The Hindus (12 page)

So too the Vindhya Mountains form the barrier between North and South India, but the stories about the Vindhyas tell how that barrier was breached, not how it kept people apart: When the Vindhyas began to grow so tall that even the sun had to go around them (just as it circumambulates Mount Meru), the great sage Agastya asked them to bow their heads before him so that he could cross from North to South India (bringing Sanskrit and the Vedas to the Dravidian lands) and to remain that way until he returned; the Vindhyas agreed to this, and since Agastya never returned from South India, where he established the Tamil language, the Vindhyas remain conveniently low.

In South Asia, history flows with the rivers. Three great river systems divide the northern subcontinent: first the Indus (“the River”) in Pakistan, with its five tributaries, the rivers of the Punjab (Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej) that give the Punjab its name (“Five Waters”); then the Doab or “Two Rivers,” the Ganges (Ganga, “Going to Earth” [from heaven, where she is the Milky Way]) and the Yamuna (“Twin Sister,” now Jumna) in North India; and then the Brahmaputra (“Son of Brahma”) in Bangladesh. All three rivers originate in a single region of southwestern Tibet, their sources so close that they may once have belonged to a single icy lake that was shattered when the piece of Africa that crashed into Central Asia drove off the waters in diverse directions.
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The Indus flows eighteen hundred miles before it empties into the Arabian sea. The Narmada (“Jester”), the great river that, like the Vindhya Mountains, divides the north from the south, has inspired an extensive mythology that balances that of the Ganges in the north.

What is the relationship between climate and culture in India? Is there some causal link between, on the one hand, “the ambivalent natural environment, where lush harvests coexist with barren soil, drought with flood, feast with famine,” and, on the other, the fact that Hindu logicians were the first to posit the coexistence of the elements of contradiction?
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Other countries have “ambivalent natural environments” too; farmers the world over are at the mercy of the elements. But the violence and uncertainty of the monsoon create an ever-present psychological factor that may well be related to Hindu ideas about the capriciousness and violence of fate and the gods.

What does the geology of the formation of India tell us about the formation of Hinduism? The answer is suggested by a story that A. K. Ramanujan retold, from Tamil sources:

This text is itself an example of what it tells about: It mixes together the story of Mariamma from two different Indian geographical and linguistic traditions, North Indian Sanskrit literature, where she is called Renuka, and South Indian Tamil oral folktales about the origins of two South Indian goddesses.
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This sort of juxtaposition, in various forms, is widespread in both myth and history, beginning with the piece of Africa stuck onto Central Asia, like a head upon a body, and continuing through all the ideas of women and low castes that get into the heads of Brahmin males. It can stand as a metaphor for all the fusions that make up the rich mix of Hinduism.

The mixing together of various human streams is so basic to the history of Hinduism that the Brahmins could not stop trying, and failing, to prevent it, even as their fear of the powers of the senses to invade the rational control center made them try, also in vain, to control addiction through asceticism. Their ultimate terror was the “confusion” of classes, the miscegenation brought on by the Kali Age. They visualized the mixing of classes as a form of impurity, which should not surprise anyone who has read the British anthropologist Mary Douglas’s explanation of the ways that throughout the world, “category errors”—things that do not fall entirely into one class or another—are characterized as dirt and as danger.
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Brahmins regarded the woman with the Brahmin head and Pariah body—and her twin and partner, with the Pariah head on the Brahmin body—as monstrosities, a double hodgepodge. But from the standpoint of a non-Brahmin, or a scholar of Hinduism, this rich hybrid or multiple mix is precisely what makes Hinduism the cultural masterpiece that it is.

Such a conflation is not a monstrosity, nor is it a mistake—or if it is, it is a
felix culpa
. The transpositions result in two goddesses (read: many Hinduisms), each of whom is far more interesting than the straightforward realignment would have been. Whatever its disparate sources, the resulting creature has an integrity that we must respect, rather like that of my favorite mythical beast, created by Woody Allen, the Great Roe, who had the head of a lion and the body of a lion, but
not the same lion
.
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The question to ask is not where the disparate elements originated but why they were put together and why kept together. The political implications of regarding Hinduism as either a hodgepodge or, on the other hand, culturally homogeneous or even monolithic are equally distorting; it is always more useful, if a bit trickier, to acknowledge simultaneously the variety of the sources and the power of the integrations. A Hinduism with a Pariah body and a Brahmin head—or, if you prefer, a Pariah head and a Brahmin body—was re-created again and again throughout India history, and these multiple integrities are what this book is about.

CHAPTER 3

In place of an opening epigram, we begin with an image, whose meaning is much disputed, for one of the many challenges of interpreting the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) lies in deciphering pictures for which we do not know the words. The second challenge is trying to decide what, if anything, of the IVC survives in later Hinduism. For the IVC is older than the oldest extant Hindu texts, the Vedas, and its material remains include many images that may be the earliest-known examples of important Hindu icons that only (re)surface much later.

Much of what we now call Hinduism may have had roots in cultures that thrived in South Asia long before the creation of textual evidence that we can decipher with any confidence. Remarkable cave paintings have been preserved from Mesolithic sites dating from c. 30,000 BCE in Bhimbetka, near present-day Bhopal, in the Vindhya Mountains in the province of Madhya Pradesh.
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They represent a number of animals that have been identified as deer, boars, elephants, leopards, tigers, panthers, rhinoceroses, antelope, fish, frogs, lizards, squirrels, and birds. One painting seems to depict a man walking a dog on a leash. The animals represented probably existed there (it would be hard for someone who had never seen an elephant to draw a picture of an elephant), though there may be false positives (an artist could have copied someone else’s picture of an elephant, and the existence of images of a creature half bull and half man certainly does not prove that such tauranthropoi actually existed). On the other hand, animals that are
not
represented may well also have existed there (the Bhimbetkanese may have had snakes even though they did not make any paintings of snakes); the missing animals may simply have failed to capture the artist’s imagination. False negatives in this realm are even more likely than false positives.

Several of the animals in the paintings have horns, like gazelles, and one painting shows people dancing with what may be a unicorn with a close-clipped mane.
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This possible unicorn continues to tease art historians when it reappears in the IVC.

MATERIAL CULTURE

There were other early settlements in India, notably the culture of Baluchistan, in the westernmost part of what is now Pakistan, dating to before 6000 BCE. But from about 2300 BCE the first urbanization took place, as great cities arose in the valley of the Indus River, 150 miles south of Baluchistan, also in Pakistan. The material remains of this culture, which we call the Indus Valley Civilization or the Harappan Civilization (named after Harappa, one of the two great cities on the Indus, the other being Mohenjo-Daro), present a tantalizing treasure chest of often enigmatic images that hover just beyond our reach, taunting us with what might well be the keys to the roots of Hinduism.

The Indus Valley plain, much like the valleys of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates, cradles of Neolithic civilizations, is a semiarid, river-watered region; the “semi” means that on the one hand, the relatively sparse vegetation, not so rich as that of the effluvial plain of the Ganges, for instance, required no iron tools to clear and settle while, on the other hand, the silt from the river floodings provided sufficient natural fertilizer to create the surplus that makes civilization possible.
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The river was also a channel of trade.

Here’s another origin story. In 1856 an English general named Alexander Cunningham, later director general of the archaeological survey of northern India, visited Harappa, where an English engineer named William Brunton was gathering bricks (including what he recognized as bricks from the IVC) as ballast for a railway he was building between Multan and Lahore. Cunningham took note of the site but did nothing about it, and the trains still run on that route, on the main line from Peshawar, on top of a hundred miles of third-millennium BCE bricks. Only after 1917, when an Indian archaeologist found an ancient knife at a place named, significantly, Mound of the Dead (Mohenjo-Daro), and excavations carried out there revealed artifacts identical with those that had been at Harappa, did this civilization begin to be appreciated. Among the treasures that they found were carved stones, flat, rectangular sections of soapstone about the size of a postage stamp, which were used as stamps or seals, as well as sealings (impressions) of such stamps.

The civilization of the Indus Valley extends over more than a thousand sites, stretching over 750,000 square miles, where as many as forty thousand people once lived.
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Four hundred miles separate the two biggest cities, from Harappa on the Ravi tributary in the north (one of the five rivers of the Punjab) down to Mohenjo-Daro (in the Larkana Valley in Sindh) and on down to the port of Lothal in the delta on the sea. Yet the Indus cities were stunningly uniform and remarkably stable over this wide range, changing little over a millennium, until they begin to crumble near the end. They had trade contacts with Crete, Sumer, and other Mesopotamian cultures, perhaps even Egypt.
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There are Harappan sites in Oman (on the Arabian Peninsula), and Indus seals show up in Mesopotamia. There was direct contact with Iran, particularly just before the end, a period from which archaeologists have found a very late Indus seal with Indus motifs on one side and Iranian on the other, together with many seals reflecting Central Asian influences.
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Some Indus images bear a striking resemblance to images from Elam, a part of ancient Iran that was closely linked to adjacent Mesopotamian urban societies.
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Trade with Central Asia continued in the Indus area even after the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization. In a sense, the Hindu diaspora began now, well before 2000 BCE.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the use of cubical dice began in South Asia and indeed in the IVC.
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Sir John Hubert Marshall, the director general of the Indian archaeological survey from 1902 to 1931, found many cubical terra-cotta dice, with one to six dots, at Mohenjo-Daro,
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and a number of other dice have been identified since then from Harappa and elsewhere, including several of stone (agate, limestone, faience, etc.).
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This is a fact of great significance in light of the importance of gambling in later Indian civilization, from 1200 BCE.

They had gold, copper, and lead, and they imported bronze, silver, and tin (as well as lapis lazuli and soapstone), but they had no iron; their weapons were made of copper and bronze. There was a huge wheat and barley storage system, and there were household and public drainage works superior to those in parts of the world today, including much of India. Most of the buildings are constructed out of bricks (both sun baked and kiln fired) of remarkably consistent size throughout the extended culture; equally unvarying stone cubes were used to measure weights. The roads too did not just evolve out of deer tracks but were carefully laid out all in the same proportion (streets twice as wide as lanes, avenues twice as wide as streets) and arranged on a grid (north-south or east-west), like the “pink city” of Jaipur in Rajasthan that Maharajah Jai Singh designed and built in the eighteenth century CE. All this uniformity of material culture across hundreds of miles and a great many centuries implies considerable control and planning
¹¹
and suggests, to some scholars, a threat of authoritarian or even totalitarian government. Some speak of the “affluent private residences with bathrooms served by a drainage system,” while “the poor, however, lived huddled in slums, the inevitable underclass in a hierarchical system,”
¹²
and others have seen in the tiny identical houses (protohousing projects? ghettos?) and in the massive government structure, regulating every single brick, an “obsessive uniformity.”
¹³
There is evidence that different professions worked out of distinct areas of the cities, suggesting the existence of something like protocastes.
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Some scholars have taken the visible signs of an overarching hand of authority and urban planning as evidence of “urbanity, sophistication, well-being, ordered existence.”
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One might also see, in the tiny scale of the seals and the figurines, and in the children’s toys, a delicate civilization, whose artwork is fine in both senses—beautiful and small.