The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  EARLY TAMIL BHAKTI LITERATURE

  As Pallava and Chola political power and architecture spread, so did bhakti, becoming a riptide that cut across the still-powerful current of Vedic sacrifice, just as moksha had done centuries earlier. Beginning among Tamil-literate people,12 bhakti soon entered the literatures of other Dravidian languages and then reached nonliterate people. It swept over the subcontinent, fertilizing the worship of Krishna at Mathura and of Jagannatha at Puri, as well as widespread traditions of pilgrimage and temple festivals. Always it kept its Tamil character and thus transported Tamil qualities to the north, transforming northern bhakti into a mix of northern and southern, Sanskrit and Tamil forms.13

  The geographical divide is matched by a major linguistic shift, from Sanskrit and the North Indian vernaculars derived from it (Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, and so forth) to Tamil (a Dravidian language, from a family entirely separate from the Indo-European group) and its South Indian cousins, such as Telugu in Andhra, Kannada in Mysore, and Malayalam in Kerala. Although we have no surviving literature in Tamil until anthologies made in the sixth century CE, other forms of evidence tell us a great deal about a thriving culture in South India, much of it carried on in Tamil, from at least the time of Ashoka, in the third century BCE. As with Sanskrit and the North Indian vernaculars, Tamil was the language of royal decrees and poetry for many centuries before texts in Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam began to be preserved.

  Tamil as a literary language appears to have developed from traditions separate from those of Sanskrit. The inscriptions in Tamil dedications of caves were written in a form of Tamil Brahmi script, probably brought not south from the Mauryan kingdom but north from Sri Lanka.14 The earliest extant Tamil texts are anthologies of roughly twenty-three hundred short poems probably composed by the early centuries of the Common Era, then anthologized under the Pandyas and later reanthologized under the Cholas in the ninth to thirteenth century.15 The poems are known in their totality as Cankam (“assembly”) poetry, named after a series of three legendary assemblies said to have lasted for a total of 9,990 years long, long ago. The sea is said to have destroyed the cities where the first two assemblies were held, yet another variant of that most malleable of myths, the legend of the flood. “Cankam” is the Tamil transcription of the Sanskrit /Pali word sangham (“assembly”) and may have been applied to this literature as an afterthought, as a Hindu response to the challenge of Buddhists and Jainas, who termed their own communities sanghams. The Cankam anthologies demonstrate an awareness of Sanskrit literature (particularly the Mahabharata and Ramayana), of the Nandas and Mauryas, and of Buddhists and Jainas.

  Brahmins who settled in the South when kingdoms were first established there gradually introduced Sanskrit into the local language and in return learned not only Tamil words but Tamil deities and rituals and much else.16 This two-way process meant that Tamil forms of religious sentiment moved into Sanskrit (which had had Dravidian loanwords already from the time of the Rig Veda) and went north. The Sanskrit Puranas (compendiums of myth and history) arose in the context of the development of kingdoms in the Deccan—Chalukyas and Pallavas in particular.17 The Tamil “local Puranas” (sthala puranas) both echoed the Sanskritic forms and contributed to the contents of the Bhagavata Purana, composed in South India.

  A few of the Cankam poems are already devoted to religious subjects, singing the praise of Tirumal (Vishnu) and the river goddess Vaikai, or of Murukan, the Tamil god who had by now coalesced with the northern god Skanda, son of Shiva and Parvati. But the overwhelming majority of these first Tamil poems were devoted to two great secular themes, contrasting the intimate emotions of love, the “inner” (akam) world, with the virile public world of politics and war, the “outer” (puram) world. The poems that praised kings and heroes in the puram genre were the basis of later hymns in praise of the gods.

  The akam poems used geographical landscapes, peopled by animals and characterized by particular flowers, to map the five major interior landscapes of the emotions: love in union (mountains, with monkeys, elephants, horses, and bulls); patiently waiting for a wife (forest and pasture, with deer), anger at infidelity (river valley, with storks, herons, buffalo); anxiously waiting for the beloved (seashore, with seagulls, crocodiles, sharks); separation (desert waste-land, with vultures, starving elephants, tigers, wolves).18 Akam poetry also distinguished seven types of love, of which the first is unrequited love and the last is mismatched love (when the object of desire is too far above the one who desires). The bhakti poets took these secular themes, particularly those involving what Sanskrit poetry called “love in separation” (viraha), and reworked them to express the theological anguish of the devotee who is separated from the otiose god, not because the god does not love him in return but because the god is apparently occupied elsewhere.gv The assumption seems to be that of the old blues refrain “How can I miss you if you never go away?”

  Beginning in about 600 CE, the wandering poets and saints devoted to Shiva (the Nayanmars,gw traditionally said to number sixty-three) and to Krishna-Vishnu (the twelve Alvars) sang poems in the devotional mode of bhakti. The group of Nayanmars known as the first three (Appar, Campantar, and Cuntarar, sixth to eighth century) formed the collection called the Tevaram,19 which departed from the Cankam style in using a very different Tamil grammar. Nammalvar (“Our Alvar”), the last of the great Alvars, writing in the ninth century, called his work “the sacred spoken word” (tiruvaymoli), and Manikkavacakar (late ninth century) called his Shaiva text “the sacred speech” (Tiruvacakam ).20 These works were clearly meant to be performed orally, recited, and since the tenth century they have been performed, both in homes and in temples.

  Bhakti in the sense of supreme devotion to a god, Shiva, and even to the guru as god, appeared in the Shvetashvatara Upanishad (6.23). Ekalavya in the Mahabharata demonstrates a kind of primitive bhakti: great devotion to the guru and physical self-violence. The concept of bhakti was further developed in the Ramayana and the Gita, which established devotion as a third alternative to ritual action and knowledge. But South Indian bhakti ratchets up the emotion from the Gita, so that even a direct quotation from the Gita takes on an entirely different meaning in the new context, as basic words like karma and bhakti shift their connotations.

  The Tamils had words for bhakti (such as anpu and parru), though eventually they also came to use the Sanskrit term (which became patti in Tamil). But the Tamil poets transformed the concept of bhakti not only by applying it to the local traditions of the miraculous exploits of local saints but by infusing it with a more personal confrontation, an insistence on actual physical and visual presence, a passionate transference and countertransference. A typically intimate and rural note is evident in the Alvars’ retelling of the legend in the Valmiki Ramayana about a squirrel who assisted Rama in building the bridge to Lanka to rescue Sita; the Alvars add that in gratitude for this assistance, Rama touched the squirrel and imprinted on it the three marks visible on all Indian squirrels today.gx21 The emotional involvement, the pity, desire, and compassion of the bhakti gods causes them to forget that they are above it all, as metaphysics demands, and reduces them to the human level, as mythology demands.

  Despite its royal and literary roots, bhakti is also a folk and oral phenomenon. Many of the bhakti poems were based on oral compositions, some probably even by illiterate saints.22 Both Shaiva and Vaishnava bhakti movements incorporated folk religion and folk song into what was already a rich mix of Vedic and Upanishadic concepts, mythologies, Buddhism, Jainism, conventions of Tamil and Sanskrit poetry, and early Tamil conceptions of love, service, women, and kings,23 to which after a while they added elements of Islam. This cultural bricolage is the rule rather than the exception in India, but the South Indian use of it is particularly diverse. As A. K. Ramanujan and Norman Cutler put it, “Past traditions and borrowings are thus re-worked into bhakti; they become materials, signifiers for a new signification, as a bicycle seat becomes a bull’s head in Picasso. Ofte
n the listener/reader moves between the original material and the work before him—the double vision is part of the poetic effect.”24 This too was a two-way street, for just as Picasso imagined someone in need of a bicycle seat using his bull’s head for that purpose,25 so the new bhakti images also filtered back into other traditions, including Sanskrit traditions.

  Unlike most Sanskrit authors and Cankam poets, the bhakti poets revealed details of their own lives and personalities in their texts, so that the voice of the saint is heard in the poems. The older myths take on new dimensions in the poetry: “What happens to someone else in a mythic scenario happens to the speaker in the poem.”26 And so we encounter now the use of the first person, a new literary register. It is not entirely unprecedented; we heard some voices, even women’s voices (such as Apala’s), in direct speech in the Rig Veda, and a moment in the Mahabharata when the narrator breaks through and reminds the reader, “ I have already told you” (about Yudhishthira’s dog). But the first person comes into its own in a major way in Cankam poetry and thence in South Indian bhakti.

  SECTARIAN DIVERSITY IN SOUTH INDIAN TEMPLES

  The growth of bhakti is intimately connected with the burgeoning of sectarian temples. We have seen textual evidence of the growth of sectarianism in the Mahabharata and Ramayana period, supported by epigraphs and references to temples in texts such as the Kama-sutra and the Artha-shastra. We have noted the cave temples of Bhaja, Karle, Nasik, Ajanta, and Ellora. And we will soon encounter the sixth-century Vishnu temple in Deogarh in Rajasthan, and other Gupta temples at Aihole, Badami, and Pattadakal. Now is the moment to consider the first substantial groups of temples that we can see in the flesh, as it were, in South India, for under the Pallavas, temples began to grow into temple cities.

  Building temples may have been, in part, a response to the widespread Buddhist practice of building stupas or to the Jaina and Buddhist veneration of statues of enlightened figures. Hindus vied with Buddhists in competitive fund-raising, and financing temples or stupas became a bone of contention. One temple at Aihole, dedicated to a Jaina saint, has an inscription dated 636, which marks this as one of the earliest dated temples in India.27 The Pallavas supported Buddhists, Jainas, and Brahmins and were patrons of music, painting, and literature. Many craftsmen who had worked on the caves at Ajanta, in the north, emigrated southward to meet the growing demand for Hindu art and architecture in the Tamil kingdoms.28

  Narasimha Varman I (630-638), also known as Mahamalla or Mamalla (“great wrestler”), began the great temple complex at Mamallapuram that was named after him (it was also called Mahabalipuram); several other Pallavas probably completed it, over an extended period. At Mamallapuram, there is a free-standing Shaiva Shore Temple, a cave of Vishnu in his boar incarnation, an image of Durga slaying the buffalo demon, and five magnificent temples, called chariots (raths), all hewn from a single giant stone.gy There is also an enormous bas-relief on a sculpted cliff, almost one hundred feet wide and fifty feet high, facing the ocean. The focus of the whole scene is a vertical cleft, in the center, through which a river cascades down, with half cobra figures (Nagas and Naginis) as well as a natural cobra in the midst of it. There are also lots of terrific elephants, deer, and monkeys, all joyously racing toward the descending river. (Real water may have flowed through the cleft at one time.) Sectarian diversity within Hinduism (as Indra and Soma and the Vedic gods were being shoved aside in favor of Vishnu, Shiva, and the goddess) is demonstrated by the dedication of different shrines to different deities and, within the great frieze, by the depiction of both an image of Shiva and a shrine to Vishnu. The frieze also contains a satire on ascetic hypocrisy: The figure of a cat stands in a yogic pose, surrounded by mice, one of whom has joined his tiny paws in adoration of the cat; Sanskrit literature tells of a cat who pretended to be a vegetarian ascetic and ate the mice until one day, noting their dwindling numbers, they discovered mouse bones in the cat’s feces.29

  [TOP] Great Frieze at Mamallapuram, Descent of the Ganges. [ABOVE] The Cat Ascetic.

  Among many other figures on this frieze is a man standing on one leg in a yogic posture, about whom art historians have argued for many years. Some say he is Arjuna, generating inner heat to persuade Shiva to give him a special weapon, as he does in the Mahabharata (3.41). Others say it is the sage Bhagiratha, who also appears in the Mahabharata (3.105-08), and in the Ramayana (1.42-3), generating inner heat to persuade the heavenly Ganges (the Milky Way) to come to earth to revive the ashes of his grandfathers. The wisest suggestion, I think, is that the frieze represents both at once,30 that it is a visual form of the usual verbal panegyric, inspired by a great military victory, in 642 CE, by Mahamalla, and that it contains references to both Arjuna and Bhagiratha and to both Shiva and Vishnu. This would make it a stone realization of the Sanskrit figure of speech called a shlesha (“embrace”), a literary expression that refers to two different stories at once, like the rabbit/man in the moon.

  Rajaraja I began building the great temple to Shiva in Thanjavur (called the temple of Brihad-ishvara [“Great Lord”] or Raja-rajeshvara [“the Lord of the King of Kings”]) in 995 but did not live to see it completed in 1012. An inscription credits him with introducing the practice of singing hymns in that temple. One of the largest and tallest temples in all of India, it had a monumental linga in the main shrine and was a major economic venture. Rajaraja donated a great deal of war booty, including the equivalent of 230 kilos of gold, even more silver, and piles and piles of jewels. Villages throughout the Chola kingdom were taxed to support the temple, which gave back some of that wealth by functioning as a bank that made investments and loans to those same villages.31

  The Chola kingdom was watered by the Kaveri River, sometimes called the Ganges of the South, and indeed the Kaveri basin is to South India what the Ganges basin is to North India. Eventually (in 1023), the Cholas decided to go for the real thing: They hauled quantities of water, presumably in jars, all the way from the Ganges, more than one thousand miles away, to Thanjavur, and so claimed to have re-created the holy land of the north in the middle of Tamil Nadu.32 The water was presented to King Rajendra (1014-1044) for the ceremonial tank (henceforth known as “the Chola-Ganga”) in his capital.33 The Cholas may have been inspired by a similar project that the Rashtrakutas had undertaken in the eighth century, when they added to the great Shiva temple at Ellora a shrine with images of the three great northern rivers—the Ganges, Yamuna/Jumna, and Sarasvati—and actually brought the waters of these rivers south in large jars.34 Closer to home, they may have had in mind the real water flowing through the sculpture of the Ganges at Mamallapuram.

  The Chola temples were a major source of employment for the community. Engraved on the walls of each temple were the numbers of architects, accountants, guards, and functionaries that it employed, as well as its land revenue.35 Numerous nonliterate assistants and ordinary laborers worked under the direction of the chief architects and master sculptors who knew the textbooks of architecture and art (the vastu-shastras and shilpa-shastras).36 The lists also include the names of numerous temple dancers, some of whom danced only for the god, while others also danced for the king and his friends, and still others were both dancers and high-class courtesans. Dancers are often represented in sculptures on temples.37

  The temples were not central to all aspects of worship; private worship in the home (puja) always remained at the heart of Hinduism, and on the other end of the spectrum, enormous communal festivals (melas) marked the religious year for specific areas and, on some occasions, for a great deal of the subcontinent. But temples filled a number of important roles that were covered neither by private puja nor by the crush of festivals. One of the innovations of bhakti was to shift the center of public activity from the courts to the temples. Now the temples, not the courts, were the hubs of pilgrimage, meeting places, and markets for souvenirs. Hinduism did not kick the moneylenders out of the temples, as some other religions (which shall remain nameless) made a point of doing.<
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  The worlds of the temple radiated outward in concentric circles of temples like the concentric continents in the cosmographic mandala, growing more complex and detailed as they moved away from the core.38 At the still center was the womb house (garbha griha), where the deity was present in a form almost (but not quite) without qualities (nir-guna), often a hidden or abstract symbol, a simple image, naked or swathed in thick layers of precious cloth. On the next level, in the chambers around the womb house, there were often friezes or freestanding images of deities, displaying more and more qualities (sa-guna), characteristic poses or weapons or numbers of heads or arms. The most extravagant and worldly images appeared on the outer walls of the temple and beyond it on the walls of the entire temple complex, rather like a temple fort, and on those two sets of outer walls artisans carved the more miscellaneous slice-of-life scenes as well as gorgeous women and occasional erotic groups. Just inside and outside the outermost wall, merchants sold the sorts of things that visitors might have wanted to give the deity (fragrant wreaths of flowers, coconuts and bananas and incense and camphor) or to bring home as a holy souvenir.

  TEMPLES AND VIOLENCE

  The downside of all this architectural glory was that sooner or later a bill was presented; there is no free temple. As endowing temples came in this period to complement and later to replace Vedic sacrifice as the ritual de rigueur for kings, the older triad of king, ritual, and violence was newly configured.