The Hindus (4 page)

To return to my central metaphor, once you’ve seen the rabbit (or hare) in the moon, it’s hard to see the man anymore, but the double vision is what we should strive for. This means that when we consider, for instance, the burning of living women on the pyres of their dead husbands (which we call suttee, to distinguish it from the woman who commits the act, a woman whom the Hindus call a sati), we must try to see their rabbit, to see the reasons why some Hindus thought (and some continue to think) that it is a good idea for some women to burn themselves to death on their husbands’ funeral pyres, while other Hindus strongly disagree. On the other hand, we cannot, and need not, stop seeing our American man (or, perhaps, woman) in the moon: the reasons why many Americans think that suttee is not a good idea at all. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out that the image of a duck-rabbit (also, actually, a duck-hare) was either a rather smug rabbit or a rather droopy duck
²⁴
but could not be both at once.
^l
But this is precisely the goal that a non-Hindu should have in studying Hinduism: to see in the moon both our man and their rabbit.

Hindus nowadays are diverse in their attitude to their own diversity, which inspires pride in some, anxiety in others. In particular, it provokes anxiety in those Hindus who are sometimes called Hindu nationalists, or the Hindu right, or right-wing Hindus, or the Hindutva (“Hinduness”) faction, or, more approximately, Hindu fundamentalists; they are against Muslims, Christians, and the Wrong Sort of Hindus. Their most powerful political organ is the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), with its militant branch, the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), but they are also involved in groups such as Hindu Human Rights, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and the ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad). I will generally refer to them as the Hindutva faction or the Hindu right. This book is also alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they tell.

There’s a personal story that I should tell about my relationship with this group of Hindus here at the start, in the interest of full disclosure. In the middle of a lecture that I gave in London on November 12, 2003, chaired by William Dalrymple, a man threw an egg at me.
²⁵
(He missed his aim, in every way.) A message that a member of the two-hundred-strong audience posted the next day on a mailing list Web site referred to a passage I had cited from Valmiki’s
Ramayana
in which Sita, the wife of Rama, accuses her brother-in-law, Lakshmana, of wanting her for himself. The Web message stated:

After a bit more of this, the writer
^m
added:

The deeper political agenda of the author of the posting was betrayed by that second set of remarks, particularly by the gratuitous reference to Muslim conversion, and I am grateful to the unnamed Muslim in this vignette for so aptly invoking the wise words of Vivekananda (or, as the case may more probably be, Kabir). My defense now, for this book, remains what it was in the news coverage then, about the lecture (and the egg):

And, I should have added, the diversity of the Hindu texts. To the accusation that I cited a part of the Hindu textual tradition that one Hindu “had never heard of,” my reply is: Yes!, and it’s my intention to go on doing just that. The parts of his own tradition that he objected to are embraced by many other Hindus and are, in any case, historically part of the record. One reason why this book is so long is that I wanted to show how very much there is of all that the egg faction would deny. And so I intend to go on celebrating the diversity and pluralism, not to mention the worldly wisdom and sensuality, of the Hindus that I have loved for about fifty years now and still counting.

CHAPTER 1

This Sufi parable could stand as a cautionary tale for anyone searching for the keys (let alone the one key) to the history of the Hindus. It suggests that we may look for our own keys, our own understandings, outside our own houses, our own cultures, beyond the light of the familiar sources. There’s a shortage of what photographers call available light to help us find what we are looking for, but in recent years historians have produced studies that provide good translations and intelligent interpretations of texts in Sanskrit and other Indian languages and pointers to both texts and material evidence that others had not noticed before. I have therefore concentrated on those moments that have been illuminated by the many good scholars whose thick descriptions form an archipelago of stepping-stones on which a historian can hope to cross the centuries.

This book tells the story of Hinduism chronologically and historically and emphasizes the history of marginalized rather than mainstream Hindus. My aims have been to demonstrate: (1) that Hindus throughout their long history have been enriched by the contributions of women, the lower castes, and other religions; (2) that although there are a number of things that have been characteristic of many Hindus over the ages (the worship of several gods, reincarnation, karma), none has been true of all Hindus, and the shared factors are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the things that are unique to one group or another; (3) that the greatness of Hinduism—its vitality, its earthiness, its vividness—lies precisely in many of those idiosyncratic qualities that some Hindus today are ashamed of and would deny; and (4) that the history of tensions between the various Hinduisms, and between the different sorts of Hindus, undergirds the violence of the contemporary Indian political and religious scene.

History and diversity—let me lay them out one by one.

The first European scholars of India believed that Hindus believed that everything was timeless, eternal, and unchanging (“There always was a Veda”), and so they didn’t generally value or even notice the ways in which Hindus did in fact recognize change. We now call their attitude Orientalism (a term coined by Edward Said in 1978, in a book by that name), which we may define for the moment—we will return to it when we get to the British Raj—as the love-hate relationship that Europeans had with the Orient for both the right and the wrong reasons—it’s exotic, it’s erotic, it’s spiritual, and it never changes.
ⁿ
Like many of the Indian branch of Orientalists, Europeans picked up this assumption of timeless, unified Hinduism from some Hindus and then reinforced it in other Hindus,
²
many of whom today regard Hinduism as timeless, though they differ on the actual dating of this timelessness, which (like Hindu scholars of earlier centuries) they tend to put at 10,000 BCE or earlier, while the British generally used to put it much later. The “eternal and unchanging” approach inspired Orientalist philologists to track back to their earliest lair some concepts that do in fact endure for millennia, but without taking into account the important ways in which those concepts changed or the many other aspects of Hinduism that bear little relationship to them.

The so-called central ideas of Hinduism—such as karma, dharma, samsara—arise at particular moments in Indian history, for particular reasons, and then continue to be alive, which is to say, to change. They remain central, but what precisely they are and, more important, what the people who believe in them are supposed to do about them differ in each era and, within each era, from gender to gender, caste to caste. And many new ideas arise either to replace or, more often, in Hinduism, to supplement or qualify earlier ideas. Some Hindus always knew this very well. Many Hindu records speak of things that happened suddenly, without precedent (
a-purva
, “never before”), right here, right now; they are aware of the existence of local dynasties, of regional gods, of political arrivistes. The Hindu sense of time is intense; the importance of time as an agency of change, the sense that things that happen in the past come to fruition at a particular moment—
now
—pervades the great history (
itihasa
) called the
Mahabharata.
That sense of history is different from ours, as different as Buddhist enlightenment is from the European Enlightenment (what a difference a capital
E
makes). But in India, as in Europe, human beings compose texts at some moment in history, which we strive with varying degrees of success to discover, and those texts continue to develop and to be transformed through commentary, interpretation, and translation.

Hinduism does not lend itself as easily to a strictly chronological account as do some other religions (particularly the so-called Abrahamic religions or religions of the Book, or monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, Islam), which refer more often to specific historical events. Many central texts of Hinduism cannot be reliably dated even within a century. Since early Buddhism and Hinduism grew up side by side in the same neighborhood, so to speak, historians of Hinduism have often ridden piggyback on historians of Buddhism, a religion that has for the most part kept more precise chronological records; the historians of Buddhism figure out when everything happened, and the historians of Hinduism say, “Our stuff must have happened around then too.” Historians of early India have also depended on the kindness of strangers, of foreign visitors to India who left reliably dated (but not always accurately observed) records of their visits.

The chronological framework is largely imperialistic—dates of inscriptions, battles, the endowment of great religious institutions—because those are the things that the people who had the clout to keep records thought was most important. And though we no longer think that kings are all that matter in history (siding more with D. D. Kosambi, who urged historians to ask not who was king but who among the people had a plow), kings (more precisely, rajas) do also still matter. They are, however, no longer all that we would like to know about. The crucial moments for cultural history are not necessarily the great imperial moments, as historians used to think they were, the moments when Alexander dipped his toe into India or the Guptas built their empire. For some of the richest and most original cultural developments take place when there isn’t an empire, in the cracks between the great dynastic periods. And although the historical records of inscriptions and coins tell us more about kings (the winners) than about the people (the losers), there are other texts that pay attention to the rest of the populace.

When we cannot date events precisely, we can often at least arrange things in a rough but ready chronological order, though this leads to a house of cards effect when we are forced to reconsider the date of any text in the series. The periodizations, moreover, may give an often false suggestion of causation.
^o
We cannot assume, as philologists have often done, that the texts line up like elephants, each holding on to the tail of the elephant in front, that everything in the Upanishads was derived from the Brahmanas just because some Upanishads cite some Brahmanas. We must also ask how the new text was at least in part inspired by the circumstances of its own time. Why did the Upanishads develop out of the Brahmanas
then
? What about the stuff that isn’t in the Brahmanas? “Well (the speculation used to go), maybe they got it from the Greeks; it reminds me of Plato. Or perhaps the Axial Age, sixth century BCE and all that? Or how about this? How about the Indus Valley civilizations? Lots of new ideas must have come from there.” Since there is no conclusive evidence for, or against, any of these influences, before we look to Greece we must look to India in the time of the Upanishads to find other sorts of factors that might also have influenced their development—new forms of political organization, taxation, changes in the conditions of everyday life.

Even an imported idea takes root only if it also responds to something already present in the importing culture;
³
even if the idea of reincarnation did come from Greece to India, or from Mesopotamia to both Greece and India (hypotheses that are unlikely but not impossible), we would have to explain why the Indians took up that idea when they did not take up, for instance, Greek ideas about love between men, and then we must note how different the Upanishadsare from Plato even in their discussion of ideas that they share, such as reincarnation.