The Hindus (21 page)

Appropriately, it is often the Ashvins who rescue people from such tight spots and bring them back into the good, broad places. For the Ashvins (whose name means “equine”) are twin horse-headed gods, animal herders, sons of the divine mare Saranyu (10.17.1-2). The other Vedic gods generally snub the Ashvins, in part because they are physicians (a low trade in ancient India, involving as it does polluting contacts with human bodies) and in part because they persist in slumming, helping out mortals in trouble. The gods denied them access to the ambrosial soma drink until one mortal (a priest named Dadhyanch), for whom the Ashvins had done a favor, reciprocated by whispering to them, through a horse’s head he had put on for that occasion to speak to their horse heads, the secret of the soma—literally from the horse’s mouth (1.116.12, 1.117.22, 1.84.13-15). Later texts explain that Dadhyanch knew that Indra, the jealous king of the gods, would punish him for this betrayal by cutting off his head, so he laid aside his own head, used a talking horse head to tell the secret, let Indra cut off the horse head, and then put his own back on.
²⁸

Embedded in the tale of Dadhyanch and the Ashvins is the ritual beheading of a horse. One of the few great public ceremonies alluded to in the Vedas is the sacrifice of a horse, by suffocation rather than beheading but followed by dismemberment. There are epigraphical records of (as well as literary satires on) horse sacrifices throughout Indian history. One Vedic poem
^bh
describes the horse sacrifice in strikingly concrete, indeed rather gruesome detail, beginning with the ceremonial procession of the horse accompanied by a dappled goat, who was killed with the horse but offered to a different, less important god:

The poet thus intermittently addresses the horse (and himself) with the consolation that all will be restored in heaven, words in which we may see the first stirrings of ambivalence about the killing of a beloved animal, even in a religious ceremony, an ambivalence that will become much more explicit in the next few centuries. We may see even here a kind of “ritual nonviolence” that is also expressed in a concern that the victim should not bleed or suffer or cry out (one reason why the sacrificial animal was strangled).
²⁹
The euphemism for the killing of the horse, pacifying (
shanti
), further muted the growing uneasiness associated with the killing of an animal. Moreover, unlike cows, goats, and other animals that were sacrificed, many in the course of the horse sacrifice, the horse was not actually eaten (though it was cooked and served to the gods). Certain parts of the horse’s carcass (such as the marrow, or the fat from the chest, or the
vapa
, the caul, pericardium, or omentum containing the internal organs) were offered to Agni, the god of the fire, and the consecrated king and the priests would inhale the cooking fumes (regarded as “half-eating-by-smelling” the cooked animal). The gods and priests, as well as guests at the sacrificial feast, ate the cattle (mostly rams, billy goats, and steers); only the gods and priests ate the soma; no one ate the horse. Perhaps the horse was not eaten because of the close relationship that the Vedic people, like most Indo-Europeans,
³⁰
had with their horses, who not only speak, on occasion,
³¹
but are often said to shed tears
^bi
when their owners die.
³²

The
Rig Veda
tells us a lot (as in the passage cited at the start of this chapter, a kind of liturgical work song) about family life, about everyday tasks, about craftsmanship, about the materials of sacrifice, and even about diversity. Evidently the rigid hereditary system of the professions characteristic of the caste system was not yet in place now, for the professions at this time varied even within a single family, where a poet could be the son of a physician and a miller. The
Rig Veda
tells us of many professions, including carpenters, blacksmiths, potters, tanners, reed workers, and weavers.
³³
But by the end of this period, the class system was in place.

The Vedic people at first distinguished just two classes (
varnas
), their own (which they called Arya) and that of the people they conquered, whom they called Dasas (or Dasyus, or, sometimes, Panis). The Dasas may have been survivorsof early migrations of Vedic people, or people who spoke non-Sanskritic languages, or a branch of the Indo-Iranian people who had a religion different from that of the Vedic people.
³⁴
(In the Indo-Iranian Avesta,
daha
and
dahyu
designate “other people.”
³⁵
) The early Veda expresses envy for the Dasas’ wealth, which is to say their cattle, but later, “Dasa” came to be used to denote a slave or subordinate, someone who worked outside the family, and the late parts of the Veda mention Brahmins who were “sons of slave women” (Dasi-putra), indicating an acceptance of interclass sexual relationships, if not marriage. We have noted evidence that the Vedic people took significant parts of their material culture from communities in place in India before they arrived, Dasas of one sort or another. The Dasas may also have introduced new ritual practices such as those recorded in the
Atharva Veda
. (The Nishadas, tribal peoples, were also associated with some early rituals.
³⁶
)

But the more important social division was not into just two classes (Arya and Dasa, Us and Them) but four. A poem in one of the latest books of the
Rig Veda
, “Poem of the Primeval Man” (Purusha-Sukta [10.90]), is about the dismemberment of the cosmic giant, the Primeval Man (
purusha
later comes to designate any male creature, indeed the male gender), who is the victim in a Vedic sacrifice that creates the whole universe.
^bj
The poem says, “The gods, performing the sacrifice, bound the Man as the sacrificial beast. With the sacrifice the gods sacrificed to the sacrifice.” Here the “sacrifice” designates both the ritual and the victim killed in the ritual; moreover, the Man is both the victim that the gods sacrificed and the divinity to whom the sacrifice was dedicated—that is, he is both the subject and the object of the sacrifice. This Vedic chicken or egg paradox is repeated in a more general pattern, in which the gods sacrifice to the gods, and a more specific pattern, in which one particular god, Indra, king of the gods, sacrifices (as a king) to himself (as a god). But it is also a tautological way of thinking that we have seen in the myths of mutual creation and will continue to encounter in Hindu mythology.

The four classes of society come from the appropriate parts of the body of the dismembered Primeval Man. His mouth became the priest (the Brahmin, master of sacred speech); all Vedic priests are Brahmins, though not all Brahmins are priests. His arms were the Raja (the Kshatriya, the Strong Arm, the class of warriors, policemen, and kings); his thighs, the commoner (the Vaishya, the fertile producer, the common people, the third estate, who produce the food for the first two and themselves); and his feet—the lowest and dirtiest part of the body—the servants (Shudras), the outside class within society that defines the other classes. That the Shudras were an afterthought is evident from the fact that the third class, Vaishyas, is sometimes said to be derived from the word for “all” and therefore to mean “everyone,” leaving no room for anyone below them—until someone added a class below them.
^bk
The fourth social class may have consisted of the people new to the early Vedic system, perhaps the people already in India when the Vedic people entered, the Dasas, from a system already in place in India, or simply the sorts of people who were always outside the system. The final combination often functioned not as a quartet but, reverting to the pattern of Arya and Dasa, as a dualism: all of us (in the first three classes, the twice born) versus all of them (in the fourth class, the non-us, the Others).
^bl

“Poem of the Primeval Man” ranks the kings below the priests. The supremacy of Brahmins was much contested throughout later Hindu literature and in fact may have been nothing but a Brahmin fantasy. Many texts argue, or assume, that Kshatriyas never were as high as Brahmins, and others assume that they always were, and still are, higher than Brahmins. Buddhist literature puts the kings at the top, the Brahmins second,
³⁷
and many characters in Hindu texts also defend this viewpoint.

The French sociologist Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) argued that the
^bk
Indo-European speakers had been divided into three social classes or functions: at the top, kings who were also priests, then warriors who were also policemen, and then the rest of the people.
³⁸
Some scholars find this hypothetical division useful; some do not
³⁹
and some think that other cultures too were divided in this way, so that tripartition is not a useful way to distinguish Indo-European culture from any other.
^bm
(It rather suspiciously resembles the reactionary French ancient regime, which put priests at the top, over aristocrats, and the people in the third group below.) In any case, by the end of the period in which the
Rig Veda
was composed, a fourfold social system that deviates in two major regards from the Dumézilian model was in place: It adds a fourth class at the bottom, and it reverses the status of kings and priests. The kings have come down one rung from their former alleged status of sharing first place with the Brahmins. This, then, would have been one of the earliest documented theocratic takeovers, a silent, totally mental palace coup, the Brahmin forcing the Kshatriya out of first place.

Thus, even in “Poem of the Primeval Man,” supposedly postulating a social charter that was created at the very dawn of time and is to remain in place forever after, we can see, in the positioning of the kings in the second rank, movement, change, slippage, progress, or decay, depending upon your point of view. This sort of obfuscation is basic to mythology; the semblance of an un-moving eternity is presented in texts that themselves clearly document constant transformation. “Poem of the Primeval Man” may have been the foundational myth of the Brahmin class, establishing social hierarchies that are unknown to poems from an earlier layer of the
Rig Veda
, such as the poem “Diverse Callings.”

One Vedic poem that may incorporate a critique of Brahmins
^bn
is a tour de force that applies simultaneously, throughout, to frogs croaking at the start of the rainy season and to Brahmin priests who begin to chant at the start of the rains. It begins:

Though this poem may have been a satire, its tone is serious, a metaphor in celebration of a crucial and joyous matter, the arrival of the rains.

The marginalized people in the lowest social levels of the Veda—Dasas, Shudras—may have included people who were Other not, or not only, in their social class but in their religious practices, such as the wandering bands of warrior ascetics the Vedas refer to as the Vratyas (“People Who Have Taken Vows”), who practiced flagellation and other forms of self-mortification and traveled from place to place in bullock carts.
⁴⁰
Vratyas were sometimes regarded as inside, sometimes outside mainstream society;
⁴¹
the Brahmins sought to bring them into the Vedic system by special purification rituals,
⁴²
and the Vratyas may have introduced some of their own beliefs and practices into Vedic religion.

Or the Others may have been drop-out and turn-on types like the protohippie described in another poem: