The Hindus (113 page)

Dogs, by contrast with cows, are supposed to be treated badly and, as we have seen, usually are, but on many occasions, beginning with the myth of Sarama told in the
Rig Veda,
dogs are, perversely, honored. One of those occasions today is the Tantric worship of Shiva in his aspect as Bhairava, who often has the form or face of a dog or a dog as his vehicle. There are Bhairava temples all over India,
¹⁵
where people offer
puja
to both statues of dogs and living dogs. In the temple to Kal Bhairava in Varanasi, there are images of Shiva astride a big white dog, as well as black plaster statues of dogs, paintings of dogs, metal dogs, and real live dogs who sleep and wander inside and outside the temple. Pilgrims to Varanasi worship the dogs and decorate them with garlands of Indian doughnuts and other things delicious to dogs, which the dogs of course immediately shake off and eat. All this is evidence either that (some) dogs are more sacred than cows in Hinduism or, perhaps, that Hindu views of animals are far too complex to capture by words like “sacred” or “impure.” Other people’s zoological taxonomies look bizarre only to people who view them through their own rather ethnocentric lenses.

A number of castes
^lk
take hounds with them during their long expeditions when they graze their sheep in mountain forests. They regard dogs as forms of their god, Mallanna (or Mailara), whom hounds follow in his expeditions and who also takes the form of a dog on occasion. In rituals, the priests (or, sometimes, the householders) enact the roles of dogs and drink milk that they regard as fed to Mallanna.
¹⁶
Kal Bhairava may be a Sanskritized (and Tantricized) version of this folk god.

The worshipers of the Maharashtrian horseman god Khandoba (a form of Shiva, often assimilated to Mallanna and called Martanda) sometimes act as his dogs and bark in the course of his rituals, as Bhairava is said to have told them to do. These devotees are called Tigers in Marathi and Kannada; it is said that they originally
were
tigers, but that through the darshan of the god Martanda their bodies became human,
¹⁷
a fascinating inversion of the
Mahabharata
story about the dog who got into serious trouble by trying to become a tiger. Forest-dwelling Maharashtrian tribal groups like the Warlis worship and propitiate tigers as the “sentinel deities” or guardians of the village boundaries, but the word for tiger can also denote certain fierce domesticated animals—watchdogs, sheepdogs, or hunting dogs of the kind that attend Khandoba.
¹⁸
The mixing of “tiger” and “dog” is chronic in myth, ritual, and art; Bhairava’s vehicles are occasionally the dog and the tiger or two animals each of which is a mixture of both.

Two pro-dog stories appeared in the news in November 2007, one about Nepal and one about Tamil Nadu. The first reported on a police dog training school in Nepal that trains dogs for rescue and search, for tracking criminals, explosives, and drugs, and for patrol. There are fifty-one dogs, some born on the premises, others from outside. For most of the year the dogs are not well treated, and many are left (like most animals in Indian towns) to forage for themselves and feed on scraps, but for one day a year they are honored and garlanded (presumably with edibles). The article began: “According to the Hindu scripture, the Mahabharat, dogs accompanied Dharmaraj Yudhishthir on his journey to heaven. There is also a Hindu belief that dogs guard the underworld.” Aside from giving Yudhishthira more than one dog, this was a good, historical approach, and the article concluded: “It’s recognised that no animal has a closer relationship with people.”
¹⁹
The compassion here is limited to some dogs, some of the time. But it’s a start.

The second story, carried by the
Hindustan Times
and CNN from New Delhi is worth reporting in its entirety:

Again the special moment of compassion is balanced by a memory of more typical cruelty. And that cruelty endures: Just a few months later officials of the Indian-administered part of Kashmir announced that they had poisoned (with strychnine) five hundred of the hundred thousand stray dogs in Srinagar and intended to kill them all, saying that the dogs posed a risk to humans and made urban life unbearable. When animal rights activists threatened legal action, the officials said they would merely sterilize the dogs, not poison them with strychnine.
²¹
Sure.

The quotation from Kathleen Gough with which this chapter begins reveals a more widespread disregard for
moksha,
indeed for the entire problem of rebirth and transmigration for which
moksha
is said to be the solution. Villagers in 1964 “stubbornly refused to claim that they hoped for, desired, or did anything deliberately to get
moksha,
even in the context of pilgrimage,” and one of them challenged the interviewing anthropologist by saying, referring to the
tirtha
shrine as a “crossing place”: “Have you ever
seen moksha
at any crossing place?”
²²
Chamars (Dalit leatherworkers) in Senapur, Uttar Pradesh, in the 1950s claimed to know nothing about the fate of the soul after death or other ideas related to karma;
²³
the Chamars in Chattisgarh, in central India, ignore the more general householder/renouncer opposition.
²⁴
At the other end of the caste spectrum, E. M. Forster, in 1921, recorded a more ambivalent position in the raja of Dewas: “As a boy, he had thought of retiring from the world, and it was an ideal which he cherished throughout his life, and which, at the end, he would have done well to practise. Yet he would condemn asceticism, declare that salvation could not be reached through it, that it might be Vedantic but it was not Vedic, and matter and spirit must both be given their due.”
²⁵
Throngs of pilgrims come to Varanasi to die because they believe that they will immediately attain
moksha.
But at the same time, many women on pilgrimage seek not (or not only, or not primarily) Release from the wheel, but a better life and, almost as an afterthought, a better rebirth. For most of them, moreover,
moksha
is something that by definition you can’t want; if you want it, then you can’t get it.
²⁶

THE FLAME OF HISTORY AND THE SMOKE OF MYTH

To say (as I do) that the
Ramayana
tells us a great deal about attitudes toward women and tribal peoples in the early centuries CE is a far cry from saying that someone named Rama actually lived in the city now known as Ayodhya and fought a battle on the island now known as Sri Lanka with a bunch of talking monkeys on his side and a ten-headed demon on the other or with a bunch of tribal peoples (represented as monkeys) on his side and a proto-Muslim monster on the other, as some contemporary Hindus have asserted. Rama left no archaeological or inscriptional record. There is no evidence that anyone named Rama did or did not live in Ayodhya; other places too claim him, in South India as well as North India, for the
Ramayana
was retold many times, in many different Indian languages, with significant variations. There is no second Troy here for a Schliemann to come along and discover. Or, rather, there is a second, and a third, and a nineteenth Troy for anyone to discover.

Placing the
Ramayana
in its historical contexts demonstrates that it is a work of fiction, created by human authors who lived at various times, and shows how the human imagination transformed the actual circumstance of the historical period into something far more beautiful, terrible, challenging, and elevating than the circumstances themselves. Indeed one of the advantages of tracing the variants of a myth (such as the flood myth) is that when we encounter it presented as a historical incident (such as the submerging of a causeway to Lanka), we can recognize it as a myth. Texts reveal histories, but we need to find out about those histories and ground them in solid evidence to read against, not into, the texts’ narratives. Reconstructing the ways in which human authors constructed the fictional works, in reaction to earlier texts as well as to historical circumstances, reveals their texts as works of art rather than records of actual events.
²⁷

Yet in a case that began in 1987, a judge in Dhanbad, in Jharkhand (bordering Bihar and Orissa), issued Rama and Hanuman a summons to appear before the court, since the villagers claimed that a 1.4-acre site with two temples dedicated to them belonged to the gods (“Since the land has been donated to the gods, it is necessary to make them a party to the case,” said a local lawyer), against the claim of the Hindu priest who ran the temples, who said that the site belonged to him since a former local king had given it to his grandfather. The summons to the two gods was returned to the court as the address was incomplete. Undeterred, the judge issued another summons through the local newspapers.
²⁸
Nor was this a unique incident. Some Hindus assume that the deity enshrined in a temple is the owner of the temple, that a Hindu statue stolen by a non-Hindu will take action against the thief, and that a statue can sue. A famous case involved a statue of Shiva dancing (Nataraja) that sued the Norton Simon Museum in a U.S. court in 1972-1973.
²⁹
“I can only say that Lord Nataraja himself won the case appearing before courts in the form of the idol,” said a Tamil Nadu state official.
³⁰

For many years, some Hindus have argued that Babur’s Mosque (also called the Babri Masjid) was built over a temple commemorating the birthplace of Rama in Ayodhya, the city where, according to the
Ramayana,
Rama was born.
³¹
During the 1980s, as the Hindu right rose slowly to power, Hindu organizations began holding rallies at the site of Babur’s Mosque, campaigning for the “rebuilding” of the temple, despite the absence of any evidence to confirm either the existence of the temple or even the identification of the modern town of Ayodhya with its legendary predecessor. Then the
Ramayana
was broadcast on Indian television in 1987-1988, adding fuel to the mythological furor over the Ayodhya mosque. In 1989, during a judicial procedure that resulted in allowing Muslims continuing access to the mosque, against the plea of Hindus who wanted to lock them out, it was said that “a monkey sat atop the court building and when the order was passed it violently shook the flagstaff from which the national tricolour was fluttering.”
³²
The monkey was presumed to be Hanuman, who has become the mascot of the RSS, the militant wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and whom Forster, in 1921, already referred to as “the Monkey God (Hanuman-who-knocks-down-Europeans).”
³³

In 1989, as a response to the growing agitation over Ayodhya, a group of historians at the Center for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) released a pamphlet entitled
The Political Abuse of History: Babri-Masjid-Rama-Janma- Bhumi Dispute.
The pamphlet marked the direct intervention of historians in the debate over Ayodhya and was eventually published as an edited volume.
³⁴
The essays all argue that the case for a Rama temple under the mosque is based on myth rather than history.

In 1990 L. K. Advani, the BJP president, put on the saffron robes of a renouncer (or, nowadays, a right-wing Hindu) and posed with a bow and arrow on top of a truck decorated to look like Rama’s chariot. He was arrested as he was heading for Ayodhya.
³⁵
Two years later, on December 6, 1992, as the police stood by and watched, leaders of the BJP whipped a crowd of two hundred thousand into a frenzy. Shouting, “Death to the Muslims!” the mob attacked Babur’s Mosque with sledgehammers. As the historian William Dalrymple put it, “One after another, as if they were symbols of India’s traditions of tolerance, democracy, and secularism, the three domes were smashed to rubble.”
³⁶
In the riots that followed, more than a thousand people lost their lives, and many more died in reactive riots that broke out elsewhere in India, first in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the mosque, then intermittently, and then very seriously again in 2002. Litigation over the site continues. On the site today (as of 2008) nothing but vandalized ruins remains, yet there is intense security (and there have been several attacks to justify such security). Visitors to the site find, in a dark corner of the large, empty space, a small shrine, like a family
puja
closet, with a couple of oleograph pictures of Rama, where a Hindu priest performs a perfunctory
puja.
Nearby, in a BJP tent, is a model of the new temple they intend to build. Whether or not there ever was a Hindu temple there before, there is a temple, however makeshift, there now.

Another, more recent example of the political use of the
Ramayana
myth was relatively bloodless but deeply disturbing. It concerned the proposed dredging of a canal through what is called Rama’s Bridge, an area of limestone shoals and shallow water between southern India and the north shore of the island now known as Sri Lanka.
^ll
In a favorite episode in the
Ramayana,
retold over the centuries, an army of monkeys, led by Hanuman and Rama, build a causeway (or a bridge, though the description sounds much more like a causeway, piling up stones and mortar) over the water to Lanka, a distance said to be a hundred “yokings”
^lm
(about a thousand miles)
^ln
(R 4.63.17). Rameshwara, a place of pilgrimage in Tamil Nadu, claims to be the place where the causeway was built.