The Hindus (54 page)

Despite the equal time that this passage gives to various approaches, several of which represent major philosophical as well as medical traditions, there is, as always, hierarchy: Not only is the penultimate sage right, and the others presumably wrong, but he even has a riposte ready in anticipation of the fact that they still might not grant that he is right (“It is hard to get to the truth when people take sides”). Yet since they do still refuse to give in to him, the subject remains open after all.

The rise of myriad small social groups at this time created problems for the taxonomists of the social order. Someone had to put all this together into something like a general theory of human relativity. That someone is known to the Hindu tradition as Manu.

When the authors of the dharma texts set out to reconcile class with caste, they had their work cut out for them.
Varna
and
jati
unite to form the Hindu social taxonomy in much the same way that the Brahmin head and Pariah body (and the Sanskrit and Tamil texts) united to form the two goddesses. Whichever is the older (and there is no conclusive evidence one way or another),
varna
and
jati
had developed independently for some centuries before the
shastras
combined them. But their interconnection was so important to ancient Indian social theory that Manu makes it the very first question that the sages ask him at the start of the book, though he does not give the answer until book ten (of the total of twelve): “Sir, please tell us, properly and in order, the duties of all four classes and also of the people who are born between two classes (1.2)”—that is, of people like the Charioteer caste (Sutas), between Brahmin and Kshatriya.

Manu, elaborating upon a scheme sketched more briefly in the
dharma-sutras
a century or two before him (he takes a relatively brief passage in the
sutras
²⁸
and unpacks it in forty verses), lays out a detailed paradigm that explains how it is that a Brahmin and a Pariah are related historically. The only trouble is that the authors of the dharma texts made it all up, for there is absolutely no historical evidence that the
jatis
developed out of
varnas
. There are many reasonable explanations of the origins of caste—from professions, guilds, families, tribes outside the Vedic world—and most of them probably have some measure of the whole, more complex truth. Manu’s explanation is the only one that is totally off the wall. Still, you have to hand it to him; it’s an ingenious scheme: “From a Brahmin man and the daughter of a Shudra, a man of the Nishada caste is born. From a Kshatriya man and the daughter of a Brahmin a man of the Charioteer caste is born. Sons of confused classes are born from a Shudra man with women of the Brahmin class, such as the Chandala, the worst of men (10.8-12).”

And so forth. The Nishadas in these texts form a caste within Hinduism rather than a tribal group outside it, as they do in most of the narrative texts. These all are marriages “against the grain” or “against the current” (literally “against the hair,” the wrong way,
pratiloma
, hypogamously), with the man below the woman, in contrast with marriages “with the grain” (the right way,
anuloma
, hypergamously), with the woman below the man. In this paradigm, the higher the wife, and therefore the wider the gap, the lower the mixed offspring. Mind the gap.

So far so good; but clearly only a limited number of castes (several of which we have already encountered) can result from these primary interactions, and there are castes of thousands to be accounted for. So Manu moves on into later generations to explain the origin of other castes: The Chandala, himself born from a Shudra who intermarried with women of higher classes and regarded as the paradigmatic Pariah, becomes the father, through further intermarriage, of even more degraded castes, people whose very essence is a category error squared (10.12, 15, 19, 37-39). (The
Mahabharata
makes the dog cookers descendants of a Chandala man and a Nishadha woman [13.48.10. 21 and .28]). And so on, ad infinitum. Manu’s attempt to dovetail castes within the class structure is a masterpiece of taxonomy, though a purely imaginary construct, like a map of the constellations. He created simultaneously a system and a history of the castes.

Despite the purely mythological nature of this charter, some semblance of reality, or at least anthropology, moves into the text when Manu tells us the job descriptions of the first generation of fantasized miscegenation:

And reality in all its ugliness takes over entirely in the passage describing the
karmas
of the Chandalas and people of the second generation of miscegenation, and explaining how they are expected to live:

In later centuries the Pariahs were defined by three factors that we can see
in nuce
here: They are economically exploited, victims of social discrimination, and permanently polluted ritually.
²⁹
The only way out, says Manu, is by “giving up the body instinctively for the sake of a Brahmin or a cow or in the defense of women and children (10.72).” This grand scheme is contradicted by another of Manu’s grand schemes; his argument here that the castes came, historically, from the classes conflicts with his statement, elsewhere, that “in the beginning,” the creator created all individual things with their own karmas, which sound very much like castes (1.21-30).

Once the castes were created, however they were created, they had to remain separate. The nightmare of personal infection by contact with the wrong castes, particularly with Pariahs, is closely keyed to the terror of the infection of the mind and body by the passions; Manu regards the Pariahs as the Kali Age of the body. The horror of pollution by the lowest castes (the ones who did the dirty work that someone has to do: cleaning latrines, taking out human corpses, dealing with the corpses of cows) most closely approximates the attitude that many Americans had to people with the HIV virus at the height of the AIDS panic: they believed them to be deadly dangerous, highly contagious, and afflicted as the result of previous evil behavior (drugs or homosexual behavior in the case of AIDS; sins in a former life for caste). Impurity is dangerous; it makes you vulnerable to diseases and to possession by demons. Pollution by contact with Pariahs is regarded as automatic and disastrous, like the bad karma that adheres to you when you mistreat other people.

The same lists, blacklists, as it were, recur in different
shastras
, lists of people who are to be excluded from various sorts of personal contact: people to whom the Veda should not be taught; women one should not marry; people one should not invite to the ceremony for the dead; people whose food one should not eat; people who cannot serve as witnesses; sons who are disqualified from inheritance; the mixed castes, who are excluded from most social contacts; people who have committed the sins and crimes that cause one to fall from caste and thus to be excluded in yet other ways; and, finally, people who have committed the crimes that cause one to be reborn as bad people who are to be excluded.
³⁰
Madmen and drunkards, adulterers and gamblers, impotent men and lepers, blind men and one-eyed men present themselves as candidates for social intercourse again and again, and are rejected again and again, while other sorts of people are unique to one list or another. Together, and throughout the work as a whole, these disenfranchised groups form a complex pattern of social groups engaged in an elaborate quadrille or square dance, as they advance, retreat, separate, regroup, advance and retreat again.

In dramatic contrast with Manu, neither the
Kama-sutra
nor the
Artha-shastra
says much about either class or caste. The
Artha-shastra
begins with a boilerplate endorsement of the system of the four classes and the four stages of life (1.3.5-12) but seldom refers to classes after that, or to caste as such; it refers, instead, to groups of people distinguished by their professional or religious views, who might have functioned as castes, but Manu cares little about their status. Yet even this text takes care to define common dharma as including
ahimsa
, compassion, and forbearance (just as Manu’s
sanatana
or
sadharana dharma
does [6.91-93]) and, just like Manu, warns that everyone must do his
sva-dharma
in order to avoid miscegenation (
samkara
) (1.3.13-15). The
Kama-sutra
ignores caste even when considering marriage (except in one verse), marriage being one of the two places where caste is most important (food being the other). The
Kama-sutra
’s male protagonist may be of any class, as long as he has money (3.2.1); the good life can be lived even by a woman, with money. This is a capital-driven class system, much closer to the American than the British model.

Manu’s view of caste became, and remained, the most often cited authority for
varna-ashrama-dharma
(social and religious duties tied to class and stage of life). Over the course of the centuries the text attracted nine complete commentaries, attesting to its crucial significance within the tradition, and other ancient Hindu texts cite it far more frequently than any other
dharma-shastra
. Whether this status extended beyond the texts to the actual use of Manu in legal courts is another matter. But for centuries the text simultaneously mobilized insiders and convinced outsiders that Brahmins really were superior, that status was more important than political or economic power.

Fast-forward: In present-day India,
Manu
remains the basis of the Hindu marriage code, as it defines itself vis-à-vis Muslim or secular (governmental) marriage law. In a contemporary Indian Classic Comic version of the
Mahabharata
, Pandu cites
Manu
to justify his decision to allow Kunti to be impregnated by five gods.
³¹
Manu
remains the preeminent symbol—now a negative symbol—of the repressive caste system: It is
Manu,
more than any other text, that Dalits burn in their protests.
³²

Manu justifies the law of karma by setting within the creation of the various classes of beings, which he narrates in the very first book, a creation that includes both humans and animals (1.26-50). And when he reverts, in the last book, to the law of karma to explain how, depending on their past actions, people are reborn as various classes of beings, again he speaks of the relationship between humans and animals (12.40-81). Thus animals frame the entire metaphysical structure of Manu. Throughout the intervening chapters, the theme of rebirth in various classes of creatures is interwoven with the problem of killing and eating. More subtle and bizarre relationships between humans and animals are also addressed; there are punishments for urinating on a cow or having sex with female animals (4.52, 11.174).

The same animals and people recur in many different lists, with particular variants here and there; whenever he sets his mind to the problems of evil and violence, Manu tends to round up the usual suspects. Just as madmen, drunkards, and their colleagues recur in the list of people to be rejected, so too dogs, horses, and cows are the basic castes of characters in the theme of killing and eating. And the animals that are the problem are also the solution; various crimes, some having nothing to do with animals, are punished by animals. Thus an adulterous woman is to be devoured by dogs (if her lover is a low-caste man),
³³
or paraded on a donkey and reborn as a jackal, and thieves are to be trampled to death by elephants, while cow killing and various other misdemeanors may be expiated by keeping cows company and refraining from reporting them when they pilfer food and water
.
³⁴
Unchaste women and Shudras are included among the animals whose murders will be punished, as we saw in the passage that opened this chapter. Manu also refers to the Vedic horse sacrifice as a supreme source of purification and restoration (5.53, 11.261), as indeed it was for both Rama and Yudhishthira. Violations of the taboos of killing and eating (that is, eating, selling, injuring, or killing the wrong sorts of animals) furnish one of the basic criteria for acceptance in or exclusion from society. Thus the distinction between good and bad people, a theme that is the central agenda of the text, is further interwoven into the warp of rebirth and the woof of animals.

The
dharma-shastras
, like the texts that precede them, wrestle with the question of vegetarianism. The
Kama-sutra
, in the course of a most idiosyncratic definition of dharma, takes meat eating to be a normal part of ordinary life but, at the same time, regards vegetarianism as one of the two defining characteristics of dharma (the other being sacrifice, which often involves the death of animals): Dharma consists in doing things, like sacrifice, that are divorced from material life and refraining from things, like eating meat, that are a part of ordinary life (2.2.7).