The Hindus (112 page)

Without leaving India, the Marwari horses became American movie stars, and they provide a rule-of-ear clue to determine whether a Hollywood film about India was shot in Rajasthan or in the deserts of Lone Pine, California (two hundred miles north of L.A.), for if the horses in the film have those curved ears, the film was shot in India. But Marwari horses now live also in the United States, where there has been, since 2000, a Marwari stud in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, reversing the age-old current of the importing of horses into India.
³⁵
There is an element of colonial manipulation here, for Euro-American ideas of breeding, and standards of equine beauty, influenced the choice of horses that were registered as pure Marwaris in India, and if, as seems possible, the best ones are exported, for extravagant prices, to America, the breed in India will be diminished.

I believe that stories, unlike horses, and like bhakti in the late Puranic tradition, constitute a world of unlimited good, an infinitely expansible source of meaning. An American who retells a Hindu story does not diminish that story within the Hindu world, even to the arguable extent that taking a Hindu statue from Chennai to New York, or an Indian horse from Kathiawar to Chappaquiddick, diminishes the heritage of India. On the contrary, I believe that the wild misconceptions that most Americans have of Hinduism need to be counteracted precisely by making Americans aware of the richness and human depth of Hindu texts and practices, and an American interlocutor is often the best person to build that bridge. Hence this book.

CHAPTER 24

One day, sitting in the Adi-Dravida street, I tackled a group of older
Pallars on the subjects of death, duty, destiny and rebirth of the soul.
In my inadequate Tamil, I asked them where they thought the soul
went after death. . . . The group collapsed in merriment—perhaps as
much at my speech as at the question. Wiping his eyes, the old man
replied, “Mother, we don’t know! Do you know? Have you been
there?” I said, “No, but Brahmans say that if people do their duty
well in this life, their souls will be born next time in a higher caste.”
“Brahmans say!” scoffed another elder, “Brahmans say anything.
Their heads go round and round!”

Kathleen Gough, in 1960, writing about the Pallars,
a caste of Adi-Dravidas (“Original Dravidians”),
a South Indian term for formerly Untouchable
castes known elsewhere as Dalits
¹

 

The subtitle of this chapter might be “Whatever Happened to . . . the Veda, the
Ramayana
?” Where the previous chapter traced the historical background of the political situation of Hindus in contemporary America, this chapter considers the relevance of history to the political situation of Hindus in present-day India. It demonstrates how alive the past is in present-day India, how contemporary events rebound off the wall of the past. We have noted, throughout, the intertextual links, the way that stories told in the Vedas and Brahmanas are retold, with variations, in the
Mahabharata,
and the Puranas, and vernacular traditions. The heads of the Brahmins “go round and round” as the meanings of the ancient texts are ignored, or inverted, or, in some cases, followed to the letter. And the diversity of Hinduism extends also to the diversity of the ways in which the past is used in the present.

I’ve taken the contemporary instances not in any logical order but following the chronological order of the historical periods described in some (though not all) of the previous chapters, beginning with the Vedas; in all other ways, they are in a random sequence. There is no consistent direction in which events from the ancient past exert their intense influence on the present moment. In some cases there is a transformation; the ancient myth or ritual takes on entirely new meanings or even new forms in the present. In other cases the past clings to its ancient, sometimes now incomprehensible or clearly irrelevant form and resists any change. Women and Dalits gain new powers but are still in many cases shackled to ancient, repressive forms, just as Hinduism in the contemporary period simultaneously reaches out to a new inclusiveness and new possibilities of equality for those who were oppressed in the past, while Hindu nationalists grow in their power to oppose that very inclusiveness. The new myths of women and Dalits may be unearthings or reworkings of ancient tales that were never preserved or entirely new creations, born of the events of our time.

The Veda lives on in revisions of the sacrifice. Although a living animal was suffocated in the Vedic sacrifice, in some cases rice cakes were already substituted for the animal victim. The irony is that now throughout India generally only the lower castes perform animal sacrifices (as the Vedic people did), while Brahmins perform vegetarian versions of Vedic sacrifices, often not just for the reasons that we have noted but also precisely in order to distinguish their sacrifices from the village buffalo sacrifice or chicken offered to the goddess—rites, associated with “carnivorous low castes,” that they regard as “popular” and “barbaric.”
²
Privately performed sacrifices may include real animals, while publicly sponsored sacrifices are less likely to do so.
³
But the flesh-eating Vedic god may still cast his shadow on the vegetarian sacrifice; the whole coconuts that the deity fancies bear a suspicious resemblance to human heads (a resemblance that is sometimes explicitly mentioned in the accompanying liturgy and in myths about human sacrifice).

The Brahmin priest often sacrifices a goat made of dough and papier-mâché, as Madhva advised his followers to do, and several ritual texts allow.
⁴
In Kerala, Nambuduri Brahmins use rice wrapped in a banana leaf.
⁵
Often the rice cakes that are used in place of the goat are wrapped in leaves, tied to little leashes, and carefully “suffocated” before they are offered. At some soma sacrifices, pots of ghee are substituted for the animals. A Vedic ritual in Maharashtra in 1992 was largely transformed into a
puja,
with a strongly Arya Samaj flavor; the sponsor was the guru, taking darshan before the image of the god, but a famous Muslim sitar player performed the music.
⁶
And when a Vedic sacrifice was performed in London in 1996, there was not even a vegetable substitute for the sacrificial beast; the beasts were “entirely imagined.” The priest didn’t walk around the imaginary victims or tie them to a (real or imaginary) stake, as one would do with a live animal, but he did mime suffocating them and sprinkled water where they should have been. In place of the omentum (which the sacrificier usually smells but does not eat), they used the large wheat rolls called
rotis
.
⁷
The transformation of a real ritual into an imagined ritual echoes a process that we have noted in the history of Tantra.

In the combinatory form of Hinduism that remains a basic format in India to the present day, the two forms of sacrifice may be performed together. When a Vedic sacrifice was performed in India in 1955, and public protest prevented the sacrificers from slaughtering a goat, another sacrificer protested the revisionist ritual by offering the same sacrifice—with animal victims—on the outskirts of town.
⁸
Sometimes, “as a concession to mass sentiments,” sacrifices using Vedic mantras and rituals are preceded by popular rituals to local deities.
⁹
Sometimes the distinction is spatial rather than temporal: The deity in the center of the Hindu temple (an aspect of Shiva or Vishnu or a goddess) is often a strict vegetarian who accepts no blood offerings, only rice, or rice cakes, as well as fruits and flowers, while there may be another deity, outside the temple, to whom blood sacrifices are made. Sometimes the vegetarian deity in the inner shrine is a god, and the carnivorous deity outside is a goddess. Similarly, the shrines of goddesses with an
identificatio brahminica
are generally inside the village, while those of mother goddesses who lacked such connections are outside the village.
¹⁰

This arrangement in the structure of the temple translates into a spatial configuration—from outside to inside—what originated as a synchronic opposition (animal versus vegetable sacrifice) and developed into a historical, diachronic transition (vegetables replacing animals). In the outer markets of the temple, one can purchase an image of the deity, or a postcard of the temple, perhaps a cassette of the songs,
bhajans
, sung to the deity, but also entirely worldly things, cassettes of (pirated) versions of the Rolling Stones, sandals, saris, embroidered shawls, brass pots, statuettes of couples in
Kama-sutra
/ Khajuraho positions (thus once again uniting the sacred and the sensual), anything. The ideological conflict endures, in transformation, through both space and time. It also often endures in a linguistic bifurcation, as worshipers gather in the temple to hear someone read a Sanskrit text; some recite it with him; the storyteller or tour guide will then gloss it in the local language, Telugu or Bangla or whatever, and then explain it, perhaps discuss it with them. Then he will read another verse in Sanskrit, and so on. The rich mix of life on the outskirts of a temple is yet another example of the real periphery that the imaginary Brahmin center cannot hold.

The Vedic idea of a nonviolent sacraifice also affects contemporary attitudes to cows.

The cow is a central issue for the Hindutva faction, whose influence upon all branches of Indian life is sometimes called Saffronization (on the model of Sanskritization), a term with strong echoes of the renunciant branch of Hinduism, whose members wear saffron- or ocher-colored robes. In recent years, some members of the Hindu right have argued, in contradiction of abundant historical evidence to the contrary, that the ancient Indians never ate beef until the Muslims brought this custom to India; they have persecuted Hindus
^lh
who have defended the historical record on this point,
¹¹
and they have attempted to use the alleged sanctity of the cow to disenfranchise Muslims, some of whom eat beef and others of whom slaughter cows, both for the Muslim ritual of Bakr-Id and for the many Hindus who do eat beef. The belief that Hindu cows are sacred is supported by no less an authority than the
OED,
which defines the term as, primarily, designating “The cow as an object of veneration amongst Hindus,” and cites an 1891 reference from Rudyard Kipling’s father (a vet in India), already in the context of Hindu-Muslim conflict: “The Muhammedan . . . creed is in opposition to theirs [
sc.
the Hindus’] and there are rankling memories of a thousand insults to it wrought on the sacred cow.”
¹²
The term became globalized as a metaphor, indeed a backhanded anti-Hindu ethnic slur. In U.S. journalism the term “sacred cow” came to mean “someone who must not be criticized,” and in American literature, “An idea, institution, etc., unreasonably held to be immune from questioning or criticism.” The term designates precisely the sort of fanaticism that characterizes the methods of those who, in the cow protection movement under the Raj and again in India today, have insisted that all cows are sacred.

But are cows sacred in India? Or is the idea of a “sacred cow” an Irish bull
^li
(the old British chauvinist term for an
ox
-y-moron)? People often perform
puja
to cows, and at many festivals they decorate cows and give them fruits and flowers, paint their horns beautifully, and place garlands around their necks. Cows are in many ways special animals. Certainly they are not publicly killed in India, for it is against the law to kill a cow in several Indian states and frowned on in others. Cows already in early Sanskrit texts came to symbolize Brahmins, since a Brahmin without a cow is less than a complete Brahmin, and killing a cow (except in a sacrifice) was equated with killing a Brahmin.
¹³

But “sacred” means a lot more than not to be killed and is, in any case, a Christian term that can be, at best, vaguely and inadequately applied in India. Few of us kill, or eat, our children, but no one would argue that they are sacred. There are few, if any, Hindu cow goddesses or temples to cows.
^lj
Hindus do not always treat cows with respect or kindness; cows are sometimes beaten and frequently half starved; Hindus will often treat cows in ways that sheltered Americans, who eat beef that comes neatly wrapped in plastic, regard as cruel. The conflicting attitudes of reverence and skepticism in the Gujarat peasants who did, or did not, drive the buffalo cow out of their houses persists in contemporary India. Hindus who would not dream of eating beef often sell old cows “to the village,” ostensibly to let them out to graze on good grass for a happy old age; but this is often a euphemism for handing them over (surreptitiously) to a middleman who eventually gives them to someone who kills them and eats them. Sometimes beef, sold as mutton, is eaten by Hindus who may well be aware of the deception and simply look the other way. But cows are, officially, not killed or eaten by traditional upper-caste Hindus.

When their owners set the cows free to wander and forage about the streets after they are milked in the morning, cows contribute to the menageries in the middle of great Indian cities, though the mélange of cars, buses, bicycles, motorcycles, rickshaws, pedestrians, and other animals accounts for the bulk of the problem. On the streets of a town like Jaipur one can encounter (in addition to cows) monkeys, pigs, chickens, goats, peacocks, bullocks, water buffalos, dogs, and some old horses, all roaming freely on a single block. Animals and humans are part of the same spectrum, all more important than cars, which have to get out of the way for them. There is total freedom, and therefore total chaos. The whole country is still one big farm, even in the big cities (except on the main roads); people feed the birds and also the cows and sometimes even the dogs. If cows are sacred, then, so are goats and horses and dogs. Or, by the same token, as one non-Brahmin caste argued, dogs and cattle are equally polluted, “the South Indian scavengers par excellence.”
¹⁴
The more relevant distinction is between these free souls and freeloaders, on the one hand, and, on the other, more valuable animals, such as better horses, camels, and, occasionally, elephants, which are, by contrast with the street animals, carefully tethered and never abused or, of course, eaten.