The Hindus (58 page)

The
shastras
present, from time to time, diametrically opposed, even contradictory opinions on a particular subject, without coming down strongly in favor of one or the other. One striking example of an apparent contradiction is Manu’s discussion of the levirate (
niyoga
), the law that allows a woman to sleep with her husband’s brother when the husband has failed to produce a male heir, a situation that frames the birth of the fathers of the
Mahabharata
heroes. Manu says that you should carry out the
niyoga;
in the next breath, he says that you should not, that it is not recommended, that it is despised (9.56-63, 9.64-68). The commentaries (and later scholars) explicitly regard these two sections as mutually contradictory. But Manu does mean both of them: He is saying that this is what one has to do in extremity, but that it is really a very bad thing to do, and that, if you do it, you should not enjoy it, and you should only do it once. If you have to do it, you must be
very, very careful
.

That is the way in which one should regard other apparent contradictions in Manu, such as the statement (repeated ad nauseam) that one must never kill a Brahmin and the statement: “A man may without hesitation kill anyone who attacks him with a weapon in his hand, even if it is his guru, a child or an old man, or a Brahmin thoroughly versed in the Veda, whether he does it openly or secretly; rage befalls rage (8.350-51).” One can similarly resolve Manu’s diatribes against the bride-price with his casual explanations of the way to pay it (3.51-54, 9.93-100, 8.204, 8.366). But it is not difficult to make sense of all this: Ideally, you should not sleep with your brother’s wife or kill a Brahmin or accept a bride-price; but there are times when you cannot help doing it, and then Manu is there to tell you how to do it. This is what you do when caught between a rock and a hard place; it is the best you can do in a no-win situation to which there is no truly satisfactory solution.

The Sanskrit term for the rock and the hard place is
apad,
which may be translated “in extremity,” an emergency when normal rules do not apply, when all bets are off.
Apad
is often paired with dharma in the phrase
apad-dharma
, the right way to act in an emergency. It is the most specific of all the dharmas, even more specific than one’s own dharma (
sva-dharma
), let alone general dharma; indeed, it is the very opposite of
sanatana
or
sadharana dharma
, the dharma for everyone, always.
Apad
is further supplemented by other loophole concepts such as adversity (
anaya
), distress (
arti
), and near starvation (
kshudha
). In a famine a father may kill his son and Brahmins may eat dogs (10.105-08), which would otherwise make them “dog cookers.” The polluting power of dogs is overlooked in another context as well: “A woman’s mouth is always unpolluted, as is a bird that knocks down a fruit; a calf is unpolluted while the milk is flowing, and a dog is unpolluted when it catches a wild animal (5.130).” That is, since you want to eat the animal that the dog has caught, you need to redefine its mouth as pure, for that occasion.

The emergency escape clause is further bolstered by recurrent references to what is an astonishingly subjective standard of moral conduct (2.6, 12, 223; 4.161, 12.27, 37). Thus the elaborate web of rules, which, if followed to the letter, would paralyze human life entirely, is equally elaborately unraveled by Manu through the escape clauses. Every knot tied in one verse is untied in another verse; the constrictive fabric that he weaves in the central text he unweaves in the subtext of
apad,
as Penelope in Homer’s
Odyssey
carefully unwove at night what she had woven in the day.

Other apparent contradictions turn out to be conflations of realistic and idealized approaches to moral quandaries. Idealism, rather than realism, asserts itself in the framework of the
shastras
. But if the
shastras
themselves acknowledged the need to escape from the system, how seriously did rank-and-file Hindus take it? Many a young man must have seduced, or been seduced by, his guru’s wife. (This situation must have been endemic, given both Manu’s paranoid terror of it and its likelihood in a world in which young women married old men who had young pupils.) How likely was such a man, afterward, in punishment, to “sleep on a heated iron bed or embrace a red-hot metal cylinder . . . or cut off his penis and testicles, hold them in his two cupped hands, and set out toward the south-west region of Ruin, walking straight ahead until he dies (11.104-05)”? Surely none but the most dedicated masochist would turn down the milder alternatives “to dispel the crime of violating his guru’s marriage-bed” that Manu, as always, realistically offers: “Or he should restrain his sensory powers and eat very little for three months, eating food fit for an oblation or barley-broth (11.106-07).” How do we know that anyone ever did
any
of this?
^gs
Who believed the Brahmins? How was Manu used? The
shastras
were composed by the twice born, for the twice born, and (largely) of the twice born, but “twice born” is a tantalizingly imprecise term. Often it means any of the three upper classes, but usually it means Brahmins alone.

There was a curious lack of communication between theory and practice at this time; the information on pigments and measurements in the
shastras
on painting and architecture, respectively, do not correspond to the actual pigments and measurements of statuary, nor, on the other hand, is the extraordinary quality of the metal in the famous “Iron Pillar” of Mehrauli supported by the known existence of any treatise on metallurgy.
⁵²
The
Kama-sutra
comments explicitly on this gap between theory and practice, and for Manu there are several quite plausible possible scenarios that will apply in different proportions to different situations: Manu may be describing actual practices that everyone does, or that some people do, that some or all do only because he tells them to, or imagined practices that no one would dream of doing.

Nor was
Manu
the basis on which most Hindus decided what to do and what not to do; local traditions, often functioning as vernacular commentaries on
Manu
(much as case law functions as a commentary on the American Constitution), did that.
Manu
is not so much a law code as it is a second-order reflection on a law code, a meditation on what a law code is all about, on the problems raised by law codes. But in the realm of the ideal,
Manu
is the cornerstone of the Brahmin vision of what human life should be, a vision to which Hindus have always paid lip service and to which in many ways many still genuinely aspire. Like all
shastras
, it influenced expectations, tastes, and judgments, beneath the level of direct application of given cases. Often it set a mark that no one was expected to hit; sometimes it acknowledged the legitimacy of practices that it did not in fact encourage. The
Kama-sutra
too makes this distinctionnicely when it argues, in the only verse that appears twice in the text, once in regard to oral sex and once in regard to the use of drugs: “The statement that ‘There is a text for this’ does not justify a practice (2.9.41; 7.2.55).” The
shastras
therefore do not tell us what people actually did about anything, but as theoretical treatises they constitute one of the great cosmopolitan scientific literatures of the ancient world.

CHAPTER 13

The image of god (Shiva, who dwells in Paccilacciramam) as a parent, as a female parent, and finally as an abandoning parent is central to the spirit of bhakti, as is the worshiper’s bold and intimate threat to abandon this god, echoing the divine mercilessness even while responding to the divine love. Bhakti, which is more a general religious lifestyle or movement than a specific sect, was a major force for inclusiveness with its antinomian attitudes toward Pariahs and women, yet the violence of the passions that it generated also led to interreligious hostility. This was the third alliance, in which gods were not only on the side of devout human worshipers (as in the first alliance) but also on the side of sinners, some of whom did not worship the god in any of the conventional ways.

We have now reached a point in the historical narrative where a work of fiction would say, “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” or “In another part of the forest . . .” Until now it has been possible to maintain at least the illusion (
maya
) that there was a single line of development in an intertextual tradition largely centered in North India, a kind of family tree with branches that we could trace one by one, merely stopping occasionally to note the invasion of some South Indian kingdom by a North Indian king or the growing trade between north and south. But now even that illusion evaporates. For Indian history is more like a banyan tree,
³
which, unlike the mighty oak, grows branches that return down to the earth again and again and become the roots and trunks of new trees with new branches so that eventually you have a forest of a banyan tree, and you no longer know which was the original trunk. The vertical line of time is intersected constantly by the horizontal line of space. And so we will have to keep doubling back in time to find out what has been going on in one place while we were looking somewhere else.

Now we must go south.

To understand the origins of bhakti, we need to have at least a general idea of the world in which bhakti was created, a world in which there was a synthesis between North Indian and South Indian cultural forms, active interaction between several religious movements and powerful political patronage of religion. There was constant contact and trade between North and South India at least by Mauryan times, in the fourth century BCE. South India was known already at the time of the Hebrew Bible (c. 1000 BCE) as a land of riches, perhaps the place to which King Solomon
^gt
sent his ships every three years, to bring back gold, silver, ivory, monkeys, and peacocks.
⁴
The southern trade route brought pearls, shells, and the fine cottons of Madurai to western lands.
⁵
There was bustling contact with Rome (the Romans imported mostly luxury articles: spices, jewels, textiles, ivories, and animals, such as monkeys, parakeets, and peacocks),
⁶
with China, and with Indianized cultures in Southeast Asia.
⁷
Oxen and mules were the caravan animals, camels in the desert, and more nimble-footed asses in rough hill terrain.
⁸
Not horses.

The empires of South India endured far longer than any of the North Indian kingdoms, and some of them controlled, mutatis mutandis, just as much territory. The Greek historian Megasthenes, ambassador to the Mauryan king Chandragupta, in c. 300 BCE, says that the Pandya kingdom (the eastern part of the Tamil-speaking southernmost tip of India) extended to the sea and had 365 villages. Ashoka in his edicts mentions the Pandyas as well as the Cholas (the southern kingdom of Tamil Nadu), the sons of Kerala (the Cheras, on the western coast of South India), and the people on the island now known as Sri Lanka.
^gu
The Tamils, in return, were well aware of the Mauryas in particular and North India in general.

The Chola king Rajaraja I (985-1014 CE) carved out an overseas empire. The Cholas were top dogs from the ninth to the early thirteenth century, pushing outward from the Kaveri river basin,
⁹
attacking their neighbors, Cheras and Pandyas, as well as the present Sri Lanka to the south, and almost continually at war with their neighbors to the north, the Chalukyas. The Chalukya Pulakeshin I (543-566 CE) performed a horse sacrifice and founded a dynasty in Karnataka, with its capital at Vatapi (now Badami); it spread through the Deccan,
¹⁰
making treaties with the Cholas, Pandyas, and Cheras.
¹¹
The Cholas finally took over the Chalukya lands in about 880.

In addition to the three great South Indian kingdoms, the Cholas, Pandyas, and Cheras, which endured for centuries, the Pallava dynasty that ruled from Kanchipuram (Kanjeevaram), directly north of the three kingdoms, was a force to be reckoned with from 375 CE on. Pallava ports had been thriving centers of trade with China, Persia, and Rome from Roman times, but the Pallavas achieved some of their greatest works of art and literature in the sixth century CE, after the disintegration of the Gupta Empire; northern artisans contributed to many of the innovations in Pallava Sanskrit literature and temple-based architecture.

As Pallava and Chola political power and architecture spread, so did bhakti, becoming a riptide that cut across the still-powerful current of Vedic sacrifice, just as
moksha
had done centuries earlier. Beginning among Tamil-literate people,
¹²
bhakti soon entered the literatures of other Dravidian languages and then reached nonliterate people. It swept over the subcontinent, fertilizing the worship of Krishna at Mathura and of Jagannatha at Puri, as well as widespread traditions of pilgrimage and temple festivals. Always it kept its Tamil character and thus transported Tamil qualities to the north, transforming northern bhakti into a mix of northern and southern, Sanskrit and Tamil forms.
¹³