The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  Hindus might therefore best be called polydox.58 Yet renouncers, certain monists, and some of the bhakti sects tended to be more orthodox than orthoprax, and those movements that challenge 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 to some people within the Hindu fold, though more often to Buddhists and Jainas.

  HYBRIDITY AND MULTIPLICITY

  The “solitarist” approach to human identity sees human beings as members of exactly one group, in contrast with the multiple view that sees individuals as belonging to several different groups at once. Visualize our friend the intra-Hinduism Venn/Zen diagram, now in an interreligious guise. The multiple view is both more appropriate and more helpful for people caught up in the confrontation of communities, such as Hindu and Muslim in India.60

  People sometimes make a further distinction between multiplicity and hybridity. Multiplicity implies a combination in which the contributing elements are theoretically unchanged even when mixed. Hinduism in this sense of multiplicity is perceived to have elements 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 church and attend a basic Catholic mass much as you would experience it in many (though certainly not all) churches in another city or another country, mutatis mutandis, and on Tuesday you go to a Hindu temple and assist at a ceremony of killing a goat, much as you would experience it in many (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 an individual: On Monday you attend the same sort of basic Catholic mass, but in place of the Eucharist you kill a goat, or you attend the same sort of basic Hindu puja but the goddess to whom 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 heterogeneous sources, or composed of different or incongruous elements,” which, when applied to a community, leaves conveniently open the question of whether those elements remain unchanged. The OED definition applies to individuals rather than communities: “the offspring of two animals or plants of different species, or (less strictly) varieties.”

  Both hybridity and multiplicity can be applied to both communities and individuals. The trouble with both multiplicity and hybridity (as well as syncretism) lies in the assumption that the combinatory elements are separate essences that exist in a pure form before the mix takes place and that the combination either does (for hybrids) or does not (for multiplicities) change them in some way. But there are seldom any pure categories in any human situation, certainly not by the moment when history first catches up with them. Long before 2000 BCE, the Indus Valley Civilization was already a mix of cultures, as was Vedic culture at that time, and eventually the two mixes mixed together, and mixed with other mixes. Hybridity defies binary oppositions and understands 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 Eurasian of India,”which is to say either a privileged Englishman ruling “Inja” or a hybrid, an underprivileged person whom the British regarded as the lowest of all castes, a mixed breed.

  Hybridity, traditionally, has had the additional disadvantage of carrying a largely negative attitude to the mixing of categories, an attitude that we now regard as reactionary. Thus the hybrid has been despised as a hodgepodge, a mix in which both (or all) of the contributing elements 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 the mixture of social classes (varna-samkara). But nowadays both postcolonial and postmodern thinkers prefer hybrids, define “hybrid” more positively, and indeed argue that we all are hybrids,61 all always mixed and mixing.62

  The Parsis (“Persians”—i.e., Zoroastrians) in several communities in India tell a positive story about social hybridity. They say that when the Parsis landed in India, the local Hindu raja sent them a full glass of milk, suggesting that the town was full. The Parsi leader added sugar and returned the glass, indicating that his people could mix among the Arabs and Hindus like sugar in milk, sweetening it but not overrunning it.63 The metaphor of sugar in milkae suggests the extreme ideal of communal integration, in which individuals change the community by melting into it, flavoring it as a whole with their qualities (Zoroastrianism, or sweetness). The Parsis did not in fact dissolve into Islam and Hinduism; they remained Parsis and indeed were often caught in the crossfire during the riots that followed the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. This seems to me the more accurate way to view such cultural mixes: as a suspension of discrete particles rather than a melting pot.

  Despite their shortcomings, the concepts of hybridity and multiplicity are useful, if used with care. The phenomenon is basically the same in either case; it’s just a matter of points of view, and it doesn’t really matter whether you call it multiple or hybrid (or even syncretic). What does 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) characterized Hindu mythology as a pendulum of extremes that are never resolved and that are also constantly in motion: “By refusing to modify its component elements in order to force them into a synthesis, Indian mythology celebrates the idea that the universe is boundlessly various, that everything occurs simultaneously, that all possibilities may exist without excluding each other . . . [that] untrammeled variety and contradiction are ethically and metaphysically necessary.”64

  Keeping both extreme swings of the pendulum in mind simultaneously means realizing that an individual actor in the drama of the history of the Hindus may regard herself as a fused hybrid of Muslim and Hindu or as a fused multiple, fully Muslim in some ways and fully Hindu in others, as many Indians have been, throughout history. In either case, there would be no perfectly pure category of Muslim or Hindu anywhere along the line of fusion. Such a person might worship at a Hindu temple on certain days and at a Sufi shrine on others, might read both the Upanishads and the Qu’ran for spiritual guidance, and would celebrate both the great Muslim holy days and the great Hindu festivals.

  I would therefore argue for the recognition of the simultaneous presence of a number of pairs of opposites, throughout the history of the Hindus, the both/and view of community. The historiographic pendulum of reconciliation, never resting at the swing either to one side or the other, forces us to acknowledge the existence, perhaps even the authenticity, of the two extremes of various ideas, and also their falseness, as well as the fact that there is no pure moment at either end 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 in the Zen diagram.

  CHAPTER 2

  TIME AND SPACE IN INDIA

  50 Million to 50,000 BCE

  THE BIRTH OF INDIA

  The Ganges, though flowing from the foot of Vishnu and through

  Siva’s hair, is not an ancient stream. Geology, looking further than

  religion, knows of a time when neither the river nor the Himalayas

  that nourished it existed, and an ocean flowed over the holy places of

  Hindustan. The mountains rose, their debris silted up the ocean, the

  gods took their seats on them and contrived the river, and the India

  we call immemorial came into being.

  —E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)1

  TIME

  ORIGINS: OUT OF AFRICA

  To 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 of Africa) and, “adrift on the earth’s mantle,”2 sailed across the Indian Ocean and smashed into the belly of Central Asia with such force that it squeezed the earth five miles up into the skies to form the Himalayan range and fused with Central Asia to become the Indian subcontinent.3 Or so the people who study plate tectonics nowadays tell us, and who am I to challenge them?ah Not just land but people came to India from Africa, much later; the winds that bring the monsoon rains to India each year also brought the first humans to peninsular India by sea from East Africa in 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 that Hinduism through the ages constantly absorbed immigrant people and ideas and as the first historical instance of such an actual immigration. (It can also be read as an unconscious satire on histories that insist on tracing everything back to ultimate origins, as can the E. M. Forster passage cited at the start.) The narratives that Hindus have constructed about that stage and those actors, 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 the aeons). Often unexpressed, always assumed, these narratives are the structures on which all other narratives about history are built. We will then briefly explore the natural features of India—rivers and mountains—that serve not only as the stage on which the drama of history unfolds but as several of the main actors in that drama, for Ganga (the Ganges) and Himalaya appear in the narratives as the wife and father-in-law of the god Shiva, respectively.

  GONDWANALAND AND LEMURIA

  Francis Bacon was the first to notice, from maps of Africa and the New World first available in 1620, that the coastlines of western Africa and eastern South America matched rather 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 vast supercontinent 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 the Gonds,” the Gonds being tribal people of central India—comprising portions of the present states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh,6 the latter a region famous for its enormous rocks, the oldest on the planet.) Scientists then suggested that what were later called continental shiftsai 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 into two pieces. One piece was Madagascar, and the other was the microcontinent that eventually erupted into the Deccan plateau and crashed into Central Asia.aj Australian Indologists joke that the Deccan is really part of Australia.7

  The Gondwanaland story takes us to the farthest limit, the reduction to the absurd, of the many 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). Both nineteenth-century scholarship and twenty-first-century politics have taken a preternatural interest 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 their tales: “We got there first,” “It’s ours” (ignoring the history of all the intervening centuries that followed and other legitimate claims). They viewed the moment of origins as if there were a kind of magic Rosetta stone, with the past on one side and the present on the other, enabling them to do a simple one-to-one translation from the past into the present ever after. But even if they could know the ur-past, and they could not (both because logically there is no ultimate beginning for any chain of events and because the data for the earliest periods are at best incomplete and at worst entirely inaccessible), it would hardly provide a charter for the present.

  Other scientists in the colonial period agreed about the ancient supercontinent but imagined its disintegration as taking place in the opposite way, not when land (proto-India) broke off from land (Australia/Africa) and moved through water (the Indian Ocean) to join up with other land (Central Asia), but rather when water (the Indian Ocean) moved in over land (a stationary supercontinent like Gondwanaland) that was henceforth lost under the waves, like Atlantis. According to this story, water eventually submerged (under what is now called the Indian Ocean) the land that had extended from the present Australia through Madagascar to the present South India.

  In 1864 a geologist named that supercontinent Lemuria, because he used the theory to account for the fact that living lemurs were found, in the nineteenth century, only in Madagascar and the surrounding islands, and fossil lemurs were found from Pakistan to Malaya, but no lemurs, living or dead, were found in Africa or the Middle East (areas that would never have been connected to Lemuria as Madagascar and Pakistan presumably once were).8 Animals, as usual, here define human boundaries, and the myths about those boundaries, as usual, proliferated. In 1876, Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist of a Darwinian persuasion, published his 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 when the 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 under Mount Shasta in California;10 and in 1888, in The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky claimed that 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 Tamil speakers on the southern tip of South India, who began to regard Lemuria as a lost ancestral home 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 of Lemuria; or that when Lemuria sank, Tamilians dispersed to found the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Americas, Europe, and, in particular, the Indus Valley.11 Nowadays some Tamil separatists want to reverse the process, to detach Tamil Nadu from the rest of India, not, presumably, physically, to float back over the Indian Ocean like Gondwanaland in reverse, but politically, in order to recapture the glory of their lost Lemurian past.

  The passage from E. M. Forster cited above, “The Birth of India,” begins with the Himalayas rising up out of the ocean, Gondwanaland fashion, but then, as it continues, it slips into the other variant, the story of the submersion of Lemuria, and regards that submersion as preceding the Gondwanaland episode, pushing back the origins even farther: “But India is really far 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 side the sinking of a continent that joined them to Africa, and on the other the upheaval of the Himalayas from a sea.”12 Forster concludes his passage with a third aspect of the myth, its periodicity or cyclicity, its prediction that the flooding of South India will happen again and again: “As Himalayan India rose, this India, the primal, has been depressed, and is slowly re-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 a novelist, but even the plate tectonics people may be building sand castles, for the plate tectonics theory is after all a speculation, albeit a scientific speculation ba
sed on good evidence.

  Whether or not a subcontinent once shook the dust of Africa off its heels and fused onto Asia, 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 already a very rich mix. The multiplicity characteristic of Hinduism results in part from a kind of fusion—a little bit of Ravi Shankar in the night, a Beatle or two—that has been going on for millions of years, as has globalization of a different sort from that which the word generally denotes. The pieces of the great mosaic of Hinduism were put in place, one by one, by the many peoples who bequeathed to India something of themselves, planting a little piece of England, or Samarkand, or Africa, in the Punjab or the Deccan.

  APRÈS MOI, LE DÉLUGE

  Hinduism is so deeply embedded in the land of its birth that we cannot begin to understand its history without understanding something of its geography and in particular the history of representations of its geography. The central trope for both time and space in India is the great flood. The myth of the flood is told and retold in a number of variants, some of which argue for the loss of a great ancient civilization or a fabulous shrine. The telling of a myth of such a flood, building upon a basic story well known throughout India, allows a number of different places to imagine a glorious lost past of which they can still be proud today.