The Hindus
Page 43
But the Kama-sutra departs from this view in significant ways, providing, once again, an alternative view of Hindu social customs. It does not use the pejorative term kliba at all, but speaks instead of a “third nature” or perhaps a “third sexuality” in the sense of sexual behavior: tritiya prakriti, a term that first appears in this sense in the Mahabharata. Prakriti (“nature”; more literally, “what is made before”), from pra (“before”) and kri (the verb “to make”), is a term that we have encountered twice in other forms: as the natural language Prakrit in contrast with the artificial language Sanskrit and as the word for “matter” in contrast with “spirit” (purusha).gr Here is what the Kama-sutra has to say about the third nature:
There are two sorts of third nature, in the form of a woman and in the form of a man. The one in the form of a woman imitates a woman’s dress, chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty, and bashfulness. The act that is done in the sexual organ is done in her mouth, and they call that “oral sex.” She gets her sexual pleasure and erotic arousal as well as her livelihood from this, living like a courtesan. That is the person of the third nature in the form of a woman (2.9.6-11).
The Kama-sutra says nothing more about this cross-dressing male, with his stereotypical female gender behavior, but it discusses the fellatio technique of the closeted man of the third nature, who presents himself not as a woman but as a man, a masseur, in considerable sensual detail, in the longest consecutive passage in the text describing a physical act, and with what might even be called gusto (2.9.12-24). Two verses that immediately follow the section about the third nature describe men who seem bound to one another by discriminating affection rather than promiscuous passion (2.9.35-36). These men are called men-about-town, the term used to designate the hetero (or even metro) sexual heroes of the Kama-sutra. In striking contrast with workingmen of the third nature, always designated by the pronoun “she” no matter whether she dresses as a man or as a woman, these men who are bound by affection are described with nouns and pronouns that unambiguously designate males, yet they are grouped with women. Vatsyayana remarks casually that some people list a person of the third nature as a “different” sort of woman who may be a man’s lover (1.5.27). Perhaps, then, they are bisexuals.
Vatsyayana is unique in the literature of the period in describing lesbian activity. He does this at the beginning of the chapter about the harem, in a brief passage about what he calls “Oriental customs” (5.6.2-4). (The use of the term “Oriental,” or “Eastern,” for what Vatsyayana regards as a disreputable lesbian practice in what was soon to be a colonized part of the Gupta Empire—indeed, the eastern part—suggests that “Orientalism” began not with the British but with the Orientals themselves.) These women use dildos, as well as bulbs, roots, or fruits that have the form of the male organ, and statues of men that have distinct sexual characteristics. But they engage in sexual acts with one another not through the kind of personal choice that drives a man of the third nature, but only in the absence of men, as is sometimes said of men in prison or English boys in boarding schools: “The women of the harem cannot meet men, because they are carefully guarded; and since they have only one husband shared by many women in common, they are not satisfied. Therefore they give pleasure to one another with the following techniques.” The commentary makes this explicit, and also helpfully suggests the particular vegetables that one might use: “By imagining a man, they experience a heightened emotion that gives extreme satisfaction. These things have a form just like the male sexual organ: the bulbs of arrowroot, plantain, and so forth; the roots of coconut palms, breadfruit, and so forth; and the fruits of the bottle-gourd, cucumber, and so forth (5.6.2).” One can imagine little gardens of plantain and cucumber being tenderly cultivated within the inner courtyards of the palace. The Kama-sutra makes only one brief reference to women who may have chosen women as sexual partners in preference to men (7.1.20; cf. Manu 8.369-70), and it never refers to women of this type as people of a “third nature.” Still, here is an instance in which ancient Hindu attitudes to human behavior are far more liberal than those that have prevailed in Europe and America for most of their history.
THE ESCAPE CLAUSE
The shastras present, from time to time, diametrically opposed, even contradictory opinions on a particular subject, without coming down strongly in favor of one or the other. One striking example of an apparent contradiction is Manu’s discussion of the levirate (niyoga), the law that allows a woman to sleep with her husband’s brother when the husband has failed to produce a male heir, a situation that frames the birth of the fathers of the Mahabharata heroes. Manu says that you should carry out the niyoga; in the next breath, he says that you should not, that it is not recommended, that it is despised (9.56-63, 9.64-68). The commentaries (and later scholars) explicitly regard these two sections as mutually contradictory. But Manu does mean both of them: He is saying that this is what one has to do in extremity, but that it is really a very bad thing to do, and that, if you do it, you should not enjoy it, and you should only do it once. If you have to do it, you must be very, very careful.
That is the way in which one should regard other apparent contradictions in Manu, such as the statement (repeated ad nauseam) that one must never kill a Brahmin and the statement: “A man may without hesitation kill anyone who attacks him with a weapon in his hand, even if it is his guru, a child or an old man, or a Brahmin thoroughly versed in the Veda, whether he does it openly or secretly; rage befalls rage (8.350-51).” One can similarly resolve Manu’s diatribes against the bride-price with his casual explanations of the way to pay it (3.51-54, 9.93-100, 8.204, 8.366). But it is not difficult to make sense of all this: Ideally, you should not sleep with your brother’s wife or kill a Brahmin or accept a bride-price; but there are times when you cannot help doing it, and then Manu is there to tell you how to do it. This is what you do when caught between a rock and a hard place; it is the best you can do in a no-win situation to which there is no truly satisfactory solution.
The Sanskrit term for the rock and the hard place is apad, which may be translated “in extremity,” an emergency when normal rules do not apply, when all bets are off. Apad is often paired with dharma in the phrase apad-dharma, the right way to act in an emergency. It is the most specific of all the dharmas, even more specific than one’s own dharma (sva-dharma), let alone general dharma; indeed, it is the very opposite of sanatana or sadharana dharma, the dharma for everyone, always. Apad is further supplemented by other loophole concepts such as adversity (anaya), distress (arti), and near starvation (kshudha). In a famine a father may kill his son and Brahmins may eat dogs (10.105-08), which would otherwise make them “dog cookers.” The polluting power of dogs is overlooked in another context as well: “A woman’s mouth is always unpolluted, as is a bird that knocks down a fruit; a calf is unpolluted while the milk is flowing, and a dog is unpolluted when it catches a wild animal (5.130).” That is, since you want to eat the animal that the dog has caught, you need to redefine its mouth as pure, for that occasion.
The emergency escape clause is further bolstered by recurrent references to what is an astonishingly subjective standard of moral conduct (2.6, 12, 223; 4.161, 12.27, 37). Thus the elaborate web of rules, which, if followed to the letter, would paralyze human life entirely, is equally elaborately unraveled by Manu through the escape clauses. Every knot tied in one verse is untied in another verse; the constrictive fabric that he weaves in the central text he unweaves in the subtext of apad, as Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey carefully unwove at night what she had woven in the day.
Other apparent contradictions turn out to be conflations of realistic and idealized approaches to moral quandaries. Idealism, rather than realism, asserts itself in the framework of the shastras. But if the shastras themselves acknowledged the need to escape from the system, how seriously did rank-and-file Hindus take it? Many a young man must have seduced, or been seduced by, his guru’s wife. (This situation must have been
endemic, given both Manu’s paranoid terror of it and its likelihood in a world in which young women married old men who had young pupils.) How likely was such a man, afterward, in punishment, to “sleep on a heated iron bed or embrace a red-hot metal cylinder . . . or cut off his penis and testicles, hold them in his two cupped hands, and set out toward the south-west region of Ruin, walking straight ahead until he dies (11.104-05)”? Surely none but the most dedicated masochist would turn down the milder alternatives “to dispel the crime of violating his guru’s marriage-bed” that Manu, as always, realistically offers: “Or he should restrain his sensory powers and eat very little for three months, eating food fit for an oblation or barley-broth (11.106-07).” How do we know that anyone ever did any of this?gs Who believed the Brahmins? How was Manu used? The shastras were composed by the twice born, for the twice born, and (largely) of the twice born, but “twice born” is a tantalizingly imprecise term. Often it means any of the three upper classes, but usually it means Brahmins alone.
There was a curious lack of communication between theory and practice at this time; the information on pigments and measurements in the shastras on painting and architecture, respectively, do not correspond to the actual pigments and measurements of statuary, nor, on the other hand, is the extraordinary quality of the metal in the famous “Iron Pillar” of Mehrauli supported by the known existence of any treatise on metallurgy.52 The Kama-sutra comments explicitly on this gap between theory and practice, and for Manu there are several quite plausible possible scenarios that will apply in different proportions to different situations: Manu may be describing actual practices that everyone does, or that some people do, that some or all do only because he tells them to, or imagined practices that no one would dream of doing.
Nor was Manu the basis on which most Hindus decided what to do and what not to do; local traditions, often functioning as vernacular commentaries on Manu (much as case law functions as a commentary on the American Constitution), did that. Manu is not so much a law code as it is a second-order reflection on a law code, a meditation on what a law code is all about, on the problems raised by law codes. But in the realm of the ideal, Manu is the cornerstone of the Brahmin vision of what human life should be, a vision to which Hindus have always paid lip service and to which in many ways many still genuinely aspire. Like all shastras, it influenced expectations, tastes, and judgments, beneath the level of direct application of given cases. Often it set a mark that no one was expected to hit; sometimes it acknowledged the legitimacy of practices that it did not in fact encourage. The Kama-sutra too makes this distinctionnicely when it argues, in the only verse that appears twice in the text, once in regard to oral sex and once in regard to the use of drugs: “The statement that ‘There is a text for this’ does not justify a practice (2.9.41; 7.2.55).” The shastras therefore do not tell us what people actually did about anything, but as theoretical treatises they constitute one of the great cosmopolitan scientific literatures of the ancient world.
CHAPTER 13
BHAKTI IN SOUTH INDIA
100 BCE to 900 CE
CHRONOLOGY1
c. 300 BCE Greeks and Ashoka mention Pandyas, Cholas, and Cheras
c. 100 CE Cankam (“assembly”) poetry is composed
c. 375 CE Pallava dynasty is founded
c. 550-880 CE Chalukya dynasty thrives
c. 500-900 CE Nayanmar Shaiva Tamil poets live
c. 600-930 CE Alvar Vaishnava Tamil poets live
c. 800 CE Manikkavacakar composes the Tiruvacakam
c. 880-1200 CE Chola Empire dominates South India
CAN’T WE FIND SOME OTHER GOD?
I don’t call to him as my mother. I don’t call to him as my father.
I thought it would be enough to call him my lord—
but he pretends I don’t exist, doesn’t show an ounce of mercy.
If that lord who dwells in Paccilacciramam, surrounded by pools
filled with geese, postpones the mercies meant for his devotees—
can’t we find some other god?
Cuntarar, eighth century CE2
The image of god (Shiva, who dwells in Paccilacciramam) as a parent, as a female parent, and finally as an abandoning parent is central to the spirit of bhakti, as is the worshiper’s bold and intimate threat to abandon this god, echoing the divine mercilessness even while responding to the divine love. Bhakti, which is more a general religious lifestyle or movement than a specific sect, was a major force for inclusiveness with its antinomian attitudes toward Pariahs and women, yet the violence of the passions that it generated also led to interreligious hostility. This was the third alliance, in which gods were not only on the side of devout human worshipers (as in the first alliance) but also on the side of sinners, some of whom did not worship the god in any of the conventional ways.
TIME AND SPACE, CHRONOLOGY AND GEOGRAPHY
We have now reached a point in the historical narrative where a work of fiction would say, “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” or “In another part of the forest . . .” Until now it has been possible to maintain at least the illusion (maya) that there was a single line of development in an intertextual tradition largely centered in North India, a kind of family tree with branches that we could trace one by one, merely stopping occasionally to note the invasion of some South Indian kingdom by a North Indian king or the growing trade between north and south. But now even that illusion evaporates. For Indian history is more like a banyan tree,3 which, unlike the mighty oak, grows branches that return down to the earth again and again and become the roots and trunks of new trees with new branches so that eventually you have a forest of a banyan tree, and you no longer know which was the original trunk. The vertical line of time is intersected constantly by the horizontal line of space. And so we will have to keep doubling back in time to find out what has been going on in one place while we were looking somewhere else.
Now we must go south.
ANCIENT SOUTH INDIA
To understand the origins of bhakti, we need to have at least a general idea of the world in which bhakti was created, a world in which there was a synthesis between North Indian and South Indian cultural forms, active interaction between several religious movements and powerful political patronage of religion. There was constant contact and trade between North and South India at least by Mauryan times, in the fourth century BCE. South India was known already at the time of the Hebrew Bible (c. 1000 BCE) as a land of riches, perhaps the place to which King Solomongt sent his ships every three years, to bring back gold, silver, ivory, monkeys, and peacocks.4 The southern trade route brought pearls, shells, and the fine cottons of Madurai to western lands.5 There was bustling contact with Rome (the Romans imported mostly luxury articles: spices, jewels, textiles, ivories, and animals, such as monkeys, parakeets, and peacocks),6 with China, and with Indianized cultures in Southeast Asia.7 Oxen and mules were the caravan animals, camels in the desert, and more nimble-footed asses in rough hill terrain.8 Not horses.
The empires of South India endured far longer than any of the North Indian kingdoms, and some of them controlled, mutatis mutandis, just as much territory. The Greek historian Megasthenes, ambassador to the Mauryan king Chandragupta, in c. 300 BCE, says that the Pandya kingdom (the eastern part of the Tamil-speaking southernmost tip of India) extended to the sea and had 365 villages. Ashoka in his edicts mentions the Pandyas as well as the Cholas (the southern kingdom of Tamil Nadu), the sons of Kerala (the Cheras, on the western coast of South India), and the people on the island now known as Sri Lanka.gu The Tamils, in return, were well aware of the Mauryas in particular and North India in general.
The Chola king Rajaraja I (985-1014 CE) carved out an overseas empire. The Cholas were top dogs from the ninth to the early thirteenth century, pushing outward from the Kaveri river basin,9 attacking their neighbors, Cheras and Pandyas, as well as the present Sri Lanka to the south, and almost continually at war with their neighbors to the north, the Chalukyas. The Chalukya Pulakesh
in I (543-566 CE) performed a horse sacrifice and founded a dynasty in Karnataka, with its capital at Vatapi (now Badami); it spread through the Deccan,10 making treaties with the Cholas, Pandyas, and Cheras.11 The Cholas finally took over the Chalukya lands in about 880.
In addition to the three great South Indian kingdoms, the Cholas, Pandyas, and Cheras, which endured for centuries, the Pallava dynasty that ruled from Kanchipuram (Kanjeevaram), directly north of the three kingdoms, was a force to be reckoned with from 375 CE on. Pallava ports had been thriving centers of trade with China, Persia, and Rome from Roman times, but the Pallavas achieved some of their greatest works of art and literature in the sixth century CE, after the disintegration of the Gupta Empire; northern artisans contributed to many of the innovations in Pallava Sanskrit literature and temple-based architecture.