The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  The Vedic people knew the elephant but regarded it as a curiosity; they had to make up a word for it and called it “the wild animal with a hand” (mrigahastin ). But they do not mention tigers or rhinoceroses, animals familiar from the Harappan seals. Nor are there any references to unicorns, mythical or real.36 The zoological argument from silence (“the lion that didn’t roar in the night”) is never conclusive (beware the false negative; the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence), but all this suggests that the Vedic people originally lived north of the land where the tiger and the elephant roam, and generally north of the Indus rhinoceroses, on the nonfalsifiable assumption that people who had seen an animal as weird as a rhinoceros would have mentioned it.

  TALKING HORSES

  Cattle 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 as differentiating 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 the Ashvins—twin horse-headed gods). Let us consider first the possible existence and then the symbolic 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 no horses is not Indo-European,38 nor does it follow that wherever people had horses, they spoke Indo-European languages. Indo-European culture is contained within the broader range of ancient 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 throughout Europe as well as North America in the Eocene age (“the dawn of time”), some sixty to forty million years ago. The horse was probably domesticated in several places, and it didn’t happen all at once even in Central Asia.

  Nevertheless, the spread of the Central Asian horse (and, after around 2000 BCE, the chariot, for people rode astride for a long time before they began to drive horses) suggests that in general, when Indo-Aryan speakers arrived somewhere, horses trotted in at the same time, and the archaeological record supports the hypothesis that Indo-European speakers did in fact ride and/or drive, rather than walk, into India. For the horse is not indigenous to India. There is archaeological evidence of many horses in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent only in the second millennium BCE, after the decline of the IVC. Horse bits and copper and iron objects were used in Maharashtra, and horse paraphernalia (such as bits) south of the Narmada during or after this period suggest an extensive network of horse traders from northwestern India.39

  By contrast, the absence of a thriving horse population in the IVC, the fact that even adamant opponents of Guesses One and Two must admit that the horse seems not to have played a significant role in the Harappan economy,40 supports the hypothesis that the Indus Valley people were not Indo-European speakers.41 Yet the ink was scarcely dry on such statements when 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 found anywhere in the Indus Valley culture42 or, somewhat more tentatively, that “the horse was probably unknown” to the Indus people,43 there is archaeological evidence for the possible existence of some horses in the IVC, if very few. From time to time people have come up with what appear to be the bones of quasihorses, protohorses like the donkey, or the Dawn Horse, or the 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 Central Asia or even West Asia.

  But such horses were probably imported, like so many other items, in the course of the vigorous 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.”45 For from the time of the settlements in the Punjab, the Indian love of horses—perhaps imprinted by the early experience of the Indo-Europeans in lands north of India, where horses thrived—was challenged by the simple fact that horses do not thrive on the Indian subcontinent and therefore need to be imported constantly. The evidence for the importing of horses can be used to support Guess One (or at least to counter Guesses Three and Four): The IVC had no horses of its own, so could not have been Indo-European speakers. And so the IVC could have played 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 horses rather than rode (or drove) them in. Assuming that the Indo-Europeans began in India, one can argue that they eventually emigrated to the Caspian and Black Sea coasts and domesticated the horse there, perhaps learning the trick from the natives; then they sent both the horses and the horse-taming knowledge back to their Indian homeland, and that’s how horses got into the Vedas.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 from the 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 the horses 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 of intimate relationships between heroes and their horses are, like the historical mastery of the horse, the common property of Indo-Europeans and the Turkic peoples of Central Asia.48 A specific historical tradition from Indo-European prehistory is strongly suggested by parallel epithets and other predicates applied to horses in the Greek and Indo-Iranian texts.49 A fourteenth-century BCE Hittite text on the training of horses uses words of Indo-European provenance. Horses, observed in affectionate, minute, often gory, detail, pervade the poetry of the 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 other animals. The Indus people were crazy about animals, but not about horses. So widely accepted is the “horse = Indo-European” equation that even when one or two clay figurines that appear to depict horses were found at a few Indus sites, these were said to “reflect foreign travel or imports,” though the same arguments for the importing of horses applies to the importing of images of horses and disqualify these figurines as evidence one way or another. But more tellingly, “The horse, the animal central to the Rig Veda, is absent from the Harappan seals”50 and “unimportant, ritually and symbolically, to the Indus civilization.”51 Such statements too have acted as a gauntlet to provoke rebuttal. Recently an animal on an Indus seal was identified as a horse,52 but it soon appeared that the seal was upside down, and the animal wasn’t a horse at all, but a fabrication, a unicorn bull made to look like a horse—that is, a (real) unicorn masquerading as a (mythical) horse.53 In Europe, people constructed unicorns by sticking a horn on a horse, either tying a horn onto a real horse or drawing a horn onto a picture of a horse. Only in India does it work the other way around, for on Indus seals, unicorns are real and horses nonexistent.

  The absence of representations of horses in the IVC does not mean that they did not have real horses; they might have had them without regarding them as any more worthy of representation than the cows that we know they had and did not depict. Arguments from silence, it will be recalled, may prove to be false ne
gatives, though this particular argument is somewhat supported by the archaeological evidence that there were few, if any, horses. The absence of equine 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 who composed the Veda would exclude the horse from the stable of animals that they depicted on their 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 no Vedic input into the civilization of the Indus Valley or, correspondingly, that there was little input from the IVC into the civilization of the Rig Veda. This does not mean, of course, that the IVC did not contribute in a major way to other, later developments of Hinduism.

  AN ALTERNATIVE ANSWER: FUSION AND BRICOLAGE

  It is therefore unlikely that both the Vedas and Harappa were “a product of the civilization of these two peoples,”54 but it is more than likely that later Hinduism was a product of both of them, a linguistic and cultural combination of Vedic words and Indus images, as well as other contributions from other cultures. In some areas this combination was a fusion, a melting pot, a hybrid, while in others the elements kept their original shape and behaved more like a tossed salad, a multiplicity. This is of course quite different from saying that the Veda was composed in the Indus Valley cities. But even if the languages and cultures were distinct, as surely they were, people from the two cultures must have met. Ideas already current in India before the entry of the Vedic people or arising outside the Vedic world after that entry may have eventually filtered into Vedic and then post-Vedic Sanskrit literature.55 (These ideas may have come not only from the IVC but also from the so-called Adivisis or “Original Inhabitants” of India, or from the Munda speakers and Dravidian speakers whose words are already incorporated in the Rig Veda, though that is another story.) Survivors of the Indus cities may have taught something of their culture to the descendants of the poets who composed the Vedas. The people of Harappa may have migrated south, so that their culture could have found its way into the strand of Hinduism that arose there.56 Some elements of pre-Vedic Indo-European civilization may have been taken up by the last inhabitants of the Indus Valley. Some elements of the Indus civilization may have been adopted by the authors of later Vedic literature. Some combination of all of the above seems extremely likely.

  A good example of this possible fusion is the case of bricks. The authors of the Rig Veda did not know about bricks; their rituals required only small mud altars, not large brick altars. But later, around 600 BCE, when the Vedic people had moved down into the Ganges Valley and their rituals had become more elaborate, they began to build large brick altars. The size of the mud bricks was a multiple or fraction of the height of the patron of the sacrifice, and a fairly sophisticated geometry was developed to work out the proportions.57 We know that the Indus people had mastered the art of calculating the precise size of bricks, within a system of uniform and proportionate measurement. The use of bricks and the calculations in the Vedic ritual may therefore have come from a Harappan tradition, bypassed the Rig Vedic period, and resurfaced later.58 This hypothesis must be qualified by the realization that kiln-fired (in contrast with sun-fired) brickwork does not reappear until the last centuries BCE,59 a long time for that secret to lie dormant. But other aspects of brickmaking, and other ideas, may have been transmitted earlier.

  Though the Vedic people told the story of their early life in India, and their descendants controlled the narrative for a very long time, most of what Hindus have written about and talked about and done, from the Mahabharata on, has not come from the Veda. In part because of the intertextuality and interpracticality of Hinduism, one text or ritual building on another through the centuries, right back to the Veda, scholars looking at the history of transmission have assumed that the Veda was the base onto which other things were added in the course of Indian history, just as Central Asia was the base that absorbed the impact of that interloping piece of Africa 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 ideas themselves, it was quite the opposite: The Veda was the newcomer that, like the African island fusing onto a preexisting continental base, combined with a preexisting cultural world consisting perhaps of the Indus Valley, perhaps of any of several other, more widely dispersed non-Vedic cultures.

  The non-Veda is the fons et origo of Hinduism; new ideas, new narratives, new practices arose 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 new narratives and practices fitted into the interstices between the plot lines of the great Sanskrit texts, as stories told in response to the protagonists’ questions about places encountered on their travels or to illustrate a relevant moral point, or any other reason why. The non-Veda is not one thing but so many things. We have noted, briefly, and can rank in the order that their records appear in history, the existence of at least five cultures: (1) Stone Age cultures in India long before 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 “Original Inhabitants” of India, who spoke a variety of languages and contributed words and practices to various strands of Hinduism. Many of them were there long before the IVC and may have been a part of it; many of them have never been assimilated to Hinduism. Next come (3) the Indus civilization and (4) the village traditions that preceded, accompanied, and followed it, and after that (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 out of the scraps of other things. We’ve seen how the British used the stones of Mohenjo-Daro as ballast for their railway before (and after) they realized what those stones were and that a Buddhist stupa stands over some of the ruins there. So too Hindus built their temples on (and out of) Buddhist stupas as well as on other Hindu temples, and Muslims their mosques on Hindu temples (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 a word or image from another religion as a kind of objet trouvé. There are no copyrights there; all is in the public domain. This is not the hodgepodge that the Hindus and the early Orientalists regarded as dirt, matter out of place, evidence of an inferior status but, rather, the interaction of various different strains that is an inevitable factor in all cultures and traditions, and a Good Thing.

  MUTUAL CREATION

  A good metaphor for the mutual interconnections between Vedic and non-Vedic aspects of Hinduism is provided by the myth with which this chapter began, “Vishnu and Brahma Create Each Other.” Each says to the other, “You were born from me,” and both of them are right. Each god sees all the worlds and their inhabitants (including both himself and the other god) inside the belly of the other god. Each claims to be the creator of the universe, yet each contains the other creator. In other versions of this myth, each one calls the other tata, a two-way word that a young man can use to call an older man Grandpa, while an older man can use it to call a younger man Sonny 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 the universe 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 on ad infinitum—another series of mutual creations. Vedic and non-Vedic cultures create and become one another like this too throughout the history of Hinduism. This accounts for a num
ber of the tensions that haunt Hinduism throughout its history, as well as for its extraordinary diversity.

  CHAPTER 5

  HUMANS, ANIMALS, AND GODS IN THE RIG VEDA

  1500 to 1000 BCE

  CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES BCE)

  c. 1700-1500 Nomads in the Punjab region compose the Rig Veda

  c. 1200-900 The Vedic people compose the Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, and Atharva Veda

  DIVERSE CALLINGS

  Our 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 physician

  and 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 the people who lived in the Punjab in about 1500 BCE and composed the texts called the Vedas. We will face the violence embedded in the Vedic sacrifice of cattle and horses and situate that ritual violence in the social violence that it expresses, supports, and requires, the theft of other people’s cattle and horses. We will then consider the social world of the Vedas, focusing first on the tension between the Brahmin and royal/martial classes (the first and second classes) and the special 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 to addiction and/or intoxication, though intoxication from the soma plant (pressed to yield juice) is the privilege of the highest gods and Brahmins.