The Hindus (56 page)

As for drinking, and intoxication more generally conceived, we have encountered Indra’s colossal hangover in the Brahmanas. There were at least twelve types of alcohol popular in ancient India:
sura
(also called arrack, made from coconut or from other fermented fruits or grains, or sugarcane, the drink most often mentioned, particularly as used by non-Brahmins
⁴²
),
panasa
(from jackfruit),
draksha
(from grapes, often imported from Rome),
madhuka
(from honey),
kharjura
(dates),
tala
(palm),
sikhshiva
(sugarcane),
madhvika
(distilled from the flowers of
Mahue longifolia
),
saira
(from long pepper),
arishta
(from soapberry),
narikelaja
(from coconut), and
maireya
(now called rum).
⁴³

The
Artha-shastra
advises the king to appoint only teetotaling counselors (to guard against loose talk) and to keep his sons from liquor, which might make them cast covetous eyes on his throne (1.5, 2.16). Against enemy princes, however, liquor is a useful weapon: An enemy prince should be weakened by intoxication so that he can be more easily compelled to become an ally (2.17).

Finally, addictive lust. The
Kama-sutra,
working the other side of the street, as it were, teaches the courtesans how to create, and manipulate, sexual addiction in others. Advice to the courtesan: “A brief saying sums it up: She makes him love her but does not become addicted to him, though she acts as if she were addicted (6.2.2).” And the clear signs of a man’s addiction to her are that “he trusts her with his true feelings, lives in the same way as she does, carries out her plans, is without suspicion, and has no concern for money matters (6.2.73).” Once he is hooked, she can control him: “When a man is too deeply addicted to her, he fears that she will make love with another man, and he disregards her lies. And because of his fear, he gives her a lot (6.4.39-42).” The
Kama-sutra
also offers advice to anyone, male or female, professional or amateur, on the uses of drugs to put lovers in your power (7.1-2).

More generally, renunciants regarded sex as a snare
^gm
and a delusion,
^gn
and householder life as a deathtrap. Manu even admits that what makes women so dangerous is the fact that men are so weak:

Manu’s entire text is an intricate regimen for the control of the senses, essential for anyone on the path to Release but also a desideratum for people on the path of rebirth. Kautilya, by contrast, tosses off the need for control of the senses with just a few, rather unhelpful lines: “The conquest of the senses arises out of training in the sciences [
vidyas
] and is accomplished by renouncing desire, anger, greed, pride, drunkenness, and exhilaration (1.6.1).” And later: “Absence of training in the sciences is the cause of a person’s vices (8.3.1-61).” But Kautilya also prescribes what we would call aversion therapy for a young prince who is addicted to any of the four vices of lust:

The
Kama-sutra
too knows how dangerous the senses can be and likens them, as usual, to horses: “For, just as a horse in full gallop, blinded by the energy of his own speed, pays no attention to any post or hole or ditch on the path, so two lovers blinded by passion in the friction of sexual battle are caught up in their fierce energy and pay no attention to danger (2.7.33).” How to guard against that danger? Study the
Kama-sutra
, but also use your head (2.7.34).

In the
Mahabharata
, Nala becomes an addictive gambler only after he has been possessed by the spirit of the Kali Age, an indication that addiction in general was perceived as coming from outside the individual. There is no idea here of an addictive personality; the vices, rather than the people who have them, are hierarchically ranked. The gambler is not doomed by birth, by his character; he has somehow fallen into the bad habit of gambling, and if he made an effort, he could get out of it. Free will, self-control, meditation, controlling the senses: This is always possible. So too there are no alcoholics, just people who happen, at the moment, to be drinking too much. Anyone exposed to the objects of addiction is liable to get caught. Sex is the only inborn addiction: We are all, in this Hindu view, naturally inclined to it, exposed to it all the time, inherently lascivious.

Manu sums up the shared underlying attitude toward the addictions:

Elsewhere (9.235 and 11.55), Manu equates the vice of drinking liquor with the three major sins of Brahmin killing, theft, and sleeping with the guru’s wife. Those verses assume a male subject, however; drinking by women, by contrast, Manu associates with the milder habits of keeping bad company, being separated from their husbands, sleeping, living in other people’s houses, and aimless wandering (9.13).

The
Artha-shastra
basically agrees with Manu: “Four vices spring from lust—hunting, gambling, women, and drink. Lust involves humiliation, loss of property, and hanging out with undesirable persons like thieves, gamblers, hunters, singers, and musicians. Of the vices of lust, gambling is worse than hunting, women are worse than gambling, drink is worse than women (8.3.2- 61).” All this is clear enough; in the
Artha-shastra
, as in
Manu,
drink is the worst vice of lust, women next, then gambling, and hunting the least destructive. But then Kautilya adds, “But gambling is worse than drink—indeed, for a king, it is the worst of the vices (8.3.62-64),” changing the order of vices for a king: Now gambling is the worst, then drink, women, and hunting last.

There was room for an even wider divergence of opinions: A Sanskrit text composed just a bit later (in the fifth or sixth century CE, in Kanchipuram) satirizes both the
Artha-shastra
and
Manu:
A young man whose father had banished him for bad behavior encouraged the king to engage in all the vices; he praised hunting because it makes you athletic, reduces phlegm, teaches you all about animals, and gets you out into the fresh air, and so forth; gambling makes you generous, sharp-eyed, single-minded, keen to take risks;
kama
is the reward for dharma and
artha
, teaches you strategy, and produces offspring (here assumed to be a Good Thing); and drinking keeps you young, uproots remorse, and gives you courage.
⁴⁵

WOMEN IN THE DHARMA-SHASTRAS

Though women are not the worst of all the addictions, they are the only universal one, and the authors of the
shastras
apparently found them more fun to write about than any of the others. Manu, in particular, regards women as a sexual crime about to happen: “Drinking, associating with bad people, being separated from their husbands, wandering about, sleeping, and living in other peoples’ houses are the six things that corrupt women. Good looks do not matter to them, nor do they care about youth. ‘A man!’ they say, and enjoy sex with him, whether he is good-looking or ugly (9.12-17).” Therefore men should watch women very carefully indeed: “A girl, a young woman, or even an old woman should not do anything independently, even in her own house. In childhood a woman should be under her father’s control, in youth under her husband’s, and when her husband is dead, under her sons’. She should not have independence (4.147-49; 9.3).”

This lack of independence meant that in Manu’s ideal world, a woman had very little space to maneuver within a marriage, nor could she get out of it: “A virtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and is devoid of any good qualities. A woman who abandons her own inferior husband . . . is reborn in the womb of a jackal and is tormented by the diseases born of her evil (5.154-64).” And she is not set free from this loser even when he dies:

Not only may she not remarry, but her
reward
for not remarrying is that she will be her husband’s wife in the hereafter, which, “if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and is devoid of any good qualities,” may not have been her first choice.

The good news, at least, is that Manu does expect her to live on after her husband dies, not to commit suicide (suttee) on her husband’s pyre. Yet Manu’s fear that the widow might sleep with another man was an important strand in the later argument that the best way to ensure that the widow never slept with any other man but her husband was to make sure that she died with him. The man of course can and indeed must remarry (4.167-69). All that there is to set against all of this misogyny is Manu’s grudging “keep the women happy so that they will keep the men happy” line of argument: “If the wife is not radiant, she does not stimulate the man; and because the man is not stimulated, the making of children does not happen. If the woman is radiant, the whole family is radiant, but if she is not radiant, the whole family is not radiant (3.60-63).” Well, it’s better than nothing. I guess.

But we must not forget the gap between the exhortations of the texts and the actual situation on the ground. The records of donations to Buddhist stupas offer strong evidence that contradicts the
dharma-shastras
’ denial to women of their rights to such property.
⁴⁶
In this period, many women used their personal wealth to make grants to Jaina and Buddhist orders. Hindu women too could make donations to some of the new Hindu sects, for they received from their mothers and other female relatives “women’s wealth” (
stri-dana
), what Wemmick in Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations
called “portable property,” and they were often given a bride-price on marriage, the opposite of dowry (Manu is ambivalent about this), and their children, including daughters, could inherit that (9.131, 191-5). Most often women’s wealth consisted of gold jewelry, which they could carry on their bodies at all times. This one claim to independence made Manu nervous; he warns against women hoarding their own movable property without their husbands’ permission (9.199).

Manu is the flag bearer for the Hindu oppression of women, but the
shastras
are just as diverse here as they are on other points. The
Artha-shastra
(3.2.31) takes for granted the woman with several husbands, who poses a problem even for the permissive
Kama-sutra
(1.5.30). Kautilya is also more lenient than Manu about divorce and widow remarriage; he gives a woman far more control over her property, which consists of jewelry without limit and a small maintenance (3.2.14); she continues to own these after her husband’s death—unless she remarries, in which case she forfeits them, with interest, or settles it all on her sons (3.2.19-34). Thus Kautilya allows women more independence than Manu, but both of them greatly limit women’s sexual and economic freedom. Though men controlled land, cattle, and money, women had some other resources. Diamonds have always been a girl’s best friend.

Control of the senses was always balanced by an appreciation for the sensual, and if we listen to the alternative voice of the
Kama-sutra
, we hear a rather different story.

The
Kama-sutra,
predictably, is far more open-minded than Manu about women’s access to household funds, divorce, and widow remarriage. The absolute power that the wife in the
Kama-sutra
has in running the household’s finances (4.1.1-41) stands in sharp contrast with Manu’s statement that a wife “should not have too free a hand in spending (4.150),” and his cynical remark: “No man is able to guard women entirely by force, but they can be safely guarded if kept busy amassing and spending money, engaging in purification, attending to their duties, cooking food, and looking after the furniture (9.10-11).” And when it comes to female promiscuity, Vatsyayana is predictably light-years ahead of Manu. Vatsyayana cites an earlier authority on the best places to pick up married women, of which the first is “on the occasion of visiting the gods” and others include a sacrifice, a wedding, or a religious festival. More secular opportunities involve playing in a park, bathing or swimming, or theatrical spectacles. More extreme occasions are offered by the spectacle of a house on fire, the commotion after a robbery, or the invasion of the countryside by an army (5.4.42). Somehow I don’t think Manu would approve of meeting married women at all, let alone using devotion to the gods as an occasion for it or equating such an occasion with spectator sports like hanging around watching houses burn down.