The Hindus (150 page)

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

What Shaiva Siddhanta theologians called a
pasha
.

What Kashmiri Shaiva theologians called
maya
.

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.

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.

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

This is a formulation from Sankhya philosophy.

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.

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.

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.

What Homer would have called feasting with the Ethiopians.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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).

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.

In the Dallas Museum of Art.

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

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.).

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
.

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.

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.

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
).

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

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.

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.

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

It is also, by the way, an extraordinarily literal example of what Freud would have called upward displacement.

Among people who find Tantra shameful, Buddhists say it’s Hindu, and Hindus say it’s Buddhist (or Tibetan), just as the French used to call syphilis the Spanish disease, the Spanish the Italian disease, and so forth.

As the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would have argued.
^‡
Imagine if the fundamentalists who run so many of the present governments of the world were replaced by Tantrics; now, there’s a theocracy for you, to boggle the mind. Or perhaps we should regard Bill Clinton as our first Tantric president.

Further still from Tantra, but even more basic to Hinduism (more particularly, to Sankhya), are the five elements, or
tattvas
: earth, fire, water, wind, and space (to which some schools add a sixth, mind or soul).

This sort of reversal was imagined in an old joke about a Jesuit priest who, when his bishop forbade priests to smoke while meditating, dutifully agreed but argued that surely there would be no objection if he occasionally meditated while he was smoking.

The terms may be a satire on their use to denote the universal aspect of Hinduism held “in common” by all Hindus in contrast with “one’s own” unique dharma.

Kula usually designates “family” in the sense of “good family”; Kulin Brahmins are high-caste Brahmins. To call Tantric groups Kaula is therefore already to mock caste strictures or to use “family” with the sort of irony with which it is used to designate the Mafia. Sometimes Kula refers to one particular branch of Tantrics, sometimes to Tantrics in general.

The verse from the
Rig Veda
—3.62.10—that a pious Hindu recites at dawn and that begins “
tat savitur varenyam
.”

The words are inscribed on a plaque near the place in Delhi where he was shot. There is much dispute as to whether he said “Ram Ram” or “Ram Rahim” when he died.

The Sanskrit trick of using words with double meanings (“embracing,” or
slesha
) was also used in an inscription written for a Muslim ruler under the Delhi Sultanate in 1328 (establishing a garden as a refuge for all animals).

In part because the Hindus didn’t usually call themselves Hindus.

Slaves in ancient India had different rights and restrictions from slaves in Greece, Africa, or America.

Portuguese traders like Payez, Nuñez, and Diaz wrote extensively about the horse trade.

To use Thomas Kuhn’s term for a major change in scientific worldviews.

The
Vayu Purana,
chapter 36, for instance, includes no animal avatars, just six of the usual ten (Man-Lion, Dwarf, Parashurama, Rama, Krsna, and Kalkin) plus Narayana (another form of Vishnu) and three more humans: Dattatreya and Mandhata (with previous histories of their own) and Vyasa (author of the
Mahabharata
).

A case might well be made for including Kalki as an animal avatar, since he often appears as (though more often with) a white horse, but we will discuss him in the context of interreligious avatars.

The pattern applies to Karna, Oedipus, Moses, Cyrus, and, as Alan Dundes has argued persuasively, Jesus. The animals are more prominent in the myths of Tarzan and Kipling’s Mowgli.

There may be an echo here of the
Mahabharata
story in which the Ganges kills the first seven of her children, and only the eighth, Bhishma, is saved.