The Hindus (52 page)

What begins as a rape somehow concludes with a law against willing female adultery, as uncontrollable male sexuality is projected onto the control of allegedly oversexed women. Pandu tells this story to Kunti in order to convince her that it
is
legal for her to give him children by sleeping with an appointed Brahmin,
^ga
an emergency plan that prompts her then to tell him about the mantra by which she can summon the gods to father her children; he is thus carefully distinguishing the permitted Brahmin from the loose cannon Brahmin in the Shvetaketu story. We recognize Shvetaketu as a hero of the Upanishads, the boy whose father teaches him the doctrine of the two paths; here his father defends promiscuity, using cows as paradigms not, as is usual, of motherly purity, but of bovine license, as cows, of all people, here become the exemplars of primeval female promiscuity. (Perhaps because they are so pure that nothing they do is wrong?)

The
Mahabharata
keeps insisting that all this is hearsay, as if to make us doubt it; it invokes a vivid, quasi-Freudian primal scene to explain a kind of sexual revulsion. A Brahmin’s right to demand the sexual services of any woman he fancied
²³
evoked violent protest in ancient Indian texts,
^gb
and Draupadi herself is subjected to such sexual harassment (unconsummated) on one occasion when she is in disguise as a servant and not recognized as the princess Draupadi (4.21.1-67). We may read the story of Shvetaketu in part as an anti-Brahmin (and anticow purity) tract, depicting, as it does, a Brahmin as sexually out of control, and cows as naturally promiscuous animals, as well as an explicit rejection of archaic polyandry. The
Kama-sutra
(1.1.9) names Shvetaketu as one of its original redactors, and the commentary on that passage cites this
Mahabharata
story to explain how a chaste sage became simultaneously an enemy of male adultery and an authority on sex.

The persistent polyandry in the lineage of the heroines is therefore, I think, a remarkably positive fantasy of female equality, which is to say, a major resistance to patriarchy, and the
Mahabharata
women—Satyavati, Kunti, and Draupadi—are a feminist’s dream (or a sexist’s nightmare): smart, aggressive, steadfast, eloquent, tough as nails, and resilient. Draupadi, in particular, is unrelenting in her drive to help her husbands regain their kingdom and avenge their wrongs.

Other women in the
Mahabharata
show remarkable courage and intelligence too, but their courage is often used in subservience to their husbands. The wives of the two patriarchs, Pandu and the blind Dhritarashtra, are paradigms of such courage. Gandhari, the wife of Dhritarashtra, kept her eyes entirely blindfolded from the day of her marriage to him, in order to share his blindness. Pandu’s widows vied for the privilege of dying on his pyre. When he died, Madri mounted his funeral pyre, for, she insisted, “My desire has not been satisfied, and he too was cheated of his desire as he was lying with me, so I will not cut him off from his desire in the house of death (1.116.26).” This is a most unusual justification for suttee, Madri’s intention being not merely to join her husband in heaven (as other suttees will state as their motivation) but to complete the sexual act in heaven. Yet Kunti too wishes to die on Pandu’s pyre, without the peculiar justification of coitus interruptus, but simply because she is the first wife. One of them must remain alive to care for both their children; Madri gets her way and mounts the pyre.
^gc
Kunti and Gandhari later die alongside Dhritrarashtra in a forest fire from which they make no attempt to escape (15.37). The four wives of Vasudeva (the father of Krishna) immolate themselves on Vasudeva’s pyre and join him in heaven; they all were permitted to die because by this time all their children were dead (16.8.16-24).

The association of women with fire is worthy of note. Draupadi, who does
not
die on her husbands’ funeral pyres (because [1] she dies before them and [2] they don’t
have
funeral pyres; they walk up into heaven at the end of the story), begins rather than ends her life in fire; she is born out of her father’s fire altar:

Draupadi, born of fire, is significantly motherless, like Sita, who was born of Earth and returns into the earth, after she has entered fire and come out of it. Like Sita, Draupadi is an elemental goddess who is often called
ayonija
(“born from no womb”)
²⁴
and follows her husband(s) to the forest. In Draupadi’s case, the absence of the expected mother is balanced by the unexpected presence of the daughter. Unasked for, riding into life on the coattails of her brother, Draupadi went on to become the heart and soul of the Pandavas. She also went on, in India, to become a goddess with a sect of her own, worshiped throughout South India primarily by lower castes, Pariahs, and Muslims.
²⁵
The
Mahabharata
mentions other dark goddesses who may well already have had such sects: the seven or eight “Little Mothers” (Matrikas), dark, peripheral, harmful, especially for children,
²⁶
and the great goddess Kali (Maha-Kali).
²⁷
Indeed Draupadi is closely connected with the dark goddess Kali.
²⁸
As in the stories of the births of Pandu and Draupadi, as well as the origins of class colors, skin color here has a religious significance but no social meaning, positive or negative.

A partial explanation for the
Mahabharata
’s open-minded attitude toward polyandrous women may come from a consideration of the historical context. The text took shape during the Mauryan and immediate post-Mauryan period, a cosmopolitan era that encouraged the loosening of constraints on women in both court and village. The women of the royal family were often generous donors to the Buddhist community,
²⁹
and women from all classes, including courtesans, became Buddhists.
³⁰
The king used women archers for his bodyguards in the palace, and Greek women (Yavanis) used to carry the king’s bows and arrows on hunts. Women served as spies. Female ascetics moved around freely. Prostitutes paid taxes. The state provided supervised work, such as spinning yarn, for upper-class women who had become impoverished, widowed, or deserted and for aging prostitutes.
^gd
If a slave woman gave birth to her master’s child, both she and the child were immediately released from slavery.
³¹
Thus women were major players in both Buddhism and Hinduism during this period, and the
Mahabharata
may reflect this greater autonomy. Indeed the tales of polyandry may reflect the male redactors’ nightmare vision of where all that autonomy might lead.

Indian tradition generally puts the two poems in two different categories: The
Ramayana
is the first poem (
kavya
), and the
Mahabharata
is a history (
itihasa
) or a dharma text.
^ge
The
Ramayana
prides itself on its more ornate language, and its central plot occupies most of the text, while the
Mahabharata
reflects the traces of straightforward oral composition and indulges in a great many secondary discussions or narrations only loosely linked to the main plot. The
Mahabharata
at the very end sketches an illusory scene of hell that is an emergency balloon to float it out of a corner it had painted itself into. But the
Ramayana
is about illusion from the very start.

The
Ramayana
tells of a war against foreigners and people of another species, with clear demarcations of forces of good triumphing over evil; the
Mahabharata
is about a bitter civil war with no winners. The
Ramayana
doesn’t usually problematize dharma; the
Mahabharata
does, constantly. Where the
Ramayana
is triumphalist, the
Mahabharata
is tragic. Where the
Ramayana
is affirmative, the
Mahabharata
is interrogative.
³²
Rama is said to be the perfect man, and his flaws are largely papered over, while the flaws of
Mahabharata
heroes are what the whole thing is about. When Rama’s brother Bharata is given the throne that should have been Rama’s, each of the brothers, like Alphonse and Gaston in the old story, modestly and generously tries to give the kingdom to the other (R 2.98). In the
Mahabharata
, by contrast, when the succession is in question, the sons of the two royal brothers fight tooth and nail over it. Where the
Ramayana
sets the time of Rama’s idyllic rule, the “Ram-Raj,” in an idealized, peaceful Mauryan Empire of the future, the
Mahabharata
jumps back in time over the Mauryan Empire to an archaic time of total, no-holds-barred war.

But we cannot say that the
Ramayana
came first, when people still believed in dharma, and then the
Mahabharata
came along and deconstructed it. Nor can we say that the
Mahabharata
first looked the disaster square in the eyes and showed what a mess it was, and then after that the
Ramayana
flinched and cleaned it up, like a gentrified slum or a Potemkin village. Both views exist simultaneously and in conversation: The
Ramayana
says, “There is a perfect man, and his name is Rama,” and the
Mahabharata
says, “Not really; dharma is so subtle that even Yudhishthira cannot always fulfill it.” Or, if you prefer, the
Mahabharata
says, “Dharma is subtle,” and the
Ramayana
replies, “Yes, but not so subtle that it cannot be mastered by a perfect man like Rama.”

Each text asks a characteristically different question to prompt the paradigmatic story: The
Ramayana
begins when Valmiki asks the sage Narada, “Is there any man alive who has all the virtues? (R1.1.1-2),” to which the answer is the triumphal, or more or less triumphal, story of Rama. By contrast, embedded inside the
Mahabharata
are two requests by Yudhishthira for a story parallel to his own; when Draupadi has been abducted, he asks if any man was ever unluckier, unhappier than he, whereupon he is told the story of Rama and Sita (3.257-75), and when he has gambled away his kingdom and is in exile, he asks the same question, to which the answer is the story of the long-suffering gambler Nala (3.49.33-34). This contrast between triumph and tragedy could stand for the general tone of the two great poems.

CHAPTER 12

This list (lists being the format of choice for the textbooks known as
shastras
) groups together animals, social classes, and (unchaste) women around the issues of killing and restorations for killing, all central issues for the
shastras
. In the long period
entre deux empires
, the formulation of encyclopedic knowledge acknowledged the diversity of opinion on many subjects, while at the same time, some, but not all, of the
shastras
closed down many of the options for women and the lower castes.
¹

The Brahmin imaginary has no canon, but if it did, that canon would be the body of
shastras
, which spelled out the dominant paradigm with regard to women, animals, and castes, the mark at which all subsequent antinomian or resistant strains of Hinduism aimed. The foreign flux, now and at other moments, on the one hand, loosened up and broadened the concept of knowledge, making it more cosmopolitan—more things to eat, to wear, to think about—and at the same time posed a threat that drove the Brahmins to tighten up some aspects of social control.

Both the diversity encompassed by the
shastras
and their drive to control that diversity are best understood in the context of the period in which they were composed.
²
There were no great dynasties in the early centuries of the Common Era; the Shakas and Kushanas were bluffing when they used the titles of King of Kings and Son of God, on the precedent of the Indo-Greeks. Some Euro-American historians have regarded this period as India’s Dark Age, dark both because it lacked the security of a decently governed empire (the Kushanas very definitely did not Rule the Waves) and because the abundant but hard-to-date sources leave historians with very little available light to work with. Some Indian nationalist historians regarded it as the Age of Invasions, the decadent age of non-Indian dynasties, when barbarians (
mlecchas
) continued to slip into India. But it looks to us now rather more like a preimperial Age of Diversity, a time of rich cultural integration, a creative chaos that inspired the scholars of the time to bring together all their knowledge, as into a fortified city, to preserve it for whatever posterity there might be. It all boils down to whether you think confusion (
samkara
) is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. Political chaos is scary for the orthodox, creative for the unorthodox; what politics sees as instability appears as dynamism in terms of commercial and cultural development.
³
The paradox is that the rule of the “degenerate Kshatriyas” and undistinguished, often non-Indian kings opened up the subcontinent to trade and new ideas.
⁴
The art and literature of this period are far richer than those of either of the two empires that frame it, the Mauryas and the Guptas.
⁵