The Hindus (50 page)

The conversation about the colors thus brings the argument for equality into the open—where it must have been at this time, when various social barriers were being challenged—but the old argument from creation comes to the rescue, and the class differences are affirmed in new ways. Now the class system is not created ab initio, by the gods, as in the Vedic “Poem of the Primeval Man”; now it results from the bad karmic choices of the classes themselves. It’s their own damn fault. This is a major transition from authoritative decree to apologia.

The four classes were the central concern of a broader social agenda that included (by excluding) both Pariahs (even lower than the Shudras) and tribal people, epitomized by the Nishadas. A typically cold-blooded disregard of the Nishadas is evident in a story told early in the
Mahabharata
:

Only the single word “innocent” (“without wrongdoing” [1.137.7]) suggests the slightest sympathy for the murdered Nishadas. They are sacrificial substitutes, whom the author of this text treats as expendable because he regards them as subhuman beings. Perhaps their drunkenness (one of the four addictive vices of lust) is meant to justify their deaths.

A somewhat more sympathetic story about Nishadas is the tale of Ekalavya:

This is a brutal story, even for the
Mahabharata
. How are we to understand it? First of all, who is Ekalavya? He is a prince among his own people, but that wins him no points with the Pandava princes. The Nishadas here embrace Hindu dharma and Hindu forms of worship but are still beneath the contempt of the caste system. For such a person to stand beside the Pandava princes in archery classes was unthinkable; that is what Drona, who “knew dharma,” realized.

In order to protect both dharma and the reputation of his own world-class archery student, Drona claims his retroactive tuition, the
guru-dakshina
. Of course we are shocked; to add insult to injury, Drona really didn’t teach Ekalavya at all and hardly deserves any tuition fees, let alone such a grotesque payment. But where is the author’s sympathy? It is hard to be sure. It is arrogant of Ekalavya to push in where he does not belong; he cannot be a noble archer, for he was born into the wrong family for nobility. But Ekalavya does not act arrogant. His outward appearance invokes all the conventional tropes for tribals: he is described as black, wrapped in black deerskin, hair all matted, dressed in rags, his body caked with dirt. He is made of the wrong stuff (or, as we would say, has the wrong genes). He is physically dirt. But his inner soul, reflected in his behavior, is pious and respectful; he does what the teacher tells him to do; not only is he a brilliant archer, but he is honest and humble. To this extent, at least, the
Mahabharata
likes him and presumably pities him; it refers to Drona’s command as “terrible” (
daruna
).

Yet the act by which Ekalavya proves his mettle as an archer is one of gratuitous and grotesque cruelty to a dog, the animal that is in many ways the animal counterpart, even the totem, of a Nishada. The dog barks at him, betraying the class attitude that dogs often pick up from their masters; the dog doesn’t like the way Ekalavya looks and, probably, smells. Does Ekalavya’s unsympathetic treatment of this dog cancel out our sympathy for Ekalavya as the victim of interhuman violence? Does it justify Drona’s cruel treatment of him—what goes around comes around, travels down the line—or, at least, remind us of the cruelty inherent in the
sva-dharma
of a hunter? But the text shows no sympathy for the dog and therefore no condemnation of Ekalavya for his treatment of the dog.

Here, as in the tale of Yudhishthira’s dog, the story shows just how rotten the caste system is but does not change it. No dogs get into heaven; Ekalavya loses his thumb. I read the text as deeply conflicted; it assumes that this is the way things must be, but it does not like the way things must be. It paints Ekalavya sympathetically despite itself. If we compare this story with the
Ramayana
tale of Shambuka, we can see one significant difference: The central episode of mutilation of an uppity low-caste man is no longer framed and balanced by another story (the revival of a child) or by the interloper’s evil goal (usurping the gods’ privileges). The basic point is the same as for Shambuka—don’t get ideas above your station—but here it is starker, unjustified by anything but uppitiness. And where we learned nothing at all about Shambuka but his class, now Ekalavya’s physical repulsiveness is contrasted with his high moral qualities. Is this progress? Perhaps. It shows a more complex view of dharma, though it still upholds that dharma.
¹⁷

In the face of his defense of the class system, the author of this story saw the humanity in Ekalavya, saw that tribals were human beings of dignity and honor. It doesn’t necessarily mean that tribals tried to break into the professions of Kshatriyas. Nor does it mean that Kshatriyas went around cutting off the thumbs of tribals. It means that the author of this text imagined the situation and was troubled by it. The people who heard and, eventually, read the text must have seen that too; maybe some of them, as a result, treated the tribals whom they encountered with more humanity. The imagination of a better world may have made it a better world.

Moreover, during the long history of both this story and the story of the Nishada woman and her sons, different people did read the story differently; the reading of the Brahmin imaginary was certainly not the only one. This is a moment that justifies a bit of fast-forwarding. There is a Jaina text from the sixteenth century CE that begins much like the
Mahabharata
story of Ekalavya but then gives the protagonist a different name and a different tribe (a Bhil or Bhilla, even more scorned than a Nishada) and veers in a very different direction:

The entire moral weight has shifted; now it is Arjuna, not Drona, who makes the cruel demand, and Drona who objects to it and who calls Arjuna deceitful and cunning, in contrast with the artless, honest Bhil, who does
not
hurt the dog, as the text takes pains to tell us. Indeed Drona has agreed to be the Bhil’s guru at the start and, at the end, grants him superior skill in archery, despite Arjuna’s attempts to hobble him. The image of Drona that the Bhil makes of mud is now matched by other flesh and blood images: Arjuna
is
the image of Drona, and the Bhil
is
the image of Arjuna, hence of Drona, once removed. Altogether, the Bhil, with his grotesque guru gift (no longer a Vedic tuition gift, but a Hindu
puja
), comes off smelling like a rose, and Arjuna, with his gift of gold and precious jewels and horses and elephants, does not.

The forefinger is called the
tarjaniya
, the finger that points, that accuses, and here it points straight at Arjuna. Knowing all this, we can see other possible multiple readings of the story even in the
Mahabharata
. For there is a two-way conversation going on between the Hindu and Jaina texts, an intertextual conversation. The Jaina text quotes the Hindu
Mahabharata
, an example of the widespread intertextuality between religions in India, not just within Hinduism. But Hindus would probably know the Jaina version too, a supposition justifiable on the basis of our understanding of the relationship between Hindus and Jainas at this period, and this may have contributed to the eventual use of the story of Ekalavya by contemporary Hindu Pariahs, for whom he is an important hero.

Whatever the spirit in which the tale of Ekalavya was originally told, it continued to be remembered among people crying out for social reform. A glance at later versions of the same story supports some of the hypothetical meanings that I have hunted out of the original telling and suggests, but certainly does not prove, that the seed of that later response may already have been there in the Sanskrit text (hindsight alert!), or at least that there may have been other readings of this episode besides the original one we have, with other evidence of moral conscience, to bridge the gap between the first recorded telling and later versions that explicitly call out for justice.

Whether the situation was equally encouraging for women is a subject that we must now consider.

The women of the
Mahabharata
are extraordinarily prominent, feisty, and individualistic, in part as a result of changes that were taking place in the social structures at the time of the recension of the text (such as the widespread public recognition of women as donors and renouncers, and their more active role in the
pujas
of sectarian Hinduism), in part as a result of the infusion of the Sanskrit corpus with stories from village and rural traditions that were less hide-bound in their attitudes to women. The new attention paid to women in the
Mahabharata
emerges clearly from the stories of the births of both its legendary author, Vyasa, and its heroes: