The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  THE AGE OF FOOL’S GOLD?

  The dynasty soon gave way to a number of weaker kingdoms and to the Huns, who nipped any subsequent budding Gupta emperors in the bud until the Turks and Sassanian Persians finally stopped them for good.8 Samudra Gupta had performed a horse sacrifice at which he allegedly gave away ten thousand cows, and his prolific gold coins abound in magnificent horses.9 But when the Huns severed trade routes in the north, they cut off the vital supply of equine bloodstock overland from central Asia to India. From now on, horses had to be imported to India by sea from Arabia, which made them even more expensive than before and put the Arabs entirely in control of the horse trade. The Guptas’ famous gold coinage became first debased, then crudely cast, increasingly stereotyped, scarce, and finally nonexistent,10 as the empire disintegrated into multiple small kingdoms. But how golden was the Gupta age even in its prime?

  Again we encounter a trick of the available light: Because we have Faxian and a lot of inscriptions, we think we know the Guptas, and many historians have been caught up in the spirit of the Guptas’ own self-aggrandizement. The Guptas did their boasting in Sanskrit, the language they chose for their courts, a move of conscious archaism. Prior to this, kings had done their boasting in the language that ordinary people spoke, one of the Prakrits, like the Magadhi of the Buddha and of Ashoka. Brahmins had continued to use Sanskrit in such a way that a bilingual literary culture underlay such great texts as the Mahabharata and the Puranas, the medieval Sanskrit (and, later, vernacular) compendiums of myth and ritual, which began to be assembled during the Gupta age.11 The Guptas’ use of Sanskrit and patronage of Sanskrit literature also contributed to the Euro-American identification of their age as classical.

  But Gupta art, however pretty, was not nearly as imaginative or vigorous as that of the ages that preceded and followed it; it seems lifeless and bloodless, classical in the sense of “boring,” in comparison with the earlier Kushana sculpture and, later, the voluptuous statues of the Cholas, the vibrant images of Basohli painting. In my humble opinion, Indian art is better than Greek art and therefore much better than art (such as Gupta art) that imitates Hellenistic art (which is second-rate Greek art). The architecture of the first Gupta temples, such as those at Aihole, Badami, and Pattadakal, or the temple of the Ten Avatars (Dashavatara) at Deogarh, in Uttar Pradesh (c. sixth to seventh century), cannot compare with the temples built from the tenth century, the “dazzling ornamented surfaces” of Khajuraho, Konarak, Tanjavur, and Madurai, to name just a few.12 Other scholars too have judged the Gupta Age to be one of “extraordinary restraint,” which eliminated options and alternatives for those “living in the strait-jacket of orthodox Hinduism.”13

  It is a general perversity of Indian history that its greatest architectural monuments—both the great temple clusters and the great palaces and forts—were created not in the centers of power like Pataliputra but in relatively remote provinces, and this is certainly true of the Gupta Age.14 It was in Ajanta, a fairly remote town in the Deccan, that Harisena of the Vakataka dynasty (c. 460-477), who owed nothing to Gupta patronage—or, more to the point, to Gupta control—completed the great caves whose walls are alive with the first examples of what has been called narrative painting:hj scenes depicting the life of the Buddha, his previous lives (Jatakas), a storm at sea, a shipwreck, and the only panoramic battle scene known from ancient India.15 Great things, golden things, did happen in the Gupta Age, but not always at the hands of the Gupta rulers.

  Moreover, the artisans who carved the temples and who ranked socially with musicians and dancing girls, types that always made the Brahmins nervous,16 did not thrive in this period, as Romila Thapar points out:

  The description of the Gupta period as one of classicism is relatively correct regarding the upper classes, who lived well according to descriptions in their literature and representations in their art. The more accurate, literal evidence that comes from archeology suggests a less glowing life-style for the majority. Materially, excavated sites reveal that the average standard of living was higher in the preceding period.17

  Yet, as we are about to see, that lower-class majority made its mark upon the upper classes.

  FROM THE VILLAGE TO THE COURT: LOST IN TRANSLATION

  Sanskrit court poetry drew on earlier Sanskrit texts, as one would expect from the general force of tradition and intertextuality. But it also drew upon folk traditions, as indeed the earlier Sanskrit texts had often done. In translating the plot from one idiom to another, or even from oral/written epic to court dramas, the Gupta poets edited out a great deal, but not all, of the power and dignity of women. One example will stand for many.

  The poet Kalidasa, generally regarded as the greatest poet in the Sanskrit tradition, the Shakespeare of India, reworked in his play Shakuntala (more precisely “The Recognition of Shakuntala”) a story that the Mahabharata tells at some length: King Dushyanta encounters Shakuntala in the forest while he is hunting, killing too many animals and terrifying the rest. He marries her with the ceremony of mutual consent (the Gandharva marriage or marriage of the centaurs) and returns to his court; when she brings their son to him at court, he lies, swearing that he never saw her before, until a disembodied voice from the sky proclaims the child his, and then he says he knew it all along (1.64-69). Dushyanta’s cruelty to his sexual partner is foreshadowed by his out-of-control hunting—the two vices are closely connected in the Hindu view—and hardly mitigated by his statement that he rejected Shakuntala because of his fear of public disapproval, an argument that rang equally hollow when Rama used it to reject Sita. Dushyanta is one of a large crowd of Mahabharata kings who had children secretly, and Shakuntala one of many women who had them illegitimately.

  Whereas the story in the Mahabharata is about power and inheritance, Kalidasa turns it into a story about desire and memory. Kalidasa probably had the patronage of the Gupta dynasty, perhaps Chandra Gupta II.hk (His poem The Birth of the Prince, ostensibly about the birth of the son of Shiva and Parvati—the god Skanda, also called Kumara [“the Youth” or “the Prince”]—may also be an extended pun to celebrate the birth of Kumara Gupta.) The story of Shakuntala was important to the Guptas, for the child of Shakuntala and Dushyanta, named Bharata, was one of the founders of the dynasty that the Guptas claimed for their lineage.hl Kalidasa had his work cut out for him to transform Bharata’s father from a lying cadhm to a sympathetic lover,18 and to give credit where credit’s due, he did at least feel that Dushyanta needed some sort of excuse for treating Shakuntala as he did. And so he fell back upon the tried-and-true folk device of the magic ring of memory19 and the curse of an angry Brahmin (the presbyter ex machina): A sage whom Shakuntala neglected in her lovesick distraction put a curse on her, ensuring that the king would forget her until he saw the ring that he (the king) had given her. Shakuntala lost the ring; Dushyanta therefore honestly did not remember her until a fisherman found the ring in a fish that had swallowed it (and was caught and served at Dushyanta’s table). Then Dushyanta was terribly, terribly sorry about it all, and he searched until he found Shakuntala and his son at last. In this retelling, Shakuntala’s mistake (a trivial breach of ascetiquette) injures Dushyanta’s mind, through a kind of transfer of karma, or transitive imagination; it’s really all her fault. Dushyanta suffers for actions committed by someone else, actions of which he is completely innocent,20 but of course he is also guilty of an even more serious forgetfulness than the one that Shakuntala suffers for. At the same time, the curse on Shakuntala merely activates what is already there in nuce in Dushyanta, his forgetfulness. The whole fishy story gets Dushyanta (and Kalidasa) out of what subsequent Indian scholars recognized as a true moral dilemma.

  Shakuntala loses her agency in Kalidasa’s hands. In the Mahabharata she is a wise woman who discourses at length on dharma; in Kalidasa she is hardly more than a child and says little when the king accuses her of lying; indeed most of her words reach us only because the king tells us she said them. Kalidasa’s Shakuntal
a, still pregnant, is snatched up by her celestial mother, just as Sita is after Rama has abandoned her, also pregnant. Indeed the parallels with Sita go further: Both women are daughters of supernatural women (Shakuntala the daughter of the celestial nymph Menaka, Sita the daughter of the earth) and are themselves supernatural (in one reading, Shakuntala is a celestial nymph21), both come from another world to bear the king a son (or sons), and both disappear when the king abuses them. Sisters in the plot, they are also the cousins of the equine goddesses Saranyu and Urvashi.

  Kalidasa’s treatment of Shakuntala suggests the declining power and status of women in this period, though at least some real women exercised considerable power in the highest corridors of Gupta polity. Chandra Gupta I married a Nepalese (Lichavi) princess, an alliance that extended his territory through Pataliputra to parts of Nepal; she, and her dowry, were so important that their son referred to himself as a “son of a Lichavi daughter” rather than of a Gupta father, and coins showing the king and queen together bear her name as well as his.22 Chandra Gupta II arranged a marriage between his daughter Prabhavati (whose mother was a princess of the Naga people) and Rudrasena II, king of the Vakatakas, to strengthen his southern flank; when Rudrasena died, Prabhavati acted as regent for her sons, thereby increasing Gupta influence in the south.

  How are we to explain this discrepancy between the literary and political evidence? General considerations of the relationship between myth and history operate here: The myths reflect attitudes toward women rather than the actual history of real women, but they also influence the subsequent actual history of real women. We might also discount either the political evidence (to argue that the women who were married to the Gupta kings were simply pawns with no real power or that they are the exception to the general rule about the powers of ordinary women) or the literary evidence (to argue that Kalidasa’s presentation of women is not typical of attitudes toward women expressed in other literature of this period, such as the Puranas, which we will soon encounter). Both are possible. A third argument, that there is an inverse correlation between the powers of goddesses or supernatural women in texts and natural women on the ground, is one that we will soon consider in the context of shakti.

  DIVERSITY AND SECTARIAN WORSHIP

  In tandem with the general tendency to clamp down on such matters as the rights of women, the narrow-minded attitude to deviation implicit in the concept of heresy took on new power in the Gupta Age.23 Yet there was a great deal of variation in religious life under the Guptas, in part because the basic political conditions provoked different reactions in different sectors of the population. This had been the case in the centuries preceding the Guptas: The Ramayana and the Mahabharata, though roughly contemporaneous, had very different attitudes to dharma, as did Manu and the Artha-shastra and the Kama-sutra, also roughly contemporaneous. Such variations were facilitated by the looser political reins of the preimperial age, but under the Guptas too there was room to kick over the traces from time to time. The sectarian diversity of the Guptas, which at times approached a kind of mellow inclusivism, may have been inspired by a need to bring the various sects and religions under the new yoke of empire or simply to differentiate themselves from other rulers, such as those in South India, who were more partisan.

  Some Gupta kings sponsored Vishnu and seemed to believe that in return, Vishnu sponsored the Gupta Empire. They put his boar incarnation and the figure of Lakshmi, Vishnu’s consort, on their coins and made mythology “a state concern, enlisting particularly Vishnu and his heroic incarnations for their politics.”24 The Allahabad inscription of 379 CE identifies Samudra Gupta with Vishnu.25 But royal patronage was, all in all, even-handed, and the Gupta kings took the names of various gods; some Guptas leaned one way, some another, and some were pluralistic, but all in all a thousand pujas bloomed. And what imperial overlay there was ran pretty thin by the time it trickled down to individual texts, as is evident from the sectarian distribution of the Puranas, some devoted to Shiva, some to Vishnu, some to a goddess, while even a Purana officially devoted to a particular god often devoted considerable space to other gods.26

  Chandra Gupta II was a devout Hindu, but he also patronized Buddhism and Jainism. In Pataliputra, Faxian witnessed an annual festival in which twenty chariots carrying Buddhist stupas covered with images of the gods and bodhisattvas and figures of the Buddha, all in silver and gold, entered the city after the brahma-charins (probably the Brahmins as a whole, not merely the students or the celibates) invited them to do so, an impressive demonstration of ecumenism. Gupta emperors dedicated many Buddhist buildings (stupas, monasteries, and prayer halls), while some of the earliest Hindu temples were built and Hindu icons sculpted during this period (the fifth to eighth centuries). Rock-cut temples and structural temples shared a widely disseminated set of conventions.27

  The burgeoning religious diversity that the Guptas had encouraged came to an abrupt end when the Huns, who were literal iconoclasts of an extreme sort, especially hostile to Buddhism, began to attack North India in the second half of the fifth century CE; they overran Kashmir and the Punjab and Malwa as far as Gwalior. Buddhism in the Indus basin never recovered from the depredations of the Huns, who killed monks and destroyed monasteries.28 Adding insult to injury, some Shaiva Brahmins, also hostile to Buddhism, took advantage of the Huns’ anti-Buddhism and accepted grants of land from the Huns.29

  POPULAR TRADITIONS IN THE EARLY SANSKRIT PURANAS: FOUND IN TRANSLATION

  The complex interactions between Hindu sects, between Hinduism and Buddhism and Jainism, and between court and village are manifest in various ways in the principal religious texts that developed in this period, the Puranas. Gupta literature came first and reworked folk and epic materials in its own way; then the Puranas came along and reworked both folklore and Gupta literature. The Puranas are far less fastidious than the Vedic texts or even the Mahabharata, more relaxed about both language and caste than anything that we have so far encountered. Scholars of Sanskrit poetry poke fun at the bad Sanskrit of the Puranas, which they view as the pulp fiction of ancient India or, as one of my students suggested, the hip-hop of the medieval world,30 in comparison with court poetry that has the cachet of Shakespeare.

  There are often said to be eighteen Puranas and innumerable “Sub-Puranas” (Upa-puranas), but the lists vary greatly, as do their dates, about which no one is certain,31 and their contents. The Puranas are not about what they say they are about. They say they are about the “Five Signs,” which are listed at the start of most Puranas: creation (sarga, “emission”), secondary creation (pratisarga), the genealogy of gods and kings, the reigns of the Manus (a different mythical Manu was born in each age, to help create the world), and the history of the solar and lunar dynasties. The genealogies of gods, Manus, and kings form an open-ended armature; into these rather vague categories (which some Puranas ignore entirely in any case) individual authors fit what they really want to talk about: the way to live a pious life, and to worship the gods and goddesses. This includes the rituals (pujas) that you should perform at home, in the temple, and on special festival days; places to visit on pilgrimage; prayers to recite; and stories to tell and to hear. The closed totality thinking of the shastras gives way to open infinity thinking in the Puranas, which often seem to swing at everything that comes across the plate.

  Purana means “ancient,” and these Sanskrit compendiums of myth and ritual face resolutely back to the hoary past, a conservative stance; the new genre positions itself as age-old, anonymous. It also strikes an imperial stance: The improved communications across the empire and the sense that it was all part of a single cultural unit, from sea to sea (as Manu put it), inspired a kind of literary cosmopolitanism. Kalidasa’s poem The Cloud Messenger uses the poetic fallacy of a banished lover who enlists a cloud to carry a message to his faraway beloved; it presents a positively imperial survey of the aerial route from Ramagiri (near Nagpur) via Ujjain to Mount Kailasa in the Himalayas.

  But the Pu
ranas also provided a Sanskrit medium for popular material transmitted through all classes and places in India, fusing the cosmopolitan, translocal vision of the Gupta court with new local traditions, the praise of the particular tirtha in our village, this temple, our river, and instructions on how to worship right here. What set the Puranas apart from one another was primarily the sectarian bias, all the stories (as well as rituals and doctrines) about our god, our pilgrimage place. Their sectarian view says not “This is the whole world” but “This is our whole world.”

  The treatment of low castes and especially tribals in the Puranas reflects a nervousness about absorbing these groups into the empire. The early Puranas continued to appropriate popular beliefs and ideas from people of various castes.32 The very different challenges posed by renunciation, on the one hand, and the luxuriant growth of sectarian diversity, on the other, which the authors of the dharma-shastras worked so hard to reconcile with their own agendas, looked like the chance of a lifetime for the authors of the Puranas. Doctrinally orthoprax Hinduism functioned, as ever, to include everything under the Indian sun. The excluded people (rural storytellers, lower classes, women) who until now had had only episodic success in breaking into Sanskrit literature (Raikva’s walk-on part in the Upanishads, Draupadi’s embarrassing polyandry) managed now to get major speaking roles. Nurtured first by the patronage of the Guptas and then by the less structured political systems that followed them, the nonhegemonic, non-Vedic traditions supply the major substance of the Puranas.