The Hindus (25 page)

Thus texts of this period define a true Brahmin in terms that transcend birth: “Why do you enquire about the father or the mother of a Brahmin? When you find knowledge in someone, that is his father and his grandfather.”
¹⁷
And other texts similarly question class lines. One follows the typical Brahmana pattern of explaining the circumstances under which a sage “sees” or “hears” a particular Vedic hymn.

In this story, a person from outside the society of the upper classes is assimilated into the inner sanctum of the Vedic priesthood. The sages call him a son of a slave woman, Dasi-putra, a term usually designating the son of a Shudra mother, in this case also the son of a man named Ilusha, presumably a Brahmin.

Shudras and Vaishyas play increasingly important roles in the Brahmanas. The surplus supported kings and an administrative bureaucracy and made a greater demand on the people who produced the wealth, taxation of a portion of the whole crop (according to Manu, a sixth of the crop).
¹⁹
The word
bali
, which originally meant (and continued to mean) an offering to gods, now also came to mean a tax paid to kings. This burden alienated at least some of the people, as we learn from one Brahmana:

Though this text, like most texts of the ancient period, was ultimately passed through a Brahmin filter and therefore surely represents the interests of Brahmins in criticizing the king, it just as surely also captures (if only to use it for Brahminical purposes) the abuse, and the resentment, of people who, not being Brahmins, did not have immediate access to the text. Yet in addition to proclaiming the brutality of the king, it assumes that class lines cannot be crossed, a lowborn man should not allow his wife to have a highborn lover, and a man of the people (a Vaishya) cannot be king.

The sacrifice was far from the only royal concern, as the historian Romila Thapar explains:

Ritual authority was thus supplemented by other trappings of authority, including armies and tax collectors. These expenses would drain the money that had previously been given to the priests for sacrifices, fueling the growing animosity between rulers and priests, an animosity so central to the history of Hinduism that it has been called “the inner conflict of tradition.”
²²

The move down from the Punjab to the Ganges also sowed the seeds of a problem that was to have repercussions throughout the history of Hinduism: The Vedic people no longer had good grazing lands for their horses, and so it was no longer possible for every member of the tribe to keep a horse. The horse became a rich man’s beast, now a hierarchical as well an imperialist animal, but it retained its power as a popular cultural symbol, one whose meaning continued to shift in each new age all through subsequent Indian history. Horses and their power to destroy are at the heart of a story about conflicts between the two upper classes. In battle, the warrior stood on the left of the two-man chariot, holding his bow in one hand and his arrows in the other, while the charioteer, literally the warrior’s right-hand man, held the reins in his right hand and a shield in front of both of them with his left hand, so that the archer would have both hands free to shoot. In this story, the king stands in the place of the warrior, holding not a weapon but a whip, while his royal chaplain or domestic priest (Purohita) serves as the charioteer, literally and figuratively holding the reins:

The text, right from the start, casts a jaundiced eye upon the king; it assumes that you can’t let a king out alone without his keeper, the Brahmin, who goes along “to keep him from doing harm”—that is, from indulging in the royal addictions, here consisting of reckless driving. This is a transformation of the court chaplain’s usual task of washing the blood of battle and executions off the king’s hands
after
he has sinned.
²⁴
In this case, between the two of them they manage to murder an innocent child, in one of the earliest recorded hit-and-run incidents in history. That child is a Brahmin, related to Vrisha by class; in another variant of this story, the dead boy is actually Vrisha’s own son.
²⁵
The jury is hardly impartial, being made up entirely of the king’s people, the Ikshvakus, a great northern dynasty, and it is therefore not surprising that they reject the priest’s argument that it was all the king’s fault, whipping the horses on, and rule that it was the priest’s job to rein the horses in. (The text’s statement that this incident happened “in the old days” implies that court chaplains no longer drove chariots, if in fact they ever did; the text metaphorically puts the chaplain in the driver’s seat or makes him the king’s right-hand man, jockeying for power.) The chariot of the senses that a person drives with one (priestly) foot on the brakes and the other (royal) foot on the accelerator is a recurrent image in Hindu philosophy; we have seen a Vedic poem (10.119) in which someone exhilarated (or stoned) on soma says that the drinks have carried him up and away, “Like horses bolting with a chariot.”
²⁶
In the Upanishads, as we will soon see, the intellect/charioteer reins in the senses/horses that pull the chariot of the mind.
²⁷
In the
Bhagavad Gita
, the incarnate god Krishna holds the reins for Prince Arjuna, though there Arjuna holds back, and Krishna goads him forward. Charioteers are major players in both the martial and the narrative/ philosophical world.

The point of this story of Vrisha seems to be that royal power trumps priestly power in the courts, since the jury is stacked; the only way that the priest can avoid punishment is by using priestly power to erase the entire crime. The mantra that he uses to do this has wider applications; it assures him that he will always get what he wants, even, apparently, when he wants to raise the dead. This same power will belong to the person who hears the story and thus gains access to the mantra known as the “fruits of hearing” (
phala shruti
) that comes at the end of many stories of this type: “Whoever knows this” (
yo evam veda
) gets whatever the protagonist of the story got. (It is guaranteed to work, though it is not foolproof: If you say it and do not get the promised reward, you must have said it wrong somehow.) This is a major innovation of the Brahmana texts: Where the Vedas asked, and hoped, that the gods would help them, the Brahmins of these later texts arrogantly assure the worshiper that they can fix anything.

But the story then goes on to tell us that Vrisha did not get
all
that he wanted; he did not get justice, vindication.

The
Rig Veda
verses that Vrisha cites refer, obscurely, to the myth in which Agni, the god of fire, is first lost and then found, which is precisely what has happened (again) here.

This part of the story seems to have little to do with the earlier episode, the fight between the king and his priest. Apparently Vrisha is still full of resentment when he recollects what he (but no one else) regards as the injustice of it all, the insolence of royal office. (The jury’s judgment is not, on the face of it, unfair; it is, I should think, reasonable to hold responsible the person who controlled the chariot’s brakes.) Yet the fire vanishes immediately after Vrisha seeks help from Jana, his father, and though Jana does nothing explicit to help his son, there are many other stories (some in this same text) in which Agni (who is, after all, a priest himself) vanishes when a priest is offended, and still others in which an offended Brahmin conjures up a demoness (a ghoul [Pishachi], as here, or an ogress [Rakshasi] or a female antigod [Asuri]) to avenge him when he has been harmed. Either or both of these may be implied here. The point of the second half of the story is therefore a warning never to offend a Brahmin.

But the text also makes a gratuitous swipe at the dangerous sexuality of women, for the fire that the queen hides under her lap and that destroys her by entering her between her legs is essential to the life of the whole community, which needs it to cook not only the sacred oblations but all profane food. Both these types of cooking belong to the wife, who cooks the everyday meals and (by her mere presence at the ritual) makes it possible for her husband to offer the oblations into the fire.
²⁹
We will have more occasions to consider the connections between women and fire in Hinduism.

THE HORSE SACRIFICE REVISITED, I

The Brahmanas now tell us more about the way in which the horse sacrifice, which began as a relatively simple ritual at the time of the
Rig Veda
, developed into a far more complex and expensive ceremony in this later period. The political symbolism of the Vedic horse sacrifice is blatant: The consecrated white stallion was “set free” to wander for a year before he was brought back home and killed, a ritual enactment of the actual equine wandering typical of Vedic culture. During that year the horse was guarded by an army that “followed” him and claimed for the king any land on which he grazed. By the late Vedic period, when the Vedic people had begun to grow fodder crops, the stallion would have been stabled, and a stabled stallion behaves quite differently from one in the wild; he tends to return to the stable where he has been fed. The idea that he will wander away in the Ganges Valley, as he used to do in his salad days up in the Punjab, was by this time an anachronism, a conscious archaism. The king’s army therefore drove the horse onward and guided him into the neighboring lands that the king intended to take over. (“Doubtless some manipulated the wandering of the horse to save face,” Romila Thapar remarks dryly.
³⁰
) It is not hard to imagine the scene. People would suddenly run out into the fields, shouting, “Get your goddamn horse out of my field; he’s trampling the crop,” and suddenly a few, or a few hundred, armed men would appear over the brow of the hill and growl, “Say that again?” and the people would reply, “Oh, I beg your pardon, sirs, I didn’t realize—do let your lovely horse graze here, and can we bring you a little something for yourselves?” and the soldiers would then claim all the land the horse had grazed. Thus the ritual that presented itself as a casual equine stroll over the king’s lands was in fact an orchestrated annexation of the lands on a king’s border; a ritual about grazing became a ritual about political aggrandizement. The Vedic drive toward wandering (without settling) had developed into what the Nazis called, euphemistically, incorporation (Anschluss) and nineteenth-century Americans called manifest destiny. No wonder the Sanskrit texts insist that a king had to be very powerful indeed before he could undertake a horse sacrifice, and very few kings did in fact perform this ritual.