The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  Of course the kings in these texts may never have existed; they may simply have been dreamed up by Brahmin authors, purely a literary convention, a fantasy. dg Texts record sentiments, not events. But it is surely significant that such a positive fantasy, if it is just a fantasy, about royal sages found its way into the texts of the Brahmin imaginary; certainly it is telling that the Upanishads attributed to the Kshatriyas ideas questioning the centrality of the ritual and thus challenging the power of the Brahmins. When the Brahmin Gargya asks King Ajatashatru of Kashi to be his teacher, the king says, “Isn’t it a reversal of the norm for a Brahmin to become the pupil of a Kshatriya?” But he does it anyway (BU 2.1.15). These passages may represent a Kshatriya reaction to the Brahmin takeover during the preceding centuries, the period of the Brahmanas.

  Nor were Kshatriyas the only non-Brahmins who contributed new ideas to the Upanishads:

  RAIKVA, THE MAN UNDER THE CART

  King Janashruti was devoted to giving a great deal of everything, especially food, thinking, “People will eat food from me everywhere.” One night some 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 the dice wins all the lower throws, Raikva, the gatherer, takes the credit for all the good things that people do. So does anyone who knows what Raikva knows.” Janashruti overheard them. He summoned his steward and repeated to him what the geese had said.

  The steward searched in vain and said to the king, “Can’t find him.” The king said, “Look for Raikva in a place where one would search for a non-Brahmin.” The steward saw a man under a cart scratching his sores. He approached 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 Raikva hundreds of cows and gold if he would teach him the deity that he worshiped, but Raikva refused, saying, “Take them back, Shudra!” When, however, Janashruti offered him all this and his daughter, Raikva lifted up her face and said, “With just this face you could have bought me cheap (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 that Brahmins always like best) and who likes women. It is extremely cheeky of him to call Janashruti a Shudra. Raikva is said to be a gatherer, which may refer to his knack of gathering up everyone else’s good karma,dh as a successful gambler gathers up the dice of the losers, another early example of the transfer of karma from one person to another. But “gathering” may also refer 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 so many homeless people, gathering up other people’s garbage for his own use. The two meanings work well together: The man who lives on richer people’s garbage also lives off their good deeds. (Much later, in the Mahabharata [14.90], several people, including a mongoose, tell King Yudhishthira about the great virtue of “the way of gleaning.”) At first the steward presumably searches for a Brahmin, for he has to be specifically instructed to search elsewhere. That Janashruti can understand the talking animals (wild geese, which often carry messages in Hindu mythology) is evidence of his high spiritual achievement, but the non-Brahmin Raikva is higher still; his secret knowledge (about the wind and breath as gatherers) trumps Janashruti’s ace of Vedic generosity.

  An innovator of unknown paternal lineage and hence questionable class appears in the story that immediately follows the tale of Raikva, the story of Satyakama Jabala, the hero of the vignette at the head of this chapter. For Satyakama’s mother had slept with many men. (“I got around a lot” [bahu aham caranti] has the same double meaning in Sanskrit as it has in English—to move from one place to another and from one sexual partner to another—as well as a third, purely Indian meaning that is also relevant here: to wander as a mendicant.) An ancient Indian text that makes the son of such a woman a spiritual leader is a feminist tract. Such a text also takes truth rather than birth as the criterion of Brahminhood, though it still maintains that only a Brahmin, however defined, may learn the Veda. (Here we may recall the Brahmana statement “Why do you inquire about the father or the mother of a Brahmin? When you find knowledge in someone, that is his father and his grandfather.”)29 Satyakama needs to know his male lineage in order to prove that he was born in a family that has a right to learn the Veda; by conventional rules, he cannot matriculate in Varanasi U and sign up for Upanishads 108 unless he 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 thrive and increase to a thousand, and after some years the bull speaks to him, and so do the fire, and a goose, 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 to converse with these animals is a sign of his extraordinary religious talent, rare in any class.

  SHRAMANAS AND BRAHMANAS

  Though the idea of karma seems to have strong Vedic roots, strong enough that it seems almost inevitable that someone would have come up with it sooner or later (it was, one might say, the karma of the Upanishads to have that idea), ideas such as the identity of the atman with brahman, transmigration, and the Release from transmigration through renunciation and asceticism don’t have such strong Vedic ties and send us out, like Janashruti’s steward, to look for non-Vedic sources.

  There were already in existence at this time a number of ascetic movements that were non-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 to Buddhism 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. The breakaway groups not only abhorred sacrifice but also rejected the Veda as revelation and disregarded Brahminical teachings and Brahminical claims to divine authority,32 three more crucial points that distinguished them from Hindus, even from those Hindus who were beginning to take up some of the new doctrines and practices. The Buddhists also denied the existence of an individual soul, scorned the gods (particularly Indradi) as insignificant and/or ridiculous and, like the authors of some of the Upanishads, argued that conduct rather than birth determined the true Brahmin, all significant departures from Hindu doctrines. Moreover, Buddhist monks lived together 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 and wandered alone.

  A number of groups engaged in friendly intellectual combat at this time. There were probably early adherents of what were to become the six major philosophical schools of Hinduism: Critical Inquiry (Mimamsa ), Logic (Nyaya), Particularism (Vaisheshika), Numbers (Sankhya), Yoga, and Vedanta. Ajivikas (contemporaries of the Jainas and Buddhists) rejected free 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 only rejected the doctrine of reincarnation (arguing that when the body was destroyed, the spirit that had been created specifically for it dissolved back into nothingness) but believed that physical sense 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 surely does not do them justice. Even the permissive Kama-sutra (c. second century CE) gives a simplistic version of the Materialist position: “Materialists say: ‘People should not perform reli
gious acts, for their results are in the world to come and that is doubtful. Who but a fool would take what is in his own hand and put it in someone else’s hand? Better a pigeon today than a 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 rebellious intellectual movements that gained momentum in the vigorous public debates of the fifth century BCE.

  Renunciants are sometimes called Shramanas (“toilers,” designating wanderers, ascetics), in contrast with Brahmanas (the Sanskrit word for Brahmins; the name of Shramanas stuck in part because of the felicitous assonance).dj “Shramana” at first often referred to ascetics both within and without the Hindu fold,34 including Ajivikas, Nastikas, Lokayatas, and Charvakas.35 But 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 to mean anyone low or vile or, finally, naked.

  Shramanas and Brahmins were said to fight like snakes and mongooses36 or as we would say, like cats and dogs. Many Brahmins loathed the non-Vedic Shramanas (Buddhists and Jainas), who had entirely rejected, in favor of forest meditation, the sacrificial system that was the Brahmin livelihood. But the Shramanas within the Hindu fold, who still paid lip service, at least, to the Vedas and sacrifice but rejected the householder life (also a factor in Brahmin livelihood), 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 they would 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 that the 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 deal of the renunciant ideal37 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, the low-caste drifter.

  But in addition to the Brahminic and Shramanic strains enriching the Upanishads, there was, as always, the great Indian catchall of “local beliefs and customs,”38 or that ever-ready source 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] from animal to human existence.”39 There is also always the possibility of infusion of ideas from the descendants of the Indus Valley Civilization, an unknowable pool of what might be radically different ideas, a tantalizing source that some would, and others would not, distinguish from the Adivasis and Dravidians. But another, better answer for the source of these ideas about individual salvation, better perhaps than a pool whose existence can’t be proved, might be simply to 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 natural development from Vedic ideas (no genius required); Kshatriyas; some brilliant person in the Vedic camp; the IVC and its descendants; Adivasis—is often nothing more than confessing, “I can’t find it in the Veda.”

  WOMEN AND OTHER LOWLIFE

  The criterion of individual intellectual talent colors an Upanishadic story of a Brahmin with two wives, who are distinguished not by their class (as multiple wives often are) but by their minds:

  THE THEOLOGICAL WIFE AND THE WORLDLY WIFE

  Yajnavalkya had two wives, Maitreyi and Katyayani. Of the two, Maitreyi was a woman who took part in theological discussions, while Katyayani’s understanding was limited to women’s affairs. One day, as he was preparing to set out to wander as an ascetic, Yajnavalkya said, “Maitreyi, I am about to go away from this place. So come, let me make a settlement between you and Katyayani.” Maitreyi replied, “What is the point in getting something that will not make me immortal? Tell me instead all that you know.” Yajnavalkya replied, “I have always been very fond of you, and now you have made me even more so. Come, my dear, and I will explain it to you. But do try to concentrate (BU 4.5; cf. BU 2.4).”

  And he explains the doctrine of the self to her and goes away. Katyayani never even appears.dk Presumably she (like Martha in the gospel story) takes care of the house (which, also presumably, she will inherit when their husband abandons both wives to take the ascetic path) while the other woman talks theology.

  Some women therefore took part in the new theological debates, though none is depicted as an author. Gargi, the feistiest woman in the Upanishads,dl is a staunch defender of Yajnavalkya. 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 shatter40). Another time, she asks Yajnavalkya 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 to challenge an enemy,” an extraordinarily masculine, and violent, simile for a woman. When he answers her, at some length, she cries out, “Distinguished Brahmins! You should count yourselves lucky if you escape from this man without paying him anything more than your respects. None of you will ever defeat him in a theological debate (BU 3.8).” This is one tough lady, cast from the same mold as Urvashi and, later, Draupadi. (A later text even suggests that in addition to his other two wives, Yajnavalkya was also married to Gargi.41)

  Women also had other options. Buddhism offered women security within a socially approved 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 the Buddhists did not value nuns as highly as monks; there is even a tradition that the Buddha himself cautioned against admitting women, which, he warned, would spell the downfall of the order 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 of supplementary 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, often performed by householders who were not necessarily Brahmins. The Grihya Sutras regulated and normalized domestic life, bringing about the penetration of ritual regulation into the daily life of the household, on a scale not seen before. We may look at this development in two different ways, both as a greater power among householders who now had many rituals that they could perform without the help of a Brahmin and as the extension of Brahmin power, through the codification of texts about householders’ rituals that had not previously been under Brahmin regulation. 44 While the earlier Shrauta Sutras had made mandatory large-scale ritual performances, in some of which (such as the horse sacrifice) the sacrificer’s wife had to be present and even to speak, though not to speak Vedic mantras, the Grihya Sutras that regulated daily practices to be performed in the home required the more active participation of the sacrificer’s wife and other members of the household. This too may explain the proactive behavior of some of the women in the Upanishads.

  ANIMALS

  Low or excluded people are often associated with animals, like Raikva and Satyakama with geese and bulls, and the fact that certain animals actually proclaim new Upanishadic doctrines tells us something important about the porosity of the class structure in religious circles at this time.

  Dogs are satirically transformed from the lowest to the highest caste in an Upanishadic passage that may have been inspired by the Vedic poem likening priests (who begin their prayers with the sacred syllable
“Om!”) to frogs singing in the rainy season:

  THE SONG OF THE DOGS

  A group of dogs asked a Vedic priest, “Please, sir, we’d like to find some food by singing for our supper. We are really hungry.” He asked them to return the next morning, and so the dogs filed in, sliding in slyly as priests slide in slyly in a file, each holding on to the back of the one in front of him. They sat down together and began to hum. Then they sang, “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 passage concludes 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 of Orwell’s Animal Farm, truly bolshie. For dogs are already stigmatized as eaters of carrion; when someone annoys Yajnavalkya by asking where the heart is lodged, he replies, impatiently, “In the body, you idiot! If it were anywhere other than in ourselves, dogs would eat it, or birds would tear it up (BU 3.9.25).” The author of this text may be poking fun at Brahmins or pleading for more 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 the Upanishads is a constant reminder of the Kshatriya presence in these texts. A horse auspiciously opens the very first line of the very first Upanishad: “The head of the sacrificial horse is the dawn; 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 cosmic counterparts; his eye is the sun just as, in the funeral hymn in the Rig Veda, the eye of the dead man is dispersed (back) to the sun, and the sun is born from the eye of the Primeval Man. The stallion’s gaping mouth of flame is later echoed in the submarine mare with fire in her mouth.