The Hindus (81 page)

And the name “lord of the meeting rivers” resonates, among other things, with the meetings of the community of devotees from every caste and class.
¹⁵⁷
“Things standing shall fall” mocks the megalomania of the temple builders.

The Virashaivas were militants who attacked the normative social and cultural order of the medieval south; some people regarded them as heretics, and many classified them as “left-hand” (artisans, merchants, servants) in contrast with “right-hand” (agricultural workers). Legends about the early Virashaivas say that the son of a Pariah married the daughter of a Brahmin; the king condemned both their fathers to death; the Virashaivas rioted against the king and assassinated him; the government attempted to suppress the Virashaivas, but they survived. Basava was against caste and against Brahmins. Muslim social customs, unrestricted by caste, influenced him deeply, and the Virashaivas’ rejection of the Brahmin imaginary may be beholden to the influence of Muslim missionaries who were active on India’s west coast just when the Virashaiva doctrine was developed there. On the other hand, the threat of Islamic iconoclasm may have been one reason for the widespread use of portable temple images (or portable lingas).
¹⁵⁸

The earlier poems of the Virashaivas were composed in Kannada, but the earliest extant full narrative of the Virashaivas is in Telugu, the thirteenth-century Telugu
Basava Purana
of Palkuriki Somanatha. It is largely a hagiography of Basava, but it is also, in David Shulman’s words, “an extraordinarily violent book . . . the Virashaiva heroes are perpetually decapitating, mutilating, or poisoning someone or other—their archenemies, the Brahmins and Jains, or their political rivals, or, with astounding frequency, themselves (usually for some minor lapse in the intensity of their devotion).”
¹⁵⁹
Where does this violence come from? We may trace it back to the Tamil saints of the
Periya Purana
, or to the wild followers of Shiva as Virabhadra in Andhra, who represent “an enduring strain of potentially antinomian folk religion that breaks into literary expression under certain historical conditions,” such as the political vacuum that existed in twelfth-century Kalyana.
¹⁶⁰
Much of the aggression and violence in the
Basava Purana
is directed against conventional religion: The god in the temple
murti
(icon) is so humiliated that he sneaks out the back door; washer-men, thieves, and Pariahs win out over the political and religious power mongers. A devotee’s dog (actually Shiva disguised in a dog’s skin) recites the Veda, shaming the caste-obsessed Brahmins,
¹⁶¹
as the buffalo does, in Kabir’s poem; making the interloper a dog instead of a buffalo intensifies the caste issue. Several stories also describe victories over Jainas, some of whom are blinded.
¹⁶²
Eventually Basava reacted against the Virashaivas’ violence and lived his life away from the community he had founded.

In the twelfth century a woman Virashaiva saint named Mahadevyyakka composed poems in Kannada
¹⁶³
that simultaneously addressed the metaphysics of salvation (including the problem of Maya, [“illusion”]) and the banal problem of dealing with in-laws:

On the banal level, the poem refers to the difficult situation of a woman under the thumb of her mother-in-law in a patrilocal society (which means that you live with your husband’s family); “no god, this man” is a direct contradiction of Hindu dharma texts such as that of Manu (5.154), which instructs a woman to treat her husband like a god. There are also more abstract references, some explicit (Maya and the world as mother- and father-in-law), some implicit: The three tigerish brothers-in-law are the three strands of matter (
gunas
), the components of nature that one cannot escape. A. K. Ramanujan sees the husband as symbolic of karma, “the past of the ego’s many lives,” and the sister-in-law as the binding memory or “perfume” (
vasana
) that clings to karma. None of the people in the poem is related to the speaker/heroine/worshiper by blood; she defies them all, using a vulgar word for “cuckold” that would surely shock them. The poem presents the love of god (Hara, a name of Shiva) as both totally destructive of conventional life and illegitimate, transgressive.
¹⁶⁵

We can reconstruct quite a lot about the life of Mahadevyyakka. She regarded herself as married to Shiva, and tried in vain to avoid marrying Kaushika, a king who fell in love with her. She wrote of this conflict:

Eventually she left her husband and wandered naked, clothed only in her hair, like Lady Godiva, until she died, still in her twenties. Ramanujan writes her epitaph: “Her struggle was with her condition, as body, as woman, as social being tyrannized by social roles, as a human confined to a place and a time. Through these shackles she bursts, defiant in her quest for ecstasy.”
¹⁶⁷
Though hardly a typical woman, Mahadevyyakka nevertheless provides a paradigm precisely for atypicality, for the possibility that a woman might shift the paradigm,
^im
as so many other women have done in the history of Hinduism, so strongly that their lives may have functioned as alternative paradigms for other women.

CHAPTER 17

The many different ways in which the medieval Puranas tell stories about animals, women, the lower classes, and other religions are the result of a sudden burgeoning of the imaginative range of the texts, nurtured in large part by the ongoing appropriation of ideas from non-Sanskrit, oral, and vernacular cultures. By the ninth century CE, Sanskrit had embraced literary and political as well as religious realms as a cosmopolitan language that was patronized by the literati and royal courts. Some scholars argue that Sanskrit faded away during this period because “the idiom of a cosmopolitan literature” became somewhat redundant in “an increasingly regionalized world.”
²
But it seems to me that the producers of Sanskrit Puranas, regionalized though they most certainly were, responded not by closing up shop but simply doing more and more business as usual, welcoming in regional popular, oral, and vernacular themes and translating them into their own kind of Puranic Sanskrit. It was in this spirit too that they welcomed in regional and popular figures and made them into some of the avatars of Vishnu.

We have already met the first two human avatars of Vishnu, Krishna and Rama, who becaome incarnate on earth to fight against antigods (Asuras) incarnate as humans and against ogres (Rakshasas) who are the enemies of humans. We have also noted, without investigating, a number of references to other avatars that Vishnu had attracted by the early centuries of the Common Era, sometimes said to be six, sometimes eighteen, but usually ten (though not always the same ten
ⁱⁿ
). One of the very few surviving Gupta temples, the temple at Deogarh, in Uttar Pradesh (c. sixth-seventh century CE), is called the Temple of the Ten Avatars (Dashavatara). In the fifteenth century the poet Kabir mocked the ten avatars as “divine malarkey/for those who really know”—that is, for those who know that it is all god’s
maya
that Rama appears to marry Sita, and so forth.
³
The Jaina concept of Universal History, which claims nine appearances of a savior in each world epoch, may have played a role in the development of the Hindu schema,
⁴
for Vishnu too usually has nine avatars in the past, the tenth being (like the Kali Age) reserved for the future (Kalki).

Some of the new avatars were assimilated into the Puranas lists from earlier Sanskrit literature, and all of them entered the ten-avatar structure through the usual processes of Hindu bricolage. The texts often describe the avatars centrifugally, as various functions of the god emanating out of him and expressed as many manifestations (with many arms, many heads). But historically they came into being centripetally, as various gods already in existence were attracted to Vishnu and attached themselves to him like iron filings to a magnet. Avatars were particularly popular with kings, whose eulogies often sequentially link their conquests or their qualities to avatars—like the boar, he rescured the earth, like Kalki, he repelled the barbarians—perhaps to suggest that the king too was an avatar.

To fast-forward for a moment, Keshab Chunder Sen (1838-1884) in 1882 noted that the succession of Vishnu’s avatars could be interpreted as an allegory of the Darwinian evolutionary process, “presciently recognized by ancient Hindu sages and now confirmed by modern science”—that is, an ancient Indian theory that Darwin re-invented.
⁵
(Sen may or may not have been inspired by the idea of Avataric Evolutionism that Madame Blavatsky discussed in her
Isis Unveiled,
published in 1877.
⁶
) Since then the ten avatars are often listed beginning with the three least complex life forms and working their way up to humans; sometimes they are also associated with the progression of the ages (Yugas) through time. Thus the list usually goes like this: the fish, the tortoise, the boar, and the Man-Lion (animals, all in the Krita Yuga, the first Age, and all but the Man-Lion aquatic animals); the dwarf, Parashurama, Rama (humans, all in the Treta Yuga, the second Age); Krishna and the Buddha (humans in the Dvapara, the third Age); and Kalki in the Kali Age. But evolutionary theory fits with the Indian theory of the Yugas only if one ignores the little matter of the clash between social evolutionism (things get steadily better) and the Yuga theory of social degeneration (things get steadily worse).

If, however, we take into account the order in which the principal ten figures first surface in texts (including coins and inscriptions), though not necessarily already labeled avatars, let alone historically connected with Vishnu, the list would look more like this: the dwarf (
Rig Veda
); the fish and the boar (Brahmanas); the tortoise, Krishna, Rama, Parashurama, and Kalki (all mentioned in the
Mahabharata
); the Man-Lion and the Buddha (mentioned in the
Vishnu Purana
, c. 400-500 CE).
⁷
Finally, if we group them according to the main issues with which this book is primarily concerned, the order would be animals (the fish, the boar, the tortoise), women (Krishna/Radha, Rama/Sita), interreligious relations (the Buddha, Kalki
^io
), caste and class (Parashurama, the dwarf, and the Man-Lion). Let us consider them in that order.

THE FISH (MATSYA)

The myth of the fish and the flood is not originally associated with Vishnu; as we have seen, at first the fish was just a fish. But in the
Mahabharata
(3.185), the fish tells Manu that he is Brahma, Prajapati, the Lord of Creatures, and since the fish expands from a minnow to a kind of whale, and since he is a savior, the Puranas make him one of the avatars of the god Vishnu, who is both an expander (as the dwarf who becomes a giant) and a savior (as Krishna often claims to be).

 

THE BOAR (VARAHA)

Like the avatar of the fish, the boar avatar was not originally associated with Vishnu; in the Brahmanas, the boar, an amphibious animal, is Prajapati, the Lord of Creatures, who spreads earth out on the waters to make her into a disk and who marries her.
⁸
The
Vishnu Purana
identifies Prajapati with Narayana (a name of Vishnu).
⁹
At Udayagiri, in Malwa, a shrine carved out of the rock-face and dated to the opening of the fifth century CE depicts Vishnu’s incarnation as the boar, rescuing the earth depicted as a female boar. This may have been a political allegory of Chandra Gupta II’s conquest of Malwa,
¹⁰
making the image simultaneously Vishnu married to the earth-boar and a king married to the earth goddess.

 

THE TORTOISE (KURMA)

The tortoise appears in the
Mahabharata
when the gods and antigods decide to churn the ocean of milk to obtain the elixir of immortality, the soma, using Mount Mandara as the churn. All that is said there is: “The gods and antigods said to the king of tortoises, the supreme tortoise, ‘You are the one suited to be the resting place for the mountain.’ The tortoise agreed, and Indra placed the tip of the mountain on his back, fastening it tightly (1.15-17).” Vishnu is not the tortoise here; indeed he appears in this version of the story in a different form, as the nymph Mohini, who bewitches and seduces the antigods so that they lose their opportunity to drink the soma. But the tortoise goes on to be quite famous in Hindu cosmologies and in images of the myth of the churning, and the Puranas identify the tortoise as an avatar of Vishnu. Usually he is depicted as anthropomorphic from the waist up, tortoise from the waist down, but sometimes simply as a tortoise
tout court.