ramayana; it claims to fill in the supposed gaps in the older text onwhich it purports to be based, just as many folk versions of the Ramayana actually do. jf It framesthe story in terms of the ancient tension between the householder life and the truth claims ofrenunciation. The Yogavasishtha takes the form of a long conversation between Rama and thesage Vasishtha, at a moment when Rama has returned from a pilgrimage in a state of depressionand madness (or so his father and the courtiers describe it): Rama says that anyone who says,“Act like a king,” is out of his mind, that everything is unreal, that it is false to believe in thereality of the world, that everything is just the imagination of the mind. Rama’s father consultstwo great sages (always get a second opinion), Vishvamitra and Vasishtha, who assure him thatRama is perfectly right in his understanding of the world, that he has become enlightened, andthen offer to cure him. 47 That is, they promise to remove his depression and make him sociallyfunctional, while leaving his (correct) metaphysical apprehensions unimpaired.THE ILLUSION OF GENDERThe Yoga-vasishtha tells a tale about another king who returns from renunciation to rulehis kingdom and, along the way, realizes the illusory nature of both sex and gender:CHUDALA: THE WOMAN WHO PRETENDED TO BE A MAN WHO BECAME AWOMANQueen Chudala and her husband, King Shikhidhvaja, were passionately in love. Intime, the queen became enlightened and acquired magic powers, including the ability to fly, butshe concealed these powers from her husband, and when she attempted to instruct him, hespurned her as a foolish and presumptuous woman. Eventually the king decided to seek his ownenlightenment and withdrew to the forest to meditate; he renounced his throne and refused to lether accompany him but left her to govern the kingdom.After eighteen years she decided to visithim; she took the form of a young Brahmin boy named Kumbha [“Pot”] and was welcomed bythe king, who did not recognize her but remarked that Chudala as Kumbha looked very muchlike his queen, Chudala. After a while the king became very fond of Chudala as Kumbha, who

instructed him and enlightened him, and she began to be aroused by her handsome husband. Andso Chudala as Kumbha went away for a while. When she returned, she told the king that a sagehad cursed her to become a woman, with breasts and long hair, every night. That night, beforethe king’s eyes, Chudala as Kumbha changed into a woman named Madanika, who cried out in astammering voice, “I feel as if I am falling, trembling, melting. I am so ashamed as I see myselfbecoming a woman. Alas, my chest is sprouting breasts, and jewelry is growing right out of mybody.” Eventually they married and made love all night.Thus they lived as dear friends duringthe day and as husband and wife at night. Eventually, the queen changed from Chudala asKumbha as Madanika to Chudala and told the king all that she had done. He embraced herpassionately and said, “You are the most wonderful wife who ever lived!” Then he made love toher all night and returned with her to resume his duties as king. He ruled for ten thousand yearsand finally attained Release. 48 Chudala w ishes to be her husband’s mistr ess both i n the sense oflover and in the sense of teacher, schoolmistress. She has already played the first role but is nowdenied it, and he refuses to grant her the second role, without relinquishing the first. Shesucceeds by destabilizing gender through a double gender transformation.The double woman whom she creates-Chudala as Kumbha as Madanika—is her real self,the negation of the negation of her femininity; the jewelry that actually grows out of her body iswhat she would have worn as Queen Chudala at the start of the story. This double deceptionworks well enough and may express her full fantasy: to be her husband’s intellectual superiorunder the sun and his erotic partner by moonlight. But since the two roles belong to two differentpersonae, she wants to merge them and to play them both as her original self.The playful juggling of the genders demonstrates both the unreality of appearances andthe falsity of the belief that one gender is better than the other or even different from the other.This extraordinary openness to gender bending in ancient India may be an indirect benefit of therigid social order: Since other social categories are taken for granted, the text can use them as aspringboard for gender role-playing. But the roles, when we look closer, revert to the rigidcategories in the end. Chudala has to become a man to teach her husband, and she has to becomea woman again to sleep with him. In the Hindu view, Chudala is like a man to begin with,aggressive, resourceful, and wise. Moreover, the relationship between Chudala and the king isnever the relationship of a real husband and wife. She is a magician; in other times and placesshe might have been called a witch. She functions like a Yogini (she can fly) or perhaps even agoddess, giving him her grace and leading him up the garden path of enlightenment, setting up adivine illusion and then revealing herself to him as the gods reveal themselves.Eventually Chudala repairs the split between kama and moksha by revealing the illusorynature of both sexual love and renunciation. Like Rama in the frame of the text, the king comesback to his duties as king. As she has gone from female to male to female, he has workedthrough his own double transformation from kama to moksha and back to kama.THE ILLUSION OF CASTETwo other tales from the Yogavasishtha deconstruct caste as the tale of Chudaladeconstructs gender, taking as the central, transformative experiences the demotion of first a kingand then a Brahmin to Pariahs. The first, the tale of King Lavana, is relatively straightforward,though it begins to challenge the linearity of time and consciousness; the second, the tale of theBrahmin Gadhi, goes further in blurring the line. They are rather long stories, but I willsummarize them as briefly as I can, one by one:LAVANA: THE KING WHO DREAMED HE WAS A PARIAHThere was a king named

Lavana, who seemed to fall into a trance one day while gazing at a horse; when he regained hissenses, he told this story: “I imagined that I mounted the horse, which bolted and carried me faraway to a village of Pariahs [Chandalas], where the low branch of a tree swept me off thegalloping horse. I met a Pariah girl, married her, raised two sons and two daughters with her, andlived there for sixty years; I forgot that I had been a king. Then there was a famine, and as I wasabout to throw myself into a fire so that my children could eat my flesh and survive, I awokehere on my throne.” The courtiers were amazed. The king set out the next day, with hisministers, to find that village again, and he did. He found an old woman there who told him thata king had come there and married her daughter, and then there was a famine and everyone haddied. The king returned to his palace. 49 The king is “carried away” by the bolting horse, amotif taken from the theme of royal addiction to hunting as well as from the recurrent metaphorof a horse as sensuality out of control. The existence of a village, and people, that we at firstassume to exist only in the king’s imagination but that then leave evidence that others can see(the old woman mentions a number of very specific details from the king’s life among thePariahs) poses a serious challenge to our concept of the limits of the imagination. Lavana seemsto seek public corroboration, first in the courtiers and then in the woman in the village, of thetruth he knows by himself. The text sets these paradoxes within its own Kashmir Shaivametaphysics: The mind imposes its idea on the spirit/matter dough of reality, cutting it up as witha cookie cutter, now into stars, now into gingerbread men, now into a palace, now into a village.It makes them, and it finds them already there, like a bricoleur, who makes new forms out ofobjets trouvés. In the end, the king returns to his original life, even though he believes that hisother life is just as real (or, as the case may be, unreal); this return is part of the lesson that Ramamust also learn.The theme of the king who becomes, or dreams that he becomes, a Pariah (or vice versa)has an ancient provenance in India. 50 One of the early Upanishads describes the paradigmaticdream in these terms: “When he dreams, he seems to become a great king. Then he seems tobecome a great Brahmin. He seems to enter into the high and the low.” 51 (The “low” would bethe Pariah nightmare.) And the theme of kings actually becoming Pariahs or tribals is refracted inthe episodes in both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in which the king (Yudhishthira, Nala,Rama) is exiled among the common people before he can ascend his throne, to learn how theother half lives. The actual banishment and the dream of banishment are combined in theMarkandeya Purana tale of King Harishchandra, who is (according to the Yoga-vasishtha)Lavana’s grandfather:HARISHCHANDRA: THE KING WHO BECAME A PARIAH WHO DREAMED HE WAS APARIAHKing Harishchandra was cursed to become a Chandala, and he lost his wife and son. Helived for years as a Chandala and one night dreamed that he was a Pulkasa [another Pariah caste],born in the womb of a Pulkasa woman; when he was seven years old, some Brahmins, annoyedwith him, said, “Behave yourself. Harishchandra annoyed some Brahmins and was cursed to be aPulkasa.” Then they cursed him to go to hell, and he went there for a day and was tortured. Hewas reborn as a dog, eating carrion and vomit and enduring cold and heat. The dog died and wasthen reborn as a donkey, an elephant, a monkey, a tortoise, wild boar, porcupine, cock, parrot,crane, and snake. Then he was born as a king who lost his kingdom at dice and lost his wife andson. Finally he awakened, still as a Chandala, working in a cremation ground. One day he methis wife carrying his dead son to be cremated; he and his wife resolved to immolate themselveson their son’s pyre. Just then Indra and Dharma came there, revived the son, and took all three ofthem to heaven. 52 We can see the seeds of the story of Lavana here, but without the Kashmir

Shaiva frame: A curse, rather than a meditation, turns Harishchandra into a real, rather thandreamed, Pariah, though within that real life he also dreams as Lavana dreams. In both stories,the death of the son and the decision to enter the fire trigger the awakening. But in this text,which is framed by samsara and bhakti, the final release is not moksha but physicaltransportation to heaven, the sensuous heaven of Indra. (We can also see a South Indian bhaktithread in the child whom the gods pretend to kill but then revive.) The curse destabilizes caste toa certain extent: If someone can be cursed to become a Pariah, the Pariah you meet might havebeen a king even in this life. The philosophy of illusion further destabilizes it: Not even a cursebut just a dream could change you. In either case, caste is not necessarily part of your inalienablesubstance, the way that the dharma texts say it is.In the end, Harishchandra and his wife do not return to their original life, as Lavana does,but leave both the earthly dream and the earthly reality, the royal pleasures and the Pariahhorrors. In this, they are more Buddhist than Hindu, and indeed the story of Harishchandra mayhave influenced and/or been influenced by the Buddhist Vessantara Jataka, which tells a verysimilar tale. 53 (Another shared Hindu-Buddhist theme appears when Lavana plans to feed hischildren on his own flesh, a theme we know from the Hindu-Buddhist stories of the rabbit in themoon and of King Shibi.) The more basic Buddhist paradigm, however, is the life of GautamaShakyamuni himself, the Buddha, who (according to the Pali texts) leaves his luxurious palace inorder to live among the suffering people and never returns; this plot is the very opposite of theHindu myths of this corpus, in which the king almost always returns. 54A nicely self-referential moment occurs when the Brahmins, not recognizing that theChandala they are talking to is Harishchandra, tell him his own story. But they make him aPulkasa rather than a Chandala, as Harishchandra himself does in his dream. For the repetitionsare never quite alike, and one sort of Pariah may mistake himself (and be mistaken by others) foranother sort of Pariah. These variations become more vivid still when the Yoga-vasishstha tells astory that both is and is not like the story of Lavana, the story of Gadhi: jgGADHI: THE BRAHMIN WHO DREAMED HE WAS A PARIAH WHO DREAMED HEWAS A KINGThere was a Brahmin named Gadhi, who lost consciousness one day as he bathedin a river; he saw himself reborn as a Pulkasa, within the womb of a Pulkasa woman. He wasborn, grew up, married, had children, and became old. All of his family died, and he wandereduntil he came to the city of the Kiras, where the king had died, and the people made him theking. But after eight years an old Pulkasa from the village identified him as a Pulkasa; the peoplefled from him, and he threw himself into a fire and awoke in the water of the river. He wenthome and lived as before, until one day another Brahmin came and told him that in the city of theKiras, a Pulkasa had become king for eight years until he was exposed and killed himself in afire. Then Gadhi went and found the village and the city of the Kiras and found all just as it hadbeen reported. He went back to his life as a Brahmin. 55 When we set the stories of Lavanaand Gadhi side by side, each sheds light on the other, forming a double image of mutuallyilluminating similes. Lavana is a king who dreams that he is a Pariah and then goes back to beinga king. Gadhi is a Brahmin who dreams that he is a Pariah who becomes a king, is unmasked as aPariah, and turns back into a Brahmin. It might appear that Lavana takes up the Gadhi story atmidpoint, a king who remembers that he has been a Pariah. King Lavana travels (or imaginesthat he travels) to another place, where he lives another life until he awakens again as a king.This also happens to Gadhi, in the middle part of his story, though in the other direction: As aPariah, he travels to another place and becomes a king. This shared, inverted episode is,however, framed by another in Gadhi’s life, in which he dies, is reborn, and experiences an

entirely new life, beginning as an embryo. And this frame casts back upon the Lavana story theimplication that he too may have a frame, that a Brahmin may have dreamed that he was Lavanawho dreamed that he was a Pariah. Gadhi finds out that his memories of the dream were true, butthey are not his memories; they belong to someone else. What is real for Lavana becomes asimile for Gadhi, and what is real for Gadhi is merely a simile for Lavana. One man’s reality isanother man’s simile.The transformations take place differently: King Lavana is never reborn but merelytravels to another place; Gadhi, by contrast, does not travel or fall into a trance but actually dies(or imagines that he dies), is reborn, and experiences an entirely new life, beginning as anembryo. On the other hand, Lavana actually succumbs to amnesia and forgets that he was a king,while Gadhi as a Pariah remembers quite well who he was and merely pretends to be a king. Thefact that Gadhi is a Brahmin, with special spiritual powers, is highly significant; he remains inmental control throughout and especially at the end, in ways that the king, the victim of hispassion (such as his mesmerization by the beauty of the horse), does not. But whatever the statusof the protagonist, the text eventually erases the distinction between having an adventure andimagining that you have had an adventure, since in either case the events of the adventure leavephysical traces that can be corroborated before witnesses.The assumptions of Kashmiri Shaiva idealism are very different from those of theaverage Euro-American reader. More vividly than any argument, the text performs theproposition that our failure to remember our past lives is a more intense form of our failure torecapture our dreams. More than that, it erases the distinction between the reality status of adreamed (or experienced) episode within a single life and a dreamed (or experienced) episode oftotal rebirth; the distinction between forgetting that you are a king and pretending to be a king;and, finally, the distinction between the consciousness of a king or Brahmin and a Pariah.CHAPTER 19DIALOGUE AND TOLERANCE UNDER THE MUGHALS1500 to 1700 CECHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES CE)1399 Timur, ruler of Central Asia, destroys Delhi1526Babur founds the Mughal Empire1530-1556 Humayun reigns1556-1605 Akbar reigns1605-1627Jahangir reigns1627-1658 Shah Jahan reigns1658-1707 Aurangzeb reigns1713-1719Farrukhsiyar reignsBeing aware of the fanatical hatred between Hindus and Muslims,and being convinced that this arose out of mutual ignorance, theenlightened ruler sought to dispel this ignorance by making thebooks of each religion accessible to the other. He chose the Mahabharatato begin with, as this is the most comprehensive and enjoys thehighest authority, and arranged for it to be translated by competentmen from both religions. In this way he wished to demonstrate to theHindus that a few of their erroneous practices and superstitions hadno basis in their classics, and also to convince the Muslims that it wasabsurd to ascribe a mere 7,000 years of existence to the world.Abu’l Fazl (1551-1602) 1

The enlightened ruler in this passage is Akbar, by far the most pluralist of the Mughalrulers (indeed of most rulers anywhere and anytime in history). His attention to the Mahabharatais coupled with his disdain (or that of Abu’l Fazl, his chronicler) for “erroneous” contemporaryHindu practices in contrast with the ancient classics. Other Mughals too valued some aspects ofHinduism very highly, while still others hated the Hindus and regarded their practices as notmerely “erroneous” but downright blasphemous. Hinduism continued to agonize over issues ofcaste and gender, often newly inspired by the Mughal example or the Mughal threat, or both.THE MUGHALSFew people have been able to resist the fascination of the Mughals, whose very namecomes into English (from a Persian form of “Mongols,” sometimes spelled “Mogul”) as a worddenoting someone of extravagant wealth and power. True, the Mughals had their little ways; theydid tend to try to kill (or blind, or lock up) members of their nuclear family rather a lot, and manyof them seem to have been drunk and/or stoned most of the time. jh Punishment was severe underthe Mughals (as it was under the Hindus—and, for that matter, the Europeans—of the period);people were impaled or trampled to death by elephants for a number of crimes and flayed ordeprived of hands or feet for relatively minor misdemeanors. 2 But the Mughals also madespectacular contributions to the civilization of the world in general and India and Hinduism inparticular. Under the Mughals, industry and trade boomed. Around the court thronged“costumiers, perfumers, gold and silversmiths, jewelers, ivory-carvers, gun-smiths, saddlers,joiners and [an] army of architects, civil engineers, stonemasons and polishers.” 3Like the Arabs of the Delhi Sultanate, the Turks who became the Mughals were not allthe same in their relationship to Hinduism. Some were religious zealots; some didn’t care muchabout religion; some loved Islam but didn’t believe that they should impose it on anyone else.Some (notoriously Aurangzeb) were quite (though not unambiguously) horrid; some (mostnotably Akbar) were quite (though not unambiguously) wonderful; and most of them were a bitof both. And there were many different sorts of Islam—Sunni, Shia, Sufi, and so forth. TheMughals as a group differed from the Delhi sultans as a group: The Mughals ruled longer asindividuals and as a dynasty, were more centralized, and held a tighter rein, with more controlover more of India; we also have much more available light, much more information, about theMughals. Hinduism too had changed in many important ways since the days of the DelhiSultanate (new sectarian movements, Tantra, philosophy), so that a different Hinduism nowencountered a different Islam.BABUR THE HORSEMAN AND HORTICULTURALISTZahir-ud-din Muhammad, otherwise known as Babur (“the Tiger”), the first great Mughalemperor, traced his descent, on his mother’s side, back to Genghis Khan and, on his father’s, toTimur the Lame (Tamerlane, in Edgar Allan Poe’s epic poem) who, in 1398, led Mongol forcesacross the Yamuna River and defeated the reigning sultan, massacring or enslaving all theHindus, sparing only the Muslim quarters of the city. An inauspicious beginning. A century later,in 1484, Babur was born in Ferghana, in the mountains of Central Asia (now Uzbekistan).Despite his Mongol blood, he regarded himself as a Turk, and he was educated in Turki. 4 Astunning mix of elegance and cruelty, Babur constructed gardens and fountains and plantedmelons wherever he went, a kind of Mughal Johnny Appleseed, but he also knocked down a lotof temples and killed a lot of people. He wrote an extraordinarily intimate, frank, and detailedmemoir, the Baburnama, from which we can get a vivid sense of the man, from the early days,

when he lived a nomadic life, riding his magnificent horse and carrying little with him but a bookof poetry, exulting in his freedom.As soon as he failed to conquer his first target, Timur’s old realm of Samarkhand, Baburhad set his sights on India, Timur’s later conquest; he named his second son Hindal, which isTurkish for “Take India!” 5 But once he actually got there he formed a low opinion of India:Hindustan is a place of little charm. There is no beauty in its people, no graceful socialintercourse, no poetic talent or understanding, no etiquette, nobility, or manliness. The arts andcrafts have no harmony or symmetry. There are no good horses, meat, grapes, melons, or otherfruit. There is no ice, cold water, good food or bread in the markets. There are no baths and nomadrassas [Muslim schools]. There are no candles, torches, or candlesticks. . . . The one niceaspect of Hindustan is that it is a large country with lots of gold and money. 6 (He adds, a bitlater, “Another nice thing is the unlimited numbers of craftsmen and practitioners of everytrade.”) Seldom has the nature of a conqueror’s interest in the object of his conquest been sonakedly expressed. The lack of good horses was, as we have seen, a perennial problem.He had relatively little to say about Hinduism: “Most of the people in Hindustan areinfidels whom the people of India call Hindu. Most Hindus believe in reincarnation.” That’s justabout it. His interest in rebirth and the related philosophy of karma reemerged on anotheroccasion, when he crossed a river that now forms the border between the Indian states of UttarPradesh and Bihar and is called the Karamnasa (“Destroyer of Karma”), sometimes referred to asthe Anti-Ganges. Babur remarked of it: “This river is scrupulously avoided by Hindus, andobservant Hindus will not cross it. They must board boats and cross its mouth on the Ganges.They believe that the religious merit of anyone touched by its water is nullified The etymologyof its name is also said to be derived from this.” He objected to both Hindu and Jaina images,especially to a group of idols, some of which were twenty yards tall, “shown stark naked with alltheir private parts exposed. . . . Urwahi is not a bad place. In fact, it is rather nice. Its onedrawback was the idols, so I ordered them destroyed.” 7His attitude to his own faith was simple and practical; on occasion he used Islamic fervor,which may or may not have been genuine in him, to rally reluctant troops against Rajputs. 8 Hisdedication to his religion was inseparable from his dedication to his military victories; after onesuch victory, he wrote this verse: “For the sake of Islam I became a wanderer; I battled infidelsand Hindus./ I determined to become a martyr. Thank God I became a holy warrior.” 9 Hispractice of Islam was leavened by his indulgence in the pleasures of the senses: “wines,composing of some very sensual poetry, music, flowers and gardens, women, even a young boyat one time in his youth.” 10 Proselytizing and demolishing other people’s places of worship werenot high on his list of priorities.Babur is thought to have built several mosques, including the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya,which an inscription attributes to him. ji But the pages of the diary covering the period in whichsuch a mosque would have been built, sometime before 1528, are missing, and it is possible thatBabur merely renovated an already existing mosque, built sometime after the armies ofMuhammad of Ghor reached Ayodhya in 1194.In 1530, Babur’s eldest and favorite son, Humayun, then twenty-two, fell ill and wasexpected to die. Babur is said to have prayed by Humayun’s sickbed and transferred his ownhealth to his son (transferring karma, an action more Hindu or Buddhist than Muslim), offeringup his own life if Humayun recovered. Humayun recovered and Babur died. He was buried firstin a garden at Agra that he himself had designed, and then, as he had wished, he was carried backto Kabul, where he was laid to rest. He had never liked India very much.

HUMAYUN THE ASTRONOMER AND ASTROLOGISTHumayun, born in 1508 in Kabul, dabbled in astrology and spiritual matters. Neither ofthese religious interests prevented him from blinding his brother Hindal in retaliation for killinghis (Humayun’s) spiritual guide. 11 In 1556, as keen on astronomy as on astrology, Humayuntripped going down the stone stairs from his makeshift observatory in Delhi and fell to hisdeath. 12 A messenger hurried to inform his son Akbar, only thirteen years old, that he was nowthe emperor; in the meantime a man who happened to resemble Humayan (what the Hinduswould have called a shadow Humayun) was displayed, on a distant platform, to the anxiouscrowds. 13AKBAR THE TOLERANTAkbar ruled for half a century. Like his grandfather Babur, Akbar was a fearless andtireless rider, 14 a man of action who killed tigers with spears and was famous for both hiscourage and his cruelty. When, after a long and bloody battle and siege, Akbar captured thehistoric fortress of Chitor in Mewar in 1568, he watched the flames consume the women as themen rode out in their own suicidal charge, and then he gratuitously massacred some twentythousand noncombatants. 15In dramatic contrast with Babur, Akbar himself neither read nor wrote. (No one reallyknows why; he may have been dyslexic, but he may just have been bored with school—a gradeschool dropout—or a mystic who preferred not to write. 16 ) He more than compensated for this,however, by keeping at his court, among his “nine gems,” Abu’l Fazl, a great biographer, whowrote both the Akbar-Nama (a rather puffed hagiography) and the Ain-i-Akbari (a more soberhistory).AKBAR’S PLURALISMOpen-minded Hindu and Muslim religious thinkers had engaged in serious interreligiousdialogues long before this, as we have seen, but Akbar was the first to put the power of a greatempire at the service of pluralism. In 1564 he began to host a series of multireligious theologicalsalons, 17 serving as a source of entertainment and an opportunity to showcase rhetorical talents,much as the Upanishadic kings were depicted as doing two thousand years earlier, though ofcourse with a different range of religious options. In the city that he built at Fatehpur Sikri (nearAgra), Akbar constructed a room where religious debates were held on Thursday evenings. Atfirst, the conversations were limited to different Muslim groups (Sunni, Shia, and Ismaili, as wellas Sufi); then they were joined by Parsis; then Hindus (Shaiva and Vaishnava bhaktas); disciplesof Kabir and probably also of Guru Nanak (Akbar is said to have given the Sikhs the land atAmritsar on which the Golden Temple was later built); Jainas, Jews, and Jesuits. This veritablecircus of holy men even included some unholy men—Materialists (Charvakas or Lokayatikas). 18Or in the immortal (if somewhat overblown) words of Abu’l Fazl: “He sought for truth amongstthe dust-stained denizens of the field of irreflection and consorted with every sort of wearers ofpatched garments such as [yogis, renouncers, and Sufi mystics], and other solitary sitters in thedust and insouciant recluses.” 19 Sometimes Akbar wandered incognito through the bazaars andvillages, a habit that may have stirred his awareness of or nourished his interest in the religiousdiversity among his people.Fatehpur Sikri was the result of Akbar’s particular devotion to Sufism; ignoring theShattaris, who were an important Sufi sect at that time and had influenced earlier Mughals, he

had become attached to the Chishtis. 20 In 1569, Akbar visited the Sufi saint Shaikh SalimChishti, who lived in the village of Sikri. Salim predicted that Akbar would have the son and heirhe longed for, and indeed a son (Salim, named after the saint, later to become Jahangir) was bornin Sikri that very year. The grateful Akbar immediately made Sikri his capital (renaming itFatehpur Sikri) and personally directed the building of the Jami Masji (the Friday Mosque) in1571, as well as other structures that reflect both Hindu aand Muslim architectural influences.But he moved the Mughal capital back to Delhi in 1586, in part because of Fatehpur Sikri’sinadequate water supply but also because he was no longer so devoted to the Chishti saint forwhom he had chosen the site.Akbar proclaimed that “the wisdom of Vedanta is the wisdom of Sufism,” 21 and that “allreligions are either equally true or equally illusionary.” 22 His eclecticism also extended toChristianity, with which he flirted to such a degree that the Portuguese missionariescongratulated themselves that he was on the brink of converting—until they realized that hecontinued to worship at mosques (and, on occasion, at Hindu temples, as well as participate inParsi fire rituals 23 ). Here, not for the first or last time, Muslim and Hindu pluralism ran upagainst Christian intolerance. (Indeed, at the very time when Akbar was pursuing theseenlightened conversations, the Inquisitions were going on in Europe; Giordano Bruno wasburned at the stake in Rome in 1600, “just as Akbar was preaching tolerance of all religions inAgra.” 24 ) In 1603, Akbar granted the Christians the right to preach, make converts, and buildchurches. Three sons of Akbar’s youngest son, Danyal, were actually christened, although thishad been a political ruse, to disqualify the boys from contending for the (Muslim) throne, andthey soon reverted to Islam. On one occasion, Akbar proposed to a group of Jesuits and Muslimtheologians the test of walking through fire (somewhat like the test that a South Indian Shaivahad proposed to the Jainas) in order to determine which was the true religion. But unlike theJainas, the Jesuits (in the person of Father Aquaviva) refused. Sometime later Hindus seekingrevenge for the destruction of some of their temples by Christian missionaries murderedAquaviva.Akbar had a number of wives (usually political rather than romantic alliances), but unlikeHenry VIII in a similar pickle, he got his priests to stretch the rules about polygamy. 25 He wasless successful in establishing his new religion, his “Divine Faith” (Din-i-Ilahi) with himself atits center—as God or his humble servant? No one has ever been quite sure. 26 Like Ashoka,Akbar carved out his own religion, his own dharma, but with a difference: The rallying call ofthe new faith—“Allahu Akbar”—was a very serious pun, which could simply be the usual piousinvocation affirming that God (Allah) is great (akbar) but in this context suddenly revealedanother possible meaning, that Akbar (Akbar) is God (Allah).In keeping with his pluralism, Akbar’s new faith was designed to transcend all sectariandifferences and unite his disparate subjects. 27 But it did not have even the limited success thatAshoka’s dhamma had had. Not surprisingly, some people regarded it as a hodgepodge, 28 but itdid not merely peter out with a whimper. “Bang!” went the old elite, the orthodox ulama, inrevolt against Akbar as a heretic. 29 They issued a fatwa urging all Muslims to rebel, but Akbarrode it out, for the Hindus stood behind him against the Muslim old guard.HINDUS UNDER AKBARThe first of the great Mughals to be born in India, Akbar regarded Hindus not as infidelsbut as subjects. And since some Muslims were his enemies, some Hindus (the enemies of hisenemies) were his friends; he was sheltered by a Hindu king when he had to flee from a powerful

Muslim enemy. He married the daughter of the raja of Amber (near Jaipur) and brought the raja,his son, and his grandson (Man Singh) into the Mughal hierarchy as amirs (nobles), his mosttrusted lieutenants, allowing them to retain their land, their Hinduism, and their caste status. Inreturn, they (and other Rajput princes) provided him with cavalry (a reverse of the usual processwhereby Muslims sold horses to Hindus). 30Two Hindus, both of whom simultaneously played Brahmin and Kshatriya roles andbridged the social worlds of Hindus and Muslims, were prominent among the inner court circleknown as Akbar’s nine jewels. One was a Brahmin named Birbal (1528-1583), who was Akbar’sminister and a kind of unofficial court jester, inspiring many folktales about his humor and hiswit. But he was also an important military leader, and Akbar called him Raja Birbal. The onlyHindu to join in Akbar’s “Divine Faith,” 31 he died (perhaps as the result of treachery) while hewas fighting the Afghans. The other Hindu “jewel” was Todar Mall (also spelled Todar Mal andTodaramalla), a Kshatriya born in Oudh (north of Lucknow), who became Akbar’s leadinggeneral, finance officer, and then prime minister. Yet he was a pious devotee of Krishna, famousfor setting up images of Krishna, and in 1572 he gathered together a group of Varanasi scholarsto compose a giant Sanskrit compendium of Hindu culture and learning, the Todar-ananda(“Todar’s Bliss”). In it he criticized in general the “aliens” (mlecchas, surely meaning theMuslims) and in particular the rulers of darkness (tamas) (possibly meaning his patron, Akbar).He said that the rising tide of alien culture had inspired him to write the book in order to rescuethe Veda when it had been sunk in the ocean of aliens (the old myth of the flooded earth) and torestore the light of empire that had been shut out by the darkness of the rulers in the cruel KaliAge. 32 Akbar was not always good to Hindus, but he almost always apologized after he had donethem harm. He approved the conversion of a temple into a mosque and a Muslim theologicalschool (madrassa). In Nagarkot, near Kangra, during Akbar’s reign, Muslim soldiers underBirbal slaughtered two hundred cows and many Hindus and demolished a temple. Local traditionadds that later Akbar made amends and sent a golden umbrella to cover the idol. Akbar alsoallowed the reconstruction of a Hindu temple built at Kurukshetra, cite of the Mahabharatabattle, when it had been demolished and a mosque built on its debris. 33 He admitted that in hisyouth he had forced many Hindus to convert to Islam (he offered life to his first adversaries, afterthe battle of Panipat in 1556, only if they would convert to Islam 34 ), but he later regretted it 35 andwent to great lengths to see that Hindus were treated with respect.He did many good things for Hindus. He abolished the jizya, the tax on pilgrims, andother discriminatory measures against Hindus. He ensured that Hindus would have their ownlaws and their own courts. He celebrated the Hindu festivals of Divali and Dussehra. He putHindus in charge of almost the entire moneylending system, acknowledging their competence inmatters mathematical and financial. 36 The lasting impression that this pro-Hindu policy made onAkbar’s Hindu subjects is suggested by the fact that in some of the bardic traditions ofRajasthan, Akbar came to be equated with Rama. 37In 1605, a few weeks before Akbar’s death, Prince Salim (who was to become Jahangir)inscribed his own genealogy on the Ashokan pillar that Samudra Gupta had already used as apalimpsest; Akbar sent Abu’l Fazl to deal with Jahangir, who had Abu’l Fazl murdered 38 and hadthe head sent back to him (Salim) in Allahabad. 39 Akbar was understandably infuriated andsaddened; a few weeks later he died in Agra.JAHANGIR THE ALCOHOLIC

Akbar’s Rajput bride had given birth to Jahangir (Salim) in 1569. When he grew up,Jahangir murdered, in addition to Abu’l Fazl, several religious leaders, including both the Sikhguru Arjan and the Shi’i Qadi Nurullah Shushtari. He punished an insurgent by serving him thehead of his only son, like a melon. Closer to home, when his own son Khusrau waged battleagainst him, Jahangir had him blinded, remarking that the relationship between father and sonwas irrelevant to a sovereign. Khusrau’s Rajput mother committed suicide. 40Jahangir’s attitude to Hinduism was disdainfully noninvasive. He talked with Hindupandits and visited yogis in Peshawar, though he said they “lacked all religious knowledge” andhe perceived in their ideas “only darkness of spirit.” At Kangra, in the Himalayas, Jahangirdemolished a Durga temple, built a mosque at the site, and had a bull slaughtered in the fort, buthe didn’t demolish the Hindu temple to the goddess Bhawani below the walls of the fort, at thebottom of the hill, which he spoke of in terms of admiration and even affection. Jahangir also leftuntouched—indeed, had both repaired and extended—the Jwalamukhi (“Mare with Flame in HerMouth”) Temple, “after testing the priests’ claim that the fire there was divine and eternal andcould not be extinguished by water”—at least, I would add, not until doomsday, when the oceanwould extinguish it. Jahangir also allowed a temple to Vishnu’s boar avatar to be constructed atAjmer; he objected not to the temple but to the boar (which was, after all, just a big pig,anathema to Muslims); he spared the temple but destroyed the boar image and threw it into atank, 41 declaring that it was an example of the “worthless Hindu religion.” Still he ordered thatno temples be destroyed (though also that no new ones were to be built). 42 Like Babur, he wrotean extensive memoir, but unlike Babur, he took no pleasure in horses. He died in 1627 whiletraveling from Kashmir to Lahore.SHAH JAHAN THE BUILDERShah Jahan was the third son of Jahangir and the Rajput princess Manmati. Hediscriminated against non-Muslims and destroyed many Hindu temples, seventy in Varanasialone. In Kashmir, he demolished an ancient temple at Anantnag (“The Serpent of Infinity,” aname of the cosmic cobra that Vishnu rests upon) and renamed the town Islamabad. At Orchha,in Madhya Pradesh, he demolished a temple because it had been built by the grandfather of aRajput raja who had rebelled against the Mughals. 43 But Shah Jahan was still open to the cultureof Hinduism—including Sanskrit poetry—and to some of its people, particularly the rajas. Hetook a verse that the Sufi poet Amir Khusra (1253- 1325), son of a Rajput mother and a Turkicfather, had originally composed in praise of India (Khusra’s motherland) and had the wordsinscribed around the roof of the Audience Hall in his Delhi palace: “If there is a heaven on earth,it is here, it is here, it is here.” When he built the great Jami Masjid, the Friday Mosque, in Delhi,he included a rather miscellaneous arcade made of disparate columns from twenty-sevendemolished Hindu temples. 44 Despite the alleged aniconic nature of Islam, the pillars are stillgraced with figures, some of Hindu gods, a few of them still with their heads on.Shah Jahan also built the Shalimar Gardens in Kashmir, the white marble palace inAjmer, and the high-carat golden, jewel-encrusted Peacock Throne. And when his beloved wife,Mumtaz, died in bearing him their thirteenth child, he built the Taj Mahal in her memory, on thebanks of the Yamuna (Jumna) River, on a site bought from a Rajput and made of marble fromRajasthan. His son Aurangzeb imprisoned him across the river, where he could gaze at the TajMahal until his death eight years later.DARA SHIKOH THE MYSTIC SANSKRITIST

Dara Shikoh (also spelled Shukoh) was Shah Jahan’s oldest and favorite son, thedesignated heir. But the orthodox Muslims of the ulama distrusted him, for he was a scholar whohad argued that “the essential nature of Hinduism was identical with that of Islam,” 45 apronouncement that orthodox Muslims regarded as heresy. jj He consorted with Sufis, Hindus,Christians, and Jews. 46 He learned Sanskrit and translated Sanskrit philosophical texts intoPersian.In 1657, when Shah Jahan was deathly ill, his sons hovered about, as princes are wont todo. Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh were the main contenders. When Aurangzeb attacked Delhi andimprisoned Shah Jahan in the Agra fort, he killed Dara’s sons in front of him, 47 paraded Darathrough the streets, had him cut to pieces, and then (according to some stories) had the piecesparaded through the streets.AURANGZEB THE ZEALOTAurangzeb was no more a typical Muslim than Torquemada was a typical Christian. Adevout Sunni, he worked hard to repair what he regarded as the damage done by his moretolerant predecessors. In the eloquent words of Bamber Gascoigne, “Akbar [had] disrupted theMuslim community by recognizing that India was not an Islamic country: Aurangzeb disruptedIndia by behaving as if it were.” 48 When Aurangzeb sacked Hyderabad in 1687, he stabled hishorses in the Shiite mosques as a deliberate insult to what he regarded as the city’s heretics. 49Thus began twenty years of discrimination against Shiites, Hindus, and Sikhs.The Sikh support of Dara in the 1658 succession crisis angered Aurangzeb. Moreover,the ninth Sikh guru, Tegh Bahadur, drew large crowds with his preaching and proselytizedamong Muslims as well as Hindus. Many Muslims converted to Sikhism, so infuriatingAurangzeb that he condemned Tegh Bahadur for blasphemy and executed him. Under GuruGovind Singh, the tenth and last Sikh guru (1666-1708), who insisted that Sikhs leave their hairuncut, carry arms, and use the epithet “Singh” (lion), Sikhism became not merely a movementfor religious and social reform but a political and military force to be reckoned with. In 1708,Govind Singh was assassinated while attending the emperor Aurangzeb. This spurred Sikhs,Maharashtrians, and Rajputs to outright defiance. 50The Hindus suffered most under Aurangzeb. In 1679, he reimposed the jizya on all castes(even the Brahmins, who were usually exempt) and the tax on Hindu pilgrims that Akbar hadlifted. He rescinded endowments to temples and to Brahmins, placed heavier duties on Hindumerchants, and replaced Hindus in administration with Muslims. When a large crowd rioted inprotests against the jizya, he sent in the troops—more precisely, the elephants—to tramplethem. 51 He put pressure on the Hindus to convert.Aurangzeb attacked Hyderabad, plundered and desecrated the temples, and killed theBrahmins. He destroyed all newly built or rebuilt Hindu temples and replaced them withmosques; in particular, he replaced the great Vishvanatha Temple in Varanasi and the KeshavaDeo Temple at Mathura with two great Aurangzeb mosques and changed the name of Mathura toIslamabad jk (as Shah Jahan had done to Anantnag). He also renamed the cave city of ElloraAurangabad. 52 In several places in Sind, and especially at Varanasi, “Brahmins attracted a largenumber of Muslims to their discourses. Aurangzeb, in utter disgust, ordered the governors of allthese provinces ‘to demolish the schools and temples of the infidels and with utmost urgency putdown the teaching and the public practices of these religious misbelievers.’ ” 53 (He particularlyhated Varanasi because it was the center of linga worship, which he regarded as the mostabominable of all abominations. 54 ) He sent someone to Rajasthan to demolish sixty-six temples

there. 55 Yet he financed the maintenance of several other Hindu temples and matts, and he evenmade land grants to some. 56 He destroyed few old temples, generally only those that had politicalor ideological power. Nor, being puritanical and mean in all things and reacting against ShahJahan’s architectural extravagances, did he allow any new mosques to be built (with theexception of the few mosques mentioned above, most of which replaced temples). This led togreat hardship for the artisans. 57 Other arts too suffered, as he suppressed poetry and music; 58dismissed dancers, musicians, and artists from the royal payroll; and hired jurists and theologiansin their place. 59 And when he went on to create the post of a muhtasib, a censor or guardian ofpublic morality, whose task it was to suppress gambling, blasphemy, alcohol, and opium, thecumulative effect surely acted as a serious wet blanket on both addiction and night life.Hindu astrologers had played an important role in the life of the Mughals until Aurangzebreplaced the Hindu astrologers with Muslim ones. 60 Aurangzeb’s grandson fought against him onbehalf of Hindus. Yet even Aurangzeb had Hindus in his court and ordered his officials toprotect Brahmin temple priests who were being harassed, instructing them to leave the Brahminsalone so that they could “pray for the continuance of the Empire.” 61 Aurangzeb lived to ninetyand died in bed, alone.When Jahandah Shah took the throne, he immediately reversed all of Aurangzeb’spolicies that had curbed the pleasures of the flesh. Said to be a frivolous and drunken imbecile,Jahandah Shah surrounded himself with singers, dancers, actors, storytellers, and a notoriousmistress, to whom he gave elephants and jewels. Other Mughals of that ilk followed him.Farrukhsiyar took over in 1713 and was murdered in 1719, though not before he carried out abloody repression of the Sikhs, who continued to harass the Mughals until the British put an endto Mughal rule. 62 ,THE OPIATES OF THE RULERS: ADDICTION TO OPIUM (AND WINE)Aurangzeb’s puritanical repressions were in part a response to the history of his family,several of whom suffered from addiction to alcohol and/or drugs, “the bane of the Mughals.”They started young; opium was often given to small children to keep them quiet. 63 Theaddictions of the Mughals may well have reinforced the Hindus’ awareness of the dangers ofsubstance abuse.It all began with Babur, whose memoir (begun when he was barely a teenager) aboundsin wine, drugs, and the Mughal equivalent of rock and roll. The drugs included cannabisexported from Kashmir, but the drug of choice was opium, made from poppies grown inVaranasi and one of India’s major export products. The opium was usually taken in the form ofma’jun, a drug still known today; it was made by pressing dried fruits such as plums, tamarinds,apricots, sometimes also sesame, and mixing the extract with a small amount of opium,somewhat like cognac-filled chocolates or hash brownies, truly a Turkish delight. It was carriedon military campaigns and consumed in large amounts at parties, “a socially acceptablerecreational drug.” 64Drugs and drink played a central role in Babur’s memoir. A typical early entry:We drank until sunset, then got on our horses. The members of the party had gotten pretty drunk.. . . Dost-Muhammad Baqir was so drunk that no matter how Amin-Muhammad Tarkhan andMasti Chuhra’s people tried they could not get him on his horse. They splashed water on hishead, but that didn’t do any good either. Just then a band of Afghans appeared.Amin-Muhammad Tarkhan was so drunk he thought that rather than leaving Dost-Muhammad to

e taken by the Afghans we should cut off his head and take it with us. With great difficulty theythrew him on his horse and took off. We got back to Kabul at midnight. 65 Babur was such agreat horseman that he could even ride when he was totally stoned: “We drank on the boat untillate that night, left the boat roaring drunk, and got on our horses. I took a torch in my hand and,reeling to one side and then the other, let the horse gallop free-reined along the riverbank all theway to camp. I must have been really drunk.” 66 This image is also captured by a fine paintingentitled A Drunken Babur Returns to Camp at Night, from an illustrated copy of theBabur-nama. 67 These parties were usually bachelor affairs, royal frat parties, though occasionallywomen were present. 68 A sure clue that we are dealing here not just with people of privilegehaving a very good long-running party but with genuine addiction is Babur’s frequent (almostalways futile) attempts to rein in his drunkenness. 69 Before one great battle, he went on thewagon, and to make sure he would not backslide, he had a quantity of the latest vintage fromGhazni salted for vinegar. 70 When he took the pledge not to drink wine, some of the court copiedhim and renounced with him, for, he noted, “People follow their kings’ religion.” 71 But he hatedbeing on the wagon and wrote a charming poem about it, which ended: “People repent, then theygive up wine—I gave it up, and now I am repenting!” 72There were also excuses to get stoned other than simply wanting to get stoned, anothertelltale sign of substance abuse: “That night I took some opium for the pain in my ear—themoonlight also induced me to take it. The next morning I really suffered from an opiumhangover and vomited a lot. Nevertheless, I went out on a tour of all Man Singh’s andBikramajit’s buildings.” And: “The weather was so bad that some of us had ma’jun even thoughwe had had some the day before.” 73 E. M. Forster wrote a wicked satire on the depiction ofconstant drunkenness, and constant travel, in Babur’s memoir: “Was this where the man with themelon fell overboard? Or is it the raft where half of us took spirits and the rest bhang, jl andquarreled in consequence? We can’t be sure. Is that an elephant? If so, we must have leftAfghanistan. No: we must be in Ferghana again; it’s a yak.” 74 Here, as so often, you only knowwhere you are by seeing what animals are with you.None of Babur’s successors wrote nearly so vividly about their drinking problems,though as a group they did manage to run up quite a tab. Humayun was an opium addict,particularly fond of ma’jun; it is quite possible that his fatal fall down the stairs of hisobservatory may have been aided and abetted by opium. Akbar drank very rarely, but his firstthree sons were alcoholics. Murad (Akbar’s second son) died of alcoholism, and when Akbarforbade Danyal (his third son, aged thirty-three) to drink wine, Danyal tried to smuggle some ininside a musket; the alcohol dissolved the rust and gunpowder in the musket and killed him. 75Jahangir’s excessive use of alcohol and opium was thought to have exacerbated hiscruelty and vicious temper; his Rajput wife committed suicide by overdosing on opium. Hesometimes forced his son Shah Jahan to drink, against his will. 76 Jahangir recorded in detail hisown addiction to alcohol, and later opium, and “his apparently half-hearted battle to moderate hisconsumption.” 77 Jahangir was also fascinated by the opium addiction of his friend Inayat Khanand had his portrait painted as he was dying. Jahangir wrote: “Since he was an opium addict andalso extremely fond of drinking wine whenever he had the chance, his mind was graduallydestroyed.” 78NONVIOLENCE MUGHAL STYLE, ESPECIALLY TOWARD DOGSThe vices of the Mughals were not limited to drugs; there was also the vice of hunting, aswell as more complicated problems involving animals. There are conflicting strains in the

Mughal attitude toward animals. On the one hand, they had a great fascination with and love ofanimals; the Sufi saints, in particular, were often depicted in the company of tame lions or bears;a tame lion accompanies Akbar’s confessor, Shaikh Salim Chishti, in one painting. On the otherhand, Muslims often sacrificed animals, including cows, at the end of pilgrimages, and this was arecurrent source of conflict, for many Hindus were, by this time, deeply offended by the sacrificeof cows. 79Babur showed no compassion for dogs when he vomited and suspected that someone wastrying to poison him: “I never vomited after meals, not even when drinking. A cloud of suspicioncame over my mind. I ordered the cook to be held while the vomit was given to a dog that waswatched.” But he also tortured the cook and had him skinned alive, ordered the taster to behacked to pieces, and had a woman suspected of complicity thrown under an elephant’s feet. 80So at least the dog was not singled out for mistreatment (and may not even have died; indeed,compared with the cook and taster, the dog got off easy). Akbar, on the other hand, was fond ofdogs. He imported them from many countries and admired their courage in attacking all sorts ofanimals, jm even tigers. In contradiction of the teachings of Islam, he regarded neither pigs nordogs as unclean and kept them in the harem; he also insisted that dogs had ten virtues, any one ofwhich, in a man, would make him a saint. At Akbar’s table, some of his friends and courtierswould put dogs on the tablecloth, and some of them went so far as to let the dogs put theirtongues into their (the courtiers’) mouths, to the horror of Abu’l Fazl. 81 An album publishedduring Akbar’s reign shows a Kanphata yogi (a devotee of Shiva) and his dog, with a text thatsays, “Your dog is better than anything in the world of fidelity.” 82One story about Akbar and dogs is also a great story about Akbar’s religious tolerance. Itwas told by an Englishman named Thomas Coryat, who traveled to India between 1612 and1617:Ecbar Shaugh [Akbar the Shah] . . . never denyed [his mother] any thing but this, that sheedemanded of him, that our Bible might be hanged about an asses necke and beaten about thetown of Agra, for that the Portugals [Portuguese] tyed [the Qu’ran] about the necke of a doggeand beat the same dogge about the towne of Ormuz. But hee denyed her request, saying that, if itwere ill in the Portugals to doe so to the Alcoran, being it became not a King to requite ill withill, for that the contempt of any religion was the contempt of God. 83 Akbar grants,implicitly, that the dogs insulted the Qu’ran, but he differs from his mother (as he rarely did) inrefusing to take revenge, thus short-circuiting the karmic chain of religious intolerance.NONVIOLENT VOWS OF AKBAR AND JAHANGIRDogs’ talent for hunting was important to Akbar, who was famous for his own skill,courage, and enthusiasm for the sport. Many pages of the Ain-i-Akbari are devoted to huntingtigers and leopards and catching elephants. Yet even there Abu’l Fazl feels it necessary to justifyhunting by an argument that it is not merely, as it might appear, a source of pleasure jn but a wayof finding out, while traveling incognito, about the condition of the people and the army,taxation, the running of households, and so forth. 84 Moreover, on two separate occasions Akbarhimself made vows to limit, if not to give up, hunting, the repeated attempts to give it up being atelltale sign that he, at least, regarded it as an addiction. He made the first vow when his wife waspregnant with his first son, Jahangir, and the embryo seemed to be dying; it happened on aFriday, and Akbar vowed never to hunt with cheetahs on Friday, a vow that he (and Jahangir, inresponse) kept all his life. This closed off one loophole that he had left in an earlier, limitedmove toward noninjury, in advising any adherent to his “Divine Faith” (Din-i-ilahi) “not to kill

any living creature with his own hand” and not to flay anything: “The only exceptions are inbattle and the chase.” 85On the second occasion, Akbar apparently underwent a conversion experience not unlikethat of Ashoka (whom Akbar resembles in other ways too, as we have seen): When Akbar washunting on April 22, 1578, he looked at the great pile of all the animals that had been killed andsuddenly decided to put a stop to it. 86 After that he became a halfhearted vegetarian (also likeAshoka), as we learn from the section of the Ain-i-Akbari that records the sayings of Akbar:“Were it not for the thought of the difficulty of sustenance, I would prohibit men from eatingmeat. The reason why I do not altogether abandon it myself is, that many others might willinglyforgo it likewise and be thus cast into despondency.” Abu’l Fazl attributes to Akbar a connectionbetween vegetarianism and what a Hindu would have called noncruelty, a connection thatHindus also made: “The compassionate heart of His Majesty finds no pleasure in cruelties. . . .He is ever sparing of the lives of his subjects. . . . His Majesty abstains much from flesh, so thatwhole months pass away without his touching any animal food.” 87Abu’l Fazl explicitly attributes much of Akbar’s qualified vegetarianism to his affinitywith Hinduism, rather disapprovingly (which is a good indication that it is probably true):Beef was interdicted, and to touch beef was considered defiling. The reason of this was that,from his youth, His Majesty had been in company with Hindu libertines, and had thus learned tolook upon a cow . . . as something holy. Besides, the emperor was subject to the influence of thenumerous Hindu princesses of the harem, who had gained so great an ascendancy over him as tomake him forswear beef, garlic, onions, and the wearing of a beard. 88 But since Jainism wasalso powerful in India at this time, and the Jainas were always more vigorous in theirvegetarianism than the Hindus, and since Akbar had been favorably impressed by the Jainamonks in his court and had issued land grants to them as well as to the Hindus, Akbar’s changeof heart may owe as much to Jainism as to Hinduism.Jahangir too underwent two conversion experiences about hunting. He had been, ifanything, even more obsessed by hunting than Babur and Akbar were, as addicted to hunting ashe was to alcohol and opium, and allergic to moderation of any kind. Then, when he took thethrone in 1605, he issued a proclamation that no animals should be slaughtered for food, nor anymeat eaten, on Thursday (the day of his accession) or Sunday (Akbar’s birthday). But he brokethis vow by shooting tigers, first in 1610, because (he said) he could not resist his overpowering“liking for tiger-hunting,” and again on several other occasions, as late as 1616. 89Then, in 1618, when he was fifty, Jahangir made a second vow, to give up shooting “withgun and bullet” and not to injure any living thing with his own hand. His memoir suggests thatJahangir was displacing long-festering feelings of remorse for the murder of Abu’l Fazl, hisfather’s right-hand man. Yet Jahangir rescinded this vow too in 1622, when his own son (thefuture Shah Jahan) openly turned on him in rebellion, as he himself had turned against Akbar.Instead of taking measures to kill his son, Jahangir started once again to kill animals, anotherdisplacement. Since Jahangir did not share his father’s great enthusiasm for the Hindus (thoughhe generally continued his father’s policies toward them), it is, again, likely that Jainism, whichJahangir had earlier treated with intolerance but later had encouraged with a number of landgrants, rather than Hinduism influenced him positively in this instance. 90HINDU RESISTANCE: SHIVAJI AND THE MAHARASHTRIANSInevitably, there was resistance. The Hindus demolished some mosques and convertedthem into temples, in the early thirteenth century, after 1540, and again during the reigns of

Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb. 91The Mughals did not have control of all India; there were major pockets of resistance,including the Punjab under the Sikh gurus, Vijayanagar, the kingdoms in the far south, and, mostfamously, the Maharashtrians under the command of Shivaji. Even before Shivaji, theMaharashtrians had been a thorn in the Mughal side. In Ahmednagar (the center of power inMaharashtra), the leader of the opposition to the Mughals after 1600 was Malik Ambar, anAbyssinian who had been sold in Baghdad as a slave but became a brilliant military commanderand administrator in the Ahmednagar sultanate, dealing equitably with both Hindus andMuslims. He trained mobile Maharashtrian cavalry units and won many victories againstJahangir, until his death in 1626. The most effective cavalry in India belonged to Maharashtraand Mysore, both of which had ready access to the west coast ports and to trade, primarily inhorses, from the gulf states. 92In 1647, when he was just seventeen years old, Shivaji founded the Maharashtriankingdom, an unexpected revival of Hindu kingship in the teeth of a powerful Muslim supremacy.When Shivaji captured Bijapur, his men took the treasure, horses, and elephants and enlisted totheir side most of the Bijapuri troops, some of whom were Maharashtrians, while some ofShivaji’s men were Muslims. In this, as in so much of medieval Indian history, allies andenemies were formed on political and military grounds more often than on religious ones, evenfor Shivaji, who in later centuries became the hero of Hindu militantism against Muslims. Thescourge of Aurangzeb, Shivaji made lavish donations to Brahmins but (according to the Muslimchronicler Khafi Khan) made a point of not desecrating mosques or seizing women. AMaharashtrian Brahmin constructed a Kshatriya genealogy for him that linked him with earlierRajputs. There are also many legends connecting Shivaji with the Maharashtrian saints Tukaram(1568-1650) and Ramdas (1608-1681). Shivaji died of dysentery in 1680. 93In 1688, Aurangzeb captured Shivaji’s successor, Shambhaji, and had him tortured anddismembered limb by limb. Shambhaji’s brother Rajaram took over until his death, when hissenior widow, Tarabai, assumed control in the name of her son, Shambhaji II. In 1714, Shivaji’sgrandson Shahu appointed as his chief minister a Brahmin who was such a poor horseman thathe required a man on each side to hold him in the saddle. 94 The Maharashtrian resistance did notlast long after that.INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE UNDER THE MUGHALSIt is hard to generalize about interreligious relations under all the Mughals; they were sodifferent, Akbar the best (and Dara, though he never got to rule), Aurangzeb the worst, ShahJahan a mixed bag (he destroyed many Hindu temples, but Mughal officials during his reignparticipated in Jagannath festivals). 95 But if we do try to generalize, we can say that throughoutthe Mughal period, official conversions of Hindus to Islam were rare; 96 non-Muslims were notobliged to convert to Islam on entering the Mughal ruling class, and the Mughals generallyregarded Islam as their own cultural heritage and did not encourage conversion to Islam amongthe general population. 97 There is no evidence of massive coercive conversion. Surprisingly littlewas written about conversion in contemporary sources on either side, suggesting that fewregarded it as a major issue. Jahangir did not approve of mass conversions; he punished oneMughal official for converting the son of a defeated Hindu raja. 98 There is evidence of fewerthan two hundred conversions under Aurangzeb.Yet evidently many Hindus did convert, or the Muslim population of India would nothave grown as it did. Some Hindus converted for money, some as punishment, some for

marriage, some because they believed in it. The sons of a rebellious Rajput were spared oncondition of accepting Islam; some refused and chose death instead. One prince convertedbecause he got a tremendous raise in pay by doing so. 99 The Hindu wives of Muslim rulerssometimes converted and even built mosques. 100 A Brahmin who had been appointed to help atheologian of Akbar’s court translate the Atharva Veda from Sanskrit into Persian ended upconverting to Islam. A ruler of Kashmir converted through association with his Muslimminister. 101On the other hand, so many Muslims converted to Hinduism that Shah Jahan establisheda department to deal with it and forbade any proselytizing jo by Hindus, 102 and so manyconversions took place as the result of intermarriage that Akbar (Akbar!) forbade Hindu womento marry their Muslim lovers; he had the women forcibly removed from their husbands andreturned to their birth families. Under Jahangir, twenty-three Muslims in Varanasi fell in lovewith Hindu women and converted to Hinduism. Under Shah Jahan, Muslim girls in Kashmirmarried Hindu boys and became Hindu. Muslim women married to Hindu men, and Muslimhusbands of Hindu women, sometimes reconverted to Islam. In the fifteenth century theBrahmins thought that there was already a need for conversions back to Hinduism; 103 theyoverhauled ancient ceremonies designed to reinstate Hindus who had fallen from caste (usuallyas a result of some ritual impurity) and evolved ceremonies for reconversion, called purification(shuddhi), usually involving both the payment of money and a ritual.One Portuguese Augustinian friar, Sebastião Manrique, noted the Mughal policy ofhonoring Hindu law in Bengal between 1629 and 1640, during the reign of Shah Jahan: jpTHE CASE OF THE POACHED PEACOCKSDisguising himself as a Muslim merchant,apparently in order to avoid the hostility that a Christian missionary might expect, Manrique rodeon horseback through the monsoon rains and took shelter in the cowshed of a Hindu village. Oneof his Bengali Muslim attendants caught, killed, and cooked a pair of peacocks; when Manriquelearned of this, he feared the wrath of the Hindu villagers and buried the bones and feathers. Butthe villagers found a few feathers and, armed with bows and arrows, pursued Manrique’scompany (and their Hindu guide) to the nearby town, where the villagers filed a formalcomplaint with the Muslim administrator [shiqdar] whom the Mughals had put in charge of lawand order there. “Evidently aware that to Hindus the peacock was a sacred bird,” theadministrator threw Manrique et cie in jail and, after twenty-four miserable hours, brought themto trial.The administrator learned who had killed the peacocks and asked him how, being aBengali and a Muslim, he had dared to kill a living thing in a Hindu district. Manrique answeredfor his servant, arguing that a Muslim had no need to respect the “ridiculous precepts” of theHindus; that God nowhere prohibited the killing of such animals but had created them for man’suse; and that killing the peacocks did not violate the precepts of the Qur’an. The administrator,however, pointed out that when Akbar had conquered Bengal sixty-four years earlier, he hadpromised that he and his successors would let Bengalis live under their own customs; theadministrator sent the man back to jail, awaiting a sentence that might require whipping and theamputation of his right hand. Manrique bribed the administrator’s wife with a piece of Chinesesilk taffeta, embroidered with white, pink, and yellow flowers. She persuaded her husband toforgo the amputation and merely subject the man to a whipping. 104 Though there is significantblurring of the line between the injunction against killing any living thing or only against killingsacred things (peacocks perhaps being sacred to Skanda/Murugan, whose vehicle they are), themain point of this story stands out clearly in either case. Though the Christian was, by his ownconfession, prepared to mock Hindu sensibilities and to resort to concealment and bribery (which

succeeded, in part) to evade them, his expectation that a Muslim judge might share hischauvinism was not justified; like Akbar, whom he invoked, the Muslim administrator respectedHindu law and did not privilege Muslims before the law.RELIGIOUS FUSIONIn the realm of religious texts, both bhakti and Sufism transfused popular literature sothoroughly that it is often hard to tell which tradition is the source of a particular mystical folksong. 105 Much of the poetry written by Muslims, with Muslim names, in Hindi, Bengali(Bangla), Gujarati, Punjabi, and Marathi begins with the Islamic invocation of Allah but goes onto express Hindu content or makes use of Hindu forms, Hindu imagery, Hindu terminology. Inreturn, the sixteenth-century Bangla text entitled The Ocean of the Nectar of Bhakti, by thetheologian Rupagoswamin, tells the life of Krishna in a form modeled on a Sufi romance. 106 Theheroes of the Persian epic the Shah Nama and the Sanskrit Mahabharata interact in theTarikh-i-Farishta, composed under the Mughals. Hindu-Muslim sects flourished, especially inBengal, and new Hindu sects emerged, headed by charismatic leaders. Muslims allowed Hindusto perform sacrifices in the ruins of old temples, and many Muslim pilgrims attended the Hindushrines in Kangra and Mathura. 107Syncretism jq remained at the heart of Sufism, which in the course of time producedMuslim disciples who had Hindu disciples who had Muslim disciples, and so on, some of whomcalled God Allah, some Rama or Hari (Vishnu). 108 In Sufi centers, low-caste Hindus, includingPariahs, shared meals with other Hindus as well as with Muslims. 109 A similar synthesis tookplace in the seventeenth century in “Dakani” poetry composed in Urdu, which blended Islamicand Hindu genres as well as male and female voices, introducing, from the Hindu lyric traditionand the Arabic storytelling tradition, a female narrator. 110 Popular religion often mixed Hinduand Sufi practices together inextricably, to the annoyance of reformers. 111 Many people wereHindu by culture, Muslim by religion, or the reverse. Mughal emperors patronized yogaestablishments. Hindus worshiped Sufi Pirs. 112TRANSLATING RELIGIONSThe enrichment of Hinduism by Islam, and Islam by Hinduism, was greatly facilitated bythe production of translations, which inspired new, original genres in both cultures. By the timeof the Mughals, Indian literature was flourishing in North India in a number of languages:Sanskrit, Persian (the official court language), Arabic, the Turkic languages, and many regionallanguages, including Sindi, Punjabi, Pashto, and Hindi. 113 In public spheres in South India too,particularly but not only in the Telugu-speaking world, language boundaries were porous bothgeographically and linguistically, and multiple literary cultures were loosely connected. 114 Urdu(“camp”), a hybrid dialect that Akbar developed in the military encampments, was widely used;it was written in Perso-Arabic script, with much Sanskrit-Hindi syntax and vocabulary. 115Developed further under Shah Jahan, Urdu became the primary fusion language.The Mughals extended their patronage to many Hindu scholars and commissioned thetranslation of many Hindu works from Sanskrit into Arabic and Persian. Already by the eighthcentury, the collection of animal fables called the Panchatantra had been translated into Arabic(known as The Mirror for Princes [Kalila wa Dimna]), and another version into Persian (entitledThe Lights of Canopus [Anvari Suhaili]). Akbar had Abu’l Fazl translate it into Persian again andalso had both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana translated into Persian. 116 There were Persiantranslations of the Harivamsha, gorgeously illustrated. 117 Jahangir had an abridged translation

made of the Yoga-vasishtha, and Dara Shikoh himself later translated it again, more fully. Daraalso provided the first Persian translation of the Upanishads, which became known in Europe(through a French translation of Dara’s Persian) and introduced the British Orientalist WilliamJones to Indian literature. Thanks to Akbar and Dara, Sanskrit became an important literarylanguage in the Muslim world. 118 The Turkish and Afghan courts of the fourteenth, fifteenth, andsixteenth centuries sponsored a rich and interactive mixture of vernacular and classical orcosmopolitan languages and fostered the growth of regional literature, music, and art. 119 Theerotic literature of the Turks and Persians easily assimilated translations of the Kama-sutra intoPersian, often with wonderful illustrations; the Persian was then translated into Europeanlanguages.ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTINGAs the Mughals were superb plunderers, so were they superb builders. Their architecturewas strongly influenced by Hindu architecture, 120 and in return, Mughal architecture had a vividimpact on many Hindu monuments, 121 inspiring, as in literature, unprecedented Hindu forms.Babur, who scorned most things Indian, disdained the Indian builders: “A stone mosquewas built, but it was not well made. They built it in the Indian fashion.” 122 But Akbar, whoadmired most things Indian, admired its architecture, too; the eclectic architecture of FatehpurSikri combined Persian with Hindu and Jaina forms. Akbar employed nearly fifteen hundredstonecutters at Agra. 123 He gave Man Singh permission to erect a number of temples inVrindaban, built of red sandstone, the material usually reserved for Mughal official architecture;these Hindu temples also had many Mughal architectural features. 124 Since there were no Ramatemples in Ayodhya until the sixteenth or seventeenth century, there is some irony in the strongpossibility that Babur, whose mosque was to become such a cause célèbre, may have sponsoredthe first Rama temples in Ayodhya, built when he built the ill-fated Babri Mosque. 125In painting too a fusion of Hindu and Muslim forms led to innovations in both cultures.Many paintings on Hindu themes are signed with the names of Muslim artists, and many Hinduminiature paintings were modeled on Persian originals 126 or incorporated composite figures andother fantastic themes from Persian miniatures. 127 Though Indian painters already knew how toilluminate manuscripts with miniatures, the Persians made it a court practice and introduced newtechniques and refinements.As always, the common people of India picked up the tab. 128 The great Mughalmonuments were also monuments to Mughal “extravagance and oppression.” Though there wereno more crop seizures, there was still crippling taxation on peasants and artisans, and the plightof the cultivator was worse than ever, with increased exploitation from above. 129 As there was nofree temple, there was certainly no free mosque.CHAPTER 20HINDUISM UNDER THE MUGHALS1500 to 1700 CECHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES ARE CE)1486-1533 Chaitanya lives1498-1597 Mirabailives1532-1623 Tulsidas lives1608-1649 Tukaram lives1622-1673 Kshetrayya livesIt is a simplefact that contemporary Hinduism as a living practice would not be what it is if it were not for thedevotional practices initiated under Mughal rule. Amitav Ghosh (1956- ) 1

Hinduisms of various kinds flourished under the Mughals. The production andpreservation of a large number of digests, as well as literary and religious texts, during thisperiod suggest that this was another of those periods—we have encountered several—when thepresence of foreign cultures in India led many Hindu intellectuals to take pains to preserve theircultural heritage. 2 This was not an unalloyed Good Thing. Some Hindus retreated into moreconservative practices lest someone mistake them for Muslims in the dark of cultural fusion. AsK. M. Pannikar, prime minister of Bikaner in the 1940s, put it, with benefit of hindsight, “Thereaction of Hindu lawgivers to [the Mughal] challenge was in general to make Hinduism morerigid and to re-interpret the rules in such a way as to resist the encroachments of Islam. It isperhaps this defensive attitude toward society that is responsible for the orthodoxy of viewswhich is characteristic of the Dharma Sastra literature of this period.” 3But in a more positive vein, Hindu kings in medieval India arranged large-scale publicdebates. 4 Fear of Muslims and a desire to circle the wagons were among the inspirations for thisburst of literary and religious activity. Mughal policies that encouraged trade and pilgrimage 5 (inpart because several of the Mughals collected taxes on pilgrims) benefited the sacred Vaishnavasites of Ayodhya and Vrindavan. Devotional Vaishnavism flourished under the Mughals in thesixteenth century in ways that are foundational for subsequent Hinduism. The establishment ofMuslim rule and the subsequent loss of a political center for Hinduism triggered a shift of focusin Vaishnavism away from the more warriorlike and kingly aspects of Vishnu to those of thepassionate god of the forest, the playful, amorous god, Krishna the cowherd. 6 Though theMughals picked up some aspects of caste, by and large they ignored it, and some Hindusfollowed their lead and loosened up. Outside the nervous world of the Brahmin imaginary, manygood things were happening.TULSIDAS AND SITA IN NORTH INDIATulsidas (c. 1532/1543-1623), one of the main architects of North Indian Vaishnavism,was close to several movers and shakers at the Mughal court, including Man Singh. 7 His retellingof the Ramayana in Hindi, titled “The Holy Lake of the Acts of Rama” (Ramcaritmanas), is stillread and enacted each year at the “Rama Play” (Ramlila) throughout North India, particularly atRamnagar near Varanasi. Tulsidas, who composed his poem at a pilgrimage center that had beenattacked by Muslims, said that even the Muslims would be saved by Rama’s name 8 (ratherreminiscent of earlier claims that this or that pilgrimage spot would save even Pariahs). TheBrahmins of Varanasi, where the text was composed, are said to have been shocked by thecomposition of such a text in a vernacular language. They tested it by placing it in the Shivatemple for one night, with the Vedas and Puranas placed on top of it. In the morning Tulsidas’s’stext was on top of them all, legitimizing its authority, 9 like that of the scriptures in the SouthIndian myth (which texts will float upstream?), buoyancy being, apparently, a sign of sanctity.Some Brahmins also objected to Tulsidas’s challenges to caste. Although by and largeTulsidas toes the Brahmin party line and upholds caste, there are also moments of compassionfor Pariahs and tribals, such as this story about a Pariah, told, significantly, through the maskingdevice of an animal:RAMA AND THE CROWWhen Rama was still a little baby, he began to cry when he could notcatch the crow that came near him; he pursued the crow no matter how high the bird flew intothe air. The crow fell into the child’s mouth and watched for thousands of years as Rama was

orn again and again as a child on earth. Then the child laughed, and the crow fell out of hismouth. Rama granted the terrified crow the boon of eternal devotion to him, and so the crowsings Rama’s praises eternally. 10 The manifestation of god’s universal form within ananthropomorphic body, a manifestation that we have seen experienced by Brahma and Vishnu,by Arjuna (in the Gita), and by Krishna’s mother, is here given to a crow, an unclean scavenger.The caste issue is explicit here: The crow was an uppity Pariah in a former life, until Shivacursed him to be reborn as a crow. This story stands in marked contrast with Rama’s treatment ofa crow in Valmiki’s Ramayana, in which he regards the crow as an enemy and blinds him.Tulsidas also tackled in his own way the problem of Rama’s treatment of Sita. In thecenturies that had intervened since Valmiki’s Ramayana, as Rama had become one of the twogreat gods of Vaishnavism (Krishna being the other), Sita’s fate had become more vexing thanever. Tulsidas dealt with this problem by incorporating into his poem the tradition of the illusoryor shadow Sita from earlier Sanskrit texts. Sita enters the fire at the ordeal and “both the shadowform and the stigma of public shame” are consumed in the blazing fire. 11 Thus the Vedanticconcept of illusion allows Tulsidas to argue that Rama never intended or needed to test Sita(since he knew she wasn’t in Ravana’s house at all) but goaded the shadow Sita into undertakingthe fire ordeal merely in order to get her into the fire so that he could bring the real Sita backfrom the fire. 12 And the real Sita then stays with him; Tulsidas omits entirely the episodes inwhich Sita bears twin sons and enters the earth; the story ends with Rama and Sita together,happily ever after.CHANDIDAS, CHAITANYA, AND RADHA IN BENGALLike Sita, Radha suffered in separation from her beloved (Krishna), but the spirit ofRadha’s longing in separation was different from Sita’s and was interpreted still differently byeach of two great medieval Bengali poets, Chandidas and Chaitanya.In the fourteenth century Bangla poetry of Chandidas, Radha is already married when shegoes off with Krishna. (In the sixteenth-century Sanskrit plays of Rupagoswamin, Chaitanya’smost famous disciple, Radha is married to Abhimanyu, the son of Arjuna. 13 ) Chandidas writes:Let us not talk of that fatal flute.It calls a woman away from her homeand drags her by the hair to that Shyam [Krishna].A devoted wife forgets her spouseTo be drawn like a deer, thirsty and lost. 14 The legends about Chandidas tell us how thetradition regarded him. His poems say that he was a Brahmin and a village priest who openlydeclared his love for a low-caste washerwoman named Rami. Legends say that he was dismissedas a priest and fasted to death as a protest but came to life again on the funeral pyre, or that thebegum of Gaur took such a fancy to him that her jealous husband, the nawab, had him whippedto death while tied to the back of an elephant.The Bengali saint Chaitanya (1486-1533) was born into a Brahmin family and received asound education in the Sanskrit sacred texts. After the death of his father when he wastwenty-two, he made a pilgrimage to Gaya to perform the funeral rituals, and there he had areligious experience that inspired him to renounce the world. The world, however, would notrenounce him; people flocked to him and joined him in singing songs (kirtana) to Krishna anddancing in a kind of trance, as well as repeating the names of Krishna, worshiping temple iconsor the tulsi plant (a kind of basil sacred to Vishnu), and retelling Krishna’s acts, particularly hisloveplay with the cowherd women (Gopis). 15 Chaitanya settled in Orissa in the town of Puri

(rather than Vrindavan, the scene of Krishna’s youth) at his mother’s urging, so that he couldmore easily stay in touch with her. He had frequent epileptic seizures and may have died bydrowning while in a state of religious ecstasy.Chaitanya and his followers believed that he was an incarnation of Krishna and Radha inone body, where at last the two gods (and Chaitanya) could simultaneously experience the blissof both sides of the couple in union. 16 The Bengali sect called Sahajiyas (“Naturalists”) sawKrishna and Radha united not only in Chaitanya but in every man and every woman; their goalwas not to worship or imitate Krishna or Radha, in a dualistic, bhakti sense, but to become them,in a monistic and Tantric sense, to realize both male and female powers within their ownbodies. 17 They praised the ideal of love for another man’s wife or for a woman of unsuitably lowcaste, or an unmarried woman’s love for a man (for even in texts in which Radha is not anyoneelse’s wife, she is usually not Krishna’s wife), because they admired the intensity of such love inthe face of social disapproval. The adulterous love between Krishna and Radha or the Gopismade a positive virtue of the addictive vice of lust, coming down solidly on the side of passionand against the control of passion through renunciation; adulterous passion, which had long beenthe benchmark of what religion was designed to prevent, now became a metaphor for the properlove of god.Yet unlike the model of Shiva as Skull Bearer, these ideals were never taken asparadigms for an imitatio dei; they were theological parables, not licenses to commit adultery.The difference can be accounted for when we consider the radical contrast between the relativelylawless period in which the Kapalikas thrived, not to mention the antinomian nature of theircommunity, and the more tempered and theocratic atmosphere of even the most erotic of thecults of Krishna.Chaitanya was said to have reconverted the Muslim governor of Orissa back toHinduism, from which he had converted and to which he had also converted many Pathans(ethnic Afghans). 18 Chaitanya’s followers include many groups, beginning with the antinomianBengali Sahajiyas, who were his contemporaries. His main disciples were the renunciants calledGoswamins. One of them, Nityananda, continuing the paradigm, was said to be the incarnationof Balarama, Krishna’s brother. In his efforts to convert the Bengali Tantrics, Nityananda is saidto have consorted with “prostitutes, drunkards, and others of dubious character,” behavior thathis followers justified by his association with Balarama, who was known for his excesses. 19Other Goswamins developed an erotic devotional theology that incorporated still moreantinomian and ecstatic Tantric influences and took root among the people known as Bauls. 20At the same time, many worshipers in the Chaitanya tradition, recoiling from theantinomian Tantric variations on the theme of Krishna and Radha that had made them the targetof social opprobrium, 21 developed a different tradition and went back to the Gita-Govinda fortheir central imagery, emphasizing not the union but the separation (viraha) of the two lovers andthe suffering of longing for the otiose god, the renunciation rather than the passion of love. Onceagain, a Tantric tradition had split in two. These Goswamins, anxious to prevent the story ofKrishna and Radha from becoming a model for human behavior, hastened to sanitize the myth byreversing the locus of the real people and the shadows; where in earlier texts the Gopis had leftshadow images of themselves in bed with their husbansds while they danced with Krishna, nowsome of the Goswamins specified that the real Gopis remained in bed with their husbands andmerely sent their shadow doubles to dance with the god. The quasi-Tantric Bengal traditionsdebated for centuries whether Krishna and Radha were married or, as they put it, whether Radhawas 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. 22The question of role models was a pressing one, for in Bengal Vaishnavism the worshiperis 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 couldbe god’s lovers and mothers, the most intimate roles, whereas male worshipers had to pretend tobe women (some of them withdrawing to menstruate every month). This gave women a greatmeasure 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 canespouse renunciation) by both the Goswamins and the lineages of the philosophers Ramanujaand Madhva. These were the Radhavallabhas (“Radha’s Darlings”), who venerated thehouseholder stage, rejected renunciation, and regarded Krishna not as the supreme deity but asthe servant of the goddess Radha. As one British scholar put it, Krishna “may do the coolie-workof building the world, but Radha sits as Queen. He is at best but her Secretary of State.” 24 Manyof the Bangla verses of Chandidasa and the Maithili verses of Vidyapati (in the fourteen andfifteenth centuries) are written from the standpoint of a Radha who is more powerful thanKrishna.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 spiritualpoverty, though the upper castes supported Ramprasad quite well and he gave no opposition tocaste. His poetry bristles with references to real life: to poverty, farmers, debts, absenteelandlords, lawyers, leaking boats, merchants, and traders. 25 Strong Tantric influences are alsoevident in the wine and drunkenness that pervaded both his poetry and (as the stories go) hislife. 26TUKARAM’S DOGS IN MAHARASHTRATukaram was a Shudra who lived in Maharashtra from 1608 to 1649. None of his poemswere 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 tothe story of the floating South Indian texts and, closer to home, to the buoyancy of Tulsidas’stext, angry Brahmins forced Tukaram to throw all his manuscripts into the river in his nativevillage. Tukaram fasted and prayed, and after thirteen days the sunken notebooks reappearedfrom the river, undamaged. 27 He married, but since his wife was chronically ill, he took a secondwife. 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 hisremaining children, and went off into the wilderness. He became a poet, devoted to the godVitthal, speaking in the idiom that the Marathi poets had fashioned out of the songs that ordinaryhousewives sang at home and that farmers, traders, craftsmen, and laborers sang at popularreligious festivals. Some say he ended his life by throwing himself into the same river where hispoems had sunk and reemerged. His poems, which challenge caste and denounce Brahmins, alsodenounce the ascetic: “He must consume a lot of bhang, and opium, and tobacco;/ But hishallucinations are perpetual.” 28His poems often imagine the relationship between god and his devotee as the relationshipbetween a secret lover and an adulteress (as many bhakti poets do) or, more unusually, as theviolent 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 inPandhari./ He will garrotte his victim with the cord of love.” 29 He also imagines the divinerelationship as a bond between a master and a dog:GOD’S DOG jr I’ve come to your doorLike a dog looking for a homeO Kind OneDon’t drive me away . . .Says Tuka,My Master’s trained me hardI am allowed to eatOnly out of his ownHand. 30 MUGHAL HORSEMEN AND HINDU HORSE GODSDogs were one sort of religious symbol; horses were another. And real, as well assymbolic, horses played a major role in Hindu-Muslim relations under the Mughals; horsetrading, both literal and figurative, was the common theme. A great deal of the revenue drawnfrom taxing the peasants was spent on royal horses. In Haridwar, in the Mughal period, the greatspring horse fair coincided, not by coincidence, with a famous religious festival that drewthousands of pilgrims to the banks of the Ganges each year. This combination of trade andpilgrimage was widespread; the Maharashtrian and Sikh generals and their troops came to thefairs to pay their devotion at the holy places in the morning and secure a supply of warhorses inthe afternoon. 31When the Europeans arrived in India in the Mughal period, horses were very expensiveanimals, the best ones costing up to ten thousand dollars. 32 More than 75 percent of Mughalhorses were imported, mostly from Central Asia. Babur seems to have spent more time in thesaddle than on the ground, and took a personal interest in the horses. 33 Akbar had 150,000 to200,000 cavalry-men, plus the emperor’s own crack regiment of another 7,000. 34 Abu’l Fazl tellsus how important horses were to Akbar, for ruling, conquest, presentation as gifts, and generalconvenience; 35 Akbar even had luminous polo balls made so that he could play night games. 36The 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 arrivefrom Turan and Iran, and there are nowadays twelve thousand in the stables of his Majesty.” 37Abu’l Fazl insists, however, that the best horses of all were bred in India, particularly inthe Punjab, js Mewat, Ajmer, and Bengal near Bihar. He continues:Skilful, experienced men have paid much attention to the breeding of this sensible animal, manyof whose habits resemble those of man; and after a short time Hindustanranked higher in thisrespect than Arabia, whilst many Indian horses cannot be distinguished from Arabs or from theIraqi 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 drivento the shore of Cachh; and that it had seven choice horses, from which, according to the generalbelief, the breed of that country originated. 38 This, then, is the answer to the apparentcontradiction: Indian horses (or, rather, some Indian horses) are Arab horses, and there is nocontest.The Arab horses from Kutch were probably the sires of the most distinctive native Indianbreed. Sometime before the eleventh century, a clan of Rajput warriors developed a new breed ofwarhorses 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 thenineteenth 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 theMarwari’s ears to the lyre, to the scorpion’s arched stinger, and to the Rajputs’ trademarkhandlebar mustaches, turned upright and set on their thick, bushy ends. (The Kathiawar horsefrom Gujarat has the same special ears but is not quite so tall or so long.) 39Despite these occasional breeding successes, negative factors made the Indian horse intoa beast so rarefied that it became more mythical than practical. Ever since the Arabs enteredIndia, then the Turks, and then the Mongols who were to become the Mughals, and despite a fewpassing references to the Scythians and the British, it has almost always been the Muslims whoplay the role of good and evil foreign horsemen in the local equine rituals and mythologies ofIndia. These myths and rituals, though not always documented in the Mughal period, are oftenabout the Mughals. The corpus of Hindu myths that depicts the Turks and Arabs bringing horsesinto India seems to have assimilated the historical experience of the importation of horses notonly to the lingering vestiges—the cultural hoofprints, as it were—of Vedic horse myths but alsoto the cross-cultural theme of magical horses brought from heaven or the underworld. 40There are some negative responses too: In the seventeenth century, for instance, a Hindufrom Afghanistan insisted that when he died, he wanted to be buried where he couldn’t hear thehoof steps of Mughal horses. 41 But despite or because of the political domination that theMughals maintained, their contribution to the equine legends of Hinduism was generallypositive, and the Muslims in the stories are often depicted in a favorable light, both because theMughals strongly influenced Hindu horse lore and because some Hindus welcomed them as thebearers of the gift of horses. The shadow of the hated and loved Muslim horse may also fallacross the highly ambiguous equine figure of Kalki.Many Hindu rituals involve Muslims and horses. The Muslim saint Alam Sayyid ofBaroda 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 clayhorses to deified Muslim saints like Satya Pir, and Hindus as well as Muslims worship at theshrines of other Muslim “horse saints.” 43 Then there is the South Indian Hindu folk hero namedMuttal Ravuttan. 44 “Ravuttan” designates a Muslim horseman, a folk memory of the historicalfigure of the Muslim warrior on horseback, “whether he be the Sufi warrior leading his band offollowers or the leader of an imperial army of conquest.” At Chinna Salem, Muttal Ravuttanreceives marijuana, opium, cigars, and horse gram (kollu) for his horse. The offerings are madeto 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 issaid to be able to fly through the air. 45Muslims are deeply involved in the worship of the god Khandoba, an incarnation ofShiva, in Maharashtra, and many of Khandoba’s followers have been Muslim horsemen, thoughit is sometimes said that Aurangzeb was forced to flee from Khandoba’s power. 46 In Jejuri, themost famous center of the worship of Khandoba, a Muslim leads the horse in the Khandobafestival and a Muslim family traditionally keeps Khandoba’s horses. The worshipers ofKhandoba act as the god’s horse (occasionally as his dog 47 ) by galloping and whippingthemselves, 48 and at the annual festival in Jejuri, when, as in many temples, the worshipers carrya 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 Nandi 50 before he mounts ahorse to fight the demon Mani; some texts say that Nandi turns into the horse, 51 while others 52say that Shiva ordered the moon to become a horse and, seated on it, cut off the head of thedemon. 53 The pan-Indian image of Nandi stands at the bottom of the hill at the shrine ofKhandoba; 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 veryopposite of being a horse. In the myth, he rides a demonic horse; in the ritual, he rides his humanworshipers. He is the subduer of horses, the tamer of horses. He makes demonic horses, like hisworshipers, into divine horses.THREE TALES OF EQUINE RESURRECTIONA story about horses and Mughals is still prevalent both in oral tradition and in popularprinted bazaar pamphlets in Hindi and Punjabi in the great Punjab area—Punjab, Haryana,Himachal Pradesh, and Delhi—where real horses have remained important throughout Indianhistory. This is the story of Dhyanu Bhagat:WHY COCONUTS ARE OFFERED TO THE GODDESSThere was once a devotee of theGoddess named Dhyanu Bhagat who lived at the same time as the Mughal emperor Akbar. Oncehe was leading a group of pilgrims to the Temple of Jvala Mukhi [at Kangra, in HimachalPradesh] where the Goddess appears in the form of a flame. As the group was passing throughDelhi, Akbar summoned Dhyanu to the court, demanding to know who this goddess was andwhy he worshipped her. Dhyanu replied that she is the all-powerful Goddess who grants wishesto her devotees. In order to test Dhyanu, Akbar ordered the head of his horse to be cut off andtold Dhyanu to have his goddess join the horse’s head back to its body. Dhyanu went to JvalaMukhi where he prayed day and night to the Goddess, but he got no answer. Finally, indesperation, he cut off his own head and offered it to the Goddess. At that point, the Goddessappeared before him in full splendor, seated on her lion. She joined his head back to his body andalso joined the horse’s head back to its body. Then she offered him a boon. He asked that in thefuture, devotees not be required to go to such extreme lengths to prove their devotion. So, shegranted him the boon that from then on, she would accept the offering of a coconut to be equal tothat of a head. So, that is why people offer coconuts to the Goddess. 54 The devouringgoddess appears both in the deity who demands blood sacrifices and, at the very start of thestory, in the shrine of Jvala Mukhi, the holy place where she takes the form of a flame. For JvalaMukhi (“Mouth of Fire,” a common term for a volcano) is the name of the submarine doomsdaymare. 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 andrestored in tandem, while Dhyanu asks for and receives a boon: that henceforth people can provetheir 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. Thecoconut, as essential to many pujas as animals are to a blood sacrifice, is a clue to the fact thatthis is really a myth about human sacrifice—perhaps a local myth—that has been adapted to takeaccount of the more “Sanskritic” tradition of the horse sacrifice. There are changes: the horsebeheaded in the story is not killed in a horse sacrifice, and it is beheaded rather than strangled asthe 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 Vedichorse 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 usedry coconuts for all offerings, presumably because they have traveled all the way fromsomewhere where they do grow, a long distance. Since these coconuts must be imported, theymay therefore represent either the adoption of a myth that is “foreign” (i.e., from another part ofIndia) or a local tradition about a “foreign” ritual that requires imported coconuts, appropriate toa ritual about imported horses.A similar myth collected in Chandigarh substitutes a child for the worshiper himself:THE HORSE AND THE BOY IN THE CAULDRONQueen Tara told her husband, KingHarichand, of a miracle that the goddess had performed [involving snakes and lizards]. The kingasked, “How can I get a direct vision [pratyakss darshan] of the Mother? I will do anything.”Tara told him that it wasn’t easy and that he would have to sacrifice his favorite blue horse. Hedid so. Then she told him to sacrifice his beloved son. He did so. Then she told him to cut up thehorse and son and place them in a cauldron and cook them. This he did. She told him to dish outthe food on five plates, one for Mata [Mother, the Goddess]), one for himself, one for the horse,one for the son, and one for her. The king, bound to his word, started to eat, but tears welled upin his eyes. The horse and the son both came back to life. Devi appeared on her lion, a directvision. King Harichand worshipped her and begged for forgiveness. Mata forgave him and thendisappeared. 55 We may see behind this story not merely the Vedic horse sacrifice but the SouthIndian story of Ciruttontar and the curried child and the well-known Puranic myth of KingHarishchandra, 56 whose son died and was eventually restored to him. What has been added is thehorse.A story about a low-caste travesty of a horse sacrifice was recorded in North India duringthe nineteenth century:THE HORSE OF LAL BEG, THE SWEEPERThere is a horse miracle story told in connectionwith Lal Beg, the patron saint of the sweepers, a Pariah caste. The king of Delhi lost a valuablehorse, and the sweepers were ordered to bury it, but as the animal was very fat, they proceeded tocut it up for themselves, giving one leg to the king’s priest. The king, suspecting what hadhappened, ordered the sweepers to produce the horse. They were in dismay at the order, but theylaid 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 confessedhow they had disposed of the fourth leg. The unlucky priest was executed, and the horse soonafter died also. 57 This is a horse sacrifice in the shadow world of the Pariahs, where Vedictraditions turn inside out. True, the horse comes back to life (like the horses in the tales ofDhyanu and Harichand), but not for long, nor does the priest fare well. The point comes throughloud and clear: A horse is not a Pariah animal.EQUINE EPICSThe long struggle and eventual fall of the Rajput kingdoms under the onslaught of theMughal armies gave rise to a genre of regional, vernacular epics that evolved out of oralnarratives in this period, taking up themes from the Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata andRamayana, but transforming them by infusing them with new egalitarian or pluralist themes,such as the figure of the hero’s low-caste or Muslim sidekick. The regional epics were nurturedin a culture that combined Afghan and Rajput traditions 58 and much more. They embellish thetrope of the end of an era, from the Mahabharata, with sad stories of deaths of the last Hindukings. The bittersweet Pyrrhic victory of the Mahabharata heroes here becomes transformed intoa corpus of tragic tales of the heroic cultural and martial resistance of the protagonists and their

cultural triumph, despite their inevitable martial defeat. As Alf Hiltebeitel puts it, “AMahabharata heroic age is thus mapped onto a microheroic age.” 59 The Sanskrit epic supplies apool of symbols, 60 a sea of tropes, characters, and situations that form a kind of “undergroundpan-Indian folk Mahabharata,” feeding into a system of texts animated by a combination ofHinduism and Islam. 61 Horses loom large in all of them.The vernacular equine epics first moved from northwestern and central regions tosouthern ones and then carried southern religious, martial, and literary tropes back north, in apattern we recognize from theological and philosophical movements. The irony is that Islamicculture contributed greatly to these grand heroic poems that people composed in response towhat they perceived as the fall of a great Hindu civilization at the hands of Muslims. Two amongthe many heroes of these epics are Gugga and Tej Singh (in Hindi; also called Tecinku in Tamilcountry and Desingu in Telugu-speaking Andhra).Gugga (also spelled Guga), a folk god, is said to have been a historical figure who lived,by various accounts, during the reign of Prithvi Raj Chauhan (the last Hindu king of Delhi, c.1168-1192) 62 or in the time of the last great Mughal, Aurangzeb (1658-1707)—that is, at eitherend of the Muslim reign. Gugga is a combination of a Muslim fakir (called Gugga Pir or ZaharPir) and a Chauhan Rajput 63 (that is, a Rajput warrior hero of the Chauhan clan in Rajasthan).According to one version of the story, Gugga, with his famous flying black mare, entered battleand beheaded his two brothers; when his mother disowned him, he converted to Islam and wentto Mecca. When Gugga died, the earth opened and received him, still mounted on his mare. 64Another story tells of Gugga’s birth: A great yogi gave some guggal (a resinous sap usedmedicinally) to a Brahmin woman, a woman of a sweeper (Pariah) caste, and a mare, all ofwhom were impregnated. 65 The horse, the Kshatriya animal par excellence, is here subversivelypaired with both Brahmins and Pariahs.Raja Tej Singh was a historical figure, the son of the commander of the fort of Senjiunder Aurangzeb. When, in 1714, Tej refused to obey a summons from the nawab of Arcot, thedeputy of the Mughal ruler (who was then Farrukhsiyar), the nawab waged war against him, inthe course of which Tej rode his horse at the head of the nawab’s elephant; the horse reared anddrummed his hooves on the forehead of the elephant, blunting the Mughal advance. A soldiersliced the hocks of Tej’s horse, unseating Tej, 66 who died in the battle, as did his best friend, theMuslim Mahabat Khan. His queen, a beautiful woman aged sixteen or seventeen, “havingembraced her husband, ordered with an incredible serenity that the pyre be lit, which was at oncedone, and she too was burned alive with him.” 67 In Tamil and Telugu legend too, Tecinku’s bestfriend was a Muslim, while Tecinku was a devout Vaishnava. 68 Yet despite the friendshipbetween the Muslim and Vaishnava hero, this is not a simple story of communal harmony.Tecinku’s Muslim companion is a very Vaishnava sort of Muslim, who prays to both Rama andAllah on several occasions but goes to Vishnu’s heaven in the end; Vaishnavism encompassesIslam. 69 Many of these stories are still told, indeed performed, in Rajasthan today, where thegods’ priests and the storytellers (bhopas) are drawn from among villagers of the lowest castes. 70Recently the patron of these performances explained why they were beginning to die out: “Whenthe stories used to be told, everyone had a horse and some cattle. . . . Now, when a bhopa tellsstories about the beauty of a horse, it doesn’t make the same connection with the audience.” Yetthe epics are surviving in places where “the pastoral context of the story”—of cows and horsesand heroic cattle herders—is still intact. 71MUSLIM MARES IN HINDU EPICS

One strong hint that much of medieval Hindu horse lore comes from Muslims is thegender of the horses. Arab horsemen generally rode mares and told stories about mares, whilethe Hindus before the Mughal period generally preferred stallions. Vedic symbolism hadpredisposed Indian horsemen to admire stallions, and Hindu mythology is all about stallions,epitomized by the male horse killed in the horse sacrifice, with all its positive symbolism keptentire (virility, fertility, aggressive volatility). Stallions dominate the depicted Hindu battlescenes, hunting expeditions, and court ceremonies. And there are still tales of Rajput stallions,such as Chetak, a gray stallion that sacrificed his life for Maharana Pratap, the last Rajput tosuccumb to the Mughals, in the 1576 battle of Haldighati. jt The females of the species, on theother hand, mares, are regarded as wild animals never tamed, symbolic of wild women whodeceive and leave their husbands, a pattern exacerbated by the image of the submarine mare,symbolic of dangerous lust and anger that will inevitably erupt to destroy the world at doomsday.A dramatic change takes place in the Hindu equine epics, where many of the horses aregood mares, such as Gugga’s mare and the celestial mare that the Telugu hero Peddanna inheritsfrom his foster mother. Dev Narayan, hero of yet another epic, rides a black mare named Tejan. 72In the epic of Pabuji in Rajasthan, Pabuji has a splendid black mare named Kesar Kalimi (“blacksaffron”), who dies with him. 73 In some versions, the mare is an incarnation of Pabuji’s mother,Kesar Pari (“the saffron nymph”), an Apsaras, who abandons him shortly after his birth butreturns to him in the form of a mare when he is twelve. Although Tecinku rides a stallion, Tej incontemporary Hindi folklore rides a mare named Magic Mare (Lila Gori); 74 the force of the mareparadigm in the Hindi version seems to have overridden the earlier and more historical Teluguversion, about a stallion.The many benevolent mares in the oral epics therefore stand in opposition to the enduringVedic and Puranic stallion tradition, arguing, subversively, for a positive valence for the demonicmare of the Sanskrit epics and Puranas. The authors of the regional equine epics were eitherignorant of the Puranic bias against mares (which is unlikely) or chose to ignore it in favor of animported Arabic pro-mare tradition, a narrative pattern of considerable detail repeated in manydifferent stories.WOMENMUGHAL WIVES (AND SAINTS)Like mares, women, or at least some women, did rather well under the Mughals. Fromfemale Sufi saints 75 and the women of the royal harem down to the wives of the lowestadministrators, as we saw in the case of the poached peacocks, women exercised great powersbehind the throne. 76 Despite being generally confined in harems guarded by eunuchs, a fewprincesses had their own libraries, and the women of the harem learned Persian poetry, wereoften able to sign away land grants (the uzuk, the round seal, was kept in the harem), and couldhave abortions. 77 Though hardly typical (education for girls was rare, and they married too earlyto have much time for it in any case 78 ), these women were at least possible, and they expandedthe boundaries of the possible for their sisters in their day.Babur’s maternal grandmother managed everything for her young grandson, and hismother accompanied him on many of his campaigns. Hindal’s mother, Dildar Begum, restrainedhim from at least one attack on his brother Humayun, when he was nineteen, by putting onmourning and telling him she was mourning for him, bound as he was on the path of his owndestruction. (He listened then but tried it again later, and Humayun killed him. ju ) Akbar’s

mother, Hamideh Banu, was in charge of the empire while Akbar went off on militarycampaigns, and Akbar gave each of his concubines her own house and her own day of the weekreserved for him to visit her; he also constructed an entire, strictly regulated city district for theprostitutes, called City of Satan (Shaytanpura). The cash allowances that Akbar’s wives receivedwere called pan (betel leaf) money (barg baha), a rough equivalent of what Euro-Americanwomen used to call pin money. Akbar also had female bodyguards, with archers in the frontlines. 79 He took an interest in the education of women and established a school for girls inFatehpur Sikri.One woman who opposed Akbar was Chand Bibi (“Lady Chand”), who was regent ofBijapur (1580-1584) and regent of Ahmednagar (1595-1599). A fine horsewoman, who knewmany languages (including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Marathi, and Kannada), she took part in thedefense of the fortress of Ahmednagar when forces under orders from Akbar led an attack andsiege against it in 1595. But when she began to negotiate a treaty with the Mughals, rumorscirculated that she was in league with them, and her own officers murdered her. 80One of the few prudent things Jahangir ever did was to marry a very capable woman, NurJahan, the thirty-four-year-old widow of one of his Afghan amirs; she was also the daughter ofhis chief minister (whose large estate she inherited) and sister of his leading general. A first-classrider, polo player, and hunter, she was a “cunning and energetic woman,” who exploited theMughals’ weakness for drugs and alcohol. She became the de facto regent on those manyoccasions when Jahangir was too smashed to function. As Jahangir himself put it, mincing nowords, “I have handed the business of government over to Nur Jahan; I require nothing beyond aser of wine and half a ser of meat.” Coins were struck in her name, and she could sign mandatesgranting rights. She built many gardens and a gorgeous mausoleum at Agra. She cleverlymanaged to have her niece (her brother’s daughter) Mumtaz Mahal marry Shah Jahan and herown daughter by her first marriage marry one of Shah Jahan’s brothers. Other women ofJahangir’s harem encouraged the design and building of mosques when he himself did not. 81Mumtaz Mahal (“the palace favorite”) is surely the most famous of the Mughal women,the one for whom Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal. She was the mother of Dara Shikoh and hisolder sister, Jahanara. Jahanara was initiated into a Sufi order and wrote about it and about herpilgrimage to the shrine of the Indian Sufi Mu’in ud-Din Chisti in Ajmer; she also wrote abiography of him. She was immensely wealthy, both from half of her mother’s fortune and fromtrading with the Dutch. Jahanara drank wine and inspired many rumors; she was said to havehidden young men in her house, sometimes disguising them in women’s clothing and riding withthem on an elephant. 82HINDU SAINTS AND ANTIWIVES (AND WIVES)There was, as we have seen, a great deal of intermarriage between Rajputs and Mughals:Mughal men married Rajput women, and to a lesser extent, Rajput men married Mughal women.Intermarriages of both sorts were also common among the nonroyal classes. Mirza Aziz Koka(governor of Malwa, Akbar’s foster brother) wrote a poem comparing the members of themultiethnic harem: “Every man should have four wives: a Persian, with whom he can converse; awoman from Khurusan for the housework; a Hindu woman to raise the children, and one fromTransoxiana, whom he can beat as a warning to the others.” 83 And Urdu poets composedromantic Hindustani poetry on an ever-popular theme, “Muslim boy meets Hindu girl, with fatalconsequences.” 84Many heroines among the Rajput princesses fought against the Mughals in battle, rather

than marry them. Tulsibai, a Maharashtrian woman, led a great army into battle, and RaniDurgawati of Gondwana was famous for her courage. The widow of the Raja of Srinagar ruledwith an iron hand during the reign of Shah Jahan; she often ordered the noses to be cut offconvicted criminals, 85 a punishment traditionally meted out to unchaste women.There were also brave women in religious literature of this period, the most famous ofwhom was Mirabai (c. 1450-1525). According to the earliest version of her life story, she wasforced to marry a king’s son but preferred the company of wandering mendicants and devoteesof Krishna; the king (either her husband or her father-in-law, according to various stories) tried,in vain, to kill her; she left her marriage to join the devotees of Krishna. In later tellings, however(including the Amar Chitra Katha comic book, India’s version of Classic Comics), it is herhusband’s brother who tries to kill her; her husband conveniently dies soon after the marriage,and Mirabai is depicted as “an ideal Hindu wife.” Although her poems are the most quoted andher life story the best known of all the North Indian saints, few of her poems were anthologizedin her time. Perhaps this is because her poems mock both marriage and asceticism, 86 leaving herfew allies.Mirabai composed a poem based on a story that Valmiki, Tulsi, and Kabir told about atribal woman (Shabari) who offered Rama fruit. Mirabai adds a woman’s touch. The tribalwoman (here a Bhil) first tastes the fruit herself:The Bhil woman tasted them, plum after plum,and finally found one she could offer him.What kind of genteel breeding was this?And hers was no ravishing beauty.Her family was poor, her caste quite low,her clothes a matter of rags.Yet Ram took that fruit—that touched, spoiled fruit—For he knew that it stood for her love. 87 Mirabai asks, about the Bhil woman, “What sort ofa Veda could she have learned?”Another poem by Mirabai is about Krishna, whom she calls Mohan (“the deluder”):My eyes are greedy. They’re beyond turning back.They stare straight ahead, friend, straight ahead,coveting and coveting still more.So here I am, standing at my doorto get a good look at Mohan when he comes.Abandoning my beautiful veil and the modestythat guards my family’s honor; showing my face.Mother-in-law, sister-in-law: day and night they monitor,lecturing me about it all and lecturing once again.Yet my quick giddy eyes will brook no hindrance.They’re sold into someone else’s hands.Some will say I’m good, some will say I’m bad—whatever their opinion, I exalt it as a gift,But Mira is the lover of her Lord, the Mountain-Lifter.Without him, I simply cannot live.” 88 The mother-in-law, a figure who also plagued anotherwoman devotee, Mahadevyyakka, is still around, though no longer analogized to illusion (maya);now it is the god himself who is the deluder, capturing Mirabai’s eyes in the binding gaze of love(darshan).

There were also a number of women saints in the Maharashtrian tradition, includingMuktabai and Janabai, whose verses to the god Vithoba sometimes address him as a woman,Vithabai, and refer to him as a mother, though he is generally male. Yet despite this femalepresence, other poems about Vithoba project negative images of women, as temptresses whodistract men from their path of detachment. 89SUTTEE UNDER THE MUGHALSThe fear that widows too might become temptresses was one of the factors that promotedsuttee, the Hindu custom of burning the widow with her husband’s body.Akbar opposed suttee but did not abolish it or use the power of the state to suppress it. 90In 1583, Abu’l Fazl reports, Akbar decreed: “If a Hindu woman wished to be burned with herhusband, they should not prevent her, but she should not be forced,” 91 and women who hadchildren were not allowed to burn themselves. Elsewhere Abu’l Fazl quotes Akbar as saying, “Itis an ancient custom in Hindustan for a woman to burn herself, however unwilling she may be,on her husband’s death and to give her priceless life with a cheerful countenance, conceiving itto be a means of her husband’s salvation. It is a strange commentary on the magnanimity of menthat they seek their own salvation by means of the self-sacrifice of their wives.” 92 Jahangirdemanded that any women who intended to commit suttee must come to see him personally,whereupon he promised them gifts and land in order to dissuade them. 93 He also complainedbitterly that even Hindu converts to Islam, still marked by “the age of ignorance,” persisted inburying jv women beside their dead husbands. 94 Under Aurangzeb, a Muslim man dissuaded aHindu woman from burning herself with her husband’s corpse and suggested that she convert toIslam, “which had no provision for this horrendous practice.” She did so. But no other manwould accept her, as her body was covered with the lesions of leprosy. 95Yet the Mughals’ hostility to suttee, which some of them regarded as a byproduct ofHindu idolatry, was undercut by their deep respect for the values that they thought itrepresented 96 —courage, loyalty, even love—and Akbar too admired those qualities in thewomen who committed suttee. 97 A Sufi in the time of Akbar regarded suttee as a example of“burning human love” and used it (as Kabir had done) as a symbol of the affection of the soultoward god. 98 An epidemic of suttees took place in Vijayanagar in the late sixteenth century,when the Deccan sultans destroyed it, and another occurred when the Rajputs fell under thecontrol of the Mughals. 99 When Man Singh died in 1614, six women committed suttee. 100Clearly whatever Muslim opposition there had been had not made a serious dent in the Hinducommitment to it.KSHETRAYYA’S COURTESANS IN ANDHRAWomen’s voices, produced by men, played a central role in another lineage of devotionalpoets, who wrote in Telugu from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century in southern Andhra andthe Tamil region. The most important of these poets was Kshetrayya, who may have lived in themid-seventeenth century, under the Nayakas, and who worshiped a form of Krishna that hecalled Muvva Gopala. 101 His poems imagine a courtesan speaking to her customer, who is notonly her lover but also her god and her king. The poems thus function on three levels, uniting thethemes of ancient South Indian secular love poetry with bhakti poetry that was alreadysimultaneously theological and royal; sex was a metaphor for religion and politics (kama fordharma and artha), and religion a metaphor for sex and politics (dharma for kama and artha).In early bhakti, the god was treated as a king, but Kshetrayya wrote at a time when the

king had become a god, when the distinction between the king in his palace and the god in histemple had blurred to the point of disappearance. 102 Money was the main characteristic that theyshared; as Ramanujan, Narayana Rao, and Shulman put it, “If a king is a god and if anyone whohas money is a king, anyone who has money is also god.” 103 God is a customer of the worshiper,just as the worshiper may be the customer of a courtesan.Kshetrayya’s songs survived among courtesans and were performed by male Brahmindancers who played female roles. We can hear the triple registers in the poems, some of whichtreat of such down-to-earth matters as a woman’s concern to find a drug or a magic potion (bothof which were traditionally made out of roots, in India) to abort the child that she conceived fromher lover—the king, the god, and her customer:A MARRIED WOMAN TO HER LOVERGo find a root or something.I have no girlfriends here I can trust.When I swore at you, you didn’t listen.You said all my curses were blessings.You grabbed me, you bastard,and had me by force.I’ve now missed my period,and my husband is out of town.Go find a root or something.I have set myself up for blame.What’s the use of blaming you?I’ve even lost my taste for food.What can I do now?Go to the midwives and get me a drugbefore the women begin to talk.Go find a root or something.As if he fell from the ceilingmy husband is suddenly home.He made love to me last night.Now I fear no scandal.All my wishes, Muvva Gopala,have reached their end,so, in your image,I’ll bear you a son.Go find a root or something. 104 Abortion is, together with the killing of a Brahmin, thedefining mortal sin in the dharma texts. Here, however, abortion is called for because the god hasraped the worshiper, with overtones of the king’s power to possess sexually any woman in hisrealm. The mythological possibilities encapsulated in the last two lines—“so, in your image,/I’llbear you a son”—are staggering; the whole mythology of gods fathering human sons (think ofthe divine lineages of the Mahabharata heroes!) is cast in a different light, for in the end thewoman intends to bear the child, not to have an abortion after all. Sex, religion, and politicsmirror one another through a man’s imagination of a woman’s imagination of god as customerand the poet’s vision of the love of god not as a lofty, abstract sentiment but as the most intimate,even sordid, of human concerns.CHAPTER 21

CASTE, CLASS, AND CONVERSION UNDER THE BRITISH RAJ1600 to 1900 CECHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES ARE CE)1600 (December 31) Queen Elizabeth I charters theBritish East India Company1750-1755 The Bengal Famine causes ten million deaths1756 TheBlack Hole of Calcutta causes dozens of deaths1757 The British East India Company defeats theMuslim rulers in Bengal1757 First wave of British Raj begins1765 Robert Clive becomeschancellor of Bengal1782-1853 Sir Charles James Napier lives1813 Second wave of British Rajbegins1857-1858 The Rebellion, formerly known as the Mutiny, takes place; thirdwave of theBritish Raj begins1858 The British viceroy officially replaces Mughal rule (and the East IndiaCompany)1865-1936 Rudyard Kipling livesThis matter of creeds is like horseflesh. . . . theFaiths are like thehorses. Each has merit in its own country. Mahbub Ali, in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, 1901 1The tumult and the shouting dies—The captains and the kings depart—Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,An humble and a contrite heart.Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,Lest we forget, lest we forget!Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional,” 1897This chapter will begin with a very fast gallop over the perilous steeplechase race knownas the British Raj (the two centuries during which India was part of the British Empire),highlighting, like all reportage of equine events, the disastrous falls along the way, particularlythose with consequences for religion. There was a chronological divide, between what we mightcall three waves of the Raj, in imitation of the feminist and cinematic nomenclature. The firstwave took place in the eighteenth century, with the first consolidations of the previouslyscattered European presence in India, and, in scholarship, the discovery of the Indo-Europeanlanguage system; it began with the Black Hole and the subsequent government takeover in 1756.The second wave began in 1813, with the official entrance of Christian missionaries. And thethird wave began in 1857-1858, with the aftermath of the event known to the British as theSepoy, Bengal, or Indian Mutiny; to Indians as the National Uprising or First War ofIndependence; and to most others as the Insurrection or Great Rebellion, jw depending on whereyou stand. Like the three alliances of Hinduism, the three waves do not replace one another butbuild up like a palimpsest: The new ones develop, but the old ones remain, so that RudyardKipling, for instance, though he lived during the third wave, is really a first wave Anglo-Indian,with a difference.I will conclude with case studies of two riders in that race, Sir Charles James Napier andKipling. Kipling’s ideas about horses and religion (as in the first passage cited above) aresurprisingly pluralistic (as is his attitude to power in the second passage cited above). Then wewill, as always, consider the horses. As for Hinduism, I am not even going to try to cover the

many texts that were produced, and the many practices that evolved, during this period but willfocus on ways in which the British affected Hinduism, for British voices too became part ofHinduism, along with Hindu voices raised in reaction and protest to those British voices. I willleave to the next chapter a discussion of religious reforms among Hindus during this period.EARLY HISTORY OF THE BRITISH IN INDIAIn the eighteenth century all sorts of Europeans, mainly the Dutch, the Portuguese, theFrench, and the British, were milling about in India. “The French and Indian Wars” can be readas a kind of historical pun; such wars took place on two continents (North America [1754-1763]and Asia [from 1751 until well into the nineteenth century]) and involved two different sorts of“Indians” but the same sort of British and French. During this period in India, while theEuropeans fought one another and the British intrigued among themselves for personaladvantage, Mughals killed Mughals, Rajputs killed Rajputs, Mughals killed Rajputs, Rajputskilled Mughals, British killed Mughals and Rajputs, Mughals and Rajputs killed British, andstarvation and taxation kept killing the farmers and laborers of India as usual.At first a commercial rather than political or martial or missionary presence, the EastIndia Company never lost that original priority; it was always there for the cash, not for theglory. Its main trade was in cotton textiles, but it also bought silks, molasses, and saltpeter fromBengal, indigo from Gujarat, and much else. 2 In addition to the private loot systematicallygrabbed by company officials, there were a number of grants, treaties, agreements, andunderstandings, which became “the pretext for the assumption of sovereign rights over trade,revenue, law, and land on the part of a monopoly joint stock company that was at the same timesystematically violating the terms of its own relationship to the Crown and Parliament ofEngland.” 3 Those treaties and agreements, together with the company’s military and financialpresence, allowed it to take part in the government and to make laws governing the people ofIndia, even though it was a private trading company. When the East India Company declaredbankruptcy (though all the members of the company were ostentatiously rich), the Britishgovernment took over to protect its investment.BRITISH-MUGHAL ALLIANCES: NAWABS AND NABOBSThe Urdu/Hindi word “nawab” designated both native deputy viceroys under theMughals and independent rulers of Bengal, Oudh, and Arcot. The English called them nabobs(also spelled nawbob, nobob, nahab, and nobab). But then, confusingly, the English spelling(nabob) came to denote Englishmen who made fortunes working for the British East IndiaCompany and returned home to purchase seats in Parliament and retire to elegant countryhomes—or, finally, anyone of great wealth and/or power and/or prominence, just as the Englishword “mogul” (from “Mughal”) did. The whole lot of them, British and Mughal, were robberbarons, all cut from the same (cotton) cloth. Debauched nawabs surrounded themselves withswarms of “eunuchs, courtesans, concubines and catamites,” while the nabobs were equallydissolute and in league with the nawabs. 4 Some Hindus thought that the British and the Mughals,nawabs and nabobs, balanced (if they did not cancel out) each other and were equally alien to therest of the people of India.The company had native troops to defend it, called sepoys (from sipahis, a Turkish wordfor “soldiers.” The rank-and-file sepoys, many of whom were left over from the Mughal armies,were soldiers for hire and had been, in their day, defenders of kings, hardened bandits, groomsfor horses and camels, and skilled spies. Often sepoys of the Indian nawabs and maharajas

fought against sepoys of the British nabobs; the old sepoy in Kipling’s novel Kim, written in1901, was proud to fight for the British and against his own people, whom he regarded astraitors. In battle, sepoys were known to switch sides depending on who they thought waswinning the battle, to make sure that they got a share of the spoils of war. Under thesecircumstances, allegiance was a very slippery thing indeed. The British rank-and-file soldiersusually came from the British or Irish working class and were predominantly unskilled laborers.Most of them were small by today’s standards (between five feet two inches and five feet fiveinches tall), dwarfed by the six-foot-tall sepoy grenadiers. Yet until 1857- 1858, though the ratioin the British army was nine Indian soldiers to one British soldier, the British kept the whip hand;they had the guns, as well as an equally powerful weapon, a highly efficient public relationsmachine that befogged both their own troops and the sepoys. Until 1857.THE FIRST WAVE: CONSERVATIVES AND ORIENTALISTS IN THEBRITISH CASTE SYSTEMSocial theories of both race and class propped up the British. Often class trumped race.At a party in 1881 the Prince of Wales insisted that King Kalakaua of Hawaii should takeprecedence over the crown prince of Germany, his brother-in-law, and when his brother-in-lawobjected, the prince of Wales offered “the following pithy and trenchant justification: ‘Either thebrute is a king, or he’s a common or garden nigger; and if the latter, what’s he doing here?’ ” 5Whatever their social origins in Britain, the British generally joined the upper classes when theyentered India. They saw the native princes, not the Brahmins, at the top of the multistory Hinduhierarchy and generally treated them as social equals. 6 Kipling’s “The Man Who Would BeKing” laid bare to the bone all the aristocratic pretensions of the British ruling elite in hisunblinking portrait of two lawless scoundrels who came to India precisely in order to throw offthe class-bound shackles of their old identity and to get rich, indeed to become kings and even,for a while, gods (to the point of one of them being crucified). The British adventurers in Indiasnubbed everyone but the rajas, for they felt themselves to be rajas, and their political domainbecame known as the Raj; they called their public court and assembly, the setting for elaboratepomp and circumstance, a durbar, the word that the rajas had used for their own audiences, alsoknown as darshan (the word for a glimpse of a god or a king). Yet it was all pomp andcircumstance. Under colonial rule, kingship was moored no longer in power but in a royal ritualdevoid of power, a “hollow crown,” 7 and privilege was preserved primarily in pageantry. 8The Hindu caste system—more precisely the class system within which the caste systemwas imperfectly assimilated, awkwardly interleaved—enabled the British to fit into Hinduism asone more Other, another Other. The sahibs (as the British were called and addressed: “sir”)belonged to the castes of horsemen who came to India throughout Indian history, beginning withthe authors of the Rig Veda and continuing through the Kushanas and Scythians and theMughals/Mongols. Along the lines of the process of assimilation within the caste system, calledSanskritization, this was an instance of Kshatriyazation, assimilation into the class of Kshatriyas,kings and warriors, a term originally applied to certain non-Hindu tribes that came to be regardedas Kshatriyas but later also to the British.Thus assimilated to the class of some Hindus (the rajas), the British tended to look upontheir own people as members of a class so exalted above the Indian rank and file that friendlyassociation with them was taboo. 9 They supported caste in many ways, both because theyunconsciously tended to adopt the ideas of social stratification of the people they were ruling andbecause the Indian caste system echoed their own subtle and deeply entrenched social

hierarchy. 10 The British therefore raised the caste consciousness of the Brahmin sepoys of theBengal army, encouraging them to regard themselves as an elite and to become more particularabout the preparation and eating of their food. Thus “notions of caste, which in India hadtraditionally been relatively fluid, underwent a process of ‘Sanskritization,’ as the sepoys cameto understand such issues being central to their notions of self respect.” 11Despite their assimilation to a Hindu class, the British tended to prefer the company ofMuslims to Hindus for a number of reasons: Muslims were, like them, the rulers of India; theywere better horsemen than the Hindus; Islam was a monotheism that revered the Hebrew Bibleand the Christian New Testament; and it was quite easy to convert to Islam, much easier than toconvert to Hinduism. The native elites (nawabs) collaborated with the British residents (nabobs)so that the latter became part of the Mughal entrepreneurial class; in 1765, one of the lastMughals formally inducted Robert Clive, governor of Bengal from 1755 to 1760, into theMughal hierarchy as diwan, or chancellor, for Bengal. 12In the early years of the Raj, British employees of the John Company (as the East IndiaCompany was also called) went native in more intimate ways, hanging out in India, as thehippies were to do centuries later. This was the Lawrence of Arabia crowd, the White Mughals(as William Dalrymple calls them) who admired Indian culture in general and Muslim culture inparticular. They were equal opportunity thieves, robbers but not racist robbers. Often theymarried native women—both Muslim and Hindu, both noble and working class—and treatedthem well, as legitimate wives, regarding their sons as their legitimate heirs and leaving theirfortunes to the women and their children. The practice of keeping an Indian mistress wascommon; one in three wills from Bengal in 1780 to 1785 contains a bequest to Indian wives orcompanions or their natural children. And surely many more did this off the record. The youngcompany officials had an after-dinner toast that took the traditional popular song “Alas andAlack-the-Day” and turned it into “A Lass and a Lakh [a hundred thousand rupees] a Day,”which expressed what had brought most of them to India in the first place. Similarly, the practiceof keeping an Indian mistress became so common that Urdu poets in Lucknow changed the oldHindustani romantic formula—“Muslim boy meets Hindu girl with fatal consequences”—to“English boy meets Hindu girl with fatal consequences.” 13Native women met the British as equals on the royal level. One Maharashtrian leader,Malhar Rao Holkar, whose son and grandson had died, relied on his daughter-in-law,Ahalyabhai, during his lifetime, and after his death in 1766 she took over and ruled Malwa forthirty years of peace and prosperity. She was said to be “an avatar or Incarnation of theDivinity,” according to oral traditions collected by the British. She built forts and roads that keptthe land secure, and she patronized temples and other religious establishments as far away asVaranasi and Dvaraka (in Gujarat). In 1772 she wrote a letter likening the British embrace to abear hug: “Other beasts, like tigers, can be killed by might or contrivance, but to kill a bear it isvery difficult. It will die only if you kill it straight in the face. Or else . . . the bear will kill itsprey by tickling.” (Presumably, the “other beasts” were the Muslim enemies of theMaharashtrians; as in Mughal times, the Maharashtrians were major players, who controlled themost territory, revenue, and forces. 14 ) Clearly Ahalyabhai had the British number.This first wave of British colonizers didn’t need to erect elaborate barriers to separatethemselves from the people of India in order to preserve, or to construct, their identity. Theyknew who they were: Englishmen with a God-given right to rule. The scholars of this period, thefirst Orientalists, were genuinely curious about India and open to the possibility that itscivilization might have something of value to teach them; they abetted the government indeed,

ut primarily in their attempts (misguided as some of those turned out to be) to govern India byits own traditional rules. The men of the East India Company in this period often romanticizedIndia; they learned local languages and went native in various ways, adopting local dress (robesand turbans) and furnishing their houses with Indian fabrics and furniture. In matters of religiontoo, as we will see, the British were open-minded and fair at the start. This batch of British,typified by Warren Hastings (governor-general, 1773-1786), might be called conservative: Likethe Mughals, they provided stable government and law and order, did not interfere with localcustoms and religions, and supported indigenous arts, education, and festivals.But this was no multicultural Garden of Eden. Even then considerations of social classrather than egalitarianism were what made some Indian women marry the company men, inmuch the same way as the Mughals had arranged dynastic marriages. And no amount ofgoodwill could erase the fact that a relatively small group of men had invaded India and werebleeding everyone in it, through heavy financial tolls extracted by a process that was oftenforcible, violent, and destructive. Moreover, the seeds of the darker sort of Orientalism weresown even now. The early scholars of Hinduism licked their chops at images of Hindu cruelty;one of the earliest European books about India, Abraham Roger’s The Open Door, published inLeiden in 1651 and more widely disseminated in the French translation of 1670, selected for itsfew illustrations images of Hindus swinging from hooks and the Juggernaut rolling over Hindubodies. (Euro-American writers called all sorts of people Juggernauts, including the pope,Napoleon, and Mr. Hyde [the worse half of Dr. Jekyll].) Already tales of madness, out-of-controlmultiplicity, and brutal sexuality were being nurtured, now simply out of prurience buteventually to justify colonial interventions.Moreover, however fine that first fancy may or may not have been, it was quicklypolluted. A number of factors eroded the genuine goodwill of most of the British in India. Someof the changes in the British attitude to India and Indians were gradual, arising in either England(such as racism 15 ) or India (such as resentment). Partly in response to changes in the concept offamily and the availability of better living conditions in India, the men brought their women overfrom England; this not only dampened (though it did not extinguish) the fires of romancesbetween Englishmen and Indian women, but also banished the formerly live-in servants toseparate buildings, now that memsahibs (as the wives of sahibs were called) were running thehouses. The men withdrew from Indian life; “the club closed its doors to Indians; and the vicaroften came to tea.” 16 There were also more white women and children there to justify theerection of barriers against unhealthy native influences and to claim to have been massacredwhen the massacres began. Going native had lost its charm.The estrangement between rulers and ruled had begun already in the eighteenth century.Eventually, by the early twentieth century, it would have reached that point where the Britishcould speak to Indians only to order them about. In E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India(1924), the wife of the petty bureaucrat in charge of a particular British colony attempts to learnUrdu: “She had learnt the lingo, but only to speak to her servants, so she knew none of the politerforms and of the verbs only the imperative mood.” 17 This did not happen only in novels. In Indiain 1963, I heard a very similar story from Lady Penelope Chetwode, who had grown up in Indiawhen her father (Field Marshal Sir Philip Chetwode) was commander in chief there, from 1930to 1935 (just a decade after the publication of Forster’s novel), and had now returned to India tolearn Hindi, among other things. When I asked her, “But why are you only learning Hindi now?Didn’t you learn it years ago, when you lived in India?” she replied, deadpan, “Yes, of course.But we only learned the imperatives of all the verbs!”

Anti-British feeling even in the late eighteenth century was strong enough to spawn, andfuel, a number of anti-British myths. The weavers were caught between the rapacity of the Indianagents who served as middlemen and the Englishmen for whom they worked. The British treatedthe weavers in Bengal so cruelly 18 that they were widely believed, apparently on no evidence, tohave cut off the weavers’ thumbs, jx or, on the basis of one piece of dubious evidence, to have sopersecuted the winders of silk that they cut off their own thumbs in protest. 19 Weavers’ thumbswere not literally cut off, but the myth arose because “worse than that happened to them and toBengal.” 20 The myth of the weavers’ thumbs may also have grown out of the famousMahabharata story of the low-caste archer Ekalavya, forced to cut off his right thumb.Changes in British-Indian relations were precipitated, in part, by a series of violent anddramatic events, reaching a climax in the Rebellion of 1857-1858. But there had been distantearly warnings a century before that.THE BLACK HOLEOne of the great British icons of the historical mythology of the Raj is the Black Hole ofCalcutta. To begin with, the British themselves built the Black Hole, the detention cell andbarracks’ punishment cell of their fort in Calcutta (a city founded by the British, later renamedKolkata), and that prison was already known by that epithet before the incident in question. Butit entered British mythology in 1756, when the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daula, attackedCalcutta and Fort William and the British withdrew in panic to their ships, leaving Siraj incharge of the city, which included a number (a much-disputed number) of European men,women, and children who had failed to get away. Siraj put them, unharmed and apparentlyintending them no harm, into the Black Hole, from which, next morning, twenty-three (a numberthat is not much disputed) emerged alive, dehydration and suffocation having killed the rest,perhaps another fifty (this is the disputed number). Of course, many more died every day ofstarvation in India as a result of British policies (or indifference), but since they weren’t British,and slow starvation doesn’t (unfortunately) make for lurid headlines, those Indian deaths werenot a useful political myth for the British. The news of the Black Hole deaths, however, set off aseries of self-righteous British reprisals, as each side kept responding to alleged atrocities of theother, upping the ante, a pattern that was to be repeated many times in India, right through thePartition riots. The Black Hole became a rallying call used to justify a number of Britishaggressions, beginning with Clive’s recapture of Calcuttain 1757 and, by 1765, the Britishconquest of the rest of Bengal. Near the end of that conquest, in 1764, twenty-four of thecompany’s Indian sepoys had refused orders and been sadistically executed: They were strappedto cannons by their arms, their bellies against the mouths of the guns, which were then fired, “infront of their quaking colleagues.” jy Clive made about £400,000 sterling on the conquest ofBengal, and his pals made more than £1,250,000. 21 This is a particularly ugly chapter in thehistory of the Raj.Over the next century, taxes levied on the company’s “subjects” were consistentlyincreased. Like the Mughals, the British collected the tax on pilgrimages to shrines like theJagannatha temple and so did not interfere with them. But their main taxes were often paid incrops, and they destroyed the surplus that was an essential buffer when the monsoon failed. Themoney from taxes became the principal source of the Company’s income and so the mainstay ofwhat was called the Pax Britannia (British Peace). But as John Keay remarks, “In the experienceof most Indians Pax Britannia meant mainly ‘Tax Britannica.’ ” 22 The merchant in Kipling’s Kimsays, “The Government has brought on us many taxes, but it gives us one good thing—the te-rain

that joins friends and unites the anxious. A wonderful matter is the te-rain,” 23 and the Britishboasted that they had given India the great gift of “trains and drains.” This argument (laterechoed in the “Hitler built the Autobahn and Mussolini made the trains run on time” justificationfor crimes against humanity) ignored the deep distrust that many Hindus had of both trains andtelegraphs. In response, Indians would retort that the main drain was the drain of resources fromIndia to England, 24 which, exacerbated by stockpiling, corrupt distribution, and hoarding by theBritish, led to widespread famines. This was a Black Hole in the astronomical sense, a negativespace into which the riches and welfare of the Indian people vanished without a trace.Famine and plague (which raged during this period), as always, affected religion. Thewidespread economic devastation may well account for the increase, at this time, of goddessworship, which generally flourishes during epidemics. When two years of failed monsoon led tothe famine of 1750 to 1755, in which a third of the population of Bengal, some ten millionpeople, died, there was a surge in the worship of the goddess Kali in her aspect of Annapurna(“Full of Food). 25 Hard times give rise to hard deities. And it was religion that really soured theRaj.THE SECOND WAVE: EVANGELICALS AND OPPORTUNISTSAND THE MISSIONARIESAs long as it was just a matter of graft and the lust for power, the British treated thepeople they robbed as human beings. It was religion that made them treat them like devils. Atfirst the East India Company had adamantly excluded all Christian missionary activity from itsterritories, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of what was at stake in the religiousdebate jz and a consciousness of the disadvantages of unnecessarily antagonizing its Indiansubjects. In 1793, Charles Cornwallis (Governor-General from 1786 to 1793) made a pactpromising not to interfere with the religions of the people of India. The Company continued thepatronage accorded by indigenous rulers to many Hindu temples and forbade its Indian troops toembrace Christianity. But when the Company’s charter was renewed in 1813, the growingevangelical conscience in England forced it to allow Christian missions to operate in India. Theevangelical Clapham Sect in London converted a Governor-General (Sir John Shore, 1793-1798) and a leading Company director and put pressure on the government in Westminster. 26Thus the second wave began. In contrast with the conservatives and Orientalists of thefirst wave, this batch of British might be labeled evangelicals and opportunists, who regardedIndia as a land of heathens and idolaters in desperate need of being missionized. They met withsome degree of success. Tribals converted to Christianity in large numbers because theyassociated the value system of the Christian missionaries with the power of the British. 27 Somelow-caste Hindus converted to avoid the stigma of being Pariahs, though the missionaries,respecting caste, as all religions in India always did, boasted of the number of their Brahminconverts. Other low-caste Hindus converted just for the relief of the soup kitchens, which madeupper-caste Hindus call them rice Christians. Hindus of all castes converted as a result of theirinvolvement in government and administration, intermarriage, and change of heart.Both Hindus and Muslims blamed the government for allowing the missionariesfreerein. 28 The missionaries influenced the government to intervene in Hindu matters; under JamesDalhousie (Governor-General from 1847 to 1856), the government passed laws making itpossible for Hindu widows to remarry, Hindu converts to Christianity to retain inheritance rights(which, according to Hindu law, they would have lost when they ceased to be Hindus), andcastes to mingle in railroad carriages. 29 Evangelical officers favored Christian sepoys, and

meddling, arrogant missionaries taught the young Indian students in their schools to be ashamedof their parents’ religions. 30 In a move reminiscent of the ambiguous positioning of the Buddhaas an avatar of Vishnu, Jesus became one of the avatars in a Christian tract published in Calcutta(and written in Oriya) in 1837, warning the reader that the deity worshiped in the JagannathaTemple at Puri in Orissa was a degenerate form of the true Jagannatha and exhorting the pilgrimto Puri to “remain a Hindu and also believe in Christ,” who is, by implication, the trueJagannatha. 31THE THIRD WAVE: UTILITARIANS AND ANGLICISTS AND THEREBELLION / MUTINY OF 1857The tipping point came in 1857. The eighteenth century saw military incursions, floods,famines, epidemics, political disruptions, and bankrupt treasuries. Great land settlementsdisplaced many landholders, and the confiscation of buildings previously rent-free for religiousofficials raised hackles in various quarters. The British relationship to Indians changeddramatically after 1813, degenerating into “a compound of cold utilitarian logic, cloyingChristian ideology, and molten free-trade evangelism.” 32 That Christian ideology made thecountry a tinderbox of resentment, just waiting for a flame to touch it off.The flame, the proximate cause of the rebellion, came, in 1857, in the form of a bit ofawkwardness about certain cartridges. Religious awkwardness. The British issued a new rifle,the Enfield, for which the cartridges had to be bitten open (since both hands were otherwiseoccupied; think of John Wayne biting off the tops of those grenades in World War II movies) topour the powder down the rifle’s barrel. Greased cartridges had been first imported in 1853. 33The sepoys believed, possibly rightly, that these cartridges were greased with a tallow probablycontaining both pigs’ fat and cows’ fat (lard and suet, animal fats that were used for a lot ofthings in the military, and though the fat was more likely to have been mutton fat, it was stillanathema to the many vegetarian Brahmins among the sepoys). The one thing that you could sayfor this arrangement, which would have forced Muslims to eat pork and Hindus to eat beef, isthat it was equally disgusting for both groups to bite the bullet, and at least the British could notbe accused of favoritism. But the animal grease was not merely disgusting; it would have beenspiritually disastrous, bringing instant excommunication and damnation. (Later the British brieflyentertained but finally dismissed a suggestion to allow the troops to grease the cartridges withghee.) From early 1857, “newspapers had made known the general repugnance felt by theSepoys to the use of the new cartridges.” 34 As one contemporary British observer ka wrote of thecartridge scandal, “It was so terrible a thing, that, if the most malignant enemies of the BritishGovernment had sat in conclave for years, and brought an excess of devilish ingenuity to bearupon the invention of a scheme framed with the design of alarming the Sipáhi [sepoy] mind fromone end of India to the other, they could not have devised a lie better suited to the purpose.” 35The rumors fueled the suspicion that the British had done it on purpose, in order to leavethe sepoys no option, if they wanted to save their souls, but conversion to Christianity. Whensepoys refused to load the cartridges, they were publicly humiliated, imprisoned, or expelled. 36Although the British quickly withdrew the offending cartridges, the damage had been done, andthe sepoys didn’t trust any existing cartridges. 37 In the intense heat of May 9, 1857, eighty-fivesepoys in Meerut were arrested for refusing to handle the cartridges. On the next night, othersepoys banded together, massacred the English residents of the town, and marched on Delhi. 38More sepoys, and more officers, joined the fight, which quickly escalated. Muslims fought on theside of the Hindus, Sikhs hostile to Muslims with the British. Innocent civilians, women and

children, were routinely killed by both the British and the Indian troops. 39A small British community sought refuge from the rebellion in the local fort at Jhansi,which was ruled by a Maharashtrian queen named Lakshmi Bai, a beautiful young widow whowas an accomplished horsewoman. The British refugees were massacred. Lakshmi Bai insistedthat she too had been victimized by the sepoys. When a local rival to the throne invaded Jhansi,she claimed loyalty to the British, but they did nothing to help her. When the British laid siege toJhansi, in 1858, she led her troops into battle, but Jhansi fell. She slipped out in disguise, rodeaway, and (with the help of a confederate) captured Gwalior. When the British attacked Gwalior,she was shot to death. 40The Jhansi massacre is one of several events that stand out amid a long catalog of deathsand horrors and thus serve as historical pegs upon which people have hung a range of myths andlegends that express the emotional impact of the Rebellion. Another concerns Mangal Pandey, asepoy of the No. 5 Company of the Thirty-fourth Native Infantry at Barrackpore, near Calcutta,who, on March 29, 1857, more than a month before the Rebellion, publicly objected to thecartridges, on religious grounds. Others joined in, all hell broke loose, and Mangal Pandey wasexecuted by hanging on April 8. But subsequent mythologies (and a popular Bollywood film,Ketan Mehta’s Mangal Pandey, 2005, with Amir Khan as Pandey) have overlaid the eventssurrounding Mangal Pandey to such an extent that they have almost totally obscured whatevidence there is. According to one legend, when a mounted officer rode at him, Pandey fired athim and hit the horse (the first casualty in the Rebellion), unseating the officer. 41 There is alsosome debate about whether Pandey was under the influence of bhang, 42 opium, alcohol, 43 somecombination of all of them, or none. (The hardship caused by a new opium tax was said to be oneof the major factors that led to the Rebellion. 44 )Yet another incident, somewhat better authenticated but equally mythologized, concernsa massacre at Kanpur (or Cawnpore, as the British called it, near what was Harsha’s Kanauj) onJune 27, 1857. When insurgents besieged the British there, General Wheeler accepted termsunder which the British would be allowed passage by boat downriver to Allahabad. Some fourhundred of the British surrendered; as they boarded boats at Sati-Chaura Ghat, a detachment ofsepoys under the command of Nana Sahib, the Indian ruler of Kanpur, ambushed them, andmany of them were shot down or drowned. Nana Sahib rescued about two hundred women andchildren and locked them up in the Bibighar (“Ladies’ House”), which was, significantly, a smallbungalow where a British officer had once housed his Indian mistress. Many of the captives weresuffering from dysentery and cholera. 45 On July 15, troops of Nana Sahib’s adopted son attackedthe Bibighar, and when the regular soldiers refused to carry out the command to execute them all(a minor rebellion of its own), four or five butchers from the local market slaughtered all whowere still alive and threw the body parts down a well. Some historians argue that Nana Sahibintended to use the captives as hostages and did not issue the order for the extermination, whileothers believe that he panicked, fearing that the British would seize Kanpur, and gave the order.In any case, as Keay describes it, “Their slaughterhouse methods, clumsy rather than sadistic,constituted an atrocity which would haunt the British till the end of their Indian days. For sheerbarbarity this ‘massacre of the innocents’ was rivaled only by the disgusting deaths devised fordozens of equally innocent Indians by way of British reprisal.” 46 Though the cartridges were theproverbial straw, the camel (flanked by the cow and pig) was already heavily loaded witheconomic, social, and political resentments, which continued to fester.Recognizing the power of the resentments ignited by these events, the British tookcountermeasures. In 1858 Victoria proclaimed that the British crown was taking over all the

ights of the East India Company; she became queen of India. 47 She forced the missionaries tolay off, now more than ever realizing, again, what was at stake in interfering with Hinduism.Acknowledging that the sepoys in 1857-1858 had genuinely feared conversion to Christianity,Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 not only curtailed missionary activity but reduced thepublic funding of mission schools and ordered British officials to abstain from interfering withIndian beliefs and rituals “on the pain of Our highest displeasure.” 48 She also specificallydisclaimed any “desire to impose Our convictions on any of Our subjects.” (Victoria herself hasbecome the religion: She capitalizes “Our” as the missionaries capitalized “God.”)Many of the missionaries had been killed during the Rebellion, but the damage hadalready been done. While the new official attitude was superficially similar to the earlierhands-off policy toward Hinduism, the sentiments fueling it were very different; whereas themissionaries had attempted to convert the Hindus, now the British as a whole were totallydismissive of them as irredeemable heathens, with no hope of ever becoming human beings.After 1858 the government officials themselves had become more Christian in their scorn forHindus, whom they avoided as much as possible. Now that they felt that they had a divinemission to rule India and were convinced of Christianity’s moral superiority, they lost theirearlier toleration, let alone their support, of Indian religions. 49 This third batch, in contrast withthe conservatives and Orientalists, together with the evangelicals and opportunists, wereUtilitarians and Anglicists, who believed in the superiority of reason and progress and pushed forWestern education.HINDUS UNDER THE RAJWhat made the sepoys so suspicious of those greased cartridges in the first place? Let usgo back and reconsider the shifting winds of religious interactions in the century between 1756and 1857.In the first wave (roughly between 1750 and 1813), despite the steadily darkeningpolitical scene, the British had respected both Islam and Hinduism and were, in general,blessedly free of religious zeal. 50 In the late eighteenth century a Muslim visitor to Indiacommented with surprise on the respect that the British paid to both Hindus and Muslims—atleast to those of a certain respectability:They treat the white-beard elders and old-established families, both Muslim and Hindu,courteously and equably, respecting the religious customs of the country and as well the scholars,sayyids, sheikhs and dervishes they come across. . . . More remarkable still is the fact that theythemselves take part in most of the festivals and ceremonies of both the Muslims and the Hindus,mixing with the people. 51 And there were conversations. The medieval Indian tradition ofdebate in the Mughal court, patronized by rulers and commonly held in the royal darbar (Akbaris the most famous but by no means the only example), was transformed, in the colonial period,first into Muslim-Christian debates, retaining much of the medieval structure and rhetoric, 52 andthen, through the end of the nineteenth century, into debates between Hindu court pandits andtraveling controversialists. The social context of these debates was radically broadened, nowaccessible to a much wider literate audience. One missionary remarked that religious debate wasa major source of entertainment in India, “and the people will enjoy the triumph as much when aBrahmun falls as when the Christian is foiled.” 53 The crowd laughed at the Brahmins and then atthe missionaries. This was a self-serving argument, implying that since Hinduism was already aspace of debate and entertainment, the missionaries would do no harm, 54 but there was sometruth in it.

The conversations, however, often turned into conversions. Religious tensions weregreatly exacerbated during this period by what Hindus perceived as attempts to convert them toIslam or Christianity. As we have noted, traditional Hinduism was not a proselytizing religion,though particular renunciant and reform movements within it did increasingly seek converts.Therefore, when Hindus had ceased to be Hindus, often against their will and/or by accident, andwished to return to the fold, it was difficult for them to reconvert back to Hinduism. Indiansepoys lucky enough to survive the First Afghan War, in 1839 (there were enormous sepoycasualties), found when they returned to India that they were ostracized as Pariahs, for inAfghanistan some had been forced to convert to Islam, and in any case they lost caste bycrossing the Indus, transgressing the geographical bounds of India, which was against caste law.(Earlier, Hindus had had the right to refuse foreign service on the grounds that they would bepolluted if they crossed the sea. 55 ) Sometimes they could reconvert by crossing the palms ofvarious priests with silver; previously Hindus had been able to reconvert with the spoils ofconquest, but since the sepoys had lost in Afghanistan, there were no spoils. 56 There were alsoritual prescriptions, dating back to the first or second century CE, by which an excommunicatedman could be purified by performing a vow of restoration, 57 and new reconversion ceremonieswere developed out of these prescriptions as well as from prototypes originally designed forreconversion from Islam under the Mughals.But converts to Christianity, though relatively few in number, posed different theologicaland political threats. It was primarily the Protestants rather than the Catholics who messed withHinduism. Catholics, who had been in India for many centuries, recognized and appreciatedmany of their own traits in Hindus: the many gods corresponding to many saints; the pageantry,color, and occasional brutality of the imagery; the animal sacrifice that could be assimilated tothe Paschal Lamb (or, as the case may be, the Paschal goat, still sacrificed in many IndianCatholic communities at Easter). The Protestants admired little in Hinduism but its texts andphilosophy. The rest was a lot too much like Catholicism to suit their tastes.On the eve of the second wave, when the company’s charter was about to be renewed, in1813, Major General Sir Thomas Munro (who served in India from 1789 to 1827, chiefly inMadras) warned the directors of the East India Company about their attitude to the people ofIndia. He spoke like a true man of the first wave, which indeed he was: He had learned Hindi andPersian and was noted for his generous rapport with both humans and horses (an extraordinaryequestrian statue of him in Chennai depicts him mounted without saddle or stirrups, which I taketo be symbolic of his relaxed attitude to domination kb ). On this occasion he granted that otherconquerors had treated Indians with greater violence and cruelty, “but none has treated them withso much scorn as we, none has stigmatised the whole people as unworthy of trust, as incapable ofhonesty, and as fit to be employed only where we cannot do without them.” 58His words fell on deaf ears. The British applied their scorn both to the people and to theirreligion. In 1810, Robert Southey (poet laureate of England), who had never been to India,declared, “The religion of the Hindoos . . . of all false religions is the most monstrous in itsfables, and the most fatal in its effects.” 59 In 1813 (the year that the missionaries were let in),William Wilberforce, an abolitionist and member of an evangelical sect, argued in the House ofCommons that the need for such missions in India was more important than the abolition ofslavery, because “our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent [while] theirs is mean, licentiousand cruel”; because Hindu deities are “absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness andcruelty,” Hinduism is “the most enormous and tormenting superstition that ever harassed anddegraded any portion of mankind,” and Hindus therefore “the most enslaved portion of the

human race.” Hindu science and cosmography came under fire too. In 1835 Thomas BabingtonMacaulay (the son of an eminent evangelical leader) issued his notorious tirade against “medicaldoctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter ingirls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reignsthirty thousand years long, and geography made up of seas kc of treacle and seas of butter.” 60 Andthat was before the Rebellion.After that, in the third wave, things went from bad to worse. Even the Bhagavad Gita,generally so dear to the hearts of European observers of Hinduism, came under fire in theEnglish imaginary. In Forster’s A Passage to India, the bigoted policeman McBryde, discussingwhat he regards as the criminal psychology of Indian natives, remarks, “Read any of the Mutinyrecords; which, rather than the Bhagavad Gita, should be your Bible in this country. Though I’mnot sure that the one and the other are not closely connected.” 61 This reflected a widespreadnineteenth-century canard: The members of one Bengal secret society were alleged to take anoath of allegiance before an image of the goddess Kali, with the Bhagavad Gita in one hand anda revolver in the other. 62 A secret police report submitted in 1909 to the chief secretary to thegovernment of Bengal stated that students were initiated into the secret society by taking theiroath lying flat on a human skeleton with a revolver in one hand and a Gita in the other. 63 Thiswhole scene is suspiciously close to one imagined by the Bengali author Bankimcandra Chatterjiin his highly influential 1882 novel Anandamath (“The Mission House”). Though Chatterji mayhave influenced the British, it is more likely that they both were reflecting the mythology of theperiod rather than any real practice. The most infamous players in that mythology were theThugs, worshipers of the goddess Kali, to whom they were now said to offer British victims;they were probably just dacoits who happened to worship in Kali temples. 64 The Rambles andRecollections (1844) of Lieutenant Colonel Sir William Henry (“Thuggee”) Sleeman of theBengal army and the Indian Political Service is the proof text of that mythology.The British brokering of relations between Hindus and Muslims also did considerabledamage. A report by Patrick Carnegy in 1870 insisted that Hindus and Muslims used to worshiptogether in the Babri Mosque complex in the nineteenth century until the Hindu-Muslim clashesin the 1850s: “It is said that up to that time Hindus and Mohamedans alike used to worship in themosque/temple. Since the British rule a railing has been put up to prevent dispute, within which,in the mosque the Mohamedans pray, while outside the fence the Hindus have raised a platformon which they make their offerings.” 65 But the report was based on no evidence whatsoever thatthere had been such disputes or any need to separate the worshipers. 66 And even by this report,the British had put up a railing where none had been, causing the disputes that they wereallegedly preventing.A more positive, though more obviously mythical, story about a similarly dichotomizedHindu/Muslim shrine is told by Forster. The shrine was created when, according to legend, aMuslim saint was beheaded but, having left his head at the top of a hill, contrived somehow tocontinue to run (in order to accomplish his mother’s command) in the form of a headless torso, tothe bottom of the hill, where his body finally collapsed. “Consequently there are two shrines tohim to-day—that of the Head above and that of the Body below—and they are worshipped bythe few Mohammedans who live near, and by Hindus also.” 67 This image of the separation ofhead and body suggests but does not realize the recombinatory quality of Hindu mythologies ofsuch head/body separations. The two shrines remain apart, but both Muslims and Hindusworship in both.Generally relations between Hindus and Muslims took several turns for the worse under

the Raj, in some cases grotesquely twisting the genuine rapproachements that had taken placeunder the Mughals. In the nineteenth century, certain yogis claimed that Muhammad had beentrained by a student of the great Hindu yogi Gorakhnath. They were scrupulous about fasting andritual prayer when they were with Muslims, and about Hindu customs when with Hindus, eatingpork according to the custom of Hindus and Christians, or beef according to the religion ofMuslims and others. 68 They argued that the striking resemblance between the Muslim minarettower and prayer niche, on the one hand, and the Shaiva linga and yoni, on the other, explainedboth why the prayer niche and minaret were always found together and why Islam had spread sosuccessfully. In this way, they relativized the sacred sources of Islam and subordinated them toIndian figures and categories. 69 On the central Nath temple at Gorakhpur there is a small boardexplaining that Muhammad was a Nath yogi and that Mecca was a Shaiva center, known in somePuranas as Makheshvara (“Lord of the Sacrifice”). 70 The arrogant insult in this wordplay ofappropriation was the very opposite of the appreciative attitude that had inspired Hindus underthe Delhi Sultanate to coin Sanskrit versions of Arabic titles such as Mohammad (Maha-muda)and Sultan (Sura-trana).DEEP ORIENTALISM 71British attitudes to India, at first appreciative and tolerant (the first wave), then scornful(the second wave) and hostile (the third), were three facets of what we have been callingOrientalism. At the start, I defined “Orientalism” as the love-hate relationship that Europeanshad with the Orient for both the right and the wrong reasons, making it in many ways theEuropean inversion of what the Hindus called hate-love (dvesha-bhakti): loving India but with askewed judgment and self-interest that amounted to hate, that distorted the Orientalists’understanding and was often horrendously destructive to the object of their affection.The early Orientalists were reacting against an early version of what has recently beendubbed (in response to Edward Said’s term) Occidentalism, a stereotyped and dehumanized viewof the West (more precisely, Europe and America, in contrast with all Asia). 72 The two viewsshare all the stereotypes, which always misrepresent both sides: the East = religion, spirit, nature,the exotic, adventure, danger, Romanticism (including Orientalism), myth, while the West =science, materialism, the city, boredom, comfort, safety, the Enlightenment, logos. The East isfeminine, the West male; Eastern males are therefore feminine and impotent, kd but alsooversexed, because the primitive Other is always oversexed. 73 The only difference, and it iscrucial, is the value placed on these stereotypes, Romanticism favoring the Eastern values,Enlightenment the Western ones.Before Said’s book, in 1978, Indologists of my generation had admired the Britishscholars who had recorded dialects and folklore that otherwise would have been lost to posterity,established the study of Sanskrit in Europe, and made available throughout India as well asEurope many of the classical texts recorded in that language. We felt indebted to them for ourown knowledge of and love of India. But the anti-Orientalist critique changed our way ofthinking forever. It taught us that those British scholars too had been caught up in the colonialenterprise, sustained it, fueled it, facilitated it. It taught us about the collusion between academicknowledge and political power, arguing that we too are implicated in that power when we carryon the work of those disciplines. In Kipling’s novel Kim, spying often masqueraded asanthropology, another form of Orientalism; Kipling made his master spy, Colonel Creighton, anamateur ethnographer.At the heart of the anti-Oriental enterprise was the argument that scholars, then and now,

affect and often harm the people they study. In a delightful satire on Orientalism avant la lettre,J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964), a British geneticist who spent his final years in India and died inBhubaneshwar in Orissa, stipulated in his will that after his death his body was to be sent to thenearest medical college, so that “some future Indian doctors will have the unusual experience ofdissecting a European.” 74 This would be a fitting revenge for all the Indians who had beendissected by European Orientalists.TRANSLATIONS, LOST IN COLONIZATIONAt the start the British hoped to govern India by its laws and, as we saw, treated theIndian ruling class, at least, with some respect. As Protestants they preferred texts to practices,and as Orientalists they preferred the glorious past to what they regarded as the sordid present.This was the result of their confrontation of a quandary: How could Europeans continue to reverethe culture of the people who had the oldest language in the world, Sanskrit, and presumably thecivilization that went with it (closely related to the Greek civilization that the British claimed astheir own heritage), at the same time as they were justifying their rule over contemporary Indianson the ground that those Indians were benighted primitives? The answer was a doublethinkhistorical process: For many centuries, as science replaced superstition (the social variant ofDarwinian evolution) and Europe was rising up, India was sinking down, as the Brahmins andthe hot, wet climate ruined the pristine Vedas and produced the degradation of present-dayHindus (an inversion of the Darwinian hypothesis). The Orientalists needed some fancyfootwork to keep these two rivers flowing up and down at the same time (like yogissimultaneously breathing out of one nostril and in through the other), but somehow theymanaged. The argument was that the Indians were once like us (language) but are no longer likeus (intermarriage of Indo-Europeans with indigenous Indians), the resolution of antiquarianismand racism. 75The British Orientalists of the first wave reached back into the past, to Sanskrit texts, andbegan to translate them. (By the third wave, after 1858, the government severed support for thestudy of Sanskrit and Persian, disparaging the culture even of ancient India. 76 ) Europeantranslations began in the eighteenth century with a fittingly fraudulent document, the so-calledEzour Veda (presumably a corruption of Yajur Veda), a French text in the form of a dialoguebetween two Vedic sages, one monotheist and one polytheist, who find that the monotheism of“pristine Hinduism” points to Christian truth. The text was, for a while, believed to be the Frenchtranslation of a document composed in Sanskrit by one Brahmin and translated by anotherBrahmin in Benares who knew both French and Sanskrit. The Chevalier de Maudave gave acopy to Voltaire in September 1760, claiming to have received it from the hand of the Brahmintranslator; Voltaire was deeply impressed by it and cited it often. 77 In 1822, Sir AlexanderJohnston claimed to have found, at the French settlement of Pondicherry, in South India, themanuscript copy of the “Ezour Vedam” in French and Sanskrit. His colleague Francis WhyteEllis then published an article in which he argued that the work was not the French translation ofa Sanskrit original but a work entirely composed in 1621 by the Jesuit Roberto de Nobili, whowas accused of having written it in order to deceive Brahmins and convert them to Catholicism.Its authorship remains unknown, but it is now certain that it was an original French compositionthat claimed to be a copy of a lost Sanskrit text.The first books genuinely translated from Sanskrit to English were Charles Wilkins’s1785 translation of the Bhagavad Gita, Sir William Jones’s translation of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala(in 1789), and then, in 1794, Jones’s Laws of Manu. The statue of Jones in St. Paul’s Church in

London holds a volume of Manu in his hand, thus commemorating Manu in a Christian church,an honor accorded him by no Hindu temple, to my knowledge. As chief justice of the High Courtof Calcutta, Jones had searched for something that the Hindu witnesses could be sworn in on thatwould put the fear of god(s) in them, since perjuries were rife. He tried the Ganges River, butwhen that failed to produce the desired effect, he sought expert counsel from the local learnedmen, who gave him Manu and inspired him to learn Sanskrit. 78 Jones’s Manu translation becamethe basis of much of British law in India (including the disastrous treatment of suttee); the textbecame instrumental in the construction of a complex system of jurisprudence based on theBritish belief in a unified Hinduism, the privileging of the “classical” language, Sanskrit, overlocal languages, and the Protestant bias in favor of scripture. In the courts of the Raj (and laterindependent India), “general law” (based on British law) was supplemented by a “personal law”determined by one’s religious affiliation (such as Hindu law). “Hindu law,” or rather the Britishinterpretation of Jones’s translation of Manu, was applied to nearly 80 percent of the populationof colonial India in matters of marriage and divorce, legitimacy, guardianship, adoption,inheritance, and religious endowments.Yet Manu had never been used in precisely this way before; the British systemcompletely bypassed the village governing units (called panchayats) that actually adjudicated invernacular languages on the basis of case law built up over many centuries. This is not to say thatthe British invented Manu; it had been (primarily through its many commentaries) an importanttext both in local law and in the Brahmin imaginary, which still exerted a heavy influence onmany Hindus. What the British did was to replace the multiplicity of legal voices and thecenturies of case law with a single voice, that of Jones’s Manu. It was as if U.S. courts hadsuddenly abandoned case law to rule only by the Constitution.The translations of the Bhagavad Gita had equally long-lasting repercussions. Wilkins’sGita had a preface by Warren Hastings, 79 a brute of the first order, who was impeached (thoughacquitted) on his return to England, in 1793. Gandhi first read the Gita, in 1888-1889, in a latertranslation by Sir Edwin Arnold; the American transcendentalists too, led by Emerson andThoreau, read and loved the Gita. Yet just as Manu was not the most important Hindu legal text,so too texts other than the Gita—both Sanskrit texts, like the Upanishads and the Puranas, andvernacular texts, such as the Tulsidas and Kampan Ramayanas, and, most of all, oraltraditions—were what most Hindus actually used in their worship. The highly Anglicized Indianelite followed the British lead and gave the Gita a primacy it had not previously enjoyed, thoughlike Manu, it had always been an important text. The fraction of Hinduism that appealed toProtestant evangelical tastes at all was firmly grounded in the renunciant path of Release andphilosophical monism. The evangelists in India assumed that God had prepared for their arrivalby inspiring the Hindus with a rough form of monotheism, the monism of the Upanishads; kepukka monotheism, in their view, was available to Brahmins but not to the lower castes, whowere fit only for polytheism. 80Many highly placed Hindus so admired their colonizers kf that in a kind of colonial andreligious Stockholm syndrome, they swallowed the Protestant line themselves and not onlygained a new appreciation of those aspects of Hinduism that the British approved of (the Gita,the Upanishads, monism) but became ashamed of those aspects that the British scorned (much ofthe path of rebirth, polytheism, the earthy and erotic aspects) and even developed new forms ofHinduism, such as the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj, heavily influenced by BritishProtestantism. Scholars have noted a pattern in which colonized people take on the mask that thecolonizer creates in the image of the colonized, mimicking the colonizer’s perception of the

colonized. 81 This group of Indians became just what the Anglicists wanted, typified byMacaulay’s hope of developing in India “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour butEnglish in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect,” 82 or, as Sumit Sarkar has paraphrased it,“brown in colour but white in thought and taste.” 83 Such people are what present-day SouthAsians refer to as coconuts, the opposite of the U.S. term “Oreos” (and with more preciseresonances; in Hindu rituals, coconuts are often offered to gods in place of human heads).It is one of the great ironies of the history of sexuality that the Victorian British, of allpeople, should have had control of India during one of the great ages of sexual and genderreform, the nineteenth century. 84 When confronting the earthier aspects of Hinduism, such as theworship of the linga, the British were not amused. kg And some nineteenth-century Hindumovements internalized British Protestant—indeed Victorian—scorn for Hindu eroticism andpolytheism. That attitude was simultaneously scornful and prurient: “Look how dirty andnaughty these people are. Look! Look!”There was a rebound Orientalism in the Hindu reaction to the Protestants, as upper-casteHindus scurried to get the low-caste temple dancers and prostitutes (Devadasis) out of thetemples and swept the village sects and stories out of sight, in shame, in shadow. Theseright-hand Hindus hastened to put Hindu eroticism into a kind of purdah, behind a veil formed ofthe Gita and Indian philosophy and the more Protestant than thou nineteenth-century Hindureform movements. Some Hindus took pride in every aspect of Hinduism that appealed toEuropeans such as Schelling and Goethe and Hegel and to Americans such as Emerson andThoreau, holding up those parts of their tradition like cover-up Mother Hubbard gowns as if tosay, “We are not the filthy savages some of you think we are.” This sanitized brand of Hinduismis now often labeled sanatana dharma, “perpetual, eternal and universal” Hinduism, althoughthat term was previously used in a very different sense, to designate the moral code that appliedto everyone, in contrast with the particular moral code for each particular caste. Britishlegislation of all aspects of Hinduism, including sexual aspects, owed as much to Calvin as toManu. It was a deadly one-two punch. But British prudery was not “simply an exotic attitudeforced on an innately sensual subcontinent. The sexual economics of empire were no lesscomplex than any other form of colonial exchange.” 85 For some of the British played animportant role in revalidating Indian eroticism against the puritanical tradition of the Hindusthemselves, translating the Gita-Govinda and tracking down and preserving Kama-sutramanuscripts in decaying libraries (the first translation of the Kama-sutra into English appeared in1883). 86 Nor are the British alone to blame for the sanitizing of Tantrism or the quasi-Tantricaspects of Hinduism. Long before the British presence in India, from at least the time ofAbhinavagupta in the eleventh century, Brahmin, Buddhist, Jaina, and Christian critics X-ratedTantrics in India, and later some orthodox Muslims objected too. The British just made it allworse, so that thenceforth sexuality in India was subjected to the triple whammy of Hindu,Muslim, and Christian Puritanism.THE TRANSPOSED HEADS, EUROPEAN STYLEWhile the British provided the impetus for changes in Hindu law, society, and religion,Hindu art and literature made their impact on Europe. Some forty years after the “Ezour Veda”captivated Voltaire, the myth of the transposed heads of the Brahmin woman and the Pariahwoman inspired Goethe (who also went mad for Shakuntala). Working apparently from RichardIken’s translation of a Persian version of a Tamil version of the story, 87 in 1797 Goethe wrote apoem, “The Pariah,” which can be summarized as follows (from the moment when the Brahmin

woman has lost her magic chastity):GOETHE’S “THE PARIAH”She appeared before her husband, who seized his sword anddragged her to the hill of death. [He beheaded her.] His son stood before him and said, “You maybe able to kill your wife, but not my mother. A wife is able to follow her beloved spouse throughthe flames, and a faithful son can also follow his beloved mother.” His father said, “Hurry! Joinher head to her body, touch her with the sword, and she will come back to you, alive.” The sonhastened and found the bodies of two women, lying crosswise, and their heads. He seized hismother’s head and put it on the nearest headless body. He blessed it with the sword, and it arose,and his mother’s dear lips spoke words fraught with horror: “My son, you were too hasty! Thereis your mother’s body, and next to it the impious head of a fallen, condemned woman. Now I amgrafted to her body forever, and will live among the gods, wise in thought, wild in action, full ofmad, raging lust from the bosom down. As a Brahmin woman, with my head in heaven, I willlive as a Pariah on earth. And whoever, Brahmin or Pariah, is overwhelmed by sorrow, his soulwildly riven, will know me if he looks to heaven. 88 Note the reference to the possibility of suttee(which got into just about everything that any European wrote about India for several centuries,though here it is also the suttee of a son for his mother) and the judgment that the Brahminwoman is wise and loving, while the Pariah woman is wild in action, mad, and raging in lust. Yetthe poem concludes that heaven watches over both Brahmin and Pariah, especially when theirsouls are “riven” as the women in the story are riven. The word “Pariah,” originally found inancient Tamil literature, referring to a particular low caste, then entered German and English inits broader sense. In 1818 the Irish clergyman and dramatist Charles Robert Maturin called allwomen “These Pariahs of humanity,” and in 1823, Michael Beer’s play Der Pariah likened theJews to the Pariahs. Goethe’s poem became a best seller (and inspired several imitations) inGermany.The myth of the transposed heads was also picked up in France and, eventually, Englandand America, undergoing several gender transformations along the way. In 1928, MargueriteYourcenar published a story in French entitled “Kali Décapitée,” republished in 1938 in English(“Kali Beheaded”). 89 In her retelling, the goddess Kali’s amorous escapades with Pariahs leadthe gods to decapitate her; eventually they join her head to the body of a prostitute who has beenkilled for having troubled the meditations of a young Brahmin. The woman thus formed is acreature who becomes “the seducer of children, the inciter of old men, and the ruthless mistressof the young.” In the English edition, Yourcenar explains that she rewrote the ending, “to betteremphasize certain metaphysical concepts from which this legend is inseparable, and withoutwhich, told in a Western manner, it is nothing but a vague erotic tale placed in an Indiansetting.” 90 This is a very different story indeed, combining Hindu ideas of caste rebellion(Brahmin women sleeping with Pariahs and disturbing male Brahmins) with misogynistEuropean ideas about feminist rebellion (seducing children, exciting old men).The Indologist Heinrich Zimmer (1890-1943) knew both the Goethe poem and a differentSanskrit version of the story, in which two men, rather than two women, are decapitated, and thewoman, who is the wife of one and the brother of the other, switches the heads when she restoresthem to life. 91 Zimmer brought the Sanskrit story to the attention of Thomas Mann, who, in 1940,wrote a novella (The Transposed Heads) in which the woman, who is married to one of the menand in love with the other, accidentally, or not so accidentally, switches the heads. 92 And in1954, Peggy Glanville-Hicks wrote an opera based on the Thomas Mann novel, also entitled TheTransposed Heads. The notes for the 1984 ABC Classics CD of the opera say, “The originalsource is in the Bhagavad Gita,” a lovely leftover from the colonial heyday of the Gita, when it

was regarded as the source of everything Indian. Ms. Glanville-Hicks herself said, “Many of thethemes are taken freely and in some cases directly from Hindu folk sources,” and she alsodescribed the heroine’s inadvertent transposition of her lovers’ heads as “the greatest Freudianslip of all time.”HOW SIR CHARLES SIND 93The best pun in the history of Raj, one that reveals a number of rather serious aspects ofcolonialism, is attributed to General Sir Charles James Napier.Napier was born in 1782 and in 1839 was made commander of Sind (or Scinde, as it wasoften spelled at that time, or Sindh), an area at the western tip of the northwest quadrant of SouthAsia, directly above the Rann of Kutch and Gujarat; in 1947 it became part of Pakistan. In 1843,Napier maneuvered to provoke a resistance that he then crushed and used as a pretext to conquerthe territory for the British Empire. Mountstuart Elphinstone (formerly Governor of Bombay)likened the British in Sind after the defeat in Afghanistan to “A bully who had been kicked in thestreets and went home to beat his wife.” 94 The British press described this military operation atthe time as “infamous,” 95 a decade later as “harsh and barbarous” and a “tragedy,” while theBombay Times accused Napier of perpetrating a mass rape of the women of Hyderabad. 96 Thesuccessful annexation of Sind made Napier’s name “a household word in England. He received£70,000 as his share of the spoils” 97 and was knighted. In 1851 he quarreled with Dalhousie (theGovernor-General) and left India.In 1844, the following item appeared in a British publication in London, under the title“Foreign Affairs”:PECCAVIIt is a common idea that the most laconic military despatch ever issued was that sentby Caesar to the Horse-Guards at Rome, containing the three memorable words, “Veni, vidi,vici” [“I came, I saw, I conquered”], and, perhaps, until our own day, no like instance of brevityhas been found. The despatch of Sir Charles Napier, after the capture of Scinde, to LordEllenborough, both for brevity and truth, is, however, far beyond it. The despatch consisted ofone emphatic word—“Peccavi,” “I have Scinde” (sinned). The joke here (well, it’s a Britishjoke) depends upon the translation of the Latin word peccavi, which is the first person singular ofthe past tense, active voice, of the verb pecco, peccare (“to sin”), from which are derived ourEnglish words “impeccable” (someone who never sins) and “peccadillo” (a small sin). Thus thedouble meaning is “I have sinned” (that is, “I have committed a moral error”) and “I haveScinde” (that is, “I have gained possession of a place called Scinde”). Got it?The story caught on. In a play published in 1852, a character named Sir Peter Prolixrecites, at a dinner party, the following doggerel:What exclaim’d the gallant Napier,Proudly flourishing his rapierTo the army and the navy,When he conquered Scinde?—“Peccavi!” 98 The story has been told and retold in history booksever since. A 1990 biography of Sir Charles actually entitled I Have Sind cites it three times, 99and the Encyclopaedia Britannica online (2008) says that Napier “is said to have sent a dispatchconsisting of one word, ‘Peccavi’ (Latin: ‘I have sinned’—i.e., ‘I have Sind’).”But all evidence indicates that Sir Charles Napier never dispatched such a message. Thepassage about Caesar and Napier is not from the Times of London but from the comic journalPunch (1844, v. 6, 209), whose editors evidently made it up and also represented him asconfessing that he had sinned in that his actions had raised such a storm of criticism in

England. 100 The authors of the Punch item may have been inspired by another apocryphalhistorical anecdote, which was linked with the peccavi story as early as 1875 and was incirculation for some time before that; it tells us that someone who had witnessed the defeat of theSpanish Armada announced it with one word: “Cantharides,” the Latin and pharmaceutical nameof the allegedly aphrodisiac drug known as the Spanish fly. 101 (Another British joke.) So it is notNapier’s text, but it is a British text—a lie but a text—with a history of its own; it is a kind ofnineteenth-century urban legend, a myth. Salman Rushdie retold the story in Shame, referring tohis “looking-glass” Pakistan as “Peccavistan,” though he calls the story apocryphal, bilingual,and fictional. 102 The shift from the text of history to the hypertext of journalism is significant; theidea of the sin was initially a writer’s idea, not a general’s. With this in mind, let us unpack themyth a bit more.Besides the two meanings I’ve mentioned (“I have conquered a part of India” and “I havecommitted a moral error”), there is a third, which we discover if we heed the good advice ofMarshall McLuhan, who taught us that the medium is the message, for the medium in this case isLatin. That third message signifies something like “Let’s say it in Latin, which we Oxbridgetypes, English upper classes, know, and the natives do not, though they know English, which wetaught them.” Stephen Jay Gould, who takes the anecdote as history, remarks: “In an age whenall gentlemen studied Latin, and could scarcely rise in government service without a boost fromthe old boys of similar background in appropriate public schools, Napier never doubted that hissuperiors . . . would properly translate his message and pun: I have sinned.” 103 And whenPriscilla Hayter Napier told the story (as history, not myth) she remarked, “Possibly this waswhen he sent his celebrated message—‘Peccavi,’ which, in the Latin every educated man hadthen at his command, means ‘I have sinned.’ ” 104 Latin here functions as a code that the bearersof the message will not understand. Yet even Punch, which invented the story, glossed it inEnglish, realizing that some of its readers might not have been educated in good schools andtherefore might not know Latin.But it is the second meaning of peccavi, the meaning of “sin” as moral error, that is mostrelevant here. kh Though Sir Charles apparently never said (or wrote) peccavi, he seems to havehad a sense that he had sinned in Sind. When he was posted there, he wrote: “We have no rightto seize Sind, yet we shall do so and a very advantageous piece of rascality it will be.” 105“Rascality” is a rather flip way to refer to the murder of many people defending their own land,but afterward he wrote, speaking of his ambition, “I have conquered Scinde but I have not yetconquered myself.” 106 Napier was also surprisingly sensitive to the disintegration of thesepoy-officer relationship after 1813, when the first wave gave way to the second. Years before1857, he expressed regret that the older type of officers who “wrestled” with their sepoys werebeing replaced by men who did not know the sepoys’ languages and practices and who readilyaddressed the latter as “nigger” ki or “suwar” (pig). 107 He was also aware of the British complicityin the negative role of caste: “The most important thing which I reckon injurious to the Indianarmy, is the immense influence given to caste; instead of being discouraged, it has beenencouraged in the Bengal army; in the Bombay army it is discouraged; and that army is in betterorder than the army of Bengal, in which the Brahmins have been leaders in every mutiny.” 108But Napier was also capable of equivocating, as when he wrote of the Sind campaign: “Imay be wrong, but I cannot see it, and my conscience will not be troubled. I sleep well whiletrying to do this, and shall sleep sound when it is done.” 109 This last phrase is almost verbatimwhat Harry Truman said after the bombing of Hiroshima: “I never lost any sleep over mydecision.” 110

SHALLOW ORIENTALISMThe sense of sin is not usually a part of the discussion of the story of Napier in India, butit may indicate a moment when some of the British felt moral ambivalence about their conquestof India and, perhaps, when we ourselves should feel morally ambivalent about the British. Thelist of massacres and degradations that I selected for my cavalry charge through the history of theRaj, England’s greatest hits (in the Mafia sense of hits), is what Indian logicians call the first side(purva paksha), establishing good reasons to hate the British. I should like now to try to nuancethat view a little, to aim for a more balanced hate-love toward them.The Freudian and post-Freudian Marxist agendas tell us to look for the subtext, thehidden transcript, the censored text; the Marxist and to some extent the Freudian assumption isthat this subtext is less respectable, more self-serving, but also more honest, more real than thesurface text. In India the British surface text—“We are bringing civilization to thesesavages”—reveals a subtext: “We are using military power to make England wealthy by robbingIndia.” But there are more than two layers to any agenda, and we mustn’t assume that it’sself-interest all the way down. The peccavi anecdote suggests that beneath the subtext ofself-interest may lie at least a slightly nobler self-perception, a place where guilt is registered.And perhaps, beneath that, there may be yet another layer, an admiration of India, a desire tolearn from India, perhaps even a genuine, if misguided, desire to give India something in return,still surviving, bloody but unbowed, from the first wave of Orientalists.If we ask, What did the Hindus get out of the Raj besides poor? the answer, in part, is themixed blessing of certain social and legal reforms, which reinforced the native reformmovements already under way. Most of the giants of the independence movement—Gandhi,Nehru, Jinnah, Dadabhai Naoroji, and others—studied abroad, generally in London. 111 But theyalso got, as they did from the Mughals, the complicated legacy symbolized by horses, now morecomplex than ever.HORSES IN KIPLING’S KIMHorses were, you will not be surprised to learn, a problem for the British in India. Somehorses were bred well in India; in 1860 a Captain Henry Shakespear, who had bred horses in theDeccan for many years, insisted that “no foreign horse that is imported into India . . . can work inthe sun, and in all weathers, like the horse bred in the Deccan.” 112 But the native Indian forcesthat opposed the British kept most of the best horses for themselves, and only a small fraction ofthe worst horses reached the horse fairs in the east, where the British were in control. 113 Therewas therefore, as usual, the problem of importing horses (most of them being shipped in fromNew South Wales, hence called Walers); shipping such fragile and valuable cargo “in a pitchingEast Indiaman on a six-month journey halfway round the world” was a costly and risky venture,and British horses became even more scarce, and even more expensive, when so many of themwere used in the Napoleonic Wars. 114 (They imported dogs too; one Englishman in 1614 orderedfrom England mastiffs, greyhounds, spaniels, and small dogs, three of each, cautioning theimporter that dogs were difficult to transport. 115 ) Occasionally, exporting, rather than importing,horses also became a problem. Sir Charles Napier was crazy about a half-Arabian horse namedBlanco, “perfectly white,” whom he rode, talked to, and talked about for sixteen years. Sparingno expense, Napier had tried to ship the old horse home like a pensioned-off Indian civil servant,to spend his final days out at grass—good pasturage at last. But Blanco died in the Bay of Biscaywhile being, against the usual current, exported from Portugal to England. 116

At the same time, itinerant native horse traders, who were often highway robbers in theirspare time (the equine equivalent of used car salesmen), posed an even greater threat as a kind ofunderground espionage network, a cosmopolitan culture that had its own esoteric language, amixture of various local dialects combined with a special jargon and an extensive code of handsigns, exchanged during the actual bargaining at the fair, mainly concealed under ahandkerchief. 117 In recorded British history, horse breeding, spying, and Orientalism combinedin the character of William Moorcroft, a famous equine veterinarian. In 1819, the British senthim to Northwest India, as far as Tibet and Afghanistan, on a quixotic search for “suitablecavalry mounts.” 118 Moorcroft had seen mares from Kutch that he thought might be right for thearmy, and he was granted official permission “to proceed towards the North Western parts ofAsia, for the purpose of there procuring by commercial intercourse, horses to improve the breedwithin the British Province or for military use.” 119 But he also collected information on militarysupplies and political and economic conditions obtaining at the borders of the Raj, 120 and shortlybefore his mysterious final disappearance in 1824, he was briefly imprisoned in the Hindu Kushon suspicion of being a spy. Moorcroft had delusions of Orientalism; he told a friend that hewould have disguised himself “as a Fakeer” rather than give up his plan, and after he was lost,presumed dead, in August 1825, legends circulated about “a certain Englishman namedMoorcroft who introduced himself into Lha-Ssa, under the pretence of being a Cashmerian” orwho spoke fluent Persian “and dressed and behaved as a Muslim.” The final piece of Orientalismin his life was posthumous: From 1834 to 1841 his papers were edited not by a military orpolitical historian but by Horace Hayman Wilson, secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal andthe Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford. According to his biographer, Moorcroft was thrilledby the stories he heard “from the north-western horse-traders—swarthy, bearded men likeKipling’s Mahbub Ali.” 121 But Kipling created Mahbub Ali—a Muslim horse trader who workssecretly for the master spy Colonel Creighton—fifty years after the publication of Moorcroft’spapers, and aspects of the characters of Creighton, Mahbub Ali, and Kim himself may have beeninspired by Moorcroft. Kim is the son of a British soldier (a disreputable Irishman namedO’Hara, already a marginal figure in the British world, who married an Irish nursemaid), but hemasquerades sometimes as a Hindu, sometimes as a Muslim, and Mahbub Ali, a Tibetan lama,and Colonel Creighton all claim him as their son.Horses are deeply implicated in espionage in Kipling’s Kim, right from the start. Napier’scode message, in the anecdote, was about a war; the very first chapter of Kim introduces amessage about a war, coded not in Latin but in horses: “[T]he pedigree of the white stallion isfully established.” Again, it is a triple code, of which the first two levels are easy enough tocrack: Ostensibly, on the first level, it means that the Muslim horse trader Mahbub Ali is able tovouch for a valuable horse that the colonel may buy. The coded message on the second level isthat a provocation has occurred that will justify a British attack in Northwest India (much likeNapier’s).The third level of signification is more complex. The idea of a pedigree implies that youknow the horse when you know its father and mother (or dam and sire); the ideas underlying thebreeding of horses, ideas about “bloodlines” and “bloodstock” and Thoroughbreds, also markedthe racist theory of the breeding of humans. Kim is said to have “white blood,” an oxymoron.The question that haunts the book is, Who are Kim’s sire and dam? I need not point out thesignificance of the color of the stallion in a book by Kipling (who coined the phrase “the whiteman’s burden”). But we might recall that the Vedic stallion of the ancient Hindus, the symbol ofexpansionist political power, was also white, in contrast with the Dasyus or Dasas, who were

said to come from “dark wombs” (RV 2.20.7). British racist ideas, supported by a complexpseudoscientific ideology, rode piggyback on already existing Hindu ideas about dark and lightskin conceived without the support of a racist theory like that of the British; one might say thatthe Indians imagined racism for themselves before the British imagined it against them. Thewhite stallion also implicitly represents Kim’s Irish father in the metaphor that Creighton andMahbub Ali apply to Kim, behind his back: Kim is a colt that must be gentled into Britishharness. 122 On the other hand, to Kim’s face, Mahbub Ali uses horses as a paradigm for themulticulturalism of Kim’s world, which includes not only his English, Indian, and TibetanBuddhist father figures, but both a good Catholic chaplain and an evil Anglican chaplain, theBengali Hindu babu named Hurree Chunder Mookerjee and the Jainas of the temple where thelama resides. Kim feels that he is a sahib among sahibs, but he questions his own identity“among the folk of Hind” in terms of religion: “What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, orBuddhist?” Mahbub Ali’s response (in the passage cited at the start of this chapter) is: “Thismatter of creeds is like horseflesh . . . the Faiths are like the horses. Each has merit in its owncountry.” 123KIPLING, THE GOOD BAD POETKim’s multireligious identity crisis (“What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, orBuddhist?”) is stripped of its multicultural details in the simple question that he asks himselfover and over again—“Who is Kim?”—and then, in the final chapter: “I am Kim. I am Kim. Andwhat is Kim?” kj Kipling bequeathed this individual quandary of multicultural identity to othernovelists too, including Salman Rushdie, who, I think, modeled the hero of Midnight’s Childrenon Kim, a boy with English blood who appears to be both Hindu and Muslim. But Rushdiereverses the point about race: The English blood doesn’t matter at all, or the Hindu blood; theboy is a Muslim because he is raised as a Muslim. Hari Kunzru too is indebted to Kipling forsome elements of the multicultural hero of his novel The Impressionist, though he takes thetheme in very different directions: Kunzru’s hero has an English father and an Indian mother,and he passes for white but loses the white girl he loves, loses her because (final irony) sheprefers men of color.How are we to evaluate the legacy of Kipling, doing justice both to his racism and to hisdeeply perceptive portrayal of India?In his surprisingly appreciative essay on Kim, Edward Said wrestles with his conflictedfeelings about Kipling. On the one hand, Said demonstrates how deeply embedded, indeedcoded, in Kim is the racist and imperialist view for which Kipling became notorious. On theother hand, Said speaks of Kim as “profoundly embarrassing” 124 —for Said, and for us, for anyreaders caught between their warm response to the artistry of the book and their revulsion at theracist terminology and ideology. Said speaks of Kipling as “a great artist blinded in a sense byhis own insights about India,” who sets out to advance an obfuscating vision of imperial India,but “not only does he not truly succeed in this obfuscation, but his very attempt to use the novelfor this purpose reaffirms the quality of his aesthetic integrity.” Said’s ambivalence was matchedby that of the poet W. H. Auden, who argued (in his poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” 1939)that history would pardon “Kipling and his views,” though he later excised those lines fromsubsequent editions.Yet Auden’s verses are powerful in precisely the way that, George Orwell pointed out,Kipling’s own verse is powerful. Auden argued that Kipling would be pardoned “for writingwell.” Orwell argued that Kipling is a “good bad poet,” who wrote the kind of poetry that you

would like to forget but that you remember, almost against your will, more easily, and longer,than good poetry. 125 Kipling is “good bad” not merely in his literary qualities but also in hisethical qualities; he is both a racist and not a racist. Mowgli, for instance, the Indian hero of TheJungle Book, is portrayed in positive terms to which race is irrelevant. And Kipling, alwaysaware that the “captains and the kings” would depart from India, could have had Charles Napierin mind when he prayed for divine guidance, “lest we forget”—forget, perhaps, the harm that theBritish had done in India? Rushdie, writing of his ambivalence toward the good and evil Kipling,remarks, “There will always be plenty in Kipling that I find difficult to forgive” (as Audendecided not, ultimately, to pardon Kipling), but then he adds: “but there is also enough truth inthese stories to make them impossible to ignore.” 126That truth grew out of a deep knowledge and love of India, where Kipling was born andwhich he described (in “Mandalay”) as “a cleaner, greener land” (than England). Some of hisstories can be read as variants on some of the classical texts of Hinduism. “On Greenhow Hill”(1891) is a translation, in the broadest sense, of the story of Yudhishthira and the dog whoaccompanies him into heaven; in the Kipling story, some Methodists are trying to convert anIrish Catholic to Methodism. They don’t like his dog, and tell him that he must give up the dogbecause he is “worldly and low,” and would he let himself “be shut out of heaven for the sake ofa dog?” He insists that if the door isn’t wide enough for the pair of them, they’ll stay outsiderather than be parted. And so they let him bring the dog to chapel. In “The Miracle of PuranBhagat” (1894), a Hindu who becomes a high-ranking civil servant under the British and is evenknighted gives it all up to become a renouncer; wild animals befriend him, as he shuns all humanlife. But he reenters the world when, warned by the animals, he saves a village from a flashflood, giving up his own life in the process. By translating dharma and the householder life intocivil service for the Raj, Kipling gives a new twist to the old problem of the tension betweenrenunciation and service to the world. Kim is as much about the search for Release from thewheel of samsara as it is about the intensely political and material world of espionage. In thefinal chapter, the lama’s vision of the universe, including himself (“I saw all Hind, from Ceylonin the sea to the Hills. . . . Also I saw the stupid body of Teshoo Lama lying down . . .”),replicates the vision of the universe, and themselves, that Yashoda and Arjuna saw in the mouthof Krishna.Kim is a novel written about, and out of, the British love of India. In part, of course, thatlove was like the love of one Englishman, Shakespeare’s Henry V, for France: “I love France sowell, that I will not part with a village of it; I will have it all mine.” 127 But that is not the onlykind of love there is, even in the hearts of other dead white males who “loved” the civilizationsof people they colonized; 128 Gandhi referred to the British as “those who loved me.” 129 TheBritish also loved India for the right reasons, reasons that jump off every page of Kim: the beautyof the land, the richness and intensity of human interactions, the infinite variety of religiousforms.CHAPTER 22SUTTEE AND REFORM IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE RAJ1800 to 1947 CECHRONOLOGY1772-1833 Rammohun Roy lives; 1828 he founds Brahmo Samaj1824-1883Dayananda Sarasvati lives; 1875 he founds Arya Samaj1869-1948 Mahatma MohandasKaramchand Gandhi lives1861-1941 Rabindranath Tagore lives1919 Amritsar massacre takes

place1947 Independence and Partition happen[Version A] After they had performed theirsuperstitious ceremonies,they placed the woman on the pile with the corpse, and set fire to thewood. As soon as the flames touched her, she jumped off the pile. Immediatelythe brahmuns seized her, in order to put her again into theflames: she exclaimed—“Do not murder me! I do not wish to be burnt!”The Company’s officers being present, she was brought home safely. Missionary Register,March 1820 1[Version B] What most surprised me, at this horrid and barbarous rite, was the tranquility of thewoman, and the joy expressed by her relations, and the spectators. . . . She underwent everythingwith the greatest intrepidity, and her countenance seemed, at times, to be animated with pleasure,even at the moment when she was ascending the fatal pile. J. S. Stavorinus (a Dutch admiralwho visited Bengal in 1769 and 1770), 1770 2WOMEN: SUTTEE UNDER BRITISH EYESHow can the same act, performed by two different women fifty years apart, elicit suchcontrasting descriptions and responses? Since the first European accounts, both Europeans andIndians have expressed widely differing opinions about the practice that Anglo-Indian Englishcalled suttee, the action of certain women in India who were burned alive on the funeral pyres oftheir dead husbands. (Sanskrit and Hindi texts call the woman who commits the act a sati, “goodwoman.”) Suttee had been around for quite a while before the Raj, as we have seen. Severalqueens commit suttee in the Mahabharata, and the first-century BCE Greek author DiodorusSiculus mentions suttee in his account of the Punjab. In the Buddhist Vessantara Jataka, basedon a story shared by Hindus and Buddhists, when Vessantara is about to leave his queen and gointo exile without her, she protests: “Burning on a fire, uniting in a single flame—such a death isbetter for me than life without you.” 3 This imagery of wives so faithful that (to paraphrase St.Paul) they’d rather burn than unmarry (by being parted from their husbands in the next life) ispart of the discourse of marital love even before it becomes a practice or is associated withfuneral pyres. Such stories take to the extreme the sort of self-sacrifice normally expressed byrelatively milder habits such as following husbands into exile, as both Sita and Draupadi do. Onthe other hand, a late chapter of the Padma Purana (perhaps c. 1000 CE) says that Kshatriyawomen are noble if they immolate themselves but that Brahmin women may not and that anyonewho helps a Brahmin woman do it is committing Brahminicide. 4In the Muslim period, the Rajputs practiced jauhar (a kind of prophylactic suttee, thewife immolating herself before the husband’s expected death in battle), most famously atChitorgarh, to save women from a fate worse than death at the hands of conquering enemies.Numerous sati stones, memorials to the widows who died in this way, are found all over India;one of the earliest definitively dated records is a 510 CE inscription from Eran, in MadhyaPradesh. Most of the suttees seem to occur at first in royal Kshatriya families and later amongBrahmins in Bengal, but women of all castes could do it. In 1823, for example, 234 Brahminwomen, 25 Kshatriyas, 14 Vaishyas, and 292 Shudras were recorded as satis. 5To a Euro-American, such women are widows, though from the Hindu standpoint, a satiis the opposite of a widow. A widow is a bad woman; since it is a wife’s duty to keep her

husband alive, it is ultimately her fault if he dies and dishonorable for her to outlive him; to thedegree to which she internalizes these traditional beliefs, she suffers both shame and guilt in herwidowhood. A sati, by contrast, is a good woman, who remains a wife always and never awidow, since her husband is not regarded as dead until he is cremated (or, occasionally, buried),and she goes with him to heaven. 6Different scholars confronting suttee, like the blind men who encountered the elephant inthe middle of the room, see a different beast depending on what part they grasp. 7 One kk calls it asacrifice and asks: What were the ancient and persistent traditions that drove some widows to doit voluntarily and other men and women to force other widows to do it involuntarily? Another klcalls it murder and asks: Can suttee be explained by the more general mistreatment of women bymen in India, particularly female infanticide and dowry murders of daughters-in-law (killing onewife so that the man can marry another and get another dowry)? Another km calls it widowburning and asks: Why did the British first loudly denounce suttee, then covertly sanction it, andthen officially ban it? This chapter will be concerned primarily with this third question, thoughwe cannot ignore the other two and will begin with them. We will then consider similarcomplexities that dog the Raj record on issues such as cow protection, (non)violence, addictionto opium and alcohol, and the treatment of the lowest castes.DID SHE JUMP OR WAS SHE PUSHED?Eyewitnesses, both English and Indian, speak with different voices, sometimes ofcoercion—of women who tried to run away at the last minute and were dragged back, held downwith bamboo poles, and weighted down with heavy logs designed to keep them fromescaping—and sometimes of willing, joyous submission. But the one voice that we most want tohear in this story seems to be missing: the voice of the woman in the fire. To Gayatri Spivak’sovular question, “Can the subaltern speak?” (the subaltern being in this case the disenfranchisedwoman), my answer is yes. But that does not mean that we can hear her speak. The satis who aresaid to have wanted to die and succeeded did not live to tell the tale; the balance of extanttestimony is therefore intrinsically slanted in favor of those who successfully escaped. Theirvoices tell us that the widow was forced to do it (by relatives who wanted her jewelry or fearedthat she would dishonor them by becoming promiscuous) or that she preferred an early, violentdeath (often very early indeed, as many were widowed in their early teens) to the hardships ofthe life of a widow in India. Thus, in dramatic contrast with the multivocality of all the otherplayers in this grim drama, almost every widow whose speech is noted by the colonial records issaid to have given the same explanation: material suffering. Economic hardships may indeedhave contributed to the spread of suttee. But this argument, that suttee occurred because widowshad nothing, is contradicted by the argument that it occurred precisely because they had toomuch; the larger incidence of suttee among the Brahmins of Bengal, particularly from 1680 to1830, was due indirectly to the Dayabhaga system of law that prevailed in Bengal, where, unlikein most of the rest of India, widows were entitled to their husbands’ share of family lands andwealth 8 —wealth that would revert to the sati’s husband’s family after her death.There were also religious reasons for a woman, or her relatives, to choose suttee. Manyobservers, both English and Indian, testified that women insisted on performing suttee, despiteserious attempts, by both British officials and Indian relatives, to dissuade them. What was thereligious ideology that might have motivated either the woman herself or the people forcing herto do it, or both? A woman might perform such an action for her own, personal, religious reasons(rebirth in heaven, or Release) or nonreligious reasons (depression, guilt, hardship, the desire to

honor her husband and her family or to ensure a better life for her children) or involuntarily forsomeone else’s nonreligious reasons (the reasons of her family, forcing her to do it so that theycould get her money) or for their religious reasons (to satisfy their own ideas about the afterlife).Some women, as we shall see, even used suttee as a weapon of moral coercion to reform theirhusbands.The crass Materialist hypothesis hardly does credit either to these women or to theirreligion; to argue that all of the satis were coerced, either driven to suicide or simply murdered,makes them victims rather than free agents, victims of male ventriloquism or falseconsciousness, an uncomfortable position for either a feminist or a relativist to assume. Takingthe religious claims seriously gives the satis a marginally greater measure of what feminists callagency and I would call subjective dignity. It views them as individuals who made choices, whobelieved in what they were doing. The religious goal of some of these women may have beenwhat they said it was: rebirth with their husband in heaven or again on earth or ultimate Releasefrom rebirth. Some of them probably meant it when they said they wanted to die with theirhusbands (death for a Hindu is a very different prospect than it is for Christians and Jews), andfeminists have taught us that it is sexist to disregard women’s words.Every ritual needs its myth, and the image of the suttee as sacrifice is supported by twomyths, neither of which in fact describes an act of suttee. The first is the ancient Sanskrit tale ofthe goddess Sati, who entered a fire that was, significantly, not the pyre of her husband, Shiva,who never dies: She spontaneously ignited herself in protest when her father, Daksha, failed toinvite Shiva to his sacrifice. A second myth, often used to justify the claim that a true sati doesnot suffer, is the tale of Sita, who entered a fire (again, not her husband’s pyre) to prove herchastity and felt its flames as cool as sandalwood. The mythology of the ordeal by fire impliedthat, like Sita, a truly “good woman” would feel no pain (and many of the reports, includingBritish reports, insisted that the women did not feel any pain), proving that she was not guilty ofinfidelity or any other failure as a wife, and if she did suffer, she was assured, her pain woulddestroy the bad karma of her evident guilt. But a suttee differs significantly from an ordeal;guilty or innocent, the sati cannot survive. And these myths were twisted into support for the ideaof widows’ immolation only at a fairly late date, while other mythological women weresometimes taken as paradigmatic satis instead. 9Any explanation of suttee must address the essential question of gender. True, there aremany instances, in both myth and history, of Hindu men who sacrificed themselves in fire, butnot on the pyres of their wives. Why not? The answer to this question must contextualize sutteeas an aspect of the more general male desire to control women’s sexuality, in which light sutteeemerges not merely as a religious tradition but as a crime against women who are the scapegoatsof a sexist society. Since Hindu texts blamed women for the sexual weakness of men, one dangerposed by a widow was that she was a loose cannon, a hazard both to men and to her family,which she would dishonor were she unfaithful to her dead husband.The traits of sexism are, however, recognizably cross-cultural; women have been beatento death by their husbands and even burned alive (sometimes as witches) in countries wherethere is no suttee mythology of women and fire. To explain why the abuse of women takes theparticular form that suttee assumes in India, we must therefore invoke, after all, the powers of areligious mythology of marriage, death, and rebirth. Once again we need a Zen diagram,allowing for the intersection of Materialist, feminist, and religious concerns.Are we forced, after all, to choose between crass materialism and religiousself-justification? I think not. Here we must consider the question of women’s subjectivity, the

subaltern’s voice. These women were not a homogeneous group of mindless victims or soullessfanatics, but individuals who made various choices for various reasons and had many voices andcannot be sorted into two tidy groups of those who jumped and those who were pushed. Somewere murdered for land or money or family honor; some sacrificed themselves for religiousreasons; some committed suicide out of guilt, despair, or terror. Some resisted, and ran away, andlived to tell the tale; some tried to resist and failed; some tried to die and failed; some wereunable to resist; some did not want to resist. What they all had in common is what they reactedto, the culture, the ideal of what a woman should be and do, a story that they all knew, thoughsome believed it and some did not. That culture too was hardly monolithic; the woman who soimpressed the Dutch admiral in 1770 was up against forces very different from those faced bythe women who grew up singing ballads praising the immolation of entire royal households inRajasthan or by those who learned on television about the much publicized, and protested, sutteeof a woman named Rup Kanwar on September 4, 1987, at Deorala, in Rajasthan.RAMMOHUN ROY AND THE BRAHMO SAMAJWith these issues in mind, we can go back and consider what some people innineteenth-century India tried to do about suttee.Raja Rammohun Roy (1774-1833), a Bengali Brahmin who knew Arabic, Persian,Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, in addition to his native Bangla (Bengali), was a major voiceraised in opposition to suttee. Roy read the scriptures of many religions, only to find, he said,that there was not much difference between them. In 1814 he settled in Calcutta, where he wasprominent in the movement that advocated education of a Western type, urging Hindus to learnmathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy, and “other useful sciences.” 10Roy always wore the sacred thread that marked him as a Brahmin, and he kept most ofthe customs of a Brahmin, but his theology was surprisingly eclectic. (He may also have been thefirst Hindu to use the word “Hinduism,” in 1816. 11 ) His intense belief in strict monotheism andhis aversion to the sort of image worship that characterized Puranic Hinduism (puja, templeworship, pilgrimage) began early and may have been derived from a combination of monisticelements of Upanishadic Hinduism, then Islam and, later, eighteenth-century deism (belief in atranscendent Creator God reached through reason), Unitarianism (belief in God’s essentialoneness), and the ideas of the Freemasons (a secret fraternity that espoused some deisticconcepts). He was one of the first upper-class Hindus to visit Europe, where he made a great hitwith the intelligentsia of Britain and France. In 1828 he founded the Brahmo Samaj (“Society ofGod”), based on the doctrines of the Upanishads, several of which he had translated into Banglain 1825. 12Roy wrote two tracts against suttee, publishing each first in Bangla and then in his ownEnglish translation. The first was A Conference between an Advocate for, and an Opponent ofthe Practice of Burning Widows Alive, which he published in two parts, in 1818 and 1820. 13 Itwas written in the form of a dialogue between an advocate and his opponent—the classicalHindu bow to diverse arguments. Roy denounced suttee from the standpoint of scripture andHindu law, 14 arguing against it even when it was voluntary and, as such, faithful to “thescriptures”; he advocated ascetic widowhood instead. 15 Though he was unwilling to endorsegovernment interference in matters of religion, his writings may have been a major factorprompting the British to take action against suttee in 1829. In 1830 Roy published a tract entitledAbstract of the Arguments Regarding the Burning of Widows Considered as a Religious Rite and,later, Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females, a tract

on women’s rights to property (a right that married women did not have in England until 1882),based on a reading of both the main commentary on Manu (by Mitakshara) and Dayabhaga law(the Bengal marriage code).After Roy’s death in 1833, Debendranath Tagore became leader of the Brahmo Samajand, like Roy, vigorously opposed the practice of suttee, as did his son Rabindranath (thoughRabindranath “treated the ideas behind it respectfully”). 16 The third leader of the Brahmo Samaj,Keshab Chunder Sen, abolished caste in the society and admitted women as members.STRANGE BEDFELLOWSAs for the British, on the issue of reform in general and suttee in particular, they weredivided in several ways. Edmund Burke, a conservative, insisted that India was fine as it was,admired its religion and customs, and advised a hands-off policy; he sided with Sir WilliamJones and the Orientalists, who wanted to educate Indians in their own tongues and their ownliteratures, and he led the move to impeach Warren Hastings. On the other side, James Mill, aliberal, insisted that India suffered from arrested development and that the British had a duty tointervene and interfere; the Utilitarians sided as usual with Anglicists such as Macaulay, whowanted to teach the Indians about European literatures, in European languages, but on this issueof interference, they also sided with the evangelicals. The colonial bureaucrats were divided onthe political costs of intervening in suttee, the Baptist missionaries took very different stances inaddressing British and Indian audiences, and European eyewitness accounts of widow burningricocheted between horror and fascination. One can hardly speak of a European consensus.The two basic factions among the British also aligned themselves along the dividebetween, on the one hand, the basic terms of Cornwallis’s pact in 1793, the promise not tointerfere in religion in India (an early antecedent of Star Trek’s prime directive), sympathetic tothe Orientalist/Conservative position, and, on the other hand, ideas of universal human rights,which often amounted to their desire to bring Enlightenment rationality to India, the Anglicistposition (or even to bring Christianity to them, the evangelical position). The debate overwhether suttee was religious (which also argued that it was painless; version B, above: She feltno pain, she really believed it, went willingly) or secular political/economic (and thereforepainful; version A: They murdered her, presumably for the money, and she fought and screamed)meant that the British were driving with one foot on the brake and one on the accelerator: Ifsuttee was religious, the prime directive would keep the British out; if it was secular, murder wasbeing committed, and it was the duty of the British to prevent the Hindus from burning theirwomen.The Hindus were also divided in complex ways, and the grounds shifted in the argumentsthat they made for and against suttee in response to colonial discourse. The British thought thatthe various Hindu reform movements canceled one another out, 17 but they misunderstood thenature of Hinduism; each side raged on against the other(s), gaining rather than losing strengthfrom the opposition. On one side were those who supported a strict enforcement of the castesystem, held on to their old ways, and opposed any change in caste customs, including antisutteelegislation. On another side were the radicals, who included in their ranks both militant Hindus,who advocated violence, and college-educated students who renounced Hinduism, aped theBritish, became Anglophile Christians, ate beef and drank beer. Somewhere in between theextremes of both Indians and Europeans, Rammohun Roy and the Indian Liberal movementopposed child marriages and suttee, preached nonviolence, and tried to build a new world thatwould combine the best of Hindu and Christian/British values.

The national press in India nowadays marches “in lockstep with the colonial legislatorwho abolished the custom of widow-burning in 1829.” 18 Nationalist historians, despite theirotherwise anticolonial bias, have accepted this part of the colonial viewpoint, thus aligningthemselves with the Christian missionaries, whom they otherwise generally despise. On the leftare the new, secular Indian elites, who engage in “internal colonialism” by protesting against thebacklash of a Hinduism that they stigmatize as superstitious, socially retrograde, andobscurantist. On the right are the other sort of nationalist who use suttee as the banner of“Hindu-tva” (Hinduness) to oppress not only women but Muslims and dissidents.Fast-forward: When it comes to suttee, we too are strange bedfellows, caught betweentwo contemporary value systems. On the one hand, the increasingly popular concept of universalhuman rights challenges previous scholarly attempts to be value free and brings its adherentsuncomfortably close to the camp of the British. On the other hand, such values as moralrelativism or respect for other cultures condemn the British as white men saving brown womenfrom brown men. kn19 Allan Bloom, in his conservative book The Closing of the American Mind(1987), began his attack on moral relativism with the example of suttee: “If I pose the routinequestions designed to confute [the students] and make them think, such as, ‘If you had been aBritish administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn thewidow at the funeral of a man who had died?,’ they either remain silent or reply that the Britishshould not have been there in the first place.” 20 I disagree. Some years ago, when I was invited toteach a class about India to a group of high school students on the South Side of Chicago, I toldthem about suttee and put Bloom’s question to them, and their unanimous reply was: “I wouldnot interfere; I would not mess with someone else’s religion.” This answer, which shocked me atthe time, came, I eventually realized, out of the Chicago students’ own experience of identitypolitics. But moving beyond the chauvinist British attitude (white men saving brown womenfrom brown men) and then also beyond the relativist reaction (“I would not mess with someoneelse’s religion”), we might aspire to a more complex synthesis, balancing our respect for theHindus as complex moral beings, many of whom protested against suttee, with our own sense ofhuman rights. The best we can do is to question the deeper motives of the British, the Hindus,and ourselves.THE RAJ RIDES TO THE RESCUEOthers before Rammohun Roy, including Akbar and Jahangir, had tried in vain to curtailsuttee, and the British involvement in such reforms came from such mixed impulses that it wasforedoomed to miscarry.Every British schoolchild was once taught the story: “In 1829 the British government inIndia put an end to the Hindu practice of suttee, their moral outrage at this barbaric violation ofhuman rights outweighing their characteristic liberal tolerance of the religious practices of peopleunder their benign rule.” But almost every element in this credo is false. True, a law was passedin India in 1829 making it illegal for widows to be burned with their husbands, but moral outragewas not the predominant factor in the British decision to outlaw suttee, nor did they succeed inending it. On the contrary, the fear of offending high-caste Hindus serving in the British armyand civil service, and concern about the political costs of legal interdiction, had led the Britishfor many years to sanction suttee under some circumstances (as long as the woman had nochildren ko and persuaded the magistrate that she was acting of her own free will), thus effectivelyencouraging it by giving it a legal support it had never had before, making it a coloniallyenhanced atavism.

In 1680 the Governor of Madras prevented the burning of a Hindu widow, and ten yearslater an Englishman in Calcutta was said to have rescued a Brahmin widow from the flames ofher husband’s funeral pyre and taken her as his common-law wife. 21 After that the Britishgenerally looked the other way where suttee was concerned. The same Orientalist spirit that ledthe British to mistake the idea for the reality, wrongly assuming that Hindus were following thedharma-shastras, led them to believe that they should not hinder but help the Hindus do as theirscriptures dictated, and do it right. As usual they reached for Manu, but when for once he letthem down—Manu is big on ascetic widowhood but does not mention suttee—they found someBengali scholars who argued that the part of Manu advocating the burning of widows hadsomehow been left out of the Bengal manuscripts, so they helpfully put it back in. 22 (Most of thedharma texts do not mention suttee, concentrating instead on ascetic widowhood; severalcondemn it in no uncertain terms; and a few late commentaries kp argue for it. 23 ) And so, on April20, 1813 (the same year the missionaries were allowed in), a British circular proclaimed thatsuttee was meant to be voluntary and that it would be permitted in cases in which it wascountenanced by the Hindu religion and prevented when the religious authorities prohibited it, aswhen the woman was less than sixteen years old, pregnant, intoxicated (a point worth noting), orotherwise coerced. In fact, there was a dramatic increase in the number of suttees from 1815 to1818, the first three years of data collection and the first five years after the circular waspublished; the toll went from 378 to 839 cases. After that, the numbers declined and thenfluctuated between 500 and 600. The 1817-1818 cholera epidemic may have increased thenumbers, with more men dead and more widows to die with them, or the clerks may have refinedtheir methods of data collection. But there was also a suspicion that the numbers grew because ofgovernment intervention: They had authorized it (their work made it seem as if “a legal sutteewas better than an illegal one”) and given it interest and celebrity (so that, as in the case of RupKanwar in 1987, there were copycat suttees). 24And when the British did intervene in suttee, the results were often counterproductive.For instance:THE SLOW-BURNING FIREA certain Captain H. D. Robertson, Collector of Poona in 1828,learned that a botched suttee had allowed the pyre to burn too slowly, causing the would-be satito escape in agony. She requested that they try again; again it was botched; British officersfinally intervened, and she died twenty hours later. Robertson investigated and determined that“Hindu scriptures” did stipulate that such slow-burning grass should be used, though it seldomwas. He decided that if the British were to insist that this text be obeyed to the letter, therealization that suttee would now invariably produce a slow burn, increasing the agony, woulddiscourage women from undertaking it. But one woman did still commit suttee, despite attemptsto dissuade her, and Robertson was zealous in carrying out what he saw as his duty. 25 WhatJoseph Conrad called the reformer’s compassion here went horribly awry.Finally, in 1829, the year after Robertston’s intervention, several years after prominentBrahmins had already spoken up against suttee, and at a time when there were many Indians inthe legislature and William Bentinck, an evangelical sympathizer, was Governor-General(1828-1835), the desire to justify their continuing paternalistic rule over Indians whom theycharacterized as savage children led the British to ban suttee altogether, as well as childmarriage, with much self-aggrandizing fanfare.The British law probably facilitated more women’s deaths than it saved, and its maineffect was to stigmatize Hinduism as an abomination in Christian eyes. 26 Suttee is apornographic image, the torture of a woman by fire, hot in every sense of the word. Relatively

few women died that way, in contrast with the hundreds, even thousands who died every day ofstarvation and malnutrition, but suttee had PR value. Thus the Raj had it both ways, boastingboth that it did not interfere with other people’s religions and that it defended human rights. Thedebate, in both India and Britain, turned what had been an exceptional practice into a symbol ofthe oppression of all Indian women and the moral bankruptcy of Hinduism. Nor did the 1829law, or, for that matter, the new legislation enacted by India after its Independence put an end toit; at least forty widows have burned since 1947, most of them largely ignored until the suttee ofRup Kanwar in 1987 became a cause célèbre, and some even now attested only in obscure localarchives.ROMANCING SUTTEESome of the British, sympathetic to one Hindu view, compared the satis with Christianmartyrs or the heroic suicides at Masada—death rather than dishonor, better dead than red, andso forth. Other Europeans romanticized suttee in other ways. Abraham Roger, in 1670, recordeda local story:INDRA TESTS A SATIIndra, the Vedic king of the gods, came to earth as a man and visited awhore, to test her faith. He paid her well and they made love all night. In the morning, hepretended to be dead, and she wished to be burned with him, despite the protests of her parents,who pointed out that she was not even the man’s legitimate wife. When the pyre was ready,Indra woke up, announced that it was just a trick, and took her to his heavenly world. 27 Wehave seen Indra’s tricks before, but this Dutch author apparently has not. He mistakes suttee forthe practice of a woman of the night, rather than the act of a chaste wife. Voltaire (who hadgotten India wrong before) also seems to have missed the point: In Zadig (1747), he imagined aheroine about to commit suttee and suggested the enactment of a law forcing widows to spend anhour with a young man before deciding to sacrifice themselves. And an eighteenth-centuryFrench comic opera presented a Frenchman in India whose wife, an Indian woman who wasunfaithful to him, feigned drowning in the hope that her husband would throw himself on herpyre. 28 Richard Wagner staged suttee in his opera Götterdämmerung by having his heroine,Brünnhilde, ride her horse onto the flaming pyre of her beloved Siegfried. kq In an early draft ofthe opera (summer of 1856), Brünnhilde spouts a kind of garbled Vedanta (via the philosopherSchopenhauer, who had read Indian philosophy in German): “I leave the Land of Desire, I fleethe Land of Illusion forever; I close behind me the open door of eternal Becoming. . . . Freedfrom rebirth, everything eternal . . . I saw the world end.” 29 Thus some Europeans glorified thecustom of suttee.ANIMALS: DAYANAND SARASVATI, THE ARYA SAMAJ, AND COWPROTECTIONSince women and cows are closely linked in the Hindu imaginary, through the trope ofpurity, let us turn now to the issue of cow protection, which was the banner of the Arya Samajeven as suttee was for the Brahmo Samaj.Dayanand Sarasvati (1824-1883) was trained as a yogi but steadily lost faith in yoga. Heclaimed to base his doctrines on the four Vedas as the eternal word of god and judged laterHindu scriptures critically, denouncing image worship, sacrifice, and polytheism. After travelingwidely as an itinerant preacher, in 1875 he founded the Arya Samaj, which rapidly gainedground in western India. Dayananda insisted that “those who read or listen to the Bible, Quran,

Purana, false accounts, and poetic theory—books of ideas opposed to the Veda—they becomesensuous and depraved.” 30 The Arya Samaj further developed the ceremony for “reconversion” kr(called purification [shuddhi]) to bring “back” to the Vedic fold some Muslims who had neverbeen Hindus at all, as well as to reconvert some recent Hindu converts to Islam. 31 They used thesame ceremony to “purify” Pariah castes. 32 And they sought to distinguish themselves, asAryans, from Hindus, who in their view (as in the British view) practiced a degraded form ofVedic religion. 33In 1893 internal disputes caused the Arya Samaj to split into two parties, sometimescalled the Flesh-eating and Vegetarian parties. But the issue of vegetarianism arose before that in1881, when Dayanand published a treatise called Ocean of Mercy for the Cow (go-karuna-nidhi), and in 1882, when he founded a committee for the protection of cows fromslaughter. For the next decade the Arya Samaj established cow protection societies all overBritish India. The first agitation over cow slaughter in the Raj took place in a Sikh state of thePunjab where cow slaughter had been a capital offense right up to the moment when the Britishtook over. 34 From then on, the issue challenged the legitimacy of British rule, though theimmediate violence was directed against Muslims who killed cows, as they did during theBakr-Id festival and after pilgrimages (though goats could also be sacrificed). The same debatethat hedged British interference in suttee (if it was religious, they should not interfere, but if itwas secular, they should) also hedged cow protection. 35 In 1888 a British court in Allahabadruled that a cow was not a sacred object, that Muslims who slaughtered cows could not be heldto have insulted the religion of the Hindus, and that police were to protect Muslims who wantedto slaughter cows.Cow protection societies continued to form the major plank of the Arya Samaj movementin North India, and cow slaughter was specifically used to justify violence against Pariahs andMuslims. Popular ballads and stories highlighted Kshatriya virtues embodied in acts of savingcows from the assaults of Muslim butchers, to whom Pariahs such as Chamars allegedly suppliedcows. At the Bakr-Id festival of 1893, riots broke out involving the entire Hindu population ofvillages, and thousands of people attacked Muslims. In the 1920s, communal riots occurredaround symbols of the cow. Cows continued to provide a lightning rod for communal violencefrom then until the present day.VIOLENCE AND NONVIOLENCEVIOLENCE: DYER AT AMRITSARAfter World War I, India was a different world, but still the iconic massacres, like thosesurrounding the 1857 Rebellion, continued. It was 1919. There had been fierce protests againstBritish rule, an orgy of arson and violence that left five Europeans dead. The British forbade allmeetings and demonstrations. A peaceful group assembled in Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, anopen space hemmed in by houses, to celebrate the feast day of Baisakhi. Brigadier GeneralReginald Dyer marched his troops in and, without any warning, gave the order to fire on thecrowd; they ceased firing only when they ran out of ammunition. Because the British wereblocking the only gate to the enclosure, the crowd was trapped. More than twelve hundred men,women, and children were seriously wounded, and three to five hundred were killed.Dyer, who already had a reputation for brutality (he had had prisoners beaten, sometimesin public, and made Indians crawl on the street), was proud of what he had done. The House ofLords passed a measure commending him, and he was designated a “defender of the Empire.”Nor was he ever punished. ks But Winston Churchill referred to the massacre as “a monstrous

event,” the British press expressed shocked outrage, and Dyer’s action was condemnedworldwide. The House of Commons officially censured him, and he resigned in 1920. Tagorereturned his Nobel Prize, and Nehru’s father abandoned his Savile Row suits and took to wearingGandhian homespun. 36And the rest, as they say, is history: Indian nationalists, under the banner of the CongressParty, succeeded, after decades of often violent Indian protests and equally violent Britishreprisals (both imprisonments and executions), in winning independence from the British in1947.NONVIOLENCE: GANDHIOne of the key figures in the independence movement was Mahatma Gandhi, whoreacted to Amritsar with one of his fasts against the British. Pleading for an honorable and equalpartnership between Britain and India, held not by force but “by the silken cord of love,” heargued: “Fasting can only be resorted to against a lover, not to extort rights but to reform him, aswhen a son fasts for a father who drinks. My fast at Bombay and then at Bardoli was of thatcharacter. I fasted to reform, say, General Dyer, who not only does not love me, but who regardshimself as my enemy.” 37Gandhi frequently used fasting as a weapon to reform (or coerce) others; on oneoccasion, he fasted to get Congress to agree to regard the Pariahs (whom he called Harijans[People of God]) as a Hindu community, and he succeeded; separate Harijan electorates wereabolished, and more seats were reserved exclusively for Harijan members. 38 Fasting, in thedharma texts, was usually a restoration for sins and errors, and Gandhi always had a strong senseof his own shortcomings; the fasting dealt with that too. Thus his fasting was intended first tocontrol himself, then to control his own people, getting them to unite in protest but to pull backfrom violence; and then to control the British, getting them to let him out of jail on severaloccasions and, eventually, to quit India. He had more success with the British than with his ownpeople.Drawing on the nonviolent Jaina and Vaishnava traditions of his native Gujarat, Gandhi,who came from a merchant (Baniya) caste, developed the idea of what he calledsatya-graha—“holding firmly on to truth” (satya, like sati, derived from the verb “to be” inSanskrit)—first in South Africa, on behalf of the Indian community there, and then in India, onbehalf of the Harijans, elevating suffering and denial into a quasireligious discipline, like yoga ormeditation. 39 He used fasting as a weapon of the weak 40 against the British, as Indian womenhad used it against their husbands for centuries (often simultaneously withholding sexual access,locking themselves into the “anger room,” as Kaikeyi did in the Ramayana). Gandhi said thatyou cannot fast against a tyrant, that he fasted to “reform those who loved me.” Refuting thebinary sexual attributes as the British generally applied them to male colonizers and feminizedcolonized subjects (the Rape of India syndrome), he made female fortitude, self-sacrifice, andself-control the model of national character for both men and women. Thus he invented agendered nationalism that expressed an androgynous model of virtue, 41 which he regarded as theessence of both bravery—indeed virility—and the female qualities of endurance andnonviolence.Gandhi was a one-man strange bedfellow. His insistence on celibacy for his disciplescaused difficulty among some of them, as did his habit of sleeping beside girls young enough tobe called jailbait in the United States, to test and/or prove his celibate control or to stiffen his

esolve. But this practice drew not so much upon the Upanishadic and Vaishnava ascetictraditions, which were the source of many of Gandhi’s practices, as upon the ancient Tantrictechniques of internalizing power, indeed creating magical powers, by first stirring up the sexualenergies and then withholding semen.On the question of eating beef, Gandhi was also ambivalent. As a child he had heardpopular poems recited by schoolboys: “Behold the mighty Englishman /He rules the Indiansmall,/Because being a meat-eater/He is five cubits tall.” 42 Thus, in contradiction of the reasonsto eat meat outlined in many Hindu texts, Gandhi felt as if the natural order—the laws ofviolence and power—required him to eat meat in order to defeat the British. But eating meat wasnot natural for Gandhi, who was raised in a Vaishnava family that practiced strictvegetarianism, 43 in Gujarat, where Jainism was strong.In the end Gandhi used the image of calf love (vatsalya), the love of and for a mothercow, particularly the Earth Cow, Mother Earth, as a key symbol for his imagined Indian nation,and though he also tried to include Muslims in the family, cow protection was a factor in thefailure of his movement to attract large-scale Muslim support. His attitude to cows was,however, an essential component of his version of nonviolence (ahimsa), which, in Gandhi’shands, came to mean not just opposition to blood sacrifice but what others called passive ktnonresistance 44 and I would call passive-aggressive nonresistance, against the British, withoutspilling their blood any more than an adherent of traditional ahimsa would spill the blood of asacrificial animal.Gandhi was well aware that there had never been true nonviolence in India (or anywhereelse, for that matter). He once remarked, “Indeed the very word, nonviolence, a negative word,means that it is an effort to abandon the violence that is inevitable in life.” 45 If you’ve read thisfar, you will know that Gandhi could not simply pick up off the rack a nonviolence alreadyperfected by centuries of Hindu meditation; it was a much-disputed concept. Gandhi had toreinvent nonviolence before he could use it in an entirely new situation, as a political strategy,against the British Raj. But he had a rich tradition to draw upon. Writing about the Gita, Gandhigranted, “It may be freely admitted that the Gita was not written to establish ahimsa. . . . But ifthe Gita believed in ahimsa or it was included in desirelessness, why did the author adopt awarlike illustration? When the Gita was written, although people believed in ahimsa, wars werenot only not taboo, but no one observed the contradiction between them and ahimsa.” 46Hindu idealists gladly embraced the Gandhian hope that the Hindus might set an examplefor the human race in passive resistance, a hope bolstered by their desire to prove to thedisdainful British that the Hindus were not the lascivious, bloodthirsty savages depicted in thecolonial caricature. Thus an ancient Hindu ideal was appropriated and given new power byHindus (such as Gandhi) who had been influenced by Western thinkers (such as Tolstoy) whowere acquainted with the neo-Vedantins as well as with German idealists who had been readingthe Upanishads (originally through Persian, Muslim translations), making these ideas moreattractive both to Westerners and to Hindus still living under the shadow of Western domination.But if Gandhi hoped that the ancient Hindu ideal of nonviolence, even in its modernincarnation, would succeed in the postcolonial context, he was whistling in the dark. His methodsucceeded against the British but could not avert the tragedy of Partition. ku Gandhi’s nonviolencefailed because it did not pay sufficient attention to the other, more tenacious ancient Hindu idealthat had a deeper grip on real emotions in the twentieth century: violence. For as Krishna pointedout in the Bhagavad Gita, it is quite possible to adhere to the mental principles of nonviolencewhile killing your cousins in battle. (Gandhi wrote a translation, into Gujarati, and commentary

to the Gita in which he interpreted the Mahabharata war as symbolic and read metaphoricallyKrishna’s exhortations to Arjuna to kill his enemies.) The Vedantic reverence for non-violenceflowered in Gandhi; the Vedic reverence for violence flowered in the slaughters that followedPartition. Then more active civil disobedience replaced passive noncooperation, and terrorismalso increased. On January 30, 1948, Gandhi was shot to death by Nathuram Godse, a PuneBrahmin who had ties with the militant nationalist organization called the RSS (RashtriyaSwayamsevak Sangh, or National Volunteers’ Organization). 47TAXING ADDICTION: ALCOHOL AND ADIVASIS IN GUJARATGandhi was concerned with control on both the political level (control of violence) andthe personal (control of sensuality). The threats to both were united in the British control ofHindu addiction to opium, for opium, along with indigo (the dye used for European uniforms)and tea, was one of the great Raj cash crops. 48 The East India Company forced Indian peasants tocultivate the poppy from which opium is produced, 49 which was then exported to China inexchange for silks and tea (thereby producing opium addicts in China); when the Chineseresisted, the company dispatched its Indian sepoys to fight and die for the company’s cause. Butnot all the opium got to China. In Kipling’s Kim, Kim’s father dies of opium and the woman helives with sells it; Kipling speaks of “the opium that is meat, tobacco, and medicine to the spentAsiatic,” a tolerant (if racist) attitude that was, oddly enough, shared by some missionaries, whowould not begrudge to the desperately poor the pill of opium that was for some, the missionariessaid, their only stimulant. But Kipling neglects to mention that opium also meant death for manypeople. More precisely, it meant death and taxes. Before the British introduced an opium tax forthe first time, opium had been untaxed and used fairly cheaply by all classes of people, in boththe towns and the villages. The tax didn’t make the addicts give it up, but increased their alreadydesperate poverty. 50Alcohol was a more pervasive problem than opium and has deeper and more complexroots in Hindu culture, but it too became a political problem under the Raj, also through a newform of taxation in Gujarat in the 1920s. What has been called the Devi movement started inSouth Gujarat among a group of Adivasis, a tribal group whom caste Hindus in the nineteenthcentury regarded as non-Hindus because they ate meat (anything but cattle and horseflesh) anddrank liquor. 51 (This definition conveniently ignored the fact that many Hindus ate meat anddrank liquor, yet reform movements often argued that giving up meat and wine was a way ofgiving up being a tribal and becoming part of the four-class system.) 52 More precisely, theAdivasis drank toddy (tadi), the fermented juice of a palm tree (coconut, palmyra, or date palm;in South Gujarat, it was mostly date palm), and daru, made chiefly from the flowers of themahua tree (Madhuca indica) and said to be seven times as strong as toddy (15 to 30 percentalcohol). Both drinks were cheap to make and not very strong. 53 “God gave the Brahmin ghee[clarified butter, used in Vedic sacrifices] and the Bhil [a tribal people] liquor,” a local proverbgoes, and these Adivasis believed (as the Vedic Indians had) that the gods also enjoyed sharing adrink with them at various rituals. At funerals, the corpse too was given a drink. They dranktoddy in part because it was so much cleaner and healthier than water, but they stronglydisapproved of addictive drinking.The Adivasis did not regard women as property but allowed them to divorce, remarry(even if widowed), and commit adultery (which they regarded as an offense but not a graveoffense). And they were anti-Brahmin (some even regarded Brahmin killing as an act of merit)and regarded literacy in Hindu texts as “a cultural force which they had always done their best to

keep at bay.” The Hinduism to which they were exposed in school was primarily Arya Samaj,amounting to devotion to a Hindu deity (in particular Krishna), a daily bath, and no meat, noblood sacrifice, and, worst of all, no daru or toddy.The Adivasis had always made toddy and daru privately at home until the late nineteenthcentury, when the colonial and various princely states, the capitalists who manufactured liquor incentral distilleries, and the liquor dealers (who in South Gujarat were almost all Parsis) combinedforces to control and tax liquor, just as the British had taxed opium. But toddy is best consumedwithin hours of fermenting; by storing it until it could be taxed and sold, the British ruined it; bythe time it got to the shops it was weak and tasteless, and expensive, and hard to get. The Parsiswho sold it came to town “mounted on a fine horse with a gun and a whip”; they raped theAdivasi women and forced the girls into prostitution for touring officials. This happened so oftenthat the Adivasis devised a ceremony of purification for women whom the Parsis had raped.Thus colonial administrators and landed castes took the Adivasis’ land, took their crops, tooktheir women, took bribes, and exploited their labor.Then the goddess arrived. Originally a smallpox deity (called, apotropaically, Sitala [“theCool”] because she brought fever), she became for the Adivasis a force for social reform and avehicle for protest against their exploiters, the Parsis. Though the Adivasis had resisted theeducational forces of Hinduism and spurned the help of higher political powers when thenationalists had tried to help them, they did not reject the Higher Power of the goddess, in amove that anticipated Alcoholics Anonymous by a decade or two. The goddess possessed certainwomen and spoke through them, and the women then led demonstrations, courted imprisonment,and persuaded the men to refuse the tax; they held the men to the mark and goaded them on.Speaking through the women, the Devi persuaded the men to drink tea instead of liquor,which broke their economic bondage to the Parsis. The solidarity that they had formerlyexpressed in communal drinking bouts they now symbolized by not drinking. Though there wasa certain amount of recidivism and the occasional great debauch to celebrate a new recruit’s finalrenunciation, by and large it worked. They sang songs (bhajans) to Krishna, some of whichexhorted them to give up liquor and stand up against the liquor dealers, while other songs (spikedby the words of the Devi herself) commanded them not to become Christians, to resist themissionaries who were active in their district.This was not Sanskritization. Like many tribals, the Adivasis realized that they would bevery low caste if they became Hindus and so did not claim a rank as a caste (though Hindus oftenregarded them as a caste). Some of them, however, asked to be regarded as Kshatriyas, whocould maintain their high status even while indulging in impure practices such as eating meat andaddictive vices such as drinking liquor. This is what has been called Rajputization orKshatriyazation, the upward mobility of castes that do not give up their “impure” habits. But theDevi’s command to give up toddy and daru doubly empowered them by helping themsimultaneously to appropriate the “purer” values of the regionally dominant high-caste Hindusand Jainas and to assert themselves against the most rapacious of the local exploiters, the Parsis.Indeed, as the Devi movement grew in strength, the Adivasis began to treat the Parsis asPariahs, taunting them that they should go back to Persia, and forcing Parsi women, for the firsttime in their lives, to do the tasks of scrubbing, sweeping, and washing. Some Adivasis refusedto talk with Parsis or even be touched by them, thus, of course, perpetuating the evils of the castesystem. Some Parsis and their strongmen, assisted on occasions by tax officials, retaliated byseizing Adivasis, holding them down, and pouring liquor down their throats (thus making thembreak their vows and become ritually impure once again) or by pouring toddy into village wells

so that the Adivasis would be forced to drink alcohol with their water.The inspiration of the Devi gave the Adivasis the courage to rebel. Unlike the priestlyspokesmen of the Hinduism they had avoided in the schools, the Devi did not require them toworship gods like Krishna or Rama (though some of them did) but allowed them to go onworshiping their old gods and goddesses so long as they did not perform blood sacrifice. Thegoddess often became incarnate in an old buffalo cow who wandered freely from house to house,and one man became richer after the cow defecated kv and urinated in his house. 54 But there were,from the start, skeptics who regarded the cow as a public nuisance, beat her away with a stoutstick, drove her out of their crops, and sold her at a public auction. And although most of theAdivasis attributed their new social activism to the goddess, they had learned that change waspossible and that they could make it happen by their own actions, long after many of themdecided that their supposed champion was no more than a figment of the imagination. 55 The Devitook the place of the intellectuals who, in other times and places (Russia in 1917, to take a caseat random), came in from outside to inspire the oppressed peasants to rebel. This was entirely atribal movement. The myth, once again, made history possible.The Devi movement was eventually crushed in many places, through the punishment ofits leaders. Often the Devi then departed, in a formal ceremony, but sometimes the movementwent on without her. In 1922 one reformer managed both to keep the villagers from drinking andto prevent animal sacrifices (by arguing that sacrificial animals and humans had the same souls).The movement became increasingly secular, and increasingly accommodating. As people noticedthat those who went on drinking liquor and eating meat did not experience the divine wrath thatthey had been threatened with, they followed suit, often within a year of the Devi’s departure.Sometimes, quitting before she was fired, the Devi possessed a few Adivasis and proclaimed thatthey could once more eat meat and fish and drink daru and toddy.As a kind of transition between the Devi movement and the nationalist movement thateventually caught up the Adivasis, a deified form of Gandhi replaced the goddess for a while. 56(The prohibition of alcohol had been high on the list of things kw that Gandhi wanted the Britishto grant. 57 ) Some of the Adivasis said that spiders were writing Gandhi’s name in cobwebs; theyalso saw Gandhi in bottles of kerosene, in the rising sun or the moon (a man—a very particularman—instead of a rabbit), and in wells, where the wheel for the bucket became the spinningwheel (charkha) that Gandhi was to make so famous. Eventually Gandhi himself put a stop to allthis mythologizing of his image. 58Gandhi had chosen for the exemplary hero of his paradigm of fasting with love a son whofasts for a father who drinks. But fasting was not the only measure that could be used to controlthe drinking of a parent or spouse. A far more extreme version of the pressure that women couldexert by fasting or withholding sexual access was suttee, a moral control available to womenwho had no other powers, a desperate but sometimes effective measure. Rajput women inRajasthan tell this story about their husbands, who, like all Kshatriyas, are expected to drinkliquor, but not too much too often:There was a woman whose husband was fond of liquor and overindulged regularly, causingmuch strife within the family. One day he was so drunk that he fell off a roof and died. At thattime his wife took a vow of suttee. Before immolating herself, she pronounced a curse that fromthen on no male in the family would be allowed to drink liquor, and since then no one in thathousehold has dared to drink. Even the women gave up drinking alcohol, in order not to tempttheir husbands to start again. 59 Here it was not a goddess but a human sati whom thewomen called on to protect their families.

Fast-forward: In the 1990s, in Dobbagunta in Andhra Pradesh, rural women attending aliteracy class discovered that they all suffered from their husband’s addiction to arak, the localalcohol. So they launched a campaign to ban it. kx The antiliquor campaign spread across theentire state of Andhra Pradesh. This time too there was no Devi.CASTEThe Devi movement was as much about caste as about addiction. The British, as we haveseen, did little to displace caste and much to enforce it, despite the many voices raised incriticism of Hindu injustices. Eventually both the reform movement and the anti-British initiativepassed to a new English-educated Indian elite. 60THE CHAMARS AND THE SATNAMISOne Pariah caste whose polluted status was directly connected with cows was theChamars, a caste of leatherworkers who had always borne the stigma of their traditional castesva-dharma and whose contact with the carcasses of cows excluded them from Hindu temples.But the Chamars in Chattisgarh, in central India, changed their lives in ways that mirror, mutatismutandis, similar movements throughout India. The Chamars often owned their own land orworked as sharecroppers and farm servants and formed about a sixth of the local population. Butin the 1820s, according to Chamar legend, a Chamar farm servant named Ghasidas (c.1756-1836) threw the images of the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon onto a rubbishheap and rejected the authority of the Brahmins, the temples, and Hindu puja, as well as thecolonial authority. Ghasidas proclaimed belief only in the formless god without qualities(nirguna), called the True Name (satnam), thus affiliating himself with the larger sect ofSatnamis that had been founded in the eastern Punjab in 1657. Other low castes joined theSatnampanth (“Path of the True Name”). They all abstained from meat, liquor, tobacco, andcertain vegetables, generally red vegetables like tomatoes, chilies, and aubergines (well, a sort ofpurplish red), and red beans, and they used bullocks instead of cows as their farm animals. 61 Inthis way they simultaneously rejected Brahmins and took on a Brahminical, Sanskritizing,purifying set of values; they became the people they had rebelled against, replicating amongthemselves the hierarchy that had excluded them.The Satnamis developed a new mythology, based on their own oral traditions, in whichgurus replaced gods as the central figures. These myths were not written down until the late1920s, and then only by someone who probably sanitized them, appropriating them to theconcerns of a largely reformed Brahminical Hinduism. Yet the written forms did not varysignificantly from the myths later collected in the oral tradition. We have questioned thepervasiveness of the Brahmin filter for Puranic stories; it may have been equally looselyconstructed here, or, on the other hand, the revised written collection may have fed back into theSatnami oral tradition by the time those stories were collected. 62There were other filters to which the Satnami tradition was also exposed. In around 1868the evangelical missionaries began to convert some of the Satnamis to Christianity, reworkingthe Satnami oral traditions with Christian teachings and forging connections between Ghasidasand the gurus, on the one hand, and Christ and the missionaries, on the other. And, finally, themost bizarre filter of all: In the 1930s, the Satnamis constructed a new genealogy for their group,with Brahmin ancestors, drawing upon Manu, of all things, but reversing Manu’s arguments, inan attempt to persuade the provincial administration to enter the group as Hindus rather than

Harijans in official records, but still to retain the advantages accorded to what were then calledthe Scheduled Castes (now Dalits). That is, the Satnamis wished to establish their superiority toother castes within the category of Scheduled Castes, once again reproducing the hierarchy. Theadministration rejected this petition, arguing that all Harijans were Hindus in any case. 63In our day, the advantages of what Hindus call reservation (and we call affirmativeaction), such as the 1980 Mandal Commission, which reserved nearly half of all government andeducational places for the underprivileged castes (whom they called Scheduled Castes), hasstood Sanskritization on its head, leading to what we might even call Dalitification. SomeBrahmins burned themselves to death in protest over the Mandal recommendations, but theconflict between the so-called Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and (other) Scheduled Castes issometimes greater than the one between Dalits and Brahmins, as castes not particularlydisadvantaged in any way often manage to get themselves reclassified as Scheduled so as to wina share of the new opportunities. 64 In Rajasthan, the Gujars (or Gujjars), an Other BackwardCaste, clashed with the Meenas (Dalits), because the Gujars wanted a lower, Scheduled status.This was precisely the outcome that Gandhi had feared when he insisted that Harijans decline thechance of being a separate electorate. As Gary Tartakov has put it, “It was evil enough that suchracializing degradation was claimed by caste Hindus; it was worse that that is what the membersof the Schedule Castes and Tribes accepted themselves to be, if they remained Hindus.” 65The idea that the solution to the problem of the Dalits was precisely not to remain Hinduwas one of the strategies adopted by Ambedkar.UNTOUCHABLES AND DALITS, BUDDHISTS AND AMBEDKARBhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a Dalit who was one of the group who drafted theConstitution, agreed with Gandhi that Untouchability had to be stopped, but Gandhi thought youcould still keep caste, and Ambedkar said you could not. At first, Ambedkar tried to reformHinduism; he resisted movements that attempted to convert Dalits to Islam or Christianity. Thenhe reasoned that since the Hindus viewed their tradition as eternal, they regarded basic elementsof that tradition, such as class injustice and Untouchability, as eternal too and impossible toeradicate. 66 “Gandhiji,” he said, “I have no homeland. How can I call this land my ownhomeland and this religion my own wherein we are treated worse than cats and dogs, wherein wecannot get water to drink?” 67 In the end he converted to Buddhism, translating the Buddhistconcept of individual suffering (dukka) into his own awareness of social suffering, discarding agreat deal of Buddhism and inserting in its place his own doctrine of social activism. Though hehad the good sense to keep a number of Buddhist stories in his platform, one that he did not keepwas the story, so basic to the Buddhist tradition, that the future Buddha was confined within aluxurious palace until one day when he had grown up, he went outside and happened to see asick man, an old man, a dead man, and a renouncer. 68 Ambedkar objected to this story because it“does not appeal to reason” that a twenty-nine-year-old man would not have been exposed todeath by then. 69Fast-forward: In 1956 five million Dalits, led by Ambedkar, converted to Buddhism.Ambedkar was concerned that they would still be labeled Untouchables if they demanded placesreserved for affirmative action, and we have seen that this has continued to be a problem. On theother hand, he insisted that even when they became Buddhists they should retain the rights thathe had fought so hard to win for Dalits. 70 One of his converts said: “My father became aBuddhist in honor of Ambedkar but could not say so openly. I became a Buddhist too, but only

orally, because on the forms you have to write down Scheduled Caste. If you are a Buddhist, youcan’t get the scholarship. But I am proud to follow Ambedkar. Being Scheduled Caste causesinferiority in our minds. To be Buddhist, it makes me feel free!” 71 It is an irony of history thatsome Dalits nowadays favor the Aryan invasion theory, but add that they, the Dalits, were theoriginal Adivasis there in India before the Aryans rode in, making the Adivasis older in India andtherefore, by the Law of Origins, more honorable than the Aryans.On November 4, 2001, more than fifty thousand Dalits converted to Buddhism in NewDelhi. Some converted only as a protest against the mistreatment of Dalits, but otherswholeheartedly became practicing Buddhists. On October 14, 2006, the fiftieth anniversary ofthe conversion of Ambedkar, Dalits again began to convert in large numbers. As a result, theHindu Nationalist Party reclassified Buddhism and Jainism as branches of the Hindu religion, toprevent the mass conversions of the Dalits from eroding the political fabric, and several states,including Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, introduced laws requiring anyone wishing to convertto obtain official permission first. In separate rallies, not connected to the conversion ceremonies,thousands of Dalits attempted to burn the new laws. 72 In November 2006 the government banneda mass conversion rally in Nagpur that aimed at converting one million Dalits to Buddhism; theauthorities were said to be under pressure from Hindu nationalists who called the rally a“Christian conspiracy.” Defying the ban and the barricades, thousands of Dalits from acrossIndia gathered at the Ambedkar Bhawan. But Dalits continue to be oppressed, and to protest theiroppression, in India.CHAPTER 23HINDUS IN AMERICA1900 -CHRONOLOGY1863-1902 Swami Vivekananda lives1875 Helena Blavatsky founds theTheosophical Society1893 Vivekananda attends the World’s Parliament of Religions inChicago1897 Vivekananda founds the Vedanta movement in America1896-1977 A. C.Bhaktivedanta, Swami Prabhupada (founder of ISKCON), lives1918-2008 Maharishi MaheshYogi (founder of Transcendental Meditation) lives1931-1990 Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho)lives1970- Hindus in Europe, United States, and Canada start building templesDuring theChicago riots in 1968, Allen Ginsberg chanted “om” for seven hours to calm everyone down. Ata certain moment, an Indian gentleman had passed him a note telling him his pronunciation wasall wrong. 1 Deborah Baker, A Blue Hand: The Beats in IndiaThe question of the degree to which other Americans too have gotten a lot more than thepronunciation of “om” all wrong, and who is the best judge of that, is what drives this chapter.REVERSE COLONIZATIONThere are many ramifications of American imperialism in India—the devising of beeflessBig Macs, the outsourcing that guarantees an Indian accent on the line when you call to complainabout your Visa bill—but here we will concentrate on the reverse flow, the process by which

Hindus, and various forms of Hinduism, came to America and colonized it. This wascolonization not in the negative and material sense of economic and political exploitation (theold sense, in which the British colonized India), but in a new positive and intellectual sense ofmaking major contributions to American culture. We might call this reverse colonization,reversed in both direction (from rather than to India) and will (voluntary rather than coerced). Atthe same time, we must consider the more problematic ways in which Americans haveappropriated aspects of Hinduism, new ways that retain the bad odor of the old Raj colonization.POSH AND PUKKA AMERICAN HINDUSAmerican Hindus constitute yet another of the many alternative voices of Hindus. Theyare an important presence in America, where, in 2004, there were 1,478,670 Hindus (0.5 percentof the total population); and in a land where over a quarter of the population has left the religionof its birth, some of them to take on forms of Hinduism, Hindus convert from their religion lessthan any other religious group and are the best educated and among the richest religious groups(according to one survey). 2 There are more than two hundred Hindu temples in America,three-quarters of them built in the past three decades. In Lilburn, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia,one of the fastest-growing South Asian communities in the United States raised more thannineteen million dollars to build one of the largest Hindu temples in the world, where about sixthousand worshipers come on festival days. Called the Swaminarayan Mandir (the New YorkTimes article about the temple defined mandir, the Sanskrit word for “temple,” as “a Sanskritword for the place where the mind becomes still and the soul floats freely”), it was modeled on atemple not in India but in London, Raj inspired and already one remove from the mothercountry. 3 Long before they came to our shores in large numbers, Hindus contributed many thingsto American culture, beginning with the very words we speak, some of them transmitted to usthrough Anglo-Indian words that entered the English dictionary in the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies. An alphabetical list of just a few of such words conjures up a vivid scene: bungalow,calico, candy, cash, catamaran, cheroot, curry, gymkhana, jodhpur, juggernaut, loot, madras,mango, mogul, moola (British slang for “money,” ultimately from the Sanskrit mula, “root,” asin “root of all evil”), mosquito, mulligatawny, pajama, Pariah, posh, ky pukka, kz punch, ‡ pundit,thug, tourmaline, veranda—why, any writer worth her salt could turn that list into a film script inan hour (“After he lights his cheroot on the veranda of the bungalow, and changes from pukkajodhpurs to posh pajamas . . .”). More recently, words about religion rather than “loot” and“moola” have entered through American rather than British sources, such as dharma from JackKerouac’s The Dharma Bums (more Buddhist than Hindu) as well as yoga and tantra, guru andashram, and above all, karma.INTERRELIGIOUS INTERACTIONS IN CHICAGOWe can trace the path of Hindu religious movements more precisely than that of thewords; the movements entered through Chicago.In 1890 an amateur magician published, in the Chicago Daily Tribune, a story that put anew twist on the sort of magic trick that had been practiced in India, and reported by gulliblevisitors to India, for many centuries. 4 Two men, one named Fred S. Ellmore, claimed to havewitnessed this scene:A fakir drew from under his knee a ball of gray twine. Taking the loose end between his teeth he,with a quick upward motion, tossed the ball into the air. Instead of coming back to him it kept on

going up and up until out of sight and there remained only the long swaying end. . . . [A] boyabout six years old . . . walked over to the twine and began climbing it. . . . The boy disappearedwhen he had reached a point thirty or forty feet from the ground. . . . A moment later the twinedisappeared. 5 The two witnesses sketched it (there was the boy on the rope), photographed it(no boy, no rope), and exposed the trick: “Mr. Fakir had simply hypnotized the entire crowd, buthe couldn’t hypnotize the camera.” The story was much retold until, four months later, thenewspaper admitted that it had all been a hoax; the author (John Elbert Wilkie) had made upeverything, including the telltale name of Fred Sell-more (get it?). And that was the origin of theIndian rope trick—which turns out to have been not Indian, or a rope (twine), or a trick (since itdidn’t happen).Then, in 1893, the World’s Parliament of Religions brought Vedanta to Chicago. Amongthe people who attended the event was Swami Vivekananda (1862-1902), a disciple ofRamakrishna Paramahamsa (1834-1886). Ramakrishna, a devotee of Kali at the Temple ofDakshineshvar, north of Kolkata (Calcutta), was a member of neither the Brahmo Samaj (whichwas represented by B. B. Nagarkar at the World’s Parliament) nor the Arya Samaj but attracted adifferent sort of educated lay follower. His studies and visions had led him to conclude that “allreligions are true” but that the religion of each person’s own time and place was the bestexpression of the truth for that person. And his respect for ordinary religious rituals gaveeducated Hindus a basis on which they could justify the less philosophical aspects of theirreligion to an Indian consciousness increasingly influenced by Western values. 6Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s disciple, was the first in a long line of proselytizing guruswho exported the ideals of reformed Hinduism to foreign soil and, in turn, brought backAmerican ideas that they infused into Indian Vedanta. Influenced by progressive Westernpolitical ideas, Vivekananda set himself firmly against all forms of caste distinction and advisedpeople to eat beef. 7la He made a powerful impression at the World’s Parliament of Religions inChicago and returned to India in 1897 with a small band of Western disciples. There he foundedthe Ramakrishna Mission, whose branches proclaimed its version of Hinduism in many parts ofthe world. Other Hindu or quasi-Hindu movements also began to thrive in America. BeforeVivekananda, Helena Blavatsky, a Russian, had founded the Theosophical Society in New YorkCity in 1875; after she had journeyed to India in 1879, she set up her headquarters at Adyar, nearMadras, and from there she and her followers, incorporating aspects of Hinduism into theirdoctrines, established branches in many cities of India. But the activities of the now VedanticizedTheosophical Society in the United States began only after Vivekananda had paved the way, andit prospered under the leadership of Annie Besant (1847-1933), who founded Theosophicallodges in Europe and the United States.A second wave of Hindu imports began in the second half of the twentieth century, theage of the Hindu Hippie Heaven. In 1965, in Los Angeles, A. C. Bhaktivedanta (Prabhupada)founded the Hare Krishna movement, officially known as the International Society for KrishnaConsciousness (ISKCON) and tracing its lineage back to Chaitanya. In 1974 followers of SwamiMuktananda established the Siddha Yoga Dharma Associates (SYDA) Foundation, teachingtheir version of Kashmir Shaivism. In 1981, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later Osho) moved hisheadquarters from Poona (later Pune) to Oregon. Shri Shri Ravishankar, Mother Meera,Amritanandamayi Ma, Shri Karunamayi Ma, Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj, Shri Ma—all these(and many more) have routinely visited the United States, many of them since the eighties, andseveral of them women. Amritanandamayi Ma, known to her followers as Amma (“Mother”),came from Kerala to the world (arriving in the United States in 1987) and specialized in Vedanta

and hugs; from fifteen hundred to nine thousand people attend her programs in the United States(closer to thirty thousand or forty thousand in India). 8 Amma was one of the speakers at the 1993World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago.In 1999, a century and a bit after the first World’s Parliament of Religions, Chicago cityofficials placed 340 life-size cow statues along city streets. The cows, which had nothing to dowith Hinduism (their referents were the [bullish] stock market and the stockyards), were a hugesuccess. They brought Chicago $200 million in additional tourist revenue and $3.5 million forlocal charities from the auction of the cows when the exhibition ended. Other cities jumped onthe animal bandwagon. New York copied the cow idea, working with a Connecticut company,CowParade, which imported the concept from Zurich, where it had originated. Cincinnaticommissioned pigs, and Lexington, Kentucky (home of the Derby), went for horses. 9 But duringthat summer, Chicago was like Calcutta, in this regard at least; everywhere you turned, you met acow.A VIRTUAL INDIA IN AMERICAAmerica often becomes India in other ways too. Sometimes Hindus in America reworklocal topography, so that the three rivers in Pittsburgh become the Ganges, Yamuna, andSarasvati, just as South Indian kings had declared that the Kaveri River was the Ganges. Nowsome have devised a practice of religious outsourcing that lets them bypass American Hinduismentirely, by conducting their worship lives (virtually) in India. The Internet enables them to be intwo places at once, a technique that Hindus perfected centuries ago (recall Krishna present toeach of the Gopis at the same time, in different places). If you are a Hindu in America, it is nowpossible for you to make an offering on the banks of the Ganges without leaving Atlanta orwherever you are; you pay someone else in India to do it for you. (This too is an old Indian trick,a form of transferred merit or karma; recall the Hindu satire on the “Buddhist” satire on theHindu argument that “if the oblation to the ancestors that is eaten by one man satisfies another,then people traveling abroad need not take the trouble to carry food.”) One Web site that offersthis service is shrikashivishwanath.org; another is www.webdunia.com/kumbhuinfo (written inHindi and run by the government of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh); yet another, bangalinetcom/epuja.htm, bills itself as “a home away from home.” Eprathana.com will send someone toany temples you choose, and most of them are small local temples, suggesting that people farfrom home miss the little shrine at the end of the street as much as they miss the big pilgrimagetemples.When you log on to some of these Web sites, you can view various puja options, forwhich you can register online and pay. For instance, you can perform a “virtual puja,” a cartoonpuja in which you burn electronic incense and crack open a virtual coconut. If you are unable tomake it to the Ganges River for the great festival of the Kumbh Mela or just for the dailyabsolution of cumulative misdeeds, you log on, fill out a questionnaire (caste, gender, color,body type—slim or portly—and choice of auspicious days), and attach a passport-size photo. Onthe selected date, you can go to the Web site to see virtual representations of yourself (yourphoto superimposed on a body chosen to match what you described in the questionnaire) beingcleansed in an animated image of the Ganges River. At the same time, someone who is actually(nonvirtually) there at the river dips your actual photo in the actual (nonvirtual) river, which iswhat makes the ritual work; it can’t all be done by mirrors. 10 Recall the Chola and Rashtrakutakings who brought real Ganges water south to their temples. Here the worshiper is transported,photographically and electronically, to India in order to make contact with the real river.

Thus American Hindus, despite building grandiose temples here, need not replace thetraditional sacred places of Hindu ritual practice with new ones in America. “The reach of thelocal” is extended by new media that allow ritual observance to center on those locales even at adistance. You can have prasad (the leftovers from the gods’ meal in the temple) delivered to you,in America, from an Indian temple, by courtesy of the Indian postal services. You can hire aBrahmin priest to perform a special sacrifice for you in Varanasi (see www.bhawnayagya.org).You can even have access to the real goddess Kali, the Indian Kali, at Kali Ghat in Kolkata,virtually.THE AMERICAN APPROPRIATION OF THE GITA AND THE GODDESSKALIBut Kali is here too and so is Krishna.When J. Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the explosion of the first atomic bomb at LosAlamos, on July 16, 1945, he realized that he was part of the myth of doomsday but not his ownJewish doomsday. (The remarks of others present on that occasion, such as General Thomas F.Farrell, also tended to employ mythical and theological eschatological language, but from theAbrahamic traditions.) Oppenheimer, who liked to think that he knew some Sanskrit, and whohad a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in his pocket at Los Alamos, said that as he watched the bombgo off, he recalled the verse in the Sanskrit text of the Bhagavad Gita in which the god Krishnareveals himself as the supreme lord, blazing like a thousand suns. Later, however, when he sawthe sinister clouds gathering in the distance, he recalled another verse, in which Krishna revealsthat he is death, the destroyer of worlds. Perhaps Oppenheimer’s inability to face his own shockand guilt directly, the full realization and acknowledgment of what he had helped create, led himto distance the experience by viewing it in terms of someone else’s myth of doomsday, as if tosay: “This is some weird Hindu sort of doomsday, nothing we Judeo-Christian types everimagined.” He switched to Hinduism when he saw how awful the bomb was and that it wasgoing to be used on the Japanese, not on the Nazis, as had been intended. Perhaps he movedsubconsciously to Orientalism when he realized that it was “Orientals” (Japanese) who weregoing to suffer.Oppenheimer was one of the last generation of Americans for whom the Gita (flanked bythe Upanishads and other Vedantic works) was the central text of Hinduism, as it had been forEmerson, Thoreau, and other transcendentalists of the nineteenth century. For later generations,it was the goddess Kali (flanked by various forms of Tantra) that represented Hinduism. Kalibecame a veritable archetype for many Jungian, feminist, and New Age writers; Allen Ginsbergdepicted Kali as the Statue of Liberty, her neck adorned with the martyred heads of Julius andEthel Rosenberg. 11 (Paul Engle later said, simultaneously insulting both India and Ginsberg: “Hesucceeded in doing the heretofore utterly impossible—bringing dirt to India.” 12 )Soon the goddess Kali became a major Hollywood star. Her career took off with the filmGunga Din (1939), in which Sam Jaffe played the title role (Reginald Sheffield played RudyardKipling lb ), with Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., buckling their swashes against Kali’sdastardly Thug worshipers, led by Eduardo Ciannelli, who usually played Chicago gangsters.(The film begins with a solemn statement: “The portions of this film dealing with the goddessKali are based on historical fact.”) The 1965 Beatles film Help! included a satire on Gunga Din,with an attempted human sacrifice to an eight-armed Kali-like goddess. lc Kali also appeared inThe Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and TheDeceivers (1988), starring Pierce Brosnan as Captain Savage, who ends up converting to the

worship of a particularly violent and erotic form of the goddess as queen of the Thugs. 13Kali made her mark in American literature too, if literature is the word I want. RogerZelazny’s Lord of Light (1967) was a sci-fi novel based on Hindu myths and peopled by Hindugods, including Kali. Leo Giroux’s The Rishi (1986) was a lurid novelization of ColonelSleeman’s already insanely lurid Rambles and Recollections (1844), updated to Cambridge,Massachusetts, in 1975; gruesome garrotings are carried out ritually at Harvard and MIT, where“a beautiful half-Indian girl is tormented by visions that urge her to participate in the mostunspeakable rites,” as the jacket blurb promises us. Claudia McKay’s The Kali Connection(1994) describes an intimate relationship between two women, a reporter and a member of “amysterious Eastern cult.” In Forever Odd by Dean Koontz (2005), the villainess, named after thepoisonous plant datura, is “a tough, violent phone-sex babe, crazy as a mad cow,” “a murderoussuccubus,” and a living incarnation of Kali (“the many-armed Hindu death goddess”). In a storytitled “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990),which really is literature, when a nice American girl gets caught up with U.S. commandos inVietnam, she is seen wearing around her throat an icon of Kali: “a necklace of human tongues.Elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a lengthof copper wire, one overlapping the next, the tips curled upward as if caught in a final shrillsyllable.” 14 Other manifestations of Kali followed apace, further still from the spirit of Hinduism,such as a lunch box on which Kali dances, her lolling tongue suggesting her eagerness to get atthe box’s contents.Particularly offensive are the many porn stars who have taken the name of Kali,presumably in vain. One, who admitted that she based her sexual therapy on Masters andJohnson, still claimed that it was Tantric because, she explained helpfully, “Tantra is a Sanskritword that means expansion of consciousness and liberation of energy. It is about becoming moreconscious and when applied in love-making deepens intimacy, intensity and orgasmic orgiasticexperience heading in the direction of full body orgasmic feeling.” 15 So now you know. Anotherself-proclaimed Hindu goddess appears on her Web site (which gives new meaning to “.org”)dressed as Kali, with sex toys and bondage gear in her many hands. 16 The upscale Britishsuperstore Harrods stopped the sale of bikini underwear bearing images of Hindu goddesses(some of it allegedly with Shiva on the crotch) but apologized only after Hindu Human Rights, agroup that says it “safeguards the religion and its followers,” lodged a formal protest. Anotherdepartment store had to apologize for selling toilet seats with images of a Hindu deity, and athird for selling slippers with Hindu symbols. An article reporting on these complaints remarked,“A number of designers have been attracted by the richness of Hindu iconography and the fad forexotic ethnic patterns.” 17Hindu Human Rights also protested against a musical film that the Muslim filmmakerIsmail Merchant was making in 2004, called The Goddess, in which the rock singer Tina Turner(allegedly a Buddhist) was to play the role of the goddess Kali (or, according to some reports,Shakti). Merchant and Turner traveled to India to visit a host of holy cities and were blessed by aHindu priest, and Merchant insisted that, “contrary to the accusations, “nobody is going to singand dance on the back of a tiger. The Goddess is not going to be half naked or a sex symbol.”(He also insisted that the goddess in his film was not just Kali but “Shakti, the universal feminineenergy, which is manifest in Kali, Durga, Mother Mary, Wicca, and each and every woman onthe planet.”) We will never know; Merchant died in May 2005 and apparently didn’t finish thefilm. Nor did Stanley Kubrick live to finish Eyes Wide Shut (1991), which aroused the wrath ofthe American Hindus Against Defamation because the orgy scene in it was accompanied by the

chanting of passages from—what else but the Bhagavad Gita? Surely the deaths of the two filmdirectors was a coincidence?Clearly the non-Hindu American image of Kali and other goddesses is very differentfrom her image among Hindus in India.TWISTED IN TRANSLATION: AMERICAN VERSIONS OF HINDUISMNor are the goddesses the only Hindu deities appropriated in this way. In Paul Theroux’sThe Elephanta Suite (2007), a shrine to the monkey god Hanuman displaces a Muslim mosque(an inversion of the alleged displacement of a temple to Rama under the mosque at Ayodhya).Hanuman goes to Manhattan in a forthcoming film in which he helps the FBI battle terrorists.“Hanuman is the original superhero. He is thousands of years older than Superman, Spider-Manand Batman. He is a brand to reckon with among Indian children today,” said Nadish Bhatia,general manager of marketing at the Percept Picture Company, which coproduced The Return ofHanuman. He continued: “Every society is looking for heroes, and we want to make Hanumanglobal. . . . If the Coca-Cola brand can come to India and connect with our sensibilities, whycan’t Hanuman go to New York?” 18 Why not indeed?Sita too has come to New York (and points west). In 2005, Nina Paley (an Americanwoman previously married to a man from Kerala who left her), created an animated film calledSitayana (www.sitasingstheblues.com), billed as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told” andset to the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. The episode titled “Trial by Fire” isaccompanied by the words of the song “Mean to Me” (“Why must you be mean to me? You loveto see me cryin’ . . .”). Rama lights the fire and kicks Sita into it; she comes out of the fire; helooks puzzled, then sad, then goes down on one knee in supplication; she calls him “dear” (andyou see the golden deer) and jumps into his arms. In Alfonso Cuarón’s 1995 remake of A LittlePrincess, the young heroine tells the story of the Ramayana, in which Sita sees a wounded deerand asks Rama to go and help it . . . not kill it!Mainstream or counterculture, once Hindu gods had become household words inAmerica, it was open season on them; anyone could say anything at all. Sometimes it takes avery nasty turn: In Pat Robertson’s evangelical novel, The End of the Age (1995), the Antichristis possessed by Shiva, has the president murdered by a venomous cobra, becomes presidenthimself, and forces everyone to worship Shiva and thus to be possessed by demons. More often itis just stupid. An ad proclaims, “Many people worship the Buddha. Many people worshipchocolate. Now you can do both at the same time.” Another advertises “the Food of the Gods:The Chocolate Gods and Chocolate Goddesses . . . Fine Quality Gourmet Handmade Chocolatesthat celebrate those gods and goddesses of love and luxury, joy and happiness, compassion,peace and serenity, healing, and fertility of the body and imagination.” It was only a matter oftime before someone made “Kamasutra Chocolates,” replicating the mating couples depicted onthe temples at Khajuraho. Even the folksy Ben & Jerry’s made a Karamel Sutra ice cream.The Kama-sutra in general has been the occasion for a great deal of lustful marketing andmisrepresentation; most people, both Americans and Hindus (particularly those Hindusinfluenced by British and/or American ideas about Hinduism), think that the Kama-sutra isnothing but a dirty book about “the positions.” Since there is no trademarked “Kama-sutra” thetitle is used for a wide array of products. Kama-sutra is the name of a wristwatch that displays adifferent position every hour. The Red Envelope company advertises a “Kama Sutra PleasureBox” and “Kama Sutra Weekender Kit,” collections of oils and creams packaged in containersdecorated with quasi-Hindu paintings of embracing couples. A cartoon depicts “The Kamasutra

Relaxasizer Lounger, 165 positions.” (A salesman is saying to a customer, “Most people just buyit to get the catalogue.” 19 ) There are numerous books of erotic paintings and/or sculptures titledIllustrated Kama-sutras and cartoon Kama-sutras, in one of which the god Shiva plays a centralrole. 20 The Palm Pilot company made available a Pocket Sutra, “The Kama Sutra in the palm ofyour hand,” consisting of a very loose translation of parts of the text dealing with the positions.A book titled The Pop Up Kama Sutra (2003) failed to take full advantage of the possibilities ofthis genre; the whole couple pops up. In 2000, the Onion, a satirical newspaper, ran a piece abouta couple whose “inability to execute The Totally Auspicious Position along with countless otherancient Indian erotic positions took them to new heights of sexual dissatisfaction. . . . Sue wasunable to clench her Yoni (vagina) tightly enough around Harold’s Linga and fell off ...” 21Another satire proposes “a Kama Sutra that is in line with a postpatriarchal, postcolonial,postgender, and perhaps even postcoital world.” 22 Kama Sutra: The Musical 23 is the story of asexually frustrated young couple whose lust life is revitalized by the mysterious arrival of theeighteen-hundred-year-old creator of the Kama Sutra, Swami Comonawannagetonya. The swamireveals to them the titillating secrets that allow any couple to experience all the joys of a totallyfulfilling sex life.“Karma,” which Americans often confuse with kama (watch your rs!), lost most of itsmeaning in its American avatar (if “avatar” is the word I want; “avatar” has been taken up bycomputer text messaging, designating the cartoon caricatures of themselves that people use toidentify their virtual personae in cyberspace 24 ). Take the 1972 Last Whole Earth Catalog: “[T]the karma is a little slower when you’re not stoned, but it’s the same karma and it works thesame way.” A United Way billboard: “Giving is good karma.” And a voluntary organizationcalled getgoodkarma.org welcomes you to Karmalot (get it?), gives you a simplified and entirelynon-Hindu version of “what goes around comes around,” and signs you up. Other Hindu termstoo have become distorted past recognition. In the film Network (1976), the character played byPeter Finch, gone stark raving mad, says, “I’m hooked to some great unseen force, what I thinkthe Hindus call Prana.” In Michael Clayton (2007), both the whistle-blower lawyer, when hegoes crazy, and Michael Clayton (George Clooney), when he is triumphant, shout, out of theblue, “I’m Shiva, the god of death!” High Sierra markets an Ahimsa Yoga Pack, to go with itsAnanda Yoga Duffel. And now there is the American version of Laughter Yoga, which“combines simple laughter exercises and gentle yoga breathing to enhance health andhappiness.” 25 There’s an energy drink called Guru. There’s a movement to make yoga anOlympic sport.AMERICAN TANTRAPerhaps the greatest distortions occur in the takeover of Tantra, which has become anOrientalist wet dream. The belief that the Tantras are in any way hedonistic or evenpornographic, though a belief shared by many Hindus as well as by some Euro-Americans, is notjustified; the Upanishads and Puranas—not to mention the Kama-sutra—have far more respectfor pleasure of all kinds, including sexual pleasure, than do the Tantras. The ceremonialcircumstances under which the Tantric sexual ritual took place make it the furthest thingimaginable from the exotic roll in the hay that it is so often, and so simplistically, assumed to be.Yet many people call the Kama-sutra, or even The Joy of Sex, Tantric. Some (American) Tantricscholars feel that, like Brahmins, they will be polluted by the Dalit types who sensationalizeHinduism, and so, in order to make a sharp distinction between the two castes of Americans whowrite about Hindus, they censure the sensationalizers even more severely than the revisionist

Hindus do. Some have excoriated others who have “cobbled together the pathetic hybrid of NewAge ‘Tantric sex,’ ” who “blend together Indian erotics, erotic art, techniques of massage,Ayurveda, and yoga into a single invented tradition,” creating a “funhouse mirror world ofmodern-day Tantra” that is to Indian Tantra what finger-painting is to art. 26Does it make it any better, or even worse, that this sort of Tantra is often marketed byIndian practitioners and gurus? For many Indian gurus take their ideas from American scholarsof Tantra and sell them to American disciples who thirst for initiation into the mysteries of theEast. Here is what might be termed an inverted pizza effect, in which native categories aredistorted by nonnative perceptions of them (as pizza, once merely a Neapolitan specialty,became popular throughout Italy in response to the American passion for pizza). The Americanmisappropriation of Indian Tantra (and, to a lesser extent, yoga) has been reappropriated byIndia, adding insult to injury.In an earlier age, the native sanitizing tendency was exacerbated by the superimpositionof a distorted European image of Tantra—namely, “the sensationalist productions of Christianmissionaries and colonial administrators, who portrayed Tantra as little more than a congeries ofsexual perversions and abominations.” 27 In their attempts to defend Tantra from this sort ofOrientalist attack, early-twentieth-century Tantric scholar-practitioners, both Hindu andnon-Hindu, emphasized the metaphorical level of Tantra, which then became dominant both inHindu self-perception and in the European appreciation of Tantra. This school was made famous,indeed notorious, by Arthur Avalon, aka Sir John Woodroffe (1865-1936) and, later, byAgehananda Bharati, aka Leopold Fischer (1923-1991).Today, too, many scholars both within and without Hinduism insist that the literal levelof Tantra (actually drinking the substances) never existed, that Tantra has always been ameditation technique. Indeed we can take the repercussions back several generations and arguethat the revisionist Hindu hermeneutic tradition that was favored by Hindus educated in theBritish tradition since the nineteenth century and prevails in India today began in eleventhcentury Kashmir, when a major dichotomy took place between the ritual and mythologicalaspects of Tantra. For Abhinavagupta’s version of Tantra was pitched at a leisured Kashmiriclass “arguably homologous to the demographics of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century NewAge seekers.” 28 Moreover, the “no sex, we’re meditating” right-hand brand of Tantra that firstcaught the European eye turned upside down to become the new left-hand brand of Tantra: “Nomeditating, we’re having Tantric sex.” As this movement is centered in California (into which,as Frank Lloyd Wright once remarked, everything on earth that is not nailed down eventuallyslides), we might call it the Californication ld of Tantra.Thus a major conflict between Hindu and non-Hindu constructions of Hinduism inAmerica operates along the very same fault line that has characterized the major tension withinHinduism for two and a half millennia: worldly versus nonworldly religion, reduced to Tantraversus Vedanta.HINDU RESPONSES TO THE AMERICANIZATION OF HINDUISMNot surprisingly, the sensibilities of many Hindus living in America have been trampledinto the dust by the marketing of Tantra and other aspects of Hinduism. Web sites and Internetcontacts make Hindus in America an often united (though still very diverse) cultural and politicalpresence, which has developed an increasingly active voice in the movement to control theimage of Hinduism that is projected in America, particularly in high school textbooks but also inother publications by non-Hindu scholars and in more general popular imagery. The objections

include quite reasonable protests against the overemphasis on the caste system, the oppression ofwomen, and the worship of “sacred cows,” as well as the unreasonable demand that thetextbooks be altered to include such patently incorrect statements as that suttee was a Muslimpractice imported into India or that the caste system has never really existed. 29American Hindus have tried to challenge and correct what they perceive, often correctly,to be the inaccuracies and exaggerations of Hinduism in American popular culture. In February1999, when Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001) aired its “The Way” episode, with guestappearances by both Krishna and Kali, complaints poured in about subjects ranging from thelesbian subtext of the show to the very fact that a television program could portray a Hindu deityas fictional at all. The episode was pulled, revised, and then reissued within six months, this timewith a public announcement to appease those who had been offended. 30It is useful to sort out three different sorts of Hindu objections to the Americanappropriation of Hinduism:1. Americans have gotten Kali and Tantra all wrong.2. Even when they get Kali and Tantra right,they are wrong, because they have gotten hold of the Wrong Sort of Hinduism; they should havewritten about the Bhagavad Gita and Vedantic philosophy.3. Even when Americans write aboutthe Gita, they are desecrating and exploiting Hinduism, because only Hindus have a right to talkabout Hinduism. There is some truth, and some falsehood, in the first of these assertions,and mostly falsehood in the second and third.As for the first—that Americans have gotten Kali and Tantra all wrong le —if we learnnothing else from the history of Hinduism, we learn that there is seemingly no limit to thevariations that Hindus have rung on every aspect of their religion. Authenticity is therefore adifficult concept to apply to any representation of Hinduism, and some of the most outlandishaspects of California Tantra, for instance, closely mirror the antinomianism of medieval IndianTantra. Yet Hindus throughout Indian history have made the subjective judgment that some(other) Hindus go too far, and it is hard to resist that judgment when confronting much of theAmericanization of Hinduism, not to mention the more grotesque misconstructions made bypeople who have no commitment to any form of Hinduism but simply pick up pieces of themythology or art and use them for purposes that are, at best, crassly commercial and, at worst,obscene. Hindus too are capable of desecrating Hinduism. In the Bollywood film God OnlyKnows (2004), in which characters speak a bastardized mix of Hindi and English, with (ofteninaccurate) English subtitles for the English as well as the Hindi, a fake guru goes up to a red firehydrant with white trim, watches a dog urinate on it (recall the meaning of dogs in Hinduism),sits down beside it, and puts a garland on it, making it into a Shiva linga of the “self-created”genre; people immediately sit down and start worshiping it. I should think that many Hindusfound this scene offensive.The second objection—that America has taken up the Wrong Sort of Hinduism—also hasroots in history. We have seen that Hinduism in America began, in the nineteenth century, with aphilosophical, colonially venerated (if not generated) Vedanta and Gita but was thensupplemented, in the mid-twentieth century, by a second phase of Hinduism, a transgressive,counterculture- catalyzed Kali and Tantra, brokered by megagurus (like Rajneesh) whose broadappeal was built largely on their exotic teachings and charismatic presence. Now the pendulum isswinging back again in a third phase, as many Hindus nowadays wish to go back to that firstappropriation, or, rather, to an even more ultra-conservative, often fundamentalist form of Hindudevotional monotheism(though socially they may be more liberal than their parents; women, forinstance, play a far more important role in the management of temples in America than they

would be allowed to have in most of India).The latest generation of Hindu immigrants to America have the same sort of traditionaland conservative forms of practice and belief that the Indian immigrants in the sixties andseventies, indeed most immigrant communities, had, as well as the same goals: financialstability, education, acculturation, and the preservation of their traditions in some form. 31 Now,however, they have the generational stability and financial backing to voice their opinionsforcefully and publicly. Moreover, cut off as they are from the full range of Hindus andHinduisms that they would experience in India, American-born Hindus are more susceptible tothe narrow presentation of Hinduism offered by their relatives and friends. 32Unfortunately, the features of Kali and Tantra that most American devotees embrace andcelebrate are often precisely the aspects that the Hindu tradition has tried, for centuries, to tonedown, domesticate, deny, or censor actively, 33 the polytheistic, magical, fertile, erotic, andviolent aspects. American intellectuals and devotees generally turn to Hinduism for theologicalsystems, charismatic figures, and psychophysical practices unavailable in their own traditions,Jewish and Christian traditions that already have, heaven knows, far more boring, monotheistic,rationalizing fundamentalism, as well as violence, than anyone could possibly want. 34 But thisWrong Sort of Hinduism that the generally middle-class and upper-class spokespersons of thepresent generation condemn has been, throughout the history of Hinduism, and remains every bitas real to many Hindus—particularly but not only only lower-class Hindus and villagers—as anyother.This brings us to the third objection, which is that even when Americans do get Hinduismright, they desecrate and exploit it when they write about it, merely by virtue of being Americansrather than Hindus. This string of assumptions provides a kind of corollary to the first option(that Americans get it wrong). The same words about Hinduism that might be acceptable in themouth of a Hindu would not be acceptable coming from an American, just as African Americanscan use the n word in ways that no white person would dare do, and Jews can tell anti-Semiticjokes that they would be very angry indeed to hear from goyim. On the other hand, for Hinduscaught up in identity politics, both in America and in India, a Hindu who makes a “wrong”interpretation of Hinduism is even more offensive (because a traitor to his or her own people)than a non-Hindu making the same interpretation. lf You’re damned if you aren’t and damned ifyou are.As an American who writes about Hinduism, I am clearly opposed to this third objection,the exclusion of non-Hindus from the study of Hinduism, for reasons that I have already stated. Iappreciate the hypersensitivity to exploitation and powerlessness lg that is the inevitable aftermathof colonialism, but I believe that one cannot exploit texts and stories in the same way that oneexploits people (or textiles or land or precious gems)—or horses.The beautiful Marwari horses (and the closely related Kathiawars), with their uniquelycurved ears, were bred under the Mughals. After independence, thousands of Marwari horseswere shot, castrated, or consigned to hard labor as draft animals. Since only Kshatriyas couldown or ride them, Marwaris, like so many horses in Indian history, had become a hated symbolof feudalism and oppressive social divisions. But eventually the Indigenous Horse Society ofIndia and the Marwar Horse Society were established and took measures to define the breed andpreserve it, making it available to middle-class, as well as royal, breeders.Without leaving India, the Marwari horses became American movie stars, and theyprovide a rule-of-ear clue to determine whether a Hollywood film about India was shot inRajasthan or in the deserts of Lone Pine, California (two hundred miles north of L.A.), for if the

horses in the film have those curved ears, the film was shot in India. But Marwari horses nowlive also in the United States, where there has been, since 2000, a Marwari stud inChappaquiddick, Massachusetts, reversing the age-old current of the importing of horses intoIndia. 35 There is an element of colonial manipulation here, for Euro-American ideas of breeding,and standards of equine beauty, influenced the choice of horses that were registered as pureMarwaris in India, and if, as seems possible, the best ones are exported, for extravagant prices, toAmerica, the breed in India will be diminished.I believe that stories, unlike horses, and like bhakti in the late Puranic tradition, constitutea world of unlimited good, an infinitely expansible source of meaning. An American who retellsa Hindu story does not diminish that story within the Hindu world, even to the arguable extentthat taking a Hindu statue from Chennai to New York, or an Indian horse from Kathiawar toChappaquiddick, diminishes the heritage of India. On the contrary, I believe that the wildmisconceptions that most Americans have of Hinduism need to be counteracted precisely bymaking Americans aware of the richness and human depth of Hindu texts and practices, and anAmerican interlocutor is often the best person to build that bridge. Hence this book.CHAPTER 24THE PAST IN THE PRESENT1950 -One day, sitting in the Adi-Dravida street, I tackled a group of olderPallars on the subjects of death, duty, destiny and rebirth of the soul.In my inadequate Tamil, I asked them where they thought the soulwent after death. . . . The group collapsed in merriment—perhaps asmuch at my speech as at the question. Wiping his eyes, the old manreplied, “Mother, we don’t know! Do you know? Have you beenthere?” I said, “No, but Brahmans say that if people do their dutywell in this life, their souls will be born next time in a higher caste.”“Brahmans say!” scoffed another elder, “Brahmans say anything.Their heads go round and round!” Kathleen Gough, in 1960, writing about the Pallars,a caste of Adi-Dravidas (“Original Dravidians”),a South Indian term for formerly Untouchablecastes known elsewhere as Dalits 1The subtitle of this chapter might be “Whatever Happened to . . . the Veda, theRamayana?” Where the previous chapter traced the historical background of the politicalsituation of Hindus in contemporary America, this chapter considers the relevance of history tothe political situation of Hindus in present-day India. It demonstrates how alive the past is inpresent-day India, how contemporary events rebound off the wall of the past. We have noted,throughout, the intertextual links, the way that stories told in the Vedas and Brahmanas areretold, with variations, in the Mahabharata, and the Puranas, and vernacular traditions. Theheads of the Brahmins “go round and round” as the meanings of the ancient texts are ignored, orinverted, or, in some cases, followed to the letter. And the diversity of Hinduism extends also tothe diversity of the ways in which the past is used in the present.

I’ve taken the contemporary instances not in any logical order but following thechronological order of the historical periods described in some (though not all) of the previouschapters, beginning with the Vedas; in all other ways, they are in a random sequence. There is noconsistent direction in which events from the ancient past exert their intense influence on thepresent moment. In some cases there is a transformation; the ancient myth or ritual takes onentirely new meanings or even new forms in the present. In other cases the past clings to itsancient, sometimes now incomprehensible or clearly irrelevant form and resists any change.Women and Dalits gain new powers but are still in many cases shackled to ancient, repressiveforms, just as Hinduism in the contemporary period simultaneously reaches out to a newinclusiveness and new possibilities of equality for those who were oppressed in the past, whileHindu nationalists grow in their power to oppose that very inclusiveness. The new myths ofwomen and Dalits may be unearthings or reworkings of ancient tales that were never preservedor entirely new creations, born of the events of our time.THE RIG VEDA REVISITED AND REVISIONEDBLOODLESS SACRIFICESThe Veda lives on in revisions of the sacrifice. Although a living animal was suffocatedin the Vedic sacrifice, in some cases rice cakes were already substituted for the animal victim.The irony is that now throughout India generally only the lower castes perform animal sacrifices(as the Vedic people did), while Brahmins perform vegetarian versions of Vedic sacrifices, oftennot just for the reasons that we have noted but also precisely in order to distinguish theirsacrifices from the village buffalo sacrifice or chicken offered to the goddess—rites, associatedwith “carnivorous low castes,” that they regard as “popular” and “barbaric.” 2 Privatelyperformed sacrifices may include real animals, while publicly sponsored sacrifices are less likelyto do so. 3 But the flesh-eating Vedic god may still cast his shadow on the vegetarian sacrifice;the whole coconuts that the deity fancies bear a suspicious resemblance to human heads (aresemblance that is sometimes explicitly mentioned in the accompanying liturgy and in mythsabout human sacrifice).The Brahmin priest often sacrifices a goat made of dough and papier-mâché, as Madhvaadvised his followers to do, and several ritual texts allow. 4 In Kerala, Nambuduri Brahmins userice wrapped in a banana leaf. 5 Often the rice cakes that are used in place of the goat are wrappedin leaves, tied to little leashes, and carefully “suffocated” before they are offered. At some somasacrifices, pots of ghee are substituted for the animals. A Vedic ritual in Maharashtra in 1992was largely transformed into a puja, with a strongly Arya Samaj flavor; the sponsor was theguru, taking darshan before the image of the god, but a famous Muslim sitar player performedthe music. 6 And when a Vedic sacrifice was performed in London in 1996, there was not even avegetable substitute for the sacrificial beast; the beasts were “entirely imagined.” The priestdidn’t walk around the imaginary victims or tie them to a (real or imaginary) stake, as one woulddo with a live animal, but he did mime suffocating them and sprinkled water where they shouldhave been. In place of the omentum (which the sacrificier usually smells but does not eat), theyused the large wheat rolls called rotis. 7 The transformation of a real ritual into an imagined ritualechoes a process that we have noted in the history of Tantra.In the combinatory form of Hinduism that remains a basic format in India to the presentday, the two forms of sacrifice may be performed together. When a Vedic sacrifice wasperformed in India in 1955, and public protest prevented the sacrificers from slaughtering a goat,another sacrificer protested the revisionist ritual by offering the same sacrifice—with animal

victims—on the outskirts of town. 8 Sometimes, “as a concession to mass sentiments,” sacrificesusing Vedic mantras and rituals are preceded by popular rituals to local deities. 9 Sometimes thedistinction is spatial rather than temporal: The deity in the center of the Hindu temple (an aspectof Shiva or Vishnu or a goddess) is often a strict vegetarian who accepts no blood offerings, onlyrice, or rice cakes, as well as fruits and flowers, while there may be another deity, outside thetemple, to whom blood sacrifices are made. Sometimes the vegetarian deity in the inner shrine isa god, and the carnivorous deity outside is a goddess. Similarly, the shrines of goddesses with anidentificatio brahminica are generally inside the village, while those of mother goddesses wholacked such connections are outside the village. 10This arrangement in the structure of the temple translates into a spatialconfiguration—from outside to inside—what originated as a synchronic opposition (animalversus vegetable sacrifice) and developed into a historical, diachronic transition (vegetablesreplacing animals). In the outer markets of the temple, one can purchase an image of the deity, ora postcard of the temple, perhaps a cassette of the songs, bhajans, sung to the deity, but alsoentirely worldly things, cassettes of (pirated) versions of the Rolling Stones, sandals, saris,embroidered shawls, brass pots, statuettes of couples in Kama-sutra/ Khajuraho positions (thusonce again uniting the sacred and the sensual), anything. The ideological conflict endures, intransformation, through both space and time. It also often endures in a linguistic bifurcation, asworshipers gather in the temple to hear someone read a Sanskrit text; some recite it with him; thestoryteller or tour guide will then gloss it in the local language, Telugu or Bangla or whatever,and then explain it, perhaps discuss it with them. Then he will read another verse in Sanskrit, andso on. The rich mix of life on the outskirts of a temple is yet another example of the realperiphery that the imaginary Brahmin center cannot hold.VEDIC ANIMALS IN THE NEWSSACRED COWSThe Vedic idea of a nonviolent sacraifice also affects contemporary attitudes to cows.The cow is a central issue for the Hindutva faction, whose influence upon all branches ofIndian life is sometimes called Saffronization (on the model of Sanskritization), a term withstrong echoes of the renunciant branch of Hinduism, whose members wear saffron- orocher-colored robes. In recent years, some members of the Hindu right have argued, incontradiction of abundant historical evidence to the contrary, that the ancient Indians never atebeef until the Muslims brought this custom to India; they have persecuted Hindus lh who havedefended the historical record on this point, 11 and they have attempted to use the alleged sanctityof the cow to disenfranchise Muslims, some of whom eat beef and others of whom slaughtercows, both for the Muslim ritual of Bakr-Id and for the many Hindus who do eat beef. The beliefthat Hindu cows are sacred is supported by no less an authority than the OED, which defines theterm as, primarily, designating “The cow as an object of veneration amongst Hindus,” and citesan 1891 reference from Rudyard Kipling’s father (a vet in India), already in the context ofHindu-Muslim conflict: “The Muhammedan . . . creed is in opposition to theirs [sc. the Hindus’]and there are rankling memories of a thousand insults to it wrought on the sacred cow.” 12 Theterm became globalized as a metaphor, indeed a backhanded anti-Hindu ethnic slur. In U.S.journalism the term “sacred cow” came to mean “someone who must not be criticized,” and inAmerican literature, “An idea, institution, etc., unreasonably held to be immune fromquestioning or criticism.” The term designates precisely the sort of fanaticism that characterizesthe methods of those who, in the cow protection movement under the Raj and again in India

today, have insisted that all cows are sacred.But are cows sacred in India? Or is the idea of a “sacred cow” an Irish bull li (the oldBritish chauvinist term for an ox-y-moron)? People often perform puja to cows, and at manyfestivals they decorate cows and give them fruits and flowers, paint their horns beautifully, andplace garlands around their necks. Cows are in many ways special animals. Certainly they arenot publicly killed in India, for it is against the law to kill a cow in several Indian states andfrowned on in others. Cows already in early Sanskrit texts came to symbolize Brahmins, since aBrahmin without a cow is less than a complete Brahmin, and killing a cow (except in a sacrifice)was equated with killing a Brahmin. 13But “sacred” means a lot more than not to be killed and is, in any case, a Christian termthat can be, at best, vaguely and inadequately applied in India. Few of us kill, or eat, ourchildren, but no one would argue that they are sacred. There are few, if any, Hindu cowgoddesses or temples to cows. lj Hindus do not always treat cows with respect or kindness; cowsare sometimes beaten and frequently half starved; Hindus will often treat cows in ways thatsheltered Americans, who eat beef that comes neatly wrapped in plastic, regard as cruel. Theconflicting attitudes of reverence and skepticism in the Gujarat peasants who did, or did not,drive the buffalo cow out of their houses persists in contemporary India. Hindus who would notdream of eating beef often sell old cows “to the village,” ostensibly to let them out to graze ongood grass for a happy old age; but this is often a euphemism for handing them over(surreptitiously) to a middleman who eventually gives them to someone who kills them and eatsthem. Sometimes beef, sold as mutton, is eaten by Hindus who may well be aware of thedeception and simply look the other way. But cows are, officially, not killed or eaten bytraditional upper-caste Hindus.When their owners set the cows free to wander and forage about the streets after they aremilked in the morning, cows contribute to the menageries in the middle of great Indian cities,though the mélange of cars, buses, bicycles, motorcycles, rickshaws, pedestrians, and otheranimals accounts for the bulk of the problem. On the streets of a town like Jaipur one canencounter (in addition to cows) monkeys, pigs, chickens, goats, peacocks, bullocks, waterbuffalos, dogs, and some old horses, all roaming freely on a single block. Animals and humansare part of the same spectrum, all more important than cars, which have to get out of the way forthem. There is total freedom, and therefore total chaos. The whole country is still one big farm,even in the big cities (except on the main roads); people feed the birds and also the cows andsometimes even the dogs. If cows are sacred, then, so are goats and horses and dogs. Or, by thesame token, as one non-Brahmin caste argued, dogs and cattle are equally polluted, “the SouthIndian scavengers par excellence.” 14 The more relevant distinction is between these free soulsand freeloaders, on the one hand, and, on the other, more valuable animals, such as better horses,camels, and, occasionally, elephants, which are, by contrast with the street animals, carefullytethered and never abused or, of course, eaten.DOGS HAVE THEIR DAYDogs, by contrast with cows, are supposed to be treated badly and, as we have seen,usually are, but on many occasions, beginning with the myth of Sarama told in the Rig Veda,dogs are, perversely, honored. One of those occasions today is the Tantric worship of Shiva inhis aspect as Bhairava, who often has the form or face of a dog or a dog as his vehicle. There areBhairava temples all over India, 15 where people offer puja to both statues of dogs and livingdogs. In the temple to Kal Bhairava in Varanasi, there are images of Shiva astride a big white

dog, as well as black plaster statues of dogs, paintings of dogs, metal dogs, and real live dogswho sleep and wander inside and outside the temple. Pilgrims to Varanasi worship the dogs anddecorate them with garlands of Indian doughnuts and other things delicious to dogs, which thedogs of course immediately shake off and eat. All this is evidence either that (some) dogs aremore sacred than cows in Hinduism or, perhaps, that Hindu views of animals are far too complexto capture by words like “sacred” or “impure.” Other people’s zoological taxonomies lookbizarre only to people who view them through their own rather ethnocentric lenses.A number of castes lk take hounds with them during their long expeditions when theygraze their sheep in mountain forests. They regard dogs as forms of their god, Mallanna (orMailara), whom hounds follow in his expeditions and who also takes the form of a dog onoccasion. In rituals, the priests (or, sometimes, the householders) enact the roles of dogs anddrink milk that they regard as fed to Mallanna. 16 Kal Bhairava may be a Sanskritized (andTantricized) version of this folk god.The worshipers of the Maharashtrian horseman god Khandoba (a form of Shiva, oftenassimilated to Mallanna and called Martanda) sometimes act as his dogs and bark in the courseof his rituals, as Bhairava is said to have told them to do. These devotees are called Tigers inMarathi and Kannada; it is said that they originally were tigers, but that through the darshan ofthe god Martanda their bodies became human, 17 a fascinating inversion of the Mahabharatastory about the dog who got into serious trouble by trying to become a tiger. Forest-dwellingMaharashtrian tribal groups like the Warlis worship and propitiate tigers as the “sentinel deities”or guardians of the village boundaries, but the word for tiger can also denote certain fiercedomesticated animals—watchdogs, sheepdogs, or hunting dogs of the kind that attendKhandoba. 18 The mixing of “tiger” and “dog” is chronic in myth, ritual, and art; Bhairava’svehicles are occasionally the dog and the tiger or two animals each of which is a mixture of both.Two pro-dog stories appeared in the news in November 2007, one about Nepal and oneabout Tamil Nadu. The first reported on a police dog training school in Nepal that trains dogs forrescue and search, for tracking criminals, explosives, and drugs, and for patrol. There arefifty-one dogs, some born on the premises, others from outside. For most of the year the dogs arenot well treated, and many are left (like most animals in Indian towns) to forage for themselvesand feed on scraps, but for one day a year they are honored and garlanded (presumably withedibles). The article began: “According to the Hindu scripture, the Mahabharat, dogsaccompanied Dharmaraj Yudhishthir on his journey to heaven. There is also a Hindu belief thatdogs guard the underworld.” Aside from giving Yudhishthira more than one dog, this was agood, historical approach, and the article concluded: “It’s recognised that no animal has a closerrelationship with people.” 19 The compassion here is limited to some dogs, some of the time. Butit’s a start.The second story, carried by the Hindustan Times and CNN from New Delhi is worthreporting in its entirety:MAN MARRIES DOGA man in southern India married a female dog in a traditional Hinduceremony in a bid to atone for stoning two dogs to death, a newspaper reported Tuesday.[Picture: “P. Selvakumar, left, garlands his ‘bride,’ Selvi.”] The 33-year-old man married thesari-draped dog at a temple in the southern state of Tamil Nadu on Sunday after an astrologersaid it was the only way to cure himself of a disability, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported.P. Selvakumar told the paper that he had been suffering since he stoned two dogs to death andstrung them up in a tree 15 years ago. “After that my legs and hands got paralyzed and I losthearing in one ear,” the paper quoted him as saying. Family members chose a stray female dog

named Selvi who was then bathed and clothed for the ceremony. The groom and his family thenhad a feast, while the dog got a bun, the paper said. 20 Again the special moment ofcompassion is balanced by a memory of more typical cruelty. And that cruelty endures: Just afew months later officials of the Indian-administered part of Kashmir announced that they hadpoisoned (with strychnine) five hundred of the hundred thousand stray dogs in Srinagar andintended to kill them all, saying that the dogs posed a risk to humans and made urban lifeunbearable. When animal rights activists threatened legal action, the officials said they wouldmerely sterilize the dogs, not poison them with strychnine. 21 Sure.THE UPANISHADS: RENOUNCING RENUNCIATIONThe quotation from Kathleen Gough with which this chapter begins reveals a morewidespread disregard for moksha, indeed for the entire problem of rebirth and transmigration forwhich moksha is said to be the solution. Villagers in 1964 “stubbornly refused to claim that theyhoped for, desired, or did anything deliberately to get moksha, even in the context ofpilgrimage,” and one of them challenged the interviewing anthropologist by saying, referring tothe tirtha shrine as a “crossing place”: “Have you ever seen moksha at any crossing place?” 22Chamars (Dalit leatherworkers) in Senapur, Uttar Pradesh, in the 1950s claimed to know nothingabout the fate of the soul after death or other ideas related to karma; 23 the Chamars inChattisgarh, in central India, ignore the more general householder/renouncer opposition. 24 At theother end of the caste spectrum, E. M. Forster, in 1921, recorded a more ambivalent position inthe raja of Dewas: “As a boy, he had thought of retiring from the world, and it was an idealwhich he cherished throughout his life, and which, at the end, he would have done well topractise. Yet he would condemn asceticism, declare that salvation could not be reached throughit, that it might be Vedantic but it was not Vedic, and matter and spirit must both be given theirdue.” 25 Throngs of pilgrims come to Varanasi to die because they believe that they willimmediately attain moksha. But at the same time, many women on pilgrimage seek not (or notonly, or not primarily) Release from the wheel, but a better life and, almost as an afterthought, abetter rebirth. For most of them, moreover, moksha is something that by definition you can’twant; if you want it, then you can’t get it. 26 THE RAMAYANATHE FLAME OF HISTORY AND THE SMOKE OF MYTHTo say (as I do) that the Ramayana tells us a great deal about attitudes toward women andtribal peoples in the early centuries CE is a far cry from saying that someone named Ramaactually lived in the city now known as Ayodhya and fought a battle on the island now known asSri Lanka with a bunch of talking monkeys on his side and a ten-headed demon on the other orwith a bunch of tribal peoples (represented as monkeys) on his side and a proto-Muslim monsteron the other, as some contemporary Hindus have asserted. Rama left no archaeological orinscriptional record. There is no evidence that anyone named Rama did or did not live inAyodhya; other places too claim him, in South India as well as North India, for the Ramayanawas retold many times, in many different Indian languages, with significant variations. There isno second Troy here for a Schliemann to come along and discover. Or, rather, there is a second,and a third, and a nineteenth Troy for anyone to discover.Placing the Ramayana in its historical contexts demonstrates that it is a work of fiction,created by human authors who lived at various times, and shows how the human imaginationtransformed the actual circumstance of the historical period into something far more beautiful,

terrible, challenging, and elevating than the circumstances themselves. Indeed one of theadvantages of tracing the variants of a myth (such as the flood myth) is that when we encounter itpresented as a historical incident (such as the submerging of a causeway to Lanka), we canrecognize it as a myth. Texts reveal histories, but we need to find out about those histories andground them in solid evidence to read against, not into, the texts’ narratives. Reconstructing theways in which human authors constructed the fictional works, in reaction to earlier texts as wellas to historical circumstances, reveals their texts as works of art rather than records of actualevents. 27 Yet in a case that began in 1987, a judge in Dhanbad, in Jharkhand (bordering Bihar andOrissa), issued Rama and Hanuman a summons to appear before the court, since the villagersclaimed that a 1.4-acre site with two temples dedicated to them belonged to the gods (“Since theland has been donated to the gods, it is necessary to make them a party to the case,” said a locallawyer), against the claim of the Hindu priest who ran the temples, who said that the sitebelonged to him since a former local king had given it to his grandfather. The summons to thetwo gods was returned to the court as the address was incomplete. Undeterred, the judge issuedanother summons through the local newspapers. 28 Nor was this a unique incident. Some Hindusassume that the deity enshrined in a temple is the owner of the temple, that a Hindu statue stolenby a non-Hindu will take action against the thief, and that a statue can sue. A famous caseinvolved a statue of Shiva dancing (Nataraja) that sued the Norton Simon Museum in a U.S.court in 1972-1973. 29 “I can only say that Lord Nataraja himself won the case appearing beforecourts in the form of the idol,” said a Tamil Nadu state official. 30BABUR’S MOSQUE AT AYODHYAFor many years, some Hindus have argued that Babur’s Mosque (also called the BabriMasjid) was built over a temple commemorating the birthplace of Rama in Ayodhya, the citywhere, according to the Ramayana, Rama was born. 31 During the 1980s, as the Hindu right roseslowly to power, Hindu organizations began holding rallies at the site of Babur’s Mosque,campaigning for the “rebuilding” of the temple, despite the absence of any evidence to confirmeither the existence of the temple or even the identification of the modern town of Ayodhya withits legendary predecessor. Then the Ramayana was broadcast on Indian television in 1987-1988,adding fuel to the mythological furor over the Ayodhya mosque. In 1989, during a judicialprocedure that resulted in allowing Muslims continuing access to the mosque, against the plea ofHindus who wanted to lock them out, it was said that “a monkey sat atop the court building andwhen the order was passed it violently shook the flagstaff from which the national tricolour wasfluttering.” 32 The monkey was presumed to be Hanuman, who has become the mascot of theRSS, the militant wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and whom Forster, in 1921, alreadyreferred to as “the Monkey God (Hanuman-who-knocks-down-Europeans).” 33In 1989, as a response to the growing agitation over Ayodhya, a group of historians at theCenter for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) released a pamphlet entitledThe Political Abuse of History: Babri-Masjid-Rama-Janma- Bhumi Dispute. The pamphletmarked the direct intervention of historians in the debate over Ayodhya and was eventuallypublished as an edited volume. 34 The essays all argue that the case for a Rama temple under themosque is based on myth rather than history.In 1990 L. K. Advani, the BJP president, put on the saffron robes of a renouncer (or,nowadays, a right-wing Hindu) and posed with a bow and arrow on top of a truck decorated tolook like Rama’s chariot. He was arrested as he was heading for Ayodhya. 35 Two years later, on

December 6, 1992, as the police stood by and watched, leaders of the BJP whipped a crowd oftwo hundred thousand into a frenzy. Shouting, “Death to the Muslims!” the mob attackedBabur’s Mosque with sledgehammers. As the historian William Dalrymple put it, “One afteranother, as if they were symbols of India’s traditions of tolerance, democracy, and secularism,the three domes were smashed to rubble.” 36 In the riots that followed, more than a thousandpeople lost their lives, and many more died in reactive riots that broke out elsewhere in India,first in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the mosque, then intermittently, and thenvery seriously again in 2002. Litigation over the site continues. On the site today (as of 2008)nothing but vandalized ruins remains, yet there is intense security (and there have been severalattacks to justify such security). Visitors to the site find, in a dark corner of the large, emptyspace, a small shrine, like a family puja closet, with a couple of oleograph pictures of Rama,where a Hindu priest performs a perfunctory puja. Nearby, in a BJP tent, is a model of the newtemple they intend to build. Whether or not there ever was a Hindu temple there before, there is atemple, however makeshift, there now.THE CAUSEWAY TO LANKAAnother, more recent example of the political use of the Ramayana myth was relativelybloodless but deeply disturbing. It concerned the proposed dredging of a canal through what iscalled Rama’s Bridge, an area of limestone shoals and shallow water between southern India andthe north shore of the island now known as Sri Lanka. ll In a favorite episode in the Ramayana,retold over the centuries, an army of monkeys, led by Hanuman and Rama, build a causeway (ora bridge, though the description sounds much more like a causeway, piling up stones and mortar)over the water to Lanka, a distance said to be a hundred “yokings” lm (about a thousand miles) ln(R 4.63.17). Rameshwara, a place of pilgrimage in Tamil Nadu, claims to be the place where thecauseway was built.On September 12, 2007, BBC headlines read, HINDU GROUPS OPPOSE CANALPROJECT, and they told this story:Protest rallies have been held across India by hard-line Hindus to campaign against a proposedshipping canal project between India and Sri Lanka. Massive traffic jams were reported in manyplaces and trains delayed in many parts of the country. Protesters say the project will destroy abridge they believe was built by Hindu God Ram and his army of monkeys. Scientists questionthe belief, saying it is solely based on the Hindu mythological epic Ramayana. TheSethusamudram Shipping Canal Project proposes to link the Palk Bay with the Gulf of Mannarbetween India and Sri Lanka by dredging a canal through the shallow sea. This is expected toprovide a continuous navigable sea route around the Indian peninsula. Once complete, the canalwill reduce the travel time for ships by around 650 km (400 miles) and is expected to boost theeconomic and industrial development of the region. Hindu activists say dredging the canal willdamage the Ram Setu (or Lord Ram’s bridge), sometimes also called Adam’s Bridge. They saythe bridge was built by Lord Ram’s monkey army to travel to Sri Lanka and has religioussignificance. Scientists and archaeologists, however, say there is no scientific evidence to provetheir claim. They say it has never been proved that Lord Ram’s monkey army existed at all asdescribed in the Hindu epic Ramayana. The Archaeological Survey of India says the bridge isnot a man-made structure, and is just a natural sand formation. 37 As the historian RomilaThapar pointed out, “All this uncertainty is quite apart from the question of the technical viabilityof building a bridge across a wide stretch of sea in the centuries BC.” 38 There are also otherissues here—ecological, economic, sociological, and practical. The Indian Supreme Court

determined that the “bridge” was not man-made (or, presumably, monkey-made). West Bengal’sBuddhadeb Bhattacharjee argued that the Ramayana was “born in the imagination of poets,” butNanditha Krishna, the director of the C. P. Ramaswami Anjar Foundation, countered that theRamayana was not fiction. Advocates for the monkey bridge have cited, in evidence, NASAphotos suggesting an underwater bridge (that is, a causeway) between India and Sri Lanka, 39 yetanother instance of our old friend the myth of the submerged continent.Two days later the headline read, REPORT ON HINDU GOD RAM WITHDRAWN,and the BBC news ran this story:The Indian government has withdrawn a controversial report submitted in court earlier this weekwhich questioned the existence of the Hindu god Ram. The report was withdrawn after hugeprotests by opposition parties. . . . In the last two days, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) has launched a scathing attack on the government for questioning the “faith of themillion.” Worried about the adverse reaction from the majority Hindu population of the country,the Congress Party-led government has now done a U-turn and withdrawn the statementsubmitted in court. . . . In the meantime, the court has said that dredging work for the canal couldcontinue, but Ram’s Bridge should not be touched. But how are they to avoid touching themythological bridge?MANY RAMAYANASAnother major issue here is the question of who has the right to say what the Ramayanais and is not. The arguments about this in many ways parallel those about what Hinduism is andis not. The question of when Sita ceases to be Sita is one that different people will answer indifferent ways. One of the qualities that allow great myths to survive over centuries, among verydifferent cultures, is their ability to stand on their heads (indeed, to turn cartwheels), to invitecomplete reversals of the political stance taken by the interpretation of the basic plot. 40This is certainly true of the political uses of the Ramayana, which has been constantlyretold in literature and performance throughout India, most famously in the version of Tulsidasin the sixteenth century, which to this day is performed in Varanasi during a festival that lasts forseveral weeks each winter. Repressive tellings of the myth use the mythological moment ofRam-raj (Rama’s reign), as an imagined India that is free of Muslims and Christians and anyother Others, in the hope of restoring India to the Edenic moment of the Ramayana.But many subversive tellings cast Ravana and the ogres as the Good Guys (as some ofthem are, in some ways, even in Valmiki’s version) and Rama as the villain of the piece (as hecertainly is not, in Valmiki’s version). Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-1873), a Bengali poetwho converted to Christianity, wrote a poem, “The Slaying of Meghanada” (1861), based on theBengali Ramayana of the poet Krittibas, but Datta made Ravana the hero and Ravana’s son,Meghanada, the symbol of the Hindus oppressed by the British, whom Datta equated with Rama,the villain. 41 Equally subversive was the Ramayana that Tamil separatists told in South India inthe early twentieth century, casting Ravana as a noble Tamil king who was treacherouslymurdered by the forces of the evil Rama coming from the north. Both North and South Indiansoften identified Rama with the north and Ravana with the south, but the north demonized the“Dravidian” Ravana, the south the “Aryan” Rama, through the composition of explicit “counterepics.” 42 In a Dalit telling, Sita, on behalf of the ogres, rebukes Rama for killing innocentpeople. 43 The Ramayana monkeys were already mixed up in colonial history in ways that stillresonate. In the nineteenth century some Hindus in North India made monkeys of the British,

calling them “red monkeys,” and Orissan narratives still depict them as monkeys. Others say thatSita blessed the eighteen million monkeys who had helped Rama, promising them that theywould be reborn as the English. A North Indian folktale tells us that two of the monkeys wererewarded with a “white island” in the far west (that is, England, replacing Lanka). From there, itwas prophesied, their descendants would rule the world in the Kali Yuga, the dark age that is toend the world, 44 a time when barbarians (i.e., the British) will invade India, the old political mythdistilled from the many actual invasions of India by foreign powers. According to a story told inMaharashtra, when one of Ravana’s ogress wives befriended Sita, during her period of captivityin Ravana’s harem, Sita promised her that she would be rewarded by being reborn as QueenVictoria. 45One device used to accommodate multiple versions of a story is by reference to multipleeras of cosmic development. One Purana refers explicitly to this technique: “Because of thedifferent eras, the birth of Ganesha is narrated in different ways.” On another occasion, the bardrecites a story in which a sage forgives his enemies; the audience (built into the text) theninterrupts, saying, “We heard it told differently. Let us tell you: the sage cursed them in anger.Explain this.” And the bard replies, “That is true, but it happened in another era. I will tell you.”And he narrates the second version of the story. 46 Another Purana introduces a second variant ofanother story by remarking, “The Puranas tell it differently.” 47There has always been a Darwinian force that allows the survival of some tellings ratherthan others, determined in part by their quality (the ones that are well told and/or that strike aresonant note with the largest audience survive) and in part by their subsidies (the ones with therichest patrons survive). Money still talks (or tells stories), but mass media now can pervert thatprocess; the tellings that survive are often the ones that are cast or broadcast into the most homes,greatly extending the circle of patrons. Amar Chitra Katha comic books have flooded the marketwith bowdlerized versions of many of the great Hindu classics, in a kind of Gresham’s law (badmoney driving out good) that is not Darwinian at all but merely Adam Smithian, or capitalist.Over the past few decades the growing scholarly awareness of the many differentRamayanas opened out all the different variants, only to have the door slammed shut byBollywood and television and the comic books, so that most Hindus now know only one singleRamayana. The televising of the Ramayana (78 episodes, from January 1987 to July 1988) andMahabharata (108 episodes, a holy number, from 1988 to 1990, on Sunday mornings) was amajor factor leading to the destruction of Babur’s Mosque in 1992. So powerful were theobjections to the proposal of Salman Khan, a Muslim (though with a Hindu mother), to play therole of Rama in a 2003 Bollywood production that the film was never made. On the other hand,though the televised Mahabharata was based largely on the Amar Chitra Katha comic book, thescreenwriter was a leftist Muslim, Rahi Masuma Raza, and the opening credits were in English,Hindi, and Urdu—Urdu for a presumed Muslim audience. Lose one, win one—and theMahabharata was always more diverse than the Ramayana.The Internet too has facilitated the mass circulation of stories that substitute for thestoryteller’s art the power of mass identity politics. Salman Rushdie, in Midnight’s Children,imagined a private version of radio, a magic ether by which the children born at midnight on theday of India’s independence communicated. Now we have that in reality, the Web site, the chatroom, the LISTSERV, the blog from outer space. A self-selecting small but vociferous group ofdisaffected Hindus have used this Indian ether to communicate with one another within what isperceived as a community. This accounts in large part for the proliferation of these groups andfor the magnitude of the reaction to any incident, within just a few hours; it’s more fun than

video games, and a lot more dangerous too. Another radio metaphor comes to mind, from twoAmerican films lo in which a bomber pilot is instructed to turn off his radio as soon as he gets thecommand to bomb, so that he will not listen to false counterinstructions. It is this tendency totune out all other messages that characterizes the blog mentality of the Hindu right.NO MORE RAMAYANASThe Hindu right objects strenuously, often by smashing bookstores and burning books, toversions of Hindu stories that it does not like, particularly of the Ramayana, more particularly toretellings of the Ramayana that probe the sensitive subject of Sita’s relationship withLakshmana. Here is a version recorded from the tribal people known as the Rajnengi Pardhan atPatangarh, Mandla District, and published in 1950:LAKSHMAN AMONG THE TRIBALSOne night while Sita and Rama were lying together, Sitadiscussed Lakshman very affectionately. She said, “There he is sleeping alone. What is it thatkeeps him away from woman? Why doesn’t he want to marry?” This roused suspicion in Rama’smind. Sita slept soundly, but Rama kept awake the whole night imagining things. Early nextmorning he sent for Lakshman from his lonely palace and asked him suddenly, “Do you loveSita?” Lakshman was taken aback and could hardly look at his brother. He stared at the groundfor a long time and was full of shame. Lakshman gathered wood and built a great fire andshouted, “Set fire to this wood and if I am pure and innocent I will not burn.” He climbed ontothe fire holding in his arms a screaming child. Neither of them was even singed. He left Ramaand Sita and would not return, though Sita kept trying to lure him back. 48 Lakshman then wentdown to the underworld, where he had many adventures. Here Lakshman, rather than Sita, callsfor the fire ordeal to prove his chastity, and Rama’s jealousy is directed against him, rather thanagainst Sita. The detail of the screaming child may have crept into the story from the traditions ofsuttee, in which the woman is not allowed to enter the fire if she has a child and is often said notto scream; here, where the genders are reversed, those tropes seem to be reversed too.Right up until the present day, stories of this sort have been recorded and published.Then, in 2008, the Delhi University course on Ancient Indian Culture in the BA (honors)program assigned an essay entitled “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and ThreeThoughts on Translation,” by A. K. Ramanujan (1929-1993), who had taught for many years atthe University of Chicago and in 1976 had received from the Indian government the honorarytitle of Padma Sri, one of India’s highest honors. Now Hindu organizations voiced objections tothe content of some of the narratives Ramanujan had cited, said to be derogatory toward Hindugods and goddesses:[Ramanujan] even sorts out a tale from Santhal folklore and puts forth the greatest outrage toHindu psyche before the students of literature that Ravan as well as Lakshman both seduced Sita.No one on Earth so far dared to question the character of Sita so brazenly as Shri Ramanujan hasdone, though all through under the convenient cover of a folklore! . . . The Delhi University forits BA (Hons) second year course has included portions defaming and denigrating the charactersof Lord Ram, Hanuman, Lakshman and Sita and projecting the entire episode as fallacious,capricious, imaginary and fake. 49 The Lakshmana-Sita relationship was also the sore point inmy egg-punctuated London lecture in 2003.On February 25, 2008, a mob of more than a hundred people, organized by the All-IndiaStudents’ Council (ABVP), linked with the RSS, gathered outside the building of the School ofSocial Sciences at Delhi University. Eight or ten of them then went inside and ransacked theoffice of the head of the department of history, breaking the glass panes and damaging books and

other objects in the office, as media and the police watched. The group threatened facultymembers and warned them of dire consequences. 50 The protesters also carried placards saying, inHindi, “The university says there were three hundred versions of the Ramayana, notone”—indeed, indeed! In subsequent interviews, one of the protesters said: “These academicsdon’t understand that they are toying with our faith. They have this idea that it’s a written story, aliterary text, so it doesn’t matter if you say there are 3000 versions of it.” Though he admitted theplurality of Hindu traditions, he proposed that “every deviant telling,” mostly tribal and Dalit, beerased. 51 The bright side of this dark story is that other students organized massivecounterprotests, and editorials strongly critical of the attempts to stifle free speech and diversityappeared in several leading papers. 52 One columnist remarked that Ramanujan was “a scholarwho did more for Indian culture than all of the ABVP put together,” and added: “The violencearound this essay was disturbing, as was the complete obtuseness of people who attackedRamanujan.” 53THOROUGHLY MODERN SITASOver the centuries, Sita’s ordeal has proved problematic for different reasons to differentSouth Asians, from pious apologists who were embarrassed by the god’s cruelty to his wife, tofeminists who saw in Sita’s acceptance of the “cool” flames an alarming precedent for suttee,and, most recently, to Hindus who objected to alternate Ramayanas that called into questionSita’s single-minded devotion to Rama. Some peasant retellings emphasize Sita’s anger at theinjustices done to her and applaud her rejection of Rama after she has been sent away, whileDalit versions even depict Sita’s love for Ravana (“indicating perhaps that this may be asubterranean theme of even the orthodox version in which she is only suspected”). Maharashtrawomen praise Sita for disobeying Rama, going to the forest with him when he told her not to. Ina folk poem from Uttar Pradesh, Sita refuses to go back to Rama even when Lakshsmana hasbeen sent to bring her and instead raises her sons on her own. 54Sita has also been made, counterintuitively, into a champion of women’s rights. There isa Sita temple without Rama (far more unusual than a Rama temple without Sita) in a village inMaharashtra, commemorating the year in which Sita wandered, pregnant and destitute, afterRama kicked her out; the temple legend states that when Sita came to this village, the villagersrefused to give her food, and she cursed them, so that no grain would ever grow in their fields. Inrecent years a reformer named Sharad Joshi urged the villagers to redress the wrongs that Ramadid to Sita and to erase the curse that has kept them from achieving justice or prosperity, byredressing their own wrongs to their own women, whom they have kept economically dependentand powerless. He told them the story of the Ramayana, often moving big, burly farmers to tears,and suggested that Valmiki had introduced the injustice to Sita not to hold up Sita’s suffering asan example for other wives but rather to warn men not to behave like Rama. (“He could havemade Ram into as perfect a husband as he was a son. Instead . . . Valmiki wants to show howdifficult it is for even supposedly perfect men to behave justly towards their wives.”) Finally, heargued that they should not wait for government laws to enforce the economic rights of womenbut should voluntarily transfer land to their women, thus paying off a long-overdue debt to Sita.Hundreds of Maharashtrian villagers have done this. 55 In contrast with the ambivalent practicaleffects of powerful goddesses with their shakti, it was Sita’s lack of power that seems to havedone the trick here.Sita’s curse was also felt elsewhere in Maharashtra, at an abandoned Sita temple inRaveri. “Rakshasas built it,” the villagers say. After Sita was driven out of Ayodhya, she settled

in Raveri and begged for food, house to house, because she had two small babies and could notwork. When the villagers refused her (on the ground that such an abandoned woman must be a“bad woman”), she cursed the village so that it could not grow wheat. Activists used this myth toget peasants to put land in the names of the women of their family. 56THE MAHABHARATAShashi Tharoor retold the Mahabharata as The Great Indian Novel, in which theself-sacrificing Bhishma (the son of Ganga, in the Sanskrit text) becomes Ganga-ji, a thinlyveiled form of Gandhi, while Dhritarashtra is Nehru, with his daughter Duryodhani (IndiraGandhi). Karna goes over to the Muslim side and becomes Jinna (where the original Karna slicedhis armor off his body, this Karna seizes a knife and circumcises himself) and is eventuallyexposed as a chauffeur, the “humble modern successor to the noble profession of charioteering.”As Tharoor remarks, “It is only a story. But you learn something about a man from the kind ofstories people make up about him.” 57 DRAUPADI AND SATYAVATISita is not alone in serving as a lightning rod for Hindu ideas about female chastity; herMahabharata counterpart, Draupadi, remains equally controversial. One Dalit woman’s take onthe disrobing scene, in which Karna teases Draupadi, is skeptical: “Now, even with fivehusbands didn’t Draupadi have to worry about Karna Maharaj’s intentions?” 58 Dalit women areequally dubious about Satyavati and Kunti: “One agreed to the whims of a rishi in order toremove the bad odour from her body, the other obeyed a mantra! What wonderful gods! Whatwonderful rishis!” 59 And a popular song among lower-class women in nineteenth-centuryCalcutta imagined the objections that Ambalika might have expressed when her mother-in-law,Satyavati, insisted that she let Vyasa impregnate her:People sayas a girl you used to row a boat in the river.Seeing your beauty, tempted by your lotus-bud,the great Parashar stung you,and there was a hue and cry:You’ve done it once,You don’t have anything to fear.Now you can do as much as you want to,no one will say anything.If it has to be done,Why don’t you do it, mother? 60 Despite Satyavati’s checkered, to say the least, sexualrecord, this possibility apparently never occurred to Vyasa (in either of his characters, as authorof the Sanskrit Mahabharata or, within the text, as the grandfather of its heroes), for a very goodreason that Ambalika seems to have overlooked: Satyavati is Vyasa’s mother.KUNTI AND THE NISHADASThe Mahabharata story of the burning of the five Nishadas in the house of lac undergoesa major moral reversal in a contemporary retelling by the Bengali feminist novelist MahashwetaDevi (1926- ):After the war, Kunti retired to the forest to reflect on her past. One day a Nishada woman [aNishadi] watched with her as the animals fled from a forest fire. The Nishadi asked her if she

emembered the house of lac, and an elderly Nishadi and her five young sons, whom she hadmade senseless with wine while she escaped with her own sons. Kunti said she did remember,and the Nishadi said that the woman who had been killed was her mother-in-law; she was thewidow of one of the five sons. She added that not once in all her reflections did Kunti rememberthe six innocent lives that had been lost because she wanted to save herself and her sons. As theyspoke, the flames of the forest fire came closer to them. The Nishadi escaped to safety, but Kuntiremained where she was. 61 In Vyasa’s Mahabharata, Kunti does die in a forest fire, but shenever does remember the Nishadi. It is the genius of the modern version to unite these twotraditional episodes of a woman and fire, a theme with other overtones as well, to make anentirely new point.The TV Mahabharata also expressed a belated sense of guilt on behalf of the Pandavas,taking pains to note that the Nishadas who burned to death in the house of lac had been itsarchitects; that Duryodhana had planned to kill them, in order to silence them; and that thePandavas knew this and felt that since the Nishadas were going to die anyway, there was noharm in killing them.EKALAVYA’S THUMBOne particular Nishada, Ekalavya, plays an important role in the life of contemporaryDalits, who make Ekalavya do for them what the myths did not reveal him doing for himself:revolt. 62 One Dalit poet says, “I am conscious of my resolve,/ the worth of the blood ofEkalavya’s finger.” 63 A movement to gain water rights for Dalits on the Ganges River used thesymbol of Ekalavya:If you had kept your thumbhistory would have happenedsomewhat differently.But . . . you gave your thumband history alsobecame theirs.Ekalavya,since that day theyhave not even given you a glance.Forgive me, Ekalavya, I won’t be fooled nowby their sweet words.My thumbwill never be broken. 64 Another poem, by Tryambak Sapkale (born in 1930), a railwayticket taker on the Dhond-Manmad railway line until his retirement, is a kind of extendedmeditation on an aphorism by the ancient Greek philosopher Archimedes, about a lever and afulcrum: “Give me a place to stand on, and I can move the earth”:Eklavya!The round earth.A steel leverIn my hand.But no leverage?O Eklavya,You ideal disciple!Give me the finger you cut off;

That will be my fulcrum. 65 And a final example was composed by Surekha Bhagat, a widow,born in 1949, who is an Ambedkar Buddhist and works in a tuberculosis sanatorium inBuldhana, Maharashtra:THE LESSON (SABAK)First he was flayedthen he took a chisel in his handknowing that each blowwould chisel a stanzaand so he learned it allnot needing any Dronacharyausing his own brainto become Eklavya.Since then no one knewquite howto ask for tuition feesso the customof asking for remuneration(in honeyed words)stopped, but slowly. 66 The televised Mahabharata made a big point of the Ekalavya story,playing it out at great length. There are Ekalavya education foundations in Ahmedabad andHyderabad. The Ekalavya Ashram in Adilabad, a northern district bordering on Maharashtra, onthe banks of the Godavari River, is a nonprofit tribal welfare facility established in 1990. Run bypeople from the local business community, it serves underprivileged tribal people who cannotafford to educate their children.SHASTRAS: SEX AND TAXESThe cross-dressing men of the Third Nature in the Kama-sutra may be the culturalancestors of the Hijras of contemporary India, cross-dressing and sometimes castrated malehomosexuals, often prostitutes, who worship the goddess Bahuchara Mata. lp Perhaps fiftythousand strong in India today, 67 the Hijras descend upon weddings, birth celebrations, and otheroccasions of fertility, dancing and singing to the beat of drums, offering their blessing or, if theyare not paid, their curse, which may take the form of lifting their skirts to display the wound oftheir castration. Their ambivalent ability to blackmail through a combination of blessing andcurse eventually struck a resonant chord with some government agency charged with taxcollection. As a result, in 2006 the Municipal Corporation of Patna, the capital of Bihar, one ofIndia’s most impoverished states, hired about twenty Hijras to go from shop to shop (later fromhouse to house), asking the owners to pay overdue municipal taxes, which apparently ran into themillions. The new tax collectors met with considerable success from their very first day on thejob, often settling the outstanding arrears on the spot; in lieu of salary, they received 4 percent ofthe amount they collected. 68BHAKTI IN SOUTH INDIA: KANNAPPAR’S EYESKannappar’s eyes, like Ekalavya’s thumb, lived on in later parables, entering Indianfolklore, both northern and southern, as a symbol of violent self-sacrifice (though Kannappar isseldom invoked in Sanskrit texts, which generally prefer a more muted bhakti). An Englishmanliving in India told this story about an event in 1986:

A village temple was said to have lost its image of Kannappar; it had been stolen some yearsago. Now the villagers announced that they planned to renovate the shrine, probably with a newimage of Kannappar. But the thief came forward and offered to return the idol. He said that, inthe years that had passed since he had stolen the statue, his eyesight had deteriorated to the pointwhere he was almost blind. He knew the story of Kannappar and had attributed hisnear-blindness to the curse of the saint. Within weeks of returning the statue, his eyesight beganto improve and apparently it eventually returned to normal. An iconographer who had heardabout this village “miracle” came to inspect the statue and pronounced that it wasn’t aKannappar statue at all. It was another god entirely, one who had no blindness stories in hisCV. 69 One might see in the mistaking of a non-Kannappar statue for a Kannappar statue themischievousness of the god or the proof of a religious placebo effect, or simply the commonconfusion between one god and another. Twenty years later, in 2006, the chief education officerin a campaign in India to promote corneal replacements and other medical measures to avoidblindness “recalled that Kannappa Nayanar, a hunter-turned-saint, was the first eye donor.” 70GODDESSES: HOGWARTS DURGA, MARY, MINAKSHI, AND SANTOSHIMATAIndian goddesses continue to evolve. At a festival in Kerala, in January 2008, the goddessBhagavati got on her elephant and visited her “twin sister,” the Virgin Mary, at the church downthe road. 71 In South Indian rituals, when the goddess Minakshi marries Shiva (a genderedalliance of a local goddess and a pan-Indian male god) and her brother-in-law Vishnu comes tothe wedding (a sectarian alliance of Vaishnavas and Shaivas), Vishnu stops along the way to thewedding to see his Muslim mistress (an interreligious alliance); the next morning he is in a muchbetter mood, and that is when his worshipers ask him for favors. 72 The Delhi High Court ruledthat it was not plagiarism for a private citizen in Kolkata to use, for his float in Durga Puja, agigantic marquee of the imaginary castle of Hogwarts, Harry Potter’s school, built in canvas andpapier-mâché, as well as statues of Rowling’s literary characters. 73And new goddesses spring full grown from the head of Bollywood. The goddess SantoshiMata, first worshiped in the 1960s by women in many cities of Uttar Pradesh, has no base in anypan-Indian Puranic myth but suddenly crossed over into national popularity in 1975, largely asthe result of a mythological film, Jai Santoshi Ma. The film depicted her birth (from the godGanesha) and the origin of her worship; during screenings, the theater became a temple, andwomen made offerings, pujas of fruit and flowers, on the stage in front of the screen. 74 Themedium was certainly the message here. Now worshiped throughout India, Santoshi ispropitiated by comparatively simple and inexpensive rites performed in the home without theintercession of a priest. She grants practical and obvious blessings, such as a promotion for anoverworked husband or a new household appliance.MODERN AVATARS OF THE AVATARSRADHA THE SOCIAL WORKERIn 1914, a tax officer near Varanasi named Hariaudh published a long poem entitled“Sojourn of the Beloved” (Priyapravas), in which Radha rejects the sensuality of erotic longingfor Krishna, undertakes a vow of virginity, and dedicates herself to the “true bhakti” of socialservice. Fusing elements of Western social utilitarianism, bits of Wordsworth and Tagore, andthe monistic Vedanta of Vivekananda, Radha substitutes for each of the nine conventional typesof bhakti a particular type of altruistic good works: The loving service she would have given to

Krishna as his wife is now directed to the “real world”; the bhakti of being Krishna’s servant orslave becomes lifting up the low and fallen castes; remembering Krishna becomes rememberingthe troubles of poor, helpless widows and orphans, giving medicine to those in pain, and givingshelter and dignity to those who have fallen through their karma. Hariaudh sees Radha’s vow ofvirginity as a solution for the perceived problem of improving the status of Indian womenwithout opening the door to the sexual freedom of “Westernized” women. His revisionist mythof Radha managed simultaneously to offend conservative Brahminical Hinduism and to insultthe living religious practices of Hinduism. 75 Not surprisingly, it did not replace the earlier,earthier version of the story of Radha.THE GOOD DEMON BALI AND THE EVIL DWARFIn 1885, Jotiba Phule, who belonged to the low caste of gardeners (Malis), published aMarathi work with an English introduction, in which he radically reinterpreted Puranicmythology, seeing the various avatars of Vishnu as stages in the deception and conquest of Indiaby the invading Aryans, and Vishnu’s antigod and ogre enemies as the heroes of the people. 76Bali, in particular, the “good antigod” whom the dwarf Vishnu cheated out of his kingdom, wasrefigured as Bali Raja, the original king of Maharashtra, reigning over an ideal state ofbenevolent castelessness and prosperity, with Khandoba and other popular gods of the region ashis officials.To this day many Maharashtrian farmers look forward not to Ram Rajya (they regardRama as a villain) but to the kingdom of Bali, 77 Bali Rajya: “Bali will rise again,” and he willrecognize the cultivating classes as masters of their own land. Low castes in rural centralMaharashtra identify so closely with Bali, a son of the soil, against the dwarf, the archetype ofthe devious Brahmin, that they regularly greet each other as “Bali.” Sometimes they burn thedwarf in effigy. 78THE BUDDHA AND KALKIIn 1990, Pakistani textbooks used a garbled version of the myth of the Buddha avatar tosupport anti-Hindu arguments: “The Hindus acknowledged Buddha as an avatar and began toworship his image. They distorted his teachings and absorbed Buddhism into Hinduism.” AHindu critic then commented on this passage: “The message is oblique, yet effective—thatHinduism is the greatest curse in the subcontinent’s history and threatens to absorb every otherfaith.” 79 Vinay Lal’s delightful short book on Hinduism identifies President George W. Bush asthe contemporary form of Kalki: He spends a lot of time with horses and is going to destroy theworld. 80THE TAJ MAHAL AND BABUR’S MOSQUEOne advocate of Hindutva has argued, on the basis of absolutely no evidence, that the TajMahal, in Agra, is not a Islamic mausoleum but an ancient Shiva temple, which Shah Jahancommandeered from the Maharaja of Jaipur; that the term “Taj Mahal” is not a Persian (fromArabic) phrase meaning “crown of palaces,” as linguists would maintain, but a corrupt form ofthe Sanskrit term “Tejo Mahalaya,” signifying a Shiva temple; and that persons connected withthe repair and the maintenance of the Taj have seen the Shiva linga and “other idols” sealed inthe thick walls and in chambers in a secret red stone story below the marble basement. 81 In 2007,the Taj was closed to visitors for a while because of Hindu-Muslim violence in Agra. 82On a more hopeful note, Muslims for many years participated in the Ganesh Puja in

Mumbai by swimming the idol out into the ocean at the end of the festival. There are still manyinstances of this sort of interreligious cooperation, as there have been since the tenth century CE.THE WORSHIP OF OTHER PEOPLE’S HORSESLet us consider the positive contribution of Arab and Turkish horses to contemporaryHindu religious life, particularly in villages. The symbol of the horse became embedded in thefolk traditions of India and then stayed there even after its referent, the horse, had vanished fromthe scene, even after the foreigners had folded their tents and gone away. To this day, horses areworshiped all over India by people who do not have horses and seldom even see a horse, inplaces where the horse has never been truly a part of the land. In Orissa, terra-cotta horses aregiven to various gods and goddesses to protect the donor from inauspicious omens, to cureillness, or to guard the village. 83 In Bengal, clay horses are offered to all the village gods, male orfemale, fierce or benign, though particularly to the sun god, and Bengali parents until quiterecently used to offer horses when a child first crawled steadily on its hands and feet like ahorse. 84 In Tamil Nadu today, as many as five hundred large clay horses may be prepared in onesanctuary, most of them standing between fifteen and twenty-five feet tall (including a largebase) and involving the use of several tons of stone, brick, and either clay, plaster, or cement. 85They are a permanent part of the temple and may be renovated at ten- to twenty-year intervals;the construction of a massive figure usually takes between three to six months. (Many of themhave the curved Marwari ears.) The villagers say that the horses are ridden by spirit riders whopatrol the borders of the villages, a role that may echo both the role of the Vedic horse in pushingback the borders of the king’s realm and the horse’s association with aliens on the borders ofHindu society. But the villagers do not express any explicit awareness of the association of thehorses with foreigners; they think of the horses as their own.A Marxist might view the survival of the mythology of the aristocratic horse as animposition of the lies of the rulers upon the people, an exploitation of the masses by saddlingthem with a mythology that never was theirs nor will ever be for their benefit, a foreignmythology that produces a false consciousness, distorting the native conceptual system,compounding the felony of the invasion itself. A Freudian, on the other hand, might see in thenative acceptance of this foreign mythology the process of projection or identification by whichone overcomes a feeling of anger or resentment or impotence toward another person byassimilating that person into oneself, becoming the other. Myths about oppressive foreigners (andtheir horses) sometimes became a positive factor in the lives of those whom they conquered ordominated.When enormous terra-cotta horses are constructed in South India, the choice of mediumis both practical (clay is cheap and available) and symbolic. New horses are constantly set up,while the old and broken ones are left to decay and return to the earth of which they weremade. 86 Clay, as Stephen Inglis points out, is the right medium for the worship of a creature asephemeral as a horse—“semi-mythical, temporary, fragile, cyclical (prematurelydying/transforming).” 87 Elsewhere Inglis has described the work of the Velar, the potter castethat makes the horses: “By virtue of being made, of earth, the image is bound to disintegrate andto be reconstituted. . . . The potency of the craft of the Velar lies in impermanence and potentialfor deterioration, replacement, and reactivization of their services to the divine. . . . The Velar,and many other craftsmen who work with the immediate and ever changing, are . . . specialists ofimpermanence.” 88 The impermanence of the clay horses may also reflect the awareness of the

fragility of both horses in the Indian climate and the foreign dynasties that came and, inevitably,went, leaving the legacy of their horses.MODERN WOMENCASTE REFORM AND IMPERMANENCE: THE WOMEN PAINTERS OF MITHILAThe impermanence of the massive clay horses is one facet of a larger philosophy ofimpermanence in ritual Hindu art.In many domestic rituals throughout India, women trace intricate designs in rice powder(called kolams in South India) on the immaculate floors and courtyards of houses, and after theceremony these designs are blurred and smudged into oblivion by the bare feet of the family, oras the women think of it, the feet of the family carry into the house, from the threshold, thesacred material of the design. As David Shulman has written:The kolam is a sign; also both less and more than a sign. As the day progresses, it will be wornaway by the many feet entering or leaving the house. The rice powder mingles with the dust ofthe street; the sign fails to retain its true form. Nor is it intended to do so, any more than are thegreat stone temples which look so much more stable and enduring: they too will be abandonedwhen the moment of their usefulness has passed; they are built not to last but to capture themomentary, unpredictable reality of the unseen. 89 The material traces of ritual art must vanishin order that the mental traces may remain intact forever. If the megalomaniac patrons of somany now ruined Hindu temples smugly assumed that great temples, great palaces, great artwould endure forever, their confidence was not shared by the villagers who actually did thebuilding.

A Herd of Laughing Clay Horses from a Rural Temple, Madurai District.The smearing out of the kolam is a way of defacing order so that one has to re-create it.The women who make these rice powder designs sometimes explicitly refer to them as theirequivalent of a Vedic sacrificial hall (yajnashala), which is also entirely demolished after thesacrifice. Their sketches are referred to as “writing,” often the only form of writing that for manycenturies women were allowed to have, and the designs are merely an aide-mémoire for thepatterns that they carry in their heads, as men carry the Vedas. So too, the visual abstraction ofdesigns such as the kolam is the woman’s equivalent of the abstraction of the Vedic literature,based as it is on geometry and grammar. The rice powder designs are a woman’s way ofabstracting religious meanings; they are a woman’s visual grammar. 90Since the fourteenth century, the women of the Mithila region of northern Bihar andsouthern Nepal have made wall and floor paintings on the occasion of marriages and otherdomestic rituals. 91 These paintings, inside their homes, on the internal and external walls of theircompounds, and on the ground inside or around their homes, created sacred, protective, andauspicious spaces for their families and their rituals. They depicted Durga, Krishna, Shiva,Vishnu, Hanuman, and other Puranic deities, as well as Tantric themes, a headless Kali (or,sometimes, a many-headed Kali) trampling on Shiva, or Shiva and Parvati merged as the

androgyne. 92The women painters of Mithila used vivid natural dyes that soon faded, and they paintedon paper, thin, frail paper. This impermanence did not matter to the artists, who did not intendthe paintings to last. The act of painting was seen as more important than the form it took, andthey threw away elaborately produced marriage sketches when the ceremony was over, leavingthem to be eaten by mice or using them to light fires. Rain, whitewash, or the playing of childrenoften destroyed frescoes on courtyard walls. 93 To some extent, this is a concept common to manyartists, particularly postmodern artists, such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose temporaryinstallations included Running Fence, a twenty-four-mile-long white nylon fabric curtain inNorthern California. Such artists are interested in the act of creation, not in preserving the objectthat is created. But this ephemerality takes on a more particular power in the realm of sacred art,even more particularly in the sacred art of women, who, in contrast with the great granitemonomaniac monuments of men, are primarily involved in producing human services that leaveno permanent trace, with one great exception, of course: children.Broken Clay Horses from a Rural Temple, Madurai District.

The impermanence of the paintings in Mithila came up against another way of valuing artwhen, in the aftermath of a major earthquake in 1934, William Archer, the local collector,inspecting the damage in Mithila’s villages, saw the wall and floor paintings for the first timeand subsequently photographed a number of them. He and his wife, Mildred, brought them towider attention in several publications. In the 1950s and early 1960s, several Indian scholars andartists visited the region and were equally captivated by the paintings. But it was not until 1966,in the midst of a major drought, that the All India Handicrafts Board sent an artist, BaskarKulkarni, to Mithila to encourage the women to make paintings on paper that they could sell as anew source of family income. They became known popularly as Madhubani paintings. 94Although, traditionally, women of several castes painted, Kulkarni was able to convinceonly a small group of Mahapatra Brahmin and Kayastha (scribe caste) women to paint on paper.By the late 1960s and early 1970s two of these women, Sita Devi and Ganga Devi, wererecognized as artists both in India, where they received numerous commissions, and in Europe,Japan, and the United States, where they represented India in cultural fairs and expositions. Theirsuccess and active encouragement inspired many other women to paint.From the mid-1970s women of several other castes, most especially the Dusadhs, a Dalitcommunity, and the Chamars, also began to paint on paper, along with small numbers of men. Itis quite likely that they were already painting at the time of the Archers, who, for some reason,wrote only about the higher-caste women. But instead of painting themes from the Ramayanaand the Puranas, the Dusadh women painted their own folklore, and their high god, Rahu (whocauses eclipses of the sun and moon), and their culture hero, Raja Salhesh. Later they alsocreated new techniques and new subject matter and eventually began to depict some of the godsof the upper castes (Krishna, Shiva). Gradually artists of different castes and genders began toborrow themes and styles from one another. Although the images were similar, women ofdifferent castes usually developed distinctive styles of painting. 95 Over time, in part because ofthe greater diversity of people painting, the subject matter of the paintings expanded to includeancient epics, local legends and tales, domestic, rural, and community life, ritual, local, national,and international politics, as well as the painters’ own life histories.Women of the upper castes eventually added to their repertoire various subjects of socialcritique, including dowry, female abortion, bride burning, suttee, terrorist attacks (such as apainting of the planes about to hit the Twin Towers), and even caste discrimination: A youngBrahmin painter, Roma Jha, depicts upper-caste women refusing access to a well to a Dalitwoman. 96 The lower-caste women, who depend upon the paintings for their livelihood, generallystick to more traditional themes, but one woman, Dulari Devi, who is of the impoverishedMallah (fisherman) caste, has painted poor women being denied medical treatment, villageheadmen chasing away women who have come to complain of maltreatment, and rich familieslocking their houses and escaping from a flood, leaving the poor to weep over their dead. 97The paintings are still ephemeral in the lives of the painters, for like all successful art,they leave the atelier and go out into the world. But the paintings are now preserved in books,catalogs, and frames on the walls of houses throughout India and beyond; like the Marwarihorses, they now belong to the world. There are troubling aspects about this transaction:Euro-American people have intervened in the lives and art of the people of Mithila, not onlyreversing the most basic understanding of what it means to them to make art—itsimpermanence—but changing the medium (encouraging them to use more permanent dyes, lessfragile paper, and so forth) and influencing its subject matter. For capitalism inevitably raises itsugly head: The knowledge of what will sell in New York and San Francisco influences the

subjects that the women in Mithila choose to paint, just as European standards of equinebreeding influenced the choice of horses that were registered as pure Marwaris. This should giveus pause, even before we acknowledge that many people besides the painters make money onthese transactions. On the other hand, the painters have also made money, money that has freedthem from degrading poverty. We may or may not judge that this gain justifies the possible lossof artistic integrity, but in any case it is what has happened and what is happening. At the end ofthe day the lives of the painters have been enriched by the income from the paintings, and thelives of everyone who has seen the paintings have been enriched by the women of Mithila.THE BRAHMIN HEAD AND THE DALIT BODYThe princess Renuka (also known as the goddess Mariamma), whose decapitated headtook on the body of a decapitated Dalit (Pariah) woman, continues to survive as a goddess in thevillage of Chandragutti, 240 miles northwest of Bangalore, where a week-long festival dedicatedto the Hindu goddess Renukamba (“Mother Renuka”) has taken place every year for centuries.The Chandragutti version of the story is that Renukamba’s clothes (instead of her head) droppedoff as she fled for her life from her murderous husband, and she took refuge in a nearby cave,where she merged with a deity. Each year, thousands of Dalits have taken off their clothes toimmerse themselves in the Varada River, then climbed two and a half miles with their clothes offto offer prayers to the goddess at the hilltop cave temple.

Medical Services Offered to the Rich but Denied to the Poor.Painting by Dulari Devi, Madhubani, Bihar.But police banned the nude pilgrimage in 1986 after devotees clashed with members ofthe Dalit Sangharsha Samiti (DSS), a group advocating the uplifting of lower castes. DSSvolunteers, claiming that the ritual was degrading for Dalits, were beaten when they tried toprevent pilgrims from undressing. The worshipers then attacked police and paraded ten policeofficials, including two women constables, naked along the banks of the river. 98 Complex issuesof sexual propriety intersect here with the rights of Dalits, as non-Dalits attempt to preventDalits, ostensibly for their own good, from indulging in their own rituals. No longer a question ofheads versus bodies, the worship of Renukamba now expresses an ambivalence toward thehuman body itself, as well as the enduring tension within the social body of caste Hinduism.CHAPTER 25INCONCLUSION, OR, THE ABUSE OF HISTORYThe spirit of broad catholicism, generosity, toleration, truth, sacrifice

and love for all life, which characterizes the average Hindu mind notwholly vitiated by Western influence, bears eloquent testimony to thegreatness of Hindu culture. . . . The non-Hindu peoples in Hindustan. . . must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ungratefulnesstowards this land . . . but must . . . stay in the countrywholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deservingno privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen’srights. 1 Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906-1973)If I know Hinduism at all, it is essentially inclusive and evergrowing,ever-responsive. It gives the freest scope to imagination,speculation and reason. 2 . . . It is impossible to wait and weigh ingolden scales the sentiments of prejudice and superstition that havegathered round the priests who are considered to be the custodians ofHinduism. 3 Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)The statement by Golwalkar, a leader of the chauvinist Hindu organization known as theRSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), in 1939, reflects a different sort of cultural schizophreniafrom the creative dichotomies that have typified so much of Hinduism. The first half of hisstatement seems to me to express largely valid historical claims, while the political agenda of thesecond half contradicts those claims, paradoxically using the justifiable Hindu pride in religioustolerance to justify intolerance. Gandhi, the bane of the RSS, also makes two points that are, ifnot contradictory, in considerable tension: He takes the inclusiveness and imagination ofHinduism for granted, but he contrasts that inclusiveness with the attitudes not (like Golwalkar)of the non-Hindus of India but of the Brahmins, whose “prejudices” against both Dalits andMuslims Gandhi protested throughout his life. The boast that Hinduism is tolerant and inclusivehas become not only a part of Hindu law but a truism repeated by many Hindus today, yet thisdoes not mean that it is false; it is a true truism, however contradicted it may be by recurrentepidemics of intolerance and exclusion. How are we to understand the balance of theseconflicting currents in the history of the Hindus?Agni, the name of the Vedic god of fire, is also the name of one of India’s most powerfulnuclear missiles. Pakistan named its missile Ghorid, 4 after Muhammad of Ghor. Why should thetwo warring South Asian nations reach back into Vedic and eleventh-century history to nametheir nuclear warheads? What is the relevance of history to religious intolerance?India is a country where not only the future but even the past is unpredictable. lq If youhave read this far, dear reader, and have plowed through these many pages, and have paid anyattention at all, you will have learned at least one important thing. You could easily use history toargue for almost any position in contemporary India: that Hindus have been vegetarians, and thatthey have not; that Hindus and Muslims have gotten along well together, and that they have not;that Hindus have objected to suttee, and that they have not; that Hindus have renounced thematerial world, and that they have embraced it; that Hindus have oppressed women and lowercastes, and that they have fought for their equality. Throughout history, right up to thecontemporary political scene, the tensions between the various Hinduisms, and the different sorts

of Hindus, have simultaneously enhanced the tradition and led to incalculable suffering.The great mystery about the abuse of history is not the abuse itself but the question ofwhy, in such a future-intoxicated age, we still reach for the past (or a past, however confected) tojustify the present. “That’s history,” after all, is an American way of saying, “So what?” Buteven such American amnesiacs practice a cult of the past with regard to the Constitution and theoften unintelligible intentions of the founding fathers, and they have just a few hundred years ofhistory. Hindus have thousands, and their concern for history is correspondingly more intense.We (and by “we” I mean all of us, Hindus and non-Hindus) can of course learn from theerrors of the past, though we are often condemned (pace Santayana) to relive it even when weremember it—indeed, sometimes precisely because we (mis)remember it. lr And we must be onguard “lest we forget,” as Kipling prayed. Often the future is shaped not by what we rememberbut by what we forget. But we have lost our naive faith in our ability to know our past in anyobjective way. And memory may not be on our side here; given the tragic power of revenge,sometimes it pays to have a good forgettery. ls At the end of the day, individuals and groups willhave to make their decisions in the present, as they did in the past, on some basis other thanhistory, such as, given present conditions, what seems most humane, most compassionate, mostliberating for the most people now.In the Epilogue to George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923), Joan cries out: “Mustthen a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those who have no imagination?” Surelyhistory is one of the most important things for us to imagine and to realize that we are imagining.What an utter waste it would be not to keep using our knowledge of a tradition, such as theHindu tradition, that is so rich, so brilliantly adaptive. The profuse varieties of historicalsurvivals and transformations are a tribute to the infinite inventiveness of this great civilization,which has never had a pope to rule certain narratives unacceptable. The great pity is that nowthere are some who would set up such a papacy in India, smuggling into Hinduism a Christianidea of orthodoxy; the great hope lies in the many voices that have already been raised to keepthis from happening.We can learn from India’s long and complex history of pluralism not just some of thepitfalls to avoid but the successes to emulate. We can follow, within the myths, the paths ofindividuals like King Janashruti or Yudhishthira or Chudala or, in recorded history, Ashoka orHarsha or Akbar or Mahadevyyakka or Kabir or Gandhi, or indeed most rank-and-file Hindus,who embodied a truly tolerant individual pluralism. We can also take heart from movementswithin Hinduism that rejected both hierarchy and violence, such as the bhakti movements thatincluded women and Dalits within their ranks and advocated a theology of love, though here toowe must curb our optimism by recalling the violence embedded in many forms of bhakti, and bynoting that it was in the name of bhakti to Ram that the militant Hindu nationalists tore down theBabri Mosque. We must look before we leap into history, look at the present, and imagine abetter future.Perhaps we can ride into that future on the glorious horse that graces the jacket of thisbook. It is an example of the contribution of a foreign culture to Hinduism, since compositeanimals of this type come from Persia and entered India with the Mughals, and an example of theintersection of court and village, as the image traveled from the Mughal court in Delhi to avillage in the state of Orissa, the source of this contemporary example. It is an image of women,almost certainly painted by a man. Depicting the god Krishna as the rider on the horse makes theMuslim image a Hindu image, and the rider on the horse is an enduring Hindu metaphor for themind controlling the senses, in this case harnessing the sexual addiction excited by naked

women. This multivocal masterpiece is, like Hinduism, a collage made of individual pieces thatfit together to make something far more wonderful than any of them.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis book is both from and for my students, who inspired me to write it, contributedmany thoughts to it, responded incisively to draft after draft that I taught in classes for years andyears, asked me questions I couldn’t answer, plied me with books and articles I would otherwisehave missed, and constituted the ideal audience for it. A few of my students and ex-students alsohelped me more specifically, and I want to thank them (in alphabetical order) for their ideas:Manan Ahmed on the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals; Aditya Behl on Sufis; Brian Collins onthe Mahabharata; Will Elison on the British; Amanda Huffer on contemporary India andAmerica; Rajeev Kinra on the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals; Ajay Rao on South India; andArshia Sattar on the Ramayana. Others did more extensive work on this book: Jeremy Morseforaged for elusive facts and texts and disciplined the computer when it acted up; LauraDesmond read early drafts of the whole text, talked over each chapter with me, maderevolutionizing comments, and provided the background for the chapter on the shastras; andBlake Wentworth drew the rabbit on the moon (in the preface), hunted down obscure texts andillustrations, read several drafts of the chapter on bhakti, and taught me a great deal about SouthIndia. I am also grateful to Gurcharan Das and to Donna Wulff and her class at BrownUniversity, for their detailed and candid responses to an early draft, and to Mike O’Flaherty forhis fastidious proofreading.Special thanks go to Scott Moyers for his canny advice about the book in its earlieststages; to Lorraine Daston for reading chapter after chapter and responding, as always, withbrilliant ideas that would not have occurred to me in a thousand years; to Mike Murphy for theweek at Big Sur in which I pulled it all together; to Vanessa Mobley, my patient and supportiveeditor at Penguin; and Nicole Hughes, who shepherded me, and the book, through the productionlabyrinth with tact and skill; to Emma Sweeney, my feisty and energizing agent; and to RichardRosengarten, dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, for his unflagginginterest and encouragement, his faith in me, and his generosity in providing time for me to writeand funds for me to pay my student assistants and my special Indological editor, KatherineEirene Ulrich.Katherine Ulrich read several long, long drafts, catching many howlers as well as stylistictics, pinpointing obscurities, suggesting books and articles, challenging unsupportedassumptions, and sustaining me with no-nonsense, appreciative, and often hilarious comments.To cap it all, she gave me the image of the composite horse that appears on the jacket of thisbook, not just finding it but buying it and carrying it back from India for me. This book isdedicated to her and to William Dalrymple, who stood by me at the lecture in London in 2003when someone threw an egg at me and who then threw down a gauntlet in his subsequent articleabout the need to tell the history of Hinduism in a new way. I am grateful to him not only for hisencouragement but for the example that he sets in his own work, writing about the history ofIndia in a way that brings it alive to readers of all backgrounds and raises the important issuesthat give such writing its life and meaning.Truro, August 2008CHRONOLOGYBCE

c. 50,000 Stone Age cultures arisec. 30,000 Bhimbetka cave paintings are madec. 6500 Agriculture beginsc. 4000-3000 *Indo-European breaks up into separatelanguagesc. 3000 Pastoral nomad societies emergec. 2500 Urban societies merge along the IndusRiverc. 2200-2000 Harappa is at its heightc. 2100-2000 Light-spoked chariots are inventedc. 2000-1500 The Indus Valley civilization declinesc. 1900 The Sarasvati River dries upc. 1700-1500 Horses arrive in Northwest Indiac. 1700-1500 Nomads in the Punjab compose theRig Veda; horses arrive in Northwest Indiac. 1350 Hittite inscriptions speak about horsesand godsc. 1200-900 The Vedic people compose the YajurVeda, Sama Veda, and Atharva Vedac. 1100-1000 Vedic texts mention the Doab, thearea between the Ganges and Yamuna riversc. 1000 The city of Kaushambi in Vatsa is foundedc. 950 The Mahabharata battle is said to have taken placec. 900 The city of Kashi (Varanasi, Benares) is foundedc. 900 The Vedic people move down into the Ganges Valleyc. 800-600 The Brahmanas are composedc. 600-500 Aranyakas are composedc. 500 Shrauta Sutras are composedc. 500 Pataliputra is founded; Vedic peoples gradually move southwardc. 500-400 Early Upanishads are composedc. 483 or 410 Siddhartha Gautama, theBuddha, diesc. 468 Vardhamana Mahavira, the Jina, founder of Jainism, diesc. 400-100 Later Upanishads are composedc. 400-100 Writing is used in the Ganges Valleyc. 327-325 Alexander the Great invades Northwest South Asiac. 324 Chandragupta founds the Mauryan dynastyc. 300 Grihya Sutras are composedc. 300-100 Dharma-Sutras are composedc. 300 Greeks and Ashoka mention Pandyas, Cholas, and Cherasc. 265-232 Ashoka reignsc. 250 The Third Buddhist Council takes place at Pataliputrac. 185 The Mauryan dynasty endsc. 185 Pushyamitra founds the Shunga dynasty73 The Shunga dynasty endsc. 166 BCE-78 CE Greeks, Scythians, Bactrians, and Parthians enter India

c. 300 BCE-300 CE The Mahabharata is composedc. 200 BCE-200 CE The Ramayana is composedCEc. 78-140 Kanishka reigns and encourages Buddhismc. 100 Cankam (“assembly”) poetry is composedc. 100 “Manu” composes his Dharma-shastrac. 150 The monuments of Bharhut and Sanchi are builtc. 150 Rudradaman publishes the first Sanskrit inscription, at Junagadhc. 200 Kautilya composes the Artha-shastrac. 300 Vatsyayana Mallanaga composes the Kama-sutra320-550 The Gupta dynasty reigns from Pataliputra350-750 The early Puranas are composedc. 375 The Pallava dynasty is foundedc. 400-477 Kalidasa writes Sanskrit plays and long poems405-411 Faxian visits Indiac. 450 The Harivamsha is composed455-467 The Huns attack North Indiac. 460-477 The Vakataka dynasty completes thecaves at Ajantac. 500-900 Nayanmar Shaiva Tamil poets live550-575 Kalachuris create the cave of Shiva at Elephantac. 550-880 Chalukya dynasty thrivesc. 600-930 Alvar Vaishnava Tamil poets live606-647 Harsha reigns at Kanauj630-644 Xuan Zang (Hsuan Tsang) visits India650-800 Early Tantras are composedc. 650 Arabs reach the Indus711-715 Arabs invade Northwest India750-1500 Medieval Puranas are composed765-773 Raja Krishna I creates the Kailasa temple to Shiva at Ellorac. 788-820 Shankara, nondualist philosopher, lives in Keralac. 800 Manikkavacakar composes the Tiruvacakamc. 880-1200 The Chola Empire dominatesSouth India900 and 1150 The Chandellas build the temples at Khajurahoc. 975-1025 Abhinavagupta, Shaiva philosopher, lives in Kashmir1001 Mahmud of Ghazni (979-1030) raids North India1021 Ghaznavid (Turkish) Muslim capitalestablished at Lahorec. 1056-1137 Ramanuja, qualified Dualist philosopher, lives in Tamil country1192-1206 Muhammad of Ghor establishes Ghorid capital at Delhic. 1200 Jayadeva lives in Bengal

1210-1526 The Delhi Sultanate is in power1325-1351 Muhammad bin Tughluq reignsc. 1200 Early orders of Sufis arise in North Indiac. 1200 Virashaivas, including Basava, live in South India1238-1258 Narasimhadeva I builds the temple of Konarakc. 1238-1317 Madhva, dualist philosopher, lives in Karnatakac. 1300 Shri Vaishnavas split into Cats and Monkeysc. 1336-1565 Vijayanagar Empire is in its primec. 1398-1448 Kabir lives1399 Timur, ruler of Central Asia, destroys Delhi1469-1539 Guru Nanak founds Sikhism in the Punjab1486-1533 Chaitanya lives1498-1597 Mirabai lives1526 Babur founds the Mughal Empire1530-1556 Humayun reigns1532-1623 Tulsidas lives1556-1605 Akbar reigns1600 (December 31) Queen Elizabeth I charters theBritish East India Company1605-1627 Jahangir reigns1608-1649 Tukaram lives1622-1673 Kshetrayya lives1627-1658 Shah Jahan reigns1658-1707 Aurangzeb reigns1713-1719 Farrukhsiyar reigns1750-1755 The Bengal Famine causes ten million deaths1756 The Black Hole of Calcutta causes dozens of deaths1757 The British East India Company defeats the Muslim rulers in Bengal1757 First wave of British Raj begins1765 Robert Clive becomes chancellor of Bengal1772-1833 Rammohun Roy lives; 1828 founds Brahmo Samaj1782-1853 Sir Charles James Napier lives1813 Second wave of British Raj begins1824-1883 Dayananda Sarasvati; 1875, founds Arya Samaj1857-1858 The Rebellion, formerly known as the Mutiny, takes place1857 Third wave of the British Raj begins1858 The British viceroy officially replaces Mughalrule (and the East India Company)1863-1902 Swami Vivekananda lives1865-1936 Rudyard Kipling lives1869-1948 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi,known as Mahatma Gandhi, lives1861-1941 Rabindranath Tagore lives1875 Helena Blavatsky founds the Theosophical Society1893 Vivekananda attends the World’s Parliamentof Religions in Chicago

1897 Vivekananda founds the Vedanta movement in America1896-1977 A. C. Bhaktivedanta, Swami Prabhupada (founder of ISKCON), lives1918-2008 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (founder of Transcendental Meditation) lives1919 Amritsar massacre takes place1931-1990 Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) lives1947 Independence; Partition1970- Hindus in Europe, United States, andCanada start building templesGUIDE TO PRONUNCIATION AND SPELLINGOF WORDS IN SANSKRIT AND OTHERINDIAN LANGUAGESSanskrit vowels are pronounced very much like Italian vowels. The aspirated consonantsshould be pronounced distinctly: bh as in “cab horse,” dh as in “mad house,” gh as in “doghouse,” ph as in “top hat,” and th as in “goat herd.”Traditionally, scholars have used diacriticals to distinguish between long and shortvowels and among three different forms of s in Sanskrit, as well as to mark other nice points ofthe orthography of Sanskrit and other Indian languages that are essential for the citation of texts.Increasingly, scholars writing for a wider audience that is blissfully ignorant of any Indianlanguage have omitted the diacriticals and changed two of the s’s to sh’s (leaving the third an stout court), and this book follows that practice. This may result in some confusion for readerscontemplating the spellings of certain words in this book, such as the name of the gods Shiva andVishnu, and noting that they are sometimes spelled elsewhere—in works cited in my text orbibliography—as Siva and Visnu. I hope and trust that readers will be able to deal with thisconflict, and also to distinguish the Kali Age (Kali with short a and short i) from the goddessKali (Kālī with long a and long i).Many words in modern Indian languages derived from Sanskrit drop the final short a ofthe Sanskrit, so that Rama sometimes becomes Ram, Lakshmana becomes Lakshman,Hastinapura becomes Hastinapur, and Vijayanagara becomes Vijayanagar. (“Dharma” oftenbecomes “dharam.”) As for the British distortions of words in Sanskrit and other Indianlanguages (Hindoo, suttee), they are often bizarre but usually recognizable.ABBREVIATIONSTEXTS

POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONSABVP: Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (All-India Students’ Council)BJP: Bharatiya Janata Party (Peoples’ Party of India)RSS: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers’ Organization)VHP: Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council)GLOSSARY OF TERMS IN INDIAN LANGUAGES AND NAMES OF KEYFIGURESAbhinavagupta: philosopher of Kashmir Shaivism, 975-1025 CEAditi: “Infinity,” name of a Vedic goddess of creation, mother of the Adityas, solar godsAdivasis : “Original inhabitants,” indigenous inhabitants of India, tribal peoplesAdvaita: nondualism, a philosophical school, propounded by ShankaraAgastya: a mythical sage said to have brought Sanskrit south to the Tamil land and alsoestablished Tamil thereAgni: Vedic god of fire (ignis)agrahara: “taking the field,” a grant of temple land to Brahminsahimsa: nonviolence, literally “a lack of the desire to harm”akam: word used in Tamil poetry for the interior world, the world of loveAkbar: Mughal emperor, 1556-1605, noted for his religious pluralismAlvars : Tamil Vaishnava saintsAmba: “Mother,” name of a woman in the Mahabharata who was reborn as a man; alsothe name of a goddessAmbalika: “Dear Little Mother,” name of the mother of Pandu in the MahabharataAmbika: “Little Mother,” name of the mother of Dhritarashtra in the Mahabharataapad-dharma: the permissive religious law that prevails in time of emergencyApala: a woman who pressed soma in her mouth for the god Indra in the Rig VedaAppar: one of the first three Tamil Nayanmar saints, sixth to eighth centuryApsarases : “Gliding in the Waters,” celestial nymphs and courtesansArjuna: one of the five sons of Pandu in the Mahabharata, fathered by the god IndraArtha-shastra: textbook of political science

Arya Samaj: a religious movement founded by Dayananda Sarasvati in Bengal in 1875Aryas : “nobles,” name by which the Vedic people referred to themselvesAshoka: Mauryan emperor, 265-232 BCE, author of the first surviving writing in India,edicts in stoneashrama: a hermitage; also a stage or way of life (there are four: chaste student,householder, forest dweller, renouncer)Ashvaghosha: a first century CE poet, author of a life of the BuddhaAshvins : “Horsemen,” twin half horse gods, sons of Saranyu and the sunAsuras : antigods, enemies of the gods in heaven; originally, the older godsAtharva Veda: the fourth Veda, largely devoted to magic spellsatman: the self, the individual soul, identical with the world soul (atman or brahman)Aurangzeb : a Mughal emperor, 1658-1707 CE, noted for his chauvinismavatar: a “descent” of a god, particularly an incarnation of the god VishnuAvesta: the sacred text of the ancient IraniansAyur-veda: the Veda of long life, the science of medicineBabur: the first Mughal emperor, 1483-1530Backward Castes: one of many names for the lowest and most oppressed castesBali: a demon undone by his generosity to the god Vishnu, who had become incarnate asa dwarfBana: a poet in the court of Harsha, author of a biography of Harshabanyan: a sacred tree that puts down multiple rootsBasava: a Brahmin who founded the Virashaiva movement, c. 1106-1167 CEBhagavad Gita: a philosophical text, spoken by the god Krishna to the prince Arjuna, inthe MahabharataBhagavan: a name of god, Vishnu or ShivaBhagavata: a worshiper of the gods Vishnu or ShivaBhagiratha: a sage who brought the Ganges down to earth from the Milky Waybhakta: devotee of a godbhakti: passionate devotion to a god who returns that loveBharata: younger brother of Rama; also the name of the son of Shakuntala andDushyanta and an ancient name of IndiaBharata-varsha: the land of IndiaBhil, Bhilla: name of a tribal peopleBhima: one of the five sons of Pandu in the Mahabharata , fathered by the god Vayu, thewindBhishma: celibate son of Satyavati in the MahabharataBhrigu: a powerful sageBrahma: a god, responsible for the task of creationbrahman: the divine substance of the universeBrahmanas : texts, from c. 800 to 600 BCE, explaining the Vedic ritualsBrahmin: the highest of the four classes, the class from which Vedic priests must comeBrahmo Samaj: a reform movement founded by Rammohun Roy in 1828bride-price: a reverse dowry, paid by the groom to the family of the brideBuddhification: casting a non-Buddhist as a BuddhistCampantar: one of the first three Tamil Nayanmar saints, sixth to eighth centuryCankam: (from Sanskrit sangham): early Tamil literary assembly

Chaitanya: Bengali saint, 1486-1533 CEChamars : a Dalit caste, leatherworkersChandalas : a Dalit caste, workers in cremation groundsChandidas : a fourteenth-century CE Bengali poetChandika: “The Fierce,” a name of the GoddessChandra Gupta I : founder of the Gupta Empire in 324 CEChandragupta Maurya: founder of the Mauryan Empire in 324 BCECharaka: author of a medical textbookCharioteers (Sutas): a caste of charioteers and bardsCharvakas : Materialists, regarded as the paradigmatic heretics; also called LokayatasCheras : an ancient South Indian kingdomCholas : an ancient South Indian kingdomClive, Robert: governor of Bengal from 1755-1760 ; chancellor from 1765Cuntarar: one of the first three Tamil Nayanmar saints, sixth to eighth centuryDadhyanch: a Vedic sage whose head was replaced with a horse headDaksha: a Vedic patriarch, father of Sati, who foolishly refused to invite the god Shiva tohis sacrificeDalit: preferred contemporary word, derived from the Marathi/Hindi word for“oppressed,” for the lowest castes, formerly known as UntouchablesDalitification: the process by which castes claim to be Dalits; the reverse ofSanskritizationdarshan: “seeing,” the exchange of powerful gazes between god and worshiper, or kingand subjectDasa: “slave,” the word that the Vedic Aryas applied to their enemiesDasyu: another word for “slave”Deshification: the process by which the Sanskritic tradition absorbs local traditionsDevaki: royal mother of Krishnadhamma: Pali for the Sanskrit term dharma; Buddhist law, and Ashokan lawdharma: religious law, justice, righteousness. See also sadharana, sanatanadog cooker shva-paka: ancient term of opprobrium for Dalit castesDraupadi: wife of the five Pandava brothers, heroine of the Mahabharata, later agoddessDravida: Sanskrit word for South IndiaDravidian: a language group from South India that includes Tamil, Telugu, Kannada,and MalayalamDrona: the Pandavas’ tutor in martial arts in the MahabharataDrupada: father of Draupadi in the Mahabharata dualism: the philosophical view thatgod and the universe, including the worshiper, are of two different substancesDurga: “Hard to Get [to],” a goddessDvaita: dualism, a philosophical school, whose most famous proponent was MadhvaDvapara Yuga: “The Age of the Deuce,” the third of the degenerating agesDyer, Major Reginald: British officer who gave the command for the massacre atAmritsarEkalavya: tribal (Nishada) prince who cut off his thumb at the request of Arjuna andDrona, in the MahabharataEllamma: South Indian goddess with the body of a Brahmin woman and the head of a

Dalit womanFs, the five: elements of Tantric ritual (fish, flesh, fermented grapes, frumentum, andfornication), see also Ms, the fiveFaxian: Chinese visitor to India in 402 CEGandhari: wife of Dhritarashtra, mother of Duryodhana and his brothers, the enemies ofthe Pandavas, in the MahabharataGandharvas : demigods, musicians, associated with fertility and horses; consorts of theApsarasesGanga: the Ganges RiverGargi: a feisty woman who interrogates sages in the UpanishadsGaruda: a mythical eagle, the mount of the god VishnuGayatri: name of a meter; of a particularly holy verse in the Rig Veda; and of a goddessGhasidas : a Chamar who founded a branch of the SatnamisGita: short name of the Bhagavad GitaGonds : a tribal peopleGondwana: a mythical land thought to have been submerged long, long agoGugga (also spelled Guga): a folk god, said to have been a historical figure; famous forhis flying black mareguna: “quality,” term for the three strands of matter in Sankhya philosophyGuru Nanak: founder of Sikhism, 1469-1539 CEHanuman: the monkey ally of Rama in the RamayanaHarappa: ancient city in the Indus Valley, c. 2500 BCEHarijan: “People of God” (Hari, Vishnu), Gandhi’s name for the DalitsIndra: Veda king of the gods, god of rain, fertility, and warIndrani: wife of the Vedic god Indraitihasa: “that’s what happened,” historyJabali: a Brahmin who argues for atheism in the RamayanaJagannatha: “Lord of the Universe,” the name of a form of Vishnu, especially in atemple in Puri, OrissaJainas : followers of the religion founded by the Jina, in the fifth century BCEJambu-dvipa: “the plum tree continent,” the ancient name for the subcontinent of IndiaJanaka: a king of Videha, father of SitaJanashruti: a king in the UpanishadsJara: “old age”; also the name of a hunter who kills the incarnate god Krishnajati: “birth,” casteJina: Vardhamana Mahavira, founder of Jainismjizya: tax levied by Muslim rulers on subjects who did not perform military serviceKabir: a poet, c. 1398-1448 CE, whose teachings bridged Hinduism and IslamKaikeyi: mother of Bharata in the Ramayana, who insisted that Rama be exiledKalamukhas : “Death Heads,” a sect of antinomian ShaivasKali (goddess): “Time” or “Doomsday,” goddess of sex and violence and much moreKali Age (Yuga): the fourth and worst of the ages; the present ageKalidasa: a Gupta poet, author of ShakuntalaKalinga: the ancient name of OrissaKalki: the final avatar of Vishnu, a horse-headed warrior who will kill the barbariansKama-sutra: textbook of pleasure, composed by Vatsyayana, third century CE

Kamsa: king who devoted his life to the attempt to kill KrishnaKannappar: Tamil saint who tore out his eyes for ShivaKanphata: “Pierced-Ear,” name of a sect of yogisKapala-mochana: “The Release of the Skull,” the shrine in Varanasi where the skull ofBrahma fell from Shiva’s handKapalikas : “Skull Bearers,” a sect of Shaivas who imitate Shiva’s wandering withBrahma’s skullkarma: action, or the fruits of actionKarna: illegitimate son of Kunti, raised by low-caste Charioteers, in the Mahabharatakathenotheism: F. Max Müller’s term for the worship of one supreme god at a timeKaula: “belonging to the family [kula],” name of a Tantric sectKausalya: mother of Rama, in the RamayanaKautilya: author of the Artha-shastrakavya: poetryKhandoba: Maharashtrian god associated with dogskliba: a sexually challenged manKrishna: an incarnation of Vishnu, a hero of the Mahabharata who grew up amongcowherdsKrita Yuga: the first, or Winning AgeKshatriyas : the class of warriors and kingsKshetrayya: a poet, 1622-1673 CE, who wrote poems to Krishna in TeluguKula: “the family,” name for a Tantric sectKumbhakarna: “Pot Ear,” a brother of Ravana, in the RamayanaKundalini: “the encircling,” name of a coiled spinal power energized through TantricyogaKunti: a wife of Pandu, mother of the Pandavas and of Karna (all fathered by gods), inthe MahabharataKutsa: a son of Indra, in the BrahmanasLakshmana: brother of Rama, in the RamayanaLakshmi: goddess of fortune, wife of Vishnu and of earthly kingsLakulisha: “Lord Holding a Club,” founder of the Pashupata sect of ShaivasLanka: a mythical island ruled by the ogre RavanaLaukification: the process by which the Sanskritic tradition absorbs popular (laukika[“of the people,” loka]) traditionsleft-hand: sinister or unclean, said by Hindus who think they are the right hand, aboutother Hindus, particularly certain TantricsLemuria: mythical supercontinent said to have once connected India and Australialinga: “sign,” a sign of sex, particularly the male sexual organ, more particularly thesexual organ of the god Shiva; also regarded as an abstract symbol of ShivaLingayat: a South Indian sect of Shaivas, also known as Virashaivas and CharanasLokayatas : Materialists, also called CharvakasMs, the five: the five elements of Tantric ritual (mansa, matsya, madya, mudra,maithuna). See also Fs, the fiveMadhva: a philosopher, c. 1238-1317 CE, in Karnataka, exponent of the Dvaita (dualist)schoolMadri: a wife of Pandu in the Mahabharata; mother of the twins Nakula and Sahadeva

Mahabharata: the longer of the two great Sanskrit epics, attributed to the sage VyasaMahadevi: “the great goddess”Mahadevyyakka: twelfth-century CE woman, Virashaiva saint and poetMahisha: “the buffalo,” a buffalo antigod killed by DurgaMahisha-mardini: “buffalo crushing,” an epithet of Durgamaithuna: “pairing,” sexual couplingMallanna: a Maharashtrian god who often takes the form of a dogMandavya: a sage, unjustly impaled on a stake, in the MahabharataManikkavacakar: nineth-century CE Shaiva poet, author of the TiruvacakamMankanaka: a sage who danced too muchmamsa: fleshManu: a mythical sage, author of a dharma textMarathas : a people of MaharashtraMarathi: language of Maharashtramare Fire (Vadava-agni): submarine fire in the mouth of a mareMariamma: South Indian goddess with the head of a Brahmin woman and the body of aDalit womanMaricha: ogre ally of Ravana, who takes the form of a deer to delude SitaMaruts : wind godsmatt: a Hindu theological schoolMauryas : a great dynasty, from 324 to 185 BCEMeru: the great mountain at the center of the worldMimamsa: the philosophy of logicMirabai: Hindi poet and woman saint, devotee of Krishna, 1498-1597 CEMitra: “Friend,” a Vedic god closely linked with Varunamlecchas: barbariansMohenjo-Daro: a great city in the Indus Valley, c. 2500 BCEmoksha: Release, from the circle of transmigrationmonism: doctrine that the universe is made of one divine substancemrigas : wild beasts, in contrast with pashus, domesticated or sacrificial beasts; also aword for deerMrityu: deathMurukan: South Indian god identified with SkandaMuttal Ravuttan: a Muslim horseman, a South Indian Hindu folk heronabob: name given to British rulers of IndiaNachiketas : a boy who goes to the underworld and learns about death, in theUpanishadsNakula: one of the twin sons of Madri, fathered by the Ashvins, in the MahabharataNammalvar (“Our Alvar”): the last of the great Alvars, in the ninth centuryNanda: name of the cowherd who adopts Krishna, in the PuranasNandas : dynasty that preceded the MauryasNandin: the bull of the god Shiva, sometimes his doorkeeper or sonNantanar: in Tamil myth, a Pariah who went through fire to purify himself because hewas not allowed to enter a templeNara-simha: “Man-Lion,” an avatar of Vishnu, savior of PrahladaNasatyas : a name of the Ashvins

Nastikas : “people who say, ‘It does not exist,’ ” atheistsnawab : name given to Muslim rulers under the British RajNayakas : dynasty that ruled much of South India, from Mysore, through the sixteenthand seventeenth centuriesNayanmars : Tamil Shaiva saints (singular is “Nayanar”)nir-guna: “without qualities,” the undifferentiated, abstract of the godheadnirvana: “the blowing out of a flame,” release from the circle of transmigrationNishadas : tribal peoples of ancient Indianondualism: the philosophical view, expounded by Shankara, that god and the universeare made of one substanceNyaya: logic, a philosophical schoolOrientalism: term coined by Edward Said to describe the attitude of Europeans toward“Orientals”orthopraxy: an emphasis on “straight behavior” rather than “straight thinking”(orthodoxy)Pahlavas : Sanskrit term for Parthians, the people whose empire occupied all of what isnow Iran, Iraq, and ArmeniaPallavas : South Indian dynasty that ruled from Kanchipuram, north of the Cholas,Pandyas, and Cheras, from the fourth through the ninth century CEPandavas : the five sons of Pandu, in the Mahabharata , in order of birth: Yudhishthira,Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula, and Sahadevapandit: a learned manPandu: father of the Pandavas, born pale, cursed to die if he begot legal sonsPandyas : a South Indian dynasty that ruled the eastern part of the southernmost tip ofIndia from the time of Ashoka to well into the sixteenth centuryPanis : enemies of the Vedic people, accused of cattle theftpapa: evilParashurama: “Rama with an Ax,” an avatar of VishnuPariah: Tamil word for a particular low caste of drummers, then extended to all the DalitcastesParsis : “Persians,” ZoroastriansParvati: “Daughter of the Mountain,” wife of Shivapasha: the “bond” that ties the individual soul (the pashu [“beast”]) to the god ( pati[“protector”]) in the Shaiva Siddhanta philosophypashu: domesticated or sacrificial beastPashupatas: followers of Shiva Pashupati, “Lord of Beasts,” antinomian and cynicalPataliputra: city on the Ganges, the modern PatnaPeriya Purana: a collection of stories about the Tamil Shaiva saints, by Cekkiyar, datedto the reign of the Chola king Kulottunka II, 1133-1150 CEpitha: plinth or base of statue, particularly of a deityPrahlada: a virtuous demon, saved from his wicked father by Vishnu in the form of theMan-Lion (Nara-simha)Prajapati: “Lord of Creatures,” the creator in the VedasPrakrit: “natural,” the actual spoken languages of ancient India, in contrast with Sanskritprakriti: “nature,” more particularly matter in contrast with spirit (in Sankhyaphilosophy)

pralaya: dissolution or doomsdaypratiloma: “against the grain”; more literally, “against the hair,” said in particular ofmarriages in which the woman is of a higher caste than the manPrithivi: “broad,” the earthPrithu: the first king, who tamed the earthpuja: worship, particularly with flowers and fruits, also sometimes with incense andother offerings pukka: “ripe” or “cooked,” perfectedPulkasa: name of one of the ancient Dalit castespuram: in Sanskrit, a city or citadel; in Tamil, the public emotion, in contrast with akamPuranas: compendiums of myth, ritual, and history, originally only in Sanskrit, later alsoin vernacular languagespurdah: the seclusion of women, particularly behind screens in a house or palacePurohita: a family priest or royal chaplainpurusha: “male,” the Primeval Man in the Vedas; later, any male animal; in Sankhyaphilosophy, spirit, self, or personpurusha-arthas: the three (later four) goals of life for a manpurva paksha: “first wing,” statement of the opponent’s position at the start of anargumentPushyamitra: founder of the Shunga dynasty in 185 BCEPutana: a demoness who tried to kill KrishnaQualified Nondualism: philosophy taught by Ramanuja, moderating the view that godand the worshiper are of the same substanceRadhakrishnan, Sarvepalli: philosopher, the first president of India, 1888-1975Raikva: the first homeless person, in the UpanishadsRaj: short for rajyam [“kingdom”]; in particular, the British Raj, the British colonizationof Indiaraja: kingrajas: emotion or passion, one of the three gunas, or qualities of matterrajyam: kingdomRakshasas: ogres, demonic creatures on earthRama: a prince, an avatar of Vishnu, hero of the RamayanaRamanuja: a philosopher, exponent of Qualified Nondualism, from Tamil Nadu, c.1056-1137 CERamanujan, Attipat Krishnaswami: poet, linguist, scholar of Tamil, Telugu, andKannada, 1929-1993Ramayana: one of the two great ancient Sanskrit epics, the story of Rama, attributed tothe poet ValmikiRam-raj (Hindi), Rama-rajya (Sanskrit): perfect reign of RamaRanke, Leopold von: a positivist German historian, 1795-1886Ravana: an ogre (Rakshasa), ruler of the island of Lanka, enemy of Rama in theRamayanaRig Veda: the most ancient sacred text in India, composed c. 1500 BCErishi: a sageRishyashringa: a sage with a horn on his head, son of a sage and a female antelopeRudra: “Howler,” a wild Vedic god, later a name of the Hindu god Shivasadharana dharma: religious law that applies to everyone in common. See also dharma

Sagara: a king whose sons dug out the ocean, which is also called sagarasa-guna: “with qualities,” the differentiated, visualized aspect of the godheadSahadeva: one of the twin sons of Madri, fathered by the Ashvins, in the Mahabharatasahib: “master,” honorific title given to British rulers in India during the RajSama Veda: the Veda of hymns arranged for chantingsamkara: mixture, in particular the mixing together of classes and/or castessamnyasa: renunciationsamsara: the circle of transmigrationsanatana dharma: the eternal religious law. See also dharmaSankhya: a dualistic philosophy, dating from the time of the Upanishads, that divides theuniverse into a male purusha (spirit, self, or person) and a female prakriti (matter, nature)Sanskrit: the perfected or artificial language called the language of the gods; thelanguage of the texts of ancient IndiaSanskritization: process by which lower castes, imitating Brahmin ways of eating anddressing, raise their statusSantoshi Ma: goddess first worshiped in the 1960s, now extremely popular, largely asthe result of a mythological film, Jai Santoshi MaSarama: bitch of the god Indra in the Rig Veda, who found stolen cows and broughtthem backSarasvati River: once a river in the Punjab, dried up long agosati: a good woman, particularly a devoted wife. See also sutteeSati: wife of the god Shiva, daughter of Daksha, who committed suicideSatnamis: “Path of the True Name,” a sect, founded in the eastern Punjab in 1657, thatworships gurus rather than godssattva: “truth, goodness,” one of the three gunas or qualities of matter in SankhyaphilosophySatyavati: daughter of a fisherman, mother of Vyasa and other key figures in theMahabharatasepoy (from Turkish sipahi [“soldier”]): native troop serving the British in IndiaShachi: the wife of the god IndraShaiva: pertaining to Shiva; a worshiper of ShivaShakas: Scythiansshakti: power, particularly female power, more particularly a goddess or the wife of agodShankara: a nondualist philosopher from Kerala, c. 788-820 CEShantanu: husband of Satyavati and of the Ganges River, father of Bhishma, in theMahabharatashastras: texts or textbooks, sciencesShatrughna: one of Rama’s three brothers, in the RamayanaShattaris: Sufi sectShiva: the Great God (Mahadeva)Shivaji: founder of the kingdom of Maharashtra, leader of resistance against theMughals, 1630-1680 CEShrirangam: Vaishnava temple, also known as Tiruvarangam, in Trichi(Tiruchirappalli), on the Kaveri River, in Tamil Nadu; the seat of RamanujaShudras: “servants,” the lowest of the four classes (varnas) of ancient Indian society

Shunahshepha: boy, in the Brahmanas, whose father tried to sell him to be sacrificedShungas: dynasty that ruled North India from 185 to 73 BCEShurapanakha: ogress (Rakshasi), sister of Ravana, mutilated by Lakshmana, in theRamayanaShvetaketu: a sage, in the UpanishadsSikhs: followers of the religion founded by Guru Nanak, 1469-1539, in the PunjabSindhu: “river,” Greek and Persian word later used as the basis of the word for thepeople who lived east of the Indus, the HindusSita: an incarnate goddess, the wife of Rama, in the RamayanaSkanda: a son of Shiva, general of the gods, identified with Murukan in South IndiaSkull Bearers. See Kapalikas.soma: a plant pressed to yield a hallucinogenic fluid, offered to the gods in the Vedas;also a name of the moonSomanatha (Somnath): a great temple to Shiva, and the city around it, in southwestGujaratSri Lanka: present-day name of the island previously known as Ceylon or Serendip butprobably not Lankastupas: Buddhist relic moundsSufism: a mystical branch of IslamSugriva: a monkey king befriended by Rama in the RamayanaSukeshin: ogre (Rakshasa) devoted to Shiva, in the PuranasSurya: the sun, a Vedic godSushruta: author of a medical textSutas: “Charioteers,” name of a caste of charioteers and improvisational bards, in ancientIndiasuttee (from Sanskrit sati): the burning of a woman on the pyre of her dead husband;also, the woman who does thissva-dharma: one’s own particular dharma, in contrast with general (sadharana dharma)svayambhu: “self-existent” or “self-created,” an epithet of Prajapati and of several othermythical creators; also applied to lingas and other religious symbols that appear in nature,without human agencySwaminarayan: founder of the Satsangi sect, 1780-1830 CEtamas: “darkness,” one of the three qualities or gunas of matter, according to SankhyaphilosophyTamil: Dravidian language of South IndiaTantra: form of Hinduism (also of Buddhism), and the texts and practices of thosetraditionstapas: internal heat, generated through rigid self-control of the senses and violent yogicpracticesTej Singh: historical figure, the son of the commander of the fort of Senji underAurangzeb; also a hero of Hindi folkloreThapar, Romila: India’s greatest living historian of the ancient periodThompson, Stith: author of a detailed index of the themes in folklore, 1885-1976 CEThugs (from the Sanskrit sthaga [“thief,” “rogue”]): members of a gang of assassins whoworshiped Kali and terrorized the British in IndiaTirumal: Tamil name of Vishnu

Tiruvacakam: “the sacred word”: a poem in praise of Shiva, composed byManikkavacakar, c. 800 CETreta Yuga: “the Trey,” the second of the four degenerating ages (Yugas)Trimurti: “triple form,” the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and ShivaTrishanku: king who tried in vain to get to heaven and remains stuck halfway theretrivarga: “triple path,” the three goals of human life ( purusha-arthas)Tukaram: antinomian poet saint in Maharashtra, 1608-1649 CETulsidas: poet, author of the Hindi Ramcharitmanas , 1532-1623 CETvastri: Vedic architect, blacksmith, and artisan of the godstwice born (dvi-ja): name of the three higher classes (varnas) of Hindu society, rebornon their initiationulama: conservative ruling body of IslamUlupi: a cobra woman married by Arjuna, in the MahabharataUpanishads: Sanskrit philosophical texts, from c. 500 BCEVaishnava: pertaining to Vishnu; a worshiper of VishnuVaishyas: the third of the four classes (varnas) of ancient Indian societyValin: monkey falsely accused of usurping his brother’s throne, unfairly killed by Rama,in the RamayanaValmiki: author of the Ramayana and, within it, guardian and tutor of Rama’s twin sonsVama: “left-hand,” said of the more antinomian aspects of Hinduism, particularly ofTantrismVaranasi: name of Kashi, Benaresvarna: “color,” any of the four social classes of ancient Indiavarna-ashrama-dharma: the religious law pertaining to social class (varna) and stage oflife (ashrama), often used as a description of Hinduismvarna-samkara: the mixture of classes, miscegenationVaruna: Vedic god of the sky, the waters, and the moral lawvasana: “perfume,” the memory traces left by former livesVasudeva: the cowherd who adopts the infant Krishna and raises him, in the PuranasVatsyayana: author of the Kama-sutraVayu: god of the windVeda: “knowledge,” one of the three (or four) most ancient sacred texts; also used todenote all four Vedas plus the Brahmanas and UpanishadsVedanta: “end of the Veda,” a term for the Upanishads and for the later philosophybased on the UpanishadsVedantic: pertaining to the VedantaVessantara Jataka: Buddhist text that tells the story of a king, Vessantara, who losteverything he hadVibhishana: an ogre, the moralistic brother of Ravana, in the RamayanaVidura: a son of Vyasa born of a servant girl; an incarnation of dharmaviraha: separation, particularly the emotional agony of separation from a lover or from abeloved godVirashaiva: a sect of Shaivas, also called Lingayats, founded by Basava c. 1106-1167CEVirochana: an antigod, father of BaliVishnu: a great god

Vitthal: a Maharashtrian godVithoba: a Maharashtrian godVivekananda: a holy man, one of the founders of the Vedanta movement, who broughtHinduism to Chicago in 1893 CEVritra: an antigod, Indra’s great enemy, in the VedasVyasa: a sage, author of the Mahabharata and of Pandu, Dhritarashtra, and ViduraXuan Zang: Chinese visitor to India in the seventh century CEYajur Veda: the third Veda, arranged for the sacrificeYakshas, Yakshinis : forest and tree spirits, beautiful, able to confer fertility butsometimes maliciousYashoda: the cowherd woman who adopted Krishna, in the PuranasYavakri: a sage who was killed because he raped a Brahmin’s wife, in the Brahmanasand the MahabharataYavanas: “Ionians,” a Sanskrit word first for Greeks, then for any foreignersyoni: the womb, the partner of the lingaYudhishthira: oldest son of Pandu, begotten by DharmaYuga: an age, one of four periods of time in which everything degenerateszenana: the part of a house or palace where women are secludedZoroastrians: members of a religion derived from the Iranian Avesta, involving theworship of fireNOTESPREFACE: THE MAN OR THE RABBIT IN THE MOON1 There are some good short introductions (see, in the Bibliography, Hopkins, Kinsley,Knipe), longer reference works (Flood [Introduction and Companion ], Klostermaier, Michaels,Mittal, and Thursby), and books on Hinduism as it is lived today (Narayanan and Hawley). Myown version of the history of the Hindus could be used as a basic textbook for a course over afourteen-week semester: one week of introduction, one of conclusion, and two chapters a weekfor twelve weeks. I would recommend supplementing it with a good book on Indian history(Keay and Thapar are my favorites), a good survey (such as Flood’s or Glucklich’s), and asourcebook (such as my Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism, or Sources of IndianTradition [3rd ed.], or the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions). Basham’s TheWonder That Was India is still unbeatable as a general introduction to the cultures of India.2 A good model is provided by Richman’s Many Ramayanas and QuestioningRamayanas, which trace the many Ramayanas throughout Hindu history.3 Ramanujan, “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?”4 I have in mind works such as those provided by Shulman (et al.) on the Nayakas andThapar on Somanatha.5 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology.6 Tubb, “Barn, Ben, and Begging Bowl: Sanskrit Words and the Things in the World.”

7 Narayana Rao, “ Hinduism: The Untold Story.”8 Srinivas, Religion and Society of the Coorgs.9 Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi, 158.10 Srinivas, Social Change, 7.11 Kosambi, Myth and Reality, 91-92.12 Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of men, 283.13 Ibid., 23.14 Pollock, “India in the Vernacular Millennium.”15 Pollock, Literary Cultures in History.16 Microhistory, in the hands of a master like Carlo Ginzburg, is another way to excavatethese often lost ordinary histories, but microhistory requires a thick description to which a surveysuch as this cannot aspire.17 With apologies to William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven ina wild flower,/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/ And eternity in an hour.”18 Schmidt, “The Origin of Ahimsa.”19 Ramanujan, “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?”20 Shankara’s “Thousand Teachings,” 1.6 ; Mayeda 2.1.6, 212.21 Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi, 51.22 “Sasa Jataka,” Jataka, vol. 3, no. 316, 34-38 of PTS.23 Doniger, The Implied Spider, 154-56.24 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, part II, paragraph xi; citing Jastrow, “TheMind’s Eye.”25 Alison Goddard, Times Higher Education Supplement , November 21, 2003, “EmailThreats and Egg-throwing Spark Fears of Hindu Extremism,” See also Edward Rothstein, “TheScholar Who Irked the Hindu Puritains,” in “Arts and Ideas,” New York Times, January 31, 2005(reprinted as “Daring to Tackle Sex in Hinduism,” in International Herald Tribune, February 2,2005); William Dalrymple, “India: The War over History,” New York Review of Books, Vol. 52,no.6 (April 7, 2005).

26 IndianCivilization@yahoogroups.com; “Jiten Bardwaj”

18 Ronojoy Sen, Legalizing Religion, 6-38.19 Ibid.20 Brian K. Smith, “Exorcising the Transcendent,” requires six qualities out of a clusterof nine; Michaels, Hinduism, 20, cluster of five.21 According to the 2004 Survey Report conducted by the Indian Census, 25 percent ofpersons aged fifteen years and above are reported to be vegetarian. But according to the 2006 theHindu-CNN-IBN State of the Nation Survey, 40 percent of respondents were vegetarian (a figurethat includes those who eat eggs), 55 percent of Brahmins are vegetarian, and in landlockedstates such as Rajasthan and Haryana, where seafood is not available as a food source, more than60 percent are vegetarians. Gujarat, the birthplace of Gandhi and home to a sizable Jainpopulation, is predominantly landlocked, but only 45 percent vegetarian.22 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein’s method was similarlyapplied to Hinduism by the anthropologist Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi, in “The PolytheticNetwork.”23 Doniger, The Woman Who Pretended, 7.24 J. Z. Smith on center and periphery.25 Pace Michaels (Hinduism), there can be no single “habitus.”26 Doniger, “Hinduism by Any Other Name.”27 Narayana Rao, “Hinduism : The Untold Story” and “Purana as Brahminic Ideology.”28 Herodotus, History, 3.97-100. He called them Hindoi.29 Thapar, Early History, 275.30 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 10.31 W. C. Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 30.32 Babur, Baburnama, 352.33 Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. India.34 Hiltebeitel, “Of Camphor and Coconuts,” 28.35 For the usefulness of the word “Hinduism,” despite its drawbacks and the subjectivenature of its boundaries, see the arguments for the similarly subjective reasons for delineating theelements of a myth, in Doniger, The Implied Spider.

36 Doniger O’Flaherty, Other Peoples’ Myths, chapter 3.37 There are also more good books about the Mughals and the British, hot topics andtopics for which there is more reliable data, than about the ancient period.38 Jamison, Sacrificed Wife, 14; Patton, “If the Fire Goes Out, the Wife Shall Fast.”39 The Mimamnsa school. Julia Leslie, The Perfect Wife 3, citing Shabda 10.8.10.22:praptipurvakah pratishedah bhavati.40 Wayne Booth’s term, in The Rhetoric of Fiction.41 Doniger, The Implied Spider.42 Ramanujan, “Towards a Counter System.”43 Hiltebeitel, Rethinking the Mahabharata, 166-67.44 For this and other definitions of people beyond the Aryan pale in ancient India, seeDoniger O’Flaherty, “The Origins of Heresy in Hindu Mythology” and “The Image of theHeretic in the Gupta Puranas.”45 Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts.46 Trautmann, cited by Bryant, The Quest, 261.47 Trautmann, ibid., queried this: “It has yet to be determined why exactly India hasnever been self-sufficient in horses. Climate? A relative scarcity of pasture?” In a word, yes.48 Gommans, “The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire,” 70-73.49 Trautmann, cited by Bryant, The Quest, 261.50 Doniger, “Pluralism and Intolerance in Hinduism”; “Hindu Pluralism and HinduIntolerance of the Other”; “Tolstoi’s Revenge”; “Do Many Heads Necessarily Have ManyMinds?”51 Festinger, When Prophecy Fails and Cognitive Dissonance.52 Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes, 5-7.53 Forster, Hill of Devi, 199.54 Doniger O’Flaherty, Other Peoples’ Myths, final chapter.

55 Mistry, Such a Long Journey, 183.56 Orr, “Identity and Divinity.”57 Stewart, “Satya Pír: Muslim Holy Man and Hindu God,” 578.58 Katherine Ulrich’s wonderful term.59 Doniger, “The Origins of Heresy.”60 Sen, Identity and Violence.61 Joh, Heart of the Cross, 53-55; Bhabha, The Location of Culture 7, 277, 168-69, 256,19, 296, 360, 240, 322.62 This phrase is Kristin Bloomer’s.63 Pangborn, Zoroastrianism: A Beleaguered Faith, 8; “Sugar in the Milk: A ParsiKitchen Story,” NPR, March 20,2008:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88505980 & sc=emaf.64 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 318.CHAPTER 2 . TIME AND SPACE IN INDIA1 Forster, A Passage to India, chapter 12.2 Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard, 29.3 This is my paraphrase of the scientific data. Knipe tells a slightly different version of it,Hinduism, 2.4 Wolpert, A New History, 6. This was the civilization of the northern Soan River valley.5 Witzel, “Indocentrism,” 348.6 Suess, Das Antlitz der Erde [The Face of the Earth].7 Personal communication from Jim Masselos, Sydney, Australia, May 2006.8 Sclater, “The Mammals of Madagascar.”9 Macleane, Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency, 1885.

10 Frederick Spencer Oliver, A Dweller on Two Planets, wrote the book in 1883-86, diedin 1899, and his mother published it in 1905.11 Sumathi Ramaswamy, “Home Away from Home?,” 151 and 155.12 Forster, A Passage to India, 12.13 Keay, India, 4.14 Mahabharata 3.12.13; 16.8.40 ; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 261-62.15 Keay, India, 4.16 Harivamsha 86.35-53.17 Lorenzen, Kabir Legends, 49, citing Paramananda’s Kabir Manshur.18 Vishnu Purana 5.38.9-28.19 Bhagavata Purana 11.3.1-28.20 Kuiper, “The Bliss of Asa,” 113.21 S. R. Rao, The Lost City of Dvaraka.22 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 88, 100. For the identification of the horse withthe sacrificer and with Prajapati, see Shatapatha Brahmana 13.1.1.1 and 13.2.1.1. For the manyvariants of the story of Indra’s theft of the sacrificial horse of King Sagara, see Mahabharata3.104-08; Ramayana 1.38-44; Vishnu Purana 4.4.1-33, etc. For a discussion of these stories, seeDoniger O’Flaherty, Women, 220-22.23 Ramayana 1.37-43; Shiva Purana 5.38; Linga Purana 1.66 ; Vayu Purana 88;Brahmanda Purana 3.46-53; Vishnu Purana 4.4; Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 230, and fn. 88.24 Mahabharata 3.105-8.25 Janaki, “Parasurama,” citing chapters 51-56 of the Brahmanda Purana.26 Ibid., citing the Keralamahatmya.27 Rig Veda 2.12.2, Maitrayani Samhita 1.12.13, Mahabharata 1.21.5. 2.28 The legend of the cankams is first expressed in Nakkiranar’s commentary on theseventh-century Irayaiyanar Akapporul.

29 Das Gupta, Malabar Nation Trade.30 Frontline, May 7-20, 2005.31 T. S. Subramanian, in Frontline, 22: 2, (Jan., 15-28, 2005).32 Keay, India, 3-5.33 Dundes, The Flood Myth.34 Shatapatha Brahmana 1.8.1.1-6 ; Doniger O’Flaherty, Hindu Myths, 180.35 Matsya Purana 1.11-34; 2.1-19; Doniger O’Flaherty, Hindu Myths, 181-4.36 Mahabharata 3.56.4-6, 1.169.16-26 ; 1.170.1-21; 1.171.1-23.37 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva.38 Mahabharata 10.18.21.39 Matsya Purana 175.23-63; Harivamsha 1.45.20- 64; Doniger O’Flaherty, Women,226-72.40 Skanda Purana 7.1.32.1-128, 33.1-103; Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, 228-33; Siva,289-92.270).41 The idea of a submarine fire is pre-Vedic, Indo-Iranian (West, Indo-European Poetry,42 Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Lost Land of Lemuria , 233. According to the note on p.276, this research was carried out by the Institute of Geophysics at UT-Austin and MIT.43 MIT Professor Fred Frey, quoted in the MIT news office bulletin, “Team FindsSurprising Volcanic Clues to Indian Ocean Formation,” Deborah Halber, News Office,December 8, 1999.44 Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1835; Keay, India, 431.45 Jonathan Z, Smith, Map Is Not Territory.46 Wolpert, India, 5.47 Ibid., 19-20.48 Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva, 24.

49 Doniger, Splitting the Difference, 204-31.50 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.51 Woody Allen, “Fabulous Tales and Mythical Beasts,” 193.CHAPTER 3 . CIVILIZATION IN THE INDUS VALLEY1 Klostermaier, A Survey, 34-35.2 Neumayer, Prehistoric Indian Rock Paintings; Vatsyayan, “Prehistoric Paintings.”3 Wolpert, India, 10.4 Flood, Introduction, 25.5 McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought.6 Farmer, “Mythological Functions”; Erdosy, ed., The Indo-Aryans.7 Knipe, Hinduism, 22; Parpola, Deciphering the Indus Script, 248-50.8 W. Norman Brown, “The Indian Games of Pachisi, Chaupar, and Chausar,” 32-35.9 Marshall, Mohenjo-Daro, pl. CLIII, 7-10 and 551-52.10 Dales, “Of Dice and Men,” 17-18. 11. Keay, India, 912 Mitter, Indian Art, 8.13 Keay, India, 10.14 Kenoyer, “Socio-Economic Structures of the Indus Civilization”; “Harappan CraftSpecialization and the Question of Urban Segregation and Stratification”; “Specialized Craftsand Culture Change.”15 Knipe, Hinduism, 20.16 Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition, 6.17 Possehl, The Indus Age.18 Witzel, cited in Bryant, The Quest, 184.

19 Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel, “The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis.”20 Keay, India, 16.21 Farmer, “Mythological Functions.”22 Keay, India, 26.23 Ibid., 1324 K. M. Sen, Hinduism,14.25 Wolpert, India, 16.26 Thapar, Early India, 92.27 Marshall, Mohenjo-Daro, 351.28 Knipe, Hinduism, 21.29 Wolpert India, 20.30 Ibid, 11.31 Marshall, Mohenjo-Daro, 348.32 Ibid., 352.33 Bollee, Gone to the Dogs, 7.34 Wolpert, India, 20.35 Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition, 5-6.36 Ibid, 5-8.37 Ibid., 5.38 Marshall, Mohenjo-Daro, 355.39 Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition, 7.40 Bollee, Gone to the Dogs, 8, citing Marshall.41 Keay, India, 17, quoting Shireen Ratnagar.

42 Thapar, Early India, 85.43 Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition, 6.44 Farmer, “Mythological Functions.”dig.45 Wolpert, India, 23, citing M. S. Vats, who directed the latter phase of the Harappan46 Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition, 6-7.47 Ibid.48 Wolpert, India, 18.49 Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition, 7.50 Marshall, Mohenjo-Daro, 52-56.51 Keay, India, 14.52 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva.53 Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition, 8.54 Flood, Introduction, 29.55 Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition, 9-10.56 Knipe, Hinduism, 22.57 Marshall, Mohenjo-Daro, 129.58 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva.59 A good summary appears in Bryant, The Quest, 162-64. I am indebted to BrianCollins for rounding up this list and more of them for me.60 Sullivan, “A Re-examination.”61 Hiltebeitel, “The Indus Valley ‘Proto-Shiva’ Reexamined.”62 Krishna Rao, Indus Script Deciphered.63 Singh, “Rgvedic Base of the Pasupati Seal of Mohenjo-Daro,” citing RV 1.64.

64 S. R. Rao, Dawn and Devolution of the Indus Civilization, 288.65 Fairservis, The Harappan Civilization and Its Writing.66 Parpola, “Deciphering the Indus Script,” 248-50.67 Richter-Ushanas, The Indus Script and the Rigveda.68 Keay, India, 14.69 Thapar, Early India, 86.70 But against this, see Flood, Introduction, 28.71 Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition, 6-7.72 Keay, India, 14.73 Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition, 5.74 Ibid., 9.75 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 238.76 Keay, India, 14.77 Farmer, “Mythological Functions.” Seal H-180-A-B.78 Ibid.79 Knipe, Hinduism, 21.80 Thapar, Early India, 86.81 Flood, Introduction, 28.82 Ibid.83 Wolpert, India, 21.84 Thapar, Early India, 94.85 Ibid.86 Keay, India, 15.

87 Wolpert, India, 17.88 Mitter, Indian Art, 8.89 Keay, India, 15.90 Flood, Introduction, 28.91 Knipe, Hinduism, 21.92 Flood, Introduction, 28.93 Michaels, Hinduism, 31.94 Thapar, Early India, 86.95 Ibid., 85.96 Wolpert, India, 16.97 Keay, India, 14.98 Michaels, Hinduism, 31.99 Debiprasanna Chattopadhyaya, Lokayata.100 Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel, “The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis.”101 Wolpert, India, 20.102 Thapar, Early India, 87.103 Knipe, Hinduism, 23104 Keay, India, 5.105 Metcalf, A Concise History, 3.106 Thapar, Early India, 86.107 Ibid., 88.108 Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition, 8.109 Thapar, Early India, 85.

110 Wolpert, India, 17.CHAPTER 4 : BETWEEN THE RUINS AND THE TEXT1 Kurma Purana 1.9.2 Sir William Jones, “On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India.”3 West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, 388.4 Ibid., 386.5 Ibid., 1.6 Lincoln, “The Indo-European Cattle-Raiding Myth,” 24; also Priests, Warriors andCattle.7 West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, 191.8 Ibid., 2.9 Ibid., 9 and 10.10 Ibid., 2.11 But cf. Bryant, The Quest, 60-62.12 Witzel, “Rgvedic History,” 325.13 Thapar, Early India, 86-88.14 Ibid.15 West, Indo-European Poetry, 388.16 Thapar, Early India, 89.17 West, Indo-European Poetry, 447.18 Witzel, “Indocentrism,” 347.19 Klostermaier, Hinduism, 38.

20 Thapar, Early India, 86-87.21 West, Indo-European Poetry; Witzel, “Indocentrism.”22 Knott, Hinduism, 7, and Flood, Introduction, 31, report, but do not endorse, thetheory.23 Hasenpflug (“a retired German defense ministry linguist”), The Inscriptions of theIndus Civilization.24 Klostermaier, Hinduism, 36.25 Hasenpflug, The Inscriptions of the Indus Civilization.26 Subhash C. Kak, cited by Klostermaier, Hinduism, 38.27 David Frawley, cited in ibid.28 Klostermaier, Hinduism, 36.29 Bryant, The Quest, 195.30 Thapar, Early India, 110.31 Ibid., 109.32 Keay, India, 25.33 Elst, “Linguistic Aspects,” 260 and 262.34 Ibid., 260.35 Keay, India, 24.36 Thapar, Early India, 109, 113.37 Flood, Introduction, 34.38 Bryant, The Quest, 15, 120.39 Thapar, Early India, 85, 88, 92, 95-96, 107.40 B. B. Lal, cited by Bryant, The Quest, 173.41 Aasko Parpola, cited by Flood, Introduction, 34.

42 Flood, Introduction, 34.43 Keay, India, 25.44 Bryant, The Quest, 119-20, 174, 228.45 Keay, India, 25.46 Elst, cited by Bryant, The Quest, 119.47 Bryant, The Quest, 116.48 West, Indo-European Poetry, 46749 Ibid., 465.50 Thapar, Early India, 109; Flood 34.51 Thapar, Early India, 85.52 Jha and Rajaram, The Deciphered Indus Script.53 Witzel and Farmer, “Horseplay in Harappa,” Frontline, October 13, 2000.54 Subhash C. Kak, cited by Klostermaier, Hinduism, 3855 Flood, Introduction, 31.56 Klostermaier, Hinduism, 39.57 Staal, Agni.58 Thapar, Early India, 130.59 Keay, India, 5.60 Klostermaier, Hinduism, 31.CHAPTER 5 : HUMANS, ANIMALS, AND GODS IN THE RIG VEDA1 Thapar, Early India, 109. All translations are from Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rig Vedaand Hindu Myths, unless otherwise noted.

2 Keay, India, 24.3 Mitter, Indian Art, 9.4 Doniger O’Flaherty, Other Peoples’ Myths, chapter 3.5 Aitareya Aranyaka 5.5.3, cited by Staal, “The Concept of Scripture,” 122-23.6 For a discussion of the oral transmission of the Rig Veda, see Louis Renou, The Destinyof the Veda in India, 25-26 and 84.7 For a fuller discussion of the relationship between shruti and smriti, see Brian K. Smith,“Exorcising the Transcendent: Strategies for Defining Hinduism and Religion” and “The Unityof Ritual: The Place of the Domestic Sacrifice in Vedic Ritualism.”8 Müller, The Rig Veda, ix.9 Taittiriya Samhita 7.5.25.2.10 West, Indo-European Poetry, 161.11 Thapar, Early India, 113.12 Romila Thapar’s phrase, after George Michell’s “portable temple.”13 Jamison, Sacrificed Wife, 9.14 Heesterman, The Broken World.15 William Buck’s apt phrases, in his translation of the Mahabharata, 9.16 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 96.17 Chandogya Upanishad 8.7-12.18 West, Indo-European Poetry, 246.19 Ibid.20 Jamison, Ravenous Hyenas, 258-59.21 RV 10.148.5; 10.94.14; 8.9.10 ; cf. 1.112.13; 10.123.1-5, 5.52.16 1.84.10-11; 8.6.19,2.34.2, 5.60.5, 34-36 ; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 322.22 Mahabharata 12.59.99-128; Atharva Veda 8.10.22-29; etc. Doniger O’Flaherty,

Origins of Evil, 321-48.23 Doniger O’Flaherty, Women; West, Indo-European Poetry, 417.24 Thapar, Early India, 115.25 Gommans, “The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire,” 71.26 Ibid., 69.27 Thapar, Early India, 114.28 Shatapatha Brahmana 14.1.1.18-24; Doniger O’Flaherty, Hindu Myths, 56-59.29 Schmidt, “The Origin of Ahimsa.”30 West, Indo-European Poetry, 46931 Ibid., 467.32 Ibid., 490.33 Thapar, Early India, 116.34 Parpola, “The Coming of the Aryans to Iran and India.”35 Thapar, Early India, 112.36 Ibid., 122.37 Ambatta Sutta of the Sutta Nikaya.38 Lincoln, Myth, Cosmos and Society.39 West, Indo-European Poetry, 100.40 Flood, Introduction, 79.41 Witzel, “Early Sanskritization.”42 Such as the vratyastoma; Atharva Veda 15; Nath, Puranas and Acculturation, 41.43 Scheuer, “Rudra-Siva et la destruction du sacrifice.”44 Doniger O’Flaherty, “The Post-Vedic History of the Soma Plant.”

45 U.S. Patent and Trademark Office appeal no. 2005-1337, application no. 10/227,006.46 Wasson, Soma; Flood, Introduction, 41.47 As R. Gordon Wasson called it.48 Shatapatha Brahmana 5.5.4.10 ; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 153.49 Jamison, Sacrificed Wife, 256.50 Ghosha as the author of 10.40, Apala as the author of 8.91; Doniger O’Flaherty, TheRig Veda, 246-46, 256.51 Jamison, Sacrificed Wife.52 Ibid., 92.53 For sibling incest, see Yami’s unsuccessful attempt to seduce her brother Yama in RigVeda 10.10.54 West, Indo-European Poetry, 500, citing J. P. Mallory, in a section labeled “Suttee.”55 Ibid., citing Atharva Veda 18.3.1.56 Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda, 245-63.57 RV 10.135, 10.51, 10.124, 4.26-7, 10.108, 10.28, etc.58 Yami, the twin sister of Yama, in 10.10; Lopamudra, the wife of Agastya, in 1.179.59 Pururavas, the husband of Urvashi, in 10.95; Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda, 245.60 Yami is rejected by Yama, Lopamudra by Agastya, Pururavas by Urvashi.61 Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda, 312. For the porcupine, see Atharva Veda 6.13,Shaunaka recension, Bloomfield ed.62 Doniger, Splitting the Difference.63 Doniger O’Flaherty, Women.64 RV 10.9, 7.49, 10.146, 10.71, 10.125; Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda, 61-63,179-182, 199-200, 231-32, 242-45.65 West, Indo-European Poetry, 139.

66 Flood, Introduction, 179; West, Indo-European Poetry, 139.67 Bolon, Forms of the Goddess Lajja Gauri in Indian Art, figure 52; Kramrisch, “AnImage of Aditi-Uttanapad,” 259-70.68 RV 10.72.1-5; O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda, 30, 37- 40 ; Sayana on, citing Yaska’sNirukta 11.23.69 Doniger O’Flaherty, Textual Sources, 28-29.70 Dorson, “The Eclipse of Solar Mythology.”71 Staal, Agni.72 Lincoln, “The Indo-European Cattle-Raiding Myth,” 18.73 Thapar, Early India,130.74 Ibid.75 Jurewicz, “Prajapati, the Fire and the pancagnividya ,” 188; Gombrich, “Thought onKarma.”CHAPTER 6: SACRIFICE IN THE BRAHMANAS1 The date is sometimes said to be 3102 BCE or 1400 BCE. West, Indo-EuropeanPoetry, 13; Brockington, The Sanskrit Epics.2 Jaiminiya Brahmana 2.182-83; Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence, 40-42.3 Aitareya Brahmana 3.21.4 Shatapatha Brahmana 1.1.1.6: idam aham ya evaasmi so ‘smi.5 Sayana’s commentary on the Rig Veda 1.121.6 Erdosy, The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia.7 Bhandarkar, Ancient History of Índia, 153-54, citing Kautilya and the Lalita Vistara.8 Stein, A History of India, 51.9 Flood, An Introduction, 53

10 Mitter, Indian Art, 13; Thapar, Early India, 109.11 Thapar, Early India, 11212 Ibid., 89-90.13 Flood, An Introduction, 33; Keay, India, 41.14 Flood, An Introduction, 80-81.15 Witzel, “The Development of the Vedic Canon,” 313, 321, 333.16 Thapar, Early India, 130.17 Maitrayani Samhita 4.8.1; Kathaka Samhita 30.1.18 Aitareya Brahmana 2.19 (8.1); Kaushitaki Brahmana 12.3.19 Manu 7.130-31.20 Shatapatha Brahmana 13.2.9.6-9; Doniger O’Flaherty, Textual Sources, 17-18.21 Thapar, Early India, 129.22 Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition.23 Jaiminiya Brahmana 3.94-96; Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence, 81-84.24 Dumézil, The Destiny of the Warrior.25 Brihaddevata; Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence, 83; Sieg, Sagenstoffe,26 RV 10.119-2-3, 9, 11-12.27 Katha Upanishad 3.3-6.28 Jaiminiya Brahmana 3.94-96; Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence, 81-84.29 Jamison, Sacrificed Wife.30 Thapar, Early India, 122.31 Shatapatha Brahmana 13.3.8.1-6; Doniger O’Flaherty, Textual Sources, 18-19.32 Shatapatha Brahmana 13.2.9.9 and 13.5.2.10; Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and

Violence, 17-18. The mantra is from RV 4.39, a prayer to a racehorse named Dadhikravan.33 Debroy, Sarama and Her Children.34 Taittiriya Brahmana 3.8.4.2; Doniger O’Flaherty, Textual Sources, 14-17.35 Jamison, Sacrificed Wife, 78, 99, citing Maitrayani Samhita 2.1.19-23 and 3.12.1.36 White, “Dogs Die,” 283-303.37 Jaiminiya Brahmana 2.440-42; Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence, 97-98.38 Kathaka Samhita 29.1; Maitrayani Samhita 3.10.6; Aitareya Brahmana 2.22.10.39 Jaiminiya Brahmana 1.161-2; Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence, 101-02.40 Kaushitaki Brahmana 23.4.41 Jaiminiya Brahmana 1.161-3, Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence, 101-02.42 Jaiminiya Brahmana 1.42-44, Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence, 32-34.43 Kaushitaki Brahmana 11.3; Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence, 39.44 Shatapatha Brahmana 12.9.1.1; Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence, 40.36-37.45 Nandy, Exiled at Home, 47 and 63; Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence,46 Thapar, Early India, 115.47 Shatapatha Brahmana 11.7.1.3; cf. 12.8.3.12.48 D. N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow, 30-36; Keith, Religion and Philosophy, 324-26;Heesterman, The Broken World, 194, 283, n. 32; Renou, Vedic India, 109.49 D.N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow, 47; Taittiriya Samhita 5.6.11-20.50 Cf. Ashvalayana Grihya-sutra 1.24, 31-33, for the ritual of killing a cow on the arrivalof a guest.51 Apastamba Dharmasutra 1.17.30 31.52 Thapar, Early India, 90.53 Shatapatha Brahmama 3.1.2.21.

54 Thapar, Early India, 115.55 See the introduction, by Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith, to The Laws of Manu.See also the conflict between sacrifice and nonviolence in Doniger O’Flaherty, Other Peoples’Myths, chapter 4.56 Atharva Veda 11.2.9 and 3.10.6, with Sayana’s commentary.57 Doniger O’Flaherty, Other Peoples’ Myths, chapter 4.58 Shatapatha Brahmana 13.6.1-2; Vajasaneyi Samhita 30.1-22; Taittiriya Brahmana3.4.1.1 ff.59 Sharma, The Excavations at Kausambi, 87ff.; Schlinghoff, “Menschenopfer inKausambi.”60 Sauve, “The Divine Victim”; Willibald Kirfel, “Der Asvamedha und derPurusamedha.”61 Flood, Introduction, 41; Heesterman, The Broken World, 10.62 Lincoln, Myth, Cosmos, and Society, 183 n.63 For men as the sacrificial beasts of the gods, see Doniger O’Flaherty, The Origins ofEvil, 169-73.64 Shatapatha Brahmana 11.7.1.3; Taittiriya Brahmana 3.9.17.4-5.65 See the discussion of human sacrifice in Parpola, “The Pre-Vedic IndianBackground,” 49-53; Weber, “Purusamedakandha” and “Ueber Menschenopfer”; Wilson, “Onthe Sacrifice of Human Beings”; Mitra, “On Human Sacrifices.”66 Shatapatha Brahmana 1.2.3.6-7; Aitareya Brahmana 2.8; Levi, La doctrine, 136-37.67 Eggeling, Shatapatha Brahmana, I, 49.68 Aitareya Brahmana 7.13-18; Doniger O’Flaherty, Textual Sources, 20-25.69 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10; Shatapatha Brahmana 14.4.2.21-22; DonigerO’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 91.70 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 171-73.71 Shatapatha Brahmana 13.2.8.1-4.

72 Doniger O’Flaherty, Textual Sources 14-19.15-19.73 Taittiriya Samhita 7.4.19; Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, 154-61; Textual Sources,74 Shatapatha Brahmana 1.9.9.75 Grottanelli, “Yoked Horses.”76 Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda, 257-263; Jamison, Sacrificed Wife, 77-88, furtherdeveloped this connection between the horse sacrifice and RV 10.86, and showed that themonkey is a mock horse and the poem a mock horse sacrifice.77 Shatapatha Brahmana 13.2.9.6-9; Doniger O’Flaherty, Textual Sources, 17-18.75-76.78 Jaiminiya Brahmana 3.199-200; Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence,79 Doniger, Splitting the Difference.80 Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda, 253-56.81 Shatapatha Brahmana 11.5.1.1-17; Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, 180-81.82 Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, 180-81.83 Doniger O’Flaherty, Textual Sources, 12-13.84 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 216-19.85 Shatapatha Brahmana 10.2.6.190.86 Ibid, 11.1.6.6; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 217; Textual Sources, 29-30.87 Shatapatha Brahmana 10.4.4.1-3. Doniger O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil, 217.88 Shatapatha Brahmana 11.1.6.6; Doniger O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil, 217.89 Tull, The Vedic Origins of Karma.90 Shatapatha Brahmana 10.4.4.1-3; Doniger O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil, 217.91 Tull, The Vedic Origins of Karma.92 Taittiriya Brahmana 3.11.8.1-6.

93 Katha Upanishad 1-2, 6.18.94 Tale Type 369, 465C, 466, 812.95 Thompson, Motif Index A 1715.96 Jamison, Ravenous Hyenas.97 Julius Eggeling, cited in Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence, 4-5.98 Aitareya Brahmana, Maitrayani Samhita, Kathaka Samhita; Doniger O’Flaherty,Tales of Sex and Violence, 12.99 Doniger O’Flaherty, “The Post-Vedic History.”100 Wasson, Soma.101 Jaiminiya Brahmana 2.369-70; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 140.102 Shatapatha Brahmana 5.5.4.10; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 153.103 Taittiriya Samhita 2.5.1.104 Tale Type 3.2.8.9-12; Taittiriya Samhita 4.1.9; Atharva Veda 6.113.105 Shatapatha Brahmana 1.2.3.2-4.106 Jaiminiya Brahmana 1.97-98; Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence, 51-52.Cf. Chandogya Upanishad 1.2.1-6.107 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil.CHAPTER 7. RENUNCIATION IN THE UPANISHADS1 Chandogya Upanishad 4.4; Doniger O’Flaherty, Textual Studies, 31-32.2 Keay, India, 52.3 Ibid., 63.4 Thapar, Early India, 138.5 Ibid., 148.6 Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism, 51-58.

7 Derrett, Dharmasastra and Juridical Literature, 4-5, 11-128 This page, and indeed much of my discussion of the history of India during this period,owes much to conversations with Laura Desmond.9 Gombrich, “Dating the Buddha.”10 Joel Brereton and Patrick Olivelle have argued, fairly convincingly, that it shouldrather be translated, “And that’s how you are.” Olivelle, Early Upanishads.11 Manu 3.100; cf. 4.201: The same karmic transfers results from bathing in anotherman’s tank without his permission.Evil.12 Doniger O’Flaherty, introductions to Karma and Rebirth and to 2nd ed. Origins of13 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 248-71.14 Keay, India, 49.15 Fairservis, Roots; Zimmerman, The Jungle.16 Roth, I Married a Communist, 72.17 Flood, Introduction, 83.18 Doniger O’Flaherty, Karma, 4.19 Thapar, Early India, 130.20 Ibid., 132.21 Heesterman, The Broken World.22 Doniger O’Flaherty, Karma, introduction.23 Thapar, Early India, 13224 Olivelle, Samnyasa Upanishads, 116, 123,132-33, 137-39, 152, 157-61.25 Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, 149-58.26 Flood, Introduction, 87-88, citing Heesterman.27 Ibid., 53.

28 Thapar, Early India, 132.29 Maitrayani Samhita 4.8.1; Kathaka Samhita 30.130 Flood, Introduction, 87.31 Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma.32 Thapar, Early India, 128.33 Garbe, “Lokayata.”34 Olivelle, The Ashrama System, 9-16.35 Flood, Introduction, 81-82; Doniger O’Flaherty, “The Origins of Heresy.”36 Patanjali, cited by Flood, Introduction, 82; cf. Thapar, Early India, 63.37 Flood, Introduction, 148.38 Thapar, Early India, 131.39 Klostermaier, Hinduism, 34; cf. Flood, Introduction, 86.40 Insler, “The Shattered Head.”41 Skanda Purana 1.2.13.62.42 Thapar, Early India, 262.43 In the Pali canon, the story is preserved in Anguttara Nikaya 8.51 and in theCullavagga section of the Vinaya.44 My insights into early sutras in general, and this paragraph in particular, come fromLaura Desmond.45 Ramayana 5.20.3.46 Olivelle, Early Upanishads, 356.47 West, Indo-European Poetry, 22.48 Biardeau, Hinduism, 31.49 Aitareya Brahmana 2.8-9.

50 Heesterman, The Inner Conflict.51 Aitareya Brahmana 7.13-18.52 Madan, Non-renuncation.53 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 44-68.54 Ernst, “Situating Sufism and Yoga.”55 Narayan, Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels.56 Jamison, Sacrificed Wife, 16-17.57 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva.CHAPTER 8. THE THREE (OR IS IT FOUR?) AIMS OF LIFE IN THE HINDUIMAGINARY1 Ashvaghosha, Buddhacarita, 2.14.2 V. Shekhawat, “Origin and Structure of Purush-artha Theory.”3 Larson and Bhattacharya, eds., Samkhya; Larson, “India Through Hindu Categories.”4 . Larson, Classical Samkhya.5 . Larson and Bhattacharya, eds., Samkhya.6 Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, 408-11.7 Cf. religion as the model of and the model for, in Geertz, “Religion as a CulturalSystem.”8 Olivelle, Dharmasutras, xxxiii-iv.9 Cf. M 8.52-57 and AS 3.1.19; M 7.102 and AS 1.4.5; M 7.105 and AS 1.15.60; M9.280 and AS 4.11.710 Olivelle, “Manu and the Arthasastra” and Olivelle, Introduction to Manu, xx.11 Divyavadana, Ashokavadana, and others.12 Wilhelm, “The Concept of Dharma in Artha and Kama Literature.”

13 Brian K. Smith, Classifying the Universe.14 Harsha, Priyadarshika, act 2.15 Mandukya Upanishad 3-7.16 Erdman, “The Empty Beat.”17 Organ, “Three into Four.”18 Olivelle, The Ashrama System.19 Organ, “Three into Four.”20 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva.21 Doniger, “Three (or More) Forms.”22 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 76-77.23 Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus.24 Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Society.25 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva.26 Mahabharata 1.187 (three variants of this verse occur at 1.App. I.1.35-36, 1.App.I.5.18-19, and 18.App. I.3.31-32).27 Krishna, Indian Philosophy, chapters 4, to 11.28 Doniger O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil, 94-97 and 128-31.CHAPTER 9. WOMEN AND OGRESSES IN THE RAMAYANA1 Chakravarti, Themes in Indian History, 53.2 Ibid., 68.3 Michell, Hindu Art and Architecture, 40.4 Thapar, Early India, 148.5 Heesterman, The Ancient Indian Royal Consecration.

6 Thapar, Early India, 143.7 Mitter, Indian Art, 13.8 Bosworth, “Calanus and the Brahman Opposition.”9 Mitter, Indian Art, 24.10 Keay, India, 78.11 Ibid., 70.12 Thapar, Early India, 194.13 Ibid., 200.14 Mathur, Art and Culture, 1-3.15 Flood, Introduction, 51.16 Bana, Harshahcarita.17 Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 359.18 Keay, India, 103.19 Thapar, Early India, 210-12. The inscription is at the Elephant’s Cave (Hathigumpha).20 Hiltebeiteil, Rethinking.21 Ruben, Ueber die Frage der Objectivität, 114, cited by Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 177.22 Pollock, Ramayana, vl. 2, 32-33, but cf. Stein, A History of India, 51.23 West, Indo-European Poetry, 469.24 Ibid., 63; Shatapatha Brahmana 13.1.5.6.25 Lord, The Singer of Tales.26 Chakravarti, Themes in Indian History, 74.27 Dalrymple, “Homer in India: Rajasthan’s Oral Epics,” 54.28 Flood, Introduction, 105.

29 Nath, Puranas and Acculturation, 66.30 Pollock “Atmanam Manusam Manye,” 234-35, citing Tryambaka.31 Ibid., 242, citing Govindaraja.32 Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, 92; Hindu Myths, 198-204.33 R, after 7.88, appendix I, no. 13, 21-25; cf. Doniger, Splitting the Difference, 9-27.34 Doniger, Splitting the Difference.35 Grottannelli, “The King’s Grace and the Helpless Woman.”36 Grottanelli, “Yoked Horses, Twins, and the Powerful Lady”; Cornelia Dimmitt, “Sita:Fertility Goddess and Shakti.”37 R 1.65.11-14, using the alternative lines rejected by the critical edition, including fivelines omitted after verse 13ab; Doniger O’Flaherty, Textual Sources, 58-59.38 R, between 6.9 and 6.10, appendix I, no. 3, verses 278-80.39 Doniger, Splitting the Difference, 88-110.40 Shulman. “Sita and Satakantharavana.”41 Ibid.42 Masson, “Fratricide and the Monkeys.”43 Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale.44 The term “side shadows” was coined by Gary Saul Morson (after Bakhtin), inNarrative and Freedom.this.45 Jones, On the Nightmare. Freud (in The Interpretation of Dreams) also wrote about46 Doniger, The Bedtrick, 118-22.47 Ramayana passage rejected by critical edition at 2.32, appendix 1, 14, 36-54. Cf.Jataka #386 (the Kharaputta Jataka) about a cobra woman and talking animals.48 Masson, “Who Killed Cock Kraunca?”

49 Ramayana 7, appendix 1, no. 8, lines 332-465.50 Nath, Puranas and Acculturation, 102.51 Pollock, Ramayana, vol. 3, 69-70, citing Talboys-Wheeler, The History of India fromthe Earliest Ages (1869).52 Goldman, Ramayana, vol. 1, 26, citing Gorresio.53 Nath, Puranas and Acculturation, 39, 103.54 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva.55 Pollock, Ramayana, vol. 2, 403-04, 470, notes.CHAPTER 10. VIOLENCE IN THE MAHABHARATA1 13th Major Rock Edict, trans, Thapar, Ashoka, 255-56; Nikam and McKeon, Edicts,27-29; Sircar, Inscriptions of Asoka, 50-52.2 Second separate rock edict; Thapar, Ashoka, 258; Nikam, Edicts, 53; Sircar,Inscriptions, 41-42.3 2nd Pillar Edict; Thapar, Ashoka, 262; Nikam, Edicts, 41; Sircar, Inscriptions, 62-63.4 Irwin, “Ashokan Pillars.”5 Mitter, Indian Art, 14-15.6 Kandahar bilingual rock inscription; Thapar, Ashoka, 261.7 4th Major Rock Edict, trans. Thapar, Ashoka, 251; Nikam McKeon, Edicts, 31; Sircar,Inscriptions, 42-43.8 11th Major Rock Edict, Sircar, Inscriptions, 48.9 1st Major Rock Edict, trans. Thapar, Ashoka, 250. Nikam and McKeon add “daily,” tothe last line, 55; Sircar, 41, does not.10 Thapar, Ashoka, 203, “his personal preference.”11 5th Pillar Edict. Nikam and Mckeon, Edicts, 56; Sircar, Inscriptions, 64-65.12 9th Major Rock Edict, Nikam and McKeon, Edicts, 46; Sircar, Inscriptions, 46-47.

13 Thapar, Ashoka, 202.14 12th Major Rock Edict, Thapar, Ashoka, 255; Nikam and McKeon, Edicts, 51-52;Sircar, Inscriptions, 49.15 9th Major Rock Edict, trans. Thapar, Ashoka, 254; Nikam and McKeon, Edicts, 46;Sircar, Inscriptions, 46-47.16 Fourth Major Rock Edict, trans. Thapar, Ashoka, 251; Nikam and McKeon, Edicts,31; Sircar, Inscriptions, 42-43.17 Thapar, Ashoka, 203.18 Keay, India, 104.19 Ibid., 91.20 Thapar, Early India, 275.21 Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 359.22 Thapar, Early India, 228.23 Flood, Introduction, 103.24 Nath, Puranas and Acculturation, 104.25 Michell, Art and Architecture, 40-43.26 Mahabharata 7.173, 10.18.1-23, 12.343, 13.76.27 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 278.28 Flood, Introduction, 218-19.29 Keay, India, 108.30 Flood, Introduction, 11931 Thapar, Early India, 139; Chakravarti, Themes in Indian History, 74B.32 Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Danger.33 Kulke and Rothermund, A History of India, 45.34 Gonzalez-Riemann, The Mahabharata and the Yugas.

35 Scharf, Ramopakhayana.36 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence.37 The Raghavapandaviya of Dhananjaya.38 Hiltebeitel, The Ritual of Battle, 14-15.39 Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 75-76.40 Also Mahabharata 1.56.34; cf. 18.5.38: “Whatever is here about dharma, profit,pleasure, and Release . . .”41 Hermann Oldenberg, as quoted in Sukthankar, On the Meaning of the Mahabharata,1; Hopkins, Great Epic of India, 58; John D. Smith, “Old Indian (The Two Sanskrit Epics),” 50.42 Reich, A Battlefield of a Text; “Sacrificial Violence and Textual Battles.”43 Collins, “Violence, Power and Sacrifice in the Indian Context.”44 Fitzgerald, The Mahabharata, v. 7, 123.45 Doniger O’Flaherty, “Horses and Snakes.”46 Van Buitenen, The Mahabharata, book 1, 4.47 Hiltebeitel, Rethinking the Mahabharata, 171.48 Ibid., 200-02.49 I owe this realization to Lorraine Daston, Berlin, 2002.50 Houben et al. and Tull, “The Killing That Is Not Killing.”51 Tilak, Srimad BhagavadGita-Rahasya, 44.52 Biardeau, Hinduism, 31.53 Hiltebeitel, Rethinking the Mahabharatas, 202-14.54 Fitzgerald, The Mahabharata, 112.55 Strong, Ashokvadana.56 Selvanayagam, “Asoka and Arjuna.”

57 Fitzgerald, The Mahabharata, 122.58 Also in passages rejected, and not even printed as appendices, in the critical edition.See Ulrich, Divided Bodies.59 Jataka 499 and Jatakamala #2.60 Collins, “Violence, Power and Sacrifice in the Indian Context.”56-60.61 RV 1.117.22; Shatapatha Brahmana 14.1.1.18-24; Doniger O’Flaherty, Hindu Myths,62 Allen, “Why Did Odysseus Become a Horse?,” 148.CHAPTER 11. DHARMA IN THE MAHABHARATHA1 Apastamba Dharma Sutra 1.7.20.6.2 Apastamba and Gautama were probably third century BCE, Baudhayana secondcentury BCE, and Vasistha first century CE; Olivelle, Dharmasutras, xxxiii.3 Selvanayagam, “Ashoka and Arjuna.”4 Flood, Introduction, 148.5 Thapar, Early India, 278.6 Chakravarti, The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism; Gombrich, TheravadaBuddhism.7 Thapar, Early India, 2798 Nath, Puranas and Acculturation, 27.9 Thapar, Early India, 124.10 Thapar, From Lineage to State, 170.11 Thapar, Early India, 125.12 Ibid., 124.

13 Ghurye, The Scheduled Tribes; Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India.14 Thapar, Early India, 126.15 Keay, India, 189.16 Turner, The Forest of Symbols; Brian Smith, Classifying the Universe.17 Brodbeck, “Ekalavya and Mahabharata 1.121-128.”18 Hemavijayagani, Katharatnakara 185.20,” story no. 163, “The Story of the Bhilla,”pp. 185-86.19 Doniger, Bedtrick, 248-54.20 Doniger and Spinner, “Misconceptions.”21 Doniger, Splitting the Difference.22 Naishadiyacarita 17.132.23 For Yavakri in the Jaiminiya Brahmana and Mahabharata , see Doniger O’Flaherty,Tales of Sex and Violence.24 Bulcke, “La naissance de Sita”; Dubuisson, “La déesse chevelue.”25 Hiltebeitel, The Cult of Draupadi.26 . Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses, 107-09, 151-02.27 Mahabharata 12, appendix 1, no. 28, lines 72-75.28 Kinsley, The Sword and the Flute; Hiltebeitel, The Ritual of Battle.29 . Thapar, Early India, 228.30 Mitter, Indian Art, 16.31 Thapar, Early India, 193.32 Pathak, “The Things Kings Sing.”

CHAPTER 12. ESCAPE CLAUSES IN THE SHASTRAS1 Much of the background material and a number of insights in this chapter wereprovided by Laura Desmond. See also Desmond, Disciplining Pleasure.2 Derrett, Dharmasastra and Juridical Literature, 4-5, 11-12.3 Keay, India, 101, 104.4 Thapar, Early India, 2615 Keay, India, 102.6 Ibid., 125.7 Mitter, Indian Art, 45.8 Thapar, Early India, 2799 AS 2.30.29, 13.2.20, 39-43.10 Keay, India, 104.11 Thapar, Early India, 219.12 Keay, India, 112 .13 Flood, Introduction, 51.14 Mitter, Indian Art, 46-47.15 Keay, India, 112.16 Thapar, Early India, 223.17 Ibid., 224; Keay, India, 131.18 Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, 286.19 Thapar, Early India, 223.20 Chakravarti, Themes in Indian History, 63.21 Mitter, Indian Art, 27.22 Keay, India, 125.

23 Ibid., 127.24 Thapar, Early India, 279.25 Pollock, “From Discourse of Ritual to Discourse of Power in Sanskrit Culture.”26 Pollock, “India in the Vernacular Millennium.”27 Thapar, Early India, 258; Zysk, Asceticism and Healing.28 Gautama Dharma-sutra 4.16-18; Baudhayana Dharma-sutra 1.16.6-16, 17.1-14.29 Deliege, The Untouchables of India.30 Manu 2.108-16, 3.8-11, 3.127-86, 236-50, 4.205-23, 8.61-88, 9.143-47, 10.5-61,11.55-71, 12.54-72.31 Amar Chitra Katha, Mahabharata #3, “The Advent of the Kuru Princes,” 13,paraphrasing the Sanskrit text, Mahabharata 1.111.31, which in turn paraphrases, and indeedreverses the point of, Manu 9.158-60.32 Galanter, Competing Equalities.33 Gautama Dharmasutra 22.14.34 Manu 8.370-71, 9.30, 8.34, 11.109-15.35 Manu 4.205-223, 5.5-44, 6.229-240, 8.296-298, 8.324-8, 11.132-44, 10.896-89,11.54-227.36 Brian K. Smith, Reflections on Resemblances, Ritual, and Religion, 198-99.37 Veena Das, Structure and Cognition, 29, citing the Dharmaranya Purana.38 Doniger and Smith, “Sacrifice and Substitution.”39 Biardeau, Hinduism, 64.40 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 223.41 Heesterman, The Ancient Indian Royal Consecration.42 Tyagi, Women Workers, 181.43 Chand, Liquor Menace in India, 3.

44 Wilson, Charming Cadavers.45 Dandin, “The Adventures of the Ten Princes,” 13.63-69, trans. Onians.46 Thapar, Early India, 262.47 Doniger, The Implied Spider, chapter 5.48 Gold, “The‘Jungli Rani’ and Other Troubled Wives.”49 Apastamba Dharmasutra 2.11.17-20, 2.12.1.50 Doniger, Splitting the Difference.51 Sweet and Zwilling, “The First Medicalization.”52 Keay, India, 154.CHAPTER 13. BHAKTI IN SOUTH INDIA1 Blake Wentworth provided the chronology as well as much of the background materialon South Indian history and Tamil literature in this chapter. See also Wentworth, Yearning for aDreamed Real: The Procession of the Lord in the Tamil Ulas.2 Cuntarar, Patikam 14, on Tiruppaccilacciramam, verse two (of fourteen), trans. DavidShulman, in Doniger O’Flaherty, Textual Sources, 170.3 Julius Lipner used this metaphor in his book Hindus. Others have used it too, and forgood reason.4 Kulke and Rotermund, History of India, 93.5 Keay, India, 119.6 Thapar, Early India, 243.7 Keay, India, 121, 123.8 Thapar, Early India 235.9 Keay, India, 223.10 Ibid., 168.

11 Mitter, Indian Art, 49.12 Nath, Puranas and Acculturation, 176.13 Keay, India, 219.14 Ibid., 120.15 Flood, Introduction, 128.16 Thapar, Early India, 234.17 Flood, Introduction, 113.18 Ramanujan, Interior Landscape, 110.19 Flood, Introduction, 169.20 Ramanujan and Cutler, “From Classicism to Bhakti,” 244.21 Flood, Introduction, 131. Cf. Narayanan, “The Ramayana in the Theology.”22 Ramanujan, “Varieties of Bhakti,” 330.23 Ramanujan and Cutler, “From Classicism to Bhakti,” 232.24 Ibid., 253.25 Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, 286, citing Pen-rose, “In Praise of Illusion,” 274.26 Ramanujan, “The Myths of Bhakti,” 298.27 Keay, India, 169. It is also the earliest dated reference to Kalidasa.28 Mitter, Indian Art, 48.29 Tantrakhyana tale no. 1, cited in Doniger and Smith, trans., The Laws of Manu, 92.30 Rabe, “The Mahamallapuram Prasasti.”31 Ibid., 216-18.32 Ibid., xxviii, 221.33 Mitter, Indian Art, 57-58. It was called Gangaikondacolapuram.

34 Inden, Imagining India, 259.35 Wujastyk, “Change and Continuity.”36 Mitter, Indian Art, 45.37 Ibid., 58-59; Orr, Donors, Devotees, and Daughters of God.38 Doniger O’Flaherty, Animals in Four Worlds, 6-7, 8.39 Sesser, Travels in Southeast Asia.40 Keay, India, 216, 220, 223.41 Carman, Theology of Ramanuja, 27.42 Keay, India, 213, 218 quoting G. W. Spencer.43 Mitter, Indian Art, 57-58.44 Ibid., 54.45 Ibid., 48; Flood, Introduction, 113.46 Ramanujan and Cutler, “From Classicism to Bhakti,” 234, 236.47 Keay, India, 174.48 Ramanujan and Cutler, “From Classicism to Bhakti,” 238-40.49 Keay, India, 219.50 Ali, Courtly Culture.51 Eck, Darshan.52 Gombrich, “The Buddha’s Eye.”53 Dalrymple, “Homer in India,” 52.54 Doniger, Splitting the Difference.55 Ashokavadana 27.56 Shulman, Songs of the Harsh Devotee.

57 Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva, 131.58 Hawley and Juergensmeyer, Songs of the Saints, 120.59 Flood, Introduction, 131, says she was the daughter of a Brahmin priest; othertraditions make her of low caste.60 Mangaiyarkkarasi was the queen; Isainani Ammaiyar, the mother. Prentiss, “JoyousEncounters,” 76.61 Indira Peterson places her in the fifth century (“Tamil Saiva Hagiography,” 194).62 Cekkiyar Periya Puranam, 157-62.63 Karaikkalammaiyar, Tiruvalankattumutta-tiruppatikam , trans. Cutler, Songs ofExperience, 121.64 Ramanujan, “On Women Saints,” 274.65 Ibid., 271-74.66 Ibid.67 Nammalvar, Tiruvaymoli 9.9.10; Ramanujan, Hymns for the Drowning, 32.68 Nammalvar, Tiruvaymoli 2.4.10; Ramanujan and Cutler, “From Classicism,” 249.69 Basavanna, trans. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva, 71.70 Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths, 314-15, cited by Ramanujan (“Myths of Bhakti,”298-99), who calls it the legend of Matrbhuteshvara (or, in Tamil, Tayumanavar), “he who evenbecame a mother.”71 The story is retold in the Sanskrit Skanda Purana, Kedara Khanda 5.111-97, 22.1-64;see Doniger, “The Scrapbook,” 66-70.72 Periya Purana 16 (650-830), McGlasham trans. 71-86.73 Ramanujan, “Myths of bhakti,” 306.74 Keay, India, 219.75 Ibid.76 Ramanujan, “On Women Saints,” 271.

77 Periya Purana 24 (1041-1077), McGlasham trans., 103-06.78 Ebeling, “Another Tomorrow for Nantanar.”79 K. M. Sen, Hinduism, 79.80 Ibid., 81.81 Flood, Introduction, 131.82 Ramanujan, Hymns for the Drowning, xi.83 Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths, 158; The Hungry God.84 M. G. S. Narayanan, Cultural Symbiosis in Kerala, xi.85 Keay, India, 219; Flood, Introduction, 170.86 Keay, India, 194.87 Flood, Introduction, 131.88 Keay, India, 21989 Ulrich, “Food Fights.”90 This is part of the guru lineage in the Vadagali tradition and in the hagiography ofTamil saints known as the Divyasuricharitam. See Monius, Imagining a Place for Buddhism.91 Tiruvatavurar Purana, canto 6, cited by Pope, The Sacred Kurral, xxx-xxxii,lxvii-lxxii.92 Periya Purana 34, 2497-2540, 2780-2824, McGlasham trans., 240-243.93 Ibid., 34, 2576-2753, McGlasham trans.94 Thapar, Cultural Transaction, 17; Marr, “The ‘Periya Puranam’ Frieze,” 278.95 Marr, “The ‘Periya Puranam’ Frieze,” 268.96 Monius, “Love, Violence, and the Aesthetics of Disgust,” 117, 126, 155.97 Marr, “The ‘Periya Puranam’ Frieze,” 279.98 Ibid., 278.

99 Thapar: Cultural Transaction, 17-18, citing P. B. Desai, Jainism in South India,82-83, 401-02.100 Ibid., 18.101 Goel, Hindu Temples, 413, citing the inscription reproduced in Epigraphica Indica,vol., 255.102 Thapar, Cultural Transaction, 18; cf. Bukka I and the Jainas, in Verghese, ReligiousTraditions at Vijayanagara, 121.103 Davis, Lives of Indian Images.104 Pidana, mardana, khandana, and dvesha. Ulrich, “Food Fights.”105 This Syriac version of the Acts of Thomas is available in Wright, Apocryphal Acts ofthe Apostles, 146 -49.106 Thapar, Early India, 25.107 M. G. S. Narayanan, Cultural Symbiosis in Kerala, x, 4.108 Ibid., 23-30.109 Keay, India, 181.110 Bhagavata Mahatmya, verses 48-49 of chapter 1, citing the Padma Purana. SeePrentiss, The Embodiment of Bhakti, 35.111 Doniger O’Flaherty, “The Origins of Heresy.”112 Prentiss, The Embodiment of Bhakti, 35.113 Ramanujan, “The Myths of Bhakti,” 307.CHAPTER 14. GODDESSES AND GODS IN THE EARLY PURANAS1 Kalidasa, Shakuntala 3.2 (alternative verse).2 Mitter, Indian Art, 28.3 Keay, India, 145, citing the third Jungadh inscription.

4 Ibid., citing Beal, Si yu ki xxxvii-xxxviii.5 Keay, India, 144.6 Mitter, Indian Art, 2.7 Ibid., 28.8 Thapar, Early India, 287.9 Keay, India, 139.10 Ibid., 144.11 Flood, Introduction, 113.12 Mitter, Indian Art, 2.13 Hein, “A Revolution in Krsnaism,” 309-10.14 Keay, India, xx.15 Mitter, Indian Art, 30.16 Ibid., 31.17 Thapar, Early India, 281.18 Thapar, Sakuntala, 256.19 Doniger, “Jewels of Rejection.”20 Goldman, “Karma, Guilt, and Buried Memories,” 423.21 Thapar, Sakuntala, 41.22 Keay, India, 136-37.23 Doniger O’Flaherty, “The Image of the Heretic.”24 Ramanujan and Cutler, “From Classicism to Bhakti,” 232.25 Thapar, Early India, 244.26 Ibid., 275.

27 Mitter, Indian Art, 45-47.28 Keay, India, 158.29 Thapar, Early India, 287.30 Ben Shonthal’s vivid formulation.31 Nath, Puranas and Acculturation, 8.32 Thapar, Early India, 275.33 Mitter, Indian Art, 56.34 Nath, Puranas and Acculturation, 67.35 Thapar, Early India, 275.36 Redfield, The Little Community.37 www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/India_at_glance/rural.aspx38 Narayana Rao, “Hinduism: The Untold Story.”39 Nath, Puranas and Acculturation.40 Narayana Rao, “Hinduism: The Untold Story.”41 Narayana Rao, “Purana as Brahminic Ideology,” 91-92.42 Markandeya Purana 135.7, 136.36.43 Nath, Puranas and Acculturation, 57, citing Atri-smirti (373-83) and Mitakshara.44 Hess, The Bijak of Kabir, 67.45 Brahmanda Purana 1.2.26.10-61.46 Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes, 130-48.47 Vamana Purana S.17.2-23.48 Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses.49 Markandeya Purana 82-83.

50 Hiltebeitel, The Cult of Draupadi.51 Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes, 90-91.52 Shvetashvatara Upanishad 6.23.53 Skanda Purana 1.3.1.10.1-69; Doniger O’Flaherty, Hindu Myths, 243.54 Markandeya Purana 85-90.55 Frederick Smith, The Self Possessed.56 Varaha Purana 33.4-15, 25-34; Doniger O’Faherty, Hindu Myths, 122.57 This is the story that Kalidasa alludes to: “Shiva’s wife, Sati, the daughter of Daksha,was devoted to her husband and outraged when her father dishonored him. She discarded herbody through yoga.” Kumarasambhava 1.2158 Mahabharata 12.183.10.3-5; cf. 13.17.98, and Nilakantha on 13.17.101.59 Fleet, Corpus, no. 18, 81, pl. XI, 11.21-23.60 Brahmanda Purana 4.11.1-34, 5.30.30-99; cf. Vamana Purana 6.26-27, 25.1-20,31.1-18.61 Brahmavaivarta Purana 4.41.20-26.62 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 226-32.63 Shiva Purana 2.3.20.1-23; Doniger O’Flaherty, Hindu Myths, 160.64 Böhtlingk, Indische Spruche, 1, 25, no. 130; Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 371, n. 220.65 Courtright, Ganesha.66 Padma Purana 1.46.1-32, 47-108,119-21. The same text, with some variations,appears in the Skanda Purana 1.2.27-29 (the version translated in Doniger O’Flaherty, HinduMyths, 251-61, and discussed by Doniger, Bedtrick, 69-75) and in the Matsya Purana 154-57(the version translated by Shulman in God Inside Out, 156).67 www.specials.rediff.com/getahead/2004/sep/16ga-ganesh.htm.100.68 Commentary on Ramayana 1.29.6 (Bombay ed.); Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil,

69 Harivamsha 118.11-39.70 Commentary cited by Kangle, Arthasastra, 12.71 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, chapter 9.72 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 84-89.73 Naishadiyacarita, canto 17, verse 201.74 Dirks, “Political Authority and Structural Change,”125-57.75 Markandeya Purana 10.47-87; 12.3-48; 10.88-97; 11.22-32.76 Lewis Carroll, “Wool and Water,” Through the Looking Glass.77 Kurma Purana 1.34.5-18.78 Markandeya Purana 6.79 Manu 10.1.1-13.80 Sanford, “Holi Through Dauji’s Eyes.”CHAPTER 15. SECTS AND SEX IN THE TANTRIC PURANAS AND THETANTRAS1 Mahanirvana Tantra 14.117-21.2 Thapar, Early India, 261.3 Keay, India, 161.4 Ibid., citing Bana’s Harsha-charita.5 Bana, Kadambari, trans. Gwendolyn Layne, 174-75.6 Lévi, Le théâtre, 184-95. The Kashmiri historian Rajashekhara, in the ninth century,identified him as a Chandala. Sylvain Lévi identifies him as a Jaina, but his name betrays hislow-caste origin.7 Harsha, Ratnavali.

8 Beal, Si-yu-ki, 89.9 Devahuti, Harsha: A Political Study, 154-57.10 Keay, India, 182.11 Mitter, Indian Art, 48.12 Thapar, Early India, 275.13 Ingalls, “Cynics and Pashupatas,” 284, citing the Mathara pillar inscription ofChandragupta II, Epigraphica Indica, vol. 21, 1-9.14 Flood (Introduction, 155-57) dates the Pashupata Sutra to about the ninth century, butIngalls thought it was the work of Lakulisha, about 100 CE.15 Mitter, Indian Art, 48.16 Flood, Introduction, 165.17 Pashupata Sutra 3.3-19; Ingalls, “Cynics.”18 Lorenzen, Kabir Legends, 102, 31-32; Kapalikas, 187-88.19 Flood, Introduction, 157.20 Shiva Purana, Jnana Samhita, 49.65-80; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 280.21 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 123-28.22 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 146-59.23 Ibid., 277-86.24 Ibid., 281; Shiva Purana 3.8-9.25 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 124.26 Siva Purana 2.2.16.30-36; cf 2.3.24.60-75; 2.4.4.5.27 Mahabhagavata Purana 22.38-39; Skanda Purana 1.1.21.15.28 Varaha Purana 97.2-8; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 279.29 Skanda Purana 1.1.1.20-40; Shiva Purana 2.2.26-27.

30 Doniger O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil, 272ff.31 Shiva Purana 2.2.26.15-40.32 Saura Purana 7.38-39; Markandeya Purana 49.13; Kurma Purana 1.15.29-33.33 Devibhagavata Purana 7.30.34 Doniger and Smith, “Sacrifice and Substitution.”35 Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 123-29.36 Flood, Introduction, 192.37 Devi-bhagavata Purana 7.30.27-37, 40-50; Brahmavaivarta Purana 4.42-43;Maha-bhagavata Purana 11-23; Skanda Purana, Kedara Khanda 162; Doniger O’Flaherty,Hindu Myths, 249-51.38 Markandeya Purana 85-90.39 Markandeya Purana 80.21-44; cf. Skanda Purana 3.1.6.8-42; Doniger O’Flaherty,Hindu Myths, 240-49.40 Skanda Purana 1.3.1.10.1-60.41 Devi-Bhagavata Purana 5.2-11; Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes, 82.42 Skanda Purana 1.3.2.18-21.43 White, Kiss of the Yogini, 21.44 Flood, Introduction, 158.45 White, Kiss of the Yogini, 9, 123, 159.46 Flood, Introduction, 158.47 Ibid., 154.48 Ibid., 155.49 Kripal, “Hinduism and Popular Western Culture.”50 Kurma Purana 1.16.109-20; Doniger O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil, 310.51 Devi-bhagavata Purana 7.39.26-32.

52 Woodruffe, Shakti and Shakta, 570; Doniger O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil, 318.53 White, Kiss of the Yogini, 254, 211.54 Mahayoga Tantra, cited by Wedemeyer, “Beef, Dog,” 385.55 White, Kiss of the Yogini, 253.56 Wedemeyer, “Beef, Dog.”57 Mahanirvana Tantra 6.1-20.58 Flood, Introduction, 189.59 White, Kiss of the Yogini, 220.60 Ibid., 254.61 Ibid., xiii.62 Ibid., 72.63 Markandeya Purana 85-90.64 Vamana Purana 44.30-38; Markandeya Purana 88.39-61; Matsya Purana 179.1-86;O’Flaherty, Women, 34.65 Padma Purana 1.46.1-32, 47-108, 119-21; Skanda Purana 1.2.27-29 (DonigerO’Flaherty, Hindu Myths, 251-61); Matsya Purana 154-57.66 Urban, “Matrix of Power.”67 White, Kiss of the Yogini, 68.68 Ibid., 220.69 Ibid., 7-8.70 Ibid., 67.71 Ibid., 23572 Flood, Introduction, 166.73 White, Kiss of the Yogini, 235.

74 Ibid., 159.75 Ibid., xii.76 Mahanirvana Tantra 6.20.77 Ibid., 11.110-20.78 White, Kiss of the Yogini, 77, 268-71.79 Sanjukta Gupta, “The Domestication of a Goddess,” 62.80 Mahanirvana Tantra 6.1-20.81 Wedemeyer, “Beef, Dog,” 392-93.82 Urban, “What’s in It.”83 Flood, Introduction, 191.84 White, Kiss of the Yogini, 82.85 Yoni Tantra 7.16b-17b.86 Bharati, “Making Sense out of Tantrism and Tantrics,” 53.229.87 Urban, The Economics of Ecstasy, 82-90; Magia Sexualis, 91-92; Tantra, 9-10, 41,88 Urban, “Matrix of Power.”89 Flood, Introduction, 195-96.90 White, Kiss of the Yogini, 253-54.91 Flood, Introduction, 191-92.92 As the historian Kshemendra reports, in Kashmir in the tenth or eleventh century CE.93 Flood, Introduction, 161.94 Skanda Purana 1.8.18-19.95 Mahanirvana Tantra 14.180-89.

96 Skanda Purana 4.2.87-89.97 Bipradas, Manasabijay, 235, cited by Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, 227.98 Banerjea, The Development of Hindu Iconography.99 Mahanirvana Tantra 6.104-19.100 Ibid., 11.120-30.101 Ibid., 11.130-43.102 Mitter, Indian Art, 56.103 Ibid., 48; cf. Dehejia, Indian Art, 128.104 Mitter, Indian Art, 48; cf. Dehejia, Indian Art, 128-31.105 Keay, India, xxviii.106 Mitter, Indian Art, 53-54.107 Dehejia, Indian Art, 132-33.108 Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, 94-95.109 Mitter, Indian Art, 66-67110 Devangana Desai, Religious Imagery, 153.111 Keay, India, 278.112 Ibid.113 Michell, Hindu Art and Architecture, 30.114 Mitter, Indian Art, 79, citing Michael Meister.115 Ibid., 68.116 Flood, Introduction, 158.117 Devangana Desai, Religious Imagery.118 Dehejia, Yogini, Cult and Temples.

119 Mitter, Indian Art, 81.120 White, Kiss of the Yogini, 12.121 Mitter, Indian Art, 42-43.122 Keay, India, 213.123 Michell, Hindu Art and Architecture, 29.124 Keay, India, 213.125 Rushdie, “Introduction” to the Baburnama.126 Keay, India, 278.CHAPTER 16. FUSION AND RIVALRY UNDER THE DELHI SULTANATE1 Hess and Singh, The Bijak of Kabir, 42.2 Keay, India, 279.3 Chattopadhyaya, Representing the Other, 29, 43, 89-90.4 Rajatarangini 7.1090-95.5 Chattopadhyaya, Representing the Other, 71Gibb.6 Ibn Batuta, Travels, A.D. 1325-1354 , written in the fourteenth century, trans. H. A. R.7 Keay, India, 180.8 Ibid., 167.9 Ibid., 181.10 Ibid., 182.11 Schimmel, The Empire, 107.12 Keay, India, 185.13 Mitter, Indian Art, 85.14 Keay, India, 207.

15 Ibid., 209.16 Ibid., 235, citing Ibn Asir.17 Mitter, Indian Art, 85.18 Keay, India, 245.19 Ibid., 247.20 Ibid., 245-47.21 Ibid., 240.22 Ibid., 259.23 Ibid., 255.24 Ibid., 60.25 Ibid., 266.26 Ibid., 270.27 Ibid., 266, 270-71.28 “Jains and Hindus Befriended,” in Husain’s Tughluq Dynasty.29 Keay, India, 266.30 Ibid., 272.31 Ibid., 274.32 Ibid., 271-72, 274.33 Ibid., 181.34 Ibid., 275.35 Ibid., 211.36 Eaton, The Rise of Islam, 268-90.37 Keay, India, 235.

38 Ibid., 242.39 Ibid., 235.40 Ibid., 225.41 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 248-71.42 Chattopadhyaya, Representing the Other, 52, 55, 57, 60, 84, 88.43 West, Indo-European Poetry, 467.44 Digby, Warhorse and Elephant.45 Babur, Baburnama, 335.46 Keay, India, 211.47 Ibid., 189.48 Ibid., 275.49 Encyclopaedia Britannica, s. v. “polo.”50 Keay, India, 240.51 Ibid., 276-77.52 Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, 71.53 Ibid., 78.54 Keay, India, 277.55 Stephen Inglis, personal communication, March 26, 1985.56 Pusalker, The Struggle for Empire, 523.57 Nagaswamy, “Gateway to the Gods.”58 Mookerji, The History of Indian Shipping, 195.59 Leshnik, “The Horse in India,” 56.60 Keay, India, 306.

61 Ibid., 306.62 Subrahmanyam, “The Political Economy of Commerce”; C. Gupta, “Horse Trade inNorth India.”63 Keay, India, 277.64 Abu’l Fazl, Ain-i-akbari, vol. 1, 142.65 Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, 72.66 Ibid., 73.67 Ibid., 72-73, quoting J. L. Kipling, Beast and Man in India, 167-68.68 Keay, India, 276-77.69 Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, 74.70 Polo, The Travels, 357; Marco Polo: The Description of the World, 174.71 Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, 74.72 Keay, India, 288.73 Eaton, “Temple Desecration in Pre-modern India.”74 Keay, India, 288.75 Mitter, Indian Art, 85.76 Keay, India, 188.77 Ibid.78 Ibid., 187.79 Ibid., 207.80 Ibid., 209.81 Davis, Lives of Images, 90-112.82 Thapar, Somanatha.83 Keay, India, 237.

84 Ibid., 241, citing Ferishta.85 Mitter, Indian Art, 75.86 Keay, India, 257.87 Thapar, Somanatha.88 Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames, 25589 Davis, Lives of Images, 113, citing Amir Khusraw,90 Keay, India, 258, citing Barani.91 Davis, Lives of Indian Images, 133-35.92 Eaton, “Temple Desecration in Pre-modern India.”93 Keay, India, 242.94 Schimmel, The Empire, 107.95 Keay, India, 202.96 Ibid., 278, 286.97 Metcalf, A Concise History, 3.98 Ibid., 275, 278.99 Keay, India, 242.100 Eaton, “Temple Desecration in Pre-Modern India,” 303.101 Ibid., 285, 287, citing Tod, Annals, vol. 1, 23.102 Ernst, “Situating Sufism and Yoga,” 24-25, citing Buzurg ibn Shahriyar, The Book ofthe Marvels of India, 132.103 Ibid., citing Taranatha’s History of Buddhism in India, 320.104 Schimmel, The Empire, 128.105 Keay, India, 235.

106 Schimmel, The Empire, 109.107 Behl and Weightman, Madhu Malati, xiii.108 Ernst, “Islamization of Yoga,” 107.109 Ibid.110 Doniger, “The Clever Wife in Indian Mythology.”111 Keay, India, 189.112 Schimmel, The Empire, 107.113 Keay, India, 285.114 Mitter, Indian Art, 87-89.115 Flood, Introduction, 144.116 Amartya Sen, Foreword to K. M. Sen, Hinduism, xix, citing K. M. Sen, MedievalMysticism of India, 146-52.117 Flood, Introduction, 142.118 Ibid., 145.119 Lorenzen, Kabir Legends, 26-27, citing Anantadas, 7, 43-44, 47, citing contemporaryoral tradition.120 Hess, The Bijak, 4-5.121 Lorenzen, Kabir Legends, 43-45, 47, citing contemporary oral tradition.122 Ibid., 3.123 Ibid., 18-19.124 Ibid., 50, from the Dabistan-i-Mazahib.125 Nandy, “Sati as Profit Versus Sati as a Spectacle,” 136.126 Kabir, The Weaver’s Songs, trans. Dharwadkar, 162.127 Ibid., 10.

128 Hess, The Bijak, no. 30, 51.129 Ibid., no. 84, 69-70.130 Ibid., no. 75, 67.131 Flood, Introduction, 145.132 Lorenzen, Kabir Legends, 29, citing Anantadas, Kabir parachai, 1693 ms. 4.10-15.133 Ibid., 65, citing Paramananda-das, Kabir Manshur.134 Hess, The Bijak, no. 41, 55.135 Hess, A Touch of Grace, xxi.136 Keay, India, 280.137 Narayana Rao et al. Textures of Time.138 Ajay Rao, “Othering Muslims or Srivaisnava-Saiva Contestation?”139 Pollock, “Ramayana and Political Imagination in India,” 278.140 Ajay Rao, Srivaisnava Hermeneutics.141 Ajay Rao, “Othering Muslims or Srivaisnava-Saiva Contestation?142 Verghese, Religious Traditions at Vijayanagara, 121.143 Chattopadhyaya, Representing the Other, 60144 Wagoner, “Sultan among Hindu Kings,” 851-80.145 Keay, India, 303, 305, 307.146 Mitter, Indian Art, 62.147 Narayana Rao et al., Textures of Time, 44-52, 73-77.148 Ibid.149 Michell, Art and Architecture, 133.150 Keay, India, 179, 212.

151 Mitter, Indian Art, 3.152 Ibid., 86.153 Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva.154 Flood, Introduction, 171.155 Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva, 28.156 Ibid., 88; “The Myths of Bhakti,” 99.157 Ibid., 297.158 Davis, The Lives of Indian Images.159 Shulman, untitled review of Siva’s Warriors, 313.160 Ibid.161 Narayana Rao, Siva’s Warriors, 235.162 Ibid., 196-201.163 Ramanujan, “Varieties of Bhakti,” 324-31; Speaking of Siva, 111-42.164 Mahadevyyakka 328; Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva, 141; “Varieties of Bhakti,” 324.165 Ramanujan, “Varieties of Bhakti,” 326.166 Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva, 127.167 Ibid., 114.CHAPTER 17. AVATAR AND ACCIDENTAL GRACE IN THE LATERPURANAS1 Padma Purana 2.1.5.1-35; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 136-37.2 Pollock, “Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out,” 102.3 Hess, The Bijak, no. 8, 45-46.

4 Kirfel, Kosmologie.5 Thapar, Early India, 276.6 Killingley, “Hinduism, Darwinism and Evolution.”7 Vayu Purana 2.36.74.8 Taittiriya Samhita 7.1.5.1; Shatapatha Brahmana 14.1.2.11.9 Vishnu Purana 1.4.10 Mitter, Indian Art, 47.11 Hawley, Krishna, The Butter Thief.12 Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero; Dundes, “The Hero Pattern.”13 Harivamsha 47-48.14 Wadley, Raja Nal, 193.15 Bhagavata Purana 10.6.16 Ibid. 10.7.37, 10.13.44.17 Brahmavaivarta Purana 4.15; Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, 103-04.18 Beck, “Krishna as Loving Husband,” 71, citing Charlotte Vaudeville.19 Behl and Weightman, Madhu Malati.20 Brahmavaivarta Purana 4.15.21 Whaling, The Rise of the Religious Significance of Rama, 138; Hess, “Rejecting Sita.”22 Adhyatma-ramayana 3.7.1-10.23 Ibid., 6.8.21.24 Brahmavaivarta Purana 2.14.1-59.25 Mahabharata 1.175.26 The earliest texts that allude to the Buddha avatar may antedate the Mahabharata(Banerjea, The Development of Hindu Iconography, 392; Schrader, Introduction, 43-47), but this

has yet to be proved (Klostermaier, Hinduism, 58-59).27 Kumbhakona ed. of Mahabharata, 2.348.2; 12, appendix 1, no. 32, lines 1-17;Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 188.28 Bhavisya Purana 3.1.6.35-421; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 203.29 Hazra, Studies in the Puranic Records, 88.30 Krishna Sastri, “Two Statues of Pallava Kings,” 5; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins ofEvil, 188.31 Vishnu Purana 3.17-18.32 Garuda Purana 1.32.33 Bhuridatta Jataka, no. 543, esp. verses 210-11.34 Kalika Purana 78.206.35 Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, 80-129.36 Bhagavata Purana 6.8.19.37 Varaha Purana 48.22.38 Matsya Purana 47.24, 54.19.39 Kshemendra, Dashavatarcharita 9.1-74.40 Gita Govinda 1.1.9.41 Krishna Sastri, “Two Statues of Pallava Kings,” 5-7.42 Devibhagavata Purana 10.5.13, dushta-yajnavighataya.43 Glasenapp, Von Buddha zu Gandhi, 113.44 Hess, The Bijak, no. 8, 45-46.45 Basham, The Wonder, 309.46 Anagatavamsa, 33-54.47 Personal communication from Prof. Richard F. Gombrich, Oxford, U.K., 1973.

48 Holt, The Buddhist Vishnu.49 Huntingon, A Study of Puranic Myth, 33.50 Doniger O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil, 179.51 Ibid., 204-05.52 Goetz, Studies in the History and Art, 77-80, discussing a frame in Srinagar Museum,of Shankara-varman (r. 883-902).53 Thapar, Early India, 277.54 Basham, The Wonder, 309.55 Revelation 19.11-15.56 Mahabharata 3.188.86-93, 189.1-13.57 Vishnu Purana 4.24.98.58 Ibid., 5.17.11; 5.18.1-6; cf. Bhagavata Purana 6.18.19.59 Banerjea, The Development, 424.60 Kalki Purana 1.1.14-39; 2.6-7, 3.6-7.61 Sternbach, reveiw of R. C. Hazra.62 Michell, Art and Architecture, 101.63 Bhagavata Purana 12.2.19.64 Ivanow, “The Sect of Imam Shah in Gujurat,” 62-64.65 Bhagavata Purana 8.24.7-57; Agni Purana 2.1-17.66 Vishnu Purana 5.17.11; Bhagavata Purana 5.18.1-6.67 Devibhagavata Purana 1.5.1-112; Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, 224.68 Vishnu Purana 5.6.69 Michell, Art and Architecture, 51.70 Doniger, Splitting the Difference, 204-16.

71 Goldman, “Fathers, Sons, and Gurus.”72 Shatapatha Brahmana 1.2.5.1-9.73 Vayu Purana 2.36.74-86.74 Taittiriya Brahmana 1.5.9.1; Mahabharata 12.160.26-28.75 Harivamsha 71.48-72, Vamana Purana 51, Matsya Purana 244-46.76 Devibhagavata Purana 4.15.36-71.77 Skanda Purana 1.1.18.121-29.78 Vishnu Purana 1.15-20; Bhagavata Purana 7.1-10.79 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 248-71.80 Vamana Purana 15-16.81 Èliade, Briser le toit de la maison.82 Vamana Purana S. 24.6-17.83 Skanda Purana 1.1.31.1-78.84 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 248-72.85 Doniger O’Flaherty, “Ethical and Non-Ethical Implications,” 196-98.86 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 231-36.87 Skanda Purana, Kedara Khanda, 5.101.88 Ibid., 8.1-13.89 Shiva Purana 2.1.17.48-2.1.18.39.90 Shiva Purana Mahatmya 2.1-40.91 Skanda Purana 1.1.18.53-120; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 127-28.92 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 308-09.93 Hazra, Studies in the Puranic Records, 99n.

94 Bhagavata Purana 7.1.29-30; 10.44.39.95 Skanda Purana, Kedara Khanda, 5.92-95.96 Ibid., 33.1-64.97 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 321-31.98 Vamana Purana S. 26.4-62; 27.1-23.99 Skanda Purana 7.1.336.95-253; cf. Garuda Purana 6.4-8.CHAPTER 18. PHILOSOPHICAL FEUDS IN SOUTH INDIA AND KASHMIR1 Rushdie, Haroun, 40.2 Purva-mimamsa-sutra 6.1.8 and 6.1.25-38.3 K. M. Sen, Hinduism, 67. He called them ardhavainashika, punning on vai-sheshika(people who make distinctions) and vai-nashika (people who make extinctions—of religion).4 Ibid., 69.5 Ibid., 66.6 Flood, Introduction, 238-46.7 Ibid., 132.8 Klostermaier, Hinduism, 60; see also the Sarvadarsanasamgraha of Madhava (not to beconfused with Madhva), a fourteenth-century Advaitia philosopher.9 Schimmel, The Empire, plate 75.10 Keay, India, 194.11 Kripal, “Hinduism and Popular Western Culture.”12 Shankara’s commentary on the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (iii.5.1 and iv.5.15);Lorenzen, Who Invented Hinduism?, 121.13 Ramanuja’s commentary on Badarayana’s Brahmasutra (Shribhashya 2.2.27);Isayeva, Shankara and Indian Philosophy, 14.

14 Grierson, “Madhvas,” 235.15 Shankara-dig-vijaya of Madhava, 1.28-43.16 Shankara-dig-vijaya of Madhava, chapter 9; Shankara-vijaya of Anandagiri, 58-59;Ravicandra’s commentary on Amaru; Siegel, Fires of Love, 4-5.17 Flood, Introduction, 240.18 Gopinatha Rao, Elements, 1.1.266; Narayana Rao and Shulman, Classical TelugaPoetry 143-44.19 Carman, Theology of Ramanuja, 43, n. 37.20 Davis, Lives of Indian Images, 133.21 Carman, Theology of Ramanuja, 44, n. 38, 39.22 Ibid., 45.23 Narayana Panditacarya, Madhva-vijaya 10.8- 10.18, 10.27-10.3224 Encyclopaedia Britannica on Madhva.25 Varaha Purana 71.48-62.26 Madhva, Brahma-sutra-bhashya 1.1.1, citing Varaha Purana 1.228; cf. Klostermaier,Hinduism, 59-60.27 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 70-72.28 Narayana Panditacarya, Manimanjari 5-8.29 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 210.30 Flood, Introduction, 166.31 Ibid., 164.32 Ibid., 170.33 Ibid.,162.34 Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 168-73.35 Lubin, “Veda on Parade,” 398.

36 Agni Purana 27.17-28.37 Beck, “Krishna as Loving Husband of God,” 70.38 Flood, Introduction, 137.39 Appadurai, “Kings, Sects and Temples.”40 Prashna Upanishad 4.5.41 Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion.42 Cox, “Saffron in the Rasam.”43 Flood, Introduction, 166.44 Schimmel, The Empire, 137.45 Ibid. 328 and 114; a copy of the gorgeously illustrated translation is one of thetreasures of the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin.46 Personal communication from Muzaffar Alam, Chicago, December 2007.47 Yoga-vasishtha 1.10-11; Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, 131, 139-40.48 Yoga-vasishtha 6.1.85-08; Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, 280-81.49 Yoga-vasishtha 3.104-09, 120-21; Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, 134-35.50 Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, 140-45.51 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.1.18.52 Markandeya Purana 8.128.53 Gombrich and Cone, The Perfect Generosity, xxv-xxvi; Jataka 547.54 Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams.55 Yoga-vasishtha 5.44-49; Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams 135-36.

CHAPTER 19. DIALOGUE AND TOLERANCE UNDER THE MUGHALS1 Cited by Schimmel, The Empire, 113.2 Ibid., 94-95.3 Keay, India, 322.4 Ibid., 274, 289.5 Schimmel, The Empire, 24.6 Babur, Baburnama, 353.7 Ibid., 52, 442, 415, 342.8 Keay, India, 295,9 Babur, Baburnama, 394.10 Mukhia, The Mughals, 18.11 Schimmel, The Empire, 30-31.12 Keay, India, 309.13 Gascoyne, The Great Moguls, 57.14 Schimmel, The Empire, 31.15 Keay, India, 315.16 Schimmel, The Empire, 33.17 Keay, India, 316-17.18 Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian, 288, citing Abu’l Fazl.19 Keay, India, 312, citing Abu’l Fazl, Akbar Nama, 2, 271-72.20 Schimmel, The Empire, 131.21 Ibid., 113, citing Akbar.22 Khan, “Akbar’s Personality Traits,” 22.23 Ibid., 36.

24 Amartya Sen, Foreword to K. M. Sen, Hinduism, x-xi.25 Schimmel, The Empire, 36, 94, 120-21.26 Keay, India, 31727 Ibid.28 Schimmel, The Empire, 38.29 Keay, India, 318.30 Ibid., 312-13.31 Schimmel, The Empire, 111.32 Wujastyk, “Change and Creativity,” 107, 109-10.33 Mukhia, The Mughals, 23.34 Ibid., 30.35 Abu’l Fazl, Ain-i-Akbari, vol. 3, 181.36 Schimmel, The Empire, 111.37 Dalrymple, “The Most Magnificent Muslims,” 26.38 Keay, India, 327.39 Findly, “Jahangir’s Vow,” 249.40 Schimmel, The Empire, 95-96, 109, 148, 328.41 Mukhia, The Mughals, 19, 23-24.42 Schimmel, The Empire, 114.43 Mukhia, The Mughals, 24.44 Mitter, Indian Art, 87.45 Richards, The Mughal Empire, 152.46 Schimmel, The Empire, 116.

47 Ibid., 50.48 Gascoigne, The Great Moghuls, 227.49 Dalrymple, White Moghuls, 110.50 Keay, India, 344-4551 Ibid., 343.52 Ibid., 342-43, 349, 356.53 Mukhia, The Mughals, 25.54 Keay, India, 342.55 Mukhia, The Mughals, 24.56 Ibid., 26.57 Keay, India, 336, 343.58 Schimmel, The Empire, 52.59 Keay, India, 34260 Schimmel, The Empire, 139.61 Eaton, Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States, 305.62 Keay, India, 36463 Schimmel, The Empire, 196.64 Ibid., 103, 196.65 Babur, Baburnama, 298.66 Ibid., 276.67 Schimmel, The Empire, 277.68 Babur, Baburnama, 300.69 Ibid., 301.

70 Keay, India, 295.71 Babur, Baburnama, 380-82.72 Schimmel, The Empire, 196; cf. Babur-nama, 436.73 Babur, Baburnama, 413, 439.74 Forster, “The Emperor Babur.”75 Schimmel, The Empire, 30, 40, 146, 196.76 Ibid., 41, 45, 96, 198.77 Findly, “Jahangir’s Vow,” 247.78 Schimmel, The Empire, 195.79 Ibid., 12, 128, 137.80 Babur, Baburnama, 372-74.81 Abu’l Fazl, Ain-i-Akbari. vol. 1, 301, 203-4.82 Karen Rosenberg, “An Emperor’s Art: Small, Refined, Jewel Toned,” reviewing anexhibition at the Sackler Gallery. New York Times, Friday, July 18, 2008.83 Mukhia, The Mughals, 14, citing Thomas Coryat, English Traveler to India, 1612-17.84 Abu’l Fazl, Ain-i-Akbari, 292-300.85 Findly, “Jahangir’s Vow,” 250, citing Humayun’s memoirs.86 Schimmel, The Empire, 10, 36, citing Akbar-nama 3 and Bayazid Bayat,Tarikh-i-Humayunwa-Akbar, 74.87 Abu’l Fazl, Ain-i-Akbari, vol. 3 446, 164.88 Ibid., 202.89 Findly, “Jahangir’s Vow,” 247-48.90 Ibid., 247, 250, 253.91 Mukhia, The Mughals, 26-27.

92 Keay, India, 331, 351.93 Ibid., 338, 350, 398, 533, 354.94 Ibid., 356, 36395 Eaton, Temple Desecration, 304.96 Schimmel, The Empire, 112.97 Eaton, The Rise of Islam, 183.98 Mukhia, The Mughals, 3099 Ibid., 30-31, 37.100 Schimmel, The Empire, 112.101 Mukhia, The Mughals, 31.102 Schimmel, The Empire, 114103 Mukhia, The Mughals, 31-32, 35, 28-29.104 Eaton, The Rise of Islam, 180-82.105 Schimmel, The Empire, 113.106 Haberman, Bhaktirasamritasindhu.107 Mukhia, The Mughals, 23-24.108 N. K. Sen, Hinduism, 89, citing the seventeenth-century Sufi Bawr Saheb, his Hindudisciple Biru Saheb, and his Muslim disciple Yari Shah.109 Schimmel, The Empire, 111.110 Petievich, “Dakani’s Radha-Krishna Imagery.”111 Schimmel, The Empire, 137.112 Stewart, “Satya Pir”; Fabulous Females.113 Schimmel, The Empire, 17.

114 Narayana Rao, “Multiple Literary Cultures.”115 Keay, India, 336.116 Schimmel, The Empire, 238, 241.117 Michell, Art and Architecture, 136-37.118 Schimmel, The Empire, 238, 229.119 Behl, Madhu Malati, xiii.120 Keay, India, 336.121 Michell, Art and Architecture, 141-42.122 Babur, Baburnama, 365.123 Keay, India, 316, 320.124 Michell, Art and Architecture, 138-39.125 Bakker, Ayodhya.126 Michell, Art and Architecture, 134127 Schimmel, The Empire, 282.128 Ibid., 300.129 Keay, India, 322, 334.CHAPTER 20. HINDUISM UNDER THE MUGHALS1 Amitav Ghosh, cited by Rushdie, Introduction to the Baburnama, ix.2 Wujastyk, “Change and Creativity,” 110, citing P. V. Kane.3 Ibid.4 Olivelle, Renunciation in Hinduism: A Medieval Debate.5 Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale, 121, citing Bernard S. Cohn.

6 Haberman, Acting, 41.7 Schimmel, The Empire, 237.8 Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text, 99.9 Lamb, “Personalizing the Ramayana,” 237.10 Tulsi, Ramcaritmanas (The Holy Lake), 7.53; Hawley and Juergensmeyer, Songs ofthe Saints of India, 153.11 Ramacaritamanasa of Tulsi Das, 3.23-24, 6.107-108.12 Ibid., 6.108.7.13 Beck, “Krishna as Loving Husband,” 71.14 Bhattacharya, Love Songs of Chandidas, 107.15 Flood, Introduction, 141.16 Ibid., 139.17 Dimock, Place of the Hidden Moon.18 Mukhia, The Mughals, 39.19 Sanford, “Holi Through Dauji’s Eyes,”109.20 Openshaw, Seeking Bauls of Bengal.21 Beck, “Krishna as Loving Husband,” 72-73.22 Ibid., 78.23 Haberman, Acting.24 Beck, “Krishna as Loving Husband,” 76, quoting J. Farquhar in 1917.25 Nathan and Seely, Grace and Mercy in Her Wild Hair.26 McLean, Devoted to the Goddess; McDermott, Mother of My Heart.27 Dilip Chitre, Introduction to Tukaram, Says Tuka, ix.

28 Ibid., xix, xiv, 119.29 Tukaram, Says Tuka, 80.30 Ibid., 86-87.31 Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, 82.32 Digby, Warhorse and Elephant.33 Babur, Baburnama, 446 and 463 (trans. Beveridge).34 Keay, India, 325.35 Abu’l Fazl, Ain-i-akbari, vol. 1, 140.36 Schimmel, The Empire, 203.37 Abu’l Fazl, Ain-i-akbari, vol. 1, 140.38 Ibid.39 Kelly, Marwari.40 Doniger, “ ‘I Have Scinde.’ ”41 Schimmel, The Empire, 52-53.42 Crooke, The Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India, vol. 2, 206; citingRousselet, “India and Its Native Princes,” 116.43 Asutosh Bhattacarya, Folklore of Bengal, 49. Crooke, The Popular Religion andFolk-lore, vol. 2, 206.44 Hiltebeitel, The Cult of Draupadi, vol. 1, Mythologies, 101-102.45 Ibid., 118, 122.46 Sontheimer, “The Mallari/Khandoba Myth,” 155, 163.47 Personal communication from Jack Stanley, Chicago, 1980.48 Sontheimer, “Folk Hero, King and God.”49 Sontheimer, “Some Incidents in the History of the God Khandoba,” 116.

50 Vinakaya, Sri Mallari Mahatmya.51 Sontheimer, “The Mallari/Khandoba Myth,” 161.52 Ibid., n. 16, citing the Sri Martanda Vijaya of Gandgadhara, 34.51 ff.53 Vinakaya, Sri Mallari Mahatmya, 13.24.54 Erndl, Victory to the Mother, 46. The story is found in oral tradition and numerouspopular pamphlets.55 Ibid., 96. From a Hindi oral version collected in Chandigarh, 1982-83.56 Erndl notes, of her contemporary story: ”There is a controversy over whether he is thesame as King Hariscandra of Ayodhya, an ancestor of Rama, or a local king of Haripur inDistrict Kangra, H.P. [Himachal Pradesh].”57 Crooke, The Popular Religion and Folk-lore, vol. 2, 206; citing Indian Antiquary, vol.11, 325 ff; Panjab Notes and Queries, vol. 2.58 Hiltebeitel, Rethinking the Mahbharata, 2.59 Ibid., 121.60 Ibid., 45, citing A. K. Ramanujan.61 Ibid., 299.62 Temple, Legends of the Punjab, vol. 1, 121-209.63 Steel, “Folklore in the Panjab,” 35.64 Crooke, The Popular Religion and Folk-lore, vol. 1, 211-13, citing Indian Antiquary,vol. 11, 33 ff; Cunningham, “Archaeological Reports,” vol. 17, 159; “Panjab Notes andQueries,” vol. 2, 1; John Campbell Oman, Cults, Customs, and Superstitions (1908), 68-82.65 Rose, A Glossary of the Tribes and Castes, 179. From Nabha State, a princely Sikhstate near the Punjab.66 Subrahmanyam, “Friday’s Child,” 80.67 Ibid., 81, quoting a French eyewitness account of 1714.68 Ibid., 92-106, citing Arunachalam, Peeps into Tamil Literature; Desingu RajanKathai, 138 ff.

69 Subrahmanyam, “Friday’s Child,” 108-09.70 Dalrymple, “Homer in India,” 51.71 Ibid., 5472 Joshi, Painted Folklore and Folklore Painters of India, 52.73 Kramrisch, Unknown India, 87.74 Agravat, Satyavadi Vir Tejapala.75 Lopez, Religions of India in Practice.76 Eaton, The Rise of Islam, 180-82.77 Schimmel, The Empire, 156, 158, 161.78 Ibid., 164.79 Ibid., 144-15, 155-56.80 Ibid., 143.81 Ibid., 143, 147-49, 156.82 Ibid., 151, 153.83 Ibid., 155.84 Dalrymple, White Moghuls, 34.85 Schimmel, The Empire, 155.86 Hawley and Juergensmeyer, Songs of the Saints of India, 126-27, 120, 132.87 Ibid., 137.88 Hawley, Three Bhakti Voices, 111.89 Flood, Introduction, 143-44.90 Nandy, “Sati as Profit,” 139, citing V. N. Datta, Sati, 13-14.91 Abu’l Fazl, Ain-i-Akbari, vol. 1, 216.

92 Ibid., vol. 3, 449.93 Nandy, “Sati as Profit,” 140.94 Mukhia, The Mughals, 32, citing the Tuzuk-I Jahangiri, trans. Alexander Rogers, vol.2, 180-81.95 Ibid., 36.96 Nandy, “Sati as Profit,” 140.97 Schimmel, The Empire, 113.98 Nau’i, Burning and Melting.99 Sangari, “Perpetuating the Myth,” 27.100 Schimmel, The Empire, 166.101 Ramanujan et al., When God Is a Customer.102 Ibid., 23.103 Ibid., 24.104 Ibid., 117-18.RAJCHAPTER 21. CASTE, CLASS, AND CONVERSION UNDER THE BRITISH1 Kipling, Kim, 191.2 Keay, India, 372.3 Dirks, The Scandal of Empire, xiii.4 Keay, India, 4355 Ibid., 8, citing Magnus, King Edward the Seventh, 217-18.6 Ibid., 18.7 Dube, Untouchable Pasts, 11, quoting Nick Dirks, The Hollow Crown.

8 Keay, India, 4479 Metcalf, A Concise History, 483.10 Cannadine, Ornamentalism.11 Dalrymple, The Last Mughal, 135.12 Keay, India, 376, 382.13 Dalrymple, White Moghuls, 33-34.14 Keay, India, 402, 407, 425,15 Jasanoff, Edge of Empire.16 Keay, India, 43217 Forster, A Passage to India, chapter 5.18 Mukherjee, The Rise and Fall of the East India Company, 300-03.19 Bolts, Considerations on Indian Affairs, 194.20 Ranjit Roy, The Agony of West Bengal, 17.21 Ibid., 389, 392.22 Ibid., 414.23 Kipling, Kim, chapter 11.24 Keay, India, 450.25 Klostermaier, Hinduism, 291.26 Ibid., 428-29, 445.27 Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi, 163; Eaton, “Conversion to Christianity Amongthe Nagas, 1876-1971,” 8, 32-33.28 Spear, A History of India, 140.29 Keay, India, 432, 434.

30 James, Raj, 237.31 An anonymous tract called the Sadsat Jagannatha Brtanta, cited in Ignatius Soreng,Odisare o odiya sahitya re Christa dharma [Christianity in Orissa and in Oriya Literature];Berhampur: Dipti Prakashani, 1998). I am indebted to Siddharth Satpathy for this reference.32 Keay, India, 427,33 Surendra Nath Sen, Eighteen Fifty Seven, 40-45.34 Gubbins, An Account of the Mutinies in Oudh, 24-25.35 Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India.36 Metcalf, A Concise History of India, 100.37 Keay, India, 438.38 Metcalf, A Concise History of India, 100.39 Keay, India, 43840 Ibid., 443.41 James, Raj, 237.42 Ibid.43 Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Mangal Pandey.44 Forbes-Mitchell, Reminiscences of the Great Mutiny.45 James, Raj, 251.46 Keay, India, 441-4247 Ibid., 446.48 Ibid., 445.49 Ibid., 429, 445-46.50 Ibid., 42551 Dalrymple, White Moghuls, 166.

52 Powell, Muslims and Missionaries, 117. I am indebted to Catherine Adcock for thiscitation.53 Sutton, Orissa and its Evangelization, 40.54 I owe this insightful comment, as well as the Sutton citation itself, to SiddharthSatpathy.55 James, Raj, 237.56 Keay, India, 419.57 Gautama, Dharma-sutra 20.10.58 Moon, The British Conquest, 427.59 Southey, The Curse of Kehama, 9.60 Ibid., 429, 431.61 Forster, A Passage to India, chapter 18.62 Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, 35.63 Uma Mukherjee, Two Great Indian Revolutionaries, 16-17.64 Urban, Tantra, 156-58.65 Carnegy, A Historical Sketch of Tehsil Fyzabad; Narain, The AyodhyaTemple/Mosque Dispute, 8-9.66 Van der Veer, Religious Nationalism, 153.67 Forster, A Passage to India, 287.68 Ernst, “Situating Sufism,” 24-25, citing the Dabistan, 149-50; translation, 239-40.69 Dabistan, 147, 157; translation, 235, 251.70 Ernst, “Situating Sufism,” 24-25, citing a letter of David DuBois, June 4, 2003.71 Sheldon Pollock’s term; see “Deep Orientalism?: Notes on Sanskrit and PowerBeyond the Raj.”72 Buruma and Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies.

73 Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 52; Hwang, M. Butterfly.74 Ramachandra Guha, “Sixty Years in Socks,”15.75 Trautmann, Aryans and British India.76 Keay, India, 431.77 Rocher, Ezourvedam, 3, 19. The text was published in Asiatic Researches, RoyalAsiatic Society, Bengal, 1822.78 Kapil Raj, “Refashioning Civilities.”79 Flood, Introduction, 124.80 Partha Mitter, “Rammohun Roy and the New Language of Monotheism.”81 Nandy, The Intimate Enemy; Doniger, The Woman Who Pretended.82 Keay, India, 431.83 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India.84 Dalrymple, “India: The Place of Sex.”85 McConnachie, The Book of Love, 198.86 Ibid., 197-98.87 Figueira, ”To Lose One’s Head for Love.”88 Published in Goethe, Werke, 1840, 1.200; here cited from the English translation byEdgar Alfred Bowring, The Poems of Goethe.89 Yourcenar, “Kali Beheaded.”90 Ibid., 146.91 Doniger, Splitting the Difference, 235.92 Kulkarni, “Darstellung des Eigenen im Kostum des Fremden”; Schulz, “HinduMythology in Mann’s Indian Legend”; Mahadevan, “Switching Heads and Cultures.”93 Doniger, “ ‘I Have Scinde.’ ”94 Moon, The British Conquest, 567-75.

95 The Whig Morning Chronicle, cited by Priscilla Napier, I Have Sind, 197.96 Priscilla Napier, I Have Sind, xvi.97 Mehra, A Dictionary, 496-97.98 George Daniel, Democritus in London, 51.99 Priscilla Napier, I Have Sind, xv, 160, 197.100 Keay, India, 421.101 Rowley, More Puniana, 166-67.102 Rushdie, Shame, 88.103 Gould, “To Be a Platypus,” 269.104 Priscilla Napier, I Have Sind, 160.105 Mehra, A Dictionary, 497.38.21-22.106 William Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier, vol. 4,107 David, The Indian Mutiny, 34-44; Edwardes, Red Year: The Rebellion of 1857,108 Charles Napier, cited in Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny, 36.109 William Napier, The Life and Opinions, vol. 2, 275.110 Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 176.111 Keay, India, 453.112 Cited by Bryant, The Quest for the Origins, 324.113 Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, 98.114 Alder, Beyond Bokhara, 50-51.115 Schimmel, The Empire, 101.116 William Napier, The Life and Opinions, vol. 1, 164-66, 186, 346, 351, 385; Priscilla

Napier, I Have Sind, 58.117 Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, 99.118 Yang, Bazaar India, 116.119 Alder, Beyond Bokhara, 105, 209.120 Yang, Bazaar India, 116.121 Alder, Beyond Bokhara, 107, 209, 341, 357-58, 367.122 Kipling, Kim, 161.123 Ibid., 191.124 Said, “The Pleasures of Imperialism,” 45.125 Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling,” 135.126 Rushdie, “Kipling,” 80; italics added.127 Shakespeare, Henry V, 5.2.182-83.128 Trautmann, Aryans, 15, 18.129 Gandhi, Selected Political Writings, 89.CHAPTER 22. SUTTEE AND REFORM IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE RAJ1 Cited by Mani, Contentious Traditions, 172.2 Cited by Weinberger-Thomas, Ashes of Immortality, 99.3 Vessantara Jataka, 495 (PTS text); Gombrich and Cone, The Perfect Generosity.4 Dehejia, “The Iconographies of Sati,” 52.5 Mani, Contentious Traditions, 22.6 Hawley, Sati, 13.7 Doniger, “Why Did They Burn?”

8 Courtright, “The Iconographies of Sati,” 42.9 Hawley, Sati, 26. Some legal texts (Shankha and Angiras Smritis) use Arundhatiinstead; Kane, History, 2.1, 631.10 K. M. Sen, Hinduism, 95-96.11 Killingley, Rammohun Roy, 61.12 K. M. Sen, Hinduism, 95-96.13 Ibid.14 Killingley, Rammohun Roy.15 Mani, Contentious Traditions, 54-55.16 Nandy, “Sati as Profit,” 137.17 Keay, India, 457.18 Weinberger-Thomas, Ashes, 89.19 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 297.20 Allan Bloom, The Closing, 26.21 Woodruff, The Men Who Ruled India, 66, 74.22 Mani, Contentious Traditions, 53.23 Kane, History, 2.1.631-33.24 Mani, Contentious Traditions, 21.25 Weinberger-Thomas, Ashes of Immortality, 202-07.26 Keay, India, 429.27 Figueira, “Die flambierte Frau,” 69, citing Roger, 220-21.28 Ibid., 58, 61.29 Ibid., 65, citing Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtung, vol. 6, 255-56.

30 Lubin, “Veda on Parade,” 389, citing Samskaravidhi 289-95.31 Ghai, Shuddhi Movement in India, and Jordens, “Reconversion to Hinduism, theShuddhi of the Arya Samaj.”32 Lubin, “Veda on Parade,” 389.33 Jaffrelot, Hindu Nationalism, 2007, 31.34 Van der Veer, Religious Nationalism, 91-92.35 Adcock, Religious Freedom and Political Culture.36 Keay, India, 475.37 Gandhi, in Young India, January 5, 1924, 145.38 Keay, India, 492.39 Ibid., 471.40 Scott, Weapons of the Weak.41 Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 52 ff.42 Gandhi, An Autobiography, 20-21.43 Ibid.44 Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi, 209.45 Gandhi, The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, 265-99.46 Gandhi, “The Message of the Gita,” in Mitchell, The Bhagavad Gita, 218-19.47 Keay, India, 487, 514.48 Ibid., 448.49 P. J. Marshall, Bengal, xiv-xv, 5.50 Forbes-Mitchell, Reminiscences of the Great Mutiny.51 Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi, 1, 33, 46.52 Nath, Puranas and Acculturation, 145.

53 The material in the next six paragraphs is taken from Hardiman, The Coming of theDevi, particularly 40, 53-54, 82, 99, 104-05, 129, 134, 139-40, 147, 154, 159, 164, 179, 203.54 Ibid., 41; Kirin Narayan, Mondays on the Dark Side of the Moon.55 Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi, 42, 175, 216.56 Ibid., 169, 189-90, 200-01.57 Keay, India, 486.58 Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi, 4, 51-52, 170.59 Harlan, “Perfection and Devotion,” 84-85.60 Keay, India, 447.61 Dube, Untouchable Pasts, 115, 260-61,62 Ibid., 115-16.63 Ibid., 15.64 Keay, India, 532.65 Tartakov, “B. R. Ambedkar,” 38.66 Ambedkar, Why Go for Conversion?, 10.67 Omvedt, 43, citing Ambedkar, Towards an Enlightened India.68 Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion.69 Ambedkar, The Buddha and His Dhamma; Tartakov, B. R. Ambedkar and theNavayana Diksha.70 Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, 499.71 Isaacs, India’s Ex-Untouchables, 46.72 Justin Huggler, “India’s Untouchables Turn to Buddhism in Protest at Discriminationby Hindus,” Independent, October 13, 2006.

CHAPTER 23. HINDUS IN AMERICA1 Baker, A Blue Hand, 214-15.2 Stephen Prothero of Boston University, cited in “Poll Finds a Fluid Religious Life inU.S.,” New York Times, February 26, 2008. Reported by Neela Banerjea. Report of the PewForum on Religion and Public Life, http://religions.pewforum.org.3 Brenda Goodman, “In a Suburb of Atlanta, a Temple Stops Traffic,” New York Times,June 5, 2007, B1.4 Siegel, Net of Magic.5 Lamont, The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, 816 Kripal, “Western Popular Culture, Hindu Influences On.”7 Vivekananda, Swami Vivekananda and His Guru, 25.8 Huffer, Guru Movements in a Globalized Framework.9 Stephen Kinzer,“Art on Streets Til the Cows Come Home,” New York Times, August20, 2001.10 Vasquez and Marquardt, Globalizing the Sacred, 92, 117.11 Baker, A Blue Hand, 146.12 Ibid., 146, 214-15.13 Kripal, “Western Popular Culture, Hindu Influences On.”14 O’Brien, “Sweetheart,” 110.15 www.tantricgoddesskali.com.16 anniesprinkle.org.17 Rajesh Priyadarhi, on BBC News, June 9, 2004.18 Rama Lakshmi, “In India, Gods Rule the ‘Toon’ Universe; Hindu Myth a Fount ofSuperheroes,” Washington Post Foreign Service, January 9, 2008, A11.19 Mr. Boffo cartoon by Joe Martin, Inc., distributed by Universal Press Syndicate,published in the September 29, 2000, Chicago Tribune.

20 Tolputt, The Cartoon Kama Sutra, and Manara’s Kama Sutra.21 “Tantric Sex Class Opens Up Whole New World of Unfulfillment for Local Couple,”Onion (March 30-April 5, 2000), 8.22 Spayde, “The Politically Correct Kama Sutra,” 56.23 The musical was conceived by Terry Abraham-son and directed by Arnie Saks, withmusic by Stephen Joseph.24 Britt, “Avatar.”25 American School of Laughter Yoga, e-mail advertisement, June 2, 2005.26 White, Kiss of the Yogini, xi.27 Ibid., xii.28 Ibid., xii, 109.29 Statements made in public hearings before the California Board of Education and theFairfax County School Board between 2000 and 2005.30 Kripal, “Western Popular Culture, Hindu Influences On.”31 Ibid.32 Huffer, Guru Movements.33 Exemplified in Krishnan Ramaswamy et al., Invading the Sacred.34 Kripal, “Western Popular Culture, Hindu Influences On.”35 Jason Overdorf, “Saving the Raja’s Horse: British Horsewoman Francesca KellyBrings India’s Fiery Marwari to the United States in Hopes of Reviving the Breed.” Smithsonian,June 2004. See also www.horsemarwari.com and Kelly and Durfee, Marwari: Legend of theIndian Horse.CHAPTER 24. THE PAST IN THE PRESENT1 Gough, “Harijans in Thanjavur,” 234.2 Lubin, “Veda on Parade,” 398.3 Ibid., 394.

4 Frederick M. Smith, “Indra Goes West,” 259-60, citing Madhava.5 Lubin, “Veda on Parade,” 394.6 Ibid., 393-94; in Solapur in 1978 and in Pune in 1955.7 Smith, “Indra Goes West,” 259.8 Lubin, “Veda on Parade,” 394.9 K. M. Sen, Hinduism, 47.10 Kosambi, Myth and Reality, 91-92.11 Doniger, ”A Burnt Offering.” review of D. N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow.12 J. L. Kipling, Beast & Man in India, vol. 6, 116.13 Biardeau, Hinduism, 36.14 Appadurai, “Gastro Politics,” 506.15 White, “Dogs die.”16 Personal communication from Nagaraj Paturi, Chicago, January 2007.17 Sontheimer, “King of Warriors,” 52-53.18 Elison, “Immanent Domains.”19 BBC news, November 8, 2007.20 CNN.com Europe, November 13, 2007.21 New York Times, March 7, 2008, “Kashmir: City Plans to Poison 100,000 Dogs”;March 8, 2008, “Kashmir: Strays Saved from Poisoning.”22 Gold, Fruitful Journeys, 5.23 Cohn, “The Changing Status of a Depressed Caste,” 285.24 Dube, Untouchable Pasts, 8.25 Forster, Hill of Devi, 176.26 Ann Grodzins Gold, personal conversation, August 2007.

27 I owe this concern, and much of its wording, to Arshia Sattar, personalcommunication, August 13, 2006.28 BBC News, December 7, 2007. The judge was Sunil Kumar Singh.29 He bought it from New York dealer Ben Heller for David L. Shirey. “Norton SimonBought Smuggled Idol,” New York Times, May 12, 1973.30 Davis, Lives of Indian Images, 252, citing N. Vidyasagar, “Back Home—but NotYet,” Aside, August 31, 1991.31 Bakker, Ayodhya.32 S. Balakrishnan, “Ayodhya: The Communal Tinderbox,” Illustrated Weekly of India,vol. 11, no. 5 (1989), 30.33 Forster, Hill of Devi, 202.34 Gopal, ed., Anatomy of a Confrontation.35 Keay, India, 532.36 Dalrymple, “India: The War over History.”37 BBC News, September 12, 2007.38 Romila Thapar, “Opinion,” in The Hindu, September 28, 2007; reprinted in Economicand Political Weekly (September 29, 2007).39 eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop /photo.pl?mission= STS067&roll=718A&frame=60.40 Doniger O’Flaherty, The Implied Spider.41 Seely, The Slaying of Meghanada.42 Richman, “E. V. Ramasami’s Reading of the Ramayana.”43 Omvedt, Dalit Visions, 100-01, citing Madhu Kishwar, in the Times of India, January28, 1993.44 Van der Veer, Gods on Earth, 14.45 Upasni Baba, The talks of Sadguru Upasani-Baba Maharaj, vol. 2B, 542-54.46 Shiva Purana 2.4.13.4, 4.27.23-24; cf. Ramayana 7.4.3-4, 7.16.44.

47 Padma Purana 2.1.5.1-35; Doniger O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 136-37.48 Elwin, Myths of Middle India, 65-67.49 Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, January 18, 2008. Seehttp://www.hindujagruti.org/news/3819.html.50 Yahoo News, February 26, 2008.51 Raghu Karnad, “Unlikely Arrows in Ram’s Quiver,” Tehelka Magazine, New Delhi(March 15, 2008).52 Mahesh Rangarajan, “Enemies of Open Society Threaten the Idea of India,” Economicand Political Weekly, February 23, 2008; Ramachandra Guha, “Devotions Destructive andDivine,” The Hindu, March 2, 2008.2008.53 Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Our Freedoms, Your Lordships,” Indian Express, March 4,54 Omvedt, Dalit Visions, 31, 101.55 Kishwar, “Yes to Sita, No to Ram,” 300 ff.56 Omvedt, Dalit Visions, 101-02.57 Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel, 141.58 Omvedt, Dalit Visions, 28, translating Tarabai Shinde, Stri-Purush Tulna, 6.59 Ibid.60 Sumanta Banerjee, “Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal,” inSangari and Vaid, Recasting Women, 138-39.61 Chakravarti, Themes in Indian History, 78, citing the short story entitled “Kunti ONishadi” by Mahashweta Devi.62 Omvedt, Dalit Visions, 98.63 Ibid., 78, quoting an untitled poem by Waman Nimbalkar (called “Just Poem”),Vagartha, 12 (January 1976), trans. Graham Smith.64 Ibid., 8, citing Shashikant Hingonekar, “Ekalavya,” Asmitadarsh, no. 12(April-May-June 1989), trans. Gail Omvedt and Bharat Patankar.

65 Anand and Zelliot, Anthology of Dalit Literature, 152. This poem (from Surung) wastranslated by Eleanor Zelliot.66 Surekha Bhagat, “The Lesson.” Personal communication from Eleanor Zelliot, 2005.67 Jaffrey, The Invisibles; Nanda, Neither Man nor Woman.68 Associated Press, November 9, 2006.69 davidgodman.org/interviews/ttimes.shtml.70 “Detect Eye Defects Early to Avoid Blindness,” The Hindu, September 8, 2006.71 Personal communication from William Dalrymple, January 6, 2008.72 Hudson, “Siva, Minaksi, Visnu.”73 Indian Express, October 18, 2007.74 Kurtz, All the Mothers Are One, 18; Lutgendorf, “Who Wants to Be a Goddess? JaiSantoshi Maa Revisited.”75 Ritter, “Epiphany in Radha’s Arbor,” 181-84, 199, 201.76 Omvedt, Dalit Visions, 19-20, citing Jotiba Phule, Gulamgiri (in Marathi, with anEnglish introduction), 1885.77 Ibid., 85.78 Youngblood, “Cultivating Identity,” 275, 319-20.79 Shekhar Gupta, “Lopsided Lessons,” India Today, July 31, 1990.80 Vinay Lal, Introducing Hinduism, 93.81 P. N. Oak, Tajmahal: The True Story (1989).82 Hari Kumar, “After Clashes, Curfew Is Set in Taj Mahal Area,” New York Times,August 30 2007.83 Huyler, Village India, 162.84 Asutosh Bhattacarya, Folklore of Bengal, 48-49.85 Inglis, “Night Riders,” 298, 302, 304.

86 Kramrisch, Village India, 57.87 Personal communication from Stephen Inglis, January 8, 1987.88 Inglis, “The Craft of the Velar,” 14-19.89 Shulman, The King and the Clown, 3-4.90 Lynn Hart, paper presented at the South Asian Conference at the University ofWisconsin at Madison, November 8, 1986.91 Vequaud, Women Painters of Mithila.92 Brown, “Contested Meanings.”93 Vequaud, “The Colors of Devotion.”94 Szanton and Bakshi, Mithila Painting: The Evolution of an Art Form, 3-17.95 Ibid., 31-37.96 Ibid., 61-67; Szanton, “Mithila Painting: The Dalit Intervention.”97 Ibid., 69-71.98 “Renuka’s Revenge,” Reuters report from Bangalore, March 7, 1995; “NakedWorshippers Lay Bare Dignity of Police and Press,” Times of London, March 15, 1986; cited infull in Doniger, Splitting the Difference, 214-216.CHAPTER 25. INCONCLUSION, OR, THE ABUSE OF HISTORY1 Golwalkar, We, Our Nationhood Defined, 48-49.2 Gandhi, The Collected Works, vol. 25, 178.3 Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 2, 286.4 Keay, India, 533BIBLIOGRAPHY: WORKS CITED AND CONSULTEDSANSKRIT, GREEK, PALI, AND HINDI TEXTS, BY TITLE

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p. 84. Courtesy of Frederick Asher.p. 346. Courtesy of Carmel Berkson.p. 441. Courtesy of Carmel Berkson.p. 682. Courtesy of Stephen Inglis.p. 683. Courtesy of Stephen Inglis.p. 686. Painting by Dulari Devi, Ranti, Madhubani,Bihar, in the collection of Susan S. Wadley. Iam grateful to Dulari Devi, Susan S. Wadley, andDavid Szanton for permission to reproduce it here.Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint selections from the followingcopyrighted works:Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (University ofChicago Press, 1990). Selection translated by David Shulman. By permission of Wendy DonigerO’Flaherty and David Shulman.Speaking of Siva, translated with an introduction by A. K. Ramanujan (Penguin Classics,1973). Copyright © A. K. Ramanujan, 1973. By permission of Penguin Books Ltd, London.Songs of Experience: The Poetics of Tamil Devotion by Norman Cutler. Copyright ©1987 by Norman Cutler. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu by Nammalvar, translated by A. K.Ramanujan (Princeton University Press, 1981). By permission of Molly A. Daniels Ramanujan.“From Classicism to Bhakti” by A. K. Ramanujan and Norman Cutler from TheCollected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan, edited by Vinay Dharwadker. Reprinted by permission ofOxford University Press India, New Delhi.The Bijak of Kabir, translated by Linda Hess (Oxford University Press, 2002). Bypermission of Linda Hess.Says Tuka: Selected Poetry of Tukaram, translated by Dilip Chitre (Penguin India, 1991).By permission of Dilip Chitre.Songs of the Saints of India by John Stratton Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer. Reprintedby permission of Oxford University Press India, New Delhi.Three Bhakti Voices: Mirabai, Surdas and Kabir in Their Times and Ours by JohnStratton Hawley. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press India, New Delhi.When God Is A Customer: Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others, edited andtranslated by A. K. Ramanujan, Narayana Rao and David Shulman. © 1994 Regents of theUniversity of California. Published by the University of California Press. By permission of thepublisher.Dalit Vision by Gail Omvedt. © Orient Blackswan Pvt, India. By permission of OrientBlackswan.An Anthology of Dalit Literature by Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot (GyanPublishing House, 1992). Selection translated by Jayant Karve and Eleanor Zelliot. Bypermission of Eleanor Zelliot.Vidrohi Kavita, edited by Keshav Meshram (Continental Prakashan, 1987). Selectiontranslated by Gauri Deshpande and others. By permission of Eleanor Zelliot.INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.Abhimanyu (son of Arjuna)Abhinavagupta (philosopher)abortionAbraham, ProphetAbstract of the Arguments Regarding the Burning of Widows Considered as a ReligiousRite (Roy)Abu al-Malik ‘Isamiaccidental gracedogs’ role inhate-devotion doctrine andin PuranasTantric ritual andundeserving devotee theme andActs of Saint Thomasaddiction(s)control offour majorin Kama-sutraManu andin Mughal Empirerenunciation andin Rig Vedain shastrasin Upanishadswomen andAdharma (antonym of Dharma)Adhyatma-RamayanaAdi (antigod)Aditi (goddess of infinity)Adivasis (tribals)Devi movement andAdvaita (nondualism)Advani. K.Afghanistanagamas (texts)Agastya (sage)Age of the Trey (Treta Yuga)Age of Truth (Satya Yuga)Aghorashiva (philosophy)Aghoris (sect)Agni (god)in Rig VedaAgni PuranaAhalya (adultress)Ahalyabhai, Queen

ahimsa (nonviolence)Ahura Mazda (Avestian god)Aims of Lifedharma anddiversity among texts ofidea of triads andKama-sutra andmoksha andas quartetrebirth andrenunciation andAin-i-AkbariAjatashatru, king of KashiAjivikas (sect of renouncers)akam Tamil love poetryAkbar, Mughal emperornonviolence vows ofpluralism ofreign ofAkbar-NamaAkhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) (All-India Students’ Council)Alcoholics AnonymousAlexander III (the Great), king of MacedoniaAllahAllen, WoodyAll India Handicrafts BoardAll-India Students’ Council (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) (ABVP)All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare)Alvars (Tamil Vaishnava saints)Amaravati, stupa ofAmar Chitra Katha (comic book)Amba, PrincessAmbalika, PrincessAmbar, MalikAmbedkar, Bhimrao RamjiAmbika (Little Mother, goddess)Ambika, PrincessAmerican AnthropologistAmerican Hindus Against DefamationAmmaiyar, KaraikkalAmritsar massacreAnandamath (“The Mission House”) (Chatterji)Angadi synagogueAnimal Farm (Orwell)animalson Ashoka’s stone edicts

in Bhimbetka cave paintingsdomestic“helpful”in IVC culturein MahabharataManu andin Puranasin Ramayanasacrifice of, see sacrificeSanskrit andin shastrasTantras andin UpanishadsVedic people andas vehicles for godssee also specific animalsAnnamayya (poet)Annapurna (goddess)Antal (Tamil saint)antigods (Asuras)good and evilVishnu-Brahma myth andAntony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare)Antyajas (tribal caste)apad-dharmaApala (Vedic woman poet)Apararka (commentator)Apasadas (Low and Excluded caste)Appar (saint)Apsarases (nymphs)Aquaviva, FatherArabian Nights, TheAranyakas (Jungle Books)Archaeological Survey of IndiaArcher, MildredArcher, WilliamArchimedesArctic Home in the Vedas, The (Tilak)Ardhanarishvara (Shiva as androgyne)AristophanesArjan (Sikh guru)Arjuna (warrior)in Bhagavad Gitasee also PandavasArnold, Edwinartha

Artha-shastracaste inhomosexuality inmarriage debate inArya (Vedic “noble”)Aryabhata (astronomer)AryansNazis andArya Samajreconversion ceremony ofAshoka, Mauryan emperoranimals andBuddhism andedicts ofmyths ofpilgrimage tradition andAshvaghosha (poet)Ashva-shastra (textbook of horses)Ashvins (equine gods)Asiatic Society of BengalAsoka (film)Asuras, see antigodsAsuri (female antigod)Atharva VedaatmanAuden, W. H.Augustine, SaintAurangzeb, Mughal emperorAustraliaAvalon, Arthur (John Woodroffe)avatarAvataric EvolutionAvestaAyomukhi (ogress)Babhruvahana, KingBabri Masjid (mosque)destruction ofBabur, Mughal emperormemoir ofreign ofBaburnamaBackward CastesBacon, FrancisBadarayana (author)Bahadur, TeghBahuchara Mata (goddess)

Baker, DeborahBakr-Id festivalBalarama (brother of Krishna)Bala-RamayanaBalban, SultanBali (antigod)BaluchistanBana (poet)BangladeshBaniya (caste)Banu, Hamidehbanyan treeBarani, Ziya’-ud-DinBardwaj, JitendraBasava (founder of Virashaivism)Basava PuranasBasohli paintingBasu, NupurBauls of BengalBBCBeatlesBeer, MichaelBegum, DildarBentinck, WilliamBhagat, SurekhaBhagavad Gitabhakti anddharma infirst English translation ofGandhi onKrishna inmoksha inthree yogas ofU.S.’s misappropriation ofBhagavan, LordBhagavata PuranaBhagavati (goddess)Bhagiratha (sage)Bhairava (god)bhaktiaccidental grace andakam poetry andBhagavad Gita andBrahmins andBuddhism andCankam poetry and

caste andChristianity anddarshan concept andin early Tamil literatureIslam andJainas andJudaism andkingship andin modern folkloreorigins ofPariahs andpoetry andproselytizing andsacrifice andof ShivaSufism andTantra andtemple diversity ofviolence ofwomen andBhaktivedanta, A.C.Bharata, kingBharata (brother of Rama)Bharata Natya ShastraBharati, Agehananda (Leopold Fischer)Bharati, story ofBharatiya Janata Party (BJP)Bhatia, NadishBhattacharjee, BuddhadebBhawani (goddess)Bhil (tribal people)Bhima see also PandavasBhimala (Bhil)Bhimbetka cave paintingsBhishma (son of Satyavati)Bhojavdeva (philosopher)Bhrigu (sage)Bijjala, Jaina kingBilgrami, AzadBindusara (Bimbisara), Mauryan kingBirbal (minister)“Birth of India, The” (Forster)Birth of the Prince, The (Kalidasa)Biruni, Abu Arrayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Black Hole of CalcuttaBlanco (horse)

Blavatsky, HelenaBlood Seed (Raktabija) (antigod)Bloom, AllanBlue Hand, A: The Beats in India (Baker)boar (avatar of Vishnu)“Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” (Miner)BollywoodBombay Harijan Temple Entry Act (1948)Bombay TimesBonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe)Book of the Night RaidBose, Jagadish ChandraBowers, Dr.Brahma (creator god)Bhairava’s beheading ofmutual creation myth andShiva’s beheading ofSkull Bearer’s beheading ofBrahma-charinBrahmagupta (mathematician)Brahmanasclass conflicts andcomposition ofcows indeath indog sacrifice inevil andfolklore andGanges urbanization andhorse sacrifice inhuman sacrifice andkingship andlanguage ofnonviolence insacrifice invegetarianism andwomen inbrahman (divine substance)Brahmavaivarta PuranaBrahminicideof Balaramabeheading of Brahma andof IndraBrahminsbhakti andcaste system and

(Roy)in Delhi sultanategovernance andKshatriyas’ conflict within Manu’s taxonomymarriage rank ofin Mauryan Empiremixing of classes feared byPuranas andreclassification ofRig Veda andsacrifice andshastras as threat toShramanas andin South Indiasuttee andTantras andtexts andin Vedic caste systemviolence andBrahmo Samaj (Society of God)breast goddessesbricks, brickmakingbride-pricesee also dowryBrief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of FemalesBrihadaranyaka UpanishadBrihaspati (god)Britainand Hindu as termsind annexed bysuttee practice andsee also RajBritish East India CompanyBrosnan, PierceBruno, GiordanoBrunton, WilliamBuddhaas avatar of Vishnulanguage ofBuddhacharita (Ashvaghosha)Buddhismahimsa andAshoka’s patronage ofbhakti andDalit conversions to

demonization ofin Harsha eraHinduism andof KalkiMagadhi dialect ofin Mauryan Empiremonuments and stupas ofShaivas andwomen andBukka, Vijayanagar emperorbullsBundelkhand, kingdom ofBurke, EdmundBurkert, WalterBush, George W.Caesar, JuliusCampantar, TirujnanaCankam (assembly) poetryCarnegy, PatrickCarroll, LewisCarter, JimmyCasablanca (film)caste, caste systemin Artha-shastrabhakti andBrahmins andclass color andconversions andDevi movement anddharma anddogs andEkalavya story andHindu-Muslim relations andhomosexuality andillusion ofinversions ofKabir’s attitude towardin Kama-sutralowestin MahabharataManu’s taxonomy oforigins ofin Puranasin purity and pollution ideologyin RajRama-crow story and

in Ramayanareconversion ceremony andin Rig VedaSatnami mythology andin shastrasin Upanishadsof Vedic peoplesvertical mobility andYudhishthira’s dilemma andsee also specific castesCatholicismcatsCat schoolCaucasiansCekkiyar (poet)centaurs (Gandharvas)Chaitanya (saint)Chalukya kingdomChamaras (caste)Chanakya (Brahmin)Chanda, story ofChandalas (caste)Chand Bibi, regent of BijapurChandellas, kingdom ofChandidas (poet)Chandika (goddess)Mahisha slain byShumbha slain byChandogya UpanishadChandragupta, Mauryan emperorChandra Gupta I, Gupta emperorChandra Gupta II, Gupta emperorChang, KennethChantrey, Francis LegattCharaka (medical author)chariotCharioteers (Suta caste)Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperorCharvakas (materialists)Chatterji, BankimcandraChaucer, GeoffreyChauhan, Prithvi RajCheras, kingdom ofchess (chaturanga)Chetak (stallion)Chetwode, Penelope

Chetwode, PhilipChicago Daily TribuneChinaChinnamastaka (Severed Head)Chishti, Khwaja Muin-ud-dinChishti, Shaikh SalimChitrangada, QueenChola kingdomtemples ofChristianitybhakti movement andHindu conversions toin Mughal EmpireRaj andsavior image ofChristo (artist)Chudala, QueenChurchill, WinstonCiannelli, EduardoCiruttontar, story ofCity of Satan (Shaytanpura)Clapham SectClement of AlexandriaClinton, BillClive, RobertClooney, GeorgeClosing of the American Mind, The (Bloom)Cloud Messenger, The (Kalidasa)CNNCobra PeopleCocktail Party, The (Eliot)Conference between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of the Practice of BurningWidows Alive, A (Roy)Congress Party, Indian“Conquest of the Four Corners of the World”Conrad, Josephconsort goddessesConstitution, IndianConstitution, U.S.Cornwallis, CharlesCoryat, ThomasCowParadecowsin Brahmanasfive products ofmodern attitudes toward

promiscuity andprotection ofsacredsacrifice ofas symbol of nonviolenceC. P. Ramaswami Anjar FoundationcranesCretecrowsCuarón, AlfonsoCunningham, AlexanderCuntarar (poet)Cutler, NormanCyrus II (the Great), king of PersiaDadhyanch (priest)Dadu (Sant)Dakani poetryDaksha (Lord of Creatures)Dalhousie, JamesDalits (Scheduled Castes)in conversion to BuddhismEkalavya myth andnude pilgrimage ofDalit Sangharsha Samiti (DSS)Dalrymple, WilliamDamon, MattDanyal (son of Akbar)darshan, concept ofDarwin, CharlesDasas (caste)Dasharatha (Rama’s father)hunting episode andDashavatara-stotraDatta, Michael MadhusudanDattatreya (god)Dawn (goddess)Dawn Horse (Eohippus)Dayabhaga (law system)Day of the Triffids, The (Wyndham)deathin Brahmanaskarma andrecurrentin Rig VedaDeath (god)Deceivers, The (film)

“Deeds of the Ten Avatars” (Kshemendra)DeismDelhi SultanateBrahmins incultural exchange indesecration of temples inevolution of language andHindu-Muslim relations inhorses and horse trading inIslamic invasions andMughals compared withpreaching of Kabir inSufism intemples-mosques inVijayanagar Empire andVirashaivas sect inDelhi Universitydemonsde Nobili, RobertoDeogarh, Vishnu Temple inDevaki (queen)Devaraja (King of the Gods)Devaraya I, Vijayanagar emperorDevi (goddess)Devi, MahashwetaDevibhagavata PuranaDevi movementDewas, Raja ofdhamma (concept)dharmaAims of Life andin Bhagavad Gitacastes andearliest text onin emergency, see apad-dharmakarma ofin Ramayanasubtlety ofDharma (god)Dharma Bums, The (Kerouac)Dharma-shastraswomen inDhritarashtra (son of Vyasa)Dhyanu Bhagat (goddess)Diaz (Portuguese trader)dice, see gambling

Dickens, CharlesDirgha-jihva (Long-Tongue) (ogress)Divakara, Matanga“Diverse Callings”Divine Faith (Din-i-Ilahi)Dr. Strangelove (film)Dog Cookers (Shva-Paka caste)dogsaccidental grace theology andin Brahmanascaste andclass tensions andon IVC sealsmodern treatment ofin Mughal Empirein Ramayanasacrifice ofof Turkaramin UpanishadsdoomsdayDouglas, Marydowry see also bride-priceDraupadi, Queenbirth ofhusbands ofShiva andDravidian languagesDrona (tutor)Drunken Babur Returns to Camp at Night, A (painting)Drupada (father of Draupadi)Dry Days in Dobbagunta (film)DSS (Dalit Sangharsha Samiti)dualismDuhshasana, KingDulari DeviDumézil, GeorgesDundes, AlanDurga (goddess)Durgawati, RaniDuryodhana, KingDusadhs (Dalit community)Dushyanta, KingDvapara Yuga (Age of the Deuce)Dvaraka, flooded citydvesha-bhakti (devotion through hatred)Dwarf (avatar of Vishnu)

Dyer, Reginald“Dynasty of Vishnu, The” (Harivamsha)Earth (goddess)Earth CowEgyptEinstein, AlbertEkalavya (tribal archer)ElamElephanta, temple to Shiva ofElephanta Suite, The (Theroux)Eliade, MirceaEliot, T. S.Ellamma, goddessEllenborough, LordEllis, Francis WhyteEllora, temples ofElphinstone, MountstuartEmerson, Ralph WaldoEncyclopedia BritannicaEnd of the Age, The (Robertson)Engle, PaulEnlightenmentEohippus (Dawn Horse)Eurostanevilin Brahmanasgods vs. antigods andevolution, theory ofEyes Wide Shut (film)Ezour VedaFail Safe (film)Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr.Farce of the Drunkard’s Games (Mattavilasa-prahasana) (Varman I)Farrell, Thomas F.Farrukhsiyar, Mughal emperorFatso (Pivari), QueenFaxian (Buddhist)Fazl, Abu’lFinch, PeterFinnegans Wake (Joyce)First Afghan WarFischer, Leopold (Agehananda Bharati)fishavatar of Vishnulaw of (matsya-nyaya)Fitzgerald, F. Scott

Five Msflood mythFlynn, ErrolForever Odd (Koontz)Forster, E. M.Foucault, MichelFour Ages, myth ofFourth Buddhist CouncilFranceFreemasonsfree willFrench and Indian WarsFreud, SigmundFriday Mosque (Jami Masjid)Frogs, The (Aristophanes)Frontline (Web site)Frost, RobertGadhi (Brahmin)“Gambler, The” (Vedic poem)gamblingGamow, GeorgeGardharaGandhari, PrincessGandharvas (centaurs)Gandhi, IndiraGandhi, Mahatmanonviolence ofvegetarianism ofGanesha (god)Ganga (goddess, river)Ganga DeviGanges (goddess, river)garbha griha (womb house)Gargi, story ofGargya (Brahmin)“Garland of Games” (Kshemendra)Garuda (mythical bird)Gascoigne, BamberGauri (goddess)Gautama (logician)Gautama, Siddhartha, see Buddhageesegender, illusions ofGenesis, Book ofGenghis KhanGhasidas (farm servant)

Ghaznavid EmpireGhorid (nuclear missile)Ghorid dynastyGhosh, Amitavghouls (Pishachas)Gibb, Hamilton, A. R.Gilgamesh, epic ofGinsberg, AllenGiroux, LeoGita Govinda (“The Song of the Cowherd”) (Jayadeva)Glanville-Hicks, Peggy“Glorification of the Goddess” (Devimahatmya)goats see also sheepGoddess, The (film)God Only Knows (film)Godse, NathuramGoethe, Johann vonGoggavve (saint)Golden TempleGolden Voyage of Sinbad, The (film)Golkonda VyaparisGolwalkar, Madhav SadashivGondsGondwanalandGopis (cowherd women)Gorakhnath (yogi)Goswamins (sect)Götterdämmerung (Wagner)Gough, KathleenGould, Stephen JayGovind SinghGrant, CaryGreat Expectations (Dickens)Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald)Great Indian Novel, The (Tharoor)Great Kali (Maha-Kali)Greece, ancientGreek languageGrihya SutrasGudimalla lingaGugga (folk god)Guha (hunter)GujaratisGujars (caste)Gunanidhi (Ocean of Virtues)Gunga Din (film)

Gupta Empireart ofcoinage ofEuropean historians’ perception offounding ofHuns andmathematics and astronomy inPuranas andsectarian worship intemples ofwomen inGurjara PratiharasGuru NanakHaeckel, ErnstHaldane, J. B. S.Haldighati, battle ofHamlet (Shakespeare)Hanshaw, AnnetteHanuman (monkey god)Hara (Shiva)Harappan Civilization, see Indus Valley Civilization“Hare Krishna Mantra” (Lennon)Hare Krishna movementHariaudh (poet)Harichand, KingHari-Hara (Vishnu-Shiva)Harihari I, Vijayanagar emperorHarijansHarisena, KingHarishchandra, KingHarivamsha (“The Dynasty of Vishnu”)Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Rushdie)Harrison, GeorgeHarrod’s (department store)Harsha, kingHarshacharita (Bana)Harsha kingdomHastings, WarrenHatha YogaHayagriva (avatar of Vishnu)Hayden, SterlingHebrew languageHegel, FriedrichHeliodorusHelp! (film)Henry VIII, king of England

HerodotusHidimbi (ogress)Hijras (sect)Hiltebeitel, AlfHimalaya (mountain, father of Parvati)Hindal (son of Babur)Hindal (son of Timur the Lame)Hindu Human RightsHinduism:alternativecosmology ofdiversity ofEuropean scholars offusionhumans-gods alliance andMarx onmultiplicity withinoral and written traditions ofphilosophic schools ofpluralism ofsectarianism andsense of time andas termtodayHinduism Invades America (Thomas)Hindu Marriage Act (1955)Hindu Nationalist Party, IndianHindustan TimesHindutva factionHiranyakashipu (antigod)history:abuse ofchronological framework ofEuropean scholars ofindividuality factor andmyth andpositivistrabbit in the moon andselectivity andsynedoche andHistory of Creation (Haeckel)HittiteshodgepodgeHolkar, Malhar Rao“Holy Lake of the Acts of Rama, The” (Ramcaritmanas) (Man Singh)Homer

Homo Necans (Burkert)homosexualityhorsesArabof clayin Delhi SultanateDhyanu goddess story andHindu-Muslim relations andas Hindu symbolimportation ofin IVC cultureof Kalkiin Kimmaresstallions andsubmarine firemodern worship ofin Mughal Empirepolitical symbolism ofrepresentations ofsacrifice of, see horse sacrificein Upanishadsin Vedic culturein vernacular epicshorse sacrificein Brahmanasof Janamejayaof Kalkiin Mahabharatain Puranasof Ramain Ramayanain Rig Vedaritual copulation inof Samudra Guptain Shunga dynastySita andwomen andof YudhishthiraHouse of Commons, BritishHouse of Lords, Britishhuman rightsHuman Rights WatchHumayun, Mughal emperorHunshunting

Husain, Ala-ud-dinHuxley, AldousIbn ‘ArabiIbn BatutaIdries ShahI Have Sind (Priscilla Napier)Iken, RichardIkshvakus dynastyIliad (Homer)illusionof casteof genderking-Pariah theme andphilosophy ofIllustrated Kama-sutrasIlusha (Brahmin)I Married a Communist (Roth)Impressionist, The (Kunzru)Inayat Khanincarnation, see avatarIndia:agriculture inancient cosmology ofanti-suttee legislation inbirth ofborders ofBuddhist monuments inchess invented inclimate ofDark Agegeologic origins ofin Harsha eraIndependence ofIslamic rule in, see Delhi Sultanatemythical origins ofname ofPartition ofriver systems ofand sense of timetemple cities ofIndia (cont.):trade andU.S. andIndia: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond (Tharoor)Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (film)Indian rope trick

Indigenous Horse Society of IndiaIndo-EuropeansAryan invasion hypothesis andfusion andRaj andIndo-Iranian languageIndra (king of the gods)Brahminicide ofelephant ofJanamejaya’s horse sacrifice andKing Shibi andin Rig Vedasacrifice debate andsuttee story andthrone ofVritra slain byYudhishthira’s dilemma andIndrani (wife of Indra)Indus Valley Civilization (IVC)animal domestication inanimals in culture ofBhimbetka cave paintings ofextent ofHinduism andlanguage ofmaterial culture ofreligion inRig Veda andseal artifacts ofVedic origins hypothesis andIngalls, Daniel H. H.Inglis, Stephen“In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (Auden)InquisitionInternational Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON)InternetInvading the SacredIranIron Pillar of MehrauliIsami (historian)Ishvara (Shiva)Ishvarakrishna (philosopher)Isis Unveiled (Blavatsky)Islamastronomy ofbhakti movement and

in Indiain Mughal EmpireRaj andreconversion ceremony andSufism andsee also Delhi Sultanate; MuslimsJabali (atheist)Jaffe, SamJagannatha (form of Vishnu) temple ofJahan, NurJahan, Shah (Mughal emperor)Jahanara (sister of Shah Jahan)Jahandah Shah, Mughal emperorJahangir, Mughal emperorJaimini (philosopher)Jaiminiya BrahmanaJainas, Jainismahimsa andbhakti andconcept of Universal History anddevelopment of karma andHinduism andreclassification ofShaivas andTantras andtemples ofJai Santoshi Ma (film)Jai Singh, MaharajahJaivali Pravahana, king of PanchalaJakobson, RomanJamadagni (sage)Jambavati, QueenJami Masjid (Friday Mosque)Jamison, StephanieJanabai (saint)Janaka, king of VidehaJanamejaya, KingJanashruti, KingJatayus (vulture)Jawaharlal Nehru UniversityJayadeva (poet)Jeanne-Claude (artist)JesuitsJesus of NazarethJha. N.Jha, Roma

Jhansi massacreJinnah, Mohammad Alijizya (tax on non-Muslims)jnana (path of knowledge)Job, ProphetJohnson, SamuelJohnston, AlexanderJones, WilliamJoshi, SharadJoyce, JamesJudaism, Jewsbhakti movement andJulaha (caste)Jungle Book, The (Kipling)justiceJust So Stories (Kipling)Jwalamukhi TempleKa, “Who,” a name of the creator see also KimKabir (poet)caste andon Sanskritwomen andKafur (redeemed slave)Kaikeyi, QueenKailasanatha (temple of Shiva)Kakar, SudhirKalakaua, king of HawaiiKal Bhairava (form of Shiva)Kali (goddess)American misappropriation ofbirth of Krishna andKali AgeKali Connection, The (McKay)Kalidasa (poet)“Kali Décapitée” (Yourcenar)Kalingas (Orissa)Kali YugaKalki (avatar of Vishnu)Buddhism ofhorse ofhorse sacrifice ofin PuranasVishnu asKalkin (avatar of Vishnu)Kalki Puranakama (erotic heat)

Kama (god) Shiva andKama-sutraAims of Life andcaste incomposition offirst English translation ofhomosexuality inmarriage inmeat eating inPersian translation ofpopular culture and marketing ofwomen inKama Sutra: The MusicalKamal (son of Kabir)Kampan (poet)Kamsa, KingKanada (philosopher)Kanishka, KingKannappar, saintKanpur massacreKanwar, RupKapalikas (Skull Bearers sect)Kapoor, KareenakarmaAmerican misuse ofbasic meanings ofcircularity ofdeath anddevelopment ofof dharmafree will andgood and badManu’s theory ofrenunciation andin Rig Vedatransfer ofin UpanishadsKarna (warrior)KashmirShaivism ofkathenotheismKathiawar (horse)Katyayani, story ofKaulas (sect)Kaunteyas (children of Kunti)Kauravas (descendants of Kuru)

Kausalya, QueenKaushika, KingKaushitaki UpanishadKautalya, Mauryan kingKautilya (also Kautakya, minister of Mauryan king)Kavasha (son of Ilusha)Kaye, John WilliamKazantzakis, NikosKeay, JohnKeillor, GarrisonKelly, WaltKerouac, JackKesar Kalimi (mare)Keshava Deo TempleKeshin (antigod)Khafi KhanKhajali, Ala-ud-dinKhajuraho, temple complex ofKhan, AmirKhan, SalmanKhan, ShahrukhKhandariya Mahadeva templeKhandoba (god)Khara (ogre)Kharavela, KingKhusra, AmirKhusrau (son of Jahangir)Kim (film)Kim (Kipling)horses inopium tax inKipling, Rudyardassessment ofKirata (hunter)Kliba, dysfunctional maleKim, “What?”see also KaKoka, Mirza Azizkolams (rice powder designs)Konarak, temple complex ofKoontz, DeanKosambi. D.Kothari, KamalKrishna (avatar of Vishnu)in Bhagavad Gitabirth of

death ofin MahabharataMirabai poem andin PuranasRadha andwomen and worship ofKrishnaraja IKrita Yuga (Winning Age)Krittibas (poet)Kshatriyas (warriors/rulers)Brahmins’ conflict withBritish andclasses ofin exilein Manu’s taxonomyParashurama andKshemendra (poet)Kshetrayya (poet)Kubera (god of wealth)Kubrick, StanleyKuhn, ThomasKulkarni, BaskarKulottunka II, Chola kingKumara Gupta, Gupta emperorKumbhakarna (ogre)Kumbha Mela (festival)Kunala (son of Ashoka)Kundalini (Coiled One), ritual ofKunti, QueenKunzru, HariKurma PuranaKurnis (caste)Kurubas (caste)Kuru kingsKusha (poet)KushanasKutsa Aurava (Thigh-born)Lacan, JacquesLakshmana (brother of Rama)death ofSita’s relationship withLakshmi (goddess)Lakshmi Bai, QueenLaksmanasena, Bengali kingLakulisha (sage)Lal, Vinay

Lal Beg (Pariah saint)Lal Ded (poet)Lanka see also Sri LankaLast Whole Earth CatalogLatin languageLava (poet)Lavana, KingLaws of Manu (Jones)Legend of Bagger Vance, The (film)LemuriaLennon, John“Lesson, The” (Bhagat)LifeLife of Alexander (Plutarch)Lights of Canopus, The (Anvari Suhaili)Lila Gori (Magic Mare)Linga PuranalingasShiva and origins ofLingayats (People of the Linga)Little Mothers (Matrikas) (goddesses)Little Princess, A (film)Little Shop of Horrors, The (film)Lokayatas (Materialists)Longfellow, Henry WadsworthLong-Tongue (Dirgha-jihva) (ogress)Lord of Light (Zelazny)Lotus SutraLucas, PaulLuther, MartinMa, AmritanandamayiMa, ShriMa, Shri KarunamayiMacaulay, DavidMacaulay, Thomas BabingtonMcKay, ClaudiaMacLaine, ShirleyMcLuhan, MarshallMadagascarMadanika, (form of Chudala)Madhavi, QueenMadhubani paintingsMadhva (philosopher)Shaivas andShankara vs.Madri, Queen

madya (fermented grapes, wine)Magadhi (dialect)Magic Mare (Lila Gori)Mahabat KhanMahabharataaddiction inanimal sexuality inAshoka’s reign inBalarama story incastes incentral plot incomposition ofDaksha’s sacrifice indharma in, see dharmaEkalavya myth inexile theme offinal form ofgeographic setting ofgreat flood inhorse sacrifice inhuman sacrifice inintegrity ofKalki inkarma andking-Pariah theme inKrishna inlength ofmodern versions ofNishadas innonviolence inoral preservation oforal traditions andpilgrimage inpolitical world ofpolyandry inpreservation ofPuranas andRamayana contrasted withsacrifice insectarianism andShakuntala story inShiva myth insnake sacrifice inTantras andtelevision version oftransmission

treatment of animals inversions ofviolence inwomen inYudhishthira’s dilemma inMahabodhi templeMahadeva (Shiva)Mahadevyyakka (Mahadevi, saint)Mahal, MumtazMahamalla, KingMahamaya (Goddess of Great Illusion)Mahanirvana Tantragrades of humans inMaharashtriansMahasaya, Sri LahiriMahavira, Vardhamana (the Jina)Mahendra Varman I, Pallava kingMahisha (demon)Chandika’s seduction and slaying ofMahmud of Ghaznimaithuna (fornication)Maitreyi, future BuddhaMaitreyi, story ofMalaysiaMalhotra, RajivMalis (caste)Mall, TodarMallah (caste)Mallanaga, VatsyayanaMallanna (god)Mamallapuramfrieze attemple atmamsa (flesh, meat)“Mandalay” (Kipling)Mandal CommissionMandanamishra (philosopher)Mandavya (sage)Mandhata (avatar of Vishnu)Mangal Pandey (film)Mani (demon)Mani, Latamanifest destinyManikkavacakar (poet)Manimat (ogre)Mankanaka, story of

Man-Lion (avatar of Vishnu)Prahlada andManmati, PrincessMann, ThomasManrique, SebastiãoMan SinghManu (lawmaker)Dharma-shastra text ofaddiction andanimals andclass and caste taxonomy ofcontradictions ofescape clauses ofManu (lawmaker) (cont.):fish myth andhorse sacrifice andkarma theory ofmarriage hierarchy ofmeat-eating andnonviolence andsacrifice andvegetarianism andwomen andManu“Man Who Would Be King, The” (Kipling)Mapillai (Arab group)Maravars (caste)Mariamma (goddess)Maricha (ogre)Markandeya (sage)Markandeya Puranamarriagein Artha-shastrasin Kama-sutraManu’s hierarchy ofrape andin shastrasof Shiva and ParvatiMarshall, John HubertMartel, CharlesMaruts (wind gods)Marwar Horse SocietyMarwari (desert horse)Marx, KarlMasters and JohnsonMata (goddess)

Matarishvan (god)Mathura templeMatrix, The (film)matsya, see fishMatsya PuranaMaturin, Charles RobertMaudave, Chevalier deMaukhari kingdomMauryan Empiredogs inShunga dynasty ofMaya (goddess of Illusion)Mayili-RavanaMayura (poet)“Mean to Me” (song)Medhatithi (commentator)meditationMeenas (caste)Meera, MotherMeghanada (ogre)MegasthenesMehta, KetanMenaka (nymph)Merchant, IsmailMesopotamiaMeykandadevar (philosopher)Michael Clayton (film)MichelangeloMidnight’s Children (Rushdie)Mihirakula, KingMill, JamesMimamsa (Critical Inquiry)Minakshi (goddess)Miner, HoraceMirabai (poet)“Miracle of Puran Bhagat, The” (Kipling)Mirror for Princes, The (Kalila wa Dimna)Missionary Register“Mission House, The” (Anandamath) (Chatterji)Mr. Tomkins in Wonderland (Gamow)Mistry, RohintonMitakshara (commentator)Mitra (god)mlecchas, foreignersMohan (“the deluder”)Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization (Marshall)

Mohini (female form of Vishnu)mokshaAim of Life andBhagavad Gita anddharma andmodern disregard ofRelease andrenunciation andin UpanishadsmongoosemonismMonkey schoolmonotheismMoorcroft, WilliamMoses, prophetmosquesMotel of the Mysteries (D. Macaulay)Mound of the Dead (Mohenjo-Daro)M’s, the fivemudra (farina)Mughal EmpireAkbar’s reign inart and architecture ofAurangzeb’s reign inBabur’s reign inBengali poetry ofChristianity inDelhi Sultanate compared withHinduism inhorses and horsemen inHumayun’s reign ininterreligious dialogue inIslam inJahangir’s reign inliterature ofname ofnonviolence inopiate addiction inreligious fusion inreligious pluralism inSikhs andSufism insuttee practice inVaishnavism inwomen inMuhammad, Prophet

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in MahabharataManu andin Mughal Empiresacrifice andin UpanishadsNorton Simon MuseumNuñez (Portuguese trader)Nyaya (Logic)O’Brien, TimOccidentalismOcean of Mercy for the Cow (go-karuna-nidhi) (Dayanand)Ocean of the Nectar of Bhakti (Rupagoswamin)Ocean of the Rivers of StoryOcean of Virtues (Gunanidhi)O’Dwyer, MichaelOdyssey (Homer)Oedipus, king of Thebesogres (Rakshasas)in RamayanasymbolicOld Age (hunter)Oman“On Greenhow Hill” (Kipling)OnionOpen Door, The (Rogers)opiatestaxation ofOppenheimer, J. Robertordeal by fireof male martyrsof SitaOrientalismAryan invasion hypothesis andrace andRaj andOrwell, GeorgeOther Backward Castes (OBCs), see ShudrasOuranos (Heavenly Vault)Oxford English DictionaryPadma PuranaPahlavas (Parthians)Painted Gray Ware (artifacts)PakistanPala dynastyPaley, NinaPali (language)

Pallars (caste)Pallava dynastyPalm PilotPanchatantraPandavas (sons of Pandu)see also Arjuna; Bhima; Nakula; Sahadeva; YudhishthiraPandey, MangalPandu, KingPandya kingdomPanini (grammarian)Panipat, battle ofPanipati, NizamPanis (Vedic opponents)Pannikar, K. M.pantheismParamahamsa, RamakrishnaParashurama (avatar of Vishnu)Pari, KesarPariah, Der (Beer)“Pariah, The” (Goethe)Pariahsbhakti anddefining factors ofParikshit, KingParliament, BritishParsis (Zoroastrians)Particularism (Vaisheshika)Parvati (wife of Shiva)children ofShiva’s marriage toPascal, BlaisePashupatas (sect)Pashupata Sutrapashus (sacrificial animals)Passage to India, A (Forster)Patanjali (grammarian)Paul, SaintPax BritanniaPayez (Portuguese trader)peacock’s neck (fabric)Peacock ThronePeddanna (hero)Percept Picture CompanyPeriplus of the Erythraean Sea, ThePeriya Puranam (Cekkiyar)Nantanar story in

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Puranasaccidental grace theme inanimal images inavatars of Vishnu inbirth of Krishna inBrahmins andcaste incontents ofFive Signs infolklore tradition andgoddesses in, see specific goddessesgood and bad antigods inGupta Empire andHindu cosmology inhorse sacrifice inimage range ofKalki story inlinga worship inlow castes inMahabharata andMankanaka story innumber ofpopular traditions andSanskrit ofsectarianism andshakti andShiva-Parvati marriage inSita’s fire ordeal inSkull Bearer inSukeshin story inTantrictemple worship inas termVishnu-Buddha myth inpurdahPururavas, KingPushyamitra, KingPutana (ogress)Pygmalion (Shaw)Qasim, Muhammad ibnQu’ranRabban, JacobRadha (lover of Krishna)revisionist myth ofRadhakrishnan, SarvepalliRadhavallabhas (“Radha’s Darlings”)

Rahu (planet of eclipse)Raikva, story ofRains, ClaudeRaipuri, Akhtar HusainRajanti-British feeling andBlack Hole andcaste system inChristian missionaries inearly history ofEuropean literature andEuropean translation of Hindu texts infirst wave ofHindus andMuslims andnative women andOrientalists andreligion andreligious conversions insecond wave ofSepoy Rebellion in, see Rebellion of 1857-1858suttee in, see suttee, practice ofthird wave oftransposed heads myth andRaja Ganesh (sultan)Rajaraja I, Chola kingRajaraja II, Chola kingRajaram, Maratha emperorRajendra, KingRajneesh, Bhagwan ShreeRajnengi Pardhan (tribal people)Rajya SriRakshasa, see ogreRakshasi (ogress)Raktabija (Blood Seed) (antigod)Rama (god)as avatar of Vishnucrow story anddeath of Lakshmana andGuha’s meeting withhorse sacrifice ofloss of Sita andNishadas andShambuka beheaded byRama (god) (cont.):talking dog and

Valin killed byVijayanagar worship ofwomen andworship ofRamakrishna MissionRamananda (saint)Ramanuja (philosopher)Ramanujan, A. K.“Rama Play” (Ramlila)Ramayanaanimals inbasic plot ofclass system incomposition ofcrane story indharma theme ofdogs inera ofin filmsHindu rightists’ objection tohorse sacrifice inhunting theme ofinterrupted sex theme ofking-Pariah theme ofmagic illusions inMahabharata contrasted withmajor themes ofmodern retellings and variants ofmonkeys inogres inogresses inoral preservation ofpoetry ofRama’s Bridge myth andsectarianism andShiva-Parvati story intelevision production oftransmission ofRambles and Recollections, The (Sleeman)Ramdas (saint)Rami (washerwoman)Ramprasad (poet)Ranganatha (god)Ranke, Leopold vonRao. NarayanaRashtrakuta dynasty

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) (National Volunteers’ Organization)Ravana (ogre)RavidasRavishankar, Shri ShriRavuttan, MuttalRaza, Rahi MasumaRaziya, sultan of DelhiRebellion of 1857-1858Jahnsi massacre andKanpur massacre and“Recessional” (Kipling)Recognition (Pratijna), philosophyreconversion ceremony“Record of Buddhist Kingdoms” (Faxian)Redfield, Robertreincarnationidea of circular time andrecurrent death andin Rig Vedasacrifice andin UpanishadsReleaseRenou, LouisRenuka, PrincessRenukamba (goddess)renunciationaddiction anderoticism andFour Ages myth andindividual salvation andkarma andovercrowding andShankara-crocodile story andin Upanishadsvegetarianism andReturn of Hanuman, The (film)Rig Vedaaddiction inAgni inahimsa inBrahmins andcaste incomposition ofdeath ingods ofHindu universe of

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sacrificebhakti andin BrahmanasBrahmins andof buffaloof cowsDevi movement andof dogsof horses, see horse sacrificehumanhumans-gods alliances andIndra andkingship andin MahabharataManu andnonviolence andrecurrent death andreincarnation andin Rig Vedain Shaiva Siddhantaof snakessoma andTantrism andUpanishads andvegetarianism andsadharana dharmaSadhus (ascetics)SaffronizationSagara (king, ocean)Sahadevasee also PandavasSahajiyas (sect)Said, EdwardSaint Joan (Shaw)Salhesh, RajaSama VedaSamnyasa Upanishads (Renunciation Upanishads)Samudra Gupta, Gupta emperorsanatana dharmaSandburg, CarlSangama dynastySankhya (Numbers), philosophy ofSanskritanimals andin Brahmanasas cosmopolitan language

court poetry andEuropean translations ofin Gupta EmpireKabir onas model languagenumber inoral traditions ofPuranas andin shastrastexts onof UpanishadsVedicvernacular languages andwomen andSanskritizationSantayana, GeorgeSantoshi Mata (goddess)SantsSapkale, TryambakSarama (dog)Saranyu (wife of the sun)Sarasvati (goddess, river)Sarasvati, DayanandSarasvati Valley cultureSarkar, SumitSasanka, KingSati (wife of Shiva)dismemberment ofSatnamis (sect)Satnampanth (Path of the True Name)Satsangis (sect)Satyabhama, QueenSatyakama Jabala (Upanishadic sage)Satya Narayana (god)Satya Pir (holy man)Satyavati, PrincessSatya Yuga (Age of Truth)Savarkar. D.Savitri (god)Sayyid, AlamScheduled Castes, see DalitsSchelling, FriedrichSchopenhauer, ArthurSecond TempleSecret Doctrine, The (Blavatsky)sectarianism

in Gupta EmpireSen, Keshab ChunderSen, MalaSena (Sant)Sepoy Rebellion, see Rebellion of 1857-1858Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles)Sethusamudram Shipping Canal ProjectShabari (holy woman)Shachi (wife of Indra)Shahis, ImamShah NamaShahriyar, Buzurg ibnShahu, Maharashtrian ministerShaivas (worshippers of Shiva)Buddhists andJainas andKashmirMadhva andShiva’s conversion toShaiva Shore TempleShaiva TantrasShaka (Scythian) dynastyShakespear, HenryShakespeare, WilliamShaktas (worshipers of the Goddess)Shakta Tantrasshakti (creative power)Shakuntala (Kalidasa)Shakyas (clan)Shakymuni, Gautama, see BuddhaShalimar GardensShambhaji, Maharashtrian rulerShambuka (mythical figure)Shame (Rushdie)Shankara (philosopher)Madhva vs.Shantanu, KingSharqi kingdomshastrasaddiction control inanimals inBrahmins threatened bycaste and class incentral issues ofescape clauses ofhomosexuality in

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Shrauta SutrasShri (goddess of prosperity)Shri Vaishnavismshruti (body of literature)Shuddhodana (father of Buddha)Shudras (Other Backward Castes)Shulman, DavidShumbha (antigod)Shunah shepha, human sacrifice ofShunga dynastyShurpanakha (ogress)Shushtari, Qadi NurullahShva-Pakas (dog cookers caste)Shvetaketu (sage)Shvetashvatara UpanishadSiculus, DiodorusSiddhanta (school of philosophy)Siddha Yoga Dharma Associates (SYDA) FoundationSikhs, SikhismSind, British annexation ofSindhu, riverSiraj-ud-daula, nawab of BengalSisunaga, kingSita (wife of Rama)banishment ofDalit depictions ofdisappearance ofenters the earthfire ordeal ofhorse sacrifice andLakshmana’s relationship withRama’s loss ofin revised Ramayanasexuality andtwin sons ofwomen’s rights andas women’s role modelSita DeviSitala (goddess of smallpox)Sitayana (film)Sivan, SantoshSkanda (son of Shiva)Skanda PuranaSkull Bearers sect (Kapalikas)“Slaying of Meghanada, The” (Datta)Sleeman, William Henry “Thuggee,”

Smith, Willsmriti (body of literature)snakes:rope illusion andsacrifice ofSociety of God (Brahmo Samaj)“Sojourn of the Beloved” (Hariaudh)Solomon, Kingsoma (plant)Agni andin Rig Vedasacrifice andin Vedic ritesSoma (god)Somanatha, PalkurikiSomanatha, Temple of“Song of the Cowherd, The” (Gita Govinda) (Jayadeva)SophoclessoulSouth AfricaSouthey, RobertSpivak, GayatriSri Lanka see also LankaSrinivas, M. N.Star Trek (television show)Stavorinus, J. S.Stoppard, Tomstupassubaltern studies movementSuch a Long Journey (Mistry)SufismSyncretism andSugriva (king of the monkeys)Sukeshin (ogre)SumatraSumerSumitra, QueenSunda (antigod)Supreme Court, IndianSurya (sun god)Sushruta (medical author)Sutas (Charioteers caste)suttee, practice ofBrahmins andBritish andcoercion and choice and

in Harsha erahuman rights andIndian liberation movements andmoral control of women andin Mughal Empireopposition toromanticization ofSati andwomen andSutton, Williesva-dharmaSwaminarayanSwaminarayan Mandir temple“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” (O’Brien)syncretismSyriaTagore, DebendranathTagore, RabindranathTaittiriya UpanishadsTaj MahalTalikota, battle of (1565)Tamil languageTamilsearly literature ofTantras, Tantrismaccidental grace andAmerican misappropriation ofanimals inbhakti andTantras, Tantrism (cont.):caste inversion inChandrika-Mahisha myth inChandrika-Shumbha myth indefiningelements ofFive Ms schema ofheresies andKundalini ritual andorigins ofPashupata sect andPuranas andsacrifice andas salvationsanitization oftemple complexes ofvegetarianism

women andtapas (inner heat)Tara, QueenTarabai, QueenTaranath (historian)Tarikh-i-FarishtaTataka (ogress)Tecinku (hero)Tej (folk figure)Tejan (mare)Tej SinghTelugu (language)templesof Chola kingdomdarshanin Delhi Sultanatedesecration ofdiversity ofof Elephantaof Elloraeroticism andof Gupta Empireinverted carvings ofmosques andnegative carvings ofpresent day configuration ofof ShivaTantras andin U.S.of Vijayanagar Empireviolence andsee also specific templesTen Avatars (Dashavatara), temple ofTertullianTevaram (poetry collection)Thanjavur, Brihadishvara templeThapar, RomilaTharoor, ShashiTheosophical SocietyTheroux, Paul“Thesis of Demonic Imitation, The”Things They Carried, The (O’Brien)Third Buddhist CouncilThomas, Elizabeth MarshallThomas, Saint JudasThomas, Wendell

Thoreau, Henry DavidThose Barren Leaves (Huxley)Thousand Names of Shiva, Hymn of“Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation”(Ramanujan)Three Princes of Serendip, The (Walpole)ThugsThyestesTibetTilak, Bal GangadharTilottama (Asparas)TimeAges ofthree aspects ofTimes (London)Timur the Lame, Mongol emperorTirumal (Vishnu)Tirumankai (poet)Tirumular (mystic)Tirumurai (poetry collection)TiruvacacamTiruvatavurar PuranaTiruvilaiyatal PuranaTodar-ananda (“Todar’s Bliss”)toddyTolstoy, Leotooth goddessestortoise (avatar of Vishnu)Total Recall (film)“Tour of the Sacred Tirthas“transmigrationTransposed Heads, The (Glanville-Hicks)Transposed Heads, The (Mann)Treta Yuga (Age of the Trey)Treveleyan, GeorgeTrimurti (trinity)Trishanku, KingTriyaruna, KingTrue Name (god of the Satnampanthis)Truman, Harry S.Tughluq, Feroz ShahTughluq, Muhammad binTukaram (saint)Tulsi, Tulsidas (poet)Tulsibai (woman warrior)Tulsidas (poet)

Turks (Turuskas)Turner, TinaTvashtri (artisan)ulamaUlupi, serpent princessUma (goddess)Underground (film)unicornUnitarianismUnited StatesHinduism misappropriated inHindu population ofHindu reverse colonization ofidentity politics inIndian languages’ influence oninterreligious interaction intemples inVedanta inUnited WayUntouchablesUpanishadsaddiction inanimals inascetic tradition ofcaste incomposition ofcontinuation of the Vedas anddeath anddogs ineroticism ofhorses inhuman sacrifice inkarma inlanguage ofmoksha inmonism innon-Brahmin doctrines ofnonviolence inpaths of smoke and flame inPersian translation ofprogeneration inRaikva story inRebirth and Release inreincarnation inrenunciation insacrifice in

shakti andsocial and political world ofstages of consciousness intextual world oftransmigration invegetarianism inwomen inUpasunda (antigod)Urdu languageUrvashi (heavenly nymph)UtilitariansVach (personification of Speech)Vaikai (goddess)Vaisheshika (Particularism)Vaishnava PuranasVaishnavas (worshippers of Vishnu)in Mughal EmpireVaishnava TantrasVaishyas (merchants)Vakataka dynastyValin (monkey king)Valmiki (poet)Varahamihira (astronomer)Varman I, Narasimha kingVaruna (god of waters and morals)in Rig VedaVasishtha (sage)Vasu, KingVasudeva (name of Krishna, or father of Krishna)Vasudevaka (worshipper of Krishna)Vatican IIVatsyayana (author of Kama-sutra)Vayu (god of wind)Vayu PuranaVedantadualist (Dvaita) school ofin U.S.Vedanta-Sutras (of Badarayana)Vedas (sacred texts)Vedavati (incarnation of Sita)Vedic peoplesbrickmaking ofcaste system ofCaucasian migration hypothesis andindigenous origin hypothesis andIVC hypothesis and

languages ofvegetarianismin Brahmanasof GandhiManu andrenunciation andsacrifice andin shastrasTantras andin Upanishadsviolence andVelar (caste)Vena, KingVessantara JatakaVibhishana (ogre)Victoria, queen of EnglandVidura (son of Vyasa)Vidyapati (poet)Vijayanagar Empiretemples ofworship of Rama inVikramaditya II, Chalukya kingVindhya-vasini (name of the goddess Kali)Vipashchit, KingVirabhadra (form of Shiva)Viradha (ogre)Viraka (son of Shiva)see also ParvatiVirashaivas (worshippers of Shiva)Virata ParvanVirgin MaryVirochana (antigod)Vishnu (god)avatars ofBali andbirth of Krishna andBuddha as avatar ofGupta Empire andas Hari-Haraas Kalkimutual creation myth andin PuranasRama as avatar ofRelease andin Rig VedaVishnu Purana

Vishvamitra, KingVishvanatha (Shiva as Lord of the Universe)Vishvanatha TempleVishwa Hindu ParishadVithabai (goddess)Vithoba (god)Vitthal (god)Vivekananda, SwamiVoltaireVratyas (ascetics)Vrisha (priest)Vritra (antigod)Vyasa (sage)birth ofchildren ofWagner, CosimaWagner, RichardWales, Prince ofWalpole, HoraceWalton, BishopWarlis (tribal group)Wegener, AlfredWeinberger-Thomas, CatherineWeinrich, Max“Wendy’s Children” (Malhotra)West, MartinWheeler, HughWhite MughalsWilberforce, WilliamWilkie, John ElbertWilkins, CharlesWilson, Horace HaymanWinckelmann, JohannWinning Age, see Krita YugaWittgenstein, LudwigWodehouse, P. G.Wolfe, Tomwomb house ( garbha griha)womenaddiction andAdivasis andbhakti andin BrahmanasBuddhism anddepicted at IVCin Dharma-shastras

in Gupta EmpireHinduism andhorse sacrifice andin Kabir’s preachingin Kama-sutrain MahabharataManu andin Mauryan Empiremodernin Mughal Empirepolyandry andpromiscuity andRaj andRama andrice powder designs ofin Rig VedaSanskrit andshakti andin shastrasSita as role model forsuttee practice andTantras andin Upanishadswall and floor paintings bywidowhood andworship of Krishna andWoodroffe, John (Arthur Avalon)Wordsworth, WilliamWorld’s Parliament of ReligionsWotanWright, Frank LloydXena: Warrior Princess (television show)Xuan ZangYadavaprakasha, AcharyaYajnavalkya (sage)Yajur VedaYakshinis (tree spirits)Yakshis (tree spirits)Yama (god)Yashoda, wife of NandaYavakri (sage)Yavanis (women body guards)yogaYogananda, Sri ParamahansaYoga Sutras (Patanjali)Yogavasishtha

Chudala story inYogi, Maharishi MaheshYoginis (Tantric female magicians)Yourcenar, MargueriteYudhishthira, Kingdilemma ofin heaven and hellhorse sacrifice ofYugasYukteswar, SriZadig (Voltaire)Zelazny, RogerZeusZimmer, HeinrichZoroastrianismABOUT THE AUTHORWendy Doniger holds two doctorates, in Sanskrit and Indian studies, from Harvard andOxford. She is the author of several translations of Sanskrit texts and many books aboutHinduism, and has taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University ofLondon and at the University of California at Berkeley. She is currently the Mircea EliadeDistinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago.aTo invoke Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase.bOther readers, allergic to methodology, should skip straight to chapter 2.cThe term “kitchen language” was, I think, first coined for Afrikaans. But theeleventh-century Indian lexicographer Acharya Yadavaprakasha does actually supply a numberof otherwise unattested Sanskrit words for everyday cooking devices (ladles, pots, and so forth),evidence either that some Brahmins did speak Sanskrit at home or that Yadavaprakasha wasshowing off by inventing Sanskrit words for objects normally referred to only in the vernaculars.After all, even in the modern period, people called television dur-darshana, a made-up Sanskritneologism for “far-seeing,” and it caught on, though dhumra-varttika (“smokestick”) for“cigarette” did not; people persisted in calling them cigarettes.dA. K. Ramanujan used to talk of his father’s speaking Sanskrit in the front room, hismother’s speaking Tamil in the kitchen in the back.eApparently this was first said in Yiddish, by Max Weinrich, who referred to a dialectwith an army and a navy (“A sprach is a dialekt mit a armee un a flot”).fAll translations from the Sanskrit are my own unless otherwise noted, and I have usuallycondensed and/or excerpted them, as I have done with citations of other narratives translatedfrom other languages, though I have added nothing that was not in the text.g

South Asians continue to devise creative ways of addressing this dilemma. In Tibet in thesummer of 2006, I met a Buddhist who said that he would eat yak, but not fish, on moralgrounds. That is, if you kill a yak, you destroy one soul but feed many people, but you have tokill many fish, and destroy many souls, to feed the same number of people. It occurred to me thatit is a good thing that Tibet does not border on whaling waters. This attitude varies by country;Sri Lankan Buddhists opt for fish over large animals.hAs, for instance, in the cow protection riots.iThis is not because they see the moon from a different angle; in the Southern Hemispherethis is true, but most of India and all of Japan are in the Northern Hemisphere. From the NorthernHemisphere the eyes are at eleven and one, and the mouth at six; the hare’s ears are at betweentwelve and two, his head at between ten and twelve, his nose pointing at between nine andeleven, and his tail at between four and six.jThis last group represents in many ways the ideal scholars of Hinduism, people like (inmy generation) A. K. Ramanujan, Sudhir Kakar, Ashis Nandy, Vasudha Narayanan, and V.Narayana Rao, and, in the younger generation, so many more.kThis characterizes the “take a Hindu to dinner” approach of such institutions as the one Ialways think of as the Center for the Prevention of World Religions.lWittgenstein would, I think, have appreciated a more recent double image that has beencirculated on the Internet. Close up, it looks like Albert Einstein, but from five feet away, it is thespitting image of Marilyn Monroe.mThe author of the posting was Jitendra Bardwaj, of whom Wikipedia (which may or maynot be accurate) says: “Jitendra Bardwaj (born 1937), an independent political campaigner in theUnited Kingdom, has contested five parliamentary by-elections in what began as an attempt toclear his name after he was convicted of assaulting a police officer outside the Houses ofParliament. As well as campaigning against what he believes is his personal mis-treatment by,and general flaws in, the British legal system, Bardwaj campaigns for the rights of ethnicminorities and for the introduction of Hindu yoga and meditation techniques in British schools.”nOrientalism also underlies the still-widespread misconception that everything in India isreligious or “spiritual”; often when I mention “South Asian studies” to non-South Asianists, theymishear it as “salvation studies.”oOne formulation of this assumption is post hoc, propter hoc (“after that, because ofthat”), a phrase that inspired an old British senior common room joke about blaming badbehavior upon drinking an excess of German wine (hock).pOne must begin somewhere, even with the polluted H words, and without the disclaimerof scare quotes to barricade them, like a pair of hands held up for mercy.qThis seems to me about as useful as the remark (which Aldous Huxley made in Those

Barren Leaves) that the works of Homer were not written by Homer, but by someone else of thesame name.rThough their women might have been grateful to have the daughter’s share in the father’sproperty that this progressive legislation granted to Hindu women.sThis is the punch line of an old joke, a statement made by a man in response towell-meaning friends who warned him that the reason why he kept losing at poker, week afterweek, was that the people he played with cheated. It is a remark that could also have been madeby Yudhishthira (in the Mahabharata ), who persisted in playing dice with, and always losingfrom, people whom he suspected to be cheating or at least knew to be much better players thanhe was.tIn Harsha’s play Priyadarshika, in the senventh century CE, the woman playwrightwrites in Sanskrit, while the clown, who is not only male but a Brahmin, speaks Prakrit.uThe term “twice born” (dvi-ja) also means a tooth or a bird, each of which undergoessecond birth, from the gum or the egg respectively.vShvan (“dog”) is the source of our “hound,” and paka (from the Sanskrit pak/c, “cook”)means ripe, cooked, or perfected and is related to the English term, borrowed from Hindi,“pukka,” as in “pukka sahib,” “well-ripened/cooked/perfected Englishman.”wPace Gayatri (“Can the Subaltern Speak?”) Spivak.xThe situation is more complex in the shastras, which often connect both the horse and thecow with Vaishyas, since that is the class concerned with animal husbandry. But even those textsmore often place the horse in the Kshatriya class, as it is used for warfare and royal ceremonyrather than for work in the fields. And the cow is the animal given to Brahmins and protected byBrahmins, though frequently coveted and stolen by Kshatriyas.yHorses and hounds contrast not merely in class but also in philology. The Sanskrit wordfor a horse (ashva) could also be parsed to mean a nondog (a-shva). It doesn’t really work in thenominative forms by which Indians refer to Sanskrit nouns or in the roots, but it works in thecombinatory forms, where ashvah loses its final h (as in ashva-medha, “horse sacrifice”) andshvan/shvaa loses its n or long a (as in the compound shva-paka, “dog cooker”).zEuro-Americans too made this equation, as in the nineteenth-century signs that oftenproclaimed, NO DOGS OR INDIANS ALLOWED.aaThe two species are combined in the German term of insult, Schweinhund! (“pig-dog”).abSherlock Holmes once solved a mystery, the case of Silver Blaze, a racehorse, by using avital clue of omission. When Inspector Gregory asked Holmes whether he had noted any point towhich he would draw the inspector’s attention, Holmes replied, “To the curious incident of thedog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” objected the puzzled inspector,

the essential straight man for the Socratic sage. “That was the curious incident,” remarkedSherlock Holmes. The fact that the dog did not bark when someone entered the house at nightwas evidence, in this case evidence that the criminal was someone familiar to the dog.acContemporary Americans have a somewhat similar sense of the multiplicity of texts andversions of texts through their knowledge of remakes of movies and covers of musicalperformances.adThis was said at Harvard, when I was there in the sixties, and it seems to have been basedon another Orientalist joke sometimes ascribed to Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb of Oxford andHarvard, that every Arabic word has its primary meaning, then its opposite, then something to dowith a camel, and last, something obscene.aeSalt dissolved in water was an ancient Upanishadic metaphor for the complete merging ofindividual souls in the world soul (brahman).afIndeed, according to the OED, even the word “hodgepodge” (or “hotchpotch”) originallydesignated a good thing, the legal combination of diverse properties into a single entity to makepossible an equitable division. The earliest attestation is a legal term from 1292.agIn the Cretaceous period. The dates are given differently in different sources. Here I amreminded of the old story about the lady who went to a lecture and heard the lecturer say that theuniverse was going to self-destruct in five billion years, at which she fainted. When they askedher why she was so upset at an event that was five billion years away she heaved a sigh of reliefand said, “Oh, thank God. I thought he said five million years.”ahThe theory is still generally accepted. Kenneth Chang wrote in the New York Times, May14, 2008, under the headline, DISASTER SET OFF BY COLLIDING LAND MASSES: “Theearthquake in the Sichuan Province of China on Monday was a result of a continuing collisionbetween India and Asia. India, once a giant island before crashing into the underside of Asiaabout 40 million to 50 million years ago, continues to slide north at a geologically quick pace oftwo inches a year. The tectonic stresses push up the Himalaya Mountains and generate scores ofearthquakes from Afghanistan to China.”aiThe belief that the continents were at one time joined in the geologic past was first setforth in detail in 1912 by Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist who coined the term“continental shift” to describe it.ajA haunting image of such a continental split occurs in the film Underground (1995) whenat the end Yugoslavia breaks off and sails away, while people continuing to sing and dance andeat at a wedding are unaware that the little piece of land they are on is sailing away from themainland, foreshadowing the violent partition of the country, as tragic as the partition of India in1947.akFor instance, once upon a time all the mountains had wings, but they flew around,bumping into things and generally wreaking havoc. To ground them, Indra cut off their wings,

ut the god of the wind hid one mountain, Mainaka, in the ocean so that he alone kept his wings.alThe word for doomsday, or time, or death—Kala—is, like the word for the fourth throwof the dice, derived from the verb kal, “to count.” The goddess Kali too derives her name fromKala. Kali as in Kali Age is spelled with a short a and i, whereas the goddess Kali has two longvowels. In the hope of distinguishing them, I will always refer to the latter as the goddess Kali.amIn Burnt Norton.anKumbhakonan is one of them; the name is said to derive from the pot (kumbha) in whichShiva, not Vishnu, floated the survivors to safety. The mountain is also said to be in Kashmir.aoCompare the standard map outline of India and the map of Mount Meru and thePlum-tree Continent on page 60.apYou can see most of them on the Web site Harappa.com.aqThe rebuttal to the argument that it is not a language at all is that in some inscriptions theletters all are squeezed together to fit the line at the end, implying that it was written in onedirection. If the sequence matters, it’s a language.arThe Rorschach test, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is “a projective methodof psychological testing in which a person is asked to describe what he sees in 10 inkblots, ofwhich some are black or gray and others have patches of colour. The test was introduced in 1921by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach.”asIt is also possible that fowl were domesticated in several different places.atThe spell-check on my Mac tried to correct “pipal” to “papal” throughout, revealing ahitherto unsuspected Eurocentric, indeed philo-Catholic virus deeply programmed into mycomputer, Microsoft Orientalism.auAfter the Kurosawa film in which several different people present entirely differentaccounts of the same murder.avAs I make it out, it goes: ma [mahisha, buffalo]-kha [khadga, rhino]-na [nara, man]-sha[sharabha, elephant]-na [nara, man].awA tongue-in-cheek example of the misinterpretation of plumbing devices, unsupported bytexts, as religious objects is David Macaulay’s Motel of the Mysteries (1979), in which visitors toEarth in 3850, after all civilization has been destroyed, produce a hilarious series ofmisunderstandings of the material items found in a bathroom: the toilet the Sacred Urn, the toiletseat the Sacred Collar, the toilet paper the Sacred Parchment, a drain plug on a chain the SacredPendant. (The television is the Great Altar.) In June 1956, Horace Miner had perpetrated asimilar joke in “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” which American Anthropologist printed as aserious article, failing to notice that “Nacirema” is “American” spelled backward.

axMarshall was dying to excavate beneath the stupa but was shackled by the archaeologicalsurvey rules. He seriously contemplated (and may actually have tried) lining up all the workmenon the stupa, on the pretext of taking their photograph, in the hope that their weight would bringit down. Personal communication from the Honorable Penelope Chetwode (later LadyBetjeman), to whom Marshall confessed this episode when he was courting her, years later.Wantage, England, 1969.ayBishop Walton, in his Introduction to the London Polyglot Bible, in 1672, first noted theconnection of Greek and Latin. A Persian grammarian in Delhi in 1720 discovered the Greek andSanskrit connection. Sir William Jones, in 1788, wrote about common elements in Greek,Roman, and ancient Indian religion and postulated a historical connection. Yet F. Max Müller,who popularized the theory in the nineteenth century, is often given most of the credit.azThe Nazis also grotesquely distorted, and inverted, both the form and the meaning of theancient Indian symbol of the swastika, whose Sanskrit name simply meant “a good thing.” Theswastika has a radically different meaning in Europe and America from the meaning that it had,and still has, inside India. Once we know its Indian origins, we see the swastika with doublevision, as we see the duck-rabbit, or the rabbit/man in the moon: It is Vedic and Nazi, reconditeand demagogic, at the same time.baThough the word may mean “mouthless”—i.e., without [our] language.bbDaniel H. H. Ingalls, in a talk recorded on film in 1980, remarked that the main thing thatkept the authors of the Mahabharata from writing it down was the lack of inexpensive writingmaterials; you could hardly carve it all in rock, and they had not yet discovered the art of writingon palm leaves. This too would have applied to the Veda, but the Mahabharata was eventuallywritten down at a time when the Veda was not.bcGandharvas (whose name is cognate with centaur) are semiequine figures, sometimesdepicted in anthropomorphic form (in which case they might well ride horses), sometimes ashorse headed or horse torsoed (in which, presumably, they would not).bdThe Brahmanas tell us a bit more about the rituals, but the detailed instructions only comemuch later, in the texts called prayogas.beNomas means “pasture,” and a nomad is someone who wanders from pasture to pasture.bfIt is most likely that it was the male animal, the bull, that was used for sacrifice, as themales of all the other species of sacrificial animal are explicitly specified, and indeed the“virility” of the sacrificed animals is the point of many myths and ritual texts. Yet it should benoted that the word “go” in Sanskrit (like “cow” in common usage in English) is sexuallyambiguous.bgMost horsey nomads drink mare’s milk—the Greeks called the Scythian nomads maremilkers—and the Vedic people may have done so before they settled in the Punjab, but milk in

the Veda is always cow’s milk.bhI will generally render the Vedic poems in prose.biDrona’s horses shed tears when he is about to die (Mahabharata 7.192.20); when theBuddha departs, his horse Kanthaka weeps (Buddhacharita 6.33-35; 8.3-4, 17); Achilles’ horsesweep for the death of Patroclus; Brünnhilde’s horse Grani hangs his head and weeps over thedead Siegfried.bjThis is one of several creation scenarios in the Rig Veda; we will see two more below.bkIndo-European linguists usually derive “Vaishya” from a different word that means“settlement” or “people who live on the land,” but some Sanskrit texts cite the derivation from“all.”blSince the fourth class is also already present in the Veda’s Iranian cousin, the Avesta,such a fourth class, consisting primarily of artisans, may in fact have been Indo-European (or atleast Indo-Iranian). Yet this Vedic hymn already regards Shudras as outsiders.bmThe numerous pairings of contrasting terms, such as “mortals and immortals” or “sky andearth” or “creatures two-footed and four-footed,” suggest that division into two rather than threeis the fundamental structuring principle of Indo-European thought—perhaps of human thought ingeneral. But that is another story.bnA possibility supported by analogy with the Greek playwright Aristophanes’ comedy TheFrogs, in which the Dionysian chorus consists entirely of frogs who say, “Brekekekek koaxkoax,” the Greek for “Akh-khala” (which is what frogs say in Sanskrit).boIn variants from the Indo-European corpus, fire is held within a reed in the Greek myth ofPrometheus and brought down from heaven by a firebird in Russian mythology.bpThe appeal was rejected because though the claim was that the soma plant was not themushroom Amanita muscaria, it never specified what the plant in fact was.bqEphedra does not seem to have a sufficiently strong mental effect to have produced theconditions described in the poems. The soma was pressed in the morning and drunk on the sameday, thereby eliminating wine and beer (which take longer than that to ferment, even in a hotclimate). Palm toddy must be drunk within hours of making it, but toddy is not “pressed,” assoma is, nor do coconut palm trees grow in the Punjab. They didn’t know about distillation atthat time (so much for daru or brandy), and they used hemp only to make rope, not marijuana(bhang). It wasn’t opium; poppies were not grown then in the Punjab.brThe Varuna-praghasa at the beginning of the rainy season, in which the priestinterrogates the queen with a question on the order of “When did you stop beating your wife?”bsIt was a man’s duty to impregnate his brother’s wife, but only if the brother was dead or

unable to produce his own heirs.btThe porcupine is attested to in India from the time of the Atharva Veda through Kipling’sStickly-Prickly (in Just So Stories).buIn classical Sanskrit it also means “having a good vagina,” which may be a distant butrelevant overtone.bvImpotence is also at issue in other Rig Vedic poems (such as 10.86 and 10.102).bwVisual depictions of this figure are first attested from the second to the fourth century CE.bxThis is an enduring concept in Hinduism; the Marathi saint Tukaram sees the relationshipbetween himself and god in these terms: “There is a whole tree within a seed/ And a seed at theend of each tree/That is how it is between you and me/ One contains the Other.”byThe Rig Veda (10.83.4) applied this name not to a creator but to Manyu, “Anger.” By thetime of the Mahabharata, however, it is an epithet of Manu and then of Brahma.bzIndeed, like the cattle raid myth, it is not merely a Vedic but a wider Indo-Europeanmyth.caThe Buddhists, in subsequent centuries, often attacked Indra and questioned hisexistence, and in the Bhagavata Purana (10.24.23), when Krishna is fighting against Indra, hedissuades people from praying to Indra for rain, saying, “Clouds driven by mist rain everywhere.What can Indra do?”cbSome renunciant forms of Hinduism stood this value system on its head and viewed lifeas a terrifying chaos and death as the liberating peace of perfect order.ccThe great French Indologist Louis Renou capriciously translated the idea of being cookedperfectly as au point, just as one would say of a good steak.cdThe Vedic mantra that he sees likens Soma to a nimble chariot horse.ceIn Homo Necans (1972) Walter Burkert argued that the act of killing the animal in asacrifice was the survival of a Neolithic hunting ritual expressing grief over the animal’s demise.For Burkert, animal sacrifice was a tragic deception, in which the sacrificer assumed that thesacrificial animal consented to being sacrificed. Whether or not Burkert’s insights are valid forthe Greek evidence, they do seem to be highly relevant to the ancient Indian texts.cfTo this day it is often argued in India that the meat of animals killed for the table ispoison because such animals die in fear and anger, while animals killed for sacrifice are happy todie, and so their meat is sweet.cgSince only cows and bulls are prohibited, the text may allow for the eating of castrated

ulls, steers, or bullocks.chThe image of the woman who flees, in vain, from rape by becoming a cow and a maremay also have been inspired by the Vedic myth of Saranyu, who takes the form of a mare to fleefrom sexual violence but is then raped by the sun when he takes the form of a stallion.ciCompare the ram that miraculously appears to save Isaac when Abraham is about tosacrifice him.cjStephanie Jamison says that the queen did not merely mime copulation, and Jamison isusually right. But in favor of the argument that the queen did not actually copulate with thestallion are the considerations that most of the texts instruct the priests to kill the horse first andthat the ceremony would be hard to do with a live stallion.ckSuch as Saranyu and Sita.clThough not for long: In the Mahabharata (1.92), the goddess of the Ganges, anotherimmortal woman with a mortal husband, not only abandons her husband and children when heviolates the contract but kills several of the children.cmJara is cognate with the Greek geron, geras, from which we derive the English“gerontology,” and mrityu with our “mortal, mortality.”cnIn The Cocktail Party.co“The Three Brothers” (Jaiminiya Brahmana 1.184) is Tale Type 654, and the tale ofKutsa and his father follows a pattern best known from Sophocles’ Oedipus (Tale Type 921; alsoT 92.9, T 412).cpFor the Brahmanas have long been regarded as the private stock of the most elitisttextualists who ever lived. Müller thought the Brahmanas were “simply twaddle, and what isworse, theological twaddle,” while Julius Eggeling, who devoted most of his life to translatingthe Shatapatha Brahmana, bemoaned its “wearisome prolixity of exposition, characterised bydogmatic assertion and a flimsy symbolism rather than by serious reasoning.” Other scholarscalled the Brahmanas “an arid desert of puerile speculation,” “of sickening prolixity,” “filthy,”“repulsive,” and “of interest only to students of abnormal psychology.”cqIf it was the Amanita muscaria, it grew only where there were birch trees.crAccording to one uncharacteristic story, when the antigods were fighting the gods, theantigods, rather than the gods, put evil into the senses and into the mind; that is why we can seegood or evil, speak good or evil, imagine good or evil.cs“Vedanta” also has a second meaning, denoting a particular philosophy, based oncommentaries on the Upanishads, that was developed many centuries later by a group ofphilosophers, of whom Shankara is the most famous.

ctIf the Buddha died in around 400 BCE, as has been recently argued rather persuasively,and if, as seems evident, the Buddha knew at least parts of the early Upanishads (theBrihadaranyaka, the Taittiriya, and the Chandogya), those texts must have been known by about450 BCE.cuIn Sanskrit grammar, karma is the accusative case.cvNo one there seems to have thought of asking about the opposite problem, why the worlddoesn’t run out of souls, which constantly leak out of the cycle in both directions, some up to theworld of brahman and some down to the world of insects. Centuries later Jaina cosmogonies didaddress this problem.cwThis was true of premodern Europe as well as India.cxHe said this (in the Lotus Sutra) in response to people who kept asking for precise detailsabout nirvana (the escape from samsara), as people in a burning house might ask, beforeagreeing to leave, what sort of house they might get in exchange. The Buddha taught that misery(duhkha) is not so much suffering as it is the inevitable loss of happiness, since everything isimpermanent (anicca/anitya), a problem for which nirvana offered the solution.cyThe Sanskrit word for the class I am calling Brahmins is actually brahmana, the sameword as the name of the texts between the Vedas and Upanishads. To confuse matters further, ofthe four priests needed to perform certain Vedic sacrifices, one, who just stands around and doesnothing but run a full script of the sacrifice in his head, to make sure there are no mistakes, iscalled the brahmin (in Sanskrit), in contrast with the other priests designated by different names.czThe Vedantic philosophers belong, by and large, to the monist tradition.daIt is also a palindrome: Do Good’s deeds live on? No, Evil’s deeds do, O God.dbFast-forward alert: This anticipates the notion developed at length in the Bhagavad Gita,that acts performed without desire have no karmic effects.dcRather like the Oxbridge schools exams.ddAn idea that turned out quite differently when Nietzsche got hold of it.deAs Rilke imagined the archaic torso of Apollo saying to him: Du muss dein Lebenändern.dfTo paraphrase Janis Joplin.dgIt is, however, a fantasy supported by Georges Dumézil’s arguments for anIndo-European king who was also a priest.dh

The phrase used here is sadhu-kurvanti, from the same roots as the sadhu-krityam of theNachiketas story.diThis may well have contributed to Indra’s fall from popularity within Hinduism too.djThe Greek historian Megasthenes called them Brahmanes and Sarmanes, and thethird-century BCE emperor Ashoka called them Shramanas and Brahmanas or else, significantly,Shramanas and householders.dkKatyayani does appear, however, in a much later text (Skanda Purana 6.129), in whichher jealousy of Maitreyi, Yajnavalkya’s favorite, torments her until she performs a particularritual (puja) to Parvati, which makes her equal to Maitreyi in Yajnavalkya’s eyes.dlFast-forward: Gargi is now the name of a woman’s college in India and a symbol forwomen intellectuals.dmIn a parallel image that Plato came up with at roughly the same time (Phaedrus, 253D),the horse of the pair that represents the senses is “a crooked, great jumble of limbs . . .companion to wild boasts and indecency. He is shaggy around the ears, deaf as a post, and justbarely yields to horse-whip and goad combined.”dnOr “except to feed a worthy person” or “except in places specially ordained” or “exceptat sacrifices.” The Sanskrit anyatra tirtheshu has all these meanings.doEarly Buddhist monks and nuns ate meat but did not kill (or sacrifice) the animalsthemselves. Non-killing was a virtue for them, but the Buddha explicitly refused to requiremonks and nuns to refrain from eating meat.dpThere was also an idea of tapas, of controlling the energy in the body through self-denialon the eve of war, that worked by a logic similar to that of the old American tradition of footballplayers’ not being allowed to party on the night before the big game.dqNot to be confused with shakti, a feminine form of power.drThe title of Gandhi’s essay on the Gita says it is about asakti-yoga, usually translated as“selfless action” but more precisely the yoga of nonaddiction.dsThe sutras, or texts consisting of lines “sewn together”—“sutra” being cognate with our“suture”—are the predecessors of the shastras.dtWomen in the Kama-sutra have sex with statues, and in the Narmamala, as we’ve seenon page 22, a woman has sex with a linga of leather or skin.duThe Mahabharata (13.63) also contains passages of satire on the Artha-shastra.dvThis story resembles the Greek myth of Paris, who, forced to choose among three

goddesses, chose Aphrodite (= Kama) over Hera and Athene (roughly = Dharma and Artha),who cursed him.dwSince the Ramayana is the main subject of this chapter, unspecified verse citations referto that text.dxDiscounting the still-undeciphered IVC seals.dyThis new social freedom is reflected in the upward mobility of abandoned children likeKarna and Vyasa, in the Mahabharata.dzThe Buddha (another Kshatriya) also left his palace (in his case, voluntarily) and lived inthe wilderness for a long time.eaGymno-sophists, according to Plutarch’s Life of Alexander.ebAs Napoleon performed his own coronation in 1804.ecManu (10.8-12) gave the Charioteers a mythological genealogy of a Brahmin father and aKshatriya mother, to account for the combination of intellectual and martial skills.edFast-forward: They continue to do so; a traveling bard in a village in South India recentlytold an anthropologist that he knew the whole Mahabharata by heart. When the anthropologistasked him how he could possibly remember it, “the minstrel replied that each stanza was writtenon a pebble in his mind. He simply had to recall the order of the pebbles and ‘read’ from oneafter another.” In the 1950s, Kamal Kothari sent one of his best singers, from the Langa caste, toadult education classes. He learned to read, but from then on he needed to consult his notesbefore he sang. As Kothari remarked, “It seems that the illiterate have a capacity to remember ina way that the literate simply do not.” Plato, in the Phaedrus , remarks that when people havewriting, their memories suffer attrition.eeBut just as the magic contained in the oral Rig Veda contributed to the disinclination tocommit it to writing, so too the Mahabharata, when converted from its oral to its written form,has potentially inauspicious magic (particularly since it tells of a great holocaust and genocide).For that reason, to this day many people fear to keep complete written texts of it inside theirhouses.efOther versions of the story divide the fractions slightly differently, but Kausalya alwaysgets half.egThe avatar of Vishnu as the Buddha is an entirely different affair, which does not appearuntil the Puranas.ehIn other retellings of the narrative, too, Rama insists that he merely pretended to subjectSita to an ordeal and, presumably, pretended to forget that he was a god.ei

The Ramayana refers to suttee in the story of a prior incarnation of Sita named Vedavati,who tells Ravana that her mother had burned herself on her husband’s funeral pyre (7.17.23).ejIn later tellings, she really does leave him at this point, but with his connivance, to live inthe care of Fire until long after the battle for Lanka.ekOr some other poet. The final episode takes place in the last of the seven books of theRamayana, almost certainly a later addition.elDid Rama know that Sita was pregnant when he banished her? He seems to allude to herpregnancy in one verse (7.41.22), but as there is no further reference to what would surely havebeen a very important event, and since some manuscripts omit this verse, it seems unlikely thatRama did know.emThe god of fire similarly has to remind Arjuna not to take his bow and arrows with himinto the forest (MB 17.1.37-40).enIn Kampan’s Tamil version, he cuts off her breasts too.eoRama’s mistreatment of Shurpanakha looks even worse if we compare it with thereception that in the Mahabharata (3.13), Bhima (with the support of his family) gives to theogress Hidimbi when she declares her love for him: He marries her, and she bears him a son.epThe horse sacrifice replaces the distribution of sin that saves Indra in other versions of themyth, both in the Brahmanas and in the Mahabharata (12.273.42-45). There a quarter of theBrahminicide goes to the heavenly nymphs, who ask for a way of freeing themselves from it(moksha) and are told that their Brahminicide will pass to any man who has sex withmenstruating women.eqOnly after the horse sacrifice are we told of subsequent sacrifices, “He did not chose anywife other than Sita, for a golden image of Janaka’s daughter appeared in every sacrifice,fulfilling the purpose of a wife (7.89.4).”erThe earth has in fact lost some of its fertility; in the story that Lakshmana tells Rama topersuade him of the efficacy of the horse sacrifice, the story in which Indra transfers his ownBrahminicide to several elements, including the earth, Brahminicide takes the form of saltpatches in the earth.esSatyavati and Draupadi are such children, and there are many, many others.etThe text says that the sage had taken the form of a deer to mate with his wife in the formof a deer and then that he lived with deer because he shunned humans.euThe commentator, Nilakantha, says Old Age was not old age but someone of the Kaivartacaste (of fishermen), who just happened to be named Old Age.ev

Indian aesthetic theory had a great deal to say about the transformation of emotion (rasa)through art.ewThe monkeys too have been identified with various groups, including the British.exShatrughna, the fourth half brother, is hardly more than the other half of Lakshmana,though he enters the plot near the end.eyKubera, the fourth half brother, serves, like Shatrughna, a minor function. There isanother ogre brother too, Khara, who is killed even before Ravana kidnaps Sita, but the threewho fight together at the end form the essential triad.ezHenry Wadsworth Longfellow, of all people, was inspired by Trishanku:Viswamitra the MagicianBy his spells and incantations,Up to Indra’s realms elysianRaised Trisanku, king of nations.Indra and the gods offendedHurled him downward, and descendingIn the air he hung suspended,With these equal powers contending.Thus by aspirations lifted,By misgivings downward driven,Human hearts are tossed and driftedMidway between earth and heaven. faBook 6, chapters 23-40 of the Mahabharata.fbThese dates are much disputed, some scholars emphasizing a much shorter period for theactual recension, with the possibility of single authorship, while others emphasize the longerperiod and multiple authorship.fcThe Kuru kings in the Mahabharata are said to have later shifted their capital fromHastinapur to Kaushambi because of floods at Hastinapur. Excavations at a village namedHastinapura in Meerut (Uttar Pradesh) have revealed habitations from the twelfth to the seventhcenturies BCE, with walls of mud or of mud bricks (sun-fired), or reed walls plastered over withmud; and then, from the sixth to the third centuries BCE, structures of mud brick as well asburned bricks (kiln-fired), and terra-cotta ring wells—all of this a far cry from the fabulouspalaces described in the Mahabharata.fd3012 BCE is also a much-cited date for the battle.feSometimes said to be a hundred thousand, perhaps just to round it off a bit.ffAlfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam.”fgPerhaps inspired by Asian carp, said to devour all the other fish in the lake.fhHe also becomes a sharabha, a fierce mythical beast, variously described.

fiIn later Hinduism, Dharma occasionally becomes incarnate as the human equivalent of adog, a Pariah (Chandala).fjThe sage Trishanku tried it and got stuck halfway up. ‡ The anthropologist ElizabethMarshall Thomas was on the same wavelength when she insisted, in an interview, that there weredogs in heaven. How did she know? she was asked. Because, she replied, otherwise it would notbe heaven. § The hypocritical cat ascetic is carved on the great frieze at Mamallapuram. (Seepage 346.)fkOther translators call it “uncruelty,” “absence of cruelty,” “noninjury,” or even“compassion.”flNilakantha, commenting on the Mahabharata in the seventeenth century, glosses“cruelty” as “lack of pity” (nirdayatvam); “lack of cruelty,” then, which is the form that occurs inthe text (a-nri-shamsya), would be “pity.”fmThese are not compliments; Yudhishthira is sometimes regarded, rather like JimmyCarter, as too good to have been a successful ruler or even as a namby-pamby who didn’t want tofight. No mother in India nowadays names her son Yudhishthira, as she might name him Arjunaor even Indra.fnIn a later version (Markandeya Purana 3), Indra takes the form of an aged bird withbroken wings and asks a sage for human flesh to eat; the sage asks his four sons to supply it (andtheir blood to drink, for good measure); they refuse and are cursed to become birds with thepower of human speech. The sage offers his own flesh to Indra, who reveals that it was ofcourse, just a test.foIn other variants of the Mahabharata text, the dove is also said to be a Brahmin.fpThough these are all animals that other texts call animals to be hunted, mrigas.fqPerhaps the same vow that Raikva, the gleaner (or gatherer), followed in the Upanishads.frThere is a rough parallel to this idea in the Catholic practice of offering up your sufferingto shorten the sentences of souls in purgatory.fsAs the priest Vrisha had served as the charioteer for King Tryaruna. Closer still, thereader (or hearer) would recall an earlier episode in the Mahabharata (in the Virata Parvan,book 4), where Arjuna, disguised as an effeminate dancing master, serves as the charioteer for acowardly prince. In that mock Gita, the inversion of power and status (the great warrior as lowlycharioteer) foreshadows that of the Gita, in which as Arjuna was to the prince, so Krishna is toArjuna, a creature of great destructive power who velvets his claws for the sake of humanaffection.ftThe Gita also recapitulates the Upanishadic idea of the third path of no return: Krishna

says that he hurls cruel, hateful men into demonic wombs in birth after birth, so that they neverreach him but go the lowest way to hell (16.19-20).fuFast-forward: In the 2000 film The Legend of Bagger Vance, loosely based on the Gita,with golf taking the place of war (though the hero has been traumatized by World War I), theKrishna figure (played by Will Smith) describes to [Ar]Junuh (Matt Damon), for whom he is thecaddie (charioteer), the feeling of karma without kama as playing in the zone, a great analogy.fvAmba is clearly the basic name, of which Ambika and Ambalika are variants. These arethe names of the three queens that Vedic texts describe as pantomiming copulation with the deadstallion who pinch-hits for the king in the horse sacrifice, just as Vyasa is pinch-hitting for hishalf brother, the dead king.fwThe goddess Ganges marries Shantanu but kills the first seven of their children (actuallydoing them a favor, for they are immortals cursed to be born on earth); like Saranyu, Urvashi,and Sita, she is an immortal woman who leaves her mortal husband when he violates theiragreement, in this case by rescuing the eighth child, Bhishma.fxThus Dharma is incarnate in one of the three sons of Vyasa in the generation of thefathers (Vidura), and he fathers one of the sons (Yudhishthira) of another of those fathers(Pandu).fyThe Puranas (Markandeya 5) expand upon this: As a result of his Brahminicide, Indra’spower goes into five gods, including him, who father the Pandavas.fzSeveral manuscripts of this passage, as well as many texts composed after the tenthcentury, remove Draupadi’s agency by saying that she called for help from Krishna, who arrivedand performed the miracle of the expanding sari. There is a real loss of feminist ground here. Inresponse to the TV Mahabharata series, a company marketed the Draupadi Collection of saris,which presumably did not stretch infinitely.gaSatyavati too has to tell several stories to Ambika and Ambalika to persuade them tosubmit to the same sort of levirate.gbA notorious example is the story of Yavakri, who tried to exert this right on the wife ofanother Brahmin and was murdered by a witch in the form of the wife, conjured up by theBrahmin.gcThe text regards this as Madri’s triumph and privilege, but a feminist might wonder if shegets this dubious honor of committing suttee as a punishment for killing Pandu by enticing him(naturally it is the woman’s fault) to the fatal coupling.gdMuch of this information about women comes from the Artha-shastra, which, if not theMauryan document that people often assume it is, was nevertheless probably composed in thegeneral period of the composition of the Mahabharata, by about 300 CE.ge

Actually, the Mahabharata refers to itself as a “conversation” or “tale” (akhyana) moreoften than an itihasa, and occasionally as a poem (kavya), just like the Ramayana, but it isusually called an itihasa. The philosopher Abhinavagupta says that itihasa is just another form ofkavya, and by that definition, the Mahabharata is kavya too.gfThe vow for killing a Shudra is one-sixteenth of the penance for killing a Brahmin, acrime for which various punishments are prescribed (11.73-90, 127).ggAttributed to Nakula, the Pandava son of one of the twin equine gods, the Ashvins.ghIn U.S. law, this is known as a Brandeis brief, which the Supreme Court justice insistedhis clerks develop in order to understand the thinking of the opposition.giBoth Kautilya and Vatsyayana would have loved Nixon, hated Clinton. (Manu wouldhave loathed both of them.)gjThe contemporary equivalent might be the Bonfire of the Vanities syndrome (from TomWolfe’s novel), in which rich people in their Mercedes accidentally end up in a really rough partof the Bronx, and the nightmare begins.gkNot only that: He cheats and is cheated (and loses to his wife, at that), causing one oftheir frequent fights and separations.glFast-forward: In the Amar Chitra Katha comic book version of the story, Draupadi saysthat Yudhishthira was “intoxicated by gambling,” conflating two of the vices of lust.gmWhat Shaiva Siddhanta theologians called a pasha.gnWhat Kashmiri Shaiva theologians called maya.goThis tradition continues in contemporary rural India, where women approve of “positive”magic when it represents powers acquired properly and is used to protect the family ordevotional practices.gpHe adds that the first six are right for a Brahmin, the last four for a Kshatriya, and thesesame four, with the exception of the ogre marriage, for a Vaishya or Shudra. Other people saythat only one, the ogre marriage, is for a Kshatriya, and only the antigod marriage for a Vaishyaand Shudra, while still others say that only the marriages of the centaurs and the ogres are rightfor rulers.gqKrishna tells Arjuna, in the Gita (2.3), to stop acting like a kliba.grThis is a formulation from Sankhya philosophy.gsThe specific vows are the Painful Vow of the Lord of Creatures and the Moon CourseVow, which involve skipping certain meals and generally eating very little.

gtThe reference to Solomon’s bringing gold, precious stones, and wood from Ophir (1Kings 10:11 and 2 Chronicles 9:11) is generally interpreted as a reference to the Malabar coast.Solomon used “ships of Tarshish” to bring peacocks, monkeys, and other treasures every threeyears (1 Kings 10:2l), probably from India, Tarshish being variously identified with placesincluding Crete and India.guIn the ancient period this island was called by several other names, including Tamraparniand Singhala-dvipa (later Ceylon). It was probably not identical with the place that theRamayana calls Lanka, though the present island was ultimately named after the Ramayana’sLanka. Nor is there any evidence that the kingdoms mentioned in Ashoka’s inscriptions and inthe earliest layers of Tamil literature are identical to the later kingdoms of the same name.gvWhat Homer would have called feasting with the Ethiopians.gw“Alvar” is both singular and plural; but the singular “Nayanar” forms the plural“Nayanmar.”gxA Delhi version of the story makes the squirrel a chipmunk, which Rama stroked, makingthe stripes. There is also a Muslim version: Muhammad, who was known to be fond of cats,stroked them and made their stripes.gyThe site is generally known as the Five Chariots, but it is sometimes called the SevenPagodas, and two ancient temples are said still to exist, submerged beneath the ocean, a variantof our old friend the flood myth.gzA motive not unlike those that drove the pious campagns of Charles Martel andCharlemagne.haTemples carved with scenes from the Ramayana date from the fifth century CE, but mostof the scenes show devotion to Shiva rather than Vishnu.hbTwo sisters who were the successive wives of Vikramaditya II (733-746) commissionedtwo of the great temples at Pattadakal.hcSometimes you can tell if it’s a queen or a goddess by counting the arms—four if agoddess, two if a queen—but often the goddess too has just two arms, and then the only clues arethe insignia of the goddess.hdThe Newars of Nepal marry all their young women first to Vishnu as Narayana, makingtheir earthlyhusbands second husbands—unthinkable for a conventional Hindu woman—and thereforeensuringthat they can never be widowed.heThe relapse into wildness is what dog trainers call “predatory drift”: The tamed wild

animal suddenly remembers that his companion (another dog) is his natural prey and kills him.hfMihirakula (early sixth century) and Sasanka (early seventh century).hgThere is a pun on “shattered” (khandita) and “heretics” (pakhandas), verse 49.hhWe will postpone, until chapter 17, our encounter with the Puranic Vishnu and his avatarsand here consider primarily Shiva and the goddesses.hiMathematics was, and remains, a subject at which Indians excel; the numbers formerlyknown as Arabic (because they reached Europe only after the Arabs had learned them in India)are now more properly known as Hindu-Arabic (and should be still more properly known asIndian-Arabic); they were first attested in the Ashokan inscriptions.hjThough narratives were depicted earlier in sculpture, on Buddhist stupas such as Sanchiand Amaravati.hkThe dating of Kalidasa is conjectural, but there is convincing circumstantial evidence toplace him during the Gupta period.hlBharata is the word used to designate India in most North Indian languages, to this day.hmFast-forward: In 1938 Akhtar Husain Raipuri translated the play into Urdu. He arguedthat Kalidasa, being a man of his time and identifying with Brahminical high culture, changedthe original epic story in an attempt “to save the king from being seen for what he really was—aman who refused to accept responsibility for seducing an innocent woman” (and, I would add,abandoning her).hnThey do speak of the Great God (Mahadeva) and the God (Ishvara), but these are namesof one particular god, Shiva, and are not meant to encompass all the varieties of male gods suchas Vishnu and Brahma, as the Goddess encompasses all goddesses.hoIn the Dallas Museum of Art.hpThe same word that is the basis of the name of the Pariahs called Chandalas.hqThe gods are Indra, the Wind, Yama (god of the dead), the Sun, Fire, Varuna (god of thewaters), the Moon, and Kubera (god of wealth), often called the eight Guardians of theDirections (east, west, southeast, etc.).hrDurga, in Bengal, is an important exception. ‡ Also the nickname of the queen inBrahmana texts of the horse sacrifice and of one of the grandmothers of the Pandus in theMahabharata.hsThe Mahanirvana Tantra may be as late as the eighteenth century and therefore mayincorporate a response to the British presence in India. Yet both its subject matter and its rhetoric

eflect classic Tantric concerns.htSome people seem to regard anything that has to do with sex in India, or not even only inIndia, as Tantric, but that way madness lies; Tantra is often, though by no means always, aboutsex, but sex is certainly not usually about Tantra.huSo too a late chapter of the Padma Purana (perhaps c. 1000 CE) says that Kshatriyawomen are noble if they immolate themselves, but that Brahmin women may not, and thatanyone who helps a Brahmin woman do it is committing Brahminicide (brahma-hatya).hvThe Chinese character niu can mean either “cow” or “ox,” as can the Sanskrit word go.hwThe Mahabharata (9.38.1-12) tells another story about the origin of a different shrinecalled the Release of the Skull, not in Varanasi and not about Shiva: Rama beheaded an ogrewhose head accidentally became attached to the thigh of a sage who happened to be wanderingin that forest. The sage went on pilgrimages to shrine after shrine and finally was released fromthe skull at a shrine on the Sarasvati River that henceforth became known as the Release of theSkull.hxIn some versions, Vishnu uses his discus (chakra), which functions like a combinedFrisbee and boomerang: You send it out, and it chops things off and comes back to you.hyLike Janamejaya’s sacrifice, in which the god really does replace the sacrificial victim,the horse, as he usually does only metaphorically.hzIt is also, by the way, an extraordinarily literal example of what Freud would have calledupward displacement.iaAmong people who find Tantra shameful, Buddhists say it’s Hindu, and Hindus say it’sBuddhist (or Tibetan), just as the French used to call syphilis the Spanish disease, the Spanish theItalian disease, and so forth.ibAs the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would have argued. ‡ Imagine if thefundamentalists who run so many of the present governments of the world were replaced byTantrics; now, there’s a theocracy for you, to boggle the mind. Or perhaps we should regard BillClinton as our first Tantric president.icFurther still from Tantra, but even more basic to Hinduism (more particularly, toSankhya), are the five elements, or tattvas: earth, fire, water, wind, and space (to which someschools add a sixth, mind or soul).idThis sort of reversal was imagined in an old joke about a Jesuit priest who, when hisbishop forbade priests to smoke while meditating, dutifully agreed but argued that surely therewould be no objection if he occasionally meditated while he was smoking.ieThe terms may be a satire on their use to denote the universal aspect of Hinduism held

“in common” by all Hindus in contrast with “one’s own” unique dharma.ifKula usually designates “family” in the sense of “good family”; Kulin Brahmins arehigh-caste Brahmins. To call Tantric groups Kaula is therefore already to mock caste stricturesor to use “family” with the sort of irony with which it is used to designate the Mafia. SometimesKula refers to one particular branch of Tantrics, sometimes to Tantrics in general.igThe verse from the Rig Veda—3.62.10—that a pious Hindu recites at dawn and thatbegins “tat savitur varenyam.”ihThe words are inscribed on a plaque near the place in Delhi where he was shot. There ismuch dispute as to whether he said “Ram Ram” or “Ram Rahim” when he died.iiThe Sanskrit trick of using words with double meanings (“embracing,” or slesha) wasalso used in an inscription written for a Muslim ruler under the Delhi Sultanate in 1328(establishing a garden as a refuge for all animals).ijIn part because the Hindus didn’t usually call themselves Hindus.ikSlaves in ancient India had different rights and restrictions from slaves in Greece, Africa,or America.ilPortuguese traders like Payez, Nuñez, and Diaz wrote extensively about the horse trade.imTo use Thomas Kuhn’s term for a major change in scientific worldviews.inThe Vayu Purana, chapter 36, for instance, includes no animal avatars, just six of theusual ten (Man-Lion, Dwarf, Parashurama, Rama, Krsna, and Kalkin) plus Narayana (anotherform of Vishnu) and three more humans: Dattatreya and Mandhata (with previous histories oftheir own) and Vyasa (author of the Mahabharata).ioA case might well be made for including Kalki as an animal avatar, since he oftenappears as (though more often with) a white horse, but we will discuss him in the context ofinterreligious avatars.ipThe pattern applies to Karna, Oedipus, Moses, Cyrus, and, as Alan Dundes has arguedpersuasively, Jesus. The animals are more prominent in the myths of Tarzan and Kipling’sMowgli.iqThere may be an echo here of the Mahabharata story in which the Ganges kills the firstseven of her children, and only the eighth, Bhishma, is saved.irRukmini, Satyabhama, and Jambavati.isOutside the Minakshi temple in Madurai is a Vaishnava temple that has Balarama inplace of the Buddha.

itThis is the first citation of the name Shambala, which was to become an important mythof a lost, magical city in the mountains.iuHayagriva also becomes a Buddhist deity, but that is another story.ivOK, here is how Vishnu was accidentally beheaded: Vishnu had laughed while looking atLakshmi’s face, and she feared that he thought she was ugly or that he had taken another, morebeautiful co-wife. She cursed him to have his head fall off, thinking that having a co-wife wouldbe more painful than being a widow. And so Vishnu’s head fell into the ocean.iwAs they are, ultimately, in all aspects of Hinduism, however theological their terms ofargument may be.ixAs Ramananda cried out the name of Ram when Kabir tripped him.iyLocal Kashmiri etymologies include Ka-shush (“to dry up water”), Kashyapa Mir (thelake of the sage Kashyapa) or Kashyapa Meru (Kashyapa’s Mount Meru). In English, it is aprecious wool whose name means “nothing but money” (cashmere).izIn the Mahabharata (3.157.57-70), Bhima, the son of the god of the wind (Vayu), kills anogre named Manimat, the ogre who (the followers of Madhva say) was to become Sankara in alater incarnation. According to later followers of Madhva, Madhva himself rewrote andcompleted this passage of the Mahabharata.jaTheir renunciant branches also shared with other renunciant orders an emphasis onpractices; where orthoprax Hinduism was concerned with regulating the behavior of lay people,renunciant orders (Hindu, Buddhist, or Jaina) focused on the correct practices of monks.jbBhojadeva (in the eleventh century), Aghorashiva (in the twelfth), and Meykandadevar(in the thirteenth).jcThe Shri Vaishnavas identify a number of scenes in the Valmiki Ramayana asparadigmatic exemplars of surrender; these include the moments when Lakshmana accompaniesRama to the forest, when Bharata receives Rama’s sandals, when the ocean allows Rama to crossover to Lanka, and, especially, the moment when Ravana’s brother Vibhishana surrenderspolitically to Rama.jdGeorge Gamow did the same thing for the speed of light and the quantum factor, in Mr.Tomkins in Wonderland.jeThe idea that mental constructs are all that we have, and all that is real, is approximated,in our world, by the film The Matrix and, to a lesser extent, by Total Recall.jfTom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead claims to fill in certain gapsthat Shakespeare left in Hamlet.

jgGadhi is also the patronymic of Vishvamitra, the king who wanted to become a Brahminand cursed other sages to become Pariahs. Though this may not be the same man, the name doeshave that narrative resonance.jhSupport for the hypothesis that throughout the world, alcoholism runs in families, throughgenes and DNA or through the chain reaction of generations.jiThis is the mosque that was later said to have usurped the site of a Rama temple and wastorn down by Hindu mobs in 1992.jjPerhaps because this was the doctrine of some bhakti sects.jkNeither of these towns should be confused with the present-day city of Islamabad, capitalof Pakistan.jlBhang is a preparation of cannabis used in India that does not contain the flowering topsand so is not very strong. It can be smoked or drunk and is used in some Hindu rituals.jmUnlike the dog in the Mahabharata, who was afraid of a leopard.jnThe Kama-sutra (1.5.4-21) offers a similar set of justifications for adultery.joMost Hindus did not proselytize, but some Vedantic movements and some bhakti sectsdid.jpI have retold the friar’s first-person testimony in the third person.jqI use the word with the understanding that it denotes the fusion of a number of religiouselements, none of which is in any way a pure essence.jr“God’s Dog,” a short palindrome, could be expanded into another: “Dog as a devildeified lived asa god.”jsThe Punjab still has good grazing; Indian breeders insist, testily, that Pakistan, at the timeof partition, got the best grazing land.jtFast-forward: The stallion’s name lives on in a line of Chetak motorscooters produced byIndia’s Bajaj Auto Ltd.juHistory does not record whether or not Dildar Begum resisted the temptation to say, “Itold you so, but you never listened to your mother.”jvMuslims generally buried their dead, instead of burning them as Hindus did.jw

One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.jxThis is a persistent myth. Shashi Tharoor (in India: From Midnight to the Millennium andBeyond, chapter 1) remarks that “on at least two occasions, the British ordered the thumbs ofwhole communities of Indian weavers chopped off so that they could not compete with theproducts of Lancashire.”jyThis incident is often wrongly said to have occurred a century later, during the 1857uprising.jzThe Anglicans and Dissenters who came to India from Britain in the 1780s, and theBaptists to Orissa in the 1820s, were comparative latecomers. Syrian Christians had been inKerala since the second century CE, Portuguese Catholics in Goa since the 1600s, and the JesuitRoberto de Nobili in Tamil country since 1605. The Portuguese promoted Roman Catholicmissionary activity from their small coastal settlements in southern India, around Goa, but theirHindu converts were few and generally of low caste. The Danish Protestant settlements inTranquebar in Tamil Nadu and Serampore in Bengal operated small but not particularlyinfluential missions.kaSir John William Kaye, Fellow of the Royal Society, Knight Commander of the MostExalted Order of the Star of India.kbRiding bareback requires, and allows, the rider to sit into the horse and fuse with hismovements. The sculptor, Sir Francis Legatt Chantrey, also depicted the Duke of Wellington, inLondon, without saddle and stirrups.kcThose concentric oceans are indeed a part of Hindu cosmology.kdNandy glosses klibatvam as “male sexual effeminacy.”keMany centuries earlier, the early church fathers had attempted in a similar way to justifythe stunning resemblances between the Gospel story and the myths of the pagans that they sodespised, such as the ancient Greek myth of a god who dies and rises from the dead. Clement ofAlexandria initiated “The Thesis of Demonic Imitation,” later advanced by Tertullian and Justin,which argued that the demons, in order to deceive and mislead the human race, took theoffensive and suggested to the Greek poets the plots of the Greek myths, in the hope that thiswould make the story of Christ appear to be a fable of the same sort, when it came (“Oh, nevermind, it’s just another one of those dying and rising gods again”) and so be ignored.kfHindu admiration for the British took many forms. In 1963, I once went to great troubleand expense to visit a famous temple to a tiger god in the jungles of Bengal; when I finally gotthere, I found in the shrine a red faced sahib with a rifle, the god who was able to kill tigers.kgAs Queen Victoria is said to have said. One can imagine that, on first hearing the tale ofthe interruption of the sexual play of Shiva and Parvati, for instance, the average VictorianOrientalist would have remarked, as a Victorian matron was said to have remarked on emerging

from a performance of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, “How strangely different from thehome life of our dear Queen.”khThat a man of great political power might have intended this subtext is suggested by aremark by President William Jefferson Clinton that Newsweek (September 21, 1998, 27) chose toreproduce as an enormous headline: I HAVE SINNED. Several South Asianist colleagues ofmine have told me that they too thought at that moment of Sir Charles Napier.kiGeorge Treveleyan, in1865 (Cawnpore, 36), wrote: “That hateful word . . . made its firstappearance in decent society during the years which immediately preceded the mutiny.”kjIf we are still in the market for arcane bilingual language jokes, Kipling may well haveknown that Kim (short for Kimball) is the interrogative pronoun “what?” in Sanskrit, just as Kais “who?” The statement “What is Kim?” is therefore just that, a statement rather than a question,and a tautology to boot: What? is What?kkCatherine Weinberger-Thomas.klMala Sen.kmLata Mani.knGayatri Spivak’s phrase.koThe two wives of Pandu in the Mahabharata, for example, could not both commit suttee,for one had to remain alive to care for the children.kpOne commentary (Apararka on Yajnyavalkya, probably around 1100 CE) says that awidow may burn herself on her husband’s pyre if she is impelled by her own deep grief, but shemust not be forced.kqG. B. Shaw remarked, nastily, of Wagner’s wife, Cosima, “She is enough to reconcile meto the custom of suttee.”krFast-forward: The present-day Hindutva movement has reactivated the process ofreconversion.ksFast-forward: In 1940, in Caxton Hall, in London, an Indian shot to death, in delayed anddisplaced retribution, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of the Punjab, who hadstood by Major Dyer in 1919.ktGandhi himself resisted the term “passive,” arguing that satya-graha was an activemeasure.kuThis is not the place to review the history of Partition, but a few basic points might beuseful: The former colony was divided into two countries, India, with a Hindu majority, and

Pakistan, with a Muslim majority. This was done because many Muslims believed that theirinterests would not be protected in a majority Hindu country, however secular the government.Hindus and Sikhs moved from what became Pakistan to India, and Muslims from India toPakistan, a displacement of between ten and twelve million people. Several hundred thousandHindus and Muslims lost their lives; entire trains pulled into stations across the border filled onlywith corpses. An untold number of women were raped.kvThe folklore motif “gold from shit” is known from Indian folktales as far away asKangra, in the foot-hills of the Himalayas, and was noted by Freud.kwThe others included halving the land revenue, protecting Indian cloth, releasing politicalprisoners, and abolishing the salt tax, this last being the one that Gandhi decided to make a majorissue.kxIn 1995, Nupur Basu made an eleven-minute film about this antialcohol campaign inDobbagunta, titled Dry Days in Dobbagunta, about the events in the early 1990s.kyPopularly said to be derived from the initial letters of the phrase “port outward, starboardhome,” with reference to the more comfortable (because cooler) and more expensive side foraccommodation on ships traveling between Britain and India.kz“Perfected” or “fully developed,” from the Sanskrit verb pach, “to cook or ripen.” ‡ Thedrink, made of five [panch] ingredients.laDr. Bowers reports: “After the first session of the Parliament of Religions, I went withVivekananda to the restaurant in the basement of the Art Institute, and I said to him, ‘What shallI get you to eat?’ His reply was, ‘Give me beef!’ ” (Outlook, July 17, 1897).lbKipling did not appear in the 1950 movie of Kim, in which Errol Flynn played MahbubAli and Paul Lukas played the Tibetan monk.lcKali’s role in the 1965 Beatles film was just the beginning. The cover of the Beatles’1966 album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band featured, among many others,Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Yukteswar, Sri Lahiri Mahasaya, and Sri Paramahansa Yogananda.George Harrison met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in England, and in 1968 the Beatles traveled toIndia, where they met with the maharishi in Rishikesh in a widely reported and famouslyphotographed visit. (Life magazine decided that 1968 was the “Year of the Guru.”) In 1969,Harrison met with A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada at John Lennon’s estate inTittenhurst Park and performed his “Hare Krishna Mantra” with the devotees of the LondonRadha-Krishna Temple.ldThe title of a Showtime TV series.leThe title of a recent book attacking American scholars of Hinduism, Invading the Sacred,may be seen as a delayed riposte to the title of an earlier book protesting the Hinduization ofAmerica: Wendell Thomas, Hinduism Invades America (New York: Beacon Press, 1931).

lfI have in mind, in India, Romila Thapar, the historian of India, and the filmmaker MiraNair and, in America, Vasudha Narayanan and A. K. Ramanujan, scholars of Hinduism, all ofwhom have been attacked by the Hindutva faction.lgA patent example of this ressentiment is the opening paragraph of Rajiv Malhotra’sarticle “Wendy’s Children,” posted on the Internet in September 2002, which enormouslyexaggerates my influence in the academic field of the study of Hinduism. I sometimes use thatpassage as a brief paragraph to give to people who ask for something with which to introduce meat public events, where hype is often called for.lhD. N. Jha, the author of The Myth of the Holy Cow, which marshaled abundant proof thatHindus did eat beef in the ancient period, was so violently attacked, physically as well as in thepress, that he had to have a police escort twenty-four hours a day for several years after his bookwas published in India.liThe OED defines “Irish bull” as “A self-contradictory proposition; in mod. use, anexpression containing a manifest contradiction in terms or involving a ludicrous inconsistencyunperceived by the speaker. Now often with epithet Irish; but the word had been long in usebefore it came to be associated with Irishmen.”ljOne learns early in this game never to say “never” about anything in India; sooner or lateryou discover that everything exists, though you yourself may not yet have come upon it.lkSuch as the Kurubas (a shepherd caste) and Kurnis (a weaver caste) of Northern AndhraPradesh.llNow, scholarly opinion has differed for the past century on the location of the mythicalLanka, the island to which Ravana brought Sita, and the identification with present-day SriLanka is problematic.The earliest name for this island, judged by Indian and Greek and Latin sources in thethird century BCE, is Tamraparni (“with copper leaves”), which Greek geographers calledTaprobane. Later, in the early centuries CE, the name more commonly used in South Asia wasSinhala or Sinhala-dvipa (“Lion’s Island”). Arabs referred to it as Sarandib or Serendib (fromwhich Horace Walpole coined the term “serendipity” in his 1754 novel The Three Princes ofSerendip). Later European mapmakers called it Ceylon (a transformation of Sri Lanka), a namestill used occasionally for trade purposes. It became Sri Lanka officially in 1972. Thischronology of names poses a puzzle for the historian. If the author of the oldest Ramayana, c.200 BCE, was referring to what we now call Sri Lanka, then the name should have been the oneby which the island was known then, either Tamraparni or else Sinhala. But since the name usedis Lanka, which appears not to have been the name for the island at that time, then perhaps thatLanka was located somewhere other than where Sri Lanka is now. Alternatively, if Lanka in thetext is a reference to the present Sri Lanka, then the composition of the Valmiki poem wouldhave to be dated to a much later period, when the island was called Lanka.lmA yoking (yojana) is the approximate distance, sometimes said to be ten miles,

sometimes fifty, that you can travel without changing and reharnessing horses.lnThe present-day Sri Lanka is about nineteen miles from India. If we take a yoking as tenmiles, it’s a thousand miles from India to the Ramayana’s Lanka; if we take a “yoking” as fiftymiles, it’s five thousand miles to Lanka.loTwo films made on the same topic in the same year (1964), Dr. Strangelove and FailSafe, imagined a doomsday plan (think: Kali Yuga) for American planes to drop atomic bombson Russia.lpBahuchara, meaning “Getting Around a Lot,” is the same phrase that the mother ofSatyakama, in the Upanishads, used to refer to her promiscuity.lqThis is a joke that historians of Russia used to make about revisionist Soviet Unionhistorical propaganda during the cold war. Alas, it applies equally well to many revisionists inIndia today.lr“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana(The Life of Reason, 1905).lsAs Carl Sandburg once said.Table of ContentsTitle PageCopyright PagePREFACE:CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION: WORKINGWITH AVAILABLE LIGHTCHAPTER 2 - TIME AND SPACE IN INDIA 50 Million to 50,000 BCECHAPTER 3 - CIVILIZATION IN THE INDUS VALLEY 50,000 to 1500 BCECHAPTER 4 - BETWEEN THE RUINSAND THE TEXT 2000 to 1500 BCECHAPTER 5 - HUMANS, ANIMALS, AND GODS IN THE RIG VEDA 1500 to 1000BCECHAPTER 6 - SACRIFICE IN THE BRAHMANAS 800 to 500 BCECHAPTER 7 - RENUNCIATION IN THE UPANISHADS 600 to 200 BCECHAPTER 8 - THE THREE (OR IS IT FOUR?) AIMS OF LIFE IN THE HINDUIMAGINARYCHAPTER 9 - WOMEN AND OGRESSES IN THE RAMAYANA 400 BCE to 200 CECHAPTER 10 - VIOLENCE IN THE MAHABHARATA 300 BCE to 300 CECHAPTER 11 - DHARMA IN THE MAHABHARATA 300 BCE to 300 CECHAPTER 12 - ESCAPE CLAUSES IN THE SHASTRAS 100 BCE to 400 CECHAPTER 13 - BHAKTI IN SOUTH INDIA 100 BCE to 900 CECHAPTER 14 - GODDESSES AND GODS IN THE EARLY PURANAS 300 to 600 CECHAPTER 15 - SECTS AND SEX IN THE TANTRIC PURANAS AND THETANTRAS 600 to 900 CECHAPTER 16 - FUSION AND RIVALRY UNDER THE DELHI SULTANATE 650 to1500 CE

CHAPTER 17 - AVATAR AND ACCIDENTAL GRACE IN THE LATER PURANAS800 to 1500 CECHAPTER 18 - PHILOSOPHICAL FEUDS IN SOUTH INDIA AND KASHMIR 800 to1300 CECHAPTER 19 - DIALOGUE AND TOLERANCE UNDER THE MUGHALS 1500 to1700 CECHAPTER 20 - HINDUISM UNDER THE MUGHALS 1500 to 1700 CECHAPTER 21 - CASTE, CLASS, AND CONVERSION UNDER THE BRITISH RAJ1600 to 1900 CECHAPTER 22 - SUTTEE AND REFORM IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE RAJ 1800 to1947 CECHAPTER 23 - HINDUS IN AMERICA 1900 -CHAPTER 24 - THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 1950 -CHAPTER 25 - INCONCLUSION, OR, THE ABUSE OF HISTORYAcknowledgementsCHRONOLOGYGUIDE TO PRONUNCIATION AND SPELLINGOF WORDS IN SANSKRIT ANDOTHERINDIAN LANGUAGESABBREVIATIONSGLOSSARY OF TERMS IN INDIAN LANGUAGES AND NAMES OF KEYFIGURESNOTESBIBLIOGRAPHY: WORKS CITED AND CONSULTEDPHOTO CREDITSINDEXABOUT THE AUTHOR

The-Hindus-An-Alternative-History---Wendy-Doniger

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