The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

be Nomas means “pasture,” and a nomad is someone who wanders from pasture to pasture.

  bf It is most likely that it was the male animal, the bull, that was used for sacrifice, as the males of all the other species of sacrificial animal are explicitly specified, and indeed the “virility” of the sacrificed animals is the point of many myths and ritual texts. Yet it should be noted that the word “go” in Sanskrit (like “cow” in common usage in English) is sexually ambiguous.

  bg Most horsey nomads drink mare’s milk—the Greeks called the Scythian nomads mare milkers—and the Vedic people may have done so before they settled in the Punjab, but milk in the Veda is always cow’s milk.

  bh I will generally render the Vedic poems in prose.

  bi Drona’s horses shed tears when he is about to die (Mahabharata 7.192.20); when the Buddha departs, his horse Kanthaka weeps (Buddhacharita 6.33-35; 8.3-4, 17); Achilles’ horses weep for the death of Patroclus; Brünnhilde’s horse Grani hangs his head and weeps over the dead Siegfried.

  bj This is one of several creation scenarios in the Rig Veda; we will see two more below.

  bk Indo-European linguists usually derive “Vaishya” from a different word that means “settlement” or “people who live on the land,” but some Sanskrit texts cite the derivation from “all.”

  bl Since the fourth class is also already present in the Veda’s Iranian cousin, the Avesta, such a fourth class, consisting primarily of artisans, may in fact have been Indo-European (or at least Indo-Iranian). Yet this Vedic hymn already regards Shudras as outsiders.

  bm The numerous pairings of contrasting terms, such as “mortals and immortals” or “sky and earth” or “creatures two-footed and four-footed,” suggest that division into two rather than three is the fundamental structuring principle of Indo-European thought—perhaps of human thought in general. But that is another story.

  bn A possibility supported by analogy with the Greek playwright Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs, in which the Dionysian chorus consists entirely of frogs who say, “Brekekekek koax koax,” the Greek for “Akh-khala” (which is what frogs say in Sanskrit).

  bo In variants from the Indo-European corpus, fire is held within a reed in the Greek myth of Prometheus and brought down from heaven by a firebird in Russian mythology.

  bp The appeal was rejected because though the claim was that the soma plant was not the mushroom Amanita muscaria, it never specified what the plant in fact was.

  bq Ephedra does not seem to have a sufficiently strong mental effect to have produced the conditions described in the poems. The soma was pressed in the morning and drunk on the same day, thereby eliminating wine and beer (which take longer than that to ferment, even in a hot climate). Palm toddy must be drunk within hours of making it, but toddy is not “pressed,” as soma is, nor do coconut palm trees grow in the Punjab. They didn’t know about distillation at that time (so much for daru or brandy), and they used hemp only to make rope, not marijuana (bhang). It wasn’t opium; poppies were not grown then in the Punjab.

  br The Varuna-praghasa at the beginning of the rainy season, in which the priest interrogates the queen with a question on the order of “When did you stop beating your wife?”

  bs It was a man’s duty to impregnate his brother’s wife, but only if the brother was dead or unable to produce his own heirs.

  bt The porcupine is attested to in India from the time of the Atharva Veda through Kipling’s Stickly-Prickly (in Just So Stories).

  bu In classical Sanskrit it also means “having a good vagina,” which may be a distant but relevant overtone.

  bv Impotence is also at issue in other Rig Vedic poems (such as 10.86 and 10.102).

  bw Visual depictions of this figure are first attested from the second to the fourth century CE.

  bx This is an enduring concept in Hinduism; the Marathi saint Tukaram sees the relationship between himself and god in these terms: “There is a whole tree within a seed/ And a seed at the end of each tree/That is how it is between you and me/ One contains the Other.”

  by The Rig Veda (10.83.4) applied this name not to a creator but to Manyu, “Anger.” By the time of the Mahabharata, however, it is an epithet of Manu and then of Brahma.

  bz Indeed, like the cattle raid myth, it is not merely a Vedic but a wider Indo-European myth.

  ca The Buddhists, in subsequent centuries, often attacked Indra and questioned his existence, and in the Bhagavata Purana (10.24.23), when Krishna is fighting against Indra, he dissuades people from praying to Indra for rain, saying, “Clouds driven by mist rain everywhere. What can Indra do?”

  cb Some renunciant forms of Hinduism stood this value system on its head and viewed life as a terrifying chaos and death as the liberating peace of perfect order.

  cc The great French Indologist Louis Renou capriciously translated the idea of being cooked perfectly as au point, just as one would say of a good steak.

  cd The Vedic mantra that he sees likens Soma to a nimble chariot horse.

  ce In Homo Necans (1972) Walter Burkert argued that the act of killing the animal in a sacrifice was the survival of a Neolithic hunting ritual expressing grief over the animal’s demise. For Burkert, animal sacrifice was a tragic deception, in which the sacrificer assumed that the sacrificial animal consented to being sacrificed. Whether or not Burkert’s insights are valid for the Greek evidence, they do seem to be highly relevant to the ancient Indian texts.

  cf To this day it is often argued in India that the meat of animals killed for the table is poison because such animals die in fear and anger, while animals killed for sacrifice are happy to die, and so their meat is sweet.

  cg Since only cows and bulls are prohibited, the text may allow for the eating of castrated bulls, steers, or bullocks.

  ch The image of the woman who flees, in vain, from rape by becoming a cow and a mare may also have been inspired by the Vedic myth of Saranyu, who takes the form of a mare to flee from sexual violence but is then raped by the sun when he takes the form of a stallion.

  ci Compare the ram that miraculously appears to save Isaac when Abraham is about to sacrifice him.

  cj Stephanie Jamison says that the queen did not merely mime copulation, and Jamison is usually right. But in favor of the argument that the queen did not actually copulate with the stallion are the considerations that most of the texts instruct the priests to kill the horse first and that the ceremony would be hard to do with a live stallion.

  ck Such as Saranyu and Sita.

  cl Though not for long: In the Mahabharata (1.92), the goddess of the Ganges, another immortal woman with a mortal husband, not only abandons her husband and children when he violates the contract but kills several of the children.

  cm Jara is cognate with the Greek geron, geras, from which we derive the English “gerontology,” and mrityu with our “mortal, mortality.”

  cn In The Cocktail Party.

  co “The Three Brothers” (Jaiminiya Brahmana 1.184) is Tale Type 654, and the tale of Kutsa and his father follows a pattern best known from Sophocles’ Oedipus (Tale Type 921; also T 92.9, T 412).

  cp For the Brahmanas have long been regarded as the private stock of the most elitist textualists who ever lived. Müller thought the Brahmanas were “simply twaddle, and what is worse, theological twaddle,” while Julius Eggeling, who devoted most of his life to translating the Shatapatha Brahmana, bemoaned its “wearisome prolixity of exposition, characterised by dogmatic assertion and a flimsy symbolism rather than by serious reasoning.” Other scholars called the Brahmanas “an arid desert of puerile speculation,” “of sickening prolixity,” “filthy,” “repulsive,” and “of interest only to students of abnormal psychology.”

  cq If it was the Amanita muscaria, it grew only where there were birch trees.

  cr According to one uncharacteristic story, when the antigods were fighting the gods, the antigods, rather than the gods, put evil into the senses and into the mind; that is why we can see good or evil, speak good or evil, im
agine good or evil.

  cs “Vedanta” also has a second meaning, denoting a particular philosophy, based on commentaries on the Upanishads, that was developed many centuries later by a group of philosophers, of whom Shankara is the most famous.

  ct If the Buddha died in around 400 BCE, as has been recently argued rather persuasively, and if, as seems evident, the Buddha knew at least parts of the early Upanishads (the Brihadaranyaka, the Taittiriya, and the Chandogya), those texts must have been known by about 450 BCE.

  cu In Sanskrit grammar, karma is the accusative case.

  cv No one there seems to have thought of asking about the opposite problem, why the world doesn’t run out of souls, which constantly leak out of the cycle in both directions, some up to the world of brahman and some down to the world of insects. Centuries later Jaina cosmogonies did address this problem.

  cw This was true of premodern Europe as well as India.

  cx He said this (in the Lotus Sutra) in response to people who kept asking for precise details about nirvana (the escape from samsara), as people in a burning house might ask, before agreeing to leave, what sort of house they might get in exchange. The Buddha taught that misery (duhkha) is not so much suffering as it is the inevitable loss of happiness, since everything is impermanent (anicca/anitya), a problem for which nirvana offered the solution.

  cy The Sanskrit word for the class I am calling Brahmins is actually brahmana, the same word as the name of the texts between the Vedas and Upanishads. To confuse matters further, of the four priests needed to perform certain Vedic sacrifices, one, who just stands around and does nothing but run a full script of the sacrifice in his head, to make sure there are no mistakes, is called the brahmin (in Sanskrit), in contrast with the other priests designated by different names.

  cz The Vedantic philosophers belong, by and large, to the monist tradition.

  da It is also a palindrome: Do Good’s deeds live on? No, Evil’s deeds do, O God.

  db Fast-forward alert: This anticipates the notion developed at length in the Bhagavad Gita, that acts performed without desire have no karmic effects.

  dc Rather like the Oxbridge schools exams.

  dd An idea that turned out quite differently when Nietzsche got hold of it.

  de As Rilke imagined the archaic torso of Apollo saying to him: Du muss dein Leben ändern.

  df To paraphrase Janis Joplin.

  dg It is, however, a fantasy supported by Georges Dumézil’s arguments for an Indo-European king who was also a priest.

  dh The phrase used here is sadhu-kurvanti, from the same roots as the sadhu-krityam of the Nachiketas story.

  di This may well have contributed to Indra’s fall from popularity within Hinduism too.

  dj The Greek historian Megasthenes called them Brahmanes and Sarmanes, and the third-century BCE emperor Ashoka called them Shramanas and Brahmanas or else, significantly, Shramanas and householders.

  dk Katyayani does appear, however, in a much later text (Skanda Purana 6.129), in which her jealousy of Maitreyi, Yajnavalkya’s favorite, torments her until she performs a particular ritual (puja) to Parvati, which makes her equal to Maitreyi in Yajnavalkya’s eyes.

  dl Fast-forward: Gargi is now the name of a woman’s college in India and a symbol for women intellectuals.

  dm In a parallel image that Plato came up with at roughly the same time (Phaedrus, 253D), the horse of the pair that represents the senses is “a crooked, great jumble of limbs . . . companion to wild boasts and indecency. He is shaggy around the ears, deaf as a post, and just barely yields to horse-whip and goad combined.”

  dn Or “except to feed a worthy person” or “except in places specially ordained” or “except at sacrifices.” The Sanskrit anyatra tirtheshu has all these meanings.

  do Early Buddhist monks and nuns ate meat but did not kill (or sacrifice) the animals themselves. Non-killing was a virtue for them, but the Buddha explicitly refused to require monks and nuns to refrain from eating meat.

  dp There was also an idea of tapas, of controlling the energy in the body through self-denial on the eve of war, that worked by a logic similar to that of the old American tradition of football players’ not being allowed to party on the night before the big game.

  dq Not to be confused with shakti, a feminine form of power.

  dr The title of Gandhi’s essay on the Gita says it is about asakti-yoga, usually translated as “selfless action” but more precisely the yoga of nonaddiction.

  ds The sutras, or texts consisting of lines “sewn together”—“sutra” being cognate with our “suture”—are the predecessors of the shastras.

  dt Women in the Kama-sutra have sex with statues, and in the Narmamala, as we’ve seen on page 22, a woman has sex with a linga of leather or skin.

  du The Mahabharata (13.63) also contains passages of satire on the Artha-shastra.

  dv This story resembles the Greek myth of Paris, who, forced to choose among three goddesses, chose Aphrodite (= Kama) over Hera and Athene (roughly = Dharma and Artha), who cursed him.

  dw Since the Ramayana is the main subject of this chapter, unspecified verse citations refer to that text.

  dx Discounting the still-undeciphered IVC seals.

  dy This new social freedom is reflected in the upward mobility of abandoned children like Karna and Vyasa, in the Mahabharata.

  dz The Buddha (another Kshatriya) also left his palace (in his case, voluntarily) and lived in the wilderness for a long time.

  ea Gymno-sophists, according to Plutarch’s Life of Alexander.

  eb As Napoleon performed his own coronation in 1804.

  ec Manu (10.8-12) gave the Charioteers a mythological genealogy of a Brahmin father and a Kshatriya mother, to account for the combination of intellectual and martial skills.

  ed Fast-forward: They continue to do so; a traveling bard in a village in South India recently told an anthropologist that he knew the whole Mahabharata by heart. When the anthropologist asked him how he could possibly remember it, “the minstrel replied that each stanza was written on a pebble in his mind. He simply had to recall the order of the pebbles and ‘read’ from one after another.” In the 1950s, Kamal Kothari sent one of his best singers, from the Langa caste, to adult education classes. He learned to read, but from then on he needed to consult his notes before he sang. As Kothari remarked, “It seems that the illiterate have a capacity to remember in a way that the literate simply do not.” Plato, in the Phaedrus , remarks that when people have writing, their memories suffer attrition.

  ee But just as the magic contained in the oral Rig Veda contributed to the disinclination to commit it to writing, so too the Mahabharata, when converted from its oral to its written form, has potentially inauspicious magic (particularly since it tells of a great holocaust and genocide). For that reason, to this day many people fear to keep complete written texts of it inside their houses.

  ef Other versions of the story divide the fractions slightly differently, but Kausalya always gets half.

  eg The avatar of Vishnu as the Buddha is an entirely different affair, which does not appear until the Puranas.

  eh In other retellings of the narrative, too, Rama insists that he merely pretended to subject Sita to an ordeal and, presumably, pretended to forget that he was a god.

  ei The Ramayana refers to suttee in the story of a prior incarnation of Sita named Vedavati, who tells Ravana that her mother had burned herself on her husband’s funeral pyre (7.17.23).

  ej In later tellings, she really does leave him at this point, but with his connivance, to live in the care of Fire until long after the battle for Lanka.

  ek Or some other poet. The final episode takes place in the last of the seven books of the Ramayana, almost certainly a later addition.

  el Did Rama know that Sita was pregnant when he banished her? He seems to allude to her pregnancy in one verse (7.41.22), but as there is no further reference to what would surely have been a very important event, and since some manus
cripts omit this verse, it seems unlikely that Rama did know.

  em The god of fire similarly has to remind Arjuna not to take his bow and arrows with him into the forest (MB 17.1.37-40).

  en In Kampan’s Tamil version, he cuts off her breasts too.

  eo Rama’s mistreatment of Shurpanakha looks even worse if we compare it with the reception that in the Mahabharata (3.13), Bhima (with the support of his family) gives to the ogress Hidimbi when she declares her love for him: He marries her, and she bears him a son.

  ep The horse sacrifice replaces the distribution of sin that saves Indra in other versions of the myth, both in the Brahmanas and in the Mahabharata (12.273.42-45). There a quarter of the Brahminicide goes to the heavenly nymphs, who ask for a way of freeing themselves from it (moksha) and are told that their Brahminicide will pass to any man who has sex with menstruating women.