The Hindus (22 page)

The dirty rags identify these people as either very poor or willingly alienated from social conventions such as dress; that they wear saffron-colored robes may be an early form (hindsight alert!) of the ocher robes that later marked many renunciant groups. Rudra is the master of poison and medicines, but also of consciousness-altering drugs, one of which may have been used here, as such drugs often are, to induce the sensation of flying and of viewing one’s own body from outside. Rudra was the embodiment of wildness, unpredictable danger, and fever but also the healer and cooler, who attacks “like a ferocious wild beast” (2.33). He lives on the margins of the civilized world as one who comes from the outside, an intruder, and is excluded from the Vedic sacrifice. He is a hunter. He stands for what is violent, cruel, and impure in the society of gods or at the edge of the divine world.
⁴³

The
Rig Veda
also tells us of people marginalized not by class or religious practices but by their antisocial behavior under the influence of some addiction. One Vedic poem lists “wine, anger, dice, or carelessness” as the most likely cause of serious misbehavior (7.86.1-8). Wine and dice are two of the four addictive vices of lust (sex and hunting being the other two), to which considerable attention was paid throughout Indian history. We have seen dice in the Indus Valley Civilization, and we will see gambling with dice remain both a major pastime (along with chariot racing and hunting) and the downfall of kings. Ordinary people as well as kings could be ruined by gambling, as is evident from the stark portrayal of a dysfunctional family in this Vedic poem:

Like a character in a Dostoyevsky novel, the gambler prays not to win but just to stop losing, indeed to stop playing altogether; his inability to stop is likened to a sexual compulsion or addiction. The “brown horses” that he yokes may be real horses or a metaphor for the brown dice; in either case, they destroy him. (The gambler’s wife who is fondled by other men reappears in the
Mahabharata
when the wife of the gambler Yudhishthira is stripped in the public assembly.) At the end of the poem, a god (Savitri, the god of the rising and setting sun) warns the gambler, “Play no longer with the dice, but till your field; enjoy what you possess, and value it highly. There are your cattle, and there is your wife.”

Intoxication, though not addiction, is a central theme of the Veda, since the sacrificial offering of the hallucinogenic juice of the soma plant was an element of several important Vedic rituals. The poets who “saw” the poems were inspired both by their meditations and by drinking the soma juice. The poems draw upon a corpus of myths about a fiery plant that a bird brings down from heaven; soma is born in the mountains or in heaven, where it is closely guarded; an eagle brings soma to earth (4.26-7) or to Indra (4.18.13), or the eagle carries Indra to heaven to bring the soma
^bo
to humans and gods (4.27.4). This myth points to the historical home of the soma plant in the mountains, probably the mountain homeland of the Vedic people. We do not know for sure what the soma plant was
⁴⁴
(
pace
a recent lawsuit
^bp
over a copyright for it
⁴⁵
), but we know what it was
not:
It was not ephedra (
Sarcostemma
) or wine or beer or brandy or marijuana or opium.
^bq
It may have been the mushroom known as the
Amanita muscaria
or fly agaric (called
mukhomor
in Russian,
Pfliegenpilz
in German,
tue-mouche
or
crapaudin
in French).
⁴⁶
It appears to produce the effects of a hallucinogen (or “entheogen”
⁴⁷
): “Like impetuous winds, the drinks have lifted me up, like swift horses bolting with a chariot. Yes! I will place the earth here, or perhaps there. One of my wings is in the sky; I have trailed the other below. I am huge, huge! flying to the cloud. Have I not drunk soma? (10.119).” Another soma hymn begins with the same phrase that ends the poem just cited (“Have I not drunk Soma?”), now no longer a question: “We have drunk the soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods. What can hatred and the malice of a mortal do to us now? The glorious drops that I have drunk set me free in wide space (8.48.3).” The feeling of expansiveness, of being set free “in wide space,” is not merely a Vedic political agenda, an expression of the lust for those wide-open spaces; it is also a subjective experience of exhilaration and ecstasy. Human poets drink soma only in small quantities and in the controlled context of the ritual. But for the gods who depend upon it, soma can become an addiction (the bolting horses in the hymn cited above recur as a metaphor for senses out of control). Later poets depict Indra, the great soma drinker, as suffering from a bad hangover, in which he cannot stop substances from flowing from all the orifices of his body.
⁴⁸

The gambler’s wife is one of a more general company of long-suffering wives, devoted but often deserted, who people ancient Hindu literature and the society that this literature reflects. In the
Rig Veda
, a text dominated by men in a world dominated by men, women appear throughout the poems as objects. Like the gambler whom Savitri warned, every Vedic man valued equally his two most precious possessions, his cattle and his wife. A man needed a wife to be present when he performed any Vedic sacrifice, though she had to stay behind a screen.
⁴⁹
Women also appear occasionally as subjects, even as putative authors, of Vedic poems (10.40, 8.91).
⁵⁰
And women may have had a voice in poems that treat women’s interests sympathetically, such as magic spells to incapacitate rival wives and to protect unborn children in the womb (10.184), and in the Vedic ritual that an unmarried virgin performs to get a husband.
⁵¹
One of these latter poems is appropriately dedicated to Indrani (“Mrs. Indra”), the wife of Indra (who is, like his Indo-European counterparts—the Greek Zeus and the Norse Odin, German Wotan—a notorious philanderer). It says, in part: “I dig up this plant, the most powerful thing that grows, with which one drives out the rival wife and wins the husband entirely for oneself. I will not even take her name into my mouth; he takes no pleasure in this person. Make the rival wife go far, far into the distance. [She addresses her husband:] Let your heart run after me like a cow after a calf, like water running in its own bed (10.145).” Some spells, like this spell to protect the embryo, are directed against evil powers but addressed to human beings, in this case the pregnant woman: “The one whose name is evil, who lies with disease upon your embryo, your womb, the flesh eater; the one who kills the embryo as it settles, as it rests, as it stirs, who wishes to kill it when it is born—we will drive him away from here. The one who spreads apart your two thighs, who lies between the married pair, who licks the inside of your womb—we will drive him away from here. The one who by changing into a brother, or husband, or lover lies with you, who wishes to kill your offspring—we will drive him away from here. The one who bewitches you with sleep or darkness and lies with you—we will drive him away from here (10.162).”

There is precise human observation here of what we would call the three trimesters of pregnancy (when the embryo settles, rests, and stirs). Though the danger ultimately comes from supernatural creatures, ogres, such creatures act through humans, by impersonating the husband (or lover! or brother!) of the pregnant woman. This poem provides, among things, evidence that a woman might be expected to have a lover, a suspicion substantiated by a Vedic ritual in which the queen is made to list her lovers of the past year,
^br
though that moment in the ritual may represent nothing more than a “jolt of sexual energy” that the wife, as locus of sexuality, particularly illicit sexuality (since most forms of sex were licit for men), was charged to provide for the ritual.
⁵²
More substantial is the early evidence in this poem of a form of rape that came to be regarded as a bad, but legitimate, form of marriage: having sex with a sleeping or drugged woman. It appears that a woman’s brother too is someone she might expect to find in her bed, though the
Rig Veda
severely condemns sibling incest;
⁵³
it is also possible that the brother in question is her husband’s brother, a person who, as we shall see, can have certain traditional, though anxiety-producing, connections with his brother’s wife.
^bs

Women were expected to live on after the deaths of their husbands, as we learn from lines in a funeral hymn addressed to the widow of the dead man: “Rise up, woman, into the world of the living. Come here; you are lying beside a man whose life’s breath has gone (10.18).” The poet urges the widow to go on living. Certainly she is not expected to die with her husband, though “lying beside a dead man” may have been a survival from an earlier period when the wife was actually buried with her husband;
⁵⁴
the
Atharva Veda
regards the practice of the wife’s lying down beside her dead husband (but perhaps then getting up again) as an ancient custom.
⁵⁵
On the other hand, women in the Vedic period may have performed a purely
symbolic
suicide on their husbands’ graves, which was later (hindsight alert!) cited as scriptural support for the
actual
self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ pyres called suttee.

Several poems explore the relationships between men and women, mortal and immortal. These poems present narratives centering on courtship, marriage, adultery, and estrangement, often in the form of conversations (
akhyanas
) that zero in on the story in medias res, taking it up at a crucial turning point in a plot that we are presumed to know (and that the later commentaries spell out for us).
⁵⁶
The conversation poems, which often involve goddesses and heavenly nymphs, are particularly associated with fertility and may have been part of a special ritual performance involving actors and dancers.
⁵⁷
The dialogues with women present situations in which one member of the pair attempts to persuade the other to engage in some sort of sexual activity; sometimes it is the woman who takes the role of persuader,
⁵⁸
sometimes the man.
⁵⁹
In general, the mortal women and immortal men are successful in their persuasion, while the quasi-immortal women and mortal men fail.
⁶⁰

Apala, a mortal woman, has a most intimate relationship with Indra, as we gather from the story told in the poem attributed to her (a story spelled out by later commentaries) (8.91). She was a young woman whose husband hated her (“Surely we who are hated by our husbands should flee and unite with Indra,” v. 4) because she had a skin disease (the ritual makes her “sun-skinned,” v. 7). She found the soma plant (“A maiden going for water found soma by the way,” v. 1), pressed it in her mouth, and offered it to Indra (“Drink this that I have pressed with my teeth,” v. 2). Indra made love to her; she at first resisted (“We do not wish to understand you, and yet we do not misunderstand you,” v. 3) and then consented (“Surely he is able, surely he will do it, surely he will make us more fortunate,” v. 4). She asked him to cure her and to restore fertility to her father and to his fields (“Make these three places sprout, Indra: my daddy’s head and field, and this part of me below the waist,” v. 5-6). Indra accomplished this triple blessing (“Indra, you purified Apala three times,” v. 7) by a ritual that may have involved drawing Apala through three chariot holes (“in the nave of a chariot, in the nave of the cart, in the nave of the yoke,” v. 7), making her slough her skin three times (according to later tradition, the first skin became a porcupine,
^bt
the second an alligator, and the third a chameleon
⁶¹
).

Apala wants to be “fortunate” (
subhaga
), a word that has three closely linked meanings: beautiful, therefore loved by her husband,
^bu
therefore fortunate. In other poems, a husband rejects his wife not because she lacks beauty but because he lacks virility (10.40); “fortunate” then assumes the further connotation of having a virile husband.
^bv
Finally, it means having a healthy husband, so that the woman does not become a widow. For his failing health too may be the woman’s fault; certain women are regarded as dangerous to men. For instance, the blood of the bride’s defloration threatens the groom: “It becomes a magic spirit walking on feet, and like the wife it draws near the husband (10.85.29).” The blood spirit takes the wife’s form, as the embryo-killing ogre takes the form of her husband/lover/brother. Sex is dangerous.