The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  c. 1000 The city of Kaushambi in Vatsa is founded

  c. 9501 The Mahabharata battle is said to have taken place

  c. 900 The city of Kashi (Varanasi, Benares) is founded

  c. 800-600 The Brahmanas are composed

  HUMANS AND CATTLE

  In the beginning, the skin of cattle was the skin that humans have

  now, and the skin of a human was the skin that cattle have now. Cattle

  could not bear the heat, rain, flies, and mosquitoes. They went to

  humans and said, “Let this skin be yours and that skin be ours.”

  “What would be the result of that?” humans asked. “You could eat

  us,” said the cattle, “and this skin of ours would be your clothing.”

  And so they gave humans their clothing. Therefore, when the sacrificer

  puts on a red hide, he flourishes, and cattle do not eat him in the

  other world; for [otherwise] cattle do eat a human in the other world.

  Jaiminiya Brahmana (c. 600 BCE)2

  Concerns for the relationship between humans and animals, and with retribution in “the other world,” are central issues in the Brahmanas. Many new ideas are introduced in the form of folktales, some of which are alluded to, but not narrated, in the Rig Veda, while others may come from non-Vedic parts of Indian culture.

  THE CITIES ON THE GANGES

  Where the Rig Veda expressed uncertainty and begged the gods for help, the Brahmanas (mythological, philosophical, and ritual glosses on the Vedas) express confidence that their infallible Vedic verses (mantras) can deal with all dangers. Troubled by the open-ended refrain of the Rig Vedic creation poem that could only ask, “Who is the god whom we should honor with the 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 god Indra (whose own existence, you may recall, was once in doubt), “Who am I?,” to which Indra replied, “Just who you just said” (i.e., “I am Who”), and that is how the creator got the name of Who.3 So too in one Vedic ceremony,4 when the ritual subject goes to heaven and comes back again, he must say, on his return, “I am just who I am.” Read back into the Vedic poem (as it was in later Vedic commentaries5), this resulted in an affirmative statement: “Indeed, Who is the god whom we should honor with the oblation,” somewhat reminiscent of the famous Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on first?” But this sacerdotal arrogance closed down some of those openings 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, it was caused by a major change in the living conditions of the authors of these texts. For the Brahmanas were composed during one of the most significant geographical and social shifts in the history of Hinduism, a period that has been called the second urbanization6 (the first being that of the Indus Valley), a time of social and intellectual transformation so extreme that it could well be called revolutionary. Let us, as usual, ground our discussion of the religious texts in a quick 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 of the present Delhi), and the scene in which most of the Mahabharata is set. Then, in about 900 BCE, 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 the Punjab probably took place gradually, through several different incursions, so too the move to the Ganges took place incrementally over several centuries. The political changes were correspondingly gradual. Though the Vedas refer to kings, they were really rulers of relatively small, and transitory, political units, numerous small chiefdoms; so too the leaders of the early political units on the Ganges were said to be “kings in name only” (raja-shabdin), and a later Buddhist 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 of Koshala/Videha), and, southeast of Hastinapur and west of Kashi, the city of Kaushambi (in Vatsa, now Uttar Pradesh), whose stratigraphy suggests a founding date of between 1300 and 1000 BCE.8 The Brahmanas must have been composed a few centuries after the founding of these cities, for considerable time must have passed since the composition of the Rig Veda (even of 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 from Beowulf 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 language but the nature of the texts changed: Between 1000 and 500 BCE, Vedic rituals spawned more and more commentaries, and by the sixth century BCE the different schools, or branches (shakhas), had been well established.9

  During 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, and rich deposits of minerals.10 First they moved east from the Punjab to Magadha (Bihar) and the lower Ganges and later, in a backflow, west from the Ganges to Gujarat. The main crop now shifted from wheat to rice, which yielded a far greater surplus, and they used water buffalo in its cultivation. 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 and control of the river floodings.

  They moved partly in search of deposits of iron, which they developed from about 800 BCE (though a better quality was developed by about 60011); its use was predominant in the western Ganges plain in the first millennium BCE and spread from the Indo-Gangetic watershed to 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 for pins and other parts of horse harnesses, as well as for weapons, iron was not imported but was developed in India, primarily from rich lodes in what is now southern Bihar.13

  CLASS CONFLICTS

  The surplus that became available along the banks of the Ganges meant a new kind of social and economic power. It meant the organization and redistribution of raw materials and the greater stratification of society, in part because the growing of rice is a complex process that requires a higher degree of cooperation than was needed for herding or for simpler forms of agriculture. As labor became more specialized, sharper lines now divided each of the three top classes 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 required still more wealth. New forms of political and social organization required new forms of ritual specialization. The early cities were ritual complexes, living statements about royal power.14 The great kingship rituals such as the royal consecration rites and the horse sacrifice responded to a perceived need for an outward justification of the power exercised by “the emerging kingdoms with their increasingly stratified societies and their multi-lingual, multicultural and multi-racial populations.”15 The ceremony of royal consecration became a highly elaborate affair, involving a period of symbolic exile, a chariot race, and a symbolic gambling match, all of which were to have long-lasting resonances in the narrative literature. And such complex sacrifices required a more complex math, astronomy, geometry; they also led to a more precise knowledge of animal anatomy.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 the sciences in India (as theology was for medieval Christianity). The more complex sacrifices also required a more complex pri
esthood, leading to questions about the qualifications of those claiming the title.

  Thus texts of this period define a true Brahmin in terms that transcend birth: “Why do you 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. One follows 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 WOMAN

  Sages performing a sacrifice on the banks 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? Let him die of thirst, but he must not drink the water of the Sarasvati.” When he was alone in the desert, tormented by thirst, he composed a Vedic poem [10.30], and the Sarasvati came to him and surrounded him with her waters. When the sages saw this, they realized, “The gods know him; let us call him back.”18

  In this story, a person from outside the society of the upper classes is assimilated into the inner sanctum of the Vedic priesthood. The sages call him a son of a slave woman, Dasi-putra, a term usually designating the son of a Shudra mother, in this case also the son of a man named Ilusha, presumably a Brahmin.

  Shudras and Vaishyas play increasingly important roles in the Brahmanas. The surplus supported kings and an administrative bureaucracy and made a greater demand on the people who produced the wealth, taxation of a portion of the whole crop (according to Manu, a sixth of the 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, as we learn from one Brahmana:

  THE KING EATS THE PEOPLE

  “When a deer eats the barley, the farmer does not hope to nourish the animal; when a low-born woman becomes the mistress of a noble man, her husband does not hope to get rich on that nourishment.” Now, the barley is the people, and the deer is the royal power; thus the people are food for the royal power, and so the one who has royal power eats the people. And so the king does not raise animals; and so one does not anoint as king the son of a woman born of the people.20

  Though this text, like most texts of the ancient period, was ultimately passed through a Brahmin filter and therefore surely represents the interests of Brahmins in criticizing the king, it just as surely also captures (if only to use it for Brahminical purposes) the abuse, and the resentment, of people who, not being Brahmins, did not have immediate access to the text. Yet in addition to proclaiming the brutality of the king, it assumes that class lines cannot be crossed, a lowborn man should not allow his wife to have a highborn lover, and a man of the people (a Vaishya) cannot be king.

  The sacrifice was far from the only royal concern, as the historian Romila Thapar explains:

  The point at which wealth could be accumulated and spent on a variety of adjuncts to authority marked the point at which kingship was beginning to draw on political authority, rather than ritual authority alone. However, the ritual of the sacrifice as a necessary precondition to kingship could not become a permanent feature. Once kingdoms were established there were other demands on the wealth that went to support the kingdoms.21

  Ritual authority was thus supplemented by other trappings of authority, including armies and tax collectors. These expenses 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 history of Hinduism that it has been called “the inner conflict of tradition.”22

  KINGS AND PRIESTS

  The move down from the Punjab to the Ganges also sowed the seeds of a problem that was to have repercussions throughout the history of Hinduism: The Vedic people no longer had good grazing lands for their horses, and so it was no longer possible for every member of the tribe to keep a horse. The horse became a rich man’s beast, now a hierarchical as well an imperialist animal, but it retained its power as a popular cultural symbol, one whose meaning continued to shift in each new age all through subsequent Indian history. Horses and their power to 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 in the other, while the charioteer, literally the warrior’s right-hand man, held the reins in his right hand and a shield in front of both of them with his left hand, so that the archer would have both hands free to shoot. In this story, the king stands in the place of the warrior, holding not a weapon but a whip, while his royal chaplain or domestic priest (Purohita) serves as the charioteer, literally and figuratively holding the reins:

  THE KING AND THE PRIEST IN THE CHARIOT

  Vrisha was the royal chaplain (Purohita) of Triyaruna, king of the Ikshvakus. Now, in the old days the royal chaplain would hold the reins in the chariot for the king in order to watch out for the king, to keep him from doing any harm. As the two of them were driving along, they cut down with the wheel of the chariot the son of a Brahmin, 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 he could not pull them aside. And so they had cut down the boy. They argued with each other about it, and the priest threw down the reins and stepped down from the chariot. The king said, “The one 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.” Finally they said, “Let us ask,” and they went to ask the Ikshvakus. The Ikshvakus said, “The one who holds the reins is the driver. You are the murderer,” and they accused Vrisha, the priest.

  He prayed, “Let me get out of this; let me find help and a way out. Let that boy come to life.” He saw this mantra [9.65.28-29] and brought the boy to life with it.cd . . . For this is a mantra that cures and makes restoration. And it is also a mantra that gives you what you want. Whoever praises with this mantra gets whatever he wants.23

  The text, right from the start, casts a jaundiced eye upon the king; it assumes that you can’t let a king out alone without his keeper, the Brahmin, who goes along “to keep him from doing harm”—that is, from indulging in the royal addictions, here consisting of reckless driving. This is a transformation of the court chaplain’s usual task of washing the blood of battle and executions off the king’s hands after he has sinned.24 In this case, between the two of them they manage to murder an innocent child, in one of the earliest recorded hit-and-run incidents in history. That child is a Brahmin, related to Vrisha by class; in another variant of this story, the dead boy is actually Vrisha’s own son.25 The jury is hardly impartial, being made up entirely of the king’s people, the Ikshvakus, a great northern dynasty, and it is therefore not surprising that they reject the priest’s argument that it was all the king’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 no longer drove chariots, if in fact they ever did; the text metaphorically puts the chaplain in the driver’s seat or makes him the king’s right-hand man, jockeying for power.) The chariot of the senses that a person drives with one (priestly) foot on the brakes and the other (royal) foot on the accelerator is a recurrent image in Hindu philosophy; we have seen a Vedic poem (10.119) in which someone exhilarated (or stoned) on soma says that the drinks have carried him up and away, “Like horses bolting with a chariot.”26 In the Upanishads, as we will soon see, the intellect/charioteer reins in the senses/horses that pull the chariot of the mind.27 In the Bhagavad Gita, the incarnate god Krishna holds the reins for Prince Arjuna, though there Arjuna holds back, and Krishna goads him forward. Charioteers are major players in both the martial and the narrative/ philosophical world.

  The point of
this story of Vrisha seems to be that royal power trumps priestly power in the courts, since the jury is stacked; the only way that the priest can avoid punishment is by using priestly 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 he wants to raise the dead. This same power will belong to the person who hears the story and thus gains access to the mantra known as the “fruits of hearing” (phala shruti) that comes at the end of many stories of this type: “Whoever knows this” (yo evam veda) gets whatever the protagonist of the story got. (It is guaranteed to work, though it is not foolproof: If you say it and do not get the promised reward, you must have said it wrong somehow.) This is a major innovation of the Brahmana texts: Where the Vedas asked, and hoped, that the gods would help them, the Brahmins 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 not get justice, vindication.

  THE FIRE IN THE WOMAN

  But 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 of the Ikshvakus: If they placed food on the fire in the evening, by morning it still had not been cooked; and if they placed food on the fire in the morning, the same thing happened to it [by evening]. Then they said, “We have displeased a Brahmin and treated him with dishonor. That is why the power has gone out of our fire. Let us invite him back.” They invited him, and he came back, just like a Brahmin summoned by a king. As he arrived, he prayed, “Let me see this power of fire.” He saw this mantra and sang it over the fire. Then he saw this: “The wife of Triyaruna is a flesh-eating ghoul [pishachi]. She is the one who has covered the fire with a cushion and sits on it.” Then he spoke these verses from the Rig Veda [5.2.12, 9-10], and as he finished saying them, the power of the fire ran up into her and burned her all up. Then they dispersed that power of the fire properly, here and there [in each house], and the fire cooked for them properly.28