The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  eq Only after the horse sacrifice are we told of subsequent sacrifices, “He did not chose any wife other than Sita, for a golden image of Janaka’s daughter appeared in every sacrifice, fulfilling the purpose of a wife (7.89.4).”

  er The earth has in fact lost some of its fertility; in the story that Lakshmana tells Rama to persuade him of the efficacy of the horse sacrifice, the story in which Indra transfers his own Brahminicide to several elements, including the earth, Brahminicide takes the form of salt patches in the earth.

  es Satyavati and Draupadi are such children, and there are many, many others.

  et The text says that the sage had taken the form of a deer to mate with his wife in the form of a deer and then that he lived with deer because he shunned humans.

  eu The commentator, Nilakantha, says Old Age was not old age but someone of the Kaivarta caste (of fishermen), who just happened to be named Old Age.

  ev Indian aesthetic theory had a great deal to say about the transformation of emotion (rasa) through art.

  ew The monkeys too have been identified with various groups, including the British.

  ex Shatrughna, the fourth half brother, is hardly more than the other half of Lakshmana, though he enters the plot near the end.

  ey Kubera, the fourth half brother, serves, like Shatrughna, a minor function. There is another ogre brother too, Khara, who is killed even before Ravana kidnaps Sita, but the three who fight together at the end form the essential triad.

  ez Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, of all people, was inspired by Trishanku:Viswamitra the Magician

  By his spells and incantations,

  Up to Indra’s realms elysian

  Raised Trisanku, king of nations.

  Indra and the gods offended

  Hurled him downward, and descending

  In the air he hung suspended,

  With these equal powers contending.

  Thus by aspirations lifted,

  By misgivings downward driven,

  Human hearts are tossed and drifted

  Midway between earth and heaven.

  fa Book 6, chapters 23-40 of the Mahabharata.

  fb These dates are much disputed, some scholars emphasizing a much shorter period for the actual recension, with the possibility of single authorship, while others emphasize the longer period and multiple authorship.

  fc The Kuru kings in the Mahabharata are said to have later shifted their capital from Hastinapur to Kaushambi because of floods at Hastinapur. Excavations at a village named Hastinapura in Meerut (Uttar Pradesh) have revealed habitations from the twelfth to the seventh centuries BCE, with walls of mud or of mud bricks (sun-fired), or reed walls plastered over with mud; and then, from the sixth to the third centuries BCE, structures of mud brick as well as burned bricks (kiln-fired), and terra-cotta ring wells—all of this a far cry from the fabulous palaces described in the Mahabharata.

  fd 3012 BCE is also a much-cited date for the battle.

  fe Sometimes said to be a hundred thousand, perhaps just to round it off a bit.

  ff Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam.”

  fg Perhaps inspired by Asian carp, said to devour all the other fish in the lake.

  fh He also becomes a sharabha, a fierce mythical beast, variously described.

  fi In later Hinduism, Dharma occasionally becomes incarnate as the human equivalent of a dog, a Pariah (Chandala).

  fj The sage Trishanku tried it and got stuck halfway up. ‡ The anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was on the same wavelength when she insisted, in an interview, that there were dogs in heaven. How did she know? she was asked. Because, she replied, otherwise it would not be heaven. § The hypocritical cat ascetic is carved on the great frieze at Mamallapuram. (See page 346.)

  fk Other translators call it “uncruelty,” “absence of cruelty,” “noninjury,” or even “compassion.”

  fl Nilakantha, commenting on the Mahabharata in the seventeenth century, glosses “cruelty” as “lack of pity” (nirdayatvam); “lack of cruelty,” then, which is the form that occurs in the text (a-nri-shamsya), would be “pity.”

  fm These are not compliments; Yudhishthira is sometimes regarded, rather like Jimmy Carter, as too good to have been a successful ruler or even as a namby-pamby who didn’t want to fight. No mother in India nowadays names her son Yudhishthira, as she might name him Arjuna or even Indra.

  fn In a later version (Markandeya Purana 3), Indra takes the form of an aged bird with broken wings and asks a sage for human flesh to eat; the sage asks his four sons to supply it (and their blood to drink, for good measure); they refuse and are cursed to become birds with the power of human speech. The sage offers his own flesh to Indra, who reveals that it was of course, just a test.

  fo In other variants of the Mahabharata text, the dove is also said to be a Brahmin.

  fp Though these are all animals that other texts call animals to be hunted, mrigas.

  fq Perhaps the same vow that Raikva, the gleaner (or gatherer), followed in the Upanishads.

  fr There is a rough parallel to this idea in the Catholic practice of offering up your suffering to shorten the sentences of souls in purgatory.

  fs As the priest Vrisha had served as the charioteer for King Tryaruna. Closer still, the reader (or hearer) would recall an earlier episode in the Mahabharata (in the Virata Parvan, book 4), where Arjuna, disguised as an effeminate dancing master, serves as the charioteer for a cowardly prince. In that mock Gita, the inversion of power and status (the great warrior as lowly charioteer) foreshadows that of the Gita, in which as Arjuna was to the prince, so Krishna is to Arjuna, a creature of great destructive power who velvets his claws for the sake of human affection.

  ft The Gita also recapitulates the Upanishadic idea of the third path of no return: Krishna says that he hurls cruel, hateful men into demonic wombs in birth after birth, so that they never reach him but go the lowest way to hell (16.19-20).

  fu Fast-forward: In the 2000 film The Legend of Bagger Vance, loosely based on the Gita, with golf taking the place of war (though the hero has been traumatized by World War I), the Krishna figure (played by Will Smith) describes to [Ar]Junuh (Matt Damon), for whom he is the caddie (charioteer), the feeling of karma without kama as playing in the zone, a great analogy.

  fv Amba is clearly the basic name, of which Ambika and Ambalika are variants. These are the names of the three queens that Vedic texts describe as pantomiming copulation with the dead stallion who pinch-hits for the king in the horse sacrifice, just as Vyasa is pinch-hitting for his half brother, the dead king.

  fw The goddess Ganges marries Shantanu but kills the first seven of their children (actually doing them a favor, for they are immortals cursed to be born on earth); like Saranyu, Urvashi, and Sita, she is an immortal woman who leaves her mortal husband when he violates their agreement, in this case by rescuing the eighth child, Bhishma.

  fx Thus Dharma is incarnate in one of the three sons of Vyasa in the generation of the fathers (Vidura), and he fathers one of the sons (Yudhishthira) of another of those fathers (Pandu).

  fy The Puranas (Markandeya 5) expand upon this: As a result of his Brahminicide, Indra’s power goes into five gods, including him, who father the Pandavas.

  fz Several manuscripts of this passage, as well as many texts composed after the tenth century, remove Draupadi’s agency by saying that she called for help from Krishna, who arrived and performed the miracle of the expanding sari. There is a real loss of feminist ground here. In response to the TV Mahabharata series, a company marketed the Draupadi Collection of saris, which presumably did not stretch infinitely.

  ga Satyavati too has to tell several stories to Ambika and Ambalika to persuade them to submit to the same sort of levirate.

  gb A notorious example is the story of Yavakri, who tried to exert this right on the wife of another Brahmin and was murdered by a witch in the form of the wife, conjured up by the Brahmin.

  gc The text regards this as Madri’s triumph and
privilege, but a feminist might wonder if she gets this dubious honor of committing suttee as a punishment for killing Pandu by enticing him (naturally it is the woman’s fault) to the fatal coupling.

  gd Much of this information about women comes from the Artha-shastra, which, if not the Mauryan document that people often assume it is, was nevertheless probably composed in the general period of the composition of the Mahabharata, by about 300 CE.

  ge Actually, the Mahabharata refers to itself as a “conversation” or “tale” (akhyana) more often than an itihasa, and occasionally as a poem (kavya), just like the Ramayana, but it is usually called an itihasa. The philosopher Abhinavagupta says that itihasa is just another form of kavya, and by that definition, the Mahabharata is kavya too.

  gf The vow for killing a Shudra is one-sixteenth of the penance for killing a Brahmin, a crime for which various punishments are prescribed (11.73-90, 127).

  gg Attributed to Nakula, the Pandava son of one of the twin equine gods, the Ashvins.

  gh In U.S. law, this is known as a Brandeis brief, which the Supreme Court justice insisted his clerks develop in order to understand the thinking of the opposition.

  gi Both Kautilya and Vatsyayana would have loved Nixon, hated Clinton. (Manu would have loathed both of them.)

  gj The contemporary equivalent might be the Bonfire of the Vanities syndrome (from Tom Wolfe’s novel), in which rich people in their Mercedes accidentally end up in a really rough part of the Bronx, and the nightmare begins.

  gk Not only that: He cheats and is cheated (and loses to his wife, at that), causing one of their frequent fights and separations.

  gl Fast-forward: In the Amar Chitra Katha comic book version of the story, Draupadi says that Yudhishthira was “intoxicated by gambling,” conflating two of the vices of lust.

  gm What Shaiva Siddhanta theologians called a pasha.

  gn What Kashmiri Shaiva theologians called maya.

  go This tradition continues in contemporary rural India, where women approve of “positive” magic when it represents powers acquired properly and is used to protect the family or devotional practices.

  gp He adds that the first six are right for a Brahmin, the last four for a Kshatriya, and these same four, with the exception of the ogre marriage, for a Vaishya or Shudra. Other people say that only one, the ogre marriage, is for a Kshatriya, and only the antigod marriage for a Vaishya and Shudra, while still others say that only the marriages of the centaurs and the ogres are right for rulers.

  gq Krishna tells Arjuna, in the Gita (2.3), to stop acting like a kliba.

  gr This is a formulation from Sankhya philosophy.

  gs The specific vows are the Painful Vow of the Lord of Creatures and the Moon Course Vow, which involve skipping certain meals and generally eating very little.

  gt The reference to Solomon’s bringing gold, precious stones, and wood from Ophir (1 Kings 10:11 and 2 Chronicles 9:11) is generally interpreted as a reference to the Malabar coast. Solomon used “ships of Tarshish” to bring peacocks, monkeys, and other treasures every three years (1 Kings 10:2l), probably from India, Tarshish being variously identified with places including Crete and India.

  gu In the ancient period this island was called by several other names, including Tamraparni and Singhala-dvipa (later Ceylon). It was probably not identical with the place that the Ramayana calls Lanka, though the present island was ultimately named after the Ramayana’s Lanka. Nor is there any evidence that the kingdoms mentioned in Ashoka’s inscriptions and in the earliest layers of Tamil literature are identical to the later kingdoms of the same name.

  gv What Homer would have called feasting with the Ethiopians.

  gw “Alvar” is both singular and plural; but the singular “Nayanar” forms the plural “Nayanmar.”

  gx A Delhi version of the story makes the squirrel a chipmunk, which Rama stroked, making the stripes. There is also a Muslim version: Muhammad, who was known to be fond of cats, stroked them and made their stripes.

  gy The site is generally known as the Five Chariots, but it is sometimes called the Seven Pagodas, and two ancient temples are said still to exist, submerged beneath the ocean, a variant of our old friend the flood myth.

  gz A motive not unlike those that drove the pious campagns of Charles Martel and Charlemagne.

  ha Temples carved with scenes from the Ramayana date from the fifth century CE, but most of the scenes show devotion to Shiva rather than Vishnu.

  hb Two sisters who were the successive wives of Vikramaditya II (733-746) commissioned two of the great temples at Pattadakal.

  hc Sometimes you can tell if it’s a queen or a goddess by counting the arms—four if a goddess, two if a queen—but often the goddess too has just two arms, and then the only clues are the insignia of the goddess.

  hd The Newars of Nepal marry all their young women first to Vishnu as Narayana, making their earthly

  husbands second husbands—unthinkable for a conventional Hindu woman—and therefore ensuring

  that they can never be widowed.

  he The relapse into wildness is what dog trainers call “predatory drift”: The tamed wild animal suddenly remembers that his companion (another dog) is his natural prey and kills him.

  hf Mihirakula (early sixth century) and Sasanka (early seventh century).

  hg There is a pun on “shattered” (khandita) and “heretics” (pakhandas), verse 49.

  hh We will postpone, until chapter 17, our encounter with the Puranic Vishnu and his avatars and here consider primarily Shiva and the goddesses.

  hi Mathematics was, and remains, a subject at which Indians excel; the numbers formerly known as Arabic (because they reached Europe only after the Arabs had learned them in India) are now more properly known as Hindu-Arabic (and should be still more properly known as Indian-Arabic); they were first attested in the Ashokan inscriptions.

  hj Though narratives were depicted earlier in sculpture, on Buddhist stupas such as Sanchi and Amaravati.

  hk The dating of Kalidasa is conjectural, but there is convincing circumstantial evidence to place him during the Gupta period.

  hl Bharata is the word used to designate India in most North Indian languages, to this day.

  hm Fast-forward: In 1938 Akhtar Husain Raipuri translated the play into Urdu. He argued that Kalidasa, being a man of his time and identifying with Brahminical high culture, changed the original epic story in an attempt “to save the king from being seen for what he really was—a man who refused to accept responsibility for seducing an innocent woman” (and, I would add, abandoning her).

  hn They do speak of the Great God (Mahadeva) and the God (Ishvara), but these are names of one particular god, Shiva, and are not meant to encompass all the varieties of male gods such as Vishnu and Brahma, as the Goddess encompasses all goddesses.

  ho In the Dallas Museum of Art.

  hp The same word that is the basis of the name of the Pariahs called Chandalas.

  hq The gods are Indra, the Wind, Yama (god of the dead), the Sun, Fire, Varuna (god of the waters), the Moon, and Kubera (god of wealth), often called the eight Guardians of the Directions (east, west, southeast, etc.).

  hr Durga, in Bengal, is an important exception. ‡ Also the nickname of the queen in Brahmana texts of the horse sacrifice and of one of the grandmothers of the Pandus in the Mahabharata.

  hs The Mahanirvana Tantra may be as late as the eighteenth century and therefore may incorporate a response to the British presence in India. Yet both its subject matter and its rhetoric reflect classic Tantric concerns.

  ht Some people seem to regard anything that has to do with sex in India, or not even only in India, as Tantric, but that way madness lies; Tantra is often, though by no means always, about sex, but sex is certainly not usually about Tantra.

  hu So too a late chapter of the Padma Purana (perhaps c. 1000 CE) says that Kshatriya women are noble if they immolate themselves, but that Brahmin women may not, and that anyone who helps a Brahmin woman
do it is committing Brahminicide (brahma-hatya).

  hv The Chinese character niu can mean either “cow” or “ox,” as can the Sanskrit word go.

  hw The Mahabharata (9.38.1-12) tells another story about the origin of a different shrine called the Release of the Skull, not in Varanasi and not about Shiva: Rama beheaded an ogre whose head accidentally became attached to the thigh of a sage who happened to be wandering in that forest. The sage went on pilgrimages to shrine after shrine and finally was released from the skull at a shrine on the Sarasvati River that henceforth became known as the Release of the Skull.

  hx In some versions, Vishnu uses his discus (chakra), which functions like a combined Frisbee and boomerang: You send it out, and it chops things off and comes back to you.

  hy Like Janamejaya’s sacrifice, in which the god really does replace the sacrificial victim, the horse, as he usually does only metaphorically.