The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  THE ERAS OF THE TWO GREAT POEMS

  The Mahabharata story may have begun earlier than that of the Ramayana, but the text that we have was probably composed in North India between approximately 300 BCE and 300 CE,fb after the Mauryas and before the Guptas. It therefore shares the general chronology of the Ramayana, 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 in the same meter), and both are about war. They quote the same sources and tell many of the same stories. But their differences are more interesting. The geographical setting of the Mahabharata signals a time earlier than that of the Ramayana. The Mahabharata is set in and around the earlier capital of Hastinapur,fc already a great city in the age of the Brahmanas, instead of the Ramayana’s cities of Rajagriha in Magadha and Kashi in Koshala, which were settled later.31 The Mahabharata calls itself the “Fifth Veda” (though so do several other texts) and dresses its story 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 back beyond 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 identified with 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 950 BCE, the latter being the most reasonable assertion in light of what we know of Vedic history.fd

  Yet its central plot is really about the building of a great empire far more Mauryan than Vedic. In other ways too it is very much the product of its times, the interregnum between the Mauryan and Gupta empires in the Ganges plain.34 The text often refers to the quasi-Mauryan Artha-shastra, particularly when seeking textual support for hitting a man below the belt or when he’s down (10.1.47). The authors react in nuanced ways to the eddying currents of Ashokan Buddhism and the Brahmin ascendancy of the Shungas, striving somehow to tell the story of the destruction and reconstruction of entire groups or classes of people and, at the same time, to reconcile 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 the Mahabharata took place later, at the cusp of the third age and the fourth, the Kali Age, when all hell broke loose. The Ramayana imagines an age of order preceding that chaos, while the Mahabharata imagines the beginning of the breakdown, the planned obsolescence of the moral world. In keeping with the basic Indian belief that time is degenerative, the Ramayana, which is more optimistic and imagines a time of peace and prosperity, is said to precede the Mahabharata, 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 the Ramayana 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 gestation so long, and in conversation during so much of that gestation period, that each of the great poems precedes the other, like Brahma and Vishnu, or dharma and moksha. The Ramayana cites the Mahabharata from time to time, and the Mahabharata devotes an entire long section to retelling the Ramayana (3.257-75), a version of the story that is probably later than the one told in the Ramayana itself.35 Characters from each make cameo appearances in the other. Intertextuality here hath made its masterpiece; the two texts may have anxiety (amhas) about a lot of things but not about influence. 36 There is a famous Sanskrit poem that can be read, depending upon how you divide the compounds and choose among the multiple meanings of the words, to tell the story of either the Mahabharata or the Ramayana.37 In many ways, the two stories are two sides of the same coin.

  THE INTEGRITY OF THE MAHABHARATA

  The Mahabharata is a text of about seventy-five thousand versesfe or three million words, some fifteen times the combined length of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, or seven times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, and a hundred times more interesting. (The Ramayana is about a third of the length of the Mahabharata, some twenty thousand verses against the Mahabharata’s seventy-five thousand.) The bare bones of the central story (and there are hundreds 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 by Dharma, Bhima by the Wind (Vayu), Arjuna by Indra, and the Twins (Nakula and Sahadeva) by the Ashvins. All five of them married Draupadi. When Yudhishthira lost the kingdom to his cousins in a game of dice, the Pandavas and Draupadi went into exile for twelve years, at the end of 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, they regained their kingdom through a cataclysmic battle in which almost everyone on both sides was killed.

  The Mahabharata was retold very differently by all of its many authors in the long line of literary descent. It is so extremely fluid that there is no single Mahabharata; there are hundreds of Mahabharatas, hundreds of different manuscripts and innumerable oral versions (one reason why it is impossible to make an accurate calculation of the number of its verses). The Mahabharata is not contained in a text; the story is there to be picked up and found, salvaged as anonymous treasure from the ocean of story. It is constantly retold and rewritten both in Sanskrit and in vernacular dialects; it has been called “a work in progress,”38 a literature that “does not belong in a book.”39 The Mahabharata (1.1.23) describes itself as unlimited in both time and space—eternal and infinite: “Poets have told it before, and are telling it now, and will tell it again. What is here is also found elsewhere, but what is not here is found nowhere else.”40 It grows out of the oral tradition and then grows back into the oral tradition; it flickers back and forth between Sanskrit manuscripts and village storytellers, each adding new gemstones to the old mosaic, constantly reinterpreting it. The loose construction of the text gives it a quasinovelistic quality, open to new forms as well as new ideas, inviting different ideas to contest 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 does not mean that it is a miscellaneous mess with no unified point of view, let alone “the most monstrous 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 assumed that 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 Brahmin philosophy accidentally stuck onto a body of non-Brahmin folklore, like the heads and bodies of the 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 bit here, a bit there. But the powerful intertextuality of Hinduism ensured that anyone who added anything to the Mahabharata was well aware of the whole textual tradition behind it and fitted his or her own insight, or story, or long philosophical disquisition, thoughtfully into the ongoing conversation. However diverse its sources, for several thousand years the tradition has regarded it 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 any subject. The text has an integrity that the culture supports (in part by attributing it to a single author, 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 cultural dilemmas that no author could ever have resolved.

  THE POLITICAL WORLD OF THE MAHABHARATA

  The Mahabhara
ta challenged the relationships between the two upper classes, only ultimately to reconfirm them. For example, the career of King Pushyamitra, the Brahmin who became a general and reinstated Hinduism over Buddhism in his kingdom, may have inspired an important episode in the Mahabharata, the tale of Parashurama (“Rama with an Ax”), the son of a Brahmin father and Kshatriya mother. When a Kshatriya killed Parashurama’s father, he avenged the murder by killing the entire class of Kshatriyas, over twenty-one generations. He also 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 to attack Kshatriya despotism and royal greed and to undo the bifurcation of temporal and spiritual power. The fantasy of Brahmins exterminating Kshatriyas and becoming Kshatriyas (a goal that was also attributed to an early historical king, Mahapadma Nanda) may also have been a projection of Brahmin fears that the Kshatriyas would exterminate Brahmins, by converting to Buddhism or Jainism or by encouraging renunciant Hindu sects.43

  VIOLENCE OF AND TOWARD ANIMALS

  We may see a parallel, perhaps a historical influence, between the ambivalence toward nonviolence (ahimsa) expressed in the Ashokan edicts and in the Mahabharata.

  The Mahabharata is about what has been called “grotesque, sanctioned violence,” 44 and violence not only toward animals but among them is a central theme. The assumption that the relationship between the animals themselves was, one might say, red in tooth and claw,ff was enshrined 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 asks Manu to save him from the big fish who will otherwise eat him, a literal instance of the metaphor for the vicious, cannibalistic aspect of human nature, the dark things that swim deep in the waters of the unconscious. This image of virtual anarchy was used to justify a law and order agenda and to promote the strict enforcement of restrictive versions of dharma, in order to keep people from behaving like animals. The assertion that without a king wielding punishment the stronger would devour the weaker as big fish eat small fish (or, sometimes, that they would roast them like fish on 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 the opposite agenda, anarchy, more precisely the jettisoning of the ancient India equivalent of the Geneva Convention (or the Marquess of Queens-berry’s rules), on the assumption that people too are animals and cannot be stopped from acting like animals. When Arjuna urges Yudhishthira to action, he says: “I see no being that lives in the world without violence. Creatures exist at one another’s expense; the stronger consume the weaker. The mongoose eats mice, just as the cat eats 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 of human beings at the center of the Mahabharata, stand like bookends framing the introductory book.45 It begins with King Janamejaya’s attempt to murder all the snakes in the world in revenge 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 sacrifice in 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 must have 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 in the first book sets the stage for the central Mahabharata story. The story of a sacrifice that goes horribly 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’s sacrifice 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, with burning wings, eyes, and paws (1.217).” Only a few snakes still remained alive when a compassionate sage stopped the snake sacrifice, and only six creatures survived (one snake, four birds, and Maya, the architect of the antigods) when Agni, sated, stopped burning the forest.

  YUDHISHTHIRA’S DOG

  Stories about animals are sometimes really about animals, the treatment of whom was, as we have seen, both a public concern of rulers and an issue that Vedic and non-Vedic people often disputed. 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 regards as unclean scavengers, literally untouchable (a-sprishya), the parasites of Pariahs who are themselves regarded as parasites. Even Yudhishthira uses dogs as symbols of aggression when he says that humans negotiating peace are like dogs: “tail wagging, a bark, a bark back, backing off, baring the teeth howling, and then the fight begins, and the stronger one wins and eats the meat. 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 dogs symbolic of low castes, though the Gita insists that wise people cast the same gaze on a learned Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog, or a dog cooker (5.18), the Mahabharata generally upholds the basic prejudice against dogs, as in this story, which also makes clear the analogy between dogs and upwardly mobile Pariahs:

  THE DOG WHO WOULD BE LION

  Once there was an ascetic of such goodness that the flesh-eating wild animals—lions and tigers and bears, as well as rutting elephants, leopards, and rhinoceroses—were like his disciples. A dog, weak and emaciated from eating only fruits and roots, like the sage, became attached to him out of affection, tranquil, with a heart like that of a human being. One day a hungry leopard came there and was about to seize the dog as his prey when the dog begged the sage to save him. The sage turned him into a leopard, and then, when a tiger 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 read his thoughts and turned him back into a dog, his own proper form by birth [jati]. The dog moped about unhappily until the sage drove him out of the hermitage [12.115-19].

  This dog even has a human heart, but he must not be allowed to get ideas above his station. The phrase “his own proper form by birth” (jati) can also be translated, “his own proper form by caste,” for jati means both “birth” and “caste.” Both the dog and the sage are all wrong from the very beginning. The dog violates dog dharma by being a vegetarian, whereas he should be a carnivore, and the sage is wrong too to protect the dog by making him bigger and bigger instead of, like Manu with the expanding fish, putting him in bigger and bigger places. But the sage does not reciprocate the dog’s devotion or attachment to him. Whereas the dog misrecognizes himself as a human, the sage in the end is as cruel as a dog.48

  A very different point of view is expressed by the tale of a dog with which this chapter began, “Yudhishthira’s Dilemma,” an episode in which Yudhishthira refuses to go to heaven without the stray dog who has attached itself to him, as the dog who would be lion attached himself to the ascetic—though Yudhishthira’s dog proves true to the end. What is most striking about this passage is that the god of Dharma himself becomes incarnate in this animal; it is as if the god of the Hebrew Bible had become incarnate in a pig.fi

  Dhar
ma uses the dog to make a powerful ethical point; this is surely a way of arguing about 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 should not be allowed into temples. All good Hindus go to heaven (in this period), but they do so after dying and being given different, heavenly bodies; Yudhishthira is unique in being given the gift of going to heaven in his own body.fj Perhaps in acknowledging his bond with animals, treating his dog like “someone who has come to you for refuge” or “a friend,” Yudhishthira has somehow preserved the animality of his own body (that very animality denied by the sages, who regard both dogs and women as dirty). And so he enters heaven not merely as a disembodied spirit but as his entire embodied self.49

  Yudhishthira refuses to abandon a dog who is “devoted” (bhakta) to him; heaven will not be heaven if he cannot bring his dog with him.‡ The dog, the loyal dog, is, after all, the natural bhakta of the animal kingdom; it’s no accident that it’s a dog, not, say, a cat, who follows Yudhishthira like that. (Cats, in Hinduism, are depicted as religious hypocrites.§) But bhakti at this period meant little more than belonging to someone, being dedicated to someone as a servant or loyal friend (or, occasionally, lover, as the term is sometimes also used for carnal love); it did not yet have the specific overtone of passionate love between a god and his devotee that was to become 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.