The Hindus (84 page)

But there are also demonic horses in Vaishnava mythology. A still-later text states that Hayagriva was not a god at all but a horse-headed antigod that had won the boon that only someone horse-headed could kill him, and so when Vishnu was once accidentally beheaded (yes, another story: His head falls into the ocean
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), the gods had their blacksmith take an ax, cut the head off a horse, and put it on Vishnu; Vishnu then killed the horse-headed antigod.
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Krishna also fights with a horse antigod named Keshin (“Long-haired,” like the Vedic sage, or here, perhaps, “Long-maned”), whom he kills by wounding him in the mouth and splitting him in half.
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A Gupta image depicts a young Krishna kicking a horse, presumably the horse antigod Keshin, in the stomach and jamming his elbow in the horse’s mouth.
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The negative image of the Shaiva mare fire joined to the positive images of Vaishnava horses may have resulted in the ambiguous equine Vaishnava figures of both Keshin and Kalki.

PARASHURAMA

Parashurama (“Rama with an Ax”) is not an avatar in the
Mahabharata,
though he is an important figure there in his own right. The son of the insanely jealous Brahmin sage Jamadagni and his Kshatriya wife, Renuka, Parashurama is an awkward interclass mix and gets tragically caught in the crossfire between his parents. One day, as Renuka bathes in the river she catches sight of a king playing in the water with his queen, and she desires him. Her husband, sensing this change, has their son Parashurama, the Lizzie Borden of Hindu mythology (forty whacks and all), behead her. But beheading is seldom fatal in a Hindu myth. Pleased by his son’s obedience, Jamadagni offers him a boon, and Parashurama has him bring Renuka back to life (MB 3.116.1-20). (The Tamil version of this story has Parashurama accidentally give his mother the head of a Pariah woman.
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) Parashurama also requests, and is granted, as an additional boon, “that no one would remember her murder, that no one would be touched by the evil (MB 3.116.21-25).” Thus nothing really happens; at the end, all wrongs are righted. All that is lost when the head has been restored is memory—perhaps not merely the memory of the murder but also the memory of the sexual vision that threatened Renuka’s integrity as a chaste wife by threatening to unveil in her the conflicting image of the erotic woman. It is not entirely clear whether the evil consists in the murder or in the original lapse of chastity, nor, therefore, whether Parashurama is asking that his mother, or he himself, or everyone else should never again experience lust.

But Parashurama later lashes out against his mother’s class (the whole race of Kshatriyas) and kills them all.
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What is most puzzling is why this out-of-control boy of mixed birth, who comes from a broken home that he did much to break, is regarded as an appropriate addition to the list of Vishnu’s avatars. All he has going for him is a fanatical anti-Kshatriya bias that may have appealed to the Brahmin authors of the Puranas and the irony that he acts like a Kshatriya, not a Brahmin, when he wipes out the Kshatriyas. Perhaps that is enough. Kings invoke him as a role model: “Like Parashurama, he cleansed the earth of his enemies.” Like Kalki, Parashurama destroys his own people; where Kalki is modeled on barbarian invaders and kills barbarian invaders, Parashurama is a Kshatriya who kills Kshatriyas.

Though the dwarf is the earliest of the avatars, and the Man-Lion the last, they both interact with the paradoxical figure of the good antigod. This figure—first the antigod Bali, whom the dwarf conquers, then Prahlada, whom the Man-Lion saves—seems to be what the anthropologist Mary Douglas would have called a category error, matter out of place: As an antigod he is by definition anti the gods, but he is devoted to, hence pro, at least one god (Indra for Bali, Vishnu for Prahlada). The texts recognize this connection, though they reverse the historical sequence, in making Prahlada Bali’s grandfather.

In each of the three alliances, antigods grow strong by amassing the paramount virtue of the period. Thus in the first alliance the antigod Bali poses a threat because he has the Vedic virtue of generosity; in the second alliance, the good antigods in the Buddha myth, as well as ogres like Ravana, have amassed dangerous amounts of inner heat; and in the third alliance, Prahlada becomes a category error through his bhakti to Vishnu. This last instance, however, as we shall see, ultimately offers the solution to the problems of all three alliances.

Humans, not antigods, were the real problem here.
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The mythology of the good antigod is the Puranas’ coded way of talking about the challenge of people born into low castes, hence condemned to do unclean tasks, who nevertheless aspire to a life more in keeping with higher forms of dharma. Most of the Brahmins in charge of Vedic religion would still have nothing to do with such people, but many of the new sects, Puranic or Tantric, were casting about for ways to allow people of all castes to join them without compromising their status as pukka Hindu sects. These myths explore various possible ways of accomplishing this.

At the same time, these are not just stories about human beings interacting; they are also about what they say they are about, the nature of god and salvation. Moreover, a myth that imagines a new relationship between humans and gods makes possible, in turn, new relationships between humans.

Very little is said about Vishnu in the
Rig Veda,
but his main appearance is as the protagonist of an important creation myth in which he takes three steps by which he measures out, and therefore creates, the earthly realms, propping up the sky (1.154.1-6). The Brahmanas tell the story in more detail: “The gods and antigods were at war, and the antigods were winning, claiming the whole world as theirs. The gods asked for a share in the earth, and the antigods, rather jealousy, replied, ‘We will give you as much as this Vishnu lies on.’ Now Vishnu was a dwarf, but he was also the sacrifice. The gods worshiped with him and obtained this whole earth.”
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In the
Ramayana,
Bali alone, not the antigods in general, poses the threat. The Puranas now make Vishnu a Brahmin as well as a dwarf:

The cosmology implicit in the Brahmana myth is stated explicitly in this text: “Vishnu revealed that the whole universe was in his body.” Bali is not allowed to excel as a sacrificer; Vishnu sends him to hell, where all antigods, even, or especially, virtuous antigods, belong.

Although the Man-Lion does not appear until the Puranas, the antigods whom he opposes—Prahlada and his father, Hiranyakashipu—have a history that stretches back to the Brahmanas. Prahlada in the Brahmanas and in parts of the
Mahabharata
is a typical, demonic demon—angry, lustful, opposing the gods.
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But in the
Mahabharata
he becomes a type that we recognize from the second alliance of gods, humans, and antigods, a too-virtuous antigod:

We recognize here the pattern not only of second alliance myths that assume the need to steal or corrupt the religious power and/or virtue of anyone who threatens the gods, but also of a transformation of the pattern of the story of Ekalavya (who gave his teacher the very essence of what made him great, even as Prahlada gives his pupil his greatness), with perhaps a bit of a spin taken from the Tantric Pashupatas who stole the good karma of people whom they tricked into wronging them. We may also recognize the pattern of the story of Bali (an antigod whose generosity to Vishnu is his undoing); indeed, in many versions of the Bali myth, Prahlada, Bali’s grandfather, warns Bali that the dwarf is Vishnu,
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and in one text, Prahlada complains bitterly that Vishnu as the dwarf deceived and robbed his grandson Bali, who was “truthful, without desire or anger, calm, generous, and a sacrificer.”
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(In a late version of the Bali myth that is even more strongly reminiscent of Ekalavya, Indra himself begs from Bali’s father, Virochana, who generously offers him anything he wants, “Even my own head,” to which Indra without batting an eye replies, “Give me your own head,” and the antigod cuts it off and gives it to him.
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) The virtue of the antigod king—his eternal dharma—leads him to lose everything, even his
sva-dharma
as king of the antigods. The Vedic quality of generosity is still regarded as desirable here, but now we see its disadvantage.

But then the Puranas rewind back to an earlier generation and make the villain of the piece no longer the virtuous Prahlada but his evil father. Now too the antigod’s opponent is not Indra but Vishnu as the Man-Lion, usually depicted as a lion’s head on a man’s body, though with many arms, equipped with terrible claws:

The more general theme of the antigod who thinks he has a foolproof list of noncombatants but leaves out an essential clause of the contract (humans for Ravana, females for Mahisha) is joined with the theme of the
Mahabharata
tale of Indra and the antigod Vritra (or the antigod Namuchi), who had to be killed at twilight (neither night nor day), on the shore of the ocean (neither on land nor on sea), and with foam (a weapon neither wet nor dry) (MB 12.272-3).

Here Prahlada is a devotee of Vishnu from the start, steadfast despite the threats and attacks by his father, who is furious not because Prahlada is virtuous but merely because he has no respect for his father and the family traditions—that is, because he is violating his
sva-dharma,
a matter of partisan loyalties as well as ethics. Hiranyakashipu tries in vain to have his prodigal son educated in antigod etiquette: rape and pillage. Ultimately, as always, Vishnu kills the antigod, but in the process he upholds bhakti in the face of caste law. Where Vishnu has to cheat Bali by using his virtue against him, now it’s OK for Prahlada to be a good antigod. Something has changed.
Sva-dharma
is abolished, while general dharma is preserved and assimilated to bhakti. The texts that tell the story this way do not even bother to explain why the young antigod should serve the gods in the first place, against all laws of antigod nature. By this time, bhakti is taken for granted.

What made it OK for Prahlada to go against the rules of his birth as an antigod? It required a shift in the shape of the universe.

The basic structures of Hindu cosmology, constantly reinterpreted, served as an armature on which authors in each generation sculpted their musings on the structure of human society. In the
Rig Veda,
the Hindu universe was an egg, the two halves of the eggshell forming heaven and earth, with the sun as the yolk in the middle; it was a sealed, perfectly enclosed space with a given amount of good and evil and a given number of souls. This is why the sage in the Upanishads asks why heaven does not get filled up with all the dead souls going into it. This closed structure began to prove problematic when many Puranic myths acted as or pamphlets for a particular shrine, magnifying its salvific powers, presumably to drum up business by boasting that anyone—even women and people of low castes—could go straight to heaven after any contact with the shrine. In reaction against this, therefore, the gods (read: Brahmins) in some myths worry that so many people are being saved at the new shrines that people in heaven will have to stand with their hands above their heads, like people in a rush-hour subway. To keep heaven a more exclusive club, the gods take measures to destroy the shrines, flooding them or filling them with sand or simply corrupting people (as in the Buddha avatar) so that they stop going to the shrine.
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Here, as throughout this corpus, we may read these debates about imaginary creatures as paper-thin overlays on the ongoing debate about very real social classes and sectarian and religious conflicts; both Hindu and Muslim rulers did indeed, before, after, and during this period, destroy great Hindu shrines.