The Hindus (149 page)

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.

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

Discounting the still-undeciphered IVC seals.

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

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

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

As Napoleon performed his own coronation in 1804.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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).

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.

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

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 manuscripts omit this verse, it seems unlikely that Rama did know.

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).

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

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.

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.

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).”

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, of all people, was inspired by Trishanku:

Book 6, chapters 23-40 of the
Mahabharata
.

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.

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
.

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

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

Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam.”

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

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

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

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.)

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

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.”

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.