The Hindus (42 page)

Monkeys are not the only talking animals who stand in for humans in the
Ramayana
.
⁴⁶
In a related corpus of myths, hunters mistake people for animals in sexual (or quasisexual) situations. These myths offer yet another set of implicit arguments for the growing movement in favor of vegetarianism.

The underlying theme is the interruption of sexuality. The
Ramayana
briefly narrates such an incident, in the story of Shiva and his wife, Parvati:

Shiva places his seed in Fire, rather than in Parvati, as an anthropomorphization of the ritual act of throwing an oblation of butter into the consecrated fire that carries the oblation to the gods, acting out the Upanishadic equation of the sexual act and the oblation. The curse of childlessness that the frustrated Parvati gives to the wives of the gods has resonances throughout Hindu mythology. As a result of Parvati’s curse, many children of the gods (including Sita) are born from male gods or sages who create children unilaterally merely at the thought, or sight, of a woman, ejaculating into some womb substitute—a flower, a female animal, a river, a furrow—to produce a motherless child, “born of no womb” (
a-yoni-ja
).
^es
Another variant of the interruption theme appears at the end of the
Ramayana
, in the passage we have just considered, when Lakshmana is forced to interrupt Rama and Death when they are closeted together under strict instructions not to be interrupted. This is the ultimate fatal interruption, interrupting Death himself.

At the same time, interrupted sexuality is often conjoined with the theme of addictive, excessive, careless hunting. Human hunters mistake other humans (or ogres) for animals, particularly when the humans as animals are mating, a mistake that has fatal consequences not only for the human/animals but for the unlucky hunter. In the
Mahabharata
, Pandu, the father of the heroes, is cursed to die if he makes love with any of his wives, his punishment for having killed, while he was hunting, a sage who had taken the form of a stag and was coupling with a doe
^et
and whom Pandu mistook for a stag (1.90.64; 1.109.5-30). So too five years after Dasharatha has banished Rama, he suddenly wakes Kausalya up in the middle of the night and tells her about this episode, which he has only now remembered:

The connection between blindness (aiming by sound alone at the child of sight-less parents) and desire (hunting as the equivalent of taking a cold shower to control premarital desire) indicates that desire was already Dasharatha’s blind spot long before Kaikeyi manipulated him by locking him out of her bedroom. He is as addicted to sex as he is to hunting.

Another tale in the
Ramayana
also ties together the themes of the interruption of sexuality, the curse of separation from a beloved, and the deadly nature of erotic love but now adds the element of the language of animals, particularly birds:

Significantly, the man in this story is allowed to understand the speech of animals, and the woman is not. (As the king happens to be the father of Kaikeyi, sexual mischief runs in the family.) This is in keeping with the underlying misogyny of the Sanskrit mythological texts that depict men as more gifted with special powers than women; it may also reflect the sociological fact that men in India were allowed to read and speak Sanskrit, while in general women were not, as well as the custom of patrilocal marriage, so that a woman often did not speak the language of her husband’s family. These stories express the idea that sexuality makes some humans into animals, while language makes some animals into humans.

In the
Mahabharata
a king who has been cursed to become a man-eating ogre devours a sage who is making love to his wife (still in human form), and the wife, furious because she had not yet achieved her sexual goal, curses the king to die if he embraces his own wife (MB 1.173), a combination of Pandu’s curse and Parvati’s curse of the wives of the gods. Nor are these hunting errors limited to the sexual arena. Krishna, in the
Mahabharata
, dies when a hunter fatally mistakes him for a deer:

Three different stories seem to be told here at once. In one, Krishna, a mortal, is wounded by a hunter, like an animal or, rather, as a human mistaken for an animal. In another, Krishna seems to die of old age.
^eu
In the third story, Krishna, an immortal, decides to leave the world by withdrawing his powers, like a god or a very great yogi. But he didn’t need the hunter or old age if he really just died by his own will. Are traces of one story left ghostlike in another?

These stories from the
Mahabharata
argue that humans are different from animals and must rise above animal sexuality and, sometimes, animal violence; the
Ramayana
adds that it is language, particularly poetry, that makes this possible.
^ev
The theme of language appears in this corpus on the outside frame of the
Ramayana
, in the vignette of “The Poet, the Hunter, and the Crane” cited at the beginning of this chapter, about the invention of the
shloka
meter (the meter in which both the
Mahabharata
and the
Ramayana
are composed). In that story, the female crane (they are Indian sarus cranes) is so moved at the sight of her dying mate that she utters words of compassion (
karunam giram
). (Some later commentaries suggested that it was the
female
crane who died and the male crane who grieved, foreshadowing the disappearance of Sita and the grief of Rama.
⁴⁸
) Compassion at the sight of the dying bird inspires Valmiki too to speak. He sees a crane who is killed in a sexual situation, hence separated from his mate, making him cry and inspiring him to invent an unusual language of humans. This story is in many ways the inversion of the story of the king who hears a bird talking when he is in a sexual situation and laughs, exposing him to the danger of death and separating him from his mate.

But it is the grief of the female crane and Valmiki’s fellow feeling with her—as well as, perhaps, the touching example of the cranes, who are said to be “singing sweetly” (immediately equated with “at the height of desire”) as the hunter strikes—that inspire Valmiki to make his second, more significant utterance; the birdsong turns to compassionate speech and then inspires human poetry. As a result, the Nishada, a member of a tribal group regarded as very low caste, is cursed, and poetry is born. The text treats the Nishada as a nonperson, hostile and evil, a man who violates dharma, kills for no reason, and is cursed to be forever without peace; in direct contrast with the compassionate crane hen and the compassionate poet, the Nishada never speaks. Since the animal he killed was just an animal, not a human in animal form, he receives only a relatively mild punishment—restlessness, perhaps guilt—prefiguring the more serious curse of Dasharatha in the story that is to follow, the tale of the boy mistaken for an elephant. With this link added to the narrative chain, the corpus of stories combines five major themes: succumbing to the lust for hunting; mistaking a human for an animal and killing the “animal”; interrupting the sexual act (by killing one or both of the partners); understanding the language (or song) of animals; and creating a poetic language. Killing an animal interrupts the sexual act, the animal act, killing sex, as it were, and producing in its place the characteristic human act, the making of language.

What binds the humans and animals together is compassion, a more nuanced form of the guilt and concern for nonviolence that have colored Hindu stories about animals from the start. The
Ramayana
is compassionate and inclusive in its presentation of animals, including Jatayus, an old vulture, a scavenger, who is to birds what dogs are to mammals, normally very inauspicious indeed. But Jatayus bravely attacks Ravana when Ravana is carrying off Sita; when Jatayus lectures Ravana on dharma, Ravana responds by cutting off Jatayus’s wings and flying away with Sita, and the dying vulture tells Rama where Ravana has taken Sita. Rama says that he holds the old vulture, Jatayus, in the same esteem that he holds Dasharatha (3.64.26) (which may also be a backhanded indirect dig at Dasharatha), and he buries him with the full royal obsequies as for a father. Rama does, however, use balls of stag’s flesh in place of the balls of rice that are usually part of these rituals (3.64.26, 32-33), a reversal of the historical process that led many Hindus to use balls of rice in place of a sacrificial animal.

Another unclean bird plays a role in Rama’s story, and that is a crow. When Hanuman visits Sita and asks her for a sign that will prove to Rama that Hanuman has seen her, she tells him of a time when a crow attacked her until his claws dripped with blood; Rama had the power to kill the bird but, in his compassion, merely put out his right eye and sent him away (5.36.10-33). The crows are said to be eaters of offerings, greedy for food, terms often applied to dogs, and Manu (7.21) explicitly links crows and dogs. The crow is a Pariah. Sita compares the crow with Ravana, and the scene foreshadows the abduction of Sita by Ravana. Yet Rama has compassion for the crow, merely taking out his eye, a mutilation that will become part of the vocabulary of bhakti, when a devout worshiper willingly gives his own eye to the god.

Dogs too occupy a moral space here. During the period of Sita’s exile, a (talking) dog comes to Rama and complains, first, that dogs are not allowed in palaces or temples or the homes of Brahmins (whereupon Rama invites him into the palace) and, second, that a Brahmin beggar beat him for no reason. Rama summons the Brahmin, who confesses that he struck the dog in anger when he himself was hungry and begging for food; when he told the dog to go away, the dog went only a short distance and stayed there, and so he beat him. Rama asks the dog to suggest an appropriate punishment for the Brahmin, and the dog asks that the Brahmin, whom he describes as filled with anger and bereft of dharma, be made the leader of a Tantric sect. (The dog himself had this position in a former life and regarded it as a guaranteed road to hell.) This granted, the Brahmin feels certain he has been given a great boon and rides away proudly on an elephant, while the dog goes to Varanasi and fasts to death (7.52).
⁴⁹
Clearly, the dog is morally superior to the Brahmin, and Rama treats him with great respect throughout this long and rather whimsical episode.

Dogs in these stories stand both for dogs (a cigar is just a cigar) and sometimes for Pariahs or Nishadas (more than a cigar), often for both at once. Tribal people stand for themselves (a Nishada is just a Nishada), but can Nishadas stand for anyone else? (Apparently not.) On the other hand, can anyone else, besides dogs, stand for Nishadas? More precisely, can ogres stand for Nishadas?

Unlike dogs and Nishadas, ogres and antigods cannot represent themselves because, in my humble opinion, they do not exist; they are imaginary constructions. Therefore they are purely symbolic, and the question is, What do they symbolize? Later in Indian history, they are often said to symbolize various groups of human beings: tribal peoples,
⁵⁰
foreigners, low castes, Dravidians, South Indians, or Muslims. Various Hindus have named various actual human tribes after ogres and antigods and other mythical beasts (such as Asuras and Nagas), and others have glossed ogres such as the ogress Hidimbi, who marries the human hero Bhima, in the
Mahabharata,
or the Naga princess Ulupi, who marries Arjuna, as symbolic of tribal people who marry into Kshatriya families. One scholar identified the ogres of Lanka as Sinhalese Buddhists, oppressed by hegemonic Brahmins represented by Rama;
⁵¹
another argued that the ogres represented the aboriginal population of Australia,
⁵²
a loopy idea that has the single, questionable virtue of correlating well with the Gondwana theory that Australia and India were once linked. Indeed writers have used the ogres as well as other characters of the
Ramayana
^ew
throughout Indian history to stand in for various people in various political positions. But what role do the ogres play in Valmiki’s
Ramayana
?