The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  We can see the seeds of the story of Lavana here, but without the Kashmir Shaiva frame: A curse, rather than a meditation, turns Harishchandra into a real, rather than dreamed, Pariah, though within that real life he also dreams as Lavana dreams. In both stories, the death of the son and the decision to enter the fire trigger the awakening. But in this text, which is framed by samsara and bhakti, the final release is not moksha but physical transportation to heaven, the sensuous heaven of Indra. (We can also see a South Indian bhakti thread in the child whom the gods pretend to kill but then revive.) The curse destabilizes caste to a certain extent: If someone can be cursed to become a Pariah, the Pariah you meet might have been a king even in this life. The philosophy of illusion further destabilizes it: Not even a curse but just a dream could change you. In either case, caste is not necessarily part of your inalienable substance, the way that the dharma texts say it is.

  In the end, Harishchandra and his wife do not return to their original life, as Lavana does, but leave both the earthly dream and the earthly reality, the royal pleasures and the Pariah horrors. In this, they are more Buddhist than Hindu, and indeed the story of Harishchandra may have influenced and/or been influenced by the Buddhist Vessantara Jataka, which tells a very similar tale.53 (Another shared Hindu-Buddhist theme appears when Lavana plans to feed his children on his own flesh, a theme we know from the Hindu-Buddhist stories of the rabbit in the moon and of King Shibi.) The more basic Buddhist paradigm, however, is the life of Gautama Shakyamuni himself, the Buddha, who (according to the Pali texts) leaves his luxurious palace in order to live among the suffering people and never returns; this plot is the very opposite of the Hindu myths of this corpus, in which the king almost always returns.54

  A nicely self-referential moment occurs when the Brahmins, not recognizing that the Chandala they are talking to is Harishchandra, tell him his own story. But they make him a Pulkasa rather than a Chandala, as Harishchandra himself does in his dream. For the repetitions are never quite alike, and one sort of Pariah may mistake himself (and be mistaken by others) for another sort of Pariah. These variations become more vivid still when the Yoga-vasishstha tells a story that both is and is not like the story of Lavana, the story of Gadhi:jg

  GADHI: THE BRAHMIN WHO DREAMED HE WAS A PARIAH WHO DREAMED HE WAS A KING

  There was a Brahmin named Gadhi, who lost consciousness one day as he bathed in a river; he saw himself reborn as a Pulkasa, within the womb of a Pulkasa woman. He was born, grew up, married, had children, and became old. All of his family died, and he wandered until he came to the city of the Kiras, where the king had died, and the people made him the king. But after eight years an old Pulkasa from the village identified him as a Pulkasa; the people fled from him, and he threw himself into a fire and awoke in the water of the river. He went home and lived as before, until one day another Brahmin came and told him that in the city of the Kiras, a Pulkasa had become king for eight years until he was exposed and killed himself in a fire. Then Gadhi went and found the village and the city of the Kiras and found all just as it had been reported. He went back to his life as a Brahmin.55

  When we set the stories of Lavana and Gadhi side by side, each sheds light on the other, forming a double image of mutually illuminating similes. Lavana is a king who dreams that he is a Pariah and then goes back to being a king. Gadhi is a Brahmin who dreams that he is a Pariah who becomes a king, is unmasked as a Pariah, and turns back into a Brahmin. It might appear that Lavana takes up the Gadhi story at midpoint, a king who remembers that he has been a Pariah. King Lavana travels (or imagines that he travels) to another place, where he lives another life until he awakens again as a king. This also happens to Gadhi, in the middle part of his story, though in the other direction: As a Pariah, he travels to another place and becomes a king. This shared, inverted episode is, however, framed by another in Gadhi’s life, in which he dies, is reborn, and experiences an entirely new life, beginning as an embryo. And this frame casts back upon the Lavana story the implication that he too may have a frame, that a Brahmin may have dreamed that he was Lavana who dreamed that he was a Pariah. Gadhi finds out that his memories of the dream were true, but they are not his memories; they belong to someone else. What is real for Lavana becomes a simile for Gadhi, and what is real for Gadhi is merely a simile for Lavana. One man’s reality is another man’s simile.

  The transformations take place differently: King Lavana is never reborn but merely travels to another place; Gadhi, by contrast, does not travel or fall into a trance but actually dies (or imagines that he dies), is reborn, and experiences an entirely new life, beginning as an embryo. On the other hand, Lavana actually succumbs to amnesia and forgets that he was a king, while Gadhi as a Pariah remembers quite well who he was and merely pretends to be a king. The fact that Gadhi is a Brahmin, with special spiritual powers, is highly significant; he remains in mental control throughout and especially at the end, in ways that the king, the victim of his passion (such as his mesmerization by the beauty of the horse), does not. But whatever the status of the protagonist, the text eventually erases the distinction between having an adventure and imagining that you have had an adventure, since in either case the events of the adventure leave physical traces that can be corroborated before witnesses.

  The assumptions of Kashmiri Shaiva idealism are very different from those of the average Euro-American reader. More vividly than any argument, the text performs the proposition that our failure to remember our past lives is a more intense form of our failure to recapture our dreams. More than that, it erases the distinction between the reality status of a dreamed (or experienced) episode within a single life and a dreamed (or experienced) episode of total rebirth; the distinction between forgetting that you are a king and pretending to be a king; and, finally, the distinction between the consciousness of a king or Brahmin and a Pariah.

  CHAPTER 19

  DIALOGUE AND TOLERANCE UNDER THE MUGHALS

  1500 to 1700 CE

  CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES CE)

  1399 Timur, ruler of Central Asia, destroys Delhi

  1526 Babur founds the Mughal Empire

  1530-1556 Humayun reigns

  1556-1605 Akbar reigns

  1605-1627 Jahangir reigns

  1627-1658 Shah Jahan reigns

  1658-1707 Aurangzeb reigns

  1713-1719 Farrukhsiyar reigns

  Being aware of the fanatical hatred between Hindus and Muslims,

  and being convinced that this arose out of mutual ignorance, the

  enlightened ruler sought to dispel this ignorance by making the

  books of each religion accessible to the other. He chose the Mahabharata

  to begin with, as this is the most comprehensive and enjoys the

  highest authority, and arranged for it to be translated by competent

  men from both religions. In this way he wished to demonstrate to the

  Hindus that a few of their erroneous practices and superstitions had

  no basis in their classics, and also to convince the Muslims that it was

  absurd to ascribe a mere 7,000 years of existence to the world.

  Abu’l Fazl (1551-1602)1

  The enlightened ruler in this passage is Akbar, by far the most pluralist of the Mughal rulers (indeed of most rulers anywhere and anytime in history). His attention to the Mahabharata is coupled with his disdain (or that of Abu’l Fazl, his chronicler) for “erroneous” contemporary Hindu practices in contrast with the ancient classics. Other Mughals too valued some aspects of Hinduism very highly, while still others hated the Hindus and regarded their practices as not merely “erroneous” but downright blasphemous. Hinduism continued to agonize over issues of caste and gender, often newly inspired by the Mughal example or the Mughal threat, or both.

  THE MUGHALS

  Few people have been able to resist the fascination of the Mughals, whose very name comes into English (from a Persian form of “Mongols,” sometimes spelled “Mogul”) as a word denoti
ng someone of extravagant wealth and power. True, the Mughals had their little ways; they did tend to try to kill (or blind, or lock up) members of their nuclear family rather a lot, and many of them seem to have been drunk and/or stoned most of the time.jh Punishment was severe under the Mughals (as it was under the Hindus—and, for that matter, the Europeans—of the period); people were impaled or trampled to death by elephants for a number of crimes and flayed or deprived of hands or feet for relatively minor misdemeanors.2 But the Mughals also made spectacular contributions to the civilization of the world in general and India and Hinduism in particular. Under the Mughals, industry and trade boomed. Around the court thronged “costumiers, perfumers, gold and silversmiths, jewelers, ivory-carvers, gun-smiths, saddlers, joiners and [an] army of architects, civil engineers, stonemasons and polishers.”3

  Like the Arabs of the Delhi Sultanate, the Turks who became the Mughals were not all the same in their relationship to Hinduism. Some were religious zealots; some didn’t care much about religion; some loved Islam but didn’t believe that they should impose it on anyone else. Some (notoriously Aurangzeb) were quite (though not unambiguously) horrid; some (most notably Akbar) were quite (though not unambiguously) wonderful; and most of them were a bit of both. And there were many different sorts of Islam—Sunni, Shia, Sufi, and so forth. The Mughals as a group differed from the Delhi sultans as a group: The Mughals ruled longer as individuals and as a dynasty, were more centralized, and held a tighter rein, with more control over more of India; we also have much more available light, much more information, about the Mughals. Hinduism too had changed in many important ways since the days of the Delhi Sultanate (new sectarian movements, Tantra, philosophy), so that a different Hinduism now encountered a different Islam.

  BABUR THE HORSEMAN AND HORTICULTURALIST

  Zahir-ud-din Muhammad, otherwise known as Babur (“the Tiger”), the first great Mughal emperor, traced his descent, on his mother’s side, back to Genghis Khan and, on his father’s, to Timur the Lame (Tamerlane, in Edgar Allan Poe’s epic poem) who, in 1398, led Mongol forces across the Yamuna River and defeated the reigning sultan, massacring or enslaving all the Hindus, sparing only the Muslim quarters of the city. An inauspicious beginning. A century later, in 1484, Babur was born in Ferghana, in the mountains of Central Asia (now Uzbekistan). Despite his Mongol blood, he regarded himself as a Turk, and he was educated in Turki.4 A stunning mix of elegance and cruelty, Babur constructed gardens and fountains and planted melons wherever he went, a kind of Mughal Johnny Appleseed, but he also knocked down a lot of temples and killed a lot of people. He wrote an extraordinarily intimate, frank, and detailed memoir, the Baburnama, from which we can get a vivid sense of the man, from the early days, when he lived a nomadic life, riding his magnificent horse and carrying little with him but a book of poetry, exulting in his freedom.

  As soon as he failed to conquer his first target, Timur’s old realm of Samarkhand, Babur had set his sights on India, Timur’s later conquest; he named his second son Hindal, which is Turkish for “Take India!”5 But once he actually got there he formed a low opinion of India:

  Hindustan is a place of little charm. There is no beauty in its people, no graceful social intercourse, no poetic talent or understanding, no etiquette, nobility, or manliness. The arts and crafts have no harmony or symmetry. There are no good horses, meat, grapes, melons, or other fruit. There is no ice, cold water, good food or bread in the markets. There are no baths and no madrassas [Muslim schools]. There are no candles, torches, or candlesticks. . . . The one nice aspect of Hindustan is that it is a large country with lots of gold and money.6

  (He adds, a bit later, “Another nice thing is the unlimited numbers of craftsmen and practitioners of every trade.”) Seldom has the nature of a conqueror’s interest in the object of his conquest been so nakedly expressed. The lack of good horses was, as we have seen, a perennial problem.

  He had relatively little to say about Hinduism: “Most of the people in Hindustan are infidels whom the people of India call Hindu. Most Hindus believe in reincarnation.” That’s just about it. His interest in rebirth and the related philosophy of karma reemerged on another occasion, when he crossed a river that now forms the border between the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and is called the Karamnasa (“Destroyer of Karma”), sometimes referred to as the Anti-Ganges. Babur remarked of it: “This river is scrupulously avoided by Hindus, and observant Hindus will not cross it. They must board boats and cross its mouth on the Ganges. They believe that the religious merit of anyone touched by its water is nullified The etymology of its name is also said to be derived from this.” He objected to both Hindu and Jaina images, especially to a group of idols, some of which were twenty yards tall, “shown stark naked with all their private parts exposed. . . . Urwahi is not a bad place. In fact, it is rather nice. Its one drawback was the idols, so I ordered them destroyed.”7

  His attitude to his own faith was simple and practical; on occasion he used Islamic fervor, which may or may not have been genuine in him, to rally reluctant troops against Rajputs.8 His dedication to his religion was inseparable from his dedication to his military victories; after one such victory, he wrote this verse: “For the sake of Islam I became a wanderer; I battled infidels and Hindus./ I determined to become a martyr. Thank God I became a holy warrior.” 9 His practice of Islam was leavened by his indulgence in the pleasures of the senses: “wines, composing of some very sensual poetry, music, flowers and gardens, women, even a young boy at one time in his youth.”10 Proselytizing and demolishing other people’s places of worship were not high on his list of priorities.

  Babur is thought to have built several mosques, including the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, which an inscription attributes to him.ji But the pages of the diary covering the period in which such a mosque would have been built, sometime before 1528, are missing, and it is possible that Babur merely renovated an already existing mosque, built sometime after the armies of Muhammad of Ghor reached Ayodhya in 1194.

  In 1530, Babur’s eldest and favorite son, Humayun, then twenty-two, fell ill and was expected to die. Babur is said to have prayed by Humayun’s sickbed and transferred his own health to his son (transferring karma, an action more Hindu or Buddhist than Muslim), offering up his own life if Humayun recovered. Humayun recovered and Babur died. He was buried first in a garden at Agra that he himself had designed, and then, as he had wished, he was carried back to Kabul, where he was laid to rest. He had never liked India very much.

  HUMAYUN THE ASTRONOMER AND ASTROLOGIST

  Humayun, born in 1508 in Kabul, dabbled in astrology and spiritual matters. Neither of these religious interests prevented him from blinding his brother Hindal in retaliation for killing his (Humayun’s) spiritual guide.11 In 1556, as keen on astronomy as on astrology, Humayun tripped going down the stone stairs from his makeshift observatory in Delhi and fell to his death.12A messenger hurried to inform his son Akbar, only thirteen years old, that he was now the emperor; in the meantime a man who happened to resemble Humayan (what the Hindus would have called a shadow Humayun) was displayed, on a distant platform, to the anxious crowds.13

  AKBAR THE TOLERANT

  Akbar ruled for half a century. Like his grandfather Babur, Akbar was a fearless and tireless rider,14 a man of action who killed tigers with spears and was famous for both his courage and his cruelty. When, after a long and bloody battle and siege, Akbar captured the historic fortress of Chitor in Mewar in 1568, he watched the flames consume the women as the men rode out in their own suicidal charge, and then he gratuitously massacred some twenty thousand noncombatants.15

  In dramatic contrast with Babur, Akbar himself neither read nor wrote. (No one really knows why; he may have been dyslexic, but he may just have been bored with school—a grade school dropout—or a mystic who preferred not to write.16) He more than compensated for this, however, by keeping at his court, among his “nine gems,” Abu’l Fazl, a great biographer, who wrote both the Akbar-Na
ma (a rather puffed hagiography) and the Ain-i-Akbari (a more sober history).

  AKBAR’S PLURALISM

  Open-minded Hindu and Muslim religious thinkers had engaged in serious interreligious dialogues long before this, as we have seen, but Akbar was the first to put the power of a great empire at the service of pluralism. In 1564 he began to host a series of multireligious theological salons,17 serving as a source of entertainment and an opportunity to showcase rhetorical talents, much as the Upanishadic kings were depicted as doing two thousand years earlier, though of course with a different range of religious options. In the city that he built at Fatehpur Sikri (near Agra), Akbar constructed a room where religious debates were held on Thursday evenings. At first, the conversations were limited to different Muslim groups (Sunni, Shia, and Ismaili, as well as Sufi); then they were joined by Parsis; then Hindus (Shaiva and Vaishnava bhaktas); disciples of Kabir and probably also of Guru Nanak (Akbar is said to have given the Sikhs the land at Amritsar on which the Golden Temple was later built); Jainas, Jews, and Jesuits. This veritable circus of holy men even included some unholy men—Materialists (Charvakas or Lokayatikas).18 Or in the immortal (if somewhat overblown) words of Abu’l Fazl: “He sought for truth amongst the dust-stained denizens of the field of irreflection and consorted with every sort of wearers of patched garments such as [yogis, renouncers, and Sufi mystics], and other solitary sitters in the dust and insouciant recluses.”19 Sometimes Akbar wandered incognito through the bazaars and villages, a habit that may have stirred his awareness of or nourished his interest in the religious diversity among his people.