The Hindus (64 page)

The mythology that pits Shiva’s ascetic heat against Kama’s erotic arrows of flame (Shiva burns Kama’s body to ashes, as we shall see) and the ever-present threat of the doomsday mare remain at the heart of both Puranic mythology and Sanskrit court literature sponsored by the rulers of the Gupta Empire. As popular traditions infuse Sanskrit texts and rituals, the sectarian male gods Shiva and Vishnu
^hh
continue to grow in power and complexity, though goddesses now begin to take center stage.

Leaving South India for the north and doubling back a bit in time, we encounter another trunk of the banyan tree that was growing steadily all the time we were sojourning in the south. While the Pallavas and Pandyas and Cholas were sorting one another out, the Gupta Empire, founded by Chandra Gupta I, spread across all of northern and much of central India: the largest empire since the fall of the Mauryas in the third century BCE. The Guptas confused matters by using the second half of the first name of the first Maurya as their dynastic name, so that Chandra Gupta I echoes Chandragupta Maurya, a kind of palimpsest of names. (The Gupta founding date [c. 324 CE] also mirrors the Maurya founding date [c. 324 BCE].) The Guptas wrote over the Mauryas: The Allahabad inscription of 379 CE (detailing the conquest of North India by Samudra Gupta [c. 335-76 CE] and his humiliation of the southern rulers) is a palimpsest written on an Ashokan pillar.
²

Chandra Gupta II (376-415 CE), inheriting a large empire from his father, Samudra Gupta, completed the Guptas’ subjugation of North India (the “conquest of the world,” or
dig-vijaya
) and continued his father’s policy by extending control over neighboring territories, whether by war or diplomacy (war by other means). The evidence for this control now begins to be quite a bit more substantial than the usual megalomaniac epigraphical chest beating. As there were Greek visitors to the Mauryas, so there are Chinese visitors to the Guptas, whose testimony often substantiates other sources; though they are often no more resistant to local mythmaking than were their Greek predecessors, it is always useful to have a foreign bias to set against the native bias to give us a cross fix.

The Chinese Buddhist Faxian (also spelled Fa Hsien) made a pilgrimage to India in 402 and, after his return to China, translated into Chinese the many Sanskrit Buddhist texts he brought back. He also left detailed descriptions of India, particularly Pataliputra, from 405 to 411, in his “Record of Buddhist Kingdoms.” He noted with approval the means for dispensing charity and medicine and the free rest houses and hospitals that the emperor maintained. He also corroborated the claim, made in a Gupta inscription, that no one who deserved to be punished was “over-much put to torture”;
³
according to Faxian, “Even in cases of repeated rebellion they only cut off the right hand.” And, he added, “throughout the country the people kill no living thing nor drink wine, nor do they eat garlic or onions, with the exception of the Chandalas only.”
⁴
(Chandalas are Pariahs.) As usual, the foreigner misinteprets the ideals of non-violence and teetotaling as actual practices. As for class conditions, one of Faxian’s few criticisms of the Gupta social system was that the Chandalas were forced to do degrading tasks such as carrying out corpses and had to strike a piece of wood as they entered a town to warn upper-caste people to turn away as they approached.
⁵
(A later Chinese visitor, Xuan Zang, in the seventh century, observed that executioners and scavengers were forced to live outside the city.)

The Gupta style was imperial, widely exported to make its mark in Southeast Asia as well as South Asia. European historians, themselves imperialists, quite naturally thought that Empire was Good for You, that culture flourished under widespread political consolidation. The extent and the character of the rich Gupta art-historical record inspired European historians to stamp the label of “classical” on the art, architecture, and literature of the Guptas, which they also regarded as “classical” in the sense of “classics”: They reminded them of Greek art. They praised the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” (Winckelmann) of Gupta art in contrast with the “florid” Hindu temples and texts of subsequent periods that they regarded as decadent.
⁶
They particularly loved the art of the Gandhara region in the Northwest, which is far more Greek than Indian (lots of drapery on everyone) and which they praised for its anatomical accuracy. They called this the Golden Age of Indian culture, a Eurocentric term, since it was the Greeks who labeled the first age Golden (while the Hindus called it the Winning Age).

The Gupta court was famous for its “nine gems,” the ancient equivalent of MacArthur geniuses, including several scientists who helpfully paid attention to data relevant to their birth dates. The astronomer and mathematician
^hi
Aryabhata,
⁷
born in 476, was first to calculate the solar year accurately; he also made an explicit statement that the apparent westward motion of the stars is due to the spherical earth’s rotation about its axis, and he correctly ascribed the luminosity of the moon and planets to reflected sunlight. His works circulated in the northwest of India and contributed greatly to the development of Islamic astronomy.

The astronomer Varahamihira (505-587) composed a masterful compendium of Greek, Egyptian, Roman, and Indian astronomy; made major advances in trigonometry; and discovered a version of Pascal’s triangle. He is also well known for his contributions to iconography and astrology. The mathematician Brahmagupta (598-665) defined zero as the result of subtracting a number from itself. Committed to the theory of the four Ages, he employed Aryabhata’s system of starting each day at midnight but rejected Aryabhata’s statement that the earth is a spinning sphere. He also dismissed Jaina cosmological views. Like Aryabhata, Brahmagupta profoundly influenced Islamic and Byzantine astronomy. The astronomical and mathematical achievements of the Gupta court show that this period’s efflorescence of art and literature—both religious and secular—was part of a broader pattern of creativity and innovation.

Other forms of inventiveness also flourished under the Guptas. Around this time someone in India invented chess. It began as a four-player war game called
chaturanga
(“four-limbs”), a Sanskrit name for a quadripartite battle formation mentioned in the
Mahabharata
.
Chaturanga
flourished in northwestern India by the seventh century and is regarded as the earliest precursor of modern chess because it had two key features found in all later chess variants: Different pieces had different powers (unlike games like checkers and Go), and victory was based on one piece, the king in modern chess. (“Checkmate” is a word derived from the Persian/Arabic
shah-mat
[“the king is dead].”) There was therefore an atmosphere in which many branches of learning thrived.

The dynasty soon gave way to a number of weaker kingdoms and to the Huns, who nipped any subsequent budding Gupta emperors in the bud until the Turks and Sassanian Persians finally stopped them for good.
⁸
Samudra Gupta had performed a horse sacrifice at which he allegedly gave away ten thousand cows, and his prolific gold coins abound in magnificent horses.
⁹
But when the Huns severed trade routes in the north, they cut off the vital supply of equine bloodstock overland from central Asia to India. From now on, horses had to be imported to India by sea from Arabia, which made them even more expensive than before and put the Arabs entirely in control of the horse trade. The Guptas’ famous gold coinage became first debased, then crudely cast, increasingly stereotyped, scarce, and finally nonexistent,
¹⁰
as the empire disintegrated into multiple small kingdoms. But how golden was the Gupta age even in its prime?

Again we encounter a trick of the available light: Because we have Faxian and a lot of inscriptions, we think we know the Guptas, and many historians have been caught up in the spirit of the Guptas’ own self-aggrandizement. The Guptas did their boasting in Sanskrit, the language they chose for their courts, a move of conscious archaism. Prior to this, kings had done their boasting in the language that ordinary people spoke, one of the Prakrits, like the Magadhi of the Buddha and of Ashoka. Brahmins had continued to use Sanskrit in such a way that a bilingual literary culture underlay such great texts as the
Mahabharata
and the Puranas, the medieval Sanskrit (and, later, vernacular) compendiums of myth and ritual, which began to be assembled during the Gupta age.
¹¹
The Guptas’ use of Sanskrit and patronage of Sanskrit literature also contributed to the Euro-American identification of their age as classical.

But Gupta art, however pretty, was not nearly as imaginative or vigorous as that of the ages that preceded and followed it; it seems lifeless and bloodless, classical in the sense of “boring,” in comparison with the earlier Kushana sculpture and, later, the voluptuous statues of the Cholas, the vibrant images of Basohli painting. In my humble opinion, Indian art is better than Greek art and therefore
much
better than art (such as Gupta art) that imitates Hellenistic art (which is second-rate Greek art). The architecture of the first Gupta temples, such as those at Aihole, Badami, and Pattadakal, or the temple of the Ten Avatars (Dashavatara) at Deogarh, in Uttar Pradesh (c. sixth to seventh century), cannot compare with the temples built from the tenth century, the “dazzling ornamented surfaces” of Khajuraho, Konarak, Tanjavur, and Madurai, to name just a few.
¹²
Other scholars too have judged the Gupta Age to be one of “extraordinary restraint,” which eliminated options and alternatives for those “living in the strait-jacket of orthodox Hinduism.”
¹³

It is a general perversity of Indian history that its greatest architectural monuments—both the great temple clusters and the great palaces and forts—were created not in the centers of power like Pataliputra but in relatively remote provinces, and this is certainly true of the Gupta Age.
¹⁴
It was in Ajanta, a fairly remote town in the Deccan, that Harisena of the Vakataka dynasty (c. 460-477), who owed nothing to Gupta patronage—or, more to the point, to Gupta control—completed the great caves whose walls are alive with the first examples of what has been called narrative painting:
^hj
scenes depicting the life of the Buddha, his previous lives (Jatakas), a storm at sea, a shipwreck, and the only panoramic battle scene known from ancient India.
¹⁵
Great things, golden things, did happen in the Gupta Age, but not always at the hands of the Gupta rulers.

Moreover, the artisans who carved the temples and who ranked socially with musicians and dancing girls, types that always made the Brahmins nervous,
¹⁶
did not thrive in this period, as Romila Thapar points out:

Yet, as we are about to see, that lower-class majority made its mark upon the upper classes.

Sanskrit court poetry drew on earlier Sanskrit texts, as one would expect from the general force of tradition and intertextuality. But it also drew upon folk traditions, as indeed the earlier Sanskrit texts had often done. In translating the plot from one idiom to another, or even from oral/written epic to court dramas, the Gupta poets edited out a great deal, but not all, of the power and dignity of women. One example will stand for many.

The poet Kalidasa, generally regarded as the greatest poet in the Sanskrit tradition, the Shakespeare of India, reworked in his play
Shakuntala
(more precisely “The Recognition of Shakuntala”) a story that the
Mahabharata
tells at some length: King Dushyanta encounters Shakuntala in the forest while he is hunting, killing too many animals and terrifying the rest. He marries her with the ceremony of mutual consent (the Gandharva marriage or marriage of the centaurs) and returns to his court; when she brings their son to him at court, he lies, swearing that he never saw her before, until a disembodied voice from the sky proclaims the child his, and then he says he knew it all along (1.64-69). Dushyanta’s cruelty to his sexual partner is foreshadowed by his out-of-control hunting—the two vices are closely connected in the Hindu view—and hardly mitigated by his statement that he rejected Shakuntala because of his fear of public disapproval, an argument that rang equally hollow when Rama used it to reject Sita. Dushyanta is one of a large crowd of
Mahabharata
kings who had children secretly, and Shakuntala one of many women who had them illegitimately.

Whereas the story in the
Mahabharata
is about power and inheritance, Kalidasa turns it into a story about desire and memory. Kalidasa probably had the patronage of the Gupta dynasty, perhaps Chandra Gupta II.
^hk
(His poem
The Birth of the Prince,
ostensibly about the birth of the son of Shiva and Parvati—the god Skanda, also called Kumara [“the Youth” or “the Prince”]—may also be an extended pun to celebrate the birth of Kumara Gupta.) The story of Shakuntala was important to the Guptas, for the child of Shakuntala and Dushyanta, named Bharata, was one of the founders of the dynasty that the Guptas claimed for their lineage.
^hl
Kalidasa had his work cut out for him to transform Bharata’s father from a lying cad
^hm
to a sympathetic lover,
¹⁸
and to give credit where credit’s due, he did at least feel that Dushyanta needed some sort of excuse for treating Shakuntala as he did. And so he fell back upon the tried-and-true folk device of the magic ring of memory
¹⁹
and the curse of an angry Brahmin (the
presbyter ex machina
): A sage whom Shakuntala neglected in her lovesick distraction put a curse on her, ensuring that the king would forget her until he saw the ring that he (the king) had given her. Shakuntala lost the ring; Dushyanta therefore honestly did not remember her until a fisherman found the ring in a fish that had swallowed it (and was caught and served at Dushyanta’s table). Then Dushyanta was terribly, terribly sorry about it all, and he searched until he found Shakuntala and his son at last. In this retelling, Shakuntala’s mistake (a trivial breach of ascetiquette) injures Dushyanta’s mind, through a kind of transfer of karma, or transitive imagination; it’s really all her fault. Dushyanta suffers for actions committed by someone else, actions of which he is completely innocent,
²⁰
but of course he is also guilty of an even more serious forgetfulness than the one that Shakuntala suffers for. At the same time, the curse on Shakuntala merely activates what is already there
in nuce
in Dushyanta, his forgetfulness. The whole fishy story gets Dushyanta (and Kalidasa) out of what subsequent Indian scholars recognized as a true moral dilemma.