The Hindus (147 page)

Orientalism also underlies the still-widespread misconception that
everything
in India is religious or “spiritual”; often when I mention “South Asian studies” to non-South Asianists, they mishear it as “salvation studies.”

One formulation of this assumption is
post hoc, propter hoc
(“after that, because of that”), a phrase that inspired an old British senior common room joke about blaming bad behavior upon drinking an excess of German wine (hock).

One must begin
somewhere
, even with the polluted
H
words, and without the disclaimer of scare quotes to barricade them, like a pair of hands held up for mercy.

This seems to me about as useful as the remark (which Aldous Huxley made in
Those Barren Leaves
) that the works of Homer were not written by Homer, but by someone else of the same name.

Though their women might have been grateful to have the daughter’s share in the father’s property that this progressive legislation granted to Hindu women.

This is the punch line of an old joke, a statement made by a man in response to well-meaning friends who warned him that the reason why he kept losing at poker, week after week, was that the people he played with cheated. It is a remark that could also have been made by Yudhishthira (in the
Mahabharata
), who persisted in playing dice with, and always losing from, people whom he suspected to be cheating or at least knew to be much better players than he was.

In Harsha’s play
Priyadarshika
, in the senventh century CE, the woman playwright writes in Sanskrit, while the clown, who is not only male but a Brahmin, speaks Prakrit.

The term “twice born” (
dvi-ja
) also means a tooth or a bird, each of which undergoes second birth, from the gum or the egg respectively.

Shvan
(“dog”) is the source of our “hound,” and
paka
(from the Sanskrit
pak/c
, “cook”) means ripe, cooked, or perfected and is related to the English term, borrowed from Hindi, “pukka,” as in “pukka sahib,” “well-ripened/cooked/perfected Englishman.”

Pace Gayatri (“Can the Subaltern Speak?”) Spivak.

The situation is more complex in the
shastras
, which often connect both the horse and the cow with Vaishyas, since that is the class concerned with animal husbandry. But even those texts more often place the horse in the Kshatriya class, as it is used for warfare and royal ceremony rather than for work in the fields. And the cow is the animal given to Brahmins and protected by Brahmins, though frequently coveted and stolen by Kshatriyas.

Horses and hounds contrast not merely in class but also in philology. The Sanskrit word for a horse (
ashva
) could also be parsed to mean a nondog (
a-shva
). It doesn’t really work in the nominative forms by which Indians refer to Sanskrit nouns or in the roots, but it works in the combinatory forms, where
ashvah
loses its final
h
(as in
ashva-medha
, “horse sacrifice”) and
shvan/shvaa
loses its
n
or long
a
(as in the compound
shva-paka,
“dog cooker”).

Euro-Americans too made this equation, as in the nineteenth-century signs that often proclaimed, NO DOGS OR INDIANS ALLOWED.

The two species are combined in the German term of insult,
Schweinhund!
(“pig-dog”).

Sherlock Holmes once solved a mystery, the case of Silver Blaze, a racehorse, by using a vital clue of omission. When Inspector Gregory asked Holmes whether he had noted any point to which he would draw the inspector’s attention, Holmes replied, “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” objected the puzzled inspector, the essential straight man for the Socratic sage. “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. The fact that the dog did not bark when someone entered the house at night was evidence, in this case evidence that the criminal was someone familiar to the dog.

Contemporary Americans have a somewhat similar sense of the multiplicity of texts and versions of texts through their knowledge of remakes of movies and covers of musical performances.

This was said at Harvard, when I was there in the sixties, and it seems to have been based on another Orientalist joke sometimes ascribed to Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb of Oxford and Harvard, that every Arabic word has its primary meaning, then its opposite, then something to do with a camel, and last, something obscene.

Salt dissolved in water was an ancient Upanishadic metaphor for the complete merging of individual souls in the world soul (
brahman
).

Indeed, according to the
OED
, even the word “hodgepodge” (or “hotchpotch”) originally designated a good thing, the legal combination of diverse properties into a single entity to make possible an equitable division. The earliest attestation is a legal term from 1292.

In the Cretaceous period. The dates are given differently in different sources. Here I am reminded of the old story about the lady who went to a lecture and heard the lecturer say that the universe was going to self-destruct in five billion years, at which she fainted. When they asked her why she was so upset at an event that was five billion years away she heaved a sigh of relief and said, “Oh, thank God. I thought he said five
million
years.”

The theory is still generally accepted. Kenneth Chang wrote in the
New York Times
, May 14, 2008, under the headline, DISASTER SET OFF BY COLLIDING LAND MASSES: “The earthquake in the Sichuan Province of China on Monday was a result of a continuing collision between India and Asia. India, once a giant island before crashing into the underside of Asia about 40 million to 50 million years ago, continues to slide north at a geologically quick pace of two inches a year. The tectonic stresses push up the Himalaya Mountains and generate scores of earthquakes from Afghanistan to China.”

The belief that the continents were at one time joined in the geologic past was first set forth in detail in 1912 by Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist who coined the term “continental shift” to describe it.

A haunting image of such a continental split occurs in the film
Underground
(1995) when at the end Yugoslavia breaks off and sails away, while people continuing to sing and dance and eat at a wedding are unaware that the little piece of land they are on is sailing away from the mainland, foreshadowing the violent partition of the country, as tragic as the partition of India in 1947.

For instance, once upon a time all the mountains had wings, but they flew around, bumping into things and generally wreaking havoc. To ground them, Indra cut off their wings, but the god of the wind hid one mountain, Mainaka, in the ocean so that he alone kept his wings.

The word for doomsday, or time, or death—Kala—is, like the word for the fourth throw of the dice, derived from the verb
kal
, “to count.” The goddess Kali too derives her name from Kala. Kali as in Kali Age is spelled with a short
a
and
i
, whereas the goddess Kali has two long vowels. In the hope of distinguishing them, I will always refer to the latter as the goddess Kali.

In
Burnt Norton
.

Kumbhakonan is one of them; the name is said to derive from the pot (
kumbha
) in which Shiva, not Vishnu, floated the survivors to safety. The mountain is also said to be in Kashmir.

Compare the standard map outline of India and the map of Mount Meru and the Plum-tree Continent on page 60.

You can see most of them on the Web site
Harappa.com
.

The rebuttal to the argument that it is not a language at all is that in some inscriptions the letters all are squeezed together to fit the line at the end, implying that it was written in one direction. If the sequence matters, it’s a language.

The Rorschach test, according to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, is “a projective method of psychological testing in which a person is asked to describe what he sees in 10 inkblots, of which some are black or gray and others have patches of colour. The test was introduced in 1921 by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach.”

It is also possible that fowl were domesticated in several different places.

The spell-check on my Mac tried to correct “pipal” to “papal” throughout, revealing a hitherto unsuspected Eurocentric, indeed philo-Catholic virus deeply programmed into my computer, Microsoft Orientalism.

After the Kurosawa film in which several different people present entirely different accounts of the same murder.

As I make it out, it goes:
ma
[
mahisha
, buffalo]-
kha
[
khadga
, rhino]-
na
[
nara
, man]-
sha
[
sharabha
, elephant]-
na
[
nara
, man].

A tongue-in-cheek example of the misinterpretation of plumbing devices, unsupported by texts, as religious objects is David Macaulay’s
Motel of the Mysteries
(1979), in which visitors to Earth in 3850, after all civilization has been destroyed, produce a hilarious series of misunderstandings of the material items found in a bathroom: the toilet the Sacred Urn, the toilet seat the Sacred Collar, the toilet paper the Sacred Parchment, a drain plug on a chain the Sacred Pendant. (The television is the Great Altar.) In June 1956, Horace Miner had perpetrated a similar joke in “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” which
American Anthropologist
printed as a serious article, failing to notice that “Nacirema” is “American” spelled backward.

Marshall was dying to excavate beneath the stupa but was shackled by the archaeological survey rules. He seriously contemplated (and may actually have tried) lining up all the workmen on the stupa, on the pretext of taking their photograph, in the hope that their weight would bring it down. Personal communication from the Honorable Penelope Chetwode (later Lady Betjeman), to whom Marshall confessed this episode when he was courting her, years later. Wantage, England, 1969.

Bishop Walton, in his Introduction to the London Polyglot Bible, in 1672, first noted the connection of Greek and Latin. A Persian grammarian in Delhi in 1720 discovered the Greek and Sanskrit connection. Sir William Jones, in 1788, wrote about common elements in Greek, Roman, and ancient Indian religion and postulated a historical connection. Yet F. Max Müller, who popularized the theory in the nineteenth century, is often given most of the credit.

The Nazis also grotesquely distorted, and inverted, both the form and the meaning of the ancient Indian symbol of the swastika, whose Sanskrit name simply meant “a good thing.” The swastika has a radically different meaning in Europe and America from the meaning that it had, and still has, inside India. Once we know its Indian origins, we see the swastika with double vision, as we see the duck-rabbit, or the rabbit/man in the moon: It is Vedic and Nazi, recondite and demagogic, at the same time.

Though the word may mean “mouthless”—i.e., without [our] language.

Daniel H. H. Ingalls, in a talk recorded on film in 1980, remarked that the main thing that kept the authors of the
Mahabharata
from writing it down was the lack of inexpensive writing materials; you could hardly carve it all in rock, and they had not yet discovered the art of writing on palm leaves. This too would have applied to the Veda, but the
Mahabharata
was eventually written down at a time when the Veda was not.

Gandharvas (whose name is cognate with
centaur
) are semiequine figures, sometimes depicted in anthropomorphic form (in which case they might well ride horses), sometimes as horse headed or horse torsoed (in which, presumably, they would not).

The Brahmanas tell us a bit more about the rituals, but the detailed instructions only come much later, in the texts called
prayogas
.

Nomas
means “pasture,” and a nomad is someone who wanders from pasture to pasture.

It is most likely that it was the male animal, the bull, that was used for sacrifice, as the males of all the other species of sacrificial animal are explicitly specified, and indeed the “virility” of the sacrificed animals is the point of many myths and ritual texts. Yet it should be noted that the word “go” in Sanskrit (like “cow” in common usage in English) is sexually ambiguous.

Most horsey nomads drink mare’s milk—the Greeks called the Scythian nomads mare milkers—and the Vedic people may have done so before they settled in the Punjab, but milk in the Veda is always cow’s milk.

I will generally render the Vedic poems in prose.

Drona’s horses shed tears when he is about to die (
Mahabharata
7.192.20); when the Buddha departs, his horse Kanthaka weeps (
Buddhacharita
6.33-35; 8.3-4, 17); Achilles’ horses weep for the death of Patroclus; Brünnhilde’s horse Grani hangs his head and weeps over the dead Siegfried.