The Hindus (65 page)

Shakuntala loses her agency in Kalidasa’s hands. In the
Mahabharata
she is a wise woman who discourses at length on dharma; in Kalidasa she is hardly more than a child and says little when the king accuses her of lying; indeed most of her words reach us only because the king tells us she said them. Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, still pregnant, is snatched up by her celestial mother, just as Sita is after Rama has abandoned her, also pregnant. Indeed the parallels with Sita go further: Both women are daughters of supernatural women (Shakuntala the daughter of the celestial nymph Menaka, Sita the daughter of the earth) and are themselves supernatural (in one reading, Shakuntala is a celestial nymph
²¹
), both come from another world to bear the king a son (or sons), and both disappear when the king abuses them. Sisters in the plot, they are also the cousins of the equine goddesses Saranyu and Urvashi.

Kalidasa’s treatment of Shakuntala suggests the declining power and status of women in this period, though at least some real women exercised considerable power in the highest corridors of Gupta polity. Chandra Gupta I married a Nepalese (Lichavi) princess, an alliance that extended his territory through Pataliputra to parts of Nepal; she, and her dowry, were so important that their son referred to himself as a “son of a Lichavi daughter” rather than of a Gupta father, and coins showing the king and queen together bear her name as well as his.
²²
Chandra Gupta II arranged a marriage between his daughter Prabhavati (whose mother was a princess of the Naga people) and Rudrasena II, king of the Vakatakas, to strengthen his southern flank; when Rudrasena died, Prabhavati acted as regent for her sons, thereby increasing Gupta influence in the south.

How are we to explain this discrepancy between the literary and political evidence? General considerations of the relationship between myth and history operate here: The myths reflect attitudes toward women rather than the actual history of real women, but they also influence the subsequent actual history of real women. We might also discount either the political evidence (to argue that the women who were married to the Gupta kings were simply pawns with no real power or that they are the exception to the general rule about the powers of ordinary women) or the literary evidence (to argue that Kalidasa’s presentation of women is not typical of attitudes toward women expressed in other literature of this period, such as the Puranas, which we will soon encounter). Both are possible. A third argument, that there is an inverse correlation between the powers of goddesses or supernatural women in texts and natural women on the ground, is one that we will soon consider in the context of
shakti
.

In tandem with the general tendency to clamp down on such matters as the rights of women, the narrow-minded attitude to deviation implicit in the concept of heresy took on new power in the Gupta Age.
²³
Yet there was a great deal of variation in religious life under the Guptas, in part because the basic political conditions provoked different reactions in different sectors of the population. This had been the case in the centuries preceding the Guptas: The
Ramayana
and the
Mahabharata
, though roughly contemporaneous, had very different attitudes to dharma, as did
Manu
and the
Artha-shastra
and the
Kama-sutra
, also roughly contemporaneous. Such variations were facilitated by the looser political reins of the preimperial age, but under the Guptas too there was room to kick over the traces from time to time. The sectarian diversity of the Guptas, which at times approached a kind of mellow inclusivism, may have been inspired by a need to bring the various sects and religions under the new yoke of empire or simply to differentiate themselves from other rulers, such as those in South India, who were more partisan.

Some Gupta kings sponsored Vishnu and seemed to believe that in return, Vishnu sponsored the Gupta Empire. They put his boar incarnation and the figure of Lakshmi, Vishnu’s consort, on their coins and made mythology “a state concern, enlisting particularly Vishnu and his heroic incarnations for their politics.”
²⁴
The Allahabad inscription of 379 CE identifies Samudra Gupta with Vishnu.
²⁵
But royal patronage was, all in all, even-handed, and the Gupta kings took the names of various gods; some Guptas leaned one way, some another, and some were pluralistic, but all in all a thousand
pujas
bloomed. And what imperial overlay there was ran pretty thin by the time it trickled down to individual texts, as is evident from the sectarian distribution of the Puranas, some devoted to Shiva, some to Vishnu, some to a goddess, while even a Purana officially devoted to a particular god often devoted considerable space to other gods.
²⁶

Chandra Gupta II was a devout Hindu, but he also patronized Buddhism and Jainism. In Pataliputra, Faxian witnessed an annual festival in which twenty chariots carrying Buddhist stupas covered with images of the gods and bodhisattvas and figures of the Buddha, all in silver and gold, entered the city after the
brahma-charins
(probably the Brahmins as a whole, not merely the students or the celibates) invited them to do so, an impressive demonstration of ecumenism. Gupta emperors dedicated many Buddhist buildings (stupas, monasteries, and prayer halls), while some of the earliest Hindu temples were built and Hindu icons sculpted during this period (the fifth to eighth centuries). Rock-cut temples and structural temples shared a widely disseminated set of conventions.
²⁷

The burgeoning religious diversity that the Guptas had encouraged came to an abrupt end when the Huns, who were literal iconoclasts of an extreme sort, especially hostile to Buddhism, began to attack North India in the second half of the fifth century CE; they overran Kashmir and the Punjab and Malwa as far as Gwalior. Buddhism in the Indus basin never recovered from the depredations of the Huns, who killed monks and destroyed monasteries.
²⁸
Adding insult to injury, some Shaiva Brahmins, also hostile to Buddhism, took advantage of the Huns’ anti-Buddhism and accepted grants of land from the Huns.
²⁹

The complex interactions between Hindu sects, between Hinduism and Buddhism and Jainism, and between court and village are manifest in various ways in the principal religious texts that developed in this period, the Puranas. Gupta literature came first and reworked folk and epic materials in its own way; then the Puranas came along and reworked both folklore and Gupta literature. The Puranas are far less fastidious than the Vedic texts or even the
Mahabharata
, more relaxed about both language and caste than anything that we have so far encountered. Scholars of Sanskrit poetry poke fun at the bad Sanskrit of the Puranas, which they view as the pulp fiction of ancient India or, as one of my students suggested, the hip-hop of the medieval world,
³⁰
in comparison with court poetry that has the cachet of Shakespeare.

There are often said to be eighteen Puranas and innumerable “Sub-Puranas” (Upa-puranas), but the lists vary greatly, as do their dates, about which no one is certain,
³¹
and their contents. The Puranas are not about what they say they are about. They
say
they are about the “Five Signs,” which are listed at the start of most Puranas: creation (
sarga
, “emission”), secondary creation (
pratisarga
), the genealogy of gods and kings, the reigns of the Manus (a different mythical Manu was born in each age, to help create the world), and the history of the solar and lunar dynasties. The genealogies of gods, Manus, and kings form an open-ended armature; into these rather vague categories (which some Puranas ignore entirely in any case) individual authors fit what they really want to talk about: the way to live a pious life, and to worship the gods and goddesses. This includes the rituals (
pujas
) that you should perform at home, in the temple, and on special festival days; places to visit on pilgrimage; prayers to recite; and stories to tell and to hear. The closed totality thinking of the
shastras
gives way to open infinity thinking in the Puranas, which often seem to swing at everything that comes across the plate.

Purana
means “ancient,” and these Sanskrit compendiums of myth and ritual face resolutely back to the hoary past, a conservative stance; the new genre positions itself as age-old, anonymous. It also strikes an imperial stance: The improved communications across the empire and the sense that it was all part of a single cultural unit, from sea to sea (as Manu put it), inspired a kind of literary cosmopolitanism. Kalidasa’s poem
The Cloud Messenger
uses the poetic fallacy of a banished lover who enlists a cloud to carry a message to his faraway beloved; it presents a positively imperial survey of the aerial route from Ramagiri (near Nagpur) via Ujjain to Mount Kailasa in the Himalayas.

But the Puranas also provided a Sanskrit medium for popular material transmitted through all classes and places in India, fusing the cosmopolitan, translocal vision of the Gupta court with new local traditions, the praise of the particular
tirtha
in our village, this temple, our river, and instructions on how to worship right here. What set the Puranas apart from one another was primarily the sectarian bias, all the stories (as well as rituals and doctrines) about
our
god,
our
pilgrimage place. Their sectarian view says not “This is the whole world” but “This is our whole world.”

The treatment of low castes and especially tribals in the Puranas reflects a nervousness about absorbing these groups into the empire. The early Puranas continued to appropriate popular beliefs and ideas from people of various castes.
³²
The very different challenges posed by renunciation, on the one hand, and the luxuriant growth of sectarian diversity, on the other, which the authors of the
dharma-shastras
worked so hard to reconcile with their own agendas, looked like the chance of a lifetime for the authors of the Puranas. Doctrinally orthoprax Hinduism functioned, as ever, to include everything under the Indian sun. The excluded people (rural storytellers, lower classes, women) who until now had had only episodic success in breaking into Sanskrit literature (Raikva’s walk-on part in the Upanishads, Draupadi’s embarrassing polyandry) managed now to get major speaking roles. Nurtured first by the patronage of the Guptas and then by the less structured political systems that followed them, the nonhegemonic, non-Vedic traditions supply the major substance of the Puranas.

The growth of temples also led to the greater use of ritual texts, both the Puranas and the texts called
agamas
, which instructed worshipers in the way to perform
pujas
.
³³
One of the great innovations of the rise of temple worship is that it eventually made it possible for people who could not read Sanskrit texts to have access to Sanskrit myths and rituals. The images carved on temples brought into the public sphere the mythology of the Puranas. For iconography transcends illiteracy; people get to see the images even if they can’t read the texts, and somebody—possibly but not necessarily the priest in the temple—knows the story and tells it. Often someone sitting beside the person reciting the Purana would explain it to those innocent of Sanskrit; these public recitals, collective listenings, were open to everyone, regardless of caste or gender.
³⁴
Moreover, once the images are on the
outsides
of temples, people can see them even if they are Pariahs and not allowed inside the temples. And in return, the temples were part of a system by which folk deities and local religious traditions entered the Brahmin imaginary.

The Puranas mediate between the Sanskrit of court poetry and the oral or vernacular traditions. Sometimes, but not always, there was a social and/or economic distance between the classes that produced the vernacular texts, Puranas, and court poetry, but we cannot assume that the Puranas come from poor people. The Puranas cut across class lines and included wealthy merchants among their patrons. One reason why it was possible for the Puranas to assimilate an astonishingly wide range of beliefs and for Hindus to tolerate that range not only within their scriptures and communities but within their own families was their lack of strict orthodoxy. Storytellers smuggled new ideas in under the Brahmin radar, stashing them in older categories, often categories to which the new ideas did not really belong. Significantly, most of the rituals described in the Puranas do not require the mediation of a Brahmin priest;
³⁵
so much for the stranglehold of Brahmin ideology. Moreover, the folk materials made their way into the Sanskrit corpus because the Brahmins were no longer able to ignore them—they were part of such widespread religious movements—and also because the Brahmins, like the privileged in all periods, knew a good thing when they saw it, and these were terrific stories, in many cases the Brahmins’ own household stories.

The village traditions and local folk traditions, which the anthropologist Robert Redfield decades ago labeled “little,”
³⁶
in fact constitute most of Hinduism and are one of the main sources even of the so-called pan-Indian traditions (such as the Puranas), which Redfield called the “great” tradition. “Little” carries pejorative as well as geographical connotations, not just small individual villages but a minor, cruder, less civilized tradition beneath scholarly contempt. Yet in terms of both the area that the villages cover in India
as a whole
and their populations (even now 72.2 percent of the national total, according to the 2001 census
³⁷
), not to mention the size of their creative contributions, the terms should really be reversed: the pan-Indian tradition is little, while the village cultures are a (the) great tradition.
³⁸